Under Fishbone Clouds (7 page)

The miniature labyrinths that blossomed in the shadow of America’s bigger cities, the ubiquitous Chinatowns, were not simple copies transposed to an alien continent, but chimeras capable of changing form at any second – towns which, if you were to walk in them for too long, would shift their streets beneath your feet and become other places. It is not just scaled-down cities, but all ideas and fantasies that are reproduced, daily, with varying differences, until it becomes unclear which is the original and which the facsimile. The facts remains that, if there was an
original
, it is irretrievably buried beneath the successive smudges and alterations of an ever-thickening palimpsest. And, in this junkshop of history, cities learn to wear their wounds like prizes, knowing that this is how they survive, like those tree frogs in the rainforest canopy whose colouring, rather than camouflaging, alerts the world to what might lie behind.

So I know what you’re thinking. Why on earth am I following this mangy-looking runaway from the backwaters? Well, it’s pretty simple.

Let me tell you what I learnt about Hou Jinyi from those early days. His body was a bag of jigs that he spent most days trying to master. He never knew what to do with his hands, and had learnt from a young age that speaking about their feelings only made men weak. He was driven equally by a desire to find somewhere that would finally feel like home and the lurking suspicion that he would never find it.

One other thing – there was a restlessness in his heart common to all orphans, a deep-seated fear that if he ever let himself love something it would be taken from him. Perhaps that fear was not as foolish as it might seem.

I do not just tell stories – I am a part of them too. Take a look around and you might find that the same could be said of yourself, regardless of whether you are immortal or not. And so, I would like to think that, in some way, I had an influence in Jinyi’s choice of a job in a small kitchen.

‘You’re going to burn your whole bloody hand off if you don’t quit daydreaming, mate. And I’m not going to put my balls on the line for you again. You’ve been doing it for weeks. Just watch me.’

‘All right, I know what I’m doing – you just concentrate on your own side. You know yours always gets overcooked. No one wants any of that burnt bitter sugar; it sticks on your teeth and you can taste it for days,’ Hou Jinyi replied, mocking his colleague to hide that he had been momentarily far away. He leaned further forward over his vat.

‘By the devils!’ The elder boy continued as if Jinyi had not spoken. ‘I haven’t got a clue what you’re daydreaming about. Now, if you’d come out with us last night to the Celestial Gardens, you’d have something to remember – they treated us like gentlemen, you know. Not like the old women in the barber’s backroom on the corner. Worth every extra
jiao
.’

Hou Jinyi raised his eyebrow and looked at his friend for the first time during his speech and then laughed. ‘One week’s pay, just for some girl. You can’t tell me she was worth that much, whoever she was.’

‘Worth every extra penny.’ Dongming said again, and grinned to himself as he stirred the glowing vat of bubbling sugar. ‘You’ll
understand
one day.’

Though he had only recently turned nineteen in that warm spring of 1942, Dongming attempted to assume the air of worldly teacher to Jinyi, who was only a few years younger and stood nearly a foot shorter than him. Despite the monotony of heating, stirring and pouring from the vats all day, Dongming gave the impression of never keeping still, his body alive with shrugs and twitches even
on the rare occasions he stopped chattering. Jinyi, on the other hand, did his best to keep to a small rhythm of careful movements. These movements even extended to his face, where his lips occasionally twitched as though formulating ideas not ready to be spoken aloud. Dongming, despite his jokes, was too polite to point these out.

On the wider streets of this small town in northern Hebei
children
were gathering with their grandparents. They crowded round a seated figure who was dripping strings of caramelised sugar onto a cold surface to produce crisp images of animals from the Chinese zodiac. Small sticks were thrust into these sticky webs of
animal-shaped
sugar so that they could be picked up and eaten.

The work done by Dongming and Jinyi required little of this artistry. In the heat of the stone room where they melted the sugar before adding water and spice, they stood naked but for their rolled-up trousers. The steam that rose from the sugar matted their hair to their heads. A third worker had come and gone, having sustained disfiguring burns from the wild bubbling and spitting of unwatched caramel. Their days were spent stirring, topping up and pouring the caramel into metallic moulds, which they then set to cool in the courtyard to await inspection from their doughy-faced boss, whom they had only once seen sober. He mostly stayed in the house next door doing the accounts and discussing
philosophy
with a collection of caged birds, which, with hooked nods and heavy flutters of wings, feigned interest in his ramblings.

Each batch of candies was sold for more than Dongming and Jinyi earned together in a day. They worked, like everyone else they had ever met, from sunrise until the last shred of light had scurried from the sky, between six and seven days a week.

After work Jinyi followed Dongming home, not because he had nowhere else to go (though this was indeed the case), but because the elder boy’s endless gibbering diverted him from his own thoughts. As their bare feet slapped against the dusty streets, Dongming kept up a rambling monologue that was only interrupted when the two of them spotted the Japanese soldiers or trucks.

‘Every year there’s more of them. Vicious bastards. You heard what happened to Little Ying, right? Brutal. Absolutely brutal. I reckon there must be some factory somewhere churning out Jap soldiers, because they can’t all come from those poky little islands, can they?’ Dongming looked around to make sure that they were
neither near a checkpoint nor being followed. ‘You know what, I’d follow my brother right now and join the Nationalists if I thought that would swing things. It won’t, not while we’ve got the commies stabbing us in the back. You know everyone says they went into the country, gathered up and packed off somewhere to regroup, right? Unlikely, if you ask me. They’ve probably just given up. About time too. Let them disappear. We don’t need a bunch of cowards following Russia like fawning dogs.’

‘Oh, come on, Dongming. You haven’t got a clue. You’ve never lived outside this city. It’s different out there,’ Jinyi interrupted. Dongming stared at him, neither offended nor shocked, but with the pursed smile he always gave while formulating a suitable reply. ‘What I mean is, shouldn’t we be working together? We’re all Chinese. That’s all most of us have got.’ Jinyi bit his nails, and looked down at his feet as they walked along the narrow road.

‘Well, sure, but what does that mean, Hou Jinyi? Does that mean we’re going to get mansions and feasts everyday like the warlords in Beijing or the merchants down south? Fat chance. It’s an illusion. A rotten illusion that’s stealing sense from people, when we should be making ourselves stronger. Of course we all ought to fight the Japanese, but how can our armies work together when a man can’t even trust his bunkmate? How are we supposed to get stronger and fight the Japanese if we end up sharing everything we have with incestuous and inbred dopes from the dirt fields? You explain that to me!’

The civil war had been raging since both of them were tiny
children
, when the figurehead and binding personality of the young Republic, Sun Yat-sen, had died in 1925. The brief Kuomintang and CCP alliance had quickly collapsed into purges and guerilla
warfare
. It had taken a rebel general’s desperate action back in 1936 to provide a united front against the Japanese as they began to spread out from the puppet-state of Manchuria. The general kidnapped the Kuomintang president Chiang Kai-shek to force him to join the Communists in resisting the Japanese. For this patriotic action, the general, Zhang Xueliang, was arrested and imprisoned by the Kuomintang for the next forty years.

Since Jinyi did not reply, Dongming returned to his favourite theme, the future. But his colleague was no longer paying
attention
. Jinyi was back in the house from which he had escaped – coal
clogging his pores and his aunt berating him for the paltry
vegetables
he had worked from a patch of the garden. He was back where his uncle glared at him whenever the sound of his rumbling stomach could no longer be muted, where the damp crept through his bones, where the wind whistled demonic melodies. Where, at night, the four of them in the crumbling shack in the deserted
valley
slept the sleep of the shivering, repentant dead. Where each day had begun with a headache, sore muscles, sweat clinging to unchanged clothes. How was it that the years since he had left had passed in the same way as those hard years – thrown aside with the same practised movement of busy hands?

Soon they came to the single-floor house, its brick walls tightly squeezed together in a lane barely wide enough for a bicycle. On either side, the neighbours’ petty squabbles could be overheard. The house consisted of two joined rooms backing onto a small courtyard where all the families on the street shared a fire for
cooking
and boiling water. As they crossed through it, Jinyi glanced at a young girl washing her knee-length raven hair in a wooden bucket. Though they were now used to Jinyi visiting, the family had still swept the house and gathered together some wrinkled vegetables so that they would not lose face.

They ate in a muddle of noise, with the younger brothers
tumbling
across each other as they grabbed at the few dwindling dishes, the sisters attempting to disguise their gauntness with what they falsely conceived as grace, a grandmother asthmatic and nibbling like a giant wheezing caterpillar, two unmarried aunts, and the patriarch ever more distant as the dusty bottle of liquor came closer to emptiness. Only in conversation about the missing brother did the family begin to raise their voices.

‘He’ll be having it rough now, sleeping with his eyes open, what with the Japs heading further south now –’

‘No … the Japs are cowards at heart, everyone knows that. It’s fighting alongside the commies that he’ll have to worry about. He’ll need to watch his back –’

‘He’ll be back by Spring Festival, you’ll see.’

‘You’re crazy. There’s plenty of work needs doing before anyone can pack up and pull out the firecrackers –’

‘
I
don’t see what the fuss is about. We were fine before, we’ll be fine now. We’ve seen darker times than these. He ought to be
thinking about marriage, a boy of his age. Nothing is going to change by –’

‘How can you even say that? The Japanese are carving up our country while the rest of the world looks the other way. It’s people like you –’

‘Quiet. All of you, eat your food and thank the dead that you’ve got your family and a loyal brother and a warm bed.’

The Kuomintang was just one of the refuges of the family’s
meagre
hopes; Jinyi was happy to be ignored and, for once, not asked his opinion. Not because he disagreed, but because he still saw himself as an extra out of place in this strange and unconvincing scene. His world began and ended with glimpses of girls, scraps of food and fantasies of a pocket full of loose change. Later, as he lay in the cloying room shared between all the men of the family, on an animal skin bunched up over the cold stone, Jinyi counted the days since he had left home, weighing them up against the days ahead. In the midst of this melancholy mathematics he fell asleep.