Why are such vital things indefinable?
Mrs Yu explains that you count sculptured figures of the wise ones around the vast hall; when you come to the number that corresponds to your age you’ve found your personal sage. The faces are caricatures to me, somewhere between regular cartoons and the figures on Norman Rockwell’s old ‘Saturday Evening Post’ covers. Whoever sculpted them had no fear of revealing their human nature and worldly concerns. Their spiritual gifts and wisdom aren’t always obvious, but their large ears with pendulous lobes are respectful signs.
I begin counting, in search of my spiritual minder.
‘No – silently,’ she says, but I lose count and give up.
A few minutes later, she breaks into her commentary:
‘That’s your one, there.’
He looks to me like a cross between Pope John XXIII and Jean Sibelius – hopefully a resourceful guardian.
A little boy bows, touching his forehead to the ground three times before a four-sided golden Kuan Yin, goddess of mercy.
‘Often parents don’t believe, but they tell their children to go and pray before the Buddha.’
‘Just in case?’
‘Yes. Do you believe in God?’
‘Yes. What do you believe in?’
‘I don’t know. Not communism. Not capitalism.’
She shows me where the Guomintang headquarters was during the war, and where Mao stayed while he negotiated with them. In those years when Chongqing was the Nationalist capital of China, the city was heavy with power, thick with intrigue.
The reward for surviving the frenetic sightseeing and the terrible welter of speeches at the school is lunch at the Cygnet restaurant, the best in town. Here, the Australians have their first taste of hot pot which, laden with chillies and odd pieces of animal anatomy, tests their tolerance.
Mrs Zhou who is sitting across the table, likes to be in the swim and listens hungrily to everyone’s conversations. She’s heard us talking about food.
‘Why do Australians eat only a little and grow fat whereas Chinese eat a lot and stay slim?’ she chips in, her plump little arms shovelling in rice at amazing speed.
‘We Chinese eat everything, just everything,’ she claims, in between mouthfuls, laughing hugely.
‘Have some pigs’ ears?’
Hilda sitting dutifully on the other side of me, looks around the splendour of the restaurant and sighs.
‘This is much more beautiful than Eric’s restaurant.’
I’ve been there with her, and know the simple tables, children standing wide-eyed beside them, gas bottles on the floor, passers-by calling through the door, tepid Mirinda drink, Eric dashing off to the kitchen to fetch another dish.
‘I liked Eric’s restaurant because it was like being in a family.’
She looks at me in surprise.
‘I’m happy you think that.’ She gives me, for the first time, a wholehearted smile; I think we’ve almost connected.
After yet another celebratory dinner, staggering a little, we climb back into the bus to drive to Eling Park to see the lights of the city. It’s misty, as it is ninety-per-cent of the time, but the lights of the city are still visible, rolling dimly away on every side as far as we can see. I’m suddenly homesick again – afraid they roll on forever.
Mrs Yu, in the darkness at my side, talks of the city. The city authorities are going to rebuild the city centre across the river on the north side of the Jialing, because the present hub of the city is too old and run-down. It’s a massive project, but there’s unlimited people power here and as you travel through the streets you see that everyone likes to be doing something – anything – flicking rubbish with twigs from one spot to another, shining shoes, selling a dozen oranges, sitting at a stall offering a few bottles of soft drink … Some women knit as they walk and chat, complex cable patterns falling from their needles and their memories. But there’s also a lot of waiting. So much of China waits.
Life in this city gropes its way through a customary five months of heavy fog. It is doomed to this by its location in a virtually windless basin and its high rainfall. As I look out from my balcony, I can see only the three nearest buildings. This small world is a cocoon, fog making the world beyond impenetrable. There’s seldom any wind; on most days the red flag droops limply around its pole. To the Chongqingese, fog is their winter environment. There’s a Sichuan proverb: ‘When the sun shines the dogs bark.’
A copy of ‘The Press’ arrives from Christchurch. It bears messages from a world of light, colour, and open windows – a young world with little yet to remember, an easy-going world with a twist of violence in its tail. And there’s a programme on television about cheetahs. I can smell the grass and watch the African wind sifting through it. I can feel the sun. The light is brilliant, the air dry. The cheetah pants like a working dog after a run, rests with his chest heaving.
I peer out each day, like a castaway looking for a ship, trying to make out the dim outline of the mountains through fog, any sign that there is a beyond. Is the sea still there? I’m homesick for light.
CHAPTER
FIVE
OPEN HOMES
I’m getting my bearings within the school and in the neighbourhood, but I feel marooned. I need to get out, into the city, into other Chinese worlds, to see the family life that forms these students and teachers. How can I teach the students effectively if I don’t know the shape of their lives beyond classroom and school grounds?
A senior English teacher, Jean has several times come weaving up to me in the school grounds, taken my arm, and chatted in a dizzy way, effusive in her offers of help. I think she’s naturally generous, but she’s also next in line for a trip to the Queensland school that placed me here, and may feel I’d be a useful friend.
A few days after I arrived here, she appeared at the door to my flat – bringing two pomelos and, for the colder weather, a mustard-coloured sleeveless cardigan with a diamond pattern. I knew I’d have to wear it on the morning I taught her class. On a comfortably-built Chinese matron it might look attractive, but on me it’s a sickly hanging whose patterns remind me of rivets. The students will think I’ve lost it completely. I also have, from Hope, a pair of too-small white socks with frilly tops that I feel obliged to wear each Monday morning in front of her class. The generosity of these teachers is humbling, and I struggle not to hurt the donors’ feelings.
An invitation to dinner at Jean’s home follows. To reach her flat, I climb the stairs leading up from my floor, tip-toe past the door of the Principal’s flat on the eighth floor, creep out onto the roof, stumble across that magic area of cats and thieves, and plunge down another flight of clanking stairs into the building’s other ventricle.
Exchanges with Jean are always earnest. Even for a proven teacher of English speaking ordinary conversational English with a native speaker, when you’ve never been out of China, is a strain. She calls me ‘James’ confidently, and throws about all the book-learned knowledge of Western culture she can muster. It’s a brave show. She and her husband cook a splendid meal in their spotless flat. Unlike the other flats I’ve glimpsed in our building, this one doesn’t give the impression of being laden with a long history of other occupants’ rich and messy living. Jean has a dream of something different.
Within the delicious meal of highly spiced Sichuan cooking, one course is a puzzle. She passes me two pieces of sliced white bread, spread with jam and with a fried egg in the middle. Does she think she’s serving an old Western favourite – something all foreigners eat on Saturdays, or is this an esoteric branch of Sichuan cooking?
‘What are you giving her?’ her husband asks.
‘Toast,’ she tells him crisply.
Mrs Zhou, who loves to be in the know and in the action, is also present. As she taught for a year in Australia, I guess she’s been co-opted as an expert on Western culture, probably self-appointed. I imagine her in Australia, shrewdly fitting in with everything there, judging nothing, le
tting it all come and go. Her flat, which I saw during Peter’s visit, has opulent Western decorative flourishes as evidence of her travels, but an entirely oriental, smoky half-light has since swept in over them, reclaiming them for China. Here at Jean’s, she’s happy to show she knows the Western ropes at dinner, rapping the hostess’s bowl with her chopsticks before the dinner and hissing: ‘She’ll pray.’
Then she nudges me, drops her eyelids and says: ‘Soup first. I know. Always in Australia, soup first.’ Jean tries to follow the play, while Mrs Zhou watches the movements of my chopsticks with intense interest.
Before I leave, Jean gives me gifts. She knows I like music and is delighted to have found a tape from a set of the Beethoven symphonies, this one offering the end of the Third Symphony and most of the Fourth. She also gives me frozen dumplings and sausage made by her aunt. Sweet supermarket sausage has been a disappointment, but the aunt’s homemade sausage is a robustly flavoured delight, especially if you cut out the pockets of fat the size of marbles. I don’t ask what’s in it.
I’ve been back at my flat only half an hour when Jean phones to say a friend of hers needs help, and minutes later she arrives at the door with Tim, a man in his thirties who’s applying for post-graduate study at a University in Iowa. He asks what he should put on the application form, listens to my suggestions as though new worlds are opening, then shows me what he’s already written, which includes much of what I’ve said and a lot of information he didn’t offer me. I find I’m no longer surprised, either by discovering I haven’t been given the whole story, or by warm thanks for an unnecessary service. There are clearly social forms expressing respect (or obligation) to be observed on all occasions, and the fact that many of these expressions, such as feigned ignorance, are transparently bogus doesn’t rob them of their social necessity. I find them at the same time irritating and soothing. In any case, Tim and I at least enjoy the sense of like-mindedness that comes from discovering that what I offered he already had. He brings a large box of chocolates, which has barely been earned, and an invitation to dinner at his home the following Saturday. This is my chance to see a home outside the school.
Jean takes my arm as we weave our way through the evening traffic, but seems uncertain about where and how we’ll make the journey. Why? She must have made this trip several times before, and surely, even in Chongqing, buses must go where they say they’re going. There’s something going on here that I don’t understand. Years afterwards, a Chinese student in Christchurch tells me that while the Western mind can be represented as powering toward its goal in a straight line, the Eastern mind works discreetly toward it following an inward curling spiral. While this doesn’t sound to me like the approach of most eastern street markets, there may be something in the theory.
At some point, having perhaps spiralled sufficiently, we board a bus. It takes a lot of people to run a small bus: the man who hangs out the window at the stops, or swings on the door, shouting to encourage passengers, the driver – hero by his mere survival – with a cigarette stuck to his lip, six or seven of his friends or family or other interested parties in the front enclosure beside him, and the female conductor holding a sheaf of stained, crumpled notes. There are no tickets on the bus, and only a very small charge for a dramatic ride accompanied by spirited shouts and yells.
We lurch on board, just as it takes off with a snarl, and Jean steers me towards the window seat to avoid the crush, the jostlers, and the light-fingered in the aisle. Unfortunately there’s also a large wheel arch on the floor beside the window; to be comfortable you’d need to unbuckle your left leg at the knee. The bus windows are so fogged up and grimy that I can’t see out, and unable to follow our route or watch the passing show I give all my attention to Jean’s chatter. As we clatter and bump through the thick fog and chaotic traffic, she talks about Tim and his wife, who introduced her to her husband. They had to exert some pressure as she was reluctant to meet him, having her own dreams of whom she wanted to marry – certainly not a businessman. However, having indicated her social scruples, she admits she’s glad she agreed to meet him. And I suspect this oddly flighty woman knows she could have done a lot worse, in or out of the business world, than her clearly responsible and intelligent husband.
She talks of her burning desire to go to Australia, but obviously has no idea at all of life in Western society. Like an English speaker trying to come to grips with the Chinese language, she has no easy way of making connections between the known and the unknown. She has a cherished dream that fires and spurs her. We fall silent and the bus clatters on. The mechanical clanking increases and it becomes clear that the bus is significantly unwell. The driver nurses it carefully through the gear changes while the passengers chat unperturbed.
Suddenly Jean leaps to her feet, shrieks something and the bus slams to a halt. She drags me like a recalcitrant child through the damp press of people in the aisle, someone pushes the door open, hands on our backs help us on our way, and we tumble down steps which are already moving and out onto the pavement.
A handsome woman, Jean prances along the crowded Saturday afternoon streets in tights and a very short skirt, currently fashionable, and a hat that would go well in a box at a winter race meeting in England. She’s a little different from the rest of the teachers – she holds herself well and speaks with a vocal and physical poise that must indicate something in her inheritance or her history. I’m the foreigner here, observer only of mysteries. I often feel I have the clues to a crossword, with no grid on which to record guesses and prove hunches.
We get off and wander in the usual ‘where can it be’ way, until Jean weaves into the depths of an old building whose wooden floor marks it as pre-Liberation (1949). Domestic life here is difficult. The floors of the narrow corridors are all at different levels and there are pipes to be stepped over. It’s very dark. At one side of a long balcony, deep in the gloom, shadowy figures are cooking at benches.
‘No kitchens here,’ she explains.
She knocks on one of the doors, and Tim’s wife, to whom Jean has given the English name Tina for my benefit, can be heard clomping to the door; she’s wearing the square shoes, with many inches of sole and their attendant racket, that are fashionable at present. It crosses my mind to tell Jean that I could probably cope with her friend’s Chinese name, to save her this hasty English invention, but she might worry that the name she has chosen is somehow inappropriate. Tim, whose voice is as light as his build, is also at home with their eight-year-old daughter, Christine. The flat is a small cell of concentrated family life. There are pictures stuck to the walls, a few over-the-top ornaments and some pink frills, signs of how the family is trying to make it theirs without spending the precious savings set aside for Tim’s studies overseas.
Tina is a stylish woman with a wild, amused glint in her eye, and answers a phone call lounging dramatically on the sofa, kicking her legs and gesturing with her small hands. Jean, always concerned with the form of things, translates the conversation for me. Tina, she tells me, loves playing mahjong and has been asked out for a game but is turning it down, saying she’d rather spend the time with me. I wonder what compensatory entertainment I’m expected to offer; we’re a language’s length apart.
The meal, delicious, offers challenges. After half an hour, when my belt’s already straining at the buckle, they produce a large bowl of dry rice. I swish some fish soup over it in an effort to lubricate it. I’m close to my adaptation limits here – and I don’t want to blow it. It’s not the dishes that are defeating me, it’s what they eat with what. They’re looking at me and smiling. They’re thinking: ‘We’ve given her the best meal we could think of and afford, and she’s really enjoying it. She likes the meal, and she likes us.’
I do, but there are some feats of adaptation I simply can’t pull off. This is close.
I’m ploughing on, when Jean triumphantly drops onto the rice a rubber-ish sort of cake with a pink nipple on top.
‘Very lucky –
a coloured peach – they bought it for you this afternoon at the supermarket.’
It has the texture of suet pudding, tastes like Turkish delight, and doesn’t go well with fish soup. The fish soup was a mistake.
After dinner, Jean asks for an excursion to the lavatory and we set off from the apartment. It’s pitch dark now, no lighting at all in the corridors or stairs of the vast old wooden building. Tina has a penlight torch, but it is little help in the shifting levels in the corridors. Our progress stirs memories of visits to ships’ engine-rooms, with their precarious catwalks and foot-tripping pipes. My conviction that the Chinese can see in the dark strengthens. We go down three flights of stairs and the air suggests the communal lavatory must be close by. No lights there either.
‘Watch out,’ Jean warns. ‘It’ll be slippery.’
Just when we’re all organised in our cubicles, Jean calls from the next cubicle to mine: ‘Jane, I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten my tissues. Can you pass some to me?’
It’s not easy passing tissues to someone around the wall of a cubicle. As we leave, the flickering penlight sends a faint glow into the open cubicles we pass, showing little old women squatting patiently in the damp and the dark.
Back at the flat, Tina calls us into their bedroom. With the child’s bed hard up against the foot of that of her parents, there’s just enough room on the far side of the double bed for a ‘Pearl River’ piano. Christine, who is about to sit Chinese Grade 3 piano examination, plays a demanding modern Russian piece to us. Tina swings her legs in the air over the edge of the bed, and her eyes sparkle with pride and triumph. The child’s playing is technically staggering, the expression forthright. She plays it just as it’s written. I doubt if I could have taught her to play with such power and precision, but I’m sure she thinks a musical score’s like a knitting pattern. I know someone, someday, will call to her to let her heart out when she plays.
Under the Huang Jiao Tree Page 8