by Leslie Li
“And that’s why they’re called zongzi” Tanmin concluded, waving yet another empty banana leaf at her son, Lizi, who took it, then started to fold it. “Zong means ‘palm,’ the kind of leaf the glutinous rice is often wrapped in. So now you know why we eat zongzi during the Dragon Boat Festival.”
I thanked Tanmin for the story about zongzi, the delicious zongzi themselves, and her assistance in unwrapping them. When I thanked her for killing two birds with one stone — celebrating two major festivals on a single day on which neither of them fell: the Grave Sweeping Festival and the Dragon Boat Festival — the smile on her face buckled then drooped into a wistful frown. (Had I said the wrong thing? Had I failed to express sufficient gratitude? Had she broken some celebratory regulation to which I inadvertently alluded that should have remained unmen-tioned? Why, oh, why was I so Western?!)
“Ahh,” she sighed. “It’s unfortunate that I was unable to arrange a dragon boat race for you and your father. That, ah, no.”
She shook her head, a gesture that expressed not so much disappointment as disbelief that she had failed to come through in such a trifling matter as an aquatic extravaganza. Her lively eyes, however, were undimmed. They actually seemed to grow brighter. I turned to see what it was that she was looking at, that made them twinkle with undisguised pleasure. There on Da Mama’s lake floated miniature dragon boats — the recycled, reconfigured banana leaves — which Lizi sent out, one after the other, onto its placid surface with a gentle push of his hand.
Dragon Boat Festival Savory Zongzi
3½ cups long-grain, glutinous rice
2 tablespoons dried shrimp, soaked 1 hour
12 ounces pork belly or bacon
4 dried black mushrooms, soaked 30 minutes
2 hard-boiled egg yolks (optional)
1/3 cup peanut oil
24 bamboo leaves, soaked in water
string
Seasoning #1:
1 teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon sugar
¼ teaspoon black pepper
1 teaspoon rice wine or sherry
¼ cup light soy sauce
½ stalk spring onion (or scallion), finely chopped
Seasoning #2:
¾ teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons dark soy sauce
Soak rice 2 hours. Drain. Change water and soak an additional 30 minutes. Drain. Drain shrimp. Dice pork. Drain and stem mushrooms; dice the caps. Chop egg yolks. Set aside.
Heat wok, add oil, and fry the shrimp, pork, and mushrooms 1½ minutes. Add seasoning #1 and heat through. Set aside.
Fry rice in oil for 2 minutes. Add seasoning #2 and mix thoroughly
Drain bamboo leaves and wipe dry. Brush one side with peanut oil. Place two leaves side by side. Fold the two bottoms over together to form a triangular pouch. Place some rice, chopped egg yolk, shrimp, pork, and mushroom mixture in the pouch. Top with more rice. Fold the leaves over the top and around the pouch to make a plump, triangular packet. Wrap string securely around the packet. Repeat with the remaining bamboo leaves.
Place all two dozen packets side by side in a large saucepan. Fill with cold water and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer 1 hour. If water has not been completely absorbed, drain the excess. Unwrap and serve.
Makes 12 servings.
THE VILLAGE WITH NO NAME
The more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there; and he retraced the stages of his journeys, and he came to know the port from which he had set sail . . . what he sought was always something lying ahead, and even if it was a matter of the past it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey, because the traveler’s past changes according to the route he has followed.... the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.
—from Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
Writing fiction involves observing people suffer and, usually later, finding some meaning in that suffering. Writing memoir involves observing people making you suffer and, usually much later, discovering what it is they’ve suffered that makes them insist that you suffer too. In other words, writing memoir involves, even requires, compassion for both the sufferer and the sufferee, compassion which if you don’t have at the outset of your project you will by the time you complete it.
I was composing my thoughts and writing them down in my journal when my father opened the door (without knocking) and entered my room (without my permission). My journal served double duty: into it went descriptions of my sleeping-dream experiences, my waking-life experiences, and whatever fell in between, which most people term daydreaming or a waking dream. I call it mulling or musing, often the most interesting of the three because mulling has to do with meaning, the discovery of which is difficult enough that very few of the pages in my journal are devoted to it. So it was especially annoying that my father should unwittingly arrest potentially meaningful words which I might have written by barging in unannounced. It was also understandable, since my father is Chinese (no matter that he has lived more than twice as many years in the United States as he has lived in China) and we were in Nai-nai’s house, where privacy doesn’t count, in China, where the very word doesn’t even exist.
That’s not quite accurate. We were actually in my parents’ house. It was the house Nai-nai had built for my parents, her wedding present to them. But the Sino-Japanese War intervened, forcing my parents to remain in the United States and my grandmother to be an Indian giver. Offensive term and misnomer, Indian giver, but correct in one way: the United States government reneged on what it gave to the Native Americans to keep — treaties, land, basic human rights, even the reservations onto which they were herded. Watching westerns on TV, my father always rooted for the Indians — “They belong to the Mongoloid race, like me” — even though they were doomed from the start. They fought with bows and arrows, while the white man had pistols, rifles, cannons. “The Chinese peasant fought the Japanese war machine with shovels and pitchforks, and still we won.” But the red man on the television screen always lost. Years later, when my father learned that the desolate outposts where the indigenous Americans had been confined were oil- and uranium-rich, lucrative, legalized gambling havens, he felt vindicated. I could see the self-righteousness, the just deserts, the personal victory fighting to write themselves into the features of his hermetic face, struggling to express themselves via his restrained, boyish body and relieve it of steadily accumulated, successfully withheld rage.
“Daddy.” A pause. “Sister Ellen wants me to talk to you.” Another pause. And to Mommy, too.”
“About what.” A statement.
A long pause. “She wants you and Mommy to get married.”
A short pause during which there was a shallow intake of breath. “Your mother and I are already married.”
An immediate answer: “I know. But Mommy told her that you both got married outside of the Church.” A pause. “At the parent-teacher conference she told her. So Sister Ellen thinks you and Mom should get married inside of the Church.”
A question proffered as a statement: “What for.”
“For your immortal souls. She says... Sister Ellen says... that if you don’ t get married in the Church, then your soul and Mom’s will...” Blurted out, “Will be dammed to everlasting hellfire.”
The swift inhalation of breath. The cessation of breath. The reddening face. The bulging eyes. The pursed lips. The flaring nostrils.
“You tell that nun ...” the voice raspy with rage and heart-woundedness, “you tell her that I’m a Buddhist. I’m a Buddhist. You tell her that.”
“Hurry up,” my father told me. “Get dressed and eat your breakfast. They’re sending a car for us. It’ll be here in half an hour.” He exited the bedroom without shutting the door.
I got out of bed where I had been writing in my journal and closed the door. And I did as I was told. I said nothing
about my right to privacy. I said nothing about kindly knocking on my door before entering. I was in China, in Nai-nai’s house. And when you are in someone else’s house, the Chinese saying goes, you must bow your head. I put away my journal, interrupted. I dressed quickly I ate my breakfast of mi-fen. The car arrived, and it took us back to Langtoucun, where I had asked to return: I wanted to walk in my grandparents’ footsteps. I wanted to retrace their wedding march, Chinese version, from Grampa’s house in Langtoucun to Nai-nai’s home in Cuntoucun, or “Village Village,” too small and too insignificant to warrant a real name. I had told my father of my wish, and he had relayed it to Tanmin, who had arranged it. I had not, however, told anyone why I wanted to do this, the purpose it would serve.
The driver stopped where the gravel-paved road did, at the edge of Langtoucun. Hovering in the sun-hazed distance was Cuntoucun. To get there I needed to make my way over a very irregular path (wide enough for bullock carts, as it was strewn with the beasts’ generous droppings) of flagstones, each a good foot or so distant from each other. I stepped out of the car, careful of where I set my feet. Jiaqiu, who was a member of our small party (Tanmin was attending to matters at home), motioned me back into the car.
“It’s hot and Cuntoucun is far. Why don’t we all simply drive to your grandmother’s village?”
My father seconded Jiaqiu’s suggestion, but when I insisted upon walking, my father said he would accompany me. Our journey was more like an extra-challenging game of hopscotch, jumping from one rock to the next, all the while trying to avoid the dung and mud. Jiaqiu and the driver followed behind, bumpily.
“Have you ever walked this route before?”
“No. This is the first time,” my father answered.
We heard a whirring of tires, a groan of gears, and smelled the pungent stink of burning rubber. The car had stalled and listed helplessly, its front half up on a rock, the rest on the muddy plain. With a firm toehold and our full body weight behind it, we managed to push the foundering vehicle, our beast become burden, back onto all four tires and on course. It advanced, huffing and groaning, more slowly than my father and I on foot. We arrived at Cuntou-cun’s village gate hot, tired, and later than if we had been unencumbered by the erstwhile wheels of progress.
The village was enclosed, strangled really, by a high stone wall which blocked out not only the sun’s debilitating heat but also its life-giving light. Within this tight embrace, each lane — flanked by the outer stone walls of the two-story houses themselves — was narrow and labyrinthine, its flagstones smeared with animal dung. Lanes led, torturously, to different family compounds, all in a sad state of disrepair and disuse. I peered inside the various gates at the wooden houses and open courtyards. Clucking hens wandered in and out of the rooms. A dirty, half-naked child played with a plastic rice bowl and a knotted piece of rope. A woman appeared in one doorway and stared at me with undisguised suspicion, then disappeared inside. A man in a stained tunic, smoking a pipe, studied me with grave indifference and held his ground.
Jiaqiu had left our little band to reconnoiter farther ahead. He was looking for Nai-nai’s childhood home, which he had visited so long ago that he had forgotten the way. The flagstones within Village Village were set closer together than those on the rocky road we’d traversed from Langtoucun but they were just as difficult to navigate: uneven, slippery, many covered with fresh turds. There was no electricity, no plumbing here, not even an open sewer to flush away waste. It was hard to imagine Nai-nai spending a happy childhood here, that she didn’t want to leave it for married life and Langtoucun.
Jiaqiu finally reappeared from behind a corner building, a smile on his face. How much he resembled Nai-nai, his aunt! The high, wide cheekbones, the elongated eyes that crinkled at the corners. He’d found her childhood home. He shouted and beckoned us forward before disappearing around the corner. Compared to us, he moved like a mountain goat on these scatological stones. My father, the driver, and I trundled on, clumsily, cautiously. When we caught up with him, he was standing by an entryway chatting with someone just within — a woman who peered out, laughed, and said something to Jiaqiu, who smiled, nodded, and waved us on. The woman, who was distantly-related to Nai-nai and was of indeterminate age and, almost, gender, invited us into the courtyard. It was less filthy than the others, but still I was appalled by the poverty, the squalid living conditions. With a nasal cry, the woman summoned the other members out of the house: a few women of different ages, one holding a child, a solemn little girl. (A matriarchy? Perhaps the men were away working in the paddies.) The women smiled unabashedly, pleased to have visitors who were not only Nai-nai’s close family but who’d also come from the Beautiful Country, Meiguo, America, so very far away.
“Your daughter?” one of them asked my father.
“The second one,” he replied. “Four daughters.” He held up four fingers, laughed, and wagged his head.
“We came by car,” Jiaqiu informed them, gesturing toward the driver. “They both walked from Langtoucun.” He was barely able to contain his amusement, camouflaging his laughter behind a polite hand and simulated coughing fit.
“From Langtoucun!” the spokeswoman repeated. “That’s quite a trek at this time of day!” She looked into my face, then took my arm, felt it, and nodded approvingly “You’re young and strong, though.”
She invited us in for a glass of tea, which my father declined for all of us. He apologized that we’d come unannounced and asked if we might take a brief tour of their house, since — he glanced at me — “my daughter has always wanted to see where her grandmother lived as a girl.”
The women were almost giddy with the pleasure of leading us from room to room, pointing out the purpose of each. Nai-nai’s parents’ bedroom, the kitchen where she learned to cook, her brother and his wife Sao-sao’s room.
“Your grandmother’s room,” the spokeswoman said, almost reverently “This bed,” she told me, “is the very one where your Nai-nai was born.”
There was a young girl in it, sleeping, her back to us. The spokeswoman reached through the filmy curtain and roused her before I could stop her. The girl turned and looked up at us over her shoulder. She was an adolescent, her face flushed from sleep (or fever?), her eyes unfocused, glassy. She stood up when the spokeswoman told her to find another bed for her nap and bashfully left the room. The vacated bed was all straight lines, made of heavy dark wood. Instead of a mattress, there was a sheet of woven grass matting. Semi-sheer white cotton panels hung from the canopy and enclosed it like a cocoon.
The spokeswoman urged, “Go ahead. Take a photograph.”
I pointed my camera at the tousled bed, the sausage-roll pillow filled with rice husks, the incongruous pink-and-white-plaid comforter, and snapped. But what I saw in my mind’s eye, what Nai-nai’s birth bed evoked for me, was entirely different.
The bed was not where Nai-nai was born, but where she had given birth to my father. She was alone because, in China, in those days, a good woman gave birth alone. A better woman gave birth both alone and in the fields, severed the umbilical cord with her teeth, stuffed some of the rice sheaves she was harvesting between her legs, then got on with her stoop work while suckling the newborn at her breast. But, seen clearly in my mind’s eye, Da Mama broke the hard-and-fast rule of a hard and lonely birth for her daughter-in-law by being at her bedside. During her final contractions, Da Mama encouraged, “What’s this? A shock of black hair thick as porcupine quills. Let’s see more. That’s it. Push harder. Harder. Ah, a high forehead. That means intelligence. Again. Push. Broad shoulders. Good for the fields. Push. Push! Only one more and the baby will slither out like a wet fish. Such a voice! Like a terrified goose.” Da Mama clapped her hands together, threw back her head, and proclaimed in a jubilant voice, “We have a grandson! The Lis of Langtoucun finally have a grandson, with hair as thick and stiff as porcupine quills!”
Again we apologized for the intrusion. Again the woman insisted that it was a pleasure, an
honor indeed. And again we made our way over the treacherous flagstones back to the car whose trunk concealed a broom, garden shears, candles, joss, a half-empty bottle of mao-tai, a few glasses, some oranges, one boiled chicken, and one dried fish. We drove the short distance just outside Village Village to the burial plot inhabited by the spirits of Nai-nai’s ancestors. The flat plain was a far less propitious site than the hillside graves where Grampa’s ancestors were buried, the gravesite itself proportionately simpler, as were our offerings. No dragons writhed along the doorjambs of the grave chambers; the sacrificial altars were mere slabs of concrete. But the occasion itself was no less. I took my place beside my father, shook the joss sticks, bent at the waist before each gravestone, poured the mao-tai, invoked the spirits’ munificence, closed my eyes, and saw.
It was the last time I saw Nai-nai in the United States, just before she returned to China after fifteen years of living in New York. I had just returned from four years of living in Europe. Her luggage surrounded the armchair where she sat. My father, who would drive her to the airport to catch her flight, was present. Anton, almost two years old, entered the room precipitously, a few steps before I did. It was the first time — it would also be the last — that Nai-nai saw her first great-grandson. The moment she caught sight of him, her creased and puckered face released its manifold wrinkles. Her whole body collapsed, then shook uncontrollably in gurgling, giggling, girlish laughter. She managed to point at me, still cackling with laughter. “Meiyou tofa! Meiyou tofa!” No hair. I had no hair as a baby. Bald as a billiard ball I was, even into toddler-hood. She held out both her arms to Anton, her spasms of laughter no less kinetic, her delight in him equally extreme. “Huangde tofa! Huangde tofa!’‘Yellow hair. Yellow hair.