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  “Nice song,” said Aki. “What’s it called again?”

  “It’s a folk tune, ‘Song of the Yellow River Boatmen.’ I’ve heard it once before.”

  I’ll often remember this scene afterwards, and I’ll tell someone about it. Who will that someone be? Wondering, Aki felt a strange thrill at the thought. Yet he also felt a premonition that by then he’d no longer be able to believe that this scene, this moment, had ever been real…

  Later, he woke again because the rocking of the boat had altered. From the regular, small sideways motion that he’d given himself over to as he fell asleep, the ferry had definitely shifted to something more complex and elusive. Not only that, the low reverberations that were attached to the bottom of his sleep, vibrating with a satisfying rhythm (whether from the engine or the screws, he didn’t know) like a knife on a chopping board, were subtly different now.

  The ship had left the ocean to enter the mouth of the Chang Jiang or “Long River” – better known as the Yangtze. Here, muddy water running off the mainland merged with the clear water of the East China Sea. Mullet migrating in from the sea against the river current had to adapt to the new environment by adjusting the movement of their gills and using their tails and dorsal fins for freshwater swimming. The 14,000-ton Xin Jian Zhen was performing a comparable manoeuvre. Aki slipped back into sleep, surrendering himself to the new throbbing motion.

  With the first rays of sunlight, he leapt out of bed. The sun was climbing higher and higher above the horizon every moment, stretching its long legs and scattering sparks on the tip of each heavy-looking, brown, triangular wave. He could hear a swell of voices calling out the river’s Chinese name: “Chang Jiang, Chang Jiang.” A pink-tinged fog began to form, mingled with soot and smoke. Coal blazed, oil burned, any number of chemical agents mixed and exploded. Odours of garlic and fennel hung in the air along with a vague stench of decay. It was the ripe smell of the continent.

  The Xin Jian Zhen tilted heavily to port and swung around into the Huangpu River. They were now in Shanghai. The Huangpu marked the start of the city’s harbour. Travelling up and down the river on either side was a jumble of large Panamanian freighters, leaf-shaped sampans, warships bristling with gun barrels, and junks like bats with their grey wings folded. On the pier a crane had stopped moving, dangling some heavy dark object in mid-air.

  He was out on the starboard deck.

  “Six hundred million tons.” Cai Fang stood next to him and addressed him in Mandarin, muttering between his teeth. So it wasn’t a trick of the moonlight; his eyes really were brown. “That’s the amount of silt carried here by the Yangtze every year.”

  Aki was seized by the thought, Why does this man keep coming up to me? They had only spoken twice, so this impression was in itself rather odd.

  “But not all of it gets washed out to sea,” Cai continued. A large portion sank to the river bottom, he said, trapped by backflow from the ocean. The entire Yangtze River Delta was formed tens of thousands of years ago by the deposit of alluvium at the mouth of the river. During spring tides and at full tide, silt accumulated as far in as the Huangpu. Left alone, the steady build-up would gradually choke off the river, making it too shallow for ships to navigate. For Shanghai, the problem was a matter of life and death.

  What to do? The three currents of the Yangtze, the East China Sea, and the Huangpu all ran together in a constant three-way struggle. No easy solution presented itself. Finally, after computing the permutations of the three currents by factoring in variables of time and season, engineers had designed a five-kilometre-long bypass channel extending from here approximately as far as the Yangshupu thermal power plant, visible on the left bank. There it was – the Chinese version of Oregon’s Astoria Channel. Its addition had altered the flow of the three currents enough to drastically reduce the alluvial deposit.

  Though Cai’s voice was flat, his account was not difficult to follow. By now the sun, after rising above the horizon to cast light on land and water, had hidden itself again. Raindrops the size of poppy seeds flew through the air by the gunwale.

  Soon, up ahead, the Bund came into view, once counted among the world’s most beautiful boulevards. One hundred and sixty years ago, Shanghai had been a riverside fishing village where reeds grew in thick profusion. England, ruler of the seven seas, had developed the place. Back then the catchment of the Yangtze, over two million square kilometres in all, supported a population of 180 million, one-tenth of the world’s population. Nowhere else in the world could you find a population of such density supported by a single river and its busy harbour. Following the Opium War and the Treaty of Nanjing, the harbour was opened to unrestricted trade. Residents proceeded to erect a row of buildings in a polyglot of architectural styles from Paris, London, Berlin, and other leading cities of the day. This was sometimes referred to as the “false front.”

  Shanghai became a Far Eastern Babylon, a place where virtue and vice coexisted and prospered with no impediment. People went there to make their fortune, or to escape poverty, or simply to forget. Europeans and Orientals lived side by side, inseparably intertwined, the city thriving like a dragon.

  But starting in 1949, the dragon was slowly but steadily buried in desert sands stirred by the wind of communism. No longer did vice flourish, no longer did different people and different worlds collide. The central government, its power concentrated in Beijing, stifled the foreign presence by siphoning off every bit of wealth stored in Shanghai, without actually destroying the foreign structures that housed it.

  The Japanese journalist Ozaki Hotsumi, in prison awaiting execution for his role in the Sorge spy case, wrote to his wife and daughter of his memories of entering the city for the first time:

  [Miyazaki] Toten[1] wrote that when he finally began travelling back up the Yangtze and saw Shanghai, he wept, overcome with emotion. I can sympathize. My own excitement on first seeing the city was greater than on any other occasion in my life.

  That was in 1928. The Bund that nineteen-year-old Waki Tanehiko first glimpsed in 1936, also from a ship, and that his son was now gazing at fifty-three years later, had the same false front, its skyline unchanged.

  The Xin Jian Zhen slowly turned to port. Aki had been staring down at the surface of the water, but now he raised his eyes. They had already reached midtown. With Garden Bridge close by, the engines slowed down as the ship approached Waihongqiao International Pier. Time to go ashore, he thought. The act of stepping ashore was, in itself, enough to stir a sense of high adventure. Hello, yellow Babylon!

  The gangplank was drawn to the side of the ship. On the pier stood a lone woman in a white dress, turning a slate-violet umbrella over her shoulder as she looked up at the gangplank. For a second, Aki saw in her a vision of Sato, before a gust swept the illusion away. He peered at her again. Definitely not Sato. Good-looking, though. Was she here to meet someone? This place was probably off limits to the general public.

  A man and a woman wearing public security uniforms came scurrying up the gangplank. Aki went back to his cabin to prepare to disembark.

  He stepped off the gangplank and onto the rough concrete of the pier. The woman was gone. Amid the other passengers, he walked down the pier and then on some two hundred metres farther. No sign of Cai Fang. Not in Immigration, either, so he must have been waved through. It occurred to him that the woman had probably come to meet Cai Fang.

  He trundled his suitcase out to the taxi stand and heard someone call his name. In front of him stood the taxi driver Chen Ying, with his inimitable happy grin.

  * * *

  1. (1871–1922). A Japanese political activist, adventurer and lifelong friend of Sun Yat-sen – who devoted his life to the cause of Chinese revolution. He first visited Shanghai at the age of twenty-two. ↵

  3

  The hotel was the Broadway Mansions, rechristened Shanghai Mansions in the 1940s; in recent years its English name had been changed back again. Built in 1934 by Shanghai’s real estate king Victor Sas
soon in typical Art Deco style, the hotel had once offered long-term foreign residents the finest apartments anywhere in the city. The Shanghai representative of a major advertising agency in Tokyo, a friend of Aki’s, was renting office space there; he was located in an executive suite overlooking the river, with combined office space and living area.

  In the wake of the Tiananmen Square violence, his friend had temporarily returned to Japan, leaving the rooms vacant. Hearing that Aki was going to Shanghai, he had suggested he stay there and keep an eye on the place while checking which way the political wind was blowing. The desk was equipped with a private phone and fax. In Chinese hotels you generally had to go through an operator; to be able to make direct calls was a great convenience. Aki decided to take his friend up on the offer.

  He checked in and went up to the suite, which was on the fifteenth floor, overlooking Suzhou Creek with a superb view of the Garden Bridge and the Bund. The door opened on a combined office and living room, although lounge would perhaps be more accurate. Off through a door on the left was a bedroom with twin beds. Aki, who had expected something like a suite in a Japanese hotel, was staggered by the vastly greater space and substance of these surroundings. He walked around to adjust to the unfamiliar dimensions of high ceilings and airy rooms, collapsing onto each bed in turn, several times, and taking deep breaths. The high ceiling was plastered, with a cornice. The tiled walls of the bathroom, which opened off the rear of the bedroom, were decorated with a design of roses. Probably British-made, he thought; they looked the same as the “Kobe rose” tiles in ijinkan, foreign residences in Kobe dating from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although everything was apparently unchanged from the old days, the rooms were immaculate and pleasant, which was a relief. All this space for one person – God, what a waste, he thought, and then showered, changed into a suit, and set off for Shanghai Film Studio.

  The recent turmoil and subsequent imposition of martial law had had little apparent effect on the place, which was bustling with activity. Even though Aki had turned up with no appointment or letter of introduction, the guard was undismayed, promptly picking up the phone and getting Xie Han on the line. “Go right on in,” he was told. Xie was in Studio 4, rehearsing scenes for his new film Paoying, “Moving Shadows.” What would be a good equivalent in Japanese, wondered Aki. Utakata – Fleeting Dreams?

  He pushed open a smaller door in the corner of a large steel door, stepped through it, and was instantly enveloped in darkness. After four or five seconds, before his eyes could grow accustomed to the dark, a bright light suddenly came on.

  “Li Xing, not like that. Turn your face more towards me. I want cruelty but softness, too. The expression of a wild animal. I know, try twitching your nose. Go ahead. Twitch it. That’ll solve the whole thing.”

  This from a man in a white sports cap worn at a slant. Beyond him, in a pool of bright light, stood a woman. That’s the same one! Aki almost said aloud in his surprise.

  Yet, she was dressed very differently now from the way she’d been on the pier. Now she was wearing washed jeans and a silk blouse, without a trace of makeup. Her hair was bobbed, with a blue band wound around the brow.

  The room was oppressively hot. Several large electric fans were humming with no discernible effect. Everyone was fanning themselves with round or folding fans; the effect was that of giant butterfly wings moving in a fitful dance. Stealing looks at this actress named Li Xing, Aki headed towards the white sports cap, approaching it from behind, but just as he came within hailing range he realized that this guy was too young to be Xie Han.

  “Twitch my nose?” said the actress in a clear voice. “I can’t do that.”

  “Do as you’re told. Your character’s a spy who trades sexual favours for information. Twitching your nose oughta be a cinch.”

  “I just can’t.”

  “What do you mean, you can’t! Concentrate and make a face. Then move the muscles around your nose… Damn. You really can’t? Look – here, I can do it.”

  The guy in the sports cap leapt into the ring of light and twitched his nose. The actress slapped her thighs and laughed out loud.

  She addressed a dimly lit corner of the studio. “Director, do I really have to do this? And please, can we turn off the light?” She sounded cheerful, her voice punctuated by laughter. Aki made out the figure of an elderly man sitting in a canvas folding chair with a cigarette dangling from his mouth. The spotlight went off.

  “Xingxing, it’s all right. No twitches. Let’s move on to the next scene.”

  The old man exhaled cigarette smoke as he spoke, looking down, so that his face was wreathed in fumes and his voice was a raspy cough.

  Aki quickly walked over, bowed, and said hello. Xie Han got up and held out his hand.

  “Well, well! What a surprise, for you to come so suddenly, and at such a time … and this morning I heard you came by boat. Anyway, huanying, huanying. Welcome, welcome! Your father’s in the next scene.”

  The spotlight came back on. A young man had appeared out of nowhere and was leaning against a black upright piano smoking a cigarette. When he finished, he tossed the butt on the floor and ground it out with the heel of his shoe before turning and seating himself at the piano. From beyond the spotlight, a couple opened a nonexistent door and entered the scene. The woman was the actress Li Xing from the scene before, escorted by a middle-aged man wearing a dark blue Mandarin gown.

  “Which one’s my father?” whispered Aki. Holding his cigarette between his fingers, Xie Han pointed at the young man, now affectedly adjusting his cuffs. Aki was shocked by the actor’s youth. Since the movie was set in the Shanghai of a half-century before, it was only natural that his father should be portrayed as someone quite young – yet the sight was momentarily unsettling. A person much younger than himself. A mere youth, with no notion of what the future might hold for him, full of eager dreams.

  “That’s Ding Mocun.” The director pointed to the man in the Mandarin gown.

  “What’s my father doing here?” Aki asked rather bluntly.

  “Wait and see. This is the scene where he and the spy Zheng Pinru meet up again by accident.”

  Entering the cabaret, the woman looked at the pianist with a faintly startled expression, eyes wide and bright. The pianist, sitting with his back to the entrance, was unaware of this. The man in the Mandarin gown, noting the change in the woman’s expression, looked suspicious as he told the waiter to take them to a table. While he was speaking the pianist began to play, singing to his own jazzy accompaniment the words, not in English but Chinese: “In every town, on every hill…”

  The woman got up and walked over to the piano.

  “…here, there, and everywhere, it’s Shanghai Li Lu.” As he sang, the pianist turned his head to look at the audience and found the woman standing by his side. “Hello, Lili!” he said, as if the words were part of the lyrics.

  “Hello, Li Lu. It’s been a long time.”

  He nodded and continued singing: “…the dream of love I dreamt that day, the devil’s dream; with every passing day I remember, those eyes, in every town, on every hill…”

  The assistant director went up to the actors to make various requests, but Xie Han looked on from where he was, remaining seated in his folding chair and saying nothing. The rehearsal went on.

  Suddenly Xie leant forward and said “‘It’s been a long time.’ Let’s have Lili say that line in Japanese: ‘Ohisashiburi ne.’” That can be the signal for the hidden gunmen to open fire. How about it?”

  The actress nodded and proceeded to practice the line several times, in a surprisingly natural accent.

  A volley of pistol shots rang out. Bang!… Bang!

  Xie Han stood up. “Okay, everyone, that’s enough for today.”

  To Aki’s acute embarrassment, Xie then announced that “We have a special guest” and introduced him to the cast and crew, causing a small commotion when they learnt that he was the son of one of the charact
ers in the movie. This soon turned to applause.

  Outside the studio, in blinding sunshine and to the shrill cries of cicadas, he asked the director again, “Why bring my father into it?”

  “Because it’s a true story.”

  “Even that scene just now?”

  Xie Han shook his head. “Not in every detail. I embellish the story as necessary. That’s only natural, isn’t it?”

  Aki nodded, watching as little boys dressed in Peking opera costumes crossed in front of them, kicking a soccer ball, and disappeared inside another studio through a small side door.

  “But that actor doesn’t look anything like my father.”

  “No, he doesn’t. And your father was a better actor.”

  I’m glad he doesn’t look like him, Aki wanted to say. He scarcely remembered his father, but he’d seen several pictures of him as a young man. One was the commemorative photo taken here at Huaying that he’d been shown last year by Zhao.

  If the actor had been a ringer for his father, he would have felt even worse. As it was, he had to face a flesh-and-blood version more than fifteen years younger than himself. Fictional or not, that sort of inversion was hard to take. This was what lay behind the acute discomfort he’d felt earlier. And yet, if his real, other father, the one with an old and feeble body, was now confined somewhere deep in China’s vast interior, in the heart of the Loess Plateau… His discomfort changed to vexation. To distract himself, he looked up, and caught sight of the actress leaving the studio and walking off in the opposite direction.

  “She’s very pretty. What’s her connection with my father in the film? Are they lovers?”

  Xie Han nodded, exhaling cigarette smoke without removing the cigarette from his mouth. In the movie, the man’s name was Li Lu, the woman’s Lili. “I’ve made her a communist spy for Mao, but Zheng Pinru was actually a spy for the Nationalist Party of Chiang Kai-shek. Otherwise… you see the problem, don’t you? A sort of Shanghai Joan of Arc.”