by Linda Jaivin
The wind had blown away the pollution. Outside my window, I saw snowflakes scribbling on the lucent slate of sky. What was that phrase of Yang Lian’s? The ‘grey shattered sunlight’. Early twilight limned the scholar tree, whose bare, twisting branches scratched the sky in silhouette like crazed lightning. I turned on the light and worked like a demon. When I next looked up from my keyboard, the ghostly sun had set beyond the Western Hills. My legs were a mass of pins and needles and my neck felt like it had been locked in the traditional Chinese torture implement of the cangue.
Duan Mou’s film needed a good title. I settled on Emp – it had a contemporary feel and managed to reference ‘empress’ and, via its incomplete nature, both eunuchs and, albeit obscurely, the classic Comme des Garçons-inspired outfits with all those rips and tears. I stretched, and reviewed my work. The film now had a coherent, dramatic but still nicely mysterious, ambivalent narrative arc with a clever element of time travel and a poignant theme of love and loss. Not bad, if I said so myself, and certainly artful enough to match the director’s intentions. Wherever possible, I had preserved the original meaning of the text; where it didn’t work, I’d thrown it out and made something up. Finally, I corrected the odd bit of awkward ‘translatese’, the syntax errors that inevitably appear in any first draft, ran a spell check and, with the blade of long experience, rapidly trimmed the lines down to subtitle length, an ideal maximum of thirty-three letters, spaces and punctuation marks per line, occasionally ballooning out to forty-two.
The monolingual director would not figure out what I’d done for a long while. If it really was true that Quentin Tarantino was going to look at it, and if Tarantino actually did embrace it, and if Emp ended up winning some jury prize at a European film festival (as I fancied it now just might do), Duan Mou could only thank me. And even if – even when – he found out, even if other people asked him about the discrepancies, I knew Duan Mou well enough to know that he’d claim the mistranslation as his own idea. There were two reasons for this. One, given his avant-garde aspirations, he would think that it should have been his idea in the first place. Two, to admit that it hadn’t been would entail a loss of face. I imagined we’d be clinking miniature tumblers of erguotou and planning our next project before long. I attached my Meisterwerk to an email, banged out a short note to the director (which didn’t mention anything about my creative contribution) and pressed send.
There. Done. And not a minute too soon. The Hour of the Rat would soon scuttle down the alleys of the restless city.
Popping the last of the bread into the toaster for dinner, I recalled how, in my teenage years, I was convinced that for anyone with an artistic soul, poverty was romantic, de rigueur even. Poets, garrets, that sort of thing, even if I never was entirely sure what a garret was. I don’t think there were any garrets on the Central Coast.
Elsie and Jack reinforced my convictions by assuring me I’d grow out of them. It took a while. I think I confused actual poverty with the idea that art, love and ideas were more important than money. I’m embarrassed to say that, early in our relationship, I expressed this romantic view of impoverishment to Q, who was intimately acquainted with financial hardship but would never call it his best friend. He coldly informed me that only a privileged Western nit could hold such a ridiculous view. Or something to that effect. If I try to remember exactly what he said my whole face scrunches up like I’ve chewed on a lemon: shame is a physical state. I do recall that I only made it worse with a stumbling objection that I wasn’t really privileged by Western standards, succeeding in proving his point rather spectacularly.
Now, some of the richest people I know are Chinese. But that’s another story. It wasn’t the story back then.
Goodbye, Q. I have places to go and people to meet.
Earlier in the evening, when the snow had stopped falling and I needed to stretch, I’d rugged up and grabbed the broom made of bundled sticks that rested against the outside of my door. Stepping into the courtyard, I heard the clash of Peking opera cymbals and recognised an aria from The Yang Family Women Generals. Through the thin curtain I saw Mrs Jin rise from the table where, I guessed, she was assembling model fighter planes, one of her latest hobbies. Her dad had been in the airforce. Apparently, her followers on Weibo are very enthusiastic about the model planes, which she photographs at various stages of completion. Those she’s finished hang from the ceiling by strings, gliding on subtle breezes, endlessly reconnoitring the living room and kitchen.
She either spied me out there or had the same thought I did because within moments she was on her stoop, waving her broom at me. We swept our way into the centre of the courtyard and then, together, cleared the paths into the side wings and the outside gate.
‘We’ll build a snowman tomorrow,’ she said. ‘I have chestnuts we can use for eyes, an old sweet potato for his nose and that hat of Mr Jin’s that worked so well last time. Remember?’ I did.
‘What will we use for lips?’ I asked. ‘Apple peel?’ She thought that would be good.
Our brooms scratched at the stone paving, now just visible again through the powder. Under the warm, uncertain light of the lamps above our doorways, the thin crust of crystalline snow seemed sprinkled with diamonds. The lamps were supposed to turn on automatically when someone approached but they had a mind of their own, often leaving us to fumble for keys in the dark while switching on in the middle of the night to welcome ghosts.
Preparing now to go out, I realised that it was only the second time I’d been out all day. Talk about the hermit of Peking. I’d always wondered about Backhouse, living his secret, private life in the midst of this gregarious city. It occurred to me that I wasn’t so different from him really; not now, anyway. I wouldn’t have imagined myself like this back when I was first here, when it seemed there was something interesting going on every hour, every day of the week. I don’t know if that’s a function of age, the solitary nature of my work, the fact that so many of my old friends have retreated into career and family life, or some combination of the three, but things have changed. Another line from Yang Lian’s poem floats into my mind: In my premature solitude.
It is as though there are turning points in life that encase what preceded them in snow-domes; you put the snow-domes on a shelf and shake them every so often in a fit of nostalgia, but you can never crawl back inside. For me, 1989 was one of those turning points. I’d spent my life searching for a story and an anchor. A story that could anchor me. My stomach filling with butterflies, I wondered if the reason I was drawn back to this place was that the key to my story had been here all along.
I traded my leggings for thick woollen stockings and eased a warm knit frock down over a thin, long-sleeved thermal top. I pulled on my rabbit-fur-lined boots and rubbed an industrial quantity of moisturiser into my face and hands. Next, a smudge of eye shadow, a flick of mascara, chapstick under lipstick, and a quick detangle of my hair. Zipping up my mid-calf-length puffer coat and pulling a woollen beanie down over my ears, I was finally ready to plunge, Michelin Man-like, into the night. I was not too old for vanity. But I was too old to be an idiot in minus-ten-degree temperatures. When I opened the door to leave, a small white apparition streaked past my legs and out into the courtyard. Mimi. I had no idea when she’d got inside or where she’d been hiding.
The serrated winds had died down as I picked my way towards the strip park that runs north–south along the site of the old Eastern Imperial Precinct Wall, Dong Huangchenggen. It occurred to me to wonder how Dr Hoeppli, if he had indeed written this letter and it was not some elaborate joke, could possibly make our appointment. The return address had been a hutong in Dashila’r, in the old ‘Chinese city’ south of Qianmen that in pre-revolutionary times had been the liveliest part of town. If I remembered correctly, the hutong was the site of a modest, long-derelict Qing dynasty brothel that had become a trendy venue for pop-up design shows, shops and cafes. The brothel was two storeys high, the small chambers of its upper storey arrange
d in neat rows off a corridor that was also an inward-facing balcony, bordered by a railing that wasn’t so much peeling as peeled, and that overlooked the ground floor with its parlours, accounting room and kitchen. I say ‘parlours’ and ‘chambers’ and ‘balcony’ but you need a good imagination to dress up the dilapidated old structure with its dubious stairwell, groaning timbers and uncertain stability with the elegance these words imply. Besides the architecture, common to old-style Chinese brothels, the only material souvenir of those times was an old bed, richly carved with images drawn from traditional pillow-book-style porn, a treasure that some artists have lovingly restored and that serves variously as a showcase, sitting area and even storytelling stage at the various avant-garde events staged there in recent years.
For all of the newfound trendiness of Dashila’r, it remains – those parts of it that haven’t yet been pounded into submission by the wrecking balls – a ramshackle crazy-paving of tiny laneways and tenements that’s hard enough to get in and out of at the best of times. Even when the weather is fine, it’s not the easiest place to find a cab. If he was travelling by public transport, it’s the sort of trip that would require several transfers. He would need to pick his way through the maze of narrow, twisting alleys to catch a bus on one of the main streets, and walk even further for a train. Given that Beijing’s taxis tended to evaporate after a big snowfall, and even public transport struggled, I wondered how my correspondent, if he was who he claimed to be, and if he lived where the return address indicated he did, was ever going to make it.
I’d be walking to our meeting place but I was at least on the right side of sixty and in fairly good shape for no particular reason other than that I tended to walk everywhere. At the park, I turned right, and, heading north, followed the path that wove over and around the foundations of the wall that had once been part of the great red fortifications that guarded the old Imperial Precinct.
Beijing was once Paradise, in the original, ancient Persian sense of pairidaeza (‘walled enclosure’), guarded on all sides by mighty grey-brick ramparts. Beginning in the thirteenth century with the Yuan dynasty, the rulers girdled the city with not one, but three parallel sets of walls. There were the defensive outer ramparts, to which the Ming emperors added gate towers and enceintes and other fortifications. (In the sixteenth century, the Ming would also wall in the southern suburbs where the Temple of Heaven and Dashila’r were located to keep them safe from Mongol raids.) Then there was the Imperial Precinct wall that enclosed those areas dedicated to the imperial family and the service of the court like Beihai and other inner-city pleasure grounds as well as the imperial Ancestral Temple (now the site of the Working People’s Cultural Palace), imperial archives and the Altar of Land and Grain (now Zhongshan Park); the precinct’s south-centre gate was none other than Tiananmen. Within this Imperial Precinct rose the third, most impenetrable of all these bulwarks, surrounding the Forbidden City itself. The residential section of the Forbidden City, the most ‘forbidden’ part of all, was also walled and off-limits to all men except the emperor and eunuchs – and, if you believe him, Edmund Backhouse.
I keenly regret never having seen the great walls and gates of the city before Mao had nearly all of them demolished in the 1950s and 60s. My eyes have feasted on photographs of the formidable fortress that once was Beijing rising out of the plains against the backdrop of the mountains, trains of Bactrian camels trudging past its towering gates. It was for the walls of Beijing, of course, that Q’s father had sacrificed his freedom, and ultimately, his life.
There’s a magic to the words ‘Old Beijing’; its ancient fortifications are just part of it. I loved listening to the stories of old Beijing told by the old men and women I met through the Foreign Languages Press and reading the Beijing fiction of Lao She and others. Despite the cold, I adored nights like this because they made it possible to dream back through the years, the decades, even the centuries.
A new fall of snowflakes filled the sky and stuck to my eyelashes. I listened to the pleasurable sound of my boots crunching and squeaking through the soft new snow down to the older crust. The falling snow hushed and obscured the avenue on the outside of the park. Through the peaceful blur, the old wall seemed to rise once again and I guessed I was approaching the park’s northern end, where a small section of it had been constructed anew as a ‘ruin’.
It happens often in China that you think you’re gazing upon a Song pagoda or Ming ruin only to discover that the physical artefact that has struck you with awe was reconstructed twenty years ago. I once wept over what I thought was the careless destruction of a Ming dynasty bridge. Workers were widening it for the convenience of car traffic. Later I discovered that the bridge they were disassembling only dated back to 1981. The fabulous, circular Ming dynasty Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests at the Temple of Heaven burned down towards the end of the nineteenth century; the one that people visit today is a reconstruction from that time. Does it matter? Whatever they do to Tiananmen Square, fence it in, tart it up, intersect it with giant LED screens – it will always be the place where history has happened. Imperial processions, patriotic demonstrations in the first half of the nineteenth century, the Red Guard rallies of 1966, the anti-Cultural Revolution demonstrations of 1976 – and the pro-democracy protests of 1989.
Pierre Ryckmans wrote an eloquent essay on the different approach to the physical past in China and Europe in which he quotes F.W. Mote, a quotation that has stuck in my brain ever since: ‘Chinese civilisation did not lodge its history in buildings.’ Ryckmans took his pen name, Simon Leys, from Victor Segalen’s René Leys, the eccentric savant with erotic access to the palace – and whom many people thought was based on Backhouse.
I wondered for the umpteenth time how I might be linked to Edmund Backhouse, if that was indeed what Dr Hoeppli was hinting at so elliptically in his letter. I realised too late that I should have looked through Hugh Trevor-Roper’s book for more details on Backhouse’s family, his sisters and brothers. My mother had said my father was a ‘prince’ – perhaps she had confused her princes and baronets, or if my father was anything like Backhouse, perhaps he had blurred the distinction. Backhouse had no children of course, but his family would have produced plenty. For Dr Hoeppli to know about my father’s lineage, however, suggests that at the very least there was some direct link to Backhouse himself – a favourite nephew, perhaps, or a distant cousin who had visited him in those final years in China. I don’t remember reading anything about such a person. That didn’t mean much. Such a visit was not necessarily something that Backhouse (or anyone else) would have bothered to record. My mind whirred with possibilities.
A wind blew up, swirling the snow through the air like icing on a cinnamon bun. I turned my face from the blast, wrapping my scarf over my mouth and nose and shutting my eyes so tightly that red lights danced on the insides of my eyelids like the swaying red lanterns of nearby Ghost Street.
Slow-moving trucks spat grit and salt onto the wide boulevard that sliced across the city’s north–south heart-line. I picked my way across the street with care, for it was still dangerously icy. Once on the north side of the road I looked for a familiar hutong, one I’d calculated would lead me towards the place I was going. Where I was certain it should begin, however, there stood a gaudy, gargantuan new seafood restaurant with a giant neon prawn waving its multi-coloured feelers from the roof. I may have been disoriented by the snow, but suspected that the charming laneway I was looking for existed no more. Developers had logged Beijing’s historic hutong neighbourhoods like the Amazon, relentlessly driving a unique and grand urban civilisation towards extinction. I could never reconcile in my mind how the inheritors of this magnificent ancient culture could be both so rightly proud of their past and so perversely active in its destruction. The old city was disappearing at the speed of memory, leaving only its stories to hover over once historic sites like lonely ghosts. It wasn’t just physical heritage under attack. In its media, schools and museums, the
Party-state was single-mindedly sandblasting the rich, complex and untidy history of the country itself, cleansing it of ambiguity, purging it of shame, and scouring it of blood, unless the stains were conveniently on the hands of enemies.
The relentless scrubbing and scratching has achieved the desired effect. You meet young people here all the time who have only the vaguest concept of when the Cultural Revolution took place or what it was about; when I asked one to guess when he thought it had occurred he hemmed and hawed and finally, tentatively, guessed: ‘After Liberation?’ Others referred in all confused innocence to the Maoist era as ‘feudal times’ but to Mao as a hero. As for the events of 1989, those too young to have lived through them knew so little that one had asked me if it had anything to do with the Falungong. I felt as though I inhabited two cities – one callow, corrupt, clueless, swelling in wattage, concrete and steel; the other cultured, critical, conscious, dimming into oblivion and leaving behind only a few clichés in the form of Olde Peking picture postcards, regrets and the shadow of defiance: a sun that will not be contained in the grave. I hadn’t thought about Yang Lian’s poem for years; for some reason, it persisted in accompanying me all day.
I wanted to ask Mrs Jin how she’d done it. How she’d lived through the upheavals, campaigns, famine and violence. How she’d coped with what she had and had not done, with what she had seen, with what she no longer saw. How throughout, or, at least in the end, she remained so manifestly happy. If I, a foreigner, found Beijing layered so thickly with ghosts, history and memory that I sometimes felt like I was stepping in bottomless snowdrifts even in summer and suffocating in the mists on the clearest of days, how did someone who had lived here all her life cope?
