Iron and Silk (9 page)

We rowed downstream for about half an hour, talking the whole way, though he often had to say things a few times for me to understand him. He tried to speak Mandarin for my benefit, but his Changsha accent made it almost incomprehensible. He seemed most interested in hearing songs from my country. I sang a few lines of this and that as he rowed and asked him if he liked them. “They’re not bad, but not as good as Hunan folk songs!” “Would you sing one for me?” “Of course!” I leaned back in the boat and put my arms behind my head while he sang. His broken voice was the perfect instrument for the exquisitely frail melodies, and
certainly I could not have heard them under better circumstances.

He stopped singing to point something out to me. Near the river bank, not far ahead, a cluster of five or six boats like his floated together, connected by ropes. “My family!” he said, then urged me to crawl under the bamboo roof. “Don’t come out until I tell you!” He rowed up to the flotilla, tied his boat to one of the others and exchanged a few words with someone before winking at me and telling me to come out. I crawled out and stood up. Ten or eleven men and women, young and old, sat together around a portable charcoal stove eating a mid-morning snack. One by one they looked up, and I could see the paralysis hit like a wave until it reached the youngest child, not more than three years old, who burst into tears. My friend doubled over with laughter, and as soon as he could speak he blurted out, “There’s more—he talks!” This time I hit them with the smile and the speech all at once, and the effect was stupendous. Before I knew it, I had more food than I could eat in a week set in front of me, the men crowding around me shaking my hands and slapping my shoulders with joy, the women asking me questions all at the same time, and the children fighting to get in line to touch me.

My friend, who called himself Old Ding, was the only one among them able to approximate the sounds of Mandarin, so I couldn’t understand a word anyone was saying. I smiled a great deal, though, and that was enough. I became their new friend, and they indicated with sincerity that what was theirs was now also mine. That morning I learned to row their boats, cast a “flower net,” as they called it, and set up the larger nets that are pulled shut by two, three, or sometimes six boats.

Around noon I reminded Old Ding that I had a two-thirty
class, so I should be getting back. He, one of his brothers and I hopped into the smallest boat, and after I had said goodbye to the family and promised to return, we started upstream. The Xiang River runs fast, so even with the brothers taking turns rowing vigorously, it took us an hour and a half to get back to the city limits, where my bicycle was parked. The brother had a huge barrel chest, a scarred face and a moustache that made me think of Fu Manchu. He didn’t speak so much as growl, or so it seemed to me, and every once in a while he leaned forward to slap me on the shoulder, nearly propelling me out of the boat. He smiled at me, gnashed his teeth and growled. “What is he saying?” I asked Old Ding. “He says he likes you and wants to wrestle! My brother likes to wrestle!”

Before letting me ashore, they insisted that we have one more adventure. A big river boat was anchored in the middle of the river, dredging up silt from the riverbed and dropping it onto flat tugboats that carried it to shore. Old Ding knew the crew and suggested that we stop by and say hello. We rowed alongside the boat and got on quietly. None of the crew saw us, for they were all in the cabin relaxing during xiuxi. The three of us walked into the cabin, me last of all. The captain was the first to look up. He opened his mouth but was unable to speak, and his cigarette fell from his lower lip into his bowl of rice, where it sizzled loudly. Once the initial shock and frenzy died down, the captain gave me a tour of his boat. He told me that he remembered the American soldiers from the Second World War very well. With great emotion in his voice, he repeated over and over how good it was of them to help China. At last, he managed to say “USA!” in English, and gave me the thumbs-up sign.

Eventually we left the river boat and the brothers took me to where I had first gotten on. Only after I agreed to accept
the two biggest fish in the hold did they let me ashore. They stood in the boat waving for as long as I could see them, yelling after me that I should come back soon to play, that all I had to do was walk by the river and I would find them. To avoid arriving late for class, I rode directly to the classroom, where I had a difficult time explaining to my doctor students how I came to possess two giant fish that still breathed when I set them on my desk. Every few minutes, just as the curious whispering had died down and we began to go over the lesson, one of the fish would leap into the air and land with a loud slap on the floor. On my way home, I gave the fish to Teacher Wei and told her of my day with the fisherman. She nodded slowly as I told it, and when I had finished, she smiled. “The fishing people are very honest, and very kind. You see how well they treat you? That is the Chinese way. They are common people, but they understand manners better than we intellectuals, who are now cautious and tired.”

Two hours later she walked into my room with a covered pot and put it on my desk. It contained one of the fish, cooked to perfection in a spicy Hunan sauce. “Of course,” she said as she hurried out, “we intellectuals can still do a pretty good job.”

I
t started with an argument about Nastassia Kinski’s lips.
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
was playing in Changsha, and I asked the small group of doctors and teachers from my class what they thought of it. We had just finished an outstanding meal cooked by two of the doctors, husband and wife, and were now relaxing in their small apartment, drinking tea and trying to digest seventeen dishes shared among eight people. The doctors beat around the bush for a while, calling the movie “interesting” and “full of characters,” but eventually confessed that they had not enjoyed it much. Among the disappointments of this movie, they said, was that Miss Kinski, the star, was not beautiful. “You can’t be serious,” I said, but they were, and their complaint was specific: her lips were too big. “They aren’t big,” I said, “they are full.” “Then they are too full,” they replied. According to Chinese taste, a woman’s lips should be small and delicate. I told them that Westerners consider full lips to be very good, and they asked, “Good for what?”

Middle-aged Chinese intellectuals, I found, do not talk about kissing much. If an American raises the subject, though, it becomes a matter of cultural exchange, and can be discussed in the name of international cooperation. “For kissing,” I said. They all exploded into laughter and decided aloud that I was a “very, very naughty boy.” They seemed in a fine mood for cultural exchange, so I mentioned that, since coming to China, I had never seen two people kiss each other, even in the movies, except for mothers kissing their infant children. Their eyes opened wide and they nodded
vigorously. “Of course not! Here in China, it is very different from your country. People don’t kiss here.” This I found hard to believe, and asked them if they meant not at all, or just in public. Here lay the boundary of cultural exchange, for suddenly there was an embarrassed spell of throat-clearing and teacup refilling. I didn’t want the conversation to turn back to “Can you tell us the secret of learning English?” so I groped for safer material. “What about parents? Do they kiss their children after they grow up?” One or two of the doctors said no, only when they are infants. You shouldn’t kiss children after they are two or three years old. And there ended our discussion, for the Small Group Leader of the class, a Party member, pulled out a grammar textbook and began pointing out contradictions.

By ten o’clock most of the guests had gone home, leaving only the hosts, myself and Teacher Liu. I thought it odd that Teacher Liu remained, for of all the students in that class, he was the most shy and the most self-conscious about speaking English. He wrote fairly well, but I had probably heard his voice only three or four times all semester, and he hadn’t said anything that night but had sat quietly and looked downward the whole time. He seemed such a gentle man, with greying hair and a reddish glow to his nose after drinking a thimbleful of baijiu; I wanted to speak with him now that the more aggressive talkers had left. He declined to answer my questions, though, looking even further downward, smiling and waving his hand—he was ashamed of his English. Then the husband and wife excused themselves to start cleaning up in the kitchen, but invited us to stay as long as we liked to finish our tea. I waited for Teacher Liu’s cue to leave, but he didn’t move. The doctors left the room, and I could see that Teacher Liu was thinking about something and trying to form the words silently. I said in Chinese that
he could speak Chinese now, the English party was over, but he gestured for me to be patient. Then, very slowly, and with great precision, he said, “Teacher Mark. Do you remember? We said that we do not kiss our children after they are big. You are an honest, and you are my teacher. So I must be an honest, your student. As to kissing, this is not always true. I have two daughters. One is twelve and one is ten. I cannot kiss them, because they would feel embarrassment and they would call me a foolish. But every night, after they are asleep, I go into their room to turn off the light. In fact, very quiet, very soft, I kiss them and they don’t know.”

O
ld Sheep’s responsibilities gave her, in addition to the keys to our rooms, daily opportunities to get to know us better. In the mornings, when she came in to dust and fill my thermos with hot water, she created such a flurry of movement and noise that I inevitably found myself drawn out of my work and into conversation with her. She always wore a white surgical cap pulled halfway down over her eyes, her strong teeth bared in a huge smile, and carried several tin buckets that crashed together as she walked. She would explode through my door and into the room, greet me in Mandarin—“Ni hao!”—prolonging each syllable for several seconds with her voicebox turned up all the way, wait for my response, then laugh in whoops. With that out of her system, she usually asked me what I had eaten for breakfast, told me it was not nearly enough and that I worked too hard, then related the latest gossip.

Naturally I was curious when one day she entered my room quietly, said “Ni hao” in a subdued voice and did not laugh when I answered. I asked her if something was wrong, and she walked over to where I was sitting so that she could whisper.

“Suicide,” she said.

“Who?”

“A woman in our college—a few buildings away. They found her just now.”

She began to dust very quickly. Without looking at me, she said, “I want to finish all of my work early today so that I don’t have to be out when it gets dark.”

“Why not?”

She looked a bit embarrassed and covered her mouth with her hand. “I’m afraid of ghosts. I’m not supposed to believe in ghosts, but I’m afraid of them anyway. The ghost of a suicide wanders around at night.”

News travels fast in China, for when I got to the classroom at half past eight, all the doctors were in a huddle, whispering tensely. I asked for the details, but all I could learn was that the woman, a middle-aged clerical worker, had hanged herself in the office of her superior. After class one of the doctors stayed behind to erase the blackboard. I asked if he had any idea why the woman had taken her own life. He looked around and said quietly that he could not be sure, of course, but the rumor was that her superior had been mistreating her for many years. She had complained, but no one wanted to take responsibility for the investigation, so at last she killed herself in despair.

“Do you think it is true?” I asked.

“No one knows what really happened.”

“But do you think it is true?”

He paused, then answered, “Maybe.”

“What will happen to the superior if the rumor is true?”

A slight frown passed over his face. “He is a Party Member. Anyway, that is not the important thing.”

“What is the important thing?”

He looked at me strangely, as if the answer should have been obvious. “The important thing is, what will happen to her family now?”

I did not understand. Patiently he explained to me that, according to Chinese law, most suicides are considered criminal offenses against Socialism and the Communist Party. When someone takes his own life, members of his family are often punished, on the principle that they must have either
condoned or been influenced by the “incorrect thought” that led to the suicide. My student predicted that the woman’s children would lose their chances of receiving work assignments in our unit when they came of age—a grave sentence, as it would be very difficult for them to get jobs in other units, which have their own surplus of young people to provide jobs for.

Four days passed, during which the woman’s family was not allowed to hold any kind of memorial service, and, I was told, few dared visit the family to offer condolences. No one talked about her in my classes, though it was clear she was on everyone’s mind.

On the fifth day a poster went up at the gate of our college. The Leaders had announced their decision: “Although Comrade M’s suicide was the wrong course of action to take, it was not a crime against Socialism or the Chinese Communist Party because she left no note blaming the Party or any of its representatives for her despair, indicating that her problems were personal and not political. A thorough investigation of the case has proven that her superior, Manager L, is competent and totally without blame. Comrade M’s gesture of hanging herself in the office of Manager L was the result of misunderstanding on her part.”

A memorial service was held right away, and the woman’s house was crowded with friends and neighbors who came to help with the cooking and cleaning. For several days afterward my students talked fondly about her in class, for she had been very popular during her lifetime, and everyone agreed how tragic it was that she had had this misunderstanding.

Lessons
 
 A Garden
 
 A Short Story
 
“Mei Banfa”
 
 A Ghost Story