Fiction: Group 4
She heard the calling of the moon:
Come away, come away
… and her soul softly sighed,
conscious of the eternal hydrangeas adorning her forehead, and at that moment, she knew she was beautiful.
IV
“A CHINESE DREAM”
In Christmas Stephen didn’t go skiing as many of his friends did, but instead stayed at his father’s estate in
Shenzhen, golfing and drowsing over the wading-pool through indolent, late-afternoons in regretful
languor. Protesting didn’t help. His father insisted they would remain in Shenzhen and go back down to
Hong Kong once a week for poker and cocktail mixers. His mother wasn’t worried when her husband went
off on his own, because all the women there draped themselves in face-masks and long pieces of garments
and sleeves, head-to-toe, as to protect themselves from ageing in the sun.
One warm afternoon, still in Shenzhen, lounging on the sofa reading, as was his custom after a long
day on the course, Stephen had realised something, given the time: he had fallen back, full of faith, into the
arms of extremely generous parents, a mother and a father who had given him profusely more than he had
asked. But even more than that they had given him the best upbringing – a liberal, private education,
openness to deep conversation, and the time to “find himself” and to discover his true specialties and
strengths. For that he was grateful.
Watching a returning buggie go by, filled with conspicuous yellow caddie helmets bobbing
ecstatically along the darkening roads, anticipating their tips at the starter, an overwhelming sense of longing
for Badminton crushed his heart into flakes: football, dinner-dances,, basement pool tournaments, karaoke
and take-away and enchanted nights… and Myra…! Oh Myra...! Even now he could hear her footsteps,
light as happiness, coming up the porch steps, and down again…
From this, he had located a newfound respect for China. Despite the old creeds and the bizarre
excesses, and the rampant ugliness of its industrial steel, he was glad that it was rising, rapidly, above death,
poverty, sickness... -- prevailing through the grotesque debris, as a land and as a people. But though the
more exquisite caves of life were ignored - art, subtleness, poise, romantic philosophy… – it would re-
discover it again, as the great Tang poets had done in their own fine days…
China was the graves of great men and women in 1911, and the heroic foot-march of weary,
nervous country boys dying in the Pingjin, their scarlet bodies languished to musical dust, hearts-in-
tender-hearts, all fighting for one final cause -- to pave way for the freshness and strength of Stephen’s
generation. Whatever faculty of life Stephen was to choose: arts, politics, finance – he knew it was only his
duty to carry out what the old longings and devotions had fought for -- and with time Badminton had
taught him this, and all the general wisdom it could think of.
