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21 China Landscape in the Forecourt of the British Museum It’s easy to invent a land and easier to efface it. But not now, not right here as five Catalan boys are hiding their faces in the leaves of the handkerchief tree teasing the name of this ancient, once endangered species on the sixth of July this year at a quarter past three. I love the sound of their language, the idleness it carries in the summer haze. The steps, the pillars, the beauty of stationary things, and the heart-shaped handkerchief fluttering effortlessly like the ghost of a dove. Three minutes late. The bamboo hisses like a boiling kettle; the white mulberry misses the silkworms; the lily listens to the weeping willow. Not having seen each other for nearly two years one assumes civility if not closeness. I sit by the scholar’s rock, deciphering the word Though set in stone, the dividing strokes hesitate at the meeting points, at the ink crossroads where meanings travel – blossoms, China – somewhere unrecognisable as the gentle terraces of paddy fields, on the first of many journeys 22 to ‘the motherland’; so much water so close to home but we chose to go away, so that we could be together as a whole, the four of us, a busy family fuelled by an itinerary through many sites and cities. The night before I left home, sleep visited you both with a gift of snores, as my room filled up with walruses. Then I hear one of the boys scream ‘Mummies!’ in english and you appear at the gate, weaving through the boisterous crowd, waving to me with your handkerchief. ...

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