I Am China (21 page)

He approaches the floating mattress and hesitates. He stares at her slim, feminine body for a moment. The floating woman does not react. Is she dreaming of someone? All he can hear is the sound of distant cars passing the hotel, sending up a mist of dust into the palm leaves.

He speaks, a little too loudly. “You’re gonna get burnt.”

Silence.

“Your performance the other night was … crap.”

Still nothing.

Then he says in bad Chinese:
“Ni shui jiao ma?”

Still nothing.

He tries another tactic. He lifts one hand, cupping a palmful of water, and pours it on her left thigh. There’s a reaction: a shiver from the inert woman.

“You like that?” Still no response. Then another palmful of liquid and more shivering.

“I see you like that.”

He moves closer to her head and now pours it onto her shoulders, eliciting a gentle spasm. Under the scorching sun, her wet brown skin dries almost immediately. She moves her head, turns towards the shadow by her side. Then she takes off her glasses. She speaks.

“Don’t bother me, I am sleeping.”

Despite her words, he thinks he hears a kind of invitation in her voice.

He touches her hair, slips his hand onto her neck. He then massages her head, gently. He hears the low feminine groan and another sound, a half-breath, half-reverberation. Something tells him to proceed, and his hands press deeper, with a slow motion, feeling the shape of her breasts.

Grasping her, he slips her body off the mattress and into the water. He holds her tightly against him in the corner of the pool. She struggles. Confused. It feels like he is teasing her, playing with her, but his grip is almost violent. He holds her shoulders and turns her hips round. He is behind her, his hands around her waist now. Still she doesn’t believe he will force her, even though his mouth now presses down on her shoulder, his teeth clasping the nape of her neck, printing red welts on her skin. He is breathing more heavily now, growing feverish, uttering incomprehensible words. Swollen beneath the water, he finds a way in, entering her with full force. She cries out. A heat-filled dizzy shock leaves her blind and dumb to what’s happening. Then there is a surging, a disturbance, in the water. The bodies seem to writhe under the surface. His thrusts are rapid, unrelenting. She releases another jagged cry, and the man instinctively puts his hand over her mouth. There is more pained sound, but it’s muffled by the wet, gripping hand.

Then, suddenly, there is a bursting apart, and Mu’s scream is louder. She moves rapidly away from Bruce into shallower water, clasping and shielding herself. He’s left gurgling apologetic words that are eaten by his own twisted mouth. She climbs up the steps, and then blasts out of the water, grabs a towel, flicks it around her, and runs wordlessly, leaving a trail of wet footprints.

7
CALIFORNIA, MAY 2012

In her room above the pool, curtains drawn, Mu lies in a crumpled mess of sheets. Her body is still damp and she is shivering. Her bowels ache. Her lips are mouthing something, but she cannot quite hear what she’s saying. For a few moments it’s as if she is not in her body. When the evening arrives, she sits up on her bed, rests her diary on her damp, bare knees and writes.

Better not to inhabit your body at all. Bodies let you down, bodies are vulnerable. Lying in my darkened room I remembered how that sense of vulnerability first came to me. An image pierces me now, twisting the knife already in my gut. It’s an old image that always seems to be lurking in the back row of the theatre of my mind, an image from years ago, from when I was nine or ten years old in my home town. A big, rough hand creeping up my skirt in the dark. I could not cry out, nor run away: the large man, with his dumb face, had me cornered in the village cinema. I trembled in the dark while the screen flickered with sound and pictures. I managed to escape momentarily, hiding myself in the space behind the stage curtains. And just when I thought I would be safe, he found me and trapped me again. His groping hand snatched me to him and found my lower body. I never dared tell my parents and I thought I had forgotten it, but now it’s all come back to me here in America
.

Fuck me. Even in the Palm Oasis Hotel. How could I let that animal-fool take me in that way? The pain in my bowels shoots up to fizzle and crackle in my jaw. That cockroach man, that machine with a cock, made me feel like a worthless hole
.
When all is said and done, when I look beneath the smooth exterior, the charming manners, the good looks, the well-dressed ease, the Harvard degrees, you just get fucked. Taken. The fucking-machine takes over
.

What can I do here? I am an alien in an alien land, and now it’s made me alien to myself. My body isn’t even mine either. My body makes me feel disgusted
.

8
COLORADO, MAY 2012

The band and their manager are squeezed into a jeep—an old Grand Cherokee—zigzagging through Colorado. In the near distance the Rocky Mountains look blank and indifferent, like Mu’s expression. The boys drink can after can of American pale lager and eat takeout beef burgers. They burp, stink and fart. Bruce sits in the front and doesn’t talk. They halt at a gas station. The boys get out to buy hot dogs and drinks. Bruce fills the jeep with petrol and takes cash from an ATM. When he returns to the driver’s seat, he takes a quick glance at Mu. Her face turns to the window, looking into the distance. They breathe the same air for a few moments, and then he opens his mouth as if to speak but the boys are already returning.

Later, at the arts centre in Denver, waiting for her show to start, Mu sits at the back of the green room, away from the band, and writes.

Silence from Jian. I don’t want to send letters into the void
—
what’s the use? My diary is a solitary ear, a patient presence. So what would you say about my politics now, Jian? And about me? I’m not sure you would recognise me now. You once said I was a little housewife, a conformist; well, I think you got me wrong. Since our baby’s death, since that four-year separation, I am no longer that conformist. I am no longer the little housewife. I have become someone else. A mother without a child. A wife without a husband. A poet without words. I’m not sure I recognise myself any more
.

—
Fen Qing, Disenchanted Youth. That is what our generation has been called. Fen Qing are these angry intellectuals who were born in the sixties and seventies. Fen Qing, the Chinese punk. Punks are supposed to be cultural revolutionaries, aren’t they? That’s what you wanted to be, wasn’t it? I could not be that person. You saw it: there is always the repressed, dutiful daughter in me, struggling to fulfil other people’s desires, the desire of continuing the tradition, and the weight of carrying history. You are not here to speak to me and to hold me. You are not here at all
.

9
ATLANTA, MAY 2012

In a bookshop in the state of Georgia, Mu is in a daze. She’s browsing the shelves aimlessly, killing time while Bruce checks out a new venue, until she spies a book called
Peking Man: Evidence for Archaic Asian Ancestry in the Human X Chromosome
. The band is bewildered when she buys the book. She hugs the paper bag to her chest, wrapping her arms tightly around it.

“What are you doing? You want to become a scientist in America?” Lutao asks, his mouth agape.

“Kind of weird thing to be interested in, Mu,” Dongdong laughs.

“Peking Man? He’s not even a real man,” Liuwei says.

Mu doesn’t bother to reply.

How can she tell them the real story? She doesn’t want to read the book, not really, but it’s a talisman, it’s all she has of him. It’s something in her destiny she cannot explain. All those four years apart from her Peking Man she pushed away any sign, any memory, anything that reminded her of her past life. And it worked, for a while. And then little by little the resurrection, the coming together until she lost him again, only a year later.

I found a book in the middle of America and it’s all about Peking Man. I don’t need to read the book, but I want to hold it close. The picture on the front is striking. Jian has the same facial structure, although he would never admit it, and the same broad forehead and strong square jaw. I know the pictures in this kind of book are always drawn so to make our ancestors look dumber than us. It suits our vanity, to think we have made progress. I’m sure that our ancestors were wiser than we are. I know they lived in a world in which things were intact, unlike our world, where things are crumbling fast
.

I remember those first few weeks with Jian. I was alive to his ideas: we talked about time, about inheritance, and even then he was anxious about the idea of family. He gave me a tour of his philosophical cave and showed me his stone tools, heavy and crude but honest and simple. He cut through all the daily bullshit with them. He amazed me. I remember him talking about how deep time was—I couldn’t understand, but he explained the Big Bang to me for the first time. I was only nineteen and I felt he was some hero of the past, born of ancient times. After so many years, I still have this admiration, this wonder, although so many other things have happened that might have undermined it. Now my world has nothing to do with Jian’s world. We have known each other for so long. I cannot imagine not knowing Jian. But I cannot imagine now how we could be together. There is no way of fixing us, to make us be in one world together again. I feel him now. It’s like the ghost of Little Shu. I carry his shade with me, like a dark cloud around me. Little Shu tries to speak to me, but cannot. He never learned how. Jian too is now like a ghost, an angry and sad ghost, carried along with me. When can I let my ghosts go?

As a part of their shambolic journey across the USA, China Underground Slam Poetry Group arrives in Atlanta. No one knows where they are or which direction the wind is blowing.

Seeing that everyone is disorientated, Bruce organises some local sightseeing. An hour later, the boys find themselves being driven up to a massive factory with an enormous Coca-Cola sign on top of the main building.

“Why are we here?” Dongdong asks when he sees the huge logo overhead, just like a Communist Central Party office in China.

“It’s the headquarters of Coca-Cola,” Bruce explains.

“No kidding!” Dongdong screams. He is the youngest in the band, born in 1990, and he has drunk Coca-Cola since he was in nappies. In fact, he claims he has only ever drunk two types of liquid since he was born—Coca-Cola and Yanjing beer.

“Why here? In Atlanta?” Lutao is still in a marijuana-induced daze.

“Why not?” says Bruce.

“But I mean, why do we have to visit a bubble-sugar factory?”

“Because we’re performing in their club tomorrow. The tour is sponsored by them—to be more precise, our Atlanta trip is being paid for by the Coca-Cola Company.” Bruce eyes Mu, but she does not react.

This is a worthy sightseeing trip for Chinese artists, given their natural poetic affinity with industrialised sugary water. The following day at the Coca-Cola Family Club the band perform one of their last shows. Mu reads a new poem—a piece no one has heard before. The band helps Sabotage Sister to build the atmosphere: the bassist, Liuwei, slides a glass bottleneck up and down the strings, Ry Cooder–style, and Dongdong hits the drums with Chinese opera’s fighting rhythms; Lutao meanwhile plucks away at a harp he has borrowed from somewhere, as if they are presenting a new diva who has just arrived on the modern opera scene. Mu doesn’t perform right away, instead she decides to tell the audience a little bit about herself first in her stuttering English.

“I just finished writing poem last night. It’s called ‘The Second Sex, Or Not?’ Thanks to your country, outside of China makes me think more about what woman is. I want to mention my family here, my mother had seven sisters and brother. But none of women in her family had education. Eight sisters worked very hard, help raising family
and support only brother for higher education. So my uncle is only man in her family can read and write. This makes me think about myself—I am only child for my mother, because I was born in one-child policy period. But even then, my mother still preferred to have baby boy instead of me.”

The audience falls silent as Mu chants her poetry with a building wall of music surrounding her.

10
LONDON, JUNE 2013

“
The Second Sex, Or Not?
” These words are spoken by another woman, thousands of miles away in London, some time after Mu declaimed them in Atlanta. Iona is googling “Sabotage Sister” as well as “The Second Sex, Or Not.” It doesn’t take very long for her to discover a blog about feminism by a student at Atlanta University, and someone has posted the whole poem online.