City Gate, Open Up

by Bei Dao

  Vinyl Records

  Around the beginning of the 1960s, our father spent 400 RMB to buy a Peony radio–record player. The record player, in particular, was quite high-tech back then: four-speed selection with automatic stopping coupled with a speed-detection regulation system. I imagined the flood of music that would flow out of the tiny red-and-green power light, turning our lives totally transparent, as if we lived inside a glass house.

  Father, however, didn’t particularly understand music, his purchase, while linked with an infatuation with modern technology, was more a reflection of his romantic temperament, a sharp contrast to the ominous age taking shape around us. An age when people endured constant hunger and busied themselves just trying to scrape by, living hand to mouth — idle ears seemed superfluous. Father also bought a few vinyl records, including The Blue Danube by Johann Strauss. I remember after the Peony was first set up, Father leaping about, dancing along to the waltz, almost making me choke with shock.

  On the 33⅓-rpm album cover, Russian text printed across an image of the Danube seemed to indicate a performance by the USSR State Symphony Orchestra. My illuminating initiation into Western classical music made me feel like a child tasting his first piece of candy. Many years later when I visited Vienna, Strauss’s waltz mingled with an Austrian pastry, causing my stomach to perform a somersault.

  The Cultural Revolution arrived. I’m not sure why but that hurricane now reminds me of those black vinyl records. The epoch had shifted — it was the mouth’s turn to be idle while the ears cocked at attention. I positioned a loudspeaker outside a closed window, lowered the volume, and played my favorite record.

  Sometime in early 1969, my friend Da Li, who had been a year ahead of me in high school, borrowed The Blue Danube and took it with him on his move to Hetao Prefecture in Inner Mongolia, where the Great Bend of the Yellow River flows at the foot of Daqing Mountain. In autumn of the same year, I went to visit my little brother at the Construction Corps site on the Mongolian border and, on my return to the capital, I hopped on a train at Tuzuo Banner to pay a visit to Da Li and other former classmates, staying in their village for two days. They materialized as a group at sunset, each carrying a hoe over their shoulders, waists tied with grass rope, a raucous pack of happy chatter and laughter. Upon returning to the Educated Youth commune, Da Li put on The Blue Danube. The graceful melodies of the Austrio-Hungarian nobility melded with the choking clouds of cigarette smoke, rising up to the roof beams of a farmhouse on the northern borders of China. Years later, Da Li returned to Beijing but that record album disappeared without a trace.

  The second record I remember listening to was Tchaikovsky’s Capriccio Italien, a Columbia 78 rpm Bakelite recording. At the start of 1970, Yifan, Kang Cheng, and other comrades, gathered at my family’s apartment, as if huddling around a bonfire with our backs turned against the cold wind. In that salon raised to books and music, there was a taste of the forbidden fruit of happiness, there were girls who brought their romantic affections. That was when we started to write, each of us an author doubling as a reader-critic. The melodies of the Capriccio Italien must have infused these early writings, as we listened to it more than a thousand times.

  It quickly became a kind of ceremonial ritual: hang up some heavy curtains, fill up the wine cups, light up the smokes, let the music carry us along as it broke through the night’s tight besiegement and advanced into the faraway distance. We listened to the record so much that the needle soon needed to pass through the noisy static zone of the dust-filled world before it could enter the splendor of the theme. Then a brief pause. Kang Cheng’s hand gestures established his tone as he began to expound on the second movement: “As dawn breaks into brilliance, a small band of travelers walk through the ruins of ancient Rome. . . .” Deep in the night, the song ended but no one dispersed, each toppling over here and there to sleep, the needle lingering on the music’s coda zhi la zhi la zhi la spinning on and on.

  Yifan developed his own photographs at home. One time the red safelight of his darkroom was reported to be a military spy signal; the police went to investigate and, sadly, they confiscated his vinyl records, including the Capriccio Italien. That small band of travelers had crossed into the archive of the dark night to never emerge again.

  Album number three: Paganini’s Violin Concerto No. 4, a 33⅓-rpm Deutsche Gramophon recording, given to me by my uncle Gufu, the husband of my father’s sister, upon his return from performing abroad. He played the flute in the Central Philharmonic Orchestra, and only retired a few years ago.

  Talking about his musical tour through Europe, Gufu couldn’t help but joyfully clap and kick up his heels. While in Vienna, he witnessed a Manchurian manifesting cloak performance that took the city by storm. From within the long cloak and robes the magician wore under a magua horse-riding jacket, he conjured up fire pans, doves, flowers, colorful streamers on the open stage; and for his final inspired act, somersaulted to the side and manifested a giant Beijing opera drum. After a hushed moment of silence, the audience broke out in thunderous applause. This amusing little anecdote, due to its countless retellings and a displaced cognitive association, caused me to conflate Paganini’s record with a Manchurian manifesting cloak, as if it too was part of the magic act.

  During the Cultural Revolution, Gufu was sent to a May Seventh Cadre School; I often worried about those wonderful records of his, especially the Paganini, its cover wondrously labeled with “Stereophonic Sound,” filling us with awe — no household could own any stereo equipment at the time. The acoustics of monophonic sound, no doubt, shaped our monophonic ears, and monophonic ears constituted our unique way of listening attentively to the world. Whenever I borrowed an album, Gufu would eye me with suspicion and warn me again: For the ten millionth time, don’t lend it to anyone.

  Recalling our initial listening experience of Paganini, it caused a bit of a feverish obsession in everyone. Kang Cheng taught himself German and word for word, sentence by sentence, translated the liner notes on the LP cover for us. When that rousing Sturm und Drang theme resounded bold and unrestrained, he waved his arms as if conducting the strings with the rest of the orchestra. “Just like a bird in the wind, rushing into the open sky, rising to new heights, then falling, and yet unyielding, unwavering, it rises higher, and rises still higher.”

  In our cultural salon, material possessions belonged to everyone, the question of borrowing or not borrowing simply didn’t exist. It stands to reason then that Kang Cheng packed the Paganini album into his book bag and pedaled back home with it. One early morning, I arrived at the Ministry of Railways residential apartments on North Altar of the Moon Street. I looked up at the second-floor window where Kang Cheng and his brother lived and observed the figure of a policeman moving back and forth. Trouble electrified the air — my forehead beaded with sweat, chills ran down my back. I immediately sped off to inform Yifan and the rest of our friends, and we converged en masse to plan our counterattack. We first wrote out every possibility of what could have gone wrong, detailing a variety of conjectures plus countermeasures for the right response to any given scenario. The summer of 1970 had just begun and that day felt like it would never end.

  Then, as night fell, Kang Cheng mysteriously appeared at my home wearing a dust mask.

  It turned out that Paganini had caused all the trouble. So-and-so, a girl at the secondary school affiliated with the Normal University, and so-and-so, her boyfriend, the son of a cadre officer, had brought the exact same record to their own literary salon and it had disappeared. They heard from so-and-so that he had seen it at Kang Cheng’s place and assumed Kang Cheng must have stolen it. One morning before dawn, the strangers appeared at his door wielding some crude weapons. As Kang Cheng’s paternal grandmother opened the door, they pushed her aside and rushed inside, the two brothers still fast asleep in their room. A dousing of soy sauce and vinegar led to a close-quartered fisticuffs. A “little feet investigation squad”
instantly reported the incident and the police appeared at the crime scene, ignoring the black-and-white and whatever red-or-green-between in the situation, arresting everyone first to ask questions later. Paganini, though, couldn’t be held as the chief counterrevolutionary, and so the intruders spent several days in jail for “disturbing law and order,” where they wrote the compulsory self-criticism report, and that was the end of it.

  Paganini could never have imagined that his music would circulate in such an extraordinary physical form of preservation and reproduction, circulate, moreover, into such a tangled situation: Almost half a century after his death, halfway across the world, it would be the cause of a bloody brawl between some random Chinese boys. Even more inconceivable is that these two identical vinyl recordings, through whatever unknown channels, found their way into a completely sealed-up China, each mingling, to further the mystery, with the warm blood of youth caught up in two separate underground salons, to eventually meet in a final confluence. Indeed, this all had something to do with magic.

  Fishing

  I was eleven or twelve when I first went fishing. After school the day before my excursion, I busied myself with preparations. The tools for fishing can be easily assembled: Mama’s clothes-drying bamboo stick can serve as a rod, a sewing needle can be bent into a hook, a short piece of pencil lead can make do as a bobber. When Mama wasn’t looking, I took a bit of noodle dough for bait, kneading in a few drops of sesame oil. I hardly slept that night, rose before dawn the next morning, and set off with my fishing pole over my shoulder, heading toward the moat by Desheng Gate, the Gate of Virtuous Triumph.

  There’s an old saying in Beijing: “First there’s the Gate of Virtuous Triumph, then Beijing City behind it.” During the Yuan dynasty, Dadu, the Grand Capital, was called Khanbaliq, and the Gate of Virtuous Triumph was known as Jiande Gate, or the Gate of Strong Virtue. In 1368, Xu Da led an army of one hundred thousand soldiers to conquer the city and Emperor Shundi fled, escaping through the Gate of Strong Virtue, which was subsequently renamed the Gate of Triumph. Zhu Di, the Emperor Chengzu of the Ming dynasty, spread virtuous governance under heaven, and its name changed again to the Gate of Virtuous Triumph. By 1420, as a result of Beijing’s reconstruction guided by the designs of the chief adviser and astrologer Liu Bowen, the Grand Capital’s north wall was moved south a couple of kilometers, the city gate and outer walls fortified, the moat dug out, and nearly six-hundred years of Beijing’s former façade swept away. The city’s inner walls once possessed many gates, each with its own specific use, the Gate of Virtuous Triumph mainly a passageway for war chariots. In 1644, Li Zicheng’s peasant rebellion defeated the Ming army outside Desheng Gate, the rebels stormed through the city walls, and Chongzhen, the last of the Ming emperors, hung himself on Coal Mountain.

  From the beginning of the last century, following the demise of the imperial regime and the new needs of modern traffic, Beijing’s city gate towers and walls were torn down first here, then there, until hardly a ruin remained. The Gate of Virtuous Triumph was razed piece by piece, growing smaller and smaller, down to a single surviving archery tower. The gate left standing in the early 1960s: crumbling walls, rubble strewn everywhere, weeds and grass soughing se se se in the wind. Onward the moat flowed around the archery tower. City walls indicated the boundary between the metropolis and the pastoral, that desolate wasteland one entered upon leaving the Gate of Virtuous Triumph for the northern outskirts. According to legend, the ghosts of lost souls roam the barren fields there.

  It was about three kilometers from my home at Three Never Old Hutong, following Deshengmen Inner Street, to the gate; at the average walking pace of a ten-plus-year-old child it took about an hour to get there. The narrow Desheng Inner Street only allowed room for two opposing lanes of traffic. The No. 14 bus took this route and ended at the gate. That old relic of a bus looked a little savage on the narrow street, doors and windows quaking hua hua, billows of black smoke pen pen tu tu blasting out, any hint of clear blue sky instantly absorbed.

  Back then, the most common means of hauling goods around was either by mule cart, horse cart, or tricycle cart. As the day grew lighter, I could hear the crisp, calm sound of horse hooves, from a distance coming nearer, then from nearness fading out into the distance. If anything could be said to embody the rhythm of Beijing in those days, it would be the sound of horse hooves.

  And how profoundly this rhythm changed along the graded incline of Deshengmen Inner Street to the Changqiao intersection. Going downhill, a cart driver must hold the reins tightly to keep the horse or mule in a controlled gait as their metal shoes can easily slip on asphalt; going uphill requires a waving of the whip plus hollering encouragement, to the extent of leaping off the cart and cheering alongside. One day, in order to “Learn from Comrade Lei Feng,” I helped push an old flatbed-tricycle driver slowly pedaling up a slope, putting my whole strength behind his cart, and then used all my pocket change to buy four pieces of huoshao bread for him, my behavior bewildering him with the nameless mystery. Afterward, I wrote an essay about it in the form of a diary, reaping the praise of my teacher.

  I’ll return to this Lei Feng story later, but right now let’s go back to that early morning of fishing. When I arrived at my destination I was already a bit sweaty. The moat was in the throes of its low-water season and no more than a ten-meter-wide band of thick yellow-green soup, as turbid as it was smelly. I sat down below the decaying stone bridge and cast out my fishhook.

  Most enthusiasts would describe fishing as a kind of metaphysical sport: physical energy expenditure is basically zero, externally it appears to be an exercise in meditation, its end goal really moral and spiritual self-cultivation. “Grand Duke Jiang fishes, the willing one is hooked” doesn’t apply here. His way of angling unusual by any standard: line hanging straight down with a baitless hook hovering three chi above the water. And as Grand Duke Jiang had declared, it wasn’t a fish he hooked but a sage-king — his strange technique luring the attention of the benevolent King Wen of Zhou.

  When I started, I felt agitated and fidgety on my seat below the bridge, anxious about having too little bait on my hook for too many fish, the competition too fierce. My worry proved unnecessary — not one fish even nibbled. A shoal of them swam with mighty flips and flops not far from my line, undulating along and spitting out strands of bubbly foam. Ripples overlapped as if tangible echoes colliding with one another. My heart began to ache for our household sesame oil.

  A venomous sun shone down from the open sky — in its reflections the bobber spun round and round, dazzling my eyes shut. The stench from the water drifted up, permeating the air. My whole body felt hot and dry, my throat parched. Then suddenly a small fish floated toward the shore, coming so close I could nearly pet it. With quick-witted resourcefulness, I conveniently found a stiff piece of cardboard to retrieve it. But the fish sensed danger, its tail swayed back and forth as it swam into the heart of the water’s torpid flow. Gone the golden moment fled, my spirits crushed.

  But then, miraculously, the fish drifted back over. It followed the ripple and chased the current, as if a mysterious force carried it toward the shore. On closer inspection, it must have been sick, or in a dreamless sleep, as it waited for the cardboard to close in before languidly swimming away once more. Dejection turned to rage, followed by a cool serenity. I waited again, making my calculations in advance, selecting the perfect point of attack, and finally, I scooped it out from behind. My heart plummeted ge-deng, and I whooped in victory.

  The little fish was about three inches long, shiny shiny black and slimy against the cardboard where traces of water bloomed out. It looked like it lay in a bed, its body still, no attempt to flounder, both cheeks working in and out. My triumphant joy abruptly faded, giving way to wonder at the cold detachment I felt toward my prey. The fish seemed to be observing me, too, with a sense of cold detachment as it faced the cold detachment of a fisherman’s power over life and de
ath. Time slipped away in our mutual gaze. Then the fish died.

  I had forgotten to bring any water or food and my stomach began to rumble, my mouth felt dry, tongue swollen. As shadows lengthened in the light of the western sun, I packed up my fishing gear. Out of curiosity, I flipped over the rock I had been sitting on, and there in the shady depths squirmed a dozen or more brown leeches tangled together, scattering in the sunlight. Terrified, my whole body broke out in a sweat and I scampered off.

  On the road home, I put the fish on the hook and carried the pole over my shoulder, head raised, chest out, strolling through streets and alleys great and small, thinking the eyes of the whole world watched me. I caught a glimpse of my shadow cast on a wall, the pole twice as tall as me, the small fish swinging at the end of the line. Smoke from stovepipes melding into sunset clouds waved like flags and turned to greet me.

  I arrived home and Mama exclaimed, “O, my dear son! You show so much promise catching such a big fish.” Those were the famine days. She disappeared into the kitchen to make preparations. Enjoying the laziness of the victor, I slumped onto the edge of the table and fell half asleep. Until Mama brought over a large platter with the small fish placed at its center, the fish roughly the size of a pencil stub and crisped to a golden yellow. I stared at it blankly for a moment, then devoured it in one gulp.

  Swimming

  1

  I learned how to swim when I was eight. Aside from Ping-Pong, swimming was the most popular sport at the time. Once the weather warmed, kids everywhere swarmed to the waterside. Rather than swimming, this would be more fittingly described as “the great benefit of bathing to escape the heat while having fun.”