When the Flowers Bloom in Zhongnan

When I was four, my father was transferred from the countryside to the town post office. Our whole family moved there with him.

He rode a postman's green Forever roadster, with its big 28-inch wheels and straight crossbar. Canvas panniers hung over the crossbar, and folding footrests were fitted on either side of the rear wheel.

Mother sat on the rear carrier with her feet on the rests and me in her arms. A thick white cotton mask covered my face beneath a padded hat. Only a narrow slit remained between hat and mask for my eyes.

My sister sat sideways on the crossbar, also wearing a thick white cotton mask. She tucked her legs into the canvas bag and hunched against the wind.

The mask was so thick that breathing felt stifling. Every so often I had to pull it down for air.

Father pedalled hard, glancing ahead and back from time to time, and said sternly:

“Put your mask back on! Swallow that cold wind and you'll get a stomach ache!”

When he turned his head, all I could see was the warm breath billowing from his mouth. I couldn't see the road ahead.

One family, one bicycle. Like an Indian army motorcycle display team, we swayed slowly forward with the twisting of Father's back, carrying our lives to a new place.

Childhood journeys always seemed long. Time moved slowly then.

Rows of poplars slipped past the corners of my eyes. Curled in Mother's arms, I had no idea how much farther we had to go.

To the north were counters of fabric bolts. People usually bought cloth and had their clothes made; ready-made clothing was uncommon. To the south were groceries. Beneath the glass counters, sesame sweets, sesame cakes, sachima, crystal pastries and red “swan's egg” cakes were irresistible to children.

Wires stretched overhead, linking every sales counter to the cashier's desk. Receipts were clipped into little wheeled carriers, hooked onto a wire and sent flying with a firm push. The cashier stamped them and sent them whizzing back. No one needed to run to and fro: wonderfully efficient.

The store was always crowded. Receipt clips shuttled back and forth above the shoppers like the shuttles of a busy loom, whirring through the air: a picture of prosperity.

On market days, people came from all the surrounding villages. Hawkers, street performers and beggars crowded the entrance until it was almost impossible to get through.

And there was no need to worry about municipal enforcement officers.

Then there was the state-run cinema: the town's cultural centre and its window onto the world.

Its concrete gateway was tall, as were the enclosing walls. Railings formed a narrow entrance lane for the queues; beside it was a small ticket window.

Foreign films were shown often: the Australian adventure known in China as Young Heroes Capture the Enemy, India's Mr. India, France's La Grande Vadrouille, the British–Swiss The Wild Geese and the American First Blood. The programme looked beyond our borders; it was anything but stale.

So my generation had more than Lei Feng and Lai Ning among its heroes. A few foreign heroes held unshakeable places in our hearts too.

Schools and workplaces regularly organised cinema outings. Cultural life was lively, and people's horizons were by no means narrow.

The post office stood in the middle of town, with houses to the west and the town hospital just over its eastern wall. Across the road was the sewing-machine parts factory. It had a sizeable forecourt, with Highway 108 running past it.

At the front stood a row of old, south-facing rooms with white walls and grey roof tiles. They housed the entire post office: from west to east, the passage to the inner courtyard, sorting room, public counter and switchboard room.

The sorting room handled letters, parcels, newspapers and magazines awaiting delivery. The counter dealt with postal business; the switchboard room connected telephone calls and sent and received telegrams.

After his transfer, Father became a telephone operator. He no longer had to spend his days out in all weathers, pedalling a postman's bicycle.

But the switchboard had to be staffed around the clock: a communications console with a panel full of sockets and two rows of brass plugs on the desk.

Every office or enterprise in town that had a telephone called this switchboard first. An operator then manually connected it to the organisation it wanted to reach.

Each socket represented an organisation's telephone line. Every brass plug was attached to a pull-out cord, covered in red or green nylon and about as thick as a child's finger.

Plugging the cords into different sockets built a bridge between the lines.

When the lines were busy, the operator wore a headset, watching and listening in every direction while speaking almost without pause. New calls came in while other lines had to be monitored and disconnected as soon as a conversation ended. Brass plugs and cords flew in and out of the sockets—like the darting needle of Dongfang Bubai, the martial-arts character whose embroidery thread becomes a weapon—until a dazzling web of connections had been woven before my eyes.

People often rushed in, anxious and flustered, needing to send an urgent telegram out of town.

First, Father converted the Chinese characters into telegraph codes. He then read the codes over the telephone to an operator at the destination post office, who decoded them and sent a local postman out with the urgent message.

That was already the fastest means of communication. Ordinary homes had no telephones, and letters took much longer.

Telegrams usually meant something urgent, yet their messages were often only a few brief, weighty words: “Mother died. Come home at once.” Or: “Mother and baby safe.”

Encoding characters and decoding them again was rather like translating between two languages. There was a codebook to consult, like a bilingual dictionary: each Chinese character had its own four-digit code.

Father could read a character and know its code, or read a code and know the character. He rarely needed the book.

Occasionally a code escaped him. He would simply pinch the book open, and the right entry would be on that very page. No searching back and forth. He must have worked at it enormously; the book was already in his head.

Later, Father moved to the sorting room. He no longer had to spend nights at the switchboard and could finally sleep properly.

That also meant I could slip in whenever I liked and read the newspapers and magazines. There was a dazzling variety; my favourites were King of Jokes and Story Club. Material things were scarce, but people's inner lives were not barren. The range of publications they subscribed to said as much.

Sorting called for brisk, practised hands. I can still picture Father at work:

One hand fed a neat stack of letters forward at a steady pace. The other held the steel postmark stamp, moving expertly between the ink pad and the envelopes: one dip in the ink, then several stamps.

Entering the inner courtyard through the western passage, the first thing you saw was a garden.

It lay against the west wall, large enough for five or six children to chase one another inside. A dense, neatly clipped evergreen hedge enclosed it, leaving just one opening, about half a metre wide, at the side.

Roses in every colour grew thickly there, each bush taller than an adult.

Between the larger bushes grew child-high cockscombs, cannas and evening primroses, filling the gaps beneath the tall stems.

Moss roses covered the ground so densely that they formed a continuous carpet. In season, countless tiny red, yellow, purple and pink flowers made the whole garden floor a tapestry of colour.

A huge paper mulberry on the neighbour's side of the western wall spread its branches over the garden like an enormous umbrella. In summer it bore clusters of sweet red fruit.

The garden was at its loveliest when the roses bloomed. Large flowers and small, in every shape, opened as though enchanted. Branches rose and dipped in answer to one another. Each bloom seemed chosen by hand, the whole garden an exquisite, oversized flower basket.

The red roses were the most exuberant. Tall bushes blazed with blossoms, gathered like sunset clouds among green leaves and the carpet of little flowers below. They reminded me of a bride's embroidered veil, radiant with happiness, love and hope.

On summer evenings, my sister and I slipped into the garden to watch the night-blooming flowers open. Fireflies often danced among them. You could see the flowers unfolding before your eyes. It brought an old children's rhyme to mind: “Malan flower, Malan flower, happy people are speaking—please bloom for us now!”

We were so absorbed that, however often our parents called us home to bed, we would not come out.

East of the garden stood the staff canteen, with a concrete table-tennis table between them.

The canteen had a brick floor and exposed rafters. A greasy tungsten bulb with a pull cord hung overhead, casting a dim light. Apart from a broad worktop, a large stove and the basic seasonings, there was little else.

Simple as it was, it was full of the warmth of everyday life. At mealtimes steam rose from the great pots. Staff gathered outside, standing, sitting, squatting or leaning, each cradling a large bowl. They ate, talked and laughed together: a scene of easy contentment.

The post office allocated rooms to its staff, most of whom had families. We received the easternmost room on the ground floor. Outside were the open concrete stairs to the upper storey, a small patch of open ground and a shallow, dry well.

The room was tiny, twenty square metres at most: sleeping space on the right, two large wardrobes on the left and a narrow passage between. Every bit of wall and floor was occupied. That was our entire home.

First in the sleeping area was a sofa bed against the wall, where my sister slept. Beyond its end, also along the wall, stood a large bed with a red-lacquered wooden headboard. I slept there with our parents.

Along the left wall stood a red coat stand, then two red-lacquered wardrobes packed with bedding and clothes. Between them was a waist-high cabinet holding a fourteen-inch black-and-white television.

At night, I lay happily between Mum and Dad. Surely that is one of childhood's greatest comforts. Jealous, my sister often insisted on squeezing into the big bed too. We would tug the covers and kick each other on purpose, earning repeated warnings from our parents.

It really was a small room. Our family lived in that little nest like a travelling household, yet I never felt crowded.

The television was our only fashionable appliance. Neighbourhood friends often came over to watch it with us.

Whenever the Eighteen Dragon-Subduing Palms began, a Star Wars spacecraft started a long-distance transmission, or the “human cannon” announced first-stage readiness, every child's nerves and muscles tensed together. We could hardly contain ourselves, chanting along: “Stage one ready… stage two ready…”

Until a sudden power cut brought everything to a halt.

Power cuts were routine. When the lights returned seemed entirely up to the power station's mood, so we always kept candles at home. Even while searching for one, though, my mind was still shouting, “Fire!”

A power cut could have its uses. When my parents lost their tempers and got into a full-blown physical fight, only sudden darkness could quickly separate them.

In the dark, neither could see where to aim the next blow. And the outage offered a respectable excuse for a ceasefire, allowing both to back down without losing face.

Children born in the 1970s to families in work-unit housing all grew up in cramped rooms. Few escaped the sound of parents fighting. There was nowhere to hide.

So watching your parents fight each other, and receiving a joint beating from them, became two benchmarks of a “complete” seventies childhood.

And the resentment of being beaten by both could find an outlet only when you watched them fight each other.

The power often failed, programmes were pitifully few and we watched most of them in fragments. Yet those few shows became unsurpassable classics. We had little, but perhaps contentment came more easily. The memories they left have never faded.

People say that life's art is subtraction: less is more. It does seem true. After a lifetime spent striving for one thing after another, we reach old age only to discover that most were scarcely used, and that their weight burdened us instead.