Once Upon a Time in the East

by Xiaolu Guo

  Two days later, I was unpacking boxes in our new flat and I received another call from China. ‘Yes, she just died,’ my brother reported in a flat, spiritless voice. ‘I assume you won’t come back for her funeral. We’ll cremate her in the next few days.’ He hung up the phone. We had no words to exchange, and no shared pain to express.

  I sat alone on the floor, surrounded by more unopened boxes. A dull depression was sinking into my body, forming a dark, inert mass that absorbed all light. I was being dragged downwards, like a body tied to a stone sinking to the bottom of a stagnant lake. But then, I felt a rush of relief and liberation, buoying me up. The stone fell away and I emerged through the surface of the water. The feeling wasn’t levity or joy. It was a sense of clarity. Now my father and my mother were gone, I had been orphaned for a second time.

  The protagonists of my favourite books were all orphans. They were parentless, self-made heroes. They had had to create themselves, since they had come from nothing and no inheritance. In my own way I too was self-made. I was born and then flung aside, to survive in a rocky village by the ocean. If I had to pinpoint a moment when this thought crystallised in my mind, it was that day on the beach in Shitang when I met the art students drawing in their sketch pads facing a sunless, wavy-grey sea. I was six years old and consumed by an ineffable loneliness. I watched the young girl in particular as she contemplated the monotonous scene before us, and then started to apply paint to her paper. Her brush made a shimmering blue and a burning sunset appear across the page. I was suddenly captivated by the girl’s imaginative act: that one could reshape a drab and colourless reality into a luminous world.

  Now, surrounded by boxes in a London flat, the narrative of my past had been brought to a close. The beginning and end echoed each other. My childhood was gone. Finally I felt free from the burden of my family. I no longer needed to find them. I was my own home now. And at last, I could breathe fully, taking fresh new air into my own lungs.

  Ode to the Light, Xiuling Guo, a typical seascape by my father

  | ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I am deeply indebted to Sasha Mudd and Stephen Barker for their comments on early drafts. I feel extremely grateful to Anna Holmwood for her elegant and thoughtful edit. As always, I thank wholeheartedly Juliet Brooke for her intense editorial work and Rebecca Carter and Cullen Stanley from Janklow & Nesbit who have supported each stage of my writing.

  I am so very fortunate to have found a home with my publishers – the Chatto & Windus team in the UK, Amy Hundley and Morgan Entrekin from Grove Atlantic in the US, Claudia Vidoni from Knaus Verlag, Andrea Berrini and Gaia Amaducci at Metropoli d’Asia, Dag Hernried from Alfabeta Bokförlag, Gesa Schneider, Thomas Geiger from Zurich and the following great individuals who have supported me over the years: Clara Farmer, Claire Paterson, Rebecca Folland, Kirsty Gordon, Sam Coates, Monique Corless, Anne Rademacher, Shalene Moodie, Vanni Bianconi, Philippe Ciompi, Suzanne Dean, Mari Yamazaki and John Freeman.

  And my last expression of gratitude is to Wu Cheng’en, the ancient writer who wrote Xi Yon Ji (The Journey to the West), a legend that has inspired me since I was a child.

  Xiaolu Guo, Berlin and London, 2016

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Epub ISBN: 9781473524309

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  Copyright © Xiaolu Guo 2017

  Xiaolu Guo has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  First published by Chatto & Windus in 2017

  Many thanks to Eva Hoffman for permission to quote from Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (Heinemann, London: 1989). Extract from ‘MCMXIV’, The Whitsun Weddings © Estate of Philip Larkin and reprinted by permission of Faber & Faber.

  All photographs come from the author’s collection.

  penguin.co.uk/vintage

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library