Under Fishbone Clouds

by Sam Meekings

  But why stop there? One of the drowned boys’ fathers was a local Party official. He vented his grief by sending the Central Authority an angry letter, which he promised to also publish in the national newspapers (all run by the Party, of course), decrying the shoddiness of a revolution that could not even ensure the building of working bridges. In return, he was publicly criticised and sent to a humiliating outpost in the freezing grasslands of Inner Mongolia. The local state-owned logging commission had been waiting years for this same official to stop vetoing their plans, and promptly bribed his greedy replacement. Within a year, the forests surrounding the city had all been uprooted; the air was thick with smoke, asthmatic children came choking to the hospital every day and the birds and foxes, denied their usual nourishment, took to scavenging from the local fields and farms, leading to another famine. Trucks filled with grain were sent from the neighbouring county, but could not cross the broken bridge. Hundreds scrambled into the river to swim across to reach the food, but were swept away by the current. Thousands more died of hunger and malnutrition, and all because of the song an elderly street cleaner chose to hum one morning.

  And still I could go on. But let us return to Yuying, sinking into exhaustion. Even her imagination was turning everything sour. She spent the day sifting through her own life, half sleeping, half rummaging through her restless grief, searching for deeper roots to better explain how everything had gone wrong.

  By the time she rose to find a few rice crackers to fill her stomach, Jinyi was back and pasting couplets on the front door. She listened as her daughters arrived and hovered around him while he glued the two strips of red paper over the flaking paint, angling them to cover some of the scrapes and scratches in the door.

  ‘Pa, where did you find those?’ Manxin asked. ‘Didn’t we throw ours out years ago?’

  ‘Of course. These are brand new. I think. I came across them on the way home.’

  ‘You didn’t steal them, did you Pa?’ Liqui asked cautiously, her knuckles raised nervously to her lips in expectance of a confirmation of her fears.

  ‘No!’ Jinyi frowned, then laughed. ‘You really don’t remember who I am at all, do you? Your old dad wouldn’t do anything like that.’

  ‘But Granny Dumpling told us about how one time –’

  ‘Oh. Hmm. Yes, well, that was when everyone was starving, and the Japanese were eating for free everywhere. So in a way, by stealing food, I was making sure the Japanese soldiers had less. I was just doing my best to help end the occupation.’

  ‘Yeah, sure,’ Xiaojing snorted.

  Jinyi finished and stepped back to admire his handiwork. The two strips were not quite parallel, and the gold lettering was already beginning to peel. Jinyi was too embarrassed to tell his daughters that when confronted with the piles of couplets, he had picked the first pair he saw, unable to connect the swirling characters that his wife had once taught him with the words in his mouth. He had been forced to ask the stallholder to read the couplet to him, blaming a quickly fabricated short-sightedness. Just a little out of practice, that’s all, he told himself.

  ‘Anyway, I didn’t steal them; I got them from a stall outside the market, in exchange for just a single food coupon. Don’t look at me like that – we’ve got enough inside for a feast. And don’t tell me you lot wouldn’t trade an apple for a whole year of good luck.’

  ‘So we’re going to celebrate?’ Liqui asked.

  ‘Of course. I’ve invited Yaba over, too. It’ll be nice. All the family back together again. I mean, uh, well …’ He realised his slip, and so did the girls. They stood in awkward silence.

  Then Jinyi remembered the cartoon of twin red fish folded on the ground. He waved them up in the cold air before pasting them between the vertical lines of fluttering characters.

  ‘Now, Xiaojing,’ Jinyi said as he patted them on. ‘We put pictures of fish on our door at Spring Festival for good luck. The word “fish”, you see, sounds very similar to the word “leftover”. Now, I guess most of the gods are hard of hearing, because if you have fish on your door then they’ll make sure you have enough in the coming year. Enough food, enough money, enough clothes – so much, in fact, that you’ll have some left over.’

  ‘Pa. I know all of this. I may not have gone to school yet, but I’m not stupid,’ Xiaojing replied, and Jinyi suddenly remembered being thirteen himself.

  ‘Yes, I’m sorry. It’s hard for me to know what you’ve learnt, what you remember. I’ve been away for so long …’ He fumbled with the words, and picked dirt from his fingernails. ‘If you ever need my help …’

  ‘We know,’ Liqui said quickly, seeing the look on his face. ‘So why are there two fish?’ she asked, the only way she could think of to show her love.

  ‘Erm. I’m not sure. I suppose because everything works better together than alone. People, Mandarin ducks, even fish.’ Jinyi looked up, and caught his wife’s eye at the window before she turned back toward the bedroom. ‘Let’s go inside, it’s getting cold.’

  While the girls were sharing tidbits of gossip at the kitchen table, passing bundles of thread and wool between them, Jinyi knocked as lightly as he could on the bedroom door.

  ‘Yuying?’ he whispered into the grain. ‘Can I come in?’ The question struck him as ridiculous. It was his bedroom. No, it was their bedroom. No, it was loaned to them by the state, with was led by the people – ‘Why am I tying myself in knots?’ he muttered to himself.

  ‘Yuying, when we lost the boys …’ Stupid euphemism, he thought; no one ever got lost: we knew exactly where they were. ‘We survived. Together. Do you remember you once told me I was the worm in your stomach? You meant I could guess what you wanted, what you would say, even before you could yourself.’

  He glanced over his shoulder to check that the girls were still giggling and talking, before pressing his face closer to the door. ‘Well, I don’t know what to do now, and I need your help. Yuying. I love you. I always have.’ It was the first time he had said it.

  The door, however, said nothing in reply, and Jinyi eventually retreated to the lumpy nudges of the futon. The cold was so thick that night that he felt he was swimming in it, twisting and fidgeting his way through the drawn-out hours till sunrise.

  Spring Festival has always been my busiest time of year. As the moon hollows out at the end of the lunar year, it is time to take stock. The Jade Emperor studies a family’s behaviour over the previous twelve months and assigns the next year’s fortune to them accordingly. Call it karma, or divine justice, if you like. Yet in a country with a population of over one billion, people are not so arrogant as to assume that the Jade Emperor personally looks over their every dull action. They realise that he has far better things to do. Thus the job of giving a brief account of each family falls to yours truly, the Kitchen God. Who better? After all, the kitchen is where most of the juiciest gossip, the most clandestine of whispers and the bitterest arguments can be heard. Perhaps this is why most families try to bribe me – during Spring Festival, I find sugary snacks, glutinous red-bean dumplings, homemade candy and twirls of toffee all set on my altar to ensure that my mouth is full of sweet tastes when I open it to give my report to the Jade Emperor. Well, what did you expect? This is China, a place where a bribe, a reference to a well-known uncle, a carefully chosen gift or secret handshake can get you anything. People get the gods they deserve.

  Yaba arrived just before midday, lumbering in without knocking, nodding his big bald head at Jinyi and the three girls milling around the main room, before sloshing a large jar of rice wine down on the table.

  Jinyi grinned. ‘Where did that come from?’

  Yaba simply opened his palms, as if to say that perhaps his inability to speak was not such a bad thing in the face of certain questions.

  The two men – one shrunk and slightly withered, the other plumper, slower, bald – saw straight through the masks of wrinkles and scars to the younger, more familiar faces hidden beneath and fell quickly into a familiari
ty of old jokes and sign language. Neither felt the need to mention all the things that had happened since they had last met, and Yaba was soon lighting two cigarettes in his dry, yellow mouth, one of which he passed to his old friend.

  As the three girls gathered at the table, Jinyi handed them each a small red packet. Inside was a single crumpled banknote, not enough to buy more than a couple of carrots. Only Xiaojing did not manage the obligatory smile; she was too busy studying the watermark and trying to fathom what she might do with this inky scrap of starchy paper.

  ‘Manxin, do you want to get your mother, and then we can eat?’ Jinyi asked sheepishly. His eldest daughter carefully pushed her hair back from her round face, and took a deep breath before slipping through the bedroom door, pushing it closed behind her. The distorted echoes of Manxin’s pleading whispers could be heard in the main room, and Yaba scratched his chin as the rest of the family tried, and failed, to blot them out with small talk.

  The table wobbled each time a new dish was piled on; the soggy dumplings, orange lotus, marinated chicken feet, steaming tofu and shredded twists of pork in a neon sauce surrounded the freshwater fish, one eye staring up at the poised chopsticks as its splintered flesh sank in a brown sizzle. Jinyi was determined to enjoy this reunion dinner, though he found his appetite ebbing away with the sheer exertion of pretending to be happy. He was about to exhort Yaba to begin when he remembered something and stumbled up to throw open the window, before searching for something to prop the front door open with. How else would they let the New Year’s good luck in? Heaven knows we need it, he thought. He settled on the unscrubbed wok as a doorstop. If it were possible to sweep the last years out along with the dead skin and shoe grime and matted cobwebs, he wondered, how far back would I go?

  Manxin emerged with Yuying, who slowly lowered herself into a chair. Her eyes were dream-battered moths, fighting to stay in flight. To everyone except Yaba, who still saw her as if she was a podgy little girl skipping in his footsteps, she looked unusually pale, her whiny breathing unnaturally loud, as if making up for her lack of words. Jinyi poured thimbles of liquor for himself and Yaba and they sank the first toast.

  ‘Everything that happens today will happen for the rest of the year, that’s what our ancestors believed,’ Jinyi said, the sharp aftertaste scalding his tongue as he topped up the thimbles. ‘To be close to my family – that is all I want for the rest of the year. Please, eat.’

  ‘Thanks Pa, it’s wonderful food. Much better than Manxin’s!’ Liqui said, and her elder sister playfully thumped her shoulder.

  Jinyi raised his thimble, but everyone had suddenly stopped eating. They lowered their chopsticks and turned to seek the source of the metronomic pinging. It did not take long: Yuying was tapping a long fingernail against her teacup. She looked up at her husband, a sad but assertive gaze, her pupils adrift in a nexus of bloodshot circuitry.

  ‘Er, well, of course, yes, I’m sorry.’

  He leaned over and trickled a measure of rice wine into his wife’s cup.

  ‘Ma, perhaps you –’ Manxin began, but as she spoke her mother picked up the teacup and knocked back the contents. Yuying rattled it back on the table, her eyes watering.

  ‘People might talk,’ Liqui whispered across to her mother, picking up where her sister left off. The only women seen in public smoking or drinking were usually either prostitutes or those disgraced beyond hope of rehabilitation.

  ‘Let your mother be,’ Jinyi said. ‘Men and women are supposed to be equal now, aren’t they? If she wants a sip, she can have one.’

  ‘But if she drinks today, she might be hungover for the rest of the year,’ Xiaojing said.

  ‘Girls, when I was young there were old men on every corner quoting Confucian epigrams at you. Now Confucius has been banned as a corrupting influence, quite rightly of course, but that does not mean you should not still respect your elders. Your Ma can make her own choices, and you can make your own.’

  ‘Yes, Pa,’ they muttered.

  Yaba clapped his hands and then raised his fingers to click his chopsticks together, and the rest of them followed his directive to stuff themselves full of food. Yet it was not long before the pinging started again. Jinyi shrugged and pushed the bottle across, allowing his wife to glug out a few fingers of liquor, which she promptly downed.

  The conversation soon turned to the new tower blocks being built beside the station, how far five yuan might now stretch, the wastelands of untended weeds and bracken being bought up by newly registered companies on the outskirts of town, who had married whom and how many children they now had and, at the girls’ insistence, the long dresses suddenly appearing in the windows of some of the small stores near the river. The two youngest girls teased Manxin about the man from the engine workshops that she had recently been introduced to, asking her questions about when she would next meet him and what he looked like. She soon turned bright red and Jinyi had to tell them to stop. They chattered until the dishes had dwindled to scraps and bones, and midnight arrived with a crackling burst of fireworks spitting light into the icy sky.

  Hours later, squirming on the futon through the haze of tipsy sleep, Jinyi was awoken by the sound of a cawing bird. No, he thought, that cannot be right. He turned over and closed his eyes before hearing it again. A stray cat howling for a mate outside the front door? No. His ears tuned in – a noisy retching and the splatter of vomit. He heard heavy breathing, then another croaky rasp and the hissing sound of someone trying to spit out all the tastes in their mouth.

  He opened the door carefully, in case it was a trick. Instead he found his wife, hunched forward on the step and vomiting into the street. He asked nothing, but reached out and gently took hold of her long hair, holding it back for her as she leaned forward once again over the step.

  In February, after three weeks of Yuying’s silence, Jinyi and his daughters had reached breaking point. Jinyi shouted until he felt as though he had swallowed a desert, while the girls pleaded tearfully; but none of them could make Yuying speak. Furthermore, she often refused to leave the house. As the month ground to a close, one of the new bosses from the bread factory accompanied Jinyi home. The boss, who urged people to call him Mr Peng, was so tall that he had to stoop to fit through their door, and gave the impression of having been zipped into a badly fitting body. Mr Peng stood next to the kitchen table where Yuying was sitting, and pushed his new glasses up his long nose.

  ‘Now, Bian Yuying. My predecessor …’ he shuffled the papers on his clipboard and fiddled with his glasses again, ‘… Mr Wang, mentioned you in a couple of his reports. Let me see. Ah, yes: “An exemplary worker, showing patriotic spirit and socialist zeal.” Quite a glowing recommendation, don’t you think?’

  Yuying looked down at her feet.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he blustered on, ‘I haven’t come here to embarrass you. But we could certainly use your experience back at the factory. What do you say?’

  Yuying continued to look at her feet.

  ‘Well, I won’t pressure you. Have a think about it, and when you feel better, you know where to find me.’ He turned abruptly. ‘Hou Jinyi, I’ll see you in the morning.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Thank you for your time, sir,’ Jinyi said as Mr Peng strode away as fast as his long legs would carry him.

  Jinyi made his way to the stove, slipping into a familiar routine of cooking and then cleaning. He did not mind the extra work – it gave him less time to dwell on the past or to worry about his wife. He tried to guess what she might want, what she might say if she were to choose to speak again. In this way, he created imaginary conversations, which blurred and became entwined with his daughters’ voices. He pushed the gnawing sting of grief down into the deep pit of his stomach, where it knotted his intestines and needled his sides.

  In April a doctor was sent by the factory to check whether Yuying was simply trying to avoid returning to work –‘which would, I’m afraid, need to be reported to the authorities,’ the young doctor took Jiny
i aside to say. ‘Imagine what would happen if everyone decided just to stop talking, to stop working. The whole country would be in chaos. No, it wouldn’t do, I’m afraid, uncle.’

  The doctor’s hand-me-down white coat trailed close to his feet, and its sleeves hung loosely from his shoulders. He checked Yuying’s tongue and tonsils, then shone a light into her ears. He spent a long time looking suspiciously into her eyes and talking to her as though she was a badly behaved child, despite the fact that she must have been around twenty years his senior. Finally he recorded her heartbeat, temperature and blood pressure.

  ‘Now, Mrs Bian, have you been having any, er, well, have you been feeling hot at all lately? Not, not the weather, I mean, erm …’ The doctor lowered his voice to a whisper, ‘… hot flushes?’

  Yuying stared him down, raising her eyebrows to show the contempt in which she held him, and then shook her head.

  ‘No, ah, well, fine … fine.’ He flustered with his briefcase and beckoned to Jinyi to meet him outside.

  ‘Women’s things,’ the doctor said, and tapped his nose conspiratorially. ‘Though she may simply be faking it.’

  Jinyi cleared his throat and glanced down at the basket of fruit on the doorstep, inside which was clearly nestled a large bottle of rice wine. He pushed the box towards the young doctor with his foot, and cleared his throat again. ‘Just a little gift to thank you for your help. So, umm, what are you going to write in your report?’

  ‘Oh, emotional breakdown brought on by family tragedy, menopausal depression and so on. The factory won’t be expecting her back any time soon.’ The doctor picked up the fruit basket. ‘Make sure she gets lots of rest and drinks plenty of water.’