The artist sits and talks about school life. He’s feeling disgruntled because he’s been beaten, by a girl, for the position of leader of the student government. She doesn’t speak in public as well as he does, he claims, but she says things designed to please and apparently that’s made the difference on this occasion. I assume James presented himself without the same effort to ingratiate. He quotes his father, who tells him that to be fair is more important than to be successful and adds: ‘I think perhaps the world’s not really fair. I used to think it was.’
He’s not sure whether to place first his ambition or his sense of justice. I know it was he who took on the school authorities last year over insects in the dining hall food, and he likes to say exactly what he thinks, but he’s wondering if it’s worth it. His parents’ hopes lie on his shoulders, and his sole ambition is to justify their faith, and secure a better life for them. Filial piety has a long history in China.
James believes that, in the end, he’ll probably follow his father’s principle of truth and justice first. The father must be a man of considerable integrity to advise his talented son not to buy success by flattering the influential. In this highlycompetitive world, a discreet word in his favour, from someone well-placed, could make all the difference to James’ future. His father and mother work in a Shanghai-owned factory that manufactures nuts and bolts and other mechanical parts, and will not want the same life for their talented son.
James is disappointed with his exam results.
‘Because my parents are workers a lot hangs on me,’ he repeats. ‘I decided to study very hard for these exams and I did, but I came only sixth in my class. I understood all the questions but I made mistakes in the calculations. It made me very sad. And I wonder, what is this for? Will I really use these things in my life?’
He gained entry to this school on his marks in primary school.
‘We have a saying: “Marks are money.”’
His parents have never earned more than 300 yuan a month, and would never have the money necessary to give him his first three years at this school. His ability, confirmed in the final Junior School exams, has secured him his three Senior School years.
James’ parents spent their growing-up years working on farms instead of having ordinary schooling, as did so many young people during the ten years of the Cultural Revolution, to undergo ‘re-education’ at the hands of the country people. At this school all language teaching stopped for ten years and the teachers taught the students how to grow crops and other country skills. James’ parents feel impoverished in not having had any formal education, which has left them so few choices for jobs. Their son says that he, in his turn, would give anything to be on a farm instead of being under such intense study pressure. His parents don’t push him, but he knows that he is their hope for what he calls the ‘unfinished business’ of their own lives.
James asks me why there are no plants on my balcony, and wants to bring me one from the roof of the building.
‘They must belong to someone,’ I respond.
‘Last year important people came to the school, so the school bought hundreds of plants. Afterwards, the school didn’t want them, so they told the teachers to take them. The teachers didn’t want them, so they put them all on the roof where no one would see them.’
‘But someone must be looking after them, or they’d be dead.’
He disappears. Execution for theft is often reported in the ‘China Daily’, to emphasise the rule of law, so I hope he’s right. He returns with a pot holding two plants, a cactus and what looks like an asparagus fern but is in fact a delicate species of bamboo. He’s very pleased to have managed a double-banger.
‘Give them a little cold tea – not too often.’
In the next three weeks the bamboo puts out three new shoots and the cactus stretches its neck.
James has been accepted as a future recruit for the Communist Party, subject to another year’s testing. It’s unusual to be given this opening while you’re still at school. Only three current students in this school have been accepted, though many have made the necessary application.
‘It’ll help everything, help my whole career. At university, I’ll be a leader and it will help a lot with jobs. And make my parents proud. I don’t know why they’ve chosen me.’
‘What sort of person do you think they are looking for?’
‘Someone obedient and someone who can lead.’
As I watch him go down the stairs, I realise I didn’t ask him if he believed in Communism; but of course, that is not the issue.
One weekend, James asks me to his home. There’s something haunting about this boy, a quality of stillness and clarity, and I’m interested to see the parents, home and surroundings that have formed him. His face is scabby around the nose and mouth from a recent cold, but he retains his particular kind of beauty, broad-browed with a contained mouth and quiet, intelligent eyes. We catch the bus and travel a route I haven’t travelled before, down the Western artery of our neighbourhood roundabout for perhaps thirty minutes.
The streets become quieter, and eventually we reach a peaceful district that feels like a country town. As I step down from the bus onto a pavement where a few weeds can grow undisturbed in the cracks, some sort of burden slips off my back. I feel rather strange. Am I perhaps just feeling normal again? It’s such an indescribable relief to be free, for an hour or two, of the long, greedy arms of this powerful city. The city fascinates – but oh how heavily it breathes.
The apartment blocks around here are accommodation provided for their workers by nearby factories. There’s hardly anyone to be seen.
‘They like to live quietly here. They stay in their homes – and play mah-jong,’ James grins.
At his own family’s simple apartment there’s more light, colour and brightness than in many homes I’ve seen, and my spirits lift. James looks at me:
‘You can see the poor conditions’.
The kitchen is less than a room, just a bay by the door, and there’s no bathroom. There’s one bedroom, with just enough room for his parents’ bed, with his own angled at the foot of it. The walls are pale green, and flowers in fresh colours dance on the curtains. The back of the bedroom door has a hinged cover across it which swings aside to show James’ collection of knives and swords – some of them simple pieces made by his father, and some old treasures with patterned blades which the family has bought. The living room walls have the companion pieces – a tiger and a dragon – to the painting of a leopard he gave me, and he plans to add an eagle.
‘The tiger of the air,’ I suggest, and he smiles.
Here in the countryside, James seems a contented son and countryman, while talks with him at school suggest a different persona – an independent thinker, restless-minded.
While his welcoming parents go about preparing the meal, James shows me a glass bowl, the size of a large ashtray.
‘Can you see what’s in there?’
At first it looks like a lump of mud, but the mud begins to move and I can just make out the backs of two turtles, the size of a thumb and forefinger together.
‘I found them when they were this big.’
He indicates the size of a small coin.
When I asked the class to write about themselves, he wrote only: ‘James. I’m a boy about sixteen-years old. I don’t like just reading and writing. I like to know strange thing. That’s enough.’
Over the generous lunch his father has cooked, the parents ask perceptive questions about New Zealand – population, education, employment. I wonder how these keen and enlightened minds survive the assembly line. Later, when we’re walking, I see the abandoned shell of a locally-owned factory that used to make small mechanical parts. Simple pictures of the products, like children’s drawings, can still be seen, painted on the brick wall of the long, low workshop. The local factories couldn’t compete with Shanghai money, and all are now closed.
After lunch, his mother fills our jacket pocket
s with oranges and chocolates, combs her son’s hair, to his annoyance, and we set off to walk to an old temple, Hua Yan Si. On the way we visit the communal lavatory, four hundred metres away from the apartment. This must be a demanding walk for the young and the frail who live in that block – especially in the foggy winters. As we walk on the apartment blocks melt away, and we’re in the countryside. There are farmhouses and ponds all around us, on low rolling hills among trees and stands of bamboo. After three months’ deep urban internment, the relief makes me unsteady on my feet. I take out my camera.
‘Take it easy,’ he smiles. ‘You’ll see hundreds of farms like these. I told you you’d see a different China today.’
It is a mild day, and the sun makes its way through the mist. Kingfishers watch from the wires above the ponds.
‘You can pay the farmer five yuan for a day’s fishing, but the farmer always feeds the fish well before you arrive. The bamboo poles in the ponds stop people from using nets. The farmhouses are cheap, only about 3,000 yuan each, but families often live in an almost empty house. Once the farmer’s paid for the house, he has no money for furniture. Only one family lives in each house.’
We pass close to a house made from mud blocks.
‘Too easy for thieves. They just pour water on the wall and make their way in.’
We’re close enough to smell something from the walls and to catch the indefinable presence of habitation, and I hear a low cough within. There is a sense of a powerful but largely invisible life in this countryside. I feel a dizzying sense of the present moment and my own presence in it. The odds against my seeing, hearing, smelling, touching this particular patch of the earth were great. People are born here, live out their intended lives, and die here. They don’t know me, nor I them, but my shadow falls on their walls today.
Outside the temple gates, there’s an eagle’s nest like a bale of straw in a high tree. It’s preposterous, like a car on a roof, but I find this claim-staking by a wild creature powerful and moving. I suddenly realise how much I’m missing the gardens and trees, parks and streams, that wrap gently around my life in Christchurch. I’m a New Zealander. I miss having the natural world always at my shoulder; I miss my isolated islands where the land is hero and rules us all – or we must take to the boats.
Before we enter the temple gates I look about me. This is James’ world – eagles and ponds – and he’s at one with them. They’ve helped to make him what he is.
The temple consists of a number of buildings scattered in the trees over a hillside. Pathways thread through the rolling forest that surrounds a large lake, dark and still. This countryside has something of the feeling of Hanmer Springs in North Canterbury where hills and mountains dwarf all that’s man-made, but here the hills are smooth-topped. They appear much older, and they roll away, range upon range, into the mist.
We pass monks, faces like alert businessmen, hands in the pockets of their saffron robes, strolling with friends or family from outside the monastery. There’s the worldly air of regulars at a New Zealand racetrack, but perhaps this is just a brand of Chinese spirituality.
At the shrines, old women and monks strike ancient bells to mark the rhythm for heads to touch the ground in prayer. A grandmother tries to bend a two-year-old’s knees to make him kneel on one of the prayer-cushions, but he resists. As we enter each hall, we step over a raised wooden threshold. They say it’s to keep out water. It certainly wouldn’t foil the rats ripping about in the drains outside.
Among the monks there are some young boys, faces still like girls – soft and pink-cheeked. I find their youth disturbing, but perhaps parents here place their sons in Buddhist monasteries as gratefully as parents placed their sons in our own early Christian monasteries. At least they’ll have food and clothing, and a little education.
I don’t fully understand the part the temple plays in the people’s lives:
‘What percentage of people around here would visit the temple?,’ I ask James, but the question doesn’t interest him: ‘I’ve no idea.’
We return to school by bus in the early evening, watching, in companionable silence, as his world passes. The bus rattles its way from this district of simple elements back into the grasp of the city.
Country things have always called me. All I remember of my early childhood in England, before my fourth birthday on the ship coming to New Zealand, was set in Buckinghamshire countryside. I thought all the world must be like that–soft rolling green, commons, copses, stiles, lanes – land wrapped round villages, cupped farms, land made gentle and small for people like me. In New Zealand, we first lived with my grandparents not far from the sea at St Clair in Dunedin. I accepted the sand-hills and sea-water swimming enclosure cheerfully enough; Buckinghamshire, after all, hadn’t given me any preconceptions about the sea. But when we settled in Canterbury, I looked at the dark battalions of pines marching over wind-swept, empty paddocks, rocky peaks scraping the too-bright sky, and despaired. I was lost. There was nowhere here for me, where the countryside would hold me, and I’d be safe. I didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t know how. I was anxious to fit in. I respected that this was my father’s country; he’d been brought up on a Canterbury farm.
We lived in town, and I spent most of my time after school in the garden – I felt most at home there. Later, I went out with a lot of farmers’ sons; girls from my school did. I liked the way the boys came back to boarding school after the holidays, sunburned, noses peeling. I liked the way, over the summer, the skin on their necks glowed against their white collars. I liked the way they could manage cars. I liked sensing the farm-work muscle packaged in their school suits as we danced.
When I met my husband, it was partly the same country loves that drew me. He was a stock-buyer. I loved his broad, sunburned forearms, the smell of sheep in his car, the shine of wool grease on his overalls in the boot. The car was big, and he drove it like an extension of his own body. I knew how this could be, from rare moments when I entirely lost myself in music, and my fingers and the piano keys became one. His arm around me was muscle I knew would hold against any of Canterbury’s wild nor’west winds, against her bitter easterlies. I’d lived in a world of shoes, but his world lived in boots – hot with effort, the leather sucked by the sun, covered in dust. So we married, the stock-buyer and the music teacher. And, of course, we lived in the Canterbury countryside, and I rejoiced. Reconciled now to land that was bare and open, I felt restored to living again where I had begun – in the country – where I wanted to be.
And I began the painful discovery that I wasn’t a New Zealand country woman at all – not in the way those around me were – and never would be. You have to be born to it. However much I loved the beauty and robustness, the honest and basic issues of country life, I knew I’d never fit in there in the way I’d dreamed of. It was one thing to love the look of the towering hills and rolling paddocks in the evening and quite another to know, from a child, where the sheep on the hills had to be brought down to in winter, which paddocks ponded in July if it was a wet year. It was one thing to wonder at the light on a field of wheat, and another to know that the wheat was late this year, or ready for heading. My view was sentimental, or at best the eye of a mute poet. I listened to my husband in easy conversation with the women he’d been brought up with: the block on the corner was up for sale again, but sheep had never done well on it they agreed; George had a new tractor, but remember what happened to his last one? They smiled at one another, no words needed, drawing from a common pool of country memories. He never expressed disappointment at this otherness in me, and I loved the land with my outsider’s eye, and came to love the people just as dearly. They were kind. I taught some of them to play the piano. But I never again thought of the countryside as belonging to me. I simply hadn’t earned it; I knew I’d always have to look at it over the fence.
As I walked with James through the Chinese countryside that afternoon, I realised I’d become quite ill in some way through living deep in the cit
y, with so few signs of the natural world around me. If missing the countryside made me ill, then it and I had some deep relationship. James understood that in me – or he wouldn’t have brought the potted bamboo and cactus down from the roof of the building to be my garden. But if the New Zealand countryside doesn’t belong to me, still less does its Chinese equivalent. What do I know of the struggles and satisfactions of a Chinese farmer, of growing Chinese leek and bitter melon, of what the sky tells him, and the strange red earth? James knows no more about farming life than I do; but I think he feels comfortable here. Perhaps we both see a beauty in the countryside the farmer has long taken for granted.
CHAPTER
EIGHT
WINTER
FESTIVITIES
It’s growing colder. I’ve not yet seen any heating in the homes I’ve visited. People seldom take off their jackets indoors, and most people put on long coats as the temperature drops in the evenings. In the streets, some people are now wearing caps that let down to cover their ears, and there are many fur collars. The air conditioning unit attached with tape to the outside wall of my bedroom allows me the luxury of some warmth in that corner of the room where I undress; there’s no way of heating the rest of the flat. I’ve decided the number one rule in this south-western China winter is: Do not remove a layer of clothing without excellent reason. ‘More clothes,’ Cherry, bunched up and pink-cheeked, shouts kindly at me in the sports ground. ‘Look, I’m wearing four sweaters. How many are you wearing? You must put on another one.’ I stare with interest at her neckline, where four acrylic rings, like those on a tree stump, mark the sweaters and the movement of the year.
Under the Huang Jiao Tree Page 11