Once Upon a Time in the East

by Xiaolu Guo

  ‘I am a monk sent by His Majesty, the Great Tang Emperor of China, to worship the Lord Buddha and return with his scriptures. We left our home country twenty-three years ago and we have suffered diseases and have aged from this long journey. We are grateful to have finally reached the foot of this holy mountain, but what we have come to realise is that there is not a single happy person living here under the shadow of Vulture Peak. Blocking the way to the holy scriptures has the purpose of creating ignorance in human minds by not allowing people to understand the purest meaning of the Buddha’s teaching. You must desist now. You must allow us free passage. I must see these ancient sutras and take them to China so that the deep wisdom of Buddha can be transmitted to the people of Chang-an. We will return the scriptures once we have finished translating them, and do so with profound gratitude to Buddha.’

  The gatekeepers were moved by these words. The master and the monkey were finally given permission to enter the tower where the sutras were kept. And there, on the Vulture Peak, Xuanzang and Wukong saw and touched the holy scriptures for the first time.

  On Westminster Bridge, just arrived in London, 2002

  Arrival

  ‘The girl is a peasant warrior, she will travel the Nine Continents.’

  I was five and a half, clinging to my grandmother’s skinny legs and listening with fear to the Taoist monk’s prediction about my future. The wind was cold, blowing from the shadowy bamboo forest behind the temple, and little snakes were lurking all around us. I never visited that desolate temple again after my grandmother died. Sometimes I wondered if it still existed, or whether it had been renovated and was now home to a new set of young monks. But from that day on, my grandmother fixed the monk’s words within her heart, and was steadfast in the idea that I would become the person he had dimly foreseen that day. Even now I don’t really believe the old man foretold my future, my memory of a snake-infested temple and an old monk bent over a fire muttering is more powerful than his prophecy. But somehow his words became a kind of personal myth for me, a myth that manifested itself as my only possible destiny.

  I spent a sleepless eleven hours sitting in the Air China Boeing 747 to London. I stared anxiously at the flight route map on the screen, ate whatever was put in front of me, and peered out of the window onto the great Mongolian plains and desert mountains below. Apparently my people, one strand of the Hui minority, had originated here. They had moved east, down into the lush rice paddies of the Chinese coast. And now I was leaving the coastline of my youth and moving west. After a few hours, mountains were replaced by flat, green farmland, and then clouds obscured the view. I was locked inside the confines of the plane. Unable to read or sleep, I entered a kind of purgatorial state, until eventually, exhausted and zombie-like, we landed at Heathrow Airport. At immigration, they checked my passport with its brand-new visa and my official Chevening Scholarship letter. The only question I remember them asking me was:

  ‘Is this your first visit to the UK?’

  I answered in my broken English, but with absolute earnestness, something like: ‘My first time, sir. My amazing letter is bigger important. Prove first-time come here arrrtest.’

  The immigration officer behind the counter raised his head, looked at me for a few seconds, and then asked: ‘Arrrtest?’

  I repeated the word a few times, then wrote it down on a piece of paper.

  ‘Artist!’ he exclaimed.

  He shook his head, smiling and scowling at the same time, and stamped my passport with a very loud bang. He then fumbled with it, somehow ejecting it from the window so that it fell on the floor, next to my feet. I picked it up and blew the dust off from its surface, before entering Great Britain.

  There was no one to pick me up, and all I had was a reservation letter for a student hostel near Marylebone Station in central London. Dragging my luggage, I jumped into a taxi.

  Great Britain or – what was this country called exactly? The United Kingdom and Northern Ireland? As I looked out at the streets through the rain-drenched window of the taxi, it smelled damp and soggy. The air clung to my cheeks. The sky was dim, and the city drew a low and squat outline against the horizon: not very impressive. We travelled slowly, through unfamiliar, traffic-jammed streets. Everything felt threatening: the policemen moving about the street corner with their hands resting on their truncheons, long queues of grey-faced people at bus stops but no one talking, fire engines shooting through the traffic with howling sirens … I realised that I knew nothing about this country at all. I had planted myself in alien soil. And, most of all, my only tool of communication was a jumble of half-grammatically correct sentences in this tongue they called English. In China I had learned that the population of Britain was equal to that of my little province, Zhejiang. Perhaps it was true, since the streets didn’t look that grand, especially the motorways, which were even uglier than the ones in China. Everything was one size smaller, or even two. Still, here I was. As the Chinese say: ruxiang suisu – once in the village, you must follow their customs.

  For the first week in London, I spent my days walking underneath a sky leaden with wet clouds and in the few moments the sky was clear the streets were blasted by a fierce wind. The weather changed constantly, and rain threatened at every moment. My umbrella was my only companion, a royal escort. If the English light had felt dim upon my arrival, it was even gloomier from under an umbrella.

  Before I left China, I was desperately looking for something. Freedom, the chance to live as an individual with dignity. This was impossible in my home country. But I was also blindly looking for something connected to the West, something non-ideological, something imaginative and romantic. But as I walked along the London streets, trying to save every penny for buses or food, I lost sight of my previous vision. London seemed no more spiritually fulfilling than home. Instead, I was faced with a world of practical problems and difficulties. Perhaps I was looking for great writers to meet or great books to read, but I could barely decipher a paragraph of English. Still, behind and beyond all the practicalities, in my naive mind, I was convinced I would find an artistic movement to be part of, something like the Beat Generation, or the Dadaists of the old Europe. Yet all I encountered were angry teenagers who screamed at me as they passed on their stolen bikes and grabbed my bag – they were the most frightening group I had ever met in my life. Before I came to England, I thought British teenagers attended elite boarding schools like Eton and all spoke posh and wore perfect black suits. It was a stupid assumption, no doubt. But all I had to go on were the English period dramas that showed rich people in plush mansions, as if that was how everyone lived in England. In the evenings, I hid my long hair in my coat and walked along the graffiti-smeared streets and piss-drenched alleyways, passing beggars with their dogs, and I asked myself: So is this what the rich West is really like? If that was the case, I wanted to cry. Cry for my own stupid illusions. What an idiot I was. Now I realised there had been some truth to my own country’s Communist education: the West was not milk and honey.

  Beaconsfield

  After the temporary student hostel by Marylebone Station, I had to move to Beaconsfield, twenty miles from London, in Buckinghamshire. There were only two big buildings in the town: a supermarket called Tesco and the National Film and Television School, where I was to spend a year studying documentary film directing. I felt like a complete alien in Beaconsfield. I was told that this was the richest village in all of Britain. For a Chinese person, village is synonymous with peasants, rice paddies and buffaloes. Here, every home was surrounded by trimmed rose bushes. Yellow roses in the front garden, red in the back. And everyone seemed to own a pair of cars, parked alongside their house. It was not quite The Forsyte Saga, but almost. If you walked out of the village, there were neither rice fields nor farming land to be seen. Instead, a car factory lay on the outskirts, alongside warehouses with trucks delivering goods to Waitrose or Sainsbury’s.

  As I strolled along the monotonous village road (there was on
ly one narrow main road from the train station to the centre), I would occasionally see an old English lady passing with her shopping. I was told that people were very polite here so I smiled vaguely whenever I encountered a local. But I wasn’t sure if I was convincing. Often I stopped in front of one of the little rose-bordered houses and tried to imagine the lives of the people inside. Had they lived here all their lives? Or perhaps moved here after wild adventures in places like India or Thailand or Ghana when they were young? Most students commuted from London, so I was a rarity in Beaconsfield. And on the weekends when I went out looking for company I found the village absolutely dead. No shops were open, no cafes served coffee, the only place with an open door was a brightly lit pub called the Old Swan. I had to admit that English pubs were something very special. They always looked cosy, soft and warm, even though sometimes the men were loud and unpleasant and never stopped talking about football, beer mug in hand. I liked English pubs in general, because they had a particular smell that reminded me of my mother’s silk factory in Wenling, with its heavy scent of steam, stale air, human sweat and scorched protein.

  I used to spend my afternoons in the Old Swan. I’d go in just after it opened and read and write. ‘A cup of hot water without a tea bag please,’ I would say. The woman behind the counter began to take this as a sort of weird insult, knowing that I would be sitting in the corner for hours. I learned that I needed to be a good customer, so I began adding: ‘I will order a plate of roast beef once your suppertime starts.’ She winked at me, as if I was some alien monkey. After a few visits with my books and laptop, everyone started calling me Lucy. ‘So how are your parents in Hong Kong?’ they would ask. ‘Do they want to visit England again?’ I was so confused. I wasn’t from Hong Kong nor were my parents, even though I secretly wished they were. Then I heard that there had been a girl from Hong Kong who lived here two or three years earlier, and also studied at the film school. Apparently she had the same long black hair as mine. They were so sure that I was Lucy from Hong Kong that I didn’t want to correct them. And I began living the part to fit in, making up stories of my former life back in Hong Kong, absorbing bits of information they revealed to me.

  ‘I haven’t seen you in a long time, Lucy,’ one of the barmaids said. ‘I thought you went back to Hong Kong! How’s your family, love?’

  ‘Oh … they are very well, thanks,’ I answered vaguely.

  ‘I remember your dad visited you a while back, and he was very fond of our lager. Is he still working for HSBC? Or did he retire?’

  ‘Yes, he just retired.’ I guessed that was a plausible answer to her question. She smiled warmly and offered me another free cup of hot water.

  My film-school experience wasn’t as friendly as the English pub. My previous training in China was, I quickly discovered, the enemy of the style here. At the Beijing Film Academy, the teaching followed the Russian model, borrowing especially from the Moscow Film School, combined with La Fémis in Paris. Since our teachers had mainly been sent to Moscow and Paris, we had been taught to think of cinema as visual poetry, divorced from the traditions of theatre and literature. Furthermore, Chinese cinema had not yet been overwhelmed by Hollywood and we had formed our own way of making films. But at the National Film and Television School, the system was strongly influenced by the BBC and popular documentary journalism. I felt that ‘Auteur Cinema’ had little place here. Rather, there was mainly television documentary-making, often made with the standard BBC voice-over. It was only much later that I would come to appreciate British documentary film-making and to understand the tradition it had grown out of. At the time I had no context in which to place what the film school was trying to do, and I didn’t understand the way in which British cultural life was dominated by ‘consumer demand’, which was something the Beijing Film Academy wasn’t so interested in. The film-makers I had loved intensely when I was in Beijing such as Vertov, Pasolini, Fassbinder, Godard, Chantel Akerman, Chris Marker and Jean Rouch were old-fashioned artists here – they belonged only to European cinema. And if I ever pressed my point too much in class, the students would despise me, accusing me of being ‘pretentious’ and ‘intellectual’. Of course, I felt their judgement was unfair. For me, ‘being pretentious’ was the complete opposite of ‘being intellectual’. A real intellectual hates empty pretention. But I didn’t want to get into such an argument with the students and teachers here, because my English was too limited to say what I wanted. Instead, I spent most of my time alone in the Old Swan, studying English grammar and reading an English dictionary straight from the letter A.

  During those desolate days I thought a lot about my childhood. I had been illiterate until the age of eight, and now, at the age of almost thirty, I was once again illiterate. I had to learn how to speak and write in another language otherwise I couldn’t construct a life in the West. Identity seemed to be a pure construction – something I had only just realised. But this time the reconstruction felt much tougher than the first time. The pride I had brought with me from China didn’t save me here; instead, it killed me. A feeling of being a ‘second-class citizen’ dominated my every day in Beaconsfield, and made me hang my head in despair.

  London

  Originally I thought I would live in Beaconsfield so that I could save time commuting between London and the film school. But after three months of wealth and deathly silence I felt like a weightless ghost, and I couldn’t stand it any more. I felt youth had abandoned me and I had become one of the middle-aged people attached to their shopping trolleys who wandered up and down the leafy streets. So I moved out of my shared flat and headed to London. It was simpler than I thought – a forty-minute train ride. And it was worth the cost. I felt life return to me again.

  Here I was, walking among all the other non-English speaking foreigners. Bengalis, Arabs, Brazilians, Spanish, Germans, French, Italians, Vietnamese and even Icelanders! At least I wasn’t the only Asian face in the street.

  All the years I’ve lived in London, I have ended up in the ugliest parts of the city. First there was a stingy, sad little house along a railway line by Tottenham Hale Station, choked by a transient and hopeless immigrant population. Later I moved to a flat on a council estate on Hackney Road that felt like a prison. The whole area was dominated by brown brick set against rusty shabbiness. The rows of high fences were depressing. The Hackney of those days was not the Hackney of now, which has gentrified considerably. In 2002 there were gangs, both adult and teenage, formed according to the different blocks and postcodes. Often when I turned onto my street gangs would burst out of nowhere, around a corner, chasing some unfortunate soul who would be beaten violently in a dark alley. It all made me shiver. In China, the peasants rioted for equality, but you rarely saw open gang conflict on the streets.

  During those long, rainy nights, with no friends and nowhere to go, my loneliness crept up from my stomach and swallowed me entirely. I couldn’t read much and had difficulty sleeping. My English wasn’t good enough to go through a page of text before I was so completely frustrated by my constant checking of the dictionary. There was no one to talk to. I had no communication with my Cantonese landlords either. Their lives seemed only to revolve around their tiny takeaway restaurant. Their meat was half rotten, they refroze the leftovers again and again, their vegetables were never washed before cooking, their sauces were long overdue. They sold everything at minimum cost. As a result, the restaurant produced box after box of, for me, inedible food. They had no books in their house, and seemingly no thoughts in their heads. There was even less culture in this house than there had been in my grandmother’s run-down dwelling in Shitang. Was the money they got worth the sacrifice of a meaningful life? I often got up in the night, stood by my window and looked out onto the empty, illuminated street. You might hear a police car rushing past, blasting its siren at a deafening volume; under some dim street light, an old bum would be slumped on a bench pulling a newspaper over himself for shelter; then a glass bottle would be smashed aga
inst a wall followed by a chorus of brutal swearing. What harsh, cold, rain-drenched and siren-whining nights they were! London seemed such a dark place, a place of deprivation. How did its people live here for years on end? I hadn’t spent much time in the happier parts of this great capital, the ‘posh’ areas. I was sure the Queen, if ever she woke in the night, didn’t look out onto such gloomy streets. Only the mindless ivy that grew along the rusty fences didn’t notice the brutality of this side of London.

  The only salvation from my overwhelming loneliness was to find a lover. The need didn’t arise from any sexual desire, nor from any goal of building a home in the West. But from some basic things I wanted: warmth in the night, a male body, gentle and kindly, to love mine. Those cold nights would be soothed by an embrace, and I would be distracted from the feelings of loneliness as his body was pressed against mine.

  Then I met Daniel. He was also studying at the film school in Beaconsfield and we often took the train back to London together. In some ways, Daniel typified the English traits I had encountered in my short time here: he was a vegetarian, an inveterate tea drinker, good at gardening and had strong connections to India. But he was also an artist and a political activist. Instead of taking me to see flowers in the park or art in galleries, he would show me around where he lived in Hackney. Often we ate in cheap greasy spoons, before walking under railway arches, passing smelly garages along the siren-song streets. I would spot a mentally ill man screaming and swearing on some desolate street corner. I had never witnessed so many desperate, angry, swearing men in my life. I felt rather disturbed by these scenes. But Daniel reassured me. ‘You know they’re not actually angry, just ill.’ I instantly imagined myself penniless, mad and schizophrenic, roaming the treeless streets, swearing obscenities in Chinese. Perhaps I’d be driven to kill myself just as my grandfather had done.