Author, filmmaker Guo Xiaolu looks back in anger
'I'm more in my films than my books,' says London-based Guo Xiaolu, but she may have shown enough of herself in her latest novel - timed to come out on the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown - to have burned bridges, writes Maya Jaggi
Filmmaker and fiction writer Guo Xiaolu was a schoolgirl in a fishing village in southern China when the Tiananmen Square student protests erupted 25 years ago. She was 15, and desperate to join her elder brother, a Beijing student on hunger strike.
"He was in the square, calling back home, 'We've quit eating. We're putting up tents,'" she recalls. "I was enthusiastic. I believed China would change, or at least we'll have democratic elections."
Her parents held her back; her artist father had spent 15 years in a prison camp in the 1950s and during the Cultural Revolution for wanting to paint. "But we thought, 'It's the 80s now.'"
Her brother survived the tanks and bullets of June 4, 1989. But, when Guo arrived at the Beijing Film Academy four years later, the long purge was under way.
"Older students were taken away to write confessions. It took 10 years of investigations for them to be punished. I had revolutionary ideas, and we wanted to protest. But people were too scared."
I Am China, which was published this month (and featured in The Review last week), on the crackdown's 25th anniversary, charts the dark aftermath of Tiananmen through the story of a punk rocker in Beijing and his poet lover, separated by political upheavals. When we encounter the musician immured in a psychiatric unit, then entombed in a "grey-white box" in a detention centre, he is in Britain in 2012 as a stateless "non-person" - a term "so absurd it sounds almost Chinese to him".
Guo, who came to London in 2002 on a scholarship to the National Film and Television School, was rejected at two appeals after her visa ran out, and faced a stark choice: "Either you go back to China, or you go to prison. But I had a political problem [in China] with my first documentary" - The Concrete Revolution (2004), which followed rural construction workers toiling on venues for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The programme won the grand prix at the International Human Rights Film Festival, in Paris, France.