by Sam Meekings
He was right. Their neighbourhood may have been thrust into 1981 – a few paces from their house a large new market shop had taken over the cobbler’s stall, the hat shop and the long-vacated calligraphy supplies store – yet as they headed down the streets to the outskirts they found themselves retreating through the decades. The further they went, the more the new shop-fronts faded into tin roofs and shanty shacks, and the few private cars morphed into rust-crippled bicycles with ear-piercingly shrill bells. A man with a loudspeaker was sweating in the morning heat, trying to sell his stack of newspapers before the cheap print pooled into an inky smudge. Yuying fought to stop herself clutching her ears in protest. She lately found herself worrying that the smallest noises might announce the most terrible portents.
The three of them stopped at a crumbling brick shell of a building, in which an oven was panting steam over round baskets. Students were sitting on plastic chairs and feasting on cheap sloppy dumplings. They bought a small, sticky red-bean bun for Lian. A chunky radio, plugged into an uncovered socket and surrounded by a mangle of frayed wires, blared out a tune Jinyi found difficult to follow.
‘What is this rubbish?’ he grinned at the middle-aged woman as he handed over the coins for the snack.
‘Search me.’ She dipped her head toward the students. ‘They tuned it, and now I can’t make it play anything except this foreign crap. It sounds like just before feeding-time at the zoo, if you ask me.’
‘What are they singing about?’ Lian asked to distract her grandfather as she tried to subtly sneak the sweet treat from the open bag swinging against her grandmother’s hip.
‘I’m not sure. It sounded as though they were singing in American,’ Jinyi replied.
‘They speak English in America,’ Yuying gently corrected him.
Ever since she decided to speak again, she had made an effort to speak only of the positive. It was not easy. She measured each word before she opened her mouth, imagining how it might ripple out away from her. There was enough bad news in the world, she had decided, enough blame and recrimination – and if we cannot alter the past then we must do our best to steer the present away from trouble. Time is a master strategist who might outwit you at any second; don’t give him any opportunity to turn everything upside-down, she thought. Silence was futile – the only thing you cannot escape is yourself. What’s more, this new decade, already bringing a wedding and another birth, had knitted her more firmly to the future she had once dared to imagine for her family, a future that had once seemed impossible. Each new year washed away more of the older scribbles in the sand.
‘Quite right, of course. English. I was never one for languages, Lian, not like your grandmother here. If you work hard, you can be just like her.’ Jinyi winked, and the little girl scrunched her nose. Why would she want to be old and wrinkled and smell like jasmine?
‘In England, you know,’ he continued, ‘the people look like sea lions. The men all have moustaches which they keep straight with candle wax, and they wear top hats all day long, even when they go to bed. Don’t look at me that way, Yuying. I saw something about it on that funny box at Yaba’s flat. What do you call it?’
‘A television, dear.’
‘Can we get a television?’ Lian asked, suddenly interested.
‘One day, when you’re a little older, I am sure you will have a big television in your house. A colour one too, I’m sure, not a tiny black-and-white one like Yaba’s.’
The little girl was not impressed with this answer. However, they were almost there – ahead of them the road trickled out into a tractor-ripped mud track, and the barbed-wire fences of the private farm rippling up over the green hill came into view. When they arrived, they would split up; Jinyi spent the mornings hunched in the smoky canteen, helping to prepare the workers’ hot lunch, while Yuying strung out notepads of numbers as one of the accountant’s assistants. They worked only mornings, home in time for the lunchtime nap, having retired from the bread factory in order to pass on their jobs to their two youngest daughters, who had been forced out of their old workplaces by more senior workers returning from countryside exile. State-controlled jobs were hereditary, and there were not nearly enough of them to go around, although it was better to say that as quietly as possible, and only when you were sure no one important was listening.
Jinyi looked down at his granddaughter, who was already eyeing up the brook that sliced down between the potato patches and the fruit vines. There might be a few more grandchildren to come, he reasoned, but nothing like the rowdy orchestra of relatives he had once looked forward to. One family, one child, that was the rule, though Jinyi could still remember when the government was telling everyone to have more children, to fuel the revolution in its early days. Best not to dwell on that either, he told himself, his inbuilt censor snapping into action.
An abandoned tractor was chugging at the entrance to the farm, the engine still on and pulsing hungrily against the handbrake. A middle-aged man, lazing on a rusty deckchair with his wooden leg stretched out in front of the main gate, signed them in.
‘Watch out, it’ll rain soon,’ he said as he waved them through. This was the only thing he ever said, and he said it, without fail, every morning.
‘Stay where I can see you, ok? You can go and paddle in the stream, but don’t disturb anyone. When you get tired, come back to the kitchen and I’ll make you something to eat,’ Jinyi said to Lian, who nodded over-sincerely, the fast movement of her head threatening to bowl over her small body.
Jinyi entered the kitchen and pulled on an apron, then settled at the work station under the window, where he could watch his granddaughter tug up the wild flowers and collect the stones that glinted at her from the onyx-streaked stream tumbling around her knees. Sly silver minnows darted past, tickling her ankles, and she bent and splashed, her pudgy fingers trying to scoop them up.
Two skinned hares, pink slips of knotted flesh, hung from a hook on the wall. Jinyi reached for a cleaver and suddenly thought of the horoscope he had got for his granddaughter.
Manxin had been pregnant for sixth months, living with her new husband in a room so small they had used their bed as a table to eat dinner on or as a seat for guests. The night before Jinyi had gone for the horoscope, Manxin had waited for her husband to start his nightshift, then packed a suitcase and turned up at her parents’ house. They had opened the door to find her bob of hair ragged and wild, her face a blotchy mess of tears.
‘I can’t stand it any more,’ Manxin had choked and wheezed. ‘I can’t! I’m not going back, not with that woman! I’ll … I’ll … I’ll go to Guangzhou and start a new life. I can’t live like that – why didn’t you tell me I wasn’t just marrying him? I’ve married his whole family!’
Manxin’s new husband’s mother was a small, crooked woman with scraped-back hair and inch-long fingernails. As soon as the honeymoon trip to Beijing – holding hands and grinning at each other as they meandered around the Summer Palace, Tiananmen Square and the new mausoleum – had finished, Manxin found that her parents-in-law would be coming to dinner every evening. ‘Your new husband is our eldest son, after all, and really you should put some more salt in the soup and, oh heavens, is that really how you’re going to cook that chicken and risk poisoning us all, no, no, no, you’d do better to follow my instructions, yes, and perhaps you should think about combing your hair before you go out, what will the neighbours say?’
‘Come in, come in, I understand,’ Yuying had sighed, sweeping her daughter into the room.
Jinyi had pottered at the stove, refrying the previous day’s leftovers – ‘You’ll feel better after you’ve eaten something,’ he assured his daughter. Yuying and Manxin had settled on the futon, the creaking pendulum in the clock on the wall cutting through Manxin’s sniffles.
‘How can I have a child there? Xue Shi will be criticising me every time I pick up the baby, every time I dare to open my mouth. Ma, I can’t stand it.’
‘Your old granny left
her house, sixty-odd years ago, and never saw her family again. Things have changed since then, of course, but you can’t expect things to come completely undone. Some people just have a strange way of showing their love. Some do it with nosy advice, some with food, some with silence, some by going to work each morning. The heart is a strange machine.’
Manxin had nodded, thinking of her husband and how the shy looks of their engagement and the sweet, giggly whispers of the four-day honeymoon had turned to unresponsive grunts between swigs of beer and stale cigarettes. She thought of the dirty shirts he threw in her direction and the derogatory comments he made about the food he wolfed down before his next nightshift began. Her husband spent the nights locked in a booth at the interchange of railway tracks a few miles from the station, cranking the levers that shifted the tracks into differing slots, depending on the train’s destination. So far, he had only made one mistake, sending a train hurtling past the wrong platform – luckily, the train that had been waiting there had just left. It happens to everyone, the officials had told him; why, there was a crash that killed a thousand up in Harbin only last month – ha! no, of course it wasn’t in the bloody papers – so as long as you don’t mention this incident to anyone, we’re just going to dock your wages for a year. Xue Jingtien had then slouched off home to sulk at his pregnant wife. The next evening she had packed the suitcase.
‘So I can’t go back, you see!’ Manxin had sobbed, looking at her parents for support. Jinyi had put a steaming plate in front of her and smiled.
‘By day, a tree in our path might be a mild annoyance, something we have to walk around to reach our destination. By night, its sharp silhouette and hunched shadow make it look like a ghost hungry for flesh. Things look different in the day. Go back, think about our grandchild.’
She had looked down at the marrow curve of her belly swelling beneath her faded jacket. ‘I can’t live like this.’
‘You have a choice. Change everything by running away, or change everything by staying,’ Yuying had said.
‘Listen,’ Jinyi had added. ‘Go back for just one more night, that’s all I’m asking. Everything will be different tomorrow, I promise. Take my word for it. Go on, for your father.’
Slowly she had nodded, and, after finishing the refried leftovers and two bowls of lightly burnt rice, she had let them take her back to her room. Yuying had lifted her daughter’s spirits by recounting the events of the first few months of her own marriage, transforming the nervous bickering and disappointments into well-meaning farce, complete with the resolution of a happy ending. Marriage is a type of theatre, she had whispered; for everything to work, a lot of strings need to be pulled behind the stage.
Jinyi had left his wife with their daughter at her room, where Yuying had helped her prepare the breakfast porridge for when her husband came grumbling back home. She had regaled her daughter with altered tales of her own childhood, of the fierce patriarch and the empire of restaurants, of the occupation and the civil war, but mostly of the days of arranged marriages when prepubescent girls were mutilated, disowned or sold, all to save face. Jinyi had slipped back into the warm night and, instead of going straight home, he had taken a side road, past the glass windows of late-night massage parlours filling the evening with pink fluorescent light, and crossed the river on the crumbling stone bridge. As he had scrambled down the other side, his aching limbs and panting chest reminding him of his age, he could already see the tip of the slim pagoda, dressed in the green nets and wooden poles of shoddy scaffolding. It rose above the long line of new office blocks, staring out from a sea of foreign logos.
He could hear the foreman’s angry shouts from two blocks away. Nightlights were hanging from the paint-stripped temple gate, and as Jinyi had approached he caught sight of a short man slipping on the half-tiled roof, then steadying himself and carrying on. The workers had turned to look at him as he had entered, their dark eyes shifting under masks of dust, patches of clean skin visible only where dribbles of sweat had washed away the weeks of dirt. They had stared, but said nothing. After he had ducked into the temple, orders were barked and the drilling had started back up, mimicking the sound of some angry god issuing proclamations.
‘Please let me apologise for the workmen – they seem to be here twenty-four hours a day. Terribly noisy, but the sooner they finish the repairs the better.’ A thin middle-aged man with a shaved head had looked up from where he was crouched over a tattered book. An open umbrella was suspended over his head, catching the dust raining down from the ceiling, protecting the long folds of his saffron robe.
‘It’s no problem,’ Jinyi had said, his voice echoing in the empty hall.
‘It’s nearly done. Amazing, isn’t it? When you think of the damage done back in the … erm … what do we call it now?’
Jinyi had shrugged. ‘The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution? A mistake, I suppose.’
The monk had nodded. ‘The insides here were gutted, axes were taken to the walls, and then a fire was started. Luckily, we had the foresight to bury most of the books before the crowds arrived. I did not expect it to be so long before I dug them up though!’ He gestured to the ragged book in front of him. ‘But a few of them survived. The earth moves in cosmic cycles; nothing is ever a surprise. The cranes may leave but they always return eventually. Whatever changes, something always remains. Whatever remains, something always changes.’
‘I see,’ Jinyi had said. ‘I was worried you would be closed by this time.’
‘The soul is always open. May I ask if you are looking for something in particular? Only, I have a good memory for faces, illusory and deceptive though they may be, and I can’t recall having seen you here before, friend. You have faced hard times and yet more are to come – do not worry, this is no magic, just what I can see in your face. You are worried. You come here for solace, am I right?’
‘Not this time. I’m … fine. But I need a fortune. Not for myself, for my grandchild.’
‘I see. We can also calculate the most beneficent name, depending on the child’s horoscope. Just tell me the sex of the child and the exact hour and date of birth and I will begin the consultation.’
Jinyi had shifted awkwardly. ‘Well, the thing is, the child hasn’t been born yet. I think it’s due at the beginning of February. And, er, they won’t tell us the sex before birth; the doctor said it’s against the law. If I had to guess, though, I think it’ll probably be a boy. My wife doesn’t agree. But anyway, none of that is important – I just want to take a good fortune to my daughter, to reassure her that everything will be all right.’
‘I understand your concern, but I can be of no assistance, except to tell you that everything will indeed be all right – the universe has a way of tying up loose ends. It’s called karma. Perhaps you should talk to my brother.’ The monk had stood up and reached for a small bell, which he then rang. The sound of shuffled footsteps could be heard in a nearby room. ‘His view of the world is quite different from mine. As, indeed, it should be. We can only live in the universe we believe in. Goodnight.’
As he had walked away, a bigger, bulkier man had appeared through a side door. He had approached to Jinyi slowly, his bulbous bald skull glowing in the lamplight; his saffron robes faded to sackcloth brown.
‘Yes?’
‘I’d like a fortune, for my grandchild. I know this might –’
‘Fine.’ The second monk had rooted around beside a pile of books, and dug out a pot filled with thin lengths of bamboo. ‘Now, here’s how it usually works. You donate some money to the upkeep of the temple, and then pick a piece of bamboo. We then pull out the scroll from inside and that’s your fortune. Everything is down to the vicissitudes of fate. However, as you can see, the temple needs quite a lot more work done. So, if your conscience should dictate that you must make a large donation to aid your poor brothers in their prayers, I think we could come to some kind of arrangement.’
Jinyi had pulled out his wallet and shuffled through the no
tes, each with the dimpled face of Mao Zedong grinning up at him. He had squinted at them for a few seconds, trying to recall each one’s worth – currency values were constantly changing. In the end, he had pressed a whole week’s wages into the large monk’s hand.
‘Make it good,’ Jinyi had said. The monk had nodded.
As the monk’s oversized brush had scratched against the cheap paper, dashing out long-winded epithets, Jinyi had studied a reproduction tanka hung up on the only wall without cracks, holes, mould or smoke stains. At its centre was a Buddha floating serenely on a cloud; above and around him were various bodhisattvas in a range of acrobatic contortions, the many-handed many-eyed dancing across bright waves of sky. Beneath him were the slobbering faces of demons juggling flames, their bodies hunched and withered, yet their expressions more vivid and energetic than the drowsy enlightened above them. This is a riddle, isn’t it, Jinyi had said to himself; we are not reborn in other lifetimes, but a thousand times in our own. We are not reborn in different bodies or in different places, but in different feelings. It is these we must escape if we are not to be ensnared by a single one.
‘Is this one of the realms of heaven or a complete universe?’ he had asked.
The monk had shrugged without looking up from his writing. ‘Search me. There are whole universes living in your socks, in the winding tunnels of your ears. Now then, I’m almost finished, so if you wouldn’t mind keeping it down for a few minutes …’
Jinyi had left the temple quarter of an hour later with one of the most impressive and bombastic fortunes ever created. This child is truly blessed, he had imagined telling his daughter, and had pictured her half-tilted smile, her dreams kindled. And, he had thought to himself, when people believe in a prophecy, they work all the more to make it come true. If he had learnt anything from his time in exile, it was that the truth was malleable, slippery.