I Am China (25 page)

My best wishes,

Iona

A few hours later an email pops up on Iona’s computer:

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subject: RE: Translation update

Dear Iona,

Great to hear from you. Let’s definitely meet up.

I’ve attached a scan of a letter from Switzerland which came my way. It might illuminate a few things, perhaps. It was written in French but one of my colleagues has done a rough translation.

Let me know when would suit you to meet up.

All best wishes,

Jonathan

Iona clicks open the attachment on Jonathan’s email. The scan is of an official letter printed on headed paper, and hurriedly signed.

Visa Office of the Department of Political Asylum
Federal Office for Migration
Berne 3402, Switzerland
12 May 2012

Department for Political Asylum

Home Office

Dover

UK

Dear Officer
,

We’re writing this letter from FOFM in Berne regarding the case of applicant Kublai Jian (registration number: 867800RFUK; original nationality: Chinese; DOB: 10 November 1972; CPS: Dover Detention Centre Non-person Hold). After a considerable investigation on the applicant’s particular background, we are pleased to inform you that we are willing to receive Mr. Kublai Jian from UK Border to Switzerland with the Safe Third Country Agreement. According to section 253 of the Geneva Convention this applicant will be allowed to stay in the Berne Asylum Aid Centre for a maximum of 45 days before a final decision on his application is taken. The applicant then can apply for further protection as long as the threat of persecution continues from his native country
.

Please arrange the border transit with Berne Border Police Sector 12 within 99 days. If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact us
.

Yours
,

Philip Dupont

Deputy Officer of Political Asylum Department of FFOM, Berne

2
LONDON, AUGUST 2013

In her local cafe, the Breakfast Club, Iona sits with the photocopies spread out before her. Kublai Jian. Half-Mongol, half-Chinese. Kublai is an ancient Mongol name, she knows that much. Perhaps his ancestors came from the great plains of central Asia. Or perhaps his family descends from Kublai Khan, the grandson of Genghis Khan. But Jian is an urban punk musician, a Beijing boy. A man with Mongol blood in the world of the Han Chinese. Blood and culture don’t always mix. Iona suddenly thinks of her own case, and feels a twinge of melancholy. The source of her name—the Isle of Iona—is a place she has never visited even though it’s always there in the back room of her life. That’s how it is for all of us, she thinks to herself. We come from somewhere we don’t have any clue about.

The windows of the Breakfast Club are steamed up. There is a familiar sour smell, like the odour of a windowless pub in Belfast or any of the small, dismal Irish towns Iona’s father used to frequent. Iona feels agitated. Something isn’t right. Something she is barely aware of. What is it? She looks up from her work and watches the world outside the cafe, as if looking for it. She used to think that as long as she could lead a sexually active life, and be able to carry on working, she would be fine. But now she feels depressed, unmoored and even unhinged. She is ashamed to admit it. She feels like a flying figure in a surrealist painting, without ground beneath her feet to steady her. And she seems unable to see the problems in her life, as if everything is hidden behind a heavy leaden curtain too heavy to draw back. Iona sips more coffee, and tries to shake the pressure out of her head. She rubs her eyes, sets her jaw, and pulls her attention back to the sheet before her. Work, I need to work. And then her
hand moves across the page, making markings. She opens her laptop and begins to type.

Something is deeply wrong in our family, the famous Hu family, at least it has been wrong for the last three generations. My father has no memory of his own father. My grandfather, one of the original members of Mao’s Jiangxi Soviet in the early thirties, died when my father was only three months old. According to the party’s record, he was hailed as a war hero and received the Medal of the First of August. He used to train the new soldiers in the three basic infantry skills: shooting, throwing grenades and swimming with weapons. He was a regimental commander and married to one of the female soldiers in the Propaganda Unit in his regiment. A typical “Revolutionary Couple” as they said. But the Revolutionary Couple barely spent any time together and certainly had no spare time to raise children. Is this why my father ended up as such a selfish career-driven dictator? And me an aggressive kid hungry for love? First the war hero died and then his wife followed two months later. So my father was raised by female soldiers in the Welfare Unit. In 1949, after the revolution took the whole of China, the regiment commander’s name was engraved on the People’s Hero Memorial in Tiananmen Square; his photo was placed in the History Museum, and his name was even recorded in our school textbook. No one in my school knew that the cerebrated hero was my grandfather. I have always kept it quiet. Until today. I don’t want to live under anyone’s shadow. I often wondered whether my war-hero grandfather was the only reason my father was promoted so quickly in the party. Yes, my father’s career was everything to him. My mother and I were nothing compared to the party. With Mother dead, our house became an orphanage, children without parents showing them love. The women in our family were sacrificed for these men, like those terracotta warriors buried along with their emperor under the earth: mute, lifeless, and dead forever
.

Who is Jian’s grandfather? Iona types “Medal of the First of August + China’s Long March” into Google. It comes out with a few names: Peng Dehuai—the marshal of the People’s Republic of China, Lieutenant General of the Liberation Army. Then Zhu De comes up—perhaps the most famous professional Chinese soldier, who later achieved the highest rank in the Chinese army. Even Iona has heard of him. Then mention of previous “Paramount Leader” Deng Xiaoping, who once served as the Secretary of Mao’s Jiangxi Soviet in 1931 and also made the epic Long March. Then Liu Shaoqi, who was Mao’s very first supporter as he rose to power, but was purged by Mao later during the Cultural Revolution and tragically died as a “state traitor” in the sixties.

There are many more names, male Chinese names, populating the Google search results, but none of them seems to have an obvious connection with Kublai Jian. She reads more, and is lost in the vast sea of Chinese civil war records. The untold story that lies behind Jian’s background is a total enigma, cast in a secret stone, lying in a frozen past, and beyond all recovery.

3
CENTRE D’ASSISTANCE EUROPÉEN POUR REQUÉRANTS D’ASILE, SWITZERLAND, JUNE 2012

One otherwise ordinary summer morning, Jian is called to the centre’s head office. As he steps through the door there is a ringing cry: “Congratulations, Kublai Jian!” The office erupts with raised voices. Members of staff approach to pat him on the back and hug him. He’s been there so much longer than anyone else—he’s become an institution. Then Mr. Battista, the director of the centre, hands him a stack of documents with official stamps here and there. Jian flips through the papers, sees the red and black marks almost on every single page, like Chinese artists’ signature stamps on ink paintings. His head is whirling.

Mr. Battista explains, “It says you are granted ‘Leave to Remain’ in Switzerland. And your legal residence period in the country is one year. After one year you must apply for an extension and the Swiss authorities will reassess your case and decide on your new status. But for now, congratulations!”

He pours Jian a glass of wine and hands him a packet of salted nuts. “Now you are entitled to be a part of our country! But don’t forget you must register your address with the police within eight days.” Mr. Battista wags his finger at Jian, and then adds with his peculiar brand of sincerity: “I wish you all the best in the future and hope you will be able to make a living in Europe.”

Jian receives five hundred Swiss francs from the organisation, as well as a clean T-shirt as a souvenir, with the asylum centre’s logo on the back. It’s not quite his
Never Mind the Bollocks
T-shirt, nor his Ming-dynasty black singlet. He won’t wear it if he busks on the street with his guitar.

Slowly and heavy-headed, Jian walks back towards his room. Between the two buildings there is a basketball court, but today nobody is in the yard. The broken net swings weightlessly in the wind. Standing under the hoop, Jian’s ears echo with sounds from the past. Suddenly he remembers his years playing basketball at high school; he was once a very good player, the best “shooting guard” on his team! In the school’s annual basketball championship he would glue the ball to his hands and zigzag his way through the human wall in front of him, and lob the ball in the net! There would be yelling and clapping from the crowd, mingled with the sound of bodies jostling each other. Jian was always the kid who could run faster than the others, until one day he disappeared from the playground—that was the day he discovered music and songwriting. Now Jian stands on a basketball court once more, in this foreign land, looking up into a blue Swiss sky. The white vapour trails of jets transect the blue field. The morning’s crispness is just beginning to slink off and let in the warmer rays of sunshine. He recalls the last game here, a week ago. There were eight people on each team, all from different countries, and four substitutes standing by—including a group of veiled Muslim girls wearing colourful trainers from places in the Middle East. It was like the Eight Nation Alliance, Jian thought, those military forces from eight countries who came to China to beat the Boxer Uprising in 1900. And perhaps I was the rebellious Boxer, he laughed at himself bitterly, eventually beheaded by the Eight Nation forces and the Qing emperor. After that “colourful” match, everyone slapped each other on the back and said that one day they would meet again out in the world and have a big party to celebrate their freedom. A big party, one day! The Freedom Anniversary party! No one has a permanent address. Everyone’s freedom is the freedom of the naked road: none of them has a roof over their head nor belongs to the country. They don’t even have telephone numbers. Only an email address scribbled on a cigarette paper. An
email address, that’s where their future will be written. Better than nowhere. Jian readies himself for a new taste. The taste of strange forms of life. The new place always seems arbitrary. Your body cannot fit into it. Then it becomes familiar, as if it had always been there, like the back of your hand.

4
LONDON, AUGUST 2013

On a hot summer day, at around teatime, Iona arrives at a cafe near Bloomsbury. As she waits for her professor to turn up, she takes out her notebook and laptop, as well as her dictionary and documents, and continues her translation.

As she works away, she hears a familiar laughing voice.

“I can see you’re working on serious stuff! Look at all the paraphernalia you need!” Charles Handfield glances at Iona’s papers, his left eyebrow rising with a familiar nervous spasm.

After buying himself a cup of tea, Charles sits down, picks up the photocopied page Iona is working from. “What handwriting! It may seem a cliché, but in my experience, it’s the rebellious Chinese who often write with these sort of wild strokes. It tends to be true, you know.” He pours his tea from a small white pot. “So, tell me about him.”

“Right, so this is Kublai Jian. And what I’m struggling with is his colloquial style. It’s fascinating, and I can manage some of it, but it’s the precision I’m lacking—or maybe it’s the spirit I find hard. At any rate there are a lot of expressions I’m not familiar with. Hopefully you can help.”

“Ha!” Charles chuckles. “You know what, Iona? There is one thing from all your classes with me that you never wanted to learn: untranslatability.”

“Untranslatability?”

“Yes, it’s something I think it’s important to teach students. It always got pushed to the end of the term and I never managed to fit it in alongside the scheduled syllabus.”

Iona looks bemused.

“Untranslatability? Surely it’s just to do with facing the lack of
one-to-one equivalence between the word or phrase in the source language and in the target language. Nothing very mysterious about that.”

“Yes, my dear, but what do you do with that problem?” Charles doesn’t look at her, and is instead scanning the menu while gesticulating to a young waiter. As the waiter comes to him, he orders a scone with jam and butter to go with his tea. “Do you want another cup, Iona?”

“No, I’m fine. Thanks.” Iona continues, undeflected. “I suppose there are the technical devices, the tricks of language—metaphors, paraphrase, adaptation, as you used to demonstrate to us. But I still have a problem.”

“Yes, like Tintin’s little canine friend ‘Milou’ becomes ‘Snowy’ in English. So now, tell me, what are your Milous, and what are the Snowys you are proposing on this page?”