Avenue of Eternal Peace (6 page)

The rain kept up, gurgling round the corners of the gutters. Wally curled the quilt round like a cocoon, listening to the noise of the heavens, the grandest April foolery, and Mother Lin's stertorous breathing. Eagle lay on his back staring at the roof.

After a while Eagle said softly ‘My grandfather had a big house. His furniture was all blackwood. Antique. He had porcelain too. He was a chief general of the Kuomintang.'

It began as a bedtime story.

‘Your mother's father?' asked Wally to show that he was listening.

‘My father's,' Eagle corrected. ‘We never knew. My father was a strict man. He never talked about useless things like the past. He got angry if we asked. The past was supposed to be dead in New China. But he hated the future as well. One day, it was after I got thrown off the basketball team, when I was in that boring office, I answered a newspaper advertisement for models. Fashion models. There'd never been such a thing before. Part-time work, but the money was good, and it was something interesting. I applied. Lots of people applied. I've always had luck, you know, good luck and bad luck too. So I was chosen. My father really lost his temper, out of fear that his son would be involved with a life of glamour and rottenness that could be dangerous. And the more I succeeded, and was paid, the stronger he demanded I stop. He said it would be used against me later. But we needed that extra money. In the end my mother and I agreed to keep it a secret from him. I kept up the office job, because he had got that for me, and did the modelling work after hours. My mother and I never spoke of it between ourselves either. She still doesn't like to speak of it. But the work paid for his medicines. “Good son” he called me at the end. When at last he said those words, he accepted what I was doing.

‘A little Party member. When he died we found in one of his pockets a letter written years ago during the anti-Rightist campaign, when my father was still in the army, concerning one of the Kuomintang generals. Mother couldn't explain the letter to me. But in the year of mourning a relation of father's came on a visit and took me aside, assuming I knew or wanting to tell me, I'm not sure. He was father's half-brother, one of two sons of the Kuomintang general's two wives. Father was the son of the concubine, the “second” wife. Perhaps that had something to do with it. Or perhaps he did have convictions after all. Anyway, when he guessed that the Communists would win, father switched sides. He was a young soldier. By the time the general was executed, father had cut all ties with the Kuomintang and was trying to line up with the Communists in the capital. His half-brother made his peace with the Communists more openly, more abjectly, saving his face and in the long run his property. My uncle's rich today. The separation between our families is complete. My father's whole life was shaped by guilt for betraying his forebears, and fear that the Communists would find out where he'd come from. A counter-revolutionary. The letter must have come just when he thought he'd got away with it, to remind him never to lower his guard. He never even told his wife. She doesn't know all the details even now, doesn't care to know. That's why our family had nothing. He played it by the book. He brought no attention on us. My luck must have seemed like a curse to him. When he called me “Good son” at the end, he was saying that I could be a completely different person. And so I am. I feel sorry for him. There's more than one kind of casualty. The past walks beside us, even if we don't always understand its language.'

He turned his head to one side and his grin was visible.

‘Tomorrow.'

5

When Wally woke, the rain was still falling steadily to thaw the earth. Water drops glistened on Mother Lin's silvered hair when she came in from the kitchen, crying out as her muddy feet nearly slipped from under her. Eagle yawned, stretched and hopped up. His mother already had bowls of rice porridge to set on the table.

‘Nearly seven-thirty,' Eagle scolded the Doctor with a prod. ‘Up, up, up.'

Wally rolled out of a baby's sleep and pulled himself to a sitting position. Rubbing his stubbly chin and matted hair, he stared out into the shining rain and wondered aloud, ‘My meeting with Director Kang is at eight-thirty. I can't be late.'

‘Quick. Eat. There's no time to wash.' Like a magician, Eagle pulled from a trunk an enormous plastic cape.

The scientist in Wally believed it impossible to keep dry while riding a bicycle through pouring rain. Eagle assured him there would be no problem. Only button up the hood and pedal slowly, keeping your knees under the cape.

Wobbling, disguised, the foreigner flowed out among the bicycles, plastic coverings, mire, umbrellas and frantic bells. He couldn't look up or his hood would fall back. He sliced through sheets of water following—he hoped—the curves of the route planned. The Yellow River of traffic, soaked, spattered, jostled to defeat the elements.

Taller than whomever the raincoat was designed for, Wally was sopping wet from the knees down, and generally bedraggled, when he arrived late at the meeting room trailing the dripping raincoat. Mrs Gu rushed forward sympathetically as the Doctor bowed his apology. By the time he was settled in the armchair, he had picked up that there was no one in the room besides himself and Mrs Gu.

‘I'm sorry but Director Kang has gone.'

‘Gone!' Faint-heartedly he looked at his watch.

‘He's gone to Chicago.'

‘That's ridiculous.' Wally was only fifteen minutes late.

‘Very ridiculous,' laughed Mrs Gu girlishly. ‘He will be back in ten days. The University of Chicago has awarded him an Honorary Doctorate.'

‘Good heavens!'

She opened her plastic briefcase and pulled out a swatch of untrimmed photocopies and dog-eared Chinese journals.

‘I know you are interested in Director Kang's work, so I make these samples available to you. Unfortunately, not all is in English.'

Wally looked glumly at the testimony to Director Kang's distinction. He detected for once a certain unease in Mrs Gu's manner. By not immediately, enthusiastically, gleefully taking up the bundle she offered, he had upset her strategy—here was the thin edge of the wedge that allowed him to make his move.

‘You mentioned last time that Professor Hsu is in retirement. Can he be visited? It would be a delight to talk with him—'

‘Hsu? Oh, he's not in Beijing.'

‘Where is he then?'

‘He's retired. I don't know.'

‘You mean he's severed all ties? Can you find out?'

Mrs Gu pushed the pile of Director Kang's papers across the table to Wally.

‘I will contact you.' And she broke into her sweet befuddled smile.

‘Thank you, Mrs Gu.'

She rang Wally after lunch to say that Professor Hsu was in a rest home on the coast some five hours by train from Beijing.

‘Couldn't be better,' he yelled into the phone. ‘I've been fancying a trip to the seaside. Can you get his address?'

‘You will go alone?'

‘Sure!'

6

Wally had the sketchiest idea of how his grandfather Waldemar had stuck China so long. He had seen photographs of a hospital built under his grandfather's supervision, an imposing whitewashed building with neat inset windows and a tiled roof along Chinese lines, with at one end a church incorporated, a steeper slope to the roof, gothic windows and a cross on top. Outside, in rows for the photograph, were the staff: Chinese in traditional dress with round glossy heads; Western women in long full skirts and men in suits with the odd dog-collar, and in the middle (if you used a magnifying glass) sunken-eyed, droopy-moustached Waldemar, beside whom was a small beady birdy woman in a pale blouse with floppy bow—his wife Retta. A ragged, painterly line of Chinese mountains faded into the sky. Behind that scene of the little mission hospital lay, to Wally's eyes, all the capability, vanity and pathos of Victorian imperatives.

Waldemar Frith was the second son of a prosperous Bristol merchant called Zachary, a name and personage to conjure with. The money came in foreign trade (tobacco to be precise), unrelenting hard work, and obsession with every penny. Vigilant, at attention, the righteous burghers of Bristol carried themselves, while their ships carried their goods, every crate accounted for, to the four corners of the empire, and returned laden with tea, spices, wool, silk, sugar, tobacco for warehouses and suppliers throughout the kingdom, every ounce inventoried and profit-bearing. Bristolians grateful for what the bounty of nature provided, along with the natural laws of a free market and their own superior position in the chain of being, were ready to pay tribute to the natural world by promoting Natural Science, Philosophy, Education, Self-Improvement and, once souls were improved, Philanthropy. From the modestly large bluestone houses aggregated on the rises of Clifton were sent outwards goods of a more spiritual kind to ballast the inward traffic. Here too the accountancy was strict in an economy inseparably practical and moral and buoyed up by a generous conception of self-interest. No accountancy was stricter than that on Sunday mornings to one's Maker and profit-bestowing Friend, no one nearer to God than the men of Clifton, assured in their evangelical projects and social reforms. Hence Zachary Frith argued in persuasive pamphlets that the advantage of Bristol, and consequently mankind, lay in the abolition of the slave trade. Zachary saw far enough. As a beginner in business with a run of good luck, he already felt anxious to make some sacrifices to balance the books. His first son would carry on the firm. But his second son was given the second name Thomas for the disciple who took the word east to the heathen. His first name was a reminder of Saxon origins. Waldemar Thomas Frith.

As fate had it, the third child—a daughter—was the stay-at-home whose husband ended up taking over the firm. The first son turned out to be a black sheep and unbeliever who ran off to the colonies, from where he wrote such enticing letters that young Waldemar went racing after him and, at the age of nineteen, stepped ashore at Port Phillip Bay: but something about Melbourne offended him. He worked as a pharmacist's assistant acquiring a certain medical knowledge and broader acquaintance with some soft and some very hard cases. The snobbery, pomp, ignorance, wretchedness of Marvellous Melbourne had an unfamiliar and shocking accent, though perhaps no worse than the same things at home. He was a free thinker.

In the damp winter of 1891 twenty-year-old Waldemar, who had a weak chest, caught flu that became pneumonia. Matter clogged his lungs. For six months Retta Glee, a Scottish nurse in the hospital, made it her mission to cure him. She was by his bedside at every opportunity to make sure that with her care and prayer he would pull through. Letters came from the anguished mother and pious father in Bristol, always the more affecting for being so far behind current developments, until when Waldemar was at last cured, and delicately, breathlessly walking about in the sunshine, the sternest letter of all came from Zachary, ‘your loving father'. While the mother prayed, the father had made a contract. If the Almighty saw fit to spare His creature on this occasion, the child would devote his life to service: if Waldemar survived the disease, he was to become a missionary. In the febrile condition of his convalescence, Waldemar received the commandment with passive recognition that his life had been saved for a purpose. When Retta saw the letter, she confirmed that it was a matter of duty, less to God than to his earthly father.

Waldemar wished to aim higher than his circumstances in the colony allowed. He cared little for Melbourne, but more for Retta who he feared would not like to leave the dear ones of her family. But he could not go alone. He put it to her: if he pledged his faith, would she pledge hers? When they squeezed hands, kneeling on dusty ground under a lime tree in the Botanic Gardens one blazing afternoon, their destiny became the Mission.

They honeymooned on the voyage back to the Mother Country and on arrival in London embarked in an appropriate institution on a training scheme two parts medical, two parts Christian doctrine and one part Mandarin, and a year later presented themselves at Clifton for uplifting farewells before sailing for the Orient.

Reaching Shanghai, they were put up in the flourishing commercial headquarters of the British and Foreign Bible Society, and a few days later took a transport boat up river to Hankou. They shared the one ‘first-class' cabin on the boat with two young girls headed for an American Baptist station, and a traveller gentleman who did recitation. The deck was covered with bodies curled against each other. Christian enlightenment had penetrated not far; and the new recruits, savouring their relatively clean and spacious cabin where candles were in good supply, felt already somewhat besieged. Waldemar stood on the deck, hands behind his back, and gazed at the wide river, recording later in a letter the ‘marvellous contrivance' by which coolies on the bank were able to pull the craft upstream. He never ceased to marvel at China's contrivances; and Retta never ceased to make sure that the drinking water was boiled.

They stayed in Hankou for in-the-field training before they moved out to a small market town on one of the many rivers that make up the network of waterways in south-eastern Zhejiang Province, a Chinese heartland of milk and honey, fish and rice; an imperial seat of the Southern Song dynasty that has continued to produce canny, conservative, entrepreneurial people who speak one of the most difficult of all the Chinese dialects. The Anglican bishop of the diocese, Bishop Mowbray, an empire-builder, recognised an opportunity in Waldemar Frith, trainee doctor, a young man of vigour and practical knowledge with a spouse to keep him sane and a bedrock Low-Church faith. He would serve to pioneer a new parish in the populous, plenteous east of the province where Nonconformists and Catholics had alike failed to make inroads. The Bishop's aim was for Waldemar and Retta to prove the singular efficacy of Anglican methods.