by Sally Rippin
‘The small sister of my mother. I have no brother or sister.’
‘She’s called your aunt, then.’
Chenxi introduced them rapidly: the woman’s name was Yang Wen and the gawky boy, in his last year of primary school, was Zhou Jin. As they began to walk, Chenxi explained to Anna that Chinese women kept their maiden names which was why his aunt’s family name Yang was different from her son’s. The children automatically took their father’s name.
The four of them had only gone a little way down the street before Yang Wen stopped in front of a photo processing shop and muttered something shyly to Chenxi. Chenxi sighed and said, ‘My sister want to show you some people.’
‘Aunt,’ Anna corrected. ‘Of course.’
They filed into the small shop and a smirking fat man with greasy hair came from behind the counter to meet them.
‘Oh!’ he said, nodding and smiling at Anna. ‘Australia, Australia.’ Obviously he had been expecting her.
‘Yes,’ said Anna.
‘Very good! Very good!’ The man put both his thumbs up.
He found a few stools for them and they sat down to talk, looking over at Anna as if to include her. Chenxi was standing by the wall, studying a calendar, so Anna didn’t ask him to translate.
Twenty minutes later they stood up to leave, and bade the man farewell. Out in the street, only a short distance on, Chenxi’s aunt made the same request, except this time it was to meet the owner of the grocery store.
Nearly two hours later, having been presented to every shop owner and postal clerk in the town of Shendong, the four of them reached Yang Wen’s home. Anna was exhausted after being poked and prodded like a prize pony. But, just when she thought the parade was over, waiting for them in the family’s little room was the other half of the town!
The round rosewood table was littered with peanut shells and mandarin skins; people perched on stools and on the edge of the big bed, smoking and chatting. They had clearly been there for some time.
‘Aah!’ they cried in delight as Anna walked in. They busied about, finding her a stool, and passing her tea and nuts and fruit. Anna tried to catch Chenxi’s eye, but he was concentrating on peeling a mandarin.
One by one the visitors left, and Chenxi introduced Anna to the remainder of his aunt’s family. Yang Wen’s husband was tall with a wide nose and thick glasses. His name was Zhou Yi and he too gave Anna a warm welcome. Their eldest son, who was fifteen, had his father’s nose and bad vision. He introduced himself to Anna in faltering English as Zhou Lai, and everybody laughed good-naturedly. He went on to say that he was studying English at school and happy to have someone to practise with. Lastly, the ancient lady with the golden rings in her long, dark earlobes was his uncle’s mother. But Anna could call her Nai nai, which meant grandmother. This made everybody laugh again.
Anna handed Chenxi’s aunt the box of chocolates she had brought. The aunt smiled and thanked Anna, then placed them in a cupboard next to two other boxes of unopened chocolates.
Chenxi’s uncle slapped his thigh and rummaged around in his vinyl satchel to pull out a camera. They took turns in taking photos and sitting next to Anna. Then Chenxi’s aunt dashed out to call a neighbour to take a photo of the whole family. They cheered as the flash went off, then sat the neighbour down with Anna and took a last photo of the two of them. Anna’s cheeks ached from smiling.
Soon it was time to eat. Chenxi helped his grandmother and aunt cook in a wok on a coal burner just outside the doorway. Anna offered to help, but Chenxi’s aunt looked offended. Chenxi explained that his aunt was perfectly able to cook by herself and didn’t require any help from a guest, thank you very much! So Anna sat and waited to be fed, embarrassed to have assumed the manners she had been brought up with would be relevant in China.
Zhou Jin and his father brought in the dishes as they were cooked and set them in front of Anna with great ceremony. Zhou Lai sat next to her on the bed and tried to explain in English what was in them.
‘Beans. Fish. Pig. That one is...how you say...doufu?’
‘Tofu.’
‘Doufu in hot sauce. That one is,’—he flicked through a dictionary—‘tongue from duck.’
‘Duck?’
‘Quack? Quack?’
‘Yes, it’s duck.’
The tongues were longer than Anna had expected, but she had never really thought much about that part of the bird’s anatomy.
She was surprised at how delicious the food was. She tasted everything except the duck tongues. This omission seemed to disappoint the family: it was clear they had ordered the delicacy especially for her.
Instead of eating over a bowl of rice, as was the custom in Shanghai, they picked the food directly from the dishes with their chopsticks and ate over a steamed rice-flour bun, called a mantou, which also served as a plate. Any dish that Anna showed a liking for was pushed in front of her, while Chenxi’s nephew laughed as he translated, ‘You like? You eat all!’
Chenxi didn’t speak much, except to correct Zhou Lai’s translations, but he appeared relaxed with his family. At the end of the meal, he shared cigarettes at the table with his uncle, and the two boys joked with Anna while their mother and grandmother washed up. Night had fallen and, when Anna yawned, Chenxi’s uncle jumped up and called to his wife who rushed in wiping her hands on her apron.
Yang Wen linked Anna’s arm in hers and took her across to the grey dormitory opposite the room where they had been eating. She called for Chenxi to follow with Anna’s bag. They walked up a dimly lit stairwell to the second floor, and along a corridor smelling of fish and steamed rice. Anna heard the clicking of chopsticks in ceramic bowls as other families chatted or ate. At the end of the corridor, Yang Wen pulled a key out of her pocket and unlocked a door onto a small bedroom with a clean cement floor. Yang Wen turned on the lights, then the television, and all the family came up to sit with Anna. They cracked pumpkin seeds with their teeth and watched the news together.
Anna looked around the little room bathed in fluorescent light and thought how simple and uncluttered it was. Everything was neatly arranged. She recalled the rambling old house she lived in with her mother and sisters in the affluent eastern suburbs of Melbourne, and the things they had accumulated over the years. Every time they moved to a bigger house, it was only to fill it with more mess.
When the news finished, Yang Wen shooed the men out of the room, and Chenxi explained to Anna that she would sleep with his aunt. His uncle, his nephews and he would share the room opposite. His grandmother would sleep as she always did, in the room where they had eaten.
Anna undressed as Yang Wen swept the floor, which was now littered with cigarette butts and pumpkin seed husks. Then Yang Wen unrolled a padded silk quilt embroidered with peonies and tucked it around Anna like a sleeping bag. As she chatted to Anna in Chinese, she slipped off her clothes, down to her underwear and slid into another quilt beside Anna.
Anna moved her head around to make a dent in the crunchy pillow that seemed to be filled with sand or chaff. But it stayed solid and her squirming only served to unwrap the quilt. So she wriggled off the pillow down into the bed, and fell asleep.
14
When Anna woke, she was alone. Judging by the pale light slanting in at the window it could not have been very late, but the other half of the bed was already made up, the thick quilt rolled at the end. She considered turning over and going back to sleep, but remembered she was a guest and slunk out of bed.
Though sunny, it was surprisingly cool. She put on her jacket over the long T-shirt she had slept in and rummaged in her bag for a pair of leggings. When she was dressed she walked over to the window to find her bearings.
The glass was covered with a thin film of dust. Even if you did have an aiyi come three times a week, as her father did, dust was something impossible to remove in China. Everything was covered in it. She swung the window open and looked down onto the room where they had dined the night before. Anna watched Yang Wen a
nd her mother-in-law squatting outside, talking as they scraped vegetables. Chenxi stood at the cement trough, in his cargo pants and a singlet, his shirt tied around his waist. He was brushing his teeth. In the morning light his skin gleamed golden over the muscles in his back.
Chenxi’s eldest nephew, Zhou Lai, was the first to spot Anna spying from above. ‘Good morning!’ he called out, pleased to be the first to speak with her.
The family looked up at Anna. She tried her faltering Chinese for the attentive audience, ‘Ni hao!’
They all roared in appreciation.
‘Come down, sleepy mouse!’ Chenxi smiled up at her. ‘Your breakfast is soon cold.’
They fed Anna rice porridge with sugar, and fried dough sticks. When she had eaten her fill, she asked, ‘Where is the shower?’ and watched Chenxi’s face fall. He whispered to his aunt who shook her head before replying. Chenxi translated, ‘My aunt take you now.’
Yang Wen disappeared and came back with a towel and a pair of plastic thongs for Anna, soap in a plastic container and a bottle of shampoo. The shower must be communal, Anna guessed. That’s what they were worried about! But she didn’t mind at all.
Anna was obliged to guess again when Yang Wen beckoned her out the front gate and down the street. They walked for a few minutes, waving at everyone Yang Wen knew, until they came to a shabby hotel.
In the foyer, Yang Wen paid a few coins to a bored woman at reception and received a couple of plastic tokens. They made their way out the back through another door and down the side of the hotel. Here, the passageway opened into a small courtyard and another woman behind a desk took the plastic tokens. When she spied Anna behind Yang Wen, she called out. A woman appeared from behind steamy glass doors to stare at the foreigner. Anna looked at Yang Wen to see what was expected of her now.
Five minutes later Anna found herself wearing only her plastic thongs and standing among a dozen other naked women. They all stared at her. She turned the tap and a jet of lukewarm water cascaded out from a nozzle in the wall. There was only one temperature. Anna closed her eyes into the torrent listening to the murmur of ‘Wai guo ren! Wai guo ren!’
When she opened her eyes, she found a woman right up close, staring at her, mouth agape. Anna nodded an awkward smile. This seemed to break the trance and one by one the women went back to scrubbing each other’s backs, only glancing at Anna occasionally.
She scrubbed herself for what she thought would be at least three days’ worth and dressed quickly to find Yang Wen who was waiting outside.
The days Anna spent in the town of Shendong passed quickly. In the mornings, she added to her journal or wandered around the streets. After an early lunch, she and Chenxi hopped on bikes and rode out into the countryside to draw from nature. Sometimes they spent a whole afternoon studying the changing light on a haystack; other afternoons they sat and sketched a busy marketplace. When they were on their own Chenxi began to relax, and a couple of times—to her delight and his dismay—she caught him making sketches of her. But he always refused to let her see them.
Sometimes he studied a drawing she was working on, or asked advice about composition. It wasn’t that she was necessarily the better artist, Anna reflected modestly, but she had a freedom and a fluidity that she could see Chenxi envied. He was amazed, once, to watch her, when she was in an experimental mood, elongate the already long chin of an old man snoozing. On its own it would have seemed ridiculous, but in the context it seemed to describe the sleepy feel of the old man better than Chenxi’s perfectly proportioned portrait.
‘Can you do that at your school?’ he asked.
‘Chenxi, this is art!’ Anna boasted. ‘You can do what you want!’
He nodded to himself, frowning.
Out of the corner of her eye Anna could see Chenxi watching her. She put down her pencil. ‘You know what I think?’ she said, feeling confident. ‘I think an artist’s responsibility is to show a different world to the viewer. No, not a different world,’ she corrected herself, working on her theory as it came to her, ‘the same world, but a different way of looking at it.’
Chenxi was busy sketching the landscape, but Anna could tell he was listening. She went on. ‘It is an artist’s responsibility, and I’m talking about writers and musicians too, to take the smaller paths that come off the main road. To go down them and to bring back what they find for those people who never dare to go themselves. Or never have the chance.’
Anna took out a fresh piece of paper and brushed her hand across it. She squinted at the tip of her pencil. ‘You know. If I painted one painting that changed the life of one person, affecting them deeply enough to make them see something in a completely different way—even if only one person—I feel like I would have achieved something. My father doesn’t understand that. For him, if it doesn’t make money it doesn’t count.’
‘You can think like that because you’re free,’ Chenxi mumbled.
‘What did you say?’
But Chenxi stood up without answering and moved away to begin another drawing.
One afternoon, at the end of the week, they were in a field when the wind blew up and the air grew cool. Chenxi wanted to take Anna home, but she scoffed, not wanting anything to shorten her time alone with him. She insisted that they stay.
It was Chenxi’s turn to be triumphant, when, back at his aunt’s home, Anna began to sneeze and shiver. His aunt, her face pale, put Anna straight to bed and brought a bowl of steaming chicken’s feet soup.
When Anna came down with a fever, they called the local doctor, despite her protestations. He tutted and shook his head and prescribed a dozen foul-smelling dried herbs and some tiny white pills in a paper package. Anna swallowed the pills and pinched her nose to drink the even fouler tasting brew that Yang Wen concocted from the herbs. Chenxi sat by her bed that afternoon and Yang Wen slept with her at night.
The following day, when she woke from a light sleep, Anna found Chenxi gazing down at her. She saw the anxiety in his eyes. He looked away, but she didn’t want to let the opportunity slip. She had seen something there.
‘You’re worried about me!’ she joked. ‘I’ve only got a cold, for God’s sake! Do you think I’m going to die on you or something?’
Chenxi told her off: ‘You think it funny, huh? My aunt worry all the time. If something happen to foreigner in her house, she has big trouble! You understand? She say now I should not bring you here!’ He stood up and spun out of the room.
Anna lay back, horrified. She was endless trouble for Chenxi. Below she could hear the family talking as they prepared the evening meal. The words floated up to her like an indecipherable melody, a jarring music that had no sense. A world from which she was shut out. She tried to listen to the tone of their shouting voices, but she found it impossible to know if they were angry, or happy. Were they arguing about her? Anna had never felt so alone. Melbourne and the culture she knew and understood, the place where she fitted in, where she was treated like a normal person, had never felt so far away. Reaching for her journal from her bag, Anna was struck by the ache of homesickness.
21st April, 1989
My whole childhood I was convinced that people were the same all over the world. That all it would take for world peace and understanding was a common language. I realise now that I was wrong. Chenxi and I are nearly the same age, we have the same passion for art, but there is a gulf between us that I feel I will never be able to cross. He has had experiences in his life that in my sheltered existence I would be incapable of even imagining.
As I blunder my way through each day catching rare glimpses of who he might be, the gulf only seems to grow larger and larger, until it becomes a chasm and I stare into its blackness and wonder how deep it stretches and whether I dare jump in…
Anna put down her journal. She pulled her jacket around her, slipped on Yang Wen’s slippers, and crossed the corridor to see if Chenxi was in the opposite room. She sensed she had an apology to make but she wasn’t quite sure why. F
or being a foreigner?
The door was ajar and Anna peeped around the corner. Chenxi’s cousin, Zhou Lai, was sitting at his desk doing homework. She tried to slip back out without disturbing him.
‘Anna! I do my English homework. It is very hard. You help?’
‘Sure,’ Anna said and sat on a stool near his desk. ‘What are you doing?’
‘I practise for oral examination about “My Family”. It very not easy.’
‘Difficult,’ Anna corrected.
‘Yes, it very not difficult.’
‘No…oh, don’t worry. What do you have to do?’
‘I have talk about all family. Uncle, aunt, cousin. Because you know now in China, no more uncle, cousin, aunt. Every family must have only one children.’
‘Yes, I know. Let’s practise then. I’ll ask you a question and you answer, OK?’
‘Oh, thank you. OK!’
Anna pulled her stool closer to the desk and peered down at the exercise book. ‘What does your father do?’ she read.
‘My father is teacher of science,’ Zhou Lai rehearsed.
‘What does your mother do?’
‘My mother teacher also. She teach small school.’
‘My mother is also a teacher. She teaches at primary school,’ Anna corrected. ‘Your brother’s school?’
‘Yes, my mother is a teacher at my brother’s primary school.’
‘Very good. What does your aunt do?’
‘My aunt is a…how you say?’ he flicked through a dictionary. ‘Housewife in America. My uncle own big Chinese restaurant and has many money,’ Zhou Lai boasted.
‘My uncle is very rich, you say. What about your other aunt? Chenxi’s mother? What does she do?’
‘My aunt working in a factory.’
‘My aunt works in a factory. What about Chenxi’s father? What does your uncle do?’
Zhou Lai blushed. He fiddled with his pencil then looked up. ‘My uncle is killed.’