I Am China (35 page)

Judging from what’s written on the wrapping paper—
(capitalist roader)—Iona is sure that the note was written by Mu’s father. And the next diary entry from Mu proves her right.

I was never taught at school the history of those years of my father’s generation. I feel like I must record his words. Perhaps one day I could show Jian these pages and he would understand another revolutionary and what he went through. My father, the young artist-worker, was sent away in the 1960s and punished with hard labour. Along with other “running dogs of capitalism,” he was living in a buffalo shed in a remote mountain region. His daily work included cutting grass to feed pigs and cows, collecting cow shit for the yam fields, planting rice while up to his thighs in the muddy water, fertilising fruit trees, and so on. When the planting and harvest seasons had passed, he would join other workers to make bricks—carrying mud and clay, mixing it with water, hardening the clay in the oven, then cutting the bricks and distributing them to villagers. He told me he probably made about ten thousand bricks with his own hands. Each night after supper, the workers would be divided into groups to study Marx and Lenin under the sparsely distributed oil lamps. Day and night they worked and studied; no one had any time to idle or to contemplate the meaning of life, my father wrote. As the Great Leader said: “First make a big pie, then everyone can get a slice!” Every proletariat agreed on this sort of canon, even the punished ones—agreed with all their heart
.

Sleeping alongside the buffalo, lonely but stoical, my father lived there for years. He hadn’t met my mother yet; he had no friends at all; he was self-critical. But he discreetly painted the wheat fields Van Gogh’s way—no people in the landscape, while nature appeared crazy and dreamlike. Of course he didn’t show these paintings to anyone. It was a very dangerous thing to do, and it made me rejoice hearing about my father’s little rebellion—trying to keep a part of him alive, even in the hardest circumstances. As my father was writing on his little scraps of medical paper about his hardship, I thought about Jian’s father
—
a high-ranking official with anything and everything he ever needed; my father had nothing but a skeletal body and an earnest heart
.

One day, he was working in a mine on the mountain, carrying heavy stones down towards the sea, to “gain farming land,” as the authority had decreed, and his vision suddenly blurred. He couldn’t see anything in his left eye. But fearing an accusation of being “bourgeois,” he continued his work until the evening and only then reported to the team leader that he couldn’t see. They took him to a local clinic and the doctor found that one of his retinas was broken. The next day the team leader compiled a report about the half-blind young man. Given that he was no longer suitable for hard labour, the camp decided he was ready to become “a good person.” A month later, he was dispatched to a small village under Rocky Peach Town and became a teacher at the village school. There, he continued to paint every evening after a long day’s work. My father didn’t say this to me explicitly, but I know he deeply valued the experience of his youth, even those punishing years in the camp. He once said the youth of today have no value system. And his daughter’s youth? I asked him. He didn’t make any comment on that. He just looked at me and drank the bitter medicine my mother cooked for him
.

8
ZHEJIANG PROVINCE, JULY 2012

“Was my father the first man you dated?” Mu asked her mother as they walked back from the village, carrying bags full of recommended herbal medicine.

“Dated?” Mu’s mother answered impatiently. “He was the first man I ever
talked to
apart from your grandfather!”

As the young painter was being punished in the countryside, the young peasant woman was still a teenager. Along with her family, she grew yams on their distributed farming land. In the fallow season she worked in the local silk factory. In the factory, some hundreds of women would stand at the assembly line removing silk fibres from silk cocoons. The silkworms were collected every day from the farmers in the province. Millions of those white-shelled moths would be soaked in hot water to allow the silk to lift away from their shells. Then the assembly line would roll the silk into piles and then they would dry it. The working floor was always hot and wet. It was a very physical job. Mu’s mother got mycosis and eczema all over her hands and feet. One day she could no longer bear the sharp pain of her fungus-ravaged hands and asked the management if she could do a different job. She was transferred to the factory’s dance troupe, to become one of the “Mao’s Thoughts” dancers—a Red Guard, singing and dancing and chanting slogans from the
Little Red Book
to promote the party’s dogma.

Sometime in the late sixties, Mu’s mother told her, the young Red Guard went out to the countryside with her team to sing for the peasants and the re-educated intellectual labourers, as the country was swept by a new revolution. And there she met her future husband. “So that was the time you two fell in love?” Mu asked her mother.

“What do you mean ‘fell in love’? There was no such thing as ‘falling
in love’ in that world.” Unimpressed by her daughter’s understanding of history, her mother went on. “Love is just a social condition.”

“What do you mean?”

“Social conditions—one’s obligations in life,” her mother answered impatiently, without a second thought. “For example, in a family or in a society, man is the first order, woman is the second. So a woman should fulfil her obligations for her man. If a man needs help, the woman is obliged to help the man, even if the man is a monster.”

Even if the man is a monster! My mother teaches me again what is “the second sex,” and I can see the last two thousand years of our Confucian feudal education is much stronger and deeper than the last fifty years of Communist education. Since our conversation about how my parents met, I have steered clear of discussing “love” with my mother. I seldom mention Jian in front of them, or anything of my emotional life. I must keep my private emotions in the safe enclosure of my heart, and make sure I don’t open it at all. If I opened it and exposed my possessions, they would be stolen and destroyed instantly!

Mu writes these words in her diary in the quiet night of her home town, with her sick father’s occasional coughing in the room across the hall.

9
LONDON, OCTOBER 2013

Love! What a strange concept among those Chinese couples! Iona sighs, and stops reading.

How can love be so totally material and pragmatic for some people? Iona doesn’t want to understand love like this. For her, everything else in life can be pragmatic, but not love. Love is something else. Maybe that’s why she separated love from sex right from the start. And perhaps it is because her idea of love is beyond the pragmatic that, so far, she has only had a sex life and no love life, and fear has always won.

In the last few weeks, besides Kublai Jian, a man she has never met, there is only one other person whose presence, imagined or otherwise, has had an impact on her, who has affected her sense of embodiment and stability, both in the day and the night. It is Jonathan. Unable to sleep one night with an agitated torrent of images and feelings running through her, she realised it was to do with him. He was somehow the focus of these subtle storms in her mind and body at night, and those feelings of liquid anxiety percolating through her belly during the day. But how? They have only met six times! Yes, they did end up in bed together. And, yes, their lovemaking, she vividly recalls—though, for some reason, not in detail—was like a sweet fire passing through the sieve of their bodies. Yes, OK, but it was only one night. How many men had she had nights with, perhaps even similar nights? Nights of the same intensity and abandonment? That is, after all, what she, Iona, specialises in. She is used to nights with men. Add to this the fact that he is a decade older than her. Admittedly, he is not very like a father or an uncle. On the contrary, he was vigorous and hungry. And he was refined, and subtle, like no other she had known. A certain
touch of the hand. Still, where is her sensible head? These thoughts about Jonathan can only be unwanted. He probably has a great family, a devoted wife with a tribe of children, and dogs, debts, everything. It’s absurd; indeed, not her at all. When she thinks of love—but then why is she thinking of love?—she thinks of falling for someone younger. More like a comrade in arms, more like an earnest but sexy young scholar. To be attached to Jonathan could only be disaster: a one-sided case of a powerless younger woman giving everything up for nothing in return. Still, she cannot explain this longing.

Last night was unsettling, and strange. She rang Jonathan, but it went straight to voicemail. It was only eight thirty. He was probably having dinner with his wife and children, or with one of the prominent writers he publishes. His answerphone was the typical breezy, echoey voice-for-everyone-and-no-one. If a man was having dinner with his wife, he probably wouldn’t take a call from another woman, she thinks. Unless he was with colleagues or friends—then he might take the call. After she’d put the phone down she had felt lonely, a sense of desertion. She sat for a while in the flat, not working on her translation; she contemplated the street lamp, some part of her waiting for her mobile to vibrate and light up. But nothing. Pointless to ring again. Other numbers lay inside her mobile that might have been pressed. Yes, there were others. But she made no effort to bring them to life. She went down to the pub on the corner of her street, sat at the bar alone, had a pint, chatted with a grumpy and tired barman. They played Memphis Slim songs, one after another: “
I’ll just keep on singing
 …”—the song made her brain muddy. As she drank the bitter beer, she gazed at her mobile. No sign from the other world. Then Memphis Slim sang “One Man’s Mad.” She watched two men hitting pool balls in the corner; they were in no hurry, no more so than the pace of the song was in any hurry. Such is the indifference of man. One moment you are drawn into a circle of warmth and promise, the next you are out.

She drank a second pint of beer and thought of her sex life. It seems that what she does to others has now been done to her. The
cruel one. The heartless one. That’s the face she likes to show. The face she showed to a perfectly decent bloke sitting beside her, looking at her attentively and waiting for her to say something. When her first pint was finished, he offered to buy her another. But she didn’t even bother to raise her eyes. She nursed her gloomy aura to protect her isolation. She finished the last drop of her beer and left the pub at last orders. The man sat there and watched her leave. She walked back to her flat, closed the door behind her and climbed into bed. She slept. Next morning, her phone was still blank. If longing always brings disappointment and desire connects to a sense of emptiness, then love really is a melancholy affair, Iona thinks, in her solitude.

10
ZHEJIANG PROVINCE, JULY 2012

In those three months in the south, there is little change in Mu’s daily routine, and apart from occasional visits from relatives or friends of Mu’s parents, no one comes to visit. There is one interesting guest who drops by the family house every now and again, though. His name is Gu Chengde, a rich old man. According to Mu’s parents, he is a shipbuilding tycoon whose business has been so successful he has offices all over the world. He doesn’t seem to mind the modest hospitality of Mu’s parents, though, despite arriving in his brand-new limousine driven by his private chauffeur and bringing rare fruits, herbs and gingseng to strengthen Mu’s father’s health.

“But, Mother, why would such a rich man want to visit Father?”

Mu’s mother shrugs dismissively. “He’s your father’s childhood friend. They grew up in the same compound in their village. Unlike your father’s useless interest in painting and communism, Mr. Gu has been doing ‘useful things’ like his shipbuilding business for the last twenty years.” Mu’s mother pours the newest tea leaves of the year into the pot and gestures to her daughter. “Mu, bring the tray into the front room for Mr. Gu. He is now one of the biggest international shipping businessmen in China.”

“But Mother, how did he become quite so very rich?”

“I remember when he was nominated for China’s New Entrepreneur Excellence Award. I saw him on TV, he went on to beat thousands of big names to win national recognition. He rose higher and higher, but he never forgot his roots. And he wanted to help your father, his childhood buddy.”

As Mu’s mother starts cooking for their guest, Mr. Gu apologises that he can’t stay, he has to drive back to his Ningbo headquarters, for
an evening meeting with clients. The mother hurriedly introduces Mu to the tycoon, and they shake hands formally. “Girl, if you have toured in America with your poetry, you must be a real talent! And your English must be good! You should come to work for us.” Mr. Gu has a booming loud voice and shows off his two gold teeth as he speaks.