去北京 (我6月 23 号 离开）

[still quotation from the book whose title and author I forgot]

Bell Tower Hotel, Xian, 22 May 1984

Peking is a very different city from tthe pinched, yellow-caked, painfullly poor village I arrived in last January. Now it resembles Canton, It is very romantic: there was a young coouple pawing each other on the bus yesterday - oh, not very daring gropes, really, and she was obviously less into it than he was - under the amazed eye of a grizzled provincial. The staid Pekingese on the bus, like hip Londoners, all managed to look a thousand other directions without looking glances.


Peking, 21 June 1984

Peking, as Louise would say, is really frisky. Full of colour: sweaty workers stinking of garlic eaten whole and raw, wearing pink tank tops, women in glittery and practically transparent dresses, all dressed rather the way I do, without any regards for things te clashing and mirrors, but with a vague eye to the utterly unimitable. People slither underneath the rope segregating the men's part of the swimming pool for the women's without any compunction, and no one ever blows the whistle.

想法 (xiangfa)

Anshun, Guizhou, 1 March 1984

Now here I'm afraid I must do a kind of passacaglia on xiang fa, or the well-worn grooves of thinking in the psychological landscape. I have with me a kind of China guide for the snide, supercilious, slightly footloose college student, purely fore information on which rules are bendable. It is full of this kind of crap, and manages to make China into a small place ful of small minds. On the contrary, China is such a great place that any attempt to grasp details usually loosens your grip on the scale; and vice versa: you are hopelessly outnumbered. But without grasping a little of xiang fa it is impossible to get a grip on the guiding, regulations and reregulations. And maybe, if it is done right, the xiang fa gives you a little glimpse of the image the Chinese have of themselves, and of the image the barbarians have of them.