Under the Huang Jiao Tree

by Jane Carswell

Sometimes as I watch China, and her children like Lily going about their business, the country seems flooded with a great peaceful wisdom; at other times it seems awash with a quiet madness – or is it blindness?

  At present I feel a strong disaffection for everything in the Chinese world around me. I also feel guilty: this malaise is both illogical and ungrateful. Unfortunately it’s also undeniable.

  Kate, who directed the course in teaching English as a foreign language that I took in Christchurch, warned our class that at some point we’d feel like this. ‘You’ll be rolling along, after three or four months there, thinking you’re beginning to understand things, enjoying that other world and your increasing familiarity with it, when suddenly … ’

  I didn’t believe her. Nobody likes to think that their negative reactions are part of an inevitable pattern; we like to think we’re different – more resourceful.

  But it has happened. Suddenly I wonder whose illconceived idea this teaching-in-China assignment was. I’m tired of Chinese food, the voices are getting on my nerves, and the other teachers … Just a week ago I felt confident they accepted me; they said appreciative things and seemed to enjoy our joint ventures. But now I’m not so sure – I think they may be laughing up their sleeves, or just putting up with me because foreign teachers are a required extra at a Foreign Language School. Most of the students seem to enjoy our classes, but am I really teaching them anything? Do they just get pleasure from our time together because I’m strange, and they can take it easy until the next ‘real’ lesson? Suddenly, I don’t trust myself – or anyone else.

  I’d give anything to be able to wander around the corner for fish and chips, chase my cat up the gum tree, hear a strong New Zealand accent sending up the government. I want to get into my sleeping bag and pull the drawstring over my head. And stay there. But that’s just what they told me I mustn’t do: ‘Don’t shut yourself away. Just keep on going out among them, doing what you have to do, and it’ll come right.’

  But how would they know?

  I feel as though I’m on a Chinese island, with the rest of the world out of sight. I’m beginning to wonder if, when it’s time for me to leave on the first stage of my journey home, the plane from Chongqing airport could really find Hong Kong and land there. I feel like a character in a children’s book. I’ve walked through the back of a wardrobe, and found myself in a mysterious, unfamiliar world. The airport is the exit sign, but I’m not sure I still believe in it.

  A generous supply of letters from home helps me to fight this frightening sense of isolation. One faithful friend writes regularly, and I read avidly her accounts of teaching in a world without classroom regimentation, careless, bountiful family gatherings without speeches, and outings with friends that are lit with irreverent humour. I write back, weekly, letters heavy on the fascinations of my exotic world and light on the drawbacks. I’m not withholding information so much as trying to serve my letters sunny side up – I suppose to help me as much as cheer her. In this degree of aloneness, I have a feeling that if I take my finger off the deliberate-smile button, I could easily slip into a dark place.

  My friend the letter-writer slips into a dark place during my months away. Widowed not long before, she goes on a holiday to Australia with friends from her growing-up years. Somewhere in her careless-of-self packing is her grief. In the course of a trip on which she drives for her friends, she loses her handbag with its vital travel papers, and the retina of one eye loses its adhesion. Too many losses. She writes painfully about them – continuing the letters using her good eye – and tips me a bitter sentence about the contrast between her present lot and my cheerful progress through a life of exotic interests and delights. I hear within it a voice accusing me of throwing off the proper toils of my New Zealand relationships in order to dance some fancy, independent routine in an alien setting. The voice may be in my own head; it’s certainly related to the feelings of guilt at apparently leaving lightly all I loved in New Zealand. My response to the letter is a complete psychological flip. I write back immediately, saying – in words of concrete – that I’m sorry for her losses, but my life here is anything but painless and I’m not prepared to be taken to task for accepting the chance to work for a year among unfamiliar rather than familiar relationships. Tumpetty-tum. I can hear the pompous self-justification; but I can also hear me trying to get my own attention. I’m astonished at my vehemence. What inflamed nerve has this touched?

  My close friend’s probably just missing me. I’m not there when she needs me. In this sunless passage of hers, surely she should be able to dump the painful negatives of her life on a friend who cares for her? But I can’t accept this, so I’m not the friend I thought I was.

  Something in me, jut a part, seems to stand stubbornly apart from all my human relationships, and all my relationships with time and place. If I’m more than all of those, what more am I – and what earthly use is that to anybody?

  School goes back, but I have little energy and, more worryingly, little interest. One of my problems is that I’m not well. I’ve eaten something that’s making sure nothing else stays in my stomach. I can’t face the lavatories of the classroom block during the teaching day, but returning to my flat means a race down several flights of stairs, a seventy-five yard dash down the hill and up five more flights of stairs. My own tradition of medicine says nothing can be done – just let it take its course, but I decide that Chinese medicine couldn’t make me feel any worse, so I opt to visit the school clinic, with Hilda’s help as interpreter. The impressive woman doctor looks at me only once – as I leave. After asking Hilda what’s wrong with me, she opens, with a key, a drawer which contains the key to her cabinet. She looks at the packets on the shelves as though she’s never seen them before, chats, fingers a few, takes them out, puts them back, and finally assembles a collection for which she gives instructions. It’s a formidable line-up, and I wonder for a moment what Hilda told her I was suffering from, but really I’m past caring. Back at the flat, after the drinking of something that tastes like goats’ spit, but is in fact a distillation of Sichuan mountain herbs, everything stays down.

  My stomach is now co-operative, but I’m still coughing and wheezing uncontrollably like one of the local buses, and Hope suggests we visit her own small hospital run by eight older doctors.

  ‘The older they are, the more respected – because of their experience.’ We turn into a dim alley off the main road, enter an undistinguished building and climb some stairs to a narrow corridor, walls painted universal hospital green from waist level down – cleaner than most walls here, but still just time-stained Chongqing stone. Hope’s doctor is broadly-built, with a thick head of hair lightly streaked with grey. He could be seventy or forty. Under his white coat he wears a checked cotton shirt that would be ideal for square dancing. His voice is comfortable but firm, as I suppose old family doctors’ voices are anywhere. Through Hope, he questions at length, asks what the school clinic prescribed originally, and approves

  He explains his diagnosis to Hope, who relays the nub of it to me. Apparently I have too much wet in my system. This sounds reasonable enough to me.

  ‘Do you want to use proprietary herbal medicine or infuse your own herbs?’

  ‘Which is better?’

  ‘Infuse your own. There are no impurities.’

  At the dispensary the smell is like a very pungent pot pourri – the aroma will fill my flat during the brewing sessions to follow. The dispenser, trained seven years for this role, wanders dreamily with a scoop and a battered aluminium balance. The dozens of deep wooden drawers are rich with harvests: dry, brown, gold or grey, frilled or feathery, sticks and leaves and seeds, fungi and grasses and roots, many of which must have blown on Sichuan hillsides or clung with patient roots to whatever lay over the rock. I take away three fat, crunchy, brown paper bags, one for each day of treatment.

  The consultation ends with elaborate courtesies, small eddies of them between pauses, so you can’t be sure w
hen the last word’s spoken. I express appreciation, he graciously finds some reason to feel honoured and presents his card. The conversation dwindles to single word murmurs, Hope rises to her feet and we shake hands. It’s a rich encounter – calm and assured, natural and persuasive. We walk away down the corridors watched by the experienced eyes of sturdy women doctors standing quietly in their doorways.

  I brew, as instructed, on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. The steam is richly aromatic, the taste bitter as gall. My throat contracts and my tongue shrivels. How much do I want to get better? The doctor predicts I’ll be well by the following Tuesday. On the Monday I croak, cough, and dismiss Chinese medicine. I tell myself that, coming from family thick with surgeons and GPs, I should have known better. On the Tuesday I awake in perfect health.

  Growing up in a family where stethoscopes swung from so many branches of the family tree gave me complete trust in doctors. When we were sick, Dad looked at us, told us what we’d caught, gave Mum some pills for us and sent us to bed. When our colour, appetite and unruly energy convinced him we should be back at school, he told Mum to pack the last doses of antibiotics into our lunch-tins and away we went. Where more than pills was called for, he would ask one of his colleagues to cut the troublesome bit out of us. It never occurred to me that the process was essentially different from household repairs. If a tap dripped, you knew it needed a new washer, replaced the washer, and the drip stopped.

  My grandfather’s brain tumour was another matter. He was in his seventies. It was operable, but he refused surgery as it would have left him unable to look after the wife he’d fallen in love with when he was ten. The tumour grew, and he came from Dunedin to Christchurch to live with us while he had radiotherapy. The headaches were terrifying. When they struck, he’d leap up from his chair and cry out. I’d seen him leap up and shout when cavalry or cowboys came over the rise in films we’d seen together, but this was a different sort of shout. He had pills for the pain, but I could see they were useless; that shocked me. I didn’t know what to do, and would sit beside him until he’d tell me to go away and play. I was too old to play; I was fifteen. I realised the limitations of my father’s science.

  Hope’s doctor diagnosed me, not the bug, and no strike was launched on the troublemaker. Instead he’s strengthening me to resist it. I’m interested in the attitudes I feel moving under the surface of different medical practices. You could generalise and say that, faced with illness, Western medicine attacks the enemy, Chinese medicine strengthens the fort. The war would surely best be advanced by combining forces; but the confidence of Chinese medicine that we hold within ourselves the resources we need for health, and that plants harbour a chemical benevolence towards us, appeals to me. I believe in inner resources. People who produce extraordinary harvests of spirit, seem to draw the golden fish from somewhere deep within them. I believe we all have some inner chamber, and that it’s bountifully furnished. My problem is that I can’t find the way to mine.

  I’m feeling quite cheerful again. Maybe it’s the odd blink of sunshine we’ve had in the last few days. The unexpected attack of sinophobia has passed. I do like these people and their city – and probably they could do worse than having me. Foreign teachers in China have been known to run away. At least I haven’t done that.

  My recent gloomy phase has sobered me. I was quite cocky at the end of the term. My grasp of local geography, hard-won wherever I am, was firming up. I was beginning to identify elements in the life around me and make connections between them. Having come here believing experience would bring understanding of the intriguing otherness, I thought I could feel my perceptions at last getting a grip on this slippery world. Those around me seemed to understand me well enough; I felt they knew that underneath I was just like them. All seemed to be going well, and for once I was dangerously pleased with myself.

  When doubts began to crowd in, I had to face the fact that I still didn’t really understand the systems. I sympathise with whoever said China has more skins than an onion. I’ve been watching people’s responses to me; they don’t understand me either. Behind their kindness and smiles they often find my behaviour quite inexplicable. So I’m sailing into this second and last term here without a rudder. Without understanding, I feel distanced from those around me – perhaps not in heart, but certainly in head. The way we think is different, right from the toe-nails up. I have such admiration for them – for their cheerfulness, industry, tolerance, humour, good sense, hospitality, endurance. I should be content with being a passably useful outsider, but I’d so much like to feel I’d in some real way stood alongside them in their world.

  Fire-crackers are now banned in Chongqing, for safety reasons. However, this is Chinese New Year and at midnight the whole school seems to explode. Countless fire-crackers go off all over the grounds, in our courtyard, on balconies. Evil spirits have been put to flight in a triumphant, thoroughgoing display of civil disobedience. I’m sure the lazy, handsome policemen at the gate won’t think of stirring themselves.

  An official decree was similarly defied a few weeks ago. At the school assembly, just before Christmas, a scornful warning, was delivered against celebrating foreign festivals: ‘We’re Chinese. We don’t need them.’

  The students, however, still decorated their dormitories quietly on Christmas Eve, and at midnight, there was a roar of ‘Happy Christmas’ throughout the dormitory building.

  In these long twenty-week terms I, no less than the students, eagerly grasp any chance for a break in the school routine. I’m prepared to celebrate anything, with anybody, so when the City Foreign Affairs Department sends me an invitation, as one of the foreign women in Chongqing, to a banquet to mark National Women’s Day, I’m all on. I set aside my chalk-impregnated teaching clothes, and iron the silk shirt my daughter’s boyfriend kindly gave me when it no longer suited his image. Only the best will do when I’m representing New Zealand.

  When I arrive at the gate, Cherry, a substitute for Hilda, is already there with wet hair, looking rushed but amused.

  She asks: ‘Have you had breakfast?’

  Probably she hasn’t.

  ‘Yes. When did they ask you to come with me?’

  ‘Ten minutes ago.’ She grins.

  For people who’ve had the model of a ‘planned’ economy for so long those around me are remarkably spontaneous. I never seem to know about anything in the school until it actually happens – but perhaps nobody else does either.

  The previous afternoon, the school had celebrated, noisily and at length, the 100th anniversary of the birth of Zhou Enlai, revered first premier of Mao Zedong’s New China. The army was called in to contribute items, and add political weight, to the programme, and if the chief joy of the celebration for the students lay in missing some afternoon classes, the greatest entertainment value lay in the number of disasters that befell the army’s offerings: songs in which the rhythm lurched and faltered; acrobatics where the flip failed and the hoist gave way; dance routines that lost their way.

  In the car, I ask Cherry why the Chinese people so revere Zhou Enlai. She seems prepared – as though she’s anticipated an exam question. She says that he was handsome. I think doubtfully of those beetling brows, the long heavy face.

  ‘And he had only one wife.’

  To a Westerner, this sounds no more than sensible, but she explains. The people believe he fell in love with another woman, but Mao told him that, as first Premier of the New China, his behaviour must be above reproach. So he gave up love for the good of the Motherland.

  He also cared for ordinary people. She recounts that on one occasion, when one of Zhou’s bodyguards was standing out in the rain, Zhou lent him his own umbrella. Once when the driver of his car had knocked down a woman:

  ‘Although she was only a worker, he took her to hospital.’

  This awe at his egalitarianism is interesting in a country officially dedicated to socialism. She continues: ‘They say he could drink a lot.’

  ‘Is th
at a good thing or a bad thing?’

  ‘Sometimes, perhaps, a good thing. Chinese people think that if a man can drink a lot, he’s strong.’

  I’m surprised that a people who approach food with so much civilised respect should harbour a less sophisticated attitude towards drinking. I wonder if eating ten chickens at a sitting also proves your strength; perhaps it’s all part of the Chinese think-big mentality that I’ve seen expressed in hotel corridors along which you could comfortably race go-carts.

  We arrive at the Wu Du hotel, where we’re handed over to Wang and Peng, pleasant and anxious as ever, from the Foreign Affairs Department of the University. Most of the foreign teachers are familiar, except an American woman from a Teachers’ College, and a black woman from a Commercial College. There are also wives of businessmen, and businesswomen. At least half of the gathering is successful Chongqing women.

  City Government officials speak, cataloguing and lauding women’s achievements. A woman with her hair violently frizzed at the ends takes the floor and talks at length about all the things she’s done better than anyone else. The piles of peanuts and oranges go down and people slink off to the lavatories. At last she runs out of steam and the audience claps wildly. They may not have listened to her speech, or even been in the room, but cutting the ground from under people’s feet isn’t a Chinese characteristic, and they give her a generous send-off.

  After the speeches about what women can do, women are called on to prove it. The Australians, Cecily (newly arrived and still a little shell-shocked) and Gerard’s wife Margaret, bravely and in tune, sing ‘Waltzing Matilda’ – all of it. The Chinese clap, and look bewildered. Kathleen, from California – the impressive woman who lost her soap down the hole in my bathroom floor, speaks unassumingly about the recent achievements of the city. Maeve, from Ireland, small and wearing a Chinese jacket, face both pugnacious and vulnerable, sings an Irish folksong in a startlingly beautiful voice. She sings with her eyes closed, and I wonder what she sees behind her eyes. The Chinese fall quiet, and I hear later that she has been snapped up to perform on Chongqing television. Following her, a Chinese woman acrobat, well over six feet, strides onto the stage and performs physical contortions on top of a small table, to the music of ‘The Butterfly Lovers’.