Avenue of Eternal Peace (2 page)

The correspondent from
Der Spiegel
, Sabina, pricked up her ears.

‘Let me know,' said Wally.

‘Sure. You should see the other side of Beijing.'

It was an initiation rite, and Wally let them tell him about China until it was late, and he was kissing people goodbye, shaking their hands, promising to see them again soon; as if he agreed to forget the past, which was not a subject for questions, and share only this disorientating present.

The Medical College was bleak on his return and his bare quarters even bleaker. The room attendant was slumped in front of the New Year's Eve television spectacular.

‘It's no good working on New Year's Eve,' said Wally, who went and got his duty-free. ‘Have a scotch.'

‘Not allowed, not allowed!' The room attendant waved his hand decisively. Wally poured the boy a full glass and stumbled back to his room without turning the light on, opened the door to the balcony despite the cold, and spread his outsize body on the bed, his thoughts soaring and swooping as he blacked out.

He was woken by the sounds of military attack. In his dream he was darting from trench to trench in a sweat as sheets of light tore across the sky. Grabbing his greatcoat, he made his way to the balcony. The sky was flickering, the ground bubbling with light. In squeals, whistles and rat-a-tat, the New Year had come. Baskets of fireworks hoarded for this midnight were erupting across the city, not to end the world but in a wild celebration of renewal, as everyone exploded their banger, flew their golden phoenix, unfurled their rainbow dragon. The red sky smelled of burning chemicals and paper from repeated onslaughts of flame and sparkle, flak and glittering rain. All across China, for thousands of miles, as for centuries, the people marked a new beginning by waging war on their besetting demons, firing heaven with the flame powder they had invented.
Pao! Pao! Pao!
Wally chuckled like a kid. Tonight each spirit made its own spunky defiance. Nothing so evanescent, so futile, so satisfying—until he was forced to close the door and curtains and insert his earplugs, to regain his world of order and shut his eyes for rest, as the crackers continued.

4

Eagle took him as promised to the temple fair, where he saw a girl lie on a bed of nails while the huge stone slab on her stomach was smashed by her brother's repeated mallet blows; a young man ramming his head into a pile of bricks; the bare-bellied old father twirling like a propeller on a spear tip, flapping his wings like a bird, showing no mark afterwards where the spear end had pressed into naked skin; and other demonstrations of
qigong
. Preceded by invocations of energy, followed by moans and applause, the tricks of self-torture and self-mastery impressed Wally, revealing the long accumulation of body knowledge in those mountain people who came down to the cities to perform. The crowd roared for the toughest trick of all, when a man lies on a bed of nails and a truck drives over his body. It doesn't always work.

That evening he put on his jacket and tie for the welcoming banquet. The holiday was into its last days and a clutch of drowsy dignitaries gathered in the reception room to greet him. They smiled and bowed, and Mrs Gu sloshed jasmine tea into mugs all round. Ash dropped into unemptied ashtrays, and alongside a calendar of Manhattan, pale in wintry light, wall charts exposed human anatomy. The place of honour beside Wally was held by Director Kang, a shiny-pated shapeless chap who laughed a lot. He was just back from Chicago, in Levi cords, running shoes and a sumptuous blazer, and he spoke with an East Coast drawl. In a speech larded with honorifics he said that the Medical College was a high-pressured place, and that they were all terribly busy and terribly expert. The Dean next to him in a Mao suit nodded furiously. Wally drank his bitter tea. He felt stodgy in his layers of underwear and wore a fixed grin, intrigued by the personal histories of the placid rosy faces around him.

‘Well,' said the Director, rubbing his hands, ‘the important business is ahead.' Laughing, he led Wally to the banquet table.

Besides Director Kang, the Dean and Mrs Gu, there was young Dr Rong with sharp eyes and a high voice, and his wife Dr Song, an earnest physiologist from Suzhou, China's city of beautiful girls, who was placed on Wally's right, and an old boy who bent his neck and hands to the table like a turtle.

Conversation did not come easily and, despite profligate speechifying, the banquet failed to click.

‘We are greatly honoured to have Professor Doctor Frith at Our College,' said the Director. ‘It is the first time in recent history that so distinguished a practitioner, so distinguished a scholar, has come among us for a whole year, to give so generously of his time and expertise. Professor Doctor Frith is acquainted with the great research institutes of the world. His own contributions in the field of oncology are too many and various to mention. It is our aim to make our own research centre here at the Peking Union Medical College the leader in China and an equal everywhere. With Frith's help we will achieve this aim. We have a Chinese saying …'

The words slipped down with as much oil as the stir-fried fish. Wally's mind was on the strongman feats he had seen at the fair. He imagined a naked man on a bed of nails, the crowd roaring ambiguously as the wheels ground over him. But he brought himself back to the fish he was squeezing with his chopsticks, and stood to reply.

‘In our search for cures, we seek know-how. In our search for know-how, we seek understanding,' he said. ‘China has many secrets, and many of her secrets are the secrets of nature. Now China is opening, perhaps she will open nature to us in a new way, and give us knowledge that so far eludes us. That is what we may achieve in working together.'

To talk in riddles was easier than to talk straight. The more his hosts smiled their assent, the more sceptical they probably were.

The old turtle, however, bobbed his head in Wally's direction.

‘I'm sorry. I didn't catch your name. You're—' said Wally in a wild leap, ‘not Professor Hsu, are you?'

‘No, no.' The man's eyelids lowered behind his glasses in polite demurral. ‘I am Zhou.'

‘Been here long?'

‘More than forty years.'

Wally did his sums to discover that the old boy was in place before Liberation. Probably he had been labelled a Rightist. There was something battered, indomitable, about him. But you never could tell.

‘Do you know Professor Hsu? You must have known him.'

‘There are many people called Hsu.'

‘Hsu Chien Lung.' Wally grabbed a pen to write it.

‘That's not how we romanise now. The name would perhaps be Xu Qianlong. I'm not sure.'

‘But you know him?'

‘I'm not sure,' concluded the turtle, his tongue flickering towards a little glass of wine before his head retreated inside its shell.

Wally looked up, and caught Mrs Gu watching him, before he turned to the serious Suzhou woman, who immediately asked him a technical question about mensuration. Could he help her? She was experimenting on pigs.

‘Of course, of course.' As far as he could see, her experiment had inadequate controls. ‘You don't know a Hsu Chien Lung, do you?' Another stab in the dark.

‘Hsu Chien Lung?' The woman's voice rose quizzically, did not descend.

Kang made a last speech, assuring the visitor that his contribution and cooperation would be greatly appreciated, and that if he could arrange solid assistance to be transferred to the College from abroad he would be a true friend. In reciprocity, Kang acknowledged, the visitor's research could only benefit from free and open contact with his colleagues in the College. Wally showered the Director with thanks.

On the way out he also spread some thanks Mrs Gu's way. ‘Professor Hsu Chien Lung was unable to make it, I guess. I'm sorry not to meet him. I was counting on him being here. Don't forget, Mrs Gu, I'm longing to meet him.' He pushed his palms forward to press the point.

‘Aha, aha,' said Mrs Gu as she led him down the stairs by his sleeve. ‘We will talk on the telephone.'

5

‘You better tell me exactly what you want,' said Mrs Gu behind her standard-issue specs. ‘And you better wear more clothes.'

Wally was rugged up like a dumpling already. The clothes, in any case, didn't stop the flu. He told Mrs Gu that colds and flu were caused by viruses. His fingers were white and numb as he tried to wiggle them. He was cramped beside the set-up tea table, the spilling ashtray, the slimy spittoon. Mrs Gu was at least compactly wrapped in knitted long johns and spencers beneath her serge suit. Was she malignant or benign? He could not decide.

‘You better tell me exactly what you want'—which he silently footnoted: so you can tell me just what you're refusing.

‘I had hoped you would arrange a meeting with Professor Hsu Chien Lung,' Wally stated unequivocally.

‘We do not know this name.'

She had the face of a kindergarten child glowing with the consciousness of power. Power, he was learning, meant the withholding of information.

‘Perhaps I'm pronouncing it wrong. Hsu Chien Lung. Xu Qianlong. I'm afraid I don't know the characters or the tones. He's a professor at your College here. An old, old, very distinguished gentleman.'

‘There must be some mistake.'

‘Perhaps he is dead,' wondered Wally.

But she made no attempt to leap at this offering. ‘No one of that name is dead.'

‘You must know who I mean. I've read his papers. I've written to him. He's based in this place.'

Mrs Gu's calm became a shade less congenial. ‘Please look again, Doctor Frith. There is no such person.'

‘There is no Professor Hsu?' he repeated incredulously. An accusation was not appropriate. ‘There is no Professor Hsu,' he repeated, his face twisting.

Mrs Gu laughed, as if the visitor had just confessed to her satisfaction that he did not believe in Santa Claus.

TWO
Towards the Not Yet

1

The mirror reflected, undisguised by make-up, the lines etched round Jin Juan's eyes by a cruel climate. Her family name meant ‘gold', aristocratic descent, her given name meant ‘graceful'. Neither mattered now. Her home was a bare dormitory room that she shared with another woman who, luckily, was seldom there. She turned thirty next year. Perhaps then people would stop their questions and comments, since to conventional wisdom she would be squarely on the shelf. A Chinese can endure because she must, a great strength when there's no choice; but Jin Juan was nearing the point where she could no longer tolerate, ignore, suffer, turn a blind eye. She brushed out her hair, thought better of display, and tied it in a ponytail. Should she copy her friends and cut it? She untied the ribbon and her hair floated defiantly over her shoulders and curving neck. She used lipstick, her body was perfumed. She stood to slip on her high heels, woolly scarf and essential down jacket. In the small mirror, by the light of the desk lamp, she could not see herself properly. Mirror, make-up, she packed away, leaving only a neat stack of books on the bench top. The bedroll straightened, she shivered. The room was cold, the windowpane black and uncovered.

Unsteady in her heels, she walked out through dark twisting lanes, pleased to be clean and pretty. She took the middle of the road through thawing black snow. Traffic was thinning as farmers sold off the last of their greens and headed home to manured fields where more seedlings grew. As she reached the crossroads, the New Age sign flashed off in the very moment she noticed it. There had always been a New Age, but nobody could say for sure whether it had passed or was to come. The phrase suggested infinite deferral. Her throat tickled with a laugh. She was drawn forwards to reliable pleasures in which lay enough hope (sheer delusion) to get by on, while knowing better that it was backwards and she should break free. As she walked by on the way to her regular appointment, taking her usual road, past the switched-off neon light, drawn metal blinds and locked doors, behind which people sat on chrome chairs sipping fancy drinks, a cart man passed whispering of home to his horse.

2

The New Age Bar was the first spot in the capital where Chinese with no clout but money could drink cocktails, with foreigners if they wished. The Public Security Bureau nonetheless insisted on a nine o'clock closing time to keep miscegenation under wraps. After nine the blinds went down and, as in Capone's Chicago, clientele came in through a back lavatory where a bouncer, huddled in layers of clothing, had a heavily congested nose to protect himself against the odours of his post. The place was smart inside, or had been when it opened, in a style derided by foreigners as Instant Old. The wallpaper was peeling; the bronze laminate was lifting. The grandiose space was underlit and underheated, and there weren't enough chairs. Like every other establishment in Beijing that year, due to overproduction by the No. 1 Food and Beverage Installations Enterprise, the ceiling was festooned with plastic trattoria grapes.

Behind the bar a pale young man with a 1964 Beatles haircut loitered meekly. An employee of the Beijing Cake Company that ran the place, he sacrificed his health to long hours in the chilly, dingy chamber. The bar gave purpose to his life. Like an early Christian living for the millennium, Young Bi was dedicated to the day when the New Age Bar would be as smooth and sleek as those in Hollywood movies.

Custom was bad tonight. The room echoed with the conversation of two men, vociferous on their third Cuba Libre, who were no older than the polite young barman but comported themselves quite differently: Mr Foreign Trader and Mr Party Greenhorn.

‘It's getting harder and harder to make ends meet,' complained pudgy Foreign Trader in leather jacket and jeans, whose offer of a Marlboro was rejected in favour of one of his friend's own Pandas, the brand smoked by China's paramount leader—impossible to buy.

‘Price increases are a necessary adjustment within planned economic growth,' responded Party Greenhorn. They had been neck and neck as school friends, until Party Greenhorn went to People's University, the training ground of the new bureaucracy. His father, a high-level PLA man who sold second-rate armaments to the warring Middle East, had decided that the future lay not in the military proper but with the technocrats, and found a place for his son at the appropriate seat of higher learning. Foreign Trader had no such luck; but an uncle settled him into one of the semi-private companies that were mushrooming in the new economic climate and the young man, put to deal with tourist necessities, pretty soon hit on an item which, as Mao might have said, should be stressed as the key link: replicas of tricolour glaze Tang dynasty horses. They appealed to foreigners, tugged at the hearts of patriots, could be exported to overseas Chinese nostalgic for their glorious past, and even had a place in the museum shops of the barbarians. Replica Tang horses were artworks from the world's greatest civilisation, and Foreign Trader had struck gold.

‘Life's getting impossible,' he told his friend. ‘Taxis, banquets, entertaining customers. I blow a hundred yuan a day.'

He was talking like a big-nose, noted Party Greenhorn, who remained curious to hear the monthly income figure his friend was working up to announcing.

‘Four thousand a month.'

Party Greenhorn got a taste of bile in his mouth, even though current policy held that to be rich was glorious. From fake Tang horses?

Foreign Trader lit up another. Party Greenhorn was accustomed to bragging about his own 300 yuan a month salary, which was high for a new graduate. But there were other benefits to be reckoned up. Originally aiming to study abroad, he had submitted to a hundred North American institutions a research paper entitled ‘Long-term Perfection or Short-term Gains: The Planned Socialist Economy versus the Unplanned Capitalist Economy'. The only reply, from an alleged Head of School in Waco, Texas, had transposed ‘planned' and ‘unplanned' with a black felt pen and added a series of queries, exclamations and stars. His father consoled the young man with a job at the Ministry of Foreign Economic Relations and Trade, where his first task was to negotiate a joint-venture contract with a Belgian pharmaceutical company. The idea was that the Belgian side would provide technology transfer for turning Chinese egg whites into a popular proprietary medicine. The Belgians would then buy a quota of the product at reduced price. The deal foundered when the Belgian side refused to buy the egg yolks and egg shells as well. This, Party Greenhorn complained to Foreign Trader, was his first encounter with the pig-headedness, greed and hostility of foreigners.

He liked the job, travelling through China at ministry expense, living like a princeling, with a car at his disposal, the promise of trips abroad and, top of the list, a guarantee of his own flat. He was twenty-four, wore a navy suit and carried a black plastic handbag; had spiky hair and chain-smoked. His childhood worship of Chairman Mao had spread to the whole Party, which would smoothly streamline its methods until triumph was assured and China reclaimed her place as greatest nation on earth. Party Greenhorn saw nothing to contradict his faith—and drained the cocktail.

Smiling more cynically, but equally contented, Foreign Trader emptied his glass in unison. He knew more; keeping his eyes and ears open was his life's blood. He respected the Party and praised the system: the ragged loopy net that gave him 4000 a month. What cared he that across the seas his riches might not amount to much? His mind could not stretch to anything he lacked, which included the satisfaction of winning at a dangerous game. He did not tell Party Greenhorn what else went into the export crates with the fake tricolour Tang horses.

Behind the bar Young Bi heard the figures they mentioned. One earned triple his wage, the other forty times, and Bi already got fifty per cent more than the average worker. Bowing his head, he went forward to ask if they would like another drink. He was invisible to them, a member of the shadow world, as they marched forward in the name of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

In a further recess of the bar sat three foreigners. Chinese thought foreigners looked funny, and foreigners on long-term residence in China lived up to that perception, their hair ill-cropped, their expressions hunted, their eyes sunken, their noses growing longer by the day. Perched like crows, the three in the dark were no exception.

‘How far can you go?' giggled the woman, Dulcia, as she signed for the barman's attention. She wanted to put a tape of her own on the sound system. She carried a bag of tapes that she played in taxis to make the environment mellow. ‘Can you use those shots?' she asked.

‘For the file,' smiled Clarence, the younger of her two male companions. ‘It's all material.'

‘The Empire Strikes Back. Those guys were a mess.'

They had come from the hospital where the injured were being treated after a bloody brawl between Chinese and Africans at one of the universities. Clarence was friendly with some of the African aid students who exposed their wounds to his press camera. On the way they had picked up the Doctor to get a professional assessment of the injuries.

Stringy, flaxen-haired Clarence had eyes the pale blue of caustic soda. ‘I don't see why the Chinese have to take it out on the blacks,' he said. He had studied Mandarin at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, came to Beijing for finishing off, and stayed on.

Dulcia had been discussing with him her thwarted project of putting together an aerobics program for Central TV which would make her Jane Fonda to one billion people—the thought made her toes curl. But the project kept coming up against the wall.

‘The first thing to learn is not to hope,' grinned Clarence.

‘I hate your cynicism.'

‘Cynicism or paranoia. Take your choice,' he replied. ‘Cynicism is the better way. I'll survive you all here.'

‘You think I'm paranoid?' A fraction of a squint, at close quarters, made her look vampish. ‘I'll tell you something—I'm paranoid because I'm fighting. We're surrounded by enemies here. I want to free these people.'

‘Liberate the Chinese? Change China? That's the oldest con in the book. Merchants, diplomats, missionaries, generals. They've all tried, all been gobbled up. Now from their citadels of enlightenment come the kids of Reagan's America.'

‘You talk like a book, Clarence.'

‘I get it from my mother.'

Clarence's anger caused the table to brood. Then he started to cough. Beijing had given him a permanent cough.

‘You should do something about that,' put in Wally.

‘What the doctor ordered, another of the same!' Dulcia bounced back from the bar with three black cocktails.

‘Cheers!
Prost
!
Ganbei
! You gotta keep hoping,' she said too loudly.

Dulcia believed—in everything; believed in hard work; believed in making it. She knew her homeland had its faults but believed that on odds it was the best place on earth, offering riches and freedom without which there was no possibility of self-fulfilment. Unlike Clarence, she had clear moral convictions. Wilhelm Reich and Tina Turner stood beside Abe Lincoln in her pantheon. She was an agent of liberation waging a personal campaign to help China.

‘You're very quiet, Doc.' She turned to the sandy-haired, sandy-faced man whose tall frame seemed to be propped against the chair rather than resting on it. ‘How are you finding this place?'

‘It's okay. I didn't come with high hopes, just to poke around. I'm interested in some of their methods of treatment. But I'd have to admit I'm not finding what I'm looking for.'

Wally's explanation was perhaps flimsier than necessary, as if the encounters with Mrs Gu were sapping his sense of purpose. ‘I admire the Chinese. The scale is enormous. To have managed even the first few steps on the road to Utopia is an achievement. They've got food. Disease is relatively contained. Things function—more or less.'

Dulcia spread her hand on the table. ‘Look at my fingernails. Even in this light. The place is filthy! We don't blow the trumpet about food and hygiene in our countries,' she said. ‘What's the difference with China?'

‘History,' said Clarence flatly. ‘The magnitude of what holds them back.'

‘For which we are partly to blame,' added Wally.

Clarence cocked his eyebrow. ‘Don't point the finger at me, chum.'

But words were only obscure terms for unformulated feelings. Wally hung on to the belief that the present cant of the Reforms expressed some deeper wisdom in the Chinese collective consciousness. Progress was biological, a struggle between mutations; and the Reforms, he hoped, were an organic process leading to health.

‘We all love Chinese,' acidly concluded Clarence, who was starved for body contact inside his sheath of winter clothing.

‘Let's play that one over.' Dulcia was tired of fuzzy talk.
Private dancer, a dancer for money
, she sang, clapping her hands above her head as she went to dance in the middle of the space with all her happy American heedlessness. ‘Hey guys, let's party!'

The barman glanced towards the manager. ‘Excuse me,' he said, coming forward to whisper in the foreign woman's ear.

‘What? No dancing! Just try to stop me, honey!'

The manager was next, insisting on the rules … their licence … the Public Security Bureau … certain regulations, as Dulcia mocked.

A single person was not allowed to dance alone; that constituted performance. Two persons were not allowed to dance together; that was too romantic. No foreigners and Chinese were allowed to dance together; that was ‘spiritual pollution'.

But according to the regulations, as interpreted by the hand-wringing manager, three foreigners were allowed to dance together. He cordially invited the two men to join Dulcia, who broke up over the regulation—a sly number, three.