I Am China (15 page)

And because you’re not here, everything is different
.

The three boys from Beijing Manic—do you know Lutao, the vocalist and guitarist?—and I had to get passports. We kept quiet about it. Didn’t tell anyone. It was like we were on some secret mission. I didn’t even tell my parents. I think Bruce had to really work hard at getting our U.S. visas. I will only really believe the whole thing once we are on the other side of the planet
.

It’s hard to know what will come in the next weeks, my ape man, but I’m all inspired. I hope your situation gets better soon
.

Love from the bravest woman you ever knew
,

Your Mu

PS From now on, in the next two months, you can write to me at this address (my manager’s): PO Box 2121, Boston, MA 02215, USA

It has started to rain again. Iona bundles the photocopies back into the folder and slips it inside her coat, hugging it to her chest as she buttons up. Back at her flat she puts the kettle on, towel-dries her dripping hair and opens her laptop. She types “Beijing Manic China” into Google. A flood of information comes up on the screen. In an interview with the band a headline reads
NEW CHINESE BAND HEIRS TO JOY DIVISION?
after a claim by frontman Lutao that the English band is their main inspiration. Iona finds another article on the fashion and sense style favoured by the band. There are two photos—although blurred, clearly taken at a concert, she can make out the figures. They are very young. All leather jackets and the familiar attitude of punk—a metallic youth, she thinks, and the phrase comes to her in Chinese and in English.

9
LONDON, MAY 2013

Iona finishes the latest translation feeling totally energised and exhausted. Mu writes fluently and vigorously; she is a natural writer, compared with Jian’s fragmented and unfocussed style. Still, she doesn’t feel quite ready to embark on a brand-new journey with this Chinese woman yet. Instead, she returns to an early part of Jian’s diary, where she discovers a loose fragment on a floating photocopy.

Beijing, July 1999

Typical situation: I was inside the History Museum looking at documents from the Opium War time while she waited outside in the cafe reading some suicidal poet—Sylvia Plath, it turns out. And when I came out we started to quarrel. I want to record this argument
—
it’s troubling me, I keep playing it over and over and I can’t find a way out. She fascinates me and I can’t seem to function without her but, Old Sky, I can’t bear the fact that on the surface she acts like a rebel but deep down she is a conformist for anything fashionable. I can’t take her blind acceptance of anything Western. (Isn’t it a perfect example of our difference that she studies Western literature and I am reading Chinese history?) I know she hasn’t had to fight like me, she hasn’t had a father like mine, but she needs to find her own ground to stand upon, not some second-hand interpretation of Western culture
.

So I said I thought it was ridiculous that all our syllabus told us to read were these Western novels. That we knew the lives of the Americans and the British better than our own artists, better than our own parents, even. She just shrugged and said she kind of liked these books, and why was it such a big deal anyway. She laughed as if it was no big deal—lighten up, Jian, stop taking everything so damn seriously! And that just made it worse. This is China and we live in China, I said. Why would we abandon our own history and allow ourselves to be totally swallowed by Western culture? She said she thought it was good to learn about the West and then I just lost it. I know I kind of got things out of proportion, but she brought up my father and turned to me and said seriously: Look, Jian, the way you sound now is just like how your father speaks on TV! If you care so much and disagree so violently, then do something about it! Playing your guitar is not going to change this society! I don’t know, but maybe she has a point. I can’t think straight when she brings up my father but I’ve got to do something. Hasn’t there got to be a way of shaking things up without being like my father? It terrifies me to think I’m more like him than I want to admit. It just depends whose side you’re on, doesn’t it?

10
BEIJING, MILLENNIUM EVE, 1999

… 
Everyone is talking about the Y2K bug and is petrified that their precious computers will die at the last stroke of midnight of this millennium. Personally, I think this might be the best thing that could happen. If all the computers of the world were to die as the clock tolled for 2000, we could happily go back to the Bronze Age, hiding ourselves in caves, making tools and singing poetry under the stars. Ha! What a caveman’s paradise! But in just a few hours, we will be stepping into a new millennium. We are waiting restlessly for the click of the clock to take us into the new century. But into what? Everyone hopes for the big change, the big renewal. They want to cast off their old selves like snakes shedding their skins. But when midnight passes, nothing will have changed
.

Jian scribbled these words in his diary in the last remaining hours of 1999. It was a year of important events. That summer, just before most of Beijing craned their necks to see a total solar eclipse in the sky, Mu received her MA in Western Literature. In the following weeks, as Jian scribbled songs and prepared his second album, she managed to find her first ever job, with a poetry magazine called
Tomorrow
. She told Jian the magazine had been introducing and translating Western poetry to a Chinese readership for a few years, printing works from Keats and Byron to Ginsberg and Bukowski. The job was titled assistant editor but in fact she didn’t get the chance to do any editing. “I will look at commas with the fullest concentration,” she told the editor-in-chief during her interview, when he told her it was mostly proofreading. Jian couldn’t believe that he’d been out of college for three years already. It
all still seemed so new. The band were doing well, playing in different venues almost every weekend. Until a strange day in December when all performances were banned in the capital. There was no information about why or when they might be able to perform again but Jian and Mu assumed it had something to do with Cambodia. They had recently learned from a journalist friend about the official dissolving of the Khmer Rouge and they guessed the Chinese government would be fearful of infection from the south, as they would always be whenever there was an international disturbance.

On the eve of the year 2000, Mu, Kublai Jian and his band gathered in the super-congested hangout, Cafe Proletarian, to celebrate the new millennium, and also for another exciting reason. There had been gossip around Beijing that the punk godfather himself, Johnny Rotten, was in town and would be coming to this bar with his friends that evening. Already, one could see a bunch of youths clutching pirate copies of Sex Pistols albums and looking around anxiously through the ever-thickening Camel and Zhonghua smoke haze for glimpses of their idol.

Just a quarter of an hour before the chimes of the new millennium, Jian and his pals heard a collective scream erupt from their midst. They looked to the entrance, and saw three white men walk through the door—in the centre of the trio was a rather tall man with red hair wearing an oversized pyjama-like suit. It was the godfather of punk royalty. The crowd’s screams grew louder still: “This is the Sex Pistol man!” or “You’re so behind the times, his band is Public Image Ltd now!” or “Whatever monkey they are, don’t tell me that’s not Johnny Rotten!”

As the white foreigners, acting as one, squeezed themselves through the crowd to find a place to sit, the assembled Chinese youth swarmed over them with CDs and posters for signatures. Kublai Jian and his band moved forward, while Mu stayed behind, shielding herself from the crazed throng.

In the midst of undifferentiated Chinese yelling and shouting, Jian heard the white man’s distinguished English:

“If you Chinese really want to be polite, then don’t call me bloody Mr. Rotten. I’m not some fucking comedy-show character unless you pay me. Call me Mr. Lydon if you can’t bear to call a man by his first name.”

Before any sensible conversation, the crowd suddenly began to scream the countdown, each number resounding like great gongs in an empty tower: Nine! Eight! Seven! Six! Five! Four! Three! Two! One! Hooray!! Everyone hugged each other, patting backs, grabbing shoulders and waists, and squeezing limbs, crying and smiling into the blurred forest of tangled bodies. Beer bottles opened, voices were raised, fireworks shot out in the street like a war had started.

Amid the general cheer, a conversation sparked into life between Kublai Jian and Johnny Rotten.

Jian, with all sincerity, stammering, dry-throated: “I’ve never been to the West. But can you tell me, Mr. Lydon, is there any positive punk scene in the West? I mean, good punk that does practical good for society?”

“Nah, there’s only negative punk, man.”

“Only negative?”

“Absolutely. Punks are useless, or worse, by definition!”

“But I don’t believe that.”

“Well, then you’ve been born in the wrong time!”

“But I know one, for sure, a positive punk. Here in China.”

Johnny began to twitch his lips again, almost laughing sarcastically. “Who is this positive Chinese punk? Eh?”

“Have you heard of Kublai Jian, a Beijing musician?”

Johnny shrugged his shoulders, unimpressed by the name. “What’s he done?”

“A new album is coming out soon, called
Yuan vs. Dollars
.”

Johnny shook his head. “
Yuan vs. Dollars
—not a bad name at least.”

Mu was now too impatient to stand behind and watch, and she cut in with her better English.

“But, Mr. Lydon, why didn’t punk bring anything good to society?”

“Good? Didn’t bring any good?! It brought good all right. Think of an enema, girl. You know what an enema is? That’s what punk was. Flushed it all out!”

Mu murmurs, “Enema?”

“Yeah, colonic irrigation of society!”

Jian didn’t understand Johnny’s words and just went on, almost angrily. “But shouldn’t they do something good to help society?”

Before the white man could answer with even more enigmatic riddles, a wave of fans pressed onto the star their notebooks and CDs, grabbing the demigod’s shoulders and hands, desperate for his mark. Outside the bar, the midnight sky was lit by a vast cascade of fireworks, illuminating the solemn and dark Long Peace Avenue, the featureless Heavenly Gate Park, the foreboding Forbidden City, the drumming Bell Tower, and finally creating a fake light of day in Tiananmen Square. A new century of amnesia had arrived on China’s earth.

FOUR | ON THE ROAD

Du wan juan shu buru xing wanli lu.

Reading ten thousand books is not as useful as travelling ten thousand miles
.

LIU YI (WRITER, SONG DYNASTY, 11TH CENTURY)

1
PHILADELPHIA, APRIL 2012

A fully loaded American Airlines flight carries 332 passengers cutting through the clouds above the Pacific Ocean. Inside the plane, most of the passengers look like business people, either reading the
Financial Times
or furiously typing on their laptops. In the back of the plane there is a loud group of Chinese passengers, all young and long-haired, taking photos and laughing at each other like overexcited first-time travellers. Beside them, a half-Chinese half-American man in a dark Vivienne Westwood checked suit studies a tour schedule on his computer.

A brand-new world. And a brand-new me. I’m no longer Deng Mu, according to our manager Bruce. He said no one was going to be interested in a poet whose name was Mu, I needed a stage name, something that fitted with the band name Beijing Manic. So he came up with a new one for me. This is what I have just read on the newly printed leaflet: “Slam Poetry from Sabotage Sister, a poet from Post-Mao China.” Is that me? I feel like I am wearing a disguise—underneath I am still a hundred per cent Chinese daughter of the countryside, and unconfident in front of a Western audience. I don’t feel true to myself; it’s as if I’m pretending to be someone else—a fake, a vain attention seeker, something I hate when I see it in others. Sabotage Sister is really Bruce’s invention, a new package of me
.