Once Upon a Time in the East

by Xiaolu Guo

  ‘But you still haven’t answered my question,’ I insisted.

  He thought for a few seconds, then said, ‘I prefer the idea that Australia belongs to Asia. Aboriginal culture is really alien to us Westerners, ours is more like “white fella culture”. We took their land, and pretend that we are still living in the West.’

  The cafe was not really the place for such a discussion, and if truth be told, we were not really taking the discussion too seriously anyway. Clearly, something else was going on. I cut the debate short. ‘I really miss eating seaweed.’ We agreed to meet two hours later at a Japanese restaurant.

  The next few weeks passed in a crazed longing. Nights spent alone in our respective flats were unbearable. ‘What is this incompleteness?’ we asked ourselves, under our own, separate duvets. Love was in the air, and we realised we had to give it a space to grow. We found a flat, still right next to our favourite park. Despite being so far away from the places we had grown up, we often looked at the weather reports in Beijing and Melbourne. I cooked Chinese food for almost every meal. Steve would describe the beauty of the forest and the water in Tasmania. ‘You can stand in the shallows and pick wild oysters straight from the seabed and eat them right there,’ he murmured in a dreamy state. Clearly, nostalgia makes itself felt in the stomach. Salty samphire took me back to the beach in Shitang and its green-brown bed of kelp. In the evenings we ate rice and fried tofu with chopsticks while watching BBC4. ‘Why don’t they ever talk about China?’ I complained. Television was repetitive, seemingly always about royalty or fashions from the dim recesses of British history. Perhaps the Hairy Bikers were discovering Cantonese stir-fries in Hong Kong, but that was the extent of content about my homeland. The programmes made me feel unfulfilled, and stupid.

  I had spent the last decade with one foot in each world: West and East. I couldn’t say I was fully here, and I certainly wasn’t fully there. Of course I found myself longing for the sounds of my childhood and its familiar flavours. But I swallowed that longing. I told myself: I have lost my country and I am in exile, even if it is self-imposed. My work is all I have and my work is my only meaningful identity. But is that enough? Am I really living fully? I questioned myself repeatedly. Perhaps I will build something else with Steve, in this foreign land. Build something together – a physical home. But what did that mean exactly for someone like me?

  I had decided that I didn’t want to have children at a young age. I didn’t want to become another one of those mothers, trapped in domesticity, and disrespected by her husband. It wasn’t a decision borne out of a militant feminism; it was totally personal. Those years living in my grandparents’ house by the sea had been a hard lesson. The domestic violence that surrounded me then felt so inescapable that I couldn’t imagine there could be a positive version of domesticity ahead of me, especially if I became a mother. Witnessing how my grandfather abused my grandmother and her silence after the beatings had left a painful conviction in my head: family life was awful and being a woman was awful. And my time in the West hadn’t convinced me yet that there could be another type of womanhood, one in which women were respected inside and outside the home, where women were not merely child producers, and where they could fall in love again even after having become mothers. My growing environmental awareness only added more fuel to the argument for not having children. And the logic of never-ending consumption didn’t just harm the environment, but actually killed people too. In 2008, a scandal came to light about 54,000 Chinese babies hospitalised after drinking formula milk adulterated with melamine. It was just another terrible incident of which we heard more and more every day. To bring more humans into the world would only add to an already threatened planet.

  But far back in my ‘positive’ Chinese mind I still felt I had a right to reproduce, to bring hope through the creation of a new generation. The China of my youth is far away now; the past is another country. Our children are our future. They will create something new in a way my generation and my father’s generation failed to do. The new generation will have to be more ecologically aware.

  Of all the negative and positive voices in my mind, the positive prevailed. So that just after my father’s death, on the verge of turning forty, I found myself asking the same question again: should I spend the rest of my life brooding hopelessly on the failings of humanity, or should I bring hope into the world by having a child and creating a person to whom I could give the best knowledge I had? I choose my future child.

  Nine months of being pregnant felt unbearably drawn out at the time, but when I look back now, it feels short and quite magical. I have always been a very impatient person. I have struggled to write long books or carry through on year-long film productions because of my low threshold for distraction. But with this, there was no way to speed up the process. All I could do was wait. The only nine months of my life I have ever truly waited, with full participation, apprehension, excitement and fear.

  I have never been a sentimental person – I don’t weep easily while watching films or attending funerals. But while pregnant, I would burst into tears at cheesy Hollywood movies. Even the cry of a child in a television soap would affect me and make my eyes wet. Just before midnight on New Year’s Eve 2013, one day before my due date, Steve and I decided to take a gentle walk through Hackney. We went from crowded Mare Street to the quiet back roads of Victoria Park. The sensations in my belly were intensified by strong kicking from the baby. I couldn’t distinguish between her feet pushing from inside me and the onset of labour. I was nervous, and very emotional. As the fireworks burst above us, I watched and wept.

  On the second day of 2013, our child was born. Weighing nearly nine pounds, she was robust and didn’t look particularly like either her mother or her father. She was a mix, a Eurasian, with brownish hair, fair skin and dark eyes. We named her Moon. As her small round face lay against my breast, I thought about my parents. My father would never have the chance to see his rebellious daughter become a mother, or meet the granddaughter that had been named after one of his favourite things to paint. She would have made him so happy.

  Two months later, on the eve of the Qingming Festival for the dead, my new family was on a plane to China. Moon was oblivious to time; screaming, crying, sucking and then falling asleep on me in a twelve-hour cycle, she was living in the moment. ‘Don’t cry,’ I said. ‘I’m taking you to see the place where I was born.’

  The Final Visit

  It had only been a year since I had last seen my mother, but the experience of childbirth made it feel like half a lifetime. Everything was blurry because of a lack of sleep, including the face and figure of my mother. There she was, a middle-aged peasant woman, waving through the glass of the arrival-hall doors. I could have walked past her without realising that this short, humble woman was my mother. I held Moon tight to my chest and dragged our luggage towards her. Steve followed with the pram and another bag. My heart felt heavy.

  ‘Ah, what a lovely little one …’ Then my mother hugged me with a weary look. She was much thinner than the last time I had seen her. Her skin was yellow and her steps were weak, as if she had just left hospital. She turned to the squirming baby wrapped in my arms. There was surprise and a little joy in her eyes, but her mood seemed to be clouded by something else. She didn’t take the baby into her arms as a typical grandmother would. She wasn’t fully prepared, perhaps. When Steve tried to greet her and shake her hand, she paid him no attention. We followed her to a taxi.

  ‘It’s not easy raising a child abroad alone,’ she said suddenly, when we reached the car.

  ‘But I’m not alone, Mother!’ I pointed to the Western man standing behind me, towering above all the Chinese men around him. How could she have not noticed him? My mother turned and gave Steve a glance, my chance to make a short introduction. It was hard to know how my mother really felt about him. She knew I was still not married and I probably never would get married. In her eyes, a foreign boyfriend without a wedding ceremony and an o
fficial certificate meant nothing. I was fine with her attitude. She didn’t have to agree with my choices.

  Once home, she reached for her hair and removed it, revealing her bald head underneath. I was in a state of shock. Then, before I could say anything, she told me in a matter-of-fact voice:

  ‘Have you ever heard of widow’s cancer? That’s what your mother’s got.’

  ‘Widow’s cancer?’

  ‘Yes. Stomach cancer, late stage. The doctor said I might have three months.’

  I was thunderstruck. It explained her strange appearance at the airport, her reluctance to hold Moon, her distance. Now I also understood why she had urged me to return to China when I had called. She hadn’t wanted to tell me about the cancer over the phone. She didn’t want me to worry about her while breastfeeding the baby.

  Like a lot of women, she believed a new mother’s milk would stop under emotional stress. As I was making a bed on the sofa for the baby, she told me the doctor said she was too far gone for surgery, but she was undergoing chemotherapy. It was a miserable experience, she said, she was vomiting all the time and felt very sick.

  That evening my brother and his family drove a few hours to meet us. He was only two years older than me, but he looked puffy, weary and far more middle-aged than a man of forty-two years should. His little daughter was healthy and energetic, as if she had sucked his spirit into her body. My brother’s wife was happy to meet us. ‘I’ve heard so much about you, Xiaolu! I can’t believe you’re finally here!’ She was the most excited to meet our baby Moon. We went to a seafood restaurant to celebrate the reunion. It was our first family meal with all three generations around the same dining table – only Father was missing. We ordered mountains of food, and my brother kept adding dishes from the menu. But my mother ate only a small bowl of porridge. She could hardly swallow. At one point the waitress brought a large bowl of crab soup. Vivid red legs and pincers swimming in a gingered broth. I didn’t expect my brother to order sea crabs. No one in the family had good teeth, and my Australian didn’t have much experience eating hard-shelled crabs. We drank the soup but left the monstrous creature in the bowl. Staring at those red pincers and two beady eyes, I suddenly remembered the opera from my childhood, Madame White Snake, in which an evil tortoise turned monk, resentful of the earthly happiness of others, seeks revenge on loving couples but ends up hiding himself in the stomach of a crab. Any human who ate the yellow part of the crab suffered stomach aches. The fear had stuck with me as a child. I still remember screaming at my grandmother not to swallow. Had my mother bitten from the cursed sea creature? Terminal stomach cancer. The monk had taken his revenge yet again on another woman.

  During our two-week stay in Wenling, we walked around with my mother, usually between the hospital and our home. The town had now grown into a city of two million inhabitants, and shiny skyscrapers had grown out of the mud and old socialist factory compounds. It was disorientating for me. Where were all the peasant workers in blue uniforms? Our house used to be fringed by rapeseed fields and untouched bamboo mountains, but now these were crowded with new buildings and traffic. We passed a row of grey concrete buildings – Wenling Silk Factory where my mother used to work. It was now a dead space, awaiting the wrecking ball. A certain nostalgia washed over me, and I tried to remember the taste of the roasted silkworms on skewers that I had eaten so often as a child on those desolate afternoons after school. But I couldn’t recall the taste on my tongue. Everywhere was the scourge of pollution: black discharge pouring into the river from pipes, the very same water in which I used to catch shrimps and small crabs; mountains stripped of vegetation and now littered with shredded plastic rubbish bags. Still, I heard children laughing and playing – not in my imagination, but right in front of me – on the riverbank next to the oily black water.

  The Return

  But the sea was calling me. Swaddled in a warm blanket, we took Moon to visit my grandparents’ fishing village. The bus trip to Shitang was easy and quick compared with when I was a child. As we arrived, I discovered that even the station had been relocated. Standing on the asphalted promontory, I breathed in the familiar air. It had the same fishy salty taste, and the same perfume of kelp and ribbonfish hung in the air, but now this was mixed with a strong odour of petrol. As we walked down the hill towards the open sea, I spotted large industrial fishing boats parked in the harbour and my heart leapt. They were different to the ones of my youth, but I loved the sight of them, creating elaborate ripple patterns in the water. As we got closer, I could hear the workers speaking Mandarin Chinese to each other. ‘How are the fish today?’ I asked one of them in Shitang dialect. He didn’t react, so I tried another question. ‘Did you catch any big snapper?’ But everyone stared back at me with blank expressions. They were migrants, I realised, they didn’t know the local tongue. Of course Shitang had always been home to migrant fishermen. My grandfather had been one. I had forgotten, somewhere in the thirty years since his death.

  As we stood by the churning waves, Moon woke up in the sling and opened her eyes. Her small head stretched out a little from my jacket, and seemed to peer out at the vast body of water in front of her. What did she see? I wondered. Was it the grey waves of my childhood? Would this picture survive into her later life to form a dim memory of the past? Or, was the sea nothing more than another part of her mother’s body and being?

  Carrying Moon in the sling, we tried to find our way back to my grandparents’ house, but we were soon lost in a maze of new buildings and streets. Whenever I passed some old people sitting out on the street, I wondered if they recognised me. Yet I couldn’t recall any of these wrinkled faces. And neither could I find my childhood home. We stopped and I asked a white-haired man if he knew a street named Front Barrier Slope. The old man stared at me for almost half a minute, not responding but only sucking on his cigarette. I then tried again in the local dialect: ‘Front Barrier Slope, it used to be called Anti-Pirate Passage.’ An obscure smile squeezed itself out across his face and he pointed with his nicotine-stained finger.

  Finally, I spotted the old stone house, squashed in between two new premises. It was our house. My feet slowed as we approached. The outside hadn’t changed at all, although now it was a hair salon filled with fashionable teenagers. Standing outside for a while, I wasn’t sure if I should go in and introduce myself to the owner.

  After some hesitation, I entered with Moon in my arms. A middle-aged man was cutting the hair of a young girl. Two teenaged boys sat on a bench playing with their phones. I introduced myself to the man: my name, and my family name, Guo.

  ‘Guo?’ The man’s eyes sparkled, as if he might just recognise me.

  ‘Yes. We owned this house twenty-five years ago, or more actually, twenty-seven years ago, when my grandmother was still alive.’

  The man holding the scissors immediately understood who I was. ‘I know! I know! Your father sold this house to us! How is he? All well?’

  I nodded. I didn’t want to explain. He dropped what he was doing, leaving his customer on the chair, and called to his wife to say hello to me. It was an awkward situation. We were invited inside for tea. The sofa we sat on was where my grandmother used to have her old bamboo bed, and where we had slept every night. This was also where, on the very night my grandmother died, I sat with my parents and watched over her coffin under candlelight. As I sat on the edge of the sofa, holding the teacup, I wondered about the upstairs room. My grandfather’s room. There was no sound coming from the top floor.

  ‘Oh, the ceiling upstairs has been leaking for a while. We don’t use that room,’ the wife said, as if she could read my thoughts.

  Sunset cast a golden light across the wavy sea and the grey sand. We took the bus back to Wenling before nightfall. Despite my mother’s illness, I was longing to return to Britain. There was no use in us staying here with her. We had nothing more to say to each other. Physical closeness hadn’t brought us together in any way emotionally. Our minds had occupied different u
niverses for too long, and we couldn’t bridge the chasm that had been created. Our relationship had always gone unacknowledged. It was just a fact, like breathing air, or rain in typhoon season. It was unconscious. As if we were performing a script which neither of us had written. We never wanted or liked it, but it had been handed to us by fate. Perhaps I had never looked into my mother’s eyes with the hope of understanding her situation, and she had never done the same for me. I had no memory of a motherly look. There was only the culturally programmed habits of duty, hers of a mother and mine of a filial child. That programme had replaced any true understanding between us. It had conditioned me, indeed, had made me guilty from the very beginning, as the unworthy, wayward daughter. It had killed any natural love I might have had for my birth family. It had never been there in the first place. Of course, I was aware of how my own child would feel about all this when she grew up, since her childhood would take place in the West – a totally different reality from mine. I will have to wait and see how our relationship turns out.

  A few days later we said goodbye to my mother. We stood by the taxi, which was about to take us to the airport, and I looked at my mother. She looked back at me, but somehow our eyes didn’t meet. I took in her broad face, aged and wrinkled, but still childlike in some way. I could tell she felt miserable. My heart was pained by a coldness, a feeling that there was no love in me. There was just a kind of weight, unbearable weight, and a lethargy of the spirit. In the next life, I would be a good daughter, I thought. She wore her wig, like an actor performing one of the opera roles of her youth, and kept up a stream of simple comments about catching the flight and breastfeeding Moon. I nodded but said nothing. Both of us knew, I guessed, that there would be no next time.

  The Circle of Life

  We returned to London. Two months passed in a swirl of activity, mostly breastfeeding and struggling to cope with sleep deprivation. We were also in the midst of buying a flat in east London and trying to plan a better family life. Then one day I received a phone call from China. It was my brother. His voice was jagged. Our mother had lost consciousness three days previously. She could die at any moment, she survived only by being fed oxygen through a tube in her nose. I listened, watching the removal men loading our furniture into the back of their van as the traffic police yelled at them to get out of the way.