by Xiaolu Guo
Dreamed of my father again. The same dream. The memory of him telling me the same old story, about my grandfather who died during the Long March. “Your grandfather had been eating grass and roots and cooking leather-belt soup for protein while he suffered from gunshot wounds. Starvation and war! So you better behave, you little piece of shit! Your life is built on top of millions of corpses! You understand? You little shit!” His voice in my dream was as coarse as if he were speaking from the grave.
On the next page Iona just finds a few cryptic lines.
Woman, the flower that traps too.
Her world is no longer my world.
Soon she will find another love.
She is a woman, after all.
Woman lives.
How much liberty does a translator have? The question has been playing on Iona’s mind. One has to build or subtract to make a text less obscure. That’s obvious. But Iona feels something else is going on. Like she herself owns these diaries. Or she now has a right to reshape them, or even a duty to do so. Or is it that the words have lodged in her mind and they are now reproducing themselves in a different way, like viruses in a new host, shaping their own structure? “She is a woman, after all. Woman lives.” Did Jian mean women survive better than men because women live beyond the mere political animal? And did he change his mind about politics from reading Grossman’s book? How much despair was he in to write “Bullets speak the truth, not maths”?
Iona thinks of a little Zen story her mother used to read to her when she was a child: two young fish are swimming along in the water and they meet an older fish swimming the other way who nods to them and says: “Morning, how’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and wonder: “What the hell is water?” Iona had always liked the story. Often she feels she can’t see clearly what sort of world she is in, even though she has been witnessing it and feeling it vividly.
18 LONDON, SEPTEMBER 2013
These are perhaps the most important diary pages I have ever read from Jian, Iona thinks to herself. Away from her nightlife of pub visits and casual acquaintances, away from her nameless lovers, Iona has spent two sleepless nights trying to digest the contents, and to tidy up her translation.
15 November 2011. Beijing Olympics Stadium. 30,000 young people! Students from Qing Hua University, from People’s University, from Beijing Foreign Language University, from Beijing Technological University … There were schoolteachers, young poets, young musicians, actors, workers, professors, magazine editors and newspaper journalists, even the secretaries and staff members of government bureaus … they all came to the stadium to listen to Yuan vs. Dollars. Everyone, except my family. So no one witnessed that scene and that moment, the moment where I became the Number One Beijing punk star. But what do I care? My family is dead to me. Especially my father. He is doubly, triply dead. So he missed out on seeing his only son becoming someone significant, someone undeniable, a phenomenon. Well, they left me alone—I had no choice but to become a self-made force. When the lights came on in that massive place, all the eager and youthful eyes were shining and electrified, and then I saw the eyes of Mu. It was like the first time she came to one of my concerts—nearly two decades ago in fact! I remember that first concert, when someone cut off the power and the lights died and she jumped up onto the stage. And now tonight she was in the front row again, those eyes on me, reaching out to me, moist with tears, only more intimate and more intense than in the past.
Then everyone was singing the song “Orphans of the Revolutionaries.” The guys in the band were singing. But I could see, and hear, that the whole stadium, 30,000 young Beijingers, were singing too, beaming back my words, like a giant mirroring echo, a sound that lifted me up beyond the roof, and then seemed to reverberate out of my own mouth:
Orphans of orphans
of revolution past,
The fathers’ dreams are buried
The children are playing in the Orphans’ House.
And then in the midst of smoke and neon lights we began our usual closing song—“Long March into the Night.” As the band played the final chords of the song I stepped to the front of the stage and hurled copies of the manifesto into the crowd. Hands reached out, grabbing at the pages, some people even started to read out loud the first lines. I threw the last bundle of manifestos at the audience and watched the white paper fly through the air like falling snow. Suddenly a swarm of police charged into the stadium. And from that point everything seemed to blur and become unreal: police snatched my manifesto out of the hands of the audience, they jumped onstage and I saw my bassist hit by an electric baton and drop, like a limp puppet, a sprawling body on the floor. The screams of the crowd gave me a chilled, sick feeling in my stomach. A dull thud shook me from the top of my head down through my spine, and a burning, sparking pain unleashed itself. My limbs exploded, and my face hit the ground. I found myself sucking on dust, and then blank darkness swallowed everything.
Iona is transfixed. Her insides twist and churn. Only a few months ago she was translating that other concert—that exciting concert when Jian was still only twenty—and now this one: how familiar and yet how very different.
A few hours later, past midnight, we found ourselves in a police station, bruised and aching. It was the Haidian District Branch, not far from our flat, a dirty place, with shabby yellow-green walls and windy corridors. We said nothing. The cops divided us up, taking us into separate rooms for interrogation, one by one. First, they took bassist Raohao, then guitarist Yanwu and then drummer Sunxin. I was the last to be interrogated. I was waiting, my hands in cuffs, with a dog-faced officer of the People’s Police who was eating a pork bun, and staring at me, like I was a curious insect, or a carp fish dragged out of the river. Simply waiting. Then they came for me. All they did was put me in a room and take my ID card away. I was sure everyone else was being questioned or slapped about. I was secured to a shelf along the wall made of indestructible iron with a pair of handcuffs and just left there. My head was throbbing.
At dawn, they brought us into a larger main interrogation room. We were held apart and were not allowed to speak to each other. Then relatives of my band members came to visit. I recognised Yanwu’s uncle, who used to come to all our concerts. Bail was put up; low chatter rumbled on; there were furtive looks, pointing, frowns. Policemen busied themselves with paperwork, and cigarette smoke from Red Tower filters filled the air. By noon, my three buddies were let out of the police station on bail. Then there was me, only me, always watched and always in handcuffs. Yet there still had been no interrogation. Then a policeman came with a food box and a bottle of water for me and unlocked my handcuffs. Inside the box there were three cold buns.
At some point in the afternoon, I heard Mu come to visit me. (I heard the special ringtone of her mobile echoing down the corridor—the ringtone was one of my songs—and her voice, angry and nearly crying, begging the police to let her in.) But they were refusing to let her visit me. I thought I heard a man’s emotionless voice: “We can’t let you see him, only family members are allowed.” Then silence. Sometime later two police officers came to take me out, and shoved me into the back of an old army jeep with steel mesh on the windows. I was driven somewhere—here, wherever this is. I can only imagine that this is a political prison, perhaps I’m somewhere in the eastern sector of He Bei Province, under the Shanhai Pass of the Great Wall. But I can’t be sure. I saw nothing. The shutters were pulled down in the little box I was in at the back of the jeep. I could only catch brief glimpses. After hours on the road we stopped and they got me out of the jeep, roughly pulling my legs and tugging at my arms, and now finally I could see where we were. It looked like a hardcore, high-security operation. I know now this is the Shanhai Pass Confinement Camp. I’ve been thinking a lot about the famous Misty Poet, Hai Zi. I must have passed the railway track where he lay down to be cut open by that great locomotive, that railway track Mu and I once visited when we were students. He was Mu’s favourite poet. I remember Mu lay d
own on the steel tracks and imagined the infinite nothingness of poetic death. I feared, as the jeep finally stopped, that no one would ever know where I was. All communications would be banned. All exits closed …
For Iona, it feels like the ruler raised in the air once again. The father’s hand never landed on his son’s head. It happened thirty years later. Then it hit the son with full force, delivered by the hands of a state police gang.
19 QING HUANG DAO 780 POLITICAL PRISON, CHINA, DECEMBER 2011
Kublai Jian was in Qing Huang Dao 780 Political Prison, the former Shanhaiguan Pass Confinement Camp. And indeed, he had passed over the railway track on the journey, the track on which, years before, Hai Zi had laid down his body and allowed himself to be decapitated.
Over the course of two weeks the guards left Jian in a cell and watched him, as he waited for his “trial.” He wasn’t handcuffed or beaten and he was isolated from other prisoners. They treated him in a controlled manner, cold, even slightly polite sometimes. Guards like automatons. Unlike the Beijing Haidian Police Station where he had been arrested, this place was very clean, scrubbed, as if even the sight of dirt, like freedom, was also withheld from the prisoners, so as to cut them off from all life. He was charged with engaging in “subversive anti-state activities.” He was not surprised by this. Everyone got charged with some crime in the end. The reality of the arrest was harder than he expected, but then it flowed over him, since he felt all sense of control had left long ago. Perhaps his drive to perform and campaign had all been aimed at this in the end. Part of him now accepted it as a kind of fate. That all roads, however he travelled them, would lead here.
During that month, Jian “disappeared” from the public eye. No contact whatsoever was allowed. In fact, no one even knew where he was. The people who knew him had to live with that thorn in their sides: his absence. Some people in the capital were trying to help Jian. But they could do nothing. A group of fans tried to protest on the streets in Beijing, in front of public spaces like the Central Fine Arts Exhibition Hall or Beijing Poly Plaza, or even Kempinski Hotel, playing his music and brandishing campaigning banners. But they were either ignored or intimidated by the authorities. It looked hopeless.
However, suddenly things began to happen, though just how and why wasn’t clear. First, a warden in the prison received an important phone call from an undisclosed government telephone number. The order came from high up to transfer Jian from prison to a secret destination. Jian was immediately disappeared from Qing Huang Dao 780 Political Prison.
A Western fan of Yuan vs. Dollars, living in Beijing and working at the British Embassy, found out where Jian was being held. He had heard Jian’s trial would be soon and wanted to help. But then, only a week later, he found out that the trial was indefinitely postponed. No reason given, no law cited. “Someone from the higher echelons of government made a phone call,” the rumour said. Three weeks later, Jian was secretly driven to the south of China with a brand-new British tourist visa. On 29 December 2011, the day the snow became dirty and the frost broke, he left China via Hong Kong, with no resistance by the authorities.
When the plane took off from Hong Kong, Jian’s eyes looked down at the blue water underneath him. The last few weeks had left him utterly exhausted, and utterly unable to collect his thoughts. He was just running, just living on his reflexes, which were about to fuse, and leave him in some stage beyond collapse. He had no idea what was ahead of him, or what he had left behind. The doors in Qing Huang Dao 780 Political Prison had been closed, slammed shut, cutting him off from the outside space, but also shutting him out from his past. But then those very doors had opened again. But who had walked out? Like the ghost of Misty Poet Hai Zi, Jian was now on a plane, his body being transported into the sky: a different kind of prison. His soul had been poured out and had seeped into the earth under the Great Wall, melting beneath the tracks leading into that dark tunnel. That day the events of 1989 seemed somehow alive again and his student self sat alongside the Kublai Jian of 2011, and thought about the long journey they’d taken together. It was the day he wrote his long letter to Mu.
Dearest Mu,
The sun is piercing, old bastard sky. I am feeling empty and bare. Nothing is in my soul, apart from the image of you.
I am writing to you from a place I cannot tell you about yet. Perhaps when I am safe I will be able to let you know where I am. I don’t know exactly what the plan is and what my future might hold. One thing is for sure—I will try to stay free and alive, for you. And whatever happens, these ideas I have stuck by all my life—the beliefs that landed me here in the first place—I cannot let them go. I must live for them. I know we’ll see each other again, my love, but how long until that day I cannot tell …
20 LONDON, SEPTEMBER 2013
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Read this!
Dear Iona
A million thanks for sending that powerful diary entry so quickly. What a find! It’s incredible to read about Jian leaving China. I managed to get hold of my contact at the embassy in Beijing and he told me something even more shocking. He says that the rumour in Beijing is that Jian’s own father had him removed from the country. The current Chinese prime minister himself!
I think it might be wise if you’re a bit cagey, or better still, completely discreet, if you ever get asked about what you’re working on. Sorry to seem paranoid, but you never know what might happen when you’re dealing with China!
Apropos your question about the shape of the text, I feel even more excited now about the idea of really making this “book.” The story is incredible and what it tells us about modern China, quite apart from being downright tragic—well, it just must be heard. Obviously I can tell you in more detail about my plans when we meet, but as a basic outline, this is what I’m thinking:
First off, I have mapped out the book as a dialogue led by Jian and Mu as two contrasting voices that reveal the political state in China and the struggle of individualism. Here is the basic vision I have. Mu—how are we to see her in the future book? Well, for me, her voice provides the backbone, the continuity, supporting our access to Jian. She is our lens, providing the focus, the spotlight, even if a bit dim, through which the elusive Jian starts to appear. Mu and Jian in my mind are opposites, but connected. They are two facets of the great contemporary enigma: China. Jian is from the north, Mu from the south. Jian is Chinese aristocracy. Mu is the salt of the earth. Most of all: Jian is dark fire. I know it sounds perverse or even pretentious, but I’ve been thinking of the rockers of old, like Jim Morrison, but instead of dying in a cold bath in a Parisian one-star hotel, he lives and writes his manifesto against all odds. And, better still, he moves into another world, our world, the West, but undercover, kind of like Rimbaud disappearing into the Indonesian jungle after he gave up poetry. Mu is like Yoko Ono, the ex-peasant avant-garde, presenting an ideal of modern Chinese youth. And somehow they are joined, while also seeming to be opposed souls in their beliefs and their struggles.
As you can see, it’s not all worked out yet, but that’s how far I’ve got with the help of your pages. Does that seem to fit what you think of them? You’re the closest to them by far, so I’d really value your thoughts. Let’s meet up, if you can still do Friday. Say six at the George, 13 Addison Avenue—it’s just round the corner from here.
Jonathan
21 LONDON, SEPTEMBER 2013
Iona stands in front of her mirror wearing her fourth possible outfit for the evening. She plays with the hem of her long navy dress—it’s terribly professional. With only minutes to go before she has to leave, she pulls off the navy and slips on the only low-cut dress in her wardrobe—a rich burgundy red—picks up her keys and leaves the flat.
The atmosphere at Iona’s meeting with Jonathan couldn’t be more different from the last couple of times. In a cosy pub near Applegate Books he is very casual and full of good humour. They start with red wine,
each cradling a globe-like glass. He enthuses about his recent conversation with none other than Henry Kissinger, whose memoirs Jonathan is publishing. Fascinating man, apparently. Jonathan has worked up an appetite, and would Iona like a bite to eat? He’s had a heavy week, he wants proper food not pub snacks. Let’s go somewhere good, he says. On me, he says, or rather, on Applegate, and laughs. If she has no suggestions, he does. A great little place near Greek Street. Meanwhile, Iona is quietly wondering why he won’t be going back home to his wife. But she says nothing.
An hour later, they are sitting in a beautifully lit French fish restaurant in Soho. They share a bottle, and the rendezvous stretches into a night-long daze of words and moods. Iona is a light drinker; Jonathan drinks deeply, but clearly knows how to pace himself. Soon the second bottle is finished, and then there’s a pint at a pub round the corner.
On the way back to Angel, she can’t even tell which direction Chapel Market is. The atmosphere of the night streets seems illuminated by her own anticipation, an almost feverish expectation that sweetens the air. They find her flat. And as soon as they get through the door and cross her rug, they fall on her bed without a word from their lips, as if an invisible sign has been given that they now both obey. He kisses her lightly on her lips. She is only half conscious with this man, a shadowy but irresistible force on her unmade bed. They make love. Jonathan seems to be very in control, of himself and of her body, and for a moment she feels a kind of perfect but painful beauty, the surrender and the desire for more surrender welling within her body. Her climax rolls out from her centre to her tips. She senses his breathless spasms—but not inside her. Warm foam on her thigh. They fall apart, panting, the cooler air reoccupying their steaming skin. A kind of half-sleep envelops them, blanking out any care, whether cares of the day, or cares of the night. And then in the peaceful half-light, he strokes her back and whispers that he must go home. It is a quarter past one, after all. Iona watches him from her bed, slipping into his clothes. The night is over, she thinks. “Take this,” she murmurs, holding up a sock. He smiles, looking a little embarrassed. They now only have words for the simplest things. She puts on her pyjamas. Then he says something that brings them back to their professional relationship, abandoned sometime over the course of the evening.