Free I Am China by Xiaolu Guo Page B

months ago. It sits by my bed most days and the words on the front feel like some kind of warning: Life and Fate. Right now I am not in the mood to read about Russian soldiers being shot in their millions and dying in the freezing winter — don’t we Chinese have enough stories like that already?… [Translator’s note: Jian’s handwriting in this passage on Life and Fate is illegible.]
I have no idea how people have reacted to my manifesto since I left China and whether they continue to discuss my ideas in the underground bars. Have you heard anything since the concert? I know you prefer not to mention these things again. I know you’ll find it hard to believe, but it is as upsetting to me as it is to you, but I can’t just let my work or my beliefs go like that. I need to know more, since I’ve been cut off from my world .
Dearest Mu, tell me, when are you leaving Shanghai for Beijing? Has your magazine job given you more time off? It seems so unlike them. I remember you saying you couldn’t work for them any more. That the cheesy poetry they published was just to pass the censorship laws, and it got you down. You’re wasting time with them, you should move on. Don’t let them eat up your beliefs. Don’t wait around. Maybe you shouldn’t wait for me either. Keep yourself inspired if you can .
Your Jian, the Peking Man
    Iona has an image of two rebels in love. Their strong emotions colour her mind with shades of red and shimmering blue. Mu and Jian, separated by their beliefs, and now separated by space, dropped on different alien planets. Both of them grappling with their own reality. Both of them trying to build a bridge on which to meet. And it’s like Iona is building this bridge again, through her reading, her translation. Building a bridge of meaning from their letters, and she has to choose the right words to keep the structure standing. And it is so hard. The Roman letters of English and the oriental characters of Chinese are not natural bedfellows. Take expressions like “niu bi”—, “cao dan”—, “ta da ye de”—, “zhou”—. How can she find the right translation for these swear words in English? If she had spent more time in Beijing’s streets and markets and noodle stores on her year in China at university perhaps she would now grasp much more. One day, she thinks, she will master the language and understand the culture perfectly. Iona imagines herself eventually settling down in China—and perhaps one morning, say, on the Fifth Ring Road ofBeijing’s Haidian District, as she is trying to cross the massive junction, squeezed between thousands of cyclists, she might overhear the exact curse that appears in one of Jian’s letters. But right now she can only sense Jian’s world from the remote isolation of her Islington flat. She has to work with what she has in her islander’s head. It’s like alchemy, but in reverse. She has to transform their gold into her lead. If she translated “niu bi, cao dan, ta da ye de, zhou” literally, it would read “cow’s cunt, wank the balls, fuck his father-in-law” or something like that. Western readers would think she was writing cheap porn. The crudeness would repel them. And she would have failed. The bridge she is trying to build between Mu and Jian would fall into the river that separates the lovers. But if she translates blandly and drily, their revolutionary love story will grow cold and stagnant. And Iona is not about to give up, having hardly begun. She knows too well the struggle of the imagination. On her island home, as a solitary child, she used to imagine faraway places. So here she is now, in her tiny London flat, imagining faraway cities and smells, the sensations of China, and faraway minds.
    Still, she feels the need to rest. Her body is like a large, sluggish octopus, reminding her of its human form only through the aches in her shoulders and neck. She also has worries. She finds herself worrying about her mother. Why now,