Wuhan

by John Fletcher

  I spend some of my time at home writing my patriotic novel, but a lot of it talking with my bed-bound mother. She talks only about the past – when we lived in Beijing. It brings her comfort, but there is little comfort in our family history.

  I should explain that I was born a Manchu. That means that I belong to the racial minority which arrived in China in the seventeenth century as the horse and foot soldiers of the invading Manchurian warrior, Prince Dorgon. Prince Dorgon became the first Manchu emperor; his soldiers were garrisoned throughout China to impose his rule. My ancestors were posted in Beijing, and as the years went past their duties became less and less onerous and more and more ceremonial. And as the Manchu Dynasty was weakened in the nineteenth century by rebellions, invasions and loss of revenue, their pay became less and less. But they always considered themselves a cut above the native Han population, and even though they were virtually penniless, living in their compounds, they still cultivated an air of languid refinement, specializing in breeding exquisite songbirds and ferocious fighting crickets.

  Which is how my father came to his grisly and non-heroic end. He still held the honorary post of a Red Bannerman in the Imperial Guard of the Emperor. In fact he was a corpulent and unhealthy middle-aged man living a life of ease. The nearest foreign equivalent I can think of is the English Beefeater, whose portly figures and red uniforms I occasionally glimpsed in London. Anyhow, when I was one year old the Boxer Rebellion broke out. This internal Chinese affray apparently incensed all the foreign imperialists who promptly sent their young and virile soldiery to quash this outrage. My father, who had hardly ever had any military training, was stuffed into his Red Bannerman uniform, had a seventeenth-century pike and an eighteenth-century musket thrust into his hand, and was ordered to rid his country of the foreign devils. He waddled to the end of our street, waddled round the corner, and was promptly shot dead by a keen and youthful British soldier.

  (There is another family version of my father’s unfortunate end. Namely that, never having fired a musket in his life, he practised in our backyard. In a state of some inebriation he experimented with connecting the burning saltpetre fuse to the gunpowder in the firing pan, but while trying to set the fuse alight with matches from his pocket, he instead set alight the voluminous Red Banner robes he was accoutered and enfolded within and promptly burnt himself to death. Our uncle allegedly found his smouldering body in our wood shed. But there must be some doubt as to the truth of this account as my uncle only told it when he himself was drunk.)

  Anyhow, the fact was that my mother suddenly found herself in a terrible situation. With all the vicious sanctions and levies imposed upon the Chinese government by the victorious foreigners, all pensions ceased immediately. My mother, without a husband, suddenly had to support herself, myself, and my elder brothers and sisters. Feed us and find us shelter. She at once took in washing. My earliest memories were of sheets and clothing of all colours and hues hanging from the rafters and in the courtyard and me having to make my precarious way among them, sometimes pulling them down and immediately enduring a barrage of slaps and scolds. I remember once burning myself on the side of the huge laundry cauldron. From the earliest age my elder siblings went out on the streets to deliver and collect washing or run errands for neighbours or to shop or even beg. I think one or two of them were caught stealing and my mother had to go down to the police station and persuade them her children were poor but honest and from a poor but honest family.

  I, an urchin, grew up on the streets of Beijing and I loved it. All I have to do is close my eyes, and immediately the city appears before me like a vivid, richly coloured tapestry. I hear the different cries of the market sellers, hucksters, hawkers, touts, barkers and balladeers, pedlars selling plum juice and almond tea, tinkers their wares, each trade with a different cry and chant and patter. Some were so funny, so sharp, some so sad and moving. I knew which street I was in simply by their different calls and songs. And there were the street entertainers and storytellers – sometimes even bigger shows like the puppeteers or drum singers with their musical instruments and chanteuses – warbling their songs and telling their tales of ancient heroes and villains, beautiful princesses and dragons and magical horses. Far too often I tarried and stared, sucked into imaginary landscapes and fantastical events, and far too often my mother found me and beat me.

  My mother was the centre of all things. She kept us all revolving around her, doing her wishes, earning her money, delivering letters and notes and bills for shopkeepers to other shopkeepers, carrying water from the wells and coal from the merchants’ yard, haggling and arguing with stall holders at the end of the day that their unsold vegetables and meats and dumplings had gone rotten and should be sold to us at a quarter their price. Each evening the laundry cauldron would be emptied of its water and we would wash in it, then replace it on the fire with a cooking pot round which we all gathered to inhale the wondrous smells of cooking food.

  And when the woman who lived down the street and read books and saw my interest in stories started teaching me how to write and read, it was my mother who encouraged me and said it was a good and a proper thing for me to do. For a while, God knows how, she found the money to send me to the Beijing Normal Third High School, but then she ran out of money and couldn’t afford it anymore so I had to leave. But by then I had a thirst for learning, so, by beating on important men’s doors and making a nuisance of herself – all the time running a household and a laundry and all my other brothers and sisters – she leveraged me, a poor street Manchu, into the free Beijing Normal University.

  So now you understand why I cannot leave her. It is not only my Confucian duty as a son, it is because I owe her everything. So I sit and listen to her memories of Old Beijing and join her in them. The man from over the courtyard with snaggle teeth, the knife grinder that kept cutting himself, the barber with the hiccups, the criminal being led down the street to execution scattering pennies to all the children so they would speak well of him when they arrived in the afterlife, the whores who lived in the hovel in the next street and sang such sad beautiful songs.

  I was her son. I am now her mother, nursing her. I feel all the tenderness and anguish for her a mother feels for her child. And all the time the shells land closer.

  With all their mad scientific ideas about master races and Social Darwinism, the Japanese must believe that they are superior to us in every way. That we are mere sub-animals and inferior apes. After all they’ve measured our skulls with calipers and tape measures and proved it! So since they possess in every way superior brains and skulls and IQs, it must follow that we Chinese have no brains at all and the IQ of a head louse. The fact that we have superb scholars at first-rate universities and a 3,000-year history of brilliant civilization and poets and painters and philosophers is, to say the least, problematic to them. In fact, it demolishes all their crazy European theories. So it can be no surprise that from the start of their war against us they have adopted a deliberate policy of always bombing and destroying universities first in any city, of deliberately killing as many high IQed students as possible. Whenever they come across a household which owns books they butcher everyone in it and burn their books. All to drive down our IQ statistics!

  Which is why our home, within the university, comes under pretty continuous fire from Japanese artillery and their air force. My children are terrified, my wife is terrified, I am terrified. My mother is too sick to understand what is going on. I have to choose between the life of my mother or the lives of my children and my wife and myself. If we stay here we are all going to be butchered by the Japanese. If my wife and my children and myself leave, then my mother remains here alone to be butchered by the Japanese – provided she lives that long. But confronted by this seemingly simple conundrum my dyed-in-the-wool Confucian blood immediately kicks in and decides we must all perish. It is our fate. And what is worse, my wife and all my children not only immediately assent to my decision, but agree 100 per cent with t
he sentiments behind it. As a halfway house I suggest to my wife and children they should leave from the railway station and I should remain here in Jinan with my mother and my books. They reject this even more vehemently.

  Finally the part of our apartment block facing the Japanese is destroyed and our apartment becomes structurally unsound. We have to move. The doctor is summoned. He says that my mother should be able to withstand about ten minutes of gentle movement. I go into the town and rent a solid stone single-storey home in a solid stone courtyard about ten minutes from our present apartment. I choose it mainly because, as well as being extremely solid and facing south, it contains in its courtyard a red persimmon tree. I love the red persimmon’s spring blossoms more than any other – not that we’re likely to still be alive by spring. I also hire coolies to move our furniture and belongings. The doctor doses my mother with four tablets of opium. When she is almost comatose a coolie and I lift her up and carry her out. Carry her down a stairwell whose walls have been blown away so we look straight out over Daming Lake, its silent waters coldly, beautifully reflecting the hills to the east. All the time she gives out a high-pitched keen, writhing slowly as though she is far underwater.

  We carefully put her down to rest in our new home.

  *

  In order to keep up with what is happening in the world and the latest war news, rather than take a paper home and risk my family reading the latest Japanese atrocities, I visit the partly demolished staff room on campus. I’m told by a surviving academic that the Japanese have crossed the river and there is now heavy fighting in the north-eastern industrial suburbs of the city. But he also assures me that the rock-solid General Han Fuju has everything in hand.

  I pick up a copy of the Shanghai Evening Post & Mercury and read an article by some fat-necked upper-class Englishman called Mr T. O. Thackery:

  The entrance to my favorite stand at the Shanghai Racecourse is blocked with corpses, fresh corpses newly made before my eyes. There are women and children among them; women shot through the back, their padded coats run through with military sabres, children whose bodies are riddled with bullets; men garbed as peasant farmers heaped grotesquely about, their wounds soaking the ground.

  Later in the article T. O. Thackery travels out into the countryside:

  The houses are burned. I saw them burn, with neat precision – not a wasted match, nor an extra piece of kindling. I witness a Japanese officer killing farmers fleeing from their burning huts. His shining sabre flashes up to its hilt in the human sheath; the body falls. A second takes its place and once again the sabre finds its pulsing scabbard. The next, a tall and likely lad, is flung unbound face down upon the two who clutch the earth in death; and as he falls a volley from six officers’ revolvers make an outline on his back and up his spine.

  I digest this while I go into the city to do the family shopping. The streets are fuller – with civilians fleeing from the north-eastern suburbs. I also hear an ugly rumour. That the Great Iron Bridge across the Yellow River was blown up not by the enemy but on the direct orders of a panicking General Han Fuju. Not only that, but he blew it up while hundreds of refugees were crossing it, and before some thousands of our finest troops to the north of the river could be withdrawn, thus causing them to be massacred by the Japanese.

  When I get home there is a knock on the courtyard door. Little Yi goes to see who it is. He comes back with a soldier in an immaculate uniform. He salutes me and then presents me with a rather ornate envelope.

  ‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘My son will see you back to the gate.’

  ‘I am under orders,’ says the soldier, ‘not to leave until you have written a response, which I will take with me.’

  ‘Oh.’

  *

  I retire to the cubbyhole where I work on my patriotic novel, sit down, and read the letter. It is from my friend General Feng Yuxiang. That soldier must have had a long journey from Wuhan. I slip out to ask my wife to prepare some food for him and find she already has. I return to the letter.

  Lao She, my dear friend,

  I apologize to you for the brevity of my telegram last week, and for not explaining to you properly what exactly it is that we need of you. I understand completely why you turned me down. The fact is that here in Wuhan matters are moving at great speed as we set up our new government, and what we, and I, intend to do has been evolving and changing day by day. I now know precisely what I want of you, but, as ever, the decision is with you.

  I will explain to you why I think you are the only person in our country who can do what I want you to do for us.

  I like you, Lao She. You are a person I trust. And trust is a quality very rare in government. I like and trust you not just because we are both Christians, but because of the sort of man you are. You have integrity. You have humour. You honour the truth. You are intelligent – not arrogant-intelligent but humble-intelligent. Unlike most artistic people you are not self-centred and narcissistic and melodramatic, instantly antagonistic to and jealous of all other creative persons – you appreciate and praise the work of your fellow writers. Well, almost all your fellow writers. I know you have especial difficulties with the work of one Guo Morou and some other holier-than-thou upper-class East Coast intellectuals with their impenetrable jargon-filled Marxist diatribes. But Christians from poor backgrounds such as ourselves are well used to politely and effectively dealing with such grotesques.

  At this time of catastrophic crisis for our country, what we need above all is communication. Most Chinese – of whatever class, whatever region or village – are not even capable of speaking to each other in a common dialect. Ninety-seven per cent of our nation cannot read. We, very quickly, obscenely quickly, must develop a common language, a common understanding through which we can communicate directly and powerfully to each other. So that we can organize and rally ourselves into some sort of effective defence, and, given time, offence. It can only be done through language. And you are our master of language.

  Through our many conversations I know your love of street theatre, folk art, the legends and stories that our common people adore and know by heart. I know there is a group of you who specialize in this, who have worked to promote your socialist views through writing and performing plays and drum singing, who know and love and can speak strikingly in the common tongue.

  But the problem is that, vital as you are, you are few. We live in a nation of hundreds of millions who must be brought to think of themselves as one nation. There are many other writers in this country, but, as I have already mentioned, they tend to be well-off intellectuals, writers used to expressing their agonies and sufferings and Marxist ecstasies in a high Mandarin style totally incomprehensible to 99 % of our population.

  We need someone who can teach them to speak and think and write in ways which will immediately enter the hearts and souls of us rude untutored common folk.’

  I sigh deeply.

  My dear Comrade Lao, of old I know that in an argument you can see and understand and respect both sides, and while not compromising your principles can usually with the greatest subtlety and grace finesse both sides so that each can recognize the good points the other side is offering. I don’t know how you do it. But you do. And this country needs that beautiful quality of yours in order to bring together our writers and artists and get them to inspire and instruct the Chinese people in what we have to do.

  That, my friend, is what I require of you. Come to Wuhan. We will set up the facilities so you can work with all these different people and help save the country we both love so much.

  I can feel your pain at my request even from this distance.

  Your friend,

  Feng Yuxiang

  Well, thank you very much, bloody Mister bloody Feng Yuxiang. Thanks for skewering me right through the gut with your bloody bayonet pen and then twisting it around and around. I slam the letter down on my desk and exit my cubbyhole, banging my head on a beam. I inform the soldier that he will have to wait for
my decision and tell my wife that I am going out for a constitutional.

  The streets are full of refugees from the north of the city. There are few street hawkers or stall holders and many of the shops have put up their shutters and closed. I see soldiers – individuals, small groups – who’ve obviously deserted their units. The crump of artillery shells and the distant sounds of rifle shots and machine gun fire play continuously on my ears but I hardly notice this. My whole being is in chaos.

  *

  Again I am on the ancient walls of Jinan. The skies, the lake, the landscape are all cold and bleak. The fighting in the north of the city fills the air with smoke. I pace melodramatically back and forth.

  I am a progressive. A socialist. As I have said before, I believe with all my heart and all my soul in all human beings, men and women, working together to build a better world. A better China. It has been what all my work, all my writings have been about. And I believe there is nothing more reactionary, more responsible for keeping China in its feudal dungeon, its fetid shithole, than the teachings of bloody Confucius. I have made a career, an increasingly successful career, out of ridiculing his teachings on society and the family. How they tie down individuals, and the whole country, into a vicious web of obligation and service. How eldest sons have to sacrifice their whole lives to serve their almighty families. How second, third and fourth sons can have no individual careers or lives because they must always be subservient to and dependent upon their eldest brother. How women are reduced to powerless helots and married off to complete strangers. How all are ruled by their omnipotent parents who are themselves ruled by their even more omnipotent ancestors. It is ludicrous, unbelievable, fascistic, Jurassic. But yet, at this, my moment of crisis and supreme test of being, what is the ridiculous mode of thought and harness of behaviour I immediately, willingly, rejoicingly climb back into – bloody Confucianism! Honour thy mother! Honour thy parents! Honour thy ancestors! They come before all! Sacrifice your children, sacrifice your wife, sacrifice your country! I wish for just a moment that perhaps I was one of those bloody – I really must think up a better swear word – Westerners – you know, the atheists, the Social Darwinists – they wouldn’t hesitate for a second. ‘Desert your dear old mum, dear boy. Survival of the fittest, dontcha know? Is it your fault she can’t run as fast as you?’