The Great Wall

by
Elmo Lum

We stand at Laolongtou: you and I. Over the parapet we look down at where the Pacific crashes against the wall. The tide is high. This is the end. After this, only the ocean. After this, no further need for a wall. The swirls and currents, the rocks and shoals: What they proclaim is victimhood. This is the message: You will be a victim. No more and no less. Between the battlements and the sea, the line of your fate is fixed. Today will lead unflinchingly to the suspension of your final desires. What can I say? You and I together at Laolongtou.

There is no storm, just mist and fog, cloud and wind. You tuck behind my shoulder. I am your bulwark against discomfort. This is what bulwarks are for: less discomfort. Being a lee to cold, to wind. Being a lee to water and salt. Being a shoulder to split through the weather. Being a shoulder against the message.

Below us the Pacific claws against the stones. It chews the wall’s foundations. Nothing is forever (isn’t that what they say?) So in the end these battlements will be eaten. But only in due time. So not yet — not in short order. This is not the message. No, the message is: You are to be a victim. Nothing more and nothing less. This wall is a stalwart guard. Try if you dare — you will be a victim, either by stone or by sea.

You peek from behind my shoulder, eye the gray sky and chop on the water. Between the two grays, the line of the horizon is missing. You clasp at my elbow. “Why does anyone ever get married?” you say.

(You once told me: Fences fence us in. Without fences, we can go anywhere. Let’s not tie ourselves down. Let’s just be ourselves. I don’t want to become somebody else’s idea of what we should be. Of what we can be. Of what someone other than us thinks we should be. Because we already are. We’re already all we need.

This is what you said: I don’t want to be the one to ruin something good.)

We are at Mutianyu, where we march the rise. The wall rises and dips; we march the wall; together we rise and dip. On some inclines the sloping brick transforms into a staircase. We march the stairs alongside Chinese tourists clasping their hands behind their backs. Who stare at their shoes to watch their footing.

The crenellations face north. This is the message — this is the direction of the hordes. But in the southerly direction nothing has been built to hide from arrows. There is only a short wall, over which we lean to look out over the trees. Which stand draped and veiled and hooded in mist and dew and fog. The air is windless. You and I stand together wearing jackets, staring at the green and the gray. Further uphill stands a squarish tower. Past the tower, more wall snakes the ridgeline. Then further trees and wall and towers are lost in the clouds and fog.

Where the hillside flattens, so does the slope of the wall. So here the vendors collect, hawking trinkets and hats and umbrellas and Coca-cola from cardboard pallets. They call out and wave their hands at everyone passing. Without prejudice they call and wave at the hordes passing by their tables. This is their message: for sale. This is their message: buy here. Their message is: Coca-cola. Which is obvious even though the bottles’ writing is in Chinese. Every hawker holds a solar calculator they finger at to bargain the price.

You tell me: “Freedom means there’s nothing you can’t do.”

(We can go, you said. We can go and make this happen. If we want. If we try. If we don’t try, we’ll never go. This is the world and the world is our oyster. But only if we try. Without trying, our oyster will never be.

Let’s not constrain ourselves, is what you said.)

We are at Badaling — we stand in the shadows. Northwards in the wall, slits are narrowed for firing arrows. Southward in the opposite wall a pair of arched windows open. Their sills are so deep almost no sunlight reaches the interior. The only light we see is the archway shapes: negative space. And around the spans of the archways: only interior dark.

The ceiling is fit with a hole. To which a wood ladder leads, which we climb to the roof crenellated northward in the direction of the hordes. The light is squintingly bright following the darkness within the tower. More so, given the weather: a misty whiteness blanketing the circle of the horizon. Unrelenting, the fog brightens. Easier would be blue sky on the eyes. But instead we squint, we blink, we blinder our vision from the unmitigated light from above.

The message is: Here we stand — here we watch — here we protect. Break, if you will, on this bulwark — we are made to withstand. We are made to endure, to outlast, to carry on. We are permanence. Time will yield to us like water. Try if you will — break if you choose. Crash and boil and dissolve. Sizzle back to yourselves to try again. The message is: We won’t be broken.

Down the ladder again and further out we march the wall, now beyond the calling and gesticulating of any hawkers or vendors. Beyond the women stepping by in their soft-soled shoes. Beyond the men under the brims of their Mao-style caps. Beyond the tour groups coordinated in their matching T-shirts. Out to where the wall empties, where the brick breaks, where the crenellations crumble. Out to where, between the cracks, grass grows in the dust blown down from the north. Quenched, no doubt, by the mist and dew and fog. Setting their crawling roots in the seams and narrows. Spreading the gaps and crevices with the passing drum of every season.

Our footing we watch — scree scatters the steps, which themselves crack and tilt. We keep marching for the next tower clearing out from the mist and fog. When we reach it there is no darkness. Whiteness pours in past the absent roof. The walls are crumbling, the floor is buried beneath brick and dust. Two windows are left facing south, framing twin views of the ridges rising out past the slumping stonework. A bush grows in the tower’s corner.

“Limits are for little people,” is what you say.

(I thought: every day constrains. Every event — every happening. Every circumstance, every decision, every chance. Everything tunnels. The sum of everything is a tunnel to our life. But the way in which we tunnel is our choice. The manner and fashion we negotiate our tunnel is all we have. This is all that matters. Manner and fashion are everything that counts.

This is what I should have said.)

We are at Shuidonggou. We squint from the wind, turn our eyes from it. Here nothing is obvious, here what’s left is too worn to make out from a distance. Only up close can we see: layers of earth mashed with layers of vegetation. A construction cake. A wall made up from dust blown down from the north. Alternated with seams of collected, local flora. Which grows low on the steppes where we stand, ducking from the wind’s cavitations.

The message was, here we reached. Here we aspired and here we attained. Here we completed. You could not do this — this made an unmatchable feat. You were incapable — your aspirations failed. You could not rise to meet our challenge. Your inferiority submitted to this demonstration of what lengths could be achieved. Of what glories could be accomplished. But not by you — you were only a victim. You were always a victim. You would always submit. This is the lasting message.

Nothing is sold and nobody is here. Only us both — you and I together. We hunch behind this layer cake too rounded to shield from the wind. Air keeps rolling over, tactile with dust and grit. With leaves and seeds. With smells and hordes. With chance and choice and time.

You curl at my chest, alee. Alee from the smells and the grit, the powder and the air. Over the sound of the wind you call out something to my chest.

“What?” I yell.

You turn to thinly answer between the buffeting gusts: “I said aren’t you glad we finally seized the day?”

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