I Am China

by Xiaolu Guo

  I have been thinking about your manifesto, dear Jian, though I can’t see that it’s of any use right now.

  I’ve got to run, I have to get my father’s medicine from the pharmacy before it closes.

  Your very own Mu

  11 LONDON, MAY 2013

  Words, symbols, verbal gestures. Sometimes clear, sometimes obscure. Iona struggles, unable to gauge their depth in the parallel world of Mu and Jian. But she tries, and at the same time she shuffles around the pages, trying to arrange them in the right order.

  Dear Mu,

  I’m sitting in this foul-smelling little library writing to you like a Mongol who has lost his horse! How pathetic, old bastard sky! But I’ve no army gearing up for battle, and there are no hills surrounding my room, just a whole pile of legal files and the sound of seagulls screeching somewhere nearby.

  I try to be USEFUL even when I cannot be used here. I study European history like I did at school, but I am too old to be re-educated! But yes, TO BE USEFUL, that’s what I must strive for. Someone has taken the only copy of Das Kapital the library holds, so I don’t have anything sensible to read—I didn’t know Marx was as popular in the West as he is in China. You may ask why I don’t read the Russian book you gave me all those months ago. It sits by my bed most days and the words on the front feel like some kind of warning: Life and Fate. Right now I am not in the mood to read about Russian soldiers being shot in their millions and dying in the freezing winter—don’t we Chinese have enough stories like that already?… [Translator’s note: Jian’s handwriting in this passage on Life and Fate is illegible.]

  I have no idea how people have reacted to my manifesto since I left China and whether they continue to discuss my ideas in the underground bars. Have you heard anything since the concert? I know you prefer not to mention these things again. I know you’ll find it hard to believe, but it is as upsetting to me as it is to you, but I can’t just let my work or my beliefs go like that. I need to know more, since I’ve been cut off from my world.

  Dearest Mu, tell me, when are you leaving Shanghai for Beijing? Has your magazine job given you more time off? It seems so unlike them. I remember you saying you couldn’t work for them any more. That the cheesy poetry they published was just to pass the censorship laws, and it got you down. You’re wasting time with them, you should move on. Don’t let them eat up your beliefs. Don’t wait around. Maybe you shouldn’t wait for me either. Keep yourself inspired if you can.

  Your Jian, the Peking Man

  Iona has an image of two rebels in love. Their strong emotions colour her mind with shades of red and shimmering blue. Mu and Jian, separated by their beliefs, and now separated by space, dropped on different alien planets. Both of them grappling with their own reality. Both of them trying to build a bridge on which to meet. And it’s like Iona is building this bridge again, through her reading, her translation. Building a bridge of meaning from their letters, and she has to choose the right words to keep the structure standing. And it is so hard. The Roman letters of English and the oriental characters of Chinese are not natural bedfellows. Take expressions like “niu bi”—, “cao dan”—, “ta da ye de”—, “zhou”—. How can she find the right translation for these swear words in English? If she had spent more time in Beijing’s streets and markets and noodle stores on her year in China at university perhaps she would now grasp much more. One day, she thinks, she will master the language and understand the culture perfectly. Iona imagines herself eventually settling down in China—and perhaps one morning, say, on the Fifth Ring Road of Beijing’s Haidian District, as she is trying to cross the massive junction, squeezed between thousands of cyclists, she might overhear the exact curse that appears in one of Jian’s letters. But right now she can only sense Jian’s world from the remote isolation of her Islington flat. She has to work with what she has in her islander’s head. It’s like alchemy, but in reverse. She has to transform their gold into her lead. If she translated “niu bi, cao dan, ta da ye de, zhou” literally, it would read “cow’s cunt, wank the balls, fuck his father-in-law” or something like that. Western readers would think she was writing cheap porn. The crudeness would repel them. And she would have failed. The bridge she is trying to build between Mu and Jian would fall into the river that separates the lovers. But if she translates blandly and drily, their revolutionary love story will grow cold and stagnant. And Iona is not about to give up, having hardly begun. She knows too well the struggle of the imagination. On her island home, as a solitary child, she used to imagine faraway places. So here she is now, in her tiny London flat, imagining faraway cities and smells, the sensations of China, and faraway minds.

  Still, she feels the need to rest. Her body is like a large, sluggish octopus, reminding her of its human form only through the aches in her shoulders and neck. She also has worries. She finds herself worrying about her mother. Why now, she isn’t sure. But like her shoulder pain, it’s there, weighing down on her. When her imagination drifts towards the north, this worrying pain about the woman who gave birth to her gives her a stomach cramp. With a certain sadness she thinks of their infrequent telephone conversations.

  “You OK, Mum? What are you up to?”

  “Oh dear, is that you, Iona? I can’t hear you very well … it must be the rain.” Her mother’s voice is frail on the end of the line. “Toby is being very noisy today. Toby! Toby! Stop messing around, come and sit here!” Toby is a Siberian Husky, her sister’s last Christmas present to her mother.

  The rest of the conversation is loose: the weather forecast and making strawberry jam and fixing the generator and one of the cows is about to give birth … Then there is always some problem with the hired workers on the farm—lazy or irresponsible or both. Everything is sort of interesting but not really interesting, nothing is unfamiliar, and there’s never a turning point. Her mother has bad rheumatism; every rainy or even cloudy day she suffers severe joint pain and muscle inflammation. On the worst days she can’t even make the trip between the bedroom and the bathroom. More and more she stays inside, listening to the radio and baking cakes that no one will eat. Her father is either out on the farm or working in the basement, where they produce and store their cheeses. When he’s not on the farm, Iona’s father will sit and drink tumblers of Scotch or several pints in their local pub down the valley, staggering back late. He is, and has always been, a good drinker.

  She doesn’t quite know why—perhaps it’s reading about so strange a place as a Shanghai hospital—but today is a day of images of home: wearing green wellies, the pungent sting of cowshit-soaked earth in her nostrils, the squish of the rain-sodden land. For Iona, the only beautiful time on the island is summertime. In the summer the temperature is just warm enough to remove coats and boots; the tall grass in the valleys is lush, and wild blue daisies bloom in blankets that cover the hillside; they eat all their meals in the garden and read books in the meadow. It is lovely, as her mother would say, but the loveliness is always so brief. Summer on the island “only lasts seven and a half days,” Iona would tell you. The rest is the winter, the ever-familiar cold, damp, windy, mossy, long, long winter.

  Iona sinks back into her chair. Her body feels lonely, although her mind is full. A longing, a need, a swoon is rising between her loins and mounting to her chest. She can’t help but lower her hand. Her fingers find their way into her underwear—it’s warm and damp there. She presses her pubic region. Her body begins to recede into a realm of pure sensation, delicate and enticing. She rests her head on the back of the chair. For a while she remains in that position, as if lying back on a man’s chest, her head resting on the warm skin covering a pulsing heart. Away, away … in some drowsy mix of pleasure and sunlight, she falls slowly, and sinks into oblivion.

  12 LONDON, MAY 2013

  By the end of the next day Iona is racing through the letters. She’s barely even getting up to make tea and stretch her legs any more. Her flat dissolves at the edges of her consciousness. All she can feel around her
are the blank faceless rooms of the letters: one lined with dying cancer patients, the other with immigrant refugees in limbo.

  Kublai Jian

  Dover Immigration Removal Centre

  Dover 2ER 4GS

  UK

  Dear Jian,

  So you are detained. Do you think they might send you home?

  I am also waiting. I am waiting to leave the hospital. I feel desperate. This morning I played the ukulele in the corridor, just to break the silence. Or perhaps to avoid looking into the ghostly eyes that follow me—Father, Mother, and all the dying souls here that envy me my energy. It’s that same electric ukulele we bought together. I played the smallest sound I could make, but still the nurse approached with her head tilted on one side, a stern disapproving look on her face. They prefer the sound of death here. They prefer the sound of a sigh. Death is respected, but not the living. All the nearly dead patients do is look at the TVs the hospital has put in every room. It’s as if the TV has replaced the figurines of Buddha or posters of Mao. I can’t see how the news—a stream of propaganda as ever!—will help with these poor sick people’s hallucinatory ends. Our General Secretary of State paid a visit to the mineworkers and praised their hard work; the Shanghai Education Bureau said education is the key to the future; a Fujian tea farmer praised the Open Door Policy, said it changed his life entirely … How tedious! These can’t be the highlights of reality, nor serve as the spiritual hallucinations of the dying. We have become so practical with our ideologies that we no longer have any imagination. Maybe that’s why I don’t agree with your manifesto. Not all art must be political, Jian. Some artists strive to go beyond the political—though I know that’s hard for you to imagine.

  You know, I really wish you had met my father, I wish you’d met just once, that’s all. You know that I’ve wanted you to meet him for years, and now it’s too late. As he endures each coming hour on his bed I can feel his end within reach. Perhaps he doesn’t feel that he is merely enduring, perhaps I’m the one doing the enduring. I think perhaps it’s only me who’s desperate to leave this diseased place of endings. The tracheotomy has done a great deal of damage to his neck and now he’s got an open hole in his throat so that when he coughs his saliva trickles out of the hole down his neck. All we can do is mop it up with endless tissues. The doctors say it’s astonishing, even magical, that he is still alive. But I don’t think so. To me it feels like the last fight before death.

  I keep thinking of that proverb, “Zhi zhe gua yan”—“He who knows doesn’t talk.” You know my father respected you but he always worried about the impact of protest. And I wonder now that maybe that’s a better way to think about my father’s voiceless hole.

  Room 415. The cancer ward. My experience of Shanghai boils down to just this one room. It’s all I will remember. It’s like I can almost hear the silent sound of cancer cells dividing. Bodies are rotting away—my father’s, and next to my father’s, mine. A single molecule produces more molecules, then other molecules die at the same time, joints grow stiff, bones get brittle, organs shrink inside the dark flesh, blood vessels slowly pump, skin flakes off, cells die on the hospital sheets, on the crushed pillows and the sunken duvets. I’m full of melancholy, Jian. Please come home.

  I love you as much as I love my father.

  Your Mu

  Iona feels a knot in her throat. Suddenly she thinks of death. Death rarely visits her mind. But Mu’s letter has invited it in. It lolls there coldly in a corner along with distant memories from her past, and it makes her feel sad. But she has been lucky. Iona has never had to face anything too traumatic. Her only experience of death was her grandmother, sitting slumped in an old armchair in her home in the highlands. It was Boxing Day, her mother was downstairs, heating up leftover turkey, and eight-year-old Iona had been wandering about the house, bored and listless, and had gone upstairs, following the silent old carpet. At first she had thought the old lady was asleep. But as she moved closer a coldness seemed to be coming from the figure. It was a horrifying moment, her grandmother’s eyes were still wide open; her face was directed towards the window which overlooked the valley. And that day the valley was grey and empty, no single living being could be seen. She heard the door open and her sister Nell crept up to stand beside her. The two little girls stood in front of the dead lady with the tremble of fear about them. Still, no tears. For Iona, her grandmother had lived in a family photo album. Death felt linked to the immobility, a frozen image.

  13 SHANGHAI, APRIL 2012

  The south wind carries the humidity from the East China Sea between the monumental skyscrapers of Shanghai. Every household opens their windows wide, as the walls are mouldy with winter damp. Inside Fuxing Park the cherry blossoms are fully bloomed, their petals falling like snow in the wind; the willow trees and maples turn deep green with their fast-spreading shoots. Spring cannot wait to arrive; it rushes in on the tide of the Yangtze River, making everyone sluggish and restless, as if one had drunk too much hot Oolong tea.

  In the patients’ canteen, over fried tilapia fish, Mu breaks the news of her departure.

  “I’m leaving tomorrow. Flying back to Beijing.” She speaks in a neutral tone, as if she is just taking a trip between her father’s room and the doctor’s office.

  “Tomorrow? So sudden!” her mother responds. “What have we done to make you so miserable here? Eh? Can’t you see your father is dying? We haven’t seen you for two years, you come back for two minutes and now you want to leave us again!”

  Swallowing a piece of fish, Mu keeps her head cast down at her rice bowl.

  Her father is saddened, but he says nothing. He puts down his chopsticks.

  There is no good excuse the daughter can offer her family. She has been a determined person since she was small. She was born in the year in which the Vietnam War ended, 1975. Although her mother desperately wanted another child—a son, or two or three more sons if possible—her exhausted womb wouldn’t produce any siblings for Mu. She tried swallowing kilos of ginseng and oyster powder but to no avail. So the “Lonely Only” girl grew up in a tea-producing southern village accompanied by her mother’s discontent. Her father was the one who showed love and affection for Mu. It was also him who taught her the first poem she ever heard, “Farewell to the Grassland,” from a Tang-dynasty poet, Bai Juyi. “The grass on the vast plain, one season it dies, another season it grows; wild fire cannot bring it scorching death, spring wind draws it into new life.” Her father would recite it slowly to his young, eager daughter, lingering over the words, drawing out each character with his ink brush.

  When Mu was very young she kept falling ill from sunstroke. Her nose would often bleed in the summer. Her father took her out of school or the Young Pioneers’ Palace, where she would study at weekends, and put her in a clinic. And the child with her burning red cheeks would swear to her father: “One day I will leave this hot oven and I will live in the north. I’ll find a snowy town, I’ll live in Haerbin or Beijing.” It was as if she was never meant to be in the south, as if by pure accident she had been placed there, a child who really belonged to snow and crisp blue skies. And one day she did run away. A four-day train ride took her to what had always been the home town of her heart: Beijing. Her first year in the city was a mix of loneliness and exhilaration. She loved the ice skating and the heavy snows, the broad streets, the urban ugliness, the vast sports stadium and the secret underground bars. She would cycle around the enormous city, in spring through sandstorms, in winter through blizzards. She hardly slept. It was here that she discovered her people, her friends and comrades. The ones with whom she could live the life of ideas, with whom she could create a new world of literature and freedom.

  In Mu’s heart, her father is the person she cares for most, but she tells herself that she can do nothing more to change his situation. “I cannot bury my life with his cancer cells, and I am not going to just wait here for him to die! I cannot repeat my mother’s life!” Mu feels like it’s all very clea
r for her suddenly: “And when I grow old, I will not mind dying alone. Goddamnit! I can die alone without demanding that anyone die with me. And I am not going to make my children sit beside my deathbed watching me wither away.” She remembers conversations with Jian on their balcony looking out over the hectic ringroads below, foodstall sellers, businessmen, peasants and students all walking fast on the same pavement.

  It is the last day of Mu’s stay in Shanghai. A train ticket to Beijing is in her pocket and it is a one-way pass. After her last lunch with her parents, there are a few hours to go before her departure. She writes in her diary:

  Father and Mother laid their skeletal bodies on the bed for their afternoon nap. I lay beside them, flipping through the local newspaper which only publishes adverts. Slowly, I felt the anguish growing with each passing second. I looked at them, as they lay there. For the last decade the only life my parents have been allowed is one of eating and sleeping. Like animals—like cows or pigs. I gazed into their faces, half covered by a bed sheet. It felt strange, like I was invading their skin. Their bodies moved only very slightly, their breath coming between long pauses. It was as if a slow cyclic sigh was escaping from their half-open quivering mouths. It was a collective sigh, the only act that they now truly perform together. They are my parents, who once held me up as a baby, and helped me walk, and fed me, now lying together in their exhaustion. I could see the sigh that travelled through their bodies, back and forth between the walls, with no release, no escape.