by Libba Bray
Qingming was the Chinese Festival for the Dead. When I was very young, Mom used to write a letter on Qingming to her dead parents back in China, telling them the good news about the past year of her life in America. She would read the letter out loud to me, and if I made a comment about something, she would write it down in the letter too. Then she would fold the letter into a paper crane, and release it, facing west. We would then watch, as the crane flapped its crisp wings on its long journey west, towards the Pacific, towards China, towards the graves of Mom’s family.
It had been many years since I last did that with her.
“I don’t know anything about the Chinese calendar,” I said. “Just rest, Mom.”
“Just keep the box with you and open it once in a while. Just open --” she began to cough again.
“It’s OK, Mom.” I stroked her arm awkwardly.
“Haizi, mama ai ni --” Her cough took over again. An image from years ago flashed into my memory: Mom saying ai and then putting her hand over her heart.
“Alright, Mom. Stop talking.”
Dad came back, and I said that I needed to get to the airport early because I didn’t want to miss my flight.
She died when my plane was somewhere over Nevada.
Dad aged rapidly after Mom died. The house was too big for him and had to be sold. My girlfriend Susan and I went to help him pack and clean the place.
Susan found the shoebox in the attic. The paper menagerie, hidden in the uninsulated darkness of the attic for so long, had become brittle and the bright wrapping paper patterns had faded.
“I’ve never seen origami like this,” Susan said. “Your Mom was an amazing artist.”
The paper animals did not move. Perhaps whatever magic had animated them stopped when Mom died. Or perhaps I had only imagined that these paper constructions were once alive. The memory of children could not be trusted.
It was the first weekend in April, two years after Mom’s death. Susan was out of town on one of her endless trips as a management consultant and I was home, lazily flipping through the TV channels.
I paused at a documentary about sharks. Suddenly I saw, in my mind, Mom’s hands, as they folded and refolded tin foil to make a shark for me, while Laohu and I watched.
A rustle. I looked up and saw that a ball of wrapping paper and torn tape was on the floor next to the bookshelf. I walked over to pick it up for the trash.
The ball of paper shifted, unfurled itself, and I saw that it was Laohu, who I hadn’t thought about in a very long time. “Rawrr-sa.” Mom must have put him back together after I had given up.
He was smaller than I remembered. Or maybe it was just that back then my fists were smaller.
Susan had put the paper animals around our apartment as decoration. She probably left Laohu in a pretty hidden corner because he looked so shabby.
I sat down on the floor, and reached out a finger. Laohu’s tail twitched, and he pounced playfully. I laughed, stroking his back. Laohu purred under my hand.
“How’ve you been, old buddy?”
Laohu stopped playing. He got up, jumped with feline grace into my lap, and proceeded to unfold himself.
In my lap was a square of creased wrapping paper, the plain side up. It was filled with dense Chinese characters. I had never learned to read Chinese, but I knew the characters for son, and they were at the top, where you’d expect them in a letter addressed to you, written in Mom’s awkward, childish handwriting.
I went to the computer to check the Internet. Today was Qingming.
I took the letter with me downtown, where I knew the Chinese tour buses stopped. I stopped every tourist, asking, “Nin hui du zhongwen ma?” Can you read Chinese? I hadn’t spoken Chinese in so long that I wasn’t sure if they understood.
A young woman agreed to help. We sat down on a bench together, and she read the letter to me aloud. The language that I had tried to forget for years came back, and I felt the words sinking into me, through my skin, through my bones, until they squeezed tight around my heart.
Son,
We haven’t talked in a long time. You are so angry when I try to touch you that I’m afraid. And I think maybe this pain I feel all the time now is something serious.
So I decided to write to you. I’m going to write in the paper animals I made for you that you used to like so much.
The animals will stop moving when I stop breathing. But if I write to you with all my heart, I’ll leave a little of myself behind on this paper, in these words. Then, if you think of me on Qingming, when the spirits of the departed are allowed to visit their families, you’ll make the parts of myself I leave behind come alive too. The creatures I made for you will again leap and run and pounce, and maybe you’ll get to see these words then.
Because I have to write with all my heart, I need to write to you in Chinese.
All this time I still haven’t told you the story of my life. When you were little, I always thought I’d tell you the story when you were older, so you could understand. But somehow that chance never came up.
I was born in 1957, in Sigulu Village, Hebei Province. Your grandparents were both from very poor peasant families with few relatives. Only a few years after I was born, the Great Famines struck China, during which thirty million people died. The first memory I have was waking up to see my mother eating dirt so that she could fill her belly and leave the last bit of flour for me.
Things got better after that. Sigulu is famous for its zhezhi papercraft, and my mother taught me how to make paper animals and give them life. This was practical magic in the life of the village. We made paper birds to chase grasshoppers away from the fields, and paper tigers to keep away the mice. For Chinese New Year my friends and I made red paper dragons. I’ll never forget the sight of all those little dragons zooming across the sky overhead, holding up strings of exploding firecrackers to scare away all the bad memories of the past year. You would have loved it.
Then came the Cultural Revolution in 1966. Neighbor turned on neighbor, and brother against brother. Someone remembered that my mother’s brother, my uncle, had left for Hong Kong back in 1946, and became a merchant there. Having a relative in Hong Kong meant we were spies and enemies of the people, and we had to be struggled against in every way. Your poor grandmother—she couldn’t take the abuse and threw herself down a well. Then some boys with hunting muskets dragged your grandfather away one day into the woods, and he never came back.
There I was, a ten-year old orphan. The only relative I had in the world was my uncle in Hong Kong. I snuck away one night and climbed onto a freight train going south.
Down in Guangdong Province a few days later, some men caught me stealing food from a field. When they heard that I was trying to get to Hong Kong, they laughed. “It’s your lucky day. Our trade is to bring girls to Hong Kong.”
They hid me in the bottom of a truck along with other girls, and smuggled us across the border.
We were taken to a basement and told to stand up and look healthy and intelligent for the buyers. Families paid the warehouse a fee and came by to look us over and select one of us to “adopt.”
The Chin family picked me to take care of their two boys. I got up every morning at four to prepare breakfast. I fed and bathed the boys. I shopped for food. I did the laundry and swept the floors. I followed the boys around and did their bidding. At night I was locked into a cupboard in the kitchen to sleep. If I was slow or did anything wrong I was beaten. If the boys did anything wrong I was beaten. If I was caught trying to learn English I was beaten.
“Why do you want to learn English?” Mr. Chin asked. “You want to go to the police? We’ll tell the police that you are a mainlander illegally in Hong Kong. They’d love to have you in their prison.”
Six years I lived like this. One day, an old woman who sold fish to me in the morning market pulled me aside.
“I know girls like you. How old are you now, sixteen? One day, the man who owns you will get drunk, and he’ll
look at you and pull you to him and you can’t stop him. The wife will find out, and then you will think you really have gone to hell. You have to get out of this life. I know someone who can help.”
She told me about American men who wanted Asian wives. If I can cook, clean, and take care of my American husband, he’ll give me a good life. It was the only hope I had. And that was how I got into the catalog with all those lies and met your father. It is not a very romantic story, but it is my story.
In the suburbs of Connecticut, I was lonely. Your father was kind and gentle with me, and I was very grateful to him. But no one understood me, and I understood nothing.
But then you were born! I was so happy when I looked into your face and saw shades of my mother, my father, and myself. I had lost my entire family, all of Sigulu, everything I ever knew and loved. But there you were, and your face was proof that they were real. I hadn’t made them up.
Now I had someone to talk to. I would teach you my language, and we could together remake a small piece of everything that I loved and lost. When you said your first words to me, in Chinese that had the same accent as my mother and me, I cried for hours. When I made the first zhezhi animals for you, and you laughed, I felt there were no worries in the world.
You grew up a little, and now you could even help your father and I talk to each other. I was really at home now. I finally found a good life. I wished my parents could be here, so that I could cook for them, and give them a good life too. But my parents were no longer around. You know what the Chinese think is the saddest feeling in the world? It’s for a child to finally grow the desire to take care of his parents, only to realize that they were long gone.
Son, I know that you do not like your Chinese eyes, which are my eyes. I know that you do not like your Chinese hair, which is my hair. But can you understand how much joy your very existence brought to me? And can you understand how it felt when you stopped talking to me and won’t let me talk to you in Chinese? I felt I was losing everything all over again.
Why won’t you talk to me, son? The pain makes it hard to write.
The young woman handed the paper back to me. I could not bear to look into her face.
Without looking up, I asked for her help in tracing out the character for ai on the paper below Mom’s letter. I wrote the character again and again on the paper, intertwining my pen strokes with her words.
The young woman reached out and put a hand on my shoulder. Then she got up and left, leaving me alone with my mother.
Following the creases, I refolded the paper back into Laohu. I cradled him in the crook of my arm, and as he purred, we began the walk home.
Steam Girl
Dylan Horrocks
Dylan Horrocks is the author of the graphic novel Hicksville and the comic book series Pickle and Atlas. He has written Batgirl and Hunter: the Age of Magic for DC Comics and his new graphic novel, The Magic Pen, is being serialized online at hicksvillecomics.com. He’s also quietly working on a series of fantasy novels. Dylan lives in New Zealand with his wife and two teenage sons, in a seaside town named Maraetai Beach.
The first time I see her, she’s standing alone behind the library, looking at the ground. Faded blue dress, scruffy leather jacket, long lace-up boots and black-rimmed glasses. But what really makes me stop and stare is the hat: a weird old leather thing that hangs down over her ears, with big thick goggles strapped to the front.
Turns out she’s in my English class. She sits right next to me, still wearing the jacket and goggles and hat. She smells like a thrift store.
“Weirdo,” says Michael Carmichael.
“Freak,” says Amanda Anderson.
She ignores the laughter, reaching into her bag for a notebook and pencil. She bends low so no-one can see what she’s writing.
Later, when Mrs Hendricks is dealing with an outbreak of giggles at the front of the class, I lean over and whisper, “What’s with the hat?”
She glances at me with a tiny frown then turns back to her notebook. Her eyebrows are the color of cheese.
“Not a hat,” she says without looking up. “Helmet. Flying helmet.”
“Huh,” I say. “So what are you—a pilot?”
And then she raises her eyes and smiles straight at me, kind of sly.
“Steam Girl,” she says.
“What’s Steam Girl?”
Then Mrs Hendricks starts shouting, and the whole class shuts up.
That afternoon she’s waiting for me by the school gate. I check that no-one’s watching before I say hello.
“Here,” she says, handing me the notebook. It’s a cheap school exercise book, with a creased cover and fraying corners. On the first page is a title, in big blue letters:
STEAM GIRL
Below that is a drawing of a slimmer, prettier version of the girl in front of me: blue dress, leather jacket, lace-up boots, flying helmet and goggles. But in the drawing it looks awesome instead of, well, weird.
“Did you do this?” I say. “It’s pretty good.”
“Thanks.” She reaches over and turns the pages. There are more drawings and diagrams: a flying ship shaped like a cigar, people in old-fashioned diving suits swimming through space, strange alien landscapes, strange clockwork gadgets, and of course, Steam Girl—leaping from the airship, fighting off monsters, laughing and smiling....
“So who’s Steam Girl?” I ask.
“She’s an adventurer,” she says. “Well, her father’s an adventurer, and an explorer and scientist. But she goes everywhere with him, in their experimental steam-powered airship, The Martian Rose.”
“Steam Girl makes gadgets.” She rummages around in her bag, finally holding up what looks like a rusty old Swiss army knife. Screwdrivers and pliers and mangled bits of wire stick out in all directions. There’s even a tiny wooden teaspoon.
“The Mark II Multi-Functional Pocket Engineering Device,” she announces triumphantly. “One of Steam Girl’s first—and best—gadgets. Got them out of many a scrape, like the time they were captured by troglodytes on the moon and locked in an underground zoo...”
She’s talking pretty fast and waving her arms in the air, and I take a step back to avoid getting stabbed by that thing in her hand.
“Steam Girl used this to pick the lock on their cage, and they managed to get back to The Martian Rose just in time,” she continues, half closing her eyes. “As they lifted into space, the troglodytes in their tunnels howled so loud that the ground shivered and shook and the moon dust rippled like windswept waves...”
“Um....” I don’t know what to say. “So you—uh - you made all this up, huh?”
She goes very quiet. Then she grabs the notebook out of my hands and shoves it into her bag.
“See ya,” she says, and runs off before I can reply.
I’ve never been what you’d call a popular kid. I’m not very smart, I’m lousy at sports, and between the oversize teeth and the woolly black hair I’m kind of goofy looking. My mom always says I have “hidden talents,” but I gave up looking for them a long time ago. I’m used to being on my own.
I have had friends. In fact once upon a time I used to hang out with Amanda Anderson, the prettiest girl in school. We live on the same street, and when I was six or seven, her mother used to visit my mum for coffee. Amanda and I would play together with Legos and dolls and stuff like that. My parents didn’t approve of gender stereotypes so sometimes they’d buy me girls’ toys. I had a pretty cool dolls house and some Barbie accessories that Amanda adored. It was all the same to me; I’d play with anything.
But one day at school Amanda told everyone about my Barbie dolls. You can imagine the mocking I got after that. When I told my parents what happened, they called Amanda’s mother on the phone and they never came for coffee again.
I’m glad my parents stood up for me, but I kind of wish they hadn’t made a scene. I mean, it’s not like Amanda and I were best friends or anything; we hardly said a word to each other at school. But she was really
pretty, even back then, and I guess I hoped that one day, maybe.... Well, you get the idea.
What’s really sad and pathetic is that I still have hopes, after all these years. You know, like in movies, when the hot popular girl suddenly falls totally in love with the unpopular nerd and dumps the arrogant macho football jock? Only in the movies the unpopular nerd is played by a good-looking film star, while in real life he’s played by me.
These days Amanda goes out with Michael Carmichael, who hit puberty three years before I did and plays bass in a hardcore band, and who once put a lit cigarette down my trousers on the way home from school. It took nearly five minutes to get the damn thing out, and I ended up with blisters in places you don’t want to know about. I don’t really get why Michael’s such an asshole. It’s like he feels personally offended when someone is ugly or stupid or clever or different. Like it makes him really angry. I almost feel sorry for him, being like that. But then he pushes past me in the hallway with Amanda Anderson on his arm and I don’t feel sorry anymore.
Anyway, as I was saying, I don’t really have any friends. Most of the time that’s OK. At home I play a lot of online games by myself. I know a lot of people treat those games as a big social thing, with loads of chatting and friending and all that. But not me. I just go on quests and kill monsters and level up and earn gold and stuff. That’s what I like about it: even a loser like me can actually achieve something, just by pushing keys and putting in the hours. I wish real life were more like that.
Now and then, the loneliness is more than I can bear. So I try things like smiling at people in class. Sometimes they smile back. And sometimes they look like they want to punch me or else throw up. And then I feel worse than ever. Once, I smiled at Amanda and she smiled back. Then after class Michael pushed me up against the wall and told me to stop creeping out his girlfriend.