Beijing

Although I’ve lived in China for almost a year, many of my friends and colleagues in Beijing saw more of me when I was based in the U.S. — and visited the country solely on a project basis. So on my way back home for the summer, I spent a couple of days in Beijing, having lunches & dinners with a number of folks I’ve known for a long, long time.

Mao’s mausoleum

While I was there, I also took the opportunity to see a major Tiananmen Square tourist site that I’d never visited, despite some 25 years of trips to the city: Mao’s mausoleum. The visit was actually spurred, however, by a short story in a recent prize-winning book: The Dog: Stories, by Jack Livings. Livings’ collection is really quite remarkable; all of the stories are set in China, even though he hasn’t visited the country since the late 1990s. The NY Times critic Michiko Kakutani called it a “stunning debut,” & included it on her list of her 10 favorite books of 2014. The longest story – “The Crystal Sarcophagus” – received particular attention from numerous critics. It describes the heroic efforts of a group of glassmakers back in 1976 to create the glass coffin holding Mao’s corpse, delving deep into the technical, political and exceedingly human aspects of that harried enterprise. I have to admit that it led me to spend as much time focused on the glass artifact as Mao himself, for reasons that the author suggests: ‘…the coffin is flawless. It is unbreakable. It gives off no reflection. It is otherworldly, a miracle, a triumph of the revolution.”

[Note: photos are forbidden inside the mausoleum, so I had to use an exterior one for this posting; for a hint about the crystal sarcophagus itself, please see this 2008 NY Times article.]