by Meng Jin
I was attracted to him. Or perhaps I was attracted to the way he looked at me, to the person I became in his gaze. My pathetic rootlessness, my desperate floundering, my grief—in his eyes they were romantic, they made me beautiful.
I took him back to my hostel room. That night, I slept with my arms around his waist, my wrists pressing his stomach wall, and reassured myself with another body’s solidity.
The walls of the hospital were dark and dense. Fluorescent bulbs pulsed weakly from the high ceiling. On American TV, hospitals were glass-walled, white-tiled, gleaming in abundant light. Here the halls were narrow. The air felt dead. Everything appeared stained with age—the floors, the windows, the doctors’ coats. Patients crowded in front of counters, spilling from waiting room chairs to lean against walls and squat on the floor. No one looked at me.
Something-Guo had suggested I visit the place on my birth certificate and I’d listened to him. But I’d expected no epiphanies and I got none. Nurses in pink frocks sauntered down the hall. A young woman led an old woman around a corner. Beyond them, a janitor mopped the floor. It smelled of acrid iron and disinfectant. I gagged. Whoever had been born here seventeen and a half years ago—she was not anyone I’d ever imagined I’d meet.
I walked out into the dull dusk. The clouds glowed orange-gray, and the metal gate of the hospital shined black in the light. Before me, Fuxingmenwai was a concrete river. Cars flew by, kicking up cold dust. I turned and walked, kept walking past one subway station and then the next, until the street name changed. Now the sign said 长安街: simple characters, I could read them without the pinyin. Chang an jie, I thought; 长 (chang) as in long, as in lasting; 安 (an) as in calm, as in still; 街 (jie) as in street, though this was more like an avenue. I said the words again, Changan Avenue, and this time I heard them not in my voice but in the voice of a documentary narrator. Eternal peace, this voice said, and then it said another phrase: gate of heavenly peace. What an odd translation, I’d not noticed it until now, how grand and dramatic the diction. Tian implied heaven but it also just meant sky, and men might be a gate but might also be just a door. In Chinese, Tiananmen sounded simpler, even elegant, it could have been calm skies door. Changan Avenue, Tiananmen Square—in the documentary narrator’s voice I couldn’t hear the grace in either name, only the irony, the threat. I blinked and the avenue appeared as something I had seen before, but from a different angle, and not long at all, not extending as it did now past my periphery, but truncated—cut off by the edges of a photograph.
Are you a journalist?
It was a mistake.
A flash: Officer Shu’s tired face, his tired threat to stay away.
So it came to me, in a whole piece, the content of my mother’s lie:
I was born on June 4, 1989, in Beijing.
On the same day, in the same city, perhaps even right here, on this avenue bordering the hospital where I was born, a months-long peaceful demonstration had ended with military intervention. This intervention included the use of tanks and bullets on unarmed civilians. The civilians had been given warning, but it was safe to say no one believed the guns would shoot until they shot and drew blood.
By early morning of that day, the streets were empty and in newspapers all over the world there appeared photographs of tanks lining the boulevards of Beijing.
I had seen these photographs, of course. They were, alongside the Great Wall, among the stock images of Beijing I’d collected while growing up in America. Like much knowledge of history taking place elsewhere, I could not remember when or where exactly I’d gained it, and my understanding was diffuse, accumulated in bits and pieces over time: flashes of imagery, bold-faced headlines, that foreboding tone of the documentary narrator. These, I realized with a stone to my gut, were the exact bits and pieces I’d been afraid to find in Beijing. I had buried them deep. Perhaps I had seen them first in an American textbook, on TV, alluded to in some movie. Perhaps I’d even once noticed that the anniversary of the event coincided with my birthday. My mother had not been a celebrator of birthdays. She had never spoken to me of June Fourth. So perhaps I had searched this knowledge out myself, in more American books, written in English by Americans for Americans. It wouldn’t be the first or last time I asked a nation that wouldn’t claim me to tell me about myself. Finally, my mind must have performed the necessary acrobatics to dissociate what little connection my mother had left (the month, the day) from what I had learned, precisely so I would not have to put myself in this position, inside the documentary film, watching a terrible story taking place in a faraway land a long, long time ago and discovering, inside it, myself.
I walked fast. The cold wind whipped my hair. The avenue was six lanes wide with no visible ways to cross. The buildings on either side, set back from the road, provided no barrier from the elements. I stepped past an enormous building and the square opened before me, cold and vast. How the scale of infrastructure here surpassed the ability of my body. Beijing was not designed for humans, I thought—and here my mind completed the idea, even as I heard my other self saying, What a derivative, Western thought—but for military machines.
On the edge of the square, staring at the empty expanse, I found myself wanting to be like my mother, wanting to cut away everything. So badly I wanted to be untethered, because to be untethered meant to be undefined, to have a body rinsed of meaning. I didn’t want my feet tied up in history. If the father I never knew was dead, like the mother I knew and didn’t know—I wanted his corpse to be the property of personal grief, not of national tragedy. I was no hero. I wanted to weep only for myself.
Professor Zhang waited under the striped French magnolia outside the physics building. He stood with his hands in his pockets, examining the peeling bark. We were meeting for lunch.
He nodded a greeting and we walked together out of the university gates to a small street lined with shops and restaurants. Professor Zhang made small talk, pointing out restaurants that were always busy when it was warmer, a small park, a bubble tea shop his son liked, a good bookstore. I’m glad you came by again, he said. I’d arrived at his office in the morning, breathless, having woken with a sense of urgency, and caught him just as he was on his way to class. It had been a week or more since I had last seen him.
As you know, he said now, continuing his casual tone, I sent your mother many letters, but she never responded to a single one. He paused.
But she did write me years later, after she had married your father. That letter came in early 1991, before the New Year, shortly before your family left for America. I hadn’t heard from her in quite some time by then. To be honest, I was worried about her, and about your father. I had begun to assume I would never hear from either again. This letter soothed me tremendously.
He stopped and looked at me. Would you like to see it?
The letter?
He nodded.
We turned into the park. Professor Zhang sat on a bench and I joined him. The thin bare branches of the trees bent in the wind. I took the envelope he held out. The wad of paper inside was thick.
It’s been sitting in my office for many years, he said, mixed with a pile of old papers. I’ve been meaning to show it to you, but I hadn’t thought of it in so long I couldn’t remember where I’d put it.
The first sentence read: Yongzong and I had a daughter.
My Chinese had improved significantly, unraveling like a spool of thread in my conversations with the professor and something-Guo, but many of the following words were illegible. The handwriting was neat and compact—my mother’s, I recognized it instantly; the script was in cursive, so the strokes that constituted a word blended together, hiding from me their platonic shape. Still I could not stop looking at the words. Twice the blocks of script were interrupted by equations and diagrams: what looked like mathematical proofs.
I didn’t know what your mother was doing when I got this letter, Professor Zhang said. Like I said, I hadn’t heard from her in some years. But I was glad to l
earn that she’d finally found a way to America. The promise of America was why so many of us had decided to study physics in the first place. There was a program at the time for top physics students to study in American universities, called CUSPEA or something like that, and under it you could win admission to a fellowship at physics departments abroad without going through the complicated university application process or even taking the TOEFL. You just had to take one physics exam, in Chinese. Your mother scored high on the exam, of course, and qualified. But she was never very good at English, and she failed the interview.
I remember she was pretty disappointed, though of course she didn’t show it. She couldn’t shrug off her conception of China as a land of inescapable poverty and shame. China for her would always be identical to the suffering of her childhood, no matter that she had left her hometown, no matter that the country was changing. And yet she kept this storybook vision of America, she believed it was a place where you could make yourself into whatever you wanted. I knew she would get there eventually, and she did.
Of course Yongzong was always a language whiz, he added. I’m not at all surprised that the two of them together did so well abroad.
A gust of wind nearly blew the pages out of my hand. I clasped tight and went through them again, staring hard. On the last page, before the signature, I read the final sentence: We are finally leaving China, hopefully forever—wish us well. For a moment, I made Professor Zhang’s mistake, and read in the we my mother and father. I shook my head and lifted my face to the cold wind. I read the pages again. Legible words and phrases leapt out without context. Again and again, the words 时间 (time), 空间 (space), 未来 (future), 现在 (now, or present), and 过去 (past) appeared. On the second page one sentence was underlined, twice:
如何记住未来与忘了过去?
How to remember the future and forget the past?
The letter was signed 你的朋友, your friend.
I handed it back to the professor. He took it and held it in his lap for a long moment before flipping to the second page. Then he began to read.
What do you make of time? he read. I mean time in the simple sense, the way we are born knowing it, with the idea of now. In this intuitive understanding of time, the present is real, the past cannot be changed, and the future is ours to make.
He flipped to the third page.
Einstein once wrote about the death of his good friend: Michele has left this strange world a little before me. This means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction made between past, present and future is nothing more than a persistent, stubborn illusion. Einstein was referring to special relativity, of course, but also to Minkowski space and the picture of physical reality as a four-dimensional existence, rather than the more intuitive model of three-dimensional space moving through time. What he means is that the evolution of space through time is only how we humans experience it. He was right about another thing: he died just a month and three days after his friend.
Did you know Einstein was cruel to his first wife? And probably to his second? He was a bad father too. He had a daughter he never met—no one knew what happened to her. He had two sons. One died in a mental institution, alone.
I have been thinking about thermodynamics, and the fact that the phenomenon of heat—something we so take for granted—is actually a result of probability. But probability as we know it is completely created by the fact of our observation. We only know that fast-moving particles will more likely collide with and transfer energy to slow-moving particles because we have observed it to be so. Probability has nothing to do with possibility. It only serves to limit our perception.
Perhaps you will laugh at me for being such a theoretician. Often I wish I could be more practical, like you.
As Professor Zhang read my mother’s words another image of her began to appear—one that I must have hoped existed behind the mother I knew, but which flickered away like an illusion, blinking behind gauze and dim lights each time I tried to see it. In this letter my mother had expressed herself as she never could to me, proficient as I was in neither mathematics nor Chinese. In this letter my mother had found her language, and the beauty and authenticity of the words and phrases and sentences, even as I could not fully grasp their meaning, made me recognize her as a person—truly, as a soul striving, with doubts and desires as tender as my own—like I had never fully done when she was alive and standing in front of me.
Suddenly I remembered a night in one of our American apartments when the cold silence of our living space was broken, and my mother talked to me, almost as a friend, over dinner. Something had happened earlier that day—I had come home, I think, earlier than expected, and found her sitting in the kitchen with her fists clenched on the table, staring out into nothing. She turned and saw me, releasing her hands, blinking. In that moment I saw a strange expression on her face, as if it were at once looking inside itself and draining out into the surroundings. Her lips drooped, her cheeks were soft, her eyes and nose red. In an instant her face reverted to normal—hard and hollow and a little bit angry—and I remembered wondering, bewildered, if she was sick. Only now did I realize my obvious mistake: she had been crying.
There was an unusual mood in our apartment that evening. My mother asked me what I was learning in my classes and I showed her a homework problem I couldn’t figure out, something to do with acceleration and force, the distance a cannonball travels against a strong wind. Unlike my mother I had no gift for science, words and sentences made more sense to me than numbers and equations, and usually she was indifferent to my weakness. She’d say my mind was not built for math and state it only as a fact, some mundane discovery she had come upon, like it was raining or the supermarket was closed. But that day she was patient, even gentle. She drew me a diagram and explained how to use the equations. She seemed happy. Newtonian mechanics, she said, are so simple and elegant. If only they were true, the world might be a more bearable place. She then went on to explain why they were wrong, or not quite right, giving me a brief lesson on relativity that went right over my head (I was in middle school). This was shortly before she would give up on academic work entirely. As I put my homework away, she said: Einstein made no significant contributions to physics after general relativity, you know. He devoted his later career to chasing a unified theory, a theory that would harmonize general relativity and quantum mechanics, and he failed. By that time most people thought it was a fool’s errand. His reasoning was he could afford it—younger physicists could ruin their careers on such pursuits.
She spoke in a mixture of Chinese and English, fluidly. She continued, her voice growing in anger as she spoke: Because after quantum mechanics, physics stopped asking the big questions, it would peek at God’s face but only through a pinprick hole, approaching its most urgent demands from a side door, hoping to gain entry by interrogation of the smallest components—a finger, a nail, a tooth. It’s like a game, like trying to trick God into revelation—well, I refuse to play games, I can’t believe God is stupid enough to be tricked, the only way to see God’s face is to demand it, to stand up and make your intentions clear.
In Beijing, Professor Zhang flipped through the pages of my mother’s letter.
There’s a lot of this, he said, mathematical acrobatics that I could barely follow at the time, just out of university. Actually, I spent many months going through them. It’s possible trying to understand them helped me get through my PhD. They are wild—conceptually—unbelievably wild, mathematically wild too, but also very beautiful. He read again, shaking his head.
So if the passage of time is an illusion created by heat—and this makes perfect sense to me, as they are both measures of change—if humans are simply stupid creatures limited by our nature to experience events chronologically, would this mean that in physical reality we have no control over our lives, that we cannot be held responsible?
He flipped the page again, and finally it was the last one. He
exhaled, long and deep. He didn’t read the last sentence or the signature. He folded the letter and put it back into its envelope.
It’s a very strange letter, he said. Strange and beautiful, the kind of thing only your mother could have made. Of course the most beautiful parts are in the mathematical proofs, which very few people can understand. To be completely honest, it kept your mother in my mind for a long time.
He held the envelope in two hands and looked at it, blinking furiously. He did not give it back to me. He let out a pained laugh.
Maybe one of these days, some museum or library will call me and ask for this letter, and physics students all over the world will study it.
Every time I saw him, I grew more certain that he did love my mother, that he might, in fact, still love her, as one loves those who are frozen in memory. At the very least he wanted very much to know her, fully, to describe how she was, who she was, defining and redefining her in the way of a person who must get to the bottom of something, who would never tire of searching. It was as if he believed that in excavating her soul, he would find, bound tightly inside it, the whole package of humanity, waiting to be unfolded—
We never went to lunch.
I don’t think I said anything. I don’t think I said what I was thinking: that the letter would never go in any museum, that he was probably the only person left in the world who gave any shits about Su Lan’s mind. But I must have betrayed myself somehow, with an expression, a gesture, a silence. The weeping knob in my throat. Perhaps I had been betraying myself this whole time without knowing it. Professor Zhang let out a long breath and looked at me. He said, Where is your mother, really?
I said, She’s dead.
I used the direct word, I said, 死.
He said, What happened to her?
I said, I did.
I didn’t mean to say it, I didn’t even know what I meant. Later, I would try to explain to Zhang Bo while discovering it myself, the rock of guilt I was wedging above my sight: that I was the one who had stopped my mother becoming who she had meant to be. I had resented her for making herself nothing, but had she only done that to raise me, to give me my Americanness? Later, I would open the box of her remains and ask Zhang Bo: What can I make of this? And Zhang Bo, shutting the box with one hand, would tell me about my grandmother. My grandmother who was living alone in my mother’s hometown, with no word from my mother in decades. He would tell me how to find her, which trains and buses to take, to follow the one dirt road leading away from town, to look for the lone pine marking my grandmother’s house. How it was my duty to go see her.