by Tariq Ali
All best,
Your old friend Confucius.
Dear Dara,
I did not return to Beijing with my brother, but spent a few days in London first preparing for the journey. Zahid knew a number of neurologists and we met two of them together. They pointed out that in memory lapses, it is normally old memories that have been submerged; whether or not they can be brought back to the surface depends on the person concerned: They were impressed by Hanif’s (please accept the use of this name even though you and other friends always think of him as Confucius) total recall of Punjabi, and one of the neurologists said he had not encountered a case of this sort before. He advised us to constantly call Hanif by his name when speaking Punjabi and Chinese. The recall of Punjabi, both of them stressed, was a sign of a submerged memory. It would take time and patience.
Hanif picked us up at Beijing airport and drove us home, pointing at new buildings and naming their architects. He lives in a huge, comfortable apartment built about five or six years ago, close to the financial quarter. His wife, Cheng Yu-chih, is in her late forties, short hair, very well dressed and fluent in English and German. She works as an economist in some government department.
While he showed Zahid the apartment and then took him to the basement to inspect the health centre and swimming pool, I told Yu-chih our story. She was not as surprised as I thought she’d be. Hanif had told her that we were friends he had met in Paris, but that we might be related to him as well. Yu-chih explained that he was slowly trying to build a narrative of his life before his collapse, and since his return from Paris had told a number of people that he had been born in Lahore and had recently met his sister.
She also said he talked in his sleep in strange languages and occasionally used such archaic words in Chinese that she had to consult a dictionary. Now this began to make sense to her. She’d wondered who the old couple were that he had introduced her to once as his parents but who never came here and whom he rarely visited. Yu-chih had thought that he was ashamed of them because they were retired factory workers. This was a common phenomenon in all the big cities, so she had not questioned him too much on the subject. ‘When a country has changed its identity so completely, is it surprising that many of its citizens do the same?’
I like her very much. She is honest and intelligent.
When the two men returned, I said ‘Hanif, I really like your wife.’ The name startled him.
Then Zahid repeated it and he turned on us. ‘Why do you call me by that name? In Paris one of your friends called me Confucius, and now you call me, what did you call me?’
‘Hanif!’
‘It’s not a Chinese name.’
I nodded, but did not push him any further. Later Yu-chih asked me whether our family was Hui. I told her we were Hui from Yunnan, but when we settled in India some of our community took traditional Arab names from our ancestors as well. My parents and I had Chinese names, but they decided to call my brother Hanif. She sat down on the bed with her head in her hands.
‘Dear sister, Jindié, the reason I asked is because your brother is always cursing the Hui in Beijing, sometimes using very bad language. I always reprimand him, but even his body language becomes aggressive. He will never accept he is Hui. That will be the biggest shock for him. I haven’t dared tell him that my family in Shanghai are Hui. We are not religious at all, but my father, a surgeon, is proud of his heritage. Sometimes I take him to Oxen Street because it has the best noodles in town. It’s in the Hui area and he always looks at them strangely. Once he asked offensively for pork and got an offensive reply in return. “Go and fuck a pig,” he said before I drove the car away. I did shout at him afterwards. He talked more rubbish. “The first Hui who came to our country said they would return to theirs. They’re still here twelve centuries later. They should go home.” I asked whether all the minorities should return and reminded him that the Tibetans are desperate to do so but we won’t let them. His reply was very strange. He said: “The others can all stay. Only the Hui. They should go.” He doesn’t mind the Muslims in Xinjiang. They can stay as well. Just the Hui in the south. The intermarriages in the south between Hui and Han were so strong that for centuries the only distinguishing feature was the pork taboo and prayers.
‘Many Han thought Mohammad was just like Confucius for the Hui. Perhaps my dear husband hates hybridity. I just don’t know. None of our friends talks the way he does.’
All this came as a shock and I was very distressed. Slowly, I unpacked my suitcases, thinking all the time of how to unpack Hanif’s mind. I had brought a lovely old photograph of our parents and Younger and Elder Granny posing in front of the Zam Zam gun, which used to hang above the mantelpiece in our Lahore apartment. I now hung it on the wall in the living room. Then I placed a photograph of all of us just after my wedding, with Hanif dressed in an achkan, wearing a turban and grinning, in the kitchen. Yu-chih nearly fainted when she saw that one, but said nothing.
Zahid knew some Chinese physicians from international conferences and through them we found an excellent neurologist. I told her everything, including the outbreak of Hui-phobia. Dr Wang agreed to see him, but only after a month. She thought that with proper stimuli his memory could return. If the Punjabi language had been unlocked, then anything was possible. She wanted to know if there had been an accident, and said I should go and meet the couple he thought were his parents. All she would do was put him under a scanner to see if there had been any physical damage. The rest was up to us.
Hanif and Yu-chih would both leave for work early, and Zahid had gone to Isloo to take Neelam and the kids to London for their holidays. I was left on my own and went out to explore the city. Oxen Street was packed with people. I walked to the mosque and looked inside. Nobody cared. I found the best noodle stand in Beijing. It was marked qing zhen (halal); another sign said ‘no pork’. They were very good noodles. When I told the owner, who was all of twenty-five years old, that I was a Hui from Fatherland, he was very welcoming. Wanted to know how I had landed up there. His uncle, a Chinese naval engineer, was currently in Gwadur. Had I been there? I shook my head. He told me he was a secular Marxist but also Hui and observed minority holidays to honour his Arab ancestors. He said that since Gulf money has been coming in to help repair the mosques and build a few new ones, he had noticed an increase in mosque attendance. He winked. ‘I think some go for free food and clothes.’
Yu-chih took a day off work and drove me to an old part of the city to meet the couple Hanif thought were his parents. They live in a cluster of small houses near the outskirts of precapitalist Beijing. They must be in their late eighties. They welcomed us warmly and offered some tea and very sweet biscuits. They told their story openly; there was no subterfuge at all.
Hanif had been a very close friend of their son’s, and the boys often stayed with them in the late Sixties. The boys were members of a group of Red Guards that called itself From the Periphery to the Centre Proletarian Group for World Revolution. One day there was a clash, either with another group or with the Lin Biaoists in their own group. They could never get the details, but it ended with their son, Hsuan, being killed. Hanif picked up his friend and carried his body home. His own head was bleeding and he fell unconscious. The old couple began to weep at the memory of Hsuan, and both Yu-chih and I hugged and stroked them till they grew calm again. He had been their only child.
They had called an ambulance and Hanif was taken to the hospital, where he recovered consciousness but had no idea what had happened. He was sent back to their home in an ambulance. After the political turbulence had subsided he entered Beijing University, gaining admittance as the son of a working-class couple. The university authorities themselves were recovering from the chaos of that period. They were aware that Hanif had suffered a severe memory lapse and didn’t press him on details of his prior schooling or anything else. He was given new papers in his Cultural Revolution name, Chiao-fu. He was a brilliant student, always coming home with good rep
orts. Then he went to Shanghai and Hong Kong to work and only recently had he returned to Beijing. Once he started working he had sent his ‘parents’ money every month, often accompanied by clothes and expensive food parcels. He never talked much after Hsuan’s death, but was always dutiful. It was Hanif who had assumed they really were his parents. They never corrected him because in a way he had become their son. Once he saw a photograph of Hsuan and himself with red bands on their heads and asked them, ‘Is that my brother? What happened to him? Why did he die?’
They’d had no idea of where he came from or they would have written us. They looked in his case and found only a Chinese passport with the name he uses today. No address book, no other identifying papers of any type. Nothing. It was like that during the Cultural Revolution. Getting rid of identity cards was regarded as an act of liberation. We now have as complete a picture as we are likely to get till his memory returns.
At home he looked at the photo in the kitchen, the one of my wedding, and didn’t recognize himself. Neither Yu-chih nor I said anything, but I’ve noticed him staring hard at the other picture, of our parents and grannies.
When I’m alone I often speak Punjabi to him and he replies, usually with a smile in his face. Once he said, ‘This is a very funny language. I remember a joke we used to repeat.’ He had used the words ‘I remember’, and this made me shiver with joy, but I kept calm and asked him to tell me the joke. ‘It’s quite stupid, but funny. Someone says to the bichu booti (the stinging nettle-like plant that you must remember from our Nathiagali outings), “How is it I only see you in the summer? Why do you disappear in winter?” The bichu booti replies, “Given how you treat me in the summer, why are you surprised I prefer to stay away in the winter?”’ I didn’t find this amusing, but Hanif laughed so much that I joined him. He alternates between this mood and one where he seems very tense, as if dragons were fighting in his head.
My boy, Suleiman, has arrived from Yunnan. He is living in Dali but travels all over the province. My child, whom I thought we had lost forever to the financial world of futures and derivatives, has returned home. Hanif was touched by his presence and heard the stories of his adventures in Yunnan with some delight.
But it was Suleiman’s earlier life as a stockbroker in Hong Kong that really interested his uncle. Where he had worked, how much money he’d made and what had made him leave that world. Both Hanif and Yu-chih nodded a great deal as Suleiman described how hard he had worked, how he had no time to think of anything else except rushing to a club after work each day, drinking with his friends, watching television and going to bed early so he could wake up at five and be at work an hour later.
Alone with me, Suleiman confessed that he was in love and showed me his girlfriend’s photograph. She was a postgraduate student at the university, a few years younger and, like him, studying history. Which mother is ever satisfied with her son’s choice? My first reaction was that she was far too pretty and I could not make a judgement till I met her. There was a photograph of both of them on a boat in the lake in which she was laughing. I liked that more than her pin-up pose. And I had always thought that Suleiman would marry a nice Punjabi girl. When I said that, he responded, ‘Yes, just like the nice Punjabi general who made Neelam so happy’ I asked him so many questions about her that he lost his patience. She was in Beijing with her family for the next week and I could meet her. So, I thought, all this has been well planned by the young couple. But before I met You-shi, there was a tiny earthquake in our lives. The tremors had been there for weeks.
One morning when Suleiman and Hanif were in the kitchen together, my son saw the old wedding photograph and burst out laughing. ‘Uncle, you look good in Punjabi clothes. Just look at you.’ Hanif paled. He looked at the photograph carefully. He left the kitchen and knocked at my door.
‘Jindié, are both our parents dead?’
I nodded, and we both sat on my bed and wept. We talked that whole day. He wouldn’t let me tell him his life story, but instead asked questions. I would answer them and he would ask more. He was piecing it all together for himself.
‘We are a Hui family?’
‘Yes,’ I said firmly.
‘From Yunnan?’
‘Yes.’
‘Our great forebear was Dù Wénxiù?’ He began to smile. ‘I think it was Plato who named me Confucius, or was it Dara?’
‘Plato died a few months ago, Hanif. And Dara you met in Paris a few weeks ago. It was he who rang us.’
‘I will ring him later. Now I have to choose between three names. Hanif would be best, I think, but all my official documents say Chiao-fu. And Confucius reminds me of our young days in Lahore.’
The silt in his head was being dislodged. Too many memories were coming back at the same time. Suddenly he began to weep again and said we had to go to the home of his adoptive parents. He drove fast, cursing the Beijing traffic even though his car was too big and part of the problem. The old couple were pleasantly surprised. Hanif burst in and hugged them.
‘I remember everything: My friend Hsuan, your son, died saving my life.’
And the story poured out. They had been attacked by a rival faction of Red Guards, who had denounced them as lickspittles and running dogs of Soviet revisionism, supporters of the traitor Lin Biao and US imperialism. Then they had taunted Hanif. You are no Red Guard. You are a Hui pig. Pigs can’t be Red Guards. Repeat after us: I am a Hui pig, not a Red Guard. Hanif had refused to repeat this, and they had charged at him with staves and knives. He had been hit several times on the head, but as they charged him once again, young Hsuan put himself in the way and died from a single hammer blow to his head. Seeing what they had done, the rival faction disappeared. All Hanif could remember was lifting Hsuan on his back and walking and walking and walking. The old couple wept. So many tears during these days. Then Hanif said to them: ‘Why are you living here? I have a large apartment. Come and live with us. Or I will find another apartment near us for you.’
They refused to leave. They were proud of having been workers at a time when it was a good thing to be, and besides, they said, it was here that Hsuan had been born and died. They did not wish to move away from him. We had bought food along from a restaurant on Oxen Street. Hanif described the area. ‘Our people lived here for centuries.’ Had his revulsion for them been caused by the taunts heard just before Hsuan died? Who knows? Now we all sat down and ate together. I couldn’t help asking the old people what they thought of Mao. The old man spoke first: ‘He forgot where he came from and headed off for a different past.’ His wife was less objective: ‘I think back now. Hsuan was always saying that Chairman Mao was fighting the capitalist-roaders. He was right about them if nothing else.’ I looked at Hanif. He was smiling. ‘Both of you are right, my parents. He was also right about fighting the Japanese bandits as well as the KMT. Our present leadership prefers Chiang Kai-shek to Mao, without realizing that they wouldn’t be where they are without the Revolution. But I can see why they’re nostalgic about Chiang.’
As he drove back, he talked about Hsuan a great deal and was full of self-reproach for not having done more for his parents. I told him that they certainly didn’t believe he had been inattentive. The next few months were truly joyous. I had not felt so happy for a long time, in fact, not since the start of the evening in the Shalimar Gardens in Lahore forty-six years ago. Yu-chih is the most adorable sister-in-law one could ever hope to have. She adjusted to Hanif’s identity without any problems and even shamed Hanif by reminding him, to his mortification, of the Hui-phobia that his amnesia had brought to the surface.
I discussed Suleiman’s life with them, and we invited You-shi to dinner. They came together. She still seemed too pretty and a bit too aware of it for my liking, but as her shyness wore off and she began to speak I melted. I was happy for them, and Suleiman, noticing the softness that had suddenly come over his mother, smiled the whole evening. Hanif asked whether she had told her parents. Both the young people started laughing.
Before I arrived, Suleiman had often spent the night at her place and clearly in her bed. You-shi’s parents were both university professors and were happy to go along with whatever the two of them decided.
‘We’ll get married when we want, Mom,’ said Suleiman. There’s no pressure on us here. This isn’t Lahore or London.’
There was nothing more to say. Soon Neelam arrived with the children and stayed a week. She, too, it would appear, loved You-shi at first sight, and they became inseparable. You-shi took charge of the children and went with them to horrible, ugly theme parks but also to the Forbidden City, which will, I’m sure, soon be sold off to some billionaire as private property once the crisis subsides a little. Perhaps Zhang Yimou can buy it and make it the centre of a pulp film industry. There are things that still make me angry, which surprises Hanif, who always regarded me as apolitical.
I decided to leave my brother and sister-in-law alone for a while. Their house had become a hotel. Suleiman and You-shi took me to Dali and then Kunming. On the way to Dali they told me that they lived together in an old apartment overlooking the lake. The ‘old apartment’ is tastefully furnished and very comfortable. They live and behave as if they were already married, but I never discuss these matters with them.
I walked by the lake often, thinking about the past. One day, even though it was sunny and warm, I found myself shivering. I was overwhelmed by emotion, remembering Elder Granny’s stories about this place. I walked a great deal that day, trying to imagine what Dali must have been like when Sultan Suleiman was alive. I looked at the people and wondered whether their forebears had been among those who had stood in the streets and wept on the day of the surrender. My thoughts were constantly interrupted by the noise of traffic and car horns. Many tourists visit this city without being aware of what took place here only recently.
