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Paradoxes:

Three days to Tian’anmen

By Moira Laidlaw Autumn 2006

1 For Pat D’Arcy, who always accompanies me on my journeys.

2 This journey didn’t really take three days, and it wasn’t actually to Tian’anmen.

Everything else is true.

3 20th October 2006. Village or City? I received an email yesterday from America, telling me about Fall and how beautiful it is: the mosaic of colours and the crispness of chilly leaves. I wrote back to say I’d keep an eye open for it in Beijing, but I wasn’t going to hold my breath. In my flat, looking out onto a dual-carriageway - although I don’t have to look as it’s loud enough 24 hours a day for me not to have to guess where I am - and concrete buildings, grey sky because of pollution, and advertising slogans that light up at night, I’m not sure any season makes its presence felt here particularly, unless temperature is an infallible clue. Summer is roaring hot and Winter devilishly cold. Autumn and Spring seep vaguely through the swathes of industry, the surge of traffic and a busy metropolis.

Taking with me a heart that watches and receives, I’ve set out to walk to Tian’anmen over the next three days. I could easily do it in a couple of hours from here, but that’s hardly the point. Tian’anmen is far too difficult for me to capture such a short time. For example, if I stood at one end of the Square and walked to the other, taking in all the architectural features and historical and political significances, could I do it justice? I doubt it. And not in three days, either. Tian’anmen isn’t so much a place as an icon. And not an equivocal one at that. Does it stand for valiance in the face of dictatorship? Is it a bastion of freedom in an oppressive culture? Is it a monument to ancient imperial civilizations? Is it emblematic of Beijing’s power as the capital? As the most developed developing country’s capital, Beijing’s Tian’anmen is the national face, the international face of China. Tian’anmen is engraved, painted, drawn, etched, photographed onto a million surfaces from plates and cups to jewellery, tee-shirts and hearts.

For many people in China, both nationals and internationals, Tian’anmen represents the many paradoxes of this vast country. It’s meant so much to so many, and in different ways. Now it seems to occupy a precarious position as both a revered monument and a repository of abuse. I believe it’s because China seems to esteem fanatics, dictators, ruthless leaders and consummate bastards - at the same time as valuing family, children, innocence, beauty, grace, symmetry, harmony - that Tian’anmen occupies such a paradoxical position in China’s psyche.

‘Tian’anmen’ means the Gate of Heavenly Peace. The Square surrounding it has a complex history. It lies at the centre of Beijing, physically, geographically and spiritually. During the Qing and Ming dynasties, ‘common’ people were forbidden entrance beyond its gates. In fact, they were expected to lower their heads while walking past, ‘unless they see too much beauty and become unsettled by it’. Guards could not pass under the gates on horseback and had to walk their animals through in silence. It was forbidden to discuss the lay-out inside the walls with outsiders. Outsiders were anyone not occupying high positions inside. Leaders had to follow no such rules. They were the rules. It was a monument to feudalism.

4 Entrance to Tian’anmen’s interior

It is with a sense of freedom that I set off on this unusual journey, a slow stroll towards something ill-defined, but powerfully felt. In the true spirit of this enquiry I walk down to the main road and turn in the opposite direction to Tian’anmen. I might as well explore my home-territory a little, before venturing towards any destination. I’m going in the direction of Dong Zhimen. It is in this district that half-a-million- year-old bones – Peking Man’s [sic] – were found forty years ago. Peking ‘Man’ was homo sapiens, like you and me. S/he lived in the then more tropical climate, made stone tools, buried the dead with ritual and sacrifice. S/he had fire to heat up Winter nights and rush-fans to cool down Summer days. The remains are the oldest human relics to have been found in China. There’s a plaque on a brick wall at the entrance to a pavillioned building. I stop to read it. It’s in tarnished gold background with black lettering. ‘Dawn of Civilisation’ it says. ‘Beginnings of China’s greatness’. I smile at the way China turns every positive natural event into something revealing national prowess. The French do that too I’ve noticed. I have a sneaking admiration for the trait. In Britain, though, and in other countries, it’s led to colonialism and racism on a brutal scale, so I dismiss my ‘sneaking admiration’ and walk on.

On my right there are apartment blocks in salmon pink. Dong Gan (Eastern Courage) is the name on the sides of the buildings in blue and white enameled tiles. The whole street is lined with these apartments from one to ten. Each separate block has an entrance-guard to a compound. I smile at each young man as I pass, identically uniformed in green with red trimmings, standing ram-rod straight and expressionless. I smile exaggeratingly, as one shouts to a foreigner to inject meaning into babble. Many smile back, cracking their faces in cheeky grins. Others remain motionless all over. I almost feel like doing what I did once as a child in a cathedral: going up to a marble saint and tweaking his nose! I resist the impulse in the interests of international relations and continue on my way.

Up to the end of the road and turn left, after crossing a road and taking my life in my hands. Crossing the road in Beijing is an Art form. Just as High Art deals with life and death issues, bolding them in sharp relief, so does crossing the road in Beijing: one false move and you’re dead! There are many underpasses and I really ought to make more use of them, but I always feel cheated by having to climb steps up and down, when the land in Beijing is flat and even. It always seems a waste of time to me.

5 However, this isn’t in the spirit of ambling about trying not to have a destination, so I decide to play the next junction by ear.

Across the double dual carriageway, Dongzhimen Road being one of the main arteries for traffic in this area of Beijing, I see a constructed archway in yellow and red bloated plastic: a huge air-filled structure that is used in China to denote a special occasion. I wonder what’s going on and decide to use the underpass to cross the road safely this time and have a look.

It’s Chaoyangmen’s Festival of Lights. Happens every year, so the posters say. Red posters glued to walls with heavy, black calligraphy, the traditional way to let people know what’s happening. On the right-hand side of the entrance, there’s a huge television screen mounted against the vast, grey, high-entrance wall, showing CCTV1 – China’s most popular station with 24-hour coverage of Chinese epic dramas, usually set in Ming or Qing Dynasty times, men in ponytails riding horseback, righting wrongs and cutting a swathe through feudalistic corruption and petty officials. I read the subtitles to gather what’s going on. People swirl around. It’s not ten o’clock in the morning, yet there’s already a winding snake growing round the semi-circular entrance grounds. Most people are watching the television screen. Children are hopping from foot to foot, playing tag; a group of roller-bladers, teenage lads, bandanas tightly wound round heads and wrists in red and gold, cavort through the space, dividing the queue in two, everyone taking it well and laughing at their antics. There are some four-star generals standing to the side, yellow epaulettes, wide shoulders, the lot. Some of them appear to be particularly important: they’re surrounded by fawning acolytes. I wish I knew who these VIPs were. I approach a guard, dressed trimly in olive-green jacket and matching skirt, her beret in bright scarlet set at a rakish angle. ‘Who are they?’ I ask her tentatively. ‘Goodness me, they’re the Chiefs of Police,’ she says, nicely, but as if I should have known. ‘Oh, I see. Why are they here?’ She looks at me now as if I’m simple-minded. ‘To represent the people!’ ‘Oh, right!’ I wonder what that means, but don’t pursue it. What’s the point? We come from different worlds. ‘Are you British?’ she asks. ‘I am, yes.’ ‘Oh, how lovely to see you here!’ she exclaims and suddenly, quite suddenly, her voice transforms from formality to candid delight. She steps closer and reaches out to take my arm. She squeezes it in a gesture of such genuine affection, I find tears in my eyes. It’s so unexpected, and yet of course, this is the China I know and love. ‘My name’s Moira,’ I say, reaching my hand out to shake hers. ‘I’m Zhang Zhelin. Pleased to meet you.’ She is nearly as tall as I am, about thirty years old, bright, shining hair drawn back in a hairstyle reminiscent for me of pictures

6 I’ve seen of women’s fashions in the second world-war in Britain, a band of hair curled round at the nape of the neck and held in place with pins. ‘Absolutely delighted to meet you!’ I say with a big grin. ‘What are you doing here?’ she asks. ‘Just looking. I’m living in Beijing at the moment.’ ‘Living here? Have you seen the Summer Palace and Tian’anmen?’ ‘Not the Summer Palace yet, but Tian’anmen I know well. I saw it first in 2001.’ ‘You’ve been in China since then?’ ‘Yes.’ She looks at me then, holding my eyes with hers. I’ve had this happen a lot in China. It’s a look which we don’t do with strangers in the West, but people do here, if they want to get to know you quickly. It is as if she is storing me up for later. I feel her gaze making me tingle. She nods her head slowly, I imagine when she feels she has finished looking. Then smiles again. A lovely smile.

‘Will you have your picture taken with me, Moira?’ she asks. ‘Yes, of course,’ I say, realizing that this is different from the usual, ‘let’s have our picture taken with the laowai’, that I first became acquainted with at Tian’anmen Square on day two of my China life in 2001. A whole load of us VSO volunteers were taken to Tian’anmen, and sitting in the late Summer glow of a vast-open space, we sat on the wall and were regaled with requests for families to have their pictures taken with us. At first it seemed quaint and even a little flattering, but very soon it became irksome and even objectionable, as we were pulled from pillar to post, limbs arranged to suit the photographer, commanded to smile, with the obligatory two fingers stuck up behind our heads to look like stupid little ears, a habit I still find annoying when trying to take a serious photograph here.

Miss Zhang alerts her comrade, pulling a digital camera out of her wide leather belt- bag around her slender middle. She hands it over and then comes and puts her arm around me. She looked at me, smiling widely. Not quite sure what at, but somehow, the fact I’ve only known her for five minutes means nothing in terms of feeling so comfortable.

‘What shall we say to make us smile?’ she says, looking sideways at me. ‘We say ‘qiezi’ (aubergine) in China. What do you say?’ ‘Nai gan’. (Cheese) She laughs. ‘Cheese. Yuk!’ I shrug my shoulders and laugh. ‘Cheese it is, then,’ she concludes. We face the front and smile and smile. Her friend takes two pictures and we look at them together with much mirth and enjoyment. ‘I’d better go,’ I say. ‘Aren’t you staying?’ she asks. ‘No, I’m taking a walk around Beijing. I want to see as much as I can.’

7 ‘I’m so happy to have met you!’ she says, putting her head slightly on one side as if for emphasis. This is someone so able to show warmth and humanity. She’s a guard, I remember, so whatever it is she’s guarding I hope it’s a worthwhile investment of her loyalty.

I walk away, turning back a little while later. She is staring after me and raises her hand in a waving gesture. I wave back.

Now it’s into Chaoyang Park, an expanse of green with sculpted flower-beds and statuary. There are men flying kites. Men used to fly kites a lot in ancient China I understand. Pitting their skills against the elements. Perhaps a bid for freedom of action in a society so heavily structured and hierarchical. This is whimsy. I don’t know why they flew kites. I wish I did. It seems purposeful. I am reminded of Somerset Maugham’s short story, ‘The Kite’, in which the kite, rather heavy- handedly, is set up as a symbol of freedom against oppression. I can’t help now but wonder why kite-flying is such a pastime in the capital. I never saw it once in the countryside in five years. Here I see it every day. Kites depicting birds of prey seem to be the most common. White bodies and black-tipped extremities soaring the heavens, cutting and cavorting in the open skies. I stand and watch one man from a distance, dark blue Mao cap perched stolidly on his head, weathered fingers plying the cord deftly. His eyes are glinting. He suddenly yanks the cord and the bird flips over in the air. I’ve never seen anything like it. I clap spontaneously. I don’t want to disturb him, but I have. He puts his head on one side quizzically.

‘ You want a go?’ he asks, twinkling. This Chinese sociability again. If I were disturbed doing something solitary in that way, I am not sure my first impulse would be to share it with the disruptor. ‘I can’t!’ I say awkwardly. I have to stop doing this: disturbing people and getting into conversations like this. ‘You can. It’s just practice.’ ‘You do it so well. I wouldn’t know where to start.’ I approach him and stand by his side. ‘Do you mind if I watch?’ ‘Of course not. You already are.’ Touche!

I realize he’s old now. He’s seventy if he’s a day. His stance seemed so young before. His face is cracked with wrinkles, a canny face, a kind face, a strong face. He plies the cord again and the kite curves the air in a parabola of skill. I watch, smiling. I start glowing. I love this country. I love this openness and this desire to share. I love the way people accept you into their lives without formality. I love the way I can stand here on this blustery day and share something intimate with a stranger in ways which seem to satisfy both of us. I look over at him: he’s absorbed in his art.

‘How old are you?’ I ask. I am still a little apprehensive when I ask this question,

8 especially when the person is older than me. But it’s not a personal question here. It’s a simple question of sums. ‘81’. He smiles at me for a fleeting moment and then turns his attention back to the kite. ‘You’re really good at that. I thought you were a lot younger.’ He laughs, throwing back his head, delighting in something. I shake my head. I don’t quite know what’s going on here.

‘Let’s sit down, eh’, he says, reeling in the kite. ‘Have you time?’ ‘Of course,’ I say. ‘I like to take a rest every now and then.’ He places the kite carefully on the ground and we sit on a large stone seat behind us. ‘What’s your name, then?’ ‘Moira.’ ‘English?’ ‘Yes! And you are…?’ ‘Chinese. Oh, my name!’ He laughs again. ‘Wang Fuqin. Well, well. You’re English. What do you do?’ ‘I’m a volunteer.’ ‘A volunteer? In Beijing?’ ‘My organization has its central office in Beijing, but we work in poor provinces like Ningxia.’ ‘Ningxia. I know it well.’ ‘Really? Most people I’ve spoken to in the capital say they’ve never been there and don’t know anyone who has.’ ‘I spent eight years there when I was younger.’ I stare at him. I find tears forming in my eyes. It’ll be the same old, sad story. I sigh.

‘You know what I mean I see.’ His voice breaks me out of revelry. ‘You were sent to the countryside to learn from the people,’ I say, quoting a phrase I’ve read and heard so often. ‘Eight years?’ ‘In 1968 until the end of the Revolution.’

I swallow hard. I don’t know if I can bear another story of hardship and endurance. Yet he survived. I should feel victorious, but somehow under this graying sky and blustery wind, I feel a depth of sadness and a sense of the purposelessness of such human suffering. This man went all through the Cultural Revolution and now he’s flying kites on the common.

‘That’s a long time.’ ‘Some people were sent for ten or eleven years. I was in Penyang.’ ‘Oh my God, I know Penyang. It’s just down the road from Guyuan. I want to hug him like an old friend.’ ‘You know Guyuan?’ ‘ Yes!’ I try to sit still and impassively. It’s not easy. I ache to hear details about

9 Guyuan. What was it like? What were the people like? How did people live? What did they do? What were their opinions of Mao? ‘Guyuan’s where I lived for five years,’ I finally add, taking care to keep my voice steady. ‘You chose it, eh!’ He laughed. ‘You chose it and I was ordered to go there.’ ‘Yes, but it’s different…’ my voice trails off. I have no experience to fill this gap. ‘Did you go to Guyuan at all? I ask’ ‘Once.’ He smiles now, distantly. I want to tread those roads with him and climb inside his memory. But I can’t. I sit outside and watch. ‘Were the times difficult?’ I ask awkwardly. What a banal question! ‘Ha ha ha! Difficult? They were difficult for us all. But we did learn.’ ‘What did you learn?’ ‘Patience. Tolerance. Humanity. To fly a kite.’ The last hangs on the air. ‘That’s an awful lot!’ He stares into the middle distance.. ‘So, shall I teach you to fly a kite?’ he asks with a grin. I bite my lip. ‘What are you looking for?’ he suddenly asks. ‘Looking for?’ But I know he understands my curiosity and the moment becomes momentous. ‘I want to understand China,’ I say softly, meekly, looking at him full in the face, searching. ‘It’s just so full of contrasts.’ ‘Isn’t every country?’ ‘ I don’t know about every country. I suppose so, but not on the scale of China, somehow. What you’ve lived and experienced in your lifetime, is something I would like to understand.’ ‘And if I tell you, you think you’ll understand, you mean?’ I sigh. ‘Probably not. But it’s better than this.’ ‘And what is this?’ ‘Back then, you know, in the Cultural Revolution, what did you hope for, dream of?’ ‘Rice and shredded pork mostly!’

I feel like crying. I know it’s ridiculous of me, but I feel like crying with frustration. I’ve lived here for five years and sometimes I feel no closer to an understanding of what makes this country this country. I sense a chance here, and I can’t let it go, like picking at a scab. I feel the answer is profound. ‘You must have had a lot of problems finding food sometimes.’ ‘Yes. We all did. The people were good to me.’ ‘They are good people.’ ‘You like them?’ ‘I love them. I was there five years and I’m going back in March next year.’ ‘Are you a teacher?’ ‘Yes!’ ‘To be a teacher is a good thing!’ he says.

10 A pause. ‘ Wasn’t it mostly young people sent to the countryside?’ I ask. ‘I thought it was students and so on.’ ‘Yes, but some of us were sent if we needed to go. Let’s fly the kite,’ he urges. He stands up, bends down to retrieve the kite, and uncoils the cord from its wooden roller. ‘If we walk up and down a little, gradually the kite will get the idea.’ ‘Get the idea?’ I laugh. ‘Yes, you have to train them, you know. I’ve been training this one for seventeen years. It’s getting good!’ I laugh. ‘Right. You show me then.’

He does. And hands over the roller to me at one point, helping me jerk the coil when necessary, learning to feel the currents of the air, stepping backwards and reeling it in or out. And at one point I feel it like a part of myself, heaving into the heavens. I look excitedly over at him and he’s smiling at me. ‘That’s what I learnt!’ he says. I nod and smile.

For a while longer we share the experience of flying the kite, not speaking at all. It’s comfortable and accepting. Eventually, I tell him I’m going now. ‘It’s meant a lot to me to meet you!’ I say hesitantly. He nods in reply. ‘I won’t forget you,’ I add. He smiles, head on one side again, his eyes warm and gentle, hands smoothly adjusting the cord. He mouths the words, zai jian at me (goodbye) and I turn away. Sometimes this is so hard. Walking away from these people. I don’t look back this time because I know it’ll be painful if he’s watching me and painful if he isn’t. Time to go. As simple as that.

I’m getting thirsty, so I stop at the side of a road, take out my map (discarding it after a few minutes, because I don’t want to be restricted by maps – I can’t find where I am anyway, so it hardly matters) and then take a couple of swigs from the small bottle of water I’ve brought with me. I stand up, juggle with imaginary dice and turn left. The traffic’s thinning out now and I’m coming upon more open countryside. It’s derelict land for the most part, though, rubbish tips cluttering the fringes of the city. I walk down an avenue of willow trees. A small boy runs out of a traditional-style house, a three-sided, court-yarded building, sees me, and runs back through the gate, shouting something to the people inside. I smile. Reminds me of Guyuan.

Several cyclists pulling carts of vegetables and fruit pedal their way past me in both directions. I look ahead and see a sign for a level crossing. I’ve never crossed railway tracks in China. I wonder whether you can do it directly, or whether you have to climb bridges over it, or descend underpasses instead. But no, it’s just like an English level crossing. Mossy tracks criss-crossing the landscape, cars rattling over them slowly,

11 the suspensions of cars and lorries clanking. There isn’t much traffic going in my direction, though, and the clouds are looming behind me. There are the city’s citadels, postmodern, concrete, dazzling. I turn back, and there’s a flat vista opening up wide. I hear birds singing. Blackbirds. How wonderful! These are the first blackbirds I’ve heard in Beijing. And there are sparrows of course flitting about the hedgerows. And orioles. There’s an oriole standing to attention on a telegraph pole. Look, over there! Standing erect, its yellow a beacon of light. And I hear the drumming of a woodpecker in the distance too. My skin suddenly senses something ineffably different in the air. I shiver, but it’s not with cold. It’s not apprehension, but it’s anticipation. I sense I’ve been here before, but I know I haven’t. I am prickling with excitement, all senses sharp and aware, but I have no idea why.

There’s a fork in the road. Which way? A blackbird, male and imperious, lands close to my feet, skitters around the ground, rooting for something? Which way? I don’t know. The blackbird twitters at my feet, apparently oblivious to any sense of danger. I take the left fork. Within yards, I come upon a large poster on a wooden frame: ‘Welcome to Bei Dou Ming Zhuang’ 北豆名庄. The road ahead of me is wreathed in trees, willow, beech, fir and elm. A cart rattles past, the driver wearing peasant clothes, ragged and ripped. He gives me a quizzical look and I smile awkwardly. This isn’t the regard of people only a hundred yards back there. This isn’t the same at all.

On both sides of the road are tiny shops, one-room businesses, managers – men and women – sitting outside talking, knitting, drinking tea, hanging out washing on makeshift clotheslines. I stop. This isn’t Beijing. This is Guyuan. I feel suddenly queasy, because this doesn’t feel possible. The roar of the city must be so close, and yet I hear nothing but birdsong and the clatter of knitting needles, or voices raised in greeting or approbation. A little boy rushes out of a shop-doorway chased by an older brother. The little boy dashes behind his mother for protection, but she steps aside to hang out a shirt on the line, and the older boy grabs the child’s arm. He screeches and wrestles himself away, and the chase is on. The two boys tarryhoot the length of the village: I constantly hear them in front of me, just out of sight. The mother sees me then, and lowers the pair of trousers she’s just retrieved from the basket of washed clothes in front of her - in her surprise at seeing me, I can only assume. I’m not expected here. It’s not that I’m unwelcome, but if this isn’t Beijing and it’s Guyuan after all, then I am the laowai again. I smile at her, and her face breaks into a greeting.

I feel too visible standing here like this, so I begin to walk through the village. On

12 both sides there is habitation in shacks or brick-houses with corrugated-iron roofs; or crenellated brick, shop fronts leading directly onto broken pavements, people sitting outside tiny snack rooms eating breakfast fare, clicking their chopsticks, slurping their soup, spitting at the ground. At each entrance, someone is there, watching, taking in the world, and I know I am being watched too. If I can get over the disconcerting idea that I’ve just traveled a thousand miles and gone back in time hundreds of years in a matter of a few dozen yards and minutes, then this is Guyuan, and it’s lovely, so what’s the problem? And it is just like Guyuan. There is an atmosphere of cameraderie, an aura of community quite unlike anything on the outside. A few dogs are roaming aimlessly about and children tease and throw sticks at them. I say hello to a woman, my age I guess, stirring a gruel-like substance in a big vat outside her tiny restaurant. She’s wearing a red kerchief around her neck and is sweating with the exertion. It’s a big vat. I wonder who’ll be eating all that.

Two men are sitting opposite each other on low, rickety, wooden stools playing checkers. Both elderly, both in flat caps, grubby clothes and with gap-toothed smiles. One chews tobacco, which might account for his brown teeth. He spits a huge shining globule onto the ground by the side of him where it lies glistening. He sees me over the road and nudges his companion to look. They both stare at me as if I am a rare exhibit in a zoo. Just like Guyuan, then! I slow down, take on the gait of a country- person and not this assertive stride that denotes urban dwellers and laowai. I nod vaguely in their direction and realize I shouldn’t be standing and watching. They’re not in a parade anymore than I am. But I want to watch. I want to stand here forever and let it all seep in. This is Guyuan without Hui caps. Guyuan, the oasis in the desert, the rural community peopled by kindness and simplicity and hope. Instead of having to close my eyes and imagine, here it is right in front of me. I hadn’t realized just how homesick I’ve been. I feel transported.

If I go over there and sit on the wall, take out something from my knapsack, I can stall for a while and watch. I cross the road to a dilapidated pile of bricks and sit down on their knobbly surface, heaving the knapsack off my shoulders, exaggerating the weight, should anyone be watching – in order to justify stopping. I lay it on the ground. I look up. A village is watching! I smile and everyone, and I mean everyone, smiles back. A woman kneading dough under the awnings of her one-room house, a group of card-players, all men of course, just the same as in Guyuan – the women probably being too busy to play games – a gaggle of young children, boys and girls with older siblings, two of them chasing each other with large hoops, which they’re rolling with sticks. I saw that in my own country when I was a child, I remember once, in Edinburgh, my grandparents’ two-up-two-down in Collington Mains Grove. Two children there, beefy and scrawny at the same time, playing hoopla and shrieking with the delight of it all. These children are scrawny without the beef, but they are just as full of glee. They pause a moment and stare as well. I shrug my shoulders. I don’t want to move yet, I want them to move. I don’t want to be the centre of attention. ‘Hello!’ I say to them all. And they move then, after smiling and grinning and being,

13 as rural Chinese people are, so friendly to strangers. They’re all going on their own way to wherever. Suddenly, there’s a chipmunk on the ground beside me, nibbling at my knapsack. I watch it in tender fascination. It’s longer than my hand, furry, with a distinct black stripe down its tawny back. It cavorts on the canvas material for a while, and then runs off into the scrub undergrowth. Teresita had a chipmunk in Guyuan too, but it died. They are solitary creatures, apparently, so it wasn’t loneliness that killed it. Captivity, perhaps? It’s gone from sight now, and I know it’s time to go, but I don’t want to. If I walk down this street, it’ll be behind me instead of in front of me. If only moments like this could be captured in amber but I can only discover this place once.

The road ahead is straight, an avenue out of time. There’s a man repairing a bicycle at the side of the road. He looks up and grins as I approach. He bends his head to his task again and taps the rim of a wheel. A horse comes towards me pulling a large cart full of fruit – apples, pears, mangoes and lychees. The owner is sitting on the rim of the cart, loosely holding the reins, calling out ‘fresh fruit!’ The sharp stink of horse assails my nostrils as it clops past, unshod hooves clicking with that delicious sound of country-lanes and slower times.

There’s a VCD shop on the left, its stock behind a grubby cloth partition, just as in Guyuan. And they’re VCDs not DVDs as are more customary in eastern China, because VCDs are cheaper, holding less information than DVDs so offer less flexibility and visual/auditory quality. A young man leans against the wall outside his shop smoking a stub of cigarette, wreathing the smoke up into the sky in a lazy arc. He’s dressed in dark blue trousers, plain and shabby, with a smock top in faded cotton. He wears a Mao cap in the same dark blue cloth. His hands are cracked and ingrained with dirt, and he flicks the stub into the gutter and immediately lights up another. He shouts out a greeting to a passing cyclist who waves in greeting but doesn’t reply. His cart is overflowing with household gadgets and mechanical innards: he’s probably got a repair shop of some kind down the road. The smoker looks up into the sky as if expecting some sort of landing. It’s a gesture that might be expected at the close of day, a valedictory scanning of the heavens. It seems portentous; perhaps it is. Apparently finding nothing he retreats behind the curtain.

On the verge a little further on, two men are sizing up a bicycle wheel as if it’s about to roll away from them before they can capture its complexities. First one picks it up and puts it down and then the other does the same, eventually passing it between them instead. It’s become a parcel like the one in the children’s game. One man, the older by a generation, garbed in peasant rags and filthy fingers, shakes his head and swears. Puts it down in disgust. Scratches his head. His younger companion, obligatory cigarette perched between his lips, reaches for it and mutters something conciliatory. Suddenly the older man shouts and from behind a curtain emerges a young woman – the younger man’s wife? – the older man’s daughter-in-law? She has the apple-round cheeks of country folk, voluminous grey skirts cinched at the waist with a wide band

14 of pink cloth. On her head she wears a cloth, grubby green. She smiles at her boys and teases them about something. Her husband (?) grimaces at her and she quickly hides her mirth and retreats back into her kitchen.

I look back and I see only village. I look ahead and see skyscrapers are already intruding. There are only a couple of hundred yards to go in this village, surrounded as it is by countryside and scrubland, populated by birds and insects and small, furry creatures - and people living in another time. There’s a kind of meeting-house at the end of the street with a large notice-board outside. Bei Dou Ming Zhuang notice- board is a stately affair. Hinged between two huge, heavy-silver standing poles, the bright mosaic posters on their canvas backgrounds tell stories about evenings spent together, feasts and feats to look forward to, daring deeds and heroic hoopla. A small crowd of children gathers round my legs and points and giggles. They’re all street- urchins, dirty, smelly and thoroughly delighted with their lot it seems. I say hello and they shriek and jump back with that frisson that is so delicious to children (and adults to watch), wrinkling up their noses, scattering back from the notice-board and screaming with pleasure. I grin and turn back to the notice-board. They inch back, exaggerating their creeping-softly movements (I can see them reflected in the windows beyond). I turn round suddenly and they scatter again amid whoops of delight.

We do this a few times, until the children tire of it. I’m putting off the inevitable, though, and it’s time to go. Time to go home and rest in readiness for tomorrow’s jaunt.

As I leave the village, I don’t look back. It’s becoming more and more like Brigadoon all the time! I have to cross a set of railway lines again, dividing rural and urban, rich and poor, modern and medieval, fast and slow time.

The skyscrapers loom ahead. The journey is over today.

21st October: One is always nearer by not keeping still. (Thom Gunn) I decide to make a more organized route through the capital, so I carry my map in my pocket, rucksack complete with notebook, pen, Agatha Christie thriller (new one – ‘The ABC Murders’ now) and a bottle of water, should the going get rough. If I want to sit and think I’ve also brought a book about Deng Xiaoping written by his daughter that details the Cultural Revolution years of 1966-1976, which will be full of details about Tian’anmen.

I set off and turn in the opposite direction to yesterday, but this is the way to Tian’anmen and I don’t want to get there until tomorrow, so I consult the map and see a long main road – 工人体育场路 (Workers’ Stadium Road) which looks perfect for the purpose – and I walk down it everyday I discover, only I’m joining it further up now. It crosses my mind that perhaps I ought to be walking this pathway everyday

15 because I’m reaching landmarks quicker than normal, but that’s a work-mentality. Time to get back to freedom-mode.

Gongren Tiyuchang is a fascinating road. Like many roads in China, it’s built in the Moscow style – incredibly wide and very straight. No curly bits, not like Slarty Bardfast’s award-winning design of the fjords of Norway in ‘Hitch Hikers’ Guide to the Galaxy’. No frills at all, that is until you reach one of the many stadia being built for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The entrance to this stadium has a wide semi-circular enclave, whose centre is decorated with profuse blooms, all in their individual trays and arranged to form the interconnected and five-coloured logo of the Games. Red, white and yellow chrysanthemums vie with purple tulips and green sprays in a spectacular display. At the centre of this effusion stand the five mascots, which people seem to think are cute, but to be honest, I can’t see it myself. Before I left Guyuan I gave a whole set of them to He Xiao Hua’s family because they are two parents and three children . T hey were uniformly delighted, but I suspect this had more to do with the fact that they came from a Beijing shop with a gold seal depicting that the wares came from a bona-fida Beijing Olympics dealer, rather than whether the mascots were cute or not. The mascots range in size from key-ring to Red-Riding Hood Wolf in the Grimm Forest! What is cute though, and very Chinese, is that in every single Olympic display, somewhere – and it’s not always obvious where so you have to spend time looking – there is a notice saying how many days until the Olympics start. These Games are a huge source of pride to the people, whether from Beijing or some tiny little hamlet in rural China. This is the preening of peacocks. If you look on the internet, you’ll find many sites with digital read-outs, illuminated, decorated, embellished. This many days to the Olympics. That many days. You’ll also find the designs for the main stadium to be used for the opening ceremony. I prefer the ones that are more Ancient Greece and traditional like this one in front of me now but there are some pleasant entries, like one I’ve seen on the internet from Sweden. It looks as if it’s about to maintain that round, comforting cathedral - dome-like quality, but then sags in the middle like a deflated souffle. Ah well, the best plans of mice and men…

Every time I pass this traditional-looking Western-style monument I feel ambivalence – admiring its contours, and yet wondering what such an investment of money, in terms of all these flowers and demonstrations of affluence, could do for Guyuan. But the world isn’t Guyuan, despite my wishes to the contrary and I pass by on the other side of the road to go down a side-alley I haven’t walked before. It’s lined with willow trees and building sites.

I walk for a couple of miles, taking in the fast cars and pollution and exhaling frustration. This could be anywhere in the world, well, anywhere industrialized and polluted. I don’t like Beijing, but it’s not as simple as that. What I mean is I don’t like

16 those attributes of Beijing that seem reminiscent to me of the worst of postmodern industrial life. I don’t like the frantic busyness, the screeching of brakes, the flat, high- rise buildings without a human-scale necessary to render them awesome. I don’t like multi-dimensional human life masquerading as linear and monochrome. I feel uncomfortable, because, like all other capital cities I’ve ever seen, with the possible exceptions of Paris and Edinburgh, this city seems more functional than habitable, more expedient than comfortable.

So, I like parts of Beijing – the parts that remind me of places that aren’t like Beijing- The-Capital-City! Places like Bei Dou Ming Zhuang, for example, or parks where old men fly kites and remember the old days; or streets off the beaten track that hold time in abeyance, cul-de-sacs where tradition is trapped – the memories-in-amber if you like. I am impressed, however, with the fact that old and new co-exist, and that the old isn’t being entirely done away with. I like some of the buildings that capture a pride in Chineseness alongside postmodern visual tricks. For example, I’m passing one now: a building made of mirrors that appears to be two-dimensional from a head-on position, but is in fact three-sided. It is crowned with a pagoda-shaped turret. Most appealing. I look for the name as I pass, but I can’t find it. This splendid building surely has a name. I walk round the building, thinking about tangents and sines, cosigns and hypotenuses, grateful that I don’t have to think about such things anymore, but can discover no name. This search for a name reminds me of a documentary I once saw about Richard Feynman, the brilliant American astrophysicist who advised on the Challenger Disaster. He said his father once asked him what the two-year old was doing (he was looking at some birds out of the window) and when the little boy replied, the father said, ‘Well, in English, that animal’s called a ‘bird’, in French it’s a ‘oiseau’, in German ‘Vogel’, in Chinese ‘ 鸟’。So now, do you know everything about a bird?’ The little boy said yes. The father replied: ‘No you don’t! You only know what it’s called, not what it is!’ (No wonder Richard grew up to be a Nobel prize winner!) So I stop walking around and trying to find what the structure’s called and just think of it as a spectacular building. That’ll do.

I walk on, passing a municipal billboard against a wall dividing this back-street with a piece of scrubland no doubt ripe for development, with its customary silver frame and multi-coloured display. There’s some kind of function happening in Tian’anmen Square in November. Some kind of pageant. There are always pageants in Tian’anmen. Displays of national pride and power, pomp and circumstance, but moving for all that. This one is in response to The Year of the Italian in China. There are posters all over the place of Michaelangelo’s David with a speech bubble saying: 你好 (hello!) and a Terracotta Warrior from Xi’an saying: ‘Ciao!’ Tacky, if you want my opinion. This advertising logo offers a backdrop for information relating to how you can get tickets, for how much and so on. Two years ago it was Year of the French in China, with concerts and marches and theatrical displays throughout the year in Beijing, but also in provincial areas too. Tickets for concerts in the great Hall of the People were certainly out of the ‘People’s’ range, as far as I could see, and this

17 particular extravaganza looked like encouraging more of the same. Tickets at hundreds of yuan, for example. I think I’ll give it a miss this year too.

I turn left at the top of the street. ‘People’s Stadium West’ opens up with the intriguing possibility of a cul-de-sac, framed in old Chinese domestic buildings and yards in ever-decreasing width. I walk towards it. Towards the end, passing by bicycle-repair frontages and scattered street-stalls, I come upon a covered market of the kind I love to explore. Whether in rural or urban settings, Chinese markets are fascinating. Full of bric-a-brac, live food, and silks of all hues and qualities, smells ranging from ginger, wild garlic, offal and sweat, street-markets are worth hours of leisure-time. I pass through the comparatively narrow entrance-way to what looks like an enormous hangar, choc-a-bloc with clutter and noise and dirt. Crabs are crawling out of buckets next to polished skeins of material. Little boys are riding tricycles in moto-cross style through people’s legs, upsetting a cart of turnips amid shouts and scoldings, and laughing off the threats of reprisals. Men are shouting out their bargain-prices, repeating goods and prices like incantations, so often, and so quickly, that the syllables merge into the general hubbub and seem to have little isolated meaning. Mothers push toddlers in light-weight prams. Fathers bargain and smoke cigarettes. Grandparents amble between them all like anchors, slow and ponderous with their sticks and knapsacks. A whole corner of the hangar is fitted out with books in no particular order. Children’s literature next to herbal dictionaries. ‘Taiqi’ next to ‘Wild animals in the Natural World’. One of the vendors points me towards some story- books in English for children about five years old. I tell him they’re a little easy for me. He doesn’t get the humour at all and indicates a shelf on which there are books in Chinese about ancient Chinese history and symbolism. Mm. Thanks. I smile and say cheerio. He asks me to repeat it, blank incomprehension on his face, so I realize that I’m not registering very clearly with this person. Time to move on.

The ground underfoot is fetid and stinks of fish and filth. It doesn’t deter me for the moment because it’s always like that in China. Perhaps surprising is that there seems to be no difference at all in terms of public hygiene between rural or urban China. Concepts of cleanliness in China are not the same as Western standards and I used to think it was a matter of commonsense: in other words the Chinese don’t have any! I suppose it’s a matter of commonsense when you are brought up with knowledge about how the human body works, what can happen to it, what dirt is composed of, and procedures to limit infection and so on. Such knowledge is not often transmitted in China. It seems to me that most people grow up without any real knowledge about how the human body functions and how disease is caused, so it’s not a matter of commonsense at all. It’s a matter of education or, in China’s case, lack of it. The state governs so many areas of people’s lives, that people seem to me less able to take initiative or any responsibility for their own learning.

So it stinks here, but I carry on regardless. I love looking at the fruit stalls because there are always fruits I haven’t been able to identify yet. Star fruit are in abundance

18 at this time of year. I tried one once, but found it fairly tasteless. It is a pleasingly symmetrical fruit though, its yellow colour cheerful and full of summer promise. Here the star-fruit are arranged in a pyramid. It’s an awesome display and I stop to admire it. The vendor is a woman of about my age, dressed in peasant garb – loose dress in dirty grey-green cloth, cinched waist, turban of cloth on her head, apple-red cheeks glowing in contrast to her drab clothes, twinkling dark eyes. She smiles showing what teeth she has and in the heaving milieu we have a little conversation, she about being from Sichuan, me about being English and a volunteer. ‘ Where are you going?’ she asks. The old question. One of the most common opening lines in China is, 你去哪里? (Where are you going?) ‘Tian’anmen!’ I answer. ‘From here? You’re going the wrong way!’ she says. I laugh. How right she is! ‘Why are you going there from here?’ ‘I’ve got a few days leave from work. I’m just walking around really.’ ‘Tian’anmen is wonderful. You must go there!’ ‘I will, I will!’ I laugh, putting up my hands in mock-defence. ‘Tomorrow! It’s my last day before I go back to work.’ ‘I hope you love it!’ she says, and clearly means it. She turns away then to attend to a paying customer. I smile and leave.

There’s a stall selling lamps and lampshades. It’s an Aladdin’s Cave of tat! Funnel- shaped lampshades with ill-glued brocade as ‘decoration’, wonky lamp-stands that won’t stand for very long, and strip-lighting in luminous plastics. ‘Go on!’ says the young man plying his wares. ‘You know you want to!’ ‘You know I don’t!’ I reply and we both laugh. I’ve found this a lot in China. If you meet people half way, they almost invariably rush to bridge the gap with you. Smiles inspire grins, greetings become banter, kite-flying becomes Confucianism – teaching and learning, experience and models, Chinese-style.

In the second corner of my wanderings, there is a whole cavalcade of crabs, shrimps and prawns. All with legs writhing. Puts me in mind of the Ancient Mariner’s observation: Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs Upon the slimy sea.

Yep, that’s this market for you! The smell is vaguely metallic and I turn up my nose at it. My maxim in China has always been never to eat anything that’s trying to get away from me, or is looking at me. I am reminded of a recent VSO evening meal when elegant Lailai daintily dismembered her food before putting it, still struggling, into her dainty mouth. Silly to be so squeamish, when I love meat so much, but I do find it difficult watching these creatures squirming with life to know they are there to die. Thrashing around in tubs next to them are large fish – probably carp – too big for the water space, clearly gasping for more air. Some have given up the struggle and are floating sideways on the surface. This fish is fresh, but I still wouldn’t want to eat it.

19 Everything about the surroundings is abjectly filthy. It reeks of death in here. I walk on swiftly to the clothes and materials section.

This is staffed entirely by men, which surprises me I don’t know why, and nearly all the customers are women (which doesn’t surprise me in the least). Bartering is going on everywhere, arguments ensue – good tempered arguments by the sound of them – a mao here, a yuan there. Deals struck and measured out. Such dexterity in the men’s fingers as they crimp and pinch and stretch, measure and tighten and cut, straight lines with never a waver. It’s a joy to watch. So I do, for some considerable time, until I’m part of the flow of something and not a boulder in the waters surging around me. One woman, in her early twenties, dressed in the bright rural clothes of a peasant-worker, pushes past me, baby curved into one arm, basket hung from the other. She shouts something to one of the tailors. The man puts down his scissors on the bench in front of him, his brow furrowed, not so much with anger as mystification. He shakes his head at her. She puts down her ragged basket on the clean bales of cloth, and raises her fist at him. He laughs. Not dismissively, but somehow with pleasure, and not a chauvinist one at that. There’s something going on here I’d love to understand. She picks up the basket and slams it down again for emphasis. This wakes the baby who begins to howl his displeasure. The baby looks like a boy. ‘I can’t do anything now, woman!’ I interpret the man saying. He wipes his brow of sweat and tries a smile. It doesn’t work! ‘You bastard!’ she says to him. People stop to watch and listen. This is sport. This is fun. Why do I get the feeling it’s fun for the protagonists as well? Perhaps because there’s no sense of danger I can sense. No sense of oppression. No underlying current of threat or menace. ‘You said YOU’D be looking after your son,’ the wife continues, opening her eyes wide on her hapless husband, who stands there, face seeping down into the ground at his feet. Yet still this tiny smile at his lips. I am intrigued. How might this resolve itself? ‘So you TAKE him!’ she demands, and taking the boy in her two hands, standing him up to face his father, screaming and kicking (the baby that is) she reaches him over the counter.

The father shakes his head and reaches out for his prize, smile growing on his face, eyes riveted on his son.

‘Look at him!’ he says, turning the child to face the inquisitive crowd. ‘Isn’t he just wonderful!’ His wife smiles. He bends his face to his girning son and kisses the top of his head. He then places the baby on his back on the cloths and reaches under the makeshift counter for a large cradle, looped handle over its bowl-shaped bed in reds and yellows and greens and purples. Delicately, as if his son is made of precious silk at a thousand yuan a yard, he gently eases him into his new bed and strokes his head of hair gently a few times.

20 ‘I’ll be back!’ the woman says menacingly and she’s gone. I think I’ve witnessed a kind of love-duet. The bartering banter resumes and I walk on.

Now we come to the spices. Always a favourite. I hardly recognize any of them, except the ginger, the garlic, the kumin and the parsley. Otherwise they’re a botanical mystery, but a fascinating conglomeration of smells and sights and semblances. Ah, there’s something I recognize. A bottle labelled ‘Yellow Snake Oil’ 黄色蛇油! With a real snake at the bottom. The snake looks like an adder. It’s quite long, about a foot. Striations are what I would expect from an adder. It looks unreal, though. The pickling process has stripped it of any sense of its former existence as a living creature. It looks like plastic, but I’m sure it isn’t. Snakes in bottles are common here. They’re expensive, highly-prized Chinese medicine, used for joint pain. I’ve even seen them on display in people’s homes in Guyuan, where a pint of snake oil would set you back a month’s salary. A pint of snake oil with the snake in residence would set you back two months’.

‘How much?’ I say, pointing to a bottle. ‘One thousand yuan!’ the vendor replies without looking at my eyes. ‘Oh, rubbish! Come on. How much?’ ‘For you pretty lady, shall we say nine hundred and fifty?’

I laugh in mock high-dudgeon. This is a bit unfair really, because I have absolutely no intention of buying, but it’s fun and the vendor seems to be enjoying it too. My presence there isn’t doing his business any harm, let’s put it that way.

‘Pretty lady I am not!’ I reply, raised eyebrows. He smiles. ‘O.K.,’ I continue, ‘I’m not buying, I’m interested in how much it would cost me if I were buying!’ The snake charmer laughs. ‘You what? You’re not buying but you want to know how much it costs anyway.’ ‘Yes!’ ‘You foreigners!’

I laugh out loud. This culture, honestly. Awareness-raising of the things we get ourselves so caught up in in the West just doesn’t happen here and sometimes, it’s refreshing. It’s refreshing not to consider what’s PC and what isn’t. I’m a whacky foreigner. He’s perfectly content with that mindset and he does me no harm at all. I can’t always be fighting the good fight.

He raises his eyebrows now. ‘A thousand yuan!’ he says at last, holding my gaze this time, and I laugh and move away.

The smell of the live-stock and the dead-stock is getting to me after all, so I decide to go out into the watery sunshine where at least it’s not shrouded in metallic odours and

21 the stench of decaying corpses and slime.

I exit the building and turn left, away again from my starting point. I’m not sure where this road will lead but I don’t want to get out the map and look. There’s another park up the road, so I hasten my steps and at the end of the cluttered street, it opens out onto a dual-carriageway (inevitably) and across the expanse of tarmac yet another park. There are people exercising, doing tai-qi, playing on swings, walking dogs, rollerblading. I could do with a sit-down and some reorientation to my surroundings. I’ve got plenty of time today. It’s still only late morning. I want some time to soak it in and not just be left with a jumbled mosaic of impressions.

I sit on a rockery rock, placing my knapsack carefully on the concrete tiles arranged around the exhibit. Lots of people are sitting on the rocks, so it’s acceptable. It couldn’t be done in Kew Gardens, but that’s another world to this. The sun’s high in the sky now.

I drink some water and look around. Mothers and sons. Grandfathers and grandsons. Where do the daughters play? There’s a mother over there next to some postmodern stone monument, vague of meaning, with her son, about ten years old, cheeky, wearing a bright yellow parka jacket and beige trousers with multiple pockets arranged down their length. He’s posing for his mother’s camera, but he’s doing it with an attitude of disdain. Ah, a Little Emperor. I haven’t seen many of those since I’ve been in Beijing, although they’re supposed to be common: a son doted on by many generations of his family, every whim catered to, growing up to be a malicious tantrum on legs. His mother looks down to adjust the camera, taking her eyes off her son. He uses the time to gesticulate wildly, posing in ridiculously outlandish gestures, and then when she looks up, he immediately smooths his features and limbs into tame guilelessness. She smiles at him. He smiles innocently, the little monster! She fiddles with the instrument again. He goes wild. This time I laugh. It’s very funny. He catches my eye and grins back. Perhaps not a simple Little Emperor after all. His mother catches my guffaw – who wouldn’t? I’m not known for the delicacy of my laugh. I hastily look down and find something in my knapsack. When I look up again, the boy’s grinning wildly at me, and I realize we’ve become co-conspirators. This isn’t the right way to behave. I’m setting a terrible example to the child. Suddenly the mother’s approaching me. Oh, no! I immediately find some words of contrition in Chinese to say to her. ‘Er, your son’s very amusing!’ Wow, very impressive.

‘Can you take a picture of us together?’ she says, in English, impeccable English, and hands me her camera. She stands nearly as tall as me, her long, glossy black hair plaited in bunchy braids one each side of her face. It’s a young style. She looks no more than 18, but her son’s at least ten. She smiles at me, bright teeth, perfectly straight, a testament to an excellent onthodontist. She’s clearly from a rich family. Her clothes are silk and fine wools, subtle in colour, gleaming with newness and crisp lines. Her jumper is probably cashmere, and her slacks are linen and silk.

22 ‘Of course!’ I say, getting up. ‘Where do you want to stand?’

‘What about in front of this lovely statue?’ asks the boy, his tone conveying clearly he thinks the statue is awful and knows I do too. He looks at me with an expression of contrived innocence, which doesn’t fool me for a moment. He’s gorgeous this lad. He oozes with a quality I find so attractive in maleness. It’s a humour, a charm, a way of captivating an audience. Puts me in mind of three men I once met in a café in Stroud. Three workers came in and sat down heavily, dominating the tiny interior with their energy. I was sitting at a table alone on my ‘bench’ and these three large men came and sat opposite on theirs, squeezed together like packaged bread. ‘I’m Martin,’ announced the first, reaching his hand to shake over the table between us. ‘This is Greg, and this is William!’ ‘Hello,’ I replied, smiling, shaking their hands in turn. ‘I’m a piano-handler,’ Martin added. ‘Yeah, I’m the piano handler,’ ‘I find the needy families…’ said Greg. ‘And I plumb the pianos in!’ finished William.

This little Chinese lad is like that. Riding on the crest of his own confidence and joie- de-vivre, entertaining because he knows he can. ‘What’s your name, you little monkey?’ I ask him. ‘Mum, did you hear that? She called me a monkey!’ ‘ More like a gorilla!’ the mother mutters. He looks darkly at her and pretends to frown. ‘Li Guofang!’ he eventually replies, after having looked me over to see whether he can squeeze some more humour out of the situation. He can’t, so he turns his attention to the camera, posing sensibly this time.

The two use a flower bed as a backdrop. I am just about to press the key, when Guofang suddenly contorts his face into a mask of horror. ‘Guofang!’ his mother exclaims. ‘Don’t be a naughty boy.’ ‘He can’t help it!’ I say in Chinese. ‘He likes the reactions he gets. Isn’t that right?’ ‘But you like me!’ he says confidently. ‘Mm!’ I say, unable to repress a smile. ‘Stand still, you little horror!’ The mother grins. ‘Do as the lady says!’ she whispers to him. ‘Right!’ he says, ramrod straight, serious face, arms by his side. No nonsense. He looks like a statue, ill-carved by an incompetent. ‘You’re not in the army!’ I call out. ‘First she says stand still, then she says…’ ‘Just do it!’ I tell him with a grin.

He stands relaxed and peers up at his mother, who looks down at him with affectionate warmth. I press the key. It isn’t the picture they’ll be expecting, but it’s a lovely one, nevertheless. I snap another, more conventional, side-by-side, mother’s hand on son’s shoulder. I hand the camera back to the mother and wish them well.

23 ‘You can come with us, can’t she mother?’ says Li Guofang, smiling up at me. ‘I have things to do, thanks, Guofang. Can I say something to you?’ ‘To me?’ the boy asks. ‘Mm. You’re a tonic! I’ve really enjoyed meeting you!’ He grins, such an open grin of delight and innocence. ‘What’s a tonic?’ ‘It’s a medicine for illness. It makes you feel better. It’s a good thing!’ ‘Thank you, beautiful lady! Bye bye!’ he says in English. I laugh. I can just imagine him in his twenties wowing all the women around him with his charm and humour and warmth.

Little toad!

‘Bye bye, you!’ I reply. I nod to the mother, who stands behind the boy and puts her arms around him, holding him back against her legs. He leans back a little, looking very comfortable. I fetch my knapsack and continue on my way.

I decide to take a right turn this time along a busy dual-carriageway, which, luckily, has an avenue of trees on either side, down which I can walk in greater comfort and peace and quiet. The trees are willows and the side-road flickers with sunshine. There is an ornate iron grille between the side-road and some kind of park. Each downward rod is in two distinct parts, like a Chinese finger puzzle relaxed in the middle to reveal the separate strands of metal made invisible above and below by the tautness of the design. It’s an intricate and unusual fence and I stop to admire it, trailing my hand along the bars’ convex centres as I walk towards what looks like yet another park.

The roar of the traffic is distracting and makes it difficult to relax. Another park might be a good place to have an afternoon rest. The flowers in the sculpted gardens next to me are bright and lively – yellow chrysanthemums and sunflowers, red and white roses, white lilies, orange, red and yellow Gerber daisies. I notice the different hues of leaves and remember the American email that began this walk.

There are peonies here too. Thousands of peonies, China’s national bloom, used on posters, backdrops, in classical paintings and as illustrations for poetry depicting young men’s yearning for the Motherland when traveling in distant lands. I try to recall a Tang Dynasty poem about such a situation and turn the corner, suddenly…

Almost colliding with a sphinx. Hugely-looming, in blue and gold and black, a sphinx sits on its grandstand podium surveying all and sundry. The blue and gold and black of its eyes are the most piercing features and I am riveted by them. Here we are in a Chinese park, probably Ritan Park’s neighbour – I forget the name – and we’re confronted with a sphinx and its dog-gods in shiny-ebony with gold-pointed ears. I count six of them. There seems to be no one about, so I wonder what they’re doing here. No notices are mounted for visitors to read from, so there’s no information to

24 solve the riddle of why, in the middle of a very Chinese park, with Chinese flowers and Chinese architecture, there’s suddenly an overwhelmingly Egyptian sphinx and canine attendants guarding the space.

I am content with mystery, however. Behind the enclave where the sphinx sits in splendour is the entrance to a children’s theme park. Through the entrance-gates set back a hundred yards or so from the entrance to the park, there is a fairground with mobile rides, hear tinny carousel music and see families crowding towards exhibitions.

I find a grove of trees set back from entrances and roads, in the middle of trees and fallen leaves, and sit on a flat, smooth rock to do some reading of Deng Xiaoping’s daughter’s book about her father and the Cultural Revolution years. I turn to the index and look up Tian’anmen Square. Seventy-one entries. I turn to 1949, because it was the founding of the People’s Republic. Deng Rong’s language is full of pride and bursting with optimism. She writes of hope and the conquest of values and potential for China to realize its greatness as a sovereign nation. An interesting choice of vocabulary, given Mao’s stance on not becoming another emperor (which in my opinion is exactly what he did become). She makes particular mention of Huabiao, a wooden cross-like structure, which stands at the entrance to Tian’anmen Gate, symbolising the people’s right to complain publicly. I am reminded, however, of the ‘Let Hundred Flowers Bloom’ Movement, that Mao inaugurated, encouraging public criticism of his policies. Of course it was simply a cunning way to bring dissenting voices into the open in order to identify dissenters and deal with them. Here again we are confronted with the paradoxes of Tian’anmen. It still seems to stand in the public imagination with freedom and yet, behind each story brought forward to illustrate real freedoms, are equally valid stories of corruption.

I look around at my surroundings. This is Deng Xiaoping Country, it seems to me, not Mao’s. By that I mean Deng’s Open Door policy has taken root. He seemed to stand for diversity and innovation (as well as holding traditional values about family and state in balance with such new ideas), whereas Mao appeared to denigrate anything that enabled individual flexibility and creativity. However, I don’t want to fall into the

25 simplistic trap of – Deng Plans Good, Mao Plans Bad. Let me be clear. I believe Mao was a monster, but I’m not entirely convinced that Deng was any kind of saint. One defence I bring for that opinion is that only a supreme pragmatist and a desire for personal survival over the lives of others could possibly explain survival of the Cultural Revolution for anyone close to Mao. Nearly all the Chairman’s other colleagues were assassinated or purged, sent away into obscurity indefinitely (which nearly happened to Deng) or discredited. I do see here in these surroundings today, evidence of a new China, one that’s cosmopolitan and valuing differences, open to external influences and thriving economically in many ways. Mao’s China sought the appearance of flourishing, the appearance of creativity, the appearance of social cohesion. The reality wasn’t Mao’s concern. Conformity, terror and anarchy seemed to be his ways of controlling the masses. Deng’s actions were subtler, more far- reaching, perhaps ultimately more dangerous, because his policies took China on its current route of economic development, so rapid and powerful that no one now can either predict their full sociological effects, or control the direction.

The challenge, as I perceive it, sitting there in the golden light of an Autumn afternoon, is to take these economic, sociological and cultural developments and deal with them humanely and not simply as a way to take control of more and more. When control at central level becomes the aim and not the betterment of our human lot, I get worried. I fear it is currently control being sought – in education, commerce, politics and the Arts. I fear the externals of western capitalism eating into the Chinese psyche and making yet another sacrifice to materialism. This, however, would be on a scale the like of which the world has never seen before. I wonder if China can handle it. Mao’s legacy was one, when it came down to it, of utterly ruthless mediocrity. The man didn’t understand foreign policy, for example, evidenced in his many attempts to engage at international level and the rejections offered by other heads of state for his trouble. His instigations of wheat-quotas in dealings with Russian politicians were entirely devoted to gaining political advantage for himself in consolidating power and not to develop the country’s resources and management at all. He once thought nothing of sacrificing hundreds of thousands of lives in giving grain to Russia so desperately needed by his own people. He believed Stalin was likely to look upon him more favourably if he made him a gift of the lot.

He wasn’t a world politician, as has sometimes been asserted. He was a thug with an egotistical mission, a terrorist with a knowledge of other people’s weaknesses and a bulging eye for self-aggrandisement. I believe he was able to do what he did because he was a psychopath who didn’t ever have to consider human needs (other than his own). If other people’s needs, feelings, realities etc. are meaningless and you’re gifted with insight and political know-how, then manipulating others to do what you want may be as easy as moving pawns around a chess-board; they’re not real after all. Mao relied on the human weaknesses all of us have, like greed, self-interest, the need for power over others and so on, and picked his time to exploit these weaknesses. By giving power to the young Red Guard early on in the Cultural Revolution, (in fact in

26 1966 in a ceremony in Tian’anmen Square, attended by millions of school-aged students and radicals) he unleashed across the whole country a huge potential for anarchy and base inhumanity. This left the infrastructure weak in resisting his absolute control and people’s psychologies less robust at resisting the distinctions between right and wrong necessary to do more than stay alive.

I look up from my reading. The Mao years seem far away from my present understanding of being in China, having spent five years away from the locus of power in this vast country, and now a few months in the capital. The Deng years do not seem far away, however. Everywhere I look I can see evidence of Deng’s philosophies of expediency, market economy, heterogeneity and expansion. I also see evidence of his emphasis on bringing back into mainstream Chinese everyday-culture, the Four Olds that Mao tried to smash using the Red Guard as a tool of destruction: Old Customs, Old Ideas, Old Habits and Old Culture. One of the key areas Mao tried to destroy was the grip the family had over individuals’ lives, as family energised the dimensions between the Olds he wanted to be rid of. This turned out to be a massive miscalculation on his part: he had no sense of loyalty to his own parents, sisters, and brothers or even later on his own children and wives. Perhaps this is why he felt he could abolish family as the foundation of Chinese society and put himself there instead.

His complete disregard for his own children’s welfare is widely documented. Mao often went for years without seeing his children, and missing opportunities to visit them or have them visit him that geographical location or occupation alone can’t explain. Similarly he seemed to have no desire to further his children’s education, their abilities to lead independent lives, nurture their personalities or anything of the like. His offspring, as well as those of his adoring biographers, as well as those not sympathetic to his life and works, express themselves similarly about his attitude to them being more hands-off than can be explained by circumstances alone. I personally think Mao didn’t give a damn about them because they weren’t him! Simple.

China’s preoccupation with family reaches back into the dawn of time and Mao’s attempts to destroy the hold the family had over Chinese people wasn’t sufficient to unravel such a mystical relationship. All around me today is evidence of his failure and Deng’s greater capacity to understand what people need and want. All my wanderings in China, whether in these past few days or years, have indicated the power family has as an idea, a value and a lived experience for people in China. Add to this China’s sense of family as symbolising the harmony necessary for a functional society – patriarchal as it might be with lines of power going from grandfather to father to son – and you have a powerful social glue. Perhaps I arrive a little closer to a resolution between the apparent paradox of the importance of family intimacy in a collectivist culture like China as well as a little more insight into the madness of the Cultural Revolution; this movement is so much now a part of the Chinese psyche, and an integral part of what is being daily witnessed in Tian’anmen Square.

27 Enough reading for now. It’s growing a little chilly and I’m more tired than I expected, so although it’s not yet late afternoon, I want to stop for today and return home for a hot-cooked meal.

22nd October 2006. Pavillioned in Splendour So, today it’s off to Tian’anmen come what may. Today’s walk is the last of the three and I’m very conscious of it as I set off. After a refreshing night’s sleep I’m keen to experience the route to Tian’anmen in all its paradoxical glories. Probably the best route is down Dongdaqiaolu（东大桥路）down to Jianguomen Waidajie（建国门外 大街）and turn right, straight past Wangfujing (王府井), the richest shopping-mall in Beijing, home to huge bookstores, McDonalds, KYC, Elizabeth Arden, Italian shoe- shops and a Gothic church. But I walk the first part of this way everyday: VSO’s office is on Jianguomen Waidaijie; I can go in that direction, then, but along different streets. There are lots of backstreets I haven’t explored on that route yet, so I’ll do that.

It’s sunny today and I look up at the sun. The colour of the sky, the visibility of distant high-rise blocks, the appearance of trees down veiled avenues – all these can be indicators of pollution on any given day. Today the trees are clearly delineated, the sky is blue, and the glassy buildings stand in sharp relief against an urban landscape. Swinging my knapsack over my shoulder I set off, past the uniformed guards who almost look asleep on their feet. They always greet me cheerily (when they’re not standing with their eyes closed, swaying with tiredness that is) and I look forward to our daily exchange of smiles.

So, Tian’anmen it is, then. I read a lot of the Deng Rong book last night and found myself in tears at a lot of it. All the hopes of the founding of the People’s Republic. All the conquests over tyranny. And I don’t doubt there were tyrannies that the Guomingdong perpetrated against the Communists. I don’t doubt there was valour in those early days that took hundreds of men over thousands of miles on the Long March towards the citadels of freedom and social betterment. I don’t doubt the reorientation of values committed against non-conformists in those early days: what was right was what those claiming power said was right. In such a world of upheaval and the overthrow of everything tried and tested, I don’t doubt then the agony, the slow doubts, the numbing despair, and the shattering of hope of generations of families across the country. I don’t doubt that millions died never knowing why they had suffered so much and that thought haunts me. To die in a noble cause in one thing (to live for a humble one strikes me as better, but beggars can’t be choosers), but to die without discernible purpose, without the caveat that it’s for one’s country, or one’s family, or one’s values: that reality I find very painful to contemplate. Time and time again, in the Cultural Revolution novels I’ve read, people’s growing mystification with what’s happening, their growing inability to rationalize events with inherent values and then later the apathy that comes from knowing they were damned if they

28 did, damned if they didn’t, and never knowing when the axe was going to fall: what was it all about? What was it all for? In a sense, in a world gone mad, where nothing is predictable except pain, I am beginning to understand how difficult it would be to be able to maintain the values one refines in safer times? I begin to see what Bernard Shaw meant in ‘Pygmalion’ when he had Eliza’s father scoff at the idea of middle- class values, because he didn’t have the luxury to develop them: as a working-man he had to make a living. In the Cultural Revolution people had to make the decision daily whether to live or die, whether to let one’s loved ones live or die. What does that do to integrity, I wonder?

Shaking my head free of these sad thoughts, I walk along a side-street and see cyclists pedaling huge carts along, taxis vying with them for road-space, and stop, riveted by sudden highrises on the skyline. This is one I’ll need to find on the internet when I get home this evening.

The gold of the tower is reminiscent of domes of mosques I’ve seen in Guyuan. I like this juxtaposition of old and new, traditional and modern, functional and decorative. That building is the best of postmodern to my mind, not like these ones:

which look like a pile of stickle-bricks of the kind I played with in my childhood. This is the view facing me as I turn the corner into Daqiao Nanlu. It isn’t that they’re ugly, so much that they don’t convince me they’re good for people! Buildings for living in, for working in, to my mind need to have discernible windows, clear and clean exteriors, firm and comfortable promises of interiors on a human scale. These look

29 angular, hard, cold and merely functional. These look like a child’s plans for a building landscape. They don’t satisfy me.

Nor does what I see around the next corner. A woman, old and frail, lies on the ground next to a rubbish bin. Every capital city has its disposable people - London, for example. A trip to the Embankments after lights out will reveal a whole subculture. The dilapidated. The derelict. The dispossessed. The deserted.

Her rags are so filthy and matted, at first I can’t tell which is her head, which her legs and feet. She’s coiled around the rubbish bin as if it gives her anchorage. It’s probably a ready source of food! I approach her, not sure what I can do, but to see a human being coiled in a public thoroughfare in this way is obscene. And in this culture, which reveres old age it is sacrilegious. As I get nearer I make out her feet sticking out of the pile of cloths at one end, shoes full of holes, grubby and dilapidated. The woman’s face is grimy with lines. She could be younger than I initially thought. She’s perhaps late middle-age. Her eyes are closed, but she gathers the covers closer to her so she’s not asleep. I want to do something. A drink perhaps. Something hot to eat. A businessman (by the look of his western grey suit and hasty steps) nearly trips over her then passes on without so much as a look at the human being he’s inadvertently kicked. She coils tighter around her anchor. I feel sick. There’s a street vendor just up the road selling drinks and snacks (there’s one on every street corner) so I purchase some milk and a straw and go back and deliver it to the shapeless figure. I crouch down near her body. She opens her eyes and snatches the offering out of my hand, when she realizes it’s food, and tucks it under the covers – for later, presumably. Her reactions are lightning sharp. Probably have to be. There’s no life in her eyes. No flicker of recognition that my actions are connected to the milk she now has in her possession. It’s as if society has stamped her through and through like a stick of rock with the words: ‘Human Reject’. I wonder what her family thinks. Where are they? What do they do? Do they know what condition she’s in? Could they help even if they did? Why is she abandoned like this? I’ve read in books on twentieth-century Chinese history that are full of anecdotes about how during famines and floods, through tempests of government, through devastation of property and ways of life, people didn’t abandon each other. Is it affluence, then, that can divest people of their humanity?

The sun is coming out strongly now.

Although times are changing, Beijing is still the city of bicycles, as I find to my cost when I try to cross the road. A man careens into me. He would, given he’s not looking where he’s going. He’s singing something at the top of his voice. Beijing Opera probably, which is enough to addle anyone’s brain! ‘Laowai!’ he calls out. ‘Idiot!’ I reply. We grin at each other. A moment of perfect accord! I weave my way between the

30 other bicycles and eventually come to the other side of the road. It’s choc-a-bloc with shop-fronts 我爱我家 – ‘I Love My Home’ estate agents most prominent of the lot with its yellow-pages garishness displayed in a plastic glare. I look in the window. All the ‘homes’ offered are apartment-block flats at hundreds of thousands of yuan. They look like homes in bomb-sites most of them. No exaggeration. Ah well, ‘I Love My Home’ has outlets all across Beijing, so it must be doing good business.

I find myself walking behind someone talking to himself. This grey-haired gentleman, clearly not Chinese, is attracting some attention from Beijingers, who give him a wide berth. In passing I catch the eye of a young Chinese man, who’s just been looking at the mutterer. ‘Laowai!’ I whisper to him, raising my eyebrows. The young man guffaws with the joke. Not PC, I know, but fun!

I’m approaching an intersection now, one of the largest in Beijing, where seven roads converge. It’s a melee of noise, human confusion and mechanical order. Traffic lights are a football pitch away from each other and never quite give you enough time to walk from end to end. If you’re a little old lady, you’d be killed in the rush, and would probably regret not having been born on the other side.

In Beijing people are being tirelessly trained for the Beijing Olympics. There are classes in crossing the road, queuing and traveling on the underground. No kidding. The classes are clearly not going very well in this suburb. People are obviously not paying attention to the traffic lights, synchronized perfectly to render a ‘safe’ time to cross. Standing guard at most junctions are council officials, hired to train the public to observe difficult rules such as ‘red means stop’. In actual fact during the Cultural Revolution some bright spark suggested red should mean go – in the light of such slogans as, ‘The East is Red’, ‘The Future Is Red!’ and so on. This caused havoc on the roads for a while, as you can imagine, as most people didn’t know the new rule. People all over the city were being cycled to death until a stop was put to it and green became again the symbol for go.

Here at this junction, people are straining at the bit. This is hardly surprising as it can take ten minutes for the lights to change at rush hour and about five at this time. The guards aren’t watching, so people edge forward, go stealthily to the next marker in the road, pushing, always pushing the limits. Suddenly a guard notices and squeals on his whistle. No one takes any notice, which surprises me in such a regimented culture as China. Not taking their attitude as opposition of any kind, he rushes up to the ringleaders – those in front will do – and physically jerks a couple of them back towards the line. No one objects to that either, it seems, and the others amble back. There’s time to read ‘War and Peace’ in the interval between this street-entertainment and when we’re allowed to walk, but at last the lights do change and we’re off, picking our way through heavily-laden men and women, packs on backs, and children using this time, most inopportunely I think, to play blind man’s buff - no kidding! There they are in the middle of the road, arms stretched out in front, eyes tight closed,

31 twirling round and round trying to see who they can catch! Their deaths, I would imagine. It’s weird to say the least. A couple of parents persuade them of the error of their ways by smacking them roundly across the head. They get the message quickly and squawk their disagreement at such treatment – as well they might. But it does make me wonder about this whole concept of ‘commonsense’ that I used to be so hot on before I came here, thinking that humanity dipped into a common pool of know- how, imbibing procedural logics like mother’s milk.

Not so. These kids just aren’t getting it. Playing blind man’s buff in the middle of the superhighway isn’t some sort of anarchic pre-adolescent protest against unfair power- relations with parents. This isn’t some young teens full of angst and ennui suffering from postmodern blues and engaging in a form of Russian roulette. This is kids wanting to play blind man’s buff. Full stop! I stare at them and shake my head, as a cyclist almost runs me down: the traffic lights have changed and I didn’t notice. Whoops!

I walk past hutongs and skyscrapers, poor and rich, old and young. The contrasts are almost routine now. And then there’s Zhang Huilin, who rushes up to me, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and starts walking along with me. He’s late teens, dressed in jeans and denim jacket, a stylish fringe, slightly bleached, giving him a gamine look. ‘My name’s Zhang Huilin. Where are you from? Are you English? Can I speak to you? How old are you?’

I stopped where I was on the pavement, people surging around us. ‘Which question do you want me to answer first?’ He had the grace to blush. ‘ Whichever you like. I’m at Beijing International Tourism School. Can I talk to you?’ ‘O.K., what about?’ Silence. ‘You say!’

This reminds me of stories of the early days of Deng’s Open Door Policy as Chinese students first began to make contact with outsiders. Jung Chang in her ‘Wild Swans’ writes eloquently of her early attempts in 1979 to make contact with foreigners, whilst obeying all the regulations given by the university to prevent any unauthorized communications. They were warned as young women never to make eye-contact with the foreign men, just in case they were ‘misunderstood’; or to be particularly careful with English-speaking Black people, ‘Because as we all know, Black people haven’t yet learned how to control their baser emotions’.

Zhang Huilin seems to be aiming all his questions at me; stored up under pressure they bombard me and I feel assaulted. ‘First thing I’ll say, Zhang Huilin. Don’t ask more than one question at a time. We’re

32 people, you know, not English-speaking machines. The first question, perhaps you should ask is, ‘Do you speak English?’ Not every foreigner you see in Beijing is from an English-speaking country, you know!’

Zhang Huilin takes out a notebook and starts to write.

I know this response is exactly what he needs and wants, even though it may sound a little bossy. He’s probably been sent out by his tutors on the tourism course to get talking to real foreigners and speak real English. Poor pup! He probably has to fill in a grid, detailing topics, length of conversation etc. This won’t be for the security reasons it would have been in the past, but it will have something to do with the idea that anything of value can be measured and therefore must be.

‘What’s next?’ he asks, all gangly limbs and enthusiasm. I look around for a bench, and see one on a strip of green land beyond the pavements where we can sit for a while. ‘All right, let’s sit over there!’ I suggest. He grins with utter delight at the idea of having a foreigner all to himself for however long. He almost bounces to the bench, reminding me of Tigger. ‘Here?’ he asks, waiting for me to sit first. ‘There!’ I agree with a laugh as I sit. ‘ What’s the next question I should ask?’ he asks, looking at me as if I might disappear if he doesn’t hold onto me with his eyes. ‘If the person is English-speaking, then ask them if they mind talking to you?’ ‘What if the person doesn’t want to?’ ‘Say ‘thank you very much’, and then leave them alone.’ ‘I see, I see!’ he says, writing it all down. ‘Then what?’

‘Zhang Huilin. Language isn’t just about asking questions, and getting answers. It’s not just about words. It’s about communication.’ ‘Yes, but I have to pass an examination soon, and so I must learn as much as I can. What next?’ I shake my head.

Zhang Huilin sighs. ‘I’m hopeless at this!’ he puts his notepad down on his lap. ‘I can’t do it. Every day for hours I stand outside and ask people but they are busy and have no time for me. My English is not good. Everyone else in my class has spoken to many foreigners, but I’ve spoken to a few. I think I am bad student.’

‘ No, you’re not, Zhang Huilin, but you have to give people a chance. Don’t ask them too many questions all at once. So, let’s see how you can improve your method!’

His face lights up again. I’ve met so many students like Zhang Huilin, desperate for a chance to be noticed as an individual in class, when the usual experience for students

33 in China – even in Beijing Universities – is being in a sea of a hundred others. Individual attention from a teacher is therefore at a premium. Time really is the most precious thing you can give an individual. The curriculum has come a long way in China, in my opinion, but students are still expected to do a lot of rote-learning, to fulfil tasks that may have absolutely no practical outcome at all, and measure the value of something by wholly inadequate standards.

‘First thing to remember, Zhang Huilin. Foreigners are people too!’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Well, if you talk to people as if they are simply English machines on legs, it’s very humiliating.’ ‘Hu-mil-i-ating,’ he repeats. ‘What does ‘hu-mil-i-ating’ mean?’ ‘It makes people feel small! If you want to talk to people, you have to remember they are people. They are not there to give you what you need. They are people going about their everyday tasks.’ ‘Everyday tasks,’ he echoes. He’s been writing this down. ‘Put that down!’ I order him, pushing his notebook down to his lap. ‘Are you a teacher?’ he asks, almost suspiciously. ‘Yes!’ I laugh. ‘How can you tell?’ He just looks at me and grins. ‘So, tell me a little about yourself,’ I suggest. ‘Me?’

This is clearly not the kind of conversation he’s expecting, but I want to confound what I suspect is a rigid brief in which he has been given no room for personality, only for grammar and vocabulary.

‘ I’m nineteen. My name is Zhang Huilin. I am attending Beijing International Tourism School. I am not good student.’ ‘Not a good student!’ I interject. ‘Not a good student!’ he repeats and writes it down. I am tempted to confiscate the book, and he’d let me because I’m a teacher, but he needs it as an anchor. ‘And what about your family? Tell me something about them.’

He does, then, in some detail. His pride in his father as a seasoned teacher, his mother too, and his grandparents, all still flourishing and living in Beijing, make up the content of his ‘talk’, but his manner relaxes and he glows with pleasure at talking about something he’s so fluent in. ‘And you?’ he asks, raising his eyebrows, pen at the ready. ‘I’m fifty one, English – well, British actually. I have a brother and sister. My father was a scientist and my mother a housewife. My father died in 2000.’ ‘ I am sorry to hear that!’ Zhang Hulin interjects. ‘How long have you been in China?’ ‘Five years. I came in August 2001.’

34 ‘So your Chinese must be great!’ I laugh. He doesn’t get the joke and looks at me uncertainly. ‘I lived in Ningxia for five years,’ I explain. ‘Oh, they don’t speak standard Mandarin there, I know. You are a teacher?’ ‘ Were you a teacher?’ I correct him and he writes it down. ‘Yes. I taught oral English, Literature, and Teaching Methodology.’ ‘That sounds interesting!’ he looks at me steadily.

I smile at him. He’s gorgeous. All youthful verve and delight. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: China really has produced some lovely young people, so keen to learn, so enthusiastic about opportunities, so hardworking.

We chat a little longer, and then I realize I want to go. I think he’s gained everything he can from this particular encounter and I have another road to travel. I make some such comment to him. He looks disappointed, but not too much. I stand up. So does he.

‘Where are you going?’ he asks me. ‘To Tian’anmen!’ I reply. His face lights up in approval. ‘Tian’anmen is a great place. Do you know it before?’ I overlook the grammar and tell him that in these three days I’m walking around Beijing with Tian’anmen as my goal. ‘That sounds like a good plan to me!’ he twinkles.

We leave it there. I shake his hand, which he seems inordinately pleased about, and send my best wishes to his family, and turn to go. A few moments later, I turn back and it’s to see him going up to another ‘laowai’, this time with a gentler approach than he first used with me. The man is slowing down. He’s stopping. He’s smiling. He’s going to talk to Zhang Huilin. I feel very pleased.

I emerge at the end of this road into a long avenue, which, if I go down to the end, will bring me out near Wangfujing and on a straight course to Tian’anmen. I think it’s time now. I feel the experiences and learning of the last two days, of the last few years, echoing in my head as I wander past glass monuments to progress alongside simple one-room stores and advertising billboards in garish colours and extravagant claims. Cyclists zoom past, vendors shout their wares into the wind, and I stand now in front of a large, convex entrance to what looks like an international hotel, but is, in fact, a municipal building with a banner proclaiming ‘10th International Women’s Conference, Beijing!’ in fat, white letters on a poppy-red background spanning the front-entrance doorway. A mother stands carrying her son in front of the tall, black iron grille to keep intruders out. She looks poor. Her child is dirty and sits listlessly in her arms. Everywhere seems imbued with irony. This international women’s conference isn’t for her or me. I wonder what they’re doing inside.

35 Down to the end of the busy junction and turn right. We’re on the home-strait now. This is Jianguomen Waidajie, a familiar street, a little further down than I usually reach on my way to work. Straight along here, the route pavillioned in splendour, is Tian’anmen. The Gate of Heavenly Peace.

There are crowds of tourists now, Japanese with the ubiquitous cameras, Germans, Italians and French, all vying for pavement space. Students rush up to us hollering their desire to speak English. Street-vendors selling souvenirs, flags, maps ply their wares very much ‘in your face’. Sometimes, it’s like an obstacle course when people want to sell you something. Show the slightest interest and you’re a goner. Taking no for an answer is not a premium skill either.

‘No!’ I explain, waving away intruders with my hand. ‘Buy, lady. Map. Good map!’ ‘Got one!’ I say in Chinese. ‘This better map!’ She almost flaps it in my face. ‘No!’ Wave of the hand. Sometimes I don’t feel like smiling when ‘assaulted’ in this fashion. I am glad, though, I don’t have to make my money that way.

I run the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune-seekers and see a junction emerging ahead. The road widens into three lanes each side. The middle of the road is embellished with a large statue of a soldier standing on a massive plinth, gun raised above his head in a triumphal gesture, his stance showing that he’s forging ahead. We’re coming into Tian’anmen territory. This is the China of triumph and power, the brute force of war not the languor of peace. This is a patriarchal culture, there’s no getting away from it. Most of the icons here are male, lauding stereotypically male values like conquest, domination, expansion and so on. I remember Jack commenting on the sense he had of Tian’anmen buildings constituting an assertion of power.

But God, it is beautiful. The wide, clean streets, the bright sunshine making my heart feel hope and pleasure in my surroundings. I wait at the junction for the traffic-lights to turn green. People are queuing in such an orderly fashion here. Obviously, the nearer to Tian’anmen we come, the better the pedestrian-skills!

The queue is a dozen long and several deep. At a given signal from the guard, which slightly pre-empts the green light, we forge as one into the road then reach the other side, expanding out a little and drifting into our own destinations. I walk past underground stations, Tian’anmen East and then West, and finally, on my left is the Great Hall of the People:

36 Great Hall of the People

I could walk over to it now and relive that memorable evening at the end of September 2004, when, after receiving China’s State Friendship Award from Wen Jiabao, we all ate together in the cavernous banqueting hall. It’s tempting in some ways, but I walk past it rather than through it. I want to walk from one end to the other.

I stop to read a notice-board. It tells the history of Tian’anmen from the fifteenth century to the present day. It doesn’t mention 1989 (which doesn’t surprise me), but I find myself preoccupied by that omission. It’s what this journey’s been about for me. This country that I love, that I’ve adopted, has done terrible things in the name of social harmony. On 4th June, 1989, an amazing year in world history – seeing the coming down of the Wall between East and West Germany, and the resounding calls for freedom throughout the world – students rushed into Tian’anmen to protest the lack of democratic progress in Deng’s brave new world. The army was waiting. How many died that night, and for the next two days and two nights, no one is sure (there are conflicting reports seemingly dependent on the nationality of the reporters) but protests were stilled. It was orchestrated civil war, for which people had had plenty of practice in the Cultural Revolution. People now saw the price of their demands displayed graphically in blood. There are stories that it took weeks to clean the flagstones of the blood. There is a picture I’ve seen in the west of the 1989 ‘incident’ - so famous it’s not available in China – of a young man standing, arms outstretched – in front of a tank – against the backdrop of Tian’anmen. I can see the lad in front of me now, gliding like a ghost between the tourists and the pilgrims from rural China. He looks to right and left, identifies the tank, and holding head erect and arms to his side, he marches up to it, holds out his arms and steps into myth…

Protest died after that night in Tian’anmen. It was Deng who ordered the tanks in. It was Deng who saw the necessity of hard-line resistance: he knew that such protests would capture the world’s imagination, but he also must have known that such impulses to freedom would destroy the power-base he was now consolidating in China. This, according to Deng, was not the time for a freedom movement: it was too soon. So, it was Deng who opened up China’s doors to the world, at the same time

37 locking the doors to people’s individual rights to self-determination yet again. He pushed forward the trend towards individual affluence, saying that some people had to become rich before everyone could become rich. It was a process of prosperity. It would come in stages.

Increased affluence amongst young people has made them, so I hear, less likely to revolt. And revolt against what, anyway? The younger generation’s parents and grandparents were all victims of the Cultural Revolution, of famine, of betrayals, of internecine warfare. They knew what it was to go without: without education; without food; without human rights. Individual human rights may not amount to a hill of beans in a country of the size of China that has recently suffered so much, or lost, it is estimated, over 180 million people in the Mao years. It might be conceivable that the greater good is to suppress individual human rights in the bid for collective prosperity and security. It might be that. I can’t sanction it as a Westerner, seeped in Western liberalism and humanism, but I think I’m beginning to understand how such logic could have carried a nation like China through the emergence into its current world visibility. Along with this trend would come patriotism on a huge scale (which is certainly true – I’ve never met anyone here who isn’t proud to be Chinese); as well as a sense of dedication to education as a way of harnessing knowledge, prestige, economic growth and internationalism. The securing of the 2008 Olympic Games is key to all the above. This is so that China can say: ‘Look how far we’ve come, World! We’ve done well! We’re proud of our achievements! We can compete with you and we can do it all with Chinese characteristics. We are a force to be reckoned with. We are Chinese and proud of it!’

Why does that stir me so much? Why, when I’m writing about feelings that have the capacity to bring the greatest disaster to human beings (because jingoism can be a particularly insidious force, stirring up pettiness and self interest in the guise of patriotism) do I feel tears pricking my eyes with a kind of sad joy?

I think the nearest I can come to an answer, lies in the positive aspects inherent in every Chinese paradox as I, an outsider, perceive them. Jingoism is unpleasant, but valiant patriotism can be beautiful. I watch the guards outside buildings everywhere with their uniforms, their erect stance, fresh-faced youth protecting something greater than themselves as individuals, and I see the children behind the mask, the innocence, the potential. They are safeguarding their Motherland. I know they believe that. I don’t have to ask them. I asked students time and time again in Guyuan how they felt about China and the answer was always the same: Of course I love my country! with a tone suggesting the question was weird. What other answer would be possible? That these feelings of sincere fervour for the Motherland can and are sometimes cynically exploited by politicians and financiers doesn’t to my mind, lessen the value of the feelings themselves. Innocence moves me. A lack of sophistication moves me. Wherever I look I see a lack of sophistication as well as bombast and self- aggrandisement. Zhang Huilin’s awkward approaches to foreigners, are, on the one

38 hand annoying. On the other hand, they are reminiscent of a child’s actions, a child’s insight, a child’s two-dimensional way of seeing the world. Are we automatically better for being sophisticated? Isn’t it the quality of sophistication that’s important, the way in which this sophistication reveals itself that matters? The Ancient Mariner might agree. I remember an essay by a student in my first sixth form English group in 1978, who wrote: The Ancient Mariner must move from ignorant sophistication to innocent wisdom. It’s the potential for innocent wisdom that I see in China’s people time and time again, and that’s what moves me.

The question I suppose I’ve been asking myself for some years now is: how can I love a country so much that is riven with paradoxes from top to bottom, from east to west, from urban to rural, from ancient to modern, from rich to poor? And the answer has something to do with the way in which innocence, or at least the potential for it, is a melding factor everywhere. I’m not naïve enough to think that China is some Shangri- la. Ask any Tibetan their opinion on that score. Of course not! But there is an innocence here. There is something un-spoilt and beautiful about this country and its peoples. By making this pilgrimage – and I realize suddenly it is a pilgrimage – I am coming closer to the heart of China and to my own heart’s truths.

The most famous Tian’anmen building is on my right now. The Chinese flag stands to flickering attention in the breeze. People mill around, some in tourist-groups, leaders standing around with Chinese flags and their organisation’s insignia to ensure people don’t get lost.

Tian’anmen Square.

I stop to look. There are no places to sit here. This isn’t a place to stop and stare, but to group, re-group and make plans where to visit first.

I realize I don’t want to go into the buildings and wander round like a tourist. I’ve been there, done that! Instead I want to walk right the way through this area of Beijing, and finish up in Qianmen, 前门 (Front Gate) which I always have liked the best, because of its simple grandeur. It stands at one end of a central compound between a dual-carriage-way (doesn’t everywhere?), and isn’t easy to reach, as grilles have been erected between the monument-ground and the walkways. The only way to reach this building is to go through an underground labyrinth, peopled with novelty

39 vendors and a lot of old tat masquerading as valuable souvenirs.

Qianmen

I walk side by side with American tourists, European tourists, Japanese tourists, all with cameras at the ready. Chinese pilgrims are here in droves. And they are pilgrims. We are pilgrims together. This isn’t fantasy. It’s not romantic whimsy. I haven’t seen a single Chinese tourist on Tian’anmen soil who doesn’t have a glow about them. Eyes bright, taking in all the details. I sit on a wall, realizing I might be moved on, but I want to watch. Taking into account all the dark whisperings of this place’s historical and spiritual past, I cannot feel any negativity because it seems to be eliciting some very positive feelings.

But isn’t the way we are able to live our lives well have something to do with the choices we make from what it is we notice and act on?

I watch a little boy with his parents, holding on to their hands, straining them to hurry up: he wants to see more. He pulls them on. I see them stop a little ahead at a gate in the wall. It’s brick red metal, this door, in the shape of a battle-shield. There’s a crest on it with characters I can’t read, in burnished gold as large as a warrior’s head. The boy stops, drops his parents’ hands and walks forward a little. He stands then, awestruck. ‘Look, Dad! Look Mum!’ he exclaims urgently. ‘Look!’

I get up from the wall as I want to move in closer and watch. The parents smile down at their son, proud of him, proud of the moment.

Standing in the closed doorway stands a guard, whose uniform looks more like a policeman’s than a civilian guard’s. It is. This is the entrance to a Beijing Police Unit. There is a middle-aged man holding a red poster. He’s protesting about something. He proffers the large poster over to the police-officer, who receives it politely. ‘I want you to take this to your leader!’ I hear him say.

I expect trouble. I expect the police officer to call for back-up through his walkie- talkie, but he doesn’t. Instead he smiles politely at the man and rolls up the poster. The

40 protester continues to protest. His tone is antagonistic and flustered. The police-officer listens carefully.

I wonder what’s going on here. Is this staged? Is it here for the benefit of the onlookers to see democracy in action? If I came back in a few hours, would I see the same scene enacted again? I doubt it somehow. The man looks genuinely poor. His teeth are brown. His clothes are shabby. He seems very nervous. There’s nothing glib about this.

The little boy and his parents seem fairly oblivious of what’s going on, and the boy, awed to the gills, leads his parents away to the next site of wonder.

If what I am seeing is what I think it is, then I’m cheered by it. I’d need to be much more fluent in Chinese, however, know much better how to interpret body-language, context and time. I see a protest. I see the protester being treated with respect. I see authority not abusing its authority. It’s a hopeful sign. I’m glad I saw this.

I am cheered by it, but I suddenly realize I am tired. I walk for another twenty minutes down towards Qianmen. It’s busy and crowded and noisy. There are people standing around and looking. There are tourists, Chinese and international. There are souvenir- vendors, shoppers, people queuing for buses. Children sprint along ahead. One stops and looks up at the heavy building that is Qianmen. In a gesture reminiscent of a grandfather and not a child, he puts his hands behind his back and leans back to take a better look. He stands still for a longer time that I would have expected from such a young observer.

He then turns to look for his parents in the crowd, who reach him one on each side, taking a hand each. ‘It’s big, isn’t it?’ he says, grinning. They all smile and look up.

I swallow a lump in my throat at the simplicity of the scene and turn to go home. There are trees on both sides of the dual-carriage way to the Underground Station. The wind is rising now: it’s the season for it in Beijing, apparently.

Leaves swirl around us as we walk on. They are turning into all shades of yellow, green, red and brown now so it really is Autumn here too. I must let my friend in America know..

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring will be To arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.

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