AN INTRODUCTION TO THE NOVEL: "THE LAKES OF BEIJING"

(first published in The Asia-Pacific Journal)

January 1, 2022 Volume 20 | Issue 1 | Number 2

The outer wall of the Forbidden City in Beijing

Abstract: “The Lakes of Beijing” is a novel set in old Beijing. By old Beijing I don’t mean so much the remnants of the Qing Dynasty capital described by twentieth- century writers. The story is contemporary but much of it is set within the confines of the Mongol Dynasty summer capital described by Marco Polo as Cambaluc, and celebrated by Samuel Coleridge in a euphonic fit of imagination in “Kubla Khan.” 

The novel brings together a small cast of contemporary characters with imperial and imperious pretensions, including a Beijing princeling, a roguish pretender to power from the provinces and Huamei, the mercurial woman they are both willing to do almost anything for. Unable to decide who she’d rather settle with, Huamei tries to enjoy the attentions of both with disastrous consequences.

The elite battle royale is observed by an American narrator who secretly fancies himself the next Marco Polo, but in the end is content to be a person of no consequence in order not to become a persona non grata.

The characters are fictional but the old imperial center of power is real enough, and archaeological remnants can be found nestled in a district still defined by walled compounds, man-made hills and lakes. The epicenter of the old, old city corresponds with Beihai Park today, and it is there that the denouement of the novel takes place.

A view of Jade Flower Island (Qionghuadao) as seen from a pleasure boat in Beihai

If Beijing, famous for being built on a grid pattern, may be compared to a giant chessboard, key scenes my story take place on contiguous squares of alternating color. The Forbidden City, a fortress surrounded by a moat sits side by side with Zhongnanhai, a walled-in lake with elite residences on its shores. The key characters are like chess pieces in that some pieces zoom across the board on squares of their own color, while others enjoy less reach but greater range.

The unnamed narrator lives on a college campus which corresponds to Beijing Normal University, situated just inside the confines of the old Yuan city wall known today as tucheng. The nouveau riche tycoon lives in a fancy walled mansion facing Houhai lake, the narrator’s American friend lives in the hutong near the Drum Tower, and the princelings live in Zhongnanhai.

In my novel, Tiananmen Square, the only empty quadrant on the board, is the scene of a transgressive quest for speed in a red Ferrari. The square itself, which hardly needs an introduction, is famously used for choreographed acts designed to celebrate and commemorate state power such as massive military parades and rallies commemorating key anniversaries in the Chinese communist calendar.

On the distaff side, the same square is also known as a site of defiance. At very different times and for very different reasons it has been the scene of civil disobedience, challenges to power and the notable mass demonstrations of 1919, 1976, and 1989. 

Yinding Bridge at the slender confluence linking Houhai to Qianhai

One of the interesting things about Beijing, now and then, if we continue to look at it as a game of three-dimensional chess for the moment, is how much of the action takes place in the same few “squares” near the titular lakes of Beijing, though the value and valence of each square changes over time. The Forbidden City is now a park, while Zhongnanhai, its garden annex is now the seat of power. The hand-dug Beihai Lake contains the man- made Jade Flower Island, once the beating heart of the Mongol-dominated city.

The Forbidden City is now open to the public while Zhongnanhai Park, which used to sport a public swimming pool, is now a forbidden zone. Beihai is a walled park requiring tickets for admission while Qianhai, Houhai and Xihai don’t even rate park status but are open to anyone strolling by. 

Xihai, near the remnants of the old city wall, is the least touristy of the central lakes

Then there is the leafy university campus, a prim and proper walled compound, a world apart from the bouncer-guarded VIP-only nightlife venues on the edge of the Sanlitun diplomatic district.

One of the Beijing architectural habits that seems to this observer rather constant over time is the obsessive tendency to restrict access and surround everything with a wall. Gates, walls, keeps, and compounds are key metaphors for moments of inclusion and exclusion in the novel. 

In sync with the long tradition of guarded compounds is the stark social segregation that goes with it. The Forbidden City, the citadel of the Manchus, who ruled China from 1644-1911 was closed off to Han Chinese and ancient Dadu was Mongol-dominated. Some of the finest walled parks and universities in today’s Beijing were once estates of Manchu nobility. Ethnic minorities and foreigners have always had their ghettos, legations and diplomatic districts, and Zhongnanhai, the citadel of China’s communist rulers, is as tightly proscribed a power enclave as the Forbidden City once was.

The characters are incessantly looking to get out of the compound that currently walls them in, but more often than not they end up in a new compound with new restrictions. It’s not architecture alone that thwarts the elusive search for freedom of the sort espoused in democracies. When the communists tore down the ancient, all-encompassing city wall of Beijing, things appeared more open than they actually were. Invisible walls remained and new boundaries proliferated.

As a student and tour guide in China shortly after the country’s opening up to the outside world, I was alternately dismayed by the limits of the foreigner-designated zones I was expected to inhabit—the Friendship Hotels, the Friendship Stores, the foreign dorms and foreign dining halls—and delighted to transgress similarly restricted spaces with often surreptitious visits to hotels, shops, dorms and dining halls designated for the Chinese.

The Foreign Exchange Certificates which foreigners where expected to use in lieu of cash, like ration coupons and dining hall chits, were mechanisms of control which helped enforce separate and unequal worlds. I first got to know about the precarious lives of Uyghurs from Xinjiang when it came to changing FEC for RMB and purchasing illegal goods such as pirate cassette tapes and DVDs on the streets of Beijing. 

The entry to a  residential courtyard in the hutong near Houhai

Many of the sharp boundaries and social divisions of the early reform period faded after 1989, and while it seems ironic to say so, things got more free, or were less than adequately policed in the soul-searching years after that terrible crackdown on the fourth of June 1989.

The wily Deng Xiaoping was responsible for the temporary tactical withdrawal of state intervention. The ultimate arbiter of power at the time, he was responsible for the brutal decision to open fire in 1989, and for the unjust arrests that followed, but he soon got boxed in the party conservatives who were lending him their support in their own quest to consolidate power. Deng’s secretive “Southern Tour” in January 1992 bore imperial echoes of Emperor Kangxi’s “nanxun” near the end of his reign and marked a return to a relatively unfettered process of reform and opening.

In the post-Tiananmen decade, the front door of political reform remained shut, but paradoxically it was an age of great laxity, a world of back doors and wheeling and dealing that was quickly exploited by hucksters, tricksters, and strivers. The wannabe Gatsbys of China’s nether world nursed fantasies of triumph and revenge against the indignities and injustice of the past. There was a lot of money to be made, but how much of it was legal, let alone well spent? 

Pleasure boats docked on the shore of Qianhai

In my story, the provincial rogue who pursues the lovely but elusive Huamei is very much in the Gatsby mold. He breaks out of the prison-like confines of a rural work farm in Inner Mongolia, and, in cahoots with corrupt police, engages in blackmail while operating a string of lucrative entertainment venues.

In keeping with Beijing’s tacit segregation of types of people and types of activity, the flashy world of discos, karaoke joints, fancy restaurants, and private clubs is situated on another square of the giant chessboard, namely Sanlitun, a zoned diplomatic district in the tradition of the old walled Foreign Legation, one of those hybrid areas in which Chinese and foreigners could mix relatively freely in the 1990s, at least up to a point, after which the rise of exclusive clubs created new forbidden zones.

“The Lakes of Beijing” is the product of many years residence in Beijing at a time when the poles of my existence oscillated between moments of inclusion and exclusion, times during which I violated the norms of both journalism and academia by allowing myself to be an observer turned participant. It would have been hard to cover as much ground as I did without occasionally skirting the law and violating oppressive norms of separate but unequal existence. It is precisely the enduring system of Chinese boxes within boxes that I wrestle with in this novel. 

Looking West over Houhai from Yinding Bridge

My characters, including the narrator, are fictional, but each of them came alive and took on lives of their own during the writing of the novel. I tried to let the dramatis personae run wild within the authorial limits of imagination, plot and narrative. Hopefully some individual idiosyncrasy shines through, for they are my tribute to the many amazing people I’ve known in China, and stand-ins for the grand cast of characters in the tableau vivant that is Beijing.

If the walls and moats and designated habitats in Beijing were as strictly observed in practice as in theory, the two would never have met, but there are cracks in the citadel and a fragile rapport between the two develops based on a mutual willingness to engage in dialogue.

The foreign teacher invites his well-connected student for private lessons in the “foreigners-only” compound of the Foreign Experts building on his walled campus while the princeling quietly reciprocates the gesture, offering a glimpse of his hidden world, one that includes venues such as the Diaoyutai State Guest House, an off-limits military installation, the Great Hall of the People and Zhongnanhai. 

link for an excerpt of the novel 

“The Lakes of Beijing” is a work of the imagination describing things that may or may not have happened but could very well have happened in the “Swinging Nineties.” The narrator and characters are contrived but the story is grounded in lived experience, the ancient lay of the land and the power geography of the guarded compounds, open plazas and picturesque waterways of central Beijing. 

Philip Cunningham worked in China in the 1980’s as a tour guide, cruise director, and production assistant on The Last Emperor and Empire of the Sun and various TV programs, including NBC’s Changing China. Tiananmen Moon is his eyewitness account of the 1989 uprising in Beijing 1989 called and has contributed to numerous documentaries on the topic including The Gate of Heavenly Peace and Tragedy at Tiananmen.

Cunningham was awarded a Knight Fellowship to teach journalism in China and later did research there as a Fulbright Fellow. He has also taught media studies at Doshisha University in Japan and Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and a visiting fellow at Cornell University and continues to write Asia commentary and analysis for a variety of publications.

In 2019 he revisited Beijing with support from the Knight Foundation and Microsoft to conduct research  for a series of articles on change and continuity in Beijing. The photographs illustrating the text above are by the author.