After the Dragons

by Cynthia Zhang

  Everyone lies. He knows that; has known it since he was small and his mother pushed away her own weariness to smooth back his hair and kiss away his tears. It’s all right Kai Kai, don’t worry, your dad will be okay. Kai had been young then, but more than old enough to hear the lie. Still, it had felt necessary somehow that she say the words, maintain the illusion of normalcy even when no one believed in it. You can’t live a life without lying, can’t construct a society without some measure of deceit, social niceties softening bare truth with gentler maybes.

  And yet.

  Mei chirps, sitting up as a flock of tianlong perch on a telephone line outside. She’s lonely, perhaps; disoriented, certainly. The apartment, never a large space, feels empty without the background noise of a dozen small creatures chattering in their cages, without the low-grade smell of salt and dirt and metallic blood.

  Kai’s head throbs when he stands up, but it’s a faded ache, nothing he hasn’t handled before, nothing a few painkillers and gritted teeth can’t cure. He sits down beside Mei, reaches one hand up to stroke down her spine. Mei leans into the touch, cool scales soothing against too-warm skin.

  “I know,” Kai says, scratching behind her ruff. “It’s weird, isn’t it? Don’t worry, though. There’ll be plenty of new friends soon.” There will be more dragons — there will always be more dragons — but now they will have another place to go, an imperfect place perhaps but one still larger and better funded than anything Kai could provide.

  Outside, the tianlong flit from pole to pole, chirping greetings in the brightening sky. There’s a storm front moving in, and while the other city animals are seeking shelter, the dragons are out in full force, drawn out of their sewer and alley hideaways by the scent of ozone in the air. Tianlong taste the air with their tongues or swoop down after passing moths. Green and brown and startling sky-blue, they could be images from some ancient scroll, brought to life against grey steel skies. If Kai squints, he can almost see it — a dozen tiny gods perched in neat rows and waiting for rain.

  A still warm cup of tea between his hands, Kai watches the dragons and, for the first time in a long time, feels brave enough to hope.

  Storm clouds gather as Eli boards the train, dark and heavy with the promise of rain. Fitting weather for the occasion, even if the mood the weather induces is more festive than funereal. Summer-browned children stream out into the streets in a parade of bright rain jackets and toy airplanes as their pale mothers cautiously peer out of doorways. Flash floods likely, Eli’s weather app had said, a warning that apparently means nothing to Beijing’s excited citizenry.

  The small cemetery is busier than the last time he visited, but that’s to be expected. The Zhongyuan Festival is a holiday for family and remembrance, and so it would make sense that it would be a bustling familial occasion, mothers and fathers bringing their children to pay their respects and lay down paper offerings to loved ones long gone. Against those sprawling nuclear units — mother plus father plus child plus extended family and in-laws too — the single visitors stand out, lone figures cradling bags of clementines and unlit lotus lanterns against their chests. Who have you lost, Eli wonders as he passes each person with their small bundle of grief. Why are you alone? How do you go on?

  He’s one these solitary ones, of course; but that doesn’t stop him from wondering. Feeling compassion, not pity — the natural heartache of seeing your experience in someone else. Simple human empathy.

  “Hi Grandma, I’m back,” Eli says, sitting down on the grass in front of his grandmother’s grave. He reaches into his backpack for hard sesame candy and incense holders.

  “Mom said to get you some fake books to burn, but they were surprisingly hard to find in shops — I can buy you a paper helicopter or five different brands of paper handbags, but not one fake wuxia trilogy. I could have brought you my old copy of Twilight, but that’s at home and I don’t think you would have liked it much anyway.”

  Eli lays out paper flowers and tiny clementines and sweet rice wine, arranging the objects into tidy symmetry on the grave before sitting back to study his work. A neat tableau of his grandmother’s favorite things.

  He wonders how long it will be before he can do this again — how long before anyone will do this again for his grandmother. Outside of an older brother now frail and nearly eighty, his grandmother’s family in China is in-laws and cousins multiply removed. How long, Eli wonders, before his grandmother’s old students and Beijing friends stop remembering to visit, the pull of other lives drawing them out of a dead woman’s orbit? When is forgetting too soon, and when is it simply moving on? Does Eli have any right to resent them, when he too is leaving?

  Dry grass rustles underfoot as a shadow falls over his grandmother’s gravestone. Eli doesn’t need to look up to know who it is, who could have cared enough to come all the way here.

  “Hi,” Eli says, placing a stick of sesame candy on top of the clementines. “This is a surprise. Were you following me?”

  Kai shrugs, not quite a denial. He looks better than the last time Eli saw him, face no longer fever-flushed and eyes a little brighter. “It wasn’t difficult. You tend to stand out, for some reason. It was simply a matter of asking the guard and helpful passersby until I found you.”

  “The curse of being a foreigner in China.” Eli sighs, brushing the dirt off his knees as he stands up. “What are you doing here?”

  In response, Kai hands him a piece of paper, folded neatly in quarters. “You said your grandmother liked flowers, didn’t you?”

  Golden chrysanthemums and red peonies reveal themselves as Eli unfolds the paper, bright colors shining in the waning light.

  “It’s beautiful,” Eli says. Kai shrugs, eyes not meeting Eli’s. It’s not quite an apology, but it is a peace offering, a silent attempt at repairing the distance between them without admitting fault. “Did you bring a frame with you?”

  Kai shakes his head. “It’s just a sketch. I can make you a proper painting later.”

  “I’d still like to frame it. Sketch or not, it’s really good.”

  Kai sighs. “You’re supposed to burn it. So your grandmother can have it in the afterlife.”

  “I know that. I’ve brought a lot of things to burn. This, though, I’m keeping for myself.”

  Kai huffs out a laugh, the ghost of a smile in his eyes. “I can’t stop you, I guess.”

  “You can’t,” Eli says, tucking the paper into a pocket. “It’s mine now.”

  Thunder rumbles, low and lazy above them.

  Eli studies Kai: the bright points of red over sharp cheekbones, the choppy line of self-cut bangs, the faint scar across his forehead from a biking accident long healed. It astonishes Eli sometimes, how little time it’s been. Barely a handful of weeks, and Kai feels so familiar — each scar a story, each callus and errant freckle a landmark on a topography of pale skin.

  However this ends, whatever regrets come later, Eli can’t imagine regretting knowing Kai.

  “So, have you given it any consideration?” Eli says, picking each word as carefully as he would broken glass. “America, I mean.”

  “Mm.” Kai crosses his arms, eyes distant as he studies the space beyond Eli’s shoulder. “Haven’t been able to stop thinking about it, actually. You’re annoying like that sometimes, you know?”

  “So I’ve been told. Certain people seem to like me, in spite of or because of it, I don’t know.”

  “Very much in spite of.” The corner of Kai’s lip twitches, and for a moment, it is almost as if the last week hadn’t happened.

  “Well?” Eli asks, because for all that he wants the easy comfort between them again, he cannot leave another conversation without knowing. “America.”

  “I don’t know,” Kai says. “Maybe.” He shifts from one foot to another, still not meeting Eli’s eyes. “I know you said your mother is a professor, but it won’t be easy. There’s still paperwork and applications to consider, and even if anyplace wanted me, I’d still have to ge
t a passport and talk to my mom, and it’s just —” Kai stops, sucks in a slow, shaky breath. He’s frowning, fine lines drawn between the furrow of his brows, mouth drawn up in a grimace so sharp it looks painful.

  “You don’t want to hurt her.”

  Kai nods. “My mom — when Dad died, some of my aunts were very kind, offered to take me and my sister in so she wouldn’t have to worry about us. But my mother refused. Said she was grateful, but that she wouldn’t do that to us, make us grow up without both parents while she was still there and could still work. I — she’s been through a lot, my mom. I don’t want to add to that. You know that. But —”

  Eli wraps an arm around Kai’s waist, pulls him in. Kai stiffens at first, but then he’s slumping against him, head bowed and buried against Eli’s shoulder. Gently, the way he remembers his mother stroking his hair as a child, Eli smooths Kai’s hair, wind-tousled and sweat-damp. Kai must have run here, Eli thinks as he pulls him closer, hurried straight off the platform and sprinted in the direction the guard pointed him.

  It’s beginning to drizzle, small, faint drops falling in a fine mist. With the flash flood warning and only one flimsy umbrella between them, they should look for shelter, head toward one of the public restrooms or mausoleums nearby.

  They don’t. In the trees, tianlong chatter at each other as they watch the roiling clouds above; on the ground, a few humans do the same, dressed in suits and shoes completely unsuited for rain but either uncaring or too excited by the prospect of rain to take cover.

  The air is soaked in petrichor, the scent of earth and rainwater and wildflowers rising out of old ground. Kai’s hand is dry and too-warm in his, heartbeat the too-fast flutter of sparrow’s wings against Eli’s chest: one-two one-two one-two one-two.

  Kai’s arms tighten around him, a wordless affirmation: it’s all right, I know, I’m sorry, I’m here. I know.

  And then, with a crack and rumble of thunder echoed by a volley of cheers from all around them, the rain comes falling down.

  Acknowledgments

  This book has been a very long time in the making. It owes its existence to a lot of coffee, community center free Wi-Fi, and many, many wonderful people.

  Thank you to my editor, Selena Middleton, and the crew at Stelliform Press for all their hard work. At the risk of presenting this book as a sad-eyed animal in a Sarah McLachlan commercial, thanks for taking a chance on this project and for helping shepherd it into a coherent narrative.

  Thank you to Neelanjana Banerjee at Kaya Press for her feedback on an earlier version of this piece, and for taking the time to meet with me. Grad school can be a disconcerting, lonely time, and Kaya Press’s events have given me a valuable space to talk about craft instead of Derrida and Deleuze.

  Katherine Aanensen, Misha Grifka, and Elaine Yao have listened to me scream about this project from almost the beginning (and there was a lot of screaming). Thanks for providing feedback on early drafts, sharing cute animal photos, and above all proving Dr. Chuck Tingle’s thesis that love is real, for all who kiss and those who don’t. May we one day meet in Chicago again, preferably with pastries and without the winter cold.

  Though this novel is by no account an anthropological account of contemporary China (who uses cash these days?), thanks to Ran Deng for Beijing/China checking. Thanks also to Elikem Dorbu for help with science details and to the staff of the San Diego Chinese Historical Museum for both the 2019 Dragons exhibit and their willingness to provide further resources for research. Your help is deeply appreciated, and any factual missteps lie with me.

  This book began life as a short story and was consequently workshopped as one by Vu Tran and my classmates: Abinav, Willa, Megan, Kathryn, Beau, Nick, Grace, Fitz, Juan, Dennison. Thanks for your comments and for eventually convincing me out of the short story format and into something longer. Thanks also to María, who read and commented on early drafts despite half a continent of distance between us.

  As a child, I would have never imagined myself writing this, but thank you to my parents for making me take Chinese classes so I could maintain some semblance of language fluency. A lot of this piece is poached from childhood memories of visits home, so thank you to both family and family friends for hosting, feeding, and entertaining us.

  Lastly, thank you to Dash, a truly dragon-hearted dog.

  About the Author

  Cynthia Zhang was born in Beijing, China and grew up in various college towns before landing near St. Louis, Missouri. She studied comparative literature and creative writing at the University of Chicago, and the experience was insufficiently harrowing to prevent her from pursuing PhD work at the University of Southern California. Her work has appeared in Leading Edge, Coffin Bell, Phantom Drift, and other venues. After the Dragons is her debut novel.

  Author photo by Elaine Yao.

  Earth-focused fiction. Stellar stories.

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  This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portayed in this novella are either products of the author’s imagination or are reproduced as fiction.

  After the Dragons

  Copyright © 2021 by Cynthia Zhang

  All rights reserved

  Cover art by Wang Xulin

  wangxulin.com

  Design by Yu-Lobbenberg, Rachel

  racheldesign.myportfolio.com

  Edited by Selena Middleton

  Published by Stelliform Press

  Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

  www.stelliform.press

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: After the dragons / Cynthia Zhang.

  Names: Zhang, Cynthia, 1994- author.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210133627 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210133643 | ISBN 9781777091743

  (softcover) | ISBN 9781777091750 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PS3626.H36 A78 2021 | DDC 813/.6—dc23