World and Town

by Gish Jen

  Their headstones are the only ones with Chinese characters, of course—her parents’ Chinese names, Gĕ Kāilìng and Kŏng Lìngwén, carved, top to bottom, along the right edge of the stones in red. And in one corner of each stone, a clump of bamboo. Bamboo done by chisel! Amazing.

  Bamboo, which bends but does not break.

  Māma, Bàba.

  She closes her eyes. It seems to her she has been painting her way all along to this moment—retreating that she might inch forward, like a snail. How sorry she is to have missed their old age! And how can they never have met Josh, or Joe? She wishes she had been there when they died—together at least, she heard. Not long after they finally escaped the Mainland; of his ’n’ her tuberculosis. The end of their story is unreal to Hattie. Far easier to picture are her parents as she knew them: young and modern and rebellious. They were never going to grow old; they were never going to weaken; they would sooner have been dead than be buried in a Christian cemetery.

  Or in Qufu, either, probably—Fallen leaves return to their roots notwithstanding. But would they have minded being reburied there? Or, more accurately, re-reburied—?

  No one more agreeable than the dead, Lee used to say.

  More trucks. The rest of the flowers. Hattie catches Lennie’s eye. He leaves his earbuds to dangle as he maneuvers a large cardboard box over to the graves. Out of this comes an aluminum folding table, on top of which he places a large red silk square that threatens to fly or slip off, and two smaller squares of shiny gold that, though of a heavier weave, are likewise too slippery to stay put. He anchors them all with dishes: a fried fish, a pork knuckle. A poor roasted chicken with its neck skewered and wound into an S. Dried fruit; fresh fruit; candy; cake. Cups of wine. In front of the food, he places two pillar candles and a jar full of sand in which to stick incense; and in front of the table, to one side, some long sticks of sugarcane. Then he starts to cut through the grass. Jabbing a half-moon spade into the ground, stepping on it, rocking it. He fashions a kind of trapdoor, then rolls this back, snipping the grass roots with a pair of clippers as he goes. Does he really know just where Hattie’s father’s urn lies? It does seem so, for in goes the shovel and out pops the jar without fanfare, the dirt raining away. Next, Hattie’s mother’s jar. The jars are sturdy white ceramic with blue markings—two feet high or so, maybe fifteen inches in diameter. Sealed, pockmarked, a little dirty, and quite extraordinarily unextraordinary; they could be for pickled vegetables. Hattie can see where there might once have been writing—her parents’ names, presumably—but the writing is too faint to make out now. How to keep them straight? She stoops to pick one up, but Lennie signals her to wait. Some rummaging and, ah—he produces some wet naps from a plastic tub and cleans the urns with these. Then—sparing her the bending—he presents the urns to her.

  “In China, women aren’t allowed to touch anything,” he says. “But this is a free country, right?”

  She accepts her mother’s urn, kissing it lightly; the jar is cold, the glaze pitted and clammy. Lennie takes it from her and presents her with the other urn, her father’s. She kisses this, too, coming away this time with a little something on her lips. Grit. She wipes it away.

  Twins.

  Lennie sets the urns on the gold silk squares on the table. His hair drips as he leans forward; he flicks it back with a snap.

  “Bones, not ashes,” he says.

  “How do you know?”

  “See how tall the jars are?”

  “Yes.”

  “The tall jars are for bones.”

  “Ah.”

  “They’re put back in the same way they were originally.”

  “Originally?”

  “In the womb.”

  “Ah. In fetal position, you mean.”

  He nods. “If you want, we can open a jar and see how they’re doing.”

  Open a jar?

  “No thanks,” she says.

  “It shouldn’t smell,” Lennie reassures her. “It’s only when we open graves, you know, that things are—” He gestures with his unbraceleted hand.

  “You mean there’s still flesh?”

  “Sometimes. You wouldn’t believe the smell. That’s the hardest part of the job, the smell. My dad used to say I’d get used to it, but I never did. He says that’s because I was born here. He says real Chinese can get used to anything.”

  Bong!

  The trees are frosted white now, and the ledges of the tombstones. Lenny’s shoulders and hair, too, and his collar, and the flaps of his jacket pockets. A world of the ledged and ledgeless.

  “You pick the bones out of the rotting flesh?” Part of Hattie wants Lennie to shut up, but she’s curious, too.

  “Only if there’s no choice. Mostly we pour in some rice wine and leave the body to steep. Crack the lid for air. That speeds up the decomp rate. Even better’s if you let the insects and animals do their thing, but most people aren’t into that. A lot of other bone pickers use chemicals these days, but we do things the old-fashioned way. It’s not as fast as the chemicals, but hey. It’s organic.”

  “Good for you.”

  Lennie rakes the dirt back into the graves, then rolls the grass back down and stomps. By spring the cuts will have knit themselves up; it will be hard to tell that any of this went on. But does that make it all right? Is this what her parents would have wanted?

  Do you not see how people want? Do you not see how people hurt?

  Lennie begins to wrap the jars in the damp yellow squares.

  “Can we mark them first, to keep them straight?” asks Hattie.

  “Sure.” Lennie searches through his box and finds a blue marker.

  “Permanent ink?”

  He nods.

  She writes the characters for Māma and Bàba, as neatly as she can, on the bottom of the jars. Māma, Bàba. Thinking as she writes how she had not known before Joe and Lee died that you could see life leave a person—that you could see their color drain away, and the light leave their eyes. But there it was. Their hearts stopped, then their brains stopped. And then never mind that their bones and skin cells went on a while longer, nonsensically. Long before their bodies cooled, they were gone.

  Māma, Bàba.

  Now Hattie sees Greta and Grace and Sophy, all in jars. Chhung and Mum and Sarun and Gift. Carter and Candy and Beth and Ginny; Everett and Judy Tell-All and Jill Jenkins. Tina and Johnson. Flora. Herself. In fact, if Josh pots her up, it will more likely be in ash form. Still, it is everyone’s bones she sees, in white jars with blue trim, on a long table. Reveille and Annie. After all that walking, all that talking, all those experiments and cookies and e-mails. Their names are in blue magic marker; their silk squares ripple under them.

  “Leaving the headstones, or taking them?” asks Lennie.

  Taking them?

  “We can arrange relocation if you like,” he goes on.

  “Leave them,” she says. “Please.”

  “You want firecrackers?”

  To advertise what they’re doing?

  “No, thank you.”

  “How about offering respects? You’re supposed to kneel and kē tóu”—he pulls the pillow out of the box and begins to demonstrate. But Hattie grew up in China; she doesn’t need to be shown how to stand in front of the table, or how to raise the incense sticks high in the air, or how to step forward and place them in the incense holder. She backs up, kneeling a bit creakily on the cushion—the damp—then touches her forehead to the wet grass.

  Māma, Bàba.

  Tears, snow.

  She bows twice more.

  Lennie offers her a hand up and a handkerchief for her forehead.

  “When I was little, we had chants,” she says, after a moment. “A monk or two, sometimes more.”

  “Those were the good old days,” says Lennie.

  He wraps the yellow bundles in bubble wrap, fastening the wrap with packing tape. The ripping of the tape is loud and harsh.

  “You should put them in your lugg
age and check them,” he says. “If you carry them on, you might have trouble getting through security—these days, especially. Unless you have their death certificates? That can be a help.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Well, then, you should check them. Some people feel the bones should stay right with you; but others think the spirits understand that these are modern times. And your parents have been stuck here for so long, they’re probably willing to do anything to spring the coop.”

  “Okay.” She nods. Whatever.

  “These going to the Mainland?”

  She nods again.

  “Then you’ll want to have them cremated. Otherwise you could have trouble getting them into the country.”

  “Thanks for telling me.”

  “Of course, there’s almost always someone you can pay off. As I’m guessing you know.”

  “I’ll have them cremated.”

  He turns his collar up. “If you’re going to have them cremated, I should probably point out that we can take care of it, if you like. That is, if you don’t have a local crematorium you’d prefer.”

  “I’ll use our local facilities, thank you.”

  He hesitates. “I didn’t mean to pressure you. It’s just that my dad would be mad if I didn’t point that out.” He toes the ground, boyish.

  She smiles. “Tell your dad you did a good job. Real Chinese.”

  “Thanks.” He looks thoughtful. “Though maybe you’d be willing to fill out a customer satisfaction survey? If you’re satisfied? Then you can tell him yourself.”

  “I’d be happy to.”

  “It already has a stamp on it. All you have to do is pop it in the mail.”

  “That’s great.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  “No problem. Fathers can be hard on their sons, I know.”

  He frowns. “Think so?”

  It’s snowing harder now, the flakes large and light; they pile up quick and high as Hattie pockets the form and Lennie crams the bubble-wrapped urns into backpacks. He helps Hattie put her arms through the shoulder straps of one.

  “It’s better to wear it frontwise,” he says.

  “Like a marsupial,” she says.

  “A what?”

  “A kangaroo or some such. An animal that carries its young in a pocket.”

  “Whatever,” he says. “This is heavy. You have to lean back.”

  “Okay.” She supports the weight with her hands, the way she used to support her belly, sometimes, back before Josh was born. It’s like being pregnant again, only with her mother.

  Your mother turned bowling ball.

  Lennie bears the other urn back to the car, one earbud in. In a show of respect he does not add the other bud until the car’s out of the cemetery and on the main road. He bops his head with a pecking motion, like a chicken.

  The urns seem much larger in Hattie’s kitchen than they did in the graveyard and, next to Hattie’s computer, older—as if they hail from another reality. The time of the large jars. And as if with reverence for that ancient dispensation, Grace and Greta stand now, like the jars, side by side, a pair. They’re about the same height; they both fold their hands.

  Twins.

  “It’s a beautiful thing you’re doing,” says Grace.

  “A compassionate thing,” says Greta.

  Hattie shakes her head. “I think my relatives are nuts.”

  Grace examines the glaze. “May I touch one?”

  “Of course.”

  “Is this your mother or your father?”

  Hattie tilts the jar; she’s still surprised how heavy it is. “My father.”

  “I’ll touch both.”

  “I’m sure they’d like that.”

  Grace stretches a finger out. Greenhouse gardener that she is, her cuticles are rimmed with dirt such as seems to befit the occasion as she touches the side of the urn, then lays a palm on its top, her fingers flat and splayed. Her eyes are squinched so tight her eyelashes flip up at the corners, but her face is serene.

  “Thank you,” she says at last.

  “You’re welcome,” says Hattie, though why is Grace thanking her? She asks if Greta wants a turn.

  • • •

  Sarun is home! As he’s still in a neck brace and supposed to stay still, he mostly watches TV or plays with his PlayStation, which he isn’t usually allowed to hook up to the TV but is now. What hair he has is not blond but black and enough like Mum’s that they’re quite a sight together. Mother ’n’ son buzz cuts! Lee would have said. It’s pretty wack. Mum lets him smoke marijuana in the living room, why not—everyone did it in Cambodia, it seems, and she likes the smell. In fact, when Mum has the energy she is going to make him chicken soup with marijuana in it, Sophy says. Hattie does not encourage this. All they need is to get busted, she says. But Mum is far more worried that Sarun will be charged with arson. Because someone must be upset, Sophy says. Like probably Everett is upset. And fair or not, people do think Sarun and his friends set the fire.

  “But why the fuck would I burn down the mini-mall?” says Sarun.

  He would shake his head if he could. As it is, he can only move it enough to jiggle his pirate earrings, which Sophy and Hattie have cleaned and fixed for him. The earrings rest lightly on the padding of his neck brace, around which is wrapped his gold chain, though it is barely long enough; it looks like an absurdly delicate dog collar.

  “And fucking plywood!” he goes on. “That be low, man.”

  Anyway, Sophy volunteers, even if he’s charged, he’ll get off, because she knows who really set the fire.

  “Oh, really,” says Sarun. “Who?” His pupils are huge, his face alive and amused.

  “Me,” she says. “I set the fire.”

  “You!” scoffs Sarun. “You can’t even strike a match.”

  “I can so.” Sophy takes some kitchen matches out of a drawer that could be the very drawer Hattie rescued long ago. She lights a match then immediately blows it out, dropping it in the sink.

  Sarun laughs. “You see? You afraid of fire.”

  “I did it!” she insists all the same, smiling.

  “And why’d you do it? Please tell us.”

  She pouts prettily, her lower lip protruding.

  “Spit it out, now. What was your mo-tive?”

  “I did it so they’d pin it on you!” She sticks her tongue out at him.

  “Because you wanted me locked up?”

  She plays with her hair. “Because you were upsetting everyone.”

  “This was your grand plan?”

  “I thought it was God’s plan. Because …” She wrinkles her nose.

  “Spit it out,” says Sarun again.

  “Because you were doing Satan’s work!” She juts her chin out.

  Sarun laughs so loud Mum pokes her head out from her bedroom; Gift claps his hands but then stops, confused.

  “Was it God’s plan that instead of going to jail I went to the hospital?” asks Sarun.

  Sophy looks as though she might cry. Still, Sarun laughs some more as Gift climbs carefully onto his lap—knowing, it seems, that his brother is hurt. Knowing he has to be careful. He pats Sarun’s brace and gazes at his face.

  “That be some kind of miracle, all right,” says Sarun. “And what about the old man?” He hugs Gift with one arm, gesturing out the window with the other. “Tell me, mastermind. He going to be sitting outside all winter? What’s God’s game plan on that?”

  Chhung sits by himself in the guard chair—smoking, drinking, brooding. Falling asleep. Mum is afraid he is going to die out there. She thinks he has been taken by k’maoch and that they need a kru to fetch him back; she just wants to know where they can find a kru.

  Hattie calls the hippie Buddhist temple.

  “Kru?” says the man. “Can you spell that for me?”

  Hattie sighs and hangs up.

  Mum goes on praying and praying, her hair shorter all the time, her carpet square tucked under her. Her shrine grows more
elaborate, spawning bowls of fruit and incense.

  “She says he has to come in. She says he’s going to freeze to death,” Sophy says. “But he says why should he come in when that’s what he wants. When he wants to freeze to death.”

  Hattie shakes her head. “Has Sarun talked to him?”

  “No, and he doesn’t want to,” says Sophy.

  And sure enough, when Hattie broaches the subject, Sarun says, “That asshole almost killed me.”

  Hattie checks his eyes to be sure he’s not high, then turns down the TV with the remote control. He leans forward to hear what he can of the show anyway, the cuffs of his sweatpants riding up.

  “You’re right. He did. He did almost kill you. But you know, he’s sorry,” Hattie says. “He was worried you did something wrong. And he was worried that because of you the police were going to find out about Sophy’s having broken probation, and about the possible 51A on him in your old town.”

  “If he’s so sorry, why don’t he say so?” Sarun scratches in under his collar with a chopstick. “If he’s so sorry, why don’t he come tell me how he knows I’m innocent? If he’s so sorry, why don’t he come tell me how he knows he beat me up for nothing? He beat me up when that cop had nothing on me, and now he can’t even say he’s sorry. You know why?” Sarun gestures with the chopstick. “Because he is crazed. That’s why. You know what he said when you first showed up? He said you were Khmer Krom.”

  “Is that Vietnamese Cambodian?”

  “Yeah. Or a k’maoch. He thought you were a k’maoch.” He looks back at the screen; he’s watching some sort of police drama.

  Hattie sighs. “Your father should tell you how wrong he was. He should. He should apologize for overreacting, and for almost killing you. But he’s not well, Sarun.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m not so well, either, thanks to he almost fucking killed me. Like you said. And why should he get off scot-free, tell me? While I’m on the spit for something I had nothing to fucking do with?” Sarun’s eyes flash with challenge; he wields the chopstick like a baton.

  Hattie plucks it out of his hand. “That is an excellent question.” She stashes the chopstick down under her thigh and turns the TV off altogether.

  “Hey,” he protests.