by Meng Jin
Old friend, he said. We’ll finally get to see how big your head’s gotten after all these years.
My head? And what about your waist?
I was surprised by how pleased I was to hear his voice. We chatted, caught up. He had finished his degree and was starting a master’s in applied nuclear physics at Beida. Life was good, evidenced by the fact he’d gotten even fatter, as I would see for myself in a few months.
You’ll have to visit me in Shanghai on your way back, I said, I can’t leave work.
Nonsense, he said, and when I did not respond immediately he continued:
Still afraid to face your father?
It was Bo’s idea that I make the trip without informing my family. It would be possible, perhaps even simple. As long as I didn’t go to my old neighborhood, how would anyone know? As he talked, something awakened inside me, a longing for company, and I remembered those years warmly, as my first years of freedom. I had made friends in Shanghai and was on good terms with my classmates, but the truth was, though I had seen him just twice since high school, Bo was one of the only people who knew some real part of me. I tucked the invitation into a textbook. A few weeks later, I bought a train ticket to Hangzhou.
On the train to Hangzhou I startled too easily. People jostled me unexpectedly and called out words that sounded like my name. I dozed, nearly jumping from my seat when the conductor, checking tickets, tapped my shoulder. I avoided looking out the window. I was afraid I would see my face in the glass and find my family name painted across it like a brand. By the time I stepped off the train I was soaked in sweat.
In the waiting room, standing before the exit, a hundred meters away, was my father.
He folded his newspaper and turned to face me.
I exhaled. It was just a man his age.
In fact, every man in the station looked like my father—I ducked from them all. I searched for a taxi. Again I heard my name, hurtling undeniably across the car lot, and this time I was sure: someone had recognized me.
At the front of the taxi line, Bo Cai dumped his bag into a car and waved me over. I looked around to see if anyone had heard him call me. Everyone went on as they were.
Look at you, Yongzong, what a wreck you are, Bo said, chuckling. He slapped my back: What, did you run here from Shanghai? I shrugged and let out a nervous giggle, which turned into full, rocking laughter, and proclaimed at the top of my lungs, What an idiot I am. I followed him into the car. The taxi sped through streets I had known since I was a child. I rolled the windows down, dug my face into the wind, and challenged bystanders to look at me twice. Perhaps this was the first time I realized how simple it was to act as if certain parts of the past did not exist.
How genuinely happy I was that day to see who everyone had become. Scrappy Tudo stayed skinny but had grown tall and permed his hair so he looked like a cotton swab; pretty Jing was now chubby and matronly in her maroon suit-dress; Enkai had gotten more muscular; the beginnings of beer bellies were visible in Bo and Zheng; little Yu had gotten surgery on her eyelids and looked quite attractive in a pink dress. Unlike Bo, who greeted everyone as if they had just spoken the last week, I had trouble recognizing many faces. When they introduced themselves I responded with appropriate surprise. Everyone recognized me.
How could anyone forget you, Yongzong? Jing said. Besides, you look the same as ever—but even more serious.
We had a noisy lunch with plenty of beer and baijiu, barely eating, everyone busy toasting each other and getting drunk. After lunch we broke into groups and played silly games conceived by Bo and Jing, designed to help us reminisce about old times while catching up on the present. We all wrote down what we’d expected each person to become, back in high school. Jing collected all the papers, and as we went around the circle announcing what it was we were actually up to, she read out our projected futures. We were still drunk from lunch, munching on sunflower seeds, and laughed uproariously whatever the results. Sometimes our predictions were spot-on—nine of twelve said Yu would become a high school teacher and that was exactly what she was. Sometimes we were far off the mark: Enkai had not become a professional wrestler but had actually gone into business and recently acquired a line of women’s lingerie. When it came my turn I knew what to expect. Chairman, CEO, astronaut.
I tricked you all, I said, spitting out the shell of a sunflower seed onto the table. I’m just a plain old doctor.
The table burst into laughing protests until Rui knocked for order. Just a plain old doctor! Enkai said. Modest as ever, Yongzong!
In the evening we feasted and drank on the northwestern banks of West Lake, far from where I’d lived as a child. Bo and I hung our arms over the edge of a stone bridge and talked as if we were old men. We spoke of the simple days of the past, when all that mattered was how we scored on some stupid test. Remember how much we cared? Bo said. You especially.
Now we had adult concerns. Money, family, our lives to make sense of. And of course, the fate of our dear country! Bo laughed. He was thinking about going to work for the government after his graduate study. The ministry of defense was recruiting physicists and engineers. Being a scientist for the Party was equal parts politics and research. Politics is a pain, Bo said. You were smart to go down another path, to truly serve the people. He said this with great aplomb, waving his arm over the water. Reducing people to diseases comes naturally to me, I said. We finished our beers and got more. Abruptly Bo asked if I had a girlfriend. Hell, was I married? I hope not! I said. I had dated two girls in medical school, classmates, but was never more than fond of them. And Bo? I gave him a playful shake. He batted me away and then grew sullen.
He had been pursuing the same girl for years with no luck, he said. He couldn’t get her out of his head, no matter how many times she rejected him. Who is she? I asked. What does it matter, Bo said, she’s no one you know. I drank down half my beer and watched my friend looking pensively over the water. He shrugged and clinked my bottle and turned around to face our classmates. Would you ever date someone in our class? he said, chuckling. Yu looks pretty, doesn’t she? For a few minutes we stood in silence admiring the girls.
Then Bo said, Hey, you know, not everyone is here. That girl who beat us isn’t here.
For a moment his face darkened. Then he laughed and slapped me on the back. Remember that girl, Su Lan?
She probably thinks she’s too good for us, I said. Forget her, she was so ugly anyways.
No, no. Bo shook his head with a drooping grin, tipping back the rest of his beer. I hear she’s a beauty now.
Liya
My mother was in perfect health. Her heart, her lungs, her liver, her brain—all in excellent working condition. Except, the coroner said, that they weren’t working; she was dead. He’d found no hidden medical conditions, no abnormal organs, no internal or external injuries, no toxins or unexpected chemicals in the system.
Strange, wasn’t it, the coroner said, that a person could stop being alive, for no visible reason at all. Really strikes you with the fear of God.
God? I was furious. I was certain she had done it to herself, not killed herself, not anything so tragic, but somehow arranged it so she would cease to exist. After all, this was exactly how she would have wanted it: a surrender to nothing at all.
We had spoken on the phone a week before. I, the dutiful daughter, had called her once a week from the university town where I’d begun my adult life, just to say hello, I’m alive, I’m doing fine, and hear her say the same. She did not demand these calls from me, in fact I don’t think she even desired them. She’d supported my decision to go very far away for school. I think she hoped I would go farther—cut her off entirely.
One night, when I was thirteen, or twelve, some terrible age, I ran away from home. It was summer, in a temperate place (Texas, perhaps, or Missouri), we had argued about something insignificant but seemingly momentous, and I, yelling insults, saying fuck shit fuck motherfucking damn goddamn fucking shit, all the ugly words I knew
in all their ugly variations, whose sounds in my mouth made me feel bad in a good way, ran out the door and onto the street, hoping she would follow. She did not. When I got tired I lay down on the sidewalk, which was still warm. I had run far, I did not recognize where I was, I did not know how much time had passed. Still I expected her face to at any moment appear above mine, disrupting the view of the stars, apologetic, perhaps, or more likely, furious. She would take my hands and lift me, or she would yank me to my feet. Perhaps she would embrace me, perhaps she would hit me; either way she would admit I had caused her great pain. I fell asleep and when I woke I was the one in pain. The sky was gray and my hips and shoulders and back were stiff and screaming. Ants had crawled onto my hand and bit a fiery ring around my thumb. I got up and walked until I found my way home. My mother was sitting in the kitchen with a cup of hot water, bent over a piece of paper with a pencil, drawing a diagram for some new convoluted calculation she had dreamed up. She looked up and said with much disappointment, You’re back, then returned to her diagram.
That was how it was: I wanted desperately to leave her and break her heart, but her heart would not be broken, so I came back, tried to make her love me, tried leaving again.
Now I couldn’t break her heart if I wanted to. Instead, again, finally, she had broken mine.
The way to make her love me, I learned, or at least to make her talk animatedly and seem to enjoy my company, was to engage her in her work. It was not work that anyone was paying her to do. After enrolling in and dropping out of a number of universities (four? five?), she finally gave up trying to earn a PhD. Academia was too stiff, she said, too invested in its own accolades, too worshipful of tradition. Especially in science, which was supposed to be a revolutionary field, all ambition had been drained; the only new ideas that could be accepted were specialized to the point of losing significance. What she was offering would be a paradigm shift, it would require entire textbooks to be rewritten. They were not ready for it, they would see their mistake in ten, twenty, fifty years.
Of course she did not use such complicated words. Often when she tried to explain her feelings about a department she had just abandoned, she would stop talking mid-sentence and stare with ferocity at the wall, her mind continuing to roll silently around those thoughts language could not adequately express. It was in those silences that I read her criticism of academia. If I was feeling mean, I would give her imaginary voice a grandiose tone: she was too good instead of not good enough. But in truth she spoke plainly, not only without grandiosity but without bitterness, explaining not as a way of giving an excuse but simply as if trying to tell the truth. Whatever her flaws, my mother was never in the business of self-deception. She got a job as a technician for some computer chip company, really boring stuff, she said, and continued doing her research alone. She didn’t need a title or an office, all she needed was paper and pencil and enough food in her stomach to keep working.
When we spoke on the phone, the week before she died, I’d asked as I always did, How’s the research going? She said she’d made good progress. She sounded happy. It’s nice and quiet, she said. I can finally think.
She was referring, of course, to my absence. This had been her answer ever since I left home, whereas before she complained about little things, this equation eluding her, this little problem presenting larger problems, circling back always to the issue of not being able to focus, of craving some clarity of mind.
It was a stranger who informed me of her death, a male voice on my phone belonging to a police officer in the cold seaside town where she’d recently moved. My first reaction was of disbelief. What! What! I shouted into the phone. Or perhaps I whispered it. The information was at once impossible and devastating and senseless; it was like returning home to find your dwelling place inexplicably filled to the brim with millions of sharp stones, like getting off a plane to Hawaii and finding yourself in Finland and suddenly under arrest, like discovering The Matrix or some other ludicrous work of fiction was a documentary film. It was like being told, Actually, you don’t exist.
It became more like that.
Conservation of mass and energy says that nothing truly disappears. I learned this early, in Vermont, in a town too small to have its own fire station. It was winter, so cold that the river froze over and even windless air bit through coats and sweaters and flesh, searing the bone. An old house down the street burst into flames, and I ran outside with my mother, who held me because I was frightened. I think she was frightened too. It was night. We walked closer to the fire and she told me not to be afraid. It’s nothing to cry about, she said. A scientist looks at fire and sees not just destruction but change. Mass that seems to disappear is only transforming into energy, like the warmth of the fire, or something else with the power to create. That house? See how as the wood blackens and shrinks, the flame grows bigger and hotter? My mother spoke quickly, in Chinese, forgetting her own rules in order to calm me. I kept my body very still, trying to hold on to a feeling I couldn’t understand. My heart had hands, the hands were reaching out for something my brain had already forgotten. The fire was growing so hot it was melting the snow. The next morning a ring of ice marked the burned black lot. There the snow had melted, then froze.
When I was very little, my mother used to take me with her to work. Her work then was in the physics corridors of large universities, where there were laboratories full of small and large machines. She told me she was taking me to the university as if it were a special treat. She said because I was so guai, because I was so dongshi, favorable words denoting obedience and maturity in children, she would take me to a wonderful place where normally only adults could go.
I hadn’t yet started school. Besides simple greetings I did not know any English. We went before anyone else had arrived and left late after dark. My mother put me in her office, which she shared with two other graduate students. Whenever they came in I slid off her lap into the space underneath her desk between her legs and the wall, and practiced being very still. It was one of the many games we’d invented together and I liked it very much. In the darkness I would pretend to be a rock in a garden, or a statue inside a museum, I would imagine all manner of people walking around me, observing, commenting on my beauty, on the special qualities that had earned me my place in the display. They would wonder what exactly I might be or mean. They would search on the walls for the name of my maker and read the name of my mother. All the while they would observe me as an inanimate object, not knowing that I was looking right back at them, observing them too.
I loved my mother so much during that time; if I’d had the language I would have called her the love of my life and no uttered words in all of time could have been more true. We must have spent nearly every minute of our lives together—I don’t remember any babysitters—and in the hours we were apart, when she had to teach or attend a meeting, I missed her so much I felt as if an arm or a leg had been taken away—no, more, a heart or brain, some part of me that was undoubtedly the best of what I had to offer. But the separations were delicious in their own way, because they made our reunions all the more sweet. Upon my mother’s return I was showered in praise and love. I was so good and brave, not crying or getting myself in trouble, successfully completing whatever game or task she’d assigned before leaving me alone. My mother picked me up and kissed my head and let me wrap my arms around her long neck. She called me guai. At night we went to sleep on the same twin mattress, her arm flung casually over my shoulder, my hand clutching a strand of her hair.
My mother kept me occupied in many ways while she worked. She gave me paper and pencil and let me draw, and when I learned to control the movements of my hands she wrote numbers and words in the margins and had me copy them, and after I got good at that I solved simple math problems and wrote little stories. In this way I learned how to read and write some Chinese.
My mother was not just trying to keep me out of the way, though writing those complicated words over and over was use
ful for keeping an obedient child busy. I believe she was genuinely interested in educating me. She was always teaching me things, answering any silly question with the truth. She pointed out little miracles I’d failed to notice—how a leaf fell to the ground, how certain things floated on water and certain things sank, how light bulbs turned on. I loved these lessons; I believed she was trying to help me become exactly like her by telling me everything she knew, and this pleased me immensely. I did not only want to be identical to my mother, I wanted to be absorbed into her entirely.
The one-bedroom apartment where my mother died was plain and bare. Sparsely and impersonally furnished, undecorated, it could have belonged to anyone. It was the first time I had seen it, in fact the policeman had had to give me the address, and when I walked into the room I had the feeling again I was inside some elaborate prank. If my mother had had a sense of play, perhaps I would even have suspected she was the one who’d arranged it—rented an empty apartment, staged her death—so as I walked around, opening cabinets, drawers, doors, I half expected her to jump out from some corner and laugh loudly in my face. In the white walls and the twin mattress on the bedroom floor, in the foldout table with a single chair, I read a challenge. I was furious, I wanted to undo her simplicity, her tracelessness, I accepted.