Nine Continents

by Xiaolu Guo

  My tourist visa was ready a few days later. But for some reason, I never used it. Perhaps because I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do with a two-week stay. From the day I lost my Chinese passport, I came to the simple revelation that nationality didn’t declare who I was. I was a woman raised in China and in exile in Britain. I was a woman who wrote books and made films. I could have applied for a German passport if I had lived in Germany. But a passport and the nationality written on its cover would never define me.

  As the old Chinese saying goes, uproot a tree and it will die; uproot a man and he will survive. I have always agreed with this proverb, especially in the years before I left China. But after the incident at the Chinese Embassy, I thought to myself: mere survival is a life without imagination, but a drifter’s life with imagination is also a life without substance. As a new immigrant, everything felt intangible: I couldn’t integrate fully with the locals, nor penetrate the heart of the Western culture that surrounded me. But the only way to overcome these problems was to root myself here, to transplant myself into this land and to grow steadily. So I began to plan a life exactly like every other first-generation immigrant, starting with making myself a proper home. One morning, as I was struggling to understand a mortgage plan on a website, I thought about my parents. My mind formed an image of my mother, and I felt her accusing presence, chiding me for not returning to China to visit them. Suddenly the phone rang. With my mother’s image still scalding, I picked up the phone and was startled to hear her voice. ‘Hello, Xiaolu, is now a good time to talk?’ I greeted her nervously. Why was she ringing? Was my father dying? Or was my brother getting a divorce? But my mother’s tone was unusually positive. She told me that my father had just undergone yet more surgery for his cancer, but was recovering well after the procedure. I felt guilty whenever I heard such news. But she hadn’t phoned to tell me this.

  ‘Your father and I are coming to stay.’

  ‘What? Where?’ I asked, still not comprehending.

  ‘In Britain!’ Ying Guo, the Chinese name for my new home, literally, English Land. Was she practising witchcraft? I thought for a moment. Had she somehow sensed that I had just lost my Chinese passport and was now a British citizen?

  But they didn’t even have passports, let alone visas. How could they come here? I heard my mother still talking, an upbeat tone in her voice.

  ‘Remember your father had all those admirers of his paintings? He told one of them that he had always hoped, before he died, to go to Europe, visit his daughter, and to see those galleries and museums he had always read about.’

  ‘What about passports?’ I asked impatiently.

  ‘This man, your father’s admirer, is a big deal in international shipping. It was easy for him. He managed to arrange passports and visas for us. He even wanted to help us with the tickets. We’re so grateful to him. We’re flying next Tuesday.’

  ‘What!’ I couldn’t think of anything else to say. There had been no warning, no discussion about this.

  ‘Have you got a spare room for us?’ my mother said, sensing my hestitation.

  ‘Er … yes.’ I muttered, lying.

  ‘Should we bring anything for you from Wenling? Have you got a rice cooker yet?’

  ‘Yes. Yes. I’ve got everything here.’ I couldn’t believe it, eight years had passed and my mother was still asking me about rice cookers.

  The rest of the day I spent in a manic daze. I hadn’t I told my parents much about my life in the West. They would find it utterly pathetic and insubstantial: renting a room in a shared house, no car, no fixed job, no family, not even a permanent boyfriend. The Hackney area I lived in was very dilapidated, with beggars shuffling along its dirty streets. I knew my mother would be disappointed. There would be no way for me to pretend that I was living in a rich area, the Queen’s land where everybody lived in affluence. And, of course, I could never tell them that I had lost my Chinese citizenship. It would be inconceivable for them.

  Yet, as I went out to buy a spare mattress for their stay, I thought: this will be their first ever trip abroad and probably their last. Maybe it was the only chance to improve our relationship. Or perhaps it was too late. We had always been like this, ever since they had abandoned me as a baby and then I had abandoned them as my adult life took over far away. There had always been a separation. It was the pattern in our family.

  An Old Couple in a Land of Wonders

  The day came. After a long, miserable flight, my parents walked through the arrival gate at Heathrow with two large suitcases, the very picture of two Chinese peasants lost among the urban Westerners. Their clothes were shabby and wrinkled, their bodies stiff and disorientated. I noticed that my mother had dyed her grey hair black, and my father looked much skinnier than I remembered. After what felt like an endless taxi ride across London from the west to the east, we eventually arrived. Staring at the mountains of rubbish bags and graffitied walls in the courtyard, they silently entered the flat. Instantly they realised that there was nothing much for them to see in my Western home: a small kitchen and a tiny bedroom, no chaise longue, no super-wide leather sofa, only a leaky bathroom without the marble basin or glass walls that were obligatory in the house of a Chinese entrepreneur. The rest of the flat comprised a narrow corridor and my flatmate’s bedroom. I had put a brand-new single mattress in the corridor, where I would sleep.

  ‘I feel so unreal coming to England,’ my mother reflected, sitting down on a chair. ‘On the plane, after flying five or six hours, I kept thinking, what if we actually took the wrong flight? So I got up from my seat and found the air stewardess. I asked her: “Where is this plane going?” She stared at me like I had two heads. She opened her eyes wide and asked: “Where are you going?” I thought, I won’t tell her that I wanted to go to London, in case she says something different. So I didn’t answer her. Then she got really serious and asked me again. I had to tell her London. She said that was where the plane was going and I shouldn’t keep asking.’

  I was about to laugh, but stopped myself when I saw my mother’s troubled expression.

  Opening their suitcases, the first thing my mother showed me was their travel insurance papers. ‘Keep this! In case anything happens to us.’

  I glanced down. The title read ‘Certificate for Overseas Emergency and Medical Insurance’. I started scanning what was covered.

  Mortal remains handling benefit:

  1. repatriation of mortal remains (approximately 100,000 yuan)

  2. repatriation of ashes (approximately 2,000 yuan)

  3. local burial (20,000 yuan according to current British service costs)

  I stopped and gasped. I didn’t want to read through the rest. They were bringing death with them from China to England. I told my mother to keep the documents safe in her suitcase, hinting that way I would know where to find them in case of emergency. For them to die here, in a foreign land, would be the saddest thing that could happen to them.

  As I was making some tea for my parents, they began pulling their belongings one by one from the suitcases: hot-water bottle, tea, raincoat, hat … I brought my father a cup of tea. He was standing by the bedroom window, looking outside. The view was of a large, rusty Victorian gasometer tank on the banks of the industrial canal. Now it was abandoned, one of the ‘landmarks’ of east London according to local estate agents. Many English people seemed attached to this sort of industrial clutter, but I had never been a fan of the rust-belt urban aesthetic. Urban people in London sometimes seemed to take bleakness as a charming feature; it felt strange for us Chinese. My father was visibly disappointed by the view. He must have been wondering: where are the famous English rose gardens and rivers? I wanted to tell him that they were in the rich parts of the city, but I didn’t say anything. Instead, I drew the curtains across the view outside and handed my father the cup.

  ‘You must be one of the people they would call poor here,’ my mother’s voice announced behind me.

  ‘No, I’m not poor.
Didn’t you see the beggars on Hackney Road? They are poor. I’m doing fine here.’ I tried to educate my mother about the reality of living in a big city like London, but I knew she had already made up her mind. She judged everything on first appearances. Like most Chinese, she assumed that a decently well-off person would own a Gucci bag or a pair of Prada shoes, at the very least. She couldn’t understand that I found these empty labels disgusting; they reminded me that the world was flooded – no, being swallowed up – by expensive but superfluous products. I didn’t want to argue with my mother, however, so I returned to the kitchen to keep an eye on dinner. My father began to splutter and struggle for breath, that sort of very particular cough developed after a laryngeal cancer operation. My mother immediately fetched his medicine.

  ‘It’s a miracle that your father has survived this long. I can’t stop thanking Heaven,’ my mother mumbled as she handed my father some pills: ‘But his operation cost us a fortune. We got the bill from the hospital a week later and the total was 640,000 yuan! I didn’t dare show your father. Can you imagine that? Can anyone’s life be worth 640,000 yuan? Maybe only Chairman Mao deserved such a sum! Even so, he only made it to eighty-three!’

  ‘So what did you do with the bill in the end?’ I asked.

  ‘We couldn’t pay it of course! I took it straight to the town hall and asked to meet the mayor. They received me and listened to my plea. Given your father’s reputation, the local government couldn’t ignore his situation so they paid 80 per cent of it. Without that, we would have had no choice but to wait for our very last breath.’

  Since the day my father had lost the ability to speak, my mother had done all the talking for him. ‘Still aching from that enormous bill, we went back to the hospital and asked them how long your father would last after this operation. They said maybe three to four years. Maybe? They like to use words like that, don’t they? That’s why we’re walking around without our heads these days.’

  As we sat down to eat, my mother brought out a present for me: a large glass jar of roasted red chilli peppers in oil. ‘You must be missing this,’ she said. She knew I had been fond of spicy food in my younger years, even though I had lived without it for so long now.

  Our first family dinner together in London was simple: chicken noodle soup with vegetables. They ate in full concentration. As they drained the last bit of soup from their bowls, my mother began telling me about my brother. ‘We had such high hopes for your brother, but you turned out better,’ she sighed, clearly disheartened. ‘He’s still an alcoholic, still bad-tempered. Not much has changed. But since he moved away from us and got married we haven’t had to face his problems every day. All I can say is that without his wife, he couldn’t function. She is a good woman, so I can’t really complain.’

  What could I say? I knew my brother had disappointed my parents because he had never managed to ‘become someone’, which was all any ordinary Chinese family hoped for a son. I barely knew him anyway. He was someone from my past, not someone I desired to have intimate contact with. I knew my brother had just had a baby girl, and his wife had given up her job as a hotel receptionist in order to take care of the family. There was only one person in our family still drifting along, who had contributed no money or grandchildren for the elderly, and that person was me. I was struck by the guilt of my unfilial behaviour every time I spoke to them. But I kept telling myself: they knew too well that I was never going to be the one to sit beside them as they lay on their deathbed.

  An Arranged Marriage

  There was an unwelcome strangeness in sleeping in a flat with my aged parents lying on the other side of the wall. I couldn’t remember the last time our bodies had been so close in the darkness. It felt like premature burial, as if my body had been covered in a thick blanket of earth and I now lay breathless and imprisoned. We were here in my flat in London, but the presence of my parents had transported me back to the family home in Wenling, to the stifling summer nights with their droning mosquitoes and ghostly shadows cast by naked light bulbs. I was an unhappy daughter there, but I had escaped all that – I had made a new life as far as I could from my old life. I didn’t like feeling that it was coming back to me, even though now my mother was old and weak and could never again raise her hand to beat me. But I don’t think she ever regretted how she treated me, I was sure about that. Yes, I forgave her. Or rather I accepted the past, just as she now accepted the daughter I had become. Yet I could hear her snoring, fast asleep, as I lay awake and restless. I could hear my father’s lungs rattling with phlegm, and him getting up in the night. All I could think about was whether he would survive long enough to make it back to China, or die here an exile, his body returned lifeless in a box on the plane. I pictured my mother’s accusing eyes, the crease on her forehead knotted in judgement. I had killed my father by seducing him over the ocean to this senseless continent.

  I survived the night, and took my parents to a nearby cafe the next morning for a full English breakfast. Food would bring us closer, I thought. But my parents looked bemused by the contents of their plates: cooked tomatoes with fried sausage, tinned beans and mashed potatoes.

  ‘The cook must have made this meal based on a nutrition wheel,’ my mother said, her eyes moving from the plate to the knife and fork that lay beside it.

  I went to the counter and asked for two big spoons.

  ‘Don’t they eat buns and wonton soup in the morning here?’ My mother took the spoon from me, turning to see if there were other options. Around us, an old pensioner was eating alone, his plate indistinguishable from ours. My mother resigned herself to the food in front of her. But they seemed to like it, and before long everything was gone apart from the mashed potatoes. As my father chewed on his last oily sausage, my mother began to look restless and impatient – something was nagging at her. I could see that she was about to say something serious. She wiped her hands on a napkin, fished out some photographs from her pocket and laid them in front of me.

  At first I didn’t pay any attention to the photographs, but as my mother sat there wordlessly I was forced to ask: ‘Who are they?’

  She separated the photos and looked at me meaningfully. ‘Take a good look. Which of these men do you like?’

  I couldn’t believe my ears. So that was why she had come! I was still sure that my father wanted to visit me and see Europe, but now I knew she had her own reason too. She was here to marry me off!

  Partly to satisfy her with a perfunctory response and partly to amuse myself, I looked down at the photographs. There were five portraits altogether, printed on glossy paper. They all wore nice clothes, aged somewhere between thirty-five and fifty. One or two looked like well-to-do businessmen. The others looked like privileged white-collar workers. Four of them stood in front of grand examples of European architecture.

  ‘Do these men live in China, or do they have green cards in the West?’ I joked.

  ‘What do you think?’ My mother was almost offended. ‘Do you really think your mother would choose some peasants for you? Or that I would force you to return to China? They all live in Europe, and are very successful businessmen. It took me a very long time to get their contacts and photos for you!’ My mother gulped down her tea with some indignation.

  My father was shaking his head slightly. I knew he was innocent of any of this. He never got involved in my mother’s plans for my ‘future’.

  ‘I’m quite sure you’ve spent lots of time and energy on this!’ I said. sarcastically. ‘But where do they come from? I mean, how did you find them? Online?’ I asked, shuffling the photos in disbelief.

  ‘Online? Internet? No! You know we don’t even know what a computer is. But your parents have lived in Wenling for more than sixty years and we know all the wealthy families in town. We’ve got two million people living in Wenling, so it’s not that difficult to dig out five decent families with unmarried sons living abroad!’

  By now, my mother had emptied her cup and wanted a refill.

&n
bsp; ‘I know you think your home town is just some tiny shitty place. But it’s not like that any more. We’ve got lots of millionaires, even billionaires! The city government has collected statistics and they say around six thousand people from Wenling have emigrated to the West. Most of them are very well-established entrepreneurs in the USA and Europe.’

  I was forced to go through each photo as my mother gave the commentary. Her greasy fingers smeared across the cheeks of one of the smiling Chinese men.

  ‘This is the cousin of my friend from the silk factory,’ she went on enthusiastically. ‘He now lives in Spain, somewhere near the sea, I was told. He runs two restaurants and he also owns a vintage furniture shop. Apparently he has very high standards when it comes to girlfriends, and has never been married. Isn’t that rare these days? Although he is five years younger than you, I thought you might give him a try. His mother will make an introduction, or I will. Look here, that’s his name, contact number and email address,’ my mother said as she turned over the photo.

  Then she moved on to the next one.

  ‘And this one, isn’t he handsome? His name is Jiang Qinglin and he’s seven years older than you. Good age for a man. He lives somewhere in Italy and runs a clothing factory. There is only one con with this one: his mother’s sister told me he’s divorced and has a child with his ex-wife. Maybe that’s not so important. He’s single now and his aunt told me he’s looking for a girlfriend who also lives abroad. Britain and Italy are not so far apart, are they? I haven’t had time to look at a map yet … ‘