Wuhan

by John Fletcher

  When this present war broke out and the Japanese invaded, I like everyone was greatly perturbed. Out of the window I saw all these soldiers and civilians pouring past, fleeing, and I saw how poor and ragged most of them were. So when it came time for us to leave – my mother had booked a suite for our household on a steamer coming upriver to Wuhan – I, for the first time, stood out against her. “No,” I said, “I will not go with you, I am going to walk to Wuhan with all the poor people. I want to be with them. Experience what they experience.” Mummy was really angry. She pointed out that I was far too ill to walk all that way. But I insisted. So I joined the march, with a servant to accompany me.’

  This provokes a ripple of guffaws – which he ignores.

  ‘It was very difficult to start with. I was not used to walking any distance. The people were strange. The food was strange. My slippers soon wore out and my servant had to buy me some boots. Which hurt my feet for a while. But soon I got used to the boots and the food. I learnt how to talk with all the different people on the march. I must say I started to really enjoy myself. And the country people’s clothes were so colourful. I had never experienced the beautiful sights of the countryside, the smells of flowers, the sounds of country birds, the clouds in the skies.’

  Smothered laughs break out around the class. He remains totally indifferent to them.

  ‘I had never seen anything so beautiful. So inspiring. People were so friendly. I got to know quite a few of them. I must have been quite strange to most ordinary people, but they did not hold it against me. Due to them I even developed a sense of humour. And then we got into those mountains. Those ice-cold, unmoving, almighty mountains – their sublimity, their magnificence…

  ‘The thing is,’ he said, ‘I am bursting with poetry. I want to go out to all of China, to every village and hamlet and railway station and wayside inn, and I wish to recite all my poetry to them, about the beauty of their country, my country, and by doing this so fill them with inspiration and joy that they rush out and pick up arms and go off to fight the Japanese. That is what I intend to do,’ he ended triumphantly.

  I blink, desperately trying to suppress all images of what would happen to this youthful Shelley if he ever dared stand on a village stage to recite his poetry. But I am here to listen, not criticize. I am here to make bricks – even if I have no straw.

  There is only one woman in the class. She is dressed in severe clothing with a severe haircut and severe glasses. She’s been staring fixedly out of the window. In the spirit of feminist fraternity I ask her to speak next.

  She turns from her window, stands up, matter-of-factly marches up to the front of the class and faces us.

  ‘Shan Shuang. Poet. Revolutionary poet. Write revolutionary poems. Will recite two to you.’

  She does.

  ‘Poem One. “To a Lady who Rejects a Poem about Spring as a Petit Bourgeois Deviation”.’

  Having announced the title she scowls at Chang Lee. He smiles obliviously back at her.

  ‘So here’s my hat into the air.

  Three cheers for your amazing hair,

  For coal mines, and for turbines too,

  For steel, the Comintern, and you!’

  This causes riotous applause, led by a beaming Chang Lee.

  She sets herself for Poem Two.

  ‘Lines Disassociating Myself from Yesenin and Opposing the Unfounded Legend that I am a Foremost Proletarian Writer.

  Goodbye verses of Yesenin

  Goodbye literary slop –

  You are not the line of Lenin

  You are not the line of WAPP.

  Never shall I moan a

  simple lyric from the heart

  I’ll devote my new corona

  to the proletarian art!’1

  Once again Chang Lee leads the riotous applause. Shan Shuang glares at him and returns to her seat.

  Which leaves only one person in the room who has not spoken. The young, muscular Tian Boqi, with the basilisk stare. With some trepidation I ask him to speak. He stands up. He looks down on me.

  ‘You are Lao She,’ he announces in an immaculate, cut-glass Han accent.

  ‘I am,’ I admit.

  ‘A Manchu. A Manchu traitor,’ he shouts, lines of anger writhing across his face. ‘For four centuries you foreign dogs with your tyrannical emperors have held down us freedom-loving Han Chinese. Polluted our nation. Exploited and repressed us in feudal servitude. In exchange for bribes you have allowed foreign barbarians and imperialists into our country to ransack it and corrupt it with capitalism and opium and Christianity. Kowtowed unblushingly towards the fascist Japanese bandits. And now we have to sit here and subserviently listen to you?’

  There are emotional murmurs of agreement around the class. He is correct that the Manchu emperors for many centuries repressed all Chinese of all ethnicities, not just the Han. But the racism was not entirely one-sided. Following the overthrow of the last Manchu emperor in 1911 the rest of the Chinese, led by the Han, happily massacred hundreds of thousands of us Manchus.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I say, resisting the temptation to out-victim him in the persecution stakes and desperately trying to sound as Han as possible, ‘but we are all meant to be Chinese in this room, united together as one force to defeat the barbaric Japanese. I certainly consider myself Chinese rather than Manchu. And we are here to, together, cooperate in writing drama and propaganda which will inspire all of us Chinese, whatever our ethnicity, to unite and drive out the Japanese invaders. That is our patriotic duty.’

  ‘I know you, Lao She,’ he says, dripping with contempt, ‘with your corrupting bourgeois novels presenting honest Chinese working men and women as fools and lackeys. Promoting individualism, making comedy out of the exploitation and destruction of the proletariat, dividing the masses, setting them against each other…’

  ‘I think you are referring to my novel Rickshaw Boy,’ I say, ‘in which I do indeed make my hero, a working-class rickshaw driver, a self-centred and ultimately foolish character. But I do this because I wish to make him a symbol of all of China – all classes, all ethnicities. Because as a nation we think only of ourselves, show no solidarity or unity in the face of repression and exploitation – whether it comes from foreigners or from our own bosses and landlords.’

  ‘Really? Then if you want to truthfully expose the vicious exploitation that working-class people daily endure in this country, why choose a working-class villain to illustrate it – why not portray a wealthy bourgeois as the villain, a member of the exploited, not the exploiting, class? You show nothing but contempt for the innocent working classes. You’re nothing more than a grovelling capitalist lackey.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ I say, not managing totally to control my anger, ‘but I am myself a member of the Chinese working classes, brought up in poverty on the streets of Beijing…’

  I manage to restrain myself from pointing out his own obvious upper-class background.

  ‘You are a Manchu,’ he reiterates. ‘A Manchu traitor.’

  I watch him with great care as he flings these insults at me. His face is contorting with rage, his body giving rictus jerks. Somewhere inside Tian Boqi there is great pain, great torment, great guilt even. As my wife says, before you can teach a pupil first you must know him. He is undoubtedly the most famous writer in the room – he has written more plays and received more East Coast plaudits than anyone else here, including me – but that won’t impress or inspire a single peasant. If I manage to win him over, so that he understands the truth of our situation, all the rest will follow.

  ‘Counter-revolutionary, collaborator, treacherous fascist!’

  Thank God Lao Xiang did not come to this class. We’d be throwing each other out of the windows by now!

  Tian Boqi continues like an implacable steamroller.

  ‘The Chinese masses are going to arise. We are going to overthrow all you imperialist stooges. Language, you say. You keep on saying, in our plays, in our propaganda, we have to speak the la
nguage of the peasants. The medieval language and culture you so assiduously promote corrupts the proletariat’s mind, destroys any prospect of a high culture that will inspire and exalt them so their struggle will overthrow all oppressors – Japanese, Manchu, British, Chinese – and allow them to reach a true revolutionary praxis.’

  Speaking as simply and gently as I can I ask, ‘How do you intend to get your ideas across to the peasantry?’

  ‘All they have to do is know their Marx.’

  ‘But only three per cent of them can read.’

  ‘Then what we will do,’ he replies, ‘is stand on our stage and on our street corners and speak the truth of Marxist revolution, the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and landlord classes, the liberation of the working classes, their inevitable and unstoppable advance to seize control of the means of production. Our people have been kept in darkness and ignorance long enough. We shall speak in a clean language. A pure language. The language of Marxism–Leninism, the light of whose logic and truth will strike like lightning in their hearts. Fill them with fire. They will rise up, seize power.’

  The room bursts out into spontaneous applause.

  After this Tian Boqi seems to calm down. He’s relieved both his intellectual wrath and his, unconscious I am sure, desire to prove himself the greatest writer in the room. As I pointed out earlier, we writers are incredibly insecure.

  I decide we have done all we can today. We’ve had enough theorizing. Only practise can resolve our various problems. I tell them that in the next twenty-four hours each of them must write a short propaganda play suitable for performance on a village stage. It must inspire its rural audience to rally to the flag of China and fight the Japanese invader. If they have never visited a village I suggest they do so before writing their play. Ninety-five per cent of Chinese people live in villages. They depart.

  I am left asking one question. Why is Tian Boqi so apocalyptically angry with everything?

  7

  As she walked through the crowds on the Bund, smiles and frowns fought for precedence on Hu Lan-shih’s face. Rarely was there any contention. Her face was usually wreathed continuously in smiles. But this morning Hu was in turmoil. Last night she’d agreed, after great resistance, to appear before a group of wealthy women and tell them the story of her journey from Shanghai to Wuhan. The fierce Shi Liang had pushed her into it. Her job was to beg these rich women for money. It was not Hu’s pride which bridled at begging – Hu had no pride – it was the rich women themselves. Just before she left Shi Laing had handed her a list of the names of the ladies she was to address. As soon as she saw it hatred momentarily flooded through her body. She almost collapsed. Horrified with herself at allowing such an awful emotion loose in her body, she forced it out and stood there shaking.

  On the list were three names – Nie, Rong and Guo. The family names of the three most prominent cotton mill-owning families in Shanghai. And there at the top of that list was the name of the wife of Nie Zhiku, founder of the New Cotton Spinning and Weaving Bureau, which owned the very mill, the Shen Xin Number 9 Cotton Mill, where she herself had slaved and faced death daily. She remembered the death of her best friend Kaija there, how her arm had got caught in a strapping belt and within seconds she had been bludgeoned and smashed to a bloody pulp in the machinery. She would be begging money from the wife of such a person. Have to meet Mrs Nie face to face – smile at her.

  Hu was walking from west to east along the Bund. The crowds were already starting to thin as she approached the more affluent eastern end. Here the wealthy Chinese bankers and merchants had their large mansions. And beyond them lay the even more wealthy banks and embassies and mansions of the various Western treaty nations. Gentle sprays watering immaculately kept lawns, gardens overflowing with rare and exotic floribunda, shaded walkways and quiet bowers.

  With the arrival of so many refugees many had taken to sleeping and camping the length of the Bund. In response the Western nations had erected a barbed wire barricade between the Chinese section and theirs, manned by enormous British Sikh police officers armed with rifles and bayonets. A couple of hundred yards out on the river were anchored a line of Western gunboats. Just to remind all and anyone what was what.

  Hu Lan-shih turned down a side road before she reached the checkpoint. Before her was a large Chinese mansion behind an imposing set of iron gates. Before it stood a smartly uniformed Chinese guard.

  ‘Good morning,’ said Hu.

  The guard didn’t say anything.

  ‘Hello,’ said Hu again. ‘Can I go in, please?’

  ‘Fuck off,’ said the guard. His bayonet glistened in the morning sun.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Hu, ‘but I’ve been invited to a meeting at this house?’

  No response.

  Hu suddenly realized she was just wearing an ordinary blouse and some workaday trousers. She looked like anyone else on the Bund – at least those who could afford clothes. Then she remembered Shi had given her an invitation. She reached into her pocket.

  ‘This is my invitation,’ she said, handing it to the guard, ‘please let me in.’

  At first the guard refused to look at it. Hu smiled at him encouragingly. For a second he glanced. A flicker of surprise crossed his face followed by a grimace when he realized he had to let her in.

  He turned, opened the gate, let Hu through, then, without saying a word, slammed it shut behind her back.

  Hu walked up a long driveway. The mansion came into view. She had never seen such a massive building before except the Shen Xin Number 9 Cotton Mill. Remember, she told herself, you must control yourself at all times. Up the workers!

  *

  She was halfway through her speech – pretty much the same talk she’d given to Shi and Li last night in the apartment. But no one seemed to be in the least bit interested. Shi Liang, the woman who’d invited her, was least interested of all. Immediately after Shi Liang arrived, she dived headlong into a maelstrom of exotic femininity. Ladies in the most spectacular Parisian and Hong Kong couture, sporting the most daring hairstyles, embossed with dazzling jewels, were loudly talking at each other, scrumming together, parading around, deciding to sit down beside dearest friends and then immediately moving when they saw even dearer dearest friends. One rather large woman, who didn’t fit particularly well into her very expensive designer dress, seemed with her booming voice to dominate the entire room. All the eddies and currents of this glittering whirlpool seemed to revolve exclusively around her. Was she Mrs Nie?

  Staring at this rugby scrum it suddenly occurred to Hu Lan-shih that wearing a white blouse and black trousers to such an event, which she had, was probably not the right thing. But then she didn’t have any other clothes.

  Li Dequan was sat alone at the back. Even she had made some attempt to escape her peasant clothes. But she waved encouragingly at Hu and it was this alone which kept Hu to her task, smiling bravely, telling stories of plucky peasants and intelligent whores and fighting soldiers.

  Suddenly the entire geography of the room shifted. A small, middle-aged woman in shabby peasant clothes, ugly and with horse’s teeth, modestly entered the room and quietly sat down amid a row of less important women in the middle of the room. (The most important women in the room naturally sat – or sat when they felt like sitting – in the foremost rows at the front.) Anyhow, as soon as this unimportant woman sat down in the middle of these less important women the less important women immediately stood up en masse and found more appropriate seating for themselves elsewhere. The rather dowdy woman with horse’s teeth sat surrounded by empty seats. This lady was Deng Yingchao, the wife of the Vice Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, Chou En-lai. When the Nationalists and Communists had declared themselves united following the Japanese invasion the previous year, Chou became the chief Communist representative and minister in the government of Chiang Kai-shek. But the seniority of her husband’s position within the government did not seem to grant Deng any recognition within the higher ranks of Wuh
an society. Not that that bothered Deng in the least. Li Dequan, the only other peasant-dressed outcast in the room, went over and sat down beside her, gave Hu an encouraging wave, and then herself immediately started talking in an animated fashion to Deng – thus leaving Hu on her own to carry on ploughing her lonely furrow, relating the tragic tale of how nearly all the soldiers they had befriended and supported for so long had died heroically fighting the Japanese in the trenches they and the girls had all dug together. Hu never stopped smiling.

  Once again the geography of the room dramatically re-crystallized. Two similar-looking ladies – one wearing dowdy but respectable clothes and the other wearing expensive but tasteful clothes – a patriotic blend of Chinese and Western styles – walked into the room and immediately sat down in the two empty seats on either side of Deng Yingchao and Li Dequan. The two ladies were Soong Chingling, the widow of Sun Yatsen, the father of the Chinese Revolution, and Soong Ailing, the wife of China’s richest banker. They were sisters, and their third sister, the youngest (not present), was none other than Soong Meiling, Mrs Chiang Kai-shek. The chairs around these four ladies, deserted when the horse-toothed Deng Yingchao had sat down there, suddenly became the most valuable property in Wuhan. The women closest to them, those of middle-ranking importance who had just deserted them, immediately reoccupied them, but then, realizing that favours granted to more high-ranking women would be valuable capital in the future, quickly ceded their seats to the more important women. The rather large woman with the piercing voice – who Hu Lan-shih feared was Mrs Nie – sat down alongside Soong Ailing. There was now a seated scrum parked all around the four not particularly well-dressed women in the centre.