Unfinished Journeys

Rachel Robertson

Shanghai, 2014: golden temples crouched between dusty high-rises, Pudong glass towers sitting inside the curl of the Huangpu River, retro fantasy Pearl Tower, colonial Bund architecture, old women squatting in the gutters, luxury shops, spaghetti road junctions, dumpling street vendors, the cacophony of 25 million people in a city of contradictions.

I fell for a beautiful man, his face delicate as jade, his mind sharply subtle. He whispered translations into my ears, words scented of lemongrass. He gifted me green tea and poetry, a tour of the Xi Garden, and later, his own story.

I would not have been surprised to see him lift his arm and peel back the streetscape to Shanghai of the 1930s, Paris of the East – glamorous, seedy, cultured. The refuge for 20,000 European Jews, Hongkou a home for my Ashkenazi ancestors.

On my final day in Shanghai, I struck out alone on the metro to visit Hongkou and the Jewish Refugee Museum. I found myself lost in a maze of backstreets: washing hanging from balconies, the secretive frontage of small shops, streets where no one spoke English. I passed through unfamiliar laneways with signs only in Mandarin, ignored by people in the middle of their daily tasks. Each time I thought I was finally heading towards the Museum, I sensed I had circled around, and was walking back the way I had come. The twenty-minute walk stretched itself, and I realised I would never reach my destination. As if in a dream, I walked on, taking different turns at random, and then following a woman in glamorous shoes. Time and space fragmented. No one in the world knew where I was.

Suddenly we emerged onto a major road, traffic roaring past us, and the woman stepped through the doors of the Golden Jade Sunshine Hotel. I was stranded on the pavement, exhausted now from my confused wander. Then I, too, walked into the Hotel. The woman I’d followed was nowhere to be seen but the lobby was like the foyer of every glossy five-star hotel and there was a bar with a free table and an English language cocktail menu. By the time I ordered a gin and tonic, my dreamlike state had passed. I was no longer invisible and estranged.

After my drink, I took a taxi back to my own hotel and packed my bag for the flight home. I could make no sense of my experiences. The Maglev bullet train to the airport became a symbol of this: sleek and ultrasophisticated, travelling over streets and the muddy river, passing factories, building sites, shoddy housing estates, universities, parks, piles of broken concrete, shrines, multiple high voltage powerlines, racing madly through yellow smog to Pudong airport at 400 kilometres per hour. All meaning was fractured by spatio-temporal confusions. Already, I longed for home but also yearned to return.

I did return to Shanghai. And I met the man with the lemongrass voice several times over the following years, in Shanghai or elsewhere. I grew more used to his coiled gestures, the pauses in his sentences, his rare smiles. But there was always distance between us. He understood my world; I was ignorant of his. That I considered his face ‘delicate as jade’ shamed me with its undertone of exoticism. No matter that his parents and my grandparents were exiles; that he was richer than me, higher status. Always, our connection was frustrated and fragmented; always just beginning or already over; always zooming in and out of focus. Like the breaking of a carefully constructed mis-en-scene, the moments slipped below or behind or beyond us.

One evening, he said, ‘you are earth, I am water,’ as if this explained everything. I thought of him then as the shifting flow of soft waves reflecting the sky in grey-blue velvety hues. I forgot the ocean can be wild, the waves tempestuous. I forgot that loss recreates itself, generation by generation, that your hopes can be tossed from a high window and fall like a lost ghost. I forgot that we are all small boats on unfinished journeys: east to west in search of fortune, west to east in search of wisdom. ‘No stars to point our way’.

I forgot: this myth is not my myth.

Author’s note

Watching Julien’s multi-screen installation linking ancient and contemporary China, I was reminded of my own brief visits to Shanghai. I wanted to reflect Julien’s themes of journeying and loss, his references to mythic deities, and the way his work deliberately fragments narrative. ‘Unfinished journeys’ attempts to create resonances with Ten Thousand Waves through referencing images of the 1930s film set, a goddess falling past a hotel window, the tempestuous ocean, refugee journeys, and small boats. The phrase ‘no stars to point our way’ is from Julien’s work.

Rachel Robertson is Associate Professor in the School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry at Curtin University. She is the author of Reaching One Thousand (Black Inc) and many other works of creative nonfiction and teaches professional writing and publishing. She leads the Creative Critical Imaginations Research Network and is coordinator of the Writers Respond collaboration between the Network and the John Curtin Gallery.