by K-Ming Chang
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Dayi was my first aunt, the eldest of my mother’s half-sisters. Ama’s letter said her first daughter was born to be dead, a ghost in future tense, so I was expecting to pick up a corpse. But when we picked her up at the airport, she was not made of ash. The first thing she said to us was that there’d been no geese. She’d read somewhere that flocks of geese flew into the airplane engines, got minced into pie-meat, and that’s how crashes happen. It was the first time she’d ever flown, and she wondered why the windows didn’t open. My mother said there were no geese migrating until winter. And I said there was no air up there, only sky, which was not made of air but water. If she opened the window, the plane would flood and everyone would drown. Just like you almost did, I almost said, but my tail told me it wasn’t time for a confrontation.
In the car, my mother watched Dayi in the rearview mirror. They had rhyming faces: same crow-colored hair that revealed its blue when the light inflected it. Same eyes: sap-soft at room temperature. The left eye and the right eye were siblings, and you could only speak to them one at a time. My mother was lighter than all her sisters, slicking so much horse-oil on her skin that the sun slid right off her.
Dayi was coming to live with us because of her frequent strokes: There was a bird in her brain that laid eggs of blood. My mother offered to take care of her in our house, even though everything my mother took care of went rabid. Her apples grew teeth instead of seeds, and our birch’s branches curved down into claws. We’ll take care of her, my mother said, and it sounded like a threat. There was a vengeance to the way my mother prepped the sofa, punching the pillow into shape, sealing the cracks between cushions with duct tape. When I was born, I stole a mother from her, she said. And it’s better to be born dead than with that kind of debt.
My mother prepared for Dayi’s arrival like a pregnancy, locking away sharp or flammable things, compiling a list of English names for her to answer to.
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We brought Dayi to Costco. I told her it was the only place in the country where you could buy both your cradle and your casket. Your life span was the length of an aisle. Carts so big they looked like animal cages rattling across the concrete floor. I sat cross-legged in the cart and humped the bars until my mother told me to stop acting deranged. I said I was pretending to be a tiger in its cage.
While my mother prodded shrink-wrapped beef, thumbing the meat as if checking for its pulse, Dayi pushed me down an aisle wide enough for an airplane. The ceiling high as a church’s. I told Dayi this was a place of worship: sacred were the super-packs of socks on sale, so cheap we wished we had as many feet as a millipede. Holy were the baked hams, fat as infants, waiting to be adopted into our bellies. Dayi and I opened every door in the freezer aisle: peas, pies, poultry. Americans freeze everything, I said, and when she asked why, I said it was because their mouths were probably microwaves.
Buy my casket at Costco, Dayi said. Better yet, don’t spend anything. Feed my body to the parking lot pigeons. The Costco pigeons landed on the pavement in bulk and panthered across the lot, pouncing on our feet. Outside, my mother bought us hot dogs with a coupon and we slicked them with mustard, eating the buns and feeding the meat to the pigeons.
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Dayi was born without blood. A doctor had to kill a goat and use tubes to siphon goatblood into Dayi’s empty veins. But the doctor accidentally pumped too much blood into her, turning her red-hard and bloated as an apple. When Ama bathed her in a bucket, she bobbed ass-up in the water. Every day, Dayi wore something red: a petal she slid under her thumbnail, a handkerchief, a red thread around her wrist, a scar on her belly where her blood was shepherded in. Even her favorite foods were red: pig’s blood cake, char siu buns, eels that grew scarlet gills after eating the corpsemeat of the drowned. Whatever she touched could only blush: Green guavas turned the color of biblical apples. Once, when she was a girl, a mutt that bit her on the ass became a bloodhound. When she drank out of the river, it unraveled like a ruddy ribbon all the way down to the sea. The missionaries called her blessed, a girl who could turn water to the color of wine, but Dayi never felt that way. Her molars grew in the color of raw meat, and her bathwater looked like a butcher’s sink.
After Dayi touched three of her classmates by accident, the teachers told her to wear gloves to school. They were made of some animal’s hide, skin on the inside and fur on the outside.
Dayi was converted by a Chinese missionary who wore two belts at a time—one to keep his pants up, the other to strip off and beat with. He taught the Bible in beatings: If they misspoke a verse, he flayed the brown off their backs.
On Sundays, there were tent-sermons and cheese sandwiches. There were buckets of lemonade and the American missionaries’ children, named for the shade they became in the sun: The tallest son was Terracotta, the twins were called Blood, the little blonde girl was Rosewater. Of all the missionary children, Terracotta most resembled his color and went sparrow hunting with Dayi and her cousins, even brought along his own pocket of stones. Dayi and Terracotta shucked off the tail feathers, tore off wings that wore no meat, and grilled the torsos on abandoned sections of chicken wire heated by the sun. Cooked on wire, the sparrows’ meat blackened in a grid pattern, but it tasted better that way: They could pretend they were eating something bred in captivity, something caged to collect fat. Dayi and Terracotta could pretend they shared a word for hunger.
Once, he kissed her. They were waist-deep in a river, snakes perming around their ankles. Terracotta taught her to skip stones, but Dayi preferred throwing them in deep, watching the snakes scatter in rings. She liked the way things sank. When he kissed her in the middle of the river, she thought of Jesus walking on water, the river cooling to glass around their bodies. Along the banks, black reeds fringed the water like eyelashes, thick and blinking in the wind. He bent her against the mudbank, buttoned his mouth to her breast. He pinned her by the palms like Jesus, but the holes in her appeared elsewhere. She thought of taking off her gloves, turning him the color of gunshot. She thought: If this is not divinity, then it must be death.
After that night by the river, Dayi checked her belly hourly, tapping it like a melon, not sure what she was listening for. The rest of that summer, Terracotta spent more hours with his father in the churchyard, building birdhouses everyone thought were bird traps. When the priests realized the locals had been stealing eggs and hatchlings from the nests and eating them, they dismantled each house. Terracotta grew two feet in one summer. In another year, he would grow a beard. Cheek-rash began to spread among the local girls, until almost every one of Dayi’s schoolmates wore the same pattern of redness on their faces, necks, inner thighs. When Dayi was midwife to one of Terracotta’s bastards, she waited for the mother to fall asleep before bringing the child to her breast, pretending it was hers. The baby responded to every sound but its name, turning its head to birdcall, the telephone, rain.
I was born with a red birthmark draped over my belly like lacework. Dayi called this karma, said my skin was her punishment for that day by the river. Dayi promised she’d pay to have it removed when I turned fifteen, no matter how expensive it would be. She said it was a price she’d been waiting to pay.
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Dayi was fathered by a ghost. None of us had ever met Ama’s first husband. We knew his punishment but not his crime: He was in prison for five years before he strangled himself with a shoelace, knotting it like a bow tie beneath the apple-core of his throat. My brother said the crime must have been something violent, like setting someone on fire or smuggling bombs up his sleeves. But my mother said he was just another accused Communist, that the police threw his body into a river with the shoelace still noosed around his neck, which is why no one in this family was allowed to wear anything with laces. You’ll summon his spirit through your shoes, my mother said. She w
as a self-appointed shoe surgeon, snipping through our sneaker laces with kitchen shears, taping them where they’d once been tied. Just in case he came to me in ghost form, I wore a pair of scissors on a string around my neck. I wanted to be the one to cut his throat free of its shoelace, the knot he pulled tight while gagging against it, his tongue exiting his mouth as steam. Dayi called him my Red father, and I translated his image literally: a man with a red beard, a pyre made of red logs, a sky scraped red by smoke, a river slit like a vein, Dayi on our sofa the first day we took her home, shelling red-dyed watermelon seeds with her teeth, telling me she once saw a girl die like a melon, a girl who was reported to the police as Red, who ran away into the mountains and drank an entire river until her belly unbuttoned.
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After school, Ben walked home with me to meet Dayi. When I’d told Ben about Dayi’s ability to summon red, she asked me for proof. I said I hadn’t seen it yet, but it had to be true. She spent every morning dressing her hands like wounds, wrapping them in gauze before putting on gloves.
Ben and I stood on the sofa, watching Dayi in the kitchen. She was dicing something red into something redder. Then her legs let go of their bones. She fell forward, cracking her forehead on the counter as she came down. Blood sashing across her whole torso. I tried to shout, but my voice calcified in my mouth. Ben and I ran to Dayi’s body, holding her head off the floor and pinching her cheeks.
My mother drove her to the emergency room, and Dayi refused to undress. The doctor let her keep her clothes on under the gown, and the nurse cut a slit in her long sleeve to draw her blood. They better not ask me to shit into anything, Dayi said. I shit for no one. The doctors said it was a stroke. She was transferred to a room where machines charted her brainwaves into mountain ranges. There were bags of fluid feeding the veins in her arms. She was discharged early, given a warning: No high-stress activities. No sodium. When the doctor asked if we had a history of heart disease, my mother said no, we have no history, just stories, just a long record of surviving our countries.
Dayi’s left side was paralyzed for a week after. She could only walk in circles, turn corners. Her dead thumb slumped forward, and I liked to flick it back and forth with my tongue.
Our word for stroke meant the middle wind. When the school called, asking why I had missed so many days, I said, My aunt suffered two winds.
At home, Dayi still refused to take off her clothes when my mother tried bathing her, so my brother and I dragged her into the backyard, hosing her down with all her clothes on. Her clothes so cheap the color slid right off the cloth. She spat water at us and swore the whole time, said there was no reason for a woman like her to be clean.
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Dayi told me stories: How Ama carved faces into the fruit to make all her daughters laugh, how one of the neighbor boys accidentally killed one of her chickens with a fastball and Ama made him eat the baseball in front of her. How she worked the oxen till their hip-bones were lace-holed, how she cured colds by stirring dung into tea. How Ama taught my mother how to tie a string around the waist of a dragonfly and leash the other end to her finger, teaching her to see the sky through the fogged glass of its wings. My mother said she didn’t remember any of these stories. She began to suspect they weren’t really sisters: We’d picked up the wrong woman at the airport and the real Dayi had turned into a goose and flown out of the plane engine. One night, my mother called my fourth aunt to confirm.
Jie, my mother said. How do we know it’s her? My fourth aunt told her to bring Dayi to water. Anything that resembled a river. You need to see her inside a memory.
After dinner, we drove to the birthmark-shaped reservoir behind 7-Eleven. Shit floated on the surface of the reservoir, though we couldn’t tell if the turds were human or not. A few uncles tried fishing here, but all they reeled in were condoms bloated like jellyfish, bike chains, plastic bags, lighters. When we drove there after dinner, Dayi stood away from the water, gripping the fence with both hands.
My brother refused to go because he said boys went into the trees around the reservoir and dipped their dicks in and out of each other’s mouths. When I asked why, he said, That’s just how they speak. I imagined their penises as instruments: You blew to make them sing. I looked into the trees but couldn’t see any boys holding penises up to their lips like flutes.
Near the shore, a goose pecked each of her babies on the head. When I came nearer to count them, the mother turned to watch me. She ran at my legs, wings flicking out like knives. Dayi let go of the fence, fisted the goose’s neck in one hand, and flung it back into the water.
What convinced my mother they were related: Not the way Dayi shied from the shore, held on to the fence like a mother. It was her hand twist-tying the goose’s neck. My mother remembered the only thing she’d ever seen Dayi do: Stick a pig in the throat. The throat is where its heart is located. They’d been girls then. Skirts blackened by rain, legs bladed to cut cane. The pig ran into the fields, blood bannering behind it. Strands of blood whipped so high, the sky was red for days and everyone thought it had miscarried the sun.
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When she lived on the island, Dayi had three miscarriages. After each one, she ate a whole papaya with seeds, prayed to Guanyin, bought all new clothes, cleaned. Her longest pregnancy lasted one summer. The doctor told her to eat only things with seeds or eggs, so she ate only watermelon, the teeth-colored seeds of guavas, the ovaries of fish.
When the city bought her land, Dayi moved to another house, tin-walled. It was so cheap she knew it must be ghost-owned. She was right: A local boy had died there one summer, stabbed in his sleep by his father. His father, drunk that night and craving pork, mistook him for the family pig, though exactly how this was possible—the pig weighed twice as much as the boy, and pigs don’t sweat the way sons do—no one really understood. The boy’s father later said he knew something was wrong when he stabbed the pig and it made no sound. A pig always died singing its blood. After hearing this story, Dayi stopped cooking pork in that house.
Sometimes she liked to treat this ghost like a son, talking to him at the tail end of night: Hello, pig-boy. I’m sorry your father wanted to eat you. She pictured a boy with hooves. She pictured a baby with ears on top of its head. Dayi wanted the pig-boy to stay. Whenever the neighbors retold the story of the murdered son, she always stopped them short of saying his name. As long as she never knew it, she could name him herself. She gave him her maiden name, a homonym for red. It was a relief to love something already dead.
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My mother said Dayi needed to get a job that would explain her gloves, so Dayi got a gig at the strip mall acupuncture parlor. She showed me her fake license, the laminated card printed with someone else’s name. When she took me to work, I sat at the reception counter with my legs crossed, my tongue greening on the guava candies I stole from the reception desk’s glass ashtray.
Once, when a customer came in asking about hand jobs, she thought it meant any job you did with your hands. It’s called a strip mall for a reason, my mother said. Learn to take off everything but your gloves.
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In every version of the story, Mazu is the daughter of a fisherman. When she didn’t cry at birth, they named her Mo Niang: unmouthed maiden. Mazu taught herself to swim, held stones in her hands to practice winging through the water with carried weight. She could project herself in dreams, swimming out to save men from the mouths of storms. When she died saving her father and brother from a typhoon, she was rebuilt as a red statue. I asked Dayi if she really was the reincarnation of Mazu. She said no, we were descended from pigs: Oxen could plow and chickens could lay eggs, but hogs were born for slaughter, ferried from birth-hole to mouth-hole to shit-hole. I asked what happened to Mazu after she died, and Dayi said: America is a kind of afterlife. Look
ing at old photos of Dayi back on the island, I almost believed it: She stood on the beach, mouth full of light, braid heavy as an anchor. She was pregnant in almost all of them, her belly casting a shadow no body would fill.
In the last photo we took of her, Dayi held a nail clipper in her mouth. She’d learned not to rely on her hands, to sew with a needle tucked between her two front teeth, tongue authoring the knot. I can do everything but wipe my own ass, she said, laughing. No one’s got a tongue long enough for that.
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Whenever Dayi fell asleep, my brother and I played our game: Whoever could fit the largest thing in her nostril without waking her was the winner. The first time, we shimmied a bobby pin into her nose before she snorted awake, oinking. After that, my brother called her Pig Aunty.
The biggest thing we could ever fit inside her was the metal rape whistle my mother kept under her mattress. When Dayi breathed out of her nostril, the whistle wailed her awake and my mother came running into the living room with her cleaver raised, asking where the rapist was.
Another time, I fit three of my fattest fingers into one nostril and told my brother I had reached her brain and was feeling it for ripeness. What’s it made of? he said, and I said, Birds, a battalion of beaks pecking away my fingertips. Rescinding my finger from her nostril, I pulled out a nosebleed by accident, kept unreeling the red ribbon of her memory.