by Leslie Li
CENTENARY
But did not his uncertainty begin with the very fact that she [his mother] acknowledged him? I am not disinclined to believe that the strength of his transformation lay in his no longer being anybody’s son. (This, in the end, is the strength of all young people who have gone away.) The people which desired him without picturing anyone in particular, made him only more free and more unbounded in his possibilities.
— from Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke
Even though I did not agree with my father, despised him for having been emasculated, I knew soon he would be one of the ancestors, so that the discords of our life would not matter any more.
— from Chirundu by Es’kia Mphahlele
I had bronchitis. I didn’t need a doctor’s diagnosis. I knew the symptoms all too well: the low energy, the high temperature, the glassy eyes, the rib cage constrained by taut if invisible iron bands. When I presented myself at breakfast much later than usual, after everyone else, but for my father, had eaten and set off to meet the day, he saw that I was not well He put down the newspaper, his face immobile, his stare apprehensive.
“Is it possible to see a doctor? Just to get a prescription for amoxicillin, for bronchitis.”
“Well go over to the hospital right away.”
Hospital. I must have looked worse than I felt.
Nai-nai’s house at No. 1 Folded Brocade Road was less than two blocks from Guilin City Hospital, where she had resided for the past two years. At nearly a century, she was frail, a wisp, requiring daily medical attention, as well as Tanmin in frequent attendance. It was Tanmin (or, less often, Jiunyang) who trotted off to the hospital three times a day bearing home-cooked meals for Nai-nai — Chinese hospitals do not feed their patients — the reason she couldn’t join my father and me on some of our excursions in and around the city. When I’d asked to accompany her to the hospital, she’d smiled and patted my arm patronizingly You have other things to do, she told me. It was a circumlocuitous and diplomatic way of avoiding the fact that, besides being very delicate in physical health, my grandmother had senile dementia: my presence or absence was all the same to her. In fact, I had seen Nai-nai just once since our arrival and then only briefly, at the very beginning of our stay. My father had visited her several times — occasions when I’d been taken (purposely, I realized) somewhere else. Nai-nai’s condition was something we were both aware of but didn’t talk about, the two words describing it unspoken, not even alluded to. Nevertheless I wanted to visit her.
“Well see,” my father said.
Those same two words, the manner in which he said them, reminded me of another request I had made, by telephone, several years ago.
“Hello. Daddy?”
“Leslie?”
“Yes. How are you?”
“Fine. We should meet this week in Chinatown. I want to give you the microscope I want you to take to Guilin.”
“Yes, of course. But I’m calling about something else. Do you remember, when we were little, the four of us, you showed us a big brocade-covered box?”
Pause. “A box.”
“A box containing a lot of carved seals. Cbops. Grampa’s cbops. Seals carved with his name. You showed them to us, once, a long time ago.”
I could see it. The box, red and gold, embroidered with stylized chrysanthemums, the floral symbol of the autumn of one’s life, a life spent in quiet retirement and leisurely contemplation. My sisters and I waited breathlessly while Daddy unfastened the bamboo clasps and raised the lid. Animals lived inside. Little stone animals. Dangerous-looking, improbable animals that didn’t exist in America, each one atop its own stone column and nestled in its own silken cradle. Griffins, dragons, apoplectic lions.
“Can we take them out?”
A reticent nod. “Be careful. They’re very precious.”
“Are they made of rubies and emeralds? And topazes?”
Some of the animals were indeed flecked with red, the ones of carnelian. Or swirled with green, the ones of jadeite. Or graham-cracker brown, the ones of soapstone.
“They’re precious for another reason. They carry Grampa’s name.” Daddy upended the animals and showed us the undersides of their pedestals. “That’s Grampa’s name in Chinese. Each chop was designed by a different artist. Famous artists. Whenever Grampa signed a document, he stamped it with one of these chops. That made the document official.”
Pause. “What about them?”
Longer pause. “I was hoping you might consider giving them to Anton...”
A “toc,” like the receiver on the other end had been dropped or hit. I realized it had, by a sharp, indignant exhalation of my fathers breath. I had been presumptuous.
“Not now, of course. I was hoping that you might save them for him. For later, for when he’s grown.”
Another “toc.” A puff of wind, harder, more heated this time. “Why should I?”
“Because he carries Gramp’us name.”
My father was holding his breath. I knew. That kind of silence, a withholding, made that kind of noiselessness: the obverse of sound, not just its absence. He was holding an exhalation. I knew, because I was doing the same. Holding it so tight, my sucked-out lungs were ready to implode.
“He’s the only one of your grandsons who does,” I rasped, knowing I’d gone too far. “He’s the only male to carry the family name. To carry it on. Well, that’s all I wanted to say.” I shut my eyes at my impertinence.
My sisters and I set up the tiny stone animals in pairs, like Noah’ s Ark. In single file, to see how far they ‘d stretch across the liv- ing room carpet. In rows, like a classroom. In a circle, facing the center, like guests seated around a banquet table.
“You’d better put them back now. I just wanted to show them to you.”
I slipped one of the animals into my pocket. But when the stone menagerie was put back to sleep in their little cradles, I slipped it out again and, aching with reluctance, set it back in its perfectly molded niche, the last one to be filled. I burned in bed that night, berating myself for being too chicken to have filched it while I had the chance.
Pause. No “toc.” “We’ll see.”
At the hospital, I was treated immediately. The moment my father told the nurse on duty that I was ill, she took me to a doctor who, after examining me, proclaimed what I’d known all along. He didn’t prescribe antibiotics, he gave them to me, after an injection of gamma globulin, to start the ball rolling. Two small bottles, each a week’s worth, just in case of a relapse.
“You don’t want to be sick for your grandmother’s hundredth birthday,” he said as a way of concluding the visit.
When I tried to pay for the pills and the shot, the cashier waved my money away, then tittered into her rejecting hand, as if I was being naive, stupid. I looked at my father, who shook his head, signifying: What can you do? I insisted no further. Double the dose and double the indebtedness. Guanxi. Connections were both blessing and burden, a double-edged sword.
“Since we’re here, let’s go see Nai-nai.”
My suggestion caused my father to frown.
“Don’t worry I won’t step into her room. I’ll stay well outside, in the corridor.”
Still looking doubtful, even anxious, he accompanied me up the stairs and down a hallway leading to her room. We passed a few groups of people — family members car-rying away empty food containers, lunch baskets, bamboo steamers. A gaunt, middle-aged man wearing a robe that was too big for him and smoking a cigarette glanced at us, then looked out the window. As we approached Nai-nai’s room, I heard a crooning voice in the process of pleading, encouraging, cajoling, praising what must have been a recalcitrant child.
“Just a few more spoonfuls, and we’re done. Eat it all up before it gets cold. Juk just the way you like it. Jiunyang made it. Open. Wider. Ahhh. There. Isn’t it delicious? Yes, I’ll give you more, but first you have to eat what’s in your mouth. You’re dribbling. Close your mouth. Swallow. Hao. Hen bao. Go
od. Very good. Now open again.”
I peered into the open doorway Tanmin was seated in a chair pulled up to Nai-nai’s bedside. She was feeding juk to my grandmother, who was propped up on her side and faced away from the door. I could see the clear outline of her fetal-shaped body under the thin white sheet. It was child-sized, curled into itself like a nautilus shell, lost in the large hospital bed in the huge private suite. Tanmin recoiled slightly upon seeing me and my father, who entered the room and stood behind her, his arms down by his sides, his hands loosely clenched.
“Ma,” my father whispered, bending over Tanmin’s shoulder. “Ma.”
“Yau Luen has come to see you for a second time this morning,” Tanmin trumpeted into Nai-nai’s exposed ear. “Your son, Yau Luen.”
“Shei ya?” Nai-nai replied in a feeble voice. Who?
“Ma,” my father repeated in a thick voice. He smiled, or tried to, but the result was a grimace, abject, leaden, weighing down the lower half of his face. “It’s me. Your son, Yau Luen.”
“Yau Luen,” Tanmin shouted into her ear. “Your son. He’s brought Lei shi with him. Your granddaughter.” To my father: “She can’t hear you. You have to yell. YAU LUEN. YAU LUEN.”
“Yau Luen,” Nai-nai mimicked dully. “Yau Luen.”
Two doctors entered from the adjacent room, greeted my father cordially, then in low tones said something to Tanmin.
“It’s time for your medicine,” Tanmin yelled, getting up from her chair. “We’re going now ...”
Nai-nai’s head moved a few scant degrees on the pillow. “Bu. Bu yao. Bu yao.”
“You must take your medicine. It’s good for you. You’ll feel better after you do.”
“Bu yao,”Nai-nai moaned.
My father and Tanmin stood aside to permit one of the men to pass. He scooped up Nai-nai — weightless, re-sistanceless — in his arms and whisked her off into the adjacent room. Her torso was so shrunken, her lolling head so disproportionately large, that her thin, gangling arms and legs looked grotesquely long, pendulous, spider monkeylike. Tanmin and my father joined me in the corridor, where we immediately engaged in small talk: my bronchitis, the medication I’d just received, Nai-nai’s centenary in three days. A low wail startled me, nailed me wordless in place. I stared at my father, at Tanmin. They too had been stunned into silence, but theirs was complicitous, edgy. Their eyes sought the floor, the window, anywhere but mine. The wailed words were repeated, this time in a rising shriek: “Shou buliao! Wo shou bu liao!” I can’t bear it. I can’t bear it anymore.
Tanmin, repossessed of her brisk equanimity, laughed and patted my arm. “Don’t look so worried. It’s nothing,” she assured me. “Your grandmother’s a little excited, that’s all. She’ll calm down once her medication takes effect.”
“Shou buliao. Wo shou buliao. Wo yao si.” I want to die.
Tanmin laughed harder. I glanced, horrified, at my father, whose breath had stopped, jammed deep inside him and locked up tight.
“Tanmin! Tanmin! Lai! Lai!” Come. Come.
His torso shuddered, his face imploded, his mouth twisted open and sucked at the air, sharp and short: a reverse sob, an inward cough. This sudden seizure lasted only a second, the physical manifestation of the emotionally registered fact: Nai-nai had called out another’s name.
“Lai le. Lai le.“I’m coming. I’m coming.
Tanmin excused herself and scurried, almost joyfully, back into Nai-nai’s room, liberated by a quotidian event, a perfunctory obligation. Trapped in our company, she would have had to deny the obvious, invent palatable explanations, diverge ever farther from the truth. In the empty corridor, which seemed to amplify sound, I could hear her consoling, cosseting, gently shaming Nai-nai, as she would an unhappy child. Gradually, Nai-nai’s screaming abated. She wept with infantile abandon. The sobs and moans I heard bespoke not suffering and torment but deliverance and relief: for Tanmin’s essential presence, to her personal ministrations. Superfluous, my father had begun to shrink. He was becoming an absence, a forgotten ghost.
“What were they doing to her? Why was she screaming like that?” I shouldn’t have asked these questions, but I wanted him to stop dissolving, to return from wherever he had started to go.
“Transfusion.”
I barely heard his reply “Blood transfusion? How often must she get it?”
“Every day”
“Every day!”
Nai-nai was moaning again, “Shou buliao,” and Tanmin was crooning comfort to her. I stood in the corridor still petrified in place; my father deliquesced with each shou buliao, became less and less substantial.
“What if they stopped. Stopped the transfusions.”
My father looked at me, finally “They can’t. She would die.”
“She wants to die. Keeping her alive is only prolonging the pain, and it’s intolerable. Can’t you stop them? Stop the transfusions. Let her die in peace.”
I awaited the wag of the head I had witnessed all my life — the one that communicated more than the words he sometimes used in its stead, or in tandem. “What can you do,” stated, not as a question but as its own answer. Or alternatively, “What’s the use.” Also rhetorical.
Me, whining: “Daddy, Lonny and Brucie Mc Manus are playing in the Blue Eagle Club. That’s my clubhouse. I don’t want them playing in it. They’re going to wreck it.”
My father: “What can you do.”
Me, resentful: “The chocolate cake that Mommy and I made and decorated with gumdrops and colored sprinkles for the raffle? Sister Theodocia said that it wouldn’t bring in more than a dollar, so she said she’d buy it for a dollar She didn’t even let it be raffled off, and everyone brought money with them to try to win it. It was the prettiest cake of all I should have told her she couldn’t have it for a dollar Not for a dollar fifty, even.”
My father: “What’s the use.”
Me, incredulous: “Kevin Cantwell didn’t know his arithmetic today. Sister Ellen made him take off his shoes and socks and count on his toes. In front of the whole class.”
My father: “What can you do.”
Me, sobbing, as are all my sisters: “Bert’s been run over by a car! Mom says he’s dying! I’d like to run over the stupid idiot who did it!”
My father: “What can you do.”
Me, incensed: “Phoebe Wong is going around telling everyone that I turned my back on her. That’s an outright lie! Someone interrupted me when I was talking with her, that’s all. The next thing I knew, when I turned back to continue our conversation, she was gone. I should tell her to quit spreading lies about me.”
My father: “What’s the use.”
Me, exasperated, self-pitying: “Anton’s hair is to the middle of his back. Everywhere he goes, people say: ‘Yes, miss?’ In bars, too. Especially there. He’s actually considering dreadlocks. Slathering raw egg and honey in his hair and coiling it into snakes, Medusa-style. “
My father: “What can you do.”
But that wasn’t what he said, or did. He turned toward me, or rather on me, growing more opaque, less diminished in the process. “How American you are! What do you know? What do you know? They’re keeping her alive because they have to. Do yon ever think about what some people have to do?”
My father softened to see what must have been the stunned and stupefied look on my face, but he continued to solidify, not to seep away.
“Nai-nai’s one hundredth birthday. It’s not just family and friends who will be celebrating it. The governor of Guangxi, government officials, newspaper and television reporters — they’re coming from all over the country, all the way from Beijing!”
Still, I was not elliptical enough, I was too American, too occluded to understand “the Chinese way.” The Chinese way that he had always insisted I be but never explained when I’d asked him just what that was. Instead, that infuriating wag of the head.
“Leslie ...” He shook his head sorrowfully: That I was so uncomprehending? That harsh reality
was what it was and that nothing we could do would change it? That he was forced to be explicit, and therefore traitorous, so un-Chinese? “It’s good propaganda. Why do you think the government invited her back to Guilin, gave her back her house, restored it — five families had been living in it, five! — sent for Jiaqiu and Tanmin to look after her? The government wanted to show the world how far China had come after the Cultural Revolution. And so soon. So fast!” Another wag of the head. “They wanted ABCs (American-born Chinese) to come back to visit. They wanted recognition from the West and to be part of the world community again.”
“And they used Nai-nai to do it,” I said, amazed, amused, disbelieving. Nai-nai. My grandmother. All seventy-odd senile pounds of her.
“Yes, they’re using Nai-nai. For every privilege, there is responsibility. For every responsibility, there is privilege. And still you don’t understand.”
“No, Daddy, I don’t”.
“Mao invited Grampa back to China. Zhou Enlai, the premier himself, met Grampa at the airport. The following year, the Cultural Revolution broke out. At the height of it, Grampa died, just a few years after he returned home. The diagnosis was gastroenteritis. But some people think he was allowed to die, deprived of the medication that would have saved him, because he had lived in America, and because he had served in Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government. All Westerners were considered foreign devils at that time. And Chiang was the devil himself. Even Zhou Enlai was powerless to save Grampa.”