Under Fishbone Clouds (57 page)

It was only a few days later that Manxin arrived home from the factory, shook the rustle of crunched-up leaves from her coat and asked the whole family to sit at the table. Her moon-shaped face was lit with the wisps of a smile which she was trying to force down into a more refined expression. They all knew what she would say before she even opened her mouth – she had been meeting with the young man from the engine workshop once a month since spring, and Jinyi had even had dinner with his parents.

‘Xue Jingtien and I are getting married!’ she announced.

In the noisy gabble of overlapping squawks and squeals that
followed
– as Jinyi tried to start a passionate speech about how proud he was, as Xiaojing and Liqui shouted and laughed and teased, and Manxin gushed at the possible plans – no one heard Yuying hoarsely whispering, ‘Congratulations.’

There are a number of different theories about how the world began. Some say that it came from Pan Gu, a man who emerged from the primeval chaos. Back when there was only nothingness surrounded by more nothingness, an egg formed, and in it grew Pan Gu. After thousands of years, he burst forth from the shell, and with him emerged the sky and the earth, the heavy matter sinking to his feet and the light matter rising up around his head. Some thousands of years later, he died. His eyes became the sun and the moon, his hair split and sparked up stars; his blood became rivers, his skin fields; his last words became the clouds, borne along by the winds of his last breath. From the fleas that had fed on his giant body, humans slowly evolved.

Some insist that the goddess Nuwa patted a handful of dark
matter
into a ball and called it earth; from the wet clay that bubbled up there she moulded men and women to populate her creation. I have also heard talk of a large explosion, which may have some measure of truth, since the gods have always enjoyed fireworks displays – the louder and more dangerous the better. Other people even talk of the world being put together in a single week, as if by builders on a tight deadline. Who said that those foreign
barbarians
have no sense of humour?

But it seems to me that the oldest stories are closest when they assert that there can have been no beginning, just as there will be no end. Everything is perception, even time: yesterday is only a story, a memory; the future is as yet only a collection of hopes or fears. Neither is real. Only the present moment exists. We must remember to be more careful with it.

11

1981 THE YEAR OF THE ROOSTER

‘Between here and there we must travel back a hundred years. See that old woman in the park, walking backwards? Some people think they can do it that way. They don’t know the secret path we know though, do they Lian?’ Jinyi said and winked.

The little girl nibbled on the deep-fried dough stick left over from breakfast and nodded. Jinyi grinned at his granddaughter, eager to display a confidence he did not feel. It was only two weeks earlier that he had found himself meandering about the park, suddenly unsure of why he was there. He had been forced to ask a stranger to help him get home, and the loss of face still upset him. But what was worse was the niggling suspicion that fate was once again snapping at his heels. He was together with his wife again and, now that they had been asked to take early retirement to make way for younger workers at the factory, now that their children had left home and their troubles slipped further into the past, they had discovered each other anew. Yet something told him that life wouldn’t let him get away with happiness for long.

‘Can we go back for lunch?’ Lian’s head was a scrag of black hair, her face as round and dimpled as a mooncake.

‘Of course. Keep hold of my hand now, come on – you can’t travel back in time on your own. And don’t forget your grandma,’ Jinyi replied, looking up at Yuying, who was a few steps behind, holding an umbrella up over their heads to stave off the late spring sun.

‘What kind of nonsense is your grandpa filling your head with now, hmm?’ Yuying said as she caught up. ‘Yesterday he was
telling
you about a dog in space. What was it today? She’s only three, Hou Jinyi.’

‘I’m three and a half!’ the little girl huffed.

‘Quite right,’ Jinyi chuckled. ‘And there was something else, wasn’t there?’

‘An ape?’ his wife said. She was growing used to Jinyi’s words
slipping
into thin air. They got misplaced, along with his keys, his glasses, his chopsticks and his thoughts. Yuying had to continually poke and prod him to keep him from floating away from the present.

‘Yes, yes, that’s it. There was an ape in space, walking on the moon. I heard about it on the radio. They do crazy things in some of those foreign countries, let me tell you. Anyway, I only told her we were travelling back in time, and that’s the truth – just look around you.’

He was right. Their neighbourhood may have been thrust into 1981 – a few paces from their house a large new market shop had taken over the cobbler’s stall, the hat shop and the long-vacated calligraphy supplies store – yet as they headed down the streets to the outskirts they found themselves retreating through the decades. The further they went, the more the new shop-fronts faded into tin roofs and shanty shacks, and the few private cars morphed into rust-crippled bicycles with ear-piercingly shrill bells. A man with a loudspeaker was sweating in the morning heat, trying to sell his stack of newspapers before the cheap print pooled into an inky smudge. Yuying fought to stop herself clutching her ears in protest. She lately found herself worrying that the smallest noises might announce the most terrible portents.

The three of them stopped at a crumbling brick shell of a building, in which an oven was panting steam over round baskets. Students were sitting on plastic chairs and feasting on cheap sloppy dumplings. They bought a small, sticky red-bean bun for Lian. A chunky radio, plugged into an uncovered socket and surrounded by a mangle of frayed wires, blared out a tune Jinyi found difficult to follow.

‘What is this rubbish?’ he grinned at the middle-aged woman as he handed over the coins for the snack.

‘Search me.’ She dipped her head toward the students. ‘They tuned it, and now I can’t make it play anything except this foreign crap. It sounds like just before feeding-time at the zoo, if you ask me.’

‘What are they singing about?’ Lian asked to distract her
grandfather
as she tried to subtly sneak the sweet treat from the open bag swinging against her grandmother’s hip.

‘I’m not sure. It sounded as though they were singing in American,’ Jinyi replied.

‘They speak English in America,’ Yuying gently corrected him.

Ever since she decided to speak again, she had made an effort to speak only of the positive. It was not easy. She measured each word before she opened her mouth, imagining how it might ripple out away from her. There was enough bad news in the world, she had decided, enough blame and recrimination – and if we cannot alter the past then we must do our best to steer the present away from trouble. Time is a master strategist who might outwit you at any second; don’t give him any opportunity to turn everything
upside-down
, she thought. Silence was futile – the only thing you cannot escape is yourself. What’s more, this new decade, already bringing a wedding and another birth, had knitted her more firmly to the future she had once dared to imagine for her family, a future that had once seemed impossible. Each new year washed away more of the older scribbles in the sand.

‘Quite right, of course. English. I was never one for languages, Lian, not like your grandmother here. If you work hard, you can be just like her.’ Jinyi winked, and the little girl scrunched her nose. Why would she want to be old and wrinkled and smell like jasmine?

‘In England, you know,’ he continued, ‘the people look like sea lions. The men all have moustaches which they keep straight with candle wax, and they wear top hats all day long, even when they go to bed. Don’t look at me that way, Yuying. I saw something about it on that funny box at Yaba’s flat. What do you call it?’

‘A television, dear.’

‘Can we get a television?’ Lian asked, suddenly interested.

‘One day, when you’re a little older, I am sure you will have a big television in your house. A colour one too, I’m sure, not a tiny black-and-white one like Yaba’s.’

The little girl was not impressed with this answer. However, they were almost there – ahead of them the road trickled out into a tractor-ripped mud track, and the barbed-wire fences of the private farm rippling up over the green hill came into view. When they arrived, they would split up; Jinyi spent the mornings hunched in the smoky canteen, helping to prepare the workers’ hot lunch, while Yuying strung out notepads of numbers as one of the accountant’s assistants. They worked only mornings, home in time for the lunchtime nap, having retired from the bread factory in order to pass on their jobs to their two youngest daughters, who had been forced out of their old workplaces by more senior workers returning
from countryside exile. State-controlled jobs were hereditary, and there were not nearly enough of them to go around, although it was better to say that as quietly as possible, and only when you were sure no one important was listening.

Jinyi looked down at his granddaughter, who was already eyeing up the brook that sliced down between the potato patches and the fruit vines. There might be a few more grandchildren to come, he reasoned, but nothing like the rowdy orchestra of relatives he had once looked forward to. One family, one child, that was the rule, though Jinyi could still remember when the government was
telling
everyone to have more children, to fuel the revolution in its early days. Best not to dwell on that either, he told himself, his inbuilt censor snapping into action.

An abandoned tractor was chugging at the entrance to the farm, the engine still on and pulsing hungrily against the handbrake. A middle-aged man, lazing on a rusty deckchair with his wooden leg stretched out in front of the main gate, signed them in.

‘Watch out, it’ll rain soon,’ he said as he waved them through. This was the only thing he ever said, and he said it, without fail, every morning.

‘Stay where I can see you, ok? You can go and paddle in the stream, but don’t disturb anyone. When you get tired, come back to the kitchen and I’ll make you something to eat,’ Jinyi said to Lian, who nodded over-sincerely, the fast movement of her head threatening to bowl over her small body.

Jinyi entered the kitchen and pulled on an apron, then settled at the work station under the window, where he could watch his granddaughter tug up the wild flowers and collect the stones that glinted at her from the onyx-streaked stream tumbling around her knees. Sly silver minnows darted past, tickling her ankles, and she bent and splashed, her pudgy fingers trying to scoop them up.

Two skinned hares, pink slips of knotted flesh, hung from a hook on the wall. Jinyi reached for a cleaver and suddenly thought of the horoscope he had got for his granddaughter.

Manxin had been pregnant for sixth months, living with her new husband in a room so small they had used their bed as a table to eat dinner on or as a seat for guests. The night before Jinyi had gone
for the horoscope, Manxin had waited for her husband to start his nightshift, then packed a suitcase and turned up at her parents’ house. They had opened the door to find her bob of hair ragged and wild, her face a blotchy mess of tears.

‘I can’t stand it any more,’ Manxin had choked and wheezed. ‘I can’t! I’m not going back, not with that woman! I’ll … I’ll … I’ll go to Guangzhou and start a new life. I can’t live like that – why didn’t you tell me I wasn’t just marrying him? I’ve married his whole family!’

Manxin’s new husband’s mother was a small, crooked woman with scraped-back hair and inch-long fingernails. As soon as the honeymoon trip to Beijing – holding hands and grinning at each other as they meandered around the Summer Palace, Tiananmen Square and the new mausoleum – had finished, Manxin found that her parents-in-law would be coming to dinner every evening. ‘Your new husband is our eldest son, after all, and really you should put some more salt in the soup and, oh heavens, is that really how you’re going to cook that chicken and risk poisoning us all, no, no, no, you’d do better to follow my instructions, yes, and perhaps you should think about combing your hair before you go out, what will the neighbours say?’

‘Come in, come in, I understand,’ Yuying had sighed, sweeping her daughter into the room.

Jinyi had pottered at the stove, refrying the previous day’s leftovers – ‘You’ll feel better after you’ve eaten something,’ he assured his daughter. Yuying and Manxin had settled on the futon, the creaking pendulum in the clock on the wall cutting through Manxin’s sniffles.

‘How can I have a child there? Xue Shi will be criticising me every time I pick up the baby, every time I dare to open my mouth. Ma, I can’t stand it.’

‘Your old granny left her house, sixty-odd years ago, and never saw her family again. Things have changed since then, of course, but you can’t expect things to come completely undone. Some people just have a strange way of showing their love. Some do it with nosy advice, some with food, some with silence, some by going to work each morning. The heart is a strange machine.’

Manxin had nodded, thinking of her husband and how the shy looks of their engagement and the sweet, giggly whispers of the
four-day honeymoon had turned to unresponsive grunts between swigs of beer and stale cigarettes. She thought of the dirty shirts he threw in her direction and the derogatory comments he made about the food he wolfed down before his next nightshift began. Her husband spent the nights locked in a booth at the interchange of railway tracks a few miles from the station, cranking the levers that shifted the tracks into differing slots, depending on the train’s destination. So far, he had only made one mistake, sending a train hurtling past the wrong platform – luckily, the train that had been waiting there had just left. It happens to everyone, the officials had told him; why, there was a crash that killed a thousand up in Harbin only last month – ha! no, of course it wasn’t in the bloody papers – so as long as you don’t mention this incident to anyone, we’re just going to dock your wages for a year. Xue Jingtien had then slouched off home to sulk at his pregnant wife. The next evening she had packed the suitcase.

‘So I can’t go back, you see!’ Manxin had sobbed, looking at her parents for support. Jinyi had put a steaming plate in front of her and smiled.