Flying High

‘What will you do with them?’ I asked.

‘Eat them,’ said Liang, a mock serious look on his face.

‘But they’re pets, aren’t they?’

‘We don’t have pets here. Only rich people have pets. We like our animals best in the cooking pot.’

I was beginning to understand that my fatuous comment about a carp being a pet was very Western. The idea that eating carp was cruel suddenly struck me as silly in this context – it made more sense to eat them than to have these slithery cold creatures as pets. I had no choice but to start perceiving life around me in a more practical way. I started to see how much I was spoiled, prejudiced and set in my ways. I had recently started to dismiss the voice of Martin that often echoed around in my head pointing out various wickednesses and cruelties. He had started to irritate me. Who was he to impose his pampered views on people?

The visit to the studio was the first time I’d been interested in the real China as opposed to the fairytale version that lingered as a fantasy. I had enjoyed it in an unexpected way. It wasn’t how I’d imagined it at all, but better. It was as if the experience had taught me something, refreshed me. It was Liang who had gradually wrought the beginnings of change in me. I was at last starting to absorb those new experiences I so badly wanted and the catalyst was Liang. It was Liang who made it possible for me to open up. He too was beginning to change. No longer the distant and polite teacher. He began to be aware of me as a person. I was no longer just an awkward and large foreigner, but a source of information about outside, a companion and possibly even a woman. I reluctantly admitted to myself that I was beginning to feel a little excited in his presence. I found myself looking at the back of his neck, noticing his neat ears and his remarkable long eyelashes. I couldn’t stop myself looking at him, partly out of fascination and curiosity at his differentness and partly in the way one looks affectionately on an intelligent pet. He seemed so young. He was about the same age as me, but his cheeks looked boyishly smooth. I wondered if he shaved. His hair had the gloss of a child’s hair, which was a wonder considering the nasty sticky shampoo they used.

‘You know, Miss Alison,’ he said one day, ‘I’m really interested in seeing your country. I often listen to the BBC and VOA. I feel I know the West already. It’s different from here, isn’t it? You’ve got so much freedom. You can choose your job, your politicians, your friends …’

‘But Liang, you can choose your friends too, can’t you?’ It occurred to me that my self-appointed role of ‘friend’ to him was perhaps not exactly his choice.

‘Not really. We don’t have many friends here, not in the sense you mean it. People suspect one another, and besides you’ve probably noticed that we often say “classmates” when we’re referring to people we know. That’s because they’re people we studied with. What chance do we have to meet anyone else? You can see what it’s like in my unit. Apart from them you’re the only person I see. You’re the only outsider in my life.’ The idea that I was now ‘in his life’ sent a small shudder through me.

‘What about your family?’

‘Relatives,’ he said with a grimace.

‘What’s wrong with relatives?’ I asked, knowing what he was going to say.

‘Obligation,’ he said. ‘My wife was given to me by my uncle. She’s the daughter of some remote member of his wife’s family. When I got to twenty-seven and I wasn’t married, they said, “Liang, it’s time you had a child.” They’re peasants, you see. Within six months I was married to Wang and a year later my son was born.’

‘Couldn’t you have chosen your own wife? Why did you let them do this to you?’ I was beginning to feel resentment towards these primitive people who were his family. Didn’t they realize that he had the right to make his own choices in life? How could they foist some stranger on him like that? It was absurd.

‘It must have been awful for you.’ I realized this sounded feeble, like a schoolgirl commiserating over an embarrassing parent.

‘Not awful. I just did my duty to my family. They were right. I needed to get married and I hadn’t met anyone suitable. A man of twenty-seven can’t stay single.’

I’d been in China long enough to know he was right. He would have been regarded as a freak or people would have suspected his reasons for avoiding women.

I wanted to ask him if he loved her. I needed to know. But I was certain he didn’t. He was obviously trapped for eternity in an enforced relationship which was meaningless and gave him no joy. But he always seemed joyful enough as if it was never on his mind. He never mentioned the child.

We were seeing each other more and more. He was obviously growing fonder of me, wanting my company. And I wanted him too. I thought about him a lot. I often found myself daydreaming about him as I stood before my forty undergraduates, crammed into filthy Classroom Number Three where I attempted to teach the rudiments of English Literature. The uncomprehending faces stared back, obedient but totally unabsorbed. I must have looked as uninterested as they did. My mind was elsewhere too.

One day a group of runners training for a sports meeting ran past the open window. My adrenalin suddenly whirled as I saw Liang among them. But no, it was just someone who looked like him. It couldn’t have been him. He was wearing blue cotton running shorts and a white singlet with a figure of eight on the back and grey plimsolls without socks. His thin legs were spattered with mud and his shoulders were hunched in the cold. So unlike Martin’s rugby player’s physique. I watched him as he ran, unaware of me, intent on his task of forging ahead of the others. I thought of Liang’s slight body, unclothed – his knees and elbows, his small buttocks – and felt a blush spreading over my neck. I was jolted back to my yawning class who had noticed nothing. They sat impassively picking their noses, scratching their armpits and staring blankly through me as before.

How Liang managed to get away from his unit I never discovered. The painting lessons continued, sometimes at my flat and sometimes at his studio and I eventually managed to produce a passable, rather sentimental picture of kittens and peonies which I had mounted on a scroll. We both began to be aware that painting was no longer the only interest we had in common. I positively looked forward to his visits. We would both invent reasons for him to come.

‘I’d better have a look at your bike,’ he’d say, knowing full well that the University Bicycle Workshop checked it regularly for me.

Or he’d say, ‘Have you taken your winter ginseng? I’ll get you some at the medicine store.’

And I would cut out articles about life in the West for him and save him my Guardian Weekly. Without a telephone, we had no choice but to meet often.

He helped me with many of the small things I found so taxing in my first months in China.

It was him who showed me how to eat properly. I had been trying to survive on boiled eggs and boiled vegetables which was all I could manage to cook on the pathetic gas ring provided in my kitchen. The oil smelt so vile I couldn’t fry anything. When I tried, the wok sent up clouds of smoke and the food tasted as if it had been cooked in engine oil. Liang primed my wok for me and expertly showed me how to heat the oil to the right point. He flicked vegetables and fatty scraps of pork around and made feasts.

I gave up going to the market by myself. I waited for him to come and we would set out on an adventure. What used to be a painful experience became fun. We tried out anything new that came into season and rushed back to the flat to cook it. I ate everything: eels, their tiny heads nailed to a board while their long bodies were split with a sharp knife, rabbits bought live and their fragile necks cracked, their white fur peeled off like peeling an orange, tiny salty dried shrimp, sweet creamy yoghourt in chunky pottery jars, and delicate translucent hundred-year-old eggs with their glinting green and orange hues. Food became a fascination to me and I even discarded the fork and spoon I’d carried everywhere and learned awkwardly to wield chopsticks. I still couldn’t bring myself to use the bamboo ones in restaurants which you had to clean up with a bit of exercise book kept in the pocket for the purpose.

We started meeting on Sundays. Usually he’d come in the afternoon. I didn’t ask what he did in the morning. I was vaguely aware he might have family commitments but kept the idea at the very back of my mind. When the weather was still cold in March I lay one Sunday morning beneath my quilt, comfortable, with the sounds of the campus outside. I’d been reading one of Martin’s letters and thinking of home. He wanted me to meet him at the end of the term and have a holiday. He would come out on a package tour and I could join him in Peking. Somehow I didn’t feel elated enough about the prospect of seeing him. I wouldn’t say my heart sank exactly, but it almost did. While I was trying to sift through my thoughts on the subject, there was a tap at the door and I knew it was Liang, very early.

‘Hang on – I’ll put my dressing-gown on.’

I rushed eagerly to open the door and there he was, clutching a small parcel in pink wrapping paper tied with a piece of string.

‘This is a little gift for you.’

‘Can I open it?’

‘Go on.’ His eyes were wide with anticipation. More than ever he seemed childlike. I recalled the runners and had to look away.

It was a set of silk hand-embroidered handkerchiefs, totally impractical but pretty in a fussy Chinese sort of way. It was the sort of gift a man gives to a woman.

‘But it isn’t my birthday, Liang.’ This was silly. Birthdays didn’t mean much here.

‘No, I thought you’d like them. My cousin works at the embroidery factory,’ he said by way of justification. Suddenly I felt a rush of sentiment, of joy and of something I had never felt in the presence of Martin. I wanted to fling my arms round him and dance.

I can’t think how I restrained myself, but I felt as if I was saving it for a later I knew would come. I increasingly enjoyed the thought of it. We went out on our cycle ride, him pedalling protectively on the traffic side of the cycle lane, telling me when to stop, when to turn, giving disapproving glances when other cyclists jostled me. He was still somewhat astonished that I could ride a bike as he was certain all Westerners drove around in large cars.

We sat together in a tea house in those low bamboo chairs. An ancient man in a grubby apron poured water from a steaming black kettle as we clattered the lids of our tea dishes. I looked at Liang and wanted urgently to know more about him. He was deliberately uncommunicative about his personal life, as if his life in my presence was the only life he had.

‘Liang, why don’t you bring your wife along?’ I ventured, uncertain of his response. I couldn’t even remember her name.

‘She’s busy,’ he said evasively, looking at the violinist squeakily performing at the far end of the tea house.

‘But you never talk about her.’ Then I dared to ask, ‘Don’t you get on?’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘Well, aren’t you and your wife good friends?’

‘She’s my wife,’ he said as if this explained everything.

‘And your baby? Isn’t it wonderful being a father?’

‘Yes, I’m proud of him.’

‘But Liang, when do you spend time with him? You’re always with me!’ As I said this I realized it was true. I hadn’t been aware until I said it that he was spending time with me that he probably should have been spending with his family.

‘I see him once a week.’

It was then that I discovered that Liang and his wife didn’t actually live in the same place and that Liang was effectively a bachelor, married in name only. Shocked but overjoyed, I sensed a tremor of anticipation. Hadn’t it always been him and me, never a triangle?

‘She’s with her mother. She can’t live with me. There isn’t room with the baby. I only have one room. Anyway she prefers it.’

Liang’s life must have been bleak until I turned up. I provided him with an excuse to go out and enjoy himself. Wasn’t it his duty to see that the foreigner was kept content? It concerned me for a moment that maybe our friendship wasn’t what I thought it was after all – then I remembered the little silk hankies. No, he wasn’t pretending. The desire to kiss him welled up again, and I wanted to tell him how sweet he was and how much he meant to me and how he had freed me. I couldn’t in the tea house, so I left it until he came the following week.

It was a Tuesday evening. He was going to call in and see me before a meeting. Although I was on the other side of town he never seemed to object to the long ride. He would call in for a chat and a cup of tea. The note he had sent said he had some news.

His jacket made him look small as he stood at the door.

‘Come in. A man came round the campus with some tinned lychees today. I got you some.’

He enthused about my discovery, but urgently wanted to tell me his own news.

‘I may get a chance to go abroad,’ he said, phrasing it carefully, not allowing himself too much certainty. Going abroad was like going to Heaven. Everyone wanted it and feared it and thought they’d never be good enough.

‘You could come to England,’ I said without thinking. Then it immediately struck me that this was not a good idea. It was a potentially dangerous displacement for us both.

‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Because I’m married it makes it easier. The authorities know I’ve got a son to come back for.’

Little did the authorities know the irony of this. From what I could tell, Liang’s son did not have a father who would pine for him while suffering in a foreign land.

Liang was looking out of the window as he spoke, with his back to me. And it was then that I chose to kiss him.

The kiss did change our lives. The relationship did take on a sexual dimension but was dominated more by intimacy than sex. We both seemed to have difficulty in expressing ourselves sexually – we didn’t easily fall into each other’s arms, we were embarrassed about kissing and bed was never mentioned. Whether he thought of it I don’t really know. It seemed out of reach, impossible and I’m not sure I wanted it. We substituted a physical manifestation of our closeness with looks into the eyes, standing close, touching fingers when we thought nobody would see. Of course, he always pretended it wasn’t happening. It was not tantalizingly erotic as neither of us understood eroticism and wouldn’t have known how to bring it about. I was certain this was more like love than the insipidness I had with Martin, who was, I suppose, a kind of fiancé. I was happy. I allowed myself the luxury of what I thought was illicit love. The fact that it might not have seemed like passion in other people’s eyes didn’t mean it was unexciting for me. Quite the reverse. I hummed with it. I had a permanent grin on my face, but in a country where grinning reflected embarrassment, a feeling appropriate to a tall foreigner, my secret was safe.

As the spring opened up into flowers and warmth in April, Liang and I began to be seen around together more. I used to get little gifts for him at the Friendship Store. He wasn’t allowed in so he would wait with the bikes outside and I’d go in and spend my foreigner’s money.

‘What can I get you, Liang? Just say what you want. It’s easy. I’ve got hard currency. Look!’ and I’d wave my notes at him.

I couldn’t fail to notice how his eyes lit up at the thought of goodies normally out of reach to all but party officials.

‘No, really. I don’t want anything, Alison.’

I’d go in and get him a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label and some Marlboros. He’d have to keep them at my flat. It wouldn’t have done for him to be seen with these gifts. He’d have been criticized; that is, hauled up in front of some bossy committee to explain himself. I’d started smoking Phoenixes. I kept the Marlboros for him. I even bought him – silk tie of the kind favoured by visiting Americans, but of course he couldn’t wear it. I wondered if I was overdoing it, making a bit of a fool of myself. I just wanted to please him and give him things he could have only from me.

As the chilly weather suddenly stopped I shed my army jacket and began to wear a skirt. People noticed and I thought they were making snide comments. I hoped I was beginning to look a bit less foreign. My hair had grown and I’d put it in bunches like the local girls. Actually, I didn’t dare risk the pudding-basin barber. We must have made a comic pair, I suppose, me six inches taller than him. But it didn’t matter.

At least so I thought until one day when he came along looking very agitated.

‘The Wai Ban says I mustn’t spend so much time with you.’

‘What do you mean? Do they suspect? What did they say?’

I felt panic-stricken. This could mean trouble for both of us. It could mean him losing his job or worse. It could mean me losing him.

‘They’re worried about me being influenced by you. And they’ve told Wang about you.’

For a second I couldn’t remember who Wang was. Then I remembered she was his wife.

‘What did she say?’

‘Not much.’

‘What d’you mean “not much”?’

‘Well, she has her own life. She’s never met a foreigner. She doesn’t know what to think.’

‘Isn’t she upset?’

‘Why?’

‘Well, you’re seeing another woman.’

‘She’s Chinese.’

‘But she’s still your wife.’

‘Yes. But she doesn’t see it like you do.’

‘You’re close enough to have had a child together, and you’re telling me she isn’t jealous?’

‘Anyone can have a child. It’s easy.’

He was talking about the thing most Westerners thought they wanted out of their relationships and dismissing it as if it was the easy bit. Getting someone into bed made people forgo understanding and kindness, as if sex would replace friendship or be an improvement on it. But from what I could see Liang and Wang didn’t seem to have much apart from the evidence of a fleeting sexual encounter. They appeared to have an easy-going or even apathetic tolerance of each other, and maybe some woolly notion of duty.

‘Well, what does it mean? Are they saying we’ve got to stop seeing each other?’ I couldn’t bear to think about it.

‘They want an explanation. They’re trying to be reasonable. And Wang has offered to divorce me.’ He added this last bombshell as a sort of afterthought.

I added up in seconds what it would mean if he was divorced. Would he then expect me to marry him? The thought ricocheted around in my brain. What about Martin? What about Mummy and Daddy? What about my friends? The thought of being married to a five-foot, two-inch Chinaman appalled me suddenly. He must have seen my expression of anguish and read it completely wrongly. All was confusion. Did I love him or had it suddenly stopped like a watch stops when it is overwound and the spring snaps?

‘Don’t you see?’ he said. ‘It would be wonderful.’

Wonderful for whom? I saw all the advantages for him and none for me. He would unload an unwanted wife and child and acquire the much coveted passport out of China – a foreign spouse. I would be married to a foreigner who would never fit in at home and who would make me a laughing stock. The thought was impossible. Could I see him at the Point to Point or the Hunt Ball, or meeting the vicar or Uncle Basil? They would all be horrified. I began to see the value of Martin. He was of my world, my sort. I had stepped into an alien place and been befriended by an alien. Liang was China and was inseparable from it. I could not blend the two worlds – the only piece of this world that I could take home was my picture of peonies and kittens.

Since I was lost for words and Liang was evidently hoping for a positive response, he said, ‘You could come with me to America. We could travel together and get out of this dump. We could be free together.’ What did he mean ‘free’? I was already free.

I looked into his eyes, then looked away to his frayed grubby collar and the tide-mark on his neck.

‘But you can’t just leave your family like that – they haven’t done anything wrong.’

‘I can. Lots of people do. I’ve been applying for scholarships for months and now at last one has come through. I’m going to Ohio in July.’

‘You never said anything to me,’ I said, hurt and beginning to be angry that I had not been part of this plan.

‘I wasn’t sure until yesterday.’ He started to fidget irritatingly with a loose button on his jacket. He couldn’t bring himself to look me in the eye.

So my part in the grand plan had been to help him prepare himself for the peculiarities of the West in order to make the escape less painful.

‘Do you really want to marry me, then?’

‘Of course. It would make things much easier. As the husband of an Englishwoman, I would be able to …’

I stopped listening. I was right. He was after a passport. How had I failed to see it from the very first? Why had I thought he cared for me? An icy trickle of disappointment pierced me with startling pain. Facing reality was like discovering I hadn’t won the jackpot after all. After months of the luxury of fantasy I now had to return to mundane reality. I couldn’t let the ice sear an irreparable wound. I shut it out.

There had been a point in both our lives where he needed to turn away from China and I needed to turn away from England. We had met in the centre of a figure of eight, travelling in opposite directions. We generated a small spark, a misunderstood spark as it turned out, as we passed, and now our only route was away from each other.

‘Take your wife,’ I said. ‘I’m leaving here and going back to England.’

He looked up at me. I had intruded on a dream. He remained lost in reflection for a moment, then seemed to emerge gradually like a creature coming out of hibernation.

‘Yes.’ He said it with an air of relief.

‘I’m sorry if you misunderstood my behaviour. We Westerners are not like you Chinese. We’re a bit impulsive, you know. It doesn’t mean anything.’

‘No.’

He made his excuses and left. I didn’t have any more painting lessons and we did not communicate any more after that meeting.

Much as I wanted to weep and feel wretched, I couldn’t. The moment had passed and I had evaded that peak. I was frustrated and even guilty that I couldn’t summon up any real misery. I felt numb and blank. It wasn’t the numbness of shock. It was the numbness of a bemused vacuum.

Eventually at the end of the summer term it was time for me to leave. Martin’s trip was fixed and I was to meet him in Peking. While I was packing I discovered a pair of Liang’s gloves. He had left them behind on the day we first kissed and I’d kept them hidden in my underwear drawer. I took them out and felt a slight pang. I sniffed them and they smelt of sourness and cheap plastic. They were too small for me to wear. They were useless and ugly. I threw them in the bin.

As always I had trouble at the airport, with nobody to help with my bags, being sent in different directions by different officials, and was glad to be leaving this irritating mayhem. I wasn’t all that keen on the grand tour of China, but at least we’d be insulated from the chaos inside an air-conditioned bus.

I got on to the plane at last after much pushing and shoving, but of course someone was sitting in my seat. They never seemed to manage these things efficiently, and having got up at the crack of dawn to be chauffeured to the airport in the university limousine, I was pretty tired and irritable already. A woman with a baby had dumped her things across three seats – there were endless gaping bags of blankets, fruit, enamel cups and Heaven knows what else.

‘Excuse me,’ I said in English, hoping she’d get the message. She stared up at me. She was a tiny delicate woman, maybe from one of the Minorities. She was like a pretty doll with perfect almond eyes, peach cheeks and a long black plait, and wearing a pink silk jacket, old-fashioned among the Crimplene glitter creations worn by other girls. The baby was bundled into several layers of shawls in spite of the heat and was wearing those disgusting crotchless trousers so that his little raw bottom protruded. He laughed as she swung him on to her shoulder and kicked his tiny feet in his little red cotton shoes. I felt large and ungainly, gawky and imperfect. I shifted my bulky body into the aisle to let her pass as she gave up her seat without a murmur. She shuffled with her belongings towards the smoking section of the plane at the back.