CHAPTER
FOUR
A BREATH
OF THE WEST
Suddenly I’m overcome with homesickness. It so often approaches by stealth. I’ve been guarding the front door of my mind, telling myself firmly that this piece of living is worth the inevitable price of temporary exile, but misery now flows quietly in the back and rises around me.
A friend has sent me Vikram Seth’s lucent translation of works by three Tang poets. One of them, Li Bai, local Sichuan hero, knew about this sort of homesickness. In the 8th century, he wrote: I lift my head and watch the moon. I drop my head and think of home. Now, as then, homesickness eventually recedes. It passes – for the present.
The fog has cleared and for an hour or two I drink in the colour of the sky, the sense of space. High puffs of cloud are still there, but in between there’s a faint but unmistakeable blue, and I can see a ring of mountains around as much of the horizon as my balconies command. I want to dance with delight. The sun’s showing and I hang over my balcony with the warmth on my shoulder, and watch a woman washing her long hair over an enamel basin. In the evening, though the fog’s beginning to creep back, there’s still something faintly luminous in the air, and I enjoy watching the light. I think about the shape life’s taking on for me here. The flat and I have come to terms with one another, and it’s proving a useful retreat for the students who come here at lunchtime or in the evening between dinner and evening school, partly to speak English, partly to see what’s new on the walls, but mostly, I suspect, because within the school grounds there are few other places to go. The classrooms are locked against thieving, and the other teachers don’t want their students’ company out of classroom hours. The dormitories, I’ve been told, are crowded, grubby, noisy, and not attractive to return to. This leaves, as pleasant places to gather, the stone seats under the straggly trees, or my flat where they can study the map of New Zealand, pinned over the door, and the inflatable world globe hanging from the ceiling. It spins in the breeze, and reassures me the world doesn’t end with China. I’ve covered the walls with pictures, keeping one wall for a photo of every student who visits the flat. I don’t often feel the urge to decorate, but here I’ve needed to make my mark, to say who I am.
In the classroom I’m blinding on, trying to do something useful, but it’s rather like attempting to play cricket when you’ve never seen the game. There will be tricks to teaching English in China, and I don’t know them. I wish I could speak with some of the other foreign teachers in the city.
A burst water pipe at the nearby International Studies University gives me my chance.
Workmen found the burst pipe four days ago and cemented it, but they let the water through too soon and it blew the pipe ends apart again. Foreign teachers there have had no water for the four days, and five of them are transported here to my flat for a shower. Perhaps the Chinese, slightly embarrassed, don’t know what to do with them, and decide that to bring them to another foreign teacher is somehow to contain the problem.
A quiet Russian woman, Svetlana, has imminent hysteria in her eyes. She’s probably no stranger to this sort of domestic hiccup in Moscow, but her fingernails and hairstyle suggest that her appearance is important to her and the lack of water may be threatening. Paul, from Western Australia has a careful, academic voice, and is gently watchful. Margaret and Gerard from Canberra bring a welcome flavour of Down-Under – easy-going and debunking. They inspect the bathroom with interest:
‘You OK here?’
‘Fine. It’s not as bad as it looks.’
‘We’ve got regular Western equipment in our bathroom, but it works better with water.’
Kathleen, rather older, from California, looks like a modest, self-respecting English woman dressed for a meeting in a village hall – tall and straight, wearing a grey skirt, blouse buttoned to the neck with an embroidered collar and a woollen cardigan. There’s humour in her face, and her incisive manner suggests a quick mind. She’s annoyed with herself for dropping her soap down the hole in my bathroom floor, concerned about plumbing consequences, but is reassured to learn that the system has serenely borne away my toothbrush without issue. The bathroom’s an unfamiliar system to most of them, but they’re so grateful for water that they don’t mind how it comes. Nobody talks about why they’re in Chongqing, and some of them may not really know. In time I’ll learn some of their stories. People come to China for many different reasons.
We talk about our teaching and living conditions, in a rather encoded way because of the listening interpreters, but there’s little to hide. Physical conditions for living and teaching may call for patience, ingenuity, and acceptance that nothing’s easy here, but the Chinese teachers and students are friendly and appreciative and the city has an amazing and endearing vitality. I teach more hours than these teachers do, but they have more written work to mark. So different are the teaching conditions from anything any of us has known before, that we’re all making it up as we go along – adapting, inventing, adjusting. Any teaching plan has to be ultra-flexible, with a plan B and a plan C waiting in the wings. China, as always, calls the shots.
I tell them about my struggles to make lessons relevant to lives whose internal and external shapes I can hardly guess at. They laugh and tell me it’ll be easier when I’ve been into a few Chinese homes.
‘The students will ask you home – once they’re sure of you. You wait.’
The Australians point out that, as foreign teachers, we face other problems, among them over-preparing for teaching assignments that change their nature between the commission and the event. Gerard was recently asked to prepare an address on health care in Australia, for a medical college. On the appointed evening, as his car turned into the gate of the establishment he noted that everyone was in uniform. It was a military academy. The speech he’d prepared was useless. The same week, his wife Margaret agreed to teach a senior high school class of sixty in a town on the Chengdu road, and took materials suitable for classroom use. She found herself in an auditorium with a faulty microphone and five hundred students.
‘I’m from Australia and I’m teaching English in Chongqing,’ she said slowly and clearly, stretching her lips.
A sea of blank faces looked at her. Clearly no-one understood a word. Putting her notes down, she conducted the rest of the afternoon as a session of questions and answers through the interpreter.
‘Tiring,’ Margaret reflects.
People come to Chongqing for many different reasons. The reason I give when asked here, is that I’m fascinated by China, and I am teaching English as a congenial and useful way of earning my keep while I learn about her. People find this acceptable. I find this acceptable. But there are reasons which I try to keep from others, and myself.
I used to think that writers were those who wrote well, and whose writing publishers turned into books to sell to readers who believed the books would make them happier or cleverer. I was wrong. Writers are those who have to write. The writing may be unreadable and unread, but they have to write. Naturally they feel guilty: all that time and energy spent on scribbling, regardless of whether or not anyone is the happier or cleverer for it. How selfish, how adolescent, and above all, how embarrassing.
I am a writer, but I try not to think about it. I hide most of what I write, leaving in view only words that give clear evidence of an adult life – lesson plans, letters received about road-widening and moss-proofing, proofs of the work of real writers that I’m to check, and of course the bills. One of the reasons I’ve come to China is to write; I’m not too worried about what happens while I’m here, so long as I can write about it. This is not edifying motivation. And I don’t want those who think I’m a regular person to know about my unfortunate habit.
A couple of days after the visit of the teachers from the university, there’s a banquet for the foreigners in Chongqing, teachers among them, given by the City Government at the Renmin da Litang Hotel, behind the People’s Hall that presides over the People’s Square. The Hall was finished in 1953 and is a startling architectural creation. It is, of course, vast. China seems to like things big – especially the things that show. It looks to me like the Temple of Heaven in Beijing with extra knobs, perched up behind the Potala at Lhasa. The Renmin Hotel, 1950’s again, has that plush, mellow, slightly out-of-date feeling that’s rather restful in a hotel.
Boris and I travel there with Mr Li, the Deputy Principal, who’s late. Other teachers, hanging around to see us off, laugh at him for having gone home to change his clothes. When he arrives, his gait a sort of ceremonial glide, he’s wearing a dark suit, slightly too tight but surprisingly well cut, and a tie emblazoned with a large golden chrysanthemum past its best. His massive head is carefully groomed and he beams at us like a benevolent elder bear. It must be an occasion for him too. He speaks slow, intelligent English with a careful, slightlypinched English accent which makes him sound like Rene from the TV comedy ‘’Ullo, ‘Ullo’. During the evening, he works hard to look after us, in a courtly, ponderous way.
As we drive to the banquet, there’s a strange sense of calm and order. We’re all dressed in our best, gliding through the city in serene isolation. Boris worked in Moscow at the Russian Academy of Science, in the scientific instruments division. Why has he come here? I suspect it’s necessity. I somehow can’t imagine him choosing this. He’s sophisticated and sardonic – the child-like side of the Chinese seems to irritate him.
His interpreter travels with us, a sad-faced man who trains his straggles of hair up over his balding head from a parting low down on his neck. He swims uneasily within the dusty folds of a suit made for a larger man. Internationally, the Chinese and the Russians are suspicious of each other at present and I doubt if the job of Russian interpreter confers much mana.
When we arrive, we find about seventy other foreigners, most of them teachers, who are living in Chongqing. Aren’t there more of us in a city of around seven million? Are those of us here so mad or brave? There must certainly also be a constant flow of visiting foreign business people, lured by a vast potential market and rich local resources. They’ll be doing business and shooting through. We’ve bought season tickets to what, to me, looks like an intriguing if bewildering season.
The teachers are an odd assortment. There are a few conventional young people here for an exotic adventure: Australian girls, big-boned, with skin beginning to dry from life under a fierce sun, and Americans well able to articulate how being in Chongqing fits into their life plan. We older ones are all shapes and sizes and colours of body and mind. There’s amusement, and mild exasperation at puzzling Chinese ways of doing things, but there are no complaints and no-one’s bored.
The announcement of a ‘buffet banquet’ seems a contradiction in terms and somehow not very Chinese. Is the Foreigners’ Banquet a courteous and politic public gesture rather than a whole-hearted Chinese occasion? We are all hand-shaken and greeted by senior city officials, standing in a smiling line. I’m interested to see the man who is mayor of a municipality with a population of 31 million (the largest in the world, I’m told) and an area of 83,000 square kilometres – nearly a third the size of New Zealand. He looks very likely to succeed anywhere – neatly-built, good-looking, and giving an impression of energy and intelligence under control. He manages to look at each of us with interest. The other officials have the comfortable air of the wealthy, with complexions and waist-lines that suggest many people find it expedient to take them out to dinner.
Music is provided by a Chinese band, comprised of the two-stringed er hu, the lute-like pipa and what looks like an outsize square xylophone. The musicians are brilliantly costumed and sway dramatically. ‘Edelweiss’ is a particular delight, stunningly inappropriate to the atmosphere and instruments. The Austrian Tyrol (smiles and wild flowers under clear sunny skies) is yoked to a complex civic occasion in an ancient, unreadable city shadowy under fog. Yodels and goat bells are presented by nasal strings and hollow wooden percussion.
We look down on the lights in the square. The fountains aren’t playing, but it’s elegantly lit, and the paving is exceptional. As on most evenings here, the lights glow softly through a haze, and the air’s heavy with diesel (every fourth vehicle’s a bus) and a dozen other weighty smells. It’s warm and humid, the square crawling with people amid city traffic that roars like a mighty beast. All the streets are tree-lined, every leaf coated in red-brown dust. Beyond the central city, long road tunnels and stretches where the buildings rise, rickety row after rickety row on the hillside, are reminders that this is a city carved out of rock. Out of the switchback of sharp dips and rises, bluffs and runaway inclines, a city has been formed by splitting the hard shell and implanting teeming human life.
For days now, excitement’s been rising over the arrival of a party from the Queensland school that has links with this school, providing teachers (me among them) when it can. From time to time it also offers positions at the Australian school, a priceless opportunity for any Chinese English teacher. The itinerary proposed for the visitors goes through a procession of re-vampings, to ensure all the desired outcomes: to welcome and show respect, to have them see what the school wants them to see, and to make a large, hospitable splash.
We leave for the airport in two buses carrying most of the school’s thirty-six English teachers, three top girl students carrying stiff bunches of flowers, and a number of boys, handsome in their dark blue suits with stand-up collars. When we grind to a halt twice as the traffic seizes, the passengers delight in shrieking ‘traffic jam’ to air their idiomatic English.
The plane has been delayed, and there’s plenty of time for three different welcome formations to be drawn up, which disintegrate as people, losing the sense of imminent drama, wander away and chat. Eventually, the weary but cheerful Australian party enters the hall: Peter, deputy head at a Christian College, his wife Shelley, Rona, an E.S.O.L. teacher, and two school captains, Suzanne and Chris, who retain enough of their extravert bounce to be enthusiastically polite and friendly. The Australians feel responsible for the foreign teachers they place here in Chongqing and try to help me like a concerned and generous family. When they leave, a week later, I find a bottle of Madame Rochas perfume on my desk, which I’m sure Rona bought duty-free as a treat for herself. Does she know what a precious reminder of other worlds the luxurious fragrance is in this city that smells of necessity?
The arrival of these visitors makes me think uneasily of the God-bit in my brief here. In the world I was brought up in, mentioning God in ordinary conversation broadcast a sickly unease, and the talk would back discreetly onto the solid ground of polite conservative opinion and the social graces. When the Australian Christian School told me, in a phone call in which they spoke constantly and matter-of-factly of God, that they had given me the teaching placing here, I burst out – in a torrent of words almost incoherent in their anxiety – that if they were expecting me to be a Christian evangelist in Communist China, they had the wrong person. I probably talked about my unsuitable personality and lack of training; I’m sure I didn’t mention fear, nor that I could hardly promote beliefs when I wasn’t sure what I believed. I don’t think it had ever crossed their minds that I’d be effective proselytising material, and they told me firmly that my brief was simply to be a Christian presence.
I’m uneasy with this label ‘Christian’. People in churches throw about words like ‘Christian’, ‘salvation’, ‘grace’, ‘redemption’ as though they’re watertight containers and we all know what they contain – like a label on a can: 440 gm sliced peaches in light syrup; 440gm pure spiritual element in certified English. They’re good words; they’re the best we can find – and we need words, but not as formulae to snuff out our questions. We say the words and think we have it all wrapped up.
But I have nothing wrapped up, and I’ve no ambition to wrap things up. What I’d like to be able to do is unwrap the dimension of spirit – let it all out, let it be itself – whatever that may be. I believe there’s something there. However unmanageable or frightening it is, I want to see what shape it is. I want the truth, well … I think I do. All I really know at present about the truth is that you can’t fit it in any box you make for it, without cutting off the dangly bits that always dribble down the sides. And once you’ve neatly trimmed it to the required shape, you no longer have the whole truth.
If I have trouble with words like ‘Christian’ what about ‘Christ’? Oddly enough, I have no trouble there. He’s the hero who won’t go away. He walked in when I was a child, and keeps on coming in, rising up off the pages of the Gospels, moving under the skin of art, roaming around inside me, flying in on the wind. It’s not so much that I know who he is, but that he says he knows who he is, and I believe him. And he is beauty, always beauty. And I love beauty – with everything that’s in me I love it; I spend most of my life trying to find it, or make it. I wonder if everybody does. One of the questions that threatened to split my head in my growing-up years was how the world could contain both the music of Mozart and my grandfather’s brain tumour. I’ve come to believe that Christ lived both, showed you have to live both.
If that is Christ for me, what is a Christian presence? Am I – neither great-hearted nor courageous, with all my doubts and questions – supposed to be carrying something of Christ into this school? That’s not only presumptuous, it’s ludicrous.
‘Christ’s presence’ – that’s different, and to the point, because among the motivations that most forcefully propel me into this journey is a strong desire to search for him here; I want to know where he can be seen in this city. I’m fairly sure I’ll know him when I see him. Some would think this an odd place to look for him, but I doubt if personal or national pledges of belief in a culturally-defined God have much to do with how love lives among you, walks your streets. On this harsh and beautiful slice of the earth’s crust, among people not officially encouraged to believe in anything beyond the material – but whose culture everywhere whispers spirit – there will be, I know, shapes of love. I’ll be looking for them.
During the chaotic sorties into the traffic of Chongqing to show the Australians the sights, Mrs Yu sits beside me in the bus and explains. I’m glad to see the city through the eyes of this intelligent and straightforward guide. I think she’ll have less concern than most with giving me a good impression. At the Pagoda of 500 Buddhas, she meets a friend at the door.
‘He’s very able,’ she whispers, ‘He can do anything. Anything.’
Apparently the man’s brother had fallen sick and Mrs Yu’s friend looked after him – cooked, sewed, saw to his every need. When his brother was spared, he gave himself to the Temple, without pay, as doorkeeper. Mrs Yu tells this story later when we’re back in the bus, but at the Temple door, I can’t take my eyes off his face. A strong, broad head, pale waxy skin, high cheek bones streaming away into his head, calm intelligent eyes, wide mobile mouth. His voice is eager and rich, and the whole man – probably on the older side of middle age – is a compelling combination of strength and poise. I want to remember this face always, but I know I won’t. I’ll only remember the presence. He seems complete. Is that what his faith can do? I’d like to be complete too. Can my faith do that for me? If so, he and I could stand on common ground; I’d like that.
Why are such vital things indefinable?
Mrs Yu explains that you count sculptured figures of the wise ones around the vast hall; when you come to the number that corresponds to your age you’ve found your personal sage. The faces are caricatures to me, somewhere between regular cartoons and the figures on Norman Rockwell’s old ‘Saturday Evening Post’ covers. Whoever sculpted them had no fear of revealing their human nature and worldly concerns. Their spiritual gifts and wisdom aren’t always obvious, but their large ears with pendulous lobes are respectful signs.
I begin counting, in search of my spiritual minder.
‘No – silently,’ she says, but I lose count and give up.
A few minutes later, she breaks into her commentary:
‘That’s your one, there.’
He looks to me like a cross between Pope John XXIII and Jean Sibelius – hopefully a resourceful guardian.
A little boy bows, touching his forehead to the ground three times before a four-sided golden Kuan Yin, goddess of mercy.
‘Often parents don’t believe, but they tell their children to go and pray before the Buddha.’
‘Just in case?’
‘Yes. Do you believe in God?’
‘Yes. What do you believe in?’
‘I don’t know. Not communism. Not capitalism.’
She shows me where the Guomintang headquarters was during the war, and where Mao stayed while he negotiated with them. In those years when Chongqing was the Nationalist capital of China, the city was heavy with power, thick with intrigue.
The reward for surviving the frenetic sightseeing and the terrible welter of speeches at the school is lunch at the Cygnet restaurant, the best in town. Here, the Australians have their first taste of hot pot which, laden with chillies and odd pieces of animal anatomy, tests their tolerance.
Mrs Zhou who is sitting across the table, likes to be in the swim and listens hungrily to everyone’s conversations. She’s heard us talking about food.
‘Why do Australians eat only a little and grow fat whereas Chinese eat a lot and stay slim?’ she chips in, her plump little arms shovelling in rice at amazing speed.
‘We Chinese eat everything, just everything,’ she claims, in between mouthfuls, laughing hugely.
‘Have some pigs’ ears?’
Hilda sitting dutifully on the other side of me, looks around the splendour of the restaurant and sighs.
‘This is much more beautiful than Eric’s restaurant.’
I’ve been there with her, and know the simple tables, children standing wide-eyed beside them, gas bottles on the floor, passers-by calling through the door, tepid Mirinda drink, Eric dashing off to the kitchen to fetch another dish.
‘I liked Eric’s restaurant because it was like being in a family.’
She looks at me in surprise.
‘I’m happy you think that.’ She gives me, for the first time, a wholehearted smile; I think we’ve almost connected.
After yet another celebratory dinner, staggering a little, we climb back into the bus to drive to Eling Park to see the lights of the city. It’s misty, as it is ninety-per-cent of the time, but the lights of the city are still visible, rolling dimly away on every side as far as we can see. I’m suddenly homesick again – afraid they roll on forever.
Mrs Yu, in the darkness at my side, talks of the city. The city authorities are going to rebuild the city centre across the river on the north side of the Jialing, because the present hub of the city is too old and run-down. It’s a massive project, but there’s unlimited people power here and as you travel through the streets you see that everyone likes to be doing something – anything – flicking rubbish with twigs from one spot to another, shining shoes, selling a dozen oranges, sitting at a stall offering a few bottles of soft drink … Some women knit as they walk and chat, complex cable patterns falling from their needles and their memories. But there’s also a lot of waiting. So much of China waits.
Life in this city gropes its way through a customary five months of heavy fog. It is doomed to this by its location in a virtually windless basin and its high rainfall. As I look out from my balcony, I can see only the three nearest buildings. This small world is a cocoon, fog making the world beyond impenetrable. There’s seldom any wind; on most days the red flag droops limply around its pole. To the Chongqingese, fog is their winter environment. There’s a Sichuan proverb: ‘When the sun shines the dogs bark.’
A copy of ‘The Press’ arrives from Christchurch. It bears messages from a world of light, colour, and open windows – a young world with little yet to remember, an easy-going world with a twist of violence in its tail. And there’s a programme on television about cheetahs. I can smell the grass and watch the African wind sifting through it. I can feel the sun. The light is brilliant, the air dry. The cheetah pants like a working dog after a run, rests with his chest heaving.
I peer out each day, like a castaway looking for a ship, trying to make out the dim outline of the mountains through fog, any sign that there is a beyond. Is the sea still there? I’m homesick for light.