As someone removes the acrobat’s table, a local dancer strikes a graceful pose as she waits for the music. The speakers give an ear-splitting roar followed by the gibberish of screaming tape, and it’s decided to postpone this one. In her place, the black woman from Oklahoma appears, and shouts: ‘I’m black, but I’m not from Africa. I’m from the USA. And I’m a woman, though my hair’s very short – see my lipstick and my earrings. I’M A BLACK WOMAN.’ She sings a liberation song ‘And I Rise’, with moving drama.
The American from the Teachers’ College sings ‘Christopher Robin is saying his prayers’ – explaining that it’s a lullaby, which she feels is appropriate for Women’s Day. The older Chinese women approve of this. Like other small things, New Zealand can slip the mind, and they forget to invite me to show what New Zealanders can do. Perhaps it’s just as well.
The sense of unreality at this gathering is overwhelming – especially at games time. First we’re given Chinese partners and run holding balloons between our backs, and after this we run three-legged races, in teams. My team wins; my partner and I are outstanding. We’re given as a prize a box of glasses marked ‘State Gift’. Next we’re supplied with strings of small balloons to tie round our ankles, the aim of the game being to go round the room popping everyone else’s balloons by stamping on them while guarding our own – a game calling for speed and savagery, excellent for a women’s meeting. Following this, a man from the City Government draws ten lucky numbers. When it’s discovered that all the winners are Chinese, the consternation on the Chinese officials’ faces is memorable. Beside me, Mr Peng whispers, in agitation and embarrassment: ‘That’s not good at all.’ Later they draw again, and the first nine names are foreign women, with one Chinese woman at the end to show it hasn’t been rigged.
When I think about it, my life here is greatly eased by Chinese tolerance and humour. The school’s careful not to put my back to the wall in any way and gives me space for whatever extraordinary individual or cultural needs I may have. Almost everyone smiles at me encouragingly; jokes are welcome currency. I can’t judge what effect that has on my teaching, but I’m certain this sensitive accommodation of my foreign self has helped me be open to learning; my defensiveness – normally ever-ready – has no reason to bar the doors here. I’m eager to know about this world; I have six pads of tissue-thin rice paper filled with stories students have told me – of China’s history, of their families, of what it’s like to be a Chinese teenager here and now. I know I learn best when I feel both safe inside and challenged from outside in the spirit of ‘I know you can do it’; this school’s an ideal place for me to learn. It’s not just that I can now recite the Chinese dynasties in order and name her famous novels and poems; I feel I may be learning at a deeper level – I can feel pieces moving inside me.
This term I’m no longer teaching the fifteen-year-olds; they have vital exams at the end of this term, and the spoken English I teach is no help in preparing for that white-hot contest. Instead, I’ve been given classes of fourteen – year-olds, exposing me to yet a further degree of youthful Chinese innocence and trust. I’m not used to being trusted like this; in a way, it’s frightening.
At the end of one lesson with a low-stream class, several students approach the front desk as I pack my bag. They watch, finger things, and smile. One tall boy, Luke, with thick glasses appears the typical swot. He looks away from me as he asks why he can’t speak English more easily, when he wants to so much. Later, back at the flat, I look at what he wrote about himself in the first lesson: ‘Friends: all those with high moral standards; When I grow up: I want to win the Nobel Prize for Medicine or be President of the People’s Republic of China.’ His ambitious contribution stands out sharply among the ranks of: ‘I very like football but my study’s not well’; ‘Mary, Doris and Julia are my friends. We like watch TV and eat chocolate.’
I ask his Chinese form teacher why Luke is in the lowest stream.
‘He failed the entrance exam for the higher classes. He was ill that day, his mother said. At his previous school, he was always in the top five of his class.’
Now he makes a personal approach:
‘I believe you’re sportsman-like. We’d like to visit you at your flat.’
It’s been a noisy lesson on describing pictures in English and I can’t see where the sportsmanship came into it, but we make a time. He arrives later in the day, with a cheerful, motherly girl who encourages him to have his say and loyally praises his abilities. In spite of his intellectual interests and high voice, he’s strongly-built, and in black shorts and a redchecked shirt looks powerful football material. In the warmer days ahead I’ll see this robust figure in class discreetly fluttering a black silk fan with a delicate white handle.
After a stream of self-deprecating courtesies, he asks if he may speak of his problem and launches into his account of how, having failed to gain high marks in the entrance exam, he found himself in a very low stream at this school. The company he keeps in class is no problem to him – his attitudes shine with honour – but he feels the scorn of the higher streams of his grade for him and his classmates.
‘They believe we are not as intelligent as they are. We feel ostracised.’
His English makes me blink. Most of his sentences must have been meticulously prepared and memorised. He says he’s given of his best to try to improve his English: read newspapers and magazines, listened to tapes and watched films.
‘I have done everything I can – everything. To this I’ve given all my efforts. I believe I can improve myself, work at a higher level, but I’m not sure. Are you able to tell me if I’m worthy of a higher grade?’
He looks up, eyes behind his glasses clear and focussed.
I must watch myself here. Who will he tell? Every student here is rocked by hopes and fears. Luke’s formal, flowery English belongs to the nineteenth century, but his grasp of English vocabulary and grammar is phenomenal.
I tell him I’d place his spoken English in the top fifteen per cent of his year.
Eyes downcast, he again shields himself with a flow of courtesies: ‘How can I express my gratitude? I’m not worthy
Having unloaded his burden, he’s now courtly towards the girl student, inviting her to talk and praising her abilities. She has her own sadness. Introducing herself in class, she wrote: ‘I love my mother and father, but my father lives far away from me. I can’t see him easily.’ Perhaps she comforts herself by looking after Luke.
I don’t see Luke again until a week before I leave Chongqing, when he comes to say goodbye. I know his mother suffers from cancer, so I ask about her health. He tells me with dignity that she died two days ago. In subsequent letters to New Zealand, he reveals that he has been removed from the Foreign Language School to an ordinary Middle School, and has suffered a severe breakdown. The letters, in the language of England’s romantic poets – he worships Shelley – express great suffering. Preserved, amidst the confusion of inappropriate ambition and abject despair, is evidence of a sensitive and powerful intelligence. Suddenly there are no more letters.
Psychiatric treatment, as we know it, is not common here, and there are few hospitals for those who suffer mental illness. I wonder if Luke had any medical help during his breakdown, which sounded like acute depression. My mother had medical help for hers, as did her mother, her grandfather, and the other members of our family who have fallen under the shadow of that illness. I asked her once: ‘What does it feel like when you’re going into a depression?’
‘It’s as though a mirror inside you is gradually turning over, until all you can see is its dark side.’
I had to ask; it was the only way I knew to share that dark path with her. Like most people, I’d felt the wintery touch of deep-sunken spirits, but only as a mild and passing blight on a happy life. This death, for weeks at a time, of all the joy in my mother was the most terrible mystery I’d yet encountered. I was twenty five.
Another time when she was feeling well, I
asked: ‘What’s the worst thing when you’re in a depression?’ She thought for a moment.
‘Standing in front of the butcher’s window and being unable – and I mean really unable – to decide between chops and sausages.’
I didn’t believe her. I think the worst thing was finding she was prey to a force against which she had no defences, something she couldn’t master. She had no previous experience to give her tolerance of her own impotence. Intelligent, courageous and resourceful, she’d always been able to do anything she wanted to. In the depths of one depression she said: ‘I’d rather have two broken legs – then I’d have something to fight. I can’t fight this.’
For a long time I thought I must be responsible in some way for her depression – perhaps by some default of tenderness or reassurance. And why couldn’t I fix it?
In the end, her instinct for survival outrunning the impotence of her condition, she herself found a doctor suitable, someone from her own world of high principles and social forms to be observed. Courtly and accomplished, he eventually, with patience, identified medication that kept her from the darkest depths. That was merciful; that was enough. The pills damaged her perspective in some way, but it seemed a small price to pay. Neither the depression nor the treatment shadowed her extraordinary tenderness toward her children. Every time the younger of my brothers comes to Christchurch, we take the kitchen scissors and cut some flowers from my garden, discussing quietly which ones we think our mother would like. Her grave is under a chestnut tree, and often under singing birds, in a cemetery near my home. There, I take the vase from the grave, and when I’ve filled it at the tap, my brother arranges the flowers. I think of him and his older brother in each other’s arms the first, dark day we stood in this place. Then he and I take a step back, time telescopes, and we remember. We look at the writing, encrusted with lichen, on the headstone. ‘Dearly loved mother of … ’ We should have written underneath, ‘And how she loved us’.
What help, I wonder, did Luke get for his sadness? I noticed there were, within the school community, those who behaved strangely, spoke irrationally, or seemed deeply troubled; but when others spoke of them, they touched only lightly on their troubles, as though it was not polite to make much of them. The sufferers remained in the community, working. Any embarrassment, distress or disruption they caused seemed to be skilfully absorbed. I had the feeling that not naming the disability was thought a good way to minimise it. The sufferers may have received little or no professional help, but neither were they put in a defining box or banished to an institution. Was it worse for my mother believing that her disability, much discussed among her friends, would label her as weak, or for Luke living where the extremity of his misery may have been discreetly overlooked?
Making comparisons isn’t always a useful approach to differences. My daughter and I travelled around the world together when she was sixteen; it was her first flight beyond the New Zealand nest. When we arrived home, I asked her what had struck her most in our travels.
‘I had no idea there were so many kinds of light switches.’
It wasn’t a bad way of indicating all the cultural differences she’d noticed, and accepted.
Which light switch (or approach to mental illness for that matter) is more effective? People do what seems to them best, or what is possible, in that place at that time.
And human rights? In China, New Zealand is thought of as highly evolved in its social attitudes. I’m proud of this. I also know that the ways we New Zealanders treat each other, on our privileged islands, are not always more enlightened than those elsewhere. Personal assaults on old people, for instance – too often reported in New Zealand – seem almost unheard of in China.
If there are students like Luke whose spirits are too tender for the Chinese education system, there are others, like Laura, who thrive on it. I find her restful company, probably because, in the absence of any twists of vanity or defensiveness, her rock-solid self-confidence allows her to be direct with me. I enjoy a visit to her home, and the company of her cheerful, straightforward parents. She calls at my flat, late one morning, and stays to talk over a meal of pork and rice. She’s spent the last four days at the home of a country school teacher, a friend of her mother’s, who’s renowned for his maths teaching and has given her six hours coaching a day. It takes about half a day to get to his village from the city, but Laura is vague about direction and distance. I understand this indifference to measurement. Our thinking goes: the village would be no closer or further away for calculating its distance from the city; so why bother? You get there when you get there.
Life is difficult for a country teacher. In his spare time he must farm a little to make ends meet, and often his fields are too small to be useful. Laura says the extended family lives in a collection of small buildings, forming a close unit. She speaks of the cheapness of the housing, about 3,000 yuan for a house with bedrooms and bathroom upstairs, and kitchen, living and lavatory downstairs, the latter usually beside the pig sty. Laura made as few visits as possible because she was afraid of the pig. They kill a pig once a year for meat, and otherwise live on eggs and vegetables with their rice. Families often keep two pigs, one for the market, to which they feed rubbish, and one they feed well and eat themselves. It follows that they know better than to buy meat at the market.
Country families like to keep watchdogs. I’ve seen them, light in colour, prick-eared and stocky like well-fed foxes. They’re not fussy about who they bite, and farmers are now discouraged from keeping them. Where there’s no dog, families leave one member of the family on guard at home when the others go to work in the fields. Laura says thieves steal, from preference, television sets and meat.
‘What sort of meat?’
‘Pigs.’
‘But a pig would make too much noise.’
‘Only when it’s being killed. You can drive one very quietly to market with a stick.’
I need to do some shopping before the afternoon classes begin. Laura says she has time to help, and we leave the flat together to buy meat and eggs. We return half an hour later with sugar cane and bananas. I’m not sure quite how it happened, but I do know that Western expectations of hitting with one shot aren’t helpful here. We need to take it easy. The meat and eggs can, after all, wait until next time – or the time after.
Before Laura leaves we talk again about her lessons from the country school teacher. The maths coaching has been helpful, she says, and believes their family friend is a good teacher.
‘Why could he teach you so well?’ I ask her. ‘Why couldn’t you learn the same things here at school?’
She has no answer. She hasn’t been taught to question. Her business is to memorise facts and to store information.
I do know, however, that her teachers at this school will be doing all they can for her. Every teacher I’ve spoken to shows a keen concern for the students, and relates closely to them. Perhaps this is because, from Monday to Saturday, all the students and all the teachers (and their families) live within the same walls. The school is as much village as institution.
I’m surprised at how many aspects of this society I envy, and the sense of community this school enjoys is one of them. There are tensions and disagreements, jealousies and resentments within these walls, but they seem like those of a family – whatever they feel about each other, they have a shared sense of belonging. I’ve so often felt on the outside of the group or community I’m with, however long and strong my apparent membership. I am an onlooker; I seem to lack some qualification for entering the circle. I wonder how many people feel this way, who sit around their community campfires, singing, laughing, talking with the others, doing their bit by throwing logs on the fire, while their spirit watches from out in the darkness.
Beyond my family, I do have one vital experience of belonging. There are branches on both sides of our family tree that carry the pain of addiction and the pain of loving those who are addicted. For years I dodged a programme for tho
se struggling with addictions; I’d enough responsibilities and problems, I told myself, without having to fit in meetings with other people with problems. In the past, when I’d joined other sorts of groups – usually educational or cultural – it was because I qualified by interest or ability. When I finally joined the programme, my qualification for membership was despair at my own behaviour, and a howling hunger for something better. In that community, I found myself – at last – on the inside.
Yet, there are other bones in me aching to find their own community. Or is it my spirit that aches? There’s no point in envying the life-in-common of a school in remote southwest China; I don’t belong here. But where is my belonging?
I enjoy Laura’s company, and that of the other girls who visit, but sometimes I miss those discussions, characteristic of males of all cultures which run on pure practicalities and how to manage them; you’d think human relationships had never existed. So I’m delighted when Tony, my electronics consultant from a senior class, tells me he’s going to buy videos at the market in Jiefangbei and will help me buy some too. As I sit beside his burly figure on the bus, he talks about his father, originally a farmer with no education, who became a country doctor, worked in a factory, studied at home to become an interpreter and then qualified as an engineer. As we pass it, Tony points out the Chongqing television station building which his father designed. The rags to riches (and vice versa) stories here often sound like the depression years in the United States. When 30 million died of starvation in China between 1960 and 1963, Tony’s father saw streams of men from the country walking down the railway lines to try to get to the nearest town to look for work. Many fell between the tracks and died. Sometimes men returning home were so emaciated their own families didn’t recognise them, and turned them away. In his small village, about thirty died of starvation. There was nothing left to eat except grass and bark.
Under the Huang Jiao Tree Page 15