Paul Bevan’s Introduction: This story comes from a series entitled Ways and Pathways. Each story in the series follows an individual, a man or woman, as they walk from point A to point B, and sometimes back again, and focuses on what happens to them along the way. Some examples from the series include: “A Walk Along the Great Golden Avenue to the Library of Knowledge and Hope”. This story follows Henry as he walks along the main thoroughfare of a central London park at a time when the weather has become unbearably hot, at an unspecified time in the future (or the present, or the past). In another story, “A Walk Around Town: Behold the Man!” set in Germany (or Poland, or Austria), Helmut wanders around town, one hundred (or fifty, or twenty) years ago, ending up at the place from which he first set out. “A Walk Around the Garden” follows an unnamed woman in the Edwardian period (or the 1970s, or in modern times) as she takes a stroll along the garden path, following an illness that left her housebound. To a greater or lesser extent, these stories might be described as “modernist” in their approach, though no direct influence, or conscious inspiration has been taken from any writer, dead or alive. Having said that, no doubt there will be influences detectable by readers, of which the author is unaware.

In this story, “A Walk Around the Square”, a man named Jack wanders from place to place in a vast square in an unnamed Asian country (Japan, or Korea, or Vietnam, or China). After visiting a museum, Jack finds a place to rest so he can take in everything that’s going on around him. After a while he decides to look for somewhere to eat lunch, then moves on to a shop, after which he visits the parliament building to take a look around. Eventually, Jack ends up in the same shady spot overhung by trees that appears at the beginning of the story, hoping to take the weight off his feet before finally moving on from the square. Some of the things that happen to Jack as he walks round the square are simple everyday occurrences, while others may be a little more unexpected. The story is told by an all-seeing narrator, and, as with all stories in the Ways and Pathways series, there is an element of surprise.

A sunny afternoon in the square.

Jack left the museum. He had been the only visitor. Those cavernous galleries house a vast array of objects, and the building sits in a busy part of town, yet it has few visitors.

Jack ran nimbly down the broad stone steps at the front of the museum and went to speak to his new friends on the street: people he knew to chat to but had only met since arriving in the country.

“You’re always here,” one of them challenged him, jokingly. “What are you up to?”

“This place is close to my hotel, so I often hang around here,” Jack replied, a little on the defensive.

His new-found friends weren’t used to bumping into the same people every day. They met many tourists on the street, but tourists usually stick to strict itineraries and go to see one or two different sights each day. Jack was different. He went to see the sights too, of course, but he was equally happy just hanging around, looking at what was happening on the street: having lunch in a local cafe, or going to bookshops and flea markets, and drinking his obligatory beer with dinner in the evening. It was all equally new to Jack. He would often get more out of wandering around town, than from visiting a famous house or garden on the tourist trail. He was doing his own thing again today.   

He found himself alone, but still in the square, that massive square. Off to one side. The eastern side. When the sounds of people at work and play reached his ears, he could hear more or less of the sounds they were making, depending on what they were doing, how far away from him they were, and how loudly they raised their voices. Despite the continual background noise, this vast man-made square was a remarkably peaceful place, even with the heavy traffic that encircled it.

Birds flew overhead and could be seen all around. Some audible, some out of earshot: the squawk of a seabird in flight, the melody of a songbird perched in a tree. Sounds at once familiar, yet somehow strange to Jack.

The sheer white walls of a vast shining building loomed over him. It was built from that type of sandstone that has a silky-smooth surface, almost like marble, and Jack liked to run his hands over it and marvel at how cleanly the blocks had been cut, and the degree to which they’d been polished by the stonemason’s skilful hand. Stone blocks like these were sometimes as white as snow; sometimes a little off white, like cream; sometimes with traces of minute grey fossilised seashells; sometimes, as in the case of this one particular block, a shiny silky-smooth creamy white that reflected the powerful rays of the sun and was dazzling to the eye. The white wall contrasted with the green of the trees, and with the bright red delicate blossom that hung on their branches, some of which had fallen to the ground. Combined with the dust, twigs, and small leaves, it was blowing around in random circular patterns, excited by the gentle gusts of wind.

Flower beds freshly planted. All neat and tidy. Pest control had been there too. Small, triangular, yellow plastic flags with the words “Beware, Rat Poison!” written on them—glued to short wooden spikes, like cocktail sticks, that kept them upright in the soil—were placed at regular intervals and laid out in symmetrical patterns that were pleasing to the eye.

People were sitting around in twos and threes, in threes and fours, on the benches. In parks in this country, you rarely see benches or places to sit and rest, and people don’t seem to sit much on the grass. But, here in the stone-paved square, one was spoilt for choice: stone benches in front of the bright white buildings, wooden benches around the flowerbeds, metal benches closer to the road, and more wooden benches under the shade of the majestic trees that loom over the pavement and give shelter from the sun, or rain, to those who are resting beneath.

Early spring had passed, though there had been a chill in the air that morning. With the arrival of the spring sun this afternoon, the air was warming up, so with his overcoat on Jack was beginning to feel rather overheated. It was already nearly four o’clock, so he walked south, with his coat draped over his arm, to look for somewhere to eat a late lunch. Up to now he had quite forgotten to eat.

Eventually, he happened upon a small restaurant in the southwest corner of the square. It was a box-like structure of indeterminate age with a broad glass frontage, most of which was covered with adverts for food, prices for the dishes of the day, and petition papers—a random selection of pastel colours: pink, green, blue, yellow. The council wanted to demolish the restaurant. The owner was campaigning to keep it open, and together with his hand-written petitions pasted to the windows and walls, he was keeping a video record. He thought perhaps this would eventually be of some use when it came to taking it to court. As it happened, in the end, he lost the case, his restaurant and house were demolished, and he had to move away to the suburbs. Moving away from his own single-storey restaurant that had served as his family home for decades, to halfway up a newly-built tower block, where he knew no one and saw few friends.

Jack ate some delicious food, cooked there in the restaurant right before his eyes, the customers seated cheek by jowl. He drank a bottle of Coke with relish. At home he never drank Coke but when he was abroad, after a long flight, it helped him with his jet lag, jet lag that seemed to hit him increasingly badly as the years progressed.

Jack came back to the south-east corner of the square to go shopping in the old railway station. He walked up the broad stone steps of the nineteenth-century building to buy a battery for his alarm clock from a small electronics shop—more like a stall or kiosk really, but just the sort of place he needed. Jack was very fond of his alarm clock. He had bought it on a previous visit to the country a couple of years before, in an enormous French-owned supermarket that sold everything, in a tourist town down south, and now he took it with him wherever he went. When you press down gently on a bar that lies across its top, the clock is sparked into action and speaks the time out loud. At night, he could press the bar in the dark without having to open his eyes, and the clock would tell him the time. In the morning, the sound of a cockerel awakened him. It was a cheap clock, but it was one of the few things Jack really treasured.

Jack was the only customer in the small shop that was situated up several unlit flights of rickety wooden stairs. “How does anyone ever find it here?” he thought to himself as he ran back down the wooden stairs after buying the battery, and a spare. He came out into the sunshine squinting in the bright light, scurried down the broad stone steps, the soles of his shoes creating a sandy shuffling sound, and was immediately accosted by one of the many people in the square who had something to sell. In this case, however, it wasn’t at all clear what the man wanted him to buy. They chatted for a while, nonetheless. Jack remembered later that the man was from far up north and was surprised that Jack, a foreigner, seemed to understand his regional accent so well. After a while they went their separate ways.

Jack walked diagonally across the vast square to the northwest corner. There he visited the parliament building and wandered around the rooms there all alone. The main hall with its vast stage, and long rows of theatre seats; and the many impressive meeting rooms, empty, except that in each, a couple of plush armchairs and a shiny wooden table or desk were placed neatly on the shiny wooden floors. In one room the armchairs were dark brown, in others lemon yellow, or pink, and still others were decorated with old-fashioned floral patterns. The chairs had lace antimacassars placed over their backs and arms. Jack found himself in the corner of one of these grand rooms, standing by the door, and was admiring the old-fashioned decor, the well-preserved decor of the 1950s. Then, as his gaze came closer to where he was standing, he looked down and noticed a few small strips of paper on the floor, scattered around his feet. Puzzled, he looked up behind him and saw a massive painting on the wall above, and, in the bottom right-hand corner closest to him, he noticed that a few strips of paper had been torn away from around the edge. Without even giving himself time to panic, he rushed off as fast as his legs would carry him, as fast as he could walk without breaking into a trot and thereby attracting attention to himself. He hadn’t done anything wrong, but who knows what would have happened to him if he’d been found standing in the corner, looming over those suspect fragments of paper?

He left the building. Skipping down a grand flight of stone stairs his footsteps reverberated in his ears. Each step he took produced a strange echo, almost like the repeated twanging of a mistuned cello string. All the buildings on the square have impressive stone steps that lead up to the main entrances, even those older buildings like the old railway station, the one with the electronics shop on the upper floor. He wandered back over the entire breadth of the square towards the east and the spot where the shady trees grow, crossing the vast expanse of white paving stones that reflected the glare of the sun, the sun that periodically dazzled his eyes as its bright rays peeked in and out through the fast-moving clouds, high up in the sky.

He arrived at the place where the shady trees grow. It was actually on the way to his hotel. That was where he ate dinner every night, sitting alone and ordering a different dish every time, much to the puzzlement of the waiting staff, who were used to a more transient clientele. The idea now was to visit the bookshops—his favourite haunts—but he stopped off first to sit in the cool shade of the trees by those newly planted flower beds, to watch the world go by.

Sitting there, Jack noticed a family from out of town. No doubt they were in the capital to visit relations. It was that time of year. A woman in a pink baggy T-shirt sat with an old lady with dyed black hair, while a couple of toddlers played happily around them, laughing and shouting, with pure delight written all over their faces. There was a tall thin man. He was dressed in a turquoise-coloured T-shirt and proudly carried his little daughter around in his arms, a broad smile lighting up his face.

The girl was looking at Jack, wondering in a childlike way, who this strange man was who was staring so attentively at her and her family. Her father was supporting her in his arms, and she was perched upright, almost as if she were trying to escape over his left shoulder. She looked around her at the enormous square, at the people milling around, some flying kites, others taking photographs. Just a few minutes before, the vast expanse of limestone paving stones had been shining brightly in the sun—as smooth as marble, or like the pure white sand on a tropical beach as the delicate waves of the sea recede, or the ice on a frozen lake on a clear crisp winter’s day. Now, she looked up at the lampposts, each crowned with a flamboyant set of lights, that dangled down like a bunch of swollen grapes. They would soon be lit, as the light in the square was beginning to fade.

The little girl looked at her siblings, laughing and running to and fro; at the old lady, her grandmother, chatting to the lady in the baggy pink shirt, her mother; then at her father who held her in his arms. All this time she was chewing happily away on a little piece of wood, like a cocktail stick.

She waved excitedly with her left hand at everything around her in the square as she chewed on the little stick, twizzling it around with the thumb and forefinger of her right hand. As she twizzled it between her fingers, the small, triangular yellow plastic flag that was glued to it, fluttered gently, periodically catching the light of the now fading sun.

^{Header image “Partial Eclipse” (2020) by Oliver Farry.}

How to cite: Bevan, Paul. “A Walk Around the Square.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 15 Apr. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/04/15/around-the-square.

Paul Bevan is a Sinologist, researcher, literary translator, and lecturer. From 2020 to 2023 he was Departmental Lecturer in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford and Retained Lecturer in Chinese at Wadham College. From 2018 to 2020 he worked as Christensen Fellow in Chinese Painting at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. He is currently an Associate Member of the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford, and a Research Associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies. His research focuses on popular fiction and the visual arts as they appeared in periodicals and magazines published in Shanghai during the first two decades of the twentieth century. He is also currently researching on guidebooks of nineteenth century Shanghai. Paul’s most recent book is a translation of The Adventures of Ma Suzhen: An Heroic Woman Takes Revenge in Shanghai (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). Another translation, Murder in the Maloo: A Tale of Old Shanghai is with the publisher, and is in the final stages of preparation. He has written two monographs: A Modern Miscellany: Shanghai Cartoon Artists, Shao Xunmei’s Circle and the Travels of Jack Chen, 1926-1938 (Brill, 2015), and Intoxicating Shanghai: Modern Art and Literature in Pictorial Magazines during Shanghai’s Jazz Age (Brill, 2020). John A. Crespi’s review of the latter calls attention to the translations embedded in the book: “Featured within the book’s densely informative analyses are translations of four modernist short stories. [These] in themselves contribute significantly to modern Chinese literary studies…”. [All contributions by Paul Bevan.]

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