The China Coin

by Allan Baillie

  She stopped, shook her wet hands in the breeze, grinned and wandered casually down the street. Now she knew exactly – well, almost exactly – where she was. She reached the corner, crossed the road to the riverside and looked left at the grey cliff of the Bund. Now Shanghai was as familiar as Chatswood.

  In half an hour everything would be okay.

  If Joan was in the hotel, waiting for her.

  She breezed up the broad promenade, past the ice-cream and toy sellers, past the shouting children and the old men playing chess, over the metal bridge, a world away from old street slaughter and running students.

  She strutted into the lobby of the hotel, saw Joan on a couch and waved at her. The fright was over.

  Joan touched her temple, jerked herself to her feet and walked stiffly toward Leah.

  Something was wrong. ‘Hi, Mum.’

  Joan seized her above the elbow and pushed her into a lift. Her face was dark and she would not speak. Two floors up, the room door was hurled open, Leah hurled into the room, the door slammed shut.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘You wretched little girl! Where’ve you been, where’ve you been?’ Joan was hissing the words, shaking Leah like a bean-bag.

  ‘I got confused – ’

  ‘Confused? Confused! Do I have to put you in a baby’s harness to keep you under control?’

  ‘Let go!’ Leah twisted away, panting.

  ‘Don’t you shout at me!’ Joan chased her, grabbed her, pushing a wild face at her. ‘Running with thugs, vanished, couldn’t find you anywhere – I thought – You think everything is a game, don’t you?’

  ‘No. I was frightened – ’

  ‘Should have left you in Chatswood!’

  ‘Why didn’t you? I didn’t ask to come! It’s your rotten China!’ Leah struck Joan’s arms away.

  ‘My –’ Joan’s hand was recoiling, curling in the air.

  Leah felt the hot fingers scoring her face as she toppled over the bed.

  For a while Joan panted in the middle of the room, the anger slowly being replaced by a haunted shadow, then she turned to the window and shivered. Leah slowly touched her cheek. It felt scorched; it felt wet with blood, but when she took her fingers away there was nothing there.

  ‘Oh God,’ Joan whispered. ‘I thought the mob had got you.’

  For a few days Joan and Leah crept around each other, wandering among the crowds of Shanghai, pretending Sunday afternoon had never happened but staying very close to each other. Joan muttered something about ‘sorting things out on the cruise’ as she bought the tickets, and they prepared to leave the city.

  In the morning Joan stormed out of the hotel in search of a taxi to take her and Leah to the riverboats, after her shower had run cold, the toilet had clogged, and the hotel had run out of change. And there were no taxis outside. She marched up and down the street and back into the hotel.

  ‘They have all gone. Gone for a siesta. Typical!’

  ‘Perhaps we could phone –’ Leah tried.

  ‘The phones won’t work. No, we’ll damn well walk!’ Joan hoisted her suitcase and marched out onto the street. Leah followed meekly.

  The crowd on the bridge was dense. People pushing, hurrying, looking slightly worried, a single policeman blowing a whistle at a truck and a swarm of cyclists. But on the other side things were changing. The crowd was spreading out, the traffic turning away from The Bund. For a short time Joan and Leah were panting along the riverfront in almost clear space, then the crowd began to thicken and there was a rumble in the air.

  ‘The road is blocked,’ Leah said. Perhaps Joan would stop.

  The crowd swelled from both sides of the road and crushed gently in the middle. Everyone was looking at a vacant intersection down the road. A few police idled under trees, gossiping over their walkie-talkies.

  ‘Why don’t they unblock it, then?’

  A deep cheer surged along the crowd as a flash of bright red appeared at the edge of the intersection. The flash became a banner, many banners in red, white, yellow, in a torrent of young men and girls. The crowd clapped as the banners came on, as the protesters grinned at them, held up two widespread fingers in a ‘victory’ sign.

  Joan stared at the students in haunted fear for half a minute, then she pressed her lips together and replaced the fear with anger. ‘Damn students,’ she snarled.

  But Leah felt she was marching up The Bund with the students, separated only by the crowd between them. The students were laughing, friends with all the world – including the quiet police – and Joan was carrying her suitcase as if she was looking for someone to swing it at. Joan had become an enemy. Again.

  A student with a band of white knotted around his forehead was smiling at Leah. She smiled back. He couldn’t be the running boy that pushed her out of the chase? Oh come on!

  ‘What’s up now?’ Joan glared back at her.

  ‘Nothing, nothing. What do the banners say?’

  ‘Something illiterate, I’m sure. There’s “Freedom”. “We” – ah – “wish” … “We want democracy and freedom.” And “Long live the people”. The big one, turning into The Bund, is – ah – “Da Dao Guanxi”, Down with – it’s a hard one that, there’s no real English word for guanxi. Maybe “Down with favouritism”. Young ratbags, shall we go?’

  The main march was joined by another flood of students at a second intersection, swirling banners and flags around a deserted traffic policeman’s tower. The noise was intense but it was cheerful.

  Joan elbowed through a knot of spectators. ‘Where are the police?’

  A leader was heaved onto the traffic tower by several of his friends as another climbed onto someone’s shoulder and onto the tower. In a few moments ten students were on the tower, keeping their position by hanging onto each other. The leader suddenly pointed at Leah’s student and beckoned him to the tower. He motioned another student to jump off, leaving room. Red flags were passed up and waved about as the leader started shouting into a megaphone.

  Something about a huge gathering in Beijing to mark a protest in Tiananmen Square for modern China and democracy – 70 years ago …

  Leah’s student waved the flag and saw Leah watching him. He grinned and saluted her with a victory sign. If it was the same boy, he was sharing a small triumph with her.

  Leah returned the sign.

  Joan dropped her suitcase and slapped Leah’s hand down. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ she hissed. ‘People will think you’re one of them.’

  9 The River

  The riverboat was a squat ferry with one broad funnel, too much superstructure and not enough paint. But Joan brightened when she learnt that she and Leah were to be given an outside cabin, with only the bridge above them.

  ‘This is the way to see China. In style,’ she said. ‘Am I not the smartest mother a girl could have?’ She was watching Leah’s face closely.

  ‘Oh, yes.’ But Leah looked away. There was to be no forgiving, not this time.

  But they did seem to have done well. They were second class passengers, but since there were no first class cabins they had one of the best cabins on the ship. A small room, cool, with two bunks, a chipped sink, a cupboard, a seat, and a moving view – provided they kept their door open. Below and behind them were several hundred Chinese and a few tough young backpackers jammed in long cabins and along the passageways.

  Leah was leaning on a rail, watching the students, as the boat pulled away from The Bund.

  Joan settled beside her and tried on a cheerful face. ‘This cruise should be very good, don’t you think?’

  ‘They don’t look like a mob.’ She could still feel the blow on her cheek.

  Joan sagged a little. ‘No, they’re not. They weren’t. I was remembering other times.’

  ‘Penang?’

  ‘Penang.’ Joan let it die.

  Leah shrugged and fiddled with her camera. Why should she get caught up in her mother’s childhood troubles? She didn’t want to kn
ow.

  She pretended Joan wasn’t there and stared at the changing life of the Huangpu River. A long river train – a barge towing a chain of other barges – crossed the riverboat’s bow and was hooted angrily. A junk, lopped of sails and masts, putted upriver with a cargo of black coal, and a lone sailing junk ghosted past the anchored freighters and disappeared. A clutter of worn submarines and transports marked old wars.

  Leah smiled and clicked away.

  Then she stopped. The grey woman kicking at Joan, the running, shouting soldiers and both times Joan was white with terror. Not just frightened, but frozen, staring, bloodless. Why?

  A man with grey-streaked hair came on deck and coughed, a shuddering fit of coughs that left him weak and clutching the rail.

  Joan and Leah looked at each other in startled recognition. Joan tried a feeble twitch of her mouth, then looked away.

  The man coughed through bend after bend of freighters, tankers, barges, riverboats anchored mid-river or snug against the wharves, cranes working over dim holds like pickpockets and behind them tall chimneys flickering a high flame, bleeding smoke into the sky.

  That was the start, Leah thought. The Cough. Just like that. Do you go up to the coughing man, tell him he’s got to see a doctor, right now? Joan did, to Dad, many times, and he finally went.

  There was wide brown water ahead.

  The coughing man moved away.

  No point in speaking to him. He probably knows anyway, and it is probably too late now. Like it was for Dad.

  The riverboat throbbed steadily from the narrow thread of the Huangpu out onto a brown plain of moving water. There was no sign of land ahead, only a hazy sun and the dark silhouettes of occasional freighters.

  Sitting on the couch, looking at his feet as if he was terribly ashamed of something. Joan holding her hand but looking at the kitchen as if she was worried about the rice boiling over. He’d got something important to tell you, he had already told Joan. He had gone to the doctors, the experts, and would go to the hospital often from now on. Funny words like remission, drug therapy, but: ‘Leah, I’m afraid I’ve got a touch of cancer.’ And then the silence, until: ‘Oh, but they can fix it, can’t they? Cut it out.’ Little girls still believed in Santa. But he just looked at you with sad sympathy in his eyes and shrugged a little. He felt sorry for you …

  ‘Are we in the Yangtze now?’ Joan asked Leah with a fading smile. ‘Or are we at sea?’

  Leah stared at the water and Joan sighed and went off to make herself a cup of tea.

  And when it was all over, she turned around and clapped her hands and said, ‘Now for China.’ Like Dad was a TV show: it’s over, forget about him. Let’s see the movie.

  Leah watched bleakly as both banks of the river slid below the horizon and a breeze whipped the water. The riverboat slowly passed an iron island, motorless metal barges loaded with coal clustered round a heaving tug. The riverboat and the tug hooted bleakly at each other as they drew apart.

  There was nothing to see now. There was no China, no David Waters now and no Mum, no Joan Waters left. Nobody, nothing but her.

  Joan started a feud at dinner with the cashier. The menu was written on a blackboard by the door, each dish priced in yuan. She ordered crispy chicken, a vegetable dish, beef and rice and offered RMB notes.

  The girl would not touch them. ‘FEC,’ she said stolidly.

  Leah shrank a little, FEC, tourist money, meant they were now to pay double for the meal, and Joan wouldn’t like it.

  ‘Why? I’m eating the same food as everyone else, aren’t I?’

  ‘RMB is only for Chinese people.’

  ‘I am Chinese.’

  ‘You are Overseas Chinese. It is not the same.’

  ‘That is not fair.’

  ‘It is the rule.’

  Joan lifted a finger, but sighed in defeat. ‘All right.’ She counted out the FEC notes calculated from the blackboard.

  The girl still shook her head. She wrote down the figures from the blackboard – and doubled them.

  ‘What?’ Joan shouted at the girl.

  ‘Tourists pay more. It is the rule.’

  ‘You know what you can do with your meal!’ Joan thrust Leah from the restaurant.

  Joan and Leah ate below in the chaotic din of the third class restaurant. The food was barely tolerable, but, she paid for it with RMB and there was a gleam of triumph in her eye.

  She had found another grey woman and this time she was not going to get kicked around.

  The riverboat dropped an anchor briefly in Nanjing, a city of tall new buildings and a cluttered waterfront built on the ruins of massive imperial walls.

  ‘Not the same as Good Field,’ Joan said quietly.

  ‘It’s bigger.’

  ‘The Japanese troops left the village alone. Here 300,000 people were killed.’

  Joan was brooding over the city until a sudden red blaze of students disturbed her. ‘Not again!’

  ‘There’s a lot of them.’

  ‘Nothing new. In 1976 they painted slogans on a train, attacking Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Students in Beijing read the slogans when the train arrived and took over Tiananmen Square. That almost finished the Decade of Chaos.’

  ‘Is that happening now?’

  ‘Now? No, just kids mucking about. No, not now.’ Joan was persuading herself

  Leah spent hours on the riverboat’s foredeck, watching lush green and yellow plains sliding slowly past. Through the trees lining the river she could see an occasional bullock ploughing a paddy, women planting rice seedlings, a distant village. She half-dozed under a hazy sun, stroking the peg doll and wondering what Swallow was doing now.

  ‘Now there’s something the Chinese are doing right!’ Joan bounced to the rail beside Leah and pointed.

  Leah saw the brown water and the flat bank, nothing else.

  ‘The trees, the trees! Look at them, they’re everywhere.’

  Young trees, carefully planted and tended. She had seen them at Good Field, on hills outside the train to Shanghai, now they were crowding the sides of the Yangtze, around a village, on the edge of a road.

  Leah hunched her back. ‘So?’

  ‘They’re fixing up the country after Mao’s backyard furnaces. The greening of China.’

  The coughing man erupted and spat heavily into the river.

  Leah looked rigidly ahead.

  ‘Are you enjoying this, Leah?’

  ‘Sure. Why?’

  Joan rubbed her knuckles on the rail. ‘Because you don’t seem to like China one bit. I thought we were getting on very well when we left Good Field, but now …’

  ‘What do you expect when you beat me about the head?’

  ‘How long are we going to go on about that? All right, I was in the wrong. I should not have done it. But can we move on?’

  Leah stared rigidly at the river. ‘There’s more. There’s been more ever since Dad died and you rushed us into China.’

  ‘It’s not like that …’ The coughing man moved toward them. ‘We had better talk. Later.’

  ‘Later’ became much later. Joan wandered about the boat by herself as the river became a chain of lakes: calm brown water with patches of mysterious darker brown.

  Leah watched smaller boats slowly replace coastal freighters, and her comfortable anger began to curdle into guilt. She shook the feeling by bouncing her memory into the time before. Before the Cough, before the coin, before everything.

  That was when Dad brewed his own beer and one day twenty two bottles exploded in the laundry, the cat took off for a week and Mum kept telling him he was lucky she didn’t know any ancient Chinese curses, because otherwise … That was when Dad and Mum sang Danny Boy for a holiday party and it was so horrible they were disowned by their beloved daughter. That was when said daughter started a car-wash business and Dad wound up re-washing cars to keep the owners happy. That was also the time the beloved daughter came wailing home because some of the boys called her a ‘Chink’. Sh
e wasn’t, was she? Dad, not Mum, filled her six-year-old mind with the glories of the emperors, the ancient inventions, the navigators. So much that she was an Empress for two weeks. Come to think of it, that was the first time she had seriously considered Mum was Chinese.

  Leah was smiling as the riverboat slid up to a flat barge, old, with a shack thrown up near the stern. The barge was steered by a small boy. He saw Leah and waved.

  Leah was waving back as Joan joined her warily. ‘Lucky,’ said Leah.

  ‘C’mon for lunch. She surrendered.’

  ‘Oh. The restaurant lady?’

  ‘Yup. We started a mutiny. Other tourist passengers were going to join us in third class, or go hungry. We pay FEC, but only what the blackboard says. Victory! Who’s lucky?’

  ‘That boy there. Huckleberry Finn.’

  Joan shook her head. ‘Goes up and down the Yangtze with his family, lives on the river, but he probably never gets any education.’

  ‘That’s lucky.’ Leah stopped. ‘All his life on the river.’

  ‘Yes. He can’t do anything else, can he? Lucky? C’mon.’

  Suddenly the first voyage was over. They stepped onto the windy streets of Wuhan, deep in the central plain of China, half way between Guangzhou in the south and Beijing in the north. They stopped to watch a passionate old man on a crate shouting at a stirring crowd of riverside workers. Two youths were painting a message on a red banner behind him.

  ‘It is not just the students,’ Joan said softly.

  ‘What is it?’ Something big was happening.

  ‘I don’t know. But it’s the same as Nanjing, as Shanghai, as Tiananmen Square in Beijing.’

  Leah could hear the anxiety in Joan’s voice. They were in the middle of China. They might not get out.

  But Wuhan had no disturbances that day. Joan had to battle through the usual crowd for tickets upriver, but they then found an old colonial hotel with high ceilings, stained walls and a chandelier in the lobby, and unfolded for a rest. They walked the quiet streets that night in search of a restaurant. But it was nine o’clock and the river city had gone to sleep. They ordered noodles at a workers’ café.