Nine Continents

by Xiaolu Guo

  Suddenly, without fanfare, the first artist appeared. He produced his ID card and read every detail printed on it in a solemn and majestic voice; the fifteen-digit ID number became a Tang Dynasty poem. Then he used an ink brush and painted his ID number all over his body, including his face. But this was only a prelude. He then sat down and, with help from another artist, tattooed the string of numbers on his belly. Since there were fifteen numbers, it took some time. We watched the blood dripping down his skin. One young girl in the crowd screamed and fainted on the thousand-year-old stones. Two of her friends had to carry her down the hill. The artist was undeterred. Once finished, he stood before us, a numbered pig on the collective farm ready to be dispatched to slaughter the next day.

  ‘Our bodies no longer belong to ourselves,’ he declared. ‘We are nothing but slaves of the state.’ He pointed to the tattooed numbers on his skin. ‘Our identity number is the only valid thing that follows us through life. We are reduced to nothing but a string of fucking numbers.’

  Most of us agreed with what he was saying, but remained silent out of respect.

  The second performance involved an artist eating a placenta. He announced that the placenta had been taken straight from the hospital – from an aborted baby. He set up a table in front of everyone with a small stove and a wok. He then chopped the placenta into small pieces and stir-fried them. He added soy sauce, salt and pepper like he was cooking pork chops. Two members of the audience whispered something in disapproval, which the artist heard.

  ‘If the state can violently and legally abort a mother’s unborn baby, why can’t I eat the placenta? Which one is more obscene?’

  No one dared challenge him. We just stood there and watched him ritualistically finish the whole plate.

  The third performance was just as startling. A long-haired young man suddenly presented himself. He wore heavy make-up: white face powder, blue eyeshadow and scarlet lips. He stripped bare, revealing his penis: it was painted red. He then threw himself on the ground and began humping it like an animal. He called this piece ‘Fuck China’s Extraordinary History’. After a few minutes of thrusting and moaning, he launched himself into a mad, nude sprint. Like a tribal man, he ran along the Great Wall, his red penis swaying violently. He screamed and howled. The journalists raised their cameras – surely this could make the cover of Time magazine.

  But just at that moment, we suddenly found ourselves surrounded by cops. Someone must have reported the activities to the authorities while we were too busy being transfixed by the artist’s public lovemaking. The police didn’t look terribly threatening. They seemed to be following protocol, asking everyone to show their ID cards or passports. So there we were, as the artist was running naked along the Wall, our details being taken down one by one. Everybody stood, solemn and obedient. No one fought back, and the police didn’t think it necessary to make a show of power. The running penis would be back soon enough and they would get his ID number too.

  Then we heard laughing.

  ‘You see?’ It was the first artist with the new tattoo. ‘Even the police agree with me! We are all nothing but a string of numbers!’

  We watched as two policemen took out their electric batons. My heart trembled. Everyone was instantly silent.

  A few weeks later, I was summoned to speak to the discipline department of the film school. They asked if I had participated in an illegal gathering on the Great Wall recently. Yes, I said, and explained that I wanted to have a real artistic experience rather than only watch French new wave films with sexy actresses in them. The head of the discipline department smiled, noting down what I had said. His deputy came in with a lunch box of pork buns, and he let me go.

  By a Waterfall, There Are Swimmers …

  By a waterfall, I’m calling you.

  We can share it all beneath a ceiling of blue.

  We’ll spend a heavenly day

  Here where the whispering waters play.

  There’s a whipper will that’s calling you.

  By a waterfall, he’s dreaming too.

  There’s a magic melody

  Mother Nature sings to me

  Beside a waterfall with you.

  The song was from an old Hollywood musical, Footlight Parade, which we were watching in our set-production class one morning. It was a black-and-white film from 1933. The school had only a very scratchy videotape with blurry images, but for a provincial kid like me, it was mesmerising. I was astonished to see attractive, half-naked Western girls filmed from all sorts of fancy angles swimming and dancing in great pools. Then the film’s most famous scene arrived: hundreds of seemingly free-spirited female bodies formed a human waterfall. The choreographer was a celebrated director called Busby Berkeley, the teacher said, and he liked to create visual fantasies out of hundreds of showgirls. We watched another of his films, Gold Diggers of 1933, and I was again amazed by the beautiful bodies and unbridled freedom of the dancers.

  I had never been the kind of girl who had much awareness of her own physical being. I barely paid attention to my body. The mirrors in our house in Wenling were always too high for me to catch a glimpse of myself, anyway. During puberty, shame was my overwhelming feeling: I associated menstruation and growing breasts with aches and pains. I covered my chest with oversized jackets, usually passed down from my brother. Nor did I pay any attention to my hair, my face or the look of my legs. I had never bought myself cosmetics. But when I came to Beijing, I started looking in the mirror more often. Every morning, as I regarded my face in the dormitory mirror, I saw my mother. How much I loathed that face, the face of ignorance and violent, brusque manners. It was hers: my mother’s peasant cheekbones and rude eyebrows, as well as her short neck. I wanted my own, I wanted to be met in the mirror by someone else every morning. I always knew I was far from being a so-called beauty. But this new environment, and the fantastic musicals we saw at film school, filled my head with plans and a new-found faith. I wanted to know my body. I also wanted to learn to swim. I wanted to wear a sexy bikini, jump into a pool and open myself up like a water lily. Thanks to Busby Berkeley, I finally, at the age of twenty-one, lowered my body into the chlorinated water and discovered my own physical being.

  Before that summer in Beijing, I had never tried to learn to swim. The only sport I grew up playing was ping-pong on make-shift brick tables. Ping-pong was considered the game of the people at that time.

  In Beijing, I bought myself an old-fashioned one-piece swim-suit, as in those days the state-owned department stores didn’t sell Western-style two-piece bikinis. The week after watching Footlight Parade and Gold Digger, my schoolmates and I jumped on our bikes and like a flock of gulls swooped down on the newly built pool at the University of Science and Technology.

  There I was, standing in the shallow end of the pool, too scared to go any deeper. Nearby, a swimming teacher was yelling instructions to a group of young children.

  ‘Don’t be so scared! Chairman Mao swam across the Yangtze River when he was seventy-two years old!’ He splashed water onto a boy’s dry chest. ‘If a seventy-two-year-old man can swim across such a big river, a young boy like you should be able to swim across an ocean!’

  The boy looked visibly ashamed. ‘But he was Chairman Mao!’ he stammered.

  But before he could even finish, the teacher had thrown him into the water. The boy shrieked with terror and I felt sorry for him. If we always had to measure ourselves against the Chairman, we would give up before trying. No one could compare with Mao, even though he had died fifteen years previously. He was our Superman, of course he could overcome any challenge, apart from death perhaps. I still remember one of the propaganda posters my parents had on their wall. It showed Mao wearing a bathrobe, having completed his heroic swim. Follow Chairman Mao and Conquer the Wind and Waves! The seventy-two-year-old had swum fifteen kilometres in sixty-five minutes it was reported. Even if I could swim, I thought, I could never imagine myself in the water like Chairman Mao surrounded by hundreds of
young, wet Red Guards.

  As I stood in the shallows, it struck me that the experience wasn’t exactly turning out to be as glamorous as I had imagined; we weren’t swimming under any waterfalls, nor being worshipped by adoring, singing men. I ducked my head quickly into the water, and started choking. Struggling like a dying chicken, I came up again. I needed time, time to understand the relationship between my body and the water, I told myself.

  A week later, we were sitting in our film-theory class, discussing ‘female presentation in Hollywood cinema’. Our teacher, a renowned professor named Dai Jinghua, showed us some clips of Rita Hayworth and Marilyn Monroe. We were admiring the pneumatic breasts and plunging necklines, the shimmering wavy hair, and the sculptured legs polished like porcelain on high heels. But then Professor Dai introduced us to the British feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey’s essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’. She muted the Rita Hayworth film, and read out aloud from the essay: ‘mainstream film coded the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order …’ She paused and looked at us to see our response. But none of us said anything. Then she asked: ‘What does Laura Mulvey mean when she says the sex of the camera is male, not female?’

  I turned to the screen, where Marilyn Monroe was swinging her miniskirt with a shake of her perfect waistline, and smiling at the camera seductively.

  Timidly, I raised my hand and answered with another quotation from Mulvey: ‘She meant that women are the image and men are the bearer of the look. So women are the sexual objects of Hollywood films.’

  ‘Yes, absolutely,’ Professor Dai nodded. ‘Most conventional Hollywood films are just like Playboy magazine, but with a bit of narrative.’

  Playboy magazine. So far we’d never had the chance to see one for ourselves. Before the days of the Internet, Western magazines were definitely not available in China. I could only guess what it might be like. In truth, I longed to own a copy of Playboy ! It would at least prove that I knew a thing or two about the West. I couldn’t help but wonder if Western girls were also subjected to the constant sexual harassment we Chinese girls in the countryside were. We didn’t wear miniskirts or sexy dresses to seduce men, but we were abused by them nevertheless. In what sort of society had Rita Hayworth and Marilyn Monroe lived? Was it anything like ours, or completely different? These were the questions I took away with me after that class.

  It was sunny and warm outside, and I suddenly felt light and free. I went to my dorm and put my swimming costume and a pair of slippers in my bag. Jumping on my bike, I once again headed towards my newly discovered swimming pool. As I rode through the old hutongs, no one seemed to notice me and I didn’t mind at all. I actually enjoyed this seeming invisibility, the feeling of the wind stroking my skin, and the bubble of quietness around me in the midst of the congestion. When I got to the swimming pool, I saw the usual assortment of people. Some were doing laps with a military dedication, some were floating like seals, their black swimming caps bobbing in the shallows. What would my mother think of me now? I thought, as I entered the delicious water. She had never swum in a pool in her life. I tried for a moment to imagine her in a swimming costume, and wondered how she might have felt about her own body. Could she have allowed herself to experience this freedom from shame, for her body to feel so gloriously alive for even just a moment? I didn’t answer my own question. Instead, I slipped below the rippling surface and slid through the blue-green water.

  Girls in the Dark

  One of the films we watched repeatedly at the Beijing Film Academy was La Chinoise. Jean-Luc Godard made the film in 1967, a year after the start of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Godard’s films were compulsory viewing, but there were many reasons why La Chinoise had been particularly singled out. For example, in the editing course, we analysed its ‘jump cut’ method and how Godard used montage to create a dynamic rhythm – in China then, we only edited from a traditional narrative point of view, making cinema something closer to a theatrical format. In production class, we were told to draw a storyboard for the film, or to produce a sketch of Godard’s set; a fake Parisian apartment with open doors and connecting corridors, all decorated with white furnishings and lamps in primary colours to match the lead actress’s bright clothing. In sound we discussed the use of music, which was interrupted like punctuation between scenes. The one thing we never, or barely, touched on, however, was its politics, which was surprising, given that it was supposed to be influenced by Maoist ideology! Maybe the teachers thought it too obvious to mention.

  I felt strange and uncomfortable watching the film, not only because the glamorous French actress Anne Wiazemsky (a real Russian princess) and the funny-looking Jean-Pierre Leaud didn’t look like they knew much about Mao, but because their revolutionary acts also felt so out of context. Paris seemed to bore them and so their actions seemed more akin to the Baader–Meinhof Gang, rather than ‘a mass revolution of the proletariat’ as we called it in China. It just felt silly watching Westerners pretend they were taking part in the Chinese revolution. I wondered what my father would have said about it. He probably would have been angry and said something like: ‘Westerners will never understand the Chinese unless they too go through the misery and poverty we did.’ Or: ‘If this French film-maker’s parents had been sent to a labour camp and had died there, he would never have made a film with such a ridiculous tone.’ Of course my father didn’t know that Godard was in fact from a wealthy Swiss family. Nor did he know that there was a distinct difference between being a French intellectual and a Chinese intellectual.

  But the film made an impression on others in my class, especially a girl in the production department called Mengmeng. She styled herself exactly like the lead actress: a navy-blue dress and a 1960s fringe that skirted her eyebrows.

  Mengmeng lived in the same room as me on campus. We were on the sixth floor, four girls from different departments squeezed into twenty-five square metres. Mengmeng slept in the bunk above me. If she tossed around, my bed would shake as if in an earthquake. If I said anything in my dreams, she would cover her ears with her blanket. At that time, university dormitories were like military camps; lots of rules and restrictions. A loudspeaker had been set in the ceiling over the door, and it was always announcing something, only shutting up at night. Most of the time, it was merely repeating the school rules, with a male voice in the morning and a female voice in the afternoon. But we managed to bypass most of the decrees. We hid our guitars and small sewing machines under our beds. At eleven in the evening, the electricity was cut so that we would be forced to sleep. We lit candles instead. It was the start of the witching hour; the dorm descended into mayhem. Riots in the common washrooms and toilets, chaos in the corridors and bedrooms. No one was in bed. People were washing, reading, chatting and playing music. Then in no time, the dorm supervisor would appear with his torch. Panic unleashed, a stampede from the bathrooms, along the narrow corridors back to our beds. We were like rats in the dark. The dorm supervisor kept a record of each room’s level of night-time activity, and our grades would suffer if he found too much noise or mess. But once he was gone, we would rise again, lighting yet more candles or switching on a torch to read, or just lying in the dark and chatting.

  The girls’ dormitory was the first place I felt I wasn’t alone, especially after one night in particular, when I told them about the sexual abuse I had suffered as a young girl.

  ‘I can’t exactly remember what happened to me. All I remember is the fear, the enormous fear and terror when his hands touched my body and fingered me,’ I murmured, lying in my bunk in the dark, my eyes wide open.

  ‘Same here.’ I heard Mengmeng sitting up on her bunk. ‘I know exactly what you mean. I hated the man who abused me and I still hate him, intensely. He lived next door. He was always coming into our house when my parents were away and groping me. He threatened to cut out my tongue if I told my parents. I wanted to kill him.’ Her tone was furious, disgusted, as if it had happened only yeste
rday.

  ‘You did better than me! At least you dared to hate the man, and not just feel scared,’ another girl on the bed next to mine spoke up.

  ‘Not really. I was too scared to tell my parents. It continued for a year or two until my father moved us away for business reasons. I don’t know what would have become of me if we had remained in that house. I probably would have got pregnant or else become a murderer. Every day I prayed that man would die the worst kind of death. I imagined him falling naked on a razor-wire fence and his penis being sliced through in the most painful way.’

  As the dormitory building grew quieter after midnight, we lay in the dark and waited for sleep to come. But it didn’t. With an unspoken, but almost collective feeling, we girls were dreading these memories would return to us in our dreams. Mengmeng told me she experienced nightmares often. She described the images to me: an obscure space, a male hand, a vulgar gesture, an icy intrusion, breathing, all devoid of faces or narrative. Then she would wake up in a cold sweat, still trembling, her limbs paralysed. How familiar all this was! I couldn’t have described it better! It seemed that all of us had experienced similar ordeals. Stories that remained untold except in the darkness of the girls’ dormitory.

  When I think back on those days now, it seems obvious that many Chinese girls then suffered such abuse, and so regard love as the opposite of sex: sex only represents the abusive and violent relationships between men and women, whereas love goes far beyond sex, and should really be asexual.

  Mengmeng was always stylish and had good taste in fashion. Elegant, pale-skinned with long black hair, you would think that she came from a wealthy, urban family. But she was in fact a peasant’s daughter from Shanxi, the home of coal and brown yams. Her family had ploughed fields for years and held no great hopes for their daughter’s future. But Mengmeng had always been fascinated with cinema. Her parents must have loved her, since she seemed very attached to them. I noticed how they posted her food packages and clothes parcels, which only increased the disappointment I felt towards my own family. My parents barely ever sent me anything from Wenling.