Once Upon a Time in the East

by Xiaolu Guo

  The whole thing left me numb. It occurred to me that there was only one truth to being a woman, and I had seen it confirmed again and again – being born this way was a curse. The worst thing in the world. We were doomed by the fact of our womanhood. The only thing we had any control over was pregnancy. Never again, I swore to myself as I lay on that hospital table, never again would I get pregnant. I walked out of the operation room, pale and hollow, and fell into the arms of my teacher.

  The affair didn’t last much longer – I began to remove myself from our emotional entanglement and found I didn’t even want to see him. Everything that had been so wonderful about him was now so very boring. Now, I just found him pathetic. My heart grew more ambitious and my eyes were focused somewhere higher, somewhere bigger. He started dating another woman not long after we split up. I later heard that they were getting married. One part of me felt hurt and betrayed by this news. But the other, stronger part was already done with Teacher Lin. The abortion had freed my body, but it had also freed my heart. I knew that I was supposed to make a mark on a much larger canvas of life.

  Confucianism vs Feminism

  I was fifteen and a half, it was the first day of autumn term, and we were sitting in the classroom reading out aloud from Confucius’ Analects. The weather in early September is the worst; the air was steaming hot like a proper post-typhoon day and our white shirts were soaked through and stank from sweat. Trying hard not to fall asleep, I joined in with the collective murmur: Fu mu zai, bu yuan you, you bi you fang – The Master said, ‘While his parents are alive, the son may not venture far abroad. If he does go abroad, he must have a fixed place of abode.’

  Abroad was a huge and heavy concept for most Chinese people, especially if they came from remote provinces and small towns. But my new heroes, such as Hemingway and Whitman, all came from abroad. Not only that, but Hemingway himself was always venturing away from his home town. And Whitman spent all day wandering around the wilderness, naked and singing about love. Going abroad seemed to be the very definition of freedom. Contrary to Confucius’ wisdom, I was determined to travel the Nine Continents whether my parents were alive or not! And once you’d made it out, who cared if you had a home to go back to – that home would be travelling with you! Life flows like a river. Home is for old people. I secretly cursed this worship of Confucianism. The more I studied what Confucius had said, the more I loathed this ancient man and his rotten words. It was a philosophy as depressing as the fates of my suicidal grandfather and my hunchbacked grandmother. I felt bored and imprisoned at school, and wondered how such a book had managed to root itself so fundamentally in the lives of the Chinese people for the last 2,400 years, even in the Communist so-called New China!

  Wei nu zi yu xiao ren nan yang – ‘Of all people, women and petty servants are the most difficult to deal with. If you are close to them, they lose their humbleness. If you maintain a reserve towards them, they grow discontented and complain.’

  The boys often quoted this at the girls in my class. I detested those lines, but they had been used as weapons like this for over two millennia. No wonder women had been so brutally treated and nonconformists so relentlessly prosecuted. Years later, I was to find solace in the words of Juliet Mitchell’s 1971 book Women’s Estate. She talked about how the traditional family structure has built upon the systematic exploitation and suppression of women, and how a patriotic society was based on the sacrifice of women’s freedom. This lady must have studied The Analects and found that passage, I remember thinking. At that age, I didn’t know such oppression was common in both East and West. I didn’t even know that in many advanced Western countries, abortion was still illegal.

  For me, the life Confucius had led seemed much more interesting than his dogmas. The details remained obscure, and so much about him sounded fictional. For example, it is said he died when he was seventy-two. But it is also said that he had seventy-two disciples. Was that a coincidence? If Confucius had indeed made it to seventy-two, he lived to be a very old man for someone born around 2,500 years ago. A miraculous survival even, considering the tigers and lions that roamed the land. But maybe it was only improbable, not impossible. I found it hard to trust much of our notorious historical archive; besides, so much of it had been burnt in the 1960s during the Cultural Revolution. Another thing that troubled me was this idea that Confucius was a great politician. Clearly nonsense; he was a failure. He may have been an important minister in the state of Lu, but he exercised no military power. The official version went that his career was interrupted by a power struggle within the court, partly caused by the conflicts of the warring kingdoms. Confucius left the state of Lu and went into exile, spending the rest of his days wandering from one kingdom to another, looking for a ruler who might employ him. So he was just another desperate long-term unemployed man. Since no one took him on, he had to inflict his knowledge on the young, amassing his seventytwo disciples. It seems his main concern was to exercise authority over others. In that respect he was like all the other power-seekers. Seen in this light, it’s pretty obvious why Confucianism has been so favoured by the emperors of China, including leaders of the Communist Party. Chinese autocracy clothes itself in the core teachings of the Master with these lines: ‘The mind of the superior man is conversant with righteousness; the mind of the mean man is conversant with gain.’ Pretty good for an emperor who wants to bolster his right to rule.

  My Chinese class now left me feeling flat, deadened and slightly drowsy. It was as if life had been squeezed out of me. I needed to read something I loved to re-energise myself. I would quickly return to my beloved Beat Generation poets, such as Allen Ginsberg and Frank O’Hara. They had been introduced to Chinese readers with a very modern translation and were wildly popular among the educated young. I loved how direct and simple a Western poem could be, and I sought to make my own writing in its image. I wanted my words to capture the rawness of life. Yes I wanted to be a poet, but not a dead Tang Dynasty intellectual, nor a disciple of Confucius. I wanted to use a real-life language, one with absolute modernity. And I was serious. While the other students played sports after school, I hid myself in corners and imitated the Western poetry I was reading.

  1989

  1989 was an eventful, anguished year. I was sixteen, and I remember it began with the news that the new American President George H. W. Bush would visit our leader Deng Xiaoping in Beijing. The television repeated footage of their meetings as well as the state banquet held in the president’s honour. Change was in the air, and it seemed like everyone was paying extra attention to politics in the capital.

  That May, news came that students across China had taken to the streets in many of its largest cities, reciting poetry and delivering carefully composed speeches demanding an end to corruption. In Beijing, the leaders of the movement shouted their slogans in front of Mao’s mausoleum, addressing the then general secretary, Zhao Ziyang. This protest had been going on for a month when the hunger strikes began. Watching the news with my parents, I secretly wished I could go to Beijing and be a part of the revolution. As Mao said, ‘History is an empty book waiting for us to fill its pages.’ But Beijing was a long way away from my home town, three days by bus and train to be precise. My parents would never allow me to go, though my brother, now eighteen, was studying fine art there. He phoned home a week before the massacre, throat dry and voice high.

  ‘Yes, of course I’ve joined the revolution! I have been on the square shouting slogans for weeks now!’

  He talked in a breathless torrent and hung up before my father could respond. So we sat and watched it unfold on the television, until the violence of 4 June erupted. Deng Xiaoping ordered an end to the whole thing. The party declared martial law and mobilised 300,000 troops from the People’s Liberation Army. That day, we watched soldiers with machine guns storm the square. Then the tanks appeared. They were rolling into the crowds of students. Before our eyes, the movement turned into a massacre. The state channels denounced the m
ovement as a ‘counter-revolutionary riot’, and the shooting began. People were screaming and running from the gunfire. A few hours later, that glorious square fell silent. Bodies lay sprawled on the ground, blood stained the paving stones, tanks burned, banners lay destroyed, and the wave of students had receded.

  We had lost contact with my brother. The last images we had seen were of tanks rolling into the square. My parents panicked. There were no mobile phones and no Internet in those days. I remember my mother crying one morning, standing by the phone. She was terrified of what was about to come. Three days later, my brother called, his voice almost inaudible.

  ‘I’m fine, just hungry.’ He was calling from a roadside stall near the university. Classes had been cancelled as the professors were being hauled in for investigation, he said as he swallowed a mouthful of noodles. He had lost his voice from screaming slogans. ‘Don’t worry about me,’ he said and hung up, just as my father was trying to prise the phone from my mother’s tight grip.

  A few months later, we heard that some of the student leaders had been imprisoned: Wang Dan from Beijing University had been sentenced to four years, and political activists Chen Zimin and Wang Juntao to thirteen years. Some had fled China for the West. Students like my brother ended up having to write weekly self-criticisms. Public gatherings were banned. And the universities added extra hours across all departments for political studies classes focused on ‘Chinese Socialist Democracy’, and what made it distinct from Western democracy.

  After the massacre we learned that Zhao Ziyang, our much respected general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, had been sacked by Deng Xiaoping for his sympathetic stance towards the students. He spent the next fifteen years under house arrest until his death in 2005. It felt as if the Cultural Revolution had returned. Although my brother played no significant role in the events, and had never been threatened with state punishment, it cast a cloud of worry over my family. For the sake of our future, they never mentioned to anyone that my brother had been on Tiananmen Square that spring.

  Things changed at school, even in Wenling. Teachers started leading readings of People’s Daily editorials every Wednesday afternoon, lecturing us endlessly in carping tones about Beijing government policy. My already dull Wednesday afternoons were transformed into exercises in stultification. I sat in the heat and sweat along with sixty other classmates, packed into one room, thinking: what is this all for? Just like my schoolmates, I would never read a copy of People’s Daily of my own volition. And I doubted I would ever do so in the future. It was just pages of dead language. To read it was to feel your mind shutting down and space closing in until you were sealed inside a tomb. I could see that the other students were also melting in the deadening boredom. One thing was clear: after 1989, young people became noticeably politically indifferent and pragmatic. Everyone wanted to just get on with life, to finish their studies, find a stable job and survive.

  Ticket to the Film World

  Gradually I began to feel that I could reinvent myself. I was eighteen but I had already published a dozen or so poems in literary magazines. In one of them, entitled ‘Red’, I imitated Frank O’Hara. Its opening lines went:

  The day that my mother died, I passed a peasant selling red nectarines.

  I bought one from him and said my mother had died.

  He answered: Have this one for free.

  I ate it in the street, and found it had a worm.

  Of course, I didn’t dare show this poem to my mother. Another, entitled ‘Nomad Heart’, ended with:

  I don’t like living in a house:

  A kitchen with four stiff chairs around a square table

  A bedroom with a damp mattress and a spittoon

  A corridor full of muddy shoes and broken umbrellas

  A wind blows in one door and out the other

  The dust of time collects on the windowsills

  A house is not a place for a nomad heart

  Only the road can be its home

  Only the bare fields its abode

  My father read the poem. He seemed to like it. ‘Sometimes I feel the same way.’ That was his only comment, but for me, it was enough. It was like some sort of secret code between father and daughter: we understood each other, though we didn’t want to debase this understanding with words. Besides, my mother would hear us if we launched into a conversation about why we didn’t like living in this house, a house largely constructed by her.

  I also managed to publish a few short stories. One of the stories was called ‘Far Away, that Aimless River’. I imagined myself as a university student in Beijing, a bohemian in the capital. But I had no real ending for my character, perhaps because I couldn’t picture my own future – she was lost in a flow of aimless actions, a life going nowhere.

  Writing had been one of my closest spiritual companions, but I wanted to do something new, and my feet were itching to get out and away from the south. When the national exams came around, I didn’t apply to study literature, but set my sights instead on film, at the Beijing Film Academy. Why film? everyone asked me. Films seemed to belong to a fantasy world, like an astronaut flying his spaceship to the moon. We had never met anyone in Wenling who made films. It was a decision that surprised even my father. But in my head, one thing was clear: I wanted to be part of the new. I needed to study something artistic, something of which I had no knowledge or access. In the early 1990s, film-making was the most modern art form in China, the newest media format. We watched Russian dubbed films such as Brothers Karamazov, Wartime Romance and Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears. I thought they were great, and to me cinema had an immediacy and direct power unavailable to literature. I was desperate to break into that mysterious, seductive world.

  But passing the exams for the film school would be an enormous challenge. At that time the only film school in China was the Beijing Film Academy. You had to physically go to Beijing and stay there for two weeks: they tested us on subjects ranging from screenwriting, film history and theatre to visual and sound aesthetics, as well as general artistic aptitude. Although I didn’t know anything about the history of cinema, I managed to gather nearly all the books about cinema in Wenling Library and began to prepare. My mother didn’t support my ambitions. For her, paying the train fare to and from Beijing, plus the hotel, was a waste of money. But my father supported me and said he would accompany me to the capital. In the meantime, I was totally consumed by my reading. One of the more annoying aspects of my chosen field was having to memorise the names of famous foreign directors — John Ford and Billy Wilder — along with the titles of their films. Chinese translates foreign names phonetically into characters, so John Ford became Yue Han Fu Te – , and Billy Wilder became Bi Li Wang Er De – . My head felt like it was splitting in two as I attempted to commit these odd and artificial names to memory. But I was determined to do it even if it felt like driving nails into my skull. I spent weeks like this, my face fixed ten centimetres away from a page.

  When the time for the exams came, my father and I embarked on the journey. We would have an eight-hour bus ride to Hangzhou, the capital city of our province, and from Hangzhou we would have a two-day train ride to Beijing. I saw nothing outside the train window nor any of the sights of Beijing, because every minute was given over to my books.

  During those manic two weeks, my father rented a cheap basement hotel room in Beijing. Our room cost eight yuan a night and had no windows, no toilet and no shower. All it contained were two hard single beds, each with a sunken pillow, and a naked bulb that hung from the damp ceiling. On the morning of the first exam, my father and I got up early and ate four pork buns each at a roadside store. Then we wiped our mouths clean and entered the campus like soldiers going into battle. It was six o’clock in the morning, but thousands of people were gathered, hopeful youngsters like me accompanied by parents and even grandparents. There was a strained intensity in everyone’s body language. We were overwhelmed by the scene and I instantly fell into a panic. Th
en, at eight o’clock sharp, two exam officers stood up on a ladder, and one yelled out across the sea of people:

  ‘Everyone participating in the exam will be given a number! Please look for your number on the chalkboard over there!’

  The officer pointed and the mass moved like an oceanic wave towards the supposed chalkboard. My father dragged me through the mayhem and we found it. Standing on our tiptoes, we searched through a great array of numbers and names, until we spotted ‘Guo Xiaolu’ followed by my date of birth. Number 5001. Out of six thousand. I didn’t know there would be six thousand students participating in the two-week-long ordeal. All for seven available places in five departments! That morning, the six thousand participants were distributed across different rooms in the campus for the first exam. Parents and grandparents had to wait outside. We were handed our exam papers – a stack of sheets with questions such as: How did the Hollywood film industry rejuvenate its creativity by adopting the methods of European cinema? Give one or two examples to demonstrate your point. Every night, the teachers whittled down the numbers and announced who would be called back the next morning. We may have been used to our highly competitive social system, but still, we were like rats running through the streets in a headless panic. I survived the first three days of written examinations. On the fourth day, the lecturers began face-to-face interviews, which would enable them to get an impression of everyone’s personality. During one of those sessions, I was told I was out of the game. I had failed the ‘Theatre Study’ exam because I hadn’t known who Stanislavski was, and what ‘Method Acting’ meant. I walked out and went to find my father. He was as disappointed as me. As some teachers called out the next numbers, a film professor came up to us. He patted me on the shoulder. ‘Don’t be too sad, number 5001,’ he said in perfect Mandarin, ‘you were doing well in the other subjects. You can come back to try again next year!’