Empire of Glass

by Kaitlin Solimine

  Instinctively, he put his hands in his pockets, reaching for the thimble but only cold knuckles scraped his thigh. Gates unlocked, chains fell to the ground: the door opened just wide enough for him to slide through, ducking beneath the hot, sharp smell he knew from that afternoon, that hand heavy on his neck, its long pinky nail indenting his skin.

  “Come to my office,” Officer Feng’s hairy mole pulled a shadow across his cheek to his salt-whiskered chin.

  With only the flashlight’s orb to guide his steps and boyish laugher echoing behind him, Little Wang shuffled past the cells of sleeping criminals, vagabonds, construction workers without city permits, rooster women with jasmine petalled hair and clicking high heels. Officer Feng’s wet breath dampened his neck, a long fingernail tattooing Little Wang’s skin with a crescent moon.

  “I have a job for you,” the officer said, thrusting Little Wang into a room where two men sat beneath a swinging yellow bulb, pushing mahjong tiles across a slab of cardboard. Cigarette smoke tendrils grayed the air. Officer Feng plopped onto a wooden stool, twirling a glinting object between his fingers. Little Wang’s mother’s thimble, he thought, but no—squinting, Little Wang realized it was one of the lenses his brother and he hawked earlier. Officer Feng’s greasy fingers smeared the lens such that whatever clarity once seen through it was clouded.

  Officer Feng reached into his pocket for Little Wang’s mother’s thimble, holding it opposite the lens.

  “This silver could take you somewhere,” he said, holding the thimble to the light. Silver in those days: a rarity, possessed only by the newest of Party members, the chosen few. “But this,” he flicked the lens and the tinkling sound brought the mahjong players to a stop—damp lips pulled into frowns, fat brown hands paused atop the white tiles—“This is a skill that could take you to the wilds of Manchuria.” Officer Feng kicked the lens across the cement to the boy’s feet.

  Little Wang bent to retrieve it, rubbing the rough edges, knowing this was his father’s oversight at the grinding wheel. Officer Feng hadn’t noticed the inconsistencies, only the perfection of a lens that could make objects at a distance appear near. Like all fat cats, he believed the unbelievable.

  “I’ll give you back your precious silver…” Officer Feng said, pausing, lips wet and hungry for what Little Wang imagined to be a thick piece of fatty pork, “if you agree to join the People’s Volunteer Army tonight and leave for the War to Resist America and Aid Korea.” He spun the thimble on the table: spinning and spinning—would the spinning ever stop? Gravity won and the thimble slowed, careening off-balance before settling to an unstable rest.

  Little Wang raised the lens to his eye to peruse a warped room: Officer Feng’s head bulging and narrowing like in the hahajin mirrors, his own hands stretching then fattening. That midnight moon over a decade earlier, when the Nationalists marched through their village lighting fires above the Xiagai Hills. Hadn’t it been that way? He was still too young to question a childhood barely passed: his mother pushed to the ground and instructed to hand over everything she owned. Everything. But as the officers ransacked their home, she shoved the thimble beneath her tongue. He imagined the metallic taste flooding her mouth like a well-known song.

  He reached across the table to snatch the thimble from Officer Feng’s fat hands and popped the silver in his mouth, sucking on its serrated edges so hard his tongue bled.

  “You’re one wild child, Comrade Wang,” Officer Feng said. “Crazy enough for the army. You think you can handle that?”

  Officer Feng handed Little Wang a piece of paper with his milk name on it.

  A pen.

  A crimson stamp.

  The date: October 15, 1950.

  Opening his eyes wider, Little Wang saw his hands anew: larger, stronger, capable of great things. His mother’s thick hands smoothing a stretch of fabric. His father’s fingers blistered after a night grinding glass. Cen Cang Yan Hands, his father said, comparing the width to that of his brothers’—every man in the countryside possessed palms the size of crows. Little Wang imagined these hands scaling the pine-covered Changbai Mountains beside the Korean border, paddling across the black Yalu, while Officer Feng rambled on about the war soon raging at their borders.

  Little Wang signed, using the characters his mother made him practice every morning before school, the milk name—Wang Guanling—she called him at birth. He reveled in the title Officer Feng bestowed upon him: Comrade. Officer Feng called him Comrade Wang. Not even his brother was a Comrade.

  “Shoulder-to-shoulder with Men of the Cities and Men of the Country,” he said. “You could make lenses to see our nation’s enemies from afar, Comrade.” Officer Feng belted a somehow cheerless laugh.

  Comrade Wang forced a laugh in response and marveled at his ability to fake camaraderie, his capacity to make smooth and spotless objects that had warped, faded. A lens without an eye is just a piece of glass. True, Doufu. But it’s our touching of objects that gives them a use, a name.

  Tucking the thimble into his pocket, he nodded his assent to the fat-faced officer. He’d join the People’s Volunteer Army. He’d leave for the border the next day. Everything they said, he’d do. For once in his life, he reveled in the complacency of saying yes: .

  Officer Feng snatched the lens from his hand, slapping it atop the mahjong board. Feng’s colleagues glimpsed up to nod their ascent, before resuming the shuffling of tiles—white on brown, white on brown. Click-tap. Click-tap. Click-tap. Their hands slid with a feminine grace across the board.

  “You’ll leave tomorrow at sunrise,” Officer Feng said, breaking Comrade Wang’s reverie. “So hurry home.”

  *

  Comrade Wang’s unsteady breath fogged the midnight air as he stumbled, loose legged, down old Avenue Joffre with its autumn-heavy parasol trees toward the Chinese Quarter. On Chen Xiang-ge Road, his father waited for him in the arched shikumen doorway of their crowded apartment block, long body aslant, arms crossed in a flattened X, eyes lowering as Little Wang proudly, valiantly, stepped closer. Tomorrow Comrade Wang would leave for the border’s war.

  “Welcome home your very own Grandma Liu!” he shouted, mocking the idiom from A Dream of Red Mansions about the country bumpkin who felt like an outsider at the Jia Family home. It was the only story his mother, the sole literate member of their family, read him before bed. He smiled at the thought he’d finally made use of those hours his mother quizzed him on the story’s details.

  “Son,” his father said, curtailing an attempt at humor. “Son, you will follow me.”

  Phlegm rose from Comrade Wang’s lungs as he entered the damp apartment with its sleeping bodies lined in corners, an uneven chorus of snores. His father had never spoken to him this way; to his father, Comrade Wang was always Wang Guanmiao—or Wang Guanling when nostalgic. His father held a single candle, guiding his way. He cautiously stepped over his sleeping brothers toward the grinding room in the back. This was where Comrade Wang often found his father after midnight, shaping another set of lenses. His was a simple aim: to feed their growing guts. All he cared was that his boys were well-fed when really, Comrade Wang wanted to tell his father, theirs was a hunger extending well beyond their guts. Shouldn’t he, of all men, understand this? It seemed unlikely a son could be so different from his father, but here it was—a lineage split like a branch spiraling downwards to the earth when it should be reaching up, seeking the sun.

  Son. Son. Son. How could there be so many ways to speak just one word? Erzi.

  The baby’s legs taking their first step, Comrade Wang’s primary school teacher said of the ideograph for ‘son.’ Ready to run. He wanted to run this very moment, but his legs followed his father to the grinding room where moonlight nicked the corners of his station and painted the old man’s black hair silver-gray.

  Comrade Wang begrudgingly shook his head as his father gripped his arm and led him to the grinder. His father simply called him ‘son.’ He could’ve called him a useless fool. Could’ve said t
he boy’s brain was hu-li hu-tu, filled with the confusion of a growing manhood, the wasted education squandered. He could’ve pointed to his own shoulders, orbs of bone bursting beneath thick, tanned skin—calcified knots from years carrying water buckets from the river in Shangyu to his family farm at the base of Xia Gai Hill, his body tattooed with the marks of hard labor. He could tell the boy he was spoiled. That he’d done nothing to live up to the image of his dead mother. He could say all this, but he didn’t. He simply called the boy ‘son’ when he saw his lanky figure striding down the alleyway toward their home, a proud smile stretched across the boy’s face and a long shadow reaching to the man who was now a widow, warning him Comrade Wang was the victor, returning home for the last time.

  His father pulled a wooden stool across the cement, scratching like needle to glass. Comrade Wang’s skin twitched.

  “Sit,” his father said. He rolled the grinding machine on its hesitant, rusted wheels, positioning it atop the boy’s lap then walked to the front room, leaving him alone with his work.

  Comrade Wang cleared his throat, swallowed. His breathing was near normal again yet everything felt different. In the darkness, he could barely see his knuckles, let alone the lenses he was supposed to grind into convex and concave shapes, the lenses now impossible to sell at the Park Hotel because his legs had been too slow. Turtle’s legs. Baby’s legs. First steps. How could he not run as fast as his brother? Why had Doufu left him behind, his shadow leering as if mocking Comrade Wang’s inability to lift his feet and make a move?

  “Turtle shit,” he said loudly so his brother, asleep in the front room, would hear. Their father was already there, undressing for sleep, his shirtless chest a sunken, yellow cave.

  His father unrolled his pants to his ankles, leaving them in a heap on the floor then slipped beneath the quilted beizi they’d shared for a decade, the one his wife made with her industrious, thick fingers. Not one sleeping body roused at the sound of Comrade Wang’s voice, his uncles’ bones clinging too deeply to the necessity of exhausted sleep.

  His father blew out the candle and the wick fizzled from orange to red to purple to blue to black—how quickly time was lost in the span of a flame becoming smoke. He slept on the mattress the boys shared with him, its innards filled with discarded newspaper shreds. Every morning they awoke smelling like yesterday’s news.

  Comrade Wang worked intently, the sliding of glass to the grinder’s tough sandpaper.

  Sharply: the pulling of midnight moon lighting the backs of his hands.

  Sharply: red-gold-blue sparks flecking the air as he worked to smooth the glass that would one day allow a man to see across a four-lane avenue, to the Huangpu River with its overstuffed junks floating listlessly, its brisk current dragging their Great Nation’s farmland run-off to the East China Sea. Maybe his father was right—maybe this industry was important; after all, what are we without our vision?

  “Are you going to turn around?” Doufu’s voice startled him—the glass slipped beneath his distracted grip and chafed his knuckle so badly white fat showed through, pink blood meandering hand to wrist. “If you have something to say, you should be man enough to say it to my face.”

  Comrade Wang turned. His brother’s dark shape greeted him, barely framed by moon: Wide-shouldered, bow-legged, flat-foreheaded. Although his brother inherited their father’s hardened heart, his body was their mother’s—sturdy, broad shouldered, thick limbed. Comrade Wang, on the other hand, was the perfect picture of their father’s physicalities—long-limbed but not at all limber, as if he and his father hadn’t grown into the bodies assigned at birth. His brother marched through the world, led by a tank-like chest. Everywhere he went, he demanded an audience. Comrade Wang simply leaned against walls, pulled a long shadow across floors like a dying, dehydrated tree.

  “Fuck your mother’s pussy,” Comrade Wang said, not recognizing the tenor of his own voice. As he gripped his injured hand, the veins beneath his skin pulsed feebly.

  His brother’s face wavered, lips slinking into a frown—or did they rise into a grimacing smile?

  “Go,” his brother said.

  “I’m already gone.” Comrade Wang reached for the soft blue satchel their mother made from old handkerchiefs years before. In it, he packed what few belongings he’d need (underwear, socks, a comb, the silver thimble). He tore a swatch of cotton from an old work shirt and wrapped the cloth around his bleeding hand. His brother stood in the corner of the grinding room patiently witnessing his departure like a stray cat.

  “You’re really doing this,” his brother said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Were you going to say good-bye?”

  “Good-bye.” Comrade Wang slung the packed knapsack over his shoulders. Carrying a load suddenly felt more natural than ever, his body comforted by the burden. He was, after all, a countryman’s Wang.

  He turned and headed for the door, tiptoeing over the sleeping bulges in the front room. He counted each good-bye: Second Uncle with his calm, closed eyes; Third Uncle with his pregnant wife in Cen Cang Yan drinking the folk medicines meant to provide a son; Cousins Sheng, Ling, and Zhang, each taller than the next, their long Wang noses and flat-topped heads; and finally, his Father, the man usually awake after midnight now assuredly asleep. Comrade Wang had never witnessed his father asleep before—he always roused before them and worked well past their bedtime. As his foot lifted over his father’s chest, he looked like he exhaled into this world from a distant place—his lips curled downward in a removed frown, eyes, closed, displaying their beloved double-flap eyelids, his chest more expansive than ever. Their father asleep: nothing like the man he knew in life—the man moving from one door to the next hawking shoddy goods, his Cen Cang Yan hands with the thickest fingers of any urbanite. My father, he thought, perhaps the last time he’d think those words in the man’s presence. The shape of Comrade Wang’s body still dented the mattress beside the old man, so many years this mattress buoyed them in sleep.

  “I’m not the dreamer now,” he whispered thinly, hoping his brother would hear. “You are.” He waited under the shikumen frame for his brother’s retort. Nothing came but the kiss of a passing breeze, the shuffling of unknown feet on nearby Yan’an Road. Finally, he closed the wooden door behind him. He observed his own shadow, how it pulled knowingly down the alleyway leading to the center of the city. If he took that first step across the threshold, he could never look back. He positioned his knapsack squarely on his shoulders, lifted his head to look forward and only ever forward, and sucked in his stomach. When he did, his abdomen recoiled—the earlier beating in the prison cell left his waistline bruised and sore. He doubled over, coughing up the remains of that day’s lunch (week-old congee and a stale, bready mantou).

  “Good-bye,” he whispered, if only to himself, as he stepped into the quiet, empty path and over his spent, moonlit remains.

  Amber street lamps traced his path, led him up snaking roads to wider avenues he’d never before traversed. Brick buildings entombed the moon, the sky the only witness of this farewell to the city of his teenage years. What did it matter what he could see beyond here? Today, said the constant drumroll of time. Again: Today. Today. Today.

  Comrade Wang sang his reply: North, north, north.

  Finally, the moon descended below the horizon of sloping brown roofs, showing only half its face between buildings; in the morning, the sun regained its rightful prominence in a boastful, post-storm sky. At dawn, Comrade Wang entered the volunteer army’s station, slipped into his newly issued uniform (crisp at the wrists, cuffed at the ankles), and joined the others who looked just like him—suited in olive with brown belts cinched tightly around thin waists, hands clasped tightly, ever so sweatily, behind backs—boys becoming men. From a photograph on the wall of the dressing room, General Peng Dehuai looked over them with stern, paternal pride. They saluted him, sharing in the excitement that maybe one day they too could be generals, could survive their own long march northward ove
r their nation’s highest mountains and fastest running rivers.

  In chorus now: North, north, they repeated, excited by the prospect of walking to their nation’s borderlands. Our new nation, they said, pulling on the word that implied an empire turned into a homeland. Finally, they were a part of something larger than their own thin shapes, those timid shadows they wanted to abandon in the alleyways of this squat city. Surrounded by their comrades, they told themselves this direction was the right one. The only one. They believed if they squinted just so, they could see the end, a final destination bursting hot and bright from down the long tunnel of interminable marching days. Within a week, that scent of hot glass, so long embedded in Comrade Wang’s skin, was gone. His knuckles healed, new skin eagerly closing in atop the old in a spider web of scars his wife would one day kiss over and over again trying to make them disappear.6 At night, along unlit country paths, the moon directed the troops toward tomorrow’s sunrise. The future never felt so within their grip and the past—well, they did not speak of wasted, foregone things….

  They marched over purple hills swathed in evening sun and skipped into sloping, empty valleys, across dung-scented oxen-plowed fields of towns with new names like Rising Sun Village and People’s Hope Fields and through clustered, smoky villages smelling of a childhood they’d once known but couldn’t name anymore.

  They called each another ‘Brother’ and forgot what cruel nicknames they once shouldered at home. They were family now. One Jia——sheltered beneath a shared roof. Their true fathers—Chairman Mao, Lin Biao, Deng Xiaoping, and Peng Dehuai—once crossed mountains as high as these, survived winds that seared skin off cheeks; these brave men would lead them home. If they followed the paths of their comrades and generals, fell solidly into a confident, forward-facing line, they knew, like a flock of swallows racing to overtake a setting sun, they’d never fall behind.