by Linda Jaivin
‘Maybe you had the wrong temple,’ someone suggested.
‘Maybe,’ Yoga conceded.
Everyone looked at me. I shrugged, zhongqi yu jin, I repeated, and we all drank to ‘nothingness’. When she’d begun her story, my guts had clenched around a nameless apprehension, but by the time she finished, I realised that I felt completely fine about Master Happy Fish’s disappearance. What was, was. What is, is. It was only in that moment that I realised that perhaps I truly had absorbed his lessons, and at the same time wondered if I’d made the whole story up myself, if it hadn’t been some sort of necessary hallucination.
Later that night, or early the next morning, and restless with alcohol and memory, I reached for my dog-eared copy of Zhuangzi. It fell open to the chapter on ‘the Great and Venerable Teacher’. There is a passage there about accepting death as part of life. A man hides a boat in a gorge, but someone steals it all the same. Zhuangzi speaks of the futility of hiding little things in bigger things, for only the world can hide the world. In other words, the only constancy is inconstancy, the only safety is understanding that there is no safety.
I did something I hadn’t done in years: I took up my pen. From it poured poems about love and loss and friendship, new and old Orchid Pavilions, unlikely philosopher–monks and the eternal temples of the mind. The sun was high in the east by the time I’d finished. I felt light, unburdened and terribly dehydrated. I put the notebook aside, drank a big glass of water and fell into a deep sleep.
I didn’t look at the poems again for several weeks, not wishing to discover that they were just the pathetic, boring scribbles of an old drunk with a tired pen. But when I did, I recognised that my spark, however modest, had returned. I showed them to a friend who worked with me at the Philosophy Publishing House.
When I started at the publishing house I was an idealist. It was perhaps a function of the times that it seemed credible that people would read books on philosophy, consider or reconsider how they lived and the values they lived by, and that this could be a redemptive project, for both the individual and society. A bit naïve in retrospect. By the time of the second coming of my poetic inspiration, the only philosophy people were interested in was that of Lee Iacocca. It is a cynical world in which the chief form of guidance people seek is that which points them to entrepreneurial and material success. Writers sent us manuscripts on pop psychology and self-help: ‘Sun Zi and the Art of Start-Ups’, that kind of thing. Worse, we began to consider them.
If you happen to pass by one of the new multi-storey bookshops, like the one at Xidan in Beijing where queues can form before the doors even open, you’d be excused for thinking that this is a nation devoted to literature and the arts (including that of self-reflection). But take a closer look. The shelves are heaped with the biographies and autobiographies of successful capitalists, inspirational tracts on accumulating wealth, hastily translated potboilers and bestsellers from the Anglosphere, anything and everything to do with computers and programming, and an infinite number of study guides, including many geared to the examinations for entrance to American universities. As for the history sections, they are full of sepia photographs and tomes covering the great, glorious and correct history of the Communist Party from every angle – except from inside a labour camp or underneath a tank tread. The histories of Beijing stretch back hundreds of thousands of years to Peking Man, but either stop or begin to shed detail in 1949.
Back in the nineties, friends told me about cultish qigong masters who caused them to shout and shake in stadiums full of the possessed. One, who later emigrated to Australia, even followed the path of Falungong with its lunatic talk of ‘emanations’ and magically shrinking and expanding flying saucers. As I saw it, like those who’d ‘found Jesus’, they were merely substituting one catechism for another: Hail Mary (or Master Li) instead of Hail Mao. This was a time when philosophy ought to have come into its own: people were fundamentally re-evaluating their beliefs, their moral systems, all the Who am I?s and What am I doing here?s.
And yet philosophy floundered. Some questions couldn’t be asked, of course. But it seemed that those who cared didn’t have the time, and those who had the time didn’t care. Some people I knew found Jesus. I distrusted their certainty and the shining, heavenward light in their eyes. One friend found madness. His uncertainty, and the way the lights had gone out in his eyes, frightened me just as much. After a while, my work began to feel like packaging up machine parts or stacking cabbages. My nephews and nieces – for I was of the last generation where it was normal to have brothers and sisters – never once said, wow, uncle, tell me more about those books you publish. They just tapped at their phones and spoke to each other in code. And poetry – forget it. We grew up on Yang Lian, Bei Dao, Mang Ke, Zhai Yongming and the soulful, witty lyrics of Luo Dayou; younger people sing meile meile meile wo zuile zuile zuile – beauty beauty beauty I’m drunk drunk drunk – and that’s about as good as it gets. (Maybe it gets better. Maybe I’m just getting old and failing to pay attention. And we had some pretty crap pop songs too.)
Anyway, you know what Beijing is like. The friend at the publishing house to whom I showed my poems, Lao Ma, still cared about poetry and said he loved them. He had a friend in a Shandong province poetry publishing house. The friend’s friend, Kong, allegedly a descendant of Confucius, was coming to town a few days later. Lao Ma invited us both to dinner at a Yunnan restaurant. Kong waved fried bees around with his chopsticks and, in that Shandong accent that sends the four tones racing for cover, swore that he’d never, in his whole life, seen anything like my poetry. I was a genius. I was Shakespeare, Blake, Zhuangzi, Li Po, Bei Dao, Yang Lian and Tagore all rolled into one. It was completely ridiculous. Guojiang, I said, bored and embarrassed. You overstate. This set off a fresh round of flattery even more over the top than the last. I concluded he was a huyou, someone who talks big and persuasively but would never deliver the goods.
After dinner we exchanged cards. Back home, I stuck his card in a drawer and didn’t think any more about it. I had more pressing issues on my mind. My parents were trying to fight eviction from the home they’d lived in half their life. My brother had just had a cancer scare. And Chunmei got in touch after all these years to send me photographs of her and her Canadian husband’s three children. Something about the direct and unaffected way her kids stared into the lens marked them as unmistakeably foreign. I searched their faces for her features and wished she’d sent a photo of herself instead. I wondered what our children would have looked like.
A few weeks later, Kong phoned up and changed my life.
‘Wow,’ I said. ‘That’s great news.’ Kong apologised for the paltriness of the advance. I reminded him that I too worked in publishing. I had no illusions that the path to wealth or glory was paved with poetry.
The proposed cover design appalled me: a sentimental, soft-focus photo of a pretty girl looking wistfully at a rose, recalling the crappiest sort of romance fiction. In the Eternal Way of the Author, I protested, and in the Eternal Way of the Publisher, they paid no heed.
I dedicated the book to Q. My original title, a reference to the lessons of Master Happy Fish, was Unhappiness is the Measure. They said it was too downbeat and suggested Love and the Orchid Pavilion. I say ‘suggested’ but it was no more a suggestion than an invitation to drop by the local police station for a cup of tea is a neighbourly gesture. I thought about Master Happy Fish and what he might do in my place. Follow the flow. So I said, yes, of course, that’s fine. When it came out, they gave me twenty complimentary copies. I gave two to Lao Ma, whose latest project was seducing some young starlet. He gave one copy to her as a gift. The starlet, Shanshan, shot to genuine stardom when, the following month, a TV series about the Qing dynasty in which she played the young Empress Dowager Cixi became a huge hit all across China. She wrote in her Weibo micro-blog about how she reached for my book of poetry first thing every morning, before she even got out of bed; it was her inspiration and her bible
. I nearly tossed my noodles when I read that. This was just embarrassment piled on embarrassment.
I hadn’t realised that, by then, Shanshan had more than 730,000 followers. She urged them to buy the book. A significant number of them did. To my bewilderment, and despite that accursed cover, it became a literary sensation. The critics and serious cultural commentators loved it (even if they universally bagged the cover) – and those who didn’t argued their case so vociferously that it drove even more people to read it, if only out of curiosity. The Shandong publishers put out a special hardcover edition with a more dignified cover, then published a collection of the poetry I’d written back in the late seventies and early eighties and hidden under the floorboards of my friend’s place that time – all of which, weirdly, flew off the shelves. I was invited to appear on TV, interviewed by radio stations, profiled on the internet. Someone set up a fan site. Everyone wanted to know, Who is Q? Is she your girlfriend?
I said Q was a friend, a male friend, but they paid no heed. They didn’t believe me or want to believe me, so I stopped trying to explain. Those who know, know. That’s enough. Not everyone has to know everything. Apparently, my silence contributed to my ‘aura of mystery’. I stopped reading about myself.
A man with a name, an aura of mystery and a few spare yuan in his pocket can do very well in a place like Beijing, this capital of culture and greatness that is also a city of whores. At bookshop appearances, young women practically hurled themselves into my arms. At first it was like manna from heaven. But I knew that the girls wanted to sleep with the idea of me they’d formed from my work, the me of my poetry, not the me of me. I didn’t blame them. The me of me was a far more prosaic creature.
I soon grew weary of dating girls who hadn’t been around in 1989. It’s not something you can explain to people, what having lived through something like that does to a person. When I’ve tried to talk about it with them, I would watch as my words drew tears to their pretty, widened eyes and feel disappointed, even disgusted with myself. While it was never my intention, it felt trivialising to talk about it like that, like I was playing for sympathy, for those cheap tears or, worse, using it for seduction: tragedy porn. The same went for the story of Master Happy Fish and the temple: enlightenment porn. The worst was when some girl, well-versed in pop psychology, nodded as though understanding: post-traumatic stress disorder, stages of grieving, that sort of thing. They thought they got me. Even I didn’t get me. Still don’t.
When I made the decision to stop sharing my bed with girls who weren’t there then, that left me with the women who had been. Of those, the ones who were single, sexy and sane appeared to be few and far between. I discovered I didn’t mind all that much, and even grew to love sleeping alone.
The publishers wanted more new poems. But a poet’s art, in my case anyway, is an uncertain kind of alchemy. A grey cloud of glumness shadows our skies for a moment. By the time we’ve done with it, frozen it, remoulded it into something symbolic and metaphorical, it is no longer a perfectly ordinary, bog-standard pedestrian bad mood but the elevated and beautiful state known as melancholy. A poet’s senses are always heightened, a poet’s soul is sensitive; a poet knows how to be bored by the most tedious and lengthy of editorial conferences and give that boredom the form of existential despair. I sound cynical, but I never wrote out of cynicism. I could not write simply for the sake of publication. If I found the poetry, or it found me again, fine. Otherwise – nothing doing.
Kong took me out for more bees and bugs and asked if there wasn’t something else left from those days. That’s when I remembered. There was. Q’s poetry. I told him, and he said that he didn’t want someone else’s poems, he wanted mine. Perhaps I could put my name to them. Q was unlikely to object. But if I had taken anything from my time studying and publishing philosophy, it was that moral questions require moral answers.
I’d left my job at the publishing house by then, able to live on and even save money from my book sales. I was never one for luxury – as many a disappointed young woman had discovered when I introduced her to the dazayuan with its rattling tin roof and lack of mod-cons. I eventually took Master Happy Fish’s advice, and opened a bar. As Li Po had also written in his wonderful ode to wine and drunkenness, ‘History forgets a sage, but legend preserves a drinker.’
I called my bar Fei Chang Dao and let people work it out for themselves. Bar-keeping may seem like the most relaxed of occupations to the drinkers who come here and laugh and joke with me when it’s busy or see me reading books of poetry, fiction or philosophy when it’s quiet. But running this place keeps me busier than I seem. I meet with suppliers of wine and liquor, manage the books, pay taxes, wash all the glasses myself, wipe down the counter and tables, water the plants in the courtyard, feed the cats and run a mop over the floor at the end of the night. I also speak to the local police and Neighbourhood Committee whenever required – just yesterday, they popped in to show me a composite of a man who stabbed and robbed someone at the Drum Tower subway station. Didn’t look like anyone who’d ever come in here but I told them I’d keep an eye out. I offered them a drink. They refused. I insisted. They didn’t say no. It’s all part of the job, just like putting up the flag on National Day. But within all this motion, there is perfect stillness, emptiness, a kind of happiness.
On this night, I am mulling wine at the bar and listening to jazz. There is nothing on my mind but spice and warmth and the niggling thought that I need to re-order those Argentinian reds. Waves of conversation in the room beyond the antechamber crest and break like a gentle sea. I’ll do a round of the room soon, greet my customers, hear about their lives, collect their empties, take their orders. This antechamber is the heart of my kingdom. I am the Guardian of the Gate in the Temple to the Grape and when someone comes along who doesn’t suit the place – too loud, too much bling, too much about them for sale – I not-so-regretfully inform them that it’s a private club, members only. On days when no one comes, I read: philosophy, poetry, whatever interests me on the day. My mind is a very private club. After a few people surprised me reading and commented on my choice of reading matter – Wow, philosophy! I like Nietzsche, have you ever read Nietzsche? – that sort of thing, I began to wrap my books in brown butcher’s paper, like we did when we were schoolkids. I could be reading Steve Jobs’ biography for all anyone knows. But I’m not.
Tonight, as nearly every night since the day I opened, an Englishman, Oliver, sits reading on the old sofa in the antechamber, a tumbler in his hand and his pug, Chouchou, snoring at his feet. Apparently there’s an English language pun involved in the name: chouchou – ugly, the dog’s a ‘pug’, so ‘pug-ugly’. This seems to amuse other foreigners. Oliver prefers his scotch Japanese and neat. He appreciates that I have an encyclopaedic knowledge of scotches and whiskeys and that I read a lot as well. Sometimes we recommend books to one another. We get along well.
For all I’ve been through and all I now know, and for all my ‘stillness’, I admit that hope still rises this side of an opening door, though I couldn’t tell you what exactly I’m hoping for – or who. Oliver doesn’t look up when the woman enters. I’ve never been able to work out whether he’s genuinely so absorbed by his books that he doesn’t notice people come and go, even when they approach the bar for more drinks or a chat, or if it’s a kind of affectation. When the door-curtain goes whoomph, however, I do look up. I see a woman about my age, foreign-not-foreign, familiar-not-familiar, eyes blinking with an expression like wonder above her scarf-wrapped face, a deer that with one bound has landed inexplicably in a brand-new forest.
She looks at me for a moment and something passes between us, something left over from another life perhaps. It could be just a generational recognition thing. Not that many single women my age come here alone, for whatever reason. Whatever it is between us, it glimmers and is gone, like burning spirit paper in the wind.
‘Ni hao,’ she says.
I’ve barely had the chance to reply when, as th
ough suddenly remembering someone’s house was on fire, she shoots past and into the inner room. Soon she returns with a look that’s equal parts relief and uncertainty.
I’m interested in everyone who comes into my bar. It’s my home, or close enough. I’ve filled it with second-hand furniture that I’ve found here and there, knick-knacks from my travels, old family photos. My CD collection is next to the stereo and my books, unwrapped once finished, are on the shelves for anyone to peruse. In addition, I have a great accumulation of stopped clocks, watches and other timepieces and a small traditional medicine cabinet full of clock and watch parts. Time is of my essence.
Fei Chang Dao is tucked away. There’s no sign on the hutong, and I don’t advertise. That keeps it from becoming, as we say in China, too fuza, too complicated. So when someone like her whom I’ve never seen before walks in on her own, I’m curious to work out who she is. When she returns to the bar after her foray inside, I am again struck by a strange, disconcerting sense of familiarity, as though I had once glimpsed or even held her in a dream.
