In mid August, I
went to Cuandixia for the third time. It’s
one of my favourite places in Beijing: a small, Ming-dynasty village squatting
in a cleft between hills. The best part
about going there is spending the night in a rural courtyard house. In terms of design, they are like the
courtyard houses in Beijing, and much of northern China for that matter:
southward-facing, with one-storey buildings grouped around one or more
courtyards that all fall on a north-south axis.
But with
Cuandixia, you get to stay with local families, and you are surrounded by
countryside – in other words, in spite of the mere 2 hours that separates it
from Beijing, you may as well be in another world.
I don’t do very
much when I am there. And in fact, there
isn’t much to do, except wander along the paths, talk with Mr. Han (everyone in
the village is called “Han” it turns out) and browse the usual souvenirs (local
honey, postcards, fridge magnets). But it bears re-visiting somehow, as certain
places do, and each time I am glad to be there again.
There are other
kinds of revisits. Yesterday I came
across a cache of old diaries, including one from 2007-2008, which was the
period framing my second and third stay in China, including my first longer
stay in Beijing. Besides out-of-breath
accounts of the Summer Palace and the Temple of Heaven, there are also some (to
me) adorably dogged attempts at keeping a diary in Chinese. I can’t remember if at the time I thought I
was making a good stab at native-level expression, or if it was just yet
another attempt to connect with a language that had me utterly under its spell. Either way, they look funny now: laboriously
and loving transcribed characters spelling out passages that read like primary
school composition exercises with titles like “My Day in Beijing”, or “What I
did last summer.” Did I even notice how
little they resembled a genuine diary?
Finally, a picture
of a girl in a hutong, flaring up like a flame and making big shadows that I
can move in. I will leave you to work
out if the image is recent, or a revisit though.
