I Am China (32 page)

Dearest Mu
,

The sun is piercing, old bastard sky. I am feeling empty and bare. Nothing is in my soul, apart from the image of you
.

I am writing to you from a place I cannot tell you about yet. Perhaps when I am safe I will be able to let you know where I am. I don’t know exactly what the plan is and what my future might hold. One thing is for sure—I will try to stay free and alive, for you. And whatever happens, these ideas I have stuck by all my life—the beliefs that landed me here in the first place—I cannot let them go. I must live for them. I know we’ll see each other again, my love, but how long until that day I cannot tell …

20
LONDON, SEPTEMBER 2013

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subject: Read this!

Dear Iona

A million thanks for sending that powerful diary entry so quickly. What a find! It’s incredible to read about Jian leaving China. I managed to get hold of my contact at the embassy in Beijing and he told me something even more shocking. He says that the rumour in Beijing is that Jian’s own father had him removed from the country. The current Chinese prime minister himself!

I think it might be wise if you’re a bit cagey, or better still, completely discreet, if you ever get asked about what you’re working on. Sorry to seem paranoid, but you never know what might happen when you’re dealing with China!

Apropos your question about the shape of the text, I feel even more excited now about the idea of really making this “book.” The story is incredible and what it tells us about modern China, quite apart from being downright tragic—well, it just must be heard. Obviously I can tell you in more detail about my plans when we meet, but as a basic outline, this is what I’m thinking:

First off, I have mapped out the book as a dialogue led by Jian and Mu as two contrasting voices that reveal the political state in China and the struggle of individualism. Here is the basic vision I have. Mu—how are we to see her in the future book? Well, for me, her voice provides the backbone, the continuity, supporting our access to Jian. She is our lens, providing the focus, the spotlight, even if a bit dim, through which the elusive Jian starts to appear. Mu and Jian in my mind are opposites, but connected. They are two facets of the great contemporary enigma: China. Jian is from the north, Mu from the south. Jian is Chinese aristocracy. Mu is the salt of the earth. Most of all: Jian is dark fire. I know it sounds perverse or even pretentious, but I’ve been thinking of the rockers of old, like Jim Morrison, but instead of dying in a cold bath in a Parisian one-star hotel, he lives and writes his manifesto against all odds. And, better still, he moves into another world, our world, the West, but undercover, kind of like Rimbaud disappearing into the Indonesian jungle after he gave up poetry. Mu is like Yoko Ono, the ex-peasant avant-garde, presenting an ideal of modern Chinese youth. And somehow they are joined, while also seeming to be opposed souls in their beliefs and their struggles.

As you can see, it’s not all worked out yet, but that’s how far I’ve got with the help of your pages. Does that seem to fit what you think of them? You’re the closest to them by far, so I’d really value your thoughts. Let’s meet up, if you can still do Friday. Say six at the George, 13 Addison Avenue—it’s just round the corner from here.

Jonathan

21
LONDON, SEPTEMBER 2013

Iona stands in front of her mirror wearing her fourth possible outfit for the evening. She plays with the hem of her long navy dress—it’s terribly professional. With only minutes to go before she has to leave, she pulls off the navy and slips on the only low-cut dress in her wardrobe—a rich burgundy red—picks up her keys and leaves the flat.

The atmosphere at Iona’s meeting with Jonathan couldn’t be more different from the last couple of times. In a cosy pub near Applegate Books he is very casual and full of good humour. They start with red wine, each cradling a globe-like glass. He enthuses about his recent conversation with none other than Henry Kissinger, whose memoirs Jonathan is publishing. Fascinating man, apparently. Jonathan has worked up an appetite, and would Iona like a bite to eat? He’s had a heavy week, he wants proper food not pub snacks. Let’s go somewhere good, he says. On me, he says, or rather, on Applegate, and laughs. If she has no suggestions, he does. A great little place near Greek Street. Meanwhile, Iona is quietly wondering why he won’t be going back home to his wife. But she says nothing.

An hour later, they are sitting in a beautifully lit French fish restaurant in Soho. They share a bottle, and the rendezvous stretches into a night-long daze of words and moods. Iona is a light drinker; Jonathan drinks deeply, but clearly knows how to pace himself. Soon the second bottle is finished, and then there’s a pint at a pub round the corner.

On the way back to Angel, she can’t even tell which direction Chapel Market is. The atmosphere of the night streets seems illuminated by her own anticipation, an almost feverish expectation that sweetens the air. They find her flat. And as soon as they get through the door and cross her rug, they fall on her bed without a word from their lips,
as if an invisible sign has been given that they now both obey. He kisses her lightly on her lips. She is only half conscious with this man, a shadowy but irresistible force on her unmade bed. They make love. Jonathan seems to be very in control, of himself and of her body, and for a moment she feels a kind of perfect but painful beauty, the surrender and the desire for more surrender welling within her body. Her climax rolls out from her centre to her tips. She senses his breathless spasms—but not inside her. Warm foam on her thigh. They fall apart, panting, the cooler air reoccupying their steaming skin. A kind of half-sleep envelops them, blanking out any care, whether cares of the day, or cares of the night. And then in the peaceful half-light, he strokes her back and whispers that he must go home. It is a quarter past one, after all. Iona watches him from her bed, slipping into his clothes. The night is over, she thinks. “Take this,” she murmurs, holding up a sock. He smiles, looking a little embarrassed. They now only have words for the simplest things. She puts on her pyjamas. Then he says something that brings them back to their professional relationship, abandoned sometime over the course of the evening.

“Let me know how you get on with the rest of the translation.”

He kisses her forehead in the dark. He leaves like a boss after a long day, leaving his exhausted secretary with her computer and a few letters to finish. Is that how it is? Iona wonders. The door closes. Later, as she waits for the kettle to boil she watches the steam rise and fade, leaving its trace of condensation on the kitchen tiles. The room is still filled with the sound of their breathing, and perfumed with the ripe smell of sex. Somehow the Zen story from her childhood returns to her: the fish swims in the sea and asks, What the hell is water? Where is the sea?

22
LONDON, SEPTEMBER 2013

The next morning Iona wakes up with a serious hangover. She tries to remember how she got from the pub near Applegate Books to her flat. She vaguely remembers the meal, their mutual seduction and the ensuing amorous meltdown into each other. And she can picture the moment she brought her hand to his while standing in the street trying to find a taxi. Perhaps that’s when the idea of sleeping with him became a certainty—she reached for his hand in the dark street, and he took hers naturally.

She stands under the shower, letting the hot water cascade over her skin, assailed by chaotic thoughts. She makes a pot of tea, now her head is clearer. She puts on Jian’s CD,
Yuan vs. Dollars
, while changing the bed sheets. The first song—“Long March into the Night,” the one Jian keeps mentioning—sends its sonic wave into Iona’s ears.

Hey little sister
,

Let me take you down the street
,

the long march is waiting
,

that’s where we gonna meet
.

You don’t need no San Francisco
,

nor Eiffel Tower for your home
,

no Champs-Élysées
,

no Golden Dome
.

You say money is poetry
,

I say your freedom is a brick in the wall
.

We got no coins in our pocket
,

we held no candles in our hands
,

on the long march to the light
,

on the long march to the night
.

Hey little sister
,

Let me take you down the street
,

I’ll show you a place
,

a place where the Liars meet
,

a place where Uncle Joe beats his people with a belt
,

a place where the hands sign the contract
.

The long march is waiting
.

The long march is waiting
.

She watches the tulips by the window tremble slightly in the blast of the music as she puts the dirty bedclothes into the washing machine. She comes back and listens to the same song for a second time. Then she turns it off. She feels, irrationally, a kind of resentment towards this intrusion of the real Jian, unedited by her own imagination. She can’t take it, not this morning.

She sits at her desk and works on the next letter. The Chinese letter has a handwritten note in English clipped to its front page:
“The last letter Mu received from Jian.”
Once again she wonders whose handwriting it might be—perhaps Jonathan’s, or his editor, Maria’s. Or his assistant, Suzy’s. Or even Mu’s own—it’s definitely as neat and composed as her diary entries. Who knows who else has been looking at these letters? Slowly, Iona reads.

A summer day, 2012

Mu
,

We both know that there’s been nothing, no word, between us for the last few months. I don’t know where to write to you. So here is my last letter to our Beijing address, whether you read it or not. It’s me being foolish, perhaps, breaking through the silence—no doubt that’s what you’ll think
.

Right now, where am I? I’ve just left Paris and I’m on a train towards the south. Paris was a strange place, the fancy scene around the Seine doesn’t do anything for me. Even the women there! They were too First World for a Third World man. And I have finally made some contacts in Marseilles, through which I hope I’ll be able get some work. There are jobs on ships here that don’t require papers or much English. Maybe I could be a sailor, living on the blue sea rather than the dirty land
.

I feel like I have been drifting up and down this European landscape over the last couple of months, like a cockroach running on the dirt. But Europe is a grim continent: they think everything starts from here, from themselves, from their land. Often you encounter some lonely cluster of stony homes in the middle of the countryside, and there’ll be a woman doing some housework in her garden, a television glowing inside, and trees glimpsed through telegraph poles, the murmur of leaves the only sound. I picture myself living in houses like these, with that kind of life—is it life? For me it’s dead, like the bottom of a well. If I were Woody Guthrie, I would sing: “This land is not my land, this land is not for you or for me.” China is not here. You are not here. And my manifesto means nothing in this land and to these people.
—xiang chou
—is the only emotion I have. I miss my land. There is no reason for me to put down my roots here, and there is no familiar earth under my feet. My roots have dried up and broken off
.