Beidao - City gate, open up!

I returned to the city of my birth at the end of 2001, after a long, unforeseen parting of thirteen years. As the plane descended, the myriad lights of the houses and buildings rushed into the portholes, whirling and spinning. I suffered a momentary shock: Beijing looked like a huge, glittering soccer stadium. It was a cold, midwinter night. After going through customs, I found three strangers with a raised sign that read Mr. Zhao Zhenkai waiting for me. Though of different height and size, they weirdly resembled one another against the glow of the arc lights, as if shadows from some other world. The welcoming ceremony was brief and silent; not until we were all seated in a sleek black sedan did they begin to speak, though it was difficult to distinguish between courtesies and threats, as the lights rushing by outside like the tide kept me distracted.

When I was a child, nights in Beijing were dark, pitch-dark, a darkness a hundredfold darker than today. So, for instance, Uncle Zheng Fanglong lived next door to my family in a two-room residence with only three fluorescent lights: eight watts in the sitting room, three watts in the bedroom, and a shared three-watt bulb that hung from a small window between the kitchen and bathroom. In other words, whenever the whole family celebrated New Years or decided to live it up on any ordinary day, they never used more than fourteen watts total those brilliant, bulb-lined full-length mirrors werent in fashion yet.

Perhaps this is an extreme example for Sanbulao (Three Never Old) Hutong No. 1, but for the rest of Beijing I fear the situation was even worse. My classmates often lived with their family in a single room with one light, and were commonly forced to observe blackouts but once the light-string was pulled.... What about homework?... Quit your lip-flapping, theres always tomorrow....

The lightbulbs were ordinarily bare, uncovered, a dim, yellow softness; a shade made a mysterious halo, projecting a single spotlight upward, and washed out the numerous subtleties of darkness. Back then girls didnt wear makeup, or even dress up, though they were strikingly beautiful, which certainly had something to do with the quality of the light. The spread of fluorescent lights turned into a disaster, painfully dazzling the eyes while blotting out the skies as they enveloped the earth without impediment or pause. As the nighttime illumination on a chicken farm pushes hens to lay more eggs, fluorescent lights create the illusion of daylight, except human beings cannot lay eggs and so they become more agitated heart vexed, thoughts confused. Whats unfortunate is that kind of feminine beauty cant exist anymore applying makeup on those ashen, worn-out faces is useless. And yet the people who suffer the most under fluorescent lights must be children. With nowhere to hide in that space erased of subtlety and imagination, they prematurely step into the savageness of a public square.