Will Buckingham: Being Offish and Unmoved

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.