Empire of Glass

by Kaitlin Solimine

  56. In the blackness, you can’t see your hands but that’s of no matter—mine are blistered and raw from holding on too long, attempting to clamor my way to an ending: hers, not yet mine. An ink moon surveys the scene and although the park’s peonies have faded from pink to gray, there’s the faint scent of living things that reaches me on the hillside as I pick scabs from my palms, trying to find the right words to say farewell. Hello, Moon… Good-bye.

  57. I recall the first and last day of her undoing in stages:

  Sweaty eggshells I rolled atop the kitchen table as Baba swept the floor, motioning for me to drop the empty carcasses so he could add them to the pile. I tossed a warm, velvety egg into my mouth, tongued the chalky yolk.

  Hao ah, hao ah, he said, egging me on. Good. Good.

  I waited at the kitchen table for Baba to leave, pretending I had a later-than-usual class that day and could stay home with Li-Ming for a few hours to read to her, make her sweet zhou for lunch.

  Li-Ming pretended to sleep on the futon, the Soviet-era apartment around us hot and wet, pickling the skin behind our knees. Sun peeked past the courtyard’s listless willows for a glimpse of Li-Ming’s swollen, jaundiced face. To signal she was still here, she smiled. She preferred warmth to cold. I wouldn’t know of her snowy soap factory days until decades later: those lemony blocks she stockpiled for the People’s Revolution that never came, wouldn’t know the girl who sat twelve hours a day on a wooden stool and molded her nation’s most beloved soaps. That’s the terribly destructive problem of meeting someone when they’re an adult: you forget they were also once a child.

  Chop-chop: Xiaofei on the futon, diligently wushu-hacking her blue notebooks with a ruler, a study tic she devised in middle school to ace Calculus—Li-Ming’s most loathed subject was of course her daughter’s favorite; only years later would I understand how a mother and daughter could be so completely different, why this was a critical reversal of inheritance.

  The television was on to dull the pain: a CCTV news exposé on Li Hongzhi, Falun Gong’s founder, explaining how he was responsible for the deaths of thousands of practitioners, who believed by jumping to their deaths, Li would rescue them in their afterlife.

  Li-Ming awoke, gestured to turn up the volume.

  Shhhhhh, she said with a dry tongue, her words cricket-cracking.

  Is anyone listening?

  Slip-slap: the door closing behind Baba as he left to clean the mess at his danwei work station two blocks east. The janitorial specter he left behind: broom tilted against the old Beijing-brand television with its warped, multicolored view of a plane departing for America and the reporter’s stoic voice, “Is Li Hongzhi preparing an escape?” Jet engines roared, the broadcast turned to the weather (monsoons in the south; drought in the west where Tibetans in mountainous Yunnan demanded water for fields).

  Peering and peering but I can’t even see the sky…

  “Time for school!”

  Li-Ming slapped the bed; Xiaofei readied her book bag. I held up a half-eaten baozi to examine the remainder of my breakfast. What hunger I’d dragged to China was abandoned months earlier; I knew my hipbones poked unnaturally through my school-issued blue and white track pants but the less I ate, the less anyone seemed to notice. I took my last bite, the sweet bean innards crawling to an uncomfortable rest below my clavicle.

  Xiaofei’s only farewell was the clang of her bicycle slapping the stairwell walls as she dragged it down the four flights, each floor’s descent a little softer. [I miss bicycle days most, riding beside the Second Ring Road’s moat, hurried spring hair, forgetting that under this highway sat thousand-year-old walls meant to keep out people like me. In just a decade this city’s bicycles were gone: Where did the wheels and ringing bells go? What sounds could replace that metallic song? Cars. Taillights as far as the eye can see.]

  Lao K, are you ready?

  A ticking rose in my throat as I stood to prepare a lunch of Baba’s stir-fried leftovers, as Li-Ming requested weeks earlier, porting them in tin containers to take on our journey to the city’s heart. We wouldn’t think how foolish it was to eat leftovers for our last meal together, or how we’d look on the subway, Li-Ming in her rusted wheelchair, me pushing her through the crowds, the two of us standing outside the government’s impenetrably red, gold-studded doors, stone phoenixes peering down, mocking us in this illustrious attempt to control one’s fate. What songs could we sing that would finally be heard? One day, I’d learn the poems, recite them to an empty conference room:

  “What’s the use of all that noise and money?”

  “I pity all these ordinary bones.”

  Nonsense! Hu-li-hu-tu. . Haha! This book of our creating is entirely nonsense.

  *

  An hour later, after an arduous maneuvering of Li-Ming’s wheelchair down the stairs to the Jishuitan subway, after we managed to fool the ticket attendant into thinking I was Li-Ming’s medical aide and could ride for free (Li-Ming’s final act of frugality awarded), we stood before the gates of a nation for which Li-Ming once sang a chorus.

  “This way.” I pushed her rusted chariot over buckled ground to our final destination: Jingshan Park. I paid my entry fee—a foreigner’s rate of two kuai; Li-Ming, a city resident, could enter for free. The park was mostly quiet save for a few old men sitting on wooden stools, practicing characters in wide, watery strokes on the pavement, first words disappearing before the poem’s last verse.

  Our final destination: Coal Hill. Where centuries before an empire collapsed and Emperor Chongzhen climbed this mound, a white silk belt tied around his waist. At the top, the white swatch unfurled like a bird in flight, and, with his favorite eunuch Wang Cheng’en by his side, they looped the belt around their necks and closed the Ming Dynasty’s grip on the land stretching thousands of li from this central heart. A double suicide. The fall of an empire. The remaining Ming loyalists said a dragon appeared in the sky that night, the emperor’s soul ascending—but to where, exactly, the Mings couldn’t provide a map.

  As we’d planned, I pulled Li-Ming out of her wheelchair and arranged her in my arms so I could carry her up the hill to her final resting place.

  She looked up at the tree and although I wanted her to be beautiful, as young as the woman Baba met in a Jiangxi pigsty, I didn’t see anything but haggard folds creasing her neck. A goose’s neck is firm and taught yet hers was nothing like that—already slack and limp, anticipating the ending she desired: but no, I wanted to tell her, not quite, not yet. We were puppets controlled by a shadowed hand, Li-Ming’s pen stronger than it would ever be again.

  “Did you know about Chongzhen? Did you study him in your books?” Her voice, suddenly hers to claim, was crinkled, grasshopper legs rubbing within her throat.

  “I didn’t,” I admitted. I never opened a history book that year. I thought being a foreigner in a foreign land was enough. I’d learn years later, when I was a more serious student, that the English word for “foreign” comes from the same Latin root as “forest,” foris meaning “outside” or that forbidden place beyond known territories. But here, towering above the concentric walls of the Forbidden City, there weren’t any forests as far as the eye could see. Li-Ming was in my arms—her head drooping to my shoulder, eyes half open and peering at a petulant sun on a day so bright and hot it was the opposite of what Chongzhen and his companion saw that night. Her hair had started to sprout in patches on her scalp, persistent weeds in dry soil. Foreign isn’t on the outside, I thought. It’s what we can’t scrape away, can’t climb within, can’t carve out nor chip away. An immeasurable distance counted by the length of an arm’s reach, the core of an atom where space itself comprises the center, the probability of an encounter not yet met, where absence creates matter, where what’s unknown, unseen, is actually what’s binding everything together, preventing the Great Unraveling.

  “Let me walk,” Li-Ming said. Her body’s weight returned to my arms.

  “You’re crazy,” I repeated Baba’s mocker
y of us.

  “As a magpie!” she croaked, the attempt at humor making her body so heavy I needed to place her to the earth. What did it matter if she crawled or I carried her? The old men in the distance had packed their brushes, poetic pavement wiped clean, an empty canvas awaiting words once again.

  I allowed Li-Ming to scramble slowly over the rocky ground but she didn’t make it more than a meter, stopping on all fours on an outcropping to catch her breath.

  “That’s enough,” I said and she didn’t protest so I heaved her body over my shoulder. How she waxed larger and I waned smaller as we trundled upwards, and then how that dead, gnarled, stupid tree could support her weight, how I would find exactly the right indentation on one of the last, stunted limbs, I couldn’t imagine. An irony of fate: the heaviest burdens require the lightest spirits. I didn’t know the entire story yet—would I ever?—but was naïve enough to believe a dying wish is a dying wish and a dying tree can support the weight of a dying body, no matter how broken and weak the bones.

  I placed Li-Ming at the tree, leaning her against the trunk. I retrieved our last meal, Baba’s congealed stir-fry, now lukewarm from the journey, and handed her a tin.

  “Oh, how stupid of me. I’ll feed you.” With my chopsticks, I lifted a limp broccoli stem, passed it to her mouth.

  Delicious, said her moan said but not her tongue.

  In the distance, a car honked, a bus attendant called for willing fares, a child cried for his mother. The city was full of sound and yet here on this strange, empty hillside, we were quiet, listening only to our own swallowing throats. She chewed deliberately, careful not to choke.

  “Now we wait,” I said. I remembered her instructions—we’d sit here a few hours, she’d recline against the tree, meditating, and then, once night fell and the air cooled, I’d take out the rope, loop it on the sturdiest branch, and send her on her way.

  Her body melted against mine, shoulder to shoulder. Where would she go from here? Where would I? As soon as one sits below the Scholar Tree and looks onto the city’s hutong mazes, history itself is erased, rewritten, a palimpsest of souls buried and resurrected in this place never anyone’s to own. I want to tell the girl: this is where we come to disappear, to sever a story at the very place it’s meant to end.

  I fell asleep with my hands still on the open tin, a slow leak of oil dappling my favorite jeans, a stain I’d never rub clean. I don’t recall the dream I had that afternoon or how it felt to sleep on cool earth, but I remember peeling open my eyes to the sun sliding below the city’s horizon, that maze of red and gold rooftops ablaze in the final light.

  Her hand was on my shoulder.

  Will you go with me?

  I nodded, only she hadn’t provided me the map.

  *

  After Emperor Chongzhen and his eunuch Wang Cheng’en’s bodies were collected from Coal Hill, fed to dogs or hungry villagers, the victorious Manchu leader, Li Zecheng, entered Desheng Gate, the same wall standing outside the apartment complex Li-Ming knew as home. Passing below Desheng—Attaining Victory—Gate on a thick-legged stallion, Li rode to the city center where he launched an arrow at the Gate of Eternal Peace in a final victory gesture: the cavalry believed if his arrow reached its intended target, peace would reign across the land. But his mark fell short, landing with a dull thud in a moat.

  No matter, said the new emperor’s advisors, history is ours to rewrite.

  They declared eternal peace anyway. Perhaps they already knew: The moon is within a finger’s grasp, trees can build a skyline, the sky is a dragon, and this, my friend, is your mountain poem, indelible as a song sung in a cave.

  Epilogue

  A few months after Li-Ming was cremated, Kang-Lin sent me an envelope via my Maine address along with a handwritten letter that began: ‘Mama’s sarira for Menglian, as Li-Ming requested.’ Li-Ming’s long-lost friend wrote that she returned a season too late for the funeral. Baba had greeted her at the apartment. He handed her a box. “This is all that’s left of her,” he said.

  Li-Ming’s weight in her hands, Kang-Lin said she didn’t understand how the liminal could feel so literal. She took Li-Ming’s sarira from Baba, the glittering remains that could not turn to ash, insistent the bones once comprising her childhood friend’s sturdy frame, her carrot legs, would turn into translucent crystals. As Li-Ming requested in her last letter, Kang-Lin shipped the sarira—Li-Ming’s dust—to my hometown in Maine. It arrived on an autumn day when the sky had no end.

  I pulled the package out of the mailbox; little did I know this wouldn’t be the last missive I’d receive containing Li-Ming’s heart, but this first delivery contained a small goldfinch-colored pineapple cookie tin, Chinese children in half-dancing, half-keeled positions. When I hinged open the top, a puff of powder rose. The dust left a crystalized, beady substance lining the golden base, resembling the silica of beach sand but rougher. There, behind the thin sheen, sat my own reflection and an unabashed sun, the strongest we’d feel until spring. Taped underneath the tin was a handwritten note whose penmanship I didn’t recognize, a recitation of a Han Shan poem Li-Ming read me at Coal Hill, when the willows were heavy with rain, the scholar tree was stiff as a corpse, and Beijing was the quietest she’d ever be. Despite the fact I was alone, it felt like everyone in the world was listening as I read aloud:

  Do you have the poems of Han-Shan in your house?

  They’re better for you than sutra-reading!

  Write them out and paste them on a screen

  Where you can glance them over from time to time.

  *

  Twenty years after Li-Ming’s sarira arrived in my mailbox, and two years after receiving this book, I met Kang-Lin for the first time at a Starbucks in Beijing’s crowded, neon Wangfujing. She said she shouldn’t have sent me the sarira. She cried spritzing tears into her passion fruit iced tea, saying she wasn’t sure Li-Ming’s sarira was there after all. No, she said, correcting herself like a reformed drunk, there’s no sarira in this world. Look at this world! She tossed back a thin arm, directing my attention to the flashing lights for a Nike store, a Popeye’s Chicken, endless shoppers chatting on their iPhones, heads tilted not to the smoggy sky above but to glowing screens, faces ghoulishly and intensely distracted. What a foolish thing to believe, she said. Sarira. . Stupid. Truly stupid.

  The Wangfujing Starbucks where I met Kang-Lin was the nicest in the city: wicker chairs on the concrete patio, signature green umbrellas still intact and relatively green above sturdy, wrought iron tables. Kang-Lin didn’t drink coffee so she ordered iced tea, asking for a porcelain mug instead of a disposable plastic cup (“better for the environment,” she’d announced to an ambivalent barista). She was nothing like the woman in Li-Ming’s book; her red lipstick more va-voom than valiant, her breasts large, yes, but in old age they sagged. She fingered the ice cubes swirling in her cup, dabbed her eyes with the back of her hand. She hadn’t taken a sip.

  She leaned close enough for me to see her breasts still retained a touch of pertness. For Li-Ming’s sake, I was strangely relieved.

  “I never told her I was leaving,” Kang-Lin said, a shrug of shoulder. “I probably should’ve written her to let her know but my life in Beijing felt so far away and then, eventually, like it never existed at all.”

  “I see,” I nodded, trying to rectify a past that wasn’t mine. But then I thought: if Kang-Lin had written to Li-Ming then this story would never have been written. If that brashly hot Beijing summer she’d written of their poetry outings and whatever it was she was doing in the western provinces then Li-Ming’s fantasy and hope would fade into reality: the dull, mundane reality of a Beijing Starbucks on a summer afternoon when the heat of the city festered so long you couldn’t see to the second story of the office building behind you, so glittering in its earthy form, so many industrious floors reaching upwards, higher still—a mountain, one may say, if only we could see its shape for the choked, touchable sky.

  I thanked Kang-Lin for shar
ing her story, sending the tin to Maine all those years ago; despite her regret, I was grateful. Leaving behind our teas in sweaty porcelain mugs, we walked to Wangfujing station, the smog-cloaked sun drenching the city in a final blast of warmth, commuters jostling for position along the subway platform where we bid each other farewell with a chesty, hopeful hug before heading in opposite directions of the same line, looking for each other as the cars clicked forward and entered the dark, manmade tunnels illuminated with so much florescent light.

  O…

  So Han-shan writes you these words

  These words which no one will believe.

  Honey is sweet; men love the taste.

  Medicine is bitter and hard to swallow.

  What soothes the feelings brings contentment,

  What opposes the will calls forth anger.

  Yet I ask you to look at the wooden puppets,

  Worn out by their moment of play on stage!

  — Cold Mountain

  —Lao K, Beijing, 2016

  For: Mom and Dad,

  Acknowledgments

  To my earliest writing supporters, Mom, Dad, A.J., Buster, and Smokey: you read the poems about snow and spiders and the long-winded stories of bowling alley trips with love and encouragement despite how boring and awful—I suspect this time will be no different and you are now duly experienced. Auntie Grace, thank you for the whimsies of gypsies and mermaids and showing me the world is beautiful in both its smallness and grandeur. I never would’ve been brave enough to travel to China in 1996 and later become a writer without all your support and love.

  To Baba and Chenxi, thank you for the endless bowls of , the early morning trips to the shop, and, above all, opening your home to me and always treating me, from the moment I stepped off that bus, as family. Your generosity and support gave me a new perspective on the possibilities of not just cross-cultural communication but, more deeply, on how love, acceptance, and knowledge translates beyond language and culture.