Screen adaptation brings 1930s Beijing to life

Author's work so detailed it could be used as guide to old city

Clad in a T-shirt, a sweater and Converse shoes, 79-year-old Zhang Beihai seems much younger. He is energetic and alert when speaking about his novel, Xia Yin, which is now being adapted into a movie by director Jiang Wen.

"The novel fulfills the dream of a lifetime," says Zhang.

The novel was first published on the Chinese mainland in 2007, and its latest edition, together with a collection of essays about New York, was published in a new book A Taste of New York in April.

Set in Beijing, Xia Yin is based on stories of Chinese martial arts heroes during the Japanese invasion of China in the 1930s.

"Over the years, I came to realize that the setting of the story pays homage to my early life in Beijing, an unforgettable part of my memories," he adds.

Zhang started working on the story after his retirement in New York in the 1990s. It took him six years to complete.

For the first two years, he invested time and energy on collecting material and doing research.

He is now an expert on the history, culture and life of the city, where he lived more than half a century ago, and which is half a world away, and he is able to draw maps of old Beijing.

While preparing to write he paid special attention to language - the Beijing dialects and slang.

He used several books to help him with this. They included The Gallant Maid by Wen Kang, which has a lot of Beijing slang, and Camel Xiangzi by Lao She, which contains descriptions of old Beijing.

Chinese author Ah Cheng says Zhang's novel is so detailed in its description of old Beijing that it can be used as a guidebook. "Zhang brings something surprising to the martial arts novel scene."

Zhang, who was born in Beijing in 1936, moved to Taiwan with his family in 1949.

After graduating from National Taiwan Normal University, he went to the United States in 1962 to do further studies in comparative literature at the University of Southern California.

Zhang says: "In the 1960s, the US was going through a huge transformation. Along with the civil-rights campaigns of the 1960s, the anti-war movement was also bubbling, attracting members from college campuses, middle-class suburbs, the labor unions and government institutions.

"Everything was new to me and I was shocked and excited."

After earning a master's degree, Zhang did a variety of jobs - from being a clerk in a bank and a deliveryman at florist shops, to working at gas stations.

His life of unstable jobs ended in 1972 when he found work as a translator at the United Nations and moved to New York, where he started to write.

He published several Chinese-language collections of essays about New York. Thanks to his sensible and insightful observations, his essays about daily life in New York, including subway trains and the city's underbelly, earned him a name in China.

As an old New Yorker, he has been the host for many Chinese artists.

Hong Kong filmmaker Stanley Kwan used his house as a setting for his film Full Moon in New York, and Taiwan musician Bobby Chen featured him in a song, Old Hipster.

Writer Xu Zhiyuan describes him as cosmopolitan.

"Like Ernest Hemingway, he wrote about his home country far away from it, adopting a peculiar view," he says.

lijing2009@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily Africa Weekly 11/27/2015 page26)