Waste Tide

by Chen Qiufan

  But now, Kaizong understood that what he yearned for wasn’t his homeland, but his childhood.

  * * *

  Today, the fifteenth day of the seventh month on the lunar calendar, was the traditional Ghost Festival. The folk holiday was also known to Daoists as Zhongyuan and to Buddhists as Yulan.

  Whatever the name, this was the day on which ghosts who had suffered all year in hell were allowed to return to the living world for a brief respite. It was their only chance to enjoy real food the whole year. The living were supposed to prepare all flavors of delicious snacks, ghost money, and joss sticks as offerings to the ghosts. The idea was to build karma, to give relief to lonely ghosts who had no family to care for them, and to commemorate one’s ancestors and keep alive the family’s memories.

  “It’s a bit like the American Halloween, I imagine,” said Uncle Chen to Kaizong.

  In the square in front of the Chen clan shrine, the townspeople had constructed an altar more than a dozen meters high. On top of the altar was a two-meter-tall statue of the Ghost King, the main deity presiding over the festival, intended to intimidate unfriendly spirits and ghosts. In front of the altar was the offering table, filled with neatly stacked piles of fruits, meats, ghost money, gold and silver bullion made of paper, and other offerings provided by all the families. Smoke from giant, two-meter-tall joss sticks lingered and covered everything in a thick fog. Before the offering table stood three papier-mâché artificial mountains decorated with dough sculptures of the Buddha’s hands, as well as various Buddhist mantras concerning the suffering of all and the relief brought by the Buddha.

  All the temporary buildings were painted in bright colors and decorated with intricate, abstract patterns modeled on flowing clouds, roiling waves, windswept grass. Everything gave off the air of celebratory excitement—the exact opposite of the solemnity that one might have expected for a festival to commemorate ghosts and ancestors.

  Through the streets and alleyways, through the purple haze of incense smoke, the noisy crowd converged on the fluttering dragon flags by the altar. Men and women carried children on their backs and held offerings in their hands. Next to the altar, folk opera troupes enacted Buddhist stories celebrating dutiful children, while street acrobats performed their tricks, engineers adjusted and applied body films, and children gathered in front of the booths of various snack vendors laying out their tempting wares.

  No, this is nothing like Halloween, Kaizong thought. It’s more like … Mardi Gras. But he kept the thought to himself. He seemed to be seeing double, with the scene in front of his eyes layered over his memories from childhood—no, that wasn’t quite right. It wasn’t the sight, but the smell, the pungent fragrance of incense, that had immediately transported Kaizong back to those long-ago years at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

  He seemed to be again with his dead grandmother. She took him by the hand and squeezed through the dense crowd—raising the lit joss sticks high overhead the whole time—until they had made their way be fore the offering table. There, she knelt, kowtowed three times, and added their offering to the table. Then she closed her eyes and continued to mutter, praying for ancestors and dead loved ones to not suffer after death.

  Kaizong’s eyes were wet, even though he had never believed in the existence of a world after death.

  “We used to hold the festival after it was dark. There would be lights hung everywhere, and it was beautiful.” Uncle Chen, the “executive director” of the clan, had to greet an endless stream of clan members as they passed by. But he continued to act as tour guide for Kaizong. “And then, one year, the electric lines overheated and started a fire. So they moved the celebrations to during the day.”

  Uncle Chen picked up a piece of paper from the ground—a ghost-money bill—and handed it to Kaizong, laughing. “I guess inflation is pretty bad in hell these days. Look at how many zeros are after the one on there!”

  Kaizong noticed that a few men were transporting the piles of ghost money, including the paper gold and silver bullion, from the offering table onto carts and hauling them away. “Are they dragging the money away to burn somewhere else?”

  “You’re thinking of the old custom. In the past, every family would burn the paper offering in a small furnace in front of their home, but now that’s been declared a source of pollution. So now they just take all the paper directly back to the factory to be pulped and recycled. It’s all about environmental protection, like you were talking about.”

  Kaizong examined the ghost money more closely: it was imprinted with a serial number and a manufacturing date, including a web address.

  “What’s the point of the URL?”

  “Oh, you can go to the site to do banking for the afterlife. You can open accounts and buy hell money for dead relatives: coins, bullion, and credit cards are all in use over there. Money deposited in the accounts can be used by the dead for any product, housing, or service available in the afterlife—and, of course, to pay all kinds of taxes over there, too.”

  The Sims, Afterworld Edition. Kaizong wanted to laugh. Traditions that had supposedly been unchanged for hundreds, thousands of years were finally, gradually fading in the face of science and technology. “But why bother paying for this? It’s so easy to counterfeit.”

  Uncle Chen surveyed the scene, filled with incense and the bustling crowd, and his thoughts seemed to be already on distant shores. Slowly, solemnly, he replied, “As long as you really believe that the other world exists, believe that your dead loved ones are living there, and that it’s possible to do something to let them know that you’re thinking of them—then it’s all real.”

  Kaizong’s father had told him that Uncle Chen’s wife had died from cancer the year before last. Before she died, she had been in a lot of pain and begged her husband to take her off life support so that she could suffer less. However, Uncle Chen just couldn’t do it. During her last moments, she—so ravaged by disease that she’d barely looked human by then—held his hand and said, “I don’t blame you. Don’t be afraid. I’ll wait for you over there.” Uncle Chen had then broken down and sobbed inconsolably. He regretted not obeying his wife’s instructions. Far more frightening than death itself was to lose dignity before death.

  Thereafter, he implemented periodic physical examinations within the territory controlled by the Chen clan. The benefit applied not just to natives of Silicon Isle, but also the migrant waste-processing workers.

  Kaizong knew that there was data showing that the incidence of respiratory diseases, kidney stones, and blood disorders among inhabitants of Silicon Isle was about five to eight times higher than in surrounding areas. In addition, the population produced an abnormally high number of cases of cancer. In one village, every single family had at least one member who suffered from terminal cancer.

  Strange fish filled with cancerous tumors had been pulled out of many polluted fishing ponds. The number of stillbirths refused to go down, and rumors spoke of a migrant woman who gave birth to a dead baby whose entire body was dark green and gave off a metallic stink. Elders said that Silicon Isle was already a place of evil.

  Kaizong watched Uncle Chen’s solemn expression; watched the young people taking photographs and recordings of the proceedings so that the files could be sent to the email addresses of dead relatives; watched the silent, praying faces, childish or lined, flickering in the flames from the candles and burning incense—and something deep in him was moved.

  Perhaps there would come a day when everything he was looking at would be replaced by virtual reality, by simulation, by technology, but what couldn’t be replaced was how people longed for those they loved. They needed some ceremony, some platform, some way to cross the border between life and death, to connect the past to the present, to shape the formless memories and longing into objects, acts, or ritualized performances so that the feelings that had been numbed by the passage of time might be reawakened, so that the pain of loss, once heartbreaking and bone-weary, could b
e recalled along with the endless memories that followed.

  History is the process through which events are bleached of their emotional color. Kaizong finally realized why he had chosen to study history. Perhaps the experience of continuously migrating from city to city as a child had made him extra cautious with his empathy. He habitually held himself at a distance—whether it was his family, his school, any organization or interpersonal relationship. It was easy for him to achieve true objectivity, a desirable trait in a historian.

  However, from that moment, Kaizong began to understand the impact and weight of the phrase “one of us.”

  One face among the crowd attracted his attention: filled with fear, it contrasted sharply against the crowd of peaceful, thoughtful faces. The features were slender and youthful, but it was impossible to tell the owner’s gender based on the hairstyle and clothing. The person was trying to blend into the prayerful mood of the crowd, but that pair of alert eyes, constantly looking back over the shoulder, threw the face into even sharper relief, much the way a stone tossed into a placid lake would become the center of ripples over a blurry background.

  One thing was certain: this was not a native of Silicon Isle. Even though he or she was making an effort at a native disguise, the facial features and minor details in the clothing gave him or her away.

  For some unknown reason, Kaizong experienced a sense of recognition. He had no explanation for the odd impression of familiarity; the topographical features of that face activated some pattern-recognition module in the right fusiform gyrus of his brain, which then began to secrete neurotransmitters that led to an elevated heart rate.

  He followed the gaze of the darting eyes and discovered several young native gang members searching through the crowd. Their getup was eye-catching: skintight, white Lycra vests stitched with phosphorescent patterns on the back that lit up like mini Christmas trees as they walked; loose, baggy, bright-colored sweatpants and running shoes; uniform crew cuts into which complex patterns were shaved with specialized razors; limbs and faces bedecked with metallic piercings; and, of course, the sine qua non of gang culture—various bits of glittering body film showing gang signs and names.

  Kaizong had already been warned many times to stay away from men like these. Behind them lay a complex web of power that he could not hope to begin to untangle.

  One of the gang suddenly turned around as though he had seen something. His lips curled, baring his teeth in a frightening mockery of a smile. At the moment the stud in his upper lip connected with his nose ring, the body film applied over his shoulders lit up with the image of a brightly burning flame. He shouted something and the two others turned to look in the same direction. The three of them began to slowly make their way through the crowd, their expressions the same as those on hunters sizing up prey that had fallen into their trap and devising new techniques for torture.

  Kaizong cursed under his breath. He turned around and saw that their prey was actually staring at him. Those gentle eyes were filled with fear, desperation, and a silent entreaty. His heart skipped a beat as he finally realized why the face seemed so familiar: it was the same face that had featured so prominently in the award-winning photo he had seen in the album from his old elementary school.

  The prey shoved through the crowd and escaped into a narrow pedestrian lane behind the clan shrine. The young gang members went in right after, hot in pursuit.

  If this were back in the U.S., Kaizong would have stayed put and avoided unnecessary trouble because he knew someone was certain to call the police. But here, on Silicon Isle, he wasn’t sure if the scene that had just played out was so much a part of daily life that most of the bystanders seemed unmoved. Kaizong gazed in the direction where the gang members had vanished; his hands clenched into tight fists, relaxed, and clenched again.

  “Uncle Chen, please wait a moment here. I’ll be right back.”

  The sides of the narrow lane were lined with vendors selling votive candles and joss sticks. The pungent smell from all the incense was overwhelming. Above Kaizong’s head was a narrow sliver of slate-gray sky. The lane was filled with festivalgoers, but Kaizong saw no signs of the gang. He asked several passersby and none admitted to seeing anything.

  In the end, it was an old woman selling fried spring rolls who, after much thinking, timidly pointed to an inconspicuous shop to the side.

  Kaizong looked closer and realized that between the shop and the store next to it was a narrow alley about the width of a man’s torso. It was very well disguised.

  The inside of the dark alley resembled a sewer, and the rotting effluvium made him gag. He was reminded of the Los Angeles from Predator 2, except that this place was ten times dirtier. He thought about calling the police but immediately decided against it.

  A scream up ahead made his heart seize up. He hurried, trying to think of a way to deal with the gang members. As a history major, his experience in street fights was sadly lacking.

  He was finally sure that the prey the gang were after was a girl. She had been pushed down into a pool of dirty water. A few surprised rats ran away along the wall. She labored to catch her breath, but she did not cry, and also did not speak.

  The man with the flame flashing over his shoulders said something to her, and then kicked her hard in the head. Another man unzipped his pants and began to piss on her.

  “Stop!” Kaizong had run out of time to think of a plan.

  The gang stared at this well-dressed newcomer, uncertain what he was about.

  “Any of you know this jackass?” Flame-Man ignored Kaizong and asked his companions.

  “He’s not a native … but, fuck, he doesn’t sound like he’s from elsewhere either,” the last of the three men answered. Kaizong suspected that the man was using augmented-reality equipment to check him out, but the man wasn’t wearing glasses, and he certainly didn’t seem like the type who could afford to have retina implants either.

  “Who I am is not very important—as long as you know who Director Lin Yiyu is.”

  Everyone paused for a moment after hearing Director Lin’s name. But Kaizong’s happiness lasted only about three seconds.

  “Pu! I know this motherfucker. He’s that fake foreigner, the one who wants to build the factory!” The man whose fly was still unzipped shouted.

  Kaizong was shocked. He knew that the local news had devoted a lot of space to cover Scott Brandle’s mission, but he had never imagined that street gang members would recognize him. The price of fame.

  “Oh? No wonder he can speak our topolect so well. Trying to drag out Director Lin to scare us, eh? Ha, now that we know who you are, do you know who we are, sengmukzai5?” Flame-Man mocked him with a term that roughly meant “college boy.” The three moved to surround Kaizong, cutting off his retreat.

  Kaizong tensed his body and struggled to recall the few sessions of taekwondo he had taken in college. Alas, he had skipped too many classes and could recall only a few useless stances. He held both of his fists up and stared at his opponents with as much fierceness as he could muster, hoping to create the impression of being willing to fight to the death.

  The men pressed closer, closer, and stopped. One even took a few steps back.

  It’s working? Before Kaizong could react, a heavy hand reassuringly clapped him on the shoulder from behind.

  “Knifeboy, you’ve grown bold. You dare to piss in Chen clan’s territory now?” It was Chen Xianyun—Uncle Chen. Behind him were a few other men with equally fierce expressions.

  “Ah, Boss Chen! I apologize. But the person we’re after was requested by Boss Luo himself. I’m just following orders.” Flame-Man, or Knifeboy, nodded and softened his tone. Opened-Fly hurried to zip up his pants, but halfway up, the zipper caught on something, and the man yelped in pain.

  “I don’t give a damn who wants this person. Not today. Not here.” Chen Xianyun’s words were imbued with a force that left no room for bargaining.

  “Of course, of course! Whatever Boss Chen wa
nts.” Knifeboy extinguished the flame over his shoulders. He spat angrily and turned to leave with his two followers. As he was about halfway down the alley, he tossed back a parting shot. “I had no idea that the Chen clan shrine is used to collect garbage. No wonder I could smell the stink from two blocks away.”

  “Pu!” one of Uncle Chen’s men cursed as the character for “Chen” flickered to life in blue over his shoulders. He was about to go after Knifeboy and his gang but Uncle Chen restrained him.

  “The Chen clan reminds me of the moon on the thirtieth day of the lunar month—dim and fading, haha…” Knifeboy’s shrill laughter gradually faded into the darkness at the end of the alley.

  “Uncle Chen, how did you know I was here?” Kaizong finally dared to relax, and his whole body felt like it was about to collapse.

  “Kaizong, I’ve lived all my life here. How could whatever you noticed escape my attention?”

  Kaizong walked over to the girl still slumped in the pool of dirty water. He cradled her and tried to awaken her gently. The girl’s eyes snapped open, and she pushed him away and curled herself into a ball next to the base of the wall, trembling all over. Her whole body was soaked in dirty water, like a bag of kitchen trash.

  “It’s all right, all right.” Kaizong switched to Mandarin to reduce the girl’s fear. “What’s your name? Where do you live? We’ll take you home.”

  It took a while for the girl to recover her wits. When she was finally sure that she was no longer in danger, she answered, “I’m called Mimi, and I live in Nansha Village.”