The Drink and Dream Teahouse

by Justin Hill

  Da Shan gave him fifteen. ‘Keep the change.’

  ‘Thanks,’ the driver said and stuffed the money into the glove compartment. ‘Thanks.’

  Da Shan took in the scene before him. The factory windows were dark and lifeless, they looked and felt deserted. It didn’t match his memory at all. This was the ultimate tragedy, he thought, the traveller who comes home to find that home is no longer there.

  Da Shan walked up the stairs, two hundred and sixteen if he remembered correctly, taking two at a time. He would have been proud of that once, when a step seemed a mountain and taking two at a time was a trick only grown-ups could perform. But now it barely crossed his mind as he retraced his way back into the past and heard the shrill sound of a woman singing Beijing Opera. It was something about a nun, and being sixteen. Half listening, Da Shan found it difficult to make out the words. He passed a few people coming in the opposite direction, but it was too dark to see their faces. He counted the blocks of flats as he passed them by, found his way up the three flights of steps to his parents’ door. He knocked three times, bang, bang, bang‌–‌and waited in the shadows. The door opened and the angle of light widened to an arc.

  ‘Hello mother, I’m back,’ he said.

  She looked at him, and squinted. The voice was familiar, he called her mother.

  ‘Mother, it’s me, Da Shan.’

  ‘Da Shan?’ she peered. ‘Da Shan!’ she exclaimed, ‘Da Shan! I hardly recognised you! My own son!’

  Da Shan’s mother hobbled round the room and smoothed back her grey hair all in a fluster. She’d cultured her anger each day he’d been gone, tended it and kept it alive and growing through all the years, but when she saw him she was so surprised she forgot to be angry. ‘Come in,’ she fussed. ‘We weren’t expecting you. You must be tired. Come in, sit down. I didn’t know you were coming. Why didn’t you warn us? You should have said you were coming home. You’ve given me such a fright.’

  She gestured him to sit, and he tried to stop her going off and making tea. She pushed him back to the seat and pressed him down, then went off to get the thermos flask and a cup. She put them on the table and turned to get the bowl of sweets reserved for special guests.

  ‘Mother, please!’ Da Shan said. ‘Sit down. You make me feel like a guest in my own home.’

  ‘Why didn’t you warn us you were coming today!’ she said and put the sweets in front of him. ‘Have some tea,’ she told him and poured steaming water from the thermos into the cup. She composed herself and began to return to her usual self. The first thing that returned was the anger.

  ‘You should never have left‌–‌look what its brought us all here!’ she hissed out of the side of her mouth

  ‘What?’ he blurted.

  She looked straight at him then. Hard furious eyes and hard furious words. ‘The factory’s closing, and everyone is killing themselves over it,’ she spat. ‘And I have a dead man in my wardrobe! How can I live with a dead man in my wardrobe? And all because you go off to the ends of the world and leave us here all alone!’ She wiped away the tears that were welling up. He wanted to get up and say something, but he knew it would make her even more mad.

  ‘Don’t think I’m crying,’ she told him as she cried. ‘Drink your tea.’ She leant down and took a sweet and unwrapped it and put it in front of him. ‘Have a sweet.’

  Da Shan sipped and looked at the naked sweet he didn’t dare eat, and didn’t dare not eat‌–‌and remembered why he had left home in the first place.

  Da Shan’s return warmed Old Zhu’s old bones, defrosted his marrow. He lay in bed and forgot that the box with Party Secretary Li’s ashes was still in the bottom of the wardrobe, under a pair of leather shoes and an old blanket embroidered with tiny blue flowers. ‘It’s right that our son should be back at home,’ he sighed. Winter had passed.

  His wife sat in front of the mirror combing back her steel-grey hair, raking through the thousand tangled strands and pulling out each knot. She looked at her husband lying in bed in his white vest. The man she had married all those years ago; who had given her the son who’d left and gone beyond the edges of her world, then suddenly reappeared.

  ‘Wife,’ Old Zhu cut through the silence, ‘we are lucky to have such a filial son, and a rich son at that.’

  She frowned and put her comb down, turned to Old Zhu and said, ‘Are you really so stupid?! How can you keep a tiger in the back garden! Whatever he’s come back for‌–‌he’s not going to stay!’

  Old Zhu looked across the room into her hard eyes. He’d not thought Da Shan would leave. Not so soon.

  Da Shan got up early that first morning, but his mother was up earlier and she told him to go back to bed. The second day the exhaustion of the journey hit him and he lay in till past breakfast time. His mother banged around the house and the fury of her passage shipwrecked his dreams and cast him adrift in daylight. He dressed and ate and watched TV and she banged and stamped even louder.

  ‘Why don’t you go and catch up with your old classmates?’ she told him at last and so he went out, but when he came back home through the dark, she was sitting up, waiting for him.

  ‘You’re late,’ she accused.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Your father couldn’t wait up.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I was only out with my classmates.’

  ‘How do we know where you were? You’ve been gone seven years.’

  He nodded and said nothing.

  The next morning Old Zhu was sitting at the breakfast table, smoking. There was a pile of hard-boiled eggs on a white plate, salted pickles, a mound of steamed bread buns and a large pot of noodle soup.

  ‘Morning,’ Da Shan said as he sat down.

  Old Zhu smiled and nodded through the threads of cigarette smoke.

  ‘This is a lot,’ Da Shan said. Old Zhu didn’t answer. ‘Where’s mother?’

  ‘She’s eaten.’

  Da Shan waited while Old Zhu finished his cigarette, stubbed it out and then picked up his chopsticks. ‘Eat!’ Old Zhu told his son. ‘Eat!’

  Old Zhu tapped a hard-boiled egg on the table, shattering the shell into a thousand islands in a delta of cracks, then gave it to his son. Da Shan nodded and picked the filigree of cracks apart. When he had finished eating the egg Old Zhu took the ladle and filled Da Shan’s bowl with noodles. Da Shan put his head down to the bowl and slurped, loudly. He kept slurping as he sucked up the noodles and slippery green seaweed‌–‌then drank down the pale green broth.

  ‘More?’

  Da Shan shook his head. Old Zhu nodded and put the ladle down.

  ‘It is good to have you back home,’ Old Zhu said after a long pause, then stopped and reached inside his jacket pocket to pull out his cigarettes. He lit one, sat back and took the first few puffs. His face relaxed and he smiled at his son. ‘You know,’ he said at last, ‘I always hoped that you’d bring your wife and come and live here.’

  Da Shan took a deep breath. ‘But my wife and I are divorced,’ he said. It was something he’d written to tell them about, he was sure. He wondered for a moment whether his parents had ever read his letters.

  ‘Yes,’ Old Zhu said, ‘I know,’ and then fell silent. Da Shan was about to say something, but Old Zhu looked up. ‘The stream of life is an endless river,’ he said solemnly, ‘it should not be left to run dry.’

  Da Shan was by the television, staring at the picture of his wife and daughter when his mother came home. He quickly put the picture down, and sat down and stared at it across the room. His wife was dark with full lips and a lop-sided kind of smile, his daughter the same. She didn’t look like him, she could be anyone’s, he thought and stopped. Now he was away from them it didn’t matter much. The not caring was what surprised him most.

  He turned on the TV with the remote control and flicked through a few channels then turned it off again. Da Shan’s mother scrubbed around him, banged and clattered, but he was too stubborn a stain to shift.

  ‘I’m cle
aning today,’ she told him, ‘and you’re in my way.’ He picked up his feet but she refused to give in. ‘You’re young. Go out,’ she told him, and continued banging cupboard doors and clearing her throat till at last he got up and went out.

  Da Shan borrowed his father’s bicycle and pedalled down through the factory gate towards town. He looked around, thoughts drifting away to pictures and thoughts with no particular order or connection: a day he’d sat to eat noodles in the street, the disappointment when he saw the others off to Beijing; a birthday when he was young and his mother made Long Life Noodles, and he slurped them up without breaking them. It was a lucky sign, his mother smiled, and he was young enough to believe her.

  Da Shan stopped at a red traffic light and waited. The city had changed so much now he hardly recognised where he was. This was the road that led to the Eastern Park. As he pedalled along he saw the road that led to the front gate and turned down it, past people selling chewing gum and popcorn. There was a new brick wall around the outside. A slogan was written across it in large red characters: Foster a correct spirit,itsaid, Resist corruption!

  Da Shan went to the side gate, but it had rusted irrevocably shut, so he had to go back to the front gate and pay two yuan to get in. The park was overgrown with weeds and discarded bits of metal. He pushed through them towards the lake, on the way stubbing his toe on the frame of a cast-iron Flying Pigeon bicycle that had lost both wheels to the years.

  Da Shan remembered the times he and his first love had come here. He shut his eyes and pictured her: her narrow black eyes and smooth yellow skin. The terror as he plucked up the courage to ask her out, which was nothing to the terror he felt when she said yes. Later they’d found places closer to home. The surer they became in each other the less shy they’d been. But the first months had been played out around the lake. The first time he’d kissed her had been in the autumn. Her lips were cold but her mouth was warm.

  Da Shan tried to remember the taste of her mouth, the thrill he’d felt as they kissed, but the image wouldn’t come. All his mind saw was the place as it was now: paths smothered in weeds; water thick with half-rotted leaves, and a rusted tin can stuck to the shore.

  Da Shan opened his eyes. All he had left was his parents. Even the ghosts of his past had gone.

  When Da Shan came home his mother accused him of being deliberately late for dinner. She kept up her assault for ten more days. If he stayed at home she drove him out, and when he came back she was waiting for him with a rebuke. On the tenth day they sat down to lunch. Old Zhu helped himself to the dishes. He picked out some roasted liver, put it in his mouth and chewed and reached for another piece.

  ‘You’re not eating,’ Old Zhu’s wife said to his son.

  ‘No,’ his son said.

  Old Zhu reached for another piece of liver and looked up at them both.

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ Da Shan asked.

  ‘What?’ his wife said.

  ‘This.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Yes you are.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Yes you do,’ he said.

  Old Zhu watched them as they stared at each other. He didn’t know what either of them was talking about. The world was only their eyes and the sound of his chewing.

  Da Shan looked at his mother. Her grey hair and tired old face, the wrinkles eroded around her eyes, the puckered look of her lips. She tried giving him that punishing look but it no longer worked; Da Shan smiled.

  ‘Why don’t you eat‌–‌is my food too poor for you now?’ she asked.

  ‘No. But it doesn’t taste as good as it used to.’

  ‘What are you trying to say?’

  ‘I’m not trying‌–‌I’m saying it.’

  Old Zhu blustered for a moment, wanting to assert his authority and trying to swallow and speak at the same time.

  In a dangerously low voice Old Zhu’s wife said, ‘Are you ashamed to be my son?’

  Da Shan looked at his mother’s cold eyes and opened his mouth. Old Zhu blustered even louder, but no words came. Da Shan looked and opened his mouth and started laughing. Long loud and excessive laughter that built to a peak, and dropped off, and then built up again.

  ‘Have some respect!’ Old Zhu demanded but Da Shan laughed even more. His mother glared but he bent double and wept tears. She put her chopsticks down onto the table, stood up and turned and walked slowly out of the room, into the kitchen and shut the door.

  Old Zhu followed her into the kitchen, where he stood behind his wife, hands by his side, doing nothing. The sounds of Da Shan’s hilarity were undiminished and Old Zhu started snickering too, though he didn’t know why. The old man tried to suppress his humour, thought it might be dangerous to stay in the kitchen and retreated into the dining room and let himself down onto a chair, let it flow.

  Old Zhu’s wife looked for something to smash. In the cupboard there was an odd collection of plates and bowls that she’d put together over the years, but there was nothing that she loved enough. She’d already smashed everything that was precious to her. She picked up the cutting board, a thick slice of tree trunk. It was heavy in her hands as she raised it over her head and threw it through the kitchen window. The glass exploded into the night: a flower of glittering glass with a centre of wooden chopping board that hung for a moment before it felt the pull of gravity and fell down out of sight.

  Da Shan checked himself, and Old Zhu stopped as well. Da Shan coughed and blinked his eyes and Old Zhu sat up hopefully, wanting his son to break out laughing again so he could join in, but he didn’t.

  ‘What was that noise?’ Old Zhu asked, hoping to prompt another outburst.

  Da Shan pointed into the kitchen where his mother stood scratching the back of her left hand with the nails of the right. She scratched till a thick stream of blood began to flow. A thick and viscous ruby line, that clung to her like a leech. She licked the blood away, the metallic taste in her mouth.

  Da Shan came into the kitchen. He saw the blood on her left hand and wiped it away. She let him clean her hands under the tap. He looked at his mother and the smashed window.

  ‘Let’s go out for a meal,’ he said. ‘I’ll take you for the very best!’

  ‘Don’t waste your money.’

  ‘No problem‌–‌I have lots of it.’

  ‘My food is better,’ his mother said.

  ‘I don’t want to trouble you.’

  ‘Your father should have thought of that when he got me pregnant.’

  ‘He didn’t,’ Da Shan smiled, ‘but I am thinking of it now.’

  ‘Then you should never have left.’

  ‘I’ve come back.’

  ‘I don’t want to go to the restaurant.’

  ‘Don’t be so polite,’ Old Zhu urged her.

  ‘Come on, I’ll take you to the very best.’

  Old Zhu grabbed his wife and pulled her out of the kitchen.

  ‘Don’t you read what it says in the newspapers?’ she protested as they stumbled down the stairs. ‘We’ll be poisoned!’ But Old Zhu pulled her along after their son, who strode on ahead and hailed a taxi.

  ‘Where’s a really expensive restaurant?’

  ‘The Cultural Revolution Commune Restaurant,’ the driver announced.

  ‘Good,’ Da Shan said, ‘that’s where we’re going.’

  Old Zhu dragged his wife through the car door, and Da Shan shut the door behind her.

  ‘Take me back home!’ she insisted.

  ‘She’s just being polite,’ Da Shan told the taxi driver, and the driver looked in the rear-view mirror at the old pair in the back.

  ‘My mother’s just the same,’ the driver smiled, ‘always thinking of other people.’ He drove the taxi back along the dark street into the crowded town, through the flashing neon lights; the throngs of people and bicycles and cars. Out of the gloom a neon sign flashed Cultural Revolution Commune Restaurant and the taxi pulled over and they climbed out and
slammed the doors shut.

  ‘Ten yuan,’ the driver said through the open window.

  Da Shan gave him fifty. ‘Keep the change.’

  Old Zhu wanted to go back and get the change, but didn’t want to make Da Shan lose face. He saw his son for the first time: rich and well dressed, confident and complete.

  ‘Mother, Father‌–‌here we are!’ Da Shan announced with a flourish.

  A posse of pretty young waitresses dressed as peasants came running out to the taxi. Da Shan led the way as the girls shepherded Old Zhu and his wife into a room decorated like the inside of a log cabin. Chairman Mao’s picture hung on the wall, his sayings were written out in red strips of calligraphy that hung on all the walls. A midi-system played tunes from the Cultural Revolution: Chairman Mao is the Red Sun; The Red Sun Lights Our Lives; Our Chairman is the Great Helmsman; The East is Red.

  Da Shan chose a table with Mao’s poem ‘Re-ascending Jing Gang Shan’ hanging over it:

  Nothing is hard in this world

  If you dare to scale the heights.

  And pulled out the chairs for his parents to sit.

  ‘Aya! This is too expensive!’ his mother said.

  ‘Can you really afford this?’ Old Zhu whispered.

  ‘To love others without first loving your parents is to reject virtue,’ Da Shan said.

  Old Zhu nodded in respect: this was his son.

  A waitress came over. She had her hair cut short, and an army cap on her head. Her eyes were almond shaped and light brown, her skin was white.

  ‘The table’s dirty,’ Da Shan said.

  The waitress blushed, pricks of blood in her white cheeks. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, and bent low to wipe it.

  ‘Here,’ Da Shan pointed. And she wiped there as well.

  ‘Would you like drinks?’ She blushed.

  ‘Mother?’

  ‘Hot water.’

  ‘Have tea.’

  ‘No. Water.’

  ‘Have tea.’

  She didn’t answer. Da Shan told the waitress ‘Tea.’ Then he turned and said, ‘Father?’

  ‘White spirit.’