by Leslie Li
A big platter of sesame-peanut sauce noodles was set before us — the culinary announcement to the end of our meal. My father’s friend, with a glance at his watch, rose, apologized to have to leave, and excused himself from the table. My mother and I bobbed our heads, our faces imitating the expression on his but to a lesser degree. When he had disappeared, my father explained that his friend had to return home to accompany his wife, who needed to be fitted with a hearing aid. My father looked suddenly and starkly smaller, now that his friend was no longer sitting beside him. Smaller, and touchingly vulnerable. He reached across the table and began to mix the noodles so that the tofu, broccoli, and onions would be evenly distributed. He gestured, first to my mother, then to me, that we hold out our bowls so that he might fill them. Noodles mean long life. Long life, prosperity, many sons. These three blessings are what the Chinese dream of, the heaven on earth that occurs only in the land of the living, the happiness that humans experience only in the here and now.
“Daddy”.
The word broke the vacuum of our silence, broke through the clatterings and buzzings of the omnipresent restaurant noise. My father looked up from his bowl of noodles. I pulled the travel section out of my shoulder bag.
“What do you think of my first article for the New York Times?”
I passed it to him across the table. It was about Guilin, the birthplace of both his parents. My mother pretended to be absorbed in her noodles.
“Four pages,” I said. “Turn one more page. There. They told me they liked the article so much that they didn’t want to cut any of it, so they inserted an additional page. Do you know what an extra page in the Times costs?”
He read several paragraphs with a scrutiny closer than I would have liked while my mother and I ate several mouthfnls of noodles with more propriety than usual.
“You write very well.” Unspoken subtext even more gratifying than text: Do you know how much it cost me in face to say that?
“You really think so?”
He nodded, then extended his hand, the one holding the travel section.
My mother pursed her lips. “Take it, Li. She’s giving it to you.”
My father looked at her, his mouth slightly ajar, his eyes clueless. He closed his mouth; his eyes regained their former consciousness. He retracted his arm. “Thank you.”
“My pleasure.” My words were drowned out in the scraping of our chair legs against the floor as we rose to leave.
We walked to Mulberry Street, my parents legally separated but physically side by side, my mother hobbling, almost imperceptibly, my father’s hand gently cupping her elbow, and me behind and between them, my left hand curled around my father’s arm, my right hand about my mother’s — not so much three links in the chain of life as a human triangle. The triangle, I learned at Bronx Science, is the most stable of geometric shapes. The eternal triangle, I realized, wasn’t the romantic configuration but the familial one.
I left my parents on Mulberry Street, having kissed them both on the cheek, a non-Chinese practice which I had long ago repudiated and now, at this stage of my life, and theirs, without forethought, resumed.
Back in my apartment I put four of the tangelos in the refrigerator. I made tassels from a spool of red silk string and tied them around the two bamboo flutes, which I hung at angles to each other from the center of the beam in my living room, where they would free up blocked chi, bring me prosperity, and increase my personal development. That concluded, I opened the cardboard tube my father had slipped into the pink plastic bag. Inside was a Chinese hanging scroll: not a brush-and-ink painting but a rubbing.
I once saw, in Guilin, a man paint a picture onto a prepared, smooth area of mountainside, then carefully and patiently chisel both the rock and the paint away With a roller, he applied a thin coat of thick black ink, pressed a large sheet of rice paper to the surface, tamped the paper with a soft mallet, then peeled the paper away. Voilà! The mirror image of the painting/rock carving, the third generation, so to speak, of the original image.
The subject of the rubbing I held in my hands was a pliant bamboo sapling growing on, gripping, really, the edge of a cliff or rocky ledge. The white, inkless sapling was delineated and defined by its black, inked background. I remembered reading in an art history book that Chinese artists leave large areas of their paintings empty not only to permit the viewer to complete the work in his imagination but also because the idea of completion is totally alien to the Chinese mind. I went to my bookshelves, located the book Arts of China by Michael Sullivan, and found the passage.
“The Chinese painter deliberately avoids a complete statement because he knows that we can never know everything, that what we can describe, or ‘complete,’ cannot be true except in a very limited sense. All he can do is to liberate the imagination and set it wandering. ... His landscape is not a final statement, but a starting point. Not an end, but the opening of a door.”
I peeled the tangelo I’d left out on the kitchen counter the way my father peeled the mandarin oranges he preferred: so that the orange remained whole and connected to its source — the stem — while the peel formed both the petals of a flower and a little cupped dish to cradle the exposed fruit. I ate each segment slowly, savoring the half-sweet, half-sour taste while I gazed at the scroll. I found my eyes more drawn to the fullness of its blackness, the depth of its emptiness that offered both substance and support to the pliant subject, than to the sapling itself.
Juk sing, I thought. The silken tassels shimmered in the fading daylight and the soft breeze blowing through the open window. The hollow bamboos from which they were suspended I’d placed at equal and opposite angles to each other, as prescribed. At cross purposes to each other. In counterbalance of each other. Juk sing. Nothing in them but song.
“Healthy” Sesame-Peanut Sauce Noodles (Hot or Cold)
2 teaspoons salt
4 quarts water
½ pound fresh noodles
½ cup cold water
2¾ tablespoons peanut oil
1½ cups fresh broccoli, cut in small florets
1 small onion, cut in large dice
½ pound tofu, firm, cut into ½-inch cubes
Sauce:
1-1½ teaspoons Guilin la-jiao (chili sauce)
1 teaspoon sugar
2 ½ tablespoons creamy peanut butter
2½ tablespoons black soy sauce
1 tablespoon Chinese red vinegar or cider vinegar
1½ tablespoons sesame oil
Add salt to 4 quarts water. Bring to rapid boil over medium heat. Add fresh noodles. Immediately stir to separate strands. Continue cooking and stirring 15 seconds. Pour in ½ cup cold water.
For cold noodles, pour noodles into colander and run cold tap water over them, tossing thoroughly to stop cooking. When noodles are cool to the touch, shake in colander to shed excess water. Add 2 tablespoons oil, toss to coat evenly Spread noodles out on serving platter.
For hot noodles, pour noodles into colander. Shake to drain off excess water. Add 2 tablespoons oil, toss to coat thoroughly Becaiuse the noodles will cook in their own heat, use them as soon as possible, or delay cooking the noodles until just before you need them.
Steam broccoli florets in boiling water 2-3 minutes, so they are still crunchy Run cold water over florets so they stop cooking. Set aside. Heat wok to medium-high. Add ¾ tablespoon oil, heat till sizzling, turn down heat to medium, and stir-fry onion till translucent, 2 minutes. Set aside.
Put the sauce mixture in a small pot over low heat, stirring, until the peanut butter softens and dissolves into the other ingredients. Remove from heat.
Top noodles with broccoli, onion, and tofu. Pour sauce mixture on top. Toss so that all the ingredients are coated. Serve hot or cold (at room temperature).
Makes 4-6 servings.
CLEAR BRIGHTNESS AND HUNGRY GHOSTS
In Mexico, they do this festival [Halloween] the right way, with no disguises. Bright candy skulls, family picnics on the gra
ves, a plate set for each individual guest, a candle for the soul. Everyone goes away happy, including the dead. We’ve rejected that easy flow between dimensions: we want the dead unmentionable, we refuse to feed them. Our dead as a result are thinner, grayer, harder to bear, and hungrier.
—from Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood
Ours, he [Malraux] said, is a civilization that has proved unable to replace what it destroys or leaves behind. And this, he added, is revealed to the very fact that Western civilization has lost the capacity to remember and relive death. “Where are the tombs and temples of the twentieth century?” he asked. He knew that death had been forgotten in order to forget pain. But this is not possible. Death exiled is pain multiplied.
—from Meetings with Malraux by Carlos Fnentes
Unlike my first solitary visit to China, which coincided with the Moon Festival, my second, taken in the company of my father four years later, fell between two major holidays, one for the living and one for the dead. The Pure Brightness Festival, or the Grave Sweeping Festival as it is also called, belongs to the latter category An anomaly among Chinese holidays, it is based on the Gregorian calendar and therefore celebrated on a fixed date, April 4. The Dragon Boat Festival, on the other hand, celebrates the living and obeys the laws of the lunar calendar. It is observed on the fifth day of the fifth month, around June 21, the summer solstice.
As its name strongly suggests, the Grave Sweeping Festival is precisely that: after a long winter’s dormancy, a spring day is set aside for families to pay their respects to the spirits of their ancestors by tidying up their graves and making offerings of food, drink, and spirit money. You will notice that I said spirits, not memory, of their ancestors. In China, the line dividing the living from the dead is somewhat permeable and the idea of “festivals of the living” as opposed to “festivals of the dead” is too severe a distinction. To the Chinese, the rationale behind ancestor worship lies in the belief that the spirit survives the body after death and remains in the grave, where it keeps tabs on the conduct of those family members left behind. Since spirits possess powers greater than those of the living (though less than those of gods), it behooves their descendants to appease them and keep them happy. This is accomplished by cleaning and repairing their homes and plying them with comestibles and other gifts on a day dedicated strictly to them. In return, the satisfied spirits reward kith and kin with health, wealth, and happiness.
The Dragon Boat Festival is also a day of propitiation — in this case, of the river god, who possesses the body of a snake, the head, mane, and tail of a horse, the horns of a deer, the paws of a dog, the scales and whiskers of a fish, and the wings of a bird. In other words, a dragon. The ancient Chinese adopted this composite creature and cultural totem in the belief that he controlled the rivers as well as the rainfall. To invoke his munificence, they devised elaborate rites and sacrifices, including and most notably a human one. Violent racing contests were conducted in dragon-shaped boats, where at least one vessel had to capsize and one person must drown. This small, compensatory dose of death and destruction was a pittance when compared to the catastrophe of drought or flood the river god might unleash if his honor was neglected and his wrath went unassuaged.
My father and I arrived in China during a holiday black hole whose event horizon, while it precluded any popular festivities, nevertheless encompassed a personally momentous one: Nai-nai’s hundredth birthday was on May 18, and we would be there that day and a dozen days before and after to help her celebrate.
At around the time that my father and I were heading east, Anton, a college freshman, was preparing to head west, to the Wind River Wilderness in Wyoming, to participate in a monthlong course on living in nature and making the least impact on the natural environment. A city boy, he would either love it or hate it. He loved it: getting caught in a blizzard, wading through deep snowdrifts with a seventy-pound pack on his back, cooking deep-dish yeast-crust pizza in a pan over a twiggy fire, even being mistaken, more than once, for being part Native American, what with his porcupine-quill-thick ponytail, his Slavic broad-planed and Chinese high-cheekboned face. After the experience, his “report card” mentioned, among other things, his real knack for cooking and his off-the-wall humor. Anton would return to the West: on an On the Road-type road trip to Colorado one summer where he canvassed door-to-door for an environmental nonprofit; then for a Desert Solitaire year to Arizona to work as head tour guide for a bat cave, where his off-the-wall humor was put to professional use. After high mountains and low desert, the open sea beckoned. For six months, he signed on as first mate on a twenty-eight-foot sailboat that plied the Intracoastal Waterway, from Newport to Savannah and back, a young-man-and-the-sea adventure. As with me at that age, China was nowhere on Anton’s internal map. The world was flat and ended with the Western world, which included France, Italy, and Finland, countries where I had friends and where I had taken him on his twelfth summer so he might reconnect with his European half by both birthplace and blood, certain that, as with most pre-adolescents, he would want little to do with his mother — traveling together least of all — once he reached his teens, which time proved all too correct.
As pleased as I was about my second trip to China and its purpose, I made the mistake, fortuitous as it turned out, of mentioning to my father what a pity it was that we had missed the Pure Brightness Festival and would miss the Dragon Boat Festival, both by a few weeks. He, offhandedly and apologetically, conveyed my remark to Tanmin (“My daughter wouldn’t have said such a thing if she thought the Chinese way”), who knit her brows and donned her thinking cap. I had witnessed these same gestures on my previous trip to China. Their meanings were unmistakable. Knitting her brows was Tanmin’s way of smiling with her forehead. Donning her thinking cap was her version of ecstatic visions, personal transcendence, a steady barrage of alpha waves. If anyone could analyze a problem, devise a strategy to overcome it, and set in motion a well-conceived plan of action, it was Tanmin.
“Meiyou banfa. No problem,” she said with a grin glinting much gold. “Leave it to me.”
As if we had a choice. My father and I were kept in the dark, or at least in deep shadow, regarding what exactly our itinerary would be, usually until the moment it was sprung on us. That way, we had no say in the matter and so would pose no interference to the ready-made plans of those who did, namely Tanmin. While our days in Guilin unfurled languorously, pleasurably, often based on wishes I had so “Westernly” divulged — an ineptitude my father politely claimed to deplore while enjoying its results — they were a whirlwind of behind-the-scenes activity for her. No phone call went unmade, no potentially useful personage escaped unflattered, no stone was left unturned. Automobiles, even air-conditioned vans, turned up at our doorstep, like Cinderella’s pumpkin-turned-coach, complete with driver and English-speaking guide. Keys slipped noisily into the locks of doors of private residences, art museums after hours, and offices of unreachable VIPs. Throughout, Tanmin inhabited the eye of the storm, and there she thrived, directing its course and velocity.
One morning several days after our arrival, two air-conditioned sedans pulled up in front of Nai-nai’s compound to take us to the village of Langtoucun and my grandfather’s house, now a museum. My grandfather had had the sibeyuan — a family compound of rooms constructed around a courtyard or courtyards — built for his mother when he attained the rank of general in the Nationalist Army at the age of thirty. Later, he built another sibeyuan on the shores of Guilin’s Fir Lake, this time for his own use, as a refuge from the pressures and problems of the vice presidency. His life of public service, however, and the advancing Red Army kept him close to Beijing — similar to how the road we were traveling, or what there was of it, was keeping us close to Guilin. Hundreds of men and women armed with sledgehammers lined our route, pounding substantial rocks into tiny pebbles and paving a stretch of road just in time for us to drive over it. An hour or so later, having passed the last of the construction crews, we sto
pped on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere. The only other sign of life was a wiry man leading a soporific water buffalo on a rope, who ambled into view, gave us a dismissive glance, then picked his way down an embankment into a flooded rice paddy.
“Have we run out of gas?” I asked my father.
“We’re here.”
“Here?” I looked around me. “Where?”
“Langtoucun.”
Jiaqiu, Nannan, and Lizi were climbing out of the second sedan, scythes, hoes, and twig brooms in their hands. Tanmin, who rode with us, pointed to a grassy hill in the near distance.
“The feng shui graves of your great-grandmother and her family. Li Zongren de jiali ren.” She made a sweeping gesture, literally, with both her arms. “Qing Ming.”
Qing Ming. Pure Brightness. Tanmin had struck again. We were celebrating the Grave Sweeping Festival today, lunar and Gregorian calendars be damned. Nannan handed the three of us walking sticks and broad-brimmed straw hats. The hill wasn’t tall, but its gradient was steep and, at eleven o’clock, the sun was high in the sky, sucking up water from the rice paddies and redistributing it as a topography-embracing, steamy haze. Jiaqiu and Lizi, besides wielding the farm implements, hefted a substantial cloth-tied bundle apiece, as did Nannan. My father and I had just ourselves and our walking sticks to handle, which was plenty, as we made our way up the vertiginous walking path, then stopped some twenty feet short of the top. We had arrived at our destination, also constructed by my grandfather — the “wind and water” graves of three ancestors, each one fronted by a stone “door” upon whose jambs writhing dragons in haut-relief frolicked in stylized waves.
The Li family plot fulfilled the classic feng shui tenets for good placement and therefore ensured maximum harmony with the natural order. It sat on the south side of a Tortoise Mountain facing the Li River, and it was embraced on the east by a green Dragon Mountain, on the west by a lower white Tiger Hill, and on the south by an even lower vermilion Bird. It was the ideal “armchair” or “dragon protecting pearl” site. It was also high up enough on the hill to have good drainage, yet low enough to avoid the ravages of strong winds and foul weather. The grave plot itself was square — the best shape — with a narrow inner chamber and a wide entrance.