China Witness

by Xinran Xue

  Here, there was none of the speed of modernised production. The small donkey carts that had been used for over a hundred years and the old wooden handcarts that had been pulled for decades had been replaced by "bong-bong cars" – motor tricycles with a small cabin for passengers built on behind the driver's seat that had long since been banned in the cities – and old-style motorbikes that made a great deal of noise even when the wheels were not going round. Your instinctive responses go into slow motion here; it takes several minutes from the first puttering sound until the vehicle actually gets going. Our driver couldn't get the people blocking our way to move aside, even with loud blasts of his horn. Occasionally you could hear a voice shout something in tones of great urgency, followed by a long pause. You would almost have forgotten what you had heard, and then another voice would yell a response.

  All of this reminded me of the works of Dalí, that strange, mad artistic genius whose work I have never understood. Perhaps there had been a similar rubble of modernisation in his life? Could that have been what gave him the ability to put together those strange works of art that smashed people's old habits of mind to fragments?

  I made up my mind to visit a few tea houses before my interview with Chen Lei, the man I had come to see.

  Most of Linhuan's tea houses have kept the original form in which they had first been built a hundred or so years before. The dim light inside the rooms comes mainly from a series of smallish skylights, there are rows and rows of great steaming iron or aluminium kettles standing on the big seven-or eight-hole linked stoves by the doorway, and by the side of the stove there is often a long bench which acts as a table for tea-making utensils, crowded with teacups, teapots and tea leaves. The remainder of the space is the tea-drinking area, which consists of several wooden tables, long benches and little wooden chairs. Some tea houses put out rows of small, low tables and chairs on the street. No matter how long you sit in the tea house, three jiao for a pot of tea will guarantee you a place from morning till night.

  According to several tea-house owners, the biggest difference between tea houses now and in the past is that in the past people drank tea and listened to the news or storytelling, while now they drink tea and play mah-jong or cards. Another difference is that women come to the tea houses. Because most of the land has been compulsorily purchased by the government, the young and strong have all gone to the big cities to earn money. The older women in the family don't have to spend their time taking care of the young children, so they have started to become a part of tea-house culture.

  Originally, I had thought that "listening to the news" meant villagers sitting clustered round a little radio listening to the news or Chinese opera. But this was not the case. Because the area had been poor not just for generations but for dynasties, many of its people were illiterate and had never been to school. In every generation, however, there would be a few men who ventured outside the village to find out news and interesting things; back in the village tea house they would then say and sing the news. After a while the "News Singer" became a special job in the area.

  We were lucky enough to meet a "News Singer", Old Mr Wu, who had been "singing and telling the Revolution" for the Communist Party since he was ten years old. From our casual chat I could see that he was at ease and eager to perform, so I decided then and there to hold an extra interview.

  ***

  XINRAN: Mr Wu, while we're waiting for the cameraman to get set up, can I make a request?

  WU: Just say the word.

  XINRAN: We'll only say what's in our hearts, no official talk – empty words or false words – and we'll just talk, without "singing". And please look only at me, not at other people. Is that all right?

  WU: I'll do as you say.

  XINRAN: Have you always lived here?

  WU: I'm Linhuan-born and -bred.

  XINRAN: So what year were you born?

  WU: I'm seventy-five years old. I'm a little deaf, but I'll tell you no lies, even though I'm seventy-five. I'm not like some people, playing up their age to cheat their way to a pension, playing up their youth to get a young wife.

  XINRAN: Don't worry about your hearing, I'll shout. When did you start drinking tea?

  WU: My father ran a tea house. We couldn't buy good water. When I was very small I started to fetch spring water – at eleven or twelve I could carry water with a pole on both shoulders. When did I start to drink? I can't remember.

  XINRAN: How long did your father run a tea house?

  WU: Many years.

  XINRAN: Do you still remember what the tea house was like? How many teapots and tea tables were there? Were there many people?

  WU: A fair few teapots – they were all old, there were none of the little pots you get nowadays. In those days tea houses were important places hereabouts; anything that was too big for the family or couldn't be kept in the bag, they'd take to the tea house, and they always got a result. Arranging marriages, fights between husband and wife, differences between neighbours, disciplining youngsters… That was why women and children weren't allowed in. This was men's business. Unless, that is, one of the tea houses was short-staffed, then they'd have to let the owner's wife in to lend a hand. So I didn't see much either. What child would dare stick his nose into his own father's business back then? That would be challenging your father's authority!

  XINRAN: Do you still remember what your mother did at home?

  WU: She cooked. I just remember her cooking. That's what women do, isn't it? Cooking!

  XINRAN: How many of you children were there?

  WU: Just the one, I was the only one.

  XINRAN: You were an only child? There was no one-child policy then, surely?

  WU: There was just me. I didn't have any sisters, or any brothers either. Luckily I was a boy or the family line would have died out. I was the only one then, but now there are four generations of us.

  XINRAN: How many sons, how many daughters?

  WU: Eh?

  XINRAN: HOW- MANY – SONS? HOW- MANY – DAUGHTERS?

  WU: Me? Four sons and a girl.

  XINRAN: How about grandchildren?

  WU: Even my grandchildren's children are grown up!

  XINRAN: How did you find your wife?

  WU: The first one, I don't know. It was all fixed up by our parents, and after four years she had a child. It wouldn't do, so I found me another one. This one was good; she's a capable woman. I joined the Party in '54, she joined in '55; she's a capable woman.

  XINRAN: So you had two wives? You were married twice?

  WU: Let's not talk about that, I couldn't be doing with the first one; she didn't have any progressive thought at all, and she wasn't capable. So I got another wife. The second one, she could talk sense.

  XINRAN: Is she a good cook?

  WU: Pretty good – dumplings, flat pancakes on the stove, she can do the lot.

  XINRAN: When your father was alive was his tea house called "the tea house", or did it have another name?

  WU: It was just called the tea house. In the past there were storytellers and drum-singers in the tea houses. He sold his tea, you did your singing, he'd give you money every month, plus tips from the customers. Nowadays opera singers all sing on the stage. They turn their noses up at the tea houses – not enough space.

  XINRAN: So tell me what you did all day, from when you got up in the morning to when you went to bed at night.

  WU: I ran the tea house with my old man, I carried water. Every day was the same, what's to talk about? At first I went to school, until grade three. I was stupid so I stopped going. I said to my dad, "I'll do whatever you tell me to." He said, "You carry water, I'll run the tea house, and the place'll be full of the sound of slurping tea." I said, "What use is that?" He said, "What's good about running a tea house? I'm telling you, this tea house of ours is the place in the village where people talk sense. If anyone in the tea house says unreasonable things, the tea house will meet to pass judgement. The tea house is just like a court,
it's like the law. And there's another good thing about a tea house: people get angry, and if they get angry at home, they fight with their sons or scold their daughters-in-law, but once they're in the tea house they don't stay angry, they chat and laugh – a trip to the tea house is a happy thing, a tea house is a good place. Besides, in the tea house you can hear about big matters from outside. Otherwise you'd be living in a dead end, wouldn't you?"

  XINRAN: Then what time did you and your father start work every day, and when did you open?

  WU: The tea house opened very early, six or so in winter, in summer a bit after five. We heated the water, and once the water was boiled we'd pour tea for the customers. We'd have customers as soon as it was light. As long as there was boiling water there'd be people coming to drink. People who were happy or angry would come early, and old people too. They would wake up early, while their family were still snoring away. There were no lights on at home, and no one to keep them company or talk about their dreams, so they came very early. And they drank until eight or nine in the evening. They used to come straight after supper, some from eight or ten li away. They all wanted to come and drink tea.

  XINRAN: So in your opinion, now that life has changed so much for the better, and people in so many places don't want to run tea houses any more, why is it that here it seems everyone is competing to open tea houses?

  WU: Who knows? In the past, before the Liberation, there were only two or three tea houses. They were quite rare and special. Now there are more tea houses, two or three with every step. A lot of people are running tea houses in Linhuan these days.

  XINRAN: Are there more people drinking tea now, or before?

  WU: I think there's even more than there used to be. In the past the tea drinkers were always old men, and that's the truth. Nowadays all the young people drink in the teahouses. Now it's three jiao to stay till eleven. That's three jiao a pot. It was cheaper before.

  XINRAN: Did you drink tea when you were young?

  WU: Yes, whenever I had time on my hands.

  XINRAN: Are tea houses now the same as the one your father ran?

  WU: My old man's tea house wasn't as pretty as this one.

  XINRAN: Do you know how many pots the biggest tea house here has?

  WU: The most? That would be two hundred or more.

  XINRAN: In the biggest tea house here, what's the greatest number of people drinking tea together? A few dozen? A hundred? More?

  WU: It could be 150, maybe more.

  XINRAN: Can you still remember any of the words on the lucky couplets stuck to the door of the tea house?

  WU: Not really. I know there are new lucky couplets for Spring Festival every year, but I can't read. I don't know, sometimes I ask people to read them out for me.

  XINRAN: So what lucky couplets do you ask people to write for you at New Year?

  WU: They're all to do with tea houses, places to drink tea and people who drink tea.

  XINRAN: Do you know how your father got married to your mother?

  WU: Someone introduced them. My dad was over fifty by the time he had me.

  XINRAN: Did your father ever tell you his story?

  WU: When he was telling me off he always used to say that he'd done all sorts of things, making lanterns, selling rice, keeping a tea house, but he'd never been black at heart. At any rate my old dad was a good man.

  XINRAN: What did your father like to do?

  WU: Make hurricane lanterns – he used to sell lanterns every year. Making lanterns, and running a tea house.

  XINRAN: And what do you like to do?

  WU: I do everything. I've sold rice, I've run a tea house, and sold peanuts. I've sold a lot of things.

  XINRAN: Then in the Cultural Revolution was this tea house still open? Did the Red Guards drink tea too?

  WU: In the Cultural Revolution they didn't let us watch opera, but tea houses could stay open. What law was there against drinking tea? The tea houses stayed open, business as usual.

  XINRAN: Is the tea these days the same as before?

  WU: In the past we didn't drink the kind with tea leaves. The tea now is better. In the past there weren't any proper buildings. Now there are buildings made specially for tea houses, made of bricks instead of beaten earth.

  XINRAN: Do a lot of young people run tea houses now?

  WU: Not many. They've gone away to make money. Most people who keep tea houses are sixty or over.

  XINRAN: Do any of your children run a tea house? What do they do?

  WU: Cut hair, sell rice, sell clothes, kill pigs. But none of them have a tea house.

  XINRAN: And do you and your wife live by yourselves? Or do you live with your sons?

  WU: By ourselves. It's the New Society now, the new family. Everybody makes their own money and spends it themselves.

  XINRAN: Do your sons give you money to keep you going?

  WU: They give me money, but I don't want it. My grandson's heading off to university. That's going to cost a lot of money.

  XINRAN: So do your sons like drinking tea in the tea houses?

  WU: Only one of them. He drinks every day. The rest of them don't like it. They say it's a waste of time.

  XINRAN: You say you joined the Party in 1954. What were you doing at that time?

  WU: In 1950, just after Liberation, I was a security officer. In 1951 I was made village head and then deputy head of the production brigade. I never took a penny. I joined the Party in 1954, my wife joined in 1955, and that's the truth, as I'm sitting here.

  XINRAN: Have your sons joined the Party?

  WU: My second son joined the Party while he was in the army.

  XINRAN: You, your wife, and your son too. You must be regarded as a red family, with three Party members.

  WU: That goes without saying!

  XINRAN: Do you still have Party meetings?

  WU: We don't now.

  XINRAN: If you don't have Party meetings, do you still count as a Party member?

  WU: I can't say for sure.

  XINRAN: How many Party members are there in your village now?

  WU: There are still a few dozen.

  XINRAN: In the past we Chinese used to say that people who engaged in trade were capitalists. So, have any Party members opened a tea house?

  WU: That's hard to say, there aren't that many of us.

  XINRAN: You see, now we're starting to use electricity and lots of new technology. We're modernised. Are you worried that the tea houses will die out?

  WU: There are people who drink tea in Hangzhou, I've seen 'em. When I went there to visit my son, I saw people sitting in tea houses drinking black tea. There's no one who can hold back tea drinkers. But people who drink tea together in the city can get AIDS, so nobody should dare to drink tea outside their house.

  XINRAN: How do you know that tea can transmit AIDS?

  WU: That's not what I said. To be honest, there are people like that, and diseases like that. They can spread. That's what infectious diseases are like.

  XINRAN: So after you stopped running a tea house, apart from being an official, what job did you do?

  WU: Well, these days I sell antiques. I go to small places to buy up old teapots. If I can get a bit for them, enough for spending money, that's all I need – the children don't want them. I'm a rough-and-ready, uneducated sort of chap. I can't read books or newspapers, but I remember everything I see and hear. If not, why would the Party have told me to "sing the Revolution"?

  XINRAN: So how long have you been "singing the Revolution"?

  WU: I started when I was ten. Everyone in the tea house liked to hear me sing. I could sing anything; whatever went into my ears, I could make into something to sing. I sang until the big loudspeakers came to the village. Things changed then. When the big loudspeakers from the broadcasting station started shouting, everyone could hear it. I couldn't sing the things that everybody knew, so I went looking for things the broadcasters didn't say. I kept on singing after I became a Party member and a
cadre, but not as much as before.

  XINRAN: How did you know what things the broadcasters never said?

  WU: Need you ask? Everybody knows that they never talk about gods or fortune-telling; that's superstition. And they don't talk about the police doing bad things, right? Or about droughts or natural disasters either, or how the Yellow River drowned all those people. It was all "class struggle every day", but we were all poor here, we couldn't find a class enemy even if we wanted to. Those class enemies were all rich. Would you stay here if you were rich? That'd be like a man dying of hunger using a gold bowl for a pisspot!

  XINRAN: So if you often spoke of those things, didn't anybody try to stop you?

  WU: Nobody bothered about me, who comes here? If they came here to control us, what would they eat? Those officials who were so fond of class struggle wouldn't have been able to bear hunger!

  XINRAN: You're seventy-five, and there are so many stories in your life, so let's narrow it down. Can you tell me about the three most painful things in your life and the three happiest?

  WU: That's easy, I was happiest when I was selling rice. It was one yuan a bowl, and I could sell five hundred bowls in a day, and that's the truth. I made money from my zhuangmo as well – that's big hard steamed bread, the kind they eat in the north-east. That was my first happy thing. The second happy thing is that I've worked for the revolution all my life, but I've never taken a penny of public money. I want to be a decent person. I joined the Party in 1954. I went to the police station to be a public security worker, I wasn't scared. "A revolutionary must know no fear, no point in thinking of revolution if you're scared." There's no third happiest thing. Family matters like my sons and daughter don't count.