Book #65: China Diary

Apologies for my blogging hiatus . . . just got back to Toronto.  For the past couple weeks, I've been travelling with my boyfriend in China.  Although I wasn't able to blog during my trip (limited computer access), here are a few excerpts from my photo diary.

This is a picture of me hanging out in Soho, the neighbourhood in Hong Kong where my boyfriend grew up.  The picture was taken right after I'd gotten off the plane, after twenty-four hours without sleep, so everything is kind of swimming before my bleary eyes: the fluorescent yellow leggings that many of the girls in this fashionista city are wearing, the multi-tiered escalators cut into the mountainous terrain carrying people past the colourful cafes, bars and shops (one upper level boutique reputedly used to be the apartment where part of Chung King Express was filmed, bringing the area to life all the more vividly in my mind's eye).

A few days later, we have tea at the elegant Repulse Bay Hotel, which is of particular interest to me because I'm currently reading Eileen Chang's Love in a Fallen City.  This novella by one of China's preeminent writers of the early twentieth century is partly set at this very hotel, during the Second World War.  It tells the story of Bai Liusu, a beautiful but disgraced divorcee in her late twenties, who has been forced to live on the charity of her Shanghainese family.  As money becomes tight during the war, her family makes clear that they'd just as soon send her back to her loathesome in-laws or let her beg in the street.  But when the matchmaker Mrs. Xu takes an unexpected interest in her situation, Liusu agrees to be offered up to one of the biggest playboys in China, Fan Liuyan, the orphaned son of a wealthy, property owning family - gambling that she'll be able to snare him into marriage.  Travelling with Mrs. Xu to the Repulse Bay Hotel where she is set to meet Liuyan, Liusu's first impression of the hotel still holds true today: "Soon cliffs of yellow-and-red soil flanked the road, while ravines opened up on either side to reveal dense green forest or aquamarine sea.  As they approached Repulse Bay, the cliffs and trees grew gentler and more inviting.  Returning picnickers swept past them in cars filled with flowers, the sound of scattered laughter fading in the wind."

Liusu and Liuyan soon become caught up in an intense game of dangerous liaisons, he trying to seduce her and compromise her reputation, she trying to discern whatever feelings may be forming beneath his slick exterior.  But in the end, it's the war - Japan's invasion of Hong Kong, along with Pearl Harbor - that forces the couple to confront their true feelings.  Struggling to find enough to eat, Liusu and Liuyan find themselves taking care of each other, as they return to the Repulse Bay Hotel, this time to seek refuge.  By the time they arrive, however, the hotel is under siege: "By this time, Liusu wished that Liuyan wasn't there: when one person seems to have two bodies, danger is only doubled.  If she wasn't hit, he still might be, and if he died, or was badly wounded, it would be worse than anything she could imagine.  If she got wounded, she'd have to die, so as not to be a burden to him.  Even if she did die, it wouldn't be as clean and simple as dying alone.  She knew Liuyan felt the same way.  Now all she had was him; all he had was her."

Wandering along the beach, staring at the vanishing horizon, brought these characters to life all the more immediately in my imagination.

The following week, we departed for Shanghai where we spent the next few days eating, drinking and touring the galleries of Shanghai's truly impressive art scene.

One of the more interesting exhibits we visited reconceptualizes what it means to read and write a book.  Artist Xu Bing puts on display his rough drafts and process work that went into writing a book comprised entirely of icons common in our contemporary experience - no alphabet, no complex grammar required at all.  According to the artist, "Book from the Ground is a novel written in a ‘language of icons’ that I have been collecting and organizing over the last few years. Regardless of cultural background, one should be able understand the text as long as one is thoroughly entangled in modern life."  The project makes you think about what it means to inhabit a fluid, cosmopolitan universe, where so much of our time - particularly when we're travelling and don't speak the language - is spent looking for universal icons, like the stick figure of a woman on the washroom door.  To think that a whole novel could be written using these icons is indeed a provocative idea.  I spent much time staring at the pages on display, delighting as I managed to piece together - or construct - the narrative.

From Shanghai, we took the train to Suzhou, a smaller city known historically as a centre of poetry and the arts, landscape architecture in particular.  The gardens of Suzhou are delightful for strolling, contemplation and just letting your imagination wander.  I can't think of a better form of rejuvenation.