DEDICATION

For Geremie and in loving memory of my father, Lewis Jaivin (1923–2013)

EPIGRAPH

Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.

Zhuangzi (translated by Lin Yutang)

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

Kurt Vonnegut

I saw lots of fucking tulips, as promised.

J.D. Salinger, letter to Michael Mitchell about his 1994 European holiday

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

DEDICATION

EPIGRAPH

PROLOGUE

PART ONE

PART TWO

PART THREE

NOTBOOK

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PRAISE FOR LINDA JAIVIN

ALSO BY LINDA JAIVIN

COPYRIGHT

PROLOGUE

My dear ________,

What follows may strike you as a wild tale, far-fetched and fantastical, but I assure you of its veracity. I don’t deny that many men have called me a liar and a fraud. Such calumnies may have even reached your ears. The thought of this pains me deeply. But know that these are but the revilements of small men, parish-pump pettifoggers cursed with too great a poverty of imagination to apprehend life’s feral richness.

Envy turns men vicious. I have suffered much from their jealousy – and truly jealousy is no less a deadly sin than the lust and covetousness of which they accuse me! Charge me with greed! I do not shy from the fact that I am a passionate collector, lover and connoisseur not only of rare books and jade, but of all that life offers in the way of experience. T’an hsin bu tsu : a heart that is never fulfilled, always craving more. And yes, mea culpa encore, I plead guilty, as well, to the sin of lust. I have been a sensualist – the intimate of courtesans, catamites, sepoys, eunuchs and sybarites, lords and ministers, poets and painters, with whom I shared many a fragrant, pomegranate night. And then there were those sultry, unforgettable interludes in the Great Within. Are those truly such insufferable crimes? So be it. Je m’accuse!

My head is crowded with all that I want to tell you, and all that I need to tell you. My tale and yours too involves the most incredible of love affairs, the greatest of scandals, and the most dreadful and unnecessary of murders. I would confide in you every detail if I could. And yet I am conscious of the relentless onward march of the “inaudible and noiseless foot of Time”. In my youth I had often imagined that I would end my days in meditative retreat in a monastery outside of Palermo. That fantasy, alas, is not destined for fulfilment. Later, I had a dream, expressed to my old friend Mrs. Danby, that I might pass my waning years in the Western Hills of Peking, at the Temple of Pi Mo Yen, that tranquil haven that inspired Lin-ch’ing’s composition Footsteps of a Solitary Goose in the Snow , but even that modest aspiration seems to have escaped my reach. No, my last stop before the Final Judgment is destined to be this humble bed in St. Michael’s Hospital in the Foreign Legation Quarter of Peking.

The manifold illnesses and privations that have long ravaged my naturally weak constitution have now taken it over. Comprising a malevolent host, a veritable family of ill-wishers, an audience that cannot contain its longing to see fall the final curtain, they now besiege this poor body of mine. This body that once afforded such exquisite pleasures now presents me daily with the insufferable pains of decay. So I lie, collapsed upon starched hospital sheets amidst tubes and potions, sheathed in a frayed and greying white gown of no dignity, the face that my Messalina once praised as “handsome” now lined and crushed with age and illness, and a life once splendid and wondrous in variety reduced to a dreary, colourless routine of salves and medicaments.

Thus, propped up on goose-down pillows, I write to you with a sense of urgency and a leaking pen. (H has promised to replace the pen on his next visit, and to type up these disorganised scribbles on his new Remington typewriter – he is the kindest of friends one could wish for in old age.)

At least the surgeons, doctors and Sisters of Mercy here at St. Michael’s sont français; although I have been forced by circumstances into the Foreign Legation Quarter, which I have sought to avoid for most of the near half-century I have spent in Peking, I am grateful that the last accents I will hear will not be those of my own benighted countrymen.

When I was still sheltering in the British Legation, before coming to this hospital, the British envoy offered to repatriate me, to send me “home” as he phrased it. He does not know – or perhaps he does – of the raptors there who would joyfully sharpen their claws on my frail bones, the Shylocks, the calumniators, the men of bourgeois morality, small talents and large envies who would like nothing more than to see me arrive on those blasted shores with my tail between my legs. In many cases they are, bien sûr, the very same people who once clamoured for a share in my treasures or a glimpse of my wit, who happily exploited my talents when they saw profit therein for their journalism or business needs. No! I shall never return to deuced England. Better to stay in my beloved Peking, whatever the consequences.

Not that there is much in these whitewashed corridors or, indeed, the world beyond this hospital’s faded curtains, to inspire me to tarry any longer in this life than is absolutely necessary. It is 1944. The world is at war for the third time in my life. First came the Russo–Japanese War in 1904, so beloved of that odious Australian, Morrison, who traded trifles of jam and chocolate for the translations of mine that gave him his over inflated reputation as the most informed of the Peking correspondents. Then came the even more extreme horrors of the Great War, which, thankfully, largely spared us in China.

The twentieth century here has nonetheless proved grim indeed. The decaying universe of beauty and power, which was the last dynasty, gave way to a rather more prosaic and troubled republic that proved itself equal to the ancien régime in corruption but not in style. Now the Japanese, once the shining light of East Asia, ride roughshod over civilisation in the East whilst their German allies brutalise Europe.

I, who once celebrated the victories of the Japanese over smug little bourgeois England, I, who was prepared to glorify the triumph of a nation of aesthetes over the country of the vulgus, I, who celebrated their restoration of the House of Aisin Gioro in Manchuria for reasons that will become manifest – even I have officially become in their eyes an “enemy alien”. (Et tu, Brute?)

I had no inkling of what was to come on that foully hot July day in 1937, the events of which are now known as the Incident at Marco Polo Bridge, the start of China’s War of Resistance against Japan. In the confused aftermath of the assault on the walled city of Wan P’ing and the Japanese march into Peking from the Yung Ting Men Gate, I briefly took shelter in the British Legation for the first time. That decision surprised everyone, not least myself.

So I am certain that it was something of a relief to all concerned when things appeared to calm down somewhat, and in a less apocalyptic mood I returned to my home at 28, 28 Yang Jou Hutung, Mutton Lane. I even cheered the Japanese successes until that terrible day in 1939 (almost five years ago!) when, living up to the names by which they are commonly known in Chinese, kui tse and wo k’ou , devils and dwarf pirates, the soldiers of the Empire of the Sun drove me from my humble but beloved home.

It was a day full of barked threats in a language I wished, for once, that I did not understand. I shall never forget the arrogance of the Nipponese bayonet as it sliced through the threads of the silk scarf at my throat, a treasured gift from dear Cassia Flower, or the insolent tramp of muddy boots on my fine Hsinkiang carpet, a present from none other than His Excellency Jung Lu (a charming man, incidentally – I could see at our first meeting the source of the Old Buddha’s attraction to him).

The memory of what the Japanese did that day stabs me still. They were exultant when they found the precious shawl of pearls, the famous shawl that once belonged to the Old Buddha – which I could not, in the end, bear to sell and so had hid from the world (including – and I know this wasn’t my most noble moment – the man who paid me a considerable advance for his share of it). They knocked the Four Treasures of my writing desk to the floor, sending my brushes clattering, shattering my inkstone, and causing my hsüan-chi rice paper to fly through the air like autumn leaves on a breezy day in the Western Hills.

No small part of me died as I watched them – was forced to watch them – loot my treasures, shred my papers and burn my precious manuscripts, including the Anglo– Chinese dictionary that represented the work of half a century. They also either took for themselves or consigned to the flames my letters, the rare diaries I’d collected, the imperial histories, and all the books in my library, including some, then rare and now non-existent – all except what I could beg from them and cram into a suitcase. They made a bonfire of the very stuff and matter of my life. Gone to ash and smoke. And then, to add insult to injury, one of them, unbuttoning his fly to reveal the fleshy purple of his samurai sword, urinated on the ashes. An acrid stench filled the air of a room that had previously been infused only with , shu-hsiang, the scent of books.

All they permitted me to salvage was my life, in the narrowest, literal sense, as well as what I could stuff into that suitcase. This included a few poor and threadbare garments, a red leather case with the document of my succession to the baronetcy, a sable-lined coat that once belonged to a Chinese noble and a few treasured books. And so I found myself taking refuge for a second time in the myopic little garrulous world of the British Legation. It is ironic. For most of my life I avoided the foreign quarter and its dull, small-minded denizens, instead living happily among the Chinese in the West City. To think that the Japanese I once so admired would drive me into the perfidious embrace of the Legations!

My countrymen at least had the decency to assign me a room within the compound of the British embassy where I had sole possession of a single bed, a rough-hewn table and one servant. Seated at that table, I read my books, worked on my memoirs and took tea. I, who had once worn court robes and the triple-eyed peacock feather in my hat, now humbly attired myself in a Chinese grass-cloth gown the colour of the winter sun when the dust of the Gobi is in the air, on my head a simple black Chinese cap with its modest ornament of rose quartz. The narrow view from my small veranda delimited a world that had once known no borders.

At least I was able to enjoy the company of the books I had salvaged: that perpetually amusing classic Ku-wen Kuan-chi , a rare nineteenth-century edition of Hung Lo Meng , The Dream of the Red Chamber, the erotic masterpiece Chin P’ing Mei , the supernatural Liao Chai Chi Yi , and a beautifully bound volume of the essays of the great Ming dynasty aesthete Chang Tai . I had one volume each of Wilde, Rimbaud, Huysmans and, naturally, Segalen. Miraculously, throughout all the upheavals, I have also retained a precious copy of Romance sans paroles inscribed to me by dear Verlaine; every so often I open it and read the poems aloud. Ó triste, triste était mon âme. . .

My dear friend Baron Corvo once wrote to me from Venice about his appassionato per l’acqua, in particular his mania for swimming the canals of Venice. He described these as “a twilight world of cloudless sky and smoothest sea, all made of warm, liquid, limpid heliotrope and violet and lavender”. He sought out the deeper waters on account of what he called his “vehement dyspathy against getting entangled in weeds or mud, to make my toe-nails dirtier than my finger-nails”. I have always admired his purity. And yet what is this life but the creeping entanglement of weeds and mud?

By the time you read this, I will be dead and so will my detractors, all of us embarked on another turn of the wheel of Samsara, swept away in a swirl of , hung ch’en, red dust – entanglement by its more poetic, Buddhist name.

My time is nigh. Escorted by both the consolations and disappointments of my new Roman faith – a faith shared with and indeed inspired by Corvo and my beloved Wilde, whose later conversion was as much an inspiration to me as his earlier perversions – I shall soon depart for the most fathomless depths of all.

I do not ask that you mourn me. I only implore you: know and remember me as I present myself to you here, without ornament, without pedantry, without guile. And understand this truth – stories are the only thing that defy death. Stories are truth. I hereby give you mine, yours – and Hers.

PART ONE

‘Naku naku!’

The landlady of the courtyard house where I rent my rooms speaks two words of English. They’re both ‘knock’. Another foreign woman who lived here before me taught Mrs Jin the phrase knock knock. But Mandarin doesn’t have any syllables that end with ‘k’, so she slips a ‘u’ in at the end and makes it into naku naku. Depending on the tones she uses, it sounds like ‘that bitterness’ or ‘where’s the cool stuff?’ This so amuses her that she rarely lets a day pass without booming out naku naku! at my doorway on some pretext or another.

‘Qing jin!’ I hollered back. ‘Come on in. The door’s open.’ The door was always open. The lock was broken. Mrs Jin kept saying she’d get someone in to fix it, but she didn’t trust tradesmen. ‘It’s not like the old days,’ she said to me the other day when I reminded her about it. ‘Chinese people used to be honest and hardworking. Now, everywhere you look, it’s crooks, liars and scammers. You can’t trust anyone. You don’t understand this because you’re a foreigner. Your brain works differently – you’re not nearly as complicated as we Chinese. We’re very complicated. China is very complicated.’ The word she used was fuza, which to my mind always seemed to cast a haze over people or situations it described and turned them into murky landscapes full of shadows and hidden dangers. I once told her I was also complicated. She laughed and shook her head. But I was complicated enough.

To make a long story short, the door to my wing in the little courtyard house I shared with Mrs Jin wasn’t getting fixed anytime soon. It wasn’t important. The main entry to the house, the door to the street, was deadlocked and guarded with a security grille, and that was the important thing. Even had my door locked, Mrs Jin would have had no compunction about coming in and rifling through my stuff whenever she felt like it. The old cliché: there’s no word for ‘privacy’ in Chinese. (That’s not exactly true, of course – but like everything else here it was complicated.)

As she stamped the snow off her feet on the mat outside, thunk thunk thunk, I looked up from the notebook in which I was writing and checked the time. It wasn’t yet ten in the morning. A tad on the early side for Mrs Jin’s daily drop-in.

I was seated on my ta, a faux-Ming platform bed. A ta was the Swiss Army knife of the furniture world. It looked simple – a deep platform covered with a tatami-like mat and walled in on three sides with a low headboard and two arms. But it served, at least for me, as bed, sofa, work station, dining room, bookshelf and storage. It could possibly open bottles too; I’d never tried. I’d bought it in the first flush of enthusiasm upon returning to live in China for the first time in twenty years. Mrs Jin had been bemused by the purchase. Like many middle-class Chinese, she shopped at Ikea. Convinced that I had the words ‘Rip me off, I’m a foreigner’ tattooed on my forehead, her immediate reaction was to interrogate me as to how much I’d paid for the thing. I’d lied, naming an amount equal to roughly half of what I actually spent.

‘Waaa,’ Mrs Jin had cried in shock and disapproval. ‘That’s so expensive. You were ripped off. You should have told me you wanted a ta. I have a friend who sells them.’ Whatever you needed, Mrs Jin had a friend who sold it. ‘But really, why would you want a ta?’ She’d screwed up her face. ‘Isn’t that thing awfully uncomfortable?’

Awfully uncomfortable didn’t come close, but I was never going to admit it. ‘It’s the most comfortable thing in the world. Seriously, Mrs Jin, you should get one. It makes me feel like an empress. You won’t find me sitting anywhere else.’

‘You don’t have anywhere else to sit.’

‘That’s because I spent all my money on this damn ta.’

‘Wo sai.’ Mrs Jin laughed. ‘You’re more Chinese than the Chinese.’

‘Qigan,’ I’d replied: I wouldn’t be so bold. But her words made me happy.

The door creaked as Mrs Jin pushed it open. That was another thing. But I figured that so long as the door remained unlocked it might as well keep its squeak, so should a thief ever really manage to jump our courtyard wall in the night and try to get into my wing, I’d wake up and have time to, I don’t know, hide under the ta.

A blur of white streaked past her legs.

‘Mimi!’ cried Mrs Jin.

‘It’s okay,’ I assured her. I liked the cat, which had already ducked under the ta as if showing me how it was done.

Small and round, on this morning Mrs Jin resembled a tomato in her red padded jacket, green fringed scarf and matching beanie. ‘Looking good, Mrs Jin.’ She grinned and patted her beanie as if to pass all the credit on to it and it alone. With the toe of her padded black corduroy shoe, she snugged the floral cloth snake back over the crack at the bottom of the thin wooden door. Incited by the snub, the desperado wind banged at the door and scrabbled at the wall of latticed windows, trying to get in.

‘This is what it’s like, living in a courtyard house,’ Mrs Jin remarked. ‘Are you sure you’re able to cope with it?’ I’d been living in her house for five years already and she asked me this whenever Beijing weather did what Beijing weather does to courtyard houses: dump snow, hurl sand, bake and stifle, scatter leaves and blow icy wind through the cracks, never neglecting to deposit a layer of whatever was in the Beijing air on every surface.

‘Yes, I’m used to it by now,’ I answered. Then, deadpan: ‘And you?’

‘I was born here,’ Mrs Jin shrugged. Her family, a distant branch (more like a twig) of the Qing dynasty’s imperial clan, had originated in the even colder climes of the northeast. They’d been Manchu Bannermen, part of the military, political and social nobility that the Qing court had allowed to drift into creative languor on generous pensions until the dynasty collapsed in 1911. By the time Mrs Jin’s father was born, in 1926, the family fortunes had fallen, and not nearly so graciously as in that early, great novel of Bannerman decay, The Dream of the Red Chamber. Her grandfather, who’d changed his Manchu surname to Jin in 1911 to avoid being beaten up or worse by the revolutionary anti-Qing mobs raging around the city, pulled a rickshaw. Her grandmother rolled the family’s heirlooms, one by one, inside rags of rough cotton. There were precious jades and scrolls, ornate cricket cages and even the embroidered badges from their ancestors’ court robes. She carried them to the antique dealers south of the city’s Qianmen gate. The merchants were wily, but apparently, and not surprisingly, no match for Mrs Jin’s grandmother, even in her desperate state. For a while, her grandfather did reasonably well – for a rickshaw puller, anyway – finding steady employment with a generous Swiss physician who lived in the Legation Quarter. The Jins rented or sold off most of what had been a grand mansion of interlocking courtyards, clinging on to one small rectangle into which they piled all the relatives of their extended and increasingly disordered family.

When he was twenty and civil war broke out, Mrs Jin’s father joined the People’s Liberation Army and the Communist Party and eventually rose to a respectable rank in the military. In turn, at the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, Mrs Jin, who was sixteen, joined the Red Guards and helped to ransack her own home, which was then sealed off: effectively confiscated. Eventually she came into re-possession of it via spider-webbed post-Mao mercantile machinations that she had once explained to me in such intricate detail that I was unable to retain a single thread of it. Mrs Jin was a retired functionary of the Bureau of Statistics, widowed and merrily so. I took it that the late Mr Jin – who’d taken her surname for (again that word) complicated reasons – had been something of a bore.

‘I saw your soldier friends were here again last night,’ I remarked as Mimi crept into sight and, seeing her chance, bounded up onto the ta to settle proprietorially into my lap, hooking her claws into my jumper and indolently pulling up threads.

Mrs Jin giggled like a schoolgirl. ‘Hope we weren’t too loud.’ Her friends, many of them old Red Guards like herself, had, as usual, shouted themselves hoarse playing drinking games and bellowing old revolutionary songs into the microphone of her bass-challenged karaoke machine. I could hear the pealing of their laughter at what were no doubt wildly off-colour jokes and political impersonations. The noise had swept through the courtyard in great waves, rattling my windows like the wind.

‘I didn’t hear a thing,’ I said. ‘Did you have fun?’

‘You should come and join us next time.’

The last time I’d joined Mrs Jin’s friends, not long after moving into the courtyard, they’d spent the first half of the evening marvelling at my ability to speak Chinese and the second half drinking me under the table. I had a vague memory of crawling back to my wing on my hands and knees – luckily it was summer. I woke up with the imprint of a toilet seat on my cheek and a head full of lion-dance drums. Most alarming of all, colour had temporarily leached from my vision: the world was tinted sepia, like an old photograph. It took several panicked hours before colour returned. I had no intention of ever repeating the experience. ‘I look forward to it,’ I said, extracting Mimi’s claws from my jumper and pushing aside the short-legged wooden writing table, the kangzhuo, that I had bought at the same time as the ta. I stretched my legs, which were prickling all over with pins and needles. Mimi climbed on top of them and worked her claws into my woollen leggings.

Mrs Jin leaned over and fingered the little desk as though seeing it for the first time. ‘What did that seller at Panjiayuan tell you this was made of again?’

‘Pear wood.’

She shook her head. ‘I’ve been reading Ma Weidu’s books.’ Ma Weidu was a celebrity antiques expert who wrote books, presented a TV show and had opened a private museum.

‘And?’

She narrowed her eyes and ran her fingers over the wood again. ‘I doubt it.’

The man who sold me the kangzhuo, a friendly old gent with a beard that grew out of a single large mole on his chin, swore that the desk was over a hundred years old and had once been the property of a top scholar in the imperial examinations. Mrs Jin shook her head at that. I hadn’t entirely believed him either. On the other hand, it wasn’t inconceivable that at some point in its humble existence, a Chinese scholar might have arrayed atop it the Four Treasures of the Study – brushes, ink, inkstone and rice paper – just as I ranged my own: laptop, notebook, gel pen and mobile phone. Six treasures if you counted the coffee plunger and mug. I did.

‘What are you writing?’

‘Nothing really,’ I said, closing the notebook, not that Mrs Jin would have been able to read it anyway. The words My Notbook were engraved on the cover, making it an irresistible buy. I shoved it back into place in the muster of locally produced notebooks on the bookshelf awaiting the long march to the Great Twenty-First-Century Bestseller. The inside cover of each one bore a different title, an epigraph and the start of a novel. These ranged from the comic political thriller Desktop, about a disorganised commander-in-chief who loses the nuclear launch codes, to the saucy psycho-sexual romance Get Out of My Head or I’m Coming In After You. ‘Stupid stuff.’

‘I don’t believe you,’ Mrs Jin said. ‘You’re smart, Linnie.’ I had a Chinese name but most people just called me by my English name, Linnie, because it was easy to pronounce in Chinese. They wrote it as (lin) (ni), two characters that were common to many girls’ names in China. ‘You wouldn’t write stupid stuff.’

Little did she know. ‘You’re too kind.’

‘You’re too modest.’

I shrugged. ‘You zizhi zhi ming.’ I’m illuminated by the knowledge of my own limitations.

‘Waa.’

On the title page of the ‘notbook’ I’d written the words A Massive Thing. The phrase came from a quotation by a famous Taiwan writer called Li Ao: ‘China’s a massive thing, still hidden in the mists. The Chinese don’t understand China; all they know are “Chinese clichés”. Foreigners don’t understand China; all they know is “Chinese chop suey”.’ I wasn’t sure yet if I was writing a novel, history, memoir, or perhaps just some mutant genre, an erotic-zombie-prose poem, for example, or perhaps just an autobiographical mystery. All I knew was that it was a massive thing in all senses of the word, and that I’d been trying to write one version or another of it for nearly twenty-five years, which felt like a lifetime, even if my lifetime had already included two sets of twenty-five years and then some. Shit, I was old. How did that happen? But as for A Massive Thing: this one, at least, was not intended as an airport novel. It might not even have wings. But I had come to the point where I felt I could no longer take off without it; even if I’d made several stabs at it back in Australia, it was a story that, I had realised, could never reach its conclusion unless I returned here to China where it began.

Just before Mrs Jin walked in, I’d been inscribing an epigraph into the notebook. It came from Graham Greene (to use the Li Ao quotation would have been too easy – I had truly developed a penchant for the fuza): ‘Leaving the miraculous out of life is rather like leaving out the lavatory or dreams or breakfast.’ I rarely overlooked breakfast. I often dreamed even when awake. And living in China, I was uncommonly attentive to the subject of lavatories. As for the miraculous, up until that moment, it had been a long time since it had made its presence felt in my life. I was ready.

That’s when I noticed the envelope that Mrs Jin was clutching in her nuggety little hand. Funny how coincidences in real life work like that. You could never get away with it in a novel.

My phone rang before I had a chance to ask about the letter. ‘Mind if I get that?’

‘Go right ahead.’ Mrs Jin plucked Mimi off my legs and tickled her ears. Mimi closed her eyes and pushed her head into Mrs Jin’s hand, crinkling the envelope.

‘Wei? Oh, Duan Mou, ni hao?’ I gestured for Mrs Jin to take a seat on the ta. Mrs Jin made a face, indicated it wasn’t so great for her back, and remained cheerfully upstanding. I glanced meaningfully at the envelope to say that if it was a letter for me she could just leave it. But if Mrs Jin got the hint, she didn’t take it.

‘Long time no hear … Really? Tarantino wants to see it? Really? Quentin Tarantino? Huh … wow.’ I suppose stranger things had happened in the history of world cinema. ‘I haven’t been online. I’ll check now. Hold on.’

I opened my laptop, checked my emails and picked up the phone again. ‘Yup. Got it. Word file and QQ link. Let me just … Okay. Downloading now. I’ll let you know if there’s any problem. When’s the deadline, by the way? … Tonight? You are kidding … You’re serious. Uh, hold on a minute, let me see if I can fit it into my schedule …’ I mentally reviewed my financial situation, which was strained, and my current commitments, which were minimal. A Massive Thing would have to wait. ‘No problem. You too. Talk later.’ I hung up, shaking my head. I’d been subtitling Chinese films for years. I was used to film directors and producers coming to me at the last minute with urgent translation jobs they surely had known about weeks, if not months, in advance, but this took the cake, or at least, being Beijing, the shallot pancake.

The thing is, Duan Mou was normally good, even considerate, about this sort of thing. He was a low-key and agreeable chap known for directing a stream of commercially successful, critically unacclaimed rom-coms, all of which I had translated. But this, he had informed me just now with an air of immense self-importance, was an art film. What’s more, a representative of Quentin Tarantino who was visiting China needed to see it – the following day.

Don’t get me wrong. I like art films. I’m fond of Bergman and Tarkovsky and Renoir, and the new wave from Iran and many of the American independents. But I’m also a practised enough translator to understand that the phrase art film in any language meant poorly paid in any other. Duan Mou was a mate. I just hoped that he wasn’t being conned by someone pretending to represent Tarantino; China was, after all, as Mrs Jin would say, rather complicated that way. But a job was a job. As the Quicktime file continued to spool onto my hard drive, I returned my attention to Mrs Jin and the envelope. ‘Is that …’

‘You know,’ Mrs Jin said, ‘I didn’t think that Love Under Guang’anmen Overpass was such a great film. The novel was better.’

I hadn’t read the novel on which Duan Mou had based his last film. ‘Absolutely,’ I agreed. ‘Much.’ With what I calculated to be a purposeful, must-get-onto-it and yet not impolite tone, I directed my gaze to the envelope and continued: ‘So …’

‘It’s a bit chilly in here, isn’t it?’ Mrs Jin glanced around her with a faux-casual air, her eyes lighting on the electric radiator that supplemented my room’s feeble central heating. ‘You know that you can only use one –’

‘– stand-alone heater at a time or I’ll blow all the fuses.’

Mrs Jin beamed like a teacher whose student had just recited the multiplication tables forwards and backwards. She gave the impression of having all the time in the world. Which she did.

I was always the first to blink. ‘Is that letter for me?’

‘This?’ Mrs Jin asked as though surprised to discover the letter in her hands. ‘Yes.’ She made no move to hand it over, but lowered her voice conspiratorially. ‘It was quite strange. Amazing, actually. Just now, the doorbell rang. I opened the door to find a young man dressed from head to toe in the uniform of a Qing dynasty postman.’

I considered this a moment. ‘Qing … You mean with the character for messenger, chai, enclosed in a circle on his tunic?’ With my thumbs and forefingers, I described a circle and held it against my chest to indicate a badge.

‘Exactly. Waa. You know your history.’

‘I watch a lot of historical soaps.’

‘That’s it. It was like he’d wandered off the set of one of those. You know how they’re always filming around here?’

I nodded. Our neighbourhood was one of the last standing traditional hutong areas in the city: narrow laneways lined with grey brick walls over which one caught glimpses of pomegranate and haw, austerely elegant red doorways with winged eaves from which wild grasses sprang, secret homes and gardens. Pedlars daily made their way through the alleys singing out for scrap, old microwaves and bottles, and selling potted plants, doonas and the evening paper, the name of which looped out from a squawking tape recorder on the hawker’s bicycle – Beijing wanbao! Beijing wanbao! – as reliable an indicator of the time as the clappers and gongs of the roving watchmen or the music of the Drum and Bell Towers in times of old. When the weather was fine, children chased one another through the hutong, madly propelling miniature plastic cars at people’s ankles and playing high-spirited games of shuttlecock. Every afternoon, wiry little Granny Feng, from the dazayuan across the way, pushed her husband out into the lane in his wheelchair, returned to get her chair and her knitting, and the two of them would spend the rest of the day there, courting the sunlight on their faces and collecting neighbourhood gossip, occasionally nodding off when the excitement became too much. White, black and black-and-white cats, no doubt all related to one original Qing dynasty pair, prowled the grey-tiled rooftops. Songbirds sang in their cages and sour-faced Pekinese with little satin bows holding the hair out of their beady, smug little eyes walked their middle-aged owners. Everyone knew everyone else’s business. Old Beijing. You couldn’t step out the door without tripping over a film crew.

‘So there was this boy, in his Qing dynasty uniform, and he never once stepped out of character as he passed me your letter.’ Absorbed in her story, Mrs Jin forgot how terrible the ta was for her back and sat down, releasing Mimi to run in crazed circles on the floor. ‘Even his gestures and the language he used were very old school. It was quite clever. So I thought maybe I’d like to use the service in the future for fun. I could write about it on Weibo too.’

An enthusiastic user of Weibo, China’s Twitter, Mrs Jin broadcast all the goings-on in the hutong as well as critiques of the Peking Operas she faithfully attended. She had over ten thousand followers.

‘I asked him if he could give me a card with a phone number or website,’ she continued. ‘Well, he stared at me with a look of total dismay or confusion, as if I’d asked him for, I don’t know, the phone number of the president of China or a lift on a spaceship. I smelled it then. I smelled it before I saw it.’

I waited.

Mrs Jin waited longer.

I gave up. ‘Smelled what?’

‘His horse.’

‘He had a horse?’

‘Yes, indeed,’ Mrs Jin confirmed. ‘Weird, hey? He had a horse. A beautiful, big shiny chestnut with a white star on his forehead. I love the smell of horses, that close grassy smell. As you know, I spent some time during the Cultural Revolution in Inner Mongolia getting “re-educated” by the masses. Great people. Terrible food. Wonderful horses.’

‘Sure. But how –’

‘I have no idea. The strangest thing is I didn’t even notice it until he’d handed me the letter and turned to remount.’

Horse-and donkey-pulled carts of vegetables and handmade furniture had been common sights on the streets of Beijing when I first lived here in the early 1980s, but they had long been banished from the city: the traffic was beastly enough without putting real animals in the mix. Occasionally, a peasant with vegetables piled high on the back of his horse cart sneaked in by night and, pulling over by the side of the road, sold off his crop for enough money to cover the fines or bribes. But the thought of someone flaunting the rules so brazenly as to ride a horse, and in the crowded, narrow alleyways around our courtyard house at that, made both of us laugh. Anything could happen in Beijing and it often did.

‘That’s not all,’ Mrs Jin said. ‘Look at this.’ She shook the envelope at me for emphasis. ‘I haven’t seen anything like it in years.’ Mrs Jin now held the envelope up to the light, flipping it over, and over once again. Only after ascertaining that there was no way at all to read the contents through the envelope did she hand it to me.

I instantly saw what had so intrigued Mrs Jin, delivery system aside. The sender had written my Chinese name and address in brush and ink the old-fashioned way, in vertical columns and using the complex old-style characters that few people in the mainland were even able to read these days, much less write. The calligraphy was fluid, if a little shaky, as though written with a palsied hand. You could still smell the ink, suggesting that it had been written and delivered within the time it might take the words to dry. I could feel Mrs Jin’s curiosity expand to fill the room, sucking up oxygen.

I placed the envelope on the kangzhuo and invited Mrs Jin to stay and have a cup of tea – insisted she do so, in fact. This was a cultural trick I picked up in Taiwan, where I’d gone in the late seventies to continue my language study after finishing my university degree in Chinese studies. Like much of my deeper knowledge of Chinese culture, I’d learned this custom the hard way. Early on in my time there, my teacher, whom I revered, had invited me to drop in after dinner. She’d greeted me warmly and placed a plate of sunflower seeds, sesame crackers and a lidded mug of tea before me, refreshing it from time to time without fuss as we chatted. When I felt the evening drawing to its natural conclusion – that point when the conversation lulls, the host discreetly stifles a yawn and it’s time to make a polite noise about ‘early starts’ – I said that I really ought to go and leave her to her rest. ‘Stay,’ my teacher said. ‘The night is young.’ She offered to refresh my cup of tea. Confused, especially as it was getting quite late, I thanked her and said that would be lovely. The conversation stumbled along with what I felt was a distinct awkwardness for another twenty minutes or so. When we reached what I was certain was another exit point, exactly the same thing happened. By the time I did feel free to leave, my bladder was full, it was past midnight and my teacher wore an expression that had begun to look as much like exasperation as exhaustion, even if she remained infallibly courteous. The Chinese friend to whom I told this story the next day was horrified. That offer of tea, at that point in the evening, was the signal to leave. If my early life in Chinese society had been a game show, I’d never have made it to the final round. ‘I’ll just go put on the kettle,’ I now said pointedly. Mrs Jin wriggled towards the edge of the ta and launched herself off like a little red cannonball, deftly scooping up Mimi from a pillow on the ta where she’d settled in for a nap following her exertions.

‘I should leave you alone to read your letter.’ Disappointed, but suffering no loss of face, Mrs Jin made her exit, Mimi mewling and wriggling in the crook of her arm.

When I was younger, I wrote letters all the time. Everyone did. Handwritten letters of friendship, news, gossip, love, revelation. The choice of paper, the handwriting, the crossings out, the blots of ink, the places where one pen ran out and another was substituted (a ‘sorry!’ hovering like bird wings overhead), the little drawings that were the ancestors of emoticons, the insertions of photos and newspaper clippings, everything down to the choice of stamp offered a snapshot of the writer. The trumpet blare of social media seems so graceless and corporate by comparison. And yet all forms of personal correspondence, whether they arrive in an envelope at your door, ping into your email inbox or onto your Facebook wall, or even, as once was common, come typed in all capitals on a nearly expired ribbon from the telegraph office, have one thing in common: we receive them with bated excitement, for they light flares of possibility and hope that they will convey love, inheritance, a prize, the surprise reappearance of a long-lost friend, or some other news, preferably good, that will rock your world … that they will change your life. No matter how many times they fail to do this, or worse, deliver bad news, the uncanny, unreasonable light of optimism burns on.

One difference between electronic communication and the physical letter is that the former is too readily unwrapped, too quickly revealed. It’s the difference between the person who jumps up onto your bed naked with a ta da! and another who waits patiently, seductively in the dark for you to undress them. The end result might be spectacular, disappointing or something in-between, but the slower process allows you more time to anticipate and dream.

It had been a long time since I had received a proper letter. Inevitably, perhaps, my thoughts turned to the two shoeboxes crammed with letters from Q, his impatient blue-penned characters racing along the faint lines imprinted on the tissue-thin paper. Although we both lived in Beijing, we wrote to one another all the time. Writing letters was just what you did in the days before mobiles, when even landlines were uncommon here. Granted, a lot of his letters were little more than notes telling me to wait for him somewhere the following day, or informing me that he wouldn’t be able to make some appointment after all. I was so besotted, I kept them all. The shoeboxes were stashed in the bottom of the old camphor tea chest that was full of silk and counted as the only other piece of furniture in the room, aside from the bookshelves. I’d tied the letters up in ribbons, just like in some Victorian novel. With a jolt, I realised that this was the first time I’d thought of Q this morning. As usual, I wasn’t sure whether to feel guilty or congratulate myself.

I carefully tore open the envelope and unfolded the letter. I made space on the kangzhuo and smoothed it out. It was just a single page and was written mostly in Chinese, with the odd English phrase or couple of sentences woven in: the work, I assumed at first glance, of a Chinese person with a good grasp of English. The calligraphy was not quite native, however, and it was also not easy to decipher, though the dedication was clear enough:

‘Dearly respected Jia Peilin’ (my Chinese name), was followed by a request in Chinese for my ‘refined inspection’ of the letter’s contents. Fun, was my first thought. Elegant formulations and archaic courtesies were among the things I loved best about the Chinese language. Studying in Taiwan, where the old linguistic habits that had graced traditional Chinese life lived on, I’d come to regard them as part of the very marrow of China’s great civilisation.

The Beijing I was introduced to in 1980 was a city still smouldering in the physical and spiritual ruins wrought by three decades of Maoist extremism. It struck me then as the place where Chinese civilisation had gone to die. For a short while, I wondered if I’d made the right decision coming here. But I quickly settled into my new life and my job at the Foreign Languages Press, where I worked as a ‘foreign expert’, polishing the text of the English editions of propaganda magazines like China Reconstructs and the Beijing Review.

One day, I asked the son of a Chinese colleague, a tall, rather dishy boy around my age called Lian, to go for a stroll. We ended up, rather romantically I thought, in the deserted grounds of an old Daoist temple that had been made into a factory in the 1950s, ruined and abandoned. Whatever statuary there had once been had long ago been stolen or smashed to pieces. Wild grasses pushed up the broken paving stones and colonised the roof tiles. A breeze blew up, and the cracked ceramic bells hanging from the eaves of the temple began to ring. Maybe I was just young and so everything was imbued with magic, but I still remember the tingling enchantment of that sound. The two of us stood there gazing up at the bells; I stole a look at Lian and saw the fringe of his scarf dancing in the wind.

I made some reference to Laozi’s Dao De Jing.

‘Dao De what?’ He looked at me as if I was speaking Greek.

Every university student and hippy in the Western world had a copy of the Dao De Jing on their bookshelf at the time, except usually in English translation and spelled Tao Te Ching. Who didn’t know the Dao De Jing? I was convinced he was pulling my leg. He thought I was pulling his when I answered, a little too smart-arsedly, that it was only one of the foundations of China’s traditional culture. I’d forgotten for a moment that Mao had denied his generation their heritage.

The day fell into an even greater shambles when I invited Lian to lunch at the Peking Hotel. We’d ended up around Tiananmen. Back then, there were very few places you could go for a decent meal where you didn’t need grain or meat ration tickets to order, where the floor wasn’t a slippery bed of spittle and bones, and where the service, if not exactly friendly, wasn’t completely indifferent: the restaurant in the Peking Hotel was one. The meal I ordered, modest by Taiwan or Hong Kong standards, was served in the old Beijing way: small tasting dishes, sort of tapas-sized, of boiled peanuts with celery, stir-fried cabbage with mushroom, dry-fried chilli beef, scrambled eggs stir-fried with tomatoes, shredded pork with garlic shoots, and tofu. I only remember the details because of what happened next. We were still eating when Lian suddenly jack-knifed in his seat, bent double with stomach cramps. He could barely breathe for the pain. I was alarmed and confused. If the food had been off, then I should have been feeling the effects too, but I was fine.

It transpired that in all his twenty-three years, he had never eaten that much protein in one meal. My younger Beijing friends today can scarcely believe this story when I tell them. They love going to one or another of Beijing’s many Argentinean grills where, just for starters, costumed waiters deposit what seems like half a cow on your table. They all know the Dao De Jing, whether they’ve read it or not, and between Ma Weidu and bloggers on Ming dynasty history, even the least academically minded among them appear to have acquired some grasp of tradition.

Back then, however, sometimes it seemed that all that remained in Beijing of that grand, ancient, rich culture were some denuded, clapped-out temples and the stubbornly tenacious, courteous pronoun nin, a kind of Chinese vous that came so instinctually to the people of Beijing that I wouldn’t be surprised if one day scientists find there’s a gene for it.

As I scanned the letter, my eyes lit on the phrase , lingzun – your honourable father. Every hair on the back of my neck stood up. I was either on the verge of being brutally conned, or the miraculous, to which Graham Greene was admonishing me to pay attention, was coming at me now in spades. You see, my correspondent said that if I was who he thought I was, then he had something that would answer certain questions about my family background; questions which, he was quite sure, would have haunted me as surely as the answers had haunted him. This, I quickly realised, was that letter, the one for which we wait our entire life.

I don’t like to talk about my family history. It sounds too much like the plot of a third-rate Victorian melodrama, ridiculously contrived and overblown with mystery. At the very least, and to return to that unavoidable word, you could say my background was very fuza. In fact, it’s possible that if I were a character in a novel and, by some trick, also the reader of that novel, I would not believe in my own existence. But as the cliché has it, truth really is stranger than fiction.

My mother, Alma, was seventeen when she arrived in Sydney on the MV Georgic from England. Her family back in Darlington, disgraced by their unmarried daughter’s condition, had dispatched her to Australia to stay with distant cousins who lived near Terrigal on the Central Coast of New South Wales. She arrived heavily pregnant and much undone by the sea voyage from England as well as a mounting fever and whatever heartache my father had inflicted on her before running off, never to be seen or heard from again. I was born on her eighteenth birthday. She had barely given me suckle when she passed away. Apparently her death was my fault. Upon my otherwise unexceptional and relatively speedy departure from her young and supple womb, it transpired that I’d left a hair on the placental bed; it entered her bloodstream, triggering an allergic reaction that led to cardio-respiratory collapse. Hairs on my pillow are just one of the things that make me feel guilty to this day.

Alma died without ever having revealed the name or identity of my father to anyone. Her scandalised parents back in England either knew nothing or pretended to know nothing about my father other than that he was very much older than she. There were rumours that he was ‘foreign’. No one, however, seemed to know for certain where he’d come from. They knew even less about where he might have gone, if he was still alive, or even what his name had been. My mother had apparently insisted that he was a ‘prince’. His behaviour would seem to indicate otherwise.

Her parents, my maternal grandparents, died not long after she did, of shame or in a motorcar accident, depending on who’s telling the story – Auntie Elsie (shame) or Uncle Jack (accident). So I never met them. I regretted this deeply not just because I was denied the only pair of grandparents I could have possibly known, but also because of what they could have told me about her. About us. Auntie Elsie and Uncle Jack – that’s what I call the cousins who raised me – always claimed to know little about her until she turned up on their doorstep in her swollen despondency.

Once, when I was about eleven, I woke up in the middle of a hot summer night to the murmur of conversation outside my window. Impelled by some intuition or impulse, I tiptoed to the window in my bare feet, carefully avoiding Mouse, the squeaky floorboard. Cigarette smoke and the smell of a burning mosquito coil hit my nostrils the second I pressed my nose to the flyscreen, and I had to stifle the urge to sneeze. Elsie and Jack were sitting on the veranda in their creaky wicker chairs, their backs to me. The street was quiet. Sheldon, our lazy old cat, was lying at the top of the steps, his tail twitching with dreams. Jack was in a singlet, a cigarette dangling loosely between fingers wrapped around a beer. Elsie, in her loose and faded blue cotton housedress, fanned herself with a copy of Women’s Weekly. In her other hand she held a tall glass of gin and tonic, which she’d once explained was fizzy drink for adults. (For the longest time I had understood it to be a kind of iced tea called jee-en.) Her own cigarette lay self-smoking in the ashtray on the arm of her chair. I was thinking I should go back to bed when I heard her speak my mother’s name. Alma. This was such a rare occurrence that I clamped a hand over my mouth, certain that if I didn’t, I’d squeak like Mouse.

From early childhood I was a prodigious reader. I quickly exhausted Elsie and Jack’s collection of books and took to spending a lot of my spare time in the local library, reading down at the beach or in a shady corner of a paddock I shared with a retired palomino horse called Shilo. At the time I was in the middle of a passionate Dickens phase. His stories about orphans enthralled me and at the same time left me consumed with terrifying (if obscurely thrilling) fantasies of being abandoned to an orphanage, a poorhouse or some local Fagin. I’d landed on Elsie and Jack as a newborn when their own children were already adults. Although they raised me as if I were their own daughter, and never gave any sign that they would give me up, I somehow figured out early on that I must have been quite a burden. As a result I did my best to be a good girl, grateful, helpful around the house and conspicuously obedient – even if secretly I fancied myself a cross between Pip from Great Expectations, Jane Eyre and Dr Seuss’s anarchic Cat in the Hat. Mostly the Cat in the Hat. I’ve always been one of those people who seem far simpler – and possibly nicer, sweeter, better – than I am, a misconception that has often worked to my advantage.

‘… was always wild,’ my aunt was saying of Alma. ‘Apparently.’

My eyes widened.

She rattled the ice in her jee-en tea and took a sip. I had to strain to catch what they were saying next. Although they had no reason to believe I was awake, they lowered their voices. That’s when I caught a mysterious reference to a ‘Miss Edgy Nation’. It confused me. I’d never heard them mention this oddly named person before. After that their voices dropped further to whispers. Try as I might, I couldn’t hear anything else. Eventually I crept back to my bed and lost myself in a tangled jungle of dreams. In the morning, I remembered Miss Nation, but couldn’t make head or tail of the reference and didn’t dare ask. I puzzled on it for years. When I was a few years older and reading something for a school project on colonial history, I came upon a new word and pursued it to the dictionary, pronouncing it aloud. Miscegenation. ‘Interbreeding between different races’. Something about it resonated in my mind. When the penny dropped, I raced into the bathroom to study myself in the mirror. Bingo.

Elsie picked at something on the front of her housedress. ‘Rumour,’ she said. ‘Rumour and scuttlebutt.’

Jack backed her up, though he couldn’t look me in the eye either. ‘Lots of English people have dark hair and eyes like yours,’ he assured me.

‘But you told me my mother was fair,’ I said.

‘That’s right,’ Elsie chimed in. ‘She was. But these things can skip a generation. And your father may well have been, I don’t know, black Irish.’ It was the first time I ever heard them pronounce the word ‘Irish’ as if it wasn’t a disease. As for my amber colouring, they insisted, not unreasonably, that everyone growing up in Australia absorbed some of that honeyed sunshine into their skin.

They had no idea that from the start I loved the idea of miscegenation. It was story. It was mystery. It had a literal touch of the exotic and an outlaw air. Everything I had come to crave. And now it became an intriguing clue to my identity, this miscegenation, and I privately revelled in the whiff of scandal that now joined the two exquisitely carved jade bracelets that had come with my mother and made up the sum total of her legacy to me.

Perhaps it was the absence of facts about my background that made fiction the basis of my ever-replenishing Magic Pudding-like imagination. Along with Dickens I chewed my way through Ray Bradbury, Mark Twain, Isaac Asimov and so much Victoriana that every time I developed a cough I grew hopeful that it might be consumption. But in the end, these marvellous tales left me even more bereft. For all my childish fears, the truth was that I never had to ask for more like Oliver Twist or steal for a living like the Artful Dodger. Auntie Elsie and Uncle Jack raised me with a kind of bewildered, generous love. Their grown-up children always spoiled me when they came to visit. But what I really wanted was to be marooned on a desert island, to raft the Mississippi, to travel on spaceships, spend a weekend in a country house with Jeeves, discover madwomen in an attic (if I couldn’t be the madwoman myself), and to have at least a shot at circumnavigating the globe in eighty days. I pretended to get lost in the bush. Once I saw a shark’s fin glide past my surf mat. Another time, I surprised a possum in the process of turning on the tap in our kitchen sink. But there were no great adventures. Although Fahrenheit 451 gave me recurring nightmares from which I awoke with a start, groping for my books, my early life was as smooth and unremarkable as a linoleum bench. I had a head full of stories but none of my own.

When adventure did come to me later in life, I discovered that there was no turning that last page. True adventure is a book that is never finished. Or to put it another way, it never finishes with you.

I even secretly envied the kids at school who got teased for being descended from convicts, or for being the children of wogs or for having Aboriginal ancestry, though at the time that last was something that many people kept quiet. Perverse prayers are often answered where normal ones fail and, before long, when I was still in my early teens, people began to notice I didn’t quite look like everyone else. A few kids started to tease me for looking Chinese – Ching Chong Chinaman, born in a jar, christened in a teapot, that sort of thing. The only real-life Chinese person I knew was Jacob Woo. His parents ran the Dragon Inn, the mandatory local Chinese restaurant. Jacob may have been a fourth-generation Australian, as he reminded people at every opportunity, but he was also a dag with a dumb, hiccupping laugh and thick glasses more often than not held together with sticky tape, usually the result of some sporting accident. I was already nerdy enough with my bookworm ways; I didn’t want to be associated with Jacob to boot. When a friend’s grandmother told her to wash her hands after handling coins because ‘they might have been up a Chinaman’s bum’, that rather sealed the deal. I denied all charges and began actively searching out a more acceptable alternative history.

A photograph in National Geographic depicting a group of beautiful Mapuche girls from Chile inspired me to claim that I was South American, spinning a tale to anyone who would listen about a Spanish conquistador and his dusky native rose. That worked well until someone pointed out that there hadn’t been any conquistadors for about four centuries. Then I saw Seven Samurai and decided that I was the love child of Toshirô Mifune; my auntie and uncle, having lived through the war, didn’t like this story at all.

‘You might be part something,’ they conceded, ‘but it would be something respectable.’ Studying my face in the mirror for clues, all I could see was part-disappointment, part-hope. Respectability didn’t interest me all that much.

One day, browsing the shelves of the local library, I stumbled across an old book. Its hard, clothbound cover had the mustardy hue of old manuscripts. In the centre of the cover was the imprint of a carved seal, Chinese characters printed the colour of dried blood. Above this simple, mysterious decoration was the title China Under the Empress Dowager. The book smelled faintly of mould.

Its frontispiece was a black-and-white photograph of a woman seated in front of an ornate screen decorated with delicate floral motifs: I recognised magnolias and plum blossoms. To her left and right, mounted on carved wooden supports, were large ceramic dishes piled high with glossy fruit. Peaches? Apples? It was hard to tell. Overhead, a banner bore more Chinese writing and under her feet lay a richly woven rug. The woman, the Empress Dowager of the title, was dressed in a magnificent robe, simple in design with its wide-sleeved jacket and full skirt, but sumptuous in detail, seemingly composed of beautifully stitched strips of silk brocade in what I guessed were contrasting colours. Over this she wore an even more dazzling vest consisting of panels of silk and embroidery that appeared to be fastened at the chest by a bejewelled clasp in the shape of a butterfly. Two carved and painted wooden platform soles the shape of a horse’s hooves peeked out from under the hem of her skirt, the toe of an embroidered slipper just visible atop the block that was closest to the hem. On her hands were bangles of jade. Filigreed gold nail protectors transformed the two last fingers of her hand into pointed talons. She wore what looked like drop-pearl earrings. Her black hair, parted just off-centre, was slicked down and so glossy that the lamplight was reflected on each side of her part like moonlight on a dark sea. Upon her head was perched the most remarkable headdress, like gem-strewn bat wings. Her face was smooth and unblemished, her chin small and delicate. Her mouth was slightly open and, under her straight eyebrows, her long dark eyes held my own with what seemed at the time an almost eerily knowing, vaguely amused expression. The caption announced the photograph to be of The ‘Holy Mother’, Her Majesty Tz Hsi. (From a Photograph taken in 1903.)

On the opposite page, I saw the publication date was listed as MCMXI. Under the title came the sort of fusty elaboration I loved in old books:

BEING THE HISTORY OF THE LIFE AND

TIMES OF TZ HSI

COMPILED FROM STATE PAPERS AND THE

PRIVATE DIARY OF THE COMPTROLLER OF

HER HOUSEHOLD

BY

J.O.P. BLAND AND E. BACKHOUSE

ILLUSTRATED

It might not have seemed the sort of thing that would hook a fifteen-year-old in … what was it, 1970? But I was an odd kid, especially in the context of a small coastal town in Australia. All that reading in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature had primed me to enjoy what others might have run from screaming. I settled myself on the floor, back against the wall under the window, and plunged into a Byzantine narrative of degenerate rulers, powerful concubines, rival clans, oracular forecasts and conniving eunuchs. There were rebellions, wars, sieges, invasions and epic struggles for power – and all this, wonderfully I thought, with a clever and beautiful woman at the centre.

Yehonala had been born in 1835 into a noble but not terribly well-to-do Manchu clan in Peking. The Manchus (Mrs Jin’s lot) were a nomadic tribe that had ruled China since 1644 as the Ch’ing (today spelled Qing) dynasty. They weren’t ethnic Han Chinese, but they produced some of imperial China’s greatest rulers. When she was fifteen – my age when I first read about her – Yehonala was paraded before the mother of the teenage Hsien-feng emperor along with about sixty other eligible young Manchu girls. It was a bit like a modern beauty contest – the emperor’s mother judged them on deportment and personality as well as looks. The Empress Dowager (as the mother of the emperor was called) chose twenty-eight of the girls for her son’s concubines, organised into grades; Yehonala was one of them, and she was given the rank of Kuei Jen (guiren).

Yehonala was smart. Her family had educated her well. She had a head for politics, and soon she was advising the emperor on matters of state. When, seven years after entering the palace, she bore him his first son and heir, her stock rose even further. But it was a rough time for China. Western imperialist powers had waged several ‘Opium Wars’ to force an unwilling China to accept foreign trade, including the import of Indian-grown opium. In the final humiliation of the Opium Wars, French and British soldiers (whom Yehonala quite reasonably called ‘pestilent barbarians’) burned down the Yuanmingyuan, an exquisite jewel of a summer palace that had been constructed over many acres and several generations of the emperor’s ancestors. Soon after, the thirty-year-old Hsien-feng emperor died, allegedly of shame.

After the emperor’s death, Yehonala ruled as co-regent on behalf of her son with her cousin Sakota, who, although the emperor’s chief consort (and empress), had only managed to give him a daughter. Yehonala and Sakota sat together behind a decorative screen at court, speaking on behalf of the child-ruler, who fidgeted on the Dragon Throne as his officials arrayed themselves before him to discuss matters of state. Yehonala was not only more politically minded than Sakota, but ambitious too. It was not long before, by tacit agreement, she became the de facto ruler of the court, and thus China itself. Her son grew up wild and died before he finished his teenage years, officially of smallpox but possibly of syphilis.

After her son’s death, Yehonala, known as the Empress Dowager Tz-Hsi (Cixi in today’s spelling), manoeuvred her nephew onto the throne as the Kuang-hsü emperor. In 1898, when he was twenty-six, a group comprising some of China’s most progressive thinkers persuaded him to adopt educational, financial and other reforms that would strengthen China and bring it into the modern world. One hundred days later, and backed by a conservative cabal at the court, including her chief eunuch Li Lien-ying (rumoured to be her lover and not a eunuch at all), the Empress Dowager placed the emperor under house arrest and resumed her regency. He remained under arrest until his death, one day before her own, in 1908. Not surprisingly, I would later learn, historians still argue over Yehonala’s legacy today.

China Under the Empress Dowager included an excerpt from the 1900 diary of a high official in the Qing court, Ching Shan. Ching Shan complained that his sons ‘mocked’ him for being deaf and observed that they were bad kids, unlikely to get as far in the world as he had. One of his sons murdered him not long after he wrote those words.

A lot of the book flew straight over my head at the time. While I couldn’t possibly have understood the complexities of the world it described, I was intoxicated by its exotic nature. Even if many of the names refused to stick, it beat the lists of English queens and kings that passed for history at school. As for the story of Federation, ‘wake me when it’s over’ was my attitude back then and it hasn’t changed much since.

On the day I found the book, I sat there reading, mesmerised, until the library lights flickered to announce closing time, plucking me out of the Forbidden City and dumping me back on the Central Coast, leaving me blinking in genuine surprise. Tucking the precious volume under my arm, I approached the checkout desk. A queue had formed. People cradled armfuls of books, shifting their weight from leg to leg while Mrs Cakely, a thickset woman with a menacing bouffant and an aura of lavender, hunched over her desk, sliding the index cards from their pockets in the books’ inside back covers, placing the cards in a pile, tapping their edges into order against the desk, writing down the borrower’s name and reaching for her date stamp. Chunk, chunk. Those were the days before computerisation, magnetic tagging and alarmed exits. It occurred to me that this book was far too precious to check out. If I checked it out, the day would come when I would have to return it. Anticipating that I wouldn’t like that at all, I slipped it into my book bag and, undetected, strolled out into the waning sunshine with my prize.

By then, I was old enough to wear my two jade bracelets. Their clinking and chiming irritated some of my teachers, and Elsie too when she was in a mood, but I loved it. It was my soundtrack. It still is. I realised that jade went with China; the bracelets in the photograph of the Empress Dowager looked exactly, I fancied, like my own. (Mrs Jin, by the way, was deeply fascinated by my bracelets.) Somewhere else I read that the Chinese language had a long list of words just to describe the sound of jade striking jade: qiangqiang, chengcheng, dingding, lingling, langlang, shanshan. And that was that. I was hooked. China brimmed with the history I craved for myself, and its people spoke the language of jade. I began to look at Jacob Woo differently. He’d got contacts by then, and didn’t seem as much of a dag, which helped. I made my decision. If I had an exotic ‘part’, then it was going to be Chinese. Or Manchu – not that I was entirely sure of the difference.

I began reading everything I could about China and the Empress Dowager. China was, at the time, another sort of closed kingdom, this one under the rule of Mao and the Communist Party. It was during the Cold War and communism was the be-all and end-all of evil regimes – and naturally, in that age of rebellion, an inspiration to idealistic young Australians far more focused on the wrongs of capitalism and the military-industrial complex that had driven us into Vietnam on America’s coattails.

China was still in the throes of the Cultural Revolution when Whitlam led a Labor delegation to Peking in 1971; Australia established diplomatic relations with China the following year, 1972. I graduated from high school one year after that. I enrolled in university in Canberra, where I studied Chinese history and language in the company of one young man of frightening intelligence who would eventually become a star of the Sinological world and another, nerdish and hard-working, who would become prime minister. I was the quiet under-achiever at the back of the room, the girl with heavy glasses (plastic lenses had yet to be invented) that left a red stripe across my nose when I took them off, which in my self-consciousness I did a lot, even though I was practically blind without them. Chinese studies still had an esoteric and impractical aura that appealed to my contrary (not to mention bookish) nature and a whiff of the politically risqué, which drew me as well. I may have been an orphan but I was still a child of my generation. The main China-related careers available at the time were academic, diplomat or spy; I wasn’t convinced I was suited for any of these but I figured I’d work something out. Chinese studies was a passion, not a career move.

I started an honours thesis on ‘Western Representations of the Empress Dowager Cixi, from Portrait Artist Katharine Carl and Biographers Bland and Backhouse to Hollywood and Beyond’. By then, of course, I had learned of that talismanic book’s scandalous history – one of its authors, Sir Edmund Backhouse, had apparently entertained some kind of wildly perverse fantasy that he had actually been the Empress Dowager’s lover and he had personally forged Ching Shan’s diary – an extraordinary, if not entirely honourable achievement. Even now, I can’t explain exactly why I didn’t finish the thesis. Something to do with the combination of some obscure (and perfectly ordinary) personal drama and the fact that my obsessive nature, which on good days I think of as perfectionism, can make it hard for me to bring things – anything – to an end.

After university I moved to Sydney and shared a house in Glebe with a fractious social worker, a depressed rock musician, a chaotic philosophy student and the usual Sydney complement of giant flying cockroaches. I waited on tables for five or six months while grinding out a novel that drew both on the material in my thesis and also what I had learned about Backhouse from Hugh Trevor-Roper’s Hermit of Peking: The Hidden Life of Sir Edmund Backhouse. When I’d read China Under the Empress Dowager all those years before, I’d had no idea that Backhouse was, not to put too fine a point on it, not just a forger but a genius of perversity, an arms salesman, an occasional spy and a fantasist who single-handedly created more mischief and scandal than any other Westerner in China before or since. I became obsessed with his story.

I grandly titled my novel The Empress Lover. Like every other pot-boiler that’s ever been written about the ‘exotic East’, it was a sweeping saga stuffed full of gratuitous, sensationalist sex scenes, murder, history lessons and purple prose. But instead of having a cookie-cutter Western hero and a beautiful Chinese/Japanese/ other Asian-ese woman at the centre, I had a perverse, eccentric gay man and a powerful female ruler: Edmund Backhouse and Cixi, of course. It was the ultimate penny dreadful for our feminist, post-colonialist, post-modern times. I’d make a packet. I’d be the female James Clavell. (‘Who?’ you say now, but at the time, Tai-Pan, Shogun, Noble House and the rest made him the John Grisham, the Dan Brown and the Danielle Steel of Asia; I read his books back then with the sweet-and-sour sauce of grudging admiration, superiority and jealousy that’s a familiar taste to most aspiring young authors.)

The Empress Lover enjoyed no small success – in fact, it enjoyed no success whatsoever. No publisher showed the slightest interest in publishing it. I put it away and bought a ticket to Taiwan.

At the start of 1980, after a year or two of language study in Taiwan, I ended up in China – which was modernising, reforming, and opening up under Deng Xiaoping. I began work as a ‘foreign expert’ at the Foreign Languages Press. John Cleland’s Fanny Hill, a poor orphan, went to London and never looked back. I went to Beijing and did the same. Fanny Hill ended up working for Mrs Brown, me for the Ministry of Propaganda.

In both Taiwan and China, people readily agreed, volunteered even, that at least part of me had to belong to that country. I always had dark hair; I now dyed it black and cut it in a severe ‘China doll’ cut. I began to look more and more Chinese. My spoken Chinese became good enough to sustain the illusion. ‘You shimmer,’ Q once said to me.

Now, as I worked my way through this short letter, dense with mystery, all of my certainties and all of my fabrications melted one into another until even I couldn’t say which was which.

The writer of the letter told me that he had been searching for me for many years. If I was the person he had reason to believe I was, then he would pass on a gift from my ‘honourable ancestor’. The gift consisted of a long letter that would, he said, ‘make clear that which was opaque and illuminate that which had lain in darkness. Not that,’ he wrote, ‘you would want to disturb all those who lie in darkness.’ He named names. I closed my eyes, opened them and read the names again. They hadn’t changed.

He requested that I meet him that very evening at the Hour of the Rat. Eleven pm. Bu jian bu san. . Literally, ‘no see, no scatter’ – a common expression in the days before mobile phones, when people made appointments and waited, trying not to imagine accidents and hospitals when, half an hour or forty-five minutes after the appointed time, a person didn’t show.

Directly following this, he wrote my given Chinese name, Peilin, as if it were a complete sentence: . It took me aback, and it was a full few minutes before I began to make sense of it. Literally, pei is to wear on one’s person; lin is a type of jade ornament, traditionally worn dangling from one’s belt. It’s neither natural nor idiomatic to consider the combination of characters a command. But I realised that this was how my correspondent, writing with the linguistic freedom of the non-native speaker, had intended it: he was telling me, in coded fashion, to wear the jade bracelets my mother had left me. That wouldn’t be a problem. I had never stopped wearing them. My first Chinese teacher, commenting on their beauty and the rare imperial dragon and phoenix motifs with which they were carved, had given me my Chinese name because of them.

But how did the writer of the letter know about the bracelets? What else did he know? Did he need to see them to know for certain that I was the person he was looking for? And how had he found me? Was the fact that the letter was written as it was, in a mix of languages, some kind of test? My head spun.

After the words ‘East City’ and the name of a hutong, he wrote fei chang dao. Fei chang dao was the second half of one of the most famous lines in a language that five thousand years of recorded history has crammed full of famous lines. The six-character line dao ke dao fei chang dao was the first sentence of the Daoist classic Dao De Jing, the one I’d mentioned to Lian that memorable day. The sentence has long bedevilled translators, beginning with the seventeenth-century Jesuits who wrestled it into Latin. Lin Yutang gave us: ‘The Tao that can be told of is not the absolute Tao.’ Robert G. Henricks: ‘As for the Way, the Way that can be spoken of is not the constant Way.’ Jean-Claude Lebensztejn: ‘La voie qu’on peut tracer n’est pas la voie constante’ and so on and so forth in every elegant and inelegant variation. Even Aleister Crowley gave it a burl: ‘The Tao-Path is not the All-Tao.’ You get the idea: fei chang dao = not real-deal Dao. On the other hand, on its own, and (mis) construed through the prism of the contemporary vernacular, which reads feichang as one word meaning ‘extraordinarily’ or ‘to an unusual extent’, you could possibly interpret it as meaning ‘extremely Dao’.

To quote Lebensztejn’s rendering of another line from the same stanza, ‘Obscur et toujours plus obscur.’ Which recalls Alice in Wonderland: Curiouser and curiouser. I did wonder into what sort of rabbit hole I was being led. Then I saw the signature and my jaw, obeying the cliché, dropped.

Unless I was mistaken, my correspondent was a contemporary and intimate of Sir Edmund Backhouse – and to the best of my knowledge had been dead for over forty years.

Either I had the name mixed up or it was a joke. A hoax. It had to be. And yet, what hoaxer was capable of writing a letter like that? Erudite in two languages, for one thing. If it was a hoax, only one man could have done such a thing and that was Backhouse himself. And he had died, without doubt, in 1944.

The combination of the ‘central heating’, an unenthusiastic emanation from just beneath the poorly insulated windows that faced into the courtyard, and the hardworking stand-alone heater gave my room a patchwork temperature, a tepid bath of air pocked with cold patches and radiant here and there with warmth – a confounding microclimate that could have been cooked up in a microwave oven. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw one of the thin curtains over the window flutter. I shivered. If there was ever a moment for believing in ghosts, this was it.

Surely, I was in error. It had been a long time since I’d read Hermit of Peking, which is where I’d learned about Reinhard Hoeppli, the professor–doctor who encouraged Backhouse to write his scandalous ‘memoirs’. Sliding off the ta, I shoved my feet into my fluffy slippers and shuffled over to the bookshelf. I ran a finger along the spines of my books, my fingertip collecting dust, until I found what I was looking for. The cream-coloured cover was plain, an old-fashioned red and black typographic design, framed within parallel lines, and a broken stain from a coffee cup circled the name of the author. It was a 1993 edition, published by Eland and much-thumbed by me; my original copy, a first edition from 1976, had disappeared in the course of my nomadic migrations, but I’d purchased it again, and this copy’s dog-eared state testified to my enduring fascination with Backhouse.

The Gallimard-like austerity of the book’s wrapping had always called to my mind the fantasy librarian who only has to remove her glasses and let down her hair to reveal the vamp inside. Open this plain tome and a world of lurid secrets, espionage, fraud, conspiracy and extravagant sexual intrigue spills out – making it in some ways not unlike Backhouse’s own biography of the Empress Dowager. I flicked through the familiar text, recalling with a jolt that Edmund Trelawny Backhouse was born in Darlington, my mother’s hometown. I’d noticed that before, but didn’t think too much of it. Had I missed some clue? His Quaker family belonged to the lowest class of the hereditary British aristocracy, entitling him to be called ‘Sir’ or ‘Baronet’. In 1882, at the age of nine, he went to St. George’s, Ascot, where the disciplinary attentions of the Reverend Herbert Sneyd-Kynnersley instilled in Backhouse a taste for the lash on bare buttocks. From there Backhouse went to Winchester, another British educational institution renowned for its punishment regimes.

After Winchester, Backhouse read classics at Merton College, Oxford, privately pursuing the study of Chinese, Japanese, Russian and other languages – and chastening me, re-reading about it now, for thinking I was pretty good for knowing Chinese and French. At Oxford he was known as a talented linguist and an eccentric, part of a circle devoted to, as the contemporary euphemism had it, ‘the Greek way of life’. He dropped out for a time because of a ‘nervous breakdown’. His lavish spending, which included buying gifts for the actress Ellen Terry, whom he worshipped, and donations to Oscar Wilde’s defence fund, left him bankrupt and with a debt of £23,000 by the age of twenty-two.

Backhouse slunk away from Oxford under obscure circumstances and without completing his studies. Another clue? Or just a coincidence? The next few years of his life are shrouded in mystery. He showed up in Peking in 1898, hoping to find work as an official translator for the Imperial Maritime Customs Service. Things didn’t go quite as he had hoped, but he managed to piece together a living (much as I do, it now occurred to me).

Sir Edmund, or Trelawny as he liked to be known, largely shunned foreign society, dressing himself in the robes of a Chinese scholar and living apart from the Legation Quarter that was the hub of expatriate life in the city. There are more than a few things about my life in China that echo his, though I’ve never gone so far as to shield my eyes with my handkerchief from the sight of other foreigners (even if, like every China studies tragic, I’ve sometimes felt the urge). When he did socialise, Backhouse seems to have charmed everyone he met with his old-world courtesies and apparent humility. His mastery of languages, which came to include Mongolian, was legendary.

He was always short of money, yet he refused payment for the translations of the Imperial Gazette and other sources for journalists like the Australian George Morrison, who relied on them for his reports for the London Times, as did Morrison’s colleague in Shanghai, J.O.P. Bland, later Backhouse’s co-author of China Under the Empress Dowager. In the early years of their acquaintance, Morrison was so impressed by Backhouse he called him ‘the greatest genius it has ever been my privilege to know’. Backhouse lived off a modest lecturer’s salary supplemented by the sale of valuable Chinese-language books and manuscripts, for which he had a great eye, as well as from an extraordinarily inventive and brazen series of scams, hoaxes and forgeries. Although my purpose in revisiting Trevor Roper’s biography of Backhouse was to search out references to my correspondent, I left myself in suspense as I revised Backhouse’s riveting history of scandal.

There was the sale of Chinese weapons to the British during World War I – shipments of guns and ammunition that always seemed to be caught up in some bureaucratic tangle or held up by bandits, never quite arriving – and the peddling of equally imaginary British warships to the Chinese. The detail was convincing: he didn’t just offer to procure guns for the War Office; he would get them one hundred and fifteen Skoda rapid-fire field guns that had been manufactured in 1911, together with their carriages, ammunition wagons and limbers, at £600 each. The mortification of the bamboozled generally ensured their silence. When challenged, Backhouse tended to go to ground, travel, feign illness.

Morrison was among the first to raise doubts about the authenticity of the Ching Shan diary that lay at the heart of China Under the Empress Dowager, though he could not prove any fraud. In his 1992 biography of Cixi, Dragon Lady, Sterling Seagrave speculates that the Australian may not have pressed the matter because he feared that a number of the rare Chinese manuscripts Backhouse had sold him over the years would turn out to be forgeries as well. (Morrison came to regard Backhouse as ‘wonderfully clever but morally unsound’.) In 1936, William Lewisohn, a journalist and China scholar, showed the diary to be an ingenious pastiche of published Chinese sources and unattributed paraphrases of Talleyrand and others whose words Ching Shan could not possibly have encountered.

Trevor-Roper wrote that when confronted with Lewisohn’s article, ‘Backhouse replied with Olympian urbanity’: thanking Lewisohn, he said the scholar–journalist’s investigation would make ‘a valuable addition to my library’. Backhouse then wrote to his vexed co-author, Bland, who had relied on Backhouse’s word that the diary was genuine, with an elaborate description of how he had found the journal in Ching Shan’s house in 1900. Again, his account was seductively detailed, to wit: Ching Shan had died three days earlier. Backhouse discovered his widow lying on her bed moaning with grief while her children urged her to eat. Gingerly entering the dead man’s study, Backhouse found it to be ‘inches deep’ in papers, books and manuscripts. He had always said that the rest of the diary, the parts that he hadn’t translated for China Under the Empress Dowager, would confirm the authenticity of the whole. But, asked to produce the supporting documents, he lamented that a ‘higher and more immediate interest, viz., BREAD AND BUTTER interest and RES ANGUSTA DOMI’ (i.e. the need ‘to keep the wolf from my door’) had led him to sell them. What’s more, he had done this with the help of his servant, friend and comprador Chang Ho-chai – and Chang himself was savagely murdered before he could let Backhouse know to whom the manuscript had gone. It was an unlikely story on the face of it, but given the fact that Chang had in truth been murdered, under murky circumstances, it was also impossible to disprove. As for any other evidence, he claimed it went up in flames when the Japanese raided his home. Backhouse, in short, without ever having published a novel, was a greater writer of fiction than I could ever hope to be.

The great drama of Backhouse’s life was already well into the final act when – and at last we get to him – the professor and medical doctor Hoeppli appeared on the scene. Hoeppli was a physician on the staff of Peking Union Medical College from 1930, a specialist in parasites, a ‘bon bourgeois’, bachelor and honorary Swiss consul in Peking from 1942. An acquaintance described him to Trevor-Roper as ‘a stiff, tight-lipped, old-maidish person, with an ambiguous expression and a secretive manner’.

Dr Hoeppli met ‘Sir Edmund’, as he always referred to him, when Backhouse was advanced in years and suffering from a variety of ailments. The doctor–professor appeared to have no knowledge of his new friend and patient’s scandalous past. He found Sir Edmund to be ‘a distinguished-looking old scholarly gentleman’ with womanly hands and ‘a definite charm’, who ‘spoke and behaved with exquisite, slightly old-style politeness’. But he also said something that none of Backhouse’s closest friends in China had come even close to saying before: that he was ‘the very picture of an old satyr’. This is where their story – and I suppose, by extension, mine – gets interesting. This is where the story starts getting pornographic. Which, if I were aiming to write a bestseller in one of those notebooks of mine, would be about bloody time.

Perhaps Backhouse, as ill-health drew him closer to death, just didn’t care to dissemble anymore. Or perhaps he wished to do so in a more flamboyant fashion than he had ever done in his life. Maybe, having made the surprising decision late in life to convert to Catholicism, he required a confessor. Whatever his motivation, over the two years of their acquaintance Backhouse regaled Dr Hoeppli with explicit tales of singular salaciousness concerning romps with British prime ministers, famous French poets, Chinese eunuchs, male prostitutes and more. He swore to the doctor that they were ‘veracious (however artless) from alpha to omega’.

Yet thirty years earlier, Backhouse had been so tested by the supposed indecency of a few mildly titillating passages about the lives of eunuchs and concubines in the manuscript of the Empress Dowager’s biography – passages he himself had supplied – that he begged Bland to cut them before publication. Bland insisted they stay. If anything, most people who knew Backhouse, in China at least, took him for prim, asexual and strait-laced. He responded to rumours that he was homosexual with indignation. Some of his closest friends described him, in good faith, as having no vices whatsoever.

I now pulled the book Décadence Mandchoue from my bookshelf. This was the second volume of memoirs that Dr Hoeppli would eventually type up for Backhouse. My copy still had its dust jacket, a luxurious midnight blue over which a gorgeous painting of green-gold flowers, leaves and branches danced. It showed its wear on the inside – spine broken (a bad habit of mine: I’m a physically assertive reader); the inevitable coffee stains; the odd dog-eared page; post-it notes on which I’d transcribed sections of text (‘her vulva like a lily drenched with rain’, ‘The latter, in the excited paroxysms of his advanced eroticism, had developed vampire habits’, ‘lascivious stroking of the anal cavity’ – that sort of thing) poking up willy-nilly from the book’s pages; and the odd underlined passage (‘Lien-ying took the view that, while men were available, there was no cause to have recourse towards animals’). Opening it at the first chapter, I found myself in the middle of a romp in the marvellously named Hall of Chaste Joys, a male brothel on Shitou Hutong in the old entertainment district of Tianqiao, south of Qianmen, with an exquisitely formed Chinese male prostitute called Cassia Flower. Orgasm, here and in the lingo of the time, referred to erection:

Then Cassia, whose orgasm surpassed my wildest imaginings, ordered me to recline face downwards upon the couch and in the gentlest, most effortless fashion proceeded to the pedicatio. Thanks to his timeous salve which lubricated and had analgesic properties, there was no difficulty about penetration, which was comparatively speaking sans secousse ou douleur; so that his very long, nay colossal (elephantine is the best epithet at my disposition), penis suffered little delay in entering my rectum up to the hilt. I had no sensation other than pleasurable, while he uttered a series of joyful exclamations, ‘this is heaven’, ‘what joy is this’, ‘how comforting’ …

‘Comforting’ – shufu . The first time we made love, Q asked me if I’d been ‘comforted’ – shufe le ma ? I thought he was making a joke and laughed. I didn’t realise back then that the common phrase for ‘comfort’ or ‘comfortable’ had another meaning in Chinese: Have you come?

There was no doubt in the case of Cassia Flower:

‘… he resumed his forcible action and after something like a quarter of an hour ejaculated in an abounding overflow like a salmon river in spate.’

Backhouse’s adventures, as detailed in Décadence Mandchoue, included trysts with the most supple of eunuchs and heterosexual of young noblemen. The wildest and most incredible of Backhouse’s stories, however, which he first shared with Dr Hoeppli, concerned the Empress Dowager Cixi herself. To untangle that twisted tale, however, we need to return to one of the most incendiary episodes in Chinese and indeed world history at the time: the Boxer Rebellion.

By the end of the nineteenth century, almost a century of incursions and insults to China’s sovereignty that began with the Opium Wars had left China’s key ports and resources in foreign hands. Even ‘little Japan’, having inflicted a painful defeat on China in the Sino–Japanese War of 1894–95, had carved up some of China’s sovereign territory for itself. Cixi quashed the Hundred Day Reforms of 1898, which might have helped to set the country on a fresh course. Drought and famine plagued the land. The government was incapable of either facing up to the foreign threat or helping its own people in crisis. Starving, alarmed, people watched as, in the country’s northeast, foreign engineers and entrepreneurs drove stakes into the ground for the transmission of ‘electrical reports’ (telegraphs) and laid down tracks over which their ‘fire cars’ (trains) could roar, in both cases breaking the rules of fengshui and snapping the spines of the dragons who lived beneath the earth. Foreign missionaries urged people to worship their one god, of whom there could be no images and who defied physical description, along with his son, said to be born of a virgin birth, while criticising Buddhist, Daoist and Confucian practices, including ancestor worship, as idolatry and superstition.

(I know. I’m a terrible history nerd. Can’t help myself. But stay with me. There’s a payoff.)

A band of peasant warriors arose to combat these evils. They called themselves the Regiment for Righteousness and Harmony, Yihetuan. In English, they were known as the Boxers. Whereas previous peasant rebellions from the start of the Qing advocated a return to native, Han Chinese, rule, the Boxers were pro-Manchu and pro-Qing. Believing that Christians drank the blood of Chinese babies, they attacked missionaries and their Chinese converts in the villages, hacking to death foreign men, women and children, murdering Chinese Christians and burning down their churches.

The year after Backhouse got to Peking, Boxers began filtering into the capital. Swaggering in red turbans and red girdles, flashing their amulets and swords, the Boxers put Peking’s foreign residents on edge. At court, opinion was divided, with one influential prince in support, and another opposed.

In the summer of 1900, the storm broke. Boxers surged into the city en masse, torching the racecourse; attacking the churches where Chinese Christians were sheltering, murdering priests and converts; burning down the homes and shops of Chinese citizens who dared use foreign inventions like paraffin lamps, and finally laying siege to the Legation Quarter with the help of some imperial troops. Despite his aversion to foreign society, Backhouse, now in his early thirties, sheltered there, surviving along with the others on the supplies of the Legation stores, the meat of horses and donkeys, and gifts of fruit and rice sent, somewhat bizarrely, by Cixi.

Fifty-five days later, foreign troops arrived and beat off the besiegers. The British, American, German, Japanese and Russian armies then rampaged through the city, raping, killing and looting. The sixty-five-year-old Cixi and her court, disguised as peasants, fled their advance. The foreign soldiers, closely followed by the rescued residents, poured into the Forbidden City, where imperial treasures now lay unguarded. The British minister Sir Claude MacDonald and his wife, according to Morrison, made off with no less than one hundred and eighty-five crates of loot. The Germans stole the huge astronomical instruments, made by Jesuits in the Ming dynasty, from atop the Observatory Tower of the city wall – and Backhouse, in Ching Shan’s house, found the man’s diaries, or so he would claim.

What he now told Hoeppli, however, added a sensational twist to an old tale. Professing himself sickened by the outrages and violence perpetrated on this most civilised of cities, he averred that, with the help of ‘trusty Manchus’, he managed to smuggle out of the Summer Palace ‘bronzes, jades, porcelain, ivories, paintings, calligraphy, cloisonné, lacquer, tapestries, carpets (some 600 pieces in all) and about 25,000 volumes’ of precious books and manuscripts, taking them to a ‘place of safety’ before the marauding representatives of what he’d come to think of as ‘the counterfeit Caucasian civilisation’ could get their sticky hands on them.

Two years later, he said, he had the opportunity to return these to the court. The Empress Dowager, he told Hoeppli, was so grateful for what he had done that she rewarded him with an honorary official position that allowed him access to the palace. The position came with court robes, a sable coat, gifts of rare books and gold – and even permission to ride on horseback within the Forbidden City. What’s more, she granted him an audience. When they met, he said, they spoke of many things. She interrogated him about Queen Victoria’s relations with her Mr Brown and rumours concerning Catherine the Great’s sexual appetite. She embarrassed him by asking what he thought of her ‘share’ in the Boxer rebellion, and as he fumbled for an answer, she shrugged. ‘I know: it was my guilt. I am to blame.’ On the other hand, she said that she didn’t really have much choice and that the foreigners had brought it on themselves. ‘Then she asked me what the reaction of the besieged had been to her gifts of watermelons, ice and cakes. Now that was awkward.’

‘What on earth did you tell her?’ Hoeppli asked.

‘The truth. That some of us, including myself, were very grateful. Others feared it was a plot to poison them. Their loss. The melons and the sweetmeats were most delicious. I assured her that people, and I believe these were my exact words, “could not realise that your only motive was kindness of heart and conveyed no political connotation”.’

It was not long after this, Backhouse claimed, that Chief Eunuch Li Lien-ying summoned him with rather more startling news: ‘The Old Ancestress will require the most intimate contact …’ And so began, in his telling, a most incredible affair.

‘You must perfume your whole person for the occasion. She has never seen a naked European of decent birth and will want to inspect you closely behind and before … Custom ordains that you should remain on your knees and I have prepared stuffed cushions for the purpose.’

Backhouse confided his nervousness to the chief eunuch: as his proclivities lay elsewhere, he explained, he feared he might have trouble exhibiting the level of sexual excitement that Her Majesty would no doubt require. Li assured him that there were potions for that – and also pliable eunuchs to be had as a reward for such service.

On the appointed day, Li helped Backhouse to prepare, anointing his genitals with sandalwood oil, laying before him a great repast and giving him a light cloak to wear. Eunuchs carried him in and presented him to the Old Buddha, as Cixi was known, who awaited him in her boudoir. All around them, a museum’s worth of European clocks ticked and tocked. Mirrors on every surface multiplied and fragmented the scene, giving it an even more surreal air (though this sensation may have owed something to the potion as well). The Empress Dowager was wearing a delicate robe that she allowed to fall open to reveal her naked body. She asked Backhouse to guess her age. He considered, before replying ‘between thirty and thirty-five’. She cried, ‘Flatterer.’ But, he told Hoeppli, she was not displeased.

‘Now exhibit to me your genitals,’ she commanded, ‘for I know I shall love them.’ By this time, he said, he had ‘an enormous orgasm and the Old Buddha fondled my verge and glans penis, kissing many times the urethral orifice or “meatus” (Ma Yen ), which was saturated in the exotic perfume. Then she played with my voluminous scrotum … and fondled my abundant pubic hair.’

Dr Hoeppli leaned forward in his chair. Backhouse, propped up against the headboard of his sickbed, closed his eyes – whether the better to recall the events he was describing, because he was tired, or for dramatic effect, the physician couldn’t tell. When he did not immediately open them again, Dr Hoeppli could scarcely contain his curiosity, and had to exercise the utmost self-control not to shake his patient awake. At last, Backhouse, drawing in a long breath, opened his eyes and blinked.

‘She bade me contemplate her august Person and I admired the abundant wealth of pubic hair, while at her command I took in my hands her abnormally large clitoris, pressed toward it my lips and performed a slow but steady friction which increased its size. She graciously unveiled the mysteries of her swelling vulva, even as that of Messalina, and I marvelled at the perennial youth which its abundance seemed to indicate. She allowed me to fondle her breasts which were those of a young married woman; her skin was exquisitely scented … her whole body, small and shapely, was redolent with la joie de vivre; her shapely buttocks pearly and large were presented to my admiring contemplation: I felt for her a real libidinous passion such as no woman has ever inspired in my pervert homosexual mind before nor since … Then Her Majesty bade me place my scented fingers inside her vulva and apply my lips to its ample surface. As I expected, she next told me to kneel over the couch in the full glare of the garish light and the reflection of the mirrors which presented the counterfeit resemblance of my buttocks which she graciously likened to a peach; she minutely inspected the fundament until she bade me open up with my two forefingers and caressed it with her long-nailed index, inserting it (to my discomfort) inside the anus. Then she drew closer and brought her erect clitoris into juxtaposition of my “trou fignon” which she poetically compared to a rose-bud. She worked the member (which Marie Antoinette so loved in the Princesse de Lamballe) backward and forward inside my anus; until, after perhaps five minutes or more, the gratifying titillation caused her to exclaim: “Shu Fu ” …’

Backhouse paused again here to eat a ripe strawberry from a basket that Hoeppli, knowing how much he enjoyed them, had brought to his bedside as a gift. He continued: ‘I cannot explain why, but a definite discharge of a sticky fluid wetted me in and around the anal cavity.

‘“Ta Yen’rh ,” said she: “Large anus: I’ll warrant that it has seen service.”

‘“Yes, Your Majesty, I’ll not deny it and plead guilty to the impeachment.”

‘“How many times?”

‘“Innumerable as the hairs of the head,” replied I unblushingly.’

‘You must write down these adventures,’ Dr Hoeppli declared at last. ‘And I shall pay you for the manuscript.’

Despite suffering at the time from high blood pressure, dizziness and ‘prostatic hyperplasia with urinary troubles’, Backhouse, adrenalised by the promise of money as well as delight at the thought of the posthumous shock he’d deliver to all who thought they knew him, prepared two fat handwritten manuscripts, The Dead Past (detailing erotic capers in Europe, including sex with British prime ministers, the French poet Paul-Marie Verlaine and Oscar Wilde) and Décadence Mandchoue, from which the above quotations are taken. He gave them to his friend.

Hoeppli, a man of science, was not entirely credulous. He questioned Backhouse about some of the more far-fetched coincidences and logical contradictions in the narrative. Conceding that memory might have failed him here and there, Backhouse revised them accordingly. In the end, as he wrote in his afterword to the manuscripts, they were ‘not purely imaginary but are fundamentally based on facts’.

Anticipating their eventual publication, Dr Hoeppli typed up four copies of the manuscripts and added some annotations. He boxed them in the simple but elegant fashion of Chinese books and dispatched the copies to the library of the British Museum in London, the Bodleian Library in Oxford, Paris’s Bibliothèque Nationale and the Harvard College Library in Cambridge. He sensed the time was not yet right for their publication.

Okay, so I made up the bit about the strawberries, though it is on record that Backhouse liked them, and imagined the conversation between Hoeppli and Backhouse. As for the rest, check out Décadence Mandchoue yourself if you don’t believe me. It’s even available as an e-book. Having been deemed, like its sibling Dead Past, to be historically ‘worthless’ by Hugh Trevor-Roper, who found their ‘cascade of dropped crowns and coronets’ ridiculous and improbable, and thanks to its explicit content, Décadence Mandchoue wasn’t published until 2011. Derek Sandhaus, the editor, who meticulously annotated the wildly, sometimes hilariously pedantic work (pedicatio – anal sex; sans secousse ou douleur – without a shudder or pain; trou fignon – anus, etc.) has written that the book is almost impossible to classify: ‘Is it autobiography, fiction or non-fiction?’ I met Derek when he was speaking at a literary festival in Beijing. I confessed that I had written a failed novel on the subject of Backhouse and Cixi when all I had ever seen of Décadence Mandchoue were a few published fragments. After the publication of the full manuscript, I told him, I was astonished by its imaginative perversity. I hadn’t come close to matching it. If I were ever to approach the subject again, I would want to quote extensively from the original. He said to stay in touch and kindly gave me his email.

I think that most readers would agree with the general assessment of the experts that the value of Backhouse’s memoir lies in its being a ‘little gem of English erotic literature’, as Robert Aldrich, Professor of European History at the University of Sydney, has written, and a fascinating insight into the psychology of one of the greatest hoaxers of the twentieth century. Frank Dikötter, Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong, called it ‘one of the most outrageous, colourful and hilarious memoirs ever written’ and ‘so pornographic’ that it makes William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch ‘look like a fairy tale for children’.

Great fun, in other words, but nothing to be taken too seriously. There are just two things that potentially upset the picture. One is the revelation by Hoeppli in his afterword to Décadence Mandchoue that the first time his own rickshaw puller, a dispossessed Manchu, saw Backhouse, ‘he mentioned spontaneously that there was a rumour that this old man in bygone days had been a lover of the Empress Dowager’. (I’ve occasionally wondered if the rickshaw puller was in fact Mrs Jin’s grandfather but his name goes unrecorded.) Hoeppli may have been many things, including gullible, but no one ever suggested that, like his notorious friend, he was a rogue. Or a liar.

The second thing was the letter I had received that day.

A brief note, before we move on, about Hugh Trevor-Roper, Lord Dacre of Glanton and a respected Cambridge historian whose prolific work also includes such tomes as The Rise of Christian Europe, The Age of Expansion, The Philby Affair and a number of studies of Nazi Germany. Critics lavished praise on Hermit of Peking when it appeared in 1976. The New York Times declared it a classic. The Times of London wrote: ‘The reader is throughout amused, amazed and enthralled.’ The Observer called it both ‘a very well-told story’ and ‘a brilliant piece of research’.

Hugh Trevor-Roper’s deep fascination with Backhouse’s sensational, masterly hoaxes and forgeries became in itself the subject of interest in 1983, when he first authenticated then withdrew support for the ‘Hitler Diaries’ – which Rupert Murdoch decided to publish anyway. They turned out to be, as he came to suspect, a forgery.

Jesus, I was easily distracted. It was well past eleven a.m. Twelve hours might be a long time to wait for the answer to life’s questions. But it was a short time to translate the subtitles for an entire film.

Putting away my books with some reluctance, and making a fresh cup of coffee, I returned to the ta, racy on a combination of adrenaline, nervous speculation and the smell of the brew. I pulled on my fingerless gloves and savoured the warmth of the cup against my fingertips. A movie by Chen Kaige I had once subtitled included a routine by Beijing comedians about fingerless gloves, which they found hilarious – what was the point? Pay a little more and get full coverage! I take it they didn’t spend a lot of time trying to type in a cold room.

Needing to get straight to work, I did what anyone in my situation would do: I checked my emails. An exceedingly courteous Nigerian general’s wife wished to deposit US$3.4 million dollars into my account. I wasn’t the most financially astute person in the world, a fact to which my circumstances bore witness, but neither was I born yesterday. I was born a long time before yesterday. I pressed delete. An online Chinese travel agency was having a special on fares to Gansu province. Winter in Gansu was even more ghastly than winter in Beijing. Delete. An old high-school classmate now living in Sydney announced her retirement in a group email. Her kids were fabulous and ‘all growed up! ;-)’. She and Rob were going to sell their house and move back to the coast. I had no retirement plan, no kids, no Rob and no house. No coast. Delete.

Facebook is blocked here, which frankly is something of a relief. I don’t need that ticker-tape parade of life passing by my window every day with its marching bands, wacky floats and delirious crowds: the quintessential hongchen, ‘red dust’, a world of materiality, illusion and desire from which both Buddhism and Daoism aspire to liberate us. Besides, what the hell was my status? Political widow? Could you be a widow if you weren’t married?

Q, I willed, call me. Please just call me. Tell me that everything is okay. The phone was mute. Its digital clock didn’t even have the decency to tick. Was there an app for that? I checked, gave up. Another ten minutes passed.

I texted Q. Long time no imperial summons, I wrote and hit send. I then repeated the message on WeChat. I often thought it would be best, in some ways, if he would leave me alone, and me him, for good. I’d tried to put him behind me before. But this thing, this crazy letter from a dead man offering a key to my past, the drink-me potion that would transport me to the other side of the looking glass – Q would be interested. He was like that: omni-curious, eager to see what lay just around the corners of life, drawn as readily to darkness as he was to light. And I longed to show him how much I belonged here. I wished, for the millionth sickening time, that I hadn’t argued with him, that I could stop arguing with him once and for all. My heart pressed against my ribs. No text came in reply. He’s just not that into me? Believe me: that’s not the problem.

The curtain fluttered again. It would have been carried on one of those colliding currents of air, the warmth heaven-bound, the cold crashing to earth. I squinted out the window at the mustard-smear sky, with its toxic promise of streaming eyes and a smarting throat: ‘that great yellow eye of the Pei-king sky’ the poet Victor Segalen called it over a century ago, when it was simply Gobi desert sand, and not smog, that made it so.

Segalen was another one with an empress dowager fixation. For him, it was Cixi’s relatively unremarkable successor, the mother of the three-year-old emperor Puyi, who took the throne when Cixi and her emperor nephew died in 1908. Segalen’s René Leys, a novel in the form of a memoir – Segalen uses his own name for the narrator – tells the story of a remarkable young linguist, the Belgian René Leys, who gains not just the confidence of the young empress dowager, but access to her bed and admission to the secretive and guarded world of the Forbidden City and even joins its internal police: ‘… the red wall, the yellow wall, the impenetrable purple wall had abruptly become delicate, diaphanous webs that I should pierce and pass through like child’s play’. René Leys was inspired by Segalen’s Chinese tutor, a young Frenchman called Maurice Roy who in his later years became a bank clerk, refusing to speak about his past, and who died in a lift accident in Shanghai. It’s a bit like that here – it can be as easy for a foreigner to try on a new identity and discard an old one as it is to carry a fake Gucci and toast one’s friends with a counterfeit Bordeaux labelled Château Margaux. Was Maurice Roy a bank clerk pretending to have been an empress dowager’s lover and former security operative, or an empress dowager’s lover and former security operative pretending to be a bank clerk? Was René Leys also based, as some have suggested, on Backhouse himself? (All roads lead …!) Nothing here was ever completely transparent; in recent decades even the air has become opaque.

On this day, the air was exceptionally vile. It squatted over the courtyard, crushing the trees, sliding down the sloped and tiled roofs to defecate on the window ledges. It was a Sisyphean task to keep any courtyard house in Beijing from being buried in sand and atmospheric vomit. Though a straight line led from my door in what used to be the Jin family gatehouse through to the inner courtyard where Mrs Jin lived with a floating population of nieces, nephews and old friends, I couldn’t even see her door this morning. The ornamental gate that separated my mini-courtyard from the main one floated like a mirage outside my windows. Mrs Jin had appeared ghostlike out of this stew – not unlike, I supposed, the way the mysterious messenger on horseback had earlier appeared to her. It occurred to me that the reason she hadn’t seen the horse at first was that it was masked by this ambient cloak of invisibility.

A great wind blew up and hurled the gritty air against my rattling windows and thin door. It whipped the branches of the trees and bent their slim trunks and, somewhere in the courtyard, flung a ceramic pot down onto the stones, where the sound of its shattering came rushing through the confusion like the message in a dream.

There was no reply to my text or message on WeChat. Fine. Fuck him.

My best friend, Jingjing, was back in the US, wrapping up some complicated financial business there. I thought about sending her a message on WeChat but the time zones were all wrong.

It was nearly noon.

I keep running into young foreigners here who want to be subtitlers. Before the Global Financial Crisis, they were in it for the presumed glory, the stardust they assumed sprinkled itself over anyone who managed to come within the orbit of the great and glorious Chinese film industry.

Once, a few years back, Duan Mou invited me to come and watch him film in a small town in the southeast. I stayed for a week with the cast and crew in a hotel that, like the rest of the little town, appeared to have dropped from another plane of reality into the middle of some rice paddies. The lobby of the hotel soared to a Venetian dome, from which mosaic tiles plunged randomly, plinking and smashing on the rough marble floor. As the sole occupants of the hotel, we knew to walk around the danger zone, where the daily growing heap of broken tiles came to resemble some kind of dynamic contemporary art installation. Every floor had a faux-Louis XIV lounge suite by the lift, gathering dust. One day, I saw the maids polishing the faux-velvet upholstery of the lounge suite on my floor with faux-Lemon Pledge – the label, I noticed, read Lemon Pedge. In the rooms, too, it was all trappings and no fittings – a marble shower but no hot water, and a plush-looking carpet composed of a grimy synthetic, scarred with cigarette burns. The lifts were impressively wood-panelled and leather-faced – until your eye focused on where they’d got chipped or torn, and then they exposed themselves as plywood and vinyl.

The director liked the hotel because it was a bit like a film set, a kind of fakery that, in the right light and framed correctly, becomes magic; in fact, when I took a photo of the lobby and emailed it to a friend, she thought it looked five-star. One day, the star of the film, one of China’s top actresses, asked if I wanted to do Pilates with her. She’d brought along a personal instructor from Shanghai as part of her entourage. While doing one of the exercises, I accidentally kicked her Chihuahua across the room. It flew back to sink its needle-like teeth into my ankle. As her personal assistant rushed off in search of antiseptic and bandages, the superstar gave the little rat a slap across its tiny nose. ‘Bad girl.’ Resuming her position on the mat, she assured me, ‘It happens all the time. Don’t feel bad.’ I didn’t.

Stardust. I’m covered in it.

I never thought that at my age, I’d be renting thin, under-heated rooms, one long room really, and worrying about the rent. I’d missed the boat that my old classmate in Sydney and nearly everyone else my age back home seemed to have caught. It’s funny. I was the smart one, the one who didn’t fool around all that much with drugs or boys – hardly a saint, but far from the wildest kid in the class, and the one who actually enjoyed doing her essays at school and took pride in handing them in on time, too (you could have tortured me at the time, of course, and I’d never have admitted it). But I always wanted to travel the world, not buy a little square of it, and have adventures, not kids. Foolishly, I assumed that at the end of my far less straight and narrow road there’d be rewards of glory and, if not wealth, at least not the punishment of poverty. I’m not complaining about my situation – I have a lovely old roof over my head, and there are plenty of people, even on this little hutong, who’d give their right hand and probably a foot too to enjoy the use of a non-communal toilet, not to mention all the other comforts that are mine. I’m not hungry, and I can still afford to buy naan from the Indian restaurant down the street and bread from the French bakery at Donghu. I’m in reasonable demand as a movie subtitler. But I’m not a famous published author either, and that, along with true love, was my vain dream. Love, I once believed, would insulate me from all other woes; I hadn’t yet made the connection between love itself and woe.

I did finally find a publisher for The Empress Lover, incidentally. Over the years, I submitted it to every major publisher in Australia, the UK and the US. No A-list publisher was interested, and the B-list never returned my phone calls. Then a few years back, I was giving it another go, working down the C-list, when someone at a small Hong Kong press heard about it and offered to take it up. On the eve of its release, the publishing house’s offices were consumed in a suspicious fire. It appears that once the publishers collected the insurance money, they disappeared off the face of the earth. I know they did publish the book, because they sent me an advance copy; they must have had some sense of conscience. Where the rest ended up, I never found out. I assumed that if any copies survived the fire, the company’s liquidators, true to their name, had taken them straight to the pulp mill along with my dreams.

I still want to write that bestseller, that airport novel. But even more I want to write that massive thing. I want to write the truth. It’s a spectacularly difficult thing to do. While writing The Empress Lover, I thought long and hard about Edmund Backhouse, wondering about his motivations. Were the forgeries and scams a subconscious response to having to keep hidden his homosexuality? Were they the games of a rogue genius who saw them as a kind of revenge on all those in society against whom he harboured a grudge? Were they a way of avoiding confrontation with some uncomfortable truth, about himself or his reality perhaps? Or had his fantasy life slipped its leash to run riot in his complicated mind? A combination? Sometimes, I wondered about myself, my own ability to recognise and patrol the boundaries between fantasy, memory and reality. Was it even possible? Life was fuza.

Fuza. . According to my Gu Hanyu xiao zidian, my ‘little dictionary of classical Chinese’, the first character in this combination, fu (fourth tone) carries meanings of return, repeat, recover, but also tell, answer and even avenge. The second, za (second tone), originally signified a number of things, including a mix of colours, a combining, a collecting and even an inclusive whole. Recovering or returning to or even avenging that combined whole, with all its varied hues and tones: complicated.

I always watch a film all the way through before beginning to subtitle it. I finally opened the Quicktime file that Duan Mou had sent me. ‘Wow me,’ I commanded, leaning back against a stack of brightly coloured silk pillows. I’ve never been wealthy, but silk wasn’t too expensive, especially if you stuck with remnants. I buy silk whenever I feel sad. That special tea-chest where I keep Q’s letters? It’s full of it.

A red mist filling the screen cleared to reveal a pianist, wearing a tuxedo and playing Bartok on a grand piano in one of those sprawling illegal garbage dumps that girdle Beijing outside the Sixth Ring Road. Migrant workers wearing random combinations of discarded clothing sloped about with fistfuls of plastic and cloth. A hopeful start. But as it rolled on, my heart began to sink.

I should have known it would be trouble the instant Duan Mou called again, after Mrs Jin had gone, to talk about the film. After the conversation with Tarantino’s rep, he told me, he’d been up all night agonising over whether it should premiere at Sundance or Berlin. It was probably too late for Berlin, he mused. Maybe Cannes was a better choice. Or Venice, though now that the Mandarin-speaking former chairman of the Venice film festival, Marco Mueller, had moved to take over the festival in Rome, he probably wouldn’t have a shot at opening Venice. He was sure that Chairman Ma – as Mueller was known here – would have loved it. He had never met Chairman Ma, which was a shame, because Chairman Ma hadn’t been all that interested in the sort of films he used to make. That he never really wanted to make again. He told me that this film was full of deep meaning and reflection on what it meant to be human. What it meant to live in the world as it was and not how we wanted it to be, to exist in reality and not in dreams and to face the consequences of that. Duan Mou then asked me if I knew the process by which a foreign film got nominated for an Oscar. He wondered which Hollywood star he would enlist for the big-budget but artistically sound American film he’d inevitably be invited to make once this was out there. He was leaning towards Leonardo DiCaprio because everyone in China knew him from Titanic. Did he need a tuxedo for Cannes or those other European festivals? He’d feel weird in a tuxedo. Perhaps he should wear one of those retro Han dynasty robes that were all the rage a few years back, though he’d once seen a photograph of some dodgy poet swanning about in one at some function in New York and the sight had made him cringe. He photographed best in black. It was just that a tuxedo …

I told him he’d look hot in a tuxedo.

‘Really? Do you think so?’ he replied.

‘Sure,’ I said, not meaning it. I then suggested that he keep in mind that there were a lot of other interesting festivals out there, like Toronto, Busan and Rotterdam, but he assured me he was aiming for the top. The world had been waiting for this film. Listening to him, I wondered at the process by which people in the arts here could turn, seemingly overnight, from perfectly normal human beings to out-of-control megalomaniacs.

I was trying to make sense of a dissolve that abruptly ended in a jump cut to an empress – a young Cixi? Hard to tell. Her court, attired in what appeared to be Qing robes as Comme des Garçons might have interpreted them circa 1985, kowtowed, arse-up to the camera. We could still hear the Bartok. ‘I had a dream last night,’ the empress announced to her court. She then proceeded to relate the contents of her dream, but it sounded like gobbledygook to me. I paused the film and consulted the script. It took me a while to work out that she was speaking backwards. The dream involved escaping from the red and purple walls that caged her, a chorus of crickets, ships of lost souls afloat on a limitless golden sea, dishes of fish-flavoured eggplant, the number 98, a kunqu opera about lesbian love in a Buddhist temple, climate change and auto-asphyxiation, which may or may not have been referring to Beijing’s air pollution. The rant was peppered with exclamations like ‘Oh, cats!’ (‘Cats, oh!’ rather) and ‘Briefcase, spaghetti!’

I pressed play again. The camera now focused on the face of a hard-eyed, soft-cheeked eunuch. Then, as the empress droned on, Bartok still playing in the background, a rapid-fire montage began that intercut between the empress, the pianist and the eunuch, who dropped to the ground and began writhing in some sort of interpretative dance while clutching at his voided crotch.

That was just the opening sequence. It was clear as day compared to the rest of the film, which consisted of unrelated fragments, the pianist and the eunuch only returning at the end. We never saw the empress, of whom I’d grown rather fond, again. To put it kindly, the whole thing was incomprehensible. To put it harshly, it was – as we would say in Oz – a wank.

I would probably have loved it when I was at university. For a while, in my second year, I was mad for an avant-garde playwright who only staged his ‘events’ at midnight, or six-thirty in the morning, in order to subvert bourgeois conceptions of what theatre was about. ‘Theatre is not something you do to fill in the time after dinner!’ Simon would shout. (The ‘bourgeoisie’ of Canberra, that is, public servants and academics, couldn’t go to the theatre before dinner because at the time, no decent restaurant in the city, our national capital, was open that late.) Once, he decided to construct a literal ‘fourth wall’ between the audience and the stage, forcing people to try to climb the wall. (Most gave up and went home instead.) It never occurred to Simon that he wasn’t shaking up the bourgeoisie at all, as they never went to any of his plays. The audience was mainly other students, people like myself. I went to all of his plays because – I admit it – I wanted to fuck him. (He turned out to be disconcertingly vanilla in the sack.) He would have loved this film.

Maybe I was being harsh. It was entirely possible that I wasn’t paying enough attention because I was so distracted by the letter. I might have missed something. So I made another cup of coffee, wrote a note to myself to get more milk from BHG Market Place next time I was in Sanlitun, stacked my silk-covered pillows on the ta in an approximation of ergonomic, and watched it again. It seemed more devoid of narrative logic the second time round, if that were possible. I could translate lines backwards – I could even write the words sdrawkcab – but I feared it wasn’t going to help. My dilemma was this: because the movie made so little sense in Chinese, it made even less sense in English. That would be fine if people understood that’s how it was. But if foreign festival directors, reviewers or, God forbid, distributors, missing all those deep meanings, dismissed it as incomprehensible, Duan Mou would end up blaming me. I knew how things worked.

Then again, maybe I didn’t. Looking back on my life to date, I wasn’t sure that I knew how anything worked. Every time I thought I did, I’d been proved wrong. Take Q, for example. Jingjing has told me to stop taking Q for an example – or for anything else. ‘Get over it,’ she told me. She said she’d only say that once. And she kept to her word. Jingjing is the ultimate move-on girl.

I had a girlfriend like that in Australia, Gemma, a clear-thinking, no-nonsense and resourceful foil to my muddle-headed, intellectual airy-fairyness. We went to university together. I started projects. She finished them. I had big ideas. She had practical ones. I was good at languages. She was good at communication. She applied a crude but unequivocal gesture whenever I was dithering about something, in which she pulled her forefinger smartly out of the closed fist of her other hand while making a kissing sound. Pull the finger out.

My hand, working against my brain, snatched up the phone and dialled. My brain, working against my hand, cancelled the call. I could imagine Q at that moment, his handsome face dignified by the streaks of silver in his still-thick hair and the fine lines fanning out from his still-sparkling eyes, speaking at some important meeting. Whatever the subject, he was ever the charismatic commander, rallying his troops. In my mind’s eye he was always striking a heroic pose, like one of those figures in a Cultural Revolution poster. Or maybe just the pose of a poet – they were given to heroic gesture too back in the day. He started out wanting the world to change. Then he wanted to change the world. But in the end, the world changed him. Despite all that had happened, his history, our history, history’s history and the chasm that had opened up between us, I loved him still. My silly. My bad. My good.

I conjured up an image of his wife, the pretty, well-connected, well-bred, well-groomed type his mother preferred, and who had given him a perfect child. The wife might have dropped in to the office for lunch. In Chen Kaige’s Caught in the Web (the one with the jokes about fingerless gloves), there’s a scene in which the wife of a corporate CEO walks into her husband’s office unannounced to discover his comely young assistant in his arms. It was a huge misunderstanding, as it turned out, far more innocent than it appeared, but there was enough dangerous possibility there for the wife to think the worst, and to act on those thoughts. I imagined this happening with Q and his wife. But I didn’t like the thought of the sexy young girl in his arms any more than she would have. I crumpled up this obnoxious vision and binned it before it could stick in my brain like a voodoo pin.

Counting ten breaths, I dialled again. A recorded voice informed me, in Chinese and then in English, that the subscriber I had dialled was ‘power off’. An unlikely story. Power off was one thing that Q never was. Never had been. Never would be.

Despite the door snake and all the creaking efforts of the gas heaters, the cold crept through the glass and into my bones. I shivered and hunched into my doona, but for all the discomfort, the recurrent colds, chapped lips and numb toes, I revelled in the winter. Odd as it may seem, as the years have passed, winter has become my favourite season in Beijing. I love hiding myself under layers of under-and outerwear, scarves and hats and woollen socks over leggings over tights. Summer is a season of exposure and vulnerability. Even one’s pores are open. Winter is all about concealment and impenetrability. I like the way fresh snow hides the city’s dirty secrets and makes it beautiful and new again.

And yet, when I was younger it was the summers I loved, their muggy, hopeless, gritty languor. Old men rolling up their thin vests to air soft sweaty tummies and younger ones doing the same to show off their shining lean brown torsos. Middle-aged women perching on the mendun’r, the stone seals or drums at the doorways of hutong residences, knees splayed, fanning themselves with their skirts. The repairman who patched my bicycle tyres taking his afternoon siesta on a low camp bed which he set up on the pavement by his tool kit, and the watchmen at the Friendship Hotel, where I lived, napping in the guardhouses. There were no outdoor cafes or bars – you had to make your own fun then, and people did, strolling in the parks and the grounds of derelict temples, swimming at the Miyun Reservoir and picnicking in gorges and valleys defended by crumbling Great Walls. Beijing summers had a particular smell, a sweaty, smoky, garlicky, earthy pungency. Although I had yet to acquire a taste for chou doufu, ‘stinky bean curd’ (the very smell of it used to make me gag), and to this day can’t claim I’ve truly acclimatised to the diabolical microclimate of Beijing’s public toilets on a warm day, the sheer intensity of the olfactory assault that Beijing launched upon itself on a hot summer day made you feel alive in every cell of your body. Dripping with sweat, caked with dust, drenched now and then with a rain that fell in sheets, alive. Having somehow held together by day in this city that mysteriously manages to be both parched and muggy, those who are young and ripened by heat, Chinese and foreigner alike, slide into dishabillé on the balm of Beijing’s summer nights.

Summer in Beijing often jumps out from behind the curtain in early May like an overeager showgirl, shaking her feathers before getting hauled backstage again. She tiptoes back out by the end of the month and in June the season is in full swing, with the odd intermission. She launches into a full, raucous can-can in July and August, complete with those crazy showers and oppressive humidity. As she winds down the show in September and October, thinning the peaches, fattening the grapes, withering the lotus flowers in the lakes and taking a paintbrush to the hills, people begin to feel nostalgic, speak of her in the past tense and sigh in anticipation of the long wait for her return.

It was on one of those hot, moist, dreamy late summer nights that I first met Q.

It was 1981. My glasses were big, my jeans were high-waisted, tight and probably featured white stitching on the seams and pockets. (Another reason to be happy that I was born in the pre-Instagram era: of these crimes against style I’ve left no proof.) I wore a Japanese T-shirt emblazoned with nonsense English – ‘JUN gentleman duck angels’, that sort of thing. Pedalling hard in Jingjing’s slipstream, I raced after her along the dirt roads that wound through the villages blending out from the northwestern suburbs.

Jingjing was the daughter of one of the editors at the Foreign Languages Press in Baiwanzhuang where I worked. She was a year older than me. We hit it off from the start. She was a typical Beijing girl of the time, tall, big-hearted, confident, loyal, potty-mouthed and funny. She spoke with that classic back-of-throat Beijing burr, rattling off thoughts and quips and gossip as quickly as she walked or cycled with those long, long legs; me tagging along after her like some awestruck little sister.

Jingjing was alert to everything that was interesting. If there was news flying up and down the hutongs, Jingjing was the airstrip. She knew where all the cool stuff was happening – those days were way before Time Out Beijing, The Beijinger, That’s Beijing and all the rest, with their guides to the city’s restaurants and nightlife; those were the days before Beijing even had any nightlife. Before mobile phones and the internet. Reporters called in their copy or filed by telex, a technology that was driven to extinction by fax machines. All that might seem as hard to imagine today as the fact that back in the early eighties in Beijing there was nothing cooler, nothing more hip or edgy, than an ‘underground’ poetry reading. The Party distrusted obliqueness and ambiguity – the bywords of ‘underground’ poetry – almost as much as they hated outright dissent. While the authorities only occasionally moved against poets, the presence of secret police at their gatherings and the odd thundering editorial in the People’s Daily against cultural miscreants like ‘misty’ poets and abstract artists, lent the gatherings an outlaw frisson.

Back then, Beijing’s young people spoke of art and books and ideas as if they were the most important things on earth. I loved it. I felt the same way (and still do, crazily enough). These, I thought, were my people. No one owned much of anything – everyone was poor and more or less to the same extent as everyone else. My salary at the Foreign Languages Press, a risible $20 a month or so, made me richer than any of my Chinese friends, but not in a way that put me in another class altogether. As Jingjing put it, ‘We’re the poor peasants and you are what’s called a “middle” peasant. You’re still closer to us than the landlords of Jianguomenwai.’ Jianguomenwai was where most of the diplomats and press corps lived on expatriate salaries with ‘hardship post’ benefits in spacious government-managed apartments that had hot running water every day of the week.

My Shanghai-made, Phoenix-brand bicycle, a shiny blue, was about as good as it got. It wasn’t as though people didn’t crave a better life, but the consumer society and the unabashed, one-eyed materialism that was later to take hold was a long way off. Only the most privileged families and those of us who lived in places like the Friendship Hotel had access to private telephones; most people shared neighbourhood phones manned by a nosy and shuffling member of the Neighbourhood Committee who’d announce incomings to the world at large through a megaphone and then settle in to listen to everything you said. So most of the time, people didn’t bother calling. They either wrote a letter to say they’d be dropping by and posted it a day or two ahead of time or simply popped in. Most workplaces (called danwei: ‘work units’) were devoted to clock-watching and endless meetings, productiveness was optional and the employees often focused on the knitting of scarves and jumpers. No one was very busy, no one took work home. Everyone took an after-lunch nap, either at their workplace or, if they lived close enough, at home. (Things weren’t so different in Taiwan when I first went there – I once had the excruciating experience of accidentally waking up an entire bank, from guards to tellers, when I arrived at noon to change some money.) The economy, which would later pick up bullet-train speed, in those early years of the Reform Era shuffled along in black cloth slippers with rag soles. That left all the time in the world for living. We’d bicycle through the hutongs and across the wider streets from one friend’s place to the next, sometimes in convoy, making up ways to pass the days.

That afternoon, we were on our way to a gathering at the ruins of the Yuanmingyuan, the Old Summer Palace. Its neglected, overgrown grounds, tumble-down marble columns, grandeur and desolation made the Yuanmingyuan a paradise for poets, strewn with metaphors as much as weeds. Yang Lian, a roguishly attractive young poet, wrote one of my favourite Yuanmingyuan poems, ‘Apologia – to a Ruin’, which the great translator John Minford later put into English:

In the troubled mist

Searching for my eyes

Here in the grey shattered sunlight

Arches, stone pillars cast shadows

Cast memories blacker than scorched earth …

I come to this ruin

Seeking the only hope that has illumined me

Faint star out of its time

Destiny, blind cloud

Pitiless chiaroscuro of my soul

No, I have not come to lament death! It is not death

Has drawn me to this desolate world

I defy all waste and degradation

– These swaddling clothes

Are a sun that will not be contained in the grave …

The city has grown around the Yuanmingyuan now, swallowed it whole, fenced it in and made it ordinary with a schmick new subway station, licensed vendors and fixed-up footpaths. Back then, it was on the outskirts, about an hour’s bike ride from the centre of town. And so we pedalled on through the ramshackle villages of the urban periphery, over narrow roads where life smelled of chickens and pigs and food frying in peanut oil. Peasants stopped what they were doing to stare as we sailed past, the fluoro-pink and lime-green vests they wore in those days glowing like tropical flowers in the incandescence of the late-afternoon sunlight. Earlier that day Jingjing and I had swum together at the huge Friendship Hotel pool. She’d dared me to jump off the high diving board. I’d always been afraid of heights. I was unable to stop myself from comically spinning my legs the whole way down like Wile E. Coyote going off a cliff, and probably yelping too, but I did it. I hit the water with an uncoordinated bang and somersaulted on under, the broken sunlight leading me back to the surface, spluttering and gasping and laughing with amazement. I did it again, just to show Jingjing I could do it properly, like she did, with air and grace – and bicycled just as hard on the way down the second time, yelling even louder but, in the end, having got a toehold on the bottom, bursting from the surface like an orca.

I remember feeling suffused with joy that day, certain that there was no place in the world better to be, and full of an inchoate anticipation. Perhaps that is just what I remember in retrospect, for when you are young, life paradoxically seems to be both exactly where you are and also waiting for you around the next corner.

Cycling past the crumbling old temple near Yuanmingyuan’s West Gate, we arrived at the marble and stone shambles that were all that remained of the rococo piles of the Western Palaces, built for the Qianlong emperor by the Jesuits and destroyed by British and French topps at the end of the Opium Wars, in 1860.

I was still fiddling with my bicycle lock when a hubbub of girls swallowed up Jingjing. Wiping the sweat from my forehead with my sleeve, I saw Q for the first time. He glided up, swinging one leg lazily over the back wheel of his bike and bringing it forward to balance toe to heel with the foot that still rested on the pedal, finally by some miracle slowing to a stop beside me, his intense gaze fixing on me. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with an unruly shock of hair and proud looks. Even under the baggy trousers and faded old ‘Mao suit’ jacket, his body appeared as strong as it was lean. He was, I thought in that instant, the most stunning man I’d ever laid eyes on.

‘Nice bicycle,’ he drawled in Beijing-accented Mandarin, his eyes giving my Phoenix the once-over. He gestured self-deprecatingly at his beat-up Forever: ‘the old iron anchor’. His voice, heavily burred, reminded me of sesame paste, somewhere between sweet and savoury, more-ish. He finished admiring my Phoenix and looked at me again. I wondered if he’d seen me seconds earlier wiping my sweat on my T-shirt. I could still feel the perspiration trickling down from my temples, over my top lip and under my arms. As discreetly as I could, I held my shirt out from my sides and lightly flapped it like the hutong ladies with their skirts.

He appeared to be waiting for me to say something. What I wanted to say was something like, ‘Forever’s not such a shabby brand either,’ but back then, my spoken Chinese hadn’t quite caught up with my comprehension. What I eventually blurted out was: ‘Forever is good.’

He raised an eyebrow. ‘That’s true,’ he said, the hint of a smile pushing up one corner of his mouth. ‘But isn’t it a bit early for us to be making such a commitment?’

I’ve always been highly suggestible. For a long, crazy-foolish moment I saw our conjoined future life pass before my eyes, straight through courtship, marriage, children and old age until death did us part – an unusual fantasy for a girl who’d always declared she didn’t believe in marriage and was quite sure she didn’t want children. In the next moment, I came floating back to earth, mortified and bewildered, and wondering if I’d misunderstood him completely. Was he even flirting? I mumbled something half-witted about phoenixes, and saw his eyes narrow and cool by a degree or two. My Chinese wasn’t up to banter back then. I felt stupid, and had an urge to run. I looked around but couldn’t see Jingjing.

‘You have an unusual look. Where are you from?’ He’d homed in on my difference. People always did sooner or later.

‘I wish I knew.’ It was a well-practised answer, but the curiosity that lit his eyes told me it was still a good one.

‘Wa,’ cried Jingjing, popping up again. She punched him on the arm before draping a protective arm around my shoulders. ‘Long time no see. Q, leave my friend alone. She’s a very nice girl and very, very innocent and needs to be protected from naughty boys like you.’

‘I’m not that innocent,’ I protested, but neither of them were paying any attention to me. They were speaking too quickly in the syrupy Beijing patois for me to follow. I made out the word tongxue, classmate, and worked out they had a connection from university. I felt frustrated, as though the language was a fabulous outfit I owned but still didn’t quite know how to wear. At that moment I wanted more than ever to be Chinese – and to be more than just ethnically Chinese, too. I wanted to share in this history that bound them, not just Jingjing and Q, but all of them here at the Yuanmingyuan, these young people my age, the kid brothers and kid sisters of the Red Guard generation, who, as I saw it, were privileged to have been through hell and survived, to have been among the first Chinese to enter university when competitive exams were reinstituted following the Cultural Revolution. They had history. It was almost as though I envied the turbulence and tragedy in their background as much as I knew many of them would have envied the peace and freedom in mine. I also felt jealous of my beautiful friend, stupidly so, even though I knew that she was mad swooning keen on a raffish artist with a roving eye called Wang Jian. As for Q, I knew nothing except that his cockeyed, cocksure smile took my breath away.

Like a miracle, the answer to my prayers, Wang Jian coasted in on his bicycle, a few louche mates in tow. Moments later, Jingjing was bounding off in their direction like a hare. Q turned that disconcerting gaze – it interrogated, it undressed, it appraised, it tickled – back on me. He then pronounced a simple, four-character phrase, xiangjian henwan, which, to my eternal mortification, I didn’t understand. Worse, I misunderstood it. I thought he was saying something about it being very late, and I replied confusedly about how the evening had just begun. Just then another Jingjing-like Beijing goddess with a big throaty laugh and a pale floaty dress materialised by Q’s side. With an airy ni hao in my direction, she pulled him away before I could even reply. Ni hao yourself.

Jingjing beckoned me over to where she, Wang Jian and his mates perched on the old column stones of the Western Palace. One, with acne-scarred cheeks and an opportunistic gaze, shared his warm beer and flirted desultorily with me as a minor poet declaimed from his mount atop the broken marble. I flirted back distractedly, my Chinese somehow springing back to life again. Why couldn’t I have been that clever with Q? As soon as I had a chance, I confided to Jingjing what had happened. She had me repeat what I thought he’d said. ‘Baober,’ she said, ‘sweetie, haven’t you ever heard xiangjian henwan? It’s only one of the most romantic phrases in the language. “I hate that it has taken so long in this life for us to meet.” Oh dear. Just look at you. I wish I could redden like that. It’s so cute. Hey.’ She snapped her fingers in my face. ‘The guy’s a player.’ Even thinking about that now, the embarrassment of that grass-scented night makes my eyes squint and shoulders hunch.

How long had I been daydreaming? My leg had fallen asleep under me on the ta.

‘Leave me alone, Q. Nothing personal. But I have to work.’ I’d read somewhere that talking aloud to yourself was the first sign of madness. The second sign was talking aloud to people who weren’t there. Mad, as we say in Australia, as a cut snake.

It was lunch time. Smoked tofu from the local supermarket, English mustard, a few leaves of lettuce from which time had stolen their crunch and the last of a seeded loaf from the French bakery at Donghu. The pantry was, if not bare, down to its undies. I took a cup of hot water back to my perch.

Nine hours to my appointment with the dead man. The apparently not-dead man.

Reviewing Duan Mou’s script, a two-character phrase I wasn’t sure about jumped into view. I was certain I’d learned it once, but couldn’t dredge up either its meaning or pronunciation. I scanned the pile of dictionaries I kept on the ta. Half hidden under a pillow was one I hadn’t used for some time, an old favourite from my Taiwan days. Its print was tiny and the characters old-form, not simplified like the ones used on the mainland, so for all my sentimental attachment to it, I consulted it less and less over the years. In the meantime, its cloth binding had frayed and the spine had split down the middle and on both ends, exposing cotton-blossom cardboard and string. Sticky tape kept an awkward hold on the back cover, itself imprinted – like the Hermit of Peking – with a coffee stain, this one in the shape of a crescent moon.

The old dictionary fell open at the index of radicals, almost always the first stop in what can be a three-step process for looking up an unfamiliar character. Time had nibbled scallops in the bottom of the page. The signature, the fold of pages to which it belonged, thrust obscenely upwards, wanting attention. I raised the dictionary to my nose and imagined that I could smell the sweat that had been wrung from me over the years by Taiwan’s subtropical heat and the effort of study. There was a small brownish spot, a splash of soy sauce or dried blood. Blood, sweat and tears. Or maybe only soy sauce. I smiled to myself as I mechanically traced the first character with my finger to count its strokes. ‘Running’ radical, twelve strokes. Page 1120. , hsieh^4 hou^4, ‘to meet without prior engagement; to chance to meet’. And there, flattened onto the page above the character, the papery layers of an ancient rose. Bloodless veins still traced its compressed and curling petals. But they had faded to khaki, only blushing here and there with a colour that wouldn’t die. At one time the dictionary had smelled like rose. Now the rose smelled like dictionary.

Q gave me that rose twenty-five years ago. It was almost a decade after our first meeting at the Yuanmingyuan and on our third anniversary as a couple. We’d quarrelled over his going. He told me to stop worrying, that it annoyed him. He said I sounded like his mother, the Party member, a malie laotai, ‘Marxist– Leninist Old Lady’ as the contemptuous phrase current at the time went.

Q’s father had been an architect and ally of the famous historical conservationist Liang Sicheng. In 1956, Mao called for ‘a hundred flowers to bloom and a hundred schools of thought to contend’, that is, for people to speak their minds. Q’s father responded by loudly and eloquently protesting what he termed the Communist Party’s ‘war on old Beijing’. One year later, as the Party’s ‘Anti-Rightist’ campaign slashed through the ranks of the nation’s intelligentsia like the Grim Reaper, his father was condemned by those fighting words to a labour camp. Q’s mother divorced him. The Party rewarded her with a promotion to a cushy job in the city administration, an invitation to join the Party and a new Party-approved husband. Q told me she maintained an air of grim righteousness throughout his childhood, even during the three years of famine when there was never enough to eat, right up to the moment when the Red Guards nabbed her as a member of the ‘old guard’ and hauled her out for public trial by the howling masses. When his father returned to Beijing twenty years later, officially exonerated, skeletally thin and still defiant, Q moved in with him to look after him. A month later, his father succumbed to complications related to the hepatitis he’d contracted while in the gulag. His mother, herself ‘rehabilitated’ in the late seventies, still defended the Party and that drove Q crazy. To cut a long story short, saying that I sounded like his mother was not a compliment.

I burst into tears. This irritated him even more. He walked out. Then he returned, about two hours later, to collect me for dinner, carrying this rose. That in itself was a small miracle. It wasn’t easy to get cut flowers in Beijing then. A bouquet could cost a factory worker a week’s salary. But he’d found it. I didn’t ask where, though later I did wonder. The point is, he gave it to me – and not long after that, he left. As he said he would.

Exhaling a long breath, I replaced the rose just above . Once it was laid back within its dictionary-casket, I re-buried the book under the cushions.

Where, I wondered, do people put mementos in e-books? It occurred to me that you could post a photo of a rose on a Facebook page, where it might remain in full bloom for eternity, long after the Dearly Facebooked had her- or himself turned to parchment and dust.

Eight hours before my appointment. The film’s dialogue was killing me. I had no idea what to do with it, and the more I studied it, the more superficial and meaningless it seemed.

Before revealing what I did next, I feel compelled to declare that I’m not a bad person. Good people do bad things sometimes. This bad was surely on the low end of the scale of badness: worse, certainly, than forgetting your best friend’s birthday, but a considerable distance from rape, pillage and murder, tyranny and massacre. On the other hand, I had made a New Year’s resolution not to do this sort of thing again and it was just days into the new year.

I made another coffee, silently cursing the genius of Thea Welsh. The Australian writer had written the only novel I knew of that centred on the adventures of a movie subtitler: The Story of the Year of 1912 in the Village of Elza Darzins. It told the story of a translator who, faced with a woolly and obscure script, threw away the original and rewrote the dialogue (and with it the story), to excellent effect. In the novel, the film did very well indeed. Did the subtitler come to grief in the end? I honestly can’t recall. I’m not very good at remembering the endings of things. My talent for forgetting means I can watch a thriller a second or even third time and remain on tenterhooks with each screening. In any case, I prefer beginnings. Beginnings, no matter how fraught or silly, always hold out the possibility that things will turn out well. Everyone’s an optimist at the beginning, because in the excitement that marks the start of all things, even pessimists can secretly hope to be confounded.

The wind had blown away the pollution. Outside my window, I saw snowflakes scribbling on the lucent slate of sky. What was that phrase of Yang Lian’s? The ‘grey shattered sunlight’. Early twilight limned the scholar tree, whose bare, twisting branches scratched the sky in silhouette like crazed lightning. I turned on the light and worked like a demon. When I next looked up from my keyboard, the ghostly sun had set beyond the Western Hills. My legs were a mass of pins and needles and my neck felt like it had been locked in the traditional Chinese torture implement of the cangue.

Duan Mou’s film needed a good title. I settled on Emp – it had a contemporary feel and managed to reference ‘empress’ and, via its incomplete nature, both eunuchs and, albeit obscurely, the classic Comme des Garçons-inspired outfits with all those rips and tears. I stretched, and reviewed my work. The film now had a coherent, dramatic but still nicely mysterious, ambivalent narrative arc with a clever element of time travel and a poignant theme of love and loss. Not bad, if I said so myself, and certainly artful enough to match the director’s intentions. Wherever possible, I had preserved the original meaning of the text; where it didn’t work, I’d thrown it out and made something up. Finally, I corrected the odd bit of awkward ‘translatese’, the syntax errors that inevitably appear in any first draft, ran a spell check and, with the blade of long experience, rapidly trimmed the lines down to subtitle length, an ideal maximum of thirty-three letters, spaces and punctuation marks per line, occasionally ballooning out to forty-two.

The monolingual director would not figure out what I’d done for a long while. If it really was true that Quentin Tarantino was going to look at it, and if Tarantino actually did embrace it, and if Emp ended up winning some jury prize at a European film festival (as I fancied it now just might do), Duan Mou could only thank me. And even if – even when – he found out, even if other people asked him about the discrepancies, I knew Duan Mou well enough to know that he’d claim the mistranslation as his own idea. There were two reasons for this. One, given his avant-garde aspirations, he would think that it should have been his idea in the first place. Two, to admit that it hadn’t been would entail a loss of face. I imagined we’d be clinking miniature tumblers of erguotou and planning our next project before long. I attached my Meisterwerk to an email, banged out a short note to the director (which didn’t mention anything about my creative contribution) and pressed send.

There. Done. And not a minute too soon. The Hour of the Rat would soon scuttle down the alleys of the restless city.

Popping the last of the bread into the toaster for dinner, I recalled how, in my teenage years, I was convinced that for anyone with an artistic soul, poverty was romantic, de rigueur even. Poets, garrets, that sort of thing, even if I never was entirely sure what a garret was. I don’t think there were any garrets on the Central Coast.

Elsie and Jack reinforced my convictions by assuring me I’d grow out of them. It took a while. I think I confused actual poverty with the idea that art, love and ideas were more important than money. I’m embarrassed to say that, early in our relationship, I expressed this romantic view of impoverishment to Q, who was intimately acquainted with financial hardship but would never call it his best friend. He coldly informed me that only a privileged Western nit could hold such a ridiculous view. Or something to that effect. If I try to remember exactly what he said my whole face scrunches up like I’ve chewed on a lemon: shame is a physical state. I do recall that I only made it worse with a stumbling objection that I wasn’t really privileged by Western standards, succeeding in proving his point rather spectacularly.

Now, some of the richest people I know are Chinese. But that’s another story. It wasn’t the story back then.

Goodbye, Q. I have places to go and people to meet.

Earlier in the evening, when the snow had stopped falling and I needed to stretch, I’d rugged up and grabbed the broom made of bundled sticks that rested against the outside of my door. Stepping into the courtyard, I heard the clash of Peking opera cymbals and recognised an aria from The Yang Family Women Generals. Through the thin curtain I saw Mrs Jin rise from the table where, I guessed, she was assembling model fighter planes, one of her latest hobbies. Her dad had been in the airforce. Apparently, her followers on Weibo are very enthusiastic about the model planes, which she photographs at various stages of completion. Those she’s finished hang from the ceiling by strings, gliding on subtle breezes, endlessly reconnoitring the living room and kitchen.

She either spied me out there or had the same thought I did because within moments she was on her stoop, waving her broom at me. We swept our way into the centre of the courtyard and then, together, cleared the paths into the side wings and the outside gate.

‘We’ll build a snowman tomorrow,’ she said. ‘I have chestnuts we can use for eyes, an old sweet potato for his nose and that hat of Mr Jin’s that worked so well last time. Remember?’ I did.

‘What will we use for lips?’ I asked. ‘Apple peel?’ She thought that would be good.

Our brooms scratched at the stone paving, now just visible again through the powder. Under the warm, uncertain light of the lamps above our doorways, the thin crust of crystalline snow seemed sprinkled with diamonds. The lamps were supposed to turn on automatically when someone approached but they had a mind of their own, often leaving us to fumble for keys in the dark while switching on in the middle of the night to welcome ghosts.

Preparing now to go out, I realised that it was only the second time I’d been out all day. Talk about the hermit of Peking. I’d always wondered about Backhouse, living his secret, private life in the midst of this gregarious city. It occurred to me that I wasn’t so different from him really; not now, anyway. I wouldn’t have imagined myself like this back when I was first here, when it seemed there was something interesting going on every hour, every day of the week. I don’t know if that’s a function of age, the solitary nature of my work, the fact that so many of my old friends have retreated into career and family life, or some combination of the three, but things have changed. Another line from Yang Lian’s poem floats into my mind: In my premature solitude.

It is as though there are turning points in life that encase what preceded them in snow-domes; you put the snow-domes on a shelf and shake them every so often in a fit of nostalgia, but you can never crawl back inside. For me, 1989 was one of those turning points. I’d spent my life searching for a story and an anchor. A story that could anchor me. My stomach filling with butterflies, I wondered if the reason I was drawn back to this place was that the key to my story had been here all along.

I traded my leggings for thick woollen stockings and eased a warm knit frock down over a thin, long-sleeved thermal top. I pulled on my rabbit-fur-lined boots and rubbed an industrial quantity of moisturiser into my face and hands. Next, a smudge of eye shadow, a flick of mascara, chapstick under lipstick, and a quick detangle of my hair. Zipping up my mid-calf-length puffer coat and pulling a woollen beanie down over my ears, I was finally ready to plunge, Michelin Man-like, into the night. I was not too old for vanity. But I was too old to be an idiot in minus-ten-degree temperatures. When I opened the door to leave, a small white apparition streaked past my legs and out into the courtyard. Mimi. I had no idea when she’d got inside or where she’d been hiding.

The serrated winds had died down as I picked my way towards the strip park that runs north–south along the site of the old Eastern Imperial Precinct Wall, Dong Huangchenggen. It occurred to me to wonder how Dr Hoeppli, if he had indeed written this letter and it was not some elaborate joke, could possibly make our appointment. The return address had been a hutong in Dashila’r, in the old ‘Chinese city’ south of Qianmen that in pre-revolutionary times had been the liveliest part of town. If I remembered correctly, the hutong was the site of a modest, long-derelict Qing dynasty brothel that had become a trendy venue for pop-up design shows, shops and cafes. The brothel was two storeys high, the small chambers of its upper storey arranged in neat rows off a corridor that was also an inward-facing balcony, bordered by a railing that wasn’t so much peeling as peeled, and that overlooked the ground floor with its parlours, accounting room and kitchen. I say ‘parlours’ and ‘chambers’ and ‘balcony’ but you need a good imagination to dress up the dilapidated old structure with its dubious stairwell, groaning timbers and uncertain stability with the elegance these words imply. Besides the architecture, common to old-style Chinese brothels, the only material souvenir of those times was an old bed, richly carved with images drawn from traditional pillow-book-style porn, a treasure that some artists have lovingly restored and that serves variously as a showcase, sitting area and even storytelling stage at the various avant-garde events staged there in recent years.

For all of the newfound trendiness of Dashila’r, it remains – those parts of it that haven’t yet been pounded into submission by the wrecking balls – a ramshackle crazy-paving of tiny laneways and tenements that’s hard enough to get in and out of at the best of times. Even when the weather is fine, it’s not the easiest place to find a cab. If he was travelling by public transport, it’s the sort of trip that would require several transfers. He would need to pick his way through the maze of narrow, twisting alleys to catch a bus on one of the main streets, and walk even further for a train. Given that Beijing’s taxis tended to evaporate after a big snowfall, and even public transport struggled, I wondered how my correspondent, if he was who he claimed to be, and if he lived where the return address indicated he did, was ever going to make it.

I’d be walking to our meeting place but I was at least on the right side of sixty and in fairly good shape for no particular reason other than that I tended to walk everywhere. At the park, I turned right, and, heading north, followed the path that wove over and around the foundations of the wall that had once been part of the great red fortifications that guarded the old Imperial Precinct.

Beijing was once Paradise, in the original, ancient Persian sense of pairidaeza (‘walled enclosure’), guarded on all sides by mighty grey-brick ramparts. Beginning in the thirteenth century with the Yuan dynasty, the rulers girdled the city with not one, but three parallel sets of walls. There were the defensive outer ramparts, to which the Ming emperors added gate towers and enceintes and other fortifications. (In the sixteenth century, the Ming would also wall in the southern suburbs where the Temple of Heaven and Dashila’r were located to keep them safe from Mongol raids.) Then there was the Imperial Precinct wall that enclosed those areas dedicated to the imperial family and the service of the court like Beihai and other inner-city pleasure grounds as well as the imperial Ancestral Temple (now the site of the Working People’s Cultural Palace), imperial archives and the Altar of Land and Grain (now Zhongshan Park); the precinct’s south-centre gate was none other than Tiananmen. Within this Imperial Precinct rose the third, most impenetrable of all these bulwarks, surrounding the Forbidden City itself. The residential section of the Forbidden City, the most ‘forbidden’ part of all, was also walled and off-limits to all men except the emperor and eunuchs – and, if you believe him, Edmund Backhouse.

I keenly regret never having seen the great walls and gates of the city before Mao had nearly all of them demolished in the 1950s and 60s. My eyes have feasted on photographs of the formidable fortress that once was Beijing rising out of the plains against the backdrop of the mountains, trains of Bactrian camels trudging past its towering gates. It was for the walls of Beijing, of course, that Q’s father had sacrificed his freedom, and ultimately, his life.

There’s a magic to the words ‘Old Beijing’; its ancient fortifications are just part of it. I loved listening to the stories of old Beijing told by the old men and women I met through the Foreign Languages Press and reading the Beijing fiction of Lao She and others. Despite the cold, I adored nights like this because they made it possible to dream back through the years, the decades, even the centuries.

A new fall of snowflakes filled the sky and stuck to my eyelashes. I listened to the pleasurable sound of my boots crunching and squeaking through the soft new snow down to the older crust. The falling snow hushed and obscured the avenue on the outside of the park. Through the peaceful blur, the old wall seemed to rise once again and I guessed I was approaching the park’s northern end, where a small section of it had been constructed anew as a ‘ruin’.

It happens often in China that you think you’re gazing upon a Song pagoda or Ming ruin only to discover that the physical artefact that has struck you with awe was reconstructed twenty years ago. I once wept over what I thought was the careless destruction of a Ming dynasty bridge. Workers were widening it for the convenience of car traffic. Later I discovered that the bridge they were disassembling only dated back to 1981. The fabulous, circular Ming dynasty Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests at the Temple of Heaven burned down towards the end of the nineteenth century; the one that people visit today is a reconstruction from that time. Does it matter? Whatever they do to Tiananmen Square, fence it in, tart it up, intersect it with giant LED screens – it will always be the place where history has happened. Imperial processions, patriotic demonstrations in the first half of the nineteenth century, the Red Guard rallies of 1966, the anti-Cultural Revolution demonstrations of 1976 – and the pro-democracy protests of 1989.

Pierre Ryckmans wrote an eloquent essay on the different approach to the physical past in China and Europe in which he quotes F.W. Mote, a quotation that has stuck in my brain ever since: ‘Chinese civilisation did not lodge its history in buildings.’ Ryckmans took his pen name, Simon Leys, from Victor Segalen’s René Leys, the eccentric savant with erotic access to the palace – and whom many people thought was based on Backhouse.

I wondered for the umpteenth time how I might be linked to Edmund Backhouse, if that was indeed what Dr Hoeppli was hinting at so elliptically in his letter. I realised too late that I should have looked through Hugh Trevor-Roper’s book for more details on Backhouse’s family, his sisters and brothers. My mother had said my father was a ‘prince’ – perhaps she had confused her princes and baronets, or if my father was anything like Backhouse, perhaps he had blurred the distinction. Backhouse had no children of course, but his family would have produced plenty. For Dr Hoeppli to know about my father’s lineage, however, suggests that at the very least there was some direct link to Backhouse himself – a favourite nephew, perhaps, or a distant cousin who had visited him in those final years in China. I don’t remember reading anything about such a person. That didn’t mean much. Such a visit was not necessarily something that Backhouse (or anyone else) would have bothered to record. My mind whirred with possibilities.

A wind blew up, swirling the snow through the air like icing on a cinnamon bun. I turned my face from the blast, wrapping my scarf over my mouth and nose and shutting my eyes so tightly that red lights danced on the insides of my eyelids like the swaying red lanterns of nearby Ghost Street.

Slow-moving trucks spat grit and salt onto the wide boulevard that sliced across the city’s north–south heart-line. I picked my way across the street with care, for it was still dangerously icy. Once on the north side of the road I looked for a familiar hutong, one I’d calculated would lead me towards the place I was going. Where I was certain it should begin, however, there stood a gaudy, gargantuan new seafood restaurant with a giant neon prawn waving its multi-coloured feelers from the roof. I may have been disoriented by the snow, but suspected that the charming laneway I was looking for existed no more. Developers had logged Beijing’s historic hutong neighbourhoods like the Amazon, relentlessly driving a unique and grand urban civilisation towards extinction. I could never reconcile in my mind how the inheritors of this magnificent ancient culture could be both so rightly proud of their past and so perversely active in its destruction. The old city was disappearing at the speed of memory, leaving only its stories to hover over once historic sites like lonely ghosts. It wasn’t just physical heritage under attack. In its media, schools and museums, the Party-state was single-mindedly sandblasting the rich, complex and untidy history of the country itself, cleansing it of ambiguity, purging it of shame, and scouring it of blood, unless the stains were conveniently on the hands of enemies.

The relentless scrubbing and scratching has achieved the desired effect. You meet young people here all the time who have only the vaguest concept of when the Cultural Revolution took place or what it was about; when I asked one to guess when he thought it had occurred he hemmed and hawed and finally, tentatively, guessed: ‘After Liberation?’ Others referred in all confused innocence to the Maoist era as ‘feudal times’ but to Mao as a hero. As for the events of 1989, those too young to have lived through them knew so little that one had asked me if it had anything to do with the Falungong. I felt as though I inhabited two cities – one callow, corrupt, clueless, swelling in wattage, concrete and steel; the other cultured, critical, conscious, dimming into oblivion and leaving behind only a few clichés in the form of Olde Peking picture postcards, regrets and the shadow of defiance: a sun that will not be contained in the grave. I hadn’t thought about Yang Lian’s poem for years; for some reason, it persisted in accompanying me all day.

I wanted to ask Mrs Jin how she’d done it. How she’d lived through the upheavals, campaigns, famine and violence. How she’d coped with what she had and had not done, with what she had seen, with what she no longer saw. How throughout, or, at least in the end, she remained so manifestly happy. If I, a foreigner, found Beijing layered so thickly with ghosts, history and memory that I sometimes felt like I was stepping in bottomless snowdrifts even in summer and suffocating in the mists on the clearest of days, how did someone who had lived here all her life cope?

I made my way around the subway station that had descended upon the once shabbily hip Yuan dynasty street of Nanluoguxiang like a concrete boot. The normally teeming street was nearly deserted on account of the snowstorm. A small group of young people emerged from a bar with apples in their cheeks and adventure in their eyes. Several others came along and joined them, among them a striking boy in his early twenties, with an air of cheeky confidence not unlike Q’s at that age. He was clearly the magnetic centre of the group; my heart pinged when I realised that at his side, regarding him with the softest eyes, was a foreign girl. She shivered theatrically and he threw an arm around her. One of their friends noticed me and smiled curiously; I realised that I was staring. I buried my chin in my scarf and hurried on.

As I passed a nondescript restaurant that just weeks earlier, I’m quite sure, had been a bookshop, a Chinese girl with the broad wind-blasted face of a peasant lass and the winged headdress of a nineteenth-century Manchu noblewoman jumped out of the doorway to shout at me in English: ‘Spicy Sichuan food okay!’ She gave the thumbs-up. ‘Nailuo huoguo! Cheese fondue! Huanying guanglin!’

Beijing is a time machine that traps and agitates within itself all eras, from the distant dynastic past through to the far-flung future (and with at least one gastronomic stop, it appeared, in the seventies). Its young artists create sexed-up artworks around motifs from the Cultural Revolution they never experienced. Middle-aged people practise calligraphic styles popular in the Song dynasty. Old folk ballroom dance in public parks to Lady Gaga, and Confucius beams his teachings from flat-screen TVs in university canteens. The multiplexes and futuristic performing arts centres present new interpretations of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a fourteenth-century classic novel about second-and third-century warfare. And my neighbourhood wi-fi cafe, situated in a Soviet-era factory, plays ‘Jingle Bells’ all year round. So why shouldn’t the writer of the letter, Dr Hoeppli, still be alive and living somewhere in this temporal spin cycle of a place?

Sir Edmund Backhouse had most certainly never died. Something of him survived in every foreigner who discovered that outwardly solemn Beijing not just tolerated but positively unleashed in them all manner of private waywardness. These were not necessarily the criminal, terrifying perversities described in Paul French’s book Midnight in Peking, but rather the artful perversities of the sensualist, the fringe dweller, the confidence man.

I never met Neil Heywood and don’t have any special insight into how he insinuated himself into the heart of the particular darkness that was Party leader Bo Xilai’s circle in the first decades of this century. But the potency of the rumours that swirled around Heywood, particularly about his relationship with the woman who allegedly murdered him, Bo’s wife Gu Kailai, attested to the abiding attraction of stories in which Western men have penetrated the inner sanctums, so to speak, of power. Yet unlike the classic Orientalist fantasy of the conquering masculine West and the supine, feminine East, here it was the Western male who was vanquished. Another thing about Backhouse and the Beijing time machine: I recall being struck by something Dr Hoeppli wrote in his postscript to Décadence Mandchoue – that dressed in his long, dark Chinese gowns, Backhouse was ‘timeless’, and would have looked at home in ancient Rome, a ‘Renaissance setting’, or in a Jesuit study room in the court of the Kangxi emperor. His sexual politics too, I thought, would have made him a plausible Roman in the time of Nero, a French or Italian libertine of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, or a Qing dynasty bawd. He would not have been out of place today, either.

Opposite three nearly identical Imperial Kitchen Custard Shops, each claiming on its signboard to be the exclusive supplier of a secret recipe passed down by palace chefs, an old man in clothes padded with cotton wadding tended the flame under a large black wok from which wafted the warm, nutty fragrance of roasting chestnuts. I stood with the man by his fire for a few minutes. ‘Delicious,’ I mumbled gratefully through the creamy sweetness, and he nodded. We gazed together at the row of custard shops.

‘Which is the real one?’ I asked. A few years back, before the street had been overrun by crowds, I came often for the custard. But I couldn’t recall what the original shop had looked like; it seemed to me then that none of the three fit my memory.

In response he quoted a line from one of China’s most famous novels, the Qing dynasty The Dream of the Red Chamber: , which David Hawkes and John Minford translate as: ‘Truth becomes fiction when the fiction’s true; Real becomes not-real when the unreal’s real.’

Then he pointed to his chestnuts and shrugged. ‘This is real.’

This is real. That’s what Jingjing told me on returning to China after she divorced the sweet, faithful American man she’d married after breaking up with the flamboyant, charismatic but caddish Wang Jian. Wang Jian had been her first love. She believed it was true love. She still believed this the first time she caught him sleeping with a life-drawing model. He had begged Jingjing to forgive him. But it happened once too often, with models, art dealers, collectors and students, and she realised that had been only the first time she’d caught him. ‘It’s not his sleeping around that gets me,’ she told me at the time. ‘It’s not even the lying, which is devastating enough. It’s the cliché. He’s a fucking cliché. And who wants to be with a cliché?’

So, not long after, off she went with blond Joshua, the sensible, kind and generous American teacher of English, who exuded an air of couldn’t-believe-his-luck whenever she was by his side. Sadly, once her own English had become completely fluent and she understood everything Joshua said, she realised that he was not nearly as bright or interesting as she’d imagined him to be. In fact, he was far less bright and interesting than she’d assumed and not quite as sensible. I suppose I could have warned her – but can you ever? She’d tried to warn me about Q and I hadn’t listened. She felt terrible divorcing Joshua. She broke his heart. But she didn’t want to be bored for the rest of her life either. It would be better for her to return to China. It would be better for me too, she said.

I had only been back to China a few times in almost twenty years at that point. I wasn’t sure I could cope. Every day, alongside the news about China’s economic rise were reports of spiralling corruption, food safety scandals, you name it. Jingjing, who had returned on a regular basis before finally deciding to move back, tsk-tsked. ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘This place is dirty and dangerous. What you eat will probably kill you if what you breathe doesn’t kill you first, and that’s assuming you don’t get whacked crossing the road, but this is real. You know what?’ she confided. ‘I was constipated nearly the entire time I was in America. No joke. It’s all so hygienic there. They just don’t produce enough bacteria for a really good shit. I was back two days and –’ here my elegant friend, who’d dabbled in modelling in the US before settling into banking, made the sound of a long, messy fart with her pretty mouth ‘– best shit of my life. And that, my friend,’ she concluded, ‘is real.’ She said I could stay with her until I found my feet. She also had a relative who was thinking about renting out a room to a foreigner. (That’s how I met Mrs Jin, whom I called ‘Auntie Jin’ but thought of as Mrs Jin.)

When I Skyped Jingjing a few days later to say that I’d decided to take up her offer, Jingjing was thrilled. I said she and Q were both pulling me back. She gave me a look then that I chose to ignore.

The truth is that I’d drifted back in Australia. For a long time, I could think of nothing but China, and yet what I thought about gave me nightmares that leached into my waking hours. Throughout the eighties, on my trips back to Oz, I felt like I was living in parallel worlds: one sunnily complacent, merrily insular, its sparse population tested by issues and politics that with a few exceptions remained more or less what they’d been when I’d first left; the other stormy, shuttered, crowded and vital. I enjoyed my visits home to see Elsie and Jack and catch up with old friends, and breathed easy in both the tangled bush and the uncrowded urban footpaths that shared the vast, oblivious blue sky. Yet I always craved a return to the vitality, the dangerous mutability, the thrilling edge of China, until in 1989 that edge became a razor that sliced my world in two.

It took me a year or so after 1989 to make my first visit back to China, and I only went for a short time, but I almost failed to board my flight on account of a mounting nausea that was almost certainly, but didn’t feel, existential. When I disembarked in Beijing that time, I felt as leaden-footed and as full of dread as if I were visiting a graveyard where not all the ghosts had settled. Jingjing, who was reaching the end of her time with Wang Jian, met the plane. Later, she took me to see some members of the old gang. There was much embracing and weeping and they filled my suitcase with volumes of poetry stencilled on rough paper in uneven blue ink, poetry I promised to translate. I made good on my promise. Some of it got published, and one volume even won a minor literary award in the UK.

Soon, other old friends in China, like Duan Mou, whom I’d known when he was a student at film school, began throwing me other translation work, including movie subtitles. Unlike poetry, this was actually profitable, and they paid me in US or Australian dollars. At the beginning they sent videotapes and scripts by FedEx. Later the scripts came by email and the films on DVDs and these days, of course, wherever you are it’s a simple matter of upload and download from file-sharing websites.

At first, I was looking after Elsie and Jack and living with them so didn’t have too many expenses. Elsie had gone almost deaf and Jack almost blind but she led him on walks, made his drinks, found his cigarettes and squeezed his hand when he spoke to her. He didn’t speak much. He’d always been the less loquacious of the pair, and now retreated into a deeper quiet. But they enjoyed a kind of accustomed, happy symbiosis. Later, I moved down to Sydney, where I gradually made an effort to embrace the sunny carelessness that was the city’s most endearing feature. Phil, Gemma’s brother, made himself very easy to like. He was a good listener, kind and attractive, and we’d known each other forever. I feel terrible about Phil. He put a great effort into the relationship; I’m sorry to say I didn’t. I don’t blame him for leaving me. I was hard work. I was still so angry with Q – with the world, really. He was prepared to ‘be there’ for me, but I was nowhere to be found. And there were still so many questions that as much as he tried, he could not answer for me.

After the breakdown of the marriage, I decided to stop being so damn serious about everything. I discovered what appeared to be an infinitely replenishing supply of charming, intelligent and good-looking young men in their twenties and upwards who were very keen on sleeping with, even having a tentative relationship with, an interesting older woman. I was confounded in retrospect at how fraught or complicated everything around love and sex had been in my own twenties, how much unfulfilled yearning there had been, and how much pain. It didn’t need to be that difficult, or perhaps it was just that I didn’t need to be.

Elsie died, and Jack followed her three days later. I hadn’t anticipated how bereft I’d feel. At the funeral their daughter read out a sentimental eulogy in rhyming couplets. Their son Skyped his eulogy from Dubai, where he was overseeing some construction project, but the church’s connection kept dropping out and his image alternately froze and pixelated. There were not many people at the funeral and most shuffled in and out on walkers. Later, as a ghastly smoke wisped from the cremation chimney, their daughter and I hugged and cried and promised we would always stay in touch. Watching her car drive away, I felt more alone than I had ever felt in my life.

China’s economy, meanwhile, was taking off like a rocket. I began to feel that life in Oz was uncommonly smooth-edged, un-peopled, even un-storied. I knew that was ridiculous. Australia had stories, history and culture well before any European even knew of its existence and which well pre-dated China’s vaunted five thousand years of continuous civilisation. Its problems pressed, its issues burned. But aside from some volunteer work with traumatised asylum seekers whom our government was hell-bent on further damaging, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was like a child in a room where the furniture had no sharp corners and the electrical sockets had been covered up.

I gained weight. With more time on my hands, and some money in my pocket, I joined a gym. The gym had a sauna. One day, lying on the top shelf like a poorly placed product in a supermarket, I overheard a conversation:

‘Hello! Funny meeting you here. How are you?’

‘Great. Amazing actually. And you?’

‘Excellent. I’m so positive these days?’

‘Me too. I’m working on my acting and singing and yoga. And I’ve got a name for my business, I even registered it. It’s Sanskrit for, like, the matter that everything in the universe is formed from?’

‘That’s so ancient. I’m very spiritual myself, which is hard because people get spirituality mixed up with religion and that really turns them off. I mean, churches have done good things but mostly bad things?’

‘I’m almost thirty-six. So I went to this palmist and she was incredible. She said, when you turn thirty-six everything is going to happen for you. I was like, I’m so glad because I kind of expected that before now?’

‘You know, Oprah didn’t get famous till later. Lots of famous people, like politicians and writers and actors, they didn’t get famous till they were in their thirties or even their forties. Brad Pitt was, what, twenty-eight when he got famous because of Louise and Thelma?’

‘Thelma and Louise.’

‘That’s it.’

‘I love Dustin Hoffman too. He’s old, but great?’

‘The thing about Brad Pitt is that he’s real? I mean, he was the first person into New Orleans. You know, helping to clean up. That’s because he didn’t grow up, like, in a bubble with people clearing traffic for him in New York. Like that actress, you know the one I’m thinking of, who gets that sort of treatment all the time. What does she know about reality?’

‘Bugger all is my guess.’

‘Exactly. But Brad Pitt, he’s been a chicken, you know, in a suit?’

‘A chicken in a suit?’

‘You know those animal suits, those people who walk around as wild bears harassing people for charity? Apparently they’re really stifling, the suits I mean, and some of the bears end up fainting. That’s why you don’t see so many animal suits around anymore. Brad Pitt wasn’t a koala. He was a chicken. It wasn’t for some charity, either, it was a job, I don’t know, advertising fried chicken or something?’

‘Oh wow.’

‘Yeah, he’s real.’

I hauled myself off the shelf, literally and figuratively, and dived into the icy pool. If only reality was Brad Pitt in a chicken suit. Those women had no idea how lucky they were to be so clueless. Reality is way overrated. And it doesn’t let you go, either: no matter how hot the bear suit gets, no matter how many times you faint. There was one thing they had dead right, however, and that was to end every statement with a question mark.

Jingjing had been urging me to return to Beijing for months. I would do it. For her. For myself. For the questions. And, needless to say, for Q. The next day, I gave notice on my lease, then I packed up and, a month later, watched the red roofs and blue waters of Sydney recede beneath the wings of a Qantas jet.

Mrs Jin once told me that sometimes, arriving in some place in Beijing where a wall or gate or even temple had once stood, she’d be struck with a kind of vertigo, an almost physical unbalancing; the strange thing, she said, was that the sensation was often connected to some long-gone monument she could not ever remember seeing outside of photos, unless she had perhaps carelessly skipped past it as a child or, worse, helped to tear down as a teenager in the Red Guards. These memories, too, have become ghosts, victims of another type of wrecking ball: type your queries about what happened in the Cultural Revolution into the Baidu search engine and you are likely to be informed: ‘Your search word could violate laws.’ The Great Firewall of China defines another kind of paradise, not of fools, but of the fooled – although that too is a question.

Though I never saw the old walls, I feel the same way when I come upon a place I’m sure I once knew. I am sure this gleaming glass and concrete office building sits on the block where my friend Lin … Lin something, a painting teacher at the Central Art Academy, lived with his wife in the tiny corner of a ramshackle and labyrinthine dazayuan, and that that hotel is where indifferent workers in grimy white cloth caps once presided over the vast, rotting piles of cabbage and carrots that passed for a vegetable market. But for each old haunt I can peg to a specific new address, there are hundreds more that float free, while fading like a photograph in a drawer. People too have vanished behind their traces in my memory.

In his novel L’Horizon, the French author Patrick Modiano describes the disappearance of experience into matière sombre – dark matter – that, like its cosmological equivalent, is far greater in mass than that part of the universe which is observable: names and phone numbers carefully inscribed in notebooks that fail to evoke any image or recollection at all, letters from people completely forgotten and incapable of being recalled, drifts and wisps of memories that refuse to cohere or even linger for more than a second or two.

The matière sombre conjured up by Modiano appears to my mind’s eye as fathomless, black and silent. The matière sombre of Beijing seems its opposite: surface-level, shiny and noisy. On normal days, Beijing produces the urban equivalent of a heavy metal wall of sound across all the senses, coming at you so thick and fast that it wipes out thought and reflection. Near where I live, three tiny clothing shops and a hairdresser exist side by side, each blasting different pop music selections into the street the entire day; a video shop a few doors down hammers passers-by with the percussive sounds of a movie battle, the same battle, maddeningly, day after day. Lights blink and glow, colours clash and compete and all is movement and flux. Smells – the good, the terrible and the just plain weird – stage a continuous assault on the nose, and the air, increasingly solid, adds an almost tactile element to the mix. The sensual cacophony engulfs memories like quicksand.

Fresh-falling or fallen snow is the only thing known to quiet this city, tamp down its sensual garrulousness, shush its chatter. Snow opens the door to memory and reflection; it restores beauty to things. But its beauty is seeded with danger: under the powder lie patches of black ice. And so my poetic musings came to a sliding halt as my feet connected with one of these and kicked me arse-up into a drift.

A hand reached down to help me up.

‘How embarrassing.’

Q helped pat the snow off my coat, playfully slapping me on the arse in the process. ‘That was cute. Did you hurt yourself?’

‘Only my pride.’

‘That’s okay then.’

‘Kiss it better?’

I saw the red glow of a cigarette being sucked back in a doorway. I never learned what the man said, but Q suddenly rounded on him. The man ducked into some corner before Q, lightning quick as he was, could get to him. ‘Cao tamade liumang,’ Q muttered, coming back to me with a dark expression on his face. Fuck that motherfucking punk. He put his arm around me and we walked on in silence for a while. Then he said what to my mind was one of the simplest and most useful and yet most infuriating expressions in the entire language, especially in the context of relationships: you shi, ‘I’ve got something to attend to.’ I once canvassed my Chinese girlfriends about this and, although they were more used to it, they disliked it as well: it was the universal Chinese male getaway clause. To ask shenme shi, what that something was, was to be shrewish, suspicious, controlling and confining. And so with those two simple words, and without warning, Chinese boyfriends, fiancés and husbands could and did slip away into the night, as Q did then. It was often like that with Q, I realised, moments of fleeting joy followed by some sense of anticlimax. I had sometimes spoken of Buddhist and Daoist detachment as if I understood it, but I never really did, it’s obvious to me now.

What year was that?

That’s right. I remember now. That sign. I had slipped because I was so distracted by it. We’d been to the movies, something pretty unremarkable, I think, and were walking down the street when we noticed a sign. It said , fandui zichanjieji ziyouhua. Oppose bourgeois liberalisation. It was the slogan for a campaign the government was waging against ‘Westernisation’ and ideas of freedom in everything from music to media. It was absurd enough in the abstract, but to come upon a sign, standing like a traffic warning on the pavement, struck us both as so over-the-top strange and hilarious that, laughing, I had failed to look down and see the patch of black ice.

I thanked the stranger who helped me up, and as he disappeared down the street, I brushed the snow off my coat as best I could, stamped my feet and slapped my gloved hands together a few times. Tugging my hat lower over my ears and my scarf higher up my face, I realised that the raging stream of my consciousness had deposited me in a completely unfamiliar dogleg of a hutong.

When the Chinese want to express a sense of being at a loss, of spinning out, they say zhaobudao bei, can’t find north. In this geometrically precise city, the saying has literal resonance, and for me, never as much as at that moment. I fumbled my phone out of my pocket to check the time: 10:46. I was marrow-cold, shivering and on the edge of panic. Out of their gloves my fingers skated numbly over the ludicrously small keyboard as I tried to open the map app on my phone.

A middle-aged Chinese man in a large Russian hat and a faded army greatcoat waddled out from a doorway, his steamed bun of a stomach straining the waist of the coat, the expression on his long, beaky face oscillating between doleful and self-satisfied. It’s said people look like their pets; I’m not sure that’s always true. But following close on his heels was a goose, cartoonish with a big white tummy and bright orange feet and bill. It stamped along, leaving flipper-like marks in the snow.

For a moment I wondered if it was so cold that I’d begun to hallucinate, at which point the goose tottered over to me and tried to bite my leg through my boot.

‘Zhen tiaopi,’ scolded the man. ‘So naughty.’ The goose looked pleased with itself.

‘Qing wen,’ I said. ‘Could I please ask …’

‘It’s all on her neck.’ With a world-weary expression, the man gestured at the goose with his chin.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Her ID. The whole story’s there.’

I realised that the goose wore some kind of laminated card around her neck.

‘She won’t hurt you,’ the man said. ‘She just wanted to get your attention. She loves attention.’ He spoke in the tone of a father discussing a spoiled but beloved child. The goose tilted her head back as if to say, go ahead, I’m used to it. Crouching down, I read how, as a gosling, she’d suffered a broken wing. She would have been put down but the man had adopted her. The card revealed her age and dietary habits and stated that she went for a swim in Shichahai, the Back Lakes, every day, rain or shine.

I looked up, bemused.

‘I get tired of answering people’s questions,’ the man explained.

‘Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean … I only wanted to ask directions.’

He appeared displeased at this. I sensed he really did want to talk about the goose. But when I told him the name of the hutong I was looking for, he informed me I was not far away. Turn left, turn right, turn left. Thanking him, I hurried on my way. There was no time to lose.

Left, right, left and there it was. I hastened along, snow squeaking under the soles of my boots. But I found nothing that made sense of the instructions in the letter. Dr H had given me no street number, and I’d assumed Fei Chang Dao would be the name of a bar or cafe. There’d be a sign, or a shopfront. All that lay before me was a parade of monotone walls the colour of disappointment. Halfway down the lane was a carelessly parked black Audi with a military licence plate. Across from that was a blink of a shop, its tiny window display crowded with dusty packets of spiced peanuts, phone cards and yoghurt in ceramic pots. I tapped on the window but no one responded. The door was locked.

My nose wept with cold. My eyes felt like iced marbles under my lids and I could feel the corners of my lips chapping. I only knew my toes were still functioning because I wasn’t falling over. I was an idiot to be out on such a night and such a mission. There had been so many hoaxes associated with Sir Edmund Backhouse. Perhaps this was just one more; an elaborate, posthumous and particularly cruel joke. Tailor-made for me – an obscure punishment, perhaps, for my failed novel, my foolhardy attempt to try to out-forge the master forger, to have written a secret history of the man with a thousand secrets. My breath hung in the wintry air, a cirrus of self-castigation and despair.

I walked the length of the hutong twice and arrived back where I started. A wild-goose chase indeed. I was preparing to give up when, speaking of goose, along she came, with her human. The man nodded, a gesture that seemed to be half greeting, half affirmation that I had reached my destination. He had never heard of Fei Chang Dao and looked at me as if I was nuts. I watched as they waddled off together, less father and daughter this time, I thought, than old married couple. In front of a narrow doorway, the goose suddenly halted and turned to look at me. She honked twice, unfolded her wings and flapped them. Then she hurried after her owner and, turning the corner, disappeared from sight.

I’m not the sort who believes in omens. Yet something – perhaps sheer desperation – made me approach the doorway. Worn stone drums stood vigil at the shallow entryway, proclaiming the place as the former home of a minor military official. The red door was cleaved down the middle in the traditional manner. A pair of tarnished lion’s head doorknockers, possibly original and possibly copies bought at Liulichang, yawned out onto the sleepy alleyway from each side. Nothing out of the ordinary, I saw with disappointment. There were similar doors all along the hutong, along every Beijing hutong.

On a whim, I reached out to cover the open mouth of the lion on the right with my palm. The door creaked under the slight pressure of my hand. It yielded a few centimetres. A ribbon of light unfurled into the narrow alley. I tested the door again, and this time, it swung all the way inwards.

Beyond the raised threshold lay a small and narrow courtyard. Its stones were rimy with frost and in its corners crusts of snow winked and glistened from beneath their sooty veils. Below the graceful, curving Qing dynasty eaves, a string of fairy lights shivered in the icy wind. A winter-bare pomegranate tree stood to one side, the sulphurous, eternal glow of the megalopolis causing it to lay an indistinct shadow on a stone table nestled against its trunk. The rosewood latticework of the windows in the wing of the courtyard house to my right exhaled a soft golden light. Over the door leading into the premises from the courtyard hung a sign: Fei Chang Dao.

PART TWO

Dreams, pale and quiet as cotton, depart for some other sky. Drift, return. Wisps and fragments, real as hallucinations. I was there again this morning, in the temple, I’m certain of it, when the dusty grey light of day crept in under the hem of my curtains, seeping through the thin material to press its cold fingers down on my eyelids. Sparks dispersed across the membrane of my closed eyes. The temple was lost in the shadows; I pulled the covers up over my face, inhaling the remnants of darkness. The wind outside my window whizzed and whistled around the tenement courtyard, giving the loose sheets of metal that covered Widow Xu’s makeshift kitchen a good shake and rattling a plastic bag that sounded like it had been hung on my door. My thoughts, dragged into reality, coalesced around the contents of the bag. I guessed it held breakfast, maybe dark, dense sesame buns, still smelling of the oven, and my mouth watered a little at the thought.

Widow Xu looks after me like that. It’s hard convincing women of her generation, one above my own, that an unmarried man in his late fifties can look after himself, and to be honest, I don’t try too hard to do so.

My dreams sent up another brief flare and I made a half-hearted attempt to follow them, but my stomach growled and the flare extinguished itself. I sighed, something I apparently do every morning upon waking, or so Chunmei, and all those that came after her, claimed. A stomach is more easily ignored than a bladder. All my organs were clamouring for attention. I didn’t relish the idea of leaving my warm bed for a dash through the cold to the public toilet in the lane with its clammy cement walls and stinking troughs. I had a chamber pot, but even that seemed like too much effort, and with all the windows shut, the air in my small room was already too close. I contemplated lighting a cigarette and coughed a little in anticipation. Just as I edged the covers down to my chin, my phone whistled for attention. I opened my reluctant eyes and picked it up: a reminder – Argentinian red. It was just past ten a.m. Sparrow’s fart, as an Australian friend used to call dawn. I switched the phone to silent and turned the footsteps of my mind back onto the path towards my temple of dreams.

Twenty-five years ago, it was. I stayed put at first. I was defiant. I was numb. I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving this wounded city. I went to the meetings. We all did. There wasn’t a choice. We read the editorials and recited the catechism, letting the flatness in our voices and the catch in our throats tell their own stories. The director of the publishing house hadn’t marched with us, but he protected us as best he could.

When the hunger strike began, Old Mou, whom I’d always taken for the quiet type, had been the first to declare he was going to the square in support of the students. The mysterious force field of the square had been drawing us all in. But we hadn’t made a point of saying so aloud. Old Mou was a funny one. He hadn’t updated his wardrobe since the late seventies. He still wore a white button-down shirt tucked into blue pants long after the rest of us were in jeans, and his hair swirled around the crown of his head in classic clueless ‘screwtop’ style. Old Mou wasn’t really old. He was my age, the age when everyone puts a ‘Young’ in front of your surname. But you simply couldn’t imagine calling him Young Mou. He specialised in nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century philosophy and spoke in aphorisms.

They came for Old Mou first. He went like a hero in one of those revolutionary movies, his head held high until they pushed it down for him. I slipped out of the office soon afterwards; as soon as I could. Guts churning, I got on my bike and rode numbly towards the Yuanmingyuan. For someone who edited philosophy books for a living, my brain was remarkably clear of thought. I didn’t see them coming. So I can’t really say where they came from. All I know is that, suddenly, a group of armed soldiers surrounded my bicycle. They pointed their guns at my head. ‘Dismount!’ one bellowed, and I did before he had finished saying, ‘Now!’ People say that when you face death, your life flashes before your eyes. But for me, at that moment, I couldn’t even have told you my name. All I saw were the gaping mouths of their rifle barrels, the indifferent eyes of the soldiers, and the shards of sunlight ricocheting off the mirrored sunglasses of their leader. I felt the earth quake under my feet. The detonations of my heart against my rib cage filled my ears. Then the leader demanded to see my ID, every word a piece of shrapnel piercing my consciousness. I have no idea how long it went on. Seconds blew out into eternities and imploded again like dying stars. And to this day I still don’t know why it happened. But in the end, after he had inscribed the details of my name, workplace and address in steely little strokes into his notebook, the soldiers lowered their guns, leaving me with knocking knees and a trouser leg full of steaming piss.

I’m no hero. When they left, I sank to the ground and vomited. And then, for my body had not yet exhausted its humiliations, I cried. Chunmei. She was already half a world away. She had had to go quickly and she could. So she went. Anyone who was able to leave, left. It was simple calculus back then. I could neither blame her nor stop her. Before the morning of her departure, I thought my heart had felt all the pain it possibly could. But the human capacity for suffering, like that for love, has no limits.

When the Cultural Revolution erupted I was eleven years old. One tearful, fearful night, my parents burned priceless paintings and calligraphy scrolls that had been in the family for generations as well as all their letters and diaries. They did this so that the Red Guards, when they came, would have nothing to find, nothing to charge them with. And it was so. The Red Guards found nothing but ashes. But they still strung up my father in the ‘aeroplane position’, shaved off half my mother’s hair and tormented them in front of howling mobs. How much worse could it have been, I wonder, if they had preserved those treasures?

Minutes after the soldiers released me, I swung my bike around and pedalled home as fast as I could go, the skin of my thighs sticky against the urine-soaked cotton of my trousers. I had nothing as precious as antique scrolls or paintings. Just a collection of the underground literature journal Today, in which I’d published my first poems, a bunch of other samizdat poetry manuscripts and Chunmei’s letters. I thought about burning all of these but, luckily as it turned out, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Instead, I hid them under the floorboards in a friend’s house. I thought to keep only one thing on me, a mimeographed collection of Q’s poetry, the broken indigo characters of his confident pen dancing in lines across the rough grey paper. Folding it carefully, I placed it in the inner pocket of my jacket, where it pressed up against the envelope with my meagre savings. Then I decided Q’s poems were too precious to risk losing, and put them under the floorboards as well.

I left Beijing by bus. My waipo lived in Hebei. I stayed with her a few days. She didn’t ask me anything, not even why I’d arrived without notice on her doorstep. But she watched me with those wise old eyes and listened to what I said and to what I didn’t say. When I told her I was hitting the road, she didn’t ask where I was going next. She stuffed my bag with boiled eggs, dried meats and mantou and pressed a small purse of cash into my hand. Take care of yourself, child, she said, and I came dangerously close to weeping once more.

In those days, a little money went a long way on the road, and you could stay under the radar if you knew how. I wandered aimlessly, catching buses at random, lost in a world that no longer made sense. Memories followed me like flies, buzzing in my ears, fouling everything. I floated them down rivers on fishermen’s skiffs, ploughed them into terraced fields of rice, offered them to passing clouds and drank them down in lonely toasts. And still they adhered to me like the pathetic fact of my survival itself. On an oppressively hot morning in September, I arrived, listless and uninterested, at a small town in the southwest.

The familiar tides of guilt and fury and despair lapped at my heels as I walked the dispiriting, anonymous streets. I was too hot and exhausted to try to outrun them. On top of everything else, I’d got some sort of urinary tract infection; it burned when I peed and, just that morning, there was a drop of blood in it as well. I didn’t want to go to some hick doctor, so I took it as a sign it was time to return to Beijing. I bought my ticket for a train leaving that very night.

I had time to kill. From behind a whitewashed wall, the curlicue grey roof of a Daoist temple beckoned like a crooked finger. In religion, at least, I’ve always been a child of Mao. Others may suck on the opium pipe of Christianity, Buddhism, Baha’i or whatever other system of salvation allows them their sleep, but I don’t need a god of any sort to tell me what hell is. As for Daoism, it may have been founded on the basis of a philosophy, yet no system of belief slipped faster or further down the muddy hill of superstitious ritual than Daoism-as-religion. I get that a Christian needs to believe that Jesus slid out of a virgin’s womb, and a Buddhist in the possibility of Nirvana. If, in the end, some of the new ghosts of that June made it to heaven or got a better deal on the upswing of their next cycle of reincarnation, I’d be more than glad for them. But no Daoist potion of immortality has ever stopped a bullet. You might as well don a Boxer’s red sash.

On the other hand, there’s something to be said about Buddhist or Daoist temples, especially if you need to pass some time before your train leaves. You can hang out as long as you like and the agreeable architecture provides plenty of shade. A sign inside the arched entrance of this one reminded visitors that it was a place of worship. It asked that they dress appropriately, not take photos and that they greet the monks with respect. So far as I was aware, I had never dressed inappropriately in my life, I didn’t own a camera and I believed that all people should be greeted with respect. I entered.

The first hall contained large, gaudily painted icons of guardian deities. The room was cool and deliciously scented by both burning incense and the fruit ripening on the altars in the late summer heat. I stood before the first icon and closed my eyes, worshipping the air. The sweat coursing down my neck and limbs tingled as it cooled and evaporated. I felt calm settle over me. When I opened my eyes, an elderly monk with an unruly grey topknot and moon-sliver eyes was standing to one side of me. He was stroking his wispy grey beard; his well-washed blue robe hung as tentatively on his thin body as if he were a wraith. I wondered how long he’d been there, how long I’d stood there. My sweat had dried, leaving snail-trails of salt down the insides of my arms.

The monk rounded the icon to exit that first hall into the courtyard. A minute or two later I followed. I drew in a sharp breath at the sight of a particularly lyrical array of pavilions for prayer and meditation. When I chanced upon that temple, I hadn’t imagined what grace lay beyond its humble gate. I looked back towards the hall from which I’d come. The old monk was standing by a large standing brazier in which was planted a forest of burning joss. From his sleeve, he produced a wad of gilded spirit paper and applied it to the tip of a stick of burning incense until the whole lot burst into flame. Immediately, a breeze lifted the scraps of burning gilt and tossed them into the air above the uptilted, charcoal eaves. There they frolicked in a glittering, manic dance of golden joy, before drifting gently back to earth as dark ash. Somewhere inside me a window was flung open, and the sadness and anger and guilt that were weighing me down grew wings and flew out to chase those sparkling shards of reflected sunlight. My head opened like a flower. A blue, cloudless sky melted into the infinite. I felt formless as water, light as air. There were tears on my cheek and I was surprised to realise they were my own. I cannot explain any of this.

The monk appeared to be waiting for me. Beckoning for me to follow him, he turned on his heel. I followed, pulling my head along on a string like a balloon – at least that’s what it felt like. We arrived at a back section of the temple that I guessed was the monks’ living quarters. A handful of monks sat in the shade of the buildings or under the trees in groups of two or three, some talking quietly, some reading. It must have been about eleven. A few were eating lunch from plain ceramic bowls.

Coming to a halt outside a small, simple room, he glanced inside. ‘Come,’ he said, urging me in before him with a flap of his papery hands. The whitewashed walls of the room smelled of lime. They were covered with meditation maps of the human body and posters with illustrations of Daoist medicinal herbs. Two younger top-knotted monks were seated in wicker chairs at a small card table over which a man with a civilian haircut presided. There were two empty chairs. The elderly monk eased himself into one. ‘Sit down,’ the layman said, as though expecting me. I did. The three monks smiled at me. One was skinny, young, dark, eager, and present; another around my own age – almost thirty-five – and palely ethereal.

As for the layman, he was at the softening stage of middle age. His cheeks were relaxing into jowls, and he had a smile that seemed childlike one moment, canny the next. His nose was long and his tobacco-stained bottom teeth crossed like the legs of a man at ease. Under a pompadour of thick, shoe-polish-black hair, his eyes shone small and bright. He wore quiet cotton trousers and a loud Hawaiian shirt that paraded hula-ing maidens with gaily coloured tropical flowers in their hair across the tidy mound of his belly. What is he here to sell? I thought.

He handed me his card, which I studied as he poured fragrant, honey-coloured gongfu tea into a tiny terracotta cup, the inside of which was glazed the nostalgic blue of a Beijing autumn sky. On the table was a saucer of roasted sunflower seeds and before each of the monks lay a small pile of shells. The card read: Master Happy Fish, Vice-director, XX Provincial Daoist Association, XX Township Chief Daoist Adviser and Daoist Physician. It gave the temple as his residence and said consultations needed to be arranged in advance. It listed a phone number.

‘First, we will eat,’ he announced. Another monk entered, as though on cue, with five bowls containing rice, pickle, chilli, spinach and tofu. I realised with a shock that I hadn’t eaten since the previous evening. I wondered how the messenger-monk had known to bring five bowls.

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘You’re very kind.’ I hadn’t spoken to anyone that whole day. I wondered if my words were slow or slurred; I felt strangely high, like I had smoked a bit of weed, something we all did back then. It grew wild and was the one bit of fun the authorities hadn’t yet worked out that we were having.

‘One day soon,’ said Master Happy Fish, as though answering a question, ‘I will retreat to the mountains. That phone number on my card will no longer work. My forwarding address will be at the end of the rainbow.’ He roared with laughter at this obscure joke. I smiled politely, and nodded as he leaned forward, tapped my knee, looked into my eyes and assured me, ‘But if you want to find me again, you’ll know how.’

By any rational reckoning, this was the charlatan I’d spent my life avoiding. And yet I made no attempt to leave. Maybe I was tired of rationality. Or maybe I was just ready for a charlatan.

‘Bazi?’

I told him the date and time of my birth – my bazi, ‘eight characters’. He did some calculations on his fingers and then reached for my hand. He laid three fingers flat across my wrist and stared off into an upper corner of the room. Mental calculations played across his drifting features like arctic lights on snow. ‘You won’t marry,’ he told me cheerfully, ‘and if you do it won’t last. But you’ll be fine. Anyway, you don’t like being tied down. Do you want some pills for that?’

A laugh shot out from my throat, like a burst of machine-gun fire. If I hadn’t cried in a long while, neither had I laughed. ‘For what?’ I gasped, recovering. ‘Will the pills make me want to be tied down?’

He chuckled. ‘There are no pills for that. No. I’m talking about your urinary tract infection. The pissing problem. Although to be honest, I’d see a Western doctor for that one.’

He got me.

Q, I thought, would love this story. Would have loved this story. I blinked.

After a few minutes, Master Happy Fish, who’d been observing me, took my tea, which had cooled in its cup, and tossed it onto the cement floor. He poured hot water into the teapot and freshened the tea in my cup before attending to the others. After a minute or two he took out a pack of cigarettes and pressed one on me. Every so often, one of the monks slurped his tea. Outside, in the temple grounds, birds sang. A slanting shaft of sunlight crept into the room from the window, illuminating a sleeping ginger cat. It opened one eye, yawned and lazily stretched out one paw, extending its claws and then retracting them. I thought of Mimi Four, my black-and-white cat, whom I’d left with neighbours. Trustworthy ones. Not the ones who, I was quite certain, were responsible for the disappearance of Mimis One to Three and the subsequent, heartbreaking, cooking smells that thickened the air in the publishing house dorm where I was living at the time.

Master Happy Fish patted his pompadour and gave his riot of a shirt a jaunty tug where it had surfed up over his exuberant belly. The old monk fingered his beard like he was playing a harp; the young skinny monk straightened up, rotating his head and then his shoulder blades in a way that set off a succession of sounds like a string of distant firecrackers. With a few slow blinks, the ethereal one gave the impression that he had spread his wings to flutter back earthwards for a visit. Master Happy Fish laughed for no reason and said, ‘There are many different types of Daoism. You see these three monks?’

I nodded.

‘They don’t eat meat. They don’t shop for nice clothes. They don’t look at pretty women.’ A quick smile flashed from monk to monk at the phrase pretty women. ‘They meditate every day. It’s necessary for them at this stage.’ Subtly, they appeared to arrange themselves as though for my inspection. I had a vision of my mind as a bucket, collecting rain water. ‘Me,’ Master Happy Fish continued, ‘I eat meat. I like nice clothes.’ He indicated his shirt. ‘And I look at pretty women. At the level I am at it is okay to look. It will be okay for them to look too when they reach that level. They will know when they get there. It will not be when they no longer think to look. Nor will it be when they look but no longer think.’

‘When will it be?’ I asked.

‘When they look and are able to see, and when they think and are able to know.’

The skinny, eager monk leaned forward. Speaking in a stage whisper, he told me, ‘That is why he is a master.’

‘Have some more tea,’ said Master Happy Fish, as if the monk hadn’t spoken. ‘It is high-grade leaf from Yunnan. Delicious and good for the digestion. A devotee brings me reels of it every time he comes.’

He gestured towards a corner of the room. Stacked there were perhaps a dozen tightly packed discs of tea, the shape and size of film reels. Later, pu’er tea, packed like that, would become a fetish and status symbol for the moneyed classes in Beijing and elsewhere. At that time, we didn’t have moneyed classes. There were just officials, some of whom had a lot more money than they ought to have had, the odd successful ‘individual entrepreneur’ and the rest of us. In fact, the student demonstrations of the first half of the year had started as a reaction to the rising corruption: ‘Sell the Benzes and Save the Nation’. It was only when the Benz-driving leadership used the press to denounce the students and raw power to try to shut down their protests that a free press and democracy jumped to the top of the agenda. (Thinking about all this now, it wasn’t that the students, or any of us, had been naïve, exactly, but we hadn’t even known what corruption was, what it could be, the altitudinal heights it could reach. We never could have imagined the eczema-spread of corruption that disfigures our nation’s face today – tea reels were, back then, simply something to marvel at.)

‘All religion attempts to answer one question. Do you know what that is?’

I thought about it, recalling what ought to have struck me the moment that Master Happy Fish had told me his name. The Daoist sage Zhuang Zi, with whom I share a surname, once asserted that fish were happy. His interlocutor challenged him as to how he could know this: ‘You are not a fish.’ Zhuang Zi replied: ‘And you are not me. How do you know that I do not know if fish are happy?’ I looked at Master Happy Fish and asked cheekily: ‘How do you know the fish are happy?’

‘Ha ha ha!’ Master Happy Fish slapped his thigh as his laughter streamed out like a progression of musical notes. ‘That is a very important question.’

‘It’s not the one you were looking for, though.’

Master Happy Fish shrugged. ‘It wasn’t, but it could be.’ He poured more tea. I was afraid he wouldn’t go on, that I had stopped him in his tracks. I waited.

‘Where do we come from, what path should our lives follow while we’re here, and where do we go when we’re gone?’

For a moment, I thought he was asking me. I was still pondering the answers when I realised that was the question.

‘A Christian believes our origins are in original sin. In this life we should do our best to expiate this sin. How well we do determines where we go – heaven or hell. A Buddhist believes we come from a previous life. We spend this life trying to accumulate good karma to add to or balance the store inherited from the previous life. How well we do determines how we are born into the next cycle of life. The Daoist –’ and here he paused for effect ‘– the Daoist says we come from Nature, while we’re on earth we should shunqi ziran, follow the flow of Nature, and after we die we return to Nature. On a practical level, all religions instruct their believers to do good things. Charity, for example, is one of the five pillars of Islam. Daoism is no exception. We say, do good deeds, be a good person and leave the world at least as good a place as you found it. Daoism is very simple, really. You are a poet.’

A beat.

‘Me?’ I felt like I’d been snapped out of a trance by a hypnotist. ‘Yes, I –’

‘A poet of sadness. You feel sorrow over life’s impermanence.’

My throat thickened with emotion. Maybe he called everyone a poet, maybe everyone thought of themselves as a poet. And perhaps we were all given over to sorrow over life’s impermanence, or at least all of us whose wanderings led us to pass through the gates of temples and drift within their perfumed courtyards. Yet, though I cannot explain it, I had the feeling that he knew everything about me, and understood me better, perhaps if only at that moment, than I did myself. For the second time I thought of Q, the one friend who could explain anything, and regretted that he was not there with me to share in my wonder. On the other hand, in this Daoist temple in this provincial town in the southwest, I felt Q was as present by my side as he’d ever been since I met him that first electric year at university.

‘There’s an American boy who teaches English in the university here,’ said Master Happy Fish. ‘His Chinese is very good. He comes here every Saturday to study Daoist philosophy and kung-fu with our young monk here.’ He indicated the ethereal one, who nodded in his vague fashion. ‘Afterwards, he comes in for tea and we talk. The American’s name is Ruosi.’

‘Ross,’ said the ethereal monk, with, so far as I could tell, flawless pronunciation.

‘Exactly. Ruosi. Ruosi has told us about a woman author from his country whose name is Rice. I thought this strange. Surely an American author would be called Bread! Ha ha!’ The monks chuckled with the tolerant air of listening to a familiar joke retold. Master Happy Fish continued. ‘Ruosi said that this Rice writes about vampires. You know vampires?’ I nodded. ‘For her vampires, Ruosi told us, the great sorrow is the permanence of life. So you see? If you stand in one place the moon looks brighter in the other place. But if you stand in the other place, the moon looks brighter in the first place. As a Daoist, of course, it’s particularly interesting to contemplate the existential dilemma of the vampires. We are famous, as you know, for our pursuit of the elixir of immortality. I would like to read these vampire novels one day. Unfortunately, they are not translated and all I can manage in English is “hello” and “thank you”, and according to Ruosi, when I say “thank you” it sounds like I have put someone to the bottom of the sea. Sank you. But should I be unhappy that I cannot read these novels by this Miss Rice?’ He didn’t look particularly unhappy.

‘No,’ I guessed. Master Happy Fish clapped twice, economical but enthusiastic applause, and the monks beamed.

‘Correct! You see, unhappiness is the distance between what you desire and what you can or do have. Put another way, it is the space between what you wish to be true and what is true, the gap between what you hope to achieve and what you are capable of achieving. You are a poet. If you yearn for the Nobel Literary Prize, chances are that you will be unhappy. If you write poetry, the most beautiful poetry you can possibly write, you will be happy. Striving for perfection, for improvement and progress, is a good thing. Of course, I could strive to learn English but in this case, I think it’s more sensible to adjust my expectations. I don’t want to be forever sending people to the bottom of the sea.’

I liked this jovial, pot-bellied, flamboyant explainer, charlatan or not; if I had meandered into his realm by accident, it was – pardon the pun – a very happy one indeed.

Master Happy Fish proceeded to answer many other questions I hadn’t yet asked. At least I don’t recall asking them. I can’t honestly remember. There are many things that are difficult to remember that I wish I could remember more easily, and other things that are hard to forget that I would prefer never to have to think about again.

These are some of the other things Master Happy Fish told me that day:

‘You don’t live in a house or apartment or even any city on earth. You live in your head. You should get out a bit more.’

‘Be. Know. Do. And don’t forget to dance.’

‘Dance, but wear the right shoes. Which may be no shoes at all.’

‘A line is the shortest distance between two points. A line is a succession of points. Look at the line and see the points. Stand on a point and see the line. If it’s a fishing line, then go fishing.’

‘Leave and come back. Come back and leave. Always write postcards. If you can’t write postcards, write poems.’

I asked him if I should learn to meditate.

‘Don’t meditate if you think it will make you smarter; meditate if you think it will make you less smart.’

‘Wear less black and more white and yellow.’

This, I told him somewhat apologetically, would be difficult. I wore white shirts but was otherwise wedded to black and grey and navy. I couldn’t see myself in yellow.

‘Get a scarf,’ he shrugged. ‘You’d look good in a scarf. And socks. Yellow socks are good. Sunlight for the feet.’

Finally, he advised me to wake up at dawn every day and exchange breaths with the trees. I told him that dawn was usually when I went to bed. I asked if the advice still held under those circumstances, and if the trees would be offended if in exchange for their pure green exhalations I occasionally gave them alcohol-tinged vapours. He said the advice still held. The trees could deal with it. He also suggested that if I was ever at a loose end I should open a bar.

Whoomph.

Whenever I am standing behind the bar and I hear the heavy, padded door-curtain fall back into place with an airy, muffled thud, I feel a thrill of anticipation. I couldn’t tell you what I am hoping for, exactly, and perhaps I don’t want to know, because all these years later Master Happy Fish’s counsel is ever in my ears. Desire creates the space for unhappiness. In the years before I met him, and especially in the years leading up to 1989, no one could have told me this, least of all a Daoist master in a Hawaiian shirt. I wouldn’t have listened. There are still moments when I don’t hear as well as I should. At the same time, and to be honest, probably more as a result of age, exhaustion and experience than philosophy, I do believe that I’m at the point where, like Master Happy Fish, I can look at pretty girls and all the rest and leave it at hope, that scudding step or two short of desire. I’ve only just got here. But I do wonder if here is not just the crumbling edge of a cliff that could still hurl me onto the rocks and into the sea.

When I was young, I was ruled by desire. My desire had no limits. I wanted sex, love, excitement and fame. I wanted to experience every emotion in every poem that had ever been written, to sleep with every woman who had ever been born, delve into every school of philosophy and see every wonder this world had to offer. I wanted to walk among the clouds and feel the stars in my hair. My senses could be set alight by the rustle of leaves in the wind, the whirr of bicycle wheels in a lonely hutong, the earthy musk of an approaching thunderstorm, the throaty sound of a Beijing girl’s cursing, the sight of spring’s first green buds on the trees standing sentinel against the dusty red walls of the Forbidden City, or the flat, swelling heat of July. The ruins of the Yuanmingyuan whispered their lyrical melancholy directly into my ears and the touch of a girl’s skin was enough to singe the hair off my own.

My generation was old enough to remember the long dark night of the Cultural Revolution but not so old that we were broken by it. We came of age in those uncertain years when everyone seemed to be holding their breath. We first let our breath out on Tiananmen Square in 1976, when Premier Zhou died and we mourned him, ourselves and the nation’s fate. After that there were the rumblings of earthquakes, terrestrial and political. We wept over lost opportunities, fear and uncertainty when Mao died in September that year. It was fitting, perhaps, that although he’d asked for cremation, the nation could not quite see its way clear even to burying him, and so he was preserved, destined to rise and fall, rise and fall in his mausoleum on an almost daily basis so that generations to come could be reassured – or otherwise – by the knowledge he remained among us.

After all the eternal waiting for something to happen, hoping and dreaming, in the late seventies, we got an intoxicating whiff of freedom with Democracy Wall, where we expressed ourselves in poetry and art alongside the manifestos. We felt so lucky, and yet we understood how exquisitely tenuous it all was. We saw that luck threatened as the decade passed with each new bullshit campaign against ‘spiritual pollution’, ‘bourgeois liberalism’, or whatever bogeyman was haunting the dreams of the Politburo at night. So, like wild animals, we pursued freedom ferociously, pouncing on it, bringing it down alive, gorging ourselves on its steaming entrails.

Today’s young people have grown up with the domesticated version of some of the freedoms we hunted and they’ve become tame too. I once saw a documentary about a zoo somewhere overseas where the animals have lots of room to roam. They’re still fenced in, and they still depend on their keepers for food, but they’re happy enough. That’s what it feels like today compared to the eighties. So long as you don’t jump the fence into the wilds of political activism, you can do pretty much whatever you like – make money, make love, play video games all day or dance all night. We, on the other hand, had to fight for every scrap of freedom: to wear the clothes we wanted to wear, to write songs and poems and make art that said what we wanted it to say, even just to walk hand in hand with the person we fancied. Every time we headbutted our cage, the walls moved outwards a metre or two. We did such a good job of widening it that kids today, half of them anyway, don’t even realise they’re still in a cage. Maybe they’re too busy trying to make a living, maybe they’re just sufficiently entertained, but I don’t know how many even try to figure out where the fences are. That bit about hunting down freedom and feeding on its entrails? That was Q’s metaphor. He was always prowling the edges of the cage.

I met Q at university. I’ll never forget the first time I saw him. I’d just swung one of the precious places in the hastily rebuilt university system – and at one of Beijing’s top universities. My parents had come back from a stint at the ‘cadre school’ where they’d been sent after their punishment to ‘learn from the peasantry’ (only to learn what a mixed bag the revolution had been in the countryside). They returned to work in offices where they still found the occasional bloodstain on the walls, and where the corridors were haunted by the ghosts of colleagues who’d been beaten to death or hanged themselves. I was their future and their hope. And I, who’d spent years deprived of formal education, was infinitely conscious of my good luck. I would study hard and do them proud. I arrived at my dorm room with a small pile of clothes that gave off a motherly tang of laundry soap and sunshine, a hard pencil case with the slogan Aim higher with every step in Mao’s calligraphy on the cover and my father’s best pen cosseted within, a dictionary, an enamel washbasin, a toothbrush cup, a pale green thermos, a thick paper packet of rough tea leaves and a lidded jar to drink from, plus a few other items that I proceeded to arrange on and around one of the top bunks. One of my new flatmates, a southerner called Wu Jian, gave me a nail from which to hang my new khaki book bag with the name of the university stencilled across the top flap. I hammered the nail into the wall above my bed with the spine of my dictionary, cursing with what I gauged to be very grown-up confidence when a spray of plaster hit my blanket.

Another classmate, Shugang, was busy colonising the third of the room’s four bunks. We were chatting about the classes we planned to take and the pretty girls we’d already seen on campus. We were trying to act a lot more off-hand and worldly than any of us actually were, when Q appeared in the doorway. Through some trick of perception, the angle of the sunlight streaming through the window perhaps, he emanated an almost godly glow. We were pretending to be cool even if the word, via English, had yet to arrive in China as ku. Q was the very definition of it. We all wore more or less the same clothes – cotton shirts of aspirational whiteness tucked into navy-blue or army-green loose cotton trousers, and black cloth shoes. Q’s clothes were no different but he wore them with style. It wasn’t a question of fashion – there was no such thing back then. It was something in the way he’d rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, something about the way his trousers, not definably less shapeless than ours, hung on his lean and muscular body. Q wore his clothes like a man. I’d felt grown up going off to university, but I knew in that instant I was still a boy.

Q already owned the room. All three of us hastily jumped to present ourselves as though to a king. He had a natural majesty that occasionally bordered on arrogance, but when the arrogant are that majestic, people tend to forgive them. He flashed that secret, knowing smile that we’d all eventually see slay one girl after the other – and that none of us could even come close to imitating, though we certainly tried. He told us his name, but said that we should just call him Q, like the English letter, because his dad had nicknamed him that when he was little to remind him always to question things. It’s funny; if anyone else was called Q everyone automatically would have teased them, called them Ah Q after the infamously self-defeating and un-self-aware protagonist of Lu Xun’s famous story, but Q – no one even thought to mention it.

‘Your dad sounds pretty great. Is he a teacher?’ Wu Jian asked.

‘My dad, he …’ When he named his dad, our awe doubled, tripled, went off the charts. His dad had recently been politically ‘rehabilitated’ and honoured. We’d all read about how he’d returned from overseas in 1949 as a ‘patriotic intellectual’ and worked alongside Liang Sicheng and others to try to save Beijing’s historic physical heritage, and had ended up in a labour reform camp in the late 1950s, where his health was ruined by three years of near-starvation in the great famine that, we didn’t know at the time, was largely man-made. Mao-made. We didn’t know a lot of things at the time. Thinking back on it now, I’m not sure we did know all that much about Q’s father. It’s more likely that we had a general notion about who his father was, what he’d done, and what happened to him, and time filled in the details.

I do remember very clearly how Q merely had to glance at the bottom bunk where Shugang had spread his things and Shugang volunteered that if Q wanted that bunk he’d happily switch to the top one. ‘No need,’ said Q then, and I think we all understood that what he really meant was that when you’re Q, there’s no need to make people do something to prove that they would do it if you so much as asked.

One late Saturday afternoon in the spring, Wu Jian was seated at his desk. He was supposed to be reading a book on Greek mythology but he was obsessing about some girl to Shugang, who sat on his bunk huddled over his feet, trimming his toenails. I was lying on my bunk, reading, young, restless. Q was out somewhere.

That morning, a ferocious sandstorm had roared through the city. Now, an eye-achingly beautiful afternoon stretched blue angel wings over a city that was still blinking from under its blanket of grit. Observing the seraphic sky over the top of my book, I was filled with a kind of ecstasy. I wrote my first poem then and there, and Q, when he returned, called it ‘genius’. I don’t think it was, and I don’t know if he meant it, but from that day on I considered myself, and eventually became, a poet. That’s just the sort of person Q was and the effect he had on people. On me.

Those were heady days: there was the brief explosion of public free expression that was Democracy Wall, with its furious poetry and handwritten pleas for justice and freedom; the first exhibitions of art that didn’t obey any diktat but that of the artists’ own will; the normalisation of relations with the US; the open-air poetry readings; the tapes of pop music smuggled in by foreign journalists and others that somehow made their way into the hands of people like us – or people like Q, who then put them into the hands of people like us. The older generation, beaten and broken, licked their wounds and wept for their lost years. We were the found generation. Our moon was high, our season come and we were all riding the bore of the Qiantang River. We were young. The water was beautiful. And the air was full of siren calls.

I met Chunmei in my first year at university. So far as I was concerned, it was love at first sight. She was in my philosophy class, whip-smart, moon-faced and tough-minded, and it took me months to summon the courage to strike up a friendship and two years to persuade her to go out with me. When she did, I was in bliss.

It would be unfair to say she disliked Q. No one disliked Q. It was impossible. He was charming, witty and charismatic. He was a party to which you wanted to be invited, a virus you wanted to catch. But some women had a stronger immune system than others, and I was unquestionably grateful that Chunmei was one. But as I saw her more I saw him less and life, I hate to say it, lost a bit of its colour.

We all graduated and got our work assignments – Chunmei to the Academy of Social Sciences, me to the Philosophy Publishing House, Q to People’s Literature. The underground art and poetry scene was losing out to rock ’n’ roll – we’d been the rock stars of our generation, the next had real rock stars. We, artists and poets, went to all the ‘parties’ – everyone used the English word – where Cui Jian and Dou Wei and the other rockers played. But for the first time in our lives, we were no longer the youngest people in the room. We’d been little kids in the Cultural Revolution, which was when the new generation had been born.

The old gang still got together for drinking sessions that lasted into the wee hours; Q could always make you forget that you had to get on your bike and pedal to work the next day. Life was still exciting. We weren’t the youngest but we were still dancing. In 1989, of course, the rug was finally pulled from under all our feet and everyone went flying.

In 1931, after the execution of five young writers by Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government, Lu Xun wrote, ‘I can but stand by, looking on as friends become new ghosts. I seek an angry poem from among the swords.’ Do dreams die? Or do they just await new dreamers? Some of us disappeared forever. Some of us went overseas. Some, shedding all dreams except those of wealth, threw their arms over their head, bounced and dived into the sea. That’s what we called going into business in the nineties: xiahai, jumping into the sea. Me, I wrote futile poems of anguish and anger. Then I stopped.

As the Tang poet wrote, once the river’s water has flowed into the sea, it never returns to its source. If Li Po and Dionysus had once been my gods, over the years their temples fell into ruin and debasement. Karaoke bars and nightclubs where girls’ thighs carry price tags are not altars of Dionysus; they are the shrines of Mammon. When Li Po composed his famous poem that went, ‘If life is to have meaning, live it to the full; raise not an empty goblet to the moon,’ he never said the goblet had to be made of gold or that it should be filled with XO or 2005 Château this or that. With whom should one raise a goblet in such an age?

Some part of me stayed in that Daoist temple, or perhaps some part of that temple stayed in me. When I told my friends about my encounter with Master Happy Fish they found it most amusing. Shugang gave me the nickname that has stuck to me to this day like toffee to teeth: the Sage. Sometimes even I forget it’s not my real name.

After Chunmei left for Canada, and following the open-heart surgery without anaesthetic that was our protracted, long-distance break-up, I had other girlfriends, long and short term, serious and less so, and continued my work at the Philosophy Publishing House, more and more robotically editing treatises on the meaning of life. But I wrote no more poetry: 1989 knocked the poetry, the romance and the wind out of me.

Then, on the day of the Spring Purification Festival in the middle of the first decade of the new millennium, the third day of the third lunar month, I was at a dinner with Wu Jian, Shugang and other old friends and classmates. One of them, now a darling of the international art scene, had invited the gang to a new restaurant outside the Fourth Ring Road called the Orchid Pavilion. The name came from the famous fourth-century gathering to celebrate the day of Spring Purification commemorated by the poet Wang Xizhi in the single most treasured work of calligraphy in all Chinese history. The festival happened to fall on the weekend that year, so we could make a proper night of it.

The taxi driver, a rough-edged young man from the rural suburbs, had never heard of the Orchid Pavilion Teahouse. When we finally found it, I admit I was as amazed as he was by this stark, funereal-white garden teahouse set in a vast field of Zen-raked white gravel. A solemn attendant in a wide-sleeved damask robe, looking like he’d stepped straight out of the Song scroll painting Along the River During the Qingming Festival, led me to a private courtyard. At its centre was a gracious pavilion; it was designed with similar elegant austerity to the rest of the place. It featured sliding walls to accommodate the weather. The table was low, the chairs cushiony and a meandering channel was carved into the floor to allow a clear stream to flow past each seat.

The party had already begun when I crossed the miniature humpbacked bridge into the pavilion. They gave me a raucous welcome and said that my punishment for being late was to bottoms-up a cup of wuliangye on the spot. As we joked and teased one another about thinning hair and thickening waists, remarking on the latter with the traditional, now backhanded compliment of fafule, how your fortune has grown, a team of discreet servers laid out a sumptuous drinkers’ banquet: plate upon plate of cold, room-temperature, and hot dishes, northern taste with southern finesse. Our porcelain wine cups boasted an unusual and, as one young server self-importantly demonstrated, hydrodynamic design: they floated in the stream. As though speaking to schoolchildren, the boy recited a prepared spiel about Wang Xizhi and the Preface to the Poems Composed at the Orchid Pavilion, explaining how when a floating cup stopped where one was sitting, that person had to drink it and compose a poem. We listened politely, humouring him as though we’d never heard the story before. But when the boy went on with a few stale suggestions as to what and how we might poetise (raising our cups to the moon, etc.), we gently shooed him away.

Our host raised his glass and toasted from the Preface: ‘Furen zhi xiangyu, fuyang yishi.’ The bonds that connect us stretch across a lifetime. Then, formalities dispensed with, we joked around, drank, and caught up on each other’s news, the divorces, the children, the travels and the latest trends in the art and poetry that was once so central to all of our lives.

‘To absent friends.’

‘To Q, if only he were able to be here tonight.’

‘To Q.’

‘Q.’

‘Sage? You’re unusually quiet.’

I quoted another line from Wang Xizhi’s ode to impermanence: ‘Zhongqi yu jin.’ And in the end, all returns to nothingness.

A silence.

‘Speaking of which,’ said Jiayu, whom we called Yoga because her name sounded like the word for yoga – yujia – backwards, ‘remember years ago, when you told us about that temple and Master Happy Fish?’

‘And you all gave me so much shit for it.’

‘I know, I know.’ Yoga laughed. ‘But the story stayed with me, and a few years later, I was on a recce in the southwest.’ Yoga had become a documentary filmmaker. Her work, which centred on environmental issues, couldn’t be shown in China but it was invited to festivals all over the world. ‘I found myself in this little town. Something about the name rang a bell, but it took me a while to work out why, and then I remembered your story. I found my way to the temple. It’s been renovated something terrible, I mean tacky. And the monks looked a bit central casting, if you know what I mean. As in Communist Party Central. Kind of weird, if you ask me, as I thought they only really bothered these days with the bigger temples in the big cities, but what would I know? Anyway, I went in and asked for Master Happy Fish. Everyone, from the gatekeeper to the fortune tellers to the monks and even the lady sweeping around the deities, looked at me with a strange mix of blankness and suspicion, which suggested that either they had never heard of him, or that something, I don’t know, bad had happened and that I’d rung all the alarm bells. In the end, I left, wishing I’d never gone in. I don’t know what I was hoping for, enlightenment, amusement, or just a good story to tell you next time we met. Sadly, it was all something of an anticlimax. There was nothing of the place that remotely matched your story except for the architecture.’

‘Maybe you had the wrong temple,’ someone suggested.

‘Maybe,’ Yoga conceded.

Everyone looked at me. I shrugged, zhongqi yu jin, I repeated, and we all drank to ‘nothingness’. When she’d begun her story, my guts had clenched around a nameless apprehension, but by the time she finished, I realised that I felt completely fine about Master Happy Fish’s disappearance. What was, was. What is, is. It was only in that moment that I realised that perhaps I truly had absorbed his lessons, and at the same time wondered if I’d made the whole story up myself, if it hadn’t been some sort of necessary hallucination.

Later that night, or early the next morning, and restless with alcohol and memory, I reached for my dog-eared copy of Zhuangzi. It fell open to the chapter on ‘the Great and Venerable Teacher’. There is a passage there about accepting death as part of life. A man hides a boat in a gorge, but someone steals it all the same. Zhuangzi speaks of the futility of hiding little things in bigger things, for only the world can hide the world. In other words, the only constancy is inconstancy, the only safety is understanding that there is no safety.

I did something I hadn’t done in years: I took up my pen. From it poured poems about love and loss and friendship, new and old Orchid Pavilions, unlikely philosopher–monks and the eternal temples of the mind. The sun was high in the east by the time I’d finished. I felt light, unburdened and terribly dehydrated. I put the notebook aside, drank a big glass of water and fell into a deep sleep.

I didn’t look at the poems again for several weeks, not wishing to discover that they were just the pathetic, boring scribbles of an old drunk with a tired pen. But when I did, I recognised that my spark, however modest, had returned. I showed them to a friend who worked with me at the Philosophy Publishing House.

When I started at the publishing house I was an idealist. It was perhaps a function of the times that it seemed credible that people would read books on philosophy, consider or reconsider how they lived and the values they lived by, and that this could be a redemptive project, for both the individual and society. A bit naïve in retrospect. By the time of the second coming of my poetic inspiration, the only philosophy people were interested in was that of Lee Iacocca. It is a cynical world in which the chief form of guidance people seek is that which points them to entrepreneurial and material success. Writers sent us manuscripts on pop psychology and self-help: ‘Sun Zi and the Art of Start-Ups’, that kind of thing. Worse, we began to consider them.

If you happen to pass by one of the new multi-storey bookshops, like the one at Xidan in Beijing where queues can form before the doors even open, you’d be excused for thinking that this is a nation devoted to literature and the arts (including that of self-reflection). But take a closer look. The shelves are heaped with the biographies and autobiographies of successful capitalists, inspirational tracts on accumulating wealth, hastily translated potboilers and bestsellers from the Anglosphere, anything and everything to do with computers and programming, and an infinite number of study guides, including many geared to the examinations for entrance to American universities. As for the history sections, they are full of sepia photographs and tomes covering the great, glorious and correct history of the Communist Party from every angle – except from inside a labour camp or underneath a tank tread. The histories of Beijing stretch back hundreds of thousands of years to Peking Man, but either stop or begin to shed detail in 1949.

Back in the nineties, friends told me about cultish qigong masters who caused them to shout and shake in stadiums full of the possessed. One, who later emigrated to Australia, even followed the path of Falungong with its lunatic talk of ‘emanations’ and magically shrinking and expanding flying saucers. As I saw it, like those who’d ‘found Jesus’, they were merely substituting one catechism for another: Hail Mary (or Master Li) instead of Hail Mao. This was a time when philosophy ought to have come into its own: people were fundamentally re-evaluating their beliefs, their moral systems, all the Who am I?s and What am I doing here?s.

And yet philosophy floundered. Some questions couldn’t be asked, of course. But it seemed that those who cared didn’t have the time, and those who had the time didn’t care. Some people I knew found Jesus. I distrusted their certainty and the shining, heavenward light in their eyes. One friend found madness. His uncertainty, and the way the lights had gone out in his eyes, frightened me just as much. After a while, my work began to feel like packaging up machine parts or stacking cabbages. My nephews and nieces – for I was of the last generation where it was normal to have brothers and sisters – never once said, wow, uncle, tell me more about those books you publish. They just tapped at their phones and spoke to each other in code. And poetry – forget it. We grew up on Yang Lian, Bei Dao, Mang Ke, Zhai Yongming and the soulful, witty lyrics of Luo Dayou; younger people sing meile meile meile wo zuile zuile zuile – beauty beauty beauty I’m drunk drunk drunk – and that’s about as good as it gets. (Maybe it gets better. Maybe I’m just getting old and failing to pay attention. And we had some pretty crap pop songs too.)

Anyway, you know what Beijing is like. The friend at the publishing house to whom I showed my poems, Lao Ma, still cared about poetry and said he loved them. He had a friend in a Shandong province poetry publishing house. The friend’s friend, Kong, allegedly a descendant of Confucius, was coming to town a few days later. Lao Ma invited us both to dinner at a Yunnan restaurant. Kong waved fried bees around with his chopsticks and, in that Shandong accent that sends the four tones racing for cover, swore that he’d never, in his whole life, seen anything like my poetry. I was a genius. I was Shakespeare, Blake, Zhuangzi, Li Po, Bei Dao, Yang Lian and Tagore all rolled into one. It was completely ridiculous. Guojiang, I said, bored and embarrassed. You overstate. This set off a fresh round of flattery even more over the top than the last. I concluded he was a huyou, someone who talks big and persuasively but would never deliver the goods.

After dinner we exchanged cards. Back home, I stuck his card in a drawer and didn’t think any more about it. I had more pressing issues on my mind. My parents were trying to fight eviction from the home they’d lived in half their life. My brother had just had a cancer scare. And Chunmei got in touch after all these years to send me photographs of her and her Canadian husband’s three children. Something about the direct and unaffected way her kids stared into the lens marked them as unmistakeably foreign. I searched their faces for her features and wished she’d sent a photo of herself instead. I wondered what our children would have looked like.

A few weeks later, Kong phoned up and changed my life.

‘Wow,’ I said. ‘That’s great news.’ Kong apologised for the paltriness of the advance. I reminded him that I too worked in publishing. I had no illusions that the path to wealth or glory was paved with poetry.

The proposed cover design appalled me: a sentimental, soft-focus photo of a pretty girl looking wistfully at a rose, recalling the crappiest sort of romance fiction. In the Eternal Way of the Author, I protested, and in the Eternal Way of the Publisher, they paid no heed.

I dedicated the book to Q. My original title, a reference to the lessons of Master Happy Fish, was Unhappiness is the Measure. They said it was too downbeat and suggested Love and the Orchid Pavilion. I say ‘suggested’ but it was no more a suggestion than an invitation to drop by the local police station for a cup of tea is a neighbourly gesture. I thought about Master Happy Fish and what he might do in my place. Follow the flow. So I said, yes, of course, that’s fine. When it came out, they gave me twenty complimentary copies. I gave two to Lao Ma, whose latest project was seducing some young starlet. He gave one copy to her as a gift. The starlet, Shanshan, shot to genuine stardom when, the following month, a TV series about the Qing dynasty in which she played the young Empress Dowager Cixi became a huge hit all across China. She wrote in her Weibo micro-blog about how she reached for my book of poetry first thing every morning, before she even got out of bed; it was her inspiration and her bible. I nearly tossed my noodles when I read that. This was just embarrassment piled on embarrassment.

I hadn’t realised that, by then, Shanshan had more than 730,000 followers. She urged them to buy the book. A significant number of them did. To my bewilderment, and despite that accursed cover, it became a literary sensation. The critics and serious cultural commentators loved it (even if they universally bagged the cover) – and those who didn’t argued their case so vociferously that it drove even more people to read it, if only out of curiosity. The Shandong publishers put out a special hardcover edition with a more dignified cover, then published a collection of the poetry I’d written back in the late seventies and early eighties and hidden under the floorboards of my friend’s place that time – all of which, weirdly, flew off the shelves. I was invited to appear on TV, interviewed by radio stations, profiled on the internet. Someone set up a fan site. Everyone wanted to know, Who is Q? Is she your girlfriend?

I said Q was a friend, a male friend, but they paid no heed. They didn’t believe me or want to believe me, so I stopped trying to explain. Those who know, know. That’s enough. Not everyone has to know everything. Apparently, my silence contributed to my ‘aura of mystery’. I stopped reading about myself.

A man with a name, an aura of mystery and a few spare yuan in his pocket can do very well in a place like Beijing, this capital of culture and greatness that is also a city of whores. At bookshop appearances, young women practically hurled themselves into my arms. At first it was like manna from heaven. But I knew that the girls wanted to sleep with the idea of me they’d formed from my work, the me of my poetry, not the me of me. I didn’t blame them. The me of me was a far more prosaic creature.

I soon grew weary of dating girls who hadn’t been around in 1989. It’s not something you can explain to people, what having lived through something like that does to a person. When I’ve tried to talk about it with them, I would watch as my words drew tears to their pretty, widened eyes and feel disappointed, even disgusted with myself. While it was never my intention, it felt trivialising to talk about it like that, like I was playing for sympathy, for those cheap tears or, worse, using it for seduction: tragedy porn. The same went for the story of Master Happy Fish and the temple: enlightenment porn. The worst was when some girl, well-versed in pop psychology, nodded as though understanding: post-traumatic stress disorder, stages of grieving, that sort of thing. They thought they got me. Even I didn’t get me. Still don’t.

When I made the decision to stop sharing my bed with girls who weren’t there then, that left me with the women who had been. Of those, the ones who were single, sexy and sane appeared to be few and far between. I discovered I didn’t mind all that much, and even grew to love sleeping alone.

The publishers wanted more new poems. But a poet’s art, in my case anyway, is an uncertain kind of alchemy. A grey cloud of glumness shadows our skies for a moment. By the time we’ve done with it, frozen it, remoulded it into something symbolic and metaphorical, it is no longer a perfectly ordinary, bog-standard pedestrian bad mood but the elevated and beautiful state known as melancholy. A poet’s senses are always heightened, a poet’s soul is sensitive; a poet knows how to be bored by the most tedious and lengthy of editorial conferences and give that boredom the form of existential despair. I sound cynical, but I never wrote out of cynicism. I could not write simply for the sake of publication. If I found the poetry, or it found me again, fine. Otherwise – nothing doing.

Kong took me out for more bees and bugs and asked if there wasn’t something else left from those days. That’s when I remembered. There was. Q’s poetry. I told him, and he said that he didn’t want someone else’s poems, he wanted mine. Perhaps I could put my name to them. Q was unlikely to object. But if I had taken anything from my time studying and publishing philosophy, it was that moral questions require moral answers.

I’d left my job at the publishing house by then, able to live on and even save money from my book sales. I was never one for luxury – as many a disappointed young woman had discovered when I introduced her to the dazayuan with its rattling tin roof and lack of mod-cons. I eventually took Master Happy Fish’s advice, and opened a bar. As Li Po had also written in his wonderful ode to wine and drunkenness, ‘History forgets a sage, but legend preserves a drinker.’

I called my bar Fei Chang Dao and let people work it out for themselves. Bar-keeping may seem like the most relaxed of occupations to the drinkers who come here and laugh and joke with me when it’s busy or see me reading books of poetry, fiction or philosophy when it’s quiet. But running this place keeps me busier than I seem. I meet with suppliers of wine and liquor, manage the books, pay taxes, wash all the glasses myself, wipe down the counter and tables, water the plants in the courtyard, feed the cats and run a mop over the floor at the end of the night. I also speak to the local police and Neighbourhood Committee whenever required – just yesterday, they popped in to show me a composite of a man who stabbed and robbed someone at the Drum Tower subway station. Didn’t look like anyone who’d ever come in here but I told them I’d keep an eye out. I offered them a drink. They refused. I insisted. They didn’t say no. It’s all part of the job, just like putting up the flag on National Day. But within all this motion, there is perfect stillness, emptiness, a kind of happiness.

On this night, I am mulling wine at the bar and listening to jazz. There is nothing on my mind but spice and warmth and the niggling thought that I need to re-order those Argentinian reds. Waves of conversation in the room beyond the antechamber crest and break like a gentle sea. I’ll do a round of the room soon, greet my customers, hear about their lives, collect their empties, take their orders. This antechamber is the heart of my kingdom. I am the Guardian of the Gate in the Temple to the Grape and when someone comes along who doesn’t suit the place – too loud, too much bling, too much about them for sale – I not-so-regretfully inform them that it’s a private club, members only. On days when no one comes, I read: philosophy, poetry, whatever interests me on the day. My mind is a very private club. After a few people surprised me reading and commented on my choice of reading matter – Wow, philosophy! I like Nietzsche, have you ever read Nietzsche? – that sort of thing, I began to wrap my books in brown butcher’s paper, like we did when we were schoolkids. I could be reading Steve Jobs’ biography for all anyone knows. But I’m not.

Tonight, as nearly every night since the day I opened, an Englishman, Oliver, sits reading on the old sofa in the antechamber, a tumbler in his hand and his pug, Chouchou, snoring at his feet. Apparently there’s an English language pun involved in the name: chouchou – ugly, the dog’s a ‘pug’, so ‘pug-ugly’. This seems to amuse other foreigners. Oliver prefers his scotch Japanese and neat. He appreciates that I have an encyclopaedic knowledge of scotches and whiskeys and that I read a lot as well. Sometimes we recommend books to one another. We get along well.

For all I’ve been through and all I now know, and for all my ‘stillness’, I admit that hope still rises this side of an opening door, though I couldn’t tell you what exactly I’m hoping for – or who. Oliver doesn’t look up when the woman enters. I’ve never been able to work out whether he’s genuinely so absorbed by his books that he doesn’t notice people come and go, even when they approach the bar for more drinks or a chat, or if it’s a kind of affectation. When the door-curtain goes whoomph, however, I do look up. I see a woman about my age, foreign-not-foreign, familiar-not-familiar, eyes blinking with an expression like wonder above her scarf-wrapped face, a deer that with one bound has landed inexplicably in a brand-new forest.

She looks at me for a moment and something passes between us, something left over from another life perhaps. It could be just a generational recognition thing. Not that many single women my age come here alone, for whatever reason. Whatever it is between us, it glimmers and is gone, like burning spirit paper in the wind.

‘Ni hao,’ she says.

I’ve barely had the chance to reply when, as though suddenly remembering someone’s house was on fire, she shoots past and into the inner room. Soon she returns with a look that’s equal parts relief and uncertainty.

I’m interested in everyone who comes into my bar. It’s my home, or close enough. I’ve filled it with second-hand furniture that I’ve found here and there, knick-knacks from my travels, old family photos. My CD collection is next to the stereo and my books, unwrapped once finished, are on the shelves for anyone to peruse. In addition, I have a great accumulation of stopped clocks, watches and other timepieces and a small traditional medicine cabinet full of clock and watch parts. Time is of my essence.

Fei Chang Dao is tucked away. There’s no sign on the hutong, and I don’t advertise. That keeps it from becoming, as we say in China, too fuza, too complicated. So when someone like her whom I’ve never seen before walks in on her own, I’m curious to work out who she is. When she returns to the bar after her foray inside, I am again struck by a strange, disconcerting sense of familiarity, as though I had once glimpsed or even held her in a dream.

She removes her hat and shakes loose her hair, which is dark with streaks the colour of ripe pomegranate that I am guessing mask strands of silver. A lock of hair clings to her cheeks with static electricity. Her scarf has settled around her neck, the skin of which appears fine and soft. As she looks around I take in her small chin, heart-shaped face and high-bridged nose. She is almost certainly a hunxue’r, a Eurasian of some description. The years and something very like sorrow have left their marks and shadows on her face, which is not unattractive.

Her lips are blue with cold and she is shivering. She seems to have come a long way. This is even more unusual. Most of my customers, with one or two eccentric exceptions, live in the general neighbourhood of the Drum Tower. No one would come out on a night like this, to a place like this, from any distance without a good reason, and certainly not alone.

‘Here,’ I say on impulse. ‘Give me your hands.’

She looks at me strangely, and I wonder if she feels the connection. She tenders her hands suspiciously, making me doubt that this is such a good idea; in fact I wonder what kind of idea this is at all. But it’s too late for second thoughts. I tug off her gloves and, placing them on the bar, warm her hands in my own, chasing my déjà vu into her eyes. A current passes between us and I feel suddenly self-conscious. What am I doing? Her expression is enigmatic. She looks down at our hands. ‘I don’t even know you.’ Then she cocks her head to one side, and regards me with a sudden, intense curiosity. ‘Or do I? You look so familiar.’

‘I had the same feeling just now,’ I say and then, my tongue speaking ahead of my brain, ‘I thought maybe you might have been a model or an actress.’

‘Ha. That’s nice,’ she replies. ‘But I think maybe you need to get your eyes checked.’ Before I can reply, she shakes her head. ‘It doesn’t matter. I’m sure it’ll come to us eventually.’

‘I’m sure it will,’ I agree with a shrug. ‘Beijing. One of the biggest cities and smallest towns in the world.’

I lay one of her hands on top of the gloves, and place the other on top of that. I pat the top one. ‘Stay there,’ I instruct it. Pouring out a mug of the mulled wine, I place it next to her hands. ‘Okay,’ I tell them. ‘You can move now.’ And to her: ‘This should warm you up.’

‘You’ve already warmed me up,’ she answers and coughs, or laughs, I’m not sure. Her Chinese is good; whether or not she’d intended the double entendre, she certainly recognised it once it was out there.

You might think I’d compliment her on her Chinese at this point. It is the last thing I’m about to do. Not out of meanness. An English friend of mine who’d been here for years and was perfectly fluent once told me that if one more Chinese person marvelled aloud at the fact he could use chopsticks or speak the language he’d put on a bear suit and start dancing. He told me that no one in the UK would dream of making a big deal over the fact that someone from another culture could use a fork and knife or speak the language of the country they lived in. When people praised his Chinese, he replied, Ma ren, shima? Are you taking the piss? He had a point. Only non-Chinese with the shakiest grasp on the language took such compliments at face value. The truth is, we Chinese can be kind and we can take the piss, sometimes at the same time, but we rarely ever think that a foreigner’s Chinese is all that good. When it is, we simply treat the foreigner like a human being.

So I reply, ‘Bici.’ Ditto. You’ve warmed me up as well.

Her eyes transform into crescent moons, balanced on their points. ‘I bet you say that to all the girls.’ She is smiling at me over the top of the mug.

Another obscure memory flits past, uncatchable, ominous. The thought comes to me: Zhuangzi, dreaming not of butterflies but of nets.

‘You’re the first. I swear.’

‘That’s the other thing about Beijing. World’s biggest flirts.’

‘I blame the language. It made me do it. How’s the wine, by the way?’

‘Xiang,’ she comments, fragrant, taking another sip before putting it down to loosen the scarf around her neck and undo her coat. ‘Where did you learn to mull wine?’

I tap my fingers on a keyboard made of air. ‘The internet.’

‘Of course.’ Her voice is deep, a little husky. I’ve never understood why even grown Chinese women often choose to speak at the upper register of their voices, as if they were little girls. I’ve noticed that some foreign women in China pick up the habit as well. I probably liked it – I did like it – when I was young and feckless, but that was some time ago. Well, it was a long time ago that I was young, anyway.

‘You can find anything on the internet,’ she is saying. ‘I get a little lost on it sometimes.’ She looks around, as though searching for someone. Her eyes linger on the doorway.

‘Don’t we all,’ my words drawing her unsettled gaze back to me. ‘When surfing the internet,’ I say, ‘it’s good to recall the words of an ancient philosopher who said that life has limits but knowledge none. He cautioned that one shouldn’t pursue the limitless with the limited. I take that to mean we shouldn’t spend too much time online.’

‘I like Zhuangzi,’ she states matter-of-factly.

‘Not everyone would have recognised the quote.’

She shrugs off the compliment. ‘He’s my kind of Daoist. And a good storyteller. But I’d assumed you’d be more of a Laozi kind of guy, judging from the name of your bar. Assuming it’s your bar. Or do you just work here?’

‘It’s my bar. And that’s a good point. It’s a long story.’

‘I’d like to hear it sometime.’

The curtain goes whoomph a second time.

When I dashed into Fei Chang Dao, the first person I saw, sprawled in an armchair as though he owned it, was a bespectacled Englishman, university don circa 1965, poring over a book of Song dynasty philosophy while a caramel pug snored in his lap. A Chinese man with glasses, not too much taller than me, was mulling wine behind the bar. He looked up as I entered. There was a doorway on the right that led to another room, the wing of what would have once been a small courtyard house, less spacious than Mrs Jin’s. This room seemed to be the bar proper. It held an arty mix of comfortable old mismatched sofas and chairs and second-hand tables – what in Australia you might call a Melbourne-style bar. It was packed. Music was playing, though I was barely aware of it at first, so anxious was I to see if my mysterious correspondent was already here.

Inside, draped over an old sofa that somehow complemented the Qing dynasty architecture, was a trio of Chinese emos in Doc – or perhaps Moc Marten boots. One looked up and, finding me of no particular interest, returned her attention to her friends. A pair of stork-like fashionistas, one Chinese, one African, perched on stools at a high table, drawing elegantly on thin cigars and playing with their phones. My heart snagged on the sight of a tender-eyed young blonde listing towards a Chinese dandy with an explosion of multi-coloured hair and a wandering gaze; he toyed with her hand in a manner that could at best be described as reassuring. To complete a picture that could seem congruous only in Beijing, gathered around a large table towards the back was a merry tribe of Mongolians, members, I was quite certain, of a famous rock band, resplendent in traditional robes and with haircuts sampling both Genghis and punk. Or perhaps they were just a less-famous Mongolian band pretending to be them. It occurred to me that they could equally have been a Chinese band pretending to be Mongolian. Perhaps they were just pretending to be a band. There was a lot of that around.

The only piece missing from this picture was anyone who could credibly have been my correspondent. I was relieved – I don’t mind waiting for people (as my relationship with Q more than amply attests), but I hate making people wait for me. I returned to the bar, reeled in by the seductive scent of wine, cloves, cinnamon and anise. Mulled wine! The bartender’s brushstroke eyebrows were drawn into an almost imperceptible frown of concentration; he didn’t seem to notice my return at first, which gave me the chance to study him. He was one of those men for whom middle age was a comfortable fit: silvered, nicely worn and loose-limbed in a thick grey jumper against which pushed the hint of a belly; he looked more like an ageing artist or intellectual than a barman.

His taking my hands to warm them disconcerted me. How long had it been since someone held my hands? I didn’t want to think. But I took to him quickly, to that subtle blend of roguishness and courtesy that has always drawn me to the Beijing character. I know that new people can sometimes give you the impression that you’ve known them forever, or ought to have, and that time has cheated you in only just bringing them to you. Xiangjian henwan. So you will them to become a part of your life. Under the slow burn of his gaze I even felt a faint shiver, a trespass of desire, against which I silently recited Q’s name like an incantation. But more than that, or perhaps interwoven, was that other thing, a spooky familiarity, a kind of a doubling, an inexplicable sense that Q was present, that he had something to do with this night. I felt unmoored. I told myself it was because my nerves were firing from the cold, from the effort of finding this place, from anticipation. The mulled wine was good. It calmed me down.

Whoomph. A cold draught. I turned to see a large man, stooped, infinitely elderly, pass through the insulating curtain over the door. It was, beyond doubt, him. His eyes, cataract blue and kindly, were framed by the heavy asymmetrical folds of his hooded eyelids above and pouches of spider-webbed skin below that served as soft wrinkled pillows for those cloudy marbles. He pulled off his beanie and I noticed his feathery white eyebrows and the ethereal puff of hair floating above his speckled scalp. His aroma was that of centuries past, of age, of the futile, sweet stay of cologne against mortal decay, with a touch of soap-laundered clothing and cold. The years had erased virtually all traces of ethnicity and even gender. And yet if his face was antique parchment, one touch away from dust, it was, I knew, overwritten with history. In that first glance I saw alphabets and characters there, lost languages and libraries. There were whole volumes on Backhouse – for this, beyond doubt, was my correspondent. If his letter had told the truth, and his appearance suggested it might well have, there was an essay or two on me as well.

My eyes fell on the document case of Morocco leather, as creased and ancient as its guardian, who held it clutched against his chest. A presence, a present, a gift from the past, enfolded in soft brown calfskin and cradled in the arms of age.

The old man peeled off his gloves and unfastened his caped overcoat, from which wintry air pulsed like the breath of Stygian night itself, an icy, phantom expiration. If this ancient creature came bearing the night, however, it was surely the black-winged creature of the earliest Greek myths, that goddess Night from whose silver egg Eros sprang double-sexed, vital and unruly with the energy of cosmic creation. Eros, the mischievous, the irresistible. The life force.

For most of his days, Edmund Backhouse had been an apostle of Eros. He even signed himself Bacchus, a trick of the tongue on an amenable surname. When, close to death, like his hero Oscar Wilde, like Baron Corvo, he converted to Catholicism and chose the name of the apostle Paul, it was not quite an exorcism. Nor was it as strange or distant a leap as people imagined, this curvet from Greek to Latin, from the cloven-footed revels of the Dionysian to the sensual, incense-soaked religion of Hadrian the Seventh and Rome. I thought I knew much about Edmund Backhouse, but standing in front of the last man to have been intimately acquainted with him in life – a man who had been mourned, eulogised and supposedly buried back when I was still in secondary school – I realised I knew nothing at all.

‘Dr Hoeppli,’ I began, and faltered. The wonder in my throat left no passage for my voice. I looked towards the bartender as though for help, but he was busy uncapping a bottle of aged scotch.

The old man didn’t react. He continued to study me.

‘I got your letter,’ I started again, suddenly uncertain: had there even been a letter?

It occurred to me that perhaps he was more comfortable speaking in Chinese. After all, this was the man whom the French diplomat Roland de Margerie had once described as a personnage assez curieux, a most curious man, tout à fait absorbé dans la vie chinoise. I switched languages and introduced myself in Chinese, the old-fashioned, respectful way – ‘humble surname’ and all that. Chinese often smiled to see foreigners from different countries conversing in Chinese but it wasn’t any stranger than, say, a Frenchman and a Turk meeting in New York and speaking to one another in English, which is to say, it wasn’t strange at all. (As the Chinese themselves say, shaojian duoguai, that which is not often seen seems odd.) I even clasped my left fist in my right hand and brought it up to my chest in the classic, albeit masculine greeting.

This gesture elicited a glancing smile, or perhaps it was merely a nervous twitch of the lips. Hard to tell, but at last he spoke. ‘I know who you are, my dear. Otherwise, I should not have asked you to meet me, especially on such an inhospitable night.’ The Swiss-watch precision of his English contrasted with the craggy, tobacco-cured quality of his voice. ‘I have followed your career with great interest.’ As he said this, his hand, friable, corded with veins, folded itself around my own. It felt weirdly discarnate, colder than weather, his palsied grip that of congealed air. The nail on his little finger was long and sheathed by a nail protector of fine-spun gold. I’d only ever seen such a thing in photographs of the Empress Dowager and was so tested by the question of how it had fit inside his gloves – or had he slipped it on after taking them off and I simply hadn’t noticed? – that it took me a moment to react to what he said next: ‘And with no little curiosity besides. That novel …’

I stared at him, nonplussed. ‘Novel?’

‘The Empress Lover, of course.’

‘You’ve … you’ve read The Empress Lover? But that’s … No one … However did you find a copy?’

‘I didn’t. I learned of it from your landlady’s micro-blog on Weibo.’ Mrs Jin! What else had she broadcast to the world about me? I wondered.

He raised my left wrist up to his face, and examined my bracelets with a narrow, forensic gaze. Rotating them on my wrist, he examined them minutely, even lifting them off my arm slightly by balancing them in his palm as though to judge their heft. For a long time he said nothing. At long last he nodded. ‘I never did find a copy of your novel. The fact you wrote it was interesting, but it was only one clue among many. Your linguistic facility, your reclusive nature, your looks and, of course, the real key: these bracelets. They fascinated Mrs Jin. I could only hope that they were what they appeared to be from her description and that you hadn’t picked them up at Panjiayuan or some such place, in which case you would not be the person for whom I’ve been searching at all.’ He ran his finger over the dragon one last time and released my hands, which had now been held captive twice in one evening. Those vellum jowls parted around a smile of old ivory and teak. He seemed then to sigh, though perhaps his breathing was simply long with age. ‘Such rare and exquisite jade, so precious and so divinely fashioned.’

‘They belonged to my mother,’ I said, discomposed.

Raising my hand to his lips, he laid upon it a kiss as delicate, dewy and suggestive as rose petals, the sensual kiss of le libertin ancien. ‘Actually,’ he replied, ‘they belonged to your grandmother.’

‘My grandmother?’ A chill ran up my spine. ‘Did you … did you know her?’

‘Regretfully, no.’

A thousand questions tangled in my brain.

The bartender put on a CD by Paris Combo. He had refilled my mug. Picking up a glass of amber spirits for my companion, he indicated for us to follow him into the inner room. ‘It’s warmer there, more comfortable.’ The music danced over the hum of conversation and laughter. On n’a pas besoin, de chercher si loin … The song was about discovering that what you’ve been looking for was beside you all along. I had the same album. I remembered, apropos of nothing, that the singer was called Belle and her husband, also part of the group, was Australian.

Entering the room a second time, now in the company of the barkeeper and Dr H, I sensed the patrons’ eyes on me. I angled my shoulders back and my head upwards a discreet degree or two; my face mirrored the slightly jaded look of the habitué. Like any chameleon, I could make myself at home anywhere. I went instantly from being a wairen, an outsider, to a neiren, one of them. As we passed, the Mongols toasted the bartender: ‘To the Sage!’

I questioned him with my eyes. He shrugged, smiling: ‘Xiao wo,’ he said, ‘they’re making fun of me.’ He led us behind a sandalwood screen into a cosy nook where two comfortable-looking armchairs sat angled as though deep in conversation. Behind them, against the wall, stood a Ming-style altar table. On the table was a lamp. Its shade depicted the ascent of the goddess Chang’E to the moon with her stolen elixir of immortality. Before the chairs stood another, lower table, on which the bartender placed our drinks. On a shelf by the window, a small electrical fish tank glowed blue as tropical fish made of metal, together with their bright blue layered waves, made their unhurried way around the central mechanism. It was one of those rare pieces of kitsch that had crossed to the other side and become strangely, soothingly lovely.

Occupying one of the armchairs was a pair of snoozing cats, one black with a speck of white on her cheek, the other white with a speck of black on her forehead. They lay curled snugly one into the other, tummies pulsing with the mismatched breath of sleep, a softly thrumming wheel of yin and yang. ‘Qu,’ the bartender scolded. Get lost. ‘Qu, qu.’ The white one yawned, opened one eye and closed it again. ‘Impossible creatures.’

Dr H flicked at their ears with a sheathed fingernail. Shaking their silky heads in feline disdain, they sneezed, one after the other, and dethroned.

The old man shrugged off his coat and settled into the seat cushion like snowdrift, gesturing for me to take the other chair. The bartender left us.

‘Why do they call him the Sage?’ I asked Dr H. They seemed to know one another. For all my burning desire to discover what lay inside the leather folder now on Dr H’s lap, I couldn’t contain my curiosity about our host.

‘Because he is the direct descendant, forty-third generation to be precise, of Zhuangzi.’

‘Really?’ I absorbed this information. ‘But I don’t think that’s possible. Once, in Taiwan, I met a direct descendant of Confucius of the seventy-fifth generation and here in Beijing, selling Japanese-style French toast on Nanluoguxiang, a seventy-third-generation direct descendant of the philosopher Mencius. The first was an old man, the second in early middle age. How can the Sage be of only the forty-third generation when his ancestor was of more or less the same vintage as Confucius?’

Dr H’s gaze floated away and anchored itself on the table lamp. For a moment I thought he hadn’t heard the question. Then I twigged. Chang’E and the elixir of eternal youth – the Daoists were renowned for their alchemic potions for longevity and even immortality. The world tilted a few degrees towards the fantastical. Unsure how to respond, I reached for my wine.

Taking that as a signal, Dr H lifted his scotch and toasted me Chinese-style, with both hands and a bow of the head. I toasted back, bowing that little bit lower. He offered me a Panda-brand cigarette from a tarnished silver cigarette case that he had extracted from his coat pocket. I wasn’t much of a smoker, but I’d lived too long in China to say no. The odd cigarette hardly made a difference when the air was so thick with God-knew-what that on the worst days it adhered to your face like some unholy PM2.5 mudpack. I inhaled, stifled a cough and waited.

He glanced up at the clock on the wall. ‘It’s time,’ he said. The clock, I saw now, had stopped at nine minutes past eight. There were other clocks, it struck me now, each one stopped at a different time. I felt as though I had landed at the centre of the Beijing time machine, or perhaps a Tardis, for this tiny space seemed capable of infinite temporal and spatial expansions.

As Dr H’s fingers fumbled with the leather thong on the document case, the rest of the world fell away. Or perhaps it was me falling: given that things had genuinely become ‘curiouser and curiouser’ I wondered if I had not tumbled down some rabbit hole and drunk the potion waiting for me there. Q seemed as distant as the moon. The Sage dropped over the horizon. For the first time in years I found myself in a place without fear, panic, history or regret – only breath.

With the slow precision of an archaeologist, Dr H extracted a rectangular parcel wrapped in threadbare and faded silk. He held it as though weighing it and then, on the verge of handing it to me, placed it on his lap. The silk fluttered and exhaled a sigh of fine dust. The old man fixed me with his snow-cloud regard. ‘You must understand. Sir Edmund was …’ His lower lip trembled slightly. On a horse, it would have signified contentment; Dr H was harder to read. ‘… what he was. Sir Edmund was what he was.’

‘I understand.’

‘I don’t know that you do yet.’ His tone was matter-of-fact. ‘But you will.’

Subconsciously, I touched my bracelets. Dr H raised his scotch to his mouth. He dabbed at his moistened lips with a handkerchief.

‘I … I have a theory,’ I said.

‘About Sir Edmund?’ He leaned forward in his chair.

‘Sort of. About foreigners in China.’

His eyes, which never left my own, widened slightly. ‘Do go on.’

‘There are eight principal archetypes of the foreigner in China. There is the storyteller, who is also a seeker – Marco Polo in the court of Khubilai Khan, every journalist, China scholar and English teacher or traveller compelled to write a book about their experiences. Second is the missionary: the Jesuit Matteo Ricci winding clocks for the court of the Ming emperor Wan Li, the artist Rauschenberg preaching post-modernism in the 1980s.’ Dr H was smiling. ‘Third,’ I ploughed on, ‘is the emissary: Lord Macartney in the court of Qianlong, Kissinger in the court of Mao. Then there’s the imperialist: Lord Elgin burning down the Yuanmingyuan, the yobbo smashing up a bar in Sanlitun. Fifth is the fellow traveller: Edgar Snow awed in the caves of Yan’an, any economist or neo-liberal with a hard-on – pardon my language – at the monotheistic altar of growth. Sixth is the profit-seeker: the British pushing opium in the nineteenth century, the purveyors of surveillance equipment to the dictatorship today, the traders and manufacturers, Vuitton and Bulgari in the court of the National Museum on Tiananmen Square and Gucci and Prada in the malls. Number seven is the desperado, the whore, the dogsbody – the pimps, hookers, gamblers and drinkers of Peking’s Badlands on the eve of the Japanese invasion or their equivalents today, the Russian pole-dancers in the clubs of little Vladivostok over by Ritan, the Nigerian drug-pedlars of Sanlitun, the Mongolian prostitutes and other economic refugees. Finally, number eight is the lover who, like the hero or heroine of every China book by a non-Chinese author under the sun, is the one foreigner who truly understands China and who, overcoming obstacles, blah blah blah, falls in love with a beautiful or handsome Chinese, and is recognised in the great court of Chinese public opinion as being not like the other foreigners and therefore wonderful: any protagonist in a James Clavell or Nicole Mones novel.’ (Me.)

‘That’s quite a theory. I like it very much. Where do you think Sir Edmund fits in?’ He didn’t wait for me to answer. ‘Perhaps there is a ninth archetype?’

‘I believe he might have been beyond archetype.’

‘Think about it.’

I did. ‘The trickster?’

As if I’d produced a password, and without another word, he handed me the parcel. It was lighter than I expected. In what was probably just a consequence of the flickering light, for the goddess of immortality appeared to have a loose filament, my companion seemed in that instant to become less substantial himself, to lose mass, even to rise incrementally on the cushion of his seat.

Feeling a little dizzy, I tried to anchor myself back to reality with words. ‘It couldn’t possibly have been true, what he wrote in Décadence Mandchoue, could it? He wasn’t really the lover of the Empress Dowager … Was he?’

‘He loved her well enough.’ He smiled distantly. ‘You wrote a novel about it.’

I blushed. ‘That was just fiction.’

‘It’s true. He loved her well enough.’ He tilted his glass and stared into it, as though at another world. ‘Though not, of course, as well as he loved Cassia Flower.’

‘The catamite in the employ of the Hall of Chaste Joys.’

‘Or Zhan Baochen.’

‘The young Manchu nobleman.’

He nodded.

‘Whose love,’ I added, like a girl swot trying to curry favour with her teacher, ‘he won by first sneaking him into the palace so that he could make love to the Empress’s handmaiden. When the Empress Dowager caught the pair in flagrante delicto, he interceded on their behalf. But, and I don’t mean any disrespect –’ I wasn’t quite sure how to put this ‘– I always thought, you know, all those things he wrote about in Décadence Mandchoue were in the nature of erotic fantasy.’

‘Do you remember the chapter entitled “The Vampire Prince”?’

‘Yes. It was about one of the sons of Prince Ching, wasn’t it?’

The doctor nodded.

‘Who got a sexual thrill from drawing and sucking blood?’

‘Well done. Do you remember how it began?’

‘With some quotations probably, but I can’t recall …’

‘Judith Gautier, Thomas Moore. Tennyson. Then he wrote these words, which so impressed me on first reading that I have never forgotten them: “Memory and imagination; the first counts as nothing without the second …” You see?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘Here,’ he said, placing the leather folder on the table. ‘You’ll want this to protect the manuscript.’ He leaned forward. The chair springs creaked. The black cat, which was rubbing itself against my legs, looked up accusingly. ‘One more thing,’ he said.

‘What’s that?’

‘You’ll find that it is –’ a pause, a flash of teak and ivory ‘– somewhat obscene.’

I tugged at the disintegrating tissue of silk, as loosely threaded as reality seemed to be at that moment. It fell away to reveal a rectangular box of stiff board. This was covered with pasted-on blue cotton that had faded to the colour of winter sky and was marked by a single stain like a teardrop, the colour of tea. A teadrop. The box was toggled in the Chinese manner with smooth, slender points of polished bone. Easing the toggles out of the tight screws of cloth with which they were secured, I gingerly lifted the cover. Within lay a thick sheaf of quarto paper, curling at the edges, yellowed to the colour and crispness of autumn leaves in the Fragrant Hills. Typed by an old-fashioned manual typewriter, it began:

My dear _____, What follows may strike you as a wild tale, far-fetched and fantastical …

… I do not ask that you mourn me. I only implore you: know and remember me as I present myself to you here, without ornament, without pedantry, without guile. And understand this truth – stories are the only things that defy death. Stories are truth. I hereby give you mine, yours – and Hers.

P.S. The story that this manuscript contains is yours and yours alone, to do with as you please. I cannot know how this finds you, in what situation. I can only pray that it is a good one. Whilst I should be gratified if pride in what you discover leads you to crow, I also must accept in all humility that you may find the revelations contained within confronting, even shocking, so much so that you choose to keep them to yourself. My hope, of course, is that you have been born into an age unlike my own, one of enlightened, liberal views. An age when such stories are, if not commonplace – for this one will never be that – at least not any cause for unpleasant scandal or outcry.

I have asked the devoted H——— to arrange for the publication of my memoirs once we are both gone from this world that so delights in scandal and persecution. I should not wish for the opprobrium that those writings will inevitably attract to fall upon his dear head. Whether it attaches itself to yours will be your choice. One doesn’t get to choose one’s ancestors any more than one gets to choose the rest of one’s family, but one can own them or not as one pleases.

P.P.S. Carpe diem! Carpe noctem! Carpe vinum!

Seize the day. Seize the night. Seize the wine. Well the last was easy, anyway. Confused and intrigued, I looked over at the old man who had brought me this extraordinary missive. His eyes were closed. The white cat had climbed onto his lap, and his hand rested on her fat purring belly. A glass of pinot noir had magically replaced my mug of mulled wine, though my mouth still tasted of cinnamon and cloves. I still had no clue as to what this was all about or what it had to do with me. At the same time, I felt like an accidental crusader who’d stumbled upon the Holy Grail. For it was clear to me that what I held on my lap was the never-before-seen last will and testament of Sir Edmund Trelawny Backhouse.

The old man’s eyes opened a crack. ‘You are wondering, perhaps, why I had not waited, as Sir Edmund had urged, to publish the memoirs after my death.’

I wasn’t sure what to say. It didn’t seem very diplomatic to speak of death to a man so apparently tottering close to its edge. His milky eyes fluttered open and twinkled under their asymmetrical hoods. ‘The truth is, I could not resist.’

‘Resist?’

‘Observing the response. I was deeply curious as to how they would be received. And then, of course,’ he continued, indicating the manuscript, ‘there was this. I had done my best to get this to your father, for whom it was originally intended, but that proved impossible. The relatives who took him in after he was sent away had been so scandalised – and they didn’t know the half of it! – that they would have nothing to do with anyone who had even known Sir Edmund. They even changed your father’s name and refused to pass on any messages. Until I found him – or his progeny; that is, you – I could not rest. And so I chose to prolong my life.’

Each time he said ‘your father’ I felt an electric shock. I was confused too. I knew my mother had scandalised her family and had been sent away, but my father? I didn’t get it. And then there was this strange claim: ‘Prolong your life?’ I blurted. ‘How …’

He shrugged, the soft mounds of his shoulders rising and falling like geological eras. ‘Many years ago, I was travelling in the southwest of China. I was studying a parasite of medical interest particular to that part of China. We ended up in a small and charmless nondescript town that did have one place of beauty, a Daoist temple. It is a long story, and some of the details, including the name of the town, are lost to memory. But I met a Daoist master there, a remarkable man, a wise man, a man of arcane knowledge – even if he struck me at first as appearing less a holy man than a vulgar peasant dressed in town clothing, even a snake-oil salesman. He asked me no questions, but gave me advice that struck me at the time as perceptive and amusing. Then he gave me a pouch with pills of his own devising which he claimed I would need later in life. He said that I would want to extend my natural lifespan and that these would help; he said that immortality was difficult but a long life not so much. I am a man of science. I took the pouch, and back in Beijing I analysed the contents of one of the pills. It contained what seemed to me for the most part to be perfectly ordinary herbs, but for one ingredient which I could not identify. I never had the chance to return, and forgot about him and the pills for a long time – until the long and difficult search for your father caused me to recall that they were still in my possession. I did not actually believe they would do anything, and considered that, in any case, the years had probably rendered them useless, but as a man of science, I am ever open to the testing of hypotheses. To make a long story short, the medicine worked. So I faked my own death.’

I reeled, struggling to comprehend.

‘I’m not the first to do so, and I won’t be the last, though I like to think that my motives were perhaps more honourable than many others who have taken this path or will take it in the future.’

‘Was it hard?’ was all I could think to say.

‘It’s easier than you’d think, especially if you have left no, what do you call it, digital footprint. In fact, I’ve barely left any footprints at all. The Weibo account I use to follow Mrs Jin is registered under the name of a kindly neighbour, who trusted me not to abuse it. You see, I have always valued two qualities that, from what I understand, are quite out of fashion these days – discretion and privacy. I was never the absolute master of these, of course, that dear Sir Edmund was. But I do believe that his life makes an excellent case for the way in which discretion provides the greatest possible space for its opposite, and privacy enables the sort of absolute freedom that those who live in the public eye could only dream of, if they only knew to dream of it. This is something that I fear the, what is it, Facebook generation will never understand.’

‘Indeed,’ I said, and asked after a brief pause, ‘Was the reaction to the publication of Décadence Mandchoue what you expected? What you hoped for?’

Dr Hoeppli’s face collapsed a little around his smile. ‘The Daily Telegraph called it “outrageous”, the South China Morning Post “remarkable”, and the New York Times wrote up its publication. This was gratifying. And yet none appears to have taken it as seriously as I had hoped on his behalf. It would have been impossible to publish earlier; even Lady Chatterley’s Lover only just squeaked past the censors in 1960, and not without a massive trial of the publisher for obscenity. Besides, Hugh Trevor-Roper rather soured people on Sir Edmund, I fear. You do know his brother was gay, don’t you?’

‘Backhouse’s brother?’

‘No, Hugh Trevor-Roper’s brother Patrick, the philanthropist, eye surgeon and art historian. He outed himself in 1955. There may have been some issues there for him. Perhaps it was the issue. It sometimes is for people. I honestly don’t know.’

‘I didn’t know about Trevor-Roper’s brother. But what, if you don’t mind my asking, does this –’ I gestured at the letter and the manuscript ‘– all this, what does it have to do with me? How did Backhouse know my father?’ Maybe it was the exhaustion of a long day compounding my confusion, but I felt impatience and emotion gritting up my voice.

Dr Hoeppli reached for his glass. ‘You have seen those carved balls of ivory and jade, I presume, in which concentric spherical shells, each capable of independent movement, surround a solid centre?’

I nodded.

‘Keep reading.’

So I did. In the periphery of my gaze, Dr H appeared to fade away like the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland, leaving behind not a grin, but that hoary, glittering gaze and the submarine clink of ice on glass like the bells on the necks of camels in a distant caravan.

A burst of gunfire crackles somewhere outside the hospital as I write. Battles are fought daily within the hospital, too, between the septic and the antiseptic. The reek of wounds festering under plaster brawls with the tang of rubbing alcohol, and the animal fetor of the hot wet blankets used on patients in the respirator ambushes the crisp starchiness of the nurses’ freshly laundered uniforms. Through the noisome air comes a continual chorus of cries and groans.

The excess of bleach in which the bedclothes are boiled causes them to scratch against my thin and sensitive skin, and bruises appear out of nowhere, dressed in the imperial colours of yellow and purple – surely an irony of cruel Nature! These sad buttocks of mine, that once craved to passer par les verges, are now plagued by bedsores, welts of a rather less enjoyable type than those inflicted by a lover’s lash. Once I believed that I had first acquired this particular perversion in that sanctum of Uranian thought that was Winchester. (You may be familiar with Betjeman’s “The Wykehamist” – “Broad of Church and broad of mind, Broad before and broad behind, A keen ecclesiologist, A rather dirty Wykehamist”.) Yet, one also recalls Juvenal: Nemo repente fuit turpissimus, “No one becomes debauched overnight.” One is, one supposes, born this way. Besides, I am in good company. Among the many great and famous men who have shared this predilection is J.J. Rousseau, who wrote in Confessions of the thrill of his governess’s fessée.

I must assume that my speaking so frankly does not shock you. I cannot know when you will receive this letter but, as I have said, I hope that it will be in a more enlightened age than that of my own. It is my fervent desire that you should understand me, and if that proves impossible, at least to forgive me.

But fond memories of the lash are neither here nor there. As the great Ming novelists were wont to say when running into a narrative cul-de-sac, or when an unspooling thread of a tangential story threatened to unravel the weave of plot, “Of this we shall speak no more.”

I would prefer not to tarry here, in this place and this life, any longer than is necessary to convey this, my true and secret history, to you. Of course, one cannot time one’s departure from life as though one were an actor on a stage. These decisions are in the hands of a merciful God, whose consolations I have sought of late. My memories span continents and eras, and they are infused with incense and osmanthus. (Oh, Cassia Flower! His perfect beauty was itself a most intoxicating perfume.) They are also pricked through with the slings and arrows I have been forced to endure. Without wanting to rehearse all of them – for that should take another lifetime – I would like to clear the air on some of the more outstanding calumnies that have attached to my name, for fear that you may have been misled by tattle.

Whilst still at Merton College, for example, I was frightfully embarrassed when the actress Ellen Terry, whom I adored, took it upon herself to return my heartfelt gift of a diamond-studded tiara (that in truth had not half her own dazzle!) after various creditors of mine claimed they had lent me the money to buy it and now needed to be repaid.

I confess that I have never taken to accounting as to language. For all my efforts at honest business, I share with many members of my class that cheerful disposition towards money that can, alas, so easily lead one into debt or – as has been so often the case with me – a genteel poverty. In later years, my natural generosity led me to bestow many gifts of rare manuscripts and precious books to the Bodleian. Had I sold them, I could easily have lifted my fortunes. And yet so-called scholars question their authenticity and petty men use past debts and present doubts to sully my good name. To quote one of the Chinese language’s many expressive sayings, t’iao chin huang ho ye hsi bu ch’ing , it is like jumping into the Yellow River – one can never come out clean. But I have never set out purposefully to be a misdemeanant.

Without going into unnecessary detail, I shall not deny that thanks to my naturally trusting soul and scholarly naivety (for what, after all, is a man of books to know of the treacherous world of commerce?), I have often been vulnerable to misuse by rapacious middlemen and so-called “partners”. Lady Luck, capricious creature that she is, has not always been on my side either. And so I have left a regrettable trail of bad debts, infamy and misunderstanding wherever I’ve travelled in this wide world, and I have travelled widely and lived fully. I assure you that in my intentions I have ever been honourable.

I am also, I concede, something of a coward. When in trouble, I find myself beset by illness and humours that mandate a retreat from the world. Whilst even I suspect that some of these might be psychosomatic in origin (I admit to some hypochondriac tendencies), I assure you that the suffering is avowedly most real. On the other hand, for the record, I didn’t run away to America after Oxford to escape my creditors, including those who claimed they had helped me in my donation to Oscar Wilde’s defence fund (dear Oscar, who once praised my “charming tool”!), and much less was I “sent away” to America due to “madness”. No.

I travelled there voluntarily in the company of Lord Montagu, who insisted on my presence, and paid for our first-class passage across the Atlantic. Lord Montagu was a man of violent and powerful carnality, whom I loved passionately at the time and who loved me as well. It was not politic to speak of it then, of course, and so rumours naturally filled the seemingly unaccountable void. As I have written in my memoirs, one cannot live a quiet, hidden life without making enemies.

But one must learn to view these things lightly. As Yehonala, the All-Nourishing, Perfect, Worshipful and Exalted Empress Dowager Cixi once remarked to me in the silken languor that followed our lovemaking, life is but “a mirage and a sensual delusion like the morning dew or the evening glow”. My Empress lover, she who allowed me to slip behind those forbidden walls and taste the true exotic, has been gone for nigh forty years, and yet I only need close my eyes to see her face, as lovely as any maiden’s. I see in my mind’s eye, as though they were before me now, the great lacquered wings of her hair as glossy as the imperial brocades that so readily slipped from her slim shoulders. Even at her great age, her skin was as lustrous and smooth as the pearls adorning her neck, and her eyes as luminous as the skies over Peking in autumn. I can hear her, teasing me in that high imperious voice: “Foolish boy. My very own devil-man.”

Her Majesty had the most delicate musk you can imagine, enhanced by daily applications of sandalwood oil and jasmine. That musk remains in my nostrils still from those hundreds of sensual encounters for which Chief Eunuch Li Lien-ying, knowing my natural inclinations lay elsewhere, amply prepared me with aphrodisiac philtres and the promise, fulfilled like cups overflowing, of more naturally amenable pleasures afterwards.

It is true that she was nearly seventy and I in my early thirties (though already tormented by lumbago and poor eyesight) when she first summoned me to the imperial boudoir. Yet I shall never forget those lust-soaked hours, for the Old Buddha was more than my match in perversity. You should also know, however, of her refinement. She loved the opera. Sometimes she’d invite me to watch a command performance of one of her favourite operas at a theatre in the Summer Palace, the Yi Ho Yuan, where we would recline on embroidered pillows of Soochow silk on the woven mats of the ta .

Other days, she commanded me to enact plays with her, at the Temple of the Azure Clouds, to which we’d repaired to view the autumn foliage of the Western Hills perhaps, or on a retreat to the Summer Palace, wherever and whenever it took her fancy. I sang lao sheng , the part of the elderly male, though I was still in my vital years. In some moods, she took on the role of the hua tan , the flirtatious maiden, and in others the ch’ing yi , the virtuous woman. She liked to play the drunken concubine Yang Kui-fei in Hundred Flowers Pavilion, but when we essayed the tragedy of Farewell My Concubine, it was she who insisted on playing the tyrant, making me the concubine, dancing unto death.

During these idylls, our every need was looked after by the eunuch bawd Li Lien-ying. Palace maids with their lips painted, like hers, into rosy little buds, brought us fragrant tea in lidded, yellow-glazed bowls fired at Ching Te Chen for her ancestor Yung Cheng. (I liked them so much she later made gifts of them to me.) The tea was brewed from the first delicate leaves of the Hangchow crop, picked by the untainted sweet hands of young virgins. Palace maids rowed on low skiffs into Kunming Lake at dusk, singing, to insert parcels of tea into the closing petals of lotus flowers. If I awoke early enough, I would amble down to the edge of the lake to listen to their sweet song and watch how, with infinite grace, they would recover the parcels when the flowers opened the following morning. The pretty apple-green, blush-pink and peacock-feather-blue of their silk garments glowed in the rosy dawn that fell upon the palace like a shower of pink and gold, their slender oars lapping like tongues at the lake’s surface.

Sometimes, while the Old Buddha enjoyed her customary pipe of opium, she would send me to feast on the nests of swallows and dishes of meats so divinely prepared that, it was said, “Buddha would have jumped the fence” for them. I rarely indulged in the vice of opium myself, for my imagination has always been opiate enough – it had propelled me, after all, from the dreary, plain earnestness of my Quaker home into the very heart of a universe of beauty, now – alas – vanished forever. As I have written in the volume of my memoirs I call Décadence Mandchoue, “As at the end of my life, I recall those garish days, the phantom and the delusion of power, those Gods dethroned and empires of the past, I bow before the Buddha’s precept: ‘Learn happiness by abolishing desire.’”

I am aware that when the manuscripts, my Ricordo Dei Felici Tempi, memories of happy times, are made public, there will be those who accuse me of lying and fabrication. That they will also accuse me of obscenity is certain, for I reveal in full my penchant ignoble. I should perhaps be used to such denouncements by now, but I have never managed to grow an elephant’s hide; had I been blessed with one of half the thickness, I should have been spared much in the way of both choler and melancholy, those yellow and black bilious humours that ravage the body as much as the soul.

I shall address the accusation that I am but a common fabulator squarely and assure you: there has never been anything common about my fabulations.

The Chinese have a saying, yuan che shang ko , those who are willing take the bait. You see, my dear, it is easy to seduce people into one’s bed when one knows of what they dream. The dreams of my victims (if one must call those who have profited from my petty deceptions “victims”) have ever been simple, material, even vulgar.

To wit: wealth, power, a brush with fame or the famous. Present them a simulacrum of what they desire and voilà!, they lie down like whores and present their posteriors as readily as any catamite in the Hall of Chaste Joys. Whenever I have promised people access to direct profit from enterprises most fanciful, they show no scruples, but snuggle eagerly under my patchwork quilt of lies, stretch out luxuriously upon the mattress of insubstantiality, and lay their puffed-up and stupidly happy little heads upon the pillow of my dissimulation, displaying their fondements et parties sexuelles and waiting for la gamme réciproque to commence. Yet, as the Chinese would say, yo hsiang tang piaotze, yo hsiang li p’ai-fang , they want to act the harlot but also wish to have a monument erected to their chastity.

And so the very ones who once praised to the skies Bland’s and my work on Her Excellency (I refer of course to China Under the Empress Dowager) – calling it an “indispensable guide through the bewildering maze of Chinese politics” and “the most informing book in Chinese affairs that has appeared within a decade” etcetera etcetera – later turned around with their Janus faces to accuse me of being a plagiarist. Plagiarism! They wound me still with their words. Plagiarism is an offence committed by incompetents. Forgery, as everyone knows, is, par contraste, a crime of genius.

There is palpable joy in the discovery that, almost to a man, those who ought to know better, or are convinced that they already do, have proven most willing to loll supine in my bed of enchantment. As Plato said, “Everything that deceives may be said to enchant.”

I don’t write this in order to gloat, even if I have taken something of a smug tone, despite myself. I should not presume, nor am I that cruel, for all my admitted fondness for la discipline et les verges. It is important for you to understand that whereas I well know that I have perhaps, from time to time, shaded the borders between truth and fiction a little too heavily, what I am about to reveal to you is, beyond any suspicion, the truth.

There was once ample proof to back my story – letters and documents and photographs. These I kept in a small camphor box, affixed with a Chinese puzzle lock that opened only when one aligned the characters to spell out an erotic poem from the Ch’in P’ing Mei . The box was a gift from my dear Cassia Flower. The Japanese threw it into the fire! O Tempus edax rerum! Time, devourer of everything!

Forgive the ramblings of an old man, and I fear I do ramble. Ch’ang hua tuan shuo , to make a long story short, the only proof of what I am about to tell you lies in two carved jade bracelets of inestimable value, gifts from the Old Buddha herself. It will ultimately be by these that my friend H will know that you are the intended – and you will know that what I say is true. But allow me a necessary digression.

It was with mille coquetteries of an intellectual and practical nature that the Jesuits ingratiated themselves with the Ming and early Ch’ing emperors. Coming from Italy, Spain, France and other corners of the Catholic empire, they were fluent in Mandarin and later Manchu as well. They beguiled the emperors with their discourses on philosophy and foreign lands, impressed them with their skills at cartography, medicine and mathematics, and taught them and their eunuchs how to play the harpsichord. Matteo Ricci even gave us the English name of this great city when he invented the first system for transcription of the Chinese language into roman letters and called it Pequim. (I was deeply moved when the Old Buddha made a gift to me of some Louis d’or that a Jesuit had presented to the K’ang Hsi emperor; the gold coins had been minted in 1702 during the reign of Louis XIV.)

Their other contribution, seemingly trivial, was to tend to the vast imperial collection of Western clocks, keeping them wound and in good repair. The empire has long been conceived of as encompassing both time and space, the former symbolised by the sundial in front of the Hall of Supreme Tranquillity and the urgency with which each dynasty approached the task of writing the history of the one it had vanquished. The notion that one can control time by marking it, and history by writing it, is a profound one.

I sometimes think that it was, obscurely, an act of winding back the clock that caused the Old Buddha to take me into her literal embrace. When the Allied Forces arrived in Peking to relieve the Boxer siege of the Legation Quarter she was forced to shed her jewels and abandon her treasures, fleeing in the rough indigo guise of the peasant woman and transported in the bone-jolting litters of the common people. It was only thus that she could be sure of escaping the wrathful barbarian legions of England, France, America, Russia and the rest, who, confronted with the superior civilisation of the Celestials, only understood how to burn and plunder, pillage and rape. They tramped through the vacated palace in their filthy boots, shameless as Visigoths, heaping their pockets with the priceless treasures of her ancestors and setting an example for the vengeful and covetous foreign residents of the city.

The actions of my so-called compatriots shamed me so much that when some trusty Manchu friends asked me to join with them in rescuing and secreting some of the palace’s greatest treasures until the court was once more in a position to receive them, I had no hesitation in agreeing, despite the apparent danger of our mission, which necessarily was of a clandestine nature.

Later, I had the opportunity to return these, which I did through these same contacts, and was most gratified and surprised to receive, in return, an invitation to an audience in the Forbidden City with the Empress Dowager herself. I relate the story in detail in my memoirs, but without knowing whether or not you have yet had a chance to read them, I must tell you that of course I had had no contact with her before that. I was an unimportant foreigner, teaching and translating, discreetly disporting myself in the Hall of Chaste Joys, going about my business, which took me only as close to the palace as its high walls and moats and guards would permit. She asked me many intelligent questions that revealed the liveliness of her mind. In me, if you will permit me a moment of immodest candour, she discovered a conversationalist of an intellectual breadth and depth that was lacking in her other confidants in the court. I sensed she also felt free to discuss with me events of political import without fear that it would later become the stuff and fodder of machination and intrigue within the court.

Not long after that I was summoned back to the palace for an audience of a rather different sort, and so began my lustful and long affair with this remarkable and unusually erotic woman, ruler of China, and nearly four decades my senior. Her demands were simple and reasonable: I could indulge to my heart’s content in coition with princes, eunuchs, male courtesans, actors in the Peking Opera, or any other males I amorously desired. But no other woman, foreign or Manchu, would ever share my bed. I gladly gave my promise, for I had never thought to sleep with a woman before her, nor indeed after. And so began an affair that, whilst well-known among the denizens of the court itself and I dare say a subject of some fascination among the nobility generally, was, perforce, discreet.

It was thus that, following her death in 1908, I wrote far more harshly than I felt, and although with great detail, far less than I knew, about the Old Buddha in the biography I wrote with that hack Bland. Even in Décadence Mandchoue, the ultimate fate of which I cannot know, I have obscured the most astonishing aspect of our relationship (astonishing both to her and myself): the child.

Shivering, I once read, is a bodily reflex designed to preserve or achieve homeostasis, the internal stability of such properties as body temperature. So if your core temperature drops, the muscle groups around your vital organs will begin to quiver, expending energy to create warmth and ward off hypothermia. When you shiver because of fever, it’s because, despite your elevated body temperature, you feel cold.

There are other reasons why we shiver. When shocked or scared or very nervous, adrenaline makes the heart beat faster. It also speeds up your breathing and diverts blood from the digestive system to your muscles so they get an extra dose of oxygen. It’s part of the body’s fight-or-flight response and, like extreme cold, it can leave you shaking too.

The space in Fei Chang Dao where I sat was close to a heater and toasty warm. Yet my shivering caused my bracelets to chime: Qiangqiang, chengcheng, dingding, lingling, langlang, shanshan.

Had I possessed a womb inside my trou fignon, I dare say I should have been made pregnant a thousand times by a thousand men, not to mention one woman whose ejaculations, as I have recorded in my memoirs, were as formidable as those of any sailor or duke. But Nature, munificent in its perversity, arranged otherwise.

It is perhaps not surprising that when there are hundreds of acts of heterosexual copulation of all possible manners and positions between two devout bawds, such as she and I, that at least one would bear fruit. I do believe I can name the exact moment of conception, incidentally, for I recall having the most tremendous orgasm and she too that day had been possessed of an extraordinary concupiscence. Some six months later, in the late spring of 1908, we decided to pay a visit to the White Cloud Temple, for in that time of many whims and urges, she had a sudden compulsion to consult the T’aoist soothsayers there. Her condition was becoming more than obvious, though she had it put about that she had simply indulged too much in the black sesame-paste dumplings and other delicacies for which she had in recent times developed a great appetite. The passage to the temple was, of course, completely private, and no one outside her intimate circle of eunuchs and handmaidens was ever permitted to cast eyes upon her. She had always ruled, as was the custom for regents, from behind a decorative barrier, in the situation described both literally and metaphorically as ch’ui lien t’ing cheng , guiding politics from behind the screen. The monks received her into the temple, and after much bowing and chanting and burning of incense, a séance of sorts began, and at the end of it they told her that a new era was dawning, and a successor to the throne was assured, yet were she to continue with her “indulgence” then it would spell disaster for her and the empire. She paled then, as did I, not that we ever had any illusions that this new life we had quite thoughtlessly and rather miraculously created would be welcomed as had her first-born, the T’ung Chih emperor, when he came into the world half a century earlier, in 1856, as the son and heir of the Hsien-feng emperor.

Here I need to say a few words about my servant and friend Ch’ang. Those who believed that he had appropriated a considerable fortune from me in the various dealings in antiques and curios for which he acted as middleman, who whispered that I was under his control after he took possession of my former house on Shih-Fuma Street, where I continued to reside as his tenant, might be surprised to see that I persist in calling him my friend. But they do not know the extent of his involvement or sacrifice in this secret business.

After my goddess, despite her advanced age, delivered our son with an ease and speed that would have been remarkable in a much younger woman, it was necessary for every reason to hide his existence from the world. The revolutionaries were active at home and overseas, calling for an end to the “foreign” dynasty that had brought so much humiliation upon China. They argued that it was time China took her place among the modern nations of the world. Had our son been announced, all the anti-Ch’ing and anti-foreign sentiment in China would have combined to rip this tiny, innocent life and, I dare say, our own, to shreds. Life, limb and reputation were all at stake.

Ch’ang was crafty and reliable, and to make a long story short, for the hand that holds the pen is already shaking with exhaustion, between myself and Li Lien-ying we promised him the resources with which to raise the boy as his own under my roof. Not long after that, the emperor, already sickly, passed away and she followed by one day, assassinated I am sure – though the history books will never record it – by the treacherous Yuan Shih-kai who, several years later, as president of the republic, found out about the infant’s existence and sent assailants to my home.

And so Ch’ang was not, as is commonly presumed, knifed and strangled as the result of some shady business deal gone wrong. The murderers were looking for the child and tortured him when he said he didn’t know where he was. The police were well compensated for protecting the murderers, as was attested by the sudden sprouting of rings of gold and jade on the hands of their chief soon after. But the truth was that the boy had been sent away at the tender age of four, around the time he began to look unmistakeably like his mother. Ch’ang was not faultless in this affair, for after the boy’s departure, seeing the end of his profitable use to me, he made certain claims upon my property that were backed by threats of blackmail.

I sent the boy, with his legacy of the carved jade bracelets and the useless, possibly even harmful, knowledge that he was born a prince, into the care of relatives in England. I am not sure if they were more relieved at this apparent proof that I had been cured of my inversion, or scandalised by the fact that the mother had most certainly not been of the white race. In any case, they wished to have nothing more to do with me and I never saw our son again. Sic transit gloria mundi. Or as Augustus said, Acta est fabula: Plaudite! The play is over. Applaud!

PART THREE

I am running after Dr H but don’t know how to follow, don’t know where he has gone. I find myself on Ghost Street with its red lanterns. Phantom-like are the emanations of laughter from the restaurants that line the street, the muffled shouts of drinkers at their raucous games. I have spent too many late nights here and elsewhere over steamy hotpots with jiurou pengyou , friends of wine and meat, whose names sank long ago beneath the roiling black surface of memory, lost to Modiano’s matière sombre. Here and there, drivers in army greatcoats lean on their cars, warming themselves with tobacco and waiting for the night to return their custom to them.

I walk back towards the Drum Tower, and then south towards the Palace, following once again the historic mnemonic of the old Imperial Precinct Wall. Before the Forbidden City’s Gate of Eastern Splendour, I stop in my tracks. Its soaring lintels are caked in snow and ice; a fragrant beauty hangs in the air. A young man of important and secretive demeanour, dressed in sable and wearing the hat of a high official of the Qing dynasty, approaches on horseback, his glossy queue hanging down his back. The great red doors swing open. A conspiracy of eunuchs swarms out. Taking the lead of his fine white horse, from whose nostrils comes a steady cloud of steam, the eunuchs beckon him inside. The doors close in my face.

I am running through Tiananmen Square. It is not the Tiananmen Square of the new millennium, guarded and barricaded and forbidding, nor the Imperial Way of the Qing, but of the 1980s, open, throwing up no obstacles. I lose a shoe but I keep going. I am trying to capture something that is eluding me when I understand that thing is time. Why didn’t I go then, why didn’t I disobey him, why didn’t I follow him? This shockingly lucid thought clutches at me, shakes me, unbalances me. I fall down somewhere, Liubukou perhaps, or maybe Fuxingmen, and weep but cannot make any sound. I realise that I am running up stairs in a building that keeps closing in on itself, its stairs turning into ladders turning into snakes, like an M.C. Escher nightmare. I was in the belly of the whale, no, the belly of Ouroboros, the snake that eats its own tail, killing itself and then bringing itself back to life, eternally cycling, reincarnating, a universe complete in itself. For as I climb only to discover that I am falling, I also realise that what I thought I was chasing is chasing me instead.

It is neither the doctor nor time, I realise. It is the story that has caught up with me. Or, you could say, the truth. Backhouse, it strikes me, again with unnerving clarity, had the genius to hold on to his story, to grow it and live it to the end. I do not have that particular genius, as much as I’d like to say I do. Cold air wraps its fingers around my throat.

My scarf has slipped from my neck. Slowly, I wind it back. It is late, how late I do not know, and though the heater is still on, the temperature in the room has dropped. My blurry stare rests on the two cats, who have retaken the other chair and curl together, once more a throbbing wheel of yin and yang. The title of a Daoist treatise floats into my head, summoned by some obscure mental algorithm. It was a manuscript that archaeologists found in Dunhuang: Wondrous Instructions on the Skill of Quiescent Breathing. Where had I read about it? Did I just dream it? Have I actually read it or do I just know the title? I feel a little dazed. I look up. The goddess of immortality Chang’E is still flying to the moon and the clock is still stopped at nine minutes past eight. The Sage has pulled up another chair and is seated nearby, looking at me, a book in his lap. The bar has emptied. It is just the two of us now. I breathe, quiescent, wondrous.

The mysterious woman who has come into my bar on this snowy night opens her eyes and blinks, unfocused, her mouth soft. Her gaze falls on me and she smiles uncertainly. An image, tinted like an old photograph, forms in my mind and then curls and crisps at the edges, and burns off leaving a chemical smell. She has sensed something too – the faint vertical grooves above her nose deepen. I don’t mind these wrinkles on a woman’s face, or the lines in the corner of their eyes; I like the reassurance that someone has both thought and smiled. I think, for some reason, of a young woman I met years ago, when I was still dating young women. She was only twenty-four years old and was capable of neither frowning nor laughing. Despite the agreeable symmetry of her features, her face seemed alien, blank and affectless. I was shocked when she explained, matter-of-factly, that she had had Botox. She professed to be mad about poetry, but I wondered how you could read poetry without being able to access the emotions that live in the skin. I saw her home, bored at the prospect of taking to bed someone who was incapable of looking even the slightest bit excited about the poetry that is sex. Oliver, predictably, thought I was an idiot for turning her away. But even he has his limits: once, when he fondled a woman’s preternaturally large, round breasts, one escaped his hand to travel up towards her collarbone. It didn’t deter him from sleeping with her, but he confessed that he avoided her breasts for the rest of the night – not an easy task, he admitted, given their size and eerie mobility.

I realise my gaze has drifted to her breasts, which are a nice size, not pert, but not droopy either; they are, I think quite spontaneously, civilised breasts. Where’d that come from? I give my head a little shake and pretend to yawn so that I can recalibrate my expression. She smiles, a slow, melancholy smile, and that’s when it hits me. How I know her. The knowledge of it smacks me in the face with such violence that the hand that had been reaching for the bottle to refill her glass travels instead to cover my mouth and cheek. Just as I do this, I see that the realisation has hit her as well, for her face, already pale, whitens.

Time swings on its hinge.

It is clear now why I am here, why I have come. We are all here now, all of us. A frozen memory begins to thaw.

The day had begun badly, with a row. I say row, but our tiffs rarely achieved such epic proportions. I would want to thrash things out, talk through any misunderstandings or presumed misunderstandings, tell him exactly what was on my mind and hear his point of view – typical Westerner, Q would say, shaking his head and refusing to engage. He knew all my buttons – ‘typical Westerner’ was one. But I could never really find his – currents of lust and affection and friendship ran between us, but it still hurts to admit that we were never truly, or at least mutually, passionately, intimate. He doesn’t demand anything from me, I’d tell Jingjing, tentative-proud, and she’d just shake her head fondly. I know now that she was biting back the urge to tell me that this wasn’t necessarily a great thing. Smarter than me in these matters, she said that Wang Jian demanded little of her as well but she wished he demanded more. Demanding less wasn’t necessarily an act of generosity or even trust. They can afford to be relaxed about us, she said, because they can see how befogged with love we are. But even she did not go so far then as to say that really, at its core, it was a kind of indifference; she said that later, after their break-up.

Befogged with love is definitely a good description of my state of mind when Q and I started seeing each other – finally started seeing each other. By then we’d both had a number of other relationships of differing degrees of intensity. I’d had two successive Chinese boyfriends, both of whom, I came to realise, ultimately saw me as a passport on legs. That they liked the legs too was just a happy coincidence. One, after more than a year of apparent mad love and naughty, secretive, dangerous fucking, dumped me the day he got a visa to study in London. The other bristled when I wouldn’t agree to marry him a week after we started going out. He asked me again a week later, and a week after that. I told him that I wasn’t ready for such a big commitment, that I wanted to slow down, and a week after that suggested that maybe we should take a break. He dropped the subject and stayed with me, but a month later, disappeared. Tellingly, I didn’t miss him all that much. When I ran into him about two weeks after that, he was on the arm of a giddy American girl. I just hoped she could teach him, as I never was able, that sticking a finger up a woman’s vagina and roughly poking around for a while wasn’t actually foreplay. Good luck to her. After that, I had a dalliance with a ridiculously handsome Japanese student with a foot fetish (apparently I have excellent feet), a casual affair with an older, drink-sodden Yugoslavian diplomat (Yugoslavia was still a country) who told me he wanted to be my ‘slav’, and then I began seeing an English guy my own age, a journalist with a good line in clever banter and a knowing, playful tongue. One day, apparently confident I’d be happy to share in the conspiracy of his words, he breezily remarked that he didn’t find non-Asian women attractive because they were a) too fat and b) too independent. In my book, foot fetishism is one thing, racial fetishism another entirely, especially when it carries a misogynistic undertone. My response: I stuck my stomach out as far as it would go and marched out the door. The dickhead came running after me: ‘I didn’t mean you, Linnie!’ I told him that, ha ha, fooled him, I wasn’t actually ‘Asian’ at all; I was South American, the daughter of a conquistador and his dusky native rose, and he could go fuck himself. Of these retrospectively minor heartbreaks I shall speak no more.

It was partly as a result of these misadventures, however, that I gradually convinced myself that in China, as elsewhere, I was never going to meet or at least get together with Mr Right, and whoever I did hook up with would always see me as representing something that might be a part of me but wasn’t the whole, and chances were that part was a squeezable laissez-passer to one side or another of the Great Wall. I decided that if that was how it was, I would work it, use my natural, genetic ambivalence, my unanchored looks and my feral mind to my advantage. I embraced an identity as a shapeshifter, a one-woman Carnivale of masked balls. Backhouse was – dare I use the word – a role model. He fascinated me with his ability to slip in and out, not so much of character, but of characters. The shy, modest scholar. The wild libertine and sexual braggart. The uxorious consort. The gracious gentleman. The eternally put-upon grudge-bearer. This country has long attracted and somehow accommodated a certain kind of foreign quirk. And if the Backhousians wrap China around themselves like a magician’s cloak, China itself barely notices. Sheer irrelevance can be the source of great freedom. I played more roles than The Dream of the Red Chamber has characters.

That’s a long way of saying that by the time I met up with Q again, at a party, when he said I shimmered, it was true. It didn’t hurt that he had pretty much the same effect on me then as the first time I met him. But I had caught his eye at last, and it didn’t take long for him to catch my hand. We’d wasted enough time. We went back to my place that night. As we hurried towards the Friendship Hotel, he tucked me under his arm, and I breathed in the close, animal smell of his leather jacket. Years of fantasising about him turned me cartoonish in my desire, and he’d no sooner kissed my neck than I was thrusting my tongue into his ear. He jerked away in surprise. Manman lai, he said, slow down. I was so embarrassed I could barely look at him but he took charge then, and his desire didn’t take long to heat up. Naked under the doona, his skin was on fire. I tried to touch every bit of him with every bit of me. He was assured in his lovemaking, sensual and abandoned, except he refused to reciprocate my ‘playing the jade flute’ by going down on me because, he said, a friend had told him that foreign women tasted unspeakably odd. I remember feeling marginally more chagrin at the realisation that he ultimately saw me as ‘foreign’ than the knowledge that he wasn’t prepared to give as good as he got. I don’t remember many of the other details of our lovemaking that night except that what he wouldn’t do with his tongue he did very well with his fingers. When I came, with him inside me, it felt like I’d never stop, great clenching waves of bliss sweeping through me from head to curled toes. He climaxed with a throaty sigh, his buttocks moving hard and tight under my fingers, his hot breath searing my throat. Later, pressed for details by Jingjing, I used the expression the Party had used in evaluating Mao’s legacy: san–qi kai, a thirty–seventy split, mostly bliss but with a certain quota of excruciating moments. If I’m to be completely honest, that pretty much summed up the relationship as a whole. The you shi secret men’s business moments I mentioned earlier, that belonged to the thirty. But the seventy – that’s what I lived for.

Like most couples, we gradually discovered a rhythm and routine, in and out of bed, and accumulated small grievances, some of which we thrashed out, some of which we nursed. I made that stupid remark about poverty, and he reacted, and I hinted at a mutual future, saying something about maybe, in a few years, visiting Europe together, and he replied, way too quickly, that it was impossible to predict where either of us would be in even six months’ time. That particular conversation, so strangely reminiscent of our very first exchange, about his Forever bicycle, I later realised with horror, took place in January 1989, just as the Dragon Year, with all its portent, was giving way to the Year of the Snake.

It was around then that the physicist Fang Lizhi launched his petition calling for the release of Wei Jingsheng and other political prisoners, and soon other intellectuals had their own petition that Q signed, making me both proud and nervous. Then, security forces prevented Fang Lizhi and his wife from attending a function at the American embassy with President Bush, and the poet Bei Dao wrote a furious response. Tensions rose along with resentment and anger at government corruption. The death of the purged and relatively liberal leader Hu Yaobang in mid-April was the spark that lit the powder keg and students began pouring out of the campuses to march on Tiananmen Square, occupying the city’s heart in more than just the literal sense. Time sped up. The students sang and danced and then they stopped eating. Q, like everyone else, was spending more and more of his days on the square.

I was as excited and keyed up as anyone else in those wildly vibrant times, when strangers spoke to one another on the street, the pickpockets of Beijing went on strike in support of the students, and the workers cheered the protesters from the scaffolding of buildings. I was with Q on the square when he jumped up and delivered an impromptu speech, saying that democracy was breath, free speech was air. I wiped away tears, the kids cheered, and that was it – he was in the thick of it after that.

May rolled into June. The military cordon tightened further. The Party’s tone grew fiercer and more threatening. One of the lovely old men I knew through the Foreign Languages Press told me that he’d joined the Party back in the 1940s because the Nationalists were so disgustingly corrupt and the Communists so pure of purpose; now, he said, the corruption was worse than that of the Nationalists in their day, and so he supported the students. I couldn’t wait to tell Q that. He took the news I conveyed as a given – had someone like the old man not been disillusioned by now then he would have been a sad case, if not reprehensible, he said. I felt stupid. He had made me feel stupid. He said it wasn’t about me and rolled his eyes, but not in his usual, indulgent way, with a tempering smile. No, he wasn’t dropping me. Yes, he still loved me, but … this was more important right now. He didn’t expect me to understand. I was refusing to understand. He had to go out there, and he wasn’t coming back until it was over. No, I couldn’t go. It wasn’t my place. I should stay safe. They’d force the government to back down soon enough. He’d come and find me as soon as it was all over.

We quarrelled. He left. He returned with a rose. He told me he loved me but that I had to understand. He was meeting some of his university classmates for dinner. I should come along. His mother was out so we went to their flat first and we made hasty love, my back pushed against the rough wall, his hands gripping my arse so hard they left marks that, if I could have stopped them from ever fading, I would have.

That day was the third of June, 1989.

Liu Xiaobo, Hou Dejian and the others had begun their hunger strike, and the art students had erected their ‘Goddess of Democracy’ statue on the square, reviving the protest movement that had begun to flag under the pressures of time and martial law. Like everyone else, I had taken part in one march or another and hung out on the square. After the government warned that they would clear the square by force if they had to, Chunmei bought us both handkerchiefs that we could use against the tear gas. Some people were saying the government was prepared to use fire hoses and rubber bullets against the demonstrators. Chunmei didn’t believe it. She argued that the city couldn’t afford to waste water and the People’s Liberation Army would never use rubber bullets on unarmed citizens.

Shugang had been in touch. A bunch of old classmates and friends were getting together for a meal at a newish, privately run Sichuan restaurant at the top of Xidan, close to where it met Chang’an Avenue, before heading out onto the streets. I walked past the square, over which the oppressive heat, the stench of unwashed bodies and the air of martyrdom hung in a heavy cloud. I perspired, and as we approached the restaurant, Chunmei took out her tear-gas-ready handkerchief and gave it to me to mop my brow. She said it had to be wet to work against the tear gas anyway.

I’d heard that Q had a foreign girlfriend, but I hadn’t met her before that night. When she came in I was a bit surprised to see that she didn’t seem all that foreign. She was petite and her Chinese was very good. She seemed a little shy, a tad awkward in an intellectual sort of way, not really the mental image I had at the time of foreign girls, who always seemed to be big, loud and not as bright as they were sexy. I had the impression she was seeking some kind of reassurance in the way she reached out to touch Q’s hands or his leg under the table when she thought she was unobserved. I could see from the way she looked at Q – the way every girl in history had ever looked at Q – that she was flushed with love and Q, well, I could see that he was fond of her too, even if, like the rest of us, his heart was at that moment in the square. I wondered if he still played around. In our university days, his relationships had a kind of epic, stormy, theatrical quality. I remember him saying that love, aiqing, was made up of two characters, ai and qing, and so one naturally needed both an airen, a wife, and qingren, lovers.

Under normal circumstances, I might have spent some time talking with Q’s girlfriend, drawing her out. At the very least I would have asked her about the rose she was carrying so carefully, placing it on the table at first and then retiring it to her lap, then worrying it back onto the table. But the events unfolding not far from where we sat picking at our eye-watering food had captured our full attention. Q was particularly revved up, intense, leading the conversation. Rumour had it that the army was rebelling against orders from the Central Government to clear the square. Rumour had it Deng had died. Rumour had it that they were arming ‘workers’ who would come in and beat up the students and their supporters. Rumour had it that some of the students’ supporters were arming themselves as well. What was going to happen? What was to be done about it? Heat, chilli and stress: I mopped my brow so many times during the course of the meal that Chunmei joked that the handkerchief was truly ready to go into battle now. Q showed us a heavy cotton bandana. He put his arm around the girl and said, very fondly, She gave it to me. Something about the look she gave him then, desperate and thankful and loving all at the same time, gave me a terrible sense of foreboding. I can’t believe I’d forgotten all about that until now.

He looks at her hands, the pale skin spotted here and there, the nails faintly striated under their thin layer of gloss, the skin looser on their bones than when those hands had nervously reached for Q’s in his memory of that night, the last night any of them ever saw Q. The CD that has been playing finishes, but he is loath to get up and put on another.

Neither of them names the elephant. Neither of them says, I remember you.

A man, red and swollen with drink, appears out of nowhere with what looks like two under-aged hookers – under-dressed, too, inside their ostentatious, matched furs – and he slurs out a rough demand for alcohol. The Sage rises and regretfully informs the man that the place is a private club, and has closed for the night. One of the girls pouts and the other stamps her feet in childish frustration. The man swears under his breath. The Sage sees them out and locks the door.

While he is doing this, the cats, suddenly alert, jump off the chair, one after the other, and begin leaping onto the backs of furniture and up onto the shelves and down again, without ever disturbing the clocks or books or anything else but the air. She watches them dumbly.

He puts on another CD, one she doesn’t recognise, and returns to take over the cats’ chair. He tells her, just to say something, that the CD was a gift from a Romanian woman he knows. She fears she will cry. So far neither she nor he has spoken about what connects them. If she cries, she feels, she will admit denial, anger, mystification and grief back into her life. She doesn’t think she’s ready for that, so she asks how long he’s been running the bar, and he, possibly relieved, he’s not sure, tells her the funny story about how his poetry collection went viral and she exclaims, That’s you! because of course she knew the collection, Duan Mou had even given her a copy. She’d been thinking of him all evening as the Sage, and it hadn’t occurred to her that he had a real name, the name of a poet, as it turned out. She asks if he really is the descendant of a famous Daoist philosopher and he shrugs, which could mean anything. She asks about the clocks and he hesitates. Because sometimes time does stop, he says, and time stops.

I feel like I’m dreaming, she says finally.

It is probably four or five in the morning now. He asks if she wants a coffee. He has cardamom and an espresso machine and can offer her a cardamom espresso. A Moroccan friend taught him how to make this coffee that is dense and spicy. When he returns with two small cups of bitter, fragrant espresso and a bowl of sugar cubes, he says softly, We met, almost twenty-five years ago.

She nods, her words tangling at the front of her mouth, between her tongue and her teeth. Eyes downcast again, he stirs two lumps of sugar into his coffee. She takes one lump. She needs a cigarette. He pulls a packet out of his pocket and they both light up, their hands trembling. Do you remember asking me to look out for Q?

The name hangs in the air between them, flickering and sparking. She says she remembers asking several of his friends to do this, to watch out for him, but she’d been so overwrought that night she hadn’t really paid much attention to anyone except Q, she’s embarrassed to admit. He says, Don’t be embarrassed, it’s understandable. He had only just recognised her himself. He starts talking compulsively about Q: Q had a heroic bent, don’t you think? She nods. He was like his father in that he had a strong sense of right and wrong. I think he believed that he was charmed, that someone like him could never die. I think we all believed that of him.

Yes, I think you’re right about that, she says. At the same time, as we say in English (and she switches now to that language), he lived like there was –

– no tomorrow, says the Sage, finishing the sentence.

They both laugh, short happy laughs, thinking of Q, and then, thinking of Q, their faces fall again. He tells her that they had headed out onto the streets and into the square. The mood on the street was the most tense it had been since the protests began.

I remember, she says. I didn’t actually go home like he told me to. I just pretended to, and then I returned. But I couldn’t find him, or you, or anyone I knew, and it wasn’t long before … you know.

I know, he says. The army. They really … They really, she repeats, they really.They began …

Shooting.

And then we lost him.

A silence.

I lost him. I feel so guilty.

You have no need to feel that way,she says. But me, I feel ashamed.

Why? What do you have to be ashamed of?

I didn’t want him to go. In my heart I didn’t want him to go. At that moment, I didn’t care about democracy, the students, anything. I cared only about Q, and our relationship. Every time I think back on this, I feel so small, so petty, so selfish, so ashamed. And yet I would have held him back if I could.

Tears come to her eyes and she blinks, willing them to retreat.

I’ve never said this before to anyone, she says now. In fact, I don’t think I’ve even said this to myself before, but I’d built such a complete fantasy around our reality that when he disappeared, I could only build a fantasy around that. Do you understand?

He nods, but he doesn’t really.

She finds her mobile phone to show the Sage how she even assigned Q a number, and notices that Duan Mou has left her a message: It begins with Tarantino. She deletes it without reading it. Everyone loves other people either a little more or a little less than they are loved back, she says. In my experience.

His turn.

He loved you, the Sage says with certainty, unsure if it’s the truth but knowing it is the right thing to say, the only thing. Words are like the marks made on xuanzhi, rice paper, by a Chinese writing brush. There’s no erasing, no painting over, no prettying up, no taking back, no rubbing out.

She senses the qi with which the Sage writes these words that hang in the air between them. She admires their form, and appreciates the poetry behind the action.

I remember he’d given you a rose, he says. Or that’s what I assumed. That night. You were holding it. You wanted to protect it, but it was such a hot night. You moved it from your lap to the table. You asked the waiter for a glass of water and you put the rose in it.

Did I? she asks. She had forgotten the detail of the water. Yang Lian’s words rise up: a sun that will not be contained in the grave.

You’re shivering. I’ll turn up the heat. Do you want another coffee? He doesn’t want her to go. He worries that the offer might be misunderstood; it is definitely not a hint for her to leave.

He has already risen from his chair when she says, in an almost inaudible voice, I wanted to search the hospitals but they wouldn’t let me in. I called his mother. She’d been to every one. I wanted to believe he was hiding, that he’d gone abroad. I even wanted to believe he’d been arrested. I didn’t want to listen to the stories of people ground into flesh and bone on the roads by the tanks, of the arrests and summary executions. I saw an English woman I knew running down the street, hysterical, with blood and muck on her shirt. She told me she had been standing talking to a young man one moment and the next a dumdum bullet had blown up his head, splattering her with brains and skull and gore. I didn’t want to hear any of it but I couldn’t stop listening. There is no way, I thought, that someone with such presence could disappear so completely from the world, leaving no trace. She breathes in and out. She says, September 11, bombs in Afghanistan, explosions in Iraq, killings on Tahrir Square, Syria – the news makes me so ill I retreat from it altogether. I say I came back to China because it’s so real, but maybe I’m here because it’s so unreal, because the censorship of the news and of history makes it easier to live in a fantasy world. She tells him she reads a lot of novels. She writes. Sometimes she manages to escape the world – and herself – for months at a time. And then something will happen – a French friend invites her to watch some old films from the Nouvelle Vague and, viewing Hiroshima mon amour, the line Tu me détruit, tu me fais bien, leaves her sobbing. Her friends don’t know what to do when things like that happen but, luckily, they happen less and less. People speak of it less these days as well. It was twenty-five years ago. A whole generation has reached adulthood since then.

As she talks, he thinks of all the things he’s seen and heard, the friends who disappeared and reappeared, the ones who sat in a prison cell for a while, the ones who went abroad, some to return, some not. Chunmei. Sometimes, he says, I wonder what it was all for. In the end, we didn’t get democracy, or a free press, or an end to corruption. We just got commerce. And most young people don’t know anything about what happened here. No one will tell them. No one is willing to tell them. There are no memorials, no plaques, nothing on TV, nothing in the bookshops. Did all those deaths, all that passion, all those injured and lost and torn lives, did they mean anything? I want it to mean something, but that’s not going to make it happen.

I just want it to have been different. I want to tell Q that it was okay by me that he went, that I didn’t want him to go but that I understood. Maybe it took me longer than it should have to understand, but … I didn’t want him to think I was some … I don’t know.

She weeps silently in his arms. He smells male, a little smoky, woolly, comforting. He holds her tightly against his chest and strokes her hair. Watching the mechanical fish loop round and round on their mechanical waves, he recalls something Master Happy Fish said. A line is the shortest distance between two points. A line is a succession of points. Look at the line and see the points. Stand on a point and see the line. If it’s a fishing line, then go fishing. Neither as a student of philosophy nor as a poet, nor even just a man, does he have any idea what this means. He never did. The rice-gruel dawn seeps in through the windows and, from the perspective of the cats, who have settled close by, the light surrounds their joined silhouette with a kind of halo.

The old man, accomplished of mission, depleted of meaning, slopes back through the crazy-paving of hutong that was old Dashila’r. By the Republican era, Dashila’r was where you’d find the greatest entertainments, the most desperate of addicts, the grandest and poorest of brothels and hundreds of shops and restaurants large and small, thousands of homes, markets, temples and mosques. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, bulldozers had already tamed great swathes of Dashila’r. A Walmart squatted on the site of the execution ground to which the Empress Dowager sent her enemies for a final bowl of wine and an even more final whack of the sharp sword on their necks. But some of the narrowest, dingiest and liveliest of alleyways and junctions have stubbornly resisted the cull. And it is through these that the old man is going home.

The sun is nearly up by the time he wearily eases the outsized key into its old-fashioned lock. Developers have chalked the character chai, demolish, onto his doorway; it would not be long before the grim-faced crews of migrant workers arrived with their sledgehammers. Developers have already strong-armed most of his neighbours out of their homes, packed them off to live in distant suburbs in vertical towers of uncertain construction, anxious ghosts pacing out their days. He is not a citizen. He doesn’t even have the right to such a compromised resettlement. Legally, he does not even exist. Legally, he is a dead man. A ghost.

The door creaks open. It is even colder inside than out and, stamping the snow and slush from his boots in the doorway, he slips his frozen feet into worn slippers. He shuffles with tired footsteps over the old floorboards, which squeak like crickets, gezhi, gezhi, to the coal-brick stove. Clouds of heavy dust rise a few centimetres off the ground and fall back, as though too exhausted to make more of an effort. The house hasn’t been properly cleaned in decades. His ayi, who is nearly as old as he is, spends half her shifts grumbling about the state of her health and the other half scolding him for not looking after his own. This leaves very little time for housework. They are both at ease with the arrangement and neither considers it in need of remedy.

By the time he succeeds in lighting the stove, there are new twigs on the bird’s nest of broken matches on the floor and a stench of coal dust in the air. The place is derelict. It once served as a brothel in the late Qing and early Republican periods. It hadn’t been the most luxurious or classy of bordellos, just the sort of place where a rickshaw man, warlord’s sergeant or even, in the city’s darkest years, a Japanese private could procure half an hour of cheap comfort. The cell-like working rooms sit off a narrow corridor, one side of which is bordered by a balustrade overlooking a central atrium, or inner courtyard. He has not ventured upstairs for years, leaving it to his cats. Even their feather-light steps can make those uncertain planks creak and groan. Sometimes the sound wakes him and he sits up with a start, certain that the entire toothpick structure is about to come tumbling down around his ears.

There is a rickety antique bed downstairs in the largest room. It is possibly where the powdered women, benumbed by opium, sat and gossiped, awaiting or perhaps competing for the next pair of rough-skinned, needy hands. It’s an old-style canopy bed. The wooden overhang is intricately carved into a riot of pornographic scenes – men in open Ming dynasty robes driving enormous phalluses into the finely bearded slits of women who lie flung open with tiny feet akimbo and expressions of rapture in the flight of their moth-antennae eyebrows; men whose mouths overflow with vaginal fluids, or whose tongues are wrapped around a bound foot the size of a lotus; two women whose cherry lips play the same ‘jade flute’. It is quite extraordinary: a museum piece.

He barely notices it anymore. It is just a bed. A bed, at his advanced age, is for sleeping, but even that comfort has become elusive. He sits down on the edge of its hard mattress and eases his feet out of his slippers again, sighing. He looks around him. Though he has his books, and the odd Chinese bric-a-brac, his clothes and his other possessions, the place feels suddenly, cavernously empty now that the manuscript he so carefully guarded for half a lifetime is no longer there. He has always known that one day the story would belong to someone else, that this was always the way it was going to work out. Yet an obscure sense of injustice congests his heart. He cannot breathe. He thumps his chest with his fist, clutches at whatever it is that is pressing down upon it. The pain is insupportable, and radiates to his neck, jaw and arms, but it doesn’t last long. His vision tunnels. He grows aware of a certain lustre in the distance. He thinks of how he has never grown accustomed to the quality of light emitted by energy-efficient light globes. With the realisation that this mundane thought will be his very last one, he dies, an ironic smile embedded in his worn and venerable features.

His body will remain on that bed until tomorrow, when his ayi is due to arrive. Seeing it, she’ll moan, aiya, aiya, and hobble as fast as she’s able on her swollen ankles to the Neighbourhood Committee office. When she bursts in, breathless and distraught, the drama will clatter the lids on the committee members’ teacups. They’ll be privately delighted that such an interesting event has occurred for them to manage and discuss. The old man’s foreign presence in their area had always seemed somewhat suspicious to them, but orders from higher up had protected him and such orders were not to be questioned. They will alert the paichushuo and will then follow the police who arrive with masks, rubber gloves, a stretcher and paperwork, observing and commenting on the action from the human enceinte they form outside his door. There’s no pressing need to do an autopsy on one so old, unless it’s to discover the secret to near-eternal life. This does occur to the coroner, but he has orders to close the file, and he does.

As there’s no known next of kin and even urn sites are at a premium, his body will be cremated and his ashes tipped. The ayi will weep, his sole mourner. Returning to tidy up, she will discover that he has left a considerable sum of money together with the gold fingernail protector under the mattress in an envelope with her name on it. A week later, a developer will bulldoze the site and a concrete beehive will begin to rise in its place.

And of this we shall speak no more.

NOTBOOK

Of all the books I consulted in my research, three were central. I drew much of my knowledge of Sir Edmund Backhouse from Hugh Trevor-Roper’s landmark biography Hermit of Peking: The Hidden Life of Sir Edmund Backhouse, though I also consulted other sources including George Morrison’s diaries. These are kept in the Mitchell Library of the State Library of New South Wales but I was helpfully afforded access to typescripts that are the work of scholars at the Australian National University, where I am a visiting fellow. A.J.A. Symons’ 1932 biography of Baron Corvo (real name Frederick William Rolfe), The Quest for Corvo, gave me an insight into the mind and life of another fascinating trickster. Although I imply that Corvo’s notorious letters from Venice were addressed to Backhouse, they were in fact addressed to Backhouse’s cousin Charles Masson Fox.

The third volume is, of course, Décadence Mandchoue. Derek Sandhaus edited, and in 2011 Graham Earnshaw published Sir Edmund’s infamous erotic ‘memoir’ of his affair with the Empress Dowager. Derek Sandhaus annotated every French and Latin and Greek and Chinese phrase in this dense and hilariously pedantic manuscript – a major feat. I owe deep gratitude to both Derek and Graham for permission to quote and paraphrase and otherwise draw liberally upon this remarkable and unique work, as well as for providing me with a pdf of the text before it was even published. Derek also kindly read and commented on The Empress Lover in manuscript and allowed me to make him a character in the book.

Professor John Minford and the poet Yang Lian have generously allowed me to quote Minford’s beautiful translation of Yang’s magnificent poem ‘Apologia – to a Ruin’ (first published in Renditions, Special Issue: Chinese Literature Today, Spring & Autumn 1983). Geremie Barmé and I translated Li Ao’s quotation about China being a ‘massive thing’ in our co-edited anthology of Chinese writing in translation, New Ghosts, Old Dreams: Chinese Rebel Voices. I wish to thank the wonderful Paris Combo as well for permission to quote a line from their song ‘On n’a pas besoin’. Love their work.

I once spent two enchanted afternoons in a Daoist temple in China’s southwest, drinking tea and conversing with a merry, delightful, insightful Daoist master. Some of Master Happy Fish’s sayings, but not all, come from him: ‘Unhappiness is the distance between what you desire and what you can or do have’ and ‘Don’t meditate if you think it will make you smarter; meditate if you think it will make you less smart’ are two. Years later, a Chinese friend went looking for him but he had gone, no one knew where.

I owe a huge debt of gratitude to the Australia Council for the Arts for a New Work grant that allowed me the necessary time and focus to shepherd this novel from conception to completion. Thank you so much, Australia Council – you make the magic happen. I was also greatly assisted by a two-week residency at Varuna, the Writers’ House in Katoomba, and a very productive month-long residency at RMIT in 2012 in Melbourne that was funded by the Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) as part of their StoriesNOW initiative and where I was made to feel very welcome by Associate Professor Francesca Rendle-Short and her colleagues in Creative Writing.

This novel took nearly five years to complete and went through countless drafts. Emily O’Connor, Jade Muratore, Emma Johnston and Miss Sam Sperring spent hours helping me key in changes and were careful and enthusiastic readers as well. Geremie Barmé read the book in manuscript and offered many helpful comments; he has been a great support in all ways and as always.

Having a supportive, energetic and tough-minded agent is every writer’s dream – Gaby Naher is that dream.

Linda Funnell commissioned the book for Fourth Estate. She and Jo Butler nurtured it through its long and difficult gestation. Publisher Catherine Milne and editors Amanda O’Connell and Ali Lavau helped bring it into the world with enthusiasm and expert midwifery.

(End)nots

‘I saw lots of fucking tulips, as promised.’ Letter, J.D. Salinger to E. Michael Mitchell, 1994, Collection of the Morgan Library, New York.

‘the Greek way of life’, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Hermit of Peking: The Hidden Life of Sir Edmund Backhouse, Eland, London, 1993, pp. 30–32.

‘The detail was convincing: he didn’t just offer to procure guns for the War Office …’ Hermit of Peking, p. 173.

‘wonderfully clever but morally unsound’, Sterling Seagrave, Dragon Lady, Alfred A Knopf, New York, 1992, p. 448.

‘Backhouse replied with Olympian urbanity’, Hermit of Peking, p. 247.

‘What’s more, he had done this with the help of his servant, friend and comprador Chang Ho-chai …’ Hermit of Peking, pp. 247–49.

‘the very picture of an old satyr’, Hermit of Peking, pp. 280–81.

‘veracious … from alpha to omega’, Edmund Trelawny Backhouse, Décadence Mandchoue: The China Memoirs of Sir Edmund Trelawny Backhouse, edited and introduced by Derek Sandhaus, Earnshaw Books, Hong Kong, p. 306.

‘Then Cassia, whose orgasm surpassed my wildest imaginings …’ Décadence Mandchoue, p. 10.

‘What he now told Hoeppli, however, added a sensational twist to an old tale …’ Décadence Mandchoue, p. 20.

‘I assured her that people, and I believe these were my exact words, “could not realise that your only motive was kindness of heart and conveyed no political connotation”.’ Décadence Mandchoue,pp. 27–8.

‘You must perfume your whole person for the occasion …’ Décadence Mandchoue, p. 61.

‘“Now exhibit to me your genitals,” she commanded, “for I know I shall love them.”’ Décadence Mandchoue, p. 71.

‘Then she played with my voluminous scrotum … and fondled my abundant pubic hair.’ Décadence Mandchoue, p. 71.

‘“Innumerable as the hairs of the head,” replied I unblushingly.’ Décadence Mandchoue, pp. 71–2.

‘prostatic hyperplasia with urinary troubles’, Décadence Mandchoue,p. 284.

‘not purely imaginary but are fundamentally based on facts’, Décadence Mandchoue, p. 291.

‘he mentioned spontaneously that there was a rumour that this old man in bygone days had been a lover of the Empress Dowager’, Décadence Mandchoue, p. 278.

‘a mirage and a sensual delusion like the morning dew or the evening glow’, Décadence Mandchoue, p. 36.

‘Learn happiness by abolishing desire.’ Décadence Mandchoue, p. 74.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Linda Jaivin is an author of both fiction and non-fiction, a literary translator from Chinese specialising in film subtitles, and the author of several works for the stage. Her first novel, Eat Me, was an international best-seller and her fifth novel, The Infernal Optimist, was short-listed for the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal. The Empress Lover is her seventh novel. She lives in Sydney.

PRAISE FOR LINDA JAIVIN

Praise for A Most Immoral Woman

‘passionate, turbulent and very erotic … I doubt the true story carried all the wit, charm and passion that Jaivin injects into her writing. Her research seems meticulous, her characters are flawless and the plot is engrossing. Jaivin has done it again, and is rapidly becoming Australia’s most enjoyable writer’ West Australian

‘Jaivin shows that to popularise can be a legitimate and fun way to educate … a most engaging, clever and memorable romp through an important recounting of rival imperialist ambitions’ Sydney Morning Herald

‘colonial intrigue and erotic embellishment entwine in steamy splendour against a tumultuous historical backdrop. Cleverly constructed, this is to bodice ripping what Harvard is to playschool’ Australian Way

‘Jaivin combines [Sinology and erotica] in a historical novel of thorough research … Jaivin creates a fully realised, intensely lived-in past’ Sunday Age

Praise for The Infernal Optimist (shortlisted for the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal 2007)

‘Jaivin’s ear is brilliantly tuned to demotic expression, using it to share her outrage through comedy’ ALS Gold Medal judges

‘An Australian Catch-22’ Sydney Morning Herald

‘pants-wettingly funny … an endearing comic portrait … biting political commentary, more effective because it is implied’ The Age Praise for Dead Sexy

‘Jaivin can satirise human pretensions, insecurities and other foibles with considerable insight and verve’ Canberra Times

‘The writing is as slick as the magazine headlines it satirises’ The Age

Praise for Miles Walker, You’re Dead

‘Rapier sharp. This is a witty, fast-paced piss-take of the art world, politics and culture’ Juice

‘The hot novel of the summer … fast and funny, it’s a satirical thriller with a romantic comedy sub-plot – one of those books that break the mould … A treat not to be missed’ The Bulletin

‘Jaivin tangos, foxtrots and cha-chas her way across the artifices of painting in Miles Walker … this book will have you reading passages out loud to friends and giggling helplessly on public transport’ Courier-Mail

Praise for Rock ’n’ Roll Babes from Outer Space

‘Witty and wickedly satiric … The plot is rocket-fueled and the puns almost literally fly off the page. Few writers have skewered the rock and roll world so savagely and accurately and with so much delight’ Washington Post

‘A lunatic mix of sf, erotica and good old-fashioned Australian myth-making, doing for inner Sydney what Banjo Paterson did for the bush … [it’s] like a teenage fantasy gone mad, and this is what makes it such a fun read’ Australian

‘There’s plenty of gender bending, drug gobbling, and rude high jinks … Linda Jaivin’s Tom Robbinsish sex writing gives the story a rapid pulse and gratifyingly sweaty palms’ New York Times

‘Rock ’n’ Roll Babes from Outer Space is a romp. The sex is sexy and the language original and amusing’ Sydney Morning Herald

Praise for Eat Me

‘You’ll enjoy this tasty romp – you’d better, you slave – and will thank Jaivin for the exquisite pleasure’ Paper (USA)

‘Erotic escapism at its best, with a touch of humour and a touch of class; a blend of fetishism, fun and kiwi fruit’ New Woman

‘The true strength of this book … is Jaivin’s merciless wit and her ear for dialogue … She’s bitchy, wicked and intelligent. She has firm control over her material and a talent for slicing through the pretension with the precision of a sushi knife’ Weekend Australian

‘This book does for sex what … Absolutely Fabulous did for fashion: it takes a subject we’re all passionate about and makes wickedly clever fun of it’ Glamour (USA)

‘This tossed salad of erotic scenarios charms as few examples of its genre ever have’ Kirkus Review

Praise for The Monkey and the Dragon

‘lively and likeable … a fine piece of reconstructed reportage … Jaivin’s narrative moves from lighthearted absurdity to movingly rendered tragedy’ The Age

‘Jaivin picks carefully through the myths and inaccuracies that still surround the demonstrations and subsequent massacre, never losing her narrative drive … The combination of Jaivin’s pop status and her passion-infused yet clean prose bringing the personal and political tumult … to a new audience’ The Bulletin

‘A fresh and insightful perspective’ China Journal

Praise for Confessions of an S & M Virgin

‘In this vastly varied and … readable collection, Jaivin tackles subjects as diverse as the Tiananmen massacre and the trials of having a penis … with the same determined irreverence … The writing is excellent, her mix of humorous observation and hard facts perfect’ Australian ‘Jaivin’s writing, like Jaivin herself, is vivacious, insightful and original’ Sydney Morning Herald

‘Jaivin’s writings rank among the finest pieces of reconstructive journalism published by an Australian’ Australian Book Review

‘a writer of quiet skill and humanity tackling the big issues’ The Age

‘Linda Jaivin is a writer of some discipline but minimal bondage. In other words, she wants it both ways – serious and funny. And who could blame her? She can do it both ways’ Canberra Times

‘Jaivin’s writing shines and burns’ Sunday Age

Praise for New Ghosts, Old Dreams

‘An extraordinary work … a vibrant, probing guided tour of the Chinese mind today: readable without vulgarization, consistently entertaining yet deeply serious. The editors know contemporary China as no one else does’ Andrew J. Nathan, Professor of Political Science, Columbia University

‘This book will dwarf the dozens of others that have appeared on the Tiananmen massacre and related events … The selections are expertly chosen, smoothly translated, and introduced by Geremie Barmé and Linda Jaivin, whose knowledge of contemporary Chinese urban culture is unmatched in the Western world’ Perry Link, Professor of Chinese, Princeton University

Also by Linda Jaivin

Fiction

Eat Me

Rock ’n’ Roll Babes from Outer Space

Miles Walker, You’re Dead

Dead Sexy

The Infernal Optimist

A Most Immoral Woman

Non-Fiction

New Ghosts, Old Dreams: Chinese Rebel Voices (co-edited with Geremie Barmé)

Confessions of an S&M Virgin

The Monkey and the Dragon

Found in Translation: In Praise of a Plural World (Quarterly Essay 52)

Beijing (Reaktion City Scopes series)

He was Our Man in Peking. She was … everybody’s.

1904. At the age of forty-two, the handsome and infl uential Australian George Ernest Morrison, the Peking correspondent for The Times of London and a renowned ladies man, is considered the most eligible Western bachelor in China. Morrison has yet to meet his match … until one night, near to where the Great Wall meets the sea, he encounters Mae Perkins, the ravishing and free-spirited daughter of a Californian millionaire, and a turbulent affair begins.

War, meanwhile, has broken out between Russia and Japan for dominion over northeast China. Morrison’s colleague Lionel James has an idea that will revolutionise war correspondence, but the Russians, the Japanese and even The Times’s own editor, it seems, would rather see James hung from the nearest yardarm. James believes that only Morrison can help him. Just as Mae seems to be slipping away from Morrison, James’s quest propels him into her orbit once more.

Inspired by a true story, A Most Immoral Woman is a surprising, witty and erotic tale of sexual and other obsessions set in the ‘floating world’ of Westerners in China and Japan at the turn of the twentieth century. At its heart stand an original and devastatingly honest woman and the extraordinary man who was drawn to love her.

Meet Zeki Togan, a small-time crim in big-time trouble.

Zeki Togan may have been born in the Old Country, but he considers himself as as Aussie Aussie Aussie oi oi oi as the next larrikin – more so, in fact, because he’s a crim. Since Australia was founded by convicts, he reckons he’s more Australian than people who were born here but haven’t committed even one crime in their whole lives. Unfortunately, the Department of Immigration sees things differently.

And so the happy-go-lucky, wisecracking Zeki, a small-time break-and-enter artist who loves Australia even if he can’t stand Australian movies, finds himself locked up in Villawood Immigration Detention Centre, thrown in together with asylum seekers, sex slaves, visa overstayers and other criminals like himself.

Immigration wants to deport him, and his own father doesn’t think that’s a bad idea. Worst of all, although he adores his girlfriend, Marlena, he’s having a hell of a time proving it from the wrong side of a double fence.

His new friends, the ‘asylums’ aren’t doing so well either. Everyone loves freedom. Not everyone gets it. Everyone wants to survive. Not everyone will.

This novel – optioned for a major motion picture – crackles with energy, humour and compassion.

COPYRIGHT

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

First published in Australia in 2014

This edition published in 2014

by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty Limited

ABN 36 009 913 517

www.harpercollins.com.au

Copyright © Linda Jaivin 2014

The right of Linda Jaivin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her under the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.

This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

HarperCollinsPublishers

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10 East 53rd Street, New York NY 10022, USA

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

Jaivin, Linda, 1955- author.

The empress lover / Linda Jaivin.

ISBN 978 0 7322 9127 3 (pbk)

ISBN 978 0 7304 9775 2 (epub)

A823.3

Cover design by Hazel Lam, HarperCollins Design Studio

Cover image: Chinese pavilion and dried lotus by wulingyun / Getty Images

Author photo: Jade Muratore