Approaching the Moon in a Stream:
My Travels in China with Li Bai
The sign-maker stands at his saw and cuts foot-high shapes from sheet metal. Then, hunched in the sulphurous stench of a spot welder, he attaches sides to give his forms a third dimension. I search the shapes strewn at his feet, looking for a character I recognize, but see only sculptures. What does the sign-maker see, I wonder. Does he notice the tin, paint, and neon tubes, or the hammer that he holds? Perhaps familiarity draws his sight past these things to the character, where the phoneme forms in his mouth, where he sees in the character the thing or idea language latches that shape to.
Jing Ye Si – Quiet Night Thoughts
When I’d moved into the apartment, I’d found a tattered copy of The Poems of Li Bai & Tu Fu. I turned through the leaf-like yellow pages, reading the English and staring mystified at the traditional Chinese characters on the opposite page. I copied the lines and curves of one poem into my notebook and brought it to a friend who laughed at my clumsy strokes. “Sisi, can you read it?” I asked. With a finger on the page, she deciphered the first character. Jing. Then, cautiously, the second and the third. Ye. Si. Jing ye si. Quiet night thoughts. After she’d worked through the three characters in the title, the poem flowed smoothly without pause, it’s syllables moving through five tones with fluid staccato. I convinced Sisi to repeat the poem several times then started imitating the sounds, stumbling through tongue contortions until I’d memorized the poem.
Over the next few days, I often thought of the poem. It became familiar, part of that peculiar store of remembered melodies, words and images that spring up or can be drawn out in notes of self-made joy. Now, at the window above the sign-maker, the poem emerges in the dreamlike thoughts of morning, and dissolves into the sounds of the labyrinth coming to chaotic life: opening kitchen windows release the crackling murmurs of voices in first use and the sizzle and clatter of woks and frying rice. Announcements of departures, closing doors, concrete footsteps and the creak then clack of bicycle kickstands make discordant noise in the narrow paths between buildings, filling out the rising buzz of unseen traffic and sales pitches from nearby markets. By six-thirty the sun is high enough to slant in bright sheets between the tall surrounding walls. When children bicycle by on their way to school, they flash on and off through light and shade, blinking yellow with sunlight.
Chuang qian Ming yue guang – Before my bed, bright moonlight
A week later I boarded a crowded late night train to Suzhou. A grey-haired man, his wife dozing on his shoulder, sat opposite me and stared at me curiously. I was still sensitive about privacy and personal space. I smiled and looked away shyly, feeling the slight burn of awkwardness. He turned to look out the window until his curiosity got the better of him. Leaning forward he made a rapid inquisition. I formed words as carefully as possible “Duibuqi, wo bu hui shuo zhongwen.” Sorry, I don’t speak Chinese. He laughed and went back to looking out the window, disappointed at the impossibility of communication.
“Li Bai, ni zhi doa ma?” I asked him, do you know Li Bai? He waved his hands laughing again and told me he didn’t speak English. I started to slowly recite the memorized sounds – Chuang qian Ming yue guang. Before my bed bright moonlight… By the third word he began lip-syncing then speaking along until we reached the end. He nodded his head to finish with emphasis on the last syllable, as if to finalize a conversation. Then, leaning in again, he spoke slowly, clearly, still unintelligibly. “I’m sorry,” I said again, “I don’t speak Chinese.”
The poem became a form of communication, a mediator that wandered with me through the loud blur of an unfamiliar world. It was also a collector of stories. I traveled through Qufu, Kashi, and Haikou and the poem took shape in a dozen dialects, and brought with it legends of its maker. An immortal, a sage. Maybe even a descendent of Lao Tzu. One who wandered from the desolate, rugged west and settled in decadent Chang’an. There he was made a member of the imperial academy by drunkenly performing improvised poems for the emperor. Proud, playful, always outspoken, after several months soaked in imperial wine, Li Bai lost his position. Soon after, the poet was banished from the capital city. He packed up his books and set off wandering, continuing his thousand-mile paper trail of poetry, south then east down the Chang River through Yueyang and Wuhan to Dangtu.
As I read Li Bai’s poetry, his myth took on the traits of the untamed world he described: the ceaseless change of moving water, the spontaneous flight patterns of loosed feathers, the aimless shapes of clouds. Sometimes reflective, sometimes riotous, always somewhere beyond city walls, forever half-drunk. One image, though, comes through more often than any other: “I arise and approach the moon in the stream.” “The moon shimmers in green water, white herons fly through the moonlight.” The moon’s indistinct light, often seen reflected in river water, is the light of reflection itself: bright in pale water, Li Bai writes, it bares our delusions. A maternal being, a beacon of his homeland, the moon is also, for the wandering immortal, both an eternal companion and the light of loneliness:
Raising my cup, I toast the bright moon
And facing my shadow makes friends three.
But the moon knows nothing of drinking
And my shadow only follows me in silence.
Yi shi Di shang shuang – Looks like frost on the ground
Eastern China is covered by an intricate steel-stringed web of railroads. But traveling westward across the country, the weave becomes increasingly thin until, entering the province of Xinjiang, only one set of tracks continues. ‘Oldest train in China,’ one of the attendants had said just after I’d boarded. I’d found my overcrowded bench seat and tried to sleep next to the window, opened to combat the desert heat built up during the day. By the time the sunrise roused me from sleep my skin was coated in engine-soot that came through the open window. Carefully I stretched, trying not to wake the boy wedged beside me. The three men across from me were already awake. Two were huddled over my tattered Chinese-English dictionary. They both held the pocket-sized book, turning pages, laughing, pointing to words and pronouncing them aloud. The other gestured my Li Bai book toward me. “Ni xihuan zhege ma?” he asked. The book’s broken spine always opened to the same page. Small pencil scratches marked tones above the characters, and below I’d scribbled the pinyin and English translations.
“Yes, I like it.” I told him.
“Yi shi di shang shuang. English, what?” Beneath the characters I’d written ‘suppose, frost, above, floor/ground,’
“Looks like frost on the ground,” I told him.
“sih-moh-kuh, sihmohkuh” the two with my dictionary repeated excitedly, looking from me to the dictionary and back. “Sihmokuh.” One pretended to puff a cigarette, the other pointed to my arms and face, then reached over and smudged the specks of soot that dotted my hand.
“Smoke,” I laughed. “Zuijiu huoche zai zhonguo.” Oldest train in China.
Ju tou Wang ming yue – lifting my head, I gaze at the shimmering moon.
On summer evenings the concrete cube restaurants would move tables out onto the broad sidewalks. I’d meet with friends, some from Xuzhou, a few other foreign English teachers, for hot-pot dinners or plates of roast fish. After eating we’d sit around the rickety tables, making conversation, drinking beer and toasting shots of stiff Baijiu, with its turpentine taste that numbs the tongue and leaves thoughts fluid and opaque. We’d drink until conversation and baijiu spilled from our table to the ones around; until language barriers were drowned; until we’d have five tables of businessmen in suits shouting ‘gunbei’ and gulping glasses of the stark liquid.
When there was little left to be said or drunk the group would dissipate. More often than not, I had my bike along. I would pedal the much too small bicycle, and Michael would ride sidesaddle on the wire bag frame over the back tire. “Like newlyweds,” was the joke. During the day, this form of transportation always turned into a game. We would steer through crowds of bikes, scooters and cars, weaving past people and crates of vegetables. In chaotic intersections we’d swerve around cars and three-wheeled motorized carts loaded precariously with clothing, bike parts or jugs of drinking water. Whenever possible, I would steer parallel with a couple on a bike, leaving Michael knee-to-knee with a side-saddling wife, to attempt conversation, a pop song or poetry: “Ju tou Wang ming yue” Lifting my head, I gaze at the shimmering moon, he would say, imitating over-inflections of Chinese soap-opera stars. At night though, I’d swerve down empty asphalt while Michael, balancing behind, sang sentimental ballads. Without traffic or stoplights, I would stand to power the pedals and propel the bike darting, hurtling, down vacant streets.
Di tou Si gu xiang – Looking down, I dream that I am home.
My last train ride is twelve hours overnight to Shanghai. The train is packed with more people than seats. On seats for three sit four, some must sit on the laps of friends or stand. Some sleep on the floor. The close air is thick and hot. Babies cry, mothers hush-hush, hands crack hard-boiled eggs. My drowsy thoughts swim in the plenum of humid sounds and smells. I lean against the cool glass of the window and watch in its reflection two girls chatting. Their soft-angled faces and thin energetic frames move with the rapid bouncing tones of their voices. Their words, those sounds by now so familiar, are still mostly music. I no longer notice that I live in a world without language. Outside, city lights scatter. Inside, people yawn and begin to pass into sleep. A student drowses with his head on an open book. A couple steals discreet kisses. The grandmother seated beside me closes her eyes and falls asleep on my shoulder. The young boy she holds sleeps too, slipping slowly from her arms until he rests across my lap. In the window his reflected face, calm, smiling maybe slightly, floats over the glint of distant city lights and the scarce faint light of stars. I think of how Li Bai’s wandering ended. He’d journeyed to a friend’s house to deliver a stack of unfinished poems for compilation. That night, the banished immortal walked down to the banks of the Chang River, climbed into a row-boat and rowed out onto the water. Aged, ill and drunk, Li Bai drowned trying to embrace the reflection of the moon in the river. Slowly, my wakefulness gives way to the rhythm of the gently rocking train, the soft clacking sound of wheels on the track, and the words of a remembered poem.
Before my bed, bright moonlight
Looks like frost on the ground
Lifting my head, I gaze at the shimmering moon
Looking down, I dream that I am home.
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