I Am China Read online

  Also by Xiaolu Guo

  Village of Stone (translated from the Chinese)

  A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers

  Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

  UFO in Her Eyes

  Lovers in the Age of Indifference

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2014 by Xiaolu Guo

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Nan A. Talese / Doubleday, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House Companies. Originally published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus, an imprint of the Random House Group Limited, London. This edition published by arrangement with Chatto & Windus.

  www.nanatalese.com

  Doubleday is a registered trademark of Random House LLC. Nan A. Talese and the colophon are trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Jacket design by Emily Mahon

  Jacket photograph by Masha Sadari

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Guo, Xiaolu, 1973–

  I Am China : a novel / Xiaolu Guo.—First American Edition.

  pages cm

  “Originally published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus, an imprint of the Random House Group Limited, London.”

  ISBN 978-0-385-53871-8 (hardcover) ISBN 978-0-385-53872-5 (eBook)

  1. Short stories, English. I. Title.

  PR9450.9.G86I26 2014

  823′.92—dc23 2013049786

  v3.1

  I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you

  Till China and Africa meet,

  And the river jumps over the mountain

  And the salmon sing in the street.

  “AS I WALKED OUT ONE EVENING,” W.H. AUDEN

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Prelude

  one Iona

  1: London, April 2013

  2: London, April 2013

  3: Lincolnshire, January 2012

  4: Lincolnshire, February 2012

  5: London, April 2013

  6: London, April 2013

  7: Lincolnshire, February 2012

  8: Lincolnshire, February 2012

  9: London, May 2013

  10: London, May 2013

  two Welcome to Dover

  1: Dover, April 2012

  2: Dover, April 2012

  3: London, May 2013

  4: Dover, April 2012

  5: London, May 2013

  6: London, May 2013

  7: Dover, May 2012

  8: London, May 2013

  9: London, May 2013

  10: London, May 2013

  11: London, May 2013

  12: London, May 2013

  13: Shanghai, April 2012

  three Interim Zone

  1: London, May 2013

  2: London, May 2013

  3: London, May 2013

  4: London, May 2013

  5: Zentrum Für Den Schutz Von Asyl, Switzerland, May 2012

  6: Zentrum Für Den Schutz Von Asyl, Switzerland, May 2012

  7: Zentrum Für Den Schutz Von Asyl, Switzerland, May 2012

  8: London, May 2013

  9: London, May 2013

  10: Beijing, Millennium Eve, 1999

  four On the Road

  1: Philadelphia, April 2012

  2: London, May 2013

  3: Chicago, May 2012

  4: London, May 2013

  5: London, May 2013

  6: Wisconsin, May 2012

  7: London, May 2013

  8: Idaho, May 2012

  9: London, May 2013

  five The Second Sex

  1: Centre D’assistance Européen Pour Requérants D’asile, Switzerland, June 2012

  2: Centre D’assistance Européen Pour Requérants D’asile, Switzerland, June 2012

  3: London, June 2013

  4: Centre D’assistance Européen Pour Requérants D’asile, Switzerland, June 2012

  5: London, June 2013

  6: California, May 2012

  7: California, May 2012

  8: Colorado, May 2012

  9: Atlanta, May 2012

  10: London, June 2013

  11: London, June 2013

  12: London, June 2013

  13: Memphis, Tennessee, May 2012

  14: London, July 2013

  15: Boston, May 2012

  16: Maine, May 2012

  six Talking to Satie

  1: London, August 2013

  2: London, August 2013

  3: Centre D’assistance Européen Pour Requérants D’asile, Switzerland, June 2012

  4: London, August 2013

  5: Annecy, France, June 2012

  6: Annecy, France, June 2012

  7: Paris, June 2012

  8: Paris, June 2012

  9: Paris, June 2012

  10: Paris, July 2012

  11: Paris, July 2012

  12: London, August 2013

  13: Paris, July 2012

  14: Paris, July 2012

  15: London, September 2013

  16: London, September 2013

  17: London, September 2013

  18: London, September 2013

  19: Qing Huang Dao 780 Political Prison, China, December 2011

  20: London, September 2013

  21: London, September 2013

  22: London, September 2013

  seven Return Home

  1: London, October 2013

  2: Beijing, May 2012

  3: Beijing, May 2012

  4: Zhejiang Province, June 2012

  5: Zhejiang Province, June 2012

  6: Zhejiang Province, June 2012

  7: London, October 2013

  8: Zhejiang Province, July 2012

  9: London, October 2013

  10: Zhejiang Province, July 2012

  11: Zhejiang Province, July 2012

  12: Zhejiang Province, July 2012

  13: Scotland, October 2013

  14: Isle of Mull, Scotland, October 2013

  eight Last Days in Crete

  1: London, November 2013

  2: London, November 2013

  3: London, November 2013

  4: Crete, November 2013

  5: Crete, November 2013

  6: Crete, November 2013

  7: Crete, November 2013

  8: Crete, November 2013

  9: Crete, November 2013

  10: Crete, November 2013

  11: London, November 2013

  12: London, November 2013

  13: London, November 2013

  nine Women Without Men

  1

  2

  3: London, December 2013

  Postscript

  Appendix: Chronology

  Acknowledgements

  A Note About the Author

  PRELUDE

  29 December 2011

  Dearest Mu,

  The sun is piercing, old bastard sky. I am feeling empty and bare. Nothing is in my soul, apart from the image of you.

  I am writing to you from a place I cannot tell you about yet. Perhaps when I am safe I will be able to let you know where I am. I don’t know what the plan is and what my future might hold. One thing is for sure: I will try to stay free and alive, for you. And whatever happens, these ideas I have stuck by all my life—the beliefs that landed me here in the first place—I cannot let them go. I must live for them. I know we’ll see each other again, my love, but how long unt
il that day I cannot tell.

  When I look around at where I am now, it seems so obvious it should have come to this. Maybe this is where I was going the whole time, I just never saw it coming. Or never believed it. I’ve been headed here, I realise, ever since June 1989. I know we have talked about it so much, but tonight under this southern sky the images of that night are burning in my head. You were still in your southern home town. We hadn’t even met. But I was there, and here I’ll say it again: I wish I had been shot that day. I should have died there. Shot and crushed under the tanks.

  I remember the night after the massacre. I went alone to Tiananmen Square. It was midnight. The troops of the People’s Liberation Army had washed the blood off the pavement. The hunger strikers’ tents had been pulled down and the square was deserted, but rubbish was scattered everywhere—blood-soaked shirts and ripped student scarves. If you looked closely you could see the blood had soaked into the gaps between the stones. I stood there and thought: this is our most glorious square. For hundreds of years people have celebrated, fought and marched on it. Every day hundreds of thousands of bicycles roll over it; hundreds of thousands of people walk on it. But now the people are defeated. I wished my blood was soaking into the earth between those stones: that would have been a worthy death. That would have been a worthy youth.

  Dearest Mu, you know what I am saying. It repeats itself in my mind. It repeats itself because of this split in me, that’s still there after all these eighteen years of us being together. I have loved you so long—you are my only family in this world. But you say you never really understand politics. You were not there in 1989. You could not understand.

  I remember that May, a month before the massacre. It was the week when Chairman Hu Yaobang died, and I had just discovered the first Chinese translation of “Howl,” that pocket edition we used to read together. All the students in Beijing’s universities started to worry about the future. Hu was the last good leader of China. We sat and argued in cafes—somehow studying seemed so unimportant. Is there any hope? we wondered. And that same week the socialist Polish government held its first democratic election. Everyone in the West was talking about democracy vs. communism. But China was uninterested. Nothing would change. We knew that. I was only seventeen years old, but I felt like an old man already, sad and depressed. Where was my faith? And the balls and the belief to achieve something in politics? But then I thought: forget about the politics, there is only one good thing in all this. It was the band, of course. I had just formed my first band. That band you came to like so much. And you know how it felt for me then—I was going to start the new century with music, the first real Chinese rock ’n’ roll band. And this is what it came down to: I would rather burst eardrums with my guitar than fight with it at the barricades.

  So that June, when the student demonstration started in the square, I was feverishly in love with rock ’n’ roll. I reckon I had already decided that a musical revolution was better than direct action while all my classmates were out protesting and on hunger strike. On 3 June, after spending two hours in the square and raising banners and flags, I have to confess, a weariness overcame me. Mu, did I ever talk about this weariness? I returned to the campus alone. I should have stayed. It should really have been my event. It’s like my defining life moment happened without me.

  On the night of that fateful day I stayed in the empty dormitory listening to the Sex Pistols and thinking about music, my music. The building was utterly deserted. There was this unruly wind going crazy, back and forth along the long empty corridors, and sending shivers up my spine. I sat on my bed and began fiddling with my old guitar. It needed new strings. The tuning was fucked and my amp had lost two valves. But still, with that crazy wind running up my spine, I wrote the first lines of “Long March into the Night”: “Hey, little sister, let me take you down the street, the long march is waiting …”

  I must go now, my dearest woman. The plane is waiting to take me away. I believe we will be soon in each other’s arms again.

  Your love,

  Jian

  ONE | IONA

  shui wei he guang, yi ye hang zi.

  shui wei song yuan, zhi yu wang zhi.

  Who says that the river is wide?

  With a bundle of reeds I can cross it.

  Who says that the Kingdom of Song is distant?

  On my tiptoes I can view it.

  THE BOOK OF ODES (1000–700 BC)

  1 LONDON, APRIL 2013

  London is a roar, a slow explosion, scattering every living and dead thing and never letting them rest. Every corner hums, or echoes with a hum, which both repels and attracts. Even the colours and smells seem to roar. Even in the seemingly serene corners of green-grey Hackney parks, with their steel-trap ornate fences, this savage sound reverberates. The City is drowned, infected by the ooze of its energy, and out east along the waterways, Docklands and Limehouse, with their fake Venetian-Lido-style living, are stained by the intensity of sound. And further and further outward to New Cross, Shepherd’s Bush, Kilburn, Kensal Rise, with its black faces and ghost-white youth leading pig-eyed surly dogs, all humming, all electrified by a single slow shout.

  In a poky two-room flat not far from Islington, the ripples of the roar still resound. Here the middle class has found a cosy corner, and a young woman called Iona Kirkpatrick has made herself a home, if only temporarily.

  Iona is jet-black-haired and blue-eyed. As another London day is breaking she is getting up from her bed. She places two bare feet on her wooden floor. Naked, she puts on her black bra. Moving towards the window, she opens it, lets out last night’s stale air. She takes a deep breath, tracking the skid of an aeroplane in the morning sky.

  Behind her in the background gloom of her flat, a nameless man finishes dressing, putting on his shirt and trousers. He gazes at Iona’s bare back, her boyish bottom, her bony and compact features. He betrays a certain awkwardness. Iona doesn’t ask him to stay for breakfast, or make the simple offer of a morning coffee. Since they woke up she has offered him nothing. Yet last night she had been so receptive, the way she had opened her body for him.

  “Shall we have a coffee together somewhere?” he asks, and then leaves the sentence hanging, as if he were going to say more, but doesn’t.

  “No.” Iona shakes her head, not turning to look at him. “Too much to do.”

  Watching her slip into the black silk panties, he remembers how he had pulled them off last night as she stood by her desk. Like a soldier surrendering, she had raised both arms above her head as he undressed her. She had been submissive. But now she is cold. As she puts on her pyjama top, she doesn’t look at him at all.

  “So, you know where you are,” she says, polite but distant. “I don’t need to come down with you, do I?” She buttons up her pyjama top but leaves her legs bare.

  “I’ll be fine,” he answers. A pause. “When can we see each other again?”

  She turns to him now, refusal in her eyes. She shrugs her shoulders in a gentle gesture of “no.”

  The nameless man kisses her goodbye and leaves. She hears the soft press of his feet on the carpet grow steadily fainter until the door shuts behind him.

  Up above the morning traffic Iona stands by the window, watching him disappear into the throng of the cobbled street. The scent of sex still lingers in the room, and seems to surprise her. It’s on the sheets, and on her body. She sees a scattering of hairs on the pillow, and an odour, not hers, leaves a cloying warmth in the bed. She strips off the sheets and stuffs the knotted mass into the washing machine. In less than an hour, she says to herself, she won’t remember his smell. And before long the recollection of his face will also have been washed from her memory.

  In the bathroom she removes her pyjama top and underwear. Standing under the shower head, she lets the water pour down on her hair. A familiar sense of relief floods over her. The lust and dirt of last night, staining her pale skin, are rinsed off and washed down the drain, mingling with other waste, t
o begin their journey through London’s numberless sewers and then ultimately out into the muddy Thames.

  2 LONDON, APRIL 2013

  For Iona, there are two modes of expression that bring her to life. One is the sexual act. All it takes to rekindle her sense of being alive is that small breath of a decision. The decision to leave a pub with an unknown man and go back with him. She takes pleasure in entering a totally new world in the pitch black of night. The next day she can live with ease.

  Her other world is through words. To delve into words, to live with them circling in her mind, allows her to regain something of her life. Perhaps this, most of all, is what enables her to connect. As a teenager, driven crazy by the boredom of living on a small Scottish island inhabited largely by sheep, she found herself longing for foreign words: the alien sound, the unknown syllable, the mysterious sign. Learning languages consumed her. She stuffed herself full with them, and went to university for more. Perhaps a foreign language would offer her an escape. At school everyone had teased her about acting because of her striking resemblance to Hollywood actress Winona Ryder, but shy Iona never saw herself as an actress. She retreated into words.

  As the noise of morning from the street below surges up to her at the window, she shakes off her lethargy and the memory of the man’s touch only a few hours ago. Iona makes herself a strong cup of tea and sits down at her desk. On the table, beside a bulky English–Chinese Dictionary, sits a stack of photocopied Chinese documents. She leafs through the papers. Some appear to be letters; others are diary entries of hardly legible Chinese characters. She randomly picks one of the pages from the stack. Almost a scrawl, she thinks. This may be harder than I thought. She starts to read the first letter on the top of the pile.

  Dearest Mu,

  The sun is piercing, old bastard sky. I am feeling empty and bare. Nothing is in my soul, apart from the image of you.

  I am writing to you from a place I cannot tell you about yet. Perhaps when I am safe I will be able to let you know where I am …