Babel

by R.F. Kuang

that he had not requested these privileges of Oxford, had not chosen to be spirited out of Canton at all, that the generosities of the university should not demand his constant, unswerving loyalty to the Crown and its colonial projects, and if it did, then that was a peculiar form of bondage he had never agreed to. That he had not wished for this fate until it was thrust upon him, decided for him. That he didn’t know what life he would have chosen – this one, or a life in which he’d grown up in Canton, among people who looked and spoke like him. But what did it matter? Professor Lovell would hardly sympathize. All that mattered was that Robin was guilty.

‘The way Babel hoards materials isn’t just,’

‘It’s not right,’

‘It’s selfish. All our silver goes to luxury, to the military, to making lace and weapons when there are people dying of simple things these bars could fix. It’s not right that you recruit students from other countries to work your translation centre and that their motherlands receive nothing in return.’

And that was the heart of it all, wasn’t it? Robin had always been willing, in theory, to give up only some things for a revolution he halfway believed in. He was fine with resistance as long as it didn’t hurt him. And the contradiction was fine, as long as he didn’t think too hard about it, or look too closely. But spelled out like this, in such bleak terms, it seemed inarguable that far from being a revolutionary, Robin, in fact, had no convictions whatsoever.

‘Suppose you invented the spinning wheel. Are you suddenly obligated to share your profits with everyone who still spins by hand?’

‘And are we obligated to distribute silver bars all around the world to backward countries who have had every opportunity to construct their own centres of translation? It takes no great investment to study foreign languages. Why must it be Britain’s problem if other nations fail to take advantage of what they have?’

Free trade, open borders, equal access to the same knowledge – it all sounded so fine in theory. But if the playing field really was so even, why had all the profits accumulated in Britain? Were the British really so much more clever and industrious? Had they simply played the game, fair and square, and won?

That’s how Evie was. When she was caught up in her work, she lost track of what was going on around her. Nothing existed for her but the research.

‘This is who you’ve thrown your lot in with,’

‘A liar and a killer. Do you imagine you’re aiding some movement of global liberation, Robin? Don’t be naive. You’re aiding Griffin’s delusions of grandeur. And for what?’ He nodded to Robin’s shoulder. ‘A bullet in your arm?’

‘So. The choice ought to be very obvious, I think. Babel, or Hermes.’

In the days and weeks that followed he would try to persuade himself that this was a moment of strategic concession, not of betrayal. That he was not giving up much of importance

But he’d never quite talk himself out of the nasty truth – that this was not about Hermes, nor about Ramy or Victoire, but about self-preservation.

‘You are unlike Griffin in every way possible. You’re humble, you’re bright, and you work hard. You are less corrupted by your heritage than he was. If I’d only just met you, I’d be hard pressed to guess you were a Chinaman at all. You have prodigious talent, and talent deserves a second chance. But careful, boy.’ He gestured to the door. ‘There won’t be a third.’

‘I have been staring at that bar every day for the past five years, wondering where I went wrong with Griffin. If I had raised him differently, or seen him earlier for what he was, if Evie would still – but never mind.’

‘Now it weighs on your conscience. Keep it, Robin Swift. Carry it in your front pocket. Pull it out whenever you begin to doubt, and let it remind you which side are the villains.’

Only he hadn’t the faintest clue whether he’d done the right thing, what right and wrong meant at all, or how the pieces might now fall.

He had no idea what the purpose was of anything he studied, only that it delighted the adults so when he mastered it all.

Lie, Ramiz.

Hide, Ramiz. Show the world what they want; contort yourself into the image they want to see, because seizing control of the story is how you in turn control them. Hide your faith, hide your prayers, for Allah will still know your heart.

Outside, he dazzled. Inside, he felt like a fraud, a traitor. And he was just starting to despair, to wonder if all he would ever accomplish was to become a lackey of empire as Wilson had intended, for the avenues of anticolonial resistance seemed so few, and so hopeless.

‘Growing up outside your country, leaving everything you knew behind, adapting to a new environment where I’m sure you received – well, less than the amount of care and affection you likely needed . . . Those were all things that affected Griffin as well, and I can’t say I’ve handled things better the second time. You are responsible for your own poor decisions, but I confess I do in part blame myself.’

‘I’d like for us to start anew. A clean slate for you, a renewed commitment on my part to be a better guardian. We’ll pretend the past few days never happened. We’ll put the Hermes Society, and Griffin, behind us. We’ll think only of the future, and all the glorious and brilliant things you will achieve at Babel. Is that fair?’

Still, he’d made a greater acknowledgment of Robin’s feelings than he’d ever done, and for the first time since they’d boarded the Merope, Robin felt that he could breathe.

Robin opened his eyes, stared out over the rolling waves until he lost focus, until he was staring at nothing at all, and tried to convince himself that if he was not happy, he was at least content.

‘Everything I’ve worked for is this!’

‘What, you think I came to Babel because I want to be a translator for the Queen? Birdie, I hate it in this country. I hate the way they look at me, I hate being passed around at their wine parties like an animal on display. I hate knowing that my very presence at Oxford is a betrayal of my race and religion, because I’m becoming just that class of person Macaulay hoped to create. I’ve been waiting for an opportunity like Hermes since I got here—’

‘Survival’s not that difficult, Birdie.’

‘But you’ve got to maintain some dignity while you’re at it.’

Free trade. This was always the British line of argument – free trade, free competition, an equal playing field for all. Only it never ended up that way, did it? What ‘free trade’ really meant was British imperial dominance, for what was free about a trade that relied on a massive build-up of naval power to secure maritime access? When mere trading companies could wage war, assess taxes, and administer civil and criminal justice?

Robin wanted to say yes. He wished he could claim that yes, of course, there was yet space to negotiate – that Britain and China, both being nations led by rational, enlightened people, could certainly find a middle ground without resorting to hostilities. But he knew this was not true. He knew Baylis, Jardine, and Matheson had no intention of compromising with the Chinese. Compromise required some acknowledgment that the other party deserved equal moral standing. But to the British, he’d learned, the Chinese were like animals.

This line of argument again. Robin could have kicked something. Always this, the argument from bondage, as if his loyalties were shackled by privilege he had not asked for and did not choose to receive. Did he owe Oxford his life, just because he had drunk champagne within its cloisters? Did he owe Babel his loyalty because he had once believed its lies?

What he wanted, Robin thought, was for Professor Lovell to admit what he’d done. That it was unnatural, this entire arrangement; that children were not stock to be experimented on, judged for their blood, spirited away from their homeland in service of Crown and country. That Robin was more than a talking dictionary, and that his motherland was more than a fat golden goose. But he knew these were acknowledgments that Professor Lovell would never make. The truth between them was not buried because it was painful, but because it was inconvenient, and because Professor Lovell simply refused to address it.

‘But I’m just some Chink, Professor. I’m also her son.’ Robin felt a fierce urge to cry. He forced it down. Hurt never garnered sympathy from his father. But anger, perhaps, might spark fear. ‘Did you think you’d washed that part out of me?’ He had become so good at holding two truths in his head at once. That he was an Englishman and not. That Professor Lovell was his father and not. That the Chinese were a stupid, backwards people, and that he was also one of them. That he hated Babel, and wanted to live forever in its embrace. He had danced for years on the razor’s edge of these truths, had remained there as a means of survival, a way to cope, unable to accept either side fully because an unflinching examination of the truth was so frightening that the contradictions threatened to break him.

This was a warning. This was where his father drew the line. Everything Robin had done until now might still be forgiven, if he only backed down; if he only made his apologies, bent to authority, and returned to naive, ignorant luxury. But Robin had been bending for so long. And even a gilded cage was still a cage.

Anger was first an ‘affliction’, as meant by the Old Icelandic angr, and then a ‘painful, cruel, narrow’ state, as meant by the Old English enge, which in turn came from the Latin angor, which meant ‘strangling, anguish, distress’. Anger was a chokehold. Anger did not empower you. It sat on your chest; it squeezed your ribs until you felt trapped, suffocated, out of options. Anger simmered, then exploded. Anger was constriction, and the consequent rage a desperate attempt to breathe.

It did not seem fair that such a minuscule action could have such reverberating consequences. Something that broke not only his world but Ramy’s, Letty’s, and Victoire’s should have taken minutes at least, it seemed; should have required repeated effort.

The four of them took turns losing their minds. There was an unspoken rule to this game: one of them was allowed to break down at a time, but not all of them at once, for the duty of the saner heads was to talk the mad one down.

How could they tell her she was being delusional? That it was insane to imagine that the British legal system was truly neutral, that they would receive a fair trial, that people who looked like Robin, Ramy, and Victoire might kill a white Oxford professor, throw his body overboard, lie about it for weeks, and then walk away unscathed? That the fact that she clearly believed all this was only evidence of the starkly different worlds they lived in?

When it came down to it, they simply could not think of themselves as anything else but students, couldn’t imagine a world where they did not belong to Babel. Babel was all they knew. Babel was home.

How had Jardine, Matheson, and Lovell known negotiations in Canton would break out in hostilities more than two years ago? But that was obvious. They’d known because this was their intent all along. They wanted hostilities because they wanted silver, and without some miraculous change in the Qing Emperor’s mind, the only way to get that was to turn their guns on China. They’d planned on war before they had even set sail. They’d never meant to negotiate with Commissioner Lin in good faith. Those talks were merely a pretext for hostilities. Those men had funded Professor Lovell’s trip to Canton as a final expedition before they introduced the bill to Parliament. These men were relying on Professor Lovell to help them win a short, brutal, efficient war.

‘Makes you wonder why they sent us in the first place.’ ‘Because they still needed a pretext,’

‘Because they still needed something to take to Parliament to prove the only way they were going to get what they wanted was by sheer force. They wanted Baylis to humiliate Lin, not compromise with him. They wanted to bait Lin into declaring hostilities first.’

‘Only they didn’t count on Lin blowing up all that opium in the harbour.’ ‘No,’

‘But I suppose they’re getting the just cause the...

‘the Hermes Society.’ It seemed so obvious when she said it. Only Hermes might know what to do with this. The Hermes Society, which Robin had betrayed, which might not even be willing to take them back, was the only entity they’d encountered that had ever professed to bother with the problem of colonialism. Here was a way out, a rare and undeserved second chance to make good on wrong choices – if only they could find Hermes before the police found them.

‘That’s why you took the fall for us that night. Every time you come up against something difficult, you just want to make it go away, and you think the way to do that is self-flagellation. You’re obsessed with punishment. But that’s not how this works, Birdie. You going to prison fixes nothing. You hanging from the gallows fixes nothing. The world’s still broken. A war’s still coming. The only way to properly make amends is to stop it, which you don’t want to do, because really what this is about is your being afraid.’

‘You were trying to let yourself off the hook,’

‘But all sacrifice does is make you feel better. It doesn’t help the rest of us, so it’s an ultimately meaningless gesture. Now, if you’re finished with grand attempts at martyrdom, I think we should discuss . . .’