She adds: ‘I think laughter is very important. We often laugh together in class.’
But she’s also a demanding teacher. She tells me that her graduate students become skilled at finding the information for essays in reference books.
‘When I set a post-graduate topic, I spend a lot of time, a lot of time, checking that there are no reference books available on this subject. They come to me and say, “but there are no books about this.” I tell them: “I know. I want to find out what you’ve learned.”’
Amy, leader of the school’s English teaching group, is the interpreter for my speech at the anniversary celebrations, and gives it the full treatment – quickened tempo and heightened tone toward the end of each paragraph, with the last words sung slowly, almost hysterically, accompanied by the distinctive ducking movement. Sneaking wondering looks at this dramatic performance, I keep losing my place in my speech.
Amy, in her fifties, has poor spoken English. She’s able in all other ways, and copes with our exchanges, smiling but clearly understanding little. When she speaks in Chinese she sounds impressive – thoughtful and decisive. Jessica explains that Amy was sent to the country for a long stint of reeducation during the Cultural Revolution and missed much of her general education. She’s never been able to catch up.
Jin talks of hard times for his family during the famine years 1959-61, of his father watching his brother die of starvation, and his mother’s brother having to be sent away to another family as there wasn’t enough to eat. These are memories buried in so many hearts of his parents’ generation. It’s also my generation, but the sufferings of these Chinese contemporaries of mine are far beyond anything I’ve ever known.
Once Jessica’s sure I’m interested in China, she gives me recipes, tells me myths, and on our last night, from the bed across the room, she says: ‘I can tell you so much about the history here.’
We’re showered, ready to sleep, and the light switch is within reach, but head throbbing and eyes gritty I eagerly prop myself up against the bed head. Dramatic stories, principally about the colourful exploits of Wu Zi Tian, an empress of the Tang dynasty, roll from Jessica’s memory. Guangyuan claims to be the birthplace of the empress, as do several other places. The city’s proud of its temple dedicated to this formidable woman who was self-educated and widely accomplished, concubine of both father and son emperors. Definitely a ruler in the grand manner, she killed her own son and daughter for interests of state. The tone of Jessica’s account suggests she feels a mixture of national pride and horror at the empress’s fearsome doings. I’m surprised that Verdi didn’t pounce on Wu Zi Tian’s story for an opera.
Our time at the school over, we wave our enthusiastic, generous hosts goodbye at the station, race along the platform to catch our return train and slump into our seats. They’re comfortable as we’ve booked soft seats on a tourist train, which is halfempty. I kick off my sports shoes and am carefully constructing a dozing nest when two fourteen-year-old boys appear by our seats. They want to practise their English. They buy ten packets of potato sticks as encouragement, and for some time we look at the books about New Zealand that Jin has faithfully carried from Chongqing. Eventually, the charm of sheep and Kiwis palls, the strain of prolonged English conversation tells, and they politely excuse themselves.
For a peaceful half-hour I sit alone beside an open window with a camera. In theory there’s half a film left, but the Chinese film winds off at fifteen exposures instead of the thirty-six claimed on the packet. There are no films for sale on the train, and no stops at stations. The countryside gleams close to the train, farmhouses, ponds and farmers pose, the train slows – but there’s no film. I put my socks up on the opposite seat and doze. Da-da, da-da … da-da, da-da. The train rolls serenely on.
Chengdu at 5.30 pm makes most other city’s rush-hours look tame. The wide streets are packed with armies of bicycles, taxis hurtle. Jin bundles Jessica, in the middle of one of her wavery sentences of mild protest, into a taxi which roars away before we can say goodbye.
I feel stricken. I realise that in the last few days, and in the company of this sensitive, wise woman, I’ve actually done what I’d hoped I might; I’ve stood alongside a Chinese in her world. Jessica and I, both visiting teachers at the Guangyuan School – I not much more a stranger there than she – have shared this small pocket of time and space. In our hotel room in the evenings, we reflected on the day past and planned the day ahead, admitted our misgivings and our weariness, and articulated our satisfactions and our hopes; we did it together. At the school and at meetings we worked alongside each other, with a shared love of teaching and of the students, and with warm appreciation of the devoted small-town teachers. This modest university professor represents so many things in China that I’ve come to love and respect. I’m so proud to have shared an assignment with her. And there wasn’t even a chance to say goodbye.
Jin and I take another taxi to the bus station. The large express buses to Chongqing, sophisticated coaches with a lavatory and TV, have a simple timetable. They wait until enough passengers roll up, and then take off. We chase one along the street and passengers pull us aboard. Chinese transport systems can be very practical. There’s a James Bond film on the screen.
‘How skilful,’ Jin says admiringly. ‘I want to do that.’
A few minutes later he urges: ‘You take a nap’ – the phrase straight from the school textbook.
But as I oblige, he pats me on the knee.
‘Excuse me,’ he says in a tender voice. ‘This vowel ‘U’ – is this right? Hut. Hut. Hut.’
The seats are small, and he’s thickset and muscular, and his warm self spreads well into my seat. It’s comfortable – like standing against a horse. He says he’d like to come to see me off at the airport when I leave Chongqing, but he’ll probably forget.
As we wait together at the stretch-your-legs half-way point on the motorway, Jin talks about his job. The traffic roars by as we stand slapping mosquitoes in the warm darkness. New to his post, he has hopeful visions for it, but he knows he’s inexperienced. ‘I respect my boss and must be obedient,’ Jin whispers into my ear.
His face is brave as though he were saluting the flag.
At first sight, Jin seemed simply a smooth-faced, well-fed young administrator, pleased with his recent degree and looking forward to a well-oiled future, but on the bus he begins to talk about his family. Some country people are allowed more than one child, and he has brothers. His father was a worker in a State-owned factory and was laid off. He now drives a truck in a nearby town and earns more than Jin. His mother is in every way a countrywoman, he says – perhaps meaning she’s illiterate. It can’t be easy for that country mother to understand the thought world of her university graduate child.
Jin was a good student, gained a place in a school in Zigong and then, miraculously, was picked to go to the University.
‘I’m the first of my classmates to graduate,’ he crows.
‘My parents have rather suffered the rigours of winter,’ he continues. ‘I want to help them. I want to be a good son. Although my father can support the family, I send them 1,000 yuan a year. My eldest brother worked in a factory. There was a bad accident. Unfortunately, I’m sorry to say, he went mad. He needs a lot of care sometimes and it’s very difficult for my mother. My brother’s wife has left him because of the madness. He has two daughters. They are very beautiful. Unfortunately my brother’s love for them is not enough, because of the madness, so I shall try to be a father to them and support and guide them. That’s why I shall not marry for a long time. I must support my nieces. Two girls have fallen in love with me … I think … but no, I must not marry. I think falling in love can be changed into friendship. Do you?’
He looks at me anxiously, as though asking a physics question.
‘I have a good job. I must do my best for my family.’
My claim to have ‘stood alongside a Chinese in her world’ has a good ring to it, and a certa
in amount of truth; but this trip has, for me, been as much about being able at last to pass beyond the surface of life here, to touch the inside. Ten months has been a long time to be always, necessarily, on the outside.
I think I know, from experience in New Zealand, what allows you to move to the inside.
When I lived in North Canterbury, in the years of nappies and first school uniforms and a husband who worked long, hard hours, there was little time for teaching music. I was known locally as his wife and the children’s mother, and was happy with that. It allowed a little dream time, and walks with the children on the silky hills among rabbits and magpies. But I knew I didn’t register, in the minds of local people, as someone who belonged; I wasn’t observably useful in their world.
When we moved to Central Canterbury, I dropped the theological diploma I was working towards. The papers were becoming less general, less safe; they were beginning to expect commitment to theology in this time and place, so I quickly slipped into teaching music instead. Friends and family applauded the move. So much more suitable, they felt, than that rather odd theology study, and so much more constructive:
‘It’s always good to have a little more money coming in, isn’t it.’
They had a point about the money. When I’d saved enough to pay for the new windows on our verandah, our home and I related differently. Instead of being environment and inhabitant, we became interdependent. The hours spent teaching on the old Lipp piano in the Sunday School were now in the window frames, gleaming and letting in the nor’west light.
The children I taught were amusing and endearing, and teaching them knit me into the community. You could use my first name in conversation in the township and they’d know who you were talking about. I enjoyed that, even if I wished I could belong by being who I was, rather than by doing what I did.
Here in China, it’s not always easy for a foreigner to move beyond the country’s hospitable, friendly surfaces, but in Guangyuan I’ve contributed to the school community on almost the same terms as Jessica, who’s one of their own. And she’s allowed me to glimpse the inside of a Chinese life, or at least to stand on the threshold.
I’ve almost belonged.
CHAPTER
TWELVE
FAREWELLS
In a few days I’ll leave Chongqing. I’d like to spend time, before I leave, with Hilda and Eric (recently and not unexpectedly reconciled). In this environment the decorous term ‘walking out together’ seems quite appropriate; since their rapprochement I’ve seen Hilda mincing along the street below the school on Eric’s arm, heavily made-up, and wearing a secret but deeply satisfied smile. In an unusually confiding moment, she confesses to me: ‘I can’t say goodbye to him. He’s patient and lasting.’
She described to me her state of mind while they were separated as ‘out of my mood’, and I wonder whether, now she’s in her mood again, it may occur to her to get my waterboiler and bedroom light fixed. How helpful that would be, but how unlikely. Having recently removed Eric’s photo from my living room wall to spare her feelings, I’ve had to put it up again.
I ask them if we can go shopping together, and the following Saturday afternoon we walk among the sauntering weekend crowds to catch the bus to the neighbouring suburb of Shapingba. Eric leads us on to the wrong one, and a fierce argument with Hilda ensues. We alight in stiff silence and catch a corrective bus that rips through a shortcut giving a splendid view of the surrounding Sichuan hills. Above the bustling streets and shops, they leap and dance along their high skyline; I like hills that poke the sky. Once off the bus, we’re sandwiched into a press of noisy shoppers and students. After four blocks of Eric’s sulking and Hilda’s niggling, they take each other’s arm, and relax into their fond, silly smiles.
Shopping here’s an intense engagement, and first we take on carbohydrate and oil at Kentucky Fried Chicken, where I watch, with interest but without surprise, as they roll the familiar chicken pieces thickly in chilli powder. After ten months in China, my threshold to surprise is high.
Fortified, we move onto streets where, far from avoiding competition, the dress shops huddle together in strings of several dozen. Each shop, one small room open to the street, has perhaps forty dresses – just one of each, so the initial impression is that they’re originals; but as we swing our way down the chain we see the same dresses again and again. I begin to find this depressing – I don’t like shopping anyway – and it’s difficult to find anything plain. Local women seem to expect a dress to sport a peony or two, a few inches of net, buttons of blinding radiance, a little-girl touch such as puffed sleeves or lace trimming, and a large split up the back, front, or side to show you’re not a little girl.
Behind the sheets strung across the corners of the shops to make changing rooms, I encounter other hot, undistinguished bodies stripping off with difficulty, or trying to make their way into unfamiliar clothes. Bottoms bump, and there are Chinese sighs about life’s difficulties; we do up each other’s zips, where possible, and help beaded faces and tousled heads to emerge with relief through the most appropriate opening. For me it’s an improvement on the clinical, spacious New Zealand changing rooms where I’ve struggled and puzzled alone.
Shopping seems to focus Hilda, and she discourages me from buying dresses that are nearly-but-not-quite-right; I’m getting tired of stripping off in this heat and just want the deed done. Suddenly a possible purchase presents itself, and Hilda settles in for some spirited bargaining. Both parties feign bewildered disbelief at the other’s unrealistic expectations. In an old Chinese novel I read, such duels between practised bargainers were described as like kissing in straw helmets – the lips are always far apart. The bargaining seems a cross between a highly competitive and devious game, and an enjoyable exchange between friends. When the deal is finally clinched, the shop assistants quickly roll up my old clothes in a plastic bag; apparently I’m wearing the new dress home. I’m definitely not in control here. The smaller assistant gives me the thumbs up and an encouraging smile.
Having dealt with me and my shopping needs, the couple make for one of the cheaper shops, where Eric buys Hilda a mini-skirt of layers of black tulle. Hilda wraps herself in her secret smile, and Eric’s eyes are warm above his high, sharp cheekbones. I trail along behind them obediently, wearing my long, deep-blue silk dress above the dusty running shoes I wore in case the outing became a long-distance event.
We board another mini bus to return, and turn off the main road onto an improbable track that leads through peaceful hillside settlements, the bus bucking and lurching over the dirt and rock surface. We tumble down a hill just beyond the toll gate on the only route back to Shiqiaopu. So this is what the dodging’s been about – avoiding the toll gate. It’s a good try, but not good enough; a stony-faced woman stands at the bottom of the track to collect the toll. The driver stuffs a fistful of crumpled notes into her hand, and we hare off down the motorway at defiant speed.
Three days until I go, three days for doing what needs to be done and saying what needs to be said, before it’s too late. Four of the school English teachers, who each spent a year teaching in Australia, organise a dinner for me at the department store restaurant. Over steaming dumplings, they confess: ‘We feel very guilty that we haven’t done more for you. We meant to but we’ve been so busy.’
I look at their well-meaning, anxious faces, and tell them truthfully that they’ve been to me all I could have wished – generous, accepting friends and colleagues. I change the subject by asking them what’s in the dumplings, and they turn their attention with obvious relief to the all-important matter of food. Their lives are indeed busy – if not with teaching, then with all the interminable meetings that they so loudly lament, and with just surviving, personally and professionally, in their precarious world. And their students did what they didn’t have time to: brought a couple of oranges; taught a recipe, a song or a poem; told stories about grandfather; relayed the NBA results; discussed Brazil’s chances in the World
Cup; begged for stories of my children when they were young; just phoned to say hello.
In this season for farewell banquets at the end of China’s academic year, the University offers one the next day for all foreign teachers attached to it. Boris and I travel for the last time in the school car through the steamy midday crowds to a meal in the relative cool and quiet of the University dining hall.
I’m directed to the same table as Cecily, my quiet Australian contemporary from Sydney who’s teaching at this university; we’ve shared several trips organised for foreign teachers. Now I look at her contented face with its marks of under-cover humour, and realise I’ve never asked her why she came to China. She explains: ‘I’d been teaching English to migrant women in Sydney, and I saw the ad for this job, and thought “I might just do that.”’
‘Do you think teaching in China’s had an effect on you?’
‘It’s been a very useful experience of powerlessness.’
I remember that Jillian, my New Zealand predecessor at the school, claimed that China had softened her. Is that perhaps what powerlessness can do?
Margaret, at the next table, who’s returning home to Australia with her husband Gerard, also thinks back on her time here:
‘It’s been very good for me. It’s quietened me down. At home everything had to be done my way, and done now. Here I’ve learned to sit back and wait, and let things happen.’
When the University unexpectedly produces a European white wine, Boris, who’s becoming noisy, proposes an ardent toast ‘to Chinese women’. This doesn’t seem a particularly tactful gesture, but the Chinese drink and smile at him anyway, tolerant as ever.
When Boris high-steps off to visit Svetlana, who’s unwell and can’t attend the lunch party, the deputy principal from our school turns towards me. He’s enjoying the party, his chubby elderly torso straining at the seams of a blazing scarlet T-shirt. His hobby is reading. He surprises me by saying he believes that much feudal thinking in China has survived the Revolution. This seems a dangerous statement for an authority figure to make to a foreign teacher, in view of the constant political insistence that this society is a seamless fabric of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’.
Under the Huang Jiao Tree Page 18