Shanghai Boy

by Stevan Eldred-Grigg

  Now, however, I come across a new likeness. A snap in bright colour taken last Christmas.

  Dad sits in the snap with my brother at a summery festive table laden with cheer, with whisky, with beer. Dad looks just like the fogy in front of me now — a fogy whose skin is stretched thin across sunken, skeletal cheeks. Yet in the pic he’s dressed himself as Santa Claus. A nylon Santa. A grinning fogy whose synthetic outfit is crayfish red to match the red of those cheeks. He wears fake white fur around the brim of his red elf’s hat. The same itchy fake fur has been stitched around the cuffs of his yuletide jacket. Santa wears that scarlet jacket open around the throat, a throat spruced with a faux-dashing white nylon cravat folded pertly.

  A tireless series of surgeons has sliced and sewn through that throat, over and over again.

  Years and years he’s kept staggering along, making clicking sounds. The surgeons, having sliced away so much of his voicebox, set to work making a hole, a fleshy tube, which gapes from the old fellow’s slashed-up, patched-up, stringy gizzard straight above the collarbone. The hole is known as a stoma. Dad can croak words through it, with a lot of effort. We find it hard to make out what he means, so more and more he turns to scribbling onto the little whiteboard.

  ‘Pity they needed to open you up again, Dad. I know they did a great job, though.’

  Again he nods zestfully, again gives me a thumbs up.

  Years and years wracked with chronic pain, frightened by nameless new acute pains, by senseless relapses. Years and years wrought upon by slicing little stainless steel blades, clamps, pliers, forceps — swab please, nurse— and afterwards the needle niftily darning, cross-stitching its way through his worn old wattle, tatting his bits and pieces back together, sewing him up, setting him up to see another day.

  ‘How are you organising the photos?’ I ask, a bit helpless. ‘Chronologically?’

  Sideways shaking of head, now.

  Alphabetically writes itself on his whiteboard.

  ‘Really? How can you do it alphabetically?’

  Name of place where photo taken says the blue ink on the whiteboard.

  The baseball cap I find a bit odd. Dad took to wearing the thing a few years ago when my brother gave it to him as a joke during a holiday in California.

  ‘You feeling okay about the hotel, Dad?’

  Yet another nodding, yet another thumbs up, followed by a wiping with a soft cloth, followed by another wielding of the marker pen, another blue smearing of bold ink upon the surface of something portable and blank and shiny.

  Very strange city, though, says the whiteboard.

  ‘You reckon?’ I say uninterestedly. ‘Strange in what way?’

  Wipe wipe, smear smear.

  Madhouse.

  We work our way wearily through the week, showing the old man the sights of Shanghai. Carmen, softening, gets him over to her apartment one night. We sit at the dinner table looking out into the darkness and down at the rooftops of old brick houses which crowd in rows along alleyways. Alley-dwellers can be glimpsed here and there in yellow lamplight, shuffling back and forth, barely lifting their rubber sandals from slippery and spat-upon blacktop. Stark interiors can be seen thanks to bare electric bulbs — small, stuffy rooms where folk are moving about, yakking, watching tele, hoicking into sinks, washing dishes, wringing out clothes, yelling to their kids out of windows. Traffic roars in the background.

  Afterwards we take our dad by cab to the international airport. We wave him away. An airliner whooshes him off to the other side of the world.

  ‘Well, I can officially declare the end of half a decade fuck-free,’ says my sis as we walk to the cab rank.

  ‘What?’ I say.

  ‘I haven’t had any nooky since a few weeks after the attack on the World Trade Center.’

  ‘DUDE, WHY NOT try to love each other?’ he says, looking down sadly at the pavement, or to be more specific at a smear of spit and squashed noodles. ‘I want eternal love.’

  ‘Ben, you know there’s no such thing.’

  ‘Eternal love, man. Eternal! Like in the movies.’

  Why am I standing on the slimy pavement of a foreign city with a guy who’s half my age? We’re talking late in the afternoon at the corner of One and Two Streets. Not the best spot for this kind of talk, but I couldn’t help myself. My feeling of being bored witless by Ben has been building up more and more, and now these words just blurted themselves out the moment after I’d greeted the magazine woman outside the Sincere Daily Stop.

  ‘I’m too old for you, Ben. You’re too young for me. We’re not good for each other. You’re young enough to be my son.’

  My fiftieth birthday has just gone by. I didn’t mark it in any way. What does it mean, that number fifty? Only by mere chance have we ended up with a decimal numbering system. Fifty would mean nothing if our system were binary, or based on three, or seven, or whatever. Mind you, my birthday did make me think for a moment about the night my life really got started, the night when my dad’s sperm lanced my mum’s egg. Pines Beach was the scene of the crime, I happen to know. Mum told me once, when I asked. After the kids had gone to bed, she added, after she and Dad, no doubt wearily, had drained their last cups of tea and closed their books and switched off the light.

  ‘Come on, dear, give us a cuddle.’

  ‘Mmmm.’

  A new noodle-house has opened on this corner. A glassy place, shiny with glib plastic surfaces, its style seems modelled on the fast-food outlets for mass-produced Yank crap which pox the streetscapes of more and more neighbourhoods. It’s a great hit. Packed with happily chewing and chatting crowds, food hurtling onto every table, it’s clearly coining money. Yet tables are waiting empty at the older noodle-house next door. I feel bad about the older noodle-house. Thriving when I first came to this town and unknowingly ordered my meal of offal, jellied blood and pigtail, it’s quiet now. Admittedly its cooks still toil over woks, their faces blackened with charcoal, in the hellhole of a kitchen. But the waitresses who once had to work the tables hard are now idling in front of the counter, eyes blank, worried about whether they’ll be laid off, whether before long the dirty doors might have to be closed for good. Where will they and the cooks go if the dump goes broke?

  Ben keeps looking down cheerlessly at the spit and squashed noodles.

  ‘Okay, I’m young,’ he says. ‘But I’m not a kid, I’m a mature guy.’

  Well, maybe that’s what’s wrong. Maybe it’s not that he’s too young but that he’s too grown up — for all his gameness with groovy vocab — if by grown up we mean hidebound, in a rut.

  ‘Ben, I’m sorry.’

  The new noodle-house is a sign of what’s happening all over my district, and other districts all over the city. At first glance, casting your eye over the streets — taking note of the workaday bleakness, the lack of pep — you might mistake the neighbourhood for a stagnant backwater where not a lot could be thought likely to happen, where trade wouldn’t switch much from one slow year to another. The truth is that the neighbourhood is forever tearing down its old walls, ripping out its guts, whacking up new walls, feverishly trying to find some new way to turn itself inside out or to twist itself about to make a buck.

  A buck. Not a lot of bucks.

  ‘I’m never gonna find the right guy,’ says Ben. ‘I’m gonna live alone, dude, and I’m gonna die alone.’

  Turnings and twistings are almost always on the skimpiest of scales — scrappy makeovers of small concrete caves in the street fronts of apartment blocks. The whole city is like this, away from the glam malls and boulevards. Shops and snack bars do a tiny trade. Yet always the vendors keep lighting on new ways to try to pick up the odd penny. A few days after I first checked into the Foreign Experts a concrete pad was poured in front of a ground-floor flat opposite the old noodle shop. A few days later I caught sight of two blokes hacking away at the front wall of the flat to open it up to the street. One week later — hey presto, a knickknack shop called Cookies. Signs in pink
plastic, scrawled with characters and stuck to what had been a stretch of mildewed cement, tried to lure us inside to poke our fingers at the knickknacks. Last week, overnight, the knickknacks were cleared away. A tarpaulin was thrown over the front of the shop. Hammering followed, along with dust and rubble and yells from workmen. Now, a bargain boutique selling shoddy smart clothes for groovy chicks. Goodbye Cookies — hello Vivian’s!

  ‘I’m really sorry, Ben. You’re a good guy. I hope you’ll be happy.’

  ‘In this modern society it seems that love is just like fast food. A quick start and a quick end.’

  I walk away.

  I feel bad, but at least my back is smooth.

  Dank chill climbs from the street drains as I walk away. Winter already. A city which knackers you with its steamy heat during summer now turns out during winter to batter you with a cold that’s hard, dull, wet. The raw edge to the air comes home to me straight after binning Ben. I cross a couple of blocks to my campus. I stand, stranded, waiting for a shuttle bus in front of a stainless steel sculpture thingy at the dead centre of the campus. The bus should be parked here already because it’s due to leave soon for our suburban campus. Two hours from now I’m meant to start a lecture there. Afternoon is coming to a close. A cold wind from the north cuts across the concrete keenly. Low rays of setting sun make fake Palladian facades turn pink. Nobody else is waiting for the bus. A bad sign. I hope nothing’s gone wrong. Trying to grab a taxi would be murder, since right now the streets are thick with rush hour.

  Okay, here’s a good sign. Somebody else steps up. A man about my age whose short, stout little body has been tucked into a tailed coat. A fellow lecturer, I’d say. He wears leather gloves and a soft felt hat — a trilby is it called? A hat of the sort worn half a century ago by bourgeois chaps in my homeland. Chaps like my dad.

  How’s my dad getting on in my green and summery, warm and flowery homeland?

  ‘How are you?’ I say in Mandarin, with a smile.

  ‘How are you?’ he says in a thick Shanghai accent, with a short nod.

  We wait.

  After twenty minutes he gives up and goes away. Damn! Now what? Wait a bit longer. All pinkness has gone from the walls of the campus. The sky, having been violet, then indigo, has become dark navy. I see the first star. Venus, right? I never have known how to name the stars.

  I give up and go across to Administration.

  Administration proves to be uninhabited and cold. I’m cold too. I’m hungry. I’m angry! Typical of fucking China. Great sham, hollow, empty structures designed to stun, to stupefy, but not to warm. Always these days the spaces below the ceilings, inside the walls where we try to work, are clammily cold — not heated at all. No cosiness, no accommodation, can be found at the university. Staff are no longer about. Students have gone home to their cold dorms. Hang on, here’s somebody! A guard standing alone, a braided guard dressed like the Grand Duke of Ruritania. Fumbling my cold fingers over the numbers on my cellphone, wanting to swear, I phone old Mr Sun.

  ‘Yes?’ says Mr Sun.

  ‘Mr Sun, this is Manfred Morse. I’m very sorry to bother you, but I need help speaking to somebody.’

  ‘Of course I am honoured to help,’ says dear, sweet, lovely Mr Sun.

  I hand my cellphone to the guard. The guard takes it, with a nod. The two guys talk. The guard is tall, with round wire-rimmed specs and buck teeth — actually he looks not so much like the grand duke in a comic opera as the caricature of a Japanese officer in the war comics of my boyhood. He nods at me once more. I nod and smile back. The guard hands me my cellphone.

  ‘What’s the story, Mr Sun?’

  Mr Sun explains that the bus has been cancelled today.

  Well, that’s great. Nobody told anybody, but that’s what things are like in this part of the planet.

  ‘Oh, thank you. So very sorry to trouble you, Mr Sun.’

  I stump off fiercely to the skytrain.

  Ninety minutes of costly commuting now follow. A crammed skytrain skims me and my sore feet across western suburbs. A cab, stopping and starting, jolts me through the traffic jams on the motorways of the southern suburbs. My wallet weighs a lot less when I step out and scuttle through the marshy chill of the night air into an icy classroom. I stand under its white fluorescent lights. Why have I come to this comfortless city? Why did I not stay safely in my own country?

  Carmen calls when I get back to my apartment at the end of this very long day.

  ‘I think the cyberdating thing is a bit of a bust. Chatwoman seems to fancy guys who fail to fancy Chatwoman. Also vice versa. Got in a grope with a guy last night, which makes three so far this month.’

  ‘What are your findings about that lucky threesome?’

  ‘Duds each and every one.’

  Cool, last classes for the semester! Bundling myself up in thermal tights and a padded jacket, I roll downstairs through spaces now smelling not only of fish and piss but mould and mildew. A vast plastic Santa swells in the foyer. Red and white, shiny and inflated and jolly.

  Outside, the street is bitterly cold.

  ‘How are you?’ says the mag woman in front of the Sincere Daily Stop.

  ‘How are you?’ I say.

  Chestnuts are being roasted in charcoal on a rusty tripod at the corner of One and Two. White ash and grey smoke — gritty, wispy — waft up from the charcoal and spread out into the dead calm sky. Cyclists stream along the streets, coming from all points of the compass. Workers on their way to work. Factory workers, shop workers, office workers. Women and men, girls and boys. Lucky me, needing only to walk a couple of blocks. Swinging out of Two, I turn into Six. Six Street is a wide thoroughfare and as always at this time of day I find myself almost shocked by the sight of thick throngs of cyclists. Rugged up against the cold, hunched over heavy black bikes, they keep coming and coming. Nobody looks happy. All look peaked, drawn, weary — it’s so cold, they have to bike so far, and the glaze of their eyes and the set of their jaws show that strength is being husbanded, that there’s nothing to spare, that nobody wants to feel anything right now. Right now you’re aware only of the need to pedal, to keep pedalling, to keep wrapped up, to pedal some more. My mind jumps across the city and I see millions — millions on their way to work, with the same drawn blank faces, pedalling back and forth each day.

  My classroom proves to be numbingly cold. Student dorms are no better, I’m told. My poor kids! They turn up to class looking like padded and quilted balls, topped with wool. Brown or black eyes peer out from the padding. A lot of the youngsters are sniffling and coughing. Today they’re waiting anxiously to be handed back their semester essay.

  I pass the essays out. Anxious looks become gloomy looks.

  ‘We’ll talk about your own essays at the start of next semester. Right now we need to revise some of the key skills necessary for writing an academic essay. First, how to hedge your language.’

  Half the class has been given a fail grade. Cheating was common even among the more gifted kids. Sissy handed in a glib essay crammed with sentences obviously nicked from a book. Her grade? Zero. She went pale. Now she looks a little sick. During the halfway break she scurries up to me when I’m by myself in the corridor.

  ‘Professor Manfred, I am ashamed when I collect my essay,’ she says, looking down at the grubbily streaked linoleum. ‘I admit that the essay is a summary of one chapter in a book I find in the library.’

  ‘Thanks for telling me the truth, Sissy.’

  She looks up at me, flushing eagerly, but maybe I look a bit grim because the poor lass turns her eyes back down to the lino.

  ‘Yes, that’s the whole truth, Professor Manfred. I am very ashamed for what I have done. I am stupid to do that. Now I only hope that you will be as kind as to give me a chance to rewrite the essay. I promise you that this time I will finish it only with my own effort, please Professor Manfred —’

  ‘Would that be fair to the others, Sissy?’

  She bursts into sobs,
making a glittery nylon ribbon bob about on her ponytail.

  ‘I hope you will be merciful to me and I will be very thankful to you. This is a great lesson for me. I am ashamed. I apologise to you sincerely and deeply. I hope you will forgive me and give me another chance to finish my original task by myself. I feel deeply guilty now. I feel too bad now, shamed, sad. Oh, I cannot feel worse now. But I deserve it, I know. Thank you for your strictness, which will remain in my memory forever and will help me a lot in my life.’

  Sissy’s been troubled by a cold sore for the past few days, which means she looks like she’s been eating pizza and has forgotten to wipe away a scrap from the corner of her mouth.

  ‘Okay, look, you’re not the only one who’s cheated, so why not come back into the classroom and you’ll see what I’ve decided to do about the problem.’

  ‘May you be happy, Professor Manfred.’

  ‘I’m doing my best to be, Sissy. Dry your tears and come into the classroom.’

  On stepping back into that unfeeling white space I walk to the blackboard and chalk up a big white word.

  PLAGIARISM!

  The class looks nervous. Girl glances at girl. Boy grimaces at boy. Calmly, I talk about the way plagiarism is condemned as intellectual crime by academics in the western world. The class stares. I tell them that those awarded a zero for stealing the work of others will be given a chance to prove they can do the work themselves by writing a new essay and handing it to me one week from now. Girl once more glances at girl, and boy at boy. I ask for questions. No questions. My youngsters, I note, now seem not so much nervous or gloomy but bewildered by the way such a bother has been made about something so everyday.