by Samuel Shem
All the deers’ ears flicked up like flags. The big doe’s eyes showed fear. It turned, ready to spring away. For a long moment it stood still, half there and half gone, its deer-spirit twisted between the past and the possible. And then it came back for the dawn’s goodnight cookie, and as it took it from her hand she whispered as soothingly as possible, “I’m just a being too, in a new beginning.”
New Beginning. The words startled her, for they were also the words for “Spring,” and in that moment two urges surfaced with a clarity that was frightening in its nostalgia: the urge to do calligraphy, and the urge to try to find her lost child.
On the eighth anniversary of the day she had traveled to Changsha and left her baby in a pile of celery, she again took the train from Tienja to Changsha. She was determined to find out anything she could about what had happened to her baby. There she learned that the worst had happened—she had probably been adopted by white people from Europe or America, as far away on this big earth as her child could be. All hope was lost.
Despite this, the next year, driven by the same relentless need to relive her catastrophe, she tried to go again, but had an attack—finding herself breathless and panicked on the train. She got off, returned to Tienja, unburdened herself to Second Sister, knowing that it was finally over. Desolate, she went back to her mountain refuge.
Calligraphy was the only way she had found to bring her lost daughter back to her. At first the stories she told, over and over again in the five characters stepping down the paper, always began with “Chun.” The first drawings were unadventurous. She merely tried to write the character for “Spring” with ease. Over and over she did what school children are taught to do, make the nine strokes in perfect order and style. And at first, rather than trying to create a story with the remaining four characters, she merely wrote “Chun” again and again. Each time she drew it, she recalled how her elementary school teacher had described it to the class:
First, the three strokes for the character for “three”:
Next, the two strokes for the character for “person”:
Next, the four strokes for the character for “sun”:
“Three people sitting in the sun,” the teacher would say, “this means ‘Spring’!”
Oh, how she and her young schoolmates in that one-room schoolhouse by the river had laughed at that, delighted by the way that a character tells a story from the real world. They couldn’t wait to draw it!
The nuns of the Elephant Temple had taught her about mantras, magic chanted formulas that had the power to change things. They tried to teach her Buddhist mantras, but she did not respond—she had no need to chant words that seemed far from her heart and soul. But this, this is my mantra, yes!
As she made the character for “Chun” she would repeat to herself, “Three persons sitting in the sun—Spring, a new beginning... Three persons sitting in the sun—Spring, a new beginning...”
At first it was a small comfort. And then it became a great comfort.
After many months of just drawing “Chun,” she began to fill in the other four characters in vertical order down the long run of paper.
At first she drew the aphorism that she had practiced as a girl—a girl of Chun’s age—the calligraphy that had won her a prize:
Spring
Returns
Flower
No
Fade
Her teacher said there were many ways to interpret this: “Spring comes and in the dark the plant comes to life,” or “Whatever is alive will always bloom,” or simply “Stillness and Aliveness, in profound harmony.”
It was astonishing to her, the complexity and profundity behind these simple ink marks on a piece of rice paper. A skeleton for such imaginings! Best of all for her despair, it was totally absorbing, both in itself and as a vessel to her lost child, an artery to another heart that had once been her own and would never be other. Calligraphy became her world.
As the months passed, as memory turned to imagination, her strokes grew into a complex and willful attempt at simplicity, but not simplicity itself. It was infuriating to her, to see the mess she was always making. She tried new brushes, she tried better paper—mulberry paper in fact, a single sheet, brought all the way up the mountain by one of the porters, costing two weeks’ pay. The harder she tried, the worse it got. She asked a monk who did calligraphy about that, and was told that will cannot work in calligraphy, rather that calligraphy is, and makes the essence of the person move, and in the movement in relationship, the character, like an unbidden ghost, appears. This was difficult for her. She thought back to the few childhood lessons taken from the strange old master in his hut on the river. He always smelled of jasmine water and seemed attached at the lips to his clay pipe and never seemed to eat. He grew more and more thin and his characters grew more and more full until one day his wife found him dead at his art, the long sheet of rice paper filled with a single stroke of the fattest brush in his collection, a single long, fat black character that was no character, no character at all, but any and all characters that anyone who wished could find in it. A stroke to begin from, contain in, break out of, to something else. She has thought about this stroke for the rest of her life, this message before dying.
“The character reflects the soul, the soul the character,” her teacher said.
It has taken her three decades to start to understand that, and over a year of practice alone on this mountain with each journey of five characters down a rice paper sheet beginning with the character for “Chun.” Each “Chun,” she understands now, when viewed from a distance is a stark black measure of her soul, and when viewed so close up that each bristle of the brush appears is a measure of the struggle still raging within it. The views from the closest place in paper and brush are beyond herself, and the views from the farthest place across the little hut and even out the door into the air of the mountain are beyond herself—and all are views of herself, too. As in an ancient painting, where the artist is so dwarfed by the mountains and rivers that his figure is hard to find—until suddenly you see it, floating in thin air between the peaks. The mineral ink of a pliant soul.
Now she chants out loud:
“All of it is my soul, all of it is my not-soul.
“All of it is me, all of it is not-me.
“All of me is made of non-me elements, all of soul of non-soul elements.
“All of it is in Chun.”
She smiles, thinking, All of it is in Spring.
It was only when she first understood this about her soul and her art that she made the first journey to find her lost daughter. Two years ago now, and she only found out that she had been taken away to the ends of the earth. Five days ago now it was her birthday. Last Monday, and it is now Saturday. She was ten.
She sighs, feels herself sinking once again, and gathers all that she has endured over these ten years to right herself.
This morning she has finished the day’s “Chun,” and has already looked deeply into it from near and far. But on this particular day her mind is still funneling around and around in a whirlpool like that below the waterfall upstream. She is gone.
Her heart strikes sorrow. Tears come rolling down.
But whatever has been learned comes blossoming up to meet the tears. Whatever has kept her going keeps her going now. She hangs the day’s “Chun” up to dry—as if for the first time now seeing what has been written:
It is a simple “Chun.” Simple strokes that are like the ancient carving on an oracle bone or a tortoise shell she once saw in a photograph. A seedling struggling for the light, strokes that have reversed the complexity of centuries, which evolved the nine-stroke character for “Spring” out of this elegant three. A simple “Chun” she has gotten back to, back to that single shoot struggling in darkness to find the light and grow toward the sun and blossom and give back seeds. Whatever she has lea
rned and seen now in this day’s simple character, she realizes that she has come to understand not only sorrow but love, not only depth but lightness, and so she is surprised to find herself saying out loud—to the lush pines and magnolias, to the stream and the fallen log spanning it, to the deer she has tamed who are curling into their beds nearby and to her playmates the erratic monkeys in the forests up the mountain—yes, breaking her silence, saying out loud:
“So? So, fancy lady, put on your plastic orange jacket and take your broom and go to work.”
A blue jay appears, the sharp face reminding her of her old calligraphy teacher. He chatters at her. She chatters back at him in blue jay, and walks out of the clearing.
The low, tilted morning sunlight casts the black shadows of the pine tree trunks across the bed of ferns. In one moment the shadows seem to her like a ladder laid down toward the most heavenly heart of nature, and in the next moment they seem like lines on her dead mother’s sallow, waxy brow, and in another moment like a mere calligraphy of the number three, counted over and over again in her path.
23
The beaten-up bus sways around the hairpin turns of the steep, narrow road and stumbles up onto a small field, a shallow bowl partway up Emei Shan, the towering Hundred Mile Mountain. Hardly hesitating, the bus then swerves around sharply so that it is pointing back to where it came from. The driver gestures for them to get out. Pep peers out the window and can’t believe that after traveling for two days this is the right destination. He sees no cable car, no signs in English, nothing. Definitely not a tourist-friendly zone. It’s the wrong place. He tries to argue, but the driver is adamant.
They get out. With a cough of oily exhaust and a spray of dust the bus is gone.
Emei Shan rises all around, up into the clouds. At one end of the field is a two-story concrete building with a single opening as large as a garage door, and several windows with iron bars. Dimly seen inside are white tiles, an open fire, and two men in white caps. Outside, a third man stands under a large, stained pink umbrella that shades an iron table. His hands are on his hips and he is staring at them hungrily. A red fire hydrant rises up nearby, tilted, as if suffering. They look around more carefully up into the surrounding mountains for the entrance to the cable cars. Seeing none, in sign language they try to get information from the men in the building. No, there is no cable car, definitely not. There is a trail, the entrance of which is at the far end of the field.
“This does not feel good,” Pep says. “Rhett and Ming Tao were lying to us.”
“Maybe,” Clio says. “But they never said they were sure there was a cable car.”
“But they were sure that it was a popular tourist zone, like Disney. This ain’t Disney.” They look at each other—the unspoken goes back and forth between them: If they lied about this, maybe they’ve lied about everything and then what the hell are we doing here?
“There’s the sign for the trail, guys,” Katie says. “Let’s go.”
Clio’s guidebook says that the path up to the Elephant Temple is winding, steep, and rises almost two thousand feet. At first the incline is gradual. The path, though ancient, is well marked, with stone steps chiseled into the mountain. Starting out at well over four thousand feet, they hike only an hour over an increasingly steep path before they have to stop. They sit, panting like puppies chasing their breath, unable to quite catch it. Pep wonders, at what altitude do you have to worry about altitude sickness?
A long line of Chinese men starts coming down the mountain toward them. They wear thin-soled rope sandals, either long pants with the legs rolled up or shorts, and polo shirts or singlets. They seem emaciated, without an ounce of extra fat. Wiry. Their calf and thigh muscles bulge, strung to bone with tendons that look like guy-wires. Most are smoking. Each has a four-foot-tall wooden carrying harness on his back from which dangles a half-gallon plastic water bottle and a sweat rag. The harnesses are empty. Clearly they have carried their loads of supplies several thousand feet up the trail to the temple, and now they are coming back down.
Seeing Westerners is an obvious rarity for them. They seem cheerful and curious, and ask Katie questions. Through sign language Clio conveys that they are going up the mountain to the Elephant Temple, and tries to ask how far it is. Several of the men indicate that it is far, and a hard climb. They offer to carry each of them up, for a price. Clio is astonished—these little men carry them up? How? On their backs. A startling idea, which Katie pronounces “Gross!” They decline, and go on.
After another hour or so on the trail, Pep and Katie, in the lead, find themselves at a clearing on the banks of a stream. A shelf of rock reaches out into a natural eddy of the water, a deep pool. Rocks pop up all around, a seating arrangement. Pines, larch, immense rhododendrons in red, purple, pink, and white, and a gathering of giant azalea shelter the glade. The afternoon sun seems caught between hot and easing. Hanging from a tree are a few tin ladles. The grotto is of an altitude to discourage serious insects. The only litter is cigarette butts. Pep cracks the seal on a fresh bottle of water and hands it to Katie. It isn’t cold, but it is safe, and both of them sigh contentedly. Clio arrives and sits next to Katie on the natural stone seat. Pep goes upstream a little to wash his face.
Katie sits there picking at her fingers—a bad habit Clio has tried to stop, using umpteen strategies gleaned from the good doctor Orville Rose and a book called How To Stop Your Child Picking, with no effect. She vows not to say anything now. Katie keeps on picking. She can’t stand it. “Please, sweetie, don’t pick, okay?”
“I’m thinking about your birthday before we left home. How old were you?”
They had celebrated in Columbia with dinner at Gourmet Restaurant, a brand-new place between the hospital and the cemetery. “I was fifty-one.”
“So when I’m twenty you’ll be sixty-one and when I’m thirty you’ll be seventy-one and when I’m forty you’ll be eighty-one! And fifty, ninety-one!”
“That’s right, but—but I’m—”
“I mean if I get married when I’m thirty-five you’ll be... what?”
“Seventy-six,” Clio says, she too feeling appalled. What a sad, awful image.
Katie does some counting on her fingers. “And if I adopt a baby you could be like eighty?” Clio nods. “Why did you wait so long to adopt me?”
“We told you—we didn’t meet each other until we were older, and then we tried for a while to have a biological baby, and as soon as we could after that we—”
“You’re not going to die, Mom, I mean before some of this, are you?”
“Are you worried about that, dear?”
“Yeah, you’re old and Daddy’s older even than you and I’m thinking you might die, you both might die, and then you’d never get to see me married or become a mother?” She glances up at Clio, and looks away again, picking. And then, after a sad, harsh sigh, she says, “You’re older than any of my friends’ parents or any in China Culture Camp, and if you die soon, who’s gonna take care of me?”
In Katie’s eyes Clio sees a terrible vulnerability—it always makes her think of Katie’s abandonment. Yet in that same vulnerability is a steely focus that Katie’s always had, calling her and Pep to be real. Abandoned, yes, but also found. “It’s scary, it really is, and not just for you but for us. But Daddy and I are in good health—you don’t have to worry—”
“I am worried, Mom.” She falls silent and looks past Clio, as if to something else.
Clio recalls the only other time she has ever seen Katie this way. She must have been about three. Pep and she had just finished singing and reading to her; had put her into her crib. “Goodnight, dear, love you.” Usually Katie would have said, “Love you too,” and gone right to sleep. But that night she just lay there and looked up at them, and asked, “Does everybody die?” Startled, they looked at each other. Clio thought to lie, but she could see that Katie had already seen her hesit
ation and knew her answer. “Yes, dear, you live a long time, a long, long time hopefully, and then you die.” “Am I going to die?” Again she hesitated. Pep started to say, “You’re really young, honey, and”—but Clio put her arm on his and stopped him because in Katie’s eyes she saw the realization, the first glimpse of her own mortality. As she watched, her baby’s eyes got glassy. She saw that Katie knew. Clio reached down and picked her up but Katie didn’t make a sound. The tears stopped. When they put her back down, she was calm. Her eyes were dry, but now she was looking past them, elsewhere.
Clio and Pep talked to her, sang to her, rocked her, and tried to get her to play, but she wouldn’t. It was as if part of her had gone missing. Clio held her, and Katie stayed that way for a long time in her arms, quiet, not crying, but with a—what?—yes, a first distance between daughter and mother, as if saying, How could you do this to me, bring me into your world when I have to leave it, when I have to leave you! How? Why? She stayed that way, quiet and still and somber, almost sorrowful, and distant, until she fell asleep. It broke Clio’s heart—Pep’s too, he said.
“Yes,” Clio says now, “I know how worried you are. It’s the scariest thing in the world, to think of someone dying. We’ll try to live a long time for you, dear, but if we die, we’ve arranged for you to be taken care of till you can take care of yourself.”
“Who’ll take care of me?”
“My sisters. Aunt Thalia and Aunt Faith.”
