by Justin Hill
Da Shan read what he had written, and then nodded to himself. ‘One day there will be a time when what I and your mother did will be seen differently. Maybe there will also come a time when you have to act like we did. These opportunities only come once a life. I know your mother would agree with me when I tell you not to miss that chance.’
Da Shan and Little Dragon turned down along the road to the factory and took a right hand into the old town, to his grandma’s house. Little Dragon’s legs were tired, so Da Shan lifted him up onto his shoulder and carried him along. But Little Dragon was so tired that even the kite felt heavy.
‘I’ll take the kite,’ his father said, bouncing him up to get a better grip.
Little Dragon liked being carried by his father. His father was so tall and strong.
‘Do you think Mother will come back?’ Little Dragon asked as they walked down the street.
‘You know I don’t know,’ Da Shan said. ‘Maybe we should ask Grandmother.’
After lunch, Liu Bei’s mother put Little Dragon to bed for a rest then made Da Shan a cup of green tea. She filled the cup while Aunty Tang sat in the shadows and wheezed.
‘I’m sorry to hear about your father,’ Liu Bei’s mother said as she put the cup down on the table. ‘He was a good man. I remember.’
Da Shan nodded. He didn’t really want to talk about it.
‘There was something Little Dragon asked me this morning,’ Da Shan said, ‘about his mother. He wanted to know if she was going to come back or not.’
Liu Bei’s mother looked at him and put her knitting down. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t think she is.’
Da Shan nodded. He let out a long sigh, looked away down at his trousers, picked a fleck of dust off them, scratched an old stain with his nail: it still refused to come off. ‘If she’s not coming back,’ he said at last, ‘then I thought it would be easier for him if we told him his mother had died.’
Liu Bei’s mother looked at him across the table. In the corner Aunty Tang lit her pipe and coughed. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘you’re right.’
That evening after supper, Da Shan sat with his son on his knee and cuddled him close. ‘Are you a brave boy?’ he asked and Little Dragon nodded. The child’s face was grave. He could sense this was a serious question. ‘I want you to be brave,’ Da Shan said, ‘because I have something very sad to tell you.’
Little Dragon nodded.
‘It’s about Mother.’
‘Is she coming back?’ Little Dragon asked.
‘No,’ Da Shan said. ‘She’s not. She’d dead.’
Little Dragon nodded. His father was serious and he was serious too. If his father cried he’d cry. Little Dragon fiddled with his father’s collar. He saw his granny washing the pots, her hands cut off at the wrists by white bubbles. She wiped the pots and put them to the side to dry. ‘Mother’s dead?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘But Grandma is here, isn’t she?’
‘Of course she is. And I’m here.’
Little Dragon nodded. He started crying even though he didn’t want to, tried to bring the picture of her face into his head but the image was starting to fade, her face was blurred. He wiped the water from his lashes and the snot from his nose, imagined him cuddling close as they lay in bed together. He could still feel her there.
‘You haven’t forgotten have you?’
‘No,’ Little Dragon said and his father gave him a squeeze.
Da Shan wished he’d brought his book so he could read it to Little Dragon. ‘How about,’ he began, ‘we go and visit the places that Mother used to go to?’
‘OK,’ Little Dragon said. His tone was flat and sad. He didn’t sound very enthusiastic. Da Shan bounced him on his knee.
‘We’ll go tomorrow–OK?’
‘OK.’ Little Dragon nodded.
The old town had a quiet, thoughtful feel to it that morning. The streets were bathed in burning sunlight, the shadows looked deeper than they were. Da Shan held Little Dragon by the hand as they walked through the streets, following Liu Bei’s mother’s directions. They went confidently at first, but after a few minutes he wasn’t so sure. This part of town didn’t look so familiar. Maybe he’d taken the wrong turning. At the end of the road was a fork. Da Shan stopped and looked around him. Both directions looked the same. He screwed up his nose and decided that left felt right.
The big heavy cobbles had been smoothed down by the years, rickety wooden houses leaned in, their eaves almost touching in the middle. Each step felt more and more like he’d come the wrong way. It wasn’t the look so much as the unbroken silence. Half way down was a house with a red-painted doorway and a bamboo bird cage hanging from the eaves. Under the bird cage sat an old man with watery eyes, his thin bones poking out like knitting needles under a thick woollen sweater. The old man sat staring into nothing. He didn’t seem to notice Da Shan approach, but the songbird cocked its head to one side and broke the totalitarian silence with a sudden trill: a tiny tune, like a fragment of a much longer piece.
‘It’s a fine bird,’ Da Shan said. Little Dragon stood silently by his side.
The old man didn’t move.
‘Is this the right way for Well Street, do you know?’ Da Shan asked him.
Still no response.
Da Shan tried again: ‘Is this the right way for Well Street?’
Silence.
Da Shan looked back along the way he’d come and let out a frustrated sigh. A little girl came running out of the doorway. She stopped when she saw Da Shan and put her hand to her mouth.
‘Hello.’
The girl sucked her hand while she looked at him.
‘Do you live here?’
She didn’t answer.
A woman came out of a house opposite, locking the door behind her. ‘She don’t speak,’ the woman said as she turned back up the way Da Shan had come. ‘Neither of them speak,’ she called over her shoulder. ‘No one speaks around here.’
Da Shan kept going after all, walked down a few more empty streets and came to a little shack where a woman in a red dress and plastic slippers sold ice cream.
‘Is there a teahouse near here?’ Da Shan asked.
‘A teahouse?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I don’t know any teahouse.’
‘It’s called The Drink and Dream Teahouse.’
She echoed the name and rubbed her chin. ‘Sounds familiar.’
‘It was near the old city wall.’
‘The Drink and Dream Teahouse,’ the woman repeated. Da Shan waited. ‘The Drink and Dream Teahouse, I know I know it, but I can’t think now.’
Da Shan waited and waited. After a while he wanted to shake the woman.
‘Oh yes!’ she said at last, ‘I know. I know the place. Wooden house–yes?’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘It must be. It’s off Yellow Willow Lane, I think. It must be the same place,’ she told him pointed down the street. ‘It’s down to the bottom and on the left. Straight down.’
‘Thanks,’ Da Shan said.
The woman’s directions weren’t quite right but the nearer Da Shan got the more he began to recognise where he was. Yellow Willow Lane was a narrow street, there was no pavement, the tarmac was hemmed in close by rickety wooden houses, and at the end was one of the old city gates: a narrow arch of dressed stone.
Da Shan asked for directions for The Drink and Dream Teahouse and a man waved his hand in the direction of the gate. ‘Through the gate,’ he said. ‘On the right.’
The gateway was thick, like a tunnel, and the air had a cool damp feel to it. On the other side was a patch of wasteland, half way between a demolition and building site. There were a few peasant workers squatting in the shade eating lunch. To the left was a little alleyway, and Da Shan looked up to see if the sign was still there. The Drink and Dream Teahouse it said across the top of the wooden gateway.
Da Shan lifted Little Dragon up into his arms, held him clo
se. ‘There you go,’ he said, ‘that’s where mother used to work.’
Little Dragon looked and stared. His mother was dead. She wasn’t going to come back after all. He turned and cuddled his head into his father’s shoulder, wrapped his little arms around his father’s head.
‘So when people die they can’t come back?’ Little Dragon checked.
‘No, they can’t,’ Da Shan said.
‘So where do they go?’
‘They used to go underground, but now they go to a special place in town,’ Da Shan said.
‘Can we go there?’
Da Shan thought of the chaos and the smoke from the town’s incinerator and shook his head. ‘Maybe when you’re older,’ he said and Little Dragon nodded. Da Shan watched tears trickle down his son’s cheeks and tried to smile.
Old Zhu’s funeral was a simple affair. The old women sat and discussed the poverty of the arrangements, the Zhu family didn’t even hire a bus to take all the relatives to the Number Three Incinerator. It came and went and the ashes were collected, and it seemed to the old women that another link with the past had been severed.
One day Da Shan came to pick up his son and Liu Bei’s mother drew him aside.
‘I think it’s time he went to go and live with you,’ she said. ‘He is your son after all.’
Da Shan nodded. He’d been wanting to suggest it himself, but had been waiting for the right moment.
When Old Zhu’s widow heard that Da Shan’s bastard was going to come and live with them she was so angry she went into the kitchen and looked for something to smash. She picked up a blue bowl and was about to throw it onto the floor when she remembered it was a bowl that Old Zhu had bought. She could picture him sitting at the table and dipping his spoon into it, or ladling soup. No she couldn’t smash that.
She looked around the kitchen for anything that wouldn’t remind her of her husband but there was nothing. Everything had his touch imprinted on it: every chopstick, plate, bowl or cup. She held the cups he’d given Old Zhu medicine in and remembered his face as he swallowed the medicine. Silly old man, she thought, and then realised she was supposed to be angry.
When she met Little Dragon she tried to be cold and distant, but he was such a pretty little boy that she couldn’t resist pinching his cheeks and speaking to him in baby-talk.
‘So how old are you little man?’ she asked.
‘Five,’ Little Dragon said.
‘Six,’ Da Shan corrected, and tussled his hair. ‘You can’t count can you?’
‘Six!’ Little Dragon declared.
That evening Little Dragon and Da Shan sat on the balcony, and Da Shan took out his book and wrote on the inside cover ‘The Drink and Dream Teahouse’, in neat brush strokes. Little Dragon watched wide-eyed. ‘Shall I tell you a story?’ Da Shan asked and turned over to the first page, as if he was about to read a story. Little Dragon clapped his hands together and sat up, his eyes intent on his father’s face.
‘And did the President really go and drink there?’ Little Dragon asked at the end.
‘Of course. All the famous people went there. They all heard about your mother. She was so beautiful and her tea was the sweetest in all of China.’
Little Dragon sat and thought. He tried to fit everything he could remember in with this new bit of information. They didn’t really blend, but swam around together in a contradictory soup.
‘Did you ever go to the Drink and Dream Teahouse?’
‘Once,’ Da Shan said.
‘Was mother there?’
‘No.’
There was a pause as Little Dragon pursed his lips.
‘Was that because she’d died?’
‘Yes,’ Da Shan said, ‘it was.’
Before Little Dragon went to bed Da Shan stood at the window and looked out, over the hill with the temple on it, where the best winds were. Little Dragon could see the moon rising. ‘Look Father!’ he said and Da Shan looked.
‘She’s not shy any more.’
‘Who?’
‘The moon.’
‘No,’ Da Shan said, ‘she’s not.’
Da Shan and Little Dragon sat watching the moon cast long dark shadows across the factory yard, when opposite Da Shan thought he could see movement in a window opposite.
A clunk! of a door bolt being drawn back startled two rooks from their sleep. They flapped through the dark and landed in the next tree, disappearing noisily in the mass of black branches. The door creaked as it was pulled back, then silence as a woman stepped out onto the balcony. She was dressed in a red robe embroidered with swirling phoenixes of turquoise blue and electric green: but all they could see were the shades of light and dark that moved around her body. The fringe of her robe billowed out from the concrete edge of the balcony. She had black hair, white skin and black eyes.
Madam Fan sat inside, listening in the shadows as her daughter began to sing:
Sigh for a beautiful woman
Born under an unlucky star
And Little Dragon fidgeted in Da Shan’s lap.
Beyond the mountains are still more mountains
A heartless lover sends no news
Madam Fan mouthed the words as Peach sang them:
I long to send a message
But don’t know where he is.
Peach danced a few steps, flapping her sleeves like the shadow that danced at her feet. Da Shan thought of Little Dragon and Liu Bei and wanted to cry.
There’s no cure for sleeping alone
No medicine to warm a half-cold bed.
Peach held her stance as she sang out the last notes: a breeze tugged at her robe, making the phoenixes dance and fly for a moment before they went still. She looked out across the factory, chill moonlight, blocks of flats and grey roof tops; then looked across the yard towards Old Zhu’s house. There was a light on and she could see his silhouette in the yellow square of the window. Da Shan and his son watching her.
Peach stared for a moment then she turned her face down and stepped back inside, and the bolt slid back in place. Madam Fan’s eyes were closed in silent contemplation. A long cold tear snaked down her cheek. She wiped it away.
‘How was it?’ Peach asked nervously.
Madam Fan opened her eyes, and looked at her daughter.
‘Beautiful,’ she said.
Praise for The Drink and Dream Teahouse
‘A vivid portrait of a small community in provincial China…Hill gives us plenty of insights into contemporary Chinese politics and it’s new economic rigours…his main interest resides in the domestic: family meal times, romantic mishaps, and nights out at the Number One Patriotic Karaoke Nightclub’
Emma Hagestadt, Independent on Sunday
‘Justin Hill knows China inside out. Every sentence is filled with knowledge, affection and a poignant sense of loss’
Washington Post
‘A fine novel… The Drink and Dream Teahouse is very well written and creative, a wonderful antidote to much writing about China, whether the three-generation-fiction style of Wild Swans or the backward-looking bitterness of most recent memoirs’
Frances Wood, Times Literary Supplement
‘[Hill] occupies the consciousness of these characters with convincing confidence. His impressive knowledge is complemented by a sensitivity to China’s past and an awareness of the cultural life that offers hope in its persistence’
Peter Ho Davies, The Independent
‘A vivid portrait of a small community in provincial China that is making a painful transition to a ‘socialist market economy’. Although he neatly sketches in the political and economic background of contemporary Chinese life, Hill’s focus rests entirely on his characters and their romantic and familial problems…It should….appeal to anyone wanting a conventional read in an unusual setting’
Daily Mail
‘China has been thrown into upheaval as it adapts to capitalism, but most of the effects on its populace have been hidden from us. The disruption is the basis f
or Hill’s novel, which examines the shifting fortunes of some of the residents of the provincial city of Shaoyang. Hill’s decorously written tale of fraught romance amid social cataclysm is by turns entertaining, moving and amusing’
Peter Carty, The Observer
‘This is intelligent and interesting novel about the clash between Chinese communism and Western capitalism. And the struggle between the two ideologies is focused exactly where it should be–in family life…. The Drink and Dream Teahouse has many passages that are extremely moving…its thoughtfulness reflects well upon the author, who shows promise as an engaging storyteller’
Mary Loudon, The Times
‘A novel about human failure and endurance. Faith is little more than a joke between muttering nuns in a run-down temple. Art is given voice by one woman belting Beijing opera from the balcony of her factory flat. Language has lost its meaning, somewhere between communist slogans, village proverbs and over-iterated ancient poetry. And yet the rituals of mourning and celebration continue, the social distinctions of old China persist (landlords who no longer own land, peasants who run video shops), and poetry still makes some people cry, or fall in love…a direct and powerful novel portraying modern China with humour and affection’
Stephanie Smith, New Statesman
‘Hill’s portrait of modern-day Shaoyang is brilliantly vivid: a world of Western-style restaurants and supermarkets that are far too expensive for most of the town’s inhabitants. If you have ever wondered what daily life in contemporary China might really be like, this will tell you more than a thousand travel books’
Jerome Boyd Maunsell, The Times
‘The Drink and Dream Teahouse is a tale of old versus new, hopes and illusions crushed and generations attempting to understand each other, and themselves. It is a story about the search for ideals and meaning in a time of change and political and economic turbulence.’
Visage Magazine
‘a masterful tale of China’s full circle, but what is truly remarkable about this novel is that the characters rise above their stereotypes…A must read if you’re looking for a book that delivers on many levels’
