by Ellen Head

“What colour do you like?”

“I like pink, the colour of the sunset.”

“You are wearing blue. Do you like blue?”

“Yes, I like blue. I like blue and pink. What colour do you like?”

“I like white.”

“You have white clothes.”

Lao Wang and Bee are sitting in Jing’an park. Bee is a tall, thin, Western woman. Lao Wang is a small Chinese man. His curved nose and high cheekbones show him to be local but his skin is strangely pink and his hair is completely white. His eyes, behind their huge, thick glasses, are somewhere between black and grey, clouded with cataracts. He has lived in Shanghai since 1936. Bee is pale-faced and serious, with long, dark hair, tortoise shell rimmed glasses. The children she teaches call her “Harry Potter” behind her back. Although she’s already past forty, it comforts her that in comparison to Lao Wang she is a child. Both of them are wearing white tai chi pants with blue piping. It’s the time which is becoming Bee’s favourite time of the week. Lately she’s been having a Chinese lesson with Mr W after their tai chi class. He’d ask a question in Chinese, repeat it a few times, translate it if she hadn’t understood.   She’d answer in English and he’d start drawing pictures to illustrate, while she’d write the words in Latin script to have something to hang on to.  He’s a mischievous old thing. He’s also so old that there’s no need to worry about any romantic nonsense. As they talk, she relaxes more than she has in the three months she’s been in Shanghai. 

“Yes. Look. They have red clothes.”

“Red is lucky for New Year.”

“Mm. I prefer white. Red! Ha ha! Like a bus.”

The red flags flutter from the flag poles in front of Jing’an temple. He glances up at her with a twinkle in his eye.

“Garbage collectors’ uniforms are blue. Why?”

“It’s because it’s the colour of the virgin Mary. They hate the church.”

 Jing’an park consists of two squares of grass lined with trees, enclosing a wild garden with a lake, ducks, lawns and paved ground where old ladies do line dancing and tai chi. To the north is the glowing, gold painted Jing’ an temple and to the south the 24 story Shangri La hotel, on the right the Everlasting Light shopping mall and all round, the traffic roars. Lao Wang remembers when it was a dusty track down which carriages or carts or pedestrians came. He used to go out with his Ayi and brother in search of cars. 

“I liked to draw them, the Model T Ford, the Rolls Royce.” Then one day there was a fence around the park and only foreigners were allowed in. He laughs about it, genuinely struck by the incongruity and not bitter at all. He speaks English with a British accent like a 1940s movie star, but pausing as images and English words come back to him. “It was the foreigners’ cemetery, there was a sign saying “No Chinese or dogs allowed.” Well, I just went home. We could still walk up and down the roads, there were trees enough and we used to visit with families who had nice gardens. We didn’t need their park. One boy tried to sneak in and got in a fight with the guard. I didn’t care. I was learning to draw and paint from my teacher. A white Russian. I’m sorry you can’t visit my apartment. My brother lives in the next room and he has Parkinson’s disease. He needs to be very quiet.”

So they met in the park instead, sitting side by side on a park bench, with “Chinese made simple” shared between them. He was too long-sighted to see it so she reads the English and he guesses the Chinese.

“Do you want to buy a chicken, some rolls, a seat by the window, a ticket to Guangzhou, a return ticket, a table for two, a lemonade?”

“Do you have brothers and sisters, children, a husband, your passport, time to meet on Monday, a blue car, a white car, a foreign car, a new car, an old car, everything you need?”

She loves the simplicity of interacting in a language she doesn’t know, everything scaled down to a few words and the unsayable making it full of potential. But he says “These questions are a little boring, do you think? Do you think we could make up our own questions? You can tell me whatever you want to ask. You can ask me anything, anything.”

 “Hey, Lao Wang. Who’s your foreign friend?” 

A smiling face looms over the back of the bench, a woman in her late 50s, dyed brown hair, a navy overall.

“She studies t’ai chi chuan with Tian Laoshe. But she also wants to study Chinese.”

“So, do you speak Chinese?” she asks Bee.

“No, I can’t. I want to learn.”

She nodded and resumed talking to Lao Wang as if Bee were a child. After a few minutes he turned to Bee to explain.

“She is a friend of my ayi.”

She went across the park and the lesson resumed.

 

Bee hadn’t felt so happy for a long time. What was it with her and Lao Wang? It was something like a hidden secret they shared, the fact of having grown up in a world which has been swept away by history. You wouldn’t think there was much in common between nineteen seventies Britain and nineteen thirties Shanghai but Bee had been raised partly at her grandma’s house, cosy with the nineteen twenties and thirties wistful elegance of the years before the war. Lao Wang had come to Shanghai as a six-year-old kid and seen the Japanese planes flying over in 1938. “It made the flowers fall off the windowsill.” He sketched geraniums in pots. They didn’t need to speak much about it. He asked “Where do you live?” and after she described grandmother’s house and the brown walls with the paintings and candlesticks and said “I cannot go there. It does not exist now,” he understood. He in nineteen thirties Shanghai, she in her grandmother’s house full of the pictures, the books, the recipes, the clothes, the cushions and curtains, seemed to be dreaming completely irrelevant dreams. With their adult selves, they knew that those days hadn’t been the good old days at all. They realized their mothers been deprived of the self-determination which was every girl’s birthright. But in some way or other things had been more certain in those days and more comfortable. People still thought there might be a God. Even after the senseless devastation of the First World War in Europe, there was a kind of peace and sunlight which could be imagined. Before Hiroshima, before Auschwitz, before 1966, before the revolution, before the war. 

 One day in spring, she went to his apartment.

“Listen.” Reaching for a huge cassette player. “I want you to listen to an English song.”

After a moment of static, the sound of a 1930s hit floated in the air.

“Sunshine you are my sunshine,” he sang along softly, laughing with a conspiratorial look.

“You know it?”

“Of course, everyone knows it.”

“I don’t know all the words, only the first line!”

He continues to sing right to the end. 

“When I awoke dear, I was mistaken.

And so I hung my head and cried.”

She gazes out of the window. 

The tower of the Shangrila and W BJ residence glitter with fresh 21 century glass above the walk of the lane. The tiny brick houses date from the 1890s. They face a long concrete wall which separates them from the police school, basketball court and 70s apartment. When they were built they would have been row on row with spaces in between for playing, buying and selling, strolling, gossiping and the city still has such places, gentrified now and fetching higher rents from incomers who put in fake 1920s showers , mirrors, bronze oil lamps, black and white tiles or pine boards and let to foreigners or upwardly mobile couples. But round here only one of the houses has been done up. Most of them seem to be like Mr W, they have lived here since the 70s or 50s. Only Mr W remembers it in the 30s. 

Inside the house reminds her of the scene from Dr Zhivago where he finds his home requisitioned by the people. A family of 5 shares his former living room, a couple, his bedroom, the local party secretary has an office in the dining room and the former owner has to move to a small box room.  All of them share the kitchen. Lao W’s house is small to start with but bears evidence of having been partitioned, she thinks. They go up the dark wood staircase and he points to his brother’s room. A little further up the stair turns and there is a neighbour who is not family. Then at the front facing the Shangri la through the high window, is Mr Ws. Finally there is another neighbour.

The most eye-catching thing in his room was a giant photo of his mother. It was an old sepia photo of a young woman’s face, blown up to maybe 70cm by 1 meter in size. So Mrs Wong stared with a faint surprised smile, her 26 year old self, from high up on the wall on the left of the tall, uncurtained window . At night she would have been lit by the streetlights and the neon sign of the hotel Shangri la, watching over the room like a giant Buddah. 

Mr W’s room is so crammed with stuff that you can’t step more than 50 cm in any direction without hitting up against something – a bookcase, a large bed, an easy chair, a desk piled with books, a giant widescreen tv , a computer, a round dining table, tow chairs, boxes of newspapers, clothes, two small cabinets of crockery, a rice cooker, a kettle. 

“Welcome,” he says. “You can see I have everything we need.” This is the first time Bee has been there, after he has been teaching her for about 6 months. His brother died during the winter. He’s not sentimental. “He’s with God now. And we are still here.”

He squeezes between the bed and the easy chair, indicating a chair at the table. It is set with willow pattern plates, a tupperware container of rice. He whisks a saucepan from behind him and places it on a hot plate. “Ayi has made duck soup. You would say, stew.”

After lunch he starts talking about tai chi. “You should know the basic ideas which Ms Tian says. These are words which she uses often.” He writes on her notebook and spends several minutes gesturing to each one, making expansive hand gestures in that space tho it is too small to stand up. “It’s all to do with this – folding -inward. If you do this, your digestion will be better.” Then he s blowing out and pushing outwards with an explosive t sound. “This one you need a lot of chi. Maybe you can’t do it yet but you will. See I am old but my chi is quite strong But you must ask Ms Tian. Her chi is very strong. She’ll be happy if you ask her to show you. She ll be happy you know the word.”

Bee was getting sleepy in the small room after the heavy food and new information. 

“I have to go.”

“I will walk with you as far as Fumin Lu.”

He recited the names of the streets in a singsong voice. How he loved these streets with their shady plane trees. But of course, all of the names of the streets had been changed in 1958. He must have had to memorise them carefully to avoid being a capitalist roader or whatever they called people who wouldn’t stop using the old French names. 

“Jimin Lu Huai Hai lu Wudong lu Wulumchi lu Fuxing Lu Wuodng l Wukang Lu. I used to ride my bicyle along Fuxing lu every day with my brother.”

He’d have been the same age as the kid J.G. Ballard in Empire of the Sun. 

The next week, she has lunch with him again.

“Tell me about your grandmother’s house,” he asked.

“My grandmother lived with her friends. The house is big. In the mountains.” When she sketched the lodge with the octagonal bedrooms like turrets at each side, he picked up the pencil and filled in a rider on a horse and a beagle. 

“No. They were dachshunds.”

He elongates the body and shortens the legs. The picture becomes ridiculous. He starts drawing a dachshund’s face at the top right corner of the next page, with eyes like saucers.  

“Yes. How do you say dachshund in Chinese?”

“Dachshund” he says it with a fake German accent. 

They have a good laugh. She’s learning enough Chinese that she can tell the taxi to stop at the next crossroads. She can order egg and tomato rice at the Uighur restaurants. She can count to ten for tai chi warm-ups. She’s never going to impress his Ayi though.

Another day they talked about books. She was reading a book in translation, by an author called Yu Hua. It was very funny but also shocking and had made her cry. It was called Brothers. She asked what he recommended. 

“Should I read Lu Xun? I saw Lu Xun’s museum is in the park up in the North of Shanghai.”

“You like to read? Lao Shi is better than Lu Xun. A better story. The Rickshaw puller. All he wants is to own his own rickshaw. His employer the professor was denounced as a communist sympathiser and disappeared – it was before the revolution you see – the professr had upset a student by giving him fail grade and the student got back at him by denouncing him after the revolution as not being communist enough. So the rickshaw man lost his job and after that he married his boss’s daughter but he couldn’t thrive. Lao Shi was criticized. Then he ran outside of his house one day and jumped in the lake and drowned himself. They said he was an enemy of the revolution. He could not stand it. Ten years later they changed their minds again. If he just waited it would have been ok. His book is very good.”

Gradually Mr W’s, story emerges. The nearer it gets to the date for her to leave Shanghai the more questions she asks.  

“We moved here in 1936. My uncle was a big shot engineer, built the railway from Beijing to Shanghai. He had a house with hunting dogs in the montains.” Mr W sketched a miniature pack of beagles and a man on a horse by the house. “Oh at night time you could hear them barking. They used to bark at the moon. It echoed in the mountain. They were British dogs you know.”

His grandfather was something to do with the customs service. In the 1860s the Chinese customs office was at the forefront of scientific development, mapping,weighing, tarrifing, westernized, imperialized, modern and reaching tendrils into the south, north, into parts of the rural economy which would send silk, netsuki, procelain to Queen Victoria s exhibition. Young Hsi Chi learned painting from a Russian emigre. A white Russian. He drew motor cars and cute anthropomorphic animals. Ayi took him and big brother to see the foreigners’ Jaguars or Mercedes Bentz or fords in front of Jing’an temple. He wanted to be an artist. Then 1958. It was decided that he would study Economics. He must have graduated in the wake of the war, just ahead of the revolution. He worked on the Bund. He was in charge of municipal works and supplies, the bricks and mortar, string and steel of the revolution. Donating every last pot and pan to make bullets. He never talked about that. He said he cycled on his bicyle from Jing’an to the Bund every day. He loved the Bund with its roccoco dome and classical pillars and bright expanse of water. The occasional car. After the war started, he still loved it because of how it had been and the beautiful outlines that remained.  He was safer than some because he had government ID. He was doing an essential job. He was kind and intelligent and knew when to shut up. He wasn’t tall. He threatened no one. He was trusted, a small cog in the great wheels that kept the city supplied with timber, sandbags, tiles, stone, cement. He knew where things were, where to get them, how they worked. He lived with his mother and Ayi. They couldn’t pay Ayi but she wanted to stay. Older brother married and wife and his child lived with them too. He was sometimes afraid but he was used to it. Then the cultural revolution happened. He was sent to Pudong to work on a co-operative farm and teach middle schoolers. It was muddy. Not like now. No bridge, no tunnel, no light railway. It seemed a million miles from Jing’an. These were not happy days. But something good came out of it. He met his wife. She had two children from her previous marriage. But he sat at the head of an eight-seater table. That had symbolic significance in his life. He was a patriarch. They were together for 18 years. She divorced him for a man who was high up in the party. He didn’t seem to mind much. Her kids still came to see him.

On the last day she arranges to meet in the outdoor café at Jing’an park. In the cafe there were three or four men sitting who might be plainclothes police. Well-muscled, with crew cut hair, black or khaki t-shirt, discreetly on their i-phones, waiting for a friend, within earshot of Bee and Mr. W. All of them had arrived separately, coincidentally within 4 minutes of Bee pulling out the air ticket and showing it to Mr. W. It didn’t help that she had been to the bank that day and taken the max allowable amount out of her account. When she started writing random notes on the envelope of the ticket, she could feel the tension level rise. 

On this day she didn’t have a notebook so she started scrawling notes on the airplane ticket holder. We know there wasn’t much time left so he was asking her where she’d go next, she was asking him about all the past, wanting to understand how he could have experienced so much and still wake up smiling as the sun rose through the curtainless window of his apartment in Wehai lu where he slept under the fluorescent glow of the Shangri La hotel tower. The short haired men didn’t like her taking notes at all. She’d already lost notebooks in mysterious circumstances on several occasions so she took notes more for the process than for keeping the notes. When a fifth crew cut guy arrived and pulled up a chair near our table,not with the others but like them, austerely waiting for a friend and listening to his ipad with one ear bud, she said to Mr W. “We can’t stay here!” And he laughed and said “No.” They walked together through the park, a tall, thin English woman and a tiny, white haired, pale, Chinese man in a white t-shirt and white pants. 

“We are going to say goodbye on the corner because I have to go pack up my things.”

“Goodbye.”

“You’ll come back.”

“I hope so.”

She writes him a postcard at Christmas time. She asks her friend who’s still living in Shanghai to go to Jing’an and look for him at the tai’chi class. Her friend sees an old man in white. But she’s not sure if it’s him and anyway what’s she supposed to say, asks the friend. What he would want to know, that is, if it was really him, is when is Bee coming back. The next year it was covid. She started searching videos of groups doing Tai chi in Jing’an. Once in the background of a vlog she thought she saw two of Tian Laoshe’s disciples. She remembers the leaves whirling down from the plane trees, dry as paper in the spring wind, with Miss Tian dancing beneath the shadows and a crowd watching. She remembers trying to hold the textbook when it kept slipping shut on the park bench as he looked surreptitiously into her eyes through his big lenses. 

“Ask me anything. Anything at all.”

She wonders what he wanted her to ask.