Under Fishbone Clouds (45 page)

‘You know how to take a pile of filling, put it in the pastry and then fold it closed. You need to see how to make it all, from scratch, so that you can do it on your own.’

‘All right.’ She squatted down at the other side of the tabletop, and looked at him. He huffed and wheezed as he chopped and kneaded, appearing far older than his age. She understood his reasoning – the authorities could arrive at any time and send him for re-education, just as had happened to Yuying the year before. The curls of diced green onion stung Jinyi’s eyes.

‘Who taught you to make dumplings then, Pa?’ Manxin said, breaking his train of thought. ‘Your family?’

‘Ha!’ His laugh sent a shot of pain through his body. ‘No, not them. My parents died young, and the rest of them … well, the only thing they taught me is that the worst crime in the world is to forget your family. Remember that, Manxin. I’ve been guilty of it myself before, I’m ashamed to say, but I understand it now.’

‘I know, Pa.’

‘Anyhow,’ he continued, trying to lighten the mood, ‘we didn’t have the means or the money to make dumplings in the
countryside
back when I was young. We could only eat whatever we found in the ground – stalks, roots, withered crops, sometimes whole
fistfuls
of crumbly earth that would stick between our teeth,
funny-looking
sprouts, saltworms, earthworms, caterpillars –’

‘I don’t believe you,’ she said, but he could tell that she was not sure. He laughed.

‘No, it was your grandma who taught me. You kids used to call her Granny Dumpling, remember, because she inherited the
dumpling
restaurants when your grandpa died, back before everything was redistributed. Well, in the old days before we had the strength and wisdom of the Chairman to guide us, I used to work in the kitchen in one of those restaurants. That’s how I came to marry your mother.’

He shredded the pork with sharp flicks of his wrist, never taking his eyes from his daughter.

‘But what about other types of dumplings – carrot, or lamb, or rabbit, or cabbage, or shrimp? Are you going to show me those too?’ Manxin asked.

‘No, we’re only doing these. You’ll just have to improvise with the rest.’

She flinched – the rules, edicts, speeches and exhortations of the state did all they could to restrict any chance of free operation. She viewed the very idea of improvising with suspicion; it sounded intellectual, rightist, and therefore frightening.

‘That’s how the original chefs, centuries back, found the recipes we use now. You’ll only find out whether something works or not by giving it a go. You might stumble across a really good taste; you never know. Whatever happens, you’ll learn something about yourself.’

Manxin shook her head. This conversation, she felt, was
definitely
veering into dangerous territory. Could it be that her father really was an enemy of the new ways, really did deserve the visit of two nights back?

‘I already know everything about myself,’ she said, defiantly.

Jinyi wanted to laugh and pat her shoulder, but held back, since he could just about recall being fourteen himself. ‘I’m a hard-
working
, dedicated, honest Communist and I follow the Party with my whole heart. There is nothing else to know.’

Jinyi coughed and his body hunched in, like a waterlogged concertina. His daughter leapt up to stop him collapsing onto the precariously balanced work surface, but turned away abruptly when she saw the way the pain had remapped his face.

Manxin returned to the room to wake her siblings. The market catcalls and doorway anthems were flooding in through the window; the day had begun. Jinyi hunched over the half-finished rolls of pastry and the jiggling blobs of soft filling, listening to the fuzzy buzz and distortion of the cranked-up amplifier outside the town hall blaring out the day’s first rendition of ‘The East is Red’, and he felt his eyes red too, stinging and tight.

As the tune rattled on, Jinyi was reminded of an old proverb about a musician, a master of the whiny
gugin
, a long seven-stringed zither made from only the finest cedar. Every day, from dawn until dusk, this musician would sit in the courtyard of his house playing his compositions. One day a wandering stranger stopped beside the house and squatted down to listen to the reeling, spindly melody
shaking itself free from the belly of the box-like instrument. When the piece was finished, the stranger spoke.

‘A great river, tumbling towards the sea. A woman in the
countryside
, waiting for a boat to return.’

The musician was amazed. ‘Yes!’ he exclaimed. ‘That is exactly the feeling I wished to communicate. Listen to another.’

The musician again began to pluck, faster this time, the strings pulled taut and snapped again and again, the piercing music
shredding
the afternoon air. When he had finished that second piece, the stranger spoke once more.

‘The terrible excitement of battle; the twin possibilities of death or glory.’

Once again the musician was astounded. Finally, he thought, I have found the perfect listener, someone who can really appreciate my music.

The musician and the stranger spent every day after that together, the musician playing and the stranger listening and commenting, before lapsing into a shared silence of contentment while they shared rice and wine. Yet almost exactly a year after their first meeting, the stranger died of a sudden illness. On the day of the funeral, the musician took an axe and smashed his
gugin
into a hundred shards of tinder, and threw them onto his friend’s pyre. ‘There is no point playing any longer,’ he told the mourners, ‘for no one else will understand my songs as well as he did. I am no longer a musician.’

Jinyi clutched his sides, drew breath, and listened for his
children
yawning and clambering out of bed. He calmed himself and made an effort to sit as patiently as he could, for what else could he do now but wait?

The Jade Emperor ran his hands over the black and white swirls of the
taijitu,
and it immediately began to glow – a strange warmth spread out across the walls, which shed their dust and smoke stains and suddenly seemed freshly built. I looked around to see that everything in the temple had been restored, complete with gold leaf and gilt and stacks of well-bound scriptures, all except for where the idol of Lao Tzu should have been.

The Jade Emperor saw my glance. ‘The old sage would be far happier with a bird’s nest than a caricature. Now, what can you tell me about the Way?’

I hadn’t realised I was going to be examined. And besides, the old god still hadn’t answered my question. Yet I shrugged and decided to play along.

‘Well, of course, in the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu tells us “The Way that can be spoken of is not the Way.” If that’s true, then a humble man like me surely couldn’t be expected to be able to say
anything
about it.’

He grinned. ‘But you explain love. Surely that is just as
impossible
to pin down, just as difficult to define. Better to give up your quest now, Kitchen God.’

‘No … well, maybe you’re right, but … hey!’

I looked up to see that the Jade Emperor had disappeared, though his words remained, echoing around the little temple. All the Jade Emperor ever seemed to do was make my head ache.

9

1974 THE YEAR OF THE TIGER

There are things people cannot hear: earthquakes before they begin to murmur beneath the ground, volcanoes before they burst, the turn of the wind that tells birds to flee, the ear-piercing whistles that make dogs cower and whine – the looping waxy tunnels
leading
to the human eardrum miss the high-pitched wails and
vibrations
of nature calling to its kin. There are colours the eye cannot formulate, pixels that the flipside of the retina cannot reassemble, blind spots that blot out the periphery. And when all these blind spots are totalled up, the whole world is obscured. There are, and I think you can guess where I am going, questions that cannot be answered. There are universes beyond our reach.

What does this tell us? That our experience is limited, is crowded on all sides by darkness and fog. Even up here, looking down on all you lot, my fellow deities and I are often puzzled. That is probably one of the reasons why the Jade Emperor challenged me in the first place. Yet though our curiosity – both human and divine – our instinct and wonder may be spurred by impossible queries, these are always eventually pushed aside, for the minutiae of life continue despite our ignorance, and our questions too get subsumed in our blind spots.

Jinyi was trying to sleep. The mist rising from the paddies, snaking around the building’s squat stilts and slinking in between the
floorboards
, however, had other ideas. His fifth winter there not yet finished, and already his bones creaked and rasped when he tossed and turned under the rancid, stinking bundle of furs. Five other men shared the room, slotted into rows of three on either side, each one fiercely protective of their marked-out part of the hard floor. The warped walls shuddered in time with their snores. Jinyi
sighed, and imagined his feet, ringed with blisters and dead skin, becoming webbed from the endless hours of squelching through the paddies. The dark was absolute; even the moon seemed to have been left behind back in the city where his children were.

He turned over again and cursed himself. He was so exhausted that he could not sleep – how could that be? Not that he wanted to sleep, because when he slept he dreamt of her, and when he woke he found himself alone on the cold floor, unsure in what province his wife might be, and that was too much. He pushed the promise to the back of his mind.

In only a few hours the god-awful cycle will begin again, he thought, and then I’ll be praying for rest. No, wait, I cannot let myself think like that. This is for my benefit, it is doing me good.

Jinyi had a hundred other little phrases that he told himself in order to get through the grind of minutes, hours, days, months, seasons; however long it would take until he could see his family again.

As sleep approached, his mind wandered back to the journey down there. He had spent days shoulder to shoulder with a hunched and half-blind elderly professor on one side and a handsome young dentist on the other, a dozen of them crammed into the back of an open-top wagon as it had juddered down too many dirt roads to count. Their knees had knocked together and their breath had streamed up into hopeless smoke signals as mountains dipped and sagged around them, the engine spluttering whenever the gears were changed to match the challenge of another ascent. Jinyi remembered the roar of rivers behind them; the chatter of hawks and the distant explosions of cliffs being blasted; the tribal drumming of rain against the pulled-up tarp while they had tried to sleep sitting up; heads slumping against
unfamiliar
bodies; the persistent smell of sweat and cigarettes; the distant snags and pockmarks of mines worked precariously into hillsides; the glares of uniformed men at endless outposts; the sound of cities carried from afar; the threatening beauty of the scenery as one
province
tumbled into another and then another, and the roaring silence that none of them could break.

As the landscape shook them through, Jinyi had realised from where he recognised the endless hills and plains. This is where it all comes from, he had thought to himself, the world ensnared in the scrolls and etchings that hang on the walls of a thousand rooms and restaurants I’ve wandered through.

Chinese painting for a long time ignored the trappings of Western art: realism and the obsession with light and space. Instead, the focus was on shadow and silhouette, on the fluidity of the dancing lines of ink. Why? One view is that the arrival of Buddhism along the Silk Road gave rise to the idea that the world is transitory, is nothing but an illusion, and thus attempts to capture it
realistically
were considered ridiculous, for everyone agreed that there was nothing real to be captured. Another view is that the fluidity of the lines suggested a world of continual flux, a world that has no place for permanence. Furthermore, the quick and careful brush strokes bring to mind the painstaking work of the calligrapher, suggesting that images share the same work as words: to fix and define the nature of things, and thus render the wild under our control.

The Song-dynasty landscape painters went even further, tracing line over line to create a sense of the unreachable: craggy mountains, snow-tipped gorges, vast precipices and ever-present reels of fog and mist blurring the distance. Yet one thing almost always absent from these paintings was people, as if the harmony the Taoists sought between transcendent nature and the sloppily human was always just out of reach. It was the landscape of these artists – a landscape of sublime mountains that threw unstoppable shadows, of winding paths and forking forest tracks where the future was obscured by haze and drizzle – that the truck had stuttered into. I am being taken, Jinyi had thought, into the unknown expanse of the past.

He was almost asleep when the frail wooden door was shoved open and the fat cadre came bellowing into the room.

‘Get up, you lazy shits! Don’t you know there’s no such thing as a lie-in here? There’s work to do, and if you think you’re too good to do it, you’re sorely mistaken. The real peasants have been up for almost an hour now – it looks like you lot have missed breakfast and are going to have to get straight to work! Come
on!
’

As he spoke he kicked over the shared chamberpot in the centre of the room, which had the desired effect of sending the men
scrambling
up, away from the spilt streams of steamy dark piss. Since they slept in their clothes, moth-chewed coats and all, the journey from scattered dreams to the dreary greys of the field was a short one. As soon as they were out of the door the six men, lumped together because each of them appeared to be around fifty (most of
the people in the countryside, they were told, did not know their exact age), were herded into work units and set to task.

Jinyi had spent the previous day guiding the geriatric oxen to their winter graze and cover, the beasts’ irritability and
undignified
lust sending their hapless driver sliding across the frost-dusted mud at regular intervals. Today would be more of the same,
winding
the oxen through the sloping paddies away from the village, toward the sustenance of the forest. Having spent his childhood in the countryside, Jinyi fared better than most of the others, bearing less of the cadre’s rage and the peasants’ scorn. He already knew that the thing that got to people there was not the monotony, for work was like that everywhere, but the unpredictability and sheer struggle that consumed the daylight hours.

‘Wait, Jinyi – stop it, stop it! – this one’s got a mind of its own.’ One of their group, a short, podgy man, whom the cadre had
nicknamed
Lard, was struggling with one of the shorter oxen, flinching when the animal’s hot, greasy tongue lapped out at him. Lard’s round face was blotchy and red, his breathing laboured and his tiny eyes screwed up in concentration.

‘Grip the horn and drag. He’s used to it, so he’s not going to charge you. Stay calm, and he’ll calm down too.’ Jinyi had found himself, despite his natural inclination to slip into the background, nominated the leader of their small group.

As well as Jinyi and Lard, there was a tall, bow-backed man with wobbling jowls nicknamed Turkey. He was the newest arrival, with freshly pink stitch scars still littering his shaved head to prove it. There was also a thin boy – fifteen perhaps, give or take a year or two – who called himself Bo. Jinyi seemed to spend the days
herding
the men as much as the beasts, yet they followed his every word; the only time, Jinyi noted ruefully, that growing up in fields had ever bestowed more than condescension.

‘It won’t respect anything, it’s just a … a great oaf. It’s got that look in its eyes, like it’s planning something,’ Lard complained, and the others let him. Better to get it out of his system out of the earshot of the peasants. If they were to report his words to the cadre, some kind of carefully crafted punishment might await the lot of them.

‘You’re looking at these animals the wrong way,’ Jinyi said. They had reached the top of the slope and grouped in preparation for the
descent among the frosted weeds and sly patches of ice. ‘You’re looking at them as if they’re exhibits in a zoo or pets or distant specks in an old painting. You’re looking at them as if they’re
thinking
things. They’re not. People here treat them like you might treat a car, or a tool, not like an unruly child. We’ve got to see the world through different eyes, remember – that is why we are here.’

The others let their heads slump in mute reply. They all knew why they were there. Twenty-odd oxen with matted flanks and swishing tails peered down, suspicious of starting downhill after such a laborious climb. Their destination, the slimy mulch of a forest of evergreens, was still only a blurry wave on the horizon.

Turkey took off one of his shoes and cursed. ‘Stupid thing. The heel is full of holes – look! My socks are the same, the ones that aren’t waterlogged, that is. My wife used to sew and darn and all that. I’m not sure I can do it on my own.’

Not wanting that kind of talk to overcome them before they had even started the difficult part of the day, Jinyi waved his arm and the four of them began to shove at the wide rear ends of the
stubborn
beasts.

It had taken Jinyi almost three months to build up an idea of where he was. Nothing was certain – even the length of the first journey seemed to have become confused after a few days on the road, so that by the time they had arrived he was not able to say whether they had been huddled up in the back of the truck for five days or ten, while they had taken so many turns and looping narrow passes that his inner compass had spun and buzzed as if held close to a powerful magnet.

The villagers there, meanwhile, knew only the names of their village, the village over the mountain and the closest market town. The province those might be situated in was an irrelevance, of no more importance to them than the arbitrary naming of the
galaxy
that their home planet happened to sit in. The endless dips and slopes and the continual undulation of forests and flats had confused Jinyi’s sense of geography, though the paddies and the frequent rainfall suggested that they had limboed down closer to the Equator. Though he later found out that he had been only two provinces away from his wife, it did not matter – when you were not allowed to visit, it made no difference whether the distance was one mile or one thousand.

‘Not far now. Bo, how are you doing?’ Jinyi kept up the flow of talk every few minutes, in order to reassure the others and stop him from worrying about himself. The boy shrugged, pressed on.

The village squatted near the bottom of a long, stretched-out hill. It looked like a tall mountain had been splatted out by a giant fist and then the lumpy damage covered over with a smattering of trees and streams. Every week a truck passed through, with a half-trained doctor who spent most of his visits attempting to debunk the locals’ superstitions and warn them away from their homemade remedies. There was no way out. The dirt road could have led anywhere, the couple of work mules looked as if they had already signed a long, drawn-out agreement with death, and the cadre always kept one eye on his rusty motorbike, even, it was whispered, while he slept.