by Meng Jin
Most of my mother’s personal items were meaningless: clothes, shoes, pens, stacks of papers written in mathematics and Chinese, languages she’d taught me once that I could no longer proficiently read. But there was one important discovery. Inside a shoebox stuffed with receipts, tax returns, and pay stubs, I found an envelope. Inside the envelope I found a letter in Chinese, typed underneath official letterhead, and a key.
It took me three hours to translate the letter; I had to look up every other word. I felt as if I were uncovering a part of my mind buried in shovelfuls of dust. Gasping, grateful, I searched for a handhold I knew was there. Eventually I pulled my first language out. It was this return that had brought the other things: early memories of my mother, the life my mother and I had lived in Chinese.
The letter’s purpose was to congratulate my mother, a PhD student at Fudan University, on her housing assignment. At the bottom was an address in Shanghai.
My mother did not like to talk about the past. But there are things you know without being told, the knowledge somehow baked into the making of you. I knew that we had lived in Shanghai before we lived here. I also had evidence: according to every piece of official paper and plastic I owned (Social Security card, driver’s license, green card, eventually citizenship certificate, and soon passport), I had been born there, on the fourth day of June, in the year 1988. Shanghai was the correct answer to that question Americans liked so much to ask people who looked like me. But the truth was I didn’t know a thing about Shanghai, which was as foreign to me as Timbuktu. When I conjured images of it I might as well have been imagining fairies, castles, unicorns—the myths I’d read in storybooks as a child. Sometimes these images suited me, when, for instance, a person whose esteem I craved found my origins interesting or special. Most times they did not.
Briefly I considered my education—the redbrick university buildings, the lectures and seminars and term papers, the professors and acquaintances who mispronounced my name, the dormitory bed/desk/bookshelf I was paying for with the cashier job I had not informed of my absence—it was all there waiting to be picked back up again, and yet the thought of returning to do so was laughable, I could hardly convince myself that that life and that person living it still existed. I had gone to college almost solely to defy my mother, who to the end insisted on the uselessness of degree and pedigree—she’d once had the highest of them all, and look where they’d gotten her. Briefly I considered the thin scrim of what I’d managed to construct without my mother and watched its small remains wash away in the stream of every other significant thing I’d lost.
I booked a plane ticket to Shanghai.
It did not occur to me I was going back to my birthplace. It did not even occur to me that I was going to China, which to my mind was still nothing more than a colorful blob on a map. Certainly I had no expectation of discovering anything about myself. Rather, when I made the necessary arrangements, as I sat on the airplane looking over a sheet of clouds, I thought only that I was reversing something my mother had done, reconnecting a line she had cut. Only the thought of undoing her moved me.
My earliest memory is of waking alone. The room was pitch-black; the bed was too cold. I felt for the edges of the mattress and found it empty. I cried out, jumped up, ran into the kitchen turning on the lights. The house was terrifying: night pushed on the windows, the vents breathed hot menace, the ceiling light bore down like a yellow eye. I ran outside, shoeless, in my underwear, to the front of the house, and did not see my mother’s car in the driveway. I knocked on the front door where a bald man with an earring lived. He opened it and looked at me with surprise. He was wearing a blue robe, beneath which I could see his thin, hairy legs.
I sat on an armchair in his living room and tried to communicate my panic. He spoke and I did not understand him. I had not started school yet, I did not speak English, the few words I’d learned flew out of my head. My mother, my mother, I repeated, with the only other English word I could remember: yes. Your mother something? he asked. Your mother something else? And I answered, Yes, yes, my mother. He picked up the telephone and spoke, again I heard the word mother: I hoped he was telephoning my mother. We sat and waited in silence. I was staring out the window when the police cars turned into the driveway. There were two. Two big men, two sets of red and blue lights spinning. My mother’s car came in behind them.
She parked and ran out, her face bright with fear, shouting at the policemen. When she saw me burst out of the neighbor’s door her fear dissolved. She was relieved, and I ran to her, relieved too, I held her and let her hold me and was thrilled.
The policemen were not thrilled. They had not come to escort my mother home but to investigate her absence. They followed us inside and spoke to my mother in harsh tones, standing tall and large beside my mother, who suddenly looked very small. I felt my mother was in danger and I should protect her—I felt I should leap forward and push the policemen out. But something prevented me, a gray-black feeling, so instead I hid behind my mother’s legs, my nose in the cup of her knee. I did not understand much. I remember one of the policemen, a tall blond man, saying in America followed by other words, while my mother struggled to explain herself. Or perhaps my memory supplied these words retrospectively. My mother had gone to the laboratory to finish some work, perhaps to check on some experiment she was running overnight on the big machine, she had been gone for less than an hour. Now she was being reprimanded for neglect, and later I was reprimanded, she said if I ever did a thing like that again I could be taken away from her, she could be put in jail, was that what I wanted?
I went back to sleep that night with ugly, afraid, ashamed feelings, which were gone by morning, burned away by a bright childhood sun. But the seed of shame remained. As I got older, as my mother and I grew apart, I would be visited from time to time by that gray-black failure. I would find myself crouching again behind my mother’s legs, watching my opportunity to save her walk away.
I never stopped loving my mother. Not exactly. A little pin fell out of the contraption of my love for her; bit by bit it fell apart, until one day I discovered she was my enemy. I never ceased to feel strongly—strongest—about her. Even long after the strength of emotion was no longer adoring, my mother retained an ability to extract, with a word, a glance, a simple tone of voice, the well of everything irrational inside me.
After the incident with the police, things between us changed. I started to go to school. My mother and I began to spend entire days apart. I could not stand being separated from her and at first resisted it with everything I had. But soon I saw that she could stand the separation, in fact she’d expected it and desired it. She turned after leaving me at the classroom door—I glimpsed her face and saw on it an expression of enormous relief.
I learned English at school. My mother encouraged me, she praised me, she loved it especially when I used words she didn’t know, she said I sounded exactly like an American and gave me a smile that told me she was truly pleased. Because I loved it when my mother praised me, I quickly became very good at English, so good that I forgot Chinese. My mother did not care. She said learning Chinese was good for exercising the brain but otherwise it had no use. She made a new game: we would only speak in English, even with each other. When I realized what was happening, that with every new word of English I was becoming more and more unlike her, it was too late. I wanted to be exactly like my mother and she wanted me to be nothing like her. She was stronger; she prevailed.
One day I came home from school and found our few possessions packed in boxes. She told me to help her load the car and I did. We drove for days. She did not introduce the driving as a game. She did not talk to me. If I asked her something—where were we going, could we stop to pee, what was going to happen to the house—she responded with a nod or more often a shake of the head. When we unpacked in our new home she gave a speech in English about how I had grown up, I was no longer a child, and so she would no longer hide from me the nature of things. And i
n fact, she presented our circumstance like the laws of nature: she had a new job, she had to work, I was old enough to take care of myself.
She pushed a bowl of instant noodles toward me and said, The thing about life is to endure it—my mother taught me this when I was much littler than you.
She blinked: her own words had surprised her. Much later I would wonder if she had ever said those words to me before, in any language. My mother. But at the time I was not yet ready to see her like that, as a person who, like me, had once needed a mother. She shook her head, clearing an unsightly vision from her inner eye, and continued: I didn’t believe her then but now I do; you’ll see later too.
For the first time, I found my mother unconvincing. It was as if she had shed a shimmering layer of skin. In English, she was flat and boring, and her words were inadequate, they did not soothe or charm me.
She saw that she had not convinced me and she didn’t seem to mind.
We moved often after this. So often that in my memory the various homes pressed into each other—stubble green lawn, lakeside shack, bedroom with two twin mattresses on the floor, windowless living room, old television, broken rocking armchair pulled from the street, teal square dining table (paint peeling to reveal yellow foam), fallen log by the parking lot where once I found a five-dollar bill, low yellow kitchen lamp—and it became difficult, almost impossible, to separate out which part belonged to which place.
Brazenly, I booked no hotel. The plane landed in Pudong airport at noon, and I hailed a taxi to take me directly to my destination, handing the driver a copy of the letter from Fudan University and a map with driving directions I’d printed from the Internet. He said something quickly. I thought I heard in it the word no but then he put his foot on the pedal and drove. It was only when we arrived that I began to understand what he had said, something perhaps like It’s not there or It no longer exists or You don’t want to go there, because the place at which he finally stopped was a dump. He pointed through a stone gate on whose arch three faded words had been carved and handed me back the Fudan letter, pointing to the middle of the second paragraph. By then I had memorized the contents of the letter; I saw that this was the entrance to Bai De Li. From there I was to turn left and enter the fourth longtang, after which my mother’s building could be found near the end of the lane.
The neighborhood was deserted, and for good reason. Half of the buildings had been torn down; what formerly must have been a row of dwellings was now a row of holes, homes displaying their innards—beams, rubble, clods of exposed wire—empty spaces held between torn walls and floors, their jagged edges like claws, ripped while clinging to remain whole. In this disorder I could not help but see my mother’s hand. It was as if her death had reached over the ocean, anticipating me, contriving to remove her traces before I arrived. I saw in the pulverized dust an analogue of what my mother had become, something that could be scooped into a plastic bag and carried on my back. I saw in the slabs of broken wood a suggestion of geometry—lines, rectangles, regular shapes, broken and reverted to their original material form.
I walked down the lane past the broken houses, toward the building at the end, and began to feel something like relief. I had accepted my mother’s challenge, I had made it this far—how ready I was to surrender. I was exhausted; it seemed for days I had not slept; the destruction and chaos of my mother’s last trace seemed, suddenly, exactly what I had been looking for.
At the end of the lane a chipped green plaque replicated the address on the letter. I pushed open the door next to the plaque, which required no key, and found myself in a dark room. It was some kind of shared kitchen, I realized, with five or six sets of stoves. A single bulb hung from the ceiling, for which I could find no switch. The walls and windows of the kitchen were blackened with oil and grime and the air was salty and stale, undercut with a bitter, medicinal smell. Past the kitchen the sun shone in through a narrow outdoor corridor, where there was a large stone sink on the ground and a set of stairs so steep I mistook it for a ladder. Beyond this corridor was only dust: besides the kitchen, every other room on the ground floor had been leveled.
According to the letter, my mother’s room was on the second floor. I went back to the stairs. There was no railing, there never had been, it seemed. The steps were narrow, less than the width of my foot, the wood was old and black. I strapped my duffel across my chest and climbed up on all fours, ducking to avoid a beam as I turned a corner, looking down, carefully assessing the placement of my feet.
On the second floor I nearly screamed.
Someone stood there, an inch from my face. A woman, I think. She was ancient. She hunched over a cane, her back bent sideways, her body a crumpled S. Her face too was crumpled, the most wrinkled face I had ever seen, her skin pale and thin, its creases radiating like a starburst from one eye, her mouth a thin opening at the meeting of two hollow cheeks. She had white hair and very black eyes.
She looked up at me, grimaced, and said my mother’s name. I think, actually, she said: Su Lan, I told them you’d be back.
Later I would realize that my difficulty understanding her was related to my earlier difficulty understanding the cab driver—they were not speaking in Mandarin, the official Chinese I’d learned, but rather in Shanghainese. I gripped the key in my pocket and swallowed. I said in halting Mandarin: Is Su Lan’s room here?
The ancient woman responded in Shanghainese. She said many things I did not understand. I heard repeated again and again my mother’s name, the tone more agitated with each stroke. Perhaps she was rebuking me, perhaps she was asking me questions, finally I understood that when she said Su Lan she was addressing me. My chest hurt. I struggled to breathe. I tried to back away without falling off the landing—it was very small—finally I heard myself saying, forcefully: I’m not Su Lan, Su Lan’s dead.
I pushed past the ancient woman to the door she had been blocking, which I was now sure was my mother’s door—suddenly the peeling red papers glued on its face looked familiar, suddenly I remembered the way the light struck the wood. The key fit—the knob turned—
The Shanghai apartment was the opposite of my mother’s final home. It was teeming, furnished, pristine—packed with items that revealed the personality of their owner. Was this owner really my mother? I did not recognize her in it at all. In the closet were feminine dresses, scarves, boots, heeled dress shoes. On the bookshelves were novels with my mother’s name scrawled inside the cover. My mother, who had laughed at me for reading novels, and described the habit as evidence of a trivial mind. My mother, whose wardrobe consisted of white cotton shirts sold by the pack and loose-fitting pants. The bedsheets were covered with large red and pink embroidered flowers. The wardrobe doors were engraved with drawings of birds and trees. The room was decorated. Far from the functional, minimal spaces we had lived in in America, this room had been organized not just to be livable but to facilitate living; even the floor had been painted white to create the illusion of more space.
Modest as my many childhood homes had been, this one was even smaller: one long room, only slightly larger than my freshman dorm. It was separated in two by a bookshelf, with a bed and desk on one side, eating table and wardrobe on the other. Next to the door was a small refrigerator and across from that a bench. It was all so Chinese—I don’t know how else to say it. The patterns on the bedspread, the style of furniture, the dimensions and lighting of the room, the neighbor who watched me silently from the door, so ancient she might have emerged from myth. Suddenly a vision of my mother appeared before me like the subject of some National Geographic or PBS documentary, I could hear the slow, benevolent commentary as the camera panned across the scene. And there I was, inside the scene, viewer and participant, exotic to myself. It was a strange and difficult vision, not incompatible with grief.
My head hurt. It raced. I discovered I had lost control of my mind, which was inventing impossible memories of childhood, constructing old scenes with new images: running down the cobbl
ed alley, bathing on the concrete roof, watching my mother walk down the dark and narrow stairs, a radio crackling somewhere below.
I sat down at the small table and dropped my bags to the floor. Then I looked up and saw the portrait on the wall.
It was a photograph of two people, a woman and a man. They stood together before a backdrop of pink blossoms, bodies nearly touching, his hand on her waist. She wore a white dress; its train fanned down a series of short marble steps. He wore a black and white suit. A pair of Greek columns flanked the couple, atop the columns plaster cupids balanced with arrows pointed and ready. It was a wedding portrait. The woman was my mother, made-up and dressed-up, a beautiful young bride.
The man was tall. Though he ceded the spotlight to the woman beside him, he was handsome too. I stood to look at his face: his wide lips, his square jaw, the high bridge of his nose—my wide lips, my square jaw, my high-bridged nose. People had always commented on how much I looked like my mother—now I saw in this man’s face all the ways in me she had failed to make her mark.
I closed the door, shutting the ancient neighbor out, and turned the place upside down.
I had never asked my mother about my father. She had not forbidden it; even if I’d had a general feeling that such questions were discouraged, I had no memory of my mother saying, Be quiet, never speak of it again. Had I been a coward? Indifferent, too absorbed in the petty present to care? Or perhaps I’d believed there’d be endless time for the confusions my knowledge might bring. However it came to pass, at a certain point it became too late to ask such questions—too late because it seemed I should already know their answers, and so an admission of ignorance would be an admission of great carelessness—and then (from shame? from sloth?) I turned father into a concept, an emptiness so abstract it was as good as dead.