by May-lee Chai
Lincoln put together an album for me. “In Remembrance,” it said in gold script across the red cover. Inside it was filled with pictures of Mom and Uncle Lincoln together, dressed up for concerts, Lincoln in black tie, Mom in slinky dresses that sparkled. She’d never dressed up like that with Dad. Lincoln stood up very straight, so that he’d appear taller, and Mom posed with a hand on her hip, one knee bent, another behind her head, smiling. She looked like a movie star. I had never seen my mother look happier.
“He was a perfect gentleman,” Mom had said once. The perfect date for a chaste Catholic girl.
AFTER THE funeral, Dad was too upset to talk, and Lewis and his wife were trying to comfort him. I sat in a lorazepam-induced haze at the table in the basement of St. Anne. The church ladies were clearing up the lunch.
Uncle Lincoln sidled up to me, the album in hand. “You know, Lu-ying, we Chinese have the Day of the Dead, too. More than one. It’s going to be up to you to remember this. Don’t let your father forget.”
Then he told me about Qing Ming, Clear Brightness, for sweeping the tombs and leaving food on graves in remembrance of dead family members, and Gui Jie, Ghost Festival, for burning incense and fake money for ghosts to spend in the afterlife. He’d written these things down for me on a sheet of lined paper.
“Your mother was Catholic, and your father will remember the Catholic things, but I’m telling you, so you’ll remember the Chinese ones, too.”
Sometimes it irritated me how forgiving Lincoln was, how much he cared about the things Mom cared about, how unquestioning his loyalty was. “Mom wasn’t Chinese,” I said dully.
“That’s not true. She was part of the family,” Lincoln said. “She was always more interested in keeping the traditions than the rest of us. Ye-ye and Nai-nai appreciated that about your mother.”
Then he held up the album he’d put together.
“Don’t forget,” he said. “Be sure to pick a good photo and put it on an altar. Light a candle. Put a bowl of fruit, fresh fruit, so you have to change it. Don’t get the plastic kind.”
I took the album from him, pried it from his fingers, and Lincoln finally unclenched, sitting down heavily in a folding chair next to mine. He sat as though his bones were melting into the metal.
My mother had been correct about one thing. Uncle Lincoln had loved her. Not in the way she could understand, nor in the way that she had wanted, but this was love, too. And in her own way, Mom had loved Lincoln.
I looked across the room at my father, but he was absorbed in the antics of my newborn niece, the first child of Lewis and his wife, Julie. Waves of bitterness and anger and jealousy swept over my body.
After all those fights with Mom growing up, the way she used her church as a cudgel, I found I still wanted to hurt her. I wanted to wound even her ghost. What had kept me from partnering up, not with Luce, there were other issues, but perhaps with Pei, if not my mother’s many contradictory and onerous rules for love?
I took a deep breath and tried to release it slowly.
It was still easier for me to blame my mother than to consider my own messiness. If I were honest, I’d admit that she had been as confused as anyone. And I was not good at recognizing love and acceptance even when it sat at my table.
When I had calmed, I put my hand on Uncle Lincoln’s back. I could feel his heart beating through his bones and flesh and dark, wool suit jacket.
Perhaps it was my touch that released something within him because finally he bent his head over his hands and cried, tears streaming down his cheeks. I didn’t know how to console him.
“These were our salad days,” he said, gesturing to the album on the table between us. “We were just figuring things out.”
I nodded, promising that I’d remember, on the Chinese days of the dead and all the other days, too. Not everyone, almost no one, had his capacity to love with such a clear and luminous heart. Uncle Lincoln deserved to have someone honor his memories, his loyalty, his unique and precious gift. “I won’t forget,” I said, and took his hand in mine.
THE BODY
THE CRANE OPERATOR
A gray mist like a shroud hung over the construction site of the future Happy Prosperity Shopping Center as the morning crew set to work. The crane operator rode the elevator to his position in the top of the crane, then waited while he watched the line of migrants filing in. They would clear the rubble by hand with shovels and buckets and wheelbarrows. They were skinny and filthy and were brought in by truck from whatever wretched dormitory the company housed them in. At least the crane operator had that much to be grateful for: he wasn’t fresh out of the countryside, he’d been able to buy an apartment after fifteen years of construction jobs, he had a wife, they were having a baby. He’d been lucky to come when he did. Not that he didn’t like to complain. Complaining meant he had something to lose.
“This smog will kill us all,” Lao Bing complained to his partner over the mic. He pulled the loops of his hospital-grade face mask up tighter over his ears. “My wife wants me to buy a new air filter. Her friends have something fancy from Korea. Cost more than two thousand yuan. I said, ‘What do the Koreans know about air pollution? Hai’er’s good enough for me.’ You know what she said? ‘If you’re a man, you’d be willing to buy this for our daughter.’ She’s pulling that trick.”
A voice buzzed in his ear. “You should tell her, ‘If I’m not a man, how did you get pregnant?’”
“I told her I’ve already worked sixty hours overtime this month. Why doesn’t she get her parents to give her the money for their precious granddaughter?”
“If it’s not the smog, it’s the overtime. One way or the other, we’re all dead men,” his partner concurred genially.
“Shut up and get to work,” their boss shouted over the mic, but good-naturedly. They laughed. The routine, day after day, was the same.
He turned on the ignition and began the code sequence for the giant crane. It let out a loud beep-beep-beep as he backed the machine over the bumpy, uneven ground.
If only the wind would pick up, he thought. Blow some of this smog away. When he was a child, he remembered waking up to his mother blowing gently across his face, trying to dislodge the flakes of coal that had settled there overnight. Henan was a coal-producing province, and his mother had always said they were lucky to have the fuel to make it through the winter. She still remembered the shortages of her youth, when one winter they’d had to burn the furniture—meaning the family’s wooden kitchen table, their stools, the frame to their lone, shared bed—to keep from freezing. And still her hands had bled every day from the cold.
It was March. Soon enough the weather would be warmer, and people would stop burning so much coal.
Although with the factories these days and their crazy production schedules, it was hard to tell. Spring used to be a time of clearing air. But the crane operator remembered how smoggy it had been in August. In his youth August had been a dry, dusty month of clear blue skies, a time when the old men played the erhu on the edge of the paddies, the notes slipping over the green fields of rice, sorghum, and corn. All the mothers and fathers walked on dirt paths carrying giant dippers of water to their crops, praying no sudden freak storm would arise and crush their fields with hail before the September harvest. As a child, it had been a time of complete freedom, running barefoot through the village, chasing his friends or hunting gophers with a slingshot. It had been his favorite time of the year, better even than the New Year with its fireworks, gifts of candy, and red envelopes of lucky cash.
Now every month was gray, choked with gray clouds that made his eyes and throat burn, his chest tightening with every breath.
“All clear.”
The crane operator flicked the switch for the wrecking ball. His muscles tensed, his jaw tightened. Fifteen years on construction and he still imagined he could feel it in his body the moment the giant iron ball struck concrete.
CRASH
The air shook around him as the ba
ll hit the wall. Dust rose up, thicker even than the fog, like an avalanche of concrete. His crane beeped as he backed up to wait while the dust cleared before he struck again.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
“Good hit,” his partner’s voice crackled in his earpiece. “One more fifteen degrees west and this next one’s coming down.”
“Got it.” He squinted at his control panel. If anything, the day was getting darker as the morning progressed. He reset the coordinates and hit the gas pedal.
“What the—?” his partner’s voice was in his ear. “Idiot farmers are running toward the building again. Hold on. Can’t tell what’s happening. It’s all luan qi ba zao.”
“Tell them you’ll fire them! I can’t waste time—”
There was a crackle of static. The crane operator looked over his shoulder, trying to see through the haze. It seemed that the migrants were indeed approaching again but this time at a run, and one of the crazies was waving his shovel over his head.
“What’s the matter?”
“STOP! CUT YOUR ENGINE! There’s a body!”
“Where, where?”
The crane operator hit the emergency brake. His heart pounded in his chest. He hoped one of the bumpkin idiots hadn’t got in the way after all. He’d be blamed. He’d lose his job. Like that, his luck would evaporate. Nothing. Gone. Now this. Now something.
“What’s happened?”
“It’s a woman,” his partner’s voice crackled in his ear. “You’d better come down and look at this.”
Like that, he felt a stab of ice shoot through his body. He knew in an instant, less than a heartbeat, his luck could change.
THE REPORTER
The woman’s body was covered with a tarp by the time the reporter arrived at the construction site, but at least the corpse hadn’t been removed. Her editor was adamant that she see the body with her own eyes.
There were police cars parked in clumps along the street leading up to the site and several unmarked passenger cars, which she assumed had to be undercover security officials. Li Ming had to show her press association card and work ID to the officers guarding the entrance to the site. Then she had to show them again to the site foreman inside. He was sweating profusely, perspiration beading across his forehead underneath his hard, yellow helmet, despite the fact it was a cool day for March, the smog blocking the sun almost entirely. As she walked behind the foreman to the site where the body had been found, she couldn’t help but feel sorry for him. A bad luck thing like this happening on his watch. Even though it wasn’t his fault, his bosses might find a way to blame him.
“We follow all safety regulations carefully,” the foreman chattered as he stepped over the furrows in the ground. “We use every known official precaution before all demolitions.”
Li followed him across the uneven ground littered with broken cinder blocks, bricks, dirt, empty soda cans, and ramen and snack wrappers. Through the gloom, she could make out a cluster of men hunched on the edge of a half-demolished apartment building. A green tarpaulin had been placed over what she assumed must be the body.
Three cops were typing into computer tablets. A fourth stood watch by the tarp. He was smoking and looking off into the distance, or at least into the thick fog.
The foreman called out to the cops. “There’s another reporter wants to see the body.”
Her heart sunk. One of her competitors had beaten her here.
But the cop didn’t even glance her way. He gestured for one of his underlings to pull back the tarp, and sure enough one of the younger cops immediately broke from the cluster and dutifully trotted over. Li Ming guessed from their casual attitude the cops didn’t consider the case politically sensitive. Or even that important.
She figured that meant the victim was poor.
Then the cop pulled back the tarp, and despite wanting to seem tough and seasoned and competent, she couldn’t help but gasp.
“Yeah, get a load of her,” the first cop said. “What a shame.”
Li pulled her notebook out of her purse and began writing.
The body was naked, female, less bruised than one would imagine for someone who was found amidst rubble. (Note: The dead woman was not killed by a falling building. But then how had she died? Perhaps she had already been dead.) She appeared young, in her late teens or early twenties. The corpse’s skin tone was ashen, bluish almost, and not a color Li was used to seeing on an actual person. Her stomach flipped and tightened, and she could taste her breakfast, rice congee, a fried egg.
Pale body but darker face and neck, which suggested the dead woman had worked outdoors or was from the countryside. She had shoulder-length hair, black roots but lighter brown halfway down, as though she’d been lightening her hair for a while then gave up. Her face was without makeup, her eyebrows bushy, full lips, wideish nose with a very low bridge. There was something about her that said “countryside.” Maybe a stockiness to the body, thick legs, strong arms. Someone who was used to working. Not a thin, delicate city girl. But perhaps Li was prejudiced, having grown up in a village. She had the same type of body as this woman, was stronger than she looked, and it was a point of pride. But who knew? It was possible for a city girl to be strong as well, Li supposed. The dead woman was taller than Li, maybe 1.75 meters. She had dirt on her arms and legs in thick swathes; then Li realized, no, it wasn’t dirt. She had dark bruises, almost black, and then discoloration, a reddish-purple so dark it only seemed like bruises, around both wrists and both ankles.
Li looked at the rest of the body. The dead woman’s breasts lay flattened against her ribs. Li tried to lean closer to see if she had any distinguishing marks, moles or freckles or scars, but there was nothing visible along the torso.
“Are you allowed to turn her over? May I see her back?”
“Why you want to do that for? Her face not good enough for you?” the young police officer snickered.
“In case she has a scar or a birthmark or something unusual on her back. Something her family might recognize if I describe it in the paper.”
“Good idea,” said the foreman. “You see, we are fully cooperating with the authorities. Can you have your assistants turn over the body?”
“Oh.” The officer gestured for two of his underlings to come forward. “Turn her over. The reporter needs to see the back of the body.”
The men raised their eyebrows, and then they pulled gloves out of their pockets and put them on. They gingerly took hold of the body by the hands and feet and turned her over.
There on the upper left shoulder blade was a strange black symbol, a tattoo that appeared to have been crudely cut into the skin: not an actual character, but a strange, uneven rectangle about four centimeters long and three centimeters high with a triangle inside and three slanted lines radiating from the top and sides of the rectangle.
Was that some kind of Falun Gong or other cult symbol? Li wondered. She sketched the design carefully in her notebook.
Was she a suicide? Some kind of doomsday thing? Or a gesture of protest?
This was the kind of detail that could make a story a sensation, especially if her competitor had not noticed. Something a family might recognize, something a crime ring might be using to identify its members (usually tattoos were for men, but exciting if women were joining in the trend), or something that could be used to rally the public against a dangerous cult. Li briefly imagined a promotion, an offer to work for CCTV, an exciting turn of good fortune that would please her parents after what had otherwise been a lackluster career in a seemingly dead-end job at one of the lesser provincial papers.
Apart from the crude tattoo, there were no other distinguishing marks, nor anything that suggested how the woman had died. She clearly had not been crushed to death by anything falling on her. Instead her body had merely been revealed when part of the building was destroyed.
There were no cuts or other wounds on her. Her face was not contorted. She lay almost peacefully, the body in relatively good shape, apar
t from being dead.
Her body appeared, Li didn’t know how else to describe it, but almost too clean.
“May I take a picture? Not for the paper, but for my notes?” Li asked the officer in charge and pulled out her small digital camera from her purse.
“No way,” he said. And waved a white-gloved hand in her face.
“I promise we won’t print it. I just want to make sure I get all the details right—”
“If your eyes aren’t good enough …,” and he pushed her camera away.
“But Older Brother, my boss will want me to write a very detailed account. Even a small thing that my eyes can’t notice might help a family identify this girl.”
“Her family will hide their heads in shame,” the cop said. “Look at her! Naked and dead. What kind of family would want to claim her? She’s probably a prostitute and she’s been killed by her pimp because she tried to hide her money or else run away.”
“We can’t know that—”
“Why else is she naked?”
“How would I know? Maybe she was robbed!”
The cop snorted, a loud pig-like grunt. “Maybe she was. But who wants to steal clothes? You know what I think, it was some kind of pervert. Followed her from work, then forced her to come here to this abandoned site and raped her, took all her clothes, and killed her. All the same, her family will still be ashamed. We’ll be lucky if we can ever identify her. And the only way her family will come forward is if we can find them first before they go into hiding and force them to pay for the disposal of the body. Mark my words.”
As the man argued, Li was able to take a quick shot of the body. It would appear in tomorrow’s paper, along with the headline: Mysterious Beauty Found Dead. The photo, cropped to reveal only the woman’s face and shoulders, would appear above the fold. The issue would sell out within an hour.
