Under the Huang Jiao Tree Page 3
Before they leave, Anne and Ellen give urgent warnings about the water. If even they are afraid of it, it must be lethal. I also ask them about the smell like rotten eggs in the kitchen. It turns out to be the gas; I hadn’t turned it off at the main tap. They look at me anxiously, perhaps wondering if I have what it takes to survive all the hidden perils of Chinese life.
My ears are always hungrier than my eyes, and once I can play my own tapes I notice how richly the immediate neighbourhood is also feeding my ears. One afternoon, I come on a table of old women playing mah-jong under the trees in the courtyard. The click of ivory on ivory is musical, both light and substantial. The gnarled, wrinkled fingers are as deft – plucking tiles and sweeping sets together – as the hands of embroiderers. That evening, through the open window, a beautiful male voice rings out with operatic strength and fervour, a startling delight. Later, over the shouts of an arguing family across the landing soars the distant tribute of a trumpeter playing ‘Red River Valley’. There are some magnificent voices here. The men on the adjacent building site call each other using both names to identify one man among so many. Their long, loud cries echo in the brick vault. At lunchtime, exultant music over the loudspeaker system drowns out all these community sounds, presumably to energise any flagging spirits. It must be only coincidental that they play ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ one day when everyone’s cooking lunch. They follow it with ‘Volare’, the Grand March from ‘Aida’, then ‘Stand by your Man’. I wait, agog, chopsticks in the air, to hear what will come next.
That afternoon, Mrs Zhang, who will regularly clean the flat for me, arrives. A fine fierce woman with high-cheekbones she marches in, skirts swirling, smiles and shouts at me as she walks through each room on a tour of inspection.
‘Hao, hao,’ she pronounces with satisfaction. ‘Good.’
Is that a comment on how I’m housed or how tidy I am? Although my living space is only about forty square metres – the two doors off the living room are locked – I’m glad she’s coming. The rag mop in the bathroom, the only cleaning implement, is heavy, always sopping wet, and in my hands only pushes the dirt from one place to another. As Mrs Zhang swishes it about like a racing octopus her verve makes it look effective. I feel myself moving from grudging acceptance to real respect. The equipment and fittings in the flat take time and effort to deal with, but they’re more economical and sensible than I first thought. A lot of our Western household equipment and routines could, by comparison, be seen as criminally wasteful and unnecessarily complex.
As she leaves, Mrs Zhang shouts something cheerful, smiles and looks me in the eye. I’ve learned from my predecessor that every foreign teacher here has a minder, someone who discreetly checks on what they’re up to in their flat. In this political climate it’s quite reasonable – after all, we have the ears of their young people and could, if we were so inclined, fill them with all sorts of political or religious irritants. My predecessor was dismissed for keeping a stash of bibles in her cupboard and other instances of failing to toe the party line. Mrs Zhang must have found the bibles.
From my bedroom balcony I look down on the courtyard between my block and the building for teachers’ families. There are trees like young colts – all legs – and concrete walks bordering garden beds edged with waxy flowers. In this courtyard, the teachers’ children play, and when there’s a breeze the shadows of the leaves move lightly on their backs. Watchful hens peck in the rusty soil. From the stairs, I hear other hens clucking behind the doors of one of the flats, while the pot, doubtless, boils. On a balcony, noisy budgies, shrill as Chinese opera, swing in wicker cages, and somewhere on the school grounds there’s a rooster. He starts up in the morning just before the patriotic music, giving a croaky, despairing howl, like an asthmatic old man. As the light strengthens, he’s joined by a dog barking.
These scraps of the natural world have, even in a few days, become vital. I’m used to living in a home wrapped by garden – brushing a rose bush with my sleeve as I open the garage door, watching shadows of gum leaves thrown by street lights on my bedroom curtains at night, hanging out the washing among whistling starlings, cats creeping along the fence tops. From the living room balcony here I face out into the city, towers and humps of angular grey and brown, harsh to the eye, smelling only of people, food and machines. In the months ahead, whenever I feel dessicated and sandpapered by the city this balcony opens upon, I retreat to the balcony over the courtyard where a little dusty green and the few small animals and birds spared from today’s pot suggest a gentler world.
And I do love the simplicity of the life around me; I love it. Most of the life I see here is a personal transaction between people, or between people and their environment. I watch gardeners watering plants with a ladle. The life looks so real, so good. I want to have a simple life like this. But how can I? I’m dreaming. I’m too soft, too complicated, the knowledge of how to live simply has been bred out of me. Education and affluence have left me unfit for what I long for. How would I get on without books, antibiotics, travel? This longing for simplicity, real and painful as it may feel, must be no more than wishful thinking. Surely what I’m really looking at is poverty, with its enforced ignorance, and social inequality. I’ve never known why Francis of Assisi spoke so tenderly of Lady Poverty when he knew the reality of poverty. Poverty is painful, pinched of all hope. It’s a long, grey, empty day with a sick headache, the smell of drains, children crying. In the end it makes you invisible. I just wish it would stop looking so beautiful. Do the Chinese gardeners still occasionally see beauty as well as necessity in their lives? Do poverty, simplicity and beauty somehow have their arms around each other’s shoulders? I know that poverty often has simplicity forced upon it, but why is simplicity beautiful to me? Maybe it makes me feel simple too. I enjoy that. I’m tired of being digitally summonsed, by my world, to worship complexity.
But how could I even imagine embracing simplicity in my life in New Zealand while I continue to flail ineptly against the flood of communications I invite. I writhe within the coils of my conflicting relationships and colliding sympathies, my dissonant beliefs and divergent directions. The only point of connection between any of the parts of my life, it seems, is myself. And that self is such an uneasy entity – I shy away from looking too closely at it. I’ve heard people – people who should know – say that the quest for self-knowledge is a sort of selfishness. If you don’t poke the self, it won’t bite; lose yourself instead in the other, or better still the Other. They must be right – I know from experience the fruits of trying to make sense of what’s going on inside me: I’m left with a pile of little wheels and shafts, screws and washers, plates and winders, a watch face and arms – but nowhere is there a manual for building a new watch. The self seems to me an inexplicable mess and an embarrassment, and nobody wants to hear about it. Better to ignore it, pretend it’s not there. The self is odd, the self is different, and who wants to assert that they’re different? Anyway, isn’t that giving yourself airs? The surfaces of life, on the other hand, are safe, I’ve learned. They’re acceptable, common to all sensibilities, respectable. If you have to give an account of your life, it’s wiser to stay in behind the camera and talk about the weather.
CHAPTER
TWO
BUREAUCRACY AND
CHINESE TIME
Ellen comes to collect me at 7.15 am for a necessary visit to the Chongqing Health Department for Foreigners. As I’d taken all the tests specified by the school before I left home, and have all the certification, I don’t know why. We have to leave early, as the school driver is afraid of traffic jams, but we get caught in one anyway, and sit for twenty minutes in the clogged artery while the driver chats and smokes and hums to the car radio. He’s obviously used to this. Eventually the car moves, and I watch hair-raising tactics in the traffic. There are few private cars, and most have tinted windows that hide the privileged from the world of taxis, buses and motorbikes.
Ellen is in charge of tea
chers’ affairs. I imagine this will bring us into regular contact and wonder how we’ll get on. She has a sort of brilliance, with long wavy hair flowing free down her back and white teeth giving her constant smile extra power. She watches me and listens carefully. I suspect she’s asking herself: ‘What will this woman need to make her happy within our system, so she won’t make trouble?’
She tells me she hates the endless meetings at school, but I wonder if she’s just making liberal noises to help me feel comfortable in this strongly regimented world. She taught in Queensland for a year and knows that Down-Under we’ll buck systems if they pinch. She desires to please, but I don’t think she’ll let me over her doorstep, and she never does.
We pass through a district of small shops. Ellen explains: ‘The government owns the shops, and the shopkeepers pay about 700 yuan each month for rent.’
I try to work this out in New Zealand dollars, but already I feel that there’s something in this culture, and this currency, that defies simple translation into any other.
Ellen works part of her time teaching English, the other part (unpaid) in school administration. She’s told that she must do this to serve. During the school week she lives with her parents – retired teachers – in their flat within the school grounds. At the weekends she goes to be with her husband who’s in charge of Chongqing’s second TV channel, and lives with his parents. Both partners in the marriage have good jobs, but having their own apartment doesn’t seem to be a priority. What is? Duty to parents perhaps? I’d like to know, but I don’t know Ellen well enough yet to ask. She tells me, with pride, that her brother is in the army, writing propaganda. The word clearly has no negative connotations here.
At the Health Department we find that the medical tests undergone at some expense in New Zealand are disregarded; they simply don’t trust them. It’s a lot of money wasted.
‘Take it easy,’ Ellen says anxiously, wanting no outbursts as she tries to fast-track everything through an official her husband met in the army. All the rooms are vast, three parts empty, with a white-uniformed doctor presiding over one measuring or testing machine of chilling antiquity. They’re extremely careful, in spite of a constant flow of conversation with Ellen. I turn to her to make a joke as they take blood, and I am surprised at the concern on her face. Is it over the safety of the procedures, or concern I might throw a Western wobbly? The staff’s gowns have blood on them, and used swabs go in an enamel bowl overflowing with others. I watch the syringe fill darkly. I must wait several days for the results of these tests, but I come away with a certificate covering my observable self. It has ‘normal’ written against all my categories except ‘nourishment’ which is ‘good’ – I’m one of the privileged in this world.
I’d expected to be thrown straight into teaching when I arrived, but Ellen tells me they’ll give me five days to settle in and get used to the climate. I appreciate this gentle introduction. It seems to promise the luxury of hours to myself to walk around the neighbourhood getting my bearings, and to read and write, but I find that these five days are really time in a holding pen, while a number of city authorities pass me under close bureaucratic scrutiny to decide whether I’m fit to live and teach here.
Ellen and I again hoot and weave our way through downtown Chongqing, this time to the Police Station. I need a Foreigner’s Residence Permit. When we arrive, the office is closed for the Chongqing siesta, so we wait with a dozen others in a narrow street where huang jiao trees – temperers of Chongqing’s vicious summer heat – meet overhead. There’s a large pile of rubbish in the middle of the footpath – marrow peelings, plastic bags, a bowl with the bottom rusted out, and the head of a white rabbit with its ears still pink and fresh.
Eventually the office opens. The officials enjoy their uniforms and have serious faces, but three are reading newspapers, having just motioned people to seats to wait. A woman saunters away with my completed forms and drifts back some time later, saying she forgot to take one of the forms with her, and then retraces her steps, yawning. Slowly, I’m being given an identity made of rubber stamps. They tell me I need two more identification photos. That makes ten for this trip. Can it be so difficult to persuade them I am who I am? It’s making me wonder if I know.
On the way back to school, we see a man mending guitars on a footpath, and beside him a deformed being lying on a dirty rag, able only to raise his head, his tin beside him. As our car purrs past him, I sit deep in its comfortable seats. What separates him from me is much more than glass, and I realise I’m not going to be able to hide from the inequalities here. I’m beginning to feel uneasy about my privileged life, but I’ll just have to get over it. I can’t exist here for twelve months under a pall of guilt for living a great deal more comfortably than most. I’m not tough enough to survive here without some cushioning.
To get the necessary photos, we walk down the oldest street in Shiqiaopu. Stall-keepers are selling cloth shoes, wellupholstered bras, Rolex watches, fancy belts and promising keys. There are glittering knives, whole trestle tables of mahjong sets, mysterious sets of local playing cards in which tigers feature. Alongside calculators by the barrow load are golden apples and spinach glistening with Chongqing’s terrifying water. I notice a shop that has carbon paper; this may be useful, as I believe the school photocopier has been broken almost continuously for three years. Food, scarlet with chillies, is being cooked in woks and we weave a crooked path to avoid the rickety tables and steaming pots. The virtues of the restaurants are announced by lively promoters standing outside. Men are using a bamboo stick, gently, to corral a soft huddle of a dozen doomed ducks. Trestles of hanks of wool from the mountainous west almost block the lane.
Opposite a lavatory, very obvious from downwind, there are fortune tellers, squatting in the dust – one missing an eye, another a hand. It seems a last resort job, a job for when you no longer have strength or resources. It is, nonetheless, serious business, and these peddlers of hope have their clients’ full attention.
Along the middle of the street, a man with a withered leg propels himself through the dust and calls for money. As he passes, he gives me a quick glance, then doubles back to follow just behind me, keeping up his call. I see his tin holds many notes, small, soft as velvet. How much do others give? As I put a note in the tin I see most are the same colour. He thanks me courteously. All the stall keepers are watching.
There is always someone watching – everywhere I go. I can feel their eyes in my back. It’s not threatening, but it’s unnerving. I’m not used to being public property.
I’ve always clutched privacy closely to me. When the children were young, the routines of country life gave our family little room to develop separate interests. Whether it was skeet shooting, visiting grandma, buying sheep drench or swimming lessons, the whole family piled into the car and we went together, like it or not. In our years lived among hills and paddocks, we built up a large bank of shared family outings, enjoyed or just endured. All the hours spent together in exhilaration, irritation, amusement, affection and boredom built a strong fabric. But we seldom had friends or family to stay in our home. Perhaps we didn’t have the right sort of domestic confidence for that; perhaps we just needed space. When we did bundle the children into bunks to make a spare bed for a visitor, I felt an unusual happiness. I had treasured memories of waking up in other people’s homes cradled in their crisp best sheets and hearing the scarcely-believable clink of a breakfast tray approaching the bedroom door. Could we give our visitor something good to remember too? I wasn’t sure what. While there was anyone extra under our roof, I couldn’t sleep. I’d lie awake, at first thinking gratefully of the guest who was content to roost with us, but later tossing and turning, sleep coming only in fitful snatches and dislocated dreams. I was staying on guard, but was I guarding the guest or myself? I decided, not happily, that I must be too private a person to relax into hospitality and shared living, but the warm attraction of enjoying a larger community haunted me.
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sp; I find I can’t be a private person in China; there’s not enough space, and I’m not sure those around me even know what privacy is, let alone put a value on it. Teenage boys, practising their English at my flat, will companionably follow me into the bedroom if I go there to get a book or a tape. My cultural conditioning tells me this is not on, yet it’s both endearing and amusing, and I feel accepted – which is surprisingly reassuring. I can hardly find space in the flat to dress unobserved, the stall-keepers all quietly watch me pass, but if I’m honest I not only feel no threat but actively like this sense of connection. I feel very little of the familiar impulse to hide myself, or anything else.
What’s happening to my privacy? Is it dying because there’s no provision for it in this environment and culture, or am I learning I don’t need it after all?
I’m still courting legitimacy in the city and in the school. Now I need a work permit. Another trip to the central city – this time to the City Foreign Affairs Department, a vast marble statement, almost deserted – is fruitless. After a long wait, we’re told that, as the school hasn’t yet managed to get my contract completed by the International Studies University we’ll have to go to the University the next day for the necessary signatures. Economy of action can’t be high on anyone’s list. I wonder what is on the top of their lists.
The next afternoon, Boris, the Russian teacher, and I duly travel, together with our interpreters, to the University at Shapingba, twenty minutes away in distance plus forty-five minutes in traffic jams. There are few traffic lights or officers – it’s all patience and ingenuity. Faint traces of zebra crossings can just be picked out here and there. I ask Hilda: ‘Is it safer to cross there?’