Barbarian Lost

À Zoë

China Calling

—Shao Yong, “Ode to the Winter Solstice,”
River Yi Ground Beating Anthology of Poems
, eleventh century

As a young child, I remember contemplating a book that my father had written on China. How grand and mighty it seemed that he had his name printed in large letters on the cover. I've no memories from that time of any other books he'd written, just the one.

Perhaps I remember it because it had a colourful and odd-looking cover that featured a picture of him, much younger but recognizable, posing with his friend Jacques Hébert, with whom he'd travelled and written the book. The title made little sense to me:
Two Innocents in Red China
.

Who were these innocents anyway?

Canadian children learn about China in the sandbox; it's the place that they will reach if they dig deep enough. They also learn about China when they find out what a billion is. There are over a billion people in China, they're told. A billion people!

My personal mythology linked me to China in another way. The idea of China as a place always accompanied the story of me in my mother's belly: my parents had visited China in October
1973 and I was born in December. Quite a thought for a toddler: in the womb in China!

When my brothers and I were quite young, before we had started to travel ourselves, our father went away for a whole month to China and Tibet. It was the longest time that he'd been away since we were born. Before he left, we asked him why he was going, and he replied that he was going because he had never been to Tibet before.

What a mysterious answer that was! Maybe we would go there someday as well, because we certainly hadn't been there either.

Because it was his first long trip away from us, my father's journey fascinated me. We grew ever more excited as his return date approached. And when he returned, he was changed. He looked and smelt slightly different. He had a beard and a tan and a strange energy about him. He radiated a kind of power, seemed more aggressive and alive than usual. As if his eyes still reflected the sights that he had seen. His body was poised to meet them head on.

This was a new father, not the patient and adoring father of before but the free spirit who had wandered the world. The lone traveller. The observer of things. The holder of secret knowledge.

The souvenirs he brought with him also left their mark on me: incense and prayer wheels, scroll paintings of mountains, fantastically illustrated books of the Chinese classic of the Monkey King fighting baby-faced Nezha, dramatic painted papier-m
â
ché masks and painted wooden swords from the Beijing opera.

This was travelling for me: going to places one had never visited but somehow needed to go to, and then returning home with strange and wonderful things, changed, both inside and out. I'd begun to grasp what my father meant when he said that
he'd travelled around the world and been to a hundred countries; to sense the transformative power of journeys and to understand why one travels. And, in my mind at least, I'd begun to become a traveller myself.

Knowledge, travel and China were all muddled together for me. Journeys, I obscurely felt, have a mental quality. They happen in the mind. One might be innocent before one travels, I thought, but surely less so afterward. We're filled with desires—needs, even—to go somewhere because untravelled places are dark holes in the mind that draw us toward them. So China lay out there like a gateway. The shapes of my childhood awareness of it, of my father's book, my womb-bound journey there left more mysteries than understanding.

My father, a politician, retired with the goal of spending more time with us, his children. This was shortly after the divorce of my parents. My mother had remarried and started a new life in Ottawa, happily out of the limelight. Meanwhile, my father relocated us to Montreal, his hometown, where he wanted us to go to school. He also intended to show us the world in its varied shapes and colours. Through the late 1980s and early 1990s, we embarked upon a series of trips with him to the “great nations of the world.” These were completed over the course of a few summers. My brothers and I were still too young to be out travelling on our own but were old enough to comprehend a little of what we saw.

The time for these journeys was limited. So we decided that our destinations would be constrained by the Cold War defini-tion of the great powers: the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. In the summer of 1984, we made our first journey through the Soviet Union, six years before the
waning empire began to break apart. We meandered south from Moscow to the Caucasus Mountains and as far east as the Amur River, deep in eastern Siberia. In the years that followed, we made trips to France, the United Kingdom and Ireland, the lands of our ancestors. In rented cars, we criss-crossed these old nations, staying at bed and breakfasts and budget inns.

In the winter of 1988–89, we decided that the coming summer's trip would be to China. But that spring, a protest began to brew in Beijing's central and most important public space, Tiananmen Square. After the death of a respected and reform-minded Communist Party leader, Beijing's university students began congregating in the square in ever greater numbers, demanding political change and democracy. They set up tents and camped out for weeks. They were joined by more and more students from the provinces, and by intellectuals and academics. Eventually, even influential Communist Party members came to the square in support of the youth.

Paid less attention to by the Western media but more worrying for the Chinese government, urban workers also began to gather in large numbers, demanding that free-market reforms be stopped, since they were causing inflation and job losses. A volatile combination of opposites was occurring. The dynasty was beginning to crack.

My family followed these events with interest. Only months previous, my father had contacted the Chinese diplomatic mission and requested a visa to visit the country with his boys. I was excited at the thought of travelling to China at a time of change. Even my typically impassive father was more and more stimulated by these events and by what they might mean for that summer's trip.

He'd been to China several times by this point. He'd made his first trip in 1949, just before the Communists finally routed the remainder of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist forces, pushing them out of their last stronghold in Shanghai. He'd seen China in the throes of massive change; perhaps he'd now witness yet another dramatic period of its history.

I was fifteen at the time, so my excitement was more than just an eagerness to see history unfolding before my eyes. I was impressed by the charismatic young student leaders who were standing up to the venerable figures of authority in their country. I already felt inclined to stand up to authority myself. I had come to believe, as I still believe, that the world belongs to those who seize it and that every generation has to seize the world anew.

As long as I could remember, my father had entertained us with tales of his worldly adventures. He told us of encounters with pirates and bandits, of his journeys through war zones and across wastelands. China in the middle of a huge nationwide protest—even an uprising, perhaps—would be a good start to the life adventure I hoped for myself.

On June 4, 1989, after weeks of protest and tense negotiations between the student leaders and the government, the tanks of the People's Liberation Army were called in and the protests violently quashed. The world watched in horror.

We knew our China trip was suddenly called into question. Could we still go to China? Would we be received there at this time? Did we even want to go after such a bloody event?

“Who cares about appearances?” I argued.

“It's more than a matter of appearances,” my father cautioned. “What state do you think China finds itself in right now?”

“So what? That's what we should go see,” I insisted.

“I applaud your position,” my father said, “but you can embark on such trips when you are a little older and alone. Right now, the Chinese are in no position to entertain visitors.”

Our China trip was postponed. I waited until the following spring and then began to insist we start planning it again. Still my father had reservations. “It means travelling to a country with which Canada has broken all ties,” he said.

“So what? We're not diplomats. You're a retired politician on a private visit with his family. It doesn't mean anything,” I argued.

“The Chinese might not see it that way,” he said.

In the end, I won the debate. We'd go to China. My father probably knew deep down that we had to go then or we'd never go, not as a family at least. I was sixteen; my older brother, eighteen. My little brother had already found the Canadian wilderness a far more enticing place for him to journey than faraway lands with his father and brothers. Soon we'd all be out travelling on our own.

Looking back, I realize that the thought of this made my father lonely. He had always encouraged us to set out into the world, to seek its challenges and mysteries. But he'd been caught off guard by how fast we'd grown. Perhaps he felt that he'd have little time left to teach us lessons or to share in our learning. So China it was, a place that had taught him so much. A place to impart something meaningful and lasting to his boys.

Only a year after Tiananmen, the country still had bleak undertones. But I did have my wish: there were practically no other foreigners to be seen there. The tourist hotels were empty. Although the country had already embarked upon the road to economic liberalization and growth, some of the characteristics of earlier Chinese periods, such as stark authoritarian rule and a
lack of contact with the outside world, had reappeared following the crackdown at Tiananmen. The China of 1990 was more like the Red China of yore than the economic powerhouse it would soon become. The winds of change were momentarily stilled.

As my father predicted, the Chinese did not let us travel alone in their country. “We wouldn't want you to hurt yourselves,” they told us.

So we were hosted by the Chinese on an elaborate private tour. We saw many parts of the country but were guided everywhere. As we moved across China, we were passed along from official to official, keeping at all times a retinue of an officer of the foreign affairs department and a translator. It was a rare if stodgy trip.

Among the things my father most wanted to see were the sacred mountains of China. He also talked of a train trip from the Sichuan plateau to the subtropical Himalayan foothills of Yunnan Province.

I remember not quite getting a handle on the idea of the sacred mountains. In my mind, I pictured the rocky bluffs in the clouds I had seen depicted on the scrolls hanging in our house. I pictured the stone palaces of the Heavenly Emperor where the Monkey King went to steal peaches.

We ended up climbing two of the sacred mountains. Our first stop out of the capital, Beijing, was Taishan—apparently one of the more famous of the set. It rose from the plain such that as we approached we could see it in its entirety like an archetype. From afar, the mountain's numerous temples were tiny white specks on an immense mass of green and blue. It was exciting to think we would reach the summit later that very day.

But arriving at the base of Taishan, we learnt that our Chinese guides had underestimated my father's physicality and arranged
for a cable-car ride to the summit. My father protested and a compromise was soon reached: we would drive halfway up the mountain on a service road but climb the final distance on foot.

The ascent was an occasion for my brother and me to burn the excess energy that had been building up during all the formalities of Beijing. At a temple that was almost entirely transformed into a bazaar for Chinese tourists, we were too impatient to pay proper attention to the strange spectacle of an ancient Taoist monk roused from a deep, dark chamber by our handlers. The monk seemed easily a hundred years old and could barely see through his thick cataracts. He was draped in black and blue robes and hunched over. His skin was blemished, and his whiskers, though hardly numerous, were half a metre long. He reeked of urine and strange herbs. For a moment, we were in awe of this old man of the mountain. But our own mission on the mountain beckoned us and soon we were continuing our ascent, hastily scrambling up the stone stairs.

The mountaintop was mostly bare, and it was windy. A few temples were scattered about. Primed and ready for more action as we waited for our father to catch up, Justin and I soon concocted a plan to run down the mountain, meeting the group at the bottom. The initial descent was treacherous, the stone stairs narrow and extremely steep. We proceeded down them sideways in a kind of fast trot. The more we dropped, the more the mountain levelled off and short flights of stairs began to alternate with narrow landings. So we jumped down each flight, covering multiple stairs at once. We sprinted across the landings and leapt out again over the next section. We felt incredible and figured we must be setting some kind of record.

Gallivanting down the sacred mountain, we had no thought of
the toll our antics might take on our bodies. Soon after our arrival back at the hotel a few hours later, it caught up with us. By dinnertime in the hotel restaurant, Justin and I had trouble holding up our heads or even lifting the chopsticks to our mouths. We were both shivering, and our legs had seized up and trembled spasmodically. We retreated to our rooms; I fell asleep immediately.

In the morning, I could barely get out of bed. My legs were stiff as wood and could not be bent. My back had also seized up and resisted straightening. I called on my brother. He was in a similar state but had just come from breakfast with our father, who was not amused and was expecting me in the dining room. So, one tiny step at a time, I walked toward the restaurant. For my own sake and to deflect my father's ire, I decided that it was a humorous predicament and made light of it.