by Xiaolu Guo
One of them was very pregnant and stated: ‘I will probably never have time to read a book in the next few years.’ She hugged her swollen belly.
Everyone had a copy of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. But no one was eager to discuss it. Everyone was talking about Brexit. And I was beginning to understand what the word meant. Or at least some of the politics behind it. But the emotion remained alien to me.
A ginger-haired woman spoke: ‘My daughter will grow up in a Brexit world, a non-European world as a European child. Can you believe it?’ She looked distressed.
Another responded: ‘Well, you have an Italian passport and an apartment in Rome, and they won’t take these things away. You are now a desirable immigrant, as they say!’
‘Ha, a desirable immigrant! Since when did I become an immigrant?’
‘We are all foreigners here. No one is aboriginal!’ The pregnant woman made another statement.
A desirable immigrant. I repeated this to myself. If I stayed, would I be one of the desirable immigrants? I wondered.
You didn’t say much. The conversation was infused with a certain anger and intensity. It was interesting to watch, but difficult to follow. Then the group began to talk about housing and the property market. The Golden Notebook was left on the floor. Literature gave way to real estate. Everyone had so much to say about property, except for you and me. Were we connected by our mutual disconnection from these women?
Engländerin
– So where are you from? I can’t tell if you have an accent.
– I grew up in Australia. Aber meine Mutter ist eine Engländerin, originally.
Then I called you. Because you hadn’t called me. Not even once.
‘I’m away this weekend, in Hanover,’ you explained on the phone. ‘But we can meet next week.’
Hang Over? I was puzzled. Was it a place? A hotel, or a famous bar?
But I dared not expose my ignorance. Instead, I asked: ‘When are you coming back from Hang Over?’
‘Oh, look, I don’t drink that much. But I’ll be back on Tuesday.’
Although your voice had a laughing quality, it had a calm and sober centre. I imagined you speaking on the phone from somewhere else in the city. But I could not picture what that place might look like.
‘We can meet on Wednesday then. There is a Chinese restaurant in Old Street. How about we meet there for lunch?’
‘Wednesday is a bit tight for me. But I can try,’ you said. ‘Hope the food isn’t too spicy.’
I paused for a second, and thought you must be one of those hypersensitive northern Europeans who couldn’t eat anything hot. You might even be a vegan, who eats tasteless food. No salt in your meals either, because of high blood pressure. I would find out.
So we arranged a time to meet. You suggested a very particular time – 12.45 – and you had to leave at 13.50 or just before 14.00. This sounded awful to me. Too precise. It was like going to see a dentist. It is true that you Westerners are not able to be spontaneous in your day-to-day lives, and you are from a supposed free country.
Wednesday arrived. You came into the restaurant wearing a battered leather jacket. Obviously you had not shaved. When we sat down at the table, you didn’t appear to like what was on the menu: spicy cow’s stomach, pickled duck tongue, ants on noodle trees, and so on.
‘My grandmother used to make stews from pig guts and liver.’ You stared at a colourful picture of fried stomach, slightly amused. ‘I used to stuff myself with it when I was a kid. It was so chewy and tasty and I thought it was just meat. Then one day, when I was about nine or ten, I found out what those long tubes were. I never went near it again!’
‘I know. Westerners think Chinese are inhuman. We kill anything just for eating. And we stir-fry anything alive.’
You didn’t comment on this. Perhaps out of politeness?
‘So, are you a vegetarian?’
You nodded. ‘More or less.’
I began to worry. Perhaps there was nothing for you to eat in this restaurant. Plain rice with soy sauce? Were you also a gluten-free person?
A Chinese waitress stood by our table. She had the face of a terracotta soldier. Speaking Mandarin, I ordered some vegetables. She responded in Cantonese. You made a few interjections in English. When she left, I continued:
‘Are you English?’ For me, this fact needed to be confirmed, so I knew to whom I was talking.
‘No way – I’m no Pom.’ You laughed. ‘That’s what we used to say in Australia.’
I was puzzled. My monocultured Chinese education was manifesting itself again. ‘What does that mean?’
‘Look, basically I’m an Anglo-Saxon, a Wasp.’
‘Wasp?’ Now it was my turn to laugh. ‘A fly with yellow-and-black stripes, going around stinging people?’
‘I don’t sting people, but I do wear striped shirts.’ You choked a little on your hot green tea, then explained: ‘A Wasp is a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. You might have heard of it?’
‘Hmm, a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant.’ All these words sounded alien to me, apart from white. ‘You know, every day I hear some new English words. I hear them but I don’t register them. As if I was half deaf.’
You raised your eyebrows slightly. ‘I know what you mean. I’m not from Britain either.’
‘So where are you from? I can’t tell if you have an accent.’
‘I grew up in Australia, on the east coast. When I was eighteen, we moved to Germany. To cut a long story short, one morning my father woke up and announced that he wanted to go back to Germany.’ Then you put on a German accent: ‘I can do a German accent if I want to. Aber meine Mutter ist eine Engländerin, originally. That’s me summed up.’
Mutter. Mother, I guessed. The rest remained opaque. I could see that Australia, Germany and England all had something to do with what you were. There was something mysteriously attractive about it.
And then this strange place you visited called Hang Over. It wasn’t until a year later that I understood which city you meant. In China, we call it Hannuowei, a wealthy German city that produced the Scorpions, a band I had listened to when I was at university.
Morning Dew
– How swiftly it dries, the dew on the garlic-leaf.
The dew that dries so fast.
Tomorrow it will come again.
But he whom we carry to the grave will never return.
Near Haggerston station by the canal, there were two housing estates: De Beauvoir Town and Orwell Estate. They were massive, connected with long corridors and narrow green spaces, and shared the same architectural style. As I sat by the water, De Beauvoir Town was quiet right behind me. Even with multitudes of families living in these council homes, the estate felt strangely serene in the early morning. As did the canal before me. No wind. No human noise. Maybe because it was Sunday. It had rained yesterday. Today London was blue. Morning dew on the sunflowers by the lock-keeper’s cottage glistened. The canal water was yellow green, but clean and clear. I thought about being alone here in England. I thought of China, and my parents. I recalled a strange conversation I had with my mother. It was at my father’s graveyard. The thought of how he had lived during his last few weeks made my throat turn to stone.
It was not the Tomb Sweeping season, and we had had my father’s burial a few months before. But we were there because I had just received the scholarship to go to Britain, and I had some time to prepare for my departure. I was leaving for good, for a future in the West. There we were, in a large cemetery under a hill with a quarry, on the outskirts of my home town. It was a new cemetery, immense and already crowded. The iron gates were wide enough for four cars to drive through at the same time. We lived in a very populated town, more so than other parts of China. The local government had to cope with the large numbers of the living, but also large numbers of the deceased.
> A few months before my father died, my mother had purchased a plot in the cemetery for him. It was only at the burial (not a real burial with a coffin, as the government had banned the practice years ago, but one with an urn) that I discovered that the tomb was so small. It was no more than one square metre. ‘It’s so expensive, I had to pay the deposit as early as I could.’ My mother had told me this in the hospital corridor, even before the doctor announced there was no cure for his cancer. My father didn’t know this, of course. None of us would tell him that there was an expensive burial pit waiting for him outside the town.
It was during this second visit to my father’s tomb with my mother that I discovered there was a new gravestone erected right next to my father’s. The two stones were side by side. The new one had the same style of engraving. My father’s headstone had his name and dates of birth and death. That was to be expected. But the writing on the new stone next to his was my mother’s name and her birthday. And then a blank space, waiting to be filled. I stood there, astonished, then turned to ask her:
‘Why is your gravestone here?’
‘Are you stupid?’ my mother answered dismissively. She was impatient, as always. She kicked away a little moss-covered rock under her feet, and said: ‘You don’t know how much they have raised the rent for grave plots, do you? For my spot, I had to pay double what your father’s cost! Not to mention the money for the mason! He charged five hundred yuan for that! What a robber! He knows it’s a one-off deal!’
She pointed to the space on her headstone, where the death date remained uncarved.
‘You will help to add that, won’t you?!’
She groaned and brought up a glob of mucus from her throat. She spat it out on the grass beside her shoes. With a clear voice, she added:
‘Don’t get those thieves to do the job! They don’t deserve a penny more.’
I was speechless. My mother had always been a blunt and coarse peasant woman, and I was used to her manners. But I had never imagined that I would have to add the date of her death to her gravestone, with my own hands. Was I meant to carve it with a chisel or screwdriver? It didn’t seem real.
Towards the end of this visit, there were almost no words left between us. My mother seemed to have closed herself off in her thoughts. Was she anticipating her own death? In those silent moments, I could not foresee or even have envisaged that my mother would die only a few months later. I knew she had a weak heart, but she was not old, and I didn’t expect anything would happen so soon. Out of the blue, she was taken to hospital, after being found unconscious on the ground in our local market. She died of heart failure before I got there. Suddenly, within months, I was an orphan, a grown-up orphan. And all this happened just before I left China. Were these events signs of my future, condemned to be alone, whether in my native country or abroad?
Before I flew to England, I visited the cemetery one more time. Now my aunt stood beside me, looking at the two gravestones. The date on my mother’s remained uncarved. New grass had grown beside my father’s. A few daisies. There was still dew on the leaves, shimmering with sunlight. Soon it would evaporate in the midday sun just as we sang that old burial song:
How swiftly it dries, the dew on the garlic-leaf.
The dew that dries so fast.
Tomorrow it will come again.
But he whom we carry to the grave will never return.
Everybody Wants to Rule the World
– As Tears for Fears sang: ‘Everybody wants to rule the world.’
– Who are these tears?
Although I had been in Britain for a few months, I still could not say whether I liked or disliked English people. Somehow, I had not got to know them. I could not read their emotions. Some made me feel uneasy, like my professor Grant Stanley. I feared his cleverness would expose my hidden stupidity. Something about his way of speaking suggested to me that in his universe I was a secondary citizen. Maybe also because I felt that my Western life depended on him, at least my PhD project. Once I bought a large chocolate bar for him before our meeting, as I noticed there was always a piece of chocolate lying around his desk. But when I got to his office, the bar in my pocket was already melting. I didn’t offer it to him. In Chinese we say ‘pat the horse’s arse’ to mean that you always offer a little bribe in a relationship. And since the melted chocolate incident, our professional relationship had not been so good, as if he knew.
Grant had some doubts about my project. ‘Project’ was an English word I found impossible to grasp. A vague and abstract concept. Nevertheless, my project, according to the academic film anthropology style, was a documentary about a village and its inhabitants in southern China. I had been reading about the village – Jing Cun in Guangdong Province. There were two thousand uneducated workers and peasants living there. But somehow in the last few decades, just about every villager had transformed himself into a painting copyist. They could now reproduce Monet, Chagall and da Vinci at the drop of a hat. I know it’s a cliché that almost every Chinese person is a good copyist. But this was still fascinating to me. I could not even draw a proper arm or leg, or paint a tree. Let alone some Western religious figure.
In the corridor I saw my supervisor rushing in my direction. He greeted me and opened his office door, with a mocking exaggeration in his gesture.
‘The admin people want to eat me alive! They have left me no time to see my students!’ Grant pointed to a chair for me. ‘Did you read the news this morning about President Xi Jinping’s new reforms? He really is trying to be the new Mao!’
‘Well. Every leader is an emperor in China, for sure.’
‘Yes, as Tears for Fears sang: “Everybody wants to rule the world.”’
‘Who are these tears?’ I asked hesitantly. Once again I felt like a fish swimming in a new part of the ocean, unable to recognise the seaweed.
Grant started to hum in a tuneless way, but stopped abruptly. ‘Okay, let’s get going, no time to lose. Tell me where you are.’
‘I’ve been collecting materials, and made contact with the village. I think I should go there for the actual research and do some filming.’
‘That’s good to know. Fieldwork is the primary thing in our area.’ He then looked at me over his glasses, and added: ‘I need to discuss one thing with you before you go further.’
My heart tightened a bit.
‘As your supervisor I have an ethical and moral duty to monitor your film-making activities and to ensure that there are no legal complications arising from your filming. It’s part of being an anthropologist. So I have some forms for you to fill in. Your secondary supervisor has to sign as well as the head of department.’
He tapped his keyboard and began to print out something.
‘What kind of ethical and moral duty?’ I asked defensively. ‘I thought our purpose was to make a good film with narrative strength and research value.’ I remembered that this was the phrase he used the other day. ‘My film will be quite straightforward. It’s just about people in a small village making reproductions of Western art, which they then sell back to the West. What’s the issue?’
Grant looked at me with his knitted brow. His hair was a mess, his clothes dishevelled. I wondered if his wife had left him recently.
I stared back at Grant, and didn’t feel like talking any more. What did he know about China and Chinese manual workers? Ethical and moral duties? Did he mean that I should get consent forms? Even though Chinese villagers would not give a damn about this sort of formality?
Grant stood up and handed me a dozen printed pages.
‘Just fill this in later,’ he said, with a slightly impatient tone.
I was about to leave, when Grant suddenly thought of something. He raised his right hand, a Lenin-style gesture, directing me to sit down again.
Authorship
– But authorship is always an issue.
&nbs
p; – Didn’t Roland Barthes announce the author is dead?
Grant settled back in his chair, and picked up one of the small figurines from his shelf. It was a dancing tribal woman and he twiddled her in his fingers. He appeared to be reflecting on something we had just discussed. He was breathing in and out heavily. This was usually a sign that he wanted to embark on a more theoretical course of conversation.
‘So, I’m curious, you say these workers are originally farmers without any artistic training. How did they learn to draw and to paint? I mean, what is their craftsmanship based on? If a worker makes a hand copy of a Leonardo da Vinci painting, he would need to understand perspective, anatomy, glazing, chiaroscuro and so on.’ Grant was on a roll. ‘So do they learn simply from copying? But how exactly? Do they learn the skills from their foreman?’
My professor liked to ask questions, but didn’t seem to need my answers. He went on:
‘You say they are self-taught. Do they have any idea that they have been forging classical artworks and making a profit out of it?’
‘No. It is not forging!’ I almost laughed. ‘These artisans never claim that they are selling the original paintings. They sell reproductions. There is a huge market in the world for them – in hotels, restaurants, people’s homes.’
I turned my head, looking around Grant’s office. There were no reproductions hanging on his walls here. But I spotted a small postcard of Hockney’s A Bigger Splash lying by his computer. I pointed to the postcard.
‘For example, that is a reproduction, not a forged copy.’
‘Yes, I understand. But authorship is always an issue,’ Grant claimed.
‘Didn’t Roland Barthes announce the author is dead? So what the Chinese artisans are enacting is a postmodern phenomenon. They interpret Western paintings with their own eyes and hands.’
‘Even if Barthes is right, that does not affect issues of intellectual property rights.’
