TINTIN À PÉKIN

Beijing, 14 August 2012

To get to our favourite cafés, my wife and I cross the bridge which spans my piece of canal and then walk all the way down Sanlitun road to the South Village. It’s one of the places in Beijing where many Embassies are located. It’s very green and leafy, quiet, a really pleasant place to walk.

Our usual route takes us past the Belgian Embassy. It has nothing notable about it except for one rather odd thing. Set up outside the Embassy’s perimeter wall, about two metres above the ground and facing the road, lit up at night, is a large picture of Tintin. I tried to take a photo of it for this posting,  but was warned off by the Chinese guard at the gate. So I took a photo in secret, stopping in front of the picture and pretending to take a call but actually clicking a photo! I’m rather pleased with myself even though the photo is skew.

Tintin aficionados will immediately recognise this as a scene from Le Lotus Bleu, the fifth album of the series and first published in 1936. It comes from a moment in the story when Tintin, who has been hiding in an opium den in Shanghai to pick up information on the Japanese villain Mitsuhirato, is making his getaway. It’s quite a cheerful picture; Tintin has a slight smile as he jumps out, and the vase has a design of children carrying a paper dragon through the streets. I show here the original picture in the album.

So famous is this picture that it is one of a number of scenes from Tintin which have been turned into collectible statuettes.

As I say, I find it slightly odd that the Belgian Embassy, an institution I would have thought anxious to project a sense of its own importance and probity, should decide to put up a picture from a comics album in so public a fashion.  But if it is going to do it, a picture of Tintin, who was drawn by Hergé, no doubt the best known Belgian in the world, taken from a story that takes place in China, sounds like a good choice.

Apart from smiling at this picture seen in such incongruous surroundings, I was also intrigued by it. Before coming to China, I had checked what books were banned here. I had read that Le Lotus Bleu was one of them because it gave too sympathetic a reading of the Kuomintang. But the Belgian Embassy’s bold move suggested that the ban was no longer in place, if it had ever been. Or perhaps the Chinese Government simply didn’t believe that any Chinese walking by would know the story and so recognise the picture. Which is probably true and to my mind quite sad. The Chinese are missing something.

Le Lotus Bleu is of course the most Chinese of Tintin’s adventures, but Tintin en Amérique, first published in 1932, also has strong Chinese echoes for me. The first time my wife and I went to Shanghai, as we walked from the Bund to Renmin Square we found ourselves among buildings from the thirties. And all of a sudden we found ourselves at the crossing of Fuzhou and Sichuan Roads where there are four identical buildings on each corner. This picture is of one of them, the Metropole Hotel:

… and suddenly I was in Chicago in 1932, watching Tintin roar by in a Deusenberg, chasing Al Capone’s men!

Oh no! Just around the corner other members of the gang were waiting to gun him down! …

… I miss my Tintin albums. They are sitting in a packing box in the dark of a warehouse in Vienna, waiting for us to come back to Europe to retrieve them. I’m nearly 60 but I’m not ashamed to say that I always got a lift when I pulled one out of the bookshelf and settled down on the couch for a good read.

And I miss the times on that same couch when I read the albums to my young children, translating as I went along. How they laughed at the Fat Man Full of Soup! A minor character in the earlier parts of L’Oreille Cassée, I should clarify, who was called such by a parrot and who thought it was the carrier of the parrot who had dared so insult him. I miss the simple joys which suffused those years, as we watched our children grow. Perhaps one day I will have grandchildren sitting with me on the couch laughing again at the Fat Man Full of Soup.

__________________
photo credits
Tintin picture outside Embassy: my picture
Scenes from the album: my picture
Tintin coming out of the vase: www.1000-sabords.fr
Hotel Metropole: my photo
Tintin in Chicago: bd-blogeur.blogspot.com