by Linda Jaivin
Fresh-falling or fallen snow is the only thing known to quiet this city, tamp down its sensual garrulousness, shush its chatter. Snow opens the door to memory and reflection; it restores beauty to things. But its beauty is seeded with danger: under the powder lie patches of black ice. And so my poetic musings came to a sliding halt as my feet connected with one of these and kicked me arse-up into a drift.
A hand reached down to help me up.
‘How embarrassing.’
Q helped pat the snow off my coat, playfully slapping me on the arse in the process. ‘That was cute. Did you hurt yourself?’
‘Only my pride.’
‘That’s okay then.’
‘Kiss it better?’
I saw the red glow of a cigarette being sucked back in a doorway. I never learned what the man said, but Q suddenly rounded on him. The man ducked into some corner before Q, lightning quick as he was, could get to him. ‘Cao tamade liumang,’ Q muttered, coming back to me with a dark expression on his face. Fuck that motherfucking punk. He put his arm around me and we walked on in silence for a while. Then he said what to my mind was one of the simplest and most useful and yet most infuriating expressions in the entire language, especially in the context of relationships: you shi, ‘I’ve got something to attend to.’ I once canvassed my Chinese girlfriends about this and, although they were more used to it, they disliked it as well: it was the universal Chinese male getaway clause. To ask shenme shi, what that something was, was to be shrewish, suspicious, controlling and confining. And so with those two simple words, and without warning, Chinese boyfriends, fiancés and husbands could and did slip away into the night, as Q did then. It was often like that with Q, I realised, moments of fleeting joy followed by some sense of anticlimax. I had sometimes spoken of Buddhist and Daoist detachment as if I understood it, but I never really did, it’s obvious to me now.
What year was that?
That’s right. I remember now. That sign. I had slipped because I was so distracted by it. We’d been to the movies, something pretty unremarkable, I think, and were walking down the street when we noticed a sign. It said , fandui zichanjieji ziyouhua. Oppose bourgeois liberalisation. It was the slogan for a campaign the government was waging against ‘Westernisation’ and ideas of freedom in everything from music to media. It was absurd enough in the abstract, but to come upon a sign, standing like a traffic warning on the pavement, struck us both as so over-the-top strange and hilarious that, laughing, I had failed to look down and see the patch of black ice.
I thanked the stranger who helped me up, and as he disappeared down the street, I brushed the snow off my coat as best I could, stamped my feet and slapped my gloved hands together a few times. Tugging my hat lower over my ears and my scarf higher up my face, I realised that the raging stream of my consciousness had deposited me in a completely unfamiliar dogleg of a hutong.
When the Chinese want to express a sense of being at a loss, of spinning out, they say zhaobudao bei, can’t find north. In this geometrically precise city, the saying has literal resonance, and for me, never as much as at that moment. I fumbled my phone out of my pocket to check the time: 10:46. I was marrow-cold, shivering and on the edge of panic. Out of their gloves my fingers skated numbly over the ludicrously small keyboard as I tried to open the map app on my phone.
A middle-aged Chinese man in a large Russian hat and a faded army greatcoat waddled out from a doorway, his steamed bun of a stomach straining the waist of the coat, the expression on his long, beaky face oscillating between doleful and self-satisfied. It’s said people look like their pets; I’m not sure that’s always true. But following close on his heels was a goose, cartoonish with a big white tummy and bright orange feet and bill. It stamped along, leaving flipper-like marks in the snow.
For a moment I wondered if it was so cold that I’d begun to hallucinate, at which point the goose tottered over to me and tried to bite my leg through my boot.
‘Zhen tiaopi,’ scolded the man. ‘So naughty.’ The goose looked pleased with itself.
‘Qing wen,’ I said. ‘Could I please ask …’
‘It’s all on her neck.’ With a world-weary expression, the man gestured at the goose with his chin.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Her ID. The whole story’s there.’
I realised that the goose wore some kind of laminated card around her neck.
‘She won’t hurt you,’ the man said. ‘She just wanted to get your attention. She loves attention.’ He spoke in the tone of a father discussing a spoiled but beloved child. The goose tilted her head back as if to say, go ahead, I’m used to it. Crouching down, I read how, as a gosling, she’d suffered a broken wing. She would have been put down but the man had adopted her. The card revealed her age and dietary habits and stated that she went for a swim in Shichahai, the Back Lakes, every day, rain or shine.
I looked up, bemused.
‘I get tired of answering people’s questions,’ the man explained.
‘Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean … I only wanted to ask directions.’
He appeared displeased at this. I sensed he really did want to talk about the goose. But when I told him the name of the hutong I was looking for, he informed me I was not far away. Turn left, turn right, turn left. Thanking him, I hurried on my way. There was no time to lose.
Left, right, left and there it was. I hastened along, snow squeaking under the soles of my boots. But I found nothing that made sense of the instructions in the letter. Dr H had given me no street number, and I’d assumed Fei Chang Dao would be the name of a bar or cafe. There’d be a sign, or a shopfront. All that lay before me was a parade of monotone walls the colour of disappointment. Halfway down the lane was a carelessly parked black Audi with a military licence plate. Across from that was a blink of a shop, its tiny window display crowded with dusty packets of spiced peanuts, phone cards and yoghurt in ceramic pots. I tapped on the window but no one responded. The door was locked.
My nose wept with cold. My eyes felt like iced marbles under my lids and I could feel the corners of my lips chapping. I only knew my toes were still functioning because I wasn’t falling over. I was an idiot to be out on such a night and such a mission. There had been so many hoaxes associated with Sir Edmund Backhouse. Perhaps this was just one more; an elaborate, posthumous and particularly cruel joke. Tailor-made for me – an obscure punishment, perhaps, for my failed novel, my foolhardy attempt to try to out-forge the master forger, to have written a secret history of the man with a thousand secrets. My breath hung in the wintry air, a cirrus of self-castigation and despair.
I walked the length of the hutong twice and arrived back where I started. A wild-goose chase indeed. I was preparing to give up when, speaking of goose, along she came, with her human. The man nodded, a gesture that seemed to be half greeting, half affirmation that I had reached my destination. He had never heard of Fei Chang Dao and looked at me as if I was nuts. I watched as they waddled off together, less father and daughter this time, I thought, than old married couple. In front of a narrow doorway, the goose suddenly halted and turned to look at me. She honked twice, unfolded her wings and flapped them. Then she hurried after her owner and, turning the corner, disappeared from sight.
I’m not the sort who believes in omens. Yet something – perhaps sheer desperation – made me approach the doorway. Worn stone drums stood vigil at the shallow entryway, proclaiming the place as the former home of a minor military official. The red door was cleaved down the middle in the traditional manner. A pair of tarnished lion’s head doorknockers, possibly original and possibly copies bought at Liulichang, yawned out onto the sleepy alleyway from each side. Nothing out of the ordinary, I saw with disappointment. There were similar doors all along the hutong, along every Beijing hutong.
On a whim, I reached out to cover the open mouth of the lion on the right with my palm. The door creaked under the slight pressure of my hand. It yielded a few centimetres. A ribbon of light unfurled into th
e narrow alley. I tested the door again, and this time, it swung all the way inwards.
Beyond the raised threshold lay a small and narrow courtyard. Its stones were rimy with frost and in its corners crusts of snow winked and glistened from beneath their sooty veils. Below the graceful, curving Qing dynasty eaves, a string of fairy lights shivered in the icy wind. A winter-bare pomegranate tree stood to one side, the sulphurous, eternal glow of the megalopolis causing it to lay an indistinct shadow on a stone table nestled against its trunk. The rosewood latticework of the windows in the wing of the courtyard house to my right exhaled a soft golden light. Over the door leading into the premises from the courtyard hung a sign: Fei Chang Dao.
PART TWO
Dreams, pale and quiet as cotton, depart for some other sky. Drift, return. Wisps and fragments, real as hallucinations. I was there again this morning, in the temple, I’m certain of it, when the dusty grey light of day crept in under the hem of my curtains, seeping through the thin material to press its cold fingers down on my eyelids. Sparks dispersed across the membrane of my closed eyes. The temple was lost in the shadows; I pulled the covers up over my face, inhaling the remnants of darkness. The wind outside my window whizzed and whistled around the tenement courtyard, giving the loose sheets of metal that covered Widow Xu’s makeshift kitchen a good shake and rattling a plastic bag that sounded like it had been hung on my door. My thoughts, dragged into reality, coalesced around the contents of the bag. I guessed it held breakfast, maybe dark, dense sesame buns, still smelling of the oven, and my mouth watered a little at the thought.
Widow Xu looks after me like that. It’s hard convincing women of her generation, one above my own, that an unmarried man in his late fifties can look after himself, and to be honest, I don’t try too hard to do so.
My dreams sent up another brief flare and I made a half-hearted attempt to follow them, but my stomach growled and the flare extinguished itself. I sighed, something I apparently do every morning upon waking, or so Chunmei, and all those that came after her, claimed. A stomach is more easily ignored than a bladder. All my organs were clamouring for attention. I didn’t relish the idea of leaving my warm bed for a dash through the cold to the public toilet in the lane with its clammy cement walls and stinking troughs. I had a chamber pot, but even that seemed like too much effort, and with all the windows shut, the air in my small room was already too close. I contemplated lighting a cigarette and coughed a little in anticipation. Just as I edged the covers down to my chin, my phone whistled for attention. I opened my reluctant eyes and picked it up: a reminder – Argentinian red. It was just past ten a.m. Sparrow’s fart, as an Australian friend used to call dawn. I switched the phone to silent and turned the footsteps of my mind back onto the path towards my temple of dreams.
Twenty-five years ago, it was. I stayed put at first. I was defiant. I was numb. I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving this wounded city. I went to the meetings. We all did. There wasn’t a choice. We read the editorials and recited the catechism, letting the flatness in our voices and the catch in our throats tell their own stories. The director of the publishing house hadn’t marched with us, but he protected us as best he could.
When the hunger strike began, Old Mou, whom I’d always taken for the quiet type, had been the first to declare he was going to the square in support of the students. The mysterious force field of the square had been drawing us all in. But we hadn’t made a point of saying so aloud. Old Mou was a funny one. He hadn’t updated his wardrobe since the late seventies. He still wore a white button-down shirt tucked into blue pants long after the rest of us were in jeans, and his hair swirled around the crown of his head in classic clueless ‘screwtop’ style. Old Mou wasn’t really old. He was my age, the age when everyone puts a ‘Young’ in front of your surname. But you simply couldn’t imagine calling him Young Mou. He specialised in nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century philosophy and spoke in aphorisms.
They came for Old Mou first. He went like a hero in one of those revolutionary movies, his head held high until they pushed it down for him. I slipped out of the office soon afterwards; as soon as I could. Guts churning, I got on my bike and rode numbly towards the Yuanmingyuan. For someone who edited philosophy books for a living, my brain was remarkably clear of thought. I didn’t see them coming. So I can’t really say where they came from. All I know is that, suddenly, a group of armed soldiers surrounded my bicycle. They pointed their guns at my head. ‘Dismount!’ one bellowed, and I did before he had finished saying, ‘Now!’ People say that when you face death, your life flashes before your eyes. But for me, at that moment, I couldn’t even have told you my name. All I saw were the gaping mouths of their rifle barrels, the indifferent eyes of the soldiers, and the shards of sunlight ricocheting off the mirrored sunglasses of their leader. I felt the earth quake under my feet. The detonations of my heart against my rib cage filled my ears. Then the leader demanded to see my ID, every word a piece of shrapnel piercing my consciousness. I have no idea how long it went on. Seconds blew out into eternities and imploded again like dying stars. And to this day I still don’t know why it happened. But in the end, after he had inscribed the details of my name, workplace and address in steely little strokes into his notebook, the soldiers lowered their guns, leaving me with knocking knees and a trouser leg full of steaming piss.
I’m no hero. When they left, I sank to the ground and vomited. And then, for my body had not yet exhausted its humiliations, I cried. Chunmei. She was already half a world away. She had had to go quickly and she could. So she went. Anyone who was able to leave, left. It was simple calculus back then. I could neither blame her nor stop her. Before the morning of her departure, I thought my heart had felt all the pain it possibly could. But the human capacity for suffering, like that for love, has no limits.
When the Cultural Revolution erupted I was eleven years old. One tearful, fearful night, my parents burned priceless paintings and calligraphy scrolls that had been in the family for generations as well as all their letters and diaries. They did this so that the Red Guards, when they came, would have nothing to find, nothing to charge them with. And it was so. The Red Guards found nothing but ashes. But they still strung up my father in the ‘aeroplane position’, shaved off half my mother’s hair and tormented them in front of howling mobs. How much worse could it have been, I wonder, if they had preserved those treasures?
Minutes after the soldiers released me, I swung my bike around and pedalled home as fast as I could go, the skin of my thighs sticky against the urine-soaked cotton of my trousers. I had nothing as precious as antique scrolls or paintings. Just a collection of the underground literature journal Today, in which I’d published my first poems, a bunch of other samizdat poetry manuscripts and Chunmei’s letters. I thought about burning all of these but, luckily as it turned out, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Instead, I hid them under the floorboards in a friend’s house. I thought to keep only one thing on me, a mimeographed collection of Q’s poetry, the broken indigo characters of his confident pen dancing in lines across the rough grey paper. Folding it carefully, I placed it in the inner pocket of my jacket, where it pressed up against the envelope with my meagre savings. Then I decided Q’s poems were too precious to risk losing, and put them under the floorboards as well.
I left Beijing by bus. My waipo lived in Hebei. I stayed with her a few days. She didn’t ask me anything, not even why I’d arrived without notice on her doorstep. But she watched me with those wise old eyes and listened to what I said and to what I didn’t say. When I told her I was hitting the road, she didn’t ask where I was going next. She stuffed my bag with boiled eggs, dried meats and mantou and pressed a small purse of cash into my hand. Take care of yourself, child, she said, and I came dangerously close to weeping once more.
In those days, a little money went a long way on the road, and you could stay under the radar if you knew how. I wandered aimlessly, catching buses at random, lost in a world that no longer made s
ense. Memories followed me like flies, buzzing in my ears, fouling everything. I floated them down rivers on fishermen’s skiffs, ploughed them into terraced fields of rice, offered them to passing clouds and drank them down in lonely toasts. And still they adhered to me like the pathetic fact of my survival itself. On an oppressively hot morning in September, I arrived, listless and uninterested, at a small town in the southwest.
The familiar tides of guilt and fury and despair lapped at my heels as I walked the dispiriting, anonymous streets. I was too hot and exhausted to try to outrun them. On top of everything else, I’d got some sort of urinary tract infection; it burned when I peed and, just that morning, there was a drop of blood in it as well. I didn’t want to go to some hick doctor, so I took it as a sign it was time to return to Beijing. I bought my ticket for a train leaving that very night.
I had time to kill. From behind a whitewashed wall, the curlicue grey roof of a Daoist temple beckoned like a crooked finger. In religion, at least, I’ve always been a child of Mao. Others may suck on the opium pipe of Christianity, Buddhism, Baha’i or whatever other system of salvation allows them their sleep, but I don’t need a god of any sort to tell me what hell is. As for Daoism, it may have been founded on the basis of a philosophy, yet no system of belief slipped faster or further down the muddy hill of superstitious ritual than Daoism-as-religion. I get that a Christian needs to believe that Jesus slid out of a virgin’s womb, and a Buddhist in the possibility of Nirvana. If, in the end, some of the new ghosts of that June made it to heaven or got a better deal on the upswing of their next cycle of reincarnation, I’d be more than glad for them. But no Daoist potion of immortality has ever stopped a bullet. You might as well don a Boxer’s red sash.
