Once Upon a Time in the East

by Xiaolu Guo

  | CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Xiaolu Guo

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  The Past is a Foreign Country

  Part IShitang: Tales of the East China Sea

  After I Was Born

  Grandfather

  Village of Shitang

  Grandmother

  The Goddess of Mercy

  Swordfish

  The Hui

  Pirates of the East China Sea

  An Unusual Visit

  The Child Bride

  The Drowning British

  DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane)

  The Medicine Master

  The Heart Sutra

  The Taoist Monk Speaks

  Tourists on the Beach

  Madame White Snake

  Meeting My Parents

  Part IIWenling: Life in a Communist Compound

  Wenling

  My Mother

  Iron Plum and Red Lantern

  My Father

  Class Enemies Getting Married

  Shaolin Kung Fu

  Life in a Communist Compound

  The Trial of Madame Mao

  Where did we come from, Father?

  Becoming a Young Pioneer

  Life as a Propaganda Painter

  The Blood Eater

  The Four Modernisations

  Sex Education

  Seeing Grandmother Again

  Mother-in-Law

  Farewell, Shitang

  Stop Crying! Every Girl has to Go Through This

  All the Aunts

  A Poet from America

  Misty Poetry with Optimism

  Five Thousand Miles of Coastline Expedition

  While Father was Away

  Adolescence

  Abortion

  Confucianism vs Feminism

  1989

  Ticket to the Film World

  Leaving the South

  Part IIIBeijing: The Whirlpool of Life

  Away From Home

  Beijing

  By a Waterfall, There Are Swimmers …

  Girls in the Dark

  East Village

  Smells Like Teen Spirit

  The Western Boyfriend

  The Revisit

  The Quiet American Again

  Truffaut Legacy

  Post-University Life and Censorship

  Becoming a Soap Opera Writer

  Cancer

  Leaving China

  Part IVEurope: In the Land of Nomads

  Arrival

  Beaconsfield

  London

  South-West Wales

  Adopting a New Language

  To be Published and to be Known

  The Curse of Being a Writer

  Cutting up Nationality

  An Old Couple in a Land of Wonders

  An Arranged Marriage

  A Colonial Education

  A French Pilgrim

  When in Rome

  Father’s Final Departure

  Part VIn the Face of Birth and Death

  A Mother

  The Final Visit

  The Return

  The Circle of Life

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Xiaolu Guo meets her parents for the first time when she is almost seven. They are strangers to her.

  When she is born her parents hand her over to a childless peasant couple in the mountains. Aged two, and suffering from malnutrition on a diet of yam leaves, they leave Xiaolu with her illiterate grandparents in a fishing village on the East China Sea. It’s a strange beginning.

  A Wild Swans for a new generation, Once Upon a Time in the East takes Xiaolu from a run-down shack to film school in a rapidly changing Beijing, navigating the everyday peculiarity of modern China: censorship, underground art, Western boyfriends. In 2002 she leaves Beijing on a scholarship to study in Britain. Now, after a decade in Europe, her tale of East to West resonates with the insight that can only come from someone who is both an outsider and at home.

  Xiaolu Guo’s extraordinary memoir is a handbook of life lessons. How to be an artist when censorship kills creativity and the only job you can get is writing bad telenovela scripts. How to be a woman when female babies are regularly drowned at birth and sexual abuse is commonplace. Most poignantly of all: how to love when you’ve never been shown how.

  About the Author

  Xiaolu Guo was born in south China. She studied film at the Beijing Film Academy and published six books in China before she moved to London in 2002. The English translation of Village of Stone was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Her first novel written in English, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, and 20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth, published in 2008, was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize. Her most recent novel, I Am China, was longlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. In 2013 she was named as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. Xiaolu has also directed several award-winning films including She, A Chinese and a documentary about London, Late at Night. She lives in London and Berlin.

  Also by Xiaolu Guo

  Village of Stone

  A Concise Chinese–English Dictionary for Lovers

  20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

  UFO in Her Eyes

  Lovers in the Age of Indifference

  I Am China

  For Marguerite Duras,

  who gave me the faith to become an artist

  during my low and hard years of struggle in South China

  ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE EAST

  A Story of Growing Up

  XIAOLU GUO

  Chatto & Windus

  LONDON

  The soul can shrivel from an excess of critical distance, and if I don’t want to remain in arid internal exile for the rest of my life, I have to find a way to lose my alienation without losing myself.

  EVA HOFFMAN

  So many times I’ve seen England from the sky

  The Past is a Foreign Country

  A wanderer, uprooted and displaced. A nomad in both body and mind. This was what I had become since leaving China for the West. It had been fifteen years of transit, change, forgetting and adapting. Then all of a sudden, at the age of forty, my belly was expanding. The earth had begun to exert a pull on me, a pull towards motherhood. On the second day of 2013, I found myself lying on an operating table in a hospital in London, my body hooked up by wires and tubes to a bank of humming machines. I was about to burst, literally. The moment the baby girl was pulled from my womb by Caesarean section I heard a cry – a sound that was at once familiar, but utterly surprising. There she was. Wrapped in a new towel with her wet, bruised little face against my breast. I embraced her with wonder and fear. This is good, I thought. This child will be rooted here. She will be a grounded person, unlike me, a peripatetic peasant, a cultural orphan.

  Twenty minutes after delivery, we were wheeled into the maternity ward, filled with newborns and new mothers. Still in a haze of morphine, I heard all sorts of languages being spoken around me: Hindi, Arabic, German, Spanish, Polish. I remained in the hospital for the next three days, dressed in only a thin gown, trying to breastfeed and struggling to use the bathroom, shocked to see so much blood flowing out of me.

  On the fourth day, when we arrived back home, I was surprised by a sudden urge to call my mother. I hadn’t mentioned to her that I was pregnant once in those long nine months. As was typical of our relationship, we hadn’t spoken
in a while.

  I dialled the dreaded number, embedded so deeply in my mind I could recite it in my dreams.

  ‘Mother, it’s me.’

  ‘Oh, Xiaolu. I wasn’t expecting your call.’ Then immediately, ‘Where are you?’

  ‘London.’

  ‘What’s wrong? Why are you calling?’ She was direct, almost rude. She had served as a Red Guard at the age of sixteen, a coarse and uneducated girl straight out of the rice fields. I always assumed that was one of the reasons we never got along.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘I wanted to let you know …’ I found myself tongue-tied and unable to bring myself to say it. ‘I just gave birth to a healthy baby girl.’

  ‘What?’ my poor mother cried. ‘You just gave birth?’

  ‘Yes. She is half-Chinese and half-Western.’

  ‘My heavens! You were pregnant?’

  After a few seconds of silence from her end, I thought she might at least ask the name of the baby, but instead she said, ‘Are you coming back for Qingming Festival?’

  Qingming is a day in April when we pay our respects to the dead. We sweep their tombs, burn incense and pray. I said nothing, only listened to her angry sobs through the telephone.

  ‘You should come back! You don’t even know where your father is buried! I want to move your grandmother’s ashes from the village and put them next to your father. You should come back for this.’

  This time, I thought, I have no excuse not to go. None. I might as well go and pay a debt of filial duty, once and for all. It’s only a twelve-hour flight. I can do it. My whole adult life I had avoided going back to my childhood home as much as possible. Shitang, the fishing village where I witnessed my grandparents’ depression and poverty, was a place I came to loathe. Wenling, where I spent my adolescent years, the cradle for my troubled relationship with authority, repelled me. When I left to study in Beijing in 1993, I promised myself: that’s it, I will never return to this stifling backwater again. Ten years later, when I left China for Britain, I said to myself: from now on, no more ideological brainwashing. I’m not going to let myself be tripped up by my rotten peasant roots. But the time had come to face the past. To try to explain to my family how I had lived all these years. After all, I would have to explain it to my little daughter one day too. Just like James Baldwin said: tell it, go tell it to the mountain, tell it to your native kin, to the dead souls and the living souls. I would have to face them, one by one. No escape.

  So, five days before Qingming Festival, I wrapped my newborn as warmly as I could and took a flight back to where my life began.

  PART I | SHITANG: TALES OF THE EAST CHINA SEA

  Once upon a time, there was neither East nor West. There were neither animals nor human beings. Aeons passed. Water appeared. Algae and fish grew. Plants began to root themselves on sandy shores. Birds flew from one hill to another. More aeons passed – tigers, lions, phoenix, serpents, salamanders and tiny slithering creatures all found their quarters in the jungle to hunt and rest. But still, the world was quiet, as if waiting for some momentous event, the birth of some wicked and powerful creature. One day, Heaven’s Eyes saw a piece of five-coloured stone shining on a mountain in the east. The stone kept shining until suddenly it burst into pieces and a monkey jumped out from the dust. The monkey had a handsome face, four long limbs and a slim body. He moved about in the fresh mountain air as he looked around with enormous curiosity. He then bowed to each of the four quarters of the sky, expressing gratitude for his birth.

  The little monkey explored his world with gaiety. He fed on bananas and peanuts and drank from brooks and springs. He made friends with tigers and leopards, sloths and baboons. But one autumn day when the sun was going down, he suddenly felt sad and burst into tears. He raised his eyes to the risen moon in the east. He felt lonely. A great urge inside him told him to do something deserving with his life. But he didn’t know what this great task could be. He stared at the moon slipping towards the west and fell asleep. During the night, he felt a drop of dew falling on his face. Then he heard someone speaking in his ear. The voice said:

  ‘Little creature, you are not an ordinary monkey. You were nourished by the five elements of this planet, and have received the energy of heaven and earth from the beginning of time. You are the force of human life. You need to find the human world and to help a monk called Xuanzang to obtain the purest Buddhist scripture on earth. Once the sutra is secured, humans will achieve real knowledge of life and death.’

  The monkey woke up under the moonlight, his ears still echoing with these words. Through the fragrant banana leaves, he felt a polar star shooting light right into his forehead.

  Village of Shitang, Zhejiang Province, where I spent my first seven years, 1970s

  After I Was Born

  I was born an orphan. Not because my parents had died, no, they were both still very much alive. Rather, they gave me away.

  Of course, I don’t remember anything specific about my first two years. No one in my family does. As a newborn, I had been given to a peasant couple who lived in a mountain village somewhere in our province by the East China Sea. Many years later, I was told a story that my mother couldn’t raise me as my father had been imprisoned in a labour camp at the time. So that’s where I lived, on that mountainside, for the first two years of my life. The only memory I have is a false one, told to me by my grandparents, who recounted the day when the barren couple from the highlands brought me, the unwanted child, back down the mountain to them.

  Only a baby, and already given away twice.

  The couple had found out where my grandparents lived and taken the long-distance bus all the way to our humble home. The first thing they did was place me in my grandmother’s arms and say:

  ‘This little child will die if she continues living with us. She is dying. You can see that. We have nothing to eat. We only manage to grow fifty kilos of yam every autumn. But we need to save them to sell at the market. So we have been feeding her the mashed leaves. But every time she sees the green mush on the spoon she turns her head away, or spits it out. She refuses to eat anything green any more! You know we don’t have much rice, so the leaves are all we have. Look at her, her face is yellow and her limbs are weak. She never stops crying. She won’t eat. She won’t survive if she stays with us. So, take her back, we beg you! Take her back right now! We know we couldn’t conceive, but we don’t need a dying baby. We beg you to take her back!’

  My grandparents were perplexed upon receiving me. They had nothing to say since they were not the ones who had sent me to this family in the first place. They took me without a word. From that day on, I lived with my grandparents by the sea, and my adopted parents returned to their yams, never to be heard of again. I was told later that the family bore the name Wong, that they lived on a mountain, with their yams, and apparently a few goats. Since the woman was infertile (or perhaps the man was infertile, but with peasants the woman is always to blame) she had no milk for me. I often wonder if she fed me with goat’s milk, or whether their goats produced any milk at all. In China at that time no one drank animal milk. We were all lactose-intolerant. They must have fed me with soya milk before I had teeth. What else could they have done with a starving baby whose mother had decided to give her away to a family with no milk? I will never know.

  Years later, when I pored over the map of the province and tried to find the mountain village where my adopted parents might have lived, I was struck by how many there were, scattered across the country, and how many nameless places were marked only by obscure yellow and green dots. Thousands of named hamlets, and many more anonymous ones. Was it Diaotou? Pingshan? Yongjia? Hengshantou? Changshi? Shifou? I gave up. After closing the map, I was told that most of these villages had become construction sites for the expanding cities. Even the mountains had been decapitated, their peaks shaved off in order to make way for roads or quarries to provide for the country’s great development.

  When I think of the first two years of
my life, the image that spontaneously comes to mind is that of a small skinny goat trotting over bare mountains. Where is all the succulent grass that will satisfy her hunger? Where is the water to quench her thirst? The mountain is naked. There are only rocks and fertiliser-poisoned soil. But somehow the little goat managed to survive the impoverishment of her early life.

  Grandfather

  My grandfather was a bitter, failed fisherman. He was born in 1905, just one year before China’s Last Emperor Puyi was born. I don’t know if that was an ominous sign, an explanation for his fate – the last generation born under the imperial system was bound to be wiped out by new fashions. The day when he was born, his own father was apparently out at sea. In a fishing village, people say a child born while his father is at sea and the tide is rising will grow up to be a good fisherman. But the tide was receding when my grandfather emerged from his mother’s womb. He never told me this himself. Other villagers gossiped about it on benches in front of their houses. But after hearing this story, I never liked watching the tide go out.

  My grandfather used to own a fishing boat, and was able to make a living from selling fish on the dock every few days. The boat was the only thing he ever cared for in his life. Nothing else mattered to him. His boat, like others in the village, was painted with two large eyes. The fishermen called them dragon eyes – a boat is a dragon that conquers the waves. The vivid colours scare away other sea creatures. Every few months, as was local practice, he would repaint the eyes a dark red, and retouch the black and blue lines along the body of the boat. From a distance, it looked like a gigantic tropical fish, with jewel-like power. Every now and then he reapplied a layer of tar, hoping that with a shiny new skin it would ride the waves like a whale. After a big catch, he let his boat bathe in the sun, fixing any broken bits, while my grandmother helped mend the fishing nets. Then he would launch the boat into the sea again, on one of those very early blue mornings. He would sail far offshore, even with limited petrol supplies. Sometimes he reached Gong Hai – the strait between mainland China and Taiwan – beyond which further navigation was forbidden. On the open water there were fewer vessels and he felt the sea belonged to him. The fish were more abundant and the eels fat and long. He would return two or three days later, sometimes quite exhausted, carrying a good catch.