Chenxi and the Foreigner

by Sally Rippin

  ‘I don’t think that has anything to do with you, Dad.’

  ‘What a waste,’ he whispered to himself. ‘Just like your mother—a waste of an intelligent brain! If that is how you want to be, if you think you’re old enough to be making these kind of decisions, then you are on your own. You’d better ring your mother, I would say, and hope to God that she will take you back, because you’re not staying here,’ he said and he stormed out of the room.

  Anna went to her bedroom, shaking. She stared out of the window. She felt the sickening sensation of the ground dropping away beneath her feet. From now on, everything was up to her. She was on her own. Was this what it felt like to be free?

  In Fuxing Park an old man hugged a tree.

  27

  Anna spent the following day packing up her room. Now that she had declared herself out of his hands, Mr White refused to have Anna stay with him another day. She was booked onto the first flight back to Australia. If she wanted to be independent and impulsive then she was on her own.

  Anna’s mother had been surprisingly calm and sympathetic. Perhaps now that her daughter’s problems were bigger than her own it would give her a new role to play? She managed to persuade her tearful daughter over the phone that, whatever her decision, she would be better to act on it in Australia. Besides, without her father’s financial support, Anna couldn’t afford to stay in China. She called the art college to speak to Chenxi, but once again got nowhere. ‘Chenxi no here,’ she was told and when she asked to speak to Lao Li, he was always busy.

  ‘Can you tell him to call me, please?’ Anna insisted. ‘Can you tell him it’s urgent. I know you have Chenxi’s contact details there, his mother’s address. Can you give her a message to tell him to call me? She’ll know where he is.’

  The secretary assured Anna she would do her best and Anna waited indoors all day for the phone to ring. As she folded her clothes, it was easy to forget about the baby growing inside her. To avoid thinking about making a decision.

  In the late afternoon, the phone rang.

  ‘Chenxi?’ she asked. It had to be.

  ‘No, it’s Laurent.’

  ‘Hello, Laurent.’ Her voice was cold.

  ‘Anna,’ he said. He sounded out of breath. ‘I’m downstairs. Meet me in the park by the statue.’ Then he hung up.

  Anna slammed down the phone. Laurent was the last person she felt like seeing, but perhaps he had news of Chenxi? She pulled on her sandals. Now that it was the end of May, the weather was becoming hotter every day. Anna allowed herself to feel pleased that she wouldn’t be in Shanghai for the summer.

  Laurent stood waiting, his back against the foot of the enormous statue. Towering over him, Marx and Engels discussed the state of communism in China. As Anna approached she saw that Laurent was even paler than usual. His shaved hair had begun to grow back and there was a dark bristle over his scalp. His skin was grey and his eyes were yellow. He looked grubby. Knowing that she was leaving, Anna could almost feel sorry for him.

  Laurent curled his lip. ‘I’m in deep shit because of you!’

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Anna said, taken aback. She had been ready to make amends.

  ‘Thanks to you I’ve just spent all of today being interrogated by the police. I’ve written three letters of self-criticism, and I am about to be deported! Thanks to you, my future is fucked!’ He prodded her in the shoulder with a bony finger.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Anna snapped back. ‘Look, if you’re talking about getting caught dealing hashish, that’s nothing to do with me. You had it coming to you!’

  ‘Oh yeah!’ Laurent shouted. ‘What’s this then?’ He reached inside his pocket and thrust a wad of papers into her hand. Anna recognised her handwriting. They were photocopies of her journal. She didn’t understand what was going on.

  ‘You’re an idiot! I warned you, but you live in your own bloody clean-cut naïve world, thinking nothing can touch you.’ He was trembling with fury.

  Anna turned the pages. Her writing looked childish. She had never noticed that before. ‘But this is my journal! How could the police possibly…’

  ‘Your aiyi? The spy? Remember? Did you think only your father’s engineering contracts would be useful to her? Don’t you know, you fool? We are living in China, here. You should never write things down!’

  She skimmed down the pages to where Laurent’s name was underlined. Of course, it was always his name on the pages she had written about hashish. She kept turning, transfixed. ‘I can’t believe it…’

  Until one of the pages made her stop. Chenxi’s name was circled here. As she turned the page she saw it circled again and again. An icy wave came over her and she found it difficult to breathe. She looked up blankly at Laurent. He saw what she had noticed.

  ‘Let me tell you something, girl!’ He pulled Anna to him by her shirt and hissed into her ear, ‘I don’t give a fuck about Chenxi! I used to think I gave a fuck about you, but now I know that you’re just an ignorant little bitch! It’s bad enough that you’ve caused trouble for them, but now, me, too! You’re pathetic!’

  Laurent spat at the dirt by her feet and was gone.

  Anna stood stunned, gazing at the papers. Chenxi’s name grew bigger and bigger and the circle around it redder and redder. Red Chinese characters scuttled over her handwriting like poisonous spiders. Sobbing, she ran out of the park into the apartment compound and clambered onto her bike.

  The route to the college had never seemed so long nor the streets so busy. Cyclists dawdled in front of her. Inside the hollow of Anna’s chest a small moth fluttered.

  As she flew down through the marketplace, she calmed at the sight of the high college gates. Chenxi would come with her to Melbourne now, she thought. She would bring him back to her peaceful country where he would be safe. Where he could still do his art. Where he would be free. In her mind she wrote the note that she would slip into his desk. She had it all worked out.

  It was meant to be.

  The classroom was empty. Chenxi’s desk was gone. His books, his brushes, even the mound of cigarette butts and pumpkin seed husks that had gathered at his feet. There was no trace of him. His space had closed over, as if he had never existed.

  28

  The thick wad of paper, one hundred and sixty pages, slid into the envelope. Thirteen months later, and this was the last hope Anna held of finding him. Her story, his story, it had begun as a desperate sort of release, but when she put it all together…could she dare call it a novel?

  Anna had returned to Australia at the end of May 1989. A few days later, on June 4th, she turned on the news to see that tanks had rolled through the People’s Square in China’s capital, Beijing, to disperse a collection of students protesting peacefully for democracy. She watched, horrified, at images of the army moving into the square from several directions, firing randomly on the unarmed protesters. The newsreader announced that hundreds of people were killed in the massacre, many of them innocent bystanders. In the days that followed, as Anna scanned the newspapers, her stomach churning, reports emerged of troops searching university campuses for ringleaders, beating and killing those they suspected of coordinating the protests. Art colleges, known to cultivate rebellious thought, were singled out. Many students fled the country.

  Anna rang the college repeatedly over the first few days, desperate for news of Chenxi, but the phone was never answered. Even her father was unable to explain to Anna what was happening in China as the only news coverage he was able to access was CNN. The local Chinese media had been banned from covering the event. Like most of the foreigners in Shanghai and Beijing, he fled on the emergency airlines arranged by the Australian consulate back to Melbourne until it was safe to return to China. They had been terrifying weeks for Anna but, like all tragedies, the troubles in China were soon forgotten by most people and replaced by other newsworthy events.

  Now Anna hesitated before licking the stamp and fixing it to the top right corner. If her book was publi
shed, if it sold well, if it was translated, Chenxi might read it. If. It was a wild idea, but it was all she had left. She had to know. Nothing was worse than not knowing.

  From the little silver snuffbox sitting on her desk, Anna pulled out a worn note. She unfolded the paper and read the words again, even though she knew them by heart. Each time she studied the note she searched for clues as if they might suddenly appear, but it remained as cryptic as when she had first received it over a year ago.

  HeLLo ANNA,

  I seeN oLd WoLF.

  He TeLL Me I TeLL You do NoT WRiTe aGaiN. PLease.

  OuR FRieND is FRee now.

  YouR FRieND,

  Lao Li.

  Anna folded the paper and placed it back in the snuffbox. Then she sealed the brown envelope and kissed it for luck. As she stood, the package slipped from her hands and thudded onto the wooden floorboards. Startled, the baby in the pram by her side began to cry. She picked it up and laid its head against her chest.

  Anna stroked her son’s fuzzy black hair and rocked him until he fell back to sleep. Outside under a bright blue sky a magpie warbled. She looked up at the painting that hung over her desk. From a Chinese landscape, her face gazed back at her.

  AFTERWORD

  I was nineteen when I first started collecting ideas for Chenxi and the Foreigner. From 1989 to 1992 I lived in China, studying traditional Chinese painting. During my first year in Shanghai, I wrote down the details of my life in journal entries and short stories, knowing that photographs could never capture the experiences and emotions in the way that words could. But it wasn’t until several years later, when I was living in France, that I began to work all these pieces into a novel.

  Many of the experiences I had as an art student in Shanghai, as well as the people I met while I was studying there, inspired this story. I invented its main thread but Chenxi, in particular, is loosely based on a close friend of mine who is still a wonderful painter but now living in Europe.

  I finished the manuscript in 1997 and it was eventually published in 2002, but in a different form from the book you have just read. When I recently read that edition, for the first time in years, I could see that, as a young and inexperienced writer, I had been afraid of my readership. Not so much of the young adult readers themselves, but of their parents, teachers and librarians, otherwise known as ‘the gatekeepers’ among children’s authors.

  I remembered how I had cut out swear words, sex scenes and unfamiliar Chinese politics from the original manuscript for fear of being blocked by those gatekeepers and never reaching my audience. I also worried at the time that, if my novel were too obviously political, I might stir up a discussion I wasn’t brave enough to enter into at that age.

  Now, I realise how compromised the first version of Chenxi and the Foreigner became through my own self-censoring, which is ironic given that this is a novel about artistic freedom. I also know, especially now that my oldest son is a teenager, that inquisitive teenage readers worldwide will always seek out for themselves those books which take risks.

  It’s not often that an author gets the opportunity to rewrite a book after it has already been published. I began to revise Chenxi with excitement and trepidation. With the encouragement of my publishers, I changed the name of the main character to allow myself to see her with fresh eyes, and even changed the key decision she has to make at the end of the novel. I decided to include everything: the sex, the swear words and, in particular, the politics.

  When I was first writing Chenxi I did not feel confident to include anything about the terrible massacre in Tiananmen Square in Beijing on June 4th, 1989, as it was still close to the event and, in China, still taboo. Even though I was friends with many of my fellow students, this was not something they felt comfortable discussing for fear of finding themselves in trouble with the government.

  Nearly twenty years later, I decided to set my novel in the period leading up to the Tiananmen Square protests, as I had originally intended. This meant I had to change many details throughout and especially the ending, which now refers to the massacre. Hundreds, and possibly thousands, of people were killed, although, because of the government’s tight control over the media, it is unlikely a precise number will ever be known.

  In researching this new ending, I was shocked to discover that, unlike the Cultural Revolution, about which information can be freely accessed, the events surrounding June 4th, 1989, have been edited from any media inside Mainland China. This includes books, magazines, newspapers and websites. The Chinese Government has declared June 4th a forbidden topic.

  This doesn’t mean, however, that the massacre is forgotten. Each year, on its anniversary, the government places Tiananmen Square under tight security to make sure that there can be no public mourning. Dissidents are placed under house arrest. But in Hong Kong thousands gather for a candlelight vigil in Victoria Park to remember those killed and to demand that the families of the victims receive recognition and compensation.

  This year, I returned to Shanghai with my family. In many ways, Shanghai is unrecognisable from the city I once lived in. The dusty shops on Huai Hai Lu that once sold old-fashioned polyester slacks and plastic sandals have been transformed into shining department stores with ten-metre-high television screens advertising Dior perfumes and Calvin Klein underwear. All the alleyways I used to ride along have been razed to make way for new businesses that are part of China’s booming economy. Nobody who is anybody rides a bike anymore. How is it then that this country, modern in so many ways, can still be so resistant when it comes to freedom of speech? Sadly, because of the lack of this most basic right, many young adults in China will never know the truth about June 4th.

  Chenxi and the Foreigner is a tribute to the Shanghai I once knew. It is also a tribute to artists all over the world who dare to speak freely, no matter what their art form may be, and to those artists who live in places where speaking out could cost them their lives.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I can’t thank my dear friend Sophie Short enough for introducing me to the wonderful Penny Hueston, who has turned out to be an inspirational editor and mentor. Thanks must also go to Michael Heyward and the fantastic team at Text Publishing, whose enthusiasm and support have been overwhelming.

  MORE YOUNG ADULT FICTION

  FROM TEXT PUBLISHING

  GENESIS

  Bernard Beckett

  WINNER OF THE 2007 ESTHER GLEN AWARD

  WINNER, YOUNG ADULT FICTION CATEGORY, NZ POST BOOK

  AWARDS

  What is it to be human? What is consciousness?

  What makes a soul?

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  ‘An engrossing parable.’

  Waikato Times

  ‘The denouement is both terrifying and magnificent.’

  Dominion Post

  Paperback • rrp $19.95 • ISBN 978-1-921351-42-6

  Available April 2008

  SKINNY

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  BEST YOUNG ADULT NOVEL,

  CANADIAN LIBRARIAN ASSOCIATION SHORTLIST 2005

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  ‘Ibi Kaslik’s characters twisted my heart…Skinny is one of the most impressive and haunting books I’ve read.’ Kate Holden

  Paperback • rrp $18.95 • ISBN 978-1-921351-12-9

  TWELVE

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  White Mike doesn’t do drugs. He deals. Jessica has just tried the new drug twelve. She wants more. Sara’s working on a big party. Nana is dead.

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  It’s fights, guns, blood and death.

  This book is fast. Can you keep up?

  ‘An infuriatingly precocious, dark and beautiful debut novel written when its author was just seventeen…Pop culture and postmillennial malaise penetrate this intense and elegantly wasted tale of wealthy teens in up-to-date urban New York… With dramatic pace and unpretentious honesty, Nick McDonell dismembers his generation in a novel that sees Bret Easton Ellis meet Kids and Kid A.’ Juice

  ‘In this debut novel he has constructed a narrative that’s as fast as speed, as relentless as acid.’ New York Times