Charlie Chan Is Dead 2

by Jessica Hagedorn

  General Li, the weeping general, was not insulted by the gift of Sudafed, as I had thought he would be. He was pleased, in fact. He told Jill he’d had his condition for years, and nothing had helped it. He was glad now to try something new. He’d already taken the Sudafed as Alice had instructed, translating from the directions on the packet when she delivered it. Could Jill see a difference?

  “Yes,” Jill lied, “I think so.”

  Peter whistled through his teeth. He set his camera up and took a long, hard look at the general.

  The old man did have large, bulging eyes, as if he had been startled at some point and had never recovered. Jill asked him about the most wrenching moment of his life, when he had surrendered his nationalist troops to the communists during the civil war. She said, “Can you tell us about that, the surrender?”

  She had newsreel footage of the general himself, younger by almost forty years, walking across a black and white field, wind rippling his shirt and his hair, leaving his brow exposed. His eyes are black in the white of his face. Is he squinting or tearing up? It’s hard to tell. The picture jumps up and down. Crackles with white specks. I wish I could hear the general crossing the field, the two armies coming face to face, both dressed in drooping gray, a gathering of dark forms against a white sky, men falling into line, coming to rest. The general steps up, yields his gun.

  “What did you say then?” Jill leaned into her question. I saw Peter zoom in for a close-up. I moved my microphone closer, too. Then we waited. The three of us. We waited because whatever the general would say, we had to be poised, camera rolling, sound rolling, to splice this moment to history. This was what we had come for, not the remaking of a great revolution—who would attempt that except as a major motion picture?—but this, this stalking of fugitive memory. We were here to stir up that beast, capture it on film as it streaked through the brush.

  “What did you say?” Jill prodded.

  “Nothing,” the old man looked puzzled. “Nothing. We are like—” he held his arms far apart.

  Was he talking about the two armies or about himself, the distance between the old man and the young, the one with eyes gone wet under our lights, or the other, forever reenacting his own demise?

  Above the old general’s desk there was a picture of the young man taken many years before fate claimed him. In the picture, the young man had the eyes of a matinee idol, dark and dreamy. He would sit for almost thirty years in prison.

  We did three solid interviews after General Li. A political officer, a peasant, a soldier. Then a day off to wash clothes, do some shopping. Nothing more for three days except five reels of platitudes, which got us to Shanghai. Then a string of remarkable interviews with people who represented the cavalcade of idealists and opportunists, gangsters and workers, rich and destitute, those who had made Shanghai the great sinkhole of capitalism that it was in the old days.

  One woman, a starlet of the 1930s, and later the dubbed voice for many Soviet films, said her specialty, before she joined the communists, was love and squalor. “They like me to cry.” She bent her shoulders and heaved heartfelt sobs.

  Jill was ecstatic. “Did you get that, did you?” she said later. She planned to use this shot with footage she had from a 1930s melodrama, showing the same actress sobbing in front of a young, handsome, and keenly distressed worker. He has just brought her the news her father has been killed. “By the soldiers!” the young man says, “They’re coming—quick, quick.” He pulls the beautifully weeping girl through a door.

  Another woman spoke of a bleak childhood spent in a textile mill. Then there was the grizzled old man who talked of the day his comrades were mowed down. “We were just walking,” he said, “dongdong dongdong, then, wah,” he brought his hand up suddenly and shot us all, Alice first—she was interpreting—then Jill, Peter, and, swinging his arm, me.

  “Nineteen twenty-seven,” he said, “and I was twenty-two.” He chomped his teeth and glared at us.

  When we finished with the proletariat in Shanghai we went on to the peasants in the south, to Jiangxi. Here the communists had had a base in the 1930s before they were forced out on their Long March to the Northwest. Jiangxi was poor and mountainous. But in the spring, when we got there, it was beautiful, the high fields yellow with flowering rapeseed, the paddy land rich as chocolate.

  Peter wanted to stop and shoot along the way, at a market town, a ferry crossing, a mountain pass with a valley laid out in green and brown below. We were driving up to a village to interview some peasants there. Jill said there was no time to film GVs—general views—however spectacular they were.

  Peter said, “Didn’t you tell me you needed to show where all this was happening?”

  Jill said, “No, I think I have it. On the old newsreels.”

  “What about transitions? Exteriors?”

  “It’s not that kind of film.”

  “You’re not going to shoot anything else?” Peter’s voice cracked. “Just talking heads? Talking Chinese?”

  “Well, what else do I need? We are getting voice-overs. In English, my dear.”

  “Ooh luvly,” Peter pitched his voice higher than usual. “That’ll really make your film, Missy. Talking heads that aren’t doing the talking.”

  At this point, I joined in. I was disturbed that most of my own efforts would end up in some netherland where original soundtracks go when they get mixed out of a show and replaced with voice-overs and uninspired music. I told Peter to quit harping about his shots. At least most of what he did would stay in the film. In fact, he was the film in a way that I couldn’t be the sound.

  “Tell her to use subtitles then.” Peter got mad at me.

  “Look, look,” Jill intervened, “Didn’t I tell you both? This is it. This is all I can give you: interviews, interviews, interviews. I don’t have the bloody money for reconstructions. I can’t give you the Long March, Peter.”

  “Who wants the Long March? All I’m saying is, open up your film. Get a shot of a village. Show the river they drowned in. The mountain that killed them. You know. It’s what you’re always talking about.” Peter turned to me, “Isn’t she?”

  “Sure,” I cribbed one of Jill’s favorite lines, “Film is drama.”

  After this, Jill wouldn’t speak to me for several days. She felt I’d betrayed her by siding with Peter. I felt I was merely asserting my rights democratically. Alice was fascinated by all this, by the way we tossed our opinions around. She would only smile when we asked her what she thought, really. We told her, if you’re going to work on a film like this, where you don’t make any money, at least you can have a good time and speak your mind.

  Given the green light, Alice did start opening up little by little. Soon, with Peter’s help—“Alice, Alice, you have a big rich boyfriend, hah hhh?”—she had even produced a picture of an L.A. camera assistant she had met on her last job, a curly headed guy she was writing to now.

  “Where is West Side?” she asked. “Near Disneyland?”

  “Let me see,” Peter took the picture Alice had pulled out for us. He made a face, “Aiya, don’t waste your stamps on him.”

  We were like this at the beginning of our shoot, fooling around every day, with even our driver joining in. He had many questions for Jill, passed along through Peter or Alice, who translated. Questions about Jill’s height. Her age. Her eligibility. And her hair. Is it really red?

  “My god,” Jill said, “Can’t you see?”

  “Hung Xiao-jie,” the driver got quite chummy, “Miss Red.” He was our movie star, cigarette plugged into his mouth, big smile sliding off the side of his face. “You don’t like marry?” he turned to look at Jill as he drove straight for whatever was in front of us, a tractor, a truck. He had quickly realized this was the best way to get Jill’s attention.

  By our third week, however, the spark of being on the road, the seduction of it, the feeling of walking into high adventure akin to walking into a new relationship, had worn off and a certain dull inevi
tability set in. Jill didn’t have the money to put us up in clean hotels, so we stayed in third-rate places. In the cities this hadn’t been too bad. We often went to the good hotels to use a bathroom, drink coffee. But once we ventured into the countryside, it seemed we got up in the mornings, ate bread, bread so white it didn’t even look like bread, then boarded our van, only to drive madly, horn blaring, to the next moldy bed, the next dripping toilet.

  I remember a hotel in the south. One of those Soviet-style buildings that looked like it had been designed by somebody who built dams. It had a big dirty façade. Corridors wide enough to drive a pickup truck through, walls varnished a mucky brown, carpets well-greased. And rats gnawing in my room.

  The first day there, I went out to pace the corridor and consider my options. That’s when Peter appeared. He was carrying his camera, on his way back to his room.

  “Did we shoot today?” I was alarmed that I might have missed something.

  “Relax. I just liberated a roll of film, that’s all. They back yet?” Peter inquired about Jill and Alice. They had gone off early in the morning to negotiate filming fees with local officials.

  “No. You get any good shots?”

  He made a face, “Looks like shit out there. The lake,” he started down the corridor to his room.

  I followed him, “You were going for exteriors?”

  “What else? Missy’s going to be happy she’s got them later. But I wouldn’t mention it now.”

  Peter went into his room and put his camera away. I watched. There must have been something about the way I was watching, an edginess, a certain tension that got to him, for when he finished what he was doing, he said, “Okay, okay. Come on.”

  He led me to the back of the hotel, to a big empty balcony. There I saw he had already set up a little survival unit for himself: a charcoal burner complete with palm-leaf fan, battered pot, and chopsticks lifted from the hotel dining room.

  “Hungry?” he set me to work with the fan. While I tended the fire, he disappeared for a few minutes, then returned with a couple of packages of instant noodles, scallions, two eggs, and two bowls.

  I leaned on the balcony wall and ate the noodles that Peter cooked for me. The city was a brown soup below. Blocks of red brick buildings. Dusty trees. I glared at all this, the ugliness down there and its unchecked sprawl into the distance, where, smack on the horizon, there rose a smokestack that failed to belch.

  “You just can’t see the smoke for all the smog,” I said. “I bet you it’s there, though.”

  “Probably,” Peter shrugged.

  “Did you see the dining room downstairs? The tablecloths?”

  “Grease on grease.”

  “Yeah. But why?” I must have said this with some vehemence, more than I intended, for Peter stopped what he was doing then, drinking a bottle of pop, and squinted at me. “They’re all standing around,” I said.

  “What’s wrong, you want to make them work?” Peter smiled. “What do you care?”

  I had become so intent on recording all the history I could on this trip, hooking straight into other lives with my microphones, and these lives coming back to me through my headphones; I’d listened so closely to the spit and gurgle of history that I had started to take everything personally. There were the good guys and the bad, the worker, the spy. There were the good deeds and the ignoble. The workers at the government guest house who wouldn’t clean their tables had failed me in some way. They made me angry. Standing about picking their faces. What did I think the revolution was about? I don’t know. But one thing for sure, I didn’t want to touch its dirty linen.

  Peter didn’t like the dirt any more than I did, but he didn’t care if things weren’t living up to expectations. “They’re going to do whatever they’re going to do,” he stuck his chin at the brown ether beyond our balcony. He wasn’t worried about any day of reckoning, the communists could have Hong Kong. He had his own life.

  “I got a house in Sydney,” he said. “You come visit me, you’ll feel better. We’ll make a nice movie there, huh? Lots of beautiful scenery, Academy Award shots. And when we’re done, I’ll take you to Bondi Beach. You want to go to Bondi Beach?”

  We left the city to go deep into the mountains. There, we interviewed peasants about their struggles with landlords and the armies that had swept through. Our best footage came from an old lady with the voice of a duck. We filmed her sitting on the threshing floor in front of her house, wet fields behind her and a boy on a water buffalo taking forever to cross through our shot.

  “Xiao Hung, Xiao Hung,” the old lady yelled at her grandson to get out of the way.

  He whipped his buffalo up to where we were, got off and stood, gape-mouthed, listening to what the old lady had to say.

  “They sold me,” she described being handed over to right-wing troops. “Not even to a poor officer, but to a nobody. And me, I was pretty, too. Everybody said.” The old lady wiped her face with the side of her hand. She was not crying; she was angry. “Sold to the cheapest fool around. Ai, he looked just like this one,” she suddenly pointed an accusing finger at her grandson. The boy backed off, frightened.

  “All right, all right,” the old lady shouted at him. “You’re a good boy.” She was quite deaf.

  When we returned to Shanghai, Jill heard she had received only part of the money she had counted on to complete her film. After her China shoot, she had originally planned to go on directly to Taiwan to interview the die-hard anti-communists there. Now she wasn’t sure she could.

  She cursed Johnny. Johnny, of Earl and Johnny in Hong Kong, had apparently promised the money she needed, some his own, some from his father’s old connections, but none of it had showed up yet at Jill’s bank in New York.

  This news, coming after our argument about opening up the film, put Jill in a tough spot. She dropped a village she had planned to include. She pored over her schedule with Alice, trying to cut it down. And she spent an evening in my hotel room, talking compulsively about how she could make the film work. This was the film that was going to put her back on her feet, restore her reputation as the terrific filmmaker she knew she was.

  “I’m not going to babysit any more people,” she said. “Let them bol lix up their own films. They’re getting the credit for it anyway.”

  “What do you think? Can we make a film about China for the average Joe? Who is the average Joe?”

  “I dunno.” I was washing my socks at the time she insisted on bringing this up.

  “Come on, you’re American.”

  “He likes people?”

  “Okay.”

  “And he identifies,” I unplugged my wash basin, “with them.”

  “Christ,” Jill flopped on my bed. She stared at the ceiling while the wash basin sucked the water down.

  “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe what I need is a face.” She sat up.

  “Isn’t that what we’ve been getting all along? Mrs. Lu, Mr. Yang, Mr. Wu,” I listed the people we had filmed.

  “No, not them. A face that tells it all. About the revolution.”

  “All right, all right.” I thought a minute, recalled the smile and the famous mole. I squeezed out my socks. “What about Mao?”

  “Jesus,” Jill almost came over and hit me. “Don’t you think I have any original ideas?”

  I had only meant to point out that she did have some powerful images, like the footage of the celebration at the founding of the People’s Republic. All the big faces of the revolution are there, standing on that famous wall overlooking Tiananmen. And Mao, the biggest face of all, waves his hand and says in that funny voice of his, “Todaay . . . the Chinese People . . . have stood up.”

  I thought that told it all, but Jill said it wasn’t enough.

  “Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.”

  Two days later, I had taken temporary leave of Jill and the tensions of her film. I was in Beijing by then, sitting in my uncle’s apartment. This was my third uncle, San Jiou-jiou, my mother’s fav
orite brother, the one she had said I must see. My uncle lived alone, his wife had died and his daughter worked in an industrial city to the north, yet he had a surprisingly large place to himself. He didn’t have to share with another family, as far as I could tell. My uncle’s apartment was plain, but adequately furnished with a big glass-covered desk in the main room and an arrangement of stiff chairs that looked out over a dusty courtyard.

  I was sitting in one of the stiff chairs, showing my uncle the books I had brought for him: The Lady of the Lake, The Big Sleep, a Ross Mac-donald, an Elmore Leonard, a Tony Hillerman. All Americans. And then, yes, the latest Le Carré, too.

  “Wonderful, wonderful,” my uncle stacked the books on his desk as if he were stacking coins. Next to the books was a bottle of cognac. I had brought this, too. “Very good. Together.” My uncle pointed to the cognac and the books.

  He had a paunch, but his hands were slim and fine as a woman’s. “For diagnosis,” my mother had told me. “Doctors there, they don’t depend on tests, they use their hands. Like your uncle—he’s the best.”

  My mother was not modest when she told me about her family and what I should be living up to. She had not added, though, that this uncle also had his vices and enjoyed them thoroughly. He lit up a cigarette now and took a long drag. I’d brought him Dunhills.

  “Los Angeles,” he smiled at me.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You went to school there.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “UCLA.”