Free Tokyo by Mo Hayder Page A

sufficient to feed his family, where the ducks wander wild and pigs snout through the bean groves, and I wonder, can I hope to escape my past?
    With the clear eyes of hindsight, I see that my mother always had plans for Shujin. They had been together to the village
     
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    fortuneteller, an old man whom I recall with no fondness, a blind man with a long white beard, persistently led round the villages like a trained bear by a child in straw sandals. The fortuneteller carefully noted down Shujin’s date, time and place of birth, and with a few scribbled characters and a juggling of his mysterious ivory tablets, soon, to my mother’s delight, judged Shujin to have the perfect proportion of the five elements, the correct balance of metal, wood, water, fire and earth, to produce myriad sons for me.
    Naturally I resisted. And would have resisted to this day, had my mother not become ill. To my fury, my desperation, even as she drew close to death she refused to forsake her country beliefs, her distrust of new technology. Instead of travelling, at my fevered insistence, to the good modern hospitals in Nanking, she put her trust in the local quacks, who spent long hours examining her tongue, emerging from her sick room with declarations of ‘An impossible surfeit of yin. It is a mystery, a scandal, that Doctor Yuan did not comment on this earlier.’ In spite of their potions, their brews and prognostications, she grew sicker and sicker.
    ‘So much for your superstitions,’ I told her, as she lay in her sickbed. ‘You understand, do you, that you are destroying me by refusing to come to Nanking?’
    ‘Listen.’ She rested her hand on my arm. Her brown hand, weathered by years in the provinces, lying across the crisp sleeve of the western suit I wore. I remember looking at it and thinking, Is this really the flesh that gave me life? Is it really? ‘You can still make me happy.’
    ‘Happy?’
    ‘Yes.’ Her eyes were bright and feverish. ‘Make me happy. Marry the Wangs’ daughter.’
    And eventually, out of nothing more than weary guilt, I capitulated. Really, the outrageous power our mothers have! Even the great Chiang Kai-shek was similarly swayed by his mother, even he submitted to an arranged marriage to please her. My qualms were terrible - what a disastrous match: the village girl with her ri shu almanacs, her lunar calendars, and me, the clear eyed calculator, rapt in his logic and his foreign dictionaries. I
     
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    worried intensely about what my colleagues would think, for I am, like most of them, a devout Republican, an admirer of the clear, forward-looking ideology of the Kuomintang, a cheerful supporter of Chiang Kai-shek, deeply sceptical about superstition, and everything that has held back China for so long. When the marriage took place, in my home town, I told no one. There were no colleagues to witness the rambling ceremony, no one to see me undergo the humiliating rituals - the token argument with the bridesmaids on the doorstep, caps of cypress, the tortuous procession avoiding wells or the houses of widows - every moment firecrackers making the entire ensemble jump like startled rabbits.
    But my family were satisfied and I was regarded as heroic. My mother, maybe feeling she had been released from her earthly obligation, died shortly afterwards. ‘With a smile on her face that was marvellous to see’, if my dear sisters are to be believed. Shujin became a proper mourner, getting down on her knees herself to dust the floor of my parents’ house with talcum powder: ‘We’ll marvel at her footprints when her spirit comes back to us.’
    ‘Please don’t talk like that,’ I said impatiently. ‘It was these very peasant beliefs that killed her. If she had listened to the teachings of our president—’
    ‘Hmmph,’ said Shujin, getting up and dusting off her hands. ‘I’ve heard enough about your precious president, thank you. All this rubbish about New Life. Tell me, what is this