I Am China

by Xiaolu Guo

  14 ISLE OF MULL, SCOTLAND, OCTOBER 2013

  When Iona gets off the ferry, the afternoon light is already waning. She carries her bag and her Chinese vase across the evening moorland. The earth is wet and spongy and her shoes sink into the muddy ooze. Her trousers get spattered. It must have been raining yesterday. She gazes at the clouds. The landscape seems already paralysed by the autumn chill. The grass is grey-brown, the island static, suspended in a gloomy blue-grey. In the near distance she can see a few cows in front of her parents’ stone house, silhouetted against the grey sky. Then she sees the old pine tree in front of the house.

  It’s a black mountain pine, producing plenty of cones each year. She used to climb this tree when she was a moody little girl. And she would sit on the branches for a long time on summer afternoons; through the foliage she could see the sea, and in the distance the small island which bears her name: the Isle of Iona. And then she would speak to herself, to the little Iona inside her: “I want to see the world, I want to know everything about the world!”

  Iona’s mother has prepared a familiar family dinner. Steamed broccoli, roast potatoes and roast beef. Her father is not at home. “He went to the Beak,” her mother says lightly. The Beak is Swan’s Beak, their local pub down the valley. It has been going strong for decades, a local haunt, and her father has frequented it since long before Iona was born.

  “Is Nell not coming tomorrow?” asks Iona, noticing the kitchen is dim in the minutes before the last of the twilight fades to dark.

  “She’s just too exhausted with the twins … and Volodymyr can’t get time off work this week …” Her mother looks a little despondent. “I’ll miss having the boys this year.” She staggers to her feet and seems about to trip, but steadies herself.

  Iona notices her mother’s hand shakes a bit when she tries to open a bottle of whisky. She feels panicky—early symptoms of Parkinson’s disease? She says nothing.

  The wind penetrates the windowpanes and agitates dust on the slate floor. It is only late October but it is freezing cold, though the heating is on and the fire is lit. Iona takes off her muddy shoes and sits beside the fire, adding more wood.

  “Have you been to see the doctor recently, Mum?” Iona asks.

  “I went last week. He said my arthritis is stable—no worse, no better. I just need to learn to live with it … and he gave me some sleeping pills.”

  “Sleeping pills? Is that all he gave you?”

  “Well, you know how it is; there’s not much to be done about my legs.”

  Her mother takes another sip of whisky, her hands steadier now.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t drink so much,” Iona says with a frown.

  “It’s good for my joints and my blood,” her mother insists, as she always has done.

  As usual, they don’t wait for the old man before starting supper. The three of them will have a big birthday breakfast tomorrow anyway. The two women sit at the kitchen table thoughtfully, the silence punctuated by windy shivers and the sounds of their eating. Iona adds some salt to her plate. The broccoli is hard, zesty, but too simple for her. She begins to feel they are goats feeding on roots on a rocky clifftop.

  “Hmm, I steamed the broccoli, but it is still rather firm,” her mother mumbles apologetically. More silence and more chewing follows. The beef has been carved from a plate with a bloody pool of gravy. It has a real country heartiness, but there is no garlic, no spice, something Iona craves.

  Outside, the highland world is quiet but for the wind and the occasional animal cry. As she watches her mother eat, a sad tenderness colours Iona’s heart. Iona remembers flavours from her childhood—strong, pungent, full of spice—and the energetic mother of those years that this unhappy woman before her once was. When she was very young, her mother read her and her sister The Little Mermaid. She had cried when she learned that the mermaid had to cut off her exquisite tail to become a human so she could love a prince from the human world. And in the end the prince marries a human princess, leaving the little mermaid with her anguished heart and bleeding body, alone. Some years later, when Iona had her first period—the painful twist, like a screw inside her, bringing her to womanhood—she remembered the story again.

  “Seeing any nice boys?” her mother asks, liberally sprinkling salt on the potatoes. They are a rich golden brown, crisp and buttery.

  “Not really … I have met someone, but he’s a lot older … so, I don’t know.”

  “Well, as long as he’s not your father’s age …” Her mother looks at her quizzically.

  “No, not that old, Mum!” Iona feels anxious, a pause, she adds, “But I think he might be married.”

  “Then you must get over him.”

  “It’s not like taking an aspirin, you know.” Iona doesn’t even know what she feels for Jonathan exactly, but she won’t be told how to behave.

  “Tell me, Iona, what is it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I’m talking about. What is it you’re after?”

  “I don’t know …” Iona tries to think of a word. “I feel like I’m looking for something—a certain aliveness.”

  “Aliveness,” her mother murmurs, then sighs. It is not the first time the older woman has heard this curious term on her daughter’s lips. “That might have meant something to me once. At the moment, I’m just happy enough getting from one day to the next.”

  “Oh, things aren’t that bad, are they?”

  One, two, three, four, five, Iona counts, as she eats each potato. The rain is starting outside, carried by the sea wind. Her father is still not back from the pub. Iona remembers that when she was here having dinner with her mother last time, she also had a plate of crispy roast potatoes. Next day, right after her morning porridge, she took the first morning ferry and got the train back to London.

  “Mum …” Iona wipes her mouth and suddenly has a totally spontaneous idea—something grows from her guilt with this old farm and this old family. “You know what? Let me take you and Dad on holiday.”

  “What?” Her mother’s eyes are wide open; she turns her head aside, thinking she might be mishearing words. “What? A holiday?”

  “Yes, a holiday, Mum, you deserve a holiday, I want to arrange that for you and Dad …”

  Her mother hasn’t left the island for a long time. “Really? Well, I don’t know, darling.”

  “You could go somewhere warm and sunny.” Iona thinks, and improvises suggestions. “Crete, Mallorca, Cyprus … We can ask Dad when he comes back.”

  Her mother smiles gently, as if listening to a radio programme she likes. It seems she doesn’t really mind whether it happens or not; just imagining being on holiday with her daughter is in itself a wonderful gift on her sixtieth birthday.

  EIGHT | LAST DAYS IN CRETE

  zhong gua de gua, zhong dou de dou.

  Sow melon, reap melon; sow beans, reap beans.

  DONG ZHOU LIE GUO ZHI, FENG MENGLONG (PLAYWRIGHT, MING DYNASTY, 1574–1646)

  1 LONDON, NOVEMBER 2013

  Above Chapel Market, Iona is nearing the end of her translation. There are two more pages to go of Jian’s diary.

  I was ten years old. One day the school took us on a day trip to the seaside town of Qinghuang Island. It was the first time in my life that I had seen the sea. Blue. Blue was the colour I loved, just like this blue in front of me now, but I no longer care about this blue on this foreign ship with a foreign language I have never encountered before. That day my school friends and I played volleyball on the beach with the tide coming and going beneath our feet; we swam among the waves; we rolled in the sand; we found blue crabs under the rocks and we made a bonfire from driftwood; we cooked our catch of crabs and sang songs under the evening moon. I was with my “da jia”—my “big family”—all the Young Pioneer boys and girls, not even teenagers yet, laughing and crying together with joy. But the sea here, today, is different. It is totally desolate, devoid of the people I once knew, devoid of their laughter and
cries.

  Now I think that was probably one of the happiest days of my life. I felt so free. I remember the soothing wind, the boundless sky, the daring seagulls wheeling overhead and then diving into the water and plucking fish from the waves … Nature was so great that day. Nature was much greater than my family, than my Beijing life, than everything I was taught and forced to learn. I wish I had remained forever in that moment. I belonged to it like the sand belongs to the beach, like the seagulls belong to the sea.

  And this morning I woke up with a single image in my head. I dreamed of the bluest sea I will ever see.

  Iona turns to the next page of Jian’s diary. She is on the last page, there are no more photocopies in his file. On the white sheet, there are only two lines, scribbled with big characters. But the characters are sprawling out every which way and so messily written that they are nearly unrecognisable.

  It takes her a while to make out each character and she has to hold the page at odd angles to try and decipher the words. Eventually she has a rough translation of Jian’s two final sentences:

  The sea there is the bluest and purest. It’s the last blue I will see.

  There are no more words from Jian for her to translate, at least not from the files in front of her. Iona double-checks the whole package Jonathan gave her. There are a few unfinished poems from Mu that she hasn’t got to yet, but this is the last fragment in Jian’s scrawl. No dates, no location either. She returns to the page, murmurs and repeats these two mysterious lines out loud in Chinese and then in English. There is something so simple, so enigmatic about this small fragment. The meaning is elusive. She tries to translate it a different way, unsure exactly what he meant.

  The sea there is the bluest and purest. And this is the last blue I can see.

  Then she changes the tense. Since Chinese has no tense indication with verbs it can be hard to determine the meaning.

  The sea there was the bluest and purest. It was the last blue I have ever seen.

  And finally, she plays with the tense one last time.

  There, that sea, the bluest and purest sea. It will be the last blue I shall ever see.

  Iona stares at the original Chinese characters, those two sprawling lines, for a long while. After a few minutes suddenly a sensation of cold, a shivering, takes hold of her, welling up from somewhere. She feels anxious. Standing up from her chair, she moves to the window. Did he? Is he? Was he? Will he?

  What does that mean exactly, the last blue? She scrolls back on her screen to the page before that she’s just translated, and stares at one of the lines: “I no longer care about this blue on this foreign ship with a foreign language I have never encountered before.” So he is, or was, on a ship somewhere in the middle of the sea, surrounded by a language he doesn’t understand. Surely not English or French? Iona thinks hard. It could be Italian, Spanish, even Greek! She feels herself straining to find any thread, any clue from all the lines, all the words she has translated, that might elucidate such a cryptic fragment. Suddenly she remembers a diary entry early on, somewhere Jian and Mu mentioned the name of an island they might go to. She scrolls up on her computer and finds the page she translated several months ago.

  13 October 1993

  I met that girl again from the volleyball match …

  Iona scans down the screen until she finds the right place. The cursor blinks at her impatiently as she reads.

  “I’m looking at these small islands in the middle of the sea.” She pointed at an expanse of turquoise blue in the centre of the world map. “Wouldn’t it be amazing if one day we could visit these islands?”

  Her slightly bent index finger pointed out a few yellow dots in the blue sea. She pronounced their names haltingly as she placed her finger on each island. “Easter Island, Pitcairn, Majorca, Corsica, Sardinia, Crete.”

  “Where would you go, if you could choose just one island?” she asked me.

  “I don’t know,” I shrugged. “How are we to know anything if we have never been outside of China?”

  “Come on … just imagine. Imagine that one day you wake up and find yourself on a quiet and beautiful island in the middle of a very blue sea. Where would it be?” She nudged me.

  Then she covered my eyes with her palms, lifted my hand and let my finger land at random on the map. Then she removed her palms from my eyes and in an excited voice said: “Here it is, Crete.” A Greek island in the middle of the Mediterranean. That’s where my finger had found its place.

  2 LONDON, NOVEMBER 2013

  Iona calls Jonathan’s mobile, but it goes straight to voicemail. She tries a second time. The same seductive, offhand tone. Then she digs out his office number. The receptionist asks her if she’ll hold. A few seconds later, she hears the voice of the Applegate secretary with her indifferent tone, which now seems entirely offensive. “I’m sorry, Jonathan is in a meeting, do you want to leave a message for him?” Iona leaves her number and asks that he return her call.

  She comes back again to the lines: “ ‘Here it is, Crete.’ A Greek island in the middle of the Mediterranean. That’s where my finger had found its place.” Is she making too great a leap, too big an assumption, that over the space of twenty years, he might still have that same wish? This isn’t the convenient plot of a novel, after all. But there is something in the naive urgency of Jian’s voice as a young man, and the melancholy of his words now, that convince Iona she isn’t going crazy. And then the ambiguous scribbles on Jian’s last diary page, like a lift shaft through which she has fallen. The two lines are translated on her computer with four different tenses. The right version for this translation depends on which timeline Iona puts into Kublai Jian’s story in her narrative; and perhaps it finally depends on what is a true Kublai Jian story, when exactly this story begins—and when it ends!

  Restlessly, Iona tries Jonathan’s mobile again. This time it’s not the recorded baritone she knows so well, but another voice, Jonathan’s brisk “Hello,” which now seems strange.

  “It’s me, Iona.”

  “Hi, Iona. Sorry, not great timing. I can only talk briefly. I’m just about to go into another meeting.”

  Although resonant, his voice is nevertheless reserved and distant. He is in office mood.

  “Of course. I’ve got just one question actually: Do you know where Kublai Jian is now?” Iona asks bluntly.

  “Where? If I knew where he was, things would be a lot easier, wouldn’t they, and we wouldn’t have to go around digging up random pieces of information from cautious embassy clerks. What’s your point, Iona?”

  “Do you think he’s still alive?” Iona is growing a little desperate.

  “Alive? God, Iona, I don’t know—I haven’t thought about it. I imagine he might still be detained somewhere … perhaps …”

  “Do you think I could find him? I mean, a Greek island is small enough surely for a lone Chinese man to stick out?”

  “A Greek island? Sorry, Iona, I think you’ve lost me there. Surely he was last in France—why would he suddenly be on a Greek island?”

  “In the final section of the diary, there’s a hint of where he might be headed. He was on a ship somewhere.”

  “Right, OK … but … Really, Iona, I have no idea what you’re talking about. And, I mean, how could you possibly find him?” Jonathan pauses, thinking. Then he asks: “So does this mean you have finished the translation?”

  “Nearly …” Then she hears him telling his secretary or assistant that he will skip the beginning of the next meeting. “Listen, Iona, we’ve just managed to find out Mu’s address in London. It seems she’s now working for a UK branch of some sort of Chinese shipping company, based in east London.”

  “Really?” Iona is instantly excited. “So she is in London after all. Can you send over her address? Why didn’t you tell me earlier—this is such great news!”

  There is silence at the other end of the phone and Iona starts to say something, but Jonathan interrupts.

  “Yes it is, bu
t—well the reason we stopped our background research is because … Well, I don’t know if I should tell you this.” Jonathan slows down and it feels to her that he is choosing his words with great care. “I got a phone call from China last week—from the office of the Ministry of State Security. The man on the phone told me that I shouldn’t publish anything linked to Kublai Jian, and in fact that I mustn’t use his diaries or letters in translation form or even just as reference material in any way whatsoever, and must certainly never release any of the material to the public.”

  “Mustn’t?” Iona repeats, exasperated. She pulls at her hair in frustration.

  “Yes, mustn’t. Mustn’t translate. Mustn’t publish. Practically mustn’t even talk about Kublai Jian. Hang on, let me read you what he sent me. I received an email from the Minister after our phone conversation, and—um, here it is, yes, ‘Our Chinese politician’s son should not become the subject of media attention. We demand a mutual respect between Western media and domestic Chinese politics. If you insist on publishing these documents, we are afraid you will face certain consequences. We cannot guarantee that any future business plans you may have in China will not be adversely affected if you fail to comply with our wishes.’ That’s it.”

  There’s a pause. Iona tries to get her head around this new piece of information. Then Jonathan’s voice becomes weary.

  “As you can imagine, I’ve been thinking this over for a while. When you get phone calls from the Chinese government you have to take them seriously. Clearly, they don’t want news about Kublai Jian’s exile to become public knowledge, nor his relationship with his father. And then again last week, we received another phone call, this time from the Chinese Embassy here. They seem to know all about it and were very adamant about warning me.”