I Am China (6 page)

Jian was taken aback. He wasn’t thrilled to hear that he looked like Peking Man. “I’m not that ugly! Peking Man wasn’t even a man, he wasn’t even a
Homo sapiens
!”

“But look.” The girl traced Jian’s jaw with a soft finger and he shivered. “Look, your jawline and bone structure
are
exactly like the fossilised head I saw in a museum once. I remember it so well—he had a very big jaw just like yours, and his forehead was as steep as yours!” All Jian could do was smile at her insistence; being compared to the supposed original ancestor of all Chinese men couldn’t be a bad thing.

“Which department are you in?” Jian gazed at the girl’s front teeth.

“Literature,” she answered, suddenly more serious, “Western Literature.”

Jian remembered well those few days after the volleyball game—he had looked out for her in lectures and around the campus, and even spied her looking at him from across the room. She told him of her mild obsession with Peking Man since her middle-school days. Like other students in her history class she had to recite facts about the
ancient apes, especially Peking Man: “…  he lived 750,000 years ago, but as primitive as he was, he already knew how to use fire and tools in his cave.” She told Jian about her trip to the museum in Beijing’s Zhoukoudian—the original cave where they discovered the fossils of Peking Man—and how she had stood in a large and empty exhibition hall and looked at the skull. It was like the head of a modern human, except its teeth looked oversized and fierce. “And now I get to meet a real Peking Man. Alive!” Her moon-shaped face glowed as she talked and she tugged the billowing shirt over her knees and coiled her small body up inside it like butterfly in a cocoon.

9
LONDON, MAY 2013

Standing in front of a mirror in her bathroom, Iona brushes her hair; black strands glisten under a battered art deco lamp, and her face looms beneath, familiar, inescapably her. There is a tug of entangled hair at the back; she tries to comb it straight, but it won’t behave. Her phone rings in the kitchen. She continues to brush her hair. The phone rings again. No, I should not go out tonight, or even this weekend. I must work. Lots to do. She talks to herself in the mirror, and her hand cuts down through the black fall of her hair.

She returns to the kitchen and leans against the table where the laid-out pages wait. Leafing through the heavy pile of documents, she draws out a page which begins with a pencil drawing:

A girl with a messy fringe obscuring her eyes, and a mouth smeared below, with eyes drooping like tears. The line has a certain fluency, like a shape-changing snake moving across the page. Is this Mu? Or some other girl, caught on paper one morning, after a long night? Is it Jian’s drawing? It must be, judging from the handwriting beneath. The shape-changing line makes her think of a lean, fluent body, in a dark-coloured jacket. Iona begins to read the writing below.

13 October 1993

I met that girl again from the volleyball match. She still seems to be finding her way around the university. I was in the reading room trying to finish that Trotsky book and she walked over and took the chair next to me. We sat beside each other for about an hour; at one point she opened her palm and showed me her fingers. “Do you see anything abnormal?” she asked, looking straight into my eyes as if she were a hypnotist
.

I pored over her hand. It felt cool and fragile. “What am I meant to be looking for?” I felt a little ridiculous and I let out an awkward half-laugh, but when I looked up she was curiously serious. I rubbed her palm gently, “Well, perhaps your index finger is a little bent.”

“My father made me practise calligraphy every day from when I was very little, and this is the result of holding the brush! And what a worthless effort!” She has this excited, childish tone whenever she tries to describe something bad or disturbing, like a child in love with horror stories. “I’ve never managed to use my calligraphy skills. But I’ll be stuck with a bent finger forever!”

She laughed and her animated voice was like a string of bells in a windy valley. Her front teeth stuck out slightly, showing a glimpse of that cute gap between them. I wanted to kiss her badly. But instead I said:

“Then you must hate your father!”

“No, no, I don’t! I love my father. How could anyone hate their parents?”

“Oh, I certainly do,” I said, quietly. “I hate my father.”

She looked very surprised by what I had said, but she didn’t ask me why. A brief cool silence fell in the air between us
.

Then I glanced at a map spread out on the desk in front of her and asked her what she was looking at
.

“I’m looking at these small islands in the middle of the sea.” She pointed at an expanse of turquoise blue in the centre of the world map. “Wouldn’t it be amazing if one day we could visit these islands?”

Her slightly bent index finger pointed out a few yellow dots in the blue sea. She pronounced their names haltingly as she placed her finger on each island. “Easter Island, Pitcairn, Majorca, Corsica, Sardinia, Crete.”

“Where would you go, if you could choose just one island?” she asked me
.

“I don’t know,” I shrugged. “How are we to know anything if we have never been outside of China?”

“Come on … just imagine. Imagine that one day you wake up and find yourself on a quiet and beautiful island in the middle of a very blue sea. Where would it be?” She nudged me
.

Then she covered my eyes with her palm, lifted my hand and let my finger land at random on the map. Then she removed her hand from my eyes and in an excited voice said: “Here it is. Crete.” A Greek island in the middle of the Mediterranean. That’s where my finger had found its place
.

10
LONDON, MAY 2013

Crete. Iona has never been to Greece, though she would love to travel to those sunny islands, smell the ancient earth’s smell. She has led a strange still life. Iona reads the date on some of the diary entries:
February 1989
,
September 1991
,
March 1992
. In 1992 she was only ten years old, Iona thinks, scampering around her Scottish island, shuttling back and forth on a ferry from her school to her home. She didn’t know then that she would study Chinese and end up as a translator. She thought she would become a writer, or a primary-school teacher. Perhaps her first fascination with China was triggered in her primary school—she remembers asking one of the other kids in a serious manner, “If we dug through the earth, would we find Eskimos on the other side?” The other child replied with total conviction, “No, Iona, we’d find a Chinaman with his pet dragon of course.” Iona thought of the books she read at home, of Jules Verne, and the dark, pitch-black tunnels sinking deeper and deeper into the earth. For days, fear clenching her chest, in her imagination she would clamber through the tunnels, and then, finally, by some topsy-turvy logic she would be led up to daylight. She might hear sounds from the world above as she was tunnelling upwards—honking horns on the street and sing-song voices. Then suddenly she would pop out under the Forbidden City. Chinese faces would crowd around to gawk at the fabulous foreign girl, perhaps a little grimy, breaking out of the earth’s membrane, like a bird cracking an egg. China! She would make a Chinese friend like Tintin does in his Tibet journey. How wonderful it had seemed. Fifteen years later, still remembering that feeling, she travelled to China for two months as part of her degree. She found China fascinating but impossible to grasp, and the people she met scarred by their traumatic pasts. Now,
in the sunniest corner of her London flat, scrutinising the dancing, jagged, handwriting of a mysterious Chinese man, Iona feels again that intense emotion, building up from within, firing up her eyes.

She types out a very short diary entry trying to decipher Kublai Jian’s messy and large handwriting.

Haidian Music Store, 4 July 1995

A celebration with a bunch of university poets and a few young journalists! But most importantly, it was the debut of Kublai Jian and the Wild Sprouts—and the release of my first proper album. This is it! We have arrived! After two bootleg CDs in three years! The whole band was there and we really feel a bond between us now, like warriors or adventurers. Beijing’s sky had turned red and purple, putting on a show for us, and we drank. We drank so much! Mu says this never would have happened if I hadn’t met Li Hua Dong. But she is so naive. A peasant girl with rice grains still hidden in her hair. Kublai Jian has learned how to write better songs
—
that’s what this success is about, and nothing to do with a bloody manager! Having a manager is just like having an accountant wearing an ironed suit. It’s a necessity, but it’s nothing to do with our music, old bastard sky!

Iona types “Kublai Jian and the Wild Sprouts” into Google. She waits a few seconds, the timer spins, the laptop whirrs and a blank window pops up. The great Chinese firewall, it seems. Iona tries a few more options but she just gets the same result. All that comes up is an album cover for
Yuan vs. Dollars
in Google images. She can only presume it’s Jian’s most well-known album, or the latest perhaps. It’s a powerful picture: a headshot of a young man with a blindfolded face. It has punch, she thinks. There are no articles about him. She sighs. She really knows so little about Chinese cyber-policing and Internet censorship. They’re clearly doing a great job. And when she searches again just for
images of “Kublai Jian,” millions of pictures of Chinese- and Mongolian-looking men with the name “Kublai” or “Jian” come up—either standing by some tacky tourist spot or smiling a plastic smile with the backdrop of fake Mongol people in a yurt, or here again among a line-up of fat bureaucrats wearing ridiculous Khalkha Mongol hats … Nothing about his family or his hated father. And none of them remotely matches her idea of a young and vigorous musician who writes angry manifestos.

TWO | WELCOME TO DOVER

shui neng zai zhou, ye neng fu zhou.

Water can float a boat, it can also sink it
.

XUN ZI (PHILOSOPHER, WARRING STATES PERIOD, 475–221 BC)

1
DOVER, APRIL 2012

Cafe-on-the-Channel is located on the west side of Dover’s busy port. It is only a mile from the Dover Immigration Removal Centre. This is where Kublai Jian has been held since he was dragged out from Lincolnshire by two policemen. Jian has never been to the cafe; his life is charted by locked doors and high walls. But Iona went there once. Some years ago Iona visited Dover with a man for a weekend. “Romantic getaway,” he’d said, “cheaper than a city break, babe, but it’ll be great, really it will.” They had stayed in a B&B where the bed had sagged and the sex had been only OK. She had tried not to care. Then they had walked down the road to find a spot for lunch and ended up in the Cafe-on-the-Channel. It was a terrace cafe, with old wooden tables and rustic-looking benches against the backdrop of the grey sea. There was a TV showing a tourist promotion on a loop. As Iona and her boyfriend ate a lukewarm omelette, a well-known actress came on the TV to talk about the sights, her encouraging voice just loud enough to disrupt conversation.