Author Profile  

Born in 1969 and raised in Newcastle, N.S.W., Australia, Mark Anthony Jones has spent the past eighteen years working as an English teacher in a variety of secondary and tertiary level educational institutions throughout Australia, England, South Korea, Japan, and more recently, the People’s Republic of China.  

He now lives in the inner west of Sydney, where he teaches English literature and film studies at a New South Wales state government high school.

Preface

I first met Xiaojing the day I arrived in Huai’an, a small city with a population of almost one million that sits to the north of the Yangtze River, roughly two hundred kilometres from Nanjing, the capital of Jiangsu Province. Eleven years my junior, she was employed as both an office secretary and as an assistant translator and interpreter by the China-Australia Education Centre – a joint-venture project with the Huaiyin Institute of Technology, whose ageing concrete blocks sat quietly off Beijing Road, just a short walk from the city’s main commercial centre.

An ex-student of the Institute herself, Xiaojing at first took on the persona of the model Confucian daughter – polite and unassuming, and deferential towards others, the first thing she did once we shook hands was to pour me a cup of tea, serving it with a smile warmer than the brew itself. But any notion I may have had about the modesty of Asian women was quickly lost the night she came knocking on my apartment door, uninvited, sometime around the midnight hour.

The air conditioner, a rusty reverse cycle, buzzed noisily that night as it pumped warm air into the room, the wallpaper peeling. ‘We should make a Five Year Plan,’ she said within minutes of us having consummated our relationship, and so I remained beneath the covers, recovering over a cigarette while she dared to dream.

Our Five Year Plan, as it turned out, involved a lot of travelling. In 2004, after spending two years together in Huai’an, Xiaojing and I decided to head south to Shenzhen, to that ‘City of Sin’ that borders Hong Kong. She found secretarial work, where I was able to take on the position of Academic Director for a Chinese company that was licensed to manage the delivery of an Australian-developed university preparation program, which it did by entering into joint-venture agreements with several universities located throughout the country. Some of the chapters in this book detail work trips made out of Shenzhen during the formation of these agreements, most capture private journeys made during vacation periods, all of which I embarked upon in the good company of Xiaojing, without whom my time in the Middle Kingdom would not have been half as exciting or as pleasurable. 

The title for this book I have borrowed from an ancient Chinese proverb, for the idea that we need to go with the flow in order to remain fresh and invigorating, very much captures what I believe is the essential spirit of the Chinese character. For thousands of years the Chinese have continuously shown a great willingness to accept change and to embrace the new, often integrating foreign ideas, products and technologies into their lives in innovative ways, in ways that are very often culturally specific. Even late imperial China, a period usually described by historians as being one that was characterised by a xenophobic rejection of all things foreign, was in fact awash with overseas-made exotica, as the historian Frank Dikötter has so thoroughly documented in his book Things Modern: Material Culture and Everyday Life in China.

The idea that one can avoid staleness by flowing like water also reflects something of the Daoist within me. There are many different interpretations of the Dao de jing, but the one that I relate to the most is the one offered by the Taiwanese scholar, Tsai Chih Chung, who understands Dao de to mean that the Way to live one’s life should be to follow the heart. In his translator’s note to Tsai Chih Chung’s The Sayings of Lao Zi, Koh Kok Kiang makes the point that the ‘traditional Chinese character for de (德) is made up of three parts: To go (彳) straight (直) to the heart (心).’ The Chinese character for de is often translated as ‘virtue’, but in the ancient Greek sense of the word, meaning an effective force or power. De then, is the power that comes from within, from one’s own heart and mind.

In their efforts to describe the Dao, the Way of the Universe and therefore the Way to live, Lao Zi and the other major personages of early Daoism employed water as their most important metaphor. ‘The superior qualities of water are to be emulated by man,’ notes Karin Albert in her essay on Mountains and Water in Chinese Art: ‘it follows its own course and always fills the bottom level, equivalent to the wise man being true to himself and maintaining a low profile. Water is the emblem of the unassertive. Taking the path of least resistance, always yielding, its effectiveness is unsurpassed.’

Despite having a list of places we wanted to visit over the five-year period, Xiaojing and I didn’t actually plan any of our trips, for our preferred way to travel is to flow freely, like water, and in the true spirit of the Daoist sage. Never did we book in advance hotel rooms, join group tours or establish itineraries, for we were determined to keep our travel selves free from the same kinds of organisational structures that governed our lives at work. By negating the need to follow timetables, apart from abiding by our return by dates to work, we were able to enjoy a considerable degree of spontaneity and autonomy during our travels, allowing us to discover for ourselves, in our own way, at our own pace, a whole variety of Chinas – kaleidoscopic and fluid, each one in a constant state of flux.

Most travel books employ the use of a continuous narrative to propel the reader forward. Like good novels, they will tell a compelling story, complete with climax or denouement. But most people do not recall the past as a continuous, unbroken series of events, but as fragments, nonlinear, as they spring to mind. This book, likewise, is little more than a collection of memories, of fragmented versions of reality – snapshots that when viewed together in the one volume, and in any order, can be used to form a broader, more detailed picture – a collage, but of a China viewed through my eyes, as I experienced it.

Although the reader may notice some reoccurring themes, no attempt is made to conclude with a grand unknotting, for ‘China is too big a country, and her national life has too many facets, for her not to be open to the most diverse and contradictory of interpretations,’ as the Chinese writer Lin Yutang once warned. ‘The truth,’ he added, ‘can never be proved; it can only be hinted at.’

It is silly to try to generalise 1.3 billion people, especially when there is so much cultural and ethnic diversity among them, yet throughout this text I have made numerous statements about ‘the’ Chinese. No doubt the reader will find me guilty in places of having imposed my own culturally mediated systems of thought and understanding on the Chinese ‘Other’, categorising the flux of experience into more manageable patterns, sometimes even essentialising ‘the’ Chinese character – though I am aware that by doing so I may have merely created for myself the illusion of understanding.

I hope I will be excused for such shortcomings, for it is also fair to say that during my time in the Middle Kingdom I tried to view the world as best I could through the eyes of those Chinese individuals I came to personally know and to respect, sometimes sacrificing my perspective for theirs. 

Although I am tempted to claim this book as a work of non-fiction, my memories here I have reconstructed, often integrating them with the knowledge I have gained from others – from the various books and journals and newspaper articles that I have listed under ‘Sources’ – an act that has further fragmented my narrative, this time into a multitude of voices.

Some of my reconstructions I have recalled in the past tense, others I relived, or partly imagined, as if in the present, and for this reason I have divided the collection into two sections: journeys in the past, and journeys in the present, thereby providing at least some structure, some balance and harmony, to what would otherwise have been a chaotic text.

Section One

Journeys in the past (part sample)

A mysterious, impossible to believe landscape

When I think back to my childhood in Newcastle, to when I was aged around eleven or twelve, I recall having been quite intrigued by the mysticism of the Orient, and by the ink paintings that commonly hung from the walls of many of my local Chinese restaurants. It was the paintings of craggy landscapes that fascinated me the most – those endless oceans of karst peaks poking up through swirling clouds of mist – mysterious, impossible to believe landscapes.

Could such places really exist? I thought not at the time. These landscapes had to have been the products of someone’s wild imagination, dreamt up after a few too many rice wines, no more real than the legend of the Monkey King.

Now I know differently.

All along the Li Jiang River, from Guilin to Yangshuo, is a landscape dominated by endless rows of towering limestone karst peaks, just like the ones depicted in the ink paintings of my youth. On a clear day they provide a striking backdrop to a river cruise, and when shrouded with mist, or when silhouetted by a setting sun, they can take on an aura of near surrealism – a mysterious beauty that is quintessentially Chinese.

‘Her waters are a maiden’s silvery sash,’ wrote the Tang Dynasty poet, Han Yu, and ‘her green peaks like jade hairpins.’ Indeed, many a Chinese writer over the centuries has described this little piece of the Middle Kingdom as having ‘the finest scenery under Heaven.’

Yangshuo’s main thoroughfare is called West Street, though the locals here usually refer to it as the ‘Foreigner’s Street.’ A walk along its full length revealed a plethora of small guesthouses and cafés and souvenir stalls, and finding a room, even though we were there during China’s busy Golden Week national vacation period, proved to be easy enough.

After checking into our room, Xiaojing and I headed for the nearest pavement café, located directly across the narrow little street from where our guesthouse was located, where we sat, shaded by an umbrella, sipping on beer and soaking in the festive atmosphere.

A few hours passed before the late afternoon sun began to disappear behind the rooftops – our cue to make a move down to the river bank from where we were able to enjoy a sunset vista overlooking the town and its surrounding limestone pinnacles.

Located at the lower reaches of the Li Jiang River, Yangshuo is known for having the most beautiful scenery in the whole of Guangxi Province, and some would say all of China. The biggest attraction is Green Lotus Hill, where a dozen peaks seem to burst open like the petals of a lotus flower. We strolled among its pinnacles, mesmerised by their beauty as they transformed from towers of electric emerald to darkened rugged limbs of silhouette; they take on an almost neo-Gothic feel once illuminated by the silver touch of moon.

Eight o’clock arrived without warning, and although my eyes were still immersed in the good liquor of scenery, my stomach had already lost its patience.

Finding a restaurant was easy though, for there were plenty of them, and it was Xiaojing who suggested we try the local specialty: Li Jiang River beer fish. As soon as the waitress placed the dish at the centre of our table, I was instantly provided with a feast for the eyes as well as for the nose. The fish pieces were cooked in beer to a golden brown, with red and green chillies and bulbs of garlic and slices of ginger and green onion, all there to tantalise my senses. I washed it all down with a bottle of the local beer, though it was served unchilled, and Xiaojing ordered another of Yangshuo’s local dishes – Li Jiang River snails, stuffed with minced pork and a small amount of mint, and boiled in a light oyster sauce.

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