A Lover's Discourse. Xiaolu Guo

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СКАЧАТЬ was during this second visit to my father’s tomb with my mother that I discovered there was a new gravestone erected right next to my father’s. The two stones were side by side. The new one had the same style of engraving. My father’s headstone had his name and dates of birth and death. That was to be expected. But the writing on the new stone next to his was my mother’s name and her birthday. And then a blank space, waiting to be filled. I stood there, astonished, then turned to ask her:

      ‘Why is your gravestone here?’

      ‘Are you stupid?’ my mother answered dismissively. She was impatient, as always. She kicked away a little moss-covered rock under her feet, and said: ‘You don’t know how much they have raised the rent for grave plots, do you? For my spot, I had to pay double what your father’s cost! Not to mention the money for the mason! He charged five hundred yuan for that! What a robber! He knows it’s a one-off deal!’

      She pointed to the space on her headstone, where the death date remained uncarved.

      ‘You will help to add that, won’t you?!’

      She groaned and brought up a glob of mucus from her throat. She spat it out on the grass beside her shoes. With a clear voice, she added:

      ‘Don’t get those thieves to do the job! They don’t deserve a penny more.’

      I was speechless. My mother had always been a blunt and coarse peasant woman, and I was used to her manners. But I had never imagined that I would have to add the date of her death to her gravestone, with my own hands. Was I meant to carve it with a chisel or screwdriver? It didn’t seem real.

      Towards the end of this visit, there were almost no words left between us. My mother seemed to have closed herself off in her thoughts. Was she anticipating her own death? In those silent moments, I could not foresee or even have envisaged that my mother would die only a few months later. I knew she had a weak heart, but she was not old, and I didn’t expect anything would happen so soon. Out of the blue, she was taken to hospital, after being found unconscious on the ground in our local market. She died of heart failure before I got there. Suddenly, within months, I was an orphan, a grown-up orphan. And all this happened just before I left China. Were these events signs of my future, condemned to be alone, whether in my native country or abroad?

      Before I flew to England, I visited the cemetery one more time. Now my aunt stood beside me, looking at the two gravestones. The date on my mother’s remained uncarved. New grass had grown beside my father’s. A few daisies. There was still dew on the leaves, shimmering with sunlight. Soon it would evaporate in the midday sun just as we sang that old burial song:

      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.

      Everybody Wants to Rule the World

      – As Tears for Fears sang: ‘Everybody wants to rule the world.’

      – Who are these tears?

      Although I had been in Britain for a few months, I still could not say whether I liked or disliked English people. Somehow, I had not got to know them. I could not read their emotions. Some made me feel uneasy, like my professor Grant Stanley. I feared his cleverness would expose my hidden stupidity. Something about his way of speaking suggested to me that in his universe I was a secondary citizen. Maybe also because I felt that my Western life depended on him, at least my PhD project. Once I bought a large chocolate bar for him before our meeting, as I noticed there was always a piece of chocolate lying around his desk. But when I got to his office, the bar in my pocket was already melting. I didn’t offer it to him. In Chinese we say ‘pat the horse’s arse’ to mean that you always offer a little bribe in a relationship. And since the melted chocolate incident, our professional relationship had not been so good, as if he knew.

      Grant had some doubts about my project. ‘Project’ was an English word I found impossible to grasp. A vague and abstract concept. Nevertheless, my project, according to the academic film anthropology style, was a documentary about a village and its inhabitants in southern China. I had been reading about the village – Jing Cun in Guangdong Province. There were two thousand uneducated workers and peasants living there. But somehow in the last few decades, just about every villager had transformed himself into a painting copyist. They could now reproduce Monet, Chagall and da Vinci at the drop of a hat. I know it’s a cliché that almost every Chinese person is a good copyist. But this was still fascinating to me. I could not even draw a proper arm or leg, or paint a tree. Let alone some Western religious figure.

      In the corridor I saw my supervisor rushing in my direction. He greeted me and opened his office door, with a mocking exaggeration in his gesture.

      ‘The admin people want to eat me alive! They have left me no time to see my students!’ Grant pointed to a chair for me. ‘Did you read the news this morning about President Xi Jinping’s new reforms? He really is trying to be the new Mao!’

      ‘Well. Every leader is an emperor in China, for sure.’

      ‘Yes, as Tears for Fears sang: “Everybody wants to rule the world.”’

      ‘Who are these tears?’ I asked hesitantly. Once again I felt like a fish swimming in a new part of the ocean, unable to recognise the seaweed.

      Grant started to hum in a tuneless way, but stopped abruptly. ‘Okay, let’s get going, no time to lose. Tell me where you are.’

      ‘I’ve been collecting materials, and made contact with the village. I think I should go there for the actual research and do some filming.’

      ‘That’s good to know. Fieldwork is the primary thing in our area.’ He then looked at me over his glasses, and added: ‘I need to discuss one thing with you before you go further.’

      My heart tightened a bit.

      ‘As your supervisor I have an ethical and moral duty to monitor your film-making activities and to ensure that there are no legal complications arising from your filming. It’s part of being an anthropologist. So I have some forms for you to fill in. Your secondary supervisor has to sign as well as the head of department.’

      He tapped his keyboard and began to print out something.

      ‘What kind of ethical and moral duty?’ I asked defensively. ‘I thought our purpose was to make a good film with narrative strength and research value.’ I remembered that this was the phrase he used the other day. ‘My film will be quite straightforward. It’s just about people in a small village making reproductions of Western art, which they then sell back to the West. What’s the issue?’

      Grant looked at me with his knitted brow. His hair was a mess, his clothes dishevelled. I wondered if his wife had left him recently.

      I stared back at Grant, and didn’t feel like talking any more. What did he know about China and Chinese manual workers? Ethical and moral duties? Did he mean that I should get consent forms? Even though Chinese villagers would not give a damn about this sort of formality?

      Grant stood up and handed me a dozen printed pages.

      ‘Just fill this in later,’ he said, with a slightly impatient tone.

      I was about to leave, when Grant suddenly СКАЧАТЬ