How to Be a Revolutionary Page 3

  “When did the walls develop those cracks?”

  “What cracks? Oh, yes.”

  “And the plants? Didn’t we have a band of blue hydrangeas running behind the wall once?”

  “Did we? Nothing but dust now.”

  And then quite suddenly we were immersed: the war within and without. Andrew joined a practice that was actively, litigiously, opposed to government.

  “You know by sticking with this regime, with them, you’re letting the people down, right?” he’d say, flippantly enough so it seemed that my work was a minor annoyance to him. In fact, it sank to the centre of our relationship. Andrew was unforgiving once we began to see friends swayed by the lure of personal wealth or power. When a colleague I’d known since the early days of our careers, on the same salary scale, stepped out of a new Land Rover and began alternating a rainbow collection of Ozwald Boateng suits, Andrew condemned the man to whomever would listen, while for me—yes, yes, I confess—it felt like a greater betrayal to turn on him. After all, we had once shared such an intimate dream as freedom (perhaps the most elemental dream of all). Weren’t we the ones who had created this new country? So no, I said nothing to our seniors. The work was all I’d truly known, I said by way of an apology to Andrew. Anyway, how could anyone walk away from a past that had fused us all together, the heroic and the duplicitous, whatever their shortcomings?

  “Corruption, not shortcomings,” Andrew said, “and by the way these were the same comrades that kicked you to the curb?”

  “You know the reasons … how it almost broke me. Anyway, all was forgiven …”

  “You make it sound like family and not a political party.”

  “Maybe it is family …”

  He always had the last word.

  I was dragging the past around with me, placing it in the centre of our lives, in fact there was a third entity in our love which really when you thought about it, this presence, this ghost had affected, no, shaped and reshaped everything so why look anywhere but to the past for a solution but no, please don’t answer that I mean just don’t. Slam.

  I never did.

  But what did Andrew know? He was an inconsistent man, careless in certain ways but resolute in others. He lost things: his wallet and driver’s license, twice each; he abandoned the Jewish faith into which he’d been born, misplaced pens and forgot appointments. He’d even lost his sense of humour. Yet when it came to people, he was exacting to a fault, accepting neither perceived weaknesses, nor moral incertitude, at least as he saw them.

  ~

  With Zhao that Shanghai morning I went through the motions of the cultural training I’d received, thanking the waitress and Zhao, taking care to flatter him on his choice of teahouse.

  “No need … I understand you Westerners think to compliment pleases the Chinese mind,” he said, so I blushed at how he’d uprooted the platitudes and at his own ones too.

  “I’m South African. Maybe we’re both mistaken … but, really, this weather,” I said, fanning away a frown as much as the heat.

  He didn’t reply immediately; silence didn’t seem to perturb him, and only after a minute or more had passed did his voice start up again, in dark rich tones. I didn’t understand the Mandarin but knew from the weight of the words, their cadences, that he was reciting poetry.

  “You know Du Fu?” he asked, when he was done.

  “I do not.”

  “Tsst.” He shook his head. “This is for us like Shakespeare. I know also in English:

  It is fine to go boating in the setting sun,

  the light breeze is slow to raise ripples.

  The bamboo is deep, with places that detain the guests,

  four lotuses washed clean, the moment we enjoy the cool.

  The young nobles flavor iced waters,

  the fair women pull off lotus tendrils.

  Then a patch of cloud grows black overhead—

  the rain will surely hurry our poems’ completion.

  If there’d been momentary unease at his falling into poetry, or at his blunt observations, it drifted off and all that was left were fragile verses on that summer morning.

  “Lovely. I imagine better still in Mandarin.”

  “Course! Chinese Tang poetry is very complex, difficult, every character very important, but only seven lines. Tone very crucial,” he said.

  Overhead, the city had awoken within its own wonder. A roof glinted, a cloud hooked on a spire, a sky-high pearl gleamed as a barge sounded below.

  Zhao said, “Some of these buildings so ugly. That one: pineapple, that one crazy English lady hat, that one bottle opening …”

  “Bottle opener …” I suggested.

  “Bottle opening,” he confirmed. And then, as if I had just mentioned it,

  “… Melancholy: this word sits inside my chest.”

  “Yes,” I agreed.

  4

  CHINA

  1958

  When last I saw my mother the plum rain season was at its end. She stood at the door twisting a skirt that had washed to grey and waved me away with her free hand, all the while eyeing the distance that devoured me in fractions.

  My village was dying or already dead: not just its people but every living thing. First the animals had gone. Then grain and rice. And when those were gone, the insects, followed by plants and grass. Soon after, the bark vanished from the trees.

  And then there was nothing.

  What had happened to absolutely everything, you ask? Well, it was eaten of course. Who by? Well, the people themselves!

  But where are my manners? Allow me to give you a tour, so you can see what I once saw. The Chinese countryside in my home province is the most beautiful in all the world. Granite rocks turn to gold as the sun crosses over peaks pointing repeatedly to the heavens, while soft downy clouds wrap those mountains. But why trust me? You can see these images in almost any traditional Chinese painting. In my most beautiful province you will also find ancient villages built during the Ming and Qing dynasties. Picture if you will the traditional Chinese village of your dreams (or from the movie that Chinese find boring, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) with its sloping-jutting roofs, a mountain for its back and a river for its mouth. Ancient residences dating back almost one thousand years. Pay attention to the latticework, the intricate carvings, archways, beams and columns. Step carefully on the black or pink cobblestones that line the many lanes that weave together this ancient village. They have been beneath the feet for so long.

  Now, cast your eyes to the places that cannot be seen. Behind there … no further, deeper, darker: yes there. My village was stuck between others. Still today no one visits unless they are lost or compelled to visit family during the annual New Year’s celebrations. No, my village was not the China of pictures and poems.

  Our houses, made of stone and thatch, were located close enough to the wheat fields that one could roll out of bed and land feet first in muck, wasting not a moment by walking to work.

  But see now. I ramble about the past like an old man, though my memory is filled with holes. At least I have the books I have kept all these years to fill the great gaping voids. It is not one book that I have used to record the days and years, you understand, but many. You might call it a diary but I never could. It is nothing so precious. My little black book (the joke’s on me) was kept first so I might recount the events to my mother when she reappeared. Then, because I needed to recall them for myself.

  I was away at school when I received news to come home quickly. Aunty, who had helped raise me and was sister to my beloved mother, was sick and would not live past the harvesting of the wheat. I dropped everything and left as soon as I could. Food by then was already scarce, but I took my ration of rice, begged for and borrowed more, so even the woman at the school canteen took pity and gave me extra.

  It was 1958 then, one decade after the communists had taken control of China. The land that had once belonged to the wealthy landowners had been confiscated soon after the rev
olution, and first divided between us peasants in equal measure. But they had a change of heart (don’t they always?) and decided they had better control all of it, so soon collectivization was instituted. Mind you, Mother’s and Aunty’s lives were better than they had ever been, there was food enough for everyone, they had their cherished son and they had been newly liberated from peasantry.

  I reached our village after hours of travel. I approached our home after the long dusty walk, and my eyes fell on Aunty visible through the open doorway. If not yet dead, she was hardly alive. The jacinth skin which had once stretched across her flesh now drooped from her bones like badly sewn cloth. She looked at me with such sorrow, yet her body was so dehydrated, so starved of nourishment, that her eyes declined to tear.

  Together Mother and I cooked congee. No matter, for it was all too late and Aunty died later that same day as we sat beside her, weeping for every day we had spent in her company and every lost day to come.

  Mother promised that she would leave the very next day, after a decent meal of the rice I’d brought. She said she wanted to mourn before burying Aunty, and only then would she go to stay with family at the county seat, just on the other side of the mountain, where surely such a cruel and heartbreaking fate, such hunger—a famine for the ages—did not await her. She insisted that I should return to school immediately and assured me of her safety despite my reluctance to let her go alone. Why could I not wait and see that she was safe? Deliver her there myself? But no, she was adamant that she was still my mother, and I, as her child, must obey. She promised she would leave soon. In my grief I suppose I must have conceded.

  ~

  Do my memories of old village life deceive me?

  I swear on summer evenings after we’d eaten, bathed, and tidied up, we’d sit outside exchanging stories from the Qing dynasty with our neighbours. During the ripening of the plums everyone was in a festive mood, and we would admire the fruit trees and birdsong, all the while gossiping or listening carefully for news carried from the county seat, where the administrative and political offices were located.

  During those golden evenings my mother and Aunty would spend hours arguing about who the better poet was: Li Bai or Du Fu, beloved since the eighth century and known to all Chinese from childhood. Aunty insisted it was Li Bai by virtue of him being the older, and so the true and original genius. But Mother never tolerated such talk. No, Du Fu never accepted his lot in life, he fought the corrupt and spoke his mind. Aunty would always tap Mother quietly on the leg when the conversation took such a turn. It was not the time for complaints of such a nature unless one wanted to find oneself before a struggle session, guilty of rightist thinking. Everyone knew what happened at the dreaded sessions—it happened for all to see—those who strayed from the path of the revolution (or complained about the land that had been given to peasants only to be taken away again so soon) were brought before the crowds to be chastised, kicked, and often beaten, some dying for their inability to hold true to communist ideals.

  I must scour this little book of mine to see evidence of what I thought; what I must have felt about the things that happened all around me. What my memory is in no doubt about is that I believed without question that disloyalty was not to be tolerated if it stood between us and our collective dream of freedom. China was undergoing a radical transformation from a humble agrarian economy to an industrialized nation. The Great Leap Forward. After one hundred years of imperialism we Chinese had felt, been, utterly downtrodden, but we were no longer on our knees. We rejoiced at the freedom the Communist Party had brought, giving us back ourselves. Not for a moment did I consider Aunty’s death, and what I would soon understand to be my mother’s disappearance, as anything more than personal tragedies brought on by that devastating famine.

  Neither the little black book nor my memory disagrees on this fact: I believed, most solemnly, in the Chinese people and our national project.

  5

  SHANGHAI

  I’d been in the city for three months when our regular walks began. I told myself we became friends by coincidence: bumped into each other on the stairwell, saw each other by chance in the garden, fell in step going the same way. Maybe this was more believable than the reality that we both needed someone to walk beside, to speak with about more than the price of a piece of fruit. It wasn’t his charm. I suspected he’d say the same about me.

  Anyway, the solitary walks had become too much. Too filled with thoughts about Andrew, how I’d left, what should happen next, my wondering what or who was to blame. Ideology? Places of work? Or that Andrew had simply met someone else and it was easier to blame me than be truthful. Finally, unable to sleep one night, I emailed him: “I left and you let me go. And I suppose, after that, what remained?” The honesty, accusation perhaps, aimed away from me, allowed some of the murk to begin to dissipate. At least it was a partial unburdening, one that permitted a look ahead, or, at least, elsewhere.

  ~

  One Sunday, weeks after Zhao and I had tea, I saw him roaming the park across the road, head hung low. He saw me enter the garden, slowed, and with hardly any kind of greeting beckoned me over.

  “I was just on my way out,” I said. “I’m going to Xintiandi. Do you want to come along?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Oh.”

  “Too many tourists drinking coffee.”

  “You don’t like coffee?”

  “Also tourists. Anyway, Xintiandi not really Shanghai.”

  “What?” I said. It was very much Shanghai. Every tourist brochure, every expat meet-up mentioned the old alleyways with some reverence as being exactly what the city had once looked like.

  “Rubbish. Xintiandi. Disneyland. Same.”

  “Oh.”

  “Come,” he said, brightening by degrees and offering to take me on a walk in an effort at my re-education. To pull the blinkers from my Western eyes, he said, or something like that beneath an elaborate grumble. We soon found ourselves walking down narrow lanes that I’d consciously, or worse, unconsciously avoided in all those months. He said I’d been too arrogant to truly understand the city, to walk into its heart, and I didn’t say so, but feared that I had been too squeamish, put off by the city’s mysterious odours, its dangling washing, its people sitting around evaluating us foreigners warily. Because I was no stranger to poor neighbourhoods hidden in a city’s folds, I accepted his scolding.

  From a narrow alleyway, deep in the shadows of the vertical city, we stepped through an arched opening in a huge stone wall and emerged into a courtyard. A handful of elderly people milled about in their summer pajamas, immersed in the ordinary drama of life: playing cards, talking and drinking tea among their collective detritus—bicycles, plastic wash basins, floor mops, a chair or two holding up, it seemed, all of Shanghai’s unused things. A violin was being plucked somewhere in the background, the same notes over and over again. The old folk stopped momentarily to watch us. What a strange combination we must’ve made: a man of their generation who might have sat with them on any other day and a younger non-Chinese woman who was … well, what would they think of my ancient mash-up, courtesy of multiple continents? A hint of Asia around the eyes. The extra-thick hair in the ponytail, that mouth, that nose? Asian-African-European? Anyway, not Chinese (or maybe more generously: striking as Andrew had always said—never beautiful—oblivious of the sting).

  “Shanghai,” Zhao said.

  Behind the group of people stood an elegant and ancient building, nature breaking through intermittently as pot plants and flowers in bloom.

  Everyone went back to their business after cursory greetings. A woman washed vegetables at an open sink complaining, I think, to no one in particular about nothing especially troubling. A young woman, straddling a toddler trying to climb her legs or swing from her arms every few moments, hung washing as she laughed and sang a song in Mandarin to the tune of “Frere Jacques.”

  “Where are we?”

  “Shikumen lilong: proper ol
d neighbourhood, with Chinese and Western characteristic,” he said. “Outside courtyard is Chinese, but house like in the West, no?”

  They were narrow row houses, three floors high.

  “The building with European influence, Chinese feng shui. And now, one family is on every floor. Maybe twenty families in here.”

  We walked further into the maze of little streets, curiously cut off from the clamour of the city just behind the thick stone wall, metres away. Zhao stopped every once in a while to point out something: a typically European column or gable, or an intricate Chinese wooden lattice embellishing a walkway that belonged to another era.

  “Many Chinese families live here together and social together.”

  “Socialize together …”

  “Yes, social together. See your neighbours when you cook. Talk any time of day. Many families with one heart.”

  “Why do you live in a compound with so many expats?” I asked. The rest of the city was a grid of apartment blocks, lining street after street with units stacked perpetually above the other, it seemed, and neighbours might not know each other at all, aside from the occasional meeting in a stairwell or elevator.

  “Life like this kind, but sometimes busy. Cannot think, work.”

  I didn’t have the courage to ask Zhao if that work included the typing I’d once heard, but no longer did, as we went on our way.

  “Why weren’t these demolished?” I asked, testing ground gingerly. I knew, and he never needed to say, that certain things were out of bounds. Any talk of Chinese politics, for instance, or derogatory mention of Chairman Mao. This was simply how it was between most Chinese and foreigners, a veil hung between certain subjects: the 1989 massacre in Tiananmen Square, the Dalai Lama, Tibet. One didn’t know where another stood, only that discussion would not be welcomed, was maybe forbidden for a Chinese citizen.