The China Coin

by Allan Baillie

  He frowned a moment. ‘Like to try?’

  Leah studied Ke’s face for a moment, then shrugged and moved past him, hovering her hand above a mud-hole. ‘What size?’

  She ploughed her fingers into the hole feeling the mud coiling around her hand like silk. Something hard, a pebble? – but moving. A hard edge, the crab’s shell? Then a sudden hot pain and she was squealing with her hand high in the air and a crab swinging from her middle finger.

  Ke caught her wrist and squeezed the crab. The crab spun away but the pain was still in her finger. He put her fingers in his mouth and sucked, looking at her in apology. The pain faded to a wet and warm feeling, and she was staring at his lips.

  ‘All right,’ she said. Her ears were suddenly burning. ‘Stop eating me.’

  Ke held up Leah’s injured finger and examined it. ‘It’s all right. I’m sorry. I should not have let you play stupid children’s games.’

  ‘It was me that did it, not you! I wasn’t quick enough, that’s all. Hey, is the crab called a turtle because the village was once called Turtle Land?’

  ‘More than that. Tong talked about it after you got his memory going. You know about the ancient irrigation scheme on the Min?’

  ‘Some governor cut a canal through a mountain to control the river …’

  ‘Ah yes, that is the fact. But we can never leave facts alone. We have to improve the story. So, we have a fairy story, a myth. Once upon a time – maybe about 300 BC – a man died near Chengdu and his body was thrown into the Min. But this body had magic powers and it floated upriver and reached the bank here. Right here, where the tree grows.

  ‘The body came to life the moment it touched the shore and became an emperor and a Turtle God, using people to conquer the wild Min River as he had conquered it in death.

  ‘The tamed Min made a desert into a rich land and a village was built with a name marking the Turtle God’s rising from the river. Gui Tu Cun, Turtle Land. That’s your – that’s our ancestral village, Leah.’

  17 Joan

  Next day Joan was propped in bed and sparking. ‘What does this look like?’ She waved her arms about the room.

  Leah was delighted at the recovery and beamed. ‘A hospital –’

  ‘A prison cell. That’s what you’ve put me into. A prison cell!’

  Leah’s brightness collapsed. ‘We had to get you into hospital. Give you some rest and –’

  ‘Rest? Here? They clatter along the corridor like the place is on fire. The washroom is cold concrete. Everything is cold concrete. There is no television, nothing to read. Food? They serve watery rice and old meat – and that’s only because someone is paying them. You?’

  ‘That is Heng.’

  ‘Who’s Heng?’

  ‘The man who hit you with his motor-bike.’

  ‘Oh, the party hack. Well, you tell him this lady won’t be bought off with rice porridge. I am going to sue the pants off him … I forgot, this is China, you can’t do anything in China. Just get out.’

  ‘They say you can leave this hospital in a week.’

  ‘I cannot leave now? It is a prison cell. Why aren’t I in Chengdu with real doctors, comfort, the right equipment …’

  ‘Heng thought it would be better here.’

  ‘I’ll bet. Heng is just trying to keep me out of sight. He was drunk and he nearly killed me. If I talk to his superiors he’s out of a job. I know what he’s trying to do. What about the taxi, what about our things?’

  ‘Tong found the taxi looking for us on the wrong side of the highway and we paid him off. Ke has gone to some friends to arrange to pick up our stuff tomorrow.’

  ‘So we are stuck here. The way Heng wanted it.’

  ‘But this way we are close to our village and our family.’

  ‘Oh yes, that too. Are we sure that it is our village, and are they really our family?’

  Leah wanted to kick the bed. Put Joan in hospital for two days and she is mad at everyone. Everyone! ‘But you heard it. It is Turtle Land.’

  ‘There may be dozens of Turtle Lands.’

  ‘But there is that myth.’

  ‘Yes, yes, a myth. Much the same as that stuff linking this Zhou family with us. Getting a pearl from the colour red. That sounds like rubbish.’

  ‘It is not rubbish. You haven’t been listening.’

  ‘It sounds like another family trying to talk their way into a Hong Kong house. That student of yours, that teenage terrorist, sounds to me like another Grandfather.’

  18 Ke

  Leah trailed down to the fishing tree to spend some time thinking before Ke arrived. But Ke had already arrived and was skimming pebbles across the Min. Leah did not want to see him – not yet – and hesitated.

  But he saw her, grinned and waved, talking rapidly as he stepped toward her. Until he saw her face. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘The village. You really think it’s mine, don’t you?’

  ‘Definitely. Yours as much as mine.’ Smiling, waiting.

  Leah sat beside the tree and watched an eddy coil past her. ‘It’s not, really.’

  ‘Why?’

  Leah hesitated. ‘You live here.’

  ‘In a two thousand year village, that doesn’t matter much. Just a scratch. I know the village now, your – our – great grandfather knew it last century when there was an emperor. You’ll know the village by next week.’

  ‘What’s it like, living in a two thousand year village?’

  ‘Hey, I didn’t think much about the age of the place until you arrived. You started Tong off. I knew it was old, but you don’t notice it so much. It’s not like living in Chengdu or Beijing where ancient pieces of buildings remind you. There is nothing much here that is old. The trailer factory is seven years old. The thatched roofs are replaced every fifteen years. The buildings are always getting added to – my father built the south wing of our house twenty years ago – or torn down to make room for new buildings. Our oldest buildings are two hundred years, but they won’t last. Hard to live in.’

  ‘Your father, where is he?’

  ‘He died.’ Quickly. ‘No, it isn’t the buildings that last. It’s the stories and the kids’ games. Like Tickle the Turtle and Tease the Dragonfly and Catch the Cat, one chaser after everybody. Nobody knows how long that chase has been going on.’

  Leah nodded.

  ‘Feel better about it now?’

  Leah doodled in the hard earth with a stick. ‘It’s Mum. Doesn’t think Turtle Land is the right village.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what she wants. She’s been wandering all over China to find her father’s ancestral village, following his last wish. We find you here, the village and the family and she suddenly doesn’t want to know. I give up.’

  ‘Maybe she’s depressed. Hospitals do that to people.’

  ‘You think so? Maybe she’ll cheer up when she gets her things.’

  ‘I’ll be getting them tomorrow. Catching a students’ truck into Chengdu. I’ll have to be gone all day. Sorry.’ But he was grinning again.

  ‘Another demonstration?’ Leah was glad to drop the subject of Joan.

  ‘Heard from friends what happened yesterday.’ Ke pounded his knee. ‘One million in Tiananmen Square! Can you imagine that? Not just students – factories, kindergartens, big businesses, acrobats, a rock band and an orchestra playing together, even people from the Foreign Ministry. Ah, to be there!’

  ‘What do they want?’

  ‘A few days ago Russia’s Gorbachev had to be greeted at the airport, no room at Tiananmen. Gorbachev told Deng he had revolution on his hands. And he’s right. Seven cities were marching yesterday. Tomorrow, who knows?’

  Leah tried again. ‘But what does everybody want? We’ve seen marches all over, but we still don’t know what it’s all about.’

  ‘What have you seen?’ Ke turned sharply to Leah as if he had only just noticed her. ‘Of course, you have travelled. You must see more than any of
us! What, when did you get into China?’

  ‘Well, it was in Guangzhou on April 21, 1989 …’ She smiled but his face didn’t change. ‘But there was nothing. There was only a student putting up posters about – ah – Yaobang.’

  ‘Hu Yaobang. That was the beginning. He had been party head and he wanted liberal laws, but Deng threw him out last year. Just before you arrived he died and students marched to Tiananmen in respect for him and stayed there. Until Deng made some changes.’

  Ke gazed on the river. ‘They went to the compound of the leaders of the Politburo, the Zhongnanhai, to tell them what they wanted, but the police attacked them with belts.

  ‘It’s never been easy. When you arrived on April 21 there was a pompous funeral in the Great Hall but there was a great crowd outside, in Tiananmen. What did you do then?’

  ‘Stayed at Good Field to the end of the month, saw things on TV.’

  ‘We were starting strikes at universities and colleges to support the students in Tiananmen but Deng attacked us in The People’s Daily.’

  Leah winced. ‘I got Mum into trouble in a train over that. About the crowds angry with Deng’s editorial.’

  ‘You, kid, had an opinion. Tourists should never have an opinion.’

  ‘We saw protesters in Shanghai on May 4.’

  ‘That was the 70th anniversary of the students’ protest for democracy and modernization in Tiananmen. In 1919! We haven’t come far, have we?’

  Leah smiled in a touch of embarrassment. She had been seeing all this without understanding anything. ‘We saw student marches at Nanjing, and at Chongqing they took over a hotel and there was a huge march of thousands and thousands …’

  ‘Yes, the students there would really feel it. Deng was once the political commissar in Chongqing, doing what? Fighting corruption, that’s what! You want to know what all those marching people want? What Deng, what Small Bottle won’t give us? Just an end to corruption. Change!’

  Ke thrust a fist out over the river. ‘Democracy! No more guanxi! No more influence, no more back-door deals!’

  Leah shifted uncomfortably, wondering if she should clap.

  He lowered his fist and looked at Leah. ‘Or something like that,’ he smiled.

  ‘It’s all right. Freedom,’ said Leah, trying a fist of her own.

  ‘Freedom. And no more guanxi. Maybe that’s the big thing. We want a fair chance. Deng said once that to be rich is glorious. Ha! He meant to be a rich party member is glorious. Nobody else is getting rich. Any money coming into China goes into the pockets of the party members and their friends. That is guanxi, back-door business. And everyone is affected.

  ‘Remember Heng, the fat fool that almost killed your mother? Well, he’s the party cadre, the headman that keeps the village in line for the government. But he’s only got a wheat strip like the rest of us. So how is it that he has a motor-bike, the only one in the village, and the only colour TV? Because he knows important people and he does favours. So we don’t get fertilizer. Someone else gets it. His son is given a factory to run. What is the difference between him and the old imperial landlord?’

  Ke stopped and shook his head. ‘You should stop me. Sounding off like a counter-revolutionary! Poor mother …’

  The laughter died, the sound drifting away on the river.

  ‘Poor mother.’

  Leah watched the light fade on the boy’s face, and waited.

  ‘She’s always saying that I am growing into the image of my father.’

  ‘He died.’

  ‘Yes. He was a poet.’ Ke plucked a dead leaf from beside him. ‘You know, if you could ride a log down this river you would reach Shanghai. This is the Min, which flows into the Jinsha and that roars down from the mountains of Tibet. The Jinsha becomes the Chang – the Yangtze. The Yangtze flows past Chongqing, through the Gorges, past Yichang, Wuhan, Nanjing, past Shanghai and into the East China Sea. This river cuts China in two.’

  Ke flicked the leaf into the river.

  ‘So father, Yuzhou Guang, wrote a poem about a leaf on the river. Something like:

  I see you, little brown leaf

  On the dark water of the Min.

  You will pass ice mountains,

  Cities climbing for the moon,

  Or dreaming of ancient kings.

  Until you touch the smoky port,

  Where sails clatter in the wind

  And the river becomes a sea.

  But I see nothing but red earth

  And wheat and another year’s work.

  Brown leaf,

  Take me with you.’

  Leah looked downriver in silence. She remembered the things she had seen: the fortress city with marching students, the ant-men with the coal baskets in the misty gorges, the giant lock door, the islands of barges, the river sea, the long lines of pick-and-put cranes, the students waving their flags on a traffic policeman’s tower, the old, old tree somehow living on a thumb-wide strip of bark …

  ‘I wish I’d known your father,’ she said.

  ‘So do I.’

  Leah turned.

  ‘I was just a howling brat when he died. Can’t remember much.’

  ‘How did he die?’

  ‘Red Guards. The Cultural Revolution. They killed him for his poetry.’

  ‘For things like Brown Leaf?’

  ‘Exactly like that. Father was a farmer, just like the others, but he wanted more from his life. For Mao that was treachery. Mao attacked ambitious villagers as “fat bourgeois pigs” and the Red Guards came and took father away. We never saw him again, but in one of his last times with us he told mother that if he had seen everything that was coming, he would still have written the poetry. Because that was right. And now mother keeps looking at me.’

  ‘You write poetry?’

  ‘I’m a student of microbiology, germs and viruses. I cannot think a single poetic thought. No, it’s because I’m in these marches. Mother thinks she’s seen it all before. She hasn’t. China has not seen this before.’

  Leah thought of the bleak nights after the funeral, when Mum crept into her bedroom and just stood in the dark, watching. ‘They’re like that. Frightened that you’ll die on them.’

  Ke looked surprised.

  ‘My Dad died too.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Cancer.’

  ‘It’s the waste that hurts so much.’

  They sat in silence by the river and Leah wondered where the clown with the flag had gone.

  19 Li-Nan

  The aroma of steaming dumplings hooked Leah out of bed before morning light. She bumbled into the kitchen, yawning, still straightening her shirt, and almost collided with Ke and his bucket of water.

  ‘Hi, orphan,’ he grinned. ‘That’s one thing we Inscrutable Orientals notice: you Long Noses never stop sleeping.’

  ‘Don’t bully the girl!’ Li-Nan was working the fire under the stove.

  ‘Yes, be polite to me, pig. What’s the panic?’

  ‘Early morning truck for Chengdu. I’ve got to go, got to go.’

  ‘Oh.’ Leah said the word flatly, making no attempt to mask her disappointment.

  Li-Nan caught the tone and turned from the stove with a slight frown. She and Leah looked at each other.

  Ke saw the eye connection and shook his head. ‘Don’t do that! I’ll be back tonight to tell you all about it. There’s no danger, no danger at all.’

  Ke hastily ate three dumplings while Li-Nan parcelled four more in newspaper and string. He looked at Leah. ‘Okay. Finished with the unhappinesses?’

  ‘What unhappinesses?’

  ‘Yesterday.’

  ‘You had them worst.’

  ‘The misery twins.’ Ke glanced at Li-Nan. ‘I’m off.’ He kissed Li-Nan and for a moment Leah thought he was about to kiss her, but he settled for squeezing her arms at the door. ‘Take it easy. She’ll be better.’

  ‘You bloody well look after yourself!’ Leah called after him.

  Tong dropped r
ound for a more leisurely breakfast, but Li-Nan remained subdued as they ate. He tried to cheer up the table with a few school stories, but gave it up eventually and pedalled sadly to work.

  After breakfast Li-Nan started to tip buckets of rice husks and cabbage leaves into the pig pen. Leah joined her.

  ‘Can I help?’ She was trying to delay her visit to the hospital.

  ‘You could feed the ducks, a little rice husk, rice and water,’ Li-Nan said quickly. ‘Would you like to do that?’

  Leah blended the ingredients under Li-Nan’s eyes and began to throw the mixture about the feed hill. The ducks were confused at first and stampeded after Li-Nan instead of Leah but after a few disgruntled quacks they left Li-Nan for the food bucket.

  No loyalty at all, thought Leah, and scowled at them.

  Li-Nan was watching her. ‘Ke has been telling you about us – about my husband?’

  Leah hesitated.

  ‘That is good. We have no secrets. Ah, perhaps just a few.’ Li-Nan smiled, the sudden flicker of a small girl’s mischief that lit up her face and was gone. ‘But you and your mother, you are like us.’

  Ke has been talking … Leah was irritated.

  ‘I am sorry.’ Li-Nan clapped her hands. ‘But I am thinking I should go with you to your mother in hospital.’

  ‘Oh. Thank you very much, but it’s not necessary.’ Leah was remembering Joan’s foul mood yesterday, muttering things about Hong Kong houses …

  ‘You are not happy here,’ Li-Nan said suddenly.

  ‘No, no, I like it here. Very much.’

  ‘But your mother is not happy. Of course, lying in bed all day, under the wing of Heng. She probably thinks we are stealing you from her. I know how it is, I have been there. We will go to the hospital when we finish feeding the animals. Yes.’

  So Li-Nan wheeled her bike from the back of the hay store, dusted the carrier rack above the rear mudguard and wobbled down the road, with Leah seated sideways behind her. Leah spent some of the journey trying to decide whether to hold the back of the saddle or grab hold of Li-Nan around the waist. She settled for a light grip of Li-Nan’s hip and concentrated on keeping her feet clear of the spokes.