I Am China (10 page)

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
.

I have been thinking about your manifesto, dear Jian, though I can’t see that it’s of any use right now
.

I’ve got to run, I have to get my father’s medicine from the pharmacy before it closes
.

Your very own Mu

11
LONDON, MAY 2013

Words, symbols, verbal gestures. Sometimes clear, sometimes obscure. Iona struggles, unable to gauge their depth in the parallel world of Mu and Jian. But she tries, and at the same time she shuffles around the pages, trying to arrange them in the right order.

Dear Mu
,

I’m sitting in this foul-smelling little library writing to you like a Mongol who has lost his horse! How pathetic, old bastard sky! But I’ve no army gearing up for battle, and there are no hills surrounding my room, just a whole pile of legal files and the sound of seagulls screeching somewhere nearby
.

I try to be USEFUL even when I cannot be used here. I study European history like I did at school, but I am too old to be re-educated! But yes, TO BE USEFUL, that’s what I must strive for. Someone has taken the only copy of
Das Kapital
the library holds, so I don’t have anything sensible to read—I didn’t know Marx was as popular in the West as he is in China. You may ask why I don’t read the Russian book you gave me all those months ago. It sits by my bed most days and the words on the front feel like some kind of warning: Life and Fate. Right now I am not in the mood to read about Russian soldiers being shot in their millions and dying in the freezing winter
—
don’t we Chinese have enough stories like that already?…
[Translator’s note: Jian’s handwriting in this passage on
Life and Fate
is illegible.]