I Am China (14 page)

Feeling her cheeks burn, Iona is almost flushed. She’s one to stumble into things, accidentally, lightly, casually. She’s never felt such a sense of responsibility. She hears her slightly trembling voice: “Yes, Jonathan, it’s exciting. I’ll be sure to let you know how I get on.”

His phone rings, and he quickly glances at it.

“Do let us know if you need further assistance. I look forward to hearing more about your progress, Iona.” He stands up, stretching his hand out again.

“OK …” Iona says, still clutching onto her coffee.

As he turns to leave, Jonathan gazes at Iona for a brief moment. “By the way, has anyone ever told you that you look like that actress? Oh, what was her name? Eighties stuff. Dark, petite. Um …”

“Winona Ryder?” Iona is nearly embarrassed.

Nodding his head, Jonathan smiles ambiguously.

5
ZENTRUM FÜR DEN SCHUTZ VON ASYL, SWITZERLAND, MAY 2012

Everything happens in time. They say time is like a great valley stretching into the distance; our lives are the great valley’s lakes and rivers, each with high and low points, depressions and hilltops. Iona doesn’t know it yet, as she walks along Regent’s Canal in Camden Town, but just a year and three days ago, Jian was caught up in his own waterway. He felt black-hearted and out of control, like he was being carried by a rushing river towards some sinkhole of oblivion within it. A police van was driving him down a winding road, away from an anonymous immigration office to—Jian didn’t quite know yet. The office had been stuck in the foothills of the Alps. Strange that he had ended up in the most glaciated area in Western Europe, the Aletsch Glacier region. To be surrounded by mountains, grey-green, clenched by icy fingers, only sharpened the pain inside, the cold fall of his stomach through a void.

Jian walks around his new home and experiences a surreal feeling of déjà vu: bare white walls, small square desk, plastic chairs, a vending machine, and a fridge containing nothing but half a pint of milk. He can’t help feeling he’s been here before. He knows he was in England before, and before England, China. And before China it was still China. So when was he here? Or did this place once come to him in a dream? For a moment he cannot locate himself. The sunlight penetrates the dormitory windows; the town outside seems like a dream town that the sleeping mountains themselves have imagined. The distant street lamps, the neon signs of occasional cafes, the quiet and lonely streets … he has seen all this before.

A week ago Jian arrived here with his old guitar and a few personal belongings. All of himself bundled up into one small suitcase. Perhaps
he is lucky, whether he likes to believe it or not: he is one of a few refugees granted a transfer to a Third Country, owing to uncommon political status. Right now, all this movement, processing, and transfer from one jurisdiction to the next, have brought him here, standing in front of a stove, in a communal kitchen, making a cup of tea.
This is Switzerland, I am in Berne
, Jian tells himself in English. Then he realises it’s not English he should be speaking, and repeats it in German exactly as he has been taught, like a child in a primary school:
Das ist die Schweiz, Ich bin in Bern
. He wanders around the quiet building while serious-looking staff discuss their work in German with the occasional French word or sentence thrown in. I am in a kind country, he thinks, as he picks up his tea and walks outside into the fresh, bright day. The courtyard is surrounded by tall, solemn pine trees. He speaks to himself: this is the basketball court where they have said I should do some exercise. He walks on, and this is the laundry room with washing machines for everyone; and this is the shower room with hot water provided every day; and this is the canteen where the refugees can eat for free—the white plates are for tasteless pastas and the green plastic cups for tap water. It is good though, definitely an improvement on Dover and Lincolnshire. But still you have to report to the reception each time you go out and sign a form, say where you’re going, and you can only go out at most three hours a day. The sign on the front says this is an asylum protection centre—what does that mean? Protection from whom? How long can he live here, with the protection of free food and free bed and three free hours a day?

6
ZENTRUM FÜR DEN SCHUTZ VON ASYL, SWITZERLAND, MAY 2012

In the afternoon, Jian sits in the canteen “Imbisshalle” with his new room-mate, Mahmud, a loud bearded man from the Libyan Desert. Mahmud teaches Jian all kinds of things about the desert: its oases and depressions, its wind and dryness. Mahmud’s speech is a blend of Arabic and English.

“You know, Kublai Khan, there are eight depressions and oases in the eastern Libyan Desert. Eight! Can you believe that?”

Mahmud has called him Kublai Khan since the first time Jian introduced himself, and Jian doesn’t bother to correct him.

“Hmm, oasis.” Hearing the faint music coming from next door’s German-speaking radio, Jian recalls oases in films he has seen: a king sits under a white tent with grapes and slices of melon on a platter in front of him as his many mistresses dance to lilting music.

“But the oases now are all fucked up, you know, they have no water.”

Jian nods in agreement, thinking of the Taklamakan Desert in western China. He had gone there with his band for a gig many years ago. It was for the annual Silk Road Music Festival, and nearly all of the underground Beijing punk bands went there, because of the loose censorship in the more remote provinces. They stayed in tents, overheated in the day and frozen to death at night. When their time to perform finally came they played on a makeshift stage to a few camels patiently nudging the sand and watching them scream. Culture and nature don’t go together, as was once again proved. The highlight of the trip for the band was watching the locals killing and skinning a sheep and cooking it for them. They waited ravenously for hours for the meat to be boiled—one sheep for four hungry men! This wasn’t
the greatest trip the band had ever had. It felt utterly uninhabitable on the hopeless sand. It had been wise of Mu to stay at home, he later realised. Better to be a Mongol on a horse than a desert man on a camel.

“You know, Kublai Khan, water is what we need the most, even more than food, more than oil.” Mahmud speaks like a cultural ambassador. “Water could bring peace to the whole country, you know.
C’est simple
, we’ve got nothing to drink!”

“But what about wells?” Jian asks. He thinks of how the Chinese had to dig wells to irrigate the agricultural land of the plains. In his childhood he even saw a team of professional well diggers come to their hutong to make a well. He was standing nearby with a bunch of kids, watching the loud digging and banging. It lasted for two days. On the third day the neighbours arrived with ropes and buckets to fetch water. But his father wouldn’t participate in the event. He told Jian’s grandparents that water pipes would soon be installed and they would have running water from the taps in their kitchen within a few days. To everyone’s surprise, his promise came true. And as he grew up, Jian started to notice that his father’s predictions on government policies were invariably accurate.

“Wells? It is just not possible in the desert, man. You’ve got to find subterranean water, you can’t see what’s under the sand. You know, you don’t want to dig a hole for nothing, Kublai Khan.”

Jian likes this Mahmud. In this city of lakes and mountains, he wants to talk to the desert man about the Yangtze River and the Yellow River and even the dirty wash outside the window in Dover. But he doesn’t know where to start. Time has passed; perhaps his Chinese rivers are now muddy and dry. Eventually the rivers and plains will be transformed into another desert, another Taklamakan, another Sahara.

7
ZENTRUM FÜR DEN SCHUTZ VON ASYL, SWITZERLAND, MAY 2012

When Mahmud of the Libyan Desert is not talking loudly or making a mess in their room, Jian lies on his bed and kills time reading. He’s finally turned to Grossman’s
Life and Fate
, immersing himself in a world of Russian Communists and Nazi spirits.

The Chinese translation of
Life and Fate
is in three volumes, 989 pages long in total. Unlike most translated literature in Chinese, which is unreadable and makes almost no sense, this book reads fluently to Jian. He feels a certain affinity with these Soviet wartime stories, apart from the long, unmemorable Russian names. Curious, he turns to the back cover, reading the praise on the blurb once again:
“an epic saga against Fascism; a masterpiece of socialist-realism—a must-read for all Chinese citizens!”
Then he turns to the front page:

China Workers’ Publishing House
Translated by Yan Yongxing
This edition published in 1989

No wonder, he thinks, published in 1989! That was the year everything burst—the year of the Tiananmen Square student demonstration and the fall of the Berlin Wall. That was the year when suddenly the phrase “Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign” was being reused by the authorities. The translation of
Life and Fate
could only have been published before June 1989. And after 4 June Jian remembers seeing the foreign-literature shelves of his local bookshop half empty. Punk music and beat poetry are perfect examples of “Spiritual Pollution” from the West, he thinks.

Jian is on page 64. Nadya, the daughter of Viktor and Lyudmila,
is unhappily drinking condensed milk and the physicist is trying to get on with his work, as the Germans and Russians hunker down in the trenches. Science against violence. I must read slowly, very slowly, Jian tells himself, I don’t want the war in Stalingrad to end. It would be better for me if neither Germany nor Russia could win the war! Although, in his heart, he knows that no one really does win a war like that. Everyone will die, from the commissars to the horses. Only the ruined city will remain.

8
LONDON, MAY 2013

There was rain last night, and Duncan Terrace Garden is wet and quiet today. Floating clouds pass by above a giant pine tree towering above Iona. The pine is at least four hundred years old, as the sign attached to the tree trunk states. It reminds her of a tall pine tree in front of the house she grew up in, which she often climbed as a little girl. And here, by City Road and Upper Street in the midst of this urban wind, the pine grows as strong as it would in a wild forest. She gazes at its clusters of sharp needles, strong roots, and smells the rich scent of the forest it exudes.

As she walks by the tree, Iona inhales the ever-familiar moisture of London spring air—a little rain, a little sun. She has brought yesterday’s newspaper with her. Laying the paper down on her wet bench, she sits and opens her work folder.

April 2012

Dear Kublai Jian
,

You say you might not be in Dover for long, so I really hope this reaches you
.

You’ll never guess where I will be THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW! I will be in that place I always dreamed about going to: America! Yes, you won’t believe it, and neither do I. But I am going to go to America! You remember how desperate I was to get out? Dreamed for years and now it comes true. This is the last letter I’m sending you from China before I leave!

Perhaps you are wondering why I have left it until the last moment to tell you this. The truth is, Jian, I have been trying to make a life here without you. This must be hard for you to hear. But I don’t know if you are coming back to China. Without you I am lost. I need to become someone new. When we got back together a year ago our relationship wasn’t the same. I am changing. So, I quit my job. No more wasting time in the printing room checking typos and punctuation on those cheesy poems written by sentimental businessmen moaning for their lost youth. I really need to get back to my own writing. Secondly, we have been busy forming a collective band—Underground Slam Poetry Group. I’m sure you’re wondering what I am talking about. Ha! Well, it’s simple. It’s my band. I am one of the vocalists, although I am only doing poetry. The boys sing. We were “discovered” or “created” just a few weeks ago. And I think we are brilliant, Jian
.

I had to get out of Shanghai. The dying was sapping my bones. And then Beijing was no better: our flat was cold and empty and a hollow shell of what it had been and what we had shared. I was so used to seeing you sit in that rattan chair playing your guitar, now I couldn’t bear that there was no one around, nor any sound. I had to get out of miserable Beijing, wasting my day looking at tea leaves and kicking about in bars waiting for news of you, waiting for you to come home
.

I met this “artist scouting manager” (that’s what was written on his card) a couple of months ago at our favourite cafe round the corner. His name is Bruce and he’s one of these scummy Americans with half-Chinese blood. You know, the ones we hate. He speaks a little crap Chinese that he got from his mother. (And he was wearing this expensive Vivienne Westwood checked suit.) He had been listening to bands in cafes in the hutong and then tumbled into our place. He said he’d been into that bar near Qing Hua University—you know the one—Mute Trumpet. I was doing a reading of some cut-up pieces and strumming my silly ukulele. I was so angry, Jian, that I decided to do something a little different this time. I found an amplifier and plugged in my uke. I got this really sharp sound, squeaky but heavy, with an acid echo behind it. It was discordant, but I liked it. When I smashed out a few chords, I could see foreigners in the audience raising their eyebrows and some even gathered their stuff and walked out. The half-Chinese guy, Bruce, though, seemed to like it. He came up to me afterwards, and that’s how it all began. He wanted to put me with a band—Beijing Manic—do you know them? They’re new. Strictly underground, your style. Why me? I asked him, a little peasant poet who can’t really sing a song (or entertain people in public), with this hot sweaty punk band? Bruce had this kind of Andy Warhol idea. (Like he thought I was a kind of naive Communist version of Nico.) He said my anti-style screaming delivery, along with my electronic uke squeaks, would really work with Beijing Manic’s heavy punk. He said I would fit right in with the acts on the tour he was organising anyway. So two weeks later we were in Bruce’s super-expensive office in Jianwai Soho, and we signed on the dotted line. We came up with the name China Underground Slam Poetry Group. And that’s it! I know, it’s crazy. And feels strange, and sort of fitting, to be making music and punk with you gone—almost like I’m doing what you cannot
.