I Am China (44 page)

Iona pushes the glass door of the bookshop and enters the hallway. She runs up the staircase that leads to the reading area. A woman’s voice projected through a microphone seeps into her ears. At first she can’t figure out whether the words are Chinese or English. But as she climbs further up the twisting staircase, the voice gets clearer. It’s English, spoken with an oriental accent. The words finish, then there is the sound of applause.

And there she is, stepping off the stage: a Chinese woman, slim, bony body, long black hair hanging like a veil on her shoulders. Her energy feels young but her eyes betray some gentle signs of age and experience. Still, they shine in the dark, lighting her moon-shaped face. Holding loose sheets of paper are small hands, the very ones Jian wrote about. Have I missed her reading already? A shudder of disappointment grips Iona. It can’t be over yet! A second reader takes to the stage as Iona moves quickly, piercing the crowd, towards the dark figure now whispering with a member of the audience. It is as if her attention were reaching out to the poet with some invisible connection. The moon-shaped-face woman turns to her, before they have exchanged any words, as if with a certain recognition.

“Excuse me … I’m Iona, the translator of your own and Jian’s writings.”

The Chinese woman grips her hand; she seems to be matching Iona’s name to her physical presence. “I’m really happy you’ve come.” There’s more applause and Mu stands up. “I have another reading to do now. Stay and listen. You will understand it better than anyone here.”

She returns to the stage area, her eyes illuminated by the spotlight. Then the room is filled with the resonance of her voice.

“Now I want to begin with the work of a poet whose spirit means a lot to me. The poem is ‘America’ by Allen Ginsberg, but I have changed the word ‘America’ to ‘China.’ I want to dedicate this poem to a man whom I was very close to. His name was Kublai Jian. He was a poet, too.”

China

China I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.

China two dollars and twenty-seven cents.

I can’t stand my own mind.

China when will we end the human war?

Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb

I don’t feel good don’t bother me.

I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind.

China when will you be angelic?

When will you take off your clothes?

When will you look at yourself through the grave?

When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites? China why are your libraries full of tears?

China when will you send your eggs to India?

I’m sick of your insane demands.

When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?

China after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.

Your machinery is too much for me.

You made me want to be a saint.

There must be some other way to settle this argument.

Burroughs is in Tangiers I don’t think he’ll come back it’s sinister.

Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?

I’m trying to come to the point.

I refuse to give up my obsession.

China stop pushing I know what I’m doing.

China the plum blossoms are falling.

I haven’t read the newspapers for months, every day somebody goes on trial for murder.

China I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.

China I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I’m not sorry.

I smoke marijuana every chance I get.

I sit in my house for days and stare at the roses in the closet.

When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.

My mind is made up there’s going to be trouble.

You should have seen me reading Marx.

My psychoanalyst thinks I’m perfectly right.

I won’t say the Lord’s Prayer.

I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.

China I still haven’t told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over from Russia.

China I’m addressing you.

Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine?

I’m obsessed by Time Magazine.

I read it every week.

Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.

I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.

It’s always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious, movie producers are serious. Everybody’s serious but me.

It occurs to me that I am China.

I am talking to myself again.

POSTSCRIPT

On a snowy London afternoon two years later, a lone Chinese woman walks into a bookshop. On a front centre desk, there are copies of a new book with a scarlet-red cover. She picks one up and flicks through the first few pages. Her eyes begin to glisten, her moon-shaped face is illuminated with surprise.

She reads:
“This book is dedicated to Jian and Mu, who will meet again in these pages.”

At the same hour of that day, in another part of the town, another black-haired woman, clutching a copy of the same book in her right hand, walks into her favourite garden. The snow has just stopped; blackbirds come out searching for food. And her lone bench is visible between the pine trees and withered honeysuckle plants.

It’s as if she is sleepwalking, or in a daydream. She is surprised to find herself where she is. It’s like she has gone back in time, but the world has moved on. The garden is unchanged, although a thin layer of new snow covers the earth. She looks at her feet; they are planted firmly on the crisp short grass. How incredible, she thinks: it didn’t drift away or disappear; she looks at her hands, yes, the same bony hand grasps the new book she has spent an intense time of her life working on. And the garden, it is still at the junction of the same two streets, with the same paint-peeling gate, the same flyers on the noticeboard, the same pine trees standing on the right and the dead rose bushes on the left; and the two chestnut trees are exactly where they have always been. Nothing has moved. It seems obvious, yet unbelievable at the same time. Not even the dried-up maple leaves on the ground have changed their composition. Iona walks further, passing a group of children playing hide-and-seek among the bushes.
Around the trees there is laughter, screaming, and a mother’s calls. The scent of the pine needles is intoxicating. She drinks in the flavour of their smell and reaches up to touch the low-hanging pine cones, green even in the middle of winter. She walks towards her bench. The bench is still here. But there is an elderly man sitting on it. A man in a winter jacket and a fur hat, smoking a cigarette. It looks as if he is something that has just sprouted out of the ground and taken human shape. This again surprises her. She sits beside the old man, and he squints at her from under his winter hat.

The afternoon sun shines on the pines and warms the people on the bench. A helicopter passes above their heads, its panicked whirr disrupting the calm. The young woman and the old man both gaze at the giant pine in front of them.

She realises there is a child underneath the tree, a little girl in a white coat. The girl jumps, trying to grab the low branches. She fails, jumps again. Finally she grasps hold of a branch and clambers onto it. Unsteadily but persistently, she climbs into the heart of the tree.

Iona gazes at the little girl climbing the pine, holding the branches, and moving higher and higher. She watches for a long time, until the girl disappears. From the treetop, high up in the branches, the little girl looks out across the park. She has never been this high and it’s slightly scary. She sees the two people down on the park bench, an old man and a dark-haired young woman. Through the foliage she thinks she can spy the sea, the lapping waves, the soaring gulls and, in the distance, a dark island she has never visited. They call it the Isle of Iona.

APPENDIX: CHRONOLOGY

The abdication of Puyi, the last Emperor of China: 1912

First World War: 1914–18

Chinese Communist Party founded: 1921

Civil war between the Nationalist and Communist parties: 1927–50

The Long March of the Red Army: 1933–35

Hu Shulai (Jian’s father) born: 1935

Hu Dongsheng (Jian’s grandfather) dies: 1935 (during the Long March)

Chinese War of Resistance against Japan: 1937–45

Second World War: 1939–45

Mao Zedong proclaims the People’s Republic of China: 1949

War to Resist U.S. Aggression and Aid Korea: 1950–53

China’s first Five Year Plan: 1953–57

Anti-Rightist Movement: 1957–59

Great Leap Forward: 1958–60

Great Chinese Famine: 1958–61

Cultural Revolution: 1966–76

Apollo 11
lands on the moon: 1969

President Richard Nixon visits China: 1972

Kublai Jian born: 1972

Deng Mu born: 1975

Mao Zedong dies: 1976

Jian’s mother dies: 1976

Introduction of one-child policy: 1979

Deng Xiaoping begins China’s economic reform: 1978

“Misty Poets” form in Beijing with the magazine
Today:
1978

Shenzhen becomes China’s first Special Economic Zone: 1980

Tiananmen Square Student Demonstration for democracy: 1989

Jian graduates from university: 1997

China holds its first Olympic Games: 2008

China launches spacecraft
Shengzhou 9
with three astronauts: 2012

650 million peasants remain in rural China: 2014

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The last few years have seemed to be the hardest years I have gone through in my adult life. First, my father passed away, then my mother. Both suffered badly from terminal cancer. Then I spent a period wandering around Europe trying to decide where to make my home. In the autumn of 2012 I returned from Berlin to London, madly looking for a new flat. Then in 2013 my own child was born—a brand new Hackney citizen only knowing too well the sound of sirens and the drone of traffic along Mare Street. Eventually, I managed to finish this novel, the most demanding and slowest project I’ve worked on so far.

I am so very fortunate to have found a home with my most loyal publishers: Chatto & Windus in the UK, Nan Talese in the U.S. and Claudia Vidoni in Germany, and to have found editors and agents who have become my friends, who support me in my personal life as well as in my work: Julet Brooke, Clara Farmer, Rebecca Carter, Claire Paterson. I have also found great support in Ruth Warburton, Kate Bland, Anne Rademacher, Kirsty Godon, Martin Ouvry, Owen Sheers, Suzanne Dean and Ruth Little, as well all the people who are behind me on the publishing side of things. And a heartful thanks to
Granta
, who found me before I turned forty.

A deep gratitude also to Stephen Barker and Philippe Ciompi, your absolute support, patience and love is written in the pages of this book.

Last but not the least, to my dear readers across the continent, from Germany to China, from Canada to Australia, from Spain to Argentina. Perhaps you are one of the most important reasons why I continue to write.

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Xiaolu Guo was born in a fishing village in south China. She studied film at the Beijing Film Academy and published six books in China before she moved to London in 2002. The English translation of
Village of Stone
was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Her first novel written in English,
A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers
was shortlisted for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction, and
Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth
, published in 2008, was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize. She was named as one of
Granta’
s Best of Young British Novelists 2013.