The Empress Lover

by Linda Jaivin

  The director liked the hotel because it was a bit like a film set, a kind of fakery that, in the right light and framed correctly, becomes magic; in fact, when I took a photo of the lobby and emailed it to a friend, she thought it looked five-star. One day, the star of the film, one of China’s top actresses, asked if I wanted to do Pilates with her. She’d brought along a personal instructor from Shanghai as part of her entourage. While doing one of the exercises, I accidentally kicked her Chihuahua across the room. It flew back to sink its needle-like teeth into my ankle. As her personal assistant rushed off in search of antiseptic and bandages, the superstar gave the little rat a slap across its tiny nose. ‘Bad girl.’ Resuming her position on the mat, she assured me, ‘It happens all the time. Don’t feel bad.’ I didn’t.

  Stardust. I’m covered in it.

  I never thought that at my age, I’d be renting thin, under-heated rooms, one long room really, and worrying about the rent. I’d missed the boat that my old classmate in Sydney and nearly everyone else my age back home seemed to have caught. It’s funny. I was the smart one, the one who didn’t fool around all that much with drugs or boys – hardly a saint, but far from the wildest kid in the class, and the one who actually enjoyed doing her essays at school and took pride in handing them in on time, too (you could have tortured me at the time, of course, and I’d never have admitted it). But I always wanted to travel the world, not buy a little square of it, and have adventures, not kids. Foolishly, I assumed that at the end of my far less straight and narrow road there’d be rewards of glory and, if not wealth, at least not the punishment of poverty. I’m not complaining about my situation – I have a lovely old roof over my head, and there are plenty of people, even on this little hutong, who’d give their right hand and probably a foot too to enjoy the use of a non-communal toilet, not to mention all the other comforts that are mine. I’m not hungry, and I can still afford to buy naan from the Indian restaurant down the street and bread from the French bakery at Donghu. I’m in reasonable demand as a movie subtitler. But I’m not a famous published author either, and that, along with true love, was my vain dream. Love, I once believed, would insulate me from all other woes; I hadn’t yet made the connection between love itself and woe.

  I did finally find a publisher for The Empress Lover, incidentally. Over the years, I submitted it to every major publisher in Australia, the UK and the US. No A-list publisher was interested, and the B-list never returned my phone calls. Then a few years back, I was giving it another go, working down the C-list, when someone at a small Hong Kong press heard about it and offered to take it up. On the eve of its release, the publishing house’s offices were consumed in a suspicious fire. It appears that once the publishers collected the insurance money, they disappeared off the face of the earth. I know they did publish the book, because they sent me an advance copy; they must have had some sense of conscience. Where the rest ended up, I never found out. I assumed that if any copies survived the fire, the company’s liquidators, true to their name, had taken them straight to the pulp mill along with my dreams.

  I still want to write that bestseller, that airport novel. But even more I want to write that massive thing. I want to write the truth. It’s a spectacularly difficult thing to do. While writing The Empress Lover, I thought long and hard about Edmund Backhouse, wondering about his motivations. Were the forgeries and scams a subconscious response to having to keep hidden his homosexuality? Were they the games of a rogue genius who saw them as a kind of revenge on all those in society against whom he harboured a grudge? Were they a way of avoiding confrontation with some uncomfortable truth, about himself or his reality perhaps? Or had his fantasy life slipped its leash to run riot in his complicated mind? A combination? Sometimes, I wondered about myself, my own ability to recognise and patrol the boundaries between fantasy, memory and reality. Was it even possible? Life was fuza.

  Fuza. . According to my Gu Hanyu xiao zidian, my ‘little dictionary of classical Chinese’, the first character in this combination, fu (fourth tone) carries meanings of return, repeat, recover, but also tell, answer and even avenge. The second, za (second tone), originally signified a number of things, including a mix of colours, a combining, a collecting and even an inclusive whole. Recovering or returning to or even avenging that combined whole, with all its varied hues and tones: complicated.

  I always watch a film all the way through before beginning to subtitle it. I finally opened the Quicktime file that Duan Mou had sent me. ‘Wow me,’ I commanded, leaning back against a stack of brightly coloured silk pillows. I’ve never been wealthy, but silk wasn’t too expensive, especially if you stuck with remnants. I buy silk whenever I feel sad. That special tea-chest where I keep Q’s letters? It’s full of it.

  A red mist filling the screen cleared to reveal a pianist, wearing a tuxedo and playing Bartok on a grand piano in one of those sprawling illegal garbage dumps that girdle Beijing outside the Sixth Ring Road. Migrant workers wearing random combinations of discarded clothing sloped about with fistfuls of plastic and cloth. A hopeful start. But as it rolled on, my heart began to sink.

  I should have known it would be trouble the instant Duan Mou called again, after Mrs Jin had gone, to talk about the film. After the conversation with Tarantino’s rep, he told me, he’d been up all night agonising over whether it should premiere at Sundance or Berlin. It was probably too late for Berlin, he mused. Maybe Cannes was a better choice. Or Venice, though now that the Mandarin-speaking former chairman of the Venice film festival, Marco Mueller, had moved to take over the festival in Rome, he probably wouldn’t have a shot at opening Venice. He was sure that Chairman Ma – as Mueller was known here – would have loved it. He had never met Chairman Ma, which was a shame, because Chairman Ma hadn’t been all that interested in the sort of films he used to make. That he never really wanted to make again. He told me that this film was full of deep meaning and reflection on what it meant to be human. What it meant to live in the world as it was and not how we wanted it to be, to exist in reality and not in dreams and to face the consequences of that. Duan Mou then asked me if I knew the process by which a foreign film got nominated for an Oscar. He wondered which Hollywood star he would enlist for the big-budget but artistically sound American film he’d inevitably be invited to make once this was out there. He was leaning towards Leonardo DiCaprio because everyone in China knew him from Titanic. Did he need a tuxedo for Cannes or those other European festivals? He’d feel weird in a tuxedo. Perhaps he should wear one of those retro Han dynasty robes that were all the rage a few years back, though he’d once seen a photograph of some dodgy poet swanning about in one at some function in New York and the sight had made him cringe. He photographed best in black. It was just that a tuxedo …

  I told him he’d look hot in a tuxedo.

  ‘Really? Do you think so?’ he replied.

  ‘Sure,’ I said, not meaning it. I then suggested that he keep in mind that there were a lot of other interesting festivals out there, like Toronto, Busan and Rotterdam, but he assured me he was aiming for the top. The world had been waiting for this film. Listening to him, I wondered at the process by which people in the arts here could turn, seemingly overnight, from perfectly normal human beings to out-of-control megalomaniacs.

  I was trying to make sense of a dissolve that abruptly ended in a jump cut to an empress – a young Cixi? Hard to tell. Her court, attired in what appeared to be Qing robes as Comme des Garçons might have interpreted them circa 1985, kowtowed, arse-up to the camera. We could still hear the Bartok. ‘I had a dream last night,’ the empress announced to her court. She then proceeded to relate the contents of her dream, but it sounded like gobbledygook to me. I paused the film and consulted the script. It took me a while to work out that she was speaking backwards. The dream involved escaping from the red and purple walls that caged her, a chorus of crickets, ships of lost souls afloat on a limitless golden sea, dishes of fish-flavoured eggplant, the number 98, a kunqu opera about lesb
ian love in a Buddhist temple, climate change and auto-asphyxiation, which may or may not have been referring to Beijing’s air pollution. The rant was peppered with exclamations like ‘Oh, cats!’ (‘Cats, oh!’ rather) and ‘Briefcase, spaghetti!’

  I pressed play again. The camera now focused on the face of a hard-eyed, soft-cheeked eunuch. Then, as the empress droned on, Bartok still playing in the background, a rapid-fire montage began that intercut between the empress, the pianist and the eunuch, who dropped to the ground and began writhing in some sort of interpretative dance while clutching at his voided crotch.

  That was just the opening sequence. It was clear as day compared to the rest of the film, which consisted of unrelated fragments, the pianist and the eunuch only returning at the end. We never saw the empress, of whom I’d grown rather fond, again. To put it kindly, the whole thing was incomprehensible. To put it harshly, it was – as we would say in Oz – a wank.

  I would probably have loved it when I was at university. For a while, in my second year, I was mad for an avant-garde playwright who only staged his ‘events’ at midnight, or six-thirty in the morning, in order to subvert bourgeois conceptions of what theatre was about. ‘Theatre is not something you do to fill in the time after dinner!’ Simon would shout. (The ‘bourgeoisie’ of Canberra, that is, public servants and academics, couldn’t go to the theatre before dinner because at the time, no decent restaurant in the city, our national capital, was open that late.) Once, he decided to construct a literal ‘fourth wall’ between the audience and the stage, forcing people to try to climb the wall. (Most gave up and went home instead.) It never occurred to Simon that he wasn’t shaking up the bourgeoisie at all, as they never went to any of his plays. The audience was mainly other students, people like myself. I went to all of his plays because – I admit it – I wanted to fuck him. (He turned out to be disconcertingly vanilla in the sack.) He would have loved this film.

  Maybe I was being harsh. It was entirely possible that I wasn’t paying enough attention because I was so distracted by the letter. I might have missed something. So I made another cup of coffee, wrote a note to myself to get more milk from BHG Market Place next time I was in Sanlitun, stacked my silk-covered pillows on the ta in an approximation of ergonomic, and watched it again. It seemed more devoid of narrative logic the second time round, if that were possible. I could translate lines backwards – I could even write the words sdrawkcab – but I feared it wasn’t going to help. My dilemma was this: because the movie made so little sense in Chinese, it made even less sense in English. That would be fine if people understood that’s how it was. But if foreign festival directors, reviewers or, God forbid, distributors, missing all those deep meanings, dismissed it as incomprehensible, Duan Mou would end up blaming me. I knew how things worked.

  Then again, maybe I didn’t. Looking back on my life to date, I wasn’t sure that I knew how anything worked. Every time I thought I did, I’d been proved wrong. Take Q, for example. Jingjing has told me to stop taking Q for an example – or for anything else. ‘Get over it,’ she told me. She said she’d only say that once. And she kept to her word. Jingjing is the ultimate move-on girl.

  I had a girlfriend like that in Australia, Gemma, a clear-thinking, no-nonsense and resourceful foil to my muddle-headed, intellectual airy-fairyness. We went to university together. I started projects. She finished them. I had big ideas. She had practical ones. I was good at languages. She was good at communication. She applied a crude but unequivocal gesture whenever I was dithering about something, in which she pulled her forefinger smartly out of the closed fist of her other hand while making a kissing sound. Pull the finger out.

  My hand, working against my brain, snatched up the phone and dialled. My brain, working against my hand, cancelled the call. I could imagine Q at that moment, his handsome face dignified by the streaks of silver in his still-thick hair and the fine lines fanning out from his still-sparkling eyes, speaking at some important meeting. Whatever the subject, he was ever the charismatic commander, rallying his troops. In my mind’s eye he was always striking a heroic pose, like one of those figures in a Cultural Revolution poster. Or maybe just the pose of a poet – they were given to heroic gesture too back in the day. He started out wanting the world to change. Then he wanted to change the world. But in the end, the world changed him. Despite all that had happened, his history, our history, history’s history and the chasm that had opened up between us, I loved him still. My silly. My bad. My good.

  I conjured up an image of his wife, the pretty, well-connected, well-bred, well-groomed type his mother preferred, and who had given him a perfect child. The wife might have dropped in to the office for lunch. In Chen Kaige’s Caught in the Web (the one with the jokes about fingerless gloves), there’s a scene in which the wife of a corporate CEO walks into her husband’s office unannounced to discover his comely young assistant in his arms. It was a huge misunderstanding, as it turned out, far more innocent than it appeared, but there was enough dangerous possibility there for the wife to think the worst, and to act on those thoughts. I imagined this happening with Q and his wife. But I didn’t like the thought of the sexy young girl in his arms any more than she would have. I crumpled up this obnoxious vision and binned it before it could stick in my brain like a voodoo pin.

  Counting ten breaths, I dialled again. A recorded voice informed me, in Chinese and then in English, that the subscriber I had dialled was ‘power off’. An unlikely story. Power off was one thing that Q never was. Never had been. Never would be.

  Despite the door snake and all the creaking efforts of the gas heaters, the cold crept through the glass and into my bones. I shivered and hunched into my doona, but for all the discomfort, the recurrent colds, chapped lips and numb toes, I revelled in the winter. Odd as it may seem, as the years have passed, winter has become my favourite season in Beijing. I love hiding myself under layers of under-and outerwear, scarves and hats and woollen socks over leggings over tights. Summer is a season of exposure and vulnerability. Even one’s pores are open. Winter is all about concealment and impenetrability. I like the way fresh snow hides the city’s dirty secrets and makes it beautiful and new again.

  And yet, when I was younger it was the summers I loved, their muggy, hopeless, gritty languor. Old men rolling up their thin vests to air soft sweaty tummies and younger ones doing the same to show off their shining lean brown torsos. Middle-aged women perching on the mendun’r, the stone seals or drums at the doorways of hutong residences, knees splayed, fanning themselves with their skirts. The repairman who patched my bicycle tyres taking his afternoon siesta on a low camp bed which he set up on the pavement by his tool kit, and the watchmen at the Friendship Hotel, where I lived, napping in the guardhouses. There were no outdoor cafes or bars – you had to make your own fun then, and people did, strolling in the parks and the grounds of derelict temples, swimming at the Miyun Reservoir and picnicking in gorges and valleys defended by crumbling Great Walls. Beijing summers had a particular smell, a sweaty, smoky, garlicky, earthy pungency. Although I had yet to acquire a taste for chou doufu, ‘stinky bean curd’ (the very smell of it used to make me gag), and to this day can’t claim I’ve truly acclimatised to the diabolical microclimate of Beijing’s public toilets on a warm day, the sheer intensity of the olfactory assault that Beijing launched upon itself on a hot summer day made you feel alive in every cell of your body. Dripping with sweat, caked with dust, drenched now and then with a rain that fell in sheets, alive. Having somehow held together by day in this city that mysteriously manages to be both parched and muggy, those who are young and ripened by heat, Chinese and foreigner alike, slide into dishabillé on the balm of Beijing’s summer nights.

  Summer in Beijing often jumps out from behind the curtain in early May like an overeager showgirl, shaking her feathers before getting hauled backstage again. She tiptoes back out by the end of the month and in June the season is in full swing, with the odd intermission. She launches into a full, rau
cous can-can in July and August, complete with those crazy showers and oppressive humidity. As she winds down the show in September and October, thinning the peaches, fattening the grapes, withering the lotus flowers in the lakes and taking a paintbrush to the hills, people begin to feel nostalgic, speak of her in the past tense and sigh in anticipation of the long wait for her return.

  It was on one of those hot, moist, dreamy late summer nights that I first met Q.

  It was 1981. My glasses were big, my jeans were high-waisted, tight and probably featured white stitching on the seams and pockets. (Another reason to be happy that I was born in the pre-Instagram era: of these crimes against style I’ve left no proof.) I wore a Japanese T-shirt emblazoned with nonsense English – ‘JUN gentleman duck angels’, that sort of thing. Pedalling hard in Jingjing’s slipstream, I raced after her along the dirt roads that wound through the villages blending out from the northwestern suburbs.

  Jingjing was the daughter of one of the editors at the Foreign Languages Press in Baiwanzhuang where I worked. She was a year older than me. We hit it off from the start. She was a typical Beijing girl of the time, tall, big-hearted, confident, loyal, potty-mouthed and funny. She spoke with that classic back-of-throat Beijing burr, rattling off thoughts and quips and gossip as quickly as she walked or cycled with those long, long legs; me tagging along after her like some awestruck little sister.

  Jingjing was alert to everything that was interesting. If there was news flying up and down the hutongs, Jingjing was the airstrip. She knew where all the cool stuff was happening – those days were way before Time Out Beijing, The Beijinger, That’s Beijing and all the rest, with their guides to the city’s restaurants and nightlife; those were the days before Beijing even had any nightlife. Before mobile phones and the internet. Reporters called in their copy or filed by telex, a technology that was driven to extinction by fax machines. All that might seem as hard to imagine today as the fact that back in the early eighties in Beijing there was nothing cooler, nothing more hip or edgy, than an ‘underground’ poetry reading. The Party distrusted obliqueness and ambiguity – the bywords of ‘underground’ poetry – almost as much as they hated outright dissent. While the authorities only occasionally moved against poets, the presence of secret police at their gatherings and the odd thundering editorial in the People’s Daily against cultural miscreants like ‘misty’ poets and abstract artists, lent the gatherings an outlaw frisson.