by Xinran
‘“If it please you, Master, something unusual has happened. A man who came begging for tea is asking to see you.”
‘When Lu Tong heard this he was both irritated and amused. “Whoever heard of a tea-beggar,” he thought to himself. “Perhaps I have misheard.”
‘“What did he want?” he asked.
‘“Tea,” the gatekeeper repeated seriously. “He’s asking for tea.”
‘Lu Tong thought for a moment. Then he said, “Let him come in.”
‘When the gatekeeper brought in Lu Yu, Lu Tong saw immediately that he was no ordinary man. He had a scholarly appearance and a courteous manner. Taking some leaves of the famous “Jade Belt Tea”, he steeped them in a pot and then poured a bowl for his visitor.
‘Lu Yu inhaled the fragrance of the tea as it filled the room. “Good tea,” he said, nodding his head. But then he added “Such a pity!”
‘“A pity?” asked Lu Tong. “What’s a pity?”
‘“The poor quality of your tea set is a pity,” replied Lu Yu.
‘Lu Tong immediately asked humbly that his visitor enlighten him, and so Lu Yu lifted up his bamboo basket and pulled away the white cloth to reveal a purple pottery tea tray on which sat a purple pottery teapot and four bowls.
‘“The fragrance from your teapot fills the room,” he said. “But the fragrance from mine fills the house.”
‘Filled with curiosity, Lu Tong took Lu Yu’s teapot and used it to brew some tea. To his joy, as soon as the water seeped into the leaves, the room and the courtyard were filled with the most beautiful scent.
‘From then on,’ concluded Thick Glasses, ‘Lu Tong and Lu Yu became sworn brothers, and their knowledge of tea became famous. That is why their names grace the doorways of many teahouses, and why Meng and I decided to follow this tradition.’
Six loved listening to Thick Glasses and Meng’s explanations, but there were some things she didn’t like to ask about. She was troubled, for instance, by the fact that Thick Glasses and Meng would occasionally put a sign on the door that said ‘Closed for Inspection’ in order to allow a group of middle-aged men to meet undisturbed. These men didn’t read, or write in the visitors’ notebook. Instead they simply drank tea and talked. Sometimes Meng would ask a friend to come and play the zither for them. Six knew that these people were not like normal customers, but she couldn’t understand why her employers never let other people into the teahouse when they were there. Eventually Meng gave her the answer.
‘Those poor people,’ said Meng one evening, as they were tidying up after a group of men had left. ‘They have to live in such a hole-in-the-corner way.’
‘Why?’ Six asked shyly. ‘Are they bad people?’
Meng looked at Six, clearly wondering whether she should confide in her.
‘They are all good people,’ she said after a while. ‘It’s just that they are different in their bodies.’
‘They don’t look different to me …’ said Six in confusion.
‘I’m going to tell you,’ said Meng, ‘but please don’t tell anyone. These men are homosexuals …’
‘But isn’t that against the law?’ said Six, wide-eyed. She could feel a chill running down her spine, and the tray in her hands was shaking.
‘That was before. These days homosexuals cuddle openly on the street.’ Meng took the tray from Six’s hands.
‘Then … why are these ones afraid of being seen?’ asked Six, made courageous by the fact that Meng had raised the subject herself.
Thick Glasses was clearing a table nearby. ‘Because they are married men,’ he said. ‘Think about it … Can you imagine how unhappy their wives and children would be if they found out?’
‘Then what did they get married for? Weren’t they cheating those women?’ Six could not understand how Thick Glasses, who had always been so kind-hearted, seemed so unconcerned about the poor wives. Perhaps men always took the man’s part …
‘When they were young, homosexuality was against the law,’ Meng chimed in, pouring some tea for Six and Thick Glasses. ‘People say that single women bring trouble and gossip to their door – it’s not much better for single men. There was no other way for them to remain respectable but to get married and treat their lovers as friends. It makes me very sad to think how these men have been leading lives of deception for so long. Almost all of them are silent and withdrawn. It’s not good for your health to live in this way …’ Meng’s voice was subdued.
‘But now that there’s no law against it, why don’t they follow their feelings?’ Six felt very sophisticated saying such a thing.
‘Their women might turn a blind eye, but what about the children? What child nowadays could endure having such a father?’ Meng topped up her husband’s tea.
Six thought about this. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘If I found out my dad was homosexual I think I’d die of disgust … But then, if Dad was … like that, how sad it would be for him to have to live a life he didn’t want.’
From then on, Six made a special effort to treat the male visitors with consideration, but she still felt awkward around them. Her favourite customers were the foreigners whom Ruth brought to the teahouse. This was not just because Six was curious about them: their hunger to learn about Chinese language and culture gave her a great feeling of pride at being Chinese, and a sense that, even though her stock of learning was meagre, to these foreigners, it seemed like a bottomless well.
She was constantly surprised by the things she found out. She had never realised there could be such differences between people. Once, for example, she overheard a Japanese teacher from Ruth’s college talking to Ruth in Chinese about the Japanese custom of present giving. When the Japanese gave gifts, she said, most bought things that were of no use at all to the owner, because the recipient could pass them on to someone else, and that person could pass them on to a third party. In Japan, you didn’t open a gift in front of the giver, but the next time you saw them you had to mention the gift and express your thanks.
‘That’s very different from England,’ said Ruth. ‘When we get presents, we open them straightaway so that we can thank the giver. But you Japanese are like the Chinese: you have to wait until the guest has left to see what the gift is.’
Ruth asked Six why Chinese people did not open presents in front of people. Six had never even thought about it, but remembered how her mother had said that ‘only people possessed by ghosts and demons open a gift in a hurry and lose face!’
One day, Ruth came to the teahouse with a Canadian couple. The man was an old university friend of Ruth’s and they were in China on their honeymoon. Wishing to congratulate the newly-weds, Six brought some snacks to them while their tea was brewing – peanuts and honeyed Chinese dates (to represent many children of both sexes).
‘I wishing you early have son!’ she said in her best English.
The foreigners didn’t appear to understand Six’s poor pronunciation, but they certainly understood Meng when she came forward and said, ‘How many children would you like to have? Do you like a big family with many kids?’ They were both overcome with embarrassment at Meng’s words, and even Ruth blushed. Once Ruth and the couple had left, Meng asked Thick Glasses why her words had caused such a reaction.
‘Don’t you know you should never ask newly-weds that question in the West?’ he said smiling. ‘They consider it a private matter …’
Six’s tongue hung out with astonishment when she heard this. Who would not want others to wish them a son?
Six often found herself perplexed like this. Even the smallest little thing, such as seeing a magpie in the street, could cause misunderstanding. The magpie was Six’s favourite bird so when she saw one hopping about on the pavement outside the teashop, she eagerly pointed it out to Ruth and her friends. To her amazement, they averted their eyes and called out, ‘Don’t look!’ and ‘Is there only one?’ Ruth explained that, in many European countries, a lone magpie was said to bring bad luck. Six then told her about h
ow, in her village, everyone believed that a single magpie brought good things. Her mother would say that, when a magpie called from a branch, an important guest was on his way. When her big sister was married off, the bride-gifts from the husband included a pair of beautiful pillowcases embroidered with magpies, symbol of love and constancy. And, when Six left the village, her best friends had given her a pair of insoles for her shoes, embroidered with a magpie and a wild goose, a symbol of their good wishes for good luck and freedom.
The foreigners who were only just beginning to learn Chinese would meet up in the teahouse to practise with each other. They gave each other language tasks, such as talking about their favourite things. When people replied ‘Going for a walk’, Six was bemused. What did this mean, and why did Westerners like the idea of walking? At home she had walked miles to school and back, even when she was exhausted. And city people were always stressed as they walked – or half-ran – to work, to the cinema or to a restaurant. She had never seen anyone walking for pleasure.
The more Six learned about foreigners the more she came to believe that the Chinese were the wisest and most industrious of all nations. After all, they never took words from other languages, but always drew a new character if they needed to create a word. Six had realised this when listening to a conversation between English students during which they used the word ‘taboo’. She asked Shu Kang its definition and he told her that it was actually a borrowing of the Polynesian word tabu. Six was astounded to hear that the English could be so lazy.
The ignorance of the Westerners who came to the teahouse also amazed her. She had learned all about Western history at school. She knew of Britain’s dark colonial past and its exploitation of slaves, America’s bloody civil war, Holland, Spain and Portugal’s battle for hegemony of the seas; she had studied French bas-relief, the ruins of ancient Rome, and Greek myths. She had therefore expected that foreigners would know all about Qin bricks and Han tiles, the poetry of the Tang and Song dynasties, the Four Great Inventions and the novels of the Ming and Qing … But one day, a friend of Ruth’s had actually asked Six to list the Four Great Inventions, as if he had no idea that they were ‘paper, movable type, gunpowder and the compass’! And not one of these foreigners seemed to know about the Book of Odes or The Dream of the Red Mansions. ‘Impossible, impossible!’ Six would cry. ‘Every middle-school student here knows your Shakespeare, Dickens and Victor Hugo. How can you not know our Cao Xueqin and Tang Xianzu? We’re not a small country, we have so many people and such a long history! Why don’t you know this?’
At the same time, however, Ruth’s friends claimed to know a lot of things about China that Six didn’t, and were constantly asking such difficult questions that even the Chinese university students who came to the teahouse to practise their English had difficulty answering them. The foreigners said Chairman Mao had starved very many people to death, but Six remembered the teachers in the village saying that without Chairman Mao, their grandfathers and grandmothers would all have died of hunger … Then there were stories of how Chinese people had built railways for the north Americans, of how European herbs had been brought over from China, how the suicide rate in China was the third highest in the world, how more than twenty countries around the world had adopted several hundred thousand Chinese female orphans between them, how Chinese overseas students in the West were the richest students, but didn’t know how to ask questions in class …
Six didn’t know where the foreigners had heard all this information about China. Was this the ‘Propaganda’ Kang talked about when he described how the Western media would say things about China that weren’t true? Why was it that the China these foreigners described sometimes seemed unrecognisable to her?
She decided to ask Thick Glasses and his wife about it. They exchanged a glance, then Thick Glasses said, ‘Six, why are our two ears on two sides of our heads? So we can hear sounds that come from different places. The things your villagers used to say about the city don’t necessarily resemble the things you see for yourself here, do they? And is your Second Uncle’s version of city life the same as Three’s? China is very big. The north and south, the east and west, the countryside and the cities are all different. People say all sorts of things about them according to the knowledge they have managed to pick up. Some are true, some are false, but there’s nobody in this world who can be the final arbiter. It is important to think and see for yourself. You can’t believe everything you’re told, but nor can you suspect everything either, do you see?’
Meng looked at her kindly. ‘It’s good that you’re making friends with the foreigners, but you shouldn’t talk too much about things you don’t understand, especially not politics. Some of the people you meet in this teahouse won’t be as good as others. These people won’t mug you or steal from you, but they might bring a false accusation against you for using “reactionary language”. Nobody with a brain in their head would believe that a little girl like you could be a reactionary, but a lot of people in China don’t have the education to know that you have to think things through before leaping to conclusions. They have little understanding of how to be a decent person. Those people might see your words as an opportunity for promotion, or to earn some extra money; they won’t consider the rights and wrongs of the matter. You’ve come to the city to see the world. It’s very important to look around you before deciding what you think. You’re still young. You need to see more of life, and read more books. Reading will allow your intelligence to grow wings and take flight. Look at me – at my age there are still heaps of questions to which I haven’t found an answer!’
‘Really? There are still things you don’t understand?’ Six could not believe it.
‘Yes, we all have them. The more you read, the more you want to know, and so the more questions you have.’
It was after this conversation that Six began to understand why Thick Glasses and Meng would take certain books home with them in the evenings. The library, so lovingly put together by Thick Glasses for his customers, was growing. As the teahouse became better known and attracted more business, lots of people were contributing books to the shelves. It was Six’s job to enter these new books into a log. She would painstakingly divide them into categories, with a serial number for each. Who knows, she thought to herself, maybe some day the teahouse would have enough books to open a quiet room solely for reading, like the big bookstores she had seen in the centre of town. But there were some books that Meng and Thick Glasses didn’t want entered in the log, and which they immediately hid in the storeroom behind the blue curtain before taking them home at closing time.
At first Six thought that the couple were simply greedy for more books to add to their personal collection. After all, Meng had told her that she still had a lot of questions to answer. But as time went by, she heard customers say things like, ‘This book is still banned, but the ban on that one has been lifted’, and only then did it really dawn on her why not every book could be put out for people to read.
She was surprised to find that it was often the upstanding Guan Buyu who brought in these secret books. Although she had never returned to his book-lined office, he often came to the teahouse to meet up with some friends, and was always friendly and pleasant to Six. He even confided to her that his teahouse meetings were actually a ‘reading group’ that had existed clandestinely for years, and was now able to use the teahouse as a base. One day she plucked up courage to ask him about ‘banned books’. How was it possible to know which book was off-limits? Thick Glasses had told her to check with him before she entered books that touched on religion, freedom of speech, law, or relations between men and women, but there seemed to be so many opportunities to make a mistake. Guan Buyu told Six that she was not alone in being confused: the policies of the Nanjing officials were many and ever-changing, making it virtually impossible to be a hundred per cent sure what the ruling was on a controversial book. It was therefore best only to lend books to people you knew and trusted. With o
rdinary customers, even regulars, you should be extremely wary. Better to say that there were ‘no new books’ than to put others in danger. It had never occurred to Six that reading books could be dangerous, but she took Guan Buyu’s warning to heart. She couldn’t bear the idea of landing a book lover in trouble.
She noticed that Thick Glasses and his family also took care with some of the jokes that were written in the visitors’ notebook. If she asked Kang to explain a joke to her that she didn’t understand, he would pretend not to hear her; a short while later Meng or Thick Glasses might discreetly rip out the page from the notebook.
One day she rescued one of these discarded pages and read the following:
In the 1980s, at the time of the Open Policy, the three Chinese leaders Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin and Li Peng were out driving a car called China when they came to a three-way junction. According to the road sign, straight ahead was Socialist China, to the left was Russia, which was in the process of disintegration, and to the right were the capitalist nations of America and Great Britain. Both Jiang and Li looked towards Deng for guidance. Without so much as a pause for thought, he said, ‘Signal left, but turn to the right’.
Six had absolutely no idea what these words meant, so she tried reading another joke a little further down the page:
One day a little boy was given some homework by his teacher. He was to write a sentence using the words Nation, Party, Society and People. The child didn’t understand what these words meant or how they were related to each other, so he asked his father over supper. The father tried to explain in words the boy would understand.
‘Imagine these words apply to our family. Granny is the Nation: without Granny none of us would be here. Daddy is the Party: his word is law. Mummy is Society: she takes care of everything in the home, but if she gets angry there’s no peace for anyone in the house. And as for you, you’re the People: you should obey the Party, help Society and win glory for the Nation.’