Does any body remember those walls of the Forbidden City? I can never forget the sight that the mighty summer sun dims quite a bit seen from the inside of those well-constructed Forbidden City walls. The outside world was, indeed, being forbidden by the walls and gates.
But walls are supposed to protect us, right? And yet protection is too simplistic a function for walls in our culture. There is more to the wall than that. Hey, don't ask me why.
The Chinese obsession with wall has grown almost out of proportion and
has become intellectually complicated, so much so that the intellectual
antenna of Franz Kafka has caught it from afar.
But I bet that Kafka never visited the Great Wall during winter time. Immediately I felt a tremendous silence coming onto me as I descended the train at the foot of Bada Mountain. The winter wind was howling and choking us a few courageous tourists with its bitter and unruly temperament. It was like a thousand whips showering our bodies from head to toe. Life was not allowed to be comfortable there.
Still winter was my choice. My heart told me that only winter with its harshness could give the Great Wall its due dignified and respectable looks that haunted my dreams, and haunt my nights still. As expected, when I saw a gigantic dragon standing before me though looking defeated and still being attacked by the relentless wind from all directions, I was deeply affected by the sheer size and the grief it held to itself. It was ultimate silence, any sound bouncing off that tremendous body turned into a low-pitch moan, hardly audible. It was a powerful silence because it was the silence of thousands or millions of naked men standing and staring into the empty winter sky. I was shaken by these calm and fearless eyes, as if my body and soul were pierced through thousands or millions of times. In fact, it took a great deal of courage to step on those miserable shoulders and backs. They might be too hot and my feet might melt right in front of my eyes in the harsh winter wind.
Power accumulated with each every story buried in the bricks of the wall. Looking at those sorrowful but still dignified eyes, though I did not know what they were looking at, The earth? The sky? The ocean? Or simply our universe of great chaos? I seemed to understand how many centuries had passed in their silence, and started to accept the fact that there would be many centuries of silence for me to endure on. I had no choice, for they were all staring at me. Every eye was like a sharp needle made of steel. I could not stand up to so much blame. The silence only grew, for I dared not to make any noise, nor move a step. Frozen like a statue, I felt that I should learn how to be silent. That was my fate. That was our fate. If they could be silent for many centuries, why couldn't I be silent for a day, or a pitiful short life?
Yet I did not want to be stupid. I could not help telling the story about the torn shoulders and crooked backs of my parents and grandparents. When their eyes cut through mountains, forests and the ocean, they also pierced through my heart. No matter how far I'm away from home, those eyes follow me. I would be a man some day, a Chinaman. I had to be able to stand up to anything just like any piece of the gray bricks on the wall. That was my fate.
The Shanhai Pass literarily can be translated as the Mountain-Ocean Pass, being on a high mountain top right at the edge of the ocean. It is also the far north gateway of the Great Wall. And the Great Wall was really built to protect China, the center of the world and the land of prosperity. The legend of the pass lives in its military importance. After they broke the forte of that strategic point, aided with a defecting Chinese military commander, the Manchurians encountered little difficulty to march into Beijing and tumble the mellow Chinese Ming Dynasty.
In 1978 on my way to my university, it was too dark for me to have a close look when my train passed by the Great Wall. Fortunately, the Great Wall was in between my university and home, so I had several other chances to visit it. And I chose winter because I had no illusion of a beautiful wall surrounded by green grass and smiling flowers. The New Year's day of 1984 was brutally perfect and it was like a dream come true, a bitter experience which taught me a great deal without muttering a single word.
Barrenness was the main theme of the day, visitors scarce, not a trace of green in sight on an enormous stretch of mountainous land. The Wall, earthy and ancient, held up by the contemporary children of its original builders, stiffly stood up on the mountains, facing up to the gusty wind. Once on top of a hill, I could see the wall snake into the dark horizon. By essence the Wall was nothing but a man-made battle trench above the ground, as opposed to underground. It was a trench broken. Still under the vast grayness one could see or sense the once boiling blood. Yes, hot blood cooled down and may have become green during the the course of thousands of years but still hadn't stop running and spreading. The mountainous land was pounced upon by cannons and burned by raging fires. But the Wall had not disappeared. Lifeless, yes, but the naked bricks were forever fearless. Nothing, the cold, the wind, the brutality of time, could really defeat that mighty stance. Dead, yes. Has been so for centuries. But even death has become spectacular there.
The cold was murderous but it did not stop me from throwing myself to the Wall, on all fours, those damp bricks smelt like, well, dead bodies. I knew that each of the oversized bricks had a pair of penetrating eyes but I was not frightened any more, for I had seen enough deaths in my young life already. It was not a secret that every brick on the wall counts for the life of a man. Millions of Chinese men had died for and been buried in the Wall.
At one of the high points an unbearable heartache assaulted me. From there I could see the north, once outside of the protected world, and I could look back to see the south, the once "protected" world. I could not tell the difference. They were all earthy gray and trembling in the fierce wind. I was puzzled by the word "protected." What or whom was supposed to be protected here? The Yellow River? Or the Yellow Earth? Or the Forbidden City? And it never crossed my mind that the Wall was built to protect those who built it. The life of the ordinary meant nothing but misery, I knew that from first hand experience.
Protected or not, the Yellow River would flow with mud. But protected, our tears had to drop into the proper branches as we had been ruled in every detail of our behavior for thousands of years. And, what's the meaning of protection, tell me, if we kill each other inside the wall? Gradually I start to understand why Shu Ting writes: