Had I known of Empire of Glass’s existence, I may never have returned to China after Li-Ming’s death. I may have been too disillusioned to believe China could retain something of the old in the new, that the woman I knew may be there yet, waiting at the top of Coal Hill for me to join her beneath that sickly Scholar Tree, to hand her an ending, close the loop. But I’ll explain more of that later.
For most of its existence, Empire of Glass was hidden beneath the living room’s futon, discovered by Baba when sweeping away decades of dust. Had he still believed in poetry, still heard the beat of his own poetic heart, he may have studied the pages longer—but he merely kicked it under the bed the way he’d nudge a stray Deshengmen cat out of his path. Not until the days drew nearer to his wife’s memorial, when his daughter moved to Hong Kong and I settled in the U.S., did he feel the oppressive loneliness that comes with age, with living too long in one place, the corners of his apartment edging closer, such that eventually he knelt on the concrete, dug deep beneath that futon he once shared with his wife, and cursed the heavens for smacking his head on the wooden frame. “Here you are, old friend,” he said, rubbing the sore bump, but then again, so much of what I’m telling you is already reimagined, reconfigured so convex angles are made concave, mirrors reflecting other mirrors reflecting an uncertain, setting sun.
The ethical challenge of translating Empire of Glass is not lost on me: this strange, hodgepodge book was Li-Ming’s last gift to me and my implication in its narrative makes me an unusual, if suspect, translator. Yet I expect this was carefully orchestrated—Li-Ming would’ve known of my return for her memorial, the agony on the stray dog’s eyes, the lichen climbing the cemetery’s front wall. She expected me to understand her language as well I could, and to one day provide this translation, which has become her last work, this novel. Li-Ming’s Empire of Glass reflects the desires of poet Stephen Dunn: “Every day, if I could, I’d oppose history by altering one detail.” Li-Ming took this directive one step further, altering enough of her life’s details to completely rewrite the world we expected her to leave us.
For Li-Ming, the world we see with our eyes or touch with our fingers is but one dimension. There’s another perspective, one read between letters and shuffled barefoot over the cold dirt of mountain caves while tempered pines shake off spring snow. And this is where we find a circular, ever-coiling link between beginning and end, that and this, other and self, form and formlessness that is the subject of Taoism, Buddhism, and of course, we’d be remiss not to mention here, Li-Ming’s beloved Tang Dynasty poet, Han Shan—or “Cold Mountain.”
If young men grieve growing old, what do old men grieve?
Li-Ming would’ve rewritten Cold Mountain’s verse to assert that old men—and women!—grieve the beginning. Which is why in the end she returned to hers. And although we carried her there on her backs, the load is much lighter now.
“Lao K”
Beijing, China
2016
Empire of Glass
Kang-Lin
Autumn in Beijing falls like a knife slicing a pig ear—indecisively slippery. Still warm enough to wear skirts, but growing colder, threatening a long winter. That was the day I first heard his name: “Han Shan”—Cold Mountain. He was a person but also a place, a long shadow stretching across a valley, yellow rock faces the shape of bald men’s foreheads. Something larger than you could measure with a bamboo meter-stick or an unspooled ball of yarn. How could a man be a mountain? How could a poet leave no trace except words? I was twelve. We were hunched together, shaking off the impending cold in the Nationalist-era Academy of Sciences with its brick walls and cavernous hallways, in a laboratory hovering over microscopes and examining the cells from a scrape of our cheek’s inner skin. The class outing that day was meant to be the most exciting event of our early lives and, although leaving school for the afternoon was something few were permitted, we weren’t convinced. Our classmate, Jiangwen, with his characteristic dullness, picked his nose in the back corner, incapable of examining anything more than his snot.
We were a strange crew of children, sons and daughters of military cadres and closer than anyone could be—revolution did that—but to us, we cared only whose tin lunch cup was shiniest, who could recite Mao’s verse with the loudest, most sycophantic voice. Simple pleasures, simple minds, my mother would say, and although I didn’t understand the chengyu’s exact meaning, I knew this was an insult. She only used chengyu to embarrass or deride.
“Look!” My best friend Kang-Lin pinched my arm, causing me to lift my eye off the lens, momentarily blinded by the immensity of the world around us. She pushed my head onto her microscope.
Look: Kang-Lin’s cells were beautifully alive, kaleidoscopic. Mine simply rested on the slide, dead and dull, as if never animate to begin with.
“They’re beautiful,” I admitted. This didn’t surprise me. Everything about Kang-Lin sparkled. That’s why we loved her.
“Can I see yours?” Kang-Lin asked, expecting my cells would be equally wondrous.
“I think there’s something wrong with my eyepiece.”
Kang-Lin pushed me aside, leaning over and straining to take a look.
“What’s wrong, Li-Ming?” Teacher Liang interrupted from the front of the room. She had a white, moon-shaped face and hated my mother so made me feel second-rate by assigning me additional after-school cleanup duties or grading my tests extra harshly. I couldn’t admit to Teacher Liang my cells looked less than vivacious, especially when compared to Kang-Lin’s. This would only prove I was indeed the offspring of once-Nationalist scum, no matter how much my mother insisted she’d merely signed her name to the Nanjing Nationalist Youth League because her teacher threatened her with a beating if she didn’t. Whenever I told Teacher Liang my mother’s excuse, she said, “I could’ve taken the lashes of ten thousand whips before joining the loathsome enemy.”
Her heels snipped the concrete as she approached. Everything in the building echoed and moaned, alive and yet on the verge of death, much like our city. Teacher Liang stood over me, her shadow dampening my spirit, even at the cellular level.
“I think I’m dead inside,” I said. This was the truth.
Teacher Liang laughed. “Did you hear that class? Li-Ming thinks she’s dead inside.” She leaned over and her lily perfume failed to mask the fact she hadn’t been to the communal showers in a week. As I held my breath, she lifted me by my shoulder, but I was too heavy so my arms lay flack, feet firmly planted. Never had I been so good at staying put.
“Lift your arms,” she nudged.
I relented, raising my arms above my head but when I did, my jacket buckled at my neck, pinching my spine.
“Now make a starburst with your palms.”
I followed her instructions even though my jaw clenched, my teeth ached to bite her hand.
“You’re moving, so you’re alive,” she said, smugly proving her point. Still holding my jacket and pinching my neck, she peered over the class’s heads, chin pointed in defiant superiority, so many faces looking expectantly for guidance, faces and names I’ve forgotten even though we were everything to one another then, calling one another “Comrade” and believing together we’d prove the Motherland’s might to the world. Little did we know how quickly and eagerly we’d turn against each other, like the wild dogs in Han Shan’s poem who fight to the death over the rarest of bones.1
“Not everything that moves is alive and vice-versa. Cold Mountain says ‘contemplate the void: this world exceeds stillness.’” Kang-Lin piped in.
“Your frivolous words have no place in protest,” Teacher Liang dropped her grip and I felt gravity like a bed springing to catch me from a bad dream.
“My words do too have meaning,” Kang-Lin insisted but Teacher Liang ignored her, reserving her hatred for the children of class scum like me. Kang-Lin’s parents’ roles in the Party protected her from Teacher Liang’s scorn even though we all knew she was restraining herself from slapping Kang-L
in’s dewy cheeks like our physics Professor Shi would to Fat Meng, the chubby boy in Form Five who always ran off with more than his student ration of lunch (an extra mantou, an ear of corn, bowl of tofu curd—all stuffed into the waist of his oversized pants, the curd dripping down his legs in slimy trails visible through the cotton fabric).
Teacher Liang returned to the chalkboard, apparently victorious.
Kang-Lin was unperturbed. As the class quieted and Teacher Liang twirled chalk between her fingers readying for the next lesson, my friend casually wiped her glass slides on the lapel of her checkered cotton shirt. I pictured her cells like squished jellyfish writhing between the plates. Her cells could not die, would always be dancing and bright. And she would always come to my rescue, my dearest friend Kang-Lin, for reasons I couldn’t yet understand. Would I ever? What had I done to deserve her affection and protection?
We’d met when we were seven, both of us fascinated by the fishermen sitting on the moat encircling the Forbidden City every afternoon, how their bait squirmed beneath the murky surface, how only after many hours the line would jig, a fish reeled in on the hand-spooled rig, the fishermen smiling, triumphant as cats.2 Such a small coup, but we loved playing witness. Loved watching the fishermen snap the fish heads in one terse twist, deboning the bodies on a cloth laid out for this purpose, pink-gray flesh and tiny bones stilled and silenced in such a quick, careless gesture. That’s how I fell in love with Kang-Lin, if love is indeed the word. But that’s how it always happens, doesn’t it? We love a person because they love what we love, see the world how we see it. Then we’re side-by-side for some time. Long enough to worry maybe we don’t see the world the same way at all. But that’s a part of the story I’ll get to later. For now, suffice it to say, by the time I leave this world, Kang-Lin will have traveled to Rome, Paris, Istanbul, New York, Tokyo, Singapore, Berlin, and Nairobi. She’ll know a universe outside China. Kang-Lin is fated for great things. She’ll crumple many lovers with the strength of her thighs and fists, tossing their love notes into wastebaskets.
Me? I was a black-hearted girl, daughter of a black-hearted woman. I didn’t yet know: We inherit the deaths created for us long before. Two months, the doctors pronounced, and inside my stomach, the sound of a sheep bleating over a long, shrewd sunset echoed between my bowels. Cancer is a fickle beast. Of course I would die first. Every story always finds its rightful ending—mine, yours, no different. The ending’s always ugly. It’s the beginning we cling to, for obvious reasons. Which is why I started this with the beginning. “Time can conquer all,” I once read; someone famous must have written it. Time. If only we could comprehend time in a non-linear way, like Cold Mountain and Kang-Lin. This was why her cells pulsed with color and movement, why I was a dead person the moment I was declared “alive.”
After Kang-Lin’s outburst, I accidentally belched so loudly Teacher Liang dropped her beloved chalk to the ground where it chattered like winter teeth. She muttered something under her breath.
“What’s that?” Kang-Lin shouted. The entire class turned to face her, heads tilted like shadow puppets behind the curtain. Where are you now, false friends?
“Kang-Lin, let it be known that Huang Li-Ming, the girl you think is your best friend, is crass as a Capitalist,” Teacher Liang referred to me by my given name so that her words grew fangs.
Kang-Ling smiled, proudly exposing wide, straight teeth. On the windowsill beside us, an oblivious magpie rustled its feathers, plucked a fly from an invisible arch in the air, then took to the sky as if flight were a forgone conclusion. Birds: the lucky ones. If I hadn’t been trying to distract myself, I never would’ve noticed the creature. Form asks shadow where to….
“Three black marks on your record today, Huang Li-Ming,” Teacher Liang announced. “And four for you, Ms. Smart Mouth,” she nodded at Kang-Lin who was still smiling as if she knew the secrets of the greatest Taoists ever to climb Tian T’ai. I should’ve known she’d lead me down paths with no ends. That to seek an ending is to fall into the beginning and start all over again. The circular madness of koans: the sound of one hand clapping.
“Teacher Liang is stupid,” Kang-Lin said as we walked home that evening. She stopped, turned to face me. The full moon: my friend’s head silkworm silver. “Don’t let her make you stupid too.”
I pulled moon strings from Kang-Lin’s hair, dropped them into a pile at our feet. Our shadows expanded and contracted, obscuring the moon, hips joined and parting like sea to sand. We could be one, and then we could be separate. I missed her even though she wasn’t yet gone. I thought: How is it always the case we remain stuck in moments we know are fleeting, impermanent? Or maybe I’m thinking this now and remembering it such: We were already best friends for five years. We didn’t know a tenth of what life would teach us but there was the sense this walk home was a critically important moment, that I was making a memory before I’d experienced enough of my life to understand it. We forget one day we’ll turn into the person looking back at this one and think: I miss you.
“Why does Teacher Liang make fun of us?”
“She’s jealous,” Kang-Lin said, throwing her long hair over her shoulder. I could see why: Kang-Lin was young and beautiful where Teacher Liang was old and ugly.
“How do you do it?” I asked. I meant: how did she stay happy when everything around us was a wall in danger of crumbling? The outer edifices started first, the city wall’s bricks chipped with pickaxes, ground into dust that would eventually form the cement undergirding the Second Ring Road with its endless pulse of traffic. By the time the city was like an old sweater to me, before I could intuit the sun cresting hutong alleyways, peering through the last turrets of the inner wall and pinpointing passing bicyclists—by that time, the city walls were being knocked down, large trucks scurrying boulders to outer provinces to prevent the inevitable autumn mudslides, an attempt to roll back the Gobi’s lung-clogging spring sandstorms. The city of my childhood, once impervious to outsiders, was inhabited by mustached Mongols from the north, narrow-hipped beauties from Hunan, wide-eyed Uyghurs from the mountainous west. And Soviets with their fur-capped hats and screaming, pink-faced babies. But then the Soviets departed, taking with them the stench of good vodka and bad cologne, and the city huddled together, fearing the battle for which we always steeled ourselves. Our beloved official, Liang Sicheng, lost the city wall’s last stand: he believed our city would be better off with greenery rather than concrete highways, but Party officials disagreed—what use was a public park circumnavigating the city when what we really needed was room for an underground metro, coal-burning factories, four-lane highways, and apartment blocks to shield the sun’s view? I’m sorry, Liang Sicheng. I’m sorry you believed in something the rest of us couldn’t see. Does that mean that green oasis in the desert is not there still?
“Making Teacher Liang jealous is simpler than you think,” Kang-Lin said as she plucked a fallen catkin blossom from my shoulder. Her bangs fell over her double-fold eyelids and I knew she’d always be beautiful. I would’ve been jealous if she didn’t love me so much; that’s how it is with beautiful people.
“Meet me in three nights at midnight on Coal Hill beneath the scholar tree where Emperor Chongzhen hung himself. Don’t tell your parents and don’t make any noise when you leave the danwei. Bring only yourself and wear pants.”
“Why pants?”
“Questions only lead to more questions.” She smiled. I knew she was quoting something she’d read somewhere. Propaganda regularly blasted through the neighborhood’s speakers; words not ours filtered through our lungs and lips, found their way into conversations where they weren’t meant. She sensed my discomfort because she laughed and touched my arm as softly as a bird to the thinnest winter branch.
“Oh, I sound like a real Comrade now, don’t I? What I meant was just trust me and meet me there.”
“Okay,” I assented, looking to our feet where our moon bodies intertwined, the necks of cranes.
�
��That’s funny,” Kang-Lin said, nodding at our shadows.
“What?”
“Cranes always visit me when I most need encouragement.”
“Then that’s a good sign,” I said, but my tongue clutched my throat. Before I could ask why Kang-Lin would need encouragement now, what it was that awaited me at Coal Hill, my friend shifted her knapsack over her shoulder and walked to the entryway that was hers: Three. I lived one entryway down in Entry Four on the Fourth Floor. The rooming assignment was a perverse way of my mother’s danwei insulting her for her black label, reminding us we’d forever be haunted by so many premonitions of death.
One step up her family’s stairwell, Kang-Lin turned.
“See you in class tomorrow,” she said. Her face was illuminated by a flickering bulb, cheeks glowing like orbs of moon on Nameless Lake where sad, desperate students drown themselves, and for a moment it felt as if it were already tomorrow and she was speaking of today.
*
The next three days I skipped class. I couldn’t return to school to see Teacher Liang. Instead, pretending to go to school in morning then returning home and picking the lock with a hairpin, I made makeshift fishing lines out of safety fasteners and twine then walked to the city moat where I dipped my rig (to which I affixed a few cooked grains of rice) below the surface. A few nibbles but no bites. The final afternoon, bored of the unsuccessful fishing attempts, I found an old hairnet of my mother’s and attached the netting to the hands of a tiny doll and threw the doll off the roof to parachute her to earth as if she had wings (the netting flattened; she plummeted like a stone). I walked through Tiananmen, all the way to Houhai where I waded, ankle-deep, in the lake’s piney, autumnal waters. Mandarin ducks bobbed wooden-like on the surface. I egged them closer with an open hand but they weren’t fooled by my lack of sweets so scurried off quickly, leaving a wake the shape of a valley—or maybe the cleft of a heart.
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