The China Coin

by Allan Baillie

  Li-Nan panted slightly as she dismounted. ‘You are a big girl. I think I am an old woman.’

  ‘Sorry. Would you like me to pedal on the way back?’

  ‘Perhaps not quite that old,’ Li-Nan muttered as she pushed Leah roughly into the hospital.

  Joan greeted Leah with a half-wave which died as Li-Nan stepped into the room. Her eyes tossed Leah a hostile query.

  ‘Li-Nan wanted to see how you were getting on,’ Leah said quickly. This is going to be terrible. Joan is going to treat Li-Nan like the restaurant girl on the boat and I am going to curl up and die.

  ‘Well I’m not. All I can say is I am alive.’

  ‘You look very well. But hospitals are bad places to stay. We must see what we can do to bring you home.’

  ‘Thank you. But I don’t wish to add to the troubles you have gathered up by hosting my daughter.’

  Cold, rigid. Joan was staying behind a brick wall.

  ‘Nonsense. She is a delight. She helps me around the farm, far better than my son, Ah Ke.’

  Joan moved her eyes curiously from Li-Nan to Leah and back. ‘Your son seems to think we are of your family.’

  ‘Who knows? I hope so.’

  ‘You do not know?’

  ‘I am sorry, what can I say? Ah Ke thinks so. I want to believe it, but we have only a name and a village …’

  Joan was nodding and the tension was beginning to seep away.

  Li-Nan smiled. ‘You brought this broken coin all the way to the centre of China to obey your father’s last wish? That is very Chinese.’

  ‘Well, we both wanted to find our family, didn’t we, Leah?’

  ‘Yes, and we have! Ke could tell you –’

  ‘Where is Ke?’

  Li-Nan grunted. ‘Ah Ke is not very Chinese. He does not obey his mother’s wishes.’

  ‘He is in Chengdu, again,’ said Leah.

  ‘Like his father.’ Li-Nan smiled weakly.

  Joan saw something in Li-Nan’s face. ‘Father? What does he do?’

  Silence for a moment. ‘He is dead. Killed by the Red Guards in the Decade of Chaos. He was a farmer and a poet, and he said too much.’

  ‘Oh, I am sorry.’ Joan was looking at her fingers.

  ‘Ah, it is a long time ago.’

  ‘But it doesn’t help, does it?’ Joan said. ‘And your son is stoking the revolution.’

  Li-Nan sighed and sat in the chair beside Joan’s bed. ‘My worthless son.’

  The two women smiled very quietly at each other and Leah suddenly felt locked out.

  ‘I feel like that sometimes,’ said Joan. ‘Mine got herself lost in Shanghai with some gang running about. Bounced up to the hotel, expecting a medal for finding her way back. I could have killed her.’

  ‘Mine paints banners and runs around shouting for Deng’s head as if we are in America. Sometimes I want a dungeon with chains deep under the house, to lock my son away until he grows out of it.’

  ‘Oh yes, yes. I used to wait by the window when the school was out. Wanted to pick her up at the gate, but I knew she wouldn’t ever permit that.’

  ‘There are rules, aren’t there?’

  ‘You have to bottle it in. When the letter came – when my father died it was a shock in my bones. When David began to die everything began to dissolve with him. There was nothing that felt solid and real.’

  ‘Except for the child.’

  ‘But they are so fragile.’

  ‘Even now.’

  ‘Even now. I thought I was getting over it after a year of study and work and you have to let go, haven’t you? But China brings it all back even worse. Does it ever get better?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe when they stop believing they are gods and begin to feel a little afraid.’

  Leah shuffled a foot sideways for balance and both women stared at her in surprise as if they had forgotten she was there.

  ‘Oh, Leah …’ Joan was fumbling. ‘Could you go for a walk for ten minutes or something?’

  ‘Widow’s talk,’ said Li-Nan with a shrug.

  Leah walked hollowly down the corridor, blinking in the bright sun outside, crunching the pebbles in the drive as she passed Li-Nan’s bicycle. She wiped at the mist in her eyes with a clenched forearm and jerked away from the hospital.

  Why did Mum have to wait for a stranger in a strange place to talk. Why couldn’t she talk with you?

  20 Tong

  The first group of children stopped shouting as they reached Leah and eddied around her, as if she were an old woman. Leah noticed their passing and looked up from the track to see a river of red scarves, of children bouncing, jostling toward her.

  She was startled. School was out and she had not realized that she had been walking for so long. Nor where she was.

  Great, she thought. You’re doing another Shanghai.

  But almost immediately she saw the spare frame of Tong riding slowly behind the children. He could have been herding them, driving them home.

  He stopped before her, straddling the bike and smiling. ‘Hello, hello.’ Then he looked into her face and the smile faded. ‘I have been thinking about you and the coin. You have it now?’

  ‘Always.’ But the quest was becoming tattered.

  Tong swung his bike round and patted the carrier rack. ‘Come back to school with me. There is a book that might help.’

  The school was fifteen minutes away, almost deserted now, and pitted with dust. Leah slid past the wall of a ruined temple, a row of concrete table tennis slabs and entered a quadrangle ringed by double-storey buildings.

  ‘My school,’ Tong said with a shrug.

  Leah was about to say politely that it was nice, but there was no affection in Tong’s voice. She nodded and remained silent.

  The building was like her own school, but only slightly. Everything, the corrugated roof, the concrete walls, the steps, the metal railings, even the rows of glinting glass, were grey. No paint, not a flicker of colour. More a prison than a school.

  Tong led Leah to rooms on the second floor. ‘I don’t think I have been fair with you or your mother, about your coin. I haven’t seen it, but that does not mean it does not exist. I apologise for being pompous.’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t think for a moment …’ This is a teacher?

  ‘Let’s find a coin I don’t know about. To the library.’

  The library was a cage. The windows from the corridor and from the classrooms had been replaced by dusty mesh. The books – and there were not many of them – were ragged paperbacks with poor quality paper and fragments of covers. But one book had a vinyl cover and it looked heavy. Tong picked it up with a grunt.

  ‘It’s mine. Sometimes teachers and students want to look at it.’

  Tong walked through to a classroom and wriggled behind a desk so Leah could sit next to him. ‘Now, where’s the coin?’

  Leah gave it to him as she looked around, a little stunned. She’d seen rooms like these in films set in other centuries. Wooden desks for two – very old wooden desks, with children’s carving on the sides. Maybe forty of them facing a smudged blackboard. Fans hanging from the ceiling, scarred water heaters. Nothing else, and everything grey.

  Tong looked up from the magnifying glass he had held over the coin and smiled, a little sadly. ‘This is not like your school at home?’

  Again Leah searched for the diplomatic answer, but she caught his eye. ‘Not much,’ she said.

  ‘No, and there are few like it in Beijing. I visited a school there once, polished floor and carpet, shiny equipment, new lockers and books, books, books. Outside trees and lawn … But that school was for children of government officials. It was a little different.’

  Tong shrugged and began to draw a large sketch of the broken coin, moving the magnifying glass slowly over the surface.

  ‘Guangxi,’ said Leah.

  Tong raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Well it’s influence, favouritism, isn’t it?’

  Tong nodded. ‘You’ve been li
stening to Ah Ke.’ Now the snake and the rod looked like hills and a railway.

  ‘Is he wrong?’ Leah thought she could detect a thread of disdain in Tong’s voice, as if he was echoing Joan.

  Tong frowned at the sketch in his hand. ‘Well it is a coin, not a charm. And it is very old. No writing that I know –’ He stopped, turned his head slowly, staring at the walls of the classroom. ‘I have seen teachers weep in this school.’

  He placed the sketch on the desk before him and leant back. ‘At the beginning and later. In the beginning, because no matter how hard and well the teacher has worked he knows his life will finish here. He can forget about designing dams or becoming a professor of history …’ Tong shook his head, suddenly angry. ‘Because he has been stopped by a few officials, sometimes because of what our fathers were.

  ‘When Mao launched his Cultural Revolution we knew what our futures were, my brother and I. Has Ah Ke told you about his father, my brother? Yes? He wrote bad poetry and they killed him for that. I wrote books of little history and they made me scrub toilets and here I am. But we were finished before we began.’

  Tong sighed softly and in that moment stopped being a teacher and became a very vulnerable man.

  ‘Our father was a good farmer, that’s all. He could grow two stalks of wheat where others grew one and his family prospered. But this was before 1949, before Mao began to rule China, and in the Decade of Chaos Mao said that if you were poor before 1949 you were a good Chinese, simple as that, and if you were wealthy before 1949 you were a bad Chinese. And so was your family.

  ‘My brother and I were ruined, but Ah Ke may escape the family curse. Who knows? Because I know my fate I do not weep in this school, but others do. New teachers know that the money they earn will only just feed them and every month this is less and less as the price of wheat climbs and the officials get richer. I survive because I have a little land.’

  Tong fingered the coin. ‘No, Ah Ke is not wrong, Leah. The students cry for democracy – for us that is the right to choose jobs and read any book. China is out there, marching with them, but it is difficult to persuade a tiger to become a bullock. Enough, enough. Now, let us find your coin.’

  21 The Café

  Tong stopped his bike near the rubble pile in front of the village café and Leah wiggled to her feet, using both hands to carry the book. Tong leaned his bike on the rubble and led Leah toward a table in the sun. They were very tired.

  ‘Lemonade or tea?’ Tong guided Leah past Heng, who seemed to be asleep.

  ‘Just tea, thank you, Tong.’ Leah sagged into a chair, dumped the book before her and looked up at the teacher with a guilty hump to her shoulders.

  ‘I think we will leave it alone for now,’ Tong said, and Leah nodded gratefully.

  They had studied Tong’s book on Chinese coins for two hours in the grey school room, looking at rigid designs, old characters, square holes, round holes. But nothing to match Leah’s half-coin. There had been an interesting curve in the Tang dynasty period but the curve ran the wrong way. Finally Tong had closed the book, but they had been half way through. Perhaps they could have another look at the book in the village, perhaps they would feel refreshed …

  ‘There is always tomorrow,’ Tong said and ordered the tea.

  ‘Wonder if Ke is here yet?’

  Tong studied Leah for a moment. ‘Not yet. He comes here first, telling the news. Just relax.’ He reached out to stop Heng sliding sideways. ‘But not that much.’

  Heng was sprawled back against the wall with his eyes closed and a half empty bottle of rice wine touching his hand. Leah almost envied him his peace. She was too tired to think.

  Oh, Dad, you couldn’t know, but you’ve left me with a stinker …

  ‘But if we never solve the coin, never mind. I am sure you have found the right family.’

  ‘So am I.’ He is still reading my face.

  ‘We like you. Even the geese.’

  Should wear a mask. ‘I like you all too.’

  ‘And if we’re not the right family never mind, we can fix it. Marry you into the family.’ He rolled back and laughed.

  Leah flushed deeply.

  Tong stopped laughing abruptly and placed his hand on hers. ‘I am sorry. Do not be embarrassed. I meant nothing.’

  Several villagers crowded around the café and the television was turned on. Three men sat at Heng’s table and continued to argue. Heng opened his eyes, glared at the newcomers and noticed Leah.

  ‘Ah, yes. Your mother, is she well?’

  ‘Getting better, thank you.’

  ‘Yes. I have ensured that your mother is receiving the finest medical care available in this county and excellent food …’

  ‘So she should,’ Tong said.

  Heng stared at Tong stonily. ‘And if there is anything you or your mother should require, please do not hesitate to ask me. I would have been most happy to have you as my guest. Are you comfortable with Zhu Li-Nan?’

  ‘Oh yes, thank you.’

  ‘You are a relative of Zhu Li-Nan?’

  Leah hesitated.

  ‘Cousins,’ said Tong quickly.

  Heng nodded, apparently satisfied. ‘Well, if you find you need …’ And he frowned.

  Ke and another youth were swinging round the corner, both loaded with familiar baggage. Ke placed Joan’s bulging suitcase at Leah’s feet and unloaded his mate, who immediately flashed a grin and bolted for the highway.

  ‘Truck,’ Ke explained. ‘Have we got everything?’

  ‘I phoned the hotel,’ Heng said. ‘I made sure Zhu Ke received everything. I did not like to entrust your possessions to the boy, but –’

  ‘What’s the news, Ke?’ Tong had seen the flare on Ke’s face.

  The anger vanished. ‘You wouldn’t believe it!’ He grabbed a chair, reversed it and sat near Leah. ‘Chengdu is under seige. The streets are blocked by tens of thousands of marchers. That’s what Tiananmen must be like. Not just students, but professors, city workers, nurses, factory workers. The police can’t stop us, they don’t want to. Everyone is behind the students!’

  Leah smiled at Tong, but he and several villagers were looking at Heng. Heng dipped his head and fixed his eyes on his glass.

  ‘And this morning, before dawn, two of the Politburo leaders, Li Peng and Zhao Ziyang, came out to Tiananmen Square to talk with the students. Leah? Remember Zhao?’

  Leah could recall the name from the Chongqing march. She grinned.

  ‘Li Peng is a flower pot,’ muttered Tong.

  ‘But Zhao will rule China when Deng is gone. They say Zhao asked forgiveness from a hunger striker because he had not acted quickly enough in the past. A man from the Politburo asking forgiveness! And tomorrow the Politburo meets to decide what to do. Zhao has told us what they must do!’

  ‘More money for students,’ a thin farmer snorted. ‘More money for people in the cities. Nothing in it for us.’

  ‘I live here, Jiajun,’ said Ke. ‘I am a student.’

  ‘Yes, and soon you will leave us to live in the cities.’

  Ke hesitated.

  ‘Everyone should be behind the students,’ said Heng suddenly.

  Tong turned in surprise.

  ‘The students want an end to corruption.’ Heng leaned forward, almost knocking his bottle over. ‘And I say they are right! Some party cadres demand payment for permission to build a factory, or for ordering gravel for a village, and people see this and say that all cadres are corrupt. So I am expected to be corrupt. I could tell you of the sly offers I have been made even in this village …’ He looked about him.

  ‘But I will not. I will not cause trouble in this village. Enough to say I have refused all the offers. Let the Politburo tomorrow promise to cleanse the party.’

  ‘Even Deng’s family?’ Tong was enjoying himself.

  ‘Corruption must be stamped out. If the Politburo has corrupt members then it must clean itself. Throw out the dishonest cadres and let the rest of us get on w
ith the job.’

  A few villagers actually clapped.

  And the thin farmer spat. ‘Don’t see much corruption round here. Nothing to be corrupt about.’

  ‘How’s your fertilizer, Jiajun?’ Tong said mildly.

  The thin farmer shut up.

  ‘Yes,’ said Heng. ‘That is a good example. We farmers – all of us – received only two bags of rice this season. And Red Sickle village, got five a farmer! Don’t tell me there is no corruption here. Support our brave students for a better China!’

  22 Lone Paddy

  Ke and Leah left Tong with his book and carried the bags toward home. Leah thought Ke was strangely quiet until she got near him and saw that he was silently laughing.

  ‘There is a joke?’

  ‘Great joke. Now Heng has joined us. Like the police and some of the army and now some of the politicians. We’re running out of enemies. Maybe new China starts tomorrow …’

  ‘Li-Nan will be relieved … I am dead.’

  ‘Trouble?’

  ‘Oh, yes. I only left Li-Nan in the hospital with mother hours and hours ago.’

  ‘Li-Nan? Is she sick?’ Ke was suddenly alarmed.

  ‘No, no, she was visiting. Li-Nan must be running wild.’

  ‘Never. Li-Nan would know where you are all the time. She knows about me the moment I get off the truck. She’s got a spy system that you wouldn’t believe. Deng should take notes.’

  ‘Sure?’ But Leah felt better.

  ‘Forget about it.’ Ke waved a finger at her. ‘I’ve got to show you something.’

  He veered from the path.

  ‘She gets frightened about you.’ Leah followed him along a muddy goat path.

  ‘I know. It can’t be helped. I’ll behave when this thing is over.’ He stepped past an old tree and stopped, placing Joan’s suitcase by his feet. Between a vegetable garden and the sea of wheat was a single paddy, gleaming red in the sunset.

  ‘That’s it. The paddy.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I was thinking about you today, between marches. You and Joan and me and Li-Nan. I’m sorry, but I did read that letter in the hospital, the one from Joan’s father to Joan, the last one. Well –’