Non-Fiction
A Paradise of My Own Making / Lu-Hai Liang
Image courtesy of the author.
Every veteran gamer has experienced the merging: the achievement of union with their avatar. I have felt it, this flow state. When you’ve focused long enough, the character on the screen will become flesh. The avatar is an appendage. Or you are there, inside the character's polygonal head, masterfully directing motions. It can be a one-ness so complete you forget your identity, your situation. The joy of it. The joy of being Mario, who jumps with such incredible alacrity, with his small hat. Or the pleasure of being Lara Croft: a woman whose legs and strafing ability feel more faithful than real-life legs. These characters inhabit virtual worlds, and in these virtual worlds are vivid terrains. In Skyrim, the Final Fantasy series, Horizon Zero Dawn, and others, you encounter natural sights: a threading path, almost white, moving through trees. Misty, Led Zeppelin-y mountains. A valley under aurora. Waving, incandescent seas.
In Assassin's Creed: Origins you traverse the landscapes of pharaonic Egypt during the final months of the Ptolemaic dynasty. You play as Bayek of Siwa, a warrior born in the famous oasis; home to the Oracle of Amun. Bayek is of above-average height and muscular, but not overly so. He has large eyes and an easy smile, like a cool uncle, which is reinforced by his affection for children. He is one of the last Medjay of Egypt, kind of like a traveling policeman or roving protector of the people, during a time when Greeks dominated the ancient state. What delighted me while playing was discovering how fecund the country is, with a variety greater than just desert and red rock. The climate is modelled on Egypt two thousand years ago, when the land was far less dry than it is today. It was well irrigated, less urbanised, lusher, and greener. Thus, you run through meadows of blue flowers, crouch in fields of shimmering crops, gallop your horse through riverine landscapes festooned with African megafauna and birds. It is not until you get out into the desert that the landscape changes, becomes the sand valleys of imagination. It is one of the least interesting aspects of the game, and occasionally sandstorms rise, lowering visibility while you play, blowing an orange mess across the TV screen.
I loved playing Origins; loved following Bayek on his quests. They reminded me of my own self-given narratives. And, although I am not a Medjay, nor was I born in an oracle village, I too felt like I had travelled far.
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I was born in the city of Guilin, in southern China, which lies in the subtropics and has karst hills that rise molehill-like in the rivers and rice fields. Numerous streams and rivers, and one good-sized river, the Lijiang, wend their way around the hills. Osmanthus, bamboo, and banyan punctuate. In Guilin, the local phrase for sunset is to describe the sun lowering beneath the hills. The limestone monoliths are full of character. Sometimes they tower into the sky; other times they are broad haunches that undulate across the horizon. Sometimes they look like distant cut-outs, as if in a wide theatre, backgrounding wisps of cloud and painted with bright, burning colours. My mother describes how, as a toddler, my uncle took me climbing, hiking up one of these hills, and I enjoyed it, but I have no memory of this experience.
I was moved to England at age five. I was taken to a very different land. For me it was a kind of wilderness, as I had not before seen such fields of green lawn. It was the unknown. The adventure of those skies, which wore such fine blue! The shapely clouds that puffed up, making the world look bigger and somehow more three-dimensional. Later, I would consume the survival programmes of Ray Mears on the BBC, nature documentaries, and science programs. These shows made me hungry for adventure and indelible experiences—a phrase that sounds too intangible.
At 23, I flew to Beijing on a one-way ticket. I had decided to move abroad, and adventure coupled with ambition called me. I knew exactly three people in Beijing, a city of 18 million or more. I spent six years in that grey environment, and eventually developed an increasingly tense relationship with the city, like a rope pulled tighter, more coiled. The lack of green spaces and varied terrain in China’s capital, which is a flat sprawl, was straining. My lifestyle was very free (I am a freelance) but the actual schedule of it felt unimaginative, infinitely dull, and lonely. I’d go to cafes, pay for overpriced coffee, and work on my laptop. Ambition may underwrite such a routine, but my drab, concrete surroundings depressed me. But consolation would arrive via the magic of a machine, in the form of the virtual world.
Beijing felt more like home once I transplanted my PlayStation 3. My videogames console, along with games, controllers, and cables, were safely packed into my luggage in England and moved to China. It was in my apartment, in Liangmaqiao, just within Beijing’s third ring road, where I roamed the wilderness, endlessly criss-crossing the vistas of Red Dead Redemption. A game set in 1911 in the American West, you play a retired gunslinger galloping over plains and scrub and navigating woodland. I lost hours in that world. But the console would often overheat, and I would go to the freezer to retrieve ice packs, which I delicately placed under and on top of the machine in a desperate bid to cool it. Finally, it died, but not before I was able to complete the game, its story. I would replace it with its successor, the PlayStation 4, and would continue on my journeys. And with these virtual worlds, my horizons grew.
On a cliffside buffeted by the sea, there is a grove of lemon trees I like to wander, where I walk among white flowers, grasses, and crates of stacked lemons. The lemon trees are haloed by the reflected sea-light and glow, as if citrus were phosphorescent. I can nearly smell the salt; hear the waves and touch the lemons.
These trees are in the game Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, the final episode of a series that sees you play as Nathan Drake, a treasure hunter. Early in the game once the story has kicked into gear there is level that requires you to steal a MacGuffin from a mansion perched on a cliff overlooking the sea. To reach the mansion you are required to hop from cliff to cliff, like a daredevil thief, but to break up this traversal you pass through a garden. Here I stop to appreciate the beauty offered, the lemons.
Later on, a major portion of Uncharted takes place on an unspecified tropical island, one that is modelled, from the verdant mountains thundering over the landscape, on Bora Bora. This part of the game involves lots of leaping, grasping, and climbing in the death-defying way only free climbers and videogame characters can. But sometimes here too I pause, allowing Nathan Drake—and me—to hang on a rockface indefinitely and linger over the sweeping sight of an island paradise. It recalls a passage from Herman Melville’s Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846), a book that made Melville famous long before his whale novel, in which he describes his ship’s approach to Nukuheva in the South Seas:
“[…] we were obliged to sail some distance along the shore, catching as we proceeded, short glimpses of blooming valleys, deep glens, waterfalls, and waving groves hidden here and there by projecting and rocky headlands, every moment opening to the view some new and startling scene of beauty.”
I know the appreciation is of something abstract; virtual. The landscape I see on the TV screen is a projection of polygons that resemble reality, but it is a virtual rendering. But how different is it from standing on a precipice and scanning the bottomless depths, the wide vista of the Grand Canyon, in Arizona? In Rebecca Solnit’s collection of essays about getting lost and the blue of distance, I gained this insight: “For [small] children, it’s the distance that holds little interest”. She records Gary Paul Nabhan’s observation, when he takes his children to the Grand Canyon and realises, “how much time adults spend scanning the landscape for picturesque panoramas and scenic overlooks. While the kids were on their hands and knees, engaged with what was immediately before them, we adults traveled by abstraction”. It is like the time I played with sand as a child, digging small mounds of sand on the street, a memory so distant I can only recollect the barest details. We dug the sand using these tiny plastic spoons. My band of children, hardly friends, just children who collected together because we were all children, would covet these multicoloured spoons. We wanted the blue one, or the yellow one, or the purple one. We would use these spoons, hardly fit for the task, to dig sand because we had to design a purpose for them and our instinct told us to dig the sand we found on the streets. This was a game with few rules, but a specific goal. Children everywhere, looking for pinecones or bottle caps, feathers, bones or daisies. And there is one kid, possibly a genius or soothsayer, who designs a kind of game around it and gives the whole project greater urgency. That abstraction is important. The abstraction is the path that leads us away from childhood into adulthood.
I remember a trip I took with a Filipina woman (I shall call her K) where we journeyed to Siquijor. We rode an overnight bus that wound its way southerly on Cebu, a long thin island with a hilly central spine, one of the more populated regions of the Philippine archipelago, to board a ferry. We ferried to a larger landmass called Negros, some 20 kilometres away, where we got off. From Dumaguete—one of the “7 Best Places to Retire Around the World” according to Forbes —we boarded another ship for Siquijor, a small island that’s famous among Filipinos for witches and mystical traditions.
We stayed in a large “glamping” tent which K had booked for a few nights, before the outside shower got flooded and we switched accommodation. We were infatuated with each other. On the island we downed cocktails and feasted on chicken and fish, and while the rain pattered down in the morning, we made love in the tent. At night, her hand reached for mine in the darkness. We went to beaches and while she read or walked along the shore, I would swim (she cannot swim).
In the sea I saw corals and creatures opening and closing and opening their mouths; I saw anemonefish facing me while I smiled at them. I remember, when the sun was lowering, swimming backwards and ducking my head under the surface to watch my legs kick, and the way the water accentuated the sun. It looked just like the level in Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End when you pilot Nathan Drake around tropical islets and you send him diving for treasures. The underwater world is drenched in saturated hues, with vast sunbeams. While I swam in Siquijor I found myself thinking of a video game. A cathedral of light in the undersea. It felt like I had achieved union.
My mind was quelled by the enjoyment, deep and sustained, of the physical. Days later, we went to see a faith healer. They live in the hills, so we made our way in a hired tricycle. As we climbed, I saw palms, a great profusion, then rainforest trees, capacious and heavy. Moving through that canopy, as our tricycle carved upward through the hills, it felt like reality contained narrative propulsion.
When finally we reached the faith healer, she turned out to be a 50-something woman with a couple of small children, her nieces, running around her timber stilt-house. A broken karaoke machine stood outside, its blue paint flecking. In her yard chickens pecked under laundry hung up between palms. She spoke with K in their native Visayan language. I asked her about witches—“We are not witches”, she said calmly, interpreted by K. “We attack witches”.
Soon after, K and I left her house feeling vaguely disappointed. I guess we both expected something more, greater magic and ritual perhaps, and we didn’t get it. Our driver drove us on, heading toward a lookout point. Before we reached the landmark, I spotted a sign that said, “Rainforest Garden”, and I asked to stop. K and I got out and climbed a path that led into the forest, where on both sides was a cultivated garden of local herbs. We started descending. Once we reached the bottom of the path, I felt like we had entered a jungle. Heavy triangular shadows, huge ferns glading the sun, and creepers curling around trunks.
I will not resort to cliché and say that the rainforest was full of life. No. We heard silence but there was a swaying; a beat to it all. The wind moved the tops of the trees and the energy channelled down. But the whole affair (nature; forest) was not there to provide anything. The vines, the creepers, the trees did not care about us. And yet, in a moment of quiet, mind and body united, attuned to the external world, and the rainforest felt full of yearning. It is an awe that has stayed with me, like a chasm, almost like a wound. We stood amid the forest, still.