by Xiaolu Guo
I watched my father tear a piece from the side of his cardboard container and try to write something on it.
‘So was this where they held gladiatorial contests? They really watched people killing each other for fun?’
‘Yes,’ I answered, ‘but that was two thousand years ago!’ Then, after a brief pause, ‘Didn’t we do that in China too?’
I reminded my parents that only seventy years ago, the death penalty was carried out in public in China, especially in local markets. People would rush to watch the decapitations. Perhaps my father had seen a few heads roll when he was a child. But maybe he hadn’t found it amusing. I didn’t want to ask. After all, the Colosseum had also served as the venue for sophisticated theatre performances and other glorious events.
We stayed in Rome for three days, wandering from one medieval fountain to another. I liked the energy of Rome – it was messy, alive, spectacular and radiant. It reminded me of the China I used to know. And yet Beijing had gone down the opposite path: every morsel of history apart from the Forbidden City had been gobbled up by rapid modernisation. My father was fond of Rome too, he had always loved old architecture and traditional ways of life. The European cities satisfied his notion of cultural inheritance. I could sense regret in my father’s gaze – we had nothing like this in China. Yet my mother was totally oblivious. She had never heard of the Roman Empire, and she missed her rice and noodles. All she wanted was to go home as soon as possible.
As we rode out to the airport, I felt a tension from my mother. She wanted to talk about something with me, but she couldn’t find a way.
‘Xiaolu,’ she said eventually, ‘you’re not young any more. You have to think about children, before it’s too late.’
‘But I’ve told you, Mother, I don’t want children.’
My mother fell silent and stared at her hands. Then, all of sudden, she started talking about my brother, or rather, his dead child. I had never been told about this. I didn’t even know my brother’s wife had been pregnant before their current daughter.
‘It aged your brother overnight. Really. His hair turned white from the shock and distress.’
My father looked away, casting his eyes upon the passing landscape outside the train window. Perhaps he didn’t want to hear this story again. Perhaps he wasn’t even listening.
‘What happened?’ I asked, a bit fearfully.
‘Well, no one wants to be reminded about it. I never mention it in front of your brother and his wife. But I guess the story won’t bother you that much.’
I nodded my head bitterly. Yes, sure, I was the selfish daughter who cared nothing for her family. Why should she be affected by another unpleasant story that had ripped at their hearts?
‘Sixteen months ago, your brother’s wife was due to give birth. The ultrasound machine said it would be a boy. Imagine how happy your father and I felt! Our only grandson, we thought, since we couldn’t expect you to give us any. On the day she went into labour, the child was delivered but he didn’t look well. He was deformed. The hospital told us that the baby would die within hours and we should know that there was no hope. Your brother and his wife were in tears. They couldn’t cope. I looked at the poor, dying little animal and told them I would take care of the rest. They shouldn’t worry about the baby any more. So I took the little one home, thinking that would be a good way of preventing them seeing the deformed thing again. When I got home, the little baby was still breathing. I wrapped him in a little blanket and put him on the sofa. I thought I should go to the shop to buy some milk for him. I went out very quickly and as soon as I got back with the bottle, I saw the baby was dead in the blanket. There was no breath coming out from his little nose. Nothing. I thought to myself, that’s it. The poor thing has died. Now what do I do?’
My mother paused, as if seeing the dead baby before her eyes. I was utterly gripped, and unable to say anything in response.
‘Then I thought, I better borrow a spade and bury him. I didn’t want your brother and his wife to witness it once they returned from the hospital. So I went to the neighbours to ask if anyone had a spade. One of them lent me a small one. I went back home, wrapped the baby in a plastic bag and went straight to the hill behind our house. I found a quiet spot where there were some bamboo. It took me at least half an hour to dig a hole for the poor thing. Then I buried him there. When I returned home, your brother and his wife were still at the hospital. I phoned them and they told me that the mother was too weak to walk. I said, don’t worry, I’ve already dealt with the baby. They could forget about the whole thing now.’
‘They never asked what happened to the baby’s body?’ I was astonished.
‘Never! Do you think they really wanted to know? It would have haunted them day and night. They thought the hospital and I had made some arrangement. Your brother was destroyed. He never mentioned the child again, but you could see what it had done to him, his hair had gone white. I told him: don’t brood on this! Once your wife recovers you should try to conceive again. Time will heal it. And now, you see, they have a healthy girl. So far, they are coping well. Heaven bless the little one.’
Rome International Departures was crowded with families. As my parents waved goodbye at the gate, my mind couldn’t erase the image of the spade. My mother carrying the dead baby in a plastic bag and digging a hole for her newborn grandson. A spade. What a tool! Perhaps only my mother could have managed such a tragedy with such practical efficiency. She didn’t mention praying or weeping after putting him in the hole, or if she ever secretly visited the grave again.
I wandered around Fiumicino Airport alone, I didn’t know where to go now. The camera in my backpack was heavy and my shoulders hurt. My flight to London was the following day and I would have to find a way to kill time until then. I thought about the moment my mother gave me away. Thirty-eight years ago now. She would have done that with practical efficiency too, whether or not she had done so cold-heartedly or wept I would never know. Perhaps she walked with me in her arms, up into the mountains, until she found the Wong family house? Or perhaps she took a long-distance bus to get there? Or perhaps the couple were waiting in the labour ward while my mother was giving birth? This too I would never know. She would never tell me. Silence was the way we communicated, a family tradition carried down to my brother and me from my parents and their parents. My father’s silence after his throat cancer operation was just another version. Silence was common in Chinese culture, it served a purpose. Never mention the tragedies, and never question them. Move on, get on with life, since you couldn’t change the fact of your birth.
Father’s Final Departure
While my parents had been with me, I had keenly felt their presence as an imposition – as if they were an uncomfortable shirt I had to wear pricking my skin, or hair constantly in my eyes blocking my vision. It was like the smell of my mother always in my nostrils, that I have to clear. But as the days passed after their departure, a sense of nakedness returned to me, and their absence became another unwanted presence. Some part of me wanted to reach out to my father, and inside I felt I was having a conversation with him, even though he was now mute. It struck me that my father didn’t know me at all. He knew fragments of a girl, of a child, of a young woman. Perhaps he recognised parts of himself in me. I would never know what my father really saw in me. He would die. He would take his images of me into himself and expire with them, and they would be burnt up with his body on the day of cremation.
Three months after my parents’ European tour, I received a phone call from a hospital in Shanghai where my father was hospitalised. My mother told me to fly back immediately. I dropped everything in London and flew to Shanghai and went straight to my father’s cancer ward. His deterioration was shocking – he had become skeletal and was depressed and in despair about the end. The cancer had viciously spread to his bones, and he was on daily doses of morphine. But it had now lost its effect and the pain was all-consuming. He could still recognise me, but his eye
s were no longer the eyes I knew. Now he was a man far away from the things he loved: art, painting and nature. Expressionless and motionless, he was preparing himself for death.
The father I remembered, the father I had kept with me all these years, was a man who never felt depressed and never gave up hope. He hated the very idea. He told me once that he couldn’t understand how people could commit suicide since life was so precious. He rarely discussed my grandfather’s suicide. For the last decade, cancer had reared its head many times. But each time he had fought back. Every day for the last twenty years, apart from his days in hospital, he had got up at five in the morning, walked through the fresh dawn wind to the mountain near our house and practised qigong, before going to his studio to paint. We always believed that as long as he painted and created, he would not surrender to death. ‘Art is bigger than life’, that’s what he told us when we were young, and that was how he had always conducted himself. But now, he could no longer even lift his pen. Had the art died already in his body and in his mind? Or had he come to the conclusion that his will could no longer rule over his body?
He slept most of that final week. His face blank and dull. Occasionally he opened his eyes and made manifest the miserable pain his body was suffering. I tried to make him recall the happy moments in his life, such as his recent trip to Europe. ‘Father, do you remember Van Gogh’s house in France? Van Gogh?’ No response. ‘His bedroom was so small that it could only take a little bed!’ My father looked at me with his sunken eyes and I stopped asking him stupid questions. Tears fell down my cheeks. I went out and stood in the corridor, waiting for the tears to stop. As each minute passed, I knew his body was shutting down. He died the next morning, with our family around his deathbed.
On the English south coast, filming She, A Chinese, 2008
PART V | In the Face of Birth and Death
Decades before, when Xuanzang and his disciples left for India, China was the most prosperous country in the whole world. By the time they returned, the country was in turmoil: warlords in different regions were fighting against each other and the population had shrunk by half. Greed was the main force now dominating the once glorious land. Rumour reported that the emperor was on his deathbed. Xuanzang and Wukong the monkey were shocked by the cries and lamentations from the people in the streets of the capital city Chang-an. There were beggars everywhere. They saw children naked in the cold air and adults starving to death. In the Imperial Palace they found the emperor lying in his bed, ancient and diseased, coughing up the last of his blood.
The emperor’s spirits lifted as his eyes came to rest upon Xuanzang. Yet he felt his death might come at any moment. He said to Xuanzang: ‘The country has lost its prosperity and faith because the people have had no strong spiritual force to guide them for all these years. It will be your mission to bring the people of the Tang Dynasty together again.’ The emperor summoned all his officials to win their support for Xuanzang’s appointed task. They would build monasteries and libraries to assist the master monk. The court felt the return of optimism about the future, and vowed to the emperor that they would do everything to encourage the right spirit in the country.
After the emperor died Xuanzang left the court and was ready to dedicate his life to the translation of the scriptures. Before his departure, he asked Wukong to join him. Knowing the monkey’s favourite fruit was peach, he suggested that they plant ten thousand peach trees around his Buddhist temple. But Wukong, the Emptiness Knower, having witnessed too many human tragedies, shook his head and said:
‘Neither eternal peaches nor countless nuts would promise happiness for me, because my mind has been so infected by human unhappiness.’
He begged his master to let him return to being a free creature, so he could go back to the wild without seeing another human being. Xuanzang accepted the monkey’s plea, but he also pointed out that now the monkey had become the Emptiness Knower, he would no longer be a savage creature.
The monkey bowed to his master, then bowed to the four directions of the world. Off he leapt, fast as lightning, light as a spring wind, riding on a pink cloud howling joyfully. In the blink of an eye, he disappeared into the ethereal mist above the East China Sea, dissolving with a cracking pop. For a long while, only a mauve glow remained on the horizon, like a luminous face spread across the sky with its ever alive spirit, playful but profound.
With Moon, two months old, 2013
A Mother
Even though I still continue to travel and live in different places across Europe and America, I have really spent the last decade in London. This is where I have made myself a home. It seems to me that people decide to settle somewhere not because they love the place, but because they value and cherish what they have invested in it. I often imagine myself as a fern, growing in a cool climate under the filtered sunlight. Most of the time there is deep shade and plenty of heavy raindrops falling from the sky onto my leaves. These are conditions for flourishing – perfect conditions for ferns, and how they have lived for millions of years. Perhaps I could learn something from them.
I met Steve, a philosopher from Australia, in east London. Perhaps our coming together was inevitable. We both lived around our local park, London Fields: he in a flat by the west gate, me by the east gate. We both wrote our books in local cafes. We first noticed each other in a Greek cafe and instantly felt a mutual attraction. Perhaps it was because we found ourselves discussing Sartre and Buddhism during our very first conversation. He stirred something in me. I felt like I was back at the Beijing Film Academy hanging out with those hard-headed artists again. A silly exchange on our first meeting was a sign of what was to come:
‘So do you, an Australian, think your country is in Asia or in some other continent?’ I asked, half joking.
‘You mean, is Australia part of the East or the West?’ Steve adjusted my question.
I laughed, and nodded.
‘Well, it’s part of Oceania. But what is Oceania? A bunch of colonised islands whose identities have been taken over by European influence. Islanders on the wrong side of history,’ he said, almost serious.
‘But you still haven’t answered my question,’ I insisted.
He thought for a few seconds, then said, ‘I prefer the idea that Australia belongs to Asia. Aboriginal culture is really alien to us Westerners, ours is more like “white fella culture”. We took their land, and pretend that we are still living in the West.’
The cafe was not really the place for such a discussion, and if truth be told, we were not really taking the discussion too seriously anyway. Clearly, something else was going on. I cut the debate short. ‘I really miss eating seaweed.’ We agreed to meet two hours later at a Japanese restaurant.
The next few weeks passed in a crazed longing. Nights spent alone in our respective flats were unbearable. ‘What is this incompleteness?’ we asked ourselves, under our own, separate duvets. Love was in the air, and we realised we had to give it a space to grow. We found a flat, still right next to our favourite park. Despite being so far away from the places we had grown up, we often looked at the weather reports in Beijing and Melbourne. I cooked Chinese food for almost every meal. Steve would describe the beauty of the forest and the water in Tasmania. ‘You can stand in the shallows and pick wild oysters straight from the seabed and eat them right there,’ he murmured in a dreamy state. Clearly, nostalgia makes itself felt in the stomach. Salty samphire took me back to the beach in Shitang and its green-brown bed of kelp. In the evenings we ate rice and fried tofu with chopsticks while watching BBC4. ‘Why don’t they ever talk about China?’ I complained. Television was repetitive, seemingly always about royalty or fashions from the dim recesses of British history. Perhaps the Hairy Bikers were discovering Cantonese stir-fries in Hong Kong, but that was the extent of content about my homeland. The programmes made me feel unfulfilled, and stupid.
I had spent the last decade with one foot in each world: West and East. I couldn’t say I was fully here, and I c
ertainly wasn’t fully there. Of course I found myself longing for the sounds of my childhood and its familiar flavours. But I swallowed that longing. I told myself: I have lost my country and I am in exile, even if it is self-imposed. My work is all I have and my work is my only meaningful identity. But is that enough? Am I really living fully? I questioned myself repeatedly. Perhaps I will build something else with Steve, in this foreign land. Build something together – a physical home. But what did that mean exactly for someone like me?
I had decided at a young age that I didn’t want to have children. I didn’t want to become another one of those mothers, trapped in domesticity, and disrespected by her husband. It wasn’t a decision borne out of a militant feminism; it was totally personal. Those years living in my grandparents’ house by the sea had been a hard lesson. The domestic violence that surrounded me then felt so inescapable that I couldn’t imagine there could be a positive version of domesticity ahead of me, especially if I became a mother. Witnessing how my grandfather abused my grandmother and her silence after the beatings had left a painful conviction in my head: family life was awful and being a woman was awful. And my time in the West hadn’t convinced me yet that there could be another type of womanhood, one in which women were respected inside and outside the home, where women were not merely child producers, and where they could fall in love again even after having become mothers. My growing environmental awareness only added more fuel to the argument for not having children. And the logic of never-ending consumption didn’t just harm the environment, but actually killed people too. In 2008, a scandal came to light about 54,000 Chinese babies hospitalised after drinking formula milk adulterated with melamine. It was just another terrible incident of which we heard more and more every day. To bring more humans into the world would only add to an already threatened planet.
