I’d nervously sweated through the last 23 hours, certain I’d be escorted to a ventilation-less detention room to wait for a flight back to the US. And now I faced a Border Control officer who looked through my passport without the slightest hint of an expression. After a minute he quickly glanced at me again, but less out of scrutiny than confirmation that this silent foreigner was still there. With a very slight upturn of one corner of his mouth—a smile?—he silently stamped my passport and opened the gate. That was all. I was through.

A week before departure I realised my passport had shy of three months’ validity left. My visa—a “family” visa lasting for ten years—was still valid another year, but according to the US Department of State I wouldn’t be allowed into the country without at least six months left on the passport. I didn’t have enough time to renew it (couldn’t get anyone on the phone); phone calls to the Chinese consular office showed a commitment to strategic ambiguity—they didn’t say no, but also wouldn’t commit to passage.

It had been over five years since my last visit, and I’d dragged my feet on this one. Between Covid restrictions, and the constant news about China’s growing nationalism, ethnic chauvinism—traits that were hardly new—and worse, I wasn’t too keen on visiting. It was bound to be No Fun. But I owed it to my wife (who is Chinese) and my in-laws to give it a try. We booked our flight only two weeks before departure.

The flight, which was much longer and more expensive than it had been the last time I travelled, wasn’t bad—except for the knowledge that it would double in length if I were refused entry at the border. I tried to enjoy the in-flight screening of the Barbie movie. Failed.

But there I found myself, on the other side of Border Control and about to be picked up by my brother-in-law. I tried my VPN, and accessed my email and Facebook; I didn’t particularly want to look at either of them, but it was a great relief nonetheless. I thought to myself, there ought to be a proverb: A foreigner without a VPN in China is like… But how would that end? …is like a foreigner who needs a different email server and social media accounts? Taken on its own terms, if China were a police state… then it was one as adamant that I use a VPN as it was indifferent to my passport situation. My growing feeling of relief—even, surprisingly, happiness—was accompanied by a growing feeling of anger at the State Department and its propaganda organs.

Here: Disclaimer. With any writing on China there’s a lot of legwork for the reader—or at least disclaimers by the author—in order to ensure that the partial view being read is read as partial indeed, and not an attempt at anything else. So this is about Beijing, or rather my experience as a traveller to Beijing and former resident of the city—not China as a purely geographical or political entity. My “analysis” will always be shaded by my experiences, just as any other author shades even statistical studies with a perspective. To attempt a broader view would be as asinine as a New Yorker (which I am) pronouncing on the rest of the US, and on the lives of all its families.

^{The sky is more a surface or a dome}

So: Sky. I swear it’s just different. In the US it’s “open”, and even crystalline. In China, or at least Beijing: translucent, jadeite, the clouds like fine hairs tangling together and pulling apart. Those old paintings with their stylised clouds weren’t just formalisms. Writing it down, this borders on nonsense: All skies are open! But here, in Beijing, it’s more tangible. Lest anyone make jokes about pollution: I’ll never forget, on a 2013 visit, when I stared at a gunmetal sky out the window as I ate lunch. But the pollution’s gone, or at least displaced. The sky isn’t a Montanan clarity of moral purpose, cowboys and freedom. It’s more a surface or a dome.

I was surprised that it felt immediately comfortable—as comfortable as it ever had. If there were noticeably fewer foreigners on the streets of Beijing, that didn’t make people more hostile to the foreigners who were there. When Yan Jun, a local musician and poet whose work my wife Haiying and I had translated, invited us to a concert of experimental music, I was one of two non-Chinese there. It was no big deal, and no one, to my knowledge, cared. And we had been personally invited—which meant that there was at least one person who thought my presence outweighed my absence. In any case, hang-ups about foreignness are nothing more than hang-ups.

At the concert itself, there were ten short performances featuring methodically slow and repetitive keyboards, expressionistic dance, and people rubbing contact microphones on themselves—producing hissing, popping, and subdued, arrhythmic distortion. I had heard that the venues for this kind of thing had completely dried up, as the city government had become (more) hostile to anything not smacking of officialese, and also that Beijing was having a mini-renaissance, with new event spaces popping up all the time, in all kinds of places. This venue was on the third floor of what looked to be a down-on-its-luck shopping mall on the outskirts of the university district. It was next door to what looked like a Lazer Tag place.

Throughout the visit, I asked people about the mood in Beijing—though, like with the consular office, strategic ambiguity prevailed. And why shouldn’t it? The last time I visited, in 2018, the go-go economy of ten years earlier had slowed, but the mood was still expectant. I spent time at luxury malls (not the kinds of places I enjoy), the restaurants seemed to be reaching toward more and more extravagant displays (for example, the Michelin-starred restaurant DaDong using dry ice as accompaniment to fancy dishes), and Regular Joes seemed to believe better things were right around the corner—whatever the politics, though always with a wink. Recently I talked with a professor who complained that people were no longer able to live the (rather deluxe, by my standards) lifestyles they’d come to expect. And no longer would a college degree guarantee a particular kind of good job, either. Leaving aside the question of whether the cooling of a hot money economy isn’t just normal in the global economy as it currently exists, the mood in Beijing this time was decisively not buoyant. If anything, it felt a little like the aughts—big bucks were around, sure, but the happy-go-lucky bourgeois feeling was not. Money was something other people had.

Along with the noticeable absence of foreigners was the noticeable absence of one foreign script in particular, Arabic, and its replacement with Chinese. The halal restaurants, of which there are many in Beijing, always had plentiful Arabic text and Islamic-themed photos. These were gone. A small photo on the wall of one restaurant showed the owner standing there with Ai Weiwei, of all people, a large Arabic-text tapestry in the background; in the same spot where the photo was taken were antique-looking Chinese text promoting sundry filial virtues. Likewise, at Niujie Mosque, the largest moque in Beijing, the graves of the imams (with inscribed Arabic text) were closed, and a number of signboards with Chinese-language propaganda were put up around the grounds. No Arabic was visible throughout.

I want to leave aside the obvious political framing: is this the deployment of Confucian-style hierarchy, where non-Han Chinese culture is relegated to the bottom rung of the political ladder? Is it the resurgence of ethno-chauvinism, where non-Han Chinese identity is relegated to the bottom rung of the cultural ladder? Or is it ham-fisted political control—as many Western pundits would have it—a test of Realpolitik in a country on the precipice? I wandered around the mosque grounds for the better part of an hour. In one corner is the women’s prayer hall, a small complex built in the relatively liberal Republic of China period, and where men were barred entry. I overheard one man (Chinese) explain to another man (South Asian) in English that his wife could pray there. The visitor asked if they could go inside and take a look. With surprise and amusement in his voice, the guide explained that neither of them were allowed in, “It’s only for women, of course!”

Since I make my living as a translator and editor, I’m keenly aware of the effort it takes to use—forget about mastering—another language. Most of the time, personal gain is a minimal part of it, and simple hospitality is the main motivator. Monolingualism: I don’t speak another language because I don’t care to (and since English dominates, as luck would have it I’m dominating you). Stay in China for a while and you’ll quickly notice the high English level of Chinese relative to the low Chinese level of non-Chinese, especially Westerners (I’m charitably excluding visitors here, who should be lauded for stepping outside of their comfort zones). Much of this is simply because of mandated English learning (as opposed to, say, mandated Arabic learning) motivated by engagement with a competitor imperium over which nation makes the most money, which culture is the indisputable global leader. Yet much is also genuine curiosity and goodwill.

^{It was a small room with beer bottles and other trash scattered around}

On the trip I had the pleasure of meeting with the curator of the Beijing Inside-Out Art Museum, Carol Yinghua Lu, and her artist and curator husband, Liu Ding. My wife and I had done some work for them, and wanted to visit their museum; they extended a friendly invitation to meet for coffee. We met and talked about art and poetry, and even gossiped. A couple of days later I went to an installation by Liu Ding. It was a small room with beer bottles and other trash scattered around. Corrugated steel covered with graffiti leaned on the walls. If I remember correctly, a radio played pop songs. A mess of wiring hung from the ceiling.

Standing in the space, I realised it wasn’t an iteration of artworld bohemia at all—as Carol later told me, it was in part a memorialisation of the Covid lockdowns, and the graffiti was actual graffiti—poetry of place left by the ubiquitous delivery drivers that criss-crossed the abandoned capital during Covid times. But even before she messaged me with this information, there was something unsettling—the creative destruction in which the installation took part felt outside of time, even though it was clearly rooted in a historic moment. It’s hard to describe the feeling in detail without blunting the sensation of standing there; the feeling of having intruded on the clutter of someone else’s world. It made me nervous. But this sense of disconnection happily allows for things to happen that won’t otherwise happen without that feeling. As an allegorical artwork—one about Covid—Covid is also a synecdoche for Beijing.

Return. During our long layover at Tokyo Haneda Airport, after getting bored walking the length of our terminal over and over, we asked the woman at the information kiosk if it would be possible to visit another terminal. Yes, of course, she said. She made a call, and soon we were being escorted here and there until we found ourselves, once again, and quite unexpectedly, on the other side of Border Control and with visa stamps in our passports. This was not our plan. We took a short walk outside the airport, on Tokyo Bay. We could see a group of houses in the distance. An auto and pedestrian bridge went from one corner of the bay to another. But we were nervous about our freedom to wander, and quickly went back in, to the assurances of airport security.

The notion of national security—border control—is of course central to nationalism everywhere, and to much of American life in general right now, especially in New York. This border fetish is also an incoherent understanding of what a border can do and mean: be an edge or a frame for seeing better. At Border Control in New York, the officer asked some friendly questions (How did I learn Chinese? What was my job? What kind of things did I translate? How are payments made?), then sighed, looked away, and curtly waved us through. I want to imagine Border Control officers who aren’t harassed inquisitors or national minotaurs, who aren’t muscular ids. Another world is possible.

How to cite: Turner, Matt. “In Beijing: 12.26-1.10.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 25 Feb. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/02/25/in-beijing/.

Matt Turner is the author of the full poetry collections Slab Pases (BlazeVox, 2022), Wave 9: Collages (Flying Islands, 2020) and Not Moving (Broken Sleep, 2019), in addition to the prose chapbooks City/Anti-City (Vitamin, 2022) and Be Your Dog (Economy, 2022). He is co-translator, with Weng Haiying, of work by Yan Jun, Ou Ning, Hu Jiujiu and others. He lives in New York City, where he works as a translator and copy editor. [All contributions by Matt Turner.]

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