I Am China

by Xiaolu Guo

  The very next day my grandparents and I took the same ferry back. My forehead was still wrapped in a bandage and it ached and throbbed for the entire journey home. In the middle of the Yangtze River I went to the edge of the deck and looked down at the water surging behind the boat. As I watched the churning water I felt my eyes sting as if bursting. Hot tears streamed down my cheeks and my mouth quivered, my breath choked. No one heard my cry, covered by the throbbing mechanical sound of the engine and the wash of waves filling the river air. I swore I would never return to Nanjing. And I’ve kept my oath. I’ve never been back there, not even for concerts, just like my father never returned to our family house in Beijing.

  The pen held tightly between Jian’s fingers is running out of ink. He doodles on the edge of his diary page, pressing hard. Nothing comes out. He throws the pen across the room in the direction of the rubbish bin. Now I can never go back. He thinks to himself: Nanjing is a city full of shame and sorrow, as they say. But perhaps nothing is more shameful than staying in a refugee camp in Switzerland. Jian stands up, picking up his diary from the table, and walks back to his room. He needs his guitar.

  3 LONDON, JUNE 2013

  Iona is sitting working in a Dongbei restaurant in the middle of Chinatown, alone, while eating slowly. She is drinking a bowl of bloodred soup. The restaurant is decorated with scrolls of kitsch mountain paintings. Seventies Maoist propaganda music plays in the background.

  Her red bowl is no ordinary soup: it’s pig’s blood and sour cabbage soup, and it’s the soup Mu often writes about. Iona wants to taste what it has to offer a disconsolate mind. Besides this, she has ordered some mala tofu and a chive pancake. She likes the sour cabbage because it reminds her of Nell’s sauerkraut which Vlod is so keen on. She is not so sure about the pig’s blood, though. Jelly-like, it has a bitter taste and a smell of rusty iron, as if it’s come from a rancid wok. The soup is sour-sharp, and “nutritious,” as the Dongbei peasants might say. Iona makes one last effort, chewing another piece of the gelatinous blood. She finds it hard to believe that this is the delicacy Mu and Jian ate every week in one of the Beijing food stores. Pushing the soup bowl slightly away from her notebook, she takes a mouthful of tea and continues working on one of Jian’s diary entries.

  May 2012

  Dreamed of my father last night. Since I left China he seems to be present again in my life. Surreal, since I’m now further from him, and more disconnected, than I’ve ever been before.

  The figure in the dream was not fully recognisable, but it was definitely him. I could tell by the sound of his breathing, the stench of cigarette smoke and the hard rattled cough. Why does he come back to me now? When I think of my childhood, I cannot see him, except as a kind of shadow in the corner of my eye, something that disturbs my peripheral vision. These days all I remember is that summer day when he threatened me with the steel ruler and locked me up. Even before he left the family I have almost no memories of him reading a story to me, or picking me up from school, or playing ping-pong with me. But I remember him telling me about his father, an anecdote he repeated frequently. He would tell it in a strained, choked voice and never looked at me as he talked. It was for him, this story, and the telling of it was agonising and painful, but he wanted to live and relive it countless times.

  He would tell of his parents—both had died during the Long March in 1934, only a few months after he was born. When the Long March ended, my baby father was left with a band of female soldiers. Then he would relate in excruciating detail—details he can only have heard from those women who looked after him or other ex-soldiers on the road—those days of Red Army soldiers eating grass and boiling leather belts in soup for protein. Starvation and gun wounds. That’s how over a hundred thousand soldiers died on the 8,000-mile journey. Each time my father told the story he would wince as he related how his father had died from a gun wound and his mother from infections she sustained from his birth. He knew exactly how to make me feel guilty, as if my easy life was a little drop of spit on the ground, a weightless existence, a nothingness in history. Or worse still, my existence was a crime, and it almost felt like my father was trying to tell me this, that my life was built on millions of corpses. I am a “qian-gu-zui-ren”—a man born with debt and guilt, a man beyond redemption. Perhaps my indignation towards my father has diluted a bit after all this time living with Mu. But for so many years, as soon as his image slipped into my mind, my fear of him would grow and rise like a poisonous wave.

  If you spend enough time reading someone else’s thoughts, after a while their thoughts begin to infect you. Your grasp on yourself becomes tenuous. Or you begin to see that you never were the essential you in the first place, Iona thinks to herself as she takes the bus back to Angel. To be a person is to imagine being someone, and the someone you imagine most of the time is what people call “you.” How strange to be in time and space with something called a “character.” Jian is separated from Iona by time and space. But there is something about his sadness, his strength, that emboldens her. It makes her long for some other self, some ability to reach outside herself and be brave. The dream about Jian’s father haunts her and she can’t help but keep coming back to that image of him holding the steel ruler over his son’s head. So far Jian has barely mentioned his mother, she’s noticed. It is as if there’s a whole section of his life that’s absent from her translation.

  Iona feels her body is like an oyster, in its dark, cold sealed shell. In the first year of its life, a young oyster spills its sperm into the water. During the next two years it grows larger and then releases eggs. Then the water surrounding it does the rest of the work. An oyster shifts from being male to female. It plays both roles. That’s how Iona feels as she walks around, confined to her oyster-shell flat—sometimes like Jian, sometimes like Mu, sometimes both. Sometimes like a hooligan in a Beijing hutong, shouting out: “Ta ma de, ta da ye de—Down on his uncle, bugger his grandma.” She seems to relive the lives of others in strange, unsatisfactory fragments.

  She hears the rumble of the street outside—her own Islington hutong with its rough market lads, buying and selling, its own particular odours and sounds. As she stretches and gets up to walk around her flat, waiting for the day to end and night to begin, she thinks of Liang and Zhu in The Butterfly Lovers, an ancient Chinese legend set two thousand years ago. Two lovers are tragically separated by their elders. After the young man’s death his lover throws herself into his grave and before long their spirits emerge from the grave as two butterflies. Iona feels an urge to leap into the past. To grasp Mu and Jian before they become butterflies and bring them back together. She wants to talk to them, to guide them, to help them to unite.

  4 CENTRE D’ASSISTANCE EUROPÉEN POUR REQUÉRANTS D’ASILE, SWITZERLAND, JUNE 2012

  Most refugees leave the Lausanne asylum centre after two weeks. Some are granted asylum by the authorities; others are rejected. Jian’s fate is suspended in a limbo space between arrival and departure, waiting to hear his destiny.

  Jian’s only friend, Mahmud of the Libya Desert, transferred from Berne with him, is finally denied asylum. The reports say he’s an ex-terrorist, and is not entitled to remain in Switzerland. Jian cannot believe it. They claim Mahmud was a mercenary fighting for Gaddafi’s dying regime against the rebelling populace. He also overhears gossip about how his African friend first arrived in Europe—a tale of violence and brutality, and totally different from the story Mahmud told him. The rumours said that Mahmud was a member of a mercenary group, soldiers paid by Gaddafi to fight. The group was armed with guns and grenades. Formed in the desert to the south of Libya, they paraded into rebel cities hoping to scare the people into surrender. The first thing they did when they arrived in a place was to rob the banks, loot shops for food and set fire to public buildings. In each new city they would kill a few men to set an example for the locals. They would carve up the corpses and hang them in public squares, even in places children would regularly pass to and from school.
Jian heard that Mahmud had been involved with one of these groups but had not been a willing participant. He hadn’t wanted to be involved in the killings and had escaped. The other mercenaries had pursued him as traitor. He too was to be slain and his body displayed in public as a threat to all those who dared to quit the cause. His only way out was to flee. He had managed to get on a boat from Libya to the coast of southern Italy, and then after interminable days in the back of a windowless truck, hot, exhausted and thin, he arrived in Switzerland, presenting himself as a refugee fleeing the horrors of war.

  There’s the real story, Jian thinks. So he asks, “And did you kill people, like they’re saying?”

  “Yes, I did.” Mahmud looks honestly at the Chinese man.

  “How many?”

  “Many.” There is a brittle silence. “Perhaps around twenty, or thirty, or fifty people.”

  Another pause. “What’s it like to kill someone?”

  “It’s not a big deal, brother,” Mahmud shrugs. “If you can kill one man, you can kill many. If you had been in my position, you would have done the same.”

  Jian nods his head, vaguely. He is thinking about those numbers: twenty, thirty, fifty. Mahmud’s casual indifference to numbers. Each number is a man. And it’s all so very familiar to him. Mao’s famous comment on the mass death was simply: It is just numbers.

  “I didn’t want to kill, believe me. But I am a poor man. The only thing I learned how to do was fight. If you grow up learning to shoot a gun and to kill, then you become a mercenary. There are no other options. Of course there is this voice that demands all the time why you do it. I had this voice. But I pushed it away. I did not listen to it. Until one day, I felt I had died. It was like I was the ghost. A ghost killer. A ghost with a gun, and I watched the power of my gun waste everything around me. Except at night. At night the ghost killer was haunted by the people he had killed. Then one night my dead brother appeared to me in a dream and said, ‘I will turn away from you, since you have killed me.’ I woke up screaming, with the peaceful bodies of my fellow soldiers around me in the dark. That’s when I began to listen to the voice in my head. I had to stop.”

  Jian wonders if this is just another story. It sounds too neat to be true.

  * * *

  Before Mahmud is taken away by two officers, he gives Jian a hug and a big smile.

  “Thanks for listening to me, Kublai Khan. You are my last friend, for the road will be short once I leave here.”

  Jian sits alone in the canteen where he and Mahmud had been accustomed to sit and read, and wonders gloomily: can someone still be a kind person if he has killed fifty people? Mahmud was not a killer to Jian. Maybe the angry ghost of one of his ancestors made him kill. Or maybe we all have these ghosts in us. The Chinese are as good as any other race when it comes to the subject of killing. Jian chews on these bitter thoughts as the afternoon drags to a close.

  5 LONDON, JUNE 2013

  It has been a strange day for Iona. In the morning, the sun is shining brightly so she changes into a summer dress and sandals. As she leaves her flat for the British Library, clouds begin to gather and the sky turns dark. With an eerie colour in the atmosphere, as if a great grey pigeon wing had enveloped the earth, hail suddenly hammers on her head. Pearls of ice clatter onto the roofs and the pavement, making the whole world like a teeth-gnashing skeleton. Everyone is running to escape the sheets of icy shards. Iona runs into a greasy spoon near King’s Cross. Inside, sheltering with a few supersized regulars, she shakes the rain out of her hair as she listens to the mad rat-a-tat of the hail, and the billowing demented haze of the storm. The famous British summer strikes again, she thinks. Only a malevolent higher power can explain this weather. She orders a pot of tea and takes out a page at random from a bundle of diary entries.

  Beijing, 2 May 2006

  I am finished. I am cursed, forever. So is Jian. We couldn’t even speak to each other afterwards or utter a word about this. No. We don’t even have the strength to look into each other’s eyes. This place is a hell now. I should simply pack my bags and go away, disappear to somewhere far away. I don’t think I can bear one more hour of living in this flat, the “home” which is no longer a home for three of us.

  What’s happened? Three? Iona reads these lines in total confusion. This is clearly from Mu’s diary, judging from the handwriting. Outside, the hail subsides, but she has now forgotten what she came out to do. This is her focus now, this is her day’s work. She doesn’t understand what Mu means when she says she is “cursed, forever.” She stumbles on the “three of us”—this is new, she thinks, this isn’t something she’s said before. Iona goes back through the photocopies of diary entries but there’s nothing to explain what’s just happened. She tries a new tack and goes forward—3 May, 4, 5, 6 May. Nothing. Then she finds an entry for 7 May and grips the page. She lays it down in front of her and starts reading.

  Beijing, 7 May 2006

  I saw Little Shu, his beautiful small face, small crinkled lips, and his tiny hands, so delicate like soft clasping flowers. His eyes were still, resting on mine. I reached out to hold him. But I couldn’t get to him. I was too tired, I didn’t have the strength to pick him up and hold him to my breast. He kept on receding into a tunnel that lay dark behind him, until he seemed to disappear. Then I woke up. It was the middle of the night. I burst into tears. It’s been like this every night since it happened. The same dream. I can’t get even a few hours’ sleep without slipping down into that tunnel. I sat up and Jian hugged me close. When I couldn’t stop weeping, he got up and went to the balcony. He stood in the cold air on the balcony alone, for nearly an hour … I think he didn’t want to see me crying, or felt powerless. Unable to shift this weight dragging us down.

  The next entry she can find is a couple of weeks later.

  Beijing, 20 May 2006

  It has already been three weeks. It doesn’t feel possible. I thought perhaps there would be a calmer time beyond the real sorrow, but there’s no respite from this bottomless place. I can no longer think, eat or sleep. I am finished. Our son, Little Shu, is dead. He only lived six and a half months in this world. He had just learned to smile and laugh, and began to garble a few sounds to make his needs clear, he had learned to sit up and already knew how to turn on his back and play with toys. But Little Shu will no longer learn anything. He no longer sees anything or hears the voices of his parents. All the tears and screams since he was born led to a void, a dark grave where his own memory is so brief and blurred.

  We no longer know how to talk. We can no longer love each other like we used to do. We have slept with our backs to each other for the last three weeks. Embracing in the dark is even sadder, I think. That day, when our son died, we came back home from the morgue, and Jian lay down on the bed. His mourning is totally silent. He is buried in depression.

  First we thought Little Shu’s fever had calmed. But then his skin flushed from red to blue, his breathing was shallow, and his hands and feet were cold and shivery. I burst into tears in the ambulance taking us to hospital. Jian was shaking the baby’s body madly and hoping he would wake up to his voice. But the baby was already dead. The doctors said it wasn’t unusual for a new baby to die instantly from meningitis. Why this punishment?

  Jian has cancelled the tour. The band have gone silent. What could they possibly say?

  Iona urgently turns the page. The following entry is only three lines long.

  Beijing, 1 June 2006

  Jian and I live in the same space but we don’t talk. We only eat together, but silently, we lie in the same bed together, but facing opposite directions. Is there any point now being together?

  Outside the hail has long passed and the sun appears, brightening the world outside—the canal, the run-down Georgian terrace houses, the passing families. Iona feels bewildered in a disorientating geography: her world, their world and the page in front of her. So Jian and Mu had a child, Little Shu, who lived for just six and a half months! Did they separa
te after their baby died? It’s hard to work out exactly, and there are no entries for several weeks until she finds a page from a month later.