I noticed her first when she came to my office to complain. Not about me, she said, but about some of the other students in the class. Some lewd jokes had been made, and she didn’t feel comfortable with things like that. She was a young Chinese girl, and it must have taken considerable courage to come in and talk to her teacher about such matters. I told her I’d do my best to cut short any such remarks in future, and – I hope – persuaded her that I disapproved of them as much as she did. Which was true – or at least half-true. I was certainly sorry that she’d been upset by them.
It was a large, unruly class, spirited and hard to control. After that, I made a conscientious effort to turn the conversation away from anything that could be construed as risqué, though I’m afraid I fell short of actually having a class discussion on the matter. She seemed to feel we’d made a connection, however. A few months later, after the end of the summer break, she sent me a message asking to meet me for a cup of tea. I was wary of such encounters, having felt on the edge of impropriety once or twice in the past, but felt in this case it would be churlish to refuse.
We arranged to meet at a campus café. I was careful to sit in full view, at an outside table (pedagogical paranoia is a whole subject in itself: never closing the door when talking to a female student, trying to avoid any ambiguous statements in oral or written form, keeping one’s paper trails active at all times …). She arrived, and promptly produced a present she’d bought for me: a pair of small porcelain teacups. We chatted for a while. She’d had a hard time. Her home was in Harbin, in the North of China, reputed to be – at certain times of year – the coldest place on earth. Sure enough, she’d got sick on her return, and had had to lie in bed for a month, her face turned to the wall.
Just at this moment the worst possible thing in the world happened. My strategy of sitting prominently out in the open backfired. One of the other students from last semester’s tutorial group happened to be walking by, and seeing me sitting and talking to one of his former classmates, assumed that it must be some kind of reunion. He immediately came over to join us. As he’d been one of the offenders who prompted the original complaint, the sheer misfortune of this is hard to exaggerate. And then some of the other students saw us! Other members of the class, who just happened to be walking by, came over to sit at the table. The conversation became more raucous. They started to chatter about car-pooling, and some of their misadventures with terrible student drivers.
I could see the hurt look on the Chinese girl’s face. She had – as she thought – arranged a private meeting with me, had come along with a gift, and now was relegated to being just one of the people seated at the table. There was really nothing I could do, short of asking them all to go away. They would have asked why, and if I’d replied I was meeting with her by arrangement, it would have seemed most inappropriate. She was an attractive young woman, after all, and – albeit an ex-student – still one studying at my institution. Eventually she left, and we never spoke to each other again.
That look of betrayal, though: the sense of the sheer shock she must have felt from her very natural assumption that I’d gone out of my way to invite all those other students simply to gazump our ‘date’, will never leave me, I think. I was completely innocent of malign motives. The horrible coincidence of just those students passing at just that minute never recurred – I don’t recall seeing any of them again, even – but I would quite understand if she saw me, from that moment on, as a fraud: one who’d actively connived at their mockery of her, and therefore as someone quite unworthy of her trust.
Chinese girl students
taking selfies
without cameras
through the perspex
bus-stop
Watching through the
the windscreen
I debate
is this the end
prepared for me?
I feel a poem
coming on
I wish it were
much better
more nuanced
more profoundRotten as the Red Chamber Hotel. That was the new slogan I came up with this morning for the fleapit they’ve put me in. Not that it is a fleapit, exactly. On the surface, it’s the very model of a modern luxury hotel (with serviced apartments as well as rented rooms): glittering mirror-glass, obsequious flunkies, discreet carpeting everywhere. It’s only when you’ve been here for a little while that the cracks begin to show. The fact that it’s impossible to turn the heat down inside the rooms, for instance. There’s a thermostat on the wall, but it doesn’t matter which direction you dial it in, conditions remain essentially the same.
Mind you, it’s cold outside. Very cold, in fact. Beijing in November is not a particularly hospitable place. You do get clear days, with high, blue sky arching off into infinity. For the most part, though, there’s omnipresent grey fog verging on yellow smog (on bad days, anyway). It’s not so hard to imagine why they’d want to keep the heat on high inside. Not that any of this is of much help with my assignment. I am supposed to be enjoying this place, I suppose: coming up with breezy travelogues to inspire other teachers to consider Northern China as their pedagogical destination of choice. Let’s ignore the surly faces in the lifts and on the streets, the game of dodgem cars they euphemistically call ‘crossing the road’ in these parts.
Let’s focus on the positive, then, turn that frown upside down, keep smuggling them bananas. I mean, after all, how bad can it be: a free trip to China on the Department? I was going to say, ‘all expenses paid,’ but all expenses don’t seem to be paid. The small amount of money I changed at the airport is gradually eking away, and none of my cards seem to work in the ATMs outside. Luckily the hotel insisted on taking an impression of my credit card when I arrived, and putting 1,000 Yuan on it – I’ve been using that up on room service, ‘charge to room.’ Will I be able to get any of that back when I get home? When do I leave for home, anyway? Though I only just got here, really. Didn’t I?
Sorry, so sorry – back on track: Judging from what all the websites say, there are three major things one really must do here: Visit the Forbidden City, Hike on Great Wall, and Visit parks (Ming Tombs, Summer Palace, Beihai Park). So there’s really no point in doing any more whining in this journal until those objectives have been accomplished. Certainly there seems scant prospect of going home till then. My plan is to tick them off one after the other until there’s nothing any of my colleagues can say to imply that I didn’t make the best of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, this chance to sample the riches of Earth’s oldest continuous culture …
I like pretending to be a writer. After a while, if you’ve kept up the pretence successfully enough, you start to see your name listed in reference books, and even printed objects with your name on them in bookshops. At that point you start to wonder if you really are a writer, and – if so – what a ‘writer’ actually is. There was a wonderful moment in the spin-off series from Donald Trump’s reality show The Apprentice when the new host, Martha Stewart, heard one of the aspiring candidates recite that old cliché ‘fake it ‘til you make it.’ [1] For some unknown reason, Martha took great exception to this. ‘I’ve never faked anything!’ she trumpeted. ‘I went to jail, for God’s sake!’
Since her incarceration was (as I understand it) due to a conviction for fraud and insider trading, it’s hard to see why this should stand as any great proof of integrity. However, given that the other great bon mot from the series was the claim, by one of her interior-design underlings, that ‘Martha’s really into taxidermy,’ it was tempting to conclude that her grasp on the difference between reality and fiction was tenuous at best. As for the ‘reality’ or otherwise of the claim to be a writer, I guess that in my own case I’ve spent so long studying the career trajectories and sufferings of various of my literary heroes and heroines – Acker, Borges, Lowell, Pessoa – that I eventually realised that one didn’t need very many external markers of success to substantiate this particular life-lie. If it really is a lie, that is.
It isn’t that I don’t scribble insistently. If that constitutes writing, then I was definitely a writer from an early age. Actually forcing myself to reread and edit my own scribblings took rather longer to achieve, but even that became possible once I’d taken the leap and decided to start using the terrifying ‘w’-word. Perhaps the claim to be a writer is a little like believing oneself to be a saint. In both cases, the accolade can only really be conferred from the outside. Just because you pray all the time and try to do good works means nothing in itself. You might be quite wrong in thinking that inner voice you hear is really the voice of God. There is such a thing as mental illness, after all.
How exactly are the early spiritual yearnings of the poet William Cowper to be distinguished from his later years of full-fledged religious mania? Because he was allowed to remain at large at first, and subsequently locked up? The question remains an open one. There are certain complications surrounding ‘coming out’ as a writer in a country as small as my own. For a start, there’s our notorious anti-elitism and instinctive suspicion of anyone perceived to be setting themselves up above the others. The physicist Ernest Rutherford, when asked why he returned so seldom to his native land, said that it was because it was the only place he ever went where all anyone wanted to discuss was what he’d got up to behind the bike sheds at school. Perhaps it’s for this reason that so many of our writers (myself included) have chosen to publish under a pseudonym.
The dry sand had turned the corpse entrusted to its keeping into a yellow-brown mummy. I told Gunga Dass to stand off while I examined it. The body – clad in an olive-green hunting-suit much stained and worn, with leather pads on the shoulders – was that of a man between thirty and forty, above middle height, with light, sandy hair, long mustache, and a rough unkempt beard. The left canine of the upper jaw was missing, and a portion of the lobe of the right ear was gone. On the second finger of the left hand was a ring – a shield-shaped bloodstone set in gold, with a monogram that might have been either ‘B.K.’ or ‘B.L.’ On the third finger of the right hand was a silver ring in the shape of a coiled cobra, much worn and tarnished. [2]
When my father died five years ago, he left behind a rather large and motley assortment of books, reflecting every transient stage in his interests: children’s fiction, military history, local history, not to mention endless books about the sea. Many of them had been stored in an unlined, unheated building called ‘the bookshed’ out at the back of the property, and most of these were so perished and swollen with damp that they had to be disposed of by the local junk removal operatives. Black mould had started to grow on their spines. The remainder, after being sorted through by two second-hand book dealers, ended up in an old storeroom downstairs: somewhat dusty, but at least dry.
Among them was an almost complete set of the short stories of Rudyard Kipling – mostly in the ‘Dominions’ edition of 1913 – but with a couple of interesting rarities thrown in. One of these was an illustrated edition of The Brushwood Boy, a story from Many Inventions (1893). The other was an early American reprint of The Phantom ‘Rickshaw and other Eeerie Tales, from the mid-1890s. Both of these I appropriated for my own use, leaving the others to await an uncertain fate downstairs. That may – in retrospect – have been a mistake. It’s easy to be wise after the event, though. All I felt at the time was a certain satisfaction in saving these few relics from his once so extensive library.
I should explain, to start with, that Rudyard Kipling published eleven standalone ‘official’ collections of short stories. The Phantom ‘Rickshaw appears in the third of these, Wee Willie Winkie and other Stories (1890). It collects three of the six small ‘Indian Railway Library’ paperbacks of his work published for local consumption between 1888 and 1889 (the other three are collected in Soldiers Three). Of course, Kipling published various other collections of stories, in America and Europe as well as in Great Britain, as well as many uncollected stories in anthologies and periodicals, but it’s his final, collected edition, reflecting his mature intentions, that I’m speaking of here.
So much for preamble. I’d like you to note a few of the numbers above, though, for future reference: 11 (the number of authorised short story collections by Kipling); 13 (the year of the ‘Dominion’ edition, and of the books left behind by my father: the eleven collections plus two separate volumes); 7 (the number of Indian Railway paperbacks published by Kipling in India between 1888 and 1889, when he left to return ‘home’ – also (incidentally) the number of years he spent working as a writer in India. Finally, 6: the number of ‘trifles’ recovered from the ‘burrow’ the dead white man was living in – also, the number of novels by the ‘divine Jane’ [Austen] of his later war story ‘The Janeites’ (1924).
Kipling’s relationship with the occult: ghosts, numerology, spiritualism, was always an uneasy one. It was his sister, Alice (known in the family as ‘Trix’), who became a medium, however (under the pseudonym ‘Mrs. Holland’). The subject crops up again and again in his stories: sometimes as a vehicle for mockery, as in the thinly veiled attack on Madame Blavatsky – one of whose séances his father had attended when she first came to India in 1880 – in ‘The Sending of Dana Da’ (1888); sometimes with more serious intent (as in ‘The House Surgeon’ (1909) – or, for that matter, ‘The Brushwood Boy’ itself.
One of the strangest of all his stories, though, is also one of the earliest: ‘The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes’, written when he was only 19, and published in Quartette, the Christmas Annual of the Civil and Military Gazette for 1885, which included four stories by Kipling, together with sundry items by his parents and sister. The story is strongly influenced by Poe and other nineteenth century writers of the macabre (Guy de Maupassant – his other great early influence – among them: ‘Le Horla,’ in particular). Yet it has an indisputable originality to it: the circumstantial nature of the descriptions is all Kipling, as is the emphasis on race and cultural prejudice. It has had its own influence, too, Borges’s story ‘The Immortal’ clearly draws on it, and so – it has been claimed – does Sartre’s play Huis Clos: No Exit.
The story is a simple one: An Englishman falls by accident down a sandbank and finds himself stranded in a strange community of people who have been condemned to stay there because they were proclaimed officially ‘dead’ at some point – either through disease or accident – and can therefore not be allowed to go back among the living. Any attempt to escape from the river bank they’ve been left on is prevented by a sniper in a boat, stationed in midstream, as well as by the quicksands that surround them. The protagonist, Morrowbie Jukes, meets an old servant of his, one Gunga Dass, who helps him initially, but then starts to lord it over him, in a reversal of the conventional hierarchies of the Raj.
Gunga Dass deposited a handful of trifles he had picked out of the burrow at my feet, and, covering the face of the body with my handkerchief, I turned to examine these. I give the full list in the hope that it may lead to the identification of the unfortunate man: –
1. Bowl of a briarwood pipe, serrated at the edge; much worn and blackened; bound with string at the crew.
2. Two patent-lever keys; wards of both broken.
3. Tortoise-shell-handled penknife, silver or nickel. name-plate, marked with monogram ‘B.K.’
4. Envelope, postmark undecipherable, bearing a Victorian stamp, addressed to ‘Miss Mon—’ (rest illegible) —’ham’ —’nt.’The body described in the quotations above reveals to Jukes that he is not the first ‘white man’ to fall victim to the strange superstitions of these Hindus, and he is just on the point of attempting a perilous escape through the quicksand when the timely intervention of one of his own servants enables him to scale the slippery sands at the edge of the colony. It’s hard to convey the sheer horror of Kipling’s descriptions of this strange community – a bit like a leper colony, but even more cut off from the world. It has something of Poe’s ‘Descent into the Maelstrom’, no doubt, but surely it must have been based on either a nightmare or a real experience of the author’s?
5. Imitation crocodile-skin notebook with pencil. First forty-five pages blank; four and a half illegible; fifteen others filled with private memoranda relating chiefly to three persons – a Mrs. L. Singleton, abbreviated several times to ‘Lot Single,’ ‘Mrs. S. May,’ and ‘Garmison,’ referred to in places as ‘Jerry’ or ‘Jack.’
It must not be supposed that I inventoried all these things on the spot as fully as I have here written them down. … I conveyed [them] to my burrow for safety’s sake, and there being a methodical man, I inventoried them. [3]
6. Handle of small-sized hunting-knife. Blade snapped short. Buck’s horn, diamond cut, with swivel and ring on the butt; fragment of cotton cord attached.Other interesting features of the story include the odd choice of names for his principal characters. Why ‘Morrowbie Jukes,’ for instance? The slightly Gallic sound to the name might support those commentators who have seen its closest avatar in Poe’s ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’ (a story Kipling references directly in his later piece ‘In the House of Suddhoo’). Nor is it possible to encounter the name ‘Gunga Dass’ without a slight premonitory shiver for the future, faithful, fateful ‘Gunga Din.’ It’s significant, too, that one of his many biographers, Angus Wilson, chose to adapt this title for his own account of Kipling’s life: The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling (1977). He, at least, appears to have suspected something autobiographical in it.
But there’s one extra, final paragraph in that old ‘American Publishers Corporation’ edition owned by my father:
To cut a long story short, Dunnoo is now my personal servant on a gold mohur a month – a sum which I still think far too little for the services he has rendered. Nothing on earth will induce me to go near that devilish spot again or to reveal its whereabouts more clearly than I have done. Of Gunga Dass I have never found a trace, nor do I wish to do. My sole motive in giving this to be published is the hope that someone may possibly identify, from the details and the inventory which I have given above, the corpse of the man in the olive-green shooting-suit. [4]
This does have the effect of bringing us back to the very circumstantial – and surely unnecessarily detailed – nature of the description, quoted above, of the dead European. It’s hard to avoid the idea, in fact, that some further communication is intended in this set of six items. Not, presumably, to the reader of today, but perhaps to some specific reader who might have been reached by Quartette. That surname ‘Singleton’ seems particularly suggestive, implying (as it does) a failed romance, leaving the two principals still ‘single’: foot loose and fancy-free. ‘Jerry’ (or ‘Jack’) Garmison is harder to identify at this date. There was, however, a seventeenth-century Jewish scholar called Samuel Garmison whose work on Spirit Possession in Judaism is still frequently cited to this day. [5]
I got lost. Again. Foreign cities and me! Everything went pretty well at the lecture: it was a big group, but there were a bunch of visiting students there who offered opinions and actually understood what I was saying. When we divided them into groups in the second hour, this was a great help. It was very dark and cold by the time we’d finished, though, and I couldn’t quite face the long walk home – especially as I’d come in by subway, so didn’t quite know where to go. Accordingly, I asked one of the teacher’s aides to show me the way back to the underground.
This went okay until I got to the point where one needed to switch between line 4 and line 10. I was about to go off in the wrong direction, when I thought again and looked at the map, and went all the way across to the other side to go the opposite way. Phew! But the subway station nearest my hotel has two almost identical exits onto different streets. I think it must have been this unfortunate fact that got me confused. I knew I had to go down the street, cross the road, and there the hotel would be. But there, alas, it wasn’t.
So I retraced my steps and tried to go the other way. But that led back to a road marked on the map as being in the opposite direction. I went back once more, tried to imagine that I was coming out of the station again, and set off – again – crossing the road for the umpteenth time. But was it the right road? Nothing made any sense. It was very dark, and I’d been walking up and down for what seemed like hours by now. Eventually I found a security guard and showed him my print-out from google maps. He didn’t understand it (most of it was in English), but pointed vaguely to the left of where we were standing.
At this a passer-by joined in: ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.
I allowed I wasn’t.
‘Where do you need to get to?’
‘The Red Chamber Hotel.’
‘Go left, across one big street, across another street for pedestrians, then another street, and it will be on your left. About ten minutes’ walk.’ I thanked him profusely and shook his hand, then followed his directions to the letter.
Sure enough, there it was: big and unmissable. As another of the teacher’s aides said, though: everything is so much farther than you anticipate. Beijing is such a big place. Even getting to the subway station and back was almost too much for me. I think I might stick to guided tours from now on.I’ve been counting it up on my fingers. Seven more sleeps. I suspect more like six, really: there’s tonight, Thursday, Friday, then the long-drawn-out madness of the weekend, moving inexorably into Monday and finally departure on Tuesday night, whilst I sit here twiddling my thumbs and feverishly watching my way through the likes of Highway Through Hell and other classics ... Everything about me seems to rile and irritate the people at this hotel. They have a desk for changing money, but it turns out not my kind of dollars when I asked them for a rate. For that I had to go to an outside bank, where I waited over an hour and a half to change fifty dollars (all I had on me).
I noticed some of the guests wearing their slippers in the dining room a day or two after I came, so decided to do the same. This morning there was a sign: ‘Guests are asked not to wear their slippers in the restaurant.’ Just a little passive-aggressive, don’t you think? I went all the way back up to my room in the lift, put on some lace-up shoes, and came back down to have my pre-paid-for (thank God!) breakfast. I mean, what difference does it make? Why should one need to wear shoes just to move from floor to floor? It’s not the thing itself, mind you, just the way it was done.
I’ve ordered room service a couple of times now, and the tray has been collected next day by housekeeping. Today there was a little note on it when it arrived asking me to ring the room service number to have the tray collected after I’d finished ‘for your comfort and convenience.’ When, however, I dutifully rang the number, they couldn’t understand what I was talking about, and instead kept on asking what I wanted to order. The staff in general, I would say, are surly and suspicious and almost completely devoid of a desire to help with anything – the reverse of what I’ve encountered elsewhere.
The waiter who’s brought
my room-service tray
two or three times
catches my eye
at breakfast
wanting to be recognised?
I’m not quick enough
so he turns back
disappointed
the others just scowlI saw one other foreigner in the subway yesterday, and no others in Tiananmen Square. My colleague back home was right. They pay no attention to us. But any attention they do pay is mostly hostile, I feel: with occasional honourable exceptions such as the man who gave me directions home after my lecture, mind you. I do feel a different atmosphere here than in Shanghai, which seemed a much more cosmopolitan, outward-looking city. Here there are barriers and policemen everywhere – and one hesitates to go down any byways for fear of being told off. I’ll be awfully glad to be back home again.
I can’t check it here anymore, of course – no Facebook in China – but shortly before I left I noticed my own Facebook page had 666 follows:
It’s not that I saw this as particularly significant in itself. I’m not that crazy. Nor am I unaware of the fact the so-called ‘Number of the Beast’ tends to come up every time anyone indulges in a spot of numerology. I remember in War and Peace where Pierre has decided to assassinate Napoleon during his invasion of Russia, and takes comfort from the fact that l’russe Besuhof adds up to 666, just like l’empereur Napoléon. It’s true that he has to drop (incorrectly) the ‘e’ from le to get this result, but he justifies it by analogy with the (correct) elision in l’empereur.
So I wasn’t particularly alarmed when the 666 follows turned into 666 likes a few days later:
Why should one be so worried at these kinds of coincidences, anyway? They happen all the time. Synchronicity, Jung called it: an ‘acausal connecting principle’ in the structure of the universe. And, in any case, 7 is generally a good number, combining the Christian trinity with the four elements: there were seven days of creation, seven days in the week, seven colours in the rainbow, seven letters in the Roman numerical system (I, V, X, L, C, D, M), seven seas, seven seals in the Book of Revelation.
However, the seventh month in the lunar calendar is also the Ghost Month in Chinese folklore: paper money and offerings are burned to appease the hungry, wandering ghosts who are permitted to revisit the earth during this period. The best seats at concerts are reserved for ghosts, and the music is played at exceptionally high volume, so that they can hear it. On the fifteenth day a feast is held to persuade them to return to the underworld. Otherwise they may invade your house and bring bad luck. Interestingly enough, the seventh day of this seventh month is reserved for lovers.
According to tradition, that’s because it’s the one day in the year when the Jade Emperor permits his daughter to meet her own lover, a cowherd who stole her magic robe from her while she was bathing. When she found the robe where he’d hidden it, she took the opportunity to make a visit to her father, but to stop her going back to her lowly husband, the emperor diverted all the rivers of heaven to flow in between them, thus creating the milky way. Once in a year they are allowed to meet in the middle of a bridge over the stream.
My God, this is a strange country! None of my cards work in the machines here, so my cash is being whittled away at an alarming rate (the only place I can use a credit card seems to be here at the hotel: and they’re about as unhelpful as could be). There’s a nice little office space here in the room, though, and I’m actually finding it quite a good place to work: making revisions to my lectures at the insistence of Tanchun, the Chinese NZ Centre contact here: I’ve added a whole load of new images to my Powerpoint presentation. If they want the full story from soup to nuts, they can certainly have it!
I did go out yesterday to explore the central city: took the subway to Tiananmen Square and had a bit of a wander around. The National Theatre is certainly a striking looking building. But I forgot to mention the one real success so far. The room was far too hot, so after a couple of days I rang up to ask about it (I’d already made various attempts to adjust the thermostat). They sent along someone from housekeeping who pointed triumphantly at the thermostat. I made various gestures designed to show that nothing one did to it actually lowered the temperature. So after a while she just went over and opened a window.
Triumph! Now, by judicious blending of the freezing air from outside and the scorching air inside, I can maintain something resembling a living temperature: a bit of Chinese practicality at work there. I have to say it did surprise me that the windows actually opened, but I’ve been very grateful for the information. Surely we’re on the countdown now. The funny thing is that I thought I saw some movement out of the corner of my eye as I turned away from the window. I guess it was just the curtain fluttering, but for a moment I was sure that there was someone else in the room. The fruits of being on my own for so many days, I suppose. I’m definitely pretty high up in the tower here.
And now I’m here, sitting in the NZ Centre, having made my way there all by myself. 2 stops north on line 4 (to East Gate of Peking University), one stop west on line 10 towards Suzhou. This is quite impressive, when you consider how thoroughly lost I got last time. It was really quite shameful (though perhaps not entirely surprising). Going back will be harder than getting here, I fear. It’s a spectacularly beautiful campus – for the oldest (and possibly most prestigious) university in China. Mao Tse-Tung was once the librarian here. There’s a memorial to Edgar Snow down by the lake.
My plan is to go to the Great Wall tomorrow, and the Forbidden City possibly on Saturday. After that my tally will be complete, and no arseholes will be able to one-up me about their own Chinese travels. It may sound petty, but that is the way it is. Not that I have any bucket list nonsense going on in my head, but just a decent sense of seizing opportunities when they present themselves. I fear I’m disappointing Tanchun bigtime. She’d clearly prefer it if I attended lectures with the contingent of Canterbury students who are here with us. Not on your Nellie – I’m not here to listen to lectures on Chinese culture. There’s enough of that kind of thing available at home.
Today, too, I took some photos really for the first time. It’s good to chronicle places and people. I think. The latter are more difficult, as one can’t simply snap – one must ask permission. Shortly I will lift my lordly arse into gear again, & start the painful business of making my way home. I feel that honour is satisfied so far as my duty-to-be-absent for housekeeping is concerned. They were unbelievably persistent on that first day when my only hope was to get some uninterrupted rest. The lecture holds fewer fears for me now. They seem a nice, responsive group, and I can pull out the stops a bit more so far as expanding on the texts – which they may even have read this time – is concerned.
Again, it seems like an awful long way to send me just to give two talks (Tanchun would rather I’d stayed till the end of the week so as to set up some meetings with other Academics in the literary sphere). Will they invite me back? I must confess I couldn’t care less. Of course it would be infinitely simpler a second time – but my assumption is that they won’t. I don’t think it’s really integral to their view of the subject as a whole. Tanchun is of another opinion. Even though her own field is history, she certainly seems to feel that my input has helped to liven up the course. Whatever that means. I hope something good, not another veiled insult disguised with soft soap.
11th Anniversary of her death. On the Great Wall. Surrounded by Francophones: ‘Ah, un plat !’ They all seem determined to reach the summit. For me, this is sufficient, I think. I have to say it all looks very recent: the mortar, even a lot of the stone work. It’s hard to convince oneself of the ‘ancient-ness’ of it all – especially as it’s mostly Ming-built, according to the guide, Ping. Other interesting aspects:
- Lots of graffiti in English, but often with Indian names attached – 2015 a popular date.
- The mountain barrier makes Beijing very defensible – but also affects the climate somewhat adversely. This is one of the few valley-gaps in the wall, so is exceptionally heavily fortified.
As it turns out, it’s just me on this particular guided tour of the Wall and the Ming Tombs in the valley nearby. I had no idea how steep it was! It was more like climbing a mountain by way of endless flights of stairs than strolling around a few battlements. There was a great sign halfway up:
Don’t fight, pick quarrels and stir up trouble and gather to gamble feudal superstitions and other illegal activities are forbidden.
I should think so too! ... All in all, it was very interesting, but this may have exhausted my taste for guided tours for the moment. You are rather at their mercy once you climb into the bus. The guide, Mrs. Ping, was very informative, though, and had a whole bunch of good ghost stories to impart.I just sprang for a major piece of tourist kitsch: my own ‘Great Wall’ book with my picture in it: Y100. Must economise! If they try to take me for some jade, it’ll have to be paid for via the credit card. I don’t know if it’s really an epoch-making experience but at least now it’s done. I suspect that they film on the other side of the valley: it is a bit precipitous for such niceties here. [Annex: at the Jade factory. Just sprung $700 or so for two jade pendants & a ‘happiness ball’ – with dragons and phoenixes, and twelve holes for the twelve months – I did rather like it, I must say. Perhaps company for our bronze dragon back home. It is, after all, quite a significant anniversary: steel for strength, for hanging on regardless …]
The Beijing subway closes down every night at 11 pm by arrangement with the ghosts (according to Ping) – a monk talked to them for three days back in the 1970s after many accidents had taken place. Palaces used to be burned down to eliminate the ghosts, because they move so fast – hence the use of the colour red to represent flames, and thus good luck. One should step over the threshold of a tomb with the right leg if one is male: men to the east, women to the west – if you imagine yourself facing south from the tomb. One must be very careful not to step through the back gate, as it marks the boundary between the two worlds.
There was a very comfortable looking black-and-white pussy cat lying slap in the middle of the courtyard of the first Ming Emperor’s tomb. He didn’t see any particular need to move when the guard came over, but as it turned out it was only to give him a pat. The rest of the layout was more or less as follows:
- Wall – to guard against robbers, I suppose.
- Courtyard – large, carefully aligned in the right directions.
- Lions – female on the left (with cub), male on the right (with ball)
- Temple – in this case, with an extensive collection of artefacts.
- Gate – you can go back but not forward through this. If you do go back through it, you should laugh loudly and slap yourself to discourage the ghosts from coming with you.
- Tower – to watch out for trouble.
- Tomb – unexcavated, buried under a hillside of earth and trees.
From: shixiangyun
Dear Dr. —，
I’m Shi Xiangyun. Welcome to China!
It is my great honor to visit the Forbidden City with you. I will arrive at the lobby of the Red Chamber Hotel at half past eight to meet you. And then we can take the tube to the destination.
However, I must return to the school before lunch as a consequence of my class which is scheduled at three o’clock tomorrow. In order to compensate this, I would love to invite you to have lunch in my university.
I have to say that my spoken English is not such good. Maybe there will be some problems in our communication. But, I do believe we would have a good time!
By the way, it only take me Y40 to buy your ticket. So Y120 is not appropriate.
Looking forward to meeting you.
P.S. Please wear comfortable shoes because maybe tomorrow we will walk a long distance. And if the air condition is not so good, you’d better wear mask.
Sincerely,
Shi XiangyunI had a strange dream last night. I was working undercover for some shadowy government agency, with orders to infiltrate a cell of dissidents. This I did with fair success, but while there I gradually befriended a young woman who treated me – at first – with disdain, but gradually came to trust me more and more. We were on a train, I recall, going to some dramatic confrontation when her feelings became truly apparent. She sat down close to me, and started to confess a series of things about her former life, her ambitions to be a teacher or a writer, and some even more intimate revelations.
I felt a great warmth towards her. At once the parameters of my mission seemed to fade, and my fondness for her to surge up. I was just on the point of declaring my feelings when, all of a sudden, I woke up. As usual in such cases, the feeling of bereftness from the dream persisted for quite some time. The idea that it was now irrecoverable seemed more bitter even than usual. It made matters worse that the thing that awoke me was somebody pounding on the door. It took me some time to pull myself together and stumble over to the eyehole. Outside there was something of a deputation. A man in a suit, a uniformed maid, and one of the concierges from the front desk.
‘What do you want?’ I asked through the door. The concierge replied in such accented English that I couldn’t at first understand him. After some time it became clear that he was asking for my date of birth.
‘Why do you need that?’ I riposted. He persisted, though, so finally I obliged. There was a brief silence on the other side, then he started banging again, and demanding that I open up.
‘But I’m not dressed,’ I said.
‘That doesn’t matter. We need to come in. We’ll call security if we have to.’
This last threat tipped the balance for me. I detached the chain and ushered them in, having taken the precaution of wrapping myself in one of their generic towelling bathrobes.‘You need to leave,’ said the young concierge.
‘What do you mean? I’m booked in here for … [my mind went blank here] … a few more days at least,’ I finished, hastily.
‘Your booking has run out. You need to leave. You need to be out by ten o’clock this morning.’
‘But where shall I go? My flight isn’t for … [once again details which had seemed at my fingertips a few moments before deserted me] … a few days. My company booked me in till then.’
At this point the man in the suit started to shout at me, his words translated simultaneously by the concierge: ‘You must leave the hotel! We have no more booking for you!’‘But – I have a credit card, I can pay for a few more nights if you need me to.’
‘No more nights in this room. You must leave by ten this morning.’
‘But I’ll have to find somewhere else to stay. Can’t you give me a few more hours at least?’
‘Till two this afternoon. But after that we’ll be back with security, and you will be made to leave.’ And so they departed.
The whole thing does seem odd. My first act was to check my hotel booking and flight reservations but – they weren’t there. I had them saved on my laptop, I thought, but there was nothing there when I checked.As for the little plastic pouch I used for my tickets and other information, it was nowhere to be seen. My suitcase and clothes were there, a drift of tourist brochures and other paperwork, but there were no records of the duration of my booking here, or even the length of my overall stay. And yet I must have had them at some stage, or I couldn’t have checked in in the first place. The problem is my memory, I think. I’ve been looking back through these notes, but not with much success, I must confess. They seem very disordered. And I don’t really remember writing them, to tell you the truth.
I recall quite a lot of what’s happened here, but these actual written records seem shadowy, distant from me – just how long have I been here? DID I MISS MY FLIGHT HOME? It’s always been my nightmare, to miss that vital connection, be stranded in a foreign city where I don’t speak the language, without friends or contacts, through simple forgetfulness of some crucial event or transfer. Is that what happened? I don’t recall packing my suitcase, or planning my departure – booking a taxi, checking departure times from the airport, booking a shuttle back home. I can’t simply have forgotten those things, can I?
The whole thing is certainly stranger than anything in my experience: was it a mini-stroke, a small touch of amnesia striking me in the night, which has left me hanging on here past my date of departure? I don’t really know who to ask, or how to act. All I know for certain is that I have only a few hours here in this room, with phones and connections, to plan my course of action to get out of here. If I do – what do I mean, of course I will, it’s just a question of how – I’ll do my level best never to get pushed into one of these situations again.
Why did they need me here in the first place? Surely pretty much anyone in my field could have accomplished the few small tasks I seem to have been sent here for. I don’t quite remember what they were, right now, to be honest, but I’m sure that they’ve all been finished now – I hope satisfactorily. When I opened the laptop on my desk I found the following quote – from C. S. Lewis’s old Sci-Fi novel That Hideous Strength, it would appear:
‘Who is called Sulva? What road does she walk? Why is the womb barren on one side? Where are the cold marriages?’Ransom replied,
‘Sulva is she whom mortals call the Moon. She walks in the lowest sphere. Half of her orb is turned towards us and shares our curse. On this side the womb is barren and the marriages cold. There dwell an accursed people, full of pride and lust. There when a man takes a maiden in marriage they do not lie together, but each lies with a cunningly fashioned image of the other, made to move and to be warm by devilish arts, for real flesh will not please them, they are so dainty (delicate) in their dreams of lust. Their real children they fabricate by vile arts in a secret place.’ [6]I’ve got to get out of here. I hope they’ll let me store my suitcase down below. There’s a little door behind the front desk which I’ve seen them wheeling luggage out of, so perhaps my big bag can go in there. I wouldn’t bet on it, though. They’ve taken of late to ignoring me when I go up to talk to them: not making eye contact, refusing to acknowledge I’m even speaking to them. But I do feel afraid to leave the hotel altogether. Where else could I go? The airport? So many security checks to go through, so many officials to placate.
No, I’ve spotted a little walk-in cupboard the cleaners use a few doors down from my room, up on the third floor. I don’t see why I shouldn’t slip in there. Nobody uses it most of the time, and when they do I’ll just wander around like any other guest. No more free breakfasts, admittedly, but I doubt that they’ll question my right just to sit here, in the lobby. After all, I could simply be waiting for my guests to arrive. Plenty of people do that here. They even have quite noisy colloquies in the middle of the floor: rough-looking fellows up here from the countryside – maybe just for the day, maybe for longer: the trip of a lifetime.
And I’ve seen her there already a couple of times. Pale and a bit sickly looking, a mask on her face to keep out the toxic dust, a scarf for warmth. Just as she was when she returned to campus for that fateful cup of tea. At first I just thought that it was a coincidence when I saw her there, right in the middle of the lobby, scrolling down her phone. It can’t be! I thought. But it was. I haven’t yet spoken to her, mind you. I’m waiting for her to make the first move. If I wait too long, the others may come, and that would ruin everything.
I wish, above all, I could remember her name. Miss Mon—’ (rest illegible) —’ham’ —’nt.’ What’s that when it’s at home? Miss Moneypenny? Or Monkey – as in that other classic novel, Journey to the West? ‘—’ham’’ and ‘—’nt’’ seem a bit easier to me. The Hamilton Gardens back home include both a Chinese Scholars’ and a Chinoiserie garden (not to mention the Indian Char Bagh garden), and one of their principal events each year is the Katherine Mansfield garden party – Kathleen Beauchamp, that is – whose work has been described as ‘one of the great monuments of the world’s literature.’ Missed Monument, perhaps: like the one to Edgar Snow.
What I find myself remembering most is that tour of the forbidden city with young Xiangyun. She turned out to have been named after one of the characters in my favourite Chinese novel, the Red Chamber Dream. They call it ‘Redology’ – the study of each and every odd aspect of that strangest of novels. Mao Tse-Tung was a particular devotee of it, too, it seems. The hotel must have been named after it, I suppose: strange that I never thought of that before. She was refreshingly frank about her future desires and ambitions as we walked through the seemingly endless courtyards and byways of that immense folly.
All her life, it appears, her dream had been to stroll by the banks of Weiming Lake as a university student. It was her definition of felicity. And now she’d achieved her goal! But somehow it didn’t, now, seem enough. She needed another dream to motivate her forward, but the future seemed all hard work and study and nothing particular to look forward to. I tried to make light of it, encourage her to enjoy her triumph in simply having got here from her small home town: ‘You must get fêted every-time you go home: surely you’re the local folk hero?’ As I turned to put a coin in one of the big brass vessels to wish her good luck, she stopped me and asked to look at it.
It was just a small coin from home which had been lurking unseen at the bottom of my old wallet: there was a tattooed face on it. It was quite shiny, though, and she asked if she could keep it.
‘Of course you can,’ I said. ‘I only wish I had something more impressive to give you.’
‘This will be fine,’ she replied, saying she did perhaps still have the dream of foreign travel to look forward to.
‘You must come and see me if you ever get over there,’ I said, and she looked at me strangely. ‘What is the name of your town, anyway?’
She said, ‘It’s near Harbin. The coldest place in the world. Every time I go back I get sick. Last time it lasted a month. I lay with my face to the wall.’
Notes:
[2] Rudyard Kipling, The Phantom ‘Rickshaw and other Tales. 1st ed. 1889 (New York: American Publishers Corporation, 1895), 75-76.
[3] Kipling, The Phantom ‘Rickshaw, 76-77.
[4] Kipling, The Phantom ‘Rickshaw, 84.
[6] C. S. Lewis, The Cosmic Trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet; Perelandra; That Hideous Strength. 1st eds 1938, 1943, 1945 (London: The Bodley Head, 1990), 551.
Jack Ross: Ghost Stories (2019)[4/6/18-26/1/19]
[8563 words]
[Published in Ghost Stories (Auckland: Lasavia Publishing, 2019): 94-118.]
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