In the Middle Kingdom, Part 2: Dragonfly Eyes

In spring of 2024, I was at the Tokyo Museum of Contemporary Art, deep in the heart of the sort of old Tokyo streets that remain sparse and ragged. It’s where I first saw Xu Bing’s Dragonfly Eyes, or at least as much as I could manage in an unplanned visit. I’d later go home and watch the whole thing on Youtube. 

The premise is simple, almost a gimmick. The footage is culled from thousands of hours of CCTV footage from around China to assemble an otherwise fairly anodyne love story. But the plot is only the thin armature that holds it all together. The real joy of seeing it is a voyeuristic look into the lives of what is often regarded as a borderline hermit kingdom, integral to the global circulation of capital, but little-visited and little-known, particularly outside a few major metros – a glimpse of ordinary people at work, at the pharmacy, enjoying the pleasures of ordinary life.

 

And that’s what I thought of on the taxi in from the airport in Shanghai – my god, there’s a whole normal goddamn country here.

Which to many is going to be the biggest shock, given how much ink is dedicated to the mystery of China – whereas once Occidental writers once wrote about the inscrutable celestial mandarins drowning in the river trying to catch the moon, they now write about smart cities and social credit scores, and the messaging is just as vapid as it was 150 years ago. So there’s an anxiety of influence there that stalks me as I write – I want to distinguish that which is genuinely bizarre and unique about contemporary China, without falling into the lazy cliches that stalk virtually all writing about the country in the Anglosphere. Granted, that experience was of Shanghai, and while the valences differed in the gloomy industrial suburbs and sun-faded steppe towns, the principle was the same. The middle-aged man drinks his after-work beer and smokes his cigarette in the doorway to the apartment block, the teenage girls make little finger-hearts and pose for their selfies, the career woman frets over the texts from her side dude, the boys in soccer jerseys and the girls in pigtails go over their math homework and the clerk in the little corner store looks up from the game on his phone and sees he needs to put more Cokes in the fridge.

But part of the reason I’m starting with the bizarre normalcy of the Chinese streets is not just as a counter to the propagandistic messaging one sees across Western media, but because it is actually a difficult place to access. The visa process is an abject nightmare, time-consuming and onerous, and even the exemptions that are in place are arcane, with contradictory information online and poorly translated websites with jankety interfaces. Beyond that, everything is, naturally, mediated through apps, most of which are either impossible or exceptionally difficult for a foreigner to access. For example, WeChat, a standard platform, requires you to be verified by a WeChat user who has been using the app for 12 months, the Weixin pay platform within the app for 6 months, and has not verified any other first-time users within the past month. I didn’t get to use it. And that isn’t to even mention the fact that one is accessing one’s financial data within the People’s Republic is enough to trigger automatic blocks on your bank account, regardless of how many long-distance phone calls you make begging them to take note and being reminded that “[they] care about your security.” 

Which of course reflects a gatekeeping. The Chinese systems and the everyone-else systems are kept at a deliberate distance, like two species evolving on different sides of a broad river.

So what is on the other side? 

Once you crack the system, once you finally get the hang of it – it’s impossible not to be impressed. Procedures are coordinated, efficient, and inexpensive. You’re effortlessly jumping into prim little electric taxis that smell (nostalgically) of cigarettes and BO, driven by gruff uncles that hack up morning half-pack out the window between historic sites and antique restaurants. Despite what you may hear about gutter oil and plastic rice – jenkem for CNN viewers – I’m happy to report that the spiced lamb skewers were flavorful and the cherries tart and sweet.

The high-speed train system should be enough to blackpill any Westerner – I come from a country that can’t build a pissant metro without having to deal with armies of red-faced suburban homeowners and byzantine public-private partnerships, and it will take decades to build. The system in China, conversely, is consistently clean, efficient, and inexpensive to use, expensive to build, but designed with long-term benefits in mind, and to alleviate the many economic externalities caused by poor infrastructure – the paymasters within the state accept the loss leader, because they view this as an investment, which is a tough thing to imagine when you come from a society run by profiteers who don’t care about much of anything beyond their Q2 returns. And you have to think that maybe, unironically, these are Brautigan’s machines of loving grace. 

It felt a bit like I was walking in the shoes of those early 20th Century European intellectuals, looking at America with awe and horror. I am a representative of the falling world, here in the rising world, and it’s impossible to feel anything other than the sublime, fascination and unfamiliarity and admiration and fear in equal measure.

Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We is often thought of as an anti-communist classic, and to be fair, Zamyatin was no fan of the USSR, despite his past as a Bolshevik revolutionary. But one thing the standard reading forgets is just how enraptured and expressionist Zamyatin’s descriptions are of what we would consider a dystopia. 

“Take, for instance, this. In the morning I was at the dock where the Integral was being built, and suddenly I saw: the lathes; the regulator sphere rotating with closed eyes, utterly oblivious of all; the cranks flashing, swinging left and right; the balance beam proudly swaying at its shoulders; the bit of the slotting machine dancing up and down to unheard music. Suddenly I saw the whole beauty of this grandiose mechanical ballet, flooded with pale blue sunlight. And then to myself: Why is this beautiful? Why is this dance beautiful? Answer: because it is unfree motion, because the whole profound meaning of dance lies precisely in absolute, aesthetic subordination, in ideal unfreedom.”

The dragonfly’s eyes flicker in the distance. 

Objections here are pretty obvious. You’ve heard most of them, with varying levels of reliability – lack of free expression (which is often reframed as a point of pride, an antidote to “disorder”) to social credit (an almost completely ginned up story designed to stoke terror in the heart of the well-meaning Atlantic reader). And to be fair, living in a mass surveillance state fucking sucks, particularly one that well-oiled.

And it comes at you at inopportune moments – when you see the QR code on the apartment door, when you’re stopped and have your notebook rifled through, presumably in search of flyers about Jesus or something of that nature. When you realize that there is a contingency upon which the new China is being built. My delight in flânerie through the streets of Shanghai could be easily contrasted with the merciless checkpoints of Beijing. 

But if you’re reading this you probably know the extent to which you’re already under the microscope, at least to some extent, from both the private and public sectors. Patriot Act, built-in forensics in devices, biometrics, you know all of this already, and it’s best not to think about it, especially given the degree to which we seem to have all collectively given up hope in any kind of an alternative. Organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Internet Archive, beautiful in their goals, seem almost as quaint as the Free Tibet concerts and Trotskyist reading groups of another era – quixotic missions for idealists who still, bless them, truly believe another world is possible.

Some asshole dork is probably ready to play the “nice whataboutism” Yu-Gi-Oh card, to which I say, fuck off, I’ll steal your Yu-Gi-Oh cards and trade them for an eighth of mids. I’m making a direct comparison here – the nature of the surveillance might differ, one might choose direct censorship over incentivized and nudged corralling of the human soul (and the direct censorship is to be fair probably worse), but the similarities should be, to any enthusiast for freedom, uncomfortable. 

And at least the Chinese provide treats. Try paying for a hotel or booking public transit stateside. And for a double contrast, compare the China of now with the China of generations past, even after Deng Xiaoping’s market reforms. The Chinese must be the last people on earth who see life getting better and better, rather than a slow miserable death, if for no other reason than that they started from nothing.

I drift back to the West Lake in Hangzhou, where I started, to the old folks with their boiled peanuts and medlars. Had they been urban youths sent down to the country? Or had they been militant Red Guards? Or had they been the countless those in between? 

As for me, as much as I enjoy the peanuts and the medlars, I am still a product of a very different place or time – for the jolly, double-chinned crowd, this is the culmination of a long and hard life, a transcendent epoch of rest. As for me?

I still love cities at night – even if I am slowly aging out of the nightlife demographic – but as someone who was always a bit on the periphery, the being peripheral is no skin off my back. I swan through the streets of the French Concession in Shanghai, surrounded by people much prettier and more stylish than I, and they pay me no heed, as I pay them no heed. I’m happy to walk on this lovely spring night, a soft rain falling. 

I stop in at the posh wine bar, and I am left alone on the rooftop – the better-connected, the ones who know exactly which bottle to select to impress their clients or their attendant crowd of fawning girls draped in Alexander McQueen, they’re inside. I am here with the malfunctioning lights, but I don’t care, their cellar selection reflects the taste of the new China, and I have in front of me a glass of Charmes-Chambertin, and I am left to enjoy it in peace, each subtle aroma sending me to a place and time from my past – here, the smell of the incense in my dorm room, and there, the hippie grocery store in my hometown, and over there, the spice cabinet from my old rattrap apartment back in Seattle, living with two middle-aged gay addicts in an illegal sublet for 600 a month, and I was one of the last to experience that. I come from falling America, and I’m here in rising Asia. And I don’t even care about the rainfall all around me.

Only to walk through the slick streets, a little music playing from the intervening years, until I find myself under a parasol.

In the Middle Kingdom, Part 1: Wuwei

What lazier way is there to title a book than the “Tao of…” (other, of course than “Zen of…,” with apologies to Mr. Pirsig, he did do it first and best). It’s an easy way to flog a book on some particular or quotidian thing, just bard it with a bit of Eastern mysticism, and an often shockingly superficial understanding of Asian religion, but it’s OK, because most of your reading public will be familiar with these concepts in name only. So off you go, and the “Tao of Fly Fishing” it is. 

(Note to self: check if that’s a real thing lol omg of course it totally is, and maybe the author is a true sage, but let’s just say my suspicions are not assuaged)

So, without going to Wikipedia, what could most of us say about Taoism? 

To be fair to my fellow damaged occidentals, it’s a devilishly difficult system to put your finger on, especially given its longstanding historical associations with esoteric and mystical beliefs despite the lack of mystical language in the Tao Te Ching, especially given the ways in which it has, like all Asian faiths, lent itself to syncretism, and the sheer openness of interpretation of the texts themselves, even by the woo-woo standards of religious literature. It is written in these dense, hermetic little aphorisms, which along with the allegories of the Zhuangzi as well as countless astrological guides, herbals, and alchemical manuals, form the corpus of Taoist holy text.

If I have to compare the whole thing to anything, it would be Robert Burton’s maddening, lengthy The Anatomy of Melancholy, an equally hermetic 1000-page Baroque treatise on the nature of the melancholic, rooted in the theory of the four humors, largely consisting of peculiar cures and musings on ancient Greek thinkers and legends. 

In that openness, I naturally found an appeal. Rather than religion, the Tao seemed more like a poetic, gestalt approach to the world. Even the first line of the Tao Te Ching is a fuck-you. The way which can be walked is not the eternal way. Sorry, next. Instead, we can only hope to listen closely to the music of the spheres, and try not to be idiots or assholes. Let that move me rather than being bogged down trying to make a rational decision in the infinite choices that flaunt themselves like streetwalkers in the grim stage of history in which I find myself. I can only try to move through as gracefully as possible, hoping to take effortless action, or what they call wuwei.

Knowing that there was no “knowledge” there, per se, no ultimate faith, I decided to take a cue from William James, and embrace the will to believe. I didn’t even know what I was believing in, but that was beside the point. I made a conscious decision, and chose to see where it leads me. 

So the wuwei led me to China.

Everyone has a take. The nation of the future. The number one enemy of human freedom. The inscrutable empire. The spearhead of communism. The spearhead of capitalism. The world’s oldest and noblest human civilization. A country irrevocably destroyed. A pillar of strength. A Potemkin village, a whole Temu-ass nation. 

Eh to all of that.

I’d rather smile at the aunties sitting next to me by the West Lake in Hangzhou. They laugh and gossip and enjoy their bags of medlars and their bayberries and their boiled peanuts, and their husbands smoke Chunghwa cigarettes, once a privilege of the Politburo, through stained teeth. They all loudly cackle and hack up phlegm and sip their tea. 

Robert Burton used to watch the boatmen of Oxford screech and swear and spit between writing the Anatomy.

They were men and women of an age where they may well have been sent down to the country. So let there be a blessing upon the sunny terrace and their medlars and cigarettes. They say that there are ten scenes of West Lake, depending on the seasons – the spring dawn on the Su Causeway, the lingering dawn, the autumn moon. This spring afternoon felt more than enough. 

Karl would have loved it. So would Rosa. But that Jiang Qing was a real ass, wasn’t she? Those were quite a few dead sparrows.

Nonetheless, the water still flows under the climbing vines on the old stone bridges of Zhouzhuang. Nonetheless, the stoic warriors still stand in silent formation, holding watch for their emperor beneath the mercury-fouled silt. 

And I can sit in a Shanghainese restaurant dating to the late Qing Dynasty, where the eels are slightly charcoal-grilled before being braised in spices and rock sugar, the chafing dish adding a second layer of char. The pork knuckle is cold and stodgy and dense under aspic, and a sip of hot Pu Erh tea turns it into an incomparably rich soup. A private joke among the last generation of mandarins. Men who would set their teacups on lilypads as they dreamed about butterflies.

“This is a way of showing the small in the large: in an unused corner plant some bamboo, which will quickly grow tall, then plant some luxuriant plum trees in front to screen it. 

This is a way to show the large in the small: the wall of a small garden should be winding and covered with green vines, and large stones decorated with inscriptions can be sent into it. Then one will be able to open a window and, while looking at a stone wall, feel as if one were gazing out across endless precipices.

Here is a way to show the real amidst an illusion: arrange the garden so that when a guest feels he has seen everything he can suddenly take a turn in the path and have a broad new vista open up before him, or open a simple door in a pavilion only to find it leads to an entirely new garden.” – Shen Fu, Six Records of a Floating Life 

I take a taxi through the hutongs midway through demolition in the northern suburbs of Beijing, a little Ethel Cain playing on my headset, to the base of the Back Hill in the Garden of Harmonious Pleasures, on the north edge of the Summer Palace. It’s a steep climb, straight up amid old brick pavilions. These were once full of splendors, but when the Second Opium War and the Boxer Rebellion came, loutish British soldiers marauding through, sacking and stealing, smashing screens, pocketing jewels, grabbing curios which would go on to decorate the bourgeois living rooms of West London.

Because a trip to China is a trip through the horrors of human history. Here, the plaque says, is where caves in the Northwestern loess collapsed en masse in the great earthquake of 1556, burying thousands in their dugout homes. Here, the next plaque says, is where the Song Dynasty intellectuals committed suicide rather than submit to the Yuan. And over here is where the emperor’s mistress was tossed into a well alive. The stone lid they put on it that day is still there. 

In Nanjing, where the crayfish are beautifully sweet, the self-titled rulers of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom slaughtered the Manchu men first, and the Manchu women second, and then 30 million of their own Han Chinese were killed in the fracas, and 70 years later, the debonair and handsome Prince Yasuhiko Asaka, uncle of the Taisho Emperor sanctioned the industrialized mass murder of 200,000 civilian residents of the same city – and given his royal status, he was granted immunity. He died in 1981, a pious Catholic and wealthy golf course developer, living on my beloved Izu Peninsula coast west of Tokyo.

On the Back Hill, I am exhausted, the midday sun shining bright, amid the scars of old wars. 

But then I reach the pine-crested top, and the trees part and reveal Xanadu.

 

The mandarins are long gone, and us commoners get to traipse the plaisance along the Kunming Lake below. The girls get to do their hair into elaborate updos and dress up like empresses and concubines and water-sleeved fairies and interwar Shanghai femmes fatales. Along with the occasional anime schoolgirl. 

Not that it’s all lovely – a pox upon the gaggle of fat old ladies in jewel tones who nearly pushed me into the ponds in the Humble Administrator’s Garden in Suzhou while they took a group photo, hideous knockoff sunglasses perched on their porcine faces. Chinese tourists have a reputation for being monstrous abroad, but it turns out that even domestically, all it takes is a selfie stick to turn a kindly aunt into hellspawn. And as I traveled, I had more than a few deeply unpleasant encounters.

Lacking the time to climb the sacred mountain of Huashan, I made my way to the Huaqing Pool, where the love of Emperor Xuanzong and his consort Yang Guifei was not to be, as told in the saga The Song of Everlasting Regret. Where, as the only Westerner, I was surrounded by more gawking locals who didn’t even have the courtesy ask if they could take a picture with me. More jewel tones. More knockoff sunglasses. 

The structures are largely hideous contemporary recreations, complete with plastic lotuses in the pond and mist machines.

 

“Other people are joyous, like on the feast of the ox,

Like on the way up to the terrace in the spring.

I alone am inert, giving no sign,

Like a newborn baby who has not learned to smile.

I am wearied, as if I lacked a home to go to.”

- Ch. 20, Tao Te Ching

 

“All my joys besides are folly,

None so sweet as melancholy.”

- Robert Burton in his overture to the Anatomy

 

But then I saw the path lead up the mountain of Lishan. Surely, this must be the way. 

And I climb to the top, to the little Taoist temple where the monks and nuns smiled and greeted me, merrily attempting to speak to me in Chinese, clucking through missing teeth. I simply smiled back and shrugged. They offered melon and steamed buns. And looking at the statues of the deities, I learned who my Taoist protector god was.

General Zhang Geng was an official of the decadent late Ming Dynasty who defended his family against unjust persecution, who defended the common folk against tyranny and oppression, who devoted his life to what he believed to be the honorable and honest way of doing things. This went as well as it normally does – of course the emperor offed him. And now, so they say, he keeps watch over all those born when the year of the tiger occurs in conjunction with the elemental sign of fire. 

I bought a cinnabar amulet there. I keep it in my messenger bag still.

And as I stared out at the turmeric-colored river, down towards the spot where the Qin Emperor’s mysterious necropolis supposedly lays undisturbed, I knew that I should be there, amid the lilacs and the cedars. 

In the distance lurked concrete towers.

As to those, I’ll see you in part 2.