A brief look at whores, virgins and 'progress' in China

Lit candles in the intense summer, the trailing willow branches are snuffed out, their smoke and shadows burning in the canals of Shaoxing, our first home in China, two and a half hours by bus north-west of Shanghai. Here the washing women bang their laundry against the huge steps that descend to the ancient canals.

Centuries later, the men are still trying their hand at fishing, though not as deft or as many as fifty years ago, the laorenjia, the senior citizens, say. They release cormorants onto the waterways to catch fish, the birds’ throats half-gagged with rope. Their heads dart into the water and come up again with large fish thrashing in their mouths. Their long throats and necks gobble and jerk as they try in vain to swallow their prey. The men haul back the ungainly birds, using a wooden pole with a hoop attached to them. The fish, sweating with sunlight, flop on the deck and the indignant, squawking cormorants are tossed onto the water again.

The grandmothers, mending or washing clothes in the shadows under the bridges, smile at the men’s luck and know their ancestors smile too. They are sad the young men do not know the benevolence of their ancestors and cluck among themselves about the days before the Cultural Revolution and The Great Step Forward. There are fewer of these elderly women now. Somehow they survived. Their faces, leathered from decades of work, hold many secrets.

In Shanghai the elderly women are memorialised in a museum at Shanghai Normal University. The museum has on display the clothing and other artefacts Japanese soldiers and their “comfort” Chinese women used in the Second World War. Slowly, in a daze, these laorenjia walk around the museum area, looking at the comfort beds and Japanese military regalia in the most bizarre museum area — in terms of its purpose — that I have yet seen. Perhaps among the elderly are one or two of the comfort women, or their daughters, or their friends. Their eyes are secretive as they shuffle around this place with its emblems of torture and bizarre erotica. Their faces are examples of that famous, oriental inscrutability I read about before coming to China. Many of the comfort women fled from their Japanese masters. But now they, and their family, come back, more than sixty years later — for what? To make their peace? Why let the general public know the dishonour of what their families did, including their grandchildren? Why did I come here? They also stare at me, deliberately and unashamedly stop, put their hands behind their backs and stare at me for a long time, something Chinese people often do, especially the older folk and the mainlanders.

The glimmer in ancient Chinese eyes: shadows among tree roots, or the dark in river water that ripples behind oars and hands; then the disturbance becomes still again, unreadable. Suddenly their eyes can be read again: that sadness once more, or the twinkle of humour as they gaze for a long moment at me and pat their tummies to show they are wondering at the size of my body. To them I am a very large man, almost a giant perhaps. Most Han Chinese people are slender and short, with narrow hands and feet, sapling bodies.

In Shaoxing, Marion and I watch the cormorants. Crowds gather to watch their performance; I learn from one or two that this is no longer a commonplace sight as more and more buildings are thrown up. China is a dervish of free enterprise “progress”. In the one year Marion and I are in Shaoxing, a lot more cars and trucks are rumbling down the roads with little scooters scuttling between; the man in front and his girlfriend or wife sitting side-saddle behind with a dignified poise, sometimes holding a bunch of flowers. There is always spring in her face, or so I thought when I first moved there. Teenage girls I teach vow they will never allow a man to touch their lips until they are sure he is “the one”, usually when they are somewhere in their twenties. Their lips do look unblemished, with that flush only the ephemeral preciousness a Chinese spring has.

– Extract from my unpublished memoir, Cracking China