God Is Red - Liao Yiwu [9]
At the top of the church’s dome was a clock weighing 150 kilograms and modeled on London’s Big Ben. Its bell was commissioned by Richard Williams and William J. Embery, who personally delivered the bell via sea to Saigon, Vietnam, from where it was taken along the Mekong River to Yunnan and on to Dali. The entire journey took three months.
McDonald made for the bell and struck it for the last time. The sound rippled through the city. Three old men drinking tea in the old city remember it. “The chiming came in waves, resounding waves, one after another; people in Xiaguan could feel the vibration,” said one.
On the afternoon of January 28, 1998, a couple from France, descendants of George and Fanny Clarke, were met in Dali by Wu Yongsheng. The couple had been inspired after reading Alvyn Austin’s history of the China Inland Mission, China’s Millions, and wanted to visit where their great-grandparents were buried.
That story reminds me of lines from a poem by Paul Valery, “The Graveyard by the Sea”:
But in their heavy night, cumbered with marble,
Under the roots of trees a shadow people
Has slowly now come over to your side.
The poet returns in his imagination to the cemetery of Sète, his hometown on the Mediterranean. He is sitting on a tombstone at noon, staring out on a calm sea, contemplating life and death. But things are rarely as we imagine them to be, and though the French couple may have been expecting a slice of China’s natural beauty, the scene they came across in 1998 was much the same as the one I encountered a decade later. No cemetery, no garden, just an empty, albeit rocky, field plowed for planting. Wu told me the villagers gathered around the French visitors and attempted to recount what had happened to the graves. One said that during the Cultural Revolution the Red Guards often used the cemetery as a target in their fight against foreign imperialists, waving red flags, shouting slogans, and singing revolutionary songs. They ransacked the cemetery, again and again, claiming that they would wipe out the ancestral graves of imperialists. Another villager recalled that the Red Guards had used explosives on the gravestones and blown them into pieces. Another said destruction of the cemetery started way back in the 1950s; with each political campaign, the cemetery became a target of hatred toward foreign imperialists. That didn’t take into account local pillaging; headstones and markers were recycled as pigsties, courtyard walls, and the footings for numerous houses. Even before the Cultural Revolution started, half of the graves had been leveled. The missionaries’ cemetery was one more desecration in the name of Communism that trashed China’s treasure troves of history.
The French couple didn’t find the grave of Fanny Clarke. But they had to have been heartened that she survived in the stories the local villagers told from one generation to the next. I’m moved to quote Paul Valery again:
The wind is rising! . . . We must try to live!
The huge air opens and shuts my book: the wave
Dares to explode out of the rocks in reeking
Spray. Fly away, my sun-bewildered pages!
Wu says the couple picked wildflowers and wove them into a wreath, which they placed in the middle of the cornfield. They had with them a small accordion, and the woman began to sing a song she said was Fanny Clarke’s favorite. When Wu told me about the song, I recognized it right away. It was from an 1805 poem by Thomas Moore that has remained popular with singers and composers and even Hollywood:
’Tis the last rose of summer
Left blooming alone;
All her lovely companions
Are faded and gone;
No flower of her kindred,
No rosebud is nigh.
To reflect back her blushes,
To give sigh for sigh.
Here I was at the same place eleven years later. It was approaching dusk.