Under Fishbone Clouds (6 page)

2

1942 THE YEAR OF THE HORSE

From where the white wig (made from human hair, of course, and recently powdered with lavender-scented starch) was fixed to his scalp, streams of sweat trickled down to collect on his blotchy jowls. Lord George Macartney mopped his face and prepared to head back to the palace. It was late summer, 1793, and he and his mission had been travelling for over a year – nine sunburnt,
brine-blistered
months across a series of knotted seas followed by another four months spent weaving north along the craggy borders of this shape-shifting country toward the capital.

For this diplomatic journey on behalf of George III and the East India Company, Macartney had been offered an earldom as well as a handsome salary. He was beginning to wonder whether that was enough. Despite, in the past, having been captured by the French, and having governed parts of India, he was unsure what to make of the surreal turn of events of this mission. Their translators had deserted them, and a newspaper in the northern port town of Tianjin had proclaimed that the Englishmen had arrived bearing such gifts as a cat-sized elephant, a giant coal-fed songbird and a party of scholars barely one foot tall.

That was not quite the case. In order to open trade between the glorious British Empire and China, Macartney had brought an array of more practical gifts from George III to the Qianlong Emperor. These included telescopes, globes depicting both the earth and all the known reaches of the universe, a spring-worked carriage and a number of barometers, all designed to demonstrate the scientific prowess of the technologically advanced nation. They would,
however
, be dismissed as trinkets and toys, a small and somewhat
useless
tribute offered to the celestial ruler of the earth’s only heavenly kingdom. Wandering through various ports, Macartney had been
taken aback by the strangeness of the country: dark women darting nimbly through the streets as if unconstrained by the foot
bindings
he had heard about; sailors barking and singing in a birdlike language that only his twelve-year-old pageboy had been able to decipher; the elaborately woven colours of the gowns standing out against the uniform black of the angular masonry; and, everywhere he turned, naked children running, squealing, scrapping, shitting, playing and slipping between everyone else’s feet.

Macartney, as the representative of the most powerful empire in the world, had expected to be received with much fanfare. Instead, eunuchs spent days trying to persuade his party that they would all need to kowtow before the elderly emperor. Macartney would return to the English crown having achieved none of his stipulated goals. There would be no British embassy in China, no ports opened up to British residences, and no trade agreements. The heavenly emperor would decide that the English had nothing to offer the already advanced Chinese and would consign their impractical gifts, untouched, to an empty shed. Yes, I was there too, eavesdropping as ever. And yes, my powers of mindreading extend even to foreigners – you may be surprised to learn, as I was, that they also have souls.

My point is this: history does not always turn out how you expect. In fact, it seems to me that it sometimes goes out of its way, like a crafty wasp, to sting you as soon as you’re not paying attention. If history can take something from you, it will. This was to be Hou Jinyi’s motto, repeated time and again to his family in the later years – at least until history came along and stole his memory too.

Hou Jinyi had only a single, blurred memory of his parents. He saw them as if through an empty bottle, their features at once both exaggerated and indistinct, and, as time passed, their faces
increasingly
woven and patched with flickers from dreams. He had been too small to understand the seriousness of the sweating illness which stole both of them within weeks of each other and sent him toddling to his uncle’s farm, where he spent ten cruel years that he was now trying to put behind him. He knew his parents, then, only from what he had overheard from others. Before the pen, this is how all tribal histories travelled, from burning mouths to
burning
ears.

Jinyi had also waited, like Macartney, between two possibilities. He had left home at the age of fifteen, as the 1930s were shivering to a close. And on that fateful day, he had been slumped at the side of the road, sitting on top of an old sack in which was stuffed another pair of trousers, a worn and dirty shirt that may once have been almost white, and a short and weathered kitchen knife. He was barefoot and bare-chested; bruises floated upon his back like murky autumn leaves bobbing on the surface of a dull stream. For the past two days he had been following dirt tracks, skirting round the edges of long fields of bowed cereal, oilseed and tea plants, and had finally returned to something resembling a road.

Some hours had passed since he had sat down to rest, though he could no longer tell how many. He heard the pebbles rattling into life somewhere behind him, and he lifted his head. A haggard mule was pulling a rickety cart, on which a weathered man was half sitting, half squatting. It was hard to tell whether the mule or its master was the worse for wear – a cloud of flies flittered around the pair of them. They were moving so slowly that Jinyi was able to climb on without the cart stopping. He settled back to back with the middle-aged driver. The older man’s sunbeaten skin felt like a worn leather hide, his heavy breath swaying his body in time with the mule’s stubborn steps.

Jinyi did not bother to give his name, and neither did the
middle-aged
man. They were a day’s walk away from Baoding, the nearest city. And if the middle-aged man did not ask anything of his new passenger, this was probably because he was not surprised to see people wandering, lost, between lives. It was Hou Jinyi who spoke first, after sitting silently back to back with the older man for an hour, watching the sun meander across the distant slopes, slower than the twitchy mule.

‘Where are you going?’

‘Not far. Few stops to make. Won’t get there by dark though.’

‘What do you do?’

The man laughed – a laugh like a large dog’s bark segueing into a harsh cough. He turned to have a good look at the boy behind him.

‘What do
you
do?’

Hou Jinyi did not reply. They lapsed again into silence. The cart wobbled through creeks of ochre slate and chalk, only
occasionally
passing peasants whose gender was indiscernable under their
wicker hats and brimming baskets. Every other minute the driver hocked up from phlegm from the depths of his throat and spat.

‘I’m not a runaway.’

‘Fine.’

‘And I’m not someone’s servant.’

The driver shrugged. Jinyi did not mention the fact that he had left his aunt and uncle’s house twelve
li
back. Why should he? He did not plan to return. Ever. They will forget me soon enough, he told himself, and then they can take their anger out on the mongrels instead. He thought about the three dogs that slept outside and how they sounded at night, howling at the ghosts in the chimney while the tattered wind tugged at their chains every autumn until spring. He bit his nails, one by one, closer to the grubby quick.

‘You won’t get far.’

‘Fuck off.’ He went back to biting his nails. Then, ‘Why?’

‘I’ll tell you why. You’re short and scrawny and look like you’ll bolt any minute. You’re too like city people.’

‘Fuck off.’ I am nothing like city people, he told himself; though, having never seen a big city, he could not be sure, and was
unsettled
by the driver’s remarks. He had not even seen a school: the furthest away he had travelled before he left was to the market in the next valley. He wanted to go wherever it was the cranes went each year. ‘I’ve worked every day I can remember. I’m not good for nothing. I’m not like city people.’

In his mind cities were fantastic and impossible; opulent, yet indolent. They were places where idle men played games of
mahjong
with bronze and jade tumbling blocks, betting houses, wives, slaves, daughters, fortunes, mountains, rivers and armies on each round. Where the birds in the lush trees whispered to you the secrets of the local lottery; where palaces grew up from the ground like leisurely weeds while your back was turned, and dead men’s treasure might be found under any floorboard; where rich men slept until noon, and where even their chefs and messengers and Pekingese wore diamonds for teeth. To create these imaginary cities, Jinyi had pieced together scraps of fairy stories and
conjured
the opposite of everything he hated about his own life in the country: waking before dawn to chop firewood and grind flour for his aunt to cook, feeding the trio of bedraggled dogs, furrowing with chilled or burnt hands in the short field every afternoon till the sun
descended, and, most of all, being thumped by a fist or thwacked with the handle of a rake for every word out of place, as well as for some never even spoken.

As they crept along, Jinyi closed his eyes and drew a future on the inside of his eyelids. He had lain awake all night for months working up the courage to run, trying to decide where he would go. Then one afternoon a neighbour had told him an anecdote about the scores of sunburnt labourers setting new train tracks straight through someone’s field. Since sneaking out of the house two days ago while his uncle, aunt and gloating cousin slept, he had had only one destination. He would go to a station. And from there, the world would open like a clamshell prised apart in his fingers. He had thought of engines roaring out like the call of a circus. He had envisaged metallic dragons with crushed wings condemned to slither between provinces, of trains hollering in a language that might drive listeners to the edge of sorrow, their winding bodies glinting silver. Even then, half asleep behind the driver, he
imagined
the endless paddies cleaved by huffing locomotives.

The idea of trains in a country of fields and mountains had already provoked desperate reactions. In 1876, China’s first railway was built by foreign businessmen who bought up hundreds of family plots and navigated round graves marked out on the principles of
feng shui
to connect the nine miles between Shanghai and Wusong. At first the locals flocked to the free rides, awed and fascinated by what was, for the imported British engines, a laughably short journey. The Qing government, however, was not impressed. After a soldier committed suicide by waiting on the line for the train to hit him, the railway company ran into difficulties with the official bureaucracy. In the end, the government negotiated to purchase the railway from the businessmen at a high price. Meanwhile, the trains continued to run, gaining in popularity while the
government
made its series of payments. The day after the last
transaction
completed the purchase, the government had the tracks dismantled, inch by inch, and sent away to gather rust. They had not considered, however, that inventions live apart from us,
willing
their own future from the depth of ideas.

It was railways, too, after the exoduses of the gold rush, that consolidated many one-way journeys across the Atlantic. By 1865 the Central Pacific Railroad Company, two years into laying tracks
for the transcontinental line snaking east from Sacramento, was in desperate need of labour to complete the joining of the railways across terrain that quickly shifted between sea-level and an
altitude
of 7,000 feet. They turned to the mass of Chinese immigrants around California. Despite an aborted strike, the fact that the Chinese were whipped and worked longer than the white
labourers
, and the high number of casualties from harsh winters and even harsher conditions in the tunnels being drilled, the last ten miles needed to join east with west were laid in a single day, 28 April 1869, by a joint Chinese and Irish effort. Imaginary borders are constantly redrawn behind cartographer’s backs, with sweat, with words, and, it hardly need be said, with dollars.