Yes, this place does indeed exist

I first noticed this place while walking down the Dongzhimen Dajie after getting off the bus following my National Day Holiday visit to Beihai Park. “Waiting for Godot” is, of course, the title of a very famous play by Samuel Becket, who was born in Ireland, but lived in Paris for most of his life. I love the photo of Becket below, as it shows him doing what most people spend lots of their time doing in Paris, namely sitting in cafés.

Beckett moved to Paris in the late 1920s, after graduating from Dublin's University College, and wrote a number of novels before the Second World War. One has of them has the very interesting title, MORE PRICKS THAN KICKS. Beckett remained in Paris after the Germans occupied France in 1940 and worked for the French Underground as a messenger and translator.

In 1942 one of the members of their resistance cell was arrested and revealed the names of the other members of Beckett's resistance cell to the Gestapo. Beckett and his girlfriend escaped literally minutes before the Gestapo showed up at his doorstep and spent the rest of the war hiding in southern France (these two lived together for decades before marrying and then divorced quickly after tying the knot).

“Waiting for Godot” was written and performed in Paris shortly after the Second War. Beckett wrote the play in French and translated it into English. This work made him famous overnight and he went on to write other, even bleaker plays like “Endgame” and “Happy Days.” “Waiting for Godot" is a play in which nothing really happens—two tramps named Didi and Gogo (or Vladmir and Estragon) are waiting on a road by a tree (the tree is the only stage prop) for a fellow named Godot. Unfortunately, this Godot chap never shows up. The most famous exchange between the two actors is, “Let's go/We can’t/Why not?/We're waiting for Godot/Oh!”

They thus pass the time discussing sundry subjects, like the merits of auto-erotic strangulation, and are briefly visited by the play's two other characters, Pozzo and Lucky. The former literally has the latter on leash, and Lucky spends several minutes rapidly spewing out some meaningless and unintelligible blather. That was Beckett's way of heaping scorn on highly refined, hyper-intellectual, but ultimately meaningless discourse (he would have had field with the likes of Jacques Derrida and other so-called “deconstructionists”).

The Chinese characters in the first photo are a falling and rising tone “deng”, rising tone “de”, first tone “ge”, and a first tone “duo.” The 等得 character combination means “waiting for,” while 戈多, or a flat tone “ge” and “duo,” is a transliteration of the name “Godot.”

Because Mandarin is a character-based language, when the Chinese want to write out a foreign proper name of a country or object, like a country, they typically select a character combination that sounds like the way the name is said in its native language. Thus the combinations are often nonsensical—the Chinese “Godot” translated word for word means “dart/lance” (戈 is the dart/lance radical) “many/much” (多).

My favorite example of this is the Chinese way of writing the common Russian given name of “Dmitri.” Last January I attended a New Year's performance by the China National Ballet with a Chinese friend and the program included music by Dmitri Shostakovich. We noticed that “Dmitri” was transliterated as 德 (rising tone “de”) 米 (falling and rising tone “mi”) 特 (falling tone “te”) 里 (falling and rising tone “li”). Translated word for word, this means “Virtue rice special inside.”

Several days after first noticing the café, I paid the place a visit. It's a pretty cool establishment. In keeping with the existentialist thrust of Beckett's plays, the walls are all black, with small, scratch-like graffiti covering their surfaces, while the interior is dimly lit by a few floodlights hanging for a myriad of pipes below the ceiling. I found a comfortable chair, switched on a reading lamp beside it, and spent a very enjoyable two hours reading and drinking coffee. I certainly plan to return and other laowi and Chinese people living in or visiting Dongzhimen might want to go there as well.