I Am China (16 page)

All of a sudden the spotlight trains on Mu and the house lights dim. The audience quietens, the band are ready with their instruments. Even seconds before she starts performing she is still racked with anguish, and feels unprepared and vulnerable. She plugs in her ukulele, turns
up the reverb and sets the tone buttons low. Nervously, she hits a series of D chords. It sounds like a screeching cat on heat, and two middle-aged women in the audience cringe and move towards the exit with trembling fingers in their ears. She belts out her verses above the roar of Beijing Manic’s driving rhythms, her uke adding a whining, tortured drone to the pounding noise of the band. She doesn’t really know what she is doing, just follows the howling in her ears, laying down a chant in half-Chinese and half-English. Two elderly men who look like veterans from an ancient trench war seem shell-shocked by the barrage; they stagger after the women to the exit. Mu sees this from the corner of her eye, and gulps back her disappointment. Her mouth speaks and her fingers move up and down her instrument. All she can see as she looks out into the crowd and the lights burn on her forehead is another stage, long ago, in a faraway place, where the lights danced and the music roared and she is in her white dress dancing and crying and screaming among the Beijing crowd.

2
LONDON, MAY 2013

The photocopied diary pages of Mu’s America tour are neat, well organised, each entry dated. It is a recent tour, only last year, according to the dates. Iona has a feeling that some secret hand has been putting these documents together properly, and it seems from April of 2012 onwards there is barely any correspondence between Mu and Jian. Most of the photocopies are from their diaries.

West 22nd Street, Manhattan, 28 April 2012

A budget hotel beside the Chelsea. We storm into the lobby with tons of luggage. At reception we were asked these strange questions: “How are you today, sweetheart?” or “You enjoy your chocolate brownie, sister?” or, even more bizarre, “I heard you Chinese still believe in communism, s’at right?” Americans don’t seem to really believe that there are other people in the world, and so, when they see you in their country, it’s like you’ve stepped straight out of a television set
.

This is New York City, the great model that Beijing and Shanghai are desperately trying to ape. But now I think China could never match the USA because we have no black people in our country, and no foreigner can become a Chinese citizen. It’s amazing what you see when you leave a place. It makes me realise how we Chinese have the worst prejudice against “others.” I look around and I imagine that I will be an immigrant here one day. Everybody I pass on the street has a confident look about them, like they’re going somewhere and accomplishing something. Only two slight disappointments—Times Square is much smaller than I imagined, not even half the size of our Tiananmen Square. It’s just a big lurid billboard. And Broadway
—
Broadway isn’t broad at all, it’s narrow. It’s just a load of street blocks all squeezed in like tubes of toothpaste. The boys from the band seem to be oblivious of their new surroundings, but they all protest about the food. They’ve threatened to quit the tour if there are no pork ribs or mala beef with rice on the table from now on. So Bruce takes us to Chinatown. Big fat noodles with fried pigs’ trotters and stewed intestines and sour cabbage blood soup. There we don’t have to force down weird eggy cheesy sandwiches. Actually the mere sight of a sandwich is depressing enough. “It sucks.” Lutao has just learned this expression, and he uses it all the time. “It sucks, man.”

Thinking of Jian. My heart aches as I see a succession of young Chinese men pass with a melancholy look on their faces. Have I just missed him? Where is he now? Did he walk by half an hour ago while we were having lunch? Would he see the posters in front of a Brooklyn club advertising my poetry performance tonight? If there was only one person in this part of the world who would recognise my voice in the crowd, that would be Jian …

West 22nd Street, Manhattan, Iona murmurs, and stops reading Mu’s diary. She thinks of her Uncle David. Three years younger than her father, David has lived in Manhattan since he left the farm on Mull in the seventies. Now a very successful businessman, David runs an accounting firm in New York City. When Iona visited him with her father a few years ago, they went to his office near West 21st Street. In the front window she remembered an advertisement for the business:
We Help Small Biz Owners Minimize Audit Risk While Lowering Their Tax Bill!!
Whenever a potential client dropped in, her uncle would give the visitor a “free thirty-minute consultation” and a cup of filtered coffee with two sugars and the offer of soya milk. It was savvy business
sense. Damn sight more savvy than his Guinness-drinking brother. Iona often wonders what it would have been like if she had moved to New York. Would she still have worked as a translator? Would she ever have encountered Jian and Mu’s story? Perhaps she would have become one of those successful members of the immigrant American business community, with her Scottish accent, a plush apartment in town and a large place upstate. Iona gazes at the Islington human zoo below her, jostling in the street, and nearly laughs at herself—if only life could be lived simultaneously in parallel spaces and times!

3
CHICAGO, MAY 2012

Chicago. The city looks hard, like it’s carved out of sheer granite. What would Walt Whitman think if he woke up in downtown Chicago, on a park bench, say, like so many of the “bums”? This bum Walt would find himself looking on an unrecognisable world. He might even start uttering one of his own poems to himself, like the one that begins “O Captain, my Captain.” There would be no leaves of grass for his spirit to merge with, except for the grass of the cold city park he would be lying in. He would shrivel up in the air conditioning, and shrink from the smiling hotel staff waiting for a tip
.

And this is the city of lakes! Lake Michigan squats here by the concrete bank. Motionless. No wind at all. What would an old Chinese fisherman think of it? Maybe all American fish live in Third World seas and are caught by nets pulled up by Third World hands. So the Americans can design Apple Macs or smoke marijuana in their spare time
.

Bruce is always hanging around. There’s an odd tension between us; although my head is still obsessed by Peking Man, I feel a certain attraction to him. This troubles me; I feel like I’m a soldier’s wife, trying to make a new life after my husband has gone missing in action. Then I hear Bruce’s voice in his East Coast accent: “Don’t be so miserable, Sabota. In America a poet has to be a salesman too. You gotta learn self-promotion and dress like a pop star, not some sad boring intellectual.” Bruce. A banana with yellow skin. “That’s awesome”—he says it ten times a day. Could someone like that really understand me?

Chicago’s Athletic Club Hotel, where Sabotage Sister and Beijing Manic are staying, is a sportsman’s weekend hangout, with a lobby playing Sinatra’s music all day long—
Songs for Swingin’ Lovers
on a loop. The walls of the club are adorned with stills from the film
The Man with the Golden Arm
, claiming a scene was shot on the street outside, though it was cut from the original film so the connection is hazy to say the least. In the Cigar Room, Bruce is forced to smoke whenever the Chinese men smoke. They hand him a cigarette whenever they light up, having told him: “If you don’t smoke with us then you are
zhuang-ya-de
”—a wanker, a ponce. As the tour wears on, he is the one who’s responsible for Camel supply. The boys smoke Camel No. 9. “It gives you a throat kick,” Lutao, the singer and guitarist, claims. Lutao offers one to the girl. Sabotage Sister takes a few puffs, but already her mouth is bitter, and a pain goes shooting through her lungs. Camel No. 9. Not so good for a cancer patient’s daughter.

Instead of messing around like a tourist, our Chinese daughter spends her days writing. Maybe I will become a real writer in America, she says to herself. Because I can do nothing here apart from write. In her limbo state, she writes new poems. She feels her Peking Man’s spirit in her pen, as if he is softly whispering anarchic lyrics into her ear, his breath on the back of her neck, his fingers stroking her bare shoulders. Her new poem subverts an Allen Ginsberg piece. She has replaced the key word “America” with “China,” and “Russia” with “America.” Who knows how it will go down here, but she has almost stopped worrying about reception. They can all go jump in the lake, she says, somewhat nervously. I should do what I want to do, I am no longer a proofreader for a state magazine in China. This is America after all.

China I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing
.

China two dollars and twenty-seven cents

I can’t stand my own mind
.

China when will we end the human war?

Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb
.

I don’t feel good don’t bother me
.

I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind
.

China when will you be angelic?

When will you take off your clothes?

When will you look at yourself through the grave?

When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?

China why are your libraries full of tears?

China when will you send your eggs to India?

4
LONDON, MAY 2013

The garden is very quiet today. Nobody around. Just one or two nervous squirrels in the bushes. Since the day Iona started this translation job, she’s been feeling that her own life has abandoned her. What is it, this subject called “life”? Is there some kind of qualitative scale? She thinks the life of Jian and Mu is worthy of being called a life: from the little she’s gathered so far, Kublai Jian seems to have lived dramatically and confrontationally. Yet her own life seems an insubstantial, almost colourless timeline dotted with trivial details.

Then she thinks of her publisher Jonathan, the man she knows as little about as she does about Kublai Jian. It turns out Jonathan went to the same university as she did, but a few years before. She wonders if they were taught by the same professors, perhaps they sat on the same seat in the library and borrowed exactly the same books, or perhaps he too got into the habit of having a coffee at the British Museum while writing his graduation thesis. She assembles the landmarks of his life, not quite at ease with her own uncontrollable curiosity about him. His biography on the company website tells her all she needs to know, but she wants more. Degree at SOAS, then into journalism briefly, then publishing. The facts about Jonathan begin to assemble themselves. He seems to be very involved in the project, perhaps rare for someone so senior. For Iona Kirkpatrick, though, Jonathan is still just a stepping stone to the story of Kublai Jian and Deng Mu.

She stops herself. She is nearly drowning in her work, or, rather, in Jian and Mu’s world. She needs to swim further, deeper, to test how deep it goes, and what islands it might take her to.

Buried in her thoughts, Iona leaves her bench and walks out from the Duncan Terrace Garden. The evening light is soft, the May wind
pleasant. She finds herself walking along the Regent’s Canal, wending her way home as the ducks squawk alongside her. The section of the canal she favours most is overgrown and strangely dead-looking, with lines of narrowboats eager to discharge their detritus into the water’s dank stillness. Staring down into the canal, she thinks to herself: maybe I should go and live abroad. Go to America or China, indeed, some vast country in a new world. Britain feels old, narrow, made stale by history. Perhaps all she needs at the moment is to do what Mu does in her own life: leave the protective space of her own culture and embark on a brand-new journey into a brand-new world. The ducks swim away. The dim water with its reflected trees remains inert, and keeps the secret of its depths.

5
LONDON, MAY 2013

Iona’s sister Nell and her husband Volodymyr live in Shepherd’s Bush Green, just behind Europe’s so-called largest mega shopping centre, Westfield. Before she even steps into the house, Iona hears a wave of loud screaming. Not only is there the familiar noise of her sister’s twins—she recognises a particular squawk as belonging to Otto—but chirpings and shouts from alien toddlers, perhaps a whole crowd of them, are mixed in with the sound of motherly reassurance.

As soon as Iona takes out her gift, the twins tear open the package. Plastic aeroplanes are smashed against the wall and new wails and tears join the general din. Nell is exhausted as usual, but somehow seems unflappable and exercises command over her progeny. The three-year-old twins writhe like monkeys in her grip. Then there are the other mums and children Iona has never met. They chatter noisily in Russian, and Iona feels inadequate with her minimal hello and goodbye. She is caught up in vapid sociability, her head and smiling face in a nodding blur. Volodymyr remains calm as ever, and hangs around in the background of the baby bedlam. She wishes he would rescue her from this.