by Xiaolu Guo
Failure. Success. Did I see my own life in these terms? In some ways, my life had just begun. Perhaps there would be something there that could be called mine, and ours.
Rote Beete / Beetroots
– We say two hearts beat as one. That’s the reason I grow two beetroots.
– Two hearts beet as one?
Just before you went back to Germany to complete the farm’s purchase, I became ill. I was feverish for a few days. Especially when the weather changed and the evenings got dark, I took to my bed, watching the child tottering and climbing around the flat. I didn’t feel good. Then you returned from Germany after a short stay. You brought back a signed contract, and a package of goodies from your mother.
‘What is this?’ I opened the wrapping. ‘I hope it’s not gingerbread!’
‘It’s called Bethmännchen, a pastry made from marzipan with almond and sugar. Usually my mother cooks it for Christmas, but this time she made it especially for you.’
I said nothing, unwrapping the German marzipan, and taking a bite into the soft mass. It was very sweet, tasted like red bean buns made for toothless people in China.
‘Where will she grow up?’ I swallowed the soft cake, and could not help voicing my anxiety. ‘I mean, she can’t be on a farm all the time. Where will she go to school? Which language will she speak?’
‘Don’t worry. She’ll learn German very easily. Children do. And they make friends quickly.’
But I was afraid I would never learn to speak German. Sometimes I thought I should take the baby back to China. I could find a job there. But the thought of returning to China made me feel disempowered and physically ill. I had been uprooted. I wouldn’t be able to survive if I tried to transplant myself back again.
You listened to me quietly. You didn’t want to indulge in my strange sadness. You said:
‘Guess what. You’ll love our farmhouse. The moment we signed the contract, my father took the keys and called the builders! I’ve never seen him acting so quickly and so enthusiastically.’
I looked over the German contract, a thick wad of pages. I felt a little better. I thought perhaps your father was fulfilling his nostalgic wish by helping you to get a Lower Saxony farm, and you were fulfilling your fantasy by projecting our future onto that piece of land. What about me though? Would I fulfil any of my desires through this project? I’d find out.
It took nearly six months before the farmhouse was ready. Finally we moved to our new home in north-western Germany – the Garden of the Waste Land. No, actually, for you it was already the Garden of Earthly Delights. We had a party to celebrate our marriage and our child with your family and their close friends. A few of your German cousins turned up. Of course I didn’t have any relatives with me – none of my aunts had a passport. I wore a red dress. A short one with black dots, Western-style. The child also wore a red dress, but a Chinese one. She had learned a few German words from you. Mutter, das Mutter, she pointed at me in front of a few guests.
The young apple trees your parents planted were not sprouting yet, but the rock garden you had created was taking shape. Our house was far from finished, but at least we now had windows and a roof. The kitchen was in progress, and we had to cook on a tiny portable stove for the time being. The Zen pond was planned and tons of soil were dug out, but there were problems with the positioning of the sewage and water pipes, which you tried to explain to me a few times. So it remained a hole at the back of our house, gathering rainwater. I often worried that the child would fall in.
Like a farmer’s wife, I made a few wooden frames in the garden, and planted beans, tomatoes and artichokes. You were planting potatoes and beetroots – not what I would have chosen to grow in my Chinese garden. For me, potatoes were boring, and beetroots were associated with cold, bleak northern landscapes.
‘What’s so good about beetroots?’ I asked.
‘You southerners don’t understand them. For me, a good lunch is a red beet soup with a beetroot pudding!’
I was taken aback. So for all this time we had been together, I hadn’t made you one single good lunch? All the lunches I cooked for you were wrong for your appetite. Had I been a bad wife from the beginning?
‘Well, if these beetroots ever grow, you can make your own beet soup and puddings, I won’t. I’m not a sad northern German who can only grow things his grandparents have grown before.’
The child on my lap repeated my word: sssaaaaad, sssaaaaad, sssaaaaad.
‘Okay, don’t take it so seriously.’ You looked at her, mimicking her speech. Then you added: ‘But don’t you know that Venus, the goddess of love, eats beetroots to enhance her beauty. So you’d better eat some of my beets when they’re ready!’
I didn’t respond.
‘Anyway, we say two hearts beat as one. That’s the reason I grow two beetroots here.’
‘Two hearts beet as one?’
This didn’t sound like something you would normally say. Perhaps I should study the essence of beetroots properly, and reconsider their importance.
Struggle
– Why do you want to return to Brexit Britain? Everyone is struggling there.
– So at least I can feel my struggle.
It was very quiet on the farm. The patterns of my sleep had changed. Evenings arrived early. After the child went to bed it took me a long time to fall asleep. In the morning I woke up early, earlier than both of you. So early that I could hear the birds starting their very first dawn chorus. Sometimes at four, sometimes at five. So quiet, I could hear the woods shivering in the distance, and the trains beginning their first morning commute from a station half a mile away from our farm. It was so still, I could hear your beetroots growing. Quiet, simply too quiet. Where were the people? I couldn’t see myself staying here – with the peace around me becoming like the silence of a graveyard. I was a Chinese woman, who had grown up in a hot and populated southern town where activity permeated every corner of daily life. After only a few months of living in this valley, like a fish out of water, I was gasping for life.
One morning, we sat by the dining table, and discussed plans to move back to London. This was not all of a sudden. It had been lingering in the air from the North Sea, on the mountain covered by green nettles, down the valley blanketed by fog, and around the Zen pond, which had never been finished. Once again you asked me the same question:
‘Why do you want to return to Brexit Britain? Everyone is struggling there.’
‘So at least I can feel my struggle.’
‘You don’t like the peace and comfort here?’
‘I do. But I feel my life has no weight here. I am of no use to anyone, except to you and the child.’
‘But I was going to get two ponies and a dachshund for you.’
I fell silent. How could I explain my feelings to you? I thought of the German word you used: spüren. It is this feeling of life I missed, somehow. On this Lower Saxony farm, even though all sorts of natural life were around me, I did not feel the vigour of life. I wanted other kinds of life. I wanted movement. I wanted the unexpected. I missed the human world, the feeling of struggling and living among other people.
‘But you didn’t like London before,’ you reminded me. ‘You said you felt very lonely when you first arrived.’
That was true. But that was my past life. My life as an absolute foreigner in a foreign land. Still, London was the place I had begun my adult life, the place I had finally realised that I had forever lost my parents and my home country.
‘Are you sure about your decision?’ You studied me, your hands hugging your arms.
‘Not totally sure. But one thing is sure – I can’t live on this cold farm just now. Maybe when I am older.’ Then I added: ‘It might take me years to know where we will end up.’
‘Or, perhaps never.’
You went for a long walk, alone. I waited. Firs
t I didn’t wait, I went to check the plants. I thought I should water your beetroots and my beans and artichokes. The hose was long, and entangled like a pile of snakes. It took a while for the water to come through the hose onto the garden. An hour passed, the garden was wet and the shoots were glistering, and I began to prepare lunch. But you hadn’t returned. I fed the child and took her to the bed for an afternoon nap. I waited, wondering where you were and why you hadn’t told me you would be away for so long. Finally I heard footsteps on the gravel outside. Your boots crushing the pebbles. You appeared in front of the door. When you came in, you took off your muddy boots and said:
‘Okay. We’ll move back to London, and we’ll find a house near the canal.’
At last we had made a decision. We would come back to the farm sometimes, especially when I missed the birds’ morning chorus. England would be our Western Chamber, and the German farm would be our Eastern Chamber. At least this way, you said, you would feel better, knowing there was a wild land waiting for us to return to, if the city became too hard to live in one day.
*
Years later, you asked me if I felt I made the right decision. By then, we had already found an old lock-keeper’s cottage by the canal in Camden and we had managed to buy the downstairs apartment. I had grown a grapevine by my window, which went up the walls and produced tiny grapes in the summer. I replied, what decision? I thought we had made the decision right in the beginning, even right before we had met. It was on the day shortly after I arrived in Britain, when I walked along the canal and sat on the chopped tree trunk by that mysterious lock-keeper’s inn. The decision was made without me or you knowing it. And yet, I still had not met you then. You were there, somewhere not far from the water, looking in my direction, without seeing me and without my seeing you.
Acknowledgements
My heartfelt thanks to: Poppy Hampson, Amy Hundley, Rebecca Carter, Clara Farmer, Fran Owen, Mari Yamazaki, Greg Clowes, Morgan Entrekin, Deb Seager, Justina Batchelor, Claire Paterson, Kirsty Gordon, Juliet Brooke, Cullen Stanley, Carol Gluck, Deborah Levy, Karen Van Dyck, Mark Mazower, Marie d’Origny, Susan Leslie Boynton, Zosha S. Di Castri, Loren Wolfe, Jenny Davidson, Tash Aw, Kaiama L. Glover, Grant Rosenberg, Eve Grinstead, Esther Allen, Patricia White, Fiona Doloughan, Audrey Chapuis, Susan Bernofsky, Kerri Arsenault, John Freeman, Gareth Evans, Peter Florence, Oliver Lubrich, William Wadsworth, Eugenia Lean, Jane Gaines, Peter Connor, Emily Sun, Eileen Gillooly and Lisette Oblitas.
My love to: Anne Rademacher, Lambert Heinlein, Philippe Ciompi, Joan Dupont, Karen Margolis, Thomas Schliesser, Simon Chambers, Simon de Reyer, Jenny Ash, Pang Choi, Vanni Bianconi, Pamela Casey, Therese Henningsen, and, of course, wonderful Stephen and wicked Moon.
My gratitude to: Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination; Abigail R. Cohen Fellowship; Columbia University and Baruch College in New York.
Notes on Citations
1. ‘Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other . . .’ A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, by Roland Barthes, translated by Richard Howard, Vintage 2002.
2. ‘How swiftly it dries, the dew on the garlic-leaf . . .’ An ancient burial song from China, author unknown, rearranged in translation by the author.
3. ‘Raindrops keep fallin’ on my head’ by Hal David and Burt Bacharach, for the 1969 film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
4. ‘Ye Yu Ji Bei – Night Rains, Greet the North’, by Tang Dynasty poet, Li Shangyin, liberal translation by the author.
5. ‘The awesome but not painful idea that she (mother) had not been everything to me . . .’ Journal de Deuil, by Roland Barthes, translated by Richard Howard, Hill & Wang 2012 edition.
6. ‘The murmuring mass of an unknown language constitutes a delicious protection . . .’ Empire of Signs, by Roland Barthes, translated by Richard Howard, Anchor Books 1983.
7. ‘The future’s in the air . . .’ Lyrics from ‘Wind of Change’ by the Scorpions, a German band formed in 1965.