by Xiaolu Guo
But this was not the worst of it. I found something even more difficult: the dreaded past progressive tense. It was itself a philosophical enigma. For example: ‘I was riding my bike all day yesterday.’ But if that was yesterday then the bike ride would be finished by today, therefore it couldn’t be ‘was riding’, a continuing action. Also, a ‘participle’ is a weird thing for East Asians. The dictionary told me it is a word formed from a verb (e.g. going, gone, being, been) and used as an adjective (e.g. working woman, burnt toast). They are also used to make compound verb forms (e.g. is going, has been). I found the whole thing very abstract, even if I had to admit it might be more logical than Chinese grammar. But what’s the point of logical? In China, it was almost akin to being impolite. ‘Friend, you are too fat therefore you should not eat.’
In my state of despair, I asked myself, what kind of tenses did my hero Jack Kerouac write in? In the Chinese edition of On the Road, there were, of course, no tenses. The whole book is in the present, like a diary. So I went to a bookshop and bought the original version. To my astonishment, as I flipped through On the Road, I discovered that even my American hero turned out to be ‘logical’; he had written the whole book in the past tense! I sat in the cafe next to the bookshop, and thought bitterly: where was Kerouac’s mind as he feverishly typed his beloved Dean Moriarty’s story? Surely a stream of consciousness, if it was anything, was a vivid form of present tense! Did that mean even youth culture in the West lived in the past? Where was their now? Did the present ever exist? I sighed. A sadness overwhelmed me. I laid down the Kerouac book and finally gave up on the idea of using only the present tense in my new, Western life.
Another curious realisation came when I discovered I used the first-person plural too much in my everyday speech. More than necessary, for sure. In the West, if I said ‘We like to eat rice’, it would confuse people. They couldn’t understand who this ‘we’ was referring to. Instead, I should have said ‘We Chinese like to eat rice’. After a few weeks, I swapped to the first-person singular, as in ‘I like to eat rice’. But it made me uncomfortable. After all, how could someone who had grown up in a collective society get used to using the first-person singular all the time? The habitual use of ‘I’ requires thinking of yourself as a separate entity in a society of separate entities. But in China no one is a separate entity: either you were born to a non-political peasant household or to a Communist Party household. But here, in this foreign country, I had to build a world as a first-person singular – urgently.
Still, the desire and will to work on a first book in English propelled me through the difficulties. Every day, I wrote a detailed diary, filled with the new vocabulary I had learned. The diary became the raw material for my novel, the one I had imagined while mopping the floor after my thirtieth-birthday party: A Concise Chinese–English Dictionary For Lovers.
To be Published and to be Known
Christmas Day 2002. London. Cloudy. Gloomy. For most English people, this seemed to be the most important day of the year, certainly the day when the English hearth and home were busiest. Yet here I was, a young Chinese writer, a foreigner still growing accustomed to life in Britain, sitting alone in my dingy, rented flat, drinking cups and cups of tea. The heating was weak and the flat was draughty, and I started to understand why English people loved tea. I began early that morning, at eight thirty exactly. The ritual went as follows: Earl Grey (courtesy of Tesco), followed by camomile (honey-flavoured), mountain honeybush (product of India) and, for the finale, blackcurrant (low in tannins, high in antioxidants). I figured that I had managed at least half of an English-style Christmas, for although there had been no roast turkey or throng of shouting relatives, I had consumed my fair share of English tea. But by the time I downed my fourth cup, I had grown weary of this tea tasting. I decided to open a bottle of French ‘Organic Red Wine’, or so the label claimed. To be honest, I didn’t much care whether it was French or English or South African, as long as it wasn’t Great Wall or Dragon Seal Red.
And so I worked on my first novel in English. I had to use four different Chinese–English dictionaries – two Oxford, one Longman, one Xinhua. The novel was a diary recording my frustrations with learning another language and trying to make it mine. After Christmas and an even lonelier new year, I managed to finish the first draft. What should I call it? I stared at the tomes on my kitchen table. I should just call it A Concise Chinese–English Dictionary For Lovers, a homage to the source of my words.
After I finished the novel I didn’t know what to do with it. I knew it would have little chance at ever being published, since I had written it using such broken English in a country awash with BBC voices and the perfect sentences of the Queen. And Britain was not like China, where writers could post their manuscripts directly to publishing houses. Here the system was different – as everyone told me. While pacing up and down in Waterstones one day and wondering how the hell all these books had been published, I happened upon the book Wild Swans. I leafed through it. In the acknowledgements, the author Jung Chang thanked her agent. At that point, my experience with agents was limited in the extreme, but common sense told me that an agent must be rather like a lawyer: a wheeler and dealer, someone capable of haggling shamelessly over prices, goods, terms and contracts … In other words, a good snakehead. This was exactly the sort of person who could help me get my book published. But I had to wonder: wasn’t the merit of the writing alone enough to get it published? Was it really necessary to have a clever and expensive agent as well? In China, writers don’t have agents because, in the world of Chinese socialism, agents have traditionally been viewed as parasites, members of the exploiting class. Although I had grown up with the same socialist propaganda and still held some of the same preconceptions about agents, I sent my book to Jung Chang’s agent that very day. A man called Toby Eady, at an address I had gleaned from a random Internet search. Who was this man? I wondered. What were the chances that he would pay any attention to a manuscript by an unknown Chinese author? Might he be a terrible snob? Might he be the sort of Westerner interested solely in Chinese dissident literature and writings about bloodshed in Tiananmen Square?
A month later, one February morning, I received a call from Mr Toby Eady’s office requesting a meeting. On the appointed day, I left my gritty lodgings in Hackney for his agency offices in posh Hyde Park. I will never forget that day. London was awash with a sea of bodies and police cars that afternoon. At first I didn’t understand why they were all there, and why helicopters were seemingly hovering above every street corner. Unbeknownst to me, it was the biggest protest in British history – a national demonstration to stop the imminent US and British invasion of Iraq. In fact, protests had been coordinated that day across six hundred cities in the world. But an ignorant person like me, who neither read the papers nor listened to the news, had little idea about what was going on. All transport had been stopped for the day, so I had to walk. I threaded my way through the chaos and banners for three hours, only to find my way totally blocked by manic crowds at Oxford Circus. Just then, I received a call informing me that the famous agent had left the office and would be unable to meet with me for the next few days. At that point, I figured it was all over. I was just part of the collateral damage.
Three months later, I received an unexpected phone call from my agent, who I finally managed to meet, informing me that Random House wanted to meet me to discuss the book. I was all nerves again. Leaving my flat at least four hours ahead of the appointed time, I made my way to Pimlico. This time I was too early. Sitting on a grey slab outside a rain-stained brown mansion building called ‘Random House’, I ate a prawn sandwich. I had no idea what the meeting would be about since no one had told me anything in advance. In those days I merely nodded my head, even before people began to speak. Eventually, I walked into the reception area. Disorientated by the number of floors and having to weave my way around mazes of paper-piled desks, I finally met some editors. They were very friendly and see
med to know a lot about me. One of them made me a cup of Earl Grey. But I still didn’t understand what the meeting was about. And my English was not good enough to understand the particular vocabulary of the Western publishing house. One of them mentioned a blurb and a jacket to me. Blurb and jacket? I asked myself quietly. Did she mean the jacket I was wearing was too blurry? Because I was wet from the rain? I wiped myself with a napkin from the tea saucer, and smiled at her again. By the time I left the office, I didn’t even understand that they had already made a good offer for my novel. At that time, even this word ‘offer’ was alien to me. I didn’t associate ‘an offer’ with money or buying book rights, I thought it meant ‘can I offer you a cup of tea, or a piece of cake?’ It took me a whole week to understand that the offer was much bigger than a cup of tea.
Over the next few months I worked with the editors intensely to improve the book. I felt much safer with their support. A year later the novel was published and I was overwhelmed by the positive reviews. I hadn’t expected such a warm reception. The book went on to be translated into more than twenty languages – ironic proof that even broken language can be translated if one has a good ear for how to go wrong in language.
Since then, many English friends have asked me how I got my book published in the West. How could a Chinese writer, fresh off the boat, barely speaking much English, manage to get her ‘English’ novel accepted? To be honest, I said to them, when I arrived I had no idea of the difficulties involved in publishing a novel here. I didn’t know that the process entailed waiting, having an agent and defining oneself in terms of a certain literary genre. In China, many genres – such as ‘self-help books’ or ‘culinary books’ – had not existed until very recently. There were only two genres in Chinese literature: ‘pure literature’ (chun wen xue) and ‘popular literature’ (liu xing wen xue). Pure literature was of course the one to which most Chinese writers aspired. And I always thought ‘genre’ was a concept that belonged to the television world. Here, it seemed that writing was another form of industrial production, albeit one with many different assembly lines. The contrast with China and its massive illiterate population could not be more stark; most of my relatives back home could neither read nor write. Such a vast selection of books was of no use to them. As a writer, I wasn’t sure which was better: being read by thousands in the West but still feeling misunderstood, or being read by very few in a country that understood me perfectly. At any rate, I had come to understand why the field of fiction in the West was so competitive, and what impact it had if you had the right editor and the right publisher behind you.
The Curse of Being a Writer
From the publication of my first English novel, I wrote intensely and all the time. I wrote three more books in English over the following three years. Apart from shopping, cooking and eating, I spent almost every waking hour in my flat, working and reading. I slept little. Although much of what I read has since been lost in the fog of inexactly understood words, reading was the only way to find my own voice in this new language. Once again, I went back to my old heroes, writers such as Marguerite Duras and Italo Calvino. But now I read the English versions rather than the Chinese translations.
I was in a vicious cycle: writing and reading seemed to be the only way to beat back the loneliness, but they also reinforced it. Financially, writing was also the only way for me to make an income. Each line written, each paragraph composed, was delivered in anxiety and desperation. My eyes were blurred, strange flashes of light marred my vision. Floaters on my retinas increased like heavy showers and moved around like a curtain blocking my vision. I thought it was merely fatigue.
Then one day while out walking through London Fields, the view before me suddenly became more wobbly and foggy than usual. I wiped my eyes with a wet tissue and looked around me again. I could barely make out the park. I blinked, and watched as my vision became ever dimmer. At first I thought it was an extreme reaction brought on by my hayfever – the maple trees were releasing their pollen into the cloying summer air. But within half an hour, I could no longer make out the faces of passers-by, even though they were walking right in front of me. I couldn’t see the shopkeeper’s face as I bought milk. I looked at my phone; I couldn’t read the text on the screen. I opened the pages of my notebook – had I written on these pages? The lines were undulating. The following day I was almost blind. But it was the weekend. Not a good time to see a doctor. I waited for Sunday to pass. Monday morning, my stress had only increased. At dawn’s first light I got up and made my way to the hospital. After an examination, the doctor treated me with a Lucentis injection in one of my eyes. I was told this might stop the blood leaking into my retina, an apparent danger due to the macular degeneration of my eyes.
Life was brutally interrupted. I couldn’t read or write. I went out to buy a magnifying glass and cancelled my publication trips, as I couldn’t even get myself to the airport. I walked outside in bright daylight, but my vision was dim like a faint candle burning down the last of its wick. I was in anguish at the thought of being disabled, being a useless presence for years to come. How would I function? I suddenly remembered an American book I had read some time ago, Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen, a memoir about the author’s stay in a mental institution as a teenager. I remembered her acute feeling of hopelessness at the violence of the disruption to normal life caused by her mental illness and her confinement. Depression and frustration lurked in every corner, in the mundane tasks of an ordinary day.
For a while I could see nothing but a grey mass in the centre of my left eye. I couldn’t even see the table right in front of me. My right eye too had high-degree myopia, registering minus twenty-four. I could see only the top letter A in the chart even while wearing my glasses. Since macular degeneration was now evident in both eyes, work became very difficult, and I began using the magnifying glass to read, as well as dictating my writing. But I knew: this was not a writer’s life, a writer should be able to see and read her own words! Nothing is worse than a writer losing control of her own sentences. I don’t believe in any God, but I silently implored the sky above: I cannot go blind, please! I cannot lose my eyesight. Being an artist defines who I am. Not my passport, my gender, my language, or my skin colour.
Bad eyesight was in the family, and I had long developed a particular sensitivity towards stories about blind writers like Borges and Sartre: how it came on gradually and how they eventually lost the ability to read and write, and came to rely on secretaries. But these writers were twice my age when the blindness got them. I was not even forty! Borges took a philosophical attitude towards his fading vision. He refused to wallow in pity, either from within or from outside.
No one should read self-pity or reproach
Into this statement of the majesty
Of God; who with such splendid irony,
Granted me books and night at one touch
Despite my doubts, I decided to spend a considerable amount of money to attend Bates Method classes, a practice Aldous Huxley had used and described in The Art of Seeing. It was a five-hour course at University College London that spanned two weeks. I was told to shift my focus from a distant tree to a distant moving person, then swing my focus slowly between different objects at different distances. ‘Pay attention to the warm sunlight,’ my teacher said. ‘You must close your eyes and bath them under the warmth of the sun. It is very important to take this sunbath every now and then, and you should try to visualise a blue sea in front of you with children playing on the beach …’
Beach and sun. But where could I find that in London? Sure, living in the mountains or by the sea would be a good way of fighting the depression brought on by the problems with my eyes. Perhaps big cities were not good for me. But where else could I go? I had made London my home.
Cutting up Nationality
Despite my declining vision, I managed to finish a new novel that I had been labouring on for years. I Am China is a parallel story about two Chinese lovers in exile
– the external and internal exile I had felt since leaving China. Publication was due in a few months’ time, but I began to worry if the upcoming publication would bring me trouble when I next tried to go back home since the novel concerned the student massacre on Tiananmen Square in 1989 and the nature of totalitarianism. What if I was denied entry because of this book? I decided to make preparations before the novel came out. So I applied for a British passport since I had been living in the UK for nearly ten years by then.
I spent some months gathering the necessary documents for my naturalisation. After a drawn-out struggle with immigration forms and lawyers, I managed to obtain a British passport. Now, I thought to myself, if there was any trouble with my books and films, I would feel a certain security in being a national of a Western country. Now I could go back to visit my sick father and see my family.
A week later, I applied for a Chinese visa with my British passport. After waiting at the Chinese Embassy in London for about half an hour, I found myself looking at the visa officer through a glass barrier. The woman wore horn-rimmed glasses and had her hair cut short, military-style. She looked like a resurrected Madame Mao. She took my British passport and scanned me up and down. Her face was stern, the muscles around her mouth stiff, just like all the other Communist officials, seemingly trained to keep their faces still this way.