Home Remedies

by Xuan Juliana Wang

  As soon as Grandmaster Tu was out of earshot, Mary’s dad walked out from the office where he was working. “Don’t listen to anything that hack says,” he told Mary. “He’s just here to swindle people out of their hard-earned money.”

  At night in his room, Tutu hardly slept. He was preparing himself in anticipation of the upcoming conference. He studied the books Dao and Tu Qin Xia and cultivated his qi cross-legged in the dark. Shivering with knowing and calm, he felt he was becoming one of the gods.

  The day of his big event, Grandmaster Tu woke up picturing hundreds of people lining up to kiss his hands. A terribly excited Mary knocked on his door, and together he and the entire family piled into their purple minivan and pulled into the parking lot.

  Five men were waiting. They looked skeptical and they looked poor.

  Without a moment’s pause, Grandmaster Tu made his way across the parking lot and entered into the back room. Mary followed him, skipping to keep up.

  “I am not nervous, but could you please bring me some water?” he asked her as he walked through the door.

  The plain room was set up with chairs lining the walls. As the time got closer to seven, the chairs filled, even if some of the attendees were just people who had wandered in from the street.

  Mary was happy for him; she interpreted the change in his voice as the force of qi turning on like a motor. To make sure she got the best view, she sat on a box of office supplies, high off the ground. She was eager for the grandmaster to prove himself, for what she was about to see. Was he going to levitate above a lotus blossom? Was he going to walk through a wall?

  Tutu walked into the room wearing his martial-arts outfit. “I am Grandmaster Tu,” he announced, then paused and added, “English name Danny. The spiritual master of China, hailing from the northeast.”

  “You are in the presence of a Taoist immortal. I harnessed the energy of the moon through the coal-smacked skies. When I killed a white tiger as a young boy, I came alive.”

  He began to circle the room, holding a half-filled glass of water in front of him.

  “I will use my qi to soften this glass to water. It will cower and become unable to cut me.”

  He flicked the glass with his fingers, producing that familiar clink. He passed it and encouraged people in the room to do the same.

  “Do not try this yourself. Only when your gong has achieved the highest cultivation will you be able to do this on your own.”

  Mary stared at the drinking glass she’d handed to him just moments earlier. It was clear and fairly tall, with a slightly thicker bottom; they had the same glasses at home.

  “Many people have hurt themselves trying to replicate my craft,” he began, launching into a series of anecdotes. “There was a soldier who cut his tongue out…”

  He encouraged the audience to be astonished. Mary shivered when picturing the bloody saliva he described, the convulsing limbs and screams of pain. She steadied her chin on top of her knee and prepared to witness a miracle.

  He paused in the center of the room and stood with his feet apart and breathed heavily as his open palm applied invisible forces to the glass.

  Then, just as the room was about to turn impatient, he grabbed his glass with both hands and took a bite out of it. He bit the glass as easily as one would a leaf of lettuce. Crisp and clean. The crunch of glass sounded like metal plates falling onto tile, and as he continued to chew, shards shattered all over him.

  Mary looked at him and the grandmaster looked back. Time was passing by in microwave minutes, shockingly slow. Mary watched as he took another bite and chewed, the crunching sound resonating through the quiet room. He swallowed and opened his mouth so that everyone could see his tongue.

  Perhaps some of the younger men in the audience had come to see this kind of bizarre spectacle, maybe hoping to be entertained by a few magic tricks. Maybe the dental assistant and the office worker thought qigong could alleviate the pain of muscle injuries and showed up to ask a grandmaster for information on alternative medicine. Yet here they were, with aching backs and damp palms, watching a young man much like themselves daring himself to eat a glass cup.

  Nobody ventured to walk out of the room, and not one horrified face twisted the other way; they were locked in the trance together.

  “Stop, stop, you’re bleeding,” said a concerned man.

  “No,” Tutu said, his mouth full of glass. “That’s just my lips. It is unaffected by the qi; the glass is not cutting me at all.”

  “Really, please stop, we get it,” said another.

  Tutu wiped the corner of his mouth with a sleeve, smearing a few drops of blood across his cheek. Rather than stopping, he raised his hand before continuing to chew and swallow.

  Finally Mary’s father got up from his chair and reached out as if to take the rest of the glass from his hands. But Mary ran up and blocked her father’s path, and used all her strength to settle him back down in his chair.

  “No, no, please let him finish,” she said. “Isn’t this amazing? He’s showing us what he can do!”

  The whole glass disappeared into the grandmaster’s mouth.

  “It’s a miracle!” Mary yelled, her voice going hoarse. “He proved it! He proved it!”

  Unfortunately for Grandmaster Tu, even after he rinsed off his partially bloody mouth, peeled back his lips, and showed everyone his intact tongue, nobody signed up for his classes or gave him any money. The eyes of those Chinese American audience members did not fill up with wonder as he had hoped, as he had expected, but instead they shone with confusion, despair, and pity. Perhaps they were too familiar with desperate survival tactics. Maybe they were not yet looking for spiritual guidance. For whatever reason, his demonstration did not put his audience in a state of wonder. Success and failure exist side by side in Los Angeles. For every Wenzhou farmer who buys a mansion in Diamond Bar, there’s another who will wash dishes until his back gives out.

  When Mary tiptoed to Grandmaster Tu’s room later that evening to wish him good night, he did not answer the door. The next morning his motel room was empty of all his possessions. He did not leave the rest of the money he owed to Mary’s family, and on his return flight to China, his was the only empty seat. Her parents said that nobody had seen him leave; it was as if he simply vanished.

  In the years to come, Mary would remember Grandmaster Tu spontaneously, with a kind of baffled veneration. He would appear to her like a pebble dropped into still water, during strange moving moments that she could not explain. When she hitchhiked through Argentina as a teenager. When she whipped through the streets of Lisbon on the back of a retro scooter. Or when on a rainy morning in Italy the ringing of church bells moved her to tears. Her parents never did figure out when or why the obedient daughter they raised grew stiff wings and flew far away from them. When, in her most glorious moments, she fought for herself and claimed what was hers, she would anticipate his memory.

  It had been printed in the newspapers that an old and alcoholic guard had forgotten to lock a door to the tiger’s sanctuary and a young boy accidentally entered the enclosure. A Siberian beast against a powerless lamb. This was a fabrication, because the boy knew exactly what he was doing the evening he entered the caged jungle with his stolen key. His mother had told him there was a tiger, holding on for weeks now, waiting to be put down.

  The big cat’s pupils were thick and unseeing. Its wasted body sensed the boy’s presence. When the boy approached the tiger, it could not even rise; it roared weakly at the boy, showing its one yellow tooth.

  Under the moon, like a brush lifting out of the ink, the tiger stood to face the boy. The night was hushed. Even in its broken state, the creature was still graceful, its shoulders powerful; the Han character for king, written by the gods long before time, spread darkly above its gray eyes.

  The tiger swayed. It had been trapped for twenty years in its cage, had never k
nown anything but this prison. It yearned for death. The boy drew closer, crouching with his thin arms by his sides, one hand brandishing a pocketknife like a sword.

  On its hind legs, the tiger was twice the height of the boy, and the first time its claws came down, the boy’s head spilled blood in a stream behind his ears. Yet the boy lunged with the knife at the tiger’s throat and tumbled into its claws. When the tiger began to tire, the boy attacked again. This final time he climbed behind the tiger and stabbed at its throat with his only miserable weapon. The tiger, ivory in the moonlight, rolled its deep mountain song in its mouth but could not, or perhaps did not want to, shake off the boy.

  There are few certainties in life. That the nights would be dark and that the sun would rise in the east every morning, these things the boy took for granted. In the morning, he thought, he would be reborn a legend in this gray world. He knew that to be extraordinary, first there must be courage. For people to follow him, he had to descend upon a road to lead them on.

  For Our Children and for Ourselves

  In a blue sky smeared with white clouds, his mother’s pigeons whirled above his head in enormous sweeps. This household chore was one he never grew tired of. He tended daily to the birds, encouraged them, and as they dove their wings took on every shade of gray. These were kites people could never dream of, he thought, and as they weaved in and out between those old porcelain roof tiles and plum trees, they drew invisible watercolors and characters without names.

  With a loud thud, Xiao Gang slapped the long branch he was waving against the tree trunk. The pigeons continued to fly on their own. A few plums fell to the ground, and boys from the neighborhood scrambled to pick them up. “Mine! Mine!” they shouted.

  When they were too tired to fly, the pigeons one by one settled back into their hutches, puffed out their feathers, and cooed gently in unison, like heartbeats slowing down to slumber. A child from the city might ask why none of them ever flew away into the inviting mountains and trees in the distance. But this was the Henan countryside, where that would be a stupid question.

  On this particular night, Xiao Gang was looking to get very, very drunk. He wanted to be carried home singing. As the occasion was his bachelor party, all of his buddies—booze in hand, undershirts already stained from spills—were ready to fulfill his wish.

  After the fish was picked to bones, Liang stood up unsteadily and raised his brimming glass of baijiu to give a toast. “To your journey, brother!” Cheers were grunted, lips smacked, and cigarettes lit.

  “Ever since we were this tall”—Liang gestured with his fat hands at his hips—“we’ve been best friends, and maybe not by blood but I always saw you as my brother. And if I can’t speak to you from the gut, then who can, huh?”

  Xiao Gang looked at him, smiled sloppily, and filled his own cup.

  “To this lucky bastard, he’s going to get rich in America!”

  Surrounded by his closest friends, Xiao Gang cheered with them.

  “Your wife,” Liang continued, “well, your wife is…” He looked around, as if searching for a euphemism, then he shouted, “Your wife is a retard!”

  The snickering around the table stopped, a series of throats cleared. Someone’s arm gently went around Liang’s meaty shoulders.

  But Liang continued, his eyes beginning to swim in their puffy alcohol pools. “Ah, but her mom’s got money! And she ain’t stingy!

  “Brother, you’re gonna live far better than us losers! Damn it all, let’s ganbei to that!” Without waiting for anyone else, Liang threw his head back, gulped his shot, and held his glass upside down above his head.

  Xiao Gang searched the faces of his closest friends for pity or jealousy, but none returned his gaze. Except for Liang, who reached out and put an arm around him. This was the man he’d fought with as a teenager, with whom he shared everything he’d ever had. Xiao Gang grabbed him roughly by the collar and kissed him on the cheek.

  Their friends laughed, showing their crowded, yellowing teeth. They clinked their glasses and then baijiu, that clear warm venom, burned their throats.

  “Gong xi!” they yelled. “Congratulations!” in a tone no different than if he’d won the lottery.

  Liang drifted away from the group, slumped in a chair, and began drinking alone. He worked at a paper factory, and though he was only twenty-eight, he was already wearing old-man shoes. The winter winds had etched deep grooves into his cheeks long before the years could get to them.

  He and Xiao Gang could have had a real heart-to-heart that night and gotten things straight before the spell of their friendship was irreparably broken, but not knowing the words, they drank instead, until they had nothing to say at all.

  Whether he believed it or not, about six months ago, Xiao Gang had tumbled helplessly into the grasp of yuan fen. The term yuan means the fateful meeting of two people, with the possibility—the shared hope—of becoming love. Fen was the responsibility of fulfilling that unspoken promise. Yuan and fen make love stories possible.

  Yuan—not quite fate—had been at work giving birth to the millions of invisible strings that pulled Xiao Gang, a single-winged seed from the Henan countryside, to his current situation. When he packed his bags for the last time and walked the long road to where a car waited to pick him up, that was fen, propelling him toward the realization of that destiny.

  Three weeks before his twenty-eighth birthday, Xiao Gang was engaged to an American girl he’d never met. The connection took only a single moment. The world turned as always, a sugar cube lost itself in tea, train stations united lovers, corn grew golden, and kites went up in the air. In this moment, yuan fen grabbed hold of Xiao Gang, counted his steps, and drew his hand to the door he held open for Vivian, the mother of his future wife.

  After that, everything changed.

  Vivian Tang’s favorite topic of conversation was money. Mortgage rates, import taxes. Her most uttered sentences included “Oh, this thing? My personal shopper at Neiman picked it out. It’s a special order from Milan.” She wore nothing but Italian suits, tailored to hug her short, stocky frame. For the past two decades she had worn her hair in a poufy bun of tight curls, dyed deep maroon, high on the back of her head.

  She had been married only once, in her twenties, when she still lived in China. But whenever her husband gave her that tragic look of his and delivered in cadenced sighs his juvenile overtures about love, she had changed the subject to the more practical matters at hand—where they would go to graduate school, when they would be able to buy an apartment, the rising price of pork. So she wasn’t surprised, some years later, when she realized he had stopped bringing up the subject of love. And she was not greatly disappointed when, soon after they immigrated to America and their daughter was born, he left her for someone else. Vivian did not mourn his loss; she did not want to resemble her weak and unfocused husband. Just by looking at the back of her head, people knew she was tough. The tight cluster of dyed curls spoke of a woman who did not have time for mood lighting and poetry, someone who took pride in never having loved her husband.

  Yong Qin was her Chinese name. She knew that those characters did not convey any elegance, but she’d always felt the name directly represented her personal virtues: bravery and hard work. Every day she forced herself out of bed, to her desk, and eventually into business school in Massachusetts. Most people were so intimidated by the fierce clarity with which she spoke that they hardly noticed the accent that still clung to her words. Within a decade she had become a successful apparel supplier, through years of never doubting her instincts. Her company, Vivian Inc., was a major client of Xiao Gang’s employer, a fabric-dyeing plant in Shenzhen.

  Like the other children in the village, Xiao Gang attended a trade school and got a job in a factory. Every summer he went home to work the wheat harvest, and this would go on until he had children of his own to send out to the machines. His life stretched out before him, lo
ng and predictable. Day after day, dyeing equipment breathed hot air into his face as he lifted and loaded weave combs. There had been times when he felt a pinprick of envy that the fabric would travel to places that he could only dream of.

  When he first saw this woman walking down the hall, the unfurling of her clothes and her entourage of assistants, he was in awe of her. To say she had an air of authority would have been an understatement; to Xiao Gang, she might as well have floated by on the shoulders of a hundred men. As she passed, he caught a hint of her perfume, and before the scent could leave him, her personal secretary had already caught up to him and, to his amazement, asked him to dinner.

  Vivian needed only two minutes to take stock of Xiao Gang, but she saw him instantly for what he was: a slightly above-average young man with big dreams but nothing to show for them. He was a fairly tall and insignificantly handsome midlevel manager who wasn’t extraordinary in any visible way. But when he held the door open for her, she sensed a rare quality in him, which she couldn’t place until later. She knew right then that he was still a boy, earnest and artless, and more than that, she knew he was what she was looking for.

  That night at dinner Vivian offered him a job and a U.S. green card. Under one condition.

  “Her name is Melanie, and she is a very sweet girl.”

  He had been resigned to becoming exactly the kind of man his mother had said he would be: strong-bodied and stable-minded. When he was younger, he’d had more outlandish hopes: He had wanted to play the piano, like on the Mozart tape his neighbor sometimes played. When college exams came up, he fantasized about applying to music school. In the end, a factory job appeared and a piano didn’t. His fingers grew thick and stiff before they were ever taught to follow music. As he got older, these realities became more apparent and easier to accept. Sooner or later, he figured, life rubs smooth everyone’s edges.