Mr Ma and Son

by Lao She

  ‘Why didn’t we bring a fortune-telling almanac with us?’ he muttered under his breath, ‘If it happens to be a “black day”, it’s suicide careering round in one of these things.’

  ‘What do you want an almanac for?’ asked Ma Wei.

  ‘Just talking to myself. Don’t butt in so much!’ Mr Ma glared at Ma Wei.

  As requested, the driver took the backstreets, dodging alternately eastwards and westwards, round a green, into a narrow alley . . . they were driving for forty or fifty minutes before they reached an open area, bounded by a high iron railing and lined with bushes. The grass was covered with stone monuments and slabs, both tall and short, and the silence was profound. London’s a funny place like that: the noisy parts are really noisy, but the quiet spots are as quiet as can be.

  The taxi circled the iron railing until it came to a small gate, at which it stopped. Father and son alighted. Ma Wei wanted to send the taxi away, but Mr Ma insisted on its waiting. Beyond the small iron gate there was a little red house, standing in isolation before the sea of stone. Its little chimney was sending out a curving, curling plume of smoke.

  They knocked on the gate, and the door of the red house opened a crack. The crack widened, and slowly a round, plump face peeped out, mouth moving as though chewing something. The door opened wider still, and the plump face became a short, fat, little old woman.

  The old woman’s face looked featureless, as if it were just one shiny globe of soft flesh. And arms and legs aside, her body was one little round wheel. It wasn’t until she’d walked right up to them that they realised all parts of her face were intact, and that her eyes were twinkling away merrily. Wiping her mouth with her apron, she asked whose grave they were looking for. As she spoke, it became clear that she had only one tooth, which, being deprived of any company, looked exceptionally large, as if it had made itself sole tyrant of the area by brute force.

  ‘We’re looking for the grave of a Mr Ma, a Chinese man,’ Ma Wei told the woman. She’d finished wiping her mouth, and now vigorously scrubbed her face, seemingly to wipe her eyes.

  ‘I know, I remember him. He died last autumn. Such a tragedy!’ She made to raise her apron again. ‘There were three wreaths on the coffin . . . In the autumn, it was. October the seventh. The first Chinaman buried here. Yet, that’s it, he was the first. Oh, poor man.’

  As she spoke, tears flowed sideways down her face, as her cheeks were too chubby to let the tears flow straight. ‘Come with me. Of course I remember him.’

  The old lady set off, waddling on her stumpy legs like a newborn duckling. And as she walked, her cheeks trembled like the jellyfish eaten in winter.

  The Mas followed her, and after going a few hundred yards, she indicated a small stone pillar.

  ‘There it is,’ she said.

  The Mas hastened over to it. The name on the stone pillar wasn’t that of a Chinese person.

  ‘No,’ she said, as they were about to mention their doubts, ‘that’s not it. We’ll have to go a bit further. Of course . . . I remember him . . . Over there. The first Chinaman, he was.’

  They proceeded another few hundred yards, then Ma Wei, with his sharp eyes, noticed a small square pillar to their left that bore an inscription in Chinese characters. He tugged at Mr Ma, and the two of them walked towards it.

  ‘Yes, that’s right, there it is. I remember. Of course!’ said the old woman from behind them, her plump finger pointing to the stone pillar that they’d already discovered themselves.

  The pillar was a mere three feet high. On it was inscribed the name of Ma Wei’s uncle: Ma Wei-jen. Beneath his name were inscribed the year and month of his death. The stone itself was light grey, streaked with greyish-purple lines. The wreaths in front of it had by now lost their colour, washed by the rain, and the notes attached to them had long since been blown away by the wind. On the grass at the foot of the stone grew a few light-yellow flowers in pale bloom, their petals hung with drops of dew like teardrops. The black clouds in the sky, the stone pillar and the tattered wreaths combined to produce an atmosphere of forlorn desolation. A feeling of distress welled up inside Mr Ma, and he found himself shedding tears. And although Ma Wei had never met his uncle, his eyes grew red-rimmed too.

  Ignoring Ma Wei and the old lady, Mr Ma knelt down before the slab, and with great reverence performed three kowtows. ‘Elder brother,’ he said in a quiet voice, ‘protect your younger brother so that he may make his fortune and carry your coffin back to China.’

  As he uttered these words, his voice broke, and he couldn’t say anything more.

  At his father’s side, Ma Wei bowed three times towards the stone slab. The old woman behind him was crying so brokenly that her face was awash with tears. Rendered powerless to even lift up her apron, she was reduced to rubbing her face with her fists.

  In the midst of her nonstop weeping, she asked, ‘Do you want any fresh-cut flowers? I’ve got some.’

  ‘How much?’ asked Ma Wei.

  ‘Bring some,’ said Mr Ma as he knelt before the grave.

  ‘All right, I’ll go and get some. I’ll go and get some.’

  The old woman picked up her skirts, seemingly to run, but, as her ankles were rather bent, she merely stumped along, face to the sky, tottering unsteadily. She was away for an age, and when at last she slowly waddled back, her face and neck were as red as the bricks of her little red house. With one hand she clutched her skirts, and in the other held a bunch of apricot-yellow tulips.

  ‘Here’s the flowers, sir. Nice and fresh. Oh, yes . . .’ she rambled on as she handed the flowers to Mr Ma.

  He picked up one of the wreaths and stuck all the flowers in it. Then he placed it back at the foot of the slab. He stepped back two paces, contemplated it, and wept once more. As he wept, the old woman accompanied him with her sobs.

  ‘The money,’ she said suddenly, at the hysteric height of her lamentations, stretching out her hand. ‘The money.’

  Without a word, Mr Ma fished out a ten-shilling note and handed it to her. At the sight of the note, she lifted her head and peered closely at Mr Ma.

  ‘Thank you. Oh, thank you. Yes, the first Chinaman buried here. Oh, yes. Oh, thank you. I do hope a few more Chinamen die and get buried here.’

  This last sentence was addressed to herself, but was quite distinctly overheard by the Mas.

  All at once, the sun shot a ray of light through a broken cloud and cast their shadows on the stone pillar, rendering that melancholy spot unique in its gloom and misery. Mr Ma gave a sigh, wiped his eyes and turned round to his son. ‘Ma Wei, let’s go.’

  Slowly, father and son made their way out of the cemetery. The old lady ran after them to ask whether they wanted any more flowers as she’d got other kinds, too. Ma Wei shot her a look, and Mr Ma shook his head. By the time the two of them reached the iron gate, they’d left her far behind them, but they could still hear her saying, ‘The first Chinaman . . .’

  They both got into the taxi again. Mr Ma closed his eyes, and wondered how he would manage to carry his elder brother’s coffin back to China. Then he remembered that his elder brother had been younger than sixty when he died. How would he fare himself? He was already heading for fifty! Life’s but a dream with no meaning. Yes, a dream . . .

  Ma Wei was also ruminating on his impressions of the cemetery. As he sat leaning back in the corner of the taxi, his eyes staring fixedly at the broad back of the taxi driver, he thought to himself, What a hero my uncle was, setting up business in a foreign land. A hero. True, selling antiques wasn’t necessarily a particularly magnificent enterprise, but, all the same, he’d at least shown it was possible to earn foreign money. My father’s useless. He glanced at Mr Ma; if his father wasn’t banging on about becoming a mandarin, he was juggling a wine cup and playing the poverty-stricken gentleman-scholar. A would-be mandarin, a famous gentleman-scholar. Ha! Real ability was being able to apply genuine knowledge to earn an honest penny.

  X

  THE MAS’ ant
iques shop was in a little side street to the east of St Paul’s. If you stood outside the shop, you could see part of the church’s dome, looking like a slice of watermelon. The shopfront was as long as a single room, with a small door on the left and a full-length glass window on the right. In the window were displayed some porcelain, bronzes, old fans, little images of Buddha and various other odds and ends. Past the window stood another door, which was the entrance for the umbrella and suitcase repairer upstairs, and past that lay a clothing storage depot, which had two horse-drawn carts in front of its door, with people going in and out moving goods onto the carts. To the left of the shop there were three other small shops in a row, the one immediately next door to the Mas’ being another antiques shop. Opposite there was nothing except a continuous stretch of wall.

  As father and son stood surveying the shop, Li Tzu-jung stepped out of the door.

  ‘Mr Ma?’ he said, smiling. ‘Please come in.’

  Mr Ma took a look at Li Tzu-jung. There was nothing particularly objectionable about his face but he was smiling too extravagantly. What’s more, he was in his shirt sleeves, with dust on his hands, having just been cleaning and rearranging the display cabinets. Intuitively, Mr Ma summed him up in two syllables: vulgar.

  ‘Mr Li?’ Ma Wei hastened over to shake hands with Li Tzu-jung.

  ‘Don’t shake hands, I’ve got muck on them.’ Li Tzu-jung hastily searched in his trouser pockets for a handkerchief, but finding none, had to give Ma Wei his wrist to shake. It was a thick, powerful wrist, of handsomely defined muscle and bone. As Ma Wei shook that warm wrist, he became rather taken with Li Tzu-jung. From Li’s shirt, his rolled-up sleeves and his soiled hands, you could tell he was a man of action, and you needed to tackle things with real vigour and capability to compete with the English.

  As foreigners would see it, Li Tzu-jung was more Chinese than Ma Wei. The Chinese man, to the foreign mind, is short of stature and wears a pigtail. He has a flat face with swollen cheekbones, no nose, eyes that are two slits each an inch or so long, a thin-lipped mouth, a stringy moustache dangling in the breeze from his upper lip and waddling Pekingese-dog legs. And that’s only his appearance; as for his hidden devilry and deceit, his habit of keeping poisonous snakes up his sleeves and concealing arsenic in his ears, how, when he exhales, he turns into a chlorine-gas gun, and how, just by winking his eye, he can send you to kingdom come . . . all such things serve yet further to make foreign men and women, young and old, shudder to the very depths of their hearts.

  Li Tzu-jung’s face almost exactly fitted the image. If he’d been slightly taller, the foreigners might have accorded him more honour by calling him Japanese. (Yellow-faced people with the slightest points of merit are all Japanese.) Unfortunately, he was only about five feet tall, and his short legs did indeed bend outwards at the knees as he walked. His hair was thick and copious, and what with that untidy mass and the lowness of his forehead, there wasn’t much space between his eyebrows and his hair. His eyes, nose and mouth were not unattractive, but, alas, his cheekbones were rather too flat. He had a very fine physique, though, with a broad, straight back and a solid, erect neck, which, with his slightly bowed legs, made him look like a little howitzer gun.

  Yes, Li Tzu-jung really got the foreigners in a muddle. They might think he was Japanese, but then his face was scarcely what you could call handsome. (The Japanese are all decent lookers.) But then, if they took him for Chinese, his yellow face was as clean and sparkling as a new pin, and no Chinese fellow can ever spare the cash for a bar of soap, can he now? Anyway, just look at those upright shoulders of his! The Chinese always keep their backs bent, ready for a beating, so he couldn’t be Chinese. And although his legs were somewhat bandy, he walked briskly, fairly pounding along. He not only failed to waddle, he even walked at tremendous speed . . . Foreign gentlemen were truly nonplussed as to precisely which inferior race he belonged.

  ‘Ah,’ Li Tzu-jung’s landlady had concluded, ‘the fellow’s half Chinese, half Japanese.’ And in private she’d confide to others, ‘Oh, he’s definitely not proper Chinese. What, a Japanese? Not likely! Not his sort!’

  Before Ma Wei had even finished shaking hands, the elder Ma had already drawn back his shoulders and made his entrance into the shop. Li Tzu-jung hurried in after him, cleared up the things on the floor and ushered him to a seat in the back room.

  The shop had two rooms in total, one where the business was conducted and another that served as the accounts office. Hard against the back wall of the latter stood the safe, in front of which there was just enough space for three or four chairs and a table. Next to the safe stood a small table bearing a telephone and a telephone directory. There was a rather dank smell about the room, which, combined with the acrid smell of metal polish, produced an atmosphere very much like that of one of those tiny foreign-goods shops in Peking.

  ‘Shop assistant Li.’ Mr Ma had reflected for some time before hitting upon ‘shop assistant’ as his chosen form of address. ‘Before we begin, make us a pot of tea.’

  Li Tzu-jung raked at the unkempt hair on his head, glanced at Mr Ma, then turned to Ma Wei with a smile.

  ‘We haven’t got a teapot or any cups here,’ he said. ‘If the old gentleman’s set on having a cup of tea, I’ll have to go out and buy some. Got any money on you?’

  Ma Wei was about to pull out some money when Mr Ma, his face darkening, again addressed Li Tzu-jung.

  ‘Shop assistant!’ (This time he even omitted the ‘Li’.) ‘Do you mean to tell me that if the manager of a shop wishes to drink a cup of tea, he is required to pull out his own money? And there are numerous teapots and cups on the shelves, yet without any thought you declare that we have none!’

  Mr Ma drew up a chair, seated himself next to the small table, and, leaning back, almost knocked the telephone over.

  Slowly and leisurely, Li Tzu-jung rolled the sleeves of his shirt down and turned round to survey Mr Ma.

  ‘Mr Ma,’ he said. ‘While your brother was alive, I helped him here for a year or more. When he died, he put the business in my hands. Every decision I make is for the good of the business. Drinking tea’s a private matter, which can’t be put down on the expense account. It’s not like in China. Business accounts have to be signed by a lawyer, to assist the government in collecting taxes. We can’t cut loose and put any old costs down on them. As for those teapots and cups, they’re for sale, not for our use.’

  Then he turned to Ma Wei. ‘I expect you’ve got the gist of what I mean?’ he asked. ‘You may feel I’m a bit direct, but we’re in England now. The English way is that business is business, and nothing personal. We’ve got to do things the same way.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ma Wei in a small voice, not daring to look at his father.

  ‘Very well,’ said Mr Ma, with lowered head, looking a bit afraid of Li Tzu-jung. ‘Very well, I won’t have any then. I won’t have any. Will that suit you?’

  Li Tzu-jung said nothing, but went into the other room and fetched the keys to the safe. He came back and opened it, took out several account books and other documents, and placed them on a chair right under Mr Ma’s nose.

  ‘Here are the account books and so on, Mr Ma. Take a look at them, please, and when you’ve done so, I’ve got something else I want to say.’

  ‘Why should I look at them? That’s just a routine matter. Surely you haven’t been cheating me, have you?’ said Mr Ma.

  Li Tzu-jung laughed. ‘Mr Ma, I take it you’ve never been in business before.’

  ‘Been in business? Huh!’ Mr Ma exclaimed.

  ‘Right. Well, whether you’ve been in business or not’s beside the point. It boils down to the same thing: business is strictly business, and the personal is neither here nor there. That’s a matter of procedure, and whether you suspect me of cheating or not just doesn’t come into it.’

  Li Tzu-jung was in a quandary, not sure whether to smile or not. He was well aware that it was the Chinese way to maintain politeness and to
bring personal feelings to play on things. But he also knew that to do business in England, one must do so like the English – everything above board and straightforward (except in their foreign diplomacy), and no beating about the bush or approaching things in a roundabout fashion. In the throes of this dilemma, he couldn’t think what to do. He was reduced to raking at his hair, then twirling the long forelock around and around into a small curl.

  ‘My father’s just got back from my uncle’s grave,’ said Ma Wei with a smile, not waiting for his father to speak, ‘and he’s still feeling rather upset. We’ll look at the accounts tomorrow, shall we?’

  Mr Ma nodded his head. That’s how things should be, he thought to himself. The son sticking up for his dad! This Li Tzu-jung fellow’s deliberately trying to make matters awkward for me.

  Li Tzu-jung looked at Mr Ma, looked at Ma Wei, spluttered a laugh, and, gathering up all the books and documents, put them back. When he’d stowed them all away, he felt gently around in the depths of the safe, and, after a moment, brought out a small lilac brocade-covered box. Mr Ma felt like laughing as he watched him.

  The young fellow thinks he’s a magician, he said to himself. What will his next trick be?

  Li Tzu-jung handed the brocade box to Ma Wei. Ma Wei looked at his father, then slowly opened it. It was filled with cotton wool. Lifting that up, he discovered a diamond ring.

  Placing the ring on his palm, he scrutinised it. It was a lady’s ring, a fine gold one, with a twisted hemp-flower design. The back of it broadened out a little, and the front had a diamond set in it, which sparkled and shone.

  ‘It’s a keepsake your uncle left you,’ said Li Tzu-jung, locking up the safe.

  ‘Let me have a look at it,’ said Mr Ma.

  Ma Wei at once passed him the ring, and Mr Ma, anxious to show off his know-how in front of Li Tzu-jung, turned it over to inspect it. He looked at the design, then peered closer, and with half-shut eyes examined the characters engraved on the inside of the ring. Then with a finger he rubbed some spit on the diamond, and gave it a few wipes.