by Leslie Li
“What do you mean?”
“Well, it was you who would have been kicked out of college if they found out you were married. Not Mom. Like it was you your father disowned for marrying Mom. Her parents welcomed you with open arms. So, it seems to me that you were the one who took all the risks. Mom was just along for the ride. You were the brave one.”
My father blinked, the expression he assumed when he put two and two together, and nodded.
“Yes, I was the brave one.”
He said this, perfunctorily, not because he believed it but because he was forced to acquiesce to its infallible logic, which he would have rather refuted. He did not want to take credit for any form of bravery, to be drawn into the past. He would have rather we dropped the subject and found something more interesting and significant than the fact that he, in his modest way, twice stormed the status quo and withstood its effects. For that, he had quickly agreed with me, only to suggest: “Eat. They might save us something from lunch, but if not, this is all we’ll get until dinner.”
I obeyed. Dutifully, appreciatively, I ate a second red-bean bun with a small, secretive smile on my lips. Now and then, my father coughed, which he did fairly often these days. A dry, hacking cough — food that went down the wrong pipe, or my throat is dry, or Guilin’s air is polluted, he would say, then add, but in Beijing it was even worse — for whose cure or at least temporary interruption I passed him a second cup of still-hot tea.
The day we had all been preparing for, anticipating (for the festivity and the fanfare), and dreading (for the festivity and the fanfare) had arrived. Over the past week or so, the house had acquired the look of a before-and-after cosmetic makeover. The final touches — a long table set against one living room wall and spread with giant sheets of red paper and ballpoint pens for the signatures of well-wishers, and a second long table set along the opposite wall on which to repose the gifts of those same well-wishers — had been perfectly timed and efficiently executed not to impede the household’s more mundane activities. And yet Nai-nai’s home was just a way station, the first leg of the journey to the birthday girl herself. Nai-nai lay groomed, sedated but awake, and swaddled in a clean pair of flannel pajamas in a freshly made bed. Her hospital room was similarly hung with painted scrolls depicting peaches or cranes (both symbols of longevity) or peonies (fu gui hua, “flower of wealth and honor”) and was a depository for the overflow of gifts from her house: hexagonal clear plastic boxes containing plastic peaches, cranes, or peonies in garish, food-coloring colors; and birthday cakes, their abundant pink, blue, or yellow frosting sometimes of neon intensity. Tanmin, Jiaqiu, Jiunyang, Nannan, and Lizi oversaw the festivities at No. 1 Folded Brocade Road. My father and I stood at the head of Nai-nai’s bed thanking the officials, poets, professors, artists, and journalists for joining us in celebrating such a happy and auspicious occasion, the center and cause of which was entirely oblivious. By Nai-nai’s blank, unfocused stare, she was dreaming with her eyes open. What she saw — all these people milling around her, bending over her, moving their mouths so close to her face in grimaces that suggested speech but revealed a vacuum, a human black hole; people some of whom took her spidery hand, the one that had crawled out from under the sheet, and shook it in their fleshy two; even her own son and granddaughter standing stolidly at her bedside — were all insubstantial images, moving shadows with no specificity or significance, ghosts neither hungry nor well fed, neither to be feared nor enjoyed. Ghosts that were just there, and then, just as quickly and meaninglessly, gone, extirpated, replaced by another amorphous image subject to the same irrevocable fate of coming-and-goingness.
My father passed me a plate of birthday cake — a small slice of a two-layer yellow cake thickly spackled with white frosting ornamented with fluted pink-frosted ribbons and rosettes — and looked at me with anticipatory, even apprehensive, eyes. He had just fed Nai-nai a forkful to the popping of flashbulbs, the click of camera lenses, the whir of camcorders. I nudged a bit of cake, complete with rosette, onto the fork which I lowered toward my grandmother. She opened her mouth, birdlike, avaricious, to receive the offering. It was the cake that was important, its taste and the pleasure it gave her that she craved. That I, her granddaughter, was at the other end of the fork was meaningless. My name, my relationship to her, had been forgotten, just as I no longer remembered the wretched taste of her bok choy which made me despise it so, even though I recalled despising it so, the antithesis of how I felt about it now. The cameras’ flashes exploded, blinding me, but not Nai-nai. Their rapid starbursts were merely another form of ghost, a ghost of light rather than of darkness. Wan wan sui, Nai-nai, I said silently, hoping she accepted telepathically the spirit, not the letter, of this wish, since she seemed to be indifferent to the opaque ghosts of the people and things swirling around her. Wan wan sui May you live ten thousand years.
I turned and looked at my father. He was nodding.
My father died when he was seventy-four, less than a year after his mother’s death at the venerable age of 102. Since Nai-nai’s return to China, he had made an annual visit to see her. Nineteen round trips in that many years. The year she died he made a second trip soon after the first to attend her funeral, an occasion more lavish than her centenary just two years before. Throughout the long flight to New York he was bothered by a constant dry cough that permitted him no sleep and sometimes barely allowed him to catch his breath. When he went to see a doctor, he was told he had lung cancer. My father did everything the doctors ordered (“Your father is just the best patient,” a nurse told us. “A real gentleman. He does everything he’s told without complaining, and he apologizes for bothering us every time he has to call on any of us for help.”), but he was merely going through the motions. Not only was he resigned to an imminent death, he admitted that he had no reason to live, now that Nai-nai was gone. My father not only believed he was dying, he decided to die, and with as little fanfare as possible.
It was just before dawn that the nurse told my mother, seated at the right side of his hospital bed, and the woman who was his companion of twelve years, seated on the left, to: “Take his hands. He’s going.” Each woman took one hand and placed it in her lap where she held it tight, as if that might prevent or at least delay my father’s spirit — Catholic for my mother, Confucian for his companion — from leaving his body, or perhaps assure safer or smoother passage. I saw (how could I have missed it all these years?) the significance of his body, supine, comatose, his arms flung out from his sides, his hands nailed to the laps of the woman he had married and the woman he was living with. The physical manifestation of the existential dilemma and unrelieved drama my father had borne all his life — in his lungs, as it turned out. The lungs, where one either holds on to grief or expels it through sobbing, keening. I was witnessing the final moments of this silent tug-of-war so perfectly expressed by the two women claiming him. A tug-of-war between, on the one hand, his American life and, on the other, his Chinese soul: between being the son of a famous father or his own individual self, whoever that might have been, between embracing cultural precedent or fulfilling his own personal desires, if indeed he believed he had a right to them or in their very existence. My father pulled right and left, East and West. My father crucified. The nurse approached the bed, took his hand from my mother and felt for his pulse. Then she left the room and returned a few minutes later with the doctor, who pronounced my father dead at 5:40 a.m. The date was April 4, 1993, Palm Sunday by the Gregorian calendar, the Grave Sweeping Festival by the lunar one.
Steamed Red-Bean Buns
1½ cups flour
2 teaspoons baking powder pinch of salt
¼ cup sugar
1 tablespoon melted lard
¼ cup warm water
1 can (3 ounces) red-bean paste
extra sugar
Sift flour and baking powder together in a bowl. Add salt and sugar. Slowly stir in lard and water. Mix until the dough is soft and smooth. Cover with a damp cloth f
or at least 30 minutes.
Add sugar to the red-bean paste to taste. Thicken the paste by heating it in a small pot over a low flame and adding cornstarch or rice- or potato flour until the paste is firm and “dry” enough to form into balls.
Place the dough on a lightly floured surface and knead lightly. Divide it into six pieces and shape into rounds. Place a ball of red-bean paste in the center of each round and pull the edges of the dough up around it. Pinch the edges together to enclose the red-bean ball. Brush the seam with water and seal it with a square of paper.
Place the buns, paper side down, in a steam basket. Steam the buns in a pot of rapidly boiling water for 12-15 minutes, raising the lid of the pot several times during the steaming process so the buns don’t burst.
Makes 6 servings.
AFTERWORD
IF STONES COULD SPEAK
Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone.
“But which is the stone that supports the bridge?” Kublai Khan asks.
“The bridge is not supported by one stone or the other,” Marco answers, “but by the line of the arch that they form.”
Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting. Then he adds: “Why do you speak to me of stones? It is the arch that matters to me.“
Polo answers: “Without stones there is no arch.”
— from Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
One last story remains to be told. Not by me, but by a stonemason who lived in Guilin. That is, he was a stonemason, until he became the very material he had mastered. To hear his story firsthand, I returned to Guilin.
On my previous two trips, Old Man Hill — brooding, lantern-jawed, gazing out from under a monstrous brow across the South China Sea — was not high on my to-do list For one, he was isolated, far away from the other karst formations anthropomorphic or eidetic enough to merit their own myths and which I had visited up close: Elephant Trunk Hill, upon whose back I climbed to inspect the hilt of the sword thrust between its weary shoulders, only to discover that the protruding object is, in fact, a Buddhist dagoba, or reliquary Folded Brocade Mountain (whose accompanying legend is a hybrid of Cinderella and Rumpelstilt-skin) and Single Beauty Peak (shades of Jack and the Beanstalk), both of which I scaled for the spectacular views at the top. Luotuo, or Camel, Hill, a geological version of a recumbent dromedary at whose flanks lay a scraggly combination of zoo and circus, complete with very sad, barely sentient pandas.
By contrast, Old Man Hill resisted the casual visitor. He was distant, emotionally as well as physically But I was a persistent pilgrim. I made the long, arduous journey, during which I suffered, among other ailments, a bruised ego and a guilty conscience, and finally arrived at my destination’s off-putting, cold-shouldered, hunched back. I walked around to where my unwitting host could see me, which he gave no indication of doing. Perhaps he was asleep. It was hard to tell with a man of stone.
“I hope I’m not intruding ...” I began.
A sound came from the crag. A sigh, or perhaps simply an exhalation, like wind rushing through a tunnel or a soughing through trees.
“. . . but I’ve come a long way, even if it is only in my imagination, which sometimes takes the longest time and makes for the farthest journey of all. I was hoping that you might tell me your story, if you have a moment, of course.”
This time, what exuded from the massive rock was most definitely a sigh.
“I have nothing but time, all the time in the world. And you are interested in stories and stones, stones in stories, and stories in stones.”
“Yes,” I replied, surprised and pleased that I didn’t have to explain my presence and purpose any further.
“Have you brought one of each with you? A story and a stone, as offerings?”
“I have. Do you want them now?” I swung my bag off my shoulder and deposited it at his feet.
“When I’ve finished telling you my story — and only if you’re satisfied with it. Sit down. People who stand in my presence make me feel even older than the hill I am. As old as the proverbial ‘since time began.’ And time, as you must know, began with stories. How else could it start?”
I sat down in front of him, my legs crooked in at hip and out at knee, in a W, the obverse of the lotus position, the way I used to sit when I was a child anticipating a story, hungry for narrative, the meat of meaning. He began with a sigh, a rumble of breath in his stony lungs. The air he exhaled was cold, moist, subterranean, mineral.
“My name is Lao Shi. Not the laoshi that connotes ‘teacher.’ But the lao shi that means ‘old stone.’ I was forty years old before I married, having finally scraped together enough money to afford a wife. Two years later, she bore me a son, whom we named Xing, which means ‘happiness.’ A son, after all, is a big happiness.”
I nodded in acknowledgment, not necessarily agreement.
“A month later, my wife died. I was left with an infant and no idea how to care for him. Fortunately, I found sympathetic nursing mothers willing to share their milk, and so Xing was passed from one mother to the next. When he was old enough, I fed him juk at night when he awoke and cried. And during the day, I strapped him to my back while I worked, hacking rock out of hillsides and setting stones into walls. My friends hinted that I should remarry, but who would want to marry a poor stonemason with a small child? And why would I want a stepmother for Xing, when such women treat their stepchildren as badly as mothers-in-law treat the wives of their sons?
“Years passed, and Xing became a strong young man, while I quickly grew gnarled and withered through toil and care. When I suggested that he was old enough to work and that I would gladly teach him my trade, he hooted in disdain, ‘There’s no future in being a stonemason — unless you’re satisfied with an empty purse and an aching back. Not I. I’m going to be rich!’ When he went down to the river to swim, which he did often, I offered to buy him a bamboo raft so that he might become a fisherman. ‘Fishing?’ he exclaimed as if I’d gone mad. ‘There’s no money in that’.
“Every trade I mentioned he rejected, as though it were an insult, until one day recruiters from Hepu, a region along the coast famous for its pearl oyster beds, arrived in Guilin searching for novice divers. A good swimmer with powerful lungs, Xing decided that here was the opportunity he had been waiting for. ‘If diving for pearls was so lucrative,’ I asked him, ‘why did the recruiters have to cast their nets as far as Guilin to collect new divers? Why didn’t boys from Hepu jump at the chance to gather pearls for them? Because the South China Sea is given to sudden storms and treacherous currents,’ I said, ‘because the risks outweigh the rewards.’ When reason failed to deter him, I pleaded with him to stay for my sake. At seventy, I was an old man who hoped my son would take care of me in my final years as I had cared for him all of his life. But Xing would not be dissuaded. I did, however, extract from him a promise: that in three years’ time he would return.
“The morning of his leave-taking, again I implored: ‘Remember your promise to return to Guilin in three years. That is all I ask of you.’ Then I raised my walking stick and pointed to this hill where you and I now sit. ‘At the end of three years you will find me there, waiting for you.’ Xing fell on his knees and swore that he would return in three years’ time. And so we parted.”
The sun was at Lao Shi’s back. I couldn’t see his face, which was in shadow (the eyes had always been in shadow, beneath the ponderous brow), but I heard his labored, rhythmic breathing. With each inhalation, he gathered and ordered memory. With each exhalation, he gave memory speech.
“Will you help me tell the next part of the story?”
“Me?”
“You are a writer.”
“But this is your story,” I demurred. “How can I know what happened to you?”
“The next part of the story is what happened to Xing, and about that I have only clues and guesses, same as you. A myth doesn’t come alive, which you have done for me, until the tale has both a teller and a listener, unless it evokes both mem
ory and imagination. And unless it changes. Myths survive because they evolve. They change with the teller, the listener, and the times.”
“But what can I know about what happened to Xing?”
“What I’ve already told you about him and about me, what you know about diving for pearls and about the South China Sea, or what you can imagine. You see?” he said, chuckling, so that some loose rock dribbled down his chin. “Already you’re looking out, like me, across the sea, looking for Xing. But unlike me, you see him.”
I looked at Lao Shi doubtfully. “I do?” in surprise. “I do,” in amazement. “I do. He’s boarded a boat along with some other recruits. They’ve all been given a string bag for collecting oysters and a sharp knife for cutting them away from the coral seabed. The boat has reached Hepu and dropped anchor.”
“Like the other divers, Xing has jumped overboard and now follows the older, experienced divers down, down to the oyster bed,” Lao Shi continued, looking into the distance where my eyes had settled on the long, faint line of the horizon. “Suddenly, he feels a strong current. Through his goggles, he looks around him — where have all the other divers gone? — then above him. The huge shadow of a great shark glides by, creating a second strong current, and twitching between its jaws is one of the recruits. Panic-stricken, Xing drops his bag of oysters and follows the older divers who kick madly for the surface, where they’re plucked out of the foaming water steeped in blood.”
I picked up the thread of the story in the interstice of silence, which was followed by a sigh — a distant roar, then a hiss, like the bursting foam of a wave breaking upon a beach.
“The following day, Xing refuses to venture out in the boat. Instead, he practically hugs the shoreline, working the shallow beds of young oysters whose shells, once pried open, reveal pearls, if any pearls there are, no larger than a grain of sand. Week after week, he works the same shallow beds, earning barely enough to live on. When fully three years have passed ...” I looked up at the old man, who continued: