by Zhang Yueran
The child was now passed from arm to arm, so everyone could wish him well. Only Chun Chi didn’t reach for him, unable to face that piercing light again. She was suffocating. Abandoning Tsong Tsong’s hand, she opened the window and heard a startled swarm of fireflies take flight. She decided to call him Xiao Xing. Her mind snapped shut on the decision. She would consult no one about this.
Xiao Xing was the name for both the stately swarms of fireflies that roamed the island in July, and the will-o-the-wisp seen rising from the ground on clear summer nights. His arrival was an astrological phenomenon. Chun Chi felt her long underwater journey coming to an end. Like a small animal, she climbed dripping onto the shore.
4
The Preacher was reluctant to let Chun Chi take Xiao Xing away with her. How would a blind woman take care of a baby? And her relationship with Tsong Tsong had not been good. What if she still bore a grudge, and the child suffered for it?
In the end, the issue was decided by Xiao Xing himself. When he cried, only Chun Chi could calm him down and soothe him to sleep. If she wasn’t there when he woke, he would start howling again. Food and rest seemed unimportant to this child; all he wanted was to be close to Chun Chi.
For her part, Chun Chi didn’t treat him especially well. When he vomited or soiled himself, she sometimes lost patience and shouted at him. He never seemed frightened, but watched in silence. Because she couldn’t see, feedings were haphazard affairs. If he moved his head, he ended up with a spoonful of rice gruel in an ear or up his nose. Even so, he never complained, but waited patiently, mouth open, for the next spoonful.
The Preacher could only sigh at perverse destiny. Perhaps having been imprinted by Chun Chi’s hand in the first seconds of his existence, the child would never be free of her, but spend his lifetime in her debt, following her in servitude. The Preacher shivered at the thought, but they truly did seem to share an inexplicable bond, and he could find no reason to make Chun Chi leave the child behind.
I had been on earth for less than a hundred days when Chun Chi and Zhong Qian brought me away, leaving behind the kind Preacher, chatty Miss Jian, and the high arches of the church. I was born under those arches. The Preacher washed me in Holy Water, but I am not a Believer. The Water came too late, and was too cold. My body was first warmed by Chun Chi, and it is in her that I trust.
She brought me to the ocean. I was enraptured by its vastness, and even more so by the great ships bobbing up and down on it. They seemed gentler than any animal, gazing lovingly at me. We stayed on shore that day. Chun Chi just wanted to show me the sea. Twenty years later, one of those ships took me across the water on a long voyage. As it departed, I thought I saw a young Chun Chi on the shore, waving goodbye.
I clung to Chun Chi’s bosom, watching the cheerfully-painted passenger boats, their cooking smells making me hungry. Chun Chi’s embrace kept me safe, I had nothing to be afraid of. Sea breeze tickled me. I was much happier as an infant than now. The fishermen on the docks of Lian Yan Island must have seen my wide smile many times.
5
The instant of Xiao Xing’s birth, Chun Chi saw a spray of light. Something moved inside her at that moment, and even her hatred seemed to evaporate. This child had come to her, she thought, and was destined to belong completely to her.
To start with, she doubted the wisdom of taking the boy with her. Whenever she was with him, the resentments of her past flashed vividly into her mind, unavoidable. As he grew older, day by day, would he come to resemble Camel, or Tsong Tsong?
Yet the child’s affection for her couldn’t be denied. He shunned the Preacher’s warm embrace, dutifully opening both arms to her instead. He needed her. How could he know that she was a penniless blind woman? Each time he rested his little face against her arm, her resistance crumbled a little.
After her daughter’s death, Chun Chi had locked herself away from life. Now Xiao Xing’s flickering flame brought a daub of light into her darkness. She was moved, but also full of doubt. Was he a test sent by the Lord to tempt her into surrendering her feelings, so she would walk further and further into the web, where another great fall awaited? She constantly reminded herself not to develop even a shred of feeling for Xiao Xing, treating him lightly, like trash, preparing for the Lord to take him away too.
Through all this, the boy sank roots into Chun Chi, like a seed containing a mysterious destiny. His life force was astonishing.
Not long after they left the Preacher’s house, Xiao Xing came down with the flu. Chun Chi refused to take him to a doctor. After her daughter’s death, she had come to see the lives of children as fragile, subject to the whims of destiny. If he was fated to die, no doctor could help him.
Zhong Qian, who had been quietly following them, urged Chun Chi to take the baby back to the Preacher, where he’d receive medical attention and the care of a nanny. Chun Chi insisted that the baby would stay with her, in the open. She clutched the weak child, as unmovable as if he were a puppet, not a living creature.
In the end, Zhong Qian snapped at her, “Just because you hate Tsong Tsong is no reason to make the child suffer. You promised you’d take care of him.”
“You promised me you’d take care of my child.”
“I did all I could.”
“But people are so weak. How can we fight destiny?”
Zhong Qian said nothing. What if Chun Chi really did take the baby’s life out of revenge?
Xiao Xing’s illness worsened. He wouldn’t eat, his body trembled and his head drooped. These symptoms were now familiar, and Chun Chi knew he didn’t have long to live. She abruptly decided to give him a happy memory, so that he wouldn’t die in too much pain. This was all she could do for him, her first gift to this baby, whose fate was so opposed to hers.
From her collection of shells, Chun Chi picked a small, coral-coloured spiral with gold lips. This one contained a sweet fragment of childhood happiness: A summer evening, in between rice fields and mountains. Piercing cries of frogs. The sky always so bright, like a full moon every night. Children playing by the pond. A burst of rain. They folded lily pads as hats and ran for shelter in a thick clump of bottle-reeds — but no one was really afraid of getting wet, and soon they were playing barefoot in the downpour.
He was one of them, running beneath the moon, night wind cool on wet skin, turning to see little faces like lily petals following him. Tiredness overcame him. He wanted to fall asleep running like this. In that instant life seemed to float high above him, like a rare and hidden jewel.
In a darkened room, Chun Chi cut the child’s nails and cleaned his fingers, warming them in her palm before lightly touching them to the shell. He didn’t understand at first, and kept scraping his nails on the surface, but Chun Chi’s pliable fingers patiently took him over and over the grooves. When her fingers sparked with the shell, Xiao Xing also felt those impulses, exquisite as dew, and suddenly he was caught, his illness arrested. Memory was a string guiding him to a brightly-coloured city.
Zhong Qian didn’t understand what Chun Chi was doing, bringing a sick child into the seashells. Did she want to make him like her, remote from this world? When he tried to stop her, she shouted like a maniac and drove him from the room.
This memory lasted Xiao Xing three days. When Chun Chi led him out, it was a clean new morning. She opened the windows, pushing aside the heaps of straw she’d piled before them. It had rained while they were gone, and water still dripped off tree branches. Xiao Xing lay motionless, swaddled in blankets. Chun Chi stroked his half-closed eyes, wondering if he was happy. She held her finger below his nose. (His nose was so like Camel’s.) He was hardly breathing. Unable to watch him die in front of her, she turned and walked away.
Chun Chi walked for hours along the coastline. She thought of Tsong Tsong on the point of death, giving her the child, so passionate, so coherent. She felt as if she had seen the baby’s face — the burst of light when he was born seemed to stamp his features and destiny onto her. Deep in her heart, sh
e thought: this child should never leave me.
She took the longest path back, returning only at dusk. As she crossed the threshold, Zhong Qian ran to take her hand. “He’s well. It’s a miracle.”
Chun Chi nodded, perfectly calm. She would show no joy, but walked straight back outside. Xiao Xing would live, as if in response to her secret wish. Her heart grew heavy again.
She hadn’t dreamt of Camel for a long time. Was he well? Would he have sensed his son’s suffering? But he’d fathered so many children, what could this one mean to him? Well, then, did she mean anything to him? Did he know she still hadn’t given up? She walked barefoot along a road she’d laid herself, made of broken shells, as if the bloodstained barbs beneath her feet would one day become a red carpet leading to his presence. He could hardly miss her, having so many wives and concubines. Would he miss Tsong Tsong? Did he know she had died? If he found out, would he be sad?
These questions came and went inside her, like the tide. When one arose in her mind, others piled up behind it, like crashing waves. The only way to prevent them was to stay detached from the world, from anything that might provoke an emotion.
6
Chun Chi’s life with a small child can hardly have been easy, but she consistently refused to accept Zhong Qian’s help. Lian Yan Island was so small, and now swarmed with memories of Tsong Tsong and Camel. Chun Chi decided she would have to leave, and find a new place in which to raise the child.
She would bring the baby back to China. Any recollection she might have had of her homeland was gone, and now she only had the memories of dead Chinese people from the sea. China seemed a distant dream to her, one she wanted to see for herself. Perhaps it would be easier for her and the child.
Tsong Tsong’s mother was from China, but Tsong Tsong had never visited. She and Chun Chi had planned to go together, on one of the great ships, following the shaky curve of the coastline, arriving in the winter, stepping off the gangplank into the biting north winds of winter. Perhaps goosedown snow would be falling. Work would have stopped, everyone safely at home, preparing to celebrate the New Year, when the God of Fortune would visit. In the topics, they would never witness such a cosy scene. Why would anyone in China leave their home for the savage South Seas?
They’d both been girls at the time, like ripe fruit high on a tree looking at the wide world below. The ocean was just a field of blue, it couldn’t really separate them from anywhere they wanted to go. Life was so long, there would be an endless parade of long dark nights ahead of them, a dimly lit corridor receding into infinity. But they were wrong. Our lives are like the sun, each day a little dimmer. Tsong Tsong’s sun burned too fiercely, and became extinguished too soon.
Only a few years after their girlish fantasies, both these maidens had become mothers. Two bright suns coming too close together, exploding in love and separation, and then tragedy. The wounded buried the dead, and their beautiful time together.
They were finally on the boat back to China, the same great ark that Tsong Tsong once sang on. This was not a coincidence, Chun Chi had long decided she would take this ship, and had waited by the Lian Yan docks for more than a month. Many of the song-girls had been on good terms with Tsong Tsong, and come to see her baptism. Chun Chi had met them there, and mourned Tsong Tsong’s death with them. Now they helped her — for this was one of the gaudier pleasure boats, and tickets were not available to just anyone. And so Chun Chi and the baby got on the grandest boat to ply the Indian Ocean, by coming on board with the song-prostitutes, pretending to be one of their number.
They told Chun Chi to take Tsong Tsong’s old berth. It seemed natural to them that Tsong Tsong’s son would take her bed for the sixty-odd nights of the journey. This was the closest Xiao Xing had come to his mother since birth. Even though many other people had since slept in this bed, Tsong Tsong’s scent still hung heavily over it. Xiao Xing dreamt of a beautiful woman floating towards him, plucking him from Chun Chi’s side. Waking, he burst into tears and buried his face in Chun Chi’s bosom.
He was crying for fear of being separated from Chun Chi, but also that this fear meant he was rejecting his real mother. Still, this was to be expected. Tsong Tsong had left too soon, too suddenly, and snapped the bond between them.
Xiao Xing was only two months old, and Chun Chi could hardly be expected to pay attention to his inchoate babbling. All she knew was he must have dreamt of his mother, to wake so distraught. She wondered if she had been remiss in her care of Xiao Xing for him to feel so uneasy in this bed, coming face to face with Tsong Tsong.
7
The ocean now seemed to own time. The dribble of the last two years was swept by the waves into a great mass, like hidden coral, not visible on the surface but creating unexpected collisions and disturbances. Yet the passengers never paused in the whirl of brightly-lit song and dance, happy and forgetful as infants. Did none of them have memories, or did they wear their memories as lightly as topical clothing, so it was not a burden? In the midst of all the hubbub, no one noticed the blind girl in a corner, lighting a sandalwood incense stick, trying to lay to rest the memories that clung to her.
Tsong Tsong permeated the last two years, as if they had walked through them together, hand in hand. And yet, when she added it up, they had only spent a few months together. Tsong Tsong had inserted herself deep into Chun Chi’s life. Had she successfully crammed herself into Camel’s life too? That was a question best left unconsidered. She tried to give it the most positive interpretation — that this was just an act of revenge, that surely nothing can have happened between her and Camel in such a short span of time — but these suppositions failed to reassure her. Faced with Tsong Tsong’s great exuberance, who could fail to be moved?
As the incense went out, trailing grey ash over Chun Chi’s hands, she lit another.
Now she couldn’t help thinking of Camel and Tsong Tsong. She knew both of them intimately, but could not imagine them together. Did they talk about her? And if they did, was it with laughter, or furrowed brows? She saw them sitting in the light of a candle, whispering about her, drawing closer as they spoke, and then clothes sliding off, pleasure. She tried to bury this scene, but it sprang upon her time after time, tickling long-dormant desires. Leaning against the mast, her body trembled helplessly.
She had nothing left now. Why wouldn’t they leave her alone? Instead they seemed determined to suck her body dry, delving into long-forgotten corners to ferret out traces of desire. Groping behind her, she found the sleeping boy child and clasped him to her chest. He yawned and then, sinner that he was, seemed overcome with joy to see her again, reaching out a little hand to pat her face. No matter what time of day or night, he was always ready to play with her. Chun Chi thrust the incense she was holding into Xiao Xing’s exposed chest, snapping it in two, a little cloud of ash rising. The baby was stunned for a long moment, before beginning to howl loudly.
Follow the spiral staircase all the way down. This buried kingdom isn’t hell. Keep going, until the sound of wind fills your ears and dust blinds your eyes and vines still your feet. Only then will the memory-keepers appear.
He’d never come across these creatures before working for the Spanish — white and thread-like, living in cacti. They dried the worms and pulverised the bodies; their insides were a bright colour they called “Persian Red.”
These worms were precious to the Spanish, who — it was said — had found them in one of their other colonies, and now brought them to the South Seas. The bright dye they produced would be sold all over the world.
He used to live on a rubber farm, until the Spanish took that. His father and brother were put to work in the mines — ostensibly to find gold, but all they were allowed to do was move sharp stones out of the way. He hated these grey stones, preferring to spend time with his worms in a large hut, simply-built but watertight with palm leaves. The cacti needed to grow in a dim, bone-dry location, and would only produce one crop of worms every five months. He harvested the
worms, drying them in the blazing sun and then grinding them to powder. The pulverised worms were boiled in water containing leaves and lemon juice, the exact shade of dye dependent on the proportions. Naturally sensitive to colour, he produced particularly eye-catching dye.
More rumours: that the dye would be used to make pictures on the ceilings of Spanish cathedrals, and to tint the silk skirts of fashionable French mademoiselles, and the tassels on the hats of English gentlemen. The Spanish had only ever planned to use this little island as a temporary outpost. When they left, they took him with them, because the dye he produced was simply too beautiful.
He was to spend a great deal of his life travelling on great ships, tending to his cacti and his white worms. Most unforgettably, they brought him to China. He felt close to the people there, perhaps because he had ancestors in common with them — although, unfortunately, he spoke not a word of their language. Working with the Chinese, showing them how to produce the vermilion dye, was the happiest time of his life. Many years later, when he’d forgotten most of the Chinese he’d learnt during this time, a few words stayed with him. He was taught them by a Chinese lady, who once dipped her fingers in his dye and lightly drew them across her cheeks, then bent to look at the untiring worms who’d produced this colour. She named them “rouge worms.”
8
Out of fondness for Tsong Tsong, the song-girls took especially good care of Chun Chi. She had turned her nose up at them in the refugee shelter, thinking them no better than they should be; now she realised how kind-hearted they were. Living most of their lives on the vast sea singing for their suppers, the unpredictability of existence meant they made the most of every opportunity for fun. They were frank and open, never hiding joy nor anger, as expansive as a topsail full of wind.