Nine Continents

by Xiaolu Guo

  At this point in the story I had already been at the opera three afternoons in a row. The white snake then travels to Emei Mountain, where she steals a magical herb that can bring her husband back to life. But Fahai, the tortoise turned monk, is a spiteful man. He tries to separate the happy couple again by imprisoning Xuxian in Golden Mountain Temple. But Madame White Snake uses her powers to flood the holy site and rescue her husband. The couple give birth to a son and call him Mengjiao, meaning ‘dreaming of a dragon’. It’s a very ambitious name, and promises much later in the story. But the evil tortoise turned monk will not be defeated and so he fights Madame White Snake and traps her in a pagoda.

  At the end of the fifth day, the drama reaches its climax. The story jumps ahead twenty years, as Mengjiao scores the top result in the imperial examination. Triumphant, he returns home to visit his parents, defeats the monk and frees his mother. The family is reunited. But the monk flees and returns to the bottom of the lake. Fearing punishment, he hides inside the stomach of a crab. Legend has it that the yellow part inside the shell is his evil body.

  My heart still hung in the air and I was in a state of nervous excitement as the opera ended. I had watched the actors eating a banquet of steamed crabs. But wouldn’t the tortoise-turned-crab spirit manifest himself in everyone’s stomachs? Or was it all hinting at trouble yet to come? The happy family would never truly be happy, because one day their stomachs would cramp and perhaps they would all die from the pain.

  Returning to my grandparents’ house, I decided to never eat crab again. Or maybe just the claws. And I told everyone else not to risk it either. ‘Don’t eat the yellow bit, Grandmother! It’s the body of the tortoise turned monk!’ But she never listened to me. She gobbled every last bit, from the shell to the glands, from the gills to the legs. I really worried that one day I would find my grandmother walking sideways and every kid in the village would laugh at me. If she was a shrimp before, she risked adding crab to the mix. It was too terrible to bear.

  I also spent days wondering about the umbrella they had used in the opera. It was made from white paper, dotted with pink cherry blossoms, and had a green fringe. The Chinese character for umbrella is pronounced san, which sounds the same as the character for separation. Couples and families are very careful about using umbrellas in China, believing them to bring bad luck – lovers will be separated, sons and mothers will lose touch, and so on. Since Madame White Snake had met her future husband under an umbrella, it was no wonder that things had turned out the way they did. I’ll never use an umbrella, I said to myself, nor give one to the people I loved. Had my parents been using an umbrella the day I was born? Was it raining as I emerged from the womb?

  I still hadn’t met my parents. I had no idea what to expect. Did they look like my grandparents? Was my father also hunchbacked like his mother? Maybe he wasn’t as bad-tempered as my grandfather. Maybe he was talkative, like Da Bo from next door. And my mother, what was she like? The village women all had long braids, or if they were married they tied their hair up in a bun. What kind of hair did she have, and what kind of clothes did she like to wear?

  I tried to picture them as I left the auditorium. I wasn’t angry with them; I didn’t know what to feel. Outside, the familiar street market lay deserted under a fish-belly white sky. Everyone had gone home for dinner. I felt desolate as I walked back to my grandparents’ house. My mood was grey, like the typhoon-drenched walls of every house in this old village.

  Meeting My Parents

  One afternoon, as I was sitting in the dark auditorium watching a new opera, some kids came and told me to go back home.

  ‘Xiaolu, your grandmother is looking for you!’

  I ran back home, thinking my grandmother had probably bought me an ice stick, or some sweets as a treat. But as I stood on the threshold, I saw two strangers sitting in the kitchen. A man and a woman. The man was slender and wore glasses. The woman was much shorter, and bore a stern expression. She came straight up to me and took hold of one of my skinny arms. She looked me up and down and in a very strange accent said: ‘Ah, Xiaolu, you are so big now!’

  I was nearly seven years old.

  Then I heard my grandmother’s voice from behind the woman: ‘This is your mother, Xiaolu. Call her Mother!’

  I stared at the woman, perplexed. I sort of understood what she was saying, but her accent and words were alien to me. She clearly didn’t speak the local Shitang dialect. As most of the fishing families here had immigrated from Fujian Province many years ago, we spoke a dialect called Mingnanhua.

  The man then moved closer, while staring at me like I was some curious animal. These strangers made me very uneasy.

  ‘And this is your father. Call him Father!’

  The man with the glasses patted my head lightly and smiled. He had big hands and long fingers and an almost gentle look, so different from the gruff faces of the fishermen in the village.

  I was mute. I withdrew to the corner of the room, unable to say these strange words, mother, father. I couldn’t do it, not that day.

  So that was it. I had finally met my parents. Oddly enough, I don’t really remember how I felt at that particular moment, perhaps a little anguished. I don’t think I had a clear concept of what it meant to have parents. I was very aware that something had been missing in my life, that I didn’t have parents like other village kids did. But still, it didn’t feel like a significant moment at the time. The only change I noticed was the new tea bags and rice cakes on the table.

  My departure from Shitang came very suddenly. I wasn’t even aware it was really happening, that I was leaving my poor grandmother behind, all alone in the house. I was given no time to say goodbye to the friends I usually played with out on the street, nor did I realise that I might never see them again. In my confusion, I heard my parents say my things were packed. I didn’t have much, just a few shirts, pairs of trousers and my slippers. And we would be going soon, before the last bus left for the night.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I asked in distress, looking up at the two adults.

  ‘We are going home, to Wenling,’ my mother answered in her strange accent. She had a rough peasant manner; she was not instantly likeable. Not that day, nor later.

  ‘You’re going to school,’ my father added, in a friendly voice. He didn’t have an accent, he spoke just like my grandparents.

  I don’t remember if I cried. I didn’t really understand what was going on. My grandmother walked all the way to the bus station with us. We had to move very slowly along the cobbled alleyways, because of her bound feet. The other villagers greeted my grandmother, and each time we stopped she would introduce my parents to the other old men and women. ‘This is my son, Xiuling,’ she pointed to my father. ‘He’s here to take my granddaughter to school.’ My grandmother was visibly proud. I noticed that she didn’t introduce my mother to the villagers. I wondered if she felt the same as me, that this woman with the strange accent was a bit scary. Sometimes my father recognised someone in the street and went to pat the man on the shoulder and say a few words. He had lived in these streets until he was nineteen years old.

  Eventually, however, we arrived at the bus station. The stationmaster was there, whistle around his neck, cleaning the car park with a broom. He instantly greeted my father and grandmother, offering them a handful of sunflower seeds from his pocket.

  He fished out another handful and put them in my pocket.

  ‘Xiaolu, didn’t I tell you that your mother and father would come to take you to the big city? You have a great life ahead of you. And your father will give you the best education.’

  I nodded as my parents smiled to the stationmaster. A great life ahead of me. It sounded promising and I was excited to hear this, although I still didn’t understand what my future might hold. As we jumped onto the bus, I saw my grandmother’s eyes welling with tears. She was crying. She took her handkerchief from her pocket, the same dirty handkerchief she used to wrap my ice lollies. She wiped
her eyes with it, but the tears were pouring down her cheeks.

  My heart felt so heavy, my throat became tight. But then came the weight of my father’s hands; he was holding me in the bus seat.

  As the bus began to pull out, my grandmother followed us. I heard her trembling voice: ‘Xiaolu, send me letters. The neighbours will read them to me!’

  I nodded. Then she yelled, her voice hoarse now: ‘Do what your parents say, won’t you?’

  But my grandmother’s last words were carried away by a gust of dusty wind. The sea blew the salty breeze into the bus, and I smelt the familiar fishy odour of Shitang.

  Suddenly, I realised what was happening around me, and I was seized by such an indescribable fear and sadness that I burst into tears. My throat hurt from the effort of holding back. But I couldn’t bear it any longer, and I started to howl. It felt like the end of the world. Even though I had been an unhappy child living with my grandparents in Shitang, I was still scared to be dragged from the only life I had ever known. The bus was moving like a coffin, and with an overwhelming sense of hopelessness, I turned back to watch my grandmother until she became a small dot in the distance.

  The bus journey was tortuous. I had never left the village before, nor had I ever taken the bus. As the diesel started to burn and the disgusting smell entered my nose and lungs, I threw up on the seat. My father opened the window and lifted me up so that I could stand and vomit outside. My mother gave me a napkin to wipe my mouth. Today it takes under two hours to make the journey, along a smooth highway, but back then it took twelve bumpy hours along twisty mountain roads, before the plains of Wenling opened out before you. They had begun building tunnels and roads around the mountain, but most of the people in Shitang never left the village. The journey was dusty, noisy and exhausting, and you could feel the uneven rocks being crushed underneath the tyres. Passengers were constantly being thrown into the air and bounced back onto the seats. My head was spinning, my vision became blurry and my ears ached. Each time the bus made a turn, my throat seized and I threw up. This lasted for two or three hours until I had nothing left to bring up. Weak and miserable, I stood on my seat and looked out of the window and howled in agony.

  My grandfather, a Hakka fisherman, 1970s

  PART II | WENLING: LIFE IN A COMMUNIST COMPOUND

  Another three thousand years have passed since that moonlit night when Monkey heard the whispering voice in his sleep. Monkey travelled from continent to continent in search of the human world, until he arrived in a land called Tang Dynasty China.

  In this rich and curious land, the Tang emperor established a grand capital called Chang-an. Inside the city walls there were countless markets selling silk, porcelain and exquisite jewels. Beyond the city walls there were miles of rice and sorghum fields where farmers ploughed for generations. But the Tang emperor was an idealistic man. He wanted the country’s future to be animated by a strong spiritual life. One day he assembled his officials and announced that he wanted to find the most enlightened Buddhist monk in the country to teach in the Imperial Court. So the officials went in search for the man. Finally, in a dilapidated temple hidden in a pine forest by the South China Sea they found a monk called Xuanzang.

  Xuanzang knew every single scripture by heart. When he was told that he had been chosen by the emperor to teach in the Imperial Court, he said that he would only do so if he could travel to India to obtain the original Buddhist sutras. The emperor agreed, and sent him a white horse as his companion, as well as two diligent assistants – Pigsy and Sandy. On a golden-rayed autumn morning, the monk and his disciples left Chang-an for India.

  As soon as Xuanzang and his companions left the city walls of Chang-an, they began to experience difficulties. They had to travel in harsh weather through Gansu, Qinghai and Xingjian in the Gobi Desert. On the thirty-seventh day of their journey they had only arrived at the edge of the desert.

  Thirsty, hungry and exhausted, the pilgrims sat by a little stream on the edge of the desert. After they drank some water and ate their last remaining food, Xuanzang urged his companions to return to the road. But Pigsy was too hungry to go on and Sandy was too weak to walk. Just then, a yellow-pink sandstorm swept down from a distant dune. The sky turned dark and the storm howled and swallowed everything in its path. The two disciples lay down on the ground, trembling with fear that the end of the world had come. But the monk kept praying. In the howling wind they heard an unearthly voice: ‘Master, I am coming to protect you!’ Gradually the storm calmed. Xuanzang and his disciples opened their eyes and discovered they were surrounded by exotic fruits they had never seen before. Then suddenly, a handsome monkey appeared and told them to eat the fruits before they began their journey again. Xuanzang was a little confused. The creature bowed to the monk three times and said: ‘Master, I was sent by Heaven to assist you in your journey. Please let me accompany you.’

  Xuanzang gave the creature a Buddhist name, Wukong, meaning Emptiness Knower. He told the monkey that he must tame his cunning trickster nature and Wukong now promised he would obey his master. When the sky turned blue, the pilgrim team stood up and proceeded into the desert.

  The first time I met my brother, aged almost seven

  Wenling

  In the autumn of 1980 I finally started primary school. Me, the seven-year-old street urchin, suddenly dressed in a school uniform and told to sit still and recite Tang Dynasty poems, no questions allowed.

  Wenling literally means Warm Mountain. It was a modest, middle-sized town, home to thousands of newly trained peasant workers. If you were to visit Wenling today, you would find a totally different place from the hilly town of my childhood. When I arrived it was at the beginning of a period of massive transition. Ten years later, the mountains had been flattened, highways squashed the fields, and the population had tripled to a million and half. The green Wenling of 1980 is very different from the overpopulated, traffic-choked, polluted Wenling of today.

  The name Warm Mountain summed up the landscape perfectly. Unlike Shitang, of which every corner was forged of rock stained by saltwater blown in from a yellow sea, Wenling was verdant and calm. It sat in the bottom of a basin, so the air was warm and sticky. Bamboo, orange and mulberry trees were our staples and they grew everywhere, in front of houses and along the streets. Rice paddies and residential buildings sat side by side, encircled by tea plantations and rapeseed fields, and beyond that, yams climbed up their wooden frames along the motorways. This was the China of the early eighties: town and nature, with no real separation between the two.

  Wenling was a big city in my eyes, with middle schools and high schools, and many new streets and gleaming residential blocks. So much to explore. Slogans and propaganda posters adorned the walls and, although the paint had faded, they were still legible. ‘Up into the Mountains, Down to the Countryside!’ ‘Learn from the Peasants, Learn from the Workers!’ ‘One Child is Better!’ The most common slogans praised our great leader, ‘Long Live Chairman Mao!’ or ‘Chairman Mao is the Red Sun in Our Hearts!’ The Cultural Revolution had ended four years before I arrived in Wenling, but visually the town was still saturated in its propaganda. Everyone here looked quite different from the citizens of Shitang. Most people worked in factories. Wenling had a very big plastics industry, as well as shoe making and a gigantic silk factory where my mother worked. But there were also lots of peasants living on the edge of the town and on the hillsides, growing their rice and vegetables.

  Everything about life here was different from the rugged Shitang. In my grandparents’ village, everyone lived in their own house – even the poorest fisherman had a small shed to call his own. But in Wenling, families lived together in compounds newly built by the government. No one was afforded an autonomous life here. Every adult belonged to a work unit, run by the state. During the day our parents worked in factories and offices. In Shitang, women were housewives, gossiping about their men on their doorsteps after lunch. But here, the women were full-time workers. Apart from the
elderly, you never saw anyone just sitting in front of their house, contemplating the clouds, as was normal in Shitang. Everyone in Wenling seemed to be very proud of their work and dedicated to building a strong industry. My new surroundings seemed much nicer and more modern than my grandparents’ draughty stone house, yet I wasn’t sure if I was going to be happier here.

  The big news for me upon arriving in Wenling, however, was that I had a brother. He was two years older than me, and we hated each other immediately. The reasons for our enmity were many and complex. We had never lived together. He was nearly nine when I first met him. I noticed how his upper lip quivered and how he squinted at me through his glasses, as if I was an irritating pest. I was an invader, a threat to his material and emotional comfort. My brother had an instant prejudice against me and I was convinced that this attitude was encouraged by my mother, who had given me away to the goat-herding Wong family for adoption when I was born. The hierarchy in our family was obvious: my father was most important, then my brother, then my mother, and I was the insignificant flea unworthy of attention. At mealtimes my mother would save all the precious pork for my father and brother. If I reached for the meat, she would beat my chopsticks back and order me to wait until the men had finished eating. I was her last concern. Not only that, but I was also one of the youngest in the compound, and became an easy target for the boys. Warm Mountain turned out not to be so warm after all.

  My Mother

  The first conflict with my mother came about over language. Unlike my father, who spoke both the Shitang and Wenling dialects, my mother could only speak Wenling Hua. It must have been those roots, sharing a first language with my father, that turned me into my father’s child. Both my father and I were raised by my paternal grandparents; we had inherited the same traditions from the fishing village. So in the beginning, I didn’t want to talk to my mother and my brother, and my mother was disgusted by what came out of my mouth.