Wednesday, March 22, 2023 // The Statement — 7
The air looks different, al-
most imperceptibly, like the edges
of colors have changed. The sky
seems more vivid, trees warmer,
taller. Is that possible? The build-
ings seem to shimmer with red
halations — but not a western, lust-
ful, aggressive red. It’s a Chinese,
happy, fortunate red.
My uncle picks both me and
my father up from the Běijěng
Capital
International
Airport.
Both of us have been on an air-
plane for the past 18 hours — we’re
exhausted. The city, even at night,
still lights ablaze with the musk of
cigarette smoke and the chorus of
car horns. I can’t place why; I find
deep comfort in that mess.
It’s the first time I’ve been
back in six years since we moved.
My father offers reasons why we’ve
returned: because my family wants
to see me and because I need to
experience Chinese culture first-
hand. But, frankly, we both know
the real reason: I am back to re-
member.
To remember is not an easy
task. Memory, her green, fickle
mistress, is a complex, elusive en-
tity, one much more complicated
than our classic understanding of
her suggests. Many of us wish to
walk in her footsteps, to pin her
on the fireplace mantle like a coy-
ote pelt and indulge in her past,
promised beauty. But personally, I
am here because some part of me,
ever since I immigrated to Ameri-
ca, feels null, void — ripped out of
its shell. I long to unearth those
missing parts of me, to feel that
all is normal in the world again, to
remember.
To start our search for her,
we must understand that memory
is neither localized nor discrete.
She isn’t the retelling of personal
experiences, something we think
of like a book in a library or data in
a computer bank. Memory, at her
basis, is a series of consolidated
neural connections — silk webs
that span all across your brain,
igniting every lobe like fireworks
whenever she is called. She is ar-
rangement, her body expressed
through the streets of a city,
branches of a sandalwood tree,
unable to be seen like a coordinate
point on a graphical plane.
Memory is lived; no longer
can we view her physique as sim-
ply past experience. According to
Denis Brouillet, psychologist and
author of “Enactive Memory,”
“This means accepting that our
memories are no longer consid-
ered as the recovery, sensu stricto,
of an event that happened in the
past, but rather as the product of a
cognitive elaboration constructed
here and now.” Our memories
are recollections skewed by the
present self, in the same way that
someone’s stray glance can appear
happy to us when we are happy
and sad when we are sad. And, like
a forest, she moves, her roots ever
so shifting, footpaths opening and
closing as our sense of self ma-
tures, vestiges of my past growing
on the tree trunks like moss.
Her highness is visceral.
Memory is lived emotion, apparent
in conditions like the Capgras syn-
drome, in which someone falsely
believes that the people and places
dear to them have been replaced
by identical duplicates. The con-
dition is caused by an emotional
malfunction in your brain’s visual
processing system — a healthy per-
son can picture their loved ones
and in turn fond emotions will
arise. But someone with Capgras
syndrome will not experience this
instinctive emotional response.
Those with Capgras syndrome can
see a loved one and not feel any-
thing — an occurrence so alien to
your brain that it rejects the logical
outcomes and concludes that this
stranger person in front of you
must be foreign, must be an exact
replica of those people you know
and trust instead of themselves. To
remember, then, is to feel.
Run your hand along your
neck and feel the spots your old
lovers used to caress. Press your
body against the apartment wall
and feel the bumps: holes where
posters were hung, places where
past tenants have cried, have
loved, have been loved — places
where she lingers in the air.
Passionately,
she
dances.
Memory is dynamic, a dialogue be-
tween two systems of information:
storage and retrieval. This simple,
extended definition of memory
has profound implications; her
back arches and we see her in a
new light — exosomatic memory.
Memory can be something that
is not purely an internal process,
but something stored outside
the brain. This is not news to us;
we remember materials for a test
in our class notes, our past lives
through journals, history through
textbooks. These are tangible
memories, physical artifacts, im-
mune to biological follies.
In that sense, I’ve known
Běijěng like an encyclopedia. I
can tell you its population, its nine
city gates and vivid details about
its rich history. But these facts are
uninteresting and largely over-
whelming — so many bits of infor-
mation that fly by and splatter like
bugs on my mind’s windshield.
While this is, undeniably, an im-
portant type of memory, I did not
return as a historian. I am back as a
taxi driver, who experiences mem-
ory like a bloodstream, who knows
the city not as facts but as a place
beyond language, as somewhere
more immutable.
Běijěng is a million different
places. Go there and you will see
districts of technological superi-
ority and capitalistic achievement
far beyond what New York City’s
Fifth Avenue or London’s Chel-
sea Street can offer. But blocks
away there will be sìhéyuàns and
other reminders of the old past,
porcelain statues in her form. It is
a city knowable only by its dichot-
omy, where rapid financial growth
meets the roots of a purple past,
where marble altars meet concrete
and steel lattice.
Běijěng is a city of stone, ce-
ramic roof tiles and the old king-
dom’s gardens, embodying the
remnants of a lost grace. But it is
also a city of poverty. Poverty that
the country rectified with capi-
talistic development — allowing
a new city to spring up from the
ashes of the cultural revolution
and grow to unimaginable heights
of magnificence.
An attentive traveler walk-
ing through Běijěng will see two
cities: one on wooden roots, an-
other on a concrete tree. Its new
incarnation is undoubtedly supe-
rior, providing better health for
the citizens and more economic
opportunity, but its values drifted
among its materialism. Before the
clock strikes midnight, Běijěng is
a rich, unimaginably beautiful city
that is pretending to be a Western
metropolis — while the edges fail
to hold its political weight. The
people speak in hushed tones,
driftless, rich in metrics of quality
but poor in the soul.
Come with me to Tiěněnmén
Square and I can tell you the amount
of people that died on May 35.
I can recite the exact times
everything happened and its so-
ciopolitical ramifications, but I
think it would be more resonant
if you stood in that square and felt
the tension tearing at the edges of
your vision like a fisheye photo-
graph. Listen to the chips at the
edges of Tiěněnmén’s bricks and
hear the gone people sing, feel
that hope extinguished and wit-
ness the death of the good China.
Design by Grace Filbin
Finding myself in memory’s corridors
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DARRIN ZHOU
Statement Columnist