Slow Boats Home

by Gavin Young

  I said tentatively to Mr Shi, ‘I’ve seen a great many factories….’

  ‘I didn’t think you’d be interested,’ he said with a smile. ‘You don’t have to see one. Or even a commune, if you prefer to miss that out.’

  ‘Then let’s see the rest.’ I like gardens and zoos. But I thought of Tom Dor and Wei Kuen and Ah Po. Supposing they did come for me, I needed time to see them. And was I going to be allowed to go out with them – outside the confines of an official itinerary? I needn’t have worried. To my relief, Mr Shi pooh-poohed any thought of a problem there. ‘If your friends come for you, make any arrangment you like. You can use the car.’

  In the next few days we did visit all the other places Mr Shi had suggested, with the exception of the zoo. Under grey skies we shuffled about the Garden of the Mandarin Yu in a crowd of padded coats; over bridges spanning ornamental ponds; in and out of red and gold throne rooms and dragon-filled bedrooms in old buildings with winged roofs that might have been reconstructions from the Willow Pattern. There were no padded coats at the Jade Buddha Temple, where Shi had to find an old guardian to unlock the doors. By the time Mr Shi proposed a visit to the zoo, the conviction that not to have a padded coat in Shanghai’s wintertime would lead to ice clots in the blood had taken unshakeable root in my mind. Although there was no snow, the wind howled up the Huangpu and gripped me agonizingly, like the icy hand of the Snow Queen herself. I come from the Atlantic side of England and people there think the winters are cold, but I was not prepared for this and it was too much. So we skipped the zoo – luckily I had seen pandas before, in Canton – and instead paid a visit to the house in which the Communists held their first National Congress in July 1921. It was then a private house, explained Mr Shi, in what was at that time the French Concession. Thirteen Chinese had attended, two Russians representing Lenin, and a Dutchman. It was a pleasant room with whitewashed walls and a wooden floor and ceiling; at the back a staircase led away from it. Old photographs hung on the walls like ikons: groups of young men, now world-famous, looked down at us dressed more like bank clerks than violent revolutionaries – Chou En-Lai and Deng Xiao-ping, nattily dressed in drainpipe trousers, ankle bootees, ties, high white collars and white hats. Next to a framed page of the Journal of the Young China Association were pictures of a general strike, with soldiers in a tramlined street between shuttered shops.

  Mr Shi pointed to Chinese characters on the wall. ‘It says, “To start something is very easy,”’ he translated, ‘“but to finish it is difficult.”’ I couldn’t argue with that. After a pause he added, ‘The Communist Party of China has 39 million members.’ There was no boasting in his voice, and I don’t know why it seemed unacceptably personal to ask if he was one of them. Presumably, if Shi had been a member of the Communist Party, he would have been proud and quick to tell me. For now, it didn’t seem to matter.

  *

  I found a note from Thomas Dor in the hotel saying he had been round there and found me out (‘Looking at a factory?’ the note asked) and that he would call again next morning. In the immense lobby, a middle-aged American was saying to his Chinese guide in unnecessarily loud, aggrieved tones, ‘Mr Chong, why didn’t you tell me those stamps I bought had no glue on them? I tried to stick them on the envelopes, I licked them, and they had no glue.’

  Mr Chong’s face registered nothing one way or another. He only said, ‘The letter office puts glue on the stamps.’

  ‘Yes, but look here, how could I know that? You didn’t tell me.’

  I went to the counter selling stamps and bought a set. When I returned, the American was still at it.

  ‘Now, the stamps just fell off. Why didn’t you tell me they had no glue on them …?’ Would Mr Chong fell him with a karate chop? I didn’t wait to see.

  From my bedroom window I looked at the Huangpu. Strings of barges meandered upstream like slow-worms, ten in line behind their tugs. The light green of the Shanghai’s hull lay alongside down to the left with several smaller steamers. Four-tiered ferries honked up and down like agitated geese, and a junk passed slowly before the Peace Hotel, one large sail and two small ones fore and aft, looking like a Chinese character in broad umber brushstrokes. Beyond the light brown water, the far bank of the Huangpu was a busy industrial wasteland – a flat expanse of jetties, cranes, slate roofs and cement factory walls. Big ports are exciting, particularly if they are old and look it. A port like Shanghai has seen many things: it is venerable, businesslike, quivering with life. It is of an ugliness, as Conrad put it, so picturesque as to delight the eye. The bending river, the water traffic creeping or darting against the background of funnels, masts and sails, wharves and chimneys, stirred me as much as the water scenes of Bangkok, of Hong Kong, of the Bosphorus at Istanbul or the Hooghli at Calcutta. In those precise, rather grimy, places, Past visibly melds with Present, and East with West. In the grime of Shanghai, too, I was aware how close past success and suffering lie alongside the self-absorbed vigour of today. It would be satisfying to carry home a bottle of such a blend and pour it out like a fine wine for discriminating friends. Taste that, one would say – it’s Life.

  Four

  As evening fell, a few weak lamps went on among the leafless trees along the Bund. Crowded trolley buses, bicycles and hundreds of pedestrians in blue caps and uniforms surged through the pale, cold light of sunset; across the river the white and blue flashes of the welders’ torches grew fewer and died out. The hubbub of sirens gave way to the sad, intermittent goose calls of the night ferries. The great strident loudspeakered voices on the river passenger boats – voices that boomed and rasped over the water as if the gods of the Huangpu were engaged in furious public debate – they, too, had called it a day.

  I sat down in a deep armchair, happier than I had been for months. I had come looking for timelessness, and I had found it here under the William Morris wallpaper and the dark, romantic panelling. Above me, the white plaster moulding on the ceiling looked – of all things – Arthurian: sword belts and bucklers, shields with metallic-looking protuberances like studs, breastplates with chrysanthemum-headed nipples. How could I have expected to find Camelot in China?

  The guidebook said:

  In 1842, near the end of the Opium War, Shanghai’s garrison surrendered to the British fleet. From that point on until 1949 the city developed largely as an enclave for Western commercial interests in China…. Residents of these infamous ‘international concessions’ were exempt from the laws of China. Numerous traders and speculators – French, US and Japanese – joined the British. By 1936, the Western population of Shanghai numbered 60,000.

  Shanghai in the twenties and thirties had been one of the world’s most sophisticated, cosmopolitan cities. Hadn’t I read that Noël Coward had written Private Lives here in four days? Some of its dialogue seemed curiously appropriate in a city once renowned for its White Russian exiles.

  Amanda: Is that the Grand Duchess Olga lying under the piano?

  Elyot: Yes…. Delightful parties Lady Bundle always gives, doesn’t she?

  Amanda: Entrancing. Such a dear old lady.

  Elyot: And so gay: did you notice her at supper blowing all those shrimps through her ear trumpet?

  Sophisticated, cosmopolitan – and wicked. Malraux’s Baron Clappique – decadent, facetious, bitchy, a humpless Punchinello, dealer in secrets and antiques – I could imagine him to the life, trifling with the Filipino and White Russian hostesses in the Black Cat nightclub.

  ‘Not a word! … the awful thing, dear girl, is that there’s no imagination left in the world…. A European statesman sends his wife a little parcel; she opens it – not a word! …’

  The finger laid across his lips:

  ‘… and there’s her lover’s head inside. Still the subject of conversation three years later…. A shocking business, dear girl! …’

  Forceful:

  ‘Waiter: Champagne for these two ladies, and for me … a s-small Martini….’

  Severely: />
  ‘… very dry.’

  Shanghai, 1927: Private Lives, Dry Martinis – and severed heads. In 1927, the severed heads were Communist heads and swung in cages from telegraph poles. Their blind eyes gazed across at the luxurious quarters of European businessmen, at the studio, for example, of Monsieur Ferral, in Man’s Fate the French president of the Chamber of International Commerce. It was a modern one, for Shanghai 1927. On the walls, some Picassos of the rose period, and an erotic drawing by Fragonard; a huge black Kwannyn of the Tang Dynasty (bought on the advice of Clappique, and probably a fake).

  It was thrilling to be in that hotel room in Shanghai – to feel the city’s grotesque past, to imagine Clappique and Ferral were in the bar downstairs. The bar too might have been a film set – it had soaring pillars, bottles, old-fashioned cocktail shakers, a polished walnut counter, a nickel bar rail. The middle-aged Chinese barman murmured: ‘Gin-tonic?’

  ‘Do you have a Shanghai Cocktail?’

  ‘Shanghai Cocktail?’ He seemed pleased I’d asked. ‘Have!’ he said, with satisfaction. He took a half-pint tumbler and sloshed into it what looked like equal measures of Chinese gin and chilled Chinese dry white wine. He stirred this briskly and then with smooth precision poured it neatly into a 1930s cocktail glass, triangular with a long stem. The drink was a pale straw colour, and cold enough to frost the glass. It tasted dry and innocuous. I put it back and had another.

  ‘This bar is new?’

  ‘No, not new,’ the barman answered me, ‘reopened one year. Cultural Revolution close it.’

  I emptied my glass again.

  He suggested a Panda Cocktail.

  ‘A what?’

  ‘Very nice cocktail from Shanghai.’

  ‘As long as I can walk out of here,’ I said.

  He laughed, pleased to demonstrate. ‘Not too strong. Take mao tai – Chinese rice liquor – half of one egg, and sugar.’ He stirred all these things in a shaker. Mao tai is strong, like Polish vodka but sweeter. He added white wine, too, and a little finger of Parfait Amour. Too sickly, but I swigged it down to please him.

  Mr Shi had left me. In the evening, he had said with a man-of-the-world smile, he had to think of his wife, and I did not detain him. I dined alone in a top-floor dining room full of golden dragons, and came down to the bar for a last beer. In a room next to the bar a handful of elderly Chinese musicians were playing on dented instruments the dance music of five decades ago. They played rustily but with gusto, and a group of dancers slow-foxtrotted sedately on a small dance floor. ‘As Time Goes By’ filled the room. How had the gleaming aluminium drums and brass cymbals survived the Cultural Revolution? Lovingly mothballed, under a bedroom floor? Perhaps only the triangle was left hanging provocatively over the washbowl: a daring snub to the Red Guards. You’d have to be quite old to remember the rumba in Shanghai, I thought, yet fat ladies and old gentlemen in Mao suits wiggled happily across the floor to ‘South of the Border’. Young waiters tapped their feet to the paso dobles. Chinese girls danced with girlfriends or Japanese tourists, but they were not hostesses. They had obviously come in to practise the steps. This was an escape into nostalgia, not a time for flirtation. The waiter who brought my beer said, ‘So happy.’

  It was happy. I waited to the end, until the lights went down and ‘Red Sails in the Sunset’ drifted smoothly over the dancers, like the innocent memory of a distant era that had managed only here to survive.

  *

  Thomas Dor appeared next day; I was pleased to see his smiling walnut face. With Mr Shi and Jade Dragon the driver, we went to Dor’s house. It seemed a long way away. Finally, in a ramshackle suburb, we walked in the cold down a lane between high walls to find ourselves in a small, bleak garden. Here was what had been his house. It was quite large, and had a neglected look.

  ‘They took my father’s furniture,’ Thomas said, dimly. ‘So what you see is odds and ends.’ The rooms were adequately furnished – that was all you could say. Downstairs, young women stood about in white coats under charts of the human body on the walls. They looked at us and curtly nodded their heads. ‘It’s a government clinic for injection,’ Dor said.

  We stood in the wintry garden. Dor seemed smaller here, and sadder.

  ‘Do you leave it empty?’

  Yes, he had a nephew-in-law to look in now and again, clean it, and air it. ‘I am lucky to have close relatives in the Housing Agency.’

  Shi seemed to have no objection to Dor’s temporarily taking over as my guide. When Dor mentioned once more his sufferings during the Cultural Revolution, Shi smiled sourly and made his own contribution. He had been ten years old at the time, he said. His mother, a teacher of the Chinese language, was beaten and forced to do ‘dirty work’.

  ‘Like me,’ said Dor.

  ‘Yes, like you.’ Yet at least those who humiliated Shi’s mother did say sorry later. ‘“It was orders,” they said. “We’d have been beaten, too.” That was their excuse.’

  We walked back down the lane in silence.

  Then again, in the official car, Past and Present wrapped us round. Thomas pointed out unchanged buildings he’d grown up with – Sassoon House, the King Kong (‘Owned by Sassoon, too. Sassoon owned so much.’), the Shanghai Mansions, the old Grosvenor, Kiessling’s Restaurant.

  And when we went to lunch in the old restaurant of my hotel, he told me things about his father that surprised me.

  ‘My father made a lot of money,’ Thomas said. ‘Smuggling.’ He smiled. ‘Smuggling arms, actually, through Shanghai to a warlord – a Mr Sun – in Hangchow. As a cover, he claimed to be the representative of IG Farben, the giant German arms manufacturer, but under that cover he really bought other arms. Mausers. German arms, but not Farben’s.’

  The klaxons and sirens rasped and whooped on the Huangpu. When the food came, Mr Shi, Thomas and I poked our chopsticks into the little dishes, aware of the encircling tables of foreign businessmen and representatives of Chinese trade agencies. In precisely such a setting as this, Dor Senior had discussed his clandestine consignments of machine guns and grenades to Mr Sun with … surely not a Punchinello figure hissing – ‘Not a word!’?

  ‘At that time there were so many things to do under cover of the British or the French administration. Arms – and drugs. Opium, largely. In those days, opium houses were open to the public.’

  I had read somewhere of one of the Al Capones of the Shanghai underworld – a notorious gangster called Tu Yueh-sheng, who dressed in silk and rode in limousines, and contributed his gunmen to Chiang Kai-shek’s crackdown on the Communists in 1927. (Local American and European businessmen gave him armoured cars for the purpose.) Men like Tu provided millions of dollars each year to the French propriétaires – the Ferrals – of the Concession. All the rackets were here: protection … kidnapping … prostitution … lotteries … murder. And opium.

  ‘“Swallows’ nests,”’ Dor said. ‘That was the name we gave the opium houses. “Swallows’ nests.” It was comfortable there, you see, just like a nest.’

  Shi and I sipped our Seagull beer and picked at crab in wine, and listened like two schoolboys at a history lecture. I wondered what Dor’s father had looked like. To match this gentle, frail, honest Dor with a physically similar pre-war arms dealer was out of the question. But if he said his father smuggled arms, he had smuggled arms. Even then I realized Dor was a truthful man; I am more convinced of it all these months later. He himself could never be a racketeer. In him, as it does so often, innocence proclaimed itself.

  A message came for Shi: wanted on the telephone. He excused himself. Dor went on: ‘My father and mother – and so many others, of course – used to entertain guests with opium. Even after the Japanese, there were illegal swallows’ nests until the Communists came in 1949.’

  The party at the table next to ours began to break up. A big, red-faced European said, ‘Thet vasn’t bed, vaitress. You did zet kvite nicely.’ Another man slapped a waiter on the arm – chummily – with a magazine.
The waiter grinned and turned red. On a wall of the restaurant I read: ‘Rules for Waiters – Polite Service, Smiling Face, Personal Hygiene, Good Attitude, Proper Posture, Enthusiastic Attention, Satisfactory Countenance, Warm Greetings.’

  Dor said: ‘When the Communists came in in 1949 – the day my ills began – the buses ran, I remember. Odd, but they ran. There wasn’t much cheering. Disciplined troops. Until the Communists knew damn well what was going on in Shanghai there were few big arrests. Until 1951, I guess. Cabarets went on. Prostitution, even. I recall the buses going round the streets one night much later. Rounding up all the prostitutes, for rehabilitation!’

  Rehabilitation: I remembered something. In Cuba in the early 1960s, Castro’s guides took me to a camp in Camaguey to see how prostitutes, recently rounded up in Havana’s red-light district, were undergoing ‘rehabilitation’. Twenty buxom tarts sat in a classroom watching a young instructress chalking basic algebra on a blackboard. They had been fitted out in khaki fatigues that on their ample figures looked skin-tight, and the pants zipped up the back, starting at the waistband and curving provocatively down to disappear between the buttocks. What’s more, they had been allowed to keep their make-up. The faces now turned in my direction from twenty desks were outrageously self-possessed. Exaggerated lips pursed into scarlet kisses. False eyelashes fluttered in a parody of seductiveness. I caught one or two long, deliberate winks. And then the whole class (with the exception of the teacher) burst out into good-natured laughter. Of course, that was Cuba. How the rehabilitation of prostitutes worked in China, heavens knows.

  *

  Wei Kuen and Ah Po had done as they promised. They and their wives and an in-law or two appeared one afternoon in the hotel lobby. I was standing at the reception desk when, to my delight, I heard a happy cacophony of chittering behind me. There was much smiling and embracing. Both families invited me to visit their homes. Ah Po’s lived two or three miles down the riverbank; Wei Kuen’s flat was in one of the most highly populated areas of central Shanghai. It was decided that I should see Ah Po’s first, the next day. A day or two later, Wei Kuen would come to the hotel to take me to his home. ‘Very difficult to find,’ he said.