I Am China Read online

  She returns to the kitchen and leans against the table where the laid-out pages wait. Leafing through the heavy pile of documents, she draws out a page which begins with a pencil drawing:

  A girl with a messy fringe obscuring her eyes, and a mouth smeared below, with eyes drooping like tears. The line has a certain fluency, like a shape-changing snake moving across the page. Is this Mu? Or some other girl, caught on paper one morning, after a long night? Is it Jian’s drawing? It must be, judging from the handwriting beneath. The shape-changing line makes her think of a lean, fluent body, in a dark-coloured jacket. Iona begins to read the writing below.

  13 October 1993

  I met that girl again from the volleyball match. She still seems to be finding her way around the university. I was in the reading room trying to finish that Trotsky book and she walked over and took the chair next to me. We sat beside each other for about an hour; at one point she opened her palm and showed me her fingers. “Do you see anything abnormal?” she asked, looking straight into my eyes as if she were a hypnotist.

  I pored over her hand. It felt cool and fragile. “What am I meant to be looking for?” I felt a little ridiculous and I let out an awkward half-laugh, but when I looked up she was curiously serious. I rubbed her palm gently, “Well, perhaps your index finger is a little bent.”

  “My father made me practise calligraphy every day from when I was very little, and this is the result of holding the brush! And what a worthless effort!” She has this excited, childish tone whenever she tries to describe something bad or disturbing, like a child in love with horror stories. “I’ve never managed to use my calligraphy skills. But I’ll be stuck with a bent finger forever!”

  She laughed and her animated voice was like a string of bells in a windy valley. Her front teeth stuck out slightly, showing a glimpse of that cute gap between them. I wanted to kiss her badly. But instead I said:

  “Then you must hate your father!”

  “No, no, I don’t! I love my father. How could anyone hate their parents?”

  “Oh, I certainly do,” I said, quietly. “I hate my father.”

  She looked very surprised by what I had said, but she didn’t ask me why. A brief cool silence fell in the air between us.

  Then I glanced at a map spread out on the desk in front of her and asked her what she was looking at.

  “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 palm, lifted my hand and let my finger land at random on the map. Then she removed her hand 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.

  10 LONDON, MAY 2013

  Crete. Iona has never been to Greece, though she would love to travel to those sunny islands, smell the ancient earth’s smell. She has led a strange still life. Iona reads the date on some of the diary entries: February 1989, September 1991, March 1992. In 1992 she was only ten years old, Iona thinks, scampering around her Scottish island, shuttling back and forth on a ferry from her school to her home. She didn’t know then that she would study Chinese and end up as a translator. She thought she would become a writer, or a primary-school teacher. Perhaps her first fascination with China was triggered in her primary school—she remembers asking one of the other kids in a serious manner, “If we dug through the earth, would we find Eskimos on the other side?” The other child replied with total conviction, “No, Iona, we’d find a Chinaman with his pet dragon of course.” Iona thought of the books she read at home, of Jules Verne, and the dark, pitch-black tunnels sinking deeper and deeper into the earth. For days, fear clenching her chest, in her imagination she would clamber through the tunnels, and then, finally, by some topsy-turvy logic she would be led up to daylight. She might hear sounds from the world above as she was tunnelling upwards—honking horns on the street and sing-song voices. Then suddenly she would pop out under the Forbidden City. Chinese faces would crowd around to gawk at the fabulous foreign girl, perhaps a little grimy, breaking out of the earth’s membrane, like a bird cracking an egg. China! She would make a Chinese friend like Tintin does in his Tibet journey. How wonderful it had seemed. Fifteen years later, still remembering that feeling, she travelled to China for two months as part of her degree. She found China fascinating but impossible to grasp, and the people she met scarred by their traumatic pasts. Now, in the sunniest corner of her London flat, scrutinising the dancing, jagged, handwriting of a mysterious Chinese man, Iona feels again that intense emotion, building up from within, firing up her eyes.

  She types out a very short diary entry trying to decipher Kublai Jian’s messy and large handwriting.

  Haidian Music Store, 4 July 1995

  A celebration with a bunch of university poets and a few young journalists! But most importantly, it was the debut of Kublai Jian and the Wild Sprouts—and the release of my first proper album. This is it! We have arrived! After two bootleg CDs in three years! The whole band was there and we really feel a bond between us now, like warriors or adventurers. Beijing’s sky had turned red and purple, putting on a show for us, and we drank. We drank so much! Mu says this never would have happened if I hadn’t met Li Hua Dong. But she is so naive. A peasant girl with rice grains still hidden in her hair. Kublai Jian has learned how to write better songs—that’s what this success is about, and nothing to do with a bloody manager! Having a manager is just like having an accountant wearing an ironed suit. It’s a necessity, but it’s nothing to do with our music, old bastard sky!

  Iona types “Kublai Jian and the Wild Sprouts” into Google. She waits a few seconds, the timer spins, the laptop whirrs and a blank window pops up. The great Chinese firewall, it seems. Iona tries a few more options but she just gets the same result. All that comes up is an album cover for Yuan vs. Dollars in Google images. She can only presume it’s Jian’s most well-known album, or the latest perhaps. It’s a powerful picture: a headshot of a young man with a blindfolded face. It has punch, she thinks. There are no articles about him. She sighs. She really knows so little about Chinese cyber-policing and Internet censorship. They’re clearly doing a great job. And when she searches again just for images of “Kublai Jian,” millions of pictures of Chinese- and Mongolian-looking men with the name “Kublai” or “Jian” come up—either standing by some tacky tourist spot or smiling a plastic smile with the backdrop of fake Mongol people in a yurt, or here again among a line-up of fat bureaucrats wearing ridiculous Khalkha Mongol hats … Nothing about his family or his hated father. And none of them remotely matches her idea of a young and vigorous musician who writes angry manifestos.

  TWO | WELCOME TO DOVER

  shui neng zai zhou, ye neng fu zhou.

  Water can float a boat, it can also sink it.

  XUN ZI (PHILOSOPHER, WARRING STATES PERIOD, 475–221 BC)

  1 DOVER, APRIL 2012

  Cafe-on-the-Channel is located on the west side of Dover’s busy port. It is only a mile from the Dover Immigration Removal Centre. This is where Kublai Jian has been held since he was dragged out from Lincolnshire by two policemen. Jian has never been to the cafe; his life is charted by locked doors and high walls. But Iona went there once. Some years ago Iona visited Dove
r with a man for a weekend. “Romantic getaway,” he’d said, “cheaper than a city break, babe, but it’ll be great, really it will.” They had stayed in a B&B where the bed had sagged and the sex had been only OK. She had tried not to care. Then they had walked down the road to find a spot for lunch and ended up in the Cafe-on-the-Channel. It was a terrace cafe, with old wooden tables and rustic-looking benches against the backdrop of the grey sea. There was a TV showing a tourist promotion on a loop. As Iona and her boyfriend ate a lukewarm omelette, a well-known actress came on the TV to talk about the sights, her encouraging voice just loud enough to disrupt conversation.

  Dover is a major ferry port on the English Channel. Facing France, the area has always been a focus for people entering and leaving Britain. It also served as a bastion against various attackers: notably the French during the Napoleonic Wars and Germany during the Second World War. And nowadays the port is the busiest shipping lane in the world. Dear visitors, why not take a lovely walk along the beach and enjoy some fresh seafood? We hope you have a pleasant stay in Dover!

  A visitor sitting in the Cafe-on-the-Channel can just see the wavy sea, and flotilla of boats. Birds scavenging for scraps of food and dead fish. If you had been sitting there on 4 April 2012, around midday, you would have seen a white van driving past with “Dover Immigration Removal Centre” printed in blue letters on the side. It stopped at the cafe for a few moments while the driver picked up a takeaway coffee and soggy sandwich. Inside the van were several individuals, including a slight Chinese man with a hungry look in his eyes. He, too, from the small window at the back, saw the birds swooping, and the grey mist on the sea.

  2 DOVER, APRIL 2012

  In a grey, nearly empty room lit by a white fluorescent tube, Jian is writing a serious letter to the Home Office concerning his future.

  As he writes and rewrites his sentences, he imagines an immigration officer in the Border Control HQ opening a pile of letters. Probably, this tired and over-routinised officer will simply glance at the applicant’s nationality and the address of each letter, then throw it into a second pile of papers which he will take to another immigration officer; then another officer in another office will open these letters and read them again and put them in another pile, and then this officer will take the papers to another officer … like a crazed man crawling up an Escher staircase, unable to reach the top.

  Jian sits back and looks round at his two room-mates in this, his second grey-white box in this strange country. During the day, the quietly chattering wardens and the silently bored refugees in the Dover Immigration Removal Centre are little different from the quietly murmuring nurses and the numbed patients in Lincolnshire. Nothing much has changed. Even his dank cell in Beijing felt pulsing and alive in comparison to this. As he tries to put words down, straining to remember the right English phrase, he feels a machine-like throbbing in his head. It is a dreadfully familiar sensation—he remembers that feeling from being hit by an electric baton at his final concert. His body becomes stiff, his pen is frozen in his hands. Now the throbbing sound interrupts the quiet around him and he sees his childhood family house—a house surrounded by acacia trees hidden in a hutong beside Hou Hai Lake in central Beijing.

  A brief, blurred memory of his mother comes to him. Perhaps it is the very first memory Jian has of her, he was only two or three. She is in the kitchen, standing in front of a small mirror. She uses a heated iron poker to curl her hair. The burning smell floats into his nostrils. Then his father’s image sneaks in, like a black crow in a bright garden, squawking. The squawking man-bird sticks in his mind. In this foreign, in-between space, Jian chooses to confront it rather than shoo it away.

  The day he last saw his father now returns to him as a sequence of pictures. Can this really be him, this smiling ten-year-old boy running down the narrow alleyways of Beijing? The summer sun hits hard, seeming to singe the poplar trees and melt the asphalt roads. Dogs are sleeping in the shadows of the trees, as are elderly people from the hutong quarter, sitting there like sacks of rice. It’s a relentless August, the summer of 1982. Jian’s mother had died a few years before, and his grandparents are visiting relatives out of town. He is left at home alone throughout the summer.

  On the day of the annual conference of the Beijing People’s Representatives Congress, for which Jian’s father was an Administration Secretary, he decides to take his son into the office with him. As the chime tolls from the Dongcheng Bell Tower behind his father’s office, hundreds of delegates start arriving in the conference hall with their dark shiny suits and their hot shiny faces. Jian’s father orders him to keep quiet and stay in the kitchen, where the chefs are clattering about preparing tea and food. It is a scorching day and Jian’s cotton shorts cling to the backs of his thighs. He does his homework and he waits. And he waits. Two hours later, though, Jian is already bored to death. He sneaks past the guard tasked to keep an eye on him, and escapes through the Congress gate. Wandering in the sleepy hutong, the ten-year-old boy feels the freedom and aimlessness of a stray dog. He sees a gang of older boys riding their bikes, and longs to join them. They welcome him into their game. It’s the usual war story kids played out so often on the streets of Beijing: Chinese soldiers versus American soldiers in the Korean War. Jian enters the game a bit late, so he is told to be a Korean peasant standing on the sidelines. But he refuses. He’s bored and hot and wants to take a side in the conflict. He asks if he can join the group of Chinese soldiers. But in order to be assigned to a unit, he has to be given a rank and, most importantly, to recite the “Soldier Oath.” Jian is never good at reciting anything, but he is eager to try. Raising the clenched right fist, he speaks aloud like a real soldier: “I am a member of the People’s Liberation Army. I promise that I will follow the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, serve the people wholeheartedly, obey orders, fight heroically; under no circumstances will I …” Then Jian can’t remember the next two lines, the crucial lines about betraying one’s motherland. Everybody laughs at him. Smeared with humiliation, he has to take on the role of an American soldier and the boys turn on him: he becomes everybody’s target. This game of war becomes violent, and Jian is badly beaten up, punched in the face so hard that he bleeds. Someone holding a branch hits him across his face—he escapes the sharp end, but gets a deep cut into his skin and forever after he will wear a scar under his eye like a sickle moon.

  After dark, with his clothes torn and his face bloody, young Jian stumbles back to his father’s office to find him in a rage. Silently he puts Jian on the back of his bike and rides home without a word. His father enters the house, places the keys with deliberate care on the kitchen table and, still saying nothing, with his back to Jian picks up a steel ruler. Suddenly he turns, grabs his son and shouts: “You want another cut under your eye? Do you? Do you? Here it is!” His father raises the weapon and seems about to bring it down upon the cringing boy. But instead of the expected blow, nothing happens. A look comes over his father’s face: a fixed stare, like a frozen image from a Communist banner, with a cruel coldness in his eyes. Grasping his son, he takes Jian to his bedroom, shoves him towards the bed and closes the door. He locks it and leaves him inside. Jian is locked in all night and most of the next day. Twenty hours later, when the door is unlocked again, the boy has passed out on the floor from exhaustion and hunger. His lips are blue and swollen, his cut is dark and encrusted, his eyes red from constant crying. Perhaps those twenty hours were the worst hours his body had suffered.

  A week later, Jian remembers clearly, his grandparents returned and resumed their role in looking after him, and his father left Beijing. He was posted to the south and rarely came back to the city. After the episode with the steel ruler Jian lived with his grandparents and barely saw his father, or received any letters from him; he had regular nightmares about his father returning home. It wasn’t the threat of his father’s violence. It was the threat behind his father’s face that day. At school a year or so later, when Jian hadn’t seen
his father for nearly nine months, a wave of gossip spread through his school about his father having a new wife and starting a new family elsewhere. He never came home to see his son after that. The boy was now a young man. He was locked in a dark room once again, only this time it was permanent: it was a larger room, from city to city, with occasional people to hold on to; a world in which the father he knew would never feature. His father had sent him into exile.

  Suddenly Jian hears someone snoring loudly beside him. No, there are now two people snoring. He shares the room with two refugees from somewhere in Africa. His room-mates’ snores blast into white space, their heads on sunken pillows, upturned slack-lipped faces breathing heavily like two buffalo in a backwood swamp. Good sleepers. They are sleeping in Dover with me. Jian’s head is heavy, his eyes are closing. His last wakeful sensation is the feeling of his toes touching the strings of his guitar which rests against his bed.

  3 LONDON, MAY 2013

  It’s after midnight; London oozes into the soundscape of late-night television dramas and the passing wail of sirens. The streets are saturated with shadows and lights. A flat above Chapel Market is still brightly lit. Iona is buried in a sea of papers. She has added two more dictionaries as well as a book about dialects in northern China to the pile on her desk. While she is sorting through the papers, trying to make sense of them, she finds a stray undated letter.