I Am China (28 page)

Today, once again, Jian cruises along the street that is supposed to be Marie’s haunt. Perhaps she is lying on a bed somewhere, with a client on top of her. Perhaps she is taking a hot bath after sex in a hotel room. Or perhaps she is taking a holiday. Do old French prostitutes take holidays? Jian wonders with disquiet. Or perhaps she is sick from some venereal infection and her lower body is right now overflowing with yeast. As the evening lamps illuminate rue Saint-Denis, Jian loses himself in the crowds. Those enchanting smiles under the lights, those elegant gestures and pleasant rendezvous in bars and restaurants. They remain intangible to him. His arms stretching out for attention and warmth reach nowhere to nobody.

10
PARIS, JULY 2012

Old bastard sky. I stared at the afternoon street, this street without Marie. I wanted to buy her a gift, for some reason, before seeing her again. And I walked up and down rue Saint-Denis, going in and out of one clothes shop after another. I felt foolish. A pathetic act. Nobody gives a damn about what I am doing anyway
.

Hours passed. I hung around. Couldn’t find anything useful to do. I ate the second apple as it was a leaden weight in my pocket. I had to tear through the tough skin with my teeth. I thought of that knife. The knife my mother used to cut herself. A long, slim knife that we used to peel the skin off sugar cane. It wasn’t sharp. She didn’t succeed at first. There were jagged scars around her wrists. She must have tried many times. My grandmother picked up the knife from the floor. The first thing she did was to wash the blood off. Then she hid it in our rice jar
,
as if the knife might fly around by itself and cut open everyone’s heads. We never used that knife again. It sat in the kitchen and became very rusty. Layers of brown rust covered the whole blade. From then on we used our teeth to peel the sugar cane. I don’t remember my grandmother eating sugar cane ever again
.

The sun is at its zenith. Brasserie Le Clauzier. Mainly old men spend their afternoons here. Two bald men each occupy a table in the corner, reading papers and drinking wine. Then there is Jian, scribbling words in his diary and occasionally looking up at the old men to reflect on things. One of them is about eighty. Skinny and decayed, he looks like a handful of dried roots. Slowly, he sips his rosé and eats his beef bourguignon. The old man chews extremely slowly, his sunken mouth
probably toothless. He seems to live in his old age with great patience. Jian imagines his own teeth falling out, his hair reduced to a few wisps: a dried-up skeleton like the one propped on this chair, wearing an old watch to witness each passing hour before death arrives.

The tunnel wind in the Métro at Belleville is very warm. The heat must be generated by the friction or pressure between the trains. Jian sits on the platform, upturns the straw hat he found the other day in the street, and opens his guitar case. His fingers are stiff. The guitar is out of tune. He tries to tune the cold strings. He tries to sing, not one of his own songs, but a song from a 1937 Chinese film,
Street Angel
, one of his favourite films. It is about a Shanghai street musician’s encounter with two sisters. The sisters have been forced into prostitution and the street musician helps them and before long falls in love with one of the sisters. A few years ago, in a cinema in Beijing’s Xiao Xitian area, Jian watched the film for at least the fifth or sixth time with Mu—holding hands together in the dark. They both remembered so well the songs from the film, and Jian even learned to play the main theme, “Song Girl at the Edge of the World”:

To the ends of the earth

To the edge of the sea

I seek, oh, seek the soulmate who understands my song

This little sister sings, and her man plays along

You and I are of the same heart

Aiya you and I are of one heart

Towards the mountains of home, oh, I gaze to the north

Tears, oh, tears wet my robe

I long for my lover man even now
.

Jian feels a sympathy for the character: a street musician in “love” with a prostitute. But his heroine is his mother’s age, and she’s nowhere to be found.

The next day he sets himself up outside Pigalle Métro. A wild-haired African drummer occupies the platform; he doesn’t sing, just madly hits his many drums, like he is caught in a powerful electrical current. As he seems to attract the crowds, Jian puts himself reasonably close to him.

Almost all street musicians like Pigalle—it’s where tourists get off to visit Montmartre. Many are middle-aged American women and their families, and, with universal compassion for the artist, they generously throw a few euros into Jian’s hat. As thanks, Jian sings Mongolian folk songs of the grasslands and horses, the bowmen and the yurts, although he can’t hold a note for as long as those folk songs require. Most Westerners like the Mongolian style—the native tribal style somehow works better than rock ’n’ roll down in a Métro station.

Over the next few days, Jian arrives at Pigalle station at ten in the morning every day and takes a lunch break to eat a half-chicken (which costs only two euros from Monoprix). Then he comes back to the Métro for two more hours’ playing. But the afternoons feel lousy and long. Sleepy and weary, cradling his old guitar, he sees himself as a dirty street bum, a thief, a superfluous being, a nameless beggar at any Métro entrance. He feels he has no dignity left in him. So on the day the police arrive to check his street-performance certificate, Jian feels ready to leave, to move on, to move anywhere.

Rue Victor Masse, 27 July 2012

Au Jardin du Bonheur. The crippled madam gave me a big bowl of dumpling soup, pork and chive filling. Madame Wu of Au Jardin du Bonheur is about sixty-five; she cooks most of the food for her clients by herself, in her tiny but homely restaurant. She said I reminded her of her son (similar age and temperament, doesn’t like to talk), who married a French girl and barely ever visited her again. I think she must be a bit discontented as a mother. She seems to be a very educated Beijingese with a Buddha-like face (even received a college degree in agricultural science!—if she had remained in China she would probably be high up in the State Agriculture Department). But she is a woman, and a woman follows her man: she came to Europe with her husband and the dreams of a new life ended up in the same space—a kitchen. My mother didn’t want her life to end up in a kitchen; instead she wanted culture; but what difference would it have made? Erik Satie didn’t save her, nor did the Communists
.

Try to live usefully … I sing outside Au Jardin du Bonheur to help Madame Wu attract customers. I sing slow songs. “What a Beautiful Jasmine Flower,” she likes to hear that. Do jasmine flowers reflect a political issue or not? In China I would ask this question and somebody would argue with me. But here, how stupid the question is! And even if it were a valid question, who gives a damn whether the jasmine flower reflects a political issue or not? Pay us first and I will tell you whatever you want
.

At night, as I lie with Chang Linyuan’s health-insurance card under my pillow, I ask myself: is this going to be my life in the West? Old bastard sky! I’m becoming Frankenstein, or Frankenstein’s monster. A large, stiff body, huge eyes staring into the world but seeing nothing, heavy legs moving without knowing their direction or purpose—a body without mind. A life without living. Fucking hell
.

—Cao ta da ye de.

11
PARIS, JULY 2012

These girls, Jian thinks, are not girls. They are whales, or some other large beast. There are six of them, professional cabaret performers. The biggest woman is Madeleine, with huge breasts pendulously undulating inside her shirt. She is from San Francisco but has lived in Paris for many years. “I’m a lesbian,” she tells Jian right away, and the conversation seems to end right there. The smallest of them is Anna, a French girl with a beautiful smile from the north, a town called Lille.

“You know, Jian, we’re like porn artists. You understand what I mean by porn artists, right?” Madeleine tries to educate the naive Chinese man.

“You know, Jian, once you understand our style, you can make music for us, even improvise as we perform,” Anna adds.

Jian gives them a quick rendition of one of his own songs, not “Long March into the Night” but another piece, one about Mongolia, mountains, yaks, wrestling and getting drunk on fermented roots. The girls laugh and clap their hands; they seem to like how he plays.

“What about French songs?” Anna asks.

He did learn a bit of Jacques Brel’s famous “Amsterdam” when he was in the Lausanne refugee centre—“
Dans le port d’Amsterdam, / Y a des marins qui chantent
”—and he can even switch into English—“
They sing of the dreams that they bring from the wide open sea, / In the port of Amsterdam
 …”—but only these four lines. Otherwise he plays “La Marseillaise” which he learned at school when he was a Young Pioneer, but this time he gives it a punk edge and adds some Chinese lyrics on top, so that it sounds half-parody, half-homage, electrified by twelve-bar blues-rock.

The girls laugh with appreciation. They like this Chinese man with his roaring-hoarse voice, an easy companion and a total mystery.

For his new job, the girls give him extra instruments to play with: two drums and an old violin. They say, “Practise!” Then they tell him to watch their live sex show that night to get ideas, and to think about how to play his music to fit in with their performance. Jian sits on a rickety cafe chair at the back of the room and watches. In the beginning, the girls wear a layer of leather, high-heeled boots, chains and belts. As the farce develops, their clothes are taken off by a male actor who plays a doctor professor-type character. Eventually the girls are naked, except for two shiny stars stuck on their nipples and a tiny G-string barely covering their crotch. In the final act the doctor asks one of the girls to lie on a table on which he lays out all sorts of medical instruments. Madeleine or Anna—it’s usually one of them—then says, “Doctor, I believe there is a mouse in my pussy. You must get him out!” Then the girl on the table opens her legs wide towards the audience. Her vagina, shaved hair and pink lips, is exposed for everyone to view. The doctor now elegantly slips on his white gloves and enters his fingers into the girl’s vagina to look for the hiding rodent. And finally a slightly moist cotton mouse is extracted from the reclining girl’s lower body, and the German tourists crowd round the stage to look at the mouse, burst out laughing and applaud loudly. Jian laughs too, but stops when a line from Aldous Huxley pops into his head: “
An intellectual is a person who’s found one thing that’s more interesting than sex
.” He ponders for a few seconds, and wonders if he is still an intellectual.

In the dressing room after the show, Jian assures the girls that he can work with the performance. “No problem,” he says, “I can either use a violin or a guitar, or a guitar with a drum, whatever you think will work.”

“You sound very positive,” Madeleine says, her left eyebrow raised quizzically, “like a real professional.”

“I don’t think I am a professional. But this job is similar to what I used to do in China, although I have never worked with women before,” explains Jian, with a defensive sincerity.

“You never worked with women before? How come? I thought China had a bloody revolution only sixty years ago!” Madeleine laughs. “Listen, Jian. Just so you don’t get the wrong idea, let me be straight with you: we are lesbians. We don’t go with men, you understand?”

She points her long, plump finger, like a piece of marzipan, at Jian’s nose. “We prefer women, and these sex shows are an artistic expression for us. We are not here to serve the male order. Do you understand, Jian?”

The Chinese man nods his head, narrowing his eyes, and silently slurps his bowl of beef noodle soup.

As Madeleine’s words are popping in Jian’s ears, his eyes cannot help but linger on Anna’s scarlet lips and her wavy chestnut hair. She has such a petite body—the kind of figure, Jian admits to himself, that draws him. Normally Anna plays the nurse or an innocent schoolgirl, her short uniform tight around her compact bottom. Jian tries not to think about that right now. Although she has a soft, feminine face and a welcoming, kind expression, her eyes are sharp as knife blades. When she speaks to him she arches back her head, viewing him from above with hooded eyes to repeat in mellower tones what the more turbulent Madeleine has already impressed upon him. For a moment he feels he is in some kind of re-education camp.