When I finally met Kang-Lin three nights later at midnight as she requested, beneath the scholar tree on the path up Coal Hill, the city finally felt like a blank landscape onto which I was meant to etch my story. How we managed to crawl out of our shared beds without disturbing our relatives, our footsteps silent down the echoing cement stairwells, doors not slamming behind us, I don’t recall. But I’m confident we were there that night, as we’d promised one another.
As I walked up the hill, the moon escaped into a smaller wedge, waning into what would soon be a very black sky. Strange: I didn’t think about the fact my parents hadn’t returned from their posts in the western provinces, nor that one day they would—and what would I tell them I’d been doing?
Kang-Lin’s head was barely visible but I saw her hunched body facing away from me. She was on hands and knees, silky white pajama pants a victory flag—or a flag of surrender? Her hands dug at a mound beneath a seemingly heavy rock. She must’ve rolled the rock aside because she can be as strong as I choose to remember her. She heaved dark objects from earth to sky, settling them beside her.
“Kang-Lin?”
She turned, hair stuck to her bottom lip. If I hadn’t known she was a real human, I might have mistaken her for a ghost girl.
“You came!” She sat on her heels, toes curled, and I could now see books piled at her side. Her ready smile was a channel of light.
“Sit,” she said, patting the ground.
Like the monks in Yonghegong, I folded my legs and lay my palms flat on my knees.
“You sit well,” she chided.
We were beneath a tree as gnarled as my Third Uncle’s hands (he’d thrown a grenade at the Japanese in Manchuria only to find the grenade was a dud and his hand was a stump). The ground beneath us was unstable, full of rocks and roots. In late autumn, dry, bristly grasses, desperate for a spring too far off, rubbed our thighs, an old man’s kiss. What was I to do but listen? The fading moon percolated through the withered tree. Hello, Moon. I see you seeing us.
“This is the Scholar Tree,” I realized aloud.
“You’re smart, Li-Ming. That’s why I brought you here.”
I didn’t dare tell Kang-Lin I’d run past the wooden gates of Jingshan Park to force my way to Coal Hill—the only guard was so asleep at his post that when he finally awoke to see the door swinging behind him, he thought he was dreaming so he closed his eyes again to enter the world of the living by falling asleep. I stepped over the raised stone at the park’s entrance meant to keep out ghosts—but where did ghosts roam if not within these desolate urban forests?
Kang-Lin didn’t care about ghosts. She shut her eyes, mouth pursed as if about to speak but unsure how to begin. Her body could levitate; in an instant, she’d gone from frantically digging into the earth to sitting peaceful and still. Perhaps that was the secret she intended to teach me: how to shape shift like the Taoist immortals who inhabit the clouds, cranes, trees.
“Sisters, we are gathered here today to learn the words of the masters,” Kang-Lin started, chin tucked, knees folded beneath her small frame.
I didn’t want to inform her we were only two sisters and her talk sounded grandiose, misplaced.
She continued: “We will read your works and memorize your words. We’ll become like the letters of nüshu, passing knowledge through us, our pens and lips. We’ll be vessels of a deeper knowledge.”
In the distance, a gunshot sheared the silence, and although my stomach churned, Kang-Lin didn’t open her eyes. I shut my eyes again, awaiting another pealing shot, a common occurrence those days—but nothing arrived. We were certain children living in an uncertain era. In a few months, everyone we knew would ask us to turn against one another, which had the unanticipated effect of bringing many of us closer together.
“I didn’t come all this way and risk getting three lashes from my grandfather’s belt in order to read. You know I hate homework.”
Kang-Lin ignored me, reaching for the pile of books beside her and handing me a particularly heavy tome with a silky cover and flaking spine that opened almost too naturally in my lap.
“This isn’t ta-ma-de homework,” she said. She always cursed in ways both crass and provocative; I imagined this would make her into a famous poet many years later.
I held the first page to a strand of moonlight the tree couldn’t catch. The words were difficult to read in the dark, but from what I could see, it was a book of poetry.
“These are my grandfather’s. The one who didn’t make it to Taiwan.”
She’d already told me years earlier: her grandfather on her father’s side was a Nationalist. During the revolution, he hid their silver cutlery and jade jewels in his village home’s basement; once discovered for the crime, the local PLA unit dragged him into the streets. Luckily for him, he didn’t make it to the firing squad—a heart attack, just outside his hometown’s square. My mother knew Kang-Lin’s family history, reprimanded me I shouldn’t spend too much time with my friend—that her family was “blacker” than ours, so black their veins ran hei, or sometimes went the joke. What saved Kang-Lin’s family from endless torture was her father’s betrayal of his own father; when Kang-Lin’s grandfather died, the junior Kang took his father’s remaining possessions to the local party chief and turned in this legacy. He professed in a public letter never to have felt any affection for his traitorous father, stamping his family name with his own blood. For this unfilial act, Kang-Lin’s father was sent to a post in Beijing within the gates of Zhongnanhai. For this, Kang-Lin and her inherited curiosity were protected. For the rest of us, there was something dangerously attractive in entitled, ennobled people bred of such devoted patriotism.
“I found these books in a box beneath my father’s bed,” Kang-Lin said. Her parents, both in the PLA, were on assignment in Dongbei where they reported on Mao’s latest campaign, “huilin kaihuang,” a ritualistic destroying of forest so crop yields of millet and corn would improve. Kang-Lin and her siblings were in the care of her grandmother—the one who lost her husband during the war of resistance. Her grandmother’s brain was failing (rumors said she regularly wore her underwear on the outside of her pants in the middle of winter and was seen smuggling baijiu rations into her cleavage), but whatever the cause, her grandmother’s negligence meant Kang-Lin could do a lot of things other kids couldn’t—namely stay out late and rummage through her house after her grandmother went to the market. Kang-Lin found army-issued condoms and sanitary pads, beacons from a distant future, telling us what our lives would one day become without the requisite warnings we were better off staying who we were now. The books were one of Kang-Lin’s scores that month, further evidence we may one day be as powerful and chesty as we dreamed—and she’d been waiting for the perfect night to show me.
The book on my lap appeared to have been printed many decades earlier; the characters in tight rows in the old, complicated script. There were also books in English, those boring, upright letters dotting the pages.
“These aren’t just any books,” Kang-Lin’s eyes ran glassy. “These were my grandfather’s. My father’s father. The one…” she paused, stuck in a history without an end. She swallowed resolutely and continued: “And he loved them, hiding them to save for my grandmother, who then she gave them to my mother, and my mother planned to give them to me, once I was old enough to understand the English. I didn’t know where she’d hidden them but then I found them. And recently, with all the book burning campaigns, I worried we’d lose them. So I brought them here. We have to protect them. Be very careful.” She shot me an incriminating look as I ran my fingers over my book’s spine.
“Shall we read them?” I wanted to know what words were worth dying for. Recently, language felt like a ticking time bomb—the language we knew we could speak and that we couldn’t. Words were shoved under beds, behind pillows, tucked in the fleshy crevasses of folded tongues. We lived and died for language, or so Kang-Lin’s grandfather’s legacy taught us. We were young, but o
ld enough to believe that without language we had nothing, wouldn’t be able to tell a sycamore from a scholar tree.
“My mother said certain places are embedded with spirits,” Kang-Lin ignored my question.
“By spirits you mean ghosts?”
She clucked. “No, something that isn’t in human form. Like thought, or hope. And these spirits live in trees, and ponds, and rivers. Sometimes they even hop from a tree to a gecko.”
“Or a cockroach?”
She slapped my wrist. “My mother said there are many cultures that believe places should be protected, that we shouldn’t build on them or take too much from them.”
“Not even grow corn and millet on them?”
Kang-Lin’s father was overseeing the expansion of a millet farm in Heilongjiang along a river so cold, or so he wrote in a letter she read me one afternoon after school, that this inhospitable northern river flowed black as calligrapher’s ink. I tried to imagine a river like that but all I saw was a shanshui painting so real I could stroke the grasses, dip my nose into the waters. I wondered what it would be like to step inside a work of art, to have one’s existence and wanderings constrained by the frame.
“I don’t know exactly,” Kang-Lin admitted. “She told me this when we were in line for our rations so I worried someone would overhear and report us for bourgeois thought, but my mother can be in these moods where she doesn’t care what anyone thinks—I suppose this was one of those. I don’t know how she and my father get along but maybe its because he never listens to her; as long as she births sons, he keeps her. That and the fact her father died on the Long March.” She repositioned her seat. “What I’m trying to say is I think this is one of those places, don’t you? Every time we pass through this park on our walks from school to the danwei, I can’t help but feel like this tree is talking to me.”
“And what’s it saying?”
“It’s saying ‘stop.’”
“‘Stop’? Stop what?”
“Stop everything. Slow down. Take a seat. Watch the way the sun bats at my tree eyelashes.”
“Trees don’t have eyelashes.”
“You know what I mean. In a poetic way.”
But there wasn’t any sun. Past midnight, the moon slipped behind a cloud. From where we sat on this outcropping in the middle of the city, we could see the entirety of the horizon spreading east, the last of the hutong courtyard fires squelched for the night, smoke rising, the few remaining danwei units skittering like cockroaches about a factory floor, street lamps twinkling in spokes from the city’s heart. If we walked toward that far horizon’s edge we would find industrial Tianjin with its cluttered, oil-slicked port, the Yellow Sea frothing white, the futile tip of Korea, the vast, enigmatic Pacific. And then what? What was beyond that? Our circular longing was contained by a linear endpoint: we knew we wanted to get beyond this realm, our ability to see only as far as the horizon, but how could we? We didn’t know yet. We hadn’t written life’s inevitable story to its inevitable end.
A rustling in the bushes across the path startled us back into our bodies; a man in army fatigues and a woman with her skirt scrunched above her waist walked unsteadily from behind a shadow of trees rimming the hill, clinging to one another’s waists and stumbling, as if drunk, or in love, or both.
“Duck,” Kang-Lin whispered, pushing my head into her lap.
If the amorous couple saw us, they didn’t mind. Such are the ways of people in love, I thought.
When they finally dipped out of view, I lifted my head and sat up, looking at Kang-Lin’s face, which was turned to the distant edges of our city, her wide forehead faintly moon-spun.
“So this tree spirit, what else did it tell you?”
Kang-Lin’s bottom lip did that trembling thing when she’s about to say something important.
“It told me to pay attention.”
“Pay attention. Like in school?”
“No, not in school, and not to wicked Teacher Liang. Pay attention to this tree. The moon. To you. To words we’re not meant to speak. I’d never felt so outside of my body as I did the first night I came here with these books. Like I was looking down on the world from the heavens, like Xiannü in that myth, I’d sprung wings and flown above this all and could barely tell the difference between a steel smelter and an iron ore. I was outside earthly things; they meant nothing. Yet I had this intense feeling that everything earthly meant everything. These books, like the one on your lap, teach us there are roads that aren’t roads and they lead to places that aren’t places. You see, beginnings and endings are actually the same—it just depends on how you’re approaching them.”
“So up is down and down is up.”
“Exactly,” she said, only she wasn’t joking. She was like one of those socialist rhetoric teachers who stood on wooden boxes outside our school now. “Cold Mountain isn’t a mountain at all, you see: when you know that you’re already in Cold Mountain then you’ll realize there was no journey to get there.”
“That sounds contradictory.”
She sat up straighter, folding her legs and leaning forward, hands on knees, so I could see just the top of her face, mouth obscured in shadow. “My grandfather wrote me a note before he died: It’s only in living our futures that we sink into the unforgivable weight of our pasts. Four days later, he was gone. My mother was never the same. My parents moved and left me with my grandmother. I meant to keep that note forever but somewhere along the way I lost it. I still remember the words. That’s why language is important. It’s a vessel.”
Here was my friend whose summer feet smelled of vinegar, whose scalp puckered so dry in winter the dandruff puffed each time she removed her woolen hat when she walked into the front gate of Beijing PLA Children’s Academy. When you held her hand, her fingers were cold and clammy and, if you hugged her, her bones were made of glass, joints of seashells. Yet she wasn’t as fragile as she appeared. She believed things none of us had the capacity to believe and because of this, I had to tell her, so I started from the beginning—
“Can I tell you something?” I asked but didn’t await an answer.
There was a time I hadn’t told Kang-Lin about, or anyone for that matter. I’d been at my aunt’s house in Guilin for the summer when my parents were in Guangxi for reeducation. My aunt left to get leeks at the market and although I was only eight, I’d been reading Tales of the Eight Immortals and wanted to know if I could fly off the apartment building, to test whether that crane would catch me as it did in the myths. Those months, I thought my parents had deserted me, that I’d always have to live with my aunt who smelled of mung beans and castor oil. She also beat my back with a broom whenever I talked back; it took decades for the switched scars to fade. Inspired by the Eight Immortals, I peeled open the window overlooking the roof and climbed barefoot onto the thin aluminum siding. The air was so hot I immediately burst into a sweat, salt cresting my tongue. My toes nestled the edge. I opened my arms like I imagined the beautiful He Xiangu would do. I thought: this is what it’s like to grip one’s fate in one’s hands. I could do this—I had the only power we’re given from birth, the power to control our destiny, our story’s ending. The revelation was powerful and terrifying. This was when, without thinking, I tipped my head back and saw the sky. I’d never noticed the universe so big and empty. This acknowledgment filled me with an overwhelming sense that not enough people stop to look up at the nest of space surrounding us, to feel so small when most of our lives we feel so big. All along I’d been thinking my life was like everyone else’s—large and real—but the sky proved me wrong. I tucked my arms into my sides and reclined against the rooftop, stunned, tracing the shape of my fingers, plucking the scabbed skin on my knees like a deranged erhu player. That was when my aunt screamed at me from the kitchen: ‘What the turtle egg are you doing?’ She never minced words. I climbed in, knees dusty and shaking, and she spanked me eight times, so hard my ass was sore for a week.
“Talk about a return to the heavines
s of earth,” I said, referencing He Xiangu’s lightness of being.
Kang-Lin’s eyes were half-closed. The moon shifted from view, entirely gone, and the world was a shadow so dark it didn’t have a shadow itself.
Her voice startled me: “Everyone knows that feeling. Only some of us choose to live within it. Others push it away, like a street sweeper brushing dust into gutters, because…”
“Because what?”
“Because they’re scared they’ll never be able to live if they feel that way all the time.”
“So that’s why I wanted to jump?”
“No, not quite,” Kang-Lin said. “You’ve always been a person who likes to straddle boundaries. Didn’t you tell me your head was stuck in your mother’s vagina for hours? That they thought you’d strangle yourself during the birth?”
I hadn’t remembered telling Kang-Lin that story but we told one another everything. That’s how it was.
“Yes, so what?”
“So you’re a li-mi-na person,” she said.
“Li-mi-na?” This sounded like a word in English our Teacher Pang hadn’t yet taught us.
This time she spelled out the English letters: “L-I-M-I-N-A. My mother said it’s the place we go when we’re neither here nor there. Like how in our language, we say ‘nie’—that place beyond this one but also within reach. Wait, give me that,” she pulled the poetry from my hands, flipping through the pages looking for something. I don’t know how she could see words in this intense blackness. Maybe in a past life she was an eagle or an owl. I liked to believe we were both birds. Birds who couldn’t die. Birds who knew the earth and sky in a way humans never could.
Her finger slipped down the page with ease. “Here, Han Shan says:
Who takes the Cold Mountain Road
Takes a road that never ends
The rivers are long and piled with rocks
The streams are wide and choked with grass
It’s not the rain that makes the moss slick
And it’s not the wind that makes the pines moan
Empire of Glass Page 3