Barbarian Lost

by Alexandre Trudeau

  History will probably lose track of the spiralling of events that led to Lin Biao’s disgrace, flight and death. Such is already the fate of the Cultural Revolution—those at the top responsible for the madness are all dead; those who took part in it, like those who suffered it, do not want or need to remember it, and now even they grow old.

  Chinese historians gloss over the Cultural Revolution as if it barely existed. Foreign historians mostly characterize it as something sinister, grotesque, infantile and bizarre. No one can fully explain it. But here in the Manchu fringe of the old capital, Lin Biao is proudly remembered by this old man as a warrior chief whose banner you definitely wanted to fight under.

  Two elderly woman show up carrying baskets of vegetables. They gently chide the old man for shooting his mouth off to strangers. They’re friendly but direct with us.

  “Who are you?”

  “A tourist and his guide,” Viv says.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “A place to eat.”

  After a lengthy deliberation, they finally agree on one household near the entrance of the village that might serve food. By now, the women are positively chatty. Viv gets them to talk about water.

  They have running water in the morning, they say without the faintest intimation that such a thing wouldn’t be perfectly usual and obvious. Perhaps they remember having to fetch water from a well, so a tap into the house that gives water a few hours every day must seem luxurious.

  “Beijing gets its water right here,” Viv tells me. “It flows all day in Beijing, but see how it is rationed here? Further afield, it’s scarce. I remember reading several articles saying that people on the fringes of Beijing don’t always have enough water for their crops.”

  We head toward the house that was recommended to us. It turns out to be right next to where we parked the car. We fetch the driver and ask him to join us for lunch. After an exchange of questions, the woman of the house understands her opportunity. She leads us through a building and into a courtyard surrounded by a few brick houses. Our hostess is in her mid-thirties and is assisted by an older woman. Her young son is also present, just back from school.

  They are peasants, weathered, pragmatic and tough. On this sunny, warm autumn day, it’s lovely in the courtyard. Half the space is brick-floored; the other half, planted earth. The fall harvest is near. The corn is ripe and golden. The vines climb on a trellis, providing dappled shade to a good part of the floored courtyard. Gourds hang down, fat and rich. Stools are pulled out of a wooden kitchen hut that has been built against the back wall of the courtyard; they are placed around a table beneath the vines. We’re brought hot water to drink and invited to sit down.

  I study the outdoor stove. A brick base cradles an immense steel wok. Our hostess fires it up by throwing dried corn husks and chaff into hot embers beneath it. Moments later, she’s frying a handful of fresh herbs and garlic. The woman notices me hovering about and laughs at my interest, which I can scarcely hide.

  Our meal consists of shrimp from the reservoir, fried in their shells with salt and spice, big flat beans fried with garlic and herbs, and a thick soup of meat and vegetables.

  The young boy has been shy but intrigued, pretending to do his homework to the side but instead watching us intently. He has a shaved head and roughed-up knees and face—the kind of sturdy child with whom I might have run wild as a boy.

  Viv asks him if he’s learning his characters. He answers in the affirmative in a gruff but friendly manner. His mother then tells him that we are people of the wide world and he should talk to us to see what we’re like. She tells us he’s learning English and urges him to speak to us. The boy indulges her: “One, two, three,” he says with great concentration.

  The conversation continues between us all with few words but much laughter. The hostess is curious to know where Viv and the driver come from. It turns out that they are both from Shandong Province. We all share an unabashed chuckle about this happy coincidence and toast Shandong. The meal costs us twenty dollars altogether.

  “Tell me about Shandong,” I ask Viv on the way back to Beijing.

  “Well, my people, Shandong people, are everywhere,” she says.

  “Why?”

  “Shandong has always been populous. The floods and the droughts and the poverty have long made people emigrate from the place. But it is also the province of Chinese religion, where both Confucius and Mencius originated, so it’s always on our minds.”

  “I’m glad we’re going there next. A place to think about the Chinese soul,” I say.

  “Are you religious?”

  “Let’s just say I believe in ghosts,” I answer with a smile.

  “Ghosts! Weren’t you laughing at me for being superstitious?” she says. “I figured you were the scientific, rationalist type.”

  “I was just prodding your beliefs.”

  “Well, I think it makes sense to remain vigilant toward religion,” Vivien says, then adds, “Lao-tzu says, ‘It was when intelligence and knowledge appeared that the Great Artifice began.’ He meant for us to be wary of any organized system of belief.”

  “To me, all organized systems of belief are beautiful. And fragile.”

  “I have to admit that I have also always been curious about all matters spiritual,” she says. “Who taught you about religion?”

  “My father.”

  “Mine too.”

  CHAPTER 3

  The Old East

  The head pillowed on a spear, waiting for the day to break.

  —biography of Liu Kun, Book of Jin, seventh century

  We are headed toward Shandong Province in our chartered car. Our first objective is Jinan, an industrial city on the banks of the Yellow River. It’s a six-hour drive south from Beijing. The highway passes through a melancholy landscape of intensive farming. The area is oppressively flat and entirely pressed into food production. Grain, cabbage, soy and corn are interspersed with the occasional grove of poplar, planted as windbreaks. From the highway, the territory seems almost empty of human inhabitation. The planners who built the highway charted its path to avoid the congestion of human settlements that can only occasionally be spotted on the horizon.

  Just before Jinan, the landscape becomes more watery. The Yellow River has been tapped for irrigation for millennia and still is. Dikes and waterways are everywhere. Finally, the river proper appears. It’s spanned by many low-lying bridges. As we cross one, the vista opens up a little. Jinan splays out along the river. Its numerous concrete high-rises and smokestacks contrast with a backdrop of hazy blue hills. To complete the industrial picture, there’s a train crossing the river and another train working its way along tracks on the distant shore.

  A major hub, Jinan is where the main north-south axis from Beijing to Shanghai and the old east-west axis of the Yellow River converge. Although big and active, the city still doesn’t have much to attract outsiders.

  We’re stopping in industrial Jinan to meet with a young man who’s a proponent of the New Confucianism movement. Discovered on the Internet, Wu Fei’s personal website features patterns for the ancient robes worn by disciples of the master. Apparently, Wu makes his own clothing using them.

  As we approach, numerous phone calls are made to determine his precise whereabouts within the rambling, nondescript city. Wu isn’t altogether comfortable with our visit. He passes on several cautionary messages: he lives with his parents in a modest flat; he hardly speaks English; he may or may not be wearing his robes to greet us. These caveats only make us more curious about this unusual individual.

  We finally locate his building. It’s deep in the city, one among many indistinct apartment buildings. To maximize space in these cramped living quarters, the balconies are often enclosed in glass or plastic and used as storage lockers, laundry rooms, kitchens or greenhouses. So the buildings’ facades resemble stacks of glass boxes packed with stuff and plants.

  From the street, we proceed through an opening into an
inner courtyard. The display there is even more chaotic. Part of the courtyard serves as a parking lot, but the vehicles strewn about are in mid-repair. There is the space allotted to a thick clutter of bicycles. An area for children to play. A few rows of vegetable beds, plus a multitude of gourd vines climbing all over the place. More ramshackle and cluttered balconies rise high above us. Several brick huts have also been erected in the courtyard. Wu’s place is on the ground floor at the back.

  The flat’s a dank cell made of a succession of jam-packed rooms. The first two serve as living and sleeping rooms. The back room is a kitchen. A tiny wooden locker encloses the toilet. The few windows open onto walls or windows of adjoining buildings. The place is filthy.

  Wu’s appearance contrasts with that of his earthly abode. He has elected to wear his robes and appears to us in a full gown of bright white. His long hair is worn in a topknot. He’s young and sports the wispiest of beards. He greets us in the traditional manner: with a bow, his hands clenched together in a fist at chest level.

  He tells us that New Confucianism is mostly a grassroots movement. He then carefully explains its doctrine to us: “Some might say that when our country regained prosperity, there was a desire to restore our cultural identity, to return to the roots of the nation. Others might say it sprang from the heart of every Chinese person who hopes to discover where we came from and who we are. Whatever the case, people came to the movement from all levels of society. For example, many young people, younger even than me, started wearing traditional Han clothing. There are also people ten or twenty years older than me who spend their time in the study of the old texts. Others are utopian practitioners. My friends and I have mostly picked the scholarly path.

  “Whatever our divergences, all New Confucianists are outside the system. We all want to take responsibility as Chinese men and women to pass on our culture to the next generation. Of course, we have our worries, but we are optimists.”

  “How did you get involved?” I ask.

  “When I began my studies,” he tells me, “I was interested in Western ways of thinking. Existentialism especially. I was interested in notions of freedom and equality, and the idea of individual participation in social change. But at the same time, at school, I found the atmosphere for learning oppressive and obstructive. I was miserable. I needed a way out. I started reading the classics. To my surprise, they weren’t at all like what we had been taught. I was stunned by Confucius’s positive attitude in the face of terrific hardships. I was inspired. And I began to adjust my own emotions. I became optimistic.”

  He admits not imagining at first that he would become a Confucian scholar, but he describes growing more interested in Chinese history: “I began to imagine what the ancient times were like, what the people looked like, how they behaved and what they believed. Then, some years ago, I met a great master online. He’d made a traditional robe for himself, like the one I’m wearing. I realized that the lives of the ancient people and their poise were not just faraway dreams. They were things that I could embrace now. All I needed was to just do it.”

  “Did your decision to live like this encounter any resistance?”

  “My parents always gave me a lot of freedom, as long as I can remember. If my desire was reasonable, they would not interfere. I guess my wearing of Chinese ceremonial clothes and researching the classics seems reasonable enough to them. Some distant relatives may think that I’m weird, but there wasn’t any serious disapproval. As for my friends, they’re all supportive, though they sometimes shy away from me when I wear these kinds of clothes in the street,” he admits with a smile.

  Wu’s room is the middle one in the apartment and is the path from the front room and his parents’ bedroom to the kitchen. The passage is almost totally obstructed by storage boxes. His bed is against the wall, beneath an opaque glass window with several cracked panes. It’s stacked with clothing. A diminutive desk is covered with old books and papers. He barely has room for his computer.

  He shows me some of the online publications he’s authored. They’re technical drawings of ceremonial robes, with instructions on how to fabricate them by hand. “Gowns for ancestor worship,” he says.

  “Do you worship your ancestors?”

  “Sort of. I try to find out who they were and learn from them.”

  As we exit the courtyard and return to our car, ready to move on from Jinan, I joke, “Well, the ghost of Master Kong is certainly present in unit 7 on the ground floor of block C.”

  To the east of Jinan, on the coast, Qingdao is Shandong’s biggest city and a place well known in the West for its beer. Viv once lived there and knows of two people whose profiles touch upon things for which I’d expressed an interest: middle-class entrepreneurship and export production. She even suggests a third person whose profile involves a totally different yet fascinating aspect of China: a medical professor who publishes China’s biggest gay magazine.

  We fly to Qingdao. Once a symbol of the Communist Revolution, the passenger railroad is giving way to other forms of travel. Like the multiplication of personal automobiles on Chinese roads, the proliferation of air travel is a sign of the burgeoning freedom of the middle class. Until recently, the means to fly around the country were beyond the vast majority of Chinese citizens. Air travel was the sparse realm of the upper echelons of the Communist Party. But on our evening flight, there are students, officials, entrepreneurs and even a few old workers and peasants.

  Qingdao airport is clean and new, built to handle an even greater volume of passenger traffic. China’s current leaders are also great believers in the power of optimism. Sustained growth tends to do this. In any case, the belief has driven bold investment in infrastructure. Hundreds of grand new airports and highways have been built across China over the last couple of decades.

  Qingdao is a hilly city. We speed along the brightly lit elevated highway that winds its way from the airport to the coast where the old city lies. Viv explains that though she grew up in a city a hundred kilometres down the coast, Qingdao is where she started her adult life.

  She chats with the taxi driver. Through the pitch and rhythm of her words, she adopts a respectful, girlish approach with the gruff older man, made all the more sympathetic by her oblique flattery and seemingly naive curiosity. This approach would coax even the roughest type into calmly sharing his experiences.

  “No, I don’t own this cab,” he tells her. “Some cabbies acquired their vehicles over the past years, but more recently, big conglomerates have made it difficult for independents to get their licences.”

  We’ve chosen to stay at a youth hostel. It’s ridiculously cheap: seven bucks a night each. It occupies an old hall of some sort, perhaps a former regimental mess or men’s club. Qingdao was once a bustling German colonial town. German builders or adept Chinese imitators erected the old building the hostel occupies, along with many others in the central areas of the city. They’re all cream-coloured stucco, three or four storeys high, with steeply peaked red-tiled roofs in the style of Bremen. Many old cobbled streets also remain.

  At the hostel, the modern Western presence manifests itself differently. The usual drifters are loitering around the lobby; an American girl is gabbing loudly on the house phone. A goateed hipster is surfing the Web at the bar. We climb sturdy wooden stairs to a long, sonorous corridor leading to rooms under the gables.

  My room’s bare; the walls, scuffed. All it contains is a hospital-like metal bed, a sink, and a wooden chair and table that look as if they have been painted a dozen times. The gabled window is cut into the steep roof. Dropping my bag, I open it to let in some air, then head out to meet Viv in the lounge.

  She’s not yet there. An aging Californian with a perma-tan, dyed hair and multiple piercings is chatting up two Australian girls. He looks slightly manic and is on the edge of losing their attention. I bury my face in an old magazine to avoid becoming his next target. Viv finally shows up.

  “From here on, let’s avoid hostels,” I
say as we exit the building.

  “They’re the cheapest accommodation.”

  “I don’t care. Let’s just stay where the Chinese stay.”

  We descend the hill toward the bustle, hoping to find food. We don’t have to look far, even at this late hour. We come to a street still full of noise and action. On this balmy night, people are eating and drinking at tables right in the middle of the dirty street. Trash and empty kegs are piled up along the sidewalks.

  Amid the chaos, we choose the establishment that seems the least degenerate. Fat Sister, by name. Its keeper is a mighty matron who greets us energetically. After authoritative commands, a table is quickly cleaned. We are seated and attended to immediately. Fat Sister herself takes our order, making emphatic suggestions that we are wise to follow.

  The main course consists of a large plate of steamed clams served with a dipping sauce of light vinegar and ginger. The clams are sweet and nicely firm.

  “My kind of food,” Viv gushes.

  A delegation of petty officials turns up and Fat Sister swings into action. Tables are cleaned and pushed together. Pints of beer are quickly brought out. Some of the officials are already inebriated and begin cheerfully toasting the group and Fat Sister.

  “They’re party officials from Sichuan Province,” Viv tells us. “I can tell by their accent. And their rough manners.”

  Although boisterous, they’re obviously good-humoured. Fat Sister is proud to minister to their needs. Viv, however, is disdainful. “You see how Chinese officials behave with public money.”

  “Do you think they’re corrupt?” I ask.

  “Well, they obviously benefit from a corrupt system. And I can assure you that in a thousand small ways, they are using their power to create advantage for themselves.”

  “Do you think petty officials are worse now than in other eras?” I ask. “Or worse here than in other places?”