Beyond Exile (2)

 

Published in February 2026

The first chapter can be read here: Yer Üstünden Notlar: Beyond Exile (1)

                                                     2

The evening I saw you at that bar, making plans for the bicycle trip that you would never take, was exactly six months after the day I was discharged from the hospital. This was the third baby I had lost. For the first time my baby had survived to the eighth month; for the first time I had allowed myself such hope; for the first time I had gone shopping for the baby who was about to be born. It was all false hope but nothing else. I was like a wild animal that had fallen from a tree and broken its leg, moaning helplessly for six months while waiting for death. My body had somehow healed with time — but my mind! I could only put it to sleep with sedatives, and the sound of a baby crying that echoed endlessly through the deep caves inside my head I could silence only, and only, by numbing my brain entirely. I had told myself that if I kept my mind occupied with something else, the swamp in my soul would dry up faster. After three separate sessions with the psychiatrist at the Provincial Intelligence Directorate, the green light had been given for me to continue my assignment where I had left off. Although in the beginning the excitement of watching you had dulled my pain, after a while I had come to understand that the wound in me was of the kind that could never heal. To those strawberry-colored pills that I swallowed three times a day and that turned my mind into the sole of an old shoe, I had simply added your presence — that was all. Now I spent every possible moment trailing you, reading what you wrote, looking at the photographs you took — including the ones you disliked and deleted — listening to the music you never get tired of, poring over with a mixture of astonishment and curiosity the texts you saved under password on your computer, reading the stories and poems you had written long before and trying to find their sources of inspiration, becoming the breath you drew, the water you drank, the view you lost yourself in, the morsel that slid down your throat. And I always asked myself the same question: where was your wound? Where were those wounds you mentioned at the beginning of the memoirs you would write years later — the wounds you believed every foreigner who came here carried — the wounds that did not heal, did not dry up, did not disappear, that kept their glowing embers smoldering deep down like a dormant volcano? Had you buried them so deep that even you could not find them? Or were you saving your secret for the woman in whose arms your frail body would be held, and at the point where your bellies touched, cherry trees bursting into spring blossom would shoot forth, and from the lips she pressed to yours the waters of life would spring — is that who you were saving it for, my esteemed Naci teacher?

Before coming to China, you had taught for five years in Istanbul. Then, with a sudden decision, you had chosen to come to the other end of the world, thousands of kilometers away. Even that was enough to tickle my curiosity! What was it that hurt you? Was your heart broken? Was it that short blonde woman to whom you had dedicated your first acrostic poems — the one who, on hearing your proposal, looked at you the way one looks at a bird with a broken wing and rejected you, then a month later went back to her ex-husband and had a child with him? Did your closest friend — Murat, Çetin, Yeliz, Serhat, Ömer — stab you in the back? Was it your father — that father you didn't love much but put up with for your mother's sake — who was the reason you traveled so far? Or was the resentment stirring inside you aimed at your older sister, who after getting married seemed to have retired from her roles as self-sacrificing, long-suffering, hardworking elder sister? The woman had married, had children, thrown herself into the worry of making ends meet — was she supposed to keep your spirits up as well? Or had you crossed the neighborhood's petty chieftain and been told you'd better not show your face around there any longer? I know about the police baton you took on your head in Taksim, the night you spent in detention during your student years, the way you wept snot and tears at the foot of the military museum wall in Harbiye under the effect of tear gas bombs — but these were not wounds; on the contrary, they were war medals you wore with pride, marks of honor you carried on your chest with pride. What I was looking for was something more insidious, more ancient — something that, the more it was investigated, would prove to rest on absolute deprivation or an undeniable knockout blow. It was hidden either in the misty mornings of your childhood or in the tender summer evenings of your early youth.

But what was it — this wound that kept you alive like an underground river fed by an endless source, neither rotting nor healing, clinging to life beneath a thin crust, breathing in and out — what kind of thing was it, where had it come from, why did it not disappear? For years I searched for the answer to this question. When I found you on deserted streets looking for a bin to throw your cigarette stub into; when you set off on your scooter after school, advancing along the avenues with kamikaze courage, flouting every traffic rule; when you paused while writing a story and glanced at that ever-growing, never-ending list of words — you had told your close friends many times that one of your greatest fears was dying before that list was finished — I always wanted to ask you this question. What was your trouble, Naci? Given that you sat at your computer until three in the morning with a class starting at eight the next day, writing with cigarette-yellowed fingertips, there had to be some trouble, some burden, some affliction that made you feel incomplete, some wild centipede lodged in a corner of your consciousness! Your inability to look new acquaintances in the eye; your tendency to tire quickly of everything you did; the way that even in new places you traveled to you felt oppressed and found yourself longing for your study room smelling of sweat, mold, and damp — those are your words; your fleeing from the bright, noisy festivities offered by cheerful crowds and taking refuge instead in the dark, gloomy, suffocating forests of solitude that books offered...

Did you know that the way I made sense of the sentence you voiced here and there, especially at the drinking table, "There are two driving forces in my life: sense of guilt and sense of incompleteness” changed considerably over the years. At first, I thought the guilt in you rested on a deep tear caused by friction against a hard surface — a tear that would accept no patching. Someone had certainly done something terrible to you, something perhaps not fit to be spoken of; at some time and in some place you had been rubbed against a surface rough as sandpaper and an irreparable rip had opened in the garments that were supposed to cover your intimate parts. Could it have been your stepfather's — your sister's father's — abandonment of your mother? Your real father accusing your sister, who was in primary school at the time, of stealing money from his wallet, and beating her until blood poured from her mouth and nose, on the stairs that smelled of yellow soap and whose automatic light went out every ten seconds— and you being unable to bear it and throwing your tiny frame between them and getting your share of your father's rage? The slap across the face you received from your primary school teacher in front of the whole class? The girl you liked in high school humiliating you in front of everyone, heaping insults on you, and giving you no chance but swallow it all like a bitter syrup without being able to open your mouth... It took me nearly ten years to understand that none of these was the answer. The remaining years were spent making myself accept that the guilt in you was not external but internal — and that therefore my curiosity was no different from the desire to find the bottom of a bottomless well. No, no one had done anything to you. Just as you threw yourself more deeply into the school's affairs just to escape the obligation of writing, you also, in the very same way, wanted to feel more indebted to the world so that you could write. Isn't that so? Because you were indebted and incomplete, you sat down at the desk — dreaming of repaying your debt and filling in the incompleteness you couldn't name — stringing words one after another, and after a while you ground to a halt. When the opening narrowed completely and the blockage turned to despair and hatred, you retreated to your most immediate and accessible comfort — the school's trivial affairs — voluntarily taking on tasks not directly assigned to you, putting your hand under every stone, working yourself to the bone. Because these were well-defined tasks, their boundaries marked in thick lines, tasks for which you could quickly receive approval from someone the moment they were done, or at worst constructive feedback. But writing was not like that and it never would be. How could it be easy to gather up the scraps useful to you from a boundless universe, build palaces from them, and on top of that make those palaces admired by others? To escape this difficulty, you hired out your body and mind, deceiving yourself with the excuse that you were too busy to find time to write. Yet after a while things returned to their natural cycle, as they say the nature of things demands. When you became excessively involved in the school's affairs and the same feelings of guilt and incompleteness wrapped around your heart like a spider's web once more, you plunged again into the world of characters made of words produced from the molasses of your brain. In a tidal process that would last until death, however much you wrote was to your benefit; the more novels, stories, poems, essays you could fit under your arm, the better for you. You were afraid of not being able to write, but you were more afraid of writing — because the more you wrote the better you knew yourself, the more you wrote the more complete you felt, and so inevitably what you thought you had hidden but could not began to resurface when you sat down before the computer. The more you wrote the more you realized how alone you were — in writing, and in lovemaking. You were alone in the arms of that Beijing girl too, moaning like a millstone making rounds; and you were alone while writing the story of the child who, taking revenge for the beatings he received from his father, killed a captured bird by torturing it... I couldn't sleep for a week after reading that story, do you know? Night after night the bird's screams entered my dreams, the feathers torn from its wings as it thrashed about, the blood dripping drop by drop from its beak onto its claws... You had constructed the scene so vividly, that at one point I couldn't help myself — I thought that you, exactly as you had written it, had screamed a bird to death. I couldn't sleep, but you could — because you were relieving yourself by writing, draining the poison inside you outward. What was an antidote for you became my poison, but of course you had no idea. What did you know about anything, really? Were you a small prince in love with his reflection on the surface of the lake, who had tied himself around the waist to the thin branches of the tree behind him so as not to fall in — and did you remain that way throughout all the years you lived here? When branches broke you found new ones, when trees dried up you discovered new trees, but whatever happened you did not allow your reflection on the lake's surface to be disturbed... Well then, what about us, Mr. Naci? What are we to do, we mortals living in what you call "the greatest of all cages"? Is there a prescription written for us too, a way out, at least a syrup to soothe the agony that wraps itself around our souls?

In your first years in China, you had a passion and enthusiasm for new things that surprised even me. You spent time with everyone you met, gathered information about them, took notes in the notebook you always carried with you. You were so full, so eager, so curious that you wrote piles of essays — with mischievous titles too — and had them published in the newspapers of the time in your first two years. In pieces published under titles that defied all logic — Mistresses and Square Mistresses, The First Emperor's Mercury Fever, Censorship Biting Its Own Tail, Solitude Without Lu Xun, Chinese Solutions to China-related Problems, China in the Magic Lamp, Yu Hua's Clichéd Palaces, The Prodigal Poet Xu Zhimo, Mo Yan or the Nobel Prize as Atonement, Tiny Powerful Waves: Wang Xiaobo, Can Lao She Make Tea?[1] — it was plain as day that you were drawn to Chinese literature and culture, to Chinese history, to the question of Chinese identity, that these subjects excited you. This passionate period, which lasted two, perhaps three years, gradually calmed; you grew accustomed to China and what it contained. The realization that every new face you met resembled the ones before, that every city you visited was as tedious as the ones you had already visited, that every entertainment you attended bore the same noisy, festive resemblance to the ones you had attended before, appeared in your heart like a festering wound. In place of the sharp wit and amusing pen of those early writings, there remained a dignified Naci who was no longer surprised by anything, who allowed life to pass by his side without leaving a mark. The chatty parrot who reacted to every movement, necessary or not, was gone; in its place had come an owl who on long winter nights could watch a snow-covered forest for hours without stirring a single feather. You were liked at the school where you worked, you formed relationships with women — brief ones — your friends held you in high regard, but you could not prevent the black hole inside you from sucking the joy from your soul and imprisoning it forever. So much so that by the end of your first five years you were filled to bursting with the desire to leave China, return to Türkiye, and continue with life from where you had left off — wherever that was. Yet five years was not as short a time as you imagined. Türkiye was supposed to be the film itself, China was a commercial break — but when you went to Türkiye during the summer holidays your mind was confused. The idea that Türkiye was the commercial break, that the real film was unfolding in China with all its aesthetics and action, pleased you, and this pleasure stroked even more deeply the soul that loved the status quo. What kind of life were you going back to, exactly? Every time you went, a brand-new country, tangled in an entirely different set of troubles, greeted you. Was it still Türkiye? Violence, ignorance, overconfidence, economic instability, corruption, injustice, a diseased mentality that yearned for the past rather than the future... In a piece you wrote many years later you used the phrase "ungrateful son" for Türkiye. He was a blood bond — one that could never find his own path, could never amount to anything, could never straighten his back and take his rightful place in the race, that blamed everyone else while allowing those around him who listened to the voice of reason and science to leave him behind — and yet, being a child, a motherland, was loved nonetheless. Throw it away and it cannot be thrown, sell it and it cannot be sold: a source of suffering to be endured, a flag you carry in your pocket at all times, a cluster of faces and names to be checked in from time to time... You looked at Türkiye the way a father looks at a son who, having reached the age of forty, has not managed to stitch a single seam in any area of life — with sorrow, with regret, and above all with disappointment. How much China had contributed to your arriving at these thoughts I cannot say, but in all likelihood if you had gone to a European country with a denser Turkish population instead of China, things would have been different. You yourself and the impulses that drove you to write would have been different, to begin with. We would have encountered an entirely different Naci had Naci the teacher chosen Germany rather than China. Besides, Türkiye's political and social inability to settle was not your only reason for the decision to stay. Deeper down, sometimes impossible to confess even to yourself, there was a far more powerful shackle pinning your feet to the ground, chaining you to this soil.

For all that you claimed otherwise at the drinking tables, and for all that you sometimes tried to approach the matter with a masochistic air in certain company in order to seem deep in thought, you loved being treated like a wàiguórén[2] who understands nothing about anything in this country. Walking along the streets and avenues with eyes swiveling every which way, you felt like an orchid that had accidentally sprung up in a lettuce field. Sometimes, even when you understood your interlocutor's simple sentences, you considered saying tīng bù dǒng[3] an excuse for escape; faced with a piece of writing someone showed you to read, you counted saying kàn bù dǒng[4] a skill — using your ignorance and laziness as a tool, a knowing feigned ignorance, precisely to make it clear you were not one of them, to thicken the line of demarcation between you and them. On days when you were in good spirits you called this inability to listen, speak, read, or write — which you named "the unbearable lightness of not knowing”, a state with liberating qualities too. Not being able to know what the people around you in a café or on a bus were talking about made you adept at easily focusing on other things. Despite the millions of Chinese around you, you lived behind a surface like a one-way car window through which light passed in only one direction. In your own small world, in the crowds you built inside your head, among people who behaved as though you were invisible, you were happy and at peace. Just as pre-adolescent children are excluded from adult gatherings, you too were not taken seriously, were overlooked, in settings where Chinese people spoke among themselves about important matters. You were, after all, different from us Chinese — you had a large nose, the thinnest of lips, hair curling in waves like the ancient Greek gods, wide bright eyes, thick eyebrows arched over those eyes like bows, long lashes that Chinese girls, on seeing them up close, tested with the tip of a fingernail to determine whether they were real or false. This capacity to be pointed at and quickly spotted in a crowd suited you. Even if you had no noteworthy quality, the mere fact of the land where you were born and raised made you extraordinary, a weed among cultivated plants, a black swan, someone who drew people's attention. Your walk, your posture, your gaze, your laugh, your wink, the way you cracked your knuckles, the way you held your chopsticks, the way you tossed boiled rice into your mouth, the way you bit off scalding noodles with your teeth and left the rest in the bowl, the way you held your cigarette between your fingers — all of it was just one notch different from us Chinese. And because it was different, it deserved attention. For someone as unremarkable as you — who did not hold a single positive thought about yourself (that expression is yours, not mine!) — could any more precious opportunity have fallen into your hands? Of course you grabbed it with both hands, tucked it into your bosom when the moment called for it and walked hand in hand with it — this lovely opportunity that had dropped unexpectedly into your lap. You were different from the person on the street; many of the events that affected them did not affect you. Changing laws were for them; rules, prohibitions, traditions and rituals to be followed, unemployment rates, the courage to sign a thirty-year bank loan to buy a house, children sent to weekend courses, the tens of kilometers of traffic that formed at city entrances during Chinese New Year — all for them. You were a forgotten guest whose comings and goings no one could remember, and you watched with delight the embarrassment of your hosts at the shortcomings of their hospitality. Whenever you were in a tight spot someone always helped you. You were an ignorant wretch who knew no language, could not read or write the local script, and if dropped somewhere a few kilometers away from your home that you had never been before could not even find your way back — and the local crowd around you was an auxiliary army assigned to help you. There always emerged some good-hearted, fine-souled person, proud to help a lǎowài[5], who would get your business done, interpret for you, or take your phone from your hand and sort out those labyrinthine procedures in seconds. And you exploited their good intentions to the fullest. You were no different from a sleepy cat taken into a space solely to be loved, whose every need was met in meticulous detail, whose food and water and clean litter were never left wanting, and whose only function — rare as it was — was to hunt the odd fly or insect of unclear provenance. Naturally you were pleased by being held in such high regard, by being rewarded for no particular reason, by having things handled automatically for you that back in your own country you would have struggled through a thousand difficulties to manage. This was why you smiled constantly, like a baby whose every need was met — "happy as a baby with a dry nappy." The zone your foreign friends called the "Expat Bubble" and which you, with your habitual urge to be original, called the "Oasis" — this liberated territory — naturally produced in a person a certain numbness, a deep state of idleness too. After all, China is a separate realm cut off from the real world — that is supposedly why they call it that! Here there is no pain, no grief, no worry, no anxiety... None of the problems that give the local population headaches, keep them up at night, cause them to develop cancer from anxiety — none of these exist for foreigners. What does exist? Comfort, joy, happiness, peace, love, friendships, the indiscretions committed with a drunken head, pleasures cheaply bought and quickly consumed. For you foreign guests this place can be perceived as an earthly paradise, a temporary resting place — and Shenzhen in particular, with its climate, its clean air, and the economic opportunities it offers, is exactly such a city. Real life is outside China: wars, deaths, economic crises, epidemics, social upheavals, redrawn borders, millions displaced and forced to migrate. People came to Shenzhen to take a break from life, to lean their backs against a tree and catch their breath, to stretch out somewhere shady and doze a little. And once they came, they did not want to leave again the safe garden they had stumbled upon. As a result of this ease, they turned into minds numbed by morphine, even into zombies with their brains rendered inert. You, being a congenitally troubled human being, had grasped the inevitability of this transformation within a few months of setting foot in China, and had decided you could not be like the others. You were not one of them, could not be — the feelings of incompleteness and guilt inside you prevented you from living in the moment, reminding you always that it was essential to cast anchor toward the future. You had taken upon yourself the lofty mission of understanding and writing about China, and you could not back down from it. This was a responsibility that came alongside pleasure, not a frivolous occupation to be brushed off with an "that'll do" or skimped on with a "just enough to show willing." You had exiled yourself for a great cause, and now you were searching for meanings beyond this exile — to soothe your soul, to convince yourself you had accomplished something. Not that the Expat Bubble didn't appeal to you either — of course it did. But how far, for what purpose, of what use to anyone would it be to live inside a bubble and look away from the life outside? Moreover, none of the figures you took as your models had lived inside a bubble. Lawrence Durrell, Anthony Burgess, George Orwell, Paul Bowles... Some had learned the language of the country they lived in, some had written novels in which characters from the local population played a central role. You too should be like them — you should conquer the fortress not from without but from within. This was why you had the desire to go beyond, to penetrate deeper than your exile, to pick up a giant mirror and walk the streets with it... And you managed it in the end — as best you could, as far as your tongue would turn, as much as the power of your pen allowed, as much as your limited means permitted.

In the end, I — both as the spy who followed your every step and as the loyal reader who absorbed and read your every sentence — was among those who found you right and successful. Foreigners — the crowd to which you also belonged — came to this country to heal. Some healed and returned; some realized they had never been ill; those in the minority, like you, lost hope of healing, decided "since we cannot heal, at least let us not grow worse," and chose to spend the rest of their lives here. What was actually lost was not hope — it was the realization of the impossibility of return, the discovery that in place of that beautiful country to which one might return, cold ashes now drifted. China, like a passionate love, erased the happy moments of the past; people forgot what had once made them happy and how. Gone was the innocent world of childhood, gone the dreamy evenings of adolescence, gone the ease and carelessness and idealism of student life. If reality had struck your head gradually and let you accustomed, it might not have shaken you so deeply, but when it scalds your soul like boiling water poured over you the moment you step off the plane, it leaves your timid constitution no choice but to flee.

By the end of your first five years, I had long since understood that you had no serious quarrel with China. You had no proper political connection, nor a firmly grounded worldview. You were not entirely spineless either — let me not be unjust. I cannot overlook that you always tried to stand on the side of the oppressed and of truth and supported from a distance those who worked toward this end. But still, your faith in literature overrode your desire to take sides. For you, it was not literature that imitated life, but life that imitated literature. That is — you constructed the people and events of real life inside your head just as one constructs characters within a novel, you factored in the possibility that even the villain might have a reason for being villainous, and as a result you found yourself excluded by the majority of those around you. In the end, you were a wretched "half-portion intellectual”[6] — lightweight enough to give everyone reason at the same time, the sort onto whom anyone who followed you even a little would pin the label of spineless, who refused to let go of neutrality despite the potential for elimination, and who was only capable of saying what he really thought — even at the cost of hurting those around him — when drunk. Your only concern was to write beautifully. Beautifully, originally, and compellingly. You always kept your distance from those who, in the name of delivering a message, pushed the poetry inherent in language itself into the background— a poetry that can only be brought to the surface through painstaking craft; from those who wrote stories or novels as though writing newspaper reports; you regarded them with suspicion and even accused them of doing harm to literature. You always looked with contempt — the look one might give a table laid with the most repellent dishes — at those who managed to publish their books with the country's most prestigious publishers despite carelessly constructed sentences; at those who warmed up commonplace expressions and hackneyed subjects and served them up again and again to the reader; at the talentless ones who had carved out a place for themselves in the literary world through the patronage of friends, family, and acquaintances. And yes, because of all these reasons I was calm and unsuspicious. What harm could come from a teacher whose favorite foreign writers were Proust, Durrell, Munro, Nabokov, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky — this last I will address separately later! A man who takes nearly ten days to write a half-page paragraph, who writes sentences and deletes them and, in the end, remains unsatisfied — no revolutionary can emerge from this hesitant mind. Those of us like me — whose profession is to suspect everyone — know this best.

Yes, you were harmless — but I was not, or more precisely I was not a spy as faithful to the rules of professional ethics as my employers believed. By chance I had found a piece of gem, and I did not want to lose it. For this reason, after the initial five-year period of surveillance and observation was over, let me confess that I deliberately and willingly drew a different portrait of Naci in my reports. The assignment I had been given was to prepare reports that, drawing on what you wrote, what you said, and your messages, summarized your views on China and mapped the changes in those views. And you made this job considerably easier for me. Why would I give up such an easy assignment, what if they took you from me and gave you to someone else? I, who over these five years had grown so accustomed to you, had drawn so close to you, had learned to see you not only when my eyes were open but even when they were closed... For this reason, at the end of every report, I added a sentence along the lines of: "Due to actions that arouse suspicion and statements that can be pulled in different directions, surveillance must continue with care." My superiors in turn appreciated my diligent and meticulous work, and without adding so much as a single note of objection to what I had written, agreed that I should continue. Moreover, your being Turkish, the fact that your country's politicians were governing the state with shortsighted, narrow-minded, and erratic decisions, and the fact that you are working in a position where you could influence young people — all of this made my job easier. I exploited all these factors to my advantage and continued for thirteen more years to follow you like a shadow, to plunge again and again into that bottomless well inside you, to be closer to you than your jugular vein. Besides, the real fun had only just begun in your sixth year.

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[1] Most of these titles include sly puns that can be understood only in Turkish.

[2] foreigner, outsider; literally "person from outside the country."

[3] I can't understand what I'm hearing.

[4] I can't understand what I'm reading/seeing.

[5] Colloquial Chinese term for foreigner, roughly equivalent to "expat" but with a slightly more familiar, sometimes condescending tone.

[6] Famous Turkish song of 1980s, written and performed by the leftist singer Cem Karaca.