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It is the morning of Nov. 19, 2009, in Beijing Capital Airport's Terminal Three departure lounge. Sandwiched between two young airport policemen – one grasping my passport and boarding pass, the other keeping careful watch – and under their "protection," I drag my suitcase along as we walk swiftly toward Air China International's innermost boarding gate.
"Do you know why the country is forbidding me entry?" I ask one of them.
"No," he replies. "You seem like a civilized literary type to me."
"That's because my career is literature," I say. The policeman says no more.
The courteous ticket checker at the boarding gate for Air China Flight 185 has been waiting a long time; one of the policemen explains and hands over my boarding pass. I walk through the boarding gate and along the entryway, the policemen following closely right up to the cabin door. There, one returns my passport and they watch as I enter the airplane. One imagines they will keep watch by the airplane door until the plane starts up, taxies and takes to the air, until it is confirmed that I have left Beijing.
I became an exile nine years ago, in late August, upon leaving a Beijing prison cell. At 6:30 a.m. that day, I was roused and told to brush my teeth, wash my face and shave my whiskers, "to protect the Motherland's image." After that came soybean milk, fritters and rice porridge, and then it was back into the police jeep to be driven through that labyrinth of turns.
It was early morning in the just-waking suburbs of Beijing. Remembering familiar segments of the route, my eyes took in every street, every view, every tree and every shrub. I saw old codgers walking with their old wives, and old single women, then boys and girls shouldering bookbags on their way to school.
This was my Beijing. Would it be the last of Beijing for me? Unexpected tears fell and soaked my collar. The security men riding along to "protect" me had nothing to say. I was taken to my parents' house on the campus of Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, where I said hurried goodbyes to them and my younger brother. I took the luggage they had spent the night preparing and was put under escort again, this time to the Beijing Airport, where I was placed aboard a plane bound for San Francisco.
"You will be deported to the United States," the senior police official had declared. "You need to make a contribution to Chinese-American relations." I had been charged with the crime of "publishing illegally" because I printed the literary journal Tendency (Issue 13) in Beijing that year.
Nine years later, on Nov. 18, I take my seat on Air China’s regular Frankfurt-Beijing flight. The cabin is filled with the stewardesses' Beijing accents and manners and the street-smart talk of the Beijing passengers. Happy-go-lucky, casual – already I am back in Beijing's atmosphere.
In eight hours it is 6:30 a.m., the sky letting off a hazy light, and the announcement sounds: "Passengers, please fasten your seatbelts. The plane will be landing at Capital Airport in 20 minutes." As soon as the plane begins to descend, I move to a window-seat and start staring out fixedly. On the horizon, the crimson morning light, mountains, and tiny buildings rise gradually. My heart rises: Hebei province, Beijing. At Beijing, I can barely contain myself.
As the plane continues its descent I see an uninterrupted stretch of mountains, a vast expanse covered in morning frost. Beneath the slowly rising sun, piles of snow glitter and trees stand naked, raising their branches to the sky. It is still as I visualized it in one of my early poems:
Hilly rise and fall of the North Land
Jumbled and harsh
The plane lands. The passengers walk out of the plane and into the temporary passageway linking the cabin door to the airport lobby, cold air hitting our faces: Freezing-point Beijing – so familiar, this fresh, piercing cold!
I step inside and that's it: suddenly, I am here. The huge, brand-new Capital Airport Terminal Three departure lounge is shaped like a creature about to take flight. The rows of leather chairs seem endless. Natsuki, a Japanese artist sojourning in Berlin whom I first met at the Frankfurt Airport, sighs in admiration.
A long line has formed at the quarantine inspection checkpoint before the arrival hall. One by one the passengers hand over their health information forms. "You haven't filled it out completely," a quarantine inspection girl wearing a large surgical mask informs me in a Beijing accent. "Please step to the side and finish it!" I retreat to one side, where I go ahead and pick up my camera, snapping several photos.
In front of the arrival hall I hug Natsuki, who will hold a painting exhibition at the Beijing Art Museum today, good-bye. Now it is broad daylight, and outside the boundless windows two or three scattered empty planes are parked on the tarmac. I walk to the arrival checkpoint and ask an idle customs official, "Excuse me, is it all right to enter Beijing if I'm in transit?"
"Yes," the official answers. "If time allows, you can enter right through the transit checkpoint to your right and stay in Beijing for under 24 hours, but you can't miss the boarding time for your connecting flight." I thank him, head for the transit checkpoint and get in line, repressing the impulse to make a call from the airport's public telephone. I want to surprise my parents, my younger brother, my childhood friends, the Beijing pals I haven't seen for so long. I'm in Beijing.
After I hand over my passport and transit flight pass, the employee at the checkpoint desk types my name into the computer. Then he frowns. Still staring at the screen, he snatches up the white desktop telephone and says into it: "We've got something going on here. Please get someone to come over." My heart takes a plunge. I stand to one side to wait. A customs official comes over and examines the computer carefully.
"Excuse me, is your Chinese name XXX?"
"That's right. Is there a problem?" I say.
"We need to check your identity. What's your birth date, please?"
I tell him.
"Please come with us for a moment," he says. "We have to check some information."
"Am I on the country's blacklist?" I press him.
The official does not answer. Now two policemen in surgical masks want me to take a walk with them. We walk shoulder-to-shoulder, straight ahead, and enter a passageway marked with an airport police squadron sign. The place they take me to is labeled, "Enquiry Room." A masked policeman tells me to sit down and then sits watching me without moving his eyes. "Am I being detained?" I ask.
"No, we need to check your papers," he says. I compose myself and guess at possible scenarios: A body search? An arrest? Would my "conduct" at this year's Frankfurt Book Fair carry a major sentence or a minor one? Since I'm already here, I might as well take things calmly. I remove a Shanghai Translation Press Chinese edition of German philosopher Karl Jasper's Man in the Modern Age – bought the month before at the Chinese booth at the Frankfurt Book Fair – from my suitcase to read.
The young mask-wearing policeman sits formally, bolt upright, staring fixedly at me. The "Enquiry Room" is not large, and it is no comfortable thing to read under someone else's stare. I close the book after two pages, open my suitcase, take out my laptop and turn it on, wanting to check the exact time on its display. Seeing this, the young policeman says, "You may not go online here."
"It's the same as in the airport lobby," I retort. "Would an 'Enquiry Room' have free wireless?"
"There was free wireless Internet access during the Olympics last year," returns the young policeman, "although there isn't any now. It's a rule that you cannot go online."
I look at the computer; it is already past 8:10. "I have to go to the bathroom," I say after a while. The young policeman uses his cellphone to call for instructions, then takes me along the passageway to a bathroom. There is no one else there. I press close to a urinal, leaning to block his gaze, and take out my "guy." The policeman stands less than a meter away, unperturbed, continuing to stare. I'm disconcerted – I thought he'd keep away. But he is still gazing at me, expressionless, and now I'm completely unnerved: A long time passes, and I still can't pee. Never in my life have I relieved myself in front of a man. A woman? I don't think so, either. "Is supervision required for peeing, too? I can't go with you staring like this," I say to the young policeman.
He continues to eye me, not moving a muscle. My temper flares and I turn my head and stare back, using my eyes to tell him, Stare anymore and I'll lose it. The young policeman is somewhat uncomfortable; it's clear he is not inherently fond of watching "bad guys" pee, but his job requires him not to let "bad guys" out of his sight.
Finally he shifts to one side, his head slightly turned, avoiding my eyes by only pretending to look at me. Standing rigidly in front of the toilet bowl, I finally let the "waters" disperse.
Half an hour later, another customs official enters the Enquiry Room accompanied by two policemen. He stops, holds up my passport and declares, enunciating each word in sonorous tones, "It has been confirmed that you are an individual forbidden to enter China, and you may not enter Beijing. Therefore, you will be supervised and controlled for the time that you wait in the airport for your connecting flight, and you may not move about at will. You will now proceed to the Air China flight to Taipei under police guard."
You are an individual forbidden to enter China, and you may not enter Beijing. You are an individual forbidden to enter China, and you may not enter Beijing. You are an individual forbidden to enter China. The voice seems to linger in my ears, repeating itself.
I am confirming a fact I long since anticipated but was unwilling to face. I am stunned. After a long time, I say in a trembling voice, uttering the words one by one, "Do you know that I am a Beijinger? Do you understand what Beijing means to me?" My expression is stern and cold; no, there is fury in it too.
"My elderly parents live within 10 kilometers of here, do you know that?" I'm nearly unable to pause. "Tell your superiors, relay it to Mr. Hu Jintao and Mr. Wen Jiabao: How many people are there just like me – blacklisted and banned – and what exactly are our crimes? Why, may I ask, am I forbidden to enter China? Tell me, why?"
The official and the policemen make no move to interrupt me. They listen, and when it is over the young policemen look at the official. A trace of harmless innocence shows in the official's face, the imposing manner gone. "I don't know why, either. Maybe you're clearer than we are on the reason."
It is 8:45, and slowly the Taipei-bound Air China plane takes to the air. Early winter has a majestic peacefulness to it. I press close to the plane window and concentrate my attention downward, freeze-framing the North Land in my field of vision – the trees, the vast open country, the north wind howling, sweeping the dusty ground. Further on, row after row of one-story houses fall away, their cooking-stove smoke rising toward us.
Bit by bit, the pain comes. The tears that I – an exile from my homeland – have long repressed, gradually fill my eyes.
White hair, cremated ashes, hometown and the netherworld.
This is my Beijing. My last look at Beijing.
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(Bei Ling is a poet and essayist and the founder and editor of Tendency, an exile literary journal founded in late 1993 and published in Chinese Until 2000. Bei Ling is also the founder of the Independent Chinese PEN Center in 2001. Bei Ling's poetry, essays and book reviews have been published in The New York Review of Books, The Los Angeles Times, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, The New Republic, The New York Times, and The Harvard Review. He is currently working on his memoirs. ©Copyright Bei Ling.)
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(Translated from Chinese by Anna Beth Keim, a translator and writer based in New Haven, Connecticut. She lived in China for seven years.)
