CHONGQING, China, March, 2015 — In a city far from my home, I woke to the sound of exploding fireworks. Dazed, I took stock of surroundings that were staggeringly unfamiliar yet overlaid upon a setting I felt I’d come to know intimately. At least, I’d thought I knew this place.
I’d been constructing a mental image of Chongqing before I’d ever visited. It was an incomplete version of the city as well as an image refracted through time, memory, and countless other lenses. Most of the objective realities that had passed through those lenses had long since disappeared.
I'd patched together my perceived Chongqing— or Chungking, as it had been called by the people who’d most informed my understanding of the city — from old letters, photos, and other sources as I wrote my first book. Now, each distant explosion scrambled the borders between past and present. Each new blast made me feel, if just for a few moments, that I was in that distant Chungking, not this Chongqing and its engulfing immensity.
The promise of this sort of momentary time travel was what had convinced me to travel to today’s (or 2015’s) Chongqing, now China's most populous city1. Most vestiges of what the city had been in the 1940s were gone, but the blasts beyond the windows of my sparse hostel room were similar to the sounds Mel must have heard so many times even if they lacked the agonies and discomforts he’ dwitnessed.
In his long-unpublished short story, Monsieur Big-Hat, Mel vividly captured that horrible sound as experienced by the story’s two main characters, a French diplomat and American journalist huddled among anxious Chongqingers in one of the city’s many underground air raid shelters. Just as the roar of approaching Japanese bombers sounded right overhead “there was a moment of stillness,” Mel wrote.
Then came a series of dull thuds, like suction cups plopping against water. The Frenchman's white helmet moved up and down almost in time with the exploding plopping bombs. Salvos of suction cup sounds smacking hard against water increased. A man nearby cleared the spittle deep down in his throat, drew it to his mouth, and let fly. The American thought he heard the spit smack the floor. But he didn't actually. It was easy to imagine sounds in the split second interludes between noises of exploding shells and throbbing motors.
Finally the AA-guns went into action. The dugout trembled as each shell twisted out of the long steel barrels. But the familiar staccato of big guns pounding their charges into Japanese airmen was comforting. The Frenchman murmured an "Ah..." each time an AA-gun fired, and remembered his son commanding a sleek gun pointed into the clouds over Paris.
Suddenly the whole hill rolled. Five hundred pounds of powder and steel bit into the road near the dugout entrance. The earth shuddered for a full second. The old man who had shouted at the crying baby slid under the bench. Air whooshed and screamed through the passageway as if hurled from gigantic bellows. It pushed the clothes against the skin like wet silk, and then tried to tear them off again.
There were a few more thuds, but their sound was swallowed in the last big blast. The droning faded. The AA-guns loosed a final round. Then they too were silent. The people hunched on the benches began straightening up, and the old man came out from underneath, muttering. There was a bumpy murmur of voices. One man's words crawled out from the babbling. "Now that was close," he repeated.
—Melville Jacoby, Monsieur Big Hat, 1940
Of course, none of this was present as I wrote in the wifi-equipped, heated and fully plumbed comfort of my room. I wasn’t writing in a spartan, drafty Press Hostel and my dated iPad and its wonky keyboard case was far from Mel’s Corona 4 typewriter. Still, I’d felt a sense of urgency to record my experience and started writing an inchoate version of this letter.
The Sensual City
Seven years, eleven months, and one week later, my memory of that night remains vividly felt. Soft thuds followed brief bursts of color here. Sizzling crackles chased sparkles of light there. Flickers and flashes illuminated the vibrant chaos rolling over the hills and beyond the rivers of a city in flux.
Before I’d fallen asleep I’d seen flower pots and drying laundry scattered on the rooftops, balconies, and window fixtures of a nearby cluster of crumbling stone buildings. These structures were surrounded by larger, plainer, somewhat newer, but still dated, apartment blocks (one of which housed my hostel). Further away, Chongqing's more contemporary residential towers and offices rose, colorfully lit, against a gray-black sky.
I'd landed in Beijing a few days earlier, right after the lunar New Year, but China’s Spring Festival celebrations continued. Fireworks were routine throughout the holiday. Still, I couldn't resist thinking about how Chongqing had once been "The World's Most Raided City."
My hostel was located just a short walk from the site of a 1941 disaster that had killed thousands during the war, a tragedy that Mel’s reporting and photography had helped bring to the American public’s attention. Now the incident appeared all but forgotten beneath the massive commercial and entertainment complex built atop the site where it had occurred. Only a small memorial and exhibit marked the location, overlooked by most of the busy commuters I’d seen streaming past on the busy weekday when I’d visited.
I’d explored Chongqing on foot for much of the week I was there. I frequently felt history’s presence as I walked, but I was also getting to know its present. As I navigated Chongqing’s many ancient alleyways I'd reflected on the pockets of timeless, peaceful calm that persisted throughout the city despite its rapidly accelerating development, though i’d just as frequently felt the busy cacophony of a city of tens of millions of people wash over me each time I exited those pockets.
I’d wound up at Eling Park at dusk one night and saw couples holding hands atop lookout towers and boisterous children running around families gathered in the park, whether to celebrate Spring Festival or simply enjoy a pleasant, clear evening out. Soon the fireworks began. Though the park’s hilltop location afforded great views of the city, i’d barely registered them at first.
When I heard them I’d been walking toward the park from a nearby alleyway and thinking about which bit of Mel’s experience had occurred where. Soon, though, the sound intruded on my thoughts. Each unseen blast reverberating off the alleyway walls or strip of firecrackers crackling like distant gunfire made me imagine the sounds as echoes of what Mel Jacoby must have once heard, perhaps even along some of the same streets and alleys I’d walked that day.
The noise soon seemed to come from all directions. The explosions sounded less like momentary disruptions than tangible, permanent components of Chongqing’s urban fabric. They formed a booming, staccato soundscape that reinforced my developing impression of the city’s pervasive sensuality.
Chongqing, I quickly realized, is a place understood best through physical sensation. One listens to Chongqing in its honking horns and to its Sichuanese dialect shouted across busy sidewalks. One hears Chongqing crackling and popping from the sizzling oil of a streetside food vendor's grillpans.
One salivates over Chongqing, its scent wafting from the meat and dough frying in those pans. One gags on Chongqing, smelling its rot in a fetid passageway one cuts through for a shortcut. One emerges again onto a pleasant, winding residential street, refreshed by the slight earthiness of fresh-picked vegetables laid atop every home’s stoop and wall and windowsill to dry in the late winter sun.
Most famously perhaps, one tastes Chongqing. The city is málà embodied (even though Chongqing’s and nearby Chengdu’s takes on Sichuan cuisine differ). Chongqing is a citrusy, almost electric numbness upon one's tongue. One savors it while sitting in a tiny plastic chair on a street corner and stirring crushed sichuan peppercorns, peanuts, chili paste, and fermented mustard greens into yet another bowl of hand-cut noodles.
One feels Chongqing in cramped calves and cracked feet weary from climbing just one more stony staircase, descending just one more steep hillside, winding through one more undulating alley, all in search of one more vestige of the city's past. One feels Chongqing as one's belly fills in a moment stolen for respite. One sweats Chongqing on a temperate late winter afternoon of wandering, even when one knows that sweat wasn’t earned, like it would have been during the scorching summer days to come.
One sees Chongqing in fields of strewn rubble, half-buried buildings, and smog-smudged 20th Century apartment blocks. One looks to a grayly-towering skyline as the onset of darkness transforms it into a choreography of multichromatic LED light displays. One watches frenzied construction upon Chongqing’s what-once-was. One witnesses one city replace itself with another.
Chongqing's sounds, sights, smells, tastes, and textures swirl through its streets as if they could flood the city, yet for all the sensation, it's often their absence that shapes the city. Chongqing ceaselessly transitions from sound to silence, movement to stillness, energy to calm. Chongqing's quiet flows as freely as its noise.
Destruction and reconstruction. Past and future. Langor and speed. Enticement and disgust. Existence in Chongqing felt simultaneously tangible and incomprehensible. The city felt at once deeply familiar and immensely foreign.
That night from my hostel bed, when I’d wondered why the sound of fireworks had struck me so strongly as they peppered Chongqing's night, I’d pondered whether I was hearing the past. Then last March, I revisited this then-dormant letter shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine. Thinking about Chongqing amid the shock and sadness of that invasion reminded me that my visit to Chongqing and my writing about Mel’s experience there, like my life overall, took place sheltered from anything remotely resembling war. I can think about explosions and rage and history and the sensations of a place and time from safe temporal and geographical distances not available to people in Mariupol, Bucha, Kyiv and so many other cities. I don't know what I can add at the moment to what else has been written about these other places and all the horrors wrought upon them, except to acknowledge the reality of their existences, of those horrors, and perhaps, to remember the life certainly persisting in each despite the surrounding despair.
Wars still rage.
Wars will rage.
Wars have raged since long before even Mel visited Chongqing.
I don't know how one reflects on the past or on the world in a vacuum. I don't think it is possible. There is a certain responsibility to simply mention the context in which one's writing and analysis occurs, but how does one do that when that context forever flows from noise to silence, sweetness to rot, chaos to beauty, fatigue to rest, disgust to enticement, and back? How does one write about a world wherein nothing is static?
These are the kind of questions that really wake me up in the middle of the night, and the ones that often linger unanswered, and often unasked, for years beyond.
What questions keep you awake? What answers have you found? Let me know in the comments below, or leave a note about anything else you’d like to express.
This Week’s Souvenir
I’ve written much already, so I’ll leave you with this short clip I recorded in March, 2015, of fireworks exploding over Chongqing, China. I made the recording while visiting Chongqing’s Eling Park.
This Week's Scenery
This Week’s Detours
Side roads I expect to take over the coming week include:
Listening to Bono: I’ve been a fan of U2 since I was in sixth grade and a friend played me a tape of their 1983 album War (you’ve almost certainly heard its hit singles, Sunday Bloody Sunday and New Year’s Day). With the 40th anniversary of War’s release approaching, I hope to spend some traveling time on an upcoming trip listening to the audiobook of U2 lead singer Bono’s recently-released memoir: Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story. And yes, I know “Surrender” and “40” also are names of tracks on War.
Dreaming of concert tickets: Speaking of U2, this week the Los Angeles Times reported that the band will begin a residency in Las Vegas this fall, though without drummer Larry Mullen Jr. (You no doubt heard his intro to “Sunday Bloody Sunday” when you read that song’s name). Tickets haven’t yet gone on sale and unless notable changes follow last month’s hearings examining Ticketmaster’s pricing practices they’ll likely be astronomically expensive. If you know anyone who can help a guy out, I know a guy who’d like to go.
Processing film with a sous vide wand: Shortly before I published Eve of a Hundred Midnights, I bought a 1930s’era Contax II rangefinder and fell in love with analog photography (that link isn’t exclusively film). The camera was the same model as Mel had carried on his last stint in China. I have a number of rolls of 35mm film way past due for developing, including some C-41 color images. I’m looking forward to finally developing them, aided by a sous vide machine.
Making Pot de crème: Now that I’m writing about sous vide I think I’ll have to also make chocolate pot de creme with mine. Poor me.
Thanks for reading all this way! I look forward to seeing you along the scenic route
-Bill
P.S. There are still some signed copies of The Golden Fortress available via my web site. Click here to order one directly from me.
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A technicality due to China's inclusion of portions of the surrounding region within Chongqing's administrative boundaries, as explored in this 2022 Business Insider piece: https://www.insider.com/how-chongqing-became-china-biggest-megacity-photos-2022-2 ↩︎