I Am China (11 page)

I have no idea how people have reacted to my manifesto since I left China and whether they continue to discuss my ideas in the underground bars. Have you heard anything since the concert? I know you prefer not to mention these things again. I know you’ll find it hard to believe, but it is as upsetting to me as it is to you, but I can’t just let my work or my beliefs go like that. I need to know more, since I’ve been cut off from my world
.

Dearest Mu, tell me, when are you leaving Shanghai for Beijing? Has your magazine job given you more time off? It seems so unlike them. I remember you saying you couldn’t work for them any more. That the cheesy poetry they published was just to pass the censorship laws, and it got you down. You’re wasting time with them, you should move on. Don’t let them eat up your beliefs. Don’t wait around. Maybe you shouldn’t wait for me either. Keep yourself inspired if you can
.

Your Jian, the Peking Man

Iona has an image of two rebels in love. Their strong emotions colour her mind with shades of red and shimmering blue. Mu and Jian, separated by their beliefs, and now separated by space, dropped on different alien planets. Both of them grappling with their own reality. Both of them trying to build a bridge on which to meet. And it’s like Iona is building this bridge again, through her reading, her translation. Building a bridge of meaning from their letters, and she has to choose the right words to keep the structure standing. And it is so hard. The Roman letters of English and the oriental characters of Chinese are not natural bedfellows. Take expressions like “niu bi”—
, “cao dan”—
, “ta da ye de”—
, “zhou”—
. How can she find the right translation for these swear words in English? If she had spent more time in Beijing’s streets and markets and noodle stores on her year in China at university perhaps she would now grasp much more. One day, she thinks, she will master the language and understand the culture perfectly. Iona imagines herself eventually settling down in China—and perhaps one morning, say, on the Fifth Ring Road of
Beijing’s Haidian District, as she is trying to cross the massive junction, squeezed between thousands of cyclists, she might overhear the exact curse that appears in one of Jian’s letters. But right now she can only sense Jian’s world from the remote isolation of her Islington flat. She has to work with what she has in her islander’s head. It’s like alchemy, but in reverse. She has to transform their gold into her lead. If she translated
“niu bi, cao dan, ta da ye de, zhou”
literally, it would read “cow’s cunt, wank the balls, fuck his father-in-law” or something like that. Western readers would think she was writing cheap porn. The crudeness would repel them. And she would have failed. The bridge she is trying to build between Mu and Jian would fall into the river that separates the lovers. But if she translates blandly and drily, their revolutionary love story will grow cold and stagnant. And Iona is not about to give up, having hardly begun. She knows too well the struggle of the imagination. On her island home, as a solitary child, she used to imagine faraway places. So here she is now, in her tiny London flat, imagining faraway cities and smells, the sensations of China, and faraway minds.

Still, she feels the need to rest. Her body is like a large, sluggish octopus, reminding her of its human form only through the aches in her shoulders and neck. She also has worries. She finds herself worrying about her mother. Why now, she isn’t sure. But like her shoulder pain, it’s there, weighing down on her. When her imagination drifts towards the north, this worrying pain about the woman who gave birth to her gives her a stomach cramp. With a certain sadness she thinks of their infrequent telephone conversations.

“You OK, Mum? What are you up to?”

“Oh dear, is that you, Iona? I can’t hear you very well … it must be the rain.” Her mother’s voice is frail on the end of the line. “Toby is being very noisy today. Toby! Toby! Stop messing around, come and sit here!” Toby is a Siberian Husky, her sister’s last Christmas present to her mother.

The rest of the conversation is loose: the weather forecast and making strawberry jam and fixing the generator and one of the cows is about to give birth … Then there is always some problem with the hired workers on the farm—lazy or irresponsible or both. Everything is sort of interesting but not really interesting, nothing is unfamiliar, and there’s never a turning point. Her mother has bad rheumatism; every rainy or even cloudy day she suffers severe joint pain and muscle inflammation. On the worst days she can’t even make the trip between the bedroom and the bathroom. More and more she stays inside, listening to the radio and baking cakes that no one will eat. Her father is either out on the farm or working in the basement, where they produce and store their cheeses. When he’s not on the farm, Iona’s father will sit and drink tumblers of Scotch or several pints in their local pub down the valley, staggering back late. He is, and has always been, a good drinker.

She doesn’t quite know why—perhaps it’s reading about so strange a place as a Shanghai hospital—but today is a day of images of home: wearing green wellies, the pungent sting of cowshit-soaked earth in her nostrils, the squish of the rain-sodden land. For Iona, the only beautiful time on the island is summertime. In the summer the temperature is just warm enough to remove coats and boots; the tall grass in the valleys is lush, and wild blue daisies bloom in blankets that cover the hillside; they eat all their meals in the garden and read books in the meadow. It is lovely, as her mother would say, but the loveliness is always so brief. Summer on the island “only lasts seven and a half days,” Iona would tell you. The rest is the winter, the ever-familiar cold, damp, windy, mossy, long, long winter.

Iona sinks back into her chair. Her body feels lonely, although her mind is full. A longing, a need, a swoon is rising between her loins and mounting to her chest. She can’t help but lower her hand. Her fingers find their way into her underwear—it’s warm and damp there. She presses her pubic region. Her body begins to recede into a realm
of pure sensation, delicate and enticing. She rests her head on the back of the chair. For a while she remains in that position, as if lying back on a man’s chest, her head resting on the warm skin covering a pulsing heart. Away, away … in some drowsy mix of pleasure and sunlight, she falls slowly, and sinks into oblivion.

12
LONDON, MAY 2013

By the end of the next day Iona is racing through the letters. She’s barely even getting up to make tea and stretch her legs any more. Her flat dissolves at the edges of her consciousness. All she can feel around her are the blank faceless rooms of the letters: one lined with dying cancer patients, the other with immigrant refugees in limbo.

Kublai Jian

Dover Immigration Removal Centre

Dover 2ER 4GS

UK

Dear Jian
,

So you are detained. Do you think they might send you home?

I am also waiting. I am waiting to leave the hospital. I feel desperate. This morning I played the ukulele in the corridor, just to break the silence. Or perhaps to avoid looking into the ghostly eyes that follow me
—
Father, Mother, and all the dying souls here that envy me my energy. It’s that same electric ukulele we bought together. I played the smallest sound I could make, but still the nurse approached with her head tilted on one side, a stern disapproving look on her face. They prefer the sound of death here. They prefer the sound of a sigh. Death is respected, but not the living. All the nearly dead patients do is look at the TVs the hospital has put in every room. It’s as if the TV has replaced the figurines of Buddha or posters of Mao. I can’t see how the news—a stream of propaganda as ever!—will help with these poor sick people’s hallucinatory ends. Our General Secretary of State paid a visit to the mineworkers and praised their hard work; the Shanghai Education Bureau said education is the key to the future; a Fujian tea farmer praised the Open Door Policy, said it changed his life entirely … How tedious! These can’t be the highlights of reality, nor serve as the spiritual hallucinations of the dying. We have become so practical with our ideologies that we no longer have any imagination. Maybe that’s why I don’t agree with your manifesto. Not all art must be political, Jian. Some artists strive to go beyond the political—though I know that’s hard for you to imagine
.

You know, I really wish you had met my father, I wish you’d met just once, that’s all. You know that I’ve wanted you to meet him for years, and now it’s too late. As he endures each coming hour on his bed I can feel his end within reach. Perhaps he doesn’t feel that he is merely enduring, perhaps I’m the one doing the enduring. I think perhaps it’s only me who’s desperate to leave this diseased place of endings. The tracheotomy has done a great deal of damage to his neck and now he’s got an open hole in his throat so that when he coughs his saliva trickles out of the hole down his neck. All we can do is mop it up with endless tissues. The doctors say it’s astonishing, even magical, that he is still alive. But I don’t think so. To me it feels like the last fight before death
.

I keep thinking of that proverb, “Zhi zhe gua yan”—“He who knows doesn’t talk.” You know my father respected you but he always worried about the impact of protest. And I wonder now that maybe that’s a better way to think about my father’s voiceless hole
.

Room 415. The cancer ward. My experience of Shanghai boils down to just this one room. It’s all I will remember. It’s like I can almost hear the silent sound of cancer cells dividing. Bodies are rotting away—my father’s, and next to my father’s, mine. A single molecule produces more molecules, then other molecules die at the same time, joints grow stiff, bones get brittle, organs shrink inside the dark flesh, blood vessels slowly pump, skin flakes off, cells die on the hospital sheets, on the crushed pillows and the sunken duvets. I’m full of melancholy, Jian. Please come home
.