Shadow of the Silk Road

I think of saying Turkey, the Mediterranean, but it sounds preposterous. I hear myself answer: ‘Along the Silk Road to the northwest, to Kashgar.’ And this sounds strange enough. She smiles nervously. But the unvoiced question ‘Why are you going?’ gathers between her eyes in a faint, perplexed fleur-de-lis. This ‘Why?,’ in China, is rarely asked. It is too intrusive, too internal. We walk in silence.
Sometimes a journey arises out of hope and instinct, the heady conviction, as your finger travels along the map: Yes, here and here…and here. These are the nerve-ends of the world…
A hundred reasons clamour for your going. You go to touch on human identities, to people an empty map. You have a notion that this is the world’s heart. You go to encounter the protean shapes of faith. You go because you are young and crave excitement, the crunch of your boots in the dust; you go because you are old and need to understand something before it’s too late. You go to see what will happen.

Eighteen years earlier, I had trudged through a run-down provincial capital. But now it had shattered into life. All around now, another generation was on the move. In my memory, their parents’ expressions were guarded or blank, and footsteps lumbered…Something had been licensed which they called the West. I gawped at it like a stranger. Being Western was a kind of conformity. Even as the West touched them, they might be turning it Chinese.

Old people gazed as if at some heartless pageant. Dressed in their leftover Mao caps and frayed cloth slippers, they would stare for hours as the changed world unfolded. It was hard to look at them unmoved. Men and women born in civil war and Japanese invasion, who had eked out their lives through famine in the Great Leap Forward and survived the Cultural Revolution, had emerged at last to find themselves redundant. Under their shocks of grey hair the faces looked strained or emptied by history. And sometimes their expressions had quietened into a kind of peace, even amusement, so that I wondered in surprise what memory can have been so sweet.

His father obsessed him. The old man had been persecuted in the Cultural Revolution for owning books. ‘He was paraded in a dunce’s hat, with his arms wrenched out of their sockets’. Huang let out a tremor of strained Chinese laughter. ‘But now he’s gone home. He’s retired to the village of his childhood.’

‘The village that persecuted him

‘Yes. But to trees now, and flowing water, and a newspaper.’

But he had left behind this son tormented by a zeal for self-improvement. ‘A year ago I helped a Brazilian tourist. He’s a lawyer. He’s my only foreign friend – and now you.’ I felt a sudden misgiving, the start of a delicate interplay between debt and request. But he said: ‘I want to go to Brazil. During the day I’ll work at anything, but in the evening I’ll give Chinese lessons. Free, no charge! Money is important, of course, but later. First, friends. Friends will be more important for my life. Maybe after a year I’ll have five people studying Chinese – all new friends. Here!...here!... and here!’ He planted them in space, like aerial seeds. ‘Soon maybe one of my friends will tell me: Oh, Mr. Huang, I have good news – my father or my uncle works in a company that needs…’

I felt an amazed misgiving for him. ‘Do you know anything about Brazil?’

‘Brazil is in South America…Maybe they are making this’. He picks up a tiny bell from a table. ‘So I’ll send one of these to friends in China who’ll find a company to make them cheaper. After that we sell them back to the Brazil company.’ Then he advances down other avenues, other schemes. And slowly, as he juggles with a ferment of percentages and notional deals, my fear for him dissipates. I start, with dim foreboding, to pity the Brazilians.

He comes with his twenty-eight-year-old daughter Mingzhao, who looks like porcelain, like him. For a long time we climb over this perfect, sterile geometry. Beneath us the city moans invisibly through the smog: The drumming of a train, faint cries. Sometimes his daughter takes his arm, as if comforting him for something. As we mount the Linde hall, the pleasure palace of nineteen successive generations of Tang emperors, his daughter falls back beside me. She is pretty and delicate, with child’s hands. ‘In the Cultural Revolution he was sent into the mines,’ she says. ‘He was there eleven years. He had silicosis in his lungs long afterwards. But he kept up his studies even there. I’ve seen his old notebooks, covered in Maoist slogans.’

Later, in a dumpling restaurant that hangs its red lanterns near the city’s bell tower, Hu Ji and his daughter are debating something. They share the same small mouth and slim nose. She is studying the Sung dynasty, as he has studied the Tang. Sometimes she laughs, as he smiles. He is writing a book of essays—they are complex, provocative—which will expose old pieties to new light.'

My hand brushes his arm. I feel for his compassion – surprising myself – a surge of consolation, and I realize that I have never lost some misgiving at this hard land.

Hu Ji says quietly, ‘That’s why the Tainanmen Square massacre could happen’.

I hear myself ask: ‘Could it happen again?’

Seconds go by before he says: ‘I don’t think so. We have opened up too much to the world now. We are overseen.’

Is that the only reason? I wonder. But Hu Ji is looking at his daughter, says softly: ‘Our culture is starting to change, it’s true.’

He is seeing it in her; and she answers my unspoken question: 'I don't know what my generation would do in revolution. But I think mine are more selfish. They have a conscience. They must decide things for themselves.'

Her gaze stays innocent on mine. She is twenty-eight, but looks a child. For a moment I do not understand her – the equation of conscience with selfishness is strange. But ever since the Cultural Revolution, she implies—when morality was vested in a near-mythic leadership—responsibility could no longer be displaced upward, but had come to rest, with guilt, in the confines of the self. Implicitly Mingzhao is announcing the death of the whole Confucian order, which places in an immutable hierarchy every person under heaven.

Before gloom can gather, Mingzhao asks me brightly: ‘What period would you have liked to have lived in?’ She enjoys these parlour games.

‘It depends if I were rich or poor,’ I laugh. ‘And you?’

‘It depends if I were a man or a woman.’

We turn to her father. Surely he would choose to live under the Tang. But he only smiles, and says uncertainly: ‘The future.’