I Am China (12 page)

I love you as much as I love my father
.

Your Mu

Iona feels a knot in her throat. Suddenly she thinks of death. Death rarely visits her mind. But Mu’s letter has invited it in. It lolls there coldly in a corner along with distant memories from her past, and it makes her feel sad. But she has been lucky. Iona has never had to face anything too traumatic. Her only experience of death was her grandmother, sitting slumped in an old armchair in her home in the highlands. It was Boxing Day, her mother was downstairs, heating up leftover turkey, and eight-year-old Iona had been wandering about the house, bored and listless, and had gone upstairs, following the silent old carpet. At first she had thought the old lady was asleep. But as she moved closer a coldness seemed to be coming from the figure. It was a horrifying moment, her grandmother’s eyes were still wide open; her face was directed towards the window which overlooked the valley. And that day the valley was grey and empty, no single living being could be seen. She heard the door open and her sister Nell crept up to stand beside her. The two little girls stood in front of the dead lady with the tremble of fear about them. Still, no tears. For Iona, her grandmother had lived in a family photo album. Death felt linked to the immobility, a frozen image.

13
SHANGHAI, APRIL 2012

The south wind carries the humidity from the East China Sea between the monumental skyscrapers of Shanghai. Every household opens their windows wide, as the walls are mouldy with winter damp. Inside Fuxing Park the cherry blossoms are fully bloomed, their petals falling like snow in the wind; the willow trees and maples turn deep green with their fast-spreading shoots. Spring cannot wait to arrive; it rushes in on the tide of the Yangtze River, making everyone sluggish and restless, as if one had drunk too much hot Oolong tea.

In the patients’ canteen, over fried tilapia fish, Mu breaks the news of her departure.

“I’m leaving tomorrow. Flying back to Beijing.” She speaks in a neutral tone, as if she is just taking a trip between her father’s room and the doctor’s office.

“Tomorrow? So sudden!” her mother responds. “What have we done to make you so miserable here? Eh? Can’t you see your father is dying? We haven’t seen you for two years, you come back for two minutes and now you want to leave us again!”

Swallowing a piece of fish, Mu keeps her head cast down at her rice bowl.

Her father is saddened, but he says nothing. He puts down his chopsticks.

There is no good excuse the daughter can offer her family. She has been a determined person since she was small. She was born in the year in which the Vietnam War ended, 1975. Although her mother desperately wanted another child—a son, or two or three more sons if possible—her exhausted womb wouldn’t produce any siblings for Mu.
She tried swallowing kilos of ginseng and oyster powder but to no avail. So the “Lonely Only” girl grew up in a tea-producing southern village accompanied by her mother’s discontent. Her father was the one who showed love and affection for Mu. It was also him who taught her the first poem she ever heard, “Farewell to the Grassland,” from a Tang-dynasty poet, Bai Juyi. “The grass on the vast plain, one season it dies, another season it grows; wild fire cannot bring it scorching death, spring wind draws it into new life.” Her father would recite it slowly to his young, eager daughter, lingering over the words, drawing out each character with his ink brush.

When Mu was very young she kept falling ill from sunstroke. Her nose would often bleed in the summer. Her father took her out of school or the Young Pioneers’ Palace, where she would study at weekends, and put her in a clinic. And the child with her burning red cheeks would swear to her father: “One day I will leave this hot oven and I will live in the north. I’ll find a snowy town, I’ll live in Haerbin or Beijing.” It was as if she was never meant to be in the south, as if by pure accident she had been placed there, a child who really belonged to snow and crisp blue skies. And one day she did run away. A four-day train ride took her to what had always been the home town of her heart: Beijing. Her first year in the city was a mix of loneliness and exhilaration. She loved the ice skating and the heavy snows, the broad streets, the urban ugliness, the vast sports stadium and the secret underground bars. She would cycle around the enormous city, in spring through sandstorms, in winter through blizzards. She hardly slept. It was here that she discovered her people, her friends and comrades. The ones with whom she could live the life of ideas, with whom she could create a new world of literature and freedom.

In Mu’s heart, her father is the person she cares for most, but she tells herself that she can do nothing more to change his situation. “I cannot bury my life with his cancer cells, and I am not going to just wait here for him to die! I cannot repeat my mother’s life!” Mu feels like it’s all very clear for her suddenly: “And when I grow old, I will
not mind dying alone. Goddamnit! I can die alone without demanding that anyone die with me. And I am not going to make my children sit beside my deathbed watching me wither away.” She remembers conversations with Jian on their balcony looking out over the hectic ringroads below, foodstall sellers, businessmen, peasants and students all walking fast on the same pavement.

It is the last day of Mu’s stay in Shanghai. A train ticket to Beijing is in her pocket and it is a one-way pass. After her last lunch with her parents, there are a few hours to go before her departure. She writes in her diary:

Father and Mother laid their skeletal bodies on the bed for their afternoon nap. I lay beside them, flipping through the local newspaper which only publishes adverts. Slowly, I felt the anguish growing with each passing second. I looked at them, as they lay there. For the last decade the only life my parents have been allowed is one of eating and sleeping. Like animals—like cows or pigs. I gazed into their faces, half covered by a bed sheet. It felt strange, like I was invading their skin. Their bodies moved only very slightly, their breath coming between long pauses. It was as if a slow cyclic sigh was escaping from their half-open quivering mouths. It was a collective sigh, the only act that they now truly perform together. They are my parents, who once held me up as a baby, and helped me walk, and fed me, now lying together in their exhaustion. I could see the sigh that travelled through their bodies, back and forth between the walls, with no release, no escape
.

THREE | INTERIM ZONE

dong zhang xi wang.

To look east and west; to look all around
.

TRADITIONAL CHINESE PROVERB

1
LONDON, MAY 2013

It is Tuesday morning. After paying her overdue gas bill and her council tax, Iona sits down and types an email.

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subject: Regarding the translation

Dear Jonathan,

My name is Iona Kirkpatrick. We haven’t met yet, but I’ve been in contact with Maria Chambers regarding the translation of documents from a Chinese musician she asked me to take a look at. As Maria is now on maternity leave, I understand you are overseeing things. I thought you should know that there might be a delay in the completion of my translation. Huge apologies about this, and I hope it doesn’t set back your publication plans, but judging by the time it’s taken me to translate the letters and diary entries this last week I imagine I’m going to need a bit more time.

I’m ploughing through the material, trying to comb out some real coherence, to find a central narrative thread, but I have to say I don’t think I have enough background information to do justice to the translation as things stand. Maria told me very little. Do you have any further information? The most important issue seems to me the identity of Kublai Jian himself. There are lots of oblique references to his background and family, his music and something he and his girlfriend refer to as his “manifesto” in the text, but I haven’t come across anything on Weibo clips or Boku archives—the Chinese equivalent of YouTube and Wikipedia—to fill in the details. I presume he changed his name long ago (standard musician behaviour, surely?) or perhaps the Chinese censors have managed to clean up everything relating to him. It seems he was imprisoned in China—presumably related to this manifesto (do you know anything more about it?)—and then ended up in the UK. But this was some months ago, and obviously I’ve still got much more to translate, but I can’t yet work out how he left China and where he is now. I hope you’ll excuse my curiosity! I’d say I need six or eight more weeks. I hope you understand that I want to do the best possible job! Do let me know whether that is going to work for you.

All best wishes,

Iona Kirkpatrick

In no time Iona receives an automatic reply.

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subject: Regarding the translation

Thanks for your email. I am out of the office this week with no access to email, back in the office on Monday 20th. If your query is urgent, please contact my assistant Suzy Warbuton on [email protected]

All best wishes,

Jonathan Barker

Iona stares at the reply. It astounds her; apparently when you have an office job you are always out of the office. With no set hours to subscribe
to, she finds herself at her desk from morning till night. It rankles her, working so hard with others seemingly off on holiday all the time. She knows there is something about this “case” that has got under her skin. Something in her wants to leap out of its box and crack open the mysterious riddle.

2
LONDON, MAY 2013

Wearing a new lilac dress, Iona walks through Camden Passage, turns left, and comes to an old narrow street called Baker’s Close. It is a Wednesday, rubbish-collection day. Piles of plastic bags are gathered on the pavement. Pigeons peck scraps of bread that spill from the bags and litter the ground. Iona normally feels so at home in these backstreets around the Angel, but today she doesn’t know where exactly she is, and feels a little out of control.

She stands in front of a house, number 126, looking at its neglected garden: a rusty fence, a few dead plants, a dried-out sunflower stem are all that suggest this might once have been a lively household. She presses the doorbell and waits. A postman passes her, carrying a large shoulder bag of mail. He gives her a long look and walks on. He doesn’t stop at the house. She presses the bell again—there’s no ring. It must be broken. She peers into the frosted-glass panes on the door, and sees just darkness behind the door. She knocks loudly. A few seconds later a man in his late thirties opens the door. According to his Internet name, this should be Tony.

They barely speak to each other. She has come here for one simple reason: the unsaid sex in their brief but obvious Internet communication. Tony is muscular and tall, not at all unattractive. She feels her loins becoming wet as he is unzipping her lilac dress. He tries to kiss her, from her cheeks to her neck, then on the mouth, but Iona feels disgusted when his lips get close to hers. She can’t do it. There’s something repulsive about the idea of their lips and tongues colliding. Instead, she commands him: “Lick me.”

The man is a bit surprised, but he obeys. He strips off her tights. She bought this semi-erotic lingerie with transparent lace patterns. It
takes him a while to remove it. When her lower body is completely exposed before him, he is on his knees, his jeans already unzipped at the flies and loose on his thighs. At first he kisses her pubic area, then he sucks her lower lips. She takes pride in her position, opening her legs wider. As he passes his tongue over her clit, his other hand reaches inside his pants. He takes his penis out and rubs it. Iona watches him swelling. His erect penis juts forward with a fleshy madness that she finds hypnotic. She watches his cock hardening almost to the point of bursting against her.

Then he stops rubbing himself. He takes her nipple into his mouth and sucks on it really hard. Iona feels a slight ache in his squeeze, almost sore. He buries his face in her breasts; his soft brown hair tickles her chin, a soapy, newly washed smell. She wants to caress it, but her hands are stiff, clenching her upper body against his face. She wants to submit herself completely, yet at the same time she doesn’t want to offer him any tenderness.