I Am China

by Xiaolu Guo

  A few weeks earlier Iona had received an email from a publisher she hadn’t worked with before. They were interested in translating some Chinese letters and diaries—this motley heap on her desk. The pay wasn’t bad; most of the other translation jobs she took up were deeply boring: business or legal documents. Iona didn’t demand anything more: no information, no context. She remembered that lull after graduation where she seemed to live only moment to moment, with no plan, no future and five thousand Chinese characters lodged in her mind struggling to get out.

  With long fine fingers she picks up a pencil and is ready to begin her work. But the pages look very confusing. Some pages don’t have dates on them, some are only half legible due to the deep black stain of the photocopier. The person who photocopied the original documents clearly didn’t speak Chinese as the pages are completely muddled and in no particular order. As she flicks through the folder, she begins to wonder where the publisher got hold of them. It looks like some of the letters and diaries are from a long time ago, some more recent. They span nearly twenty years—there are dark spots from greasy fingers, smudges and ink stains and, in a few places, blurry characters as if someone had spilt something or cried onto the page. The editor at Applegate Books had sent her the heavy folder through the post with only a cursory note, saying the material related to a famous Chinese musician. “We need a bit of an idea of what we’ve got here,” she had written. “We think there could be something very interesting, but it’s hard to know without some sort of translation.” At a rare appearance at a publishing party recently, where she had stayed for two quick drinks and lingered mostly on the edges of the crowd—her skirt was too long, her conversation too intense—Iona had overheard this editor declaiming, “We used to publish eminent people’s biographies, like the Dalai Lama’s, but no one cares about ‘eminent figures’ any more. We’re more interested in marginal characters, especially if they’re connected to something big.”

  There’s an officious-looking letterhead on the first letter. It reads “Beijing 1540 Civil Crime Detention Centre,” and there’s an address—somewhere she doesn’t recognise. She looks it up on Google maps. The pin lands in an empty grey landscape of main roads in the dark hinterland outside Beijing. She tries to imagine the desolation of a place like that—grey buildings, grey roads. She looks back at the messy script and starts to read.

  11 November 2011

  Dear Mu,

  I can’t bear this. My days are going by agonisingly slowly. There’s so little light from the window and I’m only accompanied by the stark and cold prison walls. How do I distract myself from going completely mad? I’m building the walls of our little flat inside the dark cave of this cell—our little home, where there is hot afternoon light and droopy plants, and we stand on our balcony facing the distant Xiang Mountain listening to those pirated foreign CDs we used to buy at the market—it soothes me when I think of all this.

  I know you cannot visit me, but I wish you would write to me. Your silence since I showed you my manifesto is just unbearable. How can you say you don’t believe in what I’ve written? Does it sound extreme to say that if you don’t believe in my manifesto, you don’t believe in me? Not to me it doesn’t, though you may laugh and call me naive, call me too idealistic. For me art, politics and love are all connected. You have seen how I lived for all these years—this is nothing new. It’s been nearly twenty years since I wrote my very first song, Mu! Twenty years is half a life! Half our lives, and all the time I’ve known you. And all that time you knew me. You lived with me. You accepted me by loving me. So what’s different now?

  What manifesto? Iona wonders. She puts down her pencil and rereads what she’s translated. The voice on the page is angry. Even his handwriting is angry: the pen is pressed deep into the page; there are crossings-out and repetitions. And who is this Mu? Iona looks out of the window. The sky has whitened still further, as if it’s sucking all the energy out of the busying crowds below.

  I’m going to say it again, even if you might not want to hear it. I know you, and I know you understand. There is no art without political commitment. All art is political expression. You know that—please, Mu, you know these things, why do you continue to block me out? We’ve talked about this. You knew I was going to distribute the statement at my concert. I felt stifled. We knew this might happen. Even as I miss you, I still think it was worth it.

  Imagine my arms around you in our bed. My woman, you know I love you.

  Your Peking Man,

  Jian

  3 LINCOLNSHIRE, JANUARY 2012

  The Chinese man sits at a table, holding a broken ballpoint pen. The surface of the table is heavily scratched, marked by the handwriting of every man who has sat there before him. Opening his diary, the pages all falling out, he tries to record the last few weeks. But he feels weary. Perhaps he is still jet-lagged, or disorientated. He stares at an oak tree outside the window whose twisted branches seem to stretch into the cloud laden sky like his thoughts. An old garden under an old sky. Old skin on an old body. Old, England is old, he murmurs to himself. His only reminder of China are two small cherry trees sheltering under the canopy of the huge oak. In this overheated room his eyes feel tired and his head congested. Maybe it’s the sleeping pills he’s been given to take. Or the words, words, words that the nurses fling at him in a language he can’t fully understand, despite what he learned at university. Their exasperated faces grimacing as he looks back at them blank and mournful.

  He wonders about the unit he is in—the Florence Nightingale Unit—as he watches the strange people around him. All in matching striped pyjamas, either agonised or oblivious, but all hurting in some way. Why don’t they just call it what it is: “Mad People’s Reform Hospital,” exactly as the Chinese would do? He cannot understand the layers of confusion around him.

  He looks back at the desk in front of him, his thoughts awash with recent events. The white-greyness around him is numbing. The humiliation, some days ago, when the doctor told him about his “borderline personality.” The words wouldn’t come. He felt totally inert and unable to argue back or explain what was really wrong.

  Each night he stares at his battered guitar, which he brought all the way from China; he has barely touched its metal strings since he got here. There’s a new dent on the body from the scuffle and fight at the concert. The rough hot hands which grabbed him and pulled him off the stage as the spotlights were burning his face. He hasn’t let that day into his thoughts for weeks. The guitar stands there, almost in judgement against him. But he can’t look at it without seeing the face of a Chinese girl, gazing up at him from the front of the crowd, her face open, full and light—the one still point in that underground den of mania.

  Then he thinks of those rare days he tried to set aside and spend alone, away from his musician friends, trying to write a song in memory of his long-dead mother. He remembers he wept as a little child, in rage and utter confusion, standing before his mother’s gravestone. Now the days of being alone seem to be the normal pattern of his life.

  Suddenly a shattering sound cuts through the air, like the frantic squawk of a bird trapped inside a room. Jian is startled out of sleep. He finds himself in the patients’ library. His fellow inmates are absorbed in Sudoku puzzles and blotted crossword grids. He’s awake, but tiredness clings to his limbs. His mind is possessed by hallucinatory impressions of his favourite “mala” beef-and-hog noodle soup with extra Sichuan peppers. The soup is steaming with heat right in front of his face. China is still alive for him. It has not been too long; he can still taste it. Smell the dank, sharp tang of the backstreets of Beijing and the tickle in his nose of the chilli in the air as he passes market stalls. He waits. His body dull and heavy.

  It’s late evening. He looks up at the darkening sky, searching for familiar stars. He can see the Big Dipper, only a little obscured by clouds. Swathes of empty blank sky. And then he spots a comet, speeding fast towards the dark horizon. It zips along. Barely seen. As hi
s eyes follow the trail of the comet’s burning dust, it feels like his body has been a comet zooming through the dark blue, from his birth in the leap year of 1972, when China was still in the throes of the Cultural Revolution. There he was, landed in a half-Mongol, half-Beijing family. And now the comet has landed here, in some backwater of a sodden suburb of a second-rate town in a country long since descended from glory. It must have been something about his origins, he thinks, in the Year of the Rat, that has led him here, along an inscrutable path. The rat was running as he burst out of his mother’s womb. According to his grandparents, when he came out, a screaming brat in Beijing’s No. 8 Women’s Hospital, with the umbilical cord almost strangling his cries, his family was in the midst of Mao’s madness, the Chairman’s very last ideological war against the bogeyman of imperialism and the bourgeois infection of the people’s revolution. The rat was hissing, for sure, when his grandmother took him to an old palm-reader in Beijing’s Heavenly Gate Park. The white-bearded man opened the child’s palm, studied it for a few seconds, then announced: “There are dark clouds floating in his destiny; but his energy is stronger than the clouds. He will prevail if he avoids his wilfulness.” Jian’s grandmother didn’t fully understand those words as the child’s hand escaped from her grip and tried to flee from the palm-reader into the steamy Beijing streets. But the rat-child grew up in a time of indoctrination. He was fed on the milk of ideology: Marxism plus Leninism, interpreted through Maoism. And when he was eight he was spouting the slogans of the party, a robust, fierce, cherry-faced child, on a flag-hung stage, with a wooden gun and a red kerchief around his neck, as if bursting from a socialist-realist canvas. But his allegiance didn’t last long: his teenage years blew his spirit to the opposite shore.

  Now, in the cool night, beneath a low English sky and distant Midland traffic, Jian’s past seems to him like dying embers, like a theatre of bright shadows playing quietly in his mind. A nurse passes, muttering words in a still-unfamiliar tongue; he remembers where he is. It is late, ten thirty at night. Slowly, he walks back to the bedroom he shares with other patients. He swallows a sleeping pill left for him in a small plastic cup on his bedside table. He sits on his bed, picks up his battered guitar and strokes the fretboard. The guitar has a line of characters written on its side. Although it is very scratched, Jian can still read it:

  —This Machine Kills Capitalists

  His fingers find the familiar chords that still resonate with his energetic rat’s heart inside. He plucks a string. The sound stretches out in the silent night. One of his room-mates suddenly wakes up, turning his neck and staring at Jian blankly until he sighs and puts his guitar down. Laying his head on the cold pillow, he gazes up at the grey ceiling and feels the darkness around him. Until dawn, sleep does not come. He wakes up with a single burning thought: I have to get out of here, any way I can. So he starts at the top.

  4 LINCOLNSHIRE, FEBRUARY 2012

  Kublai Jian

  Lincolnshire Psychiatric Hospital

  2 Brocklehurst Crescent

  Grantham NG31

  The Queen

  Buckingham Palace

  London SW1A 1AA

  Dearest Queen,

  My name is Kublai Jian, but they usually call me Jian—it means strong and vigorous. I’m writing to you from a madhouse in Lincolnshire. I’m sure you know your English towns as well as you know how many toes you have and how many nails are attached to your toes, and that Lincolnshire is where your Lady Thatcher comes from. You may think I am not sober, like the people in this madhouse. But I promise you that at this very moment, I am more sober and steady than anyone else here.

  I believe you understand the justice of this world. I think a powerful person like you can really help me out. In China we say if you can talk to the boss then don’t talk to the boss’s secretary, and if you can talk to the boss’s wife then no need to talk to the boss. So, dear Queen, you are that boss lady, you are the top one!

  I lived all my life in China. Well, up until a few weeks ago. I arrived in London at the end of December, and ended up in a wet and poky flat near Mile End station. It was quite depressing to live on a rotten carpet all day, but that was nothing compared with what came afterwards. One morning I was downstairs eating two oily sausages, and I found a letter from the UK Home Office and they had turned down my asylum application. I swallowed the second sausage and decided to fight back. I needed to gather £2,000 for an appeal, plus many extra documents which I don’t have. That day I went crazy and began to scream at everyone who was trying to talk to me. Then during the night my stomach declared a war on me, sharp pains in my intestines. Dear Queen, maybe this is not your business but I have had a very troubled bowel since I was a child, which is exactly what Fidel Castro has suffered from all his life. Bad intestine, knotted and throbbed and bubbled. I thought I was going to die that very night.

  But I did not die. Next morning someone took me to a hospital. And after an overall check-up with one doctor, he said there was nothing wrong with my bowel but possibly something wrong with my head. I cursed the man’s mother and grandmother and his great-great-uncle. He then immediately sent me to another doctor who specialises on brain but not body. I was so angry and impatient that I hit the brain doctor on his face and smashed his glasses.

  Right after that three security guards seized me and put me in a van. Two hours later I found myself in some ugly suburb with sheep walking in the fields. I arrived in a very lonely town that looked like an old people’s retirement village, and only several hours later I find out this is psychiatric hospital! They asked me to remove my own clothes and to change into regulation striped pyjamas, they said I should rest on a bed in a windowless room. “Rest? Rest for what?” I shouted to them, but they didn’t bother to answer me. Next morning a “Consultant Psychiatrist” called me into an office and told me that I wasn’t well enough to leave. “It would be best for you to stay here,” he said. I argued with him and told him they got me wrong: I was being thrown on a truck blindly and driven to a madhouse like a pig being sent to a slaughterhouse. But he said all patients claimed such things when they first arrived. “Soon you’ll get used to being here.” He patted on my shoulder like I was one of his distant cousins.

  Now, dearest Queen, let me be direct—why I’m writing to you? I need your help in this country. You may think I am a troublemaker. But I am not. I grew up in Beijing. An ideology-rigid city. That’s where my struggle began. In Beijing I was a punk musician. But I must explain, being Chinese punk is very different from your country’s youth. You may think we are not decent boys, swearing and spitting, burning our guitars or taking out our genitals from our jeans on the stage. No, we are not like that at all. We are disciplined, well educated, and sing about politics and art. But it is not always easy to rage against the government. I think you might like my music so I’m enclosing our most famous album with the leading song: “Long March into the Night.”

  Excuse me being wordy, but I do hope you can get me out of here!

  Yours sincerely,

  Kublai Jian

  5 LONDON, APRIL 2013

  Iona is on her third coffee of the day. As usual, she has barely eaten anything all day, but she likes the spare feeling in her stomach of “running on empty.” She often forgets to eat. Her sister said once that she had an eating disorder. Certainly food, like men, has a certain problematic position in her life.

  For now, it’s the pleasure of reading these Chinese texts that is sustaining her. Like a nun in her cell, with precious illuminated manuscripts set out before her, Iona works on a photocopied diary entry. The handwriting looks similar to the letters she translated a few days ago—messy, masculine, with big strokes and a sort of urgent calligraphy. The diary must be written by the same man, Iona thinks to herself. Slowly she types out her translation.

  2 November 1993

  It’s eight thirty in the morning and I’m not going to lectures today. A few hours ago I met again that moon-faced girl. I feel as if I now
have a clearer picture of her. She has a nervous energy, like a little canary standing at the mouth of a hot-vapoured volcano. There is something tough about her that draws me in, but at the same time, she is as delicate as a fragile young bird. It sounds foolish—I hardly know her!—but I feel as if I can sense her moods, like waves of the sea pressing into my chest as I look at her dark eyes hidden beneath her fringe. I wanted to ask her out a few weeks ago when we met for the first time at the volleyball match, but I’ve been practising with the band so much I just haven’t had a chance. I see her in class and at lectures, half looking at me and then quickly glancing away—fresh, small, biting her lower lip, not looking me in the eye, like a lonely flower fearful of the wind.

  But last night we talked in a new way. It was at the concert our band had been building up to. My fingers are still sore. My ears still ringing. I don’t feel like I’ve slept properly or eaten properly in weeks. But I don’t give a fuck! I’m on a rush, like I’m on a runaway train and I won’t be getting off soon.

  We were in Cafe Proletarian in Wudaokou. It’s small but it felt like a big deal for me and the band. There were at least two hundred fans even though the space could only fit in eighty, and the sound system was lousy but we played as loud as we could. We just went with the flow, and it all seemed to come together so well. Suddenly she seemed like the focus of it all.

  Now I divide my life between Before-Her and After-Her. She’s dug herself into me. She’s a heat inside me, churning me up. Tonight she told me she has only been kissed once before, when she was just fifteen, by a boy she knew back home in the village where she grew up. And now the second one is me! The first grown man in her life. Tonight she became my fire, and I hers. The band were playing under the tacky, eighties spinning disco lights, and the spotlights were zinging in my eyes. She was standing and jumping right at the front of the stage. The colours of the neon lights were bouncing off her white dress. I was singing hard and fast, sweat pouring from my face and my fingers melding with my guitar and the music, and then I looked down and she was looking up at me with her big black button eyes. Her eyes were the brightest eyes in that field of eyes before me. I thought I could see them glistening in the centre of the smoky haze. It’s a rock cliché but no one would refuse it. I stood in the middle of the stage with Raohao playing his bass on my right side, Yanwu his guitar on my left, and Sunxin hitting his drums behind my head. I was screaming and howling. And she was right at the front singing along with the mass, swishing her shiny dark hair. I even thought I could hear her high and girlish voice in the cloud of noise. It was one ripple in the churned-up sea, and I was the eye of the storm.