Rick Simonson

Beijing, Day 2: Closer to Home Ground, Periscoping Along
January 18, 2008

BEIJING, Monday, January 7

A second full day of being here. A cold winter sun slowly works its way through this northern city's layer of haze and smog. However dense the air is, my eyes and breathing have felt more affected in other places by the air.

After a leisurely start, Paul and I are soon traipsing along the shoreline of Beihai Park, just north of the Forbidden City. At midday, a weekday, it seems mostly locals out for lunchtime strolls. The lake, a layer of sheeny ice, looks shallow. It's not hard to imagine as a place of summer liveliness - the grounds more likely crowded, the parked pedal boats out and afloat. This seems to all be part of the old royal grounds; one place of striking beauty is a small temple built for an emperor's mother - full of Buddha and almost 60 female figures, all posed variously and beautifully around a little grotto-like scene. Blue/green are the pervading colors. Over a small rise we hear human song - we climb over, come upon a choir in practice. Men in one circle, women in another, a woman with violin. A director spiritedly leads them in and out of songs. There is listening for a good while. Human song, birdsong ... it's quiet on all but those fronts here. No boom boxes, no loud voices droning on in cell phone calls.

Somewhere amidst this one of us recalls that it is Monday. Back home, would we be up to this on a Monday afternoon? A timeless weekday lakeside stroll? There's amusement at contemplating that. No, we both would have had bookbuying appointments going.

We do have our eye a little on the time. So a walk that might have gone on, around loops of lake, is directed instead back out onto the city streets. The streets seem to have a tendency to change names. After a first night of losing our way, we have caught on to this. In a fairly short sequence, the street we walk east on goes from being Di'anmen Dongdajie to Zhangzizgong Lu to Dongsi 10 Tiap. Not that it's only here - I've been in stretches of Orange County where a road can go through the changes. Here of more notice is that all is more intimately scaled than we've otherwise walked by, which has, parks and lakes notwithstanding, tended more toward the momnumental and grandiose. Several small-laned walkways come and go from the street we're on, leading to low-storied byways - hutong neighborhoods. Paul notices the Moscow Bakery, its window festooned with Santa Claus regalia. We find the north-south street we're looking for, Meishuguan Houjie. It jogs over to become Meishuguandong Jie. Fine, we will not be thwarted. Where we are now headed, with a bit of purpose, is a place we have been sent.

Back in Seattle - near Seattle, in Olympia, to be precise - a poet and professor at Evergeen State College, Zhang Er is having a major influence on the nature of this trip. Originally from Beijing, she has given us advice - from clothing to street food to go for, to sights not to miss, and to the all-important quest we now seek to make, finding a bookstore. She has sent us to one she highly recommends - Sanlian Taofen. It's the one we've got an eye out for. Amidst the street bustle, I have eyes peeled - over there, that window, could those be displayed books? I look up at the store's sign. I know about 6 Chinese characters, one of them being the sign for shu, or book. Sure enough, I pick it out of the row of characters.

Not that we weren't relaxed, but there is an instant at-home feeling sighed once in. Yes, this is a real bookstore, a serious one. Poking around soon reveals three layers - a general main floor - magazines, cds, bestsellers, maps, travel, children's, family, and more. Down a long flight of stairs occupied on both sides by quiet readers, one treads down to a vast room full of the serious books - humanities, social sciences, technical, literary, philosophical. The upstairs floor tends towards art books - a huge selection - and a tasteful cafe. How at home can one feel how fast? Forget not knowing what's going on with most of the books.

Alas, we don't have forever to linger - we have to be back at our hotel and be met. Going out the door I notice no store ephemera - no flyers, bookmarks, nothing of the sort. I don't doubt we'll find our way back, though.

In short order, we are back. Though I think we're on time, we are awaited.

Brief pause to turn the calendar back a few pages. Early autumn in Seattle. In the course of daily doing, there is a note from Zhang Er, asking about a reading for a new book. I know there is a new book of her own poems, So Translating Rivers and Cities, coming from Zephyr via Consortium. I say yes, we have had good readings with her and whomever she draws into reading with her. Her books are bilingual - she writes in Chinese, often reads that way, too, with someone else reading some of the translations. It's all good. This time, she says, there is that book, but also another. It turns out to be a major feat, Another Kind of Nation, being the title. Edited by Er and Chen Dongdong (who lives in Shanghai), it's 24 contemporary Chinese poets, all born since 1960, writing in Chinese, presented here bilingually in a just-published volume from Talisman House. We say sure, a reading from that by her and some of the Seattle-area translators, that would be good. We set a date for early December, and in time that will happen. But if on that October day anyone would have suggested that within three months I would not only be in Beijing, but about to meet one of the poets included in this anthology, I would have given them such a look of disbelief.

Awaiting Paul and I at our hotel was the last poet, alphetically speaking, in the anthology, one Zhou Zan. In bluejeans, a jacket, somewhat spiky hair, and with a welcoming smile, she greets us, guides us out the door and into a taxi. We're on our way. Across the city's north we go west, eventually to reach a district that seems given over to universities, colleges, and institutes - People's University of China, Beijing Normal University, Polytechnic University, and more.

Soon enough, there's entry to a ground floor alcove entry that's given to booksales - up a flight of stairs and we are in a marvelous, serious bookstore - All Sages. O great day just for this: two fabulous bookstores we have been in. Talk about feeling more located. In All Sages' spacious, very comfortable cafe (people are there on laptops, a family has some sort of after-school gathering together going on), we meet Zhang Yaqiu, an editor at Peking University Press, and will then shortly be joined by Jiang Tao - a professor there, and a poet whose work is also included in the Another Kind of Nation anthology. Each of the three is 'younger' - in their 30s.

Conversation isn't the quickest - Zan, Tao, and Yaqiu have three differing levels of English going, but all exceed in leaps and bounds what Paul or I have of Chinese. Going slowly is fine. There is also the matter of Tao and Zan being poets - somewhat different subject matter than Yaqiu's realm of editing. It's hard, being so curious about so much. Talk goes all over the place - how this is done, in what ways. Of the three, Zan is the only who has been in the U.S. - she had been a scholar in residence at Columbia last year. (That is her line of work here, too - she's a scholar at the Institute of Literature in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.) So, some talk of New York, a city Paul and I both have some knowledge of. Tao has been to Japan.

There seems to be a lot of scholarly attention paid to poetry and poetics - but the present status of poetry itself is not so esteemed in present day, boom-boom China. There's talk of aesthetics and influences - whose work in China is read, whose from elsewhere, what periods. More of this will be discerned later in the trip. Suffice it to say, for what the situation is now, that in the good-sized, no-fluff bookstore we eventually roam around in, the poetry section is fairly small.

Sitting in the cafe we do do some book swapping and showing and telling. Zan has already given Paul and I copies of her collection, whose title, Huang Xinping will later tell me, translates to something like Lose Out. It's a beauty of a book. From last-minute correspondence with Zhang Er while still back in Seattle, I knew that the poets wouldn't have had a copy (bilingual) of her own new book, So Translating Rivers and Cities. So, copies of these for Zan and Tao. At some point, Yaqiu has excused herself, then returns with books and business cards. Among the books, ones she has worked on, are copies of Tao's 2005 book of poems, Birds' Bible.

Conversation goes elsewhere - talk of living in Beijing, being from elsewhere. I don't think any of the three is from Beijing. All came for school, all have stayed. Tao, recently acquiring a new home, now lives in a suburb to the northwest. There's talk of how dramatic and sudden the cost of housing is arising. The price of the place Tao got six months previous has already gone up 30%. There'll be talk later, with others, on this - how dramatic it is, what it does to neighborhoods, social fabric, and how long it can be sustained. Everywhere in Beijing there are cranes - buildings racing into the sky. Paul and I both live in cities that have had their versions of this - crazy spikes of speculation, unimaginable prices paid, then the bust which inevitably arrives. The patterns back in the US seem somewhat familiar. Here, I'd be reluctant to lay the predictability of those patterns on things - a lot is at work here, most of it surely beyond my comprehension.

Time has flown. We know it's time to go soon. We also have a bookstore to pay some respects to. We find out - or have found out - that both Zan and Tao have books of poetry scholarship out. What better books, then, to seek out, and purchase? Paul and I both have a thing, when traveling, of buying from stores visited along the way. On the face of things, we're a little more challenged here. In short order, Tao's is produced - two copies. A bookseller has been engaged in the search for that and then Zan's book. He is so much like someone I know, have possibly worked with - he so knows his way around. Nevertheless, after having checked the computer, he seems stumped as to the location of Zan's book. This is a hilarious moment for me - so familiar, the bookseller, the customer, even the author on hand, all perusing the shelf for 'missing' copies of a book. Is it mis-shelved? What? I realize I am utterly clueless in this little hunt - I have no idea what we're looking for, wouldn't, on quick looking, recognize Zhou Zan's name on a bookspine ... and then, where, in what order? The 'Z' situation here is not as it would be where I work. I still can't help but ... scan book spines. At the same moment, both Zan and the bookseller spot her book - shelved way up high. Paul is concerned: yes, there are two copies. The text is all Chinese, but there's a translation of the title on its beautiful cover, Through the Periscope of Poetic Writing.

We make our purchases. Amusement there - buying books in a language we can't speak or read, the bookseller handling the transaction can quickly surmise. I do a quick phrasebook attempt (sans accent marks here, which are of great prounciation importance)  - 'wo gongzuo shudian ... Seattle' - which I hope translates roughly as 'I work bookshop ... Seattle' - and produce a store brochure in the process. I think she gets the idea.

Parting, we give our thanks, our farewells, our wishes for soon again - here and over 'there.' With Zan, the soon again could be sooner than later: we talk of something else for later in the week. Paul and I would be most pleased to.

Back to our hotel by taxi we go again ... and then are soon met in the hotel lobby by someone we both have known back over in the US. A San Francisco resident for many years - I don't know if I ever catch where he is from - Greg Jones called on both City Lights and Elliott Bay and numerous other West Coast bookstores for many years as the rep for China Books and Periodicals. I gather he and Paul, living in the same city, had more occasions for knowing each other. With us, it was always the good but fairly brief (short list) visit of a sales call - one of many usually tucked into a quick trip north. Greg has now lived in China for about four-five years, I believe. Most of the time has been in Shanghai. Now it's Beijing - where he manages international sales for the People's Medical Publishing House.

Our plans have talk - and dinner - in them. There's a cab ride, then our first, brief attempt with the Beijing subway. It's brief - because the stop we want is closed for construction - all related to the rush to have things a certain way for the Olympics. Back in a taxi, we're soon out ... possibly near the Lama Temple. In al the trip, I'm less sure of where we are in this time than any other. What's most apparent is that we are wandering down narrow lanes, bends and turns through a district of alley-like streets, low, close structures. It's a 'hutong,' a Beijing type of neighborhood that's under major assault - lots of these being cleared for big highrises. Paul and I are entirely in Greg's hands, as he and we meander, looking at the smallest neighborhood spots for where we might eat.

We soon find something that draws us in. Small, a few tables, definitely not set up for outsiders to come larking through. One menu will do - for Greg who can read his way through. No pictures, no English versions of menus here. Dinner is ordered, dinner is delivered, dinner is delicious. Talk is mostly of Greg's life in Beijing - home in a highrise that has attendants who work elevators - he talks of getting home late at night, not wanting to disturb the woman who runs the elevator, and thus walking the 20 floors up to his place. Actually, the talk of late nights is funny. Greg has a daughter, Cassie Jones, who works as an editor at HarperCollins in New York. We have a brief excursion through Harperland - Cassie had worked for Judith Regan, was part of the move to Los Angeles, then the move back to New York and being absorbed back into Jane Friedman and Company's Big Realm. I look at the ceiling for a moment of reality check - here in a little neighborhood restaurant, tucked somewhere hidden in Beijing, finding talk of Judith Regan? Part of the reason for the segue is that at the last Beijing International Book Fair, there had been a considerable Harper New York presence - Jane Friedman, author Neil Gaiman, and others. Greg had been to a good and proper New York publisher bash there in Beijing. Hence, the getting home late.

Work, in Beijing and the US, was talked of. Though his publishing house has its roots in medical publishing, there aren't strict boundaries now. They can publish otherwise, and do. He talks of the work routine, midday meals in the office canteen. It seems a lot calmer than New York publishing. Lots of meetings, though. It's funny to be asked about the store back in Seattle - by someone who knows it. A few days and many miles away, I have to describe it, as Paul does - how things are, the season just passed.

All of this is good and nice ... and then it's time for Greg to be home, for Paul and I to mosey back to our hotel. A day and its adventures, its surprises. It's barely started. What will come next?

Posted by Rick Simonson on January 18, 2008 | Comments (0)