Five Bells (6 page)

‘There are many words for snow,' her father announced. And he tilted his head back and chuckled, as if he had just told her a joke.

 

In the bonfire the Red Guards lit in their lane in 1967
Doctor Zhivago
was aflame in the pile of books deemed ideologically treacherous. Pei Xing watched the book-burning with her parents, who were forced to kneel in mute witness. Her father's face was bruised and her mother looked absent.

The immolation of books took longer than expected. Sometimes a book would flip open page by page, each separately blackening, curling, igniting, disappearing, and still there were more pages rising softly underneath. The pyramid of paper seemed for a time to resist its own fire, so that a Guard poked at the smouldering mess and called for kerosene. When at last it flared up, with a kind of fierce luminosity, everyone was relieved that the event was at last consuming itself. And because she could not look at her parents' faces, and because she was afraid, and because history had become this incredible
will to erase, Pei Xing watched the bonfire with devoted attention. It was impressively bright.

The past never left her. Her parents were always there, always kneeling, the last time she saw them alive. The pile of books was perpetually burning.

And the seductive Yuri Andreyevich Zhivago seemed almost more real to her than her own parents, since he lived on robustly in cinema and words, and since his own life story had a definite, well-described conclusion. This was something her father believed in, that fiction might eclipse life. It pained her to think of it now, how distant he had become, how vague and how replaced. Her mother was more present: the ministrations of food and comfort, the Guangdong folk-tales, the sound of her piano as she practised a Brahms piece, or a Bach. These memories greeted her more frequently, and more often in moments of happiness.

 

It had rained during the night but the sun was now shining. The day was fast heating up. Pei Xing rose, splashed her face, and went immediately to the kitchen to prepare her Dragon Well tea. There was some cold sticky rice left over in a bowl in the fridge; she covered it with condensed milk and slices of mango and ate her breakfast standing up, as she always did, looking as though searching into the far distance.

Beyond the window above the sink lay the broad sprawl of Bankstown and the outer western suburbs. Mighty trucks were rumbling along the freeways with homicidal speed; there were houses of dubious design, with utes on the front lawns and chunky letterboxes made of bricks; there were factories and steelworks and a huge hardware store, the size of a jumbo-jet hangar, spread over an entire block. A mattress factory and a glass factory stood absurdly side by side.
Aussie Mattresses. Down Under Glass.

In the shopping centre beside the train station there were dozens of small businesses with signs above the doorways in Vietnamese and Arabic; these Pei Xing found particularly enchanting. She loved to look directly into the faces of people on the street: men with powerful forearms and forthright eyes, and women in hijabs and scarves walking together in friendly clusters. Their children all looked plump and smiling and for some reason reminded Pei Xing of nutmeg. Then there were Vietnamese at the fishmongers on the corner, a meeting place of sorts, and casual groups at the Pho shop, who all seemed to know each other. This version of Australia was Asian and Arab. These people moved in an aura of their own, not afraid to claim space; and among them were other populations, migrant as she, each pulled from another history and cast up at the bottom of the world. On the street Pei Xing always felt cosmopolitan. She felt she was moving among friends in a spacious new world. She thought people from the Middle East, especially, were very exotic. She tried not to stare.

 

Conspicuous beneath a sun umbrella, Pei Xing walked the streets of Bankstown to catch an early train. She looked at the signs above the stores and saw again how beautiful a script Arabic was, how different from Chinese characters, and from English translations. There were cursive waves and dots and ultra-precise dashes, like flags. There were suggestions of Mecca and arched windows and the spaces a mosque might contain. How might ‘snow', she wondered, appear in an Arabic script? How might desert peoples write the word ‘snow'? Would it be imagined as flying sand?

It had occurred to Pei Xing more than once that she would like to learn Arabic, so that she could speak fluently to her neighbours and chitchat with the small children who played in
the stairwell of their ugly block of flats. She could address the women in headscarves and ask what they thought of this place, and where they worked, and what kind of food they ate and how it was prepared. Her son Jimmy had tried to persuade her to move to the suburb of Ashfield, to the large Chinese community in which he lived. But Pei Xing liked it here, near the western Sydney University. Here she had a little work teaching her own language, and here, one day, she might yet learn Arabic.

 

At the train station Mr Nguyen was settled in his glass booth. Ignoring the ticket machines that looked like the robots of an unfortunately boxy future era, Pei Xing preferred her friend, and his hasty chat.

‘Mrs Chang!'

‘Mr Nguyen!' She folded her umbrella.

‘Hot enough for you?'

It was a rhetorical question. Pei Xing had teased him before about the battery-run miniature fan that he held to his face. It was of pastel pink plastic and shaped like a rocket ship. It blew his fringe backwards into a glossy black fin.

‘You sound Australian, Mr Nguyen.'

‘I'm trying,' he responded. ‘The usual?'

Mr Nguyen knew that each Saturday morning Pei Xing made the long journey to Circular Quay, then to the North Shore, to meet someone from her past. He was too polite to ask any details, but recognised her reticent dignity and the lifelong habit of privacy. He had said once that she reminded him of a schoolteacher from his childhood in Saigon and Pei Xing accepted this disclosure as a verbal gift; the remembrance she inspired in him was spoken with affection.

‘The usual. Circular Quay.'

Mr Nguyen brushed at his fin, in unconscious grooming, as he produced the ticket.

 

These simple exchanges sustained Pei Xing. People put too little faith in modest conversation, she thought, and in what was known but remained silent or impossible to express. The veneration of small sentences, or a gesture, or even a single word; this was the fabric of civility, the basic social contract. One could die without it.

Mr Nguyen reminded Pei Xing of no one in particular, but his face was generically kind and his tone solicitous. How did this kindly intelligent man end up here, locked in by timetables, and piles of change and an airless booth?

The train station was noisy and busy, all brutalist steel, echoing with voices and the severe acoustics of hard tubular spaces. Rubbish blew along the platform, a McDonald's carton for fries, a jangling aluminium can. Without hesitating, Pei Xing picked up both and deposited them in a metal garbage bin hanging from a pole. Waiting passengers watched suspiciously and with blank incomprehension.

 

The train from Liverpool approached, slowing its roar, screeching to a halt; and when Pei Xing boarded, something that persisted as a trace from early morning returned as a complete image.

Once she had sought her father at his desk and found him missing, then located him smoking on his bed, an ashtray balanced on his chest. He was lost in thought, gazing at the ceiling. Music was playing from the gramophone – something moody with wailing trumpets. The light was yellow; it was always yellow in her parents' bedroom. This easy vision: of the great man at rest, a small blue brass and enamel vessel moving fractionally with his breath. The cigarette, Great China, dangling from two fingers. As a girl she had been caught by the quietness and solemnity of the moment, the knowledge that he had not seen her, his contemplative self-sufficiency, the mixture of aloneness and distance her spying implied.
Children tell themselves things in a summarising mode: she told herself then, ‘I love my father.'

Perhaps love rested more in images than in words. There was no memory of him speaking at this time, or even acknowledging her presence. It was a quiet, folded moment, entirely her own.

 

Two young men, both wearing hoodies despite the heat, sat directly in front of Pei Xing and began talking in loud voices. One wore a pattern of human skulls on his fleecy jacket; the other had the tattoo of a Chinese character,
fate,
just visible on his neck. Odd to see these characters appearing as fashion on the skin of young men. Decoration Chinese. Empty Chinese. Pei Xing looked out the window and watched the buildings of Bankstown slide away.

 

Her father, Chang Yong, had met her mother, Nan Anyi, in London some time in 1935. He had been at Birkbeck College in London, studying for a doctorate in English Literature; she was a student of piano, at the Royal Academy. They met through a mutual friend, Wu Xingfu, who was one of those energetic expatriates for whom linking with others was an exciting and essential duty; he was always organising get-togethers in pubs and picnics in parks. Londoners gazed at the motley crowd of Chinese students, incurious as to their histories but also – they sensed – dimly hostile to their presence.

Chang Yong owned a Box Brownie camera, his prized possession, and there once existed a series of cheesy photographs of their group posed before various London landmarks, the lions in Trafalgar Square, rows of pansies in Hyde Park, the twisty decorated gates of Buckingham Palace. There was a particularly askew image of Yong and Anyi standing with palace guards in their pillar-high bearskin hats; both look dwarfed, innocent
and silly with pleasure. They had their chins raised to Wu Xingfu as he took the photo; he must have been kneeling in order to show the comic dimensions of the guards. Soon after there was a formal photograph of their marriage, also by Wu Xingfu and also slightly off-centre. The couple were standing on the steps of the registry office in Camden, both now unsmiling, as was the convention. Anyi wore a tailored suit and her hair was styled as a black sea-shell in a neat wavy bob, glistening as if wet; Yong wore pinstripes and a self-consciously slanted fedora. They were glamorous, and they knew it. What the photographs told Pei Xing was that they had loved each other, that London had emboldened them, and that they saw, in their nascent marriage, limitless days ahead.

 

None of these images survived the Cultural Revolution. None of their group. Wu Xingfu, who had a doctorate from the London School of Economics, was murdered in the early days, after being expelled from Beijing Normal University and denounced as a ‘rightist and snake-demon revisionist'. A son of the ‘landlord class', educated abroad, there was little he could say in his own defence. His wife, who worked as a doctor at the Peiping Union Medical College, renamed the Anti-Imperialist Hospital during the Revolution, committed suicide a few days after she learned of his death. Pei Xing had seen a note in the newspaper announcing Wu Xingfu's posthumous rehabilitation under the Deng regime, during the long weeks and months in which she searched lists for her parents' details. She read the names of the dead carefully, with filial piety. Her greatest fear was that she would look forever, with utmost care, and never find them.

 

Her parents' names at last appeared. Pei Xing's first thought was for herself; that she was no longer ‘politically black', that she could now leave the country. Chang Yong and Chang Anyi
were both rehabilitated, twenty-two years after their disappearance. Their names appeared in a list in the paper, in the column of political resurrections, and a formal letter from the Public Security Bureau followed.

Pei Xing felt nothing when at last she read it. She applied for the return of their property and possessions, and received instead a small amount of money. Then she wrote to her brother in Australia asking if she might join him. When she went to the Xuijiahui office for papers for herself and her son, she had difficulty speaking of a ‘family reunion' without betraying excitement. The official behind the desk, a stalk-thin man with the face of a dried peach, wrote down her birth-date – 26th December, Chairman Mao's birthday – and raised an eyebrow and smiled. Pei Xing was accustomed to comments on the auspicious date of her birth. But the official said nothing. He signed the papers. He handed them over. Pei Xing left the office briskly, and without pausing to thank him.

 

There is a section of
Doctor Zhivago
that is full of snow. Zhivago is with his wife, Tonya, travelling in the freight truck of a train, and the journey is remarkable for the snowfall that impedes their progress and enters the hero's thinking as a series of metaphors. The snowflakes begin as woolly but thicken to a white stage curtain as wide as the street, one slowly descending and swinging its fringe. Snow is a swirling fire in the headlight of the train. Snow covers the land as a child in a cot, his head beneath an eiderdown. And then there was a section her father had read to her. Zhivago is lying in the stalled train, hearing a sound like that of a waterfall, and realises all at once that spring is in the air, the time when the snowflakes turn black as they fall to the earth.

The poet thinks:
transparent, blackish-white, sweet-smelling, bird-cherry
.

Pei Xing remembered this phrase because her father taught
it to her like a poem, after he had discussed the translation of ‘snow'. When she was in distress she recited it:
transparent, blackish-white, sweet-smelling, bird-cherry
. There were so many – mostly improbable – words for snow; the melody of the phrase mysteriously nourished and sustained her.

 

There was no distress here, here and now. There was just this unbidden recall and the suburbs of Sydney flashing past. But what Pei Xing saw from the train was mostly unbeautiful. The backs of houses with their collapsing fences, the power-lines, the graffiti, the drifting glimpses of mortgaged lives. There were car bodies, rusted out, and the tangle of weeds around rubbish, riotous greenery and lush urban wastelands. A shopping trolley had been tossed with guilty haste into a gulley; it looked like an animal cage as the train whizzed past. More graffiti, scrawled in puzzling, illegible messages. A young man, perhaps, a bold young man, had climbed wire fences at night to ego-mark the city and try, with a ritzy signature, to make it his own.