Eight Chinese lessons

From Griffith REVIEW Edition 18: In the Neighbourhood
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.

Written by Brian Castro

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Chinese Lesson I: I was nine and it was dinner time. My father was in monologue mode. He said that at the north bank of the west end of Qutang Gorge on the Yangtze River, there were many caves in the cliffs. During the Ming Dynasty, Zhang Xiangzhong, an insurgent (my father took pleasure in pronouncing this word and swallowed half a glass of wine to indicate he was on a serious mission) was driven with thirteen of his followers to take refuge there.

The Emperor's soldiers blockaded the river just below the gorge, hoping to starve them out. But they didn't count on Zhang's ingenuity. He ordered his men to chisel holes in the rock-face during the night. They used what was left of their fighting sticks and staves and cut them into sections, which were then fitted to the holes. In this way they descended, one by one, removing one rung at a time to place it in the slot below. At the bottom, they were able to drink water and catch fish.

You see how you can't beat the Chinese for cleverness, my father said. But unless they could swim, they could not escape from the cliffs. My father was a good swimmer. He took the opportunity to make this point. He practised what he called ‘Australian freestyle' in front of the full-length mirror, his face flushed, his mouth constricted in a kind of rictus, his arms flailing over his head. Besides, he said, the current was too fierce in the narrow gorges and they would surely drown.

Each night, Zhang's band performed what they called their water-stealing, and each day they dried the fish they caught. Meanwhile, the Emperor's men were finding it difficult to maintain the siege, for they were recruited from the cities and needed to be supplied and did not know how to fish efficiently. They could not understand how the insurgents could have survived. Morale started to deteriorate. Zhang's rebels hung their fish out to dry in full view. They toasted the soldiers below, holding up their ceramic bowls. Then they mocked their foes, punching small holes in their bowls so that when they held them up, water poured out. This was in mocking reference to the way the Emperor measured time with his dripping water-jars. The soldiers were frustrated. There were rumours of a hundred-year siege. Archers could not reach the cave with their arrows. They soon withdrew.

Zhang's men did not leave the caves. They felt so secure there, so untouchable, they over-stayed nature's welcome. A monsoonal flood cut them off. There were no fish. The water rose and flooded the caves. They all perished. Villagers who found the bodies spoke of cannibalism. The Emperor went back to observing his pots.

lepto, to steal; hydor, water. Clepsydra: a water clock, my father instructed. He finished off by twirling his fork with a flourish. There is an old Chinese proverb: If you stand on the riverbank long enough, the head of your enemy will float past.

CHINESE LESSON II: You remembered your father only as a voice. He told tales of old Shanghai. As a child you were always very silent, perhaps because your father talked so much, and you used to hide under tables and beds, and you listened to adult conversations. Your father saw himself as a Shanghailander, as though Shanghai were a city-state. The reality was that he was stateless. He told stories of gangsters and nightclubs and his descriptions of houses and mansions were so immediate you were drawn to their interiors, to the point at which you could smell their waxed floors and lacquered furniture. Your father was haunted by what China may have been; nostalgic for what will never be again. Trapped thus, in a home without a home, he never quite recovered. China, in the meantime, had moved on.

You know most of the post-colonial arguments. As Susan Sontag said, a writer is not an opinion-machine. Anyone can read received opinions and regurgitate them. It is better to stick to personal experience. Your experience of Shanghai was that it was always on the move. The Shanghainese were supposed to be the cleverest people in China. Their women the most beautiful. The skyline changed every year. The dream was not about the future; the future was the reality. You could feel its energy surging and breaking out in its streets reinventing and re-imagining itself at every moment, from the official language of the modern nation – which is to be expected of a system still preoccupied with a totality and an authenticity – to the temporarily imagined ‘Chineseness' which sees itself negotiating a super-modernity linked to a global diaspora.

There is no suggestion here of being Janus-faced. The past is pertinently missing, except in its colonial architecture. As writer Paul Carter has suggested, the primary meaning of Janus was that of a gateway guardian. Confluences of rivers like the Yangtze and the Whangpoo had powerful spirits coursing through them. A large stone statue of an angel once stood high above the Bund. It had long since been demolished. The remains of its pedestal can still be traced. The river is now guarded by a tall tower in Pudong, something akin to a Sputnik atop a needle. This is one way of rereading Janus – with a short-term memory.

CHINESE LESSON IiI: Even before visiting Shanghai, you imagined a city built on a river with dream-like buildings sinking into a swamp; a labyrinthine metropolis incorporating a kaleidoscope of different cultures. Your father lived in the French Concession – indeed his first wife was French – and he hopped across every morning to the International Settlement, which was mainly British, for his grandmother was English – just in case a policeman knocked on his door with a list of traffic offences. There was even a block they called Spanish Town, although it may only have existed in a song, but you found your father's Spanish Consulate passport, an old sheet of paper which had visas written on the back of it in a florid hand. A passepartout. That's what it meant to be European: one crossed all kinds of borders with a master-key and passed everywhere.

This heritage had given me many voices to play off, one against another. Who am I anyway? It was through a kind of polyphony that I was able to be in flight from myself. Writing always had this liberating function. If you can't escape your reality by means of a book, then the world is very bleak and dark indeed. The memory of my father's voice, speaking sometimes in English, sometimes in Portuguese, and mostly in a mixture of both, represented a significant part of China's history. Today, officials in China are trying to rein in the diversities of dialects and languages, preventing the improvisations of language-making, in order to corral them into a standardised and centralised obsession. Visionaries have to be uniform in their expression. This is true also of Australia.