Mr Ma and Son (4 page)

M
R MA
and his son boarded a steamer at Shanghai, and sailed all the way to London in a vague daze. During the forty days they spent at sea, the elder Mr Ma struggled up on deck but once. The moment he stepped out of the cabin door, the ship lurched and he was thrown head over heels. Without a murmur, he steadied himself against the door and went back inside. The second time he came up, the ship was already in London, and completely motionless. Young Mr Ma did much better than his father, and only felt a little seasick as the boat passed Taiwan, experiencing no trouble at all after Hong Kong.

We’ve already observed young Mr Ma’s appearance. There was a difference on board ship, though: he wasn’t so thin then, and his brow wasn’t so tightly furrowed. It was, moreover, his first trip abroad, and the first on an ocean liner, and everything struck him as fresh and exciting. As he leant on the ship’s rail, with the sea breezes whisking up spray and blowing his face bright red, he felt almost as free as the waters of the ocean.

The elder Mr Ma was no more than fifty, at the most. But he deliberately conveyed an air of decrepitude, as if he felt that on attaining a certain age one should no longer lift a finger, but should pass the day in sleeping and eating, and eating and sleeping, without taking one more step than was necessary. He was shorter in stature than his son, but his face was much fuller. He had very bushy eyebrows and very rounded cheeks, and on his upper lip there was a little crescent-moon of a moustache, which in the last couple of years had acquired its first strands of white. His eyes were the same as Ma Wei’s: big, bright and pleasant-looking. He always wore large tortoiseshell spectacles, but since he was neither short-sighted nor long-sighted, the sole purpose of the spectacles was to make him appear more dignified and venerable.

When he was young, Ma Tse-jen – such being the elder Ma’s name – had studied at the
Methodist Congregational Mission
school. He managed to commit to memory quite a few English words and learn the grammatical rules off pat, but in exams he’d never get a mark of more than thirty-five per cent. Sometimes he would collar a fellow student who’d obtained a hundred per cent and drag him off to some quiet spot, saying, ‘Come on! Let’s do some swotting! You ask me fifty words, and I’ll ask you fifty, so I can learn to be a genius like you, and get a hundred out of a hundred.’

Then he would proceed to wipe the floor with the hundred-percent hero, and leave him glaring helplessly. With the dictionary tucked under his arm, the hero muttered, ‘A noun is . . .’ and Ma would at one fell swoop obliterate all the humiliation of his thirty-five per cent.

Mr Ma was a Cantonese, but had lived in Peking since childhood. He would always tell people he was a native of Peking, until Mr
Sun Yat-sen
’s
Three Principles of the People
rose in market value and the power of the
National government
in Canton expanded, whereupon he arranged for the words ‘hailing from Canton’ to be printed upon his visiting card.

After graduating from the Methodist school, he scrambled around trying to find himself a wife, and succeeded. With a bit of inherited property and Ma’s elder brother helping them out, the couple were able to live a jolly little life in complete harmony together. Ma Tse-jen sat the exam for the Board Of Education several times, but his papers failed to shine, and he was obliged to forgo all hope of a position there. Through a connection, he tried to find work with foreign interests, but his English wasn’t up to it. Someone recommended him for an English-teaching post in a school, but he wasn’t going to pick up the cane and turn himself into a teacher – not him!

Out of work and at leisure, he would discreetly visit the singsong houses, returning home late, and sometimes the cosy couple would have a minor squabble. But fortunately, as it was night-time, no one else knew of it. On other occasions, he’d take his wife’s gold ring, and slip off to pawn it. But he’d always cheerfully promise to buy her a new one once his elder brother sent some money. Half vexed and half smiling, she would give him a good telling-off. This only put him in even better spirits, and he would narrate the detailed saga of how he’d come to pawn the ring.

Three years after the marriage, Ma Wei was born. Ma Tse-jen wrote to his elder brother, asking for some money so that he might provide for the customary ceremony when the child reached the age of one month. The elder brother’s money duly arrived, and thus it came about that on the thirtieth day after Ma Wei’s entry into the world, all the family’s relatives and friends partook of a gargantuan feast. Even the neighbour’s pregnant dog came round for a gnaw of some pig’s trotters and fish bones.

Now the young couple had taken a step up in society, having made the transition from ‘man and wife’ into ‘parents’. Although they had no exact notion of parental duties, they were amply aware of their moral obligation to display their parental status and dignity. So Ma Tse-jen stopped shaving his upper lip, and in two or three months he had duly grown a small black moustache. As for Mrs Ma, to match her husband’s dapper black moustache she took some of the rouge off her cheeks, leaving them only half as red.

A most tragic event occurred when Ma Wei was eight years old. Mrs Ma, possibly through overeating or catching a chill, suddenly departed this life. Ma Tse-jen was utterly grief-stricken. To be left with a child of eight and nobody to look after him didn’t matter so much; what was worse was that Ma Tse-jen had been married to his wife all those years and never acquired her any noble titles through his own achievements. He’d let her down, and he felt thoroughly ashamed. He found huge teardrops coursing in one continuous stream down his cheeks, and he wept until his little moustache resembled the tiny sugar brush of the honey-twist vendors.

All the cost of the funeral was borne by his elder brother. What did it matter whose money it was? You have to give the deceased a decent send-off, after all. The
Buddhist rituals of the reception, third requiem and the release of the flame-mouth, and the burial
were held, with even more jolly revelry than had accompanied the first-month ceremony for Ma Wei.

Little by little, Mr Ma’s grief lessened, and his relatives and friends all took it upon themselves to fix him up with another wife. He was himself already well disposed towards the idea, but it was certainly no easy matter to choose the girl. A second marriage isn’t as easy to tackle as the first, and one had to take into account that he was by now somewhat of a connoisseur of women. Pretty ones had to be provided with an upkeep; then again, so did not so pretty ones, so why not have a pretty one? But there are so many pretty girls in this world! This remarrying really was a knotty problem.

On one occasion it nearly came off, but someone was an interfering gossip and said that Ma Tse-jen was a gluttonous idler without any prospects, and the girl’s side beat a hasty retreat. On another occasion, when Ma was again on the verge of concluding the matter, somebody told him that the girl had three spots on her nose, like the
‘long three’
on a domino. That broke it up again – how could a man marry a girl with a long three on her nose!

There was another reason to be choosy. The only way in which Ma Tse-jen felt he could cast lustre upon his ancestors was by becoming a government official. He had an earnest devotion to the notion of being a mandarin, and would not lightly pass up any chance of becoming one. Remarriage offered one such opportunity, so it went without saying that you shouldn’t rush it. Supposing he married the daughter of some senior government bigwig? Surely he’d be bound to obtain some post on the strength of his father-in-law? Or supposing . . . He did a lot of supposing, but, all said and done, supposing is mere supposition, and none of it transformed into reality.

‘If I could marry the daughter of a government department head,’ he would often say to others, ‘I’d be able to bank on an assistant secretaryship at the very least.’

‘If a department head’s got a daughter, do you imagine she would ever marry you?’ the others would reply.

It was soon pretty clear that there were no hopes of either marriage or a government career for Ma Tse-jen.

By the time Ma Wei had read three novels and completed his studies of the
Four Books
of the basic Confucian canon, Mr Ma sent him to a church school in the west end of the city, because Ma Wei could board there, which would save his father a lot of bother. When he’d nothing else to do, Mr Ma would often go to church to visit his son. There, the Reverend Ely’s words gradually enlightened his heart, and he was in due course baptised into the Christian Church. In any case, he didn’t have anything else to do, and taking a leisurely trip to the church not only proclaimed his piety but also cost him no money. After he’d been baptised, he stopped playing cards and drinking wine for a whole week, and bought an English-language bible bound in red leather for his son.

The year the Great War ended, Ma Tse-jen’s elder brother had gone to London and opened a business selling curios. Every four or five months he would send his younger brother some money, and sometimes he would also entrust him with the task of searching for goods in Peking. Ma Tse-jen despised traders and merchants, but now and again he would bring himself to buy a few old vases and teacups and so on for his brother. Every time he went to
Liu-li-ch’ang
, where all the china potteries were, to purchase a few such things, he would pop round to a place by the
Ch’ien-men Gate
and drink a few cups of
Shao-hsing wine
, and eat some
fried triangles
.

And then Mr Ma’s elder brother died in England. In his will he directed his brother to come to London to carry on the business.

By this time, the Reverend Ely had already been back in England for two or three years, and Mr Ma took up his English dictionary, and wrote him a long letter, asking him whether he should in fact come to England or not. The Reverend Ely was naturally tickled by the idea of a Chinese member of his church coming to England; he could show his parishioners that missionaries in China really did do more than eat food and collect money. He sent a reply to Mr Ma, telling him that he and his son absolutely must come to England.

So Mr Ma took his son to Shanghai and bought two first-class boat tickets, two Western-style suits, a few canisters of tea and a few other odds and ends. As the ship left port, the elder Mr Ma got the sense that his innards were all surging in unison. He took off his spectacles and lay down in his cabin, and barely moved an inch.

A
LTHOUGH THE
officials of the English Customs vary in appearance, you would never mistake them for those of any other profession. One of their eyes is always looking at you while the other is consulting some dog-eared book of regulations. A pencil, which is always a half-pencil, is stuck behind an ear. There are invariably a few wrinkles on their noses, contributing to the overall animation of their faces. Towards their fellow countrymen they are most affable, jesting and joking as they examine passports, and when it’s a lady they encounter, they’re particularly chatty. Towards foreigners, however, they have a different attitude. They straighten their shoulders, set their mouths and bring their imperial superiority to the fore. Sometimes, it’s true, they go so far as to give the ghost of a smile. Which is certain to be followed by refusal to permit you to land. When they’ve examined the passports, they disembark with everyone else, and, rubbing their hands together, they inform you, ‘Very cold weather.’ They might even praise your English, assuring you that it’s ‘quite good’.

Mr Ma and son went through the passport examination. The elder Ma had several of his brother’s documents at the ready, and young Mr Ma had an overseas-study certificate issued by the Chinese Board of Education, so they both passed through peacefully and uneventfully, without the slightest fuss. They proceeded to the medical examination. Neither of them had any internal complaints – no afflictions of the heart, liver, spleen, lungs or kidneys – so they passed yet another barrier without hindrance. The doctor even smilingly gave them some advice, ‘Eat a bit more beef while you’re in England. Make you fitter still. England beat Germany in the last war, and we won because English soldiers eat beef every day.’

The medical examination concluded, father and son opened their suitcases for the contents to undergo inspection. Fortunately, as it happened, they’d brought neither opium nor weapons with them, and the only duty that they had to pay was fifteen pounds or so on a few silk gowns of the elder Ma’s and a few canisters of tea. Mr Ma had no idea why he’d brought these treasures with him, nor why they should be dutiable. He puckered up his scrap of a moustache and quickly handed over the money, so as to be done with the matter. When he’d got through all the formalities, he was on the verge of fainting.

If I’d known it’d be so tiresome,
he told himself,
I’d never for the life of me have let anything persuade me to go abroad!

After leaving the dock, the pair boarded a train, where the elder Mr Ma plonked himself in a corner of a compartment, closed his eyes, and, without a word, went to sleep. Ma Wei sat by the window, looking out. The landscape was all ups and downs, no flatness anywhere. The high ridges of the land were green, and so were the dips, but the train was speeding along at such a pace that he couldn’t pick out any details. All that he could see was the bumpy green fields, green wherever he looked. The train went faster and faster, and gradually the green land became one verdant undulation. The few cows and sheep in the distance seemed like coloured flowers floating on springtime waves.

The elder Mr Ma was still sleeping like a little Buddha. Suddenly his lips parted. Probably he was talking in his dreams.

And then the train began to slow, and presently arrived in London. There was a huge crowd on the platform.

‘Hello, over there!’ called the porters to the passengers as they pushed their trolleys. ‘Hello there!’ called a husband, flapping his hat, to his wife. On another platform a train was setting off, and the passengers were waving to the people waiting, some with handkerchiefs. Then, in a puff of black smoke, the train disappeared. Newspaper vendors, flower vendors and cigarette vendors glided their trolleys about in solemn silence: English people approach buying and selling with the same air as they approach funerals.

Ma Wei gave his father a nudge to wake him up. Mr Ma gave a yawn, and was just about to drop off again when a young woman carrying a handbag walked out of the compartment. As she flung the door open, the corner of her handbag caught him bang on the nose. ‘Sorry,’ said the young woman, and Mr Ma rubbed his face, now thoroughly awake. Ma Wei scuffled wildly around to try to move their cases and other belongings. Just as they were about to step off the train, the Reverend Ely leapt on board. Forgoing the bother of shaking hands, he picked up the biggest of the cases and carried it out for them.

‘You’re here very promptly! Did you have any awkwardness at sea?’ the Reverend Ely asked, turning to the Mas as he deposited the big case on the platform.

Bearing a small valise, Mr Ma sauntered off the train, with the grand air of a
Ch’ing dynasty
circuit intendant
alighting from his great palanquin.

‘How are you, Reverend Ely?’ he said, placing his tiny box on the platform. ‘How is Mrs Ely? How is Miss Ely? How —’

Without waiting for Mr Ma to complete his solicitous enquiries, the Reverend Ely snatched up the big case. ‘Ma Wei! Move all the cases over here. Except for the valise. You can carry that. Bring all the rest this way.’

Ma Wei went with the Reverend Ely to move all the cases into the left-luggage room. The elder Mr Ma, carrying not a single thing, slowly swaggered over to join them.

The Reverend Ely filled in the left-luggage form at the counter, inquired as to the charge and turned to Mr Ma.

‘Give the attendant the money,’ he said, ‘and the cases and other stuff will all be delivered to you this evening. That’ll save you a lot of trouble, eh?’

Mr Ma handed over the money, but felt rather uneasy. ‘The cases won’t go astray, will they?’

‘Of course not!’ The Reverend Ely’s little brown eyeballs rolled, and he gave Mr Ma a sharp glance. Then he asked Ma Wei, ‘Are you hungry?’

‘No, we’re not,’ the elder Ma hastily answered. It would be most unseemly for them to be clamouring for food the moment they arrived in England, and on top of that, it would make him feel guilty to have the Reverend Ely treat them to a meal.

‘Come on, now!’ the reverend said, ‘Just a little something or other to eat. Not hungry? I don’t believe it!’

Feeling that any further polite refusals might be out of place, Mr Ma said in an undertone in Chinese to Ma Wei: ‘If he wishes to treat us, don’t embarrass him by arguing.’

Father and son followed the Reverend Ely through the crowds and away from the platforms. Ma Wei stomped on ahead, with his back stiff as a coffin and his head held high, while Mr Ma, both arms swinging, and coat collar turned up a little at the back, swayed and swaggered behind him with a lordly gait. Outside the station, under a large glass-covered awning, there were two or three small cafes, into one of which the Reverend Ely led them. He selected a little table, and the three of them sat round it. Then he asked them what they’d like to eat. Mr Ma still insisted that he wasn’t hungry, although his stomach was rumbling. Ma Wei lacked his father’s politeness, but, having only just arrived, didn’t know what to ask for.

The Reverend Ely perceived that it was no use asking them, so he put forward his own suggestion: ‘How about this? A glass of beer and two ham sandwiches each.’

He stood up and marched over to the counter to place their order. Ma Wei got to his feet, and helped him bring the beer and sandwiches across. The elder Ma didn’t lift a finger.

You spend money for food,
he was saying to himself,
and you bloody well have to serve yourself? Pah!

‘I don’t normally drink,’ the Reverend Ely told them, picking up his glass, ‘but when I’m meeting friends, I like to have a glass or two – join them in a spot of good cheer.’

When he’d drunk alcohol in China, he’d always done so in secret, to escape the notice of his parishioners, and thus he felt obliged to offer some excuse. He downed half the glass in one gulp, and began to laud the cleanliness of the cafe to Ma Wei, going on from there to extol the orderliness of England in general. ‘There’s good old England for you! Notice it, Ma Wei? Aha!’ He chewed a mouthful of sandwich, grinding it meticulously between his false teeth before swallowing. ‘Were you seasick, Ma Wei?’

‘No, I didn’t feel bad at all,’ replied Ma Wei, ‘but my father didn’t surface the whole voyage.’

‘What did I say! And you said you weren’t hungry, Mr Ma! Ma Wei, go and ask for another glass of beer for your father. Oh, and bring me another glass, too. I like to have a drink, just for a spot of good cheer. Ah, Mr Ma, I’ve already found rooms for you, and I’ll take you to them presently. You must have a proper rest.’

Ma Wei brought their beers over and the Reverend Ely gulped his down in one draught, for ‘a spot of good cheer’. When all three had finished their meals, the Reverend Ely told Ma Wei to return the glasses and plates. Then he said to Mr Ma, ‘A shilling each. No, that’s not right – we two had an extra glass of beer, so it’s a shilling for Ma Wei, and one and sixpence for you. Got any change?’

Never for the life of him had the elder Mr Ma foreseen such a sly blow.
A paltry matter of a few shillings,
he said to himself,
And you a clergyman! Some clergyman you are!
Trying to be funny, he made to pay the Reverend Ely’s bill as well as their own.

‘No, no! When in England, do as England does. Each pays our own way. No insisting, now!’ said the clergyman.

As the three of them were walking out of the cafe, the reverend fished out six pennies, which he handed to Ma Wei. ‘Off you go, and buy three tickets over there. Twopence each. British Museum. Three tickets. Can you manage it?’

Ma Wei took only two of the proffered pennies, produced a further four from his own pocket and went to buy the tickets at the little window indicated by the Reverend Ely. As he returned with the tickets, the Reverend Ely guffawed. ‘Good lad! So now you’ve learnt how to buy tickets, eh?’ he said, pulling out a little map. ‘You, Ma Wei, I’ll give you one of these. Look, here we are at Liverpool Street. D’you see this red line? Go four stops, then we’ll be at
Museum
. This is the London Underground Central Line. Fix that in your mind, and don’t forget it.’

And with that, the Reverend Ely led the two Mas down into the Tube.