by Arnold Zable
He stops mid-step, mid-dance, abruptly. I have seen this before, this sudden change in mood. He slumps back in a chair. His youthful complexion gives way to creases and furrows. The mischievous smile and the good cheer are gone, replaced by a plaintiff moaning.
I cannot wait until I’m allowed to leave Guizhou, he says. He is a city boy. The fields hold little attraction for him, and the landscape no romance. All he sees is the dirt and impoverishment. There is something else that goads him and drives his mood shifts. It can be triggered by the thought of what could have been. He cannot overcome his sense of a life betrayed, and of the best years of his life wasted here in Huaxi, Guizhou Province, the place of his exile.
There is one fragment of landscape, a specific stretch of road that skirts the fields overlooked by the college. When he sees it, his rage wells up. He is overcome by nausea. He quickens his steps when he has no choice but to take it. The mountains appear mute, as they did when he was being paraded from the college.
The mob was at his back. His students and colleagues were his accusers. He was bent over and crouched like a dog. Whenever he lifted himself from the crouch, he was pushed back down. You are a dog, so you must walk like a dog, the mob shouted, and he resumed his dog-crawl shuffle along the road where I now set out on my daily walks into the countryside.
It began in 1957, he says. He was a student at the Beijing Foreign Languages Institute, active in college theatre, an actor, singer and dancer. He performed excerpts from Beijing opera. He loved harmony and form, movement and rhythm. He was having the time of his life.
‘Let a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend,’ urged Mao. You are free to criticise the party. If you criticise the party, you will be loved by the party. The Beijing Man had no interest in politics, but he couldn’t resist the Siren’s call. He was in his early twenties, naive, he will say, years later. If he takes part in the movement, he reasoned, it will increase his popularity among fellow students and his esteem in the eyes of party leaders. And the slogan appealed to him; he was beguiled by its poetry.
He took part in political meetings. He stood at the microphone and addressed mass audiences. He denounced the party-controlled press. It reports only good news, he said, never the bad. He called for free speech and extolled the virtues of creativity. He was cheered and encouraged. He adored the spotlight.
Mao changed course. Those who criticised the party had revealed themselves. The Beijing Man was outed as a ‘rightist’. He was separated from his fellow students and was no longer allowed to take part in activities. Fellow rightists were sent to prison camps or to the countryside to be re-educated. A close friend committed suicide. She could not accept her fall from grace, the humiliation.
The Beijing Man graduated in 1960 and was exiled to Guizhou Province. He was assigned to the agricultural college as a teacher of Russian. After arriving in Huaxi, he wept every day for months. He could not stand the dusty streets and the coarseness of provincial life.
He stood in a classroom each week, harangued by teachers and students. For hours on end they accused him, called him a counter-revolutionary, a running dog of Imperialism. In his language classes there were students assigned to report on him. Out of class no one dared speak to him. He could not reveal his feelings or display any weakness. It would have confirmed his ‘bourgeois’ tendencies.
He fell in love with a nurse who worked in a local hospital. They were told by the leaders that they could not marry. Her father lived in Nanjing. He was a high-ranking party official. The party secretary at the hospital reported on their relationship. Her father was enraged.
On the eve of the wedding, the Beijing Man made his way to the hospital to collect his fiancée’s belongings. He intended to shift them to his room in the college, where they were to begin married life, but her room had been stripped of furniture, clothes and bedding. There was no trace of her. She had left Huaxi, the hospital administrator told him. She was at Guiyang Station, heading for Nanjing, returning to her family. There was nothing he could do about it.
The Beijing Man dashed outside. He ran frantically through the streets in search of transport. He climbed onto the back of a truck headed for Guiyang; he held onto the jolting tray, but he could not hold onto his sanity. He made out the black outlines of the ranges. The countryside dark and forbidding. Time was running out. The mountains were outpacing him. The lights of Guiyang were on the horizon, close but receding.
When the truck pulled up at the station, he jumped from the tray and dashed like a madman for the entrance. He careered between passengers. His face was hot and his temples were beating. He found his fiancée on the platform. The train was waiting. He sprinted towards her. She was within reach, but the platform was shaking; his feet buckled and gave way beneath him. He was falling. His hands reached out for the concrete. When he woke, he was lying on the ground and she was bending over him.
Why, he asked her? Why? She was silent. Why? No one knew why any longer. It was a word no one dared utter in public. Why? She was forbidden to tell him. He was beyond caring, or knowing. There were forces beyond his control. She had been ordered to see her father, she said. She had to go to Nanjing. I will come back, she said. I promise.
The Beijing Man returned to the college. For weeks, he was feverish. He couldn’t sleep and he couldn’t concentrate. His fiancée remained in Nanjing. Her father took her aside every day. It would be an insult to the family for her to marry a counter-revolutionary, he said. What he had achieved would be dishonoured, his laborious rise through the ranks in the party, for nothing.
I have risked my life for the people, he berated her. If you marry him, the family will lose face. You will take us down with you. She changed her mind from day to day, bent to his wishes, then recanted, then submitted again. That was how it went. The days became weeks and still her father harangued her.
The college president wrote that the Beijing Man was ill. The letter jolted her from her uncertainty. She had to return, she said. She had made up her mind. If you do this you will no longer be my daughter, her father told her. He bent down, drew an imaginary line on the floor, and said: You are on the right, and I am on the left. If you don’t cross back over, I will disown you. His daughter returned to Huaxi, to the Beijing Man. Her father did not speak to her for twenty years.
The following year their first daughter was born, but the struggle was not over. All teachers were required to live in the college. Every day, from dawn until late at night, slogans blared from loudspeakers to a backdrop of martial music, and three times a day, at the appointed hour, the Beijing Man stood in front of the students and staff, wearing a dunce’s hat.
He had to say ‘yes’ to every accusation. Yes, I am guilty. Yes, I am a dog, a reactionary. He stood in front of a portrait of Mao, red book in hand, and repeated: I am sorry. I am not a good man. I ask Chairman Mao for forgiveness.
His first daughter had a high fever. He ran to the hospital room where she was with her mother. When he took his daughter in his arms, a Red Guard seized her from him. You are not allowed to talk to the new generation, he said. You will corrupt your daughter. The cadre dropped the infant on the bed. He did not allow the Beijing Man to touch her.
The Beijing Man fled the hospital and took the path to the river. The mountains were menacing sentinels. The taunts of the Red Guard haunted him. He ran to the bridge, stood by the edge and stared at the water. He imagined himself embraced in its coolness.
A second daughter was born. When she took ill, he rushed to her room in the hospital. His wife was on nursing duty. He opened the door and saw his first daughter, now four years old, kneeling on the ground, tending her baby sister. The sight terrified him. Again, he had been prevented from being a father. Again, he made his way to the bridge, and again he thought of surrendering to the river.
He was ordered to labour on the college farm. He worked from dawn till dusk, and returned home each night exhausted. This is how it was for a decade, until 1976 a
nd the death of Mao. The following year the central government allowed criticism of the suffering that had occurred, and proclaimed they had been in error. The Beijing Man was exonerated and permitted to resume his vocation.
There is supper on the table: sweet dumplings, glutinous rice cakes, candied fruit and chocolate. The Beijing Man sees none of it. On his face is an expression of sullen anger. They asked you to criticise them, and then they punished you, he says. The injustice still rankles.
He looks about him, as if suddenly remembering his surroundings. He runs a hand across his forehead, straightens his back and assumes his upright posture. His eyes regain focus. His face brightens, and his playful smile returns.
This, I suspect, is how it will always be, the Beijing Man fluctuating between a childlike sense of mischief and his outrage. He has no interest in taming this. It is who he is, and what history has made of him. Take it or leave it. He reaches for the cassette player and switches it back on. He is still dancing when I leave the apartment.
Again, I am not ready to return home. I take the route to the river, the same path that the Beijing Man took in the times of his anguish, contemplating suicide. Many did take their own lives. The Beijing Man was sustained, he says, by his two daughters. He could not forsake them. They pulled him back from the brink.
The fields are quiet, the farmers lost in the sleep of the exhausted. Their days are spent transplanting rice seedlings. They will be back in the fields at dawn, backs bent in the cool of sunrise. The watermill is at rest. The lights are out and the brick structure is shrouded in darkness.
I walk beyond the bridge to the water’s edge, to a clearing with a clear view of the mill and, upstream, the waterfall, and further still, the pavilion. I have sat here often, marking my students’ work. I have stopped here several times with N when he accompanied me on my walks.
Han Shan and William Blake are similar in spirit, says N, seated beside me in the clearing one afternoon. He takes a book from his shoulder bag, a volume of English poetry. They worshipped nature and wanted to be at one with it. It is said that Han Shan, when pursued by officials, slipped through a crevice that closed behind him and was never seen again. He vanished when the authorities tried to evict him. Others say he vanished when fleeing a group of men delivering clothes and medicines.
He did not welcome their assistance. ‘Thieves,’ he cried out as they approached. And just as they reached out to grab him, he was gone, through the crack. The fissure disappeared and was replaced by a smooth surface. Others say he leapt into a cave that closed after him. Some say that he was a buffoon and a lunatic. Some believe his spirit resides in the mountain. There are those who believe he is the mountain.
N chuckles. He reads me a line from Blake: ‘Improvement makes straight roads; but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius.’ Days later, he presents me with Blake’s words on a sheet of red paper, in both Chinese characters and in English, written with typical care over the calligraphy.
It is the same care that N would apply to the translation of the couplet the miller had asked me to write weeks before I was due to leave the province. A couplet is a complex undertaking N had told me. The lines must match each other in the number of characters. The tones in one line complement the tones in the other. The heading is important too. It integrates the lines and creates a unity.
There are many rules, N said, but don’t worry about them. You are working in English. The meaning of what you write is more important. Your task is to depict the essence of what you have experienced here.
Yet, how to write it? How to evoke in two lines the many paths, both straight and crooked, I have walked; the tales that have come my way and the images that flood my mind when I sit down to the task in my apartment.
Of the travelling magician who stopped in Huaxi on market days, erecting a makeshift stage beneath a tarpaulin supported by bamboo poles and a patchwork of materials, who had then bounded on stage, wearing a shabby grey suit and a red tie over a white shirt, repeating his show, hour after hour, while audiences huddled under umbrellas to shield themselves from the rain leaking into the shelter. He performed in a rasping voice and a non-stop patter interspersed with mime, drawing belly laughs. He made coins rain from all corners of the stage into a top hat, and made watches appear and vanish. He disgorged unbroken chains of paper from his mouth, and twisted pieces of string into spaghetti. He transformed pieces of cloth into rows of flags and, with a snap of his fingers, set them fluttering. He cast a spell over the crowd, building anticipation, readying them for the appearance of his reptiles.
With a trumpet fanfare from his female assistant, he opened a wooden box that had sat all the while on a pedestal. He enticed a cast of cobras from it, prodded and kissed them, and then returned them to the box and conjured a python, three-metres in length, which he wound around his assistant as she lay stretched out on a table. Then he reopened the box, released the cobras, and arranged them in a writhing circle around the python-bound woman: the grand finale.
And how to convey what I had observed on bus trips to the outlying villages, where I followed remote paths to hamlets tucked in the folds of mountain ranges and trekked through passes squeezed between cliffs like an afterthought—coming across valleys sunk in stillness, from which there rose the bellowing of a bullock and the voice of a woman singing a melody of the hill tribes.
Towards evening, I had sat on the lower slopes awaiting the bus to Huaxi. The sun descended behind the village, closing the gap of light between sky and horizon. Clothes fluttered on lines strung across the alleys behind me: navy blues, mauves and whites against the ochres of mudbrick houses. Clay paths climbed from the valley, along which people were making their way home from the Sunday market.
Women walked with rattan coups on their backs and cackling hens strapped alongside babies. A farmer drove a herd of cows with a sharp-eyed hawk perched on his shoulder. A group of shoemakers carted boxes packed with glues, wooden lasts and slabs of leather. A posse of men rode packhorses, weighed down with merchandise. Cyclists struggled up inclines with ducks strapped to the handlebars.
And still they came: on tractors, engines stuttering under their loads of goods and passengers. On trucks and horse-drawn carts, wheels wobbling and creaking, drivers whipping their fatigued horses when they slackened. A file of men carried wooden bed frames, steadying them with their raised arms, while holding them aloft like barbells. Old men, pipes in their mouths, laboured under bundles of timber alongside a younger man with a wooden plough on his shoulder. A girl with a load of hay twice her size strung on her back, walked behind a group of youths clustered around a blaring ghetto-blaster. Men and women balanced cages of squealing piglets on bamboo rods, jogging to sustain the momentum.
Despite the weight and the fatigue there was a sense of lightness and festivity. The day was done and the haggling was over. The deals had been sealed, the goods bartered. And they were approaching their homes, the bus groaning up the bitumen roadway—its tyres flattened under the cargo of passengers and the luggage strapped to the roof, stuffed under seats and squashed in the aisles to double as seating.
The sky swelled with black clouds in the final moments of daylight. I boarded the bus and clung to a strap inside the doorway, and rocked with the weary bodies crowded around me. A burst of rain caught the driver unawares and blocked his vision. In the seconds before he turned on the lights, the bus was suspended in darkness. The mountains turned black. All sign of outside movement ceased and the valley vanished. A streak of lightning revealed pools glistening in roadside ditches, and the file of men, women and children, strung out as far as the eye could see, returning from market.
And how to encompass the stone carver lost in his dream of dragons and serpents; and the Little Gentleman leading me with bold steps through the hutongs of Guiyang city; and my students, seated six days a week, four hours each morning in the classroom—many of whom had recounted their life stories, their regrets and aspirations and taken me wi
th them to their hometowns and hamlets.
And strolling home, in the early hours, after social gatherings with Mr M the language teacher: rotund, jocular and short, approaching fifty, and seemingly content with his lot, taking in extra students for private tuition, getting rich. Well, let’s call it rich relatively speaking, he’d said, with a sardonic smile—enough cash for a TV and trips to Yunnan and the Stone Forest. Enjoy yourself, he’d said. You never know how long it will last.
A friend of his leant out of a second-floor apartment window and invited him up for a game of chess. Mr M took his leave and, like an excited child, darted through the doorway and up the steps. The men’s shadows fell on the curtain. They were still playing when I passed by at sunrise.
And how to portray the farmer bent over double, transplanting rice seedlings in a flooded paddy. Briefly stopping, unwinding her supple spine, hands on hips, her dirt-encrusted feet firmly planted. Looking up from beneath her conical hat at the mountain ranges, holding her gaze for a moment, then bending back, vertebra by vertebra, with the elasticity of the branches of a weeping willow, to resume her relentless labour.
And how to convey my friendship with the old boatman of Baihua-Hu, One Hundred Flower Lake, a thirty-minute drive from Huaxi. The boatman rowed me from a small landing. He stood at the stern, gripping two crossed oars, while rocking back and forth to the rhythm. Behind him, mountain peaks and forested slopes tumbled down to banks strewn with wildflowers and willows.
The boatman lives on the lake. He is a Buyi man, and the Buyi worship water. And on water, the boatman is at ease, even as he rows against gathering storms and sharp breezes. He ferries me to the middle of the lake, to his home island. We scramble up the banks to a hamlet of wooden houses.
On land, the boatman is a wiry gnome, running about, tending to chores, chatting. He tells of famines, when the villagers lived on roots and leaves, and the stems of wild plants and flowers. Seventy years ago, massive floods forced his family off the land. They took refuge on the hilly island and subsisted on fish and rice and a meagre income derived from rape oil.
