As she walked through the crowds on the Bund, smiles and frowns fought for precedence on Hu Lan-shih’s face. Rarely was there any contention. Her face was usually wreathed continuously in smiles. But this morning Hu was in turmoil. Last night she’d agreed, after great resistance, to appear before a group of wealthy women and tell them the story of her journey from Shanghai to Wuhan. The fierce Shi Liang had pushed her into it. Her job was to beg these rich women for money. It was not Hu’s pride which bridled at begging – Hu had no pride – it was the rich women themselves. Just before she left Shi Laing had handed her a list of the names of the ladies she was to address. As soon as she saw it hatred momentarily flooded through her body. She almost collapsed. Horrified with herself at allowing such an awful emotion loose in her body, she forced it out and stood there shaking.
On the list were three names – Nie, Rong and Guo. The family names of the three most prominent cotton mill-owning families in Shanghai. And there at the top of that list was the name of the wife of Nie Zhiku, founder of the New Cotton Spinning and Weaving Bureau, which owned the very mill, the Shen Xin Number 9 Cotton Mill, where she herself had slaved and faced death daily. She remembered the death of her best friend Kaija there, how her arm had got caught in a strapping belt and within seconds she had been bludgeoned and smashed to a bloody pulp in the machinery. She would be begging money from the wife of such a person. Have to meet Mrs Nie face to face – smile at her.
Hu was walking from west to east along the Bund. The crowds were already starting to thin as she approached the more affluent eastern end. Here the wealthy Chinese bankers and merchants had their large mansions. And beyond them lay the even more wealthy banks and embassies and mansions of the various Western treaty nations. Gentle sprays watering immaculately kept lawns, gardens overflowing with rare and exotic floribunda, shaded walkways and quiet bowers.
With the arrival of so many refugees many had taken to sleeping and camping the length of the Bund. In response the Western nations had erected a barbed wire barricade between the Chinese section and theirs, manned by enormous British Sikh police officers armed with rifles and bayonets. A couple of hundred yards out on the river were anchored a line of Western gunboats. Just to remind all and anyone what was what.
Hu Lan-shih turned down a side road before she reached the checkpoint. Before her was a large Chinese mansion behind an imposing set of iron gates. Before it stood a smartly uniformed Chinese guard.
‘Good morning,’ said Hu.
The guard didn’t say anything.
‘Hello,’ said Hu again. ‘Can I go in, please?’
‘Fuck off,’ said the guard. His bayonet glistened in the morning sun.
‘Excuse me,’ said Hu, ‘but I’ve been invited to a meeting at this house?’
No response.
Hu suddenly realized she was just wearing an ordinary blouse and some workaday trousers. She looked like anyone else on the Bund – at least those who could afford clothes. Then she remembered Shi had given her an invitation. She reached into her pocket.
‘This is my invitation,’ she said, handing it to the guard, ‘please let me in.’
At first the guard refused to look at it. Hu smiled at him encouragingly. For a second he glanced. A flicker of surprise crossed his face followed by a grimace when he realized he had to let her in.
He turned, opened the gate, let Hu through, then, without saying a word, slammed it shut behind her back.
Hu walked up a long driveway. The mansion came into view. She had never seen such a massive building before except the Shen Xin Number 9 Cotton Mill. Remember, she told herself, you must control yourself at all times. Up the workers!
*
She was halfway through her speech – pretty much the same talk she’d given to Shi and Li last night in the apartment. But no one seemed to be in the least bit interested. Shi Liang, the woman who’d invited her, was least interested of all. Immediately after Shi Liang arrived, she dived headlong into a maelstrom of exotic femininity. Ladies in the most spectacular Parisian and Hong Kong couture, sporting the most daring hairstyles, embossed with dazzling jewels, were loudly talking at each other, scrumming together, parading around, deciding to sit down beside dearest friends and then immediately moving when they saw even dearer dearest friends. One rather large woman, who didn’t fit particularly well into her very expensive designer dress, seemed with her booming voice to dominate the entire room. All the eddies and currents of this glittering whirlpool seemed to revolve exclusively around her. Was she Mrs Nie?
Staring at this rugby scrum it suddenly occurred to Hu Lan-shih that wearing a white blouse and black trousers to such an event, which she had, was probably not the right thing. But then she didn’t have any other clothes.
Li Dequan was sat alone at the back. Even she had made some attempt to escape her peasant clothes. But she waved encouragingly at Hu and it was this alone which kept Hu to her task, smiling bravely, telling stories of plucky peasants and intelligent whores and fighting soldiers.
Suddenly the entire geography of the room shifted. A small, middle-aged woman in shabby peasant clothes, ugly and with horse’s teeth, modestly entered the room and quietly sat down amid a row of less important women in the middle of the room. (The most important women in the room naturally sat – or sat when they felt like sitting – in the foremost rows at the front.) Anyhow, as soon as this unimportant woman sat down in the middle of these less important women the less important women immediately stood up en masse and found more appropriate seating for themselves elsewhere. The rather dowdy woman with horse’s teeth sat surrounded by empty seats. This lady was Deng Yingchao, the wife of the Vice Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, Chou En-lai. When the Nationalists and Communists had declared themselves united following the Japanese invasion the previous year, Chou became the chief Communist representative and minister in the government of Chiang Kai-shek. But the seniority of her husband’s position within the government did not seem to grant Deng any recognition within the higher ranks of Wuhan society. Not that that bothered Deng in the least. Li Dequan, the only other peasant-dressed outcast in the room, went over and sat down beside her, gave Hu an encouraging wave, and then herself immediately started talking in an animated fashion to Deng – thus leaving Hu on her own to carry on ploughing her lonely furrow, relating the tragic tale of how nearly all the soldiers they had befriended and supported for so long had died heroically fighting the Japanese in the trenches they and the girls had all dug together. Hu never stopped smiling.
Once again the geography of the room dramatically re-crystallized. Two similar-looking ladies – one wearing dowdy but respectable clothes and the other wearing expensive but tasteful clothes – a patriotic blend of Chinese and Western styles – walked into the room and immediately sat down in the two empty seats on either side of Deng Yingchao and Li Dequan. The two ladies were Soong Chingling, the widow of Sun Yatsen, the father of the Chinese Revolution, and Soong Ailing, the wife of China’s richest banker. They were sisters, and their third sister, the youngest (not present), was none other than Soong Meiling, Mrs Chiang Kai-shek. The chairs around these four ladies, deserted when the horse-toothed Deng Yingchao had sat down there, suddenly became the most valuable property in Wuhan. The women closest to them, those of middle-ranking importance who had just deserted them, immediately reoccupied them, but then, realizing that favours granted to more high-ranking women would be valuable capital in the future, quickly ceded their seats to the more important women. The rather large woman with the piercing voice – who Hu Lan-shih feared was Mrs Nie – sat down alongside Soong Ailing. There was now a seated scrum parked all around the four not particularly well-dressed women in the centre.
As everyone continued to shriek at each other Hu finally reached the end of her lonely speech. She stopped. No one noticed. She decided to descend from the rostrum. She descended from the rostrum. Suddenly Shi Liang emerged from the scrum and hurried towards her.
‘Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. Just what was needed,’ she said. ‘Now,’ she said, turning, ‘back to business.’ As she disappeared into the throng she pointed off to the side. ‘Help yourself to some food.’
To one side stood this enormous table covered in what Hu assumed was food. But she’d never seen any food like this before. Mountainous. All shapes and sizes and exotic cuts and colours and textures and finely curlicued tidbits and delicate morsels of – what? Hu finally recognized some dumplings. She took two and, partly to avoid Mrs Nie, walked out into the fresh air.
*
She spent the next two hours, while all those inside laid siege to the table, walking around the magnificent gardens, nibbling her lunch and admiring especially the strutting, wonderful peacocks – their lacquered iridescent wings and breast feathers, their imperious eye, their wonderful displays. Though mainly of course, being from good peasant stock, she was wondering what they tasted like.
Her role in this event seemed to have ended. What was she still doing here? Should she leave? She looked at her invitation again. It said she was invited from eleven til four. Another two hours? Should she go back inside?
At this moment Li Dequan hurried out of the French windows and came towards her. Hu smiled with relief. Li would know. Li apologized profusely for abandoning her during lunch. Hu said it didn’t matter. Li congratulated Hu on her speech and said she thought it had gone down very well. Several women had spoken favourably to her about it.
‘But nobody was listening,’ said Hu.
‘Don’t believe that,’ said Li. ‘Mrs Nie came up to me at the end and mentioned several points you’d made.’
‘Was that that large woman with the loud voice?’
‘That’s her.’
Hu’s heart sank.
‘Hu,’ Li reassured her, ‘society women have very sharp antennae. They can concentrate on many different things at the same time.’
Hu looked at Li. Li looked at Hu. They both laughed.
Li explained she’d been detained because she’d had to explain to the two Soong sisters before they left about the problems her husband Feng was having upstream in Chungking with building homes and factories for the refugees. They’d promised to speak to their husbands. She’d also been trying, without much success, to persuade all the society ladies here to donate generously to the Orphan Fostering Commission, which this event had been organized on behalf of. She was its vice chairman. ‘It’s hard work,’ she said.
‘Of course you should have been doing that,’ said Hu supportively. ‘Just passing all those starving, dying children on the street is terrible. It’s a scandal.’
‘Look,’ said Li, ‘I think you should stay this afternoon. Shi Liang has planned a bit of a show – to finally wrench the money out of these women. Someone you know will be there.’
*
Inside the ladies were being detached from their food and reassuring gossip and herded by a very determined Shi Laing out of another door into a large cobbled courtyard. Tall walls stood all around.
Before them, in the bitter winter cold, stood a line of half-starved youngsters, scruffy and wild, desperate for food and warmth. Some of them had runny noses. They smelt, they were scabby, most were probably diseased. The women in their couture dresses just gaped. Hu was amazed to see, of all people, Spider Girl stood in their midst. Her hair and clothing had been distressed and her face muddied. She looked furious. This must be Shi Laing’s doing, thought Hu.
The ladies stared at the lost legion of hobbledehoys and derelicts and waifs. The lost legion stared back. Even Mrs Nie was silent.
Shi Liang, seasoned courtroom performer, seized the moment.
‘Dear ladies,’ stated short and bespectacled Shi, ‘we earlier spent a very pleasant lunch talking about starving children and homeless and abandoned orphans. So I thought it would be good for you to actually see some – to meet children abandoned by their parents, children whose families have been butchered by the Japanese, homeless, starving children who we have taken off the streets of Wuhan this morning.’
‘Ladies,’ she said, ‘I was at school with many of you. I studied at university with some of you. Look before you. Before you stands your problem, our nation’s problem. Abandoned children. We fine ladies travel through the streets of Wuhan in our automobiles, our carriages, our fine rickshaws, and we do not even notice them, see them.
‘Ladies, I will remind you of one thing. The Japanese are coming. Creatures who drive bayonets into the arms, the legs, the bodies, the eyes, the vaginas of all the Chinese women they meet.’
A ripple of fear passed through the ladies.
‘What shall we do? Flee? To Hong Kong, to Singapore, to Paris? But all our wealth is centred here in China. If we flee abroad we will lose it, become paupers on the streets like these very children.’
By now her audience were definitely taking notice.
‘Our wealth can only survive if we stay here in China. But that will require us to fight the Japanese – with bayonets and rifles and guns. And to do that we will have to organize ourselves, our whole Chinese nation, educate and train all its peoples in order to fight them. We will require factories and steel plants and armouries, skilled engineers and technicians, roads and railroads and airfields and guns so we can attack and defeat these uncivilized barbarians. To do that, to fight them, to defeat them, what will we require above all else…?’
The great performer looked questioningly about, then pointed dramatically at the line of bedraggled children.
‘We will require these children – precisely these urchins and strays and delinquents and hoodlums – disciplined and fed and nurtured and trained and educated – to fill those factories, build those machines, forge that steel, man those trenches, plough those fields. Skilled people alone can win this war. Bring victory to China. If you wish to survive this war this nation requires your money.’
Shi cast a practised eye over her audience. They were moved, but not enough. She could see them calculating – ‘All right, I will give them money – but not today. I’ll give them money tomorrow – probably.’ Good, thought Shi, just as I want them. Shi, the consummate courtroom general, smoothly switched to phase two of her campaign.
She clapped her hands. Another door onto the courtyard swung open and a discord of military music hit everyone’s ears as, from the door, marched a line of tiny five- and six-year-old tots, banging on drums and heartily blowing on penny whistles. But unlike the filthy and ragged older children, these tots were clad in smart clean khaki uniforms, their skin glowed from regular scrubbing and washing, their bellies were visibly full of food, and their heads lice free because every last wisp of hair had been shaved off.
The line stopped dead in front of the ladies. The music stopped. There were some cooings and sighs from the ladies. Even Mrs Nie’s visage softened. These children were cute, cuddlesome, clean – everything the desperadoes and urchins were not.
As if spontaneously they burst into a popular patriotic children’s song written by none other than Lao Xiang, Lao She’s pugnacious friend:
‘The snow is dancing,
The lone crow is crying.
I am making a fur hat for the soldier.
Where can I find furs?
I ask help from a fox.
The fox runs into the grass.
Oh fox, oh fox, please don’t run.
Can you lend me a big fur coat?
I won’t wear it,
Nor will he,
We are sending it to the soldier at the front.
It feels so warm,
It looks so good,
We’re sure to beat those Japanese.’
The song ended with a neat roll on the drums.
‘You see, ladies,’ Shi continued, ‘this is what we can do for orphans. How we can transform ourselves. Two weeks ago these sweet young children were urchins and waifs wandering the cold streets of Wuhan. Starving. But we raised enough money to open a small temporary orphanage and this is what warmth, food and discipline can do. These twenty orphans are now ready to be shipped upstream to Chungking where they will start new and useful lives. But, as you know, there are thousands upon thousands of lost, homeless children – like those behind them – who are desperate. Desperate souls are a threat to us all. Those who are starving are forced to turn to crime which can endanger us all. Instead, through your generosity, your desire to be patriotic women serving your country, you can help turn our country around. Make us fight.’
There is nothing on this earth more difficult to do than appeal to the altruism of a wealthy person. Extracting money from their tightly clenched fingers. The crowd of rich women swayed backwards and forwards – slightly guiltily perhaps. Mrs Nie was checking her face in her mirror. Two or three perhaps walked back through the door to pay some small sum to assuage their consciences. The majority stayed put.
Now came Shi Liang’s coup de théâtre. She turned and asked Spider Girl to step forwards.
‘Ladies,’ said Shi, ‘I want to show you an example of outstanding courage.’
Spider Girl waddled up to her. Hu stared open-mouthed.
‘This,’ declared Shi Liang, ‘this young girl, as you can see, cannot walk properly. She is partly crippled. And yet she undertook an extraordinary journey to get here to Wuhan. This young girl has rickets. It means that her legs and hips are wasted and bruised and feeble. It is extremely difficult and painful for her to walk. And yet, to join us free Chinese here in Wuhan, to do her bit, this young girl, with extraordinary courage, walked over one thousand miles to join us. To show her patriotism. I want you now to look at those twisted and tortured legs of hers so you can understand this girl’s sublime courage.’
She turned to Spider Girl. Spider Girl stared grimly ahead.
‘Wild Pear Blossom, please raise your skirts so that all these good ladies can see your terrible affliction.’
The women pushed forwards. (Let’s be honest, we all love something really ghastly!)
Spider Girl – or to give her her formal name, Wild Pear Blossom – was naturally, like all ordinary Chinese girls, a deeply modest person. Nakedness was a taboo you never broke until your marriage night. She’d been greatly troubled by Shi’s proposal. She did not raise her skirt.
‘Wild Pear Blossom,’ said Shi Liang, ‘I can see you are a good and modest girl, and do not wish to do this in front of the other children.’
The other children were marched out. The ladies were now getting very involved in what would be revealed beneath the skirts.
‘Wild Pear Blossom,’ asked Shi, ‘please raise your skirts.’
Spider Girl did not. The ladies were in a heat of expectation.
‘Please raise your skirts,’ requested Shi Liang. ‘There are only women present. You have nothing to be ashamed of.’
It was at this point that Shi’s carefully prearranged script came off the rails. Spider Girl, staring beadily ahead of her, did not raise her skirts. Just stood there.
It took a moment for Shi Liang to realize this. With slight uncertainty she moved closer to her – hissed in her ear.
‘Wild Peach Blossom…?’
‘Wild Pear Blossom!’
‘Sorry, Wild Pear Blossom. Why aren’t raising your skirts? As we agreed to?’
‘Because I’ve decided not to.’
By now the ladies were in a frenzy.
‘Do it.’
‘No.’
Shi Liang looked her fully in the face.
‘What do you want?’ she hissed, desperately trying to soften her anger.
‘Money,’ Spider Girl hissed back.
‘I’ll pay you later.’
‘Now.’
There was a pause. Things like this simply did not occur in courtrooms. Round the back of courtrooms, maybe. But never in an actual courtroom, in front of everyone.
‘How much?’
A quick haggle ensued in which Spider Girl obviously held the superior hand. Very soon a considerable number of silver coins were surreptitiously showered into her purse and Spider Girl, still feeling the shame of it, raised her skirts.
The ladies darted forwards. They feasted their cultured eyes on the bruises and swellings and lacerations, the twisted bones and cartilage and thighs of Spider Girl’s nether regions. And at their front, staring hardest at the red tortured flesh, was the face of Mrs Nie. It was as though, with this sight, all her profoundest feelings of anger and inadequacy and ugliness bathed and soothed and healed themselves in her intimacy with this horrible human suffering.
As the mob pressed ever closer, Spider Girl slowly raised her eyes to look at the skies. Indeed, as they became more excited, so she became calmer, more peaceful. In her hand she held the tiny stone bottle containing the last of her family’s wild pear juice. She remembered another cold winter’s day on the farm with the brave little wild pear tree holding out its branches which were drenched in creamy white blossoms and gentle green leaves soft as silk, standing resilient against the cold blue skies. It was far too early in the year for any bees to have ventured out to pollinate it. So her father, as she watched, climbed high in the fragile old tree and, leaning out precariously, held a long stick with a soft brush tied to its end with which he gently flustered, stroked every blossom so each was pollinated, so each would bear sweet fruit and the family would once again drink the juice from the earth in which her father’s elder sister and the bones of all their other ancestors lay in.
Her father had been a great king bee at the centre of all her family, working incessantly to bring sustenance and shelter and harmony and blessing on them.
Spider Girl slowly realized the fine ladies were sated, were turning away, starting to make a beeline towards the room where at last they could make their – not particularly generous – donations. The day’s entertainment was over. Shi Liang was herding the ladies indoors. Li Dequan had left in disgust before this highly lucrative pantomime had even started. Hu moved towards Spider Girl to offer her comfort.
It was at this moment, as the ladies were reaching the door, that the final and totally unrehearsed sensation occurred. From the door, despite the weather, stepped a slight lady immaculately dressed in a superb Mandarin dress with bright floral patterns slashing across a deep blue background – effortlessly combining Western and Chinese styles in one chic statement. Wearing high heels, her hair beautifully coiffured, an elegant cigarette dangled from her fingers. Every single wealthy lady stopped dead. All breathed in simultaneously.
‘Ladies,’ the lady stated, ‘please continue indoors and contribute generously, extremely generously, to this wonderful charity for orphans. I myself have just contributed over ten thousand dollars.’
The entrance to the door suddenly became a scrum of upper-class women all desperate to be seen outspending each other. Shi Liang followed, smiling.
Superbly poised, the lady continued her way into the courtyard. Only Hu and Spider Girl still stood there.
Many strange and inexplicable things had happened to Hu Lan-shih today, ever since she’d walked through the iron gates of high society. She’d given a talk which no one had listened to but everyone had praised. She had seen a peacock spread its tail feathers. She’d watched while poor Spider Girl had been virtually forced to lift her skirts so that a whole lot of bizarre high-class ladies could stare at her crotch. But now – this topped it all. This lady was walking straight towards her and Spider Girl. Hu hastily looked behind them to see if there was someone else she might be walking towards – there wasn’t!
‘Good afternoon,’ the lady said, holding out her hand to Hu, ‘you must be Hu Lan-shih.’
Hu of course knew who this woman was. Her photograph was in every paper. Hu Lan-shih was shaking hands with, being addressed by none other than, Soong Meiling herself, the youngest of the Soong sisters, the cleverest, and China’s First Lady. The wife of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek himself.
‘I am delighted to meet you,’ said Madame Chiang.
‘Who’s this?’ asked a puzzled Spider Girl.
Hu looked at Spider Girl with a flicker of uncharacteristic irritation. ‘Don’t you know who this is? This is the wife of General Chiang Kai-shek.’
‘Who’s he?’ asked Spider Girl.
Madame Chiang effortlessly took over the conversation. ‘Hello,’ she said to Spider Girl. ‘I am told you are Wild Pear Blossom. I believe you have rickets. Please accept my sympathies, and I hope you will be able to get some treatment for it.’
She said this genuinely, without falseness or affectation.
She then turned and concentrated solely on Hu.
‘I must apologize profusely for not being at your lecture, which I particularly wanted to hear. I’m afraid I was detained on other matters.’
‘Of course,’ said a still bewildered Hu.
‘Shi Liang gave me a general idea of what you’d told her, but I really wanted to hear it from your own lips, so I sent a secretary of mine to copy down your speech word for word and I will read it this evening.’
‘I am honoured,’ said Hu.
‘The biggest problem our country faces – and we will have to face it if we are going to survive – is that we ruling classes are so out of touch with ordinary people. There is a vast and terrifying gap between the rich and poor, and, unless it is bridged, it will mean the end of our civilization. We must have modern health services and education systems, modern industry and manufacturing, good social services and far more social equality. We must even try – chaotic as it always is – democracy. We either do these things, or we die.’
Madame Chiang had finished her cigarette. In one movement she flicked it away, snapped a gold cigarette case full of Wills’s Gold Flake, offered them to Spider Girl, who took two and stuck them behind her ear, offered one to Hu, who refused because she did not smoke, took one herself, lit it, and continued, all without a break.
‘Our great problem is not money, finance – though we don’t have that much of it. It is essentially knowledge. We can make laws, we can pour money into projects, but we really have no way of knowing whether such actions will have practical effects. Whether they will actually result in building houses and factories and guns and wealth. Are they helping ordinary people to get on with their lives, get wealthier? Are they helping our soldiers on the battlefield? We don’t know. Because we don’t know how ordinary people work. How they think. What they feel. If they are going to do what we want them to do, or if they want to do it in a totally different way, and if so if we can reach a practical compromise. That’s why we need you, Hu Lan-shih.’
‘Me?’
‘We have a committee in our government. An important committee. Where most of these progressive plans to get things moving, to reform things, are put forwards, discussed, and then passed if we think they will work. But the truth is that no one on this committee has the least idea how their plans and theories are going to go down with the very people who have to implement them, carry them out. The everyday people of China. That is where you come in. You will understand how people think, what their reaction is likely to be to what is being proposed. Whether they will carry it out? If not, why, and how can we modify them so that people will carry them out? You will be able to advise this committee on what is likely to be practical, and what isn’t and why. From what I heard about you on your march, you were able to present workable solutions to problems, you were able to negotiate with all sorts of different people, you were able to conciliate – very rare skills in China today. I am asking you to become a member of this committee…’
‘What?’
‘…so that you can advise on what people will put up with and what they won’t. How they can be favourably presented. And on what ideas you yourself have about what must be done and how they might be implemented.’
‘Madame Chiang,’ Hu interrupted, ‘ – and I apologize for interrupting you – but I do not think that I am in any way suited for this sort of work.’
‘And I do not think,’ rejoined the Generalissimo’s wife, ‘that you have the least idea how precisely dire this country’s situation currently is.’
‘I do,’ said Hu, blushing, ‘I certainly do. I know exactly how dire it is. Not only as far as the war is concerned, but in a thousand other ways. Having worked all my life in a Shanghai cotton mill I know precisely how dire things are.’
‘Which is exactly why you are needed. I know how bad things are. You know how bad things are. But most of the people in our government haven’t the slightest idea. They think it’s all a game. “When things get really bad we’ll do a deal with the Japanese,” they say.’
Madame Chiang gave a snort. A ladylike snort, albeit, but definitely a snort.
‘We will do a deal with the Japanese over my dead body. My and my sisters’ dead bodies. I know, Hu, you are a socialist. I am not a socialist. You may well disapprove of my husband’s government. But whatever our politics we are both Chinese. Chinese patriots. We need you.’
‘But Madame Chiang,’ stuttered Hu, ‘I am not…’
Chiang interrupted her. ‘I know exactly who you are. I looked you up in the files of my husband’s secret police. You were a trade unionist. You are quite used to negotiating in a hostile environment…’
‘A very hostile environment.’
‘Committee life is not at all alien to you. And I’ll bet, nice as you are, you know how to get your way.’
The two stared at each other.
‘What do you want me to do?’ cried Madame Chiang theatrically. ‘Get down on my knees and beg you? I’d ladder my stockings. I have another very important meeting in’ – she checked her watch – ‘exactly twenty minutes. Are you expecting me to turn up to it in laddered stockings?’
The two women looked at each other. Then burst out laughing. Madame Chiang took that as assent.
‘Hu, I apologize for addressing you in this brutal and manipulative fashion. In normal times we could have spoken to each other in a humane and courteous way.’
‘In normal times,’ said Hu, ‘we would not have talked to each other at all.’
‘That is true,’ said Chiang. ‘But this is a war. Hu, I would be very grateful if you could start work the day after tomorrow. I will brief the senior official of the committee that you are coming, that you are to be treated as a full equal, and if there are any difficulties he is to report them to me. He will fully brief you on the documents and policies coming before the committee. If you have any problems access me immediately through my office.’
She glanced at her watch again.
‘I must be going.’
She shook Hu’s hand.
‘Thank you again,’ she said, even though Hu had not assented.
She turned and shook Spider Girl’s hand.
‘It’s a pleasure to have met you, Wild Pear Blossom,’ she said.
She departed, trailing clouds of exotic Parisian perfume.
Spider Girl rubbed and smelt her hand. She’d never shaken hands before. She thought it rather indecent.
‘What do you think?’ asked Hu.
‘I think you should have asked for a lot of money,’ said Spider Girl.
Hu sighed. All this had happened because she’d met Li on the Bund and told her her story and Li had spoken to Shi Liang who’d talked to Madame Chiang.
‘Cheer up,’ said Spider Girl, ‘the golden staircase opens before you.’
‘No it doesn’t,’ said Hu.
*
Hu and Spider Girl walked slowly along the Bund back to their apartment.
One of the first acts of this new government of China – the new unity government of Nationalists and Communists – was the almost total abolition of press censorship. Each side wished to show how liberal and progressive it was. Only sensitive military information was censored.
The result was an efflorescence of news sheets and newspapers and pamphlets espousing every sort of weird and wonderful idea. Extreme Confucianists advocated a return to being ruled by an emperor – even though the present emperor was a Japanese puppet ruling in Manchukuo. Anarchists advocated being ruled by no one. There were free love newspapers, syndicalist newspapers, communist and nationalist and capitalist and socialist and Seventh Day Adventist newspapers – all being flogged vociferously on The Bund by their supporters. Newspapers were pasted on walls, and people read them aloud to those who couldn’t read. Spontaneous debates and disagreements and shouting matches broke out, lifelong friendships were formed or broken in front of these walls, children picked pockets. In the first few weeks of press freedom the numbers of debaters were few, but by now whole crowds were forming, orators were orating, people flocking for entertainment and information and ideas. Policemen looked in the other direction – or listened keenly to debates while looking in the other direction. There was a hunger in the air. Suddenly everybody, Babel-like, had an opinion. People were even demanding elections!
Hu Lan-shih and Spider Girl ignored all this. Having just been steamrollered by Madame Chiang, Hu was feeling a bit disassociated.
‘That woman’s far too powerful,’ opined the powerful Spider Girl. ‘Her husband should beat her more often.’
‘The trouble is,’ said Hu, ‘I liked it on the road, with all the soldiers. Meeting new people all the time, laughing, learning things, helping people, solving their problems. And I like being with you all here in Wuhan, in our apartment, coming out on the Bund, binding the poor soldiers’ wounds, trying to comfort them. But sitting on a government committee? With all these high-class people, all educated, so they’re really intelligent, talking about all these things I don’t know the slightest thing about…?’
‘Depends on what they’re paying you,’ said Spider Girl. ‘I’d sit on it – no problem.’
Actually, Hu reflected, Spider Girl would probably be excellent on a committee. She’d put up with no nonsense, cut through waffle and double-talk, and get things done even if it meant holding a knife to the throat of some particularly irritating mandarin. Hu giggled. Her mood improved. Madame Chiang wanted her to do it. She’d give it a try!
Spider Girl was staring at a bookstall. The bookseller, who also sold newspapers, was shouting: ‘I bring you news from all the war fronts, from Shantung and Hopeh, from northern Shansi, from Canton in the far south of our great China. I also sell books. Lots of books.’
Spider Girl was staring at the books. She and Old Man Chen were the only people in their village who could read, and they had read only newspapers.
‘Hu,’ she said, ‘I’ve never read a book. What sort of book should I read?’
‘What things interest you?’
‘Well, I was thinking, all these high-class sorts of people we’ve been meeting lately, people who think and use long words, what sort of things do they read?’
‘Oh,’ said Hu, ‘all sort of things.’
‘Then what should I read?’
‘Well…’ said Hu.
Hu, thanks to her trade union library, was quite well read in progressive areas. She thought the Bible and Karl Marx might be a bit obscure for Spider Girl, but just before leaving Shanghai Hu had read Lao She’s acclaimed new novel Rickshaw Boy. She bought it for Spider Girl.
That evening, as she lay in bed, Spider Girl started to read Rickshaw Boy. She didn’t get very far. Somehow she couldn’t arouse any enthusiasm for the hero’s eternal laments and existential angst. It also had very long sentences. By the time you finished the end of a sentence you’d forgotten what the start of it was about. Spider Girl preferred action. So she put down Lao She and picked up a garish Shanghai detective novel she’d stolen off the bookstall while Hu was busy buying Rickshaw Boy. She’d been attracted by its wonderfully lurid cover – a glamorous scantily clad woman with a knife in her hand standing over a trilby-hatted man lying on the floor with large amounts of blood flowing out of him. Spider Girl licked her rather hairy upper lip and started to read.
For one night she did not think of her father.