The City Gate Opens

The City Gate Opens is a collection of essays by the poet Bei Dao. At the end of 2001, Bei Dao returned to Beijing after an absence of thirteen years. As the plane descended, a sea of lights poured through the window, and he was startled to find that his hometown had become "an enlarged floodlit football stadium." Beijing thereafter seemed to him a strange city; in his own hometown he had become a stranger. To preserve the city of his memory, he decided to "rebuild a city in words"—to rebuild his Beijing. The book begins with sounds, smells, and light and shadow: Beijing nights in his childhood were very dark, pigeon whistles rang in the blue sky, and the alleys carried the smells of all kinds of food. Toys and games, furniture, records, fishing, swimming, raising rabbits—these small everyday objects and activities become anchors of memory. He writes about No. 1 Sanbulao Hutong, a courtyard shared by several families, about his neighbor Aunt Qian, about the boyhood he spent in books, about a trip to Shanghai and the teachers and students of his primary school, Beijing No. 13 Middle School, and Beijing No. 4 Middle School, about travels during the era of the "Great Link-Up," and, in the final chapter, about his complex and heavy feelings for his father. The period covered runs roughly from the author's birth to 1969, when he was sent down to the countryside, with the focus on childhood and adolescence, including reflections on his own actions during a particular era. Bei Dao says memory is selective, blurred, and exclusionary, lying dormant for long periods, and that writing is the process of awakening it. The Beijing he depicts is one where "children know the changes of the four seasons, and residents have a sense of direction." He opens this city to wanderers roaming the four seas, to homeless ghosts, and to all curious guests. Against a city now hard to recognize, this is a private map he has preserved for his generation.