Under Fishbone Clouds (48 page)

At every turn, survival seemed to demand a suspension of
rationality
. I am reminded of Zhuxi, a renowned philosopher during the Song dynasty. Seeing his fellow philosophers and teachers
worshipping
the spirits of their ancestors, he came upon an idea: it is not for others, even the dead, that we cling to these primitive beliefs, but for ourselves. These spirits, he argued, do not exist; the practice of worshipping them, however, is important, as it forms an elaborate act of remembrance, a collective recognition of the unstoppable tide of history in which we struggle to swim. We make ourselves believe what we cannot fathom.

Legend has it that, late one night after returning from his work as a government official, Zhuxi sat down to write out these ideas, but as he picked up his ink brush a breeze blew out his candle. He relit the candle and rubbed the ink stick in a thin dish of water, yet as soon as he brought the darkened tip of the brush to the crinkled paper, the candle blew out once again. Zhuxi called for his servant, but no one came. As he reached down to light his candle one last time, he heard a low moaning sound, and the shuffle of feet.

When he looked up, Zhuxi was characteristically unimpressed. Though the apparition in his room appeared to be a skeleton, with reels of flayed skin and rungs of muscle hanging from the exposed bones, with red eyes staring from a misshapen, bearded head, Zhuxi, as a politician, was used to the impossible happening.

‘Good evening, honourable Master Zhuxi. Your peerless learning and incomparable scholarship is renowned even in the next world. Please accept the greetings of the Lord of Ghosts.’

With that the apparition bowed to the seated philosopher. However, Zhuxi was also used to dealing with sycophants. He
raised an eyebrow and said impatiently, ‘I see. What business do you have here?’

‘I have come to beseech you, on behalf of my people, not to write this tract,’ the ghost replied hesitantly, before making another awkward bow.

‘Why would you wish to do that?’ Zhuxi asked.

‘As I said, your wisdom is without equal, and your opinion is respected above all others throughout the country. If you were to prove that ghosts do not exist, then no one would doubt it,’ the ghost stuttered.

‘And this would inconvenience you, perhaps?’

‘To tell you the truth, we are not sure what would happen to us. What becomes of you if no one believes in your existence? Perhaps we will fade away completely, consumed by the ether. Perhaps our voices will disappear, our bodies too, while only our thoughts and memories remain. Perhaps our entreaties to the human world will only be met with laughter and mockery. I cannot say. But I beg you not to write that we do not exist.’

Zhuxi considered the question for a few minutes, but the ghost began to grow impatient.

‘Watch!’ he cried, and shook his bony hands. They both suddenly found themselves standing outside, on the mountain that
overlooked
Zhuxi’s house, a lone red lantern on the porch stirring the darkness of the valley. ‘See. Our powers are great, beyond even your great knowledge.’

‘I’ll grant you that. But we are of different worlds, the yin of day and the yang of night, and our knowledge itself is defined by its boundaries,’ Zhuxi argued.

‘That is true. We are shadows that speak, glimpses in mirrors, possibilities not yet considered. That is why you must not destroy us.’

‘You have transported us from my house in an instant. Tell me this: can you transport my heart from my body, that I might
understand
the workings of my own life?’

The ghost shook his misshapen head. ‘Even we are bound by certain laws.’

‘Then there is hope for you yet, for everything must take its place in the great principles of nature, of which we yet know so little. Take me home, sir.’

Suddenly they were back in the dimly lit study. The ghost smiled, put his blood-stained finger to the candle and watched it leap into flame. When Zhuxi looked up from the jittery light, the apparition had disappeared.

He stirred the ink, flicked at it with the tip of his brush, then began to bite the slim wooden end as he turned over his thoughts. Finally, he began his essay: ‘If you believe in something, it will be. If you do not, then it will not.’

If a whole country believed that it could rip apart four thousand years of history in an instant and begin again, then who could stop it? Temples were smashed down to splinters and firewood, mansions burnt to the ground, parents turned in by their own children. We do this not for yesterday or even for tomorrow, we do it for today, they chanted as they booted the bleeding heads of capitalist dogs; they screamed and shouted as millions of teenagers in identical shirts and caps lined up in Tiananmen Square, wetting themselves for a glimpse of an old man waving his short, dumpy hands from a shaky podium.

Yuying had been contemplating the same undulating wave of bracken for longer than she could remember. Each year she grew stronger, feeding on her experiences, scrubbing away some of the taint of her bourgeois past. She believed, in her heart, that she was becoming a better citizen, and this lessened the feeling of
homesickness
and the worries for her children far more than she had expected when she first arrived. They would be safe, because they were together. It was her husband she saw every time she closed her eyes, mouthing a promise again and again. She tried to push him to the back of her mind. She could not.

She bent over in the field, tugging up vegetables by the roots just as she had done when staying with her husband’s aunt and uncle, and she felt the mistakes of the past slowly being shed. She found herself absentmindedly keeping one eye on the track that descended past the fields towards one of the offshooting tributaries of the Yangtze, arching like a half-moon around the village,
marking
the boundary they were not allowed to cross. If she blotted out everything else she could hear its rush, the terrible force of the places it had surged through.

Yuying stooped, picked up the crammed-full wicker bag and hoisted it onto her back, then shambled carefully between the rows of carrots. Who was she now? The question rolled around and around her head, picking away at her certainties. The sum of her parents, sisters, husband, children? She found solace in the vastness of the landscape, the horizon line of flat fields and bracken broken only by the squat wooden houses and the occasional truck or horse-cart plodding down the slim, stony road to the east. It rendered her small, her past negligible. She gave in to it, let it take her over and remould her for whatever tasks the future might ask.

They were ascetics there, she had convinced herself, looking into the calm eye of duty, stripping away the self until only the country and all its mercies remained. At night, sitting around a fire in the small village square, the women reminded each other how they were changing the world for the better, and sang songs approved by the cadres. This was how it should be, this was the meaning of her life: she understood that now.

She let the bag slip down her aching back to the floor of the storeroom, then tipped the contents out for inspection.

‘Bian Yuying, that is enough for today. Well done, you have been doing well. You may return to your room,’ Comrade Hong said as he glanced over the scattering of carrots. His voice was clipped, his mannerisms shaky and measured, especially when compared to the gruffness of the second cadre, Comrade Lu. He waved an effete hand towards the door, his pencil moustache twitching above his tiny, pursed lips.

Yuying looked out at the pink glow where the clouds dissolved at the edge of the sky; there was still at least an hour of workable light. ‘I am happy to keep working, comrade. I want to do my fair share.’

‘Of course, we all want to do our best for the revolution. But haven’t you heard that your daughter has come to visit you? We must remember, Bian, that sometimes we must let our hearts have reign.’ Comrade Hong was beginning to warm to the sound of his own voice, to his chosen sermon. ‘It is, after all, our hearts that store the words and honourable example of Chairman Mao, and it is our hearts that stir for a better world. If we ignored our hearts, we would be like the Americans or the English, loving money and caring only for capital. Go and see your daughter, and be sure that the revolutionary zeal is burning in her heart too. I am sure she has travelled a long way.’

Yuying was dumbstruck: why would her daughter be here? Panic fluttered up through her stomach, but she pushed it back. She trod around the borders of the plots, then skirted round the back walls of the lines of houses, where old men and women were already out and tossing rice in large trays, separating the grain from the stalk. The lazy flicks of their wrists sent the grain dancing over the trays; as it jumped and fell she thought of rain and the footsteps of quick mice, the lightest of timpani, the music of sunset and hunger.

‘Ma! Hey! Ma!’ Yuying turned the side of a house to see her
middle
daughter standing awkwardly beside the stopped supplies van. Liqui’s face was painted with a mixture of sweat and dust, stray hairs leaping out electrically from the confines of her long plait. She was thinner than her mother remembered, underdeveloped for her age; her faded jacket hung loosely from her scrawny shoulders. She was swinging a dirty rucksack in her hands. It was hard to keep track of time there, since the only language used was of sowing, harvesting and storing, but a quick tally of the seasons led Yuying to calculate that Liqui was now fifteen, or near enough.

‘My, Hou Liqui, you’ve grown!’ Yuying said. They stood and faced each other, both hesitant to reach out and touch. It had been three years since they had last met. An awkward silence began to develop as they studied each other, each of them too uncertain to dare step forward.

It took them ten long minutes to begin to feel comfortable in each other’s company. Yuying wanted to say she was sorry, but couldn’t. Liqui wanted to tell her mother to come home, but didn’t.

In the end, they went inside. Liqui followed a few steps behind, watching Yuying totter toward one of the frail wooden shacks. She too was thinner than Liqui remembered, her hair knotted tightly into a bun and betraying her age with a few lone whites snaking through the blacks. Her arched back pulled her body up into a curve, her round face stretched tighter over her cheekbones.

‘Is this where you sleep?’ Liqui asked as they ducked under the laundry drying over the roof to enter the poky room, the
floorboards
divided into sleeping areas, the walls and low-jutting rafters stained with smoke and dead insects.

‘This is how everyone sleeps in the commune. There are eight of us in here – all women, of course, though we’re all treated exactly the same, men and women,’ her mother replied, and they sank
down, sitting cross-legged in the corner where Yuying slept. She reached up and brushed away a looping spider’s web before wiping her fingers on her dark trousers.

‘How was your journey?’

Liqui shrugged, wringing her cap in her hands. ‘Fine. When I heard that some barefoot doctors from home had been posted to Hubei too, I knew that I had to come. Manxin’s too busy doing your work at the factory, and Xiaojing’s too young to travel on her own, so it had to be me. Luckily, a couple of the barefoot doctors refused the offer of a lift – they said they were going to walk across four provinces as proof of their conviction. So there was a bit of extra space. I had to walk for a few days to reach Xiantao after they dropped me off, but that supplies van picked me up just as I was leaving there, so I was pretty lucky.’

‘Xiantao? Where is that?’

‘It’s the closest city to here, Ma. Only forty
li
away. Don’t you know it?’

‘Oh, I see. The locals just refer to it as “The City”. I’ve never heard its name before. And nothing bad happened to you on your journey?’

She bridled at this, and wrinkled her nose. ‘Of course not. They used to be Red Guards. We’re all comrades, after all. Anyway, bad things don’t happen to people who don’t deserve them.’

Her mother nodded, then sighed. ‘How is … everyone?’