It’s early afternoon. Iona has retreated to her bathroom and to a warm bath. Reclining in the steamy water, she reads a letter. Often when a certain frustration colours her mind, slipping into a hot bath seems the only way forward. There’s a delicate, musical drip from the tap, and the paint is peeling away from the ceiling in orange-peel curls. The flat needs serious work but her landlord is dismissive at best. The page she is holding with one dry hand is covered with doodles, black ink mixed with blue. Large characters. She recognises Kublai Jian’s scrawl. Here and there the words have been furiously crossed out.
It’s a difficult text. Iona strains to understand. Jian seems very angry, and she doesn’t totally comprehend some of the idiom he uses. She feels stressed. The Chinese seem to love using old, formal idiom, even when a young person is writing. But there is also masses of text written in a very colloquial way, as if it were a blog or an email dashed off in a rush. Nightmare if you’re trying to produce some sort of stylistic coherence in the translation! Modern Chinese colloquial idiom is the worst, she thinks. Her dictionaries are no help in deciphering many of Jian’s expressions. There are so many basic difficulties in translating Chinese into English, Iona thinks. No tense differentiation; no conjugation of verbs; no articles, no inversion in questions—and I have to invent all this and add it to fit the translation. She gets out of the bath, the water having lost its reviving quality, puts on her dressing gown and wraps her hair in a towel.
People say that islanders and mainlanders have very different ways of thinking. There is some truth in this. Islanders contemplate the distant shore, and want to communicate with the rest of the world, but mainlanders often don’t feel the need. That seems to be the case when it comes to Jian—he seems to think he’s the mainlander and the rest mere islanders. His writing is much more difficult to grasp than that of the Chinese girl writing from Shanghai.
There’s no curtain in Iona’s south-facing window and the afternoon sun cooks her head. She lurches unsteadily into the kitchen and turns on the tap. Letting the unfiltered Thames water run for fifteen seconds, she drinks a mouthful of the cold liquid. She stretches, puts on a Debussy CD and sits back down. As the piano music flows she types out a rough translation of Jian’s letter.
March 2012
Dearest Mu,
Your letter reached me, but from Shanghai, old bastard sky! Someone with a kind soul transferred it from my old Lincolnshire address. Try to send another one to my Dover address—and soon! I don’t know how long I will be here, but send another one anyway. The more you send, the better chance I have of receiving them. It’s a ping-pong game!
OK, I will try to be sensible: no manifesto or ideology for now. But in exchange, you are not allowed to mention my “father” again. NO MORE. I have no father. I have said that a thousand times. For me, he is long dead.
So, my first question to you: how long are you going to stay in Shanghai before you return to Beijing? Second question: how is your father now? Better or worse? Don’t tell me he is dying—I don’t believe he will die. He will last longer than you think—he may even last longer than me, you will see! And now: my situation.
Thinking of you makes me “zhou—
.” [Translator’s note: not sure what this means. It’s a new colloquial expression I’ve not heard before.] It’s hard thinking about you and our life together, with me here in this brown-brick world. Despite everything that’s happened, despite all our time apart, the image I carry of you is of us sitting on our windy balcony looking down into Dongsi Hutong; or you on the sofa in the living room and me in the broken rattan chair where I used to play my guitar; the red paper lamp you made with film posters; those insane cockroaches wrecking the kitchen cardboards (oh how they loved your instant noodles!). And how could I ever forget the view through the window to distant blue-green Xiang Mountain, and beneath it the capital circled by the ringroads and choked with people and traffic. I miss it all badly. Here in this wet and gloomy country I’m a man of nothing. Merely a registration number: UK66034–GH568. I’ve even learned to recite it.
I still know so little about this country. The only thing here worth mentioning is that I found an English edition of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital on one of the dusty shelves in the Detention Centre library. I tried to make out the English by picturing that Chinese translation we read at school. What a different book it is in English! Now I feel like I never understood Marx, and maybe all of China doesn’t understood what Das Kapital is really about.
Some light stuff for you—a poor man’s sightseeing! I rode their underground train twice (they call it “Tube,” like in a sausage factory) and it was utterly depressing to be in their sausage tubes. Everyone looked like they had tax problems or couldn’t afford their electricity bills. Graveyard faces. Old bastard sky! If I could choose, I would prefer to be punished in a different place. Somewhere like … a Siberian forest. Sometimes I wonder, would it be better to be sent to the Gulag, like those Soviet convicts were? To lay a railway line along the Arctic Ocean, or fell trees in forests of snow? At least in those conditions a man feels he is a man and he is using his body and his hands. Or am I being stupid again?
And this Dover camp is crammed with lost souls—from the Middle East, from Africa—all seeking protection under the British flag. But I doubt they really want to live on this rainy, windy, gloomy island. It’s like being a dog that sits where his master tells him to sit. That’s how it is here. But I should not make you worry about me. At least I’m still fit and I eat three meals a day. (The problem is they don’t have chillies; each meal comes with a different form of potato, but you know potatoes are potatoes: even if you treat them like chicken legs they still taste of potato. So I told them that they should get this clear: either potato or no potato but definitely not potato-pretending-to-be-something-else.) Apart from that, my mind is still working, busy and restless, just like those words we used to recite from Frankenstein: “My courage and my resolution are firm, but my hopes fluctuate and my spirits are often depressed.” These are the perfect lines to describe my mood.
—“love” is the most simple and complicated word I can say to you now. I shall write more to you tomorrow.
Your Peking Man,
Jian