Empire of Glass

by Kaitlin Solimine

  4. The unraveling: she refers to this “unraveling” here and several times throughout the text although a particular moment of the “Great Unraveling” cannot be deciphered by your translator. “Where did we unravel?” she asked me on the sun deck one evening, or I think I remember her asking as the moon crested, buttering our heads. “I don’t understand,” I said. She simply smiled. Early, I mistook her mischievousness for knowledge, her coy smiles for someone who could answer the greatest questions. Later, I wasn’t as naïve.

  5. “What’s imagined and what’s real?” Li-Ming passed me a telescopic lens, asked me to examine the cluttered hutongs beyond Houhai, mentioned a woman named Cao ‘E whose name I wouldn’t encounter again until reading this text decades later. I couldn’t find my way to the hutong eaves, the lens focused only on the placid faces of colorful Mandarin ducks.

  6. How many kisses erase a map of scars? Did she know their boundaries—their right angles and crisscrosses—as well as she could remember the decisive pull of dying sunlight on his head as he bounded the four flights of stairs in evening, carrot fronds waving from a canvas bag that once held a pig’s head, its ear flapping just as assuredly and reminding her that silent creatures have their own manner of speaking?

  Kang-Lin

  Once outside Jingshan Park, we jogged down the hutongs, ducking below beizi hung to dry, feet too loud for our ears, fear gnawing at our shins as we left the city’s spacious heart and entered the cluttered arteries clogged with coal fires rising from inner courtyards. This was the coldest autumn Beijing had known; our neighbors hoarded coal rations, fought over fallen summer twigs like wild dogs tearing apart chicken bones. Kang-Lin and I turned past the old city moat where months before we spent our Sundays fishing for trout. Behind fogged windows, human shapes shifted, bodies rising from bed, forearms wiping sleep from eyes, fingers sliding the fragile innards of eggshells into boiling water. Doors opened and closed, moons kissed mirrored reflections on frosted patches beneath gutters. Kang-Lin was quiet, which meant she wasn’t sure our agreed-upon excuse for our whereabouts would save us. Methods of possible punishment strummed my thoughts: the lash of a leather belt slipping across my bare buttocks, the swat of a metal wok against hipbone, the slap of a wet-palmed hand to chilled cheek. My grandfather’s bulging eyes, my grandmother’s manipulative scowl: I was never the grandchild they expected. If only they had a grandson. I never asked anyone why I was an only child. The “Most Prideful Child,” my parents called me behind closed doors. I jogged after Kang-Lin, lungs burning, my heavy pack slapping my back, surely leaving a bruise.

  At the corner to our parents’ danwei, she stopped. I’d never seen my friend so breathless.

  “You… go… first…” she wheezed.

  “No!” I wasn’t going alone. We sinned together, we accepted guilt together. That’s how friends were. “Why me?”

  “You’re a better liar. I saw it in your eyes in Teacher Liang’s class when she had you by the neck.”

  Like a sewing needle pricking the softest thumb, Kang-Lin reached inside me and scooped out something resembling pride. What was left dangled in the cold air between us. I was ugly from this angle. Moonlight glinted off cracked windowpanes and somewhere a hungry tomcat meowed, shrill as an old tai-tai unhappy with life’s meaningless lot.

  “That’s not true,” I protested, but as soon as I spoke, a shadow approached from the corner of the danwei.

  Kang-Lin pulled me to duck behind a pile of coal briquettes saved for the factory’s fires.

  The footsteps drew closer, our heartbeats pulsing, then the sound miraculously shifted farther away, toward the blare of the loudspeakers.

  “Go,” she nudged me.

  “No.” I still didn’t understand why I had to be the brave one. Or was she insinuating she wasn’t going home, that she had other plans not involving me tonight?

  I turned to ask why she wouldn’t walk home with me but then a shadow much larger than my own consumed the brick wall and wavered there, steady yet shifting, a foot tapping, hand on hip.

  “Wang ba dan…” Kang-Lin’s curse was fragile as a cuckoo’s song in winter.

  I turned from my friend to face the shadow’s owner and there she was—Teacher Liang: her cool, tall figure, a cigarette between her fingers, her free hand brushing snow off her lapel. When had it started snowing? I tilted my head to the sky and the heavens descended toward me in patterns of impeccable light. The world didn’t care about me at all right now, and for the first time I wondered if it ever had, yet here I was, standing face-to-face with the enemy, being called to say or do something brave beyond measure. I knew I wouldn’t perform well.

  “If it isn’t my favorite student,” Teacher Liang said. A laugh the size and shape of an apple formed a cloud between us. The apple took its time disappearing. “Out for a midnight stroll?”

  “My grandmother needed soy milk for my grandfather who’s sick with the flu,” I lied. Kang-Lin was right. It felt good and right on me—the first in a long line of lies tasting as sweet as mung bean soup.

  “Soy milk? At midnight?”

  “For his stomach.” I wasn’t surprised at how easy these traitorous words spilled from my mouth. For once I felt I had something to protect—and that object was shrouded in my backpack, lying against my back like a stone. The moon itself as witness: we were tied inescapably to the words we loved, the idea of a language so beautiful and forbidden.

  “I’m sure she’d rather you get home now that it’s snowing.” Teacher Liang pulled the cigarette to her mouth and sucked on it, horse-like in her devotion. I vowed I’d never love someone who smoked.

  I nodded, stepping around her and shuffling my feet to avoid slipping on the slick path between buildings. Kang-Lin stepped out as well, standing beside me like a devoted sentry. She nudged me to walk forward and although my feet didn’t know better, I followed her lead.

  “You’re lucky your father was a good friend of mine,” Teacher Liang called to Kang-Lin as we walked away. “Your friend Li-Ming isn’t as lucky with that cunt of a mother.”

  Something within me unraveled, a top snipped loose of its string, a planet released of gravity. My entire body went limber, knees separating from thighs, thighs stretching from hips, hips removed from waist, waist departing from—WAIT: to where had the balloon of my beating heart escaped?

  Many years later I will look up from this blue-lined book hoping to see something of the girl I was that night outside the apartment complex’s dusty windows but there’s nothing. For millennia, winter promised spring. That, as we know, is the natural progression of things. Nature: something we could rely upon for consistency. But it was the night I learned we’d lost the natural way that I also lost myself.

  I stood looking at Kang-Lin who was nodding at me to hurry home. Her face told a story I could read to its last page—we escaped more severe punishment and now were free to carry out our plan: To read these books cover-to-cover as many times as we could and to live by their words; to teach everyone we knew of their significance, or to carry this with us, the most sacred secret two young girls can carry? There was a glimmer of hope blanketed by urgency. I imagined us like the Bodhidharma, using words to rid the world of words as he traveled from India to Indonesia and all the way to the Shaolin Temple. That’s the inescapable tragedy of youth: everything feels utterly important. Only with age, the inevitable passing of years, do we forget how much urgency there once was. How much power was contained in the necessity for everything we did to be filled with so much purpose and meaning.

  “Hurry home before I call your Capitalist pig of a mother,” Teacher Liang said. Her face glistened, a pork hind left too long on a banquet table. I half-expected houseflies to encircle her cheeks. She’d always be the ugliest woman I’d ever know even though the local cadres wrapped their meaty forearms around her hips at every danwei party.

  Kang-Lin tugged on my sleeve and once again gestured it was time to go.

  “Fine,” I was sure I whis
pered even though there was nothing in me that wanted to return home.

  As we jogged along the usual paths, past the second row of buildings just constructed in the Soviet style, their square, unembellished shapes, I could see my friend’s shadow wavering through the alleyways, but not her form. She was five steps ahead, always a little faster, more eager to get where we were going; it didn’t matter if it was the Wangfujing night market or the Fragrant Hills or the communal toilets outside school. Always, she got there first. Always, I followed. I wasn’t yet old enough to understand I’d be following her forever, that I’d never catch her.

  “Listen,” she said, when she finally stopped at the bottom of her apartment’s narrow entryway. In the new danwei complex, her parents were afforded a plum second floor spot—not on the undesirable ground floor, but high enough for a hearty cross-breeze in summer.

  “What?” I was at the short end of a very long rope that started unraveling in class the week prior and now frayed to the point I wasn’t sure which section was safe to hold.

  “You have to promise me something. Are you listening?”

  I nodded but she couldn’t see me; the moon was on her shoulders, not mine.

  “Promise?” Her head leaned closer.

  “Yes,” I said. “I promise. But tell me what I’m promising.”

  She cuffed her hand around my wrist.

  “Promise me tomorrow you’ll return to the Scholar Tree at midnight. I haven’t finished reading everything I need to read to you. If we meet there, I can read to the end. Then I’ll tell you what we need to do in this life and in all the lives we will one day become.”

  “Isn’t there just this life?”

  “It’s not that simple.”7

  “Nothing with you ever is.” This sounded more caustic than I’d intended and her eyes did that thing they’d done earlier where they grew both bright and damp.

  “Just trust me. Can you promise you understand there’s more than this?” Zhe ge bi nei ge hai you duo. A strange construction of duality, like no form in form; no shadow without shadow. She always talked in riddles and when she didn’t sound pretentious, she sounded like someone worth listening to.

  “Okay,” I said. “I promise.”

  “Good,” she loosened her grip and walked to her stairwell. Earlier we said we’d each ascend separately so as not to make too much noise. Naturally, she would go first. But on the first step, she paused, only her feet to shins visible in the dark, the rest of her body cut by night. She said, “You must believe me.” She didn’t wait for me to confirm, instead leaving the weight of that mighty “must.”

  “Of course I believe you,” I said, but it didn’t matter—she was already on the second landing slipping her key into the lock and quietly sliding past the doorframe and into bed. I waited a few minutes, long enough for two homing pigeons to fly past the moon, their shrill whistles cutting the night in half, the moon soon enshrouded in a thick, impermeable cloud.

  “Of course,” I said again. Funny how words lose potency when spoken to no one in particular.

  The cloud hung around the moon, satisfied.8 I stood there, waiting, for what I wasn’t exactly sure but already knew there are times in our lives we must sit and wait, stare at walls or into the spines of books, and if we don’t patiently observe the passing of events we’ll miss the point entirely, even if that point is beyond comprehension, cannot be pulled through the thin head of a needle or draped like a cloak over the entirety of the universe, a sheet blanketing a lampshade or shrouding a forgotten corpse.

  Finally, I walked into the apartment where my grandparents stood in the doorway with a look on their faces of relief and anger. I swallowed so deeply I could hear my heart in my throat, feel the moon crash onto the city’s rooftops, this roof above my head specifically, this home, now mine, where I vowed to sleep until I didn’t wake up.

  7. As Cold Mountain writes, “If you were too dumb the life before, you won’t be enlightened today.”

  8. When had it stopped snowing? In the world of Li-Ming’s making, the moon mocks us.

  Baba

  The chill of Changbai Mountain in November bites your heels. Fleas survive the frigid temperatures. You don’t know how, but the critters ignore the cold, crawling up your legs and burrowing into the warmth of your sparse, downy leg hair.

  Fat Wang instructed his colleague Skinny Wang, previously and occasionally known among certain circles as Comrade Wang, to bathe in vinegar to kill the fleas. Like a well-trained schoolboy, Skinny Wang dutifully did so every night alongside his comrades; in the morning, they’d gather in tight groups to lick the freezing yellowed tips off their fingers, huddled together under the cotton bedding with the winter-white sun above as frosted as their bones.

  “Marching time!” Comrade Deng barked one morning, sliding his face under the front flap of their tent. Deng was their leader. He guided them to the 40th Battalion’s station in Andong City, on the border of North Korea. He was also the son of a party member who participated in the Long March. Deng never let the troops forget this, repeatedly telling the story of how his father lost his toes to frostbite on Jiajin Mountain every time one of the boys complained about the cold in Liaoning.

  Fat Wang snored, asleep on the ground beside Skinny Wang, oblivious to Deng’s call.

  “Fattie!” Deng barked, stamping Fat Wang’s cheek with the butt of his cold gun. “Wake up. It’s marching time.”

  Walking was bearable only by listening to the music of it: beat beat stomps your right heel; beat beat echoes your left. Rocks easily tumbled out of their way, mice scampered beneath the thick roots of tall pines. At Andong City, they set up camp just in sight of the Yalu River, the new nation’s watery border with North Korea. Chunks of ice stoppered the river’s flow, a wide expanse of silver-black set against small puffs of coal smoke rising sporadically from the villages surrounding the unassuming city. These boys stood at the edge of the empire. The Middle Kingdom. On their topographical maps, China was the center, Korea a tiny spigot grasping for the waves of the vast Pacific.

  Skinny Wang sat at the scope, setting the focus on the yellow marshy banks across the Yalu, his Russian pps submachine gun strapped across his chest, the same gun the great Martyr Lei Feng would display in posters glued to walls all over the country. Skinny Wang only fired the weapon once—during his first day on the job when, skittishly, he mistook a deer grazing in the far bank’s forests for an enemy advance. The deer dropped, twitching, as several North Korean villagers ran from behind the pines, knifing the animal’s throat and fighting over the meatiest parts. Despite this mistake, it was his assignment to watch for abnormalities on the shore and to alert Deng of suspicious activity—American troops amassing over the hills, a plane’s wings tipping above the horizon. He sat for weeks seeing nothing but dense winter clouds punctuated by large bodies of black geese in flight and flocked Vs of seagulls. One day, a pair of red-crowned cranes streaked across his view, nearly knocking him off his stool—so wide were their wings he thought he witnessed a fighter jet rising above the purple-fogged banks.

  “See a ghost?” Fat Wang poked Skinny Wang’s shoulder. Fat Wang stirred a tin of hot mung bean soup, a hungered look on his face. The thing about Fat Wang was that he wasn’t actually fat—in fact, his body was quite toned, but his face was wide and his cheeks hadn’t outgrown their childhood plumpness. Skinny Wang wondered if this annoyed his comrade, both the cheeks and the name. The nickname also tied him to Skinny Wang because the two were both Wangs, one fat, the other skinny, and they found themselves gravitating toward one another on the march, over the nightly campfires, in the tents, two planets drawn into orbit by the same sun. But neither understood why, nor found anything particularly compelling in the other. Fat Wang was from Beijing, as many of the troops were, and Skinny Wang kept his country boy beginnings to himself, only the occasional farmer’s idiom popping out accidentally which he’d quickly gloss over with a mention of rooster women in Shanghai. Women were what kept the boys
going (talk of them, fantasies at night, glimpses in the villages through which they’d marched)—all this time together, too many men without the accompaniment of the female sex, they became skeletons of their old selves. Their teeth like fangs ripping into their once-weekly allotment of pork belly, cheeks and chins swathed with stubble and grease—a warm bath was a luxury, a clean, sharp razor even more so. As Fat Wang stirred his soup, he hunched, shoulders shrugged as if matted with a coat of fur.

  “I didn’t see anything but a few birds,” Skinny Wang said, readjusting the scope. He sat so long like this, a charcoal ring indented a halo around his right eye—the stronger side—and sometimes, when walking to camp, he’d cover his left with a hand in order to see properly. His left eye had grown so weak if he viewed the distant world with both eyes, his vision wavered, his mind incapable of making sense of the doubling of objects, the crossing of scenes.

  He lowered the scope, scanned the banks with his naked, useless eyes. The white cranes had alit on a muddy patch, dipped their long necks into the river for a drink. White on brown. Two mirror images—but were there two? This was not the first time Skinny Wang’s eyes deceived him: first, his mother’s face below the husky river surface—and later, a face he didn’t recognize in the dark, smudging clear in a photograph’s reluctant ink. But now, behind the cranes, a white face was dressed in white—could it be? Most definitely a woman, her face smeared with dried mud, head thrashing, hair golden in the morning sun. He narrowed his focus, ignoring the cranes, even Fat Wang’s didactic diatribe that began each morning with the sun’s rise. Today’s fixation:

  “You know why they call this place Andong?” He thought he was the smartest of the soldiers because he’d read the Marxist heroes cover-to-cover. He even quoted Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism while they showered in the open-roofed bathhouses, one hand atop his groin to protect against the drafts bleeding in from above. They’d mock there was something quite material hidden beneath Fat Wang’s palm to which their lesser-endowed comrade would simply smile and shake his head: his comrades would never understand Lenin.