Year of the Goose

by Carly J. Hallman

  The question. The “What do you want?” Her answer. Her answer. Her answer.

  All those years ago. The night of the Goose Girl’s commercial debut. Every action felt imbued with new meaning. Lulu poured boiled water over her instant noodles: an offering. She leafed through the magazine, dog-eared and worn: worship. She chugged a bottle of iced tea: a prayer. She parked herself in front of the TV: transcendence.

  The commercial was scheduled to run during an imperial soap opera. Eunuchs and concubines schemed. The emperor issued decrees. The second wife chunked a piece of jewelry into a still black pond. Plunk. The camera panned back to the second wife’s face. A single tear leaked from her twitching eye.

  And cut to black.

  This was it. Lulu inhaled sharply, clutched a pillow to her chest. She pressed her sweaty palms into her stretch pants.

  Lights, camera, action.

  Kelly Hui, in the filmed flesh, sitting before a table, looking ahead, her anticipation clear. She was waiting, waiting for something important.

  And then a deep, booming voice, a voice like God’s: Bashful Goose snacks! You won’t even know what hit you!

  Still, she waited.

  A second passed.

  A pie flew into the frame.

  “Duck!” Lulu jumped to her bare feet, shouted at the screen.

  Smack. The pie caught Kelly square in the face.

  A second passed.

  Kelly ran her finger across her creamed cheek, popped her finger into her mouth, grinned. “Bashful Goose snacks!” she chirped in her sugary voice, addressing the nation, a vast nation, a nation that included Lulu, who lowered herself back down to sit on the hard wooden sofa. “They’re finger-licking good!”

  Notes, a tinkly tune. Kelly rose, bounded atop the table, and, face still covered in cream, tap-danced along: Bashful Goose Cream Pies / Bashful Goose Cream Pies / Don’t be a clown / Don’t be a clown / Just eat them down / EAT. THEM. DOWN!

  “Honk, honk!” she added, giving a heartfelt thumbs-up, as the camera zoomed in on her face.

  God again: Bashful Goose Cream Pies, available where all fine snack products are sold!

  And that was it. The next commercial began: If you don’t wanna be a chump, you’d better buy a European car, blah blah blah.

  Lulu picked up the remote and turned the TV off.

  Silence. Toilets flushing in other apartments. Sinks running. Water washing through pipes. From the next room, her mother’s snores—Lulu had long ceased deriving any comfort from their rhythm.

  She fiddled with a thread that’d come loose from her sock. She replayed the commercial in her head. She loved it, loved it with all her heart.

  But for one part: just after the pie in the face, there was a moment, a flash of something dark in that Goose Girl’s eyes. A familiar flash. Unhappiness? Discontent? Boredom? The acidic pain of being someone’s child, a someone not of the child’s choosing, of being forced to occupy a preordained place in this world? Lulu stuck on this moment, picked at her socks, lingered uncomfortably there. She’d wanted to be that Goose Girl, yes, but what if that girl wasn’t who she appeared to be?

  Fifteen years later, she’d all but forgotten about that commercial, the passion and turmoil it had stirred within her. She’d since moved on to and away from countless other loves and wants and fixations: books and movies and coconut oil; men and friends and meditation; jobs and dresses and soy milk lattes.

  If she’d known as a child that fifteen years later, she’d meet the Goose Girl herself in a banquet hall’s bathroom, that she’d witness Ms. Kelly Hui march to the sinks and hold her hands under a faucet like a mere mortal, that she’d ogle and gape like a damned fool…

  If she’d known as a child that someday she’d stand beside her, studying that Goose Girl’s zits and the way her pudge poked out beneath her dress’s cap sleeves; that the Goose Girl, grown up, no longer cute, no longer her spitting image, would meet her eyes in the mirror and sneer, “What are you looking at?”

  That she’d smile, say, “Oh, I—sorry, this is just a weird moment for me.”

  That Kelly would shut off the faucet, mutter, “Join the club.”

  That Lulu would laugh an ugly, unbecoming, but entirely authentic laugh. That this would bring a smile to Kelly’s round face. “Are you one of those hair extension girls?”

  That Lulu would nod, owning her lot in life.

  That Kelly would flip her own long locks over her shoulder. “This is the Lulu batch. Expensive as unicorn shit, and I hear it won’t be available to non-superstars like me anymore. Movie stars only from here on out, or whatever.”

  “Actually, I’m Lulu.”

  That Kelly would peer at her. “No way.”

  “Yep.”

  That she’d say, “Well, fuckin’ sweet.” That she’d raise her hand, her palm out to Lulu. That Lulu would flinch, believing for a moment that Kelly was aiming to hit her, but then realizing that she was only asking for a high five.

  That as their palms slapped together, Lulu would feel something leave her body. A weight she hadn’t known she’d been carrying. A weight she’d been carrying for a very long time.

  If she’d known all this, fifteen years before, as a child, belly full of chemicals, pretzeled on the sofa, picking at her lint-bumpy socks, she would’ve laughed, she would’ve cried, she would’ve shut off the TV, torn that magazine to shreds, run to the mirror, told herself this: none of these snacks will ever fill you up.

  And that was how life went: unfathomable possibilities actualized in sequence. Lulu and Liu Wei and the witches spent that evening around the fire pit out back, the four of them alone together, plucking and strumming a guzheng and chatting about the villages and neighborhoods of their youths, weaving from memory tales of deprivation and starvation and innocence and simpler times.

  At eleven, the witches retired to their sleeping quarters with winks and nods, leaving Lulu and Liu Wei alone beside the dying fire. They sat, not speaking, lost in their own thoughts. This quiet was comfortable, intimate, and Lulu reveled in it, thinking back with nostalgia to her recent night in the woods, grateful for that red-eyed creature’s gift, for its warmth, for its ability to quell the inherent flight response that had threatened to lead her away from the best life she’d ever lived. She stole the occasional sly glance at Liu Wei, lost to his own mental meanderings, and struggled to suppress the goofy smile that threatened to seize her face.

  She allowed her gaze to linger too long on his cheekbones. He caught her eye. He smiled.

  “Well,” he said, clearing his throat, motioning at the waning fire. “We’d better do something about this, eh? Action, I say!”

  He hopped up. She followed him through the gate and around the outer perimeter of the wall, helped him gather dry brush and branches. Once they’d amassed a sizable collection, they returned to the fire and fed the flames.

  “This’ll keep us going for a while,” he said. She nodded, grateful this night would stretch on.

  Liu Wei retook his seat. Lulu hesitated, wanting very badly to sit beside him on that same log, but opting instead for an adjacent rock. There was no rush. They had a lifetime.

  “So,” he said, clapping his hands on his thighs, a child eager for a story. “Tell me more about the commune, the citizens.”

  Lulu surrendered to her goofy smile. “What do you want to know?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, resting his elbow on his leg and his chin on his palm. “Everything. This place is a mystery to me, as I’m sure it was to you when you first got here. Blind faith led me. And now I’m asking you to be my eyes.”

  “Well,” she began, “the first thing you need to know is that right now everyone down there fancies him- or herself a beatnik. They’ve all read this same copy of On the Road in translation—some ex-investment banker runs a lending library out of his room—save for the super-elite who claim they read it in its original English back at university.”

  He laughed, and she continued, regaling
him with tales of the commune and its whacky citizenry. Of the ex-chef who kept a cow in his living room, claiming he shared a telepathic wavelength with this cow and, more recently, asserting that the cow was his wife, although not officially because of bestiality laws, but “in spirit.” Of the gaggle of gangly ex-models who lived together and had become master picklers, taking their craft so seriously they demanded it be called an “art” and, to prove their point, held a pickling exhibit in their neighbor’s living room-cum-art gallery, in which they displayed fifty varieties, none of which anyone was permitted to actually taste. The ex-CFO who got around on a unicycle he’d somehow cobbled together from bamboo and chewing gum. The creepy shed next to Wang and Stefan’s house that they kept locked at all times and that nobody but them ever stepped foot inside.

  “Well, what’d be worth seeing in a shed anyway?”

  Lulu poked a twig into the fire, lifted it, watched its end burn like a sparkler at Chinese New Year. “I just think it’s weird,” she said, twirling and dropping the stick into the fire. “There are citizens who have sheds and stuff for woodworking or crafting, and there are a few who’ve constructed these tiny temples in sheds, but all of that is whatever. It’s no secret, I mean. Neighbors come in and out.”

  “What do you think they’re hiding in there?” He spoke these words with a stilted nonchalance that gave Lulu pause, that broke the night’s spell.

  “Nothing,” she said, desperate to veer back toward the magic. “It’s probably nothing. I’m just nosy, is all.” A cicada chirped. Liu Wei gazed over her left shoulder. Get back on track, get back on track, back on. “Oh, and here we are sitting in front of a fire and I didn’t even mention the ex-TV host who has taken up fire-breathing!”

  The fire crackled, the moon smiled, and Lulu and Liu Wei plunged back into the sorcery of stories well told.

  She told him about the trip she took to Tibet with a middle schooler, her days as a human hair factory, her lonely childhood, her lonelier apartment in Beijing. She’d never spoken so freely, never been with someone who listened so attentively, who asked all the right questions—someone genuinely interested in what it was she as a human being had to offer this world.

  Yes, what good was a book without a reader? A play without an audience? A song without an ear? What good was a life without someone with whom to share it?

  Time slipped away, and their yawns grew more aggressive, and the black sky lightened, purple and gold. They doused the fire with a bucket of water and shuffled inside to catch a few hours of sleep.

  “Like I said earlier, when you’re ready,” Lulu whispered, padding around the pallet she’d prepared on the main room’s floor. “I can show you around the town and help you find a place to settle in. There are some people who are looking for roommates, and, uh, I’m sure you could find a really—”

  He stood now in front of her, against her, a wall, a shield. He pressed one finger gently to her lips.

  Electricity jolted, shooting up from the base of her spine.

  They paused there, bodies close, for a long, heavy moment.

  They did not kiss. They said good night.

  A couple hours later, Lulu—unable to sleep, restless, and uncharacteristically irritated by the witches’ rhythmic snores—stumbled out of the bedroom. She would cook up a big breakfast and she and Liu Wei would sit at the table, talking in hushed voices, until the witches awoke, and then perhaps they’d all go out into the woods together, come back, get the sorting done quickly, and head down to the commune in the afternoon.

  Lulu looked around. “Liu Wei?” she spoke to the lifeless room. There was no answer.

  “Hello?”

  Nothing. No one.

  He must’ve gone out for a walk. He probably couldn’t sleep either, too energized by whatever this was blooming between them.

  She stepped into the kitchen, took stock of the food situation—plenty of rice, a head of cabbage, what else?

  A creak. She spun her head around. The front door swung open.

  She exhaled. Liu Wei. Thank you, spirits.

  “Good morning!” he called. She drew her finger to her lips to shush him and blushed when she remembered his finger in that very spot only hours before. She spun back around to hide her reddening face.

  “Good morning.” She bent down to retrieve a pan from a low shelf. “So, there’s a wild chicken or something that hangs around the woods, leaves eggs here and there. I was thinking I’d go out and collect a few and cook us up a big breakfast. Porridge, fried egg, maybe some—”

  He interrupted, his voice low, subdued. “Lulu, I’m terribly sorry, but I’m afraid I won’t be able to stay for breakfast.”

  She set the pan on the counter and stared into the cast iron. “Okay, no problem. How about I just quickly cook up some—”

  He wasn’t in the doorway any longer. He stood behind her. His hands appeared, clasped around her abdomen. His arms pressed into her and then his whole body. Her knees buckled. It didn’t matter. He wouldn’t let her fall. He leaned in. His lips caressed her neck.

  “I’ve got to go down to the commune,” he whispered, inciting full-body goose bumps, his lips brushing against her earlobe. “It’s calling me. Spiritually. Mysteriously. I don’t know what it is. I need to go today, alone. I can’t explain it. There’s just something I’m called to do. You know. You understand.”

  She sighed yes and, seconds later, watched, as women are destined to do, helpless and hopeful as her man marched off to war.

  4.

  THE BASHFUL GOOSE DIARIES, SELECTED EXCERPTS, PART 2

  I WRITE TO YOU NOW FROM MY HOME FOR THE NIGHT, AN ABANDONED grain silo. Only hours ago, I alighted from my first cross-province train ride. This was an authentic train, a people’s train, my car packed with peasants and farmers hauling overstuffed plaid sacks and canvas satchels.

  We shouted. We cursed. We sang.

  Oh, we sang old Maoist ditties. We sang Teresa Teng’s greatest hits. We swigged erguotou, huffed unfiltered cigarettes, spit sunflower seeds out the windows and onto the floors. How warm, how right, how enveloped I felt among the masses. How my spirit swelled amid the booze, the seeds, the smoke, the song. My one tiny mouth, it cried out, but one voice of many in a wide, wild world.

  Finally, hours and hours in, the singing stopped. The car grew quiet. The train chugged along, metallic, rickety. Though it’d been dark for hours, only now did the blackness, its presence, its existence, even register. From all around me, stares. Side glances. Cloudy eyes.

  A nervous chill radiated through my wings. A lump lodged in my throat.

  The glower of one woman in particular unnerved me, her body solid, her face a broad and wrinkled map of lives past.

  She knew.

  Of course—did I really expect to travel without someone recognizing me? I am the bashful goose, and this is the age of the cult of celebrity, an era of obsession with the rich and famous. Anonymity is a delusion of the past!

  The broad-faced woman licked her white chapped lips and whispered to the rumpled man squatting beside her—and I use that word loosely. As the old saying goes, you can hear a peasant’s whisper from a li away. “My god, can you imagine that plump little thing braised and cut up over rice?”

  A wave of initial relief; a cacophony of growling stomachs; an endless sea of longing looks; a goose trembling with realization of a whole new terror, fleeing grabby hands, squawking, tucking and rolling alongside the tracks; many peasants following suit, rolling like hedgehogs down the steep embankment, some cracking their skulls, others more agile simply missing their ride home; a goose taking off in flight, leaving the world hungry once again.

  Make your intentions clear, clearer still!

  “Ah, cruel world,” I cried to no one as I landed, and raced through a field of corn, “I said serve the people, not be served!”

  It occurred to me today, after weeks of failures and mishaps (the station in Henan where a boiled egg vendor, surprised to see a goose waiting in her li
ne, knocked over her cart, cursed to high heavens, and incited a riot that resulted in one young man, eager for a free lunch, jumping in front of an oncoming train in an ill-fated attempt to catch an egg that had been sent airborne; the blind massage parlor where I accidentally tripped a masseuse, causing him to drop a vat of scalding hot water onto a female customer texting on a poorly assembled cell phone that electrocuted her; the karaoke girl who, after a strange and complicated series of events, may or may not be dead in a cage at the bottom of a lake—among other notable examples), that perhaps my inability to properly serve the people stems from my lack of understanding of the people. What do I know of toiling, of suffering, of truly living?

  I happened upon a village last week, deep in the countryside. The citizenry was sparse, primarily comprising children and seniors—only those too weak or old or young or stupid to leave would remain in a barren wasteland such as this.

  There I stood outside a small snack shop, awaiting a new path to reveal itself. Packages of Bashful Goose snacks, production dated well before my tragic death, lined the store’s dusty shelves, providing the only color in this otherwise bleak landscape.

  I waited for hours. The old clerk shuffled out to study me a few times, muttering each time, “Well, free advertising, eh?” and then returning to his post.

  Just when I was about to give up, to go find a pond or a creek in which to wash myself clean of this mess, a young man, donning a raggedy backpack, radiating Lei Feng’s selfless spirit, waltzed past and into the shop.

  “Ay!” he cried to the clerk. “I’m going.”

  The old man jerked awake, dragged his head up from the counter. A puddle of drool gleamed atop the filthy glass. He smeared it away with his sleeve. “That’s it, then?”

  “That’s it!” the boy cried cheerfully.