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I knew an old man
in China who had white hair and a light voice, and who had grown up
in a remote village in the 1930s, accessible only by boat down the
Shaoshui river. He had been taught by missionaries in the 1930s.
The only words he remembered were ‘alleluia’ and ‘apple.’ He had
joined the communist party after graduating with the aim of uniting
China and throwing out the cruel and corrupt government. At the age
of 72 he had retired, and spent his days watching his state income
fall behind inflation, tending his small vegetable plot around the
back of the block of flats where we lived.
He lived with his
grandson. His grandson was twelve. His parents had missed out on
an education because of the Cultural Revolution. They had managed
to find jobs in a sweat shop in the Special Economic Zone of
Shenzhen: they had one week holiday a year. They sent money home.
The boy was thin and liked to play soccer. The only English words
he knew were ‘Manchester United.’
The sixty years
that separated the two generations of a family contain the most
turbulent times of the twentieth century: Japanese invasion,
liberation, famine, the Cultural Revolution, economic reform. It
was in an attempt to capture the state of modern China that I wrote
The Drink and Dream Teahouse.
My initial
motivation was to say everything I felt about modern China: the
disparity between country and city; the affects of the modern
history on the lives of the people I knew; the struggle of the
people to survive switches in government policies: and at the end of
all the sacrifices to make communism succeed – the ultimate irony of
the Communist Party’s rejection of communism in favour of the
‘Socialist Market Economy’ – one of the most un-feted forms of raw
capitalism in the world: with labour unions banned, labour law
ignored, and the politicians and businessmen inextricably linked.
But increasingly the characters took over: and through their stories
the greater vision became clear.
I had lived in
rural China for almost five years when I started to collect ideas
for the Drink and Dream Teahouse. I had no real sense of the book
or what would happen in it – except that I wanted it to follow the
course of a year: and to sum up all that I felt about Modern China.
I knew the setting would be in a rural town like the ones I had
lived in, where the communist era industries were all closing, and
where the young people all left for the coastal areas to work in
sweat shop factories. A week before I left a teacher in the college
died, and a marquee was put up, and one night I walked home through
the monsoon rain and heard karaoke singing: a woman was singing in
the marquee and a group of men were sitting round playing cards. I
went up and we sat there, paid our respects and chatted for a
while. The image was so strong I wanted to use it to start the
book. When I sat down to write I held that in my head and began the
opening chapter with three things that had to happen: a factory
closes, a man dies and it starts raining.
That scene made it
through to the final book with almost no alterations. I had no idea
where the story would go from there: but found I had such a set of
vivid characters I began to follow their lives through the story and
see where they led.
I wanted the Drink
and Dream Teahouse to feel as if it had been written by a Chinese
person themselves. All the time I was writing I was conscious that
my Chinese friends would read the book, and would be very quick to
criticise if they felt that I was not portraying them in a genuine
way. My knowledge of Mandarin Chinese was vital in picking up the
rhythms of speech and language and using those in English.
Character is the
centre of this book: and like all characters, these people have
lives that they live which The Drink and Dream Teahouse gave us
small glimpses into. Beyond the end of the book their lives
continue, even after the last page has been read and closed. I have
not been back to Shaoyang since I finished the Drink and Dream
Teahouse, but if I did, I would not be surprised to be walking down
the street and meet Da Shan with Little Dragon, and if I did it
would be nice to stop and chat and find out what has been happening
since the last page of this book came to an end.
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