by Xiaolu Guo
During those two months, my father was as nervous as me, because he knew this would be my last chance. He couldn’t afford another trip. If I failed this time, I would have to become a factory worker, just like my mother. But on that fateful early-summer morning, when my father took the letter from my shaking hands and opened it, he erupted with relief and joy. I had gained one of eleven places in the Film and Literature Department of the Beijing Film Academy. I was in ecstasy. I had managed to beat seven thousand candidates from across China and had earned my place at the best art school in the country.
Leaving the South
August 1993 was the last summer I spent in the sweaty, drowsy south. Term started on 1 September. I could hardly wait any longer. My body was still part of the heavy, brown earth but my mind had already flown to the moon. I listened to news of Beijing and the outside world, and felt I no longer belonged to this mass in Wenling. It seemed to me that important things, momentous things, were happening that year, but no one in Wenling gave a damn about them. Months earlier, Beijing had welcomed our new president Jiang Zemin, who appeared so very grand on television, despite being much less popular than our previous president, Deng Xiaoping. But the people of Wenling hadn’t even realised there had been a change of leadership in Beijing. That same month, the moon had passed at its closest distance to Earth in recent history, and thus was at its fullest phase of the lunar cycle. Scientists said that it would appear 14 per cent bigger and 30 per cent brighter than any recent moon. That special night in March, my father and I climbed up into the bamboo-covered hills behind our house and took in the brightest moon we had ever seen.
It was so large we could make out its shadowy, cratered surface. Just as we were about to leave, I stood on the hilltop and screamed to the world beneath: ‘Can you see the moon tonight? It’s brighter and bigger than it’s ever been!’ My father laughed in response. But the world below was oblivious to my cry. The town of Wenling had been numbed by the throbbing sound of factory machines, traffic, chatter, all the mundanity of material life.
On the day I was leaving for Beijing my parents walked me to the local long-distance bus station. My mother had sewn three hundred yuan into the inner pocket of my sweater the night before, and my father was carrying two bags for me. I had a long trip ahead of me, and this time I would be alone. With mosquitoes biting at my skin, my hair knotted and tangled, I grabbed the bags from my father’s hands and jumped onto the bus. Then I heard my mother yell behind me: ‘Make sure you eat plenty of lamb and garlic in Beijing, and drink blood soup!’
I looked at my mother and nodded as I hurried into my seat. Despite everything, my mother was proud of me. At least she cared about some aspects of my future. She knew that I suffered from low blood pressure. Lamb, blood and garlic were supposed to be good for a skinny girl like me. It was some sort of farewell at least, from the mother I had never loved. She was practical, that was all I could say about her.
Then my father waved through the bus window and called: ‘Write to me!’ Yes, of course, I said in my heart. Of course I would write to my father. He was the only person I would think of writing to in the whole world. No one else. He was the only man I trusted. My parents sent me off without the merest ‘Study hard’, the standard farewell for most Chinese parents. They knew they didn’t need to say it. I was too ambitious to waste this opportunity. I had always wanted to be number one, I was an aggressive competitor. And this brutal competitiveness was probably rooted in the harshness of my childhood.
I was nineteen and a half when I finally left my home town for Beijing. The three-day journey to the capital was emotionally taxing. I was travelling into the unknown and into my adult life. It was with relief that I left behind my distressed teenage years. After the eight-hour bus ride, I sat for another seventeen hours on the train, absorbed in the world rushing past the window. This time I didn’t read any books – I could barely sit still. I felt only like writing, a poem to China’s rivers and plains. The landscape slowly evolved from the poetic to the utilitarian. Although, in reality, China in 1993 was more like an enormous construction site full of grey concrete foundations and rising factories. By dawn’s early light, the train crossed the Yangtze River and stopped at the city of Nanjing. I got up from my seat, stretched my neck and looked down at the muddy yellow water. The Yangtze, the great border between north and south China, the longest river in Asia, the very river Chairman Mao had chosen to swim across, a river that had carried with it a thousand legends east to the sea. ‘I’ve made it!’ I cried out. ‘Fuck! I got out! Beijing, I’m coming! Independence! Freedom!’
I arrived and delved straight into plates and plates of lamb, blood tofu and garlic. I had taken my mother’s words to heart. I felt strong. I wanted to become someone big, in a big capital of a big country. I didn’t miss anything about Wenling, even though I often dreamt that I was walking through its bamboo forests, trying to find the fishpond where we used to play as children. The laughter rang so loud and vivid in those nightly visions, and the bamboo shimmered in the steamy summer air. But I was never to see that landscape in person again, it lived now only in my sleep.
My parents, on a mountainside near Wenling, 1980s
PART III | Beijing: The Whirlpool of Life
The pilgrim team led by the master monk Xuangzang had been trudging for eighteen months on the long Silk Road. They had made their way through uninhabited land with deep gorges and high mountains, fearsomely difficult to cross. Only the monkey, Wukong, the Emptiness Knower, was not deterred by these difficulties. Through the energy that had accumulated in his body over centuries, Wukong possessed an immense amount of strength. He was able to lift objects many times his own weight. He was also extremely fast – with one somersault he could spring across a gorge. He could transform into seventy-two different shapes, which allowed him to take on the form of any animal, plant life or object. Yet the monkey was not always reliable. His cunning and trickster personality would get his companions into trouble and he was frequently distracted from the path of virtue along the road.
On one occasion, while the group was crossing the border into Afghanistan, Wukong saw a forest of ripe peaches in the distance and fell into an ecstasy. He flew off and disappeared into the peach forest for three days, devouring the fruits and playing with wild animals he found there, leaving his companions on a bare mountain path to starve and freeze. The monkey was also violent. He would brutally kill small innocent creatures for fun and would not feel the slightest mercy in his heart.
Xuanzang, the master monk, understood that the creature was too wild to be disciplined and he decided to find a way to control him. So he made a magical, invisible headband for the monkey to wear, which could never be removed. With a special chant, the headband would tighten and tighten around Wukong’s head, and cause unbearable pain. With the magical band on his head, the monkey would lose his immense power while the master chanted. Wukong, the Emptiness Knower, had no choice but to obey his master’s authority. Thus the journey continued.
My first year at Beijing Film Academy, 1993
Away From Home
I left the south for Beijing in 1993. I was turning twenty. In my young eyes, the great northern capital had little to do with the Forbidden City or imperial palaces. Beijing for me meant the avant-garde. It was the only place in China where you could see Western art and European cinema. Since up to now I had spent all my time studying the old, here in the capital all I wanted was to study the new. I wanted to go beyond all tradition, conservatism and its history. I would cut away the past and become someone else.
My journey ended at Beijing South Train Station. It was early morning on the last day of a steaming hot August. First I saw yellow chrysanthemum flowers blooming in pots along the station platform. Then I saw the university flags being waved by the students tasked with welcoming us newbies. They all wore bright white hats to distinguish themselves from the general throng of travellers. I spotted a blue-and-white flag with the Beijing Film Academy em
blem on it, and I dragged my luggage towards the animated-looking figure beneath it.
As the film-school bus moved through a congested Beijing morning, I immediately noticed the different light in the capital. It was much sharper, carving out each thing more precisely. Everything was in soft focus in the south. Or was it the new glasses I was wearing, bought for me by my father before I had left Wenling? In any case, for me, only this kind of light could inspire revolutionary acts. I was sure I could feel myself beginning to transform already. What would I become? I asked myself. I was going to be an artist, but what kind of artist? A film director? A cinematographer? A screenwriter?
We arrived at the film school and I checked in to my dormitory. It was a massive building. Boys and girls were separated on different floors. Each room was shared by four students on two bunk beds. Everyone was given five objects by our dorm supervisor: a quilt, a pillow, a small desk, a wooden chair and a bookshelf. No one was allowed to bring in any extra furniture due to the limited living space. My room-mates had not arrived yet. I chose a lower bunk by the window and proceeded to set up with my meagre possessions. I had brought with me my father’s books, Lust for Life and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass which I put on the bookshelf.
Class started two days later. We were introduced to our professors and I met my ten classmates – the lucky eleven finally gathered in one room. Among us was a young man called Jia Zhangke, who would later become one of China’s most famous directors of independent films. The professor who welcomed us said: ‘Always remember, you have been chosen from thousands of applicants. Don’t waste this opportunity, which you have won by your hard work. You will be the future of Chinese cinema!’ We looked back at him solemnly. My heart was racing. I nodded my head earnestly.
And yet, I could not really get into my studies right away, because I didn’t have any experience with cinema in general. I remember vividly the film we watched on that first day. It was the black-and-white French film Last Year in Marienbad, directed by Alain Resnais and written by Alain Robbe-Grillet. The film was undubbed and without subtitles, so we were provided with a simultaneous oral translation read by a lecturer sitting below the screen. He read the dialogue as well as the voice-over in a sleepy monotone. It was a bizarre experience, especially for our poor young minds from the provinces, having no idea what the film was about and what the obscure voice-over was supposed to mean. Besides, class was in the afternoon, straight after a considerable lunch. I had probably eaten two bowls of pork noodles plus a plate of dumplings before entering the darkened cinema. Eating had always been an obsession, ever since I was a child. And here in Beijing, with the dirt cheap student canteen, I would be able to indulge this obsession on an epic scale.
Stomachs suitably loaded, we listened to the lecturer murmur through a microphone:
‘Ah, you never seem to be waiting for me, but we kept meeting at every turn of the path. Behind every bush, at the foot of each statue, near every pond. It is as if it had been only you and I in all that garden. No, I have never met you, no, I was not waiting for you …’
It sounded poetic, although it was also like listening to an old man suffering from dementia. Sunk deep in my seat, I could only guess wildly what the characters were saying. The people on the screen walked around in one scene like zombies. Marienbad was a kind of geometrical mausoleum with a garden of dark, frozen trees. How had the two main characters, the man and the woman, got there? And who were these people walking around this dimly lit, expensive-looking hotel with endless corridors and waiting rooms as if in a trance and talking to themselves? As the noodles made their way through my digestive system, my eyelids grew heavier and heavier. Soothed by the lullaby of the lecturer’s voice, I drifted off. I dreamt I was lost in the corridors of Beijing’s own Summer Palace, with a large golden-walled room that exited onto a rocky shoreline of the kind we had in my fishing village. I seemed to melt into the sea. Sometime later, I woke up and found the students around me were also asleep. Some were snoring loudly. The lecturer was still reading the transcript in his heavy peasant accent by the light of a little lamp. His Hunan intonation was just like Chairman Mao’s. In my dozy semi-consciousness, I imagined Mao’s ghost had returned to provide voice-overs for nouvelle vague cinema. Somehow that seemed appropriate. Mao had been a poet and a revolutionary. But even this startling thought was unable to jolt me awake, and I surrendered fully to my unconscious, just as the dream-like characters of the film.
So that was my introduction to the next seven years at film school – not that I disapprove of it now. In fact, it was the beginning of a growing sense in me that cinema didn’t actually have that much to do with telling stories; it is a visual art form, and yet many people mistreat cinema as a mere engine of story. And of course, one should never see a film after a large lunch.
Over the next weeks, we sat through a long procession of classics of European and early American cinema, from the first film in history by the Lumière Brothers, to Cecil B. DeMille’s silent films. Then D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, the films of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, Murnau’s Nosferatu, Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin. Normally, these films would never have made it past the censorship laws. (At that time, the China Film Censorship Bureau would only allow eight foreign films per year to be distributed into Chinese cinemas. And without a doubt, these would never have been deemed sufficiently ‘full of the positive spirit of human life’ in the way that Forrest Gump or Disney’s Lion King were.) But we had certain privileges; we had access to them for ‘research purposes’. Through them, and old Chinese films from the 1930s, we studied technique, mise en scène, close-up and tracking shots, and the dizzying montage effect first realised with success on the Odessa steps by Eisenstein. Before coming to Beijing, I had only ever seen what was available in my local cinema in Wenling, with its steady stream of war dramas and martial arts films, as well as the state television. The visual world opening up to me was beyond my imagination. My days at the Beijing Film Academy became one long dream made up of thousands of black-and-white images.
Beijing
The capital was manic in those days, building ring roads and inner-city highways. The Third Ring Road outside the Second Ring Road, then the Fourth Ring Road outside the Third. Each project involved armies of cheap labour. And yet amid all the dust of the construction work, the old ways carried on: tea houses and quiet parks with people playing mah-jong and practising tai chi; food stalls scattered along the streets both day and night; snaking hutong alleys with families squashed inside date-tree-covered courtyards. Life was rough and basic. Winters were long and hard. The shelves of the state-run department stores stocked only three kinds of vegetables: leeks, bai choi and potatoes. Meat was not always available. At night, we secretly burned our small spirit stove with a little cooking pot on top. It was forbidden in the dormitory as it might cause fires. But we were adding bai choi to instant noodles in an attempt to fill our stomachs before sleep.
When spring came, the sandstorms from the Gobi Desert blasted the city with such a force that no one wanted to stay outside. Even though the government planted millions of paulownia trees between Beijing and Inner Mongolia, the skies of Beijing were still a permanent grey-brown and speckled with sand and dust. Then came the hot summer, the forty-degree heat melting the asphalt outside. It was a hard city, comfort was not a part of our daily vocabulary. But for a village person like me, I couldn’t have cared less. I spent my days in the film school reading about Godard and Duras and watching every film in the library. I was thirsty for knowledge. When I looked around at my fellow schoolmates, all urban kids, I realised that this was my re-education camp, a place to wash out my peasant origins.
In the 1990s Beijing was full of ‘body artists’ as we called them, making shocking and grotesque performances in public out of their naked forms. The Chinese for performance art, xing wei yi shu, literarily translates as ‘behaviour art’, and it fitted with what was extreme behaviour f
or post-Mao China. Some people also referred to it as ‘shock art’. But whatever the name, those works laid bare a tension between the individual and the state at that time. I loved those crazy performances. But they were illegal, because so many of them involved nudity and sexual acts and attracted foreign expats as their main audience. On many occasions, the artists and police played ‘hide-and-seek’, though the game was not much fun for either side.
Yellow Pavilion was a coffee bar near the film school where poets and film-makers would hang out. I went there often, spending my Saturday afternoons reading novels or getting used to the taste of Nescafé instant coffee, which was a new discovery for me. One day, in the bar, I heard that a collective of body artists would be performing on the Great Wall at the weekend. The exact time had not yet been announced. It depended on the police. So I moved my chair towards the conversation and asked if I could join them. They looked at me, and nodded.
On the morning of the show, we bought some fruit and red-bean buns and left the city by bus. We thought we’d better get to the Wall as early as possible so we wouldn’t miss anything. It was my first time there, and my heart was bursting with excitement. The white, papery wild grass that grew up through the cracks between the bricks, the ancient stone paths, the distant powdery-blue mountains, the eagles circling in the sky above our heads, and the capital in the distance, all added to my feelings of expectation.
As we arrived at the place where the performance was to take place, we saw some long-haired young artists roaming around in the raw spring wind. A few Western journalists were waiting with their cameras for something to happen. We didn’t see any sign of the police, but there could have been undercover officers there without us knowing. Perhaps standing around smoking, making notes to report back later.
