My mother never spoke much when she was alive. She’d always been passive, disengaged from the world around her. On the day she shoved me out the door and commanded me to run, when she turned, alone, unarmed, to fight the Demoness, giving her life to buy me a few moments, she became my hero, right before she died. Now I needed to be her hero.
Mother’s body was scored with welts, lacerated all over. What kind of monster had done this to her? Up till this point, guilt had driven me, and responsibility, and hope; but on that boat, I saw the bruises and cuts covering my mother’s body, and I felt rage engulf me.
She gazed at me, stroked my hair, and started to speak, but stuttered into silence.
What was there to say, after all? In the many books of etiquette for women, none addressed the formalities of greeting the living soul of a daughter who sailed across Hell’s seas to rescue you.
At last she spoke. I would never forget what she said to me then. It was an absurd thing to say, coming from the blood-soaked, denuded, traumatized soul, and yet it was beautiful.
“Li-lin,” she said at last, “have you eaten?”
Even dead, even after six weeks of torture, my mother wanted to be sure her child would not go hungry. She wanted to make sure my belly was full. I could not imagine a more pure and perfect expression of love than that short sentence, showing her commitment to nourish me.
Something climbed onto the deck of the ship. It looked like a very tall man, except he had a lion’s face, leathery red skin, and the antlers of a stag. Luosha demons came in many shapes and sizes. In his hand he held an iron rod spiked with sharp, jagged wolf-teeth.
“The woman belongs to me,” the demon said, “and now you are mine as well, female child.” His voice was made of hidden knives, crusted with the dried blood of his victims. Smoke the color of old bruises seethed from his leonine nostrils. My mother cowered, shivering, traumatized, and nothing but me stood between her and the demon. Barefoot and unarmed, I had no idea how I could withstand him. I was terrified, powerless, but a determination had grown solid within me: I was not going to let anything harm my mother.
When she was murdered, I’d been fleeing; afterwards I swore I would never hide from monsters. Never again.
“You did this to her?” I said.
“I will do worse to her, and to you, female child,” the luosha demon said. Black smoke snarled from the corners of his bestial mouth, and he raised his wolf-teeth rod and took a step toward me, cocky, menacing, and cruel.
My mother started to beg. “Let my daughter go,” she said, trying to crawl in between me and the demon. Trying once again to protect me from the monsters.
I would not have it. I stepped in front of her and faced the demon.
What would my father do? What would he say? I tried to wear my father’s strength, declaring, “I will kill you for my mother.”
My hands were smaller than apricots, but I curled them into fists, bared my teeth, and roared as only a child can roar. The demon came closer, closer, murderously close, now it was just a step away from me; it reeked like damp fires and corruption, and it raised its spiked iron rod to crush me.
Then the world exploded.
The walls, twenty miles high, buckled, sending a blast of waves across the sea of blood. My ship nearly capsized, and the demon and I were both thrown off our feet. I tried to stand back up, but before I could, the wall clanged again, stirring the sea into chaos. Something rolled and clattered near me on the deck. The demon’s iron rod. I shoved it overboard, letting the red sea swallow the wicked thing. Then I crawled to my mother to protect her from the churning of the bloody waves, and suddenly Hell’s sky tore open, and one of its walls split apart. Towering over the stars above the Blood Pond, titanic, taller than mountains, immense as some primordial god, my father stood, battering Hell’s walls with a staff that reached to the heavens.
He pounded the iron walls, each blow sending reverberations across the sea and the sky. Hours seemed to pass, and I felt puny, cradling my mother’s soul while my father, bigger than giants, a legend made flesh, hammered his staff against the iron walls around us, denting them, bending them, again and again and again. One mighty blow at a time, my father demolished the iron walls of the Blood Pond, and then he reached out his tremendous hands and gently lifted my ship out of the sea of blood.
When I opened my eyes, what I saw was no Hell, and my mother was gone.
In the altar room there was a table, with four walls around it, walls made of paper and bamboo. All the paper was torn now, and the bamboo in splinters. The ship my mother and I sailed across the Blood Pond was merely paper once again.
Sweat streamed down my father’s face; his skin was flushed from the exertion of pounding the bamboo. “I hope it worked,” he said.
“You hope, Father? Didn’t you see?”
A series of expressions washed over his face. First, surprise; then, momentarily, pity; and then his features hardened. “You thought you’d see your mother? We do not get to see the dead again,” he said. “That is just the way things are. It’s the nature of rituals; the living perform them for the dead. We recite liturgy, we perform sacred actions, and we send messages out to the universe, hoping we are heard, by the gods, by the wind and water. What we did here in this room echoes in worlds we cannot see.”
“Father, you never left this room?”
“Don’t be foolish. I stood here chanting, and then I beat the bamboo walls. Daughter, you know this; you were right here, dragging that paper boat around.”
“And,” I said slowly, “if it worked, what will happen to Mother’s soul now?”
“She will divide in two,” he said. “Her appearance and her activities will become a kind of phantom, and she will reside with my father’s family in the land of the Yellow Springs, where we can burn paper offerings for her. But the part that is truly her will cross a silver bridge and meet with the goddess Granny Meng. Granny Meng will serve your mother a bowl of broth. Drinking it, she will forget everything, and move forward to be reborn.”
I stood quiet, thinking. Father indicated the shattered bamboo poles and shredded papers. Responding to his unspoken command, I started to clean up after the ritual.
Gathering the debris of torn paper and the splinters of dried bamboo, I felt amazed. It had been no dream, I knew this; my father’s rite had become real for me in a way he did not experience. He never saw any of it, not the sea of blood and its iron walls, not Mother, and not the demon who tortured her. Father was always so powerful, and yet now I realized he was always blind to half the world. I had seen things he never would.
At some level, even then, I understood that I was not supposed to see the world as I saw it, afflicted by a haunt of the unearthly and weird. Aware of the shame of being different, I would not tell my father that my voyage to the afterlife had been more than a merely symbolic quest.
While I tidied the mess, my father handled the ritual implements, disassembling his altar according to formulas that kept sacred objects sacred.
In the silence of our labors, a part of me wept for joy, because we had done it. My mother was free now, free to move on to her next life. We had saved her.
And I wept because moving on to her next life meant I could never get her back. Somehow I’d expected the rite to heal the brokenness of everything, restore my world to what it should have been.
But no one, not even Father, had that kind of power.
I performed my chore in the same silence that he performed his holy duties, yet vast gulfs divided us; I could never hope to understand the man. He was alone in the world, with no family but me. He reached out a hand for a piece of cloth, which he used to wipe the tears streaming down his cheeks. I stopped what I was doing and looked at him, just really looked. How hard he’d seemed these past six weeks, as he steeled himself for the ritual to save my mother, and now that it was complete, when he thought no one was looking, my father wept in secret.
He noticed me watching him, forced himself to
regain his composure, and said, “Smoke, from the incense. Smoke brought tears to my eyes.” Saying nothing, I turned and faced away from my father to give him the privacy to grieve.
The man had lost everything and even now he did not want to burden me with his grief. The profundity of his actions made me feel shattered. I did not know whether I adored him more for saving my mother, for mourning her, or for trying to conceal his pain in order to protect me.
My father kept everyone safe, he looked after the living and the dead, but he did it all in solitude. He might never realize it, but his solitude had come to an end, because I had made up my mind: for the rest of my life, whenever my father needed help, I would help him; whenever he was vulnerable, I would protect him; whenever he was hurt, I would take care of him.
The solemn oath locked into my bones. I knew it was silly, the frivolous fancy of a little girl. Who was I, thinking I could protect such a great man? Mere hours ago he towered sky-high, swinging his staff to batter down Hell’s immense iron walls, rescuing me from monsters I could not hope to survive without him.
Behind my back I sensed his lonely presence, protecting me from his sorrow as if it were merely a demon in his mighty hands.
How could I find words to tell him of my devotion and my awe? Even if I could find the words, saying them would only embarrass him.
What would be the right thing to say? After a long time pondering, I eventually spoke up, asking a question even though I already knew the answer. “Father, have you eaten?”
My father and I embarked for the New World, the Golden Mountain, land of opportunities. Aboard a metal ship, powered by steam as strong as hundreds of galloping horses, we crowded like clams among our countrymen. They were crossing the sea in search of work, and payment. Hope drove them, each man committed to years of labor and the riches they planned to earn for their families back home.
We surged over the Pacific but remained belowdeck. In the dim light and moist, mildewy air of the ship’s metal hold, the men told stories to pass the time across the sea. When my father’s turn came, he told the ancient tale of the Great Yu, son of Kun the Betrayer. Yu, the limping, mysterious shaman-king from primordial times who slew the Beast with Nine Heads.
“Yu the Great,” my father said, “beat back the floods. He restored order; he tamed the world’s primordial chaos into mapped terrain. He made the world into what it once was, and should be again.”
The world as it once was, and as it should be. His words made me think of the world I had lost. The world once was a place where I had a mother, and it should be again.
A man asked, “What powers did the Great Yu have?”
“Let me share a secret with you all, a truth only known to the wisest men,” my father said, enjoying his audience. “Most of the books and tales about the Great Yu contain lengthy lists of the shaman-king’s powers. People say he knew the speech of dragons; he could read the future in a turtle’s shell; he ripped the beating heart out of the king of the giants and transformed his corpse into a waterfall.
“But there is a secret known only to a handful of people in all the world,” my father said, his tone confidential, nearly a whisper, and the men in that hold crowded close to listen. “All the tales listing his powers are false. The truth is, the Great Yu only ever had one power. For all his grandeur, for all his might, Yu the Great only had one single power.”
He paused, a master storyteller, pretending to be thirsty while he forced his audience to wait. He drank water in small sips, a contemplative look on his face, while we all hung on his words. At last one of the men said, “What was that power?”
“That,” he said, tantalizing us all, “is a secret that cannot be shared with the uninitiated.” Groans went up through the metal cell. But he went on, “Perhaps if you live a meaningful life, or study the Dao, you will one day understand the mystery.”
Over the next few days, I clung to him, hoping he’d reveal more of the secret of the Great Yu. What power was it that could make the world into what it used to be? If I could solve his riddle, unlock the root of Yu’s power, would I be able to bring back the world where my mother was still alive? A world where the village children still studied and played, and a large group of laughing cousins gathered at the supper table every night to celebrate being alive.
Occasionally, other men from the hold would approach him to hazard a guess. “Was it the power to command nature?”
“No,” my father would say. “Meditate, perform internal alchemy, cultivate your positive energies, and maybe someday you will reach an understanding.”
We disembarked onto a new land. The world teemed with modern wonders. Carriages clambered down the street on moving cables, bridges retracted, a waterworks pumped pressured water to hydrants at street corners, and telegraph wires sent coded messages across the continent in an instant. It felt as if we had entered the future, a dazzling land of invention and discovery.
Yet no one leaves their ghosts behind. Where we went, our demons followed. If the spirit of an ancient fox flew on the wind, people sought my father’s protection. If a ghost maiden flowed like a whisper through the night in her white funereal gown, my father would find a man for her to marry; he performed ghost weddings, so the restless dead would have families, and, in time, have the opportunity to become Ancestors.
San Francisco’s laws mandated that I must attend a city school. The instructors taught me many things. They taught me English, and arithmetic, and their lord’s prayer. They taught a little science; I learned that the moon was a satellite, locked forever in an orbit around the earth, the small circling the big; and yet the moon’s rise and fall pulled the earth’s seas after it, in a daily rhythm of longing.
I already knew the word zhongli, the attraction between celestial bodies. The Americans had their own name for it: “gravity.” That word had another meaning, because gravity is seriousness. I loved that image, objects drawing closer because of how seriously they took each other. Growing up I was always the moon orbiting my father’s planet, eclipsed by him and in his shadow.
Father tried to cure me of the way I saw the world, my macabre and deathly visions, the twisting of my soul that afflicted me with freakish sights that were only supposed to be visible to the newborn, the dying, and the mad, but the yin nature of my eyesight was a stubborn flaw, and rather than allow him to feel he’d failed me, I spent years pretending to be cured.
My father took an apprentice, the tallest young man in Chinatown. His explosive leaps, seeming to defy gravity, earned him a nickname: “Rocket.” I loved him; he loved me and married me. Living together in a tiny room that smelled like laundry detergent, we ate dinner with my father every night. Those were happy years, but Rocket died. His death hollowed me out, left me adrift, so I moved back in with my father. Once again I returned to the great man’s orbit.
Gravity; seriousness. My father always kept me at a distance; he never took me seriously until my twenty-third year, when, to save his life, I crossed lines he considered sacred. My transgressions were so serious that he disowned me.
In the next few months, though we only lived a few blocks apart, we seldom caught sight of each other. The man could step across the stars but he never took a step toward me, and I took no step at all. Father’s wishes, demands, fears, and hopes were snarled with my own in ways I’d never understand. I probably took up less of his thoughts than he did mine, but still we existed in relationship to each other, my moon revolving around his earth.
Perhaps my father’s tragedy was no different from my husband’s: both were great men in a time and place that had no room for heroes. My husband’s death broke me, but my father’s fate was also painful to observe: his home in ashes, he now lived far from his native country in a land full of unfamiliar language, weird food, and foreign music, where his only family was a daughter too monstrous to acknowledge and the days of his greatness stretched out behind him like the ragged shadow of a man walking toward the sunset.
If I was th
e moon and he the earth, then our sun was the past. We circled, circled around it, as we were driven forward from one day to the next by the seriousness of our history.
ONE
Chinatown, San Francisco, 1899
Standing alone in the deadhouse, I spoke the names of the dead. Their names were written on small wooden tablets hung from a board called the Hall of Ancestors, and I read their names now, and their parents’ names, and their grandparents’, in a daily ritual of remembrance.
It was important to acknowledge them, to let them know they were still respected, still revered, still venerated—to let them know that we the living remained forever grateful for what the dead gave us. This was my job, and I would do my best, even though I worked for the gangsters of the Xie Liang tong.
On this side of town, people paid the Xie Liang for protection. This was a racket, one hand offering friendship while the other concealed a knife, but it was also something more. The people who paid the tong’s extortionate fee could get injuries treated at the tong’s infirmary; they had access to a translator, an attorney, a telegraph machine and a man who could operate it. For funerals, exorcisms, and ritual offerings to the dead, the tong employed a reasonably competent Daoist priestess, who sometimes functioned as the tong leader’s bodyguard.
I did not choose to work for the tong, I did not participate in their community, and I held myself apart from them. But this? These moments spent offering gratitude to the Ancestors, these daily acts of reverence when I engaged with those who came before me, this was something I loved, was good at, and took pride in.
The door opened, and the sound of a careful footstep followed slowly by another made me glance over. Coming through the door was Mr. Pu, the white-bearded bookkeeper of the Xie Liang tong. His tread might have been tentative but his elderly body housed a fierce intelligence. Mr. Pu’s skill with numbers allowed many businesses to prosper, on and off the books, and he carried himself with the casual arrogance of someone whose extraordinary competence made him valued everywhere. Yet despite that arrogance, he had a warm, self-deprecating wit.
The Girl with No Face Page 2
