The Firemaker (30 page)

Li shook his head. ‘This is all a bit too much for me. I mean, all I know is that they brought in this super-rice three years ago and they have doubled production. There is no hunger in China. For the first time we are major exporters of food to other countries.’

Margaret shrugged, passion finally spent. And she wondered what point there had ever been in it. There was nothing she could do to change the way things were. ‘I guess,’ she sighed. ‘Like I said, it’s not as if the technology might not have some benefits. It’s the long term I worry about. The consequences we can’t possibly predict that are going to affect our children, or our children’s children.’

Li growled and banged the steering wheel. The traffic had ground to yet another halt. ‘What’s the time?’ he asked.

‘Nearly half past.’

He shook his head. ‘We’ll be here all day at this rate.’ He opened his window and placed the red light on the roof, flicked it on and activated his siren. ‘Hold on,’ he said, and started nudging his way out of the gridlock and into the cycle lane, where they picked up speed, bicycles parting in panic ahead of them. He flicked her a glance. ‘Now that the window is down anyway, maybe you wouldn’t mind if I had a cigarette? After everything you have told me it can’t be as bad for me as eating.’

‘Don’t count on it,’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t believe the genes they’ve been putting in tobacco plants.’

II

The great paved concourse in front of Beijing railway station was jammed with rush-hour commuters. Modern twin clock towers separated by a gigantic digital display rose above broad steps leading to the main entrance, where baggage was being run through X-ray machines under the watchful eye of armed policemen. Li nosed the Jeep over the sidewalk and on to the concourse, exchanging horn blasts with buses and taxis. By now he had cut the siren and brought the flashing red light back inside. So he was just another anonymous citizen in a Beijing Jeep. A couple of girls sweeping up litter with old-fashioned straw brooms, and clever shovels with mouths that opened and closed like hungry dogs, shouted imprecations at the Jeep for forcing them to move out of the way. They could have been no more than seventeen or eighteen, dressed in baggy blue overalls and white tee-shirts. They had large pale blue bandanas wrapped around their faces to protect them from dust billowing up from the concrete as they swept. Red motorised baggage trolleys weaved their way among the crowds. Groups of travellers sat patiently on the steps in the shade of black umbrellas, luggage piled high all around them. Margaret followed Li into the ticket hall in the station’s west wing.

Long queues snaked back across marble tiles from a row of hatches that ran the length of the back wall. Destinations were marked above each window in Chinese characters, and Margaret wondered how the casual foreign traveller would know which one to go to. A woman’s strangely disconnected nasal voice droned monotonously over the Tannoy, announcing departures and arrivals. Li joined the back of one of the queues and stood tapping his foot impatiently.

‘Where is your uncle going?’ she asked, more for something to say than out of any real interest.

‘Sichuan,’ he said distractedly.

‘That’s where your family comes from, isn’t it?’

‘He’s going to see my father in Wanxian, and then on to Zigong to talk to my sister.’

There was something in the stress he put on the word ‘talk’ that aroused her curiosity. ‘Is there a problem?’

‘She is pregnant.’

‘That’s a problem?’

‘You ask too many questions.’

‘I’m a nosy bitch.’ She waited.

He sighed. ‘She already has a child.’ He took in Margaret’s frown of puzzlement. ‘You have never heard of China’s One-child Policy?’

‘Ah.’ Understanding dawned. Of course she had heard. And she had always wondered how it was possible to enforce such a policy. ‘What can they do to you if you do have a second child?’

‘When you get married,’ he said, ‘you are asked to make a public commitment to having only one child. You sign what they call a “letter of determination”. In return you receive financial and other privileges – priority in education and medicine for your child, an increase in income, better housing. There is also strong pressure to be sterilised. But if you then go on to have more than one child, you will lose all your benefits, maybe even your house.’ He shook his head slowly, clearly concerned. ‘And during the second pregnancy there will be other pressures, psychological, sometimes physical, to have an abortion. The consequences can be terrible, either way.’

Margaret tried to imagine the US government trying to tell Americans how many children they could have. She couldn’t. But at the same time she knew what unchecked population growth would do to a country that already comprised a quarter of the world’s population. Starvation, economic ruin. It was a dreadful dichotomy. ‘Is she going to have the baby?’ He nodded. ‘But did she and her husband sign this “letter of declaration”?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then why is she so determined to have another child?’

‘Because their first child was a girl.’

Margaret pulled a face. ‘So? What’s wrong with girls? Some would say they’re a lot better than boys.’ She grinned. ‘And, in my humble opinion, there’d be a lot of merit in that view.’

‘Not in China.’

And she saw that he was serious. ‘You’re kidding. Why not?’

‘Oh, it’s not easy to explain,’ he said, waving an arm in a gesture of futility. ‘It has to do with Confucianism, and the ancient Chinese belief in ancestor worship. But perhaps more than all of that, there is one very practical reason. Traditionally, when a son marries he brings his new wife to live with his parents, and as the parents grow aged the younger couple look after them. If all you have is a daughter, she will go to live with her husband’s parents, and there will be no one to look after you in your old age.’

‘But if everyone only has one child, and every child is a son, there won’t be any women to bear the next generation of children.’

He shrugged. ‘I can only tell you how it is. The orphanages are full of baby girls who were abandoned on doorsteps.’

‘So your uncle is going to talk her out of having the baby?’

‘I don’t know what my uncle is going to say to her. I’m not sure he knows himself. But whatever he says, she will listen, in the way that she will listen to no one else.’ He stretched up to look down the length of the queue. It didn’t appear to have moved at all. ‘This is no damned good,’ he said, and pulled out his Public Security ID wallet from a back pocket and pushed his way up to the head of the queue.

Margaret watched from a distance as several people at the head of the queue began to remonstrate with him. She smiled as he turned and with a few sharp words and a flash of his ID silenced their complaints.
And some were more equal than others
, she thought wryly.

He hurried back across the concourse with the ticket and she followed him outside into the crowded square. ‘I’m sorry, I’m going to have to take the ticket to my uncle first,’ he said, glancing up at the nearer clock tower. ‘His train is in just over three hours.’

‘How long will he be away?’

‘Oh, he’ll be back tomorrow night.’

‘Short conversation.’

Li shrugged. ‘He’ll say what he has to say then go. At the end of the day it is her decision.’

They climbed into the Jeep. ‘What do
you
think she should do?’ She watched him closely, interested in his reply.

‘I think she should not have got pregnant,’ he said.

‘That’s not what I asked.’

He looked at her very seriously. ‘It is not my problem. I have enough of my own.’ And she realised that a veil was being drawn over a part of him he did not want revealed.

As he shifted into first gear and started to pull away, he had to brake sharply as a woman in her thirties wheeled a pram across their intended path. It was a strange, crude, wooden pram, with two tiny seats facing each other across a small, square table. Home-made, Margaret might have thought, except that she had seen others just like it in the street. But there was only one seat occupied. The other, empty one was a potent symbol of frustrated Chinese parenthood. Li didn’t seem to see it as he waited for the mother to pass, glaring at them as she did. Then he slipped back into gear and squeezed the Jeep into the main stream of traffic heading west on Beijingzhanxi Street.

III

Songbirds in bamboo cages hung among the pines, competing with wailing renditions of songs from the Beijing Opera. Their voices raised in Eastern discord, a group of a dozen old men, accompanied by the plucks and whines of age-old Chinese instruments, sang behind trembling wisteria in the pergola where yesterday Li had seen a drunken youth sucking alcohol from a plastic bottle. The same white-coated barber was clip-clipping among the trees, tufts of black hair tumbling to the sun-baked dusty earth. Bicycles leaned against tree trunks, their owners gathered around games of cards or chess. Somewhere in the distance, from the park itself, came the sound of a disco beat, insistent and incongruous.

Li and Margaret walked through the dappled early evening sunlight. Li said, ‘In the park there is a lake, Jade Lake, officially designated for swimming. In the winter it freezes over and it is used by skaters. But they cut a hole in the ice at one side for bathers to dip themselves in the freezing water. My uncle does this every morning.’

Margaret shivered at the thought. Li put a hand on her arm to stop her. She glanced at him, then followed his eyes to where an old man with dark, curling hair stood in the shade, legs apart, slowly arcing a sword above his head, before bringing it down in a long slow sweep through 180 degrees to point at the earth. In perfect slow motion, he swivelled on the ball of one foot, folding one leg high to his chest, and turned to swing the sword up and across his body, then out to his right, stamping his raised foot down with a thud, the sword now pointed directly at Li and Margaret. The old man glared at them with fiercely burning eyes and then broke into a broad grin. ‘Li Yan,’ he said. ‘Have you got my ticket?’

Li took the ticket from his pocket and held it out as he approached him. ‘It leaves at eight.’

Old Yifu looked beyond him at Margaret. ‘And you must be Dr Campbell,’ he said, his English almost without accent. He lowered his sword and held out his hand. ‘I am very pleased to meet you.’

Margaret shook his hand, bemused to find that Li’s legendary Uncle Yifu was this smiling, shrunken old man swinging a sword under the trees.

‘My Uncle Yifu,’ Li said.

‘I’ve heard a great deal about you … Mr …’ Margaret didn’t know how to address him.

‘Just call me Old Yifu. When you get to my age people call you “old” as a mark of respect.’

Margaret laughed. ‘That won’t come easy to me. In the States, to call someone “old” would be dismissive, or derogatory.’

He took her arm and steered her towards the low stone table where his chessmen were laid out on their board. ‘Ah, but in China to be old is to be venerated. Age equates with wisdom.’ He grinned. ‘We have a saying: “Old ginger tastes the best”. Sit down, please.’ He indicated a folding canvas chair. ‘Naturally, at my advanced age, I should be very wise. And, of course, everyone thinks I am.’ He laid his sword on the ground and sat opposite her, then leaned confidentially across the table. ‘I
would
be very wise if I could remember everything I knew.’ He sighed sadly. ‘The trouble is, nowadays I’ve forgotten more than I can remember.’ And his eyes twinkled as he added, ‘That is why I am still learning my English vocabulary. It helps to fill up all the empty places left in my head by everything I have forgotten.’

‘Well, you certainly haven’t forgotten how to charm a lady.’ She smiled back at him, an immediate rapport established.

‘Pah,’ he said dismissively. ‘Not much use to me now.’ He raised an eyebrow and nodded towards Li. ‘If only my nephew had inherited a little of it. But he takes after his father. Slow in affairs of the heart.’ He looked at Li. ‘What age are you now, Li Yan?’

Li was acutely embarrassed. ‘You know what age I am, Uncle.’

Old Yifu turned back to Margaret, mischief all over his face. ‘Thirty-three years old and still single. Doesn’t even have a girlfriend. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, I think.’

Margaret stifled her smile, enjoying Li’s discomfort.

‘I’m glad he at least took my advice,’ Old Yifu said.

‘Advice on what?’

‘Uncle, I think you should be going back to the apartment and getting packed,’ Li said.

Old Yifu ignored him. ‘On obtaining your help for the investigation.’

Li wished the ground would simply swallow him up. Margaret cocked an eyebrow at him then turned back to Old Yifu. ‘Oh, so that was your idea, was it?’

‘Well … let’s just say I encouraged him in that direction.’ Old Yifu bared his teeth in a broad smile. ‘Now I can see why he didn’t take
too
much persuasion. He didn’t tell me how attractive you were.’

‘Perhaps he doesn’t think I am.’

‘Oh, I do not think he would be blushing like that if he did not think so.’

Li could barely contain his embarrassment. He sighed and gazed off through the trees, teeth clenched. Margaret was enjoying herself.

Old Yifu asked, ‘Do you play chess?’

‘You don’t have time, Uncle. Your train is at eight. It is nearly five thirty.’

‘Of course I have time.’

Margaret said, looking at the board, ‘I think the chess you play may be a little different from the version I know.’

‘No, no, no. It is very similar. Instead of your representational carvings, we play with these wooden disks. The character on each disk tells us what it is.’

‘She’s not familiar with Chinese characters, Uncle. Once the pieces are out of position she’ll never remember what they are.’

‘I don’t think that will be a problem,’ Margaret said, a tiny edge to her voice. ‘I have a pretty well photographic memory.’

‘Good, good.’ Old Yifu clapped his hands with pleasure and began explaining the board and the rules. Instead of moving pieces into each square, you moved them on to the intersection. There was a King, but no Queen, just two King’s Guides. The four-square area at the centre-back at each side was the only area in which the King could move – one space at a time at right angles. The same rule applied to the King’s Guides, except that they could only move on the diagonal. The pawns were called Soldiers, the knight was a Horse, and while it moved in the same way as the knight, it could not jump another piece to do so. There were other minor variations in the names of pieces and their movements, but essentially it was the game Margaret knew and played in the States. The board, however, was dissected by a single broad belt representing a river. And you didn’t ‘take’ a piece, you ‘ate’ it.