Under the Huang Jiao Tree Read online

  The driver is lost.

  ‘He’s new,’ they explain.

  I don’t speak Chinese, so I have to guess from the tone and movements what goes on between them. There’s no blame for the driver. I’m cheered by this. Maybe you can afford to make mistakes here, especially when you’re new to the job. A lot of spirited discussion follows, and when we do reach the restaurant there’s still uncertainty and everyone talks at length. I’m surprised that whatever it is hasn’t been worked out before this long-planned encounter, but eventually all’s resolved and we troop in.

  In the restaurant, the waitresses, young with mild eyes and soft mouths, are involved in the choice of dishes, and protest at unsuitable suggestions. A man comes from the kitchen carrying boiling water in a teapot with a spout thin as a straw and as long as my arm. From a distance he projects the water into our cups in a fierce jet. Anne explains that training for this skill takes several months, during which you pour tea – nothing else – a change from the world of crash courses that I’ve just left. The tea-pourer clearly thought this skill was important enough to wait months for. Will I also be able to let time take its course, instead of trying to stuff as much into it as possible as the Western world insists? It’s a pleasant thought.

  A fish, held in a piece of black plastic, is brought squirming to the table. A dark, thick, cod-like species with horns, it leaps from the plastic and slithers under the table. The waitresses have played this game before – there are no girlish shrieks – and the nearest one corners the slippery escaper around a chair leg and deftly flips it back on the plastic. Retrieved, it is subjected to critical examination, but in a last desperate dash leaps two tables’ distance over the floor before being returned to the kitchen. I feel regretful that we’ll shortly meet it again lying on our plates, but I enjoy this animated consultation with the kitchen. In restaurants at home, swing doors close behind waiters, jealously guarding the kitchen’s secrets. What makes us so prim about the glad business of eating?

  The food is highly salted and strongly flavoured and there’s spirited advice, with demonstrations, on how to eat it. I have no idea what I’m eating, but it tastes good. When I’m hungry I can eat anything. This undiscriminating appetite will prove a decided asset in the months ahead. The teachers are obviously relieved, and as we leave the restaurant, Anne says to me with approval: ‘You’ll survive here.’

  An hour later in the the district of Shiqiaopu our car turns up a steep and untidy road that looks as though it might peter out before arriving anywhere. At the top are the school gates, authoritarian rather than impressive, surmounted by limp flags. A policeman waves from a small wooden gatehouse. The school compound is a communist work unit – a walled and police-guarded community of students, teachers and their families, and other workers serving the school. It looks benign enough this warm autumn evening. I don’t notice the broken glass set into the top of the school wall. Beyond, the shadowy forms of seven storey blocks of staff accommodation and classrooms rear up. There’s a dormitory and a more modest office block, separated by stone-paved gardens, light and airy trees. Somehow this all looks accidental too, as the airport did. Maybe I’m expecting some direct visual expression of purpose that I can’t see.

  Across a sportsground, two looming classroom blocks, set one behind the other on the hill, are bright with lights and, even at this distance, rumble with a great roar of student energy. The teachers talked in the car about the school being ‘under construction’, which I realise has been a gentle way of breaking it to me that the new flat I’ve been promised isn’t ready – not anywhere near, from the look of the unfinished block rising to the right of the school gates. They reassure that in a few months I’ll be able to move into the new block, but I have doubts.

  I’m to be housed with about twenty teachers’ families – all Chinese – in an older building a few metres beyond the one under construction. Through a doorway lit by a bulb that would struggle to power a torch we climb up four flights of concrete stairs. Piles of swept dirt darken the corners of the landings. On each a single naked bulb clicks on as our noise awakens it, and on either side behind heavy iron grilles are crooked wooden doors. Someone has written ‘3’ in chalk on the third landing, but otherwise you count for yourself. As the teachers open the right hand door on the fifth floor they watch my face. They’ve lived in Australian homes and know what I’m used to. I decide to smile, now, before I see what’s inside – and hope the smile doesn’t slip.

  In the tiny, narrow living room I’m relieved to see a ceiling fan. The plaster walls have been freshly whitewashed, perhaps that day as the smell is still strong. The floor’s terrazzo squares have lost all patterning in places leaving them a dreary grey, and all over are marks of today’s and previous paintings and white-washings. I’ve seen floors like this in small-town railway waiting rooms in our South Island.

  From the front door, across the living room is a large bedroom with an air-conditioning box stuck into the wall with adhesive tape. Both the bedroom and the living room lead through double wooden doors onto concrete balconies, the one outside the living room hung with a rusty clothes line. The furniture is heavy and wooden, dark-stained, the monstrous bed head decorated with swirling gold trim. Plastic fittings, a lamp and water boiler all feature lurid colours and patterns that suggest a Disney influence. Or perhaps Disney copied the Chinese.

  I look around. There is a lack of the sort of logic I’m used to – a table but no chair, lamps with no power sockets anywhere near them. The two-ring gas burner, also new and with cartoon animal stickers on it, has been set into the bench by rough-cutting two holes in the terrazzo. If they care enough about appearances to cover all the appliances with stickers of little bears, why hack at the bench like an axeman? There are so many contradictions.

  The promised Western lavatory isn’t there. Instead, there’s a Chinese floor bowl and hole with an ancient cold tap over it, and, perilously stuck on a pock-marked wall, a showerhead for hot water. I check my smile for adhesion. In the corner of the bathroom is a mass of heavy pipes and paint in thick bumps from many easy-going paintings. The window panes are generously paint-edged.

  I’m still smiling, but at the back of my mind I’m asking myself: can I live with this for a year? The floor depresses me, and the household equipment is basic and mysterious, but the last-minute paint-job shows the school wants the flat to look fresh and clean, and the simplicity is somehow peaceful. It doesn’t feel unfriendly.

  The teachers try to demonstrate the pieces of gadgetry. None of them work immediately, and though all eventually show some sign of life, the moments of triumph are shortlived. There’s intense interest and concern on the faces bent over the appliances, as they poke and twist and exclaim.

  The Principal and Deputy-Principal emerge unexpectedly out of the dark stairwell into the living room. The Principal’s plump face is beaded with the heat of the climb, while her Deputy wears his Hawaiian shirt over a comfortable paunch. I’m asked to sit down on a wooden slatted sofa grand enough for a royal family, while the Principal makes a speech of welcome through Hilda who’s to be my interpreter, a slim, uncertain, recent graduate in English from the nearby International Studies University. Hilda smiles at me and looks alarmingly vague as she translates in a high and wavery treble. The Principal exudes pleasantness and authority under some nervousness. The wearer of the Hawaiian shirt has a rich and confident voice, an air of enjoyment.

  The teachers stand around watching me and watching the Principal. They look me straight in the eye, friendly, without coyness, confident in themselves. I wonder if just being Chinese gives you this confidence. Would I feel some extra confidence if I shared my national identity with 1.3 billion people, instead of 3.5 million?

  Many things are on the way, the teachers promise – a phone, a television.

  ‘A microwave,’ someone says.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ they say, ‘and curtains, probably tomorrow.’

  I see them off finally, all smiling
and waving.

  ‘If you need anything,’ they say, ‘just come and get us.’

  ‘Have a very tight sleep,’ Hope says.

  I must see to my own needs. Until 2 am I stagger about in the unabated heat and unpack everything onto the generous range of shelves, where I can see all that came with me. I put up pictures on the walls, photos of New Zealand at its most beautiful, and some paintings sprung from Italian faith and art. At first the pictures look lost on the forbidding walls, and I panic; but as I step closer I walk into a Canterbury nor’wester blowing up behind a row of spring poplars, light catching the ridges of the ploughed paddock in front. I am reassured.

  The air conditioning roars like a dragon. I fiddle with the controls to try to adjust the fan, and all the electricity in the flat cuts out. Silence. The ceiling fan in the living room slows to a halt. Perhaps I’ve plunged the whole building into darkness. I go to inspect, but the clanking of the iron outer door sets off the bulb on the landing; it’s only the flat. I’ve found my torch and wonder if I can survive without air-conditioning until morning. It takes me three minutes, sweat running down my back, to know I can’t.

  Ellen lives on the floor below. In her singlet, she answers the door, cheerfully, throws on her dress and says: ‘I’ll find a workman.’

  Alongside the elaborate social conventions, there’s an ordinariness about life here, a laid-back approach, that I really like. I’m assuming this is an after-hours call, but perhaps work never stops here. In the rising brick building just twenty metres away, there is still chipping and hammering at 10.30 pm – not the full team perhaps, but some late worker or two within those empty sockets. A workman appears, talking with Ellen as though they are old friends. He smiles at me and throws a switch. The dragon starts up again and the fan stirs.

  When they’ve gone, I strip off and turn on the small plastic tap over the bowl in the floor, the only tap in the bathroom. It’s placed so the water falls into the lavatory to flush it. A thin tepid stream trickles into the stained ceramic pan, but it’s running water and it cools me. I believe it’s going to be alright. The appearance of the flat may be bleak and rather primitive, but I can live with that. I can’t live without air conditioning, and they can fix that. I can’t live without running water, but I can live with it dribbling out of a small tap into a well-used hole in the floor.

  I make some arrangement with the unfamiliar bedding on the double bed and fall on it. It’s firm and new and clean. The flat’s not dirty, just worn. The bed clothes have no cosmetic smells, but they’re soft. Before I sleep, I tell myself I can cope with this place.

  I haven’t yet learned to sleep on the part of the bed that collects the blast from the air conditioning, and I awake again at 6 am to a soft, rhythmic swooshing. On the ground below my bedroom balcony the sweepers have started on the paths and courtyards. I lie in bed for a moment enjoying the peaceful sound, then throw a shirt over my pajamas and walk across the gritty floor on to the balcony. Grey light’s growing but the heat’s been here all night. Silent figures appear round the side of the unfinished building, carrying enamel bowls. They walk slowly and look peaceful. It’s like watching a piece of forest floor, my eyes adjusting to see the life that moves there. A trestle in an empty window of the building stirs, and I realise there’s a body sleeping on it. I’m enjoying the intimacy of this world, being able to watch ordinary, everyday human life wake up around me. With no curtains on the windows there are only two corners of the flat, one beside the bed and one in the bathroom, where I can change my clothes without being observed by those in the buildings on either side. Exposure, surprisingly, doesn’t feel threatening here. Everywhere else it has. The atmosphere’s so different from home where, having the space to be private, we hide from one another.

  Bangs and clanks, like the sounds of couplings and wheels in a railway yard rise up from the city below. A stretch of road can be seen with its slow, patient chain: dusty bus, small red taxi, small red taxi, dusty bus …

  I was surprised last night, standing on the bedroom balcony looking towards the two classroom blocks, to see the lights still on there, well after 9.30 pm. Surely the school couldn’t expect its students to continue to study to that hour? I have a lot to learn about Chinese attitudes to education. Classes, I’ll find out, run from 7 am to noon, with half-an-hour for breakfast. Afternoon school finishes around 4.30. At 7 pm the students return to the classrooms for three evening classes. It’s a gruelling routine. The nearest approach to recreation seems to be the compulsory viewing of the news on television before evening classes. Lights go out at 10.30 pm but students study by torch-light in bed. I ask the teachers: ‘Don’t the students get very tired?’

  ‘Yes, they do, but they’re used to it.’

  Now at 6.20 am I can see balcony lights in the eight storey building that I guess is the students’ dormitory. From the outside it looks relatively modern and attractive, with its external stairways curling up the nearest wall. All students board here during the school week, and I wonder how 1200 students could possibly fit into that building and what life there would be like. I have to wait some weeks to find out.

  Beyond our accommodation, there’s a two storey brick building covered in creeper. This startling addition to the school’s range of architectural styles, with its deep eaves and settled air, wouldn’t be out of place in an English village. But the open balconies on the upper storey are a solid mass of lines of washing – I doubt if a breeze could pass through them. Occupancy must be frighteningly high on that floor. Hilda tells me that’s where she and the other young teachers are housed. There’s some sensitivity here about living conditions, so I don’t ask too much. In time, people will tell me what I need to know.

  In the half-dark there are some runners loping round the track. I expect there to be grass in the middle, but the whole sports ground is just a brown expanse within a ring of slender trees, with concrete tubs and benches around its rim. I realise I’ve always taken for granted stretches of green for my eye to rest on. For the next year I’ll have to find what visual relief I can in a few dusty leaves. I’ve no idea yet how precious they’ll become.

  The teachers continue to mention plans for a television, a phone, a toaster, a washing machine and a microwave for the flat. All I need is a chair, but this seems to be a problem. Finally, I take my interpreter into my room and watch her take in the up-ended suitcase with my towel on top standing beside the table.

  ‘Ooh – ooh,’ she says regretfully ‘You need a chair.’

  ‘Yes. The suitcase hurts my bottom.’

  She seems convinced at last.

  Eventually the chair arrives, three of them in fact.

  ‘That’ll keep her quiet,’ they must think.

  I walk over to the office the next evening to try to speak to someone about my new phone. It’s been an exciting day, as a sixty-strong delegation from other schools has visited our school (which is among the prestigious ‘key schools’ of Chongqing) perhaps to view teaching methods and equipment, perhaps to fulfil educational protocol. Most of the offices in the block are full of the delegates, lounging about smoking and shouting. I wonder whether – in this culture – purpose is always veiled. Something about my own familiarity with veiled purposes scampers across my mind, but I brush it away.

  In one room I find Anne.

  ‘You’re pleased with your phone?’

  ‘I like it very much.’ She’s delighted. ‘But I don’t have a number.’

  ‘Aah.’

  There’s a long consultation, then, with a sense of occasion:

  ‘Here’s your number – now you can use your phone and you can phone us all.’

  Ellen, as teachers’ overseer, comes to inspect the phone. It doesn’t work.

  ‘Why not?’ she wonders. ‘Perhaps tomorrow.’

  When the phone finally comes on stream, it shrills repeatedly with wrong-number calls, but the callers talk animatedly nonetheless. I launch myself into the flow to try to get the message acros
s, but they continue to express passionately … what? Is it amazement, bewilderment, or dissatisfaction with the telephone system, insistence that I’m the one who has the wrong number? It sounds even more like stubborn disbelief – the conviction that if they talk to me long enough I’ll turn into the person they want. After five or so minutes, I give up and put the phone down. Ellen later explains to me that the volume of wrong-number calls will relate to the large number of eights in my number. ‘Eight’ in Chinese sounds like ‘rich’:

  ‘Of course our fingers like to press that number.’

  ‘Of course.’ I smile, but my incredulity must surely be showing.

  There’s still no sign of the promised tape player. Deprived of my own music I feel my psyche rocking dangerously. Am I just being neurotic? My musical gifts aren’t exceptional. Why am I making such a fuss, internally, about spending a few weeks without string quartets? I begin singing to myself in desperation, but my raging thirst is for harmony. China, it seems, is satisfied by unison. At last it turns up, triumphantly borne into the flat by Anne and Ellen.

  ‘It’s very loud,’ they boast.

  It’s also a giant – all metal, very heavy to lift, with speakers the size of large dinner plates. When I plug it in there’s a terrible smell, sparks from the lead and then, sudden death. Eight ‘D’ batteries from a local shop restore it temporarily, and one day another lead appears. Replacements and repairs always seem to arrive just as I’ve decided I’ll have to live with the status quo. Perhaps I have to surrender first.