Little Gods

by Meng Jin

  An hour later, mother and daughter are still slumped on the hard plastic chair. Liya’s sleep is thick and deep. A bus to Hangzhou departs and the waiting room empties. Twenty minutes later, a bus from Hengdian arrives at the same time as another from Yiwu. Passengers pour in. One of these passengers is a boy, barely fifteen, with a close-shaved head and a jacket too big for his bony shoulders. His eyes dart through the station: they land on Liya asleep. In an instant he recognizes that she is not from Dongyang by the way she dresses, the way her body slackens on the seat. He guesses that she is from Shanghai or perhaps even Hong Kong or Japan. He guesses by the way her arms drape around the bag on her lap that though the bag is plain and small, it is valuable to her, and when he walks past her he picks it up without turning his head or breaking his step. His movement is so swift that the people walking behind him don’t even blink.

  Liya wakes for a moment without opening her eyes. She shifts in her seat, folds her arms across her chest, and falls back asleep. The noise of the influx of passengers is absorbed into a dream she will not remember when she wakes. She snaps up, alert, at 2:55. Her bus is boarding. She grabs her duffel and runs to the gate, digs her ticket from her pocket and boards two steps at a time. It isn’t until the bus is halfway up the first mountain, a chilly draft blowing sharp from a window crack, that she hugs her arms around her torso and discovers her backpack is not there. She stiffens. She picks up the duffel, stands, looks under the seat, pats her body, looks over her shoulder, turns around, picks up the duffel again, looks above in the overhead shelf, looks under her seat again. It is a tiny bus, the seats are small and cramped and her neighbor leans away, muttering something in a dialect Liya can’t understand. The bus takes a sharp turn and knocks her back into her seat. By this time her backpack is deep in a residential neighborhood in Dongyang, the laptop and passport already sold, the cough drop already melted on the young boy’s tongue, the scarf already in the closet of someone else’s mother, and the gum wrapper, the paperclip, the pens, the water bottle, the photographs, the letters, and Su Lan already dumped in a garbage pile by the side of a dirt road.

  She arrives without her mother. Her body is aching, her head is humming, the journey has been so long. The road has taken her up and around; many times it did this until it brought her here. Here: far from the edges of her imagination, from the territory of photographic implication. She has entered a landscape painting where mountains are made in gray-hued strokes and trees drawn in sharp tangled lines. From the top a frozen river sweeps down in a beard of white. There Liya is in the far corner, a flick of the brush by the arch of a bridge that leads off the bottom of the scroll.

  She crosses the bridge. Before her, frozen farmlands fan out. The sky, punctured, is draining. It is that time of winter afternoon when darkness can slip over in a snap. She passes frosted fields and clusters of dwellings made of wood and mud and stone. Shadows lengthen. Someone calls her mother’s name. A woman laughs in an open door. Other bodies appear in other doors, speaking the dialect she can’t understand:

  Ah Lan!

  With a shock she realizes she is wearing her mother’s dress, the one from the Shanghai neighbor’s shrine. Over her sweater and pants the soft fabric swishes. She hurtles onward to her mother’s home, the shadow beneath the lone pine. A single bulb lights the frame of the door. She steps over the threshold. There is the sound of water sloshing, the smell of burned rice, a clutter of furniture and things: table, stool, chair, bed, basket, pot, floor. Firewood stacked high along the back wall. There, for the first time, Liya sees the form of her grandmother’s body, outlined in yellow light.

  She puts her bag on the packed mud floor. She says, Waipo.

  When the body turns, she almost cries out:

  Her grandmother’s face is her mother’s face, if her mother’s face could age. The wrinkles are her mother’s wrinkles, deepened and set. The way this face looks at her, frowning, with eyebrows raised, is the way her mother looked at her.

  Looking at her granddaughter, An also sees Su Lan.

  An is a woman who doesn’t believe in time, so each day is a revelation of what is and has been in store. She moves through time like others move through landscape, accepting new sights with delight or disgust. In this way she can take what happens as it comes. She tries to watch herself too with detached curiosity, wondering what she will do next.

  What a way of seeing—it drove her daughter away. Now she approaches the image of her daughter with caution. She has seen this image before, her daughter wearing the same yellow dress, appearing in her door. In her dream Lanlan also sets her traveling bag on the floor. She bends to unzip it and takes out a gift, presenting it in two arms like a child. It is a roll of white cloth, impossibly soft yet strong, at turns like silk and wool. Before An can take it, it unfurls. It covers the table, the stove, the floor, and as it does this it disappears, taking what’s underneath it. Lanlan steps back and the cloth billows, draping the walls of the house. There they stand on an empty patch of earth. Lanlan opens her purse. She takes out a tube of lipstick and paints her mouth. She turns to her mother and smiles.

  Each time An has this dream she tries to change it—to take the bag, to stop Lanlan from walking through the door—and wakes instead with her arm raised, preparing to strike her daughter or to embrace her.

  Is she angry or sorry? Did Lanlan abandon her or did she push her daughter out?

  Waipo, the image of Lanlan says again. An narrows her eyes. The image is built like herself, with wide shoulders and a sturdy pose, a good body for climbing and working. Lanlan, on the other hand, was short and frail. There are traces of another in the face too: the square jaw, the dark brows.

  An says: You’re Ah Lan’s girl. Is your mother coming?

  Liya says: Uncle Zhang told me to bring her back, and I failed.

  The two women speak and listen, though neither understands what the other says. They repeat their messages with different words, stretching out phrases, distorting vowels. Where did she take you? An says, and Liya hears the words where and dirt, which in dialect sounds like you, and tries to explain her journey, the endless trains and buses, how she fell asleep, how she doesn’t know where she lost her mother, and from sleep and know An hears water and eat, and brings Liya a bowl of porridge, and Liya, surprised, says thanks, which is the first thing they both understand. It is a door: An’s look of suspicion softens to concern, Liya’s frustration to dull fatigue. Liya looks at An and tries again. An understands: dust, bone, lost, not. She sees her granddaughter’s face, at once afraid of the words and resigned to them. She turns away. She walks out the back door and stands in darkness, eyes wide, skin vibrating.

  Very unkind of you, she will say to her daughter, the next time they meet. How cruel to die before your mother.

  An has seen what happens when you try to change the future. The village leaders did this in the years before Lanlan’s birth, promising bounty for all. One year they told everyone to stop farming and melt their tools to make steel. Another year they wasted digging the reservoir. The big rice bowl campaign didn’t even last a year; for two months everyone ate as much as they craved in the communal dining room before they all ran out of food. Fields grew bare; livestock died. People started dying too. Lanlan’s father caught the illness that would kill him.

  An’s husband was an older man—a widower—he spoiled An with love. Those first years of marriage, she got all sorts of ideas about what life was supposed to be. When the famine came she had to learn how to suffer all over again. She knows how love can break a person, how once you’ve tasted that kind of happiness it is hard to go on without. You have to know what to do with hope, which is to squash it. You have to tell yourself whatever story you must to rewrite happiness into something ugly, something you don’t even want.

  Lanlan never understood this. Lanlan, born after the worst of the famine, always acted as if the rules did not apply. For some years An believed it too. Her daughter had left for Hangzhou, then Beijing; her
name was on everyone’s lips. In those years people were good to An. Neighbors stopped to ask if she had eaten and invited her to their homes. Her leaky roof was fixed for free and her house wired with an electric bulb. People dropped by for news of her daughter. Favors and gifts increased in the weeks surrounding visits. There was talk about how beautiful Ah Lan had grown, how stylish and yangqi her clothes. Parents brought their unmarried sons with baskets of fruit and firewood. For half a decade An had more food than she could eat. Then Lanlan stopped coming back.

  The truth is, to this day An has kept that feeling about her daughter. Though she will not say it, not even to herself, she has been waiting for Lanlan’s return. And what did she expect? Some kind of triumph, a parade, gold spilling from her shoes? It wasn’t hope, it wasn’t even fear. Hope, fear, she can’t tell the difference anymore.

  There are ways to help the dead, An says. She packs a basket with incense, wine, and sheets of thin golden paper. She stares at Liya and shakes her head. Liya understands. She takes off her mother’s dress.

  They go up the mountain into the dark. An knows the trail by heart. Liya follows, weaving through bamboo and pine and terraced plots. They stop at a row of graves planted on a mountain ledge. They light incense and pour wine and burn mourning papers. In the sudden light Liya reads the names of her ancestors carved on eroding stone. The flame smolders. They leave for another grave.

  In this way they traverse the mountains, lighting small fires, tracing a constellation of their dead. It is cold. Liya is so small in this tremendous dark she might as well be of it. The frozen path rises to meet her feet, stiff leaves brush her cheeks. When the sun rises to reveal the shapes of things, she is sure she will find herself transformed into a rock, a barren tree.

  At the last grave everything is set aflame: the incense, the papers, the dress. The wind lifts: ash falls like snow.

  What is this feeling? It is like grief but even hollower, the self draining out through a hole.

  The next morning Liya wakes to her mother’s voice. It is speaking in dialect and it is angry, shouting, accusing. She listens, ear to the sound. She hears how her own Mandarin has been inflected by this language, how its idiosyncrasies seep not only into her mother’s accented English but into the logic of her speech. It is a violent logic, not primitive or animal but somehow closer to death, the kind of violence that makes visible things that cannot be seen. So heartbreak appears as actual injury to chest, so grief is solid like stone. What you’re longing for will appear before you like a mirror, like hands around your throat.

  The more she listens the more she understands. She hears: How could you? Then, Get up, wake up, GO.

  She sits up: sight is a gasp. She is alone. In the one-roomed hut there is no grandmother, no woman-figure from the night before. Morning sun slices in through the wooden slabs, which shrink, black and dank and rotting. Sun lights the writhing traps of cobwebs and on the counter the bowls are white with mold, from which a roach emerges, black shell shining. The air is sour and she is inside a mouth, closing, the earthen floor a tongue, curling, even the door, a square of light, narrowing—

  She flees.

  Out of the hut and up the path, not stopping to breathe or think. From all sides her mother’s name pursues her, reaching out as if to keep her. Here in this place that is not trying to kill you, not exactly, but to keep you dead. And though she is no longer wearing her mother’s dress she has become her mother: a teenager, barely, escaping.

  Across the bridge a bus idles, door open, and when she swings on, panting, it is Su Lan’s voice that comes from her, that says, with force, Go.

  Su Lan’s daughter is on her way to Shanghai and Su Lan is on her way to a landfill, where she will become part of a man-made mountain not far from the mountain where she was born. Su Lan’s mother has returned to waiting and the man who was Su Lan’s husband is in Beijing, awake, eating slices of white bread by the yellow streetlamp light. Awake, considering a dream that has entered his waking life. In his dream Su Lan travels to the past and chooses the more deserving friend; in his life they wait outside and watch him. The deserving friend snores in a hotel in Hainan, where he has taken his family on vacation. After Su Lan’s daughter left, the friend’s wife discovered the letter from Su Lan in his briefcase, and though his wife is not a jealous or even sentimental woman, she did not speak to him for two days, not even in front of their son. The friend has resolved to explain to Su Lan’s daughter, when he returns to Beijing, and if she appears again, that it is best if they don’t see each other anymore. Su Lan’s Shanghai neighbor has found her husband. He leads her by the hand and teaches her how to see in the dark.

  In Beijing, an old nurse on night shift walks through the main corridor of the hospital where she has worked for most of her life. Six days ago she saw someone who reminded her of someone else, a patient from the past, so much so that she stopped to look again. In fact she was right (it was the patient’s daughter, a child once strapped to her chest for a night) but she has forgotten about the child and most other details of the night in question. She has not worked in the maternity ward for fifteen years and remembers little about the patient—not her name, not even her affliction. What remains and won’t go away is the woman’s bloodshot stare and pale lips, asking if she believes in time. Accompanying this image—the memory of cool air suddenly brushing her damp chest. One memory brings another: that day, she saw a man rising from the dead.

  She was standing at the hospital’s gate smoking a cigarette. The nurse does not and did not believe in ghosts, but to this day she is sure of what she saw. Lying on the street was a darkness in the shape of a corpse. It rose from the ground and became the shape of a man. As the man shook out his limbs and walked away, he gained depth and color, and when he turned to look back there was even the suggestion of a face. That was what it was, not a dead man come back to life so much as a new, living man born from a lifeless form. It was still creating itself as it walked into the smoke-singed street.

  Why was she standing at the hospital gate? Why was the street hot with death? When did she stop smoking cigarettes? Over the years she has used neglect to smudge the intensity from her memory, and mostly she has been successful. But—Do you believe in time? The nurse cannot get this question out of her head. She walks past the spot where she saw Su Lan’s daughter, and suddenly it occurs to her the reason the patient was so upset—her husband had just died.

  Liya returns to Shanghai in the dead of night, homesick for the first time in her life. She has been here before. She has hailed this taxi and given this address, she knows exactly what to expect. She can conjure an image of where she is going, and it comforts her, this warm ache of returning to a place briefly left. How sweet the sensation is, desire intensified and softened by its imminent fulfillment.

  The taxi leaves her on a dark street. The moon, a thin glow behind clouds, does not illuminate so much as give darkness texture. The shop lights are off; the buildings, too colorful in daytime, are shadows blocking the sky. Appearing thus, as patches of less and more black, the street stretches infinitely. Liya cannot see where it ends. She walks, searching and feeling, toward the entrance of the neighborhood—the pharmacy with the green sign, the arch with the flickering bulb light—she walks and walks and walks. The entrance never appears. She walks the length of the street again, crossing once, twice, another time to the other side, and each time it seems like a darker dark, and each time she does not find it, not by sight and not even by smell, no acrid whiff of the public latrine. Finally she turns onto a lamplit street, orbs pulsing in the blacks of her eyes. Frustration wells inside her, a childish feeling of injustice—if she weren’t so exhausted she’d have to fight the urge to cry—she sits on the sidewalk in a pool of rancid light. She closes her eyes.

  Somebody touches her arm.

  It is a boy, seven or eight years old. He has a long face and a lazy eye, and his bare skin—he wears no coat—is covered in sores. He tugs on Liya’s arm.

&nbs
p; She does not realize he is speaking. When she finally hears him, his voice is thin and pleading. She pulls back, stands up, walks away. He follows. He repeats his refrain: Ahyi, have pity on a poor hungry boy like me. My mother is sick and my father is dead and we’ve spent all our money on medicine. Ahyi, have pity . . .

  She turns. She picks up her pace. So does he, reciting his story, a tape on steady repeat. Finally she opens her wallet and holds out a bill. He snatches it and disappears. Soon more figures emerge. She is surrounded by three or four or five more beggars with hands out, eyes wide and sorrowful, pleas looping and insisting. Within a minute her wallet is empty and she is again alone.

  Morning is a relief. Light bathes the expanse of the world: it is so easy to see. She walks down a two-lane boulevard lined with barren baby trees. It is early. Shops haven’t yet opened, breakfast vendors are just rolling out their carts. Her head hurts. Her legs ache.

  She walks down streets that look familiar and unfamiliar at once, that could be anywhere in Shanghai. Panic has sublimated into unsettled inevitability, fluttering off her sightline like a bird. Would she recognize the neighborhood if she saw it? Does she even remember the correct address? She walks past blocks of bamboo scaffolding, past hammers and drills of demolition crews. She circles the streets until they blend into each other, into one anonymous Shanghai Street, narrow and wide and clean and filthy and old and new and crowded now with human bodies, until the wall of buildings opens and she finds herself facing an enormous nothing:

  A crater in the earth, so deep and empty she gulps, looking to the sky for some streak, some smoke of extraterrestrial debris.