Once Upon a Time in the East

by Xiaolu Guo

  ‘Did she fall from this window?’ they cried.

  I had no idea what they were talking about. ‘Is that Mengmeng lying on the ground?’ I asked in shock.

  ‘Yes!’

  The ambulance arrived as we were running back downstairs. They carried her to the vehicle. I saw some of our teachers jump into the ambulance too, including our dorm supervisor.

  That night, a few teachers came to our room and asked us many questions. But we had no idea what to tell them. I told them that I felt something had been bothering Mengmeng for a few weeks, but I didn’t know what it was. Besides, I didn’t know if I should be talking about her with everyone like this. I always believed that Mengmeng treated me as her a special confidante, and I acted on that belief. People searched through her belongings on her bed and desk, until they found a letter under her pillow. A farewell letter. It mentioned our French-film lecturer’s name, and her obsession with him. She described the unbearable pain she had suffered after his rejection of her. ‘He drew me down into the turbulence. Then he left me alone in the whirlpool.’ These were the last lines.

  It was clear. Everyone went silent. At eleven, the electricity was cut. The others left, dejected. In the dark, I heard activity in the building, just like every other night. But our dorm supervisor didn’t come up with his torch to silence everyone that night. He had gone with the ambulance to the hospital and had yet to return. In the dull surroundings, I sat on my bed and didn’t know what to think. I felt frightened. I couldn’t imagine that my best friend in Beijing had died, or was dying, as I sat alone with my thoughts. My two other roommates were in a state of shock and were unable to articulate anything much.

  I started to reflect on what had happened. I knew that Mengmeng had fallen in love some months ago. She had told me about it. The object of her desire was our lecturer who taught French cinema. He was a handsome intellectual man in his thirties, and had studied French in Paris a few years earlier. He was very popular with the female students. Perhaps some of them were also secretly in love with him. He had this charming air reminiscent of François Truffaut, and his analysis of Jules et Jim stuck with me:

  ‘What is the shared theme of both Jules et Jim and The Last Metro? It is that of the love triangle. That’s what Truffaut was interested in exploring. He didn’t believe in monogamy. If there was a logic for monogamy, it was only economic. Love only manifests its threatening power when it involves three people. You cannot just love one person. That’s not love, that’s religion, morality, or economics.’

  Mengmeng was so affected by this statement that she spent the next few days in a kind of trance. I wasn’t sure if that was the moment she fell in love with him. But everyone knew that he was married and had a child. And I didn’t think he was a disciple of Truffaut’s love triangle philosophy personally.

  Mengmeng had been attending nearly all of his classes, even when he was teaching in other departments. As with her previous obsession with Godard’s films, she watched the whole of Truffaut’s oeuvre. And she was especially fond of the ones with love triangles, such as Love on the Run and Two English Girls, men falling in love with two or three women at the same time. The turning point for Mengmeng, I guessed, was when she expressed her love to the lecturer and he rejected her outright. It must have been a very brutal experience. He was, she later told me, her first real love.

  I think she chose to throw herself out of the storage-room window because she knew no one would disturb her there. But her life was saved by a pile of rubbish bags on the pavement. They softened her fall. She broke one of her legs and some bones in her back.

  We didn’t see Mengmeng for a few months. She was hospitalised and her mother came to look after her. Then her mother took her back to her home town for another month. She was, we were told, emotionally unstable. During that time, when she was absent from school, the dorm supervisor asked us questions and one day he came and took all the notebooks that were left on her table. They wanted more clues. But for me, it was clear enough. She had had her heart broken.

  I still remember a conversation we had after watching Jules et Jim. It was past midnight and we were lying in the dark on our bunk beds. In such moments we liked to discuss love or, more frequently, the confused feelings about love we were experiencing.

  ‘I still don’t understand it fully,’ Mengmeng said. ‘Why did the woman in Jules et Jim kill herself in the end?’

  ‘Her madness. Don’t you think?’ I murmured, hearing the light snoring of the other girls in the room. But I wasn’t entirely convinced by my answer. Catherine – Jeanne Moreau – left her husband Jules, then suffered a miscarriage with Jim. Jim then left her and her pride was hurt. But then again, most of the women in Truffaut’s and Godard’s films were presented as dangerous and crazy. Suicide was a romantic act, an easy solution to emotional turmoil, at least in fictional form.

  For a while, we said nothing. I was about to drift off, when I heard Mengmeng speak as if she was talking in her sleep: ‘I think the answer to her death was in the moment when Jeanne Moreau sang that song “Le Tourbillon de la Vie”.’

  ‘Le Tourbillon de la Vie’ (‘The Whirlpool of Life’) was such a beautiful song. I couldn’t remember the lyrics, but I knew Mengmeng had been reading a translation of them. Then she began singing, softly:

  She had eyes, eyes like opal

  that fascinated me, that fascinated me

  The oval of her pale face

  of a femme fatale who was fatal to me

  We met, and then

  we lost sight of each other

  We met again, we warmed up each other

  then we separated

  Each one is gone

  in the whirlpool of life

  I’ve seen her one day at night, oh

  it’s been a long time now

  I listened as her voice went quiet. And then I fell asleep. Now, as I recalled that night, it occurred to me that Mengmeng had been cast under the film’s spell – the fact that she had fallen in love with the lecturer was her way of connecting with the spirit of Truffaut’s fiction. She didn’t realise that her life bore no similarity to the characters in Jules et Jim, that she was no Catherine, caught between two men. But for sure, this was the first time in her life she had felt an intense love. And she hadn’t been able to cope with the rejection. Would I have done something similar if I had been in her situation? I wondered.

  I couldn’t imagine myself jumping from a building for a man who was not in love with me. The last man I really loved was Paul, not Andy. Paul and I had shared an intense physical connection, which was not something Mengmeng could say for our film lecturer. Despite that, I hadn’t let myself be destroyed by Paul’s leaving for America. I had learned a little about saving myself from men.

  From a practical point of view, life had been difficult up until now. The examination to get to Beijing had been the last step in a series of tough challenges. At this stage of my life, I wasn’t going to sacrifice my artistic ambition and surrender myself totally to a man.

  But this reasoning was really only a superficial explanation. There was something else, something much deeper going on in my psyche, that went way back as far as I could remember. Back to Shitang and what I had had to do to survive. It came with me to Wenling, with my disrupted puberty and sexual awakening. It had shaped my entire thinking about men. Masculinity for me was a kind of foreign occupation, which I could take temporarily. But once that force had taken over my body and mind, I was stripped of any sense of reality, and left in a fearful state of confusion. More than this, a granite hardness had grown inside me since I was a child. I was not an unfeeling stone, but at some level, my psyche had formed a hard knot or core that couldn’t be loosened. I had dimly felt this hardness the day my grandfather committed suicide. It was there, and made even harder, when Hu Wenren fingered me in those dark toilets and on the shabby street corners covered in chicken shit. And it was so vividly felt on the operation table after my secret abortion at the age of fif
teen. I had carried it with me until now. It would never be softened or melted by some handsome man offering himself as an object of my love. On the one hand this stone in my heart gave me strength, on the other it left a deadness at the centre of my emotional life.

  I went to visit Mengmeng a few times in hospital with some of our classmates. Her upper body was connected to all sorts of tubes, while the bones in her lower body were basically destroyed. She could only roll her eyes. Some months later, she was back in the dormitory, but in a wheelchair. She was gloomy, and had clearly lost her youthful spirit. She no longer went to any classes the French-film lecturer was teaching. Nor did we mention him in front of her. He continued teaching French cinema, and philosophising on Truffaut’s thoughts about love. ‘Love triangle.’ He kept saying those words, as if he was unaware that a girl had jumped from a third-floor window because she had fallen in love with a married man.

  Post-University Life and Censorship

  On New Year’s Eve, just minutes before the twenty-first century was due to begin, we gathered in the film school’s canteen and awaited the final countdown. As the clock ticked its final gong, the Rolling Stones’s ‘I Can’t Get No Satisfaction’ blasted from eight loudspeakers placed around the large room. It was our new propaganda slogan: I can’t get no satisfaction, but I try and I try and I try. We celebrated the arrival of the year 2000 with an inexplicable sense of anxiety and expectation. Some cried in the haze of flickering candlelight and ear-piercingly loud music. A strange depression came over me. I couldn’t understand what it was. We had entered the third millennium, and our future was completely uncertain.

  After graduating from film school, I was possessed by a fever of enthusiasm to write film scripts. Some of the ideas had been circling in my mind for a long time and I wanted to get them out, realised, and ultimately on-screen. I also got commissions to write scripts from established film-makers, mostly from so-called Sixth Generation directors (ones born in the 1960s during the Cultural Revolution). I didn’t really care about how much I was being paid as I knew that, being a young woman in the industry, I had to become a professional and experienced screenwriter before I could become a film-maker. I worked on draft after draft of countless scripts, but almost all of them came rushing out of my computer and immediately slammed into a great wall, otherwise known as the Chinese Film Censorship Bureau.

  In China, each literary work goes through different stages of censorship. We writers have been bitterly joking about the process for years. We use a hard rock and a small round pebble as metaphors. If a book or a film manages to survive all stages of censorship, the rock’s original sharp, jagged edges will have disappeared and it will have been transformed into a small, smooth pebble. One film script I wrote was about a ten-year love affair between a young man and a young woman: they begin as teenagers, study at the same university together, and after graduation try to survive in the real world but ultimately fail to meet each other’s expectations and eventually separate. I wrote this story after witnessing the gap between the expectations developed at university and the realities of post-university life. Before applying for a production permit, I submitted the script to the Censorship Bureau. A few weeks later, the bureau sent me back ten pages of revision notes, and informed me the script was not yet ready to be passed. I still have those notes today. Here are a few extracts:

  1. Why do the young lovers live together in the same house without ever getting married? Although in reality such inappropriate behaviour does occur, it shouldn’t be encouraged in film. We strongly advise that a scene be added showing that the young lovers are responsibly married.

  2. The couple live in an old-fashioned hutong house without a toilet. In the night the girl gets up and curses the hutong for its lack of sanitary facilities. But the hutong is a great traditional Chinese architectural style. A character cannot be allowed to denigrate this jewel of our Chinese heritage. This would only encourage negative feelings in the audience. This scene must be deleted.

  3. It seems the girlfriend only studies English in her spare time and does not undertake any other worthy activity. The impression consequently given is that this young woman is only interested in the West. You have to add some scenes to show she also engages in Chinese activities benefiting ordinary people.

  4. In the karaoke scene, the girl sings the song ‘Wild Flower’ with a few other male characters. It suggests that she is disposed towards prostitution or loose morals. This scene should be cut.

  5. The script has an overall sickly, melancholic tone. It would not be overstating it if we were to say you have submitted a depressing project. This is its biggest problem. The writer and the film-maker have to work on raising the spirit of the story, infusing it with optimism and hopeful realism. If such positivity is not shown and felt, the script will not receive a permit for production.

  The rest were stern statements about various details and the content of the dialogue.

  Yet I was willing to revise the script in order to make a film So I worked hard and tried to add positive elements here and there. But I was being naive: my mind wouldn’t conform to the Chinese Communist Party way of thinking. My generation is different to that of my parents, I thought. The script was resubmitted three more times and each time it came back with more notes and a stamp of rejection.

  Months passed and all my other scripts similarly failed. One night, sitting with my latest rejection note and contemplating the growing pile of unproduced scripts, a new idea entered my mind. I should give up and just forget about trying to get funding. What would I do instead? I would make underground films! These would be low or no budget. Any budget would come from my own pocket or from a generous friend who wanted to be part of the action. Suddenly I remembered all those underground performance artists on the Great Wall and in the East Village who had taken this path, and had fought for artistic freedom with their own bodies. Maybe I wouldn’t go so far as to run naked along the Great Wall with my genitals painted in various colours, but I wanted to be authentic and stay true to my own vision.

  ‘You’re a real fenqing now,’ my film-maker friends joked during one of our extended dinners. A bitter mood had suffused the evening, as we savoured the succulent spices of our hotpot meal: chilli crabs and crayfish, frozen-blood tofu and pig intestines. Fenqing literally means angry youth – a reference to the 1990s generation with their roots in the 1989 Tiananmen movement. For them – for us – there was no way to penetrate the ironclad system of politics and society. To be an independent film-maker meant going underground, becoming an illegal artist, embracing an angry identity. I was ready for it.

  In the heat of the steamy hotpot restaurant, my friend Rao Wei asked me an important question: ‘So where are you going to get money to make your films?’

  ‘Good question. I’m not sure I know.’

  ‘A young female fenqing has only two choices. Either you can sleep with a rich man …’

  I didn’t like this option so I asked him for the alternative.

  ‘Or you can get drunk with a few rich men, and then sleep with them!’

  Everyone laughed. I knew some female artists worked their way up the career ladder using this method, but it didn’t really guarantee a production budget at the end of it.

  I also realised that, for a woman, it seemed easier to become a writer than a film-maker. Writing for me required only solitude and imagination, but film-making demanded everything. And money was its driving force. Where was I going to get money to make underground films? I was already in danger of being disillusioned from my failures so far. Way back in film school, when I first read Luis Buñuel’s autobiography, My Last Breath, I had been so inspired by the world this Spanish film-maker lived in, and that of the other artists of his generation like Dalí, Cocteau and Orson Welles. At least they had enjoyed some basic freedoms, despite having lived through wars. We in China had undergone a proletarian revolution under Mao, and yet there was barely a free thought allowed in our heads. The layers of self-c
ensorship we had to engage in before the official censorship came to get us had already strangled any creative work. In China, creativity meant compromise. Creativity no longer bore its original and intended meaning. Creativity under a Communist regime requires the struggle to survive under such rigid rules, and for all creative thoughts to be kept to oneself.

  Becoming a Soap Opera Writer

  Exactly twenty years after the day I watched a black-and-white television set being carried into our communal living space in Wenling, I began to write television scripts. At the age of eight, I had already understood that the television was a propaganda box, and that’s why it had been placed in the centre of our evening life in the collective. But I never imagined that one day I would produce stories to feed to the masses after dinner. I had learned a lot about life in those intervening years, especially about ordinary, day-to-day misery. It was not my first choice as an outlet for my creativity, but film censorship had led me to despair. I was also desperately in need of the money. After graduation, I had been living on three packs of instant noodles a day. My novels barely earned me any money and I had received no financial support from my parents for some years now. Some of my university classmates had already begun writing for television, so when asked if I wanted to lend a hand, I said yes.

  At that time, every province was home to numerous TV channels that all produced their own lengthy soap operas. Demand was huge, and every family loved watching them after dinner. As a result, I got a considerable amount of work. Usually scripts were commissioned, with titles such as The Tale of Third Aunt’s Marriage, or The Loves and Sorrows of the Family Liu. All I needed to do was to write page after page of combat-style dialogue between, say, a husband and a wife, a mother and a daughter, or a grandmother and her daughter-in-law. No political discussions, plenty of discourses on marriage and romance; in other words, typical kitchen-sink dramas with Chinese socialist themes thrown in for good measure. There would be no despair, no hopeless alienation or critiques of the political class. Everything would work out in the end, and the sun would shine down on the factory or neighbourhood block. I surprised myself that I could actually write these scripts so easily once I was in the mood.