They passed small rivers and one-lane overpasses and finally descended into a mid-sized town that looked exactly like other mid-sized towns. Layers of dust had covered them both and turned them mirroring shades of mahogany. It was early morning. While they waited on a concrete bench for the next bus, Kai told him stories of his village outside of Changsha. “My hometown is nearby, only a few hours away by bicycle. But if you visited, Teacher Sparrow, you’d think you’d gone back a hundred years or more. The same faces appear and reappear, they return with every generation. An old farmer might be reborn as his neighbour’s infant, a wealthy landowner might come back as an indentured farmer. In villages like mine, individuals pass away, but generations and routines cycle on forever.”
The pianist shifted his rucksack, looked out into the steady traffic of bicycles and wobbling trucks, and a storm of swallows that had gathered on the opposite bench.
“But one day, when my father himself was a child,” Kai continued, “a new school opened in the next town. The school was run by a trio of former shopkeepers who had been converted to Christianity by Jesuit missionaries. These three oiled their hair and wore black cassocks so long they swept the ground. They were pious men and also entrepreneurs. As soon as they arrived in town, they took over two shops and converted them into a church and a school. Instead of tuition fees, they asked the farmers to pay them in vegetables and grain, in labour to maintain the buildings and harvest the land, and in faith to their god, who seemed to be a well-fed baby from Tianjin, carried in the arms of an empress, and swaddled in celebratory clothes. People admired the baby because he was a cheerful god of prosperity. And every week, the three priests would gather the faithful in their church and play music on a small piano that, they said, had come to China two hundred years ago on a ship brought by Italians who had floated up the Yangtze River. But how this musical instrument went from the Italians to the three priests, no one knew.
“My father,” Kai added, “was a village schoolteacher himself who farmed a few acres of land. He sent me to the priests when I was very small because he wanted to find out more about this piano. Actually, we were believers in a way. We had complete faith in the things the priests provided: food, loans, education and medicine.
“And so I went and studied with all my heart,” Kai said. “I wasn’t the cleverest child in my class, but I was sensitive. So desperately did I want to escape my village that I even felt sorry for the grass that grew in that blighted place. I assumed that every village on earth must look like this, and so I fantasized about going far away, to the moon or another planet. The three priests, meanwhile, mistook my desire to change my life for authentic faith, that is, a child’s pure longing for the sacred. They embraced me as one of their own. When I was six years old, they began to give me lessons on the piano. I don’t know how they really acquired these instruments, but they had enough to form a chamber ensemble. They also had a good library. I learned to play a little bit of everything, violin and viola, organ, flute, even the horn, but I always went back to the piano. The keys felt like a part of my body. The piano, I thought, came from that outer, better world, from the sky and not from the dirt.
“My practice was so unruly that my fingers went numb and I even bruised my fingertips. Anyway, I sang and learned solfège and counterpoint, and the priests told us that music would free us from the discontent of our lives, that we need no longer be reborn as rats or serfs or even rich men, because we are all part of the same design, all children of the same heaven. So when Chairman Mao came with his liberating army, when the land restitution corps arrived, when the landlords were rounded up and dispossessed, when some were buried alive, when the peasants were raised up to Party secretaries, we were already prepared and willing to accept this new state of affairs. As Mencius says, a benevolent man cannot be rich. We had already been told that we were equal, and that the gates were open to us and we need only choose to walk through. The three priests were convinced that Communism was God’s design.” Kai smiled ambiguously. “Still, despite the great Revolution that I witnessed, I felt my destiny was to leave this village.”
“But, after land reform, what happened to the school, the priests and the piano?” Sparrow asked.
Kai shrugged. He seemed irreconcilably separate from the scene he was describing. “The school is still there and the priests continue to teach. In fact, during the land reform campaign, the head priest, Father Ignatius, became Party secretary for the commune. He took the lead in repossessing land on behalf of the town, he condemned every landlord even though the church was a landlord itself. The priests gave up their holdings and proclaimed Chairman Mao the second coming of their liberator. So even after revolution, people’s lives continue in cycles and not straight lines. I go home, every Spring Festival, to play for them, and they ask me, quietly, if I have been true to God. In my heart, I take God to mean the Party, the country and my family, and I say yes.
“When the famine began in 1959, the priests showed they were only men after all and had no idea how to multiply fish or loaves. My mother, father and two sisters all died that winter. Even Father Ignatius starved to death.” He shifted his bag and rested it on his knees, partially blocking his face. “I watched them starve. I was the youngest and the only son, and they did everything to protect me. Our village cadres blocked letters to distant family. Anyone caught trying to leave the village was arrested. The punishment was severe. If you’ve never been hungry, you can’t imagine…When I first came to Shanghai, I saw that it might as well be a different planet. People had not…they knew nothing about the famine or the ruin. When I was young, I was determined to fit into this new world, to save myself, because Shanghai was a paradise.”
They were silent. Finally, Sparrow said, “To come to Shanghai at all, to go from your village to the city, is like crossing the ocean.”
Kai nodded. “After my parents died, one of the music teachers saved me. Because of my ability, he sent me to live with a friend of the family, a learned man, a professor of literature here at Jiaotong University. He was the first from our village to go to university. He has been like a father to me since I was ten years old.
“Imagine!” Kai’s laugh was sharp and sad. “A stuttering, know-nothing child, suddenly clean and tidy in a professor’s salon. Six years later, I still call him ‘Professor’! I like to think that, if he had sons of his own, they would address him in the same way. You’ll understand when you meet him. I sat like a turnip while his students and colleagues debated and shouted. Sometimes I felt like an animal brought in from the forest. I know that I reminded the Professor of himself, long ago. But I could play. I could play Bach and Mozart even while my education, my language, was rudimentary. I was determined to rise to a new position in life, I had to learn to emulate the Professor and his circle–in every way, in their clothing, their habits and their language. Outside, in the streets, the Party might proclaim a new order, an end to feudalism, an uprising against the old class prejudices, but in the Professor’s salon,” Kai’s voice dropped to almost a whisper, “the old order was still preserved.