by K-Ming Chang
But who, she said, can prepare you for the past?
The Walking Trees: An Oral Story in the Voice of My Mother
What I remember about Arkansas is the weather. Same as the island. We saved all that money to fly, and in the end we arrived at the place we left. It rained, rained our sweat. Our blood turned the color of mirrors and mosquitos mated with our skin. I could name every species of tree, copy the posture of their thirst. It was typhoon season when we left Yilan, and it was like the typhoon had saddled us, rode us here. Our farts took the form of wind and fled here. Arkansas was landlocked, the opposite of the island, but the weather here spoke the same sky. It was so humid, the air was white-haired with steam, and we were the ones being boiled of our knees. And the trees that grew there, they looked just like the trees in Yilan, big-hipped and knuckle-boned and mustached with birds. There’s a story where I was born. About trees that could walk. At night, they stood up on their roots and left the earth. They walked through rivers, roped up all the water, and left them dry-mouthed. They walked to the city and kneeled into the cement, planted themselves on the street. They walked to the sea and hollowed themselves into canoes, slid away on their bellies. They walked and walked. And in the morning, the trees were never where you left them. They’d be lounging on their sides, or linking arms in a circle, or gone except for one. And my sisters and I, we went searching for the other trees. We went to all the neighbors and asked what they’d seen. But the trees, they went missing. Walked off. There were these holes in the ground where the roots used to be. They went deep, so deep my ba had to paint circles around the holes with pigblood to warn kids away, keep them from falling in. One time an ox walked into one of the treeholes and broke all its legs. Each leg was pointing in a different direction: at me, at the sea, at my sister, at the trees. My ba shot it with his army pistol. In the forehead, here, where my finger is. Here. Oxen aren’t like pigs, they don’t make a sound when they die. They just fall over. Like trees. My father drove the oxen so hard, they died of being tired. Just fell over in the fields in the middle of plowing a row. And there wasn’t even any meat left on their bodies to eat. They were hip-bones and hide, a molar maybe. All we could eat were the eyes. And my sister said, I bet if we plant those eyes, we could grow a whole new ox. But animals aren’t like trees, they don’t grow back. I learned that. In Arkansas, we were the only ones of our species. Some men carried a gun, but they weren’t soldiers like Ba. They looked at us like we were broken-legged animals to shoot, not because they hated us but because they wanted to save us from the hole we’d fallen into. Every other family had a car or a truck, and they drove to buy food. And we, we walked. We walked miles and miles. We walked to the grocery store and bought our meat in cans and found out later it was cat food. Why do cats get their own kind of food? Why wasn’t our hunger specified? It wasn’t bad, the cat food. It didn’t taste like anything. We stopped being able to taste after we landed. We weren’t fluent in the flavors here. Our tongues receded, beached in the back of our throats, whaling, amputated at the name. We walked until our feet were fish-floppy. We walked like those oxen: to death.
DAUGHTER
Hu Gu Po (III)
My mother was ready for work before the sky chose a color to dress in. Her latest job was at the foot spa, where the blacked-out windows were clotted with dust and the sign outside said: THE TREE DIES FROM THE ROOT—THE HUMAN AGES FROM THE FOOT!!!!! I hate feet, she said, buttoning her polo shirt with the logo of a footprint. They look like skinned fish, dead in my hands. I just want to fillet them open and pick out their bones. When I oil a foot, I pretend I’m preparing to fry it alive. She practiced her massages on me, submerging me to the ankles in a bucket of tap water, grating at my callused feet. She said every region of the sole corresponded with an organ inside my body: My head was the big toe, my lungs were my bunions, and my heart was in my heel, so I should watch what I stepped on.
Today the hole in my back birthed a sapling: stiff as my brother’s morning wood, a kind of kindling. It was a tail, orange with black bangles, fur tangling in a syrup too thick to be blood and too thin to tar. It tasted of smoke. The tail was the length and width of my forearm, but it ached at the core, the way my bones did when they were outgrowing me and nearly breached skin. It was growing, pulsing like a gone-bad tooth. On the mattress we shared, my brother turned around and saw me wringing my tail like a neck, trying to strangle it with both fists. He laughed so hard his last baby tooth flew out and shot down the ceiling fan.
Telling me to stand up, my brother looked at the back of my pants, saying no one would really notice my tail unless they were looking for it, and no one would look at my flat ass even if it was on fire. I told him the tail wasn’t the problem so much as the symptom: I was tigering. Hu Gu Po was the new governor of my bones. In the bathroom, I tugged the tail to remove it at the root, but the fur was too oily to grip. The tail must be breeding with my bones, seeding what would breach my skin next, claws or canines. Tomorrow my mother would ride me through the house, a daughter she smuggled into a hunter’s body. I told you not to dig those holes, she’d say while petting my neck, spaying me with a pair of garden shears. The only hole that’s natural is the one you shit from.
She told me to fear holes because of what might enter them, but I was more afraid of what would exit. Once, she lectured me for days on the importance of not letting men enter my room. But there’s one living in my room! I said. My mother said that brothers weren’t men until they were married, and my own brother would never get married because he wasn’t allowed to love a woman more than his mother. I heard that, my brother said. And I’ve already decided not to love anyone. That way it’s fair for everyone. The rest of her speech was this: Tampons are American propaganda. The string hangs out of you like a grenade pin. When you pull it out, a period of martial law begins in your body.
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_
The next morning I was the same. Gowned inside a girl. My skin still my skin. Maybe I needed to wait to be shaped: My mother always said the moon wasn’t whitened in a day. I meant to sew all the yard-holes closed, but they bred behind my back: I couldn’t guess what was fucking them.
That night, I heard a humming in my sleep. A voice dislocating the dark. My tail humped the mattress and I made a fist around it, strangled it into silence. The humming sounded like my own, but when I rose, it led me away from myself.
It was early in the night and the sky was bad-breathed, freckled with stars like white bacteria on a tongue. Since growing my tail, my night-seeing had improved: My eyes homed to heat. I could always see the shapes of faces but never mouths. I could see the shapes of bodies but not their distance from me. I kneeled in the soil, skating my ear above one of the holes. It had my teeth. It was breathing bullets of heat. The hole whistled at me like a man. I got up from my knees. Flaring open like skirts, the holes mouthed words that hadn’t yet given birth to their meanings. I looked inside the nearest one and slipped my hands into it. After a minute, the hole loosened around my wrist and gagged my fist back out. When the holes were silent again, steam stealing out of their lips, I went back into the house, following my hands like lanterns. They were clean to the wrist, no evidence of what they entered. In the morning, I told my brother about the holes and their breathing. He asked me to show him and we went together into the yard. They smell so bad, I said. Because of the landfill, my brother said. Because they’re bodies, I said.
My brother bent to examine each of them, the deepest as long as our legs. In the center of the middle row, one of the holes was squared off and looked more like a window, like the word for mouth: 口
I prayed over it: dear shangdi please flip my tail like a switch and turn me into a tiger or not I don’t care just choose one. Make me my own species with no name for her hunger but hole no name for history but still happening.
* * *
_
My mother never admitted to taking Duck Uncle’
s money, but this year all our bills were paid on time and he bought a new low-riding car that sharked down the street without stirring air. His restaurants now had three locations, each place with the same imitation-crystal chandeliers and red carpeting and suit-vested waiters and dim sum carts so brightly gilded you had to avert your eyes to order. My mother started waitressing part-time at his nearest location, and she collected tips in the waistband of her gold-trimmed pleather pants.
Between shifts, my mother wrote on the back of receipts, listing probable affairs my father was having: His boss’s new receptionist is a whore from the provinces. The woman who cleans his dorm is a whore from the provinces. The telephone operator is a whore from the provinces. He calls her every day, pretending to ask for a call transfer, and one day he professes his love, toll-free. Her voice turns into a dumb pigeon and collides into glass when it tries to fly into his bedroom. She dies and he marries the bloodstain on his window.
On the phone with my father, my mother’s voice deepened like a bowl, carrying its contents too far down to understand. We went to the zoo today. Meimei saw a tiger for the first time and peed herself. Gege peed on his snow cone, put it down his pants, and ran through the aviary shouting FRESH PEE-PEE CONE! EAT IT FOR FREE.
At the zoo with Duck Uncle, I recognized the tiger’s ringed tail, exactly like the one I sheathed in my sleep. I slept with my tail on top of the sheets, afraid that if it touched my body it would contaminate me into a beast. I’d wake with my mother’s severed foot in my mouth. I told my brother to be careful beside me: I’d hunt him in his sleep. Protect your feet by duct-taping them to the mattress, I said. Count your toes in the morning. I counted them aloud before he woke, not allowing myself to breathe or look for light in the room until there were ten. Every morning I said my hungers aloud, rehearsing for my future body: Today I want to eat my mother. I will eat as much of her as fits in my belly, and then I will rebirth her. I will eat her into a new future.
Duck Uncle packed three Tupperware containers of dim sum, shiu mai with peas crowning the meat, har gow straining out of their skins. We ate it all with our hands, sitting at a picnic table we’d elbowed a white family for, licking our fingers till they glowed. There was a feeding scheduled for the tiger exhibit, so we went back to watch the zookeeper attach the frozen steak to a thirty-foot pole. He extended the pole through the bars, past the empty moat beyond, and out toward the brown field and faux-stone cave. The tiger, napping on its side, didn’t even look at the steak-pole waving its meat flag ten feet away.
My brother kicked the bars. The tiger slept. We kept watching even after everyone left to watch the seal feeding at three. We were the last ones to leave the tiger that day, the steak defrosted and growing a rind of rot. It stank, slotting its scent through the bars. We watched anyway, convinced that as long as we stayed, the tiger would wake the full width of its hunger, show us what was done in the wild. The steak would reverse into a cow and walk into the tiger’s mouth. Instead, we drove home as evening opened its purple cape. Duck Uncle said, In China, the tigers are real, not far away like that. You can pay a man to throw in a roped-up goat, and they’ll let you watch up close from a bus. The words in China stilled my mother’s hands on the wheel, and she sped until the road beneath us was rain. In China, tigers were already extinct. There are no more breeding pairs in the wild.
Duck Uncle’s restaurants closed during the recession. On TV, when I heard the word recession, I thought it meant the same thing as recess, when you were free of teachers who slid their rulers into your mouth and told you your accent was an inch off. But this recession did not mean free, unless free meant that no one could afford to pay. Duck Uncle’s secret ingredient for his black sauce—fermented garlic—was stolen by another chain. He sold the rest of his recipes. By then, Duck Uncle didn’t sleep, his neck thin enough to make a fist around it, his teeth indented from sleepwalking into his tree. Even his voice was less like a duck and more like the gun.
Prayer to Disappear a Tail: To Be Repeated Twice Nightly and Once in the Morning (Prior to Counting Every Toe in the Household)
dear shangdi dear papakwaka please let my skin rescind all scars all tails let my teeth be benign as butterflies let my tail be a fuse if I light it the fire deletes me dear papakwaka if you are the mountain that mothered us all like my ama says please let me not become her hu gu po please let the world be extinct of children so I will have nothing to eat but myself dear papakwaka dear ancestors who took up spears toothpicked the dutch like fancy finger food who bombed back the qing dynasty with bags of farts who turned all japanese soldiers into beads with holes in their bellies please open my tail like an umbrella build me for protection not for prey keep buffering from girl from girl from girl from girl to please stop stalling if I have to transform let my new species be a window a bar of herbal soap my mother’s thumb in my ear dear papakwaka I know this story is outside your language but is hu gu po born one limb at a time or all at once which part of her am I already o papakwaka mountain teat mouth of us all please don’t strand my body outside its myth
* * *
_
Before he left, we ate at the largest of Duck Uncle’s restaurants, an hour away in a mall that sold fake phones and sour plums. Duck Uncle told us the rules before we went in through the glazed double doors: No spitting anything out, even if you’re choking on it. No swallowing your noodles whole and then pulling them back out through your nose. No removing any item of your clothing at the table. No disturbances. The red carpet made my eyes runny and the plastic chandelier hung so low we ducked for it. Dozens of dim sum carts spun in a carousel around the room. My brother and I pointed at everything that swept by, the table so crowded we ate fast to keep it from collapsing.
I filled my cheeks with boiled peanuts, then spat them at my brother’s head. You broke the rules, my mother said, while pinching my lips shut with her fingers. Duck Uncle said he’d feed us so well that we’d beg for bigger mouths. I tasted blood but didn’t know what dish it was coming from.
At the end of the meal, Duck Uncle said he’d been waiting to surprise us. I made an investment, he said. He signaled for the waiter, who nodded and walked back into the kitchen. Four waiters wheeled out a fish tank. The tank was at least as tall as me, the water a dyed-blue that was almost opaque. There was nothing inside the tank except for a floating red ribbon, flickering. A dragonfish, my mother said, and when I leaned closer to the glass I saw that it was a fish, that the ribbon spooled and unspooled on its own, an eye sewn on like a bead.
It costs 10,000 dollars, Duck Uncle said, but I got it for half that. I’d heard of dragonfish in big hotels on the mainland, where my father had gone. They were smuggled out of rivers. The shinier their scales, the more luck it would deliver its owner. The dragonfish was the length of my arm, whipping from one end of the tank to the other.
After Duck Uncle went bankrupt in the recession, he returned the fish tank. He bagged the dragonfish and took it home, releasing it into his toilet. Said he’d flush it back out to the sea, but we knew the salt would kill it. My brother and I scooped it out of his toilet with a bucket and slid it into our filled kitchen sink, watching it try to lasso itself.
Let’s sell it for 10,000 dollars, my brother said. My mother said the fish was a fake. She’d known it wasn’t real the moment the light hit it: The scales were painted on, probably with nail polish. She butchered it the night he left, scraping the shell of pigment from its skin, and then we could see its real scales underneath, a color like smog.
The night before Duck Uncle left, we saw my mother straddling the stump of the eucalyptus tree she’d felled in his yard. She said the stars were fish. But they’re not moving, we said. Because they want to be caught, my mother said. She raised her hook-finger to the sky and we waited all night for it to lure something. Near morning, a plane came to unzip the dark. It flew low, tailing light. It’s on fire,
I said, and thought of Duck Uncle inside it. If we slit open the plane’s belly like a fish, he would spill out all shiny and scarfed in guts. I thought it was unfair that she was the only one being the bait, so I stuck my tongue out at the sky and wriggled it like a worm, luring all the lost.
DAUGHTER
Hu Gu Po (IV)
The cost of being fatherless: Shut off notices from the water company (hang up, bathe with baking soda). Shut off notices from the electricity company (ignore: the house will starve itself dark). No exterminator (kill the ants with duct tape, termites with vinegar, rats with our hands). No calls from my father for two weeks, then months, then the trees started growing new beards. The fall my father stopped sending money or answering calls, my mother bought us plane tickets to the mainland, said she’d either bring him home or kill him there: She hadn’t decided which would punish him more.
We got our passport photos taken in the living room of a Shanghainese man my father once bribed for a faster visa. The man told me to show my ears in the photo, tucking my hair back with one broad thumb. His hands were like my father’s: bruised nailbeds, knuckles loose as screws. I felt guilty for summoning my father through some other man’s body.
We packed in the dark, my mother cursing my father’s cousins, their factory, my father, who must be dead, my father, who must have forgotten us, my father, who hadn’t called back, my father, who must have fished himself another family, another woman whose knees he prayed between. My brother begged her to turn on the lights, but she didn’t want us to see her face, its increasing resemblance to fear. I pretended we lived underground and had lightbulb-heads and were packing for our first trip to the surface. On the plane, I slept with my head leaning against my mother’s and woke with the sun running like a yolk across the window. Buildings toothpicked the sky. It was so humid I could gargle the air and spit it. In our hotel room, my brother and I slept on the floor, my mother on the skin-colored bed. The sheets were so thin they let light into our dreams. Our shadows sharked across the floor. The first night in Jiangsu, I dreamed my mother was kneeling over me, one of her hands balled inside my mouth and the other pressed over my nose, caging my breath in my chest. I woke believing that my tongue had dried into a cricket and leapt out of my mouth, and I crawled to every dust-clotted corner of the room searching for it.