I Am China

by Xiaolu Guo

  The tunnel wind in the Métro at Belleville is very warm. The heat must be generated by the friction or pressure between the trains. Jian sits on the platform, upturns the straw hat he found the other day in the street, and opens his guitar case. His fingers are stiff. The guitar is out of tune. He tries to tune the cold strings. He tries to sing, not one of his own songs, but a song from a 1937 Chinese film, Street Angel, one of his favourite films. It is about a Shanghai street musician’s encounter with two sisters. The sisters have been forced into prostitution and the street musician helps them and before long falls in love with one of the sisters. A few years ago, in a cinema in Beijing’s Xiao Xitian area, Jian watched the film for at least the fifth or sixth time with Mu—holding hands together in the dark. They both remembered so well the songs from the film, and Jian even learned to play the main theme, “Song Girl at the Edge of the World”:

  To the ends of the earth

  To the edge of the sea

  I seek, oh, seek the soulmate who understands my song

  This little sister sings, and her man plays along

  You and I are of the same heart

  Aiya you and I are of one heart

  Towards the mountains of home, oh, I gaze to the north

  Tears, oh, tears wet my robe

  I long for my lover man even now.

  Jian feels a sympathy for the character: a street musician in “love” with a prostitute. But his heroine is his mother’s age, and she’s nowhere to be found.

  The next day he sets himself up outside Pigalle Métro. A wild-haired African drummer occupies the platform; he doesn’t sing, just madly hits his many drums, like he is caught in a powerful electrical current. As he seems to attract the crowds, Jian puts himself reasonably close to him.

  Almost all street musicians like Pigalle—it’s where tourists get off to visit Montmartre. Many are middle-aged American women and their families, and, with universal compassion for the artist, they generously throw a few euros into Jian’s hat. As thanks, Jian sings Mongolian folk songs of the grasslands and horses, the bowmen and the yurts, although he can’t hold a note for as long as those folk songs require. Most Westerners like the Mongolian style—the native tribal style somehow works better than rock ’n’ roll down in a Métro station.

  Over the next few days, Jian arrives at Pigalle station at ten in the morning every day and takes a lunch break to eat a half-chicken (which costs only two euros from Monoprix). Then he comes back to the Métro for two more hours’ playing. But the afternoons feel lousy and long. Sleepy and weary, cradling his old guitar, he sees himself as a dirty street bum, a thief, a superfluous being, a nameless beggar at any Métro entrance. He feels he has no dignity left in him. So on the day the police arrive to check his street-performance certificate, Jian feels ready to leave, to move on, to move anywhere.

  Rue Victor Masse, 27 July 2012

  Au Jardin du Bonheur. The crippled madam gave me a big bowl of dumpling soup, pork and chive filling. Madame Wu of Au Jardin du Bonheur is about sixty-five; she cooks most of the food for her clients by herself, in her tiny but homely restaurant. She said I reminded her of her son (similar age and temperament, doesn’t like to talk), who married a French girl and barely ever visited her again. I think she must be a bit discontented as a mother. She seems to be a very educated Beijingese with a Buddha-like face (even received a college degree in agricultural science!—if she had remained in China she would probably be high up in the State Agriculture Department). But she is a woman, and a woman follows her man: she came to Europe with her husband and the dreams of a new life ended up in the same space—a kitchen. My mother didn’t want her life to end up in a kitchen; instead she wanted culture; but what difference would it have made? Erik Satie didn’t save her, nor did the Communists.

  Try to live usefully … I sing outside Au Jardin du Bonheur to help Madame Wu attract customers. I sing slow songs. “What a Beautiful Jasmine Flower,” she likes to hear that. Do jasmine flowers reflect a political issue or not? In China I would ask this question and somebody would argue with me. But here, how stupid the question is! And even if it were a valid question, who gives a damn whether the jasmine flower reflects a political issue or not? Pay us first and I will tell you whatever you want.

  At night, as I lie with Chang Linyuan’s health-insurance card under my pillow, I ask myself: is this going to be my life in the West? Old bastard sky! I’m becoming Frankenstein, or Frankenstein’s monster. A large, stiff body, huge eyes staring into the world but seeing nothing, heavy legs moving without knowing their direction or purpose—a body without mind. A life without living. Fucking hell.

  —Cao ta da ye de.

  11 PARIS, JULY 2012

  These girls, Jian thinks, are not girls. They are whales, or some other large beast. There are six of them, professional cabaret performers. The biggest woman is Madeleine, with huge breasts pendulously undulating inside her shirt. She is from San Francisco but has lived in Paris for many years. “I’m a lesbian,” she tells Jian right away, and the conversation seems to end right there. The smallest of them is Anna, a French girl with a beautiful smile from the north, a town called Lille.

  “You know, Jian, we’re like porn artists. You understand what I mean by porn artists, right?” Madeleine tries to educate the naive Chinese man.

  “You know, Jian, once you understand our style, you can make music for us, even improvise as we perform,” Anna adds.

  Jian gives them a quick rendition of one of his own songs, not “Long March into the Night” but another piece, one about Mongolia, mountains, yaks, wrestling and getting drunk on fermented roots. The girls laugh and clap their hands; they seem to like how he plays.

  “What about French songs?” Anna asks.

  He did learn a bit of Jacques Brel’s famous “Amsterdam” when he was in the Lausanne refugee centre—“Dans le port d’Amsterdam, / Y a des marins qui chantent”—and he can even switch into English—“They sing of the dreams that they bring from the wide open sea, / In the port of Amsterdam …”—but only these four lines. Otherwise he plays “La Marseillaise” which he learned at school when he was a Young Pioneer, but this time he gives it a punk edge and adds some Chinese lyrics on top, so that it sounds half-parody, half-homage, electrified by twelve-bar blues-rock.

  The girls laugh with appreciation. They like this Chinese man with his roaring-hoarse voice, an easy companion and a total mystery.

  For his new job, the girls give him extra instruments to play with: two drums and an old violin. They say, “Practise!” Then they tell him to watch their live sex show that night to get ideas, and to think about how to play his music to fit in with their performance. Jian sits on a rickety cafe chair at the back of the room and watches. In the beginning, the girls wear a layer of leather, high-heeled boots, chains and belts. As the farce develops, their clothes are taken off by a male actor who plays a doctor professor-type character. Eventually the girls are naked, except for two shiny stars stuck on their nipples and a tiny G-string barely covering their crotch. In the final act the doctor asks one of the girls to lie on a table on which he lays out all sorts of medical instruments. Madeleine or Anna—it’s usually one of them—then says, “Doctor, I believe there is a mouse in my pussy. You must get him out!” Then the girl on the table opens her legs wide towards the audience. Her vagina, shaved hair and pink lips, is exposed for everyone to view. The doctor now elegantly slips on his white gloves and enters his fingers into the girl’s vagina to look for the hiding rodent. And finally a slightly moist cotton mouse is extracted from the reclining girl’s lower body, and the German tourists crowd round the stage to look at the mouse, burst out laughing and applaud loudly. Jian laughs too, but stops when a line from Aldous Huxley pops into his head: “An intellectual is a person who’s found one thing that’s more interesting than sex.” He ponders for a few seconds, and wonders if he is still an intellectual.

  In the dressing room after the show, Jian assures the girls that h
e can work with the performance. “No problem,” he says, “I can either use a violin or a guitar, or a guitar with a drum, whatever you think will work.”

  “You sound very positive,” Madeleine says, her left eyebrow raised quizzically, “like a real professional.”

  “I don’t think I am a professional. But this job is similar to what I used to do in China, although I have never worked with women before,” explains Jian, with a defensive sincerity.

  “You never worked with women before? How come? I thought China had a bloody revolution only sixty years ago!” Madeleine laughs. “Listen, Jian. Just so you don’t get the wrong idea, let me be straight with you: we are lesbians. We don’t go with men, you understand?”

  She points her long, plump finger, like a piece of marzipan, at Jian’s nose. “We prefer women, and these sex shows are an artistic expression for us. We are not here to serve the male order. Do you understand, Jian?”

  The Chinese man nods his head, narrowing his eyes, and silently slurps his bowl of beef noodle soup.

  As Madeleine’s words are popping in Jian’s ears, his eyes cannot help but linger on Anna’s scarlet lips and her wavy chestnut hair. She has such a petite body—the kind of figure, Jian admits to himself, that draws him. Normally Anna plays the nurse or an innocent schoolgirl, her short uniform tight around her compact bottom. Jian tries not to think about that right now. Although she has a soft, feminine face and a welcoming, kind expression, her eyes are sharp as knife blades. When she speaks to him she arches back her head, viewing him from above with hooded eyes to repeat in mellower tones what the more turbulent Madeleine has already impressed upon him. For a moment he feels he is in some kind of re-education camp.

  “We are not prostitutes, Jian. We are performance artists, you get it, mon ami?”

  Anna probably thinks he is nice but a bit limited, a country bumpkin lost in the big city, like she was ten years ago.

  “We are artists. And we’re serious about our careers. Madeleine is a well-known porn-film maker and acts in most of her films.”

  Then she hands him a glossy DVD. Jian takes one look at the cover and feels himself squirm: it is the face of Madeleine, her mouth dripping with thick, pearl-coloured liquid, against what can only be described as an erect male organ. The man above her is blindfolded and handcuffed. Male Submission is the title of the film. “Acted, directed and produced by Madeleine Magdalene,” according to the credits.

  “It’s not designed for men, Jian. It’s women taking control—women producing erotica for women. Men are just the props. Sorry.”

  Jian immediately sees himself blindfolded and tied to a chair, with Madeleine about to pounce on his manhood. It’s the first sexual image that has entered his mind for quite a while.

  Beyond anatomy, what is the difference between men and women? I watch Anna and Madeleine in their show, and all I can think of is Mu. Her girlish flat-chested body in a loose man’s shirt. She uses her words and her voice to live. By Chinese standards, she is modern. But nothing like these white women with their heavy bodies. No comparison. Mu hasn’t given up men, but these girls have. Is that the future of women? Maybe they are better off without men. My mother and her secret lipstick and her Erik Satie—men wouldn’t let her be the woman she was. Yes, without men, the world might be a more peaceful place. Mao said a woman holds up half the sky. But I think it is more than half. The women of China took over the work of men, wore the same blue shirts, and worked in heavy industry. The gender revolution in China was not a sexual revolution. But for these white women of Pigalle, it’s sexual through and through.

  I’ve stopped masturbating. I can’t do it any more. I am useless. Even my penis is useless. The only drop of sperm that ever worked is dead and buried. It’s like my balls are in cold storage.

  12 LONDON, AUGUST 2013

  “It’s like my balls are in cold storage.” This is getting wild, Iona mumbles as she makes her way through Jian’s diary. What’s really going on between Jian and Mu? Their lives have taken completely different paths. It seems that before, their love was like an overgrown garden, full of weeds and thorns. And now their love is only a wasted land, a barren space; they no longer even mention each other’s name, let alone speak of their love—it’s lost in these endless, hardly meaningful human encounters. And it has lost its innocence. Iona still clearly remembers the first time she read about Mu in Jian’s diary:

  … I looked down and she was looking up at me with her big black button eyes. Her eyes were the brightest eyes in that field of eyes before me. I thought I could see them glistening in the centre of the smoky haze …

  It was an electric scene. It propelled her into the story. But now Iona feels let down, deeply disappointed even. She can’t locate the source of the disappointment: whether it’s about them or about her own inertia. Suddenly her own relationships with the men she randomly encounters seem hopeless; her love life is a cold, plastic pantomime of raw entanglements in the dark. The love between Mu and Jian seems almost non-physical, she thinks. It is an abstract love, young and innocent. She tries to imagine the way they would make love: childlike, sweet, dreaming, perhaps even laughing sometimes. And now what? Life has betrayed their love. Politics has sold their love to the devil.

  Disheartened, Iona puts away the stack of photocopies of Jian’s diary pages. She opens the original package, flipping through some other material and searching for something different. Then she finds a clean and elegant page of handwriting—Mu’s diary. It doesn’t have a date, but judging from the content it might be written not long ago, just before Jian left China in the winter of 2011, perhaps.

  How can I ever persuade him to stop living like this? Doesn’t he realise he is risking our lives with this manifesto? His grand idea is to hand out the manifesto at the concert next month in the Olympics Stadium. This will be his biggest concert. He and his band have been preparing for it for so long. He’s in total denial: doesn’t give a damn about the great danger he might face. The concert could be cancelled by the authorities just like that, and everyone will hate Jian, from his fans to his manager. Let alone his band members. But Jian seems to be oblivious of my worries. He is determined to distribute the manifesto at the concert. He says: “I have to do it, Mu!” I am at a loss for words. We have been back together for nearly a year, but some things never change. Does his obstinacy mean I should shut up and just give in to him? Should I just accept who he is and how he does things, and try to live with it? I feel I can no longer follow him, follow his way of thinking. Perhaps I have grown old and tired of his ways.

  What a situation! Iona exclaims to herself. But then what a classic case. Jian is not Che Guevara, or Castro, or some other revolutionary hero, but he has all the characteristics of one when it comes to women. Revolutionaries are not good for wives or lovers, even if they have their special magnetism. The wives and lovers always end up sacrificing their lives for their men, for some big idea beyond reality and practicality. That’s the fatal attraction. Maybe it’s a kind of masochism. Or is it just love? The last idea runs like a stream through Iona’s body. Entangled by these feelings, she gets up, and decides to take a walk.

  13 PARIS, JULY 2012

  After two weeks of working at the club, Jian moves in with the girls. He sleeps in a small box room in which the girls have placed a single mattress for a bed. Although his quarters are cramped and a little dark, everything else is more or less all right. Apart from one thing. The girls have the disturbing habit of walking around engaging in their daily tasks without a stitch of clothing on. Even during the day they are unclad. It’s not that Jian has never seen a naked woman before. It’s rather that, despite being a punk, an underground anarchist artist—or at least that’s how he once thought of himself—he finds that some conservative idea of appropriate behaviour, a sense of natural modesty or some Confucian prudishness, is still there in his personality, and that leads to embarrassment. When he emerges from his dark bedroom and finds a full-frontal display of naked f
emininity before him, he has absolutely no idea where he is meant to put his eyes. The presence of sculptured flesh has a kind of gravitational pull on him—it’s as if his eyes have a life of their own. They suddenly dart in the direction of a nipple, like fish darting towards a prawn in a pond. His brain—and his body—get completely hijacked.

  Although Jian has been naked with Chinese girls and knows their bodies well, Western girls are another matter. Jian suspects that he doesn’t feel comfortable under the naked gaze of Western girls. They have a physical power, whose source is some kind of aura. Their physicality is much more “physical” than the physicality of Chinese girls. Is it a matter of dimensions? Their breasts, for example, are larger, more developed, like globes of fruit, and they kind of demand attention. And the hourglass curve of the Western girl’s body, the breast-waist-hip undulation, is more pronounced, whereas the body of a Chinese girl is more like that of a boy, more subtle, or even asexual, less of a statement. So is it just physical intimidation that leads him to feel embarrassed? It’s more than that, of course. It’s as if their bodies demand an answer from his body, a kind of hyper-masculine display, as if he must revert to some kind of alpha-male form, like Arnold Schwarzenegger, with rippling muscles and a large member between his legs.

  And there is more. Jian thinks that maybe he also feels agitated, even defeated, because they are Westerners. The Westerner, the white Caucasian of Europe, is superior, and the Western woman is the untouchable one—she is the top prize in the world of sexual conquest. He is horrified by the thought, really disturbed that such a regressive idea is there in his mind, but he feels undone by this situation: these untouchable women’s bodies emasculate him. Like out of some Fellini film—the giant woman crushes him between her breasts and draws him down between her legs to her sex, a sex he cannot possibly have the capacity to fill or satisfy; all he can do is be swallowed and lost, and then be eaten alive.