I Am China

by Xiaolu Guo

  5 ZHEJIANG PROVINCE, JUNE 2012

  We know very well how families are in everyday patterns of life. No daughter or son can escape the family interrogation. It always begins subtly with a sigh, clearing of a throat, or rustling of the morning paper, a spike of activity in the kitchen. On this morning, the interrogation session begins while Mu’s father is digesting his day’s cocktail of medicinal syrup and tonics. Mother looks agitated, and is vigorously scrubbing a pot. Suddenly there is a clang of the pot being shoved onto the drying rack, and, without even turning round to her daughter, Mother gets straight down to business.

  “Tell me, Mu, what are your plans for the future?”

  “What future? You mean my work?”

  “I don’t see you getting interested in your career exactly … But no, I meant men! Your future with a man!” Her voice is slightly shrill.

  “I just came back from America, Mother, give me a break.” The daughter is instantly defiant.

  “But do you not have a new boyfriend?”

  Walking towards the garden, Mu pretends she hasn’t heard, but her mother chases her.

  “Don’t tell me you are still with Jian, you told me you split up long ago.”

  “We are no longer together,” mumbles Mu.

  “That’s good. You see, I have never liked him. He is not a reliable person in my eyes,” her mother exclaims, conviction billowing in her breast. “I think it’s good that you two have separated. But you must be quick, find someone urgently! We need to see grandchildren before it’s too late!”

  Mu’s mother seems in her usual state of desperation whenever this subject comes up.

  Her daughter gazes across the garden towards the hills in the distance, as if searching for a vision of her own future.

  “A musician, or any artist, is not going to bring a woman a good life anyway, even if he is a handsome crane standing amid a flock of chickens. Family is family, not an endless concert for drug addicts.” Then, with a pause and a depression of her brows, and stammering a little: “You need a husband with real substance—an upright man of bamboo quality, with a family house and good savings!”

  “Do I? Men of bamboo quality often have no savings at all,” Mu replies.

  “You are getting old! A girl over thirty isn’t worth much, no man will turn his head to look at you!”

  Later that night Mu sits in her room, writing her diary, while her parents sleep across the hall.

  “Family is family, not an endless concert for drug addicts.”

  What is a family? Isn’t it a prison in the name of love and responsibility? As much as I love my father, I also love my freedom. If I must choose, I would prefer to live for my freedom than for my family. But my family won’t let me.

  Since baby Shu’s death, my mother almost never mentioned Jian—it’s as if it never happened. She didn’t want to know about my life with Jian. Not our world, not Jian, not my son, not my pain. I still remember that cold loneliness—when we brought back Little Shu’s urn from one of Beijing’s crypts. I felt so alone when Jian and I rode the subway back to the flat, even though his hand was on my shoulder. Yes, what does it mean, a family? If Little Shu were alive, I would love him in a different way from how my mother “loves” me, then I would perhaps understand what a family really means.

  6 ZHEJIANG PROVINCE, JUNE 2012

  “How did Dad start painting in the first place, Mum?” Mu asks.

  The daughter thinks about how difficult it is to uncover her father’s story. He never speaks about his past. A very self-effacing person, her father has barely expressed his opinions on anything, whether in the house or outside. And now, the third-stage throat cancer has robbed him of his speech forever. Before it is too late, Mu thinks, I must understand everything about him.

  “Well, I never really understood that either. He was just a rice farmer and all his family members had always worked on the land.” Her mother has a wistful look on her face. “I remember he mentioned a painter’s name, a painter from some Western country. But, you know, a peasant like me, I wouldn’t recognise the names.”

  In the next room, the father hears the conversation between his daughter and his wife. He writes down two words, (Van Gogh), on a piece of paper, and shows it to Mu as she comes in with his daily herbal drink. Then he begins to tell her his story, word by word, on a student notebook he found on Mu’s dusty shelf.

  From fragmentary details her father manages to write down when he has the strength, Mu tries to piece together his story. He writes that he grew up working in rice paddies and raising pigs. His hands were rough from using a hoe and his body sinewy from lifting and digging. He didn’t ever think about culture or art—impossible for Mu to imagine now. He just thought about rain and heat, and how to make the plants produce fruits, how to raise pigs. Then one day, when he was about eighteen, he saw something he’d never seen before. It was a photograph of Van Gogh’s painting The Starry Night. He did not understand what he was looking at, but the Dutch painter’s brush, like a magical whirlpool, pulled him into another world, a world free from labour and poverty of expression. From that moment he wanted to become a painter, not just a man of fieldwork. He began to draw. To make use of his painting skills, the party told him to work in the drawing group; his title would be “artist-worker.” From that day on, this artist-worker’s job would be to paint smiling peasants in their straw hats in the rice fields under the bright sun; or a woman driver on a brand-new tractor, confidently resting her hands upon the wheel and gazing towards the horizon; or a group of strong fishermen spreading their nets upon the water while hundreds of fish lie captured on their boat. And a slogan would be written on top of every poster: “Our Destination is the Morning Sun. Our Leader is the Great Captain.”

  Then something terrible happened. One day, Mu’s father painted a rice farmer’s face on the back of an old poster. In the night, rain drenched the painting, and the farmer’s smiling face became imprinted with the lines of the earlier drawing, that of a horse’s arse. This faint yet manifest horse’s arse branded Mu’s father an anti-revolutionary, a “right-wing roader.” At the age of twenty-three he became an enemy of the people, and was forced to confess his “anti-revolutionary conspiracy.” In his written confession, he told the party that he couldn’t understand how he could be an enemy of the people since he was the son of the poorest of the poor. “From the bottom of my heart, I love the people, the peasants, the proletariat. And I respect them as much as I respect the land that has raised me, and the soil which has borne us the food we eat. I cannot be an enemy of the proletariat.” On his bed, Mu’s father writes these words painfully for his daughter, recalling a dark and cold night from his deeply forgotten past, some decades ago, when he was forced to write his confession in the camp, under the faint and flickering light of an oil lamp.

  7 LONDON, OCTOBER 2013

  Iona has in front of her a photocopy of a scrappy piece of paper, and on it the most beautiful handwriting she has ever seen. Although it is a second-hand or even a third-hand photocopy, she can still decipher the markings of the original writing paper—the back of a piece of herbal-medicine wrapping paper. In fact, she can still read the faint print of the ingredients for the herb medicines: (dried gooseberry), (orange skins), (pear-tree roots), (snake powder), as well as some Chinese plants with names she doesn’t recognise. The writing has its own particular calligraphy style, with very careful and elegant strokes. It reminds her of Mu’s style. Perhaps it is her father’s handwriting, she thinks.

  Judging from what’s written on the wrapping paper— (capitalist roader)—Iona is sure that the note was written by Mu’s father. And the next diary entry from Mu proves her right.

  I was never taught at school the history of those years of my father’s generation. I feel like I must record his words. Perhaps one day I could show Jian these pages and he would understand another revolutionary and what he went through. My father, the young artist-worker, was sent away in the 1960s and punished with hard la
bour. Along with other “running dogs of capitalism,” he was living in a buffalo shed in a remote mountain region. His daily work included cutting grass to feed pigs and cows, collecting cow shit for the yam fields, planting rice while up to his thighs in the muddy water, fertilising fruit trees, and so on. When the planting and harvest seasons had passed, he would join other workers to make bricks—carrying mud and clay, mixing it with water, hardening the clay in the oven, then cutting the bricks and distributing them to villagers. He told me he probably made about ten thousand bricks with his own hands. Each night after supper, the workers would be divided into groups to study Marx and Lenin under the sparsely distributed oil lamps. Day and night they worked and studied; no one had any time to idle or to contemplate the meaning of life, my father wrote. As the Great Leader said: “First make a big pie, then everyone can get a slice!” Every proletariat agreed on this sort of canon, even the punished ones—agreed with all their heart.

  Sleeping alongside the buffalo, lonely but stoical, my father lived there for years. He hadn’t met my mother yet; he had no friends at all; he was self-critical. But he discreetly painted the wheat fields Van Gogh’s way—no people in the landscape, while nature appeared crazy and dreamlike. Of course he didn’t show these paintings to anyone. It was a very dangerous thing to do, and it made me rejoice hearing about my father’s little rebellion—trying to keep a part of him alive, even in the hardest circumstances. As my father was writing on his little scraps of medical paper about his hardship, I thought about Jian’s father—a high-ranking official with anything and everything he ever needed; my father had nothing but a skeletal body and an earnest heart.

  One day, he was working in a mine on the mountain, carrying heavy stones down towards the sea, to “gain farming land,” as the authority had decreed, and his vision suddenly blurred. He couldn’t see anything in his left eye. But fearing an accusation of being “bourgeois,” he continued his work until the evening and only then reported to the team leader that he couldn’t see. They took him to a local clinic and the doctor found that one of his retinas was broken. The next day the team leader compiled a report about the half-blind young man. Given that he was no longer suitable for hard labour, the camp decided he was ready to become “a good person.” A month later, he was dispatched to a small village under Rocky Peach Town and became a teacher at the village school. There, he continued to paint every evening after a long day’s work. My father didn’t say this to me explicitly, but I know he deeply valued the experience of his youth, even those punishing years in the camp. He once said the youth of today have no value system. And his daughter’s youth? I asked him. He didn’t make any comment on that. He just looked at me and drank the bitter medicine my mother cooked for him.

  8 ZHEJIANG PROVINCE, JULY 2012

  “Was my father the first man you dated?” Mu asked her mother as they walked back from the village, carrying bags full of recommended herbal medicine.

  “Dated?” Mu’s mother answered impatiently. “He was the first man I ever talked to apart from your grandfather!”

  As the young painter was being punished in the countryside, the young peasant woman was still a teenager. Along with her family, she grew yams on their distributed farming land. In the fallow season she worked in the local silk factory. In the factory, some hundreds of women would stand at the assembly line removing silk fibres from silk cocoons. The silkworms were collected every day from the farmers in the province. Millions of those white-shelled moths would be soaked in hot water to allow the silk to lift away from their shells. Then the assembly line would roll the silk into piles and then they would dry it. The working floor was always hot and wet. It was a very physical job. Mu’s mother got mycosis and eczema all over her hands and feet. One day she could no longer bear the sharp pain of her fungus-ravaged hands and asked the management if she could do a different job. She was transferred to the factory’s dance troupe, to become one of the “Mao’s Thoughts” dancers—a Red Guard, singing and dancing and chanting slogans from the Little Red Book to promote the party’s dogma.

  Sometime in the late sixties, Mu’s mother told her, the young Red Guard went out to the countryside with her team to sing for the peasants and the re-educated intellectual labourers, as the country was swept by a new revolution. And there she met her future husband. “So that was the time you two fell in love?” Mu asked her mother.

  “What do you mean ‘fell in love’? There was no such thing as ‘falling in love’ in that world.” Unimpressed by her daughter’s understanding of history, her mother went on. “Love is just a social condition.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Social conditions—one’s obligations in life,” her mother answered impatiently, without a second thought. “For example, in a family or in a society, man is the first order, woman is the second. So a woman should fulfil her obligations for her man. If a man needs help, the woman is obliged to help the man, even if the man is a monster.”

  Even if the man is a monster! My mother teaches me again what is “the second sex,” and I can see the last two thousand years of our Confucian feudal education is much stronger and deeper than the last fifty years of Communist education. Since our conversation about how my parents met, I have steered clear of discussing “love” with my mother. I seldom mention Jian in front of them, or anything of my emotional life. I must keep my private emotions in the safe enclosure of my heart, and make sure I don’t open it at all. If I opened it and exposed my possessions, they would be stolen and destroyed instantly!

  Mu writes these words in her diary in the quiet night of her home town, with her sick father’s occasional coughing in the room across the hall.

  9 LONDON, OCTOBER 2013

  Love! What a strange concept among those Chinese couples! Iona sighs, and stops reading.

  How can love be so totally material and pragmatic for some people? Iona doesn’t want to understand love like this. For her, everything else in life can be pragmatic, but not love. Love is something else. Maybe that’s why she separated love from sex right from the start. And perhaps it is because her idea of love is beyond the pragmatic that, so far, she has only had a sex life and no love life, and fear has always won.

  In the last few weeks, besides Kublai Jian, a man she has never met, there is only one other person whose presence, imagined or otherwise, has had an impact on her, who has affected her sense of embodiment and stability, both in the day and the night. It is Jonathan. Unable to sleep one night with an agitated torrent of images and feelings running through her, she realised it was to do with him. He was somehow the focus of these subtle storms in her mind and body at night, and those feelings of liquid anxiety percolating through her belly during the day. But how? They have only met six times! Yes, they did end up in bed together. And, yes, their lovemaking, she vividly recalls—though, for some reason, not in detail—was like a sweet fire passing through the sieve of their bodies. Yes, OK, but it was only one night. How many men had she had nights with, perhaps even similar nights? Nights of the same intensity and abandonment? That is, after all, what she, Iona, specialises in. She is used to nights with men. Add to this the fact that he is a decade older than her. Admittedly, he is not very like a father or an uncle. On the contrary, he was vigorous and hungry. And he was refined, and subtle, like no other she had known. A certain touch of the hand. Still, where is her sensible head? These thoughts about Jonathan can only be unwanted. He probably has a great family, a devoted wife with a tribe of children, and dogs, debts, everything. It’s absurd; indeed, not her at all. When she thinks of love—but then why is she thinking of love?—she thinks of falling for someone younger. More like a comrade in arms, more like an earnest but sexy young scholar. To be attached to Jonathan could only be disaster: a one-sided case of a powerless younger woman giving everything up for nothing in return. Still, she cannot explain this longing.

  Last night was unsettling, and strange. She rang Jonathan, but it went straight to voicemail. It was
only eight thirty. He was probably having dinner with his wife and children, or with one of the prominent writers he publishes. His answerphone was the typical breezy, echoey voice-for-everyone-and-no-one. If a man was having dinner with his wife, he probably wouldn’t take a call from another woman, she thinks. Unless he was with colleagues or friends—then he might take the call. After she’d put the phone down she had felt lonely, a sense of desertion. She sat for a while in the flat, not working on her translation; she contemplated the street lamp, some part of her waiting for her mobile to vibrate and light up. But nothing. Pointless to ring again. Other numbers lay inside her mobile that might have been pressed. Yes, there were others. But she made no effort to bring them to life. She went down to the pub on the corner of her street, sat at the bar alone, had a pint, chatted with a grumpy and tired barman. They played Memphis Slim songs, one after another: “I’ll just keep on singing …”—the song made her brain muddy. As she drank the bitter beer, she gazed at her mobile. No sign from the other world. Then Memphis Slim sang “One Man’s Mad.” She watched two men hitting pool balls in the corner; they were in no hurry, no more so than the pace of the song was in any hurry. Such is the indifference of man. One moment you are drawn into a circle of warmth and promise, the next you are out.