from The Invisible Wall

The minibus rattled along between the hillsides where the soil had been plowed up. Brick red. Flesh red. Poppy red. Corn and broad beans grew from the terraced fields. And houses in the same red shades as the soil. Houses made of unfired clay mixed with rice straw. Scattered here and there, were the new houses. Covered in white ceramic tiles that looked like bathrooms turned inside-out. A sign of prosperity. Dust blew in through the rattling bus windows. The smell of the earth was unmistakable. Rust. Or blood? It was at the end of the first semester. I went home with Liu to her village.

In the morning, I saw Liu sitting on a stool in the yard. Her fingers moved over the body of a dead chicken. Feathers were sticking to her hands. She plucked quickly. Tufts of feathers lay scattered across the concrete yard. Liu wore the same silk scarf and the same city clothes she had arrived in. Over them, she had simply thrown on her father's old black leather jacket against the morning chill before the sun had begun to warm up the air. Liu concentrated on plucking with the same energy she devoted to her paintings in the city. The provincial capital we had traveled from, was only seventy kilometers away, but it felt like a different world. It seemed like we had traveled back in time. Until then, I had only seen the urban side of Liu. Now, I saw a farmer's daughter, and suddenly I understood how enormous the difference was between life in the city and life in the countryside, where most Chinese people still lived at the beginning of the millennium. Liu's mother appeared in her knitted cardigan. She was a head shorter than her daughter. The soil clung like tattoos in the cracks and around the cuticles of her round, hard hands. She smiled at me with rosy cheeks when she saw that I was up, but she continued at a steady pace between the cookhouse and the pantry which was covered with fly nets, the old clay house, and the new three-story concrete house. Liu had told me that her mother could not read. She could only write her own name. For Liu, country life was now limited to the New Year holiday. When it was over, we would travel back to the city.

I was six months into my experiment. My idea had been to learn the language while letting everything else fill me at the same time. I had recently graduated from high school in Sweden, and then, I had worked for several months of intensive night shifts at a nursing home to afford my trip to China. I had forbidden my boyfriend to follow me there. Now, I worked at a gallery in the provincial capital of Kunming in the afternoons and evenings, hanging paintings, conversing in English, and showing Bergman films. It was volunteer work. In exchange, I got cheap accommodation with a few other foreign students, and help with obtaining a visa. It was also my task to speak English with visitors and to represent the foreignness that was the gallery's main attraction. In particular, the opportunity to speak English drew many visitors every week. I tried to escape my role as a foreigner as much as possible, so that instead, I could devote myself to my own experiment and learn Chinese as quickly as I could. Once, I had been called in for a meeting at the gallery to discuss the problem and I had agreed to behave better. But at the same time, I promised myself that I would at least not waste any of my free time on the foreigners and their world.

Where I came from, I had watched an Iranian teacher become a Swedish guidance counselor, a South American doctor become a Swedish doctor, a Lebanese housewife become a Swedish shopkeeper. A Bosnian classmate earned an equally high grade in Swedish class as I did. 

Of course, I had noticed the others too. The Iranian man who never learned Swedish, who sat around talking politics with other men about a country that no longer existed. Smoking and suffering. The Somali women who swept past without uttering a word, protected by garments that reached all the way to their feet. It seemed as though the difference was in the language—between those who managed to learn it and those who never did. Those who spoke Swedish well, seemed to also be able to think in Swedish. The transformation probably required great humility. It was definitely not a task for those who were arrogant or timid. At any moment, they could be rejected as Swedes by those who considered themselves Swedish. I admired those who accepted the challenge and I had told myself that when I moved to China, I would be like them.

In my pocket, was my little yellow notebook, which I had bought at the stationery shop in the big department store in the provincial capital of Kunming. I had selected it, received a small ticket with a red stamp, gone to the cashier behind the glass and paid for it; then, I had returned with the stamped receipt to the first sales clerk, and received my notebook. The notebook had a green frog on the cover. Back in the city, were also my textbooks for foreign students. We were not expected to become Chinese, and in the textbook, examples of foreign students were always portrayed as guests to the country. In my notebook with the green frog, I collected words that did not appear in the textbooks, but that I needed in my life outside of the university, in my advanced course; fly, government, receipt, minibus.

For some reason, Liu was the one who put up with answering all my questions. She helped me write down many of the new letter signs in my notebook. Liu and I had met at an art exhibition in Kunming. That evening, white canvases hung on the walls with elongated pinkish-purple formations. Like the supernatural purple clouds of Daoism. Or female genitalia. The white slit in each purple cloud could have been an opening to anything. The painter herself was a middle-aged woman. Sun. The gallery rooms and the staircase were crowded with visitors, and it grew hot beneath the halogen lamps. I looked at them anxiously, because the gallery owner often sighed over how expensive they were and how frequently they broke. The electrical voltage was not constant, and after every exhibition, we discovered bulbs that had burned out. Both electricity and water came in uneven flows, and interruptions were common. The city was growing faster than anyone could really fathom. No one seemed to have anticipated the effect of the rapidly increasing population.

In the kitchen, were young women from the mountains. They mixed punch with watermelon in a blue, frosted plastic bowl that had been purchased abroad. The owner wanted to avoid the refreshments that were usually served at gallery openings in Kunming: red wine and Sprite in paper cups. We, who worked at the gallery, had agreed not to mention that the cook had once drowned a rat in the blue bowl. Now, we were looking for the leading artists. Whether they would show up or not. They did. Tang, who had received his art education in the army, arrived in a black hemp jacket with knotted buttons in the style of the old dynasties. Ye, who had his own gallery and plenty of success in Beijing, arrived accompanied by his wife, who ran a nightclub in the old factory. Duan, who never made a fuss about himself, brought his beloved little dog Pipi with its wrinkled skin. Lei, who worked in printmaking and photography, moved with precise gestures. As if she still wore a uniform. She too, had been in the army but had resigned, just like Tang. They had all seen the paintings before and soon, they sat in the light from the lanters at the café tables beneath the parasols on the sidewalk. They smoked and talked with Sha, the woman who had opened a restaurant in the old foundry mold factory. They had brought their own drinks, still mixing Sprite with red wine. Beggars and children were wandering among the tables on the sidewalk selling roses, but the kitchen girls shooed them away. The gallery owner had reminded me to tell the journalists that she had no intention of paying for articles. A young man from Kunming's evening newspaper promised to write a good article. He refused to believe that we would not pay the usual fee to have it published.

That evening, I noticed that Liu was standing in front of one of the paintings. She had a small point-and-shoot camera on a strap over her shoulder to document what she saw. For her studies. Her canvas-colored long dress had no decorations, and she did not try to flatter anyone. I had noticed that many people treated foreigners with a special kind of respect and helpfulness, often putting on a bit of a performance. Now that I was trying to make the transition to becoming Chinese, I needed a reliable friend. Liu was not excessively accommodating. She did not look up to me because I was a foreigner; besides, we were the same height and both a head taller than most other women. I trusted her immediately. She explained that her name meant "fragrance."

"A very country-bumpkin name," she said.

Liu rinsed the naked chicken under the water tap in the far corner of the yard which was surrounded by a wall. The hairy black pigs crowded against the iron bars of their pen. The nameless watchdog lay in its cage by the steel gate facing the fields. An apricot tree arched over stacks of old baskets, a metal cart, and the surviving chickens that wandered across the yard. It struck me that if I could somehow transport myself to my own grandmother's farm, I might have more in common with her, than Liu had with her mother. My grandmother was born in 1917 on a farm in the parish of Ramkvilla in Småland. Among the things she left behind, was a small English Bible with her name embossed in gold from the time she attended school and dreamed of becoming a nurse and a missionary, perhaps in Mongolia. Instead, my grandmother married a taxi driver from Småland and had seven children. She never went on a mission to Asia. Among her papers, I found letters from China written to her by a friend. Her friend had run a charity school, and in the letters she enclosed examples of one pupil's progress: crooked, hesitant letters written in black ink by a young Chinese woman, who had only recently learned to write in her own native language. Liu's mother was born in this village in 1951. She received no education and remained here. But her daughter had left for the art academy in the provincial capital. It was only a few dozen kilometers away, yet it had created a gap between their everyday worlds that I imagined was as wide as the one between me and my great-grandmother would have been. I had only ever seen her in a single black-and-white photograph, standing by a spinning wheel at her farm with a headscarf on her head. In China, it seemed like change had suddenly begun moving so quickly that one generation's experiences were fundamentally different from the next one’s.

Liu and her mother spoke in a dialect that I could not understand. It sounded completely different from the Chinese that I was learning in the city and which Liu spoke with me. They also seemed to shout at each other all the time. I became the family's silent guest. I only said thank you for the food: for the apple in the morning, the midmorning bowl of soft fermented tofu with chili. The chili somewhat subdued the smell of the tofu, which reminded me of Gorgonzola. On New Year's Eve, great meals were served with rice, green broad beans and pork, boiled rooster, fried pork rind, and smoked fish.

When it was time for supper, the whole family left the worn plush sofa and the rice-straw stools that Liu's mother had braided and covered with leftover scraps of fabric. Instead, we sat in front of the small television set on a springy, thick layer of green pine needles that were spread across part of the concrete floor. There was a cool scent of turpentine and forest. I thought it was like someone had taken the Christmas tree and laid it out on the floor.

"My mother does this for the New Year holidays," Liu said. She laughed at me and my questions and my notebook, but she still helped me write down the letters that I didn't know. Pine needles. Broad beans. Tap water.

The family lived in two houses that were standing back to back. One was old, made of red clay bricks straight from the earth, and one was newer, with hard, white, factory-made ceramic tiles. The family walked freely through the new gate and into the old house, the one that was facing the broad bean fields. For some reason, everyone seemed to prefer the old house, or perhaps they simply did not want to wear out the new one. Meals were served in the old main room, with the doors wide pen while the chickens tried to wander in. A bang against the steel gate set the guard dog barking. Its bark sounded hoarse. I asked whether the dog was ever allowed out of its cage.

"No, because it's a watchdog," Liu said. The dog stopped barking when it realized it was only Liu's father coming in from the fields to eat. In the small room that had once been Liu's, her older sister quarreled with her husband.

"He's from Sichuan," Liu said meaningly. The neighboring province.

Their daughter toddled out in a newly bought winter jacket and tried to pull the cat by its tail with her small hands. Liu's younger brother played with her. I thought of the one-child policy. How could Liu, who had been born in 1979—the same year the policy began—have a younger brother? She explained that her parents had to pay a hefty fine to the local authorities. The dear brother sat with his little cousin on the thick carpet of pine needles during the New Year holidays, watching historical costume dramas on television and drinking Coca-Cola.

Later, during the New Year holiday at Liu's parents' home, relatives stopped by to visit. A quiet cousin with thick glasses and uncombed hair became the center of everyone's attention. Liu explained that he was the first person from the village to be admitted to the elite Tsinghua University in Beijing. To study technology. Beijing lay more than two thousand kilometers away and seemed unimaginably distant from the village, yet it held a significance everyone agreed upon. The cousin carried the distinction like a shining badge wherever he went in the village, even though he mostly chewed sunflower seeds, spat the shells on the floor, and hardly said a word. The capital had accepted him. Everyone respected him for it.

The New Year holiday seemed just as soporific for Liu as Christmas holidays with my own family had been for me. In the main room of the old house, the television showed an endless animated kung fu series. The hero wore a long robe, and had his hair tied in a topknot. To gather his strength before the flying battles with demons, he sat cross-legged, gathering energy. Liu watched absentmindedly while chewing sunflower seeds. Every now and then, she shooed out a chicken and swept the shells from the floor into a dustpan. The family conversed loudly in their dialect. It took me several days before I was completely convinced that they were not arguing.

One evening after dinner, Liu wanted to show me something on the roof. The flat roof of the new concrete house. She walked ahead of me with a flashlight. We passed through the pantry with the clay jars, where her mother fermented vegetables and preserved salted tofu with chili. The new courtyard was covered with slippery tiles. The new house could have swallowed the old house several times over. Yet, it did not seem to attract the family the way the old, dark main room by the cookhouse did. In the new courtyard, there was a kitchen and a bathroom with a shower and hot water. I noticed the wooden washboard standing beside a new washing machine. The old gray-yellow laundry soap lay next to it, and muddy footprints led across the new, white tiled floor. The washing machine had not yet changed the old routine; it was mostly a prop displaying the family's status. In another room, dim candles were lit. I stopped there. Far back in the darkness, I glimpsed apples and porcelain cups on a long table. Incense sticks burned. Liu did not go inside.

"My mother arranges everything in here." 

I asked Liu what the room was actually used for. She said that her mother first set out the New Year's meal for them—the ancestors. The rice wine and candles on the table were laid out for those who had already died. She did not seem to want to explain further. But I thought that perhaps the new courtyard was not as deserted as I had first believed— the other part of the family, those whom we could no longer see, sat here, while the rest of us ate our meals in the old courtyard.

There was nothing ghostly about the room. I assumed that the ancestors had been just as good-natured as the living family. And probably pleased that Liu's father had demonstrated the family's industriousness by building the new, modern house that rose above the neighbors' houses.

In a large room, one floor up, Liu's father sat with his freshly washed feet tucked in on the new, fair, faux-leather sofa. The rest of the family did not seem to have found their way there. The plastic wrapping was still on the new furniture. Under the fluorescent lights beneath the new chandelier, he sat there, laughing to himself at a television program on a large screen. Liu explained that her father, a self-taught architect and structural engineer, had built the house with three floors so that each of his three children could have one. On the flat concrete roof stood yet another small house that still lacked windowpanes. But Liu pointed out that the large window openings faced north and east.

"My father knows that's how artists want it. So the light stays the same all day. So that I can paint here. If I move back."

We looked at the stars. They seemed brighter above the broad bean fields and rapeseed fields than in the city. The night wind carried a warm scent of the red soil. We breathed in smoke from cooking fires, and the sweet smell of incense from the village temple and all the rooms in the district, where the village ancestors were eating their New Year's meals.

During the last few days, Liu grew tired of staying at home. We decided to go into town and visit the market. The town was called Shilin—Stone Forest—and was named after the strange rock formations that tourists came to see. We walked past the small school. Liu told me that it was old; it was built before the revolution. The calligraphy above the gateway was still there. When Liu attended school, her hometown had still been called Lunan—South of the Road. An unassuming name for an unassuming place. That was before the local officials realized that Stone Forest would work better for marketing, and changed the name. The officials worked for the Party. But they served the growing economy just as much. Most of all, perhaps, they served their own interests. The money from tourism would also reach the officials' pockets, and the pockets of their superiors, and anyone who could demonstrate rapid economic growth in the place where he was stationed, could be transferred to a better position within the administration. Perhaps even before the roads to the newly renovated tourist sites had been completed.

The revolving hotel bar was the tallest building in town. Liu and I sat near the windows, drinking orange juice. The room revolved so slowly that it was barely noticeable. But we drank slowly too, and we had time to enjoy the view. The village in one direction. The famous Stone Forest in another. New concrete buildings. And an old city gate that remained. Liu no longer felt at home, and she was simply waiting for the holiday to end. Later, Liu's father drove us both back to the village on his red motorcycle. The motorcycle bounced lightly over the cracks in the concrete road. After seeing the studio he had built for his daughter, I thought of the slender, sunburned farmer in a new way.

I decided to return to Kunming before the holiday was over to prepare for my studies. Liu and her family wondered whether I should really leave so early. Only after I had gone, did I realize they might not have said it merely out of politeness, because when I arrived, the city seemed closed. Almost deserted. My feet became tangled in rustling straw and chopped sugarcane leaves; market leftovers abandoned in the streets when the New Year began. The shopkeepers had not yet returned. They were still sitting in their villages chewing sunflower seeds. The streets were lined with lowered and locked metal shutters. These were the last days of the only extended holiday of the year. The end of two merciful weeks for people who otherwise worked every day of the week. All over China, people were preparing to return from their villages to the big cities. Many would leave their children behind with parents and parents-in-law hundreds of kilometers from their workplaces.

At last, I found a restaurant that was open. The soups were ready in stainless steel pots on the sidewalk. I chose the one that had lotus root in the broth. It was the first time I had ordered lotus root. When I bit into the thick pinkish-white root, it released fine starchy threads, a spiderweb that clung to the corners of my mouth and stuck to my nose. I felt foolish trying to whisk them away without the other diners noticing. Lotus root was called ou. I asked the cook in the soot-blackened kitchen to write the sign for it in my little notebook with the frog on it. As I ate, I discovered that if I bit carefully along the fibers, instead of straight across the lotus root, I avoided the sticky threads around my mouth. I thought this was what I had to do to become Chinese. Chew my way through everyday life. Sometimes it was embarrassing, but I believed it would be worth it.