What the Chinese Don't Eat (9 page)

‘That’s it, if you are not guilty of any misdeed.’

I thanked her, bought 10 bunches of her wild flowers, then left.

‘Wait,’ she called after me. ‘You should try to get a
HongDu-Dou
.’

‘What’s that?’

She shook her head. ‘It’s such a pity. Our young girls have no idea about traditional beauty. You must know that piece of red silk children wear in the new year posters. Silly girl, it is very good for a woman to wear this in bed with her husband. You should get one, even though you are young, because it could be forgotten very soon if our life goes on changing in this way.’

The same day, I bought the best incense I could and prayed, but I couldn’t find a
HongDu-Dou
. I was told it had disappeared a long time ago, in the Cultural Revolution.

Two weeks ago, I went back to Xi’an with my western friends on a publishing trip. It has improved so much that I couldn’t be sure I had been there before. We were told that new empty highways have been built and thousands of trees planted, ready for the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008.

When I went back to the Terracotta Warriors, I couldn’t find the woman with her wild flowers. There were hundreds of people selling man-made stuff for tourists, but nothing from nature.

I told my husband I wanted to find this
HongDu-Dou
, and he came with me, along the narrow, twisting street that runs beneath the old city walls. There was traditional local food, and children’s clothes – tiger shoes, lion hats and cat-baby coats – but no
HongDu-Dou
. No one even knows what it is.

On my last day in Xi’an, we went back to that street and, finally, I found it on a tiny stall. The seller was a young girl; she was so happy and surprised when I bought all 30 of the
HongDu-Dou
s she had. ‘What do you want them for?’ she asked.

‘For your happiness,’ I said, ‘and my 14 western friends, who will have them as traditional Chinese gifts from my Chinese heart.’

The ghosts of Qing-Zang: When Xinran met a woman who had spent 30 years searching for her lost husband in Tibet, she was inspired to write her extraordinary story. But then her subject went missing, too …

In 1994, an old woman dressed in Tibetan clothes smelling strongly of animal skins, rancid milk and dung sat down opposite me in the town of Suzhou in China, and began to describe the 30 years she had spent searching for her husband on the Tibetan plateau. I was working as a journalist at the time and had made the four-hour journey by bus from Nanjing to interview her. Her name was Shu Wen. A listener to my radio programme had called me after meeting her by chance at a street stall: he had never heard me speak about women’s lives in Tibet, and thought I would like to meet her. He was right: I found myself so caught up in her story that I forgot to ask her all the important questions. I was so absorbed by her descriptions of Tibet that I noticed only the rough skin on her trembling hands and the deep emptiness in her eyes. I failed to realise then how little I really understood about the Tibetan way of life; I wasn’t to know that this was a story I could never walk away from.

‘Why did you go there?’ was one question I did manage to ask.

‘For love,’ she said. ‘My husband was a doctor in the People’s Liberation Army. His unit was sent to Tibet. Two months later, I was told he had been lost in action. We had been married for fewer than a hundred days. I refused to accept he was dead. The only thing I could think of was to go to Tibet myself and find him.’

I stared at her in disbelief. I could not imagine how a young woman at that time – 1958 – could have dreamed of going to a place as distant and terrifying as Tibet. She, too, was a doctor, and after he went missing she decided to join the army to go in search of him: it was her only way of travelling to Tibet.

When evening came, Shu Wen was only part of the way through her story. I suggested we share a hotel room for the night and continue our conversation the next day. She agreed in the same brief manner that she answered all my questions. When she wasn’t caught up in telling me about her experiences, her voice was flat and curt; she spoke Chinese with a strong Tibetan accent. I longed to draw her out more, so that I could ask her all the questions I had been storing up during the day – but it was clear that she considered all talk for the day to be over.

I was worried that her large body might not fit into the narrow single bed in the hotel room. But before she took off her Tibetan robe, Shu Wen removed her possessions from it like a magician producing birds from a hat. From two inside pockets came books and money, and from pockets on the sleeve some little sheepskin pouches. From her right boot she took a knife, and from her left some maps of China. She reached inside the waist of her robe and brought out two large empty leather bags. Then she removed her long silk belt, which was hung with even more little leather bags and tools.

I watched with astonishment: her robe, it turned out, was also her luggage. It became her bed as well. She spread it over the bedstead as a mattress, placed the silk belt over the books and maps to make a pillow, and then stuffed all her possessions into the sleeves of the robe, with the exception of the knife. This rested on the pillow beside her. Then she lay down, tucked the cuffs of the sleeves under her pillow and covered her legs with the two leather bags. Both her body and her
possessions were perfectly protected. Underneath the robe and all that luggage, she was tiny.

I don’t think she noticed my amazement as I got into the other bed. I felt as if I had just experienced a tiny piece of Tibetan life, and I would experience more when I went to Qinghai the following year to try to understand what it was that Shu Wen had gone through. There I would witness the incredible ingenuity of the Tibetan people, who manage to live with so few resources. I would see stones piled up to mark directions, food hidden in the frozen ground to be collected later, wood stored under rocks for fuel. I would realise that the leather bags that Shu Wen had spread over her legs were designed to carry dried food such as barley flour and curd when travelling.

The next day Shu Wen finished her story, and we parted. It wasn’t until two days later that I realised I hadn’t even asked her the words for the clothes and ornaments she was wearing, let alone the names of the protagonists in her story. All I knew was her name, and that she was Chinese, not Tibetan as my friend had originally thought. I had no idea how to find her again.

I called the listener who had suggested I meet her, but he didn’t know where she was either. ‘We got talking over a bowl of rice soup. Yesterday she sent me a tin of green tea from the fermented rice seller as a thank-you, and she said she hoped Xinran might be able to tell her story and that all women in love might be inspired by it. Xinran, I really don’t know where she has gone.’ And that was why I had to write her story.

I had been to Tibet once before, on a journalistic assignment in 1984. It was a short, five-day trip to the east of the Qing-Zang highlands, which are populated by a mixture of Tibetans, Mongolians and Chinese. For the first time in my life, I experienced what it was like to live in silence. I heard hardly any conversation. The Tibetans I saw seemed to communicate almost
entirely by body language. I had been overwhelmed by the altitude, the empty, awe-inspiring landscape, and the harsh living conditions. What would it have been like for a young Chinese woman travelling there over 30 years before?

I made the trip to Tibet again in 1995. I wanted to follow in Shu Wen’s footsteps and see the things she had told me about: the mystical connection between humans and nature, colours and silence, yaks and vultures. She had told me stories about Ao-Bao and Mani stones, Buddhist prayers carved into great boulders high in the mountains. She had told me about sewing men and multicoloured wind-chime women. Because traditional clothes were made from leather and metal, and sewing them was physically hard work, clothes-making was, and still is, mostly done by men. Tibetan women, no matter how poor, set great store by their jewellery, and everywhere you go there is the sound of bells and chimes as they move.

I learned about sky burial and water burial. Only when women die of an illness are they buried in the ground; otherwise the body is cleaned, shaven and cut into a thousand pieces, to be eaten by the birds, sending the soul back to heaven. Children’s bodies are returned to the water, their hands painted red to protect them from the gods. I found it hard to believe what Shu Wen told me until I saw it with my own eyes. It was all so very different from the life I live, and even the many books I have read.

And then, in order to tell her story as it should be told, I spent almost eight years talking to people in Tibet and China and reading more books. Before I started writing Sky Burial, I had no idea there were so many Tibetans living up in those highlands, all with very different customs, beliefs, lifestyles and languages.

After all this time and all this work, I still find it difficult to
understand completely Shu Wen’s life – what she did in the name of love, and how she went from being a 26-year-old Chinese doctor to becoming a Tibetan Buddhist. After 30 years, she did find out the truth about her husband. In many ways, I feel I am one of the readers of my own book, too – a reader who still has a lot of questions I wish she could answer. I can’t and don’t want to invent those answers without her.

I don’t know whether I could have endured the things Shu Wen did. But I would like to think that I could if I had to, for the sake of love, whether as a lover, a daughter or a mother. One thing I do know, from writing my first book,
The Good Women of China
, is that many Chinese women also devoted their lives to their families and to love, and many have endured as much as Shu Wen.

I will go on trying, as I have for the past 10 years, to find Shu Wen. At the end of
Sky Burial
I have written her a letter, asking her where she is. Perhaps one day she will answer it.

A late-night knock at the door – is it the return of the Cultural Revolution? No, it’s kick-off time

Last week I started to really worry about the two men in my life, my husband and my son. They were watching the final of Euro 2004, and they were just too excited. I realised how important it is to keep pills to hand – you never know when someone’s going to have a heart attack.

Personally, I can’t understand why they get so involved in other people’s battles, but I do know that football is a game that drives the Chinese mad, too, even though their ‘footballs’ tend to be shoes, or old melons, or bags stuffed with grass, stones or thick wooden branches.

The first time I really became aware of football was when I read a book about Chinese communist soldiers playing football with their prisoners in 1949: ‘… no one remembers who is the winner or loser of the war on either side, or in the crowded audiences. Everybody concentrates on the game, which follows the rules and is not complicated by any political thought. The ball is very old and broken but no one cares. They shout and cheer; they applaud each goal, whether it is struck by a friend or an enemy … pain has been forgotten, hatred has been forgiven.’

In the book, an old peasant woman passes and asks, ‘What are they doing?’

‘They are fighting,’ someone says.

‘Fighting? They are still battling with each other after so many deaths?’ She is very upset.

‘No, they are fighting for a ball, not each other.’ An old man tries to calm her down.

‘For a ball? Why? There are so many boys fighting for one broken ball? Poor children, when I get the money, I will buy them each a ball, so they don’t need to fight any more.’

My second football experience came in 1986, when I was woken by knocking on the door and hurried voices outside one night. My first thought was that the Cultural Revolution had begun again. I was terrified: I couldn’t forget the suffering I experienced as a child and often had nightmares about it.

‘Open your door, it’s late!’ the voices ordered.

‘Who are you all? What do you want at this time in the morning?’ I asked as I put on my clothes.

‘Open the door … it’s late, hurry up!’ They started to beg. They were my friends. As soon as I opened the door, more than 10 of them rushed into my two-bedroom flat, which had one of the very few colour televisions in the area. I stood there, watching them fill my small living room and turn on the TV. Not one of them took the time to say hello.

After an hour and a half, my fridge had been emptied and my beautiful clean floor was covered in muddy footprints, rubbish, dirty glasses and bowls. It was a chance for me to see another side of some of my closest friends: they completely abandoned any semblance of gentlemanly behaviour.

That, of course, was the 1986 World Cup, when few Chinese had televisions or, indeed, enough room for large groups of people to watch TV together. The matches took place as early as 3am Chinese time.

A third football experience came late one night in 1996. Because my radio call-in programme was broadcast at midnight, I was always one of the last to leave the building. I used to
dream that some day I would have other colleagues to share my listeners’ stories with, so that I wouldn’t end the evening feeling so drained, going home alone in the dark.

Through football, I fulfilled half this dream. I had finished the broadcast with a call from a drunk husband who had accidentally killed his wife with a broken beer bottle. It was hard to tear myself away from listening to his voice on the phone, from a hospital where his wife had died less than a hour before, where police were waiting to arrest him.

The lights were still on in most of the other offices, but the building was silent. I wondered whether there was another secret search going on, for ‘political reasons’.

I was wrong. In fact, every room was occupied by male colleagues with tears in their eyes. I was moved, thinking they had all been listening to my radio interview with the emotional husband.

I sat there quietly, rather enjoying the sad, collective emotion. Telephones rang, but no one moved to answer them.