City Gate, Open Up Read online

  City Gate, Open Up

  Bei Dao, wearing his father’s sheepskin coat, 1970

  For Tiantian and Dodo

  City gate, city gate how tall are you?

  Three hundred and sixty feet tall!

  What sort of lock is that on you?

  A giant iron-diamond lock!

  City gate, city gate will you open up or not?

  —from a nursery rhyme

  Contents

  Preface: My Beijing

  Light and Shadow

  Smells

  Sounds

  Toys and Games

  Furniture

  Vinyl Records

  Fishing

  Swimming

  Raising Rabbits

  Three Never Old Hutong No. 1

  Qian Ayi

  Reading

  Going to Shanghai

  Elementary School

  Beijing Middle No. 13

  Beijing Middle No. 4

  The Great Linkup

  Father

  Translator’s acknowledgments

  About the author

  .

  preface

  My Beijing

  Toward the end of 2001, my father fell seriously ill and I returned to a Beijing that had been cut off from me for nearly thirteen years. Nothing could have prepared me — it was unthinkable — Beijing had completely changed: Everything was difficult to recognize, nothing familiar. I was a foreigner in my own hometown.

  I was born in Beijing and spent half my life there — the momentous years of childhood and adolescence. My experiences of growing up are intimately linked with Beijing. And they’ve vanished as the city that once was has also vanished.

  It was during my return that the impulse to write this book ignited: I would use the written word to rebuild another city, rebuild my Beijing; I would use my Beijing to refute the Beijing of today. In my city, time flows backward, spring revives dead trees, vanished smells waft back with sounds and beams of light, demolished temples are restored with courtyard residences, along hutong streets, tiled roof rows rise in waves toward a low, low horizon line, pigeon-tail whistles echo through the deep blue sky, children appreciate the seasons’ transformations, residents are sustained by an inner compass. Welcoming the drifting travelers of the four seas, welcoming the homeless solitary souls, welcoming all inquisitive guests, I open my city gate.

  This long-consuming task of rebuilding and reconstruction — I feel it’s almost impossible to achieve. Memory — selective, ambiguous, exclusive — can subsist even in a state of prolonged hibernation. Yet writing awakens the process of remembering: Within memory’s labyrinth, one passage leads into another passage, one gate opens up to face another gate.

  Childhood and adolescence are of enormous significance in one’s life; it can even be said that those pivotal years shape or decide nearly everything else that happens after, often long after. Looking back into the wellspring of one’s early years is akin to a kind of prehistoric excavation, accompanied by whatever happiness and sorrow are discovered. If escape and return are the two ends of a road, walking even farther means drawing closer to childhood; and it’s precisely this primary force that pushes me toward the edge of the sea and sky.

  I would like to give a special thanks to Cao Yifan — neighbor, friend, classmate — who not only plays a central role in this book but whose astonishing memory filled in and corrected a large number of crucial details. And of course I must thank Li Tuo and Gan Qi, two “fussy readers” who embolden me to write like I’m always treading on thin ice.

  bei dao

  June 25, 2010, Hong Kong

  City Gate, Open Up

  Light and Shadow

  1

  I returned to the city of my birth at the end of 2001, after a long, unforeseen parting of thirteen years. As the plane descended, the myriad lights of the houses and buildings rushed into the portholes, whirling and spinning. I suffered a momentary shock: Beijing looked like a huge, glittering soccer stadium. It was a cold, midwinter night. After going through customs, I found three strangers with a raised sign that read “Mr. Zhao Zhenkai” waiting for me. Though of different height and size, they weirdly resembled one another against the glow of the arc lights, as if shadows from some other world. The welcoming ceremony was brief and silent; not until we were all seated in a sleek black sedan did they begin to speak, though it was difficult to distinguish between courtesies and threats, as the lights rushing by outside like the tide kept me distracted.

  When I was a child, nights in Beijing were dark, pitch-dark, a darkness a hundredfold darker than today. So, for instance, Uncle Zheng Fanglong lived next door to my family in a two-room residence with only three fluorescent lights: eight watts in the sitting room, three watts in the bedroom, and a shared three-watt bulb that hung from a small window between the kitchen and bathroom. In other words, whenever the whole family celebrated New Year’s or decided to live it up on any ordinary day, they never used more than fourteen watts total — those brilliant, bulb-lined full-length mirrors weren’t in fashion yet.

  Perhaps this is an extreme example for Sanbulao (“Three Never Old”) Hutong No. 1, but for the rest of Beijing I fear the situation was even worse. My classmates often lived with their family in a single room with one light, and were commonly forced to observe “blackouts” — but once the light-string was pulled. . . . What about homework? . . . Quit your lip-flapping, there’s always tomorrow. . . .

  The lightbulbs were ordinarily bare, uncovered, a dim, yellow softness; a shade made a mysterious halo, projecting a single spotlight upward, and washed out the numerous subtleties of darkness. Back then girls didn’t wear makeup, or even dress up, though they were strikingly beautiful, which certainly had something to do with the quality of the light. The spread of fluorescent lights turned into a disaster, painfully dazzling the eyes while blotting out the skies as they enveloped the earth without impediment or pause. As the nighttime illumination on a chicken farm pushes hens to lay more eggs, fluorescent lights create the illusion of daylight, except human beings cannot lay eggs and so they become more agitated — heart vexed, thoughts confused. What’s unfortunate is that kind of feminine beauty can’t exist anymore — applying makeup on those ashen, worn-out faces is useless. And yet the people who suffer the most under fluorescent lights must be children. With nowhere to hide in that space erased of subtlety and imagination, they prematurely step into the savageness of a public square.

  Our physics teacher once said that when one enters the dark, visual acuity expands twenty-thousand-fold for a brief moment. So darkness allows one to see things as clearly as a flame. Capturing fire originally signified humankind’s first evolutionary milestone, but surpassing this milestone only produced an open-eyed blindness. To think that the male human beast once possessed the keen vision of a wolf, its swiftly adapting focus: woosh . . . see the flame . . . woosh . . . see the flock of sheep . . . woosh . . . see the matchless beauty of the she-wolf.

  In those days there were plenty of “four-eyes” — besides lighting conditions, it must have had something to do with study habits. Students would argue vigorously about why, then, in the unlit darkness of the countryside, there were so few “four-eyes”? Although the school provided night study rooms (i.e., a space with sufficient lighting), it couldn’t prevent the round-the-clock overachievers and hard-core intellectuals, like my good friend Cao Yifan, from some light reading — nestling into his quilt with Dream of the Red Chamber and flashlight in hand, he long ago joined the ranks of “four-eyes.”

  Back then streetlamps in Beijing were scarce; many hutong alleys and lanes didn’t have a single o
ne, and even if there were any, each one would be separated by thirty to fifty meters of darkness and only illuminated the small area immediately below it. Adults often exploited the story of the beggar to frighten us. The forehead-tapping beggar used a certain enchanting drug to abduct children. The tale itself became an enchanting drug, bewildering countless children, the teller always conveying the fuzziest of details: For one thing, what exactly did the head-tapping trick entail to instantly stupefy a child into mechanically following the villain away? Didn’t Taiwan unleash this kind of advanced weaponry years before? While we couldn’t be sure if such a crime actually occurred, oil and vinegar spiced up the oral legend, which stretched through hutong history into my childhood.

  For the night traveler, streetlamps are needed more for steeling nerves than for illumination. The night traveler rides her bicycle, whistles a faint melody, ding-ding rings her bell. If every streetlamp is out, or some scamp has shattered them with his slingshot, she panics, cursing eight generations of ancestors.

  Given the scarcity of streetlamps, one required another light source to ride at night. Toward the end of the 1950s, some bicyclists still used paper lanterns, as depicted in Hou Baolin’s masterful piece of comic xiangsheng crosstalk Night Traveler. Most used a kind of square flashlight that could be strapped onto the handlebars. The next grade up for such equipage involved a dynamo-powered light that generated electricity at the spinning hub through pedaling; if the bicycle’s speed became uneven, the light flashed on and off, becoming a visible part of Beijing’s nightscape.

  At the end of the 1950s, modern streetlights appeared along Chang’an Avenue, the thoroughfare of Eternal Peace. Walking the expansive avenue as dusk settled and the lights flickered on filled one with pride — mind clear, eyes ablaze — as if devouring communism with a glance. In stark contrast, the lights in hutong neighborhoods stayed extremely dim. Once you strayed from that broad, open road, you’d be lost again in Beijing’s endless hutong maze.

  When I was a child I’d play the shadows game with my little brother and sister — intercepting the light with hands overlapped and fingers intertwined to cast animals of all kinds onto the walls, weak or ferocious, from the chase to the fight. No one chose to be a rabbit, the weak meat for the strong; behind the succession of shadows lurked a will to power, the shawdowteers believing they were masters of the ten thousand manifestations.

  For children, darkness is for hide-and-seek. Retreat from the realm of light into countless hiding places, deep into the nooks and corners. When we moved into Three Never Old Hutong No. 1, there was still a rock garden in the courtyard — strange, otherworldly forms of Taihu stone terrified people at night; whatever shapes one described they became. The courtyard was the perfect place to play hide-and-seek. Both sides trembled with fear — who could be sure one wouldn’t encounter the ghost of the famous former resident, the voyager Zheng He, or one of his handmaidens? Hearing the high-pitched, trilling calls — “Saw you a long time ago, yalayala! Don’t play dumb, come out come out!” — pierced our quivering hearts. And then, our bodies tingling with goose bumps, a shrill scream right behind us.

  Darkness is also for telling stories, particularly ghost stories. Adults tell them to children, children retell them to each other. In a country that doesn’t believe in God, to manipulate ghosts to frighten children as well as oneself reinforces Confucian orthodoxy. Chairman Mao made appeals for don’t-be-afraid-of-ghosts stories to be told in school, at once confounding the people. For one, the bold are few in this world; for another, to not fear ghosts requires a troubling complication: One must first accept the existence of ghosts to prove one shouldn’t be afraid of them.

  During the Cultural Revolution we’d make revolution by day and tell ghost stories by night, as if ghosts and revolution didn’t contradict each other at all. In my first year at Beijing Middle No. 4 (also known as BHSF, or Beijing High School Four), I lived in the dormitory. More often than not, once the lights were switched off for the night, one student would start to vocalize some spooky music. At the decisive moment, inevitably another one would smoothly push over the guardrail of a bed or toss a metal washbasin to the ground. After such a special-effects assault, the self-professed bold ones could never withstand this test of fear.

  As fluorescent lights became more common after 1970, Beijing suddenly turned bright and ghosts no longer manifested themselves. Fortunately, though, the power frequently went out. Once it did, houses here and there would glow with candles, as if remembering and mourning a lost childhood.

  2

  Waking up, ceiling bright with the reflected light of a heavy snowfall. Warm air from the heater stirs the curtains as the window frame blurs with the light pouring in, making it seem as if a train is slowly, ever so gently, moving forward, taking me to a faraway place. I linger in bed until my parents rush me out.

  A heavy snow turns the city into a mirage, as if gazing into one face of a looking glass. In a flash the glass will smash and shatter, mud splashing everywhere. On the road to school wrapped in a padded cotton coat, I grab a handful of wet snow, roll it into a ball, and throw it at the old pagoda tree by the hutong gate. Alas, it misses its target. I burst into the classroom as the school bell rings. Once again, it is as if the windows of the room are those of a train leaving the platform, gradually accelerating. In the gloominess, the teacher’s silhouette turns, chalk dust flies up, the numerals on the blackboard seem to fade. The teacher raises her pointer at me and shouts, “Hai! Yes, YOU — are you deaf?”

  As soon as the end-of-school bell rang, spring arrived. The eaves once white with snow now seeped liquid black, the sky curved down, endless branch tips were tinted green, bees buzzed in the sunlight, a steady hum, the shadows of girls dashed around like kites whose strings no one could catch, fluff from willow trees fluttered down, irritating people. I started to write, first plagiarizing Liu Baiyu’s Red Agate Essays, then Wei Wei’s Who Are the Most Beloved People? Liu Baiyu wrote of watching the sunrise from a plane above Moscow. This passage I evidently couldn’t plagiarize. I was puzzled: Why Moscow? I strolled over to Houhai Lake to watch the sunset. What exactly is that red agate over yonder? The setting sun looked like a two-fen piece of fruit candy. Swallows flew back and forth across the lake; the Western Hills folded up and down in layers. The waves glittered and a foul stench rose up from the foam.

  On a windless day, a cloud paused, motionless, casting its shadow upon a playground. Some muscular upperclassmen swung themselves mechanically on some parallel bars, their shadows like a metronome. Beneath a horizontal bar, I positioned my feet, took a breath, and prepared to stretch upward. Grip fixed, the plan was to do six consecutive reps to pass. After two, spirit and strength already depleted, my legs kicked out and my forehead just reached the iron bar. It felt like I had exhausted all my energy to climb into the sky for a peek at that white cloud, so freely gathering without a care in the world.

  The summer sun cut the streets into two halves. Shade made it as cool as water, as I passed like a fish through the crowd. I abruptly changed tactics and walked to the side of scorching sun, alone but proud, stepping on my own shadow, face dripping with sweat, my whole body soon drenched. When I reached my destination, I treated myself to a popsicle.

  I enjoy wandering the streets aimlessly, without a thought or care. At the heart of the grown-up world, there exists a kind of subconscious security. Just don’t look up, and everything one sees is below chest-level — no need to suffer if you’re ugly, no need to be distracted by the pleasures angers sorrows joys of the world. When enveloped by a thronging crowd, sky a dark screen, tightly squeezed without a trace of wind, one must struggle and strive to break free from the siege. One benefit of being young is having a unique point of view: a deformed face reflected in a nickel-plated doorknob, the stream of human figures mirrored in glass display windows, countless feet trampling cigarette butts, a candy wrapper rises and falls along a sidewalk curb, sunlight on the spokes o
f bicycle wheels, the taillights of a trolleybus blinking on and off. . . .

  I like rainy days, the way the boundary between light and shadow fade, a harmony of milk and water, like the color palette of a dilettante painter. Birds and clouds descend to lightning-rod heights, empty crows’ nests sway in the branches of tall trees, bright-colored umbrellas meet by chance like drifting duckweed, raindrops make tracks on glass, handwriting on bulletin boards smudge their convictions, the reflected light in puddles scatter beneath my feet.

  Yifan and I would often walk over to Dongan Market. In the 1960s, Dongan Market was renovated into a shopping mall, its name changed from East Peace to Dongfeng East Wind Market, its former ambiance wholly destroyed. Before, all the small vendors displayed their wares in charming disorder, whatever you wanted you could find. In my memory, that place is a maze of lights: a cross-luster of electric lamps, gas lamps, kerosene lamps, and candles all melding into a bewitching haze. Beneath such illumination, the faces of the vendors and customers appeared utterly mysterious. If one could but fix that moment onto a scroll it could represent the perfect scene of daily life at the time. Once in a while, a thread of sunlight leaked inside, barely shifting — that most ancient hour hand.

  3

  Every child naturally harbors many illusions. The play of light and shadow, the space of imagination, even the body’s physiology and biochemistry shape these illusions. As children grow up, most of their illusions are forgotten — time, society, customs, systems of knowledge together forge this forgetting as one enters adulthood.

  The three years between the ages of ten and thirteen were difficult for me — that breaking point of the advancing body and mind as puberty begins. Daily existence meant deprivation. In a photograph from that time I look like a starving African boy with eyes glazed in a fixed stare and the trace of a sly, strange smile at the corners of my mouth.