Love is a many splendoured thing and takes many forms — that stretches beyond bodily chemistry to a need to love all humankind. There is the love for one’s parents, family, practices one believes in and most of all nurtured among those who write, a love for words. For some, like Tagore, words became akin to breathing. He wrote from a young age. Eventually, an urge to bridge social gaps led him to write poetry that bleeds from the heart for the wellbeing of all humanity. Tagore told a group of writers, musicians, and artists, who were visiting Sriniketan in 1936: “The picture of the helpless village which I saw each day as I sailed past on the river has remained with me and so I have come to make the great initiation here. It is not the work for one, it must involve all. I have invited you today not to discuss my literature nor listen to my poetry. I want you to see for yourself where our society’s real work lies. That is the reason why I am pointing to it over and over again. My reward will be if you can feel for yourself the value of this work.”
And it was perhaps to express this great love of humanity that he had written earlier in his life a poem called Dhoola Mandirthat urges us to rise beyond our differences of faith and find love in serving humankind. In this month, which celebrates love with Valentine’s Day, we have a translation of this poem that is born of his love for all people, Dhoola Mandir. Another poet who writes of his love for humanity and questions religion is Nazrul, two of whose poems have been translated by Niaz Zaman. Exploring love between a parent and children is poetry by Masood Khan translated from Bengali by Fakrul Alam. From the distant frontiers of Balochistan, we have a poem by Atta Shad, translated from Balochi by Fazal Baloch, for a fair lady — this time it is admiration. Ihlwha Choi translates poetry from Korean to express his love for a borderless world through the flight of sparrows.
Suzanne Kamata writes a light-hearted yet meaningful column on the recent Taylor Swift concert in Tokyo. Aditi Yadav takes up the Japanese book on which was based a movie that won the 2024 Golden Globe Best Animated Feature Film Award. Sohana Manzoor journeys to London as Devraj Singh Kalsi with tongue in cheek humour comments on extracurriculars that have so become a necessity for youngsters to get to the right schools. Snigdha Agrawal gives us a slice of nostalgia while recounting the story of a Santhali lady and Keith Lyons expresses his love for peace as he writes in memory of a man who cycled for peace.
In reviews, Somdatta Mandal has explored Tahira Naqvi’s The History Teacher of Lahore: A Novel. Srijato’s AHouse of Rain and Snow, translated from Bengali by Maharghya Chakraborty, has been discussed by Basudhara Roy and Bhaskar Parichha has reviewed Toby Walsh’s Faking It: Artificial Intelligence in a Human World. News and Documentary Emmy Award winner (1996) Ruchira Gupta’s daring novel born of her work among human traffickers, I Kick and I Fly, has been brought to our notice by Sengupta and she converses about the book and beyond with this socially conscious activist, filmmaker and writer. Another humanist, a doctor who served by bridging gaps between patients from underprivileged backgrounds, Dr Ratna Magotra, also conversed about her autobiography,Whispers of the Heart — Not Just a Surgeon: An Autobiography, where she charts her journey which led her to find solutions to take cardiac care to those who did not have the money to afford it,
We have fiction this time from Neeman Sobhan reflecting on how far people will go for the love of their mother tongue to highlight the movement that started on 21st February in 1952 and created Bangladesh in 1971. Our stories are from around the world — Paul Mirabile from France, Ravi Shankar from Malaysia, Sobhan from Bangladesh and Ravi Prakash and Apurba Biswas from India — weaving local flavours and immigrant narratives. Most poignant of all the stories is a real-life narrative under the ‘Songs of Freedom’ series by a young girl, Jyoti Kaur, translated from Hindustani by Lourdes M Supriya. These stories are brought to us in coordination with pandies’ and Shaktishalini, a women’s organisation to enable the abused. Sanjay Kumar, the founder of pandies’ and the author of a most poignant book about healing suffering of children through theatre, Performing, Teaching and Writing Theatre: Exploring Play, writes, “‘Songs of Freedom’ bring stories from women — certainly not victims, not even survivors but fighters against the patriarchal status quo with support from the organisation Shaktishalini.”
While looking forward in hope of finding a world coloured with love and kindness under the blue dome, I would like to thank our fabulous team who always support Borderless Journal with their wonderful work. A huge thanks to all of you from the bottom of my heart. I thank all the writers who make our issues come alive with their creations and readers who savour it to make it worth our while to bring out more issues. I would urge our readers to visit our contents’ page as we have more than mentioned here.
Interviewing Bulbul: Remembering Mrinal Sen… Ratnottama Sengupta introduces Bulbul Sharma to converse with her on Mrinal Sen, the legendary filmmaker, reflecting on Bulbul Sharma’s experience as an actress in his film, Interview. Click here to read.
In conversation with Gajra Kottary, eminent screenplay writer, and a brief introduction to her recent book of short stories, Autumn Blossoms. Click hereto read.
Translations
Nazrul’s poem, Samya or Equality, has been translated from Bengali by Niaz Zaman. Click here to read.
Masud Khan’s Fire Engine has been translated from Bengali by Fakrul Alam. Click here to read.
Let’s look forward to things getting better this New Year with wars tapering off to peace— a peace where weapons and violence are only to be found in history. Can that ever happen…?
Perhaps, all of us need to imagine it together. Feeling the need for peace, if we could dwell on the idea and come up with solutions, we could move towards making it a reality. To start with, every single human being has to believe firmly in the need for such a society instead of blaming wars on natural instincts. Human nature too needs to evolve. Right now, this kind of a world view may seem utopian. But from being hunter-gatherers, we did move towards complex civilisations that in times of peace, built structures and created art, things that would have seemed magical to a cave dweller in the Palaeolithic times. Will we destroy all that we built by warring – desecrating, decimating our own constructs and life to go on witch-hunts that lead to the destruction of our own species? Will human nature not evolve out of the darkness and chaos that leads to such large-scale annihilation?
Sometimes, darkness seems to rise in a crescendo only to be drowned by light emanating from an unknown source. This New Year — which started with an earthquake followed the next day by a deadly plane collision — was a test of human resilience from which we emerged as survivors, showing humanity can overcome hurdles if we do not decimate each other in wars. Bringing this to focus and wringing with the pain of loss, Suzanne Kamata, in her column tells us: “Earthquakes and other natural disasters are unavoidable, but I admire the effort that the Japanese people put into mitigating their effects. My hope is that more and more people here will begin to understand that it is okay to cry, to mourn, to grieve, and to talk about our suffering. My wish for the Japanese people in the new year is happiness and the achievement of dreams.”
And may this ring true for all humanity.
Often it is our creative urges that help bring to focus darker aspects of our nature. Laughter could help heal this darkness within us. Making light of our foibles, critiquing our own tendencies with a sense of humour could help us identify, creating a cathartic outcome which will ultimately lead to healing. An expert at doing that was a man who was as much a master of nonsense verses in Bengal as Edward Lear was in the West. Ratnottama Sengupta has brought into focus one such book by the legendary Sukumar Ray, Abol Tabol (or mumbo jumbo), a book that remains read, loved and relevant even hundred years later. We have more non-fiction from Keith Lyons who reflects on humanity as he loses himself in China. Antara Mukherjee talks of evolving and accepting a past woven with rituals that might seem effete nowadays and yet, these festivities did evoke a sense of joie de vivre and built bridges that stretch beyond the hectic pace of the current world. Devraj Singh Kalsi weaves in humour and variety with his funny take on stocks and shares. Rhys Hughes does much the same with his fun-filled recount on the differences between Sri Lanka and India, with crispy dosas leaning in favour of the latter.
Our stories take us around the world with Paul Mirabile from France, Ravi Shankar from Malaysia, Srinivasan R from India and Rebecca Klassen from England, weaving in the flavours of their own cultures yet touching hearts with the commonality of emotions.
In conversations, Ratnottama Sengupta introduces us to the multifaceted Bulbul Sharma and discusses with her the celebrated filmmaker Mrinal Sen, in one of whose films Sharma ( known for her art and writing) had acted. We also have a discussion with eminent screenplay writer Gajra Kottary on her latest book, Autumn Blossoms and an introduction to it.
Somdatta Mandal has reviewed Sudha Murty’s Common Yet Uncommon: 14 Memorable Stories from Daily Life, which she says, “speaks a universal language of what it means to be human”. Bhaskar Parichha takes us to Scott Ezell’s Journey to the End of the Empire: In China Along the Edge of Tibet. Parichha opines: “The book evokes the majesty of Tibetan landscapes, the unique dignity of the Tibetan people, and the sensory extremity of navigating nearly pre-industrial communities at the edge of the map, while also encompassing the erosion of cultures and ecosystems. Journey to the End of the Empire is both a love song and a protest against environmental destruction, centralised national narratives and marginalised minorities.” Meenakshi Malhotra provides a respite from the serious and emotional by giving us a lively review of Rhys Hughes’ The Coffee Rubaiyat, putting it in context of literature on coffee, weaving in poetry by Alexander Pope and TS Eliot. Rakhi Dalal has reviewed a translation from Punjabi by Ajeet Cour and Minoo Minocha of Cour’s Life Was Here Somewhere. Our book excerpts from Anuradha Kumar’s The Kidnapping of Mark Twain: A Bombay Mysteryintroduces a lighter note as opposed to the intense prose of Srijato’s AHouse of Rain and Snow, translated from Bengali by Maharghya Chakraborty.
Translations this time take us to the realm of poetry again with Fazal Baloch introducing us to a classical poet from Balochistan, the late Mulla Fazul. Ihlwha Choi has self-translated his poetry from Korean. Niaz Zaman brings us Nazrul’s Samya or Equality – a visionary poem for the chaotic times we live in — and Fakrul Alam transcribes Masud Khan’s Bengali verses for Anglophone readers. Our translations are wound up with Tagore’s Prarthonaor Prayer, a poem in which the poet talks of keeping his integrity and concludes saying ‘May the wellbeing of others fill my heart/ With contentment”.
May we all like Tagore find contentment in others’ wellbeing and move towards a world impacted by love and peace! The grand polymath always has had the last say…
I would like to thank our contributors, the Borderless team for this vibrant beginning of the year issue, Sohana Manzoor for her fabulous art, and all our readers for continuing to patronise us.
With hope of moving towards a utopian future, I invite you to savour our fare, some of which is not covered by this note. Do pause by our contents page to check out all our fare.
How can anybody comprehend Beijing, one of the largest and most ancient cities on Earth? Its origins date back three millennia, but Keith Lyons tries to get a sense of the real Beijing in just full three days.
Photos provided by Keith Lyons
Day Three*
After a series of false starts on the previous day, when I’d thought I would be ticking off Beijing’s main iconic sights, for my third and final day in the city I took a different approach. Instead of heading into the heart of the capital, I sought out enclaves that were more on the periphery of the megacity, both literally and figuratively.
I’d been reading the accounts of Colin Thubron’s visits to China, including his 1987 book Behind the Wall which started in Beijing. Feeling displaced in the impersonal capital, his impression of Beijing was more of a building site than a city. “I tramped its streets in disorientation, looking for a core which was not there.” He found Tiananmen Square arid and couldn’t wait to get out of the city. “The fission of solitary travel — travel in a boyish euphoria of self-sufficiency — tingles in my stomach as I march across Beijing’s railway station,” he writes as he sets off on his travels around the Middle Kingdom as it emerged from decades of Mao and Cultural Revolution oppression.
Looking back on the previous day’s ‘failures’, I tried to reframe the disappointing experiences as learning, rather than ruminating on the rejection I felt after not getting inside the Forbidden City.
One turning point in my journey was coming across a quote from Robin Sharma while thumbing through a bilingual personal growth book that sat among the artsy and anime library at my new accommodation, the hipster co-working space and ‘serviced apartment boutique hotel, ’ Stey 798. Initially when I saw the pull quote in English and Mandarin, I thought to myself, “What a douchebag; it’s fine for the business guru to say, having made millions spouting his stuff to the likes of Microsoft, IBM, General Motors and FedEx.” But then I reflected on the words and realised the truth in them: “There are no mistakes in life, only lessons. There is no such thing as a negative experience, only opportunities to grow, learn and advance along the road of self-mastery.”
I wasn’t exactly on the road to self-mastery when I found myself lost, tired, bothered and despondent on an unnamed minor road on the outskirts of Beijing. However, I realised that some of my preconceptions had been limiting.
For example, the fixed idea that because Beijing was big and busy that it would be dangerous to hire a bike and cycle around. There were rows and rows of identical-looking bicycles for hire at every street corner, wide separate cycle lanes, and lots of visitors navigating successfully around Beijing by bike. If I’d been on a bike the previous day, I could have cycled right through Tiananmen Square rather than circle wide around the massive open space (though security personnel will still make sure you don’t stop to take photos at the best spots).
So, note to self (and to others), try exploring Beijing on bike rather than just using the subway, taxis, or buses. To make bike hire possible, get a Chinese SIM card, install Mobike, and set up payments via WeChat and Alipay, so you can use the lockless sharing bikes provided by Meituan (yellow bikes), Didi Bike (green) and Hello Bike (blue) simply by scanning QR codes, or unlocking bikes with Bluetooth.
I’ve since learnt some bike hire operators can loan high-quality bikes, with English-speaking staff who deliver bikes to your hotel. So even without a smartphone connected with a local SIM and data, you could arrange to discover the city formerly known as Peking by bike.
Beijing was once capital of the ‘kingdom of bicycles’, with the uptake of bikes trebling in the 1980s across China, as the rationing was cut for locally made bikes such as the prestigious Flying Pigeon brand. Cycle lanes were first incorporated into main roads throughout much of Beijing when car ownership was limited to government officials, with more than 3/4 of Beijing’s road space taken by cyclists in 1988. According to one study, some busy intersections saw 20,000 bicycles an hour, and 8 out of 10 Beijing’s used a bike as their primary transport.
While China is the leading exporter of bicycles, bikes dropped from 62% of vehicles on the road in the late 1980s Beijing to just 16% by 2010. However, in the last decade, there has been a boom in bike use, not so much by the proletariat but by middle-class Chinese with an environmental and health consciousness embracing a post-materialist sharing society. Bike schemes featuring special locks, non-deflating tyres, rust-resistant bodies and GPS tracking have proliferated across Beijing and in most cities and towns, though following the boom there was also a bust for some players unable to cope with aggressive competition practices copied from the Uber monopoly playbook.
In tandem with the return of the bike have been some other initiatives to address the problem Beijing was once synonymous with: air pollution. Much has been made of just how bad air pollution is in China, with 16 of the 20 worst air quality cities up to recently located in China. For the nation’s capital, vehicle emissions and burning coal to produce electricity have been the main causes of smog, but a wide range of measures have seen air pollution in Beijing decline by 50%. The air pollution in Beijing is still three times as bad as that in the US’s most polluted city Los Angeles, and some daily measures still exceed the World Health Organisation’s guidelines, but the initiatives which include better urban planning, switching away from coal, extensive public transport, and Low Emission Zones where only e-vehicles are allowed seem to be working.
As an aside, a recent comparison of air pollution readings found Delhi was five times as polluted as Beijing, though the sources, composition and frequency of air pollutants are different for the two cities, with Delhi’s woes from biomass burning, road dust and the burning of agricultural waste. Delhi has been judged the world’s most polluted capital for four years in a row, according to IQAir.
There’s another thing too. Much has been made about how polluted the air is in Beijing, but on the three full days I visited, only one day seemed to be overly hazy with smoggy, dirty air. Admittedly, particles in the air don’t have to be visible to be harmful, as the world is learning with more research into fine particles, but from a check of several air monitoring sites, including the US Embassy’s real-time monitoring which started in 2008, the readings were not too high. Probably no worse than smoking half a packet of cigarettes. Maybe that’s why many people in China wear face masks, not just because of illness or to stop the spread of germs.
So next time — if there is one — I will definitely brave it on a bike. But that’s for next time.
If Colin Thubron’s stomach was tingling with excitement in anticipation of travel, my stomach that morning was rumbling with anticipation of food to enable me to experience different parts of Beijing. Eating local is one of the best ways to experience a new place.
I retraced my steps to the window-in-the-wall vendor I’d got a snack from the previous night, who made one of the specialties of Beijing, a thin savoury crisp-friend crepe stuffed with a selection of fillings. The man recognised me from the previous day, and we went through the process of assembling the ingredients to my liking to go on and in the pancake, which is eventually folded and wrapped like an American breakfast burrito. Unlike other jianbing I’d seen being made by small eateries, roaming food carts, or on the back of tricycles, my man’s crepes were made with buckwheat rather than wheat or mung bean flour, giving them a speckled purple appearance which I said to myself was like choosing a healthy option at McDonalds.
To keep things fresh, jianbing are always made-to-order and cooked under the watchful attention of the mouth-drawling customer. Once the batter has formed small bubbles on the large round hotplate, a series of interventions are enacted, from cracking eggs over the pancake, to flipping it with long chopsticks. With brushes, the chef would smear on spicy and sweet fermented bean pastes (like miso), hoisin and chilli sauces, sprinkle on chopped coriander leaf, scallions and tangy pickled vegetables, and then add crunchy crispy-friend wonton dough strips and lettuce before cutting it in half and folding it into a rectangle.
The pancake is Beijing’s favourite breakfast, but the staple food is little known outside China compared to steamed buns, dumplings and Yum cha dim sum.
Also not well known outside China is the fact that Beijing has a sizeable Muslim population. At least a quarter of a million people who identify as Muslim reside in the capital, with a Muslim presence in the city dating back to the 8th century. As you may know from following the news, China has some issues in its north-western province of Xinjiang where Turkic-speaking Uyghur Muslims account for 12 million of its inhabitants, along with some ethnic Kazakhs. Less well-known and visible are the Hui Muslims, classified as an ethnic group and religious affiliation, who are found all across China. The Huis have adapted to the dominant Han Chinese culture, while maintaining their beliefs and customs.
There’s one feature of Muslim life that is at odds with Chinese living, and that’s the eating of pork. Pork is China’s favourite and default meat, accounting for up to 70% of all meat eaten. With Muslims not eating pork, deemed unclean, impure and forbidden, instead the preferred Islamic meat is beef, with lamb/goat also featuring. This food divide meant that Muslims often lived together in neighbourhoods with not only a mosque, but also Muslim food processing and services. Across China, Muslim beef noodle restaurants are ubiquitous, and considered cheap and cheerful as well as clean, a godsend in a land of food hygiene concerns and stomach upsets.
In Beijing Niujie and Madian are the two main Muslim enclaves, though the latter in the north has declined. Niujie, south of the centre, even has its nearby subway station, and while there is still a mosque (with Chinese-style architectural characteristics) the main attraction for most visitors is the distinctly Muslim food available, with snacks and delicacies on offer.
Of the quarter of a million Muslims who officially reside in Beijing, perhaps half live in the neighbourhood of Niujie. There are halal supermarkets, butchers selling mutton and beef, a Hui hospital and a kindergarten.
For a block, on both sides of the wide street, are stalls and restaurants, and queues. The smoke from sizzling charcoal grills serving fatty lamb skewer kebabs and the aromatic cumin-scented air probably push Niujie’s air pollution readings beyond acceptable World Health Organisation levels, but no one is complaining. Uyghur vendors, wearing round white hats, call out over the grill to whip up even more business, or shout out to younger men to fetch more of the freshly-baked sesame-studded flatbreads that are stacked high beside tandoor ovens, like round naan, but with a thick edge, like a deep dish Pizza Hut crust.
Steam rises from the large bowls of beef noodle soups slurped by families sitting on low stools around a square table, and visitors line up to order from a selection of fruit pastries. The largest amount of tripe you may ever see is cooked in a huge pot, while a rich cake made with dried fruit, nuts, seeds and sugar is sold by weight.
One of the quests for the self-labelled traveller, as opposed to the unaware tourist, is to be less an outsider and a consumer of tourism products. But underlying all this is the enigma of travel. That we go to experience things that are different from back home. And occasionally we wish to be less visible as an outsider, and more like an insider.
I think you can do this to a certain degree, depending on where you are and the acceptance of diversity of that place. But for me, as a visitor of European heritage, to the reasonably homogeneous and definitely differentness of China, I stand out. Not just because of my height at 6 feet. Or that my hair isn’t the standard black.
So what I seek is more of an authentic experience. Which for me often involves shopping local, eating local, random exploration of neighbourhoods rather than ticking off sights, preferring places without tickets or queues.
It is travel with some risks, not mentioned in the insurance fine print. It is travel which is self-deprecating, acutely aware of my ‘otherness’ and awkwardness, and of how I might connect with others. Some of that is transactional. I buy fruit from an old lady at a local market. I hop on a bus. I go to a place, but it is not the place recommended by the receptionist or concierge.
In Niujie, I am both an outsider and the ‘other’. Yet I have more empathy for and connection with the Muslim street vendors than I do with the Han Chinese who have come that afternoon to eat delicious food that is different to their normal diet.
After rubbing shoulders with fellow diners at a cramped eatery in Niujie, having finally located the area that doesn’t feature in most Beijing guidebooks, I still had one mission to complete.
Photo provided by Keith Lyons
So, as you are probably aware, Beijing hosted the Olympics back in 2008, with much fanfare and pomp. It was China showing off to the world just how modern and developed it was. It awed us not just with its impressive pageantry but also its buildings and facilities, many created just for the International sporting event. The Olympics provided the impetus for numerous infrastructure projects, particularly transport networks which were state-of-the-art.
Some facilities remain, and the Bird’s Nest is still an attraction in itself, despite its lack of use following the 16 years. You probably remember the Water Cube, the swimming pool.
Bird’s Nest: Photo provided by Keith Lyons
Often when I travel, I check to see if there are swimming pools near my accommodation, or even inside my hotel (if someone else is picking up the tab). So when I found out that Water Cube is open for casual swimming, I set my sights on swimming a lap or two in the famous pool.
It turns out the pool for public use isn’t the actual one for Olympic races — that’s reserved for competition — but the training pool where swimmers warmed up and down has been open to anyone for more than a decade. But there’s a catch.
First, you have to know that you can swim there. And there’s another level of safeguard. Because the pool is several metres deep, and there’s the danger of non-swimmers drowning, the pool is partitioned into two halves. The accessible half has a raised floor so it is only around a metre deep. You can stand up in it. Kids can stand up.
But the other half, where the depth darkens the water to deep blue, is strictly controlled entry. You need a swipe card to access it. And to get that, as an American working in Beijing described to me, involved a medical test as well as completing various swimming feats, which included swimming two lengths without pausing.
Without the time in the city to complete the rigorous entry requirements, I had to contend myself with the learner’s side, where parents walked alongside their children like chaperons, adults swam on both sides of the lanes, and there were frequent close calls or collisions.
Inside the Water Cube: Photo provided by Keith Lyons
I’m a reasonably tolerant person, and having lived in China for more than a dozen years had got used to behaviours I initially found, to my mind and upbringing, a little disgusting. But when I swam my first length, only having to stop a couple of times to negotiate around erratic swimmers, the first sound I heard was from a fellow swimmer rising up from his lane to loudly clear his throat and spit onto the floor edge. I made a mental note not to rest my goggles up there.
While I had the passive-aggressive stance towards those spitters, during rests at the end of the lane other swimmers struck up conversations. A middle-aged women confided how she had lessons to swim in her 40s, and now tried to swim at the Water Cube a few days each week, even if she could not go a few metres without gasping for air. “Can you give me any tips to improve my swimming,” she asked as she returned to my end. I replied in Chinese the word my blind masseur used to give me when he hit a sore point on my feet. “Fang song” — relax. It was probably the worst word to say, like shouting ‘keep calm’ out repeatedly when something has gone disastrously wrong.
I probably should have taken on board my own words, as I swam into a father shepherding his daughter along. He was blocking my way. I saw him do the same to others. Deliberately blocking the way of oncoming swimmers. You are the symbol of modern China, I thought. Selfish, entitled, arrogant. Because I am a man of peace and goodwill to all, when he next blocked my way, I just carried on swimming, exaggerating my kicking to churn up the water and splash his rotund belly and smug grin.
I switched to another lane, and after a few more lengths, as I waited for a slow swimmer to get a head start, a boy of 12 years decided to strike up a conversation with me. “My mother says I should practice my English, so that’s why I like to come here,” he said, pointing up to the viewing window where a dragon mom waved and then proceeded to turn her phone camera towards us. After exchanging the usual questions about himself and me, he then abruptly turned the conversation around to China and the world. “China is the biggest country in the world. We are the leader.”
Unable to find the right words to express himself, he asked another swimmer, a man who had just moved to Beijing from the north, to articulate.
I wanted to ask him if China was such a great country, why did so many of its people want to escape to a better life in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. But conscious that swimming at the Water Cube gives just two hours in the facility I escaped myself and tried to complete a length unimpeded or uninterrupted.
When I got back, the boy, who was rather overweight, was still there, waiting with another claim about China’s might.
Maybe I’m being nostalgic, about the good old days, but in the 1990s and 2000s, being a foreigner in China meant automatic adulation and attention from Chinese. Foreigners were feted and admired regardless of their behaviour and personality.
Now, in the mid-2020s, things have changed. They started changing a decade ago, when China realised that foreigners were not so great after all. When stories from the government claimed that most of the foreigners were economic spies. When Chinese TV had footage of young Americans drunk and predatory on the Shanghai subway. When my friends said how they’d heard that many foreigners teaching in China were losers in their own country. The tide had turned. The golden days were over. China has regained its swagger. The sleeping giant was waking up. The dragon was turning. And I was getting tired.
Before my number got called and I got requested to leave the pool, I got out, and used my token in the shower, wishing I’d brought my flip-flops to protect my feet from contact with the floor.
Not just being in the water, but being underground, it always takes a little to adjust to being back above ground and at maximum gravity, weightless. One of the things I like about swimming is that afterwards, some of that fluidity, ease of movement, body perception and gentle feeling remains, like a reminder of how you could be in the world. My senses feel renewed, my mind a little lighter, my awareness more centred.
Near the Bird’s Nest, they were having a skateboard class, with over 50 participants, many of them young women. And as I strode along the wide boulevard, groups of newly initiated skaters wove in and out of the family groups and sightseers, a sign to the world of new ways of being, new freedoms, and new leisure. Was this a victory for American culture? Or was China taking this recreation and adding Chinese characteristics to it?
My last swim was both a relaxation exercise at the end of the day, and a future — proofing myself for a long-haul flight home.
The faint linger of chlorine on the webbing of my hands and fingers. The sensation of lying face down and being held by the water. The realisation that the more I know the less I understand about China. These are the things I took with me as I sat in the aisle seat, stretched out my legs, and reminded myself, that I was 30,000 feet above the earth, going from the ancient capital to one of the youngest nations on earth (New Zealand). Much is lost, falling away, lost in time, the memories not so much fade as slip away imperceptibly. I scroll through the photos on my iPhone. So long Beijing.
Keith Lyons (keithlyons.net) is an award-winning writer and creative writing mentor originally from New Zealand who has spent a quarter of his existence living and working in Asia including southwest China, Myanmar and Bali. His Venn diagram of happiness features the aroma of freshly-roasted coffee, the negative ions of the natural world including moving water, and connecting with others in meaningful ways. A Contributing Editor on Borderless journal’sEditorial Board, his work has appeared in Borderless since its early days, and his writing featured in the anthology Monalisa No Longer Smiles.
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Nativity of Christ, painted in the Mughal empire, around 1800 AD
“The central celebration is the birth of a child. There is no culture that does not celebrate this event, because all of us who belong to the human race can see our collective future in the pudgy little face. We marvel at this conjuring act, the miniature miracle, at its tiny fingernails and budlike nose.” — Jerry Pinto, Indian Christmas: Essays, Memoirs, Hymns, an anthology edited by Jerry Pinto and Madhulika Liddle
Christmas centres around the birth of a child who impacted a large part of the world and urged us to love others despite differences, to be kind, to embrace those who suffered… and that is the spirit that continues to unite humankind to move towards a future where people thrive in harmony, with love in their hearts. Despite all the darkness that broods over the world, Christmas has come around. The sun still moves forward in time and at some point, the darkness will give way to light. Perhaps, Christmas will remind people of the values they need to uphold to live in a world that is not filled with fear, greed or the lust for power and they will stop killing ruthlessly and without any sense of coherence. With that in mind, we have tried to evoke the spirit of Christmas cheer by presenting writings that talk of celebrations.
This is a season that should be filled with hope, goodwill, peace and love. The celebrations — depicting variety, a departure from conventional norms — by writers who reach across borders and time, rekindle our belief in the wonder created by these values, which is what Christmas is all about. We start with Tagore, a Brahmo by religion but his poem in English dwells on the wonder he feels at the idea of this unique birth of Christ. Our other writers from across the world pitch in with what Christmas means to all of them, whether it creates a sense of goodwill, nostalgia, invokes curiosity or just evokes plain laughter. Hopefully, we can all join together to ring the bells of kindness, love, humanitarian help and peace this year!
Poetry
An excerpt from Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘The Child‘ a poem originally written in English by the poet to celebrate Christmas. Click here to read.
In I Went to Kerala, Rhys Hughes treads a humorous path while exploring Christmas in Kerala. Click here to read.
In Hold the Roast Turkey Please Santa , Keith Lyons writes from New Zealand, where summer solstice and Christmas fall around the same time. Click hereto read.
In My Christmas Eve “Alone”, Erwin Coomb has a strange encounter on Christmas eve… Is it real? Clickhere to read.
Nativity, a fresco by Italian artist Boticelli, created around 1467
A conversation with the author,Afsar Mohammed, and a brief introduction to his latest book, Remaking History: 1948 Police Action and the Muslims of Hyderabad. Click hereto read.
A conversation with Meenakshi Malhotra over The Gendered Body: Negotiation, Resistance, Struggle, edited by Meenakshi Malhotra, Krishna Menon and Rachana Johri and a brief introduction to the book. Click hereto read.
In His Unstable Shape, Rhys Hughes explores the narratives around a favourite nursery rhyme character with a pinch of pedantic(?) humour. Click here to read.
Mother & Child by Jamini Roy (1887-1972)Mother and Child by Picasso (1881-1973)
‘Victory to Man, the newborn, the ever-living.’ They kneel down, the king and the beggar, the saint and the sinner, the wise and the fool, and cry: ‘Victory to Man, the newborn, the ever-living.’
This is the month— the last of a conflict-ridden year— when we celebrate the birth of a messiah who spoke of divine love, kindness, forgiveness and values that make for a better world. The child, Jesus, has even been celebrated by Tagore in one of his rarer poems in English. While we all gather amidst our loved ones to celebrate the joy generated by the divine birth, perhaps, we will pause to shed a tear over the children who lost their lives in wars this year. Reportedly, it’s a larger number than ever before. And the wars don’t end. Nor the killing. Children who survive in war-torn zones lose their homes or families or both. For all the countries at war, refugees escape to look for refuge in lands that are often hostile to foreigners. And yet, this is the season of loving and giving, of helping one’s neighbours, of sharing goodwill, love and peace. On Christmas this year, will the wars cease? Will there be a respite from bombardments and annihilation?
We dedicate this bumper year-end issue to children around the world. We start with special tributes to love and peace with an excerpt from Tagore’s long poem, ‘The Child‘, written originally in English in 1930 and a rendition of the life of the philosopher and change-maker, Vivekananda, by none other than well-known historical fiction writer, Aruna Chakravarti. The poem has been excerpted from Indian Christmas: Essays, Memoirs, Hymns, an anthology edited by Jerry Pinto and Madhulika Liddle, a book that has been reviewed by Somdatta Mandal and praised for its portrayal of the myriad colours and flavours of Christmas in India. Christ suffered for the sins of humankind and then was resurrected, goes the legend. Healing is a part of our humanness. Suffering and healing from trauma has been brought to the fore by Christopher Marks’ perspective on Veronica Eley’s The Blue Dragonfly: healing through poetry. Basudhara Roy has also written about healing in her take of Kuhu Joshi’s My Body Didn’t Come Before Me.Bhaskar Parichha has reviewed a book that talks of healing a larger issue — the crises that humanity is facing now, Permacrisis: A Plan to Fix a Fractured World, by ex-British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Nobel Laureate Michael Spence, Mohamed El-Erian and Reid Lidow. Parichha tells us that it suggests solutions to resolve the chaos the world is facing — perhaps a book that the world leadership would do well to read. After all, the authors are of their ilk! Our book excerpts from Dr Ratna Magotra’s Whispers of the Heart – Not Just A Surgeon: An Autobiographyand Manjima Misra’s The Ocean is Her Titleare tinged with healing and growth too, though in a different sense.
The theme of the need for acceptance, love and synchronicity flows into our conversations with Afsar Mohammad, who has recently authored Remaking History: 1948 Police Action and the Muslims of Hyderabad. He shows us that Hyderabadi tehzeeb or culture ascends the narrow bounds set by caged concepts of faith and nationalism, reaffirming his premise with voices of common people through extensive interviews. In search of a better world, Meenakshi Malhotra talks to us about how feminism in its recent manifestation includes masculinities and gender studies while discussing The Gendered Body: Negotiation, Resistance, Struggle, edited by her, Krishna Menon and Rachana Johri. Here too, one sees a trend to blend academia with non-academic writers to bring focus on the commonalities of suffering and healing while transcending national boundaries to cover more of South Asia.
That like Hyderabadi tehzeeb, Bengali culture in the times of Tagore and Nazrul dwelled in commonality of lore is brought to the fore when in response to the Nobel laureate’s futuristic ‘1400 Saal’ (‘The year 1993’), his younger friend responds with a poem that bears not only the same title but acknowledges the older man as an “emperor” among versifiers. Professor Fakrul Alam has not only translated Nazrul’s response, named ‘1400Saal’ aswell, but also brought to us the voice of another modern poet, Quazi Johirul Islam. We have a self-translation of a poem by Ihlwha Choi from Korean and a short story by S Ramakrishnan in Tamil translated by T Santhanam.
Our short stories travel with migrant lore by Farouk Gulsara to Malaysia, from UK to Thailand with Paul Mirabile while chasing an errant son into the mysterious reaches of wilderness, with Neeman Sobhan to Rome, UK and Bangladesh, reflecting on the Birangonas (rape victims) of the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation war, an issue that has been taken up in Malhotra’s book too. Sobhan’s story is set against the backdrop of a war which was fought against linguistic hegemony and from which we see victims heal. Sohana Manzoor this time has not only given us fabulous artwork but also a fantasy hovering between light and dark, life and death — an imaginative fiction that makes a compelling read and questions the concept of paradise, a construct that perhaps needs to be found on Earth, rather than after death.
The unusual paradigms of life and choices made by all of us is brought into play in an interesting non-fiction by Nitya Amlean, a young Sri Lankan who lives in UK. We travel to Kyoto with Suzanne Kamata, to Beijing with Keith Lyons, to Wayanad with Mohul Bhowmick and to Langkawi with Ravi Shankar. Wendy Jones Nakanishi argues in favour of borders with benevolent leadership. Tongue-in-cheek humour is exuded by Devraj Singh Kalsi as he writes of his attempts at using visiting cards as it is by Rhys Hughes in his exploration of the truth about the origins of the creature called Humpty Dumpty of nursery rhyme fame.
Poetry again has humour from Hughes. A migrant himself, Jee Leong Koh, brings in migrant stories from Singaporeans in US. We have poems of myriad colours from Ryan Quinn Flanagan, Patricia Walsh, John Grey, Kumar Bhatt, Ron Pickett, Prithvijeet Sinha, Sutputra Radheye, George Freek and many more. Papia Sengupta ends her poem with lines that look for laughter among children and a ‘life without borders’ drawn by human constructs in contrast to Jones Nakanishi’s need for walls with sound leadership. The conversation and dialogues continue as we look for a way forward, perhaps with Gordon Brown’s visionary book or with Tagore’s world view of lighting the inner flame in each human. We can hope that a way will be found. Is it that tough to influence the world using words? We can wish — may there be no need for any more Greta Thunbergs to rise in protest for a world fragmented and destroyed by greed and lack of vision. We hope for peace and love that will create a better world for our children.
As usual, we have more content than mentioned here. All our pieces can be accessed on the contents’ page. Do pause by and take a look. This bumper issue would not have been possible without the contribution of all the writers and our fabulous team from Borderless. Huge thanks to them all and to our wonderful readers who continue to encourage us with their comments and input.
Here’s wishing you all wonderful new adventures in the New Year that will be born as this month ends!
How can anybody comprehend one of the largest and most ancient cities in the world? With its origins dating back three millennia, Beijing has been China’s capital for over 1,200 years. Keith Lyons tries to get to the heart of China’s megacity in just three days.
Photo provided by Keith Lyons
Day Two*
As the strong sun beat down on my pale jet-lagged wintered skin, I tried to guess the temperature of the warm Beijing air enveloping me. Over 30 degrees Celsius, my mind computed. Over 30 was possibly outside my body’s operating range. It was certainly outside my comfort zone.
I concluded that it was unseasonably hot and humid for early autumn, drawing on my vast experience of being in Beijing for just over 24 hours. A bead of sweat formed under my right armpit and started to trickle slowly down my side, the perspiration a futile attempt to cool down. My daypack stuck resolutely to a sweat imprint patch it had made on the back of my freshly laundered shirt. I’d just finished my second can of complimentary hotel soda water, and already the back of my throat felt as dry as the trampled brown grass that lay unloved between the uneven paving stone pavement and the stain-weathered concrete housing estate sweltering in the September mid-morning.
I looked down the wide 4-lane road I’d just walked along in the hope of spotting – like a mirage shimmering in the distance – a bus to rescue me from this situation. But all I could see was another batch of oncoming shiny new electric SUVs, unmarked white delivery vans, and angry-faced FAW trucks overloaded with gravel. The noise of their tyres on the asphalt increased to a roar and then faded away, as if to serve to remind me I was going nowhere fast. The buzz of cicadas hidden in a willow tree on the opposite side of the road taunted my already addled brain. Not only was I hot and flustered, but I was also completely lost. So much for my exceptional navigational skills, my Beijing map pre-loaded on my iPhone, and my ability to read a few Chinese characters.
I had set off early that morning with my detailed trip notes, a plan including the day’s itinerary and lists of vital bus numbers, and the intention of getting into the heart and soul of China’s capital: Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. I was so chirpy that I whistled to myself the catchy song from the 2008 Beijing Olympics ‘Bei jing huan ying ni’ (Beijing welcomes you). However, instead of catching a couple of buses the 15km from outside the 4th Ring Road into the downtown, I had mistakenly taken a bus that deposited me on the outskirts of Beijing. To make matters worse, rather than cross the road and hop on a bus going back to where I started, I decided to walk around the corner in the hope of getting a bus that would somehow bring me closer to the Forbidden City.
Not wanting this wrong turn to ruin my day’s plans, I decided first to address the essentials in life: shelter and food. The only shade I could find lay behind the bus shelter, so I leant in close to escape the sun’s harsh rays, every so often checking the road for any signs of salvation. I rummaged around my daypack to locate my emergency stash of muesli bars, and ate one, oblivious to the wrapper information which I understood to mean I’d just consumed 2 teaspoons of refined sugar. Today was not going to be my day to give up sugar.
The insulin spike also fuelled my optimism. As if I had manifested it into being, I saw a bus in the distance coming this way. Not caring about the sun or the heat, I strode out across the pavement to be sure to alert the driver to my desire to get on his bus. But as I waited on the curb, I noticed that the bus didn’t switch lanes to execute a passenger pick up or drop off. No, instead, the bus just kept going, onto the roundabout that joined a busy ring road half a kilometre away. I retreated to the shade again.
The same process repeated itself. Another Beijing bus approaching. Another exit, the shade to stand by the roadside by the broken yellow lines. Another speeding past. It was like Groundhog Day, or The Truman Show. I started to wonder if I was invisible, or just trapped in some time warp. Is this how it ends, I pondered.
With no one around, and no one to ask, I figured eventually a bus might stop. I had read in a travel guide that there were 30,000 buses in Beijing, plying over 1,600 bus lines and routes. And, after all, it was a bus stop. And on the other side of the road, the red, green, yellow city buses were stopping.
A rather podgy man in his 30s appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, to wait for a bus on the opposite side. I was about to go over to ask if he could help me, but then he crossed over to try to catch another bus heading along the road on my side. The bus zoomed past. Shading his phone from the sun’s glare, he peered into the device. I realised, that just like me, he was equally lost, like another soul you meet in a labyrinth limbo dream.
With the morning slipping away, and me getting more and more frustrated at being stuck, I resign myself to the day being a complete write-off. I lower my aspirations to just find my way back to my hotel before dark. So, when the next bus neared, I was less invested in it being my rescue. And, you guessed right, that bus slowed down and stopped, and two relieved passengers got on, grateful just for being transported away from there.
I stayed on that bus as it sped around roundabouts, raced on ring roads, stopped at major intersections and turned onto more crowded streets. Even though I still clutched my lucky list of bus numbers, 1-999, I was less inclined to get off it when I saw one of the route buses I was seeking. Given that there was always the chance I take the right bus line (1-140) the wrong way, I figured it was best to locate a subway station, and then make my way to the centre in a more exact way.
When I did finally spy a subway station and get off the bus, I realised that I’d travelled from the north-east of the city to the south-west in a clockwise direction, albeit in a very random fashion. When I started hours before I was 15km from the centre. Now, after quite a lot of travel and much travail, I had reduced the road distance to the centre to a mere 14km. But at least I was somewhere. Even if from a nearby China Telecom store I heard blaring from the speakers that overplayed tune, ‘Take me to your heart, take me to your soul . . . It’s easy, take me to your heart.’
Before I could take the subway train, there was a cursory security check with my daybag put on an X-ray conveyor belt, a security gate to walk through, and a bored officer barely out of high school waving his handheld detector wand over me like he was bestowing a lazy blessing rather than seeking out concealed weapons. A row of ticket machines was my next challenge. Even with the option of English, my money was repeated spat out, and then the monitor said unless you have a Chinese ID card go to the help desk to buy your ticket. There was no one staffing the office, but the most alert of the security kids told me to wait, and the clerk duly returned, changed the window sign, confirmed my destination on the electronic route map, took my money, and issued the ticket.
I went up to the ticket gate and eventually worked out which scanner I had to use for my printed ticket. Locals were negotiating the subway with much more ease. Some whipped out mobile phones to use apps, WeChat or e-cards. Others placed their hands on an electronic palm reader, and there was a poster on the wall which seem to suggest that soon, facial recognition could provide express entry and exit to frequent (and trusted) commuters.
When I finally emerged at Tiananmen West Station, I joined a throng of people also intent on venturing into the great square. We marched along the wide barricaded footpath to a security station, me still humming to myself ‘It’s easy, take me to your heart’. As we reached the gate, and I saw a sign in Chinese with a translated version in English, I realised today was not my day. You needed a ticket to enter the square and its attractions. What’s more, the ticket had to be purchased at least a day in advance. There’s a limit of 80,000 tickets available each day. I retraced my steps back to the subway station, but then decided while I was in the neighbourhood, I might as well look around. And even if I couldn’t get into Tiananmen Square itself, or the Forbidden City, National Museum, Zhongshan Park or the quirky Chairman Mao Memorial Hall, I could at least check out the sights that were accessible.
First, there was the Great Hall of the People, built in the imposing Soviet neoclassical style, and then its opposite, the shiny egg-like National Centre for Performing Arts. Further along, there was the anomaly of a church, still in use, which I later learnt was the Methodist Zhushikou church. And in a modern Japanese hotel, featuring bamboo, recycled bricks and lounge walls lined with shelves of books. The hotel has been designed to reflect ‘an anti-gorgeous, anti-cheap concept’ says the website. Rooms are US$110-500 a night.
Tianamen SquareNational Centre for Performing ArtsPhotos provided by Keith Lyons
At the south entrance to Tiananmen Square, I tried again to slip through a gap in the barricades with some other ticketless visitors, but we were turned back by a guard. At the official entrance, I saw a woman was China’s southwest holding her baby sobbing after she too was refused entry.
Photos provided by Keith Lyons
Having abandoned my pursuit of getting anywhere near the Gate of Heavenly Peace, I took heart from the incursions by others around the periphery of Tiananmen square. The several Starbucks dotted around, including one guarding the entry to Qianmen, the foreboding gate in the Imperial City’s wall, and equally impressive, the first KFC in China which opened in 1987, with over 2,200 buckets of chicken sold from the red and white striped building sporting the Colonel’s smiling face within the first 24 hours. Queues stretched into Tiananmen Square. Mao had died 11 years earlier. He would have turned in his grave . . . however, he’s not buried, but embalmed and on display in a glass case not too far from the smell of Kentucky fast food’s 11 secret herbs and spices, and the burnt, nutty scent of Seattle coffee. A photo I’d taken by the southern entrance, on closer inspection after I’d departed China, included the mausoleum housing Mao Zedong.
Turning my back on Tiananmen, I wandered along the 850m of Qianmen Street, a pedestrian ‘shopping’ street newly restored in the architectural style of old Peking. The Dashilan area has been a place of commerce for nearly six centuries, with medicine, shoes, silk, tea and hats China-famous, but I reckon, most of the buildings date back to 2007, with many away from the main thoroughfare appearing to be under construction.
Photo provided by Keith Lyons
Content with small pleasures and moments, I enjoyed finding a stream running through a neighborhood, with flower gardens, pagodas, and a couple of women taking photos dressed in traditional clothing. I bookmarked it on my map. A reference point was ‘Defeng East Alley No.65 toilet’. I saw an old woman taking a dog and a ginger cat for a walk and was delighted when the cat came up to me, and I chatted with the woman. “Yes, every day the cat goes for a walk with me. The cat and the dog get on. The cat probably thinks it is a dog.”
I finished my day in Beijing’s heart by heading up to the highest point of the central city, with a 10-minute hike up Jingshan Park north of Tiananmen Square for panoramic views of the Forbidden City. The views were expansive, though the visibility wasn’t great due to the air pollution and haze. What was I supposed to be looking at, I wondered. The red walled buildings of the Forbidden City, or the immense void beyond, of Tiananmen Square. So close to the symbolic centre of the Chinese universe, I peered at the scene before me. The dull tones contrasted with the display panel with its brilliant blue skies and landmark buildings. I was thirsty and hungry. The 6pm sun was making for the exit door. It was time to make my way back home to my hotel.
The Forbidden City. Photo provided by Keith Lyons
On my way down, gratitude came through in the last song of my day in my head, “Oh, it’s such a perfect day. I’m glad I spent it with you. Oh, such a perfect day. You just keep me hanging on. You just keep me hanging on.”
Keith Lyons (keithlyons.net) is an award-winning writer and creative writing mentor originally from New Zealand who has spent a quarter of his existence living and working in Asia including southwest China, Myanmar and Bali. His Venn diagram of happiness features the aroma of freshly-roasted coffee, the negative ions of the natural world including moving water, and connecting with others in meaningful ways. A Contributing Editor on Borderless journal’sEditorial Board, his work has appeared in Borderless since its early days, and his writing featured in the anthology Monalisa No Longer Smiles.
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How can anybody comprehend one of the largest and most ancient cities in the world? Keith Lyons goes up high, underground, underwater and down some dead-end alleyways as he tries to understand in just three days what took 3,000 years of history to create.
Day One*
My fascination with China started at an early age. I remember as a child leaving through the Time-Life World Library series volume for China (1965); its photographs grainy black and white, and tinted colour, only serving to increase the mystique about the nation then isolated behind the Bamboo Curtain at the height of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Back then, to be able to stand on the Great Wall of China, or to see the vastness Tiananmen Square seemed as probable as going on a school trip to the Moon.
I was in my late 20s when I first visited the Middle Kingdom, and through a series of events, choices, and decisions, later found myself living and working in the ethnic borderlands of southwest China for more than a dozen years from the mid-2000s. During that time in-country, as well as before and after during my various travels throughout China, how many times do you think I visited the capital, Beijing? Half-a-dozen times? Or at least 10 times? Sorry. I have to confess, even though I ‘knew’ Beijing through books and documentaries — and creating travel itineraries for tour groups — I never once visited in person the Chinese capital.
Yes, that’s right. I crafted detailed, tailor-made itineraries for first-time visitors to Beijing, to give them an insider’s experience of the capital, without getting within a thousand kilometres of the great city. My excuses include:
1 – China is vast, and almost the same size as Europe;
2 – It would take 3 days by train from my courtyard house in Yunnan’s Lijiang to the Forbidden City, and I wasn’t up for such a long journey
3 – To be honest, I wasn’t as enthralled about Beijing after hearing mixed reports from other travellers, so I decided I could live (and/or die) without casting my eyes upon the sights and wonders of Beijing.
A small window of opportunity opened to me recently when the stars aligned between jobs and other responsibilities. I had turned down the invitation to speak at a national tourism conference about the future of China’s tourism development post-pandemic, but I got to visit China for the first time since 2019, making an extended stopover in the capital. A visa-exemption initiative recently re-instated to encourage tourism without the need for pre-approved visas meant I could theoretically apply for a 144-hour transit stamp.
So, I touched down at Beijing’s Capital International Airport (IATA code PEK) early one morning after an overnight flight from the southern hemisphere. This being my first time without a pre-approved (and expensive) visa I was a little nervous, and my fears were not allayed when no one was staffing the 144-hour visa desk. Was this the first great wall I had to overcome? I got sent from one immigration queue to another, a couple of times having to go against the flow of newly-arriving passengers and slip upstream through security. When eventually an official arrived to process the paperwork and issue the transit stamp, I had to show all my flight and accommodation bookings; not an easy task when you can’t connect to the airport wi-fi.
I was sweating, not just because of the late summer heat, but also because I had booked a bus tour to the Great Wall that was leaving at 8 a.m. from central Beijing, a train and subway ride away. “Dear Sir, our assembly point is at Exit C of Dengshikou Subway Station on Line 5,” read my instructions. “You can see the guide wearing a blue vest. Please arrived at the assembly point 10 minutes early.”
Having a Chinese bank card, a map preloaded onto my phone, and some decent residual Mandarin skills, along with no reservations about queue-jumping as payback for being delayed, I found an ATM, and headed to the exit of the massive airport. There were only a few seconds to admire the impressive roof arching over Terminal 3, designed by Sir Norman Foster for the 2008 Beijing Olympics as I marched across the marble floors towards the Capital Airport Express. It was just after 7 a.m. but already I could see how Beijing Capital Airport is — or was — the second busiest airport in the world.
Transferring from the airport line train downtown to the metro, the time on my phone was counting down towards the departure time. I worried that if I missed my bus, my whole trip would be ruined; and that such an inauspicious start to my Beijing exploration would cause a chain reaction of delays, missed opportunities and regret. Maybe I’d never make it to the Wall. Then I thought: take it easy, it’s not the destination, it’s the journey. I studied the Chinese characters for Dengshikou, recognising the first Sinogram as meaning light or lantern.
Arriving at the subway station, I quickened my pace up the stairs and escalators to emerge into sunlight at Exit C. It was 7:59. Fortunately, a blue-vested person was standing in the middle of the carpark. “Do I have time to grab something to eat or drink?” I asked the ZANbus guide in my slightly rusty Mandarin. “No. We’re leaving right now,” she said, ushering me onto the bus.
“But we have bottles of water on sale onboard.”
My online booked tour, a bare basics budget-friendly US$25 including admission ticket, offered three advantages: visiting a less-visited section of the Great Wall a mere 70km from Beijing, arriving before the ‘other tourists’, and being a strictly ‘no shopping’ experience (many tours visit several stores where guides and drivers make huge commissions). As the only non-Chinese person on the coach, the guide (who was supposed to speak some English) gave me a special briefing (in Mandarin), explaining the options for going up and coming down from the Mutianyu section of the wall, as we sped out of the metropolis heading towards the green rolling hills in the hazy distance.
As we passed orchards, with growers selling freshly-picked fruits and nuts, I secretly wished we could stop for some shopping, not just to support the locals, but to ease my rumbling empty stomach. A nearby passenger, a man in his 20s visiting from a central province, whom I later dubbed ‘Running Man’, live-streamed the succession of farmer’s markets we zoomed past, in between video-chatting to his girlfriend. “There’s apples, pears, apricots, plums, grapes, persimmon, walnuts and huge peaches,” I heard him say. Since the bus driver didn’t once slow down, I justified to myself that, even though probably quite delicious, that produce would probably be exorbitantly over-priced for day-tripping Great Wallers like myself.
By 9.30am I was striding along an arcade of mainly unopened shops past the visitor centre, stopping to buy more water, and some snacks. “How about an ice cream?”one vendor asked me after I looked into his glass-top freezer. “Later, OK?” A cafe offered a latte coffee, but the US$8.25 price tag reminded me that China gives too much status to the beverage, which is sometimes just instant coffee and creamer. A Chinese family, long-resident in the UK, gave me a fuller rundown on the logistics for sightseeing, where to meet the guide for the trip back to Beijing (the waiting hall just near Burger King), and most importantly, when the bus driver would be leaving (4pm sharp). “Also, if you tell them you are with this bus company, there’s a discount at Subway,” the teenage son chimed in as we boarded an electric vehicle for a short ride to the base station for the ascent of the crestline high above us. Looking along the line of the hills, I could just make out the crenellated up-and-down patterns of the walls, stretching off into the far distance.
Now you’ve probably heard it many times, but let’s dispel the myth: the Great Wall of China is not visible from space. It is not visible from the Moon. It isn’t even visible to the naked eye from the low-orbit International Space Station. The popular myth goes back centuries, and more recently has been part of the propaganda of modern China to state that the wall was the only human-made structure that could be seen from space. The myth was challenged when Apollo 12 lunar module pilot Alan Bean said, “The only thing you can see from the Moon is a beautiful sphere, mostly white, some blue and patches of yellow, and every once in a while, some green vegetation. . . No man-made object is visible at this scale.”
Some artificial structures such as cities, highways and dams are visible from space, but the Great Wall is only visible from low Earth orbit with magnification or high-powered camera lenses. This was confirmed by China’s own first astronaut who went around planet Earth 14 times in 2003 on Shenzhou 5. “The Earth looked very beautiful from space, but I did not see our Great Wall.”
Photographs provided by Keith Lyons
To get personal and up-close with the Great Wall, other passengers decided to get a chairlift up and traipse further along between watchtowers and then take a toboggan (“speed slide”) down for 5 minutes of excitement. Rather than hike up (crazy in the heat), I opted to take the same cable car up and down (less than US$20 return).
Within minutes we could look down on the graceful, curved line of each section of the wall as it gently arched from one watchtower to the next. Wow! As the cable car reached its terminus near watchtower 14, the extent of the Great Wall to the north was revealed, fading to the horizon as vegetation and battlement became indistinguishable.
The Mutianyu section extends some 5.4km, and though work began in the 6th century, much of it was rebuilt or renovated in the 15th and 16th centuries. In the 1980s about 2.3 km of that section was restored, so over the last three decades, more and more people have been able to visit the less crowded and commercialised alternative to the more famous, most-restored, scenically magnificent Badaling section.
At Mutianyu, constructed of granite blocks, the wall has been made pedestrian-friendly and smooth, though there were steps, some steep in parts as they climb to the series of watchtowers. My fellow passenger Running Man darted around taking selfies and videos, as if he had only 24-hours left to live. Couples set off to the best spots to take photos, while a group of three university students set their sights on the highest watchtower, No.20, which could take one or two hours return depending on speed, stops and stamina. The path climbs from the low of watchtower 17, with the steepest leg between 19 and 20.
Being something of a mountain goat myself, you might expect me to join them purposefully climbing towards the much-talked-about ’20’, but this goat was tired, jet-lagged, and hungry. Instead, I wandered along to the next abutments and decided to just sit in the shade admiring the view. This is just what I had envisioned, I wrote in my journal. And it was. Just like in the photos. Actually, I had expected the Great Wall might be more crowded with jostling visitors, but less than half those getting off the cable car ventured beyond watchtower 16 — and it wasn’t a weekend or holiday.
At watchtower 17, it was so quiet and still that I could hear cicadas in the pine and chestnut trees flanking the wall. A pair of sparrows darted around, a plane flew overhead, and I watched the slow progress of a centipede across the path from the inner parapet to the invader-facing crenelation, a distance of four or five metres. Surely, the centipede hadn’t climbed all the way up the seven or eight metres of the Wall’s walls, five times the height of an adult? During its construction, which went until the mid-1600s, parts of the wall were made with bricks, held together by a durable glutinous rice mortar — arsenic was used to prevent insects from eroding away the wall.
An old man, who has been sitting nearby in the shade while his adult son and grandchildren went on further, finishes drinking from a plastic water bottle and discards it over the side. I feel like saying something, but stop myself, realising that some attitudes and behaviours are slow to change. He probably thinks the Great Wall was visible from space, I confide to myself.
The Wall’s modest width, no bigger than a road, was probably why it couldn’t be easily spotted from above. However, it did provide a fast means of travel and transportation for troops. Officially, the Great Wall was some 21,198 km long – that’s equivalent to half the equator – but up to a third of the structure has disappeared over time. It’s not just one continuous wall either, with sidewalls, parallel walls, enclosing walls, and even sections where there are no walls, just high mountain ridges, rivers, ditches or moats as the barriers. The Wall can lay claim to being the longest man-made structure as well as the largest building construction project ever undertaken. On a blank page I start a rough sketch of the section in front of me, trying to get my head around how this is just a tiny fraction of the longer, greater wall.
As well as being for border defence, the Great Wall also served to transmit messages, using watchtowers and beacon towers. From the next watchtower, the grandson of the bottle-litter-man waves but failing to catch the attention of the old man, he runs back along the wall path yelling, “Yéye – Granddad! Did you see me waving to you at the next castle?”
There is a certain irony about this extensive bulwark constructed across northern China and southern Mongolia up to two millennia ago to keep out invaders which now every day is climbed over by tourists from Mongolia, Russia, Eurasia and beyond. This is supposed to keep us out. But here we are, on the top of the wall and fortifications, having invaded, not from beyond, but from the downtown of the capital of the nation. So much for the upright projections, resembling teeth bared at the enemies.
Other travel experts and expats living in Beijing tell me if I visited Mutianyu a month later, I would see the surrounding maple, oak and chestnut trees in their autumn splendour. In winter, snow transforms the scene. But on this day, I am just happy to be present, to take on the literal meaning of Mutianyu — Admire Fields Valley — as I take the cable car down to the bountiful valley, snack on a corn cob sprinkled with chilli, and some fresh walnuts. As the clouds turn to a sudden rainstorm, in the comfort of the waiting hall, after savouring an ice cream, I let the day catch up on me.
Photo provided by Keith Lyons
Back on the bus at 4pm, Running Man is sunburnt red and sweaty — but still grinning as he sorts through his photos and videos. The mother hen guide gives us all a small memento of the day, a fridge magnet of the Great Wall, as a reward for all making it back on time.
The next thing I recall is being woken by the guide. I must have drifted off to sleep. “We’ve arrived,” she says, pointing towards an entrance to the Beijing metro which seems different from the starting point. For a moment, I wonder if I have been dreaming it all: the Great Wall, the perfect day, how everything worked out in the end. Then I realised it was all true: I’ve just seen and been on the Great Wall. And I have the fridge magnet in my pocket to prove it. I turn to say goodbye to Running Man, but he’s already exited the bus, and is making for the escalator down.
Keith Lyons (keithlyons.net) is an award-winning writer and creative writing mentor originally from New Zealand who has spent a quarter of his existence living and working in Asia including southwest China, Myanmar and Bali. His Venn diagram of happiness features the aroma of freshly-roasted coffee, the negative ions of the natural world including moving water, and connecting with others in meaningful ways. A Contributing Editor on Borderless journal’s Editorial Board, his work has appeared in Borderless since its early days, and his writing featured in the anthology Monalisa No Longer Smiles.
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