Barbarian Lost

by Alexandre Trudeau

  Perhaps Gia is relieved to have us shine lights on her in the loggia backstage, a last shot of the good stuff just as the party is ending. She sips water and tells us to give her a moment before asking our questions.

  Richard goes hand-held for some visuals and begins moving the camera around her, almost as an invitation to dance. On cue, Gia begins to pose. She growls at the camera, then sticks her tongue out and lifts up her middle finger in defiance. Finally, she turns to me and says, “So how did you like our bad music?”

  Off-balance, I shake my head in disagreement, trying to reject her question. She will have none it and declares that, as musicians, she and her bandmates have no talent and their music is not beautiful. I only manage to smile at her, to lift my clenched fist and shake it in support.

  Then it’s my turn. I ask her a slew of serious and sobering questions. Quickly, the rock star, the junkie princess, transforms into a poised young woman to tell her story:

  “I grew up in a traditional family. Both of my parents worked in the government. They were strict with me. Even when I was in high school, I had a curfew of 6 p.m. I had an oppressive upbringing. I felt school was really stupid and life was boring. I wanted to commit suicide. Then I discovered rock ’n’ roll, and it saved my life.”

  When I push her to elaborate on her relationship with her parents, she explains that one needs to understand that in the West, even old people grew up with pop music, but that in China, “rock is new to the older generations, and they associate it with sex and drugs. Naturally, they see it as quite dangerous.” She admits that over time things have changed with her parents: “They now see that rock ’n’ roll is something real and are much more understanding.”

  When I ask her about recent musical directions, she says, “I’m the type of person who’s always changing. My music tastes, my preferences in art, my clothes. Punk was my way of entering the music scene. It was a start. But it’s music from another time and place. It’s quite distant from young people’s lives now. So I just keep moving.”

  “What are you singing about these days?” I ask.

  “Love,” she says with a coy smile. “I keep finding it and losing it. Spiritually, I feel like a monster. I’m constantly fighting with myself.”

  As Richard and I tear down our camera equipment, Gia and I talk about the painters I’ve been visiting. She confesses that painting has been bringing her at least as much joy as music these days.

  “I like the quiet of it,” she admits.

  As she predicted, Viv is now doing graduate studies at an Ivy League school in the United States. She’s only back in Beijing for a short summer vacation after an internship in East Africa. After spending time in the tropics, she’s not keen on more sweaty work in the heat of the Chinese capital in August and has resisted following Richard and me around on our gruelling documentary shoot. Nonetheless, touring China’s nooks and crannies without her doesn’t feel quite right. So between two shoots, she and I meet for tea in a small restaurant near Beijing’s Drum Tower.

  The girlish young journalist with whom I’d journeyed a few years before has since grown calmer and more assured. The transformation makes me wonder how, in her eyes, I too might have changed. When I tell her about my new family life, she asks if it has altered me.

  “Fear has returned,” I say after a moment’s reflection. “Even with the loss of my brother and father, I had come to consider human mortality rather dispassionately, as something natural, beautiful even. But with children in my life now, I can’t consider death with such serenity. It terrifies me again. As it probably should.”

  “It doesn’t surprise me that little ones could do that. Speaking of which, I’m engaged now. My fiancé is a computer engineer. He recently got a job offer in Europe. I’m going to follow him there when I’m done my studies. Actually, we’re considering starting a family as well,” she says cheerfully.

  “Sounds like you might be leaving China behind for good,” I wonder.

  “Maybe.”

  “How does that make you feel?”

  “The things that matter stay with us wherever we are. What I need from China is already with me.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “Are you still defending the Communist Party?” she suddenly asks.

  “You realize that I generally seek to disagree with people whose views I share. It forces us both to refine our ideas, to make them clearer and better.”

  “I know. You once explained to me that that was the Jesuit way.”

  “Exactly. But to answer your question, yes, I still occasionally defend the CPC. For one, I don’t think China could have come so far so quickly without the unity and organizational power it has provided,” I say. Then I tell her about my talk with Ai Weiwei. “As is my custom, I argued with him and made him defend his ideas, but deep down I couldn’t help but agree: China may be ready for something more sophisticated than opaque authoritarian rule. It is time.”

  “Funny. On my side, I’ve softened my stance a bit, perhaps as a result of not living in China anymore. From a distance, the terrific challenges that China faces don’t seem to have easy solutions. This humbles me a little. I’ve also been able to see up close how democracies work. They don’t always serve the people. They too can be corrupted in many big or small ways. But I will never accept how the Chinese state can still trample people’s rights. How, for example, it takes people’s homes and ruins their lives with complete impunity. Democracy or not, China needs the rule of law, to which even the CPC must bow.”

  “Are you any more optimistic than you were about how quickly political transformation might come?” I ask.

  “Living abroad, I can afford to take a more patient approach,” she confesses. “But let’s consider how China is changing now. Its development is slowing down. The huge gains of recent decades cannot be sustained anymore. They’re levelling off. The need for outside resources is no longer so ferocious, as fewer and fewer huge construction projects are undertaken. The Chinese urban middle class now makes up a near majority of the country. These people have quickly grown accustomed to consumer choices, so they are now exploring deeper notions of individual choice. They are travelling and experiencing the world. This all makes China more introspective, and ready to evolve. But I realize not everyone here cares as much about politics as I do. Things might only change very slowly.”

  “How pragmatic grad school has made you!” I joke.

  “It probably has more to do with perspective than my studies.” She pauses to smile, then begins again. “Another thing has changed for me: I remember you teasing me about my anti-Japanese sentiments during our talks. I would like to take back what I might have said. My sentiments were perhaps logical for a girl from Shandong, but they were nonetheless a little misguided. Now that China is so strong, I truly hope it can avoid becoming an aggressive power in the world. I always used to reassure myself by simply thinking how China has traditionally been on the receiving end of attacks by outsiders and not an aggressor, but now I feel this conceit is not enough. It’s too backwards-looking. Chinese nationalism has become a political tool for the CPC. Really, I don’t love China any less, but I now feel very detached from this manipulative patriotism. A page must be turned on the past, and China has to be more careful about its nationalism. This too has to be part of its maturation process. It has been for me.”

  “Seems like we are growing wiser, Viv. Anyhow, we probably shouldn’t waste too much time on politics. Aren’t they just a whole lot of noise to distract us from the deeper things in life?”

  “Spoken like a true Taoist,” she teases.

  “Yes, the Tao does have a way of taking over. Speaking of which, I’m headed to a Taoist temple this afternoon.”

  “I thought you didn’t like temples. You told me you always preferred their gardens.”

  “That’s true. But remember, I’m shooting documentary footage, and I need stuff to show people.”

  “There’s a conundrum for you: showing th
e Tao!”

  “Yeah, like making a film about one hand clapping.”

  For film crews to circulate freely in Beijing in the summer of 2008, a government-assigned driver is a must. Our driver is Li Nan, a tall young woman from north China. She wears pastel yoga clothes and loves cigarettes and pop music, but her quiet calm and assured physicality suggest an army or police background. Just as well, because documentary work can be relentless. Cameras, cars and crew are expensive. We are fisherfolk as much as hunters. We cast our nets wide and pack the days with content to get value for our operations and give ourselves options in the editing room.

  Before long, Nan is enjoying the long days and proud to show off her own guanxi, or network of connections. She begins to offer suggestions for characters for us to film: monks, calligraphers, artisans and clothes designers.

  The Taoist monk she knows is at a temple surrounded by high-rises. It borders the third ring on its western flank. It’s mid-afternoon and the heat has broken just slightly, but the air’s dull and white, and the traffic thick.

  Against all the concrete of the city, the temple is colourful and well maintained if mostly bereft of nature. The yin-yang motif is recurrent. The monks are wearing tidy black-and-white robes. They perform various rituals throughout the day. They meditate and bang a gong.

  Our contact is a former colleague of Nan’s father. They worked together in a government department. The man in question joined the monastery a few years ago. As I prod I understand that, for him, being a monk is a kind of day job, and that he doesn’t live at the monastery but goes home to his wife at night. Despite the robes and hat, he seems more like an unremarkable cadre than a man of religion. I deduce that he’s some kind of government agent assigned to the temple as a liaison, someone who wears the robes but whose first devotion is to the CPC, not the Tao.

  One might think this would make him unsympathetic and inauthentic, but in a way I find his circumstances even more interesting. Political power in China did once find its ultimate legitimacy in religion, but religion has long since been made mostly subservient to politics. Through the ages, rulers picked and chose from a wide array of religious traditions to enhance and extend their own power. Emperors regularly razed or reassigned temples to suit their purposes. Mad religious fervour set fire to China more than once. The heavy hand with which the CPC can deal with organized religion is not the exception.

  Planting a government agent in the monastery to live as a monk is probably more a gesture of preservation than one of control. The temple shows little indication of widespread popular use. It’s as though the place and the monks it contains are already a kind of museum exhibit, to be briefly contemplated from a distance, a repository for something antique and prestigious. Without the help of government, this valuable real estate might not be able to continue to serve such arcane purposes in the face of raw capital.

  The temple agent seems to have embraced his job and become a genuine supporter of religion. “Modern life is full of noise and distractions,” he explains. “People are solely concentrated on achieving material goals. These pursuits soon grow tiring. One can never find satisfaction this way. This is why it’s good to turn to the Tao.”

  I grin to hear this costumed bureaucrat calmly describe these things to me over the din of constant traffic. I ask him how being a monk has changed his own life.

  “Well, at first my wife and daughter thought it strange that I spend my days here. Then they saw that being here made me a happier and healthier person. So they began to appreciate what I’m doing.” He adds: “The Tao tells us that the material world is a world of illusions. Things are always changing in it. As such, harmony must have something different at its foundation.”

  I watch the aging monks enter the main hall in procession for incantations. After that, they set up a calligraphy demonstration for Richard and me. A rather serious monk takes position at a large table with ink, paper and brush and begins to draw bold and powerful strokes. Suddenly all the monks become grave, almost forceful in their solicitude. They cluster around, focusing intently on the agent as if to make sure that he conveys to us the important but difficult message.

  “It takes many years to be able to master the strokes,” he finally tells me. “They’re not just words that this monk is writing. Each stroke has a power, a balance.”

  I have not mastered the Chinese script and probably never will. I’m willing to grant it a power not found in our phonetic scripts. The separation between spoken word and written symbol frees each to their own realm. The conceptual nature of written meaning is preserved while the spoken language can indulge in all the profanities and imprecisions necessary. Over the ages, dialects are formed and grow unintelligible in orality, but the script remains, impervious to easy transformation and ever accessible.

  The secret meaning of calligraphy harks back to the infancy of the Chinese script when incantations were etched into bone and turtle shells. The script itself is meant to be a portal through which higher powers enter the world to bring meaning to the chaos. Is the portal still open? Does this monk with his brush in the temple bring a little more balance to the mad world? Does his colleague in robes, the government agent, render a service to the people by being here?

  Does the Tao even need a home? How about the corpse? The one god? Or the lord of love?

  We take the subway north almost to its end. After clearing the rings, it emerges onto elevated tracks and charts a path through myriad new towers. We’re going to see another kind of artist: a video-game artist. His compound is a short walk from the station but, in habitual fashion, it’s gated and we must negotiate our way through a guard post to access the tall apartment tower where he lives.

  The young man lives on the twenty-third floor of a forty-storey building. The elevator and hallways are already grimy and rundown for a building not ten years old. Finding his apartment, we knock hard at the door, but no one answers. Finally, he’s reached on the phone and comes to let us in. He’s confident and affable if unkempt.

  He has the sloppy, pale demeanour of someone who plays video games all day. Long, unwashed hair hangs from the top of his head. The sides of his head are shaved. His clothes are loose and neglected like those of a teenage skater. The apartment is big and roomy, though sparsely furnished and messy.

  In the living room, plastic cups and plates with half-eaten food on them are scattered across the coffee table. As we pass through the kitchen I see that it too is littered with refuse. He stops to offer us something to drink, then opens the fridge to a space devoid of anything save dubious packages and a plastic bottle with a dribble of bright orange liquid in it. We all laugh: beverages will not be necessary.

  Unlike the rest of his apartment, which seems an empty wasteland, his bedroom is packed with stuff. He takes a seat at his computer desk, covered with papers. We sit on his bed. Next to his desk is a big window that gives a sweeping view of the forest of concrete towers.

  He tells me that he’s twenty-eight. He’s from the beautiful city of Ya’an, on the fringe between the fertile Sichuan Basin and the Himalayas. He studied art and design at Chengdu’s prestigious university for computer arts. As soon as he graduated, he got a job as an illustrator for a successful game studio in Beijing. A couple of years ago, he was poached by a major player in the industry and made art director of one of its big titles.

  He generally starts with pencil on paper, he tells me, showing me some of his sketches. They’re clean and elaborate illustrations of fantastic Chinese historical characters. “Then I get on the computer to draw the images,” he says, bringing up on the monitor a series of impressive illustrated characters: demigod generals with unreal weapons, wild geomancers with fantastic beards and exotic half-humans. All ready, it would seem, to bring down the wrath.

  “As you can see, my specialty is heroes, armour and weaponry,” he goes on, “but I also do landscapes. Or at least, I oversee their creation. I have a team now. It takes my core drawings and does all the vario
us 3-D permutations necessary for the animation.”

  I ask him who came up with the ideas for the game he’s currently working on.

  “My bosses, the company’s creative directors. But I was recruited for my talents for drawing these kinds of things. My team and I are fleshing out the game from the original idea.”

  He tells me that games are hugely popular: “In fact, many people say there is a video-game addiction problem in China. That there are too many young people who do nothing but play video games.”

  “Is this true?” I ask.

  “Yes, probably,” he says nonchalantly.

  “What about your parents? What do they think about video games?”

  “My father doesn’t take my work seriously. He’s an executive at an important financial institution. He’s always asking me when I’m going to get a real job. I tell him that I now supervise thirty-five people.”

  “What does he say to that?” I ask.

  “He tells me that he’s in charge of hundreds of employees and billions of yuan,” the young man answers with a resigned smile.

  “It looks like you like Chinese history.”

  He explains that he and his team do a lot of research for the drawings. “But we do what we want with history,” he tells me.

  “So what kind of game is it?”

  “A hybrid war strategy-RPG. A popular type of game here.”

  “What’s it called?”

  “Kill the Immortals.”

  I get back in touch with Gia and ask to see her paintings. She’s not sure whether I’m serious, but I insist. She agrees to receive us in her apartment, where she paints. She lives in a building in the north of the city within the fourth ring. Her building sits next to a canal and park. It abuts a massive but underused boulevard, so is mercifully quiet. Her place is on the third floor, which we reach by foot.