China Witness (28 page)

XINRAN:
Then what time did you and your father start work every day, and when did you open?

WU:
The tea house opened very early, six or so in winter, in summer a bit after five. We heated the water, and once the water was boiled we'd pour tea for the customers. We'd have customers as soon as it was light. As long as there was boiling water there'd be people coming to drink. People who were happy or angry would come early, and old people too. They would wake up early, while their family were still snoring away. There were no lights on at home, and no one to keep them company or talk about their dreams, so they came very early. And they drank until eight or nine in the evening. They used to come straight after supper, some from eight or ten li away. They all wanted to come and drink tea.

XINRAN:
So in your opinion, now that life has changed so much for the better, and people in so many places don't want to run tea houses any more, why is it that here it seems everyone is competing to open tea houses?

WU:
Who knows? In the past, before the Liberation, there were only two or three tea houses. They were quite rare and special. Now there are more tea houses, two or three with every step. A lot of people are running tea houses in Linhuan these days.

XINRAN:
Are there more people drinking tea now, or before?

WU:
I think there's even more than there used to be. In the past the tea drinkers were always old men, and that's the truth. Nowadays all the young people drink in the teahouses. Now it's three jiao to stay till eleven. That's three jiao a pot. It was cheaper before.

XINRAN:
Did you drink tea when you were young?

WU:
Yes, whenever I had time on my hands.

XINRAN:
Are tea houses now the same as the one your father ran?

WU:
My old man's tea house wasn't as pretty as this one.

XINRAN:
Do you know how many pots the biggest tea house here has?

WU:
The most? That would be two hundred or more.

XINRAN:
In the biggest tea house here, what's the greatest number of people drinking tea together? A few dozen? A hundred? More?

WU:
It could be 150, maybe more.

XINRAN:
Can you still remember any of the words on the lucky couplets stuck to the door of the tea house?

WU:
Not really. I know there are new lucky couplets for Spring Festival every year, but I can't read. I don't know, sometimes I ask people to read them out for me.

XINRAN:
So what lucky couplets do you ask people to write for you at New Year?

WU:
They're all to do with
tea houses, places to drink tea and people who drink tea.

XINRAN:
Do you know how your father got married to your mother?

WU:
Someone introduced them. My dad was over fifty by the time he had me.

XINRAN:
Did your father ever tell you his story?

WU:
When he was telling me off he always used to say that he'd done all sorts of things, making lanterns, selling rice, keeping a tea house, but he'd never been black at heart. At any rate my old dad was a good man.

XINRAN:
What did your father like to do?

WU:
Make hurricane lanterns – he used to sell lanterns every year. Making lanterns, and running a tea house.

XINRAN:
And what do you like to do?

WU:
I do everything. I've sold rice, I've run a tea house, and sold peanuts. I've sold a lot of things.

XINRAN:
Then in the Cultural Revolution was this tea house still open? Did the Red Guards drink tea too?

WU:
In the Cultural Revolution they didn't let us watch opera, but tea houses could stay open. What law was there against drinking tea? The tea houses stayed open, business as usual.

XINRAN:
Is the tea these days the same as before?

WU:
In the past we didn't drink the kind with tea leaves. The tea now is better. In the past there weren't any proper buildings. Now there are buildings made specially for tea houses, made of bricks instead of beaten earth.

XINRAN:
Do a lot of young people run tea houses now?

WU:
Not many. They've gone away to make money. Most people who keep tea houses are sixty or over.

XINRAN:
Do any of your children run a tea house? What do they do?

WU:
Cut hair, sell rice, sell clothes, kill pigs. But none of them have a tea house.

XINRAN:
And do you and your wife live by yourselves? Or do you live with your sons?

WU:
By ourselves. It's the New Society now, the new family. Everybody makes their own money and spends it themselves.

XINRAN:
Do your sons give you money to keep you going?

WU:
They give me money, but I don't want it. My grandson's heading off to university. That's going to cost a lot of money.

XINRAN:
So do your sons like drinking tea in the tea houses?

WU:
Only one of them. He drinks every day. The rest of them don't like it. They say it's a waste of time.

XINRAN:
You say you joined the Party in 1954. What were you doing at that time?

WU:
In 1950, just after Liberation, I was a security officer. In 1951 I was made village head and then deputy head of the production brigade. I never took a penny. I joined the Party in 1954, my wife joined in 1955, and that's the truth, as I'm sitting here.

XINRAN:
Have your sons joined the Party?

WU:
My second son joined the Party while he was in the army.

XINRAN:
You, your wife, and your son too. You must be regarded as a red family, with three Party members.

WU:
That goes without saying!

XINRAN:
Do you still have Party meetings?

WU:
We don't now.

XINRAN:
If you don't have Party meetings, do you still count as a Party member?

WU:
I can't say for sure.

XINRAN:
How many Party members are there in your village now?

WU:
There are still a few dozen.

XINRAN:
In the past we Chinese used to say that people who engaged in trade were capitalists. So, have any Party members opened a tea house?

WU:
That's hard to say, there aren't that many of us.

XINRAN:
You see, now we're starting to use electricity and lots of new technology. We're modernised. Are you worried that the tea houses will die out?

WU:
There are people who drink tea in Hangzhou, I've seen 'em. When I went there to visit my son, I saw people sitting in tea houses drinking black tea. There's no one who can hold back tea drinkers. But people who drink tea together in the city can get AIDS, so nobody should dare to drink tea outside their house.

XINRAN:
How do you know that tea can transmit AIDS?

WU:
That's not what I said. To be honest, there are people like that, and diseases like that. They can spread. That's what infectious diseases are like.

XINRAN:
So after you stopped running a tea house, apart from being an official, what job did you do?

WU:
Well, these days I sell antiques. I go to small places to buy up old teapots. If I can get a bit for them, enough for spending money, that's all I need – the children don't want them. I'm a rough-and-ready, uneducated sort of chap. I can't read books or newspapers, but I remember everything I see and hear. If not, why would the Party have told me to "sing the Revolution"?

XINRAN:
So how long have you been "singing the Revolution"?

WU:
I started when I was ten. Everyone in the tea house liked to hear me sing. I could sing anything; whatever went into my ears, I could make into something to sing. I sang until the big loudspeakers came to the village. Things changed then. When the big loudspeakers from the broadcasting station started shouting, everyone could hear it. I couldn't sing the things that everybody knew, so I went looking for things the broadcasters didn't say. I kept on singing after I became a Party member and a cadre, but not as much as before.

XINRAN:
How did you know what things the broadcasters never said?

WU:
Need you ask? Everybody knows that they never talk about gods or fortune-telling; that's superstition. And they don't talk about the police doing bad things, right? Or about droughts or natural disasters either, or how the Yellow River drowned all those people. It was all "class struggle every day", but we were all poor here, we couldn't find a class enemy even if we wanted to. Those class enemies were all rich. Would you stay here if you were rich? That'd be like a man dying of hunger using a gold bowl for a pisspot!

XINRAN:
So if you often spoke of those things, didn't anybody try to stop you?

WU:
Nobody bothered about me, who comes here? If they came here to control us, what would they eat? Those officials who were so fond of class struggle wouldn't have been able to bear hunger!

XINRAN:
You're seventy-five, and there are so many stories in your life, so let's narrow it down. Can you tell me about the three most painful things in your life and the three happiest?

WU:
That's easy, I was happiest when I was selling rice. It was one yuan
a bowl, and I could sell five hundred bowls in a day, and that's the truth. I made money from my
zhuangmo
as well – that's big hard steamed bread, the kind they eat in the north-east. That was my first happy thing. The second happy thing is that I've worked for the revolution all my life, but I've never taken a penny of public money. I want to be a decent person. I joined the Party in 1954. I went to the police station to be a public security worker, I wasn't scared. "A revolutionary must know no fear, no point in thinking of revolution if you're scared." There's no third happiest thing. Family matters like my sons and daughter don't count.

XINRAN:
And the most unhappy thing?

WU:
The most unhappy thing? There are people in the government who act recklessly. I don't say anything out loud, but in my heart I don't approve. The peasant cadres in the past were all better than the ones now. I've got no way to say it.

*

Judging by my experience of interviews in the countryside, I could feel that he was not being completely candid. There must have been other things that made him unhappy. But Old Mr Wu changed the subject, and his face immediately took on an actor's stage expression of "happiness".

*

WU:
There's nothing to make me sad. I play, I sing. If a man's happy he'll have long life. The happier a man is the longer he lives; the more anxious a man is the quicker he'll die.

XINRAN:
If you had your life over again, would you still live it this way?

WU:
That's not easy to say. Me, live my life again – I would be hundreds of years old! That's not possible.

XINRAN:
No, if you had your
time
over again, would you still stay here and run the tea house with your father, or would you go to live somewhere else? Do you regret your life, or do you think it was worth it?

WU:
It was worth it.

XINRAN:
Many foreigners say that China is very poor, and this place of yours is really very poor. You live in poverty here, is it worth it?

WU:
This place doesn't count as poor. When Chairman Mao was alive, just after Liberation, it was very poor. Now? Not poor.

XINRAN:
A lot of people here don't even earn three jiao a day, and you still don't think this is poor?

WU:
It's not poor now, truly. Back in 1949, 1950 and 1951, we were poor. Chairman Mao was making revolution in those days. There were no buses,
not many people; that was real poverty. Foreigners? I say the foreigners are poor. When I went to Hangzhou I saw the trousers the foreigners were wearing, holes all over, and their hair was all dirty. Isn't that poor? Why be like that?

XINRAN:
Do you prefer Hangzhou or Linhuan?

WU:
For living Hangzhou is better, of course. But it's not so bad here either. A peasant's lot has been bitter since ancient times. Who told you to be born into this life, born into a peasant family to spend all day working in the muck and mire?

XINRAN:
Do you and your wife ever quarrel?

WU:
I've never fought or quarrelled with her since the day we were married, not even sworn at her.

XINRAN:
Comparing you and your wife, are you more successful than her, or the other way round? Who's more revolutionary, who's more successful?

WU:
She's more capable than me. She's a model worker, the first female Party member in the village. She's a cut above me.

XINRAN:
Can you still remember the ceremony when you two got married?

WU:
It was raining that day – she came in a sedan chair.

XINRAN:
Did you have a banquet?

WU:
We were very poor then, we didn't have any land yet, or a house, we didn't have a thing, my family was the poorest.

XINRAN:
Is there anything that you wanted to do that you haven't done yet?

WU:
No, I've done it all, a man should have a conscience.

XINRAN:
How old is the oldest person in the village?