by Meng Jin
I emptied every drawer—I opened every book. I found more of my mother’s things—notebooks, pens, bowls, clothes—tossing them all aside until finally, I found my mother guilty:
Under the bed, a heavy dark thing. I crawled in and pulled out a wooden trunk. I dusted the clasps and eased it open. Inside: my father, my father, my father. His clothes—pants, shirts, jackets, shoes, two leather belts. A stethoscope, a lab coat, medical textbooks with his handwriting in the margins. More photographs—twenty—all of him and him alone.
My father was a person. He was flesh and blood, a man with hands and mouth and skin and hair; he walked, he smiled, he ate, once he coupled with my mother to make me.
I wanted to fight my mother. She had put the evidence of my father away, literally shoved it under the bed, then spirited me to the other side of the world, where she had raised me alone, making herself so substantial, so real, so overwhelming that she suffocated the need for another parent. I wanted to shout her down. I remembered the vicious way we’d fought, the cycle of our mutual care and contempt, how we would move to a new place, ushering in a period of lightness only to destroy it and start again. At first my mother would feel free; she worked well, laughed, lifted her eyebrows, gave a contained smile, and said her mind was clear. I made new friends and new interests and she liked learning about them, seemed to love me more, as if I too were a new daughter she was meeting for the first time. Then the lightness would wear down: my mother alluded to a bad day at work, to a combative colleague, or to a professor with whom she disagreed, her eyes were cast increasingly downward, more and more she ran her hands over her forehead, trying to wipe it clean. She spoke sharply to me, disapproving of any little thing I did or ignoring me altogether. I saw this and could not help but provoke her, and then we fought. With my growing vocabulary I found ever more eloquent ways to insult her, I said, You have a morbid fear of history, I used words like consequence and responsibility that neither of us really understood. I knew I had infuriated her properly when she broke out shouting in Chinese.
I never understood what she said in those moments. At the time I attributed it to my loss of my first language, but now I realized she had probably not spoken in the Mandarin she’d taught me, which was soft and melodic, but rather in some dialect—not Shanghainese, or I would have recognized it here, but the local dialect of wherever she’d been born. Her voice didn’t just get loud. It assumed a nasal, forward quality that can only be described as violent. The sound was physical, meant to be used as a weapon, and though I could not understand what she was saying her voice itself hurt me, it slapped me across my face. I did not recognize my mother then, it was as if the sound had found another chamber of resonance, as if her body itself had changed to create it. This was the stranger I wanted to confront now.
She’d hated our fights. I could see her surprise and regret after we’d both calmed down. Afterward, the memory of a fight weighed on both of us, filling the empty spaces around us with ugliness. I sensed that she hated the person she became when I provoked her, that this person flew out of her without her permission or control; she wanted to be unflappable, simple, civilized. I was ashamed of being so bad that I made her act in this way. She was ashamed of me too, more ashamed than I was—she was ashamed for us both, and I felt at once furious and sorry that I had disappointed her by revealing her to herself. I knew then we would be leaving soon.
Leaving helped. In a new environment we were fresh and unburdened; we could live alongside each other in peace. Sometimes I wondered if the only way my mother knew how to solve a problem was to abandon everything and start again. Once, she’d said: It makes the life of the heart more simple.
Her body under the white sheet had been very small. In the morgue, I was afraid to lift the sheet. I was afraid I would find under it the shriveled body of some child-size mummy from a natural history museum, some primordial Eve. The face looked shrunken, but it was hers. I recognized the part in the hair, the strands of white and black curling over the crown of her skull. I recognized all the individual features of my mother’s face: the arch of the eyebrows, the thin mouth, the soft plunging bridge of the nose. I understood that these features belonged to my mother and came together proportionally on a face the shape of hers. But I could not connect these certainties to my mother. Perhaps it was the lack of effort in the muscles, or the waxy paleness of the skin. The face did look like a stranger’s.
I tried to calm down, to return my breathing to normal. I neatly folded the men’s clothing I’d torn from the trunk, stacking shirts and pants on the bed. I sorted through the remaining items. I had the feeling that I was standing on the edge of something. What else had my mother done to make my heart’s life simple?
At the very bottom of the trunk was a dense stack of documents. I took out a bundle of letters—the rubber band binding them snapped. The script, cursive and tiny, was impossible for me to read, but I saw that the handwriting belonged to one person, and that the addresses on the envelopes were all the same. On each envelope I recognized my mother’s name; on both sender and recipient addresses I was able to read the words: 北京. I remembered that my mother had gone to university in Beijing. Later I would open the letters and see that they were dated 1985 and 1986—years before I had been born. Later yet I would try to read them, moving through their contents word by word as I had the Fudan letter, searching for clues to confirm my suspicion that the writer—a man named Zhang Bo—was my father.
At that moment I still had discoveries to make. Underneath the letters was a green booklet the size of my palm, laminated in peeling plastic film. I opened it and found a small footprint stamped inside. It was a birth certificate. I read my mother’s name after the entry saying mother. The entry for father was followed by a blank. But it was what had been written after time and place that made me stare, blinking, for a long time, uncomprehending. It said:
Place of Birth Fuxing Hospital, Beijing
Date of Birth 4th day of June, 1989
I did not understand what I was seeing. I took out my crisp new American passport and compared:
The passport said Shanghai 1988.
The birth certificate said Beijing 1989.
I looked at the two documents many times, trying to make the words match. They refused. In the roil and shock of so many discoveries—my mother’s death, her former life, the concrete existence of my father—I was left now with a feeling almost like a laugh. What in the world did this mean? Had my mother had another child, after me, in Beijing? No, I sat on the floor with my knees splayed to read the designs on the bottoms of my feet, which matched the baby stamp with spooky precision. I had needed no dictionary to translate the child’s name. The words were familiar; the name was mine.
I had a strange sensation then, of being inside and outside my body at once, aware of sounds, feelings, smells, and tastes passing through me in a timeless fashion, lighting up parts of my memory so that I was suspended in a pool of emotions from disparate points in my past. Suddenly I was returned to a time in elementary school, fourth or perhaps fifth grade, when I was invited to go trick-or-treating for Halloween with some popular girls. I had not celebrated Halloween before and had only learned of trick-or-treating recently. Of course I wanted very much to go—I could not believe my luck at being invited at all—but I sensed it was the sort of thing that would upset my mother or make things difficult for her. This was a time when my love for my mother was being transformed into a kind of fear. Most of all I was afraid to ask her to buy me things. Halloween required a costume that could only be worn on one day of the year, and I knew the girls who had invited me would have beautiful costumes, nicer than the clothes I wore every day.
To my surprise my mother had brightened at the request. I know exactly what you’ll be, she said, and she began to assemble my costume from old clothes. I didn’t dare ask her what she was planning. I mentioned my friends were going as Disney princesses and they expected me to be Mulan. That’s ridiculous, my mother said
, you’re going to be something much better. The night of Halloween she dressed me in black and put a homemade headband on my head. She had decorated the strap to look like a ruler and sewn on two horns shaped like thermometers. They looked like blue antlers.
You can tell your friends you’re the devil, she said, and if they’re mean to you, tell them to go to hell. Then she lowered her voice and spoke conspiratorially. She unfolded a piece of paper she had placed in the pocket of my shirt, on which she had drawn a picture of a partitioned box with little balls inside.
She had dressed me as Maxwell’s demon, an imaginary creature conceived by the physicist who unified electricity and magnetism in the electromagnetic field. Maxwell’s demon didn’t have to do with electromagnetism, however; rather, this demon was the hypothetical being with the power to violate the second law of thermodynamics.
She pointed to the picture she had drawn and explained.
Imagine you have a box with two sides, divided by a wall with a small hole in its middle. One side is filled with a very hot gas, and the other is filled with a cold gas. After a certain amount of time, what will happen?
I thought and answered correctly: the two sides would become the same temperature, neither hot nor cold, both would be warm.
Exactly. This was the idea of entropy, the second law of thermodynamics, that the hot and cold would mix naturally with time, that everything moves toward an equilibrium. Now imagine that both sides are the same temperature, but on both sides there is a mixture of hot gases and cold gases. What happens as time passes?
Nothing, I said, and I was right.
Now imagine, my mother continued, a small creature like yourself sitting on top of this box. You are able to observe all the molecules inside moving, and to open or close a door, letting only the faster, hotter molecules through, so that as time passes, one side gets hotter and one side gets colder.
This creature was Maxwell’s demon.
Of course, she went on to explain, it was simple to solve this paradox, Maxwell’s demon changed the nature of the isolated system by joining it, and increased the entropy of the system by processing and storing the information gathered about the moving molecules. Gathering information too was a kind of irreversibility. But imagine if such a mechanism could be created, imagine if a true Maxwell’s demon could be manufactured, it would give physicists the tools to manipulate and thus truly understand time.
You get to decide which way you want time to run, she said, pointing at my chest.
I thanked her for the costume and left.
For a few years we’d had a television in our living space. My mother had found it abandoned in the grocery store parking lot, rewired its insides to teach me about circuits and electric waves. What the grainy images taught me instead, while I was home alone after school, with the blinds down so nobody could see and tell social services, were the manifold things one could desire: toys, clothes, microwaveable snacks, toastable waffles and pizza pouches, cars, trucks, cars, clothes, a certain way a person should look. So the television had taught me shame. Standing in the free lunch line with fish sticks and soggy green beans and a paper carton of milk that made me ill, I envied the beautiful girls with silky blond and brown ponytails who sat together with their lunch boxes and brown paper bags, so happy. I had seen their yellow-haired mothers on television in pastel clothes, smiling as they packed lunches with Jif, Oreos, Lay’s, Capri Sun, Chips Ahoy!
At the door of the new friend’s house I took off the weird headband and pulled my hair into a high bun. I muttered to the television mother that I was Mulan. Poor thing! she said, she must have seen the tears I was blinking back. She led me to her room and rifled through her drawers, finally extracting a colorful silk scarf that she tied around my waist in an odd sash/skirt, and a paper folding fan the friend’s older sister had gotten in Japan while studying abroad. My new costume did not look like Mulan’s or even particularly Chinese, but everyone was satisfied, my face was the costume, it was enough.
But before this staged humiliation and triumph, before I left my house and knew to feel ashamed, there had been a moment when I stood in front of my mother and felt sheer power in my hands. My mother was looking at me as if I had actually transformed into her impossible thought experiment, as if I were indeed a creature of multitudes and mysteries, capable of overturning the laws of physics and making my own.
In Shanghai I looked at my documents. I looked at the strange gap in time and place and seemed to traverse this distance of years. Suddenly I felt as I had then, I felt my mother looking at me in hunger as I wore the costume of infinite power. For a moment everything almost made sense. I was exhausted, nodding off to sleep. I thought, yes, that’s what my mother’s done, she’s dressed me as the demon again, she’s dead so now she’s chasing me around in time. Well, I would show her, I would turn around and catch her, make her reveal everything she’d hid.
I would find my father.
Zhu Wen
I’m hard to look at, I know. I have a face that makes people want to both stare and look away. Even when I was young, it was scrunched on one side, with one eye smaller than the other, peering out beneath its ugliness as if daring you to name the powers that made me and put me on this earth, defective as I am.
I have always been like this. My mother said ugliness was born inside of me, a cloud covering half the dark pupil of one eye, growing daily like the changing phase of moon. There was a surgery—successful, even now I have perfect vision—but a thick scar grew over the eyelid, and grew and grew. This was not enough for my body. When it was time for me to start walking, it became clear that my left leg was a bit shorter than my right. Learning to walk was painful, and I could only do so with this odd limp, swinging one leg out in a wide circle and jostling my hips up and down. Until I was old enough to justify it, I refused to use a cane.
Most people are like you: around me, they quicken their pace. The mean ones gape and kind ones stiffen their shoulders. There was a time, after my husband died, when I would grimace and stare them all down. Sometimes I lifted my cane and gave it a few swings, and when there were children nearby they scattered, little limbs flailing as they ran away. Once I made an infant boy burst into tears. I still enjoy it, being a terror. It’s better than being pathetic. It almost resembles a reason to live.
Who knows what would have happened to me without my mother’s suffering, her prayers? She reminded me often of how she had labored to buy me divine favor. When she gave me her Guanyin statue to hide from the honglijun, she had clutched my wrists tight and whispered: Remember how the pusa helped you. Protect her as she has you.
If she were here today, she would point to the clear evidence: I am still here, I have outlived them all. Despite the way I was born my composition has proven robust. I rarely get ill, I have grown into a hardy person, hard to kill. Did I think all this came from nothing?
Every year when I was a child we made a trip to the city temple where my mother presented a good portion of our family’s meager earnings to the monks in exchange for blessings and prayers. These blessings were conferred in the form of a yellow slip of paper, on which were written in calligraphy the amount of her offering and the things she had asked for. My mother protected and treasured this paper despite the fact that she could not read what it said. She could not read anything; like most women of her and my generation, she had not gone to school. I could read it, however—because I was too ugly to marry, I had been sent to school alongside my older brother. My parents thought I should be prepared to endure life alone. Every year, I would read among the things written on the slip of paper: A normal life for Zhu Wen. I think my mother truly believed that if only she was pious enough, the pusas would reach their hands into our lives and mold me into a different person.
Like most people, we had in our home a small shrine where we set things to burn or rot before symbols of our dead ancestors. In our shrine my mother kept also the statue of Guanyin and a paper cutout of a local god from her hometow
n. She lit a stick of incense for these inanimate things every day and offered to them our best fruits, and when we had them, pieces of meat and wine.
To this day when I think of my mother I see her mouth moving ceaselessly, chanting amitofo amitofo as she sweeps the floors, as she prepares our meals, as she brushes the gray dust of spent incense off the shrine into the upturned palm of her hand. And I cannot help but hear in her amitofos the hope for my normal life. Perhaps this was why I was so repulsed by her religiosity. I had gone to school, I had read books, learned mathematics and some basics of chemistry and physics—I had even read the Buddhist scriptures my mother kept boxed away from dust. I thought the holy writings were interesting, clever, sometimes even beautiful, but they also seemed clearly to be invented, invented and put into words by someone who was very smart and perhaps a little sly. The most convincing things they spoke of, which regarded the way we ought to move through life, seemed to have little to do with my mother’s superstitions and the daily offerings of incense and expensive foods. Even at that age, I was interested in a reality dictated by logic and fact—by what I could see and prove. I think that was why, so many years later, I was so drawn to Su Lan. I saw in your mother a person I might have become if I had been born in different circumstances.
But in the world of her logic my mother could make convincing arguments. She would say that my life was the strongest proof of divinity there was. I had married—and her prayers were to be thanked for it.
When I was eleven, my mother began to whisper with the neighbors about something that concerned me. I knew because of the way she avoided looking directly at me, glancing instead at my knees. Soon I heard it too. There was a rumor in the neighborhood about a boy a few longtangs down who had started to go blind. The condition was inexplicable: one day he woke and found a light had been blown out. Medical experts were consulted, remedies were tried, and not one could help; each day he saw less and less. Meanwhile, this boy, who had previously been bright, with a promising future ahead of him, was thrown into a kind of stupor. Since the beginning of his misfortune, he did nothing but lie in bed. We heard he was so terrified of the darkness he might encounter that he refused even to open his eyes.