Beihai Park – Kate Xu
March 2, 2026
Beihai Park is a park in northern Beijing. Beihai Park is now hiring security guards.
*
There was a duck with teeth in Beihai. The duck was called the Duck.
The Duck came to apply at the start of autumn and received the acceptance call the next day.
Beihai Park had a lake called the Northern Sea and an island with a white Tibetan-style lama pagoda.
The Duck loved reading Richard Brautigan and went to the nightclub next to the famous Peking duck restaurant to watch pole dancing. The Duck liked to sit in the back, drinking Tsingtao from the bottle, watching the women spin. He never talked to them. He just watched. The women knew him. He was polite. He always tipped.
On his first day of work, the Duck wore a stiff gray officer cap and stuck out his tongue while greeting the security captain.
The captain was holding a vacuum-packed bag of pickled snacks. He looked at the Duck’s glistening pink tongue and thought of the girl he had slept with the day before. That girl’s tongue was like a flat, pink peach-shaped gummy coated in sugar crystals. The captain’s lower belly felt swollen. He gnawed on a bagged braised duck tongue, crunching loudly on the cartilage. Drops of grease dripped from the corner of his lips.
The captain told the Duck his patrol area was the island in the center of Beihai Lake and the bridge connecting the island to the southern bank of the park, but the White Pagoda was not within the Duck’s duties. The White Pagoda was not within anyone’s duties. The Duck thought the White Pagoda was a lighthouse that glowed in the dark. The Duck was a day-shift guard. It never occurred to the Duck that Beihai Lake was too small for ships that might hit reefs and sink. There were only red, yellow, and blue plastic tourist paddle boats shaped like swans and dragons. Children screamed on them in the summer. The Duck liked the sound of screaming children. He found it refreshing.
*
The Duck cared about many people in this world, like pole dancers.
“Performers need an audience.” The Duck said. “You consume, I consume. The government is calling for us to stimulate the economy.”
“The country is going through a recession.”
Someone asked the duck, why—when there are so many places to spend money near Beihai Park, like the famous Peking duck restaurant, does he still choose to watch women dance on the pole? Yesterday, they invited him to eat steamed pancakes with sweet bean sauce after work, but he said no. Why is he always so alone?
The Duck looked at the roasted ducks impaled upright on poles behind the restaurant window, dancing and spinning in the oven with their eyes closed.
“Sometimes loneliness chooses me, sometimes I choose loneliness,” the Duck said. “It’s a consensual transaction, like hiring a prostitute.”
The Duck began to recite:
“Loneliness is a fart
smells like a marriage between
an avocado and a fish head.”
Someone laughed. The Duck didn’t. He had meant it.
*
The economy was bad in the winter. Security started to lay people off. The White Pagoda looked even whiter.
The Duck felt that the pagoda gained three to five pounds with each snowfall. But he didn’t dare tell it to go on a diet, because if he did, he would be fired for body-shaming and emotionally abusing a colleague in the workplace.
It was the best time of the year. The winter in Beihai Park was cold, and the lake’s surface froze thickly. The leadership was pleased because now the park could charge an extra three yuan per person for those who wanted to skate. Then they’d set up a folding deck chair on the shore, counting money, watching men, women, old, and young slip and fall on the ice.
The Duck wasn’t laid off, but he got his first night shift.
It was the Duck’s first time seeing the White Pagoda at night. The White Pagoda did not glow in the dark. The ghosts skating on the lake couldn’t see clearly, so they fell one after another like dominoes.
It had just snowed that afternoon. This year’s first snow was weak, like a premature baby. The footprints from the tourists were erased by the snow. A frail snow began to drift down again. Slap, slap. Walking toward the island, the Duck left a long trail of webbed footprints. The Duck stopped in the middle of the bridge, the fat pagoda standing ahead. He had walked for a long time, but the pagoda still seemed far away, as if he would never reach it. The snow continued. In the snow, the White Pagoda began chanting lama sutras.
空, 空, 空 (Kong, kong, kong: Emptiness, emptiness, emptiness).
The snow was getting heavier.
The Duck thought about the ghosts spinning on the ice. He thought about the pole dancers spinning in the nightclub. He thought about the ducks spinning behind the restaurant window. He opened his mouth. Snow landed on his pink tongue. The pagoda chanted. The Duck stood still.
The Duck turned around and walked back. Slap, slap. The snow erased him as he went.
*
Winter in Beihai was cold. The Duck fell ill. His head hurt; his hands and feet were icy cold.
The Duck had to take a day off. He went to a traditional Chinese doctor wearing only a sweatshirt. It was cold.
The doctor wore a white coat over a down vest, also white. As he reached out to take the Duck’s pulse, he was bitten fiercely by the cold of the Duck’s hand.
“Oh my! Your hands are so sick, such a cold constitution. That’s not right, ducks are warm-blooded. How are your hands colder than ice? Why are you dressed so little? Oh my!”
“Are we going to discuss the issue of exploitation here?” The Duck looked at the doctor’s down vest.
The doctor scratched his head. “You should get some medicine then.” He said.
The Duck paid five hundred yuan for three packets of herbs. Then he added another two hundred for a course of heat-acupuncture treatment.
When he turned his head, the doctor had already put on a mask and pointed for the Duck to lie face-down.
“These tiny little needles won’t hurt at all, just like an ant bite,” the doctor said.
“Do you know bullet ants?” The Duck asked. “When they bite you, your whole body trembles and sweats. It’s not fatal, just excruciating. You’d rather be shot.”
“Have you ever been bitten?” The doctor asked.
“No, I read it in an encyclopedia.” The Duck said.
“Get on.” The doctor patted the bed. The Duck obediently got on the bed and lay prone.
The Duck heard the clicking of the metal. He imagined the doctor pulling out a long needle. Then he felt an icy alcohol-soaked cotton ball press against his neck.
The Duck felt a tiny ant begin biting his neck, then his head.
The Duck’s head slowly lost sensation. He guessed the ant’s toxin had begun to work. Then the Duck’s hands and feet began to grow warm. Soon his stomach grew warm as well. He guessed the heat-acupuncture was taking effect.
We got hot and died.
The Duck was doused in boiling water. Feathers fell away, the skin tightening around the fat.
The Duck was impaled on a steel pole, placed in the oven. ZAP!
“I’m dead. This is practically my sexiest look,” the Duck said.
My sexual image
Isn’t worth a shit.
“I’m dead,” the Duck said. “I quit.”
The Duck was taken out of the oven, brushed with several layers of syrup, then put back in. The syrup was maltose. It made his skin glisten.
The Duck was taken down, wheeled in on a small cart, and presented before the table. The leaders were having a dinner party. The chef stood behind the cart, performing. He sliced the Duck piece by piece with a knife longer than his arm. The knife was shiny. The leaders were shiny too.
The Duck no longer speaks.
In the main seat of the table sat the head leader. He was fat and had the tender, fair skin of a baby. The chair under him trembled the second he sat, as if it had been hit by a white pagoda.
The sliced Peking duck was served with steamed pancakes and sweet bean sauce. While the leaders chewed, the greasy oil from the crisp duck skin squirted out and went straight into the fat head leader’s eye.
The fat head leader blinked. The fat head leader rubbed his eye.
The fat head leader took out his phone and dialed HR’s number.
“The first thing you do tomorrow morning is to cut fifteen percent off the goddamn security department’s pay! Understand?” The fat head leader yelled.
The Duck no longer speaks, but he understood.
*
Beihai Park is a park in northern Beijing. Beihai Park is now hiring security guards.
The Duck came to apply.
The ice had melted. The swan boats were back. Children screamed again. The captain recognized the Duck. “How are you?” The captain asked.
“Couldn’t be better.” The Duck said. “For spring is here,
I do not dream
of death.” He smiled like a sunflower.
The captain saw two rows of pure white teeth shining under the spring sun.
*This story used quotes from poems by Richard Brautigan.
Poems:
DECEMBER 30
THE FEVER MONUMENT
MILK FOR THE DUCK
RETURN OF THE RIVERS