Little Gods

by Meng Jin

  She was a competent mother. She did everything necessary to keep you alive, and did it well, she fed you and held you and cleaned you. She performed these actions mechanically, with neither tenderness nor disgust. I sensed in her a certain gratitude; some part of her understood that the ceaseless movements of her hands, arms, legs, in picking you up and bouncing you, in nursing and cleaning you, in washing diapers and swaddling blankets, forced her mind to stay in a dull and inactive state, an inactivity which she must have understood was keeping her sane. When she did allow herself to think and feel, she returned to subjects that had consumed her in the beginning of pregnancy, the perils of raising a child. It was in these reveries that she sometimes mentioned her own mother and spoke, however fleetingly, of her past.

  She had gone to Beijing University, Beida, one of the top universities in the country. It had been her first time in the capital, and the entire time she had felt as if she were enclosed inside another person’s body. She’d walked across the green lawns of campus, around the paved pondside walkways, under the swooning branches of willows, not recognizing the way people looked at her or spoke to her, believing whenever she was addressed that the message was meant for someone else. Her own upbringing had been so far from the place she’d landed that she hadn’t even known it was special; in high school, on the day university placements arrived, she had learned of the prestige of her placement by the hushed envious looks of the other students, who seemed to be seeing her for the first time. When she arrived in Beijing, and for months, even years after, she could not shake the feeling that she was there because someone had made a mistake.

  She remembered a day in the fall of her first year, before she knew the way back from class to her dormitory, when she saw a young woman walking through the grounds surrounded by a large entourage. The woman was a fellow student, judging by the books in her hands and the youth of her face, but she distinguished herself somehow from the others, in the very way she walked and breathed. Su Lan asked a young man for directions; he noticed her gaze and said, That’s right, that’s such-and-such, and Su Lan nodded though she did not recognize the name. Some time later she came across the name again, in a newspaper or magazine, and learned that the girl was the daughter of a top party official. When she learned this, she became dizzy and disoriented, she felt a gut-dropping vertigo accompanied again by the certainty that she was in the wrong place. This dizziness would strike again and again, such as when she heard that Mao Zedong had studied at the university, that Lu Xun had taught there. Later, after she grew accustomed to the idea of sharing space with legends and myths, the dizziness came to her in her physics lectures, for instance when she learned the mathematics to manipulate electricity, or the principle that had made possible the atomic bomb, or when, lying awake at night, she memorized the infinite digits of the numerical constants that governed what we saw in the skies at night, that governed the warping of time and space. It seemed to her that the keys of truth and knowledge and perhaps even time had been thrown on the table before her, the gates flung open, granting her access to a world that was for most of her life so separate it might as well have belonged in the domain of gods.

  Occasionally, of course, being at Beida had given her the confidence one might have expected, the feeling that she had earned her place, that she belonged among the special and the extraordinary. But this confidence was always fleeting, attached to a little success (a perfect test score, a word of praise from a difficult professor), and its glimmer faded as quickly and sharply as it had come. Furthermore, the reminder that she did not truly belong was present whenever she opened her mouth: she had not learned to speak proper putonghua until she left her hometown for high school, and for years she was unable to erase the remnants of her childhood dialect, the country accent, the illiterate phrases and idioms that had no written counterpart. When she first arrived in Beijing she had been ridiculed for failing to pronounce the difference between su and shu or rou and lou, and more than once she translated into Mandarin a saying in dialect so common she’d assumed it universal, only to be asked to repeat her words to bursts of derisive laughter. Though her excellent grades, and later, in her graduate studies, her excellent research results, confirmed on paper that she did deserve to be there, she was never fully convinced.

  Ever since I left home, she said one day without introduction, gripping my wrist, I have felt this great—threat—hanging over me, looming, following me wherever I go, saying, Any day, I will strike, and now it has.

  She had a fever as she often did in those days and was lying in bed. I was trying to take you from her so she could rest. Her voice was croaking, it sounded like she was trying to speak with hands around her throat.

  Because I am not innocent, she continued. I have reaped the rewards and I have left everyone behind. I have been very lucky, and until now I have fooled everyone. My mother used to tell me I was nobody special, she used to say my bones could be broken like anyone else’s, my skin could be cut and I would bleed too, and I left telling her she was wrong, I would prove her wrong.

  She smiled sweetly then. She brought her hand up to my face and said, You’re a mirror, aren’t you? She touched my cheek; she darkened and said: Of course I’ve always known what I am.

  She was confused. She shook her head as if to clear it. She returned to looking at you, petting your head. I picked you up and stood. I said, You’ll get the child sick.

  In her confusion I saw her words with frightening clarity.

  From the very beginning Su Lan had seen herself in my disfigured face, had seen the truth of what she was in my lopsided body. You look like someone I’ve always known, she’d said that day, the day she painted the room white, and she had meant it. In her mind we belonged to the same class of people, but it was not as I’d secretly hoped, that somehow she’d glimpsed her beauty in me, that hers was the body in which my mind and self belonged. No, she saw herself as a disposable, hideous human. To the world Su Lan was beautiful but to herself she was a monster, and her greatest fear was that this monster would be revealed. So we did see each other in the same way, as projections of our true selves. But while she was my hope, I was her fear. This was why she had kept me close from the start, because she feared and suspected a time would come when I would be the only person left she could turn to. That time was now. She looked at my face and called me a mirror; she despised the reflection she saw. I swallowed. The taste was bitter and hard.

  Go to sleep, I said. I moved my hands down her face, wiping the lids shut as to a corpse, and your mother, obedient, slept.

  All this I could have told you, and more, if only you wanted to know the truth. When I think of Su Lan a well opens and one memory leads to another, one thought to many thoughts. After all she was the kind of person whose combination of personality and circumstance made you wonder what life was for, even if you were fundamentally uninterested in such questions. So ask me how she spoke when you caught her off guard, ask me how she walked down the stairs carrying a stack of books, how she fiddled with the dials on her watch, how she stood on the terrace looking over the roofs of the longtang, as if something immense and invisible were keeping her prisoner.

  But you are not interested in the truth; you are interested in answers. I can see it in the way you move, as if your mother has hidden something, and you have a right to whatever it is. Perhaps you believe that solving the mystery of your father will fill the hole your mother left when she died. If this is a mistake, it is forgivable; grief, I know, can manifest in stupid ways. But I think it is a deeper quality of yours—one you have had since you were a child, one inherited from your father—this ability to turn your face away from one thing in order to obtain the other thing you want.

  I remember watching you one morning while you were with your mother. You were leaving infancy then, becoming pretty, your expressions exhibiting more and more those characteristics that distinguished you from any other child, the ones that would eventually form your personality. Su Lan had sa
t you on her desk, next to a pile of textbooks. She had put you in a white and red dress and brushed your hair so it curled around your round face, and slid a shiny white headband on your head. She was applying makeup to your face, her back bent and her eyes inches from yours, her fingers smudging your cheeks and lips with rouge, drawing lines around your eyes, plucking your brows. You did not like these sensations and would not sit still. She grabbed your face and you began to sob and scream and rub your eyes with your hands, ruining what work she had done, so she had to start over; she wiped your face hard with a wet towel until it was red and clean. She spoke to you sternly and held your chin still and made you doll-like again. The whole time you screamed and fought. When she was done, she scooped you into her arms and kissed you and told you how sweet and pretty you were, how much she loved you.

  Just like that you changed; it was like a switch had been flipped. She carried you down the stairs out the longtang onto the bus for the university. You beamed, any previous injury forgotten, hugging her neck like she was the love of your life. You never cried again when she dressed you. By the time the two of you left for America, when you were not yet three, you had grown into such an obedient and conscientious child that you insisted on helping her with the luggage. You tried to roll a suitcase out the door and fell, nearly toppling with it down the stairs. Your mother gave you her purse, she looked you in the eyes and said that though this bag was little it was very important, perhaps the most important of all: she was trusting you to keep it safe. You nodded, serious. You clutched the purse to your chest, guarding it with the gravity of an adult, and walked down the alley toward the cab, following just one step behind Su Lan, walking too with attention and care, watching the rest of the luggage with vigilant eyes. It was only at the end of the longtang, when your mother said to say goodbye to ahpo, that you remembered me. Goodbye! you said, in English, with glee, and threw yourself into my arms, your familiar little weight, as if you were playing a game. My arms were not special, by then you must have known them much better than your mother’s. You turned your head to make sure she was watching, and I couldn’t blame you, I was watching her too. She said, I owe you too much, and looked away.

  Instead I said, in Mandarin, so you could understand:

  The truth is, I didn’t like your mother very much. I never trusted her.

  Then you were gone. You stopped briefly in my room before fleeing down the rotting stairs, past the abandoned alleys, out the crumbling stone gate. Perhaps you had meant to say goodbye. But when you walked into my room and saw my altar—the white smoke, the candles flickering, my strange collection of gods—you marched to it with sudden certainty and picked up the photograph of your mother.

  Underneath a black coat you were wearing the same pale yellow dress. Your shins showed, your feet disappeared into socks and boots.

  Where did you get this?

  Without waiting for a response you pointed to the portrait of Tao Kun.

  Who’s this?

  You turned to the altar with a searing stare, looking at each item, roving over the table twice and then again, looking for something and not finding it there. You had taken some things from Su Lan’s room—your bag was noticeably bulkier than it’d been when you arrived—and you began to empty it, searching for something. A few more of Su Lan’s dresses, the box with her ashes, the photographs of your father, a Chinese-English dictionary. Finally you held up the bundle of letters I’d found in the desk drawer and thrown into the trunk. Searching the altar a final time, you said:

  You knew my father too. He’s alive, isn’t he?

  You brought the letters to your face. Read: Zhang Bo, Beijing University.

  Is that him, is Zhang Bo my father?

  I don’t remember his name, I said.

  It was the second thing I said to you in Mandarin. It was true.

  Again you picked up the photograph of your mother, holding it like a mirror, then put it down rudely, as if discarding it, as if saying, you have it—this piece of trash.

  You said, My mother never mentioned you, packed up your things, and left.

  Yongzong

  Rifle through my wallet and search my house. Come into my bedroom and open my cabinet. Take this key. Unlock that drawer. Dump the contents on the floor and thumb through them all. Make sure you read my marriage certificate, my work license, my daughter’s birth certificate. Look carefully at my ID.

  That is my face, is it not?

  Ask my wife. Ask my daughter.

  They will say, Yongzong? I don’t know anyone with that name.

  I received a postcard from Su Lan in June of 1985, two weeks after our five-year high school reunion. On the back was an aerial photo of Gugong, which I had bicycled past on my trips to see Bo but never actually entered. The postcard was sent to my address in Shanghai, tucked between the newspaper and a letter from the hospital. The script was small and neat. The note on the back was addressed To my dear classmate:

  I regret that I was unable to attend the Hangzhou First Secondary School Class of 1980 reunion. I would have liked to be there, as I had looked forward to seeing you, and of course, beautiful Hangzhou, after all these years. Please visit me in Beijing if ever you have a chance.

  She signed it, Your friend.

  I read the note again, flipped it over. Underneath her signature she had written her address, complete with room number.

  When were we ever friends?

  Su Lan. Her name was like a splinter, forgotten and flaring. I knew nothing about her. She had beaten me on the gaokao, she lived in Beijing, and was once ugly and poor but now, according to Bo, a beauty. How did Bo know? Had he been in touch with her?

  I thought back to our conversation. I thought of the hesitant look in Bo’s eyes when he finally brought up Su Lan, and how he had changed the subject, not wanting to speak more about the very thing he had led us to, as if embarrassed to be so blatantly showing his hand.

  I read the postcard again. I had looked forward to seeing you . . . after all these years.

  Was Su Lan in love with me?

  Perhaps Su Lan had seen Bo in Beijing and asked about me. They were not in the same course, but they attended the same university and must have seen each other from time to time. Perhaps she had asked him to put in a good word, to plant a seed of interest. But once he executed the favor, he became embarrassed and abandoned the topic. Why had she not simply come to the reunion?

  In two years of high school, she had never spoken to me. She couldn’t have had very many friends. If she had really changed so much, as Bo said, then her presence at the reunion would have been an event. She would have been noticed, called out. Perhaps she did not want the attention. Perhaps she was shy.

  It was all very odd.

  I shook my head and opened the newspaper. It was impossible to guess her reasons for sending the postcard. But even as I tried to put her out of my mind, I could not stop imagining the quiet girl in the back row, admiring Number One from afar. How I must have looked to her, who had never left her village. Had she studied with such perseverance to get closer to me? I picked up the postcard again. This much was clear: I had forgotten about her, but she had not forgotten me. She was still thinking of me, had been looking forward to seeing me after all these years!

  I assembled the pieces I had:

  She was brilliant.

  She was sneaky.

  She was beautiful (Bo said).

  She had no need to show off, as I did. In her place, I would have marched into the five-year reunion transformed, flashing my dazzling new self to everyone I had left behind. Perhaps she knew that her absence would speak more loudly than her presence.

  And she had chosen me. She had seen something in me that she had not forgotten, after all these years. She had invited me to see her in Beijing.

  I threw the mail on my bed and lay down. My lamp was dim. I reread the postcard and flipped through the paper. I opened the letter from the hospital and read it without registering the words. My fan w
hirred loudly. I read the hospital’s letter again. There was a thoracic cancer lecture in Beijing. The department of radiation oncology at my hospital wished to send me as a delegate.

  Please visit me in Beijing if ever you have a chance.

  Followed by her address. Who did a thing like this? Who was so brazen?

  I took out a blank piece of paper and began to write.

  Dear Su Lan,

  Thank you for your the postcard. I was We were sorry to miss you in Hangzhou. Turns out I will be in Beijing next month for a conference. and since I’ll be there anyways I would love like to catch up.

  Yours,

  Your friend,

  Your classmate,

  Yongzong

  I crumpled up the paper and threw it in the trash.

  I would appear at her door, unannounced. I would barge into her world as she had into mine.

  Beijing was sweltering. In the wide avenues it was impossible to find refuge from the sun. I wandered through the city aimlessly for two days after my conference, sweating through all of my good shirts and failing to work up the courage to go see Su Lan.

  I thought about ringing up Bo and telling him I was in town. Instead, I spent the days walking around the hutong by my hotel in Dongcheng. These old neighborhood lanes were not unlike the Hangzhou xiang where I’d grown up, and though I did not wish to return to my childhood, there was a liveliness and intimacy in the hutong that I suddenly missed, living for so many years in school dorms. I walked past gatherings of residents at doors and storefronts, grandmas in their housedresses and grandpas in undershirts and boxers, children playing with a stray dog, neighbors gossiping, watching games of weiqi, and showing off new babies. I edged through a crowd that blocked the entire width of the lane and found myself nearly stepping onto the gnarly foot of an enormous snapping turtle. As I jumped back, the thing lifted its beaked mouth and swiped at me, and the old women standing nearby shrieked with laughter before turning back to their gossip. He’ll feed four families, a woman next to me said, if we can find a big enough pot.