I Am China

by Xiaolu Guo

  Let me know when would suit you to meet up.

  All best wishes,

  Jonathan

  Iona clicks open the attachment on Jonathan’s email. The scan is of an official letter printed on headed paper, and hurriedly signed.

  Visa Office of the Department of Political Asylum

  Federal Office for Migration

  Berne 3402, Switzerland

  12 May 2012

  Department for Political Asylum

  Home Office

  Dover

  UK

  Dear Officer,

  We’re writing this letter from FOFM in Berne regarding the case of applicant Kublai Jian (registration number: 867800RFUK; original nationality: Chinese; DOB: 10 November 1972; CPS: Dover Detention Centre Non-person Hold). After a considerable investigation on the applicant’s particular background, we are pleased to inform you that we are willing to receive Mr. Kublai Jian from UK Border to Switzerland with the Safe Third Country Agreement. According to section 253 of the Geneva Convention this applicant will be allowed to stay in the Berne Asylum Aid Centre for a maximum of 45 days before a final decision on his application is taken. The applicant then can apply for further protection as long as the threat of persecution continues from his native country.

  Please arrange the border transit with Berne Border Police Sector 12 within 99 days. If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact us.

  Yours,

  Philip Dupont

  Deputy Officer of Political Asylum Department of FFOM, Berne

  2 LONDON, AUGUST 2013

  In her local cafe, the Breakfast Club, Iona sits with the photocopies spread out before her. Kublai Jian. Half-Mongol, half-Chinese. Kublai is an ancient Mongol name, she knows that much. Perhaps his ancestors came from the great plains of central Asia. Or perhaps his family descends from Kublai Khan, the grandson of Genghis Khan. But Jian is an urban punk musician, a Beijing boy. A man with Mongol blood in the world of the Han Chinese. Blood and culture don’t always mix. Iona suddenly thinks of her own case, and feels a twinge of melancholy. The source of her name—the Isle of Iona—is a place she has never visited even though it’s always there in the back room of her life. That’s how it is for all of us, she thinks to herself. We come from somewhere we don’t have any clue about.

  The windows of the Breakfast Club are steamed up. There is a familiar sour smell, like the odour of a windowless pub in Belfast or any of the small, dismal Irish towns Iona’s father used to frequent. Iona feels agitated. Something isn’t right. Something she is barely aware of. What is it? She looks up from her work and watches the world outside the cafe, as if looking for it. She used to think that as long as she could lead a sexually active life, and be able to carry on working, she would be fine. But now she feels depressed, unmoored and even unhinged. She is ashamed to admit it. She feels like a flying figure in a surrealist painting, without ground beneath her feet to steady her. And she seems unable to see the problems in her life, as if everything is hidden behind a heavy leaden curtain too heavy to draw back. Iona sips more coffee, and tries to shake the pressure out of her head. She rubs her eyes, sets her jaw, and pulls her attention back to the sheet before her. Work, I need to work. And then her hand moves across the page, making markings. She opens her laptop and begins to type.

  Something is deeply wrong in our family, the famous Hu family, at least it has been wrong for the last three generations. My father has no memory of his own father. My grandfather, one of the original members of Mao’s Jiangxi Soviet in the early thirties, died when my father was only three months old. According to the party’s record, he was hailed as a war hero and received the Medal of the First of August. He used to train the new soldiers in the three basic infantry skills: shooting, throwing grenades and swimming with weapons. He was a regimental commander and married to one of the female soldiers in the Propaganda Unit in his regiment. A typical “Revolutionary Couple” as they said. But the Revolutionary Couple barely spent any time together and certainly had no spare time to raise children. Is this why my father ended up as such a selfish career-driven dictator? And me an aggressive kid hungry for love? First the war hero died and then his wife followed two months later. So my father was raised by female soldiers in the Welfare Unit. In 1949, after the revolution took the whole of China, the regiment commander’s name was engraved on the People’s Hero Memorial in Tiananmen Square; his photo was placed in the History Museum, and his name was even recorded in our school textbook. No one in my school knew that the cerebrated hero was my grandfather. I have always kept it quiet. Until today. I don’t want to live under anyone’s shadow. I often wondered whether my war-hero grandfather was the only reason my father was promoted so quickly in the party. Yes, my father’s career was everything to him. My mother and I were nothing compared to the party. With Mother dead, our house became an orphanage, children without parents showing them love. The women in our family were sacrificed for these men, like those terracotta warriors buried along with their emperor under the earth: mute, lifeless, and dead forever.

  Who is Jian’s grandfather? Iona types “Medal of the First of August + China’s Long March” into Google. It comes out with a few names: Peng Dehuai—the marshal of the People’s Republic of China, Lieutenant General of the Liberation Army. Then Zhu De comes up—perhaps the most famous professional Chinese soldier, who later achieved the highest rank in the Chinese army. Even Iona has heard of him. Then mention of previous “Paramount Leader” Deng Xiaoping, who once served as the Secretary of Mao’s Jiangxi Soviet in 1931 and also made the epic Long March. Then Liu Shaoqi, who was Mao’s very first supporter as he rose to power, but was purged by Mao later during the Cultural Revolution and tragically died as a “state traitor” in the sixties.

  There are many more names, male Chinese names, populating the Google search results, but none of them seems to have an obvious connection with Kublai Jian. She reads more, and is lost in the vast sea of Chinese civil war records. The untold story that lies behind Jian’s background is a total enigma, cast in a secret stone, lying in a frozen past, and beyond all recovery.

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

  One otherwise ordinary summer morning, Jian is called to the centre’s head office. As he steps through the door there is a ringing cry: “Congratulations, Kublai Jian!” The office erupts with raised voices. Members of staff approach to pat him on the back and hug him. He’s been there so much longer than anyone else—he’s become an institution. Then Mr. Battista, the director of the centre, hands him a stack of documents with official stamps here and there. Jian flips through the papers, sees the red and black marks almost on every single page, like Chinese artists’ signature stamps on ink paintings. His head is whirling.

  Mr. Battista explains, “It says you are granted ‘Leave to Remain’ in Switzerland. And your legal residence period in the country is one year. After one year you must apply for an extension and the Swiss authorities will reassess your case and decide on your new status. But for now, congratulations!”

  He pours Jian a glass of wine and hands him a packet of salted nuts. “Now you are entitled to be a part of our country! But don’t forget you must register your address with the police within eight days.” Mr. Battista wags his finger at Jian, and then adds with his peculiar brand of sincerity: “I wish you all the best in the future and hope you will be able to make a living in Europe.”

  Jian receives five hundred Swiss francs from the organisation, as well as a clean T-shirt as a souvenir, with the asylum centre’s logo on the back. It’s not quite his Never Mind the Bollocks T-shirt, nor his Ming-dynasty black singlet. He won’t wear it if he busks on the street with his guitar.

  Slowly and heavy-headed, Jian walks back towards his room. Between the two buildings there is a basketball court, but today nobody is in the yard. The broken net swings weightlessly in the wind. Standing under the hoop, Jian’s ears echo with sounds from the past. Su
ddenly he remembers his years playing basketball at high school; he was once a very good player, the best “shooting guard” on his team! In the school’s annual basketball championship he would glue the ball to his hands and zigzag his way through the human wall in front of him, and lob the ball in the net! There would be yelling and clapping from the crowd, mingled with the sound of bodies jostling each other. Jian was always the kid who could run faster than the others, until one day he disappeared from the playground—that was the day he discovered music and songwriting. Now Jian stands on a basketball court once more, in this foreign land, looking up into a blue Swiss sky. The white vapour trails of jets transect the blue field. The morning’s crispness is just beginning to slink off and let in the warmer rays of sunshine. He recalls the last game here, a week ago. There were eight people on each team, all from different countries, and four substitutes standing by—including a group of veiled Muslim girls wearing colourful trainers from places in the Middle East. It was like the Eight Nation Alliance, Jian thought, those military forces from eight countries who came to China to beat the Boxer Uprising in 1900. And perhaps I was the rebellious Boxer, he laughed at himself bitterly, eventually beheaded by the Eight Nation forces and the Qing emperor. After that “colourful” match, everyone slapped each other on the back and said that one day they would meet again out in the world and have a big party to celebrate their freedom. A big party, one day! The Freedom Anniversary party! No one has a permanent address. Everyone’s freedom is the freedom of the naked road: none of them has a roof over their head nor belongs to the country. They don’t even have telephone numbers. Only an email address scribbled on a cigarette paper. An email address, that’s where their future will be written. Better than nowhere. Jian readies himself for a new taste. The taste of strange forms of life. The new place always seems arbitrary. Your body cannot fit into it. Then it becomes familiar, as if it had always been there, like the back of your hand.

  4 LONDON, AUGUST 2013

  On a hot summer day, at around teatime, Iona arrives at a cafe near Bloomsbury. As she waits for her professor to turn up, she takes out her notebook and laptop, as well as her dictionary and documents, and continues her translation.

  As she works away, she hears a familiar laughing voice.

  “I can see you’re working on serious stuff! Look at all the paraphernalia you need!” Charles Handfield glances at Iona’s papers, his left eyebrow rising with a familiar nervous spasm.

  After buying himself a cup of tea, Charles sits down, picks up the photocopied page Iona is working from. “What handwriting! It may seem a cliché, but in my experience, it’s the rebellious Chinese who often write with these sort of wild strokes. It tends to be true, you know.” He pours his tea from a small white pot. “So, tell me about him.”

  “Right, so this is Kublai Jian. And what I’m struggling with is his colloquial style. It’s fascinating, and I can manage some of it, but it’s the precision I’m lacking—or maybe it’s the spirit I find hard. At any rate there are a lot of expressions I’m not familiar with. Hopefully you can help.”

  “Ha!” Charles chuckles. “You know what, Iona? There is one thing from all your classes with me that you never wanted to learn: untranslatability.”

  “Untranslatability?”

  “Yes, it’s something I think it’s important to teach students. It always got pushed to the end of the term and I never managed to fit it in alongside the scheduled syllabus.”

  Iona looks bemused.

  “Untranslatability? Surely it’s just to do with facing the lack of one-to-one equivalence between the word or phrase in the source language and in the target language. Nothing very mysterious about that.”

  “Yes, my dear, but what do you do with that problem?” Charles doesn’t look at her, and is instead scanning the menu while gesticulating to a young waiter. As the waiter comes to him, he orders a scone with jam and butter to go with his tea. “Do you want another cup, Iona?”

  “No, I’m fine. Thanks.” Iona continues, undeflected. “I suppose there are the technical devices, the tricks of language—metaphors, paraphrase, adaptation, as you used to demonstrate to us. But I still have a problem.”

  “Yes, like Tintin’s little canine friend ‘Milou’ becomes ‘Snowy’ in English. So now, tell me, what are your Milous, and what are the Snowys you are proposing on this page?”

  Iona is silent as Charles butters his warm scone. He surveys her pale face and heavy brow.

  “I see you don’t want to follow up the matter with Milous and Snowys in your text.”

  “No. Perhaps not.” She seems to confess with a sigh, “I think it’s more to do with making people intelligible. You know, Charles, translations only work because we get inside a person’s inner culture. And how does one do that? How does one get inside someone?”

  Charles has his beaming, kindly eye upon her. “You have to imagine. Allow yourself to be opened up. The great translator, now and then, has to go beyond what they know. You have to go beyond translation and its techniques and tricks, and be absolutely human.”

  But Iona is still not at ease. Maybe it is something about this knowing but kindly man’s gaze, like a better, kinder father looking at her. “Yes. I get all that. But it’s just not working. There’s something I’m completely missing.”

  “So what is it then, Iona? It’s not translation, not intelligibility?”

  “I seem to be failing here. I spend my days grappling with the real people, trying to get them to come out. But I feel like I’m not making contact with them. It’s like, despite all my efforts to make them speak, they remain silent. Or won’t speak to me. What can I do? What am I doing? What’s the point without that connection?”

  Charles draws towards Iona and rests his hand on hers. “I think, my dear, you’re talking about something else here. I don’t think it’s about translation at all. I think it’s more about you.”

  5 ANNECY, FRANCE, JUNE 2012

  “Take me to the French border, please,” Jian tells the taxi driver as he throws his old guitar case onto the back seat. The driver is surprised, turns his head and looks at this strange Chinese man with a large shoulder bag and big round eyes ringed with shadowy circles. The Chinese face does not waver; indeed, it seems to have no expression at all.

  “A French border?” the driver questions doubtfully in English, and then says, “Il n’y a pas de frontière française, monsieur.”

  “Then take me to the nearest French city, I have had enough of Switzerland!”

  After a few seconds of silence, the North African–looking driver doesn’t bother to prevaricate. Maybe he realises that this man is not a tourist, is on no sightseeing trip. A little grumpily, he gets out and picks Jian’s guitar case up off his clean back seat and puts it in the boot—he doesn’t want his leather upholstery scratched. He starts the engine and they move off.

  In no time at all the taxi takes Jian across into French Annecy. To Jian’s surprise, there is no discernible border, no wires, no soldiers, no sign, no announcement, just a motorway connecting the two countries. So this is Europe! I am in Europe! And Europe has no borders.

  The driver halts in Annecy’s city centre, in front of a large Carrefour supermarket, and turns his head to announce: “Voilà, monsieur. Vous êtes en France.”

  France! Getting out of the car, Jian pays the man the meter fee plus another ten euros as thanks. Carrying his shoulder bag and his old guitar, he speaks to himself, as if in a rap: “Now I am a FREE man. No address, no bank account, no money, no family, no friends, no more persecution, no more protection. Absolutely free. Nothing to lose, nothing to gain, as I am a free man!” He laughs out loud.

  For a few days he wanders around Annecy getting his bearings. He takes his guitar and sits in a square off one of the main streets and begins to play. He sings in a low voice, an old song. But soon a gendarme appears and asks him to move on. Jian doesn’t protest. He moves through the cobbled streets. Everywhere feels like a suburb. Everywher
e feels provincial, everywhere feels like hell for a Beijinger who is used to life in a lively city of twenty million. Mont Blanc and the Alps are always in view. It gives his day-to-day life a surreal penumbra, like the city is surrounded by an infinite sea of mountains. Nights pass on a bench in a park; days arrive with new hope. Then he walks into a local restaurant and finds himself a job. Labour should help him, he thinks; help both his wallet and his mind. The Chinese takeaway will be his re-education camp in the West.

  6 ANNECY, FRANCE, JUNE 2012

  In the Blue Lotus, there are two chefs working in the basement kitchen, both from Canton Province. They are long-married, with grownup children. The two girls upstairs serving the customers are of course their daughters or some relative’s daughters. Perhaps, for Chinese people, all social life starts with the kitchen, and everything else takes its course from there. But even so, in Jian’s eyes, they don’t seem to be very good cooks. In fact, the Blue Lotus has a terrible reputation. They use loads of MSG and recycle the oil from old dishes; their bok choi are refrigerated for nearly six months; their instant noodles expired three years before; they’ll use any old rot to cook with as long as it has a bit of grease in it. The first time Jian sits with the other workers and eats a potato dish on the menu, he is shocked. This is a typical yi-ku-si-tian dish——a dish from the famine time, a dish that reminds him of all the miserable days he has had in his life. Not a dish of freedom. He thinks of England and the wretched pie and mash he ate when he first arrived in London, staying in a poky flat near Mile End station, and the tasteless jacket potatoes topped with greasy butter he ate in Lincolnshire. It’s strange that his food fantasies take him in this direction. He can’t help hating these overseas attempts at making Chinese dishes. Obviously, the chefs have had their hearts eaten by money, foreign money.