Barbarian Lost (32 page)

Authors: Alexandre Trudeau

I watch the aging monks enter the main hall in procession for incantations. After that, they set up a calligraphy demonstration for Richard and me. A rather serious monk takes position at a large table with ink, paper and brush and begins to draw bold and powerful strokes. Suddenly all the monks become grave, almost forceful in their solicitude. They cluster around, focusing intently on the agent as if to make sure that he conveys to us the important but difficult message.

“It takes many years to be able to master the strokes,” he finally tells me. “They're not just words that this monk is writing. Each stroke has a power, a balance.”

I have not mastered the Chinese script and probably never will. I'm willing to grant it a power not found in our phonetic scripts. The separation between spoken word and written symbol frees each to their own realm. The conceptual nature of written meaning is preserved while the spoken language can indulge in all the profanities and imprecisions necessary. Over the ages, dialects are formed and grow unintelligible in orality, but the script remains, impervious to easy transformation and ever accessible.

The secret meaning of calligraphy harks back to the infancy of the Chinese script when incantations were etched into bone
and turtle shells. The script itself is meant to be a portal through which higher powers enter the world to bring meaning to the chaos. Is the portal still open? Does this monk with his brush in the temple bring a little more balance to the mad world? Does his colleague in robes, the government agent, render a service to the people by being here?

Does the Tao even need a home? How about the corpse? The one god? Or the lord of love?

We take the subway north almost to its end. After clearing the rings, it emerges onto elevated tracks and charts a path through myriad new towers. We're going to see another kind of artist: a video-game artist. His compound is a short walk from the station but, in habitual fashion, it's gated and we must negotiate our way through a guard post to access the tall apartment tower where he lives.

The young man lives on the twenty-third floor of a forty-storey building. The elevator and hallways are already grimy and rundown for a building not ten years old. Finding his apartment, we knock hard at the door, but no one answers. Finally, he's reached on the phone and comes to let us in. He's confident and affable if unkempt.

He has the sloppy, pale demeanour of someone who plays video games all day. Long, unwashed hair hangs from the top of his head. The sides of his head are shaved. His clothes are loose and neglected like those of a teenage skater. The apartment is big and roomy, though sparsely furnished and messy.

In the living room, plastic cups and plates with half-eaten food on them are scattered across the coffee table. As we pass through the kitchen I see that it too is littered with refuse. He stops to offer
us something to drink, then opens the fridge to a space devoid of anything save dubious packages and a plastic bottle with a dribble of bright orange liquid in it. We all laugh: beverages will not be necessary.

Unlike the rest of his apartment, which seems an empty wasteland, his bedroom is packed with stuff. He takes a seat at his computer desk, covered with papers. We sit on his bed. Next to his desk is a big window that gives a sweeping view of the forest of concrete towers.

He tells me that he's twenty-eight. He's from the beautiful city of Ya'an, on the fringe between the fertile Sichuan Basin and the Himalayas. He studied art and design at Chengdu's prestigious university for computer arts. As soon as he graduated, he got a job as an illustrator for a successful game studio in Beijing. A couple of years ago, he was poached by a major player in the industry and made art director of one of its big titles.

He generally starts with pencil on paper, he tells me, showing me some of his sketches. They're clean and elaborate illustrations of fantastic Chinese historical characters. “Then I get on the computer to draw the images,” he says, bringing up on the monitor a series of impressive illustrated characters: demigod generals with unreal weapons, wild geomancers with fantastic beards and exotic half-humans. All ready, it would seem, to bring down the wrath.

“As you can see, my specialty is heroes, armour and weaponry,” he goes on, “but I also do landscapes. Or at least, I oversee their creation. I have a team now. It takes my core drawings and does all the various 3-D permutations necessary for the animation.”

I ask him who came up with the ideas for the game he's currently working on.

“My bosses, the company's creative directors. But I was recruited
for my talents for drawing these kinds of things. My team and I are fleshing out the game from the original idea.”

He tells me that games are hugely popular: “In fact, many people say there is a video-game addiction problem in China. That there are too many young people who do nothing but play video games.”

“Is this true?” I ask.

“Yes, probably,” he says nonchalantly.

“What about your parents? What do they think about video games?”

“My father doesn't take my work seriously. He's an executive at an important financial institution. He's always asking me when I'm going to get a real job. I tell him that I now supervise thirty-five people.”

“What does he say to that?” I ask.

“He tells me that he's in charge of hundreds of employees and billions of yuan,” the young man answers with a resigned smile.

“It looks like you like Chinese history.”

He explains that he and his team do a lot of research for the drawings. “But we do what we want with history,” he tells me.

“So what kind of game is it?”

“A hybrid war strategy-RPG. A popular type of game here.”

“What's it called?”

“
Kill the Immortals.
”

I get back in touch with Gia and ask to see her paintings. She's not sure whether I'm serious, but I insist. She agrees to receive us in her apartment, where she paints. She lives in a building in the north of the city within the fourth ring. Her building sits next
to a canal and park. It abuts a massive but underused boulevard, so is mercifully quiet. Her place is on the third floor, which we reach by foot.

The small apartment is almost completely devoid of furnishingâonly a couple of rugs and cushions to sit on in the living room. Although tidy, the place seems half-inhabited, as if it were a stop along the way.

Gia has hung paintings and photos on the bare walls, edgy and urbane pieces if a little effeminate. The rooms are painted pastel pinks like a doll's house.

“I'm lucky to live here. My parents were smart. Property values have really increased in the past few years,” Gia says as she leads us to the front. She paints on a glassed-in balcony overlooking the grand boulevard, which we can spot through the trees.

“I hesitate to show you my paintings because I don't consider myself a painter,” she confesses to me. “I have no training. I don't paint for others; I paint for myself. It relaxes me.”

As she begins focusing on her canvas I ask, “Can you imagine yourself getting married, buying a house and a car, having kids?”

“I want to imagine myself like that,” she says, “but I feel it's not my destiny. Whenever good things happen to me, bad things always happen as well.”

Drawing her brush across the canvas, she grows more oblivious to the world. Only after she steps back to look at what she is doing does she turn to me to say, “I really don't know where I'm going. But I don't care.”

Pollution has hit hard this night in north Beijing. I'm riding a bicycle down an empty road, the streetlights forming halos
through thick smog. Overtowering the lights and thus lit from beneath, the mass-planted poplars that line the way and veil the bleak plain so coarse and vulgar during the day are shadowy titans whose dappled foliage merges together overhead like some mysterious firmament cloaked in smoke.

I'm returning from a boozy banquet. Red eyes and irritated throat don't bother me at all now. The effect of bad air is pleasing, beautiful even, like a Hollywood night scene. True darkness does not make for a good show on the silver screen and is not welcome. Spotlights and smoke are used for effect to define and illuminate the darkness, just like the street tonight. In this movie, the capital's outskirts seem like a mountaintop immersed in clouds. The illusion weakens with the realization that the air's still save for my own movement and that the haze brings little moisture.

Tonight I'm staying near the airport with my old friend Deryk and his wife. They are now teachers at a fancy English school in the capital. They've started a family and have relocated to the northern edge of Beijing. Hoping to offer their two young daughters another experience, in a detached home with a yard planted with shrubs and flowers, hoping to get away from the pollution so prevalent in central Beijingâa strategy that seems to have failed if the thick dirty air of this evening is any indication.

My head is buzzing from the discussions of the banquetâan impromptu reunion of thoughtful, soulful people, both local and foreignâas I ride in the shadows, as I once more fall asleep in a strange bed in a strange land. As I board the big plane and take position at the portal, as I slowly return to my home and family, all the banquets blend into one. They're one long conversation, filled with wisdom and surprises.

We know the future cannot be predicted like a story. But it's
never silent either. Even now its messengers have already arrived in our midst.

We ask, who are they and where do they hide? What message do they bring about who we are to become? We all see vastly different meanings.

Memories are built with desires and intentions. It's not what we think we saw and heard that really matters. The future is not hiding there. It hides in our memories like an unnoticed backdrop, a hidden detail or face blurred in the shadows, only to be released with time, deep reflection or art.

We live for stories, the ones that leave us uneasy and excited, the ones that are fresh and new. As we bring them forward and draw them up for friends, we know our words will not quite make them real, but real enough perhaps to share the feeling of what lies behind, should it ever be ready to step forward.

I suspect I'll always be a little lost in China. That the endless banquet and smoky firmament are a reminder that a part of me never made it out, of knowledge not yet acquired.

We are still ghosts upon the river, and Viv is telling me that we have not much longer to go. But the journey is never complete. China will surely haunt me forever. China comes for us all, wherever we are. Its cup spilleth over. Its stories and people come to mix with us and share its many conundrums. Its spinning absorbs us in its rhythm.

The need to remember and the need to forget grow clearer for us all now. The need to preserve and the need to destroy. The need for knowledge and the need for secrets. Our overwhelming power and our great fragility. The more they all dance together, seeking balance, the more they glitter in the shadows and beckon us on.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Vivien, without whom none of this would have been possible. Deryk Fournier, bridge builder. Alex and Jane Cockain, generous friends. Jacques HÃ©bert, fellow traveller. Ling Xia, who started me on this road back in 2005. Maurice Strong, for early guidance. Alphonso Lingis, Philippe Rheault and Ron Graham, patient readers. Stephen Valentine, the man in my corner. Scott McIntyre, first supporter. Jim Gifford, faithful editor. Michael Levine, navigator and friend.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ALEXANDRE TRUDEAU
is a traveller, filmmaker and journalist. Over the past decade and a half, his films and reports on issues of geopolitical importance have been seen and read by millions of Canadians. Trudeau was a trusted witness in Baghdad as the bombs brought shock and awe. He charted out the intimate realities on both sides of the Israeli security barrier, explored the pluralism of Canadian identity, stood up for the rights of arbitrarily imprisoned terror suspects in Canada, tracked youth-driven democratic awakenings in the Balkans, shed light on the origins of unrest in Darfur, Liberia and Haiti and deconstructed the Canadian peacekeeping legacy fifty years after Lester Pearson's Nobel Prize. Born into one of the country's most prominent political families, Alexandre has been familiar to Canadians since birth by his nickname, Sacha. He lives in Montreal with his wife and three young children.

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CREDITS

COVER PHOTOGRAPH: KEVIN LEE

COPYRIGHT

Barbarian Lost

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Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

First edition

EPub Edition: August 2016 ISBN: 9781443441421

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