Asia Literary Review No. 18, Winter 2010

Asia House

Festival of Asian Literature 10-26 May 2011

The only Festival in the world dedicated to writing about Asia from the Persian Gulf to the Pacific, The Asia House Festival of Asian Literature celebrates the newest and best writing from over 38 countries.

Previous participants have included: William Dalrymple, Fatima Bhutto, Ma Jian, Azar Nafisi, Aravind Adiga, Kamila Shamsie, Chang-rae Lee, Basharat Peer, Miguel Syjuco, Tash Aw, Amit Chaudhuri, Daniyal Mueenuddin, Mark Tully, Shashi Tharoor, Xinran Xue, Kiran Desai and many more.

The 2011 programme will be available in March.

For more information: www.asiahouse.org

The 2nd Annual Fiction Edition Including the Griffith REVIEW Emerging Writers’ Prize This highly-anticipated collection of sparkling new fiction will focus on the Pacific region: from the Americas to Asia, the Pacific islands, New Zealand and Australia. What binds us? What pulls us apart?

Subscribe online at www.griffithreview.com with the promo code ALR2010 for special savings on one, two or three-year subscriptions.

‘An absorbing read for the hot months.’ – Australian Book Review

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW No. 18, WINTER 2010

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW No. 18, WINTER 2010

Publisher

Editor-in-Chief

Deputy Editor

Managing Editor

Poetry Editor

Contributing Editor

Consulting Editor

Production

Design Sales, Circulation & Marketing Director

Cover Image

Back Cover Image

Ilyas Khan Stephen McCarty Charmaine Chan Duncan Jepson Martin Alexander John Batten Peter Koenig Chesley Cadham, Alan Sargent George Pang Anil Kumar Steve Ellul Background text from The Analects of Confucius Philip Gostelow Migrant cotton picker Zhen Chen Xin, parted from her family for two months, sings a plaintive folk song to fellow workers on the train to Xinjiang.

Asia Literary Review is published by Print Work Limited 2401, Winsome House, 73 Wyndham Street, Central, Hong Kong www.asialiteraryreview.com To subscribe email subs@asialiteraryreview.com Editorial: 852.2167.8947 Email: stephen.mccarty@asialiteraryreview.com Advertising: 852.2167.8910 / 8980 Email: anil.kumar@asialiteraryreview.com Typeset in Adobe Garamond Printed in Hong Kong by Magnum Offset Printing Co., Ltd ISBN: 978-988-18747-5-7 ISSN: 1999-8511 Individual contents Š 2010 the contributors This compilation Š 2010 Print Work Limited

Contents

Contents

Stephen McCarty

From The Editor

5

Jan Morris

Memoir The Name of China

11

Zheng Danyi

Poetry Modern Chinese Poetry – Insistent Voices

15

Zhang Zao

In the Mirror

20

Yang Lian

Snow without Subject (2)

21

Duncan Hewitt

Non-Fiction The Huangpu League of Nations

23

Zheng Danyi

Poetry Phoenix

38

The Future

39

Ming Liu

Fiction 1801

41

Bei Dao

Poetry Landscape Above Zero

48

Chen Dongdong

Wild Temple

49

John Batten

Art Essay Cracking the Sunflower Seed

51

Jonathan Fenby

Politics The Solitary Giant

55

Duo Duo

Poetry Tonight We Sow

63

One Generation

64

Bai Hua

Gu Cheng

3

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

Wen Huang

Memoir Xian

65

Philip Gostelow

Reportage The Slow Train to Xinjiang

77

James Kidd

Interview Yiyun Li

91

Xiaolu Guo

Fiction Life by Accident

105

Shu Ting

Poetry A Few Memories

114

Mother

115

Scott Ezell

Travel The Road to Kekexili

117

Marshall Moore

Fiction Cambodia

131

Anjum Hasan

Non-Fiction Living in the 14th century: E.M. Forster in Dewas

You Wait for Me with Dust

162

Burlee Vang

Fiction Mrs Saichue

165

Liao Yiwu

Endpiece My Kind of Town ...

Dining with Ghosts

183

Contributors

189

Zhai Yongming

Liu Xiaobo

153

Poetry

4

From The Editor

N

apoleon was right after all. The little general-emperor, who had quite a repertoire when it came to starring on an international stage, said, “Let China sleep. For when China wakes, it will shake the world.”

China watchers may now consider that to be something of a cliché, but like all clichés it has its basis in truth.

China has woken and the world is shaking. The People’s Republic seems to have burst to the forefront of the consciousness of so many millions of observers so expeditiously that it can only be making up for lost time.

Despite motoring straight into the occasional pothole on the road to superpowerdom and universal respect – the Tiananmen Square massacre, the continuing repudiation of human rights, the silencing of dissenting voices, the colonisation of Tibet – China has, in the last two or three decades, barged in from the periphery to seize the global-affairs spotlight, radically altering its relationship with the rest of the world.

Cast off have been any hangovers from the appalling privations of the Great Leap Forward and the catastrophic lunacy of the Cultural Revolution.

Embraced almost lasciviously since China decided in 1979 to reform its economic system and dump its planned economy have been overseas trade and the transition to a market economy. Domestic private businesses are prospering; state-owned enterprises are revelling in growing autonomy; and political and economic stability mean that for years China has been the investor’s destination of choice. Foreign capital, in conjunction with trade and the dissolution of state monopolies in transport, communications and public utilities, has helped to create jobs without number. It appears that China is living by a novel creed, that of the Four News: capitalism, individualism, self-determination and privilege. From Marx to the markets.

Every country reserves the right to behave according to prevailing circumstances, but China’s pragmatic volte-face has been astounding, if not hypocritical.

“A communist should … [look] upon the interests of the revolution as his very life and subordinate his personal interests to those of the revolution,” said Mao Zedong.

“To get rich is glorious,” said Deng Xiaoping.

5

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

China realised what it was missing and decided it too wanted its place at the table. It is peculiar, however, to find the Chinese authorities disingenuously clinging to the vestiges of some “pure” political ideal, even in these days of plenty, as if that gave their capitalist conduct a sheen of socialist legitimacy.

As Prime Minister Wen Jiabao said: “The market economy can exist within socialism … the socialist ethos should be upheld such that every individual gets his due share in this era of … economic prosperity.”

The Asia Literary Review is devoting most of this issue to China. We have given our contributors carte blanche to express what China means to them – and not just the familiar China of Beijing and Shanghai, arguably the two faces of the country best known to the rest of the world. Why was the notion of China mythical and even sinister to the young Jan Morris? What is life like for a transplanted cotton worker hired for Xinjiang’s autumn harvest?

Is Kekexili a synonym for desolation? Was the Shanghai Expo designed by surrealists?

As China cements its position centre stage, and more of its citizens step out, how much longer can China maintain its distrust of the outside world? The China Tourism Academy estimates that 54 million mainlanders will venture abroad this year. The world’s largest passenger aircraft, the Airbus A380, was developed partly to handle growing numbers of Chinese travellers. In a sort of reverse Marco Polo effect, the tales they bring back, of a brave new world beyond China’s walls, will unavoidably stimulate curiosity at home.

However painful for the Chinese government, this will also spell the end, eventually, of censorship. Beijing is not alone in Asia in restricting internet access or truncating other media. According to The Guardian, Thailand, the Philippines and Vietnam, as well as Burma and Cambodia, are following the Chinese model of cyberspace obstruction – the internet with Chinese characteristics – to silence dissent. Inevitably, however, the Great Firewall of China will disintegrate. The Facebook and Twitter tide cannot be turned back forever and Kindle users have already discovered that its technology scales the wall with impunity, making – for the moment – Beijing’s authoritarian attitude redundant.

Which brings us to the most vexing itch for the Chinese government: political freedom, and attendant freedom of speech.

Thomas Friedman, writing recently in The New York Times, suggested that China cannot continue to expand on all fronts at its current pace by 6

From The Editor

allowing economic liberty without political liberty. The reason advanced was that, “Liberty is a value in and of itself, because without it human beings can never develop their full potential. Liberty is also an essential ingredient for any society that wants to thrive … otherwise it can’t develop its full potential.”

China has had its foot to the floor in its modernisation onslaught, delivering many of its roughly 1.4 billion people from agricultural penury to reasonable standards of (often) urban living, from ignorance to a widely available basic education, at bewildering speed. But can the prosperity drive survive continuing news blackouts, internet censorship and the totalitarianism of the one-party state?

Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Liu Xiaobo, whose poem You Wait for Me with Dust is here published in English for the first time, was sacrificed on the altar of George Orwell’s Newspeak, at least for 11 years, but one wonders if he will eventually be revealed as the fulcrum on which the entire issue of freedom of speech turns.

Writer, critic and political activist Liu was arrested two years ago as Charter 08 was about to be released. He is a co-author of the declaration, which advocates political reform, the recognition of human rights and the abolition of single-party rule. It is thought that 50 or so writers are in detention in China as a result of cleaving to what they consider their right to express themselves in print and elsewhere. The Independent Chinese PEN Centre, part of PEN International, the global association of writers, and a prominent body in the quest for freedom of expression in China, has reported increased “pressure” on its activities in the last three years – hardly the direction in which observers might wish China to be moving.

In October, Premier Wen Jiabao told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria: “I believe freedom of speech is indispensable for any country … Freedom of speech has been incorporated into the Chinese constitution.”

Was he sincere, or was he throwing a sop to Western critics, cognisant of the fact that the full interview would not be broadcast in China, and that many internet sites carrying it would become “network error” victims at the point of downloading?

Wen continued: “In China, there are about 400 million internet users …

They can access the internet to express their views, including critical views.

I often say we should not only let people have freedom of speech. We, more 7

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

importantly, must create conditions to let them criticise the work of the government. It is only when there is supervision and critical oversight from the people that the government will be in a position to do an even better job and employees of government departments will be the true public servants of the people.”

So far, so astounding. But then came: “All these must be conducted within the range allowed by the constitution and the laws.” It seemed that Wen was reserving an escape route – perhaps one whose basis can be found in the forthcoming 12th Five-Year Plan.

Drafts of the plan address the realisation that, according to Vice-Premier Li Keqiang, “China’s citizens are becoming increasingly demanding as their living standards improve.” Now that the fundamental problems of food, clothing and shelter shortages prevalent a few decades ago have been resolved, he said, “people’s desire to raise their living standards and improve their quality of life has clearly strengthened”.

Money equals power, and as China’s citizens become richer, it seems, they must grow more dissident, more demanding – more dissatisfied, rather than less – regarding their lot in life.

As access to information improves and that Great Firewall crumbles, as the fragile equilibrium between a capitalist economic system and a communist government dissolves, how will Beijing react?

Are high-profile dissidents such as Liu Xiaobo acting in the common interest? Should the Chinese government continue to function as an implacable guardian of information because it is, essentially, paternal? Is there something culturally unique about Chinese people, and the size of the Chinese population, that central control is required, be it imperial or communist, to keep together a country of so many ethnic and now economic strata? What would happen if, suddenly, access to media of all kinds was unrestricted? Bloody revolution?

If a communist system is to be maintained, Orwell might prove an apposite philosopher: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

Can China afford freedom of speech and political liberty? Can it afford to persist in disregarding them? In the context of Liu’s award and the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s tacit challenge to Beijing, this is a dilemma China can sidestep no longer.

8

From The Editor

* * * The previous edition of the Asia Literary Review carried a report by Deputy Editor Charmaine Chan on Mount Merapi, Indonesia’s most volatile volcano, and the villagers who live on its flanks. Regrettably, Merapi has since erupted – and at the time of writing continues to explode sporadically – killing Maridjan, the elderly spiritual custodian of the mountain featured in our story. At least 303 other deaths have also been reported, with hundreds of thousands of people left homeless. We send our condolences to all casualties and their families.

9

Stephen McCarty

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

Sunflower Seeds (2010) by Ai Weiwei. Mixed-media installation, dimensions variable.

Courtesy of the artist and the Tate Modern, London.

10

The Name of China Jan Morris

C

hina!

The name of the world’s Number One State strikes me as properly onomatopoeic, especially perhaps in English. China! It rings grand, and big, and sonorous, like a great copper gong, but to my mind there is something mysteriously discordant to it, as though the alloy is defective. Of course this interpretation is ridiculously subjective, but then China has made such vague and varied contributions to my sensibility, from insular British childhood to cosmopolitan old age, that the effects of its name are bound to be cloudy.

The Middle Kingdom has been a lifelong presence in my psyche, but its form has been protean. Like the sound of it, its shape has sometimes seemed fine to me, sometimes faulty, now charming, now brutal.

And while much of this is my own fancy, some of it is a true effect of history. * * * When I try to remember my own first consciousness of the name, I think of it as sinister. Slant-eyed baddies, comic-book gangsters, dangerous Chinatowns in pulp novels, opium dens and secret societies – these were my first Chinese images. A familiar schoolboy form of torture, involving arm-twisting, was called the Chinese burn. A Chinese whisper was a murmured message that started with one meaning and ended with another. I don’t think I ever saw a Chinese person during my childhood and adolescence, and although I do 11

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

remember one or two music-hall turns in which comedy artistes dressed up in robes and pigtails to make us laugh, the only Chinese theatrical name that had entered into popular musical language was that of Chu Chin Chow – and he in fact was a character in a musical comedy who never actually appeared, having been murdered offstage before the action began.

Perhaps it was in an echo of Chu Chin Chow that allegedly Chinese music entered my childish awareness. It was often played, as it is even now, to typify the Orient more or less in the abstract and was easy to adapt from Western music, I am told, simply by the substitution of the pentatonic for the diatonic scale and the addition of lots of cymbals. Phony though it was, it was my first intimation that China had a culture different from my own, and if I mixed it up in my mind with Arab musical forms, well, so did its composers.

Willow-pattern dishes ornamented our kitchen dresser, but it never occurred to me that those dark blue trees, the three figures on that little bridge, the boat and the birds and the blueness of it all were anything to do with China. All the tea in China, went the proverbial phrase, but my family preferred Darjeeling.

Nor did China figure much in our educational curriculum. I remember learning only about the Great Wall, the Boxers, the Opium Wars and Kubla Khan, who was not exactly Chinese, but near enough (and whose Xanadu was, in fact, not far from Beijing). The British Empire, it was true, had long ruled the coastal Chinese city of Hong Kong and made lots of money in the interior too, but China and Chineseness never did enter the ethos of Empire, as India did; and because the country never was marked pink on the map we seldom took much notice of it. It seemed almost inconceivably far away, and although my favourite childhood occupation was watching ships from distant countries sailing up the Bristol Channel, never once did I see one flying the Chinese flag (whatever that was, in those days).

And out of the recesses of my memory comes a nonsense rhyme that perhaps expressed the mythical nature of Chineseness to British children of my generation: Inky-pinky Chinaman Went for a ride in a catamaran.

When he got to the other shore He rang the bell and asked for more.

12

The Name of China

* * * Of course as I grew up the name of China came to mean more to me.

It meant the delicate delights of chinoiserie. It meant silk, and silkiness.

Remote and marvellous sages replaced those old villains in my imagination, Buddhism crept in, and the glories of calligraphy, and I began to realise how much of our own lives, from paper to gunpowder, had come to us from China. World War II did not make China itself feel any closer to us, because so few of us served there; but it did perhaps shift our historical perspectives to see Chiang Kai-shek sitting with Roosevelt and Churchill at summit conferences, and eventually to find China joining the United States, the British Empire, the Soviet Union and France as one of the original Big Five of the United Nations.

Everything has changed since then. The meaning of China has changed, for me as for everyone else in our remote British islands of the West. Things Chinese have infiltrated every aspect of our lives. First there arrived Chinese restaurants, not only in the various Chinatowns of our great cities, but in every last small town of the kingdom. First chop suey, then Peking duck, then squid in mango syrup, then even Chinese beer became staples of the British diet, and today in Scarborough as in Chipping Camden, in former bank buildings or adapted pubs, almost anywhere you might see the British islander, bred to roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, descendant of John Bull and the imperial nabobs, doggedly trying to eat fried rice with chopsticks.

The very name of China, too, entered the everyday British vocabulary, if only because by the late years of the 20th century and the early years of the 21st it seemed that almost everything we purchased, from garden hose to iPod, was made somewhere in China – and unlike the first cheap Chinese goods we bought, these things were not trash, but quality merchandise of obviously advanced technology where appropriate. It no longer seemed anomalous that the Great Wall (as we were assured, wrongly as it turned out) was the only man-made object to be seen from outer space. Almost anything, it began to dawn upon us all, was possible in China.

So it seemed to me that the end of our own world dominion, the British Empire, was best symbolised not by the successive granting of independence to emancipated colonies, but in 1997, by the surrender of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China – the last great British colonial possession to 13

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

go, and the only one that was handed over to a foreign power rather than to its own people. The spectacle of soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army assuming authority from the British Army brought home to many of us that the presence of China in the world was more than a mystery, more than a legend, but would be one of the supreme historical facts of the 21st century. * * * But the gong, though certainly grander than ever, still rang disturbingly, for me. I had always felt, somewhere at the back of my mind, that China was obscurely threatening – not in the crude old sense of a yellow peril, but as a potential rival to everything I had grown up to accept as our social, political and historical norm. As the people of the Holy Roman Empire once felt about the Muslim Turks, so something told me, rightly or wrongly, that China, the Chu Chin China of my childhood, was destined to alter all our futures.

Years ago, in novelettish fantasy, when communism momentarily burst into the frenzies of the Cultural Revolution, I imagined that perhaps the myriad Chinese restaurants of the West were really the first agents of Chinese world expansionism, linked in a vast waiting web. It was only a fancy for fiction, but in the 1980s I visited for the first time the tea plantation in Sri Lanka – Ceylon in those days – where my Australian father-in-law had died during World War II. His home was an archetypal colonial homestead among the hills, where he had spent his last days in the care of his kind Cingalese workers, almost an allegory of the British Empire’s decline. But when I reached the place, unannounced, 40 years after his death, and swept up the long drive to the verandah, I found that the plantation had been taken over by Chinese.

It was happening, I see now. We were about to enter the Chinese century.

The gong was ringing fatefully, and it rang for all of us.

14

Modern Chinese Poetry – Insistent Voices Zheng Danyi

I

t was a time of deep disaffection and despair. Those who had experienced the agony of the Cultural Revolution were filled with uncertainty about the future of China. Her people had hungry souls as well as stomachs and poetry helped to feed them, becoming an inspiration and a source of hope in a profoundly depleted nation. “Money worship” – as Chinese call the current obsession – had yet to become the god it is today.

When Mao Zedong died in 1976 and the grip of Maoism loosened, the country began to breathe again. Modern Chinese poetry found its voice, first through the politically subversive Misty poets, then with the literary innovations of the New Generation.

As the Yangtze and Yellow rivers carve out the geography of China, so have the two schools shaped the landscape of contemporary poetry – Misty poets coming largely from northern China, near Beijing and the New Generation being mostly southerners, from cities along the Yangtze between my home province of Sichuan and Shanghai.

Although both groups were united in fierce opposition to Maoist repression, they disagreed fundamentally about poetry itself. Misty poets, characterised by necessary ambiguity and a refusal to praise the regime, emerged from a literary vacuum to confront urgent political and social issues.

Their name, which had originated from a scathing insult by an outraged party critic, had developed into a badge of pride by the 1980s. Equally passionate, but literary and introspective, the New Generation later forged a link to reconnect with China’s long poetic tradition and make it anew.

15

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

Modern poetry began with underground writers such as Gen Zi; the young maverick, Shi Zhi, inspired Misty and New Generation poets with lines such as these: When spider webs seal my stove without mercy When ember smoke sighs over sad poverty I spread out the despairing ashes stubbornly And write with fair snowflakes From Believe in the Future by Shi Zhi (translated by Michelle Yeh)

Born in 1948 to a privileged Party family, Shi Zhi was an unremarkable writer during his adolescence – but the terrors of the Cultural Revolution transformed his poetry into something truly powerful. Images like the one in the poem above infuriated Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, and in 1968 Shi was questioned by police. Internal exile and a debilitating paranoia followed.

Though his background protected him from beatings, he was nevertheless a broken man by 1973. He no longer writes.

Shi Zhi and his later followers bellowed their resentment of Maoist tyranny in the 1960s and 1970s. Their controversial work was circulated in secret, preparing the ground for Misty poetry. Tumbled out of villages, factories and city streets into the Cultural Revolution, many future Misty poets were fanatical Red Guards before bitter experience drove them to undermine Maoism. Their poetry resonated powerfully with readers disillusioned by the fantasies of government propaganda. The technique of expressing and obscuring the perceptions of the writers created an ambiguous and richly varied way of presenting shared experience. In the genuinely representative first and second person of the new poetry, the falsely inclusive “we” of government rhetoric was scathingly exposed:

16

Modern Chinese Poetry – Insistent Voices

Did you see Did you see the sunflower in the sun Look, it didn’t droop its head But turned it around As if wanting to bite off The rope around its neck The rope held in the hands of the sun From Sunflower in the Sun by Mang Ke (translated by Luo Hui)

Misty poets asserted the value and dignity of the individual against Maoism’s attempts to erase private life altogether. Though their only language was Mandarin (and their tone the strident idiom of the Cultural Revolution), they turned it to emphasise compassion and a shared humanity.

Jintian, Beijing’s hugely influential literary magazine, was instrumental in bringing their movement into the open. With the growing freedom of the late 1970s and mid-1980s, the publication highlighted key poets such as Bei Dao, Duo Duo, Shu Ting and Yang Lian, whose work, (with the addition of Liu Xiaobo’s You Wait for Me with Dust) is featured in the following pages.

Misty poets were brave enough to articulate the zeitgeist with a powerful and often angry voice. Though the literary value ascribed to their work has perhaps been inflated in the West by its political context and in China by its novelty, its audacity had a significant and liberating impact in China. Minor poets (and the lesser work of significant poets from both schools) are now represented in Chinese university textbooks. This tactic of emasculation has dismissed modern poetry to the fringes of the dominant communist canon.

A good example is Liang Xiaobin’s famous but mild China, I Lost My Keys, which even he has declared “dishonest” and “not a modern classic”.

In the turmoil following Mao’s death, literature had served as a tool for confrontation; but by 1985 this opposition had exhausted the Misty poets.

As Deng Xiaoping lifted the weight of repression, at least for the moment, it seemed their job was done. It was time for a rising generation to take the stage.

We – the New Generation poets, mostly children of the 1960s – were spared the exodus to the countryside forced on the Misty poets. Too young to be active as Red Guards in the violence of the Mao years, we were able 17

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

to complete our university education. The intellectual and literary life of the campus became the centre of our world. Such a contrast inevitably led to a new creative direction and, in the interlude of optimistic freedom, we devoted ourselves to aesthetics, language and experiments in poetic form: “My life is in the crucible of language” – Over and over again, this was my silent vow.

From Autumn Drama by Zhang Zao

We were ravenous for books, for music and for ideas. One of Zhang Zao’s professors appealed to colleagues in the United States for a shipment of books, saying, “They’re hungry for anything in print!” We read anything we could. If you read, you will think; if you think, you will talk; and then you will think about how to write. This is where New Generation poetry came from.

For us, poetry wasn’t just a social tool or a political weapon. We worked to create an independent literary movement, inspired by T.S. Eliot and other Modernists, and to form a new sense of beauty from Chinese and Western traditions. We wrote in the music of our own southern languages – and edited with an ear for Mandarin. A vernacular approach was therefore also important – what Coleridge called “the language of ordinary men”. This had been a feature of China’s New Culture Movement, which flourished from 1917 to 1919. It aimed, as we did, to build on the literary traditions of the past and to speak directly to a broad audience in its own language.

Tragically, a few extremists in the movement overturned their founding principles by declaring war on China’s literary heritage. Chief among these was Chen Duxiu, who later became the first chairman of the Communist Party and was one of the models for the destructive fanaticism that characterised the Red Guards in the 1960s. Laying the ills of the present at the feet of the past, they insisted that all our traditions were corrupt and must be swept away.

We determined to restore this creative innovation to its place in the continuum of classical tradition. What separated us further from the public, representative voice of the Misty poets was our desire to open the private space of the individual to poetic expression. I speak only for myself – I am nobody’s spokesman. I am Zheng Danyi and I am Chinese.

18

Modern Chinese Poetry – Insistent Voices

In the two or three intense and productive years before Tiananmen, the major New Generation poets included Zhang Zao and Cheng Dongdong, whose poetry is also featured herewith, as well as Hai Zi, Xi Chuan, Hu Dong and Zang Di, among others.

By 1989 the 60s generation was ready to build a new China. Some of us had become leaders of the democracy movement; for others, the passion was literature. But the Tiananmen Square massacre changed everything.

Some activists were killed or simply disappeared. Many were imprisoned, some escaped into exile. Others moved into different professions and abandoned writing.

As for the fate of the Misty poets after Tiananmen, Shu Ting, the only southerner prominent in the group, never left China: she is still widely admired for her patriotic and political poems of the late 70s. In contrast to these, presented here is an intimate, more southern poem, whose speaker remembers her first lover. From among the northerners, Duo Duo flew from Beijing to Hong Kong on the day of the massacre and has recently returned to the mainland after a long exile, mostly in Amsterdam. Bei Dao was in Europe on that June 4. He re-established Jintian in Sweden and now teaches at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Jintian is today a general cultural magazine that avoids controversy. The Misty poets no longer represent the voice of dissent.

The New Generation and other groups that burned brightly in the late 1980s have become wisps of smoke in the furnace of China’s economic development. We don’t know if this materialistic heat will spark a revival of China’s long passion for poetry, but whatever happens those of us who have lived through the social upheaval and political chaos of the last three decades will still be writing.

With Martin Alexander and Shirley Lee. Unless otherwise credited, poetry translations are by Zheng, Lee and Alexander. Special thanks to Luo Hui.

19

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

Poetry Zhang Zao

In the Mirror As long as there are thoughts that bring regret plum blossoms fall: watching her swim to the other shore, perhaps, or climbing a pine ladder, there’s beauty in dangerous things.

Nothing beats watching her return on horseback, cheeks warm with her shame, head lowered, answering the Emperor.

A mirror always waits for her.

Let her sit at her usual place in the mirror look out the window.

As long as there are thoughts that bring regret plum blossoms fall and cover the southern mountain.

20

Modern Chinese Poetry – Insistent Voices

Poetry Yang Lian

Snow without Subject (2) The snowfield, covered with the blind. They couldn’t see the poem that died in the hotel and the valley breeding terrible sunlight.

They lost their shadows under the same precipice becoming thin black needles on the sundial in the garden washing their feet with laughter.

Flowers meticulously etched on a bowl by a dead bird – drinking from the bright red stream at the picnic.

Noon – the stream secreted by the blind.

They couldn’t see the travellers in the poem lying naked in their hotel beds.

Without having to fall, they were swallowed by the avalanche.

21

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

Wan Zhou #4, Three Gorges Dam Project, Yangtze River (2000) by Edward Burtynsky.

Chromogenic print, 68.58cm x 86.36cm. Courtesy of the artist and Sundaram Tagore Gallery, Hong Kong.

22

The Huangpu League of Nations Duncan Hewitt Photographs: Tim Winter

A

sunny October day, and the sound of foghorns is a reminder that we are close to the banks of the Huangpu River, in the heart of Shanghai.

But there are other reference points here too. In a zigzagging corridor open to the sky, at the foot of a stark modernist building, teenagers are queueing to have their photographs taken with a man dressed as the 19th-century King Ludwig II of Bavaria. Inside, people stare at displays of modern German technology, then squeeze into a circular pit, where a giant ball sways and flashes in response to sound waves generated by the crowd.

On the terrace visitors eat roast pork, sausages and some of the 20 tonnes of sauerkraut imported especially for the occasion. Others cheer as they speed down the sloping roof of a nearby building in a Swiss cable car. Patrons lined up outside crane their necks to watch a Mexican parade featuring a float bearing giant cacti wearing sombreros. Not far away, a group of men in Tibetan hats sits among spectators at a performance of African jazz.

It is the last month of the Shanghai World Expo, the modern successor to the World’s Fair, a series of public exhibitions that began with the Great Exhibition in London in 1851 and bequeathed the world such wondrous structures as the Crystal Palace and the Eiffel Tower. The exposition is an event that had been considered out of date: a 19th-century notion of internationalism outmoded in the age of the internet and satellite television.

But here in early 21st-century China the Expo seems to have found its contemporary niche, in a land with a huge curiosity about the outside world, the majority of whose citizens have never travelled abroad. For months now, 23

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

crowds of visitors from all over the country have surged onto a five-squarekilometre site spanning both banks of the Huangpu, in the grounds of what were a steelworks and a shipyard, to visit pavilions and sample exhibitions from almost every country on Earth. On the Saturday a fortnight before the Expo ends, 1.03 million people cram onto the site. The promise of Shanghai government officials that the event will attract 70 million visitors – roughly three times as many as recent Expos – is coming true, and perhaps with it the pledge of its chief planner, German-trained Professor Wu Zhiqiang of Shanghai’s Tongji University, that it will be the largest single event in human history. Some might say it is also the most surreal …

This being contemporary China – and Shanghai in particular – superlatives are everywhere: the site is the biggest of any Expo, the investment larger than ever, and 189 countries and 57 international organisations, the most in Expo history, are participating. In theory, their pavilions address this Expo’s theme of making urban life better and more sustainable; in practice, governments and sponsors have lavished scarcely affordable sums of money – 50 million Euros from Germany, US$140 million from Japan, US$75 million from Australia – on the event, seeing it as a unique chance to promote themselves in the Chinese market, a global obsession in these dark economic times. Their pavilions, lined up in rows along the Expo’s boulevards, are exercises in often bizarre, sometimes startling, architecture. There is Austria’s porcelain-white edifice with a red rim, a cross between a ski slope and a space craft; Japan’s pale pink chrysalis pod; Germany’s shattered cube; Norway’s gravity-scorning spiral; Saudi Arabia’s gracefully curving Moon Boat, which from some angles barely seems to touch the ground; and perhaps the most talked about, Britain’s Seed Cathedral. Designed by fashionable, sometimes controversial, architect Thomas Heatherwick, it consists of 60,000 acrylic rods, each containing the germ of a plant from London’s Millennium Seed Bank, which give its outline a hazy quality, but in which, viewed from the right angle, a greyish-black silhouette of a Union flag can be discerned.

Yet these countries also know that radical architecture alone may not be enough to capture the attention of Chinese crowds, many members of them elderly tourists bused in from small towns in the hinterland, light years behind the sophistication of Shanghai. Participants have sought to cater to their tastes: Denmark (pavilion below), to the annoyance of some of its citizens, has brought the statue of the Little Mermaid, beloved in China as elsewhere, 24

The Huangpu League of Nations

from Copenhagen Harbour; Japan, a tooth reputed to be from the Buddha, and a clutch of household robots; Belgium, the Smurfs, cartoon characters that were a hit in China in the 1980s. France has appointed actor Alain Delon its Expo ambassador and is offering dreamy French weddings at its pavilion; Canada chose not an international celebrity but perhaps the most famous foreigner in China as its ambassador: Mark Rowswell, otherwise known as Dashan, a long-term resident of Beijing whose pitch-perfect Mandarin has made him a nationwide television star. Spain’s pavilion features a 6.5-metre gurgling baby designed by film director Isabel Coixet; Chile, meanwhile, has made a last-minute bid for popularity by bringing one of the three Phoenix

capsules used in the rescue of Los 33, the copper and gold miners trapped underground for more than two months, whose plight transfixed the world.

And celebrity visitors have descended to help raise national profiles: De Niro and Schwarzenegger, Gerard Depardieu and Hong Kong singer and actor Alan Tam; Sarkozy and Hillary Clinton, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, even the reclusive General Than Shwe of Burma, along with assorted princes and prime ministers, footballers and basketball stars.

There have been criticisms: some have wondered why the Chinese version of the German pavilion’s official name, Balancity, does not employ 25

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

the word balance but rather “harmony” – a popular term with the Chinese government, which uses it in a political campaign aimed at promoting social stability. Others have questioned whether the content of the United States pavilion – three films in which ordinary Americans try, laughingly, to speak a few words of Mandarin, corporate leaders talk of idealism, Barack Obama offers his friendship and a young girl transforms an urban wasteland into a garden, with help from her community – isn’t a little trite. But others like the humour and the personal touch.

“I’ve always admired the American spirit,” says Harry, a 20-year-old Shanghai accountancy student. “We can learn a lot from it.”

There can be little doubt that the sometimes baffling array of cultures and nations has made the Expo probably the most cosmopolitan event the People’s Republic has ever seen. You can travel from the Libyan desert to a Lithuanian castle by crossing a road; listen to French dance music in an Indonesian café; stroll from a demonstration of qigong by Shaolin monks to a lip-synched performance by a pert Japanese pop star; take in the National Dance Troupe of Cameroon or attend a workshop by Brazil’s most famous samba star. There are Canadian Mounties, New Zealand police and the marching band of the Hong Kong constabulary, resplendent in tartan trousers. Food plays a central role, although many local visitors are unhappy about the high prices. You can eat Polish dumplings, Argentine steaks, Turkish kebabs and Bangladeshi curry; visit restaurants run by leading Japanese and French chefs and cap it all by drinking kopi luwak, the Indonesian coffee supposedly made from beans excreted by civets. *** And so it went on, for six whole months. The Expo was certainly popular: in the early weeks, when visitor figures were below expectations, there were suspicions that the authorities were simply sending work units on days out to make up the numbers. But by the end there seemed no doubt that many of the 73.08 million visitors – far more than the previous record, of 64.21 million, held by Osaka 1970 – attended out of genuine interest, or at least curiosity.

About 3.5 million of them were foreigners. But, as the tannoy messages trying to reunite the separated made clear, the majority were from all corners of China. And with an average of 400,000 people attending each day, it meant 26

The Huangpu League of Nations

that vast queues for the most popular pavilions became one of the features of the event; the first sound greeting patrons was an announcement informing them of pavilion waiting times.

Some wags suggested the whole thing was little more than an international queueing festival; the extended waits meant many visitors saw perhaps only one or two pavilions. Some considered theirs a wasted journey: “People told me if you don’t go to the Expo you’ll regret it for 10 years,” complained a man from the southern city of Wenzhou, “but if you do go you’ll regret it for your whole life!” Others appeared to think it was worth the seemingly endless lining up to see the pavilions of Japan, South Korea, the United States, Britain, France, Germany or Spain – or the most popular, Saudi Arabia, where the waiting sometimes exceeded seven hours. I asked a student volunteer why people were so interested in Saudi Arabia, not a nation normally spoken of in China. Well, she said, as though it were self-evident, it was mainly because everyone knew its pavilion had been the most expensive to build, at US$160 million.

And perhaps it was no coincidence that this was probably the most commercialised expo: almost everything was available for sponsorship, from the air-conditioning units to the free pushchairs. Pavilion shops sold cowboy hats featuring the Expo mascot (the United States) and miniature bottles of whisky for RMB70 (Czech Republic); there was African clothing and Dutch confectionery; even the North Koreans were selling souvenirs, in their case albums of old postage stamps for a rather reasonable US$40 a time. By the end, some pavilions were even dealing in parts of their structures, most heading for demolition after the event. Restaurants filled the site: Colonel Sanders faced off against a bearded Chinese man in period clothing, the not entirely dissimilar logo of the Uncle Fastfood chain.

At times, battling through crowds denser than those of Shanghai’s busiest shopping streets on a Saturday afternoon, it was easy to forget the whole event had an ecological motif. The site was resolutely urban, crossed by new roads and designed to be sold as city blocks to developers when the Expo finished.

Shanghai made no apologies for the fact that what it called the Expo Garden was mostly concrete and asphalt; it proudly emphasised that this was the first Expo to be held in a downtown area. Its official slogan reiterated the point: in English it was Better City, Better Life, but the literal Chinese version meant Cities, Making Life Better, an appropriate message, perhaps, from a nation 27

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

planning to move 200 million people from rural to urban areas in the next 20 years. One newspaper, the China Youth Daily, dared to criticise the slogan, saying it was “at best a remote dream. In reality, big cities have made our lives worse … Housing prices are more and more expensive … walking is more and more difficult, there is more and more garbage and water is becoming scarcer by the day.”

All the hoopla aside, would the people of a nation facing every imaginable problem of rapid urbanisation gain anything valuable from the Expo? There was no doubt many of the participants were serious about trying to impart an environmental message (and of course sell some environmental technology too if they could). Innovations of all kinds were on display: Hamburg built a passive zero-energy house, Switzerland’s pavilion had a roof made of soya bean fibres, Japan’s had a floor that generated energy when walked on. The German pavilion exhibited energy-saving appliances and materials; there were displays about urban green belts, allotments and British parks; Denmark promoted the use of bicycles and offered them to visitors to ride around its attractions – a novel idea to offer a host nation obsessed with jettisoning bicycles in favour of cars and electric scooters. (Shanghai Automotive, one of China’s largest car manufacturers, paid for its own pavilion.)

But some doubted that the message was received or understood by a majority of visitors. “Most of these people just came here to see some foreign things,” said a university student with a shrug. A member of the German pavilion staff, who had watched countless visitors from among the pavilion’s four million spend more time having their photograph taken with Princess Sissi or a garden gnome than reading signs explaining the importance of recycling, declared that many were “peasants” mainly interested in a fun day out.

Other visitors, however, showed a keen interest in what they saw: “I’ll certainly try to save energy in future and encourage others to do the same,” said a Mr Zheng, a retired physics teacher from Hangzhou, after watching a film about sustainable living in Malmö, Sweden. And among the many schoolchildren there was concern for the environment: “We learn a lot about low-carbon lifestyles,” said an 11-year-old boy from Wenzhou, “but here I can see a lot more examples, it’s really useful.” Perhaps just as significantly, delegations from local governments across China were taken on VIP tours of many of the exhibits. “We already know quite a lot about environmental 28

The Huangpu League of Nations

issues,” said an official from Shenzhen, “but I think people from other parts of the country can really learn a lot here.”

That was certainly the dream of Professor Wu, the urban planner who designed the Expo site. “China is urbanising so fast,” he said. “We have to take this opportunity to change the thinking of officials, especially from lessadvanced parts of the country.” He emphasised the value of re-using some of the site’s old industrial buildings and of promoting public transport as the main means of travelling to the Expo. He claimed to have used the Expo to push the Shanghai municipal government to advance the building of several new underground railway lines, in some cases by 10 years or more, to reduce the city’s dependence on the car. In the year before the opening of the Expo Shanghai inaugurated six underground lines and extended several others; its network doubled in length and overtook London’s as the world’s most extensive.

Professor Wu had even converted a stretch of riverbank into a miniature urban wetland in what seemed like a forlorn attempt to resist its colonisation by entertainment premises and luxurious housing. Others were also doing their best to change the mentality of their compatriots: mainland media published articles hailing Expo initiatives, from car sharing to bicycle use and sorting rubbish for recycling. In the corporate pavilion section, China’s (and the world’s) largest property developer, Vanke, acclaimed the virtues of green-building techniques. Next door another private company, Broad, a Hunan-based manufacturer of air-conditioning and cooling systems, had taken matters one step further. The brainchild of the company’s charismatic founder, Zhang Yue, the five-storey Broad pavilion was erected in 24 hours using a pre-built steel structure and ready-made insulated wall panels developed by the company.

Zhang, a United Nations sustainability advisor, insisted the building was better insulated than almost all of China’s new buildings – 99.9 per cent of which, he said, were basically “junk” – and more earthquake proof too: the pavilion featured a room that shook in simulation of the ruinous Sichuan earthquake of 2008 to educate visitors about the need for better building standards. Also featured were an organic-food restaurant, a film on global warming and a room full of ice, with meters showing how much energy could be saved if windows were triple glazed and walls effectively insulated. There was even Zhang’s latest invention, a mobile phone that measures air pollution, 29

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

something of great concern for untold numbers of urban residents. The Broad Pavilion’s earnest tone –“Our guides do not wear make-up” proclaimed a sign at the entrance – was out of keeping with much of the Expo, but guests seemed impressed.

In a sense, the Expo highlighted two sides of modern China. It was where provincial fun-seekers collided with slick officials and businessmen from the big cities; and it was where sincere concern for improving the nation’s urbanism ran up against the organisers’ obsession with image (the height limit for the Chinese pavilion was three times that of all others) and with promoting Haibao, the Expo mascot. A blob-like blue cartoon character with goggly eyes and a pointy quiff, Haibao was likened by uncharitable observers to a cross between a Smurf and a condom. This did not stop Shanghai authorities stationing giant fibreglass Haibaos at the entrance to every park and public building in the city and giving them to every school – inflatable Haibaos for outdoors, plush specimens for indoors. At times it felt as if Haibao had replaced the hammer and sickle as the official logo of the Communist Party.

He was sent to perform for bemused audiences in Tokyo and Trafalgar Square and to dance with Uyghur women in Xinjiang in China’s northwest. A stuffed variant even appeared from the trophy presented to Scottish tennis player Andy Murray when he won the Shanghai Masters tournament in October.

Haibaos were for sale in every shape and size and were emblazoned on every imaginable product.

However inadvertently, the Expo summed up contemporary China in all its contradictions: the altruistic and the commercial, the serious and the superficial, the open and the authoritarian. For an ostensibly carefree, fun, family event, it was surrounded by extraordinary paranoia. In the 12 months to May, Shanghai’s security establishment began calling in foreign journalists or their assistants. It was a tense time, functionaries explained, and they didn’t want any negative coverage: one security overseer declared matter-of-factly that the Expo was at risk from attack by international terrorists, bannerwaving by foreign supporters of Tibetan independence and self-immolation by disgruntled domestic activists.

The security forces certainly appeared to be leaving nothing to chance: armed police frogmen conducted an exercise in which they repelled a waterborne Expo attack from the Huangpu. The site was patrolled by members of the People’s Armed Police, who normally guard central 30

The Huangpu League of Nations

From top: Shanghai and the Huangpu River in miniature; a well-rounded view of a bright, shining Australia; a foreign corner of a former shipyard that was, temporarily, Chile.

31

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

government buildings and foreign embassies. Two armed officers were stationed at each exit of every Shanghai underground railway station for the entire six months, while X-ray machines were brought in to check passengers’ bags. Even neighbouring cities, such as Jiaxing in Zhejiang, recruited thousands of volunteers to patrol the roads leading into Shanghai, ordering them to be on the lookout for potential villains trying to sneak in down country lanes. Shanghai mobilised 100,000 volunteers, many of them retirees who sat at bus stops or made their rounds wearing bright orange waistcoats, keeping an eye on social order and waiting to offer advice to Expo tourists.

It was an atmosphere that didn’t always sit well with the international exchange of ideas and cultures. In the early weeks of the Expo, foreign pavilion personnel found themselves involved in bitter bureaucratic battles concerning

On the waterfront: Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Hall’s variegated Expo site model.

site access for staff, vehicles and material. Germany and the Czech Republic even warned that their pavilions might have to close if arrangements did not improve. And although a series of thought-provoking debates on social, urban and environmental issues was organised by various pavilions – most 32

The Huangpu League of Nations

for invited guests, but some in public spaces around the city – as well as film festivals and design shows, some functions were seen as simply too political.

An attempt by the Dutch to present a forum featuring Chinese bloggers and foreign journalists was proscribed and the bloggers warned not to take part in any public activities. Art galleries and performance venues throughout the city found themselves under much tighter scrutiny than usual, with several non-Expo-related events, particularly those featuring foreign artists, closed down.

It was a reminder of contemporary China’s strange state of half-openness and the distortions that go with it, particularly the fact that the nation’s “software” does not always keep pace with the development of its “hardware”.

The reclamation of industrial land for the Expo site, for example, was a colossal achievement, yet parts were barely finished before the exposition opened: trees were still being shipped in at the last minute and a trial opening a few weeks before the event began descended into bedlam, with a lack of food and drinks and crowds so enormous that security checks were abandoned.

Many were baffled that the city government announced its decision to give a free Expo ticket and gift pack to every family in the city only about a month before it started, thus missing a chance to appease earlier the innumerable residents who had spent two years complaining about the air pollution and extensive traffic disruption caused by Expo-associated construction projects.

There was surprise too that tickets were not linked to specific dates, making it difficult for authorities to predict the number of visitors on any day. On several occasions they issued text messages en masse, urging people not to attend because the site was too crowded; yet while officials originally pledged that no more than 600,000 visitors would be permitted on site daily, for safety reasons, attendees far exceeded that limit for much of the final month.

There were suggestions that it was all linked to the obsession with reaching the target of 70 million visitors, which had become almost an article of faith, such as achieving eight per cent GDP growth. Veteran Shanghai journalist Chen Weihua argued that there should have been a daily cap on numbers “to ensure the quality of the experience for visitors”. But as usual, he said, China was focused on “quantity over quality”. Nevertheless, some foreign participants pointed out that many of the Expo’s initial problems were quickly solved – a sign of the flexibility that has been a part of China’s rapid development in recent years. The 80,000 bilingual student volunteers on the 33

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

Buy, buy, Shanghai: shopping for Expo souvenirs – a characteristic pavilion activity.

34

The Huangpu League of Nations

Oceania Square’s corner of the action, featuring the Malaysian pavilion.

35

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

Expo site impressed with their friendliness and, generally, patience. Others noted approvingly that the city had avoided the draconian traffic controls used in Beijing during the Olympic Games, which kept cars off the roads on alternate days according to whether their licence plates ended in odd or even numbers.

Some in China considered the entire spectacle a monstrous waste of money: US$4.2 billion dollars was spent on the Expo site and its operation, and as much as US$60 billion on Shanghai’s infrastructure makeover, which demanded new roads, tunnels, bridges and airport terminals, as well as new underground lines.

“Why do they have to keep talking about this Expo? It’s all just a distraction from really important issues and problems,” said a man outside Wenzhou Airport. He was gazing at a giant sign showing three policemen carrying semiautomatic rifles beneath the slogan: “Protect peace, Protect development, Protect the World Expo”. And as fireworks exploded over the Expo site for the final time and property developers began rubbing their hands at the giant auction of prime land to follow, some wondered how much of Professor Wu’s dream of a greener, more open, more cultural city – with public spaces for outdoor events and performance and conference venues – would outlast the jamboree.

But there was another school of thought: perhaps the spectacle had been a necessary, or at least useful, step on China’s path towards greater interaction with the outside world – and towards greater openness, however hamstrung.

Cities in China competed to acquire the Expo pavilions post-event: Wuhan bought Luxembourg’s; Norway’s went to Chongqing. Shanghai had its new underground railway network, exhibition centre and venue for NBA matches and rock concerts; it would also recoup a sizeable amount of its investment from selling the land – while tourism revenues from the Expo were estimated at US$16.3 billion. Its citizens had had six months of relatively fresh air, thanks to controls on construction in the suburbs and hay burning on the outskirts of town, and officials guaranteed they would continue to “see the blue sky and white clouds” often, those having been rarities in previous years.

They also promised to promote free bicycles, to be made available at roadside parking bays, eco-considerate buildings, river buses and better access to public buildings and transport for disabled people.

36

The Huangpu League of Nations

The city and national governments had their high-profile success story and perhaps the fact that nothing serious went wrong might make them less paranoid in future. The Chinese people had their chance to experience foreign cultures, take photographs and, perhaps, learn useful lessons about how to make their cities, and their lives, a little better.

And now it is all over they might even look back and miss those strange few months, when the skies were bright and the roads especially clean, and they could watch folk-music performances from the Arctic Circle, Estonian film festivals, Tang Dynasty emperor robots and the Hong Kong Police Band playing Chinese traditional songs on the bagpipes – all in the same place.

37

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

Poetry Zheng Danyi Phoenix Tonight, my Phoenix is a greedy fox When she loves me, it feels just like summer Perfumed five times, her hair is soft and tender Her small hands delicate as ever After a few days away, they fascinate me Here is no home, but the summer breeze is just as cool Now I see her drinking cold water. Then She counts the freckles on my neck.

When evening comes, the lanterns look fat. All is before me But my mind is on salt and a flock of sheep Oh, how many bead curtains are closing at this moment And how many deprived hands are fingering a single garment One night differs from another. But in her room One breath is familiar with the rest Like a basketful of pears, with soft-jade core, one Another, for her I peel the fruits As she repeats those gentle words All words are but one. Tonight Pears roll over our bodies as love Opens its fiery body, then starts a storm in my heart Translated by Luo Hui 38

Modern Chinese Poetry – Insistent Voices

Poetry Bai Hua

The Future The wanderer has to return He’s already damaged by loneliness His unlucky liver is burdened with fish and with pride Unlucky youth, and the crying of alcohol too!

Oh, must you be angrier still, and are not your curses enough?

Birds, beasts, flowers, wood, spring, summer, autumn, winter – all are surprised by this crazy little man.

More red than red, more white than white More yellow than yellow He is the corpse of his future.

39

1801 Ming Liu

T

hese things were not questioned. Why, out of the hundreds of men, Ah-Zhong had been given the task of fetching dinner every night for his superiors, no one knew. If Ah-Zhong had really thought about it the only answer he could have given was that he was from the north, a native of Harbin, where tourists wrapped in down jackets posed beside ice sculptures.

From this his four superiors must have assumed Ah-Zhong liked the cold; but it really boiled down to the fact that one of them supposedly came from the north too. So Ah-Zhong had been singled out and that was that.

And until he was told to stop, with the sound of the bell to end everyone else’s day, Ah-Zhong would dutifully mount his bicycle and take to Beijing’s streets, those four dinner orders on his mind, his hands and face encased in wool. He looked like a bandit.

If he had managed to speak to his wife she might have asked merely whether this extra job could help them. Not that Ah-Zhong was complaining.

More than once he had had a free meal. One night, the Four Men had even told Ah-Zhong to keep the change. It had been unusually warm so AhZhong had decided to eat down on the ground, trading the grey-streaked windows of the upper floors and his broken concrete slab for the outside air.

Enveloped by the darkness, his eyes watering from the warmth of his meal, Ah-Zhong had fingered the bills in his pocket, knowing exactly what he 41

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

would buy with the extra money; and watched, as he did every night, the residents of New World Park, looking up, this time, at apartment 1801.

He wondered if his son had visited this year’s ice festival yet. He would be old enough to go down the slides now, old enough to stay through the night.

That was the festival’s most beautiful time, Ah-Zhong recalled, when the man-made buildings of ice would glisten in glorious green, purple and gold.

Ah-Zhong’s site faced New World Park, across the street, which had 10, 15 buildings. Ah-Zhong could not be sure because he had never been inside the complex, where uniformed men wearing big, warm hats checked the arriving cars. From where Ah-Zhong sat every night on a dark, empty floor, his shoes sliding in the dust and the overhead wiring yet to be put in – but that was no longer his job – he could see there were more buildings behind that housing apartment 1801. Each tower was 30 or 40 storeys high, with a monstrous, arched top. After Ah-Zhong had made his nightly delivery and while eating alone he would watch them pop alive. At night the windows of New World Park aligned in a mysterious pattern, like those on the backs of exotic beetles. The towers were illuminated and warmed by kitchen lights, bedroom lamps, television screens and computer monitors. The slanted, cutting light of someone returning home; the maniacal flicking on and off of someone testing a bulb.

Apartment 1801 sat in a tower of 30 floors. Eighteen-o-one; Ah-Zhong had made that up, he couldn’t even be certain it was the 18th floor. And 01? Well, other than 1, what could it be? Ah-Zhong had tried, on many occasions as he cupped a plastic bowl, to count the floors of that New World Park tower. But at 10 or so he always gave up. Everything blurred together: the dull glow of lights, the floors, the moving bodies. But Ah-Zhong could identify the window. To him it was the 18th floor, 1801, and he was happy with that.

Once, on the phone, Ah-Zhong had described to his son where he worked. How he and hundreds of men wore yellow hard hats – the Four Men wore white – and navigated fields of steel rods, the rumbling sounds of progress surrounding them as immense modern buildings soared. Eighteeno-one’s building was not nearly as tall as some others in the area and surely much shorter than Ah-Zhong’s would be when it was finished. Ah-Zhong had learned this from one of the Four Men; the fact that 1801’s building was relatively low meant it was relatively old: one of the first to be built.

42

1801

You always had to build better, the Four Men advised; tomorrow would be a better day.

The structure Ah-Zhong had been hired to help build would be the tallest yet, the Four Men had boasted. New World Park had, Ah-Zhong sensed from their conversations, been a model for his building. But that was three years ago. “Standing on Beijing, Facing the World”; “Extravagant and Luxurious Life and Work”; “CEO and Rich Lifestyle” read the dust-coated banners that lined the streets – each new building in the area trying to outdo the others – the rubberised sheets veiling, cheaply, the promise behind.

Ah-Zhong’s tower, wrapped in green netting seemingly secured by rising and falling yellow lifts, had a banner slogan of its own; but it covered only the base of a concrete skeleton that shared the sky with rotating cranes. “Only Hong Kong and New York have buildings close to anything like ours,” one of the Four Men said: the one who had been abroad. When Ah-Zhong heard that he felt proud. Pleased that his hands were like those of his father, working this great country’s soil. He imagined bringing his son here, one day, but that would be a day when his son was older, of course, and he had moved on, he hoped. Ah-Zhong would point out to him the finished building, the tallest in the area. Then his son would understand why his father, like the other men around him, had been away so long.

China would catch up with the rest of the world, the Four Men prophesied every night, huddled over the plastic containers and uneven chopsticks AhZhong handed them. Head bowed, walking backwards, he would leave his superiors, telling them he hoped they enjoyed their meal, the Four Men hardly noticing him. That was often the last they saw of their errand boy each night. At daylight, when Ah-Zhong returned to collect their boxes, orange peel and crumpled napkins they would be gone; dangling from AhZhong’s neck would be the cheap plastic binoculars he had bought with the change.

China was indeed growing prosperous: look at the people coming out of New World Park. Ah-Zhong saw them arriving home from a day’s work, only to work some more; in the mornings he would spot fair-haired foreigners hailing taxis with briefcase or newspaper; the women sparkled with accessories that caught the sunlight and twinkled.

He gave her a name, the woman in apartment 1801. Jessica. Yes, she had to have an English name – she lived in New World Park after all – and Ah43

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

Zhong liked the sound of the one he picked. Jessica. It sounded like a rich person’s name. Ah-Zhong liked in particular the esses, the way they slurred and stretched. And the ending. That resonant aah. He had heard an American celebrity on the television with that name – before Beijing, when the sounds from the television set were absorbed by the woollen blankets his wife hung over their door and window frames to keep out the cold. Jessica. Ah-Zhong had practised it many times and the other hard hats who overheard laughed, mouthing it too. But Ah-Zhong was serious about pronouncing it correctly, quickly. Who could tell? He might meet her one day.

Jessica was also rich, although if anyone asked Ah-Zhong how he knew he would say only, resolutely, that she must be. It was more than her living in New World Park; it was partly, Ah-Zhong imagined, the way Jessica was just there, alone in 1801, nearly every night, like an ornament surrounded by things he knew to be expensive. She was something lightweight, unburdensome. Something foreign, and from the West; a new set of heels on her feet; branded shopping bag by the door; a fresh collection of flowers when the previous bunch had hardly begun to droop. Ah-Zhong detected all these in his binoculars, steam often fogging the lenses.

Yes, Jessica was different, especially from those other New World Park women. Ah-Zhong watched them too, shuffling through their rooms in slippers and sweaters, scolding maids or children. The men, stripped of their suits, would be yelling at unlit laptop-computer screens or malfunctioning television sets. But Jessica just sat there – alone, quiet, nightly – on her couch.

Sometimes she held a remote controller.

Occasionally people appeared at the door of 1801, as on the night of the blackout, to deliver food. This took place early in the evening only; if Ah-Zhong was quick enough – or if the Four Men were impatient or not fussy and asked Ah-Zhong to buy meals from the 7-Eleven – Ah-Zhong could return in time to check on the men who delivered to the apartment.

Ah-Zhong would sit, fold a leg under him and follow Jessica’s movements, which were by now familiar. He didn’t always need the binoculars (they were a recent indulgence) and New World Park was just across a two-lane street.

Ah-Zhong knew whenever a deliveryman had arrived: Jessica would turn her head in alarm, interrupted by the chimes of the doorbell. She would put down the black box, stand up from the couch and check the grey image 44

1801

from the security camera. They were not always the same people, these deliverymen who shuttled in and around New World Park at night. But it was of no significance to Ah-Zhong if they were the same or not: they had been inside. They had, while rustling their plastic bags and adjusting their caps, waited for the lift and pressed the button on the control panel. They had made their way towards 1801 and looked into it in a way, from an angle, that Ah-Zhong never would. They had seen the left side of the couch, the brown leather back of a dining-room chair, perhaps a price tag protruding from a bag. They had seen Jessica’s face when she opened the door and could tell him if he was right about the floor.

Once, a few weeks after the newspapers and radio hosts had announced that winter had officially arrived, an entire tower in New World Park went black. It was only briefly, only one tower and Ah-Zhong would not have noticed the darkened building – it wasn’t Jessica’s – had one of the Four Men not pointed it out.

“Lights must have cut,” he said, gesturing with his chin. His white hard hat had been placed on the ground, one shoe resting on it; he was sitting on a low concrete wall that would rise to partition the floor.

Ah-Zhong handed him his box, subserviently pinching the edges but afraid of squeezing too hard and spilling the contents. He glanced over his shoulder and saw it was true, one of the New World Park towers was in darkness. Only through the stairwell windows could a pale glow be seen: dim emergency lighting and the soft radiance of mobile-phone screens outlined charging, descending bodies.

Blue hues danced off windows and railings, like detectives searching for clues or policemen on the tail of a spy. Ah-Zhong’s eyes followed them and he whispered aloud, though he had not meant to: “They’re coming out.” He fixed on the faces as they emerged onto the pavement, some in twos, some in threes.

“I’m surprised it’s only one tower,” the man from Ah-Zhong’s hometown said nonchalantly. At that moment the lights exploded back into life, like at the beginning of a concert. The episode had lasted no more than 10 minutes

by Ah-Zhong’s calculations.

Later, his mouth steaming in the frigid air, he fixed on 1801 and could tell from Jessica’s attitude, as she sat on her couch facing the television screen, that she was ignorant of the blackout; ignorant of the fact that in sudden 45

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

darkness she too would have abandoned her warm, safe apartment for a glass stairwell and materialised, with a look of relief, on the street.

“If one goes out, they should all go out,” the one of the Four who had been abroad announced, pointing his chopsticks towards New World Park.

The last of the residents had returned upstairs. “Even ours. You know they’re all wired up together. New World Park, our building, Fortune City on the west side,” he listed the other names the banners announced. “Whether we like it or not,” he said, shrugging, “we’re all linked to New World Park. It’s a stupid idea. Do you know what would happen if all the lights went out? I’m surprised it didn’t happen tonight. In the end, we’re all wired up together.”

“The police would come,” another Four Man promised. “All of us – me, you, even Ah-Zhong here, yes you – we would all be out on the street. New World Park, Fortune City, Park Place Gardens, all connected. Like one big family. Like one future.”

None of the Four Men was present a few weeks later when the entire New World Park and its neighbours turned black. They had decided to go out for dinner that evening: one had had a son and although he was with his family in the northern city of ice, the news of a birth, and of a boy, was excuse enough for the other three to celebrate. So it was a surprise to them on returning to their lodgings, adjacent to the site, their faces red and jackets unbuttoned, to find the entire plot in darkness. Every tower and every streetlight was out; even the constant, deafening sound of drills had ceased.

People filled the streets, all the inhabitants of New World Park and the blocks nearby, the sprinkling of Westerners and their children; hundreds of workmen. Several deliverymen circled the edges, necks craned, staring in astonishment at the black structures.

A few days later the newspapers reported that someone had cut the power and police were investigating. New World Park, Fortune City, Park Place Gardens – all were connected, a senior building supervisor had been heard saying on the radio. But that night, when they had returned to their featureless building site, one of the Four Men, liquor on his breath, had asked where Ah-Zhong was. Their reliable deliveryman, the one they sometimes gave a free meal.

Had they arrived earlier and squinted hard enough, had they looked past residents stamping their feet and clapping gloved hands, or holding mobile phones to pink ears, they would have found Ah-Zhong, standing alone at the 46

1801

base of one of the New World Park towers. The building was now considered outmoded, its emergency-exit doors slightly creakier than others’. But still Ah-Zhong stood there, undetected, waiting for the last of the residents to join everyone else on the street.

47

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

Poetry Bei Dao

Landscape Above Zero It was the seagull that taught the song to swim It was the song that found the first wind’s source We shared shards of happiness Entering the home from different directions It was father who recognised darkness It was darkness that led us to sudden lightning The weeping door slammed shut And echo pursued its cries It was the pen that bloomed in despair It was the flower that refused the necessary journey It was rays of love that awoke Lighting the landscape above zero

48

Modern Chinese Poetry – Insistent Voices

Poetry Chen Dongdong

Wild Temple Peace and meditation Twenty years alone on the empty mountain An old monk Acrid pines He hears people speaking in the temple A child’s voice Then a woman’s Then again the child: a startled cry Like thin ice, the crescent moon drifts on water

49

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

Anonymous street performers, June 4, 2008, Times Square, Hong Kong, in front of Contemporary Terracotta Warriors (2005), mixed-media installation by Yue Minjun.

(Photograph: John Batten)

50

Cracking the Sunflower Seed John Batten

T

he humble sunflower seed has long been a favourite snack for Chinese travelling long distances on buses or trains; the tedium of cracking the husk to extract a small seed is compensated for by the camaraderie borne of sharing food and travel, and measured, almost, by the mound of empty shells carpeting the floor. Ai Weiwei’s installation of 100 million hand-made, painted ceramic sunflower seeds covering the floor of the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in London (see page 10) recalls a similar scene. His seeds, however, are a metaphor for ideas, similar to those sent using Twitter. A single idea, Ai reminds compatriots, can mutate virally to form a collection of connected thoughts – consciousness, possibly – to challenge any repressive regime.

Ai is an adept twitterer and publicist and much of his art (including performances and large installation pieces) challenges the illusion of power held by the Chinese Communist Party and mocks its censorship and its intolerance of enquiry and dissent. Ai’s public approach contrasts with that of many successful mainland artists who are cautious of attracting unwanted attention. Art-auction favourite Yue Minjun, whose smiley faces have become an unfortunate leitmotif for mainland Chinese contemporary art, has said: ‘‘My aim is to treat the burdens and suffering in our history in a relaxed and light-hearted way, so as to lessen the pressure and powerlessness we feel in real life. In addition, there is an element of standing back from worldly affairs and remaining impassive. In sum, my theme is – ‘pink humour’.”* * Yue Minjun, from the Contemporary Terracotta Warriors sculpture exhibition wall text, Times Square, Hong Kong, 2008.

51

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

Ai would probably be dismissive of such thoughts: on hearing that jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo had been awarded this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, he castigated mainland intellectuals who, he said, “should feel ashamed of themselves” because many had “betrayed the values they once strove for and drifted away from their public responsibilities”. Of course, Ai continued, “it is the regime that should feel most ashamed”. Anger, frustration and cynicism are common on the mainland, where government officials and the rich exert their privileges over everyone else and there is a widening gap between rich and poor, country and city and those who have urban-residence permits and the many who do not.

With mainstream mainland painting predominantly decorative but exhibiting, in an odd juxtaposition, a banal, lurid exoticism, it is through video, short film, performance and photography that artists conduct a spirited visual debate about the mainland’s culture, society and politics. Lin Yilin’s Safely Maneuvering Across Lin He Road (1995) is an early example of a subtle but critical video about the pace of urban development. Lin, Liang Juhui and Chen Shaoxiong, who together founded the Guangzhou-based Big Tail Elephant Group, for example, escaped the kind of close censorship prevalent in the north. Encouraged by the south’s independently minded Cantonese culture, as well as access to Hong Kong’s uncensored cross-border television broadcasts and film and print media, a spirited and critical visualarts community has emerged that has enabled the incisive Guangzhou triennials and photography biennials to become unusual official forums of artistic openness.

Chen, commenting on the Cynical Realism painting movement that evolved in the 1980s and has been stylistically dominant on the mainland since, said: “That is from the North, it was never done in the South!”

Photography has quietly and efficiently served as the most successful medium used to capture the mainland’s last three decades of momentous change. The pure documentary photojournalism of Vincent Yu depicts anachronistic symbols of workers joining arms with soldiers during the 60th From ‘Proud or shamed: intellectuals react to Nobel win’; South China Morning Post, October 10, 2010.

Interview in documentary From Jean-Paul Sartre to Teresa Teng: Contemporary Cantonese Art in the 1980s, Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong, 2009.

52

Cracking the Sunflower Seed

National Day parade in Tiananmen Square in 2009. Yang Tiejun exposes provincial excess: elaborate small-town and municipal government offices designed in faux White House Georgian style. The work of visiting overseas photographers offers important perspectives on China. Edward Burtynsky’s large-format Three Gorges Dam Project photographs testify to the uprooting of communities and the recasting of a landscape in the name of one of the world’s largest engineering ventures (see page 22). Laurence Aberhart’s 8x10inch contact prints carefully extol the beauty of the unique hybrid vernacular architecture seen in Macau and Guangdong’s Tai Shan.

Hong Kong and Taiwan have played significant roles in Greater China since Mao Zedong’s Communist forces took control of the mainland from Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang in 1949. Their projection to the world of a “different” type of China has offered a refreshing, subtle understanding of what China is and what being Chinese means. Hong Kong’s individuality and dogged protection of freedom of expression and the rule of law, and Taiwan’s determination to remain independent are tempering influences: their contemporary art is similarly autonomous, with the mainland having little ostensible influence. Hong Kong and Taiwan are what Ai Weiwei might, on a good day, refer to as blooming sunflowers. The mainland, however, is a tougher seed to crack; but, inevitably, as Ai would argue, it will crack.*

* In November, mainland authorities briefly placed Ai Weiwei under house arrest for threatening to organise a protest dinner against the demolition of his Shanghai studio. The dinner was to have featured the serving of 10,000 river crabs, their Chinese name being a homonym for “harmony”, the euphemism used by mainland authorities for the exercise of censorship.

53

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

60th National Day, Tiananmen Square 03 (2009) by Vincent Yu. Archival digital pigment print, 145cm x 47cm. Courtesy of The Upper Station, Hong Kong.

54

The Solitary Giant Jonathan Fenby

A

ny consideration of Asia must have China at its centre. That has been the case for more than 2,000 years and has been sharpened in our day by the evolution of the People’s Republic, whose economy overtook Japan’s this autumn to be ranked the world’s second largest after the United States’. For all Deng Xiaoping’s advice to keep a low international profile, China is being pushed into the political spotlight, be it as the target of US congressional anger or as the prime exponent of resources diplomacy across the globe, from Australia to Angola, Iran to Brazil.

Tens of millions of Chinese tourists now travel each year to other parts of Asia. Confucius Institutes sprout and the legacy of the sage’s behavioural teachings provides an obvious source of cohesion running from the northern deserts of the mainland to Chinese communities in southern Indonesia.

China has signed a free-trade pact with ASEAN and acts as a giant assembly shop for technological products made from components imported from Japan, South Korea, Singapore and across the Taiwan Strait. Goods from East Asian countries jostle with domestic products in Chinese shops.

Hyundai cars have largely replaced Volkswagens as taxis in Beijing. Japanese investors and developers helped to put up the 492-metre Shanghai World Financial Centre, the third-tallest building in the world. The mainland is slowly making its currency international chiefly through arrangements in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia to spread renminbi usage. Since 1997 it has possessed a prime international financial centre in the shape of the former British colony. Look west and north and China is increasingly becoming 55

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

involved in Central Asia while maintaining its grip on Xinjiang and casting acquisitive looks at Mongolia’s mineral wealth.

Still, China’s place in Asia is not quite what it seems – and thereby hangs a series of interrogations that ripple beneath the surface of the China-Asia story. The country that prides itself on possessing the longest continuous civilisation on Earth is simply too big and too aware of its uniqueness to fit into Asia, however one defines that geographical entity. It is a state that, to use Lord Palmerston’s phrase, has interests but not allies: China’s only bilateral treaty is with North Korea.

Historically, China has been its own master down the centuries, in good times and bad. Not that it was ever as cut off from the rest of the world as suggested by the legend of the hermetically sealed Middle Kingdom, or the Qianlong Emperor’s treatment of the Macartney Mission from Britain at the end of the 18th century. It has suffered invasions from the nomads of the northern steppes, from Tibet and Manchuria and from Japan. It tolerated the presence of Europeans in their treaty ports after the Opium wars. It has been ruled by Mongols and by Manchus, whose dynasty endured from 1644 to the end of empire in 1912, and who saw China as part of a great domain stretching from their homeland in the northeast to Tibet through Mongolia and Xinjiang.

For centuries, the Silk Road acted as a major international route for commerce and cultural exchanges, and the great Ming admiral Zheng He sailed far and wide through Asian waters – even if one doubts some of the more ambitious claims made for his maritime journeys. Whether Marco Polo actually visited China remains a subject of controversy (he probably did) but Jesuits enjoyed favoured status under the early Qing rulers. They and later Protestant missionaries brought a foreign creed to the home of Daoism and Confucianism and, despite a low conversion rate and the violent reaction of the Boxer Rising, proved extraordinarily persistent.

Chinese inventions spread through the world and, in some cases, were better developed abroad than at home, such as in the use of gunpowder for war rather than fireworks. China was referred to by writers in Europe who had never gone near the place: Coleridge imagined Xanadu and Voltaire wrote his eulogies of Chinese civilisation and society. Chinese motifs permeated European design in the 18th century. Tea became the fashionable drink,

56

The Solitary Giant

leading to a trade deficit that spurred the British to export opium from India to the Middle Kingdom.

Though Canton was the only port authorised to trade with the outside world before the British imposed the treaty system in the 1840s, after the first Opium War, Chinese migrants moved to Southeast Asia and beyond, laboured in the gold fields of California and dug trenches on the Western Front in World War I. Chinatowns sprouted from Australia to Lima, San Francisco to the East End of London, in Manchester and Liverpool. In the late 19th century the leading Self-Strengthener, Li Hongzhang, attended the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II, stayed at the Waldorf Astoria in New York, took tea with William Gladstone and went shooting with the Duke of Devonshire. As part of his short-lived array of whirlwind reform in the Hundred Days of 1898, the Guangxu Emperor was said to have considered requiring imperial officials to wear Western suits. Sun Yat-sen and his fellow revolutionaries used Japan as a base from which to plot against the Qing and imagined an Asian counterbalance to the power of the West; when the revolution broke out in Wuhan in 1911, the Father of the Republic was on a fund-raising trip to Chinese communities in the United States.

As one of the great trading cities after the imposition of the “unequal treatiesâ€?, Shanghai linked China with the world for the best part of a century; Chinese who could afford it moved into its foreign concessions, where they could avail themselves of electricity, sewerage, modern banks and a respectable legal system. For all his nationalist sentiments Sun took up residence in the rue Molière in the French Concession rather than in any Chinese area of the city; leading figures of the May Fourth movement followed suit. The Communist Party held its first meeting there, adopting an ideology imported from Europe.

Despite the travails of the Republican period in the 1920s and 1930s, Chinese diplomats and experts played their part in international organisations. Rich Chinese sent their children to be educated in the West.

European experts went to China to help plan its modernisation. Chinese writers and artists travelled the globe, while notable Westerners, including George Bernard Shaw, members of the Bloomsbury Group, Charlie Chaplin and Bertrand Russell visited China to lecture and discuss the future with Chinese intellectuals. Madame Chiang Kai-shek tried to rouse the conscience of the United States to provoke action against Japan after its invasion of her 57

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

country. Franklin D. Roosevelt sent aid and wartime missions to China and elevated the Nationalist regime to the rank of one of the Four Policemen who were to rule the world after the defeat of Germany and Japan. Mao looked to Stalin as a big brother and Zhou Enlai became an international diplomatic pin-up boy, with his skilful appearances at international conferences and air of reasonableness.

And yet, for all these links and contacts, China still stood apart in the imperial age in the basic sense that it considered itself the Middle Kingdom between Heaven and Earth, its rulers holding the Mandate of Heaven. After 1949, a new mandate was claimed by the Marxist-Maoist first chairman of the People’s Republic. His successors may have been more human but Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin and now Hu Jintao have all had their thoughts written into a constitution that acts as the basis of the regime. Though Prime Minister Wen Jiabao may sound a modest note about China’s continuing backwardness and poverty, the growth of the last three decades and the recovery from the downturn of 2008 have imbued the nation with a high degree of self-confidence, particularly in light of the economic woes of the West and the long paralysis of Japan. Equally, China’s unflinching pursuit of its own interests in international affairs sets it apart from an America and a Europe that often seem uncertain where they are heading. The challenges China faces at home are immense, but they do not diminish its selfassurance in dealing with the world. That confidence harks back centuries, and airbrushes out the periods of weakness, invasion and internal conflict. It is something that other Asian countries have to take into account.

Start with the other Asian BRIC nation that, like China, has an enormous population and has achieved strong growth rates. The once-fashionable evocation of “Chindia” seems to have died a deserved death. The relationship across the Himalayas is, at best, an arm’s-length affair. Enthusiastic talk of symbiotic cooperation between Indian software and Chinese manufacturing has led nowhere. There are recurrent tensions concerning security problems, trade, the Himalayan frontier – where the two countries fought a war 48 years ago – and, increasingly, the competition for raw materials to feed the Chinese and Indian economies.

For China, India could easily be seen as a US surrogate. This would, of course, be rejected as paranoia by New Delhi, but the agreement allowing India to acquire spent nuclear fuel from the US, and joint naval exercises 58

The Solitary Giant

in the Indian Ocean, have aroused concern in Beijing. On the other hand, India cannot be happy to see China’s ever-increasing influence in Burma, its building of ports in Sri Lanka and its joint initiatives in Bangladesh. Indian hawks regularly warn of Chinese military strength on the mountain border and one retired general I heard at a recent conference was sure Beijing was supplying arms to India’s Naxalite Maoists and stirring up trouble in Kashmir.

This is all a long way from the common interests some observers believe must bring the two nations together, with their combined populations of about 2.5 billion people and their high economic growth rates.

Moving a step farther west, there is Beijing’s link with Pakistan, highlighted

by China’s recent decision to sell Islamabad two nuclear reactors without bothering to secure international approval. This is, above all, a strategic play

by China aimed at giving it a friendly client on the other side of India that will provide the People’s Republic with naval facilities on the Indian Ocean, and ports for ships carrying oil and gas to the mainland from the Middle East, and, perhaps, at helping to dampen Islamic opposition to Han rule in Xinjiang. China’s growing interest in Afghanistan as Western powers grope their way towards an exit strategy is dictated by that country’s mineral resources and a certain nervousness about what a Taleban resurgence might mean for the Muslim territories of western China.

Go even farther west and there is the connection with Tehran although this, again, is in no sense an “Asian” relationship, but the result of economics revolving around energy supplies the mainland needs and infrastructure contracts for its companies. The link is bolstered by Beijing’s desire to protect nations such as Iran and Sudan from Western interference with their sovereignty, a constant concern because China has no desire to see the United Nations turn its attention to Tibet or Xinjiang. The PRC can use its permanent seat on the Security Council to slow down United Nations action, for instance in the implementation of sanctions against Sudan or Iran.

It can use its vast reserves of foreign currency to extend its reach, as in the current building, at a loss, of a light railway connecting religious sites around Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia. (The China Railway Construction Corporation will, no doubt, be compensated for its contribution to PRCSaudi relations.)

Look to China’s immediate south and one discovers a sometimes prickly relationship with Vietnam, which Deng Xiaoping attacked, in the main 59

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

unsuccessfully, in 1979. The Communist rulers in Hanoi may have adopted the Chinese model to boost their economy, but the two countries are at loggerheads about claims to parts of the South China Sea; Hanoi thumbed its nose at its big neighbour by opening the former US naval base at Cam Ranh Bay to foreign naval ships, and receiving American aircraft carrier the USS George Washington on a Vietnam visit in September during Sino-US jockeying on regional matters.

Look east and one sees how fragile China’s relations with Asian powers can be: consider Beijing’s adamant refusal to relinquish its claim to Taiwan. In theory, China and Japan have much in common in culture and beliefs. The legacy of Japanese invasions of China remains potent, of course, but there seems to be something more to the discord between the two nations. If Japan were more activist, one might speak of rivalry for leadership in East Asia; as it is, what appears to be evolving is more in the nature of Beijing asserting itself and declining to take the other country’s concerns into account.

In 2006 and 2007, Chinese President Hu Jintao and Shinzo Abe, Japan’s prime minister, attempted to find common ground. Wen Jiabao then told the Japanese government that China was ready to start “treaty negotiations” on disputed areas of the East China Sea and proposed to set up a hotline between their two capitals. An East Asian Trilateral Cooperation Secretariat was to be set up, with South Korea as the third partner.

But fundamental sensitivities did not dissipate. In one small, but telling, incident, the aperture at the top of the Shanghai World Financial Centre, designed to reduce wind pressure on the building, had to be changed from a circular to a trapezoid shape after the city government and others objected that it resembled the rising sun on the Japanese flag. Then, again in September, a top-level confrontation erupted after Japan detained a Chinese trawler and its crew sailing in disputed waters near the Diaoyu Islands in the East China Sea. When it came to history, an attempt to write a common account of events from 1894 to 1945 quickly hit the buffers: the scars of the past, covering the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-5 to the occupation of Manchuria in 1931 and the full-scale conflict that broke out in 1937, are still too politically charged on both sides to be left to academics.

The inability to bring North Korea to heel is a running problem for Beijing, but one that, despite the six-party talks, it seems to prefer to deal 60

The Solitary Giant

with on its own as much as possible, perhaps in the hope of expanding its economic reach across the border. The relationship with South Korea is primarily economic. And when it comes to ASEAN, things are not quite what they seem there either. The trade pattern is, of course, flourishing.

The health of China’s economy is vital for the prosperity of Southeast Asia.

But the fear of China becoming too dominant in a re-run of the imperial tributary state system cannot be swept under the carpet. Like Japan and South Korea, ASEAN states want cordial relations with the mainland, but they also realise the usefulness of the American strategic umbrella that has been unfurled over the region since 1945.

That leads one to Asia’s seas and oceans. These are important to China for two reasons: the ships that sail them carry resources to the mainland and its exports to global markets; and China has various claims to sovereignty over the waters and the islands they contain. Those islands may be no more than barren, uninhabited outcrops; no matter. On Chinese maps they are part of national territory and Beijing considers them a “core interest” like Tibet and Taiwan, reportedly advising other nations not to discuss the issue among themselves. As in the apparently trivial case of the impounded trawler, the bottom line for Beijing is that China’s sovereignty is not negotiable.

But Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Brunei all have claims to at least parts of the Paracel and Spratly islands. So, while Beijing builds up its blue-water navy, China’s maps are faring poorly with other petitioners. Vietnam went as far as requesting that Washington become involved.

The United States has been quick to spot an opening. In July, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told a regional meeting in Hanoi that the US was ready to act as mediator in talks about the disputed islands. China reacted badly to this reassertion of Washington’s strategic interest in the region, which had declined under George W. Bush as his administration focused on conflicts elsewhere.

Equally annoying for China have been Washington’s strong support for Japan in the quarrel about the detained fishing boat and its backing of Seoul after the sinking of the South Korean naval patrol vessel, the Cheonan, in March, apparently by North Korea. China refuses to accept that Pyongyang was responsible and has staged its own show of naval strength in response to US-South Korean maritime exercises designed as a warning to the North.

61

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

With the warm relationship between India and the US on one side and the long-standing links between America and Japan, and America and South Korea, on the other, China may lapse into old fears of encirclement.

As well as wanting to stress that the US has no intention of reducing its presence in East Asia and that America is a Pacific power, Washington’s moves probably stem from a frustration the Obama administration feels at what it sees as a lack of cooperation from China concerning North Korea, Iran, climate change and the interlocked issues of trade and currency. In September, The New York Times ran a story apparently based on a White House briefing that the lack of reciprocity from Beijing had been a surprise to the president.

That admission may have been naive of him, but it was just another instance of China standing alone regardless of what the superpower across the Pacific wishes. Such solitariness can only raise tensions between Beijing and other Asian nations, which want the two big powers to live and let live without making them choose sides. How China plays this out could be a key regional saga for the years ahead; it will be all the more complicated by China’s reversion to a national identity inherited from the millennia of the imperial eras as it confronts the shifting patterns of the region and blends its national, global and Asian roles – with domestic concerns always the priority.

62

Modern Chinese Poetry – Insistent Voices

Poetry Duo Duo

Tonight We Sow Tulips, last days and the ferrying and bed after bed piled up with seed, nourishes lovers.

Tonight, a piano made of ice plays in time with the deep thoughts of goldfish but the dull-witted sea knows only the swell.

Tonight, the wind has more voices Tonight there is peace and here, no pretence.

Tonight the doors of the church are shut.

Tonight all around us, every bowl stops begging all the eyes that watched us watch each other now.

We should sing our secrets out behind the clouds Jesus holds me in your arms tonight.

Tonight is the night of our divorce.

63

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

Poetry Gu Cheng

One Generation Black night gave me black eyes But I use them to search for brightness Translated by Luo Hui

64

Xian Wen Huang

“O

ur hometown, Xian, was just one vote short of becoming the capital city of China,” my late father used to tell me, referring to the aftermath of the Communist victory in 1949, when a political advisory body comprising delegates from all walks of life decided on a new seat of power.

“Otherwise, we could have seen Chairman Mao easily. The government would have built nice buildings like you see in Beijing and people from all over the country would have come to visit us,” he continued, smacking his lips in regret.

Growing up in the 1970s in China’s eastern-central city of Xian, I constantly heard similar utterances from people who believed Xian was not chosen as the capital for the lack of a Forbidden City. “Only one vote,” they would say with a sigh. I searched for evidence and found nothing to support the assertion. I assume it made the Xian natives feel better about themselves.

That was before the terracotta army catapulted Xian to international fame.

It was true that Xian had been China’s capital through 12 ancient dynasties; we had a well-preserved Ming Dynasty wall and bell tower in the middle of the city. Father said the tower, with flying eaves, was built to conquer a dragon that lay dormant underneath Xian but that would occasionally wake up to cause earthquakes. But my generation didn’t want to be associated with a past redolent of feudalism and backwardness. We wanted our city to be like Shanghai, a big industrial hub.

65

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

Chairman Mao must have felt the same way. In the 1960s and 1970s China faced threats from the Soviet Union and the United States, which then had a heavy military presence in Southeast Asia. To protect China’s industry from possible attack by “Soviet Revisionists” and “American Imperialists” the government moved many strategic industries inland. Xian was chosen for the manufacture of military equipment and heavy machinery and as the site of scientific universities. Distinct communities of workers, housing complexes, schools, restaurants and shops in the city’s southern and eastern sections were created. Xian soon turned into an important industrial centre as well as “a salad bowl”, into which diverse groups were tossed together; party ideology was the only common dressing covering disparate ingredients.

Like cities such as Chicago, Paris and New York that experience tension as ethnic groups coalesce, Xian has long been rife with regional and native hostility. Of a population numbering six million residents in the 1970s (now eight million), many were migrants from across the country who brought with them dialects and cultural traditions.

My parents arrived in Xian as part of the large wave of refugees from Henan Province in the mid-1940s, propelled by a severe drought-driven famine and the Japanese invasion. Because most of those refugees were illiterate farmers who had trekked hundreds of kilometres bearing what they could carry on bamboo shoulder poles, they were derisively called Henan dan, or Henan shoulder poles, by Xian residents. Most congregated in Henanese ghettos in the city’s east or northeast – “north of the train track”, locals would say snobbishly – where the Henan dialect came to dominate and anyone using the Xian dialect was called jia-wa, or “corn boy”.

As Xian expanded, more peasants from nearby villages and counties joined the urban workforce. Feuding between regional groups began at the apex of the municipal government and filtered down to street level. A large group of veteran revolutionaries, who had fought with Chairman Mao in Shaanxi Province, settled in the city and were appointed to senior positions in the Party. These were the so-called northern Shaanxi gangs. Every time an unpopular provincial government decree was promulgated people would say: “This is the doing of those conniving northern Shaanxi gangs.”

Father’s company was a microcosm of cultural conflict, a relatively new state-run enterprise with a diversified set of employees, locals from Xian and 66

Xian

its environs, and migrants or their immediate offspring from Shanghai and the provinces of Henan, Shandong, Shanxi, Hebei and Liaoning. On hot summer nights, when people gathered in the relatively cool open fields in the middle of our residential complex, it felt like a meeting of the National People’s Congress, with representatives from across China. At dinner time, the aromas of numerous regions wafted from little outdoor stoves: the locals liked spicy noodles; the northeasterners liked big green spring onions and garlic; Shanghai folks preferred rice, though wheat was the local staple fare, and sweet dishes. At Lunar New Year the Shanghainese ate sweet sticky rice balls while we northerners had meat-filled dumplings. Each group looked down on, and whenever possible avoided, the others. Father grimaced when he saw locals cover their noodles with chilli peppers. When my sister developed a taste for spicy food he was horrified that she had been localised and feared her children would be born with mouths red and cracked from too much chilli, like Xian natives.

Many of Father’s work stories often related to how one group or other of Henan descendants was attempting to seize power from the Xian natives; and how officials from Xian who were on the housing committee always allocated the best units to their friends but gave Henanese the worst.

Each time Mother argued with someone in the neighbourhood she would say, “Mrs So-and-So is mean, narrow-minded and stingy – a typical Xian native.”

Friction was common. After Mrs Du, who came from the northeastern province of Liaoning, lost one of two chickens she raised in her yard for their eggs, she found chicken feathers in the rubbish pile near the public lavatory.

She immediately suspected Mrs Pan, from Shanghai. “Those Shanghai people are shrewd and love eating delicate meat. Who else could have done it?” she asked Mother. For a week Mrs Du spent the days standing outside Mrs Pan’s house, cursing her loudly in her northeastern dialect, to the point where one of Father’s friends, a Shandong native, complained about Mrs Du. “Those northeastern women are so loud and bitchy,” he said. When I told a classmate the story he said Mrs Du used to smoke tobacco in a pipe and that northeastern women were as tough as men. His parents had told him, so it had to be true.

My sister’s first boyfriend had Shanghainese parents; the Shanghainese dialect is so distinct as to be, like Cantonese, almost entirely different from 67

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

the Mandarin spoken in Beijing and promoted as the national language.

Mother liked him because he knew how to cook and, unlike the local corn boys, dress properly. But Father stood his ground. “We Henan people eat our noodles with large bowls, those Shanghai people are too delicate, with those tiny bowls; they suck on a chicken’s foot for hours as if it were a piece of ginseng. How can anyone live with those Shanghai people?” My sister broke up with the Shanghai boy.

Conflict between different regional groups was a constant in our lives, but religious tensions ran deeper still. Xian is home to a sizeable Muslim community, the Hui, who live in the western section of downtown Xian and who have created a labyrinth of houses and mosques built in traditional Chinese architectural styles. There were about 40,000 Hui in Xian 30 years ago; today they number about 60,000. They were among the city’s earliest residents and were descended from Arab and Persian merchants and soldiers who travelled the Silk Road from the seventh century onwards. Xian was a prosperous, cosmopolitan city that marked the beginning, or the end, of the Silk Road. The Hui’s Muslim traditions and customs survived down the centuries and though the Party banned all religious practices in the 1970s – and some Hui Communist Party members were forced to eat pork to symbolise their break with “feudalistic and superstitious practices” – most Hui persisted in their faith. Daily prayers were said in secret at home.

The mosques were closed during the Cultural Revolution and some were converted into schools or factories. But each time I visited the area it was like stepping into a detached world: the men wore white skullcaps and the women headscarves; the restaurants were halal and the air smelled of roasting lamb. Islam is tolerated by the atheist Party as long as it does not intrude on the political or cause “disharmony”. I had my first taste of the Muslims’ lot in China in 1975.

Ma Dasheng, a young Muslim, was visiting his parents in the Hui section of Xian. He had brought with him good news: sent to a rural village nearby for four years when Chairman Mao urged young high school graduates to settle in the countryside and receive re-education from peasants, he had been offered a job that would let him return to the city. Many young Chinese were left stranded in the countryside at the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, so there was reason to celebrate. Ma was hitchhiking back to his village 68

Xian

and managed to stop a truck at a busy junction in Xian, close to the Hui district. As he was about to board, a police officer intervened and ordered him not to accept the ride. An argument followed. The official version of what happened next is that Ma ran to a restaurant, returned with a kitchen knife and stabbed and hacked the policeman to death. My brother-in-law, who attended school in the area, recalls blood stains on the street after the killing. Officials were outraged: it was the first time a policeman had been murdered on duty since 1949.

The rule of law is still in its relative infancy in China and in 1975 the judicial system was barely functioning. The city was controlled by a Revolutionary Committee consisting of officials whose conduct during the Cultural Revolution had been considered excellent. The committee didn’t have to think too hard and gave Ma a public trial in front of 10,000 people before sentencing him to death. The Hui community staged a demonstration and petitioned the government to spare Ma’s life because of his youth (he was 22). The appeal for mercy was rejected. Rumour had it that Muslims were plotting to abduct Ma if he was to be paraded around the city. In the run-up to the execution the government initiated a propaganda blitz, condemning Ma’s brutality and hinting that stationing troops in the Hui zone might be necessary to quell any uprising.

Ma’s execution was on a Sunday. Thousands of people gathered to watch the procession, which was accompanied by the usual loudspeaker exhortations glorifying the “iron fists of the proletarian dictatorship”.

Father refused me permission to attend the parade and execution. “What’s so entertaining about seeing people shot?” he said. Father had also heard about the abduction plot and didn’t want me to be caught in a riot. Up against the temptations of defiance and risk, how could I resist? Public trials were popular entertainment and, on the excuse of visiting a classmate to borrow his notes, I joined my waiting friends and we headed into the city. I had never seen so many uniformed policemen. Dozens of military trucks with machine guns mounted on the roofs of their cabs passed and groups of soldiers were scattered around. We had hoped to see Ma, but were told that his truck had already left for the execution ground. Apparently, he was wedged between two guards and his eyes were closed – he already looked dead. Later, a rumour circulated that Ma had been killed before the scheduled execution to thwart any abduction plan.

69

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

Modern Xian has its share of murders, but, leaving aside the extreme events of the Cultural Revolution, it was almost unheard of in the 1960s and 1970s. After I mentioned the execution to Grandma she told me to stay away from the Hui section of town. Father was more open-minded.

A colleague we knew as Uncle Liu was Hui and he and Father were good friends. “Every group has some bad apples. There are many good Hui people, like Uncle Liu,” he said. Murder didn’t scare me but the sight of soldiers in battle gear with machine guns did. Uncle Yang, who ran the library at Father’s company, told me the machine guns were there to intimidate the close-knit Hui, who resisted domination by the majority Han, and that the Hui spirit of solidarity made a lot of Han nervous. Uncle Yang said Han and Hui had a history of conflicts, often bloody and always costly in human lives.

Uncle Yang was a fan of Hui food and once treated me to mutton soup with pitta bread at a halal restaurant deep in the Hui quarter. It was called Old Ma’s mutton soup and came with its own ceremony. As I entered the restaurant a waiter handed me a big enamel bowl with three pieces of hard pitta, which I broke until I had made a mound of tiny pieces in the centre.

The waiter took my bowl to the cook, who tipped the bread into a wok, adding ladles full of thick lamb broth from a big cauldron and pieces of thinly sliced lamb and rice vermicelli. He placed the wok on an open fire, yelling, “If it doesn’t taste good, we give you your money back!” The bread softened, absorbing the mutton broth and the flavours of green onion and ginger, which we enhanced with pickled garlic and chilli paste. I felt full and happy for the rest of the day. The Hui sitting around us and sharing the same culinary experience looked no different from me and Uncle Yang, except their hair had a slightly brownish hue, and some had blue eyes.

Father learned to like mutton soup too. He introduced it to our diet because a doctor friend said we children ate too many noodles and needed more protein – and pork and chicken required ration coupons in the 1970s.

Uncle Liu could procure halal mutton, which didn’t require coupons, and at a discount.

My 78-year-old Grandma knitted her eyebrows, her face crumpled like paper, and wrinkled her nose when Father came in with a sheep’s rump wrapped in linen slung over his shoulder. “I can’t eat that,” she said. “The smell of mutton makes me sick.” Mother let the meat soak in water for a day 70

Xian

before mixing it with two large, roughly chopped white turnips, and linen packets of star peppers with cloves and pepper corns, and letting it stew over a moderate fire. Mother served mutton-soup noodles every other night for a month and I began to appreciate it.

I was surprised to find Grandma heating a pot in the kitchen one day.

“I want to try the soup too,” she said and at dinner time ate with the rest of us, slurping down the noodles. Mother was suspicious. There was a phrase popular in movies from those days, when the loyal communist asks the enemy spy about his real motives. Mother quoted it then: “What kind of medicine are you hiding in the gourd?”

Grandma wouldn’t look at Mother and instead addressed Father, by his pet name. “Jiu-er, do you have guanxi at the local public security bureau? Is there any way we can change our ethnicity to Hui? We can offer a bribe if necessary.”

The Ma Dasheng incident was still fresh in everyone’s minds and we were all shocked. Where had this urge to follow Allah come from? I asked, “Didn’t you tell me to stay away from Hui people?”

Father stopped eating. “Why do you want to be a Hui?” And the truth came out. “Mrs Liao told me burials are allowed for minorities like the Hui people. They don’t have to be cremated.”

The government had banned burial in urban areas to save space and for years Grandma had been frightened of the idea of cremation. Mrs Liao, a neighbour, had called that morning and told Grandma the government let Hui people bury their dead according to Muslim custom for fear of offending them. When officials seized a section of a cemetery to build a factory the Hui demonstrated for days until the authorities dropped the plan.

“I know being a Hui person you can’t eat pork,” Grandma said. “That’s not a problem. I can eat mutton. I’ve put up with all sorts of hardships before. It will make me sick at first but I can get used to the taste.”

Father wasn’t amused. “You can’t change your ethnicity. And I don’t think eating that qualifies you as a Hui. I’ll go to jail if the government finds out I lied about our ethnic status.”

Grandma’s ignorance was not unusual: many people thought the only difference between Hui and Han was that Hui didn’t touch pork, though none of us knew why, not Father, not Uncle Yang. In my hometown we seldom called pork zhu rou as they do in other Chinese cities. We named it 71

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

da rou, or “big meat”, to show respect for the Hui people. We all assumed the Hui considered the pig a sacred animal and they didn’t want to eat its flesh. I also heard rumours that the ancestors of the Hui had been rescued by pigs during a catastrophic flood in ancient times. There was a popular rhyme describing how a Hui family displayed a pig’s tail on the front door as a sign of respect for the animal. Father didn’t think that made much sense but nobody dared ask a Hui, worrying that we might be beaten up. In 1982 the government lifted restrictions on religion and people of all faiths could attend devotional services. I went to the Hui district during Ramadan and, as men wearing loose-fitting white garments and white skullcaps streamed into the Great Mosque of Xian, I too went inside. The mosque looked like a temple in a beautiful ancient Chinese architectural style, but with exotic décor, and everyone was chanting in a language I didn’t understand. When an old man began talking to me I panicked and fled. I didn’t see any pig totem pole and I learned nothing about pigs either. Years later I could only wonder why the simple fact that Muslims consider pork to be unclean was a mystery.

Ignorance about Islam persists: during a recent trip to Xian I heard people were repeating the hearsay about pigs being sacred animals for Muslims.

Grandma’s interest in becoming Hui lasted only until she learned they did not use coffins but instead buried their dead in a shroud. During a visit to our house, Uncle Liu elaborated that burial usually followed soon after death.

Burial would be nearby and without the complicated ceremony demanded by the Han. Grandma wanted a coffin, she wanted to be taken back to her native village and she wanted the ceremony. The subject of becoming Hui was given its own quiet burial. * * * In November last year my brother sent me an email reporting that a private developer, contracted by the government, wanted to demolish our old house, ownership of which had passed to me. Before the house, which had so many memories, was obliterated, I felt compelled to return home to Xian from the United States.

“The old neighbourhood is disappearing,” my brother told me as we left Xian airport. We arranged to meet again two days later at the apartment block built by my father’s old company.

72

Xian

Like thousands of once state-owned enterprises Father’s former firm had collapsed. The land it had occupied was being redeveloped as another shopping mall. The warehouses, factories and administrative buildings had been blasted to rubble, though a handful of stubborn concrete-and-steel support columns had survived. It reminded me of old newsreel footage of German cities devastated by British bombing in World War II. Weeds were reclaiming the soil.

We arrived in time for what my brother said was a frequent scene: a crowd gathered near the entrance of the residential complex, erstwhile neighbours barring entry to the demolition teams. The local government wanted the land for a replica Han Dynasty palace, something to do with tourism and restoring tradition. I was unaware of any such link with China’s imperial past. The only thing notable about our area was that it was near an execution ground where thugs and counter-revolutionaries were shot dead with a single bullet to the back of the head. The thugs now seemed to have found employment with the government as they fought with defiant residents. The government promised modern and spacious apartments would be built in the distant west of the city for people who agreed to move.

A loudspeaker truck blared recorded messages, urging residents to comply with the relocation plan. Nobody moved out. They had read and heard about other forced relocations and the empty promises that robbed others of their homes. The old women of the neighbourhood created a human wall to block any attempts at entry.

That morning, my brother said, the developers had sent in dozens of men armed with long wooden batons. They had managed to breach the human wall, bringing down the compound gate and smashing windows, plus the skulls of a few younger residents who dared to resist, before being driven back. I saw many familiar faces among the defenders: erstwhile classmates, a former workshop director and Mother’s friends, with whom she used to dance every morning in the park. I pulled my baseball cap down, hoping people wouldn’t recognise me, but I was spotted by an old colleague of my father who, tears welling in her eyes, loosed a tirade: “The government is rotten to the core,” she said. “The leaders are greedy and ruthless. They’ve sold the people’s property to private developers. They want to make us homeless so neither the living nor the dead can find peace.”

“I have kept a few items from the house,” my brother said. He had sold 73

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

everything else. “The old stuff is useless. We need to move forward.” In China now, people are eager to “move forward”. Dwelling on the past is “reactionary”.

At my brother’s house I realised he had disposed of most of my parents’ furniture after their deaths. I sifted items he had saved and found one of my old diaries, one with a red cover given to Father by his company on June 18, 1980, when I was at senior school. On the first page three lines of neatly written characters read, “For Comrade Huang Zhi-you, a model Party member.” Father had given it to me and, like a good communist, I had filled its pages with inspiring quotations: “A person’s life is finite but the Communist cause is infinite.” “When a person merges his life with Communism, making it a whole organic entity, his life will be prolonged and elevated in this common collective cause.”

Nobody talks about merging their lives with communism now, not even my sister, a veteran Party member who lives in Xian. She reminded me that it was the first day of the lunar month, an auspicious day to visit Famenshi, a Buddhist temple said to contain one of Sakyamuni’s finger bones. “Your prayers are more likely to be answered today,” she said. During the Cultural Revolution an abbot immolated himself in a desperate attempt to protect the temple from destruction by Red Guards. His heroic act scared the young communists and today the temple is an important tourist attraction. The local government hired a Taiwanese architect and built a modern hall nearby for worshippers, who are charged an exorbitant entry fee. A long path leads to the temple and I copied my sister’s actions, lighting incense sticks I bought from a peasant vendor who cornered me at the entrance. I kowtowed to a row of freshly painted gold-coloured statues of the Buddha. Each addressed different human needs, such as reproduction (“Please grant me a baby boy” is a typical request), education, careers and cash (“Please shower me with more money”) or health. Wealthy people too busy to worship may buy an “everlasting candle” to be placed next to the enormous Buddha statue in the cavernous hall to receive his perpetual blessing. The original temple, with its elegant, delicate tower, still stands, lonely, on a side street, guarded by the spirit of the self-sacrificing abbot.

During the Mao era, the ancient city of Xian was a target in the purging of tradition to make way for a new communist society. Red Guards and revolutionaries blew up many time-honoured buildings and smashed and 74

Xian

burned whatever was deemed representative of China’s oppressive and exploitative past. Even the statues outside Empress Wu Ze-tian’s tomb were not spared persecution: their heads were hacked off. In a city as old as Xian there was much to destroy.

Now a tourism cash cow, with the terracotta warriors a powerful draw card in the global game, Xian has experienced a rebirth. There is a rush to restore the past – which should erase forever what is left of the city’s history.

In the southern suburbs the government has demolished antiquated homes and built a grand Tang-style palace, with actors dressed in period costume greeting visitors and performing Tang-era dances. The gaudy surfaces and crude craftsmanship suggest an inferior version of Disneyland. The last time I wandered Xian’s “restored” streets I half expected to see Mickey Mouse in mandarin robes.

All was transition and impermanence. The courtyard houses had gone.

Skyscrapers punctuated the prospect and garish shops in supposedly traditional designs lined the widened thoroughfares. In the hastening dusk billboards glittered with the universal consumer icons of Chanel and Rolex.

Where were the giant portraits of Chairman Mao, the red flags with the golden hammer and sickle omnipresent in my youth? They had been replaced

by Colonel Sanders and the golden arches; happy-looking children chewed huge hamburgers in crowded eateries.

The Hui district of Xian’s Muslim population offered some solace because of its ancient charm. The narrow streets, towered over by old houses with flying eaves, brought back intimate feelings of our old city. Hundreds of speciality foods in dazzling colours were on display. The visitors’ hustle and bustle, the cacophony of cooking and the food vendors’ hawking was soothing to the ear.

History empowers: the Hui have remained united and defiant in defence of their religion and cultural heritage. The government leaves them alone, fearing demonstrations, which is probably why their section of the city has survived China’s “modernisation” unscathed. If Grandma were alive she would probably be trying even harder to become Hui. Like Shanghai and Beijing, Xian has become a haven for migrants.

With the relaxation of the urban residential permit rules, Xian’s status as the largest industrial and cultural hub in China’s east has attracted settlers who, according to an old Chairman Mao saying, “hail from all corners of 75

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

the land and have joined together for a common revolutionary cause”. It was not the revolution, but the goal of making money, that brought people together. Gone is the tension among regional and ethnic cultures, because stereotypes change. Folks from northern Shaanxi used to be typecast as worthless and lazy. With the recent discovery of huge oil and coal reserves in their region, many former idlers are now millionaires, driving MercedesBenzes and buying large houses in the city. Meanwhile, the new generation has jettisoned dialect to pursue the sophistication of Mandarin and residents no longer confine themselves to their regional cuisines. One can find all manner of restaurants, from Sichuan hotpot to Korean cold noodle. Parents no longer care where their sons- or daughters-in-law are born. Money and good looks, not a clean, Party-approved lineage, are what count now. My niece, descended from Henan stock, is dating a Hubei native. My brother’s new wife grew up in Gansu. My nephew’s girlfriend is from Shaanxi and a northerner friend’s son married a Cantonese girl from the far south near Hong Kong – husband and wife grew up speaking different languages and communicate in Mandarin.

Father used to say the worst curse one could fling at someone was: “I’m going to dig up your ancestral tomb!” Disturbing the dead and letting angry ghosts wander, homeless, could bring untold disaster. During the frenzy of the Cultural Revolution even the Red Guards trod cautiously around age-old tombs. Today, nothing in the new China stands as an obstacle to progress.

The living and the dead must both make way for the living. I assume millions of ancestral ghosts are drifting homeless around us. I can almost hear my late father cry, “This is no good!”

76

The Slow Train to Xinjiang Story and photographs: Philip Gostelow

I

n Carriage 12, before a crowd of fellow passengers, Zhen Chen Xin sings a folk song in a high-pitched, mournful voice. She is leaving behind her husband and four children in Henan for work in China’s far-northwest province of Xinjiang. Like many gathered around her, Zhen will be spending two months picking cotton. Although reluctant to say goodbye to her family, she is happy about her prospects: harvesting the crop will earn her three or more times the average wage for unskilled labour.

On a train leaving the city of Xinxiang, a grey industrial centre in northern Henan, I join 2,500 recruits on what will be a formidable 60-hour journey. Orchestrated by the Chinese government, this seasonal employment drive results in one of the largest annual labour migrations on the planet, comparable to the worker movements during the dry season across the African Sahel where, following the harvest, millions of farmers leave their homes to seek short-term agricultural and industrial work.

In September and October every year three million migrant workers – most travelling by train, some by bus – converge on Xinjiang from the central and eastern provinces of Henan, Hubei, Hebei, Shaanxi, Shanxi and Anhui to help with the harvest on more than 200 cotton farms. Transporting the men and women is a monumental logistical operation.

With factories in the country’s south luring young, unskilled single women, and construction sites in the booming north and east employing men, it is mostly middle-aged housewives, such as Zhen, 41, who are attracted to the temporary work in the cotton fields.

77

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

I share a carriage with pickers from a village near the town of Huojia in Henan, and their team leader, Lao Qing, a wiry man of about 50 with a crew cut. He has the respect of his 36 hired hands, some of whom are making the journey for the second or third time.

Lush green fields of vegetables, fruit, grain and cotton line the broad flood plains as our mid-afternoon train proceeds into night. The workers pass the time napping, playing cards, chatting or eating instant noodles or fruit bought from vendors plying station platforms.

At dawn, having stopped at Xian, home of the terracotta warriors, the train heaves along beside a muddy tributary of the Yellow River, cutting through the valley’s rocky escarpment via a seemingly endless series of tunnels.

Travel is uncomfortable in the crowded third-class carriages: there are no sleepers, which is why the passengers snooze in their hard seats (of which there are far fewer than there are passengers), or lie in the aisles or even under the seats.

For them the short-term hardships are worth it. At the end of their two-month contract, most workers can take home the equivalent of at least US$1,000 if they pick an average of 90 kilograms of cotton a day – enough to add another room to their family home.

Few on the train seem to know that the country’s cotton industry is controlled by the Bingtuan, which The Sydney Morning Herald China correspondent John Garnaut, with whom I am travelling, describes as a “unique, state-owned, feudal-paramilitary-capitalist behemoth”. The organisation, he says, governs three-quarters of Xinjiang’s arable land. And as he will later write: “Neither Lao Qing nor his workers have any idea that they are components of a concerted government policy to entice migrants from mainstream China to dilute and control the Uyghurs, many of whom resent Chinese rule.”

Passing through Lanzhou, the train continues to follow the fertile river valley, though the farther west we go the harsher the surrounding landscape becomes. Reddish eroded hills dominate beyond the strip of cultivation.

Waking the next morning, I gaze at the desert in the early light. The train, having traversed the long, narrow tract of Gansu, negotiates the flat, rocky desert plains as it nears the border with Xinjiang. In a few hours the snow-topped peaks of the distant Tianshan range will provide a spectacular northern backdrop.

78

The Slow Train to Xinjiang

At Hami, a sanctuary amid the wide wilderness, we pull in beside a train carrying migrant workers from Shaanxi. I gaze outside in restless silence, transfixed by the landscape’s desolate harshness. We pass derricks in an oilfield and several mining sites. Barren as it may appear, the land conceals China’s largest coal deposits and is rich in oil and minerals, chief among them copper, nickel, gold and lead.

The train arrives at Urumqi station near midnight. Lao Qing’s workers file off with bundles of baggage and head for the bus that will take them to the cotton-farm dormitories, a four-hour ride away. The inky darkness conceals the harvesters’ fate until the bus turns onto a track that leads to Fragrant Grass Lake Farm No. 3, where they are greeted by a large pot of soup noodles in a small open hut beside several brick dormitories. A tub of water next door is to be used for ablutions and to clean the dishes. There are no toilets, at least not if you exclude the undulating trails into the surrounding fields.

But no one complains and, after supper, they head for the small two-tier bunks for a few hours’ sleep.

The next two months will be gruelling, the crew working from 8am to 8pm every day, weekends included, hunching low to pick at bushes and filling bags with fluffy fibres from prised-apart cotton heads. Once full, the sacks are collected and placed on a tractor, which takes them to be weighed.

Payment for each kilogram is fixed between the farm manager and work-team leader at the beginning of the harvest. This year Lao Qing has negotiated an increased price of 1.2 yuan a kilo – up 25 per cent on last year’s – and persuaded the manager to cover his workers’ travel expenses. Not everyone can count on such largesse, unskilled workers being prime candidates for exploitation.

Unfavourable word-of-mouth accounts from cotton pickers are slowly improving conditions. Finding it increasingly difficult to recruit workers, cotton-farm managers are staging roadshows in cities such as Xinxiang and farms are competing against each other, sometimes publishing glossy brochures and talking up the living quarters and possible earnings.

That increasing shortage of cheap labour and consequent rise in picking costs suggest that in future mechanisation might have an enhanced impact on the cotton harvest: the largely flat, expansive Xinjiang fields mean the crop is suited to machine gathering.

There solely to earn money, the workers rarely take time off, such as to 79

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

explore Urumqi, once a key central Asian stop on the northern route of the Silk Road. The city, with its 1,500 years of history, is isolated in China’s distant northwest but it is no crumbling provincial backwater. It is a modern conurbation whose affluence has been built on farming (chiefly cotton, sheep and fruit), mining and the petrochemical industry.

In Urumqi’s old sector one smells, sees, hears and feels the influence of Xinjiang’s Muslim inhabitants. The Uyghurs, few of whom are hired by the Bingtuan for the cotton harvest, are the largest of Xinjiang’s dozen or more ethnic minorities, making up 40 per cent of a provincial population of 20 million people. A walk around the Two Bridge Markets area, which is also home to several mosques, is an immersion into the area’s Islamic culture.

Fabric, jewellery and jade are sold here, as is food, which fills the air with the scent of cumin, turmeric and grilled lamb.

The harvest in northern Xinjiang finishes in late November. Just outside the city, I pass a cotton field with pickers bagging the harvest under an unforgiving sun. They may have to endure burned necks, calloused hands and aching backs, but for many the money will be worth it. Little wonder the songs they sing are bittersweet laments.

Near Huojia, Henan Province: Yan Zhi Wang, mother and daughter about to wave her off, waits for the bus taking migrant workers to Xinxiang Railway Station for the two-and-a-half-day trip to Urumqi. She will be away from home for two months.

80

The Slow Train to Xinjiang

Xinxiang Railway Station, and the beginning of the 60-hour journey. Cotton pickers jostling to buy train tickets crowd a work-team leader.

Interminable card games help travelling labourers pass the time.

81

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

Squeezing room only: adjacent to the toilets, migrant hired hands try to sleep between the doors of the overcrowded carriages.

Point taken: workers fuelled by beer and cheap spirits conduct an impromptu debate in the relatively sumptuous dining car.

82

The Slow Train to Xinjiang

Sleeping labourers fill almost every horizontal space, some lying under the carriage seats.

Hami, Xinjiang Province: hawkers serving food and drinks push their carts along the station platform as the train makes a scheduled stop.

83

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

Desert plains in the eastern reaches of Xinjiang Province. The Tianshan range stands on the horizon.

The train carries twice as many passengers as seats. Any spare corner will serve as home for the 60-hour ride.

84

The Slow Train to Xinjiang

A cold early morning: having arrived the night before, cotton pickers await their noodle breakfast outside dormitories at Fragrant Grass Lake Farm No. 3.

Terraced grasslands, western Gansu Province.

85

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

86

The Slow Train to Xinjiang

87

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

A migrant labourer and her son outside Urumqi.

Workers spend up to 12 hours a day in the fields, hence the protective clothing.

Workers stuff cotton into sacks in a field near Urumqi.

Labourers are paid about RMB1 per kilogram.

A cotton picker waits for loaded sacks to be collected.

The snow-dusted Tianshan peaks are visible in the distance.

88

The Slow Train to Xinjiang

Downtown Urumqi. Supported by money from provincial mining and petrochemical industries, the city’s population has recently swelled to three million people and its infrastructure has developed accordingly.

89

Randi Lynn Beach

Interview: Yiyun Li James Kidd

Y

iyun Li is known for her delicately sombre writing. But a spark of humour flashes through her new collection of short stories, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl. Striking a rare note of levity among its nine fictional pieces, House Fire tells of six middle-aged women, divorced or widowed, who have “declared war against love outside marriage”. Their means is a special form of detective agency that investigates unfaithful husbands. The women (who call themselves “saviours of burning houses”) become famous and successful. Then things start to fall apart. One day, a man called Dao asks the women to deduce whether his wife is having an affair with his father.

Each woman reacts differently to this request; the jovial surface cracks, as does the women’s solidarity.

91

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

Because this is a Yiyun Li story the women don’t confront each other.

Instead, they sense the undercurrents generated within the group by their private selves. Beneath the light-hearted surface, Li has fashioned a fable about the individual’s unstable relationship with society – and about women’s unstable relationships with one another in modern China. The story asks a question typical of Li’s fiction: how do human beings navigate a path between their innermost selves (including their pasts and their desires) and the outside world? It is also typical that she offers no easy answers.

One of the most memorable lines in House Fire is: “Odd People at this Unique Time”. In the story, it is a throwaway joke: the title of a fictitious gossip column in a magazine. But “Odd People at this Unique Time” could have its serious side: a fitting term, perhaps, if used to refer to Li’s already impressive body of work. This comprises a novel, 2009’s The Vagrants, and two volumes of short stories: Gold Boy, Emerald Girl and her 2005 debut, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers.

Li’s people are generally speaking “odd” – or at least gently at odds with mainstream Chinese society. From the start, her work has been populated by the lonely, the bereft, the dispossessed, the eccentric and the punished: the forgotten people of China. “My characters are often like extras from society,” she tells me. “They wouldn’t be leading characters in a mainstream narrative.

I don’t like flashy characters; mine tend to be older or lonelier. They mask themselves really well.”

This attention paid to the outsider might seem contrived if it weren’t for the nuances and simplicity of Li’s prose, which establishes her protagonists with little straining after effect. Her characters are outsiders, but rarely exiles: they exist on the margins of society, not apart from it completely. Their masks see to that. True, The Vagrants is driven by a young woman, Gu Shan, who is sentenced to death in 1979 as a counter-revolutionary and then executed, but she becomes the hub around which Li’s dramatis personae orbit. Most of them are ordinary residents of the town of Muddy River: teachers, road sweepers, factory workers, and people who fall in love, struggle to survive, yearn for intimacy (or shrink from it) and try to live their lives. What they share is that they have been abandoned by lovers, family, work or, often, China itself. Some find their masks slipping in the aftershock of Gu Shan’s death; others need their masks more than ever.

92

Interview: Yiyun Li

Which brings us to Li’s Unique Time. Taken as a whole, her books create a mosaic-in-progress of her birthplace’s recent past. The Vagrants is set in 1979, at the pivotal moment when China began its journey to quick riches. Other stories examine the Cultural Revolution, the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre, the cult of Chairman Mao and contemporary China’s economic boom, technological evolution and state of social flux.

There are characters from cities, from rural areas and, as the title of The Vagrants suggests, those who migrate between the two. A few stories spread their wings to peer at the question from the point of view of the Chinese diaspora, especially in America. The reader experiences the ensuing culture clashes from both sides.

Nevertheless, political and economic change tend to remain in the background of Li’s fiction. Power is perceived as an effect rather than a cause.

In The Vagrants, for instance, Li portrays the vagaries of Communist Party policy at one remove, through the impact it has on everyday lives: Han, the local politician, is flying high one moment, rendered vulnerable the next.

“I treat China as a character,” Li says. “I try to understand it without saying it is a good person or a bad person. I try to understand how complex that person is.”

If this makes Li’s work sound serious and melancholic, it is a charge she accepts cheerfully enough. “Unhappiness is a perennial theme of my writing, isn’t it?” she asks rhetorically. “I find that happiness simplifies the world too much. Maybe I don’t write about happiness because it doesn’t provide me with that glimpse into human nature.”

Serious she may be, but as House Fire illustrates, Li is not humourless.

When I propose (at some length) my theory about Odd People at this Unique Time defining her work, she giggles at the thought. She agrees that her characters tend to be alienated, but is less convinced by the second part of the phrase. “My shortest answer is that there is nothing unique about this time.” She cites War and Peace as evidence. “Tolstoy said almost exactly the same thing. He described these parties given for Russian aristocrats where they talked endlessly about how everything was unique in their time. Tolstoy says only minor minds find their time interesting. I marked that line and sent it to everyone I know.”

We hold two lengthy conversations, Li, 38, speaking from her home near Oakland, California – home sojourns being rare in her recent life.

93

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

She is part-way through a book tour behind Gold Boy, Emerald Girl. But just when she thought her promotional duties could not be any more intense, she was awarded one of this year’s MacArthur “Genius” awards.

Bestowed annually, MacArthur fellowships recognise “talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits”, rewarding them with grants of US$500,000, paid quarterly for five years.

Li emerges as someone defined by fundamental tensions, creative and personal. While her literary focus is almost exclusively on her birthplace, China, her literary career has been made almost entirely in the West. Li writes in English (her work has not even been translated into Chinese), even though she hardly spoke a word until she moved to Iowa in 1996, aged 24.

She insists, moreover, that until she went to America the thought of writing fiction hadn’t crossed her mind. “I was never a writer in China. I would never have thought about writing if I had stayed.”

This negotiation between East and West has characterised most of Li’s existence. Ask for her main literary influence and she names William Trevor.

Ask what she read as a child and her first thought is to name classic works, not by Lu Xun, Mao Dun or Ba Jin, but from the English, American and European traditions: Dickens, Hardy, Lawrence, Hemingway and Tolstoy.

Li detailed this youthful appreciation of such authors in another recent story, the autobiographical Kindness. “One reason to write it was to explore how literature started to grow in one person’s life. I read these same authors, and also Hemingway, Jack London and Gone with the Wind.”

With Li, stresses abound. She has attracted considerable admiration in the West: she writes regularly for The New Yorker; A Thousand Years of Good Prayers won The Guardian First Book Award; The Sunday Times compared her to Chekov and Tolstoy. Yet Li is also conscious that sections of this same audience see her as a spokeswoman of sorts, a conduit for explaining China.

“Every time you write, you get readers who are right and wrong for you.

Some people just want to read about China,” she explains. “I think they will find themselves disappointed and a bit lost. It is really not my goal to present a vision of China. I don’t feel any pressure to portray a whole picture. I am more interested in individual stories.”

Li is an intensely private person whose career has thrust her into the limelight. While her work dips quietly below the surface to explore the inner 94

Interview: Yiyun Li

truths of her characters, she keeps most questions about herself at a polite distance. When I ask what awoke her inner author, she claims to have no idea.

“I can’t explain it very well. It seems such a radical and illogical position. I think I just happened to be in a place and at a time in my life when I wanted to do something different. The something I chose was writing.”

This measured elusiveness might reflect Li’s unwillingness to analyse the mysterious operations of her imagination. If she does this at all, it is something she reserves for her writing. It is certainly a notion that crops up in Gold Boy, Emerald Girl. In Kindness, a teacher (Professor Shan) declares: “People who think they know their own stories do not appreciate other people’s mysteries.” In The Proprietress, the leading character, Mrs Jin, speaks approvingly of “fear and reverence for what was beyond control … in life”.

At other times, Li simply seems wary of venturing an opinion, especially where politics are concerned. I ask her opinion of Liu Xiaobo’s winning the Nobel Peace Prize. “Oh,” she begins, sounding surprised at the question. “I have to say I didn’t really read the news, I just saw the headlines. I can’t make any comment until I understand everything. I really need some time off to think.”

Li’s reticence is understandable. Expatriate Chinese writers are often criticised for commenting on current affairs in their homeland from the distance of a foreign country. In 2008, Ma Jian published an article in The Guardian examining the power of the Chinese government, media and bloggers in combating dissent offered in the West: “Even in the West, anyone who speaks out of line is eventually compelled to toe the Communist Party line,” he said.

As the comments page accompanying his think piece proved, Ma Jian was not exempt from criticism either. One reader noted: “Just the opinion of a writer who has moved from the mainland since 1986 and presumably has lost touch with the many changes there since then. I don’t see why we should give much weight to his opinions.” Another wrote: “The author clearly has an axe to grind with the Chinese government, and thus wrote this opinion piece.”

Li’s unwillingness to discuss politics implies a honed awareness of the potential pitfalls of making unguarded or unresearched comments. “I worry about it all the time. To me that is expected. Nothing surprises me, positive or negative, from China. It just confirms my expectations.” I ask whether 95

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

she feels she presents a critical vision of China. “I would say I present a dark image of life. I write about America and America is no brighter in my writing than China. And anyway, most writers don’t present bright pictures of human nature to readers.”

The roots of this artistic pessimism can be traced to her earliest years.

Li was born in Beijing in 1972. Her father was a physicist, her mother a teacher. The family lived in a compound reserved for scientists, especially those in the field of nuclear energy. Her father’s choice of profession (highly confidential, intellectual but badly paid) goes some way to explaining defining traits of Li’s childhood: secrecy, intelligence and want. She describes life in the compound as “secluded and secure”, adding: “We know we were not as affected [by political events] as the rest of the country.”

For Li’s parents, the sense of protection was a welcome buffer against China’s political instability. This was a delicate subject for the family: after Japan invaded China Li’s grandfather joined the Kuomintang and later, with his two sons, fought against the Communists during the Civil War. Their choices had varying effects on the three men.

“One of my uncles went to Taiwan. He was gone for 40 years. The uncle who stayed in mainland China had a very hard life. Demotion after demotion.” Li’s grandfather escaped lightly by comparison. Although he had been born to capitalists (his parents ran a fabric shop) and was a self-proclaimed intellectual, his main punishment following the Communist victory was unemployment. Eventually taken on by a Beijing publisher, he may have been beaten down, but he was unbowed: he regularly referred to Mao as “the King of Hell” and Party officials as “gate-guarding devils” – comments that invited imprisonment. He took early retirement and moved in with Li’s parents. In an article in The New Yorker, Li notes: “incredibly … he survived the 10 years of the Cultural Revolution without once being beaten up by the Red Guards”. While tens of thousands of perceived counter-revolutionaries were killed, Li’s grandfather “lived a happy and healthy life”.

Li learned the value of silent self-censorship. “It doesn’t matter which country you come from, people keep their secrets. In China, people of my parents’ generation kept their secrets for specific reasons. They wanted to stay safe and sound. They wanted to stay away from political turmoil.”

As Li describes it, her childhood was content, but solitary and materially unsatisfying. “My family was neither rich nor poor. In the early 1980s 96

Interview: Yiyun Li

everything was rationed – especially food. As a child, you always felt that insufficiency of what life could provide you. We didn’t have enough of anything, just like every family we knew.” In Kindness, Professor Shan again shares some wisdom: “One’s fate is determined by what she is not allowed to have, rather than what she possesses.” Li’s fate – to experience China as if from afar – was sealed at an early age.

In the guarded atmosphere of semi-deprivation Li became introspective, restless and possessed of a “wild imagination” that she quickly learned to hide from the world: her first mask. She was an exile-in-waiting: “I was very private, which is hard growing up in China. People interpret you like you have some ugly secret to hide from them.” Li credits compound life with being a significant influence on the intensity of her tales. “My stories are claustrophobic. When you live in a compound you live in each other’s eyes.

Everyone is watching you.”

On a more practical level, Li’s sensitivity to this constant surveillance was partly behind her desire to leave China as fast as she could. “By 11 or 12 I knew I wanted to leave China. People around me had emigrated to America.

I knew fairly early on that was where I wanted to go.”

Li had no realistic idea of what America was like. It simply meant freedom from family, from Beijing and from China. “It represented a future away from your parents. If you grew up in Beijing there was nowhere else to go apart from Shanghai. I wanted another world.” The all-consuming desire to escape coloured Li’s eventual decision to study immunology at Beijing University. The choice of subject was partly influenced by her parents; partly, it represented the means to her own ends. “It was my ticket to America. I didn’t particularly love immunology. I could just do it very well.”

Before Li began her degree, history intervened in the shape of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Li was 16. She recalls being locked inside the family apartment with her father while her mother went to see what was happening: she witnessed scenes of death and fear, including a mother holding her seven-year-old son, who had been shot and killed. “I was of course very angry, as everyone else my age was in Beijing. We were also shattered. That was the historical moment that made me a grown-up. It has a lot of influence on me and my generation. For my parents, it was the Cultural Revolution. For me, it was Tiananmen.”

The most immediate consequence for Li was an enforced year in the 97

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

People’s Liberation Army: the government hoped to drive a wedge between the generation of student protesters and those that came after them. The defiant and angry Li was the perfect target. “As a teenager, I was very rebellious against the political reasons for being in the army.” This is the experience Li fictionalised in Kindness. Narrated by Moyan, a 41-year-old teacher, the story recalls her youthful conscription and her gradual decision to cut herself off from love and other feelings.

“In retrospect, I am happy I had that experience,” Li recalls. “But at the time it was not a happy experience. Being very private, the army was an extreme experience. I felt very uncomfortable. In the army there was a constant clash with the outside world.”

As Kindness reveals, it was in the army that Li’s love for classic literature matured. She had always been a precocious reader, diving into adult novels before she was in her teens. “I didn’t grow up with children’s books. From eight years old I read literature and fairly complex stories. To begin with, these comprised classic Russian and modern Soviet novels.” Ironically for a writer often compared to Chekov, his were not among them. “He came much later. He is a little hard for children.” Possibly, but Li’s youth did not stop her loving Turgenev, Tolstoy and Maxim Gorky.

When I ask which home-grown authors she enjoyed, she says they were mainly poets. “From the age of three I would memorise every poet taught to me,” she says. “That practice lasted until my late teens.” Shen Congwen was a preferred writer, as were the novelists who became prominent during the 1980s: Wang Meng, Zhang Xinxin, Han Shaogong.

Lu Xun is another intriguing influence: Li recently contributed an afterword to the Penguin edition of The Real Story of Ah-Q. “Lu Xun and I have a very complex connection, as every Chinese writer does with him. I think he was a great storyteller. His best writing is unmatched by anyone of his generation. But he was uneven – he wrote some terrible stories. It is very hard to deny his influence, but I don’t idolise him as some people do.”

In 1996 Li left China for Iowa City. She spoke only rudimentary English and her sister’s suggestion that she learn by viewing Baywatch proved unhelpful. Li says she didn’t suffer from culture shock. Instead, she found that America was a place that indulged her need for privacy. “Part of the reason I started writing was that people left me alone. I arrived as an immigrant and a student. For me it was a very comfortable place to be.”

98

Interview: Yiyun Li

What Li didn’t know to begin with was that, coincidentally, Iowa had one of the most prestigious creative-writing schools in the world; the Iowa Writers’ Workshop alumni, including Michael Cunningham, John Irving and Ann Patchett, have won 17 Pulitzer Prizes.

It would be some years before Li would win a place on the programme.

She earned her PhD in immunology with research into allergies, asthma and the behaviour of B- and T-cells, and married her college boyfriend, Dapeng, now a computer programmer. It was a two-month writing course at a community college that set her on the literary path: a story about her grandmother impressed the tutor so much he encouraged her to try to be published.

Li’s first stories, collected in A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, reveal a novice author trying to find her identity. Relatively experimental compared to her later work, they play with voice and subject matter. She tries the firstperson singular narrative in Death is Not a Bad Joke if Told the Right Way. In Immortality she uses the first-person plural to tell the communal history of a Chinese town that was noted for providing the “imperial families with their most reliable servants. Eunuchs they are called, though out of reverence we call them Great Papas.” A related descendant proves to be a doppelganger of Mao and the story becomes a potted history of China, from the dynasties of empire through the Communist Revolution and beyond. Its hyper-realistic approach (Li’s version of what the critic James Wood calls hysterical realism) would not last long: Li would ditch witty, but incredible devices such as Mao-alikes and settle into a traditional, if intimate, realist approach. “In your first book, you will try everything,” Li says. “Now I have found what I would consider my natural voice.”

From the start, two ideas were non-negotiable. First, Li’s writing was an attempt to understand China. “Those first stories asked who those people were I used to know really well. They were not about me.” Second, she chose to write in English. “English liberated me to write. It had little to do with my earlier history.” In particular, Li was able to write about feelings. “English freed me to write about emotions. Chinese was a language where I hid from people. English is a language where I don’t hide. I can’t entirely explain it, but I cannot write about people or feelings in Chinese.”

It is a divide Li dramatises in stories in which China clashes with an English-speaking West, for example The Princess of Nebraska and A Thousand 99

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

Years of Good Prayers. In the latter, Mr Shi, a retired rocket scientist, visits his newly divorced daughter in America in the hope of understanding “her situation”. When she remains stubbornly silent, he berates her for withholding her feelings, only to have her turn the cultural tables: “You never talked, and Mama never talked, when you both knew there was a problem in your marriage. I learned not to talk.” However, she explains that thanks to life in America and conversation in English, she has found her tongue. She even admits her responsibility for the break-up, which was the result of her affair with a Romanian man: “We talk in English, and it’s easier. I don’t talk well in Chinese … Baba, if you grew up in a language that you never used to express your feelings, it would be easier to take up another language and talk more in the new language. It makes you a new person.”

In Li’s case it also makes you a writer. Having won a place at the workshop, she gradually began to feel a literary career might be possible. “By the time I left I had finished my first book and my second was under contract.” Li adds that Iowa didn’t so much teach her to write as teach her to read. It was at Iowa, for example, that she discovered William Trevor, her literary hero and mentor. He is thanked in the acknowledgements of her two most recent books. When I ask what struck a chord, Li again sounds lost for words.

“It’s just his sensibility. He can be so kind and so ruthless at the same time.

He exposes his characters, but not in a mean way. He is just curious about people.”

Trevor’s combination of kindness and ruthlessness has had a clear effect on Li’s prose, which portrays the most private existences of individuals with cool precision. Li is not a visual writer: when she collaborated with Wayne Wang on the film of the story A Thousand Years of Good Prayers she found the process of transforming her characters’ interior lives into dramatic action difficult. On the page, Li explores thought processes as much as plot. She doesn’t judge her characters, or pin them down, but allows them to exist in all their complexity of action and motivation. “Every time you have a hero or villain you are advocating something. I cannot write literature as propaganda. I cannot give readers anything that is a simplification of life.

Heroes, villains and victims are all simplifications of life.”

In Kindness, narrator Moyan chooses a life of introspection rather than one of engagement with the world: it is a wall that protects her from the pain of life. At the same time, she retains a keen awareness of her self-imposed 100

Interview: Yiyun Li

segregation. A middle-school mathematics teacher, she exhibits a pessimism genuinely felt and intellectually abstract: “I pity those children more than I appreciate them, as I can see where they are heading in their lives,” she thinks. “It is a terrible thing, even for an indifferent person like me, to see the bleakness lurking in someone else’s life.”

In The Vagrants, characters struggle to balance similar tensions. Set against the political instabilities of late-1970s China, the novel investigates varying notions of heroism. At the centre is Kai, a former child star who portrayed mythical characters in the theatre and who has become the voice of her home town, Muddy River: she is the news announcer on the radio station.

Kai has ascended the social ranks to marry a powerful official, but she lives a double life: she consorts with Jialin, who belongs to an underground political movement that protests against Gu Shan’s execution. Kai’s opposition to the system is not only self-destructive but has repercussions for her family.

Li asks: is her act one of self-sacrificing political nobility or simply one of selfishness?

Li’s authorial disinterest has caused unease in some readers. Her most controversial character is arguably Bashi, the fool of The Vagrants, whose naïve sociability is tarnished by darker sexual impulses. An otherwise normal adolescent desire to see the female anatomy has been warped into dreams of inspecting the bodies of unwanted baby girls, who are occasionally left beside the Muddy River. Li mentions that some readers branded Bashi a paedophile because of his relationship with Nini, a 12-year-old girl shunned by her family because of a deformed hand and leg. And yet, Bashi is not presented as a straightforward monster: that honour goes to Kwen, whom Bashi discovers has desecrated Gu Shan’s body.

“I was very surprised how angry readers were with Bashi. Critics found him very difficult to read,” says Li. “He is one of my favourite characters from the novel. He doesn’t wear any masks. He is just himself. He has real kindness. He wants to help other people. That doesn’t mean he’s not disturbing. But no more than any of the other characters.” * * * It is tempting to read this literary ambivalence as a reflection of Li’s own relationship with China: although she left the country as soon as she could, 101

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

its people and culture continue to fill her imagination. “I need some distance from my subjects,” she notes at one point. Self-imposed exile, however agreeable, has its consequences. Of primary interest for Li is her sense of time – a preoccupation she shares with Trevor. “One of my major interests in themes is how time passes in people’s lives and in their memories. Some novelists are really good at writing about the dramatic moment. For me, and William Trevor too, that moment often happens in the past or is going to happen in the future. We write about the world after the dramatic moment or the world leading up to it.” Occasionally a narrative plays out in the present tense, but more often she follows a Wordsworthian template of emotion recollected in tranquillity – although the line between tranquillity and isolation is blurred.

Again, one could suggest that the importance of memory in Li’s work stems from her relationship with her homeland. Although she returns regularly, China must exist more in her mind as a recollection than as an everyday reality. But it is not an argument Li accepts easily, on a number of counts. She contends that the stories in Gold Boy, Emerald Girl attempt to examine contemporary China. A Man Like Him has a typical Li protagonist: an isolated, introverted and embittered teacher with a shadowy sexual history taking out his frustrations on internet-enabled social networks.

It is one of several recent stories that concentrate on the place of women in modern Chinese society: House Fire and The Proprietress also feature ad hoc communities of women who exist in an uneasy solidarity. In A Man Like Him, the blacker cousin of the whimsical House Fire, the women’s group exists on the internet. After her father abandons his family, a young girl creates a blog that reviles wandering husbands: “MY FATHER IS LESS OF A CREATURE THAN A PIG OR A DOG BECAUSE HE IS AN ADULTERER.” Li argues that anger has defined generations of Chinese women. “Anger is an uninteresting emotion. It simplifies life by targeting a villain.” Ironically, this reduction by fury is precisely what makes the young girl in A Man Like Him so intriguing to Li. “She is representative of women from the last two or three generations – from the Communist Revolution and even during the Cultural Revolution. These angry women who act without any deeper connection to the world ... I have seen so many in previous generations and my own generation.”

102

Interview: Yiyun Li

In Sweeping Past, the frictions between women double as differences between generations. Ying, an ambitious young Chinese girl brought up in Portugal, visits her grandmother Ailin in China. The culture clash manifests itself through conflicts of language and propriety: Ying admires a photograph of her grandmother in her teens as being “very Chinese”; but Ailin is shocked when Ying casually asks if an old friend was raped. Ying has “accumulated wisdom beyond her age”, but is nevertheless too young to understand one of life’s greatest mysteries: “that hatred, as much as love, did not come out of reason but out of a mindless nudge of a force beyond one’s awareness”.

Li insists that these encounters are not specific to China but are universal.

Beijing’s landscape, pace of life, economy and politics might be altering faster than those of most cities, but its people exist in a continuum with the past. “I go to China to see the people, to see the country, to see the surface change.

But you realise pretty quickly that people don’t really change much. The country has had a facelift. The economy is better. But human beings don’t evolve that fast.” Li mentions a young, female Chinese journalist who asked how Li hoped to convey the pains and struggles of her current generation when she lived abroad. “Every generation thinks its pains and struggles are unique. But I don’t think her struggles are so different from those of the heroine of a Jane Austen novel. I really do think human nature evolves really slowly.”

In The Vagrants, Li harnesses the diverse perspectives of her stories within a single narrative. In one memorable passage, our point of view deviates suddenly from the main characters and settles on a “fourth grader” who discovers her “silk Young Pioneer’s kerchief [has] been ripped by her little brother”. Li’s focus moves swiftly to a truck driver in bed with his wife, then to a hospital nurse arriving late for work because her son has overslept. The chapter ends with a bad-tempered girl working a switchboard. The excerpt is suggestive of Li’s restless narrative voice: a switch is flicked and the character changes.

These multiple points of view have a powerful effect and offer an artistic challenge to the political and moral certainties that defined Li’s life in China.

One can imagine the novel’s changing perspectives challenging the absolutism of a totalitarian state. “Growing up in that sort of environment, there is only one sort of truth. When you become a writer you realise there is no absolute truth. You have to approach that from as many angles as you possibly can.

103

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

It is a sort of minor rebellion. It is my nature not to trust that one truth broadcast by people. Fiction allows you to explore those questions.”

Thanks to the MacArthur Fellowship, Li should be financially free to explore many more questions in the coming years. There is a new novel, but with her typical reticence she prefers not to discuss a work in progress.

She teaches creative writing at the University of California, Davis and serves as an editor with the Brooklyn-based literary magazine A Public Space. If there is any irony in the notion that Li is happy in a land where happiness is pursued so vigorously, she laughs it off. “I do think America is a funny place. Everywhere you go you see all these self-help books that have the same message – happiness is your goal. I think that is why many of my American readers find my writing too fatalistic.”

Chinese-speaking audiences will have a long wait before they can read Li. She dismisses any likelihood of her work being translated soon. It is a mood she transfers to China in general. I wonder whether her characters – her odd people in this unique time – might be happier in the future than they have been in the past. “Probably not,” Li says after a pause. “I am optimistic if you are talking about changes decades from now. In the next five years, I think change will be very slow.” Li sounds dejected. I doubt she would have it any other way.

104

Life by Accident Xiaolu Guo

The coffin millionaire’s melancholy

T

hey say of the Taklamakan Desert: “If you go in, you will never come out.” Its winds are restless and persistent, shaping hills by stripping off their sand. Each day, a new layer of crystalline grains falls on Mr Dong’s garden. This spring his cherry blossoms, transplanted 3,000 kilometres from the wet south, have flowered beautifully. But Mr Dong feels blue.

Coffin millionaire Mr Dong lives in the Tarim Basin, somewhere on the edge of the Taklamakan. His factory and private villas are built around a small oasis, a place of tangled green in a brown sea. Every morning he walks around the 2,800 square metres of his factory yard, where all the newly varnished coffins are placed. He feels life has no weight, no meaning, just like the thirsty cherry trees, a species blown in from elsewhere. A deep melancholy wraps around him. Watching the polished pinewood planks being fitted together by his workers to make tapering boxes, the only thing that concerns him now is having a baby. A baby boy, or even a baby girl, any baby; the millionaire desperately wants one, if not five, or seven.

But even the carpenters in the factory are aware that Mr Dong’s wife is infertile. Everyone knows it, from the truck drivers who deliver the wood every week to the engravers who carve names on the coffin lids. Everyone has met Mrs Dong: elegant, slim, she walks slowly on her high heels as if in danger of being swallowed by quicksand. But Mr Dong is loyal; he will

105

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

not divorce his wife, and his wife seems to love him even more than he loves her. She seems not to mind sleeping in a villa whose ground floor is full of coffins.

The practicality of young lovers The future is more important than the present. That’s what the two young lovers in Chongqing believe. Wet, smoggy, it is a city of more than 31 million inhabitants, a noisy sea of humans, cars, highways, opportunities and desires.

If there is an earthquake one day, a new city will rise from the ruins the next.

The collective will to survive pervades every street corner.

A fragment of this will has lodged itself in Weiming and Yuli. They must sell their baby, a baby who first saw the light of the world a month ago.

Yuli, a 17-year-old village girl, risks a ruinous scandal in which she will be expelled from college, wasting all the money her parents have invested in her. She has lied to the principal and her fellow students. She told them all she had hepatitis. She lifted her eyelids to show how yellow they were inside.

She told everyone she needed to stay at home for a while to recover. That was after she managed to hide her growing belly in a big coat for five months; she is not a well-padded girl, but thin, as if she never has enough to eat. In a shabby suburban clinic she gave birth to a screaming little thing.

Yuli is determined; her plan is to study hard, earn her business diploma and start a career in a big city. She is not going to let anyone from her village know she has a child. She is from a mountainous region in Sichuan where people make a living growing and selling chilli peppers. The villagers take family matters seriously. If they were to learn she had given birth to a son they would come to the city to kidnap her and the child. As the baby sucks at a nipple with its small wet mouth, her mind is made up. No, she won’t keep it.

Yuli’s boyfriend, Weiming, is from the same village as Yuli. Nineteen, he has had trouble surviving since he left home. There is no way he can imagine helping Yuli with her college costs, sending money to his family in the village and bringing up a baby at the same time. He already works 19 hours a day, doing two jobs. By day he washes cars, at night he is a massage-parlour doorman. He sleeps from 3am to 7am and has been exhausted from the day he arrived in the city a couple of years ago. His vision is blurred and his mind is foggy, like the permanent haze hanging over the Yangtze River. But 106

Life by Accident

he understands that for the future, he must work like a donkey. A donkey can sleep while standing up and Weiming has to learn to do that too. He dozes and even snores while mechanically mopping car windows, soapsuds bubbling onto his oily jeans.

The future is written April is not a busy month for coffin selling: apparently, people don’t like to die in the spring. The millionaire spends his spare time with his wife driving in his sports utility vehicle, or wandering by the Tarim River and along desert paths. The distant mountain tops are covered with glaciers that move down the valleys to melt, forming icy river water that winds towards the Tarim Basin. The water never finds the sea: in the midst of the desert it feeds the small oasis and runs to marshes, where it evaporates. Mr Dong thinks this mountain water is like his wife, precious but not very nutritious.

But one cannot have everything. Man must know his limits.

Nevertheless, Mr Dong feels at home in the desert, where he has become the biggest coffin seller in China. Death is big business. Even though normal Chinese people don’t have much money, the Japanese do – and there are enough buyers coming from Japan. They come all the way to his factory for real pinewood coffins, Mr Dong enjoying a reputation as a provider of superior caskets. Mr Dong knows many Asians are obsessed with death and will pay RMB20,000 for a deluxe coffin – then let the corpse and coffin burn to ash in a cremation parlour.

What is all this for, Mr Dong wonders. Ashes! A good coffin should not be burned – it should be appreciated until the day the wood turns to oil in the soil, becoming the ginseng of the earth! That’s what he calls the real afterlife.

What he has planned for his own future, however, is more solid: he has built a three-storey mausoleum in which to put his family’s coffins. It stands near his villa, with a view of the desert and occasionally of Uyghur men on horseback. In that multi-layered house of caskets the first floor is for his parents’ double coffin. The arrangement pleases Mr Dong’s parents greatly and they look forward to resting peacefully within the super-sized capsule.

The second floor is reserved for the coffin of his wife and himself. It is a white piece, of above-average length because he is quite tall. On the third floor 107

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

there is a normal-sized coffin painted gold. This box awaits Mr Dong’s son or daughter. It is always good to plan, before it is too late.

Every year at Ching Ming, the festival that commemorates the dead, the coffin millionaire walks around his three-storey house just to check if those large, expensive boxes are still there and haven’t been stolen or gnawed by mice. He wants to make sure his relatives won’t be disappointed when it comes to the end.

Mr Dong has been trying to become a Buddhist, as his wife has advised, and renounce desire. All suffering is caused by desire, his wife says. Mr Dong agrees, and sighs.

The internet baby After two bowls of beef-flavoured instant noodles the young lovers agree to sell their baby on the internet. Yuli has studied computer technology at college and knows how to do it. What people normally sell online are machines, television sets, bicycles, shower curtains, banned books. Selling a baby is not very common. But what’s so different, wonders Weiming. If China could sell half a billion people to the West the remaining Chinese would have much better lives and much bigger apartments to live in.

Yuli takes photographs of the baby and chooses the cutest, most smiley one to post online. After a quick discussion with her boyfriend she types a price.

Healthy baby boy for sale: RMB10,000 Contact: 136-0138-6243

The number is for Weiming’s massage-parlour mobile phone, given to him for his night job. They both know RMB10,000 is far too little for a healthy baby boy. But asking for a relatively small amount of money can sort things out quickly.

After posting the advertisement Yuli breast-feeds her son and changes his wet nappy. What she is worried about is that if the baby doesn’t go soon she will miss her end-of-term exam. Then she won’t receive her diploma. Again, a deep anxiety hits her, an anxiety that has been eating her slowly for the last 108

Life by Accident

few months. An image of herself appears in her mind as just one more loser, a human error, lying on a street corner and begging for rice.

But the internet offer proves effective. After only a few hours Weiming’s phone starts to ring continually, interrupting his work. The first few callers want to know whether the whole thing is a joke, which makes Weiming yell at them. He has no time to joke about life, he needs immediate action.

Sounding like an irascible businessman, he shouts that if they’re not serious he’ll just switch off his phone.

In the night, a woman caller with a shaky voice explains that she is from a seaside town; her husband was seriously ill, which is why they didn’t have a child. He has just died, so she would like to buy the baby. But the sad woman talks for such a long time, in a strange dialect, that it puts the weary young man to sleep. Weiming wakes up still holding the phone.

A candid talk Three days pass; 20 more calls later, a couple ring from Xinjiang.

“Xinjiang?” Weiming repeats. “That’s very far away.”

“Yes, actually we are in the Taklamakan Desert,” the couple explain. The Taklamakan Desert? The young man has no idea of what he should imagine; holding his phone and watching government officials entering the massage parlour, he pictures a camel. The camel has two humps and wanders the sands with nothing to eat. Nevertheless, the desert couple explain that they run a coffin factory and don’t care about money, but want the baby as soon as possible.

“We can take the first plane in the morning,” says the man, a Mr Dong.

After a little negotiation the couple from the faraway desert offer to double the price. So the deal is done. Weiming and Yuli will receive RMB20,000, in cash. But Yuli doesn’t want the couple to come to the city in which she studies. So they agree to meet where no one knows them: Shanghai. The meeting point will be Shanghai People’s Park, the next day, at 4pm, at the East Gate.

The young couple grab a bag, wrap their sleeping baby in a big towel and hurry to the station. They take the first train to Shanghai along with many migrants: a swarm of luggage-burdened ants. Weiming and Yuli rarely take trains and are excited about the trip. Eyes wide open, they peer at every 109

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

station, picturing themselves working in Shanghai one day thanks to the RMB20,000. From time to time Yuli feeds the baby, but the moody little thing doesn’t seem to like the trip and keeps screaming and crying.

Out of the desert Green tea and cashew nuts to hand, the coffin millionaire and his wife are sitting in business class on the flight that has just left Urumqi. “I wish we’d brought some nappies and children’s clothes,” Mrs Dong keeps mumbling, as if she has suddenly gained 20 years and can’t remember what she said 10 seconds earlier. She starts to worry: she must be an instant mother the moment the transaction is complete.

The millionaire is not so nervous. He is already feeling happier than before. His mind starts to wander as he looks down at the earth. He thinks about something long ago. He has heard that many mummies were found in his desert, beneath those tedious sand dunes. Scientists say the mummies are 4,000 years old and reveal many racial characteristics, mostly European and Middle Eastern. Mr Dong ponders whether he should name his son something European, or at least Turkish. Then life in the desert would gain some kind of connection with the past and with the ginseng of the earth.

Shanghai interlude After a 14-hour train ride the young couple arrive, pale and exhausted, in the shiny city of Shanghai. Yuli is deeply impressed: people are more fashionable, the buildings are much more opulent, than in Chongqing. But Weiming can’t enjoy the new city. He is starving and feels even more powerless on Shanghai’s teeming streets than he does in Chongqing.

They enter a restaurant at random and down two bowls of noodle soup each. Then Weiming devours half a roast duck while his girlfriend eats a bowl of stir-fried egg rice. They eat with great urgency; the baby sometimes coughs in Yuli’s arms and tries to drink his mother’s milk at the same time.

Twenty minutes before 4pm, Yuli and Weiming are standing in front of the iron East Gate of Shanghai People’s Park. The baby is crying again and Yuli has to rock him in her arms, wearily, until he falls asleep.

Mr Dong and his wife arrive on time. They seem equally worn out. But 110

Life by Accident

as soon as Mr Dong looks at the baby in Yuli’s arms the boy’s eyes glisten. His wife can’t help but scream: “It’s fate, I tell you! He likes us!”

Her husband stretches out a stiff forefinger and touches the baby’s pink cheeks. During this encounter the baby doesn’t cry. Rather, he is overwhelmed by the strangers. He stares at the couple from the Taklamakan for a long time, as if he knows there is an expensive coffin waiting for him on the third floor of a desert house.

In the People’s Park “What about the money then?” Weiming asks impatiently.

“No problem. All hard cash,” the coffin tycoon answers.

Mr Dong opens his compact leather briefcase, revealing a heavy blue plastic bag with notes inside. But he doesn’t give it to Weiming straight away.

Instead he closes his briefcase and says: “Let’s go into the park and sit beside some bushes. We need to check if the baby is as healthy as you say.”

The two couples enter the park.

It is a warm spring. The willows are green, the bamboo lush. Elderly people are doing tai chi; younger residents play table tennis. Children fly kites as their grandparents try to run after them.

The baby boy is already in Mrs Dong’s arms. At lakeside, beside an overgrown rose bush, husband and wife conduct a thorough inspection of their future son. They turn him upside down, looking at his ears, eyes, teeth, nostrils, fingernails, toes. They study him like Japanese clients scrutinising expensive coffin timber. Oddly, the baby seems to enjoy this sudden attention and starts to giggle, beatific smiles bubbling up on a soft face.

The water in the lake is clear. Carp swim at the bottom while dragonflies zip across the surface. Life! the man from the Taklamakan thinks. He opens his briefcase and hands over the money. Weiming and Yuli immediately start to count. They are satisfied they have the correct sum.

The young couple from Chongqing feel the urge to ask the couple from the desert some questions before leaving.

“Is it true,” the young man asks hesitantly, “that you live in the desert?”

“Yes, the Taklamakan Desert,” Mr Dong answers.

“But … why would you live there? I mean, if you have money,” Weiming says in a low voice.

111

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

“Why not? It is the most peaceful place in the whole country. I cannot stand people and noise, like the people and noise here,” replies Mr Dong.

“You prefer making coffins to any other business?” Yuli asks, already feeling ashamed of the question.

“I’ll tell you why,” the coffin millionaire says calmly. “I want to make some honest money. I don’t want to run a business by cheating people, or selling them want they don’t need. Death is the exception, it brings a certain honesty with it. That’s why I am doing this job. It is a genuine and noble business.”

The young man and his lover nod, trying to understand honesty and nobility, while their eyes remain fixed on the baby in the arms of Mrs Dong.

“I just think,” the coffin millionaire concludes, “one cannot go against the laws of nature. One should confidently obey the eternal rhythm.”

“One should confidently obey the eternal rhythm,” Weiming and Yuli murmur. Weiming holds the bag full of money; each reaches for the other’s hand and holds it tight. They walk through the park, pass the gates and disappear into the commotion of Shanghai’s streets.

The third floor Fifty-five years later, the Taklamakan Desert. Dong Tak walks slowly up through a three-storey mausoleum. He passes the first floor, glancing at a large red coffin with dried chrysanthemums on its lid. He goes up to the second floor, where cherry blossoms, now withered, are still arranged around a white box. He contemplates the scene for a few moments. Then he climbs to the top floor.

He stands by a wooden casket. The gold paint has faded slightly in the strong desert sunlight. He opens the lid. He places one leg inside, then the other. Elegantly, he lies down, his feet facing north. The lights gradually disappear as he pulls the lid down. Still hearing the desert wind scouring mountain and valley, he waits.

112

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

The Mobile Persepolis (2009) by Fiona Wong Lai-ching. Ceramic, cement and wood, 40cm x 274cm x 457cm. Courtesy of the artist, Hong Kong.

113

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

Poetry Shu Ting

A Few Memories A wine cup knocked over Stone paths float in moonlight On green grass, pressed down A lost red mountain flower Eucalyptus trees turn Crowded stars kaleidoscope By the rusty iron anchor Eyes reflect a dizzy sky A book raised to block off candlelight Fingers held gently between lips In thin crisp silence Dreams are half-awake Translated by Luo Hui, with Zheng Danyi and Martin Alexander

114

Modern Chinese Poetry – Insistent Voices

Poetry Zhai Yongming

Mother There are too many places that we cannot reach and our feet ache.

Mother, you never taught me in the eager pink of dawn to drink that age-old sadness.

My heart takes after you alone.

You are so much my mother that I am the blood that you bled as dawn broke – surprised into seeing yourself by the sight of the blood, that was you!

You awoke me to hear the voices of the world.

You gave me birth, and cursed me with the world’s misfortune as my twin.

For years I’d forgotten the tears of that night.

The light that made you pregnant came from so far away – and was so suspect – as it stood between life and death.

The dark was possessed by your eyes.

How heavy the shadows at the soles of your feet!

115

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

Once, in your arms, as though I could give you a riddle’s response, I would smile.

But nobody knows this – that I did not care as you led me like a virgin to light.

I believed that this world was a virgin like me.

Could it be that my outburst of sunny laughter in your face wasn’t enough to ignite summer’s fire?

Wasn’t it enough?

I was left abandoned in this world all alone shrouded in sadness by the rays of the sun.

Bending over the world, did you not feel the loss?

Time put me in its mill and made me watch myself be ground into dust.

Oh mother, were you happy at my final silence then?

Nobody knows how my misguided love came about.

Well, the secret is this: it slipped out of you.

My eyes gaze up at you, two suffering wounds.

Merely alive, a stone discarded, like bone’s marrow left to dry in the wind, I court death to confront that age-old love.

Orphans exist in the world to lay false blessings bare.

Who really can know that all who have stood in their mothers’ cupped hands will pay for their birth with their death.

116

The Road to Kekexili Story and photographs: Scott Ezell

H

ills like white muscle and tendon sloped up out of the ground and were subsumed again. The morning sun glittered sharp and hard off the snow and the ridges reflected the pale sky. The spreading earth was like the anatomy of a vast cetacean, a blue and white infinitude that swallowed sound and thought.

The day before I had caught a ride in a jeep angling northwest between the town of Qumalai and Budongquan, a truck stop on the Qinghai-Tibet highway on the edge of the Kekexili wilderness. We covered half the distance on a dirt track. The midpoint was here, Qumahe, in the middle of the empty wasteland at the centre of China’s Qinghai Province, known as Eastern Tibet before the Chinese occupation of 1950. We had arrived the night before in a snowstorm and the driver’s friends had invited me to sleep on a lumpy couch in their living room. It was the best guest bed in the house, it turned out: the driver and his brother both slept upright in wooden chairs with their Tibetan cowboy hats pulled down over their eyes.

I woke refreshed and sated; in the morning light and stillness the living room felt warmed by the smell of butter tea and burning yak dung and sleep.

The family was waking up and rubbing their eyes and shuffling to the stove.

One of the women brought me a bowl of tea. I thanked her and stepped outside.

Qumahe was not a town, not even a village. It was barely a settlement, a superficial impression of civilisation on this untamed landscape, like a brand on a wild animal that would soon hair over and disappear.

117

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

Qumahe, Qinghai Province

Meat market, Qumahe

118

The Road to Kekexili

Half a dozen buildings were clustered together at skewed angles, low concrete shacks like those of the town of Qumalai, about 100 kilometres away, but their paucity of imagination was starker here – perhaps because they had not reached some critical mass where one could see them as a unit of human society. I walked through the settlement until I came to the Baohu Zhen, the Conservation Bureau, but it was closed. It didn’t even seem real – with its red roof and green sides it looked like a magnification of an architectural model, built for purposes of illustration only, not intended for practical applications such as entering and exiting, living, working, breathing.

There were no buses in Baohu Zhen, no restaurants, no flophouses. In this outpost of humanity the family had simply accepted me as a guest and shared what they had without motive or question. Their alternative would have been to throw me out into the storm to freeze to death. I walked back to the duplex. Two men moved a pool table into the street and started knocking balls across the baize with hand-carved cues, except that there was no baize, just naked plywood. The sun cast long shadows of the men as they laughed and joked, blowing their hands for warmth, rubbing their chins and looking at the balls as if they formed a schema of the space that vaulted off in every direction.

Back at the family’s home the driver I had ridden with the previous day was wrapping the steering wheel with electrician’s tape, like a boxer taping his hands before a bout. He had long, tangled hair and an equine face, and spoke and acted with grave self-assurance. He wrapped the wheel with red, green, blue and yellow tape, so it swirled like a party streamer as he tested the grip and smoothed it down.

“What are you up to today?” he asked me.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Continuing north to Budongquan. What about you?”

“Going home. North from here.”

The driver’s younger brother was tightening the lug nuts on the wheels of the jeep – he was shorter and rounder, quiet, self-contained, with a neatly trimmed moustache, and he was in charge of the technical and mechanical side of things, while the driver gave the orders.

I stepped inside the house, where the family had set out leftovers from the night before; they invited me to sit down and eat. The driver came in and 119

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

washed grease from his hands in a plastic basin, then poured himself a bowl of tea.

“We can drive you to Budongquan,” he said.

“You’re going that far?”

“No, but we can take you.”

“How long will it take?”

“It’s a day’s drive.”

“But it’s only 100 kilometres.”

“By the map, yes, but it’s a bad road.”

“How much?”

“Eight hundred yuan.”

“What? It was only 50 yuan to ride with you the same distance here from Qumalai.”

“To come here was easy. The road is not so bad and we were already on the way. But to go to Budongquan you have to hire us to drive you.”

“I can’t pay that much,” I said, even though I’d known from the start of this short cut to the Kekexili wilderness that I might have to pay dearly to travel it.

Traversing this expanse of blank map space saved me a 1,500-kilometre detour as I travelled north along the edge of Tibet, heading to China’s border with Pakistan, but it also took me out of the range of anything but a hired ride.

“Okay, it’s up to you.”

I went back outside. The only other vehicle in sight was an old army truck propped on jacks. I walked up the street to a cave-like sundry shop tended by an ancient Chinese woman. She sold a few jars of hard sweets and packs of noodles that seemed to have turned to dust within their plastic packaging. Outside, the sun was so bright it pinned me to a wall like a firing squad. We had not encountered another vehicle on the road the day before, and suddenly the possibility of becoming stranded here, waiting days for a ride, or forever, became palpable.

The driver and his brother were arranging things in the jeep. “What do you think?” the driver said. “Do you want to go?”

“Maybe.”

“We can go right now. You’ll be in Budongquan by evening; you’ll wake up in Kekexili. You don’t know how bad the road is. It’s up and down, full of holes, washed out and broken all the way. We can’t drive much faster than walking.”

120

The Road to Kekexili

Qinghai: hitchhiking monks waiting for a ride to Lhasa.

“Is there anyone else who can come along to share the cost?”

“Yes, if you want, there’s a family of seven. If you don’t mind riding with them we’ll lower the price to 600 yuan.”

“Only 200 less! And seven plus us in the jeep. It’s impossible!”

“No,” he said calmly, “we do it all the time. If you want a lower price we can do it that way, but we’ll have to wait for them. It’ll take some time. For 800 we can go right now, and you have the front seat.”

“I get the front seat?”

“Yes, because you’re paying for the trip. My brother will ride in the back.

The whole jeep is yours. We’re ready right now!”

“Okay,” I said “Let’s go.”

“Good, get your things.”

I went inside and grabbed my pack. I thanked the family and they asked when I would be back to visit again. I tried to pay them something for their hospitality, but they refused until I said, “For the children, buy something for the children.”

I half expected the jeep to be gone when I walked out of the door, but there it was, with the engine idling and the front seat empty. I stashed my pack in the back and climbed in.

121

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

The driver gave me a thumbs-up. I looked back to his brother, relegated to the rear seat, who smiled dispassionately. We drove up the street, passed the pool table where the men waved to us, but then turned off the road and bounced towards a building with a red cross on the door.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“We’re just picking up something for a friend.”

A woman in a chüba (a knee-length Tibetan overcoat with sheepskin lining) and wearing a white nurse’s cap came out to greet us. The driver went inside and returned with a styrofoam box.

“You don’t mind putting this on the floor by your feet do you?” he asked me. “That’s the safest place for it – it’s medicine.”

He handed me the box and I tried to arrange it so that I still had room for my legs, which was impossible. Then we all waved to the nurse, who called out thank you to me and we continued out of town.

The driver had not exaggerated about the road. He couldn’t drive more than a few kilometres an hour as he weaved back and forth to avoid the worst pits and ruts. It was like riding a mechanical bull swerving and bucking in slow motion. We passed through white hills scattered with wild yaks, black

Zen moment: motorcycle maintenance, no repair shop required.

On the road from Qumalai to Qumahe.

122

The Road to Kekexili

and immobile, and Tibetan marmots darted across the road and into their holes. It must have been close to hibernation time for them because grass and earth showed through in some places, but soon the whole landscape would be covered with snow.

From the back seat the brother reached past me and jabbed the cassette deck with a pair of scissors until a cassette popped out. He twirled the tape on one of the scissor blades to rewind it, then handed it to me to stick back in the slot, whereupon twangy Tibetan folk songs accompanied us scratchily down the road.

I felt happy, fronting the landscape, feeling like it was my own eye that pulled us forward. The hills and valleys looked as though they had been chewed by a dog, the edges all gritty and crumbled. The earth shone dark and wet where it showed through the snow, along alluvial washes or in the clefts of hills. We joggled down a stream bank and crossed black stones in a silvery current, a film of ice on the surface in the eddies.

After two hours we came to a faint turn-off towards a swale at the seam between two mountains.

“This is where we live,” the driver said. “You don’t mind if we stop for a minute, do you? We haven’t been home in two weeks.”

We rolled up a dirt incline and parked in the bare yard before an earthen home. Two women stood by the doorway, squinting at us against the sun.

The brothers jumped out, trotted to the door and clasped them in arms like big bear traps. Then they stepped back and bent their faces to the tiny baby each woman held. Both brothers, usually stoic and staid, broke into rhapsodic smiles and held the infants to their chests, kissing their wives and bubbling with baby talk.

They invited me in and offered me a red velvet chair in a sitting room with a big brick stove at the centre, leaking smoke. The walls were made of earth and straw, the floor was brick and the ceiling was papered with gold foil.

A wooden cabinet three metres across held glasses, cups, plates, bowls and pans. The back wall was a crazy juxtaposition of tacked-up images: posters of bodhisattvas and lamas, reproductions of thankas, a photograph of Mao Zedong meeting the Dalai Lama, a staged picture of communist officials riding horses across a plain, a Chinese calendar with a cartoon peacock, motorcycle adverts cut from magazines, a poster of a Hong Kong movie starlet, kitschy kitten and puppy pictures and a schematic diagram of an engine.

123

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

The driver’s wife brought me a bowl of tea. She wore a dark woollen robe with a sky-blue apron, a magenta silk blouse and an embroidered brocade belt of gold and green. Her hair was pulled into a neat bun and held with shiny pins and she wore her chüba off one shoulder as she moved around the stove.

The sitting room and kitchen were combined, the two spaces and functions meshed into one. The brick oven in the middle of the room served as cooking stove and central heater; next to it the driver’s wife diced meat on a grooved and pitted cutting board concave with age and use. The other couple disappeared into another room somewhere. The driver sprawled out on a couch across from me and lit a cigarette, inhaling sensually.

“Are you in a hurry?” he asked.

“Who, me?” I just laughed.

“Ah, good, then we’ll take our time,” he said with a lazy grin. Meat sizzled in a big cast-iron pot and filled the house with the smell of the hunger that had been bouncing around in my belly for hours.

The other brother and his wife returned, leading an ancient woman by the hand, a grandmother, who sat down by the fire to play with the babies.

She too wore a magenta blouse beneath her robe, but it was faded and dun.

She wore her hair in thin double braids beneath a red and blue silk hat lined with sheepskin. Her eyes were milky blue, her face creased and slack. On her feet were yellow yak-hide shoes with long pointed toes that curled up at the sky.

The brother’s wife went outside and returned with a bag of yak dung, dumped it in a bin next to the stove and threw a scoop in to feed the fire.

She dunked barley noodles in a pressure cooker: at Kekexili’s high altitudes regular cooking can be protracted.

The women fried the noodles with spices and yak meat, then served them in bowls we sat holding in our hands as we ate. The driver’s brother connected a tape player to a car battery charged through a small solar panel propped against the front wall of the house. The scene was like that of a 19th-century American West homestead, with a family living in a subsistence economy, their 100 or more yaks scattered across the otherwise empty valley, no town or neighbour for many kilometres.

Neither of the wives spoke a word of Chinese, but they were kind and friendly and offered me a second serving of noodles. When we finished 124

The Road to Kekexili

eating the brothers began unloading the jeep – for the previous two weeks they had been in Yushu, the regional capital and market town to the south, selling farm products and buying market goods. They brought in boxes and unpacked several pairs of women’s shoes, purses, a mirror, jackets and hats.

All the goods were for the women and babies and the wives laughed and clapped their hands.

The brothers were clearly loath to leave their home after just returning.

I wandered outside, where snow melted from brown hills in the warm sun.

The valley flowed like molasses between ice mountains. There was nothing here, or everything, depending on how you looked at it. There was no commercial or material abundance, no upward mobility, no entertainment.

But there was no sense of lacking, of poverty or need either. There was a sufficiency, which is almost unheard of in the modern world – how many people ever feel they have “enough” in a market economy predicated on perpetual expansion? *** Icicles hung from the bumpers of the jeep despite the clear skies and autumnal sun. The brothers loaded a few boxes into the back, kissed their wives and babies, holding them as if they would never willingly release them, then turned and called to me and we piled in. They waved and shouted farewell as we backed out and turned round; then we continued towards the main “road”. Up ahead a fox, with a copper-gold body and a bushy, dark silver tail, trotted across the track like an omen.

“What’ve you got in the back?” I asked the driver.

“Just some things to take to Budongquan,” he said. “No reason to waste the trip.”

Before we reached the main track the driver turned and we thudded over a roadless stretch to another homestead. A bearish Tibetan man emerged suspiciously from a low earthen building but hailed us happily. He and the driver spoke to each other for a few minutes before he looked up, said something to me, then returned to his house.

“Just one minute, the driver said. He’s coming with us.”

“He’s what?”

“He needs to go to Budongquan. He’s a friend. You don’t mind, do you?”

125

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

The man emerged with a big bundle wrapped in canvas, then went back in for another load. Soon there was a large pile of goods, which the driver and his brother packed into the jeep, over-packing it, with boxes, duffel bags and parcels filling the back seat to the ceiling, so there didn’t seem to be room left for the man, but he wedged himself in somehow. I stacked a few things passed to me on top of the styrofoam box that sat where my feet should have been. The three men carried all this out with great good cheer; everyone was happy to ride down the road on my petrol dime.

We drove to the main road and turned north, the jeep still bucking and heaving, the cramped space we shared now filling with the rancid smell of the raw skins the man had brought. But as we clawed and hewed forward the landscape opened into ever-greater expansiveness. The hills subsided, mountains retreated and we passed out of a basin into a plain defined only by distant snow peaks low on the horizon.

The Kunlun Mountains at the northern edge of the Tibetan Plateau

Orange-red blossoms spilled across brown earth and grey stone. We passed a dead marmot with eyes closed and front paws drawn up against its chest.

The earth seemed to relapse into autumn, as if winter had not yet been able to encompass the breadth of the plain before us. A scattering of small gazelle-like 126

The Road to Kekexili

animals ran across the road, jumping and skittering like grease across a frying pan until they were nothing but small dots in a sea of grasses.

“What were those?” I asked.

“Huang yang,” the driver said. “Mongolian gazelles. Let me know if you want to take any pictures. We’ll stop for you any time.”

We turned west towards a gap between snow-veined hills and came upon a concrete building surrounded by boxy canvas tents. Suddenly dozens of children streamed around us, shouting and laughing.

The driver turned off the engine and smiled. “It’s a school,” he said.

We all left the jeep and the children grabbed our hands in greeting, shouting to me in English, “Hello how are you?” Then they ran across the road to a vast open space with two football goals several hundred metres apart. It was the largest, most spectacular football field in the world, taking up several hectares, with no defined touchlines, at 4,200 metres, ringed by snowy peaks.

The brothers took out the styrofoam box picked up in Qumahe and motioned me to follow them to one of the tents.

Inside, an old woman sat on a raised mattress fingering a wooden rosary, turquoise beads looped around her neck. The brothers went over and kissed her; the driver said, “This is my mother.”

She welcomed me with the warm benevolence of older women in traditional cultures, her face crinkling with every smile.

“She lives here?” I asked.

“Yes, she helps with the school.”

“But where do the students come from?”

“All around. They are locals.”

They were nomad children who gathered there for school and were taught in Tibetan and Chinese. I wanted to ask how the school came into existence, how the mother came to be there, but it was somehow too unwieldy to ask those questions so they sat obtrusively in my mouth, irrelevant, really, because it didn’t matter. Everyone smiled at me with friendliness and patience. I could only shrug and accept the complex relationships that formed the system I was moving within but would never understand. I would never truly know even the beginning of a nomad mind or heart. All I could do was observe and let as much as possible seep into my mind and blood.

127

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

The brothers opened the box, which was full of vaccinations for the children. We had a cup of tea from a pot on a stove moulded from mud, then prepared to leave.

“It’s getting late,” said the driver. “We still have a long way to go.”

Mountain shadows slanted across the plateau and a slalom of rivers reflected the sky. We all bundled into the jeep as the sun went down and the mountains turned blue in the sunset. Ponds pooled from winding streams and a pair of waterfowl alighted from a cobalt lake – mallard-sized birds with white heads, russet bodies and black tails.

The Tibetan Railway, Qinghai

128

The Road to Kekexili

“You want to take any pictures?” the driver asked. “Any time, just tell me, we’ll stop.”

As we rolled heavily up and down the road the cloak of evening spread across the sky, the plateau turning gold in sunset light, the horizon daubed aureate pink. Soon dark yawned around us, the black wilderness unbroken except for our headlights knifing through.

Night lay like a slab of steel across the plateau when faint glimmering lights appeared ahead. We passed under the strange elevated geometry of the Tibetan railway, hoisted above us on rounded pillars, obscuring an arcing swathe of stars; beyond it the Milky Way was a pulp of light smeared across the blackness of space.

We pulled into a truck stop in the crumple of shacks that comprised Budongquan. We stood in a stony yard speckled with shards of glass and plastic. Trucks blew by and compressed the air, slapping their speed against us. The jeep driver slammed his door with a hollow metal thud.

“Here you are,” he said. “Kekexili.”

A girl appeared in the doorway, holding a kerosene lantern spilling yellow light in puddles around her feet. We followed her into a makeshift shack nailed together with corrugated cladding and scrap lumber. The girl reminded me of a Tibetan princess I’d fallen in love with weeks before, in Litang, Sichuan Province. Djoma wanted to go to America so much she almost accepted the invitation to ride on the back of the motorcycle I had bought. This girl was like her in face and body, in the implicit electricity of her flesh and bones and especially in some aspect of escape that clung to her – except that this girl was much worse off, stranded at the edge of nowhere, working in a ramshackle siding with no hope of ever leaving, probably.

We sat around drinking tea, reclining like sacks of potatoes after two days on the road, our bones shaken loose and slack. The driver and his brother talked to the proprietor, the girl’s father, their feet kicked up on the stove as they sipped their tea. I paid the driver and took off my Hong Kong-fake Rolex, which he had admired, and offered it to him as a gift.

“It’s all right, maybe next time; you keep it for now,” he said with a casual handshake, as if we would be meeting again soon. The three men returned to the jeep and headed off to a friend’s place somewhere nearby. The driver’s brother waved to me from the front seat.

The girl showed me to a cot at the back of the truck stop, partitioned by 129

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

a sheet hung over a cord. My body was filmy with grit and dust. Away from the stove I shivered uncontrollably. I zipped myself into my sleeping bag, my feet hanging off the end of the cot.

I lay listening to the rush of lorries on the highway to Lhasa, the tongue of the empire lapping at the edge of the wilderness. I felt relief and dismay: I was lucky to make it down this road in two days and to arrive in Kekexili by the back door, yet I felt annoyance at returning to civilisation, in being back on the grid again. From here you could be in a metropolis in a day – just take the highway to Golmud, catch a flight to Shanghai or Beijing, or Tokyo, New York, London ‌ I fell asleep and dreamed of San Francisco, a shining city at the edge of America, a continent and an ocean away.

130

Cambodia Marshall Moore

G

oing to Cambodia is about bearing witness. Even so, nothing had prepared Gene Shephard for the sight of the limbless beggars, landmine casualties, wheeling themselves through the streets of Phnom Penh on makeshift carts, stopping to rustle cups of near-worthless banknotes at tourists.

He was similarly unprepared for the pedlar children herded out to the riverfront by a gruff adult handler every lunchtime and evening. He always wore a tight black T-shirt and black jeans. The children would go from restaurant to restaurant, table to table, accosting everyone who didn’t look Khmer. Dining out, Gene would be approached by three or four children all selling the same odds and ends: Lonely Planet guidebooks in English and French, postcards, a couple of silk scarves, even themselves, to tourists. He’d think, shouldn’t you be in school? And in a country without genocide in its recent past, he’d have been right.

His older sister Adele had been working for various NGOs in north Cambodia for almost a decade, long before it had become one of the don’tmiss stops on the Banana Pancake Trail. Early on, she sent him a packet of antique photographs and yellowed articles from newspapers, souvenirs she’d found in a market. Looking through the old photographs and clippings, Gene thought, so this is what time smells like, and sneezed three times. Here was somebody’s grandfather or uncle in Malacca. Other pictures showed people of similar vintage at the Raffles Hotel in Singapore and The Strand in Rangoon. Gene, just out of high school then, could almost hear the churning 131

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

of the ceiling fans and the scratchy music on the radio. His virgin passport cried out for a good stamping. Lacking ties to any other part of the world, it was inevitable that he would follow in Adele’s footsteps after college and graduate school. * * * Gene’s mother disliked the idea of his saving the world from Cambodia, as she put it. He could do just as much from an office in Manhattan or London or Geneva. But Phnom Penh?

“There are landmines, dear.”

“Uhh … yeah. Didn’t you try that on Adele before she left?”

Silence at the end of the line.

“There are also diseases,” Gene said. “The kind that rot you from the inside out. Fungal infections too and huge insects that drink blood. And there’s not much to do at night, I’ve heard. There’s good broadband though, so you’ll be able to send lots of emails about my impending death.”

“I suppose it’ll be convenient. I can email both of you at the same time.

Who knows? Maybe you’ll rediscover your sanity over there and come home on the same flight.”

“Because America is such a safe country,” Gene said, angrily. “How many people were gunned down on college campuses this week?”

“Just three,” she said.

“That’s down from last week. I’ll call my travel agent first thing in the morning.”

“Of course you will.” After a long silence he refused to break, she said, “Well, have fun pulling tapeworms out of your ass,” and hung up.

By the time Gene left the US his mother’s spasm of irrationality had ceased, but he could tell she hated the idea of having two of her three children in such an unstable place. Even if Cambodia had more boutique hotels than bombs these days, she seemed determined to believe no good would come of it. * * * Gene regretted agreeing to have dinner and a couple of beers with Beverley and Ewan, two of his NGO colleagues. They discussed the concept of 132

Cambodia

consensus building longer than he’d have thought possible, overlooking the reports they had ostensibly been hired to scrutinise. Words like praxis and privilege ricocheted off every eardrum.

“You’re awfully quiet, Gene,” said Ewan at one point.

“I’m American. We don’t have conversations like this. We blow up small countries and call it democracy.”

“Right then.” Ewan turned back to Bev and picked up where he’d left off.

Gene zoned out again; he thought about Adele, whom he had seen exactly once in the six months he’d been in Cambodia. Always something of a fixer, she wanted to wipe away every tear, splint every broken limb and give away every last cent when confronted by the bitter side of life. She was at her best when there were things to repair. In fact, Adele’s overbearing maternal instincts had driven a wedge between her and their younger sister, Samantha.

In the aftermath of their parents’ divorce, Adele tried just a little too hard to be nurturing. With their father gone, she tried being a surrogate parent.

Gene mostly ignored her, but Samantha’s cactus-like personality allowed no forbearance. Adele’s first attempts at establishing rules saw her screamed at. Her caretaker’s ardour cooled after that. So did her relationship with Samantha and after Adele went away to college they barely spoke. Gene suspected his relationship with Samantha was the real reason Adele wouldn’t see him. It was something she couldn’t fix.

When Ewan mentioned a forthcoming conference in Siem Reap, Gene snapped back to the present. This was the first he had heard about it.

“Why there?” Gene asked. “Aren’t most of the participants based here in Phnom Penh?”

“Why not? It’s a nice place and we actually need to spend some of our money?” he asked mockingly.

Is anyone as smug as a politically left-leaning NGO-bot in his or her 20s with the ink on his or her master’s degree barely dry? Gene thought.

And why are these idiots talking shop? Haven’t they noticed we’re not at the office?

“No, it’s a good thing. I think. My sister’s up there. I’m just curious why we don’t do it here,” Gene said.

They looked at him as if he had drunk too much and belched at a fundraising dinner. Bev attempted to be delicate and explained it as if Gene hadn’t already figured it out for himself.

133

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

“Of course we need to spend more if we want to justify requesting more.

Isn’t that how the NGO world works? ” Ewan stopped eating long enough to fish in a pocket for some riel to give to one of the children who had approached the table to beg.

“Earth to Gene,” Bev said.

“Sorry, I was off in space.”

“Do you need to get laid?” Ewan asked. “If you do, it shouldn’t cost much. Stay away from the little kids though – that’s sick.”

“I’m not interested in kids,” Gene said, thinking that shouldn’t have needed pointing out. “I was an uncle until right before I came here. Let’s leave it at that.”

In the silence that followed Gene asked himself what the hell he’d been thinking. It wasn’t as if he and his colleagues were close or even liked each other that much. In proximity, isolation from the rest of the world mimics intimacy. Like being in jail, he supposed: outside, you’d never hang out with your thug of a cellmate who made ends meet by robbing convenience stores.

Inside, you just find a way to make the time pass. You work with what you have on hand. * * * Saturday. Several days had passed, none much different from the one before.

When he walked, he watched his step: the sidewalks were cracked and crooked and someone was always hobbling up to him to beg or to peddle.

As the weeks turned into months, the initial barrage of email histrionics (“Oh my God what are you doing going to Cambodia, are you trying to get yourself killed?”) dropped off. His friends became wrapped up in their job searches, their new marriages, their mundane lives. At times, Gene had the feeling certain people wanted to check in more to see whether he had caught leprosy yet than out of any real desire to catch up. Besides, as long as he updated Facebook now and then (preferably with pictures of hungry-looking brown-skinned children, so everyone would know How Much Good He Was Doing), the people in his life would know he still had a pulse.

Gene heard the least from his sisters. Because they hated each other, this didn’t surprise him; it just made him weary. Adele was staying in Cambodia 134

Cambodia

because it was her way of blocking the column of tanks with her body or offering a flower to the soldiers at the barricades. There was an asceticism in it. There was also a self-serving aspect: as long as she remained in the relative safety of the Third World she wouldn’t have to deal with the messy realities of her own life. * * * Dear Gene, Now that you’ve been here long enough to start seeing things more like the locals do, here’s a question for you. How many things here have outlived their usefulness? Someone keeps a beautiful old Citroën parked on the street near my home. It’s one of those cars you see in old movies. I recognised it, but I never knew what it was called. So I wikied it – it’s a Traction Avant – and I’m in love. In fact, it’s for sale. I’d buy it, but what would be the point? Where would I park it?

Who’d keep it from falling apart from neglect, since I wouldn’t drive it to work or anywhere else? The car must have served some purpose, sometime in its history; now it exists mostly to be an ornament.

I could hire a moto driver – on an average day I pass 17 of them – but it’s only a few blocks. The walk gives me time to think.

Sometimes the confrontation with Cambodian reality turns grim, but I can’t turn away from it: to do so would defeat the purpose of being here. The Cambodians don’t get many opportunities to turn away. Why should anyone else? Besides, life in the US confers no exemption from reality: a nut with a gun in a mall, a botched medical treatment, a lapse in insurance at a critical time … frailty is universal.

We’re never as far from the margin as we’d like to think. Maybe the Khmer Rouge had a point, instituting Year Zero? Everything old is … out the window, like so much garbage? They just … botched the implementation. Badly. You don’t literally throw the baby out with the bath water, but that’s just what they did. So tell me: why are you here?

Love, Adele

135

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

* * * And Samantha had lost her first and only child. She was bound to want to hide under a rock for a while. The tiniest interactions overwhelmed her. She said she saw children everywhere: other people’s children. The ones who had lived, when hers hadn’t. Although Gene understood all these things, he wished Adele and Samantha would reply to his emails more often. And sometimes he was glad that they didn’t. * * * The one time Adele consented to a weekend visit the sight of her shocked Gene profoundly. He hadn’t seen her for five years. She looked older, of course. She’d lost weight and gained grey hair, but the change that made Gene queasy was the broken look on her face. She couldn’t help everyone and was now old enough to know it. She couldn’t curtail the corruption as property developers swooped in and bought up the country from under the feet of its people. She couldn’t protect children from stumbling on landmines in remote spots. She couldn’t hang a mosquito net around every bed and serve three meals a day to every child delirious from starvation. Her time in the country had taken a toll.

Oh, she dressed well, as always. She’d chosen a deep green silk blouse to go with a sharply creased pair of khaki pants and woven leather sandals. But she never seemed to be more than 80 per cent there. For too much of their afternoon together and most of their dinner, her eyes stayed on a point in space somewhere beyond Gene’s left shoulder. * * * Gene went for a walk.

Phnom Penh is a fairly large city with a population of about a million people. Or two. Who’s counting? That’s a far cry from New York or Tokyo, but it’s still a big mass of humanity. At night, he could almost hear the crackle and thump of sidewalks being rolled up. There were signs of life along the riverfront: the cafés and bars on the Tonle Sap stayed open late and if he ventured a little farther west he could usually find a modest crowd out drinking, dancing and shooting one another at the Heart of Darkness bar.

136

Cambodia

The power went off at about 11.30pm. Gene had left the apartment only 10 minutes earlier. He saw the streetlights fade to black; TVs dimmed, stereos slowed down and stopped: the cumulative sound was like a loud electronic meow in reverse. A blanket of silence smothered everything.

Sudden sunlight after emerging from an afternoon movie would cause him to squint, blink, and sneeze; similarly, his brain took a few seconds to process the abrupt absence of noise. At first he heard nothing at all. Gradually, sound returned: the chirp and whirr of insects, the dull roar of cars and motos in the distance, the susurrus of the humid night-time breeze.

It’s too quiet, Gene realised, as he walked towards the riverfront.

Then he hit his head against the roof of a vendor’s cart parked behind a high shrub. A hot burst of pain knocked the world off its axis. His legs wanted to give out but he held himself upright by force of will. Call it a vestige of hygiene-obsessed American prissiness, but he couldn’t stand the idea of touching the sidewalk with anything other than the soles of his shoes.

People spat on it, squashed bugs, urinated, threw up.

After roaming the darkened streets for another 10 minutes he found his way home. Panting, sweaty and itchy, he sat on the floor inside his front door. When the lights came on again he rebooted his computer and refreshed his Gmail account. There were several new messages: the usual batch of Facebook updates, plus one from each sister. He glanced outside to see what colour the moon was. He opened Adele’s first: Dear Gene, Are you sure you know what you’re doing here? I know I always ask you that, but are you sure you know what you’ve gotten yourself into? Today at work one of the boys told me that there’s a new church-sponsored group up in Oddar Meanchey and the other border provinces. Landmine country. The Xians are going in and proselytising the amputees. I heard today that one of their aid workers – one of the preachers they shipped in fresh from universities like Bob Jones and Oral Roberts – was arrested after castrating two boys who’d been caught having sex together. Get this – he’d talked their parents into giving permission. Permission! To cut off their sons’ dicks! Who gives permission for that? One of the boys bled to death and the other had to be rushed to Thailand for treatment. The 137

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

doctors were able to reattach his penis. Apparently Thai surgeons are good at sewing them back on. Sometimes I think this country is being overrun by outside people with agendas – religious nuts who want to save souls, even if they have to kill their converts to do it, corporations who want to buy everything that’s not nailed down and sell it back to the citizens at a 200 per cent mark-up. And what do we do, in the NGO? We take note. We file reports. With photos and bar graphs. Sometimes I hate myself for being here and I hate you too now that you’re a part of it.

Love, Adele

Gene thought Love, Eeyore might have been more appropriate. Samantha was more laconic: I know you’re not busy so I’ve booked a ticket already. See you in a couple of weeks.

Gene checked her flight details: Asiana from Los Angeles, connecting in Seoul. So much for hiding under a rock.

He thought for a moment.

So much for hiding under a rock, for both of them. They just didn’t know it yet. * * * “What the fuck did you do to your head?” Ewan barked, Monday morning.

Gene had barely set foot in the office.

“I was taking a late-night walk when the power went out,” he said. “And I bashed my head against something in the dark. A vendor’s cart, or something.

I couldn’t see a thing.”

“Looks nasty,” Bev said. “I’m surprised your skull wasn’t cracked.”

“If I show any signs of brain damage call my mother back in the States, all right? Tell her all her worst fears have been confirmed.”

“God, she sounds like my mother,” Bev said. In a thicker accent – Gene could tell it changed but didn’t know what region to associate it with; he still 138

Cambodia

just heard New Zealand when she spoke – she said, “‘Going to CamBOdia, Beverly? CamBOdia? Why don’t you just go to RWANda or one of those places?

BuRUNdi? Or just go to a university SCIence lab and inJECT yourself with some HANtavirus?’ Can’t you see it? Me, in a lab, like in one of those airtight isolation rooms you see in the movies, with a needle stuck in one arm and a stupid look of relief on my face? Yes, Mummy was right, and everything will be so much better once I’m dead!”

She punctuated this by sticking out her tongue, crossing her eyes, making a ghastly choking noise and collapsing to the floor.

“My God, Bev. Was that … a sense of humour? Were those … comic antics?” Ewan exaggerated the astounded note in his voice, clapped a hand over his forehead and sank to the floor next to Bev. He pretended to pass out.

“That carpet looks comfortable,” Gene said. “Have we vacuumed it recently? Maybe I should lie down too, but I’m concerned about my flesh wound becoming infected.” * * * Gene had been warned that people didn’t last long in Phnom Penh – and now his own case of expat ’flu was sinking in. How had Adele done it? Every time he heard from her he wondered what it meant to be coping and whether longevity abroad was really such an accomplishment. The imminence of Samantha’s arrival made his doubts worse instead of better.

Bev once admitted she spent hours every night chatting online with friends back in New Zealand and Australia. Fortunately, Microsoft didn’t charge for instant messages. If they did, she’d have gone broke in her first week. You adapt, she said. You find a way. And if you’re not going to make it, be kind enough to give at least two weeks’ notice before you flee back to America? * * * Ewan liked whores. Gene didn’t think he was supposed to know this, but Phnom Penh was simply too small a city and the expatriate community too visible for his colleague’s predilections to stay hidden. Three times he 139

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

saw Ewan out with different Khmer women all dressed in that distinctly hyper-feminine manner that functions both as lure and price tag. The first time it happened Gene was still wide-eyed and jet-lagged, having been in the country about a week. Ewan came stumbling out of the Heart of Darkness, unsteady from too much drink, as Bev and Gene arrived.

Ewan introduced the woman – petite, perhaps in her early 20s, garish in a sequined minidress and heels, too much make-up slathered on a flinty face – as “my friend Dalit”. They didn’t stick around for conversation. At first Gene hadn’t suspected her of being a prostitute; a week later, when he saw her in the same dress leaving with a much older white man, he made the connection.

“Don’t tell him you’ve figured it out,” Bev said when Gene asked. She looked uncomfortable, as if she’d put on damp clothes by mistake. “This is a good place, but it’s a hard place to live too. Ewan … he’s a little out of control, but … it’s Cambodia. Just look the other way.” She looked around the office to make sure no one was in earshot, then dropped her voice to a whisper: “I even saw him with two at a time once. They were leaving the Heart of Darkness together … and one was a guy!”

Gene wanted to go out. The hours were clawing at him. He tried to make himself comfortable on the sofa with John Burdett’s The Godfather of Kathmandu. Half an hour passed; he hadn’t turned the page, but he felt obliged to keep reading because he’d been following this series since its beginning, Bangkok 8. How long did a Westerner have to live in Asia before he could claim a near-native understanding of how things worked? Gene wondered if he’d be in Asia long enough to find out for himself.

His eyes were closing of their own accord but it was too early to go to bed. Thinking there must be something on TV he set the book aside. The Very Large Array of satellite dishes on the roof gave him about a thousand channels and there was still nothing on. And then the lights went out.

Gene took a moto to the waterfront and started drinking beer, more intimidated by Samantha’s pending arrival than he liked to admit. Not the touchy-feely sort who wanted to process her grief (unlike their older sibling in Siem Reap), Samantha would insist she’d moved on: “The way out is through.” It was an act. Inside, she hadn’t stopped screaming since the baby’s death. And now, she and her screams were on an Asiana flight somewhere over the Pacific, or China, or … he had no idea. Somewhere.

140

Cambodia

Three Angkors later he didn’t feel refreshed or relieved, just listless. She would be arriving in the morning. For the next couple of weeks he’d be walking the minefield of what not to say. He motioned for the waitress to bring the bill, gave her exact change and fled. * * * Phnom Penh’s airport is a handsome structure: new, immaculate and French; all soothing earth tones, terracotta tiles and discreet halogen lighting in recesses. Even in the immigration and baggage-claim areas there are Angkorera artefacts on display. It is an excellent if somewhat misleading introduction to an otherwise shambolic country.

In the arrival hall Gene saw the usual throngs of jabbering middleaged Korean women with faces half-hidden by oversized sun visors; tour groups of mainland Chinese in matching polo shirts and baseball caps; and the assorted dreadlocked Westerners lugging monstrous backpacks.

Samantha’s flight had arrived early and, true to form, she was nowhere to be seen.

He walked around, scanning Western women’s faces and beginning to feel as if he might be wearing a groove in the floor. The moment he parked himself by the doorway touts swarmed around him offering tuk-tuk rides, tour packages, hotel rooms, hookers.

“There you are.”

Gene jumped. The last time he’d seen her she had cut her hair and had unfortunate highlights put in. He remembered thinking, “Who’s this suburban frump and where’s my sister?” Today she looked like a more gaunt version of her former self: hair back to her natural brown, sweatshirt tied around her shoulders, simple black T-shirt and jeans. Maybe she’d taken advantage of the distraction created by one of the pestering touts to sneak up on him.

“Have you been sitting there long?”

“No, I walked around. It’s not a big airport. How did we miss each other?”

“Ladies’ room. I’d been holding it since somewhere over Vietnam.”

Gene stood and offered to pull her wheeled suitcase, but she wouldn’t let him.

141

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

“Flights all right?”

“Best ever,” she said. “Why can’t the American carriers be that good?”

“I don’t know. Unions?”

Samantha stayed with safe topics: the gassy passenger in the row ahead, the surprisingly decent meals, the terrible patch of turbulence they encountered about an hour and a half after take-off, the bizarre banana-republic ritual of obtaining a visa on arrival in Cambodia.

“You hand your application papers, your passport, your photos and the fee in US dollars to one … functionary in a uniform. Then he or she passes it to the functionary to the left. There are seven or eight other functionaries crammed up close to each other, like diners in a Tokyo sushi bar. After like 10 minutes I finally got my passport back. All that, just to put a big sticker on one page!”

“I remember,” Gene said.

“This isn’t a country, it’s a parallel dimension,” Samantha said. * * * Samantha couldn’t handle the children: neither those who flocked to their table to beg, returning with the mindless persistence of flies that no amount of shooing would chase away, nor those she saw in the street. When the children surrounded them before the menus had even arrived, her face crumpled. She rushed to the ladies’ room. Although Gene had warned her before they’d left his flat, words weren’t enough.

A waitress appeared, chased the children away and stormed outside to yell at their handler. Gene couldn’t understand a word, but her tone and angry gestures said more than enough. The goon looked chastened for a second or two, then recovered his tough-guy stance and, to save face, barked at a couple of his nearby charges.

“I’m sorry,” the waitress said afterwards. “Your friend – first time in Phnom Penh?”

“My sister. Yes, she got in this morning.”

“From America?”

“Los Angeles.”

“Mmm. She should eat some lunch. Then she’ll feel better.”

142

Cambodia

* * * “Stuart’s leaving me,” Samantha said, out of nowhere.

Gene’s hand stopped in mid-air: the slice of chicken in his chopsticks slid out of captivity and landed on his plate again with a splash of sauce.

“What?”

She nodded. “I’d seen it coming. We were having problems anyway. I know it’s naïve, but I actually thought the baby would make us work through them, and she didn’t. We weren’t getting any sleep, so most of the time we weren’t thinking clearly. Just stumbling through the days. And then … it happened. Now he says he can’t look at me without seeing her lying in her crib, not breathing.”

“So he’s taking off.”

She nodded.

“When I get back, he’ll be gone.” She ate a couple of bites of chicken although Gene could tell she didn’t want food and he doubted she could taste it. “How am I supposed to get my head around that? Have you got any fucking idea how lonely I feel right now?”

Gene shook his head and said he couldn’t imagine. He understood loneliness well enough, but expatriation is a chosen form of exile. No one asks to lose a child to SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome) and a husband right afterwards to SADS (sudden asshole disappearance syndrome).

“He’s tired of me crying myself to sleep every night. And since I can’t have another one, well, what good’s a woman without a womb, you know?”

“You didn’t tell me that part. Jesus. You can’t have more?”

“Nope. I’m a goddamn train wreck down there. But let’s not keep talking about this, all right? That’s enough sadness for one night.” * * * A friend from Toronto had told Gene about visiting Phnom Penh for the first time. Tom was afraid to leave his hotel at first. His civilised arrival at the airport in no way prepared him for the dusty poverty outside. His flight from Thailand arrived early in the evening, just as night fell. From his viewpoint on the descent, the lack of city lights had been alarming. On the ground, he was shocked to see shuttered businesses and dirty streets. People stood 143

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

around in large groups, seemingly doing nothing but talking. Most of the men were not wearing shirts, understandable in the oven-like temperature but disconcerting nonetheless. Tom said he couldn’t make out the expression on anyone’s face. Was it that dangerous mixture of envy and entitlement that precedes so much of today’s violence? People everywhere are sick of the rich, after all, and to the poor, wealth is just a matter of degree. Or were the milling locals merely observing, dismissing him as yet another in the long string of white tourists who came and went?

After breakfast the next morning Tom took his first cautious steps outside. When he wasn’t immediately swarmed by beggars he felt stabs of both relief and disappointment. Okay, so this wasn’t India. The sidewalks were manageable enough, but crossing the street? With no traffic lights?

The way the locals did, just by plunging in and counting on drivers and moto riders to see him? Obviously there was a way to do it, but his terrified anticipation of a mangling sent him scurrying back inside to take another nervous dump.

Samantha handled her first experience of Phnom Penh’s urban shock with surprising composure. She hadn’t travelled much: a couple of trips to Europe, spring breaks in the Caribbean and Cancún. To keep things light, Gene took her to shops selling craftwork by local artisans; the mark-ups were obscene but the goods still cheap by Western standards. Samantha draped shimmering fabric around herself, checking her reflection in a time-darkened mirror at the back of the shop.

“I should be mummified in this,” she said. “Wouldn’t that be glamorous?”

Gene nodded. “Yeah, it would. Except for the death part. And having your internal organs pulled out via your orifices. That doesn’t sound like much fun.”

She sneezed from the dust she’d inhaled. While most of the bolts of silk looked iridescent and new, those at the bottom of the shelves needed a good shaking. When she’d recovered from her attack she looked pensive, as if picturing fragments of her brain being fished out of her skull through her nasal cavity.

“Oh, I don’t know. I mean, if you’re dead, it’s not like you’re around to care what they’re doing to the meat sack,” she said. “How about this? I’ve always looked good in deep purple.”

“I’ll keep it in mind,” Gene said.

144

Cambodia

* * * When she insisted on going to the Killing Fields, Gene tried to talk her out of it. In the end, he couldn’t argue with her logic: anyone wallowing in self pity needed to visit a place like that to put everything back into perspective.

Yes, she’d lost a child and her marriage had broken apart. Mass graves would remind her that other people had gone through much worse.

“Mom told me something you’d said about Cambodia, how coming here was about bearing witness,” she said. “Even though she accused you of coming here for the poverty porn – Adele too – she was actually really impressed with that. So was I. That’s why I want to go to the Killing Fields.

I need to see the worst.”

What to do with something like that except comply? She couldn’t be told that there is no single worst. It’s a cumulative thing, a gestalt. Gene hired a tuk-tuk driver for the trip, a 20-minute journey south of the city.

Would this be dark enough for Samantha? Worst enough? The journey down there would be disorientating. He had done it a couple of times before: the loud two-stroke engine of the vehicle conspired with its torturerack suspension to pound the hell out of eardrums and skeleton. Along the way, corrugated-metal shanties lined the roads; naked children played in the shade. Dilapidated houses hugged the banks of ditches like ravines on either side of the road. Precarious stilts kept these places from tumbling down the overgrown slopes underneath, into the water. Every breath meant assault by hot dust, engine fumes, and that unique corpse-in-a-restroom stench given off by durians for sale at random roadside kiosks.

Gene had found the Killing Fields underwhelming. He couldn’t tell Samantha this, she would have to see it for herself. She’d arrive, no doubt expecting contorted, capering nightmares out of Goya or Dante. But that’s not how it works. At first glance, the place looks like a pasture. As soon as the tuk-tuk comes to a stop, or even before, several beggar children in threadbare clothes will race up to the vehicle imploring, “Give me dollar, give me riel,” in the faint, monotonous voices of ghosts. The graceful white stupa near the entrance is innocuous at first. It’s full of bones, organised by the sex and age of the victims they used to belong to. There is a stack of skulls from girls in their teens; femurs from grannies. More skulls from young men. A microcosmic necropolis. An index of the anonymous dead.

145

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

Before this, when Gene had thought of a mass grave, he imagined a charnel house: bodies stacked like firewood, limbs strewn across the ground, blood soaking into the soil. The reality is so much simpler: just a deep hole with a puddle of muddy water at the bottom. The bodies have long since been exhumed – those that could be retrieved, anyway – and the holes left behind, gradually filled in by the elements. A closer look reveals something wrong with the soil.

On his first visit, Gene had squatted down to find the fabric of victims’ clothes forming a matrix with the earth, decomposing but still identifiable.

For more than three decades, the clothing of the dead had been knitting itself into the ground. That was when the wallop of horror arrived.

Gene followed Samantha, waiting for her moment of impact, but her expression barely changed. She said little. He had a feeling she wanted to ask, this is all? Later, after a few Angkors in one of the waterfront bars, maybe she’d find the words.

No talking on the ride back: the tuk-tuk was too loud and too rattly.

The driver dropped them off at Gene’s building, accepted his payment and zoomed away, leaving a thick cloud of dust and diesel fumes in his wake.

“That was …” Samantha searched for a word. “Grim.” * * * Hi Adele, The conference starts on July 4, so I’ll be pretty swamped for a couple of days. I’m staying on after that and my colleagues are flying back to PP to get back to work. I’ve been in Cambodia for months and have only seen you once, for dinner. Stop hiding, all right? I’m going out to the temples. Let’s meet on the 7th and do a bit of sightseeing.

We don’t have to talk about anything you don’t want to talk about.

I just want to see you, all right? There’s a restaurant called the Blue Pumpkin. My co-worker Ewan, the British guy, told me to check it out. Upstairs they’ve got lots of big white sofas and ice-cold air-con.

That’s where I’ll be. It’s a Saturday, so I know you won’t have to work.

We can have breakfast, drink some coffee and head up to the temples when we’re ready. Don’t say no.

– Gene 146

Cambodia

They’ll probably both hate me for this, Gene thought after sending that message. Not probably. They will both hate me for this. * * * Siem Reap is a town like few others, elevated above dusty Cambodian obscurity by its proximity to Angkor. Samantha hated it. Beggars accosted them at every turn, offering the same packs of postcards and guidebooks hawked in Phnom Penh. Bolts of silk in rich hues shone with a low luminosity in shop windows. The price tags on the porcelain knick-knacks displayed in one shop made her sniff in contempt.

“At least there’s no McDonald’s,” she said.

“That’s something.”

Gene neither liked her attitude nor understood it. Being able to buy a damned good espresso and choose from a range of excellent New Zealand wines in the restaurants meant people had jobs. Finding steamed barramundi or Cantonese-style dumplings stuffed with foie gras on the menu didn’t mean traditional fare like rice noodles and stir-fried morning glory was on the way out. But her views seemed to be an offshoot of a free-floating rancour towards the world and she was aiming at the easiest targets: globalisation and multinational corporations, something Western visitors to Asia often did.

When they left their guesthouse to walk to the Blue Pumpkin, Samantha loosened up a little, but her demeanour remained dour.

Gene tried to talk her out of it: “You’re acting like we’re cultural terrorists with dynamite strapped to our love handles, going out there to blow up the relics.”

“You have love handles?”

“Fuck you. Cellulite. You’ve got every reason to be mad at the world right now, but … enough is enough, Samantha. Hating the town because you can actually find decent food in the restaurants? What good does that do? It’s like you’re pissed off at the whole country because you can’t hear landmines going off in the distance and too many people still have both legs. Did you come here because you wanted to be surrounded by people more miserable than you are? Is that it?”

She couldn’t say anything to that.

Gene continued: “The people here are rebuilding after horrors you and 147

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

I can’t even begin to conceive of, and how dare you take that away from them? If you wanted that kind of comfort you should have stayed home and watched horror movies. What number is the Saw series up to? If you want amputations so badly, there you go.”

She had no chance to answer because as soon as they set foot in the Blue Pumpkin Adele greeted them. Adele looked more robust than she had on the last visit, or at least less wan. The sunburn pink of her cheeks and her nose told Gene she’d had some fresh air and her sensible outfit – walking shorts, hiking sandals and a long-sleeved white shirt – suggested she wasn’t intending to flake out at the last minute. But at the sight of Samantha her jaw dropped open and stayed that way.

“You …” Samantha muttered to Gene. “You set this up.”

“It sucks to be in the middle. Now be a grown-up, Samantha, and say hello to your sister. We’re going to have breakfast, like grown-ups, then we’re going up to the temples. Together. And if you don’t like that, give me back my apartment key. You’re on your own.”

Samantha glowered but greeted her sister and even consented to hug her.

Adele just looked poleaxed.

After they had seated themselves and been served, Samantha said Gene had some explaining to do.

“Adele, remember emailing me about an old Citroën near your home?

That idea that some things outlive their usefulness stuck with me. But some things don’t. I mean, no one in their right mind would say the temples here have outlived their usefulness. People don’t live in them, but they bring money into the country …”

“Not everything’s about money, Gene,” Samantha said.

“Try telling that to somebody who lives at the garbage dump in Phnom Penh,” Gene said. “So this pissing contest of yours. I’m tired of it. I can’t tell Samantha this or Adele that … honestly? Screw you both. Mom feels the same way. Either you find a way to deal with each other, or …”

“Or what?” Samantha demanded. “You’ll quit talking to us both? Or push us off the side of one of the temples?”

“Don’t tempt me,” Gene said. “Eat your food. It’s getting cold. Look, you don’t get along, but a lot of it’s got to do with shit from when we were kids.

Samantha, we’re in our 20s. Adele’s in her 30s. We’re not children.”

“That’s very mature of you,” Adele said.

148

Cambodia

“See! This is the kind of shit I can’t stand.” Samantha pushed her plate towards the centre of the table and tensed as if to stand up and storm out.

“That condescending maternal shit. You’re not even a mother, Adele.”

“Neither are you,” Adele said.

Samantha jumped up and ran to the restroom.

“Good job,” Gene said. “That’s the second time on this trip she’s had to go to the loo for a meltdown. Go clean up your mess.”

Adele looked terrified. “But I can’t, I mean I just … what I just said …”

“Go.” * * * The approach to Angkor Wat – the main temple, the one that synecdochically represents the whole complex – was breathtaking, not from awe at approaching one of the architectural wonders of the world but from the long walk across the Naga causeway under the H-bomb heat of the sun.

Inside, the temperature was markedly lower thanks to the thick stone walls.

After a few minutes of relaxing and catching her breath Samantha almost looked cheerful. Angkor is like that, though: no matter what visitors may be preoccupied with, they forget to brood. The archways and apsaras demand attention.

Adele wouldn’t tell Gene what she’d said to Samantha in the ladies’ room at the café and Samantha, true to form, barely spoke during the tuk-tuk ride north from town. She hadn’t raced out though, nor returned Gene’s apartment key. That had to mean something.

Because it was Samantha’s first visit they scaled the heights of Angkor Wat, straight up the same towers featured on Cambodia’s flag. She surprised Gene in her willingness to tackle the near-vertical staircase at the structure’s highest point. Although a rudimentary handrail had been bolted to the bare stone Gene didn’t trust it with his full weight. That didn’t stop him. He just knew what would happen if he were to slip. The only question was which bones he would break and how many. This rickety climb would never be allowed in the United States, yet people ascended to these skyscraper heights just for the view: temples poking above the canopy of palms like toys on a green carpet for several kilometres in every direction. A couple of college149

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

aged Korean men stood next to the three of them, snapping photographs and making the cheesy V-for-victory sign alongside their big white grins.

Next, the Bayon temple, some distance away. They needed the tuk-tuk for that, it was too far to walk. The Bayon featured serene, slightly eerie Buddhas carved in relief on every surface. Gene had always thought these Buddha likenesses benign, smiling with the same subtlety as the Mona Lisa, but he had seen them at sunset too. As the shadows grew longer the changing light altered their expressions. Were they as benign as they seemed, or simply ironic? * * * Anyone would have considered Samantha a suicide risk and after what happened, Gene tried to tell himself there had been no signs. After six months in Cambodia he had come to know the appeal of embracing the dark. But he really hadn’t seen it coming. After the Bayon they went to Preah Khan, the temple made famous by the tree growing out of one of its walls.

Adele said she needed a rest and asked if they could call it a day when they were finished at there.

“Sure, but do you mind if we go back to the main temple?” asked Samantha. “I want to take a few more pictures from up top because I don’t think the first batch turned out.”

Adele beamed. Something she could help with. Gene didn’t mind either: Samantha’s camera was new and she hadn’t figured out some of the controls.

He expected her to stay on the lowest level but she gamely climbed the staircase-ladder.

Samantha was subdued, even quieter than usual, but that made sense: they’d spent all day climbing temples. They were all at a low ebb. Samantha surveyed the surrounding landscape: towers like periscopes above the treeline.

“Here,” Adele said. “Let me see. You’re trying to take a picture of …”

“I don’t need your help, Adele,” Samantha said.

Without warning, Adele turned and jumped from the highest point.

Gene caught one last glimpse of her face. It was just a glimpse, a splitsecond image of her in mid-air, but it answered the question in his head.

The look on her face wasn’t fear, or remorse for what she had just done. It was relief, even rapture, as if she’d discovered the secret of flight. No more 150

Cambodia

needing to fix things. No more reminders that some things were irreparable.

And when he turned back in horror, on Samantha’s face he saw pure envy.

No matter how many times she repeated the phrase “the way out is through”, in her heart she longed to be airborne for a moment too.

Adele had attained her own Year Zero. And Samantha found she had something in common with her elder sister after all: she could look up to Adele by looking down at what was left of her.

151

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

Honeymoon: Mao-kong Gondola (2010) by Yao Jui-chung. Handmade Indian khadi paper, drafting pen, gold leaf, acrylic, 140cm x 100cm. Courtesy of Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong.

152

Living in the 14th century: E.M. Forster in Dewas Anjum Hasan

I

n 1953 E.M. Forster published what he called a record of a vanished civilisation. “Some will rejoice that it has vanished. Others will feel that something precious has been thrown away amongst the rubbish …” He meant the tiny kingdom of Dewas, about 25 miles from the city of Indore in central India, which with independence and the gradual fading away of the princely states effectively fell off the map. For six months in 1921 Forster was private secretary to Maharajah Tukoji Rao Ponwar of Dewas.

Employer and employee remained consistently hazy about the function of a private secretary, it apparently being crucial for an Indian maharajah to have an English secretary but immaterial what he did with one. During his time in Dewas Forster sacked a dastardly driver, paid off a few small bills, participated in interminable Gokul Ashtami celebrations to mark the birth of Krishna, lent an ear to palace intrigues, was embroiled in an epistolary dispute with his predecessor, Colonel Wilson, played a card game called jubbu and sent home the vivid, delightful letters that make up The Hill of Devi.

When I visit Dewas, bearing a copy of the book that has sent me into mourning for that vanished civilisation each time I have read it, I imagine that just as The Hill of Devi breathes life into Dewas, Dewas maintains a half-century-old excitement about The Hill of Devi. I am, naturally, wrong.

A telephone call to the palace reveals that the present king is travelling and that the edifice – Anand Bhavan, where Forster stayed for those six months – is out of bounds to visitors. The stern voice of the custodian kills 153

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

Photographs from The Hill of Devi by E.M. Forster; Harmondsworth: Penguin (1965)

all hope of stumbling upon some amiable, toothless raconteur eager to gossip about 1921.

There is nowhere to go, therefore, but to Devi – up the hill to her shrine at the top, where Forster once went on an elephant with his visiting friend, Sir Syed Ross Masood. The elephant’s howdah started to slip on the journey up and later, when they visited Ujjain, the river bank was overrun by naked sadhus. Masood, inspiration for the character Aziz in A Passage to India and, at the time he visited Dewas, Education Secretary in the much more advanced state of Hyderabad, found it all a bit much. “After three days of Hinduism,” writes Forster in The Hill of Devi, “Masood retired with his clerks and his files to Hyderabad.”

The hill: Forster’s titular hero

The town is spread before me, all encompassed by the eye of Devi. The water tank whose breezes Forster enjoyed of an evening is a stamp-sized glitter in the sun and I can see the roof of the old palace – “inconvenient, dirty, dark and a hotbed of intrigue”. Anand Bhavan, the new palace, is on the outskirts of town. I decide to confront the unfriendly guard and go downhill to look for a rickshaw.

My first, surprised, thought on emerging from the avenue of trees off the Indore-Bhopal road and seeing Anand Bhavan is that Forster was wrong.

Of the abundance of appalling taste that bothered him in Dewas, this small palace was seemingly an exemplar. It turns out though to be a tumbledown 154

Living in the 14th century: E.M. Forster in Dewas

but still elegant, compact, yellow and white villa-sized structure, built in a style that came to be called Indo-Saracenic, with arched verandahs running around its sides and a plaque elaborating in ornate prose the history of its construction and the date of its inauguration: January 12, 1911.

I can picture the airy, high-ceilinged rooms where Forster sat writing letters home when not despairing about the manuscript of A Passage to India that he had brought with him. (It was not until he returned to England that he was able to complete it.) I want to see the rooms but the present king has his quarters in some of them. I am prevented from going inside or taking photographs by the half-dozen men – all apparently caretakers of different denominations – who have emerged from various niches in the grounds.

One stands on the balcony of a recent-looking extension to the palace and bellows in answer to my appeals: “Impossible!” I wish Forster were at hand to mitigate disappointment with scintillating prose, or at least good humour.

Another caretaker, less categorical about what is and is not possible, makes a failed attempt to find me the king’s mobile phone number – then a successful one. I try it; the phone is switched off. I wander around the grounds disconsolately with a watchful guard following. At the rear, peering through the slats of a tall, wooden gate, I see the back gardens and suddenly there it is! It is possible to transpose one of the photographs in The Hill of Devi – an outdoor scene in which Forster and friends play cards against the background of Anand Bhavan – onto what I am seeing. The hedgerows are new but everything else is identical, right down to the pattern of the wrought-iron railings, the bricks in the building’s plinth and the carved points of the wooden screens hanging from the verandah arches. I proudly

The maharajah speaks to his brother during a game of jubbu on the palace lawn. Forster sits in the centre of the group.

155

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

show the picture in my book to the guard and he, not unwilling to share in the excitements of the past, points to Forster in his Indian clothes and says, yes, that’s the king.

I climb back into the waiting rickshaw and take off to see the guest house where Forster stayed on his first visit to Dewas (Christmas 1912) and which he thought of as a “dark red dump”. It is today, although it is still possible to discern, in its simple lines, that almost 100 years ago this was, in architectural terms, a close cousin to Anand Bhavan. I am stumped again

by Forster’s convictions about ugliness. Did he really think so or was it just more charming to make things out as ghastly? This is a danger he was aware of. Looking back over the letters that make up The Hill of Devi, he writes in his preface that one of their shortcomings was that they were written to “amuse”; he was apt to be “too humorous and too conciliatory, and too prone to turn remote and rare matters into suburban jokes”.

Among these remote and rare matters was Forster’s deep admiration for the king, whom he called Bapu Sahib.

In no essential did he ever fail me. Quite often I did not understand him – he was too incalculable – but it was possible with him to reach a platform where calculations were unnecessary. It would not be possible with an Englishman.

His highness mismanaged the kingdom as well as the royal household, yet was a cosmopolitan of the kind that is possibly extinct today. In speeches he would insert remarks such as, “One may sympathise instinctively with those who talk of race and nationality, but civilisation, which they often forget, is greater than these.” He spent long hours praying (“I am so very sorry. I am holy just now,”) and embroiled in palace politics. Yet friendship compelled him equally. Malcolm Darling, an English Indian civil service officer and his former tutor, was among his closest friends; they had studied Aristotle’s Politics together. Forster read to Bapu Sahib the essay written by Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay on Voltaire’s adventures at the court of Frederick the Great, which inspired the two to set up a literary society in Dewas. Forster recounts reading a paper to members of the society, in which he quotes from the Dostoyevsky story about the iniquitous woman and the onion: 156

Living in the 14th century: E.M. Forster in Dewas

She had been so wicked that in all her life she had only done one good deed – given an onion to a beggar … I had always thought this story touching, but I had no idea of the effect it would produce on the Dewas Literary Society. Hitherto they had been polite, bored, straining to follow. Now their faces softened, and they murmured, “Ah that is good, good. That is ‘bhakti’.” … Of the many English writers I had quoted not one had touched them. Their hearts were unlocked by a Russian.

Where in Dewas should one look for traces of the friendship between writer and king? My rickshaw driver, Mohammed Sheikh, who informs me he has won the Mr Gujarat bodybuilding championship twice (I’m not sure there’s a connection), is ready for anything. We head to the district collector’s office, also housed in a whitewashed Indo-Saracenic beauty called Laxmi Nivas. No one among the men who sit in gossiping huddles in various office rooms has heard of E.M. Forster. I am sent to the archives, where the librarian can tell me little about the history of the town but is happy to instruct me on the differences between a gazette and a gazetteer. “Why do you want to know about this Forster?” he asks me and I mumble something about being a writer. He grows mildly interested and asks his assistant to dig deeper into the shelves. Soon there is a pile of crumbling, dusty pamphlets before me on subjects such as how to grow melons and the 19th-century Indian Oath Act, but also a book on Dewas, in whose appendix is reprinted the treaty that the Dewas king signed with the British in 1818.

Successive Dewas kings were, like the rulers of most princely states, far more loyal to the British than to Indian nationalists. The terms of this relationship could be, judging from the treaty before me, simple, even crude: you maintain a certain number of horses and foot soldiers, which must be at our disposal, and we’ll protect you from the attacks of enemies and oversee all disputes. Yet from Forster’s account, a century on, of the political life of Dewas, pacts like these seem to have had immense longevity.

In other words, little had changed in Dewas. (“Politically – though not socially – we are still living in the 14th century,” wrote Forster to his friend Malcolm Darling.) Yet it is perhaps exactly this sense of timelessness that abetted those conversations and relationships to which Forster gave the name civilisation.

157

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

I realise that the only person who might still embody some traces of that other, older world is the king. I try his number again and find myself speaking to the first person in Dewas who has heard of The Hill of Devi and of the man who wrote it. The king, also called Tukoji Rao Ponwar and by my calculation the great-grandson of Forster’s king, is a member of the state legislative assembly and is at the moment busy campaigning for local elections in the villages around Dewas. He lives partly in the state capital Bhopal and partly in Anand Bhavan, and will be boarding a flight tomorrow from nearby Indore. He asks me to meet him in the airport’s VIP departure lounge.

I am there early in the chilly morning. Car after car starts to draw up before the lounge and ejects personage after personage, many of them politicians, judging by the security. I slip through the barricades and hurry after aides and guards, trying to identify the king. None of them is him.

When, after an hour of waiting, I call him again he is deeply apologetic. The campaigning held him back; he has had to cancel his flight. “Perhaps if you come to Bhopal some day …” he says kindly, trailing off.

On my way back from the airport I think of the questions I would have asked the king. Each comes from the vanity of believing that something of Dewas’ past is still graspable. Perhaps in pursuing the king, in being curious about the archives at the collector’s office, in trying to see the rooms where Forster lived, I am chasing phantoms. It is elsewhere that I should be looking for what is still precious among the rubbish.

An elderly, smiling couple proudly showed me around the small, well-kept Protestant chapel built in 1928, the oldest church in town. Mr Gujarat, my rickshaw driver, drove uncomplainingly around the hot streets all day, eventually taking me to the exact spot before the tank (Forster’s favourite place in all Dewas) from where the view of this water vessel, he was certain, mirrored that of a photograph in the book. And at the foot of the steps that led to the shrine there sat a curiously laid-back Muslim father and daughter, from whom I bought a mounted and framed picture of the Devi on the hill.

These are experiences of the sort that Forster might have valued, for if there was one thing he cared about it was the encounters of the present. As for the past, “Men have always misinterpreted the past and always will misinterpret it: the past must be left to its own dead who knew that it was alive.”

158

Living in the 14th century: E.M. Forster in Dewas

E. M. Forster in his private secretary’s finery.

159

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

The maharajah and members of his retinue.

160

Living in the 14th century: E.M. Forster in Dewas

Forster’s boss: Maharajah Tukoji Rao Ponwar in ceremonial attire.

161

Poetry Liu Xiaobo

You Wait for Me with Dust

for my wife, who waits every day

Nothing remains in your name, nothing but to wait for me, together with the dust of our home those layers amassed, overflowing, in every corner you’re unwilling to pull apart the curtains and let the light disturb their stillness over the bookshelf, the handwritten label is covered in dust on the carpet the pattern inhales the dust when you are writing a letter to me and love that the nib’s tipped with dust my eyes are stabbed with pain 162

Poetry by Liu Xiaobo

you sit there all day long not daring to move for fear that your footsteps will trample the dust you try to control your breathing using silence to write a story.

At times like this the suffocating dust offers the only loyalty your vision, breath and time permeate the dust in the depth of your soul the tomb inch by inch is piled up from the feet reaching the chest reaching the throat you know that the tomb is your best resting place waiting for me there with no source of fear or alarm this is why you prefer dust in the dark, in calm suffocation waiting, waiting for me you wait for me with dust 163

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

refusing the sunlight and movement of air just let the dust bury you altogether just let yourself fall asleep in the dust until I return and you come awake wiping the dust from your skin and your soul.

What a miracle – back from the dead.

164

Mrs Saichue Burlee Vang

S

weet rice simmers on the gas stove. A pot of boiling water under the bamboo steamer hisses. In the oven, cuts of salted jerky darken and crisp.

It is seven in the morning and already the furniture in 109 has been dusted, the linoleum floor swept, the tiled counters and dining table wiped. After 22 years of marriage, living in the same upstairs one-bedroom apartment in Fruit Valley, Mrs Saichue feels she must work harder than ever. Mai Nhia, the new girl in her home, is 19, childish and sleeps in.

A troubled mind can find quiescence when the body is absorbed in physical work. But despite her constant cooking and cleaning, today’s ultrasound appointment has distracted Mrs Saichue all week. How had she not noticed the nectarines near the sink going brown and growing mould? They had been a gift from Mrs Faidang, a middle-aged woman in the complex. For as long as Mrs Saichue can remember, Fruit Valley, with its bluish stucco walls rising two storeys high and sectioned into 30 apartments, its courtyard shaded by a few maple trees during summer, has been home exclusively to Hmong tenants. Everyone knows everyone, especially the women.

Mrs Saichue cleans the bowl, salvaging two pieces of fruit from the batch. She slices one, skins it and eats half. Yuepheng is a good boy’s name, she reminds herself as she swallows the sweet pulp. When she washes the stickiness from her hands she thinks again of what the doctor’s visit will confirm; though she can’t imagine a face, she can hear the child’s strong heartbeat, a pulsing, watery sound, a description she has heard from other women. Already she can see his hands in fists, tight and round as 165

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

quails’ eggs. She can hear his cry for milk and feel the weight of his body in her arms.

Mrs Saichue leaves the uneaten nectarine half on the windowsill above the sink. Outside, the morning air is moist and cold, with a blanket of Fresno fog that will lift before noon and settle again in the evening, when her husband is working his regular late shift. Bare maple branches look like veins against the grey February sky. Mrs Saichue notices these things whenever she peeks through the curtains, sometimes to watch the children playing in the courtyard or climbing the stairs, or skipping in the gravel parking lot, their exuberance quivering in the chilled air. Not many years from now, Yuepheng will do the same. At this hour the children are preparing for school, pushing their heads, hands and feet into sweaters and pants, rubbing sleep from their eyes, yawning over the rush of cold tap water as it slowly warms. Mrs Saichue entertains herself by thinking of the children, a cheerful ensemble in front of their teachers, though she has never been inside a classroom. She imagines them running around the playground at Lowell Elementary, where she and Saichue have watched them several times from their old Cressida.

She also thinks of their busy mothers, who tend small makeshift gardens cultivated in narrow beds of dirt under their apartment windows. In the afternoon they’ll heat their pots and pans, boil water and fry lard, tossing in chopped vegetables and meat and bones. Rice is soaked overnight and steamed manually, if one is meticulous about food preparation. Otherwise there is the “lazy rice” option of using an electric cooker, something Mrs Saichue never resorts to, despite owning one.

If the day allows, the women of Fruit Valley Apartments will visit one another. They’ll sit next to electric heaters and stitch paj ntaub while listening to the Hmong station on their radios, or put on one of the many romantic dramas filmed in Thailand that they’ve borrowed or come to own. But Mrs Saichue keeps to herself, always. And because of this, the other housewives address her only by her husband’s name, no doubt a polite and customary formality for persons of no relation, but an indication of impersonal distance nonetheless.

A month ago, while her husband was out of the country, Mrs Saichue had kept the curtains shut and the lights on at all hours. Twice she stepped out to buy pork and greens from the Hmong supermarket, the two occasions in those 22 years on which she had left home unaccompanied by Saichue. It 166

Mrs Saichue

was enough to stir the curiosity of the other female tenants. “I’ve never seen you shop alone, is Saichue sick?” Mrs Seng in 110 had asked the morning Mrs Saichue returned from Golden Triangle Foods. After her second trip to the store, as she passed the communal laundry room on the way to her apartment, Mrs Naolee and Mrs Thongkoua from 103 and 112, knowing her husband worked late, asked again why he was not with her. “He’s visiting family members in Thailand,” she replied, frisking her purse for her keys and almost dropping her grocery bags. She had pushed her way through the door before the two women could ask why Saichue had not taken her along.

But there had been no way to conceal the truth. Following his return the tenants had seen him with Mai Nhia, like a man with his daughter. It was impossible to keep the curious girl cooped up in the apartment. Not long ago the women had envied Mrs Saichue’s marriage, calling her and her husband a perfect couple, a devoted pair. “Saichue is such an affectionate man,” they said among themselves, “always treating her so tenderly.” But in their flattery there was pity. “What else can they live for but each other?” the housewives whispered. “They’d have less time for one another if there was a child to keep them on their feet.” * * * The housewives, meddlesome but good-hearted, had given Mrs Saichue herbal preparations to help conception. Mrs Saichue and her husband had learned about the problem at the local Vietnamese-owned clinic; gossip had informed their neighbours. Although Saichue, compassionate by nature, never implied that she failed him in marriage, his wife could not forgive herself after the doctor explained the cause. “A woman without a womb,” she imagined the housewives muttering behind her back. One day, as she was helping Saichue button up his work shirt, the word “adoption” escaped her lips. “It’s our only chance for a family,” she said. Saichue shook his head, rare as it was for him to reject her suggestions. She had thought about her older sister, and his siblings, who lived in other states; but to ask them for a child was out of the question, he said. He worried that an adoptee would not love and care for them in old age. She was in her 30s then but, despite a few strands of grey hair and half circles under her eyes, remained beautiful. Her stomach was still smooth and her hips narrow, unlike those of mothers. In his 40s, Saichue had grown heavy 167

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

around the gut and developed sleep apnoea. He also had high blood pressure.

But he was a good husband, unlike many of the married men in Fruit Valley, who spent their free time with friends fishing, hunting and cock fighting, or with other women, often demanding from their spouses more sons but not making enough to provide for the household. As a security guard, Saichue didn’t make much either. But they weren’t lavish spenders, and what he handed to Mrs Saichue every month was enough to support the two of them, enough to take her out some weekends or buy her a new dress. And after all that there was still some to put away, which she stashed inside an old, rusty pot, dented with wear, hidden in one of the lower kitchen cabinets. Saichue showed his affection for her publicly. Passing other wives on the apartment walkways, he was never afraid to stay beside her with a hand pressed gently on her lower back, and she was proud of that. When the Fruit Valley men talked about their mistresses, he scoffed at them; he told Mrs Saichue that he harboured no such desires. He was unchanging in his goodness to her, so she didn’t argue when he said a child for them must be his or hers only.

It was in their 16th year of marriage, on an evening when she was storing money in the rusty pot, that he asked, “Do you ever wonder how all that money will be spent?”

The question had crossed her mind time and again. She had pondered buying a house a few months before, and they had almost offered their savings for a three-bedroom flat a few blocks from Fruit Valley. Eventually, Saichue said there would be too much space, that all they really needed was a one-bedroom apartment. She agreed, not wanting to remain alone in a sizeable place while he worked.

“It’s good to have some savings,” she said. “The money will help us when you can’t work anymore.”

“I’ll have my retirement money to add to the pot when the time comes,” he said, looking down at his dinner of boiled pork and raw ginger.

After supper, when they had showered and slipped into bed, she reached for him and he clung to her. But no matter how tightly they held each other, trembling like young lovers again, the emptiness of the act seized them in the end. They woke up sometime during the night in the mess of sheets, sat up and stared into the darkness.

“You think all of our savings will be enough for a retirement home?” he asked.

168

Mrs Saichue

“Don’t be foolish,” she said. “We won’t survive in such a place. They treat old people badly. I’ve seen it on TV. They’ll beat us, make us eat what they cook and we’ll have no one to complain to. Don’t worry, I’ll take care of you.”

In the dark he chuckled to himself. “At least we’re not living in the old country.”

She asked why he said that.

“That saying about the childless and ageing,” he answered in a quivering voice. “That when there is no one to lend a hand, one will see firewood but no longer feel its burning warmth. One will hear the dripping of a spring but no longer have the chance to drink from it.”

Like many Hmong men and women of their generation, Mrs Saichue and her husband had been born in Laos and lived in refugee camps in Thailand after the American War. Despite their years in the United States, the old life always found its way into their conversations.

“This is America,” she said. “We don’t need to carry water from the river or chop wood for fire. We’ll never be too weak to feed and clothe ourselves.

Besides, we’re not that old yet. You’re just thinking too much.”

But they had all the time in the world to think. It was something you could do standing guard at Golden Triangle Foods until closing, cleaning the Cressida on a Saturday afternoon, rinsing vegetables at the sink, or counting the minutes until your husband arrived home from work.

Saichue yawned. “My snoring will keep you up,” he said, pulling the blanket over his shoulders and turning to face the wall. The doctor had recommended he combat sleep apnoea by lying on his side.

Soon she heard him breathing heavily but she couldn’t sleep. Her eyes roamed the dark as if trying to see the years ahead, and before the first wash of blue light soaked the curtains of their room she had reflected on all her life’s misfortunes.

It seemed her journey from Laos to the United States had been like waking from one obscure dream only to enter another. During the war her father had stepped on a landmine and her mother had remarried, leaving her and an older sister, as was the custom, in the care of their uncle. With his family they had eluded communist troops, crossed the Mekong River into Thailand and spent four months in Ban Vinai refugee camp subsisting on rations of rice, meat and cabbage. She was 12 then, already more mature than most 169

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

girls her age, and in her solitude she realised how she did not share the idyllic life of the children who still had parents and who, for that reason, seemed not to care about any uncertainty before them. It was apparent that she would have to accept fate, including an unpredictable future in America.

After they had settled in Utah, her sister, three years older, married a man in Salt Lake City and became a Mormon. In 1982 their uncle gave Mrs Saichue away too, at 16, for a bride price of US$1,000. Saichue had driven with friends from California and had met her at a community gathering in Ogden. A quick ceremony and feast affirmed their marriage. She had only hoped then that the kindness and decency she noticed in his character were genuine. * * * Mrs Saichue opens the oven. She takes the beef cuts, broiled to a crisp the way her husband prefers his jerky, and dices and pounds them in her steel mortar with a wooden pestle. She adds chopped ginger and chives and cilantro plucked from the box outside her window.

The children are leaving for school now. From her kitchen she can hear them chattering outside. A father scolds his to hurry them. Car doors slam, followed by the sound of steel gates opening and scraping gravel.

There is knocking at her door. Expecting no one at this hour, Mrs Saichue waits until she hears it again, louder this time, accompanied by faint female voices.

It is Mrs Faidang, visiting for the second time this month. More nectarines? No. She has brought along Mrs Thong, the young wife from 120.

Mrs Faidang, stocky with small eyes and large freckled cheeks, is gripping a head-sized squash under her bosom. Mrs Thong, pale and thin, her hair a natural brown and frizzy, is carrying a plastic shopping bag.

Mrs Saichue welcomes them in. “Come sit awhile.”

“It’s all right,” the two women say, standing on her doorstep and looking anxious to return to their own household chores. “Yesterday one of our church members donated a truckload of his squashes,” says Mrs Faidang.

“This one I brought for you.”

Out of politeness, Mrs Saichue asks if she might reconsider keeping it for her family instead.

170

Mrs Saichue

“We have more than enough to eat. I took so many; if I don’t give them away they’ll just sit and rot. Nyab Thong has taken one.”

Mrs Saichue thanks her for the squash.

“There’s one more thing,” Mrs Faidang says. “Sai has been telling our husbands that he wants a son, so we thought we could help.”

“My husband has been telling everyone that?”

“Here,” Mrs Thong utters in her brittle voice, handing Mrs Saichue the plastic bag in her hand. “My mother dug these fresh roots from her garden.

Chop them and boil some in water. I drank the broth for three mornings to give me my first boy.”

“Thank you.” Again she invites the women in, but they decline and turn to go.

“I have rice cooking on the stove,” says Mrs Faidang. “We just came by to give you the squash and the roots. If you’re not doing anything in the afternoon bring some of your paj ntaub over to sew with us.”

“Or watch a movie,” Mrs Thong offers. “Last night I borrowed a new one from my sister. She says it’s very romantic and sad. It was filmed in Thailand a few months ago, right before your husband flew over there.”

“I never have the time,” Mrs Saichue asserts politely, thanking them again.

Unless she is repairing a loose seam on one of her garments or Saichue’s work clothes, she rarely sews. The only movies she has seen in years are the ones that Mai Nhia borrows from other women. Mrs Saichue waits until her visitors are out of sight before closing her door and locking it.

The rice is still steaming on high heat. She sits the squash in the corner and lays the bag of roots on the counter. Then she walks around her apartment, almost in an awkward, floating manner.

In the bedroom doorway she feels as though she is lost inside a stranger’s home. The two figures under the covers are still asleep. Her eyes wander over dimly lit walls, not searching for anything specific, just looking at the yellowing paint and landscape posters and photographs, some taken of Saichue’s family now living in Michigan, the rest chronicling two decades of their quiet marriage in California. A collection of shoes lines the foot of the king-sized bed her husband purchased before his second trip to Thailand. She notices a pair of white heels, no longer worn, with which he had surprised her during the winter of their 17th year, boxed and crudely gift-wrapped by a Fruit Valley tenant’s daughter. He had driven her that evening to see the 171

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

1999 Miss Hmong International Pageant at the Fresno Fairgrounds, bought her roses from a vendor and shared with her a papaya salad that was too spicy and too sweet. They had posed for a photograph with the contestant from Wisconsin, a tall, small-shouldered girl, deathly pale, with high cheekbones and a thin dimpled smile. Saichue had expected her to steal the crown from her competitors, but in the end she was the runner-up. The memory of it all comes flooding back to Mrs Saichue at the sight of the heels, now beige from use.

One memory leads to another. “She looks too much like your pageant girl from 1999,” Mrs Saichue had told her husband, four winters after the event, in a northern Chiang Rai village. It was their first time back in Thailand, the round-trip tickets paid for with some of their savings. They had planned their visit six months in advance, landing in time for the New Year celebrations.

Mrs Saichue and her husband spent the morning eyeing the young unmarried women on the village’s football field, where the festivities were held. Many – the men too – wore hand-stitched clothing embroidered with paj ntaub and ornamented with jangling coins as brilliant as fish scales. Their xauv necklaces were fashioned from silver. Bright sashes of neon green and pink were tied around and draped from their waists. They had all come to play pov pob: two parallel rows of marriage hopefuls stretched across the field, the eligible ladies on one side facing their suitors on the other, tossing cloth balls back and forth. The activity allowed unabashed courtship, with each girl being asked by a potential mate about her family, who her friends were, what she did with her free time and whether her heart belonged to another.

Some clutched umbrellas for shade. A few old maids and widows were there, some much older than Mrs Saichue, their wrinkles cracking through heavy make-up whenever they giggled or squinted because of the sun. She watched these women amusing themselves at pov pob until someone senior paid them attention. Some older men, grinning with missing teeth, were still married but on the prowl for a second or third bride. Now and then a couple took a break from ball tossing and strolled around the perimeter of the field, engaged in private conversation, looking for a shady tree or combing through booths selling merchandise or food. A gentleman might buy for his chosen lady a pair of earrings or a skewer of meatballs dipped in sweet chilli sauce. Despite its being December, the midday heat nagged 172

Mrs Saichue

at necks and hands swatted away flies. From the pho huts came the aroma of noodle spices boiling in large aluminium pots. The air was lively with kwv txhiaj sung by impassioned individuals to welcome the arriving year, to lament a lost love, to greet a new companion, each poetic verse punctuated by blaring megaphone announcements from a stage constructed from hewn bamboo trunks. There were bullfights and gambling on some days; but today the football field belonged to suitor and pursued.

Saichue taped the young women on his camcorder. “How about her?” he suggested, pointing to a chubby girl with bangs standing next to the one Mrs Saichue had likened to the pageant contestant from Wisconsin.

“That one might do.”

The girl had a bulbous nose. An obvious flaw. She was thick around the hips and talked excessively.

“Do you think she’ll find me attractive? I mean, she would have to find me attractive …”

“If she doesn’t, there are still others,” Mrs Saichue said.

They had no blood ties with anyone in the village. Neither had left any relatives behind when they went to the United States and they had not returned since their days in the refugee camps. They stood out in their clothes, he in a slightly oversized grey suit and turquoise tie, she in an indigo blouse and black slacks. They were not the only Hmong tourists. There were also visitors from as far away as Australia, France and French Guiana.

Most had come for the annual festivities. Some, despite an enduring fear of communists, had hoped to leave the village after a few days and venture, if possible, into Laos. Her husband did not tell her how happy he was to be back in Thailand, but she could see it in his eyes. For her, the purpose of the trip had drowned out all the joy and laughter around them, even her own nostalgia.

They compromised on the plump girl with the big nose. She was loud, verbose in Hmong and Thai, and clucked with laughter that could be heard from afar. Mrs Saichue allowed her husband as much privacy as he needed.

For most of the week she observed them from a distance, the two tossing cloth balls and circling the field, occasionally eating noodles at one of the huts. To assure the young lady of his interest in her, Saichue bought her a skirt and a copper bracelet. She took him on her blue moped to visit her parents on their farm, untilled and overgrown with weeds, on the other 173

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

side of the village. Mrs Saichue stood on the edge of it all, telling herself it was wrong to feel any heartache. She learned that the girl, 19, had fallen out of a previous relationship with a Thai bar owner in the city where her parents had sent her to find work, and that she had given birth to a son who remained with his father. The girl’s parents were a lanky couple roosting under a thatched roof sagging from years of rain and heat. After welcoming Saichue the mother returned to the mat where her husband lay, sucking his bamboo pipe. Their raw-boned faces were lit by the opium lamp between them. They were concerned about neither Saichue’s age nor his wife. “As long as you’re willing to pay the bride price,” the father said through a veil of smoke.

It was unfortunate that the girl had never been married to the father of her child. Having been married would have lowered her cost, Mrs Saichue thought, watching the couple on New Year’s Day and noticing how she kept pushing her bangs to the side of her face, wrinkling her pudgy nose and smiling too much at Saichue. He explained that she was excited about going to America, that it was worth sharing a husband for such an opportunity.

They drove to the city a few days later to proceed with the paperwork required for the girl’s emigration. Mai Nhia’s parents were paid US$1,500 for her hand, an amount taken from the savings pot. Mrs Saichue feared her husband would have difficulty kowtowing for an hour during the wedding procession, an obligatory act of respect for the bride’s family and relatives.

But he had managed it despite his health. Mai Nhia’s eldest clansmen offered the customary blessings and advice, counselled Mai Nhia to be an obedient wife and told Saichue to love and guide her in his American ways. A small feast was held in the village. Her parents, elated finally to have married her off, contributed a measly hog. She and Saichue registered their marriage to ensure her immigration, which would take more than half a year to process.

On the flight home Mrs Saichue closed her eyes and said she would go through it all, as long as it was temporary. Like some people they knew in America, she and Saichue had regarded their traditional wedding as more of a validation of their union than a piece of paper, so they never obtained a marriage licence. Saichue promised he would commit to their plan, but that it would take years before they could return to a normal life. He was 174

Mrs Saichue

confident that a woman like Mai Nhia, who used marriage as a ticket to America, would not remain under their roof for the rest of her life. “She could go anywhere when she’s ready,” he said, “but the child will be ours.”

“I’m tired,” Mrs Saichue replied, turning away to face the window for the rest of the journey home.

In the following year, after hearing that Mai Nhia’s paperwork had been completed, they replaced their queen-sized bed with the king. He returned to Thailand to fetch her, as agreed. * * * It was in the laundry room, a few days after Saichue’s return, that the Fruit Valley women asked about Mai Nhia.

“We had to think about our future,” Mrs Saichue explained. “It was for the best.”

“Perhaps, perhaps,” the women said, folding their children’s clothes. “We hope he’ll treat you as well as before.”

“I never wanted us to come to this. But ... a childless marriage is a disappointment for anyone.”

“And we tried with all our medicines,” the women said, one after another.

Mrs Chafong, an old widow who had lived in Fruit Valley with her late husband and his second wife for as long as anyone could recall, was passing the laundry room when she overheard their conversation. “Learn to be patient,” she advised Mrs Saichue. “That’s all you must do now. Love and care for the children they have together, and they might love you in return.”

Mrs Thong, brashly curious, asked about their sleeping arrangements.

“In one bed, of course,” Mrs Saichue said, unswervingly.

But how could anyone sleep in such a bed? Though she couldn’t make out the words, she heard Mai Nhia in the dark, her voice against Saichue’s ear.

What did she have to whisper to him during such an act? Yes, he’d withheld his tongue behind his teeth and given no passionate response. Still, he’d done what was meant to be done.

A necessary life, Mrs Saichue reminds herself now, standing in her kitchen. How many times in the night had she bitten her lip until she 175

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

tasted tears and the iron tang of her own blood, wondering if her heart would stop? When they learned that Mai Nhia was expecting, Mrs Saichue said to her husband, “If the child is a boy, let me call him Yuepheng.” It had been more of a demand than a request. The girl was in the shower then, allowing Mrs Saichue a private moment with her husband. “Yuepheng is a good name,” she whispered again to him a few days after, as if she needed to defend her choice. * * * She pours the sweet rice from the bamboo container into a large bowl and stirs it with a spatula, allowing pockets of steam to rise. Then she covers the bowl with a lid and sets it aside on the kitchen counter, next to the dish of jerky. Mrs Saichue spends the next hour idling at the dining table, eyeing the magnet clock on the refrigerator. She won’t eat without her husband. It is a good day, Mrs Saichue tells herself, again and again. Perhaps she’ll take some money from the pot, drive out alone, buy herself something nice. Mai Nhia doesn’t know about the savings and she hasn’t demanded a share of the household income. But Mrs Saichue will buy the girl something nice too. Even with all the overseas expenses she has managed to keep the pot growing.

At nine o’clock she hears Saichue brushing his teeth in the bathroom.

Mai Nhia, in a large pink T-shirt, wobbles into the kitchen straight from bed, paler these days, her belly slightly swollen, eyes sticky with sleep. Her bangs have grown longer, curling around her face.

“How do you get up so early to cook and clean?” she asks, grabbing a cup from the dish rack.

“I don’t mind doing most of the work around here,” Mrs Saichue replies.

“The Vietnamese doctor said I need rest.”

“Yes, he would tell you that.”

Mai Nhia pours herself a cup of water from the pitcher and guzzles it quickly. A few drops dribble onto her chest. “I have to drink plenty today so the machine can see the baby’s heartbeat.” She wipes the corners of her mouth with the back of a hand and yawns like a fat cat, nostrils flaring.

The wet spots on her pink shirt bloom like small roses. She leans against the counter, propping her elbows on its edge, a posture that exaggerates the small protrusion of her belly.

176

Mrs Saichue

“It’s going to be a son,” Mrs Saichue says. “In the next few months, I’ll be able to tell for sure from the shape of your stomach. From what I’ve seen, boys are mostly held high, not so low like girls.”

“I don’t know how people can tell just by looking. Does the doctor stick something inside me to peek at the baby?”

“He will use a machine to see from the outside, just like the one his nurse will use on you today.”

“How do you know all this?”

“Women around here talk about their pregnancies to me. That’s the only thing they’ll talk to me about.” When Mai Nhia asks about the bag of roots sitting on the counter, Mrs Saichue replies, “Oh, Mrs Thong brought them for you. They helped give her a boy. I’ll chop some up and boil them for you to drink later.”

“I don’t drink anything bitter tasting.” Mai Nhia scrunches her nose and sighs, her eyes rolling to the side. “You’re lucky. I don’t want children right now, but I’m doing it for Sai. I was dizzy and throwing up during this time with my first baby.”

“Have your children now while I still have the strength to help you raise them.”

“I can do that myself. I’m not a helpless mother. I’ve already decided on a name for this baby.”

“You already have a name?”

“Yileng.” Mai Nhia sighs again. “That’s what I wanted to name my first son but his Thai father chose a Thai name. It doesn’t matter whether I have a boy or a girl. Yileng will be a good name for the baby.”

“What did Sai say?”

“I told him a mother has the right to name her child. He didn’t say anything after that. Besides, what could he say?”

“It’s past nine,” Mrs Saichue remarks, looking at the clock. “Go get ready.

We’ll eat before Sai takes you.”

“You’re not coming with us?”

“There’s no need for me to be there. If I go, I’ll have to sit in the waiting room. Or in the car.”

When Mai Nhia leaves the kitchen Mrs Saichue rises from her chair, suddenly annoyed with the ache in her ankles from standing all morning.

She begins to set the table. In a few minutes she hears the girl hawking 177

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

and spitting in the bathroom like a wounded animal. Toilet water splashes, enough to douse the plastic seat and she wonders who will clean it up.

There is a high-pitched cry, followed by whimpering. She hears her husband comforting Mai Nhia and imagines the palm of his hand on the girl’s back, gently rubbing it.

Saichue appears in the kitchen a moment later, wearing an ochre shirt he bought in Thailand.

“How is she?”

“She’s feeling dizzy. She says she has a craving for pho this morning.”

“But I cooked.”

“I know,” he says with a sigh, his eyes fearful. “We’ll have pho after we see the doctor. And then we’ll have your cooking later.”

“I’ve already eaten. I got up early and couldn’t wait for the two of you.

Go without me.”

“But don’t you want to come?”

“No need for me to squander money at the restaurant. The pot can use what I’d be wasting anyway.”

“I meant to the doctor’s.” The expression on his face is quietly alarmed, almost sad.

“I have other things to do. The clothes need to be washed, the house has not been vacuumed. Besides, it’s not me the doctor needs to see.”

A vastness spills between them now. In a minute or two this privacy of theirs, this rarity, will end when Mai Nhia emerges from the bedroom.

Though they never spoke about it, anyone could have sensed what this sort of life would entail. How could one endure such a marriage without the slightest sense of worry, envy, anger, doubt?

“I heard the two of you,” he mutters, almost apologetic. “I heard her telling you about naming the baby.”

“Yuepheng or Yileng, why should it matter to me?”

“It shouldn’t matter to us,” he says. “We should be happy we’re having a child.”

“I am happy.”

“It’s foolish to assume that we are having a boy.”

“We’ve both been …”

Mrs Saichue looks at her husband, as if for the last time, her mind’s eye taking in the entire moment: his staggered expression, his ochre shirt, the 178

Mrs Saichue

sun shining brightly through the window and splashing on the linoleum floor, the sweet scent of nectarines rotting in the rubbish bin. She turns away to repeat one of her kitchen chores, allowing him to leave. In a moment the front door closes, gentle as a secret, with Saichue and the girl walking out of 109 like father and daughter.

Sitting alone in the apartment, Mrs Saichue eats a fist of rice with mashed jerky. A quiet walk to Lowell Elementary suddenly seems necessary. She’ll catch the children at recess. If fortune allows she’ll find a dropped quarter or dime for the pot. She takes the last nectarine from the fruit bowl and stuffs it into her coat pocket. Forgotten now on the windowsill is the half from earlier that will soon dry up, wrinkling to a heart that no one will eat.

As she surveys her kitchen, Mrs Saichue is filled with an unspeakable desire and she finds it difficult to breathe. She bends to open one of the cabinets, removes the savings pot and rests it on a burner. Perhaps she will spend all their money today. Another thought comes to mind, twisting her mouth into a smile and forming tears at the edges of her eyes. Steamed rice has cooled on the tiled counter. In the refrigerator, two plates of jerky wait to be eaten. Blue flames jump from the range, the burst of energy startling Mrs Saichue. “One will see firewood but no longer feel its burning warmth,” she tells herself. “One will hear the dripping of a spring but no longer have the chance to drink from it.”

179

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

Illusory Worlds (2008) by Lu Peng. Chinese pigment on paper, 132cm x 103cm.

Courtesy of Plum Blossoms Gallery, Hong Kong.

180

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

Corner, Zeng Shi Street, Tai Shan, Guangdong, November 28, 2000 by Laurence Aberhart.

Silver gelatin, gold chloride and selenium toned print. Courtesy of the artist and Peter McLeavey Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand.

181

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

The Damage of Grandeur – The Courthouse of Minhang District in Shanghai (2009)

by Yang Tiejun. Epson Q-print, 60cm x 207cm. Courtesy of the artist and Contemporary by Angela Li, Hong Kong.

182

My Kind of Town …

Dining with Ghosts Liao Yiwu Translated by Wen Huang

W

e, the people of Chengdu, love to eat. Food is more important than life itself. Su Dongpo certainly thought so.

A famous son of Sichuan who left his mark on the Song Dynasty as a writer, poet, artist and statesman, he made his real contribution after his political enemies turned the emperor against him and he was banished to Hubei in 1081. There poverty forced him to live close to the land and from that experience came some of his finest poems. Despite his dire circumstances he spent time perfecting his Dongpo pork shoulders recipe. Few today can recite his poetry, but no one can forget the smell and taste of that original dish. My grandpa told me how, in the 1930s, when warlords were battling for control of Chengdu, and artillery fell on the Huangchengba area, deluging streets with debris as houses collapsed, customers in a packed mapo tofu restaurant watched the bedlam creep closer as they waited for their meals, urging the chef to hurry so they might take shelter. The chef maintained his steady pace in the open kitchen, responding, “Mapo tofu cannot be rushed; that would ruin my reputation.”

As food aficionados may know, Chengdu is China’s capital of street snacks. Sichuan’s most famous modern writer, Li Jieren, fashioned the term guiyinshi, or “ghost eating”, in his 1935 book Ripples in Stagnant Water.

Li described street vendors who carried baskets of food on shoulder poles and crossed streets and lanes like ghosts, wooing night owls and offering to appease their grumbling stomachs with spicy delicacies: husband-and-wife beef lung slices, dragon wonton, sticky rice balls, steamed beef, cold spicy 183

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

gelatin and dan dan noodles. Many of Chengdu’s well-known dishes had their roots in guiyinshi. Nowadays, hawkers use flatbed tricycles and carry little coal-burning stoves, setting up shop with hotpots and steamers, and dust covers and umbrellas, on popular thoroughfares.

One night in 1994, soon after my release from prison for my involvement in the student movement of 1989, I went to Tianfu Square in the centre of the city looking for guiyinshi. The vast plaza is supposedly built around the remains of an ancient palace and in more recent history was home to Chengdu’s best-loved guiyinshi. After the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911 the area became a slum, then an indoor-outdoor market for those consigned to society’s bottom rung. The market was demolished after the Communist Revolution because the Party thought it epitomised “old China”. At the height of the Cultural Revolution, what was left of the palace was blown up to make way for the Long Live Chairman Mao’s Victorious Thoughts Museum.

Starting in the late 1970s, when Deng Xiaoping came to power and reversed many of Mao Zedong’s radical policies, Chengdu experienced a revival. Most of its old buildings were gone but the food, in all its variety, survived. Without the market as a focal point, however, guiyinshi was scattered. I found vendors on a street leading off the square and, after deciding on a bowl of minced-meat noodles, boiled peanuts and a small bottle of liquor, sat on a folding chair on the kerb and contemplated the competing smells of the food around me. A loud commotion jolted me from my reverie as chairs, tables and stoves started disappearing on the backs of scrambling flatbed tricycles. The very chair I was using was yanked from under me as my noodle man tried to escape the police cars closing in, amid deafening sirens, from all directions. But it was too late.

Uniformed police were pulling riders from their bicycles, toppling chairs and smashing plates and bowls. The whole street was in chaos. Smoke rose from overturned stoves, women cried, men cursed loudly. I heard a voice declare through a megaphone, “You are operating without licence. You are ruining the city’s good looks. You are violating sanitary rules. Anyone who resists will be thrown in jail.” The farce lasted an hour or so and ended with the departure of six trucks laden with confiscated furniture and cooking utensils. I and other patrons shrugged and continued the search for the best guiyinshi in town.

184

My Kind of Town …

*** China had a box seat for the total solar eclipse in July 2009 and Chengdu was among the cities best placed to observe the century’s longest and most spectacular cosmic event. It was a cause for celebration. A little past midnight I joined my sister and we went hunting for guiyinshi. We passed Tonghuimen Road and the Fengqintai district and penetrated a labyrinth of lanes that took us to the back of the People’s Park. Entering a courtyard, we followed a long, tunnel-like corridor between houses that wound round and round like duck’s intestines. Then I saw Old Mama’s Pig Trotters, a well-known little eatery that seemed to be always on the move and revelled in its shabbiness and disorderly seating. Customers who couldn’t wait for one of the tables, which always spilled onto the narrow pavement, squatted on the ground with steaming pigs’ trotters in their hands and plates of dipping sauce in front of them. A middle-aged man in a white vest held a shot glass in one hand and a pair of chopsticks in the other, smacking his lips and chatting to people queueing to be served: “Even the bones melt away: heavenly!”

Hunched over my food, I wasn’t paying attention to the crowd, but my sister spotted Zhou, a monkey-thin man with Coke-bottle spectacles who used to be well known in Chengdu as a chef. As is the custom in Sichuan, if you bump into someone at a restaurant and hit it off after the ritual exchange of pleasantries, you invite the stranger to join you at your table, which is how we came to dine with Zhou that night and learn a few of life’s secrets.

“Tofu is a wonderful thing, truly miraculous,” he said as he sipped his liquor. “You get some high-quality yellow beans, grind them and strain the soya milk. Then you add bitter-tasting gypsum as a coagulant. The final product is bland and tasteless, almost to a fault, but you can make a couple of hundred gourmet dishes out of it,” he said. “In the book Daodejing the philosopher Laozi extols the physical properties of water. When you control water it can become anything you desire. But if it takes control it will turn into a flood, filling the Earth and sky, killing people and destroying the world. It’s the same with tofu. A chef can turn tofu into anything, from dried and seasoned tofu skins to fresh tofu jelly broth. But if he is not paying attention he can screw up and ruin his reputation.”

185

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

I was entranced by his insights. Zhou said most people in Sichuan probably knew how to make a couple of tofu dishes, but mapo tofu was the most challenging. He explained that its name dates from the 1860s, when a restaurant called Prosperity Chen’s Food stood near Wanfu Bridge outside Chengdu’s Northern Gate. “The place was in worse shape than those roadside food stalls that serve migrant workers today,” Zhou said.

“But one should never underestimate those low-class restaurants.”

His words reminded me that the finest French cuisine is just peasant food served as expensively as possible, and it was as if Zhou had read my thoughts.

“Most well-known Sichuan gourmet dishes originated at the lowest level of society,” he said. “The wife of Prosperity Chen had dirty, dishevelled hair, and her face was pitted from a childhood bout of chicken pox, but although she was nothing to look at she stood strong, like a tigress, a spitting image of the monstrous female innkeeper and warrior, Sun Erniang, in Outlaws of the Marsh. Her patrons were mostly traders who bought rapeseed oil from extraction workshops in the city and pushed small wooden barrels on squeaky wooden carts. They would always gather at Prosperity Chen’s restaurant for lunch.

“Those oil traders had the most back-breaking jobs and it was worse in the summer, when Chengdu turns into a steamer. One day, a shirtless trader arrived exhausted, dehydrated, hungry and shaking. With a gourd ladle he scooped out half a litre of vegetable oil from a barrel on his cart, patted his stomach and said: ‘I’m a poor guy with a big stomach. Surprise me and give me a big plate of whatever you can make.’ “‘No problem,’ said Mrs Chen, tossing a pile of cow’s innards onto a cutting board. She took a long knife and chopped up a storm, her arms flailing, ping, pong, ping, pong. A group of customers watched in awe, one shouting: ‘This woman is under a crazy spell!’ The restaurant shook as chunks of innards disappeared under her knife and tiny pieces flew off the board.

“When a chef finds the right mood, it’s the same as a poet who finds his or her muse,” Zhou said.

“Surrounded by pots, pans, ladles and basins, and amid the cheering crowd, pockmarked Mrs Chen seemed hypnotised by inspiration. With her hair hanging loose she chanted something nobody understood. ‘The 186

My Kind of Town …

sun must have come up in the west,’ some customers said to each other.

Mrs Chen took the gourd of oil offered by the trader and tipped it into the wok. Then she threw in broad beans, a small pinch of Chinese prickly ash from Hanyuan county and a handful of dry peppers. You can imagine the intoxicating smell of the oil sizzling with the spices. When the oil reached its optimum temperature she removed the innards, adding water mixed with starch and a bunch of green garlic sprouts. She removed the tofu from the wok, banged her metal spatula against the stove and yelled, ‘Ready to go!’

“The trader bent over and sniffed the food, declaring that the smell itself made him sweat. He picked up a chunk of tofu with his chopsticks, put it in his mouth and was speechless. The other customers wondered what had happened. Could he have been poisoned? Finally, the trader screamed: ‘You damned pockmarked woman! The tofu is killing me with its freshness and flavour. I love it!’ Seeing its effect, the other customers took their chopsticks to the man’s plate, had a couple of bites and mobbed Mrs Chen. ‘I want exactly what he’s having!’ they demanded.

“Word spread quickly. Stories of pockmarked Mrs Chen’s magic tofu dish swept Chengdu like the autumn wind. The recipe for mapo tofu, or pockmarked Mrs Chen’s Tofu, passed from generation to generation for nearly a century and a half. Many high-end restaurants now serve mapo tofu as a signature dish, but its soul could be found only in that small, dirty roadside shed near Wanfu Bridge.”

Chef Zhou’s story made me nostalgic. The government’s three-decade modernisation drive has erased the past. New buildings are taller than ever, restaurants bigger and grander. Sichuan dishes have become more elaborate, exaggerated. Watching a television chef talk about mapo tofu is like sitting in on a science lecture – esoteric. Like government officials, Sichuan food is being corrupted with each passing day.

Advertising has embraced the new code: “Imperial Court food” and “dishes copied from ancient recipes” attract customers to extravagantly decorated, “exclusive” restaurants serving dishes with “unique” flavours.

Such eateries have become venues at which officials and businessmen can eat at the public’s expense while cultivating political and business connections.

187

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

Food has become part of the culture of corruption. If one wants to find the soul of Sichuan cuisine, it is in Chengdu’s guiyinshi, scattered down small side streets, under dripping eaves and inside crowded, smokefilled rooms.

188

Contributors MARTIN ALEXANDER is a prize-winning writer whose work has been published widely. His poetry collection Clearing Ground appeared in 2004. In 2009 he received the Orient-Occident International Grand Prix for Poetry and was a finalist in the Bradt/ The Independent on Sunday travel-writing competition. He has participated in literary festivals in Hong Kong, China, Egypt and Romania. He is the Poetry Editor of the Asia Literary Review.

JOHN BATTEN is a curator, writer and critic on art, culture and urban planning and a former art gallery owner. Born in Melbourne, he has lived in Hong Kong since 1992. He is an organiser of the annual charity art event Hong Kong ArtWalk and a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Australian art magazine Broadsheet. He is also a Contributing Editor to the Asia Literary Review.

SCOTT EZELL, an American poet, lives in Hanoi and Seattle. His poetry books include Petroglyph Americana and Songs From a Yahi Bow. He has composed and recorded 15 albums of ambient, folk and experimental music. In September he read his lyric essay The Road to My Lai as his contribution to the global Authors for Peace event, which featured 80 authors from 35 countries.

JONATHAN FENBY, a former editor of The Observer and the South China Morning Post, has written a dozen books. Five have been about China, including The Penguin History of Modern China.

He is China Director of the research service Trusted Sources. His most recent book is The General: Charles de Gaulle and the France He Saved. He is working on another book about contemporary China.

PHILIP GOSTELOW, from Perth, Australia, is a portrait and documentary photographer whose work has appeared in Time, Vogue China and The Independent on Sunday Review, among many other publications. His e-book Visible, Now – The Fragility of Childhood was published in 2006 and his work can be found in the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. He has been based in Shanghai for the last four years.

189

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

ANJUM HASAN is the author of the novels Neti, Neti (longlisted for the DSC and Man Asian Literary prizes) and Lunatic in My Head (shortlisted for the Crossword Book Award). She has also written a book of poems called Street on the Hill. Her reviews, short fiction, poetry, travel writing and literary essays have appeared in publications in India and internationally. She is Books Editor at The Caravan magazine and lives in Bangalore, India.

DUNCAN HEWITT is the Shanghai correspondent for Newsweek and was a BBC correspondent in Shanghai and Beijing. He first lived in China in 1986 and 1987 during his Edinburgh University studies for a degree in Chinese. His book Getting Rich First discusses how ordinary people have coped with the social transformation that has accompanied China’s economic reforms of the last three decades.

JAMES KIDD, based in London, writes for The Independent on Sunday, the South China Morning Post, The Observer, Time Out, The Jerusalem Post, The Daily Telegraph, The London Magazine and Square Meal magazine. He is a member of the advisory board of the Asia House Festival of Asian Literature. He recently wrote an introduction to the 20th-anniversary edition of Patricia Cornwell’s debut novel Postmortem.

SHIRLEY YOUNG-EUN LEE is reading Persian, Latin and Greek literature at Oxford University. She has performed her poetry at the Man Hong Kong International Literary Festival and her work has been published in journals and anthologies in Asia and Europe. An accomplished composer, she writes music for television and film.

She is also recording an album of electronic post-rock music.

LIAO YIWU is a poet, novelist and screenwriter. His collection of interviews, The Corpse Walker, was published in 2008. Other non-fiction works include Testimonials, Earthquake Insane Asylum and Report on China’s Victims of Injustice. In 2003 a Human Rights Watch Hellman-Hammett Grant was conferred on him and in 2007 he received a Freedom to Write Award from the Independent Chinese PEN Centre. He lives in Sichuan Province.

190

Amnesty International

Contributors

LIU XIAOBO, winner of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize, is a poet, although he is better known as a scholar and literary critic. Liu’s most influential works include Dialogue with Li Zehou and Aesthetics and Human Freedom. He is one of the authors of Charter 08, which calls on the Chinese government to respect human rights. He helped save hundreds of lives during the Tiananmen Square massacre. Liu is interned in Jinzhou Prison.

LUO HUI has pursued literary studies in China, the United States and Canada, earning degrees in English, Comparative Literature and Chinese. He is interested in contemporary uses of the past and literary translation, avant-garde poetry and independent film, among other cultural media. He has translated CBC documentaries and books of poetry, including Wings of Summer by Zheng Danyi.

He lives in New Zealand.

MING LIU is a writer and journalist whose work has been published by, among others, the Financial Times, V Magazine, The Sunday Telegraph and China International Business. It has also featured on programmes such as the NBC Today Show. When not studying for her master’s degree in creative writing at the University of Manchester, Ming spends her time in London or Beijing. She is writing a novel about Chinese Americans living on the mainland.

MARSHALL MOORE is an American writer based in Hong Kong.

A native of eastern North Carolina, he is the author of novels An Ideal for Living and The Concrete Sky and short-story collections Black Shapes in a Darkened Room and the forthcoming The Infernal Republic. He is the founder of Signal 8 Press, a publishing company that focuses on Asia-Pacific writing.

JAN MORRIS was born in 1926 of a Welsh father and an English mother; when not travelling she lives with partner Elizabeth Morris in the top left-hand corner of Wales. Her books include Coronation Everest, Venice, The Pax Britannica Trilogy, Conundrum and Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere. She is also the author of six books about cities and countries, two autobiographical books and several volumes of travel essays. Her most recent book is Contact!

191

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

BURLEE VANG is the author of the poetry collection The Dead I Know: Incantation for Rebirth. His prose and poetry have appeared in Ploughshares, North American Review, Massachusetts Review, Runes and the anthologies Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers: Best New Writers of 2006 and Highway 99: A Literary Journey through California’s Great Central Valley. He is the founder of the Hmong American Writers’ Circle.

WEN HUANG is a writer and freelance journalist whose articles and translations have appeared in The Wall Street Journal Asia, the Chicago Tribune, the South China Morning Post, The Christian Science Monitor and The Paris Review. Translated works include The Corpse Walker by Liao Yiwu and Woman from Shanghai by Yang Xianhui.

TIM WINTER is a Sydney-based photographer and academic.

Much of his photography is integrated with his academic research on Asian cultural politics and heritage, and he has held exhibitions in Cambodia, Singapore and Australia. He is the editor of the forthcoming book Shanghai Expo: The World in a City.

XIAOLU GUO was born in 1973 in a Zhejiang Province fishing village. She is a film-maker, poet and novelist. Her novels, translated into 23 languages, include A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, Village of Stone, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth and UFO in Her Eyes. She directed the feature film She, A Chinese, which received the Golden Leopard award at the 2009 Lorcano Film Festival, Switzerland. Xiaolu lives in China and Europe.

ZHENG DANYI was born in Sichuan in 1963. His poetry has won awards in China and the United States and was shortlisted for the 2003 Grand Chinese Media Prize in Literature. His poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Ten Major Poets Today, Gold in Blue Sky, New Generation: Poems from China Today and have been translated into 12 languages. He has published six poetry collections and four novellas.

192

Art and the Artists LAURENCE ABERHART lives in New Zealand. He is a recipient of a Fulbright Travel Award, which has enabled him to photograph in the United States this year.

AI WEIWEI lives in Beijing and is one of China’s most outspoken artists.

Photographer EDWARD BURTYNSKY is based in Toronto and has worked extensively in China.

LU PENG was born in Beijing and teaches at the Beijing College of Education.

FIONA WONG LAI-CHING is a Hong Kong artist working predominantly with ceramics.

Continuing series The Damage of Grandeur, by Beijing’s YANG TIEJUN, was first exhibited at the 3rd Guangzhou International Photo Biennale in 2009.

YAO JUI-CHUNG of Taiwan pursues a range of artistic interests, including installation art, mixed-media painting, photography and art theory.

VINCENT YU is a prolific photojournalist based in Hong Kong.

193

Principal Sponsor

London & UK-wide

15–31 october 2010

thank you the Festival directors would like to thank the 70-plus speakers and 40-odd organisations, vital sponsors, amazing volunteers and supporters, and of course all the wonderful audiences, for helping to make the inaugural year such a fantastic success. the Festival will return in Autumn 2011 with an expanded programme – keep checking online for updates. discover voices from across and beyond South Asia:

www.dscsouthasianlitfest.com v v v v

event highlights and reviews Author profiles and blogs South Asian literature debates Up-and-coming writing talent facebook.com/southasianlitfest @sthasianlitfest

Festival media partner

produced by

AmPhorA ArtS