A Writer's World (46 page)

All this makes life in the city feel remarkably
immediate
. There is no lag, it seems, between introduction and confidence. By my second day in town I was being given under-the-counter comments on the local judiciary by a well-known politician. By my third day I was being treated to the lowdown about some spectacular financial goings-on. Hardly had I been introduced to a member of one of St John's oldest families, who has one house in town and another on its outskirts, in a kind of Newfoundland version of the
transhumance system – hardly had I met this distinguished citizen and his wife before they were explaining why their cat is named after – well, I had better not say who it's named after, let alone why.

1. Extend
   Arm
   (says a notice at a pedestrian crossing outside City Hall)
   
2. Place Foot on Street
   
3. Wait
   Until
   Cars
   Stop
   
4. Thank
   Driver
   

This strikes me as a quintessentially St John's announcement, with its blend of the amiable, the unexpected and the tongue-in-cheek. If reading this essay makes you too feel rather as though you are being slapped in the face with a dried codfish, that is because I was beguiled by almost everything about the city and its inhabitants.

I was conscious always all the same, as I wandered so enjoyably through the city, that life and history have never been easy here. Beneath the charm there lies a bitterness. St John's is full of disappointment, and is an exposed and isolated place in more senses than one. One afternoon, by driving the few miles out to Cape Spear, I made myself for a moment the easternmost person in North America, and was chilled to think, as I stood there in the wind, that while at my back there was nothing but the ocean, before me there extended, almost as far as the imagination could conceive, the awful immensity of Canadian rock, forest, prairie, and mountain. St John's is the edge of everywhere, the end and start of everything. The sign for Mile ‘0' of the Trans-Canada Highway stands immediately outside city hall.

And to this day, though much of the activity of St John's has moved inland, everything in this city looks down, if only metaphorically, to the Narrows. Even the stolid Confederation Building, erected with a becoming diffidence well back from the bloody-minded seaport, peers cautiously from its distance towards that dramatic fissure. I found myself bewitched by it, repeatedly driving up to its headlands, or around the southern shore to the lighthouse at the end, or waving goodbye to the ships as they trod carefully between the buoys towards the open sea – a distant slow wave of an arm, from wheelhouse or forecastle, returning my farewell as seamen must have responded down all the centuries of Atlantic navigation.

Once I was contemplating that hypnotic view from the bar of the Hotel Newfoundland, which looks immediately out to the Narrows and the Atlantic beyond. It was evening, and the prospect was confused by the reflection, in the plate-glass windows, of the people, plants and ever-shifting
patterns of hotel life behind me. Beyond this insubstantial scene, though, I could see the stern outline of the cliffs, the floodlit Cabot Tower on Signal Hill, the white tossing of the ocean breakers, and the slowly moving masthead light of a ship sliding out to sea.

The hotel pianist was playing Chopin – and as he played, with the recondite inflections of Newfoundland conversation rising and falling around me, mingled with laughter and the clink of glasses, somehow the riding light of that ship, moving planet-like through the mirror images, brought home to me with a frisson the grand poignancy that lies beneath the vivacity of St John's. I thought it sad but exciting, there in the air-conditioned bar. 

And in the distance, through the porthole, there stood China.

Of course wherever you are in the world, China stands
figuratively
there, a dim tremendous presence somewhere across the horizon, sending out its coded messages, exerting its ancient magnetism over the continents. I had been prowling and loitering around it for years, often touched on the shoulder by its long, long reach – watching the Chinese-Americans shadow-box in San Francisco, say, or being dragged screaming and kicking to the Chinese opera somewhere, or interviewing renegade patriots in Taiwan, or debating whether to go to the fish-and-chip shop or the Cantonese take-away in Dublin. It had seemed to me always the land of the grand simplicities, pursuing its own mighty way through history, impassive, impervious, where everything was more absolute than it was elsewhere, and the human condition majestically overrode all obstacles and reversions. I had wondered and marvelled at it for half a lifetime: and here I was at last on my way to meet it face to face, on a less than spanking Chinese steamship, rust-streaked, off-white, red flag at the stern, steaming steadily northward through the blue-green China Sea.

My fellow-passengers assiduously prepared me for the encounter. They showed me how best to suck the goodness out of the smoked black carp at dinner. They taught me to count up to ten in Mandarin. They drew my attention to an article in
China
Pictorial
about the propagation of stink-bugs in Gandong Province. Mrs Wang, returning from a visit to her sister in Taiwan, vividly evoked for me her hysterectomy by acupuncture (‘when they slit me open, oh, it hurt very bad, but after it was very
strange
feeling,
very
strange
… ’). The Bureaucrat, returning from an official mission to Hong Kong, thoroughly explained to me the Four Principles of Chinese Government Policy.

Around us the sea was like a Chinese geography lesson, too. It was never empty. Sometimes apparently abandoned sampans wallowed in the swell, sometimes flotillas of trawlers threshed about the place. Red-flagged buoys mysteriously bobbed, miles from anywhere, grey tankers loomed by high in the water. Islands appeared, islands like pimples in the sea, like long knobbly snakes, islands with lighthouses on them, or radio masts, or white villas. And always to the west stood the hills of China, rolling sometimes, sheer sometimes, and once or twice moulded into the conical dome-shapes that I had hitherto supposed to be the invention of Chinese calligraphers. Ah, but I must go far inland, the Bureaucrat told me on our third day at sea, I must go to Guangxi in the south, to see such mountains properly – mountains like no others, said he, the Peak of Solitary Beauty, the Hill of the Scholar’s Servant – ‘But look’ (he interrupted himself) – ‘you notice? The water is turning yellow. We are approaching the mouth of the Yangtze!’

So we were. In the small hours that night, when I looked out of my porthole again, I found we were sailing through an endless parade of ships, gloomily illuminated in the darkness: and when at crack of dawn I went on deck to a drizzly morning, still we were passing them, up a scummy river now, lined with ships, thick with ships, barges and tugs, and container ships, and a warship or two, and country craft of shambled wood so fibrous and stringy-looking that it seemed to me the Chinese, who eat anything, might well make a dish of them. Hooting all the way we edged a passage up the Huangpu, narrowly avoiding ferry-boats, sending sampans scurrying for safety, until after thirty miles of ships, and docks, and grimy warehouses, and factories, we saw before us a waterfront façade of high towers and office buildings, red and shabby in the rain. It was my China landfall: it was the city of Shanghai.

‘Moonlight Serenade!’ demanded the elderly American tourists in the bar of the Peace Hotel, ‘Play it again!’ The band obliged – half a dozen well-worn Chinese musicians, a lady at the piano, an aged violinist, an excellent trumpeter: Glenn Miller lived again in Shanghai, and the old thump and blare rose to a deafening climax and a smashing roll of drums.

The Americans tapped their feet and shook their hands about, exclaiming things like ‘Swing it!’ The band’s eyes, I noticed, wandered here and there,
as though they had played the piece once too often. They have been playing it, after all, since they and the song were young. Their musical memories, like their personal experiences, reached back through Cultural Revolution, and Great Leap Forward, and People’s Revolution, and Kuomintang, and Japanese Co-Prosperity Zone, back through all the permutations of Chinese affairs to the days of cosmopolitan Shanghai – those terrible but glamorous times when European merchants lived like princes here, Chinese gangsters fought and thrived, the poor died in their hundreds on the streets and the Great World House of Pleasure offered not only singsong girls and gambling tables, but magicians, fireworks, strip shows, story-tellers, mah-jong schools, marriage brokers, freak shows, massage parlours, porn photographers, a dozen dance platforms and a bureau for the writing of love-letters.

No wonder the musicians looked world-weary. The Great World is the Shanghai Youth Palace now, the past of its former prostitutes being known only, we are primly told, to their Revolutionary Committee leaders. The band plays on all the same, and in many other ways too I was taken aback to find Old Shanghai surviving despite it all. The Race Club building, it is true, has been transformed into the Shanghai Public Library, and the racetrack itself is partly the People’s Square, and partly the People’s Park, but nearly everything else still stands. The pompous headquarters of the merchant houses still line the Bund, along the waterfront, surveying the tumultuous commerce that once made them rich. The Customs House still rings out the hours with a Westminster chime. The celebrated Long Bar of the Shanghai Club, which used to serve the best martinis at the longest bar in Asia, is propped up now by eaters of noodles with lemonade at the Dongfeng Hotel. The Peace Hotel itself is only the transmogrified Cathay, where Noël Coward wrote
Private Lives
, with its old red carpets still in place, 135 different drinks still on its bar list, and the Big Band sound ringing nightly through the foyer.

Even the streets of Shanghai, where the poor die no longer, seemed unexpectedly like home. There are virtually no private cars in this city of 11 million people, but I scarcely noticed their absence, so vigorously jostled and tooted the taxis, the articulated buses and the myriad bicycles: if there were few bright flowered clothes to be seen along the boulevards, only open-neck shirts and workaday slacks, there were still fewer of the baggy trousers, blue jerkins and Mao caps that I had foreseen. The theme music from
Bonanza
sounded through Department Store No. 10; there were cream cakes at Xilailin, formerly Riesling’s Tea Rooms; the Xinya
Restaurant still ushered its foreigners, as it had for a hundred years, into the discreet curtained cubicles of its second floor. On my first morning in Shanghai I ate an ice-cream in the People’s Park (admission 2 teng), and what with its shady trees and winding paths, the old men playing checkers at its concrete tables, the students at their books, the health buffs at their callisthenics, the miscellaneous meditators and the tall buildings looking through its leaves above, I thought it, but for an absence of muggers and barouches, remarkably like Central Park.

Mrs Wang had invited me to lunch at her apartment, and this was no culture shock, either. True, we ate eggs-in-aspic, a kind of pickled small turnip, and strips of a glutinous substance which suggested to me jellified seawater, but nevertheless hers was a home that would not seem unduly exotic in, say, Cleveland, Ohio. It was the bourgeois home
par
excellence
. It had the statutory upright piano, with music open on the stand, the 16-inch colour TV on the sideboard, a picture of two kittens playing with a ball of wool, a bookshelf of paperbacks and a daily help. It had a daughter who had come over to help cook lunch, and a husband away at the office who sent his regards. ‘We are very lucky,’ said kind Mrs Wang. ‘We have a certain social status.’

So this was
China
? I had to pinch myself. The Dictatorship of the People (Principle of Government No. 3, I remembered) does not visibly discipline Shanghai. Occasionally bespectacled soldiers of the People’s Revolutionary Army trundle through town on rattly motor-bikes with sidecars, and outside the Municipal Headquarters (
né
Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank) two fairly weedy-looking troopers stand on sheepish sentry-go. Otherwise Authority is inconspicuous. The traffic flows in cheerful dishevelment over the intersections, ineffectually chivvied along over loudspeakers by policemen smoking cigarettes in their little white kiosks. Jay-walkers proliferate, and in the crinkled back streets of the old quarter there seems no ideological restraint upon the free-enterprise peddlers and stall-holders, with their buckets of peaches, their plastic bags of orange juice, eels squirming in their own froth and compounds of doomed ducks.

Nobody seemed shy of me. Everyone wanted to talk. A factory worker I met in the park took me off without a second thought to his nearby apartment (two dark rooms almost entirely occupied by cooking utensils and bicycles), and the only hazard of the Shanghai street, I discovered, was the student who wished to practise his English. Stand just for a moment on
the Bund, watching the ships go by, or counting the flitting sea-bats in the evening, and you are hemmed in, pressed against the balustrade, squeezed out of breath, by young men wanting to know if the word ‘intend’ can legitimately be followed by a gerund. Go and lick an ice-cream in the park, and like magic there will materialize out of the trees Mr Lu and a troop of elderly friends, all of whom remember with affection their English lessons with Miss Metcalfe at the Mission School, but none of whom has ever been
quite
sure about the propriety of the split infinitive.

Well! So this was the policy of the Open Door, which is bringing modernity to China, and has made foreigners and all their ways respectable. It seemed remarkably liberating. I often talked politics with people I met, and their answers sounded uninhibited enough. The Cultural Revolution, that hideous upheaval of the 1960s? A terrible mistake, a tragedy. The future of China? Nobody knew for sure what kind of country this was going to be. Communism versus capitalism? There was good and bad in both. Would they like to go to America? Of course, but they would probably come home again. What a kind face Zhou Enlai had! Yes, he had a lovely face, he was a good kind man, the father of his people. Did they like the face of Mao Zedong?

Ah, but there was a hush when I asked this question. They thought for a moment. Then – ‘We don’t know,’ was the mumbled answer, and suddenly I realized that they had not been frank with me at all. Not a reply had they given, but was sanctioned by the political orthodoxy of the moment. Did they like the
face
of Chairman Mao? He was a great man they knew, he had fallen into error in his later years, it had been admitted, but nobody it seems had ever told them whether to like his
face
. My perceptions shifted there and then, and where I had fancied frankness, now I began to sense evasions, veils or obliquities everywhere. This was, I reminded myself, the very birthplace and hot-bed of the Gang of Four, that clique of xenophobic zealots – it was from an agreeable half-timbered villa near the zoo, Frenchified in a bowered garden, that their murderous frenzies were first let loose. A decade ago I might have had a very different greeting in Shanghai, and Mrs W. would probably have been banished to one of the remoter onion-growing communes for giving me lunch.

No, perhaps it was not so home-like after all. On the Bund one evening a young man with the droopy shadow of a moustache pushed his way through the crowd and confronted me with a kind of dossier. Would I go through this examination paper for him, and correct his mistakes? But I had done my grammatical duty, I considered, for that afternoon, and I
wanted to go and look at the silks in Department Store No. 10. ‘No,’ said I. ‘I won’t.’

At that a theatrical scowl crossed the student’s face, screwing up his eyes and turning down the corners of his mouth. He looked, with that suggestion of whiskers round his chin, like a Chinese villain in a bad old movie, with a gong to clash him in. I circumvented him nevertheless, and ah yes, I thought in my new-found understanding, if the Gang of Four were still around you would have me up against a wall by now, with a placard around my neck, and a mob there to jeer me, not to consult me about participles!

As it was, I hasten to add, every single soul in Shanghai was kind to me, and as a matter of fact my conscience pricked me, and I went back and corrected his damned papers after all. The Open Door really is open in this city, and Foreign Guests are enthusiastically welcomed, from package tourists shepherded by guides in and out of Friendship Stores to bearded language students scooting about on bicycles. Back-packers labour through town in search of dormitories: peripatetic writers hang over the girders of Waibaidu Bridge watching the barges pass below.

Of these categories, the peripatetic writer seems the hardest for the Chinese mind to accommodate. ‘What is your
field
?’ Mr Lu asked me. I answered him with a quotation from the Psalms, to the effect that my business was simply to grin like a dog and run about the city. ‘You are a veterinary writer?’ he inquired. Other people urged me to contact the Writers’ Association, or at least to visit the new quarters in the north-east of the city, ‘where many intellectuals live’, so that we could discuss common literary problems. Just running about the city did not satisfy them. It could not be productive.