I Am China (34 page)

The afternoon on which Mu clears out of her flat and puts everything into storage, she walks back to the street where she and Jian used to live. She looks up at the flat once more. She lowers her gaze. She has kept the key, as well as the access to her mailbox. There is only one thing that makes her hesitate about when to return the key to the landlord: her hopes, perhaps foolish, that she might receive something from Jian. A final letter maybe, or many letters, or some sort of real farewell. She is not sure. Like a stray dog, she wanders about under her building for a while, carrying only her handbag. Ten minutes later, she stops at an old pancake stall to eat as she makes her final decision. Then she jumps in a taxi—direction: Beijing Railway Station. There she buys a one-way ticket for the earliest train she can get on, down to her southern province.

She stays with her parents for nearly a hundred days in the village where she grew up. Her father is at his end. The hospital in Shanghai
has given up on him and he’s come home. The family is still trying to find ways to cure him with all kinds of traditional herbs. But cancer is cancer. Especially in its final stages. There is no mistaking it. For Mu, there is little to do, and she spends her time digging vegetables in the family plot. They used to grow beans and cucumbers when she was young, and her mother would take them to the market to sell. Now Mu resumes that labour. She spends several hours a day bending over, prostrating herself almost, to get small green things to send out shoots, or to prevent them from being eaten by slugs or hens. She is surprised that she still remembers how to grow them. Although a bit clumsy, she knows how to arrange the poles and to set strings to support the climbing plants. Maybe that’s how life is, she thinks. Everything needs support.

In the heat, under the blue, encircled by the profile of egg-shaped hills, among flies and mosquitoes, her wordless companions, she sets about trying to re-create the small yam field which her mother had abandoned when her father fell ill. They don’t need to grow their own yams any more—they can buy a kilo of yams in the market, in any season, for only eight yuan. But Mu tells herself: isn’t this what village life is all about? It has been a strange time; her mind and body feel as if they have separated and left behind an empty skeleton. Those days in Beijing and in the U.S. are like a long-distant dream, evaporated in the southern China heat. The wind occasionally refreshes her sweating skin, but then she will be anguished again by the sound of her father coughing behind her as he tries to rearrange his aching limbs in his chair. Sometimes, with moist eyes, the father eyes his daughter who has returned so transformed and yet remains the same serious child. Mother too watches her spooling out the strings for the cucumber vines and beans. She doesn’t ask much about her daughter’s American experience; it is as if nothing is worthy of conversation now that the old man is in his final days.

5
ZHEJIANG PROVINCE, JUNE 2012

We know very well how families are in everyday patterns of life. No daughter or son can escape the family interrogation. It always begins subtly with a sigh, clearing of a throat, or rustling of the morning paper, a spike of activity in the kitchen. On this morning, the interrogation session begins while Mu’s father is digesting his day’s cocktail of medicinal syrup and tonics. Mother looks agitated, and is vigorously scrubbing a pot. Suddenly there is a clang of the pot being shoved onto the drying rack, and, without even turning round to her daughter, Mother gets straight down to business.

“Tell me, Mu, what are your plans for the future?”

“What future? You mean my work?”

“I don’t see you getting interested in your career exactly … But no, I meant men! Your future with a man!” Her voice is slightly shrill.

“I just came back from America, Mother, give me a break.” The daughter is instantly defiant.

“But do you not have a new boyfriend?”

Walking towards the garden, Mu pretends she hasn’t heard, but her mother chases her.

“Don’t tell me you are still with Jian, you told me you split up long ago.”

“We are no longer together,” mumbles Mu.

“That’s good. You see, I have never liked him. He is not a reliable person in my eyes,” her mother exclaims, conviction billowing in her breast. “I think it’s good that you two have separated. But you must be quick, find someone urgently! We need to see grandchildren before it’s too late!”

Mu’s mother seems in her usual state of desperation whenever this subject comes up.

Her daughter gazes across the garden towards the hills in the distance, as if searching for a vision of her own future.

“A musician, or any artist, is not going to bring a woman a good life anyway, even if he is a handsome crane standing amid a flock of chickens. Family is family, not an endless concert for drug addicts.” Then, with a pause and a depression of her brows, and stammering a little: “You need a husband with real substance—an upright man of bamboo quality, with a family house and good savings!”

“Do I? Men of bamboo quality often have no savings at all,” Mu replies.

“You are getting old! A girl over thirty isn’t worth much, no man will turn his head to look at you!”

Later that night Mu sits in her room, writing her diary, while her parents sleep across the hall.

“Family is family, not an endless concert for drug addicts.”

What is a family? Isn’t it a prison in the name of love and responsibility? As much as I love my father, I also love my freedom. If I must choose, I would prefer to live for my freedom than for my family. But my family won’t let me
.

Since baby Shu’s death, my mother almost never mentioned Jian
—
it’s as if it never happened. She didn’t want to know about my life with Jian. Not our world, not Jian, not my son, not my pain. I still remember that cold loneliness—when we brought back Little Shu’s urn from one of Beijing’s crypts. I felt so alone when Jian and I rode the subway back to the flat, even though his hand was on my shoulder. Yes, what does it mean, a family? If Little Shu were alive, I would love him in a different way from how my mother “loves” me, then I would perhaps understand what a family really means
.

6
ZHEJIANG PROVINCE, JUNE 2012

“How did Dad start painting in the first place, Mum?” Mu asks.

The daughter thinks about how difficult it is to uncover her father’s story. He never speaks about his past. A very self-effacing person, her father has barely expressed his opinions on anything, whether in the house or outside. And now, the third-stage throat cancer has robbed him of his speech forever. Before it is too late, Mu thinks, I must understand everything about him.

“Well, I never really understood that either. He was just a rice farmer and all his family members had always worked on the land.” Her mother has a wistful look on her face. “I remember he mentioned a painter’s name, a painter from some Western country. But, you know, a peasant like me, I wouldn’t recognise the names.”

In the next room, the father hears the conversation between his daughter and his wife. He writes down two words,
(Van Gogh), on a piece of paper, and shows it to Mu as she comes in with his daily herbal drink. Then he begins to tell her his story, word by word, on a student notebook he found on Mu’s dusty shelf.

From fragmentary details her father manages to write down when he has the strength, Mu tries to piece together his story. He writes that he grew up working in rice paddies and raising pigs. His hands were rough from using a hoe and his body sinewy from lifting and digging. He didn’t ever think about culture or art—impossible for Mu to imagine now. He just thought about rain and heat, and how to make the plants produce fruits, how to raise pigs. Then one day, when he was about eighteen, he saw something he’d never seen before. It was a
photograph of Van Gogh’s painting
The Starry Night
. He did not understand what he was looking at, but the Dutch painter’s brush, like a magical whirlpool, pulled him into another world, a world free from labour and poverty of expression. From that moment he wanted to become a painter, not just a man of fieldwork. He began to draw. To make use of his painting skills, the party told him to work in the drawing group; his title would be “artist-worker.” From that day on, this artist-worker’s job would be to paint smiling peasants in their straw hats in the rice fields under the bright sun; or a woman driver on a brand-new tractor, confidently resting her hands upon the wheel and gazing towards the horizon; or a group of strong fishermen spreading their nets upon the water while hundreds of fish lie captured on their boat. And a slogan would be written on top of every poster: “Our Destination is the Morning Sun. Our Leader is the Great Captain.”

Then something terrible happened. One day, Mu’s father painted a rice farmer’s face on the back of an old poster. In the night, rain drenched the painting, and the farmer’s smiling face became imprinted with the lines of the earlier drawing, that of a horse’s arse. This faint yet manifest horse’s arse branded Mu’s father an anti-revolutionary, a “right-wing roader.” At the age of twenty-three he became an enemy of the people, and was forced to confess his “anti-revolutionary conspiracy.” In his written confession, he told the party that he couldn’t understand how he could be an enemy of the people since he was the son of the poorest of the poor.
“From the bottom of my heart, I love the people, the peasants, the proletariat. And I respect them as much as I respect the land that has raised me, and the soil which has borne us the food we eat. I cannot be an enemy of the proletariat.”
On his bed, Mu’s father writes these words painfully for his daughter, recalling a dark and cold night from his deeply forgotten past, some decades ago, when he was forced to write his confession in the camp, under the faint and flickering light of an oil lamp.

7
LONDON, OCTOBER 2013

Iona has in front of her a photocopy of a scrappy piece of paper, and on it the most beautiful handwriting she has ever seen. Although it is a second-hand or even a third-hand photocopy, she can still decipher the markings of the original writing paper—the back of a piece of herbal-medicine wrapping paper. In fact, she can still read the faint print of the ingredients for the herb medicines:
(dried gooseberry),
(orange skins),
(pear-tree roots),
(snake powder), as well as some Chinese plants with names she doesn’t recognise. The writing has its own particular calligraphy style, with very careful and elegant strokes. It reminds her of Mu’s style. Perhaps it is her father’s handwriting, she thinks.