Vessel

by Chongda Cai

  The day my father was to be moved from his school-adjacent resting place to the upscale cemetery, my mother spent the whole day crying. She wouldn’t tell anybody the reason, and she resisted any efforts to cheer her up. The sulking was contagious, and I eventually took her aside to ask her what the problem was. She looked like a child speaking through sobs: “I just can’t stop thinking there’s no way I can see him every day now.”

  On the day my father was to be moved to his new resting place, I was in charge of carrying his heavy stone urn. As I struggled to make my way toward the new plot, lugging the urn, one of my cousins joked to my father, “You must be eating good over there, put on some pounds, huh? This scrawny little son of yours can’t even carry you now.”

  The weight of the urn became even more of an issue when it was time to lower it into the tomb. I didn’t think I had the strength to place it just right without reaching down inside. According to what the feng shui master of the place had told me, though, it was taboo for a living soul to enter the tomb, and that included the shadow of a person.

  We finally figured out a way to get the ashes into the tomb with me lying flat on my stomach and the cousins placing the urn into my hands so that I could put it in place.

  Lying flat on that patch of land into which my father would soon be placed, I felt as close to it as I would with my cheek pressed to the chest of a loved one. I placed the urn in the ground as gently as I could, and everyone cheered. I couldn’t stop myself from discreetly shedding a few unexpected tears. I was sure my father would be happy with the choice I had made. I wasn’t sure why, but I was sure. I had laid myself down on that soil and felt the warmth and comfort of it.

  When I woke up the next morning, my mother told me about a dream she had the night before. My father had said to her, “Blackie bought me a new house. It’s very nice.” She smiled at me then, but she spent most of the next several days in a dark mood because she was no longer able to visit him daily.

  Frankly, I still had some regrets over moving my father. The plot at the cemetery was about a hundred square feet, but it would never live up to the massive tombs my favorite ancestors had been buried in.

  Those tombs were over four hundred square feet. They had a burial mound in the center, where the actual remains of the deceased were interred, a memorial stone and altar in front of that for making offerings, and then a narrow, raised platform running in a horseshoe shape around the back and sides.

  When family members got together to clean the tomb and offer sacrifices, they lit candles and burned incense on the altar, and stuck colored paper to the platform.

  The last time I had been out to the tombs for Qingming, the festival of tidying up the graves of ancestors, it was a humid day with a bit of wind. I remember sweating while putting up the colored paper and feeling the moist breeze running over my skin.

  I have always liked Qingming. It’s a moment for the family to come together to tend to the final resting places of shared ancestors. The scene at Qingming was never static: each year, the old people had grown older, and there were always new arrivals into the family. The older family members you work alongside on Qingming will one day make their way to the other side, and you will come together again—but one of you will be under the earth and the other above it. The young people who share the day with you will one day be the ones to sweep your tomb. The tradition gives me a sense of steadfastness in the world, so that I no longer fear life or death.

  I had returned home to recuperate, but since it was Qingming, I followed everyone out to clean the graves of my father and uncle, then in the afternoon I insisted on going along with the rest of the family up the mountain path to the tombs that housed my grandmother, my grandfather, my great-grandmother and great-grandfather, and so on up the family tree. . . . The mountainside was bright with strips of colored paper, the sound of family members paying their respects, and the pop of firecrackers. The smell of black powder mixing with the scent of the earth after the rain—for me, that was the smell of Qingming. It was a smell I knew from a time when I was one of the youngest, while on those later visits, I was surrounded by young people who addressed me as uncle even though they were nearly as tall as I was, and who even wanted to ask me about politics.

  At the graves of my grandfather and grandmother, the family, tied together by blood, continued the tradition. They sat together on the platform around the mounds, as if sitting on the laps of the venerable deceased.

  At that moment, I felt like a growth ring in a split log, pressed peacefully between countless other concentric circles.

  I believed in spirits; I believed that my father visited my mother in her dream. When I lay down on the earth into which my father was about to be placed, I felt a deep connection, and it was just like my father, I thought, to describe his resting place as his home. A home is not simply a structure that gives one shelter but a place you are linked to by blood and soil.

  After I left my hometown and went far away, whenever I encountered setbacks or felt like my resolve was weakening, my first urge was to rush home, even though the trip was often inconvenient.

  My mother used to tell me, speaking our local Minnan language, “If you don’t come back for the New Year, you might as well not have a home; if you don’t sweep the tombs on Qingming, you might as well not have ancestors.” What my mother had said was part of the reason I went back home for the festival, but there was something beyond that, too, something gnawing at me that I wasn’t sure what to do about.

  I had accrued plenty of airline miles on business trips and ashen-faced flights home, and I traded them in for a ride in glorious business class. When I told my mother on the phone about cashing in my miles earned rushing around the country for a ride home in luxurious and expensive comfort, I realized it was something of a metaphor for my life.

  The flight home was full of people just like me, all returning to the southern coast of Fujian from the big city. Everyone in business class, carrying gifts and offerings for the festival, was speaking my mother tongue. “I’ve got to get out to my uncle’s grave this time,” I overheard one man saying. “I remember the way he used to put me on his knee when I was a boy and feed me guava.” “It’s too bad you never got to meet your grandmother,” another woman said. “She used to always save the best morsels for me. . . .” I realized that I was living a life nearly identical to many other Minnan people and overseas Chinese. We ran around until we were ready to drop dead, just so we could return home with dignity.

  That Qingming afternoon, during a lull in the ceremonies, my mother started teasing me about my homesickness. She told a story. During university, when I was doing whatever it took to help my family scrape by, one of my many part-time jobs was tutoring students at an exam prep school, and one day I almost collapsed from overwork. A few people got together to drag me to the hospital, but I was delirious from fever and kept refusing. Instead of seeing a doctor, I told them, slipping in and out of consciousness, yelling hysterically through tears, “I want to go home, I want to go home.”

  Why did I want to go home? After the fever went down, I opened my eyes and found myself in my own bed. My mother told me that nobody could talk me into going to the hospital, so they put me in a taxi and sent me home. “What is it about home?” my mother said, teasing me. “Why did you want to come home?” I tried to come up with an answer to her questions, but I was left speechless. I blushed.

  What is it about home?

  I had gone through so much while I was away, the trip home was long and arduous, and in the days after I returned to my hometown, I pondered what had lured me back. When I looked at things without emotion, my hometown was dull. The neighborhood was chaotic, full of hideous buildings, most of them with rough stone foundations and upper walls of reinforced concrete. Even the homes built of red brick by the overseas Chinese were set side-by-side with huts made of rammed earth and shacks where migrant workers kept flocks of ducks on the roof.

  I particularly liked the
few stone alleys that remained. When it rained, they became treacherous, but strolling there, I still felt the romance of them—until I came across a new artery full of concrete. There were temples everywhere in those alleys, and the smell of agarwood incense still puffed out onto the street—until the dust and smells of a construction site overpowered them.

  I couldn’t help but ask myself, Why am I still dependent on this place?

  The afternoon of Qingming, I returned to the neighborhood alone and walked through the cityscape I knew so well. I took an umbrella and walked over to my old elementary school. With all the kids off for the festival, it felt deserted. I cut through the noisy wet market, where the same middle-aged woman was still plying her trade at the marinated meat stall, cutting each item with laser precision. I paused in front of the old hunchback who sells sea worm jelly out of a rusty metal box. I decided to order a few pieces, watched as he dressed the balls of gelatin with garnishes, then stood off to the side and ate. . . . When I got home, I decided to take my motorcycle out, without telling my mother where I was going. I rode out to the coast and walked around for a while. After returning from the coast, I felt a bit light-headed, but there was a sense of relief, too, to be back at home.

  I still felt the familiar comfort. I knew every stone, and every stone knew me. I knew every corner of the neighborhood and how the years had collected there, transforming them, and every corner of the neighborhood had also looked back, watching time change me.

  When I got home, I went up to the fourth floor of the house and looked out over the town. With the rain misting down, the flagstone roads looked even more lush, and the red brick houses seemed to glow. Down in the mess of construction and ramshackle half-renovated homes below, through the smoke from the industrial district, an old woman with flowers in her hair came up the road carrying a basket back from the wet market, followed by a convoy of fishermen back from the coast and a voice echoing from down some lane, singing a tune in the Minnan language. . . . I felt deep down that those were the ingredients of my soul. Maybe it’s not quite right to say that my heart contains this landscape, but this landscape is what formed me.

  After a few days of indulgence, I decided it was time to start my convalescence in earnest. I lay in my bed with the seemingly endless rain falling outside. I felt like a kid again, lazily soaking up the smell of wet earth as I stretched out in my bed. The moisture and warmth of the place was so familiar and comfortable, it felt like the embrace of a loved one. I felt incredible comfort wash over me. I thought of my father entombed in the earth and decided that he must feel the same as I felt.

  I have liked the smell of the earth since I was young. I was never afraid of death, since it would simply mean returning home, back to the soil of my native place. On the contrary, it was living that was a problem. Babies crawl, then they learn to stand up because they want to break free from the earth. After they stand, they keep climbing, pushing forward, driven by desire, ideals, ambition. But our feet are forever bound to the soil. Comparing life and death, it is life that makes more demands upon us. Perhaps living too intensely represents a kind of willfulness, but it’s not always the way of life we should pursue.

  That afternoon, smelling the thick, fresh scent of the earth, I fell into a deep sleep.

  In my dream, I was a child again, wandering away from home. I was walking barefoot down one of the stone alleys. I knew the people in the alley, and I knew the stones. The people and the stones asked me where I was going. I told them I was going to take a look, just a look. I started to run down the alley, racing wildly past the stones and the people, who both called out to me with warnings. I slowly realized that my headfirst rush had carried me to an unfamiliar place. I didn’t recognize the feeling of the place. I didn’t recognize the stones. The red bricks were gone. I felt a sudden panic, as if I were plunging into a dark cavern. It felt as if the ground had dropped out below me. I began to cry, but my curiosity kept me sharp, forcing me to take in the unfamiliar scenery.

  It was a beautiful place. There was a beach I had never seen before, whose name I did not know. There were a few big boats floating out on the water, and a flock of seabirds skimmed the surface of the water. I could have spent the rest of my afternoon there—but it wasn’t home. I couldn’t hold back my fear. Why was it so windy? Why was the sand so dry? Where were the stones I knew? I glanced back and saw that the stone alley was waiting for me not far away.

  I ran for the alley as if I were being chased. I was running and crying, running and laughing, all at the same time, and I kept going until I was at my own front door. I pounded my fists on the door, and my mother opened. She knew nothing of my narrow escape, but she saw my pale face covered in tears. She didn’t ask what was wrong; she didn’t scold me for wandering away. She opened the door wider and said, “What are you doing? Why don’t you come inside?”

  I used the last ounce of energy in my legs to drag myself into the house. The smell of the stove, moist wood, and dog embraced me. In that moment, I knew I was home. I lay down on the dirty floor. And when I woke up from the dream, I started to cry. Perhaps, I thought, I had never left my hometown at all, but merely strayed for a while, seen the beauty of a new place, and scared myself. I had returned home, and I knew that I could always come back. I would always find the narrow alley that led me back to where I belonged.

  14

  Where Is This Train Going?

  I must have passed by at least once

  The river where you bathed

  Your childhood at age six

  Floats on the surface of the water

  I looked up

  Saw a massive

  Tangerine

  Hanging above me

  I know

  This is childhood’s

  Every dusk

  —“Every Travel Story”

  I wrote that poem on the train to Nanping sometime in my first year of high school. The trip had been a reward for myself, and it was the first time I’d taken the train alone. Because southern Fujian used to be considered a maritime front line, it never had many train lines built, and this route into the mountains was one of the few.

  I had boarded the train at the coast and was being carried into a lush mountain landscape. Light and shadow slipped by the window like a stream. I watched houses set along the tracks approaching at great speed, then being pulled into the distance just as quickly. In a ruined courtyard, I saw an old woman cradling her crying granddaughter, then there was a man sitting on a block outside a gate puffing on a cigarette, and then there was a young girl, book bag slung over her back, looking intently at the closed door of a house, as if hesitating to go inside—and each person slipped away as the train pulled me onward.

  I started to try to imagine the lives of these people with whom the train put me into brief contact as I passed, but they just kept coming, until finally the sun began to set, and the train pulled me far from the town and into the country, where there were only occasional pinpoints of light in the hazy mountain scenery. The orange glow of the sunset fluttered like satin, shifting over the landscape as if being rustled by the hands of a playful child.

  I was ambushed by unexpected emotion. What was happening out there, where those faint lights shone? What had made the old woman take the child into her arms? What was the man thinking about as he sat smoking beside the gate? Why was the girl hesitating to open the door?

  The pleasure of travel is that everything slips by so quickly. The traveler treads lightly and happily. But there is a dark side to this as well: since everything slips by so quickly, it never becomes anything more than scenery.

  That trip I took in my first year of high school suddenly came to mind one day while visiting my old university. A former professor had invited me back to speak to new students. “What We See Along the Way” was the topic he suggested for the talk. Before the speech began, sitting in my former seat in a classroom where I had attended many lectures, memories came flooding back to me.

  Whatever
you are going through, it is often the length of time you experience it, as much as the experience itself, that makes it brutal.

  Nine years earlier, sitting in that same classroom, my mind was in a different place, occupied with thoughts of my father, half his body paralyzed by a stroke, my family plunged into a horrible predicament from which there seemed no way out. Thinking back, I felt as if I was seeing another person who happened to share my name. What was Cai Chongda thinking? He wanted to figure out how to make enough money to send his father to get treatment in the United States. He would give up simple luxuries if it meant he could save up enough to send Nana on a trip. Cai Chongda was ready to risk it all. He wanted to be famous. He wanted to make his old boss, Wang Chenggang, proud of him. Cai Chongda had promised him he would someday write a book and carry a message to the children of the patients at Fujian Second People’s Hospital, tell them that there was still hope, that they should never give up. . . .

  The Cai Chongda who returned to the classroom that day had lost his drive and idealism. His father was gone, Nana was gone, and Chenggang was gone. The new Cai Chongda had lost touch with the real world and seemed instead to float above it. The only way he could keep contact with solid ground was to throw himself into his work.

  For the past several years, I have lived in the gap between worlds. When it came to my life, I was never willing to take any real steps forward. In my work as a journalist I played the role of the dispassionate recorder of events, a casual observer of things. I could press myself into the crowd and get swept up in their rage or joy, but I would always harden my heart and walk away from it all.

  I started to think of myself as a constant traveler. Just like on that first train trip I took into the mountains, I let people approach, sometimes shared a moment, and then roared past. I tried to remind myself that it wasn’t any good to be caught up in something emotionally, because life, like a train, keeps rolling. There is no way to freeze a moment in time. Eventually, I became accustomed to my role. I learned to be indifferent. I thought of myself as a traveler even when I appeared settled.