I Am China

by Xiaolu Guo

  9 LONDON, MAY 2013

  Iona finishes the latest translation feeling totally energised and exhausted. Mu writes fluently and vigorously; she is a natural writer, compared with Jian’s fragmented and unfocussed style. Still, she doesn’t feel quite ready to embark on a brand-new journey with this Chinese woman yet. Instead, she returns to an early part of Jian’s diary, where she discovers a loose fragment on a floating photocopy.

  Beijing, July 1999

  Typical situation: I was inside the History Museum looking at documents from the Opium War time while she waited outside in the cafe reading some suicidal poet—Sylvia Plath, it turns out. And when I came out we started to quarrel. I want to record this argument—it’s troubling me, I keep playing it over and over and I can’t find a way out. She fascinates me and I can’t seem to function without her but, Old Sky, I can’t bear the fact that on the surface she acts like a rebel but deep down she is a conformist for anything fashionable. I can’t take her blind acceptance of anything Western. (Isn’t it a perfect example of our difference that she studies Western literature and I am reading Chinese history?) I know she hasn’t had to fight like me, she hasn’t had a father like mine, but she needs to find her own ground to stand upon, not some second-hand interpretation of Western culture.

  So I said I thought it was ridiculous that all our syllabus told us to read were these Western novels. That we knew the lives of the Americans and the British better than our own artists, better than our own parents, even. She just shrugged and said she kind of liked these books, and why was it such a big deal anyway. She laughed as if it was no big deal—lighten up, Jian, stop taking everything so damn seriously! And that just made it worse. This is China and we live in China, I said. Why would we abandon our own history and allow ourselves to be totally swallowed by Western culture? She said she thought it was good to learn about the West and then I just lost it. I know I kind of got things out of proportion, but she brought up my father and turned to me and said seriously: Look, Jian, the way you sound now is just like how your father speaks on TV! If you care so much and disagree so violently, then do something about it! Playing your guitar is not going to change this society! I don’t know, but maybe she has a point. I can’t think straight when she brings up my father but I’ve got to do something. Hasn’t there got to be a way of shaking things up without being like my father? It terrifies me to think I’m more like him than I want to admit. It just depends whose side you’re on, doesn’t it?

  10 BEIJING, MILLENNIUM EVE, 1999

  … Everyone is talking about the Y2K bug and is petrified that their precious computers will die at the last stroke of midnight of this millennium. Personally, I think this might be the best thing that could happen. If all the computers of the world were to die as the clock tolled for 2000, we could happily go back to the Bronze Age, hiding ourselves in caves, making tools and singing poetry under the stars. Ha! What a caveman’s paradise! But in just a few hours, we will be stepping into a new millennium. We are waiting restlessly for the click of the clock to take us into the new century. But into what? Everyone hopes for the big change, the big renewal. They want to cast off their old selves like snakes shedding their skins. But when midnight passes, nothing will have changed.

  Jian scribbled these words in his diary in the last remaining hours of 1999. It was a year of important events. That summer, just before most of Beijing craned their necks to see a total solar eclipse in the sky, Mu received her MA in Western Literature. In the following weeks, as Jian scribbled songs and prepared his second album, she managed to find her first ever job, with a poetry magazine called Tomorrow. She told Jian the magazine had been introducing and translating Western poetry to a Chinese readership for a few years, printing works from Keats and Byron to Ginsberg and Bukowski. The job was titled assistant editor but in fact she didn’t get the chance to do any editing. “I will look at commas with the fullest concentration,” she told the editor-in-chief during her interview, when he told her it was mostly proofreading. Jian couldn’t believe that he’d been out of college for three years already. It all still seemed so new. The band were doing well, playing in different venues almost every weekend. Until a strange day in December when all performances were banned in the capital. There was no information about why or when they might be able to perform again but Jian and Mu assumed it had something to do with Cambodia. They had recently learned from a journalist friend about the official dissolving of the Khmer Rouge and they guessed the Chinese government would be fearful of infection from the south, as they would always be whenever there was an international disturbance.

  On the eve of the year 2000, Mu, Kublai Jian and his band gathered in the super-congested hangout, Cafe Proletarian, to celebrate the new millennium, and also for another exciting reason. There had been gossip around Beijing that the punk godfather himself, Johnny Rotten, was in town and would be coming to this bar with his friends that evening. Already, one could see a bunch of youths clutching pirate copies of Sex Pistols albums and looking around anxiously through the ever-thickening Camel and Zhonghua smoke haze for glimpses of their idol.

  Just a quarter of an hour before the chimes of the new millennium, Jian and his pals heard a collective scream erupt from their midst. They looked to the entrance, and saw three white men walk through the door—in the centre of the trio was a rather tall man with red hair wearing an oversized pyjama-like suit. It was the godfather of punk royalty. The crowd’s screams grew louder still: “This is the Sex Pistol man!” or “You’re so behind the times, his band is Public Image Ltd now!” or “Whatever monkey they are, don’t tell me that’s not Johnny Rotten!”

  As the white foreigners, acting as one, squeezed themselves through the crowd to find a place to sit, the assembled Chinese youth swarmed over them with CDs and posters for signatures. Kublai Jian and his band moved forward, while Mu stayed behind, shielding herself from the crazed throng.

  In the midst of undifferentiated Chinese yelling and shouting, Jian heard the white man’s distinguished English:

  “If you Chinese really want to be polite, then don’t call me bloody Mr. Rotten. I’m not some fucking comedy-show character unless you pay me. Call me Mr. Lydon if you can’t bear to call a man by his first name.”

  Before any sensible conversation, the crowd suddenly began to scream the countdown, each number resounding like great gongs in an empty tower: Nine! Eight! Seven! Six! Five! Four! Three! Two! One! Hooray!! Everyone hugged each other, patting backs, grabbing shoulders and waists, and squeezing limbs, crying and smiling into the blurred forest of tangled bodies. Beer bottles opened, voices were raised, fireworks shot out in the street like a war had started.

  Amid the general cheer, a conversation sparked into life between Kublai Jian and Johnny Rotten.

  Jian, with all sincerity, stammering, dry-throated: “I’ve never been to the West. But can you tell me, Mr. Lydon, is there any positive punk scene in the West? I mean, good punk that does practical good for society?”

  “Nah, there’s only negative punk, man.”

  “Only negative?”

  “Absolutely. Punks are useless, or worse, by definition!”

  “But I don’t believe that.”

  “Well, then you’ve been born in the wrong time!”

  “But I know one, for sure, a positive punk. Here in China.”

  Johnny began to twitch his lips again, almost laughing sarcastically. “Who is this positive Chinese punk? Eh?”

  “Have you heard of Kublai Jian, a Beijing musician?”

  Johnny shrugged his shoulders, unimpressed by the name. “What’s he done?”

  “A new album is coming out soon, called Yuan vs. Dollars.”

  Johnny shook his head. “Yuan vs. Dollars—not a bad name at least.”

  Mu was now too impatient to stand behind and watch, and she cut in with her better English.

  “But, Mr. Lydon, why didn’t punk bring anything good to society?”

  “Good? Didn’t bring an
y good?! It brought good all right. Think of an enema, girl. You know what an enema is? That’s what punk was. Flushed it all out!”

  Mu murmurs, “Enema?”

  “Yeah, colonic irrigation of society!”

  Jian didn’t understand Johnny’s words and just went on, almost angrily. “But shouldn’t they do something good to help society?”

  Before the white man could answer with even more enigmatic riddles, a wave of fans pressed onto the star their notebooks and CDs, grabbing the demigod’s shoulders and hands, desperate for his mark. Outside the bar, the midnight sky was lit by a vast cascade of fireworks, illuminating the solemn and dark Long Peace Avenue, the featureless Heavenly Gate Park, the foreboding Forbidden City, the drumming Bell Tower, and finally creating a fake light of day in Tiananmen Square. A new century of amnesia had arrived on China’s earth.

  FOUR | ON THE ROAD

  Du wan juan shu buru xing wanli lu.

  Reading ten thousand books is not as useful as travelling ten thousand miles.

  LIU YI (WRITER, SONG DYNASTY, 11TH CENTURY)

  1 PHILADELPHIA, APRIL 2012

  A fully loaded American Airlines flight carries 332 passengers cutting through the clouds above the Pacific Ocean. Inside the plane, most of the passengers look like business people, either reading the Financial Times or furiously typing on their laptops. In the back of the plane there is a loud group of Chinese passengers, all young and long-haired, taking photos and laughing at each other like overexcited first-time travellers. Beside them, a half-Chinese half-American man in a dark Vivienne Westwood checked suit studies a tour schedule on his computer.

  A brand-new world. And a brand-new me. I’m no longer Deng Mu, according to our manager Bruce. He said no one was going to be interested in a poet whose name was Mu, I needed a stage name, something that fitted with the band name Beijing Manic. So he came up with a new one for me. This is what I have just read on the newly printed leaflet: “Slam Poetry from Sabotage Sister, a poet from Post-Mao China.” Is that me? I feel like I am wearing a disguise—underneath I am still a hundred per cent Chinese daughter of the countryside, and unconfident in front of a Western audience. I don’t feel true to myself; it’s as if I’m pretending to be someone else—a fake, a vain attention seeker, something I hate when I see it in others. Sabotage Sister is really Bruce’s invention, a new package of me.

  All of a sudden the spotlight trains on Mu and the house lights dim. The audience quietens, the band are ready with their instruments. Even seconds before she starts performing she is still racked with anguish, and feels unprepared and vulnerable. She plugs in her ukulele, turns up the reverb and sets the tone buttons low. Nervously, she hits a series of D chords. It sounds like a screeching cat on heat, and two middle-aged women in the audience cringe and move towards the exit with trembling fingers in their ears. She belts out her verses above the roar of Beijing Manic’s driving rhythms, her uke adding a whining, tortured drone to the pounding noise of the band. She doesn’t really know what she is doing, just follows the howling in her ears, laying down a chant in half-Chinese and half-English. Two elderly men who look like veterans from an ancient trench war seem shell-shocked by the barrage; they stagger after the women to the exit. Mu sees this from the corner of her eye, and gulps back her disappointment. Her mouth speaks and her fingers move up and down her instrument. All she can see as she looks out into the crowd and the lights burn on her forehead is another stage, long ago, in a faraway place, where the lights danced and the music roared and she is in her white dress dancing and crying and screaming among the Beijing crowd.

  2 LONDON, MAY 2013

  The photocopied diary pages of Mu’s America tour are neat, well organised, each entry dated. It is a recent tour, only last year, according to the dates. Iona has a feeling that some secret hand has been putting these documents together properly, and it seems from April of 2012 onwards there is barely any correspondence between Mu and Jian. Most of the photocopies are from their diaries.

  West 22nd Street, Manhattan, 28 April 2012

  A budget hotel beside the Chelsea. We storm into the lobby with tons of luggage. At reception we were asked these strange questions: “How are you today, sweetheart?” or “You enjoy your chocolate brownie, sister?” or, even more bizarre, “I heard you Chinese still believe in communism, s’at right?” Americans don’t seem to really believe that there are other people in the world, and so, when they see you in their country, it’s like you’ve stepped straight out of a television set.

  This is New York City, the great model that Beijing and Shanghai are desperately trying to ape. But now I think China could never match the USA because we have no black people in our country, and no foreigner can become a Chinese citizen. It’s amazing what you see when you leave a place. It makes me realise how we Chinese have the worst prejudice against “others.” I look around and I imagine that I will be an immigrant here one day. Everybody I pass on the street has a confident look about them, like they’re going somewhere and accomplishing something. Only two slight disappointments—Times Square is much smaller than I imagined, not even half the size of our Tiananmen Square. It’s just a big lurid billboard. And Broadway—Broadway isn’t broad at all, it’s narrow. It’s just a load of street blocks all squeezed in like tubes of toothpaste. The boys from the band seem to be oblivious of their new surroundings, but they all protest about the food. They’ve threatened to quit the tour if there are no pork ribs or mala beef with rice on the table from now on. So Bruce takes us to Chinatown. Big fat noodles with fried pigs’ trotters and stewed intestines and sour cabbage blood soup. There we don’t have to force down weird eggy cheesy sandwiches. Actually the mere sight of a sandwich is depressing enough. “It sucks.” Lutao has just learned this expression, and he uses it all the time. “It sucks, man.”

  Thinking of Jian. My heart aches as I see a succession of young Chinese men pass with a melancholy look on their faces. Have I just missed him? Where is he now? Did he walk by half an hour ago while we were having lunch? Would he see the posters in front of a Brooklyn club advertising my poetry performance tonight? If there was only one person in this part of the world who would recognise my voice in the crowd, that would be Jian …

  West 22nd Street, Manhattan, Iona murmurs, and stops reading Mu’s diary. She thinks of her Uncle David. Three years younger than her father, David has lived in Manhattan since he left the farm on Mull in the seventies. Now a very successful businessman, David runs an accounting firm in New York City. When Iona visited him with her father a few years ago, they went to his office near West 21st Street. In the front window she remembered an advertisement for the business: We Help Small Biz Owners Minimize Audit Risk While Lowering Their Tax Bill!! Whenever a potential client dropped in, her uncle would give the visitor a “free thirty-minute consultation” and a cup of filtered coffee with two sugars and the offer of soya milk. It was savvy business sense. Damn sight more savvy than his Guinness-drinking brother. Iona often wonders what it would have been like if she had moved to New York. Would she still have worked as a translator? Would she ever have encountered Jian and Mu’s story? Perhaps she would have become one of those successful members of the immigrant American business community, with her Scottish accent, a plush apartment in town and a large place upstate. Iona gazes at the Islington human zoo below her, jostling in the street, and nearly laughs at herself—if only life could be lived simultaneously in parallel spaces and times!

  3 CHICAGO, MAY 2012

  Chicago. The city looks hard, like it’s carved out of sheer granite. What would Walt Whitman think if he woke up in downtown Chicago, on a park bench, say, like so many of the “bums”? This bum Walt would find himself looking on an unrecognisable world. He might even start uttering one of his own poems to himself, like the one that begins “O Captain, my Captain.” There would be no leaves of grass for his spirit to merge with, except for the grass of the cold city park he would be lying in. He would shrivel up in the air conditioning, an
d shrink from the smiling hotel staff waiting for a tip.

  And this is the city of lakes! Lake Michigan squats here by the concrete bank. Motionless. No wind at all. What would an old Chinese fisherman think of it? Maybe all American fish live in Third World seas and are caught by nets pulled up by Third World hands. So the Americans can design Apple Macs or smoke marijuana in their spare time.

  Bruce is always hanging around. There’s an odd tension between us; although my head is still obsessed by Peking Man, I feel a certain attraction to him. This troubles me; I feel like I’m a soldier’s wife, trying to make a new life after my husband has gone missing in action. Then I hear Bruce’s voice in his East Coast accent: “Don’t be so miserable, Sabota. In America a poet has to be a salesman too. You gotta learn self-promotion and dress like a pop star, not some sad boring intellectual.” Bruce. A banana with yellow skin. “That’s awesome”—he says it ten times a day. Could someone like that really understand me?

  Chicago’s Athletic Club Hotel, where Sabotage Sister and Beijing Manic are staying, is a sportsman’s weekend hangout, with a lobby playing Sinatra’s music all day long—Songs for Swingin’ Lovers on a loop. The walls of the club are adorned with stills from the film The Man with the Golden Arm, claiming a scene was shot on the street outside, though it was cut from the original film so the connection is hazy to say the least. In the Cigar Room, Bruce is forced to smoke whenever the Chinese men smoke. They hand him a cigarette whenever they light up, having told him: “If you don’t smoke with us then you are zhuang-ya-de”—a wanker, a ponce. As the tour wears on, he is the one who’s responsible for Camel supply. The boys smoke Camel No. 9. “It gives you a throat kick,” Lutao, the singer and guitarist, claims. Lutao offers one to the girl. Sabotage Sister takes a few puffs, but already her mouth is bitter, and a pain goes shooting through her lungs. Camel No. 9. Not so good for a cancer patient’s daughter.