Belgian Cultural Festival in China (continued)

The day after my lecture I took off to go and visit the Great Wall, in company with three musicians, a lecturer, and a lecturer's spouse. We left before dawn, to avoid the rush. Before leaving I asked at the hotel desk whether it would be possible to get something from the kitchen to take with us. The girl at the desk told me that breakfast wouldn't be served until 8. I asked again if we could take something, bread rolls, apples, anything, that wouldn't need cooking or serving, and she told me that there was a shop around the corner, but it wouldn't be open. I asked at the desk rather than at the kitchen because my Chinese was hardly up to the task, but having met such stubborn unhelpfulness at the desk I ventured my Chinese in the kitchen, and left laden with slices of cake and a plastic bucket of cherry tomatoes. The cooks wouldn't let guests go hungry, whatever the night clerk might say. The Great Wall just after dawn, with no one else about, and in a blaze of autumnal scenery, is quite a sight.
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Belgian Cultural Festival in China

Almost a month ago now I was in China, to lecture at an event that was billed as the “First Belgian Cultural Festival in China”. Apparently this puts me among the “most renowned and diverse art forms, artists and academics” that Belgium has to offer. I’m pretty sure I’m not renowned, nor an art form, nor an artist, so I must be a diverse academic. There were perhaps a dozen of us: three academics, a comic book artist, a film-maker, two trios of musicians.

It was quite an intense few days, with as undoubted high-point one of the trios performing 18th-century music in Beijing North Cathedral, followed by the Cathedral Choir giving a rendition of two 17th-century sacred songs: Italian polyphonic chant with Chinese words, as sung by Chinese converts almost 400 years ago. Eerily beautiful music, beautifully performed, and with the added touch that it was in the the ideal setting: the oldest church in Beijing. It quite brought tears to my eyes. Afterwards, we were taken to a hot pot restaurant by a former student who now edits the lifestyle section of a business magazine (she’s also a former teacher, having done some Chinese tutoring after graduation: I’m not sure what that does to our relationship in Confucian terms, but I’m older so perhaps that settles things).

Chatting to a journalist after one of the lectures, I was asked what my “most profound impression of Beijing food” might be. My answer (“I really like the dumplings”) was plainly not profound enough for my interlocutor, whose smile took on a frozen look. What was I supposed to say?

Most of the event was hosted at Peking University, which (I discovered on our final day there) must be a front-runner for the title of most beautiful campus in the world.


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