The China Coin

by Allan Baillie

  ‘Concussion,’ said Ke, to Leah. ‘Exhaust burn on the leg, and Tong thinks there is a broken ankle …’

  The plump man, Heng, started to shout again. Slower, and this time Leah could just about work out what he was saying. ‘Look what this woman has done! Look, look!’ He was wobbling a warped mudguard, but he was ignored.

  ‘Get a stretcher, Ke,’ said Tong.

  ‘Rushed out on the road, just like that. Didn’t look at all.’

  ‘Xu Ping? How’s the tractor? Yes, back here.’

  ‘It wasn’t my fault.’

  Tong stood up. ‘Going at that speed through the village … could’ve killed anyone.’

  Heng stumbled a little and peered at Leah, then at Joan. ‘Who are they?’

  ‘Australians, looking for – ’

  ‘Foreigners! He looked at Joan as if she had bitten him.

  Ke and another youth ran up with an army stretcher, shaking dust from it with every stride. It had been used many times, but not recently.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Taking this lady to hospital.’

  Heng shook his head in a moment of alarm. ‘No, no …’ He was alarmed, fumbling. ‘It’s too far.’

  ‘We’re not going to Chengdu hospital.’

  ‘Not Chengdu.’ Suddenly Heng was almost smiling.

  ‘The local hospital.’

  ‘Yes, that is best. I will make arrangements.’

  ‘They will probably send this lady on to Chengdu.’

  ‘I will make arrangements.’ Heng kicked his bike into life and rode away.

  Ke watched him go. ‘He’s our village cadre. Our Party man. When I march I think of him.’

  Joan was carefully eased onto the stretcher. The tractor, a long, low machine which rattled as it moved, arrived and one of the new trailers was hooked up. The stretcher carrying Joan was loaded onto the trailer and the tractor rocked slowly from the village.

  Leah sat in the trailer and rubbed Joan’s wrist. She had seen that being done on TV. ‘Can’t we go any faster?’

  ‘Too rough,’ Ke said. ‘It’ll be all right.’

  The tractor turned away from the highway. It ran between two thin rows of trees, along an embankment beside a broad bend of the Min River, and up a slight hill. The hospital was an off-white building sheltered by a cluster of trees. Two men in white coats were waiting at the front.

  Joan was carried along a cool corridor, past a cluttered dispensary, a washroom and toilet and into a three-bed room. It was empty. Leah was ushered out of the room by the white-coated men who had carried Joan, and a woman with a stethoscope went in.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Ke said. ‘She’s good.’

  Leah squeezed her hands together. She could not trust this flag-waving boy.

  Ke led Leah to a small and simple lounge, and that also was empty. The hospital seemed almost deserted. Heng walked past the door, talking fast to a tall white-haired man, who nodded thoughtfully.

  ‘Can you write your name?’ Ke said suddenly.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I mean in Chinese.’

  ‘Oh.’ She did not feel like playing games. ‘No.’

  ‘That’s a pity.’

  ‘Yes.’ She was listening for footsteps.

  ‘What about your mother?’

  ‘Yes. But she’s next door, unconscious, isn’t she?’

  ‘She will be all right. Would she have written her Chinese name in Chinese on something in her bag?’

  Leah glanced sharply at Ke, but she looked in the handbag on her lap. It was something to do. Passport, purse, address book, packet of aspirins, herbs from that grim Guangzhou market, lipstick, and the old letter written in thick black Chinese characters.

  ‘No. Nothing. Mum knows Chinese to speak, but she doesn’t know much about how to write it.’ Where is that doctor?

  ‘What about that letter?’ Ke was looking over her shoulder.

  ‘It’s Grandad’s. We can’t really read it, but it’s why we’re here. That and the coin.’ Leah looked up at the open door and rubbed her knuckles up her sleeve.

  ‘Can I have a look?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I only want to see the signature.’

  Leah picked up the letter, shrugged and handed it over.

  Steps outside.

  Ke began to unfold it very slowly.

  Heng, the white-haired man and the woman doctor walked into the lounge. They were all smiling, but all differently: Heng, broadly, even triumphantly; the white-haired man, politely; the doctor, angry but smiling for Leah’s benefit.

  The woman doctor spoke first. ‘Your mother is all right.’

  Leah sagged and began to tremble. ‘Can I see her now?’ She was having trouble getting the words out.

  The doctor opened her hand in regret. ‘She is sleeping now. I have given her some tablets to reduce the pain. She is no longer suffering from concussion, but she does have a headache and has been mildly burned on her leg. She does have a fractured ankle. Normally, being a foreigner, she should be taken to Chengdu – ’

  ‘But this is not necessary,’ the white-haired man said hurriedly. ‘Your mother needs only some rest and this hospital can give her rest and care better than any Chengdu hospital. Mr Fan Heng has kindly made sure she will receive excellent food and comfort while she is here.’

  Heng nodded and smiled with a glint of gold, and the woman doctor looked as if she was about to spit.

  ‘And Mr Heng has offered the hospitality of his house to you while your mother recovers from this unfortunate accident.’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘It is not necessary,’ said Ke. He was holding the letter and he was fighting down a grin. ‘Leah should stay in my family’s house. She is my family.’

  15 Names

  Back in the village Ke was showing the letter to Tong and to his mother, Li-Nan.

  ‘You see? The name at the bottom? It’s us!’

  Tong took the letter from Ke and spread it before Li-Nan.

  The woman smiled softly at Leah, as if she was sharing a secret joke.

  ‘You understand, Leah?’ said Ke.

  Leah stared blankly at the letter.

  ‘The name, your mother’s name, Ji, it doesn’t mean much. You can say it in so many ways, Jey, Jay, Jee, Zhiy and it can mean so many things: famine, engine, chicken, shoes, lucky, a book …’

  Leah suddenly realized that she had stopped playing games with names. She could have worked out Ke was a visitor, Tong was a boy and Li-Nan was Experience-Child, but she hadn’t. Ke was Ke and that was that – apart from when he was called Ah Ke by his mother, and ‘Ah’ didn’t mean anything at all, just a way of calling the boy Ke with affection. Maybe she was beginning to think Chinese. But now the Chinese were playing games with names.

  ‘For a start,’ said Tong.

  ‘But for every different meaning there is a special Chinese character,’ said Ke, with a clap.

  Ke spun the letter from under Tong’s eyes and jabbed at it. Tong looked at Ke through the thatch of his eyebrows.

  ‘Your mother says she is of the Ji family,’ said Ke. ‘But your grandfather does not write that. He writes something else.’

  ‘We think,’ said Tong.

  Ke hesitated for a moment. ‘That is Ji.’ He picked up some paper and made some marks on it with a pen. ‘That is your Ji – a pearl.’ A ragged capital E and an even more ragged flag on a tripod. ‘Now look at the letter.’

  A ragged flag on a tripod. With a slash instead of the E.

  He tapped the slash. ‘That could be anything – a mistake copied for generations. Many people in China did not know how to write their names. Or maybe it is a sick man trying to write this.’

  Ke scrawled a flag on a tripod with no E, no slash.

  ‘Your family name?’ Leah said softly.

  Ke nodded. ‘Zhu. Meaning the colour red.’

  ‘They do look alike, don’t they?’ Leah said, standing on her excitement. She looked at Tong
, and his face was bland.

  ‘Very much,’ said Ke.

  ‘But we’re Ji, not Zhu. We’re Pearl, not Red.’

  ‘Now. Now you are Cantonese, we are Sichuanese. We speak differently. A person who was a Zhu here a hundred years ago may have changed the sound of his name when he lived in Canton. He may have become a Zhao, a Jao, a Ji. And if he cannot write, the letter-writers and the officials may make his family Red, or Pearl as time goes by.’

  ‘Can this be right?’ Leah asked Tong.

  ‘Oh yes, it is possible.’

  ‘But you don’t think so.’

  Tong rubbed his hands. ‘I don’t know, Leah. You were looking for the Turtle Land village and this is Turtle Land. You were looking for your family and maybe we are. I just don’t want to give you any false hopes.’

  ‘And it doesn’t matter.’ Li-Nan firmly pushed Tong aside and placed her hand on Leah’s forearm. ‘You are in this house. You are part of our family now. Welcome.’

  Leah looked at the angular woman with the fine laugh lines around her eyes and the wisps of grey in her swept-back hair, and wanted to hug her. There was something like understanding in her eyes, as if she had been hurt and saw it in others.

  For a moment Leah felt that she was being pulled home.

  ‘And it is better than staying at Heng’s house,’ said Ke.

  16 Turtle Land

  Leah stretched drowsily and felt the hard wood with her toe. For a minute she was still at home, waiting for the slow grind of a truck, the shriek of the kids next door. Then she heard the bray of angry geese and she was in China, in gentle Good Field village. But the bed was harder and different and far older. Ah yes, in Red Star village, no, in Turtle Land. Her family home – perhaps.

  She wondered about that. The warm glow of Li-Nan’s welcome was still there, and it had not been quite that way at Good Field. Swallow and Jade were closer, but they were sort of friends, like Rose and Ben at home. This was different.

  Because she was not worried about the way Joan was thinking this time? Or perhaps she was changing, somehow. This time she really wanted to be part of the family. Now she had to find the missing part of the coin, both for Dad and for herself.

  She slid out from under the warm quilted bedcover and stepped onto the straw mat with a shiver. It was cold. She hopped about trying to get her feet into her socks under the glittering eyes of the dragons that crowned her two hundred year old bed. She stumbled and fell awkwardly to the packed earth floor.

  ‘All right, Leah?’ Li-Nan called from outside.

  ‘Fine,’ shouted Leah. ‘Fine.’ But that earth floor, trampled and swept every day for two thousand years, felt like concrete.

  Ke greeted her in the kitchen with a kettle of hot water for her to wash herself, apologising for the din of the geese. And the ducks and the pigs. ‘Sorry to wake you up. Sleep well?’

  ‘Great, I’m getting used to ducks and geese, now.’

  ‘Ah, yes, you’ve been in a Chinese village before. But maybe we’re not the same.’

  Leah looked outside. Four low, thatched buildings formed the walls of a square courtyard and Li-Nan was feeding the geese on a low hump outside this courtyard. The walls of three of the buildings were stucco, with windows but no glass. The other building did not have any inner walls and was filled with hay and large woven baskets. There was a thick old tree in the centre of the courtyard, with a bicycle leaning against it and three wooden chairs facing the sun.

  ‘A little older,’ Leah tried.

  ‘Ah, yes. Maybe too old. Maybe we should have houses with wooden floors and gas stoves, hey? And the animals and the birds, you see them?’

  ‘They look very nice.’

  ‘They ought to be! They get more food – much more – than in any ordinary village. I think they eat better than us.’ Ke was smiling, but with a touch of annoyance in the smile.

  ‘But why?’

  Ke pointed at two sagging, almost empty bags in the corner of the storeroom. ‘That’s all the fertilizer we have left for the next harvest. The government only lets us have two bags instead of five, and that is the same all over the village. So we have to make our own fertilizer.’

  ‘Lucky animals.’

  ‘Pig heaven.’

  Ke worked up the fire in the blackened concrete wok stove and prepared a breakfast of eggs and noodles while Li-Nan finished feeding the livestock. Tong strolled across the courtyard from his house and stayed for a few cups of tea before pedalling off to his school.

  Li-Nan looked thoughtfully at her son. ‘And you are still on strike?’

  Ke looked sharply up at Leah. ‘Until they surrender!’ And he grinned.

  ‘You think they ever will?’ Li-Nan moved to clear the plates, smiling wearily, as though they had been through this many times before. Like an old dance.

  ‘But today the battle will have to go on without me. Today I want to show Leah what she is part of.’

  Li-Nan looked relieved. ‘I will make a lunch. You must show Leah the way to the hospital.’

  Ke stopped by the pig pen and snorted. The sow ignored the squealing piglets tumbling about her feet and nosed through the pile of vegetables and grain mash. She snorted back.

  ‘Your turn will come,’ Ke said sweetly. ‘Crackling and sweet and sour sauce. Lovely.’ He snapped his teeth together.

  The sow hesitated a moment and stared up with her black-button eyes before ploughing into a mound of slop.

  ‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ Leah said. ‘She heard it.’

  ‘Good. Everybody should know where they stand …’

  It’s like running around with a little brother, Leah thought suddenly. He’s what, eighteen, but he’s only a clown.

  Ke took Leah along a narrow path running between the houses and the fields as the Turtle Land village settled into its rhythm. Children wearing red scarves trailed from their thatched houses and followed Tong to school. An old woman heaved on a rusty pump to fill a bucket with water with a lazy dog sprawled at her feet. A tall man strode into the fields with a yoke of two buckets slopping manure. A youth was flailing at grain in a courtyard in combat, dancing back, kicking high as he brought the flail down with a whoop.

  ‘Watch out for Deng!’ Ke shouted.

  The young man grunted and kicked back at a tree that was padded far above his head.

  ‘Karate nut,’ Ke said.

  ‘Deng Xiaoping? I thought he was a hero.’ Leah remembered Grandfather’s sneer at students for criticising Deng.

  ‘Was. Suppose he can still be. If he did the right thing. You know he’s one of us? Came from Sichuan, but we’re not proud of him now. Too worried about staying the boss of China.’

  It’s very hard to pick your heroes in China, Leah thought.

  They walked past the hammering of the trailer factory, the whirr and dull thump of a very small rug factory and a repair shop.

  ‘And this was one of Mao’s favourite spots. That’s why the village was called Red Star. He visited us. So of course we were one of the first villages to become a commune in 1950 and one of the last to stop being a commune ten years ago … Ah, you aren’t interested in Chinese politics.’

  ‘I don’t know much about the politics of my country, either.’

  ‘Sure. Because they don’t affect you. Here they affect all of us. Sorry, sorry, change the subject. We go and see your mother now, okay?’

  Joan was lying on a bed that looked as hard as a park bench, alone in a room with one light, one window, no curtains. The walls were painted dark green to head height and then white. Joan was wearing a simple surgical gown and a plastic hospital bracelet. She was happy to see Leah, but she was weak.

  ‘How do you feel, Mum?’ Leah was just relieved to see Joan conscious.

  ‘They are very nice to me here, dear. Nice food, peaceful …’ She sounded like an old woman, her words resting on her breath.

  ‘That’s good. I’m living in the Turtle Land village, not far from here. And Ke has worke
d out from your father’s signature – ’

  ‘Only I still hurt. In my leg and in my head.’

  ‘The doctor says you are recovering very well.’

  ‘Yes. I must get better. Sleep is the best thing.’

  They walked away from the hospital, across the whispering plain of wheat and down to the brown river.

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ Ke said. ‘She’s just tired. Heng gave her body a terrible jerk.’

  ‘I’m not worrying. Much.’

  Ke looked sideways. ‘You and your mother … You must be very close.’

  Leah was surprised. ‘We’re mortal enemies most of the time. What gave you that idea?’

  ‘The bike crash. You seemed to be very badly upset.’

  ‘Yes, well … It looked bad, didn’t it?’

  Ke led Leah off the main track, through some long grass to an old tree leaning over the river. There was no grass at all under the tree, just a low hump of compressed red earth and polished humps of the tree’s roots. Ke slapped the trunk of the tree and squatted beside it. Leah tried to duplicate the squat but overbalanced and fell into him. He steadied her and she sat down.

  ‘Like it?’ he said, reaching wide to present the river to her.

  ‘Very nice,’ she said, rubbing a red mark from her jeans. ‘Is it special?’

  ‘It is my fishing place. And my father’s fishing place.’

  Leah looked up quickly and caught Ke’s eyes.

  ‘Everybody’s fishing place. All the boys and a lot of the girls come here after school to talk about things and see if they can be mighty fishermen.’

  ‘I used to go fishing. With my dad.’

  ‘We play Tickle the Turtle here. Want to see how it’s done?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Ke moved to the edge of the bank and slid a hand into a hole in the mud above the water. ‘Everywhere else it is called something else, but here – ’ He concentrated, turned his arm carefully in the mud, pulled a clicking black crab out of the mud and placed it on the red earth. ‘Here that is called a turtle.’

  ‘Oh, I can see. Definitely a turtle.’

  ‘It’s all tradition.’

  ‘Everything here is tradition. Looks easy.’