50. To walk the talk

A friend called yesterday, from the other side of the planet. So nice to hear his voice. Calling to remind me to write a text for a magazine of analysis and debate. Haven’t done that for a long time. And it must be in French. Do you think I can still handle verb tenses in a Latin language, well enough for publishers? And what about the accents on the vowels? I don’t have the keyboard for that.

Or am I making excuses?

There’s the topic too. Not sure I have something to say about it: The fear of China. I mean personally, I’m not scared. And I cannot really see from here how people elsewhere feel. I’ve been in China a long time, it’s home. You were born in Beijing. You’re among the first Chinese with blond hair and blue eyes. You attend school here. You’re native language is Mandarin. And you don’t like western food that much.

This lack of distance from the topic I've just summoned, is it another cop-out?

Analysis and debate, that’s altogether an issue. Can I still do it, be political, simultaneously theoretical and formidable? Honestly, I don’t think I can. Not that I ever did, though. Most of the time back then my writing so idiosyncratic, it even eluded me, and was praised for that virtue. But you would have been proud of your Laolao 30 years ago. Right in the heart of Paris, name them: The best actors, painters, photographers. I was with them, invited everywhere. My table at Café de Flore or chez Lipp. Published by the top post-modernists. Well-known philosophers as mentors and lovers. The great-Greats in literature taking me under their wings. Bada-boom. From my far away province straight to Les Champs Elysees at Fouquet's with the iconoclasts and fashion designers lending me outrageous fringues, not that much pret-a-porter, mind you. Evenings at La Coupole, porto and little gray schrimps to talk revolution. The young promising discovery. The female version of Georges Bataille. Living very Rive Gauche. Mistress of the most articulate and handsome ultra left-wing leaders, French, Italians. Yes, I was a pretty, sexy writer, sweethearts. They loved me, opened the doors, kept them gaping, introduced me, the propitious small-town nymphette. They also read me, quoted me. Saw me betray them. Excited about it. Showed me their own manuscripts. Drinking only champagne at La Closerie des Lilas. Cocktails at embassies with disabused prestigious foreign intellectuals. Known. Recognized. Talked to. And talked about. So many pirouetes. Gyrating. Conjecturing. Being told the in-depth stories of every stone, chair and table in Saint-Germain. All of us nothing less than a chef-d'oeuvre, the young and the old. So much above the vulgarity of money.

I had it all. Everything I wanted. I was exactly where, pedantically, I thought my place should be.

And I walked away. And stopped the writing altogether, except for a few sporadic texts for friends. Because they were friends. But never truly believing in what I was doing.

Three decades later, I still can’t account for my decision. Maybe because it wasn’t one. If you’re patient with me, I’ll discuss it later. But not now.

It’s only today, as I write to you, that I re-establish a form of link to the written word. Over time I’ve learned. Mostly about the cost linked to the work I had in mind in my early twenties. Also the implications it would have had for you, my children and grandchildren. There’s the question, too, about responsibility towards one’s work. I don’t think I was ready for that. In short, I may have had some form of talent, but certainly not the personality to go with it. And realized I definitely couldn't afford brilliance, real or dreamt. No difference.

So, this text I should write by the end of the year, what should I do?

Weak, I said yes, but extirpated a compromise, cowardice on my part. It was a yes under the condition I would do something light, possibly treating the topic with derision, provocative because that’s easy to do and it works all the time.

But then, why do it, right?

Can I try? Has enough time gone by? Can I inject a dash of meaning in a text without putting myself at risk? Unfortunately for me, I tend to think these are inseparable. That hasn’t changed.

One of the most important skills I’ve acquired in the past 30 years is to walk away. I sound here, but I’m not. I’ve perfected the art of the sentence so to make a decent living out of it, never exposing myself, safely withdrawn, like a technician watching the machine. Standing nearby, casually glancing his eye around. Intervening through the distance provided by good quality tools and easy-to-remember commands. It’s comfortable. Quiet. It’s an imitation of expertise in an environment where there’s no real competition. And it pays. I’ve fed and raised you with it.

Do not think it was pleasant, effortless, all that undoing I cleverly performed. One needs to be smart to discard articles of faith and a fine convoluted posture. Guilt, regrets, doubt, anger, they were constantly hanging over my head, troubling more than half my life basically busy at unlearning ideals.

And now that I know I’ve succeeded from a professional standpoint, having reached the trivial, at last the tranquil and decent nest of stereotypy, hackneyed ideas, the soft sheltering of linear syntax to render mental pictures that hardly need to be formed, will I walk away again? And to go where?

A pensive Laolao