Once Upon a Time in the East

by Xiaolu Guo

  As we walked along the rusty, scruffy east London roads, I began to get the sense that London must be a hard place to love. People from other countries moved here for jobs and opportunities, but this didn’t necessarily make you love the place. If you felt affection for your home, you planted flowers on your windowsill, or a tree in your front garden. But all I saw were bare walls and CCTV cameras. Some lines from a poem called ‘Slough’ came to mind. It was by the English poet John Betjeman. I had read it when I was applying for the Chevening Scholarship back in Beijing. At the time I thought it would be something useful to learn. I didn’t really understand it, as I had never been to Slough. But now the lines ran through my head:

  Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!

  It isn’t fit for humans now,

  There isn’t grass to graze a cow.

  Swarm over, Death!

  It isn’t fit for humans now, there isn’t grass to graze a cow. How precise.

  ‘Why does the council have to put fences around those ugly houses?’ I asked. ‘Even the little patch where they grow grass is fenced. The rubbish disposal areas are fenced off. The bicycle chaining place is fenced … The city looks like a prison!’

  ‘I know what you mean, I hate that too,’ Daniel said. ‘I hate London as much as you do.’

  At the time Daniel was working as a deliveryman when we weren’t studying, driving around in his dirty, misshapen hippy van, delivering goods to people’s houses. He told me he suffered from migraines after spending all day in the city.

  ‘I’m never happy in London. Every day is a struggle here, every day.’

  ‘Every day? Really?’ This sounded like what I was going through.

  ‘Yes, every day. Fighting with the council, fighting with business people who want to steal money from you, fighting with those bastards in the street.’

  ‘Then why don’t you live somewhere else?’

  ‘I did live somewhere else. I used to live in Wales. And I loved it there, people are much nicer. And I love the sea and the valleys.’

  Wales! For me, the whole idea was exotic. The only thing I knew about Wales at that point was that it had a dragon on its flag just like imperial China. But it seemed strange to think of this Chinese dragon transplanted to such a faraway place, a tiny hilly corner of Britain.

  ‘Can you take me there?’

  ‘I would love to,’ he smiled.

  So when the summer holiday started, we left London for Wales.

  South-West Wales

  Even though the beauty of the British countryside has been extolled in song and verse by writers such as Wordsworth and Keats, I wasn’t prepared for the empty, windy no-man’s-land that I encountered in Wales. As it turned out, the trip was a deeply alienating experience for me, and led to me breaking up with Daniel.

  Daniel used to live in Pembrokeshire, and he seemed impatient to introduce me to his old community. But the introduction apparently came with conditions. The first thing he said to me when we arrived at Fishguard train station, was:

  ‘Change your shoes, or people here will think you’re city folk – boring middle class.’

  ‘What?’

  I looked down at my shoes: a pair of modern leather boots. What was the problem? Although they looked a bit feminine, they didn’t have high heels or fancy buckles. I didn’t understand what was wrong with them. But he insisted. We rushed into a shop by the station and I bought a pair of plain wellies. Still, I chose a red colour rather than black. What was wrong with being middle class? I wondered. Weren’t most people in the West middle class? In China, we were taught to strive for such a thing, to catch up with the West. A pair of modest-looking rain boots wasn’t going to rid me of my middle-class vanity, I thought, and I kept the leather boots.

  It soon became clear that Daniel’s old home here was a hippy commune. All the people I met seemed proud of their own eccentricities, which was probably why Daniel worried about me looking middle class and boring. Ten families lived together in an old church and priory. Everyone seemed to be everyone else’s ex-lover. They spent their time sitting around, or playing with each other’s children. No one went to work. Planting beans seemed to be the main occupation, though this didn’t take up much time. The food was simple – raw leaves, steamed beans and potatoes – a kind of culinary hell for a Chinese. And there was no proper loo. You just had to squat on the wet grass, depositing your waste alongside the cowpats.

  ‘What’s your problem?’ Daniel said, sensing my disapproval. ‘Did you have an indoor loo when you lived in your village in China?’

  To top it all off, I soon discovered that half of the commune residents were drunk by midday. Nights started earlier in west Wales, around four or five in the afternoon. It always seemed to be dark, a land of eternal evening.

  Pembrokeshire is occasionally referred to as little England beyond Wales. Maybe that’s because of all the English hippies who came here from London in the sixties and seventies. On the third day, Daniel showed me an old church he had always wanted to purchase, lost in one of the valleys.

  ‘Isn’t it lovely?’ he said, pointing to the old cemetery infested with tall grass and weeds that were slowly strangling the weathered gravestones.

  Lovely was one of those enigmatic words that I discovered after arriving in England. The English used this word in ways that were baffling to me. Clearly, I was encountering some kind of aesthetic experience or concept that was alien to me. I contemplated the decaying churchyard with its scattering of defunct apple trees. Their leaves were coated in a white-greyish mildew that suggested a world in which time had stopped. I thought I would never grasp the idea of loveliness, there would always be something about Daniel I could never understand. Why would someone who was interested in becoming a film-maker want to end up in a decaying churchyard counting gravestones? For me, film-making involved a commitment to modern technology and certain social realities. It was progressive, whereas this vision to me was regressive: the sinking of all ambition into a quicksand that promised to suffocate us.

  On one of the mountains – Carningli, in the Preseli Hills near the town of Newport – I encountered some people who had been living in isolation for years. One of them, a female poet, was deeply melancholic, and wrote about death and nature. She was a Sylvia Plath, brought back to life, but only halfway. I couldn’t empathise with her. Instead, I felt like her bleakness was eating away at my optimism. I told her in my bad English: ‘You should leave your husband, take your children and get out of this cold and dead farm, get out of here! It’s this place that is killing you!’ My bluntness shocked her immensely. But couldn’t she see her problem? I left her house, infected with her depression. From that moment on, people thought I was the rudest and cruellest foreigner they had ever met. And I could feel that Daniel no longer wanted me there.

  The weather in Wales was cold, wet, and windy. There never seemed to be anyone on the hills, nor farming their lands or working the soil. My feeling of dislocation was growing, like a stain darkening my body. That feeling of abandonment had always been there, in the background, but here it was being reawakened. The landscape was projecting it. Death was moving about on those wet hillsides, slithering like a lizard under a tangle of brush. It was waiting to reclaim me. How could I survive here, let alone find the intellectual and artistic milieu I wanted? No one here had any interest in my story. Cows and goats didn’t give a damn about where I came from. I cursed the distant hills as I took my daily, solitary walks, my feet sucked down into the ravenous mud. I felt a mute dread come over me on those green valley paths, as if my body was being drowned in the monotony of greenness. I imagined losing my yellow-brown fighting spirit, being inked into the grey-green mist like an anonymous figure in a forgotten painting. I screamed and yelled in my heart. It was the loneliest moment of my life. At least during those years in Shitang I had the warm ocean, and the fishermen who generally said ‘yes’ to life. I followed Daniel along the edge of the Irish Sea at Newport Bay. In the freezing
wind, I swore to myself that I would never return to this part of the world as long as I lived. I thought: this is the west of the West, and it’s all I can take. I needed to be in a part of the West that had enough of the East in it for me to survive! Suddenly, I recalled a line from a Rudyard Kipling poem: ‘East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.’ I had never agreed with this line. But right there, in my desolate heart, Kipling’s words seemed to capture exactly how I felt. It was also in Wales that Daniel introduced me to some sad English poetry. One, by Philip Larkin, has stayed with me.

  Never such innocence,

  Never before or since,

  As changed itself to past

  Without a word – the men

  Leaving the gardens tidy,

  The thousands of marriages,

  Lasting a little while longer:

  Never such innocence again.

  When Daniel read this poem, ‘MCMXIV’, to me in his draughty 200-year-old stone house, I kept wondering: what does it mean, ‘never such innocence again’? Does it mean that men and women can never again fall in love with the absolute innocence and passion of the first time?

  Certainly it felt like Daniel was unable to fall in love again, since he was much older than me and had a few failed relationships behind him. I found him almost too calm, and often detached. If any problem did arise, his first reaction would be to put the kettle on and make a cup of tea, as if everything could be solved with hot water from an old kettle. Well, never such innocence again. What about me? Yet again, I was facing the question of love and sex, both of which, in my case, had been conditioned by trauma from the past. After Hu Wenren’s abuse and Jiang’s violence, I felt that men always let me down, or hurt me, or sent me to a place which set off alarm bells inside me. Relationships. I didn’t understand the concept. Coupling didn’t make sense. Intimacy was invariably pierced by the bleakness of my heart, a shell-like thing with pins and hard edges that fiercely prevented any merging with another.

  Then a letter arrived from my father, sent to my new address in Wales. Clearly he was confused about where I was exactly.

  Where are you living these days? In school accommodation or a rented apartment in London? Which is the best address for me to send letters to? And how are your studies? Do you think you will be able to get any film work afterwards? I hope your education in England will be fruitful. Everyone in Wenling now knows about your prestigious scholarship and we are very proud of you …

  I felt a deep shame upon reading this. I couldn’t tell him the truth – that I was neither focusing on my studies nor looking for any film jobs. Instead, I was marooned on a wet Welsh mountaintop with a bunch of hippies. I was doing nothing productive. I could never share their ideals, nor could they understand why I had such an all-encompassing ambition to be an artist. It was clear that I could never put roots down in such bleak soil.

  I missed the pulsating human energy of life in China: frenetic streets and crowded markets, kids laughing and fighting in the fields, delicious food smells from every kitchen window in the evening as I walked home. I even grew nostalgic for the sound of the loudspeakers and their propaganda broadcasts. I missed those ever-changing sights and sounds. It was on those barren hillsides that I realised that I couldn’t, and wouldn’t, cut myself off from China forever. I was born in the East and part of my heart had been left behind there. Indeed, it was only in west Wales that I understood how much I needed China as the driver of my imagination, a source of creativity, thought and understanding. From now on, never again would I turn my back on the China of my youth.

  I didn’t reply to my father’s letter. I didn’t want to lie to him. He would feel sad if he knew I was lost in these cold, rain-soaked mountains. To London I must return, that was clear. I had to go back to my film-making and writing as soon as possible, even if I had to break up with Daniel to do it. It occurred to me that relationships with men seldom made me happy. Perhaps I was expecting too much from them, despite not really believing such expectations could ever be realised. Being with Daniel made me feel more desolate than usual and isolated me from a world to which I had once belonged: literature, cinema and art. I felt a constant urge to write. So I packed my clothes and left. That experience in Wales and my days with Daniel, though difficult, gave me inspiration for themes I would later explore in my books and films: alienation, dislocation and the idea of home. I think these feelings had always been there, it was only a question of when and where I would finally write them down.

  It was on that long train ride from rural Wales to the cityscape of London that I began to work on a feature-film script called She, a Chinese. It was a story about a Chinese peasant woman who leaves her village and comes to the West, before eventually realising she must now rely on herself, not on the men in her life. The film ends with her walking by the sea, heavily pregnant, looking across the water as if to the distant image of her childhood home.

  Adopting a New Language

  The year I came to England I was nearing thirty. I spent several months in panicked activity as the thought of my age came bearing down on me – to be a thirty-year-old woman in China was to be unbearably old! I still remember that celebration in London with some of my classmates from the film school. It was actually the first birthday party I had organised in my entire life. Like most Chinese families at the time, my family never celebrated birthdays. But there I was, cooking Chinese dumplings for my Western friends. Everyone declared that thirty was a good age, the age at which you started to know yourself a little, when you were no longer confused and started achieving goals. But I spent that year very confused. I had lost my main tool: language. Here, I was nothing but a witless, dumb, low-class foreigner.

  At the end of the Chevening Scholarship I was supposed to go back to China. But I didn’t want to. So I struggled to get all the required paperwork together and managed to extend my visa. Now the crucial question was: how do I make a living in the West? I had to survive somehow. But survival wasn’t enough. I wanted dignity. I could only see myself making a living through writing, as I had done in China. But should I write in Chinese here, a foreign land, or enrol in a language class and study English grammar? If I continued to write in Chinese I would have no readers here. Besides, I would never create a community of fellow artists and thinkers in my Western life while speaking Chinese.

  I didn’t want to risk feeling even lonelier than I had done in China. It was not just the physical loneliness, but cultural and intellectual isolation. By the time my thirtieth-birthday party drew to a close, I was clear about my direction: I would have to start writing in another tongue. I would use my broken English, even though it would be extremely difficult. And yet, more positively, I would be free from state and self-censorship, which was an even more significant issue for me as a Chinese writer. State censorship was an obvious assault on our creativity, but few Chinese writers actually acknowledge the serious and endemic issue of self-censorship. For me it was as clear as the operation of the state’s apparatus – without self-censorship an artist in China would get nowhere and had no voice. Self-censorship was like a shadow body embedded in every Chinese writer. It was necessary and useful. This self-protection enabled us to continue living safely in China doing what we loved. But now that I was living in the UK, I wouldn’t need this foreign body that had lived inside me any more. I could flush it down the toilet, along with my consciousness of the propaganda machine.

  When the birthday party was over, I mopped the floor and did the washing-up. An idea for a novel was already forming in my mind: I would make an advantage out of my disadvantage. I would write a book about a Chinese woman in England struggling with the culture and language. She would compose her own personal English dictionary. The novel would be a sort of phrasebook, recording the things she did and the people she met.

  I had to overcome the huge obstacle of my poor English. I decided I didn’t want to go to language classes because I knew my impatience would kill my will, my threshold fo
r boredom being just too low. Instead, I decided to teach myself. Perhaps this was a huge mistake? As I studied day and night I grew more and more frustrated with English as a language, but also as a culture. The fundamental problem with English for me was that there is no direct connection between words and meanings; in Chinese most characters are drawn and composed from images. Calligraphy is one of the foundations of the written language. When you write the Chinese for sun, it is or , which means ‘an extreme manifestation of Yang energy’. Yang signifies things with strong, bright and hot energy. So ‘extreme yang’ can only mean the sun. But in English, sun is written with three letters, s, u and n, and none of them suggests any greater or deeper meaning. Nor does the word look anything like the sun! Visual imagination and philosophical understandings were useless when it came to European languages. Technically, the foremost difficulty for an Asian writer who wants to write in English is tense. Verb conjugations in English are, quite simply, a real drag. We Chinese never modify verbs for time or person, nor do we have anything like a subjunctive mood. All tenses are in the present. Because once you say something, you mean it in your current time and space. There is no past or future when making a statement. We only add specific time indicators to our verbs if we need them. Take the verb to go. In Chinese to go is , zou, and you can use zou in any context without needing to change it. But zou in English has all these forms: goes, went, gone, going. Mastering verb conjugations was a serious struggle for me, almost a dialectical critique of the metaphysics of grammar.

  I particularly detested the past perfect progressive tense, which I called the Annoying PPP: a continuous action completed at some point in the past. I felt giddy every time I heard the Annoying PPP; I just couldn’t understand how anyone was able to grasp something so complex. For example, my grammar book said: ‘Peter had been painting his house for weeks, but he finally gave up.’ My immediate reaction even before I got to the grammatical explanation was: my God, how could someone paint his house for weeks and still give up? I just couldn’t see how time itself could regulate people’s actions as if they were little clocks! As for the grammar, the word order had been and the added flourishes like ing made my stomach churn. They were bizarre decorations that did nothing but obscure a simple, strong building. My instinct was to say something like: ‘Peter tries to paint his house, but sadness overwhelms him, causing him to lay down his brushes and give up his dream.’