New China, Part 2 (the likable)

“I had no repugnance then – why should I now have – to those little, lawless, azure-tinctured grotesques.”

– Charles Lamb, “Old China”

“The beauty of the originating knot, the configuration of time-space, distance-difference, separation-sight, sight-desire, lack-fullness, body not-body, i-It, this gentle symphony or dance in which mind is born and world is realized, the moment after the moment of wholeness, which clearly is imperceptible since it contains the would-be viewer, the first splitting which allows sight and the shattering that follows as all the world becomes available to language and “I”, when desire and words bless-confuse everything, this I sing.”

– From Part 1 of “New China”

杯子 (beizi): cup

被子 (beizi): quilt

辈子 (beizi): lifetime

2.

I love maps. They spread me the world like a buffet, like a world to enjoy, a world through which I pass with, I hope, no indigestion. My student Muyourack and I once saw a devil, a Chinese devil. It was in Huizhou, a city built around water, between rivers, where one finds oneself always crossing and circling a lake in which a large park spreads over several garden islands, with temples and Chinese foot-bridges and playgrounds for children. The city at that time was small but modern, modernized rather, with a few tall glass buildings and fine hotels. On that sunny morning we were standing, Muyourack and I, on the broad steps of the main bus depot. The weather was fine and hot, and all around us small groups of people were standing, or sitting on their luggage, or going up the steps to buy tickets or walking down to find a restaurant for an early lunch and a spot to sit and wait.

A pair of men in orange robes and sandals were working the crowd for donations. They were monks, so-called, offering passersby a small figure of Guanyin made of gold-colored foil, then pleading for cash. A little farther two policemen rode a motorcycle slowly through the crowd on the street. The policeman on the back of the motorcycle had his face screwed up in a terrible scowl. With his eyes popping and nostrils flared, teeth sticking out like two rows of black carpet tacks, and with that hateful sneer, he appeared a devil of cruel debauchery. But he was a little devil, it was clear, a very minor demon that had to puff itself up this way. Unable to inspire terror he settled for disgust and fear. The filth he wallowed in when he had power over some so-called criminal he tried hard, you could tell, to express in that nasty mask his face.

As Muyourack and I stood watching the crowd the two monks in saffron robes approached and pressed us with their Guanyins. I waved them off but my young friend accepted the little foil gift they offered, which surprised me as I thought everybody, especially everybody Chinese, knew this annoying game. Accept their little gift and they’ll ask for a donation; give them five or even ten kuai qian, which is twenty times the value of whatever gift they hand you, and they will pressure you for more. If you happen to be walking you’ll eventually shake them or they’ll eventually shake you, but our business kept us standing in one place.

This is how it went with Muyourack and their pressuring was getting ugly. They were scruffy, middle-aged men with a sneering, crafty malice. Muyourack, confused and a little worried, again waved his hand “No”. They persisted with aggressive voices. Muyourack affected that Chinese look of indifference which is so often impervious, but then one monk, the one nearest to me, pushed his shoulder. My young friend was flustered. His face reddened. He wanted to push back I could tell, but these men were heavy if not powerful, and there were two of them. The monk stepped in for another push and as he did so I put my hand on his arm and pressed him away, thinking at the time that I wanted no more to do with those two so-called policemen than with these two monks. Happily, the oily fellow felt likewise. He turned and smiled broadly at me. Bobbing his head up and down he acceded: “Hao ah, hao hao.” I smiled back and nodded too, “Hao ah, hao hao”, so that for one absurd moment we were both of us smiling and bobbing our heads at each other like a couple of excited parrots. And thus we disengaged. They went to find other nuts to crack. Muyourack and I laughed it off.

I wondered what might have happened, though, if I’d reacted more swaggerishly, without the smiles and nods, if I’d gone and got all aggressive, bethought me to ejaculate an hearty “Oy!” or, as I imagine Americans do, a  “Hey!” or even “Hey you there!” But I’ve seen some swaggering in China and it always comes off badly. Even if one gains whatever is one’s goal, there remains some puzzling and unwanted excess hovering in the air, altered relations, stirred up emotions, and who knows what damage has been done.

Anyway, swaggering’s excessive. As far as I can tell white foreigners are blessed in this country if, when they have nothing to add to a conversation but their hot-headed emotions, they can manage to keep their mouths shut. For locals life’s more complicated. We were in a taxi, Muyourack and I, after the lecture in Huizhou, going to meet a few colleagues for dinner and a stroll around the lake, but the taxi wouldn’t go. It went half way, but then the driver pulled over and refused to turn into the street we pointed to. I don’t know why; it may have been inconvenient for him to do so. He declined to explain.

Foreign devil I was all for verbal abuse and financial sanctions. My young guide sat and considered thoughtfully, confusedly it seemed to me, but thoughtfully too. He considered. When these foreigners (I mean, these natives, the Chinese) do this silent considering, one finds oneself in a state of inter-cultural suspension; without the skills to participate meaningfully in the situation, and among people who have not the skills to communicate the situation to one, one can: a) keep quietly watchful, b) tangle things up with questions and useless suggestions, or c) rave and swagger like a foreign devil. I was ready to rave, but didn’t. Muyourack considered a moment longer, then paid the fare. I gave the scoundrel a black look, however, so that he might suffer some punishment for his crime.

On the sidewalk I asked Muyourack why he chose to pay the fare and, a little abashed, he replied: “If they are angry with you they’ll call their friends to come and beat you.”

I wasn’t much surprised about the taxi driver, but something else struck me. Young as he was, and in his own country, our little road trip was a bigger adventure for my Chinese colleague than for me, a foreigner. His own backyard was stranger to this young person than to me. The frontier is forever time, it seems, where youth turns to age, or rather where innocence becomes experience and experience slides into memory. The frontier, which is ever-burning, like a map whose edges are on fire, is time and difference, difference from another’s experience, or difference even from one’s own self a moment ago.

That summer for five days Muyourack and I were on a lecture tour. I was the speaker; he was my manager. It was a charity event arranged and run by university students to bring foreigners to speak at smaller cities and towns in Guangdong. Muyourack handled the translating, transportation, meals, and hotels; I gave lectures and attended meetings. We traveled from Shenzhen northeast to Meizhou and then back again.

You can see on a map or globe where we traveled, or on Google Earth. From Shenzhen up through Huizhou following the East River upstream, up into ancient, fertile hills. What is it we want when we turn a globe in our hands, or play with Google Earth? What are we looking for? Knowledge, no doubt. More than that, though, more by far. More and other. But wait a moment. This question – this question too, the question of the question – what are we after with our questions? What are these puzzles? Why cannot I crack it like an egg, this stone egg? This bit of painted crockery, why cannot I get to the heart of it?

I hold “yi beizi”, which I translate into “a teacup”, I hold the precious thing in my hands, a question in mind; not any question in its specificity, but the question of questions, and any question in its “being-in-question”. How is it possible that there is question? What is this egg and why cannot it be cracked?

I spin Google Earth and can only gaze at the world’s flashing colors in wonder. It seems to me that we do not so much answer questions as drop into their orbits. The moment we begin to try to find an answer we enter into a question. We drop into its orbit, its gravity-field and atmosphere. And just as one is never a “resident” of a planet, but is a “subject” of a planet, subject to its physics, its forces, its energies and nutrition, so one is never outside of one’s questions, but becomes the subject of one’s questions. We are the “others” of our own questionings, questions that swallow us the way a planet does. What do we want when we question?

I think I want knowledge dissolved in experience and experience clarified by knowledge. I want life, the thing itself at once represented and in proper. No, after all, I want something that is more than these two mountains. I want a moment comes when knowledge and experience blend together and there is no such thing as one or the other, but only exists a more masterful consciousness, a moment in which one knows and lives simultaneously. Knowledge dissolves into experience; experience rises like a mist above the peaks of those mountains, while the mountains themselves…

My mountain metaphor is not working wery well.

This broken horizon, shall we call it “writing?” And “being” and “knowing”, shall we call them “modes of writing”? “Description” and “Narrative” and “Exposition”? Useful distinctions, ultimately meaningless, as they converge into “representation,” and beyond that, beyond the maze of Minos, into blank and unknowable Being. Where then is the world whole and complete? Outside of Experience. How does, how can one Know? I don’t, can’t. How is it possible to represent or even re-create a single moment of life in words on paper? And why bother?

Beautiful teacup. Beautiful precious temporary beizi. The feast that’s painted on these surfaces! A few patches of pure pure white float like meringue in seas of deep blue. Australia’s a great toasted crumpet down there, dipped in jam. Huge stretches of almond-biscuit tan are the Sahara and Arabia, but the brown that looks like lightly roasted coffee beans crushed in a mortar, that’s Tibet and Xinjiang and Mongolia. That pot of milk chocolate represents the Taklamakan desert. To the east the brown’s streaked with green and the world drops into a poached egg in aspic, so Google Earth depicts the Sichuan basin.

And all of this is painted on an eggshell, illustrated upon a bit of porcelain in colors that seem to swirl and eddy, an ever-shifting diet for the eyes. They hold still while you’re looking, but eyes averted shift again and dance and play, “so objects show, seen through the lucid atmosphere of fine Cathay.”

On the left rise steep green hills. To the right a broad farming valley, patched here and there with yellow and fresh green crops, stretching to a horizon lost in blue-white haze. Our road winds along the base of the hills, which crowd their bodies sometimes right up against the windows of the bus. Suddenly a cataract bursts from out of a cleft half-way up the slope where a hill splits open. Water falls through a narrow, rocky draw, then flows under the road into a river. The river is broad and shallow in late summer, a fast-flowing river that looks good for trout. The road follows the stream, climbs slowly higher until the plain is left behind and all around are hills. We cross the river, leave it behind and continue into more hills. The hills gather like folds of green velvet. They become less high but closer and growing always closer. In every flat space, wherever possible, a tiny farm is cut. Dirt tracks lead from hut around slope to tiny field, then over hillock to small paddies, around the base of hills to another small field, more tiny rice paddies.

We rode the bus all day, Muyourack and I, he by the aisle, I by the window, map in hand, looking out. As afternoon wore on the sky lowered. Black tattered clouds dropped from gray overcast. The air became still, close. Warm mists hung in the air, condensing slowly into rain. Curling through those hills we passed through corridors of dirt, earth cut away to make room for the narrow road. Even these walls of moist red earth grew ferns and bushes. Suddenly would appear a row of buildings, an open space and a row of small buildings made of flat red bricks covered with gray mortar covered with small white and blue tiles, all falling down, decapitated, half-dead. Decaying walls like skeletons of dogs, piles of rain-soaked brick and mortar. Behind these buildings came glimpses of farmland, patchworks of fields and paddies where in the distance farmers stooped ankle-deep in water. Another red gash of earth and hills once more.    

We passed for many hours through those hypnotizing hills. At length a broader space opened, a rip in time. Everything stopped. Every sound, every motion stopped, save the motion of the bus; we glided across a tableau which showed at a glance ten thousand years of natural life. Even that motion slowed, then stopped. It is a wet, fertile valley. In the far distance rise blue mountains. Nearer roll lush green hills. The earth wet with ponds, cut with myriad broad furrows each thick with foliage of many shades of brown, blue, gray-blue, water-soaked browns of earth and soil, greens and blues of foliage dripping rain. In the middle distance stands an isolated hill, on which a pagoda, old it seems as ages. Nothing in the scene is of the present more than of a distant past, distant two thousand, five thousand, ten thousand years. The ancient soil, the ancient plants, the farmers’ crook-backed bodies, their dirt-clot hands. Wet earth, growth, decay, earth. Farmers tilling themselves out of, then back into the soil, their mother, their grave. Another red gash; the hills close in once more.

We traveled through to Wuhua, where we stayed one night before moving on to Meizhou, the county seat, also situated on a river, famous for its Hakka culture. There we stayed another night. Our mornings were filled with bus rides, afternoons with meetings and lectures, evenings with meals in the Chinese style, each a small, boisterous feast. At night I had bad dreams. In the mornings Muyourack, whose constant concern I was, woke me with a phone call and asked how I had slept. 不太好。有了恶梦. “Not too good,” I said. “Nightmares.”

The return trip did not take us through those melancholy ancient hills. I was grateful, didn’t want to see the walking dust again digging into its soil, spreading its quilts, making its bed. Instead we dove back into life via main highways. We flew out of the hills, practically leapt onto the bright, broad valley, rolled over the several bridges and were quickly on the plain, safe again in happy Huizhou with its monks and modern shopping malls, where even the devils are explicable and not a farm in sight.

Here we stayed at the pleasantest hotel of our journey: a business hotel in the international style. Everyone will recognize this place who has ever spent a night in a Hilton or Sheraton or in any business hotel anywhere. It was here, in a series of remarkable moments, that I had a vision, and this is the story I want to tell you, companionable reader, the story of a vision. This is our final destination and the highlight of our trip: a tale of two powerful drinks, whisky and tomato juice, and dusk and dawn.

The essay ends with a remarkable vision which, if you’ve enjoyed the journey so far, I am sure you will appreciate. Log in here or register here. It’s free, carries no obligation, and is much appreciated. Cheers, and cheers.