Shanghai Boy

by Stevan Eldred-Grigg

  ‘Will you marry?’

  Jin Dui sighs deeply.

  ‘My mother wants the grandson too.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be a bad mistake to get married? You wouldn’t be happy. Nor would your wife.’

  Jin Dui sighs still more deeply.

  ‘I so very tired,’ he says.

  Not too wonderful, given that he works ten hours a day, seven days a week, almost always.

  ‘Poor guy,’ I repeat.

  ‘Everyone is tired in China.’

  We slope back inside and swing the air conditioning up to full bore, having become sick of the sticky heat outside. Jin Dui begins gazing beatifically at the tele-screen, on which affluent and attractive people are agonising over their emotions in a soap opera. We loll on a leather sofa. We swap the odd kiss. After a while he gets restless and switches to a costume drama, a story about a wealthy family of drop-dead gorgeous warriors and women of rank during the Tang Dynasty. Jin Dui yawns a lot. The actors pose and pout and speak in smart anachronistic soundbites.

  ‘Let’s turn off the tele,’ I say. ‘Why don’t we go to bed so you can have a nice snooze?’

  Code, of course, for saying let’s nip into the bedroom and maybe with fancy fingerwork I might after all get in a bit of nooky before the good-looking guy next to me on the sofa drops his head dead on the pillow.

  ‘Soon,’ he says.

  Crap. I haven’t come all the way across town to watch tele, exactly.

  Lifting my head, looking up, I stare out through the window and past the balcony at the white domes. I see red navigation lights flicking on-off-on over a score or more other tall towers, while high above wallows that white moon, and a sharp point of hot red intensity marks Mars.

  ‘I’ll get you another beer,’ I say.

  ‘No beer. I feel dizzy.’

  ‘Dizzy? Why?’

  An ad has come onto the tele hyping a drink supplement for kids. Want your son to grow taller? Course you do! Boys who grow taller will do better at school. Higher in height, higher in grade is the slogan. Boys are often made to sluice four or more litres of milk a day because milk is thought by many to be the secret of tallness. Boys are also made to pop calcium pills for the same purpose. Tall sons not only have better luck in exams but also look more modern, have more likelihood of landing a beautiful wife, and have more success in their career. One widely believed pseudo-scientific theory is that kids will stay short if they have too much aluminium in their body. Apparently they get too much of that metal into their system by drinking fizzy pap from aluminium cans. Wise parents will feed the lads with an anti-aluminium pill.

  ‘I feel I am suffocating,’ complains Jin Dui.

  ‘Toxic air?’ I say.

  ‘Yes, toxic air.’

  Jin Dui complains a lot about what he calls the toxic air of his apartment. Certainly there does seem to be a thin, unnatural odour always lurking in corners or wafting through doorways. Formaldehyde, maybe, from walls and floors and furniture.

  ‘Well, we could down the air conditioning,’ I try, ‘and open a window or two to let some air blow through.’

  ‘Air outside toxic also,’ says Jin Dui. ‘We live in the modern city.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘Is your city modern? The hometown in your country?’

  My mind quickly flicks across the ocean to alight on the leafy streets I feel most fondly about. Old wooden houses, old trees, old gardens. What’s a modern city? I know what the phrase means to Shanghai. Techno city. Screens, glass, speed. Yet of course in my country we’ve left behind the dream of modernity. We tend to think it was a bad dream anyway. We look askance at the techno. We rather like the worn, the lichened. We’re keen on wetlands, and hand-me-downs, and wooden shacks on the sand.

  Coffee next day at Dante. My sis and I keep tabs on each other. As we spoon froth from the tops of our coffees and bring it up to our greedy lips I tell her that I’m worried, in a low-key way. I’m worried because I’m a fake, because I know nothing about how to teach English. Classes start tomorrow. I’m fidgety at the thought that the students, when I stand up in front of them and open my ignorant gob, will twig straight away to the fakery.

  ‘Wing it,’ says Carmen. ‘They’ll be wowed by your wit.’

  ‘Yeah, but —’

  ‘Hey, are you eating healthily? I’ve been thinking about ordering you a breadmaker from back home so you can bake yourself wholemeal loaves. Don’t forget not to drink the tap water.’

  ‘Mr Sun says the water is more or less okay — he says it’s free of bacteria most days.’

  ‘Well, he’s right, is your wily old Mr Sun. But it’s not bacteria that are the worry. Tap water in this town is full of heavy metals. Drink too much of it and in a week or two you’ll get a lifetime’s allowance of lead and mercury. So how are things going with Jin Dui?’

  ‘Next topic?’

  ‘Hmm. Well, as for me, I’ve just joined a cyberdating thingy and am having an interesting time chatting up blokes. Chose as my online nick Chatwoman.’

  ‘Any encounters as yet?’

  ‘One yesterday and one the day before. The chaps are not really up to scratch in general. The guy yesterday looked doable at first sight, but turned out to be a Christian. So I binned him. I’ve had phone sex twice. And then blocked the guys from being able to call me. So it’s fun. I’m a hot tamale because I’m a professional and because I’m tall. And probably also because they don’t have my photo. I bought a new pair of jeans yesterday. When I got them home and put them on and twisted sideways to look at myself in a mirror my bum looked big enough to hire out for balloon sightseeing rides over the Yangtze Delta.’

  How to get a back wax, that’s the worry. One of the things about hitting fifty, if you’re a white guy, is that your back has very likely been getting hairier — and then hairier — for years, while elsewhere your thatch has long since thinned out. My way of handling this till now has been with wax. Shanghai, however, has proved to be a bugger of a town to try to buy a back wax. Shanghainese are naturally smooth.

  Maybe you’re asking yourself why I should want to be smooth anyway? Because I’m back in the market for guys, that’s why.

  ‘When I face to you in the dark and in the daytime, I always wanna have much feeling language to talk with you,’ says Jin Dui. ‘I wanna but do not know how.’

  We’re on his balcony, another hot evening, looking once more at the slick towers.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I say. ‘It’s always hard to talk about feelings.’

  ‘I am not good at English. I wanna tell you I don’t wanna leave you. I wanna tell you I just hope you are my lover forever. I know I am only a normal and soso guy, and you are a professor. I know we belong to different country. But I feel so happy and fortunate and appreciative that I can meet you in this world.’

  Hmm, not too bad for someone who says he can’t talk about feelings and can’t speak good English.

  ‘I’m sorry, Jin Dui. I don’t feel the same way.’

  He bursts into choking tears.

  ‘Why?’ he pleads. ‘Why?’

  Why? Well, how about the fact that you’re always sleepy and there’s hardly ever any nooky? And how about the fact that even the first night after meeting at the club the score on the nookometer was so low that it registered only as blah? And how about the fact that you do nothing with what little free time you give yourself but eat too much and drink too much and watch tele and yawn and doze and afterwards wake up for no better reason than to get yourself ready for bed? And — and —

  ‘We’re very different from each other, you know. And you’re always — you’re always so busy.’

  The guy looks at me, his cheeks wet and blubbery.

  ‘What you mean busy is, I have to deal with my government work and my own business. I wonder whether you can imagine. You know I have to rush between my government office and my designing studio. I feel that I hardly can find joy and goal of my life. So just live hopeless and sightless.’

/>   ‘Your life is tough, I know.’

  ‘I don’t wanna lose you. I wanna we just belong to each other in this world.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  He sends me a text message shortly after we’ve said goodbye. I’m walking fast down an alley, having scooted quickly downstairs and out into the smelly heat of the night. A night that, while it may stink, seems wonderful because it’s the first night since my first landing in this town when the air seems slightly less humid, slightly less stiflingly hot.

  ‘Forget me thank you for what you gave me and I wish you have happy life.’

  I text him back to say that he is a good man who deserves to be happy.

  Afterwards, silence.

  I feel a heel. I also feel free. Yippee!

  GRABBING MY BRIEFCASE, weighty with books, I scoot downstairs and out into hot, smelly One Street.

  ‘How are you?’ says the old magazine woman, giving me a gummy grin.

  ‘How are you?’ I say, smiling back.

  Opposite the two of us, to the tune of some patriotic song squawking from loudspeakers, kids march into the classroom block of One Street Elementary School. The school climbs to five blank storeys. The kids wear nylon tracksuits of shiny green and yellow. The street entrance has been landscaped with a tiny geometric lawn, clipped shrubbery and a swirl of bright yellow and pink dahlias and chrysanthemums. A black palisade, taller than a very tall man, keeps the kids inside and outsiders out. A bossy woman’s voice can be heard now hectoring the kids over the loudspeakers.

  ‘Children, keep quiet. Monitors, keep watch —’

  The principal, probably.

  My white shoes, stepping nattily over choice gobs of spit, pick their way across an oily stretch of pavement in front of a bike workshop. Tiny, airless, let into the ground floor of an apartment block and jammed from floor to ceiling with steel chains, gears, cogs, wheels, brakes — the whole lot thick with grease — the shop is manned by boys who squat on their heels all day long and well into the night. Delicately probing the innards of battered bikes brought to them by local folk, the boys have a hunted look. Yet they’ve bleached their hair an unlikely blond. Clearly they think it looks sharp.

  Now my way takes me past a row of stalls selling crickets.

  The crickets chirp. The stalls are rickety. Cops come on occasion to try and clear this trade away, but cricket sellers keep coming back because they’re jobless or just out of prison. All are men about my own age. We’re older than the streets and structures in our neighbourhood. What was here two generations ago? Ponds, paddyfields. Almost the whole of this town is much the same — raw, new, inventing itself out of nothing, or nearly nothing.

  A few steps away from the last cricket stall you turn a corner and stare straight at my campus.

  Stop for the red lights, wait for the traffic.

  A prospect of timelessly dreaming spires seems to welcome you. Okay, blink! The university was completely rebuilt just the other day. New masterpieces, run up on the spot, display a choice selection of historic architectural styles from all corners of the globe. A monumental palace — Palladian, fit for a parliament or a duke — broods at one point of the compass and houses the library. At other compass points are various schools. One has been topped with a gleaming golden dome. Russian Orthodox? Another has been topped with two domes, also gleaming gold. Moorish? The layout of the campus if seen from the window of a plane whooshing overhead would look not unlike the Forbidden City in Beijing. The same calmly arid symmetry. Concrete streets, laid down at rigid right angles, cut between clipped lawns, topiary, regimented rows of bamboo.

  Wafting inconsequentially between the massive facades are a lot of tiny little earthlings.

  Students, poor sods.

  Now, nip across the campus. A guard in his uniform is raising the flag of the republic as I scull past the basketball courts. I come to my own school, English. A giant building of red brick, looking a bit like a Jacobean jail, it proves when you step behind its fancy facade to be like all other buildings on campus — nothing more than a standardised block enclosing sets of heartlessly spaced cells onto which architecture has been applied skin-deep, as though the image of a historic building has been xeroxed in colossal colour magnification and then pasted onto the outside of a big concrete box. My office is almost naked. One fake wood desk. One chair. One plastic basket inside which is a rag. The rag is for wiping the blackboard.

  Okay, sit at the desk, open the briefcase and spend an hour working through papers, feeling oddly nervous.

  Afterwards, set off to my classroom.

  My classroom is spanking new and very hot, with no air conditioning. A hundred or so students look up, stop yakking and stare. They seem scarcely older than those kids seen marching through the portals of One Street Elementary School.

  ‘Good morning,’ I say, smiling broadly. ‘Welcome to academic writing in English.’

  Grabbing their pens, the kids start to scribble.

  Ninety minutes follow of trying to get them to stop scribbling and start thinking. I ask them to speak out. I ask them to doubt. What do you think? What’s your opinion? After a bit they stop scribbling. A few of the brighter or more dogged or more biddable fix their eyes on me and wonder what to say. Others, having downed their pens, begin to yawn, to text friends, to take a nap, to drink Coke. At the end of the class nearly all run away without a backward glance. Only a group of the more bookish girls, along with two or three boys, come up to my desk. The girls begin talking on top of one another, which leads to a lot of giggling.

  ‘My name is Sissy,’ says a lass with buck teeth. ‘Welcome to Shanghai, Professor Morse.’

  ‘Thank you, Sissy.’

  ‘Did your ancestor invent the Morse Code?’

  ‘Uh — no. Not that I know.’

  Sissy, like all the more geeky girl students, wears shiny specs and has pulled her hair behind her head in a tight ponytail. Cooler chicks on campus like to sport flared jeans and wasp-waisted jackets dyed bright colours.

  ‘Shanghai is such a rapidly developing city. Shanghai is just like the sun and students are flowers growing in the sunshine. How do you think about Shanghai, Professor?’

  Clearly this calls for a little tact.

  ‘Shanghai is very big, and very — very busy, and the city is — um —’

  ‘Shanghai is a phenomenon!’ cuts in Sissy. ‘High buildings of new pattern, booming business, that is Shanghai. I can’t doubt that Shanghai is on the top of days in China. There are so many shops that it seems I can’t finish arriving every place. In a word, it’s so wonderful. The inhabitants of Shanghai look very self-confident all the time. I think they’re very proud of being citizens of this city. Do you need a class monitor, Professor?’

  Taken off guard by her last sentence, I hear a low humming sound. A sound that starts to gather speed and rise to a higher pitch — then more speed — and higher and higher pitch — until like someone whistling to a dog the sound vanishes into thin air.

  The skytrain on its concrete pylons half a kilometre away.

  Stumped, I ask the forward young woman to spell out what she means by a monitor. Brightly, she does so. She explains that it’s the custom for the teacher to choose a student to help run the class. Apparently the task brings with it some kudos. Sissy seems keen for the kudos. Without another word she takes the task upon herself and starts to introduce the other girls, telling me their names in English. Carnation, Candy, Elaine, Echo. We nod and bob. The girls giggle. Next I ask about nicknames. Nicknames are important, I know. More giggling. Sissy says that because Carnation has a round face they call her Baby — though sometimes they call her Trouble because they think she’s cheeky. The girl they think prettiest is called Apple. The most relaxed of the girls is called Sheep, which is a pun on her surname.

  One of the boys meets my eye. A tall, athletic, strikingly good-looking boy.

  ‘I am very curious about academics,’ he says. ‘Is there any conflict between reality and acade
mic world for you?’

  ‘Reality is a word it’s hard to define, don’t you think?’

  ‘Answer my question, please.’

  I laugh.

  ‘Sure, there’s conflict. There’s conflict not only between reality and the academic world but between reality and what we like to think is the real world.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Why don’t we ask what everyone else thinks? Nobody should look to me as an oracle.’

  The girls glance at one another anxiously.

  Sissy a little later tells me that the boy’s name is Jay. She’s walking me to the pay office, to help me collect my first salary. We’ve dealt with her duties as monitor. Now she’s making the most of the chance to gossip.

  ‘What sort of boy is Jay?’ I ask.

  ‘A sunshine boy,’ she says with a laugh.

  Sissy means that he’s a guy who works hard never to look anything but happy. She and the other girls believe that the best kind of boy is a sunshine boy, a boy whose face is sunny.

  We go into the pay room, which like my classroom turns out to be stiflingly hot. My salary will take the shape of a stack of banknotes, handed across by one or other of the pay clerks behind a long counter. Women clerks wear pink skirts, pink blouses. Men wear blue jeans. Pink for girls, blue for boys. All seem to be either languidly at leisure or frenetically at work. A crowd of my colleagues, come for their own pay, jostle for a place in front of the counter. Clerks choose quite at random from among the crowd. Almost every transaction involves some sort of crisis — hardly anyone simply gets handed money in a quiet way according to procedures set out in a staff manual. Clerks frown, fret, dither about, shake their heads, jump up, ask fellow clerks about what to do or, more likely, what not to do. Banknotes — thousands and thousands of red banknotes — sit stacked up on all sides, trussed with rubber bands.

  My mind takes me back to those childhood war comics, cinched in a tube and clutched in my white smooth fist, and also to the sand, the surf, the gulls, the magpies of faraway Pines Beach.

  After stuffing a wad of notes into my wallet, I shake hands with my monitor.