by Bei Dao
I must have been in the throes of a consummate illusion. Before my eyes I saw grotesquely shaped trees, brilliant flowers about to drop petals, smoke suspended in midair, water flowing backward, crooked houses, stairs rolling out, clouds turning into monsters, inscrutable shadows, stars so big and bright. . . . When I finally encountered van Gogh’s starry sky I felt no surprise. For me, such visions were the normal result of a deprived existence.
I’d walk the streets with eyes glazed over, straight ahead no turns, talking to myself. In class, especially, immersed in my imaginary world, I could barely hear a word that came out of the teacher’s mouth. The teacher would ask a question, my reply would be nonsense. During parent-teacher conference, she transferred all her worries to my mother and father. Being a doctor, my mother didn’t make a to-do over nothing. But I was put under close surveillance.
Waking up in the middle of the night, I watch my shoes shuffle along and make a circle before returning to their original place. An enormous ship suddenly rushes in through the window, a stranger’s face appears in the glass, a forest lit from behind erupts in flames. . . .
One evening I returned home alone and found a white cloud motionless above the gate of Three Never Old Hutong No. 1. Not huge, slightly curved in the canopy shape of a large umbrella, the cloud hovered incredibly low, even a little lower than our four-story home. Some years later I learned about UFOs and enlightenment struck. Beneath that cloud it was as if I had been put under an enchanting spell — mind a confusion of tangled threads, body completely rigid. Time seemed to have stopped. I finally took a step forward, and quick as a wing flap ran into the house.
Smells
1
When i think about Beijing, the first thing that recurs in my mind are smells, smells that change with the changing seasons. In this respect, the human species reminds me of our canine friends. Why else do those elderly Chinese emigrants, upon returning to the motherland after so many years, look blankly around, slack-jawed, taking in a whiff to the east and a sniff to the west, desperately trying to find those precise Beijing scents in their memories.
The smell of winter white cabbage. When the year reaches the nineteenth solar term marking the start of winter, a temporary vegetable stand appears outside the entrance of every grocery shop — white cabbage is heaped into a hillock, long lines form from dawn to dusk. Each family buys at least a few hundred catties (nearly four hundred pounds), piling them onto a flatbed tricycle, or child’s bicycle, whatever means to peddle them home, neighbors helping one another with transport, particularly those solitary elders who have difficulty getting around. The cabbage is first peeled open and sun dried, then stacked below the hallway window by the balcony doorway and covered with a grass curtain or old cotton quilt. Through desolate winter winds and snow, the cabbage desiccates, withering away like a mummy, and pungent waves of mold scent emanate forth, calling attention to its hidden existence.
The smell of coal smoke. All the neighborhood furnaces burning coal cakes and honeycomb briquettes for cooking and heating look like chain smokers with their flue pipes sticking out the window, puffing out clouds, spitting fog. Coal tar oozes from the pipes and drips to the ground, forming sticky lumps of black ice. On windy days, a strong gust swiftly swivels the elbow of a furnace pipe — reversing the thick smoke and causing family members to choke in tears and snot, coughing uncontrollably. Better to not bring up that sinister coal air: It catches you off guard, kills you off gently, softly.
The smell of dust. Take a shade of iron gray and add a hint of ocher: the essence of Beijing’s winter color. Dust is the commander in chief of all odors, making one’s mouth parched, tongue dry, throat a smoky soreness, mood foul. It borrows the northwestern winds and grows even more terrible, an army of ten thousand soldiers and horses, concealing sky and swallowing earth, invading rooms through cracks around doors and windows, no place to hide, no place to flee. In those days if you didn’t wear a dust mask, venturing outside meant getting a mouthful of grit.
It’s understandable that Beijing residents survive with little patience, caught in a swirling snowstorm that suddenly shrouds the whole city. In the middle of the storm drifts a cloud of peppermint scent; its presence, upon stepping outside, so strong in that first gulp of air — a cool, refreshing softness. With shouts and hoots, children rush outdoors, tossing away dust masks, flinging down gloves, white breath puffing out while throwing snowballs and piling up snowmen. Where the mud on the road dirties the ice, the children slide, squat down as inertia takes over, tumbling flat on their backs into the “old man flops into a quilt” position.
My home wasn’t very far from Houhai Lake. Children often went there for the “wild ice,” bringing their handmade skates, sleds, and skis, crowds of kids howling and screaming, powder spraying up in bursts, wind blowing it into faces, tongues licking it like grains of sugar, a sweetness born from nothingness. Workers chipped pieces of ice off the lake with an iron hook, then took the wood-plank path to the shore and on to the icehouse at the north side of Li Guang Bridge. When no one was looking, my classmates and I would sneak into the icehouse — a dim murky chilliness, a fishy watery smell mixed with the scent of dried grass. Chunks of ice were stacked on a multilevel wooden frame, each level of ice separated by a bed of straw, and then covered on top with another layer of straw, wooden planks, and dirt. Come summer the ice would be used to keep produce and other perishables fresh. I imagined myself as a fish frozen to the bone inside there.
Winters lasted forever, people grew anxious and irritable, children gazed restlessly toward spring. Then May Fourth arrived and the willow trees along the banks of the Houhai suddenly turned green, their branches velvety, issuing forth a subtle pungent scent. The melting lake ice resounded with sharp rupturing cracks, snow water dripped down the eaves, the lumps of frozen coal tar flowed away like ink. Our cotton-padded shoes changed shape, turned flat as a toad with a grinning mouth, and smelled like salty fish.
Nearly every year the narcissus my mother bought would silently bloom around the time of Spring Festival, its fragrance billowing out sub rosa, brightening up the oppressive air inside. Outside, the apricot trees bloomed earliest, swiftly followed by pear, lilac, peach blossoms, wind sweeping along the flowery bouquet, a fragrance so intense it made people dizzy, luring them to sleep. An oft-repeated saying during my childhood days went: “Spring brings sleep, autumn exhaustion, summer’s for napping, don’t wake for three months in winter” — apparently, no one knew enough about hay fever back then to complicate the spin.
By the time the pagoda trees bloom it’s summer. Pagoda trees have a northern temperament, their beauty evoking a kind of fierce, unrestrained wildness. By contrast, their pale yellow blossoms flower with an ordinary banality — a passing wind and the petals fall like raindrops. The fragrance of their blossoms, though quite faint, can travel great distances like the notes of a xiao flute. But their scent arrives with the haunting “ghosts of the hanged.” Inchworms suspended in midair by invisible threads rise and fall, blocking off walkways. To pass through the “ghosts of the hanged” phalanx is like passing through the gates of hell — once they dangle from face and neck, it’s nearly impossible to get rid of them; the body breaks out with goose bumps, screams difficult to suppress.
Summer marked the year’s happiest season, largely because of summer vacation. We regularly went to the Chinese Association for Promoting Democracy (CAPD, or Min Jin, “people’s progress”) at the Drum Tower to watch TV and play Ping-Pong, or to the sports facility in the Shichahai district to swim. As we swam, we’d bob up and down in the smells of formalin, bleaching powder, urine, bob up and down between the boisterous din of people, with a moment’s serenity underwater.
Torrential rains seemed to burst forth from an inner pressure. When the heat reached an unendurable critical point, thunder and lightning recurred with earth-shattering intensity, and the agitations of puberty could find a certain measure of release
. Once the rain stopped, children rushed into the street gutters, trampled through the water, shouting and singing: “It’s raining lah, it’s bubbling lah, the old turtle’s wearing a straw hat lah. . . . !”
I’m not sure why autumn is often associated with sadness, though it might have something to do with the start of school: freedom surrendered. Yes, autumn has come to symbolize the mechanical rhythms of the school system, its systematic order. Chalk dust flies into the air as words and numerals on the blackboard materialize, then fade away. Above the foul stench of the reeking feet and the rude language of boys floats the overpowering essence emanating from the bodies of girls, wisp upon wisp, causing bewilderment and confusion.
Autumn rains fall in bursts, leaves turn and whirl away, damp, then soaked, the bitter aroma of strong tea, over-steeped, gives way to the aroma of fermenting mold. Which, in mutual correspondence, is soon succeeded by the aroma of stored winter white cabbage.
2
Considering the senses, besides the olfactory, the gustatory is naturally involved, too. Taste’s memory being even more innate, and thus more enduring.
The taste of cod-liver oil awakens my earliest childhood dream: Deep behind the doors and portholes of a paper-boat cutting, lamplight glows, bearing a fishy odor. That lamplight must be interlinked with my early experiences with cod-liver oil. Before my parents’ solemn faces, I took it regularly, as if it were medicine, swallowing it down with an instinctive vigilance.
When cod-liver oil passes through an eyedropper to fall on the tip of the tongue, a sharp chill quickly fans out, filling the mouth with its flavor. This oil extracted from codfish brought the loneliness of the ocean’s abyss to me. Eventually I learned that the theory of evolution supports this experience: Our ancestors can be traced back to fish. As I grew a little older, the loneliness amplified into the inner roar of puberty. Then the eyedropper turned into a capsule and cod-liver oil turned into a kind of candy for me — the antipathy disappeared. I’d first bite open the capsule, wait for the fish oil to leak out, and then delicately chew the gel, which had the texture of Cowhide Sesame Candy.
The taste of White Rabbit Milk Candy — surely the King of Candy, foremost for its semitransparent rice-paper wrapper that dissolves on the tongue, triggering delight’s anticipation. White Rabbit Milk is extremely potent: They say that seven pieces equals one glass of milk, and so all malnourished children thirst for it. Sadly, it went through some difficult times when it became known as “high-class candy,” a perfidious jingle spreading through the ether: “High-class sweets, high-class candy, high-class old man clambers onto the chamber pot” — this “high-class” saying clearly had nothing to do with the common folk. Some years later in Paris, a French friend of mine reunited me with the White Rabbit, offering me a piece; my heart skipped a beat, deep emotions stirred within me, and from then on I would always carry a few pieces with me, as I joined the ranks of “high-class old men.”
During that torturous period as my body matured and transformed, I secretly started to eat anything in our house, from the chlorella algae in the fishbowl to the viscous lecithin doled out by my parents, from calcium tablets to dried wolfberry, from mustard tubers to soybean paste, from dried shrimp to scallions . . . my parents tried to fortify the walls and raze the fields, but couldn’t hinder my appetite that expanded with each passing day. Whatever I ate, I devoured with monosodium glutamate. Much later in life, after settling for a period in America, whenever I dined at a Chinese restaurant with foreigners, they usually said, “Please, no MSG” — each time this happened, with their words ringing in my ears, my heart would become so motherfucking vexed.
I took a pinch of MSG from a jar and sprinkled it into the hollow of my palm, licked it with the very tip of my tongue, firing off the taste-bud nerve clusters, impulses shooting through the brain layers and triggering an electrifying buzz — as if savoring the vast ocean refined and purified, that sensory sensation called “umami”! I gradually increased the dosage, the high continuing to rise, until the umami taste completely faded. Finally, I just dumped the half-filled jar of MSG into my mouth, causing the signals in my cerebral cortex to misfire or short-circuit, leading to dizziness and nausea; I collapsed headfirst onto my bed. I suppose this must have been similar to a drug trip.
“Who spilled all the MSG?” Father and Mother complained.
Right outside the walls of the playground at my primary school stood a peddler who always tried to lure innocent souls with his hawking shouts. Like a magician, he would conjure all sorts of candy and snacks from his knapsack. From a classmate’s recommendation, I fell in love with cinnamon bark. Cinnamon bark, commonly used in herbal remedies, comes from the inner bark of the cassia tree, its spicy flavor suffused with a delicious sweetness. Two fen could purchase several pieces, which lasted longer than candy. I’d wrap the bark up in a handkerchief and, during class from time to time, sneak in a lick. Truthfully, besides the taste of cinnamon bark, the rest of my education in those days made no lasting impression on me.
One night, Guan Tielin and I were walking home from school when we happened upon a peddler carrying his wares with a shoulder pole, singing out: “Stinky tofu, fermented tofu . . .” I had never tried stinky tofu before and, egged on by Guan Tielin, I spent three fen on a piece, took one bite, gagged, and threw the rest onto a roof. When I got home, Qian Ayi (“Auntie Qian”) shouted out that something stank, as she sniffed to the east, sniffed to the west, determined to track down the source. I rushed into the bathroom to brush my teeth and gargle, then slipped into the kitchen and scooped two spoonfuls of sugar into my mouth, pasting it shut. But Qian Ayi’s nose still twitched like a police dog’s as she continued to search and search every which way.
3
One summer morning, Yifan and I set off from Sanbulao Hutong No. 1 and headed for the CAPD at the Drum Tower Square Brickyard, 98 Xin’anli Lane — that political party a testament to the organized labor of my parents’ generation. As usual during summer vacation, we’d go there to play Ping-Pong, passing a wild pear tree along the way from which we’d pick some of the little sour pomes.
Leaving Sanbulao via Denei (“Inner Virtue”) Street — my primary school across the way in Hongshan Hutong — the small sundry store on the northeast corner emitted its invisible signals and the conditioned reflex in my brain switched on its red light, causing a secretion of saliva in my mouth; walking to school, I’d often waste two fen on candy there, pressing the pieces into the bland corn-cone buns to dress up breakfast.
Continue along Denei Street south a hundred or more steps, across the next intersection, and arrive at Liuhai Hutong market. Outside, the vegetable stand overflowed with seasonal tomatoes, four catties for one mao; salted beltfish, one cattie for three mao eight, attracted a swarm of flies impossible to swat away. Yifan and I wanted to buy two juicy tomatoes, so we pooled all the coins in our pockets, gulped down our drool, and rushed off with our booty.
Heading east toward Liuhai Hutong, then turning north onto Pine Tree Street, just past a large, new hutong, we stopped at the public toilet off the roadside there, the salty stench of piss in the pit pools assailing our nostrils so that we couldn’t even open our eyes; it was as if we were training to hold our breath underwater, and only after fleeing far away could we take a deep, deep breath, the fragrance of flowers seeping into our hearts and spleens, a field full of blooming pagoda trees. It had rained the night before; a small puddle of water reflected the sky, light, tree shadows.
Turning north onto Willow Shade Street the neighborhood changed into stately mansions and spacious courtyards — rumor had it that the official residence of Marshal Xu Xiangqian, one of the founders of the People’s Liberation Army, could be found at the northern end, enclosed behind tall walls. Beneath the shady trees we bought red-bean pops, two for five fen, saving us one fen. But these ready-made red-bean pops were soft and droopy, at the cusp of melting into nothingness; thus powerless to savor the
delicious icy red-bean bits at a leisurely pace we inhaled them in two bites, craning our necks, bending back, faces to the sky, stomachs rumbling.
Emerging from Willow Shade Street to Houhai, a bright expanse suddenly opened out. Houhai Lake is one of the three lakes in Shichahai, a neighborhood that dates back seven hundred years to the Yuan dynasty when Beijing was known as Dadu, or the Great Capital. The northern terminus of the Grand Canal ended here, the area once a flourishing commercial district, as colorful as a brocade. Around each bend enormous pagoda trees spread upward, and beneath them, concealed in the shade, people play what’s called xiangqi, “the figures game,” or Chinese chess. Some strapping lads dig for clams in the lake, each taking a deep breath before leaping into the water and diving down, feet sticking out, treading open air, their laughter infective. Clams pile up on shore, the largest ones as big as a pot lid. They give off the strangest fishy smell, as if issuing humanity a final warning.
We followed the path south around Houhai, banging willow branches against the iron railing that ran along the lake. The wide expanse of the water abruptly narrowed and a stone bridge linked the two sides of the shore, none other than the famous Silver Ingot Bridge. From the bridge, the view across the lake of the western hills is renowned as one of the old Yanjing capital’s Eight Landscapes of scenic beauty. Beside the bridge stands Ji’s Mongolian Barbecue, an establishment more than a hundred years old whose name has been raised to the heavens and whose very existence presents an excruciating test for my impatient nerves: the smell of roast mutton, the smell of charring coal, the smell of myriad spices commingling in the breeze, stirring our stomachs, reminding us that lunchtime approached.