I Am China (7 page)

Dover is a major ferry port on the English Channel. Facing France, the area has always been a focus for people entering and leaving Britain. It also served as a bastion against various attackers: notably the French during the Napoleonic Wars and Germany during the Second World War. And nowadays the port is the busiest shipping lane in the world. Dear visitors, why not take a lovely walk along the beach and enjoy some fresh seafood? We hope you have a pleasant stay in Dover!

A visitor sitting in the Cafe-on-the-Channel can just see the wavy sea, and flotilla of boats. Birds scavenging for scraps of food and dead fish.
If you had been sitting there on 4 April 2012, around midday, you would have seen a white van driving past with “Dover Immigration Removal Centre” printed in blue letters on the side. It stopped at the cafe for a few moments while the driver picked up a takeaway coffee and soggy sandwich. Inside the van were several individuals, including a slight Chinese man with a hungry look in his eyes. He, too, from the small window at the back, saw the birds swooping, and the grey mist on the sea.

2
DOVER, APRIL 2012

In a grey, nearly empty room lit by a white fluorescent tube, Jian is writing a serious letter to the Home Office concerning his future.

As he writes and rewrites his sentences, he imagines an immigration officer in the Border Control HQ opening a pile of letters. Probably, this tired and over-routinised officer will simply glance at the applicant’s nationality and the address of each letter, then throw it into a second pile of papers which he will take to another immigration officer; then another officer in another office will open these letters and read them again and put them in another pile, and then this officer will take the papers to another officer … like a crazed man crawling up an Escher staircase, unable to reach the top.

Jian sits back and looks round at his two room-mates in this, his second grey-white box in this strange country. During the day, the quietly chattering wardens and the silently bored refugees in the Dover Immigration Removal Centre are little different from the quietly murmuring nurses and the numbed patients in Lincolnshire. Nothing much has changed. Even his dank cell in Beijing felt pulsing and alive in comparison to this. As he tries to put words down, straining to remember the right English phrase, he feels a machine-like throbbing in his head. It is a dreadfully familiar sensation—he remembers that feeling from being hit by an electric baton at his final concert. His body becomes stiff, his pen is frozen in his hands. Now the throbbing sound interrupts the quiet around him and he sees his childhood family house—a house surrounded by acacia trees hidden in a hutong beside Hou Hai Lake in central Beijing.

A brief, blurred memory of his mother comes to him. Perhaps it
is the very first memory Jian has of her, he was only two or three. She is in the kitchen, standing in front of a small mirror. She uses a heated iron poker to curl her hair. The burning smell floats into his nostrils. Then his father’s image sneaks in, like a black crow in a bright garden, squawking. The squawking man-bird sticks in his mind. In this foreign, in-between space, Jian chooses to confront it rather than shoo it away.

The day he last saw his father now returns to him as a sequence of pictures. Can this really be him, this smiling ten-year-old boy running down the narrow alleyways of Beijing? The summer sun hits hard, seeming to singe the poplar trees and melt the asphalt roads. Dogs are sleeping in the shadows of the trees, as are elderly people from the hutong quarter, sitting there like sacks of rice. It’s a relentless August, the summer of 1982. Jian’s mother had died a few years before, and his grandparents are visiting relatives out of town. He is left at home alone throughout the summer.

On the day of the annual conference of the Beijing People’s Representatives Congress, for which Jian’s father was an Administration Secretary, he decides to take his son into the office with him. As the chime tolls from the Dongcheng Bell Tower behind his father’s office, hundreds of delegates start arriving in the conference hall with their dark shiny suits and their hot shiny faces. Jian’s father orders him to keep quiet and stay in the kitchen, where the chefs are clattering about preparing tea and food. It is a scorching day and Jian’s cotton shorts cling to the backs of his thighs. He does his homework and he waits. And he waits. Two hours later, though, Jian is already bored to death. He sneaks past the guard tasked to keep an eye on him, and escapes through the Congress gate. Wandering in the sleepy hutong, the ten-year-old boy feels the freedom and aimlessness of a stray dog. He sees a gang of older boys riding their bikes, and longs to join them. They welcome him into their game. It’s the usual war story kids played out so often on the streets of Beijing: Chinese soldiers versus American soldiers in the Korean War. Jian enters the game a bit late, so he is told to be a Korean peasant standing on the sidelines. But he refuses.
He’s bored and hot and wants to take a side in the conflict. He asks if he can join the group of Chinese soldiers. But in order to be assigned to a unit, he has to be given a rank and, most importantly, to recite the “Soldier Oath.” Jian is never good at reciting anything, but he is eager to try. Raising the clenched right fist, he speaks aloud like a real soldier: “
I am a member of the People’s Liberation Army. I promise that I will follow the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, serve the people wholeheartedly, obey orders, fight heroically; under no circumstances will I
 …” Then Jian can’t remember the next two lines, the crucial lines about betraying one’s motherland. Everybody laughs at him. Smeared with humiliation, he has to take on the role of an American soldier and the boys turn on him: he becomes everybody’s target. This game of war becomes violent, and Jian is badly beaten up, punched in the face so hard that he bleeds. Someone holding a branch hits him across his face—he escapes the sharp end, but gets a deep cut into his skin and forever after he will wear a scar under his eye like a sickle moon.

After dark, with his clothes torn and his face bloody, young Jian stumbles back to his father’s office to find him in a rage. Silently he puts Jian on the back of his bike and rides home without a word. His father enters the house, places the keys with deliberate care on the kitchen table and, still saying nothing, with his back to Jian picks up a steel ruler. Suddenly he turns, grabs his son and shouts: “You want another cut under your eye? Do you? Do you? Here it is!” His father raises the weapon and seems about to bring it down upon the cringing boy. But instead of the expected blow, nothing happens. A look comes over his father’s face: a fixed stare, like a frozen image from a Communist banner, with a cruel coldness in his eyes. Grasping his son, he takes Jian to his bedroom, shoves him towards the bed and closes the door. He locks it and leaves him inside. Jian is locked in all night and most of the next day. Twenty hours later, when the door is unlocked again, the boy has passed out on the floor from exhaustion and hunger. His lips are blue and swollen, his cut is dark and encrusted, his eyes
red from constant crying. Perhaps those twenty hours were the worst hours his body had suffered.

A week later, Jian remembers clearly, his grandparents returned and resumed their role in looking after him, and his father left Beijing. He was posted to the south and rarely came back to the city. After the episode with the steel ruler Jian lived with his grandparents and barely saw his father, or received any letters from him; he had regular nightmares about his father returning home. It wasn’t the threat of his father’s violence. It was the threat behind his father’s face that day. At school a year or so later, when Jian hadn’t seen his father for nearly nine months, a wave of gossip spread through his school about his father having a new wife and starting a new family elsewhere. He never came home to see his son after that. The boy was now a young man. He was locked in a dark room once again, only this time it was permanent: it was a larger room, from city to city, with occasional people to hold on to; a world in which the father he knew would never feature. His father had sent him into exile.

Suddenly Jian hears someone snoring loudly beside him. No, there are now two people snoring. He shares the room with two refugees from somewhere in Africa. His room-mates’ snores blast into white space, their heads on sunken pillows, upturned slack-lipped faces breathing heavily like two buffalo in a backwood swamp. Good sleepers. They are sleeping in Dover with me. Jian’s head is heavy, his eyes are closing. His last wakeful sensation is the feeling of his toes touching the strings of his guitar which rests against his bed.

3
LONDON, MAY 2013

It’s after midnight; London oozes into the soundscape of late-night television dramas and the passing wail of sirens. The streets are saturated with shadows and lights. A flat above Chapel Market is still brightly lit. Iona is buried in a sea of papers. She has added two more dictionaries as well as a book about dialects in northern China to the pile on her desk. While she is sorting through the papers, trying to make sense of them, she finds a stray undated letter.

At first glance she thinks it’s a letter from the 1990s, but the tone is angry and hurt like the first few letters Jian seems to have sent Mu after he left China in 2011. She’s been muddling at these translations for a few weeks and she still hasn’t managed to get a sense of the story. What went wrong in their relationship? They seemed so happy, so full of promise and excitement. There are nods and clues to a manifesto which changed everything, but she has no background information at all, and her Internet searches are fruitless.

She glances at the letter again—it’s pretty vehement. Iona wonders if it was ever sent. No address, no sentiment, just straight in.

I can’t understand why you’re behaving like this, Mu. How could you say you hate my manifesto? I mean, you know I believe that what we do, the action we take, is the most essential expression of art and therefore the most essential expression of a political view. For us, the most basic action is to say No to the reactionary and raise our fist. I don’t think I am asking too much, Mu. I just want you to understand me. I thought you did
.

For years you have been telling me you want to live an apolitical life. You disagree with whatever I do. You know I think that to take no action is a political gesture, too. To take no action, to be ignorant and passive. Isn’t that the worst? Didn’t we always say that? The same goes for love—there is no simple love between one and another to the exclusion of the rest. I can only love …

The characters have blurred and Iona struggles to read what comes next. There is one more illegible phrase and then the letter comes abruptly to a halt.

4
DOVER, APRIL 2012

Another Dover night. Jian tries to sleep. But his mind is racing, like an express train from Shanghai to Nanjing with totally blurred scenes outside the window. He vaguely sees a small gap-toothed girl in the dim light, and he stretches out his arms. Wait, wait until tomorrow morning, someone will help me, someone will reach down and draw me out of this place. He thinks and thinks. A flood of faces rush past, then the flood stops with the calm, slightly pink complexion of his caseworker, Brandon.

Brandon is a law student who works as a volunteer for immigrants with problematic cases. Jian finds him incredibly kind, but it’s as if his voice is wrapped in bed sheets, obscuring all meaning and clarity. He had said the other day, “Schjaaaan, an seen a wee hope, a wee hope!” Jian had looked at Brandon expectantly. It took a lot for Jian to finally understand Brandon’s Glaswegian brogue—repetitions and gesticulations like actors in the Beijing Opera. Jian feels his own Mongol blood shares something with Brandon’s wild-man ancestors, and this voice from a land of ice and whisky calls out to his past, his desire to rage and defy.

But now, enveloped in the dark, Jian twists under the damp bedcovers. The scenery of his past life is a silent river flowing through his blood. It’s been like this for some days now. In the daytime he’s numbed, he’s fine, but when he lays his head down, he feels his skull is cracking open; he feels headless. He is sitting on a bench with Mu on a bright Beijing afternoon, under the shadow of a half-built flyover trying to write songs while watching a group of construction workers busy with a crane in the near distance. If you have to try to write a song, he has always said, it will never work. The struggle you have with one song is
only preparation for the real song that will come later in a rush, perfected at birth. It is this one which will be Your Song, not the one you struggle over.

And now, in the mind of this older Jian cradled by a moonless Dover night, he is rushing around Beijing’s underground bars trying to replace the drummer in his band—drummers are always crazy and unreliable—and arguing with the Neighbourhood Police who control the noise levels in the street. Showing them the power cords to reassure them, while getting them to drink with him! The police are not natural rockers, so he buys them hard liquor and lambs’ ribs as bribes. Waking up at midday, after a hard gig and midnight crab-eating with Yan, and non-stop drinking of er guo tou, and shambling under the street lamps along the avenues, and shocking the neighbourhood surveillance ladies. There he sees the loud-laughing migrants’ faces, selling him steamed buns and a glass of warm soy drink, the lousy taxi rides through flag-waving Long-Peace Street, heading for some new venue, to plug in instruments and send out charged sound, and so on, and so on. In the morning he wakes up beside Mu, who has already prepared congee and pickles for their breakfast, and his head is a foggy blur, and aches like a torn drum.

Another month sinks into the sand that borders the English Channel. Jian’s routine meetings with his caseworker Brandon frustrate him. The conversation moves through a thick treacle of accents. Nothing seems to cut through.