‘Not in China, you don’t.’
‘How come?’
‘Teaching standards are really low. Apparently it wouldn’t mean much more than working your way mindlessly through the textbooks.’
‘Okay, cool.’
‘You’d be wise before you left home to do some sort of crash course in Mandarin.’
‘Right you are, sis.’
‘Let me know which way you go. Gotta get my skates on now.’
‘Okay. Smooches!’
‘Smooches!’
So what would be best? Staying safely at home? Or heading to Shanghai? Perched on my dune, trying to make up my mind, I found myself watching an old gaffer who pegged his way with a walking cane and a spaniel back and forth on the sand. Other folk were roaming up and down less sternly. Old men, old women, dressed in a way they no doubt would call sensible. Shapeless, bulky. They were what I might become myself in another twenty years — or ten years.
‘Mutton dressed as mutton,’ Mum used to say when she saw the old coots going back and forth on the sand.
Mum’s been dead for years. Cervical cancer. Pines Beach was not only where we spent summers during my childhood but where I came for holidays during my own years as a young dad, the years of the childhood of my own children. So many summers have gone by — summers of kids and skinned knees and pine resin and seagulls and sand and sandwiches and — and now my two girls are grown up and out on their own in the world.
‘Okay, I’ll do a runner,’ I said to myself, seated on my dune. ‘I’ll do a runner to far Cathay.’
Of course the widely received wisdom is that it’s wrong to do a runner from what ails you. Stay and slug it out! That’s what we’re told, right? Dig deep! That’s what we’re also told. Grub up your ghosts, vaporise your vampires, find your fears, cry your tears, mourn your dead, move on!
Well, okay — but no thanks.
I’m sick of stress leave. I’m sick of talking my life through with a shrink. I’m weary of having to work out an answer. I want things to be easy. Why can’t things be easy? Why not just run away? My home city gives me the creeps. Driving down the streets I know so well — too well, too bloody well — makes my chest hurt. My mind knots. Dad keeps dying. A sad little kid, creeping around quiet corners, sneaks glances at me — a kid who’s myself, of course, myself forty and more years ago. Can’t I get away now? Can’t I run away? You don’t really have to stay in a cemetery all your life, do you? Let me out! I want to run away.
Run — run away!
SHANGHAI WAS A shock. A plane had powered its way with a payload of groggy, drinking, gobbling, snoring passengers for more than eleven hours across the Pacific. Afterwards, lurching myself and my backpack and my headache out of our narrow vinyl-lined, foam-rubber-padded aluminium tube, looking up and down the length of an immense yet almost empty concourse of stainless steel and glass, I’d wondered why anyone would want to try to find their bearings inside the seamless surfaces, the nameless spaces, of a faceless international airport.
‘Dr Morse?’ said a small round woman with a small round face, bobbing and nodding.
‘Dr Sun?’ I begged hopefully.
One hour had already gone by since landing. An hour of wandering and queueing and wandering, and of documents getting stamped.
‘Dr Morse, welcome to China. I hope you had a good flight.’
Bob bob, nod nod.
The two of us, together with my suitcases and my backpack and of course my headache, were stowed inside a sleekish car sent by the university and soon were speeding down a motorway. All I wanted to do was scope the sights — a flashing sequence of fields, factories, motorways, warehouses, apartment blocks — and down a couple litres of coffee, and not have to listen, let alone speak, but of course I worked my socks off at civility, at bright and interested answers to bright and interested questions, smile smile, bob nod.
‘We are looking forward to meeting you at the department tomorrow morning, Dr Morse.’
‘I’m looking forward myself to meeting you all, Dr Sun.’
One hour after climbing into the cab we were swapping these words, with our last bobs and nods of the day, on the steps of the Foreign Experts. My apartment had been shown me, the facilities pointed out, my suitcases seen safely into the rooms. I was fighting hard not to show my dismay. The apartment seemed so drab. The neighbourhood seemed so bleak. The city seemed so ugly.
My colleague and I waved each other goodbye, both labouring to the last to smile brightly.
Next step?
Dismay was about to come busting forward from the back closet of my brain, to be followed at a quick clip by hysteria, so it seemed a good plan to poke my nose into the nooks and crannies of the neighbourhood. Lots of nooks. Still more crannies. Crowded streets, crowded courtyards, crowded alleys. People everywhere, inside and outside. Women, kids, men, grannies milling about, shuffling, scuffling, standing, sitting, squatting, wandering, eating, working. Heat struck me, as I started sloping up One Street. Heat pulsing from the pavements, from the blotched masonry walls. Stink, next. Bad drains, rotting fruit, rotten meat. The weary look of my neighbours was what struck me after the stink. Weariness in the set of blank faces, the bones of slack bodies. One woman lay flopped in a sort of flimsy deckchair on the footpath, looking as limp as though all her bones had been pulled out, her head hidden under a damp yellow towel she’d thrown over herself as a way to get a little cool. Working men sat on boxes in shorts and nothing else, smoking hungrily over a game of cards played on top of another upturned box. Working women in thin pyjamas, fanning themselves, squatted in doorways.
I found my way down to a creek. A black, greasy creek. Flying creatures, little bats, were flickering their black wings over the water.
The creek gave me the creeps.
Hunger was now my most pressing worry. After trailing up and down the streets for an hour I felt so starved — having not found any place where I could make sense of the menu stickytaped to the glass — that I stepped into the noodle-house nearest the Foreign Experts, sat myself down at a table and stabbed at the names of a few dishes on offer. Not a lot later my eyes widened when the waitress brought me a great big juicy bowl of steaming animal offal. The offal had been stewed in red chilli, together with what looked like enough oil to keep all the moving parts of a small car running smoothly for a year. My next dish was bowl of jellied pig’s blood, cut into cubes. After the blood came a dish of flesh, though what sort of flesh was the worry. The flesh of some small being, about the length of my little finger, spiky at one end, stirfried with oil and onion. Gnawing showed it to be a vertebrate, for inside was a tiny bony spine. Okay, a chewy and leathery vertebrate. What kind of creepy-crawly could be that size and shape? Snake? A small snake? Skink — with limbs lopped off?
Wrapping one in a napkin, I took it back to my apartment to study at my leisure.
Let’s see, what could it be?
Nothing more outlandish, as it happened, than a pig’s tail.
Hunger continued to be a bit of a worry for the next few days, though slowly I worked out ways of fitting myself into the neighbourhood. My bearings proved not too hard to find in One and Two Street. As the days went by, more and more of my mind was able to switch itself from humdrum puzzling about food and water onto bigger things like how to get myself ready to start the academic year, and how to explore the wider world of this huge city. Now it’s the evening of the Ghost Festival. I’ve been here for two weeks and have been invited to a banquet at a restaurant downtown. About to take a shower to get myself scrubbed up for the party, I’m forestalled by a sound of a tiny electronic trill.
‘His cancer’s come back,’ says a mezzo. ‘They want to cut him open again to have another go at digging it out.’
‘Urgh,’ I say — baritone tending to bass, by the way.
‘Can’t talk now, gotta get to the gym,’ says Carmen. ‘How about we have a powwow over coffee?’
‘Okay.’
‘Noon tomorro
w? Can you come over my way?’
‘Sure. Where?’
‘A place called Dante. Text me for the address when you’re in the cab.’
My sis, out of town at a pathology conference in Tokyo when I first landed, has been back for a few days. She lives downtown and works at the Anglo-American Hospital. Already she’s shown me a few sights, helped me to get my bearings, opened a few doors, fed me up with cheese and chocolate and gossip.
‘Cool,’ I say.
‘Cheers, Big Ears.’
Now, my shower. A windowless bathroom opens, like a private cave, off my bedroom. I strip myself in the bedroom. I drop my clothes on the floor. My feet not too eagerly follow my head into the murky darkness of the bathroom. My fingers find a light switch. The sound of a faint little winking of light, and slowly an anaemic blueish white, or whitish blue, blooms inside a fluorescent strip over a mirror.
What does that weak light show?
The body that belongs to me and gets mistaken by others — and sometimes by me, too — for myself. Six foot tall. White skin. Blue eyes. Glance at myself quickly in a mirror screwed onto the wall. Let’s not look too closely, okay? Luckily, for someone my age, the weakness of the light cranked out by the fluorescent strip helps to bleach the moles and dim the wrinkles. I wonder whether I should shave. I hate shaving. I check out my jaw more closely. Five o’clock shadow?
Not exactly. A bloke my age doesn’t so much sport a five o’clock shadow as find himself hoary with a five o’clock frost.
Step into the bathtub. A plastic curtain, bunched onto plastic rings, hangs from a chromed tube. The chromed tube hangs in turn from a scrap of wire someone has hooked into one of the aluminium strips which hold up the asbestos panels of the ceiling. The ceiling sags with the weight. One of the asbestos panels has broken off at its corner, leaving a ragged little crack through which, when I peer at it closely, I can see greasy black pipes. Someone has long ago stubbed out a fag by wedging its butt between the frame and another of the panels. Okay, let’s give the curtain a tug. The plastic rings run with the curtain along the chromed tube for a bit, but all of a sudden the tube splits in two and the curtain falls to the floor.
Hmmm. Well, no worries — happens a lot.
Now, turn on the tap.
Flying Angel is the name of the mixer tap in my bathtub. A clumsy steel apparatus. The bracket into which the shower rose is supposed to slot has been broken, snapped off near its base. Not a lot works the way it should work in Shanghai. I’ve soon soaped up and sprayed myself with lukewarm water. We don’t always get water piping hot when we want it. Afterwards, pull a pair of blue jeans up my legs, throw a green T over my head, and we’re ready to rock.
Swing out into One Street.
‘How are you?’ says the old woman.
Cooks are sweating in the kitchen of the noodle-house. Young men under the eye of an older bloke, hunching in their smutted white overalls, they bend over woks, stir and toss, run back and forth, and spell each other by taking short breaks outside on a bamboo stool. A boy on the stool grins up at me as I go by. The noodle-house does a roaring trade among local folk at this hour of the day — early evening, rush hour.
Turn a corner. Scarper for the skytrain.
Commuters are streaming, hurrying, scowling. I elbow my own way into a dark concourse. I trundle up two escalators. I come to a steel palisade of electronic turnstiles. Wheeling pools of snappish cits, banking up behind the palisade, collide with clumps of peasants. The peasants look bewildered. Men clutch big bags stuffed with family belongings. Women peer at metro smartcards. Lancing across the plastic surface of each card can be seen a white bolt of lightning, symbolising speed and electricity. The women wonder whether lightning is auspicious. Kids pick at scabs on ankles. Granny stands with her eyes wide open in terror. Country folk come by the hundreds of thousands every year to seek their fortune in this Babylon. Often they come illegally, without proper papers. I slide my card across a scanner mounted on a stainless steel pylon.
The steel pylon says bleep.
An escalator carries me higher to a long, crowded platform, pulsing with heat. A shiny train, swishing above a choppy sea of red terracotta, carries me towards the central city. Shimmering apartment towers — stiff and glassy — burst out of the red rooftops on all sides as far away as the horizon. Vast signs can be seen through our windows.
SIEMENS
CITY-MART
BUDWEISER
CHINESE CIVILIZATION FLOWS LIKE A GREAT RIVER
AVIS RENT A CAR
Forty minutes later and I’m striding the pavements of a broad, brilliant avenue. You could be forgiven for thinking you’ve not simply come downtown but that a space probe has shot you straight to some shoppers’ Shangri-La on one of the rings of Saturn. Suave young groovers are sashaying self-consciously. Matrons in silk and gold surge up escalators. Skinny boys in flares call to passers-by, in English, while flaunting fake Rolex.
‘Watch? DVD?’
West Slender Lake Restaurant welcomes me with the bowings of uniformed young women, one of whom leads me upstairs to a private dining room.
‘Welcome, Dr Morse,’ says a bookish-looking old chap, shaking my hand weakly.
‘How are you, Mr Sun?’
Mr Sun is no kin to Dr Sun, as far as I’m aware, but as we all know, surnames are in short supply in China. An acquaintance made through one of my new colleagues on campus, translator for a staid publishing house, he seems to have been knocked about a bit by life, yet his manners are slow and courteous and very much at odds with the fittings of this room, which you could call Las Vegas Louis Seize. A baby-faced young waiter in black is moving about, as gravely mannered as Mr Sun. Our host, a merry man of about seventy with a mane of silver hair, picks some snot from his nose, looks at it thoughtfully, then wipes it on the fine white linen of the tablecloth.
‘Mr Yu,’ says Mr Sun, introducing me to the host in English.
Mr Yu stands and beams, and nods and bobs.
‘My pleasure, my great pleasure,’ he chuckles in Mandarin with a thick Shanghai accent. ‘An honour, a great honour.’
Mr Yu was a high-ranking cadre in the Propaganda Ministry during the days of the Gang of Four. Comrades found out that he liked boys. He was sacked from the job and kicked out of the Party. Now he thrives as a real estate broker.
We work our way around the table, nodding and bobbing.
‘Mr Jiang, the guest of honour,’ says Mr Sun, taking me to a gentleman of eighty, dimpled, smiling gently. ‘You see his skin is as white as an egg?’
‘Beautifully white,’ I try to say in Mandarin.
The whole party laughs politely.
Mr Jiang is a retired opera singer, it turns out, who played on stage the roles of women warriors.
My seat gets pulled out for me at last and I plonk myself down. Not really my cup of tea, this dinner party. All of us are men and I’m the youngest. Somehow it’s as though I’m seated in a circle with a chorus of chaps who could each in turn have been my father, each of whom certainly has enough years tucked under his belt to qualify as my father, and all of whom now seem to beam at me with what looks awfully like the wise benevolence in which dads are widely supposed to abound. Gulp. I feel faintly weepy. Looking at all these older blokes, thinking about fathers tending their sons. Even the grave young waiter acts like he’s on his way to becoming a granddad.
We sip tea, tipple at beer.
Slowly the waiter starts to set out dishes on the table. One dish in the middle. The second dish next to the first. The third dish set obliquely from the other two. Dishes must not be set out in a straight row. Setting out dishes in a straight row is what you do for the dead.
‘I am amazed, so many good girls willing to sell themselves to a stranger,’ says Mr Sun a little later, devouring duck and once more trying out his English.
Mr Yu says that anyone is a fool who thinks that marrying a sugar daddy will make them happy.
We’re talking about a squilli
onaire in the city who’s just placed ads in newspapers and magazines asking for a young virgin to become his bride. A website set up by his consultants to help spread the word has had thousands of hits already, apparently, since it was launched only a few days ago. The tycoon says he wants a young woman who can prove that she has no sexual experience. A lawyer acting on his behalf has been reported as saying that a shortlist will be drawn up of a few hundred applicants who comply with the requirements for face-to-face interviews.
‘He claims to have strong traditional values,’ says Mr Sun unhappily. ‘He claims he cannot accept the woman with avant-garde spirit.’
‘We must be alert about this trend of loving money,’ says Mr Yu. ‘It is a matter concerning the future of our country.’
‘How about the tycoon?’ I ask. ‘Is he a virgin himself?’
A slightly bitter little run of laughter from Mr Yu and Mr Sun.
A turtle gets brought to the table, where it finds itself set to boil alive in a sort of yellow soup. My fellow guests have greeted it with happy smiles. I turn away. The turtle, after simmering in its soup, gets pulled to bits.
‘None for me, thank you,’ I mumble shamefacedly, as a choice hunk hovers on the end of a couple of chopsticks.
Mr Yu is at the other end of the chopsticks.
‘My pleasure, my great pleasure,’ he says with lots more bobs and nods. ‘Please do me the honour —’
Grimacing with what I hope looks like a grateful smile, I watch as he drops the hunk into my little porcelain bowl. The turtle is obviously the chief dish of the dinner. A good guest must not turn it down. Well, all I can do is make sure I keep face for my host by faking enjoyment while chewing the oozing, dripping hunk of muscle and tendon — which is what I do now, secretly wanting to spew.
Mr Sun nods approvingly.
‘The turtle, it makes the penis strong,’ he says.
A dark street in the old French Concession. A cab has dropped me off at a small garden in front of a high-gabled villa. Windows in the upper floors are dim or dark but on the ground floor glows a small neon sign, while bright light streams into the garden through doors and windows. Men stand at ease, talking in groups or lounging on garden furniture, smoking. I’ve come here at midnight after saying goodnight to my host and fellow guests at the West Slender Lake Restaurant.
Shanghai Boy Page 3
