China Witness (27 page)

My conversation with Tashi reminded me that I first heard about tiger stoves – these hot-water shops that double as tea houses – when I was in Shanghai on business in 1995. And by that time there was only one tiger stove left in the whole Shanghai area. The older locals told me that tiger stoves had been at their height in the early 1950s, with more than two thousand in the city. After that their numbers declined over the years as the water-supply systems improved, especially after the 1980s, when almost every Shanghainese home had a bathroom with a water heater. Nobody went to the tiger stoves any more, and the scenes of people chatting as they queued for water died out along with the tiger stoves. By the time I had a chance to investigate the subject, the last tiger stove had closed down in 2005, though the old people sipping cups of hot tea under the trees nearby told me that this habit was a relic of the tiger stoves. And this in turn reminded me that many folk customs are subject to history, and also that many folk customs will one day disappear with history.

In the course of my investigation and this "unearthing" of tiger stoves, I heard a story about a customer who used to wash at one. He had been a small trader all his life, and he had his fixed place in the tiger stove where he sat every day. All his fellow bathers jokingly referred to him as "Number XX", but nobody knew his real name. A few years ago "Number XX" became ill and he wanted a wash, so his son dutifully ran him a bath in his modern imported bathtub, but the old man flatly refused to take off his clothes. When the son finally understood what his father wanted, he took his arm and supported him to the one remaining tiger stove in Shanghai. The old man was helped to his accustomed place by all his old bathing buddies, like a crowd of stars surrounding the moon. He seemed to have come to life once again, whipping out a packet of cigarettes from his breast pocket and sitting down for a smoke, beaming. The
following day, this old bathhouse customer left the world, with a smile on his face.

As we travelled northwards from Nanjing, the view outside the bus window was gradually changing from the scenery of the lower reaches of the Yangtze Delta to a landscape of "poor mountains and impoverished soil". Our driver told us that we were heading north by the side of an ancient canal running from north to south that could tell the story of three thousand years of China's transport history. The canal had been excavated in the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods (770–221 BC), and was expanded many times in various dynasties. Up until ad 618 in the
Sui dynasty it had been the main water-transport route of China's eastern region, which was the most densely populated part of China and remains so to this day. The
Grand Canal went as far north as Beijing, linking it to the coastal city of Hangzhou, and sideways to connect China's three great rivers, the Yellow, Yangtze and Huai. It had a total length of over 1,700 kilometres – twenty-one times the length of the Panama Canal – making it the longest canal in the world. Together with the Great Wall, it is one of the two most important engineering projects in ancient China. Because there had once been a branch of the ancient canal in the place we were driving through, the "
Tongji Channel" that cut across Anhui province north of the Huai River, the area became a place of political, economic, cultural and military importance in the Tang and Song dynasties. Later on, the Yellow River flooded in 1194 in the Southern Song dynasty, and the Tongji Channel became silted up. The surrounding regions went into decline with the end of transport on the channel, and the area to the north of the Huai River gradually moved up the list of China's poorest places. This was our destination: Linhuan.

Linhuan is not even mentioned in tourist guides, but it is well known throughout China for its antiquity. Linhuan was first built in around 200 BC, and in due course it became a rest stop for merchants and travellers heading north or south along the Grand Canal. The tea houses of the village were in high fashion for a time, and even now most of the locals are habitual tea drinkers, preferring a kind of tea with no tea leaves that is called
bangbang
tea.

When we drove into Linhuan "town" (though in fact it is no more than a village), we saw a kind of modernised poverty: a street scene covered in the dust of a thousand years. There was a dustiness to everything, from
little hammered earth houses a hundred years old, through the low brick and tile buildings of the fifties and sixties, to the two-storey peasant homes of the eighties. The whole street was full of builders' rubble – it seemed that everybody in Linhuan was "hurrying in the footsteps of international development" to build a house or pave a road – but the things that were being built were the scrap material of modern China. The people were neatly dressed but not clean. It appeared that they had no requirements beyond keeping themselves warm and fed, with no aspirations for enjoyment, and their skinny dogs lacked even the strength to bark a couple of times at strangers. It seemed that only the cocks and hens scavenging for food in the street had enough energy to keep their necks stretching out tirelessly, and a little freshness and brightness to their feathers.

Here, there was none of the speed of modernised production. The small donkey carts that had been used for over a hundred years and the old wooden handcarts that had been pulled for decades had been replaced by "bong-bong cars" – motor tricycles with a small cabin for passengers built on behind the driver's seat that had long since been banned in the cities – and old-style motorbikes that made a great deal of noise even when the wheels were not going round. Your instinctive responses go into slow motion here; it takes several minutes from the first puttering sound until the vehicle actually gets going. Our driver couldn't get the people blocking our way to move aside, even with loud blasts of his horn. Occasionally you could hear a voice shout something in tones of great urgency, followed by a long pause. You would almost have forgotten what you had heard, and then another voice would yell a response.

All of this reminded me of the works of Dalí, that strange, mad artistic genius whose work I have never understood. Perhaps there had been a similar rubble of modernisation in his life? Could that have been what gave him the ability to put together those strange works of art that smashed people's old habits of mind to fragments?

I made up my mind to visit a few tea houses before my interview with Chen Lei, the man I had come to see.

Most of Linhuan's tea houses have kept the original form in which they had first been built a hundred or so years before. The dim light inside the rooms comes mainly from a series of smallish skylights, there are rows and rows of great steaming iron or aluminium kettles standing on the big seven-or eight-hole linked stoves by the doorway, and by the side of the stove
there is often a long bench which acts as a table for tea-making utensils, crowded with teacups, teapots and tea leaves. The remainder of the space is the tea-drinking area, which consists of several wooden tables, long benches and little wooden chairs. Some tea houses put out rows of small, low tables and chairs on the street. No matter how long you sit in the tea house, three jiao for a pot of tea will guarantee you a place from morning till night.

According to several tea-house owners, the biggest difference between tea houses now and in the past is that in the past people drank tea and listened to the news or storytelling, while now they drink tea and play mah-jong or cards. Another difference is that women come to the tea houses. Because most of the land has been compulsorily purchased by the government, the young and strong have all gone to the big cities to earn money. The older women in the family don't have to spend their time taking care of the young children, so they have started to become a part of tea-house culture.

Originally, I had thought that "listening to the news" meant villagers sitting clustered round a little radio listening to the news or Chinese opera. But this was not the case. Because the area had been poor not just for generations but for dynasties, many of its people were illiterate and had never been to school. In every generation, however, there would be a few men who ventured outside the village to find out news and interesting things; back in the village tea house they would then say and sing the news. After a while the "News Singer" became a special job in the area.

We were lucky enough to meet a "News Singer", Old Mr Wu, who had been "singing and telling the Revolution" for the Communist Party since he was ten years old. From our casual chat I could see that he was at ease and eager to perform, so I decided then and there to hold an extra interview.

*

XINRAN:
Mr Wu, while we're waiting for the cameraman to get set up, can I make a request?

WU:
Just say the word.

XINRAN:
We'll only say what's in our hearts, no official talk – empty words or false words – and we'll just talk, without "singing". And please look only at me, not at other people. Is that all right?

WU:
I'll do as you say.

XINRAN:
Have you always lived here?

WU:
I'm Linhuan-born and -bred.

XINRAN:
So what year were you born?

WU:
I'm seventy-five years old. I'm a little deaf, but I'll tell you no lies, even though I'm seventy-five. I'm not like some people, playing up their age to cheat their way to a pension, playing up their youth to get a young wife.

XINRAN:
Don't worry about your hearing, I'll shout. When did you start drinking tea?

WU:
My father ran a tea house. We couldn't buy good water. When I was very small I started to fetch spring water – at eleven or twelve I could carry water with a pole on both shoulders. When did I start to drink? I can't remember.

XINRAN:
How long did your father run a tea house?

WU:
Many years.

XINRAN:
Do you still remember what the tea house was like? How many teapots and tea tables were there? Were there many people?

WU:
A fair few teapots – they were all old, there were none of the little pots you get nowadays. In those days tea houses were important places hereabouts; anything that was too big for the family or couldn't be kept in the bag, they'd take to the tea house, and they always got a result. Arranging marriages, fights between husband and wife, differences between neighbours, disciplining youngsters . . . That was why women and children weren't allowed in. This was men's business. Unless, that is, one of the tea houses was short-staffed, then they'd have to let the owner's wife in to lend a hand. So I didn't see much either. What child would dare stick his nose into his own father's business back then? That would be challenging your father's authority!

XINRAN:
Do you still remember what your mother did at home?

WU:
She cooked. I just remember her cooking. That's what women do, isn't it? Cooking!

XINRAN:
How many of you children were there?

WU:
Just the one, I was the only one.

XINRAN:
You were an only child? There was no one-child policy then, surely?

WU:
There was just me. I didn't have any sisters, or any brothers either. Luckily I was a boy or the family line would have died out. I was the only one then, but now there are four generations of us.

XINRAN:
How many sons, how many daughters?

WU:
Eh?

XINRAN:
HOW– MANY – SONS? HOW– MANY – DAUGHTERS?

WU:
Me? Four sons and a girl.

XINRAN:
How about grandchildren?

WU:
Even my grandchildren's children are grown up!

XINRAN:
How did you find your wife?

WU:
The first one, I don't know. It was all fixed up by our parents, and after four years she had a child. It wouldn't do, so I found me another one. This one was good; she's a capable woman. I joined the Party in '54, she joined in '55; she's a capable woman.

XINRAN:
So you had two wives? You were married twice?

WU:
Let's not talk about that, I couldn't be doing with the first one; she didn't have any progressive thought at all, and she wasn't capable. So I got another wife. The second one, she could talk sense.

XINRAN:
Is she a good cook?

WU:
Pretty good – dumplings, flat pancakes on the stove, she can do the lot.

XINRAN:
When your father was alive was his tea house called "the tea house", or did it have another name?

WU:
It was just called the tea house. In the past there were storytellers and drum-singers in the tea houses. He sold his tea, you did your singing, he'd give you money every month, plus tips from the customers. Nowadays opera singers all sing on the stage. They turn their noses up at the tea houses – not enough space.

XINRAN:
So tell me what you did all day, from when you got up in the morning to when you went to bed at night.

WU:
I ran the tea house with my old man, I carried water. Every day was the same, what's to talk about? At first I went to school, until grade three. I was stupid so I stopped going. I said to my dad, "I'll do whatever you tell me to." He said, "You carry water, I'll run the tea house, and the place'll be full of the sound of slurping tea." I said, "What use is that?" He said, "What's good about running a tea house? I'm telling you, this tea house of ours is the place in the village where people talk sense. If anyone in the tea house says unreasonable things, the tea house will meet to pass judgement. The tea house is just like a court, it's like the law. And there's another good thing about a tea house: people get angry, and if they get angry at home, they fight with their sons or scold their daughters-in-law, but once they're in the tea house they don't stay angry, they chat and laugh
– a trip to the tea house is a happy thing, a tea house is a good place. Besides, in the tea house you can hear about big matters from outside. Otherwise you'd be living in a dead end, wouldn't you?"