Dissolution.
Nothing had prepared her to imagine this place.
How was she to meet this gargantuan land with her pre-broken heart, shattered by absences, her soul resculpted by a stranger’s hands? Ayaana hurried down a quieter alley, escaping the thick weekend crowd and the layers of novel scents, smells, faces, sounds, and whispers. Every way she turned, someone was watching her. Now she shrank, as if to become invisible. Futile: she was taller than most of the crowd. There were some tourists, too—Westerners, with the look of the perennially surprised. Her eyes scanned above heads as if self-programmed, scanning for images and any likeness of the familiar. She was mute in her hunt. When she looked at the signs above shops and the street signs, it was as if she were blind, and for the first time in her existence, she became conscious of the shade of her skin. All the phrases she had acquired on board the ship had scrambled; she walked with a dictionary even as the pictograms she had memorized metamorphosed into a single silent creature that ate even her speaking voice.
Perhaps that did not matter in this land drenched with noise, noise, and noise. The main dialect here was Minnan, not Mandarin. She crossed a wide street, looking left and right, expecting a wild car to rush at her and toss her off. But the cars stopped, obeying rules. This, too—this sight of rushing life coming to an obedient halt to let a person cross their street—this shocked her, and she reacted by sitting on a bus bench and thinking. An old woman wrapped in a sky-blue shawl sat down next to Ayaana and started to talk to her. She reached out and rubbed Ayaana’s hair, then, immediately, pointed upward, her hands flapping. When Ayaana looked up, she saw two small birds with yellow-gold plumage gliding; one had its beak pointed downward, looking for something specific. The woman grinned at Ayaana, and said something in a dialect Ayaana was only just getting familiar with. The woman was ancient, and her eyes shone, and she rubbed at Ayaana’s skin as if the color might bleed, chatting all the while. Ayaana leaned toward her speech, the cadences, looking for reassurance. Birds twittered. A reticulated bus appeared. The elder slowly got up and hobbled on board, still talking to Ayaana and gesturing.
Ayaana watched the bus leave. She glanced upward to orient herself, using the sky-scraping red-tiled roof of the university. Losing her voice—what was her language now? She walked until she stood outside the library at the Nanputuo Temple. And it was as if the air in her existence were squashed out of her and she had been cast adrift on a nameless, formless sea. Ayaana turned and fled. She tore through the streets, down the side roads, past the boulevards, and into the storied structure that was the student hostel, and into the elevator, and stairs that led to a numbered door—454—that opened into a small room, at present her sanctuary, before her hosts at last showed up with a plan and program for the rest of her life.
* * *
The seduction of places, their iridescent layers. Ayaana listened to the garbled Baidu Map instructions as she faked ease and meandered past Xiamen’s rushing citizens. Inundated by bodies, discovering that a human could be alone in a crowd. She stumbled into and became negative space. The grandeur of this nation’s dreams, its seething force, its giant machines—nothing had prepared her for the capacity of anything to imagine planning for and moving a billion people from one end of an infinite realm to another. Citizens of many shapes and colors managed to gawk at her mid-rush. She flinched when someone trod on her toes. Baidu Maps eventually led her to a massive tech-goods shop where she would buy a new phone.
* * *
Later, Ayaana phoned home. She heard her mother’s “Naam.”
“Shikamoo,” Ayaana started, formal and shy.
“Marahaba, mwanangu.” Her mother laughed out loud. “What now, child?” Munira could not wait. “How is it? Tell me.”
Ayaana only laughed. “It is big,” she said. “Everything is big. So many people.”
“You are happy, yes?”
A simple question, yet it disassembled Ayaana. Shadows within. Motionlessness before she switched the conversation: “How is my father?” Then an old piercing longing returned, as if a knife were lodged under her rib: her wait for an absent father who had not ever returned to look. “Muhidin,” she clarified, for herself.
“Who knows?” Munira sounded indifferent and annoyed. “How are our people there?”
Ayaana’s laugh was flat. But she started to regale her mother with the habits of her hosts. She suddenly needed to sustain the myth and mystery of other worlds for her mother. “Eh! They have buildings here that reach to and cover the sun.”
“Mashallah!” A pause. “You look like them?”
No. “In some ways.”
They talked some more. Ayaana recorded and stored her mother’s voice in her memory, in her heart—its timbre. This was her map home. She listened with tears running down her face.
Munira said, “Kenya ni Kosi.”—Kenya is a goshawk. “Halei kuku wa wana.” It does not nurture the hen’s chicks. “Nothing here…Marines, al-Shabaab…Now some are here drilling for oil.” She scoffed. “They have chased our people away like goats. From their homes.” Desperate-toned. “Hekima, salama.” Wisdom is safety. “Find a fresh path, lulu.”
“Yes,” replied Ayaana.
“Try,” Munira insisted.
They spoke until Ayaana’s phone credit ran out. And then she sat, still holding the phone to her ear, listening to its nothing as if it were the wail of a shell dreaming of a different ocean.
* * *
Ayaana had to learn how to cycle. Every day there were Mandarin lessons to go to, and at night, she attached herself to earphones attached to a disk loaded with Mandarin phrases and their visual histories; she was downloading this into her dreams, where images were the language. The accompanying dictionary rested beneath her pillow, her hand in contact with it. Teacher Ruolan had seeded the ground well. Ruxiang suisu—Belong—she had insisted, as had everybody else. Language was the password, Ayaana imagined. Calligraphy—but it was the Basmallah she etched over and over again.
* * *
Ayaana retrieved the card Delaksha had told Nioreg to give her. She needed to understand how to heal a seeping heart. Mostly, she wanted to tell Delaksha that on the ship something had happened, and it had caused her to misplace herself. She dialed the number. The phone rang and rang. Nobody took her call. Nobody ever did in her early days in Xiamen. She tried every day. Much later, when she tried the number again, a foreign female’s voice informed her, in the inflection of similar voices elsewhere, that the subscriber could not be reached.
* * *
Ayaana hovered outside the Xiamen Ferry Terminal, trying to peer at Gulangyu Island, also known as Piano Island, across the pale green water, past fifteen white boats tethered to the land. A place of artists, of musicians. She had thought she might give herself a break from falling as she learned to cycle. She needed to escape from the invasion of pictograms in her dreams. She wanted to watch people. She wanted to look back without averting her eyes. She wanted to extend her hosts the same courtesy of curiosity they extended to her. She needed the sense of human eyes gazing back at her.
* * *
In between language and Chinese-heritage classes, Ayaana did her “duty to history.” She knew her language skills had improved when she realized she could follow a whispered debate between two professors who were arguing whether to classify her as laowai—old foreigner—or merely heiren—black person. In public she was “the Descendant” with the right kind of eyes. Her linguistic progress, though slow, was acknowledged, and her opinions of China and being Chinese were sought. On the few occasions when Ayaana spoke—swathed in Chinese dress, in a voice to which she was still a stranger—she spoke basic Putonghua.
She could now make a joke in basic Mandarin, and, on cue, a hall-full of five hundred people laughed, clapped, and beamed at her, and she felt temporarily lit up from within. The next time she spoke to audiences, it was near Taicang Port,
fifty kilometers northwest of Shanghai, where Admiral Zheng He had embarked on his journeys into worlds that included her own. Ayaana used words she had carefully prepared and rehearsed. She referred to common sailor ancestors, to Tang and Ming dynasty ceramics, to distinctive crescent tombs. She spoke of a child stumbling home one night by the light of the moon and meeting an old man, her Yue Xia, the matchmaker who created connections between strangers. She said that she and other islanders called him Mzee Kitwana Kipifit. Her audience laughed. Ayaana added that fate had betrothed her small island to an immense nation. The audience applauded. They especially applauded Mzee Kitwana Kipifit, the man who had sacrificed his life to offer companionship to the ghosts of lost sailors. Later, Ayaana traveled inland, where many of the tens of thousands of Ming-dynasty sailors came from, places with names she promptly forgot. She watched a likely relation—there had been a DNA match of sorts, an uncle, presumably—hack and spit a gob of phlegm. It struck the earth. She stood with many possible relatives. They shared one another’s perplexity. Four putative aunties touched her hair and rubbed her skin. With time and distance from official eyes, something meaningful could have evolved. Duty to history, she reminded herself, and to our nations, as she waited to be told what to do and where to go next.
“Ni shi zhongguoren”—You are Chinese.
Ayaana so badly wanted to feel it.
But the more she spoke, the more Pate pervaded her dreams, until she could no longer speak of Pate without weeping.
* * *
—
She was surrounded by new acquaintances. She offered them portions of her heart. She imagined she might belong. “Now you are Chinese,” they said. And she imagined they were right. Then, four weeks later, she was invited by a classmate to a tea party to find thirty people waiting for her with cameras. Flashes of light, the forced selfies, the rubbed skin—made her recognize the mere novelty that she was, something to display to family and neighbors. This realization was like news of a death. It formed a new crack in a much-fragmenting heart.
Game face.
Ayaana’s public smiles started to fray. The difficulties only increased when she went to Nanjing Province to visit Admiral Zheng He’s cenotaph. The nothingness of the cenotaph was as a confusing blow. Not even a stopover at the stark new museum dedicated to his honor could assuage her sense of drifting.
Thinking of the admiral: “Where did he go?” she asked her hosts.
It was assumed that her question was rhetorical.
* * *
When Ayaana returned to her hostel room, she would sleep and pray that the dawn would postpone its arrival. Drifting. Drifting in a place where industrial fumes and towering structures choked off the sun. How could she explain to her people in Kenya that there were places in the world where humans purchased fresh air, packaged it, and sold it in cans? She slept, restless, and had the first of her dreams in Mandarin.
“What does Rabi’a al-Adawiyya say?” That is what Muhidin asked her when she whispered to him over the phone, and only him, about her discontent.
Rabi’a would have said, “Listen.”
* * *
—
Ayaana leaned over, the better to hear the question from the audience: “Will the bones of our ancestors on your island be returned to China?” Ayaana said, “No, they belong to Pate now.” After that, no further questions were permitted. Ayaana was instructed to say, in future, “Everything in time.” Two days later, a question from a different audience: “What does China mean for you?” Ayaana answered, “Everything in time.”
Her China? It was frozen within a Zao Wou-Ki print, spoken in the tenor of a ship captain whose hands her skin knew. A smile. Self-mockery. Learning the art of concealment. To her mother she spoke of the colors, sounds, and senses of Xiamen as if she were Xiamen’s tourism ambassador. No shadows. When Munira asked, “How is school?” Ayaana trained herself to say, “Fine.”
She cut back on her nonofficial outings. Her circle of acquaintances diminished. It was made up of Chen Sheng, also called Shalom—who was obsessed with the dead poet Hai Zi, and who practiced her English on Ayaana—and Sung-Hi, who was South Korean. These became Ayaana’s mall-going, clothes-shopping, Korean-pop-music-listening, park-walking, study-sharing friends. They went into one another’s rooms to boil water for tea and biscuits. The two other girls hoped that their destinies and future husbands lived in North America, where they would go to after Xiamen. Ayaana wondered what she belonged to, and then slipped into bookshops to binge-read. To improve her language knowledge, she bought several children’s beginner stories—folktales with pictures. Having done that, she rewarded herself by going to the English-language shelf. She noticed a title, The Book of Chameleons, and picked it up, as her new friends tried to hurry her up.
* * *
—
As part of the Descendant’s tour, her hosts had taken her to Xi’an, in Shaanxi Province, the point zero of the Silk Road, which was woven into the history of Ayaana’s seas. Amid the songs of Islam, of prayers in mosques and muezzin utterances, when she glimpsed Islamic themes on prayer rugs for sale, she broke down for no reason. She ached for her mother so fiercely that she bent over. In the public event titled “Descendant of the Seventh Voyage,” Ayaana counted headscarves on the heads of women, the range of shades and shapes of faces; the young were dressed exactly as she was, jeans and T-shirts, and when the food was placed before her, there was no pork on the menu. She was served a large bowl of beef-noodle soup. She swallowed her food unafraid.
* * *
—
Ayaana sometimes escaped her responsibilities by seeking out and hopping onto fast trains to experience movement and live out the illusion of traveling miles of earth in the shortest of times. She had been given a generous travel stipend. She would travel one way to find giant cities raised by human will alone. She traveled into and through the frenzy—of movement, of people, of growth and destruction, of starting again and again. She traveled to escape, to rest. When she went to Beijing, a fog entered her body and clamped down her throat. She choked. But she lingered, whirled by the vortex, the flurry, a city of the world, for all the world. She witnessed the trading, entertaining, performing, choosing, erupting, becoming; noise, colors, crowds, scents. Someone hawked phlegm, which spattered her shoes. No space or time to stop and exclaim. Ceaseless movement. Everything was on sale and seemingly for sale. There was nothing she could not buy if she wanted. She was losing breath. She took the slower train back to Shanghai, and then Xiamen. That way she could sleep on board and imagine she was on a ship. She returned to Siming the next day. At night, as stars tried to peer down from clouded skies, a confusion of yearnings made her wonder to what she belonged? In Guangzhou, which she later visited, a West African colony had taken root. There were so many who looked as she did, in-between children, so she was the one who searched out eyes with more than curiosity. Still, after nine months of performing “the Descendant,” Ayaana began to dream she was hiding inside Muhidin’s Bombay cupboard, and Muhidin was outside, staving off the assaults of phantoms. In the daylight, when she surfaced, she spluttered as if from a drowning.
Mtumi wa kunga haambiwi maana.
The carrier of a secret is not told its meaning.
[ 59 ]
A gibbous moon rose high in the northern skies like a veiled beacon, and shrouded the humidity of Siming District with pale light on a Tuesday evening in early February. Ayaana looked out of her fourteenth-floor hostel window at the remains of the Spring Festival, Chun Jie, the ghost of red lanterns strung across the streets, remembering overeating, looking at the car lights from the traffic below. High tide was a kilometer away, and boats on the bay bobbed. Haicang Bridge was like a skeletal scepter haunting the waters. Hokkien-speaking voices below—it was as if all the population of the Siming District had wandered out to exclaim at the night. Upstairs, Ayaana blew her congested nose and coughed. The da
ys had been exceptionally cold. Strident screeches from outside blended with muffled scramblings from within the corridors of her hostel. Her flu headache throbbed. Now she was gasping for silence. She held her breath. She looked at the people below as if they were fish and she a diving bird. Stillness. Feelings and colors floated past a breathless place of her own making. She opened her mouth and gulped down air, letting in the noise again.
Through half-shut eyes, she traced the outline of the midnight moon, grasping at memory, unsettled by its changeability, how it deconstructed, like the egg she had tasted a month ago, which was served as blue foam and tasted of salted fish. “Egg,” she was told, and had to trust the notion. Now. Disjointed life-images more and more interwoven with the Pate she had thought she had relinquished. Xiamen’s potent history had engulfed her and then tossed her into its accents, colors, streets, shops, music, water parks, the botanical garden, shops, puppet shows, food, shops, voices, the architecture of a trading people, a conquered people, a people cohabiting with the cultures the sea brought to them. She had wanted to know, to become more of herself.
The Dragonfly Sea Page 29
