This is how you say Do Not Touch in the Forbidden City, the Vatican City-like imperial township in the centre of Beijing, where the Chinese emperors of the Yuan, Ming, & Qing Dynasties roosted for almost 700 years. In the movie “The Last Emperor,” the child runs through its Imperial Palace. Now it’s a museum, swarming with the denizens who were once shut out of its royal walls. Framed by the rhetoric of the state, the archaic sites inside—“Supreme Harmony Hall” & “Heavenly Purity Gate,” like dioramas behind glass, untouched for epochs—are quaint curios of the past, leading up to the glorious triumphs of the revolution. “Cultural relics are irretrievable, please be causeful when viewing them,” says a sign.
At its main Tiananmen Gate hangs a banner with the glacial visage of Mao Tsetung. (I open up my shiny new copy of Mao’s red book & read, Everything reactionary is the same; if you don’t hit it, it won’t fall. This is also like sweeping the floor; as a rule, where the broom does not reach, the dust will not vanish of itself.) Across the street, Tiananmen Square is the biggest & ugliest piazza on earth. It strangulates. So much walking space, but all made of oppressive brutalist concrete. The opposite of freedom: raw power. Architecturally, it’s a kind of cult classic in the tradition of “Casablanca,” piecing together archetypal clichés from a slew of cultures: an Egyptian-style obelisk (“Monument to the People’s Heroes”), Russian-style statues of communist proles (in front of Mao’s huge mausoleum), Corinthian columns, & sixteen giant red flags à la the Nuremberg rallies. The result is Orwell’s “boot stamping on a human face—forever.”
People are the same everywhere, no? We try to be kind. We try to be brave. We are fragile. A single act of carelessness ruins us. But politicos & their bureaucrats are also (usually) the same everywhere. We begin to believe in Big Ideas. We are offered compensation for compromise. We learn to sleep beside our own inhumanity. The Beijing Patriotic Health Campaign Committee suggests—blithely, ubiquitously—that we Do Not Smoke, although we have all of us witnessed, at the margins of the Chinese capital, the far-flung waste produced by the state & its nuclear smokestacks.
On the streets, military is pandemic. Boys in oversized green stormtrooper coats, waists like ballerinas, stand at attention in doorways, on pedestals, under flags. Around them, on the streets of the bright lovely Xuan Wu district, kids with Green Day hair wave Maoist red flags for digital pics while holding up two fingers sideways like Ali G. A man with an irretrievable expression drifts past clicking together two walnuts in his left palm. Electric scooters & bicycles wind among the people in constellations of silence.
Acrid smoke, pork tang in smog, burnt soy sauce, sulfur, grilled chicken stinging the eyes, dust. Red lanterns behind a grey gauzy lens, rice paper windows. Temple roofs curved to ward off the evil of straight lines. O’erhanging eaves, red tiles, roof charms. A high-pitched scream, eternal loss. Dogs in doorways, dumplings. Loud spitting. In the stones, imperial dragons. A bronze lion. Crouching tiger with a bright pearl in its mouth. In the walking tunnel under Tiananmen Square, a man low on his knees, left hand missing. Bowing so slowly, up & down. Causeful.