Empire of Glass

by Kaitlin Solimine

  10. “A rustic living in a beam-and-thatch dwelling

  has few horses or carriages at his gates,

  but in deep woodlands the wild birds gather

  and the broad valley streams are full of fish;

  he takes his children to gather bramble-berries

  and his wife to help him

  husband his fields; back in his home

  he has nothing to treasure

  except the books piled high on his bed.”

  —Han Shan (trans. Peter Hobson)

  11. “I have a favor to ask you,” Li-Ming said. We sat on the sun deck enjoying the winter sun’s early apricity, ficus plants prickling our backs with spiny, impetuous fingers. “What do you need?” I was eager to earn her affection, to become the most loved member in this strange tribe, the Wangs, a name once bestowed to kings now most common in the kingdom. But memory is a fickle test: her nose, waxen and freckled; her shirt, plaid flannel, soft when brushed; her eyes, loose in their sockets, unsteadily judging the world beyond the slanted, frosted windows of our perch. She was beautiful to those who knew her; to others, I don’t know—she was average, commonplace? Where are you magpie who flicked my window each morning, thrice tapping the glass then flying off? Where are you baggy-faced yooo yooo egg vendor with your rusted bicycle and clanging bell? I’m making excuses for what happened next, diverting the eye’s attention so the heart can’t hear itself skip a beat. “I need you to help me to my ending,” Li-Ming said. Sun pooled at our feet, climbing slowly to our ankles. Quickly, I thought of an excuse: “You’re not that sick.” But as soon as I spoke, I knew there was another explanation. “Someone sighed, said ‘Cold Mountain sir your poems possess no sense’,” she quoted her beloved, the same man I was eager to read. “No,” I said. “Your ending isn’t beginning yet.” But four months later, I heard my pitched, catching voice say, “Yes, okay.” Yes, I will take you to the tallest mountain in the city. Yes, I will find a way to end this. Yes, you will be cloaked in white and we will mourn you for decades, until we ourselves are the ones being mourned. But during the earliest question, the initial rebuttal, a housefly zipped between the ficuses, smelling for rot and decay. When it landed on Li-Ming’s shoulder, I didn’t brush it off. How has that become my life’s greatest regret? Not the midnight in the dark room or the mid-morning on the hill or everything that followed—perhaps shame is a tattoo we can’t erase.

  12. For as long as I knew her (shorter than a cicada’s life span but longer than a cricket’s), Li-Ming was fascinated with animate objects turned inanimate. The first month of my arrival, she accompanied me to the warehouse of a famous Beijing shadow puppeteer, telling me he was an old friend yet asking me not to tell Baba where we were going. On the outskirts of the city, near the Fragrant Hills that still smelled of jasmine and fresh-cut grass, the puppeteer converted a giant factory space into a storage room for his shadow puppets from decades of performances. They hung from the rafters, mismatched sizes, colors, and translucencies, and when the sun hit them at a specific angle, they seemed to wave, like a fetus in utero reaching to her mother’s touch. “Isn’t this beautiful?” Li-Ming asked. I didn’t know the word “creepy” in Chinese so I said, “Very strange. Like death.” “No, not like death at all,” she said. “Like immortality.” I’ve since wondered what happened to that puppeteer and his stock of immortal puppets. The autumn leaves, a red world lit from the inside, kicked up as we walked away from the lonely man and his puppets that afternoon, leaving a season or two in our wake. His warehouse was in a Beijing suburb that’s now a technology park, rows of high-rise condominiums scooped up by eager millennials as investments, so new and empty with their cool granite countertops, stainless steel appliances. Who buries trees? Who memorializes stumps and roots? Where do the dead puppets lie now, forever entombed in a world without light?

  Kang-Lin

  We could sit a thousand years beneath a wan’s worth of trees under the scope of millions of stars forming trillions of galaxies that we simultaneously can and cannot see. We could sit there because we’ve been asked to. Because someone we loved long enough to matter to us asked us to return here. We could sit with our bones growing cold, that same cold edging into our hips and down our femurs to our knees and our tiny, frivolous toe joints. We could remember this time—when we sat too long in the growing cold of midnight—because we are now old enough to look back on times like these and sigh.

  Ahhh… Why did we do that again?

  The answer is simple: love. No, it’s much more complicated—involves a tangled mix of: fear, love, disgust, envy, awe, stupidity, genius, madness, and something so close to the inane we could call it “meaning,” but we cannot decipher exactly the right adjective nor human emotion. Needless to say, there we sat, freezing to the point of exhaustion, not having worn thick enough socks or our winter-weight school pants. The scarf that was once ours had been handed down to our younger cousin who wore it like a Russian babushka because she thought it was funny to make fun of foreigners and our parents indulged her with hooting laughter and the widening of their eyes with their fingers.

  What else is there to say about a girl who wakes up one day and wants to be more than who she is, who she’ll never be?

  I sat beneath the ambivalent leaves of that Scholar Tree in late autumn. I didn’t know it was the last season the tree would ever bloom, so quickly it shrank and hardened like a peach in the sun. I wish everything beautiful didn’t eventually turn hard and ugly.

  I sat long enough the cold made my feet numb, the tree dropping its last leaves on my shoulders.13 I wanted to tell a story from the beginning so I could understand why we chased fishermen along moats and down willow-arched alleyways past the stench of an old man’s piss and the mad woman who called for a daughter named “Little Plum” and how this made us laugh and spit mouthfuls of peach teas we’d bought in glass bottles from the illegal vendor in the third alleyway past the gated entrance to PLA Children’s Middle School. Why was I studying alongside China’s best and brightest? Why did anyone think I was anything like them—how they spouted Mao phrases with bitter ease, how they pledged allegiance to our new flag with its strident stars—how was that me? But it must have been. And I played the part so brilliantly. But then again, not brilliantly enough.

  Because I was alone. Because the cells in my cheek were dead and Teacher Liang knew it. Because those who understood more than I knew I didn’t believe enough. There’s a fine line between losing yourself to a cause and holding the smallest kernel of disbelief—it makes you shine differently than the other stars hunched over their metal desks in Classroom #5, Hallway #2. But we are only obvious to those who harbor the same pea-sized glowing kernels. That’s why Kang-Lin led me to the tree, and why she abandoned me there. Because we can’t learn anything in the presence of others. Because, like Han Shan says, loneliness is liberation.14

  While I waited, I picked at a scab on my elbow and read the words I imagined Kang-Lin wanted me to read. How this old man somewhere on an unnamed mountain over a thousand years ago had written on walls, or on his hands, or on the carved wooden shaft of a broom, and someone thought these misshapen characters were pertinent enough to human life to memorize, to pass down to others, to eventually press woodblocks into thick, woolen pages, to butterfly sew with horsehair and distribute to the most learned, in every cardinal direction.

  Listen, he says, in his most patient verse…

  That chilled evening, as I sat counting the ways in which my best friend had wronged me, Kang-Lin was sent, by whom or what jurisdiction we’d never learn (although we had our suspicions), to live with her parents in Gansu, in a far-away village with a name like Left of Nowhere, or East of the Third Hill, or Big Cliff Above Valley. She didn’t say good-bye, was transported by bicycle cart by her grandmother on a train before class, before I could ask her what she planned to do with these books, what other magic we could perform beneath that ancient, cursed tree. What was I meant to do with Cold Mountain, a language cup
ped within seashells?

  Since that night, I’ve wondered if because of the book she was sent west. I wondered if I too would be punished for my curiosity—“to read too many books is harmful.” But I found strength in a language not my own, a realization that form is but one manifestation of reality—the physical: a farce. We love the physical but fear it too—if only we understood:

  Who takes the Cold Mountain Road

  Takes a road that never ends

  I never heard the last lines of that famous Roman verse she began, the English-language tome in her bag and now in some distant village or perhaps buried beneath a rock or burned in the latest courtyard fire—she’d left only one piece of a puzzle whose size I couldn’t gauge from where I sat.

  The next night I sat at home alone, my grandmother at a struggle meeting near school, loudspeakers blaring:

  Pig.

  Ten years.

  Four evils.

  I sat on the living room futon, leaning against the cold concrete wall, and pulled the book from my knapsack. I ripped one of the earliest pages from the book, sheared off a piece, placed the paper on my tongue. I let it melt, attempting to taste the words but all I sensed was birch, dust, and the tips of fingers, a muted, unforgivable salt. I chewed, swallowing the shred, and then another, fully consuming an entire page, the earliest of Cold Mountain’s poems, or so said whoever chose to place them in this order, how words along a cave wall could become strokes of a printer’s ink in a bound book—is this what he expected? I wanted to hate Kang-Lin. I suppose part of me did, but another part was dumbstruck by my aloneness in a world that once felt so vibrant and alive.

  Kang-Lin, we were so stupid. Stupid to believe we are anything important or bigger than our stupid, small bodies. Then I remembered the moon rising above the Scholar Tree, how round and white and ebullient with its perpetual circling around the earth. Rising, setting, rising, setting. How consistent. The very same moon Cold Mountain once peered up at from his perch above the clouds. Things are different, but then also very much the same. There was a deep, abiding comfort in this revelation, that I was small but also large, important and meaningless, could be remembered—and just as easily forgotten.

  I chewed the tough paper, hoping eventually this lost man’s language would find its way to the pit of my stomach, a heavy boulder burrowing into the riverbed of my body’s final shape.

  People who meet Cold Mountain

  they all say he’s crazy

  his face isn’t worth a glance

  his body is covered in rags

  they don’t understand my words

  their words I won’t speak

  this is for those to come:

  visit Cold Mountain sometime15

  13. “Kang-Lin took me there. Where is Kang-Lin?” she asked one night as I wiped sweat off her brow. “Who is Kang-Lin?” I later asked Baba. “I don’t know. One of Li-Ming’s old colleagues?” But something told me he knew. Something told me he swept this name beneath the bed along with Li-Ming’s hand-knit sweaters (too hot for summer, never worn again), her Fed Zorki camera (retired once it was too heavy for her to lift), and this book. For how many years was she chasing a ghost? For how many years will I?

  14. A contemporary Chinese writer, Gao Xingjian, would one day echo Li-Ming’s compulsion towards loneliness, writing:

  “You know that I am just talking to myself to alleviate my loneliness. You know that this loneliness of mine is incurable, that no-one can save me and that I can only talk with myself as the partner of my conversation.

  In this lengthy soliloquy you are the object of what I relate, a myself who listens intently to me—you are simply my shadow.

  As I listen to myself and you, I let you create a she, because you are like me and also cannot bear the loneliness and have to find a partner for your conversation.

  So you talk with her, just like I talk with you.

  She was born of you, yet is an affirmation of myself.

  You are the partner of my conversation, transform my experiences and imagination into your relationship with her, and it is impossible to disentangle imagination from experience.”

  I met Gao Xingjian once at the Frankfurt Book Fair; we found ourselves sharing an elevator in the center’s hall, just the two of us, miraculously, and although I spent several rushed seconds attempting to say something revelatory in Chinese, my lips clamped shut. “Thanks,” I said in English, as he held his arm against the door for me to pass. I suppose when we are in the presence of those whose words we love, we lose all semblance for words; perhaps there’s an allotment of well-put phrases in the world and if we’re not one of the creators of those phrases, we best stay silent.

  15. The night after Baba hands me this book, I dream of taking a long train ride and finding myself in a town with the air of a business hotel lobby: wide boulevards, flashing traffic signals, empty high-rises reflecting an obscured sun. “Is this Cold Mountain?” I ask a man in a suit who picks his nose with a long pinky finger, looking equally as lost as I feel. He stares. There is no Cold Mountain, a voice says. There is no Cold Mountain. There is no Cold Mountain. Give up.

  The First Letter To You, in Poem Form

  Dear Kang-Lin,

  You’ll ask me: Why write? You’d laugh at the sight of it.

  Pen in hand. Paper on lap. Empty lines.

  Anger: a cool stick, a bare ass.

  Forgiveness: the ass’s whip, stammering you into submission.

  Friends forgive. Friends leave behind books.

  In the dark the moon is bright and whole as the night we met.

  You traced stars on the map above our heads and we reached up to poke our fingers through the canvas of a known world.

  But we didn’t.

  And now you are gone.

  No fish caught from Zhongnanhai’s moat. No fishermen hauling an evening’s meal. All dried out. The city walls crumbling, newly paved roads for bicycles, mianbao vans.

  Old Bug Eyes in the library sniff-sniffs when I ask for the collection of poems in his name. Good luck.

  This city smells as bad as Gan Ming’s underarms.

  Rats swarm the hills, carve underground aquifers, sludge concrete of earth and sky.

  Wo de. Mine.

  Ni de. Yours.

  Ta de. Hers.

  Teeth crowded with garlic and scallions: How can we trust their chattering?

  In this poem, who is Pick-Up and who’s Han Shan?

  I laugh a wicked tone, wait for you to howl across the expanse of wasted land between us. Motherland, they say.

  [A blackout—my ink invisible: Damn the imperialists!]

  Yours,

  Li-Ming

  Baba

  A lamp: flickering, sputtering, spitting dying light from buckling to bulging tent wall. Warm leg beneath his legs. Cool arm around his waist. Stroking of cool, smooth cheek. Golden light. Golden hair. Golden breasts. She pulls him closer. Devil’s blue eyes flash—Fat Wang’s flashlight finds them in the dark, loving shapes mocking the walls barely holding back the wind. Laughter outside. Cackling. Roosters pecking at frosted dirt. Closing his eyes. Squinting. She pulls him onto Deng’s mattress with the integrity of a bull, dirty hair smell enveloping them, their bodies no longer skin and bones but hair, hair everywhere. The world is made of hair. And snail’s trails crawling from pelvis to chest. A warmth inside his belly—the resonance of a struck bell. She can’t know what she does to him. He held her by his knees, her knees. She went limp. She did not speak his language. Who is she again?

  He tried: “I’m sorry.”

  Wo dui bu qi.

  Her hand to his mouth, combing his hair like mother to child.

  Wo shi ni de haizi.

  The last time he was a child: in his mother’s arms at the river, she let him go first into the current then followed afterwards. Didn’t he know her ankles were tied with rope? That she’d sink like a briquette to the bottom, the last oxygenated blood finding its way first to lungs, then trachea, and finally li
ps, parted, for no one to see but herself, if only eyes could still see under the dark, sun-streaked waters of the Cao’E River,16 that final belch reaching the surface, a seedling from soil or a bird’s beak cracking its shelled womb. Did he see this bubble when it crested the river’s skin? No. He was halfway to the city of Shangyu when his father found his body lying like a sunning muskrat on the riverbank, panting and starry-eyed, a four-year old who didn’t know how to swim but somehow conjured enough strength, or rather, buoyancy, to float, to survive. The soap tree: he’d seen it from the river, those long arms reaching to lift him towards the sky, saving him with his mother’s scent.

  For a long time that’s what he believed—floating was survival. And survival was life. So life was a contained buoyancy, the ability to stay afloat when all else threatened to drag you down, bring you to the depths of which he’d only once overheard (his uncle’s palmed whispers in their Shanghai apartment, telling Third Cousin how Wang’s mother succumbed at the bottom of a river bed, so traumatic for Little Wang he’d forgotten it all, turned rebellious, a side effect of never again being allowed near a body of water by a father who’d throw himself into a life of grinding glass, smoothing ragged edges). Little Wang who became Comrade Wang who became Skinny Wang who would soon become Hawk Eye. He was known by many names but he was still Little Wang when his father stood over the grinding machine and taught him the earliest lesson he’d know about beauty:

  First you feel for the imperfection in the glass, rubbing a thumb here, like this.

  Don’t touch the glass with your grubby fingers.

  Always wear gloves when you work the grinder.

  You want to lose a thumb?

  Here, feel that? That’s a groove. The worst blunder…

  American Nurse slid Skinny Wang’s pants to his ankles in a simple clip, a groomer unbridling a horse’s bit. She climbed atop him, straddling him such that she couldn’t see what was within her but only the shape that made her who she was: a silhouette hidden behind tent walls, a neck capable of being caressed, kissed. Without a thought or motion, he fumbled deeper inside a place he couldn’t see but understood the way we think we understand a far away shore; her skin slipped against his, soft and damp. She wanted to be inside him too, so she leaned forward, tongue to teeth. Her loosened words stuck to his mouth, his dry, wind-chapped lips. Her hair was all he could see from there to the river, past the bridge, the mountainous backdrop the troops scanned every dawn. Everywhere he looked was hair.