by Chen Qiufan
“Aren’t you afraid they’ll talk?”
“What about?”
“That you’re spending all your time with a fake foreigner, bringing dishonor to the waste people.” Kaizong maintained a serious expression. Mimi’s face lit up with a wide grin.
After Mimi was moved over to the workshops in the Chen clan territory, Kaizong sought her out every day in an effort to understand the lives of the waste workers better. Like everyone else, she had initially reacted to him guardedly, and spoke to him in the same cold, impatient tone one might use to answer some clipboard survey in the street. It wasn’t until Kaizong began eating with them, working by their side, filling his nostrils with the stench of burning plastic, and immersing his hands in the chemical-filled basins for cleaning the plastic, that she slowly accepted this fact: the young man’s appearance belied his character. He was not one of the natives who forever looked at the migrant laborers through glasses tinted with prejudice. Even his expressions and gestures differed subtly from theirs. It was as if his Chinese skin were nothing but a disguise, and underneath was some other strange race that she could not identify.
Their topics of conversation grew more varied. Mimi had countless whys: about Kaizong, about everything on the other side of the Pacific. In response to his slightly dry explanations, she nodded, half understanding, and after an oh, she would follow with a non sequitur of a new question.
There were a few mysteries that had been bothering her for a while.
For instance, the dead dog.
The carcass, full of lacerations and gashes, was lying next to a heap of incinerated circuit boards. Due to the hot weather, the belly was grossly distended like an angry pufferfish, threatening to burst open at any moment, revealing the rotting viscera full of wriggling maggots. The fetid stench of the carcass mixed with the odor of trash, forming an unforgettable mélange.
Kaizong was at first confused why no one cleaned up the dead dog, but soon, he learned the reason.
“I used to feed it often. Poor thing. The owner didn’t want it, and other dogs wanted nothing to do with it, either.” Mimi squatted some distance away, seemingly trying to convey her sorrow via telepathy.
“What is its name?” Kaizong asked.
“Good Dog. I just called it Good Dog.” Mimi smiled at her memory. “It wagged its tail at everyone, and that meant no one cared about it.”
Kaizong took two steps closer to the dead dog. Mimi was about to stop him, but it was too late. The tail began to writhe about violently like a live wire, and raised up a cloud of dust. The scene was both ridiculous and terrifying. Kaizong, startled, stumbled back a couple of steps, and the tail became still. But as soon as he came closer, the tail began moving again.
“Frightening, isn’t it?” Mimi’s voice was subdued. “It’s as though its soul is still trapped in the body, if dogs have souls. But it was a really good dog—not like those mean dogs who are always pouncing at people, barking and biting—why did it end up with such a fate?”
Kaizong noticed that the waste people subscribed to a simple form of animism: they prayed to the wind, the sea, the earth or the furnaces, hoped for the containers of trash shipped from distant shores to be full of valuable goods, easy to process, and nontoxic, and even felt penitent as they took apart the artificial human bodies—the Japanese products were so realistic that they felt they were slicing apart real flesh.
He quickly figured out the truth about Good Dog: a failed laboratory experiment in cyborg research.
As originally designed, it should have behaved as any other chipped dog and attacked any and all visitors who did not emit the designated signal; however, something had gone wrong during the implant process and instead of attacking, the dog wagged its tail. In a paranoid environment where everyone was on high alert and treated everyone else as an enemy, a good dog was destined to receive no more fairness than a good person.
“Silly! There’s no soul. It’s dead, but the servo circuits in the body are still working.”
Kaizong spent a long time trying to explain to Mimi the principles behind the chipped dogs. She looked dubious as Kaizong took out his phone—Director Lin had given him and Scott temporary authorization codes to prevent another accidental attack. Kaizong sent out the master key signal and gestured for Mimi to come closer. Mimi tiptoed over hesitantly.
Now, Good Dog’s tail remained lifeless.
Mimi let out a held breath. Her gaze at Kaizong was filled with a mixture of two parts admiration plus one part dawning realization. It was as if the fog that concealed the world had been dispelled slightly, revealing the truth in one corner, but it was also akin to losing some of the world’s sparkle and shine. Kaizong felt a pang of regret: perhaps some things should not be reduced only to mechanistic, materialist explanations, and a sliver of pure and simple beauty should be preserved.
It was always a dilemma whether to allow someone to hold on to the fantasies of childhood for as long as possible or to force them into the cruel realities of the world as soon as possible.
But one night, on the shore next to a sea full of glowing blue stars, Kaizong chose a third path.
* * *
They hired an electric sampan and left at dusk. By the time they approached the neat edge of the artificial coast, the sky and the sea in the distance had merged into a dark indigo. The air was filled with a low rumbling, accompanied by the rhythmic slap of the waves against the shore and the cries of occasional passing seabirds. A marvelous sense of harmony filled the scene.
“Is that the power plant?” Kaizong pointed to a few gigantic dome-shaped buildings not too far away. Next to them was a large chimney painted in red and white stripes, like a phallic monument worshiped by some primitive tribe.
Before Mimi could answer, their boatman spoke up.
“That’s right! Look at the color of the sea around here: all black. They dumped the wastewater into the sea every day until all the fish were dead. I used to be a fisherman, and now all I can do is pick up tips by hauling tourists around—” Abruptly, he stopped talking, and it was impossible to see the expression on his dark face in the failing light. “Listen: that’s the sound of the pump. Every day, they draw water from the sea for the cooling system, and along with the water, they pump in about two trucks’ worth of fish and shrimp. Then they sell the toxic seafood on the market—such sins!”
“Uncle—” Mimi interrupted him in a soft voice. “We’re just here to see the glowing sea lights.”
The boatman had the good sense to stop his complaining. He turned the rudder and cruised until the sampan was at the other end of the coast; here, the sea smelled pungent and felt warm—apparently where the warm water from the cooling system was discharged.
“Look!” Mimi grabbed Kaizong’s hand and pointed at the dark surface of the sea.
Kaizong stared where she was pointing. Now that his eyes had adjusted, they were much more sensitive to faint light. In the depths of the dark green, agate-like water, there appeared points of blue-green luminescence. At first, he only saw a few scattered glows here and there, but they grew, connected into lines and patches, and seemed to rise gradually from below the undulating surface until their outlines became clear: hundreds of thousands of translucent bells. They pulsed rhythmically, contracting and then expanding, their motions graceful and gentle like a dance, like countless blue-green LED lights glowing in the sea, like the trembling, whirling starry sky under Van Gogh’s brush. The sampan seemed to be floating in a sea of stars and the passengers drifting in a dream, their swelling emotions matching the rolling waves, resulting in a sensation of vertigo.
“It’s so lovely.” Mimi’s face reflected the luminescent glow and her look was one of intoxication.
“I’ve never seen so many jellyfish.” Kaizong recalled the Aquarium of the Bay in San Francisco, which he had visited. “Why are they gathered here? I thought the water is toxic.”
“I heard on TV that the jellyfish glow because of a reaction between some protein
inside them and the high concentration of calcium ions in the wastewater,” the boatman said. “What you’re seeing is the second generation already.”
“What do you mean?” asked Mimi.
“The power plant discharge warms up the water, and the artificial shore reduces the impact of the tides; so, every winter, the jellyfish breed here. The babies develop into little stalks with feeding tentacles until the next summer, when they bud into multiple disklike jellyfish that grow into adults. Oh, you’re looking at the adults.”
“I still don’t understand.” Kaizong pointed to a blue-glowing underwater current nearby. “They’re being sucked in again.”
The current flowed into some water intake, and they could see the translucent bells swirling slowly, forming a vortex that accelerated as they approached the pipe’s mouth. In a moment, the glowing bodies were deformed, torn apart, and vanished. Their lives’ journey came to an end almost as soon as it had begun.
“Every year, they have to spend a lot of money to clear out the clogged pipes,” the boatman said. “The jellyfish just breed too fast.”
Mimi stared at the scene for a while before the meaning sank in. Angrily, she spat out, “What kind of parents leave their babies in such a dangerous, poisonous place? Don’t they care about their children?”
Kaizong chuckled on the inside. This young woman was so naive that he felt another wave of tenderness toward her.
“Miss, if they’re not born here, even fewer of them would survive,” the boatman said.
“I just don’t understand. Why can’t people be more compassionate and wait until these beings have left the area before pumping water? Wanting more money doesn’t make it okay to kill.”
“They can’t even afford to care about human lives, let alone the lives of jellyfish.”
The old Kaizong probably would have launched a lecture about survival of the fittest, culminating in the conclusion that the presence of the power plant provided the impetus for the evolution of this species of jellyfish so that surviving descendants would be better adapted to the environment, quicker to react to changes, and become more fecund. But the new Kaizong sank into silence. The young woman in front of him was a victim of just this type of thinking: she and others like her had left their homes to come here under the euphemism of “economic development” so that they could eke out a living in pollution and poison, suffer the prejudice and exploitation of the natives, and perhaps even die in a land far from home and loved ones. He could not utter the sentiment that this is all so that your children and their children will have better lives, even if that was the truth.
“You’re right.” Even Kaizong was surprised by himself. “Sooner or later, karma catches up with everyone.”
“Sooner or later,” the boatman echoed.
The undulating blue-green glow gradually faded from Mimi’s face until only her irises, reflecting the faint ambient light, remained visible in the darkness like two dim stars not belonging to any constellations, rising and falling gently over the sea. Though he could only see a blurred outline of her body, Kaizong couldn’t move his gaze away; it was as if the region around her had been deformed by gravity so that all the other stars had contracted into inconspicuous details in the background.
Mimi raised a hand and pointed somewhere in the dark. “Look.”
Kaizong squinted but could not tell what she wanted him to see.
“I thought you foreigners all wore augmented contacts.” Mimi twisted around to look at him. “Fake Foreigner, you’re a strange one.”
“Not everyone.” Kaizong awkwardly tried to neaten his hair, messed up by gusts of sea breeze. “My parents converted to Christianity later in life, and their fundamentalist church believes that mankind should only look at the world with God-given eyes. All prosthetic augmentations are thought of as violations of the will of God because the world must be experienced and understood in the original manner in which God had created it.”
“Oh…” Mimi seemed to be struggling to grasp the meaning of his words. “Then … do you believe in God, too?”
“I’m an atheist, but, since I’m Chinese, filial piety is my first duty; I try to respect their beliefs.”
Mimi was quiet, as if reminiscing. She turned to gaze at the sea, over which various dark shadows seemed to stick out like the spines of strange beasts. “That’s Tide Gazing Pavilion.”
She turned to the boatman. “Uncle, would you take us to Tide Gazing Beach?”
“Miss, it’s late. Why go to such an unlucky place?” Kaizong could hear how anxious the boatman was.
“Just to see,” Mimi answered softly, but her voice did not waver.
* * *
Tide Gazing Beach wasn’t in the same location as Tide Gazing Pavilion. Silicon Isle extended a long, curved shoal into the ocean like a tentacle, and it encircled a lagoon of a few square kilometers. The pavilion was at the tip of the tentacle, while the crescent-shaped beach on the shoal was Tide Gazing Beach.
As the tide came into the lagoon, the underwater reefs beyond the tip of the tentacle caused the water to surge into a silvery crescent; and as the tide continued on and reached the beach, the breakers formed a second crescent opposite in curvature. The locals called the sight “Dual Tides Reflecting the Moon.” Though the scenery was beautiful, few seemed to come to enjoy it.
The sampan gave a light jolt as it crossed over the outer crescent. As clouds drifted overhead, the scattered silver moonlight fell unevenly over the water. The shadows of the clouds moved along with the sampan, and the two passengers experienced the illusion of standing still until the pale sandy beach grew clearer in their sights.
The boatman stopped the sampan. “This is as far as I’ll go.”
“Here?” Before Kaizong even finished talking, Mimi had already leapt into the waist-high water with a splash. He hurried to take off his shoes and socks, but Mimi jumped up, grabbed him by the arm, and pulled him into the sea, spraying water all around.
“What’s that for?” A thoroughly soaked Kaizong emerged from the water and stared at Mimi angrily.
“Be careful, all right? Once you’re onshore, just follow the road back to the village.” After this quick reminder, the boatman started the motor and returned the way he had come.
Splash. While Mimi was distracted, Kaizong used his arm as a paddle and doused her with seawater.
“Now we’re even.” He looked smug.
In the moonlight, Mimi’s hair seemed to be encrusted with glistening pearls that slid down her wet strands and left sparkling trails on her face. Her black T-shirt was wrapped tightly around her body and reflected the moon like fish scales. A breeze accompanied the parting of cloud shadows, and her moist eyes brightened suddenly, as though underneath her radiant lashes were two shimmering seas. There was a circle of light around her on the surface of the sea, like the halo around the moon. Kaizong caught his breath as he watched this moon goddess stride toward him through the water.
The goddess stared at him, said one word softly, and then turned and waded for the shore.
“Idiot.”
Exhausted, they lay on the beach, unconcerned with the sand that stuck to their bodies. Since so few came here, the beach was far cleaner than the other beaches of Silicon Isle. The waves slapped against the sand rhythmically while the starry sky, visible only in torn patches through cracks in the clouds, slowly drifted. Kaizong heard the sound of Mimi’s breathing, soft and slow like a sound coming from the depths of space.
This feels different. Kaizong thought back to the women he had known: his well-bred, fashionable, socially adept East Coast classmates. No, it wasn’t just a difference of demographic labels, but something deeper, some contrast that he couldn’t describe precisely but was sure of. The soul. He thought of the word that Mimi brought up often. It will have to do.
“What do you want to do in the future?” Kaizong gazed at the stars. He phrased it like a question directed at her and also at himself.
“Make enough money to
open a store back home so that my parents won’t have to work so hard.”
“I mean—what is the thing you most want to do for yourself?”
A long silence.
“I don’t know … I’ve never thought about that.” She paused for a moment. “I want to go far, far away and learn many new things, like you.” She laughed. “Maybe in my next life.” Her voice took on a forced levity.
Kaizong didn’t know what to say.
In the long stream of human history there was one school of thought that resurfaced time after time: a devotion to the hidden order of the universe and a blind faith in the natural balance of the world. God was fair to all of His children, and Heaven took from overabundance to replenish scarcity.10 Fate ultimately guided all. Faced with signs of unfairness in the real world, people tried to marshal all kinds of evidence to comfort themselves: if Heaven endowed some with status, wealth, beauty, talent, health … then it was certain to take away something else as a price. When such evidence couldn’t be found, the theory of reincarnation was invented so that there was infinite time to tally up the counters of lifetimes to achieve eventual balance. Kaizong had once scoffed at the theory of conservation of destinies, but perhaps people needed such a theory not because it was the truth, but because it offered solace in their limited lives.
A laughing face interrupted his musings; Mimi pulled him up from the sand by his arm and they ran, together, toward the other end of darkness.
* * *
But he’s a native! the other girls always said to her. He was a Silicon Isle native who was unlike any other. Although he occasionally appeared foolish, he never called them “waste people”; his gaze was kind and inquisitive, but he was never afraid to look anyone in the eye; he didn’t spit in public, didn’t curse and swear; and strangest of all, he wasn’t implanted with any prostheses and didn’t rely on augmented reality. Kaizong seemed like an astronaut who had just returned to the Earth from light-years away: as soon as he stepped outside the sterile landing capsule, he was mired in a filthy living hell.