A Day in Beijing
We were walking in the center of Beijing, along the northern end of Tiananmen Square. My son Josh's first time to Beijing, my third or fourth visit. He was visiting from New York and I was living in Hong Kong. We were in Beijing for a January week, being tourists, visiting friends.
We walked along the sidewalk between the square and the front gate of the Gu Gong, the Forbidden City. Chang’An Avenue, the Avenue of Eternal Tranquility stretched out to the west towards the Fragrant Hills. It was still in the days before massive urban reconstruction began to turn half the city into a replica of Los Angeles, with bland tasteless buildings built on top of historic rubble.
As bicycles streamed by, then still the most common transportation tool, we walked along the crimson walls that separated the city rush and flow from the Zhongshan Park gardens on the inside. The park was originally built in 1420 as the Altar of Land & Grain and in 1928 renamed for Sun Yat-sen (Sun Zhongshan in mandarin), the founder of the 1911 revolution. Inside the park is the Zhongshan Concert Hall, now renovated and modern, but then a down-at-the-heels theatre little better than the bandstand it had started out as. We didn't know this at all. We were wandering west down the street, soaking in the sites, watching the people flow past us in both directions, like schools of fish gracefully keeping their distance. We had no discernable destination. When we got there, where ever it was, we'd know. It was a grey day, from threatening snow or pollution or both.
We had been walking for more than an hour and looking for a break. We turned north, and walked up the quiet street that divides the Forbidden City and its public parks and museums and Zhongnanhai, the "Central and South Seas", the really forbidden home base for China's central government. Maybe Deng Xiaoping was inside. The further north we walked, the more little shops we saw. As we walked, a bicyclist rider slowed along the curb in front of us. Strapped to the back of his bike was a canvas backpack, faded through long use into a colorless tan. It was open on the top and the cover flapped loosely to the side. Out of the top of the pack we saw the black ends of ten to fifteen scrolls, either calligraphy or traditional Chinese paintings. The rider, a middle-aged Chinese man with a sensitive face and a full head of hair, seemed just as frayed as his backpack.
He pulled his bike over the curb, angling across the wide sidewalk, on a trajectory that would quickly intercept us.
“Hello”, he said in accented English.
We mumbled a response, ambivalent about the encounter. On the one hand, we wanted to make contact with people. On the other, we’d become bruised by the constant efforts by Beijingers to separate us from our money.
“Where are you from?”
Again we responded. He introduced himself as “Wang Laoshi”, Teacher Wang, and said he was a calligraphy teacher from a nearby school. The scrolls in his pack were both his and his students. He was taking them to an exhibit.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
We told him we were looking for a place to rest, maybe have some tea. Actually, coffee would have been better but, in those days, coffee was hard to find. None of Beijing’s now ubiquitous Starbuck’s existed.
“I know a place very close; you can have tea. And noodles. I’ll show you.” Wang hadn’t asked for money, at least not yet. I kept my hands in my pockets. As we walked up the road, he told us that calligraphy was a very time-honored art in China. Writing hanzi, characters, was both literary and artistic. Every educated Chinese was taught calligraphy, he said. I thought of how different it is in the west and how bad my handwriting looked. I’d almost failed penmanship in second grade. If I were Chinese, I’d be considered a complete idiot. We nodded and smiled.
“It is different from the past. Before we used traditional characters. The same for a thousand years. Now, we don’t. China is a very poor country. No money. So Chairman Mao decided Chinese people should use simplified characters – use much less ink and paper, save money.”
I’d never heard this theory before. I mean, I knew what he said was true: that outside the PRC, in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and even New York’s Chinatown – the characters were the traditional, more complex ones. They had more brush strokes and were harder to write & read. I’d always thought that the PRC had switched to simplified characters because they were easier to learn. If they were easier to learn, more people would master them. If more people mastered them, literacy rates would go up and China would look better to the world. I kept my mouth shut, but determined not yet to discard my own view; maybe I was wrong, but Wang’s theory sounded a bit, well, . . . goofy. What was this guy up to? He hadn’t offered to be our tour guide, translator, money-changer, girl-friend-finder, or any of the myriad other scams and money-related schemes we’d been battered with.
We arrived at the faded green door of a tea shop, tucked up against the west wall of the park. To the right of the door was a window, but little could be seen of the inside.
“May I join you?” he asked.
“Sure. Why not”
We went inside and, in the dim light, took seats at a small “four-top” on the right, a few meters in from the window by the door. The whole place looked like it was last renovated during the reign of the Empress Dowager, a hundred years ago.
We ordered tea and noodles.
“Would you like to see a scroll?”
“Yes, of course!” I’d hoped, but hadn’t wanted to ask. I’d been afraid maybe he would think it was too intrusive.
He shuffled through the scrolls in his pack, finally selecting one and pulled it out of the pack. He put the pack back on the floor.
“Do you know Li Bai?” he asked.
“No.” We hadn’t met many people in Beijing besides our hand-full of friends.
“He is China’s most famous poet, from the Tang Dynasty.” No wonder we hadn’t met him.
The tea came, followed by steaming and enticing fragrant bowls of noodles. We slurped the little cups, careful not to burn our tongues.
Wang untied the scroll, stood up, and unrolled it. As it cascaded down, I could see that it was beautiful. But to my ignorant eyes, it was also a mystery. That I couldn’t read it was irrelevant; the mystery just added to its beauty.
“What does it say?”
Wang rolled the scroll back into itself and put it on his chair. He backed away from the table and stood with the window to his right. We watched him, fascinated. He held out both hands, palms down and swept them from one side to the other, parallel to the floor.
“Jing Ye Si”, he said. “From my bed . . .” He leaned towards the window and lifted his hands, palms facing each other but still apart, towards the sky outside the window.
“ . . . bright moon shine.” His hands, palms still facing each other, pointed to the floor near the table. “Chuang qian ming yue guang . . . Think snow on ground.” His hands swept back in a smooth arc.
His hands came together as if in prayer. He raised them towards the ceiling and lifted his face.
“Yi shi di shang shuang . . . ; Raise head see bright moon.”
His chin dropped to his chest, his hands at his sides.
“Di tou si gu xiang . . . lower head, think of home.”
I was overwhelmed. I wanted to clap; a standing ovation wouldn’t have been inappropriate, In the dim light, Wang smiled. He sat down, slurped some tea – by now a bit cooler. He began to eat his noodles.
By now, after Wang’s performance, I wanted that scroll. I would remember the grace and depth of feeling and the magical moment every time I looked at it at home, I was sure. But how to buy it? Wang had offered nothing for sale. I felt awkward and culturally illiterate. What was proper? How could I buy this thing without insulting the moment, without taking its magic and making it a crass commercial encounter?
“Can I see some the other scrolls?”
A few more came out of the pack, all beautiful, all meaningful only as foils for the first one. No more poetic dances followed. Wang quietly shared calligraphy, noodles and tea. He seemed unrushed, attentive. When the noodles were finished, the scrolls neatly tied and put back in the pack, Wang stood.
“I must go now.”
We offered to pay for the small meal. He gently refused and took a few rumpled bills out of his pocket and put them on the table. He turned and took a few steps towards the door. He stopped and turned around, facing us again.
“I would like to give you a scroll,” he said. “For friendship.” He searched through the pack again, pulling one of them out. We couldn’t tell which one it was. They all looked the same – round coils of paper and silk, with black knobs on either end and wisps of silk string tightly holding the coil in place.
“It is Li Bai’s.” he said. I was speechless.
“But you cannot give us that one!” I wanted to say. But not wanting to, either.
“You must let us pay for it. Really!”
“No, no. I cannot.” He put it on the chair. He said nothing for a moment.
“But it is not mine. It is my student’s. Maybe you can give him something for the materials: the paper, the ink, the scroll . . .”
“Of course!” We wanted to be fair, of course. But we had no idea how much this could be.
“How much?”
“It is up to you. You can give him what you think it is worth.”
The scroll seemed priceless to me. A thousand renminbi would be too little. What could I say that would not be insulting? How much could the ink, paper, silk, and the wooden dowel be? And that was too little! Li Bai was a great poet! It was as if he, himself, had written this scroll!
“Two hundred and fifty.” I said.
“Haode”. Okay.
I counted out the money, stood up and gave it to Wang. I sat back down. He took it, carefully folded it and put the bills into his pack. Keeping it safe for his student, I thought.
Wang said goodbye, turned and left the tea house. Josh & I paid the bill, stood up and followed him onto the street. He had disappeared, nowhere to be seen.
A few snowflakes floated in the grey January air.
“I think we were just played.” Josh said. “I think maybe he planned that all out, just to sell us a scroll.”
“You think?”
“Yeah.”
I thought about what Josh said, as we walked back towards Chang’An Avenue.
“But he’s really a master,” I answered. “It was worth it every penny.”
We looked for a cab.
We never saw Wang again, but never forgot his remarkable performance. And, in the years since, I’ve sought out Li Bai many times.
