Under Fishbone Clouds Read online

  In stretches of sun-lashed fields in rural India, the English East India Company hit upon a solution to reset the scales: poppies. From the unripened plants the resin was extracted and dried, and the chestnut-coloured mass tied into British trading bags. By the 1830s, despite the Chinese ban on importing or cultivating opium, British merchants had reversed the flow of trade. British silver, as well as silver from the quickly depleting Chinese stocks, began to trickle back across the ocean. To halt the illegal trade that was crippling the Chinese economy, in 1838 government representatives stopped ships and ordered the handover of opium. They then dumped nine million Mexican silver dollars’ worth of it into the sea. For days the waves lapping at the harbour bubbled and foamed and frothed. The British viewed this as an act of war.

  The Opium Wars succeeded in showing the military supremacy of the foreign forces. During the Second Opium War, British forces burnt down the summer palace in Beijing and forced humiliating treaties, including the perpetual lease of Hong Kong and an area around the Kowloon peninsula, on the defeated Chinese. Perhaps more importantly, the trade in opium was legalised.

  This was one of the many reasons why Old Bian was reclining upon a cushioned opium bed, privately witnessing the swaying silk curtains melt into rain-like threads of light. Years drifted by for him like this, in the pull of gentle tides. His fingers clutched at the air, and he was handed the long bamboo pipe by a lithe waiter hovering nearby. He had come from a drawn-out lunch with one of his mistresses, and, eyeing up the skinny young waiter, wondered if he had enough energy to manage it again.

  His mistress’s room had been a mess, but she had at least prepared a few dishes for them to eat, though he left these untouched. The place needed a decent clean. Didn’t he pay for the room, and its upkeep? Was she worth it –forced to listen to her whine about her brat for a couple of hours just for a maudlin, tearful fuck? He decided not. There were plenty of others he could rely on. Anyway, the outer contours of her face were beginning to pinch into crow’s feet, and he couldn’t abide that.

  Before Bian got the hit, pain slipping away and bliss prickling up behind his eyelids, he was restless. Sleeplessness, itchy skin, constipation. He took another drag. His worries dissipated. Someone was talking. He raised his eyes, and felt his body floating, glowing; he could feel it tingling in his pores.

  The establishment in which he was lying was built around a long, snaking corridor; the doors to each of the spacious rooms remained closed while there were people walking between them, so that for all one knew, one’s son or neighbour could be in an adjoining room. Furthermore, no one ever seemed to leave by the same door that they entered, though Bian was not sure whether this was for the same reason or not.

  The ball was black and firm in his hands, like a slab of dark honeycomb in the dull afternoon light. Of course, he had nodded to the waiter, just put it on my tab.

  Old Bian’s list of colleagues, backroom associates and rivals was changing almost too fast for him to keep track. Many had been closed down by the occupation, reported covertly to the new authorities for some offence or another – a word in the right ear after a long dinner was all it took. Others had been dragged down by the cost of free meals for the new first-class citizens, conspicuous in their camouflage. Meanwhile, those who had not headed south in self-imposed exile with the Nationalists were trying to buy their way out of trouble. This did not always work. Every week, where the river narrowed, fishermen hauled up pale, bloated bodies stopping the flow. After stripping them of clothes, rings and sometimes teeth, they were thrown back. So what? Bian thought. Serves them right. Bian was now used to the sight of old aquantainces shaking with withdrawal, grown men worn down to sandy-skinned ghosts, pinching pennies and wearing the same clothes day in day out, packing off their old girlfriends and concubines to whore-houses or different cities where they would not be recognised. So what? There would always be people to do business with: Chinese, Japanese, British, French, Germans, Americans or even the Russians, despite their crazy ideas. He chuckled. How does one talk business with people like that? He now ignored his former associates when he passed them on the streets.

  It was his grandfather, bald and stooped from his early twenties to his premature death, who had expanded the first famous restaurant until there were three of them etched like birthmarks upon the resilient flesh of the city. And there he was now, raising a limp arm to the waiter to place a reclining chair beside Bian’s sprawling pile of cushions. No, Bian thought to himself, that cannot be right, he has been dead for almost fifty years. He rubbed his eyes and saw that the man beside him was neither his grandfather nor completely bald – at the base of his shiny crown a slender black tail knotted down the back of his neck. He was talking.

  ‘Ah, Bian. My blessings to your family. I trust they are healthy and happy?’

  ‘They are. And yours?’

  ‘They are wonderful. The Jade Emperor has watched over us both, has he not?’ The two men acted as though the world was the same as it had always been, as though there was no invasion, no war, no famine, no poverty and no death. They both felt they must maintain that nothing had changed, or else they themselves would begin to disappear, to fade into the past.

  ‘Business,’ and here the pony-tailed man took a drag from his own pipe, letting the sentence hang in the air with the fine tendrils of smoke, ‘is good? Well, I have no doubt of it. Xiang, I hear, is doing terribly. Pity.’

  ‘It would be terribly vulgar to dwell on work –’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘But the restaurants are in good hands.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And I have no doubt that you are doing well. It is an auspicious year for expansion, or so they say.’ Bian let his eyelids sink closer together as he spoke. He could not quite place who this man was.

  ‘Of course, I quite agree, it would be vulgar to talk of it. Though, as you know …’ But the words were already moving beyond Bian, merging with the buzzing of insects, the irritant rustling of wings rubbing together. He closed his eyes and let them carry him away. It was only when the room had sunk into silence that Bian realised he was expected to respond.

  ‘Let the heavens be thanked for prosperity,’ Bian said.

  The man with the pony-tail nodded. He was pleased.

  ‘Your daughters have nearly finished their schooling?’ he asked with a hint of a grin.

  Bian knew what was coming but could find no way to skirt around the required etiquette, the subtle sparring and dropping of hints. So this is what he wants, Bian thought. A match with my daughter. Bian reached for the pipe, trying to appear relaxed and congenial, though he was tempted to ignore the man and hope he got the hint and went away. He had emplyed this tactic many times, and it usually worked, with people eventually moving off as he stared unflinchingly toward the window. As long as the pipe was near. He calculated quickly and, though he still could not place the man’s name, surmised that it would be foolish to risk offending him. He may yet, in some way, prove useful.

  Bian sighed. ‘They crave learning more than jewellery.’

  ‘And why not? An educated woman makes for an enlightened mother, one who can bring up strong, intelligent sons.’

  ‘If only it were that simple. She has plans for college.’ They both knew who he was talking about – Yuying, the eldest daughter, fourteen and a half: marriagable age. It would have been disastrous to think of marrying another daughter before the eldest. That would be shameful. Bian saved the worst from his interrogator: that his daughter wished to continue to study Japanese.

  ‘Ah, but when she is married, she will have more important things to focus her efforts on.’

  ‘Of course, of course, she would not neglect her womanly duties.’ Bian was anxious to end the conversation.

  ‘My son, you know –’

  ‘Will become a great man. I have no doubt of that. I have heard enough people praise him to know that he will equal his father.’ Bian was used to making such false compliment
s; he had no memory of the young man he was talking of, but at least the ponytailed man next to him was now smiling and bowing his head in false modesty.

  ‘And I too have heard of the many suitors you have turned away from your daughter. Are we to be next?’

  ‘No, of course not. However, she wishes to study in college.’

  ‘But be sensible. These are the whims of women: they change every day. Today it is college, tomorrow it will be new shoes, a dress; the day after, a pet, a child. And so it goes.’

  ‘If only.’

  ‘I am beginning to believe that you do not want her to be married. You would rather keep your daughters close to you, your family within your home. It is not easy to give up a daughter. But she will get a new life. That is the way of the world. Think on it.’

  The unknown man got up and moved wobblingly away from the bed of cushions, his pony-tail swishing behind him. Bian drew from his pipe and coughed up the harsh, scratchy smoke; it was run down, almost out. He finished it and closed his eyes. He hated these encounters, the false smiles and rules of mutual deception. Though perhaps the other man was right – of all the intermediaries that had come to argue the case of rich and renowned young men from the stateliest families in the city, none had impressed him enough to offer up a limb of his family. Once a girl leaves, she cannot return. Or if she does, it will be as a wife, as a mother, as someone else – not the daughter he had studied silently for over a decade. Grandchildren, well that would be fine, but what would they be – Lis, Xues, Wangs? What about Bian? Who will keep this name alive? Into his mind came the faces of the carved ancestors in the main hall of his home, their faces knotting and contorting with the flow of the auburn cedar’s grain. (I have met each one in their time, and trust me, they were a hard bunch to please.)

  The afternoon shadow conquered the chequers of the tiled floor, and Bian smoked and counted how many weeks it had been since he last slept with his wife.

  He took another puff and let his thoughts roam to the brothel two streets down, and the girls there that he had catalogued according to their flaws: the buck-toothed adolescent, the pockmarked matron, the russet-haired twenty-something with the child-bearing paunch. He did not care about the pretty girls, the well-dressed madams who shyly slipped from silk to lie with the patrons on rustling cushions. He could find those types anywhere. What he wanted was the sight of veins, the smell of sour breath and the sound of grunting noises; the bristle of dark hairs on legs or underarms, maps of moles drawn across damp thighs, and all the other parts they no longer bothered to hide. There was an honesty in this that he denied himself in all other aspects of his life.

  Why not take a concubine, like us, many of his associates had asked. Bian had nothing but contempt for them – groups of women sharing the master’s secrets with each other and discussing him behind his back; what could be worse? It was safer this way, cheap rooms rented on different sides of the city, a jigsaw not quite pieced together. Creeping from bed to bed in your own home cannot be respectable, he thought to himself. And, despite the bad examples of his own urges (which, he told himself, it was too late to remedy), his daughters should learn that a woman need not disappear into the unfathomable depth of a man’s shadow. It was often his daughters’ faces that persisted between the dreams, and not those of the many sons – boys that, though they lacked his family name, had inherited his ravine jawline, chicken-thin legs and rice-bowl forehead – playing in the alleys he often sneaked past. How many secret children did he have? He was not sure. He kept pieces of fruit in his pockets to hand out when they ran up to him, so that he did not have to speak to them. He took another drag and tried to shake himself free of these thoughts.

  In the eyes of his peers he was too reserved, too unpredictable. All that money, but no concubines! And now daughters who showed no sign of leaving the family home! Bian knew all the things that were said about him. Furthermore, although he feigned ignorance, he knew that his wife now played a large part in his business empire (after all, someone must – and he had never had a head for figures, profit margins, stock-taking or staff issues). Shameful, people whispered. In an age when women were still treated like slaves in many rich households, and new wives were often known to commit suicide in the cold, harsh rooms of patriarchal houses, the sight of his only wife hobbling alone from the restaurant, rocking along on her dainty curled feet, was enough to get the last of the powerful families talking. Yet such was Bian’s influence that few ever dared spread these simple truths in public.

  Here are the things Bian had been offered (discreetly, of course, by the matchmakers sent scurrying to his house to sound him out) for his daughter:

  Four donkeys and a mule (the latter past its best);

  a diamond the size of a sucked-dry plum stone;

  a pair of marble Fu Lions to guard his home;

  a river of yellow Suzhou silk (the colour previously reserved for emperors);

  rice and wheat fields that stretched beyond the city’s borders;

  a Ming-dynasty carving of a demon, which he had eyed covetously in a rival’s restaurant;

  the several necklaces and rings that had previously belonged to the wife of a recently executed warlord and which had just happened to have found their way into a suitor’s hands;

  sprays of silver;

  animal skins, tanned and beaten into clothes, rugs and wall-hangings;

  a Qing-dynasty hand-carved dining table and stately chairs, replete with phoenix motifs;

  storerooms full of different teas: fur-tip, melon-seed, oolong and jasmine.

  It remains easy, even in the twenty-first century, to buy a wife. Everyone needs sons and heirs, especially when there is work to be done. And with the population snowballing in favour of men, there are distant villages, indeed whole rural towns, without enough women to go around. There is money to be made. And though they do not come willingly, they continue to arrive, these trafficked women forcibly migrated to places without even the most barren of broken roads to carry them back home.

  Even the dead cannot begin their twilight journeys beyond the city’s backstreets alone. Families in rural areas go to great lengths to secure the corpses of unwed girls to bury alongside the bodies of their sons; and if they cannot be bought, bodies are sometimes stolen. The unmarried, you see, only constitute half a life. If no corpse can be found, one made of straw will have to suffice. Perhaps in the streets of the dead these straw women will gaze upon their husbands and speak. What might they say? You can buy whole universes and hide them in places no one else will think to look. There are places you have not yet been that are more vivid in your memory than those you have left behind.

  The coals were burning down to blackened embers in the grate, and the keening wind blew the window open. Bian listened to the far-off screech of truck tyres as the troops loaded and unloaded at designated outposts. He had decided what he would do. He distrusted the look of the matchmakers, all those sly, crooked smirks and winks and hints and pattings of pockets. Perhaps he thought of Pu Yi, installed as a puppet emperor in Manchuria to give an air of legitimacy to the Japanese rule, or perhaps he thought of his family name, the single arched character that had hung above the Bian restaurants for almost a hundred years. Perhaps he thought only of his daughter. But he now had a plan, and the heirs of the most important men in the city were unnecessary. He would find her a husband himself. Why give up a daughter when you can gain a son? All he needed to do was find a suitable candidate, someone who would follow orders, and it would be as simple as all his other subtle manipulations, the transactions he conducted daily with the most languorous of fixed smiles.

  However, this was not the kind of magic trick he would have wanted me to reveal the workings of: his business deals, like his other more casual intimacies, were always conducted behind closed doors.

  The next time I saw the Jade Emperor was when I was up in heaven, running errands petitioned for in backroom prayers. He was among the dragons and eight immortals, but as soon a
s he saw me he descended from his throne and beckoned me to a garden that sprouted out beneath our feet – within a few minutes I found myself beside a still stream, and I stood awkwardly as the emperor settled himself on a seat of humming stones.

  ‘I thought I would see how it is going,’ he said, smiling up at me. ‘What have you learnt about the human heart so far, I wonder?’

  ‘Well, Your Excellency, I know that the heart beats a hundred thousand times a day, that without it life stutters out and stops … that it is a four-roomed muscle which squeezes and contracts to pump blood through the body …’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he said impatiently. ‘It is the engine of a journey: life flows from heart to artery to capillary to vein and back to the heart. You will perhaps come to understand that everything is bound into this cycle. There is neither end nor beginning to this motion, though it may admit variation, or the eventual inevitable entropy of certain components. Take time itself, or the fiction humans refer to as history. There is only the circle. There is war, then peace, then new wars; the division of the country, then its unification, then the carving up of its borders; liberating heroes who become tyrants, then new heroes who rise up to topple them and establish new regimes; stagnation, then revolution, then conservatism; birth, then death, then rebirth.’

  ‘Or perhaps it is that everything changes constantly, except the way we see it,’ I ventured.

  ‘No one sees the world but me,’ the Jade Emperor declared emphatically. ‘Everyone else simply interprets it. Alas, I regret that I have other business to attend to. Tell me, at least, how your research is progressing. A blackbird whispered to me that you had picked a man to follow purely by sticking a pin in a map.’