The first term is over, and the students have returned to their homes for a few weeks of winter holidays. The school grounds fall quiet, given over to groups of small children from the teachers’ families, who shout and race in the space that’s now all theirs. The trees stand still in the fog.
I end the term feeling quite cheerful. I ask the students in their final class to tell me which lessons they’ve found most useful and why. They respond willingly and many express warm appreciation. It’s only when I’m complacently rereading these, that I think to consult the seating plans for the classrooms, and note that at least a third of the students wrote that they appreciated the same lesson, and for the same reasons, as the person sitting next to them. It also occurs to me that these students, already well-schooled in the arts of showing respect and generosity, and drawing a veil over life’s unpleasant aspects, are most unlikely to let me know when I was a bore and wasted their precious time. I know I don’t take criticism well, retreating quickly from engagement to nurse hurt and resentment, but in this environment I value the impatience and disappointment of the few brave critics. I know where I am with them, and have the chance to take up a better position.
I too have a couple of weeks’ holiday and decide to stay at the school rather than travel to other provinces to see further treasures of China. This decision mystifies both teachers and students. Ten years ago, I’d have shot off without thinking, but now my instinct is to stay here. I hope to go deeper into this immediate Chinese world of school and city, where I have a modest foothold, rather than skitter over more distant surfaces. And I simply need some time to myself – to listen, to be alone. Living in this lively school during term is like living with a radio slightly off station, and wherever I go, someone’s eyes follow me.
We move through the fog from Christmas to New Year. The Chinese New Year comes later than ours, but this foreign one is another excuse for a party, and the school holds a New Year dinner for teachers. The teachers forget to let me know about it; the school’s dispatches of information often fail to penetrate the doors of its foreign teachers’ flats. This sense of being so precariously attached to the system, makes me – in my more dislocated moments – wonder if I’m really here. Perhaps I need to work on this, looking in the mirror each morning, and saying firmly: ‘I exist.’
I put up a calendar for the New Year. January shows a photo of Akaroa, where I spent all my childhood summer holidays. I look at the wharf where I used to fish all day and through into the evening, until an understanding parent would come and drag me gently past the fishing boats, through the seasmelling darkness, back to bath and bed. I look now at the neat squares of January days and find I can dare to look ahead down the other months towards going home. I’ve been here four months and at last myself in exile and my returning self are on the same calendar.
Boris and I travel with Ellen and a school driver to the International Studies University at Shapingba, to join the other foreign teachers who are going to what is billed as the 5th International Dinosaur Lantern Festival in Zigong. In this environment, where many questions don’t have answers that can be rendered into English for a Western mind, it hardly seems worth asking why it should be called a ‘Dinosaur’ Lantern Festival – it looks a tough one. But the answer is uncharacteristically simple; there’s a famous dinosaur museum near Zigong, built over a pit where most of the bones of a gigantic skeleton was discovered.
The elegant campus, standing in the shadow of Gele Mountain, that I remember with pleasure from an earlier afternoon visit, shows a different face now in misty early morning light. There’s no-one about except the occasional sleepy worker moving slowly into his day. We soon discover that, while the school has brought us here in the dark to arrive at 8 am, the party isn’t due to leave until 9.30. As Ellen wanders off to try to raise someone, Boris spreads his white hands in one of his exasperated and expansive Slavic shrugs: ‘They knew we were too early.’ He rolls his eyes.
Ellen scampers here and there without conviction, saying ‘sorry’ under her breath, before excusing herself to return to the school for a meeting.
Boris stalks about looking for a phone to call Svetlana, with whom he taught here last year. On previous meetings with Svetlana I’ve noticed she takes care over her elaborate hair style and makeup. How pleased will she be to be called so early in the morning? But perhaps they know each other well. He turns from the phone and says:
‘Ten minutes. She’s only stood up.’
When we arrive at Svetlana’s flat, she welcomes us graciously, given the circumstances. She is a plain woman, but her style and vivacity make her striking. There’s a hint of temperament about her, the smouldering variety. Boris and I sit in the bare and shadowy living room of her apartment. Against the dark furniture and on the walls are just three or four decorative touches – Russian and Chinese ornaments and hangings. She’s twenty-four, but there’s no sign of youth in this room. What life have Boris and Svetlana come from? What has bred in them this combination of proud bearing, reserve and sudden flashes of temperament? I may not know them or their world, but here in the absolute other-ness of Chinese life I feel an affinity with them.
Svetlana produces a bundle of postcards of Moscow, which Boris explains with passion. As she and Boris retire to talk in another room, she hands me a collection of photos of her three-year-old son, Alushkin, in Moscow with Svetlana’s mother. A solemn boy stands, wrapped in furs, on a bare snowy street. Beside him his grandmother looks out, from those uncompromising surroundings with eyes heavy with feeling. She has the look of a countess in reduced circumstances.
Svetlana eventually appears in a high fur hat, under which her long plait falls down her back, a fine grey coat with wings at the back and long black boots. It is as if she has walked in from a boulevard of a northern city under snow.
We discover the party to Zigong contains three other foreigners. Paul from Perth, scholarly and careful, has finished his year teaching at the University. His older sister Margery from Melbourne, is spending one week with him before they return together to Australia. David from Cardiff, tall, ruddy and solid among these pale, spare Chinese, looks defensive. We travel in a minibus with Wang from the University Foreign Affairs Department, his chatty wife, their small son and a driver. The take-off is characteristically indecisive. We’re waiting for someone or something … or are we? No-one arrives. Wang is nervous – he’s responsible for the safe passage of these foreigners with their inconvenient expectations.
In the low-slung bus, its windows misted up, fog outside, and the motorway making its clinical cut through the countryside, there’s not a lot we can see. It takes time for anyone who’s lived most of their life on a narrow island to get used to the idea that here the same landscape can roll on for days: terraces of vegetables; ponds mirroring sky and tree; settlements whose textures and colours melt into their surroundings; lines of clothes hanging still, under verandas and between trees.
At Zigong we draw up before a three-star hotel; the City Government has been generous. Svetlana and I are given an upstairs room together. We find the staff are willing, the rooms clean, and most things work.
Downstairs, we’re given red ribbons to wear, which, Wang translates proudly, have ‘Extinguished Guests’ written across them. At the help-yourself banquet, there are long speeches by the mayor and councillors, followed by the American ambassador – a man with a perpetual smile, who wears casual clothes and speaks Chinese. The French consul, with grey hair en brosse, wears a suit and an anxious, stiff expression. Maybe his ambitions for his diplomatic career didn’t include speaking at the opening of the Zigong Dinosaur Lantern Festival.
We set off after dinner for the opening of the Festival. Wang has organised an official, a minute man who is all bones, to hold up a yellow flag with ‘6’ on it, to be our rallying point. For a guide, he looks bewildered. Margery is swaying, her stomach, struggling with the fierce Sichuan food. To Westerners who take a modicum of physical comfort for granted, th
e Chinese official occasions to which we’re invited can be nightmares of endurance. Tonight there are dozens of speeches, nowhere to sit, and the numbing cold. The people around us are tough. It seems they can stand in icy winds for hours, walk or climb forever. They have an amazing tolerance of repetition, don’t demand that they understand what’s going on, and remain cheerful.
The official routine this evening starts with the introduction of all the city councillors, then a long coy dialogue over loudspeakers between a man and a woman. It sounds like an interminable advertisement. No-one appears to listen. Following the yellow flag, we set off to see the exhibits, which are spread over a city park of hills and lakes, walks, bridges and significant rocks. Painted paper lanterns in their thousands, in delicate or glowing colours, line every path, but there are also lights in the sky and every imaginable sort of moving light show, including animated figures and animals. At any point, you can hear ten different musical accompaniments.
Above a central island in the lake rears a Buddhist goddess, white, enormous, revolving with fixed and terrible gaze under a shower of lights. Beneath her, a three metre turtle made of transparent balloons filled with lights ploughs through the water. On its back is a collection of wise ancient figures in robes – rather like giant versions of the plaster figures we used to win with darts at the Christchurch A & P Show. The turtle moves to an ear-splitting recording of a tango. I’m sure this represents some cherished ancient story, but to a foreigner the representation is brain-curdling.
There are wondrous dragons and dinosaurs with thousands of scales, sometimes plastic, sometimes made of glass bottles filled with coloured water; and naturally there are lights within the monsters. David later reflects: ‘For me, nothing could touch the dinosaur made of condoms.’ I remember each one standing up, frosted, forming one glittering scale among untold thousands on a rearing dinosaur two storeys high. Only the Chinese could do it.
Halfway through the tour Margery is moaning softly: ‘Take me home.’ But our bewildered, diminutive guide with flag number six weaves on tirelessly through the packed festival ground. We limp on after him, grateful for our own bobbing yellow buoy in this strange carnival world. The Russians are nowhere to be seen; following a Chinese flag may not have appealed.
Finally, our guide seems to have nowhere else to take us. He looks frightened, but Wang appears out of the crowd and finds another floor of exhibits for us to admire – ‘but the last one,’ he says encouragingly.
When we’ve found the hotel again, David, Svetlana and Boris go off to a tea house and Paul ministers to Margery. I’ve been obsessed all evening by the thought of a bath. The plug plunger has been broken, so that the plug won’t lower into the hole and guests won’t flood the hotel. I partly block the hole with a film canister wrapped in a plastic bag and run the water full-throttle into the bath like the Yangtze through the Three Gorges, and sink under the steaming water. The next bath will be in Hong Kong in five months. How well, I wonder, are bath plugs functioning there since the territory returned to Chinese rule? Svetlana returns, moving about our shared room with composed carriage and discreet sighs, singing Russian songs as she removes her eyelashes.
Over the last days I feel we’ve been moving across a stage hung with veils separating my New Zealand path from the paths of Svetlana and Boris, Wang and the other Chinese. I believe these veils are woven of all we don’t know of each other’s worlds. Yet we can see each other’s forms dimly through those veils, and the words that have passed through them have been respectful and kind, gentle, even affectionate. Maybe my conviction, that to get on with people you must understand them, needs dethroning. Here in Zigong our odd party of disparate human types has – a few sighs of impatience and bewildered shrugs apart – respected the mystery of difference. It’s surprising what you can learn at an International Dinosaur Lantern Festival.
CHAPTER
NINE
ILLUSION
AND DISILLUSION
I return to school feeling unsettled, partly because I miss the connection with other Westerners; but my spirits aren’t helped by a cough that seems to come all the way up from my feet. Chongqing isn’t good for lungs. I stand on my balcony and look irritably out into the damp, grey fog. I can hear the low rumble of the city traffic, but the thought of the struggling crowds and thick fumes makes a walk uninviting. Around me, the school lies quietly within its holiday calm, but what at first seemed to me blessedly peaceful now feels empty. With a number of families away, even the other flats in my building are strangely quiet. Maybe I should have gone away for the holidays after all. The phone shrills. Lily, who’s studying at a Beijing University, has returned to Chongqing to be with her family over the winter holidays. She knew the last foreign teacher here, and asks if she can visit me for some English conversation. I agree – at least it’ll be some company – and an hour later she arrives at the door bearing four arum lilies. She’s taken aback when she sees me: ‘Oh, I thought from your voice on the phone that you were my age.’
In my present ill-humour, her obvious disappointment at not finding a contemporary leaves me quite unmoved, and I decide crisply she’ll just have to come to terms with the thirty years between us. It is a freezing afternoon and she’s travelled for an hour on buses to get here; I hope she’ll find some useful English conversation in compensation.
The first hour is stiff and awkward. She’s troubled, but if there’s a specific cause it never emerges; there are so many likely sources of suffering in this country. Her English is excellent, though her degree is not in English but in automotive engineering.
After a time of desultory conversation as we try to get the shape of one another, she glances at the pile of ‘China Daily’ newspapers on the table beside us and comments bitterly: ‘You know, things in China are so much worse than the newspaper says.’
‘I know, but this is one of my few sources of Chinese news.’
‘It’s not only this newspaper – it’s all the newspapers. They’re all the same.’ She goes on: ‘You know, most of China is rural. In the country, and in the factories, there’s still terrible suffering. You and the other teachers here are in the best place – a Foreign Language School. This is not like the rest of China.’
She obviously feels she needs to tell me that I’ve no idea what life in China is really like. She’s probably right. Having set the story straight, she appears to feel more at ease.
‘My parents, you know, they suffered everything, all the things, all of them. All they want is that I don’t suffer in that way.’
‘Do you want to travel when you’ve graduated?’
‘I’d like to … I’d like to take a look.’ She gives her first relatively frank smile. ‘That’s why people study in a Foreign Language School, – that’s usually the reason, that’s their dream.’
‘Will you want to bring back to China what you learn overseas?’
‘Of course, but when you return it’s often very difficult to accept the conditions here and find a job. Often you can only find a job with a foreign, joint-venture company … if you’re lucky. And you can be over-qualified for jobs; some people now say that a doctoral degree isn’t worth having – it makes it impossible to get a job.’
We talk about my students’ belief that all Western countries are the same, and that all are problem-free, and she mentions the change in China’s official attitude to the outside world since the late 70s. I have the chance to check my own impressions:
‘Did Chinese people once believe that the outside world couldn’t be trusted, that it would harm them?’
‘More than that. They were taught that the outside world was poison.’
‘Why do most Chinese students want to study in the United States?’
‘Because they think America leads the world.’
Bully for America, I think wryly, and I’m glad that I know of one student, at least, who has thought beyond its obvious attractions. Physics and chemistry are her passion, and she longs to study i
n France. Inspired by the stories of Madame Curie, she sometimes signs her classroom assignments ‘Diana Curie’ and cherishes a vision of helping the world by harnessing the power of thunder and lightning. I’m moved by this student’s fearless dreams.
Lily says, ‘I believe Chinese students are more disciplined than Western students.’
‘Yes – your good students generally spend all their time studying. Western students expect to do many different things in their student years.’
We both know Chinese students have no choice.
‘Why are you here?’ she asks suddenly.
‘I’m not sure. I only know I want to learn. Teaching here is part of the learning. And I’m interested in differences. Maybe I won’t know why I’ve come here until I’m back in New Zealand.’
She copes surprisingly well with that unsatisfactory answer, and we talk about my struggle to identify useful teaching material for students whose external and internal worlds I know so little about. She invites me, quite gently, to visit her home, and finally leaves for the long bus trip home across the muddy, grey city. At the door, she gives one real smile, almost free from shadows. I wonder what she thinks she’s discovered here, and what she thinks she’s taught me.
Under the Huang Jiao Tree Page 13