I went to New Zealand by way of the IELTS exam. Before that, the farthest I had ever travelled alone was Shanwei in Guangdong. I had never left China, and my English was poor. I chose New Zealand because it did not require a gaokao score, its foundation programmes demanded less English than those in other English-speaking countries, and, on the map, it looked very far from home.
My deskmate in foundation school was a Saudi named Alex, whose English was about as good as mine. He said he had been studying in the United States until he saw a classmate shot and killed in a helicopter. He transferred because he had heard that New Zealand did not discriminate against minorities and was a peaceful place. There were many Saudis in our class, most studying on government scholarships. One told me that before coming he had thought New Zealand was beside Ireland and, like Ireland, part of Britain.
Before leaving China, I spent a long time trying to persuade my mother that I should skip the gaokao and go to a vocational school instead. I could learn welding, or how to operate an excavator; I even considered becoming a cook. None of these were serious, affirmative choices. They were all ways of escaping the system of academic advancement, and this had much to do with what my mother had taught me since childhood: that diplomas were important, that they largely determined a person’s opportunities and dignity. University, she said, was the minimum. Ordinary people did a master’s; those who were a little better did a second one; to stay at a university and teach, you generally needed a doctorate.
My mother became a full professor early. She supervised doctoral students and was designated a national academic leader—a title with complicated implications. In her view, anyone who did not attend university had no rights in society. My refusal to study turned much of her hair grey and kept her awake at night. After a long, repeated and painful struggle, we reached a compromise: I would not sit the gaokao, but I had to study abroad.
Our high school was a good one, the kind with more strong students than weak ones; it was usually the weaker students who chose to go overseas. When I needed a transcript for foundation school, I returned to the academic office. The teacher stamped the form, left the grades blank for me to fill in myself, and warned me, ‘Don’t go too far.’ I only just passed IELTS on my second attempt, though I attended plenty of preparatory classes. I bought a membership at the internet café next door and often skipped lessons to play games. I remember a book market beside New Oriental, where a stallholder who loved novels recommended a Changjiang Literature and Art series of world classics. Seeing me read fantasy, he told me gravely, ‘You’ll never amount to anything reading that.’ The off-campus classes took no attendance and called no roll; everything depended on self-discipline. When I turned up for an IELTS mock exam, the listening teacher was astonished: ‘You really are taking the test?’ I had heard that the foreign examiner for the speaking section loved jazz, so I prepared carefully to talk about Clapton. My halting English soon drained his interest.
Later, at foundation school in Auckland, I discovered that plenty of people spoke worse English than I did. In fact, Asians mostly stayed with other Asians—not only the Chinese, but Koreans and Japanese too. Abroad, the line between East and West became even sharper. In their minds, people sorted those who resembled them into small groups and sealed themselves inside for protection.
Auckland is the City of Sails: a harbour, the Sky Tower, a clear and generous sky, and islands scattered everywhere. Waves, tides—the movement of the sea was like breathing. Living beside it, a person fell into the same rhythm, the mind rising and falling with the water.
I went to see the last place Gu Cheng had lived. His Māori neighbour, his face covered in tattoos, was friendly and showed me the way. Every window of the house had been boarded over; weeds and trees blocked the sun; a sign read FOR SALE. The roads on Waiheke Island rose and fell, exhausting on a bicycle. Like the other islands, it had abundant sunlight, luxuriant plants, clean sea and very slow time.
At our foundation graduation, a teacher asked each of us what we thought about choosing a university. I said I wanted to learn skydiving or scuba diving; becoming a fisherman in Fiji would be good too.
Later I called my mother and told her I wanted to spend two years earning a private pilot’s licence. That option came after diving instructor and paragliding instructor, but still before university.
In the end I applied to a university near the South Island, in Wellington, New Zealand’s capital. I heard there were many local New Zealanders and few Asians there. I wanted to escape a world full of Korean barbecue, Japanese sushi, internet cafés, Hong Kong-style diners and Chinese supermarkets, and learn English in solitude. Wellington is a windy harbour and it rains often. The rain travels sideways, so people prefer raincoats to umbrellas. Fine days are rare, and one seldom hears of anyone going to the beach for water sports. In the dark wind and rain, people droop like plants deprived of nourishment.
By my second semester, I had begun shutting myself inside my cramped little room. I missed classes in great numbers and turned day and night upside down.
The door slid sideways on rollers, leaving two parallel tracks in the carpet. Many smells were shut inside with me, all mixed together. If socks could swim through the air, the room would have looked like a dark, murky aquarium: half a bottle of red wine propelling itself by squirting out its own liquid; socks like seahorses or earthworms; a blue-striped quilt like a whale, forever swallowing inexplicable things. When I opened the window, the murk thinned. Everything slowly sank to the floor and became itself again. Wrapped in the quilt, I truly felt that part of me disappeared, and with it my unease and guilt. Sometimes I woke to find I had missed a three o’clock class. My tongue was knotted; I had lost the ability to speak.
I lived on high ground, and from the right place could look down over the city and the sea. Whenever I caught sight of it unexpectedly, I realised how far away the sea had become, and that this was not Auckland. Cold cement dust settling over the earth; salt water lifting into waves; burning grains of sand; clouds hanging low above the sea—all had become things that happened long ago, past time refracted into the present. When my mind was foggy and my head swollen, my senses opened by accident and I became fragile, acutely receptive. Music and books took on meanings I never felt while fully awake. Two nights before an essay was due, I would run to the library with chocolate and a fizzing energy drink, idle until late, then resolve to take one step and work out what those narrative languages were actually saying. I opened the books my teachers had assigned—McEwan’s Atonement—and after a single page knew it was a good book, that they were right to ask me to analyse such things. In that moment, everything about university suddenly made sense; everything glittered. Everything except me. I had become a light-absorbing material. I could sit on the grass for two hours without speaking while people around me talked endlessly about essay topics, the sun making my neck itch and my wrists ache and swell. Late at night the library announcement returned at intervals, a woman’s voice telling you the library was about to close: ten minutes, five minutes, repeated again and again. You could remain and be locked in overnight, but the voice created urgency. Lights that had switched off automatically would be turned on again. In the moment when they closed on all sides and slowly brightened, there was a blurred boundary, and I preferred to stay inside it. A chocolate factory: that was how I imagined myself then. My body divided into departments that processed and refined the flow of energy through macromolecular compounds. This was how food gave me the energy of the sun.
4 January 2022