Here in China I’ve realised how frighteningly dependent I am on music if I’m to keep any sort of psychological balance. When I arrived here, it was so long before the teachers brought me a tape player that, deprived of music, I felt myself begin to curl up in a neurotic knot. I don’t like being dependent for sanity on a mere machine. It’s dangerous. I’m beginning to wonder if there’s some other way I can connect with the hub of myself without pressing buttons.
CHAPTER
SEVEN
A RANGE
OF VALUES
I’ve been enjoying getting to know my teaching colleagues, but I also feel the weight of all the hopes and fears and ambitions and struggles – especially the relentless struggles – contained within the school walls. One Saturday afternoon, I feel oppressed, and trapped, but don’t feel like trudging out into the foggy neighbourhood on my own, or wrestling with the mysteries of bus stop locations, destinations and timetables. So I breathe a sigh of relief when Rose appears with an invitation to visit her parents’ home. Rose is a fifteen-year-old of the paying grade who has unusually good English and distinctly managerial ways. In my present mood, I’m quite happy to be managed by anyone who can spirit me away from this place for a few hours. She tells me her father and mother – both working in an apparently indefinable business – have just returned from the provincial capital, Chengdu. I leave a flight plan at Mr Liu’s office, and Rose and I join her cheerful and welcoming parents in one of the ubiquitous red taxis. They are an attractive couple – I’d guess lively spenders who may once have been the children-to-watch on a very ordinary block. Rose’s mother is dressed in a short skirt and the sort of leather jacket studded with diamante that pop stars wear. She’s elegantly thin, and has a beautiful face with long, clear bones and a lovely speaking voice, low and warm. There’s a sort of gypsy brilliance about her. Her husband exudes confidence. He can write English but can’t speak it and passes notes written in a strong, neat hand. He sings and smokes – both unappreciated by Rose and her mother.
After an hour’s journey in and out of traffic jams, we reach the great river. The moment of crossing is somehow more important than all the others around it, and seems to hang a little longer in the air. I feel there should be music to it. There it is, flowing beneath us, that extraordinary impartial force, the vital, blood vessel of Southern China. We look down on a mighty sweep of water, smooth faced, its great and terrible intentions veiled. This is the river they have recently dammed, in the world’s largest water control project – and possibly the world’s largest gamble. Chongqing shivers at the possibility that consequent silting of the upper reaches may render her vital port useless. But it has to be tried – this effort to tame the river’s terrible flooding and realise its enormous potential for hydroelectric power. The reservoir has submerged 2 cities, 11 counties, 114 towns, 1,711 villages. Over a million people have been resettled. Progress comes at a price. The ‘China Daily’, as always, played the glad game with the remarkable heading: ‘Dam displaces happy people.’
Our dusty taxi, a tiny scale in the great serpent crossing the bridge, accepts its ordained place in the procession until the driver sees a chance to jump the queue and performs a breathtaking shimmy past a panting bus, almost skinning the taxi as he manoeuvres by margins so fine you listen for the scrape.
We draw up in a quiet courtyard beside a newish block of flats. Rose’s father leaps into a dirty but sporty white car, and drives it away to have it cleaned. As we climb the stairs to their apartment I’m struck by the silence. No people jostling and singing on the stairs, no neighbours chatting at their doorways. This is what considerable wealth can secure for you in China. I love quietness and stillness, but I feel strangely uneasy here. In terms of this city I’m coming to know – and maybe even love – this atmosphere seems unnatural.
The cloth shoes lined up at the door for inside wear are tiger heads, fluffy with cosy expressions. Inside, the apartment is sumptuous and careless, ashtrays overflowing onto glossy surfaces. The living room looks awkward. Most living rooms here do. What am I looking for that I don’t see? Perhaps the invitation to relax that our own living rooms usually project? Although the owners’ sense of the decorative is much in evidence in gilt elephants and crystal ships, it’s difficult to see any relationship between the room space and the furniture that fills it. On this angular furniture, placed at strict right angles, I feel I should only perch, poised for flight at any moment. How I’d like to see this room through Rose’s eyes. With a satisfied smile, she notices me taking in the opulent furnishings, and leads me through to her bedroom, a confection of pink frills and over-sized soft toys. She watches my face with her sphinxlike smile, and I admire. Pastel fluff may not be my thing, but there’s no call for condescension. If I lived all my life, as these people do, under grey skies in a struggling city won from the rock, I too might be glad to cushion myself.
Rose brings out a large album of photos taken of her last year. I’m amazed to see she’s wearing dresses that look like costumes for Chinese opera. She’s also heavily made-up, with her hair elaborately styled and covered in roses and bows. In everyday life, Rose is pleasantly plain, with a shrewd eye and determined chin, but in these soft-focus pictures with filigree edges she looks like a string of romantic heroines from China’s dramatic past, play-things for their noble and ferocious lords. What could be the appeal of that simpering show to her mother, with her dramatic flamenco brilliance?
Each page in the album has a theme word in English at the side: ‘Magnificent’, ‘Tenderness’, ‘Amorous’ in a variety of fancy scripts. There follows a romantic outpouring of English words that makes no sense at all. The strange sounds and vague associations must trail some elevated aura: ‘I think in my trembling heart of soft leaves left somewhere I can never forget under the moon without dreams love without end hoping always never forgotten tenderly in silken dreams forever.’
This most practical and down-to-earth of races also delights in tender raptures of the heart and swoonings of the senses. If I could understand the appeal of this album, I suspect I’d have the key to many other Chinese puzzles. Perhaps there’s a link between the album and something I’ve noticed in the ‘China Daily’. Hard-headed commercial giants like Ford, when advertising, place their hands over their hearts and vow: ‘CARING, no matter where the road takes you, that’s the heartfelt pledge of Ford’s country-wide Service Centers.’ Ford certainly doesn’t take this line in New Zealand, and we don’t have albums like Rose’s. We’re more terse Down-Under.
Rose and I gaze – she deeply satisfied and I bemused – at the extravagant photos.
‘Your hair was long then?’
‘Yes, the school made me cut it off later. I cried for a week. You can have long hair if you can dance, but I can’t dance.’
She shrugs at the hard things in life you can’t change. We take the album back to the living room, where I turn the pages back and forth trying to memorise some of the remarkable wording. Rose’s mother is humming and moving about. It sounds as though she’s making a meal, but when her husband comes back there’s talk of going shopping and to a restaurant.
‘Which do you want to do first?’ Rose asks.
It’s a long time since lunch. I give up on etiquette and say I’m hungry.
The streets between the apartment and the restaurant are almost empty. After the noisy vitality of the streets around the school, they seem sterile. I can’t understand why I, who love silence and stillness, should feel this way. Perhaps it’s because the poorer streets where I walk are packed with all that passes between people, when they need and can’t escape from one other. Those streets boil with a turbulent yet shared life. This family lives in a cocoon of wealth; I won’t pretend I’m not basking in the comforts of sharing the cocoon, but I also feel a strange chill in the air. Rose’s parents know how life works and have managed it successfully. They have choices. But this calm, assured neighbourhood with its privileges seems cut off from the city’s tide of
tumbling life. I wish evolution toward affluence didn’t so often keep company with a kind of social isolation.
Why is it that the first thing to drop out of a life as it becomes affluent is the sense of needing a neighbour? Why is it that, once we move beyond struggling for needs to fighting for wants, we forget to celebrate just having enough?
On one of these quiet streets, I see, through the freshlycleaned car window, an old man standing absolutely still, eyes closed, under a huang jiao tree. I don’t know what he’s doing, but his image vividly imprints itself on me, and saves to my long-term memory. I have a strong sense that his solitude, his withdrawal into himself, far from cutting him off from his world, connects him to it. Why does this old man light up a dead street with possibility? Why do I feel that poverty and wealth live in proper relationship in him?
Rose’s father manoeuvres the car with flair, and with a flourish drives up onto the footpath outside the restaurant, leaps out, and throws the keys to an attendant. He then flashes us his handsome smile, and leads us to the restaurant door where we pass before a line of elegantly gowned young women who bow gracefully as we enter. How pleasant this is, and what a fraud I am: even as I’m banging on internally about the perils of wealth, another part of me is relishing the easy passage it can carve through life. The family comes here every week, Rose tries to read my face to see if I’m impressed.
Over dinner, her father and I have a satisfying conversation, entirely on paper. He asks intelligent, interested questions about New Zealand, groping for the shape of an unimaginable world. Workers in the city, he wrote, make on average 300-500 yuan a month. These figures don’t make me comfortable. From the resources of this struggling city, I soak up over 2000 yuan a month. I wonder what he thinks I earn, and how much he thinks I’m worth.
The family wants to shop at Daduhui, the largest department store in Chongqing, opened a year ago, child of a Hong Kong businessman. We make our way to Jiefangbei, the site of the Liberation Monument and shopping hub of the city. Outside the store, two foreign women, American voices carrying over the city roar – make-up running thin, arms full – climb into a taxi. The building is vast. We cross expanses of space, empty of all but gleaming tiles and glittering lights. I‘m sure these shows of light and space must be to remind us that we’re in the presence of power, international commercial power. Daduhui’s like a large international airport, for almost all the shops represent expensive foreign marques, and the goods are those of the duty-free shops at any large airport in the world. Here in the murky heart of Chongqing is the best of French, German, Italian, Swiss, and British merchandise – six or seven floors of sparely and elegantly stocked shops, gleaming, discriminating and to me somehow disdainful.
I am sure to be expected to buy something. All Westerners are expected to be rich, and it’s disappointing and confusing if we’re not. It’s even more confusing if we don’t have an appetite for shopping expeditions. I hope I feign sufficient enthusiasm.
At the toy department delighted parents and children rummage through the bins and shelves. Rose asks me if I like a towering fluffy dog that we see on a stand. I reach up to pat its head – then realise she’s going to buy it for me. I panic, and I tell her that what I really want to buy this evening is a tape of traditional Chinese music. Her eyes glint.
In the music department, Rose and I search the shelves, eventually tracking down music for the gu zhen, a strident but eloquent Chinese zither. We find her mother sweeping off the shelves several boxed sets of music for traditional Chinese instruments. Many recordings, many instruments. For me. Hers is the face of a calm, practised, authoritative shopper. Father’s whistling, hands in pockets – patient.
I look out the car window as they drive me back to school. Neon signs race and flicker, skyscrapers rear in the fog. Mercedes cars slide past roadsides where people without feet try to sell combs.
What’s making the issues of poverty and wealth nudge me so uncomfortably at present? I wonder if it was the porters I saw near the school, one afternoon last week. They call them ban ban – the stick men. The temperature in the city had dropped to about seven degrees, and as I walked down the hill from the school, I saw them huddled in doorways, poles beside them, waiting for something to carry. I saw them hunched over, saw how thin their cotton jackets were, the shivering underneath. The rain made it worse, oozing from their light canvas shoes and plastering their hair to their heads, outlining the bones and sending streams into their eyes. The fortunate ones found doorways to shelter in and shared noisy games of cards, slapping them down into the mud. Others crouched alone, mouths slightly agape, brows knitted, eyes empty. When I returned up the hill, they were still there; no work, nothing to carry – no one was on the streets that afternoon if they could help it. I knew these men were from the country, and would have travelled together from their village to work in the city for a time, leaving the care of vegetable plots to their families, and would return to the country for planting and harvest. In Chongqing they lived where no one else would live. You can watch a hundred TV programmes about poverty, and put as much money as you like into charitable envelopes, but it is seeing people shivering with your own eyes, and walking past them in a warm jacket and heavy shoes, that makes the difference. Will someone please teach me to distinguish my needs from my wants? There are Chongqing porters who desperately need all that I consume but don’t need.
Rose, I think, basks not only in her parents’ wealth but in their contentment with one another. Family life works well here: her father is confident, her mother is assured and Rose has a firm grip on her own life.
Not all families fit together as effectively, and naturally, as this one.
I’m interested in the marital compromises I find when I visit fifteen-year-old Clara’s home. There are fewer photos of father than mother in the family albums, mother’s brothers are in attendance at dinner, and it’s mentioned that father is ‘away on business’. Clara speaks affectionately of her father both at school and in front of her mother and uncles.
A few weeks later I’m invited to a wedding in Clara’s family. She takes me to meet her father. He’s welcoming, but very drunk, and has rice sticking to his chin. Afterwards as Clara leads me gently by the arm, back across the hotel dining room to her mother’s table through the deafening hubbub of celebrating guests, I feel tears prickle behind my eyes. I don’t know what is going on here, but I think something has been lost and something is being held on to.
I know about marriages that need plenty of space. My husband and I have lived in separate homes for ten years, spread our marriage across them, and spend a day or two each week together. I look forward to those days: there are jokes, memories and intuitions that only he and I can share. Why do we need two homes? It’d be easier to give a glib, fob-off-the-question reason than to be sure of the real one. Maybe we’re both difficult to live with; I’d buy that. The extra independence works for me, and I hope for him. We’ve never talked much about these things. It could be fatal for me to try to cover the acres of meaning in our marriage with the few square yards of words I have.
When first I moved into a separate home, a friend asked: ‘Are you going to cut your hair?’
She didn’t understand. I didn’t want a new start, and my hair was OK the way it was. I just wanted a wider path – if he and I could find it.
She didn’t understand; I think China does. China knows life’s tough for most people, most of the time. Relationships take time to build; nothing’s perfect. If you’ve managed to get together some good things for yourselves in a marriage, take care of them and enjoy them. Cherish in a marriage whatever your two warring egos have managed to cobble together; cherish the extraordinary grace that gives two people occasional glimpses into the heart of the other, where they see, wonderingly, what they can never forget.
One Friday night, one of the older students, Rush, invites me to go with her classmates to her home to make dumplings to celebrate her seventeenth birthday. Her friends tel
l me with awe that their beautiful classmate has done some modelling, and I later recognise her enigmatic smile on a popular biscuit tin.
At her home, I meet James. We’ve never spoken, but I’ve noticed him in one of my senior classes, leaning forward in his seat, quiet-eyed and composed. Among his exuberant classmates, he preserves the absolute stillness of real attention. Now he comes and sits beside me as we eat our dumplings. I look at his creamy skin and one of the varieties of serene Chinese beauty, and he watches me carefully and seems to be listening, as he does in class, not just to the English words themselves, but for what lies beyond them. Making a connection with my foreign origins, he tells me that all his uncles are in Australia, and he’ll probably follow them there in time. He’s full of quiet curiosity and takes away with him a book on Christchurch I ‘d brought with me.
Among the visitors to my flat, boys and girls come in about even numbers, but boys usually come in packs, seldom alone, and those who do make an excuse at the door and retreat if they see female students in the flat. I’m sorry about that – I’d like to get to know the boys better. So I’m delighted when James knocks on my door a few days later. He brings a present for me – a scroll he’s painted of a leopard, with a long accompanying script – a poem by a Chinese general looking back on his life, regretting his lack of success when he knew he had the potential to be a leopard. It’s a dignified expression of regret. The painting, the first James has attempted, took him about two hours to complete. I realise this is a very generous chunk of his time in this school where many students’ answer to ‘What do you do in your spare time?’ is simply ‘I have no spare time’. The painting is well executed, and the Chinese script equally elegant.
Under the Huang Jiao Tree Page 10