I look very closely into her face. Someone has quite deliberately drawn a razor blade straight across it and left a great gaping scar. Someone brutally and deliberately blinded the little girl in both eyes so the voids of two empty sockets stare back at me. She smiles sweetly in my general direction. ‘Please sir. Alms, sweet sir.’ Above her a notice reads This awful atrocity to this beautiful Chinese child has been done by the murderous Japanese devils!
I know this is a lie.
Beside her, against the wall, sit other warped, mutilated, mangled children. Their owner walks up and down before them, threatening those who do not cry out for alms piteously enough with a whip. They cry out enthusiastically. Some have been raised in tiny cages so their limbs are bent, their spines crooked, their shoulder blades stick out like delicate twigs.
Until now I have avoided this wall of child beggars – gravely wounded so they might attract the greatest sympathy and generosity from passing people. The blinded girl with the torn and ploughed face upsets me particularly. So normally, when I am on the Bund, except for the occasion when Tian Boqi made his brave stand against them, I avoid it. Those children could be mine!
But today, as I set off on my sordid quest to enslave young Yu Liqun, buy her as a sex slave to sell to the awful Guo Morou, I find my self-loathing and self-disgust reflected exactly in this child’s ripped and ruptured face. I pay a particularly large sum into her bowl in the hope that her owner will treat her better – at least for a while. As I leave he starts to beat her. The more she suffers the more money she attracts!
I continue my journey. I locate the place on the Bund where Miss Yu and her idealistic young dancers are presenting a patriotic dance-and-speech spectacular entitled ‘Sign Up for the Military!’ A group of striking young ladies, attired in smart and alluring military uniforms, march and strut up and down before a stage, vigorously striking militaristic poses, saluting each other crisply, twirling their wooden rifles. They chant and sing patriotic slogans and songs. Miss Yu is by far the most gifted and eye-catching performer. Nobody juts her chin out like her, struts up and down like a clockwork doll like her. Meanwhile on the stage an earnest young East Coast male, with a striking Han accent, urges all and sundry to rush off and sign up for the military immediately.
The young ladies by themselves attract quite a large crowd, but as soon as the young man with the posh accent starts addressing them alone, the audience disappears.
The performance over the stage is quickly dismantled and the various participants go their separate ways. Feeling dirty and soiled I follow Miss Yu.
She enters a shabby apartment building.
I ring her doorbell.
It opens.
I look at her. She looks at me.
‘Hello. My name is Lao She.’
‘Yes?’
‘I am a writer.’
‘Oh,’ replies the eighteen-year-old. ‘I think I have heard your name.’
‘I saw your military display just now. I thought it was very good.’
The ageing, slope-shouldered male stands before the spick-and-span young woman.
An edge enters her voice.
‘What do you want?’
‘I wondered if I could speak with you.’
‘I do not sleep with men. All you middle-aged men – you come round here after I’ve finished performing, asking to sleep with me.’
‘I’m not…’ I stutter.
‘I am dedicated to one thing,’ she continues, ‘one thing alone in this world. The revolution.’
Oh dear, I think, whatever I say, she will rightly refuse me.
I look at her.
‘Excuse me. I’ve not come here to ask you to sleep with me, I’ve come to ask you to do something infinitely worse. I feel terrible coming to ask you this, but I too serve the revolution you serve, and believe me, it can demand you do things which are awful.’
‘The revolution would never ask you to do something that is immoral. Revolution is the ultimate morality.’
I look down at the ground.
‘Believe me, I come here in the name of the revolution to ask you to do something that is utterly immoral.’
‘What do you do?’
‘I am a propagandist for the revolution.’
‘You’d better come in,’ she says. ‘No hands. I have to go out in five minutes for rehearsals at the theatre.’
We enter her small apartment, hung with revolutionary posters and half-read books. I sit on a chair. I ask her which theatre company she works for.
‘The Anti-Japanese Drama Troupe. We are putting on a new play full of revolutionary zeal called We Have Beaten Back the Enemy.’
‘Oh yes,’ I say, ‘I know the writer.’
She is now sitting opposite me. Waiting for me to speak. Enough flannelling, I get to the nub.
‘I come from the very highest levels of the revolutionary party.’
‘Yes? How high?’
‘The highest.’
‘What, from…?’
‘The one just below him?’
She now looks straight at me.
‘And what does he have to say?’
I look at her. She sits so straight-backed. The infinite confidence of the upper classes! The shield of their education, their breeding! Which is why they get me to do their dirty work for them. Because, a mere lower class Manchu, I’m used to grovelling and worming for a living. Get on with it!
I look directly at her.
‘Revolutionary comrades are not always so – revolutionary – as you might think. Sometimes revolutionary machines need dirt, grit in their gears and wheels to make them bite, to make them turn.’
‘What on earth are you talking about?’
‘Our leaders are not always paragons of virtue. They demand prices. They cheat. They lie.’
‘That is a lie. You are a liar.’
‘Miss Yu, as I said, I’ve been sent by the highest of leaders in the party. Believe me, they would not request from you what I am about to request from you if they were not absolutely desperate, unable to resolve things in any other ways. The leaders of the party are of course highly moral people,’ I lie.
By her expression I can see she is starting to become interested in what I am saying.
‘But what do they want me to do?’ she asks. ‘Do they want me to die? I would die for the revolution, without a second thought!’
‘No, they do not want you to die for the revolution. I am afraid what they want is far more ignoble, far more degrading, than that.’
There is a pause. I continue.
‘There is a man vital to the success of the revolution. If he were to be freed so that he could stand up, speak out, write about our revolution, the struggle against the Japanese barbarians, he would speak in a voice which would encourage, inspire so many people, he would utter phrases which would stop people in their tracks, arouse them to perform heroic acts, to redouble their efforts to win this war. He is a man of the greatest integrity, already a hero of the people, and all he requires is…’
‘Me?’
I can see how my words are starting to arouse her. Her eighteen-year-old imagination is beginning to catch alight with all sorts of girlish imaginings and simplicities. From my description, my lying description of ‘him’, she is doubtless imagining some dashing young star of the silver screen, some Shelleyan poet desperate to fall into her arms.
‘I suppose this would involve…?’
‘Yes, it would involve…’
She understands the undertaking. She thinks.
‘Well, I suppose I am an actress.’
‘Yes.’
‘It is my job to imitate others, enter into their lives and emotions as if they were my own. And it would only be for a while…’
I do not correct her there.
‘…and in my heart of hearts I would never betray my one pure love – the revolution. After all, I am a modern woman, a liberated woman, a feminist. To be intimate with a man one does not have to marry him.’
I swallow hard.
‘Who is this man?’
Aye, there’s the rub!
‘As I said, he is a man of great integrity, a vital part of the revolution.’
‘What is his name?’
‘I’m afraid he might not be quite as young as you are imagining.’
‘An older man? Does he possess some great secret or something, vital to the party, that I must somehow, like a spy, wheedle out of him? I would be good at that! Or must I carry secret messages to him?’
‘No, it is nothing like that. The thing is, he wants to marry you. For you to carry his children. He is much older than you. He is vital to the success of the revolution.’
‘Who is he?’
‘You already know him.’
She looks at me, baffled.
‘I am speaking of Guo Morou.’
Her mouth falls open. She slumps back onto the sofa. Oh you murderer, I think, you murderer! But I continue with my knife-wielding duties.
‘He is vital to the success, the survival of the Chinese people. He is our greatest speech maker, our greatest polemicist, our greatest writer. If he were to speak publicly here in Wuhan it would unite the people, fire them, inspire them as no other speaker could.’
‘But what does this have to do with me? Why must I marry him? The creepy little man. I despise him.’
‘He says that he is paralyzed, he is devastated, he is unable to think or even move, such is the desolation he feels being unable to be united, as one with you. The leaders of the party have sent me here to plead with you, beg with you. They desperately need him to become the Guo Morou he once was, to unify the masses, to unite them against the barbarians, to send them forth to battle. They ask you to do your duty.’
Her face has become a great cavern of desolation. Suddenly she is no longer a sharp, confident young lady, she is a teenage child loose and abandoned in the world. Without home, without family, without love. I continue in my hollow way.
‘He is a great man. When you see his greatness, you will come to love him. You will be proud to be the mother of his…’
I stop talking. She has risen up, she is looking straight at me.
‘He is a worm and a traitor of the first order. You don’t even like him, do you? In fact, I’d venture, you despise him every bit as much as I do.’
After that, there isn’t much else to say. For the first time I look her straight in her eye. What a brave little girl! Honesty is the least she deserves.
‘Yes. I do not like him very much.’ I pause. ‘But this is war we are in. One has to do what is necessary.’
There is a long pause. A wave of emotion overcomes me.
‘Do you mind if I tell you about my wife?’
‘Please do,’ she says icily.
‘I too was asked by the nationalists and by the communists to come here to write for them for the war effort. I was very torn. I too love China. I desire above all else to see China become once again a strong and a decent country, in which all citizens, especially the poorest, are treated with respect, are lifted out of their terrible poverty. And – and I know this will make you think I am the most despicable of hypocrites – I have always felt that those who need the most liberating are the women of China. Their slavery, their forced marriages, their bound feet.
‘Myself and my family were living in Jinan, a long way from here. And the Japanese were advancing on us fast, and the telegrams kept arriving for me from Wuhan – “Come here! Come to Wuhan!” I am a Confucian, a Christian, a socialist – a terrible mess. In my writings I have continually attacked the Confucian morality of family above all things, said it was paralyzing China, holding it back. But in the moment of crisis I became totally a Confucian. I had a wife, three young children, an aged mother who could not be moved, had to be nursed all the time. So, as the father, the head of the family, the servant of every other member of the family, I could not abandon my mother. I decided I must stay. Do my best somehow to protect my family from Japanese bayonets. I would forget Wuhan.’
‘And what happened?’
‘My wife. My wife came to me and in the strongest possible terms told me that China needed me, that I was to get on the train, and she would defend and feed our family. She could quietly get work – she is a graphic designer – I must abandon her and my family, I must go and do my duty to the new China.’
‘And so you did your duty? You came to Wuhan?’
‘My wife did my duty.’
‘Is your wife, your family safe?’
‘I do not know.’
‘And what is it like living here in Wuhan?’
‘Hell. It is darkness and desolation.’
Now I am the one slumping back in my chair while she looks at me straight-backed.
‘Your wife loves you?’
‘I think so.’
‘Good. Then I will follow your wife’s judgement of you. And do what you ask me to do.’
I look at her. She gives me a saucy smile in return.
‘Your wife’s duty means she’s got to live alone and defenceless in Japanese territory and somehow protect and support her family and nurse her mother-in-law. While I only have to marry an old roué. I think I’ve been very lucky.’
I do not know whether to sing Hosannah or vomit.
An unhostile silence follows. I move to reassure her.
‘Your marriage will probably not be too onerous. I’m sure you will be able to pursue your career. He will require a certain amount of time away for work and – other interests.’
‘I think I will have “other interests” too. I shall come and see you…’
I turn bright red.
‘…and your wife, when she arrives.’
‘I doubt if Guo Morou will come with you. He and I are not the best of friends.’
‘Good. My visits will be an irritant for him and a joy for me.’
‘And for us.’