by Meng Jin
It was in these moments that I understood I would do whatever your mother required. No matter that we were no one to each other. No matter that I was not a natural caretaker, did not particularly like children, and had a bad hip. You see, there was a delight in the neighbors’ gossip that made me want to hurl my cane through a window. They did not try to hide it. The ones who had been friendliest and most welcoming when Su Lan and her husband first moved to the longtang, looking like youth and wealth, now kept the farthest distance, addressing Lan only with formalities, disappearing quickly, whispering cheap falsities among themselves while she was gone. The younger women shot her openly dirty looks and pulled their men close. Worn as she had been by pregnancy and all that followed, Su Lan was still beautiful. And after she returned to the university she began to dress beautifully again as well, wearing the fashionable clothes and bold lipstick and bright earrings (hardly any women in those days would even consider piercing holes into their ears) that had once spurred the other women to praise her elegance and style, and now gave them a reason to call her whore. In the neighborhood, a beautiful, confident woman without a husband was a dangerous, hungry beast.
If they had known her at all, they would have seen that Su Lan had eyes for no human. She was not interested in her beauty. In fact she did not think herself particularly attractive, and believed her features to be small and inoffensive, nothing remarkable on their own. Rather, she felt the strength of her face was its neutrality; like the white walls of her room, it functioned as a blank palette that was enhanced (rather than made garish) by makeup and jewelry. In this way she conceived of her beauty, like her other attributes, not as an inherent or inherited quality, but rather as another aspect of her self-invention, the hard-earned result of her own work and will. At times I wondered if she thought of herself as two people: the one that moved through the world, and the one that created that other apparent self.
It was for the sake of her work that she made herself beautiful. It scares them, she told me once, poking earrings through her lobes. By them she meant the other physicists in her department, who were mostly men. She had introduced herself at enough institutions, research groups, and conferences to see how her appearance affected her colleagues. It started with surprised confusion—initially she was asked, addressed as xiaojie, what she was looking for, if she was lost. Then came shock and dismissal. She didn’t mind being underestimated. It was a satisfying feeling to prove someone wrong, to know that she would not be underestimated again. After she revealed her intellectual superiority, the result was a kind of terror. Physics professors are not comfortable around beautiful women, she said. She strapped on her high-heeled shoes. It was important to be as tall as the men, so she could make them look her in the eye.
Perhaps she heard what the neighbors were saying about her after she returned to Shanghai alone. Perhaps she didn’t care. To break through the shock of those first months, she had wrapped herself so thoroughly in her physics that the little time she wasn’t at the university was spent bent over her desk, cradling you in one arm and scribbling and erasing with the other, so focused she often didn’t notice when you cried. She had started work on an ambitious project for her dissertation, the project that would eventually take her and you away from Shanghai, and which, I now believe, would hound her for the rest of her life. It had to do with the most fundamental laws of nature, and its question was one she had long pondered without the proper vocabulary, the kind of question she had pursued knowledge in order to know to ask.
Her subject was time. The arrow on the horizontal axis of a graph, pointing beyond the edge of the page, the little t found in nearly every fundamental equation describing the workings of the universe. And yet we barely understood it. Less than a century ago, physicists had believed in absolute time, some god-hand beating out the seconds as our three-dimensional world was pushed from past into present, present into future. Human nature was to blame for this error. We centered our experience too readily. For the same reason we’d once believed the stars revolved around the earth, we believed time to be static and irreversible.
What strange torture it was for Su Lan to be limited to a linear experience of time. Imagine being constricted in space, a cartoon drawn on a page. This was how Su Lan related to time: as a prisoner. She was determined to rewire her brain so it could comprehend—and eventually intuit—reality as it actually was. In this reality time was more complex than we could imagine; far from static, it might be bent and twisted and tied in knots. And during one of those nights when she stayed awake reading the physics journals that had piled up by her bed while she convalesced, a breakthrough came to her, a new way of conceiving the restriction of our temporal experience. This reconception, impossible and wild as it was, provided a small opening through which she glimpsed the beginning of a theory.
The reconception had to do with energy. Specifically, it had to do with the theoretical conditions under which the second law of thermodynamics might reverse.
According to the second law of thermodynamics, in a closed system disorder will always increase with time. This is also called entropy. When Su Lan taught this concept to first-year physics students at the university, she used the classic example of the partitioned box. The two sides of the box are filled with two inert gases, and there is a small hole in the partition. After enough time has passed, the random motion of molecules bouncing off the walls and each other will result in the two gases distributed evenly across the two parts of the box. The gases will be mixed so thoroughly it would take quite a bit of energy to separate them back into their original pure states. In other words, the box gains in entropy; to decrease its entropy requires work. To further illustrate the concept, she asked her class to imagine two bowls of water, one hot and one cold, which are then combined. Passing your hand through the water, you wouldn’t expect half to be cold and half hot; rather, it would all be warm. In both scenarios, it would be impossible to imagine the reverse sequence occurring. Nothing starts in disorder and moves without intervention to order.
Su Lan argued that the second law of thermodynamics was why we experienced time at all. While the rotations of the earth around the sun constituted our relative measurement of time, the tendency of the universe toward disorder was what created our experience of irreversible events. Irreversibility in turn created the feeling of moving in one direction versus another—that is, the experience of moving through time. The second law of thermodynamics resounded so strongly with human intuition that many physicists believed it to be the most fundamental of fundamental laws.
Did Su Lan believe there existed a place where the laws of physics would not hold? Not exactly. She believed it might be useful to theorize the physical consequences. To articulate the strange relationship between entropy and time, she would develop both a physical and a mathematical theory for what might happen under the circumstance of reversal. That’s what she told her colleagues at least. In private her imagination ran wilder. Imagine if you could manufacture conditions under which the universe tends not toward disorder but toward order—she said to me once—you could watch time run backward.
One morning she’d found a student sleeping in her class, and to wake him, grabbed a glass of water off her lectern and threw it down. Wet shards sprayed across the floor and the sleeping student sat up with a jolt, tucking his feet beneath his desk. Explain to the class, she said to the student, how you would put the water back inside the cup.
For the rest of the term she hung this impossible problem over her class.
The answer, of course, lay in the idea of entropy. Only by reversing the second law of thermodynamics could we expect the glass to come back together and the water to fly back into the cup. Of course this was physically impossible.
Or nearly impossible. Su Lan corrected herself: actually, it was only extremely improbable. When you considered the question of why the second law of thermodynamics existed at all, the answer was simple: probability. It will always be more probable, gi
ven a set of heterogeneous components, for the components to arrange themselves in a disorderly way. In the case of the broken glass, there was only one way for the pieces to fit together in the original glass, and near-infinite ways for them to lie in a disorderly heap. What people forgot was that probability had nothing to do with possibility.
So you’re building a time machine, I ventured.
She laughed: That sounds too exciting.
She began to speak then of human memory, calling it the mind’s arrow of time. In her thought experiment, under the reversal of the second law, the thermodynamic arrow of time would run backward, toward order instead of disorder. The mind’s arrow should run parallel to it, so instead of remembering what had already occurred, we would be able to predict what was about to occur. The cost of seeing into the future, however, was that we would lose our memory of the past, and with it, any explanation of how we arrived at our present state.
Again she used the example of the glass of water, the scenario in which the broken glass comes together and the water flies back inside. If this were to happen, while the glass was still broken we would be able to remember it becoming whole, but once the glass was whole we would forget that it had ever been broken. Though the mind now remembers the future, order is in the future now, and disorder in the past. It’s so strange, she said, that even when you turn the laws of physics on their heads, we’re still blind in the direction of chaos.
Perhaps Su Lan would cringe at my understanding of her work. Perhaps she’d say that physicists defined things differently from you and I, that a thought experiment was just that, meant to manipulate the mind into thinking differently. She might shake her head and laugh, dismissing her ideas as wordplay and mind games. But I saw their grip over her, and wondered what the project really meant for Su Lan—what exactly it was that had made her so desperately want to remember the future and forget the past.
She began to study for the TOEFL, the English exam required for admission to American universities. She never said explicitly that she was aiming to go abroad. But as your cries and murmurs turned to strings of syllables and then to words, your mother was also forming her mouth around new sounds. She practiced at every opportunity. On the weekends she held you on her lap and sat on the terrace, and the two of you spewed nonsense noises at each other, each staring intently at the other’s face with bewildered eyes.
Human language was not among Su Lan’s talents. She had asked me once to teach her to speak Shanghainese like a local, and it was immediately apparent that her instinct for mathematics worked against her ability to master language. The patterns in language were not perfect and consistent like the patterns in numbers, in fact nearly all the time they were false patterns, breaking down just when you needed them most. Language was messy, unpredictable, inelegant: in other words, too human. It was this human logic that seemed to elude her. Solving a mathematics problem, she said, was like entering a room filled with clear light: the air is crisp and fresh, the mind is free. On the other hand, trying to say something—trying to say exactly what you mean—was a foray into darkness, where your fears and failures hid—a foray into hell.
So she resorted to rote memorization and repetition, and her memory was much weaker than her intuition. You could tell it pained her to know there existed some deep current of linguistic understanding she could not access.
Su Lan had always spoken with a strange accent, so much so that I could not place her—even now I don’t know where exactly she was from. Initially I’d believed this was intentional, part of her effort to present herself a certain way. After I watched her struggle with Shanghainese, then English, I wondered if it was actually her failure to properly learn Mandarin.
By then you had entered your most charming and pretty phase. You’d grown a full thick head of hair and your singled eyelids had doubled. You sat up on your own and looked around, blinking, making little o’s with your mouth, opening and closing your chubby hands. For a long time you had not had proper clothes. It was easier to wrap you in diapers and blankets or keep you naked during the hot days. But after returning to the university Su Lan purchased a handful of nice baby outfits, tiny shirts and dresses that she fitted over your head with care. Sometimes she took you to work with her, and on these days she dressed you as meticulously as she did herself, once even dabbing a dot of rouge on your lips. I think she was using you as a kind of prop, similar to her high-heeled shoes, a way of forcing her colleagues to contend directly with that for which they might judge her. I imagined her striding into a laboratory full of balding men in glasses, with silent smiling you staring over her shoulder, and that hard look in her eyes, a fearsome and impressive sight. With me you fussed and cried and grabbed whatever you liked, ignoring my scolds with a stubborn willfulness that astonished me. But with her you were perfect and obedient, as if you knew your role in her game. Even then you had developed an instinct to please her.
It was spring, nearly two years after Beijing. Su Lan checked the mail often. The other time I had seen a similar impatience, she had been waiting for the letter from her university friend; I assumed she had written that person again. Now you could stand up and carry your body across the room. You called me po-po and gleefully mimicked the sounds of cats and dogs. When Su Lan finally received the letter she was waiting for, she ran up the stairs and went into her room without stopping at mine to collect you. Later she came in and announced that she had gotten what she had been working for. She would be going to America to complete her PhD. She had passed the TOEFL, just barely, and she had been granted a fellowship to work with an American professor who had visited Fudan the previous year and was impressed by her work. She would be leaving in a couple of months and did not know how long exactly she’d be gone. She picked you up and asked me to look after the room while she was away. This was her first home, she said, the first home she chose, and she did not want to lose it. I saw a flash of fear.
Besides, she continued, it was possible that her husband would return—the room was his too, after all. It was the first time she had mentioned her husband since Beijing. Months later, when I went into the room to air and dust after you’d gone, I saw that she had left his clothes hanging in the closet, his shoes arranged neatly beneath them. On the back of the door was his doctor’s coat and stethoscope.
She handed me a key and took you away.
The last real conversation I had with your mother took place the night before she left for America. In the three years she’d lived here, she had somehow accumulated many things, and so she spent her final week in Shanghai packing what she could into two suitcases and tossing or storing the rest. After she finished the room was immaculate, with books and bedding and clothes perfectly organized on shelves, in trunks, shut behind wardrobe doors, the kind of order that could never have persisted amid life ongoing. She buckled her suitcases and pulled them upright. When I came in she was sitting in the middle of the room with you, looking at the white walls, which now gleamed again as if new. We sat there for a long time without speaking. In the silence I felt all we knew and did not know about each other. How strange time was indeed, this human time, how it could bind people, pull you away from yourself. There was too much to say so I said nothing. I could feel that Su Lan had more to tell. She bobbed you on her lap and stared at the wall behind my head.
When she finally spoke, she did so compulsively, without interruption, the words pulled from her throat.
I have always had a talent for leaving, she said. I began to cultivate this talent when I was very young, barely old enough to dream. Most of all I wanted to leave my mother. Leaving her, I thought, I might finally leave myself.
I know you think of me as this bright, talented person, a person who will no doubt become something. I think you’re wrong. I’m ambitious, yes, that much is true. But my ambition runs backward, not toward anything but away. In fact, whenever I’ve tried to become something, I’ve failed, because I’ve only really ever managed to care about what I’m not.
I left my childhood home early, when I was still a child, and then I left the place I left for, and then that place too. In secondary school and university I would return home for the new year, because that’s what everyone did. Eventually I stopped going back. For years I haven’t seen my mother, I don’t even know if she’s alive or dead. And yet, she’s still here, her spirit, her ghost, she follows me wherever I go, even into my mind and thoughts. I think I am alone, and then the room fills with shadows: my mother, my waipo, my tai-waipo—I can see her limp body, calling out from her deathbed. My father too, sometimes, and other men I know only from names carved on stones. They all watch me, closely, waiting to laugh in my face.
Sometimes I ask myself why I am going to America. Isn’t there more for me here, where I already know the rules? Isn’t Shanghai big enough, rich enough, new enough?
But my mind trips on itself, repeats, comes up again and again with different versions of the same story. It orders the space around me—which should be new and dynamic, full of its own patterns and pains—with outlines of everything I need to forget, so that no matter how far I have come, how old I’ve grown, I am stuck in a reel of the same irrationalities and insecurities that plagued the first decade of my life. Even my husband—I see them taking him, in order to drag me back. I am leaving, again, to populate my world with unfamiliar, indifferent ghosts.
Su Lan looked down at the patch of white floor between her legs. She had never before spoken of her childhood or of her family, not even in this vague way. I realized that in all the time I had taken care of you, I had implicitly accepted that you had no blood grandmother, no blood aunts or uncles, just as I’d accepted you would have no father, and I saw again your mother on the day we met, standing in the center of the totally white room. Despite all her talk of time, I had accepted her as she presented herself, as a person without a past. What had she seen in the paint that day, where I had seen an expanding emptiness?