LITMIR.BIZ

       Preface

      Thinking about gardens leads naturally to an alchemy of mind.

      —Diane Ackerman, Cultivating Delight

      It is rare to be able to date the birth of a book. I feel grateful that I can point to the day, month, and hour: October 16, 1993–10:30 A.M. A brisk wind was blowing this Saturday across Beijing University. I was taking a walk on wooded paths in the northwest corner of campus I have come to know intimately over the past twenty-five years. I had lived at Beida (the shortened name of Beijing University), I had returned for yearly visits, and I had written about its history in the 1910s and 1920s. This morning in October, I was unprepared for discovery. I was just strolling and thinking about the dense layers of friendship that bind me to this familiar ground.

      Suddenly I was accosted by a new building. It was located among the old Yenching University structures that I knew quite well. They connected the Beida of the Communist era back to the distinguished institution of liberal learning founded by American missionaries in the 1920s. Those buildings have more beauty, more history than the cement dormitories and classrooms built after 1949. The new building blended into the Yenching style, yet was far more graceful in its proportions, in the details of the paintings under its winged roofs. When I came to the front of the building I was surprised by the sign: Arthur M. Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology. How could this museum appear so suddenly? After all, I knew each part of this campus like the palm of my hand. True, I had not returned for a few years after the shock that followed the violent suppression of student demonstrations in June 1989.

      I entered the museum to chat with the ticket seller. It being Saturday, I was not carrying money, in keeping with my practice as an observant Jew. Having no cash, I had more time for conversation. In the colloquial language that has become one of my “mother tongues,” I asked the old man in the ticket booth: “What was here before? This is my mu xiao [my “mother school”—I chose the Chinese intentionally to signal my intimacy with our shared space]. I know it too well for such a surprise!” The septuagenarian with a kind smile full of wrinkles turned out to be a retired manual laborer, a former groundskeeper at Beida. He answered me as if we had been old friends: “Oh, this was the place of the niu peng. The shacks where they herded all those brainy professors during the Cultural Revolution.”

      Niu peng—the “ox pens.” This then was the site that my old friends at Beida had hinted about so often, yet had refused to identify over two decades of friendship and interviews. Almost everyone I knew among the highly educated intellectuals in China had spent time in the niu peng. I had heard much whispering about the brutalities committed in the first prison, set up at Beida. But I never knew exactly where my friends had suffered their humiliation and terror.

      On this day of Shabbat, I backed away from the Sackler Museum and went to sit in a nearby pavilion, also new. A flood of questions came to my mind: How does Jewish money (I knew of Arthur Sackler’s background) come to provide a haven for architectural fragments that survived the Cultural Revolution? Is it an atrocity to have an art museum on the very ground where there had been so much suffering? Can art ever be a meaningful container for historical trauma? In the next hour I faced all the dilemmas that frame this book. I knew before I left the garden setting outside the Sackler Museum that I was willing to dedicate years to wrestling with those dilemmas. Even without being a historical geographer, I knew that I wanted to write a narrative about this layered terrain. In my journal, on Sunday night, I wrote: “A sense of congealed

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