the more struck I was by the complete absence of simple street pedlars when there used to be an endless stream of them from morning till night, their bicycles laden with heavy bags of food, which bulged over both sides of their luggage racks. Tumchooq could do a brilliant impression of the ones who sold grilled sweet potatoes, the yellow flesh with a hint of red, so much better than chestnuts; or those selling sweet or sour apricots, which made you drool in summer; or hot, crispy, deep-fried cakes; spicy, salted crabs; dried carrots covered in chilli; steamed dumplings; stinking soya cheese; or even those selling aphrodisiac plants reputed to make a man pee higher than an electricity pylon … I couldn’t hear anything except the rumble of bulldozers reverberating like thunder in the stifling night air and the long, irritable, aggressive toot of car horns.
Fifty metres further on I stood for a moment under a spanking new streetlight casting its light over a metallic sign on which the name of the street was written, but where I expected it to say EAST GATE STREET, there was another, unfamiliar name, the name of some ghostly impostor calling itself JOY OF THE EAST STREET. Disconcerted by the change, which I initially put down to a slip of memory on my part, I asked a passer-by whether he knew East Gate Street, but he looked at me as if I were mad and walked off without answering. Despite all this, I set off down the street, but the little restaurants where I used to have a bowl of warm soya milk and a steamed dumpling for lunch had disappeared like the hutong, without a trace. The street had become smooth, impersonal and wide, edged with concrete buildings some ten or twenty storeys high, some of them still under construction. Next there was a no-man’s-land of luxury shops—Gucci, Dior, Chanel, Lacoste, L’Oréal—with flags by the door and brightly lit windows where Western-style mannequins adopted poses, blond women with green or blue eyes, beautiful black athletes with well-honed muscles, shiny, life-size photographs of Zidane, Beckham, Ronaldo … and all at once I understood.
Gone, alas, was the world of the old map in the lithograph. Gone, alas, the spiders web of tiny streets, which had constituted the flesh and bones of Peking since the Yuan dynasty in Marco Polo’s day. I wondered whether anyone had made a note of how many hutong had disappeared in this neighbourhood, which now belonged to a new era. A thousand? Two thousand? What a shame! Even if only for their names with their wealth of retroflex consonants, which only natives of Peking could pronounce, their diphthongs and other exquisite sounds. Not sure what I was doing, in despair, I started to run and was soon going frantically, foolishly fast. Like a lost child. As if trying to exorcise something. There were cars in front of me and others coming to meet me, ruby of rear lights, dazzle of headlights. I couldn’t breathe properly. My legs weren’t really under my control, disobeying my need to escape, in places refusing to take the turning I wanted. I let them carry me through that world of illuminated signs for boutiques, financial corporations, estate agents, cosmetic surgery clinics offering breast enhancements, remodelled noses and tautened eyelids, dubious hair salons with red lighting, Indian or Thai massage parlours, Finnish saunas, Turkish baths, Brazilian grills, advertisements for foot baths using forty Tibetan plants, shops selling aphrodisiacs, which all claimed to deal in “contraception and adult health,” sex shops offering gadgets more realistic than the actual thing, acupuncturists promising to cure stammers, restaurants with aquariums illuminated by finely tuned lighting to show off crabs with long pincers, soft-shelled turtles known for their curative properties, strange lobsters …
When I reached the bridge at the North Gate of the Forbidden City I couldn’t see the single-storey house with the square courtyard where Tumchooq’s mother lived. Paralysis of memory or losing my mind? I scanned the place again, concentrating twice as hard. No. It wasn’t there any more. It had gone. The house had gone, along with the whole block of houses which used to be behind it, forming a small street called the Hutong of Figs, which started at the exact point where the palace walls turned eastwards on the corner of a watchtower in carved wood. The hutong wound its way between the moat and the tall imperial wall, which it followed for a kilometre until it