I Am China

by Xiaolu Guo

  But it’s not the food that makes the customers vomit in Blue Lotus. It’s the stale tinny music that’s played all day long: romantic Hong Kong ballads, second- or even third-hand imitations of Western pop rubbish: huan huan xi xi, huan you xi. And so on and so on. It all curdles in his head as Jian chops dried cabbage and frozen cucumbers mercilessly into pieces, and splits carrots into twos and fours, and strips spring onions of their souls. He casts it all into a never-washed wok or a boiling cauldron, to be melded into shapeless, flavourless oblivion. No wonder business has been so bad, with music like that.

  But despite the irritations of the Blue Lotus, Jian is grateful to be there, and indebted to one of the chefs in particular—Chang Linyuan.

  “I have had enough here, Jian, enough.” Chef Chang opens his bearded oily mouth in his smoke-damaged face and tries to persuade Jian to go back to China. “Zhong Guo—that’s the only place in the world you can live with some dignity and speak like a sensible man.” Jian hasn’t told his new workmates the whole story, Chef Chang doesn’t know Jian can’t just go back.

  He carries on. “Jian, one day you will grow as old as a pickled egg, like me. And let me tell you—Europe is not for old men!” Chang shakes his head in desolation. “There is no more reason for me to stick around here waiting for the Buddha to turn up one day. And my children are all grown up and have their own lives.”

  No wonder, if the chef himself eats so badly every day—there is indeed no reason to stick around in the West waiting for the Buddha to perform some miracle. Jian swears silently with aching teeth and a pained stomach. In the last few days he has eaten nothing but rice with soy sauce.

  There is a TV in the Blue Lotus which receives a Hong Kong news channel. That is the only entertainment the Chang family have for their leisure hours. The Alps stand proudly in the European wind only one and a half miles away, but it seems that the snowy peaks and cosy chalets have nothing to do with these yellow people. Nor have they ever climbed even the most modest foothill, let alone the most famous European mountain. “Not fun there, too lonely.” It’s as simple as Chang says.

  Chang Linyuan has been preparing his return to China for a few months, and he has successfully transferred his savings to a Chinese bank in his province so he can buy a piece of land. One night, after the clients are gone and half a bottle of rice vodka swills in his stomach, Chef Chang starts treating Jian like a younger brother. He opens his wallet and takes out a plastic card with a string of numbers printed on it. He speaks as Confucius might.

  “Young man, I know you don’t have papers. I too had nothing for years, in the beginning. You see this piece of plastic? Keep it! It’s my French health insurance card—it will help you!”

  Jian doesn’t say a word; he brings the plastic card up to his face and looks closely at the letters written on it.

  “A leaf is bound to return to its roots; a man is bound to his homeland! When I return to China I’ll buy a little house in Guangzhou and I will brew my tea and feed the sparrows in my garden, go fishing, play chess and grow my own vegetables.” The chef speaks drunkenly, in a snaking Cantonese accent, appealing to Jian with his muddy little eyes.

  Jian nods his head to show his respect for the old man, still studying the name printed on the card:

  From that night on, Jian carries Mr. Chang’s health insurance card with him wherever he goes—he has even made two photocopies. Surely this is going to be useful, he thinks. He recites his new name like he’s accepting his personal karma—Chang Linyuan, aka William Chang. Numéro de carte d’assurance maladie: FR688003301.

  William Chang is going to make a living in Paris, that’s it. Like Picasso used to do, like Van Gogh, like Jim Morrison. Paris, that’s where Kublai Jian, aka William Chang, is headed.

  7 PARIS, JUNE 2012

  Number 141 rue Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, a windowless basement room under the Hotel Esmeralda. It’s not really part of the hotel, it’s where they store the extra bedding, toilet products and all kinds of cleaning equipment. The corners are piled with old curtains, old mattresses and old carpets. The air is stagnant, and a strong smell of ammonia lurks everywhere. Remembering something he learned in a high-school science lesson, Jian fetches a basin of water, and puts it right in the middle of the room, to test the alkaline reaction. But there are barely more than four or five bubbles as the pH dissolves. Probably this type of gas prefers to stay in Jian’s head rather than enter the water.

  A fly has been stuck in my room for more than a week now. There are no windows in my basement, just a dark narrow staircase leading up to the ground floor and entrance.

  Rain is pouring down outside. Water is dripping everywhere, from the Parisian roofs to the sewage flowing in pipes under my floorboards. But how did this little fly manage to live here for weeks without seeing any light at all? Perhaps it was born from the sewage under my feet. She’s large, with a dark, heavy head between two transparent wings, and is always making this buzzing noise. Twenty-four hours a day. I think of that William Blake poem I read once at college:

  Little Fly,

  Thy summer’s play

  My thoughtless hand

  Has brushed away

  Am not I

  A fly like thee?

  Or art not thou

  A man like me?”

  Later that night … I looked for the fly. I’ve decided that I’ll either kill her or let her out through the doorway. But she is nowhere to be found and I realise I miss her low hum.

  This morning when I woke up, the first thing I did was to look out for her, my large-headed one. There is absolutely no trace of her. Not in the toilet, not buzzing around the kitchen sink, not on the ceiling, not on the floor. Where did she go? Did she starve to death? Was she exhausted from being imprisoned here? She must be dead. I walk around the room, open the garbage bag, bring out a rotten banana. I expose the drooping banana on the floor. A fly would understand this, old bastard sky.

  Are you a fly, or a butterfly? A fly likes rotten substances, but a butterfly prefers flowers. You say politics are rotten; you say art lives outside the rotten political sphere. Your antenna is drawn to something beyond the stench of politics. Maybe you are right in your own way. You’ll have to convince me.

  Iona finishes translating the diary entry and finds herself searching for insects on her geranium plants by the kitchen window. There is neither fly nor butterfly on her small red flowers. Instead, a sharp ringing pierces her ears. She feels a slight cramp in her head. The sounds from the street below, the all-day buzz of Chapel Market, are echoing in the chill gloom of a wet London evening.

  What a peculiar thing to translate, she murmurs to herself. What’s the meaning of these strange diary fragments? Are those lonely words supposed to be Jian’s expressions of love to Mu? Or is it just me over-interpreting? Would they still think of themselves as lovers? Where are they now? Do they still deny their love? Or have they become the tragic spirit of the Butterfly Lovers of the ancient Chinese legend? Jian and Mu have now transformed into Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai, the two star-crossed lovers of the 2,000-year-old myth.

  Then Iona remembers her time in Beijing, and the Chinese boy she met in the foreign students’ club, who had desired her and sent her a poorly written English love letter, quoting lengthy lines from traditional Beijing operas, lines like “you are the falling blossoms obscuring the moon.” To a Western woman, his passion appeared naive. But at the same time he was so constrained and shy in the daylight, like a bat shrinking from the light. A young man totally of the head, not of the body. A young man very different from the Western ones she had met before. When she left China and returned to college in London, she still didn’t understand that Chinese boy’s protestations of love and, not knowing quite how to respond, she never replied to the letter.

  But Jian isn’t like that, in Iona’s head at least. Or wasn’t like that. But maybe that’s because she has been allowed inside, into this private place, his journal. Jian is an angry monk. A hungry begga
r with a knife, maybe holding it to his own chest. Ready to strike, with a single cut, and split everything in two. Maybe that’s how he played the guitar, or gave out one of these cries—a bit theatrical, but haunted at the same time.

  The street lamp gleams in her room. Iona sees herself drawn to the light like a moth. Like she is drawn to those men-boys that she has known, picked up in pubs or on the Internet, and then used. What would she have done with Jian, if she were Mu? She writes his name with a ballpoint pen: .

  Under the acid-green light, the characters seem to shimmer and move. They are etched and yet alive-seeming. Maybe it’s just her stiff, unpractised Chinese writing. She tries to imitate his writing style. His hand, there, on top of her paper. Her mind mingles with his image and seems to touch him, maybe, with these signs, half-pictures, half-words. Did he carry this image inside his head while he lived outside of China, like an inner stamp?

  And now she writes Mu’s name: .

  It looks more stable to her. The strokes are like arms reaching down, wanting to embrace someone.

  It’s all too much, Iona thinks. Her own life has been totally consumed. Still, there is something ungraspable about her anti-heroes, especially Jian, that inspires in her such a rampant curiosity and longing to know more. Iona almost feels that she needs to find Jian, to talk to him. She needs her Jian. She needs to think of his skin, his habits, his way of walking, his way of talking, laughing, singing and sleeping.

  8 PARIS, JUNE 2012

  Standing in front of a Turkish grocery. Suddenly lost the sense of where I was. I felt like I was Comrade Krymov in Life and Fate being put in a solitary cell and losing all sense of my humanity. He was no longer Krymov and his soul was no longer corresponding with his body. “I need a piss, open the door!” I heard myself shouting, “Open the door! And I will remain pure to my belief!” Then the door opened, I ran out, and some rude impatient shoulders pushed and cursed me in French, and suddenly I realised I was in a queue in front of the grocery. Everyone stared at me in disgust. In embarrassment I bought two apples. Two polished waxy shiny green globes: immaculate as plastic. “One-fifty, please.” The shopkeeper flapped his eyes up like a dead fish. One euro and fifty cents for two plastic apples I didn’t even want to buy. . I bit into one of the vitamin bundles anyway, right through the plastic leather jacket. Fuck me. It was absolutely tasteless. Eating a lump of cardboard.

  Rue Saint-Denis. Jian has wasted hours on the pavement, up and down, absent-mindedly looking at the glitzy shops, the beautifully lit cafes and occasional prostitutes standing about in their fur coats. He catches sight of a Chinese woman. She is probably forty-something, not young for someone who does this kind of job. Her red cheek suggests that she might have left her field just a few months ago, taken an illegal boat, a train, a coach and got herself here. Despite her fishnet tights and her fake leather coat, she reminds Jian of his mother. His mother, with her dark brown eyes, her lips full of unspoken words. He was four when his mother died. And her image remains forever young in his blurred memory.

  As Jian zooms up and down rue Saint-Denis, he decides to go into a record shop to find out what the CD covers of Erik Satie recordings are like in this country. In fact, he’s after a cover of the recording his mother had. Satie was the composer who indirectly killed her. He walks straight to the classical piano section and in no time finds a Satie CD. The cover design is not fashionable; he recognises the same smiley photo of the bearded man wearing the same suit he knows from a Chinese cassette, an image he remembers from his childhood.

  It looks neither provocative nor decadent—how could anyone imagine that in a faraway country a mother would be classified as an enemy of the state for listening to this?

  In the midst of loud pop music blaring across the shop floor, he slots the CD into a test-listening machine. Instantly a flow of melancholy piano notes seep into his ears. It’s his mother’s favourite, Gnossienne No. 4. So familiar, and deeply sad. Now Jian’s stomach begins to ache. His guts knot together each time his mind fills with heavy thoughts.

  He hangs up the headphones. With the pain still in his stomach, he takes the CD to the counter.

  “Do you like Satie?” the cashier asks.

  “Yes,” Jian answers and pays. “But actually it’s for my mother.”

  “That’s nice. Hope she enjoys it.”

  A kind man, a regular nice guy, just like those innocent people who never stop to imagine that shit can fall from the sky in an instant, as they walk down the street. Jian murmurs to himself, and puts Satie in his green army bag.

  9 PARIS, JUNE 2012

  Marie, an old French prostitute, looks about fifty, or perhaps fifty-eight or sixty-two. She refuses to say. Whatever her age, she looks worn and drawn. One can’t help but stare at her thickly powdered face, and the eyes, like those of a silent-movie actor, heavily outlined and glimmering up from a soup of dusty make-up. What a mouth! A labouring mouth. A hard-working mouth. How many men has that mouth taken? It must have been young once, a flower, an animated jewel. Marie! As her image starts to blur in Jian’s head, he enters a Wenzhou restaurant in rue de Belleville. He is hungry, despite being unable to remove the image of that twilight creature from his mind. As he eats his pork dumpling soup, his stomach feels less miserable and those images return: Marie’s leopard-skin skirt, the intricate lace around her neck, her breasts like semi-sunken ships but surprisingly white and soft beneath her black nylon dress. This is the first European woman he has slept with. It felt more like sleeping with a mother than a girlfriend.

  People come into Jian’s life the way maple leaves blow down the streets of Paris. It seems so random and futureless. He met Marie about two weeks ago, in the street where she works. The negotiation was fast. She asked for three hundred euros; he shook his head and said he couldn’t afford even half of that. They settled on eighty. They went to a nearby hotel room. The room was so small that it could only fit the single bed. When they were inside, she stripped off her clothes right away. Jian felt awkward. She wore a bodysuit, a sort of body-shaping corset with wires to lift her breasts. Jian still remembers the red mark the wire made under her chest. He didn’t ask how painful or constrained it felt in that costume. When she removed it and emerged from her cage, her sunken bottom looked like a large deformed pear. She told Jian she had been working the area for the last two decades. And before that she was in Marseilles—she used to hang out with the sailors. She said she would carry on working until the day she couldn’t get up or didn’t have the strength to open her legs any more. “C’est vrai, Jian, sometimes my legs are too sore to open,” she said. “And my muscles around my crotch are aching. I need to take a hot bath three times a day!” She then laughed loudly; exactly like the big woman in that Italian film, Mama Roma, which Jian had watched in college. Laughing so that every part of her body shook, even her red curly hair, shaking as if electrocuted. Her laugh was coarse and threatening. It made Jian lose confidence. But he didn’t dislike her. An old female lion, he thought to himself. But after that afternoon, strangely, each time Jian walked up and down the street where he had met her, she wasn’t to be found.

  Today, once again, Jian cruises along the street that is supposed to be Marie’s haunt. Perhaps she is lying on a bed somewhere, with a client on top of her. Perhaps she is taking a hot bath after sex in a hotel room. Or perhaps she is taking a holiday. Do old French prostitutes take holidays? Jian wonders with disquiet. Or perhaps she is sick from some venereal infection and her lower body is right now overflowing with yeast. As the evening lamps illuminate rue Saint-Denis, Jian loses himself in the crowds. Those enchanting smiles under the lights, those elegant gestures and pleasant rendezvous in bars and restaurants. They remain intangible to him. His arms stretching out for attention and warmth reach nowhere to nobody.

  10 PARIS, JULY 2012

  Old bastard sky. I stared at the afternoon street, this street without Marie. I wanted to buy her a gift, for some reason, before seeing her again. And I walked up and
down rue Saint-Denis, going in and out of one clothes shop after another. I felt foolish. A pathetic act. Nobody gives a damn about what I am doing anyway.

  Hours passed. I hung around. Couldn’t find anything useful to do. I ate the second apple as it was a leaden weight in my pocket. I had to tear through the tough skin with my teeth. I thought of that knife. The knife my mother used to cut herself. A long, slim knife that we used to peel the skin off sugar cane. It wasn’t sharp. She didn’t succeed at first. There were jagged scars around her wrists. She must have tried many times. My grandmother picked up the knife from the floor. The first thing she did was to wash the blood off. Then she hid it in our rice jar, as if the knife might fly around by itself and cut open everyone’s heads. We never used that knife again. It sat in the kitchen and became very rusty. Layers of brown rust covered the whole blade. From then on we used our teeth to peel the sugar cane. I don’t remember my grandmother eating sugar cane ever again.

  The sun is at its zenith. Brasserie Le Clauzier. Mainly old men spend their afternoons here. Two bald men each occupy a table in the corner, reading papers and drinking wine. Then there is Jian, scribbling words in his diary and occasionally looking up at the old men to reflect on things. One of them is about eighty. Skinny and decayed, he looks like a handful of dried roots. Slowly, he sips his rosé and eats his beef bourguignon. The old man chews extremely slowly, his sunken mouth probably toothless. He seems to live in his old age with great patience. Jian imagines his own teeth falling out, his hair reduced to a few wisps: a dried-up skeleton like the one propped on this chair, wearing an old watch to witness each passing hour before death arrives.