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Essay

Peeking at Beijing: Fringe-dwellers and Getting Centred

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.

*Read the Day two of Keith Lyon’s China trip by clicking here

Read the Day One of Keith Lyon’s China trip by clicking here

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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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL. 

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

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Categories
Essay

Peeking at Beijing: The Wall

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.

*Read the Day two of Keith Lyon’s China trip by clicking here

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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Bhaskar's Corner

Richard Hughes: The Reporter Who Inspired Ian Fleming

Death came to Richard Hughes a little over a quarter century ago — precisely on 4th January 1984. For his friends it was more than a personal loss, not just the occasional twinge of sorrow. It was a permanent bereavement. Richard Hughes was the foreign correspondent of the Far Eastern Economic Review from 1971 to 1983 and was one of Asia’s top-notch reporters.

Born to an Irish mother and Welsh father, Hughes combined Catholicism and Calvinism. Hughes was a pressman, complete and unassuming. He began his life with a writing job in the public relations department of the Victorian Railways. He soon joined the Melbourne Star (he was reported to be cracked, leaving PR for journalism is like running away from sea to go to school). Then he joined Sydney’s Daily Telegraph and was sent to Tokyo. Hughes reported the events of World War II. After the war ended, he continued reporting for other wars — particularly, the Korean War (1950-53).

His journalistic stints hovered around The Economist and The Sunday Times. Like all great reporters, scoops were his forte — the best known being an exclusive interview in Moscow with Burgess and MacLean, both British men who spied for the USSR. Later he shifted to Hong Kong and began writing his weekly columns.

Richard Hughes was more than a pressman. A towering personality who loved his job eminently, he was equally in the company of eminent people. Ian Fleming who was penning his James Bond thrillers was Hughes’ foreign editor and John le Carre wrote him into his books. Dikko Henderson of the Australian Secret Service in Fleming’s You Only Live Twice (1964) and Old Craw in Le Carre’s The Honourable Schoolboy (1977)are none other than Dick or Richard Hughes.

The life of Hughes as a reporter spanned many decades, most of which was spent in Asia. Hughes wrote extensively about Asia and his memoirs of those decades are chronicles of some important happenings in the continent. From hilarious events to the macabre ones, Hughes wrote about them and with great elan.

Hughes was an avid China-watcher and in most of his reports China figured prominently. Even the first report he filed on 16 October 1971, carried a commentary on Chairman Mao Zedong’s health and Lin Biao being anointed heir-apparent.

The year 1972 was, like 2008, the Chinese year of the Rat. Hughes wrote rather assertively: “The late Comrade Marx may not have heard of this celestial law of the animal calendar, and Chairman Mao himself does not refer to it in any of his manifestos; but stubbornly it persists, real and abiding, if non-ideological.”

President Nixon was visiting Peking early 1972. Hughes in his ingenious style commented: “The Chinese comrades have their own Maoist version of champagne, which was available in an alleged nightclub in a hutung behind the old Peking market as late as 1957; but the less said about that bastardized product the better for the Washington-Peking detente.”

In yet another of his weekly columns, Hughes described how Comrade-Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia (1922-2012) feared and distrusted the communists and the Vietnamese (Hanoi and Saigon alike) more than he feared or distrusted the Americans and the West.

Hughes’ oeuvre spanned from small little facts to great tributes. His piece on the death of Mitsugoro Bando VIII, the 69-year-old Kabuki actor, which he wrote in February 1975,was not only an homage but it carried an incisive analysis of the cause of this theatre personality’s death-eating fugu or Japanese globefish. Mark these details which Hughes had appended in his dispatch:

“Globefish poisoning is caused by tetrotoxin, usually found in fugu liver or ovaries, which can be far deadlier than potassium cyanide and causes violent paralysis. Since 1958, when a total of 289 diners suffered from globefish poisoning in Japan and 167 died, only licensed cooks have been authorized to prepare fugu dishes.”

Hughes was once expelled from the press galleries of both the Senate and the House of Representatives in Canberra because of his critical remarks about an irresponsible Senate vote against John Curtin’s Labor government. As he was re-seated after being exonerated in the galleries, he was not only delighted but gave this bit of information in his column that the Canberra press is one of the friendliest in the world.

Richard Hughes’ dispatches were not always matter-of-fact reporting; some of them were comical and conversational. One such backdrop was the lunar zodiac in which Chairman Mao and Premier Zhou were born.

Here is another account of Kim II Sung of North Korea (1912-94), who was speculated to have disappeared from public life owing to an incurable malignant neck cancer. Hughes wrote:

“Many of my barefoot spies in Peking and Seoul believe that when Kim II Sung sought medical advice in Rumania in 1974, he was told that he could expect to continue in public office for only two more years. This story certainly helps to explain his family-cult buffoonery and the controversial promotion of his 37-year-old son Kim Jong II as his successor.”

A September-1978 column of Hughes takes us to what happened in Indonesia in the late sixties — Ratna Sari Dewi, the one time Tokyo geisha hostess and the third  wife of the late president Sukarno, denouncing the CIA for complicity in the abortive 1965 communist coup. In the same vein, Hughes wrote eulogistically about President Suharto: “He sought to retire Sukarno, the father figure of Indonesian revolution, with relative dignity and avoid humiliation of the man who had been the country’s voice for two decades. But Sukarno, that arrogant hypocrite, never gave Suharto credit for his characteristically Indonesian perception and generosity.”

No newspaper columnist can ever keep himself aloof from writing about newspapers themselves. So, when Hughes attended a reception of Shimbun’s 35th anniversary celebrations he was nostalgic about the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan and how it had grown to a strong 250-member association by 1946. In a similar vein, he argued in one of his reports in November 1981 that the world’s first daily newspaper was not The Times but the contest was between west and East Europe or Korea. Based on various sources Hughes resolved that The Leipziger Zeitung (Korea) was the world’s first daily newspaper.

Richard Hughes’ last column was on the charade by former Australian prime minister Harold Holt’s espionage and his submarine escape to China. He, no doubt, called him a patriotic Aussie and recalled their friendship from the debating days of Melbourne. This column was submitted on 15 December 1983 and after which he never returned to write those brilliant columns once again.

Hughes columns were hilarious and sensitive to prevailing situations. He touched those niceties of life which he could handle with great aplomb. Whether it was the slave children of old Shanghai, plunging pathetic, claw-like hands into vats of boiling water to prepare silk cocoons for spinning or the Teikoku poisoner who massacred a bank’s staff for a haul of US 80 dollars, Hughes’ columns were down-to-earth.

No wonder he was called the ‘barefoot reporter’!

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Bhaskar Parichha is a journalist and author of No Strings Attached: Writings on Odisha and Biju Patnaik – A Political Biography. He lives in Bhubaneswar and writes bilingually. Besides writing for newspapers, he also reviews books on various media platforms.

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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Categories
Slices from Life

Serve the People

By Danielle Legault Kurihara

My father-in-law’s passing, when I was pregnant with his grandson, served as a sort of personal consecration. The Japanese family entrusted me with tasks and responsibilities from the moment of his death to the moment, three days later, when we picked his bones out of the ashes. All differences of nationality and religion flew out of the window.

Being married to the third son of a Japanese family, you could say I’m very low on the totem pole. When my mother-in-law married the eldest son of this clan in 1947, she had prestige but she lived to serve. She gained some measure of glory by giving birth to all those boys in the tatami room, but she was still the last one to use the bath water after her parents-in-law, her husband and her three young sons had soaked in it. She laughs about it now but when I asked her about Great-Grandma’s antique hand-painted silk kimonos, she said she made a big bonfire in the garden after her death and burned them all.

We got the call in the middle of the night. Otoosan had passed. As soon as my mother-in-law stepped into her husband’s room at the Veterans Hospital, or Veteru as it is called in Japan, she put everybody to work. His body had to be washed and his face shaved. My husband took me to the other side of the curtain and offered a chair. “You don’t have to do this”, he said. I could hear my mother-in-law instructing her sons. They worked in silence. I sat in the dark.

Otoosan, an architect, a father of three sons and a former soldier and prisoner of war, lived the final years of his long life in the Veteran Hospital. I had only met him once before in his home where he was spending the day as an outpatient. This man, whose powerful physique held memories of a four dan black belt judoka, was strapped in a chair, being fed by his wife. My husband said in a loud voice: “Otoosan, this is my wife. She’s Canadian”. He looked up, showed no reaction on seeing my Caucasian face and the family giggled: all in a day’s work. His son, a three dan black belt himself like a chip off the old block, took over feeding his Otoosan spoonfuls of lukewarm miso soup, their knees touching, their eyes meeting.

First Task

For my first task, after the family finished taking care of Otoosan, I was asked to sit at his bedside and wait with him while the family filled out paperwork in the office. Before leaving, my mother-in-law turned to me and said gently, “He should not be alone, you understand”. They left in the wake of two black clad white-gloved funeral employees who had appeared on cue from the shadows. There we were together, and it seemed like a moment to reacquaint myself with Otoosan, now wrapped in a pristine white sheet, only his tranquil face showing. I stared at him for a long time and finally whispered domo. It can mean hello or thank you or a mix of both. I read once that this greeting was used during the Edo Period to express a feeling of confusion or unsureness about the person one was addressing.

Second Task

For my second task, to my great surprise, my mother-in-law asked me to accompany Otoosan in the van transporting him to the family home while the others went to the funeral support company. Why me, the foreign wife married to the third son?  But everybody had a part to play in this family event and at that moment, the responsibility fell to me. I climbed into the white van to do my job.

My father-in-law and I could never have imagined making this trip together. Not in our wildest dreams. Not only were we practically strangers to each other, but we came from vastly different worlds, him an elderly Japanese man and me, a thirty-something pregnant French-Canadian. Together we crisscrossed the empty streets in the cold white van, side-by-side, his body wrapped in a shroud on a futon near me. In winter, three am is a dark and deep hour but I was told Otoosan was still here among us, in the realm between two worlds. He had just begun his last pilgrimage. Knowing this, I somewhat felt less forlorn traveling through the winter night, so far away from my country and my own cultural bearings. But that’s beside the point. I had a responsibility to fulfill.

Third Task

The porch light was on, the house already wrapped in black and white stripped cloth swaying in the dark as Otoosan was carried inside his home through the front door. He was laid to rest on a futon in the tatami room, two decorative lanterns like fancy bookends framing his bed. A black-and-white photo of Otoosan looking strong and serious sat in the middle of an altar among candles, chrysanthemums and fruit. In the pale yellow light of the lanterns, we dressed him in his white pilgrim garb for his 49-day journey to the Pure Land, following a hierarchical order. His wife put a white cap on his head and rice in the small pouch hanging from his neck, his sons smoothed out the white coat folded in reverse, and I slid, as best as I could while kneeling on the tatami, white cloth slippers over his feet. This was my third and last task of the night. The wake would start tomorrow. My husband, looking sad and exhausted, said, “We will sleep here next to him. Go home to get some rest.”

Fourth Task

The next day I stepped over the rows of slippers now crowding the spotless entrance step of the family home like a military parade. My mother-in-law, in her formal black silk kimono stamped with the family crest on the back collar, glided between the tatami room and the adjoining kitchen on her blinding white tabi socks. A diminutive powerhouse, married to an eldest son. I looked down at my rather homely nondescript black maternity dress.

For my fourth task, she directed me to take down from the cupboards the fancy sets of dessert dishes and tea cups, wash them thoroughly, dry them rigorously and set them out on the table. “Don’t break anything!” she chided with a smile in her eyes. I also had to wipe clean the large decades-old bone china serving platters and stack them with oranges, the locally-grown fruit. I took a certain pleasure in displaying them in a Jackson Pollock style. One way or the other, I knew they would be rearranged.

Early evening, relatives and acquaintances arrived in black suits and dresses to whisper condolences to my mother-in-law who bowed deeply to each guest. The mourners filled the tatami room, all sitting seiza before Otoosan. Leaning in, they greeted each other quietly.

Suddenly there was a commotion. The priest strode in like the phantom of the opera, his magnificent black kimono robes and glitteringvestment swooshing around him. We snapped to attention, backs straight, holding our Buddhist rosaries between clasped hands.  He greeted us, kneeled in front of Otoosan and started chanting in a loud sonorous voice. I was sitting on a stool in the back. I could never sit seiza and being pregnant did not help my cause.

It seemed like the chanting lasted forever. Just as I started dozing off in the stuffy incense-filled tatami room, my husband began to heave. I realized with horror that he was trying to suppress what looked like a maniacal laugh. Eyes staring ahead, his mouth half-closed, he repeated several times in a strained voice, “Snoopy, look, Snoopy!”. From the ceiling lamp a small plastic Snoopy wearing a red fireman hat was dangling from a string just above the bald head of an old uncle. My husband left the room to bawl in the bathroom. I sat on my stool thinking about the Japanese character in the movie Snow Falling on Cedars, how his stereotyped stoic face had changed his fate.

Fifth Task

After the service I strolled into the kitchen to get a drink. There stood one of the elder female relatives, erect in her black kimono. She had now officially taken over duties while my mother-in-law was busy chatting with the guests. I had met her only once and this time she looked at me with what seemed like shiny panther eyes, ready to pounce. In a flash I was thrown into the deepest end of the hierarchical senior-junior relationship: Cinderella, the wife of the youngest son. Serve more tea! Boil more water! Offer sweets! Wash these dirty cups! I was learning humility on the spot, my only stunned response being a weak Hai! I began shuffling around in my black stockings, looking busy and alarmed, set on doing my duty.   A Mao slogan popped into my head: Serve the People, for I was living a cultural revolution of my own. I just could not imagine this scenario happening in my country.

The wake lasted two more days. People came and went, and we ate our meals together just two meters away from Otoosan. We re-arranged flowers, sat near him and chatted. He was never alone. Some family members talked to him. On the morning of the fourth day, the family lined up from the house to the hearse. Otoosan exited his home feet last to the mournful sound of the car horn. No birds, no wind.

For the ceremony at the large funeral hall, the priest recited the sutras in front of Otoosan’s photo and a magnificent flower display. So many mourners, in slippers, paid their respect with incense and prayers at Otoosan’s casket. Each person brought incense grains three times to their forehead before finally depositing them in the incense burner. After the eldest son gave the customary speech, we lined up in order of importance to receive condolences. I was last of course but wholeheartedly included. “You must be Yoshiro’s wife,” some of Otoosan’s elderly friends exclaimed, naturally mistaking me for the second son’s spouse, the one working abroad. 

We followed the hearse to the crematorium and, huddled together in front of Otoosan, we said goodbye to his earthly envelope before he was sent off for cremation. In the meantime, we all gratefully sat down to a feast of large bento lunchboxes filled with rice balls, potato salad, fried chicken and pickles. Relatives from far and near sat close to my mother-in-law, some lay back on the tatami, some loosened their ties and belts and others had loud conversations over the long low tables. I sat on a stool devouring my food. Pregnancy made me hungry.

Sixth Task

Finally, we were called in to pick Otoosan’s bones from the ashes and transfer them to an urn. As he handed me a pair of large chopsticks, my husband said, “You don’t have to do this”. But I wanted to do it. By that time, I had had four days to acquaint myself with Otoosan and with death while going about my tasks in the living family home. The family put Otoosan’s bones in his urn in a matter-of-fact way. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

On the 7th day of his passing, a sunny winter day, we stood in front of the imposing family grave while the eldest son placed Otoosan’s urn alongside those of his forefathers, under the heavy slab of rock at the foot of the stone monument. Only first sons and their wives are included. It looks like my husband and I will have to find our own resting place in Japan. 

I think my mother-in-law worries that her eldest son’s eldest son will not be able to carry on the tradition of caring for the family grave. He doesn’t have a son to continue the lineage, only daughters. But then again, my mother-in-law stoically goes with the flow of life and change. I was part of this flow. Twenty-three years after Otoosan passed on, she apologised for imposing on me the task of riding with him from the hospital to the family home. On the contrary, it was an honour.

I fulfilled my role as the third son’s wife the best I could to assist the Japanese family mourn Otoosan. On my next trip to the home country, it wouldn’t kill me to brush leaves or snow off the headstones of my loved ones, bring flowers or have a look at their urns through the glass. I might linger and tell them about me, my son, the Japanese family. I also need to discuss my resting place among them. Who knows, maybe my husband and my son will come from Japan to help me.

Glossary

Sieza – formal Japanese sitting posture (on your knees)

Hai—Yes in Japanese.

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Danielle Legault Kurihara, a Quebecker, lives in Japan. She writes about her expat life and her bicultural son. She writes for him.

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