The Empress Lover

by Linda Jaivin

  I made my way around the subway station that had descended upon the once shabbily hip Yuan dynasty street of Nanluoguxiang like a concrete boot. The normally teeming street was nearly deserted on account of the snowstorm. A small group of young people emerged from a bar with apples in their cheeks and adventure in their eyes. Several others came along and joined them, among them a striking boy in his early twenties, with an air of cheeky confidence not unlike Q’s at that age. He was clearly the magnetic centre of the group; my heart pinged when I realised that at his side, regarding him with the softest eyes, was a foreign girl. She shivered theatrically and he threw an arm around her. One of their friends noticed me and smiled curiously; I realised that I was staring. I buried my chin in my scarf and hurried on.

  As I passed a nondescript restaurant that just weeks earlier, I’m quite sure, had been a bookshop, a Chinese girl with the broad wind-blasted face of a peasant lass and the winged headdress of a nineteenth-century Manchu noblewoman jumped out of the doorway to shout at me in English: ‘Spicy Sichuan food okay!’ She gave the thumbs-up. ‘Nailuo huoguo! Cheese fondue! Huanying guanglin!’

  Beijing is a time machine that traps and agitates within itself all eras, from the distant dynastic past through to the far-flung future (and with at least one gastronomic stop, it appeared, in the seventies). Its young artists create sexed-up artworks around motifs from the Cultural Revolution they never experienced. Middle-aged people practise calligraphic styles popular in the Song dynasty. Old folk ballroom dance in public parks to Lady Gaga, and Confucius beams his teachings from flat-screen TVs in university canteens. The multiplexes and futuristic performing arts centres present new interpretations of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a fourteenth-century classic novel about second-and third-century warfare. And my neighbourhood wi-fi cafe, situated in a Soviet-era factory, plays ‘Jingle Bells’ all year round. So why shouldn’t the writer of the letter, Dr Hoeppli, still be alive and living somewhere in this temporal spin cycle of a place?

  Sir Edmund Backhouse had most certainly never died. Something of him survived in every foreigner who discovered that outwardly solemn Beijing not just tolerated but positively unleashed in them all manner of private waywardness. These were not necessarily the criminal, terrifying perversities described in Paul French’s book Midnight in Peking, but rather the artful perversities of the sensualist, the fringe dweller, the confidence man.

  I never met Neil Heywood and don’t have any special insight into how he insinuated himself into the heart of the particular darkness that was Party leader Bo Xilai’s circle in the first decades of this century. But the potency of the rumours that swirled around Heywood, particularly about his relationship with the woman who allegedly murdered him, Bo’s wife Gu Kailai, attested to the abiding attraction of stories in which Western men have penetrated the inner sanctums, so to speak, of power. Yet unlike the classic Orientalist fantasy of the conquering masculine West and the supine, feminine East, here it was the Western male who was vanquished. Another thing about Backhouse and the Beijing time machine: I recall being struck by something Dr Hoeppli wrote in his postscript to Décadence Mandchoue – that dressed in his long, dark Chinese gowns, Backhouse was ‘timeless’, and would have looked at home in ancient Rome, a ‘Renaissance setting’, or in a Jesuit study room in the court of the Kangxi emperor. His sexual politics too, I thought, would have made him a plausible Roman in the time of Nero, a French or Italian libertine of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, or a Qing dynasty bawd. He would not have been out of place today, either.

  Opposite three nearly identical Imperial Kitchen Custard Shops, each claiming on its signboard to be the exclusive supplier of a secret recipe passed down by palace chefs, an old man in clothes padded with cotton wadding tended the flame under a large black wok from which wafted the warm, nutty fragrance of roasting chestnuts. I stood with the man by his fire for a few minutes. ‘Delicious,’ I mumbled gratefully through the creamy sweetness, and he nodded. We gazed together at the row of custard shops.

  ‘Which is the real one?’ I asked. A few years back, before the street had been overrun by crowds, I came often for the custard. But I couldn’t recall what the original shop had looked like; it seemed to me then that none of the three fit my memory.

  In response he quoted a line from one of China’s most famous novels, the Qing dynasty The Dream of the Red Chamber: , which David Hawkes and John Minford translate as: ‘Truth becomes fiction when the fiction’s true; Real becomes not-real when the unreal’s real.’

  Then he pointed to his chestnuts and shrugged. ‘This is real.’

  This is real. That’s what Jingjing told me on returning to China after she divorced the sweet, faithful American man she’d married after breaking up with the flamboyant, charismatic but caddish Wang Jian. Wang Jian had been her first love. She believed it was true love. She still believed this the first time she caught him sleeping with a life-drawing model. He had begged Jingjing to forgive him. But it happened once too often, with models, art dealers, collectors and students, and she realised that had been only the first time she’d caught him. ‘It’s not his sleeping around that gets me,’ she told me at the time. ‘It’s not even the lying, which is devastating enough. It’s the cliché. He’s a fucking cliché. And who wants to be with a cliché?’

  So, not long after, off she went with blond Joshua, the sensible, kind and generous American teacher of English, who exuded an air of couldn’t-believe-his-luck whenever she was by his side. Sadly, once her own English had become completely fluent and she understood everything Joshua said, she realised that he was not nearly as bright or interesting as she’d imagined him to be. In fact, he was far less bright and interesting than she’d assumed and not quite as sensible. I suppose I could have warned her – but can you ever? She’d tried to warn me about Q and I hadn’t listened. She felt terrible divorcing Joshua. She broke his heart. But she didn’t want to be bored for the rest of her life either. It would be better for her to return to China. It would be better for me too, she said.

  I had only been back to China a few times in almost twenty years at that point. I wasn’t sure I could cope. Every day, alongside the news about China’s economic rise were reports of spiralling corruption, food safety scandals, you name it. Jingjing, who had returned on a regular basis before finally deciding to move back, tsk-tsked. ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘This place is dirty and dangerous. What you eat will probably kill you if what you breathe doesn’t kill you first, and that’s assuming you don’t get whacked crossing the road, but this is real. You know what?’ she confided. ‘I was constipated nearly the entire time I was in America. No joke. It’s all so hygienic there. They just don’t produce enough bacteria for a really good shit. I was back two days and –’ here my elegant friend, who’d dabbled in modelling in the US before settling into banking, made the sound of a long, messy fart with her pretty mouth ‘– best shit of my life. And that, my friend,’ she concluded, ‘is real.’ She said I could stay with her until I found my feet. She also had a relative who was thinking about renting out a room to a foreigner. (That’s how I met Mrs Jin, whom I called ‘Auntie Jin’ but thought of as Mrs Jin.)

  When I Skyped Jingjing a few days later to say that I’d decided to take up her offer, Jingjing was thrilled. I said she and Q were both pulling me back. She gave me a look then that I chose to ignore.

  The truth is that I’d drifted back in Australia. For a long time, I could think of nothing but China, and yet what I thought about gave me nightmares that leached into my waking hours. Throughout the eighties, on my trips back to Oz, I felt like I was living in parallel worlds: one sunnily complacent, merrily insular, its sparse population tested by issues and politics that with a few exceptions remained more or less what they’d been when I’d first left; the other stormy, shuttered, crowded and vital. I enjoyed my visits home to see Elsie and Jack and catch up with old friends, and breathed easy in both the tangled bush and the uncrowded urban footpaths that shared the
vast, oblivious blue sky. Yet I always craved a return to the vitality, the dangerous mutability, the thrilling edge of China, until in 1989 that edge became a razor that sliced my world in two.

  It took me a year or so after 1989 to make my first visit back to China, and I only went for a short time, but I almost failed to board my flight on account of a mounting nausea that was almost certainly, but didn’t feel, existential. When I disembarked in Beijing that time, I felt as leaden-footed and as full of dread as if I were visiting a graveyard where not all the ghosts had settled. Jingjing, who was reaching the end of her time with Wang Jian, met the plane. Later, she took me to see some members of the old gang. There was much embracing and weeping and they filled my suitcase with volumes of poetry stencilled on rough paper in uneven blue ink, poetry I promised to translate. I made good on my promise. Some of it got published, and one volume even won a minor literary award in the UK.

  Soon, other old friends in China, like Duan Mou, whom I’d known when he was a student at film school, began throwing me other translation work, including movie subtitles. Unlike poetry, this was actually profitable, and they paid me in US or Australian dollars. At the beginning they sent videotapes and scripts by FedEx. Later the scripts came by email and the films on DVDs and these days, of course, wherever you are it’s a simple matter of upload and download from file-sharing websites.

  At first, I was looking after Elsie and Jack and living with them so didn’t have too many expenses. Elsie had gone almost deaf and Jack almost blind but she led him on walks, made his drinks, found his cigarettes and squeezed his hand when he spoke to her. He didn’t speak much. He’d always been the less loquacious of the pair, and now retreated into a deeper quiet. But they enjoyed a kind of accustomed, happy symbiosis. Later, I moved down to Sydney, where I gradually made an effort to embrace the sunny carelessness that was the city’s most endearing feature. Phil, Gemma’s brother, made himself very easy to like. He was a good listener, kind and attractive, and we’d known each other forever. I feel terrible about Phil. He put a great effort into the relationship; I’m sorry to say I didn’t. I don’t blame him for leaving me. I was hard work. I was still so angry with Q – with the world, really. He was prepared to ‘be there’ for me, but I was nowhere to be found. And there were still so many questions that as much as he tried, he could not answer for me.

  After the breakdown of the marriage, I decided to stop being so damn serious about everything. I discovered what appeared to be an infinitely replenishing supply of charming, intelligent and good-looking young men in their twenties and upwards who were very keen on sleeping with, even having a tentative relationship with, an interesting older woman. I was confounded in retrospect at how fraught or complicated everything around love and sex had been in my own twenties, how much unfulfilled yearning there had been, and how much pain. It didn’t need to be that difficult, or perhaps it was just that I didn’t need to be.

  Elsie died, and Jack followed her three days later. I hadn’t anticipated how bereft I’d feel. At the funeral their daughter read out a sentimental eulogy in rhyming couplets. Their son Skyped his eulogy from Dubai, where he was overseeing some construction project, but the church’s connection kept dropping out and his image alternately froze and pixelated. There were not many people at the funeral and most shuffled in and out on walkers. Later, as a ghastly smoke wisped from the cremation chimney, their daughter and I hugged and cried and promised we would always stay in touch. Watching her car drive away, I felt more alone than I had ever felt in my life.

  China’s economy, meanwhile, was taking off like a rocket. I began to feel that life in Oz was uncommonly smooth-edged, un-peopled, even un-storied. I knew that was ridiculous. Australia had stories, history and culture well before any European even knew of its existence and which well pre-dated China’s vaunted five thousand years of continuous civilisation. Its problems pressed, its issues burned. But aside from some volunteer work with traumatised asylum seekers whom our government was hell-bent on further damaging, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was like a child in a room where the furniture had no sharp corners and the electrical sockets had been covered up.

  I gained weight. With more time on my hands, and some money in my pocket, I joined a gym. The gym had a sauna. One day, lying on the top shelf like a poorly placed product in a supermarket, I overheard a conversation:

  ‘Hello! Funny meeting you here. How are you?’

  ‘Great. Amazing actually. And you?’

  ‘Excellent. I’m so positive these days?’

  ‘Me too. I’m working on my acting and singing and yoga. And I’ve got a name for my business, I even registered it. It’s Sanskrit for, like, the matter that everything in the universe is formed from?’

  ‘That’s so ancient. I’m very spiritual myself, which is hard because people get spirituality mixed up with religion and that really turns them off. I mean, churches have done good things but mostly bad things?’

  ‘I’m almost thirty-six. So I went to this palmist and she was incredible. She said, when you turn thirty-six everything is going to happen for you. I was like, I’m so glad because I kind of expected that before now?’

  ‘You know, Oprah didn’t get famous till later. Lots of famous people, like politicians and writers and actors, they didn’t get famous till they were in their thirties or even their forties. Brad Pitt was, what, twenty-eight when he got famous because of Louise and Thelma?’

  ‘Thelma and Louise.’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘I love Dustin Hoffman too. He’s old, but great?’

  ‘The thing about Brad Pitt is that he’s real? I mean, he was the first person into New Orleans. You know, helping to clean up. That’s because he didn’t grow up, like, in a bubble with people clearing traffic for him in New York. Like that actress, you know the one I’m thinking of, who gets that sort of treatment all the time. What does she know about reality?’

  ‘Bugger all is my guess.’

  ‘Exactly. But Brad Pitt, he’s been a chicken, you know, in a suit?’

  ‘A chicken in a suit?’

  ‘You know those animal suits, those people who walk around as wild bears harassing people for charity? Apparently they’re really stifling, the suits I mean, and some of the bears end up fainting. That’s why you don’t see so many animal suits around anymore. Brad Pitt wasn’t a koala. He was a chicken. It wasn’t for some charity, either, it was a job, I don’t know, advertising fried chicken or something?’

  ‘Oh wow.’

  ‘Yeah, he’s real.’

  I hauled myself off the shelf, literally and figuratively, and dived into the icy pool. If only reality was Brad Pitt in a chicken suit. Those women had no idea how lucky they were to be so clueless. Reality is way overrated. And it doesn’t let you go, either: no matter how hot the bear suit gets, no matter how many times you faint. There was one thing they had dead right, however, and that was to end every statement with a question mark.

  Jingjing had been urging me to return to Beijing for months. I would do it. For her. For myself. For the questions. And, needless to say, for Q. The next day, I gave notice on my lease, then I packed up and, a month later, watched the red roofs and blue waters of Sydney recede beneath the wings of a Qantas jet.

  Mrs Jin once told me that sometimes, arriving in some place in Beijing where a wall or gate or even temple had once stood, she’d be struck with a kind of vertigo, an almost physical unbalancing; the strange thing, she said, was that the sensation was often connected to some long-gone monument she could not ever remember seeing outside of photos, unless she had perhaps carelessly skipped past it as a child or, worse, helped to tear down as a teenager in the Red Guards. These memories, too, have become ghosts, victims of another type of wrecking ball: type your queries about what happened in the Cultural Revolution into the Baidu search engine and you are likely to be informed: ‘Your search word could violate laws.’ The Great Firewall of China defines another kind of paradise, not of f
ools, but of the fooled – although that too is a question.

  Though I never saw the old walls, I feel the same way when I come upon a place I’m sure I once knew. I am sure this gleaming glass and concrete office building sits on the block where my friend Lin … Lin something, a painting teacher at the Central Art Academy, lived with his wife in the tiny corner of a ramshackle and labyrinthine dazayuan, and that that hotel is where indifferent workers in grimy white cloth caps once presided over the vast, rotting piles of cabbage and carrots that passed for a vegetable market. But for each old haunt I can peg to a specific new address, there are hundreds more that float free, while fading like a photograph in a drawer. People too have vanished behind their traces in my memory.

  In his novel L’Horizon, the French author Patrick Modiano describes the disappearance of experience into matière sombre – dark matter – that, like its cosmological equivalent, is far greater in mass than that part of the universe which is observable: names and phone numbers carefully inscribed in notebooks that fail to evoke any image or recollection at all, letters from people completely forgotten and incapable of being recalled, drifts and wisps of memories that refuse to cohere or even linger for more than a second or two.

  The matière sombre conjured up by Modiano appears to my mind’s eye as fathomless, black and silent. The matière sombre of Beijing seems its opposite: surface-level, shiny and noisy. On normal days, Beijing produces the urban equivalent of a heavy metal wall of sound across all the senses, coming at you so thick and fast that it wipes out thought and reflection. Near where I live, three tiny clothing shops and a hairdresser exist side by side, each blasting different pop music selections into the street the entire day; a video shop a few doors down hammers passers-by with the percussive sounds of a movie battle, the same battle, maddeningly, day after day. Lights blink and glow, colours clash and compete and all is movement and flux. Smells – the good, the terrible and the just plain weird – stage a continuous assault on the nose, and the air, increasingly solid, adds an almost tactile element to the mix. The sensual cacophony engulfs memories like quicksand.