1.5m * 1.8m, Acrylic on canvas, Copper thread hand stich.
At the upper deck of the red bus, with a piece of Chinatown cake on my lap, I gaze out the window. The bustling city is now feeling like a distant memory: after crossing the Thames river, the streets of southeast London grow darker.
One of my friends is about to leave after finishing his studies in London. We hanged out during the day. People in Soho, come and go, they never see others; tourists gather under Big Ben endlessly from morning to night. Thinking about his departure, I feel a bit sad, but only briefly. I suppose I’ve already grown used to goodbyes.
I grew up in a small post-industrial city, back when there was no high-speed rail. At seventeen, I took the overnight train alone to Beijing to study art. Later, I got into a university in the provincial capital. After graduating, I returned to Beijing to work. By the time I’m writing this, I’ve been in London for a full year. I still remember when I choose to work in Beijing and the sadness my mother felt about my long absence from home, and how I held back tears until I passed through security. Since the high-speed rail was constructed, it only takes five and a half hours to reach Beijing now, even though I didn’t have too much time stay at home. So many scenes are weaving in my head. Parting with family and friends was a painful thing. The night before the BA graduation ceremony, classmates played games all night, and the next day we said goodbye. I cried so much in the taxi that the driver looked at me in alarm.
Over the years, for various reasons, friends I made eventually moved to different cities—Shanghai, Shenzhen, Hangzhou or maybe back to their hometowns – while I continued to drift in the vastness of Beijing. Will they miss this city? Or will they miss their youth? The time we were cycling in the hutongs, walking in the Olympic Forest Park, skating in the Beihai Park. Willow catkins and cherry blossoms in spring, the bad smell of ginkgo trees in autumn, the howling winds in winter when the leaves have all fallen and the light makes the shadows of trees particularly clear.
Everyone left, unable to bear this city anymore. The air pollution, the awful food, the high rents, long time transition. As people of the middle class, we were not able to earn enough to afford a flat in Beijing, however hard we tried. The Chongqing noodle restaurant I liked shut down. The hutongs were renovated, and many shops there closed. The Livehouse I often went to also closed. 798 art zone is dying. Too many things changed. The Beijng in my heart was extinguished bit by bit.
Hundreds and thousands of people dedicate their best time to Beijing. The city never lacks fresh blood. London is the same. International students carried hot cash flow into the city and no one knows where they'll be tomorrow.
A parting no longer brings me to tears.
A shiver briefly shakes off my drowsiness. I get off at New Cross Gate, I’m hit by the sharp smell of marijuana, as fallen leaves and murky rainwater roll across the road. The homeless women has returned after disappearing for a few days. No one stops their hurried footsteps. The noise from pubs rises from the ground, cars and pedestrians crush cigarette butts underfoot. I’m slipping back home like a fox.
Finally back home, I’m exhausted but can’t sleep. My thoughts keep swirling - I don’t know what I’ll do after graduation, where I’ll go, or how I’ll make a living. If I don't have a job, I won’t be entitled to welfare. I don’t want my mother to have to feed her thirty-year-old daughter. Outside the window, motorcycles speed down the road as usual, their engines always roar past midnight, stabbing at my eardrums and my heart.
For the past six months, I have been tormented by anxiety. In the summer, the faint sunlight had no effect on my skin. When I faced all the congratulations at the graduation show in July, I wasn’t happy; I knew how much I had deceived myself. I filled the canvas with angry brushstrokes to mask my dull soul. Anxiety and unease engulfed me – my practice, my life, my love. I built everything on lies, and in turn, everything deceived me. I grew even more anxious. My head had been hurting on and off for two or three months. I worry that I might not even have the strength to weave lies anymore…
I wake with the morning sounds of children playing in the playground. I always feel that the sun in London hangs low, never far from the horizon, even in summer. In the autumn, the sunlight would slant onto the red leaves outside my window from midday, tracing a vivid outline. At some point, a dark cloud drifted over, casting a shadow on the once-bright blue sky.
I make coffee, finger slipping across the screen on my phone, and the photo memories take me back to this time last year - a picture of Tian and me in Richmond Park. We hadn’t seen each other since middle school. I never expected that, over ten years later, we would meet in London. Back in school, she had always been the top student in our class. Later, she completed her master’s and doctoral degrees in the best quantum physics program in China and, during the pandemic, secured a postdoctoral position in the UK.
The weather that day wasn’t great – strong winds and heavy clouds with a light drizzle. The withered autumn grass stretched out before us and we saw a herd of deer, an aeroplane crossed swiftly across the sky. Perhaps the deer are accustomed to the noise of aeroplanes and crowds of people. They look so peaceful.
I asked Tian, “Why did you want to come to the UK?” I’ve forgotten how she answered.
Looking back at that day, the warmth of that conversation still lingers.
90*100 cm, Acrylic on cotton
We tried to sit on the ground but it’s too wet. The sounds of wood were so quiet. Tian said, ’When I was studying, almost all the female PhD students got married and had children right after graduating. They were married in an instant, then stopped pursuing academic work.’ A wave of bitterness swept through me. I remembered a year ago, I worked in the same internet retail company as a woman with PhD in Physics from Tsinghua University. This company was once fined approximately £379 million by the government for its monopolistic position in the industry. We are both nobody in 80,000 staffs. It was hard to imagine someone so brilliant spending her days doing mundane work, trying to get the more poor people to spend more on our platform—like combined Uber and Amazon, the platform provide every service and product you need in daily life. Whatever you do in this company, let more people consume more is the core of the work. In secular standards, she is much more excellent than me, but still was tormented by a large amount of repetitive work and endless paper plans. What about me? What was I doing every day? I have my own talent and it was almost completely worn away. But at least in that company, the blunting of my edges had earned me some savings, though the work was truly monotonous and dull.
Fresh out of college, I worked at two magazines for over three years, driven by ideals. During that time, I drifted through various social events – a small-city girl transformed in Beijing, seemingly glamorous, meeting intellectuals, artists, government officials, traveling to different cities, enjoying media hospitality. But in the end, I would come home with barely a coin in my pocket and without a single relationship that truly belongs to me. I felt as if I had experienced a huge deception. I gave up on finding anything of value beyond money in office buildings. I changed jobs as quickly as I could, moving to an internet company, where I finally managed to spend £600 to get an HPV vaccine at a private hospital just as I was nearing 25. By the time I was 29, I had saved enough to cover the tuition fees to study in the UK.
But I wasn’t that resolute and happy. Years later, when I revisited my cv and looked back at the articles I wrote as a fresh editor, I was reminded that there was once such a version of me who existed in this world. The new photographer I had found became successful six years later and sent me postcards and gifts from his hometown, just when I was thinking of muddling through life. My colleagues in the editorial team were my like-minded, dearest friends. Since graduating, I've only been in three romantic relationships, all with men I met through the editor work. I come from a small city, my English was poor, marked by a thick local accent. My manager asked me to translate an English email, which I struggled to do. I ended it up with failure. A colleague who studied in the UK came to my rescue. I was so embarrassed on the first day of work. But my editor-in-chief treated me warmly, nurtured me and encouraged me to venture further. So, in that cold winter, with my first paycheck, I enrolled in an English class, waking up early every day to study English and then took an hour-long bus to work by midday. These intertwined fragments are so precious, was flickering in my heart, forever present.
I held back my tears and told myself: No. I didn’t regret leaving.
My friends who are still working in magazines are all from Beijing or Shanghai, and their families have already gave them estates and cars. Their parents' wealth is enough to ensure that they will have no worries about money throughout their lives even in a place like Beijing.
There was no choice.
No, I had choice.
I chased a despicable one.
I don't want to succumb to the fate I was born into.
I want to climb up and control as much as I can.
I don't want to be a piece of driftwood floating in a river of huge population.
I lied to myself many times.
‘My parents don’t want me to stay in London; they want me to go back,’ Tian continued, pulled me out of my thoughts. We’re both only children, and our parents want us by their side. In the distance, the skyline was continuing shrouded in dark clouds, blending with the dry yellow grass. ’My mom always tries to reassure me, saying a girl doesn’t need to set such high standards for herself,’ I replied. I can’t help but wonder - if I were a boy, would my mother expect more of me? It was too late when I wanted to work hard. If I had worked harder when I was studying, would I be different today? ’Remember how in school, teachers always paid more attention to the boys,’ I said without resentment. It’s as if everyone is trying to pull women toward mediocrity.
I don't deny the lucky part in my life; my mother devoted herself fully to my education. What would my life be like without the one-child policy? Would I still receive all the family's resources? How much family love would I receive? Even at my age, it's hard to accept the idea of suddenly having one or two more people in my life sharing my mother, my grandmother, my aunt. But I also think that one day my parents pass away, there will no longer be anyone in this world who shares my bloodline. I truly know some friends in my generation have more than one child, but I hear too little about sibling’s love, more about the fight for family property even though we are not older than 30.
I am selfish. When I think of my responsibility toward my parents, I long for someone to stand with me and share it. If I had a sibling, would I be freer to pursue my own life? ’One child is best; the government will take care of your elderly life.’ People believed this slogan once.
The lives of the previous generation were incredibly hard. Material goods were scarce, and siblings had to take turns wearing the same pair of pants. Due to malnutrition, women only had their periods once every six months. Even the right to have multiple children was taken away. The cold contraceptive ring became a part of their bodies for over twenty years. Their only child became their emotional pillar but will grow up and leave them. How could they bear the thought of that child one day no longer being by their side? Everyone is so pitiful.
‘I work for everyone, and everyone work for me.’ That was their childhood.
‘Study for the rise of the Chinese nation.’ That was mine.
There is no ‘I’ in their world.
In fact, I think I don't have ‘I’ either.
As the winter sky darkened, we left the park. Our footsteps flattened some of the grass. ’It was not easy for us to get here.’ ’But even in London, the senior management of our Institute of Physics are all old white man.’ ’But this is London, where else can we look? New York? No!’ ’We must have been brainwashed by the British.’ We laughed,and the sound was lost in the cold and swallowed by the roar of passing cars.
I’m wondering if living in London is truly any happier than living in my small hometown in China. I’m beginning to suspect that London, Beijing, elite education - all of it might just be a grand illusion. Emigrating, is merely choosing a government under which you’d rather be oppressed. You sacrifice money, social status, family bonds, in exchange for something you believe is worthwhile. From hometown to Beijing, from Bejing to London, with every journey you're leaving behind a little bit of you. I wanted to go back. But what you throw away won't be waiting for you on the way back.
The potted plant on the windowsill is wilting. Outside, a light drizzle is falling, and the noisy children on the playground below have quietly dispersed. I open the window, letting in the smell of earth and mildew. I am such an ordinary woman, a good woman, the only daughter of my family.
What use is my ego to this world?
120*150cm, Acrylic on canvas
With my savings and my mother’s support, I have fifteen months free from worry about money, time in London to study, far removed from all the familiar social rules. It’s a space purely my own. I can read, write, and converse. I realized that I’ve truly connected with Woolf’s words from a century ago: a woman needs money and nourishment; only then will her talent emerge. In that moment, my interest in romantic love between men and women vanished completely. What I lack isn’t love, but power and money! How much foolish time I’ve wasted in the past. I decide to get up and go to the studio, even though my arms still feel a bit sore.
Physical pain has been a constant companion. In my senior year of high school, I didn’t even know about taking painkillers for period cramps, so every month I’d have to take a day off, curled up in bed with a hot water bottle. Faced with the heavy workload, all handwritten, I developed a thick callus on my right middle finger, which still hasn’t disappeared. In college, when I was studying photography, I was obsessed with the darkroom, obsessed with perfecting standardized processes. For a year, I’d spend all day stand there, striving for images on photo paper to be flawless and precise, then lost interest once I achieved it. Even now, just thinking about the darkroom makes my legs ache and sore. After a few years of work, with so much time spent at the computer, my neck has started to tilt forward. If I paint or set up easels for hours on end, my body feels shattered the next day. For a while, I was obsessed with going to the gym, training to the point when every step hurt the next day. I fall into obsessions, withdraw from my passion, and fall again, one trap after another, unable to stop. I didn’t love those ex-boyfriends either: if I found them attractive, it was just a desire to possess, then gradually lose interest. With every new world I encounter, an uncontrollable desire within me. My suffering isn’t deserving of sympathy. My head is starting to ache again.
The fruit of lies is a poisoned apple. I swallowed it.
After abandoning the painting I studied in my teens, I begin approaching it again ten years later. At first awkwardly, and then, suddenly, the muscle memory from my teenage training surfaced, and everything started to flow. I felt surprised, even a little pleased. Myself and my body met in a nonlinear moment of time.
Only action can ease anxiety. In the constant act of doing, a sudden calm rises from beneath the surface, sweeping everything else away in an instant. I’ve digested that apple.
Consumed in the act of painting, my menstrual blood seeps beyond the pad, staining my chair, my pants, making everything in crimson.