Mr Ma and Son by Lao She Page A

rendering that melancholy spot unique in its gloom and misery. Mr Ma gave a sigh, wiped his eyes and turned round to his son. ‘Ma Wei, let’s go.’
    Slowly, father and son made their way out of the cemetery. The old lady ran after them to ask whether they wanted any more flowers as she’d got other kinds, too. Ma Wei shot her a look, and Mr Ma shook his head. By the time the two of them reached the iron gate, they’d left her far behind them, but they could still hear her saying, ‘The first Chinaman . . .’
    They both got into the taxi again. Mr Ma closed his eyes, and wondered how he would manage to carry his elder brother’s coffin back to China. Then he remembered that his elder brother had been younger than sixty when he died. How would he fare himself? He was already heading for fifty! Life’s but a dream with no meaning. Yes, a dream . . .
    Ma Wei was also ruminating on his impressions of the cemetery. As he sat leaning back in the corner of the taxi, his eyes staring fixedly at the broad back of the taxi driver, he thought to himself, What a hero my uncle was, setting up business in a foreign land. A hero. True, selling antiques wasn’t necessarily a particularly magnificent enterprise, but, all the same, he’d at least shown it was possible to earn foreign money. My father’s useless. He glanced at Mr Ma; if his father wasn’t banging on about becoming a mandarin, he was juggling a wine cup and playing the poverty-stricken gentleman-scholar. A would-be mandarin, a famous gentleman-scholar. Ha! Real ability was being able to apply genuine knowledge to earn an honest penny.

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    T HE MAS’ antiques shop was in a little side street to the east of St Paul’s. If you stood outside the shop, you could see part of the church’s dome, looking like a slice of watermelon. The shopfront was as long as a single room, with a small door on the left and a full-length glass window on the right. In the window were displayed some porcelain, bronzes, old fans, little images of Buddha and various other odds and ends. Past the window stood another door, which was the entrance for the umbrella and suitcase repairer upstairs, and past that lay a clothing storage depot, which had two horse-drawn carts in front of its door, with people going in and out moving goods onto the carts. To the left of the shop there were three other small shops in a row, the one immediately next door to the Mas’ being another antiques shop. Opposite there was nothing except a continuous stretch of wall.
    As father and son stood surveying the shop, Li Tzu-jung stepped out of the door.
    ‘Mr Ma?’ he said, smiling. ‘Please come in.’
    Mr Ma took a look at Li Tzu-jung. There was nothing particularly objectionable about his face but he was smiling too extravagantly. What’s more, he was in his shirt sleeves, with dust on his hands, having just been cleaning and rearranging the display cabinets. Intuitively, Mr Ma summed him up in two syllables: vulgar.
    ‘Mr Li?’ Ma Wei hastened over to shake hands with Li Tzu-jung.
    ‘Don’t shake hands, I’ve got muck on them.’ Li Tzu-jung hastily searched in his trouser pockets for a handkerchief, but finding none, had to give Ma Wei his wrist to shake. It was a thick, powerful wrist, of handsomely defined muscle and bone. As Ma Wei shook that warm wrist, he became rather taken with Li Tzu-jung. From Li’s shirt, his rolled-up sleeves and his soiled hands, you could tell he was a man of action, and you needed to tackle things with real vigour and capability to compete with the English.
    As foreigners would see it, Li Tzu-jung was more Chinese than Ma Wei. The Chinese man, to the foreign mind, is short of stature and wears a pigtail. He has a flat face with swollen cheekbones, no nose, eyes that are two slits each an inch or so long, a thin-lipped mouth, a stringy moustache dangling in the breeze from his upper lip and waddling Pekingese-dog legs. And that’s only his appearance; as for his hidden