by Xiaolu Guo
“Well, I’m still freelance, working on translations.” Iona feels a bit embarrassed. “Most of the jobs are not very interesting, to be honest …” Her voice peters out as the professor looks at her intently. “But there is a job I’ve been working on recently which is getting me really fired up …”
“Oh really? What is it? Do tell me. I’m intrigued! Landscape poets from the Ming dynasty? The travel writings of Bai Juyi?” He shifts his umbrella onto his other arm and walks with her over the bridge.
“Actually, something more contemporary. A publisher sent me a pile of Chinese letters and diaries in April, asking me to translate them. All a bit of a mystery, as they didn’t really know what they were or whether they were even publishable. But I’m uncovering more and more as I go. So far I know that the letter writer is a banned punk musician who used to live in Beijing, but is now in exile in the West.”
“Excellent. I knew you would do something interesting. But this musician—would I know his songs?” Her professor speaks with what can only be a glint of sarcasm, though with Charles it’s always difficult to tell if he is being serious or not. “You know, I’m not as much of a fuddy-duddy as I look. I’m quite partial to second-generation Beijing punk. Do you know Cold Blooded Animal—Leng Xue Dong Wu?”
“No, Charles, I don’t. And I’m not entirely sure you do, either.” They laugh together. “My musician’s name is Kublai Jian. It’s probably his stage name, though I can’t find anything about him online. I think the most famous album was called Yuan vs. Dollars—Renminbi Huan Mei Yuan. And that wasn’t all that long ago. Only a couple of years. I can’t find his music online at all. I think everything’s probably been cleaned away by Chinese cyber police.”
“Hmm, that title sounds suspiciously euphemistic, don’t you think? Well, the cyber police in China are the best in the world. If this musician is banned, he’s probably someone who’s done something important, said something dangerous, incited crowds to rebel—the list is endless! We know all about Ai Weiwei, and the familiar list of dissident writers. They are not nobodies. Often they’re connected to the elite. That’s why they’re watched even more closely.”
Iona nods vigorously. “Yes, exactly. I’ve been thinking that, too. But I have to get further with the translation, delve further into the letters. I still have mountains to get through.”
“Well, Iona, you know where to find me if you ever need an expert opinion. I realise I’m more at home with the Boxer Rebellion on the whole, but contemporary resistance has also started to interest me intensely.” Here Charles’s hypnotic brown eyes, with their laser-like lustre, momentarily arrest her. “You know, we really miss you at SOAS,” Charles says with a great show of sincerity. “If you ever reconsider academia, do let me know …” He checks his watch quickly. “I must rush—meeting a friend at the South Bank. We’re seeing Khachaturian’s Spartacus. Lots of nude muscular young men under the Roman lash.” He raises his eyebrows suggestively. “Remember, do come and find me any time in July. I’ll be in Nangking until the end of next month. Zaijian!”
Charles and Iona hug and move on. As they walk in opposite directions over the bridge, Iona’s university days come vividly to life. She studied language mainly with Charles—prerevolutionary Chinese idiom in particular. But she also dipped a toe in history. She did a course with Charles on Chinese secret societies like the Boxers at the end of the nineteenth century. What would he make of her mysterious punk musician? she wondered. He might translate him better than her, since didn’t he teach her all she knows about translating? She feels cheered by his presence. As she crosses the street, the roar of the city returns to her: traffic, church bells, buses, gulls, sirens. The weak spring sun momentarily flashes and she suddenly feels a rush: she is alive! Yes, she is still young—I have hardly begun my life! And, she tells herself, feeling she has declared something solemn and serious, I will not live a trivial life.
8 IDAHO, MAY 2012
This is the twelfth hotel we have stayed at in the U.S. The twelfth bed I have lain in since we arrived in this country. So far the band’s American trip has always taken place inside: in hotel rooms, in concert halls, in waiting rooms, in trains, in bars, in planes. There is always a curtain and a window to separate us from the world. Nature is out there, like a perfect postcard, but we haven’t managed to put ourselves in the picture.
We arrived in Idaho yesterday. Lying on my bed looking at a straight road outside the window, I see a scene from the film My Own Private Idaho: a young man standing on an Idaho highway, trying to decide which way he should go. Why am I thinking about this? Is it just that travelling through America feels like travelling through a film set? Everywhere you go, the mythology of cinema has left its trace. I remember reading the Chinese translation of the novel the film was based on. An extract was published in a Chinese state magazine called Western Classics. In Chinese the title was modified to Idaho in My Heart. Using the word “private” was not thought a good idea in a state magazine, while “heart” is more a positive word. But having never been to the West, it was hard for me to imagine the sandy desert roads and cheap motels, the neon signs and greasy food. And I really don’t remember the gay story from the book at all—censored like everything else.
My stomach is all I care about in the West. Our first meal in Idaho was in a Mexican restaurant called La Pasadita Drive-In. Pancakes stuffed with red kidney beans, served with an enormous flat fish. All for $9.99, the waitress said with a big smile. Everyone smiles here. In America you can eat exotic foods at bargain prices. There’s a lot to get used to. A television on the wall in the restaurant was showing Top Gun with the sound down low; everything in the film was lit to make it look gorgeous: the planes, the pilots, the hero, the heroine. It was a bright and golden day outside, the sunlight flooding into the restaurant, making the whole place look like part of an afternoon dream, bright and unreal. Only the mountains of red kidney beans heaped with guacamole tell me that I am not in a Top Gun fantasy but a regular cowboy state of America.
Jian, I hear your voice inside my head. You’re asking: is America as we always imagined? Well, there is everything you would expect from America. All the clichés about this land of living clichés are true. But perhaps that’s because people want them to be true. It’s like ideology, you are told to believe some stuff and you are never supposed to give it up! It feels like you can become important here if you dedicate your life to fulfilling your goals. Maybe that’s the difference with China. We struggle like buffalo all our lives and we still don’t become someone.
The next day, as Beijing Manic and Sabotage Sister march back to the same restaurant, Top Gun is playing again on the big screen in the corner, as if it is on loop eternally. The band’s front man, Lutao, says he has some important news to announce. He speaks as he eats, his words coming out as a muffled hiss as he chomps down his three-and-half-inch sirloin steak. After he finishes the steak, he takes a mouthful of Coke, and repeats his announcement.
“I will stay in America, whatever the cost.”
Everyone raises their head from their plates, and stares.
“Brother, what do you mean ‘stay in America’? Illegally? With an expired visa?” Dongdong, the drummer, asks.
Then the bassist, Liuwei, speaks up. “Man! What about us? Tell us what your plans are. Quickly, before Bruce comes in.” He turns his head towards Mu.
When Bruce’s name is mentioned, everyone turns to look at Mu, their eyes intent with suspicion.
“Don’t look at me, guys!”
“You know why we’re looking at you, Mu!”
“What? You assume I’m sleeping with Bruce, and now I’ve gone over to the side of the enemy?” She is furious suddenly. “Don’t you go thinking I’m Bruce’s dog just because we’re sleeping together. And I’m not saying we are!”
Lutao continues with a steady tone. “You guys can go back to China or on to somewhere else or go wherever you want. I’m going to find my own way.” He pauses and looks at
his empty plate, then looks up at them and adds, “I’m gonna go solo.”
Everybody is silent.
America is better than China. The band are in demand here, receiving hard cash and eating three-and-a-half-inch sirloin steaks any time they want.
“But what are you going to do in America?” asks Dongdong. “You can’t speak more than five words in English!”
“I’ll learn! I’m going to start a business. A Chinese takeout joint first. Isn’t that what everyone does? I’ve saved some money. I have plans. I’m not an idiot.”
At that moment Bruce enters the restaurant and the band go back to sipping their Coca-Colas, pretending nothing has happened.
9 LONDON, MAY 2013
The annual reunion of the Chinese Study Department is held in the usual bar near Bloomsbury. Iona plans to go only for a bit, just to say hello to her professor, Charles, and a few fellow students she used to hang out with. She needs to go back to work, and there are one or two ex-boyfriends she doesn’t particularly feel like seeing.
Two beers later, Iona is beginning to feel restless. The usual catching-up and photo-taking with her old friends somehow doesn’t inspire her, she wants something more, something fun to happen. Iona is bored; she’s surprised her professor hasn’t made it. Across the room she watches a bunch of young men playing pool. As she stands at the bar to buy another drink she gets into a conversation with one of them, a man of thirty-something with ginger hair. He buys them two Belgian Leffes and says he is a veterinary surgeon. She’s always found vets creepy; for her they’re kind of like undertakers. But she is curious about the animals, and tells him about her family’s farm in Scotland, and of the few times she tried to milk the cows with her hands. It’s all mechanised now, though. Hand-milking is only to draw the tourists. As the reunion gradually breaks up, the ginger-haired man orders two more Leffes while they talk about castrated dogs and sick cats, accompanied by the background throb of tinny pub music. He says he has castrated about 250 dogs. Iona is impressed, but doesn’t quite know how to respond. After the call for last orders they leave the pub and walk into the evening rain. Their body language has been working on each other all evening, with a secret but clear code, and both sides have received the message perfectly. She follows him into a taxi, and they go back to his flat. He seems an experienced sexual partner—clear and confident about what he wants. He is very tall and thin, matching the size and shape of his cock. When he is inside her, she feels her lower body filling up so much it is about to burst. His hand forcefully holds her hip. It is good sex, from a technical point of view, but she can’t seem to ignore the sharp antiseptic tang that pervades his flat. During sex, she feels at one point as if she were a dog being manipulated for an unknown operation. As their bodies tangle, the image of herself as a bitch lying on his surgical table, waiting for her womb to be removed, plays in her mind with lurid vividness. She does not orgasm. After he comes on her, she can’t wait to leave. There she is, in the cold midnight dew in the dead zone again, a neutered dog released from sexual need. She finds herself in a cab in Clapton, where sirens are still blaring and drunken multitudes stumbling out of pubs onto the pavement. As the taxi pulls up at her flat, she cannot wait for a hot bath.
An hour later, after her bath, she drinks a mug of peppermint tea. She doesn’t feel like going to sleep immediately, so instead she reads a page of Mu’s diary.
Denver, Colorado
The day before yesterday, Bruce and I passed by a wedding party in a park somewhere in Denver. We stopped our car and peered through the trees at the bride and groom—they were both fair, young and healthy; their smiles were as perfect as the smiles in a television commercial. They seemed to have big families and plenty of friends. There was even an orchestra playing. I watched Bruce walking towards the young couple to congratulate them. He then came back and handed me a glass of champagne. It had never occurred to me, but suddenly I thought: what if Bruce and I get together and even get married? It seems a ludicrous idea. I wonder whether Bruce has had a similar idea, although the Peking Man has been lurking around the back of my mind.
Even though we lived together for so many years, Jian and I never thought about getting married. No, it’s more than that: we have always rejected the idea of marriage. We saw marriage as a trap and we didn’t want to enter that trap like everyone else. But now. Now I don’t know any more. This foreign soil makes me rethink everything, and I am becoming more and more practical. Perhaps one day I will no longer know how to write a single line of poetry. This practicality will rob me of all my words. And perhaps then I might even welcome this obscene act of robbery.
FIVE | THE SECOND SEX
bu wen bu rou wen zi, wen zi bu ruo jian zhi.
jian zhi bu ruo zhi zi, zhi zi bu ruo xing zi.
Tell me and I will forget. Show me and I will remember.
But involve me, I will understand.
XUN ZI (PHILOSOPHER, WARRING STATES PERIOD, 475–221 BC)
1 CENTRE D’ASSISTANCE EUROPÉEN POUR REQUÉRANTS D’ASILE, SWITZERLAND, JUNE 2012
In the beginning there was nothing in the universe. The sky and the earth were glued together and the whole world was a hot and bubbling pool. For twenty thousand years nothing changed, until one day there appeared a cosmic egg. Inside this cosmic egg, yin and yang slowly found their balance, and a half-man half-dragon was shaped inside the egg. His name was Pangu …
Jian writes this on the first page of his new diary, a slender notebook he found lying around on a staff table the other day. It is early summer, but in this part of the world he still feels cold. He is in a camp in Lausanne, after being transferred from Berne with several other asylum seekers. In this new setting he starts to have strange dreams at night. Somehow the ancient god Pangu, the first creature of ancient China, has infiltrated his mind in the last few days. Jian sees the great creature vividly. Pangu seems to fit well into this alien space, like a vine winding through a lush rainforest, or a fungus growing on a mouldy carpet. He hears people around him speaking in French or German and he feels even more mute and deafened. His own Chinese world has come to an end, so why not think of the origins of things, the beginning of China, the mythic world, before emperors or the cultivation of rice? Before laws, or the worship of gods; before human feet left their footprints on the muddy shores of the first lakes …
Suddenly everyone is gathering for breakfast and he stands, bored, in a queue in the canteen. The other inmates sit or stand around in the boxy white room with sullen expressions, skinny creatures on stick legs. Jian laughs to himself occasionally, hunched over in his corner of the canteen, as he contemplates his plate of bread, cheese, coffee on the table in front of him, and pictures his ancient ancestor.
After breakfast the canteen transforms into a classroom for their French-language class. Sitting among the Muslim women wrapped tightly in their scarves, Jian peeks at their naked eyes, wondering what they are hiding. “Don’t stare at me!” He can almost hear the women cursing in Arabic under their veils! They don’t seem to want to be in Europe at all. They sit on the hard benches of grey Switzerland; perhaps they are thinking of nothing, have nothing but fragmentary images of their previous life looping around in their heads: a shady corner of a clay house, hens pecking in the dirt, an old plum tree on the dusty road, fish bones thrown towards a stray cat, the afternoon sun blazing down …
The French class is the only thing Jian likes about being here. The teacher, Monsieur Georges Godard, is someone who has admirable patience for the elder foreign students and the mentally disarranged. A useful sentence Jian has learned to speak this week: “Asile de réfugié, je suis venu de Chine.”
Monsieur Godard asks everybody in the class to change the last word according to their origin and to say the sentence out loud.
“Requérant d’asile, je suis venu de Somalie.”
“Requérant d’asile, je suis venu d’Angola.”
“Requérant d’asile, je suis venu de Libye.”
“Re
quérant d’asile, je suis venu d’Égypte.”
“Requérant d’asile, je suis venu de Syrie.”
2 CENTRE D’ASSISTANCE EUROPÉEN POUR REQUÉRANTS D’ASILE, SWITZERLAND, JUNE 2012
In the library that evening, Jian reads his Russian novel, looking up now and then at the scrawny Africans reading their Qurans, which they flip through with grimy fingers, snot dripping from their noses. They look like they are crying, he thinks, as they mumble their prayers. Their god is not his god Pangu. Man makes gods in his own image, and in his case the gods had Mongol faces. They were there from his early childhood, the years he spent with his maternal grandparents before they passed away.
Then all of a sudden there’s a ringing in his ear, sharp and persistent. His head is throbbing again. He feels he is somewhere underneath the earth. Like an infinitely deep pit with cogs, wheels and pistons whirring, the stink of oil in churning water. The water of the Yangtze River. He remembers his first ferry trip across the river; he was eleven years old. He had heard that exact same throbbing sound coming from the engine room. He ran to the front of boat and leaned over the railing, trying to see where the pulsing sound came from. Clunk! He fell. He was nearly swallowed up in grinding gears and flying sparks. A blinding flash in his eye, and he touched his broken skin on the sharp wheel. He was crying. His grandparents ran to pull him out. They wrapped his broken forehead with someone’s handkerchief. It was an unforgettable trip, not only because his head throbbed from the injury, but because of what happened when they finally arrived. His grandparents had brought him all the way from Beijing to Jiangsu Province, trying to get the son to meet his father. Jian’s father had left fourteen months before and hadn’t returned home since. They only knew he had a post as an industry delegate in the Communist Party Head Office in the province. There were occasional messages sent back home from the south saying the father was too busy to return home. But the rumour was quite different, something which the child Jian didn’t entirely understand. When they got off the ferry and arrived in Nanjing’s newly built town hall, they were told his father was in a meeting and couldn’t see them right away. So Jian and his grandparents stayed in the father’s office waiting—they were given sunflower seeds to eat and tea to drink. But the waiting took forever and the father didn’t turn up. The child was bored and looked around the room. Before his grandmother could stop him, young Jian saw a framed picture sitting on the corner of the table, squeezed in between official photographs taken of his father at conferences and local events. In this picture his father is sitting upright before a fake mythical mountain landscape beside a young woman in red whom Jian had never seen before. The woman had glasses and very short hair. They were both smiling at the camera, holding each other’s hands. Young Jian stared at the photo in utter bewilderment. His grandmother pulled him away from the table quickly and fussed the photograph away into a drawer. Half an hour later, someone came in. It was the woman from the photo, with the exact same short haircut and the exact same glasses. She carried a little baby in one arm and a lunch box in another. As she entered the room she stared at the three strangers and didn’t say a word. Silently, she laid the lunch box on the father’s table and went away. As her footsteps subsided in the corridor outside, Jian heard the baby’s plaintive cry. Now, nearly three decades later, in a white room in Lausanne, Jian can still recall every detail of that trip. It comes back to him as if in Technicolor, so he writes it down, as if the process of recording might transfer the pain from inside his body onto the page.