In the Mao memorabilia store, and some ancient poems.
Thursday July 29, 2010
I am in the Mao memorabilia store at the Yellow Crane Tower. One of the sales assistants approaches me. “Would you like to buy a copy of the quotations from Chairman Mao?”
“Oh, er, um, well….”
She leads me to a shelf of dog-eared copies in various languages. Presumably they are historical; at least, they are not cheap.
“This one is good. It is in English and Chinese, it’s very convenient.”
“Oh, yes, so it is. So on the one hand I can study Chinese and on the other hand I can study Mao Zedong thought.”
“Yes.” She doesn’t smile, but instead looks at me with a long and level gaze, and I realise that she is a woman who believes in her job.
“Hmmm…. In England we call that ‘Killing two birds with one stone.’” As I say this, I think that it sounds curiously like it could be a line from Mao himself, always one for spinning homely metaphors.
She doesn’t respond. “Very convenient. You should study it.”
“Well, thank you for your help. I should go.”
“No, come and look at our Chairman Mao bags. You can carry many things. The bag is very popular.”
I have spent the best part of a day in Wuhan out and about, and the weather is punishingly hot. I started the day – not long past eight and already sweltering – in the Changchun Daoist temple listening to music being played on the gu qin, whilst people came and went making morning offerings. And enterprising businessman was offering a fistful of incense whilst bellowing in his mobile phone. Then I headed to the Guiyuan Buddhist temple, in reality more of a Buddhist theme park, and to the Yellow Crane Tower – once a place of literary inspiration for the likes of Cui Hao and Li Bai. Cui Hao’s poem went something like this, in somewhat loose translation (this is, I should say, more a rendering than a translation, just going through character by character and seeing where it gets me):
Once a man mounted a yellow crane and flew,
but all that now remains is a yellow crane tower.
The yellow crane, once departed, will not return.
A thousand years of white clouds drift across the void,
the clear river reflects the Hanyang trees,
and parrot island is lush with fragrant grasses.
Dusk. Where is the passage to lead me home?
The mist over the surging river brings me only sorrow.
The original, for those who are interested, is here:
昔人已乘黄鹤去，此地空余黄鹤楼。
黄鹤一去不复返，白云千载空悠悠。
晴川历历汉阳树，芳草萋萋鹦鹉洲。
日暮乡关何处是? 烟波江上使人愁。
I like this poem, because written in the eight century it expresses already a sense that the great poet-sages have departed. Li Bai also stopped off here. Here’s his poem in Chinese, another poem filled with a sense of longing.
故人西辞黄鹤楼，
烟花三月下扬州。
孤帆远影碧空尽，
唯见长江天际流
Here is my attempt at a rendering of Li Bai’s poem – there’s a nice blog post, incidentally, on translating this poem here.
An old friend heading West
bids farewell at Yellow Crane Tower
in the third month of mist and flowers
and heads down to Yangzhou;
a lonely sail dwindles to a trace
in the jade emptiness,
until all I see is the river
flowing to the horizon.
In my version, I’ve got the old friend heading West, which may or may not be an illegitimate move; but it sits nicely, I think. I don’t know if it has become progressively more difficult to write poems at Yellow Crane Tower, but certainly it does not have quite the allure of Li Bai’s time, and I was not wholly filled with literary inspiration during my visit. Here’s a picture from the roof. The tower, incidentally, was completely rebuilt in the 1980s. You can see the Yangtze in the distance, but it’s not exactly jade emptiness out there.
Tomorrow I’m heading to the provincial museum, hoping that it’s not so much of a boot camp as is Hunan’s, and maybe I’ll pay a call to the foreign language bookstore which is relatively nearby here. Then the day after I’m heading to Jinan. Once again, I’m travelling overnight hard seat. No sleeper berths available again. What would the poet-sages of old have made of all this?
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Where do stories come from?
Wednesday July 28, 2010
Storks bring them, of course. Everybody knows that. Or they appear under gooseberry bushes along with the early morning dew. There is a kind of coy mystique amongst writers about the question of where stories come from. When you ask them, they tend to go all shy, the way that conservative parents do when their offspring ask awkward questions; and they tend to smile coyly and nod to each other with a “not in front of the children” look.
All of this supports the idea of writers as solitary creators who have a hotline to another world of deeper, greater significance – a world to which other mere mortals have no access. But for me the answer to the question of where stories come from is rather more prosaic. They come from other stories, of course. This is the first thing (and the reason that writers need to read, and to immerse themselves in the sea of stories). They come from the world, and our interaction with the world – a kind of swirling about of disparate elements. They come from chance encounters between these various elements. And they come from the fact that we have the kinds of minds that cannot help but construct stories.
It is this that I’m interested in exploring with this current project. The idea is to take the Yijing or Book of Changes – a book which has been taken to be everything from a divinatory manual to a book of philosophy, to a hotline to esoteric wisdom, to a load of old cobblers – and to use it as a machine for making stories. The Yijing is a book of changes, but it is also a book of chance: creativity, I think, comes both from having structure and also having a degree indeterminacy or uncertainty. In terms of the Yijing, uncertainty is almost everywhere: in in the process of consultation which leads to an essentially random result, in the allusive and indirect nature of the text that always requires interpretation, in the layer upon layer of commentary and so on. I am, alas, not one of those who thinks that there is some kind of mystical or otherworldly power in this particular book that reveals the nature of things. There are, of course, structures and patterns, and the patterning of the book is one of the things that makes it potentially generative of new ideas and stories; and perhaps there are nice Darwinian mechanisms by means of which those versions of the book that are more generative of ideas and thoughts have managed to replicate whilst those various of the book that are interact less fruitfully with the human mind have tended not to be copied. But whether tossing coins or using yarrow stalks, I can see no reason to see the result as anything but mathematically random.
And yet, my hunch is that it is perhaps it is precisely this play of randomness that makes the book so successful, and that allows it to generate new stories and new possibilities. So this novel I’m working on is, in a sense, an exercise in method. I’m seeing how the book, the structure of the book, the play of randomness, and the various chance conditions of my everyday life conspire to generate new stories. Not from some deep and esoteric source, but from the shuffling and recombination of various elements and experiences here in the world. It’s pretty mechanical, in a sense; but in the way that complex, squidgy, human-world systems are mechanical. I long ago resigned myself to the fact that, in my everyday functioning, I’m a fairly mechanistic kind of guy. Give me cake, I become affable. Tell me you don’t like my stories, I feel glum.
Anyway, this – in rough outline – is the kind of thing that I’m preoccupied with between hurtling down mountainsides in toboggans, hanging out in various temples and parks, treading the hot and sweaty streets of a succession of smoggy Chinese cities, hurtling here and there by train, and accidentally provoking taxi drivers to rage over the situation in Korea. I can’t say I know precisely what kind of a book all of this is going to turn into (an unpublishable one, the hard-hearted might mutter, but this is an inherently chancy exercise I’m engaged in, so it is a risk I am prepared to take); but so far the process is intriguing.
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The most fun you can have for twenty kuai
Monday July 26, 2010
I had been planning to head out from Changsha today and to visit Heng Shan, but the nagging desire to have a second attempt at trying to get a ticket to see the Hunan museum and the Mawangdui Zhouyi manuscript won out, and so I decided last night to stick around for another day or so. As the museum was closed today, I headed instead up Yuelu mountain (岳麓山), which is just behind where I am staying here in Changsha. The mountain is a pleasing mix of good old tourist fun and interesting temples to visit, with some lovely walks through forests filled with black and iridescent blue swallowtail butterflies. I opted to take the cable car up the mountain, which was sedate, somewhat rickety, and offered wonderful views of Changsha.
I spent most of the day at the top of the mountain visiting the various temples. I rather liked the somewhat scruffy but very lived-in fifteenth century Daoist temple (云麓宫). Not many folks seemed to want to pay the 2元 entrance fee, so they had to run to get somebody to take my money. Inside they were friendly and welcoming and the place had a ramshackle charm to it.
From there I headed on to the Buddhist temple some distance away – a rather more impressive and elaborate affair but, like the Daoist temple, also a functioning building which houses the Hunan Buddhist college.
The next door restaurant offered good tea and somewhat bland vegetarian food, which I perked up with a bit of chilli sauce. People in Hunan are proud of their ability to eat ferociously hot food, although my extensive training on the Narborough Road in Leicester has made me more or less immune to all but the fiercest of dishes.
I only bought a one-way ticket on the cable-car, as I intended to walk down the mountain, stopping off on the way at any interesting places, but I came across a much more entertaining way to make my descent, a kind of toboggan run or slide (滑道 – a useful addition to my vocabulary, I think). I spotted this on my way up: from the cable car the toboggan run looked like this:
I was not entirely sure that my university insurance would stretch to mountain toboggan runs; but it looked far too much fun to resist. So on my way down, I stopped off at the head of the slope. There was nobody there, although there was a phone number posted on the door, and a family from Nanchang who turned up at the same time gave the number a ring. While we waited, they told me about all the interesting Mao Zedong pilgrimage sites that I could go to in Hunan. Eventually some folks arrived and unlocked the small hut, dragging out some precarious looking wheeled carts that they put into the toboggan run. I paid my 20 kuai, they gave me a shove, and I was away. Here’s a picture looking forwards:
And here’s one with the camera pointing the other way:
The little cart had a brake on it, but where’s the excitement in that? And whilst the pictures at the top showed people dressed in protective clothing of all kinds – helmets, elbow pads, that kind of thing – this was purely for show. All in all, it was about as much fun as you could possibly have for twenty kuai, and I think that sacred mountains worldwide should, by law, all be equipped with such a thing. Imagine the fun you could have on Mount Athos, for example, zooming down one of those things with the wind in your beard (I assume that beards are almost obligatory on Mount Athos, but I don’t know for sure).
Just as I was thinking that things could not be bettered, then close to the bottom of the mountain, I came across the Five Tone café, which probably serves the best cup of coffee in Changsha. It is relaxed, friendly, deliciously cool after the heat outside, and serves excellent brownies with ice cream. I spent an hour or so with an iced cappuccino, reading my simplified Chinese version of 西游记 or “The Journey to the West” – which, in the English translation by Arthur Waley, is one of my all time favourite books. Then I made a few more notes towards the novel, and caught the bus home, reflecting on the way that research should simply not be this much fun…
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Being Offish and Unmoved
Sunday July 25, 2010
It had been my intention this morning to go to the Hunan provincial museum, where the Mawangdui tomb copy of the Zhouyi is kept. Museums in China tend to be well attended, but not excessively so; so when I turned up to find that all the tickets for the day had gone, I was surprised. It was eleven in the morning. A friendly couple outside the museum – who were similarly disappointed – told me that tomorrow the museum would be closed as well, and so my next chance would be Tuesday, by which time I’m intending to be down at the sacred mountain Heng Shan.
Changsha itself is not a bad place. I’m staying here with a couple of immensely generous Couchsurfing hosts, and have been taken out, perched precariously on the back of a motor-scooter, and treated to excellent hot-pot. The Yangtze river cuts through the middle of the town, and last night we walked along the river banks as bats swooped overhead for insects. A few brave souls were out swimming, but the water didn’t look at all inviting. We stopped by the roadside to sample some black stinky tofu, which Changsha is famous for and which was a favourite of the Great Helmsman himself. Having been warned about this dubious delight, I was surprised by the mildness of the flavour.
Today, however, having failed to make it to the museum – it is the weekend, it is the summer holidays, and the tickets are free, so demand is high – I stopped off instead at the nearby Martyrs’ Park, which was a good place to sit and do a bit of writing. Writing, I think, was probably OK, but the sign at the entrance warned visitors, “Do not engrave and painted confusedly.” I spent four years as an art student at university painting confusedly, so I think that I got this out of my system back then. The sign also admonished visitors, “Do not be offish and unmoved. Do not be coarse-grained and malicious.” I attempted, therefore, to be as moved, unoffish, fine-grained and sweet-natured as I could, sitting there writing as magpies flitted to and fro.
At the centre of the park is a memorial tower, filled with images of China’s “martyrs” – those who died in the revolution and also those who died in the earlier Opium Wars with the British. With regard to the opium wars, I always think that modern-day moralists who talk about the war on drugs could do with a good dose of history. After all, back in the day, Queen Victoria was a fan of the poppy, Edwin Arnold, author of the interminable poem “The Light of Asia” was singing the praises of opium in the Telegraph newspaper – the Telegraph, I tell you, and we were lobbing explosives and things at the Chinese because we wanted keep the Chinese market in what Arnold called “this most benign and useful drug” open.
My favourite sign in the park, however, was the following one – “Ensure cleanliness, keep glamour.”
If I had to translate the Chinese more or less literally, it would be something like, “To pay attention to hygiene is a to bear yourself elegantly.” 风度 or “fēngdù” is the problem here. It can mean something like “bearing” or “poise” as in “我的语文老师颇有一些古代文人的名士风度” or “My Chinese teacher has the bearing of the ancient scholars” (taken from nciku.com)，and is usually applied to men; but – as far as I can see – it can, more straightforwardly mean “glamour”, particularly when applied to women, as when on a train trip a few days back my male companions were whispering excitedly about the “风度” of a particularly attractive-looking female passenger.
I did my best, although keeping glamour has never been my strong point. It began to feel as if simply sitting in the park was a kind of moral assault course: there is such a lot to think about – avoiding malice, offishness and coarse-grainedness, resisting the temptation to paint confusedly, and all the while keeping glamour. In the end it was too much for me and I wandered off for another part of the city where I ate the fiercest noodle lunch, cooked before my eyes for a mere 5元, before catching the bus back to the flat.
I have another week before I need to be in Jinan for a meeting at the university, so I’m planning a couple of days at Heng Shan, followed by a short stay in Wuhan where I hope to get a bit more writing done. After that, I’ll be heading further north again to Jinan. I’ve still got about five weeks in China left, and so I may start to think about slowing the pace, travelling rather less, and making more space for the writing.
Hong Kong to Changsha
Saturday July 24, 2010
I am writing this from an underground internet bar in Changsha – it is dark, dingy, friendly, and filled with cigarette smoke and the sound of online gamers hawking and spitting. My laptop is behaving quirkily at the moment least – the trouble with netbooks is that the build quality is not as high as it might be. What I think has happened is that the internal circuitry has flexed a little, and so the machine is misbehaving. Anyway, I’m hoping it will last the course until I get back from China and can get it looked at.
I arrived early this morning after what was a relatively comfortable night travelling from Hong Kong via Shenzhen. The border between Hong Kong and Shenzhen is remarkably straightforward – you take the MTR from the centre of Hong Kong and then just walk across the border, direct to Shenzhen rail station. It is good to be back here on the mainland and using my Chinese again, but Hong Kong was well worth the visit. On my final full day there, I went to hear Xu Xi at the Hong Kong book festival, as she was talking about writing between Chinese and English. Unfortunately, despite the topic of the talk and the fact that she writes and publishes in English, she spoke only in Chinese; and in Cantonese at that, so I did not have much of a chance even to give my Putonghua a workout. But I enjoyed soaking up the literary air and hearing the few extracts in English that she read. Also on the same day, I met up with the extraordinarily hospitable Xiaosui Xiao, a scholar of rhetoric with an interest in the Zhouyi. We managed to dodge the rain – that started to come down in earnest after I left the book fair, and then took the peak tram up the hill to look over Hong Kong by night – a truly spectacular view, particularly given the bruised and brownish storm clouds and the occasional stray flash of lightning. Here are a couple of photos, the first of the rain and the second of the view from the peak:
I also managed to write another story for the book, which takes me past the half-way mark. This was from hexagram 38, and featured a cart full of ghosts, a fox spirit (there are a few of those in these parts) and other curious happenings. But it’s hard writing on a keyboard that sometimes does not respond at all, and sometimes just repeatedly inputs the last key that you pressed, like thissssssssssssss. Whilst here in Changsha, I plan to see the Mawangdui manuscripts of the Zhouyi (周易) at the Hunan Provincial Museum. Then I’m hoping to head out of the cityfor a few days, perhaps to Heng Shan (衡山) before I travel up to Jinan for more meetings. What I need now, however, is to get in touch with my host here, and to have a shower to wash off the grime of the journey.
Polar bears, minor mishaps, and some thoughts on cross-cultural philosophy
Thursday July 22, 2010
If you want to know how far away Hong Kong is from Beijing, you only have to go to the campus of the Chinese University of Hong Kong and get off the train. There, outside the railway station, is a faux-bronze statue of liberty, a sculpture that brings to mind, of course, not only New York, but also the student protests in Tiananmen Square. For commentary on this, I can do no better than point you to the wonderfully thoughtful analyses by 鬼佬 here and here, (a website that I warm to immediately as it has a quote from Calvino at its head).
I was up at the Chinese University of Hong Kong meeting up with the philosopher Xiaogan Liu, with whom I spent a delightful evening. As well as talking about the novel that I’m here to write, we talked much more broadly about the question of the relationship between Chinese and Western philosophy. Hegel, famously, was puzzled by Confucius, claiming that there was nothing in his writing except rather bland, everyday homilies. And since then, Western philosophers (not all of them – Leibniz, of course, was an enthusiast) have tended to look at Chinese philosophy and, finding little there that they recognise, have tended to think that it can’t be philosophy at all. Certainly, if you pick up an introductory textbook on philosophy, much of the stuff that you will find – the question of the distinction between appearance and reality, the question of God’s existence (why is the philosophy of religion always considered to be the philosophy of God? This always frustrates me), the idea of free will, and so on – does not really loom very large in the traditions of China, although obviously one can find rough equivalents here and there if one is determined. The reason that I find looking into Chinese philosophy so stimulating is that it is a powerful reminder that, even though the Western philosophical tradition pretends to a kind of universality, it is a much more local tradition than we would tend to think. When other people just don’t see the questions that we treat as fundamental as being fundamental (the idea of fundamental questions may be one that is rooted in a particular tradition as well) then we have a choice either to dismiss these folks as simply obtuse, or to question our own sense of what is genuinely fundamental.
So we chatted about these things over dinner and a bottle of wine, and then we went on a quick campus tour, heading up to the pavilion of harmony where heaven and humanity are united (天人合一) – a place with the most spectacular views over Hong Kong. Unexpectedly, there was a polar bear hanging out by the pavilion (see the link here). It was at this point, so spellbound by the view, and perhaps bamboozled by the presence of the polar bear, that I took a step forward onto what I thought was a wet pavement and found myself stepping straight into a shallow pond. All of which felt somehow appropriate to the occasion.
I headed back on the train with wet feet, and spent the rest of the evening drying off and making plans for my last day in Hong Kong and my return to the mainland. I’ve not had a great deal of time to see the city, and the weather has not been particularly good, although the first typhoon of the year has skirted the city way to the West, but it is a place that I like. Today I’m meeting with another scholar to talk about my work, then I’m off to the book festival, all being well. People tell me that Stephen Fry is in town for the festival, although I won’t be catching him as by that time I’ll be heading to Shenzhen and then on to Changsha overnight – this time enjoying the luxury of a hard sleeper. What bliss!
Hong Kong
Tuesday July 20, 2010
This morning I left the mainland for Hong Kong. I had not, when I first arranged my trip, intended to come to Hong Kong, thinking that Changsha – where the Mawangdui archaeological finds are – would be about as far as I would get. So I got myself a single entry visa. But then, at the last minute, the connection with Zhongshan University came up, so I decided to travel to Guangzhou; and after that, I made a couple of interesting connections here in Hong Kong, so I thought I might as well cross over the border.
I hadn’t expected Hong Kong to be such a different world from Guangzhou, only two hours away by train – despite knowing about the whole one country, two systems thing, I wasn’t prepared for how much Hong Kong breathes a different air from China. It has an independent legal system, and a very different vibe: higher prices, a much more ethnically mixed community, a surprising number of gaudy neon strip joints, and – if the South China Morning Post is to be believed, a spirit of going its own way.
Since my arrival some time around mid-afternoon, however, I’ve not had much chance to look around, as I’ve been negotiating with the bank. This is frustrating. I went to the not particularly Co-operative bank twice before leaving for China to tell them that I would be overseas, and to ask them to put a note on my account. Nevertheless, my cards suspiciously stopped working a couple of days back. A swift phone call should have sorted this out, but alas it didn’t. After a long time on hold, I eventually got through to a demotivated sounding employee – and who can blame him? – who said that the account was fine, and that the bank had sorted out the problem. So I ventured back out to draw out some cash, which I need for my return visa to China, and I discovered that this was fiction: my cards still didn’t work. I came back to the hotel and phoned the bank again, getting through straight away to somebody who was both friendly and efficient. Yes, she said, my cards were blocked a day or two ago on suspicion of fraudulent activity. It is puzzling enough that booking hotels in China, where I said I would be, should be considered suspicious. It is downright odd that when I first called the bank, they omitted to mention anything about this.
Anyway, tomorrow morning I’m off to sort my visa, and then I’m meeting up with a professor of Daoist philosophy, and hopefully taking in a few of the sights. That is, if the promised typhoon does not keep me indoors.
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