I Am China

by Xiaolu Guo

  “Let me know how you get on with the rest of the translation.”

  He kisses her forehead in the dark. He leaves like a boss after a long day, leaving his exhausted secretary with her computer and a few letters to finish. Is that how it is? Iona wonders. The door closes. Later, as she waits for the kettle to boil she watches the steam rise and fade, leaving its trace of condensation on the kitchen tiles. The room is still filled with the sound of their breathing, and perfumed with the ripe smell of sex. Somehow the Zen story from her childhood returns to her: the fish swims in the sea and asks, What the hell is water? Where is the sea?

  22 LONDON, SEPTEMBER 2013

  The next morning Iona wakes up with a serious hangover. She tries to remember how she got from the pub near Applegate Books to her flat. She vaguely remembers the meal, their mutual seduction and the ensuing amorous meltdown into each other. And she can picture the moment she brought her hand to his while standing in the street trying to find a taxi. Perhaps that’s when the idea of sleeping with him became a certainty—she reached for his hand in the dark street, and he took hers naturally.

  She stands under the shower, letting the hot water cascade over her skin, assailed by chaotic thoughts. She makes a pot of tea, now her head is clearer. She puts on Jian’s CD, Yuan vs. Dollars, while changing the bed sheets. The first song—“Long March into the Night,” the one Jian keeps mentioning—sends its sonic wave into Iona’s ears.

  Hey little sister,

  Let me take you down the street,

  the long march is waiting,

  that’s where we gonna meet.

  You don’t need no San Francisco,

  nor Eiffel Tower for your home,

  no Champs-Élysées,

  no Golden Dome.

  You say money is poetry,

  I say your freedom is a brick in the wall.

  We got no coins in our pocket,

  we held no candles in our hands,

  on the long march to the light,

  on the long march to the night.

  Hey little sister,

  Let me take you down the street,

  I’ll show you a place,

  a place where the Liars meet,

  a place where Uncle Joe beats his people with a belt,

  a place where the hands sign the contract.

  The long march is waiting.

  The long march is waiting.

  She watches the tulips by the window tremble slightly in the blast of the music as she puts the dirty bedclothes into the washing machine. She comes back and listens to the same song for a second time. Then she turns it off. She feels, irrationally, a kind of resentment towards this intrusion of the real Jian, unedited by her own imagination. She can’t take it, not this morning.

  She sits at her desk and works on the next letter. The Chinese letter has a handwritten note in English clipped to its front page: “The last letter Mu received from Jian.” Once again she wonders whose handwriting it might be—perhaps Jonathan’s, or his editor, Maria’s. Or his assistant, Suzy’s. Or even Mu’s own—it’s definitely as neat and composed as her diary entries. Who knows who else has been looking at these letters? Slowly, Iona reads.

  A summer day, 2012

  Mu,

  We both know that there’s been nothing, no word, between us for the last few months. I don’t know where to write to you. So here is my last letter to our Beijing address, whether you read it or not. It’s me being foolish, perhaps, breaking through the silence—no doubt that’s what you’ll think.

  Right now, where am I? I’ve just left Paris and I’m on a train towards the south. Paris was a strange place, the fancy scene around the Seine doesn’t do anything for me. Even the women there! They were too First World for a Third World man. And I have finally made some contacts in Marseilles, through which I hope I’ll be able get some work. There are jobs on ships here that don’t require papers or much English. Maybe I could be a sailor, living on the blue sea rather than the dirty land.

  I feel like I have been drifting up and down this European landscape over the last couple of months, like a cockroach running on the dirt. But Europe is a grim continent: they think everything starts from here, from themselves, from their land. Often you encounter some lonely cluster of stony homes in the middle of the countryside, and there’ll be a woman doing some housework in her garden, a television glowing inside, and trees glimpsed through telegraph poles, the murmur of leaves the only sound. I picture myself living in houses like these, with that kind of life—is it life? For me it’s dead, like the bottom of a well. If I were Woody Guthrie, I would sing: “This land is not my land, this land is not for you or for me.” China is not here. You are not here. And my manifesto means nothing in this land and to these people. —xiang chou—is the only emotion I have. I miss my land. There is no reason for me to put down my roots here, and there is no familiar earth under my feet. My roots have dried up and broken off.

  The sunlight, too, feels remote, as if I’m moving far away from the source, as if the sun is trying to escape from me. The sun doesn’t recognise me any more. My body’s numb. It limps along like a strange loping animal, stiff, joints cracking, a coldblooded lizard—yesterday’s man in ragged but once fashionable clothes. That’s how I feel on this train. I am no longer a soldier. There’s no one waiting for me at my destination. The train will spew me out, like a cat pukes up a hairball. And where then …? Just the wind waiting to roll me along some small-town high street?

  Every now and then, just for a second, I think I’m in China. It chills me and warms me at the same time: my country looms heavy, bigger even than my mind, but sometimes small too, like a point in memory. Each time I see a brown wheat field or an expanse of standing corn, I think of those intense yellow rapeseed fields of the Huabei Plains, and those wrinkle-faced peasants, shovels on their shoulders, walking like statues in the dirt, with glass-eyed buffalo following. Then the streets and their life appear in my mind, the smells and tastes, sashimi oil from hidden jars, the laughter of fighting kids, bicycle bells—even the deafening fireworks of the Spring Festival … These images and sounds flow as a river whose mirrored surface shimmers with sadness.

  And you, my woman far away. Maybe you are beyond this crying and laughing. I’ve been thinking of your father. A strong man, cancer in his throat, going through the motions of life even as the anarchic cells invade each corner of his body-box. But which force is stronger? The evil cells or your father’s spirit? I’m finding hope difficult at the moment, but I do hope your father survives.

  My last words to you in this letter: whatever happens with your life and my life, I still have this love for you. So now I give it to you, wherever you are.

  Your Jian

  SEVEN | RETURN HOME

  yan zhi yi wei qi, dang qi wu, you qi zhi yong.

  Zao hu yong yi wei shi, dang qi wu, you shi zhi yong.

  We turn clay to make a vessel;

  But it is upon the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the vessel depends.

  We pierce doors and windows to make a house;

  And it is upon these spaces where there is nothing that the usefulness of the house depends.

  TAO TE CHING, LAOZI (PHILOSOPHER, 604–531 BC)

  1 LONDON, OCTOBER 2013

  Iona stares at the photocopy of two black-and-white snapshots on her desk. Who are these people? One is an old Chinese lady in front of a house, sunlight coming from the low winter sky; the other is a little girl holding a balloon before a tree-planted yard. They must have been pasted in Mu’s diary. They look old and faded.

  Iona can’t help but wonder whether the little girl with the balloon is a young Mu. She has no way of knowing. There is a TV aerial sticking out on the girl’s left side, by the wall. Is that Mu’s family house in the south? And the old woman smiling under two Chinese lanterns, could that be Mu’s grandmother? Or Jian’s grandmother, perhaps. The little tree in the clay pot looks like a bay tree or a small orange tree. She seems
to remember seeing them everywhere in people’s gardens when she visited southern China. Iona calls Jonathan’s mobile.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, it’s me,” Iona says, feeling a swell of confusion and awkwardness rising from that night, their night.

  “Hi … Iona?” Jonathan is checking it’s her; she feels her chest go tight at his lack of recognition. Then his voice softens and sounds slightly ambiguous. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes, I’m fine. Do you have a moment?”

  “I’m in my office. I’ve got—um, five minutes before my next meeting. Fire away.”

  “Did you manage to take a look at those photos—the two black-and-white photos?” Iona prompts him. “You didn’t mention the photos. One is of an old lady standing in front of her house, well, I presume it’s her house; the other one is of a little girl holding a balloon.”

  “… the girl with a balloon …” He pauses, then two seconds later: “Yes, I do remember them, vaguely. What about them?”

  “Well, do you know who they are? Would the little girl be Mu when she was a child? And I think the old lady could be Mu’s or Jian’s grandmother perhaps?”

  “Iona, you might think I know more than you do from those documents, but I don’t! Really I don’t. I’m not the one who reads Chinese! I’ve looked through all the letters, diaries and photos, again and again, but without the language skills I’m at a complete loss. I’m just as excited as you are but I don’t have any secret knowledge.”

  “Right, OK, sorry. Looking at the photos, there are clues that make me think they might have been taken in southern China—the architecture, the plants … that’s why I think the little girl might be Mu … but it’s all guesswork, really,” Iona murmurs slowly.

  A pause. Then Iona hears him say, “When can I see you again?”

  2 BEIJING, MAY 2012

  A year and a few months ago, far away from Iona’s evening desk, on a United Airlines flight from Boston to Beijing, Mu returns home. Beijing hasn’t changed much since she’s been away; the familiar scent and sights of the capital’s polluted air—even thicker than before—still hangs in the sky like a noxious soup cloud. As she enters her one-bedroom flat on Beijing’s Third Ring Road, she instantly throws herself on the dusty bed. She sleeps a deep sleep for three days, lying motionless, blank, dreamless, without dimension.

  She wakes up and walks downstairs to her mailbox. It’s been a while since she was home and there’s the standard accumulation of glossy flyers and overdue bills—then she finds a lone letter. She looks at the stamp—a European stamp postmarked two months ago, and then redirected from Boston to Beijing. Mu can find no address, though, as she turns it over in her hands. It must have arrived when she was in Maine on her own—how odd that Bruce never mentioned it. She sits on the cold step in her pyjamas and opens the letter.

  Dearest Mu,

  I received your letter finally—the one about you going to America. America! Old Hell! I don’t know how it made it to me, across seas and continents, but somehow it did. But that was two months ago, so who knows where you are now. I’m going to try this Boston address, but I don’t hold out much hope—on tour means on the road, surely. What a surreal concept; my world is in stasis. I don’t know what it is to explore any longer. I bury inside myself: that’s all there is left.

  I am still in an in-between state. I’m waiting for my asylum application to be granted. That is all. No news, no change—or at least that’s how I feel after days in this grey box. I can’t see what there is beyond this right now, I can’t ever see you here with me, or us together in Beijing any more. Even my memories of our flat are hazy and dissolving. I hope you’re having a good time, wherever you are. And I hope you can lead the life you’ve always wanted to live. America must be better than China, whatever I think of it.

  You should start a new life, a brand-new life without me.

  Good luck, Mu,

  Jian

  3 BEIJING, MAY 2012

  A week passes. She recovers. She thinks and plans in her pyjamas at the kitchen table each evening, sitting in front of a bowl of instant noodles. Now her flat is nearly empty. The pillows and sheets are packed in a box. Plates, cups and kitchen utensils are in another. Books and CDs are stuffed into two large suitcases. Mu’s and Jian’s clothes, divided into two separate bundles, lie like skins cast off their backs arranged in a dead geometry. All their belongings wait in the middle of the main room to be removed.

  The living room is quiet. There’s only the occasional sound of a water pipe, a twisting groan from under the toilet. Already the dust is settling on the bare floor, like the slow, thick flow of time. Mu sits on the edge of the empty mattress on which she and Jian used to spend their nights, lying together, sleeping, touching. She gazes at the remaining furnishings: the handmade lamp, the broken rattan chair, the old carpet from Pan Jianyuan market, the dried-out bamboo plants outside on the balcony. These things should be familiar to her; she and Jian lived here together only thirteen months ago. So why do they appear so alien? It’s like her sense of belonging is something she cannot recognise any more. But then, she remembers, they were never theirs to begin with. They came with the flat—such an ugly, tasteless assortment of cheap cast-offs. It’s so obvious: now that their meanings have been stripped from them, they no longer speak to her. And soon, after Mu leaves, new tenants will come, putting their own tablecloth on the table, wrapping their own bed sheets round the same mattress, and making these objects their own. What’s this strange merging of life with the bare world of things? She tries to imagine the future of the flat without her and Jian. Nothing will remain of their presence as the new bodies move about, sit, sleep, breathe and dream.

  Then there’s the corner, beside their mattress, the corner where Little Shu’s cot used to be. The cot was removed a few days after the baby died. The corner has been left empty and she has tried to sleep facing the other side of the room ever since. It is as if looking at the shadow of the cot that was once there is a bad omen for her future life.

  One afternoon people from the removal company arrive. The workers, beefy young men with rough voices, carry her boxes and suitcases out in waves. With an indifferent efficiency it’s all loaded onto the back of the truck. Doors are slammed shut, and she is squeezed into the front of the truck. Then they are off. They drive towards the storage depot as if they are on a journey to a cemetery. An hour later, she stands in an industrial space, watching her belongings—to which she no longer belongs—disappearing into a dark storage unit. It has a number: E33468. They should store her behind this number as well, she thinks. She’ll exist in suspended animation till one day someone comes to release her.

  4 ZHEJIANG PROVINCE, JUNE 2012

  Our heroine’s new station in life, it seems, has very little to do with Slam Poetry art-rock performances. Sabotage Sister evaporated somehow, along Highway 71, in the desert landscapes of western USA, or disappeared down a drain in a downtown Chicago side street, or in a polite Boston diner with its gleaming parking lot out back. When she returned to China, she stopped writing her diary for some months. She felt aged by the tour, as if she had suddenly gained twenty years; and she had put on some weight. She felt her body had grown so heavy that she could no longer do a somersault or stand on her head, things she used to practise at college. “Money is poetry, freedom is a brick on the wall.” Jian’s words strangely echo in her ears after the U.S. tour.

  The afternoon on which Mu clears out of her flat and puts everything into storage, she walks back to the street where she and Jian used to live. She looks up at the flat once more. She lowers her gaze. She has kept the key, as well as the access to her mailbox. There is only one thing that makes her hesitate about when to return the key to the landlord: her hopes, perhaps foolish, that she might receive something from Jian. A final letter maybe, or many letters, or some sort of real farewell. She is not sure. Like a stray dog, she wanders about under her building for a while, carrying only her handbag. Ten minutes la
ter, she stops at an old pancake stall to eat as she makes her final decision. Then she jumps in a taxi—direction: Beijing Railway Station. There she buys a one-way ticket for the earliest train she can get on, down to her southern province.

  She stays with her parents for nearly a hundred days in the village where she grew up. Her father is at his end. The hospital in Shanghai has given up on him and he’s come home. The family is still trying to find ways to cure him with all kinds of traditional herbs. But cancer is cancer. Especially in its final stages. There is no mistaking it. For Mu, there is little to do, and she spends her time digging vegetables in the family plot. They used to grow beans and cucumbers when she was young, and her mother would take them to the market to sell. Now Mu resumes that labour. She spends several hours a day bending over, prostrating herself almost, to get small green things to send out shoots, or to prevent them from being eaten by slugs or hens. She is surprised that she still remembers how to grow them. Although a bit clumsy, she knows how to arrange the poles and to set strings to support the climbing plants. Maybe that’s how life is, she thinks. Everything needs support.

  In the heat, under the blue, encircled by the profile of egg-shaped hills, among flies and mosquitoes, her wordless companions, she sets about trying to re-create the small yam field which her mother had abandoned when her father fell ill. They don’t need to grow their own yams any more—they can buy a kilo of yams in the market, in any season, for only eight yuan. But Mu tells herself: isn’t this what village life is all about? It has been a strange time; her mind and body feel as if they have separated and left behind an empty skeleton. Those days in Beijing and in the U.S. are like a long-distant dream, evaporated in the southern China heat. The wind occasionally refreshes her sweating skin, but then she will be anguished again by the sound of her father coughing behind her as he tries to rearrange his aching limbs in his chair. Sometimes, with moist eyes, the father eyes his daughter who has returned so transformed and yet remains the same serious child. Mother too watches her spooling out the strings for the cucumber vines and beans. She doesn’t ask much about her daughter’s American experience; it is as if nothing is worthy of conversation now that the old man is in his final days.