After breakfast, as we gathered our small packs and readied to leave for the station, Li-Ming stopped me at the doorway, gripped my arm. “I wanted you to take me to Cold Mountain. To show me where your mother remains.”
I should’ve told her there was nothing left, but little untruths are somehow easier than the bigger ones. “We’ll have to take the train there,” I said and she nodded, hand on belly, the baby kicking inside but I’d never know that feeling—a man’s creation lives and dies with his desires. Like my father, I was neither executor nor deliverer. For that, we needed our women.
*
When we boarded the train that morning, Cousin Ming was so distracted by a Shanghai peach candy vendor (seldom did the sweets come all the way to Shangyu) he forgot to show us off, so my father stood alone at the platform’s edge.
The train’s whistle blew, a shrill cuckoo. On the platform, slowly at first, then with a hop in his step, my father mirrored our cabin’s movement, shoulders humped, a hand meekly raised, waving at us—but it wasn’t clear: was he shooing us away or calling us to return?
“Say good-bye, Lao Wang,” Li-Ming instructed.
I did as told, propping myself onto the seat to stretch my neck out the window.
My father smiled at this last, filial effort to show my face, his palm flashing its reply in the sun. I waved.
Li-Ming slouched into her seat, exhausted from the walk to the station. She closed her eyes. Soon, I knew, she’d sleep. Sleep was all she did these days.
But me: I kept watching and waiting, fearing that moment when my father would disappear altogether. We were two people moving in the same direction, but at a distance, like the sun and moon rising and falling from an identical eastern horizon but never catching one another. He’d returned home. Where was mine?
At the end of the platform, my father stopped, toes nudging the edge, palm still waving, wide sleeves flapping in the wind and exposing old man arms, thin and slack with blue-gray skin.
I waited, one hand on Li-Ming’s distended belly, the other frivolously waving into the humid air outside our open window, until my father’s figure slowly shrank, the train turned north, and he was gone.
A Buddha-like smile spread across Li-Ming’s face, insinuating that for her, the journey was just beginning. Ridiculous.
“You know, there isn’t any mountain,” I muttered and although her eyes opened, shock-wide, that dastardly-sweet smile remained. She patted my arm, patronizing in its tenderness, then rested it there. She didn’t need to say anything. Didn’t need to remind me that although our train coursed north, wheels assuredly locked into the tracks, we were loosened from one another now, walking divergent paths to different mountain cliffs, unsure where, exactly, we expected to arrive in the end.
40. From the perspective of this translator, I cannot ascertain why Li-Ming’s narrative shifts from third to first person—and why here, all of a sudden, we receive such intimate access to her husband’s interior thoughts. Perhaps Li-Ming is taking a cue from Cold Mountain, reminding us—
“People ask the way to Cold Mountain
but roads don’t reach Cold Mountain
in summer the ice doesn’t melt
and the morning fog is too dense
how did someone like me arrive
our minds are not the same
if they were the same
you would be here.”
—Trans. Red Pine
But aren’t you here? Isn’t your mind enough?
41. “It started in Cen Cang Yan,” Li-Ming swept a sweaty lock of hair off her forehead. “You can’t understand. You’re still a young woman. You still believe you can do whatever you want.” I couldn’t disagree; as I listened, I traced the tattooed crane on my inner wrist, a gift from a tattoo artist I’d met, slept with, and received as a gift in a Beijing alley months before. “I chopped off all my hair at that damn river,” she said. “You did what?” “I. Chopped. Off. All. My. Hair.” Wheezes between words: I should’ve counted her last breaths but I didn’t know how to contain them, if I could keep them in a glass jar like a firefly whose feeble light would die without the reply of a lover’s pulse.
42. As in one of my favorites from Han Shan:
“A white crane carries a bitter flower
a thousand miles without resting
he’s bound for the peaks of Penglai
with this for his provision
not yet there his feathers break off
far from the flock he sighs
returning to his old nest
his wife and children don’t know him.”
—Trans. Red Pine
Letter #9
Dear Friend,
Old Man Lu with deer-like eyes stands half-naked from the waist up, on the corner of Xinjiekou. He should wear a warning sign around his neck: “When the words stop flowing, your heart stops beating.”
Last week, my husband, like a fool, tried to chase down a flasher haunting our danwei’s apartment blocks.
Naked body: schoolgirls giggling.
“Loo loo loo!” he shouted, kitchen cleaver twirling, glinting pink-gray dusk, a cow shell’s sheen.
But he was a coward again: a fainter, fallen to earth, smacking head to pavement outside Lao Jiang’s baozi stand.
They brought him home wrapped in shrouds, blood flower-blossoming in his palm where the knife sliced his skin.
“Silly, stupid man,” Xiaofei aped and added: “Mama, I saw his penis!”
The flasher’s penis. Limp or taut? I couldn’t ask.
Lady Meng and her Tea of Forgetfulness:
Immortals sprouting wings, becoming cranes.43
That night, we landed in a dark cave.
My teeth: ridged in grooves, the reach of my tongue.
Did my arms extend into wings?
Human!
We laughed; how silly! Searching for a place we didn’t know was so deeply ordinary, full of pines and cold sea wind, rocky faces and a sun with the same insidious pull from light to dark to light again. Laughter dissipated, valley fog rose, an unexpected sunset across black chin, white chest—even though it was only morning.
I folded my wings into my hips, hopping down the rocks, ecstatic to think one day I’d bring you here.
You nodded: your husband was right, you said.
I tssskked through broken teeth and the penis that flapped for my daughter was not the last penis she’d ever see but because it was the first, we couldn’t laugh just yet.
43. What is the weight of a bird? Twenty years after Li-Ming’s death, a flock of storks nearly took down a passenger plane heading from Istanbul to Singapore. I wonder: if Kinetic Energy is KE=1/2mV^2 and m is the bird’s mass and v is the true air speed of a plane, how many red-crowned cranes does it take to kill three hundred and thirty five people?
Baba
They told us the American was fragile. They used that word specifically: Fragile.
: Brittle as porcelain.
Principal He’s voice cracked on the phone as he read the list of problems our “American daughter” had already encountered in her sixteen years in the richest nation on earth:
A parental divorce.
A suicidal mother.
A suicide attempt herself.
Too low a roof.
Broken fibula.
Cigarettes: The expensive imported kind in sleek boxes.
Alcohol.
Sex with too many boys.
I gasped, more for Principal He’s sake than my own. I didn’t need to see his face to know when he talked of cigarettes and teenage sex his cheeks flushed like the girls in the Shanghai Soap ads, how this made him endearing to my wife and all the Erfuzhong Middle School mothers but to us husbands he was soft and easily misled.
“Don’t be fooled,” Principal He cleared his throat. The connection crackled: someone was listening. What a stupid conversation to play audience to. “This girl is rich! All Americans are! And they attend top American high schools. So this girl ma
y be fragile,” the word skinned a serrated edge, my stubbled cheek against the receiver, “but she’s smart. You know what they say in the 36 Stratagems? 44—about playing the part of the madman? My guess is this is what she’s doing. And why she’s perfect for your family. You and Li-Ming will see right through her and bring her around. You know the saying: ‘A long road reveals the strength of your horse, a long time reveals the heart of your friends.’” Principal He spoke tirelessly in idioms, as if being intentionally opaque made him smarter than the rest of us. I didn’t know how long this road would be, or how strong our horse could become, but decided it best I not tell the girl’s history to my wife.
“Thank you for the introduction to our American daughter,” I said.
Behind me, Li-Ming and Xiaofei sat on stools in the kitchen making animal shapes out of floating potato skins in the sink. A horse. A dog. A snake. For only the Year of the American, and only in the fading light of an afternoon, did they share a temperament. Three weeks later and there she was, that brittle, “fragile” girl, leaning against the coal-dusted bricks of Erfuzhong Middle School with her cargo pants, tight black tank top, white canvas sneakers, and skin that glistened in the sun like something cold needing licking. Xiaofei’s shiny Mary Janes scuffed the pavement, the shoes Li-Ming read about in smuggled British children’s books, paid a ridiculous sum for at the Friendship Store and forced our daughter to wear for this momentous occasion. For the past three weeks since Principal He’s call, while her mother skittered about like a house cat, preparing pyramids of oranges, cleaning and ironing the bed sheets, our daughter pouted in her room, the only room in the apartment, save the bathroom, with a door. But Li-Ming wanted Xiaofei to know: maybe China wasn’t the center after all, maybe nowhere was.
Her fellow Americans stepped off that rusted green bus full of winning smiles and tins of chocolates so sweet they’d burn your teeth. But Lao K scowled to the sun—it took us an hour to match the beautiful girl in the photo Principal He sent us weeks earlier to the pigeon-toed, lanky teenager near the coal pile stealing a smoke, hoping no one would notice. In the file Principal He gave us to prepare for her visit we learned she attempted to throw herself from her home’s roof last year but was “reconciled” now. Yes, “reconciled” was how Principal He explained Lao K’s situation. The world is always trying to find a proper place for those of us who don’t fit, squeezing us into ever-smaller spaces.
She flicked her cigarette to the coal pile at her side, the dying butt rolling off the briquettes saved for the coming winter. Her figure was so much larger than ours, even from this distance, her knotted hair an auburn cape decorated with flowered pins like in the costumes of Dai dancers. She was neither girl nor woman but held the promise of both. This may explain why we loved her so much, or why this love harbored attraction and repulsion.
From where we stood across the courtyard, we weren’t sure whether we should boldly approach or angle our eyes to the earth and wait for her to join us, occasionally glancing up to see if our tactic was working. A hot day: sweat crawled from our necks to the creases at our lower backs. We swatted at mosquitoes driven into the city by a drier than usual season. The other students found their parents; when there were just a few left lingering, Principal He walked to us, one hand in his pants pocket, one on his chest as if saluting a flag.
“You want to meet your American?” he directed us to the girl. She had started another cigarette and as we approached, she squelched it beneath her boot.
“No smoking,” he said in Chinese.
She didn’t extend a hand as we’d practiced for her arrival.
She shrugged.
We shrugged.
When she smiled, we smiled.
This pantomime continued for weeks. And for weeks after the girls left for school, Li-Ming searched the American’s clothing for cigarette cartons, even a spare butt, but all she’d find was the lingering scent of rose hips and tobacco leaf on the breast and cuffs of the girl’s shirts. Even her socks reeked of tobacco, but we’d never catch her smoking again—was she able to make objects disappear? That shrug. Sure, she seemed to say, bring it on. Could a scent alone implicate a greater crime? We clung to the hope she was greater than this girl who barely spoke our language, who jumped from rooftops like Fan Qiniang45 and survived.
A girl is a girl is a girl. That should have been Principle He’s idiom of our year together.
What I didn’t know was how alike they’d be—the girl and my wife. How the girl, weeks later, would pull a hat from her luggage and give it to me, saying “gift,” insisting I wear it. How for years I’d never go anywhere without that hat, sometimes mistaking the smell of my hair for the smell of hers and thinking, instinctively, that made us close, almost kin.
*
I couldn’t have predicted the rest: the diagnosis of my wife’s illness, Li-Ming shuffling the boxes under the bed, looking for that book she’d hidden for so many years, and then, once she found it, dusting off the cover, and spending hours cloistered on the sundeck with the American, attempting to translate into her own language the words of a long dead Chinese poet-monk.
“You’re teaching her drivel!” I’d shout from the kitchen—because we both knew the only thing leading to Cold Mountain is madness and the only thing driving us from Cold Mountain is the same thing that propelled us up. There are no answers in anything contained within the thin spine clasped with two hands. A book is a foolish replacement for real knowledge. Couldn’t she remember? I wanted none of this anymore.
One evening after the coal fires started in the courtyards, after the heat was turned on from the Huai River northward and all Beijing became a smelting pot, I banged three times on our apartment’s only bedroom door then swung it open with a thrust of shoulder (an unnecessary show of force: the door was unlocked, and easily opened).
“What are you doing?”
The women were not reading a book this evening. Instead, my wife held a rouge blush in one hand, her father’s Fed Zorki camera in the other.
“Oh,” I said. Oh: Always my best retort. What had I thought I’d uncover? And what would I do with the book when I found it? Burn it like the old taitais in the danweis of the ‘70s, that insidious language so threatening it demanded a violent reaction, or would I chuck the heavy tome out the sundeck window, leave it prey to Gobi rains that seldom kissed this dry-mouthed city?
“Oh, what?”
My wife. How did it take me so long to see: the problem with a marriage is you’re always two individual people, so close but never close enough, and then you’re standing in a doorframe panting, rubbing a bruised shoulder, and your wife is applying rouge to an American’s cheeks in a photography modeling session the two of them have planned for weeks. There was no poetry. Was there ever?46
My wife elbowed me. When she was strong, she was strongest.
“Okay,” I agreed.
Xiaofei slowly glanced up from behind her math textbook, a pencil wedged between her lips. “You’re weird, Ba,” she said.
I stood for only a few seconds longer in the doorway before I knew there was nothing left for me to ruin. For now, I’d let my wife play her games with her new American doll. She could think this was the way her ending would begin, the cancer we’d ignore for so long we’d lose ourselves in the dance of deceit. Was I the fool? Did my wife know I’d enter the room on this particular evening and witnessing nothing as I expected? Was I writing a story that wasn’t mine to write or was everything already written somewhere I hadn’t yet discovered?
Look at the wooden puppets! Worn out by their moment of play on stage….
44. “That’s me,” Li-Ming said, “Fake crazy but not insane.” “You’re not crazy,” I needed to believe. She cawed like a bird. “Not a terrible day,” she tilted her head to the ceiling. Fake crazy. Not insane. Afternoon shifted such that what was once yellow was now gold. When the wind touched the trees on a distant hillside, it set them a-jig briefly then moved south and everything green went colorless
and silent.
45. “Don’t you want to be like Fan Qiniang?” Li-Ming asked me. “I don’t know who that is.” From where I sat I saw dying light peeling off buildings, the sun’s former apricity fading. Baba’s ficus plants scratched our backs, requesting attention. Li-Ming said, “Fan Qiniang studied the way of the crane as a form of self-defense.” “Are cranes particularly violent?” I asked. “Not at all,” Li-Ming said. “They duck and avoid attacks, striking only when the perpetrator is most vulnerable.” “I like that idea,” I said. The cigarette I smoked that afternoon still clung to the back of my throat, making me hungry. “How do you know so much?” I asked. What I should’ve asked was, “Why will it one day be impossible for me to remember your face without recalling it in one particular photograph?” Li-Ming winked, raised her arms in a bird-like gesture. “Because I’m a bird too.” “Funny,” I said, and she laughed, patting my back, reminding me years later I’d keep a photo of her from that afternoon in a frame, her face turned, slightly in profile, her lips almost smiling, if that’s what her expression could be called, was bound to be recalled.
46. Here’s what I’ve learned about bird strikes during the course of translating this book: Along with the properties of kinetic energy, you must understand several other factors in assessing a bird’s potential damage. How high you are, as well as what speed you’re traveling, will impact the scale of force. A few years ago, after several snowy owls flew into planes, officials at JFK airport demanded the birds be shot. Angry birders protested, asking for a swift policy reversal. At Boston’s Logan airport, over one hundred snowy owls were captured and released elsewhere, expected to make a home in a place they didn’t know. Black vulture, cackling goose, Laysan albatross, dark-eyed junco, boat-tailed grackle, anhinga… all guilty of deaths. In 1962, a mute swan killed 17 in Ellicott City, Maryland. A speckled pigeon took out 35 in Ethiopia in 1988.
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