Barbarian Lost

by Alexandre Trudeau

  Viv and I arrange to meet in front of the CCTV buildings, in the eastern part of town. She tells me to wait at the front gate near Professor Wang’s office building. “You’ll see soldiers guarding it,” she adds.

  Indeed, the CCTV offices are guarded by the People’s Liberation Army. I imagine the CBC offices being on a Canadian military base.

  Viv’s stuck in traffic, so Wang comes out to meet me at the gate and usher me through the military checkpoint. He apologizes for the nature of his workplace. “Television stations are not like this in your country,” he says as we climb a grimy staircase in an old concrete office building. He is fairly young and fit.

  “Actually, CCTV has a huge new fortress for all its channels,” he continues, “a modern and expensive building that I’m sure you have seen. But I keep an office in this less assuming setting.”

  Wang’s office is cramped—and empty except for his brand-new computer. I’m not quite sure what to talk about, so I begin throwing him technical questions about his channel, his program and the individual documentaries.

  I learn that his program produces portrait documentaries. He has only recently become its producer. He’s in charge of half a dozen directors and a dozen post-production personnel. He was a director on the show before being promoted.

  “Who are your documentaries about?” I ask.

  “Famous people—movie stars, filmmakers, artists, some business people.”

  “Politicians?”

  “Yes, sometimes.”

  “Your show’s powerful.”

  “It can be,” he happily acknowledges.

  “Who tells you what to do?”

  “No one tells me what to do. They only tell me what not to do.”

  “Who are they?” I inquire.

  “The CCTV 10 producers,” he says. “I produce Great Masters. They are in charge of the whole channel’s programming.” Then he adds curiously, “My job is very hard,” and waits for me to probe.

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because a lot of people think they know whom I should make documentaries about. Sometimes people come to me with gifts.”

  “I see.”

  He nods, grinning, then continues: “I refuse them, of course. But managing this is not easy.”

  Wang’s show is broadcast throughout China. Virtually every television set in the country gets the signal. Canadian producers are proud when a million people watch their documentaries. Wang’s show gets tens of millions of viewers every night. A main vein, one might say. From his bare office on the third floor of building E, Wang has a say over the Chinese people’s values, a say over celebrity in China, the new cult of personality.

  “Movie stars are always a safe bet,” he says. “Very popular.”

  Wang explains that this is because they can be worshipped without consequence. Business people are easy as well, he admits, because their agenda is clear and simple: they want to sell stuff. Artists and musicians are typically more difficult—it can be more difficult to control the message. Politicians are more sensitive still. Political power is a delicate affair in China. Wang tells me that he walks a thin line when dealing with certain types of people.

  “What makes a good documentary filmmaker, Professor?” Viv asks, once she arrives.

  “I look for people who have lived a lot,” Wang says. “People who have suffered. People who have had many crazy love affairs, who have been divorced, who have been flat broke and have moved around a lot. People who have known upsets and instability. They always have the most empathy and understanding for human nature.”

  Beijing is built on a great plain surrounded on all sides by mountains. To the north of the city is the Great Wall, charting its way across an extremely rugged stretch of mountains. A visit to the wall or to those mountains will reveal how arid the territory is. Beijing is a city at the edge of a desert. Beyond the mountains toward the west is a vast wasteland of dusty, rocky landscapes and shifting sands. When the wind kicks up in the west, the capital of China is engulfed in dust.

  Like Los Angeles or Mexico City, the Chinese capital is in a valley, trapped by the surrounding mountains. When no wind blows, a pocket of air forms above the valley that fills up with the fumes of automobiles and the acrid smoke of industry. In Beijing, eyes are constantly irritated and bloodshot. Respiratory troubles are rife among children. The city’s air can sometimes be a serious assault on the body. With hundreds if not thousands of new cars out on the road every day, the air quality is not likely to improve.

  But the capital has even more serious concerns than its air quality: water. The provinces around the capital have been experiencing an unprecedented drought over the past decade. There’s simply less water in the region; meanwhile, the city needs more and more.

  In the old neighbourhoods within the second ring, many of the hutong dwellings were without flush toilets. Several dozen families shared a single public latrine. But with so many of these old lodgings now demolished to make room for modern buildings, and the new high-rises equipped with all the modern amenities, including flush toilets, water mains into the city are multiplying.

  The city’s water comes from reservoirs in the same dry mountains where the dust clouds originate. Sometimes when the dust gets unbearable, public works brigades shoot rockets into the sky to release silver iodide crystals into the atmosphere. These crystals soak up the moisture and release it upon the capital in the form of rain, dampening the dust. But this bizarre method comes at a cost: wicked from the atmosphere, less moisture reaches the mountains and the western barrens, further drying them and thus taxing Beijing water sources and exasperating the erosion and dust problems.

  Where this cycle is leading is anybody’s guess. One thing is for sure: bigger water and air problems are ahead for the capital. Vivien and I are keen to make a trip to one of the city’s main reservoirs, so we charter a car and head north.

  Viv has repeatedly told me about how reluctant average people might be to talk to us. “Your average Chinese person is guarded around foreigners,” she says.

  I have never been good at making first contact. Viv’s pessimistic outlook doesn’t make it any less daunting for me. I emphasize that she needs to be the one to make contact with people. I tell her I will act like I’m completely out of it—bored, distracted or simple-minded. “Like I’m hardly even present,” I say. “Like a tourist inadvertently following you around on some detailed tour of China.”

  “Hard to imagine, really,” she counters, “but we’ll try.”

  The city sprawls almost to the mountains. Smog makes them invisible until we are very close. At their foot, the urban areas give way to the countryside, sprinkled with a few apple and peach orchards. The Ming emperors are buried in these foothills. Their tombs remain an attraction for tourists on their way to the Great Wall.

  Tombs are important to the Chinese. They are stone reminders of our fleeting presence on earth. Chinese civilization was built on the memory of ancestors; its continuity cemented by ancestor rituals. Imperial tombs are that much more important. They’re relics of an era. But our journey leads us to other ghosts.

  We turn toward the northeast, following civilization along the mountains, and reach an area of intense construction. Through great clouds of dust churned up by huge machines making new roads and housing developments, we see our first old village across the plain. Beijing stops here.

  Earlier that morning, we drank a lot of tea. We decide to head into the village to find a place to pee. The road through the village was once paved. But it hasn’t got any attention in decades. Traffic and trucks have ground wide potholes into the road. There are now more potholes than road.

  I have seen this kind of road in many places in the Third World. These places aren’t developing. They are falling apart, torn up by disease, war and poverty. But this village is not simply ignored by powerless corrupt cliques like those in the other places I have seen, not simply forgotten and bereft of any economic activity or state structures. This v
illage is not neglected. It’s doomed.

  At least the trucks don’t pass through the village anymore, not since the government started building the big road. In fact, the feeling I get driving through the village is that no cars come here anymore at all, save the delivery guy once a week.

  The street is filled with people. Old people. They obligingly clear the road for our car. They are coldly curious as to why we have come to their village. I laughingly say to Viv to announce to them that we have come to piss in their village. Vulgarity aside, she thinks that it would be a reasonable thing to do. “It’s why we’re here, isn’t it?” she says.

  “Damn right,” I concur.

  We stop the car and proceed on foot.

  The garb of the village is dusty black; the style, pyjama, unisex. But these are not just clothes, they are uniforms, long ago issued by the government. They even come with matching caps. For all the poverty of their surroundings, these elderly people are in fact extremely dignified, filled with silent purpose.

  Respectfully, Viv asks an old woman where the public washroom is. She points us down an earth road just off the main street. The washroom is a single-unit brick outhouse built into the side of a building. Qing dynasty, by the looks of it. I let Viv have the privilege and head to an empty field down the road. She tells me to take as long a time as possible.

  I loiter, looking at the clay-brick constructions bordering the field. On my return, I find the old woman and Viv chatting. I decide not to interrupt and so go look for something to drink. Not a chance in this village, I quickly see. I remember that we have bottled tea in the car. As I fetch it, a group of old men catch my eye. There are seven of them in a row on the front stoop of a post office–like building. Some squatting, some standing, some sitting on minuscule folding stools. A few of the men wear not black but grey uniforms. They’re all dapper. Clearly the old guard, I tell myself.

  Viv approaches and tells me that the old woman is a widow and a grandmother. Her grandchildren are in school nearby. Her daughter is in the city working. Her son is also working but far away. He came back once a few years ago. He stayed for a while, then left again. She misses him terribly but doesn’t know if she’ll ever see him again. All the grown children have now gone away to work as well.

  Viv asked her about the water situation, but the old woman couldn’t understand the question and didn’t give a coherent answer.

  “One more thing,” Viv says. “They’re Manchu people.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Their appearance, her accent. And look at the school,” she says, pointing up the street. Its walls are covered with small Manchu flags. They flutter in the wind, brandishing colours and symbols. They look like children’s cut-outs strung up on a line. We concentrate a little and then our ears perk up. The sound of children chanting in Mandarin faintly echoes through the village.

  “Ask these men behind me where the reservoir is,” I urge Viv.

  A couple of them point in its direction, but they tell her that we can’t get to it that way. Go back the way you came, they say. Then they ask her who I am and why I look so serious.

  “He’s a tourist. That’s just the way he looks,” she says.

  So much for my distracted imbecile routine.

  Viv asks a few things about the village, then inquires about their banner tribes. The men offer only shrugs and smiles, then wish us a happy journey. We respectfully withdraw.

  “The Manchu came here as an army,” Viv explains as we drive out of the village. “Every man was part of a regiment or clan. We call these groups ‘banners’ for the flags they carried. Those are what the flags on the school represented.”

  The sly looks the men gave Viv suddenly make more sense. “Yes, you’re right, we are men of the Manchu clan,” their loaded silence conveyed. The statement is as much a warning as an apology; it means that Viv’s question was pointless—that, sadly, the clans’ time in these parts has passed and they, men of the Manchu, are now as irrelevant as her question about their banners.

  The Manchu were the people of the last dynasty in China. Their great armies descended from the north upon the decaying Ming Empire. As with the Mongols before the Ming, the Manchu rule, called the Qing dynasty, was at first seen by the Han Chinese majority as a kind of foreign occupation.

  The early Qing emperors kept control of China through a network of Manchu clansmen or bannermen, as they were called, placed throughout all Chinese institutions. The Qing emperors backed up this soft power with hard power: their own Manchu armies were always ready and never stood down.

  The Qing armies were like no modern army. They were more like tribes. When the Manchu aristocracies set themselves up as sovereigns over all of China, their tribesmen followed them into China by the hundreds of thousands. Bannermen and their dependents were given land around strategic cities throughout China; their camps would have been military villages.

  The villages north of Beijing, around the Ming tombs, are probably a residue of the Manchu forces established there several centuries ago. For a while, they kept the peace in China. The people of these villages, living so close to both the old capital and the mountains beyond which lies Manchuria proper, might even have been of the Qing emperor’s reserve. With a moment’s notice, the emperor in the Forbidden City could call on these men to mobilize and seek marching orders. The early Qing military would have been impressive; the soldiers would have fought as one force, one will. They would have been fierce, organized and loyal. For a while, they would have been what China needed. But alas they were not masters of the sea in an age when maritime supremacy became paramount.

  So, in time, even the flag of the hard and military Manchu order grew tattered. Exposed to China, soaking up Chinese ways, the Qing too gave into the cycle of all things and grew weak. In China, the cycle of the yin and the yang has ruled since time immemorial. What is black will be white, what is hot, cold. Man, woman, strong, weak.

  We leave the village and head back toward the construction at the edge of Beijing. It isn’t hard to see what fate awaits the village. It will be swept away by machines, devoured by the new capital of the new Middle Kingdom, and in its place, a new kind of life will begin, the like of which China has never seen before.

  Soon the stoop, the latrine, the post office–like building, the old people themselves will be gone. The children will go to a new, big school. Perhaps this is why they fly the flags at their current school—to say, Children, whatever happens, remember that you carry the banners. Whatever is said, hold your heads up, for you are of the Manchu clan, which once brought peace and prosperity to China.

  Finally, we’re heading in the right direction. A broad valley between two ridges opens up to us. It’s sunny and fertile and without villages. The great dam is visible. It’s an immense concrete wall connecting one hilltop to the next. We follow a narrow road that winds its way up one of the hills, passing a multitude of pagodas and tourist-trap restaurants as our car climbs toward the reservoir.

  As we reach a crest, the vista opens up to the reservoir. It’s vast, and picturesque with its surrounding mountains. The road circumscribes the man-made lake. It leads us to the back of the valley, where the reservoir is fed by a creek flowing from the mountains. This September, the creek looks dry. We find a small village and decide to stop.

  The village is a series of earth-brick houses tightly grouped around central courtyards. Between the courtyards tight alleyways chart their way. I can make out, over a wall, two crops: corn—unmistakable with its high, plumed ears—and gourds, on vines. We turn into an alley that makes its way deep into the dense village and come upon an old man in a straw hat.

  “Please excuse my bothering you, respected elder,” Viv appropriately starts, “but I would like to know about this village. Is this an old village?”

  “Oh yes,” the old man keenly answers. “It has been around for a time.”

  “And how old are you?”

  “Over eighty.”

  �
�Wow, you’re in great health for someone over eighty,” Viv comments.

  “Yes, this mountain living’s good for the health,” the old man cheerfully says, “not like in the cities. Every morning I climb into the mountains to check on my nut trees. It’s all the exercise that I need.”

  He pulls from his pocket walnuts, which he proudly shows us. Then he looks squarely at me and laughs. “Oh, I can tell right away that he is a foreigner. There’s no mistaking that.”

  “Yes,” Viv continues, “we have come from the city to see the reservoir. Is the water level usually this low?”

  “Not usually. It has been a hot summer. A drought even. But the creek is flowing now.”

  “How long have you been here?” Viv asks.

  “All my life. Since before the reservoir was built. But when I was young I was a soldier of the People’s Liberation Army. I fought under Lin Biao.”

  Lin Biao was one of the greatest of the Communist generals. His armies defeated huge Nationalist formations in a series of battles across Manchuria. Those were the boldest hours of the revolution. The victories in Manchuria, with hundreds of thousands of northerners switching sides during battle, resulted in the flight of Chiang Kai-shek to Taiwan and overwhelming Communist victory in China.

  By winning in the north, the Communists won over the Manchu clan and Mao had succeeded: a man from Hunan had convinced all of China, even the northerners, that the heavens had opened to him and through him would bless China with a new order. Mao never could have done this without Lin Biao and countless others. But nonetheless, the East was Red.

  A bizarre culmination of events led to a tragic end for Lin Biao. In the late 1960s, the general rose to become Mao’s designated successor and one of the leaders of the Cultural Revolution. But in the maddening events of the revolution, Mao grew tired of his champion and turned on him. Sensing the walls closing in on him, Lin made a break for it and attempted to flee China for the Soviet Union. His plane reportedly crashed in the mountains of Mongolia.