Free I Am China by Xiaolu Guo

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

10 LONDON, MAY 2013
    It’s deep into the night. Through the open window the purple sky is illuminated by the stark fluorescent light of office blocks and council flats. Iona finds herself alone on her bed. Perhaps work is the compensation for her unsatisfying sexual life, she mocks herself while tidying a mass of muddled pages spread on top of her duvet. She has been trying to establish some sort of chronology in her translation. But some of the letters are undated and often the diary pages seem to launch straight in without any indication of date or location. A two-page letter, in Mu’s neat handwriting, rises to the top of the pile. It seems to be sent soon after Jian’s letter from Dover.
April 2012
My Peking Man ,
No father talk, no manifesto discussion. It’s a deal .
Tell me firstly: how are your stomach pains? How are your bowels doing with no familiar meals of noodles and rice every day? It’s all the mundane daily silliness of living together that I miss so much. I can’t understand where you are now — what’s this Immigration Removal Centre? What does it mean? You’re going to be “removed”? Are you allowed to walk in the street freely? I don’t understand the legal issue—I thought you had a special UK visa. Why do they have to detain you there?
Tell me more, even if it’s depressing!
It’s been raining today, Shanghai is muddy and foggy. The air smells sour and sweaty, like soy sauce. 11 a.m., I just got up to start my day but my parents were already clamouring for lunch. We put my father in a wheelchair and went to a nearby restaurant. “Your father needs nutrition,” Mother said, and ordered an enormous bowl