I Am China (22 page)

The Second Sex, Or Not?

Sabotage Sister aka Mu

De Beauvoir published
The Second Sex
in 1949
,

Mao Zedong announced the birth of

the People’s Republic of China in 1949
.

And my mother was born in 1949

in a house with seven sisters and one brother
.

Seven sisters formed an army

assisting one brother to become educated
.

But I want to know:

what is “the second sex”?

what is “the feminine”?

what is “domestic science”?

In a suburban bungalow
,

A man chews his beef boiled
,

A woman cooks her soup slow

sitting before the TV’s glow
.

Sound and visuals each other swallow
.

Lack, hollow, void, black hole giving birth to the universe
.

Haunted by femininity, I scream:

Transplant the womb!

Grow it in men, in every boy-child’s bowel!

In drone, in bull, in rooster, in ram
,

in buck, stag, dog, in Chairman and President!

In every creature grown, the womb
.

The poem is sending off sparks in a different mind now. Iona chews on the words, gets tangled up in their meaning until she cannot tell what is her meaning and what is Mu’s. She feels an intimacy with this woman she has never met. Iona remembers arguing over de Beauvoir’s work at university. Sitting in someone’s room late at night: the bad decor, the heap of patchwork cushions on the floor and Ikea cupboards, the empty wine bottles and full glasses, the bulging ashtrays, and the heated debates about motherhood and work. They were just nineteen, they knew nothing about what it was to be a woman, about the trap of motherhood or the liberation of work. Iona isn’t entirely sure she knows much more now, though, eleven years later. She hasn’t thought about it for years.

Iona feels woken up by the poem. It’s undeniable. Mu’s poem sends a strange jolt through her body and her mind like the tingle of an electric field. For a long time, she has seen love as a form of nightlife—an after-hours activity in which she will give herself over to random encounters. These ultimately impersonal sexual exchanges have been her “personal life.” She has barely built any friendships with men of her age. This compulsive pattern seems to be the only form of encounter she has between herself and men. Amid these unsettling reflections, she thinks about her mother, and how she has been raised under this “second sex” unconsciousness.

Staring at her keyboard and the screen, Iona sits back and thinks.
The screensaver takes over and photographs flash up in a random order. Home: the house she grew up in on the Isle of Mull, the tall lone pine tree standing guard over the house, her mother in the kitchen making an apricot pie, a sheep giving birth, her sister Nell playing with their cat on the bed, a deer moving up the hillside at the back of their house. A deer! Yes, she remembers that moment when the deer passed.

In the north they say if you see a wild deer passing, it means your love has betrayed you. Iona’s mother once told her that “women will always be betrayed by their men, but you have to be light about it.” Now, looking at that blurred photograph of an escaping deer, she remembers a scene. She was probably about fourteen or fifteen, a pale-looking girl stuck on a Scottish island, unhappy at school and uninspired at home. One day she felt sick so she left school much earlier than usual. As she was passing her parents’ bedroom she heard two voices inside. One was her father’s, but the other was not her mother’s, nor her sister’s. Her mother had left on the morning ferry for town to see friends. Everyone knew she would only be back on the next morning’s ferry. Meanwhile, young Iona lay in bed listening to the loud lovemaking coming from her parents’ bedroom. Her father’s groans sounded disgusting to her. She never remembered her father making such noises when he had been with her mother. Shamefully, she left the house with the sound of her father’s groans sticking in her head. A feeling of nausea began to build in her as she walked up the hill and a paralysing vertigo gripped her head, causing the trees around her to swirl. Suddenly she found herself vomiting. She remembers looking indifferently at the warm slush from her stomach on the grass by her feet.

At her age, sex was still very alien to her. Now she thought it like the muck before her on the ground. She felt terrible and awfully lonely on the hill. Then suddenly she saw this little deer, a skinny deer passing, scampering up their hill. She was beautiful and magical. Iona watched the deer until it disappeared. She forgot about her father’s groans, and the unknown woman in his bed. She wandered on over the hill, looking for that wild deer until the night soaked her into the
darkness. The next morning when she woke, through her bedroom window with a view of the hill, she was astonished to see the deer passing in the distance, a silhouette on the brow of the hill. Moments later, she heard her mother turn the key in the lock and come through the front door. As she walked into the kitchen, her first words to Iona’s father were, “I wish I could have stayed away a bit longer.” Iona came out from her bedroom and looked straight at her father. It was a look of knowledge. He was shocked and turned his back on her, going out in silence to pull weeds in the back garden. Years later, the memory of her sickness and the beautiful little wild deer came back to her. “You have to be light about it,” her mother’s words often echo in Iona’s head. She understood that her mother knew very well that her father was having an affair—a long affair, it turned out. It carried on until only recently when his lover died of cancer. It seemed the whole island knew of the affair, and had been gossiping about it for years. It is strange to Iona that her parents never acknowledged that anything had happened, neither to each other, nor to her, even on the day the other woman died.

11
LONDON, JUNE 2013

Iona has been thinking about revolution. She has read a hundred pages of Grossman’s
Life and Fate
, but its weight, nine hundred pages of fine print, is intimidating. How much time can she invest in research for this translation project that is taking her over? Real lives, Mu’s and Jian’s, have replaced fictional ones for her right now: they have their own revolution. Iona has started reading about it in Mu’s diary.

Beijing, 28 February 2011

Nervous atmosphere above Beijing’s sky. It’s ridiculous! The press aren’t allowed to mention a word of what’s going on in the Arab world right now. It’s going mad in Tunisia and Egypt and we’re not supposed to know
.

It has been three days since I’ve seen Jian. Yesterday I went out looking for him all day and came back alone at night. Still he is not here. Today, the same. I’ve become desperate, pacing up and down in the flat waiting for news of him. He told me he might need to bed down somewhere else, wherever they ended up that first night, and might even go into the suburbs too as they “stroll” along. But still, I have the worst fear. The protest has been going on in Beijing for nearly a week now, in a quiet form—Strolling Revolution, as Jian and the other organisers called it. No banners or posters, but they do have slogans. Yesterday I saw the police begin to arrest the strollers—but they could not tell who were the protesters and who were normal people out walking, since the secret protesters have conducted their “strolling” in the park and on local streets. I don’t know how many people have been arrested but I fear for Jian. He has no sense of proportion, no second thoughts. He’s like a naive schoolboy sometimes, and it keeps him believing himself invincible. I know he just believes he is right: total conviction. The strolling was Jian’s idea, and it was supposed to be a clever idea. But has he ever thought about his own safety? Or mine? Didn’t Little Shu’s death teach him anything? Isn’t life fragile enough and family so easy to break apart?

Iona hurriedly gets down the basics, fiddles with a few passages, and then flicks to the next photocopied page.

Beijing, 1 March 2011

I fell asleep in total exhaustion, then in the early morning I woke up in a panic. The bed is still empty. This is now the fourth day since I’ve seen Jian. The streets below are quiet as I stand on our balcony where we normally drink in the evening together, looking out. The rallying cry for protest seems to be posted everywhere online: “We want work, we want housing, we want justice and fairness, we want free press!” I’m amazed the cyber police haven’t shut it down yet. And then I read a blog Jian sometimes looks at which quoted a government source: “From today the government is banning the selling of jasmine flowers. All the window displays in hotels, restaurants and shops with jasmine flowers have been stripped bare. Most flower shops in Beijing will be closed indefinitely.” As I walked down to the streets, strangely nobody was “strolling,” just office workers hurrying to their work with nervous expressions on their faces, and then undercover policemen with telltale snake-like eyes. I pretended to be out food shopping, casually wandering along, looking in shops, and bought two buns from a street seller, then walked a U-turn to get to the crossroad flower shop while eating my buns. Far off in the distance I saw a troop of community policemen burning a sea of colourful flowers on the hard, black tarmac, right in front of the shop. There were not only jasmine flowers flaming, but also other plants
—
roses, bamboo, sunflowers, lilies … Damn, I couldn’t believe this! They used to burn books, now they’ve started burning flowers! What’s the next thing they’re going to burn? The owner, Xu Wei, from the same province as me, stood in front of her shop, blank-faced and dead-eyed, watching her flowers flaming in the fire …

The bell rings and Iona runs down the stairs in bare feet. A delivery man stands on the pavement holding a huge bunch of white roses which obscure his face. All Iona can see are white flowers. A voice comes out of the bouquet:

“So, hang on …” There’s a rustle and then, “I’m after Mrs. Nasreen Akin. Is that you?”

Iona shakes her head, points next door and heads silently back upstairs.

Beijing, 2 March 2011

Thank you, Old Sky! Jian came back, totally worn out and covered in dirt but at least he is still alive and here with me! “Don’t be stupid, girl. I’m not going to die just like that. We walked for three days towards the suburbs. Slept a bit in the streets at night. Then we stayed in some local peasant’s house for the night at Changping County, moved on the next day and took a bus and strolled in Hebei Province. Now I’m sure that every peasant in Hebei Province knows exactly what the Jasmine Revolution is all about!” He hugged me warmly, but he was so dismissive of my worry. “We were fine. We were smart and discreet enough so the cops couldn’t follow us! It’s the strategy of guerrilla warfare, you know that!”

I was still angry with him, but I lost all my fury as I watched him open the fridge and devour the leftover cold noodles like a ravenous dog. He seemed utterly indifferent to the consequences of his actions. Doesn’t he realise that no other woman would be able to stand a boyfriend like him? And no matter what he says, he hasn’t changed, even after our four years apart. I think he might have even got worse. He’s out of control like a lone wolf. He told me that the 1989 student revolution didn’t work. And he was right. But now it seems the excitement of the fight has got into his blood. This can go nowhere. But he won’t see that. Has he some kind of suicidal wish? Does he want to destroy us? It makes all those conversations about trying to get pregnant again absurd! I can’t bring another child into this mad life with Jian. Perhaps we are destined to be childless
.

Good Lord. Iona sighs. She researches China’s Jasmine Revolution in 2011. Then she finds a
New York Times
report that confirms everything she has just read—the rallying cry, the strolling, even the absurd burning of jasmine flowers. Then she comes to a quote from a government official, Li Chengde, Minister of State Security.

… 
the probability of China having a Jasmine Revolution is absurd and unrealistic. I can give you every confidence that the government is combating these problems with extensive state measures. We are strong and have full public support. We will move forward successfully
.

All this politics is beyond Iona’s knowledge. Things are heating up; she wants to share her excitement with someone and get a second opinion. She has an urge to talk to Jonathan. She finds the number for Applegate Books and phones him straight away.