Under Fishbone Clouds (36 page)

Where do gods go when they are given up, proscribed,
forgotten
? Nowhere. We’re still here, just biding our time – you’ll find we’re pretty good at that. In cupboards, attics, cellars; in keepsakes, cobwebs, books; lodged in the back of a mind and itching to be taken out and polished. I was one of the lucky ones: easy for kids to remember and hard to shake from memories of the taste of candy and sugar. Furthermore, as famine slowly began to spread across the country, a god dedicated to the kitchen stopped seeming like such a bad idea.

Hou Manxin waited diligently in the line for the tap, stuck between a stocky man in his twenties and a lanky teenage girl whose
home-decorated
plimsolls, dotted with poorly embroidered rose blooms, betrayed a hint of personality beneath the familiar uniform of dark blue tunic and slack black trousers.

A voice from the back of the line cut through the dull quiet. ‘At least the tap’s still running, so even if we starve we won’t be thirsty, eh?’

Heads turned cautiously. The speaker was unshaven and unsteady, as if one of his legs was having trouble keeping the other in line. He must have been around forty, his cropped hair specked with grey.

‘I mean,’ he continued, a little louder than before, ‘it’s gonna be us soon too, you know, we aren’t going to have anything to eat, and it wouldn’t surprise me if someone makes off with the bloody tap to melt it down to meet a quota.’

By now heads had snapped back towards the tap, the people in line willing the old adage to be true, that if you ignore something it might disappear. However, that did not seem to put him off.

‘You all know what I mean, don’t you?’ His tone was somewhere between pleading and petulant. ‘My cousin, he lives in the country, not far from here – couple of hours, that’s all, couple of hours north. And he’s at the furnace every day, and so are his boys, and even his wife. No surprise there, that’s what the rest of us are doing too.
For the good of the country
.’

Here he paused and grinned, almost oblivious to the fact that the small group was trying to inch away from him. Manxin and her bucket were slowly being edged closer to the hiccupy flow of yellowy water. His words were drifting over her head; it was the clearing of throats and rigid shoulders around her that alerted her to the possibility that something was not right. There were three more people in front of her – soon she could go back home. She willed them faster.

‘So, what I want to ask all you is, while they are working at the furnace all day and all night to meet their commune’s quota, who do you think is in the fields, who do you think is growing the rice?

The group shifted as the stocky twenty-something in front of Manxin turned and slipped from his place in the line, clenching his teeth.

‘You’re drunk, and you’re making a scene. Pull yourself together! You ought to be ashamed of yourself, talking like this in front of women and children.’

‘I’m not ashamed of the truth, boy,’ the man muttered back. ‘You’re not blind. What do you think is going to happen?’

‘That’s enough! Now, we’re going to go back to waiting in line, and you’re not going to say another word. There’s police and soldiers all around who might be interested in your opinion, but we’re not. So why don’t we all forget you said anything, understand?’

The man opened his mouth to reply, but instead mumbled under his breath before turning and stumbling away. They caught a few words left over as he walked off – ‘trying to be helpful … you’ll see … nothing pretty about the truth … idiots …’

The whole line seemed to shake itself off, but remained quiet, pensive, though Manxin had forgotten all about the strange
conversation
by the time she had finished her turn at the tap and hauled the slopping bucket back to her impatient grandmother.

Yuying returned soon after, and bent straight to the small stove without bothering to remove her jacket. Her hair was tightly bunned, and thin furrows of skin twitched at her smile as she swept through the ragtag clutter of the busy room. She was henlike, happy to be busy, to not have too much time to stop and think,
getting
lost in the little corners of her own life. She looked at her son and thought of her husband. Her hands tipped the pan to heat the last slither of oil above the fire. She shouldn’t feel this way. This was not what she had wanted for her future: all of them walking all days with hunger churning their bellies; barely seeing her husband or her children because of her shifts at the factory and then at the communal furnace, where they were just as set upon building a new country as she and Jinyi had been of building a new marriage. But, despite it all, she was happy. They were together, still, and coming home late at night to the sound of three children snoring in the dark of her room was all she could ask for.

While Yuying fried the last of the cornflour batter into pancakes, Manxin pondered why it was that her father, who was the best cook in the house, was also the person who cooked the least. The best things must be stored away or else they will lose their powers, she concluded. To become too good at something can be dangerous. She vowed not to practice too much at anything that mattered.

‘Eat up,’ Yuying told her two eldest. ‘This is going to be our last meal at home for a while.’

They looked at her as if she was joking.

‘Is that because there’s no food left?’ Manxin asked.

‘No,’ Yuying laughed. ‘Of course there’s food! We’ll still eat, only you and your brother are going to have to eat all your meals at school, and your Pa and I will eat at the factory.’

‘But I hate the school food. It’s not fair! Why must we eat it, Ma?’ Dali asked.

‘Because we need to take our cooking pots to the furnace. Oh, don’t pull that face, Hou Dali. The sooner we make more steel, the sooner our country will became powerful again. You want to help, don’t you?’ Yuying said.

Dali nodded sheepishly, but he was not convinced.

When you have lived as long as I have – which is to say, longer than anyone should be asked to remember – it becomes easier and easier to spot similarities in the smallest actions. The push
towards dining halls and communal eating, for example, reminds me of something that happened under the first emperor, Qin Shi Huang. Now, you cannot unify a huge country by being diplomatic: Qin Shi Huang was ruthless, bloodthirsty and merciless, but he got the job done. Naturally fearing reprisals and rebellions, as soon as he had defeated the last of the resisting kingdoms he sent an edict out around the country: all weapons were to be handed over to his army. This included kitchen knives, garden tools and any other sharp implements that could be misused. Without kitchen knives, communal eating, with meals shared between large groups, soon became a necessity. However, the edict ignored one important point: when deprived, the first thing people do is improvise.

Both Yuying and Granny Dumpling picked at the edges of the dishes, pushing them towards the two children, who nevertheless complained of unquenched hunger once everything was finished. Yuying noted that her mother had been eating less and less since they had received the news about her middle daughter, Chunlan. She and her husband had died in a local struggle at the beginning of the year. The starving locals in the rural village had broken down the door to their house when they heard that the well-off family had been stockpiling food for themselves during the famine, and, in the
ensuing
fight for the few measly supplies in the backroom, the villagers had bludgeoned to death husband, wife and their two toddlers.

Yuying wrapped a single soggy pancake in a sheet of smudged newspaper for Jinyi. She kissed the baby and then searched through the cupboard, to see if there were any knives, nails, keys, spoons or anything else made of metal which she might have missed during the last search.

‘Now, you be good for your Granny Dumpling and go to bed when she tells you. If you’re good, I’ll be back to tell you a story,’ Yuying said, hovering by the door.

‘Ma, why do we have to burn things?’ Dali asked as she turned to go.

‘Why? Well, fire makes things pure, and it helps us,’ his mother replied.

‘How?’

‘We use fire to change metal, to make new things that help people. But we must be very careful, because fire can become angry and jealous.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it is so hot. Think how uncomfortable you would be if you were boiling hot and sweaty all day.’

‘Oh,’ Dali paused. ‘But why do
we
have to burn things?’

‘Because we want to be good Chinese. Don’t you want to be good too?’ Yuying said, before turning and leaving.

‘Why don’t you go too, Granny Dumpling?’

‘I’m not strong enough. The ancestors stole my strength when they stole the colour from my hair. But I’m sure you will be strong enough soon. Not long now and you’ll be able to go and help them. Would you like that?’

Dali did not answer, but looked back down at his collection of aeroplane pictures, his eyes skirting over the smeared whirl of
propellers
, the slick tilt of lazy wings and, somewhere amidst the blur, the squinting, grinning pilots. After a while, he looked back up.

‘Would I have to melt bits of planes?’

‘Oh no, I shouldn’t think so,’ she reassured him, but the truth was that the people manning the obligatory furnaces seemed to be melting anything they could get their hands on.

Fire is not only furious and possessive – it is also the condition of existence. All is burning, the Buddha began the Fire Sermon; our longing for the world is aflame. For where we think fire to be the reckless abandon and impulse of unchecked passion, we are wrong; it is the sober work of the senses, and because of this it is even more dangerous. Longing, greed, suffering, hatred, sorrow – these are fires afflicting every pore of the body, spreading through every crevice of the mind. These are fires that cannot be quenched, that are fed by every attempt to extinguish them. Only by becoming dispassionate, the Buddha noted, by giving up the fiction of the self, the idea of being in the world, can these fires be tamed, managed.

The tumbling gushes of smoke shaded the shrinking moon, and Yuying instinctively covered her mouth as the air became thick and dry. The whole of their block had been organised to man one furnace, and each of the households brought their own possessions, along with an unspoken sense of uncertainty, to feed to the fire. She entered the compound, loosely marked out by a straggly wire
fence, and Jinyi waved to her, a lopsided smile spreading across his face. He was sweaty and red beside the puffing brick hulk that the group had hastily assembled in imitation of the one the young army recruits had built near the factory. When Jinyi had begun asking questions about the process, a young soldier had pushed a lump of rough ore into his hands and said, ‘Here’s the science part: keep it fucking hot!’

‘You look tired,’ he said, concerned. He dropped the glowing tongs and pulling off a singed glove to wipe the sweat from his face.

‘Everyone looks tired. That’s how you know how hard people are working.’

He laughed. ‘How are the children?’