Nine Continents

by Xiaolu Guo

  But far back in my ‘positive’ Chinese mind I still felt I had a right to reproduce, to bring hope through the creation of a new generation. The China of my youth is far away now; the past is another country. Our children are our future. They will create something new in a way my generation and my father’s generation failed to do. The new generation will have to be more ecologically aware.

  Of all the negative and positive voices in my mind, the positive prevailed. So that just after my father’s death, on the verge of turning forty, I found myself asking the same question again: should I spend the rest of my life brooding hopelessly on the failings of humanity, or should I bring hope into the world by having a child and creating a person to whom I could give the best knowledge I had? I chose my future child.

  Nine months of being pregnant felt unbearably drawn out at the time, but when I look back now, it feels short and quite magical. I have always been a very impatient person. I have struggled to write long books or carry through on year-long film productions because of my low threshold for distraction. But with this, there was no way to speed up the process. All I could do was wait. The only nine months of my life I have ever truly waited, with full participation, apprehension, excitement and fear.

  I have never been a sentimental person – I don’t weep easily while watching films or attending funerals. But while pregnant, I would burst into tears at cheesy Hollywood movies. Even the cry of a child in a television soap would affect me and make my eyes wet. Just before midnight on New Year’s Eve 2013, one day before my due date, Steve and I decided to take a gentle walk through Hackney. We went from crowded Mare Street to the quiet back roads of Victoria Park. The sensations in my belly were intensified by strong kicking from the baby. I couldn’t distinguish between her feet pushing from inside me and the onset of labour. I was nervous, and very emotional. As the fireworks burst above us, I watched and wept.

  On the second day of 2013, our child was born. Weighing nearly nine pounds, she was robust and didn’t look particularly like either her mother or her father. She was a mix, a Eurasian, with brownish hair, fair skin and dark eyes. We named her Moon. As her small round face lay against my breast, I thought about my parents. My father never had the chance to see his rebellious daughter become a mother, or meet the granddaughter that had been named after one of his favourite things to paint. She would have made him so happy.

  Two months later, on the eve of the Qingming Festival for the dead, my new family was on a plane to China. Moon was oblivious to time; screaming, crying, sucking and then falling asleep on me in a twelve-hour cycle, she was living in the moment. ‘Don’t cry,’ I said. ‘I’m taking you to see the place where I was born.’

  The Final Visit

  The experience of childbirth made it seem like half a lifetime since I had seen my mother. Everything was blurry because of a lack of sleep, including the face and figure of my mother. There she was, a middle-aged peasant woman, waving through the glass of the arrival-hall doors. I could have walked past her without realising that this short, humble woman was my mother. I held Moon tight to my chest and dragged our luggage towards her. Steve followed with the pram and another bag. My heart felt heavy.

  ‘Ah, what a lovely little one …’ Then my mother hugged me with a weary look. She was much thinner than the last time I had seen her. Her skin was yellow and her steps were weak, as if she had just left hospital. She turned to the squirming baby wrapped in my arms. There was surprise and a little joy in her eyes, but her mood seemed to be clouded by something else. She didn’t take the baby into her arms as a typical grandmother would. She wasn’t fully prepared, perhaps. When Steve tried to greet her and shake her hand, she paid him no attention. We followed her to a taxi.

  ‘It’s not easy raising a child abroad alone,’ she said suddenly, when we reached the car.

  ‘But I’m not alone, Mother!’ I pointed to the Western man standing behind me, towering above all the Chinese men around him. How could she have not noticed him? My mother turned and gave Steve a glance, my chance to make a short introduction. It was hard to know how my mother really felt about him. She knew I was still not married and I probably never would get married. In her eyes, a foreign boyfriend without a wedding ceremony and an official certificate meant nothing. I was fine with her attitude. She didn’t have to agree with my choices.

  Once home, she reached for her hair and removed it, revealing her bald head underneath. I was in a state of shock. Then, before I could say anything, she told me in a matter-of-fact voice:

  ‘Have you ever heard of widow’s cancer? That’s what your mother’s got.’

  ‘Widow’s cancer?’

  ‘Yes. Stomach cancer, late stage. The doctor said I might have three months.’

  I was thunderstruck. It explained her strange appearance at the airport, her reluctance to hold Moon, her distance. Now I also understood why she had urged me to return to China when I had called. She hadn’t wanted to tell me about the cancer over the phone. She didn’t want me to worry about her while breastfeeding the baby.

  Like a lot of women, she believed a new mother’s milk would stop under emotional stress. As I was making a bed on the sofa for the baby, she told me the doctor said she was too far gone for surgery, but she was undergoing chemotherapy. It was a miserable experience, she said, she was vomiting all the time and felt very sick.

  That evening my brother and his family drove a few hours to meet us. He was only two years older than me, but he looked puffy, weary and far more middle-aged than a man of forty-two years should. His little daughter was healthy and energetic, as if she had sucked his spirit into her body. My brother’s wife was happy to meet us. ‘I’ve heard so much about you, Xiaolu! I can’t believe you’re finally here!’ She was the most excited to meet our baby Moon. We went to a seafood restaurant to celebrate the reunion. It was our first family meal with all three generations around the same dining table – only Father was missing. We ordered mountains of food, and my brother kept adding dishes from the menu. But my mother ate only a small bowl of porridge. She could hardly swallow. At one point the waitress brought a large bowl of crab soup. Vivid red legs and pincers swimming in a gingered broth. I didn’t expect my brother to order sea crabs. No one in the family had good teeth, and my Australian didn’t have much experience eating hard-shelled crabs. We drank the soup but left the monstrous creature in the bowl. Staring at those red pincers and two beady eyes, I suddenly remembered the opera from my childhood, Madame White Snake, in which an evil tortoise turned monk, resentful of the earthly happiness of others, seeks revenge on loving couples but ends up hiding himself in the stomach of a crab. Any human who ate the yellow part of the crab suffered stomach aches. The fear had stuck with me as a child. I still remember screaming at my grandmother not to swallow. Had my mother bitten from the cursed sea creature? Terminal stomach cancer. The monk had taken his revenge yet again on another woman.

  During our two-week stay in Wenling, we walked around with my mother, usually between the hospital and our home. The town had now grown into a city of two million inhabitants, and shiny skyscrapers had grown out of the mud and old socialist factory compounds. It was disorientating for me. Where were all the peasant workers in blue uniforms? Our house used to be fringed by rapeseed fields and untouched bamboo mountains, but now these were crowded with new buildings and traffic. We passed a row of grey concrete buildings – Wenling Silk Factory where my mother used to work. It was now a dead space, awaiting the wrecking ball. A certain nostalgia washed over me, and I tried to remember the taste of the roasted silkworms on skewers that I had eaten so often as a child on those desolate afternoons after school. But I couldn’t recall the taste on my tongue. Everywhere was the scourge of pollution: black discharge pouring into the river from pipes, the very same water in which I used to catch shrimps and small crabs; mountains stripped of vegetation and now littered with shredded plastic rubbish bags. Still, I heard children laughing and playing – not in my imagination, but
right in front of me – on the riverbank next to the oily black water.

  The Return

  But the sea was calling me. Swaddled in a warm blanket, we took Moon to visit my grandparents’ fishing village. The bus trip to Shitang was easy and quick compared with when I was a child. As we arrived, I discovered that even the station had been relocated. Standing on the asphalted promontory, I breathed in the familiar air. It had the same fishy salty taste, and the same perfume of kelp and ribbonfish hung in the air, but now this was mixed with a strong odour of petrol. As we walked down the hill towards the open sea, I spotted large industrial fishing boats parked in the harbour and my heart leapt. They were different to the ones of my youth, but I loved the sight of them, creating elaborate ripple patterns in the water. As we got closer, I could hear the workers speaking Mandarin Chinese to each other. ‘How are the fish today?’ I asked one of them in Shitang dialect. He didn’t react, so I tried another question. ‘Did you catch any big snapper?’ But everyone stared back at me with blank expressions. They were migrants, I realised, they didn’t know the local tongue. Of course Shitang had always been home to migrant fishermen. My grandfather had been one. I had forgotten, somewhere in the thirty years since his death.

  As we stood by the churning waves, Moon woke up in the sling and opened her eyes. Her small head stretched out a little from my jacket, and seemed to peer out at the vast body of water in front of her. What did she see? I wondered. Was it the grey waves of my childhood? Would this picture survive into her later life to form a dim memory of the past? Or, was the sea nothing more than another part of her mother’s body and being?

  Carrying Moon in the sling, we tried to find our way back to my grandparents’ house, but we were soon lost in a maze of new buildings and streets. Whenever I passed some old people sitting out on the street, I wondered if they recognised me. Yet I couldn’t recall any of these wrinkled faces. And neither could I find my childhood home. We stopped and I asked a white-haired man if he knew a street named Front Barrier Slope. The old man stared at me for almost half a minute, not responding but only sucking on his cigarette. I then tried again in the local dialect: ‘Front Barrier Slope, it used to be called Anti-Pirate Passage.’ An obscure smile squeezed itself out across his face and he pointed with his nicotine-stained finger.

  Finally, I spotted the old stone house, squashed in between two new premises. It was our house. My feet slowed as we approached. The outside hadn’t changed at all, although now it was a hair salon filled with fashionable teenagers. Standing outside for a while, I wasn’t sure if I should go in and introduce myself to the owner.

  After some hesitation, I entered with Moon in my arms. A middle-aged man was cutting the hair of a young girl. Two teen-aged boys sat on a bench playing with their phones. I introduced myself to the man: my name, and my family name, Guo.

  ‘Guo?’ The man’s eyes sparkled, as if he might just recognise me.

  ‘Yes. We owned this house twenty-five years ago, or more actually, twenty-seven years ago, when my grandmother was still alive.’

  The man holding the scissors immediately understood who I was. ‘I know! I know! Your father sold this house to us! How is he? All well?’

  I nodded. I didn’t want to explain. He dropped what he was doing, leaving his customer on the chair, and called to his wife to say hello to me. It was an awkward situation. We were invited inside for tea. The sofa we sat on was where my grandmother used to have her old bamboo bed, and where we had slept every night. This was also where, on the very night my grandmother died, I sat with my parents and watched over her coffin under candlelight. As I sat on the edge of the sofa, holding the teacup, I wondered about the upstairs room. My grandfather’s room. There was no sound coming from the top floor.

  ‘Oh, the ceiling upstairs has been leaking for a while. We don’t use that room,’ the wife said, as if she could read my thoughts.

  Sunset cast a golden light across the wavy sea and the grey sand. We took the bus back to Wenling before nightfall. Despite my mother’s illness, I was longing to return to Britain. There was no use in us staying here with her. We had nothing more to say to each other. Physical closeness hadn’t brought us together in any way emotionally. Our minds had occupied different universes for too long, and we couldn’t bridge the chasm that had been created. Our relationship had always gone unacknowledged. It was just a fact, like breathing air, or rain in typhoon season. It was unconscious. As if we were performing a script which neither of us had written. We never wanted or liked it, but it had been handed to us by fate. Perhaps I had never looked into my mother’s eyes with the hope of understanding her situation, and she had never done the same for me. I had no memory of a motherly look. There was only the culturally programmed habits of duty, hers of a mother and mine of a filial child. That programme had replaced any true understanding between us. It had conditioned me, indeed, had made me guilty from the very beginning, as the unworthy, wayward daughter. It had killed any natural love I might have had for my birth family. It had never been there in the first place. Of course, I was aware of how my own child would feel about all this when she grew up, since her childhood would take place in the West – a totally different reality from mine. I will have to wait and see how our relationship turns out.

  A few days later we said goodbye to my mother. We stood by the taxi, which was about to take us to the airport, and I looked at my mother. She looked back at me, but somehow our eyes didn’t meet. I took in her broad face, aged and wrinkled, but still childlike in some way. I could tell she felt miserable. My heart was pained by a coldness, a feeling that there was no love in me. There was just a kind of weight, unbearable weight, and a lethargy of the spirit. In the next life, I would be a good daughter, I thought. She wore her wig, like an actor performing one of the opera roles of her youth, and kept up a stream of simple comments about catching the flight and breastfeeding Moon. I nodded but said nothing. Both of us knew, I guessed, that there would be no next time.

  The Circle of Life

  We returned to London. Two months passed in a swirl of activity, mostly breastfeeding and struggling to cope with sleep deprivation. We were also in the midst of buying a flat in east London and trying to plan a better family life. Then one day I received a phone call from China. It was my brother. His voice was jagged. Our mother had lost consciousness three days previously. She could die at any moment, she survived only by being fed oxygen through a tube in her nose. I listened, watching the removal men loading our furniture into the back of their van as the traffic police yelled at them to get out of the way.

  Two days later, I was unpacking boxes in our new flat and I received another call from China. ‘Yes, she just died,’ my brother reported in a flat, spiritless voice. ‘I assume you won’t come back for her funeral. We’ll cremate her in the next few days.’ He hung up the phone. We had no words to exchange, and no shared pain to express.

  I sat alone on the floor, surrounded by more unopened boxes. A dull depression was sinking into my body, forming a dark, inert mass that absorbed all light. I was being dragged downwards, like a body tied to a stone sinking to the bottom of a stagnant lake. But then, I felt a rush of relief and liberation, buoying me up. The stone fell away and I emerged through the surface of the water. The feeling wasn’t levity or joy. It was a sense of clarity. Now my father and my mother were gone, I had been orphaned for a second time.

  The protagonists of my favourite books were all orphans. They were parentless, self-made heroes. They had had to create themselves, since they had come from nothing and no inheritance. In my own way I too was self-made. I was born and then flung aside, to survive in a rocky village by the ocean. If I had to pinpoint a moment when this thought crystallised in my mind, it was that day on the beach in Shitang when I met the art students drawing in their sketch pads facing a sunless, wavy-grey sea. I was six years old and consumed by an ineffable loneliness. I watched the young girl in particular as she contemplated the monotonous scene before us, a
nd then started to apply paint to her paper. Her brush made a shimmering blue and a burning sunset appear across the page. I was suddenly captivated by the girl’s imaginative act: that one could reshape a drab and colourless reality into a luminous world.

  Now, surrounded by boxes in a London flat, the narrative of my past had been brought to a close. The beginning and end echoed each other. My childhood was gone. Finally I felt free from the burden of my family. I no longer needed to find them. I was my own home now. And at last, I could breathe fully, taking fresh new air into my own lungs.

  Ode to the Light, Xiuling Guo, a typical seascape by my father

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am deeply indebted to Sasha Mudd and Stephen Barker for their comments on early drafts. I feel extremely grateful to Anna Holmwood for her elegant and thoughtful edit. As always, I thank wholeheartedly Juliet Brooke for her intense editorial work and Rebecca Carter and Cullen Stanley from Janklow & Nesbit who have supported each stage of my writing.

  I am so very fortunate to have found a home with my publishers – the Chatto & Windus team in the UK, Amy Hundley and Morgan Entrekin from Grove Atlantic in the US, Claudia Vidoni from Knaus Verlag, Andrea Berrini and Gaia Amaducci at Metropoli d’Asia, Dag Hernried from Alfabeta Bokförlag, Gesa Schneider, Thomas Geiger from Zurich and the following great individuals who have supported me over the years: Clara Farmer, Claire Paterson, Rebecca Folland, Kirsty Gordon, Sam Coates, Monique Corless, Anne Rademacher, Shalene Moodie, Vanni Bianconi, Philippe Ciompi, Suzanne Dean, Mari Yamazaki and John Freeman.