Under the Huang Jiao Tree: Two Journeys in China

Tree

PROLOGUE:

TWO JOURNEYS

There are always two journeys, the outer and the inner.

I spent ten months in China teaching English at a Foreign Language School. The outer journey, what I saw and heard and did in that time, is easy to talk about. I dipped deep into a world that was strange, baffling and full of wonders. My head spun, my heart lurched, I struggled, and I was never bored. But there were no dramas, no bandits or torrid love affairs. Like most travellers I came back to New Zealand with too many tales. I dived back into everyday life with hardly a ripple. At this level, I felt nourished but unchanged.

Of course, outer and inner journeys are inseparable, skin and bone of the same life. Always they lie together.

The inner journey was much more troublesome, more disturbing. Insistently intimate – which in itself made me uneasy – it was much harder to pin down in thoughts, let alone words. From beneath the outer journey where masks could be everyday wear, it called inconveniently for attention to the real; it demanded to be lived as fully as its outer covering. Its nagging voice plagued me – I resented the way it raised the same questions again and again. At the end of the year, I carried the same familiar muddle of impulses inside me. They’d all reared up while I was in China as if they were returning bouts of an old fever that would be with me for life. Nothing was resolved. A year or two after my return to New Zealand, it was a different story … but more of that later. Where was I before I left on those journeys?

On the outside, I was fifty-six, a born-in-England New Zealander, married, with a son and daughter who were leaping off into the adult world. I’d taught music, at the piano, ever since I’d left school. From time to time I’d studied – English, Italian, Theology – in an apologetic way; it was ‘just for interest’. I had no clear sense of direction. In those times of my life when money didn’t matter too much, I taught music full-time, and when money did matter, I worked in offices – publishing, university, real estate – and taught music at night.

A few years before, in the course of a short visit to China, I’d watched an old man riding a bike, one amongst thousands in the flood of Beijing traffic. Something about him caught my attention – perhaps it was his dignity. He sat so still, so straight. Something made him stand out; I never knew exactly what it was, and I never forgot him. He made a stately turn into a narrow alley and disappeared. What had moulded him? What did he care about? What did he enjoy? Did he have a dream? In what ways would his life be different from my own? I wanted to find out – and for that I needed to come back; I began casting around for a means.

A remarkably efficient course – so intensive I only had time to open tins of baked beans for fuel – gave me a survival kit for teaching English to speakers of other languages. And then the tide brought in an offer from an Australian teacher to broker a position teaching English for a year at a Foreign Language School in Chongqing in southwest China. I grabbed it before I could feel the fear. It was the right time. My husband understood why I had to go back. The children were no longer children, and in their spirited searches for ideal jobs and mates, I knew I’d be no more help in Christchurch than in China.

I told people, and sometimes myself, that I was going simply out of intense interest. I wanted to use my eyes and ears to find out more about this intriguing and enigmatic country – without preconceptions, without any political, religious or sociological axe to grind, without any particular personal agenda. I wanted to ask questions, and wait for answers – promising myself that if none appeared, I’d just live with the questions.

The challenge of teaching a new subject in a totally unfamiliar environment appealed. I knew something of the delights, satisfactions and amusements of teaching music – what would be the joys of teaching English in Chongqing? I had no idea what I was going to, knew very little about the language and culture of China, and had only the sketchiest idea of her history. I knew only that life in China was hard – for almost everybody, and hoped the students and I could enjoy learning from each other.

All this was communicable, acceptable motivation; so this was how I explained my journey.

The inner story of where I stood on the eve of going to China, and why I went, was much less neat and tidy. I’d always believed that the grounding element in life was spiritual. My relationship with the Christian church was much less sure. I’d been brought up and educated within a Protestant ethos, and attended church of one denomination or another whenever it wasn’t too inconvenient, or to be with family or friends. But I sat on the end of the pews in every sense – ready to bail out at the approach of any call to commitment, any threat of being identified with a specific congregation or belief system. In the era and environment I grew up in, we knew we were all Christian – if only because the sole alternative was to be heathen. I also absorbed from that time the unspoken social law that, while we were Christian, it wasn’t the done thing to talk about it – except in the most general terms. Nonetheless, I admired the commitment of those in churches who signed on, literally or figuratively, and felt guilty. Who was I to feel truth must be bigger than any spiritual proposals I’d found?

I also knew something in me longed to climb the steps into a Catholic church; all those symbols of the human and the sensual held out their arms to the child in me. I was hungry for the mystery of the Mass, but I dismissed the longing and the hunger. I thought I’d probably feel differently about it when I grew up.

I felt about the figure of Christ rather as I did – on quite another scale – about the first boy I ever felt comfortable with. I was twenty. In the years ahead, his was a presence I could never quite forget, someone whose special place with me could never be taken by another. Perhaps that’s the way it always is with a first love. I believe that, for my husband, it was a young nurse who cared for him after an accident. I never understood why I was so unquestionably drawn to that young Austrian, why I felt right with him. But it felt right for only five weeks; then the ship docked and he went his way and I mine. Christ, on the other hand, stayed with me.

An Italian year in my twenties, living where the spirit of the early Umbrian mystics still seemed to breathe from the stones, fed something furtively monastic in me. I was in Italy to learn a musical language, to make exotic friendships and to go dancing; I was no monk. Yet it was becoming more and more difficult to live as I felt I should – in polite accommodation of life – above a rising tide of inconvenient longings.

In spite of being exposed to considerable Italian charm, I kept thinking of a man I’d met in New Zealand, a home-bred Kiwi. I didn’t understand why wary green eyes should haunt me when there were so many warm brown ones about, or why I should dream of a head of fast-receding fair hair when Perugia’s streets were full of lustrous heads of dark hair; but that was how it was.

So marriage in New Zealand followed Italy, and a good marriage it proved – good, but not easy for either of us. Are worthwhile marriages ever easy? The children who followed startled me with their beauty, their mystery, and with the unimagined new shapes into which the family genes were cast. For ten years I was observably a country wife and mother, for ten years a small town music teacher, for ten years – to meet a mortgage – I sat at the front desk of a real estate office, quite unable to engage with the fascination of business, but enjoying my colleagues who did.

Then China appeared on the scene. After travelling in China and being attracted to something in the people he met, my husband insisted I go and see for myself. I don’t like being pushed, but sometimes I need it. It was on that trip that I saw the old man on the bike in Beijing.

It wasn’t the first time China had nudged me; I’d already been delighted and disturbed by encounters with Chinese music students and their families. A wave of Chinese came to Christchurch in the 1990s to give their children the perceived benefits of the New Zealand education system. Many settled in the northwest of the city, close to our principal University and a large and popular State high school. Many of these same Chinese parents wanted their children to learn music, and I live and teach the piano in the same part of the city. This is why, at one stage, my Chinese students outnumbered the Kiwis, seven to one.

Their families delighted me with their hospitality, gifts and warm smiles. I was also flattered by their fulsome appreciation of my skills, their grave respect for my role as teacher. I felt I must be an unusually good teacher … even a gift to society. As the students’ mothers fondly took my arm, I knew I must be lovable too. The attention was irresistible, but these ingratiating persuasions that fed my vanity were also disturbing. These were clever people; I have some species of intelligence, but I’m not clever. How was I, who always liked to be safe, to know whether all this apparent affection and appreciation was genuine?

I so enjoyed these Chinese friends – more than that I treasured them; they painted bright red patches on my teaching timetable. I didn’t feel threatened by these attractive people – on some level they and I seemed to get on so easily. It was just that I never really knew how I stood.

Whatever my uncertainties, there was something about the Chinese spirit that drew me …

CHAPTER

ONE

INTO A

WORLD APART

Flight KA840 from Hong Kong to Chongqing dips and begins descending. I’m scared, really scared; I’m not ready to be dropped into a vast concrete industrial city in this remote mountainous land ruled by the mighty and despotic Yangtze River. Foxy brown and smooth from this height, it is as powerful and arbitrary for good or ill as any chilling emperor. I’m afraid of a metropolitan area with thirty-one million people, perhaps seven million in Chongqing city, and as I look down at the great industrial plants, stacks belching, half hidden in the haze – a grey metal-and-rock world – I wonder how souls fare here. From the security of my home in New Zealand, teaching English for a year in a Chinese school seemed an exciting adventure. Now, I’m not so sure.

To steady myself, I concentrate on the land rapidly rising to meet the plane. Chongqing is a mountain city and beneath us the land boils into hills, blistered and bubbled, the terraced edges like a thousand eyebrows. Beside the imposing spread of the city, the airport looks startlingly small and somehow unsure of its function.

We wheel our cabin baggage through corridors that have a makeshift air, as though they don’t expect to be here tomorrow. The red-carpeted stairs open into a hall with rows of wooden booths. The customs officials are young, their blank faces and earnestness both engaging and disturbing. Every passport is a problem. They turn the pages back and forth continuously. Other uniformed officers face the queues, forcing us back behind the yellow line, randomly diving into the crowd to demand a passport. They seem reluctant to let us into the country. I expected some suspicion of foreigners in this relatively unvisited part of China, but such blank-eyed resistance scares me. At this moment I’m nervous of the whole teaching-in-China business and wouldn’t mind being stopped and sent home.

Two smartly-dressed, sharp-eyed women wait at a rail and I fear they may be waiting for me. I’m hot and crumpled, the shirt sticking to my back – I must look a doubtful prospect. Mercifully, they melt away to meet someone else and through the final barrier of smeary glass I see three young women holding a poster: ‘We welcome Mrs Jane very warmly.’ When I wave, they jump up and down, one flailing a large bunch of carnations. They introduce themselves as Anne, Ellen and Hope – teachers of English.

‘We’ve all taught at Peter’s school in Australia,’ Ellen announces.

Peter, Deputy-Principal of a high school in Northern Queensland, arranged my job here. His letters suggest the exchanges he organises are less of a business venture than a matter of heart. He loves China.

The three propel me across the car park all talking at once. Anne drags my arm and delivers a breathless speech on behalf of the School Principal. The driver receives a barrage of instructions on how to stow the bags. He’s warm-eyed and patient, smiling at their excitement. It is a two hour drive to the school and thirty-five degrees but it feels like a children’s birthday party, and I begin to relax.

They talk in high-pitched polyphony about the school. Today is National Teachers’ Day when the country celebrates teachers. They received two bottles of cooking oil each and 200 yuan (approximately $NZ40) and have kept mine for me.

‘You’re one of us.’

The instant acceptance takes me by surprise – officialdom at the airport seemed to trust no one. The three boast happily: ‘Other schools had a holiday today, but as we’re a special school we don’t have a holiday.’

There are 1200 students at their school and 120 teachers, of whom 36 teach English. They have one other foreign teacher – a Russian, Boris, who last year taught at the nearby International Studies University to which the school is attached. Officially, English, French, German and Russian are taught – all by Chinese teachers unless they can catch a foreigner, but an Australian who taught here last year told me she didn’t know of any French or German courses being offered – an interesting difference between official and unofficial versions. It crosses my mind that I too, when questioned, often issue an official statement differing wildly from the reality. I turn my mind away from that awkward issue. I’m trying to grasp the shape of the school, not of myself.

We pound on through the steamy darkness. Lights beside the road are weak, but I can pick out figures strolling under dusty trees. Small shops with one light bulb glow at the roadside – figures at the door, a handful of soft drinks on the counter. There’s some rubbish, but I wonder what there is to throw away. These views of a simple life are appealing, but I wish I could forget the scathing phrase ‘picturesque poverty’, that I know describes the perspective of people like me, who look sentimentally out of the windows of large cars.

‘We’re going to have a small banquet to welcome you.’

My ears are still crackling from the plane’s descent and there’s an obvious chilli stain from a Hong Kong eating house on my trousers, but it’s no time for faint responses.

The three faces are just visible in the darkness of the car. Anne, the spokesperson, is chisel-featured, and behind the friendly, lightly-tossed words I sense the ring of authority; perhaps she’s bound for promotion. Ellen has a dark, mobile face suggesting high intelligence, and she moves quickly and decisively. I pick up signs of an independent spirit, but later learn that she’s a ardent member of the Communist Party. Obviously, I’ll have to learn to read a different language of signs here. Hope is slight, pale and gentle. She’s also startlingly beautiful, with her fine-featured, oval face framed by hair that streams over her shoulders and far down her slender back. In the car, her lilting voice, with its high flutes, is soothing at the level of my left armpit. Anne sings, loudly, with the car radio. She sings well and reminds the others of how she sang for two hours at a teachers’ gathering. The response is tepid, and I feel they’ve heard this before.

The driver is lost.

‘He’s new,’ they explain.

I don’t speak Chinese, so I have to guess from the tone and movements what goes on between them. There’s no blame for the driver. I’m cheered by this. Maybe you can afford to make mistakes here, especially when you’re new to the job. A lot of spirited discussion follows, and when we do reach the restaurant there’s still uncertainty and everyone talks at length. I’m surprised that whatever it is hasn’t been worked out before this long-planned encounter, but eventually all’s resolved and we troop in.

In the restaurant, the waitresses, young with mild eyes and soft mouths, are involved in the choice of dishes, and protest at unsuitable suggestions. A man comes from the kitchen carrying boiling water in a teapot with a spout thin as a straw and as long as my arm. From a distance he projects the water into our cups in a fierce jet. Anne explains that training for this skill takes several months, during which you pour tea – nothing else – a change from the world of crash courses that I’ve just left. The tea-pourer clearly thought this skill was important enough to wait months for. Will I also be able to let time take its course, instead of trying to stuff as much into it as possible as the Western world insists? It’s a pleasant thought.

A fish, held in a piece of black plastic, is brought squirming to the table. A dark, thick, cod-like species with horns, it leaps from the plastic and slithers under the table. The waitresses have played this game before – there are no girlish shrieks – and the nearest one corners the slippery escaper around a chair leg and deftly flips it back on the plastic. Retrieved, it is subjected to critical examination, but in a last desperate dash leaps two tables’ distance over the floor before being returned to the kitchen. I feel regretful that we’ll shortly meet it again lying on our plates, but I enjoy this animated consultation with the kitchen. In restaurants at home, swing doors close behind waiters, jealously guarding the kitchen’s secrets. What makes us so prim about the glad business of eating?

The food is highly salted and strongly flavoured and there’s spirited advice, with demonstrations, on how to eat it. I have no idea what I’m eating, but it tastes good. When I’m hungry I can eat anything. This undiscriminating appetite will prove a decided asset in the months ahead. The teachers are obviously relieved, and as we leave the restaurant, Anne says to me with approval: ‘You’ll survive here.’

An hour later in the the district of Shiqiaopu our car turns up a steep and untidy road that looks as though it might peter out before arriving anywhere. At the top are the school gates, authoritarian rather than impressive, surmounted by limp flags. A policeman waves from