The Empress Lover

by Linda Jaivin

  Whoomph.

  Whenever I am standing behind the bar and I hear the heavy, padded door-curtain fall back into place with an airy, muffled thud, I feel a thrill of anticipation. I couldn’t tell you what I am hoping for, exactly, and perhaps I don’t want to know, because all these years later Master Happy Fish’s counsel is ever in my ears. Desire creates the space for unhappiness. In the years before I met him, and especially in the years leading up to 1989, no one could have told me this, least of all a Daoist master in a Hawaiian shirt. I wouldn’t have listened. There are still moments when I don’t hear as well as I should. At the same time, and to be honest, probably more as a result of age, exhaustion and experience than philosophy, I do believe that I’m at the point where, like Master Happy Fish, I can look at pretty girls and all the rest and leave it at hope, that scudding step or two short of desire. I’ve only just got here. But I do wonder if here is not just the crumbling edge of a cliff that could still hurl me onto the rocks and into the sea.

  When I was young, I was ruled by desire. My desire had no limits. I wanted sex, love, excitement and fame. I wanted to experience every emotion in every poem that had ever been written, to sleep with every woman who had ever been born, delve into every school of philosophy and see every wonder this world had to offer. I wanted to walk among the clouds and feel the stars in my hair. My senses could be set alight by the rustle of leaves in the wind, the whirr of bicycle wheels in a lonely hutong, the earthy musk of an approaching thunderstorm, the throaty sound of a Beijing girl’s cursing, the sight of spring’s first green buds on the trees standing sentinel against the dusty red walls of the Forbidden City, or the flat, swelling heat of July. The ruins of the Yuanmingyuan whispered their lyrical melancholy directly into my ears and the touch of a girl’s skin was enough to singe the hair off my own.

  My generation was old enough to remember the long dark night of the Cultural Revolution but not so old that we were broken by it. We came of age in those uncertain years when everyone seemed to be holding their breath. We first let our breath out on Tiananmen Square in 1976, when Premier Zhou died and we mourned him, ourselves and the nation’s fate. After that there were the rumblings of earthquakes, terrestrial and political. We wept over lost opportunities, fear and uncertainty when Mao died in September that year. It was fitting, perhaps, that although he’d asked for cremation, the nation could not quite see its way clear even to burying him, and so he was preserved, destined to rise and fall, rise and fall in his mausoleum on an almost daily basis so that generations to come could be reassured – or otherwise – by the knowledge he remained among us.

  After all the eternal waiting for something to happen, hoping and dreaming, in the late seventies, we got an intoxicating whiff of freedom with Democracy Wall, where we expressed ourselves in poetry and art alongside the manifestos. We felt so lucky, and yet we understood how exquisitely tenuous it all was. We saw that luck threatened as the decade passed with each new bullshit campaign against ‘spiritual pollution’, ‘bourgeois liberalism’, or whatever bogeyman was haunting the dreams of the Politburo at night. So, like wild animals, we pursued freedom ferociously, pouncing on it, bringing it down alive, gorging ourselves on its steaming entrails.

  Today’s young people have grown up with the domesticated version of some of the freedoms we hunted and they’ve become tame too. I once saw a documentary about a zoo somewhere overseas where the animals have lots of room to roam. They’re still fenced in, and they still depend on their keepers for food, but they’re happy enough. That’s what it feels like today compared to the eighties. So long as you don’t jump the fence into the wilds of political activism, you can do pretty much whatever you like – make money, make love, play video games all day or dance all night. We, on the other hand, had to fight for every scrap of freedom: to wear the clothes we wanted to wear, to write songs and poems and make art that said what we wanted it to say, even just to walk hand in hand with the person we fancied. Every time we headbutted our cage, the walls moved outwards a metre or two. We did such a good job of widening it that kids today, half of them anyway, don’t even realise they’re still in a cage. Maybe they’re too busy trying to make a living, maybe they’re just sufficiently entertained, but I don’t know how many even try to figure out where the fences are. That bit about hunting down freedom and feeding on its entrails? That was Q’s metaphor. He was always prowling the edges of the cage.

  I met Q at university. I’ll never forget the first time I saw him. I’d just swung one of the precious places in the hastily rebuilt university system – and at one of Beijing’s top universities. My parents had come back from a stint at the ‘cadre school’ where they’d been sent after their punishment to ‘learn from the peasantry’ (only to learn what a mixed bag the revolution had been in the countryside). They returned to work in offices where they still found the occasional bloodstain on the walls, and where the corridors were haunted by the ghosts of colleagues who’d been beaten to death or hanged themselves. I was their future and their hope. And I, who’d spent years deprived of formal education, was infinitely conscious of my good luck. I would study hard and do them proud. I arrived at my dorm room with a small pile of clothes that gave off a motherly tang of laundry soap and sunshine, a hard pencil case with the slogan Aim higher with every step in Mao’s calligraphy on the cover and my father’s best pen cosseted within, a dictionary, an enamel washbasin, a toothbrush cup, a pale green thermos, a thick paper packet of rough tea leaves and a lidded jar to drink from, plus a few other items that I proceeded to arrange on and around one of the top bunks. One of my new flatmates, a southerner called Wu Jian, gave me a nail from which to hang my new khaki book bag with the name of the university stencilled across the top flap. I hammered the nail into the wall above my bed with the spine of my dictionary, cursing with what I gauged to be very grown-up confidence when a spray of plaster hit my blanket.

  Another classmate, Shugang, was busy colonising the third of the room’s four bunks. We were chatting about the classes we planned to take and the pretty girls we’d already seen on campus. We were trying to act a lot more off-hand and worldly than any of us actually were, when Q appeared in the doorway. Through some trick of perception, the angle of the sunlight streaming through the window perhaps, he emanated an almost godly glow. We were pretending to be cool even if the word, via English, had yet to arrive in China as ku. Q was the very definition of it. We all wore more or less the same clothes – cotton shirts of aspirational whiteness tucked into navy-blue or army-green loose cotton trousers, and black cloth shoes. Q’s clothes were no different but he wore them with style. It wasn’t a question of fashion – there was no such thing back then. It was something in the way he’d rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, something about the way his trousers, not definably less shapeless than ours, hung on his lean and muscular body. Q wore his clothes like a man. I’d felt grown up going off to university, but I knew in that instant I was still a boy.

  Q already owned the room. All three of us hastily jumped to present ourselves as though to a king. He had a natural majesty that occasionally bordered on arrogance, but when the arrogant are that majestic, people tend to forgive them. He flashed that secret, knowing smile that we’d all eventually see slay one girl after the other – and that none of us could even come close to imitating, though we certainly tried. He told us his name, but said that we should just call him Q, like the English letter, because his dad had nicknamed him that when he was little to remind him always to question things. It’s funny; if anyone else was called Q everyone automatically would have teased them, called them Ah Q after the infamously self-defeating and un-self-aware protagonist of Lu Xun’s famous story, but Q – no one even thought to mention it.

  ‘Your dad sounds pretty great. Is he a teacher?’ Wu Jian asked.

  ‘My dad, he …’ When he named his dad, our awe doubled, tripled, went off the charts. His dad had recently been politically ‘rehabilitated’ and honoured. We’d all read ab
out how he’d returned from overseas in 1949 as a ‘patriotic intellectual’ and worked alongside Liang Sicheng and others to try to save Beijing’s historic physical heritage, and had ended up in a labour reform camp in the late 1950s, where his health was ruined by three years of near-starvation in the great famine that, we didn’t know at the time, was largely man-made. Mao-made. We didn’t know a lot of things at the time. Thinking back on it now, I’m not sure we did know all that much about Q’s father. It’s more likely that we had a general notion about who his father was, what he’d done, and what happened to him, and time filled in the details.

  I do remember very clearly how Q merely had to glance at the bottom bunk where Shugang had spread his things and Shugang volunteered that if Q wanted that bunk he’d happily switch to the top one. ‘No need,’ said Q then, and I think we all understood that what he really meant was that when you’re Q, there’s no need to make people do something to prove that they would do it if you so much as asked.

  One late Saturday afternoon in the spring, Wu Jian was seated at his desk. He was supposed to be reading a book on Greek mythology but he was obsessing about some girl to Shugang, who sat on his bunk huddled over his feet, trimming his toenails. I was lying on my bunk, reading, young, restless. Q was out somewhere.

  That morning, a ferocious sandstorm had roared through the city. Now, an eye-achingly beautiful afternoon stretched blue angel wings over a city that was still blinking from under its blanket of grit. Observing the seraphic sky over the top of my book, I was filled with a kind of ecstasy. I wrote my first poem then and there, and Q, when he returned, called it ‘genius’. I don’t think it was, and I don’t know if he meant it, but from that day on I considered myself, and eventually became, a poet. That’s just the sort of person Q was and the effect he had on people. On me.

  Those were heady days: there was the brief explosion of public free expression that was Democracy Wall, with its furious poetry and handwritten pleas for justice and freedom; the first exhibitions of art that didn’t obey any diktat but that of the artists’ own will; the normalisation of relations with the US; the open-air poetry readings; the tapes of pop music smuggled in by foreign journalists and others that somehow made their way into the hands of people like us – or people like Q, who then put them into the hands of people like us. The older generation, beaten and broken, licked their wounds and wept for their lost years. We were the found generation. Our moon was high, our season come and we were all riding the bore of the Qiantang River. We were young. The water was beautiful. And the air was full of siren calls.

  I met Chunmei in my first year at university. So far as I was concerned, it was love at first sight. She was in my philosophy class, whip-smart, moon-faced and tough-minded, and it took me months to summon the courage to strike up a friendship and two years to persuade her to go out with me. When she did, I was in bliss.

  It would be unfair to say she disliked Q. No one disliked Q. It was impossible. He was charming, witty and charismatic. He was a party to which you wanted to be invited, a virus you wanted to catch. But some women had a stronger immune system than others, and I was unquestionably grateful that Chunmei was one. But as I saw her more I saw him less and life, I hate to say it, lost a bit of its colour.

  We all graduated and got our work assignments – Chunmei to the Academy of Social Sciences, me to the Philosophy Publishing House, Q to People’s Literature. The underground art and poetry scene was losing out to rock ’n’ roll – we’d been the rock stars of our generation, the next had real rock stars. We, artists and poets, went to all the ‘parties’ – everyone used the English word – where Cui Jian and Dou Wei and the other rockers played. But for the first time in our lives, we were no longer the youngest people in the room. We’d been little kids in the Cultural Revolution, which was when the new generation had been born.

  The old gang still got together for drinking sessions that lasted into the wee hours; Q could always make you forget that you had to get on your bike and pedal to work the next day. Life was still exciting. We weren’t the youngest but we were still dancing. In 1989, of course, the rug was finally pulled from under all our feet and everyone went flying.

  In 1931, after the execution of five young writers by Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government, Lu Xun wrote, ‘I can but stand by, looking on as friends become new ghosts. I seek an angry poem from among the swords.’ Do dreams die? Or do they just await new dreamers? Some of us disappeared forever. Some of us went overseas. Some, shedding all dreams except those of wealth, threw their arms over their head, bounced and dived into the sea. That’s what we called going into business in the nineties: xiahai, jumping into the sea. Me, I wrote futile poems of anguish and anger. Then I stopped.

  As the Tang poet wrote, once the river’s water has flowed into the sea, it never returns to its source. If Li Po and Dionysus had once been my gods, over the years their temples fell into ruin and debasement. Karaoke bars and nightclubs where girls’ thighs carry price tags are not altars of Dionysus; they are the shrines of Mammon. When Li Po composed his famous poem that went, ‘If life is to have meaning, live it to the full; raise not an empty goblet to the moon,’ he never said the goblet had to be made of gold or that it should be filled with XO or 2005 Château this or that. With whom should one raise a goblet in such an age?

  Some part of me stayed in that Daoist temple, or perhaps some part of that temple stayed in me. When I told my friends about my encounter with Master Happy Fish they found it most amusing. Shugang gave me the nickname that has stuck to me to this day like toffee to teeth: the Sage. Sometimes even I forget it’s not my real name.

  After Chunmei left for Canada, and following the open-heart surgery without anaesthetic that was our protracted, long-distance break-up, I had other girlfriends, long and short term, serious and less so, and continued my work at the Philosophy Publishing House, more and more robotically editing treatises on the meaning of life. But I wrote no more poetry: 1989 knocked the poetry, the romance and the wind out of me.

  Then, on the day of the Spring Purification Festival in the middle of the first decade of the new millennium, the third day of the third lunar month, I was at a dinner with Wu Jian, Shugang and other old friends and classmates. One of them, now a darling of the international art scene, had invited the gang to a new restaurant outside the Fourth Ring Road called the Orchid Pavilion. The name came from the famous fourth-century gathering to celebrate the day of Spring Purification commemorated by the poet Wang Xizhi in the single most treasured work of calligraphy in all Chinese history. The festival happened to fall on the weekend that year, so we could make a proper night of it.

  The taxi driver, a rough-edged young man from the rural suburbs, had never heard of the Orchid Pavilion Teahouse. When we finally found it, I admit I was as amazed as he was by this stark, funereal-white garden teahouse set in a vast field of Zen-raked white gravel. A solemn attendant in a wide-sleeved damask robe, looking like he’d stepped straight out of the Song scroll painting Along the River During the Qingming Festival, led me to a private courtyard. At its centre was a gracious pavilion; it was designed with similar elegant austerity to the rest of the place. It featured sliding walls to accommodate the weather. The table was low, the chairs cushiony and a meandering channel was carved into the floor to allow a clear stream to flow past each seat.

  The party had already begun when I crossed the miniature humpbacked bridge into the pavilion. They gave me a raucous welcome and said that my punishment for being late was to bottoms-up a cup of wuliangye on the spot. As we joked and teased one another about thinning hair and thickening waists, remarking on the latter with the traditional, now backhanded compliment of fafule, how your fortune has grown, a team of discreet servers laid out a sumptuous drinkers’ banquet: plate upon plate of cold, room-temperature, and hot dishes, northern taste with southern finesse. Our porcelain wine cups boasted an unusual and, as one young server self-importantly demonstrated, hydrodynamic design: they fl
oated in the stream. As though speaking to schoolchildren, the boy recited a prepared spiel about Wang Xizhi and the Preface to the Poems Composed at the Orchid Pavilion, explaining how when a floating cup stopped where one was sitting, that person had to drink it and compose a poem. We listened politely, humouring him as though we’d never heard the story before. But when the boy went on with a few stale suggestions as to what and how we might poetise (raising our cups to the moon, etc.), we gently shooed him away.

  Our host raised his glass and toasted from the Preface: ‘Furen zhi xiangyu, fuyang yishi.’ The bonds that connect us stretch across a lifetime. Then, formalities dispensed with, we joked around, drank, and caught up on each other’s news, the divorces, the children, the travels and the latest trends in the art and poetry that was once so central to all of our lives.

  ‘To absent friends.’

  ‘To Q, if only he were able to be here tonight.’

  ‘To Q.’

  ‘Q.’

  ‘Sage? You’re unusually quiet.’

  I quoted another line from Wang Xizhi’s ode to impermanence: ‘Zhongqi yu jin.’ And in the end, all returns to nothingness.

  A silence.

  ‘Speaking of which,’ said Jiayu, whom we called Yoga because her name sounded like the word for yoga – yujia – backwards, ‘remember years ago, when you told us about that temple and Master Happy Fish?’

  ‘And you all gave me so much shit for it.’

  ‘I know, I know.’ Yoga laughed. ‘But the story stayed with me, and a few years later, I was on a recce in the southwest.’ Yoga had become a documentary filmmaker. Her work, which centred on environmental issues, couldn’t be shown in China but it was invited to festivals all over the world. ‘I found myself in this little town. Something about the name rang a bell, but it took me a while to work out why, and then I remembered your story. I found my way to the temple. It’s been renovated something terrible, I mean tacky. And the monks looked a bit central casting, if you know what I mean. As in Communist Party Central. Kind of weird, if you ask me, as I thought they only really bothered these days with the bigger temples in the big cities, but what would I know? Anyway, I went in and asked for Master Happy Fish. Everyone, from the gatekeeper to the fortune tellers to the monks and even the lady sweeping around the deities, looked at me with a strange mix of blankness and suspicion, which suggested that either they had never heard of him, or that something, I don’t know, bad had happened and that I’d rung all the alarm bells. In the end, I left, wishing I’d never gone in. I don’t know what I was hoping for, enlightenment, amusement, or just a good story to tell you next time we met. Sadly, it was all something of an anticlimax. There was nothing of the place that remotely matched your story except for the architecture.’