Once Upon a Time in the East

by Xiaolu Guo

  Partly to satisfy her with a perfunctory response and partly to amuse myself, I looked down at the photographs. There were five portraits altogether, printed on glossy paper. They all wore nice clothes, aged somewhere between thirty-five and fifty. One or two looked like well-to-do businessmen. The others looked like privileged white-collar workers. Four of them stood in front of grand examples of European architecture.

  ‘Do these men live in China, or do they have green cards in the West?’ I joked.

  ‘What do you think?’ My mother was almost offended. ‘Do you really think your mother would choose some peasants for you? Or that I would force you to return to China? They all live in Europe, and are very successful businessmen. It took me a very long time to get their contacts and photos for you!’ My mother gulped down her tea with some indignation.

  My father was shaking his head slightly. I knew he was innocent of any of this. He never got involved in my mother’s plans for my ‘future’.

  ‘I’m quite sure you’ve spent lots of time and energy on this!’ I said sarcastically. ‘But where do they come from? I mean, how did you find them? Online?’ I asked, shuffling the photos in disbelief.

  ‘Online? Internet? No! You know we don’t even know what a computer is. But your parents have lived in Wenling for more than sixty years and we know all the wealthy families in town. We’ve got two million people living in Wenling, so it’s not that difficult to dig out five decent families with unmarried sons living abroad!’

  By now, my mother had emptied her cup and wanted a refill.

  ‘I know you think your home town is just some tiny shitty place. But it’s not like that any more. We’ve got lots of millionaires, even billionaires! The city government has collected statistics and they say around six thousand people from Wenling have emigrated to the West. Most of them are very well-established entrepreneurs in the USA and Europe.’

  I was forced to go through each photo as my mother gave the commentary. Her greasy fingers smeared across the cheeks of one of the smiling Chinese men.

  ‘This is the cousin of my friend from the silk factory,’ she went on enthusiastically. ‘He now lives in Spain, somewhere near the sea, I was told. He runs two restaurants and he also owns a vintage furniture shop. Apparently he has very high standards when it comes to girlfriends, and has never been married. Isn’t that rare these days? Although he is five years younger than you, I thought you might give him a try. His mother will make an introduction, or I will. Look here, that’s his name, contact number and email address,’ my mother said as she turned over the photo.

  Then she moved on to the next one.

  ‘And this one, isn’t he handsome? His name is Jiang Qinglin and he’s seven years older than you. Good age for a man. He lives somewhere in Italy and runs a clothing factory. There is only one con with this one: his mother’s sister told me he’s divorced and has a child with his ex-wife. Maybe that’s not so important. He’s single now and his aunt told me he’s looking for a girlfriend who also lives abroad. Britain and Italy are not so far apart, are they? I haven’t had time to look at a map yet …’

  I stood up, went to the counter and ordered another cup of tea for my mother. When I came back she was ready to show me the third photo. By the time she got to the fourth, I couldn’t take it any more.

  ‘But, Mother, I have a boyfriend here already!’ I was going to have to invent him quickly. ‘Besides, I refuse to date Chinese men, not after my experiences. I’ve told you that before.’

  Her face abruptly changed colour. Just seconds before, she had been excited by my rosy-coloured future. She turned away and her face saddened.

  ‘Then why didn’t you tell me you had a boyfriend already? Where is he?’

  ‘I didn’t have time to tell you, Mother! You just arrived yesterday, and my boyfriend left two days ago for a holiday with his family!’

  Mother shot me a suspicious look as she gathered up the photos. Just then, my father rose from his chair and made a sign for the bill. He wasn’t happy. As always, he was on my side. He had never really agreed with his wife’s plans for life and the future in general. He was often frustrated and could hide in his painting studio for days. Once again, I wondered how my mother and my father had managed to live together day in and day out for the last forty years. In the old tale The Weaver Girl and the Cowherd, Mother Heaven created the Milky Way to prevent her daughter from seeing the cowherd. But perhaps the Milky Way was part of a marriage settlement: the reality to be endured in any marriage between a woman and a man. My grandparents had lived with their version of the Milky Way. And my parents had continued the tradition, each living on their own side of a tidal wave of stars, yet somehow joined nevertheless. For me, love could not take any such interstellar form. We had to be on one planet. There would be differences, to be sure, but I was determined never to live in such profound disagreement with a future partner.

  A Colonial Education

  On the third day of my parents’ stay in London, I found myself filming them with a video camera. Once I had started, I couldn’t put the camera down. Why was I doing that? I asked myself. Not because I was a film-maker by training, but because I thought that images would be less prejudiced, a more objective way to make contact with my parents, especially my mother. I had hated her when I was a young girl, and I still couldn’t forgive her for abandoning me, and later neglecting me when I was taken back. Filming her would be therapeutic, but also anthropological. It would perhaps bring some sort of truth to the surface about her and about our relationship after all these years of separation. Yet my parents were absolutely oblivious to my camera and the whole filming process, which I found quite amusing in the context of our humourless coexistence as a family. A year later, when the film was premiered at the Museum of Modern Art in New York with a full house and then toured hundreds of international film festivals, I was surprised by the enthusiastic response this humbly-made home video received. Perhaps these audiences would have done the same thing had they been in my position? But at the time I had no intention of making a work of art. I was acting almost instinctively.

  I also wanted to record their interactions with the alien Western environment. I had suffered cultural isolation ever since I left China, and this was a way of understanding that isolation, through the lens of my parents. So I took them, and my camera, around. My neighbourhood in east London was very mixed with large communities from India, Bengal, Africa and the Caribbean. This was the very phenomenon that confused my parents: they didn’t recognise this as the ‘England of the English’. It was nothing like our monoculture of ‘China for the Chinese’. I told them that a mixed culture demonstrated the level of tolerance and freedom of a society. China didn’t embrace this mix of cultures and wouldn’t have it for a long time. My father thought about my comment for some seconds and nodded. My mother didn’t dispute it, but nor did she agree with me. In the manner of a wise peasant, all she said was: ‘If you mix things up, how can you sort them out again later?’ For her, the movement of people around the world was a mistake and she never saw the point of it. She hadn’t enjoyed the trip so far. Although I might have described myself as a ‘global peasant’, she would never be one.

  Despite all our exchanges about the meaning of a ‘free’ society, I wanted to show them something concrete. So I took them to the local shops where they could buy vegetables and fish. We walked to the fishmonger’s at the end of Broadway Market, run by an old Jamaican man. Everyone called him ‘Spirit’. When we got there, he was unloading sugar cane and yams. With a big white beard and a bulging, multicoloured Rastafarian hat, he resembled an aged Bob Marley who had spent years as the guru of some mysterious tribe. Spirit was always very friendly to me. Perhaps it was because I was one of his best customers. As I introduced my parents to him, he cheerfully took my father’s hand and shook it rigorously. It looked like a summit at the UN, the delegates from China and Africa formally greeting one another. My mother held herself back, her demeanour reser
ved, her body tight, as if a show of friendship would be akin to physical assault.

  I switched on my video camera. Spirit seemed not to be bothered by my filming. Instead, he was making funny gestures at my lens. I knew why this man was so happy to meet people from China. He had once told me with deep nostalgia that his first love back in Jamaica had been a Chinese girl. That was about fifty years ago. ‘She was very special, the quietest in our class,’ Spirit had said. They had studied together for years but he never managed to tell her how he felt. By the time they graduated, she was engaged to another boy. He had been heartbroken and soon left Jamaica for Britain. Since that confession, Spirit and I had formed a kind of secret bond.

  ‘London is not as good as I imagined,’ my mother proclaimed as we walked home. I couldn’t help but feel this judgement included me in its scope. I sensed her jaundiced and weary eyes casting a glance over my life, just as they had done upon entering my flat, and finding it deficient. But what perhaps surprised me a little in the whole situation was my cold, stone-hard awareness of this. I couldn’t have cared less about her judgements and expressions of disgruntlement. They meant nothing to me. I had stopped caring a long time ago. Indeed, my camera, the dispassionate lens directed at her, expressed all of this. I was indifferent, a scientist observing two insects scrabbling at the bottom of a glass jar. I found my parents’ behaviour in this foreign land interesting, sometimes surprising, but it had nothing to do with me.

  In order to show them a better side of London, I took my parents from Bethnal Green to Buckingham Palace. As we approached, the sun came out and it suddenly made England seem momentarily glorious and friendly. My parents were thrilled just to stand in front of the palace, imagining the Queen in her immaculate mansion enjoying a rest or having tea and cakes with some elderly lords or foreign presidents. But after ten minutes, heavy clouds covered the sky again and the wind started to howl. It immediately affected their mood. I knew what they were feeling, as for years my moods had been subjected to the whims of the British sky. We began to shiver in our thin coats. A helicopter appeared from nowhere, circling above the palace as if it had detected possible terrorist activity inside. For a second the hostility of the atmosphere and the piercing sound of the rotors seemed about to annihilate us.

  All my mother could say was: ‘So the Queen lives alone in such a big house?’

  I made something up, as I didn’t really know. ‘Well, not alone. With her five hundred servants. They also have their state banquets here.’

  ‘State banquets, hmm.’ My mother was suspicious. ‘It doesn’t look very alive. Maybe to keep good hygiene.’

  Just as we were about to flee, the sun pierced through the dark clouds again and illuminated everything. The helicopter lost interest in us and hovered off.

  My father looked relieved and then went back to admiring the palace. He wrote on his damp notepad: ‘It’s not as grand as our Summer Palace, or the Forbidden City.’

  We walked into St James’s Park and rested on a bench. As if under a spell, my parents began to stare at the glorious red tulips in front of them, each seemingly absorbed in thought. I wondered how they felt about this part of London. It felt to me that the royal landscape isolated us from our surroundings. The ‘royal parks’ were always overly manicured: the neatly cut lawns, the mismatched flower beds that were somehow also lifeless, and even the lemon trees were shaved into confinement. Apparently the red geranium beds are planted to match the tunics of the Queen’s Guard at Buckingham Palace, but I would never have made such an association if I hadn’t read it on the park noticeboard.

  My mother sighed. ‘It’s so clean and beautiful here, my heavens. But …’ Her voice was almost melancholic.

  She had always been a practical, materialistic person. There was some hint of discontent in her praise – a knowledge that she would never be able to live in this foreign landscape. She couldn’t really enjoy something full-heartedly when she saw there was no connection to her own reality. Her gaze across the park landscape felt almost bleak and desolate to me, and I shared the same feeling. But in my mother’s case perhaps her bleakness came from the contrast to the hardship of her past, and the blandness of her present. She had no feeling or sentiment towards this grand foreign place, it only made her feel more alienated than she already was. She had come to Britain because her husband wanted to see the West, but she had had an ulterior motive: a marriage quest for her daughter. One last hope. She had come armed with photos and CVs: one of whom I would choose to be her son-in-law. But she knew now there was little hope I would give in to her designs. In her wordless sighing, I could sense that she was deeply disappointed that she had absolutely no influence over me in my adult life. And it made me happy, with a certain degree of mercilessness, that she was now small and wrinkled, a woman who had lost her power to cast further shadows over my life. I knew she knew it, but she should have realised it long ago. It should have been obvious even when I was still a young girl in the town of Wenling.

  A French Pilgrim

  After multiple visits to famous gardens, my father had had enough of hectic London. He wanted to see France and Italy. He was told by some Chinese tourists that he could do a tour of five European cities in three days, ‘because Europe is so small’. Reluctantly, I nodded. It was his first and last trip abroad, and I would have to put up with it.

  First, my father wanted to visit the Louvre in Paris. ‘We can skip the rusty iron tower. What is it called? Right, the Eiffel Tower. It looks like one of our tarnished telegraph poles. But I must see the Mona Lisa in the Louvre,’ he wrote in his clear hand on his notepad. My mother was also enthusiastic about the idea of Paris. She had seen the old Hollywood film An American in Paris and had absolutely loved it without understanding a word of the singing or the dialogue. Perhaps it had reminded her of her days in the revolutionary opera in Wenling – her most glorious of her youth, when she had still been a young, vibrant woman. They would enjoy Paris and Rome, I thought.

  In Paris we headed straight for the Louvre. The queue under the glass pyramid extended like a snake across the courtyard, and it took forever for us to get in. We joined the mob there to absorb the aura of Leonardo’s masterpiece. Having struggled for nearly two hours, we finally found her. But the painting was blocked by hundreds of visitors, chatting in a multitude of languages. Even on my toes, I could hardly catch a glimpse of the not-quite-smiling enigma. My father squeezed in front of the crowd in desperation. He stood there for quite a while, perhaps about two minutes (certainly longer than the average twelve seconds according to the Louvre). When I finally broke through to stand beside him, I noticed that he was not looking at the Mona Lisa herself. He was studying the landscape in the background behind her. His eyesight was poor, but he was trying hard to make out the mountains and mists. I knew that, for him, they were far more beautiful than Mona Lisa’s elusive smile. As a Chinese ink painter, apart from his propaganda phase during the Cultural Revolution, my father didn’t like painting faces or figures. Humans were not objects for the imagination, and certainly not spiritual. The Chinese do not associate the sacred with the human form. Western church paintings of Christ and the Apostles have little emotional effect on us. Here, standing before one of the great works of Western art, I wondered if my father had changed his mind. Then I heard my mother comment: ‘She must have been very rich to afford an artist to paint her.’

  She wasn’t wrong. I thought of my grandmother, who had never even had a photo taken of her. She had been the poorest person in our family and, surely, the most ignored. She hadn’t even been graced with a name. The Mona Lisa, whoever she was, had enjoyed both portrait and title. She had lived on in the regard of others as an individual.

  Once we extricated ourselves from the crowd, my father lost interest in seeing anything else and my mother began to complain about her aching feet. As we were exiting the Louvre, I thought to myself that perhaps I preferred Marcel Duchamp’s Mona Lisa parody, a reproduction of the lady with a moustache
and goatee. The Louvre was a great mausoleum of culture: a tomb for art. Grave-robbing tourists filled its halls. Duchamp’s Mona Lisa was a punk gesture towards the establishment and the meaning of art. In China, we had taken the same logic to its political extreme in the Cultural Revolution. But in the West, instead of launching revolutions, they built museums.

  After wandering around in Paris for two days, we came to the Gare du Nord and I bought some more tickets.

  ‘Where are we going?’ my mother protested. I knew she just wanted to stay put in a hotel, put her feet up and guzzle a bowl of noodle soup.

  ‘We’re going to visit a little village called Auvers-sur-Oise, because Father wants to see where Van Gogh lived out his last days.’

  I didn’t want to mention that it was the place where Van Gogh had shot himself. My mother didn’t know anything about Van Gogh. My father and I had both read Lust For Life. Twenty years had passed, but our mutual fascination with Van Gogh was just as fervent. We arrived on a rainy Sunday to deserted streets. We walked to the famous Maison de Van Gogh, now a restaurant with a sophisticated menu and a long wine list. The artist’s bedroom had been preserved upstairs, and was accessed by a very narrow wooden staircase. It was tiny, cramped and felt strangely miniature. The idea that the troubled painter had eked out his last nights here filled us with a strange sense of intimacy with a dead past. My father reached out and touched the bed frame, stooping silently as if in some sort of benediction, then turned to leave. My mother was gazing out through the tiny bedroom window, looking impatient and ill at ease, her breath laboured from the exertion of climbing the stairs.

  We walked back downstairs again and entered the restaurant. My mother was hungry, but my father was inspired and roamed around, restlessly soaking in everything around him. Maybe I should buy a meal at Van Gogh’s house for them, even though it would be expensive? Timidly, we sat down. I was given a menu with herring and salmon entrées for twelve euros and beef bourguignon for twenty-eight. I decided to order everything on the page, just to impress my parents. Of course, as Chinese, we refrained from the cheese and dessert. ‘What’s the point?’ as my mother would say about Western dessert culture. ‘Eat more rice if you’re still hungry!’ We even ordered a glass of red wine for my father. Everyone was happy, although my mother kept asking for more rice. I had to keep begging the grumpy waiter, ‘Plus de riz, s’il vous plait!’