Empire of Glass

by Kaitlin Solimine

  “A product is only as good as its function. In other words,” Doufu bent, plucked the lens from the puddle, wiping it on his pants, “a lens without an eye is not really a lens. Its just glass! An eye is what makes your belly full!” He slapped Little Wang’s stomach.

  “You’re quite the philosopher.”

  “I’ll make the next sale. Watch me.”

  If there is a next sale, Little Wang thought, reaching into his breast pocket to touch his mother’s thimble—the only silver she saved from before the Nationalists swept through the village, the same silver she’d given to him the day she died. He always kept it in his pocket, played with it the way a coolie scratched the blisters on his thighs and shins; distraction—a cool drug.

  A Party official stepped from a black car, feet sloshing winningly through puddles. His head dipped beneath an umbrella. When he reached their stand, he folded the umbrella to a crisp close and perused the boys, judging their clothing, their wet hair sticking up at birdlike angles. The official wore a dry Mao jacket and pleated khakis, his shoulders touched with rain. He picked up a pair of lenses with clammy fingers, examined the lobby’s golden light seeping through the hotel’s rotating doors. His chest was wide, the bronze buttons on his uniform in danger of popping off.

  Wagging a fat finger in their faces, he said, “Shoddy… Terrible… Your goods are rubbish.” He dropped the lenses to the ground, slapped open the umbrella, and stepped into the downpour, immune to the dampening effects of rain. As he strode away, their father’s product easily discarded, Little Wang wondered if maybe his brother was right. Perhaps the only way to be anything in this world was to play by the rules of the Fat Cats—but what were those rules? We could be born into a certain position in life, he thought. Meet the right people, properly answer questions. We could do all this and still one day a fat foot could stamp its shape in our face. He’d seen this happen just weeks earlier outside a food rationing store near Xintiandi: a young party member wearing a Mao suit asked for an extra ration for his pregnant wife just as a passing official overheard the request. The official slapped the man and demanded, in front of a growing crowd, that the perpetrator show his party membership card, but the man hadn’t carried it with him. Within minutes, this man was accused of being a Nationalist spy and dragged to a politburo office. The city’s bicycle bells and vendor calls overwhelmed his cries. The crowd, moving to the next public spectacle, dispersed.

  The lenses in a puddle again, this was the first time Little Wang saw all of the industry of their everyday existence so quickly made irrelevant: his father at that tortuous machine, slouched in a constant C, the moldy mats on the floor where they slept each night, the apartment smelling of garlic, sweat-stained sheets, rat droppings, an ever-present mix of exhaustion and spoiled peanut oil. How long could they live like this? They were tu baozi, the city folk reminded them as they spat globules of phlegm at their feet. Country shits.

  Little Wang raised his fist, a finger extended, lips curdling: “There’s a turtle shit posing as a Communist!” He shouted to the back of the Fat Cat.

  The Fat Cat turned, face umbrella-shadowed. “What did you say, Tu baozi?”

  “I said…”

  Doufu’s palm stamped Little Wang’s lips. “He said ‘have a nice day,’” Doufu said, his own lips purple. He was their father’s son: weakened in the presence of the powerful. Their father, who instructed them to lower their heads when they passed a foreign face, and then, after the foreigners left along with the Nationalist pigs, the same gesture expected for party leaders who saved them from Japanese occupation.

  The Fat Cat shook his head dismissively, ducking into the flooded warmth of a chauffeured car.

  “You’re the turtle shit now,” Doufu said, bending to retrieve the damaged lenses. Irreparable. They knew—a cracked lens was worthless, displayed the world in kaleidoscope: broken trees, broken boulevards, broken faces, broken all the hours spent smoothing its sides. Little Wang wanted to push his brother, for him to land with a thud in that growing puddle over which the Fat Cat stepped. But he held his fist and watched as Doufu lifted the cracked lenses to his eye. How did he see Little Wang? Half his head this way, the other cut in two, nose and chin distorted. Little Wang hadn’t seen himself like this in a long time: only when they snuck into the Big World arcades before the war. A mosquito laden summer, their mother waiting for them on the stoop, their limp, overpriced kites at her side. Hours were like water to the boys visiting the hahajin, the funny mirrors that made them shorter, stouter, longer, leaner. They could’ve stood there forever, watching themselves grow older in their various shapes and forms. Haha, they laughed. In their duplications they could be everything and anything.

  Haha. Life wasn’t broken yet.

  Haha. Time, and with it the rest of their lives, remained theirs to shape.

  Haha. Little Wang released his fist.

  “Stay here,” Doufu said. “I’m going to find Cousin Sheng. We should pack up now that our products are useless.”

  “Fine,” Little Wang said. “Tell Ling-Ling I say ‘hi.’”

  Cousin Sheng was regularly running off with Ling-Ling, a classmate from the poorest region of Jiangxi, to the abandoned rooms at the Big World arcades. At night, he arrived home smelling like rotted sorghum; the same smell Little Wang knew from their private school’s bathroom where boys leaned against wooden stalls, hands wrestling beneath pant zippers like catching a slippery fish, leaving glistening snail’s trails on the walls.

  “Ten yuan for a pair of lenses! Two for seventeen!” Little Wang shouted to the pedestrians and bicyclists as his brother’s wide back disappeared into the gray streets. Cold water leaked through the awning, kissing his neck.

  The coolies lined the curb, starlings on a wire, damp newspapers draped over their heads, arms limp as shadow puppets. They waited in front of the foreign Y.M.C.A. recently converted to Party offices, windows re-shined, doors repainted red. Little Wang mused at how quickly a city could belong to different owners, wear an entirely new mask.

  “What you looking at?” he asked the lead coolie, a boy they called ‘Sing-Song’ because he lacked two front teeth and whistled when he spoke. The same boy teased prostitutes exiting the Park Hotel each morning, calling them to straighten their skirts and smooth their hair. But the ‘rooster women’ just winked and named him ‘Little Friend’ to which he beamed a wide, toothless smile, as if he actually had a chance.

  Sing-Song exposed that gaping smile. “I’m looking at a boy about to be arrested!” he nodded up the street toward the corner of Central Tibet and Nanjing Roads. Bicycling bodies shrouded their view of anything other than gray-clothed limbs and arms. “Time to pack up, Glass Grinder!”

  The coolies folded their rickshaws and departed quickly, pant legs slapping the ground, wet tongues to parched lips.

  “What is it?” Little Wang could barely hear his own voice.

  “Licenses!” Sing-Song’s legs accelerated, his bicycle catching speed.

  “What?” As Little Wang stepped from under the awning, the rain slicked his hair, stung his eyes. He scanned the length of the busy street for Doufu and Cousin Sheng but he couldn’t see anything except his own sopping, startled eyelashes.

  Little Wang quickly gathered the lenses into his mother’s satchel, but the heaviness of his clothing slowed his movements. The coolies, pedaling off, laughed, shouted for him to hurry him turtle feet. But where was his brother? Of course he couldn’t find him—his brother was always distracted by two things: one, selling enough lenses to appease their father and uncles; and two, a girl at school named Liu Li who Little Wang thought was homely but his brother loved. By now, Little Wang realized his brother’s vanishings were a way of averting blame, like the morning of their mother’s disappearance, how he’d been nowhere when Little Wang wrapped his arms around their mother’s beloved soap tree so tightly Third Uncle had to pry him free. They’d lost her. But how could she be lost if he could still picture her face, hear her voice s
inging from behind the bamboo groves as she plucked sweet potatoes from pickled earth?

  “Wang Guanfu!” Little Wang shouted his brother’s proper name, the name their father called him but no one turned: not a bicyclist nor anyone among the hordes of street vendors who followed the call of the coolies—Zou! Zou! Zou! Little Wang didn’t know from what he was running, but the urgency propelled him forward. The lenses cradled beneath his armpit slowly slipped away, joining the rain’s wash like fallen, silver leaves.

  “Wait!” he called to Sing-Song’s disappearing back. But the coolies were gone. He could barely see to the other side of the old racetrack. Even the Park Hotel’s glittering revolving doors were shrouded in gray. Several lenses caught on a grate. As he struggled to pry them loose, he saw his father and his uncles, slumped shoulders aching while they welded metal to glass, blinking feverishly to stay awake. Keep your eyes trained on the machines… What was the use? His fingers worked as quickly as they could, but the joke was on him. Maybe Cousin Sheng was the fastest after all. Maybe he was, as Doufu always suggested, the lesser of the Wang men.

  As he pried loose a particularly stubborn lens, a heavy hand wrapped itself around his neck, gripping the collar of his shirt. The strong hold lifted him off the ground, legs spinning on the futility of industry and air.

  The hand thrust him into the warm backseat of a car. A heavy door slammed shut.

  “Wang Guanfu!” he shouted one last time, his voice pointlessly addled.

  Little Wang immediately knew where he sat: a Shanghai City Police car, the dry navy leather sliding beneath his soaked behind. The officer started the engine then cursed, spit spraying the dashboard:

  Illegal peddling.

  Children.

  Parents to blame.

  Careless.

  Capitalist.

  Their car split the street in two, effortlessly parting lines of bicyclists from the damp bodies of yexiao vendors.

  As the officer’s words blasted the windshield, Little Wang fixed his gaze on the buildings rolling by—his first time on wheels and watching the world from behind the glass. Traffic conductors stood on yellow and black pedestals, arms bending at sharp angles. Pedestrians melted into a mass of gray and black. Only the occasional red dress flashed at him like a magpie’s tail in flight. He tried to catch a glimpse long enough to revel in the shape of a woman. No such luck. Windshield wipers splashed aside rain yet it was dry and hot inside the car. He folded his hands beneath his bare legs. At an intersection beside People’s Park, he saw his brother huddled beside Cousin Sheng. Both shivered, invisible to everyone but Little Wang. The car lurched forward as his brother’s hand raised, their eyes meeting and Doufu’s mouth opening, stuck in an incredulous—

  O.

  Little Wang wanted to say his brother’s name, but his tongue couldn’t form the syllables. From where he sat, Doufu was the insignificant one now. A pane of glass separated them.

  “Who you looking at?” The officer asked, eyes unblinking in the rear view mirror.

  “No one.”

  The car slid around a turn, his brother’s reflection replaced by crowded streets, the searching glare of rain-slick headlights. “Just a kid on the street.”

  “You’re the kid,” the driver said. “And you’ll call me Officer Feng from now on.”

  Officer Feng with the big ears and shining bald head.

  Officer Feng with the double chin.

  Officer Feng with the whiskered cheeks, a black mole the size of Hangzhou City.

  Little Wang placed his palms on the window. His breath clouded the glass, fingers outlined. In the fogged parts, he wrote his milk name, the one his mother called him as a child—

  —as the cab pulled to a stop.

  What did his brother know?

  Little Wang peeled open the door, but before he could start toward the street, a man as wide as a shikumen doorway jogged out of the station’s swinging doors and yanked him by his elbow.

  “Thought you’d run, eh?” He dragged Little Wang up the front stairs.

  Officer Feng’s car backed away, down the street to another call, another group of street kids selling goods, or maybe one of Big Eared Du’s opium dens.

  “I can run so fast, I’ll run as fast as a car. In fact, I’ll have my own car soon.”

  The fat man’s smile spread almost as wide as his waist.

  “And I’ll have a driver. I’ll call him Officer Big Ears Feng.”

  “Ah, just like the famous Big Eared Du,” the man said.

  “Exactly.”

  The officer laughed, his belly shaking against Little Wang’s arm.

  “Enjoy your stay,” he said, escorting Little Wang into an unlit cell full of street kids lounging on benches and sprawled across the floor. The boys snickered and took up more space so Little Wang couldn’t sit. Outside, the rain slowed to a patient drizzle. A strip of evening sunlight peeled cautiously through the bars of the cell’s only window, highlighting the dust, making even the air between the bodies tired and spent.

  The smell he knew well from his back alley home: urine and sweat. He avoided eye contact and found a corner beside two younger boys playing cards. Because of their matching cropped haircuts and stout Guangzhou noses, Little Wang assumed they were twins, a blessing in Old China—double the manpower, double the grandchildren. But these jailed twins clearly missed the mark.

  “You want a turn?” The twin on the left asked. His brother elbowed him in the ribs and whispered something into his ear. “Sorry,” the first twin clarified. “Guess this is only a two person game.”

  “That’s fine,” Little Wang said, backing against the cold cement. He pulled his knees to his chest, clenched shut his eyes and tried to sleep, but all he could hear was the slap of cards, the lull of country accents. All he could see was that bright red ass and how it went swish swish through the streets as if owning them. If I could dream, Doufu, he wanted to tell his brother now—that mouth flash-frozen in a gaping ‘O’ outside the car window—I’d dream only of this:

  O

  *

  Little Wang awoke to a ring of feet surrounding him, feet owned by tight-lipped smiles and clenched fists with purple-blanched knuckles. The boys spit slurs in Shanghainese, Hokkien, Hakka:

  Country Bumpkin.

  Nationalist.

  Turtle Shit.

  In the cell, they held his face to the ground, painting brush strokes with his saliva against the gray cement.

  A pun that made “turtle shit” out of Little Wang’s surname, turned a KING into EXCREMENT.

  Dirt sandpapered his tongue and iron taste dripped into his throat, filling his chest with the unmistakable feeling of drowning—unmistakable despite the fact he’d never drowned, at least not to his memory.

  “Say it, Chicken Face! Say ‘Big Ears Officer Feng sticks it to me’!”

  They fingered his pockets, digging deeper, fumbling past pieces of lint, finally finding his mother’s thimble and tossing it to one another, laughing gui smiles as the silver flickered in the barred moonlight. Little Wang closed his eyes, trying to think of something wonderful, but everywhere was a mess of color like the wavering tarp on which he’d watched the Ba Jin film that August evening in Shangyu City, the sun setting over Xiagai Mountain, teaching him the lesson of impermanence. Gold and red, purple at the edges, transitioning to pink and navy. Even the sun could be desiccated by darkness. His stomach tightened. They kicked his chest and a voice he didn’t recognize rose from the surface, desperate to be heard—

  “Never!” That voice said. If it weren’t for the hot, sticky syllable clinging to his lips, he would’ve thought someone larger, much more powerful, had spoken.

  Instinctively, he kicked back, feet striking shins. Knees. Anything. But he couldn’t kick them away. There were nearly a dozen of them. He tasted blood. He closed his eyes. He tasted the tart peach candies his mother bought after the Ba Jin film from a man with pockmarked cheeks and a mouth full of missing teeth. What night was it w
hen he never fell asleep on the long walk home, his mouth busy with salivations of peach, the wonderings of ghostly images on screen? The first time you see a face on film you touch your own cheek to remind yourself how real you are. He’d reached up to feel his mother’s cheek and she’d grimaced like his touch seared her skin. This was before she was in bed with the boils, tiny blisters climbing her legs the day she found a package from the Japanese on the road to Shangyu. She’d opened the box and slipped her fingers through the long, dry grains of rice before another villager snatched the parcel from her. Months passed after her death before they’d understand: . Anthrax. It didn’t matter who got there first, who was first infected: they were all victims in one way or another. Their mother—the boils too painful to endure—at least she eventually chose her death, though they blamed her for not asking permission to slip into the river, bags of rice tied to her ankles, as if personal endings were a collective decision.

  But Little Wang didn’t know this yet—couldn’t compile the details of a life that make a story, and vice versa. In this scene, his legs tired.5 The boys tired of their taunting. Slipping through one of the prisoners’ fingers, his mother’s thimble clinked along the floor, rolling under the cell’s bars and into the hallway where a fat hand clenched it, holding it to a flashlight’s beam. All the boys could see, crawling toward that very same light like bats to the moon, was the half-crescent double chin, the whiskered cheeks, that mole with the long, black hair sprouting, a hungry weed.

  “Wang,” the lips moved, teeth yellow, flashlight blinding as it searched for his face. “Come with me, Wang Guanling.” Little Wang’s milk name. So he’d seen the foggy scribbling on the car window: Wang Guanling—the name Little Wang’s mother spoke the night of Ba Jin’s film, the night she smoothed her hands through his hair promising him the nightmares would end, the night before the boils scaled her body, firing a fever into her forehead, making her words unintelligible, the thimble she placed in the pocket of the pants she made for his ever-growing legs, the thimble he kept even after he outgrew the pants, even after the silver lost its purpose—a lens without an eye, a thimble without a needle.