by Gavin Young
‘Good, yes. American.’
‘Well, how did I get it? Not from books, because they have no intonation.’
‘Radio? No – movies.’
‘Yes, at first I saw many, many movies from Hollywood. But after the Communists came – no more movies. So then the Voice of America broadcasts. And – just think – it was a criminal offence to listen to them! Yet I learned. How about that!’
The influence of the 1940s movies had survived the Voice of America. I had noticed that his conversation was sprinkled with phrases like ‘I guess’ and ‘So what?’ and anachronistic Americanisms I associated with Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney, expressions like ‘No dice’. Pleasantly nostalgic, they took me back to fleapit cinemas of my own youth. It was like meeting a man in a grey fedora with spats and a cane, or hearing a recording of the Andrews Sisters or Rudy Vallee. But while the matter of how he spoke was of course trivial, Thomas Dor’s daring, clandestine persistence with the Voice of America had shown real courage.
‘You speak it excellently,’ I assured him. ‘No foolin’.’ And he laughed, gratified. When I asked him for more reminiscences, he was pleased to continue, once he was sure I would not be bored. After Mao’s death and the arrest of the Gang of Four, the Communists had looked at him differently. They had needed intellectuals, and found from his dossier that he was a university graduate. ‘But, gee whiz,’ he said, ‘I had no ambition left by then. The best thirty years of my life were gone. I had been a happy-go-lucky young man. And, well, I had become … old.’ He wiped his face with his hand, and for the first time I saw Thomas Dor downcast, almost in tears.
Was he a Catholic or –? He fanned away the question with a hand. ‘No, I ain’t no Catholic; I ain’t no Protestant; and I ain’t no Buddhist. Pity. It would have helped me.’
*
Investigating the ship, I found a bulkhead plaque that said, ‘S.M. Cockerell-Ougree – Chantier Naval, Hoboken, Belgique, 1957’. The Belgian Congo became independent in 1960, so the Shanghai had had no more than three years on that run. Most of the books and magazines in her library were in Chinese, but not all. There were books in English by, and about, the Chinese writer Lu Hsun, who had been called ‘China’s Gorki’ – Dawn Blossoms Plucked at Dusk, Brief History of Chinese Fiction, and The Opium War. Reader’s Digest lay on a table and a copy of Newsweek with a cover story about Sadat’s murder. There were several leaflets, and photo-magazines with articles and pictures about the breeding of storks. Younger passengers tucked their feet under them on the cushions; older people simply slept in the comfortable armchairs.
The Shanghai – I realize it now – was the only vessel of all those on which I sailed round the world whose deck officers remained wholly invisible. No officers appeared for meals in the dining room. Looking up at the bridge from the foredeck, I could glimpse no face at the windows, nobody on the wing taking a sighting. Glass and metal stared inscrutably back. It was disconcerting. Perhaps if I had asked, I might have been allowed to have a look round. The purser, available each day in his office, was friendly, and once or twice he asked if I was comfortable. Near his office an advertisement showed concern for health. ‘Rare Medicinal Herbs, Antler (of Young Stag), Nutriments and Tonics, Etc., for your good Health and Longevity’.
I had expected to find political slogans scattered around the ship, but there were very few. The dining room had one: ‘Long Live the Great Unity of the People of the World’, but the only other sign in the room said, ‘Cockatoo Brand Woollen Piece Goods – Elegant Appeal’.
The Shanghai was a smoothly run ship. Yet there were times when it seemed that hijackers might have been fighting to board her. Night and day the mah-jong schools filled the lounge with the sounds of musketry on a nineteenth-century battlefield. ‘Tak-tak … crack … bbrrak … tak.’ Elsewhere young Chinese milled round the electronic games room, barking ferociously like extra-terrestrial invaders on the Star War-path. Tracing a different hubbub to its source on the promenade deck, I discovered Wei Kuen and Ah Po, in shorts and T-shirts, partnering two girls at ping-pong, battering the ball back and forth with wild inaccuracy.
In the dining room I was conscious of many passengers watching me, furtively but certainly without malevolence. When they saw me using chopsticks, they nodded and smiled. Even the ship’s chefs showed an interest in me; inquisitive faces under tall white hats peered at me round the kitchen door and they, too, nodded and smiled when our eyes met.
In the bar, after dinner, when Black Label scotch came neat in a wineglass, I described a bigger glass with my hands and a young waiter ran for a tumbler. When I asked for ice and water a young Chinese waitress came with them, giggling, and together they chorused like kindly teachers to a backward pupil, ‘Ping – ice: Soe – water. Ping … Soe.’ They led me up and down the bar, pointing and instructing. Telephone in Chinese was such-and-such; the Norris glass-washing machine was something else; a bar stool was this; the plastic flowers were that. We reviewed the array of bottles like generals inspecting troops – Beehive brandy, Tunghua wine, Tazhi Bailandi (brandy, that), Rémy Martin, Kaesong Konyo Insan wine.
Later that night an unusually swollen moon lay on the horizon. From the boat deck I saw, silhouetted against its wide, glimmering trail, two of the Shanghai’s crew exercising in the grave Chinese manner – coiling and uncoiling apparently boneless limbs in slow, soundless motion. I leaned on the rail for some time, watching these dark, silent figures at their martial shadow play.
Then I went below to the improvized disco in the ballroom and watched Wei Kuen and Ah Po, trying, as far as inexperience and crippling gusts of hilarity would allow, to teach their girlfriends the Twist.
Three
By the time we saw land, the seasons had changed. A wintry wind was whipping up the shallower coastal sea to the colour of café au lait. I would soon need a thick sweater – or a Chinese quilted coat. In the lounge, too, the season had changed. No more T-shirts and shorts. The women had pulled on cashmere sweaters and trousers, or jeans and Chinese jackets. Men wore the padded, baggy Chinese coats with bulging pockets, wide trousers and carpet slippers. Inflated by the extra clothing, old men wandered impatiently about, hands clasped behind their backs, their heads thrust forward, like inquisitive turtles. They talked in staccato barks.
The Chinese mainland appeared, bruise-black mountains against the darker sky. I saw what looked like a strip of beach or a sandbar and a few trawlers motionless in front of it. It was my first sight of China since my river trip to Canton two years before, and I was registering it in my notebook when I was startled by a putty-faced young white man with faded blond hair tied in a bun, who poked a sharp nose over my shoulder and said in an American accent, ‘You keeping notes?’ It was the first time I had seen him. He looked like an underfed governess.
‘Yes,’ I said.
From the sort of tasselled leather handbag that costs a few rupees in Pakistan and very much more in boutiques in London, Paris or New York, he drew a large notebook. ‘I worry about my notes,’ he informed me, showing me pages of very cluttered writing in an illegibly small hand.
‘People have told me that the Chinese customs officers read foreigners’ notes, and if they don’t like ’em, they keep ’em.’
I said I doubted it. In any case, if they could read my writing they’d be lucky. That went double for his, I thought.
‘I’ve written mine in Latin,’ he said. ‘That should fox ’em.’
I suggested that it might make the customs men very suspicious indeed – and infuriate them as well. They might confiscate the lot just to be on the safe side. ‘Oh, my gosh.’ He stared at me. ‘I’d never thought of that.’
‘It won’t happen,’ I said, soothingly.
Later I saw him in the ship’s shop, where the Chinese passengers were doing the last of their New. Year’s shopping: silk ties, girls’ cotton slips, Rowntree’s fruit gums, shoelaces, soap.
‘What’s this?’ the American was asking, holding up a small bott
le.
‘Dried plums,’ the shopgirl said.
Before I left he had bought a glass jar with something in it that looked more like a marinated centipede.
*
Soon the mouth of the Yangtze River met the Huangpu in a great brown stain. Water thick with silt spurted up when I flushed the toilet in my cabin.
There were bundles and suitcases all over the decks. Passengers zipped up their jackets and wound scarves round their necks. Some, like Thomas Dor, had woolly hats with earflaps. All I had was my old green anorak and a sweater, which I doubted seriously would be enough. That sad, end-of-term feeling enveloped me – my usual feeling when a ship reaches the end of voyage, however short.
The barmen and waitresses wanted me to sign their book. They meant the large suggestions pad hanging on a hook over the bar. I wrote my thanks (genuinely felt) for their friendly service, and Thomas Dor translated it for them into Mandarin or Shanghainese.
‘I hope this will get you a reward,’ I told them.
Big grins all round: ‘Oh, no. It’s duty. We are please. Bye-bye.’
My sad feeling was alleviated by Ah Po who bounded up to me as I followed Dor to the boat deck. He looked smartly athletic in a white woolly sweater and a baseball cap with the word ‘Australia’ and a kangaroo in silver thread stitched over the peak. What on earth, I wondered, would the Shanghainese make of that? Now Ah Po signalled urgently and tugged me quite roughly towards my cabin. Was there a fire? No. In the cabin he yanked a tin of jasmine tea from his windcheater pocket, thrust it into my hands, clamped his arms round my neck, kissed me hard on both cheeks – and vanished with a final thumbs-up gesture round the door. I recovered my breath and packed the tin of tea into my zip bag.
*
Shanghai! Past the dim outlines of islands to seaward, we turned up the Huangpu. Rows of ships moored on either side, chimneys, gantries, derricks, smoke mingling with a light drizzle: the smoke and soot of industrial China.
The first sight of the Shanghai Bund – the former European business section on the riverfront – thrilled me as I was thrilled by Paris and New York years ago. ‘The living heart of China’, Malraux called it, and the waterfront I gazed at now was something I had seen in my dreams and imagination for a very long time. Imagination had not lied. I had taken a step into the past. With its old-fashioned skyscrapers, its neo-Babylonian towers and pinnacles, the Shanghai exposed by the river was exactly the metropolis I had expected; a city of the 1920s, architecturally paralysed by circumstance. To approach it by sea was as unreal as approaching it in my dream. I thought: I have been here before. Thomas Dor stood by me, saying, ‘British people coming back here after many years say, “Oh, everything is the same. Nothing’s changed. No new buildings.” A city with no change for thirty years, that’s very rare in the world today.’ A petrified city like this was not merely rare, but unique. Here, two eras impinged – Yesterday and Today swirled together as the muddy waters of the Yangtze and Huangpu commingled at the entrance to the East China Sea.
I consulted my guidebook. Shanghai (it said) is among the two or three largest cities in the world, supporting eleven million people and resembling New York or Rome more than it does Peking or Canton. The only ‘Chinese’ element in the view I saw now were the junks that spread their brown sails like motionless fans on the lighter surface of the Huangpu.
I could remember earlier images of Shanghai – gruesome images from old newsreels and photographs in the Illustrated London News: huddles of burnt bodies after the Japanese air raids in 1932; living soldiers used for bayonet practice; political prisoners, about to be buried alive, posing by their graves for tomorrow’s papers; refugees dwarfed by columns of smoke. A city of tragedy and melodrama.
The piped musak was interrupted by a girl’s voice telling us that the captain and crew wished us a happy stay in Shanghai. We glided alongside a quay, close to a long warehouse. Sailors threw ropes to each other. The gangway went down.
‘I’ll come and see you at the Peace Hotel,’ said Thomas Dor. ‘Some time this afternoon. Say, 12.30 or 1 p.m. You’re sure to be in that hotel. If not, I shall find you in another. There aren’t too many.’
‘I don’t want you to waste your holiday time looking for me.’ I hoped he would come.
‘Oh, I will come.’
A jostling began around the tables in the lounge where immigration and customs men were examining passports and asking about currency. But there was no delay. I was soon free to go. Wei Kuen and Ah Po were in the queue. When I went to say goodbye Wei Kuen said, ‘We will come to your hotel. Tomorrow.’ Ah Po nodded his head until I thought he would shake loose the kangaroo on his cap.
I said, ‘I hope so,’ but I doubted that I would see them again; not here. They had given me their Hong Kong addresses, but I was sure they’d be too busy with their families in Shanghai to bother about me. In any case, I suspected that their in-laws, waiting for official sanction to leave China, would advise them against contact with a foreigner. Might they not be pointlessly drawing suspicion down on themselves? Or was I now the victim of paranoia?
‘We will come,’ said Wei Kuen.
We shall see, I thought.
*
I was met – though gathered up would be a better expression. Not only did a trim young man appear promptly at the dock gate, asking ‘Mr Gavin?’ but he had a car and a driver with him. Angel Yip had scored again. Mr Shi Zhi Wei of the China International Travel Service – he introduced himself with a smile and a handshake – wore a Mao suit and a long, wide, maroon scarf. ‘My wife knitted it,’ he said when I admired it. He was positively elegant, his suit distinctly stylish, tailor-made, I was pretty sure, in a soft, dark blue material, not just any old official uniform grabbed off a peg in a people’s store. It fitted his slim and willowy figure to perfection; above it a pleasant, intelligent face, pale and heart-shaped with a quite large, curved nose, was lively and benign. His Chinese black hair was thick and wavy on top of his head and long over his ears. There was something rather aristocratic about him, as if he had been born the son of a mandarin. Now he asked me with the greatest politeness to wait a moment while he made some arrangement with the customs men – nothing to do with me, some unfinished business. I watched him move among the piles of baggage swiftly and nimbly, and saw that when he talked with the customs officers he fluttered his hands in graceful gestures. I waited by the car while a pressing crowd of men and women gathered closely round, silently appraising me. I might have been a giraffe that had been decanted from the ship onto the quay. I was certainly quite a bit taller than the tallest man there.
‘This is our driver, Mr Jang,’ said Shi, coming up. I shook hands with the driver, a stocky man of Shi’s age, I guessed – about twenty-nine – in a brown zip-up jacket and dark blue trousers, with the top of a grey scarf showing over his collar. ‘His name is Yu-long. That means Jade Dragon.’
I asked him what his own name meant.
‘Stone of Wisdom,’ he said, and laughed. ‘We shall go to the Peace Hotel now. That is where you will stay. It is a good hotel with a very good view over the city and over the river.’ His English was fluent and accurate; there would be no language problem between us.
The Peace Hotel on the Bund was the one Thomas Dor had named – it had been the Cathay in the old days – and on the river was where I wanted to be. On the Bund! – the Bund was the place for me. We pushed through the hotel’s vast, high-ceilinged hallway, full of shopping counters and salesgirls, to the reception desk. We ascended in an antique lift and followed a porter into a seventh-floor room whose tall windows looked onto the Huangpu. I had not been allotted a broom cupboard. The immense room had black and gold William Morris-style wallpaper, romantic panelling (were there secret panels?), a 12-foot-high moulded ceiling and a ponderous baronial fireplace the colour of mahogany – perhaps it was mahogany. It was like a film set for a 1930s movie called, maybe, Rendezvous Shanghai, and starring Clark Gable and Carole Lombard. I wondered what Wei Kuen
and Ah Po would make of it.
The thing now was to see what was possible and what was not. After all, I had not come to explore China, much though I would like to do so (but that would take several years and a course in Mandarin). I had to ask Mr Shi whether or not I could find another ship to take me to Tsingtao and Dairen. Or to Japan. The answer was short and simple. It was not possible to do that now, he said. There were ships plying between Shanghai and northern ports, and it should be possible to get on them – but only when dates and schedules had been planned in advance. Plans could not be made on the spur of the moment, Mr Shi said. The CITS was not yet geared to handle a sudden whim. If I had made an arrangement, in Hong Kong, to get off the Shanghai here, then to catch whatever steamer would take me to some place up the coast, he thought it could have been manageable. He thought so…. ‘What a pity,’ he said.
So one thing was clear. I could not go on from here in any direction except back – to Hong Kong, and by air. Miss Yip had warned me that I must have a confirmed ticket out of China and I had a place on a flight in four days’ time. Mr Shi was consoling: Next year or the year after, he said, many more things would be possible. Meanwhile, he had one or two things to suggest. Would I like to see a commune? And the Garden of the Mandarin Yu? The Jade Buddha Temple? The Shanghai Industrial Exhibition? A factory? The zoo?
I hesitated. Was it de rigueur to see a commune or a factory? I’ve looked at factories in many countries, always with a barely tolerable feeling of bone-aching boredom. I don’t understand factories; they all look the same. ‘The guide may want you to see a factory,’ Thomas Dor had said. ‘Just say you’ve seen many factories.’
