A BITTER DISAPPOINTMENT #1
by Ronald Sparling
James came from a prominent Toronto family and was married to a well-off woman whose family had emigrated from Hong Kong. He was very serious and proper and spoke in deep monotones that put you to sleep immediately; one of those grey, featureless monoliths constructed during the Stalinist period personified. He had an excellent memory and could recite Wordsworth word for word, but without feeling or heart, the way a monkey can play piano if you teach it which keys to hit.
He had come to China to teach English at a university in Shijiazhuang, three hundred kilometres south west of Beijing. The city was like James himself, grey and dull with only the main hotel standing over three storeys. At the time China had no high-speed trains and the journey from the capital took seven hours.
James and his wife arrived in September, but the cold of winter was already approaching and the air was thick with coal dust from the fires and in the afternoon when you came home you could use your finger to wipe white streaks down your cheeks. They arrived at night, their dinosaur bus lumbering through the darkened streets, past lonely, naked light bulbs hanging from lines strung between the trees that lined the roadside. Past pool tables partially hidden beneath slumbering families or surrounded by small groups of young men drinking beer between shots. Past relics of steam rollers and road graders parked next to tent villages pitched in dirt lots among piles of broken concrete left over from defunct buildings long since collapsed. Past laundry drooping over confused electrical wiring strung above clans of hairless, damaged dogs.
On their first night both James and his new wife were stricken with that most common of afflictions that accompanies an abrupt change of diet. That combined with the university’s policy of shutting water supply from midnight until 6 a.m. had left them with a bursting toilet. Had it not disappeared with the first push of the handle, James had sworn to heave his unpacked bags onto the next vehicle heading toward the capital.
Each morning James and his new wife awoke at six to the sounds of a Chinese army marching tune that blasted forth from speakers located around the campus. Ten minutes later the grounds were lined with students following their teachers in their morning calisthenics. At first, James watched the students jumping from pose to pose amazed at how disciplined their formations were, but the novelty wore off and then he merely rolled over and placed a pillow over his head when the music started. The routine never changed except for those few mornings when the students pulled and burned grass in their relentless, Mao-inspired war on nature, leaving bare, dry sand for the wind to snatch and merge with the speckles of coal that drifted ceaselessly throughout the city.
They had been at the university for three weeks when an invitation from the director of the local opera company arrived. They were to view a Chinese opera version of Othello. The director, who was also the writer, spoke no English, they no Chinese.
The opera house was old, but not as old as it was dilapidated. There were only eleven rows of seats, the back of the theatre having been amputated by a hastily constructed wall of rotted plywood, the layers peeling and bubbling, trying to escape the grip of what little glue remained.
To either side of the theatre was a toilet emitting an angry stench of antique piss and shit. James and his new wife breathed through their shirt tails for as long as possible, then gave up and gasped in the tiny wrathful particles that coerced their way through their nostrils to assault the back of their throats like miniature sledgehammers. Mixed with the faeces and urine were strains of spoiled cooking oil, bean paste and dried fish, imported in styrofoam containers by the dozen or so other patrons of the arts. Above all this floated the musk and deep-seated body odours seeping from the aged, damp and ratted overcoats left over from the Mao days of uniform fashion the locals still wore.
A translator sat with James and his new wife. She tried valiantly to make herself heard above the clamour of the Chinese opera. James and his new wife smiled and nodded and she continued bravely with the full knowledge that they couldn’t hear a word. Maybe she thought since they spoke English, they must know every line of Shakespeare.
Halfway through the performance they discovered what lay behind the plywood wall; from ruptured speakers, juddering and distorting what once might have passed for music, wannabe pop stars straight from government shops, factories and coal dispensaries spewed forth mournful tales of homes left behind and loved ones lost.
In the end, when the opera was over, James and his wife clambered onto the stage, and stood with the cast to the flash of local press and the muffled, painful echoes of Chinese pop songs.
By the beginning of November, the cold was bitter as James and his wife walked to the cafeteria where lukewarm rice pudding and cold toast awaited them each morning. The cold and the coal dust had given many of his colleagues and students a deep hoarse cough and the lack of things to do in the city was leaving James bored and depressed.
James found whiskey imported from Scotland at the main hotel in town and peanut butter in a back alley where he’d least expected to find peanut butter. The old man who sold it made the peanut butter himself. He’d discovered it while living in Beijing but sold very little as few in Shijiazhuang were aware of its existence.
On Monday of the third week in November, James bought a fresh bottle of whiskey and a jar of peanut butter, closed all the curtains in the rooms the university had given him and his new wife and locked the door. No one, not his new wife, not his colleagues and not his students, could entice him to leave the darkness of his self-imposed exile. When he finally did reappear five days later, it was to find his new wife had returned to Beijing and caught the first flight to Hong Kong. He chose to ignore this new development, behaving as if his internment and his new wife’s departure had been the plan all along.
A week later James caught pneumonia and was placed in the local hospital. By coincidence the hospital was named after another Canadian, Dr Norman Bethune, who’d set up field hospitals for Mao’s revolutionary army. Bethune was a terrible egoist but was fortunate enough to die of a blood infection before he could piss off Mao and thus managed to make it into Mao’s little red book.
James was bitterly disappointed the same did not happen to him.