Emeritus Professor Wally Frith addresses a ceremony at Peking Union Medical College (Beijing, 2008).
Ladies and gentlemen. Colleagues. Friends. I am honoured to be invited back to speak to you as we celebrate the award of the prestigious Heilmann Award for Medical Advancement to Dr Song Weihong. Over the past twenty years China’s international research collaboration has produced significant results in many areas—nowhere more so than in medicine. The cooperation between PUMC and my own research institution in Australia is just one example. My old friend, Dr Song, leads one of the world’s great research teams, working with her colleagues at the Harvard Medical School to unlock the human genome and to apply that knowledge to cancer treatment. Hers is a major contribution to the unending human quest for understanding and well-being. We acknowledge that contribution tonight.
Applause.
As a retired professor, I am something like a veteran of the Long March. Medical progress in my own generation has been extraordinary. But it takes a young person’s imagination even to think about what might be possible for the next generation. To the students here tonight I say, ‘That is your task.’
Dr Song Weihong’s success continues the great traditions of this College. She draws on the pioneering work of your renowned early researcher, Professor Hsu Chien Lung, who passed away in 1988. I was fortunate enough to meet him a couple of years before he died, at his home in Shaoxing. I owe Dr Song a personal debt for that. She also introduced me to my wife, Jin Juan, who is old Professor Hsu’s granddaughter. Her daughter—our daughter—his great-granddaughter—is also here tonight, and also wants to do medical research.
Wally looked up from his text to see Jin Juan and nineteen-year-old Jojo seated in the front row, each elegant woman watching him with a version of the same clear, calm intelligence. Beside them were Song and Rong, and their daughter Claudia, and an empty seat for his grown up son Jerome, who was hiding behind his camera as he recorded the proceedings from the aisle.
How much more should he say? He remembered Eagle at PUMC, in a hospital ward, and Jin Juan beside the bed during the young man’s convalescence. After Wally was gone, she and Eagle had become lovers. Then, after her grandfather died and she was free of family responsibility, Jin Juan and Eagle had married. Wally received the news with mixed feelings, but he appreciated their resilience. Jin Juan was pregnant with Eagle’s child when Tiananmen happened and Eagle answered the call. Eagle had experienced too much obstruction of his natural hopefulness not to vent his passion when the moment came, though his wife and his mother had warned him repeatedly. It was what he must do, he insisted, all he could do, as a citizen of Beijing. After the night of June third, when he went to the square, they never saw him again. His daughter, Jojo, was born that Tiananmen autumn.
Wally wrote letters of condolence, and then of congratulations, in both instances offering whatever help he could. Even at a remove of continents and oceans, he was unable to detach himself. But he would not cast himself as a friend of the Chinese people in general; he was not on that journey. He had some particular friends and he was willing to want what they wanted. That was all. He had returned to Beijing in a later grey year to see Jin Juan. Her agreeing to marry him meant she and her child, then one, could escape to Australia. Wally wanted that. She could continue her work as a specialist translator in Sydney, he promised, and they would take it from there.
Standing now at the garlanded podium, Wally felt a surge of emotion in his love for Jin Juan. They had found happiness together, their feelings for each other holding together all that had gone before, China and Australia, the dead and the living.
The audience stirred. He cleared his throat.
Maybe she will work here one day, as a medical researcher, just as Dr Song’s daughter, Claudia, who is also with us tonight, hopes to practice in Beijing when she completes her law degree in America. I remember her as a precocious kid, reciting all the capital cities of the world—in alphabetical order. She was the first really global person I knew.
Wally felt moved to open his arms, like a preacher.
And now that applies to all of you, as the world comes to Beijing for the Olympic Games and life puts the future in your hands.
The applause surged as he stepped down from the podium. He was relieved by its warmth. The banner across the stage read: Smile Beijing. Volunteer for the Olympics. Build a Harmonious Society.
When the ceremony was done, there was a celebratory dinner. Jin Juan thanked Wally again for mentioning her grandfather and they all toasted the old man’s memory. The College had been skilful in resisting the real estate development that plundered Beijing after Tiananmen. Shopping malls lined the Avenue of Eternal Peace through this part of town, yet, one block back, the graceful buildings of PUMC remained, somewhat overshadowed, with stubborn dignity, which allowed them this night to dine in a grand hall of red and gold.
Afterwards, as Wally walked with Jin Juan and Jojo across the dark courtyard toward Goldfish Alley and their hotel, it was easy for him to recall his feelings of arrival in that frozen world so many years ago. As they turned the corner into Wangfujing, into a city transformed by the present, with spring in the air, the personalities of that earlier time swept across his memory.
‘Hey, how about we eat at Jumbo’s restaurant tomorrow?’ Jojo suggested.
‘If we can get in,’ said Jin Juan.
Jumbo, the artist, had ridden the contemporary art wave on his return to China, without Dulcia. He lived in a New York-style studio in an artists’ community and owned a popular city restaurant that specialised in gourmet insects and weeds. Through Jumbo, Wally heard about the two guys who had hung out in the New Age Bar where the expats used to drink. The rebuilt New Age just got bigger and bigger. Its clientele was at the centre of every scam in Beijing throughout the 1990s. The kid they called Party Greenhorn, on account of his connections, got to the top of Twenty-First Century Realty, the property group responsible for turning farming villages into residential developments. Along the way, he broke with his buddy, the one they called Foreign Trader, who became a scapegoat during an anti-corruption purge and was executed, a bullet in the back of his head, after a televised confession. Barman Bi had been looked after—he now managed China’s most exclusive golf club.
Philosopher Horse was still in jail when Tiananmen happened in 1989, and had served ten of his fifteen-year sentence when he was released on medical grounds, broken in body and spirit. He returned to his home town in the south and lived on charity. People who were prospering in the boom economy were happy to put some money his way. They knew the poor fellow was right about the just society, that he was the one who stuck his neck out when no one else dared. Wally had followed the case through Amnesty International. The fiery poet Build-the-Country was also in the thick of things at Tiananmen. He was rounded up and charged with ‘inciting counter-revolutionary turmoil’. After a couple of years he was released, but kept under surveillance, and when he spoke out again he was again detained. He could have left China—the authorities would have welcomed that—but he stayed and joined other committed and outspoken writers to form an International PEN group and made themselves heard.
Clarence had been at Tiananmen. His photographs were a sliver of history. Two years later he succumbed to AIDS, in the last months of his life setting up a medical research fund with his own money and what he had received from his famous novelist mother’s estate. Clarence reconnected with Autumn’s sister in Beijing—she had a small son—and looked after the family. Through his intervention, though they did not meet again, Autumn now lives in England, a chubby middle-aged man, pleased with his vintage-clothing business. He is intending to visit his family in Beijing this August for the Games.
Mother Lin’s promised new flat did not come through by the time of Tiananmen. Her old brick home was not far from the square, which made it easy for Eagle to come and go in those fervent weeks. After she lost her son, her home became part of her curse. If she had been moved to decent accommodation—her right as a long-time resident—her son would have had no base from which to join the protests. To be relocated afterwards was little solace. By then she had become one of the Tiananmen Mothers, campaigning for recognition for their sacrificed children. ‘Getting on for a hundred years I’ve lived in the capital,’ Mother Lin told Wally with bitter humour, ‘and I’ve learned one thing. The government always makes the wrong decision.’
Wally, Jin Juan and Jojo laughed with the old woman. Jojo delighted in her Beijing grandmother. As long as she could remember they’d always been laughing together, picking up where they left off each time she came back. When Mother Lin looked at Jojo, she saw not only her missing beloved son, but also, through her tears, a girl full of her own sunny energy, full of a new enthusiasm for life, and she loved her with pure sweetness.
Earlier that day, Wally and Jin Juan had strolled around the construction site where the landmark edifices of the Olympic Games were growing to completion. With the other sightseers they gawped at the stadium, as conceived by Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, a gigantic bird’s nest bound in shining steel, beside it the bubbly blue box of the translucent water cube for the swimming, designed by German-Australian Chris Bosse. Landscapers—work teams from out of town—were in their own race against the clock, planting the root balls of severely pruned trees in the orange earth, their spring growth already bursting in a jade blush on the topmost fronds. The wind overnight had cleared the air of pollution, and the distant hills were outlined like glass against a blue sky.
For Wally’s benefit, Jin Juan quoted some lines from Du Fu, great poet of the Tang dynasty. He had almost used the same words in his address at the College.
Even if the country collapses,
mountains and rivers remain.
Spring in the city:
grass shoots and new leaves grow.
But the irony of renewing life was not quite the right note. The mood he detected all around was a starker optimism. He had let the quote go.
Their taxi flew above the old hutong on a clean, new overpass as they took the Fourth Ring Road back to Mother Lin’s new flat. Wally and Jin Juan looked down at the low brick walls of yesterday with passive, passing attention, clasping hands. Their driver turned to them with one of those pasted-on, tip-me-big grins and quipped, ‘Things just keep on getting better and better.’