by Xiaolu Guo
She drank a second pint of beer and thought of her sex life. It seems that what she does to others has now been done to her. The cruel one. The heartless one. That’s the face she likes to show. The face she showed to a perfectly decent bloke sitting beside her, looking at her attentively and waiting for her to say something. When her first pint was finished, he offered to buy her another. But she didn’t even bother to raise her eyes. She nursed her gloomy aura to protect her isolation. She finished the last drop of her beer and left the pub at last orders. The man sat there and watched her leave. She walked back to her flat, closed the door behind her and climbed into bed. She slept. Next morning, her phone was still blank. If longing always brings disappointment and desire connects to a sense of emptiness, then love really is a melancholy affair, Iona thinks, in her solitude.
10 ZHEJIANG PROVINCE, JULY 2012
In those three months in the south, there is little change in Mu’s daily routine, and apart from occasional visits from relatives or friends of Mu’s parents, no one comes to visit. There is one interesting guest who drops by the family house every now and again, though. His name is Gu Chengde, a rich old man. According to Mu’s parents, he is a shipbuilding tycoon whose business has been so successful he has offices all over the world. He doesn’t seem to mind the modest hospitality of Mu’s parents, though, despite arriving in his brand-new limousine driven by his private chauffeur and bringing rare fruits, herbs and gingseng to strengthen Mu’s father’s health.
“But, Mother, why would such a rich man want to visit Father?”
Mu’s mother shrugs dismissively. “He’s your father’s childhood friend. They grew up in the same compound in their village. Unlike your father’s useless interest in painting and communism, Mr. Gu has been doing ‘useful things’ like his shipbuilding business for the last twenty years.” Mu’s mother pours the newest tea leaves of the year into the pot and gestures to her daughter. “Mu, bring the tray into the front room for Mr. Gu. He is now one of the biggest international shipping businessmen in China.”
“But Mother, how did he become quite so very rich?”
“I remember when he was nominated for China’s New Entrepreneur Excellence Award. I saw him on TV, he went on to beat thousands of big names to win national recognition. He rose higher and higher, but he never forgot his roots. And he wanted to help your father, his childhood buddy.”
As Mu’s mother starts cooking for their guest, Mr. Gu apologises that he can’t stay, he has to drive back to his Ningbo headquarters, for an evening meeting with clients. The mother hurriedly introduces Mu to the tycoon, and they shake hands formally. “Girl, if you have toured in America with your poetry, you must be a real talent! And your English must be good! You should come to work for us.” Mr. Gu has a booming loud voice and shows off his two gold teeth as he speaks.
Mu says nothing, but smiles graciously.
“We need someone like you, with a good education and grasp of English.”
Mu hangs back, checking for slugs on the cucumber leaves. Working in shipbuilding is not something she had ever considered.
“How kind of you, Mr. Gu!” Mu’s mother answers quickly for her daughter. “Wouldn’t that be fantastic? But I am not sure if our daughter wants to stay and work locally, she’s got a big head!”
Now the millionaire is nearly offended. “I’m not talking about working in the province! I’m talking about getting her trained in our Beijing office, then posting her to our brand-new branch in London, you understand?”
“New branch in London?” Mu says, turning her head towards their guest.
Gu’s chauffeur has now leaped out of the front seat and opened the car door for his boss to climb in.
“Yes, London branch!” he says, nodding, and leaning on the open car door, his generous paunch squashing against the glass. “Remember, we are running an international business!”
Mu’s mother almost jumps when she hears his offer. As the shipping tycoon climbs into the smooth leather-upholstered back seat, he waves goodbye. Mu stands behind her mother, still holding the limp body of a slug she has just killed, and watches the shiny limousine disappearing along the winding country road. The landscape either side of the road is no longer the rice paddies she once knew, stretching flat and glowing green for miles. It is now a wasteland, littered with rubbish and industrial refuse. Plastic bags are everywhere, blowing in between the chopped tree roots and polluted streams.
11 ZHEJIANG PROVINCE, JULY 2012
In the early part of the night, rain drenches the windows in torrents. It’s a steady downfall, on a tide of restless air. Then, in the second part of the night, Mu hears her father tossing and turning on the bed, and his strange, irregular breathing: short and fast, punctuated by groaning, his groans propelled by pain. He seems to be struggling to release something through coughing. But he cannot: something has clogged his throat and is choking him. Mu hears her mother getting up and asking him how he feels and giving him water to drink.
The night seems uncannily quiet outside. Only the sound of the rain can be heard; even the crickets on the plants have stopped their chirruping. Mu gets up and enters her parents’ room. Her father’s face is dark—redder than usual, slightly purple. His breathing is laboured, and rattling sounds come from behind his feverish tongue. He looks in pain. Her mother tries to turn his body on its side to help him breathe more easily. But his breathing grows heavier and heavier. After a few more minutes of agonised wheezing, mother and daughter begin to dress him.
Mu picks up the phone and calls an ambulance. A few moments later, the father struggles to write a note in pencil. His words are almost unrecognisable. But both mother and daughter understand instantly. Too painful. Let me go.
Tears like a fountain, coming up from the two women’s throats, rising to their hollow eyes—but neither dares cry out in front of the dying man. As the ambulance’s siren gets closer and closer, the father looks even paler, while his limbs have turned a darker colour than usual. His wife puts on his shoes. The daughter feels something dreadful is going to happen.
* * *
At two o’clock in the morning, the ambulance took us to the local hospital. We waited in the Emergency area only for a few minutes before two nurses put my father in a wheeled bed and placed him in a room with an oxygen tank and an angiogram recording his heartbeat. Buried in some place of great pain, he was only semiconscious. A doctor came and asked my mother about all the past cancer treatment my father had received, then they gave him a morphine injection. He could hardly breathe. The doctor and nurse put a respirator on him, and inserted a nasal tube that fed into his lungs. His heartbeat was very weak and irregular. His mouth was half open, with very dry lips. At one point his eyes were moving and I called to him. “Dad? Dad, can you hear me?” He didn’t respond, and although he was looking in my direction, his eyes froze for a few seconds. They ceased looking, ceased to be the eyes of a man, and right then my heart stopped beating. My mother whispered his name softly, asked him if he felt cold. But he made no response. His eyes were closing, as if he was falling asleep. His face looked green and grey. His lips looked dry and cracked. The nurse said he needed some liquid, but he probably couldn’t swallow. She brought some small pieces of ice and placed the half-liquid, half-ice in his mouth.
Three hours of unconsciousness followed. We glazed, almost unconscious ourselves. The numbness was almost protection. Then suddenly he opened his eyes. My mother held his left hand and I held his right. We called his name. He seemed to be responding. His face showed strain and confusion, as if to ask, “Where am I?” I told him he was in hospital. He tried to take in my words, but his face had darkened. He closed his eyes again. His skin went cold, and felt moist, like some kind of cold sweat was coming out. Mother began to cry, but she suppressed her weeping. Her tears kept rolling down silently on the sheets that covered his body. We sat there and prayed he would wake up. But an hour later, as the morning light hit the window, his heart stopped beating.
The cremation has been arranged for three days after Father’s death. Mother appears frail from long nights of grief. I stay close to her. But my throat is contracted and dry. My eyes produce no tears. When I look at myself in the mirror now I see a numbness clings to my face. I am a mute ghost in this old house. But when the moment comes and the coffin is pushed into the incinerator, and the ashes are collected, I suddenly feel an inexplicable relief.
In front of the crematorium, with the smoke still rising from the chimney, the relatives begin to part and go their separate ways. Mu walks home with her mother. Silently, they walk through their patch of field and open the door of the house. Rooting through the letter box, Mu is surprised to find a strange postcard addressed to her. The postcard seems to have come via a snaking path. It was originally from the singer Lutao in the U.S., and sent to his drummer, Dongdong, in Beijing. It simply says: “I am in California. Sunny every day. Found a job!” with a picture of a beach with palm trees, blonde girls in bikinis, and brown plastic-looking boys in swimming trunks diving into waves. Then under Lutao’s scrawl is Dongdong’s brief note, ending with the cryptic lines:
Mu! I’m working for a software gaming company now, given up on drums! You can only dig a garden for so long. Time to grasp the new spirit of the age!—Your little brother Dongdong.
In her southern home town, reading this readdressed, messily written postcard, Mu wonders how her ex-band member knew that she was digging in a garden. Was it just a lucky guess, or was it some sort of intuition? Or did he hear something? And what is “the new spirit of the age” anyway? Mu thinks to herself as she walks in her parents’ vegetable garden. The beans are growing fast, the cucumber plants are flowering, but her father is gone.
“Grasp the new spirit of the age”—the phrase continues to play on Mu’s mind. And then practical things start to happen. She takes a short trip to visit the shipbuilder Gu’s company. It’s a relief to get out of the house of mourning which she has been confined to, and she craves an escape. She didn’t exactly know what she wanted from him, but it isn’t long before she is enveloped by Gu’s network of connections. Mr. Gu is indeed opening a London office. He needs a young employee with good English. Mu is the perfect choice. And for Mu, this is also the perfect chance to start anew. While her visa is being dealt with by the company, the future seems to become more and more real for her. It looks like this job is more concrete than her poetry, her American tour, even her past life with Jian.
One very warm morning, Mu says goodbye to her mother and takes a train back to Beijing. A small voice inside her whispers all through the journey that she will not be seeing this southern ancestral landscape for some time: the watery rice paddies, the muddy buffalo following the farmers’ children, the shimmering Yangtze River running towards the east. She remains in the capital for a few months, every day going into the Beijing office to learn about the company and get the training she needs for the move to London. The company rents her a new flat in the expensive part of Beijing. She is indeed saying goodbye to her hutong life, the cheap rent and the dingy noodle bars. Yet on the first weekend free from her new work she takes the subway and visits her old flat, and she still has the key for the mailbox. As she opens her post, she finds a big package posted from France. In the package are old letters between Jian and herself dating back months, as well as Jian’s own diary. Then she pulls out a letter written by Jian on the train from Paris to Marseilles. A goodbye letter, it seems, dated “A summer day, 2012.” She cannot read the letter here, standing outside their old home. But nor will she be able to read it in her glistening new flat, decorated entirely with cold white tiles and white plastic surfaces. She enters a hutong and goes into a local noodle store, one she and Jian used to hang out at in the evenings. And then she reads the letter.
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 …
The pain dilates slowly in her new office, with her new colleagues and new daily routine, as each day goes by. But for weeks, she doesn’t know what to do with the documents. The package sits, like a talisman or a souvenir of the past. Every time she glances at it, sitting on the black marble counter in her hallway, she hears a little thud beat inside her. Then she picks up her keys, shuffles on her new high heels and walks out the door. In January 2013, she goes to an international literature festival where one of the days is dedicated to her favourite Russian novel, Life and Fate. She listens to an English publisher speak about publishing censored works of literature. And on that day, sitting on an uncomfortable chair at the back of a lecture theatre as a sandstorm outside whips up the capital, she knows exactly what she should do with this package.
She goes home and makes photocopies of all the material and, along with Jian’s old diaries, she adds photocopies of her diaries that she has kept for years. She wraps everything in a large folder, goes to the festival site later that day and finds the English publisher who had spoken about Life and Fate. He seems confused to receive the package from her, but she insists. What can she possibly do from China?
A few months later, in the summer of 2013, she finishes her business training. On a very hot Beijing afternoon, she goes through her gate at Beijing International Airport. She travels with a bare minimum of possessions. It’s an absolute goodbye to the once-innocent Misty Poet, a goodbye to the no-longer-confused, angry Sabotage Sister. In her brand-new suitcase even her sweater and her raincoat are newly bought. Within twelve hours she is transported across the world and emerges at London Heathrow Airport. She is exhausted, but when she gets through immigration she has a feeling that here, somehow, she will encounter “the new spirit of the age,” whatever that turns out to be.
13 SCOTLAND, OCTOBER 2013
Iona is on a morning train winding its way towards Scotland. Sitting in the Quiet Coach, she surveys the sky, constantly changing its mood above her. One moment sunlight illuminates the carriage and her reflection in the glass against the rushing landscape, the next moment black clouds pitch the carriage into darkness and she disappears, leaving a world of shadow outside.
It is Wednesday and there are not many people on the train. Iona occupies three seats—on her left are the photocopies of Jian’s and Mu’s diaries, on her right is a large package, a birthday gift. Under the wrapping paper there’s a Chinese vase, which she bought in Covent Garden the day before. It’s her mother’s sixtieth birthday tomorrow. Her mother likes porcelain objects and has a big collection at home. They are mostly those pseudo Qing-dynasty plates and cups, plus other pieces of oriental kitsch. So why not add another one? With that thought a shadow passes outside and also within. Has she become so mechanistic in her dealings with her parents? Once a needy child, she is now an occasional visitor, there through a sense of obligation only. Is she cold, like the oyster-shell sky of the London she has left behind? The dappled world of undulating fields and passing towns seems to answer: Yes. She looks away.
She tries to finish reading Mu’s diary entry on the death of her father. Perhaps, witnessing one of your family members dying is a way of understanding death, as well as a way of overcoming the vanity of youth. Childhood is a kind of eternity, youth is the time of daybreak. And then … Iona imagines her mother’s death. She thinks of the dying process taking hold of her mother’s body. It has already begun: hair falling, flesh beginning to loosen from bones, the heart growing weaker, like a slithering lizard scratching inside a box. But her imagination is running out of control. It’s only her mother’s sixtieth. Suddenly, a downpour of light flushes into the train; she peers at her serious face in the window, frowning, with an unsettled look. She feels a needling disturbance, but she also feels she has never been so steady and acc
epting of her own sense of anxiety. It’s like she can step back and look at herself, like watching a frightened animal. But as the shadow comes again, she wonders if her steadiness is just the coldness within her, rising up, like damp in a wall. Once the damp begins, you can’t stop it. Like a frozen shoulder joint, movement impossible.
The train stops in each town on the way north. Stafford, Stoke-on-Trent, Kidsgrove, Crewe, Preston, Lancaster, Carlisle. She’s not been anywhere; the names mean very little to her. She imagines Jian and Mu’s figures appearing, from time to time, in the midst of the hazy green fields. But their shadows are swallowed by the dark tunnels into which the train plunges headlong. As the train passes Glasgow, a steward pushing a trolley stuffed with snacks and drinks stops beside Iona. She turns and stares stupidly at the sweets and crisps and drinks; at a loss as to what to choose, she buys a chocolate bar and turns back to Mu’s diary.
In my peasant mother’s eyes the shipping tycoon Gu is Chairman Mao’s reincarnation, perhaps even more useful than Mao himself. Now, as I write, a London address is before me. And that address will be my new home—as a lodger in a flat in east London. Goodbye to my old life. Goodbye, China.