China café: My literary death match

If I were an artist I’d create a new “school” called modern Chinese impressionism.

Last weekend I turned onto a dirt track along a reservoir, cracked open a beer and sat on a rock to enjoy the scenery. The late afternoon sun threw broad bands of silver across the water. The bright white clouds diffused the light across the dark green hills that rolled away towards the horizon, each one a fractionally different shade to the other. On the opposite side of the lake a tea plantation fanned out above a cluster of buildings, like a buffer zone against the bamboo that covered the upper slopes. Thanks to the sun’s angle, a line of pylons was almost invisible against the backdrop, except where it stood up and crossed a ridge. A flock of white egrets covered a distant gravel bank, and in front of me a coot-like bird paddled to and fro. I sat for a long time, savouring the natural beauty. Even the concrete causeway that crossed the lake to my right was picturesque. It shone white against the dark water, and I was too far to hear the few trucks that crossed it.

Yet only two years ago, this scene didn’t exist: no lake, no causeway, no pylons and no tea plantation. This was a valley before it was turned into a reservoir. I remember watching the water slowly climb into the hills. There was an ancient stone bridge that took a week to disappear. Being no artist, I wish I had at least taken a photo.

PLAYING HOST

In the summer, living in a unique village in China is like having a house in the home counties with a swimming pool. Friends and acquaintances, and their friends and acquaintances, rock up in a steady stream. In China, they come from nearby cities, from across the region—and all the way from Britain. “Just for a few days,” they say, “Don’t want to impose.” Then the next lot arrive. We are torn between the desire to spend time with them and play the generous host (as they would to us) and the task of running our business and our lives. It would be easier if we did have a pool.

I love visiting our favourite restaurant in the village, and seeing the tea plantation around the back of the mountain, but when we go there every other day to show them off, even they can lose their shine. I enjoy taking a side route through the old villas, avoiding the tourists and saying hello to the locals—but I would forgive my neighbours if they ask for a ticket the next time I let a foreign family stick their noses into their homes. Then there are the mornings when I wish we had opened a teetotal tea house rather than a café and bar. All those “catch-up sessions” take their toll.

Perhaps the pressure will ease when the new resorts are finished. There are two being built at the foot of the hill—one by a Frenchman, the other by a South African. They are intense rivals with nothing good to say about each other. I am playing a delicate game of staying friends with both—since they’re both digging swimming pools.

STEALING MY THUNDER

In late August I took part in a “Literary Death Match” in Beijing. These worldwide events, which were created by an energetic young New Yorker, are a literary version of the X Factor: four authors read their work (fiction, non-fiction or poetry), which is critiqued by three judges. The final round is decided by a party game such as musical chairs—or in our case using chopsticks to throw toys into a mini-basketball hoop.

My competitors were all China-based foreign writers. Holding the printout of my latest “work in progress” in front of the audience, I felt like a hermit who had just emerged from a cave, albeit a crowded one. I read my piece and was duly humiliated, though the American judges gave me credit for my “accent.” A Beijing-based British novelist also went down despite her description of a Chinese prostitute’s initiation that ended with a resounding c-word.

The finalists were an American short-story writer and a Brit who gave less of a reading and more of an impassioned speech on the state of Xinjiang, the autonomous Muslim region. The Chinese government once took away my business on the pretext that I supported the region’s independence. Yet I felt his choice of topic was unfair, as if he had stolen my thunder.

But my loss was made up for by an English lady with an important literary job who was here for the Beijing Book Fair. She approached me afterwards and asked if I was the “British chap who lived on a mountain and wrote a column.” She seemed genuinely delighted to find I was.