Empire of Glass

by Kaitlin Solimine

  Who can get past the tangles of the world

  And sit with me in the clouds?”

  “Don’t you see? You’re a li-mi-na person too. We slip between the spaces where doorways meet, float over cities and swim below the ocean’s waves. We should’ve been born as an owl or a tree. But too late for that; no use bemoaning heaven’s decisions that weren’t ours to make. Or were they? Look: the sleeping magpie dream-chirps on a tree. She’s happy and free. Her bird fingers curl over the thinnest branch. Without a thought, she lifts her wings, floats on a passing breeze to some other tree beyond sight and I think, ‘there you go again, showing off without knowing your greatest gifts.’ We need to enter time. We need to let it envelop us and disappear. Do you think the magpie worries about the shift between today and tomorrow? Do you think the mandarin duck predicts the crossing of autumn to winter or that the crane envisions how much time has passed since her last mating?”

  I guessed the answer she expected was ‘no.’ Only humans seemed capable of ruining everything with what we thought was our brilliant knowledge. But if we were so brilliant why were we always proving ourselves wrong?

  Before I could ask, she reached to the pile beside her, plucked a book from the top: a translation of what Teacher Ming, our history and literature professor, called a Roman classic. Rome: None of us believed our Chinese ancestors once took Romans as our army’s soldiers. Implausible to consider: rosy-cheeked, blonde, blue-eyed, double-metered men standing beside their shorter, darker-haired comrades. Teacher Ming, lecturing that rainy day in the classroom that smelled of pig’s feet, was inordinately proud. As if he was once Roman himself. “Luo ma,” we all repeated in the Chinese transliteration. The word didn’t have as much punch as it did in Italian: “Roma.” We tried that too: “Rrrrroma!” Rolling the rrrrrs. Feeling invincible. That’s how we learned then: Loudly. Teacher Ming was sometimes ridiculed for his outlandish assumptions (for one: that the United States would reach the moon if the Chinese didn’t get there first) so we thought this was another, but he spoke with such conviction we hoped he was right—those days, right and wrong were striated. You had to align yourself with right, but if right became wrong, you better jump left. If left was meant to be right. But what if you didn’t jump quickly enough and the right had already shifted back? Feet planted on two ships at sea, legs peeling apart, your body split in two. Rome. A powerful place. We weren’t sure if it was left or right. Or if left was right or right was…?

  “Lucretius,” Kang-Lin said. “He’s Roman. He knows everything.”

  “Knew,” I corrected. “He’s dead.”

  “His words are alive.”

  I snuffed. I wanted to believe, like she did, there was something worth protecting in the breath passed between us, the moon winking through waving sycamore branches of a tree dead longer than we’d been alive, would never live again but would remain for thousands of years, a reminder its branches had once been strong enough to support the strangled death of one of the nation’s last emperors. I’d never loved my city more than I did this night. Wo ai Beijing Tiananmen, we sang in our loudest voices, chasing each other like feral cats down the alleyways now paved into six-lane highways. Wo ai Beijing Tiananmen. How could a song chisel into your heart, become a rhythm you’d cling to years later if only to convince yourself there’s a long, red string reaching from that moment in time to this one, that you’re one and the same with the young girl carving out the center of your story?

  Kang-Lin read a poem from the Roman book, her English lyrics clipped as a horse’s gait:

  From winter’s grip, first birds of the air

  Proclaim you,

  Goddess divine, and herald your approach,

  Pierced to the heart by your almighty power.

  Next creatures of the wild and flocks and

  herds

  Bound across joyful pastures, swim swift

  streams,

  So captured by your charms they follow you,

  Their hearts’ desire, wherever you lead on.

  And then through seas and mountains3—

  In the distance, a foghorn moaned. The loudspeakers cleared their throats, one by one extending a cacophony of words: “All Comrades report to their danwei. Midnight sessions to commence immediately.”

  Kang-Lin stopped, eyes wide and white. She didn’t often show fear on her face but tucked it into a tapping toe or jumping knee.

  “Do you think they know about us?” I asked.

  She quickly stowed the books in her knapsack, clipping it shut, then stood, wiping grass off her backside. My eyesight shifted—whereas I’d begun to see her clearly in the dark, now she was just the outline of a skinny, hunched body.

  “They’re going to know we’re gone.”

  “We have to come up with a worthy excuse.” I strummed my thoughts for something to convince my grandparents why I wasn’t home.

  She said: “Let’s say Teacher Ming asked us to clean up our stations at school.”

  “At midnight? Why would we need to do that?”

  “Rats.”

  “Rats?”

  “Yeah, the rats only come out after dark. We had to kill the rats, like the Chairman says, so we had to go there after midnight to perform our patriotic duties.”

  “And why didn’t we tell anyone we were going?”

  “We didn’t want to wake them. Or thought they’d be worried for our health. Rats carry diseases—isn’t that where the plague started? And our families looked too peaceful in their sleep to bother them. Trust me, it will work.”

  “Rats,” I repeated. The more the thought sunk in, the more I had to hand it to Kang-Lin: she was good at thinking on the fly. I, on the other hand, ruminated too long, exposing whatever it was I’d meant to protect. I worried Kang-Lin chose the wrong person with whom to share her grandfather’s treasured books, but before I could examine that fear too closely, she tapped my shoulder and motioned for me to follow her down the hill.

  That’s when I noticed she’d left a book on the ground at my feet: Han Shan’s Cold Mountain, the same poetry that was on my lap and must’ve slipped off when the loudspeakers startled us. I picked it up, the book’s silk cover silvery cool, like offering bowls left outside a temple gate in winter.

  “You forgot this!” I called to my friend, already descending downhill, shadow sliced in half at the hips.

  “You coming?” Her chirpy voice willed me into action.

  I shoved the book in my knapsack and adjusted the pack squarely over my shoulders: “I’m right behind you!”

  But no matter how quickly I ran, I’d never catch her, never reach the girl who once seemed so close I could trace her shape as well my own, could share her head’s form within a woolen hat, her hand’s grip within a glove, her mouth’s entombing a spoon lumped with sticky-sweet congee.

  Over time, the city closed its shell around us and the moon crawled onwards in its endless journey across the arched curve of the sky’s spine.

  Hello, Moon.

  Good-bye.

  1. Here, Li-Ming is likely referring to this Han Shan poem (as translated by Red Pine):

  “I see hundreds of dogs

  and every one of them scruffy

  lying wherever they please

  rambling whenever the whim arises

  but throw them out a bone

  and watch them growl and fight

  as long as bones are rare

  a pack of dogs can’t share”

  2. Did Li-Ming know fishing was seen as a political act in ancient China, the protest of an existing regime accomplished by the lazy, contemplative act of waiting on a rod to jig? Too late to ask; we must draw our own conclusions.

  3. Li-Ming spoke of Rome just once during our afternoon sessions: “I never read that book on Rome. I should’ve read other books too. My singular pursuit ruined me.” Her hair was a cuckoo’s nest, lips a temporary palsy, and yes, she was beautiful, because she was close to an end. “You did the best you could,” I said, kno
wing I sounded trite, the angle of sun available only to those who stop and cock a head to pay attention. But everything sounds trite when nearing completion or contained within the footnotes of a text.

  Baba

  Summer: Beijing’s hottest on record, star-palmed leaves dropping to the streets as readily as cicadas and my husband wiping sweat off my forehead. Telling me to stop writing. To stop. To stop what—breathing?

  What was the name he called me before the Great Unraveling?4

  Wife. Or mostly: Old Woman. An inside joke? Not exactly: Old Woman is what everyone called their wives at a certain age, in a certain era in which we played certain parts.

  Where were we?

  Home. The musty, spirited apartment we’d known for decades. And although it was the first time I knew him, it was also the first time he knew me, wadding my temples, making sense of the senseless in the most tender, incessant gesture. That’s how these events occurred: reciprocal, the two of us straddling the cliffs of our lives, looking at each other as if we were meant to love the face facing us, but how can you love something you only know as a familar scent housed within an aging carapace of skin?

  And so we forget who we are again. Why am I telling this story?

  Year after year we move on—where we raise the dust today— long ago was an endless sea.

  My husband’s, your Baba’s, story started well before he was born, reaching full sprint the autumn his father called him and his brother ye haizi—wild kids. He was “Little Wang” then, to differentiate him from the older Wangs on the block. That wet season in the first year of the Communist Era, the Wang boys fashioned themselves wild beasts, cutting through Shanghai’s shower-sodden streets, shouting curses at slouched men on stools, slapping posters glued to city walls: Long Live the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army! Oppose the Imperialists!

  Big-Eyed Sheng, their eldest cousin, laughed like he owned the city. The fastest in the family, he beat Chiang Kai-shek’s son in a city track meet ten years earlier and never let anyone forget it.

  “I’m the fastest man in China!” he shouted after they left the high school’s morning classes, skipping the afternoon mathematics and physics lessons to run the alleyways to their daily assignment. This particular afternoon they’d sell the eyeglass lenses their fathers made in the Old Chinese Quarters apartment, the same work they conducted since before the War of Liberation. Glass making was a natural profession for men who spent their childhoods chopping hay in the fields of Zhejiang province—thick, calloused fingers invincible to sparks and slivers. In their rucksacks, lenses clinked, and to Little Wang, they sounded like shell buttons racking washing boards in his hometown. How many years since he’d been in the country? A city boy now. Their glass lenses: warped at the edges, useless, not worth a fen. The brothers swindled clients to purchase a pair then packed up and sold their damaged wares at a different street corner the next afternoon. They preyed on the fat cats from the Northern Capital with their Party pride and People’s Currency freshly minted with the Chairman’s round, happy face. Of course, they didn’t tell the fat cats with their bulging waistlines the lenses they sold were riddled with imperfections—the glass curved ever-so-slightly so after a few days you’d see bright circles around street lights, rings around the sun.

  Big-Eyed Sheng panted as he stopped beneath the fluttering green awning of the Park Hotel, hands on knees, operatic sweat atop fat cheeks. “You’ll never catch me,” his breath heaved.

  “Never,” Little Wang agreed, side-eyeing his brother.

  Although his brother wasn’t slow, he always let Big-Eyed Sheng win their races; in the past year, Sheng’s girlfriend Ling-Ling fed him pork jiaozi every afternoon to the point his slacks needed to be let out. He was their ‘big’ cousin in more ways than one; they didn’t want to upset him in thinking he’d lost his speed—when he was upset, he didn’t direct his furor toward the perpetrator, but also the perpetrator’s friends, parents, distant relatives. He was an infinitely-tentacled octopus with hands everywhere, like their government. They were only beginning to understand what that meant, how their Middle Kingdom speared the world with its sharp edges and slick-tongued proclamations:

  “We’ll never catch you,” Doufu, Little Wang’s brother, said—“Doufu,” a variant of his nickname, “Bofu,” and reference to his brother’s tofu-soft thighs.

  Cousin Sheng straightened and helped them set up shop: a wooden Republican-era stool the boys carried with them everywhere and atop it, their dead mother’s tattered indigo handkerchief she once used as a satchel to carry her meticulously-tailored cotton pants to market in Shangyu. Doufu laid out the latest collection of eyeglasses. The industrious smell of freshly-ground glass clung to their fingertips—part of the larger machinery of the world they could sense but didn’t fully grasp.

  That morning, as on every morning, their father set the prices. Along with Second, Third and Fourth Uncle, the elder Wang spent most nights grinding glass in the windowless back room of their two-room apartment where Doufu and Little Wang slept on the floor. In the mornings, their father and uncles departed for the Little World market outside Yuyuan Garden, bringing home sheet glass and sandpapers in bulk from the leftover goods at the U.S. army supply store. The Party had claimed Little World after the Nationalists fled to Taiwan and the remnant goods were distributed at random, rationed to those who needed them. The boys and their uncles were grateful; the hand that feeds wins the heart.

  Tink.

  Tink.

  Doufu tapped the lenses on the hotel wall to promote the product’s durability. A woman in a tight red skirt, a fit more common in Hong Kong than the mainland, walked out of the hotel and grabbed a lens from Doufu’s hands. She smacked him over the head with it.

  “Don’t do that!”

  “Don’t do what?” The brothers asked as her high heels clopped away.

  “That!” she flung her hand dismissively, tossing them their lens, and they watched her melon-shaped ass sashay until she was lost to the lines of coolies on their rickshaws.

  “Did you see that one?” Little Wang elbowed his brother.

  “See what?” Of course his brother would pretend he hadn’t seen the woman’s finely-tuned shape. Doufu held a lens to his eye as if through it he could watch the Chairman leading the Long March.

  “You didn’t think that woman was attractive?”

  “No.”

  “Not even a little sexy?”

  “Little Wang, if you’re only watching a woman walk away what’s the point? The Fat Cats… those are men who really know women.”

  “Sure,” Little Wang snatched the lens from his brother’s hand and held it to his own eye. There wasn’t a swimming Chairman. He directed the lens, and with it his gaze, back to the busy, wet street, searching for the beautiful woman.

  New rain kissed the pavement, fat gifts from the cloud-pregnant, autumnal heavens. Farmers slapped donkey haunches, women opened floral umbrellas and tip-toed cautiously over expanding puddles. The green awning above the boys hiccupped and sighed. The lenses fogged, lost their translucence. Their thin cotton shirts clung to their backs; they shrugged off the coming cold. Behind them, their goods were stacked and tied together with cotton strings. At least the lenses were dry, they reassured one another, nodding like they’d seen their father and uncles do, wordless communication they assumed occurred naturally between all adult men.

  “All you care about are the fat cats.” Little Wang reached for a lens and cut the edge into the Park Hotel’s brick wall.

  The truth: his brother was obsessed with the Party, avowed it his life goal to become a member. He’d work late nights on his school work—particularly drawn to physics and engineering—in the hopes of attending Shanghai’s Shipbuilding School to someday build ships for China’s proud, new, People’s Liberation Navy. Doufu was their father’s son—obsessed with industry and the opportunity given when they moved from their backwater village of Cen Cang Yan to the city. To be city folk. They left everything in t
heir hay-roofed pingfang atop Zhejiang’s marshy coast—their mother’s bones buried among the spiny shrubs of Xia Gai Mountain, their grandfather’s plots of dehydrated tomato vines, his parched pumpkin patches besotted with desperate thorns. Little Wang’s brother and father never looked back, not even when the boat escorted them down that ribbonous river toward neighboring Shangyu City, slicing golden fields only country sunsets could set afire. Why did it seem only Little Wang remembered this?

  Doufu grabbed the lens from his brother. “You don’t get it. You’re muddle-headed.”

  “Get what?”

  “This.” Lifting the same lens, his brother peered through the center then carelessly tossed the glass into the street where it landed in a puddle, losing its luminosity.

  “See what we can waste with just one throw?” Doufu had a way of making nonsense out of sense.

  “You’re not making sense,” Little Wang said.

  “Listen,” his brother said, then spouted numbers and figures, profit calculations: 45 kuai a kilo! Two kuai a sale! A bad lens wasn’t useless, he laughed, it was a commodity! Little Wang half-listened, watched as a toddler squatted in front of their stoop to piss on the steps. The toddler’s mother waited patiently, staring toward the old horse stables that now housed Party ammunitions. Pigeons cooed somewhere above them, hungry for sun. Doufu kept at it: weren’t our lenses, the profits they generated, translatable into rice, red beans, yams? But Little Wang knew: His brother saw the world in angles, supported by the rational forces of engineering, all that girded the physical. He knew following well-traveled paths—school in the city, a party membership—would reward him. Little Wang didn’t believe in such rewards. Ever since their mother’s death the week after the Nationalists stormed their village, he avoided politics. He wanted to roam the streets alone at night, skipping rocks down Shanghai’s wide boulevards and musing over the shapes of rooster women leaning in the doorways of the abandoned jazz halls, inviting him past the slanted doorways with clucks of plum-tinted lips.