Once Upon a Time in the East

by Xiaolu Guo

  In order to give the dialogue some authenticity, I decided to write my scripts in cheap restaurants, so that I could note down amusing conversations going on around me. I especially loved hearing customers’ complaints about the bill or dirty jokes about their office secretaries. As soon as I heard anyone arguing, I would put down my chopsticks and feverishly make notes in my notebook. I wrote fast and ate a lot.

  I remember the first time I received a chunk of cash from a television producer after delivering a script. Twelve thousand yuan. Enough to cover a whole year’s rent, also to buy clothes and eat out every night. Over the previous few months, I had been listening to music on my Walkman through headphones, but now with cash in hand, the first thing I wanted to buy was a new stereo. My beloved Walkman went into retirement and I could listen to music properly. I bought the works of great Western classical composers: Chopin, Schubert, Beethoven, Mahler. I was listening purely for educational purposes. I needed to understand why we Chinese didn’t produce this type of music.

  As I put a recording of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony on the CD player, I somehow thought of my grandmother. ‘Xiaolu,’ she would often say to me after her daily prayer to Guanyin, ‘one day, when you are able to make a living, do send your grandmother a ten- or twenty-yuan note every now and then. I would love that. But I don’t think I will live to see the day.’ I could have sent her quite a lot of notes now, even a few hundred-yuan notes with Mao’s smiling face on it. But where would I send it? To an address in Hell? In which of the eighteen levels did she dwell? I hoped the Demon King had placed her on an upper level. Surely that was where she belonged, seeing as she had never hurt or killed anyone in her life. Why was there no Heaven for dead Chinese people? It struck me as odd. People in my village never questioned this lot, every dead fisherman and his dead wife ended up in Hell, including my grandparents. I thought about Shitang and my grandparents often in those days, but ‘miss’ would be the wrong word. I had left behind that period of my life, my orphaned existence, and the whole scattered assortment of souls who dwelt in that windswept, rocky village.

  Cancer

  From now on there would be no more underground film-making or experimental novel writing: TV soap operas were my work. I spent most of my days alone in a rented one-bedroom apartment on the fifteenth floor in Beijing’s Wudaokou. I lived in a world of cheap dialogue, petty rivalries, shallow materialism and middle-class aspirations.

  I became very efficient at producing this kind of work. I was a one-woman factory. I wrote on a first-generation Chinese PC called ‘Great Wall’ which only had one function, Chinese character input software for Word. I could write a solid and decent three thousand words every day, sending them to the television producer as I went. He was usually quite happy with what I wrote. I imagined myself as a female version of Woody Allen, writing television comedies before becoming a real film-maker. There was hope, I thought, leaving aside the censorship issues.

  But this work flow was to be interrupted. One morning, I received a call from my mother requesting that I return home immediately. ‘Your father has been diagnosed with terminal throat cancer. Stop everything you are doing and come back!’

  I agreed, of course, the guilt of not having visited my parents in years weighing on me. I bought a ticket and flew back to Zhejiang, which now had a brand-new airport near my home-town. As I sat on the plane, I began to feel very stressed by the dilemma I faced. From a Confucian point of view, I was not a good daughter. I hadn’t put much focus on fulfilling my filial duty up to that point. The demands to be a dutiful daughter and a dutiful wife were purely an ideological tool for the suppression of women, I thought. Just think of my grandmother! On the other hand, my father was the only person in my family I respected, and I would probably stay if he asked me to. But for how long? I was already missing my Beijing life. I didn’t want to sacrifice my freedom and my future for the sake of my family.

  The air in Wenling had that familiar moist, slightly stale, subtropical feel. The dialect I heard in the streets somehow seemed much coarser and more primitive than I remembered. I hadn’t spoken Wenling dialect for some years now, since in Beijing I spoke Mandarin. And I was not sure if I really wanted to make those sounds again. Time slowed down.

  When I finally got to the hospital, I saw my mother’s frantic, bloodshot eyes and my brother’s sallow, depressed face. I knew then it was bad.

  That night, my father underwent a seven-hour operation. The cancer had spread to his neck and lymph nodes. They had to remove his larynx entirely. We waited outside the operation room for what felt like a delayed death sentence. The next morning, when my father woke up, it became apparent to both us and him that he would never be able to speak again. It was a shocking realization; added to his not being able to swallow water, urinate unaided, or engage in the simplest physical tasks. He lay on his bed, staring blankly at the tube that passed food through his nose and into his stomach.

  My father lay in that hospital bed for three weeks. He shared his room with four other cancer patients. During that time we saw two of them die in front of us. The nurses came to remove their bodies. It was an efficient procedure; first an old bedding sheet was spread out under the dead body and then it was wrapped like a sausage roll. Off they went, leaving the bed bare and empty. One of the patients was a very young girl of maybe only ten. She, too, had had throat cancer. My father had given her an apple the day before her operation. Two days later, she was dead. When the girl’s family wept in devastation, I saw my father burst into tears. My father, who had always believed the mind stronger than the body. He thought the will controlled our physical being, that it would prevail over any physical weakness. This came from Mao. But the cancer ward taught him a heavy lesson. The mind is powerless when it comes to certain illnesses.

  My mother tried everything to improve my father’s health. Apart from the usual mix of Western pills and traditional herbal medicines, she regularly brought him turtle. Chinese people believe that eating turtle will promote longevity, as they regularly live for hundreds of years. First she cooked turtle soup with all sorts of herbs. Then she ground the shell into powder, and fed him the mixture. I’ve never been sure whether it worked, but with all the radiotherapy that followed, he survived for another thirteen years.

  I was quite disturbed by what we witnessed in that hospital ward. The sheer number of patients was shocking, and it seemed to take all sorts indiscriminately: rich businessmen, poor farmers, young migrant workers, middle-aged women as well as small children. Most of them were diagnosed too late and were already deemed terminal. Some were actually dying in their beds. The wards were full: new patients had to sleep on makeshift beds in the corridors. Even the narrow space between staircases was crammed with chair-beds. The sick puked, coughed and howled, seemingly without respite. Nurses and doctors were bombarded by demands from patients and their families. The place was a living hell. There was no such thing as human dignity in this provincial hospital.

  Women and children who had never smoked in their lives were dying of lung cancer. Most likely because of the pollution – Zhejiang was a fast-developing industrial province with countless large-scale factories. There had been lots of talk about water and soil pollution, and rumours that factories were releasing heavy chemical waste into the rivers. But no one was conducting any thorough investigations, since proving the link between such catastrophic pollution and human health would be too damaging: all the big factories were state-controlled. The people on the bottom rungs of society had no power to demand changes in regulation.

  My father’s cancer was the catalyst that got me thinking about the fragility of human health in relation to our environment. His sickness gave me an increasing sense of foreboding, indeed gloom, about China in particular. So much of what the ‘New China’ is about is getting rich at any cost. And what’s waiting for us? Cancer, on a national level. Yes, cancer is eating us up, even as another industrial zone is built and another power station constructed. Perhaps I woul
d leave Beijing and become an environmentalist. How many years would it take me to make amends, after all that meat-eating and relentless energy consumption? Ten years? Twenty? I could only hope that I might live to see that day come.

  Leaving China

  From 2001 onwards, Beijing was consumed with preparations for the 2008 Olympics. Everywhere you went, there was construction going on. Every bus route had to be redirected. Every building was covered in scaffolding. Highways were springing up around Beijing like thick noodles oozing from the ground, with complicated U-turns and roundabouts. Suddenly, many old residential houses were marooned in the middle of six-lane highways or under snaking flyovers. The city was perpetually surrounded by a moonscape of construction sites. Living in Beijing had become a visual and logistical torture. It was also becoming artistically impossible. There were increasing restraints put on my books and film scripts. I was desperately looking for a way out. This time, it had to be for real. It wasn’t just my fishing village Taoist monk’s supernatural imagination working through my subconscious, sending up its obscure vibrations. It finally made sense to leave. The lines that my father read to me from Leaves of Grass when I was fourteen had turned into a mantra inside my head: Not I, nor anyone else can travel that road for you. You must travel it by yourself.

  Yes. I must travel it by myself. No one else would be with me, and no one would do it for me. Just like my father’s 5,000-mile seashore expedition which he had done alone, I had to travel the Nine Continents, wherever they might be. My father had never made it abroad, even though he had been the one to introduce me to Whitman and Hemingway. I knew he would support me in my resolve to go. It was just a question of how and when and perhaps where.

  The opportunity came sooner than I could have hoped. I heard that the Chevening Scholarship and the British Council were looking for talent in China. I had never heard of ‘Chevening’. Someone told me it was a large historical mansion in Kent, England. This was as good as anything abroad, so why not? To apply for a residency in a large mansion in England would be interesting. My mind was instantly filled with images from The Forsyte Saga – one of the most watched English television programmes on the Chinese Internet. The wealthy housewives of Beijing in particular loved the fancy houses and rich people dressed in elegant costumes riding about on white horses. So I applied as a film-maker. Eight months later, after many stressful exams, the British Council in Beijing called me in. ‘Congratulations! You are one of three people in China this year who’ve won the scholarship! You beat five hundred other candidates!’ The English lady brought me a cup of tea with a big smile. She also handed me back my passport with a UK visa in it.

  ‘Oh, thank you so much,’ I said, flipping through the pages to check. I couldn’t really believe that I had received a year-long UK visa, the first visa ever in my Chinese passport. ‘So what should I do now?’ I asked in disbelief.

  Somehow, I was comfortable as soldier and warrior, but I was unable to function when the ‘war’ was over. Especially when I had been the victor.

  ‘Oh. You know the purpose of the Chevening Scholarship, don’t you?’ The lady was a bit surprised.

  ‘Actually, no,’ I answered. ‘To be honest, I only studied the subjects the exams required, such as film-making skills, English literature, etc. But I don’t know what Chevening is. Is it a large mansion house where I will be staying in England? In Kent, I heard.’

  The English lady started to laugh. She laughed for so long, that I began to laugh too. I now thought that I might be at risk of losing the scholarship because of my ignorance.

  ‘You’re actually not too wrong about Chevening! It is a mansion in England, but I’m afraid you won’t be living there. It’s the official residence of our Foreign Secretary in the UK. Sorry!’ She gave me a wry look, then added more seriously: ‘But you should really know what a Chevening Scholarship is.’

  Now I felt slightly ashamed. I should have never mentioned the mansion. She would think that I was a greedy Chinese who wanted to kick out the British Foreign Secretary from his home. But the woman seemed to have forgiven me and went on: ‘The Chevening Scholarship is a British government award for future leaders from all over the world. We select young, global talent with leadership qualities, then we bring them to Britain so that they will have the opportunity to develop their vision and international skills. And the money you receive will enable you to focus on your work.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ I looked at the official letter she had just given me. Fifteen thousand pounds for a year’s film study in England. ‘Who gave me this money?’

  ‘It’s funded by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office of the UK.’

  Commonwealth. This was a strange word for a mainland Chinese to hear. We are not part of any Commonwealth. We have never been under British rule, except for Hong Kong which had only recently been returned to the mainland at that point. So if I was not a British subject, how could I receive this scholarship?

  I didn’t dare ask the nice lady these questions. I knew I was ignorant about global politics, which only showed I was not really the future leadership material they were looking for. I thanked her repeatedly, took my passport and the official letters from the UK government, and walked outside.

  Beijing was its usual mess of construction. Every inch of earth and wall was being penetrated with ear-piercing drilling and banging. Crane drivers were shouting down at me to get out of their way, and barely a layer of scaffolding protected the pedestrians below. I looked up in distress. A few tall cranes were hovering above like spacecraft from Star Wars, shifting tons of building material and turning in all kinds of directions. There was nowhere for me to sit down or think in peace. I ran into the nearest McDonald’s, which had some empty seats, and I sat and studied my passport and the mysterious-looking visa. I had to get used to this, I told myself. Leaving aside the ridiculous ‘future global leader’ stuff, I realised that I had to tell my parents the news at once.

  They were rather surprised but both thought it sounded like a great opportunity. My father couldn’t talk, but he wrote his words on a piece of paper and my mother repeated them to me down the phone.

  ‘Your father says he is very proud of you! All your years of studying now make sense.’ Then she added: ‘You said the scholarship is from England. Do you mean Great Britain?’

  ‘Yes. Great Britain,’ I confirmed.

  ‘That’s great. Greater than United States, right?’ my mother said, drawing her conclusions from her Maoist education of the 1960s. But I knew that she had no idea about either Britain or America. The only thing she knew about those countries was that they were in the West. ‘You should take a rice cooker with you. I heard that Westerners don’t use rice cookers.’

  I didn’t respond to such a trivial suggestion. I was thinking about my father’s cancer. How long would he last? But I wouldn’t let this thought trouble and delay me. I just wanted to leave the country now.

  I remember very well the day I left China. It was 1 April, and the notorious Beijing sandstorm season had begun. At noon the sky above Beijing was still blue. But within minutes an ominous yellow billowing sheet enveloped the tall buildings and a crazy wind whipped at my hair. I dragged my luggage towards the subway, choking in the sandy soup. This was my chance to escape the world I had grown up in. But that world was trying one last time to keep me. I will be walking under a gentle and moist English sky soon, I said to myself. It nurtures rather than hinders its inhabitants. I will breathe in the purest Atlantic sea air and live on an island called Britain. All this was destined to be nothing more than a memory.

  It was on the back of receiving this scholarship that I managed to leave China for the first time

  PART IV | EUROPE: IN THE LAND OF NOMADS

  After another eighteen months, the pilgrims arrived in India. Although they had heard legends about India’s fabulous wealth, instead they found poverty brought on by drought: the rivers had dried up and the vegetation had shrivelled to scrub. There was no water i
n the wells and no food in the markets. A bushel of wheat cost a hundred pieces of silver; a bundle of firewood cost even more. Girls of five were sold for three pints of rice; boys of two were being given to whoever would take them. Everywhere they went, they saw human suffering. Under his master’s influence, Wukong the monkey began to see and feel the misery and injustice of the human world.

  For the next thirteen years, they travelled through the subcontinent, visiting Buddhist pilgrimage sites and studying at the ancient universities. Xuanzang and his two disciples also learned Pari and Sanskrit, the languages of the Buddhist scriptures. Wukong had been loyal to his master, though he could not engage in any intellectual activities due to his nature. As always, he preferred to fight and play with other animals in the wild. But he never forgot that he was wearing his master’s magic headband all the time.

  In the final year of their travels, they arrived at their destination: Vulture Peak in Rajagaha in the north-east of India. But Vulture Peak was surrounded by nine rings of high walls. The people who lived under the peak were destitute and the streets deserted. There were many soldiers guarding the walls. Xuanzang spent three days and three nights explaining to the gatekeepers that he had been sent by the emperor on a noble mission. But they were not moved by his entreaties. By the end of the third day Wukong had lost patience and began to attack the soldiers. Chaos was unleashed. The gatekeepers launched an offensive against the pilgrims. Though the master was protected by Wukong, Pigsy and Sandy were not and they were soon killed by the spears thrown by the gatekeepers. Xuanzang thrust himself before the menacing soldiers and addressed them with these words: