Once Upon a Time in the East

by Xiaolu Guo

  ‘Do you have a Chinese passport?’ She stared at me with a cold, calm intensity, clutching my British passport.

  ‘Oh, yes.’ I thought it was better to be honest since they would have all my details in their records anyway.

  ‘Show me,’ she demanded.

  I had my Chinese passport in my bag, just in case. So I took it out and handed it to her through the narrow window.

  She flipped through its pages. The way she handled it gave me a sudden stomach ache. I sensed something bad was coming.

  ‘You know it’s illegal to possess two passports as a Chinese citizen?’ she remarked in her even-toned, slightly jarring voice.

  ‘Illegal?’ I repeated. My surprise was totally genuine. It had never occurred to me that having two passports was against Chinese law. I knew that in the West most countries allowed citizens to hold dual nationality.

  The woman glanced at me from the corner of her eye. She was scrutinising me, her look designed to strip me of all exterior layers and bore right through me. I couldn’t help but feel the judgement she had formed of me: a criminal! No, worse than that, I was a Chinese criminal who had muddied her own Chinese citizenship with that of a small, foreign state. And to top it all off, I was ignorant of the laws of my own country.

  She then flipped through my visa application, which was attached to my British passport, and announced: ‘Since this is the first time you are using your Western passport, we will only issue you a two-week visa for China.’

  ‘What?’ I was speechless. I had applied for a six-month family visit visa. Before I could even argue, I saw her take out a large pair of scissors and decisively cut the corner off my Chinese passport. She then threw it back out at me, where it landed before me on the counter, disfigured and invalid.

  I stared, without comprehension, at my once-trusted passport. The enormity of what had just happened slowly began registering itself in me. Although I was totally ignorant of most Chinese laws, I knew this for certain: when an embassy official cuts your passport, you are no longer a Chinese citizen. I stared back at Madame Mao with growing anger.

  ‘How could you do that?’ I stammered, like an idiot who knew nothing of how the world worked.

  ‘This is the law. You have chosen the British passport. You can’t keep the Chinese one.’ Case closed. She folded my visa application into my British passport and handed them to another officer, who took it, and all the other waiting passports, to a back room for further processing. She returned her tense face towards me, but she was no longer looking at me. I was already invisible.

  There I was, standing in front of the Chinese Embassy on Old Jewry, near Bank station. I was still struggling to believe what had just happened. Was that it? I had just lost my Chinese nationality? But I am Chinese, not British, I don’t feel in any way British, despite my new passport. Little Madame Mao hadn’t even asked me which passport I wanted to keep, the British or the Chinese. I suppose from her point of view I had already chosen by applying for another nationality, and in doing so, I had forfeited my birthright. For a few minutes I truly hated her, she became an emblem for everything I detested about my homeland, now no longer my country.

  My tourist visa was ready a few days later. But for some reason, I never used it. Perhaps because I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do with a two-week stay. From the day I lost my Chinese passport, I came to the simple revelation that nationality didn’t declare who I was. I was a woman raised in China and in exile in Britain. I was a woman who wrote books and made films. I could have applied for a German passport if I had lived in Germany. But a passport and the nationality written on its cover would never define me.

  As the old Chinese saying goes, uproot a tree and it will die; uproot a man and he will survive. I have always agreed with this proverb, especially in the years before I left China. But after the incident at the Chinese Embassy, I thought to myself: mere survival is a life without imagination, but a drifter’s life with imagination is also a life without substance. As a new immigrant, everything felt intangible: I couldn’t integrate fully with the locals, nor penetrate the heart of the Western culture that surrounded me. But the only way to overcome these problems was to root myself here, to transplant myself into this land and to grow steadily. So I began to plan a life exactly like every other first-generation immigrant, starting with making myself a proper home. One morning, as I was struggling to understand a mortgage plan on a website, I thought about my parents. My mind formed an image of my mother, and I felt her accusing presence, chiding me for not returning to China to visit them. Suddenly the phone rang. With my mother’s image still scalding, I picked up the phone and was startled to hear her voice. ‘Hello, Xiaolu, is now a good time to talk?’ I greeted her nervously. Why was she ringing? Was my father dying? Or was my brother getting a divorce? But my mother’s tone was unusually positive. She told me that my father had just undergone yet more surgery for his cancer, but was recovering well after the procedure. I felt guilty whenever I heard such news. But she hadn’t phoned to tell me this.

  ‘Your father and I are coming to stay.’

  ‘What? Where?’ I asked, still not comprehending.

  ‘In Britain!’ Ying Guo, the Chinese name for my new home, literally, English Land. Was she practising witchcraft? I thought for a moment. Had she somehow sensed that I had just lost my Chinese passport and was now a British citizen?

  But they didn’t even have passports, let alone visas. How could they come here? I heard my mother still talking, an upbeat tone in her voice.

  ‘Remember your father had all those admirers of his paintings? He told one of them that he had always hoped, before he died, to go to Europe, visit his daughter, and to see those galleries and museums he had always read about.’

  ‘What about passports?’ I asked impatiently.

  ‘This man, your father’s admirer, is a big deal in international shipping. It was easy for him. He managed to arrange passports and visas for us. He even wanted to help us with the tickets. We’re so grateful to him. We’re flying next Tuesday.’

  ‘What!’ I couldn’t think of anything else to say. There had been no warning, no discussion about this.

  ‘Have you got a spare room for us?’ my mother said, sensing my hestitation.

  ‘Er … yes.’ I muttered, lying.

  ‘Should we bring anything for you from Wenling? Have you got a rice cooker yet?’

  ‘Yes. Yes. I’ve got everything here.’ I couldn’t believe it, eight years had passed and my mother was still asking me about rice cookers.

  The rest of the day I spent in a manic daze. I hadn’t I told my parents much about my life in the West. They would find it utterly pathetic and insubstantial: renting a room in a shared house, no car, no fixed job, no family, not even a permanent boyfriend. The Hackney area I lived in was very dilapidated, with beggars shuffling along its dirty streets. I knew my mother would be disappointed. There would be no way for me to pretend that I was living in a rich area, the Queen’s land where everybody lived in affluence. And, of course, I could never tell them that I had lost my Chinese citizenship. It would be inconceivable for them.

  Yet, as I went out to buy a spare mattress for their stay, I thought: this will be their first ever trip abroad and probably their last. Maybe it was the only chance to improve our relationship. Or perhaps it was too late. We had always been like this, ever since they had abandoned me as a baby and then I had abandoned them as my adult life took over far away. There had always been a separation. It was the pattern in our family.

  An Old Couple in a Land of Wonders

  The day came. After a long, miserable flight, my parents walked through the arrival gate at Heathrow with two large suitcases, the very picture of two Chinese peasants lost among the urban Westerners. Their clothes were shabby and wrinkled, their bodies stiff and disorientated. I noticed that my mother had dyed her grey hair black, and my father looked much skinnier than I remembered. After what felt like an endless taxi ride across
London from the west to the east, we eventually arrived. Staring at the mountains of rubbish bags and graffitied walls in the courtyard, they silently entered the flat. Instantly they realised that there was nothing much for them to see in my Western home: a small kitchen and a tiny bedroom, no chaise longue, no super-wide leather sofa, only a leaky bathroom without the marble basin or glass walls that were obligatory in the house of a Chinese entrepreneur. The rest of the flat comprised a narrow corridor and my flatmate’s bedroom. I had put a brand-new single mattress in the corridor, where I would sleep.

  ‘I feel so unreal coming to England,’ my mother reflected, sitting down on a chair. ‘On the plane, after flying five or six hours, I kept thinking, what if we actually took the wrong flight? So I got up from my seat and found the air stewardess. I asked her: “Where is this plane going?” She stared at me like I had two heads. She opened her eyes wide and asked: “Where are you going?” I thought, I won’t tell her that I wanted to go to London, in case she says something different. So I didn’t answer her. Then she got really serious and asked me again. I had to tell her London. She said that was where the plane was going and I shouldn’t keep asking.’

  I was about to laugh, but stopped myself when I saw my mother’s troubled expression.

  Opening their suitcases, the first thing my mother showed me was their travel insurance papers. ‘Keep this! In case anything happens to us.’

  I glanced down. The title read ‘Certificate for Overseas Emergency and Medical Insurance’. I started scanning what was covered.

  Mortal remains handling benefit:

  repatriation of mortal remains (approximately 100,000 yuan)

  repatriation of ashes (approximately 2,000 yuan)

  local burial (20,000 yuan according to current British service costs)

  I stopped and gasped. I didn’t want to read through the rest. They were bringing death with them from China to England. I told my mother to keep the documents safe in her suitcase, hinting that way I would know where to find them in case of emergency. For them to die here, in a foreign land, would be the saddest thing that could happen to them.

  As I was making some tea for my parents, they began pulling their belongings one by one from the suitcases: hot-water bottle, tea, raincoat, hat … I brought my father a cup of tea. He was standing by the bedroom window, looking outside. The view was of a large, rusty Victorian gasometer tank on the banks of the industrial canal. Now it was abandoned, one of the ‘landmarks’ of east London according to local estate agents. Many English people seemed attached to this sort of industrial clutter, but I had never been a fan of the rust-belt urban aesthetic. Urban people in London sometimes seemed to take bleakness as a charming feature; it felt strange for us Chinese. My father was visibly disappointed by the view. He must have been wondering: where are the famous English rose gardens and rivers? I wanted to tell him that they were in the rich parts of the city, but I didn’t say anything. Instead, I drew the curtains across the view outside and handed my father the cup.

  ‘You must be one of the people they would call poor here,’ my mother’s voice announced behind me.

  ‘No, I’m not poor. Didn’t you see the beggars on Hackney Road? They are poor. I’m doing fine here.’ I tried to educate my mother about the reality of living in a big city like London, but I knew she had already made up her mind. She judged everything on first appearances. Like most Chinese, she assumed that a decently well-off person would own a Gucci bag or a pair of Prada shoes, at the very least. She couldn’t understand that I found these empty labels disgusting; they reminded me that the world was flooded – no, being swallowed up – by expensive but superfluous products. I didn’t want to argue with my mother, however, so I returned to the kitchen to keep an eye on dinner. My father began to splutter and struggle for breath, that sort of very particular cough developed after a laryngeal cancer operation. My mother immediately fetched his medicine.

  ‘It’s a miracle that your father has survived this long. I can’t stop thanking Heaven,’ my mother mumbled as she handed my father some pills: ‘But his operation cost us a fortune. We got the bill from the hospital a week later and the total was 640,000 yuan! I didn’t dare show your father. Can you imagine that? Can anyone’s life be worth 640,000 yuan? Maybe only Chairman Mao deserved such a sum! Even so, he only made it to eighty-three!’

  ‘So what did you do with the bill in the end?’ I asked.

  ‘We couldn’t pay it of course! I took it straight to the town hall and asked to meet the mayor. They received me and listened to my plea. Given your father’s reputation, the local government couldn’t ignore his situation so they paid 80 per cent of it. Without that, we would have had no choice but to wait for our very last breath.’

  Since the day my father had lost the ability to speak, my mother had done all the talking for him. ‘Still aching from that enormous bill, we went back to the hospital and asked them how long your father would last after this operation. They said maybe three to four years. Maybe? They like to use words like that, don’t they? That’s why we’re walking around without our heads these days.’

  As we sat down to eat, my mother brought out a present for me: a large glass jar of roasted red chilli peppers in oil. ‘You must be missing this,’ she said. She knew I had been fond of spicy food in my younger years, even though I had lived without it for so long now.

  Our first family dinner together in London was simple: chicken noodle soup with vegetables. They ate in full concentration. As they drained the last bit of soup from their bowls, my mother began telling me about my brother. ‘We had such high hopes for your brother, but you turned out better,’ she sighed, clearly disheartened. ‘He’s still an alcoholic, still bad-tempered. Not much has changed. But since he moved away from us and got married we haven’t had to face his problems every day. All I can say is that without his wife, he couldn’t function. She is a good woman, so I can’t really complain.’

  What could I say? I knew my brother had disappointed my parents because he had never managed to ‘become someone’, which was all any ordinary Chinese family hoped for a son. I barely knew him anyway. He was someone from my past, not someone I desired to have intimate contact with. I knew my brother had just had a baby girl, and his wife had given up her job as a hotel receptionist in order to take care of the family. There was only one person in our family still drifting along, who had contributed no money or grandchildren for the elderly, and that person was me. I was struck by the guilt of my unfilial behaviour every time I spoke to them. But I kept telling myself: they knew too well that I was never going to be the one to sit beside them as they lay on their deathbed.

  An Arranged Marriage

  There was an unwelcome strangeness in sleeping in a flat with my aged parents lying on the other side of the wall. I couldn’t remember the last time our bodies had been so close in the darkness. It felt like premature burial, as if my body had been covered in a thick blanket of earth and I now lay breathless and imprisoned. We were here in my flat in London, but the presence of my parents had transported me back to the family home in Wenling, to the stifling summer nights with their droning mosquitoes and ghostly shadows cast by naked light bulbs. I was an unhappy daughter there, but I had escaped all that – I had made a new life as far as I could from my old life. I didn’t like feeling that it was coming back to me, even though now my mother was old and weak and could never again raise her hand to beat me. But I don’t think she ever regretted how she treated me, I was sure about that. Yes, I forgave her. Or rather I accepted the past, just as she now accepted the daughter I had become. Yet I could hear her snoring, fast asleep, as I lay awake and restless. I could hear my father’s lungs rattling with phlegm, and him getting up in the night. All I could think about was whether he would survive long enough to make it back to China, or die here an exile, his body returned lifeless in a box on the plane. I pictured my mother’s accusing eyes, the crease on her forehead knotted in judgement. I had killed my father by sedu
cing him over the ocean to this senseless continent.

  I survived the night, and took my parents to a nearby cafe the next morning for a full English breakfast. Food would bring us closer, I thought. But my parents looked bemused by the contents of their plates: cooked tomatoes with fried sausage, tinned beans and mashed potatoes.

  ‘The cook must have made this meal based on a nutrition wheel,’ my mother said, her eyes moving from the plate to the knife and fork that lay beside it.

  I went to the counter and asked for two big spoons.

  ‘Don’t they eat buns and wonton soup in the morning here?’ My mother took the spoon from me, turning to see if there were other options. Around us, an old pensioner was eating alone, his plate indistinguishable from ours. My mother resigned herself to the food in front of her. But they seemed to like it, and before long everything was gone apart from the mashed potatoes. As my father chewed on his last oily sausage, my mother began to look restless and impatient – something was nagging at her. I could see that she was about to say something serious. She wiped her hands on a napkin, fished out some photographs from her pocket and laid them in front of me.

  At first I didn’t pay any attention to the photographs, but as my mother sat there wordlessly I was forced to ask: ‘Who are they?’

  She separated the photos and looked at me meaningfully. ‘Take a good look. Which of these men do you like?’

  I couldn’t believe my ears. So that was why she had come! I was still sure that my father wanted to visit me and see Europe, but now I knew she had her own reason too. She was here to marry me off!