Review: I Am China - Xialou Guo

Speaking at a Granta event at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester last year, Xialou Guo talked about the difficulty for Chinese authors to isolate individual voices from the past, in the way that Western writers of historical fiction can. She described a sense of collective self, and the cyclical nature of rural life, the knowledge that each day would be the same as the last. Her own writing, she said, was a rebellion against this sense of collectivism, a struggle to identify an individual out of the masses. I Am China, the second novel she has written in English, dramatizes this struggle through the figure of Iona Fitzgerald, a Scottish freelancer charged with translating a mysterious bundle of letters and diaries written by two Chinese lovers.

For Iona’s publisher, the proposition is simple. He is looking for a ‘big story’ which fits in to his preconceived ideas about ‘the suppression of individual freedom, the state of China’.  For Iona, the task is less straightforward. The role of translator requires a high degree of empathy (‘if you spend enough time reading someone else’s thoughts, after a while their thoughts begin to infect you’), but she struggles to make connections. The colloquial terms used in the letters are unfamiliar to her, and Chinese internet censorship prevents her from gathering background information on her subjects.

As she reads the fragments she has been charged with, she begins to piece a story together. The man, Kublai Jian, is a Chinese punk musician, born in Beijing at the height of the Cultural Revolution in 1972. Coming into conflict with the authorities, he is expelled from his own country, and spends time in immigration centres in the UK and Switzerland, before travelling to France. The other author is Mu, his girlfriend, with whom he clashes over the role of politics and art. At first, Mu is seen solely as a prism through which to view Jian, but her role develops, her own creativity becoming more apparent as Iona reads deeper into their relationship.

One thing that links translator and translated is a sense of rootlessness. Iona has never visited the island which gave her her name, she is emotionally and physically distant from her family, and her love life is a series of anonymous one night stands. She has no great connection to her surroundings, and no regular interaction with friends or colleagues. London seems faceless, disassociated; life is going on outside her flat, as evidenced by the ‘shrieking sirens’ and ‘anti-capitalist protest slogans’ coming from the street below, but she shuts her windows to keep the noise out. Jian and Mu are also both distant from their families, and after Jian is forced into exile, they both travel abroad, struggling to come to terms with their new surroundings. 

This exile from China is metaphorical as well as physical. The first sign of rupture comes in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, when Jian finds solace in Sex Pistols records. Struggling to find a way to articulate his protest against the Chinese authorities, he embraces the radical individualism of punk, vowing to ‘burst eardrums with my guitar [rather] than fight with it at the barricades’. This isn’t a simple cultural appropriation, though. In one memorable passage of the novel, John Lydon arrives at a bar in Beijing, on the eve of the millennium, and is immediately surrounded by admirers who tell him ‘being Chinese punk is very different from your country’s youth… we are disciplined, well educated, and sing about politics and art’. They question the destructive impulses of punk, asking ‘Mr Rotten’ ‘why didn’t punk bring anything good to society?’, and arguing for music as a positive force for change. Jian’s punk is not nihilism; by tying his music to a manifesto, he is attempting to use it as a more positive force. It is at the point when he tries to make his manifesto public that the authorities intervene.

Mu also opens herself to outside influences whilst touring America under the name Sabotage Sister. The tour starts out as a manufactured venture by a Chinese-American would-be svengali, presenting a watered down version of 'authentic Chinese culture' to a US audience, but Mu grows as a performer, and begins to develop her voice. Viewing her country from abroad, in the wake of Jian’s disappearance, she becomes more critical, and adapts Ginsberg’s America to vocalise her feelings about China, provoking a near riot when she performs it in front of the privileged children of the Chinese elite at Harvard. By turning to the Beats, Mu is also drawing on an individualistic, existential counter-cultural movement for inspiration, rejecting the collectivism she has grown up with.

However, while Mu and Jian are largely writing from outside China, and while they are critical of the present regime, their thoughts are constantly drawn back to that country. This is a deeply personal novel, often referring to incidents in Guo's own life. Guo portrays her generation as being caught between 'the last two thousand years of our Confucian feudal education' and 'the last fifty years of communist education', with no satisfactory synthesis emerging as yet. Guo is part of the most recent generation of Best British Writers selected by Granta, and it seems that globalisation will be a key theme for this set of authors to explore, if the novels produced by Adam Foulds, Ned Beauman and Kamila Shamsie this year are anything to go by. A lot of authors who write from a Western perspective are suspicious or cynical about the cult of individualism, but the possibility of individual destiny offers redemption in Guo's novel, giving I Am China more complexity than Glow; at the same time, she is critical of the way the Chinese authorities throw their weight around to suppress uncomfortable stories, and the willingness of British companies to fold under pressure from them.

I Am China is a complex and subtle novel, aware of the subtle links that globalisation forms between individuals in different continents, and the role of chance in making them aware of these links. Throughout the timeframe of the novel, the three main characters are operating in isolation, unaware of where the others are in space and time, and yet there is still mutual benefit to their relationships. At first, Mu and Jian seem as distant from Iona as the long-deceased poets in AS Byatt’s Possession were from the academics who studied them, but bonds become apparent as the novel progresses. Iona is forced out of her alienation by the deep empathy she develops for the two letter-writers, while Mu and Jian’s relationship is saved for posterity, freeing them from the anonymity of collective history which Guo fears. There have been a few missteps from the new Granta generation so far, but Guo has proven that she deserves her place among the best young authors of the decade with this ambitious, wide-ranging and intelligent novel.