Tiananmen Square

One

My earliest memory is of my grandmother. I remember the smell of her. Somewhere between the scent of jasmine and the more earthy odour of the leather oil she used, working up the material to fashion slippers for neighbours on our landing. Her breath was the same: warm and sweet against the side of my face, but with the slightest tang of sourness. Most of all I remember her hands. The fingers gnarled but clever, still able to move deftly across the leather of the shoes she was tailoring, or quick to scatter rice in a boiling pot without being scalded by the billowing steam.

I remember too - perhaps I was no more than two or three - being fascinated by the bulging purple and green veins which ran like vines across the back of those mottled, burnished hands. They seemed so different from my own. Sometimes my grandmother would take my small hand - much lighter and smoother - and cup it in hers, and that would fascinate me. But more than anything I would feel the warmth which emanated from her leathery skin, I would feel that warmth on my own hand. And I would feel safe, protected.

The lines which creased her forehead, the jowls which hung from her cheeks - these details never repulsed me in the way old age can sometimes frighten children. Rather, my grandmother's face, her body, her being, were like an ancient map, both familiar and strange, to be read over and over by my eyes, and my fingers too. For I would often reach out for her face, running my tiny fingers across her thin grey eyebrows, playing with the thicker hairs which sprouted from her chin and which, for some reason, always delighted me. Sometimes I would pull on them and my grandmother would sneeze involuntarily. This would delight me all the more, and I would be reduced to the joyful and unending giggles of a toddler. My grandmother would watch me convulse - herself solemn and composed - only the slight curl of her lips and the twinkle in those grey-blue eyes betraying the beginnings of a smile.

My parents were a different proposition. They were devoted to me, in the way that a Chinese family in the 1970s was devoted to a daughter: a devotion tinged with a certain reluctance (my brother had not yet entered the world at that point). But more than that, we were, perhaps, incompatible. My father was a kind man - and a moral one. But throughout my childhood he remained a distant presence even though I would encounter him every day: in the morning when I was awoken for breakfast, in the evening when he returned from work.

Sometimes, I'd be wandering through the hallway of our small but noisy apartment, lost in my thoughts, having conversations with imaginary friends and doing battle with imaginary foes, when suddenly I'd be pulled back into reality, having run up against him. My father. He was, I realise now, rather small for a man, both lean and compact, but as a small child you inhabit a land of giants. And fathers are the tallest giants of all. My father was so large in my eyes perhaps because of the size of his severity; he would blink down at me, having encountered me in the hallway, and he would frown as though he had come across some midget-stranger rather than an emanation of his own flesh and blood.

My father would peer and squint at me, as though he was not quite sure what I was; then, as the silence between us unfolded, he would manage a brief, mumbled question: 'Have you . have you . done your homework?'; 'Have you finished your chores?' As a five-year-old I had no homework to speak of, but I would nod my head furiously, for it was in my mind that if I didn't acquiesce I might well be expelled from the apartment that same night. Nothing my parents ever told me, by the way, had in the least bit implied I might be ejected from the family home for failing to complete the non-existent homework my father was so concerned I finish. But somehow I'd got it into my head that such a thing could happen. It was one of the many fears I had.

Looking back, I think my father was as terrified of encountering me as I was of him. So he said the first thing that came into his head. He was an academic, a cartographer in fact - he worked with maps and geology. A rather nondescript occupation, perfectly suited to the precise and harmless man that he was. And yet, he and people like him had been subject to persecution during Mao's Cultural Revolution. A good number of teachers, technicians and intellectuals lost their lives as a result of being branded 'bourgeois degenerates', and I suppose the fear and uncertainty he inherited from that period never left him. It crossed into every element of his life. Even his relationship with his daughter.

I grew up in the aftermath of Maoism - after the death of the Great Helmsman - so that fear wasn't real to me, at least not until the events which took place some fifteen years later. But my father was never able to step out from that fear, from its shadow.

Perhaps my father alleviated that fear by allowing himself to grow faint, to retreat into the vague and abstract world of the graphs and charts that populated his study. A place where he would not be bothered by the hectic messiness of family life: the dirty diapers and detritus of toys strewn across the carpet; the bawling loudness of a toddler's tantrums; the slickness of small upturned faces, both expectant and outraged, lathered with snot and tears.

My mother handled her fears in a different way. She was hands-on, seeking to police every aspect and inflection of her family's life. She'd make sure we were all gathered around the table at precisely six, that the napkins we used were open on our laps. During the meal itself, we would be informed of the goings-on of our neighbours who lived on our landing: of the achievements they had laid claim to, and the scandals which took place behind closed doors. Most of all, the scandals. My mother was possessed of a shrill energy; like a tsunami, it could batter and overwhelm any structure that stood in its way. Local gossip was something she used to set herself in motion, to make sure we were all fed and watered, that our clothes were clean and our respective paths in life were cleared. It wasn't until much later that I realised this, however. At the time she just seemed oppressive and annoying.

At the tail end of the Cultural Revolution, my father had been demoted, but had managed to survive. He had been incarcerated for a short period but returned to full employment. He was, I suppose, one of the lucky ones. To this day I don't know what indignities, or worse, he suffered. It was something he would never have considered disclosing to his family, especially a family of women. My mother, however, was convinced that the source of his woes - the source of all our woes - was simply a random error on the part of an otherwise flawless bureaucratic machine. For her, the government was hard at times but fair, and its authority and power had always worked in the best interests of the people themselves. As a child I shared my mother's belief that the Chinese government was best; that it was ahead, in every respect, of the Western imperialist powers that sought to do it down. Every radio broadcast suggested that we, the Chinese people, were the flagbearers of humanity as it entered a more humane and free classless society. Such things we imbibed from an early age in the same way the children of America stood to attention each morning at school in order to pledge allegiance to their flag.

But again, looking back, I wonder how much my mother's credulous and enthusiastic devotion to the powers that be had further reduced my exhausted father, someone who had been battered by life and by the state he sought to serve. The relentless enthusiasm for the status quo on my mother's part surely must have grated. Perhaps, on occasion, he even bridled with anger. A rare flash of the type of emotion he had spent a lifetime learning to suppress. But he was never harsh to her.

On our corridor, husbands would occasionally beat their wives. Sometimes you could hear their arguments; you could even make out the sudden deadening silence before a hand met the side of a woman's face, and then the high-pitched yelp which followed. But even the battered women on our corridor retained a sense of decorum, a sense that there were certain things respectable people did not talk about, things that should not be acknowledged before neighbours.

On these occasions, the whole floor entered into the same strange and surreal charade; that everything was fine, that sometimes the corners of doors simply leapt out, like monsters in an ancient Chinese scroll, surprising a woman, striking her as she busied herself with the mundane details of everyday life. The sides of cupboards, the edges of beds - these things could be equally dangerous, equally provoking. The men they shared their lives with, however, were beyond reproach.

A child understands and absorbs such things as she goes along without ever framing them in terms of a conscious set of ideas. I understood that, on occasion, wives would be beaten, and I knew this was no good thing. I knew that the adults around me frowned on such behaviour but did not speak of it. And yet, it happened. And even as a young girl, I remember feeling that perhaps the stark brightness of my mother might in some way be dimmed - that her compulsion to regulate every detail of our lives with her shrill sense of etiquette and respectability might in some way be offset - if, just once, my father struck her across the face. If, just once, he interrupted the never-ending flow of salacious gossip and hectoring demands.

He never did, thank god. But what remained was in some ways...