I Am China (33 page)

The sunlight, too, feels remote, as if I’m moving far away from the source, as if the sun is trying to escape from me. The sun doesn’t recognise me any more. My body’s numb. It limps along like a strange loping animal, stiff, joints cracking, a coldblooded lizard—yesterday’s man in ragged but once fashionable clothes. That’s how I feel on this train. I am no longer a soldier. There’s no one waiting for me at my destination. The train will spew me out, like a cat pukes up a hairball. And where then …?
Just the wind waiting to roll me along some small-town high street?

Every now and then, just for a second, I think I’m in China. It chills me and warms me at the same time: my country looms heavy, bigger even than my mind, but sometimes small too, like a point in memory. Each time I see a brown wheat field or an expanse of standing corn, I think of those intense yellow rapeseed fields of the Huabei Plains, and those wrinkle-faced peasants, shovels on their shoulders, walking like statues in the dirt, with glass-eyed buffalo following. Then the streets and their life appear in my mind, the smells and tastes, sashimi oil from hidden jars, the laughter of fighting kids, bicycle bells—even the deafening fireworks of the Spring Festival … These images and sounds flow as a river whose mirrored surface shimmers with sadness
.

And you, my woman far away. Maybe you are beyond this crying and laughing. I’ve been thinking of your father. A strong man, cancer in his throat, going through the motions of life even as the anarchic cells invade each corner of his body-box. But which force is stronger? The evil cells or your father’s spirit? I’m finding hope difficult at the moment, but I do hope your father survives
.

My last words to you in this letter: whatever happens with your life and my life, I still have this love for you. So now I give it to you, wherever you are
.

Your Jian

SEVEN | RETURN HOME

yan zhi yi wei qi, dang qi wu, you qi zhi yong.

Zao hu yong yi wei shi, dang qi wu, you shi zhi yong.

We turn clay to make a vessel;

But it is upon the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the vessel depends
.

We pierce doors and windows to make a house;

And it is upon these spaces where there is nothing that the usefulness of the house depends
.

TAO TE CHING
, LAOZI (PHILOSOPHER, 604–531 BC)

1
LONDON, OCTOBER 2013

Iona stares at the photocopy of two black-and-white snapshots on her desk. Who are these people? One is an old Chinese lady in front of a house, sunlight coming from the low winter sky; the other is a little girl holding a balloon before a tree-planted yard. They must have been pasted in Mu’s diary. They look old and faded.

Iona can’t help but wonder whether the little girl with the balloon is a young Mu. She has no way of knowing. There is a TV aerial sticking out on the girl’s left side, by the wall. Is that Mu’s family house in the south? And the old woman smiling under two Chinese lanterns, could that be Mu’s grandmother? Or Jian’s grandmother, perhaps. The little tree in the clay pot looks like a bay tree or a small orange tree. She seems to remember seeing them everywhere in people’s gardens when she visited southern China. Iona calls Jonathan’s mobile.

“Hello?”

“Hi, it’s me,” Iona says, feeling a swell of confusion and awkwardness rising from that night,
their night
.

“Hi … Iona?” Jonathan is checking it’s her; she feels her chest go
tight at his lack of recognition. Then his voice softens and sounds slightly ambiguous. “Are you all right?”

“Yes, I’m fine. Do you have a moment?”

“I’m in my office. I’ve got—um, five minutes before my next meeting. Fire away.”

“Did you manage to take a look at those photos—the two black-and-white photos?” Iona prompts him. “You didn’t mention the photos. One is of an old lady standing in front of her house, well, I presume it’s her house; the other one is of a little girl holding a balloon.”

“…  the girl with a balloon …” He pauses, then two seconds later: “Yes, I do remember them, vaguely. What about them?”

“Well, do you know who they are? Would the little girl be Mu when she was a child? And I think the old lady could be Mu’s or Jian’s grandmother perhaps?”

“Iona, you might think I know more than you do from those documents, but I don’t! Really I don’t. I’m not the one who reads Chinese! I’ve looked through all the letters, diaries and photos, again and again, but without the language skills I’m at a complete loss. I’m just as excited as you are but I don’t have any secret knowledge.”

“Right, OK, sorry. Looking at the photos, there are clues that make me think they might have been taken in southern China—the architecture, the plants … that’s why I think the little girl might be Mu … but it’s all guesswork, really,” Iona murmurs slowly.

A pause. Then Iona hears him say, “When can I see you again?”

2
BEIJING, MAY 2012

A year and a few months ago, far away from Iona’s evening desk, on a United Airlines flight from Boston to Beijing, Mu returns home. Beijing hasn’t changed much since she’s been away; the familiar scent and sights of the capital’s polluted air—even thicker than before—still hangs in the sky like a noxious soup cloud. As she enters her one-bedroom flat on Beijing’s Third Ring Road, she instantly throws herself on the dusty bed. She sleeps a deep sleep for three days, lying motionless, blank, dreamless, without dimension.

She wakes up and walks downstairs to her mailbox. It’s been a while since she was home and there’s the standard accumulation of glossy flyers and overdue bills—then she finds a lone letter. She looks at the stamp—a European stamp postmarked two months ago, and then redirected from Boston to Beijing. Mu can find no address, though, as she turns it over in her hands. It must have arrived when she was in Maine on her own—how odd that Bruce never mentioned it. She sits on the cold step in her pyjamas and opens the letter.

Dearest Mu
,

I received your letter finally—the one about you going to America. America! Old Hell! I don’t know how it made it to me, across seas and continents, but somehow it did. But that was two months ago, so who knows where you are now. I’m going to try this Boston address, but I don’t hold out much hope—on tour means on the road, surely. What a surreal concept; my world is in stasis. I don’t know what it is to explore any longer. I bury inside myself: that’s all there is left
.

I am still in an in-between state. I’m waiting for my asylum application to be granted. That is all. No news, no change—or at least that’s how I feel after days in this grey box. I can’t see what there is beyond this right now, I can’t ever see you here with me, or us together in Beijing any more. Even my memories of our flat are hazy and dissolving. I hope you’re having a good time, wherever you are. And I hope you can lead the life you’ve always wanted to live. America must be better than China, whatever I think of it
.

You should start a new life, a brand-new life without me
.

Good luck, Mu
,

Jian

3
BEIJING, MAY 2012

A week passes. She recovers. She thinks and plans in her pyjamas at the kitchen table each evening, sitting in front of a bowl of instant noodles. Now her flat is nearly empty. The pillows and sheets are packed in a box. Plates, cups and kitchen utensils are in another. Books and CDs are stuffed into two large suitcases. Mu’s and Jian’s clothes, divided into two separate bundles, lie like skins cast off their backs arranged in a dead geometry. All their belongings wait in the middle of the main room to be removed.

The living room is quiet. There’s only the occasional sound of a water pipe, a twisting groan from under the toilet. Already the dust is settling on the bare floor, like the slow, thick flow of time. Mu sits on the edge of the empty mattress on which she and Jian used to spend their nights, lying together, sleeping, touching. She gazes at the remaining furnishings: the handmade lamp, the broken rattan chair, the old carpet from Pan Jianyuan market, the dried-out bamboo plants outside on the balcony. These things should be familiar to her; she and Jian lived here together only thirteen months ago. So why do they appear so alien? It’s like her sense of belonging is something she cannot recognise any more. But then, she remembers, they were never theirs to begin with. They came with the flat—such an ugly, tasteless assortment of cheap cast-offs. It’s so obvious: now that their meanings have been stripped from them, they no longer speak to her. And soon, after Mu leaves, new tenants will come, putting their own tablecloth on the table, wrapping their own bed sheets round the same mattress, and making these objects their own. What’s this strange merging of life with the bare world of things? She tries to imagine the future of the flat without her and Jian. Nothing will
remain of their presence as the new bodies move about, sit, sleep, breathe and dream.

Then there’s the corner, beside their mattress, the corner where Little Shu’s cot used to be. The cot was removed a few days after the baby died. The corner has been left empty and she has tried to sleep facing the other side of the room ever since. It is as if looking at the shadow of the cot that was once there is a bad omen for her future life.

One afternoon people from the removal company arrive. The workers, beefy young men with rough voices, carry her boxes and suitcases out in waves. With an indifferent efficiency it’s all loaded onto the back of the truck. Doors are slammed shut, and she is squeezed into the front of the truck. Then they are off. They drive towards the storage depot as if they are on a journey to a cemetery. An hour later, she stands in an industrial space, watching her belongings—to which she no longer belongs—disappearing into a dark storage unit. It has a number: E33468. They should store her behind this number as well, she thinks. She’ll exist in suspended animation till one day someone comes to release her.

4
ZHEJIANG PROVINCE, JUNE 2012

Our heroine’s new station in life, it seems, has very little to do with Slam Poetry art-rock performances. Sabotage Sister evaporated somehow, along Highway 71, in the desert landscapes of western USA, or disappeared down a drain in a downtown Chicago side street, or in a polite Boston diner with its gleaming parking lot out back. When she returned to China, she stopped writing her diary for some months. She felt aged by the tour, as if she had suddenly gained twenty years; and she had put on some weight. She felt her body had grown so heavy that she could no longer do a somersault or stand on her head, things she used to practise at college. “Money is poetry, freedom is a brick on the wall.” Jian’s words strangely echo in her ears after the U.S. tour.