death there is nothing. I believe only in knowledge.’
Out in the street a light rain was falling. He took no notice of it.
Something else was bothering him, small but insistent. He said: ‘We have a tomb-sweeping day, you know, when we burn paper money for the dead. For two years now, just before this day, my dead grandparents have come to me in dreams…’
But this coincidence was all he knew of faith, and the thought dwindled away with the rain. He took my hand. He was afraid for me, he said. Then, with an incongruous sweetness, he became reluctant to say goodbye. He thought of me as his father, he said depressingly. I was so old and my health wasn’t good (I had a cold). And the railway stations were dangerous. I must never talk to anyone in a station. They were full of drifters and criminals. ‘And you must not go out at night. Here’s my mobile number…you must ring me if you ever have trouble…’
But as he drifted away from me, perpetually turning to wave, turning again until the rain and the dark subsumed him, it was his own journey that I wondered at–the self-exile of millions of his countrymen. That night I tried to picture him succeeding. I surprised myself by badly wanting this. I almost telephoned him. In the hotel’s quiet it became uncomfortable, then painful, to envisage the alternatives: Huang scraping a pittance in some crime-ridden barrio, while his dream faded away.
I closed my eyes, imagining a distant, changed time. This other fantasy developed pleasurably as I fell asleep. In some unknown future, needing financial help–a loan perhaps, to support my old age–I would find myself in a grand banker’s office wavering down a gauntlet of secretaries and assistant managers; and there at the end, his hedgehog hair flecked discreetly with grey, proffering his gold-ringed hand from behind the director’s desk, would be my old friend.
Through the cold halls of the Confucian temple, 2,300 stone stelae rise in ranks higher than a man. Sacred texts, imperial edicts, early poems: this imperishable library accumulated for a thousand years, after the Roman-era Han dynasty. Some stand isolated on the backs of stone tortoises, symbols of longevity, topped by atwirl of dragons; others stretch in seamless walls of black granite, eight feet high. Ancient classics–the Book of Rites, the Book of Odes, the Book of Changes–become avenues of stone you walk through. The core texts alone cover the surface of 114 giant stones. There are laws about fields and canals, records of peasant uprisings and the removal of ancestral graves, even the killing of missionaries, copybooks of calligraphy, maps, and a single six-foot-high character, ‘Harmony’, carved on its own stele. You are walking through the memory-trace of a whole people. You have no power to turn a page or unfurl a scroll. The words might be the voice of the stone. Incorruptible, they have been proof against the Chinese whispers of generations of scribes.
Their redundancy was majestic now. The neat, incised characters in their vertical columns struck me like a chilly magic. I had learnt to speak Mandarin only through the pinyin system which Romanises the characters. I could not read them. But each character, I knew, was discrete, inflexible. The language had no developed past or future, no gender, no singular or plural. In these dank halls it suddenly seemed less a living organism than a wondrous monument. Locked in a changeless system of notating history, the near and the distant past might seem to co-exist. Duration was recorded by the reign of emperors, or in sixty-year cycles. There was no trajectory to the future, no opening-out of the centuries, no last day. Instead, sometimes, there was the illusion of perfect equilibrium.
This gloomy power followed me through hall after hall of granite memory. I went in fascinated alienation, as if tramping between tombstones. The characters were filing up and down their stelae like worker ants. The
Out in the street a light rain was falling. He took no notice of it.
Something else was bothering him, small but insistent. He said: ‘We have a tomb-sweeping day, you know, when we burn paper money for the dead. For two years now, just before this day, my dead grandparents have come to me in dreams…’
But this coincidence was all he knew of faith, and the thought dwindled away with the rain. He took my hand. He was afraid for me, he said. Then, with an incongruous sweetness, he became reluctant to say goodbye. He thought of me as his father, he said depressingly. I was so old and my health wasn’t good (I had a cold). And the railway stations were dangerous. I must never talk to anyone in a station. They were full of drifters and criminals. ‘And you must not go out at night. Here’s my mobile number…you must ring me if you ever have trouble…’
But as he drifted away from me, perpetually turning to wave, turning again until the rain and the dark subsumed him, it was his own journey that I wondered at–the self-exile of millions of his countrymen. That night I tried to picture him succeeding. I surprised myself by badly wanting this. I almost telephoned him. In the hotel’s quiet it became uncomfortable, then painful, to envisage the alternatives: Huang scraping a pittance in some crime-ridden barrio, while his dream faded away.
I closed my eyes, imagining a distant, changed time. This other fantasy developed pleasurably as I fell asleep. In some unknown future, needing financial help–a loan perhaps, to support my old age–I would find myself in a grand banker’s office wavering down a gauntlet of secretaries and assistant managers; and there at the end, his hedgehog hair flecked discreetly with grey, proffering his gold-ringed hand from behind the director’s desk, would be my old friend.
Through the cold halls of the Confucian temple, 2,300 stone stelae rise in ranks higher than a man. Sacred texts, imperial edicts, early poems: this imperishable library accumulated for a thousand years, after the Roman-era Han dynasty. Some stand isolated on the backs of stone tortoises, symbols of longevity, topped by atwirl of dragons; others stretch in seamless walls of black granite, eight feet high. Ancient classics–the Book of Rites, the Book of Odes, the Book of Changes–become avenues of stone you walk through. The core texts alone cover the surface of 114 giant stones. There are laws about fields and canals, records of peasant uprisings and the removal of ancestral graves, even the killing of missionaries, copybooks of calligraphy, maps, and a single six-foot-high character, ‘Harmony’, carved on its own stele. You are walking through the memory-trace of a whole people. You have no power to turn a page or unfurl a scroll. The words might be the voice of the stone. Incorruptible, they have been proof against the Chinese whispers of generations of scribes.
Their redundancy was majestic now. The neat, incised characters in their vertical columns struck me like a chilly magic. I had learnt to speak Mandarin only through the pinyin system which Romanises the characters. I could not read them. But each character, I knew, was discrete, inflexible. The language had no developed past or future, no gender, no singular or plural. In these dank halls it suddenly seemed less a living organism than a wondrous monument. Locked in a changeless system of notating history, the near and the distant past might seem to co-exist. Duration was recorded by the reign of emperors, or in sixty-year cycles. There was no trajectory to the future, no opening-out of the centuries, no last day. Instead, sometimes, there was the illusion of perfect equilibrium.
This gloomy power followed me through hall after hall of granite memory. I went in fascinated alienation, as if tramping between tombstones. The characters were filing up and down their stelae like worker ants. The
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