When we first meet Dunhuang, he’s walking out of prison after three months in for selling pirate DVDs. He’s got swagger, but also guilt. His partner in crime, Bao Ding, took the fall and faces a much longer stretch inside. Still, things are looking up.
But what to do now? He wanders the streets of Beijing and strikes up a conversation with Xiaorong, a DVD seller. They end up sharing a meal and then a bed. Good start to your life of freedom, Dunhuang! But nothing stays good for long; she has a boyfriend, is impatient to marry him and go back to her hometown.
Dunhuang slips back into the DVD business, and after a farcical confrontation starts working with Xiaorong and her boyfriend. He’s smart, figures out how to get in with the local university students and get stable repeat business. He’s willing to risk selling porn too, so starts making a bit of money.
All this time he is looking for Qibao, a girl Bao Ding has asked him to check on. Having only met her once and remembering only her attractive backside, he is at a bit of a loss as to how to find her again. This is an excuse for Xu to dryly paraphrase the classic Tolstoy line, as Dunhuang wanders the city looking at bottoms: “The unpleasant ones were each unpleasant in their own way, but the nice-looking ones were more or less similar.”
He does find her though, and another affair begins with lots of shouting and sulking, between bouts of lovemaking and drinking. It’s another of these dispiriting (in no small part because it rings true) Chinese books where people never have calm conversations about their problems – the moment anybody feels threatened or thrown off balance, they go straight to shouting and bravado. It’s not a recipe for a happy life.
But then this isn’t a book about a happy life, it’s about doing what you have to do to survive. Dunhuang actually had a decent enough education and sees he is not intellectually inferior to the university students he sells to. But he’s a grifter by nature. Xiaorong is just trying to get home with some money saved. Qibao has to earn money too, though in some sense she has already given up.
She’s only in her twenties; so are most of the people in the book, and while this helps explain some of the decision-making, it’s striking how worn down some of them already feel. The most positive person in the book is Bao Ding, behind bars: “Just concentrate on making money… Remember, whatever happens, don’t let it get to you.”
And then there’s the other presence in this book, Beijing itself. Here it’s a city of baleful weather – sandstorms, wind that cuts through you like a knife, the kind of cold that sends you scurrying into the hot pot restaurant, or leaves you outside looking at the red faces knocking back beers.
It’s a city where someone’s always trying to cheat you, but where there are kind words and acts of generosity too. There’s a moment late in the book where Dunhuang visits a massive distribution center filled with DVDs and realizes just how small-time he is; Beijing will do that to you too.
So what does this all add up to? Perhaps we should remember that real life isn’t a story, it’s just one thing after another. And even though Xu tops and tails the story neatly, the book’s most interesting aspect is that how little sense of writerly inevitability there is as we follow Dunhuang through his days.
He got busted in the first place because he misjudged how fast the cops could run, not because of any particular flaw of character; the trajectory of his life in the weeks that follow seems equally random. And as for the somewhat grandiose sense of responsibility he feels to make sure Bao Ding is taken care of when he gets out, Qibao is right to mock Dunhuang’s guilt: “Because of you? It’s because of money! Anyone who does our work is going to jail eventually, it’s just a matter of time.”
This is a book that resists jumped-up, heavy conclusions. Running Through Beijing is a stirring, swift read about people who cover the streets of Beijing like the sand blown from thousands of miles away, and it seems to skim along the surface. But there’s an appetite for freedom running through its pages, rarely even articulated but always there.
When Dunhuang visits prison, he hears the “vegetable-chopping” sound of prisoners marching in step. He never knew what it sounded like before, because he had been one of the marching prisoners. “You only ever heard one thing: either silence, or chopping.”
// Xu Zechen: Running Through Beijing (Two Lines Press) is available on Amazon.
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