Ten Years My Senior

Teaching Chinese history.  Flying into Shanghai, late at night.  The cab queue is long, as usual, but shorter than I’ve seen it, when people snake out for three hundred yards beyond the physical entrance to the corral.  Shanghai is cool this evening.  That’s odd.  Usually it should be hotter and more humid here, seven hundred miles to the south.  Tonight, the city is notably more comfortable than the capital had been.  Shanghai’s infamous humidity is nowhere to be found.

I brought two beers from the Air China lounge on to the plane.  Helps to wash down the dry-as- dust xiaobing they give you on board for the flight at this hour.  This may be why I end up saying more than “Hiya.  Take me to the corner of Tibet St. and Beijing St.  Thanks.” Tonight.    This, and of course because the driver himself turns out to be educated and unassuming.

Teaching Chinese history.  But where do I usually end up practicing Chinese history?  Cabs are a low risk environment to try out anything you’ve learned.  You’ll get an earful.  You’ll get feedback.  I’ve just taught students about the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.  Once I’ve discerned my driver is my older brother, ten years my senior I can place him in events and see what it is he will share. 

He doesn’t remember the famine.  But he tells me that his family was outside of Shanghai, the major cities largely escaped the famine, and though he doesn’t remember him he mentions that he lost an older brother to starvation during that time.  He would have been ten when the Cultural Revolution started in Shanghai.  Vivid memories of schools closing and Red Guards storming and hapless prisoners being driven through the streets out to their executions. 

And his memories linger with me as I bid him farewell, and step off the cab and into the night, beneath the haunted block that was also here, bearing witness to that time.

Wednesday 6/06/18