by K-Ming Chang
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After two hours of the TV broadcast, Jie said she’d started seeing severed heads everywhere. In the bathroom mirror, she thought her head was attached to nothing, rising off her shoulders like steam. When she saw a birthday balloon in the sky, she assumed someone had let go of their head. Ma said, Enough about heads. We ate leftovers from Ba’s restaurant, lemon chicken that tasted like soap, broccoli with sauce-sagged heads. Ba dragged his sleeves through the oyster sauce, a slug-slick trail from plate to lap. Ma pinched him hard on the wrists until he noticed.
At the dinner table, Ma asked Ba if he’d remembered to put on his underwear. Ba’s hands shook too much, so Jie and I sat on either side of him and took turns feeding him. Ma asked again if he’d remembered to wear underwear. Ba looked up, eyes unfixed, teeth typing on his lower lip. Jie blew on the spoon. She lifted it to Ba’s lips. Make a mouth, she said. But his tongue was smoke and didn’t know shape.
Did you remember to put on your underwear, Ma said again. Ba looked. He’d put his hands down but couldn’t remember where. He stood up from the table and unbuttoned his pants, penis lolling out. It looked like a plucked neck, a bird stunned for slaughter. Ma set down her bowl. She reached across the table and clamped Ba’s penis between her chopsticks, squeezed. Don’t check when you’re at the table, she said. I will cut you off and boil the bone out. Ba trembled, his pants thin from years of scrubbing the stains from his lap, the fabric almost see-through at his crotch. We watched Ma choke his penis with her chopsticks until its tip purpled. Ba’s eyes like the fish’s, lidless.
That’s when Jie went into the kitchen for the knife. The wooden handle was sweat-softened, fingerprinted. Ma used it to sliver guavas in the summer, telling us not to swallow the seeds when we’re fertile. How do we know when we’re fertile? I said. When you want most to be touched, Ma said. We never saw her touch Ba unless she was knocking on his head with a spoon or dressing him in the morning, calling him a ______ who couldn’t even thread his neck through a hole.
I was standing on Ma’s side of the table, opposite of Ba, twisting the skin of her wrist so she’d let go of the chopsticks. Then there was a knife in the soft hinge of my elbow. Coins of blood on the table, the same color as the tablecloth, so at least I wasn’t staining anything. Ma dropped Ba’s penis, let it bounce off the lip of the table.
Jie stared at my elbow, then at her own palms, not knowing which to apologize for. I felt no ache, just a presence beneath the skin like a splinter. I reached down to withdraw the knife, but Ma said: Don’t. Ma tied her quilting squares into a tourniquet, yanked it out an hour later. By then, I’d gotten used to its permanence inside me, a new bone. When she drew it out, I felt the absence more than anything, a hole where something once homed.
Ma left the morning after. She’d said nothing about the penis, my sister, my arm. Dinner still on the table from the night before, flies redacting the fish from its bones. She’s gone three days before Ba notices, and even then he only asks why we’ve been eating porridge for every meal. Jie and I walk him to the bus, adjusting his hairnet before he boards, telling him to get off the bus when the road runs out of trees.
On the fourth day, Jie and I forget to wash the spoons and bowls. Collars of mold strangle everything. Ba and Jie and I eat in front of the TV, scooping cold rice porridge with our hands. We look like a litter of pigs, suckling on our fingers like this. We watch Monkey King cartoons on the Chinese channel, translating the Mandarin into Ba’s first dialect, watching his mouth mime ours. Ba laughs at the sound effects, what we don’t have to translate: In this episode, the Monkey King gets buried alive under a landslide, and the little rocks rivering down the mountain sound like gunfire. Pa pa pa pa pa pa, Ba says. Then the Monkey King gets rescued by a monk who asks for a debt paid in bones, so the Monkey King castrates himself and hands the monk his penis and says, Enough? Ha ha ha ha ha ha, Ba says.
When Ba is asleep, there’s only the news. That’s when we see Ma’s factory on fire. We recognize the blacked-out windows. The whole factory haloed in flame, smoke we can’t smell. There’s a close-up of ten hoses spraying the flame at different angles, each one leashed to a different little man. Jie says the hoses look like alien penises. While she laughs, I watch the stretchers, scuttling in and out of the building like beetles.
I wait for Jie to tell me. To tell me Ma must be inside there. To say Ma is ash. Or she can’t be, she is in our old house stroking a picture of our three sisters, she is on her knees in the next room praying, she is in the kitchen scraping away the mold that is our fault, she is undressing Ba in the bath and oiling his back.
The reporter on-scene speaks too fast to understand. We scan the screen for a body count, but there is only the day’s temperature in the left corner. Jie shuts off the TV and we watch the last ghost-strand of static wriggle in the center of the black screen, then flatline.
Jie tells me to go to bed. She thumbs the broken seam in our sofa, tugs at the thread. Go to bed, she says. I ask if Ma is inside there. She says, Sleep. I ask if she’s sure it’s the right factory. I mean the wrong factory. Jie shuts off the light, and we sleep together on the sofa, her chest pressed so deep into my back I feel her heart punching my shoulder blades, harder than anything I’ve ever been hit with, louder than what we know how to say.
Have you ever wished me dead? I forgive you for that, just as I want you to forgive me for what’s next. Ma comes home after six days, two days after the fire is put out. She hadn’t been at work. She hadn’t even left our block. She slept in the bathroom of the dollar store, locking it from the inside. All day she walked up and down the aisles, fingering pots of plastic putty and flipping the glazed pages of magazines, pretending she could read them. Finally, the employee told her to purchase or leave. Ma says yuanfen kept the fire caged from her, kept her corralled in the dollar store until the fire was done.
When Jie and I first hear Ma knocking, we think it’s a debt collector and hide behind the couch. We know it isn’t the police: Ma has no ID that can confirm her identity. She has no face in this country, only a fire’s record of her body. Then we hear Ma calling our names, Ba’s. Her fist flying into the door like a dumb bird. We let her shout. We let her keep knocking with no one answering. It’s an entire minute before Jie climbs up from behind the couch, unlatches the door, presses her lips to our mother’s knees.
It was easier to want her living when she was dead. We wanted one more day of missing her. We wanted it back, our grief—we wanted it real—but grief was just another thing we lost, another thing she took from us.
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Sometimes I thank shangdi you won’t ever leave home for a man. You can leave me for anyone but a man. Jie gets married two weeks after her graduation. The boy is nineteen and Cantonese and works as an auto mechanic at his father’s garage, which is where they first meet. Jie is a serial roadkiller, collecting smashed pigeons on her windshield, daily scraping the dogs and raccoons and squirrels off the fender. When I’m riding with her, that’s how I calculate our speed: in miles per dead thing. Jie finally decides that something must be wrong with the car. Maybe it’s some kind of animal magnet. Maybe she needs new brakes. So she drives it down to the garage, and the boy is there with a wrench, looking at her in the reflection of his greased hands.
Jie gets married on a Saturday. She stole a bolt of sateen from her second factory job and I sewed her dress from it: It was sheer as rain, the kind of blue that looked green in indoor light, a border color. The morning of her wedding, Ma and Ba and I walk to the Baptist church and sit on the ass-dented pews and wait for the priest to speak. It’s morning and the boy’s family is also there, his three little sisters identically dressed in red sweaters and jean skirts. The sisters all stole a different part of their mother’s face: The youngest one took the flat eyebrows, the middle one got the mouth, the third one’s hair is already silver. The father is
there too, in his mechanic uniform with a wrench in one hand, like he’s waiting for something to use it on. Ma refuses to meet them, so we sit on opposite sides of the church and don’t look for too long. Ma says, Don’t marry a man with more oil in his hands than blood. Ba’s hands are so greasy from the restaurant, he can’t work open our doorknob. Jie says that engine oil is different from food oil, and it doesn’t matter anyway because the boy is smart and going to college, and his oldest brother is a surgeon who once saved a girl with a hook-shaped heart.
Jie gets married in a month without rain. From the kitchen, Ma says it’s an omen, says something about no children, but Jie says she doesn’t want kids anyway. At night, kneeling in the bathroom, she once tried to insert rat poison into herself, but she got it up the wrong hole. Now your ass is rat-free, I said, and she laughed. Another time she drank insecticide and got diarrhea for so many days that our sewage must have dyed the sea brown and bloody. For years I thought babies began as insects, and that’s why you drank insecticide to get rid of them. They began as gnats flying in your belly, and then they matured into flies and then into moths, flying out of the dark of your body and into the light that would incinerate its wings.
Jie gets married and the boy hasn’t hit her yet. He’ll do it only once, when he’s home from work and doesn’t like the way she’s asleep on their couch, curled like some kind of animal in his house. She wakes but hasn’t recognized him yet. There’s a palm print on her cheek that will turn autumnal and then shed.
When the priest asks if there are any objections to the marriage, I stand up. Ma reaches up for my skirt, tugs me down to the pew. I don’t know why I’m standing, only that I’ve spoken something. It sounds like no or go.
Before her wedding, we sit together on the mattress we share for the last time and I ask her why she has to get married so soon, why can’t she wait till I make some money and we can live together, find a place with a room for Ba. We can take him, I say. We can take care of him all day and work at night in a cemetery or something. We’ll buy bars of gold and bury them together. I tell her this with my hands in her hair, braiding it so it’ll wave on its own tomorrow. If I do it wrong it’ll frizz like bad wiring, but I always do it right, oiling my hands beforehand.
Jie says, I don’t want him. I don’t want either of them, and she turns around so fast I pull a handful of her hair out. I’m braiding it to the air. That’s how I know she really wants to leave, when she turns around to me: her eyes bright from the pain of my braiding. She smells like my hands. She smells like the vinegar we use to clean Ba’s piss from the floor.
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At the front of the church, Jie kisses the boy and I make a fist around Ma’s hands. While she walks back down the aisle with the boy who hasn’t smiled yet, Ma pets my knuckle-bones in her lap, the two of us still here, still sitting as everyone else stands up to cheer.
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Jie gets a job painting advertisements onto vans. The latest is a two-day project, a giant crab that needs to span the whole side of the minivan. It’s for a seafood supply chain that recently got sued for polluted fish. Jie hires me to help her paint the giant crab, which needs to smile and wear a tuxedo and look like it is completely not poisonous.
We use a mix of house paint and spray paint, wear masks to avoid inhaling fumes. We learn from Ma, whose lungs on the X-ray look like nibbled cheese, like some rodent is burrowing a home inside her. Ba has bad lungs too, but that’s from the war, the piece of shrapnel that’s still nested in his chest and once set off the metal detector Jie and I made. It comforts me, that if he was ever buried I could locate him with a radio and some wire, no gravestone necessary. No need for aboveground grief.
Jie traces the shape of the crab with permanent marker and I fill it in. Orange first, then black for the shadowing. For practice, Jie and I spray-paint orange crabs all over the street, some of them lopsided or missing legs, some of them looking like stains. Sometime in the afternoon, while the sun is pearling the sweat on our skin, the spray-painted crabs stand up. They walk up and down the street on their half-assed legs, limping in circles and mincing the gravel. Jie and I run after them, flip them onto their backs so they’re clawing at air, cutting the clouds. There are two dozen in total, two dozen crabs we’ve drawn on the street and traced into meat. I say we should sell the crabs, but they’re too strange-limbed to be eaten, too botched to breed. Jie decides they’d make good pets, so we fill a garbage bag with hose-water and toss each of the crabs inside, knotting it at the neck.
When the van’s painted, she drives away inside it, leaves me with the cans and brushes and stencils. The crabs awake in her passenger seat, pincers snipping holes in the plastic bag. When we boil them that night, their meat dissolves into salt-foam, and inside their bellies are baby teeth, all the teeth we lost and swallowed in the dark, afraid that Ma would see our parts coming loose and send us back to the factory.
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At home, Ma is asleep on a stool in the kitchen, her hands in the sink, her palms a litany of calluses. Alone on my mattress for the first time, I told the ceiling I’d leave Ma soon, find a man I can steer out of this city, a man who can snuff the sun out with his thumb.
In the kitchen, I can hear Ma struggling to tug the thread of her breath up her throat. After breathing all the cleaning chemicals and the factory air, Ma’s lungs cringed to fists and beat at her ribs. When she needs someone to unsnag her breath, I fill a bowl with hot water and push her head an inch from the surface. The steam speaks for us. Her head bucks against my palm, but I press harder. Sometimes I want to sink her head into the water, remind her of the river, but I’m too afraid she’ll become a fish and wriggle out of my fingers. It’s more a punishment to keep her in this body, ache-lunged and coughing, skin worn thin as a lampshade.
It’s not night yet, but Ma prefers the kitchen dark, says her eyes have never been native to light. When she wakes, her mouth opens before her eyes. She says, Jie, and I don’t correct her. She gets up from the stool and finishes the dishes. I do the drying. Ba’s not home yet, but he’s already on the bus, counting the stops with his shirt buttons. At every stop, he unbuttons one. When the shirt’s all the way open, the sweat of his chest beaconing through, he knows it’s time to get off.
When Ma plunges her hand into the sink, groping for the bowl, she grabs the blade-end of a knife instead, releasing her blood into the water. Taking her hands out of the sink, I dry them on my shirt. I don’t know why I’m rescuing her hands from the water when they once tried to d____ me in the r___. In a year I’ll leave. I’ll marry your father, any man I can ride away from here. The irony: We’re the same as Ma. That’s what Ma did, marry out of her country, marry out of her body.
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You only know her as disappeared, but your fourth aunt was the first one to hold me when I was born: I practiced latching on her thumb, crying when I couldn’t suck anything out but blood. Her absence now is the size of the sky. The only thing that fills it is night. At night, I watch your yard-holes gaping for the moon to descend into their mouths like a nipple, fill them with milklight.
Two nights after her wedding, she came back to pack the last of her things. Jie said they were driving to Reno for the honeymoon soon, and I told her not to gamble anything she wasn’t willing to lose. Folding the denim skirts she’d sewn on Ma’s Singer, Jie kept her eyes down on the seams and said she never intended to lose anything.
I told her she could leave most of her things here—her fake jade bangles that were just glass painted with green nail polish, the mannequin hand she stole from the factory and French-manicured, and that Ma almost threw away because she thought we were using it to masturbate. The soda can tabs she liked to pick up off the sidewalk and pocket, the coins she stole from public fountains and didn’t spend out of respect for what had been wished on them, the sha
rds of a tortoiseshell headband she once broke during a fistfight with another factory girl, though she couldn’t remember what they were fighting over, only that she tore out the girl’s ponytail, flapping open her scalp to the bone. A sun-scoured book stolen from the Montebello Library, a book she couldn’t even read but that had a cover she liked: two blonde girls painted from behind, almost identical except for the angle of their heads, standing in a field full of some ugly species of flesh-colored flower with petals that looked like foreskin.
One of the girl’s heads was half-turned, painted in profile, as if she was going to say something, something to make the other girl stay and watch morning make it here alive. Jie never said why she stole it, except once when she said the field reminded her of the island, reminded her of the time we thought we were being chased by a feral mountain dog but it had only been our own two-headed shadow, and when we finally stopped, we were in some other city where we had no Ma or Ba, where we were only sisters. When she asked if the cover reminded me of the island too, I knew she was asking me something else. But I only answered that there hadn’t been any blonde people on the island.
Jie packed everything, which meant she wasn’t coming back from the honeymoon, and that night we slept facing each other like we used to, the dark a third body between us, our daughter. From the window came the moon, a buoy we both held on to. I could smell the horse-oil in her hair, the boy on her breath: Her husband was picking her up in the morning, and then they would be in Nevada, the state we had crossed to get here, where the sun looked like a half-peeled orange and the dry air knifed out your lungs.