Fish Heads and Duck Skin

by Lindsey Salatka

  “Seven months.”

  “I’m at two years, and it’s only just started to get easier. Fun even.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Fun seems like a stretch. I’m just going for bearable.”

  She chuckled and shook her head. “Well, it helps to meet some fellow outsiders, so you feel less alone.”

  “What’s the best way to meet these outsiders?”

  “I don’t know, mate.” She pushed on my upper arm. “Ballet class, I reckon!” Just then her youngest dropped out from under her coat like one of Mother Ginger’s children in the Nutcracker. She ran to the plastic wall, let out a giant, messy sneeze, and then smashed her lips and nose against the window and scuttled sideways to the right, leaving a trail of saliva and snot in her wake. Ellen ignored this window-as-Kleenex maneuver. “Also met a few mums at Mother Goose and then there’s Mahjong Monday. I really try to put myself out there.”

  “What’s Mahjong Monday?”

  “Just a bunch of us outsiders who meet up at Malone’s to shuffle bones and build walls.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, it’s good fun. You should come! Why don’t you meet me there next Monday at 4 p.m.?”

  I paused.

  “Or if this Monday isn’t good, we’re there every Monday. You can come anytime.”

  For the briefest moment, I thought about saying no—no to the energy it requires to meet a roomful of new people and then lose to them at an unfamiliar tile game. Then I realized that was ridiculous. This woman had just called Shanghai fun. I needed a sip of whatever she was drinking, even if it was both radioactive and hallucinogenic.

  “I’ll be there,” I said, and right then, I resolved to get better at this.

  30.

  “Ting Ting!” Mr. Han called as I pushed the stroller down the pedestrian path toward the flat rock where he sat clutching a bamboo cane with both hands. It had been two weeks since I’d seen him. He leaned forward and peered into the stroller at the two faces staring back at him that had recently been stuffed, with significant resistance, into scratchy ski caps and puffy pastel parkas. “Zhèxiē xiǎopéngyǒumen shì shéi?”

  I smiled. “I have no clue what you just said.”

  “What, you don’t study putonghua?” He flashed his gums at me. “That’s the Mandarin Chinese word for Mandarin Chinese. Or you can say zhōngwén.”

  “I need to learn the Mandarin Chinese word for everything, badly. Like today. Can you please teach me?”

  He laughed. “Nothing worthwhile can be learned in one day.”

  “I know that, I—”

  “Plus, you need a real teacher, a master. Then you will come sit on my rock for practice. We will alternate.” He nodded as he described his vision. “Mandarin for you, English for me, you, me, you, me. We both will become hěn lì hài. Very strong, yes!”

  I laughed. “Okay, but I think your English is already very strong.”

  “No, I forget many things.” He coughed and then cleared his throat with such force that I stepped closer, holding my arm out to him in case he fell off the rock while turning my face away from the spray of germs. When his fit subsided, he rasped while wiping his eyes with a Kleenex from his pocket that was at least as old as me. “Before, I asked you in Mandarin, who are your small friends?”

  “Oh! These are my daughters, Piper and Lila.” I touched their heads as I said their names.

  “Don’t!” Piper said, ducking her beanie-covered tangles to avoid my hand. It was apparently an off moment for affection.

  “Pei Pei,” he said, pointing at Lila. “And La La.” He nodded at Piper. “Very beautiful.”

  “I’m Pei Pei!” Piper said as she raised her hand and graced him with her biggest gap-toothed smile. Maybe it was just an off moment for my affection.

  “Ah, okay. Pei Pei, La La, do you already have Chinese names?” he asked.

  “Uh,” I said.

  “Good! I will name you when I know you better. Beautiful names for beautiful girls!” Mr. Han leaned toward them. “Now I will watch my comrades; they dance here every Wednesday. Come, look!” He carefully touched his cane to the ground and then stood up slowly, keeping one hand on the cane and the other on the rock as he maneuvered himself near the fence. He wound his quivering hand into the chain link. “Come here for looking-looking, La La, Pei Pei—stand next to me.”

  I undid the stroller straps and the girls scrambled out. I picked up Lila and she hollered, “NO!” while squirming with straight arms pushing against my chest. I set her down and she ran for the side of Mr. Han that Piper wasn’t occupying. I was 0 for 2.

  On the other side of the fence, a woman stood in a football field-sized area enclosed mostly by tin siding and warped sheets of plywood. The field was filled with rubble. She bent down to lean her music player against a giant mound of dirt which had apparently been there a while because there were long and crazy weeds growing out the top of it, giving the hill a Muppet hairstyle. The only thing larger than the hairy hill of dirt was a neighboring mountain of trash, already picked through for anything recyclable or of any value, leaving mostly plastic wrappers and busted up cinder blocks.

  “This is jiě jiě, my big sister, Xiǎo Qīng,” Mr. Han said, extending his arm toward the woman. She growl-grunted in response without looking up.

  A man rolled up on his bike, disembarked, and leaned his wheels against the opposite side of the dirt hill. He yelled loudly at the woman and then squatted to yank a sword from his bike basket.

  “What’s the—” I asked, alarmed.

  “The sword is for the dance,” Mr. Han interrupted with a smile.

  “But are you sure? He sounds so angry.”

  “Not angry, just saying hello,” Mr. Han said.

  Xiǎo Qīng pulled her sword from where it was tied to the back of her hip by a faded black sash. Right then, two men and a woman walked up from the other side of Mt. Trashmore, also holding unsheathed swords. The next two men were the last two men. As soon as they arrived, the group stepped into a crooked line between the dirt and the trash and turned to face the fence with stern faces.

  “The sword dance is, how you say, like magic.” Mr. Han sighed as his sister pushed play with the tip of her sword. An unfortunate sound burst forth—a stringed instrument heavy on flats in duet with another stringed instrument being plucked. A Beethoven violin concerto this was not. To my ear it sounded like someone was rubbing a dull saw over a bike chain that was duct-taped over metal garbage cans—a symphony of sounds kids might make out of junk found in an abandoned shed and quickly discarded in the interest of ear health. I winced and looked at Mr. Han and the girls.

  They were still. Captivated.

  “Very beautiful.” Mr. Han sighed, and I turned to see the dancers slowly stab their weapons at the air, then pull, twist, lean, step, and stab again, neither in time to the “music” nor in sync with the other dancers in the line. I blinked and looked at my watch.

  “What do you think?” Mr. Han asked me with wet eyes once the extra-long first song had ended.

  My most honest answer would not have furthered our newfound friendship.

  “Well, it’s nice, but, uh, I guess I’m not clear on the meaning,” I said after an awkward pause. “I mean, I feel like I’m watching conflicting symbols. The dance itself is slow and deliberate, almost peaceful, but the sword looks heavy and unwieldy. Also, it seems dangerous to dance with a weapon, like they chose the wrong prop.”

  He cleared his throat again, this time with less force. “It’s good you speak your thoughts. Americans are honest, even about things they don’t understand.” He nodded. “For me, the sword is not only a tool for war, but also a powerful symbol for the war inside.” He thumped his chest. “Each of us has a quarrel in our heart, between who we are and who we want to be. It is difficult, but we must fight to uncover our own truth. We must harness our qí to succeed, which can be difficult, or as you say, ‘unwieldy,’ but the process is also very beautiful and empowering.”

&nb
sp; “What is qí?” I asked as the next song began.

  He turned to watch the dancers. He didn’t respond until the song ended. “Qí is this,” he finally said. He pressed his hands toward one another but stopped them about a foot apart, as though he were a mime pressing on an invisible pillar in front of him. “Your life force.” Then he dropped his hands and looked back toward the field as the music began again.

  I didn’t know what that meant, and I didn’t ask for clarification.

  “You should learn sword dancing,” he said, this time speaking over the music.

  “Me? No, I don’t think—”

  “Yes, yes. It is good for you. You can borrow my sword and dance with this team. My comrades.”

  “Oh no, I still feel lost here, so I want to learn Mandarin; I think that’s enough.”

  “The dance will help you learn, teach you many things,” he said.

  “Yes, Mommy! And you can dance with these people in the magic field!” Piper chimed in.

  I looked at her with a smile on my lips even as my eyes said STOP TALKING. “I’m sure it would be great, but I’m not very strong and I—”

  “You’ll start with tai chi only, no sword,” Mr. Han announced as though it were settled.

  “But I’m not—”

  “Very good for your heart struggle. Bring you peace.” He patted my mitten with his dry hand. “Don’t you want peace, Ting Ting?” He smiled at me like he knew the answer.

  Tears sprang to my eyes. “Of course I want peace,” I said softly. “I always have. I’m just not sure I’m capable of it.”

  “Yes,” he said, putting his hand on mine. “You are.”

  “But how do you know that?”

  “I know,” he said. “I know.” He looked back at the dancers and then said, “Next Wednesday afternoon, 2:00 p.m., here, I will teach you tai chi. Soon you join this team, learn more. Gain control, gain power, gain peace.”

  You would have thought it was Mr. Han who had spent the last ten years of his life in sales, not me. Because somehow, he convinced me to try something I didn’t understand and wasn’t particularly interested in. I didn’t know why I agreed to it. Maybe because he’d caught me fresh off deciding to say yes to more things and dive into China. Good timing on his part. Or was it?

  31.

  Dear Jennifer,

  I almost rang your doorbell last week, no joke. Part of me still wishes I had, just to see your reaction. I can imagine your face opening up in shock and delight at the sight of your long-lost friend, then your brows dropping and chin pulling back in the transition to confusion, then your head tilting and eyes opening wide again, but softer this time, to say, uh oh, what happened? And should I hug you before or after you tell me?

  I was this close (picture my fingers still touching) to traveling 7,000 miles for that hug. Which is ridiculous because I have access to unlimited hugs from Daniel, Piper, and Lila.

  Unlimited is perhaps the wrong word. The following story problem will illustrate the actual situation:

  Eighty percent of the time my family is more than happy to hug me, but twenty percent of the time I don’t want them to touch me, and sometimes we don’t want to be anywhere near each other at the exact same time. Therefore, sixty-eight percent of the time, I have access to unlimited hugs here.

  I might have math-ed that wrong; you always had a stronger Venn diagram than me. But my point is, all I wanted was a hug on a different continent, which told me it wasn’t about the hug. It was more about pulling the silver lever on the rectangular door with the rounded corners in the airplane exit row, and then inflating the giant yellow slide, and finally, hurtling myself face first onto it. It was about the escape.

  Alas, the realist in me knows that escaping will only give me more problems than solutions (Was it my inner realist that said that or did you say it once in college and it stuck with me, but I forgot where it came from, and now I credit myself? That sounds more likely). So I will stay here, and today, I’m glad for it. Because even after eight months, this place keeps surprising me and revealing new sides of itself.

  I won’t mince words—at first glance, from my (limited, myopic) perspective, China is heinous. Almost irredeemable. But, like hidden facets in a concealed crevice on the underside of a raw gemstone caked in manure and buried during a natural disaster 10,000 years ago, this place looks (and smells) like a shitty old rock on the outside but there exist clandestine rainbows on the inside.

  I’m going to make a concerted effort to tell you about the rainbows from now on. You, after all, are a natural rainbow seeker; you somehow find the good in all things. This habit of yours, which I have at times found annoying, I will now emulate. See? I do learn.

  This must be my season for learning. I have a few exciting new things on the docket! I’ll tell you about them soon, but not today. Today I’ll keep you in suspense because that’s fun for me and is also a great way to get you to open my next email. Hopefully it won’t say something urgent, like, “Answer the door. Surprise!”

  Thanks for being my transpacific rainbow-seeking dream hug.

  -Tina

  Wait, is it Christmas?

  Dearest Jennifer,

  How often does the above question get asked in the US? Hint: NEVER. Of course we know when Christmas is—we know the day after Halloween that an earthquake has struck off the coast of life and the green and red tsunami is rolling our way, featuring copious bouts of stress-eating and feelings of inadequacy. Plus, all the fun stuff! That gets kicked under the tree skirt of stress-eating and feelings of inadequacy.

  Where was I? Oh right, I was about to inform you that PEOPLE IN CHINA DON’T KNOW WHAT CHRISTMAS IS. You’re probably thinking, well duh, Tina, of course they don’t know what Christmas is, but until you’ve lived through this Christmas-without-Christmas phenomenon, it begs description.

  But first, a clarification: they sort of know what Christmas is. They know we westerners celebrate something they call “Sheng Dan Jie” and that it involves an obese man in a red suit. But that’s about it.

  If only it were so simple.

  Anyhoo, today is Christmas Day, and here’s what the lead up has looked like:

  1. The shops were crowded in December, but not more crowded than any other time.

  2. Only the tourist hotels are decorated. If you didn’t walk by a tourist hotel (which is hypothetical because of course you would walk by a tourist hotel, how else would you get to Starbucks?), you would not know there was this holiday called Christmas causing melt-downs in every Costco parking lot across the Pacific right now.

  3. No one in the megalopolis of Shanghai was in a state of panic yesterday, attempting to buy a last-minute gift for their spouse’s cousin who just RSVPed “yes” to Christmas Eve dinner. The cousin who never says yes. Who definitely wants to borrow money.

  4. Without the demand created by oddball cousins, no one was attempting to hawk over-priced, last-minute gifts.

  5. All shops were open for business today, as though it were any other day.

  6. The over-priced import grocery store was the only place that ran out of things—mostly (expired) baking supplies—which gave me the perfect excuse not to burn something in my toaster oven. SORRY KIDS, STORE’S OUT OF PIE CRUST.

  And the kids didn’t notice any of this! It’s as though they never even knew that exactly one year ago, Christmas was a gigantic part of our life—financially, emotionally, perhaps spiritually if you caught me at the right moment. It impacted every aspect of our existence for at least one tenth of every year.

  What did we do today instead of celebrate Christmas? Daniel took the day off, and we went on a bike ride with the girls. He rode Piper and I rode Lila. We cruised through town as though it were a day like any other, but with no agenda and no plan. We ate delicious noodles from a street vendor on the next block, and dumplings from the guy on the corner. I did break into Christmas songs during bath time, I couldn’t help myself. Piper’s memory was jogged—she joined me for Rudo
lph. Then each of us opened a very small something before we went to bed. Daniel gave me a knock-off Mont Blanc pen; he said it’s so I can finally start writing again. He is really very sweet (You should remind me I said that next time I complain about him). I gave him a Starbucks mug that says “Shanghai,” but only because I want it as a future keepsake. I am perhaps less sweet.

  It was a very refreshing, very merry un-Christmas, which I will try to replicate next year, and maybe even once we move back home.

  I hope you had an equally lovely day, my friend. Merry, merry to you and yours.

  xxT

  32.

  “No kids allowed,” the woman called in a Cockney accent that sounded like a sneer as I crested the final stair butt first, having finally arrived after hoisting the stroller up one step at a time backward for three flights. It was the first Monday of January, and I’d made it a resolution to finally attend Mahjong Monday.

  We were at Malone’s, the large, wood-paneled, American-themed bar near the Ritz-Carlton. I turned to locate the source of the bad news and spotted her, smoke seeping from her nostrils to hover above a red pashmina that had been tossed over her right shoulder and attached with a bejeweled brooch, casually on purpose.

  Her hair was steel gray and bobbed. All angles on her face were pointy. She was giving me the slow once-over, capturing my purple ski jacket with the ripped side-pocket, faded jeans baggy in the knees from months of wear without a clothes dryer, well-worn, waterproof hiking boots, and unstyled, sweaty hair. I could understand her look of disapproval, but still. With another drag and an unconscious wave at her fumes, she dismissed me to resume focus on her tiles.

  Ellen was sitting right next to the woman and was dressed nicely, in a black dress and boots. She was kidless, frozen, wide-eyed, and silent, as though she’d just realized the rules she’d neglected to tell me. Her whole face said “Oops.”

  “Oh, come on Barbara, stop being such a bitch,” piped her friend from across the table. “Let the girl play awhile. She just scaled the building pulling some kind of pediatric SUV for heaven’s sake. An’ look at ’er, she’s new!” She laughed at the obviousness of her statement. “How would she know not to wear jeans to mahjong?”