Under the Dragon (21 page)

May married in the spring of the year that Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists encircled the Red Army in Kiangsi province. As Mao broke through the siege and began the
ch’ang cheng
, or long march, she tried to extend her own horizons by taking Liu Wei, son of the railway booking agent, as her husband. Wei was a bachelor with good prospects, and with a seductive knowledge. He knew by heart the times of the Mandalay trains, the schedule of Irrawaddy ferries, even the date of the next sailing of the
Canadian Pacific Empress
from Hong Kong to Vancouver. The arrival time of the London mail plane and the ports of call of Japanese freighters slipped off his tongue. During their engagement May was allowed to sit with him in the booking office, which acted as a sort of travel agency for the town. It was there, while Wei consigned bales of cotton and sacks of rice to the morning train, that she first began to conjure up her fanciful journeys. She pored over his timetables and freight-rate guides, travelling in her mind from Mu-sé to Kunming, then on to Kowloon, Saigon and Colombo. Wei saw no harm in his fiancée’s imaginary travels, and it flattered him to be able to impress her with his grasp of the routes of Indian Ocean steamers and European railways. But he had no desire to travel to the exotic destinations himself. His interest in transportation was that it made good business. He was due to inherit his father’s position, and the web of land and sea routes that wrapped itself around the world comforted him with an illusion of certainties.

The morning after the wedding Wei made an offering to his ancestors’ shrine and wished for a son. May lay in their bed unclothed, planning a trip to Shanghai, dreaming of taking a honeymoon across the Pacific to America. She drew her fine black hair back from her face, exposing her slender neck, and laughed. Her heart was free. She felt herself no longer tethered to Lashio by duty and convention. She hoped that marriage would thrust her out into the unknown, but instead it tied her back to the familiar. Nine months later she gave birth to a baby boy.

The world war came and went, taking away first the British and then the Japanese, razing Mandalay and driving the Shan into their fight for independence. But the conflicts did not touch May. Over the years, whenever a stranger arrived on the station platform, waiting for a bus or train, she would appear beside him, her son on her hip, and without shame quiz him on the details of his home city. In such a manner she came to know the names of the good hotels of Tokyo and the dosshouses of Taipei. She learned to be wary of the crafty rickshaw drivers of Soochow and, without ever leaving the landlocked Shan State, became an authority on ocean-going steamship lines. Neighbours who were considering fleeing sought her advice on the comparative advantages of life in Malaya and Siam. Her knowledge grew to include an understanding of trade routes, exchange rates and tariffs. She entertained her son with elaborate adventure stories of air travel by Empire flying boat and German Zeppelin, even though the only aircraft she had ever seen had passed high over the town as a distant, silver speck. She became an authority on international travel, containing the globe with railroad schedules, though like her sister she never ventured further afield than the town gate.

Kwan did not marry; she mourned. To come to terms with her loss she tried to forget her parents, unpicking their memory and casting them out of her mind. She gave away their clothes and burnt their bedding. The few mementoes of their lives – her father’s abridged
Beng Cao Gang Mu
text, her mother’s tortoiseshell comb, the handful of family photographs – were consigned to a tightly lidded basket at the back of the godown. Her waking hours were filled with work alone. She coped with the vagaries of business: the disruption of the kaoliang supply due to fighting in Hunan, the plague of frogs which devastated the Szechwan tung-oil harvest. Her labour kept her distress at bay, and ensured the continuing prosperity of the family’s spice business. But because she feared the pain of remembering, because of her refusal to acknowledge the memorial that death had erected in her heart, she felt only emptiness.

The hard work took its toll. Time and profit margins smothered the spark of youth. The years of industry in the dim storehouse dulled Kwan’s clear brown eyes. A walnut virus affected her hearing. Her lustrous skin turned paper dry as if withered by the barrels of sea salt that aired in the yard. She became anxious about her dependency on smell, even though it, alone of all her senses, remained unaffected by age. She feared that if her nose failed her, unscrupulous dealers would sell her bitter tamarind and scentless saffron. She worried that her customers would desert her and that the business would fail, making a farce of her father’s devotion, leaving her with nothing. Her fears affected her sleep and, in the toss and turn of her nights, she became aware of her dreams.

One morning on the edge of dawn a sweet perfume wafted through her mind. In her dream she rose up to chase after it, running barefoot through her mother’s old lavender garden, following the fragrance towards the storehouse. The aroma inside the building was so heady that at first she did not notice she was not alone. Then Kwan saw her parents standing in the dark room, throwing up into the air the precious stocks of vanilla and roselle leaf.

‘Within,’ her father shouted, digging his hands into a basket of jasmine, ‘and without.’ He cast the white petals out of the door.

‘Within,’ said her mother, opening a container of galangal root.

‘And without,’ cried her father, tossing it away with the turmeric.

Even in her sleep Kwan knew that her parents were dead, or at least for ever apart from her. Denial had been the only way in which she could cope with the loss. Yet in her dream they stood before her, scattering spices and herbs on the hard earth floor, emptying out all that was contained.

‘Within and without,’ repeated her father as they passed through the door, a balmy trail suspended in the air behind them. Kwan called out their names. She asked them to stay with her. But they could not, or would not, hear. Her father spread the flowers and leaves to the wind. Her mother turned and waved. Her parents vanished down the lane. Kwan awoke to the sound of her own crying.

She was too distraught to go to her desk that morning. Instead she left the storehouse locked and hurried out to find her sister. May was not at home, and Wei directed her to the station. ‘Where else would she be at this time? He sighed over his breakfast
bao-sii
bun.

‘What, if not the family,’ Kwan asked herself as she rushed along the Namtu Road, ‘entwines the ties of the heart? To whom does the child owe her birth?’ By the time she reached the station, she had worked herself into an agitated state.

‘I’ve seen them,’ Kwan cried out, breathless, across the rails. May stood across the platform waiting for the departure of the Mandalay No. 132 Down train. ‘I dreamed of them.’ Kwan skirted the last carriage and led May towards a bench. ‘Our parents came to me, talked to me.’ She wept again as she recounted her dream. ‘Do you understand, sister?’

‘What are you talking about?’ said May, trying to stem the flood of Kwan’s tears. The train’s departure had distracted her.

‘We owe everything to them.’

‘Within, without?’ repeated May, catching the story between the gasps of breath. ‘Those are the words you heard?’

‘Yes. They were telling me to remember that they are within us, even when we are without them.’

May shook her head. ‘It means that we should leave this place. It’s a warning.’

‘No, sister.’ Kwan had a habit of looking doubtful when she did not understand, but now there was wild certainty in her eyes. ‘We are contained by their love.’

‘They’re telling us that we are
not
contained,’ insisted May. ‘We have always been outside this place.’

‘I was wrong to deny their memory.’

‘Sister, you spend too much time alone.’

‘We have never honoured our parents,’ said Kwan. ‘The man and woman who gave us life’

‘Take a husband and have children. It is not too late.’

‘I have no need.’

‘Our need is to leave Lashio. You must look forward, or for ever be an old maid.’

According to Confucianism, man is in essence a social creature, bound to his fellows by
jen
– that is sympathy, or human-heartedness.
Jen
is expressed through the five relationships: sovereign and subject, parent and child, elder and younger sibling, husband and wife, friend and friend. To many Confucians the filial relationship is the most virtuous bond. Kwan had had suitors, bachelors who had taken an interest in her modest manner and lucrative business. She had understood that marriage would enable her labour to be shared. But her devotion to her parents outweighed her wish for a partner. It was not that she had no feelings for the living, but that those emotions were overpowered by the debt of birth. Her parents remained her deepest love, even in death. They bound her to life, even after their memory was beaten out of her during the Red Badge riots.

It had long been believed in China that, with correct conduct and a sense of virtue, the millennial ‘great commonwealth’, or union of mankind under ethical rules, would be attained in time. But after twenty centuries of autocracy and thirty years of civil war, the Communists had lost patience with waiting for an ethical Utopia. Their commonwealth, or People’s Republic, aimed to unite men by imposing upon them a central vision. In pursuit of a classless society private property was seized. Labour was organised. Agriculture became owned by all for the benefit of all. Work was performed in the service of the state, not for the advancement of the individual. Food and land distribution was made more equitable. The natural obligation to be virtuous that had rested upon all men was supplanted by the demand for adherence to a pragmatic interpretation of the common good. Mao’s ‘Great Leap Forward’ was intended to speed the attainment of this ideal by imbuing the people with revolutionary vigour. In the process it devastated China’s small entrepreneurs. Local businesses were replaced by labour-intensive industries. Family control was surrendered to peasant groups. Wealth shifted from the people who had made it to those whose labour had produced it. Tens of millions died of starvation on the road to Utopia.

In Burma too an attempt was made to redress the imbalances and injustices of the past. After the 1962 coup, all shops were nationalised and tenancy rights abolished. People’s Councils took control of land use. But they were packed with soldiers who had no experience of paddy production. The result was inefficiency and corruption. By 1967 there were acute shortages of food throughout the country. Farmers had to buy rice on the black market to fulfil the obligatory quotas. To deflect public anger the government incited anti-Chinese riots. Their excuse was the refusal of some Sino-Burmans to remove their Mao badges. It was put about that the Cultural Revolution was causing Burma’s destitution. Furthermore, Chinese traders were rumoured to be hoarding rice.

The zealous young men who arrived at Lashio’s railway station did not wear uniforms, but no one doubted where their allegiance lay. They took possession of food stalls and seed stores. They ordered the Chinese proprietors out of their shops. Zhang Chow, the manager of the textile firm, was driven from his home. His cousin’s rice mill passed into the hands of a workers’ cooperative. The soldiers advanced under the clay-tiled roofs from the cotton spinners to the dye house, the employees of each pressing them forward. A crowd gathered behind them, driven by hunger and ready to vent their frustration. The Chinese were scapegoats, Burma’s Jews or gypsies. No one wanted to miss out on the redistribution of their ‘secret’ stocks.

It was not until late morning that the mob reached the herbalist’s shop. Even though the town was small there had been many enterprises to search. Fear opened all doors before them, and the Shans and Burmans looted as they pleased. But the failure to discover any hoard had enraged the crowd.

Kwan stood on her threshold, blocking their path, halting the advance. She explained, with good grace, that she had nothing to hide. ‘My father came to Lashio because he believed in the uprightness of the Burmese people,’ she said. ‘It is unjust to submit his house to a search.’

The leading soldier shoved her aside. She held her ground and took hold of his cuff. He shook it and her, sneering at the spectacle of the petite, powerless woman gripping onto his clothing. The crowd laughed with him, mocking Kwan and goading Liu Wei, who had followed them up from the station. He confronted the soldier and demanded to know if he made a habit of beating old women. He provoked the mob by telling them he was hungry too. In truth his first concern was not for his sister-in-law. It was terror which made him speak out. Wei was defending the twins’ property more than Kwan’s honour. May, who had chased after her husband, apologised for him. She called him a fool. She tried to pull him and her sister away. But the soldier turned his fury on the man. In the scuffle baskets and jars were overturned. Wei was seized by a dozen hands. Kwan was knocked to the floor. As she fell her head hit a chest of fresh herbs. She lay unconscious among the crushed mint and dust.

Wei fared less well. Beneath the open window on which May had first fixed her eyes, his life was beaten out of him. She uttered a deafening, impatient scream.

The next morning May’s son ran away, a railway timetable tucked under his arm, chased by his mother’s plea, ‘Watch out for the rickshaw drivers of Soochow,’ and a promise, ‘I will follow you.’ Armed with her knowledge of transportation systems, he rode lorries and trains, evaded Burmese border police and the Red Guards to reach Hong Kong and then, after waiting for three months for her to arrive, sailed on to America. He did not know that May could never follow him. The winding lines of road and rail, so often travelled in her mind, would remain unexplored. For Kwan had been wounded. She had lost hold of the threads of memory, as well as her sense of smell.

In her dark room, above tailor Ch’ien’s shop, Kwan stared at the photographs of the family. Six matching faces glared back at her. Two sepia patriarchs wore pigtails and stern expressions. A silvered woman in embroidered robes gazed out of a daguerreotype. A bride and groom ventured a smile in their wedding portrait. There was also a snapshot of a small boy playing outside a booking office. Kwan knew the pictures and noted the sitters’ similar features: the high family forehead, the rounded shoulders, the pinched nose. But she no longer recognised the faces. Her ancestors were strangers to her.