I Am China by Xiaolu Guo review – exile and uncertainty

In 2010, the Chinese writer Liao Yiwu wrote an open letter to Angela Merkel, to express his deep disappointment that the Chinese authorities had prevented him from travelling to Germany to take part in a programme of literary events. In his letter, he imagines himself visiting Germany, but returning to China: "It is unimaginable," he wrote, "that a writer would be able to do anything once he has left the place of his mother tongue." 

Liao is now in exile in Germany after escaping from China on foot in 2011, and perhaps he might find comfort in the examples of other Chinese writers who, despite having left the place of their mother tongue, remain engaged and prolific artists. Some of them, such as the novelist Ma Jian, continue to write in Chinese; others, such as Xiaolu Guo, who has lived in Britain since 2002, now write in English.

It would be impossible to categorise Guo as a writer in danger of losing her voice once out of her native context. In addition to 10 books, five of them written since leaving China, she has racked up a total of 10 films as director/producer and two as screenwriter. She is the most convincing exemplar of her belief that, as she once told an interviewer, for someone driven to create: "Languages and settings are the tools, but not the first thing."

Her first novel in English, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, was written, she has said, out of frustration at the shortage of literary translators, which meant that her existing body of Chinese-language work could not get the attention of London publishers. Translation, in its broadest sense, English readers' ignorance of Chinese literature and the fate of lovers are recurring themes in the work of this now much-acclaimed writer and film-maker.

I Am China, her latest novel, is a multilayered exploration of politics and culture across three continents. It opens with a letter written by a Chinese man, who signs himself Jian, to Mu, his absent lover. We learn from the letter, dated December 2011, that Kublai Jian, to give him his full adopted name, is a musician, and that he was in Tiananmen Square in 1989. We do not know where he is now, or where his lover is, but he hopes that they will soon be reunited.

Jian's letter is one of a bundle of documents that has reached Jonathan Barker, a British publisher, who handed them on to a young translator, Iona Kirkpatrick, in the hope that a book might be fashioned from this mysterious collection of personal papers. It is a speculative project, driven by Barker's belief that translating the letters might uncover "something big" – in which category, bizarrely, he appears to include artistic censorship in China, a phenomenon that hardly counts as breaking news even in London's more parochial intellectual circles. This is perhaps unlikely behaviour for a leading light in a publishing world that Guo herself has often condemned as overly commercial, but never mind.

The reader has the advantage of Iona, as narrative sections pick up the stories of both Jian and Mu: Jian's passage through English and Swiss detention centres, and Mu's subsequent career as a punk performance poet, also pursued in exile; Mu's dying father; and the couple's passion for each other, for politics and for their respective creative lives. We discover that a political manifesto that Jian wrote for his last rock concert is the ultimate cause of his exile.

Family backstories emerge as Iona struggles on with the translation, pausing for some brief, functional sexual encounters, and filling in the gaps in her own understanding of contemporary China through a combination of Google searches and the advice of her former teacher, until she pieces together the identity and fate of both Mu and Jian.

This discovery resolves the plot, but is less important than Guo's picture of the dislocation that afflicts all the characters as they struggle through atomised lives, where the relative freedoms of exile are counted against cultural nostalgia and loss of certainty as once-cherished meaning is stripped away. Cultural references, from Johnny Rotten to Erik Satie, are refracted through a lens of Chinese politics; through much of the book, Jian is absorbed in reading Vassily Grossman's magnum opus, Life and Fate, the epic novel of human survival under totalitarianism. The closing line of his own manifesto, particularly resonant in this 25th anniversary year of the Tiananmen protests, informs the title of the book. "I am China," he writes "We are China. The people. Not the state."