cooperation, and for two successive years we shared the same bench near the window through which we twice saw the spring buds of an elm tree transform into clouds of cool green that took up a considerable portion of sky and shaded us from the sun. Now we exchanged not only schoolwork but also marbles, kaleidoscopes, penknives, comics, stamps, solid wooden tops that we spun with a whip and hollow German tops that hummed as they spun, danced across the sky and zig-zagged through the air with a long whine …
“At the height of our friendship we pooled our pocket money to set up a fund, with Ma as treasurer. Full of heroic aspirations, we promised ourselves we would increase our capital without spending any of it until it could eventually finance a long trip to Manchuria, where my great-grandfather, a former aristocrat nicknamed Seventy-one, lived in exile. But at the end of the first fortnight we gave in at the sight of some glazed duck with glossy, red translucent skin, hanging in a restaurant window We bought it and, not daring to sit down, had it cut up and put into a paper bag. Out in the street we savoured a few mouthfuls and it tasted so divine we thought we’d been transported to Heaven; the trees of Peking seemed to float around us and adults swam through the air like famished sharks, launching themselves at us, their noses homing in on our paper bag. We wandered through the streets eating it, no, devouring it, piece by piece, licking the last drops of its exquisite fat trickling down our fingers, before realising our Manchurian dream had gone up in smoke.
“Mr. Liu was succeeded by a strapping young woman who wore a red scarf—the official sign of the young revolutionary elite—round her neck, and a new era, hers, began with a radical reorganisation of our classroom with Ma and myself as the major victims. It was the middle of winter, a few weeks before the end-of-year exams, the worst time to separate us. In her triumphant opera singers voice she condemned Ma to irrevocable exile on the other side of the classroom. I still remember the moment she passed sentence: we huddled together on the bench, in the black shadows of the bare elm, its branches darkening our desk as well as Ma’s enormous head, eclipsing his entire body. He stood up briskly, took his satchel without looking at me, or anyone else, crossed the room with his head lowered and slumped onto the new bench he was sharing with a girl.
“Now Ma could no longer help inflicting the disappointment he so feared on his mother. Once summoned, she came by train from her distant province for a meeting in the headmaster’s office, and through the open doorway I saw her—crushed, as if struck with a mallet. The headmaster was talking, she was crying. That image, captured by the photographic lenses that were my adolescent eyes, was imprinted on my retinas for such a long time that I still find it easy to describe now: in the distance, far in the background, through the window and beyond the dark branches of thuya and cypress trees (the headmasters office was two floors above our classroom), beyond the school fence, beyond 4th May Boulevard, stand the high walls of the Forbidden City, ringed by the blue-grey of the frozen moat on which the minute figures of skaters flit about like crazed wasps, bending, fluttering, glittering, ‘so small they play tricks with your eyes,’ as the old poem goes. And in the foreground a woman crying silently. She fascinated me at the time, not for that mute eruption of her maternal heart, but for her brutal metamorphosis: she became ugly! Ugly and old. What a contrast compared to my mother, the most beautiful woman in the museum, if not the whole of Peking.
“My mother’s first name, as she herself delights in saying, is made up of just one proud, insolent syllable, a single vowel which refuses alliance with any of its vocalised peers and certainly not with a consonant, giving it a strong ring of protest: E. There are few words in our language with the same pronunciation. My mother’s E means ‘Mulberry Bombyx,’ the silkworm moth, and is made up of two ideograms, the one on the right meaning ‘worm’ and the one on the left meaning ‘me.’ She often says, ‘I do wonder which one of our ancestors invented my name.’