Book 1, Chapter 2 - My City

1979 Feb

Chapter 2

Each winter night, long before morning, the stove went out and heat fled the room. I slept pressed against my mother, our clothes heaped on top of the quilt for extra protection against the freezing cold, two burrowing creatures sharing the warmth of their blood. When the alarm clock rang my mother stretched for the cord she tied every evening to the bed frame. The cord ran to the light-pull and allowed her switch on the overhead light without having to step into air cold as well water. In the dull orange glow of a small bulb the room seemed to be remembering itself - it’s bareness, it’s smallness.

The bed took up half the room. The ceiling was papered with old newspapers. stories from the time before I was born. As the paper dried and the paste lost its power, the pages slowly crumbled. The sharp feet of rats chasing each other in the space between our ceiling and the roof, dislodged fragments of paper that spiralled down like grimy snow flakes. A New Year’s decoration hung above the bedroom door, a sheet of wrinkled red paper on which the character for “prosperity” was written in my absent father’s calligraphy.

My mother took the bundle of my clothes under the covers and pressed them against her body until they lost their chill. I waited, then took them - my shirt, trousers and wadded jacket, all smelling faintly of my mother’s scent - and dressed as quickly as I could.

In the room next to the bedroom - the only other room we had - there was a clay urn of water with a thin mirror of ice on its surface. I broke the ice with a tin cup and scooped water into a basin. I shuddered as the bitter water splashed my face, then dried my skin with a square of rough cotton that hung from a nail in the wall. Now I was ready.

‘Take care in the dark’ came the muffled call of my mother’s voice as I stepped into the courtyard. I crossed the yard to the outer door, quiet as a cat. This outer door, with its heavy wooden bolt, was the true border between the world of home and the world of others. I dragged it just wide enough to slip through. The old hinges spoke their usual word of greeting.

On the pavement outside, Grandpa was practicing Tai-Chi, his breath misting the air, the gentle movement of his arms seeming to fold away the thinning silk of night.

‘Grandpa!’

He stopped, grinned, held out a hand. Each morning he would creep out of the Zhang family home ten minutes away beside Five Season Crossing, and walk through the unlit streets to meet me. We set off a steady jog, our breath pluming in the air. This was our morning exercise - a circuit through the city before going back together to the family house. The narrow streets were flanked with low houses and winter-bare trees. They rippled with the energies of the deep past— fifteen centuries of it, layer upon layer of ghosts and spirits. A pair of small stone lions guarded the corner of a house, as they had for centuries. Further on, squatting in  a niche in the wall, a venerable headless Buddha. Ridge-walking beasts, silhouetted against the strengthening light, stalked along the eaves of slumbering houses.

I heard the swish of the street sweeper’s giant rattan broom as it swept the whole width of the narrow street in one broad stroke. Shadowy figures busied themselves around a communal tap. The subdued sound of morning greetings, water splashing into buckets; then the jangling of chains as the buckets were slung onto the ends of yokes and the the yoke lifted onto someone’s shoulders.

The small street led us to Xian’s city wall, to the Vermillion Gate where once only Emperors could pass. Still jogging we climbed the stone steps and burst out on to the top of the wall, standing there, side by side as our breath settled. In those moments I always felt as if we had won something. I couldn’t have said what it was, but the prize was the city itself.

Spread out below us, under a tattered sheet of mist and morning smoke, was the vast grid of Xian city, with its avenues and alleyways, its towers and gables, its roofs like swallows’ tails. At the very centre were the tilted eaves of the Bell Tower and the Drum Tower. In the distance, mountain peaks floated in the rose light of the dawn.

The city lay on the great Silk Road. Through its gates had come camels laden with the treasures of a thousand miles. Grandpa had taught me all this. In the East market and the West market, either side of the Bell Tower, you could have found whatever you dreamed of. A visitor with a full purse might shop for an intricately made saddle, for coral or lapis lazuli. Wine shops traded next to butchers and haberdashers. There were acrobats, storytellers. The air would have been fragrant with saffron and cloves and cinnamon, and ringing with a score of different languages. What a place it must have been then, our Xian!

But as the hazy sun climbed higher, the city began to change its face. The enchantment of the Middle Kingdom faded with the last shadows of the dawn. The city at our feet now was a sprawl of tattered grey walls, flaking and wrinkled houses, yellow dust. No more morning bell or evening drum to mark the closing and opening of the city gates! All that, like the strangers in the camel trains with their sleeves drenched in perfume, was gone now. Our city had suffered. Those newspapers stuck to the ceiling of my bedroom told stories of humiliation, struggle, and triumph. I knew some of it. I also knew that many wounds had yet to heal.

We came down from the wall, plunging into the crowded streets as if into fast flowing rivers that merged and divided. Bicycles streamed past us, their wheels yellow with mud. Grandpa’s house - the Zhang family home - was on the edge of a small open space called Five Flavour Crossing, at the foot of the Bell Tower. It was occupied by shops, one of them a medicine emporium whose walls were lined with wooden drawers, each drawer labelled with the name of the remedy it held. The shop was the sole survivor in a neighbourhood that had once been filled with such outlets, and with the accompanying aromas, the five flavours of traditional healing - sweet, salty, sour, pungent and bitter.

We walked under the shadow of a high wall plastered with ‘big character’ posters, black calligraphy on a red background. “Seek truth of the facts and be self reliant” ‘Serve the people.’ ‘Women hold up half the sky.’ The once- ubiquitous, ‘Take down the capitalist roader’ was covered over, but a corner of it was still visible, a faded remnant of that burst of energy that had recently swept the nation. Fresh paper stuck on top of the old, new messages layered over obsolete ones, wave after wave of slogans telling the story of the recent past.

We passed a small cinema showing ‘Little Eighth Route Army’. Next to it was an antique bookshop, dark as twilight, its shelves packed with scrolls and hand-stitched volumes. On the pavement, farmers with their hands tucked in their sleeves squatted next to handcarts loaded with cabbages, beansprouts, eggs in baskets, potatoes. A woman sliced tofu from a giant off-white slab.

A class of school children marched past us, red neckerchiefs knotted at their throats. They carried their books in satchels made of the same green canvas the army used. Some of the satchels had faded to the grey of winter skies, some were patched, some had been stamped with Mao’s face. These were children not much older than me. I would soon be seven years old, and come the first of September I’d be joining them. It seemed almost too long to wait.

At the Zhang family house, where grandma and grandpa and Taitai lived, (uncles?) grandpa put a pan of milk onto the stove. Milk was a great luxury reserved for the eldest and the youngest - for me and for great-grandma Tai-tai. The radio was turned on, tuned to the galvanising music of the morning exercise routine the whole nation was supposed to follow. Grandpa did a few stretches and lunges. I pushed through the room-divider of padded cotton that hung from ceiling to floor. Great grandma was sitting up on the kang, her eighty-six year old back straight as a girls as she fixed her hair into a bun with nimble fingers. Our new calendar - 1979 - looked at her from the wall opposite. It was the first calendar we’d ever had with glossy colour pictures rather than just a grid of numbers. February’s pine trees stood on a frozen mountain range, their spiky limbs extending to the sky. When the milk was ready we all sat together at the old family table, its square wooden surface marked with scuffs and burns from generations of family meals. Mimi the cat rubbed herself against my dangling legs. She was half-wild, a street cat with a scarred face and a bent tail from years of fighting. She loved Taitai and Taitai’s stove.

With a last swallow of the delicious milk, I put down my bowl (grandpa emptied the very last drops into his own mouth), and it was time for pre-school. I swung my satchel over my shoulder, was half out the door when I heard grandpa’s voice: ‘Meng! Did you forget something?’

I pouted, turned back, fetched grandma’s chamber pot from under her bed and, holding it carefully at arm’s length, nose wrinkled, I took it into the courtyard and emptied it into the outside toilet.

‘Oh my sweetest little bun is so filial!’ she sang when I came back with the empty pot. It wasn’t that no one else could have done the job, or that nobody wanted to. It was part of my training in obedience. Grandpa, polishing the leaves of his orchid (the only handsome plant we possessed), winked at me and nodded. I was free to go. Behind me, the morning light danced on the geometric patterns of latticework around the doors and windows. Their painted colours had faded long ago into a warm hue of bare wood. Our fifty year-old family home: tiled eaves and walls built from bricks of yellow mud.

Bricks of yellow mud.