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.

That evening there was no little feast, a welcome change as I’d been hoping for some time alone to relax, so with a little difficulty I escaped my minder, the earnest Muyourack, and found the lobby bar/coffee-shop, where I sat at a table and ordered a scotch. After a time, when the scotch had done its work, when that delicious liquor had lifted me up my spirits and settled me soft upon a cloud, while I floated pleasantly along quietly enjoying the wonders of body and world, the cloud suddenly flipped and sent me tumbling.

I looked at the lobby of this hotel coffee shop where I had never set foot before, and as I looked the place dissolved and rematerialized. Slowly I realized: I’d been here before. Recognitions came in waves as everywhere I turned my eyes everything I saw shifted and became strangely familiar. How could I have forgotten? and for so long? I’d been in this coffee shop before, many years before, when I was Muyourack’s age. I realized I knew every corner of this place. A hotel in China that never existed at that time I knew with an intimacy well beyond the physical. I knew it the way a schoolboy knows his classroom, the way a prisoner knows his jail cell. I had worked here in my youth. When I was Muyourack’s age I had already worked for many years in this very hotel, in this city Huizhou, in Guangdong, in China. Or in a place just like it.

I remember the Scottsdale Hilton, where I came of age, a busboy, then a room service waiter, finally an angry young man. For seven years while in high school and college I woke every weekend morning at five o’clock, bicycled in the quiet pastel dawn, entered the hotel through the loading dock, punched a time-clock, made some coffee, got to work.

And these hotels are all exactly alike. They are eight or ten elements pieced together one way or another: lobby, reception desk, coffee shop, lobby bar…. Their forms may be grand or humble, they may be differently arranged, but the content is always the same. Enter the hotel, you are in the lobby. The front desk will be visible in a privileged, but usually not too obtrusive place. A coffee shop and a lobby bar, a place to sit, a lobby attendant. There will be furniture, plants and art, and the lighting will have been carefully chosen. You can estimate the cost of the rooms by the cost of these elements. There may be a concierge or if not, maybe a manager’s desk. The elevators will be off to one side, and also some shops, usually including a hairdresser’s. In the smallest hotels the shops may be reduced to a small display in a corner of products useful to travelers. 

However they’re mapped, the pieces are the same all over the world. This is no old British pub, no American dude ranch or hostel in Thailand or Japanese country inn where spatial arrangements and visual signals may be incomprehensible, where a foreigner may step indoors and be at a loss what to do next. This pattern, duplicated from New York to Nanjing, Amsterdam to Almaty is immediately, almost subconsciously explicable. 

But in these hotels the guest’s is only one perspective; workers map and navigate the same spaces differently. For them, too, it is a psychological space, a landscape of centers and peripheries, privileged and forbidden areas, but flipped, and diffused with more complicated valences of power and vulnerability.

As I drank my scotch and watched the busboy and the waitress, how they moved around the dining room, the way they escaped to the safety of the side-station and glanced carelessly out from time to time, every gesture I recognized, every emotion and thought I felt I knew. Most of all I knew the role of the busboy. The look in his eyes, I knew. The attenuated paychecks, the long hours of work, how one got one’s job, the application forms, the interviews, all the tilling of that dry soil I knew.

But I too had flipped. No longer in the role of my youth, now I was the privileged observer, the guest. I was the man who paid, clothed in money, the paying customer. I recognized the role as I slipped into it with a twinge of helpless wonder. It’s not easy to communicate camaraderie, let alone kindness across that gap. One’s role forbids. I could no more step out of my place, be too friendly or too “different”, too off-character from my place-imposed role, than the waitress could come sit and share a drink with me. I must be like the thing I appear to be like, like it or not. Social spaces are impossible distances, too far to travel, you can’t get there from here. You’d have to dismantle half of society first.

At the Scottsdale Hilton in my time most customers were decent enough. Businessmen and businesswomen, or people living on money already earned. I accidentally poured a pot of coffee on a businessman’s lap once. He was very understanding about it. I remember a certain Madame Rieux, or Roux, a resident come from France for the climate, a former actress or entertainer I think. I sometimes read her niece’s letters to her because her eyes were bad and her nurse didn’t read French.

Sometimes masks slipped. Once I came too near, in my bus-boy shirt, with my pitcher of iced water, to a table where I overheard a well-dressed man turn to his well-dressed wife and hiss disgustedly: “Pull yourself together.” She looked like she wanted to cry, through all her make-up. “Pull yourself together.”  

As I drank my scotch I relived a hundred memories and impressions, some powerful, others subtle as vapor, but one impression became, the next morning, especially meaningful. It was a thing that often used to fill me with wonder and disgust, the kind of thing that is incomprehensible to a young man, and makes him wonder what people are, what happens to people, what they become in life and what terrible changes the future holds. It was this: people sometimes drank tomato juice. It was as if they’d never heard of orange or grapefruit juice. We had both, fresh-squeezed, delicious, healthy. Also prune, apple, pineapple, all kinds of juice. And yet of all the world’s juices they chose this bizarre vegetable thing. It’s like drinking pizza sauce.

Nothing is a stranger to time, says Sphinx.

Ye gods! Is it even so? The very next morning, in the same dining room, at breakfast with Muyourack, I did and fully self-consciously, “seeing all my own mischance”, in the company of a young man who witnessed the act and that with respectful amusement – I do not exaggerate – I did see on the menu, and ordered and did receive, and finally drank for breakfast that which I had rejected and condemned, what was beyond the pale and forever strange, inconceivably different and other: a large glass of cold tomato juice. The stuff! That which who could possibly drink?! The truth is, I wanted orange juice but I knew they would only have the sugary processed kind, not the fresh. The only other juice on the menu was apple, again too sweet. Tomato was all that was left. But this is no apology. Mea culpa! I ordered and enjoyed the thick red liquid fully aware of my actions, totally cognizant of their meaning.

And as I drank in awareness of my change from youth to maturity I saw my world come around in a circle, saw myself in the mirror of my youth like that fellow at the end of 2001: a Space Odyssey. I watched the present-past-future unfold and separate, slowly turn and then blend together again. In the space of a moment I doubled and watched me step out of the eyes of my younger self, sit down and become this thing I had-witnessed-was-witnessing-again when I was younger than now. The beauty of the configuration and its crystallizing moment were deepened further, reflected to infinite depths through my reflection of Muyourack’s reflections on the scene, which, echoing mine so many years ago, doubled us both like two facing mirrors.

We left that hotel, too, once more by bus. The vision soon disappeared. The feeling lingered, as feelings do, striving for a likeness. I and all the world. Kindness, likeness, it is a way of not dying, an instinct toward that. More digging in that dark soil, more tilling and sowing, after all. Forward and backward, up and down we travel, though it’s always also forward, and every moment of the journey occurs between memory and expectation, retold dramas of once-solid ghosts and fretful imaginings, half-formed phantoms. Between the Earth and the Sky, if you like, the dream of the material and the immaterial dream.

Suddenly the bus violently swerves, screeches to a halt. Outside men are barking orders. A commotion, voices yelling. Machine-gun fire bursts from somewhere and a metallic squeal of tanks, a terrific jolt … I wake and see Muyourack looking at me, worried. “Are you okay?” he asks. I sit up, wipe my forehead. “Yeah, yeah. 恶梦,” I answer but think, “What must he think, this middle-aged foreigner who has so many bad dreams?”

We have returned to youthful Shenzhen and are stopped on the freeway in traffic caused by heavy construction, the building of an overpass. All around the bus machines are chewing up concrete, spitting out metal filings the size of my leg. Below us lies the shallow basin where Shenzhen is growing up. In the middle distance, up from out of a white haze, a blue devil lifts its horns: 地王, the Diwang building.

So we travel. Ever in every direction, forward and backward in time and space, sniffing out titbits. And are content if occasionally, in some unexpected place and unlikely moment, sitting at a restaurant after lunch, standing on a street-corner waiting for a bus to arrive, for a moment all of life becomes clear, all of life, every moment of mind and body in world, forms a figuration in which past and present, self and world are, for one bright moment, so lucidly composed and so clearly drawn it seems … you almost held it in your hands.

Like a beautiful precious teacup.

The good moment passes. The bus has come. Baggage wants lifting and shifting again. So we lift our bodies up and settle us down into our seats, Muyourack on the aisle, I by a window watching out. And now just have a look on this map how we might with an energetic, you know, “over-a-low-fence” step reach that delicious-looking island with the famous name one half an hundred miles to the south.

Shenzhen, 2009

I hope you enjoyed the journey. If you have not done so already, please consider registering here (it’s free, carries no obligation) and supporting the artist. Thanks much. ADD/FIX LINKS