I Am China

by Xiaolu Guo

  “Right …” The officer writes something on the form and looks up again. “Do you know if he used any other name? Like a Western name?”

  Iona shakes her head. “I’m not sure, but he might have a French health insurance card with a different name …” She hears her own voice trembling slightly.

  “Yes, we’ve got that. A—” she takes the plastic card out and reads the name badly in Greek-accented Chinese—“Mr. Chang Linyuan … Yes, that was also found in his bag.”

  “I think Chang was a chef Kublai Jian met in France.”

  “We can lead you to the morgue to check the body, but before that you have to fill in all your personal details here.”

  In the morgue, Iona’s eyes rest on a seawater-washed body. His face is pale, swollen, although it still retains the traces of youth, and a vague sense of some original character. His eyes are closed, those eyes Iona has never seen, and now, as if they completed their final statement, the secret is sealed forever. A certain horror creeps from the corpse lying there on the slab to Iona’s body.

  “So is this the man you say you know? A Kublai Jian?” the female officer asks.

  A few seconds of silence, then Iona breathes out. “Actually I have never met him. I only know his writing, and I am not certain this is him.”

  “What do you mean?” The police officer is not happy with Iona’s answer. Her face becomes rigid. “When we were upstairs you told me you were this man’s friend, you were his translator.”

  “Yes, but I have only been translating the documents about him, I have never actually met him in person.”

  The cool gaze of the policewoman chills Iona. Neither of them says a word. There is only sickly heavy air hanging around them.

  Back upstairs Iona is handed a diary and a letter. A letter with familiar scrawly handwriting. This time, it is not a photocopy, but an original.

  Under the gaze of two police officers and a secretary, Iona silently reads the first four lines of the letter. Then she stops. She can’t bring herself to believe what she is reading.

  To the ones in this world who will eventually read my words:

  And to Mu:

  The sea here is the bluest and purest I have ever seen. It’s the last blue I will see. They say planet Earth is a blue planet when you see it from space. So I want to go out with the blue.

  Iona takes a deep breath, and reads a few more lines.

  And the air, too. As much as I like to breathe the fragrance of the gum trees and the dried sunflowers, it’s not going to win me back. It’s not an argument that can convince me to stay. It’s just a smell in my nostrils. So what? There is something in my head that I can’t swing out of, and now that thing in my head has spread to the whole world. It saturates it all. So there is no space left for me.

  I have sung my songs and there’s no longer a place for me to sing them, either in the East or the West. There never was a punk culture in China. Punk isn’t an illusion. It’s the masses who suffer from the illusion. They cannot escape to see through the veil of commodification and the advertising slogan. I do not regret, or think I was wrong in, the manifesto I wrote. But maybe there was never a manifesto in the end: it is me, becoming what I wrote.

  You are in my mind every day. I am talking to you every day of my life, but our life in this world has ended. I am already with those who have taken the other path. My dead mother, my deceased grandparents, and our baby boy Little Shu. Whether the end is now or in the future, since time has stopped flowing forward, it’s all the same. I don’t have dreams of living in an afterlife. I am not for life. I know I have disappointed you, my dearest.

  Time is flowing backwards here. Leaves are leaping from the ground and attaching themselves to the trees, and waves are going back out to sea. The wind is dropping sand from the sky onto the beach; but I am not growing younger …

  Best to draw a line in the sand. No more than this.

  Don’t forget, my love for you is beyond this life.

  Jian

  11 LONDON, NOVEMBER 2013

  When the plane lands Iona switches on her mobile and rings Jonathan. As she waits for the line to be connected, she realises it is Friday night, nearly eight o’clock.

  “Listen, Jonathan, I know the timing is shitty, but is there any way I can see you this evening?”

  “This evening? I’m busy right now, Iona. We’re actually having a little celebration in our office for—”

  “It can’t wait, Jonathan. It’s really urgent. Please, it’s about the work—about Kublai Jian.”

  Iona can hear background noise from the other end of the phone. “Well, if it is about work, how about you come into the office on Monday morning and we can talk about it then?”

  “No, I need to see you. How about tomorrow morning?”

  “Tomorrow morning? You mean Saturday? OK, if you want. But you know, as I said, Iona, I’m not going to publish this book for a while—”

  “Yes. I heard. So, where can we meet?” Iona keeps it brief.

  “How about lunch? I can cook something simple at my house, if you don’t mind coming to Shepherd’s Bush.”

  For a second, Iona thinks she has misheard. Go to his house? What about his wife and children? But she hasn’t misheard, for then he says, “I’ll text you the address. Say around one o’clock?”

  Iona is surprised, confused perhaps, but she answers a weak “Yes.” The phone is hot against her ear. She doesn’t really know how she should feel. The London sky is dark and starless, the concrete pavement frosty under her sore feet. It must be reaching near-freezing.

  12 LONDON, NOVEMBER 2013

  Saturday morning. Waking up from a series of feverish dreams with the faces of men she’s slept with—even the face of a peaceful, dead Jian—Iona opens her eyes. She looks at the clock; it is already ten thirty.

  In the shower she lets the warm water run through her hair and down her body. She dimly remembers an episode of her dream—first there was an urgent doorbell, twice, very impatient; then, as she opened the door, two Chinese policemen stood before her with inscrutable faces. They pushed her away, entered the room and walked straight to her desk, where they snatched her computer, along with all the Chinese documents laid beside it. Then suddenly, in that inexplicable way that things happen in dreams, the figures disappeared, leaving her alone and confused standing by the open door, looking back at her empty desk. When she realised what was happening, she tried to run downstairs, but her body was so heavy she couldn’t lift her legs—her dream had chained them together, she had no strength and she struggled, forcing her legs to move until she was exhausted. And then she had woken up.

  When she opened her eyes, the first thing she did was sit up instantly and stagger towards her desk. And there was her computer and all the Chinese files. They were there like a pile of fossils, untouched, secretive, but safe. In her pyjamas she had sat down at her desk for a moment, just laying her hand on the pile of papers for a few minutes. A verification. A prayer. Until she was properly awake.

  Two hours later, Iona comes out of Shepherd’s Bush Tube station, crosses the main road and checks the map on her phone. She walks down the street scanning the house numbers. It doesn’t take her long to find Jonathan’s place. It is a typical Victorian family house, with wisteria growing up the side of the heavy door and a broken child’s bicycle in the front garden. As she presses the doorbell, a dog starts barking inside; then Jonathan opens the door. He is wearing a T-shirt and low-slung jeans, and has a cooking spoon in his hand. They kiss on both cheeks. Iona feels slightly disappointed.

  “Come on in. Are you hungry? I’ve just finished making some soup.”

  She shoves herself, curious and yet unprepared, into a house she has imagined for a long while. There is a strong smell of roasted onions coming from the kitchen. As she takes off her winter coat and scarf, she doesn’t hear the expected noise of children, and nor does a woman emerge to greet her. The house is quiet and spacious, but very messy. Newspapers and books are
piled everywhere, as well as some manuscripts. Iona spots the early pages of her translation which she sent to Applegate Books all those months ago. Well, here we are, we are on the same page now, she mutters to herself. At the back of the kitchen, the garden is wild and the grass untrimmed, a leafy old apple tree standing in the middle. In a corner of the garden lies a pile of sun-bleached children’s toys.

  “Make yourself comfortable. Do you want some soup? And I couldn’t resist getting some fish, too,” Jonathan says. “I remember you saying you liked sea bass.”

  He seems to be in a good mood and glad that she’s there. He does not know why she is suddenly here for an urgent Saturday visit, but equally he does not ask, and she is glad of that. Iona feels nervous and unsettled. For a brief moment she thinks perhaps she won’t tell him anything. They can have a nice lunch together, perhaps go upstairs to bed, or sit and talk about books. She doesn’t know where to start, to ask about where his family is, or to tell him she has just been to Crete, and found Kublai Jian’s dead body in the basement of a police station with a suicide letter.

  But there he is: Jonathan, a man whose life is about constructing stories; the man who has sent her on a heavy emotional journey in the last few months. He is not at all just someone; he is a particular one, with a clear mind and firm presence.

  “Where is your … family?” asks Iona hesitantly.

  He turns his head from the stove and the hot steam rising from the pot of soup. He looks at her intently then turns back to his cooking. “They don’t live here any more. Let me get the cooking done and then we can talk.”

  She stands behind him, watching him cooking, and waits. But she is not watching him at all, in fact her eyes see nothing of this reality. All she can see is a frozen body on a slab in the basement of Crete West Coast Police Station.

  “Kublai Jian is dead,” she blurts out.

  “What?”

  “He died three days ago. I went to Crete, and I went to the local police station on the island to see the body.”

  “You went to Crete? You saw his body? What? Stop, hang on. Iona, what are you talking about?”

  “I just got back last night.” Iona’s voice is taut, frustrated. “I was too late … if I’d only gone to look for him two days earlier, or even a week earlier, a month earlier … I could have talked to him. I could have saved him! I knew he was in Crete. I figured out from his diary that Crete might be where he would go if he—if he felt that awful he—but I didn’t get there on time! I was too late! It’s so stupid of me!”

  Iona’s control crumbles and she bursts out a flood of words and tears all at once. She feels extremely angry with herself.

  Jonathan still doesn’t say anything. He stirs the soup very slowly.

  Iona takes a battered piece of paper out of her pocket. Jian’s final letter to the world, a photocopy she brought back from Crete West Coast Police Station.

  An hour passes. A deep sense of lassitude and loss have taken over them both, making them numb and speechless.

  13 LONDON, NOVEMBER 2013

  They sit down to eat the soup, barely lukewarm now. Green lentil soup and steamed sea bass to follow. Jonathan puts a bottle of white wine in front of Iona, while he opens a can of beer for himself. He breaks the silence.

  “You were asking about my family before, well, I can tell you now … if you still want to know.”

  Iona nods her head.

  “A year ago, my wife took my two boys to India,” he starts slowly. “It was supposed to be a holiday, but then it stretched into months; later she returned with the boys but only stayed in London for two months. Then she went to India again, taking the children with her. She hasn’t been back since.”

  “What about the children?”

  “She’s put them in an international school in Delhi and is asking for a divorce.”

  A pause. Iona puts down her spoon.

  “And I can do nothing in India, apart from be a tourist. I need to be here with my work, and my company.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that …” Iona says in a low voice. “You did mention you were in India a while ago.”

  “Yes, and it turned out to be a disaster.” He finishes his soup, pushes his bowl to one side, and continues talking, his voice a little subdued. “She didn’t let on that she had been in love with her yoga teacher for the last two years. The holiday was a ruse; he’d moved out there and she couldn’t resist following. You could say I had a bit of a rude awakening. When I arrived in Delhi I was standing in the doorway with my suitcase still in my hands when suddenly her boyfriend came out of her bedroom and started playing with my children in their sitting room like a big happy family.”

  Jonathan falls silent. Iona watches him picking out bones from his sea bass with a fork.

  “Is he Indian?” Iona asks.

  “No, he’s a hippy from America, actually. Used to teach here, then moved to Delhi.” Jonathan’s voice becomes calmer. “I left and checked into a hotel. It was a new place, run by a Dutch couple. I holed up in the bedroom, put the air conditioning on, and read most of your translation. I thought: here I am, in a tacky Indian hotel, reading an exiled Chinese man’s story, unable to see my wife and my children. How absurd is that.” He sounds resigned, calm almost.

  Iona takes a bite of the fish, it’s overcooked and cooling fast. She puts her knife and fork down, gazes into the dull eye of the fish on her plate, trying to comb out a tangle of thoughts. “Sorry, Jonathan, I don’t know what to say,” she mumbles.

  “That’s OK. It’s mainly my fault, I realise …” Jonathan’s voice becomes clearer as he finishes his beer. “Her dissatisfaction with me is understandable. I care too much about my work, never give enough attention to her and the children. Right now I feel like I care more about Kublai Jian’s family than my own.”

  It is a chilly Saturday afternoon. The winter air penetrates the door and streaks of condensation slip down the windowpanes. Iona looks out to the garden, the branches of the apple tree shiver and bend in the wind. But there is something unusual in today’s air. She looks more closely. Yes, it is snowing. Jonathan follows her eyes and watches the snow for a beat. They walk out of the kitchen, and stand in the middle of the garden, gazing at the gently falling flakes.

  Iona reaches out her hand to the snow. Suddenly she no longer feels anxious, either with herself or with Jonathan.

  They return inside and pick over the remainder of their lunch.

  “I had a dream last night,” Iona says, looking at her food, and then looks up. “It was horrible. I dreamed two Chinese policemen entered my flat and confiscated all the documents and my computer. Then I woke up. I wondered why I wanted to come here today—just to tell you Kublai Jian is dead, or something more? And then I found the answer on the way to your house.” Iona looks into Jonathan’s eyes. “You must publish this book, Jonathan, as soon as you can. I don’t think we should worry about pressure from China.”

  Jonathan folds his arms, sits back and listens to her attentively.

  “This is Britain after all!” Iona raises her voice, flicks her hair back dramatically. “It’s also my book, Jonathan. I’ve been working on this for months now. It’s got into me. You might not know what it is to struggle to translate and bring out something from another world into our world. It’s hard, and it takes it out of you, your energy, your days and nights. I’ve been getting deeper and deeper into these two people and their story. They’ve laid it all before me, like they’re ready to open themselves up to the world. And I have been a part of that opening up.”

  Jonathan looks confused.

  “Opening up—to China. Mu and Jian have such an incredible and tough story. It cuts across so much of what we take for granted. Don’t pretend you don’t understand. Don’t pretend you don’t believe in this too, Jonathan … And maybe it’s about responsibility also. It’s a cliché, but we owe it to them to tell their story, to show their love, and their destruction too …” Iona’s eyes glitter. “Maybe also to report o
n Jian’s death. We can show what his choice was and how he decided to die, and that’s important. I thought, here it is, I’m going to live with them, live through them, until the day this story comes out into the light. And there’s no way I’m going to let anyone hush it up. We must publish it. And soon!”

  Jonathan smiles and says her name. “Iona.”

  She suddenly feels she has known this man for a very long time. She is so familiar with his frown, his smile, his discreetly greying hair about the temples, and she feels that she probably knows his awkwardness and his weaknesses too. She recognises what he is, and is comfortable with that; but it’s subtle, as if it comes from some recess in the back of her mind.

  As their eyes meet, a phone rings somewhere in the house. Jonathan turns round; it’s the phone in the living room. He lets it ring until it stops and the room becomes quiet again.

  They grin. Her dimple is deep. The air in the winter house becomes sweeter, thicker; it collects between Jonathan and Iona and links them. She knows there is something precious in this moment, something to do with love, in this space, right now. She feels like crying. This feeling is so fragile, so discreet, and yet it seems mutually acknowledged without either of them saying another word. For a while, in this space, all they hear is the wind shaking the windows, and the soft hush of snow falling on the apple tree in the garden.

  NINE | WOMEN WITHOUT MEN

  Hai di lao yue.

  It’s not likely to fish the moon out from the bottom of the sea.

  SONGS OF YONG JIA ZHENG DAO, SHI YUAN JUE (WRITER, TANG DYNASTY, EIGHTH CENTURY)

  1

  Buckingham Palace

  London, SW1A 1AA