Year of the Goose

by Carly J. Hallman

  One of the officials, a man with an unnaturally lustrous head of hair, cleared his throat. “Zhao, what you have done—”

  Zhao felt his cell phone vibrate against his leg (surely his mother calling).

  “—is remarkable.”

  The phone continued to vibrate.

  “‘Rehabilitated’ all but two campers!” The official pronounced the word with a certain euphemistic emphasis. “A record, Zhao. A glorious and remarkable achievement!”

  Each of the officials picked up a shot glass, stood up, and cheered. They clinked their glasses together.

  Zhao didn’t cheer, didn’t stand up. He sat, stunned, as the waitress entered the room with a tray stacked high with huge cuts of meat.

  The men began to feast.

  Zhao’s phone continued to vibrate. He looked at the unidentifiable meat and then at each of the officials’ faces, which looked now not like doors, but mirrors, and then he reached down and slid his phone from his pocket, dropped it into his soup, and pushed the steaming bowl away. He sat back in his chair and felt, once again, that burning in his stomach. He recognized it now as hunger. He picked up his chopsticks. He ate and he ate and the burning faded, and the delicious, fatty, juicy meat soon disappeared, and the waitress took away the last plate, and Zhao felt lucky—luckier than he’d ever felt and bound only to be luckier still—so he shouted over the din of the chattering officials, “Bring that back, lady legs. I wanna lick the grease!”

  IN THE NEWS

  BASHFUL GOOSE HEIRESS KILLS FATHER, GOOSE, RECEPTIONIST IN SENSELESS ACT OF VIOLENCE

  WUXI, CHINA —…while across the country, mourners take to the street to weep and wail…

  May our great nation find the strength necessary to carry on without guidance from its most powerful and beloved tycoon!

  THE LEFTOVER WOMAN BEHIND THE CLEAVER: PROFILE OF A COLD-BLOODED MURDERESS

  WUXI, CHINA —…Ms. Hui, a 24-year-old bachelorette, was educated in Los Angeles, California. Unable to secure a boyfriend, fiancé, or husband in the United States, despite its abundance of eligible and wealthy men, Ms. Hui returned, single, to China two years ago. Upon her return Ms. Hui was appointed head of corporate social responsibility at Bashful Goose Snack Company. This reporter was unable to unearth information about any charitable projects undertaken during Ms. Hui’s employment at Bashful Goose—by all accounts, it appears she squandered much of her time and her enviable salary on dining out and purchasing pirated DVDs…

  In an April interview for Asia Business Monthly, Papa Hui indeed referred to his daughter as a “royal pain” and asserted he would “personally kiss the hairy ass cheeks” of any man foolish enough to take Ms. Hui off his weary hands…

  BASHFUL GOOSE SNACK PRICES SKYROCKET AMID RUMORS

  WUXI, CHINA —…a spokesperson for the Bashful Goose Snack Company insists that the company will not shut down or slow production. He urges consumers to remain calm…

  However, as one netizen posted on his microblog, “How can we trust anyone anymore? Children killing parents! Heiresses killing tycoons! I for one am stocking up on Tangerine Crumbly Cakes…”

  KELLY HUI NAMES HAIR TYCOON WANG XILAI AS COCONSPIRATOR IN PAPA HUI MURDER

  SHANGHAI, CHINA — Ms. Kelly Hui, accused of the murder of Bashful Goose founder and CEO Papa Hui, has named Wang Xilai, a hair tycoon headquartered in Shanghai, as a coconspirator. According to Ms. Hui, Mr. Wang approached her last summer in a dark alley. There, he allegedly offered her a large sum of money to murder her father…

  JIANGSU CHILDHOOD OBESITY FIGURES PLUMMET

  NANJING, CHINA — Government officials were pleased to announce at a press conference Friday afternoon that Jiangsu is no longer China’s fattest province…

  AT THE ROOT OF IT ALL: THE MEMOIRS OF A CHINESE HAIR TYCOON

  You cannot prevent the birds of sadness from passing over your head, but you can prevent them from nesting—and shitting—in your hair.

  —ANCIENT CHINESE PROVERB

  1.

  YUNNAN, CHINA

  I AM A SIMPLE MAN. I WAKE WITH THE DAWN. I TAKE A BRISK WALK around my house to stretch my legs. I linger at the window, staring out at sweeping fields, orange orchards, the gold-tinted horizon. I prepare my breakfast, a plain rice porridge, and I boil water for my morning tea. Aside from the clinking of the pan, the whistling of the kettle—all of these homey, comforting noises—it is quiet. I live alone. I haven’t spoken to anyone I would consider a friend in a very long time. Most days my voice goes unused.

  I finish my meal and wash my dishes in the sink. This house, for a country house, is well outfitted. I’ve got running water, a bathtub, a washing machine. This is not a farmer’s house. It is a retreat for an overworked city man with soft hands and black circles around his eyes. I was once such a man, and I suppose, in a way, still am. But what do bank accounts and investments matter out here, in the countryside, in Yunnan, a province all but forgotten by those great shakers and moneymakers in Beijing, in Shanghai, in Guangzhou? I exist now not among neon lights and constant construction and golden toilets and da hong pao tea. I exist among the forgotten in the cast-aside home of dozens of ethnic minorities—non-Han Chinese—under a slice of the only clear blue sky we have left. But I’m not political and I’m not some environmental nut, and that’s not why I’m here. It’s more about the thought that after I’d acquired everything, after I’d achieved what I set out to achieve, that there was nothing else left. “What next?” is the most terrifying question in the world when answers cease to be.

  I go for a stroll through the orange orchards. Birds flutter above in the sky, white clouds above them. I’ve spent the past month—or maybe it’s longer now, maybe it’s been nearly a month and a half—here, walking these paths, sleeping in that simple house. I have a car, my Bentley, parked in the driveway, but I have no reason to use it. I have nowhere to go. I have my groceries and supplies delivered from Kunming. The man who used to bring them in his bread-loaf van was young, not much older than myself, maybe twenty-six or twenty-seven. He made mention once, upon my noting the birds singing outside, of having a deaf three-year-old son. He found a way to bring this up again each subsequent visit, and I came to understand that he was not trying to share intimate details of his life for friendship’s sake, but rather in hopes that I’d take heart and offer money for a surgery or for the little guy’s tuition at a special school. All I could feel at this realization was selfish pity, shame that I’d never be able to escape myself. People still knew who I was; will always know who I am. How couldn’t they? My photo was plastered in magazines, in newspapers, all over the Internet. And what about that car in the driveway, the clothes in my closet, these parts I hadn’t wanted to escape, these parts I’d taken with me? Maybe I wanted them to know. I couldn’t fault this sad-eyed father for trying anyway, for his son’s sake; some might even call his effort admirable, so I gave him some money, a large chunk of money, and then I dismissed him from the job.

  Now the man who makes my deliveries is older, in his forties, bald and gruff. He came yesterday. He isn’t one for small talk, producing at most a grunt in response to anything I might say. If he knows who I am—or who I was, to be more accurate—he doesn’t show it. He hauls in bags of rice, crates of eggs, boxes of vegetables. He leaves them on the floor for me to put away. He doesn’t linger. He doesn’t hold up any mirrors. He leaves.

  Left alone, here among rows and rows of evenly spaced orange trees only a little taller than me, I stop and remove my shoes, dangling them on my fingers as I continue. I’ve taken to walking barefoot on the soil, despite the risk of parasites, of ringworm, of heaven knows what else. There isn’t broken glass here like in the city, smashed beer bottles and car windows. There are rocks, caterpillars, mushrooms; there is energy, uncorrupted energy. I think so often of people in those cities, how so many of them live in high-rises, and how many of them wear shoes outside, and, accordingly, how many of them reside in bodies that never touch the earth. How can you
feel connected to anything when you’re floating on rubber soles and concrete slabs, when you’re perpetually passing through? Everyone is a stranger in the city, and it’s no wonder we have customers trampling customers in foreign hypermarts, entitled businessmen ripping babies from strollers and slamming them down against the pavement, women tearing out each other’s hair over the rising price of vegetables.

  Thank heavens I am removed from all that now. I am connected; I live and I walk on the ground. Sometimes I think this earthing therapy is working, is grounding my psyche and lifting my spirits. But then midafternoon hits and I have nothing to do, and this depression washes over me, the typhoon of meaninglessness that inundates me with the feeling that all my life has been wasted and that it will continue to be wasted.

  I step over a sharp-looking pebble and I notice something on the ground, maybe two meters ahead, that interrupts my thoughts. I approach with trepidation. There are people who might want me dead, after what they think I’ve done, what I didn’t actually do. But as I draw nearer, I see that this foreign object is not a bomb or a booby trap or anything of the sort. It is a laptop computer. My laptop computer.

  I begin to tremble, to sweat.

  The little things I could dismiss as delusions. When I found my lost watch on the outside windowsill with all its numbers carefully removed, when I found a human tooth on my pillow one morning but no missing teeth in my mouth, when I saw a fly that looked to be carrying a folded note but was unable to reach for it before it flew away. But this is my laptop and it is sitting in an orange orchard and I was not the one who put it there.

  I carry it inside, sit down at the table, open it. There is no message that pops up, no warning, no clue. I perform a thorough check of all my folders and documents and find nothing unchanged. I stare into space and try to recall a specific physical sensation, pain or something, from the exact moment I saw the computer in the orchard and in those moments that I carried it back inside. Nothing springs to mind. I lift the computer and check the bottom for dirt. There is none. I suppose it’s entirely possible that I’ve made the whole thing up, that the computer was here on this table all along. I don’t realize until now that I’ve been holding my breath. I exhale.

  I pop in the Ethernet cable, and I open a browser and wait for a page of celebrity red carpet photos to load. This is a daily practice, searching famous heads for my trademark hair extensions. The Internet here is painfully slow, but I suppose I’ve got nothing else important to check anyway and plenty of time to waste. There are fewer and fewer new search results, fewer and fewer articles and blog posts to read. The media is losing interest in me. It was another story entirely a month ago when all the headlines read, “Tycoon’s Nervous Breakdown.” Netizens and experts alike engaged in analysis and frank conversation about our country’s lacking mental health services. While happy to open the floor to such important discussion, I also couldn’t help but feel it wasn’t really me they were talking about. This, I learned from their discussions, is called disassociation.

  I knew I was in trouble well before the alleged “breakdown,” when I started hearing voices at night. I’d clap out the lights in my apartment and lay down in bed and then they’d start. They were never evil or demonic, never told me to “kill, kill, kill” like they do in the movies. But they were hardly kind. They were critical, harsh, honest. They said, “You don’t deserve this,” and “You know nothing about friendship, about people, about love,” and “You will die alone,” and other such gems, and I used to lie there paralyzed, with damp palms, too frightened to move, to clap the lights back on. I used to squeeze shut my eyes and pray silently that my grandmother’s ghost would make an appearance and demand that those voices leave me alone. My grandmother was the only person I think ever truly loved me, who ever made an effort to understand me. She died when I was twelve. Now that my mental health is improving, I think maybe she was there after all, that all of those voices were actually hers.

  The pictures never load, and I give up, shutting the laptop. I stand up to stretch, and go over to the kitchen but decide I’m not hungry enough to bother preparing lunch, and resolve instead that today I will sing a song. Believe it or not, I’ve never sung a song before. I was a prodigious child with a mind tuned solely to success. If I wasn’t good at something the first time I tried it, I wouldn’t do it again. Early on, I determined that music wasn’t my strong suit, so I just halfheartedly mouthed along to the words in nursery school—no one noticed my lack of voice in such a big crowd. That’s how I got by in my early years, and then after that, there was no need, no requirement to sing.

  No one can hear me here, so I am safe from judgment, but I am unsure of where to begin. Standing on the cool tile before the stove, I open my mouth. I shut it again. I know I’ve got to start somewhere though, so I start to hum. This is easy enough. I hum a tune by a famous singer who used to wear my hair. She had mental problems too—it was rumored that she was a victim first of her father, who molested her in her youth, then of a volatile and abusive relationship with a music executive. Later, after that executive’s lethal overdose, she turned the violence on her manager, savagely attacking him with an ax. He barely survived. This song though, it gives no indication of any such brutality. It is beauty, pure beauty, and then, recalling the words, I open my mouth again, and this time I sing.

  I am halfway through the song, really belting it out now, when there is a knock at my door. I freeze mid-note, my mouth agape. My gaze darts over to the window, through which I see a figure, dressed all in black and wearing a ski mask, running to a red sports car. The figure pulls open the driver’s side door and then, a moment later, the car speeds off. I creep over to my door, my heart pounding. Who was this figure? Why didn’t I hear the car approaching? Who, besides the grocery deliverymen, knows where I am? Is this another mental break? Have I not escaped the voices? Have they grown bodies now? I pull open the door, afraid of what I might, or might not, find.

  It’s amazing how long it takes to tell a story, or to listen to a story, or to read a story, or to write a story, and then, once stored in the brain, how quickly, instantly, that story can be remembered. Memory is, despite all connotations otherwise, not connected to time. A second, a story, and a lifetime take up the same amount of space in the brain and can therefore be remembered all at once, without sequence or pacing, just all at once.

  In the time it takes me to undo the lock, turn the knob, and open the door, a story comes to mind, one my grandmother’s mother, a wrinkly old raisin with bound feet, told me a very long time ago: “When I was a child in the Dragon Mountain Village, we had a neighbor, Village Witch, who gathered herbs and plants in the forest. She used her gathered materials, along with some form of magic, to concoct potions. I know she was a true witch because she once cured my father of a fever so terrible that we were certain he was going to die. With only one sip of her potion, his health was completely restored. Yes, she saved many lives and cured many villagers, and because of this, she was so beloved that no one dared question her odd lifestyle—Village Witch had no husband, no relatives, only a child, named Witch Daughter. From the time Witch Daughter could walk on her own, Village Witch schooled the black-eyed girl in her magical and medicinal ways. For all those years, Witch Daughter never left her mother’s side, so it came as a great surprise to them both when one month Witch Daughter’s blood didn’t come. Village Witch dismissed it as an anomaly—after all her daughter was just sixteen and maybe her moon cycle was still adjusting. But the next month there was still no blood, and the next month still none, and Witch Daughter’s belly grew full, and Village Witch cornered her daughter in their home, shook her by the shoulders, and demanded that she tell her who had done this to her. Witch Daughter didn’t speak, didn’t speak, didn’t speak, and then finally said, only, ‘No one.’

  “Now this confession frightened Village Witch, who had herself gotten pregnant under similarly mysterious circumstances, and whose own mother, disbelieving, had disowned her,
forcing her to walk a great distance to find a village where she could be a stranger, a village that might take her in. And she’d found one. Yes, many years ago, these Dragon Mountain villagers had accepted one unwed mother, but were they ready to accept another?

  “Bogged down by these thoughts and questions and by the stress of her daughter’s virgin pregnancy, Village Witch made a mistake in her scavenging and accidentally cooked a poisonous mushroom into one of her potions, killing an old villager. His family was livid. That very same month, a doctor—a proper doctor trained under French missionaries, a doctor who dismissed what she did, calling it ‘hocus pocus’—began making what would become regular rounds to the village. Village Witch knew now for certain that Dragon Mountain, having no use for her, would never accept her daughter and the baby that grew inside. She had her answer.

  “Frightened by a looming future, Village Witch forced all manner of tonics and potions down her daughter’s throat to try to rinse the baby out. Nothing worked. In fact, these poisons only seemed to make the baby stronger. Resigned now to their fate, the inevitability of this baby’s birth, the two witches locked themselves inside their gates. No one thought this troublesome or suspicious—that murdering witch, the villagers said, she was lucky they were all so civilized, lucky they didn’t slay her and that fat, googly-eyed daughter too. But my father, despite the other villagers’ unkind words and despite the recent availability of modern medicine, still felt he owed his life to Village Witch. He took pity on her. Locked in that house, they ran out of food, and Village Witch was too afraid of meeting an angry mob to go out and scavenge in the mountains, so my father and I slipped rice, leftover vegetables, and bits of cooked bird meat under their gate. Sometimes Village Witch would meet us there, and through the stones’ cracks she told us all about her daughter’s strange and stubborn pregnancy, and many months passed this way, and then, come autumn, I was woken in the night by a cry. The time had come. I hopped up from the kang, my parents and my brothers still snoring, holding each other tight, and I raced outside, where there was no more crying. I stood under the cover of our pomegranate tree and watched Village Witch on the roof of her house, her silhouette cast against the full moon as she held a smaller silhouette by its ankles and then dropped it headfirst down the chimney shaft. And that was the end of that.