. . . One day we will reach a truce, lie down together, join my father’s ancestors: newborn girls whose mouths were stuffed with ash, soft-shouldered eunuchs beheaded for errors in calligraphy, courtesans with three-inch feet that ran to rot. Mistakes erased from the family genealogy. We will be fleetfooted, my wolf and I, dash through the afterlife without being bothered by stares . . .
. . . Nineteen when it first struck. Papa trying to save me, bringing stews of garlic, cinnabar and rooster blood. Lungs of vermilion river frog, genitals of swans. Circling my room with mi yao, distracting evil spirits. Mama weeping, scouring my body like she did when I was small, looking for lesions on my skin. One night Pono standing at my bed, studying my delirium, arthritic limbs, looking at my skin like Mama. I knew what they were looking for. I have always known . . .
. . . Rachel, Vanya, Jess see me as mystical, a kind of martyr nailed to the crucifix of pain, humiliation. How can I explain to them how illness brings its twisted gifts. Privacy. And journeys. Dark hinterlands where creatures jibber, jeer and drool. My wolf visitations. My cousins mistake my silences for wisdom, my intuitions for magic. O dearest women, barefoot familiars of my youth! If I am magical it is only in the way rotting trees give off a kind of light . . .
. . . Maybe I was born exhausted, years of running in my mother’s genes. I never learned to laugh. So quiet, people talked around me. In this way one learns. Father says I was a somber child, staring, contemplating. I remember him squatting in his vegetable patch—a garden so small he could hoe all corners of it from the center—crooning to me in my cradle. And Papa’s “HAH! HAH! HAH!” at dawn, practicing Gong Fu in our little balding yard. In later years explaining it was good for his shoulder, shot in World War II. Growing up, I would wake, rest my head on the windowsill, see the sun coming up between his strong, yellow calves. Papa poised, a frozen warrior, the Mantis Walk, the Tiger Leap, the Cobra Coil—in his mind, vanquishing the enemy, the crack-shot German soldier. Even with his shattered shoulder, he could split giant summer squashes with two fingers. ZAP! . ..
. . .O Papa, I see you coming home from war, armed only with your dreams. To be someone, become someone, something more than stoop-work “coolie.” Studying bookkeeping on the G.I. Bill, marrying an un-Chinese. But then, your shoulder refusing long hours turning into years, the physical endurance of hunching at a desk. O dreams! How they evaporated in the steam of kitchens wetly soothing, comforting your wounds. And you became a cook, floating in the fog of other people’s meals . . .
In her half stupor, Ming didn’t taste the tears brackish on her lips. She tasted stale rice, cold tea, the hard years when her father failed at bookkeeping, when he was learning to be chef kine, stealing salt and fish-heads from the restaurant for his family. Weeping, soaking his feet at night, while Ming massaged his shoulder, reciting her lessons. The years her mother worked as night attendant in the local women’s prison, things her mother saw she never spoke of. Years her mother walked home, saving bus fare. For Ming, Ming’s brothers, everything for them, their education.
. . . And Papa doing woman-chores for Mama . . . ear cleaning, toenail clipping, polishing our shoes. Some nights, shampooing my hair, drying it gently as if I were porcelain. And his fantastic stories! Tales of the Water Margin, stories of Gong Fu heroes, performing deeds like Robin Hood and his men of Sherwood Forest. Sometimes, in a silly mood, Papa changed the endings or the beginnings. Sometimes Lu Zhishen, or Phony Monk, ended up a real monk, sometimes an emperor, a roasted dog. One day Papa bringing me a gift, a book of fairy tales. In this way, he led me to my Right World. Lives did not begin until I opened books, and when I closed them, lives were suspended, waiting for my eye, my finger on the page. The power! So I learned how Art does not betray . . .
. . . Other things he taught me: Pākē rituals of hospitality, sometimes lost to hapa-Pākē. How to hold chopsticks properly, palm up, never down. How to hold a bowl of rice, and tiny no-handle cups. Never to be late, too talkative. He taught me the un-Chinese. Father-affection. Father-love. Mama was loving, but only with her eyes, her silences. Held back by that invisible leash, her past. One day I opened Mama’s lunch pail, threw her lunch out in the gutter. “Why can’t you hug us, laugh with us, like Papa?” Why did brothers and I have to suffer for what Pono did to her. . . .
. . . “When angry do-say nothing,” Papa instructed. “Before do-say something stupid, count to ten. If very angry, count to ten backwards. In Chinese.” This was very hard, Papa very wise!
Mostly, I said nothing, growing up. A book-swallower, people thought I was bright, so I became bright. Even when marriage came, and children, I said mostly nothing, always living with the hermit’s quirky grasp of words. Even now, the wolf years, books, music, thought, my consolation, that edge I count on when all the normal signs don’t speak. The mind, the mind. Imagine, in one moment, you can see a hundred years!. . .
Sometimes Ming feels mild nostalgia for the early years, husband, Johnny, attentive, her children young, her body strong. Sundays in Chinatown, son and daughter carrying their Chinese singing parrot, Fong, to little tea shops where old men competed ruthlessly. Whose caged bird sang the brightest, the loudest. Chrysanthemum tea, shrimp dumplings, lotus-seed mooncakes. Her son and daughter laughing, small legs carrying them down streets where they guessed Chinese riddles printed on hanging paper lanterns.
. . . My little Pākē-kanaka. Life was most real for me when they were young, and still believed in magic. Johnny saying magic fit in with my meditative temperament. And then, my wolf returning, claiming me more often. My children frightened into strangers. The years. Haunted nights of sleeplessness, “white nights,” when I turned to books. Johnny asking if his snores disturbed my reading, if he has left me enough space in our bed. Me thinking how one can read in the space of a coffin . . .
. . . I try gentle humor, telling him the concept of good health, normal life, bores me, the slow drip of the quotidian. “But you’re still young,” he says. “There’s so much life to live!” How can I speak of my exhaustion? When my wolf comes, he consumes everything, even my excrement. Face haggard, eyes ringed like targets, wolf mark spread across my face, spine bent, fingers swirling arthritically. Confronting myself in mirrors, I cannot look, cannot turn away. When it hits me in full stride, I ask Johnny to smother me, stab me in the heart. He weeps, measures out my medication. And when the wolf softly pads away, what’s left of me is ravened from within. What now inhabits me? What stares out? A raw and wide-mouthed nerve, begging, begging . . .
. . . “Expect nothing,” the Buddha says. “Do not hope to attain. Go lightly on the way.” A sequin on the path, a sign. Pain can become another thing. Thus, I turn to that bright sequin, Dragon Seed, buried in the smoked skin of my mind. It leaves me aerial, embalmed. There is my Mongol in the Gobi, milking his singing horse. Does he know that in the Gobi there are many types of water? Water that lies two feet under sand. And water lying at a depth of one foot if one is positioned near certain ancient dunes. Buri water is no good, it will kill you. And at certain points of sun, if one stands in the length of one’s own shadow, yen bur water can be had, by scraping the sand ever so lightly. Once, the troops of K’ang-Hsi, emperor of China, marched for forty-seven years without seeing a river or a stream, surviving because they possessed water-wisdom and faith in their own shadows . . .
. . . I have faith in nothing now, lusted after by the wolf, addicted to the Dragon. What are emotions, they chafe like uncured skins . . . O Toru! Only you can understand and you have turned away. My knight, my mounted archer, who first rode out to slay the Dragon, bringing me its seed. Before you, there was only weak medication, my face stepped on by the will to die. Then you, home a hero from the war, limping, damaged in so many ways.
In the dark, Ming sighs, remembering Toru home from Vietnam, the two of them drawing together as damaged people do, him showing her his blown-up foot, Ming explaining her wolf mark, butterfly rash across the face, joints hugely swollen, her slowly curling s
pine. One day after long hours of teaching, picking the dead man’s hand of ignorance off the faces of her students, Toru was waiting for her, waiting to lead her down to Chinatown. She remembers sounds of honky-tonk saloons and laughing bar-girls, singsong shouts of old men gambling at mah-jongg and fan-tan. Midst hidden chimes, burning joss, smell of salt fish, ginger, jook, she remembers ancient addicts clinging to tenement walls, like starfish.
. . . I knew where we were going. I wanted to. A greasy alley, tiny man in black pajamas opening the door. Face rigid, like a loaded pistol. Until he sees Toru’s wad of dollars. Leading us through steamy, crowded rooms, families brooding over plates of food on oilcloth. Chopsticks poised, old woman waving, prawn collapsed between her teeth. Sudden courtyard, then a slum of orchids. Long, dark room like a tunnel. Bunks, old mattresses against a wall. My knees collapsing, “I don’t think I can.” Toru’s hand warm on my hip. “Try, Ming. It make everyt’ing kind.” His voice odd, lungs already hungry, waiting . . .
. . . Oh, I remember . . . Sitting on a bunk, skin jumping off my face. Bamboo pipes, little oil lamps, brown gum like little playing marbles. Inhale, choke, inhale, get pipe going over flames. “Give me your hand,” I beg, so afraid of dying. His hand warm and steady in mine. Then him lying beside me, someone somewhere moaning in their dreams. The gum all burned away, sweet smoke clotting my lungs. I want to be sick. Try to open my mouth. Form. The. Words. And cannot. So massively adrift. And somewhere . . . somewhere in the Gobi, a Mongol milks a singing horse. Caravans approach. Someone quietly removes my skin. “Toru!” His hand still in mine. I feel its weight. Could be a dog’s paw, a grenade . . .
. . . How well they get to know us in that alley! My nausea slowly rinsing away. One night on those bunks, Toru coming at me, slick and amber. Bodies drugged, hijacked, indifferent as assassins. “I am a married woman.” “Yes,” he says, moving deep inside me. He promises we’ll never grow addicted. If we respect Dragon Seed, it respects us. And yet, and yet . . . one day at school, in front of students, I moan. Feel like my lips are curling back. Filth, an appetite for filth. Turning away from my family, afraid my sour breath will convict me. Nothing helps. Not garlic, myrrh, not coriander . . .
. . . Now the little man in black pajamas greets us like family, eyes plump with the never-to-be-said: we are reaching the point where Dragon Seed ceases to be kind, the point at which its motionless speed addicts to you. Losing interest in other humans. Sitting like Ice Age artifacts, waiting for the hour of small gestures, lighting of a pipe. Still, somehow managing my family, classes, students, great spurts of academic passion. Term papers corrected overnight . . .
. . . One night, Toru quietly rolling up his sleeves. On his arms, snail track tattoos. “Oh, Toru.” I touch the tracks, trying to erase them. “Ming,” he says softly. “You not tired of this nineteenth-century shit? Dragon Seed small-time. Let me give you somet’ing make you soar, make you see da walls part.” Backing away from him in horror, so terrified I even back away from Seed. The nights. My nerve ends begging, each nerve a gaping mouth. Nights when I cry for it, that smoke licking at my lungs. A feeling deeper than need, deeper than the human condition, like back-flipping through my soul. Going to Chinatown alone, smelling the smells. Walls hung with mildew. Mattresses of living yeast. Whose lips have touched this pipe? I cannot do it without Toru . . .
She sighs again, remembering how even the memory of clicking mah-jongg tiles in that alley made her retch. Or was she retching from the lack of it? Acupuncture, herbal cures, insomnia, gut-grinding weeks of what doctors called withdrawal. Turning her appetite back to books, the balm of Chopin, Albinoni. One syllable hacked from her lips. Seed. And missing Toru, him touching parts of her no man had ever known. Him doing things to her she didn’t have a name for. Keeping her slick, circuits lit, terribly alert. In sleep, she wound herself round her husband, hungering for Toru. Or was the hunger a requiem for Seed, the mummy in the pipe?
. . . And then another flare-up, visitation of the wolf. This one so bad, neighbors hear me scream. Wrists and elbows, knees so swollen, I am a creature without joints. Pain. Pain that brings stupidity, grinds me into powder. Racking, racking. Jess in from the mainland sobbing over me. Rachel, Vanya, faces like crushed flowers. WATCH ME DIE. And one day Toru, sleeves rolled down, kissing my brow, leaving in my palm one small, solitary orb. Bringing one each day. Helping me light it, helping me drag it in. Pain deserting me. One night, like that! it goes. I run outside in circles, pull wings from a dozen fireflies, hang their bellies in my hair, a woman blinking off and on. The Dragon has consumed my wolf!. . .
. . . After that, Toru is everywhere. I sleep and feel his breath, bite down on a pigeon heart and it is his. I feel his pulse in me. One day he is waiting, draws me down a path of crushed plumerias. “Ming, you miss me, neh? Want go to Chinatown? Old time’s sake?” I would walk through fire. Same alley limned with bak choy, same little black pajama’ed man. Lying on the same bunks with pipes lit. Waiting for him to touch me. Him smiling, rolling up his sleeves, the same snail-track tattoos. “Why, Toru, why?” And he begins to tell . . .
. . . One day in ’Nam, his unit had been ambushed outside Hoi An. For days he lay hidden in a paddy; maybe the rice mud helped, kept his shot-up foot from turning green. Every day, he said, he watched this little mama-san sitting in the sun, polishing her new metal legs. “She walk like Tin Man in Judy Garland movie! But oh, so proud.” When the Army finally tracked him down and Medevac’ed him out, the escort bomber blew her legs and all of her away. And took her village, too. Old mama-san was Cong. Her face, those metal legs, kept leaking through his sedative and morphine. For weeks he couldn’t close his eyes, just lay there in his foot-cast shrieking. An orderly took pity on him, shot him up with heavy stuff. The heaviest . . .
. . . Maybe his tales from the paddies were tall tales. Maybe Toru had started smack on R&R, with some child-whore in Bangkok. Maybe he was priming me. “Next time your joints hurt, I’ll take you where you don’t feel not’ing!” His hand on me. “Ah, Ming, soft as dew on ginger.” His warm fingers on my hip in a way that makes my hip, somehow, forever his. My circuits lit, terribly alert, his slick perfect entry . . .
. . . After that he courts me, knowing lupus will return, a sickness like a dancer that waltzes off, masquerades, peeks from behind a fan. Eventually, Toru grows impatient, desperate to show me the void. I can’t do it, can’t make that leap from pipe to needle without the craven need. He grows more impatient, I can lose him in a minute. If lupus is my only hold on Toru, I tighten the embrace, start praying for another flare-up—hideously swollen joints, bone-weary fatigue, the wolf mark leaping on my face. I pray for so much pain I will beg him “Do it! With the needle! Hook me like a fish” . . .
. . . We wait, two people on a platform, looking down the track. O the perversity of my wolf! Biding his time. One night in Chinatown, Toru puts his hand on me, whispers in my hair. “Ah, Ming . . . it cost so much to live.” I moan, drift back to dreams, cradling my pipe, inside it dark exhausted little mummy. Now, I imagine him that night, sliding from my bunk, dragging his small kit, dragging his extinction. Alcohol, lighter, spoon, cotton, rubber cord, syringe, an arsenal in moonlight. At dawn, I find him curled up like a child. He seems no bigger than my fist. Cold, so cold, his pulse so slow. I do the thing, forbidden thing . . .
. . . Panic. Finding little black-pajama’ed man, shaking him from sleep. “Emergency. My friend dying.” Him cursing, telephoning, helping me drag Toru’s body far from his greasy alley. Me writing Toru’s name, address, attaching to his T-shirt, then holding him against my breast. “Live! Oh, live!” And waiting for the whining ambulance. Then running through a dawn limned with salt fish, ginger, jook. Running with my cowardice. Finding Papa in his little yard, still a Gong Fu warrior. Sun coming up between his calves, scrawny but still strong, Papa frozen in the Mantis Walk, Tiger Leap, the Cobra Coil. HAH! HAH! HAH!. . .
. . . Hospital corridors, Arctic white of nothingness. The nothingness of
Toru’s eyes. The months. Pono sworn to break his habit, even if it kills him. Run Run living on her knees, beseeching plaster saints with naked, moody little feet. The smell of Catholic priests, incense in her hair. In one year Toru’s purged, his health oppressive. He lectures me, my mounted archer, who first slew the Dragon for me, bringing me its Seed. Now a preacher, proselytizer. I listen dreamily, leaving my body with him in conversation while in my mind another, younger man tiptoes through alleys bringing me my Seed. We nod politely, making the exchange. He never touches me. I never learn his name . . .
. . . Toru grows angry, “It will kill you. A slow and ugly death.” I answer softly. “Uglier than lupus?” “I love you,” he says. “For all time” . . .
. . . Time. That thing I no longer measure. Now time measures me. The wolf approaching with his yardstick. Racking. Racking. Then, his coy, perverse retreat. How many years now? Twenty? Twenty-five? The luxury of debilitating sickness: We are allowed to stop keeping track. Allowed to do the thing that’s easiest, to step back from the bleating stir of daily repetition. Allowed to not really live, as much as appear to. To circulate in silence, contemplation, so others can’t hear the sly crushing of our bones, so they cannot see the thing with human fat dripping from its lips . . .
. . . Toru healed, his body purged of smack. No longer joined in addiction, we have lost our genealogy. Did I really love you? Mozart’s piano concerti, Schumann’s études, Bach’s oboes. Euripedes, Saikaku, Lu Hsun. These I have loved. A word I could never apply to living humans, perhaps not even to my children. Vanya, Jess, Rachel—we are charged with something else, continuity, the voices in our blood. We are each other’s conscience. But, you! Perhaps with you what I experienced was release. Blood-red drowning passion of release. Now I am old, and there is no release. There is only this triumvirate, me, my wolf, and Seed. But I remember. For a while with you, I was a woman without pain . . .
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