Barbarian Lost (2 page)

Later that day, as Justin and I hobbled from the car to some tourist site we were visiting, my father pulled us aside and said, “Boys, you must not forget, the Chinese have often perceived westerners as barbarians. Think carefully about those occasions when you might be giving them good reason to do so.”

In the years that followed, I became a traveller myself. I journeyed to war zones and uncharted hinterlands. China remained on the horizon, a distant figure whose call I ignored. I heard about the profound metamorphosis it was undergoing but felt I was not yet ready for it. I was ever the barbarian whose travel skills were no match for the Middle Kingdom. The journey would have to wait.

I focused instead on places remote and misunderstood, regions into which I could disappear. Searching for singularities, I journeyed to Yekepa, Liberia; Tessalit, Mali; Maroantsetra, Madagascar; Ngalimila, Tanzania; and Maprik, Papua New Guinea. I took to
places where few others cared to go, tried to grow wise to some small places of big drama, where strange things happened on the margins. Meanwhile, China was still distant, wrapped in mystery and doubt, immense, troubled, stiff and austere. Still it called.

In 1998, a news editor asked if I'd consider a full-time job at his network's Beijing office. The idea was truly tempting: to become an early witness of the new China, to learn its language and make my name in a place that mattered. But I would not walk through that gate either. How quickly turns the wheel. Age had finally caught up to my father, and his health was deteriorating fast. No other mission could matter. I would stay close to him, be there for him as he had been for me, see him off on his final journey and return perhaps some of the powerful devotion he had shown us.

In 2005, a Shanghai publisher released a Chinese translation of my late father and Jacques Hébert's book on China and invited Jacques and me to the launch in Shanghai. So, with that funny little book in hand, I was finally back in China.

I barely recognized the place from when I was there in 1990. I decided that this short trip to China would be the first of many over the coming years. I resolved to devote myself to understanding China.

The country's lightning-fast ascent and increasing impact on the world have now become clichés. China is a global superpower. Its appetite for resources and its astounding manufacturing capacity have transformed the planet's economies. China is no longer the mysterious, distant and inaccessible pariah it once was. These days, fortunes are being made in China on a daily basis. The intrepid adventurer has been all but replaced by the mundane business traveller and the pedestrian tourist.

Yet China is still not an easy place to understand. One can meander the country soaking up the sights, as millions now do every year. We walk along the Great Wall, marvel at the Forbidden City and travel down the Yangtze. We fill our lives with things made in China, but still we have a hard time understanding what the place is all about.

China can be frustratingly opaque, a most inwardly directed place. It moves fast and furiously. Hardly stopping for the Chinese, it certainly doesn't stop for foreigners. Although not dangerous, China is still overwhelming.

All foreign lands are puzzles. They reduce the newly arrived traveller to a kind of innocence, a childlike state in which the basics of communication and movement have to be relearnt. In many parts of the world, that alienation is relatively mild; in China, it can be extreme. The sheer size of the place, the frenzy of activity, the deep detachment from Western ways make its puzzles much more difficult to solve, their every clue that much harder to discern.

Language is another hurdle. If I was going to question China and its people deeply, I would need a translator. In the summer of 2006, I contacted an old classmate, Deryk, who had been living in China for years, and asked him to interview a short list of candidates that I had put together through contacts. I told him to look for good spoken English, an outgoing personality, a developed intellect and a sense of humour.

After several interviews, he suggested a young woman who used the English name Vivien. She had studied humanities at China's finest university. She had done some rough travel in remote regions of China and had worked as a translator in several foreign offices. Deryk also said that she had a sense of humour
and was above crass commercial interests. After exchanging brief emails with her, my instincts told me that she had some understanding of the Western mind—a must if she was going to deal with the likes of me.

I feared my own disposition. I still felt myself something of a barbarian, a boisterous and judgmental type, the boy who injured himself by moving too fast and lightly through the sacred landscape, never noticing the stone stairs upon which he jumped. Blind to the work that went into them. Deaf to the prayers they were meant to carry.

Would I be in China long enough, experience it deeply enough, for revelations to occur? Would my guide, Vivien, hold up against the onslaught of my quickly formed opinions? Would she tolerate my brash methods? Not demur at my bold ideas but instead provide them with their proper test?

I cringed to think that my mind and manner might still make a mess of things in China. But in loving memory of my father and what he once tried to teach me, I would give the place my best shot.

Always and in everything let there be reverence; the deportment grave as when one is thinking deeply, speech composed and definite. This will make the people tranquil.

—
Liji (The Book of Rites)
, last century BC

September 2006. I descend on Beijing in one of the hundreds of daily international flights through which people now pour in and out of China. As my plane taxis across the runway, I get a glimpse of Beijing's international terminal, a gigantic lurching structure. In the smog and dust, it splays out across the horizon like a shimmering celestial palace, there but not quite real.

The terminal is immense and cavernous. In its glassy depths, I join a flowing horde of business people and tourists. The road to China is by now well travelled; few obstacles greet whoever enters the country. I declare myself a tourist and am smoothly ushered into the Middle Kingdom.

At first sight, Vivien, my translator, guide and soon-to-be advocate and interlocutor, comes off as slight, a little shy, yet subtly intense. She's twenty-five years old, with the polished, old-fashioned manners of a conscientious young Chinese woman. As we ride toward the city, I discover that under her quiet surface
she's as highly opinionated as I am. She freelances as a print journalist and is ready to defend her opinions in good English.

“In the spring, I'll be applying to graduate programs in the United States,” she tells me.

“You know people who've done this?”

“My closest friends are abroad already,” she says.

“And after that where will you go?”

She laughs. “I don't know.”

“Here?”

“Not sure.”

“Have you worked with foreigners before?”

“A few.” Then adds, “Also some ABCs, BBCs; even CBCs.”

“Sorry?”

“One of our expressions,” she explains. “
ABCs
and
BBCs
mean ‘American-born, British-born Chinese.'”

“I suppose they're not at all like Chinese nationals?”

“No, very different.”

I imagine what lies behind her statements: a curious and adventurous mind, one that evaluates, judges and builds theories, crystal castles that glimmer with meaning, then are ruined and abandoned. There will be so much for her and me to talk about, but for now I am groggy and jet-lagged. Our taxi, a banged-up Chinese-made Volkswagen, glides along the smooth new highway through heavy smog toward the capital. In silence I turn my attention to the sights materializing before my eyes.

Beijing is not China, but it reveals a lot about China nonetheless. These days, the capital is arguably more potent and central to the country than ever before. It stews with its own specific flavours and habits, and somewhere in the mix is also a little bit of everything in China.

When I first came to Beijing, with my father and brother in 1990, it was altogether a stodgier time. I remember seeing a show of various ethnic groups displaying their traditional outfits and singing their folk songs, a kind of Communist variety show. I'd seen similar stuff in the Soviet Union.

As emblems of the radically diverse ways of life to be found within China's immense borders, these displays were forced and phoney. I was generally pretty bored by them. At age sixteen, I had other things on my mind and spent the time scanning the young performers, looking for the curves and faces I liked best.

Distracted as I was, I didn't understand that it was not so much diversity that was on display as unity. What mattered was the connectedness of these diverse peoples who, like the spokes of a wheel, were linked to an axle that commanded all movement forward. The Communists, more prominent and visible then, were claiming to be at the centre of China and that they alone had brought the unity that had eluded China since the early Qing dynasty, three centuries before.

Parading peoples and things from the far reaches of the empire has long been a show of imperial might, proof of a central government's hold on all the regions. Far-fetched energies and passions descending upon the capital are thus made to radiate together as the Chinese people, ancient, diverse and united.

The capital city has been undergoing a great metamorphosis since I was first here. New symbols are on display. Buildings surpassing even the greatest halls of Red China have popped up across the city. The immense National Stadium being built for the Olympics is both beautiful and slightly terrifying, with its countless spidery girders. Beside it, the enormous bubbly and translucent box that will house the swimming pool gives off an
otherworldly feel. Across town in the new business district, the national television building will appear as an immense crooked arch—a giant pair of pants, some like to say. In the centre of the city, an immense egg will take shape—the new national opera house. Often cloaked in thickly polluted air, these fantastic creations speak to new and unexplored sources of Chinese reality, to both danger and renewal.

As in times past, legions of workers from the far reaches of the land toil anonymously, constructing a new capital, a new forbidden city radiant with power.

At the heart of Beijing is the Forbidden City proper, the world's biggest empty museum. The structure still stands, but its content and inhabitants have long since disappeared. Amid the throngs of visitors, their ghosts can scarcely even be imagined now.

In its heyday, the Forbidden City was a supremely orderly place, a tool of obedience and worship. The Forbidden City was so powerful precisely because it was closed, the unattainable nucleus at the very heart of the Middle Kingdom, itself the centre of the earth. It was never meant to be open for contemplation. Pedestrian access to the holy sanctuary would have been a fatal breach of its sanctity.

The capital is laid out in concentric rings around the Forbidden City. The First Ring Road is the huge boulevard dissecting the city from east to west, passing beneath Mao's portrait on the Gate of Heavenly Peace, also known as the Tiananmen, which looks out over the square of the same name. Parkways go north from this boulevard to circumscribe the Forbidden City and complete the first ring.

The Second Ring Road follows the old walls of the city; the Ming dynasty capital sits within its confines. It remains as a
map still etched into the territory—a great rectangle organized along cardinal lines. The north-south median was the imperial way. Along it, at the intersection with the east-west median, sat the emperor, the son of heaven, lord of the earth, commander of the four directions. From the Forbidden City at the centre, the emperor ruled the earth. Due south of the Forbidden City is Tiananmen Square—the Square of Heavenly Peace—and beyond it the Temple of Heaven, where the emperor communicated with the heavens.

These days, great halls flank Tiananmen Square. They are the people's assembly halls, the seats of modern government. Mao's mausoleum is also in the square, in the centre surrounded by the people's halls and on the old axis between the Forbidden City and the Temple of Heaven, on the south side of the square. The symbols of power may be at the centre, but real power is now elsewhere and mostly invisible. Perhaps real power lies in the ancient
hutong
neighbourhoods, crammed as they are with traditional abodes. In the tiny, tortuous streets beyond the great square, the temples and the empty palaces, China goes about its way.

Residences are hidden behind three-metre-high walls. Behind some of these walls, families—often as many as eight to a compound—dwell in stone or concrete houses set around cluttered central courtyards; behind others, a single general or party leader might live amid tranquil gardens. But in the open lanes, they all mix together. A bicycle squeezes by a black Mercedes and dodges a vegetable cart. Newspaper in hand, grandpa shuffles on his way to the public latrine. Grandma heads to the market; grandson, to school.

Beijing has long exceeded the Second Ring Road. For centuries, various folk from different regions and callings established
themselves beyond the old Ming walls to answer the biddings of power. Within this third orbit, soldiers, merchants, foreigners and workers came to dwell, tools of the establishment without being landholders.

When the Communists took control of the capital, they too relied on the service quarters of the third ring and housed their workers and their soldiers there, building factories, schools and laboratories—everything they needed to govern Red China and triumph against its foes.

Increasingly within the third ring, Communism bows to capitalism. Office towers have taken over the area. In them, China's hybrid economy churns. Chinese private businesses, state interests, foreign investors and multinational trading companies interact here daily. The power of the new China resides in its immense economy, partly free, partly planned. And an important part of this economy is managed along the third ring.

The sprawling territory of the fourth ring was long considered more mundane and less significant than that of the others. Primarily residential, it is home to all sorts of people and a place of certain flux. But with the boom of the new China, the territo-ries of both the fourth and fifth rings have undergone tremendous transformations, with shopping malls, residential complexes and sports centres appearing all over.

I'm staying at my friend Deryk's place in the north of the city, on the seventeenth floor of a slick, brand-new apartment tower, one of five arranged around a central gated esplanade. Deryk lives with his English fiancée, and from their crisp new quarters high above the city, they can gaze out over the Fourth Ring Road, a massive highway a dozen lanes wide. The traffic is mind-boggling. Day and night, the apartment faintly resonates with the incessant
vibration of a thousand engines. Deryk tells me that on a clear day they can see the jagged mountains of the north from the living-room window, but clear days are infrequent.

After my first night's sleep in China, Vivien meets me at the apartment. We talk about the most banal elements of our respective biographies. She's from a medium-sized coastal town in Shandong Province to the south, a very old region not too far from the hometown of Confucius, the greatest of all Chinese rationalists.

We'd exchanged emails outlining a vague itinerary for a month-long trip. Beijing. Somewhere typical of present-day China, perhaps in her home province. A village. The Yangtze River. Automobile factories in central China. Shanghai. The Pearl River area. Guangzhou. Shenzhen. Hong Kong. And Beijing again.

“I'm here to figure things out,” I say. “I want us to see as many things and meet as many people as possible—journalists, intellectuals. But also farmers and workers, as well as activists, artists, prostitutes and business people.”

“Last week, I sent Deryk some articles for you to read,” she tells me. “There was one about a woman who is fighting for the preservation of
hutongs
. I know her. Would you like to meet her?”

“I read it,” I reply, “as well as a lot of other articles and books about China and Beijing, before arriving. The destruction of the
hutongs
is well documented. I'd like to stay away from covering what other journalists have already covered. I'm really looking for new subjects. But since we're just starting to fill our schedule, we can meet your
hutong
preservationist,” I arrogantly conclude.

Unfazed, Viv immediately makes more suggestions. “How about a television producer? A constitutional lawyer?”

“Yes to both. What about the Beijing infrastructure? Do you know any city officials? Any public works people? Water? Power? Sewage?”

“Hmm, I don't think so,” she says, hesitating. “And I don't think we should meet any officials at the beginning of the trip. They ask a lot of questions, and it takes time to set up meetings with them. But we could go to the city's water reservoir.”

“Great.”

I had skipped breakfast, so by now, almost noon, I'm starving. We descend from Deryk's apartment into the gated esplanade. At the foot of a sister tower is a commercial area with restaurants. But the place is being renovated, and the only restaurant in operation is a sushi joint.

“Do you eat Japanese food?” I ask Vivien.

“Our first meal together in China and you are suggesting we eat Japanese food?”

“Yeah, a little funny, I guess. Anyhow, do you like it?”

“Yes, I do,” she says, a tad sheepishly.

We go in and place an order.

“Are you one to hold a grudge against the Japanese for problems of the past?” I ask.

“Maybe,” she says with a smile, knowing that I'm teasing her.

“Tell me about Japan and China,” I ask innocently as we wait for our food.

“Come on! You must know a little of the history of the Japanese in China.”

“That was a long time ago, Viv.”

“In China, sixty years is not a long time.”

I tease her, knowing how predictable anti-Japanese sentiments are in China.

“Just leave it be,” she says politely but sternly.

Of all the foreign occupations China endured, it's no surprise that the people still have the keenest memory of the last one, by the Japanese. They consider it especially harsh. From the Chinese perspective, Japan was a pupil of China, a child of Confucius and Chinese Buddhism. Many significant parts of Japan's culture, including its formal script, came from China. Thus, for Japan to turn around and make China a vassal was a cruel deed for the Chinese. Reminders of the occupation also remain a useful tool in China for stirring up nationalist sentiment and deflecting bad energies from the centre outward. So anger against the Japanese is still widely encouraged in the schools.

After lunch, on the way to meet Viv's friend, the
hutong
preservationist, we take the Second Ring Road around the old quarter of the city. After the Shanghai book launch in 2005, I briefly visited Beijing and stopped in a
hutong
neighbourhood just off the ring road to get the bicycle I was using repaired at an old blacksmith's shop. The
hutong
jutted right up onto the ring road and was sooty and cramped—quite the display when compared with the modern highway.