Letter to G

Perhaps you remember the winter of 1993, when Beijing was covered in Mongolian wind. You were eighteen and I was twenty. We were walking fast through the night over Ji Men Bridge. People call that canal Xiao Yue He – Little Moon River. The water was still flowing then, though it was frozen. There was never a single fish in that canal or a boat in any season. Near the concrete riverbank was a small wood of pine trees from which young art-school lovers emerged, holding hands or secretly kissing. No place for lovebirds to hide except the woods at night. You were speaking of 1960s’ Paris. Ah, how much interesting nonsense we learned in that film-school library, perhaps the only place in Beijing where censorship of Western art doesn’t apply. You were talking about Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Of course. There was no stopping you talking about them. You so much lived in another time and another world, a world where men resembled the young Sartre and women the young de Beauvoir. Even if you could afford only two packs of instant noodles every day, the library at least was free. Yes, we were living through the ruthless sandy winds of Beijing, we were orphans of our country’s history. Born during the Cultural Revolution, all we were taught was that History equals Feudalism. So history had to die.

Letter to H

I was going to visit you last time I was in Beijing, but they told me the foot-massage parlour where you worked was being refurbished, and I didn’t think you were still there.

     I was the customer you always saw around midnight, yes, I was the one who wore a pair of oily glasses and sometimes fell asleep while you were massaging me. I was the one arguing that you should not do this job; that you should study at college because you were the cleverest boy in that massage place.

     I couldn’t believe you when you told me your whole village left for the cities to work in the massage parlours. How many people were there in your village? Three thousand? Or thirty? You said Henan is the most populous province in China, at least one hundred million people. I imaged thousands of young Henan villagers leaving their homes to work on city people’s feet. Yes, everyone came to Beijing or Shanghai to press tired feet, day and night, so many feet – maybe you remember those feet, certainly not the faces.

     You were seventeen, you told me that you’d like to be an actor, that you were good at martial arts, that you’d like to leave your job and act on television. I gave you a phone number for a film studio and told you to call. And then I never saw you again.

Letter to S

1996, people were still talking about a legendary UFO that appeared in the Beijing sky the year before. You were writing novels in the style of Jorge Luis Borges, I was trying to write TV soaps for a living. We stole a few cabbages in the hutongs, you borrowed some money to buy cigarettes. We went through the cruel story of youth, or is that the title of a Nagisa Oshima film? Cruel Story of Youth, 1960s desperation in Japan. Then one day you took me to a dim jazz café near Wudaokou called Lush Life, right next to Beijing Language College. You said they played the best jazz in town. Some black American musicians were blowing the saxophone on stage and there were only two of us to listen. I think that was the first time I’d seen a black American jazz musician. Why would they come to Beijing? Don’t they find life tough or lonely here? You couldn’t answer me. After that day, you told me: ‘I am a man, I’ve got to make my life happen, soon. I have to leave.’

     Then you disappeared, along with the jazz café. They started demolishing all the seedy streets of Wudaokou, the ones that sold the cheapest chilli paste and Korean food. Our favourite was pickled cuttlefish. It’s all gone.

Letter to A

You were beautiful. We liked the same music, Miles Davis and Pink Floyd. We loved Eileen Chang’s novels too. You were the girl everyone took for my younger sister. You left your home town in Shangdong, Confucius’ birthplace; you came to Beijing to sing. You sang Hong Kong and Taiwanese pop songs – Deng Lijun’s ‘Goodbye My Love’ and other such stuff. That was the legacy of the 1980s; China still imitating Taiwan. You sang propaganda songs too, in some Beijing army dancing troupe, and you had a handsome boyfriend, Beijingese and an actor. You stayed at his place, an old hutong house near Dongcheng train station – each time a train departed for the provinces you heard the horns and bells. Then I came to see you, came to your little home without windows. We ate lamb hotpot and bok choi. The house was decaying; I noticed the cement wall stained by the rain, covered with a huge flowery cloth – lilies on the wall. Those lilies were silver in colour; your room was in the house of grey lilies.

     Then you came to find me at the art school, in my dormitory room with bunk beds for four students, a tall chimney vomiting its black smoke outside our windows. You came in, one hand carrying some duck meat, the other holding a book – its title Existentialism or Post-Marxism? It was written by some Harvard scholar, or was he from Berkeley?
I asked, ‘Do you understand this?’ You said, ‘I have to.’

     You wanted to change your life; you saw that being a little singer in a troupe was leading to a future without hope. You wanted to go abroad, anywhere in America, no matter whether in Wisconsin or Oregon or Kentucky. We were discussing Max Weber, a German and supposedly a neo-Marxist. Well, we were still discussing neo-Marxism in art schools in those days, or had we already moved on to how to get an MBA? Then we went to listen to some Beijing punk bands in a dark bar – Cui Jian was singing ‘Rock and Roll on a New Long March’. There were teenage bands too, and you were their favourite girl in front of stage. You dyed your hair red; you wore shiny trousers with elephant feet. Was that Elvis Presley style, or second-hand Hong Kong imitation? Then one day, you wrote to me: ‘I am married, I am in Copenhagen, and I miss Beijing.’

Letter to W

I wanted to send you the photos of that well, the well inside the Forbidden City, the well in which the Emperor’s favourite concubine was drowned by his own mother, Cixi.

     I suppose you still remember the trip we made to the Forbidden City? It felt there like no museum in the world could be so empty. Not entirely empty maybe, but every gallery was locked. ‘Where are all the treasures,’ I asked? You said, ‘They probably all went to Taiwan – to Taipei’s National Palace Museum, or to the British Museum, where they brought all the jade, and the Buddhas, and the chairs on which emperors sat once, or sat for all their lives.’

     Like any other tourist from the Chinese provinces we took photos in front of that famous well, the Zhen Fei well. Its waters seemed bottomless, it scared me. The story of the Emperor’s Pearl Concubine was dispiriting. Wind back to 1900 – the year the Eight-Nation Alliance, the armies of Britain, the USA, France, Germany, Russia and more entered China. Menaced by the foreigners, Empress Dowager Cixi fled Beijing with her eunuchs. The city was occupied by the invaders, the houses were burnt down. Emperor Guangxu loved Zhen Fei against his mother’s wishes. When Cixi was forced to flee the capital she left the Emperor behind to negotiate with the invaders, but first, she had Zhen Fei thrown into the well. The girl drowned. “Historically”, maybe it was not in this exact same well, perhaps not even in the Forbidden City, but that’s of no importance. For those confused Chinese tourists who lost all trace of history in the Cultural Revolution, what matters is: a beautiful concubine was drowned in a well for love, for her master, or for the sake of history’s rolling on like a tape recorder.

     Now, contemplating those photographs, I want to ask you to visit that place again; to check whether the well is still there, or has it been moved to make way for a Starbucks café? It used to be in the north of the Forbidden City, just behind Ningshougong Palace. I hope its waters have not dried up.

      

      

Letter to M

I was waiting for you at Beijing Airport, in the middle of the night. We rode in a taxi with your red suitcase behind us. You gazed at the poplar trees standing straight on the sides of the highway, silent in the darkness. ‘Obedient forest,’ you commented. Obedient forest, is that how you thought of Beijing? Did you mean the obedience of its citizens, or of its government? Surely not the latter.

     In that red suitcase, you had brought me an art-book novel called Griffin & Sabine. I had never seen a foreign book before, let alone a novel with real envelopes and postcards inside you had to read to follow the story. It may have been a love story, but for me it was my first adult children’s book – and I had never read a children’s book in my life at that time.

     The year was 2001 and Beijing was enduring the construction of those crazy new ring roads. I left college, and started to teach at another. Since then I’ve often thought of Griffin and Sabine’s love by mail – a man in London writing postcards to a mysterious island in the South Pacific, to a woman who lives there. Where in the South Pacific could that island be? In my tower-block apartment invaded by cockroaches I was standing on my bed staring at a world map glued to the wall. Did they mean Fiji? Samoa? Nauru? Or the Solomon Islands? Is there any great mysterious island left in this world?

     Then I slowly became the man in Griffin & Sabine, so lonely he has to invent his distant woman. All I did in those days in Beijing was sit in my bedroom scribbling in my diaries. The construction workers continued building the Fourth Ring Road, then the Fifth Ring Road, each circling the Forbidden City, but none leading to it. That’s Beijing: a power station with no access to the control room. When spring came, the cherry blossoms in Chaoyang Park opened, and I was reading about ‘a successful lifestyle’ in the newspapers – cars, mortgages, a collective middle-class dream.

     I did become Griffin, and Sabine became me.

     One year later, I left Beijing. I came to London. I am in this windy island, far away from all the continents of the world; I am in a bedroom where I can see maple trees standing in London Fields, under a cover of heavy rain clouds. Here too, there is a world map pinned on the wall. Before I finish this letter to you, I have to stand and look at it. I want to find that city again, a city full of the hopes and illusions of our youth.