英文小说: A Shadow in Surfers Paradise(45)天堂之影

洋八路

Part V


Chapter 45           1/2




The immigration officers were different, because none of them had Chinese face. They looked very serious, their eyebrows hooked and protruding. Each desk their eyes bent over was enclosed by secured glass. Now and then they looked at what must be a monitor, or riveted their gaze for a moment too long, too intimidating on the faces of the passengers. Each human being under their scrutiny was but a soulless object, or a potential intruder who might one day break into the backyards of Australian homes. Not infrequently they rose and left their seats, moved to their partners to exchange one or two thoughtful nods and words, while still eyeing the person who stood there nervously.

In the queue, the people, either ‘real’ or ‘fake’, either high as a long-necked giraffe, or low as a flat-nosed donkey, were waiting patiently without audible grunts for their coming trial. On the border of a sacred country there was no exception for intense study; on the line of security no mercy could be spared.

Bing was not very short, nor very tall, nor very flat-nosed. He was just fine, just okay, just mediocre. At his turn, he handed over his passport to the officer. He heard him say, ‘Hi, how are you?’, to which he replied, as an English teacher, in an accent of British or American or somewhere in between he never cared, ‘I am very well, thank you, Sir.’ And strangely, the man didn’t stare at him as he seemed to have done to many others, and after rapidly stamping his passport twice he tossed it back to him. ‘Enjoy your stay in Australia,’ he said.

The entry was so easy that Bing was for a moment reflecting about the ticket inspection at a train station in China. In his wonder of disbelief, Bing forgot to say, ‘Thank you very much’.

Probably it was his English as an English teacher that had helped him gain the official’s confidence, he thought as he followed the arrows and the clear indicators along the corridor, and more important his human peers, to the baggage reclaim area.   

The luggage conveyer belt was rotating, bags and things being pumped onto it from the dark blinded outlet in the wall. He waited, and waited, with the sort of patience of a pacified dog, checking the excitement of others who grabbed their belongings with such a joy as if their bags were free gifts or full of treasures. A small Chinese girl in glasses, actually the one who had been previously seen shedding some lingering tears on the plane, was making remarkable efforts to pull a case of great size, rushing a few steps with it along the fast-moving belt. Bing was deciding to give her a hand, but no sooner had he begun moving towards her than she had already dragged it onto the floor. Then in his amazement, she lifted the case, which looked even heavier than herself, onto a trolley. She then pushed and pushed and slid away.

After collecting his own bags, he proceeded to the customs clearance. He showed the Arrival Slip he had filled on the plane to a big woman in uniform, who pointed to slot him to the longest queue. On the slip, he had ticked ‘Yes’ to the box at the question: ‘Have you brought in any grains, seeds, bulbs, straw, nuts, plants, parts of plants, traditional medicines or herbs, wooden articles?’ Because in his case did store a number of bags of dried mushrooms his mother, knowing his liking for mushrooms, had purchased for him.

He was ordered to open the bag, take out every single item, and put them on display on a large table. The official was a man, very strong; Bing guessed, if he was also ordered to do a wrist-wrestling contest, he would need at least four hands if not legs to win him. As soon as the man saw the mushroom bags, he snatched one up, his eyes gleaming like fireflies, looking at it very closely, from left, then right, then down, then up, then left again, then right again, then finally in its middle; pawing and kneading its surface as if massaging a woman with his thick fingers. Several minutes passed, he was still undecided upon the matter of safety. Then, he went away with the mushroom, entering a nearby little room, leaving Bing standing there bewildered. A minute later he returned and put the mushroom back on the table, and asked him, with a smiling politeness, to repack all the displaced items.      

So after the drama he was cleared, stepping out into the arrival hall, where he stood as a free soul on the land of the sun-shining country full of kangaroos.  

However, it was not kangaroos but the expectant names or marks of Deakin University he was looking for. Straining his eyes, browsing many Chinese faces in the row who had come to meet their friends or relatives, he was not successful in locating the personnel who were supposed to pick him up. So he went through the sliding door, wandered about the veranda, and looked up into a sky where no sun was shining. It was drizzling, the mist was thin and sombre. And it was very warm; he wanted to take off the coat he had worn in wintry China, but he hated the trouble.

Lingering ten more minutes inside and outside the hall without being met, he was growing a little worried. But he comforted himself, ‘Never mind, I have my address, so I can always call a taxi.’ In the pocket of his short pants, knitted by his wife tight and close to his flesh, were plenty of US dollars exchanged from Yuan at the Bank of China.

Thinking of the taxi and its fare, he realized he had forgotten to exchange for Australian dollars. But how much should he exchange? He had only two-hundred US dollars easily accessible in his coat pocket; if he needed more, he might have to go to the toilet to produce the money from his secret pocket. Again he hated the trouble. So hauling the trolley, he went to the counter of a Foreign Exchange outlet, where he received from a sweet beautiful girl the notes of three hundred and twenty Australian dollars, plus a number of heavy coins.   

Then he strolled back to the arrival area, where he still saw no sign of prospects waiting for him. He reckoned he would just wait ten minutes more before setting off by himself.  

He took a seat in the rows of scarcely occupied chairs and sat down. A couple of ‘foreigners’, or in Chinese nickname, Laowai – Mr. Foreigner, meaning the people without ‘Chinese face’, sat in the corner kissing; the girl was on the boy’s lap, her arms snaking his neck. Their gesture appeared in his mind familiar; he had done it with Vivian in Lu Xun Park in Shanghai. The difference was that this couple were doing this in public, and were not making real love.  

Then his eyes were drawn to a guy, a Chinese youth whose head was half hidden in the hooded window of a payphone, which reminded him of the need to call home to report his safe landing. Well, he could make the call after him.

However, a couple of minutes went by, the Chinese was still standing there. And though the handset was upon his ear, he didn’t seem to make any speech. Then he hung up; the coins dropped jingling inside the machine. Bing thought he was about to end the business, but he didn’t. He lifted the handset again, put back the coins into the slot, dialled again, then stayed long just listening, in the same manner as before.

Realising he must have difficulty operating the phone, Bing rose and pushed his trolley and walked towards him.
‘Nihao,’ he said.

The Chinese turned to him in surprise. ‘Nihao.’

‘Anything wrong with the phone?’

‘I don’t know, I have tried a number of times, but heard only a kind of noise.’

Bing moved closer, looking at the payphone of which face was as big as small TV. On its top, it was labelled Telstra. It was indeed, a very strange name; why not Telecom or Telstar? The ‘Telstra’, as he tried to pronounce it, sounded very odd, and almost irritable to him, an English teacher.

‘Look, there were three steps as instructed,’ he said to the young man.

‘Yeah, I read it as well, and did exactly the three steps.’

‘Can you try again?’ he encouraged, in a tone of a teacher to his student, ready to ensure he did the right steps as written.

The boy began all over again; lifted and inserted the coins and keyed slowly in the numbers he read from a piece of paper, and then listened. Then he handed the handset over to Bing, who was convinced of the failure by the beeping noise.

‘Hello, do you need help?’ a voice came up rather abruptly to them. They turned to find a woman, with a broom and rubbish holder in her hands, smiling at them. ‘Do you need any help?’

Bing took the chance, ‘Yes, you may help us make a phone call.’

Putting aside his tools, she asked: ‘What number you want to dial.’

The boy showed her the paper, and she went on with the task.

After dialling the numbers, she listened, and apparently, it was successful, for Bing could hear a weak voice coming from the other end. She then handed it to Bing, ‘It is connected, go ahead.’

‘Thank you, thank you very much, Madam,’ Bing said to her, and passed the handset to the young man.

Highly confused, Bing was wondering how she could get connected while they couldn’t. Her dialling procedure didn’t seem to be different from what they had been doing.  

Then he heard the boy mentioning Deakin University a number of times. Was he also going to Deakin?

When he finished the call, Bing asked about his destination, and glad to know they were both to be new students at the university. His name was David Zhang.   

‘Why haven’t they come to pick us as arranged?’ Bing asked.

‘That was why I called the agent.’

‘What did they say?’

‘They said the car had already left for the airport, and asked us to wait, and said because of the inconvenience of parking, the driver ran deliberately late, to make sure all the four students are ready to go when he arrives.’

‘Four?’

‘Yes, they said there are four in total for the trip.’

So they sat on the chair, chatting as country-fellows in their mother language, and within minutes, they had become good friends.

David was from Tianjin, to do a two-year master course in IT. After graduating from Tianjin University where he had completed a bachelor course in Computer Science, he had worked in a software company for one year.

‘You have a better major than me,’ Bing said, ‘I come here to start a new subject.’

‘But your English is a big advantage, isn’t it?’

‘Maybe, but I have to study here for three years before I can apply for permanent residency,’ Bing replied. ‘By the way, why don’t you go straight for P.R., since you are already in required skill category?’

‘I tried, but my English and work experience didn’t earn me enough points.’

‘I see. In my case, my English is okay, but without favoured occupation, I have to study first.’
….

Some minutes later, a man entered the hall, holding a piece of paper with four Chinese names. Seeing their names on the list, they arose immediately and followed him out of the hall to where a minibus was parked. After loading their luggage, they got onto the bus, in which two girls were already seated, and one of them, as Bing recognized at first sight, was the same little girl who had wept a little on the plane and also had had difficulty removing her baggage from the conveyor. She must have been waiting all the while outside the hall.

Bing thought to say “Hi’ to her, but not detecting any hint of such a greeting being expected, he withheld his courtesy.
On the way to their destination, the driver didn’t say anything, nor did the four passengers. Bing attempted to break the silence, but he couldn’t proceed, for, David, like a boy suddenly turned shy in front of girls, merely gazed out of the window.
Although Bing had not noticed, the rain had already stopped. The sky was clearing up; some clouds were becoming isolated,  lonely looking. And the sun, though still veiled by hazy clumps, began to peer out from the fringe. It was going to be fine, and warm; after all, February was still summer in Australia.

The cars and trucks, many of them, were running in an order way on their respective lanes. No bicycles, no pedestrians. It was very quiet; he heard nothing but the droning and purring of engines.

It was like a city, a notion evidenced by the quantity of vehicles on the road. But it was not like a city, for it lacked the typical horns and noise and throngs in the cities like Shanghai, Beijing or Chengdu. Nor was it like a village, because he saw no rice fields or hills or cows or those hoe-borne farmers along the way. Its vast space was but sparsely and languidly occupied by some constructions, a few high, mostly flat and low.

It was as if the things on earth were still asleep, in their serenity, not yet awakened for the morning.

But the cars were moving, and the light was sufficient for a day.

Now the bus was entering a tunnel or a bridge he couldn’t define. With an arched roof made of a mesh of metalwork, it had a curvy shape that resembled a fly-catching bag or a section of intestine. It was not very long; the queer sensation passed by quickly, but for a while it was virtually like a dream.

As the bus ran deeper into the city, more people were seen strolling along the streets, more traffic lights were flashing, but his dreamy state of mind ensued. It was only when he drew back his eyes and saw the face of David did his very sense return to a Chinese-minded reality.

Half an hour later, after pulling the bus stop at a street, the driver spoke first time since the trip began: ‘Here we are.’

It was a red-roofed, red-bricked one level house, a temporary residence arranged for them by their agent. It was supposed to be close to the campus, but Bing saw no buildings in the near or far neighbourhood that were high enough for a university as he pictured in his mind.

‘Is the university nearby?’ he asked the driver.

‘Yes, only five minutes’ walk.’

‘Oh.’ Looking around, he was still confused, but he didn’t pursue it further with the driver, who looked friendly but rather incommunicative.

The driver helped unload all the burdens from his vehicle, then he was gone.

The street, now with no more cars running on it, and no other souls except them and their luggage littering the neat footpath, was very empty and quiet. The silent trees and the electric poles and the low houses were the only adornments of the Earth. For a moment, Bing had a shivering thought that he, and the other three standing beside him, were four convicts exiled to a place of absolute strangeness. The desolation on the street and in the air cast a stark and surreal contrast to any places he had known in China.

But the air was very fresh, clean and sweet as if it were filled with nothing but life-giving oxygen. Then suddenly, a car emerged from the other end of the road, injecting a stream of noise rippling the tranquil atmosphere. And its trailing sound, dying slowly away, only increased the feeling of desertion and stillness.

Bing was about to propose a quick self-introduction in the little group, when a cry, very loud and shrill like that of a wailing baby, broke the silence in their tentative musing.

‘What voice?’ Bing muttered shakily.

As startled and stunned as Bing, the other three said no word, only looking around anxiously to trace its source.

Then a second cry came, which shocked them as much as its first but helped them spot a large black bird in a tree.

‘Raven! A big raven over there,’ David spat out first the intelligence, more frightened than excited. ‘Strange, it is so much like a baby’s cry.’

‘It must be a special type of crow, but it is so all black,’ Bing added, now assuming a tone like a teacher. ‘I haven’t heard it for a long time in China. Their appearance or voice was always a bad omen. When I was young in the village, I would rush back home as soon as I saw or heard them.’

The two girls were for the moment dumb; their faces were paler, their eyes wider than necessary.

Bing looked at them amusedly, and said lightly: ‘Come on, don’t be scared, it is just a bird.’

The girl, taller and thicker than the other one Bing had known better, spoke first time, ‘So terrible, I have never heard anything like that.’

‘Neither have I,’ muttered the small girl, whose wit seemed to be only half restored. ‘I have never seen a crow in Shanghai, only in a text book.’

‘So you are from Shanghai?’ Bing rejoined quickly, ‘I am from Sichuan,’ and pointed at David, ‘David is from Tianjin,’ and turned to the tall girl, ‘how about you?’

‘Oh, I am from Nanjing,’ she said. ‘My name is Mei.’

‘My name is Bing.’

‘Me, David.’

‘Me, Susan,’ said Susan, touching the rim of her glasses.

Then Bing said to the rest, ‘Okay, let’s go; you, two girls carry smaller things, leave the big ones to me and David.’

The first thing that impressed him, as he carried the baggage towards the house, was a cluster of dog-tail grasses by the side of steps leading to the door. They were so elegant and exquisite, swaying perceptibly even to a little breath of wind. The second thing that impressed him was a lamp, capped and shaded by a colourful, diamond-shaped glass, very old-fashioned, sitting on top of a pillar erected in the middle of the front yard.

Bing laid down the burden on the doorstep. He knocked at the door, which was then opened by a girl, or a woman he couldn’t tell. But no doubt she was an Asian, even if she was less than a Chinese, to judge by her relatively darker skin.

‘Hi, I am Maria,’ she said in English, ‘come in, please.’

He carried the case into the living room. The carpet was grey and reasonably clean, except for a stained area where the desk and the chairs were located. In one corner was a cot, or just a mattress, on which lay a pillow and a neatly folded quilt. The air in the house was not as good as outside; a faint odour of smoke mixed with the type of staleness typically caused by the old, uncleaned, and over-used furniture, welcomed his nostrils.   

‘Those are two rooms for you,’ Maria pointed at the two opened doors. ‘One for boys, the other girls.’
‘Okay, let us bring up our luggage first,’ he said, and turned to signal David who had also come into the room, to go back together for another trip.

A couple of minutes later, five of them gathered in a circle chattering merrily. Maria was from Taiwan, and had been in Australia for two years, dong a Bachelor of Business Administration at Deakin University. She rented the whole house and shared it from time to time with new students who needed a temporary residence before looking for a longer-termed tenancy. Susan and Mei were both to study accounting for a master’s degree.

Bing, after briefly telling the others his own background, was respectfully called ‘Wang Laoshi’, that is Mr. Wang in the Chinese way by the three from mainland China. And Maria, whose age was close to his, called him ‘Wang Sir’ for Mr. Wang as well, simply for politeness rather than reference to his former profession.




-- To next post --

洋八路

Chapter 45    2/2




Then, with the two girls in one room, and David and him in another, they did their little task of unpacking. They were not supposed to stay there long. As soon as they found a better, and most importantly a cheaper place, they would move out.  
Approaching lunchtime, Maria, like a big sister, drove them in a Toyota to a grocery, where the four newcomers purchased the items such as fast noodles, bread, bunches of vegetables, eggs and tomatoes, salt, washing detergent. Bing also bought a Melbourne street directory on Maria’s advice. All up it cost him about $45, the value of which he couldn’t get a clue. So he multiplied the exchange rate of six coming to about 300 Yuan. Based on his salary as the teacher in Jiaoda, this amount, the first money he spent in Australia, had already bitten a quarter away from his monthly income.

But it was a relief they didn’t need to buy crockery or cutlery or utensils, for there were plenty already in the kitchen. After coming back to the house, they boiled the water for their fast noodles, the first meal they would have in the country.

Their lunch quickly finished, they discussed what to do for the rest of the day. Seeing a phone in a corner of the living room, Bing asked Maria if it was convenient to make long distance calls. The amiable Maria said each of them could make a call to China for this purpose, without an extra charge, so long as the conversation was brief. So in turn, each of them went ahead making a short phone call to China reporting their safe landing.

The street they lived on was Peacock Street, and according to Maria in her Taiwan-accented Mandarin, was less than ten minutes walk to the campus. It was Thursday, they could do the registration the next day, and the formal classes wouldn’t start until the followingt Monday. Though it was 11am in the morning, Bing thought he needed some rest first to make up for the loss of sleep. But the other three, probably affected by their emotional phone calls, had less tendency to sleep. So they agreed to take a quick tour to the Deakin campus. And after Maria drew them the directions on a piece of paper, and also gave each of them a key to the house, they set off.

In the beautifully named Peacock Street, they saw no peacocks; instead, a number of sparrows, as little as those in Shanghai, were jumping noiselessly in the trees. They also saw a bigger bird, with black and white striped feathers, walking leisurely across the road, proudly cocking its head sideways as if it was the master of the land.

Then all at once, this bird issued forth a series of loud whistling that was as fluid and vehement as running water, its throat pumping fervently like that of a frog.

‘What a sound!’ exclaimed Susan, frankly astonished. ‘How can a bird sing like that?!’

‘Susan, I hope you are not scared as much as by the raven,’ David chuckled.   

The group gave a gust of laughter, which might have bothered the freedom of the bird, for it stopped singing, taking off from the road and surging away, its white-spotted wings spinning like pinwheels.

In another while, Bing looked around, ‘I wonder where the raven is?’

Both Susan and Mei rushed in at the same time, ‘No, the raven is horrible, I don’t want to see or hear any of that.’
Bing made a comment: ‘Well, I remember a story told by my friend in Beijing, when I was visiting the Great Wall. According to him, crows all over the world have inherited the type of plaintive cry of Meng Jiao Nu.’

‘Really? I have never heard of that,’ said David.

‘I think he just invented it himself.’

‘What is it?’ David asked keenly.

The curiosity was now aroused in the knot of people, including the two girls who had shown aversion to the raven topic a moment earlier.

‘It is too long, I will tell you guys later.’

They ambled on; David and Bing ahead, the other two, chatting in a low voice like a new pair of confidential friends, straggling behind. Now without the bird’s singing, or the raven’s crowing, or the car’s running, the street relapsed into silence. The sky had again turned gloomy, but seemed to refrain from raining. The houses, loosely lined up on both sides of road, were showing no signs of human occupation. Many cars parked in the driveway and along the kerb, yet people were nowhere to be seen. On the roof of each house, a TV antenna was threaded to the short sky; some of them were taken by one or two birds, fat and grey and unperturbed, perched there brooding.

The only thing familiar to him was the tall, wooden electric poles, the skins of which were as scarred and miserable as those in his village. And the wires, parallel, never coming across to touch each other, looked feeble and lonely.
‘Is it going to rain?’ Bing asked.

David raised his eyes to inspect the sky, ‘Probably, but I don’t know. It was fine just now.’
They crossed Burwood Highway by a subway, and came out at the other side to find themselves right at the entrance of the campus.

The six letters of DEAKIN was upside down and adhered floatingly to a slab that was rammed into the earth like a sword. No Chinese-style calligraphy was written here by some famous hands.

David asked, ‘What does Deakin actually mean?’

‘I don’t know,’ Bing said, then asked the two girls, ‘do you know what Deakin stands for?’

Mei shook her head; Susan, frowning, touched her glasses and said: ‘I read the introduction and vaguely remember it is after the name of someone famous in Australia.’

‘Is it? That makes sense, but I find it hard to say it properly,’ said David, and then turned to Bing, ‘Wang-Teacher, what is the correct one, Dikin, or Dekin, or Diken like the translated Chinese?’

‘Honestly I don’t know, I would think Dikin, but it sounds very odd, doesn’t it?’

‘We will find out when local people say the word,’ Mei summed up the topic.

On the campus, the first building they saw had a whitewashed masonry wall, high and very broad, with a surface curved slightly like a gigantic white plate, sparkling even in the cloudy afternoon. The name of the university was marked on its right upper corner. And the windows, or in other words, rows of identical rectangles as if punched out by a sculptor, were arrayed neatly on the larger part of the wall, very much like a careful display of standing match-boxes.

‘I saw that building on the website,’ David said, ‘what is it?’

‘Well, it only says Deakin on the wall,’ Bing replied, ‘or maybe the library?’

‘Not the library; the library is at the other end,’ Susan said, pointing down the main path.
Bing was impressed with her knowledge. ‘How do you know? Have you been here before?’

‘I checked the university website, and there is a map,’ said Susan, touching her glasses, ‘but I don’t know what this white building is called.’

‘Maybe just Deakin Building; it must be the iconic building of the university,’ Mei remarked, who seemed very good at making conclusive comments.

Under their feet was a paved lane, the middle of which was patterned with a zigzag of colours, like a long, multi-coloured ribbon suddenly shaken by a gust of wind. Then on their right an open space with cascading rows of concrete benches. A number of students sat there reading. A water channel began from the top, going through a number of small ponds, arriving finally at the last and also the biggest pond at the bottom. Rushing and splashing and ringing, the water feature was very impressive.

At the end of the lane was the library, which was in acute contrast to Bing’s conception of a library. With a lot of shining space and shapes and with those clean and tidy chairs and cushions, it was as if entering an art gallery or a glamorous shopping centre. Inside, he saw an area of book racks and shelves, but the tables and chairs still claimed a lot more space in the room. Students loosely occupied the furniture, quietly writing something at the desk, or indulgently turning the pages of a book as if they felt better with the touch of the leaves than its actual print and content.

‘Studying must be very comfortable here,’ David remarked.

‘Yeah, but it seems to me more like a resting place than for study,’ Bing said, ‘and I wonder if I will fall asleep more easily here than the library back in China.’

The two girls went to the bookshelves. Bing followed, and began to browse through the books, taking one out, turning and skimming a little, then putting it back, then another...   
…

On their way back, they saw a noticeboard, where heaps of paper were stuck one over another, as messy as the posters he had seen in Shangwai and in China Renmin University in May and June 1989.

‘Look, a lot of rooms to let,’ Bing said, ‘do any of you have a pen with you? The rent, $50 a week, is much cheaper than $90 we currently pay.’

‘No, you don’t need a pen, just rip one of the pieces on its end,’ Mei said.

‘Haha, how stupid am I not noticing it.’ He immediately tore one from it. ‘It is in Box Hill.’

‘Box Hill has a train station. I heard there were a lot of Chinese living there,’ Mei shared her intelligence. ‘And the bus is convenient.’  

‘Yes, that is what the agent told me.’

With a number of slips in their pockets, they strolled back home. The white building, now beheld from this side, was like a giant sail or a hamburger with two walls holding a thin layer of what looked like a swirling staircase.   

Maria was not in the house. For their dinner, the two girls cooked rice, lettuce, and tomatoes with fried eggs, while David and Bing elected to wash the dishes.

After that, Bing made three calls about renting, and agreed to see the places as soon as possible.




--End of Chapter 45--