For Susan, Fang-Fang, Sam and Thomas, all of whom I am eternally grateful.

The quote from Zhuangzi has been taken from ‘Disputers of the Tao’ by A. C. Graham.

‘Child, it’s broke, and I feel you slipping away.

Child, by one mistake, you’ve lost your way back.’

(Do You Love, Natalie Imbruglia)

*************

            In time I came to realise that living in Beijing had rendered all creative pursuits an endeavour of inescapable monotony; and moreover, that the explosive dichotomy of pain and pleasure that had so underpinned my understanding of human experience had, inevitably, given way to something far more subtle and disturbing.  The city, perennially grey, dry, dusty, even in the winter – life’s metabolism at work, wearing you down, stretching you thin, dissolving what’s left, atom by aching atom.

            There was not a day that went by when I did not question my purpose in coming to this place, when I did not question the supposition that, by turning the other cheek to pain, by soldiering on, I was in fact creating an even greater source of adversity; and that this adversity, being the fruition of a martyr’s labours, was no one else’s fault of my own.

            In the autumn, I began work at the International Hospital; the change in weather was imperceptible yet sudden; one day in November, the blistering sunshine suddenly gave way to bitterly cold winds and gales, to slate grey skies and drab, cob-webbed horizons; the musty layer of pollution iced over – it would not thaw until March.  And not a drop of rain.  Back home, in the quaint, leafy English suburbs, rain had always been my inspiration; storms would splinter the sky and pour forth their essence almost unbidden.  In ancient days this would have been the brief, impassioned union of both Father Sky and Mother Earth, of white-bearded Uranus and fat-thighed Gaia; in their jangling, jerking, shuddering orgasm the heavens would have unburdened all life into her cavernous womb, sparking maelstrom upon swift, torrid maelstrom.  Then the earth would lie flat, gasping, shaking, the smell of her sweat clean, fresh, tangy as dewy grass, her mountainous arms spread open; I, in turn would, fall prostrate before the world, utterly, utterly emptied; in the dim calmness of the swirling aftermath, I would sit in the twilight, I would write.

            But not in Beijing.

            In rained once that November, in such a torrential downpour that you just knew it would not rain again for a very long time.  I went out in the storm, for no other reason than to feel again; five minutes later, I returned, drenched, shuddering, petrified as if the skies had turned me to stone and dashed me upon sea-torn rocks.  I had felt ravished; ravished by the world, Eve on the last leg of her survival, ripped apart, rent asunder, ejected.  No place was my home.  Whatever demons had haunted me another two continents away, they had chased me here, and I couldn’t run away.

            After two weeks of autumn, winter encroached, slaughtered its forebear and settled in nicely, thank you; not without a self-consciousness though, one that belied its true nature – murderer, pretender, usurper; inescapably cold, and intrinsically malicious.

            The International Hospital managed to remain white where all the other buildings were overcome by dust and drabness.  This was where all the tourists, the diplomats, the expatriates and the foreign students came for medical attention – a world of alien arrogance in the midst of the wasteland, a world that felt like home, all white walls and chrome and glass, a true bastion of Western civilization.  I hated it.  Back home, no clinic I ever went to looked like the International Hospital.  But it was my refuge.  And in many ways, it was also my sanity.  Because it was the only thing that served to remind me that, locked somewhere in another envelope of enclosed reality, home still existed.  And that, before I had signed my life away to two years of exile in this strange and foreign place, I had had the best and truest of intentions in my heart.

            So much for that.

            That November, the sky was thick with cloud, pollution and premonition – the roads were lined with the heavy, metallic masonry of cars, buses, trams; the atmosphere was implacable, one could have cut through the length and breadth of the district with a chainsaw and watch the suspended, lingering thrum of disquiet fall into solid cloven quarters.  On the entire length of Jiangtai Street, there was an unearthly aura of deep agitation, as if the world were about to disintegrate, as if life itself longed to be itched.  The clothes boutique felt strangely forlorn and quiet when music should have been playing; the block of flats, so often ringing with the voices of children, seemed locked in a lofty, stony silence; even the customary chatter of the two old men playing Goh on the pavement seemed to have dwindled into nothing more than a dreary drone.  The sense of discomfit was oppressive; I approached the hospital feeling inexplicably heavy of heart, as if the autumn wind and the autumn chill had seeped into the pores of my skin.  My usual route brought me past the open doors of the second-hand clothes boutique; I caught myself in the window, unable to make out what lay on the inside, despite having been in the store a hundred times before.  My normal schema had been covertly disrupted, and in the momentary confusion, during which I was unable to grasp the certainty of what I knew to be undeniable truth, I saw myself reflected in the dusty, grimy window, a blurry phantom from another world, displaced.

            Yes – that’s what I was.  Displaced.

            I paused, staring at the indistinct image before me, colourless, androgynous, passive, watchful, still.  This action, this activity, inactive, motionless, seemed familiar, achingly so.  And I still cannot say whether this is something I did, or something I dreamed, or something that I forced upon myself.  And if it had been raining, it still frightens me to think that on that dusty windowpane, I would have seen a hundred more reflections of indefinable self.

            Granny Mu was sitting on the street corner as usual, watching me.  Of course, I could not be certain that she was surnamed Mu, since I had never spoken to her myself.  But I had heard mutterings from the children from the block of flats at the other end of the road, the children who walked quickly and with gazes bent whenever they passed her, because they feared her.  They would never give a voice to their fears, even if they could – the truth was too terrible, too unsettling.  They would say to you it was because she had bound feet; that she was one of the last women alive to have bound feet; that bound feet were brutal, cruel, unnatural, almost as if to say that the cruelty inflicted upon her in youth had made her the perpetrator of her own suffering.  But I knew the answer.  I knew why they feared her – the object of their fear was staring me right in the face at that very moment, and it was that action, or inaction I should say, that was the source of their fear.  It was that she seemed to stare straight through you, that those glassy eyes of hers seemed so devoid of emotion, so uninformed of your presence that you got the feeling that she shouldn’t be looking at you at all, because for her, you simply didn’t exist.

            Why then, after I had shuddered and turned back towards the hospital, did I feel her eyes trail after me, boring into my back, causing my stomach and womb to ache?

*

            In the hospital, my room was lodged on the third floor like a bullet, in a quiet, civilised world wherein the casual visitor would immediately feel cradled in the security of calm, temperate sanity.  This is a point that never ceases to amuse me.  The people were friendly.  The staff at reception were polite.  The doctors and nurses were bounteous with their benevolent and indulging smiles.  The walls were a serene, placid cream.  The pictures that hung on the walls were of boating trips, meadows and sober, condescending, mountainous Western scenery.  The sofas on which the patients were invited to sit were soft, mellow, a myriad display of ingratiating pastel hues.  The magazines spread out upon the low coffee table were sedate and cheerful in nature: country life, horse racing, classic motoring, flower arranging, embroidery, yachting, holiday get-aways.  The only refreshment on offer was mineral water.  The rowdy restlessness of Beijing was a world away from this place, a world that might never have existed – until you stepped out of the front doors again, until you were expelled, as child from womb, into the real world, and sensation began to assault your sensibilities once more.

            My room, on this third floor, was the colour of purple.  Not the deep, passionate shade of purple that I had worn on February 14th three years ago, when John had so memorably fallen into the fountain in Trafalgar Square while on the way back to the hotel, flash Armani suit and all.  No: this shade of purple was subtle, delicate, a soft and goading tinge of lilac, one that promised to hold you in its greatest confidence.  Against one wall was set a long, welcoming sofa, a slightly darker shade of purple; across from it sat a comfy armchair in the same style.  The small table that stood in-between was made of light, airy glass – a box of tissues was set upon it, a simple alarm clock, a dish filled with coloured stones, a few appointment cards.  My desk and computer stood non-intrusively at the other end of the room, by the door, next to my metallic grey filing cabinet.  To make it just that little bit more inviting, I had hung a few prints of my favourite paintings on the wall – Renoir, Waterhouse, Foujita, Burne-Jones.  On the corkboard were pinned a few cards of thanks, a calling card from Le Meridien hotel in London, my diplomas, a few scribbles from imagined nieces and nephews that I’d never had.

            A part of my life, a part of my world, and therefore, inevitably, a falsity to those who come to this room seeking to know the secret of ‘me.’

            Today, ensconced in the violet sofa, sits Bao-Bao, an eighteen-year-old Chinese American student currently studying at Qinghua University.  Something of a child prodigy, she won her first music award for playing the violin when she was six, had written her first novel when she was ten, and had won a scholarship to Havard University when she was just sixteen.  Two months before she came to Beijing to study for her degree, her father had died.

            That was why she had come to me, out of despair, out of grief, out of anguish and madness.  This was our third session together.

            Bao-Bao sits, silent, dabbing her moist eyelids with a sodden tissue.  She’s one of very few people I have met who are truly beautiful.  Clear-complexioned, olive-skinned, almond-eyed, silky-haired – she is a pure-blood, a thorough-bred; unlike me, who is a mongrel mixture of two dichotomies, a half-caste.  Like me, Bao-Bao has always felt the strange pull, the spiritual and emotional tug-of-war that her Chinese blood and her American upbringing has eternally inflicted on her.  But for me, the division in identity has always been more devastating, more precise, because it is embodied in me, in the very composition of my genetic coding.  I am neither this nor that; I am neither British, I am neither Chinese.  I am, by very nature, indefinable, and I always will be.  That is why I think that when I needed to run away from the misery, from the stifling prison that Britain had become for me, I had chosen to come here.  In part, perhaps, to find out who I truly was – either one thing, or the other.  Bao-Bao would tell me now that there is no such thing in either being one, or the other.  Her, me, everybody – we are all contrived of either/or; we are living, breathing gestalt.  This I found out a little too late for my liking; Bao-Bao is smarter than me, and I both envy and admire her that.  She is one of the few foreign students who can afford my services (my fees are regulated by the hospital – I have no say in them – although I do sometimes offer discounts to special cases on the sly, Bao-Bao being a case in point).  She is gifted and pretty, all her life she has wanted for nothing.  She has her whole future ahead of her, her father’s inheritance, the world at her feet.  She shouldn’t be here.  Anymore than I should have been, when I was her age.

            Bao-Bao dabs at her eyes with the tissue.  She has the kind of face that would rather crack before it sheds tears – one might think she had never shed a tear in her life.  Her mouth holds the childish petulance that so many of those born with privilege own.  She allows herself to cry, here, in this room; but she is proud, dignified, sedate; she always cries in a civilised manner, never weeping, never wailing, never snivelling, unlike many of the people who take refuge in this place.  She dabs at her eyelids with the cultured gesture of the lady in her manor house; the remaining tears film over her eyes, glaze over, slowly fade away.  For a moment I see myself, in her eyes.  I am temporarily shocked, confined in my own recurring, consciously re-playable sense of deja vu.  I no longer quite remember why the shattered vision of myself reflected should surprise or unsettle me – perhaps it is because, in Bao-Bao, I already see so much of myself.  I am reminded, suddenly and obliquely, of Granny Mu.

            “Bao-Bao,” I begin, after a moment’s pause, having finally gathered together my thoughts. “I need to ask you a question, and it’s not going to be a very nice question.  But it’s something that I ask all of the girls like yourself that come to speak to me.  Do you understand?”

            Bao-Bao drops her hands into her lap, crumples the tissue between long, agitated fingers, carefully hides her wrists from view.

            “Yeah,” she says, sniffing, not without an inkling of intrinsic defiance.

            I pause, uncertain of whether to ask the question.  Of all the girls I have counselled, it is Bao-Bao’s reaction that I am the least certain of.  In her, I see a force at work, an inner challenge, an unbreakable spirit that is, nevertheless, breaking.  And it frightens me, as much as it frightens her.  It frightens me because in the face of her perceived infallibility I see my own vulnerability; because in the breaking of her defences, I see the mirror image of my own.  And the question… the question could prove to be my undoing as much as it could prove to be her own.

            “Did your father ever abuse you?” I ask at last, softly, slowly.

            She looks at me, a quick split second, her countenance one of confusion mixed with surprise; then she lowers her gaze again, quickly, embarrassed.  The first few sessions, most clients can never look me straight in the eye.

            “No,” she replies after a moment, voice hard.  It is hard not to ignore her defensive tone.

            “You sound a bit uncertain.  Is that because you’re apprehensive, or because you’re embarrassed?”

            One thing I have learnt about Bao-Bao.  The only language she understands is coming straight to the point.

            “Because I’m embarrassed, I suppose,” she replies, biting her lip, looking at the clock, wringing the tissue, unconsciously bearing her wrists to my gaze.  I inhale deeply, calmly, wait for her to continue.  Half of everything in this game is allowing for quiet, allowing for the client to speak their mind.  I am reminded of those still, silent nights by the laptop back home, droplets running down the inside of my glass of water, pooling into the liquid depths, lost inside the whole.  Bao-Bao takes in a breath as if to speak, changes her mind, expels it sharply, frowns. “It’s not everyday someone asks you such a horrible thing about your own father,” she says at last, her voice as sharp as cut diamonds.  I half smile in resignation.  Bao-Bao does not like to give information freely.  Sometimes, I feel she is playing a game with me – a game of wits, as if she knows that the therapist only helps the patient partly by goading the patient into helping themselves – in this, she wishes to prove me wrong.  She wishes to prove to me that the patient is always aware; that their understanding of their own suffering is integral to their own experience; that all outer experience is merely a channel through which that suffering may be perceived and clarified, but only because it is so filtered, so distilled and so refined that the human element of it is clinically excised and thrown away.  The understanding of passion is not without passion.  Likewise with suffering.

            What Bao-Bao wishes to tell me is this: - ‘you have no full understanding of my suffering; therefore, you have no certain way of curing it.  Only I hold the key, and I choose to withhold the key from you – because it’s the only control I have left over my own self.’

*

            I come from a long line of dysfunctionality.   Looking back on my younger days, I feel I must have been older then than I was now.  I had cloaked myself in a shroud of rationality and cynicism; I was certain of my destiny, of my purpose, that I was greater than the sum of my parts, that I would be the first to break the chains that my ancestors had handed down unto me, the chains that I had willingly bound myself up in.  Just as the bleak insidious winter encroached upon the pitiful, maudlin autumn, so I would wrap the chains of my progenitors around their scrawny necks; I would strangle them slowly, fill my murderous self with the ritual severance of all those old, decaying ties until –snap!- I’d be cut away from it utterly, the thing that disgusted me, from my inevitable doom, from ego, from self.

            And yet, as I grew older, it became impossible.  The chains I was so sure I had a grasp on; the chains that they had given me and that I was so certain I would break through; the chains that I had promised I would strangle the past with… All the while they had been ensnaring me themselves, of their own volition, from the knees up: in time, almost involuntarily, I became my mother; I became my father’s daughter.

            By the time I was fourteen, I had been irreparably destroyed, I had become irreparably adult.  And when my father passed away, neither of us had gained the courage to say ‘sorry’.

            This is the only regret I have.

*

            “I want to be free,” Bao-Bao says to me, an indeterminable amount of time later.  The minute hand of the clock has come dangerously close to five minutes to two.  I wonder that time manages to do this, to crawl around that circular, glass-encased face with such subtle finesse, so that I never notice, so that no one ever notices, until it’s too late.  But she notices – I fancy she deals in time; that back in her dull and insipid white-walled room on Qinghua campus, she fills her hours with the painful recollection of bygone minutes, discarded seconds; that she analyses them, unravels them, recycles them as memories, as the tortures that pain her most.

            Time, the ever-healer, the thing that, paradoxically, erodes us.

            How many times did I lie on my bed and will my heart, my life, the world to simply just stop?

            Only to find that the world, that time, that life, simply went on?

            “I want to be free,” she says.

            “From what?” I ask her.

            That pause, that slight upturn of the corner of her mouth, the look that says that she still holds, that she still withholds; that ultimately, she is doomed to withhold forever.

            “From nothing,” she replies on a breath, turning her eyes to look at me briefly but fully.  There is something sly in her look, sly and knowing – she knows, she knows more than I do how she will end. “I just want to be free to love my dad for what he was.”

            Reflection in her eyes.

            Ah.  Yes.

*

            Granny Mu is walking up Jiangtai Road, bound feet shuffling, inching her way with the motion of a man whose shoe-laces have been tied together.  But her poise is calm, sedate; her expression almost oblivious to anything except that which it contains.  I stand outside the hospital and glance at my watch.  I consider whether I should take a bus home, or a taxi.  It is a quarter past five in the evening – outside the world seems to have erupted, the eerie sense of disquiet has exploded wide open, incinerating the disquiet in the heat of the blast.  Canto-Pop blasts out from the boutique across the street.  The Goh players are drinking tea from silver flasks, guffawing at some crude, unintelligible joke, shifting the Mao caps on their head between thumb and gnarled forefinger.  A group of schoolchildren are running up the road, towards me.

            But Granny Mu shuffles along, unperturbed, down towards the other end of the road, the end of the road that I have never walked down before.  I feel disturbed by her advance, as if her approaching me is an attack in disguise, a besieging, an infringement, a displacement of my entire being.  Nervously, I keep my eyes upon the face of my watch.  I try to concentrate on weighing up the pros and cons of bus; taxi: taxi; bus.

            Bus saves money, I think.  But taxi is faster, and less crowded.  And infinitely cheaper than a cab in London would be…

            Granny Mu passes me; I feel an instinctive shiver pass through me, zigzaging down my spine.   It’s as the aura of her body had subtly infringed upon mine and taken it over, like frost gathering on a sleepy lawn.  Petrified, still as wrought stone, I stare into the glass face of my watch, uncomprehending of the movement of the second hand – indeed, it is as if the hand is not moving at all, as if it never has.

            Granny Mu passes, bound feet shuffling, blank eyes staring.  I catch my image, once, twice, in her gaze; I catch my breath; I catch myself; I am thrown from one conception to another, tossed helplessly on a tide by forces I cannot fathom.  I am momentarily perplexed, bewildered, baffled.

            Is she me, or am I she…?

            A red taxi breaks out into the horizon, slicing the frozen image into fragmented, reflected shards of ice, making up my mind.  Thin darts of drizzled rain are piercing the artist’s painted impression of Jiangtai Street, water seeping over an oil canvas.  Rain!  Best not to hang around waiting for a bus.  I hail the taxi – thankfully it is one of the cheaper twenty jiao per kilometre ones – and hop inside.  I direct the driver to my flat on Yuminzhong Road.  He changes gear, does a U-turn, speeds off.  I turn back once, look over my shoulder.

            Granny Mu, still shuffling, inching down to the end of the road that I have never walked down before.

            I return to my cream-walled, sparsely furnished flat having spent most of the taxi journey engaged in idle chit-chat with the driver.  My mind is inexplicably drawn back to both Bao-Bao and Granny Mu.  I am worried about Bao-Bao; I am disconcerted by Granny Mu.  I am reminded of the writing Zhuangzi (‘I dreamt I was a butterfly…’), whose works I take comfort in, despite the fact that, ironically, my life is composed of neither spontaneity, nor vision.  But I am moved.  I can’t say why.

            “Within yourself, no fixed positions:

            Things as they take shape disclose themselves.

            Moving, be like water,

            Still, be like a mirror,

            Respond like an echo.”

            … … …

            The flat is lonely; even the air inside it smells of loneliness.  I prefer things this way.  I have been brought up to be alone, to rely upon self-sufficiency for sustenance.  This was the lesson that curtailed my childhood.

            I switch on the kettle, throw my bag and coat onto the couch, turn on my computer.  I open the balcony window; the scent of stifled rain wafts in, stained by the stench of dirt, grime, pollution.  Down below, there is the sound of bicycle bells ringing, the bellowing honks of the cars skidding past.  Darkness is descending upon Beijing, like a madness; the light slips, drowning, and is swallowed by the night.

            I log onto the internet, decide to have a shower.  Under the water my body is dry, brittle, unresponsive, impassive as if my mind were no longer bound to it.  I touch myself, hesitantly, wondering what it is for, if not to be alive.  Deep inside soft slowness, something stirs, like a memory, but remains hidden, just below the surface, locked tight – I threw away the key.  I no longer understand my own femininity.  I would give the key to anyone if only I could find it, if only doing so would stop me from being afraid of love and loving someone.

            John had once said to me:

            “It’s not because I don’t love you.  It’s not because you can’t love me.  It’s because you don’t want to.”

            When I return to the computer, there is a new message from Bao-Bao.  When I open it up, I see she has written only a few lines, no greeting, no formalities.

            ‘I’ve decided that I won’t be needing any more sessions.  I think you know why.  I think you’ll also know that this isn’t your fault.  Thanks for trying.  And I hope you sort things out with your own dad.  If you get the chance, you should talk to him about things sometime.  Bye.’

            I drop my chin into palms, expelling a sharp intake of breath, covering my mouth with my fingers, heart pounding.

            I should have told her, I think, I should have told her…

*

            Bao-Bao wrings her fingers over the crumpled tissue.  Her face is suddenly expressionless.

            “I’m fed up with hate,” she says. “Is being able to love my dad too much to ask?”

            “Not until you’ve dealt with the anger inside of you,” I say. “You are angry at him, Bao-Bao, and rightfully so.  But he’s dead – you can’t share your anger with him, any more than you can share your love with him.  Everyone says that we shouldn’t think ill of the dead.  Sometimes, if you need to get something off your chest, there’s no harm in allowing yourself to do so.”

            She is calm, indifferent.  The matter of the fact is trivial to her, as much as the fact of the matter is – it’s not why she’s here.

            “I understand, Bao-Bao,” I say at last, gently. “I know how you feel.  My own father and I… We had our own misunderstandings.  Disagreements I would say, except that we never talked about the misunderstandings enough that they could ever become disagreements.”

            She remains silent, probing for nothing, but her mouth is flat, and there is a sudden glint of interest in her eye.

            “My father was a confused man,” I continue slowly, “A sad man, in many ways… He tried to be good to me, to all of us… He only wanted acceptance… But I couldn’t give it to him, because he wouldn’t give it to me…  Because he couldn’t accept that I was just a little girl…” I’m fumbling, side-stepping, back-tracking, and I have no idea why – suddenly I want to cry, suddenly it all comes flooding back so that words can’t contain it, the brutality, the loneliness, the burden that should never have been mine…

            No.  Stop.  This is too personal.  I shouldn’t have spoken of it.  Not here, not to her.  Empathy is one thing, but this…

            I pause, take in a deep breath, recollect myself.

            “To this day my father and I still haven’t come to terms with what he did, with what I should have done but didn’t – talk,” I finish neutrally.

            Bao-Bao remains quiet.  Her eyes glaze again.  I want to put my arms round her, I want to say that I know the pain of her loss, that it runs far deeper than beyond mere life and death.  I want to tell her, too, that even though it doesn’t go away, the pain does get easier, in time.  But I can’t.  I no longer know what would be overstepping the bounds of the doctor-patient relationship.  Not simply because of what we share.  But because, in her, I see my own refracted, scattered self.

*

            I drain my tea, exit Bao-Bao’s message, get up, pace, switch the light on to dispel the eerie glow of the computer screen, pace, halt in the centre of the room.  I feel suddenly and unequivocally emptied, drained of all emotion, calm as the glassy sheen of a lake left untouched.  As a mirror.  I feel as if something has been excised from me, cut away with the lightest of incisions; I feel free, I feel relieved, I feel hollow as a flue, as an open channel.

            I check my watch.  The second hand is moving, measured, steady, like it should be.  Seven O’clock.

            John will be at work now, I think to myself. I will phone him; I will phone him in the morning.

            The resolution is pleasant to me; life-affirming almost.  I sit down at my desk, open my pad of paper, take up the pen that has been sitting idle in its pot for so long.  I close my eyes.  In Bao-Bao, in Granny Mu, in myself, I see echoes, I see echoes of past and future and present replayed.

            Outside, the storm grows.

            I surrender.

            I ravish the world.  The world ravishes me.

05-04-2004