Jade Yù Shan, the Lady of Dōngguǎn – The Chinese woman and the Jew
Posté par ITgium le 21 février 2013
A jùn mǎ 俊 马 tale (François de la Chevalerie)
At first, Jade puzzled me.
Native of Dōngguǎn, according to her own word, she praised this city « posed as a jewel on Earth ».
Wedged between Shenzhen and Guangzhou, Dōngguǎn (7 millions inhabitants) is a Chinese city with a longtime poor reputation, widely known for its bawdy houses and assembly workshops.
A city to avoid, said a tourist guide.
A city where nobody has the will to adventure himself, confirms a French entrepreneur who is living in Guangzhou for 30 years.
A city like a no mans land restricted to the sex trade and the assembly of wretched dolls for export.
Rejecting my fears, eager in dispelling my prejudices and false stereotypes, Jade asked me to go there.
- Getting into the walls of Dōngguǎn, you’ll spend the most beautiful day of your life ! she claims.
The day to come, I went backwards, trembling at the idea of being there.
At the Guangzhou Railway Station, I hesitated.
I asked a railway agent.
- What do you think about Dōngguǎn ?
- Women for the worse ! he replied.
Carried by a flow of passengers, despite myself, I entered into the commuter.
I tried to get out but the doors closed. I was so desperate that a little girl offers me some candies.
Here, on the way to the heads of the proverbial hydra, stated Lord Byron.
I was warmly welcomed by Jade, a beautiful woman in her late twenties.
- Let’s go to the battle ! she exclaims with laughing eyes and a mischievous smile.
Jade has an inventive and colorful temperament and a fresh and quirky personality.
Ten minutes after arriving, I was walking inside a museum celebrating the Chinese paintings.
Jade was proud to detail each composition, each artist.
- This city has an artistic soul, Jade told.
After the museum, we went through an ancient garden meticulously ordered by ponds and flower arrangements.
Further we penetrated into some buildings where mandarins used to serve tea and to recite old style poems.
In the afternoon, we visited the old town overlooking by the remains of a fortification dating from the sixteenth century. Along narrow streets, archways supporting small houses stand there, some with entrance doors made of oak.
A bookstore draws our attention.
Song Qingling was at the forefront, in her twenties, beautiful and radiant.
We continued our journey towards the City Hall that dominates a large square hosting numerous museums and well fashion restaurants.
- This place is larger than the tiān ān mén guǎng chǎng, Jade whispers, but do not say so, it is dangerous.
We met her friends, doctor, official, entrepreneur and a filmmaker You Song who will become in the next decades a figure of the revival of the Chinese movies.
Ending the day, under a streetlight, Jade took my arm abruptly.
- I’ll tell you a secret. You will be the only one to know until the end of the time. I am proud to be Cantonese, by soul and by blood, the blood of my people.
She raises a finger to her lips forcing myself to be silent forever.
Then she took my hand.
- We have to celebrate the greatness of Dōngguǎn ! she said.
All night long, we enjoyed the time dancing rock’n'roll as it was in the Elvis years.
By then, Jade spirit was entwined in her dreams.
By then, I was like a new man free from the popular belief.
Xiǎo Yù (petite Jade), la Dame de Dōngguǎn
Au premier abord, Jade m’a laissé perplexe.
Originaire de Dōngguǎn, elle vantait sa ville, « posée comme un joyau sur Terre », selon son propre mot.
Coincée entre Shenzhen et Canton, Dōngguǎn est une ville chinoise très peuplée (7 millions d’habitants) à la réputation sulfureuse connue pour ses bordels et ses ateliers d’assemblage.
Une ville qu’il faut tout prix éviter, précise un guide touristique.
Une ville où personne ne s’aventure, confirme un français vivant à Canton depuis 30 ans.
Une ville comme un no mans land réservée aux seuls jeux de corps et à l’assemblage de misérables poupées destinées à l’exportation.
Balayant mes craintes, Jade me propose de m’y rendre, d’entrer dans les murs de Dōngguǎn.
- Tu y passeras la plus belle journée de ta vie ! annonce-t-elle.
J’y suis allé à reculons, tremblant à l’idée de côtoyer tant d’horreurs.
A la gare de Canton, j’hésite encore.
Je consulte in extremis un agent ferroviaire.
- Que pensez vous du Dōngguǎn ?
- Les femmes pour le pire !
Emporté par un flot de passagers, malgré moi, j’entre dans le train.
Me voilà aussitôt embarqué vers l’hydre, soupire Lord Byron.
Les yeux rieurs, le sourire taquin, le corps légèrement enveloppé, Jade m’attend de pied ferme.
- Allons au combat ! s’exclame cette belle femme portant heureusement la trentaine.
N’avais je pas fait cent pas dans cette ville en perdition que je me trouvais dans un musée célébrant des peintures chinoises.
Jade explique alors par le menu l’histoire de chaque composition, de chaque artiste.
- Cette ville à une âme artistique, dit elle, plus que cents âmes réunies !
Après le musée, nous parcourons un jardin méticuleusement ordonné où se mêlent étangs et compositions florales.
Plus loin, nous pénétrons dans des bâtisses où naguère des mandarins servaient le thé en récitant de vieux poèmes.
L’après midi, nous visitons la vieille ville qui s’ouvre sur les restes d’une fortification datant du XVIème siècle.
Des colonages longent des rues étroites où se dressent de petites maisons dont les portes d’entrée sont souvent en bois en chêne.
Une librairie attire notre attention, Sòng Qìnglíng est aux premières loges, belle et radieuse, dans ses vingt ans.
Nous poursuivons notre route vers une esplanade où domine la Mairie flambant neuve et d’autres musées encore.
- Cette place est plus vaste que la tiān ān mén guǎng chǎng, murmure Jade, mais il ne faut pas le dire.
De ce pas, nous rencontrons ses amis : docteur, entrepreneurs, fonctionnaires et un cinéaste You Song lequel deviendra dans les décennies à venir une figure du renouveau du cinéma chinois.
La journée s’achevant, sous un réverbère, Jade m’attire vers elle.
- Je vais te dire un secret que tu seras peut être le seul à porter jusqu’à la fin des temps. Je suis fière d’être cantonaise, d’âme et de sang, le sang de mon peuple.
Elle pose alors un doigt sur ses lèvres m’imposant de faire silence à jamais.
Remarquant un groupe de danseurs, elle me prend par la main.
- Si nous dansions maintenant pour célébrer la grandeur de Dōngguǎn, la ville aux secrets enfouis.
Sur un pas rapide, Jade m’entraine bientôt dans d’incessantes rondes, l’esprit enlacé dans ses rêves.
Jade Yu Shan in the shadow of a Jew
A jùn mǎ 俊 马 tale 故事 (François de la Chevalerie)
Jade, as the British actor Georges Sanders whispers with his inimitable cockney accent
Jade Yu Shan is a native of the city of Donguang, southern china, in a family learned and rather well off.
Her dad is committed in a computer equipment manufacture. Mom at home.
Jade spent twenty years of her early life having the small talks, the same food, the same everything, worse still, the same ways in treating colds and flu’s.
So, she enjoyed the daily life of the average Chinese middle class, revenues goes up to.
Those early years, sometimes she looked herself in her room mirror and compared to others.
- I want to see what it would be like to live in another body, in another land. For what unknown reasons, I am rooted here in China? For what reason I am what I am? She asked nervously.
Rejecting a sense of despair, she decided to take its fate into her own hands. She went in England, Manchester, stayed one year in the middle of the British crowd.
- Even if I smelt the sense of freedom, a possibility of going so far as to say everything, I realized that I have a Chinese mind, an indestructible sense of conservatism.
Tradition still carried considerable weight in her mind.
She came back in China having no hope, however, of improving her intelligence. She recalled the Albert Einstein quote: “It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.”
In Guangzhou, this modern woman devoted her leisure time drinking, chatting. Mainly, dressing as the Queen of the Night, she danced until the music was over, enthralled with her dance steps and oblivious of others around her.
Jade claimed often she is cynical.
Apparently, a state of mind.
She isn’t but, over the years, she built her own credo, a somewhat celebration of a pessimistic thinking. As stated by J. Robert Oppenheimer “The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true.”
Some examples of Jade Yu Shan quotes:
- I don’t like competition.
- I don’t like arguing.
- I am so tired of all these arguments.
- I don’t like quite anything in this goddamn world except my shoes. I like to take them in picture. Do you know for what reason? Shoes are innocent! I can go everywhere without arguing. Good slaves, aren’t they?
Her sad soul nestles as sorrow, coined with this latin saying:
“Accipe quam primum, brevis est occasio lucri[1]”
In her complex life, there’s very little she can control.
As for instance, her age. As she nears 30 years, it comes as no surprise that her parents urged her to get married.
- Take a man no matter who he is as he is wealthy!
This old Chinese saying comes to every mouth.
She was exhausted to hear such noisy call.
At the very end, this statement from a Dongguan connoisseur : “Languor and indolence are her greatest assets. She is awfully sluggish and groggy as if any relationship bored her to death. Is the indolence the sleep of the mind ? For sure, she is not made for a sustainable love !“
That’s when a Jew comes to her life.
Two cultures very far from each other and still very similar. Both rooted in eternities.
As a Jew, the man has an oratorical art, made of imprecations and repetitions, peculiar to the subtle and grandiloquent prophets the Jewish people has always had.
As a Jew, he is extremely sensitive.
Every morning, he asks himself whether he will remain alive the same night.
August 1942, by a thick fog in the Belgium countryside, his family was tracked down, arrested and taken to the Auschwitz concentration camps. None returns alive except his dad disabled and mentally destroyed.
Seventy years after, his son bears always the stigma of being chronically invaded by the thunder of guns.
This man is a real wandering Jew living in more than one country simultaneously, gaining market share from one company to another.
Growing old, he realized the urgency of being father.
When he saw her for the first time in a cozy artist painter workshop, he loved her at the first sight.
Well, she welcomes the idea by a very short, writing SMS stylized.
“Yes!” she approved.
That’s a poor beginning but something was perhaps much more striking and disturbing in the guy mind.
For him, nobody exists except in suffering.
“ Jade, once i saw you dancing, I read on your face some sadness, a mark of absolute desperation. I believe that this will be one of my fondest memories of our relation. “
Do you believe that?
What kind of man is he?
Then he spent all his time arguing as he learned in his Kabbalah[2] teachings.
When, for instance, she suggested him a closer tie, he replied with anger:
- I don’t appreciate your comment about my somewhat “sex” interest for you. If you think in that way, I should recommend you to stop any kind of relation with me!
More disruptive was his faith that the child of this union was to embody a bridge between the West and china.
However, those thoughts were part of the Jewish universalism arsenal that claims that the course of human history may change by the Jewish waves.
Jade didn’t care so much.
She went away in India, dressed beautifully in a sari.
Any man would do well to keep in mind the Chinese saying: « I hear and I forget”.
At the end, she wrote to him:
- I think your problem is, you want more than one woman, so you’ve been busy between two, you won’t get any if you lost their trust, and your sensitiveness blocks all the communication. If you insist this way, you tired people.
Then she left.
Then, the wandering Jew followed his way with no place to settle, no wish to do so.
“The worst thing in life, lost the love of the life”.
They will remember.
[1] « Act now, the chances of success doen’t last long. «
[2] Kabbalah is the closest science to man because it speaks of the purpose of life, of why we are born and live in this world.
The platonic love between an indian man and a chinese woman
By that time, a depressing anguish troubled her.
What am I in this world ? she whispers.
Seeing the earth from the sky gave her an intense and calming sensation.
Every time when Jade flew out to New Dehli, an overwhelming feeling of wisdom invaded her suddenly.
Far from the madding Dongguang crowd, she realized that she is not anymore a pawn in the world chessboard but a human being able to chart her own course.
Looking at the Earth from the sky, she is once again able to take a few deep breaths and clear her mind, able to relieve her soul.
At New Delhi airport, an extremely old man, in a red suit and a long white beard celebrating nearly a century of achievements, is waiting peacefully, reading the book written by Anxmandae de Leira, “a time for nothing”.
A philosopher is not necessarily a man who sets himself up to be wise, but one who is a lover of wisdom, he stated.
Then Jade arrived.
She rests her hand on the old man’s shoulder.
- May the Force be with you ! he said, welcoming her.
- Let me first of all say how delighted I am to be here in New Delhi, breathing your native air and soaking up the beauty of the city and its way of life.
By the side of the old man, Indra, a beautiful woman, remaining silent.
Then they traversed the colorful capital of India, reaching by night the westen part of the city, towards surrounding villages.
At the end of an impasse, stands there the house of the old man, all brick and granite.
As ancient as his life.
Jade found her room as it was during her last visit, disorderly, tangled as her character.
She dressed herself immediately with a sari, blue-bordered and its choli, a midriff-baring blouse.
- I am Indian, now, as ever, she murmured, with a wistful smile on her face.
During one week, the old man taught her the world, before the world, after the world, unchanged after centuries of history since the dawn of time.
A few words to explain the nearly everything : the sun, the stars, the galaxies, the universe and among them a curious component, a man as stripped as he came to earth, a past that gets lost in the night of time.
Just a word to remind that life on this planet is as it were merely a preparation for a better life.
- But it is never easy to think that one’s life is ending ! recalled the man.
- You will land somewhere on paradise, suggested Jade.
- Do not think, that upon leaving this world I will achieve the maximum level of spiritual elevation. While there exist men on earth, I will suffer. How could I abandon you to the fury of the today world ? This sadness will settle down on me.
She embraced him on his forehead.
- I will take away this kiss in heaven, he said.
During her stay in New Dehli, Jade learned some pearls of the Indian wisdom, a rigorous sense of values, passion and daring that have been handed down through the generations.
Returning to her native China, Jade is far from completely cured, but she feels so much better. By then, her fears will decrease and she will feel more confident about herself.
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