I Am China Read online

At first glance she thinks it’s a letter from the 1990s, but the tone is angry and hurt like the first few letters Jian seems to have sent Mu after he left China in 2011. She’s been muddling at these translations for a few weeks and she still hasn’t managed to get a sense of the story. What went wrong in their relationship? They seemed so happy, so full of promise and excitement. There are nods and clues to a manifesto which changed everything, but she has no background information at all, and her Internet searches are fruitless.

  She glances at the letter again—it’s pretty vehement. Iona wonders if it was ever sent. No address, no sentiment, just straight in.

  I can’t understand why you’re behaving like this, Mu. How could you say you hate my manifesto? I mean, you know I believe that what we do, the action we take, is the most essential expression of art and therefore the most essential expression of a political view. For us, the most basic action is to say No to the reactionary and raise our fist. I don’t think I am asking too much, Mu. I just want you to understand me. I thought you did.

  For years you have been telling me you want to live an apolitical life. You disagree with whatever I do. You know I think that to take no action is a political gesture, too. To take no action, to be ignorant and passive. Isn’t that the worst? Didn’t we always say that? The same goes for love—there is no simple love between one and another to the exclusion of the rest. I can only love …

  The characters have blurred and Iona struggles to read what comes next. There is one more illegible phrase and then the letter comes abruptly to a halt.

  4 DOVER, APRIL 2012

  Another Dover night. Jian tries to sleep. But his mind is racing, like an express train from Shanghai to Nanjing with totally blurred scenes outside the window. He vaguely sees a small gap-toothed girl in the dim light, and he stretches out his arms. Wait, wait until tomorrow morning, someone will help me, someone will reach down and draw me out of this place. He thinks and thinks. A flood of faces rush past, then the flood stops with the calm, slightly pink complexion of his caseworker, Brandon.

  Brandon is a law student who works as a volunteer for immigrants with problematic cases. Jian finds him incredibly kind, but it’s as if his voice is wrapped in bed sheets, obscuring all meaning and clarity. He had said the other day, “Schjaaaan, an seen a wee hope, a wee hope!” Jian had looked at Brandon expectantly. It took a lot for Jian to finally understand Brandon’s Glaswegian brogue—repetitions and gesticulations like actors in the Beijing Opera. Jian feels his own Mongol blood shares something with Brandon’s wild-man ancestors, and this voice from a land of ice and whisky calls out to his past, his desire to rage and defy.

  But now, enveloped in the dark, Jian twists under the damp bedcovers. The scenery of his past life is a silent river flowing through his blood. It’s been like this for some days now. In the daytime he’s numbed, he’s fine, but when he lays his head down, he feels his skull is cracking open; he feels headless. He is sitting on a bench with Mu on a bright Beijing afternoon, under the shadow of a half-built flyover trying to write songs while watching a group of construction workers busy with a crane in the near distance. If you have to try to write a song, he has always said, it will never work. The struggle you have with one song is only preparation for the real song that will come later in a rush, perfected at birth. It is this one which will be Your Song, not the one you struggle over.

  And now, in the mind of this older Jian cradled by a moonless Dover night, he is rushing around Beijing’s underground bars trying to replace the drummer in his band—drummers are always crazy and unreliable—and arguing with the Neighbourhood Police who control the noise levels in the street. Showing them the power cords to reassure them, while getting them to drink with him! The police are not natural rockers, so he buys them hard liquor and lambs’ ribs as bribes. Waking up at midday, after a hard gig and midnight crab-eating with Yan, and non-stop drinking of er guo tou, and shambling under the street lamps along the avenues, and shocking the neighbourhood surveillance ladies. There he sees the loud-laughing migrants’ faces, selling him steamed buns and a glass of warm soy drink, the lousy taxi rides through flag-waving Long-Peace Street, heading for some new venue, to plug in instruments and send out charged sound, and so on, and so on. In the morning he wakes up beside Mu, who has already prepared congee and pickles for their breakfast, and his head is a foggy blur, and aches like a torn drum.

  Another month sinks into the sand that borders the English Channel. Jian’s routine meetings with his caseworker Brandon frustrate him. The conversation moves through a thick treacle of accents. Nothing seems to cut through.

  Brandon conciliatory in his Glasgow brogue:

  “Ya must be patient, Schjiaan! Et’s not in one day we can sor’oot yer application. We hav’ ta wait for the leegal process …”

  Jian desperate in his Chinese accent:

  “ ‘Be pay-shon’ doesn’t bring immigration officer atten-shon, neither their respect-ah!”

  “Whoa, laddie?”

  Jian eventually understands what Brandon is trying to tell him: since his visa is no longer valid until he’s been registered as a refugee, he now has no status. He is a “non-person.” A “non-person”? “You don’t belong to any country; you are not a citizen of anywhere,” the immigration officer explained.

  Non-person, he thinks. It’s so absurd it sounds almost Chinese to him.

  5 LONDON, MAY 2013

  10 November 1993

  The desert wind from Mongolia sweeps through the capital; our hair is tangled and dusty. They’ve said Beijing is undergoing the worst sandstorms in its history. Perhaps within a few years, Beijing will turn into a desert, become a part of the Gobi Desert. But nothing can stop us. All day long, we race around on our bikes cutting through the wind and searching desperately for copies of Western novels and records we’ve heard of in the hidden bars downtown. Foreign CDs are hard to find. But I have gathered a lot of them. Stuff is happening, I can feel it. Perhaps 1989 did force the door open wider, but at the cost of so much blood. And while I’m working my way through all the English punk bands, Mu is going through this phase of being madly in love with Misty Poetry. I quite like it too, because of its obscure but sensuous language, so different from the sloganeering style of Mao’s Little Red Book …

  Iona is bemused. Misty Poetry? She sharpens her pencil and underlines Misty Poetry in Jian’s diary. Scratching her head, she vaguely remembers her Tang-dynasty poetry study at university, but it seems a long time ago right now. Opening her computer, Iona instantly starts googling. The names Bei Dao, Duo Duo, Yang Lian, Shu Ting, Gu Cheng spring from the screen. A poetry movement writing about ideas of freedom which began in the early eighties, right after the Cultural Revolution, she reads. Poems address both individual and political freedom but ideas are expressed through descriptions of landscape, agriculture and the use of imagery like the blurred indeterminacy of hills in mist. Right, got it. She looks up from the screen. How fitting, she thinks, that the key year for this movement was 1989. Issues with freedom all right. She returns to Jian’s diary, and reads on.

  20 January 1994

  I’ve been worried about Mu for some time now. I was afraid to tell her, I hoped that she’d move on, find a different literary movement to obsess over, but she still talks about the damn Misty Poets all the time, and her fanaticism about Hai Zi is so overpowering. It’s exactly like the time she discovered Sylvia Plath, the first foreign poet she had ever read. It’s all too sad, too weak for my taste. It feels morbid, perhaps. It seems to be about looking back, not advancing forward. I mean, Hai Zi committed suicide just a few years before Mu came here.

  But today things took an even weirder turn. Mu bullied me into taking her to the railway bridge where Hai Zi killed himself just before his twenty-fifth birthday. She stood there and recited the lines of that poem she’s got framed on her wall—“Facing the Sea, with Spring Blossoms behind Me.” Old heaven knows how romantic and naive she was! Just a peasant girl still carrying around t
he soil under her shoes from her southern province. Old bastard sky, it took us twelve hours on our chain-broken bikes to get to Shanhaiguan railway path! (We had to sleep under the freezing cold Great Wall for the night and get back on our bikes at sunrise.) When we arrived at the railway track where the poet’s body had supposedly been found there was nothing. No fucking sign, no tombstone, and not a single drop of dried blood on those tracks. The only thing there was a dead sheep, its guts spilling out, still fresh and ripe red. Mu was searching for anything Hai Zi might have left before he lay down to die. Like a detective she took hundreds of photographs, using up precious film, pictures of any object that might be linked to his death: the broken trunk of a pear tree beside the track, the crushed end of a pencil buried under the earth, an old scarf muddied with dirt. She was driven mad by her fascination. Perhaps one day she may be able to understand my madness, like why I skip classes to write songs in my dorm room. Oh, old sky, she will understand me, I know she will, in the end.

  Iona returns to the Internet with a sense of dissatisfaction. She gathers information, thinking it might lead somewhere, give her a clue, unveil a personality, unlock a mysery. Hai Zi was a leading member of the Misty Poetry movement. Born in 1964 and committed suicide in March 1989. So before Tiananmen Square, she thinks. She then reads about Bei Dao, forced into exile after the student massacre. And Duo Duo, who left the square on the day of the demonstration, jumped on a plane to the West and never returned. And then Gu Cheng whose escape took him to an isolated village on Waiheke Island in New Zealand. The article quotes a famous two-line poem, “A Generation,” from Gu Cheng:

  Translating poetry is quite a challenge, but Iona has a go:

  Dark night gives me dark eyes.

  I, however, use them to search for the light.

  She sits back and reads what she’s typed. It’s strained, forced. She holds down the delete button and tries again:

  Dark night dims my vision.

  But I will still look for the brightness.

  Better, definitely better. Then she has a thought, moves down the page and starts rapidly typing yet another version:

  Even with these dark eyes,

  I go to seek the shining light.

  It is hard to tell which version is more accurate. But what Iona can’t make sense of is why a poet from revolutionary China would go from the heart of Beijing to such a remote corner of the globe like New Zealand? Was freedom so very hard to find? Iona returns to the page on the Misty Poets and reads how Gu Cheng built himself a bamboo forest as a barrier around his house on the island, that he lived simply with his wife and child and with almost no contact with the outside world. Iona scans the article. There are more excerpts from poems, more analytical commentary. She feels tired and her eyes haze over. She skips to the last paragraph and gets a shock: on 8 October 1993 Gu Cheng killed his wife and child with an axe that he used to chop wood, and then hanged himself. The article states it bluntly, no explanation, no reason. Despite the minimal information the images that come to Iona are so strikingly vivid. She imagines the young poet’s last day. The sound of his bamboo barriers creaking in the wind. Perhaps there was a deep chill in the air. She knows what that feels like. The blue mist that lifts from the water to envelop you and makes space icy and lonesome, the violent bite of the wind eating into your skin.

  6 LONDON, MAY 2013

  Iona leaves the local GP surgery and walks away slowly. She admitted she often misses meals, sometimes she worries about putting on weight. And recently she’s begun to feel exhaustion and dizziness. Occasionally she vomits. “It could be an anxiety disorder, or stress from your work or difficult family relations, and it can be related to low self-esteem,” her GP suggested to her almost casually while scrolling through her medical records on the computer. She’s been given a prescription for antidepressants, but she feels uneasy about taking them. As she passes a pharmacy she holds the piece of paper, as if dirty, a little away from her.

  Low self-esteem. She could just about agree with all the other conditions, but she has never considered herself someone with “low self-esteem.” It’s true, though, that she isn’t able to think of herself romantically. Although she feels at ease with the satisfaction of her body, she doesn’t have the language to connect with a man emotionally. Her father often said she was a perfectionist, a “silly” idealist. For Iona, there are certain things in life that are just not beautiful, many things in this world are too ugly, and she is not going to give in just like that. The same goes with men: she is not going to commit herself to any old man. She always finds something not right, imperfect, attached to a man after she has seen him once or twice. And the more she knows that person, the less she wants to entangle herself with him. To stay away is to protect her vision of the perfect man, even if it is a knowing act of self-deception.

  It is a cloudy afternoon; Iona feels like shaking off the grey energy around her body. She walks to the British Library, heading along the canal, and coming up behind King’s Cross station, enjoying the view of the constantly shifting building works, the cranes and semi-industrial landscape. She finds herself drawn to this library every now and again. Working in a quiet reading room with strangers is a way of feeling less lonely: an abstract community, sharing their minutes and hours in silent acts. Today, as usual, she settles herself in a corner by the window, and continues to work on Kublai Jian’s documents. To her left, in a corner, she sees a familiar figure. A bearded man, maybe fifty-odd, with scraggly hair and foggy glasses, and an intense look, mumbling silently as he reads. He’s always there and never acknowledges her. She likes that, in a way. Opening her laptop and laying out the Chinese photocopies, Iona pulls her focus back to the page, and begins to translate a new diary entry.

  Beijing, 1 August 1997

  Our graduation ceremony was held at ten this morning. All the boys got themselves shaved last night, except for the smooth hairless ones, and some even got new haircuts. By ten o’clock, with cicadas screaming in the poplar trees across campus, our new shirts were already soaked in sweat. We had to listen to all sorts of tedious speeches from deans and professors for hours. This is your final day here and your most glorious day at the college … blah blah. But today’s accomplishment is just the beginning of a new tomorrow … blah blah. Everyone had their parents around, and even some old grannies stood at the back blubbering. For me, of course, there were no blubbering grannies or anxious parents. I had no one there apart from Mu. She sat beside me, half reading her favourite Latin American poet Neruda, half worrying about her upcoming term examination paper.

  At midday the dean of our department handed me a piece of paper with a golden stamp on it. It read: “On the 1st of August 1997, Beijing University grants Kublai Jian the Degree of Master of Arts in Chinese History.” Underneath it was the signature of our university chancellor in his mad Mao-style scrawl.

  Mu tapped the certificate with a wicked smile and teased me. “Congratulations, Jian. It’s not entirely useless. One day when your music no longer earns you a living, this piece of paper might help.”

  “With a degree in Chinese history? I doubt it.”

  “You never know, my Peking Man.”

  She squinted at me, and took a photo—a gangly long-haired hungry young man, holding a certificate, with a warped smile on his face, surrounded by sweat-soaked classmates greeting their parents.

  And then the mad evening drinking began. Yanjing beers were gulped down with spicy beef. Mu didn’t stay for the banquet, she was never a part of the drinking scene. Instead she waited for me in the library. She said she was reading this huge Russian novel: “serious literature, like War and Peace.” Her usual rave. But of course I didn’t give a shit about any damn book that night. And before long the table was lined with empty bottles and no more cold beers could be supplied from the canteen. We drank the warm ones. We screamed to each other and hugged each other and some students even cried like babies. No one said the words “Tiananmen” or “1989” or mentioned the
classmates who were no longer with them. Perhaps it was the fear of being reported, or perhaps it was the fear that even one word, one look might tear open our deep scars. Then all the Tsingtao beers were gone as well, and we began to drink warm Haerbin beer, the cheapest kind. We were smashed. Everyone sang “La Marseillaise” tunelessly, drunkenly, while finishing a glass: “Arise, children of the fatherland! The day of glory has arrived. Against us tyranny’s bloody flag is raised …” We sang together with a howling crying tone: “Good Lord! By chained hands, Our brows would yield under the yoke, The vile despots would have themselves be the masters of our destiny …” And we cried like a group of stupid idiots.

  7 DOVER, MAY 2012

  Brandon walks through the gate of the Removal Centre with his pepperoni pizza and his watery coffee. Today he has bad news for Jian. He passes two blue-uniformed workers perched on a ladder, taking down the sign that says Dover Immigration Removal Centre. Up the ladder again and Removal Centre becomes Detention Centre. Brandon raises his eyes; heavy dark clouds drift across the sky. Rain is falling, instantly drenching the sign the workers have just put up.

  One of the workers turns to his companion. “Detention or Removal—isn’t it the same thing? Most of the foreigners in this place are gonna be sent back. Right?”

  Brandon walks on as raindrops pelt down, exploding in his hair and eyes, like gobs of pigeon shit. He scoots into the building for shelter.

  Rain is battering the windows next to Jian. As Brandon breaks the news he hunches further over his world map, trying to dissolve into it. The UK authorities are closing the door to immigrants; nearly 90 per cent of applications will be refused, according to the new points-based system.

  “Jian, you gotta understand, there’s nai more space for people in this country. This is not China!”