Under Fishbone Clouds (33 page)

After work, with their hair still dusted grey with traces of flour, Yuying and Jinyi settled at their fold-out table and the lesson began. Yuying took the stick of ink and rubbed it carefully into a sliver of water on the small porcelain plate. She then let the brush hover for a moment, considering where to begin.

‘This one,’ Yuying said, swishing the brush downwards with a flick to the right, then another to the left and a final horizontal strike through the centre, to create what looked to Jinyi like a headless stickman with outstretched arms. ‘Means
big
. It –’

‘Yes, yes, even I know that one!’

‘All right. But look, draw another line, a flat roof across the top, and it becomes
heaven, sky, day
. That’s how you can remember them: this top line is the limit of vastness, the border of
big
– for nothing is higher than heaven, and sometimes it can seem like there is no time longer than the span of a day.’

In this way they worked through the ideograms, piling them together until they had a vocabulary in common, until the intricate brush-strokes had become bridges which they could wander over together. And in the very year they started, a process of
simplifying
the language was begun in the capital: pruning the overgrown branches into a slimmer script, tidying up the ancient forest so that light could shine between the thick pines. Over a thousand and a half characters in everyday use were simplified. After all, the old words, people agreed, were tainted with the blood of peasants forced to make ink for greedy emperors. The new language would be completely democratic – though, of course, everyone would have to speak the Beijing form of Mandarin, the Party officials agreed – for if people spoke in tongues they could not understand, how would they know what was being said about them?

As winter huddles turned into summer yawns and the table was edged closer to the stopped-open door, Jinyi graduated to newspapers and leaflets, and they made a game of testing each other. ‘Communism’ – that meant the end of poverty and injustice.
‘Imperial’ – that meant unfair and repressive. ‘Bourgeois’ – that meant anyone who had enslaved the people and made money from their misery. ‘People’s’ – there was People’s Park near where the river curved and pulled its belly in, People’s Square where the flag was flown and where statues were being built, People’s Government, People’s School, People’s Money printed by the People’s Bank in the People’s Republic of China – well, that meant it belonged to them, didn’t it, at last receiving what they deserved.

Yaba accompanied Bian Shi for dinner more often in the summer. The large-muscled mute helping the hobbling old woman was the only person from the restaurant not ashamed to be seen with his former employers. With his delicate hand movements, he told Yuying about the changes in the layout, the service, the
customers
and even the menu in the restaurant, and Yuying translated to her husband, while her mother buried her face in her hands in exasperation after every other sentence.

‘You still make money from it, Ma, and it’s only changing to make the country a better place for everyone, not just a few of us.’

‘Well, it’s just lucky your father isn’t here to see this. He would have gone mad with some of these changes. Those are the oldest dumpling restaurants in this city, remember, and they’ve been in your family …’

And so the embellished history was rattled out, the one Yuying learnt as a child and could repeat word for word along with her mother. The truth was a little different – perhaps Old Bian was lucky to be gone, but only because otherwise he might have ended up like his friends, the portly businessmen with whom he gambled and smoked, who were now wheezing and straining as they
shouldered
ploughs through endless brown fields in provinces they had previously never even heard of.

Jinyi soon joined in, his curiosity getting the better of him.

‘The grumpy old head chef, is he still there?’

Yaba shook his head.

‘What about Liu, the waiter?’

Yaba shook his head.

‘Yangchen?’

Yaba shook his head, his hands swooping up into a salute.

‘He’s a boss? Of what? A factory? Huh, seems like he hasn’t done badly out of his brother joining up in the war – it always helps
to be on the winning side. Are any more of the old guys still in Fushun?’

Yaba sucked on a cigarette, and shrugged his shoulders. New times, new faces. He had different expressions for every kind of resignation to the inevitable.

‘Oh, well. There must be a word for this kind of sudden change, but I don’t know what it is,’ Jinyi joked, and he and his wife giggled. Yaba threw up his hands, as if to say, ‘Well, words are no business of mine!’

The language has always been like a South Chinese Tiger – it has no desire to be tamed. Near the beginning of the Qing dynasty, the Kangxi Emperor, keen to ingratiate himself with Han mandarins still faithful to the defeated Ming and suspicious of the Manchus in the palace, set them to work on the compilation of a giant dictionary. On completion, it contained around 47,000 different characters. Just like Chairman Mao, the emperor knew that the way to get people behind him was to give them tasks that kept them occupied while the world around them was irrevocably altered. He must have known that to wield power over language is to wield power over people’s thoughts. He was the longest-reigning emperor in China’s history.

With dipping brushes clashing like chopsticks and the ink stick mixed and stirred with water, Jinyi and Yuying set about rewriting their history. They drew lines beneath the long months of
mourning
, of guilt and blame and recriminations and doubt that separated them, and began again. They blotted out the talk of demons or spirits, and started to scribble in the present tense. Each word they wrote was a promise, a vow.

That’s the funny thing about humans. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I was mortal too once, but you remember how well that turned out, don’t you? Now I’m a god I have a different perspective. Humans seem to think they can control their own lives. They think that, somehow, if they act a little differently, they can make everything turn out right. It’s never that simple. You can call it fate, if you like. Or karma, or destiny, or whatever. But something always gets in the way. Isn’t that what history means?

Even as the summer began to bubble up through the paving stones, they huddled close, thinking that if they were separated even by a couple of inches then everything might fall apart again.

‘Promise me,’ Yuying whispered into the dark at night, listening to him breathing beside her.

‘I promise.’

‘We will never leave each other’s side again.’

‘I promise. You?’

‘Of course.’

‘Go on then.’

‘Jinyi, I promise.’

And then their hands met, and their faces drewer closer, and they would briefly fool themselves into believing that these promises, which would prove impossible to keep, were enough to keep them safe.

The days stretched out into russet and burnt amber, so sticky that when Jinyi finally emerged from loading trays into the belching ovens and fetching others out all day long, he found his hair turned itchy and damp, and his face transformed into a puffy pink sigh. The factory stayed open another hour with the sunlight. This extra hour of work was greeted by the workers not with annoyance, however, but with celebration. Everywhere people seemed to be excited, awash with energy, saying they would work for free if the Party asked them to and competing to see who could show the most loyalty to the new state, ‘a China finally run by the people’. They stayed in the factory, in the reallocated fields, the food halls and the building sites until all traces of sunlight had disappeared, until their tense muscles had begun to sob, until they were sent home smiling.

As Yuying and Jinyi soared back through the crowded streets on their shared bicycle, dodging marching soldiers and market officials shepherding crowds back to the greener outskirts, slipping past the last few rickshaw men unsure what to do with themselves now they had been forced to give up their feudal trade, Jinyi had to remind himself to keep pedalling. He was distracted by his
satisfaction
, by the twenty-one-year-old perched on the handlebars, and by the hopes he had squeezed to fit her life. If he forgot, they
would topple into the pavement, where, if they lingered too long, they would be removed from sight. The streets had to be kept clean – appearance was everything. It was only when they turned the corner onto Bian Shi’s street, with the older stone mansions poking out from between the hastily assembled brick huts, that they heard the commotion.

‘Aiii! Old woman, you are making no sense! Just give us back our chicken and we won’t report you to the authorities, how about that?’

Bian Shi was standing in the courtyard of the old house, doing her best to make her small frame fill the large gate. In front of her stood a man and a woman – each with dark faces, red noses and knotted, dirty hair – who could keep neither still nor quiet. From behind her, in the house, the leisurely clucks of a chicken could clearly be heard.

Bian Shi puffed out her chest. ‘This is my chicken. How dare you accuse me of stealing! I’ve never seen you before in my life!’

‘Look!’ They tried agitated reasoning. ‘We were working at the market when we noticed that one of our chickens had escaped, one with white feathers and a black plume. We looked everywhere, and someone on this street said they had seen you pick up a chicken, one with a black plume and white feathers, earlier today.’

‘Who? Who told you that? Tell me!’

‘It doesn’t matter. Look, we know you’ve got a chicken in there. We can hear it! Don’t think you can cheat us, just ’cos you’re hungry! You’ve got it easy here, old woman, in your big house – we’re supposed to be equal now!’

‘Now, listen to me. I don’t care for your insinuations. It’s my chicken. I’ve had it months. And I certainly don’t intend to eat it. It’s a pet.’

They poor couple stared at each other with shocked, open mouths. They did not understand. Animals fell into two categories: work or food. Horses, donkeys, oxen and mules comprised the former. Pigs, cows, sheep, goats, horses, donkeys, mules, dogs, snakes, rabbits, mice, any kind of bird, cats, squirrels, monkeys and many others made up the latter. To keep a plump, juicy animal and not eat it seemed the very embodiment of the crazy bourgeois they had been warned about.

‘You’re crazy! We can’t go back without our chicken – we’ve got
quotas to fill, and we’ve already made offerings to the god of heaven and hell to keep our brood safe.’

‘Well, you’re not supposed to be following those feudal
superstitions
anymore, so it serves you right!’

‘And you’re not supposed to boss us around anymore. We may be peasants, but we’re also citizens now. We know the cadre in our village – he had supper at our house last year. Ha! Wait till he hears about this!’

Bian Shi sighed and reached up, her hands pushing through her lank grey hair. She unhooked her earrings and drew them both into a closed fist, which she slowly extended in front of her. For the briefest of seconds she let her hand open a little, letting them see the slick glint of tiny gemstones, like bright scales shimmering through a clear river. The peasant couple nodded, and the man shook hands with her. They wandered off with their shoulders held high, without anything more being said.