by K-Ming Chang
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I ran upstairs to get my brother’s camcorder and came back down, started filming. When my mother asked what I was doing, I said, Pirating. I was the woman choosing between sides, between side-wounds: Ama and my mother, related by blade. I filmed the back of my mother’s head jutting into the frame, her commentary when the love interest committed suicide (I never liked that actress because she has my eyes), the oil on her hands like sunlight. I wanted to set them on fire, to turn her hands into light-bouquets and capture the smoke onscreen. My mother said, You’ll never be able to sell any of that, and I said I didn’t want to sell her. There was a scene near the end where my mother turned her head to look back at the camera, her face outliving the screen behind her, brighter. She held herself still as if posing for a photo. Behind her, credits ribboning down the black like names of the dead, cueing us to continue. I rewatched the footage later and saw that all the actors were blurred or out of frame, no storyline salvageable. Everything off-focus except my mother’s face, the light speaking what I can’t subtitle, clarifying for the audience: She’s the only one I’ve been watching.
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After I fed Ama’s parable to the 口, its mouth unbuttoned. The hole hummed, spitting pebbles like teeth, and when I pressed my ear to it, I could hear static like a radio, punctuated by the sound of Dayi’s voice. Bits of words, none born whole. I wondered if this was her mouth now, if I had tuned in to the frequency of ghost speech. Beneath us there was a pipeline of voices, intersecting where we stood. Calling down into the hole, I told Dayi that I missed her, that sometimes I felt her fingers pinning words to my tongue, her breath guitaring the strands of my hair. In the morning, I found two letters flapping loose around the yard, spat out by the 口, and I chased them down, my tail perked for the hunt. Pinning them down with my feet, I took the letters home and soaked them in the bathroom sink. In the water, the words thrashed like fish, stilling only when I said them aloud.
*1 Ok, what Ama really said here was foreigner, but I think we know she really means white person, white devil, gwailo, baigui, etc. Substitute your own culturally appropriate term here.
*2 See the irony yet?
*3 Ama really said once a month, but I thought moon would sound more old-timey.
*4 Ama used a slur here—I prefer not to write it.
*5 What is Ama trying to say about my father?
*6 More on this soon!
*7 I don’t know what an ordinary hog looks like, so please feel free to imagine this for me.
*8 Is this a “that’s what he said” joke? Good one, Ama.
*9 I wish I hadn’t just learned the Mandarin word for semen, but here we go. And yes, this story is being told in Mandarin. See: linguistic imperialism.
*10 See: karma.
*11 Enough with the euphemisms. Ew.
*12 Not really sure what this means, but I sense an omen here. Do you? But no woman in my family can be rushed. When someone tells a story, expect ass-to-chair the whole day. She won’t even let me use the toilet. I’ll wet the page.
*13 Typical internalized Confucian patriarchy. Why do we always have to wait for the man to eat? It’s not like they cooked any of what they’re eating. They don’t even do the killing.
*14 Ku, meaning bitter. Li, meaning work or strength. Ku-li. Bitter work. Bitter strength. This is for me to remember.
*15 You’re probably thinking, Wait, does that mean Ah Zheng thinks he’s divine? A god? Is this story Buddhist or Christian? Karma or god? Luckily, Ama seasons this story with a variety of faiths. Whomever you believe in will definitely make a cameo at some point.
*16 Updated the swearing because extremely specific references to certain deities are no longer relevant in our so-called globalized world.
*17 Glad to know that my Ama doesn’t subscribe to the “kill your gays” brand of storytelling.
*18 I’m not a professional translator, okay? This is the best I can do.
*19 A metaphor for the migrant?
*20 See: the beginning.
*21 This part was obviously directed toward my brother, who is sitting by my bed and clearly doesn’t realize it’s a joke and starts nodding all serious because he’s just so weirded out. I mean, who’s about to feed their spunk to the sea?
*22 Okay, so these last paragraphs are my addition, not Ama’s telling. But it’s true, I do dream about Ah Zheng and Old Guang. I prefer this ending, which doesn’t end. I think Ama would say I’m sentimental, that I shuttle every scene to the sea, but I’m the editor here. I’m the one who sees salt as a lineage. I’m the one who’s saying these two were born in one body. This story is just surgery, sewing together what is already belonging.
*23 I cannot confirm the accuracy of this statement.
GRANDMOTHER
Letter III: In which a knot is tied
Dear third daughter,
Your birth came easy to me involuntary as breath. From birth knots were your only form of speech: to say your name you knotted a string in three places you knew all the ways to tangle a thing I predicted your life knotting around your neck I kept so many things away from you jump ropes sewing thread purse straps
Still you came home every day with cinched wrists young branches recruited into bracelets garter snakes scars you could braid your own hair before you could speak tied knots into it one for yes two for no three for don’t bother me when you were hungry you unraveled a knot two if you were thirsty you spoke to me in undoings I hear your wife is a Hakka woman a tour guide in the south that you two are running a hotel now her fingers reading your knots in the dark I hear you buried a pair of scissors together on the beach for the wedding I want to know what you fight about if you ever mention me the mother the summer I took you and your sisters to the far shore the one facing the mainland the ghost-
bridge you asked why so many people once crossed the Strait there was a war a war a war our island was captured for I told you the sea here is sold to the biggest bidder the country where my own mother taught me before crossing any body of water you pay it a coin a bracelet your life
How much do you know about forgetting? When your wife slips a finger into you do you think of it as a birth? Her mouth mentors the dark between your legs she pickles her tongue in you I am not asking because I want to know how you are loved by a woman once I kissed my girlcousin my teeth all rotted the next month flew out of my mouth as flies once I tried to teach you speech pressed your hand to the woodstove waited for you to say let me go your palm sizzling like pork the skin grew back bark your word for mother is missing here’s a story you were born cordless you cut it yourself leashed* to no one born to leave me
I raised all my daughters like the dead: your dead father the first man I married died a red spy born a bastard: the son of a servant & a landlord he had night-sight born with nocturnal eyes he believed rich men should be rewritten without bodies he tied his own father to a fence flayed him with reeds years later your father arrived on my island a boat we didn’t recognize the soldiers brought guns a language
Your father half of a foot gone missing in a war when he was a child on the mainland he stepped on a Japanese landmine his shin shot up speared the sky flesh fountain it made him laugh the pain the doctor puzzled his foot back together. He snuck out every day of bedrest lugged his dead foot he found a cave on the fourth day the clouds shaped like colons inside the dark a girl & her shadow eight-limbed . He assumed she came to meet a man or a moon she taught him how to make shadow puppets on the wall of the cave filtering light through fingers pasting the dark over the night in the morning he crawled home spent days practicing
silhouettes nightly he climbed to the cave his shadow-tutor casting stories onto stone. Most about revenge: stories the boy who grows his foot back twice as large & clawed & your father never made love to the shadow-girl tried once but the girl was cave rock it hurt to enter her one week a rockslide down the mountain he crawled toward the cave saw its mouth gated by boulders he tackled each stone by the time light broke in morning & no one inside when he spoke her name what he thought was her name: his echo never noticed that before. He danced his shadows along the walls she never answered his hands with her own:
When your father told me this story I revised the ending one day the shadow-girl waiting with an oil lamp. She threw it at the entrance to enter the cave he must walk through burn the body that brought him to me when your father met me he shadowed me for days heeled like a bitch broke an umbrella in my fist I said make me a new one he folded it from newspaper oiled so the water leapt off it handle carved from the body of his warpistol he kissed me beneath my skin wasn’t even raining the sun a bullet through us both
* WHAT IF YOUR TAIL IS SOME KIND OF REGROWN UMBILICAL CORD? WHAT IF YOU’RE BEING FED THROUGH IT? I KNOW CORDS DON’T USUALLY GROW OUT OF THE ASS, BUT IF I WERE AN UMBILICAL CORD, I’D WANT TO COME BACK AND AVENGE BEING CUT. WHAT ARE UMBILICAL CORDS FOR, ANYWAY? THEY HYPHENATE TWO BODIES. DO YOU SPEAK THROUGH IT LIKE A TELEPHONE CORD? DOES IT CARRY MEMORY FROM THE MOTHER TO THE BABY? —BEN
GRANDMOTHER
Letter [ ]: In which I am the driver
Dear [ ] daughter, Jiejie, girl I gave to this country,
Today the crotch of my underwear is a landscape painting. The landscape is mud for miles cleft-ass mountains cloudturds. The zhongyi says loose anal sphincter says it’s age but I suspect it’s because your father liked to do dirty things to me. He must have knocked loose a beam in my bowels I let him put it in wherever I couldn’t grow another daughter the zhongyi says I’m beginning to lose motor skills I say I never knew how to drive anyway. He laughs says the body is the motor in this situation says I am the driver in this situation I remember how you learned to drive from that ghostboy whose balls you licked you think I didn’t know heard you joking to your sister about planting his balls in the yard to grow us a son but could you find someone to teach me how to drive? I may shit the seat but I won’t hit anything living
Remember the time you threw a knife to me no at me it perched on your sister let that be a lesson about intention. I eavesdropped on all your bones laboring to make blood your throat diameter of a fishbone nothing could fit down it I injected water into your belly needle stolen from the morphine-addicted widow the one whose doctor husband disappeared with the rest of the men when the rain was raided the police told her to listen to General [ ] [ ]-[ ] on the radio transcribing the night into names of the missing
because they owned guns fists she didn’t tell them she was illiterate I transcribed General [ ] [ ]-[ ] ’s speeches for her when the soldiers came again they told her eat what you’ve written they said a woman is only loyal with a man’s words inside her I watched from the door you were strapped to me batting milk from my breasts the woman knelt in the road the roosters round her preening gungloss round her mouth O O O she swallowed each sheet of my handwriting
I used to think the neighborwoman weak her needles sinning through skin now I pray to replace my blood something sweet & buzzed honey or bees my bones a hive of memory make me foamfooted porridge-headed as your father never thought I’d marry another soldier his sack of government rice pregnant with rats your father with his gold bars love for American rock I watched him hawk his Japanese watch sell his own shoes outside the bars in Taipei eavesdropping on jukeboxes he never knew the lyrics made them up in dialect the province he was born in north of a river cleaving mountains like an ass-cleft when he sang so off-pitch even birds offended shat all over his shoulders now his voice is a gnat I slap off my cheek you always thought I hated him saddling me with shit-stains the river I inherited like debt following me to bed bowl of water where I swim his dentures at night I wrap him in lamp-skin search for a bulb small enough to fit his mouth beneath his eyelids clots of flies I have always wanted to be that empty no need to be anything but living maybe god a hole we keep filling with our dead
I envy the way he watches me TV the way he believes blinking his eyes changes the channel. Sometimes he thinks shutting off the TV means the weather is off the war has switched countries time to halve his skull into bowls pour out the oil of last week he thought the TV a window tried opening the country climb in this week gardening I dug a hole in the ground beneath my chili bush a rehearsal the hole sized for his skull my chili bush will keep the dogs away from his body I’ll home him better than any country the army claiming they’d pay him enough to keep hunger at home every hole is a crown the dead wear save me from what my hands plot* when I let them off the leash of my arms I mine for gods all of them hiding here I’ll dig him here he’ll share a grave with his gold
They always say: cold feet in bed means a man will leave you I have had cold feet my whole life & still no luck
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My tail ticked side to side while I read the fourth letter, beating out of sync with each syllable. Outside, my mother approached the holes with a butterfly net in her hand, prodding dirt-mouths with the rod of it. But my holes were not traps: They didn’t shut around squirrels or stray cats, they weren’t triggered by anything but my voice. When they heard me coming, they lolled open, begging to be fed, and I could smell the rust on their breath, the blood. Sometimes, when they were bored, they inhaled birds out of the sky, sucking in a whole flock and spitting the bones at the moon. When my mother walked through the yard, the holes grew snails inside their mouths like blisters. When she tried to rebury the holes, they grew back in the morning, camouflaged in hats of moss.
I sat on the letter to hide it from her. My tail pinned it down, flattening all of Ama’s words into the same sound. When my mother came in with the butterfly net, a hole gouged in it from the time my brother tried catching a raccoon, I asked her why I’d never met my fourth aunt. Whenever my mother called her sister, they spoke only in sentence-shards. My mother looked down, tearing the net off the rod like a wig, crumpling the fabric in her hands and tossing it over my head like a veil. There were dead flies floating in the folds of the netting, wings straining light through their mesh.
You look like a bride, she said, turning me toward my reflection in the window. I made your fourth aunt’s veil out of a mosquito net. When she got married, it rose and flew her away. I said that protection from malaria was very important in a marriage. She laughed, plucking the net from my head, balling it in her hands. When she released it out the window, it opened into a parachute with no body attached, a ghost we watched go.
* SHE’S BEEN DIGGING HOLES IN HER YARD TOO? AREN’T YOU WORRIED SHE’LL COME UP THROUGH THE ONES YOU’VE DUG? THAT SHE’S LOOKING FOR YOU? SHE’S DIGGING A HOLE FOR YOUR AGONG. I WOULD BE WORRIED. VERY WORRIED. DOES HE HAVE LIFE INSURANCE? AND WHAT DOES SHE MEAN BY “PLOTTING”? I HOPE SHE JUST MEANS SHE’S PICKED UP GARDENING. —BEN
MOTHER
Journey to the West (II)
Arkansas 1980
It’s summer and the sky is vomiting. It rains in chunks, like that time you were sick and threw up into your pillowcase and I sat all night beside you, emptying it every hour, wringing the sweat from your hair.
I calculate that the road trip from Arkansas to California is four days total if we don’t pee. Jie and Ba and Ma and I are going to do it in thre
e. Four is a bad omen to begin on. Our new city is east of LA, where some cousin of a cousin of a cousin has promised Ma a job at a skirt factory. Ba will be a fry cook. When the river here gets thick in the middle, he fries us a pyre of riverfish, blackening the bones till they’re strands of our hair.
After three years, we paid off our debts—half in labor, half in gold—to the missionaries who did our papers, who bought our plane tickets and rented us the house that’s so thick with mice we call them the carpet, who convinced the Sunday school to let Jie stay even after she began taking money with her mouth. She told me she was blowing boys in the woods, and for years I imagined she was blowing them up, shearing open their bellies and burying dynamite inside, necklaces of boymeat dangling from the trees. The Sunday school teacher called to tell Ma about Jie’s carnal appetite, but Ma misheard penis as peanuts and said no, Jie doesn’t have allergies.
We pack in the dark, take the moon with us. Leave the frying pan with its bottom scarred like a palm. The doorknobs we sold for nickels. Take the bucket we used to shower with, threading water through one another’s bones, going to bed wet as newborns. Ma stewed riverfish in our leftover bathwater. We taste of what has touched us. Ma tells us not to take everything, as if we own more than these bodies. Ba spends the rest of the gold on a used car, domestic, painted the purple of a bruised knee. Jie drives, and the ghostboy who taught her is standing on our driveway the entire time we load up. He’s the same sand color all over, his hair matching his lips. The boy tries to kiss her goodbye, just like the pastor did, but Jie veers her face away and the kiss sprawls dead on her neck.