Song Read online
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
Michelle Jana Chan is an award-winning journalist and travel editor of Vanity Fair. She is also contributing editor at Condé Nast Traveller, presenter of the BBC’s Global Guide and a writer for the Daily Telegraph, The Wall Street Journal and Travel & Leisure. Michelle has been named the Travel Media Awards’ Travel Writer of the Year. She was a Morehead-Cain scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
With very special thanks to
David Matthews for his support
bringing this book to readers
With special thanks to the patrons of Song:
Louis Gave
Nicholas Johnston
Ginanne Mitic
Hubert Moineau
Philip Muelder
Maia Sethna
Henry Verey
Dear Reader,
The book you are holding came about in a rather different way to most others. It was funded directly by readers through a new website: Unbound. Unbound is the creation of three writers. We started the company because we believed there had to be a better deal for both writers and readers. On the Unbound website, authors share the ideas for the books they want to write directly with readers. If enough of you support the book by pledging for it in advance, we produce a beautifully bound special subscribers’ edition and distribute a regular edition and ebook wherever books are sold, in shops and online.
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For all the Ms in my life
Contents
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
DEDICATION
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
SUPPORTERS
COPYRIGHT
CHAPTER 1
Lishui village, China, 1878
At first they were glad the rains came early. They had already finished their planting and the seedlings were beginning to push through. The men and women of Lishui straightened their backs, buckled from years of labouring, led the buffalo away and waited for the fields to turn green. With such early rains there might be three rice harvests if the weather continued to be clement. But they quickly lost hope of that. The sun did not emerge to bronze the crop. Instead the clouds hung heavy. More rain beat down upon an already sodden earth and lakes were born where even the old people said they could not remember seeing standing water.
The Li rose higher and higher. Every morning the men of the village walked to the river to watch the water lap at its banks like flames. Sometimes they stood there for hours, their faces as grey as the flat slate light. Still the rain fell, yet no one cared about their clothes becoming wet or the nagging coughs the chill brought on. Occasionally a man lifted his arm to wipe his face. But mostly they stood still like figures in a painting, staring upstream, watching the water barrel down, bulging under its own mass.
Before the end of the week the Li had spilled over its banks. A few days later the water had covered the footpaths and cart tracks, spreading like a tide across the land and sweeping away all the fine shoots of newly planted rice. Further upstream the river broke up carts, bamboo bridges and outbuildings; it knocked over vats of clean water and seeped beneath the doors of homes. Carried on its swirling currents were splintered planks of wood, rotting food, and shreds of sacking and rattan.
Song awoke to feel the straw mat wet beneath him. He reached out his hand. The water was gently rising and ebbing as if it was breathing. His brother Xiao Bo was crying in his sleep. The little boy had rolled off his mat and was lying curled up in the water. He was hugging his knees as if to stop himself from floating away.
Song’s father was not home yet. He and the other men had been working through the night trying to raise walls of mud and rein back the river’s strength. But the earthen barriers washed away even as they built them; they could only watch, hunched over their shovels.
The men did not return that day. As the hours passed the women grew anxious. They stopped by each other’s homes, asking for news, but nobody had anything to say. Song’s mother Zhang Je was short with the children. The little ones whimpered, sensing something was wrong.
Song huddled low with his sisters and brothers around the smoking fire which sizzled and spat but gave off no heat. They had wedged among the firewood an iron bowl but the rice inside was not warming. That was all they had left to eat now. Xiao Wan curled up closer to Song. His little brother followed him everywhere nowadays. His sisters Xiao Mei and San San sat opposite him, adding wet wood to the fire and poking at the ash with a stick. His mother stood in the doorway, the silhouette of Xiao Bo strapped to her back and her large rounded stomach tight with child.
The children dipped their hands into the bowl, squeezing grains of rice together, careful not to take more than their share. Song was trying to feed Xiao Wan but he was too weak even to swallow. The little boy closed his eyes and rested his head in Song’s lap, wheezing with each breath. Their mother continued to look out towards the fields, waiting, with Xiao Bo’s head slumped unnaturally to the side as he slept.
‘I don’t think they’re coming back.’
Song could barely hear what his mother was saying.
‘They’re too late,’ she muttered.
Song wasn’t sure if she was talking to him. ‘Mama ?’
Her voice was more brisk. ‘They’re not coming back, I said.’
Song didn’t reply. He looked across at his sisters, who were continuing to push squashed grains of cold rice into their mouths. Song’s breathing quickened, losing its rhythm. He felt his body tighten. Lying across Song’s lap, Xiao Wan woke up and started to cry.
That night Song slept on the wet woven matting between his sisters and brothers, and dreamed of a place far away which resembled land but in fact was a gigantic lake whose surface was covered in broken rice shoots. At first it seemed beautiful. But then in Song’s mind he saw the bloated bodies floating face up and staring wide-eyed at something beyond the cloudless blue sky.
Song stared up at the underside of the roof above him. In the darkness he could just make out the curves and ridges of the pottery tiles. Another land began to appear in his mind, this time protected by giant roof tiles ten times as big as the ones above him, keeping everyone dry, allowing them all to scramble up to safety.
Song sat upright and shook himself. The night was quiet except for the heavy breathing of his family.
Xiao Mei had a raw cough, but it didn’t wake her. Xiao Bo continued to moan rhythmically in his sleep. He was too small to pretend he wasn’t hungry. Song had been pretending ever since he could remember. Taking less than his share. Knowing that he, the eldest, at the age of nine, was stronger than his sisters and brothers.
‘Song’ll make it,’ he had once overheard his mother tell his father. ‘He came to us in a good year. Not like his sisters and brothers. They were born at the wrong time.’
Song shivered in the cold damp room. It was then that he remembered the words of Zhu Wei, the medicine man who travelled between villages, carrying his chinking bottles of tinctures and pots of sweet-smelling balsam, all the while telling stories of places he had seen.
‘This world is sweet, my friend. Go. Take yourself away.’
Song tried to piece together what he had heard.
‘Malaya. Heady with spices. India. With its regal princes, elephants dressed up in finery, and the vivid colours. Ah, and then there’s Guiana. The sugarcane whispers in a sea breeze so salty you can lick it. Mangoes. Mangoes so full of juice they split on the tree and seep nectar. Like sunshine might taste. Rubber trees bleed without so much as a tap and a full bucket fetches a price so high that you don’t have to work for the rest of the month. There’s nothing to spend money on anyway, with fruit hanging off every tree: papaya, guava, carambola, sapodilla. No one is ever wanting. And don’t start me on the gold. Even babies of the poorest families wear solid gold bangles around their wrists and ankles. Diamonds too. They say there are whole cities built of gold and precious stones.’
Song screwed up his eyes and tried to believe in the place Zhu Wei had described.
‘The Englishmen take you there for nothing – not a penny – on huge wooden boats which use the wind and the stars and their magic to reach these new lands. Hundreds are going every day, boy. You don’t want to be left behind. Hail down one of the carts. They’re sweeping through the villages collecting up young men with dreams and courage, the ones looking for adventure and who are willing to work. You want to get on your way before these places are full.
‘The boats leave from Guangzhou. A terrible place. Don’t get waylaid, I warn you, or you won’t make it to the end of the month. Keep moving. There’s a world beyond what you know. Every boy should travel. Go and see new places. Find work. Get rich. Come back if you want to. But see the world first. Don’t die here, boy. You’re too young to die here.’
Song pictured himself boarding one of the wooden English boats and arriving among lush plantations of sweet sugarcane bordered by trees bearing plump fruit on bowed branches. He licked his lips around the taste of a mango and felt burning cramps in his stomach. Then he imagined himself returning home laden with sugar and gold and diamonds, and the wide disbelieving shining eyes of his sisters and brothers.
Song shivered again. His mother had propped open the front door and the room was cool. He looked up, trying to imagine his father’s silhouette in the doorway, but nobody was there. Not that Song ever particularly noticed his father coming home. He was a man who spoke quietly and was soft of foot. But in his head Song could hear his father’s voice telling him how to move through life: ‘strangers don’t like strangers’; ‘trouble only comes to those who stand out’; ‘keep your head down’. The memory of his words triggered something inside Song. He felt the sudden weight of his family; now he must not only take care of himself but everyone else, too. Song felt himself fold, sobbing, covering his face with his hands.
The village of Lishui felt their way through the days and weeks ahead in a daze. For the women and children left behind there was too much to do to think about mourning men. They could no longer drink clean water from the wells. There was no dry firewood. The babies lay listless, too emaciated to cry. The old people had stopped eating. The rest of the village sifted through the debris carried by the floodwater trying to salvage anything useful: a sack of wet seed, odd rice shoots, rotten wood, a sodden shred of cloth.
Every morning they hoped to wake to see the land steaming dry and to feel the heat of the sun, but instead clouds brooded heavy and low in the sky before bursting like blisters. Rain fell so hard it bounced from the ground, raining up as well as down. The grey air and reflecting water drained the land of colour.
Song knew what he had to do. He thought of the sugar, the gold, the diamonds in far-off lands. But he also remembered the dark stories about the city called Guangzhou and how some men returned broken. ‘Stay away from them men,’ the women told the children, even when it was their own husbands. And the children listened and stayed away, frightened by the way the men sat all day staring out, as if they were asleep with their eyes open. Song shuddered, but he had made up his mind.
He went to find his mother. She was at the back of the house keeping the fire alight. He watched her as she shifted around a pot of water, trying to catch the heat of a flickering flame before it extinguished with a fizz.
‘Mama.’
Zhang Je looked up. There were dark shadows under her glazed eyes, red and streaming from the smoke. Her face was drawn. She did not seem to see Song.
He crouched down and took the pot from his mother. ‘Let me.’
She let the stick fall from her hands. Song used it to poke at the charred embers and blew into the fire. A cloud of ash billowed up.
‘I’m going to Guangzhou to look for work, Mama.’
They both watched a small flame momentarily light up.
‘I’ll go with the next cart,’ Song said. ‘They’re looking for boys like me. It doesn’t cost anything to go, they say. There’s lots of work. I’ll bring back money and food for everyone.’
Song looked up at his mother’s blank face. She was staring down at the fire. Her cheeks were smeared wet.
‘It’s just for a time,’ Song said. ‘Until the rains end.’
She shook her head.
‘We need some food for Xiao Bo, don’t we ?’ Song continued. ‘And the baby and everyone.’
‘Not by sending you away, son. Not at your age. You don’t know anything about the world out there. I’ve heard they’ll slit your throat for the shirt on your back, even a grain of rice. Your papa wouldn’t have allowed it. I won’t let you go.’
Song thought of his papa, and it hurt. He wanted to leave the place where memories of his father were so strong, where he felt his absence everywhere: in the flicker of each shadow, hoping it might be him; hearing the echo of his voice in an empty room; remembering the way they caught each other’s eye.
‘He would let me go.’ Song wanted to believe that his father, from his grave, or wherever he was, would take care of him. ‘Mama, listen to me, there’s nothing left.’
‘Nothing left,’ Zhang Je repeated.
‘I must go. Nobody else can. I’m the eldest now.’
‘My eldest is too young.’
‘But I’m also too young to die,’ Song said.
Zhang Je took a sharp intake of breath. ‘Don’t talk that way.’
Song looked at the tears like grey rain on his mother’s face. He felt alone, as if everybody was already dead. ‘You’ve given up,’ he said.
Song felt the slap hard across his cheek, and then his mother pulling him to her. She held him firmly against her hard pregnant stomach, with his head resting by
her small soft breasts. Her damp shirt smelled of mould and smoke. She moaned as she stroked the side of his head where she had struck him. He stopped breathing to be even more still.
‘Nothing left,’ she said again.
Song waited, afraid to speak again.
His mother turned him towards her and held his face between her palms like a prayer. ‘Find some life for yourself, son,’ she said. ‘Go and find some life. Find it for all of us.’
Hearing those words, Song suddenly felt alone.
‘We’ll wait for you,’ his mother continued. ‘Don’t forget. We’ll be here when you come back.’
There had been nothing to pack. Song had only the clothes he was wearing. He waited by the road with his sisters and brothers looking for the cart. Xiao Wan began wailing like a sick dog. Song told him to hush and the little boy stopped instantly. When Song sighted the cart in the distance he called out to his mother, who was still inside the house. She emerged from the doorway and hurried awkwardly towards them, one hand cupping her swollen stomach and the other gripping a swing-basket of rice. She held it up for Song like a trophy. He tried to refuse it but she forced it into his hands. The other children stared on.
‘No mother sends off a son empty-handed,’ she said. ‘You never know how long the journey will be.’
As Song took the gift he felt its weight. He was keenly aware how many days this might feed his family. He held back the tears. The cart halted in front of them. It seemed too crammed to take another but a hand reached out to haul Song up from the ground and pull him on to the back ledge. Song clambered inside and then quickly swung around to look back. The cart had already started to roll away.
‘We’ll call him Xiao Song,’ his mother shouted, pointing at her belly. Her words cut. He didn’t want to imagine another Song taking his place.
This was his family. His four sisters and brothers seemed even smaller beside their mother with her gourd-like stomach; they gazed up at him in the high-sided cart, above which he barely reached. They raised their hands to wave, all except Xiao Mei, who stared out blankly, the only one who didn’t cry.
Song