I Am China (19 page)

bu wen bu rou wen zi, wen zi bu ruo jian zhi.

jian zhi bu ruo zhi zi, zhi zi bu ruo xing zi.

Tell me and I will forget. Show me and I will remember
.

But involve me, I will understand
.

XUN ZI (PHILOSOPHER, WARRING STATES PERIOD, 475–221 BC)

1
CENTRE D’ASSISTANCE EUROPÉEN POUR REQUÉRANTS D’ASILE, SWITZERLAND, JUNE 2012

In the beginning there was nothing in the universe. The sky and the earth were glued together and the whole world was a hot and bubbling pool. For twenty thousand years nothing changed, until one day there appeared a cosmic egg. Inside this cosmic egg, yin and yang slowly found their balance, and a half-man half-dragon was shaped inside the egg. His name was Pangu …

Jian writes this on the first page of his new diary, a slender notebook he found lying around on a staff table the other day. It is early summer, but in this part of the world he still feels cold. He is in a camp in Lausanne, after being transferred from Berne with several other asylum seekers. In this new setting he starts to have strange dreams at night. Somehow the ancient god Pangu, the first creature of ancient China, has infiltrated his mind in the last few days. Jian sees the great creature vividly. Pangu seems to fit well into this alien space, like a vine winding through a lush rainforest, or a fungus growing on a mouldy carpet. He hears people around him speaking in French or German and he feels even more mute and deafened. His own Chinese world has come to an end, so why not think of the origins of things, the beginning of China, the mythic world, before emperors or the cultivation of rice? Before laws, or the worship of gods; before human feet left their footprints on the muddy shores of the first lakes …

Suddenly everyone is gathering for breakfast and he stands, bored, in a queue in the canteen. The other inmates sit or stand around in the boxy white room with sullen expressions, skinny creatures on stick legs. Jian laughs to himself occasionally, hunched over in his corner of the
canteen, as he contemplates his plate of bread, cheese, coffee on the table in front of him, and pictures his ancient ancestor.

After breakfast the canteen transforms into a classroom for their French-language class. Sitting among the Muslim women wrapped tightly in their scarves, Jian peeks at their naked eyes, wondering what they are hiding. “Don’t stare at me!” He can almost hear the women cursing in Arabic under their veils! They don’t seem to want to be in Europe at all. They sit on the hard benches of grey Switzerland; perhaps they are thinking of nothing, have nothing but fragmentary images of their previous life looping around in their heads: a shady corner of a clay house, hens pecking in the dirt, an old plum tree on the dusty road, fish bones thrown towards a stray cat, the afternoon sun blazing down …

The French class is the only thing Jian likes about being here. The teacher, Monsieur Georges Godard, is someone who has admirable patience for the elder foreign students and the mentally disarranged. A useful sentence Jian has learned to speak this week: “Asile de réfugié, je suis venu de Chine.”

Monsieur Godard asks everybody in the class to change the last word according to their origin and to say the sentence out loud.

“Requérant d’asile, je suis venu de Somalie.”

“Requérant d’asile, je suis venu d’Angola.”

“Requérant d’asile, je suis venu de Libye.”

“Requérant d’asile, je suis venu d’Égypte.”

“Requérant d’asile, je suis venu de Syrie.”

2
CENTRE D’ASSISTANCE EUROPÉEN POUR REQUÉRANTS D’ASILE, SWITZERLAND, JUNE 2012

In the library that evening, Jian reads his Russian novel, looking up now and then at the scrawny Africans reading their Qurans, which they flip through with grimy fingers, snot dripping from their noses. They look like they are crying, he thinks, as they mumble their prayers. Their god is not his god Pangu. Man makes gods in his own image, and in his case the gods had Mongol faces. They were there from his early childhood, the years he spent with his maternal grandparents before they passed away.

Then all of a sudden there’s a ringing in his ear, sharp and persistent. His head is throbbing again. He feels he is somewhere underneath the earth. Like an infinitely deep pit with cogs, wheels and pistons whirring, the stink of oil in churning water. The water of the Yangtze River. He remembers his first ferry trip across the river; he was eleven years old. He had heard that exact same throbbing sound coming from the engine room. He ran to the front of boat and leaned over the railing, trying to see where the pulsing sound came from. Clunk! He fell. He was nearly swallowed up in grinding gears and flying sparks. A blinding flash in his eye, and he touched his broken skin on the sharp wheel. He was crying. His grandparents ran to pull him out. They wrapped his broken forehead with someone’s handkerchief. It was an unforgettable trip, not only because his head throbbed from the injury, but because of what happened when they finally arrived. His grandparents had brought him all the way from Beijing to Jiangsu Province, trying to get the son to meet his father. Jian’s father had left fourteen months before and hadn’t returned home since. They only knew he had a post as an industry delegate in the Communist Party Head Office in the province. There were occasional messages sent back home from
the south saying the father was too busy to return home. But the rumour was quite different, something which the child Jian didn’t entirely understand. When they got off the ferry and arrived in Nanjing’s newly built town hall, they were told his father was in a meeting and couldn’t see them right away. So Jian and his grandparents stayed in the father’s office waiting—they were given sunflower seeds to eat and tea to drink. But the waiting took forever and the father didn’t turn up. The child was bored and looked around the room. Before his grandmother could stop him, young Jian saw a framed picture sitting on the corner of the table, squeezed in between official photographs taken of his father at conferences and local events. In this picture his father is sitting upright before a fake mythical mountain landscape beside a young woman in red whom Jian had never seen before. The woman had glasses and very short hair. They were both smiling at the camera, holding each other’s hands. Young Jian stared at the photo in utter bewilderment. His grandmother pulled him away from the table quickly and fussed the photograph away into a drawer. Half an hour later, someone came in. It was the woman from the photo, with the exact same short haircut and the exact same glasses. She carried a little baby in one arm and a lunch box in another. As she entered the room she stared at the three strangers and didn’t say a word. Silently, she laid the lunch box on the father’s table and went away. As her footsteps subsided in the corridor outside, Jian heard the baby’s plaintive cry. Now, nearly three decades later, in a white room in Lausanne, Jian can still recall every detail of that trip. It comes back to him as if in Technicolor, so he writes it down, as if the process of recording might transfer the pain from inside his body onto the page.

The very next day my grandparents and I took the same ferry back. My forehead was still wrapped in a bandage and it ached and throbbed for the entire journey home. In the middle of the Yangtze River I went to the edge of the deck and looked down at the water surging behind the boat. As I watched the churning water I felt my eyes sting as if bursting. Hot tears streamed down my cheeks and my mouth quivered, my breath choked. No one heard my cry, covered by the throbbing mechanical sound of the engine and the wash of waves filling the river air. I swore I would never return to Nanjing. And I’ve kept my oath. I’ve never been back there, not even for concerts, just like my father never returned to our family house in Beijing
.

The pen held tightly between Jian’s fingers is running out of ink. He doodles on the edge of his diary page, pressing hard. Nothing comes out. He throws the pen across the room in the direction of the rubbish bin. Now I can never go back. He thinks to himself: Nanjing is a city full of shame and sorrow, as they say. But perhaps nothing is more shameful than staying in a refugee camp in Switzerland. Jian stands up, picking up his diary from the table, and walks back to his room. He needs his guitar.

3
LONDON, JUNE 2013

Iona is sitting working in a Dongbei restaurant in the middle of Chinatown, alone, while eating slowly. She is drinking a bowl of bloodred soup. The restaurant is decorated with scrolls of kitsch mountain paintings. Seventies Maoist propaganda music plays in the background.

Her red bowl is no ordinary soup: it’s pig’s blood and sour cabbage soup, and it’s the soup Mu often writes about. Iona wants to taste what it has to offer a disconsolate mind. Besides this, she has ordered some mala tofu and a chive pancake. She likes the sour cabbage because it reminds her of Nell’s sauerkraut which Vlod is so keen on. She is not so sure about the pig’s blood, though. Jelly-like, it has a bitter taste and a smell of rusty iron, as if it’s come from a rancid wok. The soup is sour-sharp, and “nutritious,” as the Dongbei peasants might say. Iona makes one last effort, chewing another piece of the gelatinous blood. She finds it hard to believe that this is the delicacy Mu and Jian ate every week in one of the Beijing food stores. Pushing the soup bowl slightly away from her notebook, she takes a mouthful of tea and continues working on one of Jian’s diary entries.

May 2012

Dreamed of my father last night. Since I left China he seems to be present again in my life. Surreal, since I’m now further from him, and more disconnected, than I’ve ever been before
.

The figure in the dream was not fully recognisable, but it was definitely him. I could tell by the sound of his breathing, the stench of cigarette smoke and the hard rattled cough. Why does he come back to me now? When I think of my childhood, I cannot see him, except as a kind of shadow in the corner of my eye, something that disturbs my peripheral vision. These days all I remember is that summer day when he threatened me with the steel ruler and locked me up. Even before he left the family I have almost no memories of him reading a story to me, or picking me up from school, or playing ping-pong with me. But I remember him telling me about his father, an anecdote he repeated frequently. He would tell it in a strained, choked voice and never looked at me as he talked. It was for him, this story, and the telling of it was agonising and painful, but he wanted to live and relive it countless times
.

He would tell of his parents—both had died during the Long March in 1934, only a few months after he was born. When the Long March ended, my baby father was left with a band of female soldiers. Then he would relate in excruciating detail
—
details he can only have heard from those women who looked after him or other ex-soldiers on the road—those days of Red Army soldiers eating grass and boiling leather belts in soup for protein. Starvation and gun wounds. That’s how over a hundred thousand soldiers died on the 8,000-mile journey. Each time my father told the story he would wince as he related how his father had died from a gun wound and his mother from infections she sustained from his birth. He knew exactly how to make me feel guilty, as if my easy life was a little drop of spit on the ground, a weightless existence, a nothingness in history. Or worse still, my existence was a crime, and it almost felt like my father was trying to tell me this, that my life was built on millions of corpses. I am a “qian-gu-zui-ren”—a man born with debt and guilt, a man beyond redemption. Perhaps my indignation towards my father has diluted a bit after all this time living with Mu. But for so many years, as soon as his image slipped into my mind, my fear of him would grow and rise like a poisonous wave
.

If you spend enough time reading someone else’s thoughts, after a while their thoughts begin to infect you. Your grasp on yourself becomes
tenuous. Or you begin to see that you never were the essential you in the first place, Iona thinks to herself as she takes the bus back to Angel. To be a person is to imagine being someone, and the someone you imagine most of the time is what people call “you.” How strange to be in time and space with something called a “character.” Jian is separated from Iona by time and space. But there is something about his sadness, his strength, that emboldens her. It makes her long for some other self, some ability to reach outside herself and be brave. The dream about Jian’s father haunts her and she can’t help but keep coming back to that image of him holding the steel ruler over his son’s head. So far Jian has barely mentioned his mother, she’s noticed. It is as if there’s a whole section of his life that’s absent from her translation.

Iona feels her body is like an oyster, in its dark, cold sealed shell. In the first year of its life, a young oyster spills its sperm into the water. During the next two years it grows larger and then releases eggs. Then the water surrounding it does the rest of the work. An oyster shifts from being male to female. It plays both roles. That’s how Iona feels as she walks around, confined to her oyster-shell flat—sometimes like Jian, sometimes like Mu, sometimes both. Sometimes like a hooligan in a Beijing hutong, shouting out: “
Ta ma de, ta da ye de
—Down on his uncle, bugger his grandma.” She seems to relive the lives of others in strange, unsatisfactory fragments.