Wandering into Beijing, one is always immediately aware of some nebulous sense of duplicity.  On the inside, where there is all that glitters, antiquated walls and mansions are hidden behind shops and stalls and roads and fast-food joints; tourists go there, and ooh and aah, and commune with a past that was never theirs, yet it instills in them some sense of common identity.  And on the outside, there is the dingy, plain architecture of yesteryear, houses springing up like pale, coarse rock from a foundation of dried, caked mud and dust, lone survivors of some vast and arid wasteland.  They cling to the edge of the city like spores to some great and ancient oak tree, thriving on the source of their anonymity and their squalor, their poverty and plainness, their pale, inherent ugliness.

      Beijing is a city constantly being consumed by the new – one might wake up one morning to find an entire district of the town demolished overnight; the rambling hutongs[1], the squat, rough-hewn buildings, the quaint and winding passages, the smell of damp clothing hanging out to dry, the shouts of mothers calling children in for tea – they all disappear with a stealth that denies that they were ever there at all.  Upon the old ground the new is built – buildings straight and tall and imposing in some butchered Soviet style intermingled with the bland, patriotic flavour of the modern Socialist Market Economy that is now China.  Death is embodied in the single sweep of a bulldozer.  What replaces it is the cold and the dystopian.  That trees are relegated to the parks and the countryside is a foregone conclusion.  Trees are strange and sacred.  They line avenues in a plastic parody of themselves, choked by the masonry, choked by the dry and grimy air.

There are no hills in Beijing.  They fringe the city on some misty, obscure horizon that you can never quite seem to reach.  The 1.20 dollar taxis that frequent the roads will try to take you there.  But for some reason, you end up where you started; you go to the jazz club instead, listen to the frenetic, syncopated pace of the band in the New Orleans-styled Big Easy and the next morning you never quite remember how you got back to your ramshackle room.

       Outside, afternoon will beckon with the sound of bicycle bells ringing.  If you look out of your window – if your window overlooks a main road – you will see that a glistening river of cyclists runs past your room.

       By my second month in Beijing, I had come to believe that I was quite insane.  It was not a conscious decision to believe that I was such, it just happened.  It was simply that a part of me had died, and the wound that had been left behind began to rot and fester – and that wound was in my heart.  Often, I would sit in my room and weep, and listen to the sound of bicycle bells ringing.  Other times, I would lie on my bed and will my heart to stop.  It never did.  I was more selfish, in those days.  I was selfish because I had never known what it was truly like to need before.

       What I needed was, quite unaccountably, dead, stripped away from me like so many tattered rags.

       Isn’t it funny how, when people find you shamed and naked, they avert their eyes and walk away?

       I suppose I should not have blamed them.

       By the third month, a singular and delicious impulsion overcame me.  I was sitting on the edge of my bed and pondering those indomitable shades of grey, when I suddenly had the urge to walk.  To walk anywhere, to walk everywhere that my will would take me.  So I walked.  I walked where I would not have walked before, when I was sane.  Because of my blood, no one stared at me, and no one called me laowai[2] – that phrase so full of jocular contempt.  I was no more a foreigner in this city than I was in London, or Paris, or an asylum, or home.  I was the ugliest thing there was.  Despite my hatred for all this place was and all that it had become, I was at home here.  The city had taken its roots in the wound of my heart.

       It is the easiest thing to get lost in this city.  It is built on a faux grid-system – all the roads in between remain untouched since their first conception.  Nevertheless I found it – a walled public garden down a pot-holed street, unmarked and unheeded by the inhabitants that strolled nearby.  I paid the entrance fee and entered, because I had decided that feeling sorry for myself was not as noble as feeling sorry for others who had been neglected.  And because I was ugly, and so were the walls that enclosed this small space.

       The garden was larger than I had expected it to be; there was the obligatory little stream, the obligatory rocks hewn in the ‘contrived naturalism’ always so favoured throughout Chinese history.  And then there was the pavilion, built upon a little hill, overlooking it all.  I climbed the steps that led up to it at a leisurely pace, and when I had reached the top I sat down.  Unlike most pavilions, the columns were not the carved, smoothed and sand-papered wood that we are so accustomed to.  Neither were they painted in that bright and garish vermilion, or adorned with that thick and sparkling gilt.  Rather, they were the thin, white, spindly trunks of long-dead willow trees – four in all, with the pavilion itself built around them.  Old wood, dead wood.  Its nerves were dormant, dead, asleep; yet comfort crawled like marching ants along its veins.  I leaned into those spiral lanes.  For the first time in weeks, I felt a sense of normality wash over me.

       “Where are you from, xiaojie[3]?”

       I had never noticed until that moment the old man that sat across from me.  His features were as shrivelled as a wrinkled walnut; his body was as bent as the willow.  He was dressed like so many of the old folk of Beijing – a faded blue Mao suit, an azure cap and black cotton shoes.  Beneath the cap his hair was still jet black; the jet black hair framed a face almost red with the sun, a toothless grin, a stubbled chin.  Between the old man’s gnarled fingers was clutched the neck of a battered erhu[4].  The instrument rested on his knee like the graceful stance of a sculpted stork.

       “England,” I answered in reply to his question, in my own brand of stilted Mandarin.

       “Ah,” was all he said.  The silence that followed was, to say the least, unusual.  It was also somewhat unreal.  My eyes strayed to the garden walls.  From my vantage point on the hill, I should have been able to see over them and into the city beyond.  But there was nothing but mist.

       “Hao qiguai,” I murmured. “How strange.”

       The man smiled.

       “Beyond the mist are the hills,” he informed me with simplicity of a child to a child.

       “Beyond the walls is the city,” I corrected him.

       “Not from here.  Not from Bai Liu Ting,” he insisted.  That was what the Chinese call ‘White Willow Pavilion’.  He seemed proud to say it.  He was beaming so inanely, so toothlessly that it was almost endearing.

       “Why not from here?” I asked him, stupidly.  I did not know how he could hope to answer me.  But he smiled again, and his face crumpled like a dried up prune.

       “Because the White Willow Pavilion dries the tears of the sad, and opens the way to the land of the immortals,” he replied, as if the truth was self-evident.  And then he took up his bow in his right hand, and he began to play a song on his fiddle.  And while he played he sang to me, and he told me the story of White Willow Pavilion.

*

       In the old days, there was an old man and an old woman, and they had a young son who was in love with a young woman.  And one day the young man was conscripted into the army, and had to go and fight on the northernmost borders of the Emperor’s territory.  Now this was the only son of the old man and the old woman, and being of a poor family, their son was the only treasure they had left.  So when he was called to fight for the Emperor there was a great wailing between the couple, and they beat their breasts and they tore their hair out.

       “If our son should die, who shall look after us in our old age?” they moaned. “And who shall pray to our souls when we have left this dusty world behind?”

       And the young peasant girl who loved their son wept and said:

       “And how should I ever be able to endure being another’s bride, if he does not return?”

       But the son said to them all:

       “I shall return to you.”

       But they did not know that on the shores of Lake Kokonor, white bones had gathered, and none had come to gather them up.

       A year passed, and none was heard of the young man, and all three feared him dead but still they prayed to the spirits and the ancestors that he would return.  And then one day the couple received a letter from their son’s garrison to inform them that he had perished while protecting the border along the Yellow River.

       Now all three gathered together and mourned and lamented for many a day, and it was in their minds to travel to the north and retrieve the bones of the young man.  But they were poor and could not afford the journey – moreover the country was at war, and many of the provinces were impassable.  So at last they decided that they must pray to the immortals and implore them to restore their son to them.  So they climbed a small hill, where the shrine of the village ancestors had been built, and while they wept they said:

       “We beg you spirits, to stem our tears and grant us solace, by reuniting us with this boy we hold so dear.”

       And the immortals heard them; but the soul of the boy had already passed into heaven, and it was beyond even the means of the gods to take back what now belonged to heaven – for heaven was the greatest force the world shall ever know.  And so they said to the old couple and the young woman:

       “We cannot restore this man to you, for to do so would upset the balance of heaven and earth.”

       And the three wailed and said:

       “Then our tears shall never run dry, not until the moment of our passing.”

       And once more the immortals took pity on them, and determined that their fate should not be so piteous.  Instead they transformed their bodies into trunks, and their hair into branches, and their tears into leaves.  And that is why the willow tree always seems to weep.  But then the immortals gathered up the bones of the young man, and they laid him beside the three willow trees that were once his parents and his lover; and they too fashioned him into a willow tree – but this willow bore no leaves, and it stood taller than the rest.

       Then the immortals left, and the villagers saw the four willow trees on the hilltop, and soon it spread amongst them that whoever stood under their boughs would be assuaged of all anguish and sorrow.  And in time they came to venerate the trees, and built an enclosure around them, to protect them – and when all four trees had become as bare and dead as that which had been the young man, they built a pavilion around them, and called it ‘White Willow Pavilion’.

       And ever after it was said that the pavilion was enchanted, and that it looked out onto the misty home of the eight immortals from above.

*

       Now when the old man had finished the song, he said goodbye and wandered off down the hill, and I never thought to ask him for his name.  On the other side of the wall, the mist was lifting, and in the distance, the spire of Dongtang Cathedral punctured the sky like a silver needle.

       After a while I came down myself, and went back into the city.

       I never found the White Willow Pavilion again.

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[1] A kind of alley-way, extremely narrow, where the residents live in roughshod stone buildings.

[2] A mild derogatory word for ‘foreigner’, though usually spoken in jocular affection.

[3] ‘Miss’ or ‘young lady’.

[4] A type of Chinese fiddle.