Bill Porter - Finding Them Gone: Visiting China’s Poets of the Past

I checked out of the Beijing Friendship Hotel at five thirty, before the sun was up. The Friendship was where all the foreign experts from the Soviet Bloc and Third World stayed back in the day when Chinas Communist Party ruled a Communist country. It was where my Chinese publisher always put me up. He was once a bureau chief in the Ministry of Education, and I was, in an odd way, a foreign expert. Besides, I couldnt turn down free lodging, especially garden-surrounded lodging in a city like Beijing.

Once I reached the street, I headed for the nearest subway station. It was only a two-minute walk, but this was the end of August. I was already perspiring. When I saw a taxi waiting at the curb, I threw my pack in the front, climbed in the back, and asked the driver to take me to South Station. That was where the new bullet trains left from, and I had a ticket on the first one of the day headed south. My train was scheduled to leave at seven, and I figured I would need an hour to get there. But I had never been on a road in Beijing before sunrise. Once we were on Third Ring Road, we were going one hundred kilometers per hour, in Beijing. It felt unreal.

As I looked out the car window at the predawn skyline, I could see the distinctive pagoda of Tienning Temple. Dating back to 1083, it was the oldest structure in Beijing. I was actually looking for another tower, a tower that disappeared before the pagoda was built. It would have been a few hundred meters to the north in the ward recently reclaimed by the Taoists of White Cloud Temple. It was called Youchou TowerYouchou being an old name for Beijing. One day in 696, Chen Tzu-ang climbed to the top and wrote one of the most famous poems in the Chinese language, Climbing Youchou Tower Song :

I dont see the ancients who came before me

I dont see those yet to come

facing the endlessness of Heaven and Earth

I am so overcome I cry

According to the earliest commentary on the Shihching, or Book of Poetry, poetry is what the heart holds dear put into words . Of course, the poems Chinese poets wrote werent always from the heart. The Chinese have had their share of head poets. But there were plenty of poets like Chen Tzu-ang, and I wanted to thank as many as I could for sharing their hearts. I had put together a thirty-day itinerary to visit their hometowns and graves, and this was Day 1. As quickly as Youchou Tower and Chen Tzuangs poem came to mind, they vanished in the first rays of the morning sun. A few minutes later I was at the station. It looked more like an airport terminal. It was huge: 60,000 tons of steel huge. I paid the driver the 44 RMB (the exchange rate was 6 RMB to 1 USD ) it cost me to be an hour early and hoisted my backpack onto my shoulders. Unlike Chinese airport terminals, there were no free baggage carts waiting outside. If there was air-conditioning inside, I didnt feel it. The temperature was expected to hit a hundred that day. I walked past the ticket windows and the ticket-vending machines and the convenience stores and the still-closed doors of KFC and Burger King and looked up at the billboard-sized train schedule. Once I saw my train listed, I headed toward my designated gate. When I was within viewing distance, I sat down on one of the metal benches, alongside a few other early arrivals.

My clothes were still damp, not from perspiration but from washing them the night before, which didnt happen until after ten. Earlier that evening I participated in a panel discussion about Chinas hermit tradition sponsored by a real estate company. My stays in Beijing were like that: one appearance or interview after another, involving odd, if not mysterious, concatenations. It was the price authors paid if they wanted to sell books, which I did, of course. It turned out that the people most interested in the books I wrote lived in China, not in America. The income made a huge difference. I no longer qualified for food stamps. Damp clothes were a small inconvenience. Besides, that morning they made me feel cooler.

Once the gate opened, I followed my fellow passengers down the escalator onto the platform. There were a dozen trains lined up waiting to begin another day zipping across the Middle Kingdom. Their white fuselages shimmered in the early morning light. They were so clean someone must have washed them during the night. My train was bound for Shanghai, 1,300 kilometers away, and it was scheduled to get there in five and a half hours. It was pulling sixteen cars, and I was perspiring again by the time I reached the car at the front. I had asked my publisher to arrange for a seat behind the engineer. Id seen pictures on the Internet of the glass enclosure and was looking forward to the view of hurtling down the tracks from behind the engineers shoulder. But it was not to be. As the attendant in charge of the five seats in the front cabin escorted me inside, I saw that the clear glass of the engineers enclosure had been replaced by frosted glass. Apparently the engineers didnt feel comfortable with people staring over their shoulders while going 350 kilometers an hour. I later learned there was a button the engineer could push to change the glass from clear to frosted. I still dont understand how it worked, but it worked.

High-speed trains waiting to leave Beijings South Station

I sat down, and the attendant asked me whether I would like a cup of coffee not tea, coffee. I suppose it was the drink foreigners were expected to ask for, and I didnt disappoint her. A few minutes later, she brought the coffee along with a small box of complimentary snacks that included packages of dried seaweed, dried dates, dried peas (from America), hawthorn candy, something labeled Instant Donkey-Hide Gelatin, and a mint presumably to mask donkey-hide breath. As I sat there thus ensconced and cared for, the train pulled out of the station. The engineer didnt waste any time picking up speed. Within five minutes Beijing was a memory. The digital readout in the front of the car indicated we were going over 300 kilometers per hour. Outside, the fog, if that was what it was, limited visibility to a few hundred meters. All I could see were plastic-canopied fields: suppliers to the greengrocers of Beijing.