CHAPTER
NINE

ILLUSION
AND DISILLUSION

I return to school feeling unsettled, partly because I miss the connection with other Westerners; but my spirits aren’t helped by a cough that seems to come all the way up from my feet. Chongqing isn’t good for lungs. I stand on my balcony and look irritably out into the damp, grey fog. I can hear the low rumble of the city traffic, but the thought of the struggling crowds and thick fumes makes a walk uninviting. Around me, the school lies quietly within its holiday calm, but what at first seemed to me blessedly peaceful now feels empty. With a number of families away, even the other flats in my building are strangely quiet. Maybe I should have gone away for the holidays after all. The phone shrills. Lily, who’s studying at a Beijing University, has returned to Chongqing to be with her family over the winter holidays. She knew the last foreign teacher here, and asks if she can visit me for some English conversation. I agree – at least it’ll be some company – and an hour later she arrives at the door bearing four arum lilies. She’s taken aback when she sees me: ‘Oh, I thought from your voice on the phone that you were my age.’

In my present ill-humour, her obvious disappointment at not finding a contemporary leaves me quite unmoved, and I decide crisply she’ll just have to come to terms with the thirty years between us. It is a freezing afternoon and she’s travelled for an hour on buses to get here; I hope she’ll find some useful English conversation in compensation.

The first hour is stiff and awkward. She’s troubled, but if there’s a specific cause it never emerges; there are so many likely sources of suffering in this country. Her English is excellent, though her degree is not in English but in automotive engineering.

After a time of desultory conversation as we try to get the shape of one another, she glances at the pile of ‘China Daily’ newspapers on the table beside us and comments bitterly: ‘You know, things in China are so much worse than the newspaper says.’

‘I know, but this is one of my few sources of Chinese news.’

‘It’s not only this newspaper – it’s all the newspapers. They’re all the same.’ She goes on: ‘You know, most of China is rural. In the country, and in the factories, there’s still terrible suffering. You and the other teachers here are in the best place – a Foreign Language School. This is not like the rest of China.’

She obviously feels she needs to tell me that I’ve no idea what life in China is really like. She’s probably right. Having set the story straight, she appears to feel more at ease.

‘My parents, you know, they suffered everything, all the things, all of them. All they want is that I don’t suffer in that way.’

‘Do you want to travel when you’ve graduated?’

‘I’d like to … I’d like to take a look.’ She gives her first relatively frank smile. ‘That’s why people study in a Foreign Language School, – that’s usually the reason, that’s their dream.’

‘Will you want to bring back to China what you learn overseas?’

‘Of course, but when you return it’s often very difficult to accept the conditions here and find a job. Often you can only find a job with a foreign, joint-venture company … if you’re lucky. And you can be over-qualified for jobs; some people now say that a doctoral degree isn’t worth having – it makes it impossible to get a job.’

We talk about my students’ belief that all Western countries are the same, and that all are problem-free, and she mentions the change in China’s official attitude to the outside world since the late 70s. I have the chance to check my own impressions:

‘Did Chinese people once believe that the outside world couldn’t be trusted, that it would harm them?’

‘More than that. They were taught that the outside world was poison.’

‘Why do most Chinese students want to study in the United States?’

‘Because they think America leads the world.’

Bully for America, I think wryly, and I’m glad that I know of one student, at least, who has thought beyond its obvious attractions. Physics and chemistry are her passion, and she longs to study in France. Inspired by the stories of Madame Curie, she sometimes signs her classroom assignments ‘Diana Curie’ and cherishes a vision of helping the world by harnessing the power of thunder and lightning. I’m moved by this student’s fearless dreams.

Lily says, ‘I believe Chinese students are more disciplined than Western students.’

‘Yes – your good students generally spend all their time studying. Western students expect to do many different things in their student years.’

We both know Chinese students have no choice.

‘Why are you here?’ she asks suddenly.

‘I’m not sure. I only know I want to learn. Teaching here is part of the learning. And I’m interested in differences. Maybe I won’t know why I’ve come here until I’m back in New Zealand.’

She copes surprisingly well with that unsatisfactory answer, and we talk about my struggle to identify useful teaching material for students whose external and internal worlds I know so little about. She invites me, quite gently, to visit her home, and finally leaves for the long bus trip home across the muddy, grey city. At the door, she gives one real smile, almost free from shadows. I wonder what she thinks she’s discovered here, and what she thinks she’s taught me.

Sometimes as I watch China, and her children like Lily going about their business, the country seems flooded with a great peaceful wisdom; at other times it seems awash with a quiet madness – or is it blindness?

At present I feel a strong disaffection for everything in the Chinese world around me. I also feel guilty: this malaise is both illogical and ungrateful. Unfortunately it’s also undeniable.

Kate, who directed the course in teaching English as a foreign language that I took in Christchurch, warned our class that at some point we’d feel like this. ‘You’ll be rolling along, after three or four months there, thinking you’re beginning to understand things, enjoying that other world and your increasing familiarity with it, when suddenly … ’

I didn’t believe her. Nobody likes to think that their negative reactions are part of an inevitable pattern; we like to think we’re different – more resourceful.

But it has happened. Suddenly I wonder whose illconceived idea this teaching-in-China assignment was. I’m tired of Chinese food, the voices are getting on my nerves, and the other teachers … Just a week ago I felt confident they accepted me; they said appreciative things and seemed to enjoy our joint ventures. But now I’m not so sure – I think they may be laughing up their sleeves, or just putting up with me because foreign teachers are a required extra at a Foreign Language School. Most of the students seem to enjoy our classes, but am I really teaching them anything? Do they just get pleasure from our time together because I’m strange, and they can take it easy until the next ‘real’ lesson? Suddenly, I don’t trust myself – or anyone else.

I’d give anything to be able to wander around the corner for fish and chips, chase my cat up the gum tree, hear a strong New Zealand accent sending up the government. I want to get into my sleeping bag and pull the drawstring over my head. And stay there. But that’s just what they told me I mustn’t do: ‘Don’t shut yourself away. Just keep on going out among them, doing what you have to do, and it’ll come right.’

But how would they know?

I feel as though I’m on a Chinese island, with the rest of the world out of sight. I’m beginning to wonder if, when it’s time for me to leave on the first stage of my journey home, the plane from Chongqing airport could really find Hong Kong and land there. I feel like a character in a children’s book. I’ve walked through the back of a wardrobe, and found myself in a mysterious, unfamiliar world. The airport is the exit sign, but I’m not sure I still believe in it.

A generous supply of letters from home helps me to fight this frightening sense of isolation. One faithful friend writes regularly, and I read avidly her accounts of teaching in a world without classroom regimentation, careless, bountiful family gatherings without speeches, and outings with friends that are lit with irreverent humour. I write back, weekly, letters heavy on the fascinations of my exotic world and light on the drawbacks. I’m not withholding information so much as trying to serve my letters sunny side up – I suppose to help me as much as cheer her. In this degree of aloneness, I have a feeling that if I take my finger off the deliberate-smile button, I could easily slip into a dark place.

My friend the letter-writer slips into a dark place during my months away. Widowed not long before, she goes on a holiday to Australia with friends from her growing-up years. Somewhere in her careless-of-self packing is her grief. In the course of a trip on which she drives for her friends, she loses her handbag with its vital travel papers, and the retina of one eye loses its adhesion. Too many losses. She writes painfully about them – continuing the letters using her good eye – and tips me a bitter sentence about the contrast between her present lot and my cheerful progress through a life of exotic interests and delights. I hear within it a voice accusing me of throwing off the proper toils of my New Zealand relationships in order to dance some fancy, independent routine in an alien setting. The voice may be in my own head; it’s certainly related to the feelings of guilt at apparently leaving lightly all I loved in New Zealand. My response to the letter is a complete psychological flip. I write back immediately, saying – in words of concrete – that I’m sorry for her losses, but my life here is anything but painless and I’m not prepared to be taken to task for accepting the chance to work for a year among unfamiliar rather than familiar relationships. Tumpetty-tum. I can hear the pompous self-justification; but I can also hear me trying to get my own attention. I’m astonished at my vehemence. What inflamed nerve has this touched?

My close friend’s probably just missing me. I’m not there when she needs me. In this sunless passage of hers, surely she should be able to dump the painful negatives of her life on a friend who cares for her? But I can’t accept this, so I’m not the friend I thought I was.

Something in me, jut a part, seems to stand stubbornly apart from all my human relationships, and all my relationships with time and place. If I’m more than all of those, what more am I – and what earthly use is that to anybody?

School goes back, but I have little energy and, more worryingly, little interest. One of my problems is that I’m not well. I’ve eaten something that’s making sure nothing else stays in my stomach. I can’t face the lavatories of the classroom block during the teaching day, but returning to my flat means a race down several flights of stairs, a seventy-five yard dash down the hill and up five more flights of stairs. My own tradition of medicine says nothing can be done – just let it take its course, but I decide that Chinese medicine couldn’t make me feel any worse, so I opt to visit the school clinic, with Hilda’s help as interpreter. The impressive woman doctor looks at me only once – as I leave. After asking Hilda what’s wrong with me, she opens, with a key, a drawer which contains the key to her cabinet. She looks at the packets on the shelves as though she’s never seen them before, chats, fingers a few, takes them out, puts them back, and finally assembles a collection for which she gives instructions. It’s a formidable line-up, and I wonder for a moment what Hilda told her I was suffering from, but really I’m past caring. Back at the flat, after the drinking of something that tastes like goats’ spit, but is in fact a distillation of Sichuan mountain herbs, everything stays down.

My stomach is now co-operative, but I’m still coughing and wheezing uncontrollably like one of the local buses, and Hope suggests we visit her own small hospital run by eight older doctors.

‘The older they are, the more respected – because of their experience.’ We turn into a dim alley off the main road, enter an undistinguished building and climb some stairs to a narrow corridor, walls painted universal hospital green from waist level down – cleaner than most walls here, but still just time-stained Chongqing stone. Hope’s doctor is broadly-built, with a thick head of hair lightly streaked with grey. He could be seventy or forty. Under his white coat he wears a checked cotton shirt that would be ideal for square dancing. His voice is comfortable but firm, as I suppose old family doctors’ voices are anywhere. Through Hope, he questions at length, asks what the school clinic prescribed originally, and approves

He explains his diagnosis to Hope, who relays the nub of it to me. Apparently I have too much wet in my system. This sounds reasonable enough to me.

‘Do you want to use proprietary herbal medicine or infuse your own herbs?’

‘Which is better?’

‘Infuse your own. There are no impurities.’

At the dispensary the smell is like a very pungent pot pourri – the aroma will fill my flat during the brewing sessions to follow. The dispenser, trained seven years for this role, wanders dreamily with a scoop and a battered aluminium balance. The dozens of deep wooden drawers are rich with harvests: dry, brown, gold or grey, frilled or feathery, sticks and leaves and seeds, fungi and grasses and roots, many of which must have blown on Sichuan hillsides or clung with patient roots to whatever lay over the rock. I take away three fat, crunchy, brown paper bags, one for each day of treatment.

The consultation ends with elaborate courtesies, small eddies of them between pauses, so you can’t be sure when the last word’s spoken. I express appreciation, he graciously finds some reason to feel honoured and presents his card. The conversation dwindles to single word murmurs, Hope rises to her feet and we shake hands. It’s a rich encounter – calm and assured, natural and persuasive. We walk away down the corridors watched by the experienced eyes of sturdy women doctors standing quietly in their doorways.

I brew, as instructed, on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. The steam is richly aromatic, the taste bitter as gall. My throat contracts and my tongue shrivels. How much do I want to get better? The doctor predicts I’ll be well by the following Tuesday. On the Monday I croak, cough, and dismiss Chinese medicine. I tell myself that, coming from family thick with surgeons and GPs, I should have known better. On the Tuesday I awake in perfect health.

Growing up in a family where stethoscopes swung from so many branches of the family tree gave me complete trust in doctors. When we were sick, Dad looked at us, told us what we’d caught, gave Mum some pills for us and sent us to bed. When our colour, appetite and unruly energy convinced him we should be back at school, he told Mum to pack the last doses of antibiotics into our lunch-tins and away we went. Where more than pills was called for, he would ask one of his colleagues to cut the troublesome bit out of us. It never occurred to me that the process was essentially different from household repairs. If a tap dripped, you knew it needed a new washer, replaced the washer, and the drip stopped.

My grandfather’s brain tumour was another matter. He was in his seventies. It was operable, but he refused surgery as it would have left him unable to look after the wife he’d fallen in love with when he was ten. The tumour grew, and he came from Dunedin to Christchurch to live with us while he had radiotherapy. The headaches were terrifying. When they struck, he’d leap up from his chair and cry out. I’d seen him leap up and shout when cavalry or cowboys came over the rise in films we’d seen together, but this was a different sort of shout. He had pills for the pain, but I could see they were useless; that shocked me. I didn’t know what to do, and would sit beside him until he’d tell me to go away and play. I was too old to play; I was fifteen. I realised the limitations of my father’s science.

Hope’s doctor diagnosed me, not the bug, and no strike was launched on the troublemaker. Instead he’s strengthening me to resist it. I’m interested in the attitudes I feel moving under the surface of different medical practices. You could generalise and say that, faced with illness, Western medicine attacks the enemy, Chinese medicine strengthens the fort. The war would surely best be advanced by combining forces; but the confidence of Chinese medicine that we hold within ourselves the resources we need for health, and that plants harbour a chemical benevolence towards us, appeals to me. I believe in inner resources. People who produce extraordinary harvests of spirit, seem to draw the golden fish from somewhere deep within them. I believe we all have some inner chamber, and that it’s bountifully furnished. My problem is that I can’t find the way to mine.

I’m feeling quite cheerful again. Maybe it’s the odd blink of sunshine we’ve had in the last few days. The unexpected attack of sinophobia has passed. I do like these people and their city – and probably they could do worse than having me. Foreign teachers in China have been known to run away. At least I haven’t done that.

My recent gloomy phase has sobered me. I was quite cocky at the end of the term. My grasp of local geography, hard-won wherever I am, was firming up. I was beginning to identify elements in the life around me and make connections between them. Having come here believing experience would bring understanding of the intriguing otherness, I thought I could feel my perceptions at last getting a grip on this slippery world. Those around me seemed to understand me well enough; I felt they knew that underneath I was just like them. All seemed to be going well, and for once I was dangerously pleased with myself.

When doubts began to crowd in, I had to face the fact that I still didn’t really understand the systems. I sympathise with whoever said China has more skins than an onion. I’ve been watching people’s responses to me; they don’t understand me either. Behind their kindness and smiles they often find my behaviour quite inexplicable. So I’m sailing into this second and last term here without a rudder. Without understanding, I feel distanced from those around me – perhaps not in heart, but certainly in head. The way we think is different, right from the toe-nails up. I have such admiration for them – for their cheerfulness, industry, tolerance, humour, good sense, hospitality, endurance. I should be content with being a passably useful outsider, but I’d so much like to feel I’d in some real way stood alongside them in their world.

Fire-crackers are now banned in Chongqing, for safety reasons. However, this is Chinese New Year and at midnight the whole school seems to explode. Countless fire-crackers go off all over the grounds, in our courtyard, on balconies. Evil spirits have been put to flight in a triumphant, thoroughgoing display of civil disobedience. I’m sure the lazy, handsome policemen at the gate won’t think of stirring themselves.

An official decree was similarly defied a few weeks ago. At the school assembly, just before Christmas, a scornful warning, was delivered against celebrating foreign festivals: ‘We’re Chinese. We don’t need them.’

The students, however, still decorated their dormitories quietly on Christmas Eve, and at midnight, there was a roar of ‘Happy Christmas’ throughout the dormitory building.

In these long twenty-week terms I, no less than the students, eagerly grasp any chance for a break in the school routine. I’m prepared to celebrate anything, with anybody, so when the City Foreign Affairs Department sends me an invitation, as one of the foreign women in Chongqing, to a banquet to mark National Women’s Day, I’m all on. I set aside my chalk-impregnated teaching clothes, and iron the silk shirt my daughter’s boyfriend kindly gave me when it no longer suited his image. Only the best will do when I’m representing New Zealand.

When I arrive at the gate, Cherry, a substitute for Hilda, is already there with wet hair, looking rushed but amused.

She asks: ‘Have you had breakfast?’

Probably she hasn’t.

‘Yes. When did they ask you to come with me?’

‘Ten minutes ago.’ She grins.

For people who’ve had the model of a ‘planned’ economy for so long those around me are remarkably spontaneous. I never seem to know about anything in the school until it actually happens – but perhaps nobody else does either.

The previous afternoon, the school had celebrated, noisily and at length, the 100^th anniversary of the birth of Zhou Enlai, revered first premier of Mao Zedong’s New China. The army was called in to contribute items, and add political weight, to the programme, and if the chief joy of the celebration for the students lay in missing some afternoon classes, the greatest entertainment value lay in the number of disasters that befell the army’s offerings: songs in which the rhythm lurched and faltered; acrobatics where the flip failed and the hoist gave way; dance routines that lost their way.

In the car, I ask Cherry why the Chinese people so revere Zhou Enlai. She seems prepared – as though she’s anticipated an exam question. She says that he was handsome. I think doubtfully of those beetling brows, the long heavy face.

‘And he had only one wife.’

To a Westerner, this sounds no more than sensible, but she explains. The people believe he fell in love with another woman, but Mao told him that, as first Premier of the New China, his behaviour must be above reproach. So he gave up love for the good of the Motherland.

He also cared for ordinary people. She recounts that on one occasion, when one of Zhou’s bodyguards was standing out in the rain, Zhou lent him his own umbrella. Once when the driver of his car had knocked down a woman:

‘Although she was only a worker, he took her to hospital.’

This awe at his egalitarianism is interesting in a country officially dedicated to socialism. She continues: ‘They say he could drink a lot.’

‘Is that a good thing or a bad thing?’

‘Sometimes, perhaps, a good thing. Chinese people think that if a man can drink a lot, he’s strong.’

I’m surprised that a people who approach food with so much civilised respect should harbour a less sophisticated attitude towards drinking. I wonder if eating ten chickens at a sitting also proves your strength; perhaps it’s all part of the Chinese think-big mentality that I’ve seen expressed in hotel corridors along which you could comfortably race go-carts.

We arrive at the Wu Du hotel, where we’re handed over to Wang and Peng, pleasant and anxious as ever, from the Foreign Affairs Department of the University. Most of the foreign teachers are familiar, except an American woman from a Teachers’ College, and a black woman from a Commercial College. There are also wives of businessmen, and businesswomen. At least half of the gathering is successful Chongqing women.

City Government officials speak, cataloguing and lauding women’s achievements. A woman with her hair violently frizzed at the ends takes the floor and talks at length about all the things she’s done better than anyone else. The piles of peanuts and oranges go down and people slink off to the lavatories. At last she runs out of steam and the audience claps wildly. They may not have listened to her speech, or even been in the room, but cutting the ground from under people’s feet isn’t a Chinese characteristic, and they give her a generous send-off.

After the speeches about what women can do, women are called on to prove it. The Australians, Cecily (newly arrived and still a little shell-shocked) and Gerard’s wife Margaret, bravely and in tune, sing ‘Waltzing Matilda’ – all of it. The Chinese clap, and look bewildered. Kathleen, from California – the impressive woman who lost her soap down the hole in my bathroom floor, speaks unassumingly about the recent achievements of the city. Maeve, from Ireland, small and wearing a Chinese jacket, face both pugnacious and vulnerable, sings an Irish folksong in a startlingly beautiful voice. She sings with her eyes closed, and I wonder what she sees behind her eyes. The Chinese fall quiet, and I hear later that she has been snapped up to perform on Chongqing television. Following her, a Chinese woman acrobat, well over six feet, strides onto the stage and performs physical contortions on top of a small table, to the music of ‘The Butterfly Lovers’.

As someone removes the acrobat’s table, a local dancer strikes a graceful pose as she waits for the music. The speakers give an ear-splitting roar followed by the gibberish of screaming tape, and it’s decided to postpone this one. In her place, the black woman from Oklahoma appears, and shouts: ‘I’m black, but I’m not from Africa. I’m from the USA. And I’m a woman, though my hair’s very short – see my lipstick and my earrings. I’M A BLACK WOMAN.’ She sings a liberation song ‘And I Rise’, with moving drama.

The American from the Teachers’ College sings ‘Christopher Robin is saying his prayers’ – explaining that it’s a lullaby, which she feels is appropriate for Women’s Day. The older Chinese women approve of this. Like other small things, New Zealand can slip the mind, and they forget to invite me to show what New Zealanders can do. Perhaps it’s just as well.

The sense of unreality at this gathering is overwhelming – especially at games time. First we’re given Chinese partners and run holding balloons between our backs, and after this we run three-legged races, in teams. My team wins; my partner and I are outstanding. We’re given as a prize a box of glasses marked ‘State Gift’. Next we’re supplied with strings of small balloons to tie round our ankles, the aim of the game being to go round the room popping everyone else’s balloons by stamping on them while guarding our own – a game calling for speed and savagery, excellent for a women’s meeting. Following this, a man from the City Government draws ten lucky numbers. When it’s discovered that all the winners are Chinese, the consternation on the Chinese officials’ faces is memorable. Beside me, Mr Peng whispers, in agitation and embarrassment: ‘That’s not good at all.’ Later they draw again, and the first nine names are foreign women, with one Chinese woman at the end to show it hasn’t been rigged.

When I think about it, my life here is greatly eased by Chinese tolerance and humour. The school’s careful not to put my back to the wall in any way and gives me space for whatever extraordinary individual or cultural needs I may have. Almost everyone smiles at me encouragingly; jokes are welcome currency. I can’t judge what effect that has on my teaching, but I’m certain this sensitive accommodation of my foreign self has helped me be open to learning; my defensiveness – normally ever-ready – has no reason to bar the doors here. I’m eager to know about this world; I have six pads of tissue-thin rice paper filled with stories students have told me – of China’s history, of their families, of what it’s like to be a Chinese teenager here and now. I know I learn best when I feel both safe inside and challenged from outside in the spirit of ‘I know you can do it’; this school’s an ideal place for me to learn. It’s not just that I can now recite the Chinese dynasties in order and name her famous novels and poems; I feel I may be learning at a deeper level – I can feel pieces moving inside me.

This term I’m no longer teaching the fifteen-year-olds; they have vital exams at the end of this term, and the spoken English I teach is no help in preparing for that white-hot contest. Instead, I’ve been given classes of fourteen – year-olds, exposing me to yet a further degree of youthful Chinese innocence and trust. I’m not used to being trusted like this; in a way, it’s frightening.

At the end of one lesson with a low-stream class, several students approach the front desk as I pack my bag. They watch, finger things, and smile. One tall boy, Luke, with thick glasses appears the typical swot. He looks away from me as he asks why he can’t speak English more easily, when he wants to so much. Later, back at the flat, I look at what he wrote about himself in the first lesson: ‘Friends: all those with high moral standards; When I grow up: I want to win the Nobel Prize for Medicine or be President of the People’s Republic of China.’ His ambitious contribution stands out sharply among the ranks of: ‘I very like football but my study’s not well’; ‘Mary, Doris and Julia are my friends. We like watch TV and eat chocolate.’

I ask his Chinese form teacher why Luke is in the lowest stream.

‘He failed the entrance exam for the higher classes. He was ill that day, his mother said. At his previous school, he was always in the top five of his class.’

Now he makes a personal approach:

‘I believe you’re sportsman-like. We’d like to visit you at your flat.’

It’s been a noisy lesson on describing pictures in English and I can’t see where the sportsmanship came into it, but we make a time. He arrives later in the day, with a cheerful, motherly girl who encourages him to have his say and loyally praises his abilities. In spite of his intellectual interests and high voice, he’s strongly-built, and in black shorts and a redchecked shirt looks powerful football material. In the warmer days ahead I’ll see this robust figure in class discreetly fluttering a black silk fan with a delicate white handle.

After a stream of self-deprecating courtesies, he asks if he may speak of his problem and launches into his account of how, having failed to gain high marks in the entrance exam, he found himself in a very low stream at this school. The company he keeps in class is no problem to him – his attitudes shine with honour – but he feels the scorn of the higher streams of his grade for him and his classmates.

‘They believe we are not as intelligent as they are. We feel ostracised.’

His English makes me blink. Most of his sentences must have been meticulously prepared and memorised. He says he’s given of his best to try to improve his English: read newspapers and magazines, listened to tapes and watched films.

‘I have done everything I can – everything. To this I’ve given all my efforts. I believe I can improve myself, work at a higher level, but I’m not sure. Are you able to tell me if I’m worthy of a higher grade?’

He looks up, eyes behind his glasses clear and focussed.

I must watch myself here. Who will he tell? Every student here is rocked by hopes and fears. Luke’s formal, flowery English belongs to the nineteenth century, but his grasp of English vocabulary and grammar is phenomenal.

I tell him I’d place his spoken English in the top fifteen per cent of his year.

Eyes downcast, he again shields himself with a flow of courtesies: ‘How can I express my gratitude? I’m not worthy

Having unloaded his burden, he’s now courtly towards the girl student, inviting her to talk and praising her abilities. She has her own sadness. Introducing herself in class, she wrote: ‘I love my mother and father, but my father lives far away from me. I can’t see him easily.’ Perhaps she comforts herself by looking after Luke.

I don’t see Luke again until a week before I leave Chongqing, when he comes to say goodbye. I know his mother suffers from cancer, so I ask about her health. He tells me with dignity that she died two days ago. In subsequent letters to New Zealand, he reveals that he has been removed from the Foreign Language School to an ordinary Middle School, and has suffered a severe breakdown. The letters, in the language of England’s romantic poets – he worships Shelley – express great suffering. Preserved, amidst the confusion of inappropriate ambition and abject despair, is evidence of a sensitive and powerful intelligence. Suddenly there are no more letters.

Psychiatric treatment, as we know it, is not common here, and there are few hospitals for those who suffer mental illness. I wonder if Luke had any medical help during his breakdown, which sounded like acute depression. My mother had medical help for hers, as did her mother, her grandfather, and the other members of our family who have fallen under the shadow of that illness. I asked her once: ‘What does it feel like when you’re going into a depression?’

‘It’s as though a mirror inside you is gradually turning over, until all you can see is its dark side.’

I had to ask; it was the only way I knew to share that dark path with her. Like most people, I’d felt the wintery touch of deep-sunken spirits, but only as a mild and passing blight on a happy life. This death, for weeks at a time, of all the joy in my mother was the most terrible mystery I’d yet encountered. I was twenty five.

Another time when she was feeling well, I asked: ‘What’s the worst thing when you’re in a depression?’ She thought for a moment.

‘Standing in front of the butcher’s window and being unable – and I mean really unable – to decide between chops and sausages.’

I didn’t believe her. I think the worst thing was finding she was prey to a force against which she had no defences, something she couldn’t master. She had no previous experience to give her tolerance of her own impotence. Intelligent, courageous and resourceful, she’d always been able to do anything she wanted to. In the depths of one depression she said: ‘I’d rather have two broken legs – then I’d have something to fight. I can’t fight this.’

For a long time I thought I must be responsible in some way for her depression – perhaps by some default of tenderness or reassurance. And why couldn’t I fix it?

In the end, her instinct for survival outrunning the impotence of her condition, she herself found a doctor suitable, someone from her own world of high principles and social forms to be observed. Courtly and accomplished, he eventually, with patience, identified medication that kept her from the darkest depths. That was merciful; that was enough. The pills damaged her perspective in some way, but it seemed a small price to pay. Neither the depression nor the treatment shadowed her extraordinary tenderness toward her children. Every time the younger of my brothers comes to Christchurch, we take the kitchen scissors and cut some flowers from my garden, discussing quietly which ones we think our mother would like. Her grave is under a chestnut tree, and often under singing birds, in a cemetery near my home. There, I take the vase from the grave, and when I’ve filled it at the tap, my brother arranges the flowers. I think of him and his older brother in each other’s arms the first, dark day we stood in this place. Then he and I take a step back, time telescopes, and we remember. We look at the writing, encrusted with lichen, on the headstone. ‘Dearly loved mother of … ’ We should have written underneath, ‘And how she loved us’.

What help, I wonder, did Luke get for his sadness? I noticed there were, within the school community, those who behaved strangely, spoke irrationally, or seemed deeply troubled; but when others spoke of them, they touched only lightly on their troubles, as though it was not polite to make much of them. The sufferers remained in the community, working. Any embarrassment, distress or disruption they caused seemed to be skilfully absorbed. I had the feeling that not naming the disability was thought a good way to minimise it. The sufferers may have received little or no professional help, but neither were they put in a defining box or banished to an institution. Was it worse for my mother believing that her disability, much discussed among her friends, would label her as weak, or for Luke living where the extremity of his misery may have been discreetly overlooked?

Making comparisons isn’t always a useful approach to differences. My daughter and I travelled around the world together when she was sixteen; it was her first flight beyond the New Zealand nest. When we arrived home, I asked her what had struck her most in our travels.

‘I had no idea there were so many kinds of light switches.’

It wasn’t a bad way of indicating all the cultural differences she’d noticed, and accepted.

Which light switch (or approach to mental illness for that matter) is more effective? People do what seems to them best, or what is possible, in that place at that time.

And human rights? In China, New Zealand is thought of as highly evolved in its social attitudes. I’m proud of this. I also know that the ways we New Zealanders treat each other, on our privileged islands, are not always more enlightened than those elsewhere. Personal assaults on old people, for instance – too often reported in New Zealand – seem almost unheard of in China.

If there are students like Luke whose spirits are too tender for the Chinese education system, there are others, like Laura, who thrive on it. I find her restful company, probably because, in the absence of any twists of vanity or defensiveness, her rock-solid self-confidence allows her to be direct with me. I enjoy a visit to her home, and the company of her cheerful, straightforward parents. She calls at my flat, late one morning, and stays to talk over a meal of pork and rice. She’s spent the last four days at the home of a country school teacher, a friend of her mother’s, who’s renowned for his maths teaching and has given her six hours coaching a day. It takes about half a day to get to his village from the city, but Laura is vague about direction and distance. I understand this indifference to measurement. Our thinking goes: the village would be no closer or further away for calculating its distance from the city; so why bother? You get there when you get there.

Life is difficult for a country teacher. In his spare time he must farm a little to make ends meet, and often his fields are too small to be useful. Laura says the extended family lives in a collection of small buildings, forming a close unit. She speaks of the cheapness of the housing, about 3,000 yuan for a house with bedrooms and bathroom upstairs, and kitchen, living and lavatory downstairs, the latter usually beside the pig sty. Laura made as few visits as possible because she was afraid of the pig. They kill a pig once a year for meat, and otherwise live on eggs and vegetables with their rice. Families often keep two pigs, one for the market, to which they feed rubbish, and one they feed well and eat themselves. It follows that they know better than to buy meat at the market.

Country families like to keep watchdogs. I’ve seen them, light in colour, prick-eared and stocky like well-fed foxes. They’re not fussy about who they bite, and farmers are now discouraged from keeping them. Where there’s no dog, families leave one member of the family on guard at home when the others go to work in the fields. Laura says thieves steal, from preference, television sets and meat.

‘What sort of meat?’

‘Pigs.’

‘But a pig would make too much noise.’

‘Only when it’s being killed. You can drive one very quietly to market with a stick.’

I need to do some shopping before the afternoon classes begin. Laura says she has time to help, and we leave the flat together to buy meat and eggs. We return half an hour later with sugar cane and bananas. I’m not sure quite how it happened, but I do know that Western expectations of hitting with one shot aren’t helpful here. We need to take it easy. The meat and eggs can, after all, wait until next time – or the time after.

Before Laura leaves we talk again about her lessons from the country school teacher. The maths coaching has been helpful, she says, and believes their family friend is a good teacher.

‘Why could he teach you so well?’ I ask her. ‘Why couldn’t you learn the same things here at school?’

She has no answer. She hasn’t been taught to question. Her business is to memorise facts and to store information.

I do know, however, that her teachers at this school will be doing all they can for her. Every teacher I’ve spoken to shows a keen concern for the students, and relates closely to them. Perhaps this is because, from Monday to Saturday, all the students and all the teachers (and their families) live within the same walls. The school is as much village as institution.

I’m surprised at how many aspects of this society I envy, and the sense of community this school enjoys is one of them. There are tensions and disagreements, jealousies and resentments within these walls, but they seem like those of a family – whatever they feel about each other, they have a shared sense of belonging. I’ve so often felt on the outside of the group or community I’m with, however long and strong my apparent membership. I am an onlooker; I seem to lack some qualification for entering the circle. I wonder how many people feel this way, who sit around their community campfires, singing, laughing, talking with the others, doing their bit by throwing logs on the fire, while their spirit watches from out in the darkness.

Beyond my family, I do have one vital experience of belonging. There are branches on both sides of our family tree that carry the pain of addiction and the pain of loving those who are addicted. For years I dodged a programme for those struggling with addictions; I’d enough responsibilities and problems, I told myself, without having to fit in meetings with other people with problems. In the past, when I’d joined other sorts of groups – usually educational or cultural – it was because I qualified by interest or ability. When I finally joined the programme, my qualification for membership was despair at my own behaviour, and a howling hunger for something better. In that community, I found myself – at last – on the inside.

Yet, there are other bones in me aching to find their own community. Or is it my spirit that aches? There’s no point in envying the life-in-common of a school in remote southwest China; I don’t belong here. But where is my belonging?

I enjoy Laura’s company, and that of the other girls who visit, but sometimes I miss those discussions, characteristic of males of all cultures which run on pure practicalities and how to manage them; you’d think human relationships had never existed. So I’m delighted when Tony, my electronics consultant from a senior class, tells me he’s going to buy videos at the market in Jiefangbei and will help me buy some too. As I sit beside his burly figure on the bus, he talks about his father, originally a farmer with no education, who became a country doctor, worked in a factory, studied at home to become an interpreter and then qualified as an engineer. As we pass it, Tony points out the Chongqing television station building which his father designed. The rags to riches (and vice versa) stories here often sound like the depression years in the United States. When 30 million died of starvation in China between 1960 and 1963, Tony’s father saw streams of men from the country walking down the railway lines to try to get to the nearest town to look for work. Many fell between the tracks and died. Sometimes men returning home were so emaciated their own families didn’t recognise them, and turned them away. In his small village, about thirty died of starvation. There was nothing left to eat except grass and bark.

I remember, on our bus trip to Zigong, looking out the window at tranquil settlements in poor parts of the Sichuan countryside and wondering whether, even today, I was looking at peace or starvation.

In his husky voice, Tony recounts his father’s and his country’s stories. He isn’t trying to enlist either my admiration or my sympathy, but the facts speak for themselves. Shattered – so much for my expectation of a reassuring, practical conversation – I’m momentarily relieved when the bus stops in the central city.

When we reach the video market, with its hundreds of booths the size of my laundry at home, boiling crowds so thick they have to lunge past each other’s ears or under each other’s arms to grab what they want from the racks, I find I can’t concentrate on searching for videos. Tony’s stories are still trudging heavily across my mind, like the men between the rails. Outside each video booth a man or woman sits on a chair, occasionally rising to make a sale, but mostly just sitting, watching – and waiting. I’m suddenly overcome with awe at this resilient, patient Chinese people. I blow my nose on a tissue which, with no rubbish bin in sight, I sneak surreptitiously into my pocket. Chinese think this is such a dirty habit.