I Am China Page 6

  “How many people you got then?” Jian asks.

  “Sixty million. That’s a laat for a wee island. It’s not like Switzerland, only got sieven million!”

  It’s not like Switzerland, only got sieven million. Like a breeze gently murmuring in Jian’s ears, the thought occurs to him that maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to live like a goat on the side of a Swiss mountain. A mountain would be good enough, for a while at least. And this is what inspires Jian to write to Switzerland, a country that might be kinder than the Queen’s Land to someone like him.

  “Do you know the address of the immigration office in Switzerland?” he asks eagerly.

  8 LONDON, MAY 2013

  The pile of letters before Iona seems to be a never-ending mystery—haphazardly organised, some dated, some not. Iona had assumed all the material was from Kublai Jian and it’s rather a surprise to find the letter she is reading now is written in a totally different style.

  Unlike Jian’s letters and diary entries, messy to the point of indecipherable, the handwriting on the page in front of Iona is neat and clear, with elegant flourishes, touches of calligraphy even. A feminine hand; a woman’s voice. Indeed, it is “Mu’s voice,” as Iona guesses from reading the first paragraph. Perhaps translating is another kind of storytelling: finding the writer’s voice, unravelling the narrator. Yet Iona’s storytelling is frustrated by the muddle in this new job—she still feels she knows so little about where their story started, how it ended here, where they are now.

  It is a long letter. The dusk is falling quietly at Iona’s window. She reads on until she reaches the end of the letter and goes back to the beginning again. Slowly she types out the text, consulting her dictionaries when an unfamiliar word crops up.

  Kublai Jian

  Dover Immigration Removal Centre

  Dover 2ER 4GS

  UK

  20 January 2012

  Dear Jian,

  A letter at last! Finally I now know where you are! I’ve been so worried. I’ve been ringing Amnesty in London and every other refugee agency I can think of, but they didn’t know anything about you. And only one small postcard with the words “I am safe” isn’t enough. Tell me more. I am still in shock about your disappearance. It’s been over a month now, our home is bare without you, and I feel exhausted and angry. Please. Just tell me what’s going on. How can politics really be worth all this?

  There’s so much I want to tell you. Without you, my sense of stability disappears.

  Right now I cannot even begin to countenance your ideas about art and politics. Even if you are right in what you believe in and what you fight for, argument and revolution seem so unimportant right now. All I can do is separate you from your manifesto and think about what it was like before all this.

  I hope this letter reaches you. I am sitting in a corridor in the People’s Liberation Army Hospital in Shanghai. My father has been diagnosed with terminal throat cancer. And all I can think is: why aren’t you here with me?

  This feels like a place for the nearly dead. There are people here for all kinds of radiation treatment—cancer, leukaemia, diabetes, kidney diseases. But most are terminal cancer patients like my father. My father, Jian. You know. My father! I have one, even though you like to pretend we have no families and you have no father at all.

  The last two lines are entirely cryptic for Iona. Why would he pretend he has no family? She reads on.

  I wish you were here with me in this strange antiseptic place. I wouldn’t have to explain it, I wouldn’t have to describe it. But I want you to know, Jian, what my reality is right now. Even if I can’t know yours. It’s the closest we can get to being in the same room. This is what’s going on, bear it if you can. My father is being transferred to the intensive care ward at the back of the hospital—each room has six patients alongside their relatives on camp beds. There is nothing to do here but wait: we lie on our beds, hot in the sordid air. The wives tend to their husbands, feeding them, watching them. The windows are closed, the fans turned off. They don’t want anyone to catch cold so the air is thick with heat despite the cold outside and the frost making patterns on the windows. My mother is sitting beside my father, watching the vitamin drip connected to his vein, feeling the pulse on his wrist. A big sign—SILENCE—is on the wall. Silence is all we have. No one reads books or listens to the radio. Sometimes one of the relatives, an uncle, mother or sister, falls asleep during the night on the camp bed by the side of each hospital bed, their head leaning over against the patient’s feet, body stiff from being in the same position for so long. This endurance leaves us stiff and numb—unable to think or feel much further than the aches in our own bodies.

  After midnight the nurses stop coming. A cleaner will come to distribute hot-water bottles and clean up everyone’s discharges. The toilet is located at the end of the passageway, but none of us use it. It looks like hell—God knows what’s floating on the floor, from dead or near-dead people. This is a corridor of death—you would not want to be here.

  My corridor is lined with late-stage patients waiting to enter the radiation room, wrapped in striped uniforms ready for this advanced Western machine to kill the evil cells in their bodies. My father meditates while he waits. He looks calmer than the rest of us. He says it’s the only way he can endure the wait. My mother is sitting next to me, staring at the letter I am writing to you. And what a good thing she is illiterate! Otherwise I would never cope with her! And you know what she says, Jian? “I only have one regret in my life, I wish I had learned to read and write.” Then she sighs. And it makes me think of you and me. What has all our reading and writing given us?

  A shrieking siren is flying down a nearby road and wakes Iona from her focus. A high-pitched voice is speaking through a megaphone, and now a group of voices follow rhythmically. There is a protest going on somewhere close by, Iona realises. As she listens more carefully, she can almost make out the sound of anti-capitalism protest slogans. She stands up, closes the window. She can’t quite face the relentless bad news that’s sweeping round Britain; her ears have grown weary of it.

  I’ve been making an effort to talk to my father, ever since I came here. It scares me, but I don’t know when there will be another chance. I talk to him about anything and everything, especially his past. And he answers me in writing, since he can no longer speak because of the throat operation he’s had.

  So I asked him, “Father, what do you believe in?” Silly question, I told myself. My father is a crazy man, nearly as crazy as you! But he has a pure, uncorrupted nature; he has dedicated his whole life to the party and he believes in it all.

  So my father answers me, and I can feel his anger as he writes, “Oh, Mu, you should know by now!”

  “So tell me again,” I say, calmer, as if I’ve never met this old man. My father puts down his pen and stares at me in disapproval. “Even now, do you still really believe in communism?”

  He picks up his pen and writes each word on his notepad with intensity, pressing the biro into the page with deliberate force. “Like everything, communism has its faults, but it’s our only hope.”

  I can feel his unwavering strength even as he lies sick and weak. He uses such force to write these words that the sharp tip of the pen rips through the paper.

  You know, you and my father are made of similar stuff. I know it seems mad, but in his case he believes in communism; and you, you believe in freedom of expression through confrontation, even if it involves confronting the state and your own father. Years of life separate the two of you, but what I want to say is this: my father wanted to be a free person but rigid Communist ideology has been killing him little by little over the years. I think that’s why he has this cancer. He has been fighting like mad throughout his life, but the disease is swallowing him, he cannot win. You are still young, Jian. Is it worth it? Think about it.

  Your Mu

  9 LONDON, MAY 2013

  It’s early afternoon. Iona has retreated to her bathroom and to
a warm bath. Reclining in the steamy water, she reads a letter. Often when a certain frustration colours her mind, slipping into a hot bath seems the only way forward. There’s a delicate, musical drip from the tap, and the paint is peeling away from the ceiling in orange-peel curls. The flat needs serious work but her landlord is dismissive at best. The page she is holding with one dry hand is covered with doodles, black ink mixed with blue. Large characters. She recognises Kublai Jian’s scrawl. Here and there the words have been furiously crossed out.

  It’s a difficult text. Iona strains to understand. Jian seems very angry, and she doesn’t totally comprehend some of the idiom he uses. She feels stressed. The Chinese seem to love using old, formal idiom, even when a young person is writing. But there is also masses of text written in a very colloquial way, as if it were a blog or an email dashed off in a rush. Nightmare if you’re trying to produce some sort of stylistic coherence in the translation! Modern Chinese colloquial idiom is the worst, she thinks. Her dictionaries are no help in deciphering many of Jian’s expressions. There are so many basic difficulties in translating Chinese into English, Iona thinks. No tense differentiation; no conjugation of verbs; no articles, no inversion in questions—and I have to invent all this and add it to fit the translation. She gets out of the bath, the water having lost its reviving quality, puts on her dressing gown and wraps her hair in a towel.

  People say that islanders and mainlanders have very different ways of thinking. There is some truth in this. Islanders contemplate the distant shore, and want to communicate with the rest of the world, but mainlanders often don’t feel the need. That seems to be the case when it comes to Jian—he seems to think he’s the mainlander and the rest mere islanders. His writing is much more difficult to grasp than that of the Chinese girl writing from Shanghai.

  There’s no curtain in Iona’s south-facing window and the afternoon sun cooks her head. She lurches unsteadily into the kitchen and turns on the tap. Letting the unfiltered Thames water run for fifteen seconds, she drinks a mouthful of the cold liquid. She stretches, puts on a Debussy CD and sits back down. As the piano music flows she types out a rough translation of Jian’s letter.

  February 2012

  Dearest Mu!

  Your letter reached me! But from Shanghai, the old bastard heaven! I can’t believe it! Try to send another one to my Dover address—and soon! I don’t know how long I will be here, but send another one anyway. The more you send, the better chance I have of receiving them. It’s a ping-pong game!

  OK, I will try to be sensible: no manifesto or ideology for now. But in exchange, you are not allowed to mention my “father” again. NO MORE. I have no father. I have said that a thousand times. For me, he is long dead.

  So, my first question to you: how long are you going to stay in Shanghai before you return to Beijing? Second question: how is your father now? Better or worse? Don’t tell me he is dying—I don’t believe he will die. He will last longer than you think—he may even last longer than me, you will see! And now: my situation.

  Thinking of you makes me “zhou—.” [Translator’s note: not sure what this means. It’s a new colloquial expression I’ve not heard before.] It’s hard thinking about you and our life together, with me here in this brown-brick world. Despite everything that’s happened, despite all our time apart, the image I carry of you is of us sitting on our windy balcony looking down into Dongsi Hutong; or you on the sofa in the living room and me in the broken rattan chair where I used to play my guitar; the red paper lamp you made with film posters; those insane cockroaches wrecking the kitchen cardboards (oh how they loved your instant noodles!). And how could I ever forget the view through the window to distant blue-green Xiang Mountain, and beneath it the capital circled by the ringroads and choked with people and traffic. I miss it all badly. Here in this wet and gloomy country I’m a man of nothing. Merely a registration number: UK66034–GH568. I’ve even learned to recite it.

  I still know so little about this country. The only thing here worth mentioning is that I found an English edition of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital on one of the dusty shelves in the Detention Centre library. I tried to make out the English by picturing that Chinese translation we read at school. What a different book it is in English! Now I feel like I never understood Marx, and maybe all of China doesn’t understood what Das Kapital is really about.

  Some light stuff for you—a poor man’s sightseeing! I rode their underground train twice (they call it “Tube,” like in a sausage factory) and it was utterly depressing to be in their sausage tubes. Everyone looked like they had tax problems or couldn’t afford their electricity bills. Graveyard faces. Old bastard sky! If I could choose, I would prefer to be punished in a different place. Somewhere like … a Siberian forest. Sometimes I wonder, would it be better to be sent to the Gulag, like those Soviet convicts were? To lay a railway line along the Arctic Ocean, or fell trees in forests of snow? At least in those conditions a man feels he is a man and he is using his body and his hands. Or am I being stupid again?

  And this Dover camp is crammed with lost souls—from the Middle East, from Africa—all seeking protection under the British flag. But I doubt they really want to live on this rainy, windy, gloomy island. It’s like being a dog that sits where his master tells him to sit. That’s how it is here. But I should not make you worry about me. At least I’m still fit and I eat three meals a day. (The problem is they don’t have chillies; each meal comes with a different form of potato, but you know potatoes are potatoes: even if you treat them like chicken legs they still taste of potato. So I told them that they should get this clear: either potato or no potato but definitely not potato-pretending-to-be-something-else.) Apart from that, my mind is still working, busy and restless, just like those words we used to recite from Frankenstein: “My courage and my resolution are firm, but my hopes fluctuate and my spirits are often depressed.” These are the perfect lines to describe my mood.

  —“love” is the most simple and complicated word I can say to you now. I shall write more to you tomorrow.

  Your Peking Man,

  Jian

  10 LONDON, MAY 2013

  It’s deep into the night. Through the open window the purple sky is illuminated by the stark fluorescent light of office blocks and council flats. Iona finds herself alone on her bed. Perhaps work is the compensation for her unsatisfying sexual life, she mocks herself while tidying a mass of muddled pages spread on top of her duvet. She has been trying to establish some sort of chronology in her translation. But some of the letters are undated and often the diary pages seem to launch straight in without any indication of date or location. A two-page letter, in Mu’s neat handwriting, rises to the top of the pile. It seems to be sent soon after Jian’s letter from Dover.

  April 2012

  My Peking Man,

  No father talk, no manifesto discussion. It’s a deal.

  Tell me firstly: how are your stomach pains? How are your bowels doing with no familiar meals of noodles and rice every day? It’s all the mundane daily silliness of living together that I miss so much. I can’t understand where you are now—what’s this Immigration Removal Centre? What does it mean? You’re going to be “removed”? Are you allowed to walk in the street freely? I don’t understand the legal issue—I thought you had a special UK visa. Why do they have to detain you there?

  Tell me more, even if it’s depressing!

  It’s been raining today, Shanghai is muddy and foggy. The air smells sour and sweaty, like soy sauce. 11 a.m., I just got up to start my day but my parents were already clamouring for lunch. We put my father in a wheelchair and went to a nearby restaurant. “Your father needs nutrition,” Mother said, and ordered an enormous bowl of chicken soup. Then she drank most of it herself. Father tried to bite into the chicken feet floating in the broth with his pathetic fake teeth, but he has no strength any more and just gave up. I find it so hard to watch. Mother told the restaurant to put the bony soup to one side and save it for us to come
back and finish off tonight. “And how should we do that?” the waitress asked in a dismissive tone.

  “How? Just put the chicken bones back into the pan and boil them with new water and add some greenery—and don’t forget to add a bit of ginger.” The waitress listened in silence, taken aback.

  “We can’t do that. You need to pay the cooking fee. That’s at least five yuan,” she said sulkily.

  My mother laughed at her attitude and said firmly, “Of course, sister! Now also add three or four pieces of tofu. We will finish it for dinner.” She stood up and paid from her fake-leather wallet.

  My father has been in intensive care for nearly three months now, Jian. I’m so accustomed to the routine: Father has one injection in the morning and one dose of radiotherapy every two days. But yesterday after his most recent bout of treatment my weak, pale, reduced father refused to stay in the ward any longer. He says he can’t stand another minute of watching the patient next to him dying. When one of the other patients dies we seem to sit there watching the body for what feels like forever, until finally a harassed nurse or relative comes and discovers the dead man. Sometimes there are tears, there is shock, or resignation. The nurses barely respond at all. We sit there and watch the body being lifted from the bed and wrapped like a dumpling in the bed sheets the body’s former owner slept in. Then we stare at the empty bed, for what can seem like hours, remembering vividly the dead man’s cough, his particular way of speaking to his daughter and fussing around his wife, how he would always spill his tea or drop his book. The worst of the worst is when, on the following day, a new patient is laid out on that very same bed. He’ll turn to us, a room full of drawn and tired faces, try to smile in a friendly way, but he must wonder why we all stare at him as if he were a ghost. No one dares tell him anything. My father believes if he stays in this room he will definitely go before his time. He’ll become the bandaged body, and we the weeping figures. And I’m sure he’s right. So we’ve decided to rent a room at a hostel nearby. Although the room at the hostel is bare and tacky, at least my mother has a TV to watch, and a private bathroom for us to use whenever we want. And there’s only one more week of radiotherapy to go, so perhaps we’ll be out of here soon.