The Phoenix Song

by John Sinclair

  On our return to Shanghai we landed at the civilian airport. The plane pulled off the runway and, with its engines still running, deposited Director Ho, Tian and me, along with our luggage, on a grassy verge, and then turned around and roared back into the air, bound for the military airfield on the other side of the city. We trudged across the grass towards the terminal building, carrying suitcases and my violin in its case. A welcoming party of senior officials, faculty and students from the Conservatory rushed forward onto the tarmac to greet us. Three photographers and a camera crew moved around our flank and started pushing some of the bystanders back to allow them a better shot. A martial tune started up on the airport loudspeaker.

  First to shake my hand was the Minister of Culture, a man with a face like a moon cake who beamed at me and crushed my hand in both of his. ‘Comrades, look this way!’ the photographers shouted. We looked, and in the resulting photograph we appear to be fighting over something I am holding in my hand. The bulbs flashed and burned my retinas so that I was blinded as the Minister attempted to present me with a medal and ribbon – ‘Hero of Cultural Labour’, it said – set in its own red velvet case. ‘Comrades, once more!’ Another flash. Another magnesium ghost harrowing the surface of my eyes.

  And so it went on. The Mayor of Shanghai gave a speech. Flash! A gentle hug from Comrade Meretrenko and a more manly one from his wife. Flash! Two little girls loaded bunches of flowers into my arms. Flash! Flash! Professor Yu approached me, and his hand wriggled like a snake amongst the mound of foliage I was holding, until our fingers touched; he clasped my hand warmly as his eyes searched out mine, and he announced, with a catch in his throat, that I had brought honour to China. Flash!

  The crowd encircled me as we moved towards the gate. My suitcase and violin had been seized by a woman in uniform. I called out for Tian, and was told that Director Ho had already taken him to the infirmary. A car door stood open and I was pushed into the back seat with my burden of flowers. The opposite door opened and Professor Yu slid into the seat. ‘Now,’ he said, as we pulled away, ‘there are things we must discuss.’ He apologised for the confusion over the competition in Paris. Director Ho had been misled about the dates, he explained. The competition was several months away. In the meantime, there were urgent matters he needed me to deal with. The Conservatory needed to prove itself worthy of China and its people, he said, and I would be in the vanguard. If we failed all could be lost. We all needed to play our part. That was all he could say at that moment. More would be known in a few days.

  We spent the rest of the journey in silence. I turned away from him to hide the tears that welled up in my eyes. For I was certain that, whatever else this meant, I would not be allowed to return home to visit my parents.

  The following day was a Sunday, so I slept late. Ling Ling took me to the Zhujiaojiao Gardens and we strolled arm in arm along the canals, and sat upstairs in the Moon Pavilion. She fed me sweets and oolong tea and, encased in an aromatic haze, I answered her questions about Bucharest, the finer points of powered flight, and Tian’s illness. In the afternoon I returned to my room and as I wearily ascended the stairs I received the greetings of several of my Russian neighbours, among them Pavel and Raya who pressed a small parcel of dried fruit into my hand. On the top floor I flung myself at my bed and did not wake until the following morning.

  Ling Ling had disappeared from our room before dawn, and I only met up with her at the gate of the Conservatory. She was bent under the weight of a large item in a canvas cover strapped to her back. ‘A piano accordion,’ she explained. ‘They won’t have any pianos where we are going.’

  ‘Where are we going?’ I asked. ‘I have only just arrived back.’

  ‘No idea,’ she said. ‘But read that, and you may have some idea what is going on.’

  She nodded towards the main door of the Conservatory upon which was pinned the revised text of Mao’s article, ‘On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People’. I read the document, as usual straining to pierce the familiar recitations of Marxist principle and reach through to some shadowy truth beyond.

  What would become apparent was that the words of Mao’s original article, after some clarification, were now revealed as censuring the untethered thoughts of intellectuals rather than encouraging public criticism and debate. How absurd that anyone had thought otherwise! In the weeks that followed we came to understand that the Hundred Flowers Movement was over, the scent of the new blooms having proved too pungent for the Party, and the criticisms of its cadres so trenchant and irrefutable as to be unpatriotic. Those who had spoken out were clearly Rightists in temperament, regardless of the sacrifices they may have made during the revolution or the Long March. In Shanghai, intellectuals were publicly shamed: some publishing retractions and self-criticisms, others, we would learn in the months and years to come, simply disappearing. There was whispered speculation that from the start the purpose of the exercise had been to entice ‘bad elements’ to declare themselves publicly. Perhaps I am fooling myself, but I recall somehow knowing all of this – not its detail, of course, but its essence – as sunlight struck the paper nailed to the Conservatory door and the characters started to swim in a pool of brightness: a surface luminous and painful to behold, but with depths of meaning refracted and elusive, shooting this way and that like tiny fish under the surface of a pond.

  Ling Ling was at my shoulder. ‘Tian was at the Director’s house last night, so he may know more.’

  ‘Tian is better?’

  ‘Well enough, so it seems.’ In a low voice, she related what she had been told the night before as I slept – that Director Ho was to be severely censured for praising Fu Cong and his father, Fu Lei; that the performance of Beethoven’s Ninth was now postponed; that the whole Conservatory was under suspicion, and the faculty had decided that, to re-establish its revolutionary credentials, all students would be assigned to ‘cultural labouring’ tasks amongst the workers and peasants for the remainder of the summer. We were to pack up our instruments and a small bag of personal items and report to the Conservatory courtyard at midday.

  ‘I want to stash this thing in the common room,’ Ling Ling said, hoisting the piano accordion onto her back. ‘Then let’s go home and pack.’

  *

  We joined the crowd in the courtyard at midday. Tian and the Director arrived together, Tian with a bulging satchel over his shoulder, a cello case in one hand, and a locked metal case in the other. Director Ho greeted me warmly and handed me a copy of the People’s Daily. The front page carried a report of the competition in Bucharest, referring to my ‘victory’. I had fought bravely against great odds, it read. I had outsmarted my opponents, and had completed my prize-winning performance with the strains of ‘The East is Red’ ringing in my ears, a feat I found difficult to imagine. There was no mention of the American woman, and the winner of the violin section of the competition was identified only as ‘a Ukrainian’. Nor was there any mention of Tian Mei Yun, the pianist who had spent the entire trip staring at the ceiling of his room.

  The Director took me aside and laid his hand on my shoulder. ‘Please accept my apologies,’ he said, ‘but for the time being I cannot arrange . . .’

  ‘I understand,’ I interjected.

  He dropped his head. ‘It is out of my hands, I am sorry.’ With that he disappeared inside the main building.

  Tian started to explain that the metal case was full of sheet music, and that he had spent the previous evening going through Director Ho’s collection, selecting music that they thought would be fitted for the task of ‘cultural labouring’. Ling Ling asked if he knew our destination, but we were immediately called to attention by Ding Shangde, the Deputy Director, who stood up on a chair and read out a list assigning each student to one of three teams. I was grouped with Ling Ling, Tian and a dozen other students, and Ding announced that we were to join the Hainan Autonomous Prefecture Cultural Work Team. A truck would carry us and our luggage to the station, where
we would catch the train south to Guangzhou, and from there a ferry to the island of Hainan in the South China Sea, where we would help teach socialist principles to villagers from the Miao ethnic minority.

  The train journey lasted twenty hours, and when our fellow passengers discovered that we were musicians on our way to join a cultural work team we felt obliged to put on an impromptu performance. Ling Ling strapped on her piano accordion, and we sang our way through the standard repertoire of revolutionary songs, finishing with the chorus from ‘The Red Detachment of Women’, which many of the passengers knew by heart. Afterwards, a young man from Guangzhou attached himself to us, insisting on singing for us, in a voice shaky with some deep infirmity in his chest, a traditional song from his home village complete with rather feminine hand gestures and a sad tilt of cheek and eyebrow. Then he shared around cigarettes, and told Tian what he knew about the Miao people while Ling Ling and I dozed. ‘Miao men share their wives with guests,’ he said, bending his head towards Tian, ‘especially those who bring a gift of rice wine.’

  ‘And are Miao women worth a bottle of rice wine?’ Tian asked.

  ‘Definitely,’ the young man said, ‘in some cases, two bottles.’ Ling Ling shuffled around on her hard seat, and I saw the shadow of a smile on her lips. I glanced discreetly at Tian, who was nodding earnestly to his informant.

  Dropping his voice further, the man from Guangzhou went on. ‘They stand to urinate,’ he said, almost in a whisper. ‘And they believe that regular sexual congress enables them to work as hard as men.’

  ‘How regular?’ Tian asked.

  ‘Twice a day.’

  ‘Twice a day. Indeed?’

  ‘Yes, and more often in winter. Three or four times a day.’

  ‘When do they get time to work as hard as men? And is all this sexual congress perhaps the reason why the men themselves have no more energy to work?’

  The young man’s face clouded, and he ignored Tian’s questions and continued. ‘But beware, because every five years the women form a hunting pack and castrate one of the men from a rival village – or a visitor who has offended the village headman – and then they cook up his testicles in a special soup that is fed to all girl infants under five years old.’

  ‘I will be extra careful, then,’ Tian said, looking around to wink at me. ‘Are we approaching the five year mark?’

  The young man could not say, but he passed on his last piece of wisdom: that each March, Miao youth who had come of age serenaded each other from opposite sides of the valley, young men facing east and young women facing west. Using only the sound of their voices, they paired off, and arranged to meet in the forest on the valley floor to make love. There were many stories of mistaken identity, he said, and while some spawned epics or farces, most of them ended as tragedies. Tian thanked the young man for his advice, and after he left the three of us fell into a prolonged fit of giggling.

  The train rolled on into the night. I lapsed into a deep sleep, waking to find that I had slumped down onto Tian’s shoulder. I saw Ling Ling on the seat opposite, looking at me with an expression I had never seen before – a sad, reflective look I would not have thought was part of her repertoire – and immediately went back to sleep. When I awoke next, Ling Ling was gone. I was still leaning against Tian, and discovered to my horror a wet patch on his jacket sleeve next to where my mouth had been. Tian looked down and noticed it too. Dui bu qi, I whispered. Mei shi, he whispered back. It’s nothing.

  The train stopped at a town near Canton, and the three of us got off for half an hour and bought some food at the station cafeteria. Tian complained of a sore neck, the result of a night spent pinned awkwardly against the side of the carriage. He said he had not wanted to wake me or to try to move me in my sleep. I told him he was too polite, and noticed that Ling Ling scowled at him when she thought I was not looking.

  On the ferry to Hainan we slept on the deck, amongst soldiers returning home and peasants transporting breeding pigs to the island. What bunks there were below deck seemed to be occupied by officers, factory managers and Party officials. We were met at the dock by the leader of the Cultural Work Team, and transported by bus to bunker-like quarters on the edge of a village in the foothills of the main mountain range. There we were introduced to the rest of the team, an assortment of dancers, actors, and singers from every corner of China. We learned that our first task was to prepare for a celebration of Miao traditional culture (with references to sex and feudal values replaced with socialist messages). The dancers and singers were already rehearsed, but the team’s musicians had been reassigned to another part of Hainan, so we were to fill the gap. We began our preparation immediately.

  That night Tian Mei Yun showed us the contents of his locked case. The whole party gathered under a tree in the courtyard, and Tian released the lock using a key hung on a chain around his neck, and one by one placed before us his treasure of musical scores. None of the titles were in Chinese; instead, there were titles in languages Tian identified as French and English, as well as some in Russian (which I carefully avoided translating). For the most part, they were works by familiar composers; but there were some I had not heard of: Bartók, Kodály, Hindemith. There were also some scores from which the front cover had been ripped, along with the few centimetres at the top of the first page where the composer and title had been. I waited for someone to ask Tian to explain why these scores were damaged, but nobody seemed to want to know.

  We practised Miao folk songs for the next two days, before being loaded into two buses again and heading up into the mountains. For the next two weeks we slept in empty storehouses, barns, school rooms and peasant huts, ate whatever food we were offered, travelled along narrow mountain roads by day, and every evening set up our stage in a new village and sent messengers to summon the Miao villagers to our show, which we performed in the light of hurricane lamps on poles. Our audiences were no doubt happy for some entertainment, but must have been irritated to find that attendance was compulsory, and amused or insulted to discover that the evening’s fare was to watch Han Chinese dress up in Miao costumes and present sanitised versions of Miao songs and dances to the descendents of their authors, accompanied by traditional melodies, but with Western harmony and instrumentation.

  On our return from the mountains, we were presented with a special challenge. We were to be sent to a district where villagers had destroyed a newly installed electrical system, believing it contained devils. A political team had already held mass meetings with the villagers and explained revisionism and its Maoist critique, but to no avail. The sabotage continued. Could we put together a performance about the advantages of electrification?

  We had the performance worked out within three days. The dancers and singers would act out the story of how the peasants lamented having only oil-lamps for light; how the benefits of electrical power were recognised by Mao Zedong; how scientists discovered ways of capturing electrons; how they sent out messengers to the sky and the streams to convince them to lend their powers to assist the villagers to modernise, and then gathered in a harvest of electrons into their storehouse of transformers and wires; how electricity flowed down the wires and into houses and health clinics and factories, creating light and animating machines which milled grains, sewed sacks and warm clothing, and assembled guns with which to fight the enemies of socialism.

  Tian assumed the role of musical director. We would break away from Mozart and Beethoven, he said, and instead use French, Russian and Hungarian composers. One of Bartók’s Rumanian Dances represented the sufferings of the pre-electrified peasants. A march from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet accompanied the entrance of Chairman Mao and the scientists. Another Bartók dance and a movement from a string quartet by Ravel, played pizzicato, represented, in turn, the search for compliant electrons amongst the mysterious elemental powers of nature, and then the machines jumping into life. I was to be the soloist, accompanied by the rest of the ensemble or sometimes just by Ling Ling and her
piano accordion.

  To indicate the happy electrons leaving the generation plant and making their way along the wires, Tian chose a sprightly dance tune. It was one of the damaged scores, and so was without a name. This piece proved to be the crowd favourite when we visited the recalcitrant village itself and performed our ‘electrification suite’. (I heard it again years later, in Paris, when a friend took me to a competition for young musicians in which her son was playing the violin. When the boy played the very piece that we had used to try to win over the hearts of suspicious Miao tribesmen, I asked my friend what music her son was playing. ‘Tu ne le connais pas?’ she said, taken aback in that Gallic way. ‘Mais c’est le Golliwog’s Cake Walk de Claude Debussy.’)

  The sabotage of the electrical system ceased, and, encouraged by the ineluctable power of scientific music, we turned out several more ‘suites’ over the next two months, some in support of ‘goods’ like family planning (a restful piece by Elgar played around the actors representing responsible parents who ensured adequate spacing between their children, while the stubbornly ignorant parents were dogged by an irregular march by Shostakovich), and others against a variety of ‘bads’, including gambling on cockfights (with music by Bartók), smoking opium (Hindemith) and consulting traditional healers (Kodály). By the time we were summoned back to Shanghai in September, every score in Tian’s case had been copied, reordered, transcribed to a different key, slowed to a more useful pace or manipulated in other ways until it had found its true vocation as a means of promoting hygienic living and hard work among the Miao.

  *

  A few days before we were due to return to Shanghai, Tian called me out of a practice session and explained that we had a small task to attend to. He was carrying the case with Director Ho’s scores and two straw hats. ‘You’ll need one of these,’ he said, handing me a hat. ‘It’s hot today.’