Wuhan

by John Fletcher

Behind him toiled a black horse-drawn carriage, silk curtains tightly drawn to hide his exotically dressed wives and children and parents and favourite concubines all sweating and moaning and arguing and lamenting in the heat. Jammed in with them was the family safe.

  Behind them, heavily guarded, rolled a steel wagon into which had been welded an enormous tank of water.

  Behind that came a train of his wagons piled high with food, with clothing and fineries, a kitchen range from which the sweating cooks regularly despatched exquisite morsels of food run forwards in a silver bowl by a favourite servant to the prince who almost invariably refused them. In the next cart, the valuable furniture from his palace, his family papers, plants, and the memorial tablets and portraits of all his most influential ancestors.

  On either side of these wagons trotted lines of donkeys tethered head to tail, carrying huge burdens of clothing and bedding piled on their backs. So heavy was their weight their nostrils had been slit open so they could pant more rapidly under their enormous loads.

  Behind them, on foot, followed the household servants and astrologers and cooks and gardeners and slaves and doctors and sing-song and taxi girls.

  Behind them followed a train of beggars and the starving, desperate to pick up any scrap which had fallen from his vast train, all the time crying out for water and alms.

  At the front, in his carriage, rode the prince, his face a study of exquisite blankness. As blank as the vast plain across which they now all toiled.

  *

  Floods of humanity flowed relentlessly southward across the great yellow plain. In the centre, on the road, travelled the rich and strong. Further out the common people spread out and moved more slowly. Finally, on the fringes, hovered clouds of bandits and criminals watching always for signs of weakness or exhaustion on which to pounce. Above them wheeled vultures and kites and crows. And above them all flew the fragile, one-engined Japanese reconnaissance plane, all the time sending back radio reports on what it saw.

  Wei and his family watched this vast armada stream past them as they rested and fed themselves.

  He and his wife stood at the front of the cart while the donkey fed from its nosebag. They ate a dumpling each stuffed with goat’s cheese. Each sipped a tiny amount of water from a bowl they shared.

  ‘There will be no water,’ said Wei’s wife, ‘except when we get to a river. And even then we will have to boil it. And there will be no wood for fires.’

  ‘We will have to eat all our prepared food and what vegetables we can raw,’ replied Wei. ‘Then with the firewood Eldest and Second Sons gathered, we will have to cook as much of the dried food as possible.’

  ‘How is the wheel?’

  ‘After last night the splints are still good, but the nails which hold them are starting to move in the wood. More people must walk. There’s still a bit of water in the buckets beneath the cart, but most of it was spilled last night. From now on I’m only going to water the donkey.’

  ‘We can keep the goat til it stops milking,’ said his wife, ‘then you can slaughter it and I’ll sell it to a family with some firewood – so we can have some of it cooked in return.’

  Suddenly his wife groaned.

  ‘Wife?’

  She looked back at him. Her face wrenched in pain. She sank to the ground. For two days her willpower had held the child back. Now she was going into labour.

  ‘Get me into the cart,’ she ordered. ‘And get underway.’

  Once again the cart started to roll across the Great Plains of Central China.

  4

  THE UNIVERSITY CAMPUS OF THE CITY OF JINAN. AUTUMN 1937.

  I am, I think, what you would call stupid. Or, to put it another way, an intellectual. I, a stupid man, look at the dungheap that is China and for some reason am attracted. A normal intelligent man simply walks straight past a dungheap. And if he is a super intelligent man he walks straight past while averting his eyes and holding his nose. But I, a stupid man, an intellectual, an intellectual so brainless he even loves his country, tarries by the dungheap that is China. I even approach the dungheap and attempt to engage the flies, crawling all over the turds, in uplifting conversation. I cheerily put forward grand ideas and theories for improving, rebuilding, even totally cleansing and disinfecting this shithole and building a brand new and wonderful city in its place. Do the flies, sucking greedily on their turds, even grace me with a reply?

  Someone – another intellectual – once said China was like this emaciated, worn-out old nag, whose master harnesses her to this incredibly heavy wagon, just at the foot of this dangerously steep hill. And then he whips her and curses her and kicks her til the terrified beast lumbers forwards in her traces and slowly starts to climb her way up this amazingly steep hill, straining every muscle and sinew of her broken-backed old body. Her owner screams obscenities and threats, laying into her with whips and sticks, so she gradually wheezes and totters upward yard by yard, straining on inch by inch, til, eventually, halfway up, the creature reaches this point where she cannot pull it another step but is too terrified, with the weight of that great wagon behind her, to let it slip even an inch backwards. So she is stuck, teetering back and forth on the edge of disaster.

  In the darkness I lie in my warm, warm bed, next to my soft, soft wife, who in her sleep pushes her arse so intimately into my crotch, but all I can do in response is sweat. Not sweat with lust, sweat with fear.

  I’m in despair over my beloved China. I mean, our last tyrants, the Manchu emperors, collapsed, thank God, but did the Glorious Revolution of 1911 follow them with enlightenment and socialism and justice and the emancipation of women? No, it followed them with thirty years of civil war and famine and warlords and bankers and landlords sucking every last drop of blood out of the corpse. To say nothing of all the foreign invaders. Take the English, pushing into all our rivers and ports with their gunboats, controlling our trade, force feeding us opium. Not that I have anything against the English. I quite like them, in fact – even though they killed my father. I spent a few years living in the rougher end of Bloomsbury in a freezing cold lodging house eking out a living teaching at the School of Oriental Studies. (One of my pupils was a young man called Graham Greene who these days, I’m told, is making quite a name for himself.). Anyhow I fell in love with English writers – Dickens, Conrad, H. G. Wells, Joyce – even their modernists who have influenced me considerably in my own work. I once saw Virginia Woolf walking down the street in Bloomsbury. She hailed a taxi and it stopped right by me so I opened the door for her and she stepped inside without even a glance in my direction. But it’s more the ordinary English I really like and admire. The landlady in my lodgings read the Daily Mail and was greatly exercised by their continual claims that the country was about to be overrun by a great ‘Yellow Peril’ – of which I, apparently, was the vanguard. But once she had ceased belabouring me for my oriental infamy, she would pass on to belabouring hundreds of her fellow countrymen, all of whom were apparently even more infamous than me. What I liked best was if I went into pubs or cafes or anywhere, they would all be full of Englishmen telling each other precisely what they thought about everything and precisely what they were going to do about it. And the people they insulted the most were their own government. Imagine a Chinese person doing that! Most Chinese people don’t even know they have a government. So the Englishmen and the Englishwomen would insult and vilify and excoriate every politician alive and then promptly rush out and vote for them. English people know their minds and speak them.

  There are lots of other foreigners – French, Portuguese, German, Italian, Americans – who have invaded us and posted their soldiers and gunboats throughout our country – but I don’t know so much about them.

  But the foreigners who have caused the greatest humiliation, the greatest terror are, without doubt, the Japanese.

  My wife turns in her sleep. I feel her soft breath on my cheek. In the next room sleep my three young children. In the room beyond my beloved – if diffi
cult – mother. She talks continuously – even when asleep.

  The Japanese are barbarians. They believe in and practise the disgraceful scientific theories of Social Darwinism. Eugenics, they believe, scientifically proves that they are superior to all other races on earth and that therefore it is natural and right for them to butcher and enslave all inferior races, especially us Chinese.

  Don’t get me wrong. I consider myself to be a progressive man. I believe in all human beings, men and women, working together to build a better world. I believe in the compassionate and loving teachings of Our Lord Jesus Christ. The writings of Count Tolstoy and Rabindranath Tagore, of H.G. Wells and Mr George Bernard Shaw. But do I believe in Science? The great God which all the Western world bows down before? Science gives us medicine, fine buildings, swift transport, good food – but only the rich can afford them. Science also gives the Japanese the flying machines and tanks and shiny weaponry and poison gas to massacre us. And worst of all, Social Darwinism, taught in universities all around the world, gives madmen the just cause to exterminate the rest of us.

  I can bear this no longer. With all my churning and sweating I will awaken my gentle wife. I slip softly as I can out of our bed, pass the room my children sleep in, pass the room my mother chatters in. We live in a modern westernized apartment block on the university campus where I teach and write. In the sitting room, in the ghostly light of first dawn, I dress, hopping about beside the drawing board my wife sketches out her graphic designs and paints her paintings on. I slip out onto the streets.

  In the cold dawn air I pass traders carrying fresh vegetables and fruit to market, food stalls starting to steam their sweet-smelling dumplings, a beggar out early to catch the early bird. I give him a few pennies. I climb the stone stairway onto our city walls and look outwards. Drink in Thousand Buddha Mountain stood immense and eternal to the south, its snow peak blazing in the first yellow shafts of sunlight. Further down its slopes the refractions of light purples and mauves and oranges and lemon yellows and pinks – a kaleidoscope of mists and hazes and tiny hide-and-seek rainbows. Around its dark base solid crags and sombre pine forests.

  I relax a little.

  To the north the silent mist-shrouded waters of Daming Lake – lost in a dream of itself. In summer it’s matted in a vivid green tapestry of lotus leaves, each with its white spiked flower spearing into the sky. Now in autumn the lotuses have all rotted and the usually clear waters lie brown and rank. Swallows swoop above, feeding on its fat flies, daggering up and down again like black lightning. It warms me that they are still loyally staying with us, not yet starting their long flight south. In the distance, on the far side of the lake, runs a line of willow trees which marks the southern bank of our Great Yellow River. Our Mighty Protector. On its bank looms the black hulk of the Great Iron Bridge spanning the river. From several miles further north of the bridge comes the occasional crump of artillery – our artillery – firmly keeping the Japanese away from us. Unlike in Beijing or Tientsin or Taiyuan or Shanghai or Nanking, our Jinan troops have not turned and fled. Our general, General Han Fuju, has stood and fought. He has successfully fought off Japan’s most feared, most arrogant soldier, General Rensuke Isogai, commander of the Imperial Japanese Army’s notorious 10th Division. The Great Iron Bridge resupplies General Han’s troops on the north bank with food and ammunition and reserves. In our city of Jinan we feel safe.

  But it’s not just the Japanese who keep me awake at night. I recently received a telegram. Before I relate its contents I think it only courteous that I should explain who I am – otherwise you will not understand the import of the telegram. I say this in all modesty but I, Lao She, am actually a quite well-known writer – well, as well known as any writer can be in a country where 97 per cent of the people can’t read. I have written novels and short stories. Last year I wrote a novel, Rickshaw Boy, about a rickshaw boy, a sort of social realist State-of-China type novel, which gathered some quite positive reviews and has since been translated into several languages. Hollywood is apparently talking about making it into a film.

  So I, a writer, receive this telegram. From a firm friend, General Feng Yuxiang. He, like me, is a Christian. He used to baptize his troops by lining them up in a field and drenching them all with a fire hose. He was an extremely successful and humane general, and whatever lands he gained control of he always governed justly and with an eye to improving the lot of the ordinary people. He dresses like a peasant because he says he was born a peasant and will die a peasant.

  We met six or seven years ago when our great and wise leader, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, saw fit to send us both, separately, into exile here in far-off Jinan – myself for my critical writings, Feng for being too successful a soldier. We met at our chapel social, over tea and biscuits. He told me that, in order to educate his troops, he had regularly read them some of my short stories. Our families immediately took to each other. Feng’s wife, Li Dequan, had set up fifteen schools for poor rural children in the Mount Tai area and myself and my wife would sometimes go and teach at them.

  After chapel we frequently took picnics together on the slopes of the majestic Thousand Buddha Mountain. Since the Japanese invasion three months ago, though, our beloved leader, not trusting General Feng to be so close to actual fighting, had ordered him to attend him at his new capital, Wuhan, where he could keep a closer eye on him. However Chiang, being widely criticized for losing Beijing and Shanghai and Nanking, was not in as strong a position as he had once been and was forced to grant Feng a more powerful position. That would not involve – perish the thought – actually fighting the Japanese, but two areas where Feng Yuxiang also had a reputation for expertise – social reform and propaganda.

  Feng sent me this telegram offering me a job as a propagandist in Wuhan. He was vague about the details. I thought about it and came to this conclusion. I am not a propagandist, I am a novelist. My latest novel, half finished, is all about the invasion – the horrors of the Japanese, the heroism of the Chinese. I feel my novel will be more effective in stirring people up to fight than any propaganda I might attempt. Moreover my family are happily settled here in Jinan and we seem relatively safe. And I am certain my mother would find the long journey south extremely arduous. I sent my friend a telegram last night thanking him but turning down his offer. Though I still felt sufficiently guilty about turning him down to toss and turn all night.

  While I am thus pacing the battlements bewailing my indecision like Hamlet on the walls of Elsinore, a huge explosion occurs. Even though it is a long way off it knocks me on the hard stone walkway. As, bewildered, I am still trying to recover my senses, I become aware of these dead leaves from the willow trees above all descending upon my head and the sound of breaking glass and screams from within the city. I stand up and look immediately in the direction of the university campus – no smoke or flames there. I look round the city – nothing there. I look at Thousand Buddha Mountain. It’s still there. Only then do I turn and look north at Daming Lake. There are waves and disturbance on its surface, shrieking waterfowl rising all over it in panic as behind me jackdaws and crows and kites scream above the city – but nowhere on the lake is there any sign of an explosion. Only then do I look even further north. And that is where the explosion has occurred. The Great Iron Bridge over the Yellow River is belching fire and smoke. Some of its spans have been hit as well as the piers beneath them so its central section appears to have collapsed into the water. Parts of it are still creaking and crashing. Our bridge! Our defence! We will no longer be able to resupply our troops and hold the Japanese back, they will be able to advance and shell our city at will.

  I know I should be with my family. I start running home. The explosion has broken windows everywhere and they might have been caught by the flying glass. All the time as I run I see people who have been cut and wounded by glass, others just milling about in confusion.

  I finally get home. Fortunately our apartment faces away from the direction of the ex
plosion. I rush into it and see my young son Little Yi. He says no one has been hurt by the glass but then he points towards my old mother’s room. The look on his face indicates something grave has happened. The door is shut. I knock on the door saying it is me. My wife’s voice says ‘You can come in.’ I go in and shut the door behind me, all three children having gathered on the other side of it. On the floor lies my mother. She is moaning and obviously in pain.

  ‘What happened?’ I softly ask my wife.

  ‘She was just getting out of bed,’ she says, ‘just as it happened. The bang. It knocked her sideways. Her leg fell across this stool. I think it’s broken.’

  ‘Have you called a doctor?’

  ‘Little Yi ran down to the medical facility on the campus. A doctor is on his way.’

  ‘Get her something to soothe her,’ I say.

  ‘I’ll infuse some corydalis root. I should have bought those aspirin pills I saw in town yesterday.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ I say, sitting beside her on the floor with my back against the bed. Very slowly we transfer my mother’s head from my wife’s lap to mine. She gives out little sharp cries as we do so. Her fractured upper leg lies at two angles from where it has been broken. My wife scurries away.

  I sit there with my mother’s head cradled in my lap, soothing her with words and the odd crooning, keening noises I remember from childhood. My three children creep slowly into the room and stare at us in wonder.

  The doctor comes. He confirms that her leg has been broken and that it will take several weeks to mend. He says in the meantime she cannot be moved.

  5

  The shells from over the river have started landing in our city. Not too many of them at the moment. We have hunkered down in our apartment – I go out to do the shopping and I still do a bit of teaching on campus. Some of the students have left for the south from the railway station, but many have stayed. They still come to my classes, but they spend most of their time in the city – digging out and nursing the wounded, putting out fires, feeding the poor, helping to house the many refugees who have poured into our city. They constantly hold meetings to stir the people up by explaining why we have been invaded and how we can fight back against the invaders. They issue pamphlets. They improvise theatre and drum singing shows – some showing stirring moments from our history, others set today – to raise morale and rouse peoples’ fighting spirit. Some have joined the armed forces. I am immensely proud of them.