Dust of the Land

by J. H. Fletcher

  It was a hard rule to understand. She was aware of the stone steps beneath her feet, the laughter of the students, so how could she not exist?

  She had another thought also. Surely a degree of friendship was necessary if she were to understand these foreigners? What had Chairman Mao said? Let a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend… Without getting to know them how could understanding be possible? Without understanding how could knowledge be possible? Without knowledge what value would her learning have?

  Such confusion… I am too young, she thought. I do not even understand myself. How can I understand westerners with their different thoughts and ways?

  That boy is still watching me, Su-Ying thought. I can feel his eyes on me but I shall not look back. It would be unthinkable to look back.

  She reached the car, the driver waiting, engine running, door open. She stepped into the car and the driver closed the door. As he did so she risked a sideways glance. He was there, as she had suspected, standing motionless at the top of the steps. She remembered how he had looked at her after the lecture, with all the students pressing up the auditorium steps around them. She remembered how for a moment they had seemed to be alone amid the crowd.

  Perhaps she could learn from this boy? If she was very, very careful?

  It took Richard a long time to coax the relationship beyond that first stage but eventually he succeeded, because he wanted it. He knew now that he had wanted it from the first moment he saw her. There was another thing, too: with the passing weeks he became more and more convinced that she wanted it, too.

  Slowly she was becoming integrated into the student body, mixing and making friends. Girl friends, mostly, but with her looks it would have been too much to hope that some of the boys would not be after her too. Richard watched apprehensively, asking himself what he had to offer this wonderful, beautiful, exotic woman with whom he now knew himself in love. It was hopeless, of course. She was from China, her father a senior man in the Party. As students among other students, friendship might be possible, but a closer relationship was out of the question.

  She had told him that Comrade Minister Deng believed that China needed the west to develop its own potential. That was why she was in the commerce faculty, to study western business methods and improve her English. What she learnt she would take home with her and use for the benefit of China.

  ‘What does your mother think about that?’ he asked.

  ‘My mother died when I am small,’ she said. ‘In any case make no difference. We are taught individual not important. Obedience to Party everything.’

  He knew he must not become too attached to her; their lives were set on separate paths. But knowing and accepting were two different things.

  ‘There is Chinese fable,’ she told him. ‘Spinning maiden and cowherd.’

  ‘Tell me,’ he said.

  ‘They live in night sky, are permitted to meet once each year. They cross a bridge of stars and are with each other for a single night.’

  ‘And the rest of the time?’

  ‘They wait for that one night.’

  ‘You are saying that you are the maiden and I the cowherd,’ Richard said.

  ‘Except that in our case there is no bridge,’ she said.

  He had found out her full name. It had taken a long time to get it out of her.

  ‘What is secret about anyone’s name?’ he had asked in exasperation.

  ‘No secret.’

  Lee Su-Ying: the sounds were unfamiliar yet fitted comfortably in his mouth.

  ‘And that is what people call you?’

  ‘My name is Lee,’ she said. ‘Miss Lee. My father and close friends call me Su-Ying.’

  ‘May I use that name?’

  She studied him, her expression so grave that he almost withdrew his request. Yet did not, sensing it might be important. At last she nodded. ‘You may call me that.’

  They were seeing more of each other now, regularly with other students but sometimes by themselves, too. It was surprising how much they had in common. Not in everything: his jokes were a problem. He sensed her feeling around the edges of his offerings, attempting to decipher them but seldom succeeding. It might have irritated him but did not; it endeared her to him more than ever.

  I shall hold her hand. I shall explain everything to her and she will understand.

  He was besotted yet said nothing, afraid he might frighten her off. They never met off campus. Control over her seemed more relaxed than at the beginning, the watchers less in evidence, but still there were limits. Always there was the waiting car, the watching man. Having coffee in the students’ cafeteria, he asked her about it.

  ‘What harm can it do? Go to the movies? Go dancing? Do all the things other couples do?’

  She stirred her coffee thoughtfully, not looking at him. ‘I know it is difficult for you to understand but it is impossible,’ she said.

  Her fluency with English had increased beyond belief. The accent was still there but she had learnt to use the tenses that did not exist in Chinese, and all the other phrases that had baffled her at first. Her conversation was no longer stilted. Richard liked to think that the relaxation in her speech was increasingly mirrored in their relationship.

  At a nearby table a girl was shrieking at a boy who was shouting back. His attention focused on Su-Ying’s lovely face, Richard shut out the distraction. ‘For heaven’s sake, why not?’

  ‘That man is my father’s friend. He sends weekly reports to Beijing.’

  Richard was aghast. ‘He spies on you?’

  ‘It is not spying! He protect me. He is right to keep my father informed. How else is Father to know?’

  ‘Does he know about us?’

  She shook her head emphatically. ‘If Father thought I had become friends with a westerner, he would summon me home at once.’

  ‘And you would go?’

  ‘What else should I do?’

  ‘It is your life, after all.’

  ‘I serve the Party, and my father. Their wishes, not mine. Anything else would be unthinkable.’

  ‘You are with me now,’ Richard said. ‘Is this what the Party wishes? Is this what your father wishes?’

  ‘My father would be distressed.’ She looked troubled. ‘I am a most unfilial daughter.’

  ‘But the right to decide does matter. The individual does matter.’

  ‘You are wrong. The individual does not matter at all.’

  Yet she was still seeing him, although she knew her father would disapprove. The spinning maiden and the cowherd… Perhaps the bridge between them might be found, after all.

  * * *

  Su-Ying stood at her bedroom window and stared out at the walled garden at the rear of the house. It was July 1966, winter in Australia. The plants looked drab, there were no flowers and the sky was grey.

  The colours matched her mood because she could no longer pretend Richard Tucker meant nothing to her. She had known him for eighteen months and had let herself get fond of him, which was very dangerous. She did not love him – she was the Party’s instrument to be directed as the Party wished, and there could be no question of that - but from the first he had been comfort in a strange land.

  I wish to remain his friend, she thought. But it is not easy because I know he feels more for me than he should.

  Her dilemma about Richard was made worse by the bad rumours coming out of China. There had been nothing so far in her father’s letters, which arrived punctually every month, reminding her of her duty to Chairman Mao and to the Party, but the Chinese businessman in whose house she was billeted had been hearing stories for two months now of schools being closed, of teachers being attacked and even murdered. Bands of students, waving Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book and calling themselves Red Guards, were said to be spreading mayhem through the countryside. And now The People’s Daily newspaper was full of criticism of former President Liu.

  The whole country was in turmoil. What could it me
an?

  She was increasingly scared for her father. If Liu Shao-Qi could be attacked in such a way no one was safe.

  It was mid-August and he thought they had become close. They were not lovers – they had never even kissed – but Richard was in love. What was to be done?

  There was nothing to be done.

  He had got into the habit of meeting Su-Ying every morning at the students’ cafeteria where she had first told him that the individual did not count. They met; they talked. Students’ talk, mainly, although once or twice Su-Ying mentioned unrest brewing in China.

  ‘Nothing serious, surely?’

  ‘No need for concern,’ she said brightly. ‘The Party is in complete control.’

  She was concerned, whatever she might pretend, but Richard knew she would never say anything critical of events in China, even to him.

  Today she was late. Richard sat at their usual table. Through the window he could see the grounds sloping down to the river. It was a fine day at winter’s end, the sky clear and the temperature likely to rise to twenty-five degrees. What he would like to do was cut classes, take a boat and picnic basket and explore upriver with Su-Ying beside him. He would like to do that and all the other things his friends did with their girls. He would like to take her to movies, the theatre, concerts. He would like to take her to bed. He knew there was no chance of any of these things.

  With her, he was happy. Apart, doubts came crowding. What was he doing, longing to possess what he could never have? The most he could hope for was half a relationship: and not the better half, either. There was no chance of intimacy or even tenderness, because they were never alone long enough for tenderness to be possible. He had invited her to his room only once.

  ‘To listen to music,’ he had said. ‘To be together.’

  To be alone. To hold hands. To kiss. To touch.

  It was natural, wasn’t it?

  It might have been rape, the way she reacted to his suggestion, and he saw nothing of her for a week. There were times when their different cultures were a trial, indeed. He looked at his watch. It was getting late. He had plenty of work to do. After five minutes he assumed she wasn’t coming and headed back to his room.

  For three days he saw nothing of her. On the fourth she was there, acting and speaking as though everything was normal, but he had read the papers, saw the strain in her face and knew that things were very far from normal. He did something he had never done before. He leant across the table and covered her hand with his. She flinched but did not withdraw her hand.

  ‘Tell me what is troubling you.’

  She would not look at him. ‘It is nothing.’

  ‘I do not believe you.’ Richard took the newspaper that lay folded beside his cup. He opened it and showed it to her.

  ‘Page two,’ he said. ‘Middle column.’

  He watched as she read the news report that he had read several times.

  Several million so-called Red Guards gathered yesterday in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Chairman Mao addressed several mass meetings, calling for an end to revisionism. This is widely interpreted as an attack on certain prominent officials, former president Liu Shao-Qi and leading Party member Deng Xiao-Ping among them. Observers believe these attacks are likely to continue and intensify.

  Su-Ying put down the paper. Her lips were white; she was staring not at him but at something Richard could not see.

  ‘Deng Xiao-Ping?’ he said. ‘Could this be dangerous for your father?’

  ‘I do not believe this story.’ Her eyes told a different story. ‘I love Chairman Mao,’ she whispered.

  In the early spring of 1967 Su-Ying was walking on the beach. The sun was shining, the sea blue. All should have been harmony in her world but was not.

  She was not alone. The previous year control over her movements had been relaxed but now she was once again being watched. The comrades who had come with her from China had been replaced by others, more prison guards than protectors, who answered none of her questions and seldom spoke except to each other. Now they walked ten yards behind her as she paced the sand. She knew she was their prisoner in all but name and felt increasingly adrift, alone and helpless.

  One by one, her beliefs had been destroyed.

  She had been taught that Australia, like all western countries, was starving. She had believed it unquestioningly; now she knew it was a lie.

  She had been taught that westerners hated the Chinese and were envious of China’s living standards. That was a double lie. There was no hatred and Australia’s living standards were much higher than those in China.

  She had been sent here to gain knowledge for China’s benefit. What use was that now that China had descended into an anarchy where violence was commonplace, rape and murder encouraged, schools and universities closed and in which nothing and no one was safe?

  Brought up from childhood to revere Chairman Mao, she had told Richard that she loved the Great Helmsman. Maybe once that had been true; not now. Whatever good things he had done in the past, she believed that Mao Ze-Dong had become a monster.

  Deprived of faith, she had fulfilled her father’s parting words. She no longer knew who she was. Lee Su-Ying did not exist.

  Waves edged with foam ran up the tawny beach and retreated and she could hear the sand grating as it was sucked in and out. Gulls sailed overhead, white wings curved to capture the wind. The sunlight on the wind-flecked sea was dazzling; the soft sand made walking hard but she went on. There were standing rocks twenty feet high at the end of the beach and she was determined to reach them. If her escorts hated her for making them walk so far under the hot sun the feeling was entirely mutual. Lies had destroyed the old Lee Su-Ying but with each step along the steeply shelving beach she became more determined that a new Su-Ying would take her place, one loyal to the values of the past but less gullible than before. From now on, she thought, scepticism will be my guide.

  She reached the end of the beach. The rocks were stinging with heat when she placed her hands on them. Her body was a lather of sweat beneath her clothes and there was no shade. The sand shimmered and she could feel her temples swelling beneath the impact of the light. She turned and walked back past the two men, ignoring them as they ignored her. They had their orders. If they were told to follow her they would; if they were told to kill her they would. That was the level to which the new China had reduced them: all three of them were things, without will or individual significance.

  She feared for her father under this new system. She thought his faith in the omniscience of the Party and the perfectibility of man could not survive, as hers had not. But there was a difference. She was young enough to remake herself; she feared that he was not. If the Red Guards did not destroy him he might destroy himself.

  She feared for herself, too. The People’s Daily had quoted Madam Mao as saying that those who worked with foreigners were enemies of the people. Where did that leave her? If they could force her back to China she might find herself another victim of the madhouse that the country had become. Banishment, rape, murder… None of these things was impossible.

  Only one person had shown her unfailing respect, support and loyalty. She knew that Richard Tucker loved her, would protect and cherish her if he could. She also knew there was nothing he could do. He was Australian and she Chinese, separated not only by race but by civilisation and beliefs. He had a mother, a sister who might regard her as an enemy. Whichever way she looked she could see no refuge. She was adrift, alone and helpless.

  It was over a year since the troubles had begun. Formerly they had been seeing each other every day; now it was once a week. Whenever he saw her Richard asked about her father.

  ‘Still all right,’ she said.

  Her face was wan; the tension was draining her. She no longer proclaimed her love for the Chairman, yet still he could not reach her.

  ‘Can nothing be done?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  Only wait anxiously for news. Which in some ways
was the worst punishment of all.

  He felt for her so much.

  ‘I would shed my blood for you.’ Never would he have believed he could have expressed his feelings so openly, yet now he could say no less. ‘You know that, don’t you?’

  Even after saying such a thing… She looked at him silently, her drawn face showing nothing, her eyes showing nothing… Still he could not reach her.

  ‘There have been developments,’ Su-Ying said.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Here. And in China.’

  She told him that the man who had been entrusted with her care, the Australia-based businessman who was also her father’s friend, had been replaced.

  ‘He has been ordered back to China to answer charges.’

  ‘Obviously he won’t go.’

  ‘He has already gone.’

  ‘And in China?’

  ‘The People’s Daily has reported that Comrade Deng has been sent for re-education to an engineering works.’

  Her father’s mentor and, until now, his protector. No need to ask the implications: they were written clearly on her face.

  It was terrible to be so helpless.

  In November 1967 she received news that her father had been dismissed. He had been sent to the countryside, to labour in the fields.

  For the first time she came sobbing into Richard’s arms, head resting on his chest.

  ‘They are calling him a class traitor,’ she sobbed.

  Richard told himself he would kill whoever had caused her such pain. Such a stupid thing to think. He was powerless; they were both powerless. Yet that was not the worst thing she had to tell him.

  ‘This is goodbye,’ she said.

  He stared; he could not have heard correctly.

  ‘I have been ordered back to Beijing.’

  He said: ‘You must not go.’

  ‘The plane leaves tonight.’

  Richard stared at her questioningly. ‘Plane? China has no diplomatic representation here.’

  ‘Commercial flight to Hong Kong,’ she said. ‘Then on to Beijing.’

  ‘I want you to listen to me,’ Richard said. ‘Listen to me well.’

  He made her sit in her usual chair, pressing gently on her shoulders until she did so. ‘Wait here while I get us some coffee.’