by K-Ming Chang
When he left the room to shower for hours, spending so long in the bathroom I wondered if he’d become water and gone down the drain too, I crawled where he’d rained all over the floor, touching my tongue to his sweat, divining where his body had been based on taste. He’d been at the beach, I told my brother, and he’d kidnapped all the salt from the sea, holding it hostage here.
After work, my father irrigated our apartment building’s shared courtyard, scooping trenches too straight to be veins. When it rains, he said, the water won’t flood. It’ll be outsourced. I asked him how he knew where the water had to go, and he pointed at a pack of bushes with finger-shaped flowers. Water follows want, he said. If the body is really mostly water, I asked, then how come it can burn? My father said something about parts and sums: how water is a part and the body is the sum, but I didn’t want to do the math and ran back inside.
The first time I saw him install a water hose, I asked him what he was holding and he said a snake just to scare me. At school, when the teacher told us the snake was temptation and Eve was evil, I thought of my father cradling that green hose, feeding bushes that weren’t his, shucking petals off a flower and licking them like stamps to press onto my cheeks. When he turned the hose on, water sprang from its mouth and that was a miracle. I remember him whipping my brother with that hose, its metal mouth striking between my brother’s rolled-back eyes. I remember him saying, I’m sorry, but this is the only way you’ll grow.
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My mother got a job at a company that manufactured photocopiers. In the mornings, she drove west to a building so tall it sanded the sky smooth. All day, she sat at a desk and answered customer calls with an accent. The only reason you haven’t been fired is because you’re a minority, said the woman from marketing.
When they promoted her to receptionist, my mother had official access to the black-and-white photocopier, where she made copies of handwritten notices to be circulated around the office: Please refrain from using air fresheners. Please refrain from bringing food with nuts or shellfish into the communal kitchen. Please do not flush menstrual products down the toilet. Menstrual, which she spelled minstrel.
The day she was fired, she cleared the refrigerator of half-finished Caesar salads and waxen ham sandwiches, took them home in her purse, and ate them for dinner after cooking pots of fishball soup for us. She only ever ate leftovers, lifting the lace of burnt rice out of the cooker, sucking marrow out of the bones I didn’t eat clean. I’m on a diet, she joked. A diet called life.
The day she was fired for photocopying my birth certificate, my mother watched the green laser swipe the glass pane like cleaning a window. The glass was blue-white and cool as ice. Beneath layers of powder, mother’s cheek was a swollen gourd. After photocopying both sides of my birth certificate, having seen on TV a story about a records office burning down, all citizenship undone to smoke—my mother pressed the start button again, though she had nothing left of me to copy. She pressed her hot cheek to the glass as the laser beam flitted across it. What printed was a map of her right cheek, its broken veins like tributaries, a bruise beginning to blue from nose to ear. She held the photocopy in both hands, lifted it to the fluorescent light. Folded it. She touched the cheek on her face, then the one on the paper. Couldn’t tell which was the evidence and which was the crime.
My mother was always covering up our crimes: Once, when a candied shrimp slipped out of my mouth and stained the carpet, she threw a napkin on it so my father wouldn’t see. When I was asleep, she bleached the sauce out of the carpet, though the bleach sucked it out too well and left the spot brighter, too white, a spotlight where my stain had been.
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While she cooked, my mother told stories she claimed were from the Bible, though I could never find them later in any translation. When my father told my mother to teach us a mainlander story, the one she told was Meng Jiang Nu, the girl born from a gourd.
The story begins with two families on neighboring estates, one known for its fruit and the other for its flowers. Between their yards was a gourd tree, its trunk so wide even the wind could not wrap around it. The tree’s roots lived on the Meng family’s land, but most of its branches—including the branch with the largest gourd, so gold it blinded birds that flew past—crossed over into the Jiang family’s yard.
While the Meng and Jiang families argued every day over the ownership of that gold gourd, it grew to the size of an infant, juice-bloated and so tender it bled in the breeze. When it fell at last, the rind split open to reveal a child, a daughter. They wept at the miracle. The Meng family insisted on naming her Meng Nu, while the Jiang family wanted to name her Jiang Nu. The girl starved for two days as the families argued, before someone said that the girl would die before they ever decided. So they named her Meng Jiang Nu, daughter of both families, daughter of two bloods.
This story is wrong, I told my mother. If she was really a daughter, neither family would want her. She couldn’t be milked until she was a mother, couldn’t be bartered until she was a bride. My mother never finished the story. I never asked if she had wanted me, if I was the kind of daughter who doubled as a battleground, who was fought over. Later, my mother would say, Remember, it wasn’t the girl they were fighting over. It was the gourd.
Maybe, when the gourd split open, they wept not to celebrate her birth but to grieve their lost gold. They cursed gravity as thievery. I remembered watching families in restaurants fighting to pay a bill, and maybe that was what Meng and Jiang were fighting over: a bill they were too proud to let the other take. To say a daughter is a debt they could afford to pay.
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On Sundays, our mother woke us up with the end of her broom to clean every room, saran-wrapping the sofa and spitting on the windows to lubricate the light that entered them. To keep my language clean: gargle saltwater twice a week. To keep your teeth from leaving you on wings: tally them every night with your tongue. She rinsed the dishes so bright we had to squint while eating; she sang to a knife in the sink as if auditioning to be its blade. We can never be clean enough for this country, she said.
Weekly, my father accused her of loving the apartment better than her husband, of kneeling to clean but never kneeling for him. My mother said that keeping a clean home was a sign of wealth and keeping a husband was a sign of stupidity. When my father raised his hand, my mother always raised something else—a vase, a chopstick, a sofa cushion—not to deflect the blow, but to meet it midair, to return it. When my father took off his belt, we held on to the other end to anchor it, give back its gravity. Sometimes he beat us with it just to hear us beg him to stop. This is the only thing I can give you, he said. Not money or a house. Just this, his hands overflowing with us, just this: his mercy.
Some Sundays, after my mother finished scrubbing every seat in the apartment that had fraternized with our asses, my father taught us to make kites with rice paper and disposable chopsticks and twine, our arms acting as spools. He told us to draw eyes onto our kites, or else they’d be blind to the path of their own flight. In the backyard, the kites tugged me onto my toes, the paper wings so thin the stars teethed through them. My father told me stories of flying over a salt lake, his kite slitting the sky’s belly, the winds so strong they could hike a child up onto a cloud. My father tethered me by stepping on my feet. While my brother punctured his kites on trees and powerlines, the string lurching out of his hands, I could fly for hours, even at night, my paper kite a second moon, a man-made light.
My father stayed up with me and watched. He told me that kites were once used for war. Once, an approaching army set up camp just outside the city. The army was banked on all sides by a fog thick as milk. To trick the enemy, the city strapped children to paper kites, gave them gourd-flutes to blow as they flew. The army, walled by fog, heard the children making music in the sky and assumed they were sur
rounded. The men surrendered within an hour. The city was saved by its smallest members.
My kite’s eyes blinked at me from above: It could watch itself being flown, my father perching me on his shoulder-bones. You’re flying me, I said. He gripped both my ankles—one in each fist—as if the wind would lick me away. Kites were once made of skin, he said. Flown to frighten the enemy. I misheard him and imagined my skin made of kites, how anything could wound me, tear me: wind, getting wet, getting dressed. I wore my shirt backward once and my father called me careless, tugging me back into the house by the collar. He asked me what people would think if I went outside with my head facing the wrong way. In the kitchen, I practiced putting my shirt on, taking it off and putting it back on until I couldn’t lift my arms above my head, the shirt trembling when I tried to hoist it, a failed flag of surrender.
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I wanted to teach my father how to make something too, so I showed him how to make sock puppets we’d learned in first grade. You put a sock over your fist and made it speak by opening your hand, blinking its button eyes. My father said I should cut it a mouth, a real one that could eat. To make anything real required butchery. So I used scissors on one of his white socks, long enough to roll over my forearm, and cut a mouth into it. My mother said he would kill me for doing that, but instead he sat with me in the kitchen and fed my fist everything that would fit in it: a found fishbone, a peach pit that had rolled under the cabinets, his own thumb. I bit down with my fingers and twisted his thumb until he yanked it back. I wasn’t sorry, but I blew on his thumb with my sock-mouth. It blued anyway.
When I saw that my sock-mouth was stronger than my born one, I spent weeks speaking through my fist, holding it up to my mother’s ear and asking her to call me through it. She held my fist like a seashell to her ear, whispered back to it. Only my wrist heard her words, and in bed I tried to replay them, dialing my hand in the dark between my legs, waiting for her voice to come out of me.
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Weeks before his visa expired, my father decided to work a few years at a cousin’s slot machine factory in Jiangsu, where he’d examine and approve the machines before they were sent to Macau. My father had learned most of his English playing Texas Hold ’Em with college kids at the park after dark: Hit me. Raise. Stay. Stay. At night, he renamed all the constellations after card suits, pointing out a spade in the sky, a club, then a heart, telling us stories of his biggest wins. Money’s like the moon, he said. By morning they’re both gone.
The night my father left for the airport, we ate a whole fried fish, a broth so thin it evaporated on our tongues before we could swallow, vegetables boiled translucent, ghostly. We ate with our elbows on the table and didn’t speak. We let our knives narrate. My mother caught crickets in the backyard and panfried them with sesame oil. Bent over the table, my father packed his stomach like a suitcase, folding pieces of pork in half before sealing them into his mouth. The fish was for good luck. He’d carry the luck in his body and shit out its bones in another country. When my mother ran out of dish soap, when she didn’t want to pay for water, she spat directly on the dishes. Erased his hunger from every plate.
Packing for the mainland, my father folded his steam-ironed white shirts in symmetrical stacks. He took one of the fake-leather belts he wore and left the other one dangling on a hook in the closet, tame without his hands around it. He packed gifts for all his cousins, Band-Aids with cartoon characters printed on them, boxes of Cheerios, disposable dusters. My brother and I sat on his suitcase so he could jimmy the zipper, and the second before it shut, I saw a white sheet sliding out from between two shirts. It was a piece of paper with drawn-on eyes, a half-finished kite.
When we drove him to the airport, I counted the hours his flight would take, calculated that he would land the hour I woke. I didn’t sleep that night, telling myself that as long as I never woke, he would never land: our father forever midflight. That night, flying my kite in the rain, I saw the paper shrivel into a fist before falling. From the sky, my father said we’d make a new one, a kite so large we could strap it to our backs and leave the country. I lost the kite that night, stayed out till morning to watch it reappear, as if light could undo any loss. It was years before I realized that kites were only puppetry and could only fake their flight. Real flight involved no leashes or strings. Birds did not come with girls tied to them, girls reeling them down, girls the opposite of the sky.
My father called from the mainland every week with nothing to say. When we picked up, he was twelve hours ahead in the day, answering from our future. We pulled the phone toward our mother, yanking the spiral cord straight. My father’s roommate—another cousin whose name we didn’t know—sometimes talked to us instead. He complained that my father never spoke, that silence had shrunk his throat to the width of a string. This worried my mother, but comforted me: It meant I could reel him back to me. I knotted the phone cord around my wrist, tugged his voice taut like a kite-string, but I couldn’t pull him back into the sky I could see.
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Meng Jiang Nu grew at the rate of a tree and could be fed only soil, silt, water, insecticide in the form of vinegar. The two families took turns watering her, but she never grew more than an inch per year. By the time she was a girl, her mothers and fathers were dead. She outlived the second generation of the family, then the third, each generation leaving a written set of instructions for the care of the gourd girl: Keep her buried waist-deep in soil at all times. Turn her face to the sun. Stimulate her roots by stroking them. Water her. Prune her hair twice a week. If you see moss on her skin, beat it off with a broom. Meng Jiang Nu was planted in a trench dug between the Meng and Jiang courtyards. Her body was hollow, and the neighborhood boys liked to sneak onto the estate. They carved her a pair of earholes and shouted into them, heard their own names echo back. They dared one another to cut her down, bring her home, plant themselves in her body.
In Jiangsu, my mother said, where my ba was born, there were daughtertrees. When a daughter was born, every family planted a camphor tree outside their home. Its branches grew parallel to her bones. Sometimes the tree grew scales down its trunk and sprouted a single jellied eye, like a fish, and sometimes the tree had a mouth in the center of the trunk, where birds were born, except these birds had no feathers, just skin, flightless as fists. When the matchmaker walked by your house and saw that the tree had grown to the width of a waist, she knew it was time for your daughter to be married away. The daughtertree was cut down, chiseled into trunks to carry her clothes and bedding. When my mother was born, Agong tried planting a camphor tree outside the military village where they lived, but the soil there was incestuous with the sea and too salty. The tree was salt-sick, its trunk crumbling. Every day, Agong measured its waist with his hands, but it remained the width of his wrists. My mother was relieved: As long as the tree never grew wide enough to be wed, she’d never have to leave home. She asked of every tree she saw: Don’t ever grow a body worth cutting down.
It was Agong who felled the tree one morning, plucking the trunk from the ground as easily as an arrow shaft, its only two branches braided together like my mother’s legs when she was born. After he broke the tree into shrapnel with his bare hands, my mother tried plucking the eyelash-fine splinters from his palms, but the shards submarined through his blood, merging wood with marrow. That’s why he was so flammable, why his memories were already smoke. Why he wasn’t allowed to touch the stove, newspapers, our hair, this story, anything that could be translated into fire.
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When my father sent money from the mainland, we folded half of it into the duct-taped shoebox under my grandmother’s bed, gave the rest to pay our late rent. My mother’s period was three months late. She miscarried in bed while I slept in my father’s place, on the moonsoaked side of the mattress. Blood ribboned between us, and I wo
ke with both wrists bound in red. I checked my body for a wound, but it was nowhere on my body. My mother sat up in bed and corked her crotch with a fist. She told me to get a bucket. I ran to the kitchen and emptied a bucket of brine into the sink, scrubbing away its ring of salt with the hem of my shirt. When I brought her the bucket, she squatted over it for the rest of the night, her blood baying into it, making a sound like a trapped dog. The air turned to salt and crystallized around my lips and eyes. I fell back asleep, and when I woke my mother was still crouched on the floor, naked from the waist down, staring down at her blood like a mirror. In the morning, I helped her carry the bucket to the bathroom sink. The blood was only two inches deep, but it was heavy as bone. As if death had a hidden density. We tipped the bucket together. Later, my brother would complain that the sink wasn’t draining properly, that something down there was clogged. I would catch my mother spooning beef broth down the sink, feeding the drain like a mouth.