Zhang Li nodded, drawing her hands into her lap. “Yeah, there was this teacher at my school who gave one of my classmates a book of dirty drawings. He got fired, but it was hardly the end of the line for him. All he had to do was move to another city and start over with a new job, you know? Who would ever know? There’s this line in a song that goes: With just a little distance, a little bit of wiggle, reputations shed like skin. It’s pretty true, I think.”
Lulu swallowed. “Heavens. But with Dorjee, I mean, I just really can’t understand how one person can have such consistently bad luck.” An instance of the exact opposite, of her own life, struck her—this ever-flowing tributary of success she’d unwittingly found herself recipient of, drowning in. What had she done to deserve it? And what was she making of it? Why was she incapable of deriving pleasure from it? Her gaze traversed the living room—flat-screen TV, BoConcept furniture, due-for-a-dry-cleaning Anna Sui jacket haphazardly tossed across the dining room table, one sleeve inside out, a crumpled tissue poking from the pocket.
“Poor Dorjee,” Zhang Li said. Her empty can clinked on the coffee table as she set it down.
They allowed for a moment of silence, and then the turtle continued.
There were whispers for a long time after it happened, low voices around the dining hall, the courtyard, the dormitories.
“Caught touching a young boy.”
“Transferred somewhere remote.”
“It was a seven-year-old, I heard.”
“The little guy started screaming, waking someone up.”
“I hear it wasn’t just that one boy. I hear there were others before him. Others.”
“Who do you think?”
“I would never tell anyone if that happened to me. How embarrassing. How disgusting.”
“How do we know it didn’t happen to you then?”
“Yeah, right. It was probably you. And I bet you liked it.”
Chortles, hearty slaps on the back, full-fledged laughter.
And in the background, Dorjee, silent, as though not a broken boy but a precisely placed prop, staring into his dish, into the horizon, into the dead end lines written in his palms.
The turtle stopped there, slipped back inside his shell.
Lulu tapped on his shell. “Hey? You okay?”
Silence.
She lifted him from the hardwood floor and set him back into the box.
Silence.
“No, he doesn’t want to be in there,” Zhang Li said. “Take him out.”
Lulu removed him, placed him between herself and Zhang Li.
More silence. Lulu wiped her palms on her thighs. Clammy. Was that all he had to say? Was he seeking absolution? Had they somehow given it to him? Was that all there was to this? What next?
He poked his head out from his carapace and gazed out the window. At this welcome sight, the girls simultaneously exhaled, met each other’s gaze, and burst into nervous giggles. The turtle turned toward them and spoke once again: “Thank you. I just needed a minute. And after seeing this wide world, how could I bear to tell the remainder of my story to cardboard walls?”
When I was twenty, I was released. Or rather, I released myself.
I’d never been much of a scholar, much of a virtuous man. I’d long been sneaking out to do unholy things, and I’d long been entertaining impure thoughts. So I guess you could say it was all a long time coming.
Of course, my disillusionment was also rooted in what had happened to Dorjee and that screaming seven-year-old and heaven knows who else. I can’t go on with this story unless I acknowledge my own guilt, my own forsaken responsibility. The mental gulag in which I found myself prisoner. The questions that swarmed me like wasps, stinging, swelling my eyelids, blinding me: What had stopped me from standing up for Dorjee? What had stopped me from caring, from uncovering the roots of his pain, from opening that storage room door? What had caused me to give up so easily on him? What had made me ashamed of him? Had I somehow misinterpreted detachment? What the hell kind of brother was I?
With a head bulging with questions and no relief, no answers to be found… after many weeks of restless nights and sour stomachs… after clawing my way out of one too many daydream nightmares… I decided to leave the monastery.
I didn’t want to tell my family about my decision, not yet anyway, and I didn’t want to ask for their help. I discussed my predicament—no money of my own, no place to stay, a pressing need to escape—with some of the older monks, men I trusted deeply. They converged privately, while I waited in the corridor, tracing circles on the walls with my index finger. Hushed voices, determining my fate. Centuries passed. At last, they called me back into the room. I floated outside of myself, light as a wisp, as they told me the verdict—I could continue living in the monastery until I made other arrangements so long as I continued performing chores. Light-headed with happiness, I thanked them profusely and skipped, danced, twirled down the corridor. I assumed the donations my sister had sent, and continued to send, had at least something to do with their kindness, but what does it matter, really, and who am I to make such hasty judgments anyway?
It seemed probable that this goofy beanpole with only a religious education would wind up toiling as a wage employee, skipping like a stone from rented bed to rented bed, from job to job, and bound to live a life just as fulfilling. But what would be the point of seeking refuge from one unfulfilling existence in the next? I was young and I had dreams and I wasn’t going to be trapped in any such cycle.
You see, I’d witnessed with my own eyes people from all over the world visiting our grounds, peering through our gates. Women with black hair and yellow hair and orange hair and purple hair too, with red dots on their foreheads, with faces completely covered; men with turbans, beards, white hair, blue hair, long skirts, pants with dozens of pockets. All of these strangers had come to see my home, and now I planned to cash in on the favor. I wanted to see the world, to be a stranger somewhere, anywhere, everywhere—this desire is the universal burden of the young, the free.
And free I was. Relieved of my study duties and with time to burn, I roamed the streets, becoming intimately familiar with the narrow alleyways, white buildings, billboards for alcohol, neon signs, shiny storefronts, Tibetan writing and Chinese characters, beggars, cranky restaurateurs, women who washed clothes in plastic buckets and women who sold vegetables spread out on cloths, vegetables I one day planned to be able to buy with my very own money.
One lazy summer night, just after the Saga Dawa Festival, when we honor Buddha’s memory, when we replace the old prayer flagpole in Kailash Kora with a new one, when we set the year’s fresh multicolored wishes and hopes to the wind, I strolled down a sidewalk, humming the words to a commercial jingle under my breath. The new flagpole had been set crookedly, which old-timers believed meant bad luck, but I couldn’t fathom the prospect, not then. The evening was all cool breezes and smiling faces, and my world was still blooming before my eyes, and I caught sight of a man in a dark jacket struggling to pull one of a half-dozen giant plastic crates of green bottles into the open back door of a building. I jogged over to him.
“Can I help you?”
The “man,” who, up close, I realized couldn’t have been older than fifteen or sixteen, looked up at me with terrified saucer eyes.
“Are you a…” He spoke in Chinese and pointed at my robes, unable to complete his question.
“Yes,” I said. I didn’t have any other clothes, and anyway, be-cause I was still living in the monastery, it made sense for me to continue wearing them.
He studied me, his mouth agape for another twenty seconds, beads of sweat sprouting from his hairless upper lip, before shrugging and mumbling, “Yeah, sure, a little help.”
Together we pushed and pulled the crates inside. Panting, I wiped the sweat from my forehead with my arm. The kid thanked me for my help, and I was just turning to leave the way I’d come when a weight pressed on my shoulder.
I turned to meet the ha
ndsome face of a tall and muscular man, long hair tied back in a ponytail. I adjusted my focus to see beyond him. This was a bar. Those green bottles were beer bottles. I had, for many minutes now, been inside a bar. My heart pounded, and all manner of thoughts ran through my head—mostly of the “am I going to be stabbed and robbed?” variety, and I didn’t even own anything worth stealing.
My fears dissipated as the man’s square face cracked into a smile. He addressed me with a thick Beijing accent. “You’re a monk, are you?”
I shrugged—what was the right answer anymore? “Was. Am. Sort of. It’s complicated.”
He play-grimaced and raised an eyebrow. “All right, well, listen, I’m a bit of a Buddhist too, though maybe not a good one, and this is my bar. This might be a weird offer, but we could really use an extra set of hands around here this evening, and here you are, so how does fifty yuan for a couple hours sound? Fair?”
Questions popped into my head: Had I just walked into a job? Was this fate? Or was this trouble? I kept my questions to myself. Then I had a thought in statement form, which I said aloud. “But I don’t know how to tend bar.”
This was the closest I’d ever been to alcohol, aside from on billboards. Real alcohol, I mean.
The man laughed. “A monk in robes tending bar! Nah, none of that tonight. Just putting things away.” He picked up a cardboard box, lifting with bent knees, carrying it into the beyond. “We’re not even open yet. Hey, don’t be shy. Follow me.”
And that was how I, this monk in robes, wound up washing glasses, carrying boxes, and unpacking inventory in a bar with a sixteen-year-old Chinese migrant worker called Little Cancer.
Although Lhasa brimmed with ethnic Chinese migrants and tourists, working alongside Little Cancer was the closest I’d ever been to a real Han. Most of what I’d heard about the Han Chinese was in the monastery and related to a distant history of destruction and current struggles with bureaucracy: the authorities said we couldn’t do this, should do this, couldn’t do that. It’s not that I was expecting all Han to be stubborn, difficult, and rude, but our minds become angled in certain directions based on our upbringings and circumstances.
It pains me to admit it now, but it genuinely surprised me how kind Little Cancer turned out to be, how easy to work with, to talk to. He was soft-spoken and small, like Dorjee, but had a physical strength about him, a sturdiness, a quickness, that Dorjee lacked. As we washed and dusted and organized, he told me about how he’d gotten the job at the bar (through an employment agency), how he came to Lhasa, and how he’d come to be called Little Cancer.
He began, “There was a cloth factory in the town where I’m from, and that’s where everybody worked and had, since I was born, always worked. It was an old concrete structure, and it was the nucleus of local life. When I was seven years old, like everyone I knew, I went to work there too. One of the few in my work unit with arms, I was responsible for pressing the buttons on the machines and removing the cloth from the loom.
“Life went on like that—work, three scant meals a day, sleep, work again.
“But then, when I was thirteen, some plates in reality shifted. That’s when my mother first discovered a tumor growing on the side of her head. It began the size of a grain of rice, but it grew, grew, kept growing. I would never see my mama looking lovely again, sure, and that was a difficult truth to accept, but in my town, we were tough, adaptable—the others at the factory didn’t lose any sleep over it and took to calling her Mama Cancer. I became known, then, as Little Cancer.
“Then there was the second shift. The factory was never profitable to begin with, but the head of the township—an ugly man with jagged, turned-in teeth—always said at least it gave us something to do and, red patriotism boiling under his irises, said it contributed to our great nation’s development.
“One day, out of nowhere, he forsook his love affair with busy hands, with building a better, brighter, redder future. Everyone said we should’ve seen it coming, that he’d been extorting taxes from all of us for a long time, making money on his door-to-door visits in the cover of night, Taser in tow. But we’d been blind in our busyness. We’d failed to come together, to protect one another, to address the problem of this robber baron. He made off with our money, fled to some city, disappeared in its depths.
“By the time I turned fifteen, there was nothing left to run the factory on and no one to sell to, even if we could produce—that township crook not only took our money with him, he took his lists of contacts and his expertise. He took our livelihood. Waste continued to pour downhill from other towns and into our dwindling water supply. No one could afford electricity anymore, and so nighttime found us plunged into complete darkness. Desperation strangled us, cutting off oxygen to our brains, and we wandered around like fools in mounds of dirt, combing through the gravel and grains for anything edible. While we were out scavenging, the factory’s second-in-charge ransacked homes for TV sets and bicycles and anything worth anything, and then he disappeared too.
“Swearing to guard what we had left with her life, my mother stayed inside and nursed her still-swelling tumor. Soon the tumor became so heavy that she couldn’t stand. She got around first by crawling and then by dragging herself and her tumor across the floor. I’d come home from scavenging and find her wiggling on her belly like a worm, performing chores, boiling indigo water, sweeping. As though cleanliness mattered. As though our lives mattered. Every day, this anger would simmer up inside me—she was distracting herself, kidding herself. Everyone in the town was. Why couldn’t they see that we had to get out before it was too late? Before we all turned from deformed people into dust people into dust?
“For many weeks, I swallowed my anger down. It was one of my only forms of sustenance.
“But then the arguments started. Intense, unforgivable arguments. Maybe it was just because we were hungry. Maybe the radiation was driving us mad. We fought daily over my insistence that we leave and her insistence that we tough it out.
“‘What will our ancestors say!’ she’d shout at me. ‘We cannot leave their ghosts here all alone. No good awaits us without their blessing. Tell me, what would they say?’ And I’d defiantly shout back, ‘Nothing. They’d say nothing because they’re dead just like we will be soon if we don’t get out.’
“I tried. Oh, I tried, but nothing could convince my mother to leave home, and our heated fights only seemed to exacerbate her health problems.
“Racked with guilt, and after days of eating only grass sprout soup, I’d had enough.
“With just my ID card in my pocket, I made my way through town, heading for the bus station and, on the way, passing people I’d known all my life: One-Armed Doctor, Boy-Girl, Cyclops, Fish Lady, Legless Skateboarder, Two-Faced Aunty. Here I was walking past, with two perfectly good legs and two perfectly capable arms, and all the parts I needed and none that I didn’t, and I wondered: Why had I been left untouched? Or was I tainted too, but by something invisible, something inside me that couldn’t be detected now, but someday would? These troubles swirling in my head, I boarded the bus. I nodded a hello to Three-Foot Driver. I was the only passenger. I looked out the window at the deserted bus station, the empty parking lot, the lonely snack shop, the muddy latrines.
“We sat there for a long, long time and Three-Foot Driver fell asleep.
“I fell asleep too and awoke, drowsy, as dawn broke. Three-Foot Driver stepped out to have a cigarette. I wondered if we would ever depart the station, if he would ever press the accelerator. I waited. I waited on that bus for days, so many days that I lost count, going outside only to piss or to steal longing looks at the one package of plastic-wrapped candied sweet potatoes in the bus station’s snack shop. All of those days passed, and I grew woozy, tired, weak. I lost all of my will. I accepted that I would die there on that dingy, dirt-caked bus in that abandoned parking lot.
“One second I was slipping into death and the next my eyes popped open. The bus swayed ever so slightly. Fish Lady st
epped on board. Like me, she traveled empty-handed. There was nothing worth taking, and I guess we were afraid that these things might contaminate our next life.
“I could have cheered, I was so excited. I didn’t. I sat, and I waited. I held on to hope.
“And slowly but surely that afternoon, as the distant sun streaked across the gray sky, the townspeople did turn up. Driven out by dwindling savings or by the dawning realization that there was truly nothing left, the bus filled, nearly to capacity—there was one empty seat left, the one right beside me.
“You can probably guess who never came.
“Satisfied with his ticket sales, Three-Foot Driver revved the engine. And that was it. We were off, all of us freaks, to a small city bus station, where we all boarded buses and then trains bound for new places, none of us sticking together, not any of us wanting anything to do with one another any longer. We’d had enough. We were, once again and forever, on our own.”
We finished drying glasses, and Boss—as Little Cancer called him—gave me my pay and told me I was welcome to come back and help any time. I nearly grabbed the big man and hugged him. I wanted to. I wanted to squeeze him half to death. It may seem silly, excitement over so little money, but this was the first time in my life that I held my very own money, money I’d earned on my own. I clutched these pieces of paper, and images of what they would allow me to buy—a portion of a rented room, vegetables, freedom—flashed through my head. I restrained myself, thanked him profusely, and under a star-strewn sky, I practically skipped back to the monastery, where I let myself in and sunk softly into a deep, contented sleep.
It’s funny how everything happens one way, and then suddenly it happens another way completely. How a whole life, a whole future, can pivot so quickly, smoothly on its feet.
My fate, I knew, was wrapped up this bar, in that cancer village, in the work and the money and the people I’d meet. That next day, all I could think about was going back.
Year of the Goose Page 19