Reliable Essays (25 page)

She was headed for the Shanghai Institute of Biochemistry of the Academica Sinica, whither all the British Media, except one, decided not to accompany her. My colleagues, wise in the trade, had knowledgeably concluded that now was the time to file their copy, take a well-earned nap, or check out the attractions of what had once been China’s most westernized big city, the first one to import every occidental fad up to and including Communism. In Shanghai it is even possible to buy an alcoholic drink if you turn the right corners. The girls are just as unattainable as in Peking but they dress more provocatively, with a cut to their comradely trousers which suggests that they are not above withholding some of their labour from the commune in order to sit up at night resewing the odd seam.

It would have been good to spend more than just a few minutes following Sidney Greenstreet’s ghost past the old Western Concession compounds of the Bund, and on top of that there was the Shanghai National Museum, containing pictures which I had been waiting to see half my life, and of which I can only say that if I could write the way those guys painted I would use up a lot less Tipp-Ex. But like a fool I went to the Biochemistry Institute, and like a fool I got lucky. The Woman of Science put on her best public performance of the tour so far, and I was the only scribe there to cover it.

The performance was good because for once she wasn’t performing. Biochemistry is her field and the assembled scientists were among the top boys in it, so when they spoke she was for a moment distracted from her usual self-imposed task of proving her superiority to everyone else. The head of the Institute apologized, in beautifully eloquent English, for his English, which he had not spoken for forty years. ‘Today we are very honoured to have you with us. First of all, may I introduce Professor . . .’ He introduced a dozen professors, respectively in charge of such departments as insulin synthesis, nucleic acids, biomemory, molecular radiation and a lot of other things I couldn’t catch. Most of it was Chinese to me but clearly it was grist to the mill of the Woman of Science, especially the stuff about insulin, which she was concerned with when studying under her famous mentor, the Nobel Prizewinner Dorothy Hodgkin – a name revered by the Shanghai scientists, who had a picture of her in their visitors’ book.

That the Yin Sage was Dorothy Hodgkin’s Pupil plainly went down a storm with the Chinese, in whom the dynastic principle is well ingrained. The Pupil’s pupils sharpened, I noticed, when one of the scientists announced that the laboratory was working on leukaemia and liver cancer. Since the same laboratory had already developed, among other things, such eminently applicable ideas as the reprogramming of fish to breed in still water, there was no need to think they would not crack the case, always provided that their government gave curing old humans the same priority as feeding new ones. Of these latter, needless to say, there is no shortage, and in fact the Shanghai laboratory is working on a fertility drug (derived from the same LH–H analysis that fixed the fish) which could produce irreversible infertility at high dosages – a possibility which the Woman of Science immediately saw might be open to abuse, and said so.

Touring the individual laboratories, she interviewed the scientists working in each. They all spoke dazzling scientific English, with words like ‘cucumber’ falsely emphasized and phrases like ‘polypep-tide macromolecular electrokinesis’ fluently delivered. After she left each room I backtracked to ask the interviewees, relaxing after their ordeal, whether she still knew her stuff. Without exception they said she did. She missed a trick, though, in the room where they analyse proteins by counting dots. Reminiscing, the Woman of Science said: ‘We had no computers in those days to analyse the dots.’ Her hosts were too polite to tell her the truth, which was that as far as they were concerned those days were still here. Even to the inexpert eye, the laboratory is painfully underequipped. The rubber tubes are perished, glass is hoarded like gold, and there is obviously no more computer time in a year than there are rainy days in the Gobi. They’re counting those dots with an abacus. When the Woman of Science handed a Sinclair desk computer to the Japanese it was coals to Newcastle, or at any rate bamboo shoots to Tokyo. The same computer given to the Shanghai Biochemistry Institute would have made some long friends.

The banquet that night was hosted by the Mayor of Shanghai, who generously announced in his speech of welcome that ‘British people have always had a great feeling for the Chinese’. He could have put this another way, saying that British people were instrumental in poisoning half the country with opium and showed an enthusiasm unusual even among the European nations when it came to humiliating the Chinese by such practices as shutting them out of their own cities. The park which was denied to ‘dogs and Chinese’ is still there on the river side of the Bund. Nowadays it is enjoyed by the indigenous population but they allow us to share it, which is a lot more than we ever did for them. One only hoped that the Yin Sage knew how tactful the Mayor was being in not mentioning any of that.

The possibility that the Woman of Science might be a bit thin in the area of Chinese history was a constant worry to those of us in her entourage who wished her well on her delicate mission. But she caught all eyes in her dress of vivid
K’ang-hsi
cobalt blue, a veiled reminder that in the eighteenth century (our time) the European demand for Chinese porcelain was matched by an equally eager supply. The Mayor, perhaps forewarned, had countered in advance by gracing every table with a full kit of Yi Sing stoneware specially procured for the occasion. It looked like bitter chocolate and provided an ideal container for the dreaded
mao tai
, the liquid land-mine, the anti-personnel potion employed by Chinese functionaries to render one another’s official speeches inaudible. Since first encountering the stuff a week before, the British Media had settled on two ways of coping with it. You could down it in one and get drunk straight away or you could sip at it and get drunk almost straight away.

In Shanghai, however, one was likely to forget about drinking in favour of eating, because the food was astonishing – compared with Peking, there was a playful savour to its presentation which suggested that we were already getting closer to the West. The same thing was suggested by the attire and general demeanour of the waitresses, who wore skirts instead of trousers and in an alarming number of cases were unmanningly pretty. British scriveners and cameramen fought one another for a smile. If you are the kind of man who falls in love through the eyes, you will fall in love a hundred times a day in China. No wonder that in the Chinese artistic heritage the pictures outweigh the words and even the words are pictures. The whole place soaks the optic nerve like a long shot of morphine into a fresh vein. I smiled like a goof from daylight to dusk.

Among those prominent behind the top table’s array of carved pumpkins was the inevitable Powie. The Mayor referred to him as ‘Mr’ Y. K. Pao, thereby depriving him of his knighthood, which he must have received for services to athletics, because when the Woman of Science went up to congratulate the orchestra Powie was out of his starting blocks and congratulating them right along with her. The great Australian sprinter Hector Hogan used to move that fast but he needed spiked shoes to do it.

Onward to Canton, where there was another banquet, this time for lunch instead of dinner. The venue was the Dong-fang hotel, a Disneyland Chinese emporium all dolled up in funfair gilt filigree. By now you could feel the West close by, just outside the Pearl River delta, a jetfoil ride across a short stretch of the South China Sea. People from Hong Kong come here to visit their relatives and give them that greatest of all gifts, a television set. The girls at the cashier’s desk have pocket calculators which the scientists in Shanghai would covet and which the clerks in the Minzu hotel in Peking would probably fail to recognize. China is a big place. Here, at the edge, it is a bit like the West, but the edge, we had learned, is a long way from the middle.

We were all Old China Hands now. Even the Woman of Science, clad today in a green dress recalling the
famille verte
teapots of the Ch’ing, was looking blasé. The locals kept bringing forth food fit to change the mind of anyone who had been harbouring the notion that Cantonese cuisine means offal rolled in red ochre and glazed like a brick. It was wonderful, but after a week of banqueting we had had enough. The Yin Sage’s impeccable chopstick technique did not falter. She could still pick up a greased peanut without lifting either elbow. But her usually transparent azure eyes had grown slightly occluded, like the milky-violet glaze which the Chinese collectors of ceramics call
kuei-mien-ch’ing
, or ghost’s-face blue. Perhaps she had seen too much of Powie.

She escaped him on the short flight to Hong Kong. When her plane took off he was not on it. I was not on it either, having failed to fill out the right forms some weeks before. After several hours spent anxiously facing the prospect of staying in China for ever – imagine how long it will be before they get breakfast television – I secured the last seat on a packed Trident and scrambled aboard. As I came stooping through the door I recognized a certain pair of Gucci shoes. It was Powie. He assured me that Mrs Thatcher’s trip was ‘very successful’ and that she had done a grand job. Powie has a lot in common with David Frost – permanent jet-lag, an unusual way with the English language, and an infallible nose for the main action.

The approach to Kai Tak, Hong Kong’s notorious airport, starts between mountains and continues between buildings. As the joke says, Hong Kong is the only city where street-vendors sell you things before you land. The place struck me, even at the very moment when I thought I was about to strike it, as a kind of slant-eyed Las Vegas. No sooner had the plane stopped rolling than Powie was outside and into a black Toyota, while your reporter was making his solitary and sweat-soaked way to the Hilton, where the rest of the British Media were already up to their necks in pine-scented suds while they filed copy on the bathroom telephone. The wealth of Hong Kong would seem ridiculous anyway, but after the Chinese People’s Republic you feel like a nun dropped into Babylon. To dial room service is to experience disgust, and for half an hour I hesitated. All right, half a minute.

The Dragon Lady, guarded by police swat squads up on the roofs, had by now transformed herself into the Keeper of Secrets. The fate of Hong Kong, known to her faithful consort as Honkers, was locked in her mind and safe from divination, even by the methods of geomancy or
feng-shui
(the winds and the waters). While the Hong Kong Media went crazy with speculation, she did her chores, starting with a visit to the Scots Guards at Stanley Fort. After Northern Ireland, Honkers is a cushy posting. The wives swim in the clear water of Repulse Bay and have babies while the going is good. The Keeper of Secrets dropped out of the sky by helicopter and moved among them in a midnight-blue dress sprinkled with almond blossoms. The heat was breathtaking. ‘Are you
all
pregnant?’ she asked. The teeth of a pretty child called Joanna were duly inspected. The British Media rushed to interview Joanna. I interviewed the wives, who all said, without being prompted, that their visitor looked too tired to last out the day.

As she climbed back into the thwacking helicopter, one could only agree. Her stamina is impressive but she is overly proud of it, and this trip she had pushed herself too far. Along with the punch-drunk British Media I strapped myself into the back-up helicopter and found myself hanging into space over an open door with Kowloon lying sideways underneath. If she felt half as bad as I did then the upcoming, all-important press conference was going to be a disaster.

In fact, it was her best yet. On the last day in Peking she had made a bad press conference worse by showing obvious impatience with the halting English of some of the Hong Kong Media. This propensity probably springs less from intolerance than from her urge to get cracking, but to possess it is a handicap and to indulge it is a grievous fault. Now, however, on the day that mattered, she kept her irascibility bottled up. She said all she could say, which was that an agreement had been reached that there should be an agreement, and that from here on in it was all down to the diplomats. When a Hong Kong girl reporter said that the question of renewing the lease could have simply been ignored, the Stateswoman turned a potential minus into a plus by insisting that a contract is a contract and the means of meeting it should be found early, ‘in good time’. Clearly she spoke with conviction, from the deep core of her nature, where the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval has the force of law. In Peking she had got away for a few minutes on her own in search of a bolt of fabric. The one she liked was too pricey at £39 a yard, so she had not bought it. Her passion for managing the household along sound lines was what got her elected in the first place, and was what now reassured the people of Hong Kong that things might just conceivably, in the long run, be going to be all right. On Hong Kong television the assembled pundits, posing in front of blown-up Thatcher glossies that looked like publicity stills of Eleanor Parker in
Return to Peyton Place
, began a long analysis of what little she had said, as if there could have been more. Next day the stock market dipped but there was no crash. When the rabbits had finished pulling out, the smart money would probably buy back in.

The smart money was there in force at the Government House reception. Chinese businessmen whose personal wealth made Powie look like a pauper were jostling to breathe the Dragon Lady’s perfume. If her mission had been a flop then they would already have been in Acapulco, so the signs were favourable. I met such mighty Hong Kong
tai pan
s as Mr Lee of real estate, Mr Fong of many boats, and the ineffable Sir Run Run Shaw, who had made a hill of money out of those terrible films in which bad actors kick each other. (In the days when he was plain Mister, Run Run invented a cinematic process called Shawscope, a version of the widescreen ratio which allowed more actors to kick each other at the same time.) One after the other I asked all these characters whether they had been in Peking lately. It turned out that all of them had been spending a lot of time there. Mr Lee told me how much the Chinese leaders respected his honesty.