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 course. None of us would tell him that there was an expensive burial pit waiting for him outside the town.
It 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.