Free I Am China by Xiaolu Guo Page A

of chicken soup. Then she drank most of it herself. Father tried to bite into the chicken feet floating in the broth with his pathetic fake teeth, but he has no strength any more and just gave up. I find it so hard to watch. Mother told the restaurant to put the bony soup to one side and save it for us to come back and finish off tonight. “And how should we do that?” the waitress asked in a dismissive tone .
“How? Just put the chicken bones back into the pan and boil them with new water and add some greenery—and don’t forget to add a bit of ginger.” The waitress listened in silence, taken aback .
“We can’t do that. You need to pay the cooking fee. That’s at least five yuan,” she said sulkily .
My mother laughed at her attitude and said firmly, “Of course, sister! Now also add three or four pieces of tofu. We will finish it for dinner.” She stood up and paid from her fake-leather wallet .
My father has been in intensive care for nearly three months now, Jian. I’m so accustomed to the routine: Father has one injection in the morning and one dose of radiotherapy every two days. But yesterday after his most recent bout of treatment my weak, pale, reduced father refused to stay in the ward any longer. He says he can’t stand another minute of watching the patient next to him dying. When one of the other patients dies we seem to sit there watching the body for what feels like forever, until finally a harassed nurse or relative comes and discovers the dead man. Sometimes there are tears, there is shock, or resignation. The nurses barely respond at all. We sit there and watch the body being lifted from the bed and wrapped like a dumpling in the bed sheets the body’s former owner slept in. Then we stare at the empty bed, for what can seem like hours, remembering vividly the dead man’s cough, his particular way of speaking to his daughter and fussing around his wife, how he would always spill his tea or drop his book. The worst of the worst is when, on the following day, a new patient is laid out on that very same bed. He’ll turn to us, a room full of drawn and tired faces, try to smile in a friendly way, but he must wonder why we all stare at him as if he were a ghost. No one dares tell him anything. My father believes if he stays in this room he will definitely go before his time. He’ll become the bandaged body, and we the weeping figures. And I’m sure he’s right. So we’ve decided to rent a room at a hostel nearby. Although the room at the hostel is bare and tacky, at least my mother has a TV to watch, and a private bathroom for us to use whenever we want. And there’s only one more week of radiotherapy to go, so perhaps we’ll be out of here soon .
I have been thinking about your manifesto, dear Jian, though I can’t see that it’s of any use right now .
I’ve got to run, I have to get my father’s medicine from the pharmacy before it closes .
Your very own Mu

11 LONDON, MAY 2013
    Words, symbols, verbal gestures. Sometimes clear, sometimes obscure. Iona struggles, unable to gauge their depth in the parallel world of Mu and Jian. But she tries, and at the same time she shuffles around the pages, trying to arrange them in the right order.
Dear Mu ,
I’m sitting in this foul-smelling little library writing to you like a Mongol who has lost his horse! How pathetic, old bastard sky! But I’ve no army gearing up for battle, and there are no hills surrounding my room, just a whole pile of legal files and the sound of seagulls screeching somewhere nearby .
I try to be USEFUL even when I cannot be used here. I study European history like I did at school, but I am too old to be re-educated! But yes, TO BE USEFUL, that’s what I must strive for. Someone has taken the only copy of Das Kapital the library holds, so I don’t have anything sensible to read—I didn’t know Marx was as popular in the West as he is in China. You may ask why I don’t read the Russian book you gave me all those