It ties in with an exchange with a young Canadian doctor I met when I first arrived in Chongqing. I was puzzled: ‘The social attitudes I’m encountering here seem more hierarchical than socialist.’ He laughed: ‘Canada’s really much more socialist than China.’
So maybe my impressions were right. It’s never been easy to be sure of that here. I’ve always needed someone else to say: ‘Yes. You are seeing what you think you see, and hearing what you think you hear.’
In the taxi on the way home, Boris, relaxed and full of soul, recites Pushkin and sings Russian songs. Mr Liu, in the front seat, claps politely at the end of each song, until he falls asleep with his head almost on the driver’s shoulder. The driver turns up the Chinese popular songs on the car radio, as competition for ‘The Birch Tree’ and ‘Kalinka’.
Two nights before I leave, Anne remembers that, because of the trip to Guangyuan, I haven’t had a chance to say goodbye to the students, and calls at my flat to take me to the evening classes. She and I walk slowly through the warm darkness towards the lights and noise of the classroom blocks, where their class teachers allow me a few minutes with them. My life and those of the students, shared for ten months, are about to move apart, and we throw addresses between ship and shore while we can.
I wonder whether any of them will actually write to me in New Zealand, a world largely unimaginable to them. But they do, more than seventy of them, some for several years, until all their precious spare time is claimed by falling in love, still more demanding studies, or a foreign teacher far more fascinating.
Laura, no less robustly practical in her writing than in the flesh, sends letters as full of information and short on personal detail as a bus timetable. Her letters always end: ‘I’m studying very well.’ This is just a cheerful statement of fact.
Tony, my advisor on videos, sends warm letters in untidy writing, the pages covered in blots and cross-outs. He’s obviously much more at home on a keyboard. Although he gives me four email addresses, I don’t immediately use them. When, eventually, I send him a message, there’s no response. I imagine he’s abandoned those addresses long ago, in his passionate pursuit of improved technology. His last, laboriously penned letter ends: ‘I’m your true friend always. If I can ever help you in any way, I’ll do my best. Cheers forever.’ This still makes me sad. How can I let him know I’m his friend forever too, if I don’t have his email address?
And James? He first writes two weeks after my return home, saying: ‘I’m James. Do you still remember me?’ Sometimes now, when I’m at the computer late in the evening, I see him come on line in China, and we talk. I ask him how his work’s going, and he asks what the weather’s like over here. He gained entry to one of China’s most prestigious universities, in Shanghai. His first letters from the city were full of irritation – the food was insipid and the people thought of nothing but money … but he’s grown used to life in this Chinese city where dreams of opportunity, success, fame and wealth may even come true, and his parents follow him there, leaving behind their country world of ponds, eagles’ nests and kingfishers. James graduates well in civil engineering, and carries off prizes for art several years running. His first painting, of a leopard, with its accompanying dignified poem of regret from the old Chinese general, now hangs on my living room wall, bathed in New Zealand light.
But these letters lie in the future.
The following evening, I walk round the school sports track for the last time. The term’s winding down, the school beginning to empty. A crane is still working on a construction site, the voice from the lighted cab a woman’s. The air is a warm, damp blanket laden with all the things that Chongqing exhales. Skyscraper flanks glow through the hazy darkness. Small children, attended by parents, wobble on their miniature bicycles; older people saunter in twos and threes and boys hang from the parallel bars under the huang jiao tree near the office. It’s still too hot to put the young children to bed, and small bundles, cheeks spotted with mosquito bites, stagger a few feet between adoring parents. Musical voices call out to each other in Sichuan dialect across the darkness. Two days from now, Cantonese will sound clipped and flat.
The senior classroom block rears up, solid on its hill, just one light on the seventh storey. How could you describe this sentinel building, with its open balconies flanking it on each storey, dark classroom doorways, white-tile facings that gleam through the dust? Stubborn certainly – and resolutely hopeful. People smile and say hello or goodbye as we pass on the track. This is all ordinary and friendly and familiar now, but it is time for me to go home.
That night, I awaken and wonder why. It must be the silence. There are no school buzzers summoning to class, no loudspeakers, no trucks carrying building materials, no karaoke from open windows, no Hanon exercises on neighbouring pianos, no workmen knocking down walls next door, above or below, no voices calling across playground and courtyard. I climb out of bed and turn off the whirr of the airconditioning, leaving only the intermittent click of a single cricket in the courtyard below. With a candle on the lid of a jam pot, I sit up watching the candle flame and the shadows on the wall, listening to the silence.
They book the school bus, a twenty-seater, to go to the airport. Half-a-dozen teachers, and a few others who are on for any outing, turn up for the ride. It’s a long trip for them, a couple of hours there and back, but they like this sort of occasion, the opportunity to chat and argue, to be together, to do something different within the safety and convenience of a school outing. It makes a mark on the surface of their lives. Although they want to see the foreign teacher off, say thank you and show friendship, in a way it doesn’t have much to do with her. The Principal will also come to the airport. It’s pointed out to me that this is an honour, as indeed it is. But I know that she is primarily going to the airport to meet her daughter from a flight that happens to coincide with my flight out to Hong Kong. How convenient for everyone. The cheerful group shouts and laughs in the bus. We smile at each other. The contract between us has been honoured. Now I’m going, and someone else will follow.
I wonder if I’ll hear from any of these teachers again. As with the students I doubt it at the time, but messages arrive. For several years, I receive a card at Christmas, written in Anne’s large firm hand, bringing impeccably-worded, generous and flowery good wishes from the Principal and school. Hope sends me a number of emails, embellished with exquisite showers of bluebirds, blossoms and butterflies and bearing tender good wishes – but no information whatsoever.
My source of real contact with the school, surprisingly, is Mr Lu, with whom I exchanged only a couple of sentences while I was there, though his flat was in the same building as mine. He appears to have appointed himself Chief-Communicator-With-Past-Foreign-Teachers, and I receive a succession of emails asking me, among the others on his mailing list, to join the school in celebrating Teachers’ Day, Autumn Festival, Spring Festival, May Day, Chinese National Day. I enjoy these exotic invitations, and I get to know him a little through these messages; but more interesting are later emails in which he reveals he’s had a run-in with the school, got the pip, and flounced off to another city. For a few months he crows about the delights of freedom, but after a time, emails again from Chongqing, where he seems, with a touch of spite, to have joined the staff of a rival school. He tells me his talents are deeply respected there. Why did he return to Chongqing, I wonder? Perhaps he missed the chillies, or more simply ran out of money. I still hear from him when his new school is looking for foreign teachers. One day … maybe.
From the University, Jessica regularly emails considerate, generous messages in her accomplished English. Too selfeffacing to dwell on her personal feelings, she nonetheless writes in one message of what must be a crushing family disappointment. After her son completed his Masters degree, she tells me: ‘He mailed applications to seven American Schools and four of them admitted him academically. But none gave him any form of financial aid. So he couldn’t go. Now he is working for a comp
uter magazine and his job is making CDs, which will be sent to readers together with the magazine.’ This would be far from the job Jessica had dreamed of for her clever, hard-working son, but she voices neither disappointment nor frustration. This is simply the way it is. The family is not wealthy; nothing can be done. The emails from Jessica stop shortly after this. I continue, for a time, to send messages from New Zealand, but I never hear from her again. I know she is on the point of retirement, and perhaps her email address went with the job. For the second time, there is no chance to say goodbye.
My flight leaves from the international part of the airport. I‘m surprised: ‘But Hong Kong’s part of China now.’
‘Yes, but it’s a special zone.’ Reconciliations can take a while to shake down.
Cecily, from Sydney, is also at the airport. She’s not yet finished her teaching contract, and has come to meet a friend arriving from Australia, but, like the Principal, she also joins the party seeing me off. She stands beside the group from school, eyes amused behind her glasses. She’s wearing a loose blue and white cotton dress and sensible shoes, her calm contentment and detachment in sharp contrast to the excited, steamy confusion of the school party.
I’d have been pleased if I’d known the years of good friendship that lie ahead of us. Letters will also keep us in touch with her friend Kathleen, the gracious Californian, who, after two years in Chongqing, returns to the United States to restore her sense of reality. But perhaps just a little reality, American-style, is enough – for letters soon arrive instead from the prisons of Taiwan, where for several years she helps prisoners who have AIDS.
Boris has already left the school, making me a parting gift of a tape of Russian songs with which he’d comforted himself during the two years he taught in Chongqing. I know his passion for sailing ships, and when, after my return to Christchurch, I see in ‘The Press’ a fine photo of the sailing ship putting young would-be sailors through their paces around the Canterbury coast, I cut it out and send it to him at the only address I have for him, the Moscow Academy of Science. A letter in a large and wildly stylish hand comes back, thanking me and saying that his heart trembled within him when he saw who had sent the photo to him. I very much doubt it. Trembling hearts weren’t a feature of our respectful acquaintance at the school, and the phrase can only have come from an over-enthusiastic use of the dictionary. There was a sense of shared European heritage between us, and I’m glad to know he’s returned safely to his beloved, brooding world of snow, vodka and passionate song.
Here at the airport, Ellen notices a student’s father working at the luggage-weighing and check-in counter. I’ve not seen Chinese wink, but this is close.
‘No trouble with your bags. This is a lucky thing.’
The teachers are delighted to have side-stepped the system, to use the ‘who you know’ network, to save me money, to feel luck at their elbow. My baggage, loaded with their generous gifts, is at least three times the legal allowance, but the massive pieces glide away, swaying dangerously, on the conveyor belt. Somewhere in the depths of the largest bag is a simple wooden fan. On it, Luke has written, in Chinese and English, a quotation from one of Du Fu’s poems:
‘We will be friends across the seas.
We will be neighbours wherever we are.’
I think of the other things I’m taking home from China, packed in those bags. While I expected to have, neatly packaged together, the questions about Chinese life I brought with me and the answers I discovered here, there are in fact precious few absolute answers in those bags. The questions remain: what is the ruling force in China, power-politics or humanity; why does exploitation and corruption take easy root here; what has made this gracious race so hard-working yet easy-going, hospitable yet secretive? In this Chinese environment, posing the question seems sufficient. China doesn’t lend herself to easy answers – and to propose answers simpler than the questions would be to reduce her. I’ll farewell her with awe, and take my questions back home with me.
Everyone is straight-faced and matter-of-fact as the bags disappear from view, and the school party leads me away, jubilant. I shake hands quickly with the student’s helpful father, plump and tender-faced like his son, in a way that I hope suggests discreet appreciation rather than triumphant collusion. I can’t just turn my back on him, but even in this final minute I still don’t know the right thing to do here.
In the main hall of the airport, we’re approached by a reporter for Hong Kong TV. Do I know I’m on the last flight into Kai Tak Airport? The plane from Chongqing has been delayed an hour and so stumbled into history. The white-knuckle landings of the old airport are about to become a thing of the past. Two days hence, I’ll fly out of Hong Kong from the great modern expanse of Chep Lap Kok. The teachers from school look on with approval as the reporter questions me about where I’ve been and where I’m going, and smile as I give safe replies.
That was my last task, and it’s done now. The party from school calls ‘Goodbye’ and waves – still strangers, but also friends. I came here thinking I had to learn to understand them, but there was never any need – I needed only to accept and enjoy them.
They taught me that.
I turn down the narrow corridor to the departure lounge and the Western world.
EPILOGUE
STAND WITH ME
UNDER THE HUANG
JIAO TREE
Someone wise said the influence of anything can be seen in its outcomes – which may seem obvious, but I can easily miss the obvious.
I didn’t look for outcomes when I came back to New Zealand. Chongqing had been a colourful episode – like the school holidays – but then ordinary life swept in again, and nothing seemed to have changed. I’d brought back unusual stories, warm memories, scraps of miscellaneous information, but this was stock traveller’s baggage. The year away, lacking intrepid journeys or startling achievement, had on the surface been undramatic. I filed the truthful photos, most of them wrapped in fog, in the pockets of a new album, and hoisted journals and teaching material onto a high shelf in the garage. Somewhere inside, I did feel endorsed in some long-held internal directions, but it was a sense as foggy as the city I’d just left.
A year after I returned, still uncomfortable in my own skin, I began to sleepwalk into my own solutions. The issues had been simmering in me for decades – China didn’t raise them, but she’d touched them. In the way of all good teachers, she’d caught and held my interest, given me worlds to explore, made me welcome – and so made me willing to learn, on all levels. While my outer self had been carefully screened by my hosts from anything that might disturb, my psychological comfort guarded by smiles, hospitality and simple kindness, I’d no longer been able to hide from my inner unease – exposed, I imagine, by the degree of solitude in which I found myself.
When the prompts came, I was ready to move.
Shortly after I came back to Christchurch, a young Chinese woman approached me at the end of a New Zealand China Friendship Society meeting. She was an English teacher studying in Christchurch, and we’d exchanged polite greetings earlier in the evening; now she bore down on me like a tank:
‘You have to let me come and live with you.’ She had a loud voice.
‘Why?’
‘My homestay family has two small children; it’s too noisy, I can’t study. I can cook and I can clean and I won’t be any trouble.’
So Grace came, and so began the Chinese invasion of a private life. She was the perfect vanguard; every time I retired under a stone, she poked me with a stick. She forced me to engage with her vitality; insisted I tell her what I was thinking, wailing: ‘I’m frightened when you’re silent’; loaded me with the generosity of her company. And I found I could, after all, live in community-wider-than-family within my home, something for which I’d longed and from which I’d fled in fear. It didn’t come naturally at first, but it felt right, and somewhere inside I was the happier for it. From then on, there were always one or two young Chinese
living in the house. I kept only my bedroom as my own territory, as a sortof domestic New Zealand Embassy.
I must have forgotten to pack, and left behind somewhere in a school in Chongqing, an unnecessary privacy and isolation.
I was still haunted by the memory of the old man standing, stiller even than the fog, under a huang jiao tree in a Chongqing street, eyes serenely closed, doing whatever he was doing. I envied him. I knew he’d gone somewhere I wanted to go, to do something I wanted to do. It was an inconvenient and impotent envy – how did I, with only a gum tree in Christchurch to stand under, think I was going to find the key to his world?
But two years after I returned, the monks arrived – three of them, standing on each other’s shoulders you might say. I heard a Benedictine monk, Laurence Freeman, speak in the Christchurch Catholic Cathedral one evening. He told us he’d been the student and friend of another Benedictine monk, John Main, who’d recognised an extraordinary deposit of light in the 4th century writings of yet another Christian monk, John Cassian. The light was a simple discipline of contemplative prayer, prayer of the heart, prayer of being. First he talked about it. I was surprised to have no issue with what he said. Why wasn’t I, as usual, spoiling for a theological argument, or feeling guiltily at odds with what he outlined? Why wasn’t I re-running my usual internal growl that the answer had to be bigger than this? He proposed a principle of union.
Under the Huang Jiao Tree Page 19