Wuhan card players ©2001, UrbisMedia
I was mildly surprised when the elderly man who took his place beside me at the trough-like urinal in the park in Wuhan was my height, maybe even a scratch taller. He was an exception among Chinese men. The second surprise was the excellence of his English.
“You must be finding this weather intolerably hot and humid,” he said, keeping his eyes fixed on the wall straight ahead of him.
I had noticed his height in my peripheral vision, but didn’t want to turn to look at him, the way guys avoid eye contact when doing their “business.”
With barely a trace of accent he continued: “Do you know that Wuhan is one of China’s “Four Furnaces”? The others are Hangzhou, Guangzhou and Nanjing, but I think Wuhan burns hottest.” He turned and walked over to the wash basin.
He was wearing one of those almost diaphanous white shirts that are ubiquitous on Chinese men in summer, nicely-pressed gray slacks and rubber flip-flop sandals. On his head was a green baseball cap with a yellow block letter “O” above the peak.
I estimated him to be at least in his seventies. He carried a cane but didn’t seem to need to rely on it.
“It’s making a well-roasted believer out of me,” I said, quickly, wondering if I was being too idiomatic.
Anticipating my next thought he said, “Not as many tourists come to this furnace as to the others, so I welcome the chance to speak English. I am a retired university lao shi , a teacher of English.”
I wondered silently how he knew that my language was English.
Outside in the little park, enclosed in gray stuccoed walls topped with darker gray scalloped tiles, and opened at various points by graceful “moon gates,” were a few dozen elderly Chinese men. Most were dressed like the English teacher, but several wore shorts and white tank-top undershirts against the heat and humidity. Knots of them played mahjong, checkers and dominoes at small, low tables that they squatted around on low chairs, their ubiquitous jars of green tea beside them.
They chatted, argued, joked and I suspect, told each other the “lies” for which hazy memory can be held to account. Packs of wretched Chinese cigarettes with names like “Double Happiness” and “Phenix” cluttered the tables as well, from which most of them seemed to be chain-smoking. Clouds of blue smoke swirled up in halos around the shaved and bald heads, most of which were speckled with age spots, and a few that showed signs of long ago trauma. They laughed, kibitzed, and spit through their missing teeth and wispy little mustaches.
Off in a corner of the little park beneath a tree a ye-ye (grandfather) sat back in a wooden chair propped against the wall. Beside him a little girl I assumed to be his granddaughter, maybe great-granddaughter, napped in a canvas, hammock chair wearing not more than a little pair of white underpants to keep cool.
I wanted a picture of him and the little girl, a generational tableau that had some vague resonance in my own life. I approached him, pointing to my camera and then making a frame with my hands like a Hollywood director, and asking respectfully if it was OK. He nodded his assent and then looked away.
It wasn’t until I was home and looking at the proof sheet of the black and white photos I shot in the park that day that I noticed the eyes of the old ye-ye . The stare, that old man gaze, focused on some cloud bank of memories about which I can only guess. Could he be thinking about his youth on some farm, maybe of the famines and floods that surely marked his time? Maybe he was in the Long March with Mao, or perhaps recalling the horrors of the Cultural Revolution. He’s evidently old enough to have spanned all the tumultuous times of China in this century, into a China that is so vastly different from when he was his grandchild’s age.
Today’s China cannot be said to be his China. Yet it was his contemporary, Deng Xiaopeng, China’s last leader from the old order, who thrust his country into the 21 st Century. Market capitalism with “social characteristics” was the justification and connection with the old economic order. “To get rich is glorious” became the anthem for its headlong pursuit. And “it doesn’t matter whether the cat is white or black, as long as it catches mice,” served as the rhetoric for those who would remain doctrinaire in their allegiance to what remained of communism’s foibles. His China was fading further into the distance of memory.
“May you live in interesting times,” the Chinese saying goes. It’s actually a curse, but I think that “boring times” would be a curse upon the memory of an almost equal cruelty.
I found myself thinking that so much of the personal, the human, the particulars of China’s modern era resided in the memories of the old men in that park. My curse was that I could not converse with them, to learn what they might divulge to me of their pasts.
I brought that matter up with the English professor when I later encountered him again on the way to the urinals (such frequency being a different curse on old men). But he was not forthcoming. “We have seen many things, good and bad, in our lives,” he said, “but it is the future that matters. Only that we can change.”
Spoken like a true teacher, I thought. So I said, changing the subject, “The ‘O’ on your hat, Ohio State University?”
“Oregon State University,” he replied, “Ohio State’s color is red.”
“Right, ‘Go Ducks,’” I said, making a little pumping fist gesture.
He mimicked me, smiling. “Go Ducks.”
I wondered whether the smile owed something to the predilection the Chinese have for the flavor of roasted duck.
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©2004, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 6.28.2004)