I just finished reading "The Vagrants" by Yiyun Li. Like the book I read before it, "The Corpse Walker" by Liao Yiwu, the plight of many characters involved was both depressing and familiar in theme, if not content. Looking over a shelf of China books this morning, I realized that most of them have that in common. 

Then after lunch today, I read a Spiegel interview of Liao, who fled China earlier this year. (His account of literally walking out of his homeland is here.) His newest work, just published in Germany, is about his time in Chinese prison. It was pretty dark. A partial description from the Spiegel piece: "He (Liao) was kept in a cell near the latrines, and from there taken to his interrogations. The guards beat him with electric batons, one time delivering 100 blows in a single interrogation, another time for 20 minutes without pause."

At the end of making my way through descriptions of Liao's mistreatment, I felt more than a little bit down.

I told myself: There are 1.3 billion people in China, and these are just a handful of stories. Most Chinese people are not dissidents and have normal lives in which intimidation by state security is not a feature. The past few decades brought tremendous gains to China. More than half a billion people have been lifted out of extreme poverty. And so on.

Still, the stories by people like Liao stuck. 

I turned to a video I'd seen recently by Jordan Pouille, a French journalist and a friend of mine. The clip begins with the portrait of Mao Zedong on Tiananmen Square and a dreary cityscape from the back of a taxi. It's a journey that any Beijing resident could describe.

He rides into the diplomatic neighborhood where both our offices are located, and watches as a group of People's Armed Police (either starting or ending a shift of standing guard outside foreign embassies) walk by in lockstep, beneath the gold of gingko trees. Then the crush of the Beijing subway and the tired look on a woman's face. 

But Jordan turned from that point to a broader field of vision, what he describes as "my Beijing, my city, with sorrow and happiness, with colors and grey, with dust and glitter, with concrete and old stones, with work and laziness, with wealth and poverty, with shopping frenzy and spirituality."

It was just what I needed:

My Beijing from jordan pouille on Vimeo.