Popagandhi

As part of the interviews I am doing for my article, I have been randomly engaged in conversation with all sorts of people who live in Mae Salong. The people I was most hopeful to meet and interview — the lao bing, or the first generation who had fled out of China with the Fifth Army, spent years wandering in Burma, and fought the early battles, were understandably, well, mostly dead. Other for a certain sole surviving ‘general’ of sorts who I’m dragging my feet about interviewing and meeting (because I personally believe his name in the history books is far too illustrious for what he had actually done), the leads have been somewhat tenuous. I keep walking past a little shack, curiously decorated with scores of essays outside its door, written in traditional Chinese calligraphy. One was for the occasion of the Thai king’s birthday, another was about the ails of the ‘forgotten Chinese’. I knew from the day I got here this was going to be an interesting conversation, whether or not I got anywhere with it — yet the sight of the 90 year old man spouting off in classical Chinese and Yunnanese intimidated me for days. After days of soaking in the atmosphere, and generally just attempting to absorb as much as I could of the curious Yunnanese inflections of speech and colloquialisms, I finally made it around to his front door.

Mr Deng, 90-something; not exactly clear himself. Born in Yunnan, raised in Kunming, he’d been in Mae Salong for 50 years. He was a man of culture, as he called himself, and his incredibly abstract speech reflected the meandering thoughts of a sprightly old man, but also dipped at many points into completely irrelevant conversation. I let him talk, knowing this technique to be a better deal for the two of us. He began.

“Ah, so you are Chinese, you speak our great language very well. Very good, let me tell you this, everything about the future and everything about the past has been predestined by our Chinese calculations. It is predestined that I will live a hundred years.

So I was raised in Kunming. No, I am not a solder. I am a man of culture, not war. I did not come with the army. I was working in a factory in Kunming at the time, the communists were in power. Now, I have read the works of Marx, Stalin, Lenin, I have read about every other political system in the world, and I have concluded every one of them is a little good and a little bad. So I choose to believe in none. I do not follow Jesus, Mohammed, nor Buddha either. I follow the way of the ba gua.”

I was getting lost, but decided to let him ramble on.

“Your summer qi is retreating. That is not good. You need to balance your qi.” He began to read my palm, exerting pressure on various points. He pressed my wrists. “You, young lady, have great wealth ahead of you. Great wealth and great luxuries. It is a good thing: you like the good things in life. But let me tell you this: it is not the time. There are obstacles.”

I thought, right, okay, I’ve known I was going to be a struggling writer/photojournalist for a while, then eventually write novels in Mussoorie and somehow make a lot of money. But this obstacle, let me guess, I have to unblock the obstacles in my qi? It’s apparent I watch a lot of Chinese martial arts serials. I was half expecting him to poke me in the chest and back with his fingers.

“You need to unblock your qi before you can obtain your great wealth. And your body. It has a lot of cold at the moment, not enough heat. Balance that.” Looking intently at my fingertips, he proclaimed my liver did not get enough blood or fluids. Unlocking these secrets that my Chinese-ness has bestowed on me, he said, is the secret to great things.

My mother was getting uncomfortable, but I thoroughly enjoyed every moment of it. I like nutty old people in a way I can’t explain.

Putting on his reading glasses, he stared intently into my eyes. He turned to my mother, and said: “This daughter of yours. Is extremely intelligent. She is swimming with ideas and intelligent thoughts at every moment of the day!”

He turned to me. “Do you want to live a hundred years?”

Before I could answer that (no), he went off on a tangent. “It was very difficult during the early years. We had to do opium, morphine, everything. Horses came at night. The soldiers followed. We had no choice. It was a very hard life. We had been dispossessed by our country, and Taiwan, who wanted us to stay to help them fan fu hui guo (return to the motherland) also disowned us. We are now Thai people. Thailand is good. It is a small country with a big big heart. But it was hard.”

“I am setting up a university. Right here in this shack. It is called the University of Ability. Everyone can join. I am the teacher. I will teach fasttrack 12 years of education into a few months. Here, look at the pamphlet. Yes, it is rather deep: phoenix wind, key success. I don’t blame you for not being able to read or understand it. Do you want to live to a hundred years?”

“You are a very intelligent young woman. There are two kinds of intelligence in the world. The first, is a regular kind, that prepares you to be a good official and mandarin. The second kind, which is what you have, assures you of a brilliant future. You have a brilliant future. Because you are this kind of intelligent, everybody loves you, your family loves you, your friends love you, your enemies painfully respect you, you can do great, great things. But the key to unlocking this —

Do you want to live to a hundred years old? — I am almost there, I am already 90 — anyway the other day in Virgina, do you know Virginia, it is in America, something really bad happened, and 30 odd people died, but — The key to unlocking great things, young lady, is this. Master the Chinese language. If you master the Chinese language, you are the master of the world. You can conquer the world. You can do anything. It is predestined — you will do great things — do you want to live to a hundred years old? I am almost there, girl, I have ten more years. When my university is set up, everyone will come. You can come too, and master the Chinese classics, like I have, and be the master of the universe. Great things are destined for you; you must unlock them; master Chinese. The world looks to us, zhong guo ren, you and me now. They used to say we were barbarians, bu ru gou, but now: we are kicking their ass.”

Mr Deng lit his cheroot, a kind of bidi-like cigarette from Burma, his fifth in the half hour that we had been speaking. With his worn military overalls — he swore he had never been in the army, but he had — army green cap snug on his head, he bent over his beloved calligraphy and flashed me a toothless smile. Everything was perfect. It was a perfect picture for the article, and the kind of magazine it will be in. And yet I felt an extraordinary sadness for the man who had lost his country. Perhaps it was better that he seemed to live someplace else in his little shack. When I went back to look at the picture I had taken of him, the vacuous look in those eyes was one that had seen much and gained little.

As I left him, he shouted to me: “I have never lost a battle. Every battle I have fought in, I have won. Live to a hundred years — unlock the secrets — you can do great things.”

Then he stumbled back into his little, dark shack adorned by his beloved calligraphy and essays, and sank into a chair to lay out the blueprint for his University of Ability, which, “will be set up very soon, maybe when I am one hundred”.