Her Father's Daughter (2 page)

Returning to Beijing at night, roads stretched everywhere. Car headlights moved white down one highway lane, while tail lights flashed red in the opposite; and all these roads looped so that the city became swirls of diamonds and rubies on black bands.

A taxi dropped her at her flat at the university hotel. Peking University had once been the site of the Emperor’s summer palace, with bridges over lakes, rooftop eaves that curved at the corners, and old ruins in its green parks. But the campus guest house was built in the austere square style of the Communist era, all beige bricks and little rectangular windows, the sort of building that had the sturdiness of a peasant wife whom you might eventually resent when the decadent Western mistress came calling.

A week after her return from Chaozhou, she was tired of being cooped up in her flat overlooking the Lake with No Name. She had to get out, so she went to a small town called Qufu, the birthplace of Confucius. It was surrounded by an ancient wall that was around six hundred years old. And a lesser wall, which was about six months old.

In Qufu, they openly advertised dog meat, wholesale. Old men and women sold turnips and dates from small carts outside four-star hotels. Nuts were called nutlets. You could order ‘par-boiled balls’ from a hotpot menu.

It was there that she met the young tour guide Ford, who had named himself after the car because he couldn’t afford one. His English was so good that he was funny.

‘Do you know what the national bird of China is?’ he asked her.

‘No.’ Her Chinese was so bad that she did not have a personality.

‘Guess.’

‘The phoenix?’ That wasn’t even a real bird, she realised. How dumb.

‘No!’

‘Then what?’

‘The national bird of China. Look out your window. You can see it.’

‘I don’t see any birds.’ She suddenly realised she had not seen a single bird in this country since her winter arrival.

‘There. And there and there and there.’ He pointed.

‘I still don’t see any birds.’ Against the grey sky, industry stuck out like knitting needles.

‘The crane!’ he exclaimed. ‘The national bird of China is the construction crane! Ha-ha!’ He then told her that two-thirds of the world’s cranes were in his country. He was very proud of this. At night, she had seen construction sites where men in yellow helmets walked unharnessed across high beams in near darkness. The following morning a bit more of the superstructure would appear as if by magic. The yellow helmets were only to enable them to see each other in the dark, because there was no way one of those little bowls was going to stop a man’s skull smashing if he fell to the ground. She did not tell Ford this. He kept saying, ‘China is a developing country,’ in awe that development could be so extraordinary.

He asked her where she was from, presuming, as they all did, that she came from the country that had invaded his homeland before the Second World War.

‘No, I’m not Japanese,’ she said. ‘My family’s from the Chaozhou province.’

His ancestors had built the Forbidden City, but hers were known for spitting in the streets and generally pissing off across the seas to Southeast Asia in times of political turmoil or famine. There is a special word for overseas Chinese –
huaqiao
– because so many of them left. Not to colonise other lands, but to settle in the market centres of small and large cities. Her ancestry was a race of small-business owners.

And here she was, back after three generations of exile. She was wearing her fake Oaks overcoat with plastic silver buttons and fake leather lapels, which she had bought from the local marketplace. She carried a bag with
Spoony Dop
printed on it in big white letters above a pilfered image of Snoopy’s face. But there was nothing ironic about her personality in China. All she was was literal and polite, which is how she had come to meet Ford. She had turned to the person behind her in the queue at the station and asked, ‘Excuse me, but could you please tell me how much a ticket costs to get back to Beijing?’

He told her and they started a conversation. Or, more accurately, he started talking, and she started listening, and eventually they ended up catching the train back to the capital together. Ford had a limp because he had sprained his ankle falling off the tour bus a day ago. She suspected that he had sprained it quite badly, but he was stoic about it.

‘Don’t you need to go to see a doctor?’ she asked, worried.

‘No, not today.’ And that was all he said about it.

He was about the same age as her younger brother, she figured. When they arrived in Beijing, she told him she was going to the local market, as she needed a new jumper. He came with her, probably out of boredom, and also partly out of a sense of chivalry.

‘Don’t speak,’ he said to her, ‘because then she will know you are a foreigner and raise the price times five hundred.’

It was too late – she had already opened her mouth and asked the vendor a question. When she heard the price, she said dutifully, as her local friends had taught her, ‘Too expensive,’ and made to walk away. She wanted only a small reduction because she had calculated that by Australian standards she was getting a phenomenal bargain.

But then Ford opened his mouth. She could not believe what came out. He started yelling at the market-stall holder, who was an old woman with a face like a walnut. She had two tame black crows with her; they walked up and down a bamboo pole. The old woman howled back. He yelled louder, the aggressive hook of his head leaning towards her.

In his anger he looked almost psychotic. In fact, it frightened her. He was barking like a mad dog. The old lady got so worked up that her brown face flushed the colour of a strange ruddy wood. She looked as if she would keel over any second and die.

‘Stop it!’ she said to Ford. ‘Stop it! I don’t care, I will pay what she said!’ She could not bear to be responsible for this poor lady’s death.

In the end he managed to lop quite a lot off the price for her, but she felt ashamed, even though she had not asked this local boy to do her bargaining for her.

She opened her bag and realised that he could see her wad of notes scattered inside, without a wallet. The reds of the one hundred-yuan bills were glaringly obvious, and the smallest thing she could find was a fifty.

‘They all do it, don’t worry,’ he told her. ‘You just watch. She’ll repeat the same thing with the next customer.’

The next customer was an American, who was happy to have a tiny amount taken off the price.

‘Americans are dumber than Europeans,’ he muttered, ‘happy with two kuai off, thinking they’ve really tricked the seller.’

They walked past the place where she had bought her black coat when she first arrived in Beijing. She heard the lady tell a customer about the same coat, ‘Two hundred and fifty kuai.’ She hoped he did not notice. He would have told her it was worth only one fifty, and he would probably have been right.

They decided to take a rickshaw and see the hutongs of the city – the narrow alleyways of Old Beijing. Again he bargained the rickshaw driver down to a third of the price. She wondered how the people living in the hutong must feel, with tourists coming endlessly through their narrow home laneways. She imagined hordes of Mexicans or Mongolians touring the leafy huge-house suburbs of Australian coastal cities – but that would never happen. The rickshaw driver did not have change when she handed him a red note.

‘Don’t worry, I’ll get it. You can pay for dinner,’ Ford told her.

He led her up and down a few more streets and they came across a building with a red and green veneer, painted like an imperial palace. ‘Old Beijing is dirty,’ he said. ‘Make sure you wash your hands before you eat.’

At the restaurant, she let him order. He ordered enough for five people, even though there were only two of them. She knew that he knew that she was paying. He ordered so much that half the food went to waste. She would never see him again, so she watched his greed with bemusement. She had really grown quite fond of him, and he looked so happy sitting there eating gold and silver mantao dipped in sweetened condensed milk. He called the waiter over and ordered bowls of noodles. She understood what it was like to be so young and expectant, with so many words to describe things.

‘Did you see the Bird’s Nest already?’ he asked her. ‘The Water Cube? The CTV tower?’ The modern marvels of Beijing. Yes, yes, she told him, they were very lovely.

He took out his new computer to show her that he had the latest model, and that it wasn’t a replica but a real Apple.

She liked the fact that he kept his hands to himself as a good Chinese boy should, and that he kept a great distance between them. It was nearing the end of the afternoon.

‘How old are you?’ she asked.

‘Guess.’ He loved that guessing game.

‘I don’t know. You look very young.’

He looked nonplussed.

‘I am about your age,’ he said, ‘probably older.’

‘How old do you think I am?’ she asked.

‘My age.’

‘Which is what?’

‘Guess.’ God, it was annoying. She’d met a few Chinese who loved this game. You had to guess at things, and they would never tell you the answer. In the end she figured out that there were cues – such as, if they stayed silent for longer than two seconds, it meant you had the right answer. But sometimes they would just stay silent throughout and make you guess some more.

‘Twenty?’

‘Older.’

‘Twenty-one?’

Because he did not say anything, she knew this time she had got it right.

‘Well, I am much older than you,’ she told him. ‘I am definitely your older sister.’

‘How old are
you
?’ he asked. She noticed he now looked worried.

‘Almost thirty.’ There, that should kill it, and indeed it did. There was nothing more undesirable than an unattached woman nearing thirty. The fact that it killed his fascination pleased her – his embarrassment confirmed her intuition that he was, at heart, a good and decent Chinese lad.

She paid the bill, which came to only one hundred yuan. ‘Have you ever had a meal this expensive in Australia?’ he asked her.

‘It was a good meal,’ she told him. ‘You ordered well.’ She did not tell him that one hundred yuan was the equivalent of twenty-five Australian dollars. Twenty-five dollars for a five-hour cultural tour of Beijing and help at the local market was a steal, to her mind.

She stood up and shook his hand. ‘See you again, Little Brother,’ she said. They both knew they would not, but there was no Mandarin word for goodbye. It was just literally, ‘See you again.’

Ford walked her to the subway station and showed her the platform and which train to catch. ‘I hope you get your car one day,’ she told him as she boarded.

She watched from the cramped train window as he limped away from the platform, back to his home in one of the hutongs in the outer suburbs of the city.

Back in her flat at Peking University she sat with the heater turned up for about a week, in a full padded black ski outfit. She didn’t own any skis but before coming to China she had been told that it was cold, so in Wagga Wagga she bought a ski jacket and pants. She thought she would wear them in public and no one would care because it was a communist country and communists tended to wear dour pillowy winter clothes – at least they did in the pirated DVD television series her mother watched in Australia. In these interminable series, they donned furry Russian caps with ear flaps and were always fighting an endless army of Japanese soldiers. So at the market she’d also bought one of those olive-green hats to keep her ears warm.

Oh, how wrong she was. This was one of the most stylish cities in the world, yet on her feet were a pair of children’s Aussie Bush Tracker boots, which were not walking anywhere.

She had come to Beijing to write and find her roots. Instead she had become a black larva with a puff of fake fur around her head. Waiting for something to hatch. Waiting to grow legs and arms, searching for an authentic feeling to bring home. But no such luck. Her mind was a mollusc, and her mouth a small suction pump. Things would go in, but not much came out. Most of what went in was the complimentary jasmine tea that came from the university guest house, and she drank so much of it that she was sure her internal organs were dyed khaki by now. A few more months and maybe her skin would be entirely camouflage, but it was no use being olive in a city of steel and glass.

*

The first time she had seen snow in China, she was outside on one of her aimless five-hour walks. The sky was grey and hung low. Snow came down like grotty soapsuds, and when she wiped her face with a tissue, the tissue was smeared brackish grey. She dragged her feet through pavements dotted with dirty ice and showed her pass to the security guard standing at the west gate of the university. When she had first arrived, she thought these guards standing at every gate were members of the Chinese Communist Party. They were dressed in what looked like green military uniforms, with matching caps. She felt as though she should salute. She was also scared of them, but she realised that she automatically feared anyone in an official uniform, even ticket inspectors in Australia, even when she had a ticket in her hand. She wondered whether her parents had passed on this fear through their genes, in the same way that some people passed on the fear of spiders and snakes.

The fear evaporated early one evening when she watched two of the guards heading home balanced on one bicycle. The boy at the front had his hands on the handlebars and his friend behind him was clinging on tightly. They had flung their hats off and were hooting with laughter through the quiet wide driveways of the university. She noticed how young and brown and lovely their faces were, how their features were bent blank with delight, how their hair whooshed in all different directions.
Hello, Officer!
In Australia no one wore a uniform if they could help it. Uniforms were for schools and gags.

*

The last time she had seen Teodoro was two months ago in Melbourne when they parted, but what she remembered most was the feel of him, even more clearly than what he looked like. He became a series of textures beneath her fingertips. Parts of him felt like sandpaper softened in water, and other parts were hot velvet. She remembered seeing not in colour, but in gradients of heat. It was then that she knew, without a doubt, that desire was the accelerator of life, and that she would speed along its trajectory while she was with him.

All men were literally foreign bodies to her. She had been twenty-four when she first saw a man in his birthday suit, and that was only because she had secretly arranged to take life-drawing lessons in the evenings at the university. Those men quickly became planes and lines and light and shade. The older the subjects were, the more interesting pictures they made because there would be more grooves and hollows, and very quickly she began to get used to the idea that the human form was just a subject to be captured in charcoal.

But then the storm of pheromones wiped out the smug self-restraint which had grown in her after day upon day of drought. She had always thought the word ‘pheromones’ made it sound as though molecules were floating in the air, shaped like little fluted horns, ready to attach themselves to the nearest target. Microscopic Edison phonographs flying about, their brassy mouths puckered to sucker onto bare unsuspecting skin. These were what he sent out to her. The pheromones. The eyeless babies of energy.

She learned about his arms, his upper deltoids, his face, like Helen Keller learning about water. What a thrill to sense on her fingertips the growth of stubble. The Adam’s apple at the throat, and the difference in their shoulders. ‘Yours slope downwards,’ he said to her. She would have made a nice aristocratic concubine because she had read somewhere that the Emperors liked sloping shoulders in a woman, but unfortunately she was born in this century, ‘born in a nun’s habit’, as he once joked to her.

It was as if all the air had been sucked out of the room and had collected in mean little hordes between the fibres of the clothes he had left discarded on the floor. She tentatively walked up to him and put her arms around his waist and her face against his chest and stood there feeling faint. She hadn’t realised it would have such a visceral effect on her. It was like the legend of Aphrodite and Hermes: how the girl saw the boy by the pool bathing and was so struck by his perfect form that she couldn’t help herself and ran up from behind and grabbed him and clung so hard that she became bonded to him, and the gods smote them and melded them into one person.

*

He was a generous lover, there was no doubt about it. It was just that the two of them had very different ideas about love. When he said
I love you
, he meant it with absolute conviction at that moment. It was a feeling that swelled and needed release. But perhaps he might feel differently the next day, week or month. You had to find someone to make you more acutely aware of your own feelings, was the way he saw love, to take you back to your essential self.

Teodoro was an artist living in Macau, a painter. He’d moved there because he had been commissioned to do work in Hong Kong, but one day took the ferry into this former colonial island owned by the Portuguese and found its quieter ambience and old buildings charming. So he stayed.

They had exchanged letters long before they met. When she first started writing to him, she didn’t think of the possibility of their meeting any time soon because he lived overseas. She’d write to him from her writers’ festivals and interstate school visits, clean convivial letters about books she had been reading, things she had been doing, and ideas that preoccupied her mind.

But then he came to Melbourne for a week. She remembered what they talked about: John Keats, Sisyphus, Cyrano de Bergerac. All their metaphors and references were from Western culture, and there they both were, different shades of non-white. His was a body so close to hers in colouring and everything else, and yet so different in its maleness, that she felt he was her corresponding puzzle piece.

‘People say that our faces are flat,’ he said to her, ‘but they are looking at us from only one angle. See, from the side, and from up above, and beneath the chin, we have more contours than Ayers Rock.’ She liked his sense of humour and his rugged Australian accent. Although his mother was Timorese, he had grown up in Darwin.

‘When I go back to Southeast Asia, I don’t identify at all,’ he told her. First they used up all their A-grade conversation, and then the B grade, and then C and D, until they were scraping at the bottom of the barrel to find things to say to each other.

Once, he told her, he had stayed in a farmhouse when he was younger, with his parents. Every morning he’d wake up and go outside, and the ground would be covered with dead bees.

Once, she told him, she and her brother held a funeral for a ladybird that they had kept in a Ferrero Rocher box for three days. They’d carried it around from room to room until its wings were bruised, and until one day it didn’t move anymore.

Once, he said, his pet turtle died, and he wanted to free it from its trapping of armour. When his mother came home and saw him in the kitchen, standing by the sink, a porcelain bowl filled with turtle limbs and him still trying to pull out the face, she burst into tears.

They spent a week together. She knew this was impermanent, but when she also realised how good it was, and how blissful and alive she felt, as she had never felt before, then that sealed it. There was nothing wrong with an action if deep in the heart it made a person feel so alive, kept alive in them a dream of ephemeral affection.

She had once thought she was so self-possessed, prided herself on this self-possession, but he taught her that she didn’t understand the first thing, at twenty-seven, about what it meant to be self-possessed, and how it began with possession of your own self – your fingertips, your face, your hands, your feet – all the parts she had not been aware she owned, but had carried around for years like a thing trailing a few steps behind her mind, forced to serve it. Just a rickety painted barrow to cart around her thoughts. Now he breathed this knowledge into her, let her know she was alive, alive and living and young too.

The language of lovers was so complicated and self-important, but the language of touch was simple and magically self-effacing. She wanted to kiss him until her kisses had rubbed down his skin to the colour of her lips, the colour of a fresh graze, the consistency of seedy jam over hot toast. Why hadn’t she done this in seven years? Sometimes she looked at him and looked at him like a psychopath, as if the craters of her eyes could swallow a man whole.

Then at the end of their enchanted week, Teodoro told her that he was planning to move to Melbourne.

‘That might not be such a good idea,’ she replied tentatively. Her heart was racing. This would bring him closer to her than she had ever anticipated. He wasn’t taking any of this slowly.

He told her he was in love.

It was definitely not a good idea.

They had been two unattached people suspended in the strange state beyond home and family and thoughts of money and mortgage. There was the pure joy of eating chocolate and going for long walks in parks and in the city and seeing museums and theatres and feeling in love. But in the gaps, her belief in this romantic hedonism started to get a little shaky. What they seemed to have, she suspected, was the essence of love without its attendant responsibilities and woes.

‘But I’m soon going away for three months to China,’ she told him.

‘I’ll come with you.’

She couldn’t understand this strange need to plummet into immediate action based on a blind feeling. Did he not realise that feelings changed at least five times in the course of a day? If all love was about was clinging to good feelings, then things might not work. He was a solitary wanderer, but she came with a thousand attachments. ‘You might want to be with me for a couple of years and then decide you’d rather be with someone else,’ he once told her. ‘That’s all right. At least we would have spent that time together.’

But it was not all right. That was not how she wanted to be with someone, yet she couldn’t explain why. And because she could not yet explain why, she slowly started to reconsider her experience – maybe love was not a matter of life and death, but could be imbued with a sense of playfulness, a sense of joy for its own sake; not cold comfort derived from surviving, from sticking together, from not losing anything or anyone.

So when she went to China on her residency she decided to take a short detour from Beijing to Macau, a warm reprieve in the middle of the cold winter, to see if she had been wrong. Perhaps she could live a different life, a daring one; perhaps she could even become a completely new person and shed her old skin.