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Xiaolu Guo has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

Many thanks to Eva Hoffman for permission to quote from Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (Heinemann, London: 1989). Extract from ‘MCMXIV’, The Whitsun Weddings © Estate of Philip Larkin and reprinted by permission of Faber & Faber.

For Marguerite Duras,
who gave me the faith to become an artist
during my low and hard years of struggle in South China

The soul can shrivel from an excess of critical distance, and if I don’t want to remain in arid internal exile for the rest of my life, I have to find a way to lose my alienation without losing myself.

EVA HOFFMAN

The Past is a Foreign Country

A wanderer, uprooted and displaced. A nomad in both body and mind. This was what I had become since leaving China for the West. It had been fifteen years of transit, change, forgetting and adapting. Then all of a sudden, at the age of forty, my belly was expanding. The earth had begun to exert a pull on me, a pull towards motherhood. On the second day of 2013, I found myself lying on an operating table in a hospital in London, my body hooked up by wires and tubes to a bank of humming machines. I was about to burst, literally. The moment the baby girl was pulled from my womb by Caesarean section I heard a cry – a sound that was at once familiar, but utterly surprising. There she was. Wrapped in a new towel with her wet, bruised little face against my breast. I embraced her with wonder and fear. This is good, I thought. This child will be rooted here. She will be a grounded person, unlike me, a peripatetic peasant, a cultural orphan.

Twenty minutes after delivery, we were wheeled into the maternity ward, filled with newborns and new mothers. Still in a haze of morphine, I heard all sorts of languages being spoken around me: Hindi, Arabic, German, Spanish, Polish. I remained in the hospital for the next three days, dressed in only a thin gown, trying to breastfeed and struggling to use the bathroom, shocked to see so much blood flowing out of me.

On the fourth day, when we arrived back home, I was surprised by a sudden urge to call my mother. I hadn’t mentioned to her that I was pregnant once in those long nine months. As was typical of our relationship, we hadn’t spoken in a while.

I dialled the dreaded number, embedded so deeply in my mind I could recite it in my dreams.

‘Oh, Xiaolu. I wasn’t expecting your call.’ Then immediately, ‘Where are you?’

‘What’s wrong? Why are you calling?’ She was direct, almost rude. She had served as a Red Guard at the age of sixteen, a coarse and uneducated girl straight out of the rice fields. I always assumed that was one of the reasons we never got along.

‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘I wanted to let you know …’ I found myself tongue-tied and unable to bring myself to say it. ‘I just gave birth to a healthy baby girl.’

After a few seconds of silence from her end, I thought she might at least ask the name of the baby, but instead she said, ‘Are you coming back for Qingming Festival?’

Qingming is a day in April when we pay our respects to the dead. We sweep their tombs, burn incense and pray. I said nothing, only listened to her angry sobs through the telephone.

‘You should come back! You don’t even know where your father is buried! I want to move your grandmother’s ashes from the village and put them next to your father. You should come back for this.’

This time, I thought, I have no excuse not to go. None. I might as well go and pay a debt of filial duty, once and for all. It’s only a twelve-hour flight. I can do it. My whole adult life I had avoided going back to my childhood home as much as possible. Shitang, the fishing village where I witnessed my grandparents’ depression and poverty, was a place I came to loathe. Wenling, where I spent my adolescent years, the cradle for my troubled relationship with authority, repelled me. When I left to study in Beijing in 1993, I promised myself: that’s it, I will never return to this stifling backwater again. Ten years later, when I left China for Britain, I said to myself: from now on, no more ideological brainwashing. I’m not going to let myself be tripped up by my rotten peasant roots. But the time had come to face the past. To try to explain to my family how I had lived all these years. After all, I would have to explain it to my little daughter one day too. Just like James Baldwin said: tell it, go tell it to the mountain, tell it to your native kin, to the dead souls and the living souls. I would have to face them, one by one. No escape.

So, five days before Qingming Festival, I wrapped my newborn as warmly as I could and took a flight back to where my life began.

Once upon a time, there was neither East nor West. There were neither animals nor human beings. Aeons passed. Water appeared. Algae and fish grew. Plants began to root themselves on sandy shores. Birds flew from one hill to another. More aeons passed – tigers, lions, phoenix, serpents, salamanders and tiny slithering creatures all found their quarters in the jungle to hunt and rest. But still, the world was quiet, as if waiting for some momentous event, the birth of some wicked and powerful creature. One day, Heaven’s Eyes saw a piece of five-coloured stone shining on a mountain in the east. The stone kept shining until suddenly it burst into pieces and a monkey jumped out from the dust. The monkey had a handsome face, four long limbs and a slim body. He moved about in the fresh mountain air as he looked around with enormous curiosity. He then bowed to each of the four quarters of the sky, expressing gratitude for his birth.

The little monkey explored his world with gaiety. He fed on bananas and peanuts and drank from brooks and springs. He made friends with tigers and leopards, sloths and baboons. But one autumn day when the sun was going down, he suddenly felt sad and burst into tears. He raised his eyes to the risen moon in the east. He felt lonely. A great urge inside him told him to do something deserving with his life. But he didn’t know what this great task could be. He stared at the moon slipping towards the west and fell asleep. During the night, he felt a drop of dew falling on his face. Then he heard someone speaking in his ear. The voice said:

‘Little creature, you are not an ordinary monkey. You were nourished by the five elements of this planet, and have received the energy of heaven and earth from the beginning of time. You are the force of human life. You need to find the human world and to help a monk called Xuanzang to obtain the purest Buddhist scripture on earth. Once the sutra is secured, humans will achieve real knowledge of life and death.’

The monkey woke up under the moonlight, his ears still echoing with these words. Through the fragrant banana leaves, he felt a polar star shooting light right into his forehead.

Village of Shitang, Zhejiang Province, where I spent my first seven years, 1970s

After I Was Born

I was born an orphan. Not because my parents had died, no, they were both still very much alive. Rather, they gave me away.

Of course, I don’t remember anything specific about my first two years. No one in my family does. As a newborn, I had been given to a peasant couple who lived in a mountain village somewhere in our province by the East China Sea. Many years later, I was told a story that my mother couldn’t raise me as my father had been imprisoned in a labour camp at the time. So that’s where I lived, on that mountainside, for the first two years of my life. The only memory I have is a false one, told to me by my grandparents, who recounted the day when the barren couple from the highlands brought me, the unwanted child, back down the mountain to them.

The couple had found out where my grandparents lived and taken the long-distance bus all the way to our humble home. The first thing they did was place me in my grandmother’s arms and say:

‘This little child will die if she continues living with us. She is dying. You can see that. We have nothing to eat. We only manage to grow fifty kilos of yam every autumn. But we need to save them to sell at the market. So we have been feeding her the mashed leaves. But every time she sees the green mush on the spoon she turns her head away, or spits it out. She refuses to eat anything green any more! You know we don’t have much rice, so the leaves are all we have. Look at her, her face is yellow and her limbs are weak. She never stops crying. She won’t eat. She won’t survive if she stays with us. So, take her back, we beg you! Take her back right now! We know we couldn’t conceive, but we don’t need a dying baby. We beg you to take her back!’

My grandparents were perplexed upon receiving me. They had nothing to say since they were not the ones who had sent me to this family in the first place. They took me without a word. From that day on, I lived with my grandparents by the sea, and my adopted parents returned to their yams, never to be heard of again. I was told later that the family bore the name Wong, that they lived on a mountain, with their yams, and apparently a few goats. Since the woman was infertile (or perhaps the man was infertile, but with peasants the woman is always to blame) she had no milk for me. I often wonder if she fed me with goat’s milk, or whether their goats produced any milk at all. In China at that time no one drank animal milk. We were all lactose-intolerant. They must have fed me with soya milk before I had teeth. What else could they have done with a starving baby whose mother had decided to give her away to a family with no milk? I will never know.

Years later, when I pored over the map of the province and tried to find the mountain village where my adopted parents might have lived, I was struck by how many there were, scattered across the country, and how many nameless places were marked only by obscure yellow and green dots. Thousands of named hamlets, and many more anonymous ones. Was it Diaotou? Pingshan? Yongjia? Hengshantou? Changshi? Shifou? I gave up. After closing the map, I was told that most of these villages had become construction sites for the expanding cities. Even the mountains had been decapitated, their peaks shaved off in order to make way for roads or quarries to provide for the country’s great development.

When I think of the first two years of my life, the image that spontaneously comes to mind is that of a small skinny goat trotting over bare mountains. Where is all the succulent grass that will satisfy her hunger? Where is the water to quench her thirst? The mountain is naked. There are only rocks and fertiliser-poisoned soil. But somehow the little goat managed to survive the impoverishment of her early life.

Grandfather

My grandfather was a bitter, failed fisherman. He was born in 1905, just one year before China’s Last Emperor Puyi was born. I don’t know if that was an ominous sign, an explanation for his fate – the last generation born under the imperial system was bound to be wiped out by new fashions. The day when he was born, his own father was apparently out at sea. In a fishing village, people say a child born while his father is at sea and the tide is rising will grow up to be a good fisherman. But the tide was receding when my grandfather emerged from his mother’s womb. He never told me this himself. Other villagers gossiped about it on benches in front of their houses. But after hearing this story, I never liked watching the tide go out.

My grandfather used to own a fishing boat, and was able to make a living from selling fish on the dock every few days. The boat was the only thing he ever cared for in his life. Nothing else mattered to him. His boat, like others in the village, was painted with two large eyes. The fishermen called them dragon eyes – a boat is a dragon that conquers the waves. The vivid colours scare away other sea creatures. Every few months, as was local practice, he would repaint the eyes a dark red, and retouch the black and blue lines along the body of the boat. From a distance, it looked like a gigantic tropical fish, with jewel-like power. Every now and then he reapplied a layer of tar, hoping that with a shiny new skin it would ride the waves like a whale. After a big catch, he let his boat bathe in the sun, fixing any broken bits, while my grandmother helped mend the fishing nets. Then he would launch the boat into the sea again, on one of those very early blue mornings. He would sail far offshore, even with limited petrol supplies. Sometimes he reached Gong Hai – the strait between mainland China and Taiwan – beyond which further navigation was forbidden. On the open water there were fewer vessels and he felt the sea belonged to him. The fish were more abundant and the eels fat and long. He would return two or three days later, sometimes quite exhausted, carrying a good catch.

In those days, no one in a Chinese fishing village would buy dead or even only half-dead fish – it was considered a bad deal. In our kitchen we cooked everything alive – preserving as much of the energy, the chi, from the sea as we could. So as the fishing boats were returning, my grandmother and the other fishermen’s wives would gather on the beach with buckets around their feet and wait. Once their husbands had hauled the boats in, the women would rush to separate the catch immediately. Shrimps went into one bucket, eels into another. Snapper were thrown into a basin of water, clams and crabs together in a large barrel, and so on. Within minutes, the fishmongers from the village markets would arrive to pick the freshest items, peeling greasy notes from their pockets. There was no need for negotiation – the prices of shrimp, crab and snapper were always the same. With eels, a delicacy in the south, prices fluctuated with the season and the difficulty of catching them.

But those were the good old days, when the villagers were free-for-all sea scavengers. Then, in the 1970s, the Communist government decided to construct the Fish Farming Collective. Individual boats like my grandfather’s were snatched away, to be ‘managed’ by the state. Fishermen were teamed together according to regional population, and then assigned a certain sector of the sea to fish in a big, industrial fishing boat. All catches belonged to the state, who would then distribute the harvest to every family according to a quota system. My grandfather was unhappy that his old way of life had been taken away, that time alone on his boat, away from the day-to-day grind and people he didn’t like. Besides, he would have had to learn industrial fishing techniques with people he had never met before, under state supervision and with everyone reporting on everyone else behind their backs. He didn’t have the character for that sort of life. He was a man born in the Qing Dynasty, the same age as our Last Emperor. For him, his days belonged to the Qing, not some quick-thinking Communist Party. So in the early 1970s, after his own boat was destroyed in a typhoon – one of those deadly storms that sweep up every summer from the South Pacific into the East China Sea – he gave up fishing. He became grumpy, spent his days drinking, and started hitting my grandmother regularly. From the age of three or four, I only really remember seeing him brooding in his room, a bottle glued to his palm.

Unfortunately, he had no other skills with which to make a living. He was starving and had virtually nothing to feed my grandmother and me. Then, one day, he found a big wooden board on a street corner. He took two benches from the kitchen and constructed a makeshift store outside our house. He would sell anything he could find – vegetables, pickled fish, shrimp paste, soap, nails and cigarettes. His cigarettes were a bit funny-looking, sold as singles, ‘treasures’ he found by the seashore. The cigarettes were originally packed tight in boxes like fancy Western biscuits. But storms and war with the Communists sunk many Taiwanese Nationalist boats and released their goods into the sea. Those ‘treasure chests’ floated ashore along with other flotsam and jetsam. And my grandfather, a proper sea scavenger, spent his days walking along the beach, picking from the goods. Somehow, he always found boxes of cigarettes, soaked through with seawater. Sometimes he would find stylish American cookies in brightly coloured tin boxes. Occasionally he would turn up with tinned food, typically beans. The cigarettes he would unpack and dry under the hot sun. He would then beautify them and sell them at a cheap price. This business worked for a while, but it depended on continued conflict in the Taiwan Strait – there wasn’t exactly a daily supply of shipwrecks in the East China Sea, and currents were also liable to take what had been wrecked further south.

Still, my grandfather managed to sustain us with these meagre pickings, if only temporarily. Every day we drank watery porridge and ate boiled kelp. Our neighbours – families of the men who had joined the collective fishing boats – would give us some extra rice and noodles every now and then. My grandfather’s scavenging days were numbered, we all knew that.

Village of Shitang

Some people said Shitang was an island, others a peninsula. It lay soaking in the salty water between mainland China and Taiwan, three hundred kilometres from the Taiwanese coast, the first place on the mainland to receive the dawn’s rays every morning. In 2000, Shitang was in the news because a ceremonial sun statue had been built on a cliff facing east. The statue didn’t look anything like the sun, but more like a tall, thin monolith out of 2001: A Space Odyssey. It turned the village into a tourist attraction. But for the people of Shitang, it was odd. They had always known their village lay furthest to the east. Why, suddenly, was it such a big deal?

Shitang literally means stone pond. The word pond in old Chinese was associated with fish. Perhaps thousands of years ago, the area had been a salt-water lagoon next to the sea, before inhabitants built up the land along the seafront, just as Hong Kong or Macau had grown up on reclaimed marsh and swamp. Our family house was a small, green-coloured stone dwelling right on the horn of the peninsula. My grandfather lived upstairs, where he could look straight out to sea through a small window by his bed. In my memory, the sea was always yellow-brown, whether seen from my grandfather’s window or from the beach. This yellow-brownness was to do with the large kelp beds growing in the shallow water by the shore. The kelp – we called it haifa, the hair of the sea – had tough stalks with broad leaf-like palms and long green-brown stripes. A swarm of shapeless sea snakes, they entangled themselves in the space between land and water. Despite its monstrous shape, we loved the taste. We either stewed it in eel soup or fried it with pork. We never tired of it, along with the tiny kelpfish we harvested from among the algae.

The soil was very salty in Shitang. It was not land suited to agriculture. There were barely any trees growing in the village. But gardenia trees are a determined species. They grew between rocks, their white flowers swirling in the salt-laden wind. It was the only type that could face the sea’s yellow foam. I loved their strongly scented flowers. Women picked the buds to tie in their plaits. One day, thirty-odd years later, I stumbled across a gardenia in northern Europe. I breathed in the familiar scent under a clear European sky and cried. This tree didn’t belong in my Western life. It was a sorrowful smell, if tinged with a warm feel of nostalgia. It took me straight back to my childhood on the typhoon-ridden coast of the East China Sea.

In that house, only my grandfather had a view over the kelp beds and the foamy sea. My grandmother and I lived downstairs, where the windows on two sides were blocked by our neighbour’s washing lines, dried squid and salted ribbonfish hanging from poles. I couldn’t say then whether I loved or hated that house. I lived there until I was seven and a half. It was simply our house, our village. There was no comparison, no alternative. But years later, after I had left the village, I felt that Shitang had killed all tenderness in my heart. It had become a rock in my chest. Those hard corners, those jagged stone houses had turned me to stone too. The landscape made me merciless and aggressive.

Our street was originally called Anti-Pirates Passage. In the 1980s, the name was changed to Front Barrier Slope by the local authorities. The original name came from the Ming Dynasty. During that time, the area was under constant attack by pirates from the East Pacific, such that the local militia armed themselves with home-made guns and bombs for protection. Eventually, the village was returned into local hands. But that was four hundred years ago. It felt to me that nothing significant had happened since then, apart from when the local government replaced the Buddha posters in their offices with images of Mao. It had been a backwater, from the days of China’s dynasties until now. The only dramatic stories came from the sea, from being close to Taiwan.

In the sixties and seventies, some local fishermen and villagers tried to cross the Taiwan Strait in secret, hoping they would be rewarded by the Nationalist government with gold and farmland as promised. Some succeeded, but very often they were recaptured and punished: someone’s uncle and his brother were caught on the edge of international waters and sentenced to death. ‘Shot at dawn’ and ‘life sentence’ came regularly through the village loudspeakers. In the 1970s, no one had private radios or televisions. All news was announced at high volume in the street. Our house directly faced an electricity pole adorned with two loudspeakers. Every so often, in the early morning, we were woken by Communist songs followed by a ‘shot at dawn’ announcement. Even though capital punishment was normal at that time, hearing these statements still horrified me. I had never witnessed anyone be shot, but the village gossip alone was enough to make me shiver.

Our street doubled as a market, with one end starting in the mountains where a Buddhist temple had been built, and the other end finishing at the beach and the open sea. From our little house we could always hear chatting, crying, arguing, haggling, cockerels crowing, children screaming, pigs oinking from day to night. There was never a moment of peace and quiet. It was simply the sound of China. There were always people everywhere, life everywhere, noise everywhere, for better or for worse.

My grandparents knew everyone in the village. They could spot an outsider instantly. My grandfather was always grumpy, so even though he knew everyone he never greeted anyone in the street. People would greet him and ask: ‘How is your boat, Old Guo?’ or ‘Have you eaten today?’ Local longhand for hello. But he never bothered to answer. He would just grunt, or pass them without even raising his eyebrows. My grandmother was the opposite, and greeted everyone she passed. But she also knew that her friendliness could not stop the village gossip about her relationship with her husband. No wonder, as gossip was the only form of entertainment available.

Grandmother

My grandmother was a kind, sometimes fearful woman. She barely had a penny in her pocket, but she would still manage to scrape together small presents for the children who played out in the street: sweets, leftover rice, or some colourful seashells. So kind and voiceless, she was the most humble person I have ever known. I always thought that it was her decency that made her hunchbacked. It slowed her down, stopped her from walking even at a normal speed. Obviously, her tiny bound feet were a factor, but she never complained about them. Her back had been bent ever since I could remember, long before she had become an old woman. The nasty kids often laughed at me, taunting me with things like: ‘Your grandmother is a big shrimp, she can only see her toes!’ or ‘Here comes the turtle on her hind legs!’ Her thin, grey-white hair was always bound into a chignon behind her head, as her diseased and twisted spine made it difficult to wash her hair. She also slept poorly. Her long sighs and the creaking of her bamboo bed as she moved her twisted body would wake me up at night.

No one in remote Chinese villages had photos taken in those days. I have no way of knowing what she looked like when she was young. Perhaps she was a decent-looking girl, but surely always small and very skinny. Her parents arranged her marriage when she was still a child and at the age of twelve she was sent (or more correctly, she was sold) to my grandfather as a child bride for a bag of rice and eight kilos of yams. Her new home was not close; it took two days for her and her father to walk from their village to Shitang. But really, she came to fill her hungry stomach, without knowing that her old husband didn’t have much rice in his rice jar either. This was the 1930s, when China was ravaged by civil war, when the Chinese Communists were fighting the Nationalist government. The Japanese invasion followed soon after, and their armies committed atrocities all over the country until 1945. My grandmother had a vague memory of the Japanese soldiers looting their house while they were hiding in a temple in the mountains. When they returned some weeks later, there was almost nothing valuable left, apart from a covered wok still sitting on the stove. She lifted the lid and found a big brown shit inside. She told me this story when I was about six and knew almost nothing about the world outside Shitang, which made me think that the whole Sino-Japanese War was to do with shitting in woks. She never said anything more about that time, despite having been witness to every war that had raged in China since the early twentieth century.

In the 1970s, people like us who lived in small villages were still chained to a feudal system, and women continued to be treated like cheap goods. My grandmother was still an outsider in this fishing community, even after living here for her entire adult life. Having grown up in an inland farming village, she didn’t understand the sea and the lives of the fishermen. Just like all the other women in the area, she never set foot on her husband’s boat, or on any other boat. To have a woman in your boat brought bad luck.

I often saw her crying alone. She would weep silently in the back of the kitchen or in front of a white porcelain statue of Guanyin she had hung on the kitchen wall. Her eyes were almost always clouded. Every day she prayed to Guanyin – the Goddess of Mercy – the most popular goddess in our region. When I was about five or six, and beginning to know a little of the world, she would tell me: ‘Xiaolu, I have the life of a dog, it’s hardly worth living. But I pray for you, and for your mother and father.’ At that age, I had no idea what my parents were like and my grandmother was so reticent about our family background.

Nor did my grandmother ever talk about my grandfather, at least not in front of me. She was frightened of him. I saw how her limbs became stiff and she sometimes trembled when he came near. I never saw them lie on the same bed together, or even stay in the same room for more than half an hour. My grandfather barely ever ate in the kitchen with us. If he did, my grandmother would retreat, sitting in the corner, usually by the stove – a place that belonged to the woman in Chinese tradition. And she would eat only the leftovers. Grandfather preferred to take his rice bowl upstairs to his own room, where he could drink liquor by himself and chew on his own unhappiness. I think he despised her deeply, partly because of tradition, partly because she came from an inland family and didn’t know how to be a fisherman’s wife. I was told that he had already decided on this hate the first year they were married, her crime not knowing things like how to eat a fish properly in a fisherman’s house. In Shitang, we would always start from the tail, never from the head. Eating the head of the fish straight away was considered bad luck for a fisherman. But my grandmother, who didn’t know this and was concerned only to show her modesty, would pick at the part my grandfather was not eating. Furious, he left the table. My grandmother tried to learn the local customs, but it was too late. She never gained his heart.

It was an awful partnership – he beat her almost every day, for small things like not fetching a matchbox quickly enough when he wanted to smoke, or for not cooking to his taste, or for not being there in the kitchen when he was hungry. Or he beat her for no reason at all. He kicked at her short, skinny legs, and pushed and punched her to the floor. That was a normal sight in our house. She wept only after he had left. And then she wouldn’t even get up from the cold stone floor. Despite my young age, I was already numb from having witnessed this sort of scene too often. Usually I would just hide. Who, in 1970s rural China, had not encountered such scenes on a daily basis? I didn’t feel close to my grandfather as he never showed any affection or warmth to me, but I didn’t think he was in any way a monster, because where I grew up, every man beat his wife and children. In the morning, in the evening, at night, I heard our neighbours’ sobs. First a male voice shouting, the sounds of furniture being thrown, and then the weeping of a mother or a daughter. That was village life. It was normal. As long as I remain unmarried, I will be more or less all right, I said to my young self then.

I remember how my old hunchbacked grandmother used her meagre savings to buy me an ice lolly – the cheapest sort, made from only water and sugar. She would wrap it in a used handkerchief onto which she had coughed up her lungs and then come looking for me in the scorching summer afternoon, to give me that little morsel of sweet ice. But by the time she found me, rolling around in the dirt or play-fighting with a bunch of kids in an alleyway, she would unpack her snot-ridden handkerchief to recover what was left of the lolly. The ice would have already melted, of course, and I would be left with only a thin little stick with an ice clot attached. ‘Suck it quickly!’ she would cry, out of breath from her search. I would suck it out of thirst, like a street dog. That was how my grandmother loved me, although I didn’t know what ‘love’ meant then. No one had ever taught me that concept in the village, at least not verbally. Later, once I had grown up, I came to realise how much she loved me. She really cared for me. An ice lolly cost five cents, the same price as a vegetable bun. A luxurious love by our standards and for that I should have stood by her, especially when my grandfather lost his temper and threw his fists at her. But I was too small and too scared. I would hide wherever I could. Tears fell down my cheeks too, but not for my grandmother. I cried out of anger, a rage, that I had been born into such a shithole and out of an overwhelming sense of desolation.

The Goddess of Mercy

The small white statue of Guanyin above our kitchen table had been there as long as I could remember, and she was there until the day I left Shitang. She was always covered in dust, but my grandmother’s cataracts prevented her from seeing how dirty the statue was. Guanyin stared out into the dimly lit kitchen, her expression devoid of meaning or feeling, alongside the old bench and its flaky paint, the broken umbrellas, and my grandmother’s comb that lay silently on the windowsill, missing its teeth.

Guanyin has often been compared to the Virgin Mary, maybe because some representations show her carrying a willow branch in one hand and a baby in the other. But the story of our Goddess of Mercy is not about raising a future god. My grandmother, who preferred to pray to Guanyin rather than Buddha, identified with her, woman to woman. Guanyin bestowed her compassion on all those grief-stricken wives and unlucky daughters.

Guanyin:

– her name literally means one who listens to the cries of the world. Legend has it that some thousand years ago she was the daughter of a cruel king. One day the king asked her to marry a wealthy but unloving man. She told the king that she would agree to marry, as long as the union would ease the three great misfortunes of mankind; ageing, illness and death. If her marriage could not help with any of these sufferings, she would rather retreat into a life of religion. When the father-king asked who could possibly ease these sufferings, his daughter mentioned a doctor she knew who could cure all of these ills. Her father was furious, as he wanted her to marry a man of power and wealth, not a healer. He punished her, forcing her into a life of hard labour, giving her little to eat and drink. But still she was unyielding. Every day the king’s daughter begged to be allowed to enter the temple and become a nun. Finally her father agreed, but ordered the monks to give her the toughest chores in order to break her spirit. But Guanyin was such a kind-hearted person that even the animals around the temple wanted to help her. Her father, seeing this, became so frustrated that he tried to burn down the temple hoping that she might perish in the fire. Guanyin was trapped, but as she was dying, a white tiger saved her and took her into an underground world. When she woke up she found herself in the land of the dead. Guanyin gazed upon the suffering souls around her and heard their cries. But her gaze soothed the crying children and soon they began to smile and play; the men stopped punishing themselves and started to find peace within; the dried willow trees flushed green again; the dead lotus began to blossom in the stagnant water. While in Hell, Guanyin witnessed the horrors that human beings had to endure and was overwhelmed with grief. Filled with compassion, she released the good karma she had accumulated during her life, and freed all the suffering souls back on Earth. From then on, the world worshipped her, calling Guanyin the Goddess of Mercy.

This was one of the few stories my grandmother told me, and I remember my first reaction was: ‘Grandmother, why can’t all women stay unmarried like Guanyin?’

My grandmother looked at me and shook her head. Then she sighed. ‘Women have to get married. Otherwise we are punished.’

This seemed like a bad rule for women, I thought. They were punished either way. Just look at my grandmother. I could understand why she prayed to Guanyin every day. Women like my grandmother were not valued for themselves. She was a dutiful daughter, then the dutiful wife, and dutiful mother, until eventually she was abandoned and forgotten.

During the Cultural Revolution, however, the Goddess of Mercy was to be punished yet again. In the early 1960s, Western symbols like the Virgin Mary or Jesus Christ were banned and destroyed. But some of the underground Chinese Christian groups venerated the Virgin Mary by disguising her as a statue of Guanyin holding a child; a cross would be hidden in an inconspicuous location on her body. So this half-Chinese Goddess half-Western Madonna survived for a while, until one day Mao announced his ‘anti-feudal’ and ‘anti-superstition’ movement. The government in Beijing declared that anything linked to China’s feudal past (such as images of kings and queens, grassroots religious practices, temples, etc.) should be destroyed. Overnight, anti-feudal public meetings in the village market square were set up and statues of the Goddess of Mercy were smashed, the hidden crosses in Guanyin’s robe cast into oblivion along with the little baby in her arms. My grandmother hid her precious porcelain figure in her wardrobe until the middle of the 1970s, when images of Guanyin were finally allowed again, and my grandmother could regain her faith in an afterlife through prayer – surely the next life would be better than the one she had endured so far.

Swordfish

Everyone in Shitang was crazy for swordfish. The good fishermen often boasted about how many they could catch in a season (sometimes they did the same for eels). As for eating them – whether steamed, grilled or fried – the fishermen’s wives paid extra care in their preparation. The fishmongers in the market would always try to keep them alive as long as possible after extracting them from the salty water, in order to maximise their succulent texture. For me, swordfish were strange creatures. I especially found their long, sharp bills threatening – like swords cutting through water, piercing anything that obstructed their path.

Our next-door neighbour, Da Bo, was about forty-something (I imagined my father to have been the same age because Da Bo had four daughters who were close to me in age). Da Bo was a skilled fisherman with a good reputation; unlike my grandfather who had wrecked his boat and then lost everything, Da Bo always kept his boat in a good condition and sailed it frequently. He fished with his own boat even after the Fish Farming Collective formed in our region. I would go with his daughters to the dock and wait for him to return. His four daughters all bore the same name, Feng, which means Phoenix, but were distinguished by number. So from the oldest to the youngest they were called Yifeng (Phoenix One), Erfeng (Phoenix Two), Sanfeng (Phoenix Three) and Sifeng (Phoenix Four). You would think they had been treated badly by Da Bo and his wife, as they were only useless girls, not longed-for sons, but in my eyes they were not mistreated at all. Da Bo loved them just as he would have loved sons. It made me wonder about my parents. If they had loved me, would I have been living with them?

Once, while we were playing in Da Bo’s backyard, he taught us how to catch swordfish. ‘The swordfish is the fastest of all the fish in the sea. They can swim down to two thousand feet below the surface of the water and then swim back up again in one go. Can you imagine that?’ Da Bo stared at me, his bloodshot eyes glistening. Just like the swordfish. I shook my head weakly.

‘It’s very difficult to catch them, that’s why they are so prized.’ He spoke as his hands untangled the fishing net. His wife was holding the other end, trying to spot any bits that needed mending.

‘How? Because I never sleep! I catch them by moonlight, when the sea is calm. I don’t like having any other scavengers around me, you see? Swordfish are powerful predators because they have large fins. They have very few enemies, only whales are strong enough to attack and eat them. I take my boat out in the dark and then I circle quietly, choosing spots where the shrimps live because swordfish love shrimps. My old heavens! Those bastards are so quick! They can dive so quickly at the brush of a hook or harpoon. And when hurt, they can run their swords through the bottom of our hulls. Once, I saw them form a gang and attack the sides of my boat! And one of the swordfish was about four metres long. It was half the size of my boat! I thought, those bastards will destroy it!’

‘They made holes everywhere and water came in. But in the end, I was fully prepared, and with strong gloves I snatched the four-metre-long monster and smashed his head with my oar!’

Da Bo stood up, took out a small knife from his pocket and cut a piece of dried swordfish hanging from a branch of his bay tree. He handed it to me. I took it and put it straight into my mouth. After chewing on it for a long time, I decided my teeth were not strong enough. It tasted like salty steak, but felt like a piece of wooden cardboard. I couldn’t swallow it. I would have preferred to eat my grandfather’s shoes. So I spat it out. Da Bo didn’t take offence. He just laughed.

Since I rarely ate swordfish, I had assumed it must be delicious, when not dried and salted. Of course my grandmother could hardly afford such a delicacy. She would only buy the cheapest creatures from the sea – small crabs and fiddly shrimps for making a kind of pickled-fish mash. Otherwise she would buy jellyfish. Jellyfish were cheap. You could get a big bowl for just five fen. And I loved the sour spicy pickled white globules in ginger sauce. That was my idea of luxury, my swordfish without the proud sword.

The Hui

When I was six one of our neighbours told me that I was Hui, not Han Chinese. I didn’t know what he meant. He said Hui don’t usually eat pork, but we ate pork ravenously when we had the chance. Pork was the best. We would eat any meat available in the village, including dog and cat. So I went back home and asked my grandparents about the Hui. But my grandfather refused to explain. He had taken to only ever speaking in monosyllables. And my grandmother couldn’t help me since her family’s ancestors were Han. All she said was: ‘Don’t ask me! You know your grandmother is illiterate. I can’t even write my own name.’

So I went to see the stationmaster, the man in charge of our village’s long-distance bus service. I had heard people say he had made it to the outside world many times and knew lots of things. Besides, he was a member of the Communist Party. Not that I knew what that meant then, but I gathered that it was no easy achievement. So I walked up the hill, all the way to the bus station with its wide view of the coast.

‘What are Hui, stationmaster?’ I asked. He was standing by the ticketing window, holding a book of bus tickets and a pen. A whistle hung around his neck which he used when it was boarding time. But it was noon, and all the buses had already left. He was having some time to himself, chewing roasted sunflower seeds while monitoring the station.

‘Hui? They are descended from the Mongols or the Turks. Your ancestors were Tartars.’

‘Yes. They were from the west of China, that is, Central Asia. They were very powerful and brutal people. Haven’t you ever heard of the Mongols?’

‘They ride horses and sleep in yurts on the grass. They don’t like growing rice, nor do they know how to fish.’

‘They sleep in yurts on the grass?’ I was caught by that image, thinking it could be fun living under a giant umbrella beneath the sky.

‘You might be a descendant of the Mongols. You know, one out of every three hundred Chinese is related to Genghis Khan, the great emperor of the Yuan Dynasty. I bet you are one of them!’

‘But, stationmaster, you mean I don’t come from around here? I come from the place where people ride horses and sleep on the grass?’

‘Yes. And when you grow up, you’ll be just like your Tartar ancestors. You’ll carry a long knife and conquer the world.’

I was never a girly girl. For some reason I was always drawn to epic stories of heroes. So I was impressed by what the stationmaster had told me. Carrying long knives and conquering the world. It was unimaginable for a skinny girl like me. It sounded strange but wonderful!

‘But Grandpa doesn’t like to talk. You know that. He doesn’t even speak at home.’

As we talked, a bus full of passengers arrived. Chicken cages, wedding quilts and piles of luggage had been tied to the roof. The exhaust was so thick it made me want to throw up. The stationmaster jumped back on duty. He blew his whistle loudly and made signs to the bus driver.

As he was directing the driver he turned to me and said: ‘One day, when you see your parents, they will tell you where you come from.’

| CONTENTS

Also by Xiaolu Guo

ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE EAST

A Story of Growing Up

XIAOLU GUO

The Past is a Foreign Country

PART I | SHITANG: TALES OF THE EAST CHINA SEA

After I Was Born

Grandfather

Village of Shitang

Grandmother

The Goddess of Mercy

Swordfish

The Hui