The Drink and Dream Teahouse

by Justin Hill

  ‘It’s true,’ the other players agreed. ‘Which is very good for us.’

  Madam Fan’s husband shook a cigarette out of the box, picked it up and lit it, all one-handed. ‘I tell you why I don’t win,’ he whispered loudly, ‘I’ve got no yang energy left.’

  ‘You’re not telling us that you’re frying beans in a cold pan!’ one of his friends laughed.

  ‘I am!’ Madam Fan’s husband grinned as he puffed the cigarette to life, wreathed his face in fumes that curled and licked the air. ‘The heat’s off when you’re around, but turn the lights off and my wife’s as excited as hot oil!’

  Peach stood up and left the room.

  The mah-jong players watched her go.

  ‘Like mother like daughter, heh!’ one of them sniggered.

  Madam Fan’s husband leant forward. ‘I don’t know how I deserved both of them in one life!’

  ‘She’s pretty enough!’

  ‘What can you do with a flower that refuses to go to seed?’ he asked.

  ‘She could marry my son.’

  ‘She’s not a dog,’ Madam Fan’s husband laughed, and the others laughed too. ‘That son of yours couldn’t even mount a bicycle!’

  Peach closed the door of her parents’ bedroom, and stilled the voices. The house seemed to be full of voices; ever since Party Secretary Li had killed himself. Her parents had hardly stopped arguing. Madam Fan sat on the bed with a blanket over her legs. She was knitting a pair of baby’s trousers.

  ‘Are you all right, Mother?’ Peach asked.

  Madam Fan looked up and ignored the question. ‘When you get married and have a child, then you’ll need these,’ she said holding up what she’d knitted so far. ‘I’ll embroider a dragon and a phoenix on them‌–‌for a boy or a girl!’

  Peach sat close next to her mother. ‘Are you all right, Mother?’

  Madam Fan smiled a tight smile as she patted Peach’s knee, but inside she was reliving the latest row with her husband. With each stitch she felt every blow, on the head and arm and back. And the kick in her stomach. White bruises on her white skin; invisible and unforgivable. She was thinking so much she missed a stitch. Peach didn’t notice and lay back on the bed. Madam Fan missed another stitch, and swore.

  ‘I wish I’d learnt to do this as a child,’ she said.

  ‘Why didn’t you?’

  ‘Nobody was interested in Old China. We had political studies. We were getting rid of all that.’

  Peach nodded. She’d learnt all about Old China when she’d been a student. In Old China women had their feet bound, the country was under attack from all kinds of foreign countries, there were drugs and prostitution, and the life of the people was very bad. But there were drugs and prostitution now, Peach thought.

  ‘Was it very different then?’ Peach asked.

  ‘When I was your age,’ Madam Fan said, ‘we’d been liberated. The Communist Party officials were honest and good men. They worked hard.’

  ‘But didn’t they do some bad things?’

  Madam Fan looked up and returned her daughter’s stare. ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like shooting father’s father?’

  Madam Fan looked back down at her stitching. It was good her husband’s father had been shot. Madam Fan would have shot him herself if she’d known what his son would do to her. ‘In those days the officials were hard but honest. They shot people because they were the people’s enemies. But now they just shoot anyone.’ Madam Fan stitched. Peach looked out of the window to where the factory chimney no longer smoked. ‘It’s all the fault of Deng Xiao Ping. Mao should have shot him first of all.’

  Peach lay back again. The room next door was full of the rattle of mah-jong tiles and the dull banter of her father and his friends. Their chatter made her mother seem quieter, and more real. She’d never talked to Peach like this before. Peach wanted to ask her about the past. Things she didn’t understand, that she’d never dare ask before, because questions had always seemed such dangerous things.

  ‘Is life better now?’ Peach began.

  There was a long silence filled by the creak of the bed and the rattle of tiles in the other room. ‘No, it’s not,’ Madam Fan said at last. ‘Things now are much, much worse than they’ve ever been.’

  ‘Why?’

  Madam Fan counted out the stitches. ‘Stop asking questions. Don’t you have anything to do?’

  Peach picked at her fingernails, easing out the dirt, then looked up at her mother. Madam Fan was still concentrating on her knitting.

  ‘When you were my age you were married, weren’t you?’ Peach said.

  Madam Fan screwed her lips together and thought. ‘How old are you now?’ she said.

  ‘Nineteen.’

  Madam Fan hummed a snatch of opera.

  ‘Well?’ Peach said.

  ‘Well what?’

  ‘Were you married at my age?’

  ‘No,’ Madam Fan said.

  ‘I thought you married Father when you were sixteen.’

  Madam Fan stopped humming and bit her lip. ‘Your father never married me,’ she said with stone-hard coldness. Her eyes began to fill with the tears she had protected and nourished all these years. She let one curl down her cheek; a pearl in the light that shone for an instant and then slipped out of sight.

  Peach watched that teardrop disappear, and felt it land on her hand.

  ‘Your father never married me,’ Madam Fan repeated slowly, making sure she said it calmly, knowing there was no way back. ‘Your father never married me‌–‌I sold myself to him for his monthly rice ration.’ There was a long gaping pause which stretched on. ‘I sold myself to him. My father was landlord class, we had no food, we were starving. Everyone tried to make me leave him afterwards. Our backgrounds were too different. But I wouldn’t.’

  Peach looked away, Madam Fan patiently stitched and let one more tear roll down her cheek. It landed on the same spot as the first. Right on Peach’s heart. Madam Fan stitched, and kept on stitching. She only looked up when Peach had dashed out of the house and slammed the door. And then she hummed her line of opera.

  The hills inhaled the last of the cold sunlight and night fell, as cold and sharp as icicles. The moon rose silently through the black branches as Peach ran down towards the factory gateway. She ran and sobbed as she went. Tears for her mother and her father, and most of all for herself.

  Heaven and earth are not kind, she thought

  For them we are all disposable.

  The moon looked down with soundless contempt as Peach cried. The past was behind her, waiting to chain her down as it had chained her parents. Above her head the stars glittered like her dreams of the future‌–‌beautiful, bright and impossibly distant.

  Peach wandered out of the factory gate, under the words We Wel Come Your In Vest Ment, and off into the darkness of her thoughts. Past the pool tables where young men were laughing and through the empty stalls where the peasants had left piles of rotting cabbage leaves and plucked chicken feathers on the road. A street-sweeper was brushing the garbage together into a pile. There were a few shops open and their owners sat amidst their sacks of rice and boxes of milk powder and watched TV. Peach walked and walked through her thoughts, down past the film rental shop and down to the river, which flowed as dark and silent as death.

  In the video shop Sun An was shovelling the last of his dinner into his mouth when he saw Peach lean over the lip of the bank. He tipped up the bottom of the bowl and cleaned away the last flecks of rice.

  ‘You’ll get a zit for every piece of rice you leave,’ his grandmother had warned him when he was a boy. Since then he’d always eaten all his rice, but it didn’t seem to help. He was twenty-three and still felt spotty. Sun An watched Peach for a while, her willowy waist and tenuous figure. He watched and imagined, till he was frightened she’d feel him watching her, and he cleared his throat. ‘Heh, Peach,’ he shouted. ‘Have you eaten?’

  Her pale moon face turned to him through the dark. ‘
Yeah.’

  ‘You want some more?’.

  She didn’t answer, but slowly reeled herself towards him, kicking stones as she came.

  ‘Look‌–‌there’s plenty! Have some!’ he picked up the lid of the pot and let it steam the smell of cooked food. She leant against the door post.

  ‘I’m not hungry. I’ve eaten.’

  ‘Don’t be polite, I’ll get a bowl for you!’ Bits of rice flew out when he spoke. ‘If you don’t eat it, it’ll just go to waste. Here, I have a bowl, sit down!’ He forced her to sit, and dug out the rice using the bowl, and then handed it over to her. ‘And here‌–‌the dishes,’ he said, gesturing to the plate of fried egg, and plate of pork and green chilli. ‘Eat!’

  Peach sat and picked threads of pork out of the chillies.

  ‘How’s your mother?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘And your father?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Good.’

  She looked up and caught him watching her. ‘Eat! Eat!’ he said. ‘Don’t waste it!’

  Sun An beamed too much. Peach chewed a strip of pork. ‘I’m really not hungry.’

  ‘I cooked it myself.’

  ‘It needs more salt.’

  ‘I’m not a very good cook.’

  Peach sat staring at the food, but not eating. At last she asked, ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Nearly eleven.’

  ‘I think I should go home.’

  ‘It’s not safe. Let me walk you back.’

  ‘I don’t want to trouble you.’

  ‘It’s no trouble.’

  ‘What about the shop?’

  ‘Oh, it’s too late for customers now. Come on, let’s go.’

  Sun An and Peach walked back through the deserted streets. Nocturnal beggars were picking through the day’s rubbish, eating scraps of rice with their fingers, and then hurrying out of sight in case they were recognised. A few taxis rattled round potholes as they looked for customers; karaoke singing echoed through the streets and buildings, then faded off into the empty heavens.

  Da Shan sat at a roadside shack, eating a late snack of cold beef and rice wine, chewing. He watched Sun An and Peach walk past, but only saw Peach. White skin and black eyes. She caught him staring at her, and stared back till she passed and looked away; but after she had walked on her beautiful black eyes stayed there in the middle of the street, looking into him.

  Da Shan thought of his wife, and his daughter, and all the women he had ever seen and loved. And those beautiful eyes.

  Love’s troubles are not to be numbered,

  Just one evening scars the soul.

  He sipped the wine; spiced with sadness and the petals of chrysanthemums.

  At the Mists and Dew Pavilion Fat Pan was making love to a whore. He ejaculated with a grunt and rolled to the side, his penis leaving a wet trail as it slid out and he dropped again into the deep loneliness of strangers. Fat Pan reached for a cigarette with one hand while his other hand cupped her breast. He absent-mindedly massaged it with his left hand, rubbed the nipple until it was erect, then tweaked it between his fingers.

  Fat Pan let go of her breast to light his cigarette; smoked as the girl tore off a piece of toilet paper and wiped herself. The cigarette’s red ember was like a red eye watching him in the darkness. The girl tore off another piece of paper and dropped it onto the far side of the bed. There was a wet splat! as it landed. Fat Pan decided to pay her less for that. He didn’t pay good money to fuck peasants. Next time he’d go to the Teahouse and drink tea.

  The red eye glared at him as he inhaled, then the glow dimmed as it watched him from the shadows. He thought of Cherry, next time he’d go and see her. It took a couple of cigarettes before his energy returned, the rhythm of the girl’s hand hastening his erection. At last he was firmly erect again, and he stubbed his cigarette out and rolled on top of her and kissed her neck.

  After midnight Fat Pan washed himself and dressed. His footsteps echoed on the wooden steps, filling the house with the dull thuds of his descent. Outside the spring air was warm, the brothel courtyard was empty except for a bonsai cherry in a terracotta pot turned gold by the yellow light that came from an upstairs window. As Fat Pan walked away the light was turned off, and the darkness rushed in. Over the silhouette of the tower blocks, little by little, the crescent moon appeared. Before dawn, in the silver moonlight, a cherry bud opened up in a slow and silent explosion of petals.

  The next morning was clear and bright. Da Shan got up early and set off along the road that went into the centre of town, which was clogged with peasants and beggars. He struggled through the melee of bodies, pushed himself free of a tight clam of people and got onto the scrub land between the pavement and the river. The river had stopped years before; now it lay dead and stagnant in the long trench of the riverbed. Leaves floated just under the surface, there were pale grey smudges where plastic bags had drowned, and flecks of green algae made up a lurid scum on the surface. In the middle floated a fishing boat, anchored to an unseen net.

  ‘Heh‌–‌what have you caught?’ Da Shan shouted across the water.

  The man waved to him, thinking it was someone he knew.

  Da Shan shouted again. ‘Caught any fish?’

  ‘No,’ the old man said, ‘no fish.’

  ‘I caught a grass fish as long as my arm when I was a child.’

  ‘I’ve never seen a grass fish in this river.’

  ‘Well‌–‌you’ve never fished here then.’

  ‘I’ve fished here for forty years.’

  ‘It was as long as your arm.’

  ‘Grass fish don’t grow that long in this river.’

  ‘I tell you it’s true.’

  Da Shan waved and the old man waved back, and a polystyrene cup bobbed on the black water.

  Da Shan walked through the town, down roads awash with liquid mud, and up the hill towards the Temple of Harmonious Virtue. There were steps of granite laid up one side of the hill. Untouched by the passage of feet and years, the steps were as rough as the day they were chiselled out of the mountainside. Da Shan’s feet left no mark as they carried him up and away from the desperate chaos of the streets.

  As the slope levelled out the steps were replaced by a path, long buried under grass. He found the groove feet had worn into the earth and followed it. It led to the temple door, that exhaled a cool breath of air spiced with sandalwood incense. Da Shan stepped into the candlelit gloom of the shrine and felt strangely as if he was entering a living body. He took a sheet of yellow newspaper from a pile and spread it out on the floor, then sat down. The statue of Guanyin smiled as it had always smiled, and in front of her knelt two old apprentice nuns chanting the Lotus Sutra. They were his mother’s generation, old with their hair beginning to fade from grey to white. One had thick glasses and the other needed them. She squinted to focus, squinted so hard her eyes were almost closed.

  Da Shan tried to cultivate his mind as they massacred the Lotus Sutra. The text was full of characters they didn’t recognise, meanings that had been lost to them through time. They chanted without understanding, mispronouncing words and then correcting one another and the plastic statue of Guanyin looked down on them, half-moon eyes full of compassion and hands raised in a gesture of inner peace.

  He sat at the back of the temple for a long time. In the blundering chaos of the women’s worship he shut his eyes and tried to imagine that there was no past or future; but all he could hear were the two women chanting and stopping and correcting each other, and then striking their blocks as they turned the next page.

  Shaoyang was soaking up the evening twilight as Da Shan returned to town through Li Family Village. The mud path wound down between brick houses; a smell of burning hung in the air. Da Shan stopped and saw lots of small fires burning in the village. The closer to town he got the stronger the smell. Threads of smoke veined the skyline; the smell of burning had a melancholy taste; and above his head a tall pine sang in the breeze.


  The path wound between the houses, and Da Shan turned a corner and found a man in a cheap suit squatting by the roadside. He was squinting through the smoke as he fed a small fire with bundles of paper. His face was flushed red by the dancing flames, a cigarette perched between his lips as he shuffled back to watch the flames dance.

  ‘Has someone died?’ Da Shan asked.

  The man tossed the last wad of paper on the fire and looked up, still squinting. His chin was unshaved, his voice high pitched. ‘It’s Qing Ming tomorrow,’ he said with peasant simplicity.

  ‘Of course.’ No one had celebrated Qing Ming when Da Shan was growing up, certainly not in the cities. Not the educated people. It was a peasant superstition.

  Da Shan and the man stood back and watched the flames fight each other in their eagerness to consume the wads of paper, burning themselves out in their struggle; leaving only crinkled shreds of white ash that took nervous flight. Da Shan shook his head: he wouldn’t even be able to celebrate Qing Ming if he wanted to. He didn’t know how.

  Old Zhu was playing cards with one of his friends when Da Shan came home. There was a half-smoked packet of cigarettes on the table and a half-full ashtray. They were talking of 1950, the year after liberation, when they had been sent to Shaoyang to set up a re-education centre for prostitutes. They’d called it the Re-education Centre for Shaoyang Prostitutes. On the first day they held a parade through town with drums and banners to proclaim the benefits of the new Communist society and to call all the town’s whores for re-education. None came. Undeterred they’d begun to plan out the camp. They’d staked out an office block, residential quarters, a clinic and a kindergarten on the crest of the hill. When they had finished the rain came and washed away their plans, but that didn’t matter. The next day they just started again.

  ‘I came across a peasant burning money,’ Da Shan said as he sat down. ‘He said it’s Qing Ming tomorrow.’