I Am China (29 page)

“We are not prostitutes, Jian. We are performance artists, you get it, mon ami?”

Anna probably thinks he is nice but a bit limited, a country bumpkin lost in the big city, like she was ten years ago.

“We are artists. And we’re serious about our careers. Madeleine is a well-known porn-film maker and acts in most of her films.”

Then she hands him a glossy DVD. Jian takes one look at the cover and feels himself squirm: it is the face of Madeleine, her mouth dripping with thick, pearl-coloured liquid, against what can only be
described as an erect male organ. The man above her is blindfolded and handcuffed.
Male Submission
is the title of the film. “Acted, directed and produced by Madeleine Magdalene,” according to the credits.

“It’s not designed for men, Jian. It’s women taking control—women producing erotica for women. Men are just the props. Sorry.”

Jian immediately sees himself blindfolded and tied to a chair, with Madeleine about to pounce on his manhood. It’s the first sexual image that has entered his mind for quite a while.

Beyond anatomy, what is the difference between men and women? I watch Anna and Madeleine in their show, and all I can think of is Mu. Her girlish flat-chested body in a loose man’s shirt. She uses her words and her voice to live. By Chinese standards, she is modern. But nothing like these white women with their heavy bodies. No comparison. Mu hasn’t given up men, but these girls have. Is that the future of women? Maybe they are better off without men. My mother and her secret lipstick and her Erik Satie—men wouldn’t let her be the woman she was. Yes, without men, the world might be a more peaceful place. Mao said a woman holds up half the sky. But I think it is more than half. The women of China took over the work of men, wore the same blue shirts, and worked in heavy industry. The gender revolution in China was not a sexual revolution. But for these white women of Pigalle, it’s sexual through and through
.

I’ve stopped masturbating. I can’t do it any more. I am useless. Even my penis is useless. The only drop of sperm that ever worked is dead and buried. It’s like my balls are in cold storage
.

12
LONDON, AUGUST 2013

“It’s like my balls are in cold storage.” This is getting wild, Iona mumbles as she makes her way through Jian’s diary. What’s really going on between Jian and Mu? Their lives have taken completely different paths. It seems that before, their love was like an overgrown garden, full of weeds and thorns. And now their love is only a wasted land, a barren space; they no longer even mention each other’s name, let alone speak of their love—it’s lost in these endless, hardly meaningful human encounters. And it has lost its innocence. Iona still clearly remembers the first time she read about Mu in Jian’s diary:

… 
I looked down and she was looking up at me with her big black button eyes. Her eyes were the brightest eyes in that field of eyes before me. I thought I could see them glistening in the centre of the smoky haze …

It was an electric scene. It propelled her into the story. But now Iona feels let down, deeply disappointed even. She can’t locate the source of the disappointment: whether it’s about them or about her own inertia. Suddenly her own relationships with the men she randomly encounters seem hopeless; her love life is a cold, plastic pantomime of raw entanglements in the dark. The love between Mu and Jian seems almost non-physical, she thinks. It is an abstract love, young and innocent. She tries to imagine the way they would make love: childlike, sweet, dreaming, perhaps even laughing sometimes. And now what? Life has betrayed their love. Politics has sold their love to the devil.

Disheartened, Iona puts away the stack of photocopies of Jian’s diary pages. She opens the original package, flipping through some
other material and searching for something different. Then she finds a clean and elegant page of handwriting—Mu’s diary. It doesn’t have a date, but judging from the content it might be written not long ago, just before Jian left China in the winter of 2011, perhaps.

How can I ever persuade him to stop living like this? Doesn’t he realise he is risking our lives with this manifesto? His grand idea is to hand out the manifesto at the concert next month in the Olympics Stadium. This will be his biggest concert. He and his band have been preparing for it for so long. He’s in total denial: doesn’t give a damn about the great danger he might face. The concert could be cancelled by the authorities just like that, and everyone will hate Jian, from his fans to his manager. Let alone his band members. But Jian seems to be oblivious of my worries. He is determined to distribute the manifesto at the concert. He says: “I have to do it, Mu!” I am at a loss for words. We have been back together for nearly a year, but some things never change. Does his obstinacy mean I should shut up and just give in to him? Should I just accept who he is and how he does things, and try to live with it? I feel I can no longer follow him, follow his way of thinking. Perhaps I have grown old and tired of his ways
.

What a situation! Iona exclaims to herself. But then what a classic case. Jian is not Che Guevara, or Castro, or some other revolutionary hero, but he has all the characteristics of one when it comes to women. Revolutionaries are not good for wives or lovers, even if they have their special magnetism. The wives and lovers always end up sacrificing their lives for their men, for some big idea beyond reality and practicality. That’s the fatal attraction. Maybe it’s a kind of masochism. Or is it just love? The last idea runs like a stream through Iona’s body. Entangled by these feelings, she gets up, and decides to take a walk.

13
PARIS, JULY 2012

After two weeks of working at the club, Jian moves in with the girls. He sleeps in a small box room in which the girls have placed a single mattress for a bed. Although his quarters are cramped and a little dark, everything else is more or less all right. Apart from one thing. The girls have the disturbing habit of walking around engaging in their daily tasks without a stitch of clothing on. Even during the day they are unclad. It’s not that Jian has never seen a naked woman before. It’s rather that, despite being a punk, an underground anarchist artist—or at least that’s how he once thought of himself—he finds that some conservative idea of appropriate behaviour, a sense of natural modesty or some Confucian prudishness, is still there in his personality, and that leads to embarrassment. When he emerges from his dark bedroom and finds a full-frontal display of naked femininity before him, he has absolutely no idea where he is meant to put his eyes. The presence of sculptured flesh has a kind of gravitational pull on him—it’s as if his eyes have a life of their own. They suddenly dart in the direction of a nipple, like fish darting towards a prawn in a pond. His brain—and his body—get completely hijacked.

Although Jian has been naked with Chinese girls and knows their bodies well, Western girls are another matter. Jian suspects that he doesn’t feel comfortable under the naked gaze of Western girls. They have a physical power, whose source is some kind of aura. Their physicality is much more “physical” than the physicality of Chinese girls. Is it a matter of dimensions? Their breasts, for example, are larger, more developed, like globes of fruit, and they kind of demand attention. And the hourglass curve of the Western girl’s body, the breast-waist-hip undulation, is more pronounced, whereas the body of a Chinese girl
is more like that of a boy, more subtle, or even asexual, less of a statement. So is it just physical intimidation that leads him to feel embarrassed? It’s more than that, of course. It’s as if their bodies demand an answer from his body, a kind of hyper-masculine display, as if he must revert to some kind of alpha-male form, like Arnold Schwarzenegger, with rippling muscles and a large member between his legs.

And there is more. Jian thinks that maybe he also feels agitated, even defeated, because they are Westerners. The Westerner, the white Caucasian of Europe, is superior, and the Western woman is the untouchable one—she is the top prize in the world of sexual conquest. He is horrified by the thought, really disturbed that such a regressive idea is there in his mind, but he feels undone by this situation: these untouchable women’s bodies emasculate him. Like out of some Fellini film—the giant woman crushes him between her breasts and draws him down between her legs to her sex, a sex he cannot possibly have the capacity to fill or satisfy; all he can do is be swallowed and lost, and then be eaten alive.

Anna is one of the extreme nudists in the apartment. The previous day they were walking down the street and, all of a sudden, she just lifted up her dress and flashed her silky transparent underwear at the passers-by. The only person interested was an old tramp at a pavement cafe, smoking and smiling to himself. It was like one of her performances, but with no music and bad lighting. Right now she has her top off while holding the noisy vacuum cleaner. Her breasts—there they are right in front of him, although he desperately tries not to look—hang down, not quite the Venus de Milo, but at least a goddess of hoovering. Hiding in the corner, peeling onions and chopping garlic, Jian shakes his head weakly. The body of a Western woman alienates him, robbing him of any romantic sentiment.

14
PARIS, JULY 2012

“We’re leaving France next week, Jian.” After a morning shower, Anna leans on Jian’s door and dries herself with a towel, telling him the news.

“Leaving France? To go where?” asks Jian, with slight hope.

“Well, we’re going to the east. Bulgaria, Serbia, Turkey, then to Russia. We’ve got an invitation from Russia to perform,” Anna says, with a slightly excited tone. “You heard of places like Yalta, Varikono, or the Ural Mountains?”

“Ural Mountains?” Jian nods his head vaguely. “That does sound familiar. I think I’ve read about it in a war novel. So, I’ll come with you then?”

“Sorry, we can’t take you with us, Jian.” Anna lights a cigarette. “We’re only self-funded. Flight and accommodation aren’t cheap. Plus, I think you will have problems at the border control.”

“How long will you be away?” asks Jian weakly.

“Not sure. As long as we can, I hope! But you’re welcome to stay here, Jian, looking after the flat. We won’t charge you.” Now she lowers her voice, hesitates and asks: “By the way, do you think we could borrow your guitar? We need a guitar to play the accompaniment. It’s sort of essential for the tour.”

Jian stares at Anna in silence.

Madeleine suddenly walks in, one hand holding her coffee, another hand with a bunch of performing leaflets. “Ah, my Chinese friend, it would be so very useful to have your guitar. We’ll be stuck without music, and with your guitar Anna and I can play during the show.”

A real instrument. Jian turns his head, gazing at his silent guitar in the dim light leaning against his bed. He has been carrying This
Machine Kills Capitalists for many years now. It’s the most important possession he has ever had. He still remembers the day he bought it. He was about eighteen, still in his first year at college. That day he took a dozen crumpled and oil-stained yuan from under his mattress—his grandparents had left some savings for him when they died. At that time, music shops only sold traditional Chinese instruments like erhu, yangqin, drums, etc. Jian cycled and checked nearly every single instrument store. Eventually he managed to buy a beautifully made second-hand Fender. The seller told Jian that he had originally bought the guitar from an American agriculture expert he’d met in some northern province. Jian liked the guitar’s background story, he especially liked the fact that the American travelling in China was a university professor in agronomy. Ever since the day Jian bought it, he has been true to that instrument, and it has been true to him. But what need has he of it now? The neck sticks up like a bayonet, urging him to action, but he is no longer a soldier. For the last few months it has had a fake existence—a mercenary’s instrument to make a few coins on the pavement. No, he doesn’t need it any more.

“Yes, Anna, you can have my guitar.”

Jian kneels down, lifting his instrument, heavily and painfully.

Later in the night, Jian squats in the empty corner where his guitar used to lean, and thinks to himself: it seems like nothing can last, that everything escapes us in the end. Love, passion, trust. Perhaps even these things I have spent so long believing in and fighting for.

15
LONDON, SEPTEMBER 2013

Autumn in England is a temperamental season. It has this blue-golden daylight for about thirteen days, the grass is green and lush, the canal water is clear and flowing, then all of a sudden the temperature drops. You have to put on a heavy jumper and a long coat, and you might even need warm boots. Overnight, winter has arrived.

Iona strolls through Hyde Park in her wellingtons, walking upon fallen leaves and rotting chestnut shells. When she arrives at the offices of Applegate Books it is nearly evening, the unearthly premature darkness permeates everything like deep ink.

“You look tired, Jonathan. Are you OK?” This observation springs out from Iona’s mouth the moment she sees him.

“Well, I’m still alive, just! Though I really do need to catch up on some sleep. I went to India for a week and just got back yesterday actually.”

“How was India? You’ve got a tan.” Iona tries to sound flattering.

“Ah, it turned out to be slightly less than good fun. It’s … it’s complicated. Family stuff, you know …” Jonathan doesn’t seem to want to explain. “But … I’m now glad to be back at work.”

Family stuff
 … Iona can’t help being curious, but she asks nothing further.

“So, how’s the translating coming along?” he asks as his mobile rings. Iona remembers the last time, the phone call he received and how he had to abandon her at the Hayward. She watches him checking his phone but not answering it.