Under Fishbone Clouds

by Sam Meekings

  It was not till early afternoon the next day, pacing back as fast as they could from their shifts on the farm, that Jinyi and Yuying had returned to their eldest daughter’s room. Manxin had ushered them straight back out again so that they would not disturb her husband’s hard-earned sleep, and the three of them had huddled on a rain-warped wooden bench outside, watching a herd of grunting bulldozers destroy a street of courtyard houses to make way for a hotel.

  ‘I know how you must have been feeling last night,’ Jinyi had begun. ‘And that it must have been hard going back. It’s always easier running away than sticking things out, but nothing ever gets solved like that. You did the right thing. Anyway, I’ve got something for you that might help make you see things differently.’ He reached into his bag for the scroll. ‘Now, do you remember I promised that everything would be different today?’

  ‘I remember, and, Pa, you were so right!’ Manxin had replied. ‘But how could you have known? It’s amazing.’

  Jinyi had been confused. He had not given her the gift yet. ‘What’s amazing?’

  ‘Well, this morning Jingtien came back from work and brought his parents round for breakfast. Now usually this would have made me want to cry and scream, but he was being really sweet. They had even brought the food with them so I wouldn’t have to cook. Jingtien said he had been talking to his parents about everything, and that his dad could help us. Well, his dad said that it wasn’t right that I kept working in a dirty, smoky, smelly factory when I had their grandchild inside me, so he offered to get me a job at the high school where he’s the headteacher. Can you believe it?’

  Yuying had smiled and clasped her daughter’s hands. Jinyi had let go of the scroll and retied the bag. Perhaps he would save it for later. ‘So what will you be doing there?’ he had asked. ‘Will you be a janitor, or a dinner lady?’

  ‘No! I’m going to be a teacher.’

  Her parents had opened their mouths, but had not been able to think of anything to say. Jinyi had scratched his head, while Yuying had fiddled with the chopstick in her hair. She had finally settled on tact. ‘He doesn’t mind that you never finished high school yourself, that you never went to college?’

  ‘No. Why would he? No one my age has been to college – but that doesn’t mean we’re stupid. We just happened to fall into a hole in history. This is my way out.’

  ‘What will you teach?’ Jinyi had collected himself to ask.

  ‘Well, he said it was up to me, but they had a shortage of science teachers. So I picked biology. I’m not sure why, but I spent ten years looking after my sisters, so I think I’ve got a good idea about how things work.’

  ‘I think there might be a little more to it than that,’ Yuying had murmured.

  ‘Oh don’t worry, he gave me a big textbook. Just cover one chapter a week, and you’ll be fine, he told me. We’re not allowed to mention anything outside the textbook anyway – in fact, the list of things not to talk about is longer than the list of things we can talk about. If something is not in this book, then it is not on the curriculum, which means that students shouldn’t be discussing it. So all I’ll have to do is read the chapter a few days before I have to teach it, and then explain it to the students. Simple really. Plus, I’ll get two months off when I have the baby.’

  ‘Congratulations. You’re lucky. I thought about being a teacher once, you know, back before the revolution,’ Yuying had said as she clasped her daughter’s hands.

  ‘Yes, congratulations,’ Jinyi had added.

  And with that Manxin had gone back to her life, managing now, with this small change, to blot out the pieces of snide advice from her mother-in-law and her husband’s exaggerated demands. Jinyi had not given her the fake horoscope that day, nor the day after.

  Back in the canteen kitchen he finished chopping up the meat and peered out of the window to see his granddaughter sprawled out on her back beside the stream. Whistles of steam rose from the three rice-cookers, their lids rattling, and Jinyi checked his trouser pocket – it was still there, the secret fortune, a scrunched-up scrag of mock-scroll that he no longer dared unfold. He could almost convince himself that because the real future was unknown and the phoney prediction remained unread, they shared a correspondence, that their truths were inseparable and indistinguishable. If even an interfering neighbour’s few sly words about a family could divert a destiny so utterly, he thought, then why not suppose that a few written words might be able to do the same? His belief rested on the condition of the fortune never being given, and this enabled him to think of himself as its protector and, by extension, his granddaughter’s most important guardian.

  After gobbling down their lunch, the farm workers headed out for siestas under the shadier trees, leaving a mess of tin trays and spoons to be washed. Lian was chasing after butterflies outside, her body twirling and doubling back with a range of false starts and grabbing fingers. Jinyi scrubbed his hands with the sliver of black soap, kneading the creases and scars, wondering if there was anything left underneath. In the converted shed behind the tangled rows of vine, Yuying put away the bulky calculator which she took out each morning for show, not having had the confidence to admit to her new boss that she had no idea how to use it, preferring instead the jammed wooden abacus and her own knife-sharpened pencil.

  ‘Are we going back now?’ Lian asked as they regrouped, each of the adults stooping to more easily hold one of the little girl’s small hands.

  ‘Of course. If you stay in the past too long, you’ll turn into a dinosaur,’ Jinyi grinned, as his wife shook her head and sighed.

  ‘What’s a dinosaur?’ Lian said.

  ‘Er, well, a dinosaur is half dragon, half lizard. Don’t worry though, they’re all gone now. They were around long before even I was born!’

  ‘In China?’

  ‘Of course! China is the oldest country in the world. We had developed writing and building before most countries had even worked out how to start a fire.’

  They carried on past a dusty building site and around the park, where toddlers on leads were being walked by slow, meandering pensioners. It was a common sight – children were expensive, and parents risked losing their jobs if they took time off, so it was up to grandparents to look after any children. That was how things have always worked here, people said; families take care of each other. Most days Lian even slept in Jinyi and Yuying’s house, her cot set between the kang and the wooden bed where their last unmarried daughter slept.

  A sour-faced street cleaner in faded overalls was sweeping dust and debris from one side of the street to the other, from the east of the city to its westernmost point. The next day she would push the accumulated junk back the other way, her work a tug-of-war, in which some places were cleaned only so that others could be made more dirty – it was an example, a more eloquent official of the Public Sanitation Department might have reasoned, of eternal balance, of cosmic harmony, of yin and yang. Her brush stirred up a storm of soot, feathers, bottle tops, clumps of hair and food wrappers.

  In one of the battered brown auto-rickshaws, a man in oversized dark glasses was picking his teeth in the side mirror. White hairs were pushed across his scalp to cover his baldness, and a faded pink scar sloped down between his right ear and his chin. A few of his fingers were missing, though this did not seem to impede his artistry with the toothpick. The man lazily tossed the toothpick onto the street, keeping his eyes on the side mirror as he spat into his fingers and adjusted the few remaining strands of his hair.

  ‘Excuse me!’ Yuying barked at him. ‘What do you think you’re doing? Your dirty toothpick just landed on my granddaughter’s shoe, you filthy man. Perhaps you should be more careful!’

  ‘Hey, lady, why don’t you –’ he swivelled round in his seat as he began to respond, but suddenly stopped, staring slack-jawed at the three of them. Unconsciously, he began to rub the stumps of his missing fingers with the few he still had left.

  They started to move away, pushing Lian hurriedly
in front of them as they marched onwards, but they were stopped by his shout. ‘Hou Jinyi? It’s me, Yangchen.’ As he rose from the driver’s seat, Yuying and Jinyi wheeled around. ‘Ha! Didn’t recognise me, did you? Well, it took me a minute too, I’ll admit. And Bian Yuying, well, I still remember your dainty golden slippers. Oh yes, some things you just can’t forget, no matter how hard you try. And it seems like only yesterday we were all laughing and having dinner together. You look like you haven’t aged a day since then, not like myself.’

  ‘Yangchen?’ Jinyi muttered, amazed. He was not sure whether to ignore him and walk away, to vent his anger or simply act normally. In any case, he had no anger left – everyone regretted the past these days. ‘Well … how are you?’

  Yangchen slapped the bulky carriage of the auto-rickshaw. His hand left a dull print. ‘Not bad. This is my new career. I’m going to get rich ferrying businessmen around town in this thing. Of course, it’s early days yet. I got back a few years ago, after my sentence finished. I was surprised to find not much has changed round here. Sure, there’s a lot of new things, but that’s just show. All journeys away take you home, isn’t that what they say?’

  ‘Hmm. You look well,’ Jinyi said, noticing that Yuying was trying to stop her lip twitching and her fists clenching.

  ‘Ha! First off, I know you’re lying, Hou Jinyi, ’cause you never were much good at it. I look rough as a dead mule, and I know it. Still, if that’s the worst you can say of me after all I’ve been through, then I’m doing pretty well. The last twenty years haven’t been kind to me, but then who have they been kind to? I’m a changed man now … well, aren’t we all?’

  Yangchen sighed, and looked at his feet. Jinyi realised that this was the nearest thing to an explanation or apology that they were likely to receive, and that in some way it was for the best. Whatever this country had been through since the revolution, however people had suffered, there was an unspoken agreement not to dwell on dark areas of the past. To do so was unpatriotic. Whatever had happened to Yangchen, he surely deserved it, Jinyi thought. Twenty years’ penance is enough for anyone, though, he decided, remembering the time he had spent away from home.

  Jinyi and Yuying had learnt to rework their past, to focus the telescopes of their memories only upon the things that bound them together: the sum of their actions, the sum of their love – children, grandchildren, work, hopes, stories, forgotten whispers, poems, kisses. When they lay together in the warm, sleepless nights, or whispered in the early mornings before Xiaojing or Lian awoke, they spoke of the early days of their marriage, reconstructing each brick of the old house, the scent of opium and white jasmine petals, the ghosts of ancestors, the fierce Fu Lions outside the restaurants. They re-imagined the city brick by brick until it was theirs once again, reclaimed by memory. Days were for the necessary business of moving forward, for caring for their children and grandchildren, for putting food on the table and money in the bank. Nights were for the secret language of their youth, discovered among the darkness, the things that persisted. In this way, they sought to remind each other who they were, who they still might be.

  ‘Do you want a lift? Go on, it’s on me! Least I can do. You look a little tired, sweetheart, do you want to ride in my tuk-tuk?’ Yangchen said to Lian. ‘Have you ever been in one of these before?’

  The little girl shook her head and hid behind her grandmother’s leg, clutching tightly, afraid of what might happen if she let go.

  ‘Ha!’ Yangchen laughed. ‘Never fear. Better than twenty horses this thing!’ He slapped the metal roof, before yanking the door open.

  Yuying refused the offer, once, then twice, but after the third insistence she knew they had to cave in to common courtesy or risk rumours of an impolite slight slipping into the vast web of gossip that spread even to the most distant reaches of the city. This is a test, she thought, to see how we fare when the past returns, to see how we handle forgiveness. The three of them clambered into the small box-like carriage behind the driver.

  As he drove, Yangchen lit up a pair of cigarettes, one of which he handed back to Jinyi through the open window separating the driver from passengers. Lian was wedged between the two adults on the thin wooden seat in the cramped carriage. She whooped every time the vehicle jolted over bumps in the half-finished roads. Twin gold medallions, one emblazed with a calm, meditative Buddha and the other with a grinning Chairman Mao, dangled from the ceiling, jangling into each other every time Yangchen braked or accelerated.

  ‘When did you learn to drive?’ Jinyi shouted.

  ‘Oh, I always had a knack for this kind of thing. I called in a favour with an old friend at the local transport office and he managed to sort me out a licence before I’d even bought the damn thing. Then I taught myself – it’s so simple, even a monkey could do it.’ He pressed his hand to the horn for half a minute to forewarn any other vehicles as he puttered round another blind corner, then turned his head around and grinned at his passengers. ‘When I was a nipper you couldn’t move round here without bumping into some burly figure with no top and rippling biceps dragging a rickshaw through the streets. You remember that, don’t you?’

  ‘Certainly,’ Yuying called over the noise. ‘My dad used to send us home in them all the time.’

  ‘Of course, they were only used by rich folk like your father, or landlords, or the Japs. Thank god they’re all gone. Anyway, there’s got to be a market for that now, what with Deng Xiaoping opening up the country. It’ll be filled with rich businessmen soon. And are they going to want to ride a bicycle and crease their fancy Western double-breasted suits? No, sir!’

  The auto-rickshaw squeezed into a narrow lane leading past the back entrance of the army base, then on past the adjacent military school and snack bars serving cold noodles and watermelon to soldiers flitting between the two. Above them a series of flagpoles shook out a line of matador’s capes. It was then that it dawned on Jinyi that Yangchen had no idea where he was going. The city looked different through smeared windows. They turned into an alley, which turned out to be a dead end, and Yangchen began to reverse. Jinyi drew on his reserves of diplomacy to suggest a new route as subtly as he could. If they had carried on walking, they would have already been home.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Lian began to sulk. ‘It smells yucky in here.’

  ‘Jinyi, do you remember when we were working in the kitchen, we were teasing you about something, I think – we were just stupid kids back then, before I let power go to my head and ruin everything – and you said life is where the heart carries you, no more, no less?’

  Jinyi tilted his head. ‘I can’t say I do. That doesn’t sound much like me, but I’m prepared to take your word for it. Why do you still remember that?’

  ‘I don’t know. It just stuck in my mind. And I was thinking, life’s more like a taxi ride. That’s why I like driving. You just get thrown together with different people, different problems, and the only thing you can do is keep heading forward, keep going.’ He lit another cigarette. ‘It must be nice having a big family.’

  Neither Jinyi nor Yuying knew what to say. Cigarette smoke blew back into their faces.

  ‘Our youngest daughter is getting married next month. Why don’t you come?’ Jinyi blurted out, expecting a polite refusal.

  Yuying looked at him as though he was insane, daggers in her eyes. Yangchen bit his lip and appeared to think it over.

  The car stopped at the turning of the alley that led to their house, a short lane of small stone houses now dwarfed by the blocks of flats on the north and west sides that swallowed up the evening light and snipped hours from the end of the day. Yangchen wound down the window as his three passengers climbed out.

  ‘It’s a nice offer, Jinyi, and I wish your daughter good fortune and a strong husband to take care of her. But I would be a bucket of water poured on your firecrackers.’ He reached into the pocket of his faded blazer. ‘But here, take my business card. I can offer you rides for free, any time you want to go w
here the heart carries you. I know it doesn’t make up for anything, but I don’t have much else left.’

  The auto-rickshaw pootled off down the road, beeping manically. Jinyi and Yuying looked at each other. Wherever they went, the past was never far behind.

  As Yuying pottered at the stove, brewing the tea, she thought of Xiaojing’s upcoming wedding to the thin, reedy man she had met in the canteen of her factory. They did not even have a matchmaker! Then again, neither had she. Yuying had heard all the tricks her friends and colleagues used to check out the family of potential suitors: listening in on private conversations with ears pressed to doors or windows, picking the intricate tiny padlocks on diaries hidden under mattresses or simply applying good old-fashioned discipline. She knew of parents who had disowned their children over their choice of partner, children who had killed themselves after their parents had insisted on an unwanted match, young men who had been thrown out of university (or, heaven forbid, high school) for having a girlfriend, and a whole army of men whose new wives had deserted them after a few months to head back to their hometowns and their own families. She had vowed she would never be like those parents, and that she would give her children what she had never had: a choice.

  Still, something bothered her. If you do not have to struggle and sweat and curse and sacrifice to make a marriage work, then are you really entitled to call it love? Yuying was not sure, though she decided that it was not her place to say. Love wears thousands of disguises. She had only just learnt herself that love could creep back, could change shape, could find peace in that small knot of blood. Although Yuying knew little about anatomy, she did know that the heart was stronger than many imagined – it can survive a thousand nicks and cuts; whole chunks can be sliced off and it will continue to thump, and though there may be pain, you will at least be more aware of the stitched-up scarred parts still left.