by Meng Jin
I said goodbye and goodnight. Her eyes were far away, imagining the white walls of her future. In my own room I took the key she had given me out of the drawer and threaded it onto my own chain. I understood she would be gone for a long time.
For many years after your mother left I thought about what she’d said that night. You see, I had come to see her as a sort of authority, whether I realized it or not. Perhaps it had to do with her education and the relentlessness with which she pursued it: you could trust her not to say anything unless she had investigated it thoroughly. She was a generation younger than I, yes, and there were times when the foolishness of that youth was too apparent, when I could see that in fact she was still coming of age—nevertheless I felt a deference to her that I’ve never been able to summon for my elders. I was reluctant to touch whatever it was that was growing inside of her for fear of altering it.
Su Lan had spoken of ghosts, familiar and unfamiliar, of seeing things that were not exactly there. How jarring it was, to hear a science-educated, reality-minded woman like her speak of such things, and with such nonchalance. She did not present these fantasies as unbelievable or surprising but rather as mundane phenomena, as ordinary as this chair or that broom.
She had spoken, I realized, with the same casual certainty as my mother. Uneducated and intensely religious, my mother lived in a world inhabited not just by humans and their depravity but by all-powerful beings and their invisible notions of good and evil. Throughout my childhood she enforced this world on me with great tenacity and skill. Despite her efforts she failed to convince me—from a young age I had considered myself science-educated and reality-minded too.
I had assumed Su Lan would have taken my side, knowing as she did the scientific explanations for all manner of seemingly inexplicable things. I wondered then if perhaps it was not a matter of education at all; perhaps people were born with pious or wicked dispositions—my brother too, despite his literacy, had been like my mother. Both were the kind of people who liked to be praised, and especially liked to be praised for doing well what they were told to do. They took pride in being seen as good and kind and self-sacrificial. Did Su Lan have a small measure of that desire to be good too?
I, on the other hand, am wicked. There is no instinct in me to please. Even after things changed, during those years Su Lan and you were in America, when I entered voluntarily into that world of spirits and ghosts and became a woman like my mother, who burned incense at her altar every day, I believed it was the wicked person inside me, acting against my own disposition toward disbelief.
It started with Tao Kun’s ashes. For as long as my husband was dead I had kept him under the bed next to old quilts and my red wedding shoes. I thought of his remains only as what they were: bits of significant dirt. Now a presence made itself felt there. It was physical—it pressed against my back as I slept, not like a hand or a push but a simple light upward force. If Su Lan had still been here, she might have described it as gravity, applied in the opposite direction. It was enough to arch my back in discomfort and toss me in my sleep. The next morning I pulled out the ashes and placed them on the table next to the window. A film of dust covered the box. Particles moved in the light and came to life. I wiped it with a damp cloth. That night I slept soundly.
But Tao Kun looked lonely on the table. So I searched in my trunks and drawers for things to keep him company: a marble bust of Mao he’d once been awarded by the neighborhood committee; my mother’s Guanyin statuette, which we had kept hidden for her during the Cultural Revolution; and Tao Kun’s flute. The flute was made of bamboo and had a little crack at its lip from years of sitting in the trunk. I picked it up and felt its weight. My fingers slipped over the grooves over which his hands had moved, on summer evenings when the neighbors played mahjong in the alley and he stood by the door like a sentinel, feeling for a tune. I put Guanyin and Mao next to Tao Kun’s ashes and laid his flute in front. Behind his ashes I propped up a black-and-white portrait of him at thirty, a photograph he had taken for me. He’d had no use for photographs, he’d been blind. In the portrait, he looked surprised, as if he had just turned his head toward an unexpected sound.
Slowly, I found myself gathering more gods for the altar. In the alley stacks of old cardboard boxes leaned against a crumbling wall, so I took one and cut four plaques out of it, and, wetting my stiff brushes, wrote on the plaques in my best script the names of my and Tao’s deceased parents. From the wall of an abandoned room I peeled a poster of the five revolutionary heroes and pasted it to my own wall with pinches of mushed rice. I cut out pictures of past and current presidents from newspapers and magazines, Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin, then Hu Jintao and a handsome black man the newspapers said might become America’s next president, and glued them on frames of cardboard. In the alleyway dump I spotted a small painting of the white man’s pusa, a woman in pink and blue robes holding a yellow-haired baby with a golden crown, and a perfectly intact plastic figure of the monkey king. All these items joined Tao Kun and kept him company. They kept me company too. There was a strange pleasure in the work of this accumulation. I still did not believe in spirits or ghosts or pusas or gods, but what was the harm in pretending, just in case I was wrong? If it turned out that my mother and Su Lan were right, if gods were indeed real, then a wicked old woman like me needed as many as I could get.
While I assembled my altar, the neighborhood changed. The living fled (your mother’s departure had marked a beginning); the dead returned.
I remember the year 2000. It seemed such a large number, much larger than one plus 1999. Even now it seems larger than the numbers that came after. How inappropriate my continued existence felt, in this year with so many zeros. The future had been thrown backward, trapping me in a place I did not understand. I hoped I would die soon.
The red shells of New Year’s firecrackers were swept from the alley. That same week, large posters appeared on the walls of the longtang, and people gathered before them, talking and craning their heads over each other to read, as they had in the months before your father disappeared. This again, I thought, and paid them no mind.
But there were no ensuing protests or marches. Instead the longtang quieted. The neighborhood began to empty. The clutter lining the alleys accumulated a layer of dust, and I saw that it was mostly piles of junk. The clotheslines no longer sagged with clothes, clods of exposed electrical wire hung unconnected and dangling, dusty windows flapped open in the sun. Where had the people gone, the ahyis with bags of groceries, the children racing up and down the block, the men coming home from work, all those people I had had to jostle around just to go to the market or the latrine? It seemed that even the stray dogs had wandered away to neighborhoods with fresher garbage.
On the outer wall of my building was painted a single red word:
拆 (chai)—to tear down, to take apart.
The word had a red circle around it, with a line slashing across its middle.
The 拆s were painted up and down the longtang. Windows and doors were boarded up. Three rows down, near the southern entrance to the neighborhood, one building had already been reduced to a gap of rubble in the row of houses. In the pile of splintered wood and bricks, partially buried in crumbled cement, were items left over from lives: a pair of pants, a hanger, torn pages of magazines, smashed bowls, broken brooms, and mops. I picked out a fat-bellied buddha and dusted his face with my sleeve. I brought him back to my room and lit three sticks of incense. My window fogged with smoke.
I sank into a way of living in which forgetting and remembering tumbled around each other, floating me in their midst. I abandoned a linear relationship with time—I forgot about the 拆. Days passed quickly and slowly at once. One got comfortable on a stool, and then it took a long time to convince the body to move. An hour disappeared considering whether to open a curtain. If the curtain was opened, it was possible that sunlight would expose how the window needed to be wiped, which then required finding a rag, wringing it out, rubbi
ng it over the glass. After which other things in the room (the stool, the window frame, the bed, the table gods) might look dull compared to the newly brightened window, or dirty in the light now barreling in, and have to be wiped clean too. Sometimes the stomach rumbled and food had to be made, which meant deciding what food to make, as well as buying, cleaning, and preparing the food, then storing and cleaning the remainders. Relieving oneself too required time, as well as washing the chamber pot, though there were no more lines at the latrines or sinks. After all that, I wanted nothing more than to sit peacefully on the landing and just be.
One day, while I sat there doing just this, catching a cool morning breeze, Tao Kun came up the stairs. It was summer. He was wearing his white undershirt and plaid boxer shorts. With one hand pressed on the dark wall, he tapped his fingers lightly, as if feeling for the rot that had softened the wood in the years he had been away. His face was quiet with concentration. He was counting the stairs.
I understood that he was a memory, but as the memory walked by me and passed through the door, I felt a brush of air. The memory walked around the room, it touched the furniture and opened the cabinets. I heard the chafing of shoes on wood and the sigh of skin over cloth. For a long time Tao Kun stood in front of the altar, facing his photograph, and I could feel his amusement, not just about my new habits but because besides this table, everything was in the same place as it had been when he was alive. Even his sunglasses case still lay half open on the covered massage table; a small critter had crawled inside to die. What a kind sight it was, Tao Kun feeling his way through our home. For a long time I hadn’t known why I’d acted in the ways I had; I understood now it had been for this.
He stayed in the room all day. In the evening I stood to enter. I did not try to speak to him. When I went to sleep I made room for him on the bed and heard it creak as he lay down. The next morning I knew before opening my eyes that he had gone.
I lit incense and dusted his portrait. I pulled my stool to the landing and waited for him to return.
Waiting became a ritual. Halfway through the morning his hand appeared on the railing and his body came up the stairs. I left the room to him during the days, sitting outside as I had when he’d run a private practice in our room, and I’d managed the books on the landing. We went to sleep together and sometime in the night he disappeared down the stairs. I slept deeply, not wanting to catch him leaving. I didn’t bother with wondering what he was. I didn’t think of him as the first ghost until the others came.
Some of the ghosts were alive, living human beings. But despite being alive, they were intent on making the longtang into a place for the dead; everywhere they went they brought with them destruction and death, death that came in the form of hammers, shovels, and money.
One of these ghosts came to my door after the 拆 circles appeared. He wore a polo shirt tucked into nice pants and had his hair slicked back. He waved a piece of paper in front of my face and read it to me; it said I would be given 100,000 renminbi and a new apartment in Pudong if I vacated my room. I took the paper from him, confirmed that he had read what was written, then tore it into two. He gave me pamphlets decorated with photographs of tall buildings that resembled the new ones being built around the neighborhood, which cast the longtang increasingly into shade. He said the 拆 was happening, demolition was inevitable, terms would be best for those who left early, voluntarily.
I told him I could not. He was the first ghost of this kind to visit, and so I explained myself with patience: My husband had returned, and this was the only home he’d known. He was blind and he was dead, so it didn’t matter how big or pretty the new apartment would be, in fact the larger and more beautiful it was, the more impossible it would be to teach the ghost of a blind man how to get around. Even if I found a solution to this obstacle, how would I inform him of where the new home was?
When the government ghost returned he was bigger and meaner, with broad shoulders and a stone face. He stood over me with an enormous hammer in his hand, ready to strike down the walls the moment I gave a sign of assent. He said vaguely that it would be better if I signed; I saw then on the paper he held that the number had gone up; now I would be given 150,000 renminbi. Shame on you, I said, threatening your grandmother. I hit his shins with my cane until he went away.
The bully ghost left me alone but he returned to the neighborhood, bringing with him noise and dust and taking in return whole sections of the building: a wall, a room, an entire floor. In this way the building was amputated to its present state, where only my room and your mother’s remain, standing parceled and whole in the wrecked shell of the house.
The next government ghost took the form of an ahyi who had lived nearby. She brought a plate of red bean cakes and spoke with syrup on her tongue. She took my elbow and said, Nainai, 200,000 renminbi is a lot of money. She spoke exaltingly about the shiny new house she had moved into: it had a bathtub, a toilet, a washing machine, a new kitchen with an electric stove. I sent her away disappointed.
That evening I discovered my light would not turn on. I lit a candle and climbed down the stairs. The kitchen lights were out too; the electric rice cooker Su Lan had left for me did not heat up. In the alley I looked up and saw a ring of lighted skyscrapers around the dark emptiness of the neighborhood. So the electricity had been cut; I understood it was meant to drive me out.
I walked through the hollow rooms. They lit up around me as I walked, each step revealing spaces that for years I’d only presumed existed behind curtains and doors. The ground was covered in dust and little chunks of rubble, small and large splints of wood. Enclosed by shadow, I felt I was not only traversing a foreign terrain but creating it with my light. Su Lan had told me once that light did not age. Light could travel only through space, she said, not time, and if we could travel as fast as light, time would cease to exist for us too. She went on to speak of a particle she had imagined—only imagined, for she had no proof—a corollary particle to the photon, one that was the opposite of light: dark. This darkness particle, as she called it, would be stationary, frozen, lacking the ability to travel through space, and so lacking almost all physical capability, except that it could move through time.
Soon I covered the entire space of the first floor. How small this building was, even in the dark, now that all the walls were on the floor.
Every time the ghosts came, they knocked too on Su Lan’s door. When no one answered they slipped the same notices and pamphlets beneath that they had given to me. A few times I tried to shout them away, and they smiled at me knowingly before leaving.
I went back to my room and lit incense. I prayed for Su Lan’s return.
It was in this environment that you appeared to inform me: Su Lan was dead.
Yongzong
Midday, when we lay in the hot sleep of noon, my father stalked the house with a flyswatter. Splat. Splat. Little corpses dropped to the ground. I pressed my ear against the bamboo mat and listened for the sound of crushed wings. I heard—
My father’s foot crashing down.
My father creeping steadily across the room, flyswatter up and alert, his shuffling broken by another splat.
My father had good reason. The house was big and pristine. The walls were painted white, the floors tiled. The windows were lined with glass to keep dust outside. Who else had a house like this?
In the mornings while my mother boiled porridge for breakfast, my father ran a damp cloth over each piece of furniture. His ragged finger penetrated every groove—he kept even the carved designs on the backs of the chairs dust-free. He had worked hard to earn and keep all this, he reminded us. He took nothing for granted.
For my father, I was another one of these things—the house, the furniture, the glass windows—to be kept fly-free.
I didn’t understand this until I was much older. As a boy all I knew was that at times I envied my two older sisters. My envy confused me. I had no chores. I picked the best pieces of meat at meals. If I even got a cough,
my mother and grandmother pampered me with attention. Why was I so unhappy, to be so loved?
My father threw out the dead flies before I could look at them.
A bamboo mat rustling under my ear, a broom bristling against a smooth floor—to this day, these sounds will lull me to sleep.
A father looks at his grown son and cannot understand how that man, now bigger than he, was once an infant. Not only was once but is still—that the man is the same person as the infant. So I am with myself, unable to recognize who I was. It is not only that my body has changed. Each time I stop to take measure, I feel not as if I have grown, but as if I have left behind many corpses of former selves.
Today I am 1.79 meters, with bony broad shoulders and long legs. I am thin. No one would call me muscular, but my muscles do their job, and their movement over the years has etched a certain shape into my skin. My skin, pale and hairless, has just begun to sag. My bones are stiffer in their joints. My hair is full and thick but peppered with white.
Bodies I have shed: plump white babe; sturdy toddler with a square face and rosy cheeks; runtish boy, his body smaller than he felt; gangly teenager with legs that shot up daily and a torso that could not keep up; tall young man with long legs and a full frame, sprightly, not chubby, but with meat on his bones. This middle-aged body, rougher, weaker, beginning to shrink. I shed my bodies for something uglier each time.
I shed their memories too. The meat of them. So when I read the bones of my past, I feel as if plunged into a terrifying book, identifying too well with a story about someone else.