Little Gods

by Meng Jin

  Bring your mother’s ashes back, he would say. It might bring you comfort.

  But before that, before we spoke any more about my mother, we sat on the bench beside each other in silence. He stared at the envelope in his hands. I stared straight ahead. The wind blew sharply and branches slapped against branches above. I unclenched my shoulders. I closed my eyes and opened my mouth. Wind came into my lungs, a cold stinging clap. It brought smells of pine, exhaust, and cooking oil, which I tasted in the back of my throat. I listened to it whip through and around me, and to the voices of passing people chattering indistinctly, and felt again submerged in the past, in every other moment when these manifold sensations had passed through my body, and I observed the emotions that accompanied each sensation, floating just out of reach.

  Then Professor Zhang was pulling my elbow. I found myself on my feet. He was speaking, quickly, his eyes dancing to avoid mine. He said, Let’s go. We have to go.

  I followed him.

  He took me to the subway station and we got on. We spoke rapidly. I confessed everything. He confessed everything too:

  There had been another letter. My mother had sent it to Zhang Bo in late June of 1989, shortly after I was born. The letter was nothing like the other one. It was short, less than one page, and the handwriting was wild, words running into each other, ink dots splattered over the page. Even after he deciphered the words it was difficult to understand—incomplete sentences, exclamations, repeated apologies, repeated pleas. But the gist of it was this: my mother and father had been in Beijing during the government crackdown. My father had disappeared. My mother had looked for him, on the streets, in the hospitals, in the makeshift morgues, without success. She had been forced to return to Shanghai alone. In the letter she begged Zhang Bo to continue searching, to find him.

  For weeks Professor Zhang had searched. Upon reading the letter, any bitterness he still held for my father dissolved. He spent every waking moment in the streets, he looked through every hospital room, into the face of every corpse. He asked people he met, he called in favors with anybody of significance, anybody who might be able to obtain information. He even put out an ad in the newspaper.

  A month went by and he found nothing. Finally he wrote back to my mother saying he had had no luck. He didn’t tell my mother the rumors he’d heard about bodies collected and taken away in trucks, of mass graves and evidence burned. He told my mother to hold out hope that Yongzong was simply lost or hiding somewhere but would return when things calmed down. He offered his friendship and support.

  My mother did not write back until two years later, with the letter I had just read.

  Around the time of the second letter, Zhang Bo had met the woman who would become his wife. He was very much in love, and the love was doubly happy not only because his future wife loved him back but because once, when he was in love with my mother, he had not believed himself capable of loving anyone else. More than two years had passed since the events of June Fourth. It seemed to him that the country was healing too. The economy was growing, people had more money, found better jobs. Small business in Beijing was booming and everywhere you could see China beginning to develop, becoming a modern nation. In science and technology, especially, the growth was exponential. Zhang Bo had secured a well-paying, respectable professorship. He would soon marry a woman he loved. In the glow of his own happiness he read in my mother’s letter affirmation that Yongzong was alive and returned. My mother had encouraged this reading; the first sentence, after all, was Yongzong and I had a daughter. For a brief moment he considered it strange that my mother never wrote him explicitly to say Yongzong had been found, but quickly he was able to dismiss it—of course she must have been so happy, so overwhelmed, that she simply forgot.

  So when he saw a man who resembled my father in a bookstore on Wangfujing, thirteen years later, his first reaction was of delighted surprise. In fact, the man looked so much like Yongzong that Professor Zhang thought he must be mistaken—time should have done its work. But then he looked closer. Despite the full head of black hair (Professor Zhang rubbed his own graying head), the man did appear to be middle-aged. Certainly he was no university student.

  I was so surprised, Professor Zhang said again, not because I thought he was—he swallowed the word—I had assumed from your mother’s letter that they were in America together.

  Again he tried to justify his misreading of my mother’s letter:

  Your father and I, he said, we’d had a misunderstanding—an argument—you must understand we were very young. We hadn’t spoken in years, so when I got your mother’s first letter and heard that he was possibly—it made me sick. Of course, death itself, in anyone—not just one so young, and a friend, and by such an unthinkable—he cleared his throat, began again: My grief was magnified by the unresolved matters between us. Death—even a glimpse—even the possibility of death—reveals the triviality of all other grievances. I had always assumed there would be time to forgive him. So you can imagine the relief I felt when I got your mother’s second letter. For the last fifteen years I have imagined your parents exactly as you described them to me, in America, succeeding beyond all expectations, and hearing you confirm these things made me very happy.

  He waved me out of the subway train and we transferred lines.

  It wouldn’t have been improbable for your father to have returned to China for a visit, Professor Zhang continued. In fact, if I remember correctly, I saw the man in the foreign language section, reading an English book. I had gone to the bookstore to get a Japanese manga for my son’s birthday; I was on the second floor. But the problem with the doppelgänger in the bookstore was that he looked too much like Yongzong. Even when I saw he was older, about the right age, there was something off about him. I realized that he did not look like he had been abroad. Colleagues and friends of mine who have emigrated—they look recognizably different, even if they are wearing the same clothes and have the same hairstyle, though this is rarely the case. They wear their attributes in a new way. I don’t know how to describe it, but you have it. You look like a foreigner, I guessed it the moment I saw you, even though all your features are Chinese.

  I must have stared at the man for a long time, Professor Zhang continued, considering all this. Eventually he saw me. I looked into his face. I was convinced it was not him—the physical likeness was undeniable, yes, but the man’s eyes lacked the intensity that made Yongzong’s face his. It was the one thing I was certain no amount of time could alter. But then the man did something that changed my mind again.

  We left the subway and emerged onto another busy street. The traffic screamed.

  What? I shouted, running after Professor Zhang as he crossed the intersection. What did he do?

  Zhang Bo turned to me and shouted back, He fled.

  I followed him, he said some moments later, and then we walked in silence, listening to the cars roaring past.

  I knew we were near. The professor’s breaths had grown long and slow. He sucked them in with dread. Around us, near-identical five- and six-story buildings lined the residential streets. We stopped in front of one of these buildings.

  He has a wife, Professor Zhang said. And possibly, a child.

  He did not explain how he knew these things and I did not ask.

  We stood and looked at the building. The professor shifted his feet.

  It’s probably not him, he said after some time.

  I’m sorry I brought you here, he said. I don’t know what I was thinking.

  He made to turn around. I didn’t move.

  We stood beneath the stripped branches of an old oak, behind a row of hooded motorcycles. Above us a bird sang, its voice thin and cold. But I did not really hear the bird. I did not hear anything. I barely saw. My senses and my mind were suspended in a thick liquid, lifted outside of time.

  How long did we stand there? The sun came out, then went behind clouds again. Nobody entered or left the building. Beside me Professor Zhang continued
to shift his feet but made no other noise. Now and then I felt him looking at me with an apologetic air. I knew the moment I said the word we could go. But I made no sign and continued to wait, and eventually, there was a stirring inside the building—the sound of a door closing somewhere, followed by voices, then a man appeared in the stairwell, and he was my father.

  My father was wearing a shapeless black jacket, zipper open. He had his hands in its pockets. He looked very much like the man in the photographs: wide mouth, square face, my features my mother lacked. He did look older. He was smaller, not only taking up less space (how did I know this, never having seen him in space, but I did) but commanding less of it. Professor Zhang was right about the intensity in the eyes. The man in the photographs had a look that expected—no, demanded—from the world. This one simply used his eyes to see.

  The professor stirred beside me. I couldn’t even breathe. I watched my father. He stepped lightly, almost hopping, as he came down the stairs, turning occasionally to speak to someone behind him—a girl.

  My father and the girl walked across the parking lot together, talking. The girl was six or seven, probably just starting school, the collar of a uniform visible under her red winter coat. She looked like him, more like him than I did, because she was gangly and boyish, with short cropped hair and the beginnings of a masculine gait. Their postures matched: relaxed but upright, not huddled against the cold. As they walked by, my father turned to the girl and ruffled her hair, and she batted his hand away, peeking at him as she did with a little grin.

  That’s when he looked up and saw me.

  Yes, he saw me. We looked at each other, straight in the eyes.

  Perhaps his face turned pale. Perhaps his shoulders stiffened. Was there recognition, fear? Whatever was in his body to be discovered, however, was lost, because I discovered nothing, in fact I was plunged into a darkness so intense my sight did not return until they were no more than two figures receding in the distance. I blinked but encountered only a tangle of shape and color and light and dark and the movement of these components, nothing that could be named. In the empty parking lot next to Professor Zhang, I replayed all I’d managed to see: the man and girl exiting the building and walking by, exiting the building and walking by. Suddenly I was the girl, I was watching myself in another version of the past.

  Professor Zhang’s face was red, his mouth open, his lips blue from cold. It was possible he was weeping. The harsh wind had followed us here, the branches above us swayed about, raining a few remaining dry leaves at our feet. I clamped my coat around my chest and raised my face to the wind. The professor was speaking in a meek little voice, he sounded like a boy:

  I wanted to shout out Lanlan’s name, just to see . . . I wanted . . .

  On a high branch a red-throated bird hopped off into the wind. I watched it dip and rise. I turned back the way we came.

  That night, or perhaps the night after, I do not know, I was visited by a vision of myself from the future. It was not like a scene in a time travel film, in which the older self delivers a warning to the younger self in the most careful terms possible, combatting disbelief and fear. My vision did not try to interact with me or to avoid me, it was not even clearly embodied. It came instead as a sense of who that future person was, a gray cloud of being, accompanied by a feeling of inevitability.

  She was from years later, from after I’ve returned to living, to America and university and the boring but sufferable life. With mild relief I noted that these years would return to her the investigative and reasoning faculties that fled me with my mother’s death. She—I, many years later—thinks suddenly of the man I saw in Beijing and decides that he was not her father.

  She examines her memory of this afternoon for the first time in many years, observing me now (perhaps this is why I could see her too), and determines that the physical likeness of the man was a coincidence, possibly even my hallucination (what Professor Zhang called hope), because how likely was it that of all the people living in that building, the first and only one to exit would be him. Besides, she knows her father is dead. Her father is dead: in this moment of reflection it becomes clear. This is the only solution to the problem of her history, the only one that sufficiently utilizes all the pieces left behind. By then she has replaced the full memory of this afternoon with the knowledge of history books, which have informed her that her birth hospital was in the district where the most people were killed, that many of the dead have never been identified, that mass graves, mass cremations, all manner of cover-ups in which a body and its evidence could disappear were not only likely but probable.

  She imagines then how the events of her birth unfolded, how her father left the hospital for a moment, walking briskly through the front gates, perhaps to buy her mother something to eat, perhaps simply for a breath of fresh air, or to stretch his legs, which, bent under the chair outside her mother’s delivery room, grew restless and cramped, and was caught, unwitting—innocent—in the fire. Or perhaps her father, moved by the sight of senselessness, stepped into violence, afraid but unable to stand by and watch injustice—a hero. She imagines these scenarios again and again, and each time they become more convincing, so convincing that when she finally shares them with others, her voice low, her eyes dull, her lips barely moving, these impossible memories will have gained firm territory in her mind, will have become so vivid they must be true.

  Liya is surprised, in those first rare moments of divulgence, when, moved by some trick of the light or strange scent in the air, she answers the difficult simple questions (where are you from? who are your parents?) with truth instead of evasion, and is met by a grave and respectful silence, elevating her vulnerability to glamour, heavy and dark. The story about her dead father is a story pleasing to Americans, to Westerners in general, she discovers, and though she recognizes that she is using it to package herself, the pleasure she derives from being a person with solid answers to these questions overrides her doubt. How lucky she is! How attractive this person was to me, this person who, in her lifetime, filled in rootlessness with a story so deep in the mud of history it could be passed as identity—as self! She was the kind of person I’d always dreamed of becoming without a notion of how to do it, a person admired for possessing an authoritative moral center, who, when called to, can speak with assured gravity about past and present, personal and global moral failings, the kind of person admired for seeming to have been born with a knowledge of what is right and what is wrong. She spoke too like she was born with the right to speak, along with the right words—even as I knew she was me I envied her for carrying her history with the dignity of possession. In the presence of other immigrants and especially other Chinese Americans, the children of living parents, she was the one who made the others feel less authentic, who sent them home wishing for a similarly earned peace.

  The vision stayed with me as I fell asleep, perhaps it entered my dreams. Vaguely I resisted sleep in order to prolong it, so badly did I want it to be true. Because the alternative was to stay as I was, bombarded by sensory information without comprehension, by emotion and pain without comprehension. I did not know what to do in this state but to keep moving, charge forward to be surrounded by new senses and feelings with the hope that they might replace the current ones and be more sufferable. What vision of a stable future would not be more enticing than this?

  The Beginning

  She is on a train going back in time. The train is a fast train, it leaves the city faster than a jetliner leaving the ground. As the train reaches terminal velocity, the images in the window move faster than their boundaries. To avoid dizziness the human eye must fix on a point in the distance, hook onto the eye of the horizon.

  Liya is sitting awake on an overnight train and Su Lan is in a box in her backpack. The box is made of pine and the backpack is on the floor, tucked between Liya’s legs. The pine box that has been Su Lan’s home for the last month is inches from her daughter’s feet. The train turns, the backpack shift
s, the hard edge of the box rubs against Liya’s big toe—

  Su Lan is on her way home for the first time in twenty years.

  With her in the bag: twenty photographs of Yongzong, taken during their courtship. Letters from Zhang Bo and one from Fudan University. Behind her, her daughter’s laptop in a padded sleeve. Above, a scarf, a half-empty bottle of water, the birth certificate she hated to look at, and the passport with the history she improved. In the linings of the bag, an old cough drop, an empty gum wrapper, a paperclip, and two pens.

  They arrive in Yiwu eight hours later. They walk through the train station, through dust and people and suitcases wrapped in twine. At the exit a smoking man scans Liya up and down, ashing his cigarette on the ground. They take the shuttle to Yiwu bus station and weave through the packed lot searching for one going to Dongyang. The engine is rumbling, the door is closing—they swing on as the bus pulls out.

  In Dongyang, two hours later, Liya learns that the morning bus to her village has just left. It is eleven a.m. and the next one isn’t until three. She buys a ticket. She is ravenous. She eats a bowl of noodles at a stall outside, slurping down the broth. She buys a mantou and gulps it down in big bites. She sits in the waiting room with her feet on her duffel and her backpack on her lap. She falls asleep with her head tilted back, mouth open, arms wrapped around her mother.