Once Upon a Time in the East

by Xiaolu Guo

  ‘I have just arrived at Qinghuang Island, where the Great Wall plunges into the sea. It’s blue and windy here and you cannot help but admire how the army in ancient times managed to build this part of the Great Wall …’ More romantic rambling followed in the next paragraph. ‘There is a temple dedicated to the Lady of Mengjiang which I visited today. This Lady of Mengjiang, whose husband was sent to build the Great Wall of China, missed her husband so profoundly that her tears flooded the Wall. An impressive story, but even more impressive scenery here!’

  He wrote this to my mother entirely without irony. It could only be a one-way correspondence. We received another letter in which my father had sent a beautifully shaped golden almond leaf for me.

  ‘This leaf is for Xiaolu’s World Leaf Collection – it fell on my shoulders while I was walking through the forest in Hainan Island, at our country’s southernmost tip.’

  I had barely any specimens from outside our province in my World Leaf Collection. As I placed it among the others, I imagined a tropical forest in the middle of the South China Sea full of golden leaves. How much I wished I was with him! The letters just made my mother unhappy. Once she was out of hospital, my brother and I had to look after her and cook every day. Sometimes I had to ask for leave from school. I remember seeing her weeping on the bed when I brought in a bowl of noodle soup. But even then, we weren’t brought closer together as mother and daughter. It was a burden to look after her and do the household chores. In my heart, I was coming to know what it was like to be a trapped housewife, just like my grandmother. A house made a woman busy with meaningless things. And now it seemed that I too had been swallowed by such a fate, while my father wandered freely.

  Then my brother got bored being stuck in the house without much to do. He started associating with some wild teenagers who smoked and engaged in gang fights. He was only sixteen, but he no longer came back home until the early hours of the morning. He was often drunk and stank of cigarette smoke. He started missing class. But since my mother loved him, she felt powerless to change his bad behaviour.

  Those six months felt very long and lonely to me. For some reason, though, it was during that time that Hu Wenren stopped following me through the mazes of Wenling’s streets, and so for now the sexual abuse ended. But I didn’t feel any sense of relief. Instead, I felt unpredictable danger lurking at every corner like a miasma. I had one or two female friends from my class, but I had never mentioned my plight to them, nor anyone else. I couldn’t stand living with my mother and brother without my father to temper their behaviour. I didn’t feel emotionally attached to them. I was intimidated and frightened by both of them most of the time. My father had been my only protection. One lonely night, two months after my father had left, I remembered the other book he had left me: Lust for Life. With an image of my father sitting by some rocky bay, sketching boats and waves, I picked it up and started reading.

  I continued reading every night after I had finished washing the dishes and had done my homework. I even read it discreetly during class. I had to use a dictionary occasionally, since quite a few of the characters used in the translation were unknown to me. The first half of the book was so joyful, pure and intense, describing the young Van Gogh’s desire to paint, and how much he loved the landscapes that surrounded him in Holland. All this reminded me of my father. It was strange that a painter’s eyes should be so different from everyone else’s, from all the ‘normal’ people, but it seemed to be so. A painter’s eyes took the familiar dead things around us, and made them come alive again. I was moved by Van Gogh’s long letters to his brother Theo, in which he described his absolute attachment to nature. Sentences like these were magical to me, and I read them repeatedly.

  When one has walked for hours and hours through that country, one feels that there is really nothing but that infinite earth – that mould of corn or heather, that infinite sky. Horses and men seem no larger than fleas. One is not aware of anything, be it ever so large in itself, one only knows that there is earth and sky.

  I was enthralled by the book’s depiction of how Van Gogh’s love for his brother inspired him in his love of nature. Those letters were like poetry.

  And then when twilight fell – imagine the quiet, the peace of it all! Imagine then a little avenue of high poplars with autumn leaves, imagine a broad muddy road, all black mud, with an infinite heath to the right and an endless heath to the left, a few black triangular silhouettes of turf huts, through the little windows of which shines the red light of the little fire …

  How could anyone write so beautifully? How could I obtain this sort of ability, to be able to look at nature with such an intense love, and also let that love come out in my writing? Instead of the painter, I thought about the writer, the poet, as I came to the end of Lust for Life. And such an ending! Reading about his suicide left me mournful. What really killed him? Poverty? Loneliness? Losing faith? Madness? I thought about my grandfather again, and for the next few days I was consumed by my melancholy solitude. I walked to school on my own in the morning and back home again in the evening. I ate in silence. I went to bed without saying a word. I had taken the poison, my stomach ached at night and I woke up in tears. My father probably never knew how much that book had affected me.

  After what felt like an eternity, my father returned home. A beard obscured his face; he was scruffy and his clothes were torn, the heels on his shoes wrecked, the sleeves of his jacket were ripped and the zips on his bags were broken. But he was in high spirits. He had filled every page of his five sketchbooks with drawings and watercolours. He had taken plenty of photographs, too. The trip had restored his energy, and my mother was relieved to have him back. She was recovered now and didn’t tell my father how hard it had been. Instead, she took to cooking chicken soup. But after finishing two bowls and a glass of hard liquor, my father went straight into his painting studio and disappeared for the next few weeks, coming out only when he was hungry or needed a proper sleep. He was inspired and in a hurry to complete some large paintings for his official solo exhibition. He had to repay the government with new work, he said. ‘I want everyone in our province to see how wild and beautiful our coastline is. I want everyone to realise that the sea is our mother,’ he said with a great earnestness as he devoured a plate of pork dumplings.

  Adolescence

  My adolescence was spent under the influence of Hong Kong pop music and Western literature. I particularly liked reading anything sentimental, as long as it didn’t have too much official Communist talk in it. Apart from Whitman, one of the very first Western poems I read was Frank O’Hara’s ‘Why I Am Not a Painter.’ It’s a very simple poem, especially for us Chinese who grew up studying the Chinese classics and Soviet literature, but it had a great impact on my thinking. It had lines like:

  … One day I am thinking of a color: orange. I write a line about orange. Pretty soon it is a whole page of words, not lines. Then another page. There should be so much more, not of orange, of words, of how terrible orange is and life. Days go by. It is even in prose, I am a real poet. My poem is finished and I haven’t mentioned orange yet. …

  Why could Westerners write something like that, but not us Chinese? I was startled by its clarity and straightforwardness. It was especially striking for a child like me, given that we had to go through the pain of memorising hundreds of highly complex and metaphorical Tang and Song Dynasty poems. O’Hara’s words were a kind of untrammelled freedom the like of which I had never before encountered.

  I was reading this poetry around the time I first fell in love. Our teacher Mr Lin was in his late twenties and taught us science. I was drawn to him from the very beginning, maybe because his manner was so gentle, even slightly feminine. Most of the adult men I had encountered were macho, rough and insensitive. They treated girls like second-class humans. But Mr Lin had none of that attitude. He rode to school on his bike, kept himself to himself and took breaks by walking calmly around the campus on his own. In the late afternoon
he would ride his bike back home again and we wouldn’t see him until the following morning. He was mysterious.

  He walked into the classroom and introduced himself, then said nothing more. He turned to the blackboard and drew something, which I could only roughly make out due to my weak eyes: a man pushing a long stick with a circle on the end of it. Then, in a soft voice, he announced: ‘The Greek mathematician and philosopher Archimedes said: “Give me a lever and a place to stand on and I will move the Earth.” What did Archimedes mean?’

  We were about thirteen or fourteen years old, and in the first year of middle school. Such a bold opening astonished us. What kind of lecture was this? I was impressed. I wasn’t good at physics, and spent most of Mr Lin’s classes reading my Chinese literature textbook, doodling, or sleeping. But I took to following him around the campus, to try to attract his attention. In China, schoolchildren are forbidden from entering relationships with each other, let alone with a teacher. But I only had two kinds of interactions with men, either sexually or not at all. One day Mr Lin and I walked back home together; I had discovered he lived nearby. But instead of going back to the compound, I followed him to his apartment. He lived alone, which was not unusual then for an unmarried man. He explained that his parents were farmers and they still lived in the village. I wandered around his apartment, looking at his books and the small sculptures he had made. He seemed to spend his spare time carving little wooden animals: horses, cats, fish, chicken and other trinkets. He was pretty good, I thought. My father would have approved.

  It was late afternoon and I didn’t want to go home. An idea had formed in my fourteen-year-old head: I was going to be with him. I was going to be his girlfriend. Without even a kiss or an embrace, I lay on his bed and undressed myself. There was no foreplay. We made love for the first time, although there wasn’t much lovemaking really. He had removed his clothes and gone through the whole thing so clumsily that I realised Mr Lin must have been a virgin, despite being fifteen years older than me. He was rather timid and even frightened by our naked bodies touching. His body was trembling as I watched his hardening penis slip out from his underwear.

  We continued our affair in secret. He understood my loneliness. Every night, it felt like a torture as I lay on my small bed, listening to the sounds of the television in my parents’ room. I wanted to escape the monotony. I wanted to be beside Mr Lin. I could no longer sleep alone. I thought about running away with him. We could live together in a little hut, grow vegetables and go fishing. Like the forbidden lovers the Weaver Girl and the Cowherd, like Madame White Snake and the medicine man Xuxian, we could live outside society. But in those stories, there was always an evil character who would chase after the lovers and punish them for their transgression, and in our case that person would be my mother. She would savage me if she found out about our affair. I couldn’t sleep from the anxiety, and the situation made me feel even more lonely. Some nights, I waited in the dark until I could hear the sound of snoring coming from my parents’ room, before getting up and stuffing some clothes under the duvet to give the impression of a sleeping body, and sneaking out the door. But I had to return before six, so as not to get caught. A game that dangerous couldn’t last long. Early one morning, I pushed open the door discreetly and slipped inside. That’s when I saw her, a dark shadow sitting at the kitchen table, waiting. I was petrified. My mother’s face was blue-grey with a frosty anger.

  ‘Don’t you have any shame?!’ she hissed at me like a snake, her eyes red like a hungry wolf in the night.

  I was shaking all over.

  ‘You’re up to no good. Are you going to tell me where you were?’

  ‘I … I slept over at my classmate’s house,’ I muttered, my teeth chattering from the morning chill. Or perhaps I was just scared.

  ‘A classmate? Take me there now!’ My mother stood up and began smacking me, her chubby palms landing on the back of my head. This time, she slapped me so hard that my eyes hurt. I cried out and tried to run away. But at that moment, my father came in and stopped my mother.

  ‘You always spoil her!’ my mother said, turning to my father, her left arm still raised above my head. It hung there, threatening me. ‘Your daughter is about to become the biggest scandal in Wenling! All the neighbours will laugh at us. There is no decency left in this house any more!’

  She was furious at my father’s interference. She pushed him out of the kitchen and resumed the beating. My brother was now up too, leaning against the doorway and watching everything.

  ‘You’re not going to school today if you don’t tell me where you were last night!’

  My mother locked me inside the bedroom.

  I didn’t get out that day. My brother went to school and my parents left for work. I had no one to help me. I wondered if Mr Lin noticed I wasn’t in class, and worried whether my mother would find out the truth. I was stuck under my mother’s autocratic rule. I hated her. I secretly wished she would die in an accident, be mangled in a car crash or be swept away by a natural disaster. I cursed her every second of that day and swore to myself in desperation. Then I made a plan. I was going to get out of Wenling forever.

  The day gradually passed, but it was one of the longest of my life. And the greyest. In the evening, I heard my parents returning home. I heard them talking. My father was distressed to see me still locked up. He told my mother to let me out. They argued. Then came the sound of the key in the lock and I was out. My mother ignored me for the rest of the evening. I was her enemy, she detested me. The feeling was mutual.

  Abortion

  My mother couldn’t stop me and I managed to keep my secret. Nobody knew I was with Mr Lin, not even my classmates. I had always been a good pretender. The affair lasted for a year or two, our bodies entangling together many evenings. At some point, my mother gave up on me.

  The affair also resulted in my first pregnancy at the age of fifteen. My parents didn’t know anything about it, and I was in deep distress. It was clear that if people knew I was pregnant, I would be finished. I heard somewhere that a woman could bring on a miscarriage by jumping up and down non-stop until the foetus dropped out between her legs and onto the ground. So, whenever we had a break between classes I would find a quiet corner of the school and jump up and down wildly. My stomach ached, but nothing came out from in between my legs. I tried in my bare feet in the middle of the night when I couldn’t sleep. But still nothing. The nausea continued and I could taste a metallic bitterness on my tongue. I had also heard that a mouthful of ash caused a miscarriage. So I snuck into the canteen of my mother’s factory and filled my pockets with the remnants of the coal fire. I gathered my courage and swallowed a mouthful. It was so terrible that I choked and coughed, but in my desperation, swallowed some more. It was deranged. But still there was no effect. Knowing it would be a big scandal if we were discovered, Teacher Lin began to contact places. He found an abortion clinic in another town. He raised the money and told me to use a fake name when registering. We made something up, something so ordinary that I had forgotten it by the next day. He also found some womanly-looking shoes with a medium-high heel for me to wear on the day of the operation, so I would look a bit older than I actually was. I had long straight hair back then. Maybe I should curl it so I didn’t look so much like a schoolgirl? But I didn’t have the chance, I didn’t want my parents or anyone else to see and grow suspicious. On the day, Teacher Lin left school before me and waited for me at the bus station. I left class at noon and met him there. After about an hour and a half on the bus we arrived at the isolated clinic. It was dirty, nothing more than a country hospital with very basic facilities. I remember seeing piles of rusty metal waste at the back of the hospital. And further in the distance, buffaloes grazing on a patch of grass in front of an expanse of paddy fields. In the 1980s, abortions performed in the countryside barely involved any anaesthetics. Teacher Lin told me I would just have to endure the pain. The two female doctors led me into a separate room, apparently not notic
ing my real age. Their job was to operate on me as efficiently as they could. They didn’t even ask me how long I had been pregnant. Abortion must have been a doctor’s most common surgical procedure in 1980s China, and perhaps for most women too. Including young girls like me.

  The operation room was shabby and bare. The walls were painted green, but looked as if someone had vomited on them. Teacher Lin wasn’t allowed in. They asked me to remove my pants and lie down on the operation table. One of the doctors had strong arms. She forced my trembling legs open and placed them up in the stirrups. I felt so dreadful, so shameful that I couldn’t bear to ask what was about to happen to me. I would rather have died in that moment than be treated like this. Then they turned on all the lights in the room. With tears flowing down my cheeks, I shut my eyes. Then came the sound of clinking metal, like medical scissors or a knife. The doctors made some irrelevant conversation. I was told to take a deep breath. Suddenly I felt a freezing cold tool enter my lower body, some sort of suction pump. Then came the most horrifying pain as the sharp tools worked in and out between my legs. I have no idea how long it went on for, but just as suddenly, it was done. They had sucked the foetus from my womb.

  When the operation was over, the doctor supported my back and tried to get me to sit up, as Mr Lin was still not allowed to come in. I will never forget that moment when she pointed at the little chunk of flesh in a bucket by the bed and said in the most ordinary tone:

  ‘There it is.’

  Terrified and still recovering from the agonising pain, I leaned over the operation table and took a quick glance at the little ball wrapped in blood. It was an utterly inexpressible feeling to see my supposed baby foetus, having just been cut from my body. Close but separate. So little, this thing! But already as big as a chicken’s egg. Yes. There it was, lying in a cold white bucket. Dead, or maybe it was dying, not dead yet. There it was, a consequence of love, the poisoned fruit of my relationship with my teacher.