Oh! Maybe she would never get to own her own horse!
Yifan started to cry, which was very uncomfortable for Vicky, who was not crying.
“Are you alright, luv?” came a shout from the Director.
“Yes, yes – just a bit of grit,” replied Vicky, rubbing at her eyes. “Very irritating.”
-- You’ll just have to make sure you get a decent career, and make money, so you can get your horse, said Vicky. Yifan could tell that she was very annoyed.
-- I know, I know, she said. I just thought it’s really comfortable having it all coming out so good, and now I’m not sure what’s going to happen.
-- Well, you’ll do well, as long as you get sensible.
-- I AM sensible, she snapped, and turned her back on Vicky. Unfortunately this caused Vicky to spin in a corkscrew motion and fall over.
The last thing Yifan heard before she headed back to the restaurant was the hearty, loud laughter of the filmmakers.
The first thing she heard when she reached the restaurant was an argument in Chinese. Her mother and grandmother were arguing about who should be held responsible for Yifan being poisoned, or drugged, or otherwise mucked around with.
Yifan’s eyes were closed, and her head was being held in a vice-like grip. She struggled and waved her arms, bashing her hand against something soft which went “oof!” with John’s voice. Probably John, then. Then the pressure around her head was relieved and her mum hugged her hard, which was just as bad as when she had hugged her head.
“What happened, Yifan?” wailed Ji Ye, and Mrs Ji wailed in counterpoint, in Mandarin.
“Just tired, ma,” Yifan responded softly, and got another brutal hug as a present.
“You’ve been out for about two minutes,” said John. “We were just about to call for a Doctor.”
“Who?”
“No, just an ordinary Doctor,” said John.
The trip home by train was filled with excited analysis of the day’s events in Mandarin by all concerned, excepting of course John, who did not speak any foreign languages except for French and Gibberish, and Yifan, who just wanted not to be the centre of attention. She did not like the speculative way John was looking at her, as if he had suspicions about her. It was quite similar to the way Bart looked at her now and again. Then John said something that Bart would never have said. He said, “How’s Vicky?”
Yifan knew that her mouth had swung open, and that she looked equally stupid and terrified, and that was not the best way to look if you wanted to say, “What nonsense are you talking, John?” So she did not say that. Instead she shut her mouth and composed her face and then said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Where were you when you were asleep in the restaurant?” persisted John, quietly. The others were still engrossed in their own loud conversation, but it was best to be cautious. “You know, Ji Ye is really worried, and wants to take you to the Doctor. If that happens you’ll have lots of tests and probably have to take some quite horrible medicine. You may get a diagnosis that could stay with you for the rest of your life. So tell me – what happens when you suddenly fall asleep like that?”
Yifan mulled over the implications of telling John all about it. And of course she would also have to tell her mum. On the one hand it was a fantastic story, and couldn’t be believed. On the other, in Vicky’s world John and Ji Ye already knew all about it. “Wait till we get home,” she said finally, “and we can talk privately, just mum and me and you.” She had forgotten about Bart.
In the event, Bart heard all about it by virtue of being there the next day, when Ji Ye’s parents had set off to return home to Cardiff and Yifan settled down to spill the beans.
She started by describing the first time, on the rainy day that seemed so long ago. The conversation that started her hunt for the Princess Aster pot was gone into in as much detail as she could remember, with John interrupting to ask about silly things like weather until Ji Ye shut him up. Both adults seemed to accept Yifan’s story without visible astonishment, but it was a fantastic narration, and Yifan was a bit annoyed that they were not growing pale with fear and marvelling at her bravery.
Her story took quite a while to tell – about three days, because of tiredness and holes in her memory, and interruptions, and meals, and TV, and John having to go to work and Yifan to go Mall-surfing with friends – but eventually it was told, and holes in the narrative were mostly filled, and the whole thing was sanity-checked by Ji Ye and then John, and then Bart (though nobody saw him do it), and Yifan had well and truly told her secret.
“It’s quite an amazing story,” said John, “and the idea of alternate Universes is certainly a theoretical possibility. I suppose it depends on what sort of alternate Universe – there are, I think, three different theories…” He began to ramble aimlessly, as usual.
Ji Ye was a bit more practical.
“Ask Vicky to look up who won the Grand National next year.”
No mention was made of Yifan’s having to go and see a Doctor, which was good, and precautions against injury were discussed but nothing could be decided. “If she has a fugue when she’s riding a horse, she could fall off and be quite badly injured,” explained John, but stopped short of forbidding Yifan to do things. After all, as Ji Ye said, Yifan could be injured in many ways by falling asleep suddenly; there was no point in stopping her doing everything.
This did not quite cheer Yifan up, as far as her thoughts on personal safety were concerned. John suggested she wear a hard hat during the day, but that was vetoed. Then he said she could put a Bob the Builder sticker on it, and people would just think she was a big fan.
In the end, life went on very much as it had done before. In course of time Yifan’s excursions into another Universe became almost commonplace – she would just fall asleep and then wake up, sometimes only a fraction of a second later, and have reams of information about how Vicky was doing, and what her boyfriend looked like – fit, said Yifan, he looks real fit – and John tried to work out how time went by between the two different Universes and got quite confused; and Ji Ye asked about the Grand National, but Yifan always forgot to ask Vicky.
VI.
In August Ji Ye, Yifan and John went to China. They went for the whole month, visiting places Ji Ye had always wanted to see.
They flew into Beijing, where they stayed for a few days, and friends took them for hot-pot and grills, and for Korean food at the North Korean Embassy’s restaurant. The restaurant was staffed by very pretty North Korean girls, some of whom waited at the tables, and others, in gorgeous silk dresses, entertained the diners with flute and accordion music and Korean songs. Ji Ye looked crossly at John every time he stared at a waitress.
Ken and his wife, who were hosting the lunch, ordered so many dishes that John was convinced they could not eat all that was put in front of them. There were long smoked fish, noodles, sliced cold beef in vinegar sauce, jellyfish, sliced white fish, monks’ vegetables, rice cakes, short unsmoked fish, Korean bread... John was particularly taken by a meat stew.
“What is this?” he asked Ken. Ken beamed, and made an ‘OK’ sign with his fingers.
“It’s Yummy Meat,” he declared. Yifan looked suspicious.
“It really is,” John agreed, spooning more onto his plate as a waitress leaned over his shoulder to pour more beer into his glass.
It must have been yummy, thought Yifan. He didn’t even look at that waitress.
*
John had always wanted to see the Summer Palace. It had been destroyed in the nineteenth century by Lord Elgin, who had marched on Peking, as Beijing had been known then in the West. Elgin had wanted an audience with the Emperor, but at every step in the journey he and his army of British and French soldiers took they were harassed and picked off by the Chinese. The final straw occurred when a group of diplomats were invited to a truce, and were captured and taken to be tortured in the capital. Then Elgin forced his march and defeated the huge Chinese for
ces at the gates of the Forbidden City. When the captured diplomats and troopers were brought out of the prison they were broken men; Elgin decided that the only way to punish the Imperial Court was to destroy the Summer Palace, a garden kingdom that had been built over a hundred years or more into the most beautiful landscape in the world. Elgin explained that if he had just demanded gold, the Chinese people would have been beaten for it, and the real perpetrators, the Court, would have got off Scot-free.
So the British and French troops ran amok in the world’s most beautiful garden, destroying treasures that would have made them all millionaires, and the only people in China who cared, or who even knew about the destruction, were the rich Imperial courtiers.
Later a new Summer Palace was built, and this is the one that John found himself wandering around the day after he had eaten Yummy Meat. It was stunning.
You can find plenty of pictures of the Summer Palace in Beijing on the internet. Perhaps one day you will be as lucky as John, and go there, and then you’ll see that photographs are a poor imitation of the real thing.
John felt he was in Heaven.
*
The next morning they flew to Kunming, in Yunnan. Kunming is, in John’s opinion, the rainiest city in the world. Ji Ye had an aunt and a cousin in the city, and John asked them whether they had grown gills and fishy tails. John, as you might have guessed by now, was used to being met with bafflement and nervous laughter.
After a night in the rain they were met by a guide from the Yunnan tour company and were driven through the Province to visit exotic cities and see spectacular mountains, waterfalls and shops.
Well, shops are exciting, and two-thirds of the party were not male.
Behind the city of Dali there is a mountain called Cang Shan, and in front of Dali there is a lake, called ear-shaped lake (which sounds better in Chinese). Taken both together, their names make a very romantic saying in Mandarin, which made Ji Ye feel warm, and she smiled a lot, and wept a little tear because she had finally come to a place she had always wanted to visit.
The family went for a boat trip, just them, their guide and the boatman, who looked to be about two hundred years old and who smoked vile hand-rolled cigarettes, so he was probably only thirty.
On the way back to the shore they watched a floating song-and-dance show, and then drew up alongside some cormorant fishers. Yifan and John got photographs taken with cormorants standing on their outstretched arms, and then they watched the birds fishing and taking their catch back to the fishermen.
“They don’t eat them because there’s a string tied round their throats,” explained John before the guide could. The guide then asked him if he would like to do the guiding for the rest of the day, and now John looked as if someone had tied a string around his throat.
Leaving that guide in Dali they took a bus north through waves of green hills that rose and rose. These hills eventually end up as the Himalayas, and in northern Yunnan get high enough that it becomes difficult for tourists to breathe.
LiJiang is a beautiful city, where, Ji Ye told her husband, young people go to as singles and leave as couples. It is a romantic place, even in the rain, agreed John. And it had a busy and crazy centre, full of streams in the middle of the street, crossed by high humped bridges busy with tourists trying to end up as couples. They found a bar owned by a European who had loved the place and decided to stay. It mixed incredible cocktails, and made omelettes and toasted sandwiches, which endeared it immediately to John.
They ended up in Shangri-La, a city in the very north of Yunnan, picturesque and friendly. Their guide there was a small, tough young woman who bounced about like Tigger and set a cracking pace, which at that high altitude made them all feel dizzy. Their first stop with her was Tiger Leaping Gorge, and the first bend in the Yangtze river that flowed through all of China until it emptied into the sea at Shanghai. There were hundreds of steps down to the river, and there seemed to be thousands more leading back up. Tigger bounded up the steps like a plump gazelle, while the family puffed and groaned, and took rests, and lingered over views; anything that did not involve upward progress.
Shangri-La had been named after a book of that name which had described a perfect society in a remote Himalayan valley; a place where no-one died, which Ji Ye found to be a joke in poor taste as she contemplated the downpour of rain from the window of their hotel room.
“You could drown in this,” she observed.
“Well, you don’t have to go out in it,” said John, who was trying to dry his shoes.
“True,” she said. “You do. We need to eat. Go out and get us some pizza.” Yifan sniggered, and got a wet sock thrown at her.
It was on the flight back to Kunming that Yifan had a bad feeling in her stomach. She clutched John’s hand and said, “I think I’m going to be
-- Oh, Yifan…
-- Oh!
She was in a smart, neat bedroom in an unfamiliar house. There was someone in bed and she – Vicky – was holding his hand, and Ji Ye was there, and the whole atmosphere seemed sad.
-- You shouldn’t be here.
-- I haven’t got a choice, said Yifan, whispering in Vicky’s head. And then she looked at the man in the bed.
It was John.
He was very old, and did not look well. And when she recognised him, Yifan burst into tears, with Vicky’s eyes.
== What?
== Welcome to the party.
== This is amazing!
== Quite. But there’s not long to go. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but it better be something good…
John stared out of his own eyes, felt the running down of his own body, saw his wonderful wife, his grown-up daughter. He was pleased with the room, pleased it was not a hospital but their own place, pleased that the John he was talking with was sane and willing to talk.
“Yifan,” said John in a voice that was barely a whisper, “I mean Yifan, not Vicky…”
Vicky allowed Yifan to use her voice, but it was almost a minute before Yifan spoke.
“I’m here.”
“I know what it’s like, now,” said John, and smiled at her.
Ji Ye was holding John’s other hand, and now she also grasped Vicky’s. So those three – those five – were in a circle, in silence for a while, and then, peacefully, almost imperceptibly, he died.
sick…” Yifan vomited into John’s lap.
“Oh, you messy pup,” he cried, but after he had gone to the tiny aircraft toilet and sort of cleaned up, he hugged her, and she saw from the look in his eyes that he really had been there.
Yifan cried, and Ji Ye comforted her, but it was not until they were in the terminal at Kunming that she got the whole story, and then she started crying too.
*
The China trip proceeded apace, and they flew on to Guilin, meeting Ji Ye’s friends and going on a river-boat trip through the rounded green mountains that gave Guilin its fame. They transferred to the moving boat from a river taxi, and then spent quite a bit of money to sit on the top deck, under an awning to protect them from the blazing sun, and ate a lunch of river fish, river crabs and crayfish. The passengers who had not paid for a lunch had to stand at the back of the deck, or sit inside. Meanwhile the river meandered through a landscape of high, cylindrical forested hills, domed at the top, the remnants of a time when the whole area had been a field of volcanoes two thousand square miles in area. Fishermen in tiny boats sped out of their way, and even smaller boats brought fruit from the shore to be bought by the tourists.
Another day they visited the caves – you will always find caves in volcanic areas – and saw stalagmites and stalactites, some of which looked like Buddha, or a dragon, or monkeys, and others of which were beautifully lit and seemed to dance in the moving lights. Yifan wondered which was which, meaning stalagmites and stalactites,
“Tights come down,” John explained. Which of course meant that stalagmites might be the ones that sprang out of the floor.
They
spent much of their time in Guilin having exotic dinners, travelling in ancient buses and perilously fast taxis, bicycle rickshaws and rattly tuk-tuks all around the huge city.
“It’s not so big,” said Ji Ye. “Wait till we get to Changchun.”
Changchun was, indeed, huge. Changchun was Ji Ye’s home town, the city where Yifan had been born, and there were many friends, and some family, and a really excellent hotel to stay in which was a gift from one of Ji Ye’s friends. They visited friends’ homes, saw where Ji Ye had lived when Yifan was a baby, where Yifan went to school, where Ji Ye had worked as a teacher.
They went to the huge park north-east of the City, and to an exhibition showing the settlement of the Province in older times. There were lots of dinners, lunches and trips out, and children of Yifan’s age to play with, boss about, get into mischief with, argue with, make up, laugh, hit, run around and generally be a child with.
What sort of dinners would you have in China? It has to be said – Chinese food in the West is quite different from Chinese food in China. One barbecue restaurant brought half a sheep to the room where the family were being treated by a group of friends. The lamb had been grilled in the open air, and everyone was given a razor blade which they used to slice off the best pieces of meat. Another restaurant served hot-pot, which is a seething spicy broth into which you drop thinly-sliced meat, mushrooms and vegetables. When they are cooked you fish them out with chopsticks, dip them into peanut sauce and eat them. At the end of the meal the broth is served as a soup.
One of Ji Ye’s friends had put them up in the best hotel in the city. They had a suite, with fresh fruit every morning and a view over the city to the far-distant hills, which were usually obscured by haze. Yifan, on the daily trips out, rode horses, sped around in a speedboat, and fumed in the frequent traffic jams. Ji Ye roamed the shopping plazas, examining Gucci, Hermes, Chanel and Yves St Laurent with aplomb, sometimes curling her lip and shaking her head, which vastly impressed the shop assistants. But she didn’t buy.