I Am China (4 page)

His fingers find the familiar chords that still resonate with his energetic rat’s heart inside. He plucks a string. The sound stretches out in the silent night. One of his room-mates suddenly wakes up, turning his neck and staring at Jian blankly until he sighs and puts his guitar down. Laying his head on the cold pillow, he gazes up at the grey ceiling and feels the darkness around him. Until dawn, sleep does not come. He wakes up with a single burning thought: I have to get out of here, any way I can. So he starts at the top.

4
LINCOLNSHIRE, FEBRUARY 2012

Kublai Jian
Lincolnshire Psychiatric Hospital
2 Brocklehurst Crescent
Grantham NG31

The Queen

Buckingham Palace

London SW1A 1AA

Dearest Queen
,

My name is Kublai Jian, but they usually call me Jian—it means strong and vigorous. I’m writing to you from a madhouse in Lincolnshire. I’m sure you know your English towns as well as you know how many toes you have and how many nails are attached to your toes, and that Lincolnshire is where your Lady Thatcher comes from. You may think I am not sober, like the people in this madhouse. But I promise you that at this very moment, I am more sober and steady than anyone else here
.

I believe you understand the justice of this world. I think a powerful person like you can really help me out. In China we say if you can talk to the boss then don’t talk to the boss’s secretary, and if you can talk to the boss’s wife then no need to talk to the boss. So, dear Queen, you are that boss lady, you are the top one!

I lived all my life in China. Well, up until a few weeks ago. I arrived in London at the end of December, and ended up in a wet and poky flat near Mile End station. It was quite depressing to live on a rotten carpet all day, but that was nothing compared with what came afterwards. One morning I was downstairs eating two oily sausages, and I found a letter from the UK Home Office and they had turned down my asylum application. I swallowed the second sausage and decided to fight back. I needed to gather £2,000 for an appeal, plus many extra documents which I don’t have. That day I went crazy and began to scream at everyone who was trying to talk to me. Then during the night my stomach declared a war on me, sharp pains in my intestines. Dear Queen, maybe this is not your business but I have had a very troubled bowel since I was a child, which is exactly what Fidel Castro has suffered from all his life. Bad intestine, knotted and throbbed and bubbled. I thought I was going to die that very night
.

But I did not die. Next morning someone took me to a hospital. And after an overall check-up with one doctor, he said there was nothing wrong with my bowel but possibly something wrong with my head. I cursed the man’s mother and grandmother and his great-great-uncle. He then immediately sent me to another doctor who specialises on brain but not body. I was so angry and impatient that I hit the brain doctor on his face and smashed his glasses
.

Right after that three security guards seized me and put me in a van. Two hours later I found myself in some ugly suburb with sheep walking in the fields. I arrived in a very lonely town that looked like an old people’s retirement village, and only several hours later I find out this is psychiatric hospital! They asked me to remove my own clothes and to change into regulation striped pyjamas, they said I should rest on a bed in a windowless room. “Rest? Rest for what?” I shouted to them, but they didn’t bother to answer me. Next morning a “Consultant Psychiatrist” called me into an office and told me that I wasn’t well enough to leave. “It would be best for you to stay here,” he said. I argued with him and told him they got me wrong: I was being thrown on a truck blindly and driven to a madhouse like a pig being sent to a slaughterhouse. But he said all patients claimed such things when they first arrived. “Soon you’ll get used to being here.” He patted on my shoulder like I was one of his distant cousins
.

Now, dearest Queen, let me be direct—why I’m writing to you? I need your help in this country. You may think I am a troublemaker. But I am not. I grew up in Beijing. An ideology-rigid city. That’s where my struggle began. In Beijing I was a punk musician. But I must explain, being Chinese punk is very different from your country’s youth. You may think we are not decent boys, swearing and spitting, burning our guitars or taking out our genitals from our jeans on the stage. No, we are not like that at all. We are disciplined, well educated, and sing about politics and art. But it is not always easy to rage against the government. I think you might like my music so I’m enclosing our most famous album with the leading song: “Long March into the Night.”

Excuse me being wordy, but I do hope you can get me out of here!

Yours sincerely
,

Kublai Jian

5
LONDON, APRIL 2013

Iona is on her third coffee of the day. As usual, she has barely eaten anything all day, but she likes the spare feeling in her stomach of “running on empty.” She often forgets to eat. Her sister said once that she had an eating disorder. Certainly food, like men, has a certain problematic position in her life.

For now, it’s the pleasure of reading these Chinese texts that is sustaining her. Like a nun in her cell, with precious illuminated manuscripts set out before her, Iona works on a photocopied diary entry. The handwriting looks similar to the letters she translated a few days ago—messy, masculine, with big strokes and a sort of urgent calligraphy. The diary must be written by the same man, Iona thinks to herself. Slowly she types out her translation.

2 November 1993

It’s eight thirty in the morning and I’m not going to lectures today
. A
few hours ago I met again that moon-faced girl. I feel as if I now have a clearer picture of her. She has a nervous energy, like a little canary standing at the mouth of a hot-vapoured volcano. There is something tough about her that draws me in, but at the same time, she is as delicate as a fragile young bird. It sounds foolish—I hardly know her!—but I feel as if I can sense her moods, like waves of the sea pressing into my chest as I look at her dark eyes hidden beneath her fringe. I wanted to ask her out a few weeks ago when we met for the first time at the volleyball match, but I’ve been practising with the band so much I just haven’t had a chance. I see her in class and at lectures, half looking at me and then quickly glancing away
—
fresh, small, biting her lower lip, not looking me in the eye, like a lonely flower fearful of the wind
.

But last night we talked in a new way. It was at the concert our band had been building up to. My fingers are still sore. My ears still ringing. I don’t feel like I’ve slept properly or eaten properly in weeks. But I don’t give a fuck! I’m on a rush, like I’m on a runaway train and I won’t be getting off soon
.

We were in Cafe Proletarian in Wudaokou. It’s small but it felt like a big deal for me and the band. There were at least two hundred fans even though the space could only fit in eighty, and the sound system was lousy but we played as loud as we could. We just went with the flow, and it all seemed to come together so well. Suddenly she seemed like the focus of it all
.

Now I divide my life between Before-Her and After-Her. She’s dug herself into me. She’s a heat inside me, churning me up. Tonight she told me she has only been kissed once before, when she was just fifteen, by a boy she knew back home in the village where she grew up. And now the second one is me! The first grown man in her life. Tonight she became my fire, and I hers. The band were playing under the tacky, eighties spinning disco lights, and the spotlights were zinging in my eyes. She was standing and jumping right at the front of the stage. The colours of the neon lights were bouncing off her white dress. I was singing hard and fast, sweat pouring from my face and my fingers melding with my guitar and the music, and then I looked down and she was looking up at me with her big black button eyes. Her eyes were the brightest eyes in that field of eyes before me. I thought I could see them glistening in the centre of the smoky haze. It’s a rock cliché but no one would refuse it. I stood in the middle of the stage with Raohao playing his bass on my right side, Yanwu his guitar on my left, and Sunxin hitting his drums behind my head. I was screaming and howling. And she was right at the front singing along with the mass, swishing her shiny dark hair. I even thought I could hear her high and girlish voice in the cloud of noise. It was one ripple in the churned-up sea, and I was the eye of the storm
.

Suddenly a sharp sound breaks Iona’s quiet. She looks around; her phone is ringing loudly on her desk and the vibrating motion against the wood makes it hum insistently. Still holding the photocopied pages of the Chinese man’s diary, Iona turns back to the page and tries to ignore it. But the sound is persistent and after the caller hangs up they try again straight away.

“Yes?”

“Iona? Is this a bad time?” Her mother’s voice sounds hesitant.

“Mum, I’m working.”

“Oh, that’s surprising! Yes, very good, darling.”

“What’s up? Are you all right?” Iona speaks impatiently.

“Yes, all good, darling. But the milking machine isn’t working properly, and one of last year’s calves died yesterday. I’ve been in the
garden, but it’s so cold I came back into the kitchen to warm up. So I just thought I’d call you while I wait for the kettle to boil.”

“Oh dear. I’m so sorry.” Iona is hasty and distracted. “Listen, Mum, can I call you back in a bit? I’m just in the middle of something.” She pauses and there’s silence on the other end. “I’m sorry, Mum, I’m sorry, it’s just—”

“It’s fine, darling. Bye dear.” And she puts the phone down.

Iona sits down again and picks up her pencil. She resumes where she left off, and starts translating the rest of the passage, this time with a more urgent energy. The words are spilling out of her onto the page.

… 
It was one ripple in the churned-up sea, and I was the eye of the storm. Through the smoky air, the vortex of turning lights, I could see some students had lit candles and lighters to match the lines from my song. The disco lights dimmed. We could feel this wave of sound, all of us connected by our music. It was unforgettable! Perfection! And her right in the middle of it! Then all of a sudden the electric power was cut and the double doors at the back of the hall swung open. Police. Now there was just screaming in the dark. And all the lights went out. I felt someone lunge for me in the dark. Mu’s skinny arms had found me in the blackness and her soft cheeks were next to my face, her cold hands tight around my waist. And among the sirens and the mess in the darkness, she screamed into my ear: “Jian, I will come with you if the police take you. I won’t let you be arrested alone!” I found her lips with mine. She, the most delicate girl, the bravest of all, stood there waiting to go under with me. We were very still, in all the noise and movement around us. Then after what seemed like forever, the lights were back on, the venue was quiet and the police were gone. There weren’t many people left and the cafe manager totally freaked out but we didn’t give a fuck. We started playing again. Gradually, more and more people returned to the cafe. We played until this morning, more fervent than before. We came back to my studio (luckily I’d made the bed). And she has only just left for class. I can’t get enough of her
.