A Lover's Discourse. Xiaolu Guo

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      – So where are you from? I can’t tell if you have an accent.

      – I grew up in Australia. Aber meine Mutter ist eine Engländerin, originally.

      Then I called you. Because you hadn’t called me. Not even once.

      ‘I’m away this weekend, in Hanover,’ you explained on the phone. ‘But we can meet next week.’

      Hang Over? I was puzzled. Was it a place? A hotel, or a famous bar?

      But I dared not expose my ignorance. Instead, I asked: ‘When are you coming back from Hang Over?’

      ‘Oh, look, I don’t drink that much. But I’ll be back on Tuesday.’

      Although your voice had a laughing quality, it had a calm and sober centre. I imagined you speaking on the phone from somewhere else in the city. But I could not picture what that place might look like.

      ‘We can meet on Wednesday then. There is a Chinese restaurant in Old Street. How about we meet there for lunch?’

      ‘Wednesday is a bit tight for me. But I can try,’ you said. ‘Hope the food isn’t too spicy.’

      I paused for a second, and thought you must be one of those hypersensitive northern Europeans who couldn’t eat anything hot. You might even be a vegan, who eats tasteless food. No salt in your meals either, because of high blood pressure. I would find out.

      So we arranged a time to meet. You suggested a very particular time – 12.45 – and you had to leave at 13.50 or just before 14.00. This sounded awful to me. Too precise. It was like going to see a dentist. It is true that you Westerners are not able to be spontaneous in your day-to-day lives, and you are from a supposed free country.

      Wednesday arrived. You came into the restaurant wearing a battered leather jacket. Obviously you had not shaved. When we sat down at the table, you didn’t appear to like what was on the menu: spicy cow’s stomach, pickled duck tongue, ants on noodle trees, and so on.

      ‘My grandmother used to make stews from pig guts and liver.’ You stared at a colourful picture of fried stomach, slightly amused. ‘I used to stuff myself with it when I was a kid. It was so chewy and tasty and I thought it was just meat. Then one day, when I was about nine or ten, I found out what those long tubes were. I never went near it again!’

      ‘I know. Westerners think Chinese are inhuman. We kill anything just for eating. And we stir-fry anything alive.’

      You didn’t comment on this. Perhaps out of politeness?

      ‘So, are you a vegetarian?’

      You nodded. ‘More or less.’

      I began to worry. Perhaps there was nothing for you to eat in this restaurant. Plain rice with soy sauce? Were you also a gluten-free person?

      A Chinese waitress stood by our table. She had the face of a terracotta soldier. Speaking Mandarin, I ordered some vegetables. She responded in Cantonese. You made a few interjections in English. When she left, I continued:

      ‘Are you English?’ For me, this fact needed to be confirmed, so I knew to whom I was talking.

      ‘No way – I’m no Pom.’ You laughed. ‘That’s what we used to say in Australia.’

      I was puzzled. My monocultured Chinese education was manifesting itself again. ‘What does that mean?’

      ‘Look, basically I’m an Anglo-Saxon, a Wasp.’

      ‘Wasp?’ Now it was my turn to laugh. ‘A fly with yellow-and-black stripes, going around stinging people?’

      ‘I don’t sting people, but I do wear striped shirts.’ You choked a little on your hot green tea, then explained: ‘A Wasp is a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. You might have heard of it?’

      ‘Hmm, a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant.’ All these words sounded alien to me, apart from white. ‘You know, every day I hear some new English words. I hear them but I don’t register them. As if I was half deaf.’

      You raised your eyebrows slightly. ‘I know what you mean. I’m not from Britain either.’

      ‘So where are you from? I can’t tell if you have an accent.’

      ‘I grew up in Australia, on the east coast. When I was eighteen, we moved to Germany. To cut a long story short, one morning my father woke up and announced that he wanted to go back to Germany.’ Then you put on a German accent: ‘I can do a German accent if I want to. Aber meine Mutter ist eine Engländerin, originally. That’s me summed up.’

      Mutter. Mother, I guessed. The rest remained opaque. I could see that Australia, Germany and England all had something to do with what you were. There was something mysteriously attractive about it.

      And then this strange place you visited called Hang Over. It wasn’t until a year later that I understood which city you meant. In China, we call it Hannuowei, a wealthy German city that produced the Scorpions, a band I had listened to when I was at university.

      Morning Dew

      – How swiftly it dries, the dew on the garlic-leaf.

      The dew that dries so fast.

      Tomorrow it will come again.

      But he whom we carry to the grave will never return.

      Near Haggerston station by the canal, there were two housing estates: De Beauvoir Town and Orwell Estate. They were massive, connected with long corridors and narrow green spaces, and shared the same architectural style. As I sat by the water, De Beauvoir Town was quiet right behind me. Even with multitudes of families living in these council homes, the estate felt strangely serene in the early morning. As did the canal before me. No wind. No human noise. Maybe because it was Sunday. It had rained yesterday. Today London was blue. Morning dew on the sunflowers by the lock-keeper’s cottage glistened. The canal water was yellow green, but clean and clear. I thought about being alone here in England. I thought of China, and my parents. I recalled a strange conversation I had with my mother. It was at my father’s graveyard. The thought of how he had lived during his last few weeks made my throat turn to stone.

      It was not the Tomb Sweeping season, and we had had my father’s burial a few months before. But we were there because I had just received the scholarship to go to Britain, and I had some time to prepare for my departure. I was leaving for good, for a future in the West. There we were, in a large cemetery under a hill with a quarry, on the outskirts of my home town. It was a new cemetery, immense and already crowded. The iron gates were wide enough for four cars to drive through at the same time. We lived in a very populated town, more so than other parts of China. The local government had to cope with the large numbers of the living, but also large numbers of the deceased.

      A few months before my father died, my mother had purchased a plot in the cemetery for him. It was only at the burial (not a real burial with a coffin, as the government had banned the practice years ago, but one with an urn) that I discovered that the tomb was so small. It was no more than one square metre. ‘It’s so expensive, I had to pay the deposit as early as I could.’ My mother had told me this in the hospital corridor, even before the doctor announced there was no cure for his cancer. My father didn’t know this, of СКАЧАТЬ