Braised Pork

by An Yu

  ‘What are you always writing with your finger?’ Jia Jia asked.

  ‘Oh, I barely even realise I do it, probably just as you don’t know you always do this with that lighter you’re always holding.’ He clenched his left hand into a thumbs-up fist and tapped his thumb on his fingers a few times.

  ‘I do that a lot?’

  ‘Yeah. Quite a bit.’ He laughed. ‘Even when you don’t have a lighter. You want a drink?’ He pulled out a bottle of qingke wine from his backpack.

  They took turns drinking from the bottle. The alcohol burned a little as it entered Jia Jia’s stomach, making her feel alive.

  ‘I imagine this to be the drink of the heavens,’ Ren Qi said. ‘There’s a purity to it. Don’t you think?’

  Jia Jia laughed.

  ‘I’m serious,’ Ren Qi said.

  ‘It tastes more like the drink from hell to me. Sour and rotten.’

  ‘But you do agree that it tastes like it’s from another realm.’

  Back at the edge of the village, Grandpa was pacing around an empty plot of land with a long stick in his hands. As Jia Jia and Ren Qi approached him, they saw that he was digging holes in the ground and planting something into them.

  ‘It’s almost two in the morning – what could he possibly be planting?’ Jia Jia whispered.

  ‘He’s old. He can’t sleep.’

  Ren Qi was unable to whisper. Grandpa turned around and waved at them, motioning for them to join him. Unable to refuse, Jia Jia made her way over, a little dazed, careful not to step on whatever it was that Grandpa had just planted. Ren Qi followed, dragging his bad leg behind the good one. The old man handed Jia Jia his stick and beckoned to her to replicate his movements. She felt compelled to obey and started digging until she had a hole that was about a hand’s span deep in the soil. Grandpa shook his head, suggesting that the hole was too shallow. And so Jia Jia continued, while Ren Qi cheered her on, until Grandpa told her to stop by pulling her hand away. He fetched something from his pocket, signalling for her to bury it in the hole.

  It was a flower bulb. After Jia Jia had planted it and covered it with soil, Grandpa suggested Ren Qi plant one as well.

  ‘No, no. I’m not the gardening kind of man,’ Ren Qi explained, yawning, as if Grandpa’s authoritative aura had no effect on him. Grandpa gave a small frown and proceeded to dig the next hole.

  Ren Qi had not managed to find accommodation yet, so Jia Jia offered to let him sleep in her room. She asked Grandpa for permission, and he nodded in approval. Ren Qi took a blanket from his backpack, spread it over three cushions, and nestled against the far wall.

  ‘The worst days give us the best memories,’ he muttered. ‘My wife told me.’

  His breathing deepened and steadied while Jia Jia lay still on her side and rested her finger gently on her birthmark.

  She woke again in deep, dark, cold waters. She knew this well by now; this real, biting chill. Instinctively, she searched for the silver fish that shimmered like the North Star, kicking her legs and propelling her body upwards. Something appeared in the distance; the fish had grown to be much bigger than before. She changed direction and trailed the creature, treading harder, fighting off the bitter cold, and each aching breath felt as though it was going to be her last.

  The way this creature swam was different – it swayed its tail more. It reminded her of the fish-man in her dreams. She was holding hands with someone. The hand was warm and felt as though it belonged to Chen Hang, plump and strong.

  ‘Keep going, Chen Hang,’ she thought she said, and kept her eyes fixed on the creature for fear that if she looked away it would vanish again. She was not going to let it disappear from her sight this time, not this time.

  But it did. It was gone. And holding her hand, kneeling next to her on the wooden floor of the farmhouse with the moonlight on his face, was Ren Qi, with his cold palms dry like ginger.

  14

  ‘Look outside,’ said Ren Qi. He gave Jia Jia’s hand a firm squeeze and then let go of her.

  Jia Jia looked. Though it was still dark, she could see the outlines of at least a dozen people gathered beneath the house.

  ‘Put on a jacket – let’s go down.’

  Ren Qi took his crutch, opened the door, and clambered down the narrow staircase.

  Jia Jia felt the solidity of the floor beneath her, the weight of the Tibetan plateau air, the vivacity of her cells, the flowing blood in her veins. The water, had it gone? The creature was lost with it as well. Did Ren Qi see it all? And now something was happening outside, in a landscape where there was air and soil, and where water had its boundaries.

  Whatever was going on, it must be important. Even the neighbours had been woken up. Could it be that Ren Qi’s wife had returned? He was so quick to join the get-together. It would be delightful news, something to rejoice in. But Jia Jia’s body ached all over as if her tendons were rupturing. She could not imagine herself shaking the wife’s hand, congratulating the couple on their reunion. She lay back down and rested her arm on her forehead, waiting for the night to retreat into calm.

  But people began climbing the stairs and clomping around. Ren Qi thrust his crutch at the door and burst back in.

  ‘You fell asleep again?’ His hoarse voice erupted into the room.

  ‘What is it?’ Jia Jia asked.

  Without moving, she waited for him to announce the return of his beloved; the ripe fruit of his laborious hunt. She waited for him to tell her that he regretted not being able to accompany her any more on her quest, that he wished her the best of luck for her future endeavours, and that he, unquestionably, would learn from his past and live a life of gratitude from now onwards.

  But instead, he said, ‘The old man is gone.’

  Jia Jia turned her head to face him.

  ‘Get up.’ Ren Qi fumbled through Jia Jia’s bag and tossed her a jacket. ‘Hurry.’

  Jia Jia did not know what he meant, whether he was speaking about Grandpa or somebody else, and whether he meant that a man had gone missing or had died some time during the night. What lifted her from the floor was the fact that Ren Qi’s wife had, for the time being, chosen to remain missing. Only a few minutes earlier she thought she had been left behind.

  Ren Qi, waiting for her at the doorway, impatiently inclined his head towards the room where Grandpa usually slept with the children. The others were nearby, discussing something noisily in Tibetan.

  Jia Jia joined him and the two of them walked past the family room and kitchen to the hallway on the other side. T.S. spotted them first.

  ‘Were we being too loud?’ T.S. asked, and gave Ren Qi a confused look.

  ‘This is my friend, Ren Qi,’ Jia Jia explained. ‘He arrived late last night and Grandpa told us that he could stay in my room.’

  ‘You saw Grandpa? He’s gone missing.’ T.S.’s nose was red and his eyes were moist.

  ‘We saw him outside, two or three hours ago. He hasn’t come back?’ Jia Jia asked.

  ‘It’s strange,’ T.S. said. ‘My mother woke up and she couldn’t hear a thing. That’s not normal, she thought – usually there are the dogs or the wind or the men snoring. It’s never so quiet. So she checked the house and that was when she found that Grandpa’s bed was empty. The kids were all there, asleep. But Grandpa was gone and nobody heard him leave. We’ve searched everywhere in the village.’

  T.S. put his hands on his waist and turned his head to look around the family room, as if Grandpa might suddenly appear again in a cloud of smoke. Ren Qi had left them briefly and was now returning with something clasped in his hand.

  ‘Look at this,’ he said to Jia Jia.

  He held out his palm and revealed a miniature wooden figure of the fish-man. It was about the size of a teacup. On the back, the number ‘9’ was carved.

  ‘There’s an entire shelf of them,’ he added.

  Jia Jia navigated past the family and into the bedroom, Ren Qi limping behind. Indeed, there was a collection on the windowsill nex
t to Grandpa’s bed, some carved from wood, others from stone. The faint gleam from a single light bulb cast the figures the colour of persimmon. In the shadows next to the collection was a stack of photos. The one on the top showed a little boy posing in a Mickey Mouse sweatshirt next to a donkey. It was taken at the entrance to the village.

  ‘Looks like me when I was young,’ Ren Qi commented. ‘Just a bit chubbier.’

  Jia Jia picked up the pile and began studying the photos.

  ‘Grandpa took these,’ T.S.’s mother said as she walked up behind Jia Jia. ‘He saved a traveller from a wolf once, and to thank him, the traveller gave him a camera. Ever since then, Grandpa’s photographed all kinds of people who visited this village. The camera is his little treasure. And he didn’t even take it with him.’

  T.S.’s brother entered the room, out of breath, and said something in Tibetan.

  ‘He couldn’t find Grandpa in the mountains,’ T.S.’s mother translated, shaking her head. ‘We’ll call the police. I can only hope that the wolves haven’t taken him.’ Her voice trembled a little.

  The photos came in all sizes and many had all kinds of stains on them. Jia Jia could tell that a handful of them had been taken decades ago, when the village was poorer, and so were the travellers. In the newer ones, most stood with their cars, while some of the more daring seemed to have been high-altitude mountain-biking. Jia Jia flipped through the endless enthusiastic smiles, passionate hugs and exhausted thumbs-up of the tourists, until the most ordinary photo took its turn at the top of the pile. In the frame was half of an army-green three-wheeled motorbike, piles of wet mud on a road, a blurry black dog, and a couple walking away from the camera. On the bottom-right corner was the date stamped in red: 19 06 87.

  Unlike the other photos, in which the subjects were all posing for the camera, this one looked like a mistake: a moment not extraordinary enough to be captured. Perhaps it was for that reason that Jia Jia felt attracted to it over the others. The woman was wearing a red cardigan and the man held a beige jacket in one of his hands; his other hand was holding the woman’s elbow to make sure that she would not fall.

  ‘I remember this couple.’ T.S.’s mother squinted her eyes at the photo. ‘The woman was pregnant. I remember that they were from Beijing too, or was it Tianjin? It was somewhere up north. They stayed for quite a long time, and became good friends with Grandpa.’

  T.S.’s mother gently lowered herself to the bed and told Jia Jia and Ren Qi to sit next to her. Since she had woken up in the middle of the night, she was not in her Tibetan robe and her hair had not yet been braided. It was tied instead in a loose ponytail. She wore blue tracksuit bottoms and a white sweater, but she still had her prayer beads wrapped around her wrist. The neighbours seemed to be returning to their homes and the room had quietened down. T.S. and his brother were gone as well; perhaps they were calling the police.

  T.S.’s mother picked up a fish-man figure.

  ‘You wanted to know about this creature?’ she asked. ‘When I was young, Grandpa used to tell me that it is the guide to a world where air is replaced by water and light is replaced by darkness. He called it the world of water. He said that it’s a world where there are no barriers. He was quite obsessed and told everybody about it, especially the few travellers who stopped in our village on their way to Lhasa. He told them about how he was trying to go to the world of water. Do you two want some buttermilk tea?’

  Jia Jia shook her head.

  A world with no barriers, Jia Jia repeated to herself.

  ‘I never got used to the taste of buttermilk tea. Even with a Tibetan wife,’ said Ren Qi.

  T.S.’s mother continued, her fingers running along her rice-coloured prayer beads.

  ‘This couple in the photograph were good people. Kind. Grandpa spent a lot of time with them. The woman taught him how to make these little sculptures. But after they left, Grandpa stopped speaking altogether. I don’t know what happened, but he stopped going on about the world of water. He kept making these little sculptures, you see. He even numbered them. The big one that you saw near the river, Grandpa made that too. It was the first one. But I know that even though he won’t mention it, he’s been trying to cross into that world all these years. I can tell, because he’s continued to plant those tulips of his.’

  ‘Tulips?’ Ren Qi asked.

  ‘We saw him planting them before we went to bed,’ Jia Jia said.

  ‘The tulips have never bloomed, that’s why you haven’t seen any,’ T.S.’s mother explained. ‘The old man is stubborn; he plants them every season. Even in the winter. According to Grandpa, the fish-like guide takes tulips in exchange for leading you to the world of water. Ever since Grandpa appeared in our village, he’s been planting tulips every season. Perhaps he’s gone to that world now. But I’ve checked, the flowers haven’t grown.’

  Silence reigned in the room. For a moment, the only sounds that could be heard were dogs barking outside, some near, some distant.

  ‘You think that old people have been as they are for ever,’ T.S.’s mother said. ‘Doing those things they do, carving these figures and planting tulips. In reality, it’s only been so many years. But you think they’ve been like that since the beginning of time.’

  The woman inhaled deeply, and lingered a moment before letting the air out. Hunched over with strands of hair tucked behind her ears, she gazed into the distance, like an office worker on her subway ride home. Then she gave a smile that disappeared as suddenly as it came to her, and stood up from the bed. Ren Qi and Jia Jia followed suit.

  ‘This all sounds like nonsense,’ T.S.’s mother admitted, as the three of them walked in the direction of the door. ‘But I’m glad I told you.’

  ‘Can I keep the photo?’ Jia Jia asked.

  ‘I’m sure Grandpa wouldn’t mind,’ the woman said before descending the stairs.

  15

  Back in her room, tenderly unfolding the photo in her hand, Jia Jia kneeled on the wooden floor and faced the window. The mountains were sleeping beasts piled on top of each other; by this hour, the valley was beginning to form the shadow of a feeding bowl for those beasts. But it seemed as though the day would never stir.

  ‘Wu Jia Jia,’ Ren Qi said. ‘Why do you think you’ve ended up here?’

  Jia Jia rubbed her icy feet with her hands.

  ‘I was there, in the world of water,’ she said.

  Ren Qi joined her on the floor with a loud thump.

  ‘So it exists?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ve been there, I think,’ Jia Jia told him. ‘I don’t know how.’

  Ren Qi crossed his legs. ‘Why are you still looking for the fish-man? If you’ve been to the world of water, you’ve seen him?’

  ‘I haven’t seen him there. I’ve only been inside the water. But every time, I’ve been afraid that I’d get stuck. It’s as if the water knows. It’d spit me out.’

  Ren Qi contemplated for a moment. A few times, he opened his mouth, wanting to say something, but decided against it and finally reached into his chest pocket for a cigarette.

  After a few impatient puffs, he said, ‘You know, when that woman was speaking, I couldn’t help but think that my wife must be there in that world.’

  Jia Jia took the cigarette from his fingers and smoked it.

  ‘Why would she be there?’ she asked.

  ‘She’s been gone for more than a month now.’

  He wiped his forehead with his hand. Then he took the photo from Jia Jia and studied it.

  ‘It’s definitely a lousy photo.’ He brushed it as if it were dusty, and handed it back.

  ‘You don’t know why your wife is missing, so you think she’s in the world of water. It’s because you don’t understand it. We explain things that we don’t understand by using other things we don’t understand.’

  ‘Wu Jia Jia, I don’t think anything is chance. You believe in fate?’

  Jia Jia did not respond.

  ‘I do,’ Ren Qi continued. ‘I think it
really must be fate that brought us here together, Wu Jia Jia. There must be a reason for me finding out about the world of water. I’m going to stay in this village, find the fish-man, plant tulips if I must, locate the world of water, and find my wife.’

  He beamed like a child who believes he has found his way home. His teeth were stained yellow and his eyes were black lacquer. Jia Jia could see his suffering. It was the kind of torment still unfamiliar to the person in pain, the kind that induced more hope than resignation, the kind that would scar more deeply. He was still so young.

  ‘All the uncertainty around your wife must be hard,’ Jia Jia said.

  ‘Pain is pain,’ Ren Qi said calmly. ‘There are various things that bring about pain, but in the end, we all feel it in the same way. These memories stick to you like the smell of tobacco on your fingers that won’t wash away with soap.’

  Silent for a few more seconds, Ren Qi said, ‘Tell me more about the world of water.’

  Jia Jia gave it some thought. It felt as though he was enquiring into something deeply private, as if he was asking her to take off her clothes and spread open her legs. For her to tell him what he wanted to hear, if she was even able to translate the experience into words, she would have to crack herself open like an egg and let the liquids spill out, leaving nothing for herself. But she could not refuse this man, she could not shut herself away this time. The moment she had found her hand wrapped in his as she swam in the cold, black water, her shell had already cracked. She gathered her words and began to speak.

  ‘All I can tell you is this,’ she said warily. ‘In the world of water, if that’s indeed where I’ve been, like I said there’s nobody there. In that world, you disintegrate. Your body, your emotions, your perceptions and your thoughts are all separated into different components, like pages of a book that’s been ripped apart. There is a fish there, a silver fish, but that’s it. Everything else is just pitch-black. There is no other human. You’re no longer human. So I can tell you that your wife is not there. Even if she is, you won’t see her. Not in the way you’re used to seeing her. She won’t be looking for you either. It’s a dreadfully empty place that is also overwhelmingly full. Do you understand what I’m getting at?’