Little Gods

by Meng Jin

  He was a few years older than me. His family was better off—his parents were shopkeepers while mine worked at a cigarette factory—but, perhaps because their desperation was fresh, perhaps because of my mother’s prayers, they agreed to meet us, and after the meeting a marriage was arranged. As I would come to learn intimately, the Taos were modest and good people, naturally gentle, who were not so wealthy as to be arrogant but had also for a number of generations skirted the kind of poverty that made you bitter and mean. Tao Kun’s misfortune was the greatest they had suffered in living memory, and they were as grateful to have found us as we them.

  I don’t remember feeling one way or another about the engagement. My future as a wife or as a spinster had always been my parents’ preoccupation, I had no say in the process or outcome and it did not seem like I should. At eleven years old, I could not imagine being married. When I thought of my future husband, I pictured only a dark shape lying despondent in bed, that image concocted from the little I’d heard. I considered this image with detached curiosity.

  A few days after it was settled, I was sweeping the kitchen floor when my mother came in and started to comment on what I was doing, telling me to hold the broom like this, pointing out the spots I had missed, all the while standing with her arms crossed and looking at me with something sourer than distaste. It was a look I had seen often: regretful, squinting, straining to narrow her eyes or to observe me from a different angle, so that she might see someone different, and perhaps discover that I was in fact not so ugly after all. She could not help it and I did not blame her. But as I noticed this look and made sense of it, my mother said something along the lines of: You should learn to do housework the right way, we don’t want the Taos to think they’ve made a mistake. That was when I realized that to marry meant to leave this house, where otherwise I might have stayed forever. I began to feel that marriage was a good thing. I looked forward to the day I would leave my mother’s gaze.

  Tao Kun was a shy man. It turned out that the rumor forming my sole image of him was false—it had been his grandmother who forced him to lie in bed, hoping that he was simply tired, using his eyes too much, that if he only rested them for long enough he might be cured. By the time we married, a few years later, any sign of depression surrounding his condition was gone. The man I met was openhearted and infuriatingly positive—my opposite, in other words.

  I was fifteen, he nineteen. We understood: we had married to make life bearable for our families. On our wedding night we lay down beside one another and left a courteous space between our bodies. I turned my face to the wall; he turned his to the room. I breathed shallowly, sleeping with one foot in consciousness so I would not roll accidentally into his half of the bed. For months the only parts of us that touched were our hands: when I took his to lead him through a particularly narrow alley, when he forgot where he’d set a cup of tea, when I shifted a chair or table while cleaning and he could not find it.

  In his company I soon learned not to fear being seen. I picked my nose, I let my face fall into grimace. I did not worry about the neatness of my hair, my clothes, my gait. It was a kind of relaxation, like being alone without the loneliness. I grew fond of this feeling, and of him.

  When we did touch, my body responded involuntarily, producing shivers of feeling that were at once pleasant and unpleasant. Each time they shocked me so that I had to stop myself from snatching my hand back as if from a hot pan. Wickedly I craved this feeling. I began to misplace things on purpose: his walking stick, his teacup, his shoes. As I waited for him to discover the misplaced things, as I waited to touch him, I suffered a physical pain unlike any I had known before: it was an ache that could not be attributed to one joint or muscle but was felt throughout the body. One day I decided to call this pain love. I was very happy with this, happy to have found a name for something and happy with how lucky I was, to have fallen in love with the person I’d married.

  Tao Kun was too good to suspect me in his growing mindlessness. He called me by my full name, not wife or woman, which made me feel like I was back in school—a wonderful feeling. Zhu Wen, he said, what would I do without you? When he said this it pleased me very much. At night, on my side of the bed, I fantasized in half-sleep about my husband reaching over, his hand falling on my elbow, my shoulder, my knee.

  A few years after we married, the Communists liberated Shanghai. The Taos, who were a little better off than most people in the longtang, made adjustments so they would not be denounced as bourgeoisie. Tao Kun’s parents closed their shop, giving away the space and half of the living quarters above, along with everything inside: clothes, furniture, linens, food. The Taos kept the worst of everything for themselves. They crowded into the two darkest rooms in the back of the former living space. A stairway was hastily built by the back door; more stoves were installed in the kitchen so each of the new families could have their own place to cook. The room Tao Kun and I shared was divided into two: this one where I still live now, and the one that years later would become Su Lan’s.

  In this way my marriage into the family became an asset. The Taos had made themselves poor, and my ugliness and limp, next to Tao Kun’s blindness, gave this identity an air of authenticity. No one could look at the family as it was and muster up any residual feelings of envy, and so we were left in peace.

  Nonetheless, to prove the industriousness and humility of the Taos, or to assist in bringing in income now that the shop was gone, Tao Kun decided to find work. He had heard that in a hospital in a neighboring district, there were medical massage classes for the visually impaired, and he asked me to take him there to enroll. We met the elderly teacher, blind himself, who called their disability a gift. The hands of blind men, the teacher said, could feel illnesses that others could not see. I could tell that Tao Kun enjoyed the classes, enjoyed being among people like himself. It was in this time that he began to take special note of his hands and the sensations his skin imparted. And it was on an evening shortly after he began his classes that he asked if he could practice what he had learned on me.

  I was washing rice for dinner. I said yes, too quietly for anyone but my husband to hear. I was glad he could not see me. At the question my body had tensed, betraying my desire.

  The bed was low. After dinner I layered what blankets we still had to raise it up. I lay on my stomach and closed my eyes.

  Many moments passed and he did not touch me. The pain in my chest grew and turned to shame. Had he changed his mind? I worried I had given myself away. He had sensed—I was sure, because as his teacher said, he had a special sense—my eagerness, the ugly desire of an ugly woman to be touched. He was embarrassed. He was repulsed. Despite being blind, Tao Kun was a handsome man, he had a nice face and a fine body, and he must have known this, and must have known too that I was not fit for him, could only be fit for him if he never fully knew what I was. He was just too kind to say it. I opened my eyes and sat up, suddenly relieved.

  I saw him standing on the other side of the room, running his hands over the new wall.

  I’m sorry, he said, I’ve suddenly forgotten where I am. Is this the west wall? Or the north?

  I got up and took his hand, led him across the room. I mapped the room with words, moving his hands over the table, the chair, the curtain, letting him feel as I spoke. I sat on the bed and closed my eyes. This is my face, I said, and placed his palms on my cheeks. His fingers moved over my eyebrows and wrapped around my ears. His skin smelled like salt.

  These are my shoulders, I said, and kept his hands there for a long time, they were so warm and large and comforting.

  This is my chest, and I placed his hands on my breasts.

  I lay down again on my stomach and gave him my hand.

  He moved his hands up my arm until he found my shoulders. The span of his palms covered the span of my back. He moved them down my torso. He touched my back, my hips, my legs, my feet. He stopped and rubbed my soles, pressing his thumbs into the skin. He rolled the heels of hi
s palms into my calves. He moved along the edge of the bed as his hands moved along my body, along my thighs, my buttocks, my back. My neck. My head. He threaded his fingers through my hair.

  Could he tell, touching me, that I was deformed? Had they taught him at massage school what a body ought to feel like? Had he practiced on the bodies of beautiful women? And when he felt their slim waists and plump buttocks, when he rubbed their symmetrically shaped legs, did his hands recognize that they were beautiful?

  His fingers and palms pressed into my body, rubbing away aches I had not known I carried—tension in my side and hips from walking in jolted steps, a knot in my neck from lowering my face—and as these aches disappeared the ache I called love replaced them. This time I could locate it in my thighs, between my legs. Blood pounded loudly in my ears. I took his hand and pulled him down.

  I have never been interested in political matters. For a person like me, it does not matter who holds power—I will always remain outside the hierarchy, in that group of people everyone pities and secretly wishes did not exist because they would rather not bother with pity. So when wars are won or lost, when political movements succeed or fail, when great changes in government and power come about, I don’t feel much measure of anything. The restlessness that overtakes the city, the illusion of time suspended that makes people like Su Lan’s husband behave in strange and unexplainable ways, has no effect on me. The only exception is the liberation of Shanghai. My memory of dirty soldiers shouting down the boulevards in the spring of 1949 is happy; it is tangled with the memory of the first time my husband and I made love.

  Death took Tao Kun as blindness had: slowly, relentlessly, too early. He was fifty-three when a lump began to grow in his brain. As the tumor spread, he was forced to stop working; he could no longer control his hands. He spoke of the disease as an extension of the darkness that had taken his sight. Finally his optimism was conquered, and he turned into the man I had imagined before I met him, a shadow who did nothing but lie in bed. I reminded him that the doctors said they were two isolated, unrelated conditions. I fed and bathed him. When I was not maintaining his body I attempted to catch onto whatever remained of his mind, reading to him newspapers and books. I needed him to know to the end the difference between what was true and what was comforting.

  Now death had taken your mother too. I believed you instantly, in fact you looked so much like her—the same crown of forehead, the same curve between chin and neck—that I had believed you were her: I believed you were her ghost. You spoke the words bluntly; without knowing who I was you hoped to wound me. Later I realized your childlike use of language was the result of living in America for so long. You had forgotten how to say any but the simplest things in Chinese.

  You disappeared into your mother’s room, where I heard you moving things around, opening doors, cabinets, drawers. I returned to my room and searched through my own things. In my desk drawer I found the one photograph of Su Lan I had. I blew off the dust and wiped it with my sleeve.

  The photograph had been taken in Beijing’s Yuanmingyuan when Su Lan was studying for her master’s degree. In it, she stands in a mazelike hedge dotted with yellow flowers, wearing the same pale yellow dress she wore on the day we first met. She is not touching anything, and though she is completely alone, with nothing but shrubs beside her, she poses as if sharing the frame with someone else, her body deferent and her eyes retreating, as if hoping that the viewer’s attention will land on the other person instead. I found the photograph in a bag of things Su Lan was planning to discard before she left. When she saw me looking at it, she plucked it out of my hand and stared.

  This is why I hate photographs, she said before dropping it back into the garbage. They’re so disappointing, they never show you as you think you are.

  Later, I fished it out.

  There had once been many photographs of her. She was very photogenic, she knew how to pose, how to look at the camera so her face was shown in its best light. Once upon a time her husband couldn’t stop trying to capture her in film, and he had put his attempts up all over their room. But in the months before she left she had destroyed them all.

  Now I glued the photograph of Su Lan in Yuanmingyuan to a piece of cardboard and took it to my altar. Between Guanyin and Tao I made a space and put Su Lan there. I lit three sticks of incense. Somewhere outside the neighborhood walls, a round of firecrackers went off. The first round was followed by another, then fireworks, and for a moment the sky behind the window glowed.

  You don’t have Su Lan’s face—not quite. Your eyes are sunk deeper into your brows, and they dart about without focus, wide—lost. Each time I look, I discover another difference: the square jaw, the thick, athletic legs, a rougher complexion, and a distinct way of holding yourself, with your neck sticking out slightly, like one of those animals that is always turning its head this way or that.

  A few years ago I saw these attributes on the face of another ghost, one that came not too long after Tao Kun, but who stayed only shortly. He appeared after the new year. He stood in the alleyway underneath the window day after day in the same place, the ground beneath him littered with the blasted red scraps of firecrackers. He stared, silent and unmoving, at the red 拆 on the wall. Something about him looked familiar, but he wore a strange expression, one I had never seen on any living person’s face. It was fixed yet far away, as if he could see through the wall. I sensed that he wanted to come up but something was stopping him. He only ever appeared for a moment—I would glance out the window and note his presence, turn away to do some things, and by the time I looked back he would be gone.

  It wasn’t until I went into Su Lan’s room that I realized who he was. You see, I took the task your mother gave me seriously. Up to the day you appeared I went in there every so often to dust the furniture, open the windows, move things around so the air felt lived in. Each month I pay her rent alongside my own with the money she left for that purpose. The rent, which has not risen since she moved in, is laughably low—these days, less than a meal for two at the new restaurant down the street—and the amount she left could sustain it for an entire lifetime. For fifteen years I kept the room in a livable state, ready for the day Su Lan returned.

  After the appearance of your father’s ghost I decided to make some changes. Su Lan had left that man’s traces everywhere, so thoroughly that the room seemed prepared not for her return but for his. His shirts, pants, and jackets hung in the wardrobe. His shoes were lined up on the floor. On the hook behind the door hung his white doctor’s coat and stethoscope. Meanwhile she’d left few traces of herself; the clothes she had not taken with her or given away were packed in trunks and drawers, and her books were stacked underneath and behind his, hiding in shadow.

  There was a trunk under the bed filled with cloth diapers and swaddling clothes, things you would certainly no longer need. I emptied it. I filled the trunk with everything that had belonged to Su Lan’s husband: clothes, medical textbooks, papers, a pen I had once seen him use. In the empty wardrobe I hung the dresses Su Lan had left behind. I rooted through her cabinets and drawers. In the bottom drawer of her desk was an envelope of photographs, twenty or so, all of the man I had seen outside. They looked like they had all been shot in the same day. I dug through the drawer, which was full of notebooks and papers. There were no more photographs, not one of Su Lan. But the search was worthwhile: in the back corner I found a bundle of letters bound tightly with string. I threw the photographs and letters in the trunk. I dropped the lid and it closed with a satisfying sound. I shoved it back deep beneath the bed.

  You no longer needed your swaddling clothes; Su Lan no longer needed him. I was certain he had fallen out of her mind, had faded in her heart. In America Su Lan would be occupied by many important things, perhaps she’d found other lovers, perhaps she’d even remarried. I could hear her voice on the night before she left Shanghai: I see them taking him, in order to drag me back. I was simply enacting the natural work of time, and wha
t Su Lan had confessed to doing that night. I was cleansing the future of the past.

  I left just one thing: the wedding portrait. I had plucked it from the wall to press down the tangle of her husband’s ties, but the wall was lighter in color where it had hung and the spot drew attention to the crooked nail that protruded from it. The white paint Su Lan had brushed on more than a decade ago looked yellow-gray and stained around the rectangle where the portrait had been, and I felt inexplicably sad looking at it, as if witnessing something that had happened to Su Lan herself.

  I rehung the portrait.

  It was enough—the next morning the ghost was gone and he never returned again.

  Your mother had not always wanted children. One day, when she was a child, she had learned that she’d been created inside her mother, and that this creation had been a decision—something that could have been prevented. On that day she had sworn that she would not make her mother’s mistake.

  She told me this once, when we were still strangers and she was trying too hard to become my friend. I thought she was this way with everyone; I found it incredibly irritating. Later she admitted she was trying to provoke me without explaining why, and in a backward way the admission made me like her. She said, If you think I’m trying to draw you out, you’re right. She found reasons to admire me; among these—my independence, my stubbornness—was the fact that I had no children.