Empire of Glass

by Kaitlin Solimine

  (“sheng”) = “rope”.

  Do you see the body hanging there, dangling beneath a calligrapher’s stroke? I walked into a corner store whose windows displayed every object ever needed: toilet plunger, wrench, curly-haired wig, industrial-grade bleach. And rope. Coils of it looped around a wide, silver spool, waiting to be cut.

  Baba

  Wang Guanmiao had forgotten how the countryside was just a collection of smells and colors—manure, moldy hay, angled evening sun cutting reddened rooftops, soil-starched faces of village girls at washboards, their limp breasts that would one day rise pert, slack-jawed mouths singing folk songs in local lilts. He’d forgotten the quiet of places like this Jiangxi village. Forgotten loud insects and silent snakes hidden in knee-high grasses. Forgotten moonlight, his full moon invisible behind a city of buildings but now, unabashed, white faced and unforgiving. Look up, that moon said, beginning its journey across the sky’s waist. And he’d forgotten blue. A sky the color of her irises. He’d forgotten what it felt like to be in love, how there was rapture and repulsion, how he’d once held a mirror to his face and hoped to see the reflection of someone else staring back: his first and only love touched him here, and here, and here. Tenderness bruised his neck, cobwebbed kisses only a practiced lover could make of his boyish body. So much forgetting he didn’t believe when the sun slanted just so across her back, bare shoulders revealing a Jiangxi tan and a compulsion, because there couldn’t be any other word for the impulse, to wrap his arms around her, to swallow her as wholly as a cormorant to a trout—all throat, no bite. She danced beside a pile of pig manure in a stall soon-to-be cleared for slaughter, her back brushed with freckles, shoulders tinted yellow-gold in a beam of late day sunlight. Who cared that these pigs would soon be the soy-sour jinjiang rousi at the campfire or the flecks of cheek fat relished in a morning’s congee? The pigs snorted and she jigged; what music accompanied her steps was hidden, silent as the city was to him now.

  Wang was sent from Beijing by his superiors to take a letter to a sent-down young woman named Ms. Huang. Given her assignment, she should’ve been pitching hay or transporting manure to the slop bins outside. She shouldn’t have been alone in the stys where he found her—most women here were solitary, their chattering birdsong catching on mountain breezes and finding any prospective suitor’s eager ears. Instead, this girl danced to a rhythm she hummed loudly, arms lifting above her head, hands bursting open, palms white and wide and waving like a distant distress signal. Her knees bent and straightened, cotton skirt ballooning with each beat. Sweat stains circled her underarms, burned a damp crescent onto her lower back that smelled alive. He walked closer. He reached to span the distance between them, to touch that dark, animal moon above the waist of her skirt. He knew that place in a woman’s back, didn’t he? Only once did he press his palm into the dented crease between spine and bottom, those plum dimples, how they’d make her buckle. His fingers tentatively glanced the tuck of a crisply-pressed shirt, that tight elastic waistline unyielding. But this waist was thinner, hips narrower. He recoiled his hand as she sensed his presence, turning suddenly, forced pleasantry on her face.

  “Oh, hello, Comrade. Can I help you?” She reached for a pitchfork atop a stack of hay, wiped sweat off her forehead.

  A thick wrist. A strong wrist. He didn’t know this wrist. Nor this face—it was young, relaxed, and attempting a soft, cordial smile before a stranger’s gaze. Whose face was this? The face smiling at Comrade Wang was not long and thin and pink-white beneath a winter-white sky. Her eyes were not rings of ice. Him: arms slack, grimace pulling a tentative grin, mind tilted on its axle attempting to rewrite the history he thought was his. But who was he to claim a part in this story? He shook his head, blinked feverishly to wash away temporary blindness. He was standing in Jiangxi Province. He was Wang Guanmiao (now called by his given name, an adult bound to formality by all measures). He attempted to answer her question—but no, she couldn’t help him. How could she? Wang made himself helpless long ago and this girl standing before him could never understand what it was like to live one’s life on the fringes, incapable of trusting the sturdiness of one’s feet, the stability of one’s frame. She was a city girl attempting to be rustic, have country roots. He wanted to hate her naiveté but that’s exactly what made her so attractive.

  “Ummmm,” Wang Guanmiao sputtered. He needed to say something.

  She waited, a patient soldier dressed not in the typical Red Guard olive army uniform, but a blue-and-white-checkered blouse clinging to her teenage figure, all jutting hips and shoulders. She bent at angles comfortable only on the young, not quite trusting her body. The hem of her navy skirt cut above slightly-knocked knees. Knees… the sight of bare knees made the hair on his arms stand at attention, a distant yet familiar desire to draw her closer. Since his border years, the glimpse of the back of a woman’s knee was enough to send him running to the latrines to relieve himself of the nervous jitters invading his abdomen. Aside from a brief, after-hours encounter with a distributor from Heilongjiang—a lean, wide-eyed woman who walked his factory floors for a week inspecting samples as well as the men she’d take to the back office for a flurry of kisses and errant groping (twice that happened to be a flustered, yet flattered Wang)—he hadn’t been in a woman’s company. His days were filled with an almost religious devotion to his work in the factories such that he was regularly allotted an extra ration of beef tongue or pig hock for his better-than-expected manufacturing quantities. The beef tongue and pig hock did nothing for his frame—lanky, still hunched at the shoulders, bones on bones—and nothing to distract him from the unending day-in, day-out of life on a factory line. But now, Ms. Huang waiting his response, blood flushed his cheeks. Here she was; here he was—in some before-unknown county in a province he’d only known on maps. He looked at her looking at him and swore she winked, knowledgeable that the greatest secret passed between them in this moment—here we are, finally.24

  He blinked and shook his head again. In the distance, a truck rumbled over the sole dirt road leading to this mountainous perch. If the two of them stood on tiptoes and looked outside, they would’ve seen the vertiginous drop into the valley that only storks could navigate without fear, a mighty bird with a wingspan to blacken a rooftop, a child’s game of marbles, a riverboat drifting off-anchor down the Gan River toward the lazy shores of Lake Poyang.

  “Sorry,” he said—but all he could do was look at this girl’s face and try to reconstruct the one he knew years earlier. Why did he think he’d see a familiar face here? What insanity existed in going to an unknown place in order to find something you never lost? He was sent from his danwei, his assigned work unit in Beijing where he ground telescopic lenses, to this re-education camp in Jiangxi province to deliver a letter to a girl named Huang Li-Ming. He was to report back to the capital she was a model student, on her way to becoming a “barefoot doctor.” She and her family had been listed “black” because her mother once signed her name to a Nationalist Youth Party list long before Li-Ming’s birth—it was another member of his danwei, frown-faced Mrs. Xu, who reminded everyone of this during the Destroy the Four Olds Campaign. After Li-Ming’s mother was the victim of a virulent public struggle session, Li-Ming was sent down to the countryside with other children of questionable backgrounds from her graduating high school class, the class his generation called the Old Threes because they hadn’t studied past their third year of high school. A year later, the party elders sent him to the camp to investigate Li-Ming’s progress; if she acted as a model villager, the council in Beijing would upgrade her to Class Number Five Red.

  Five: the number of points in a red star.

  Five: the number of days he’d stay in Jiangxi Province.

  Five: the fingers on her dancing hand flashing from the dark, a hand divorced from work, from the sun’s tangoing rays of affection and loathing.

  Five meant nothing to this girl. She’d shoveled pig slop for more than five days, more than five months
. Wang Guanmiao lowered his eyes to her knees, wishing he could trace the wrinkles in the grimy skin above her kneecaps. He didn’t know in a few decades he’d hate her for those wrinkles, hate that her body became a cage, and would encage him too.

  “Comrade,” she cleared her throat. “You need a sip of water? The mountain air and altitude can make heads go hazy.”

  He shook his head. “No, thanks. I’m fine.” He dug his feet into the hay-strewn earth. A pig snorted. Outside, trees rustled, nothing more. Quiet closes in on you when you haven’t heard it in some time; his ears attempted to find a talon’s scratch on the roof, his own heartbeat.

  He cleared his throat: “So you’re Huang Li-Ming?”

  She nodded and stood upright, well-trained in the art of deference to officials. The earth settled at Wang’s feet and he looked to her boots covered with mud and pig shit.

  “I am Huang Li-Ming, of Beijing’s PLA School, Zhongnanhai,” she announced. He didn’t welcome the formality of their exchange. But her face softened, she smiled while looking to her feet—was there something else she wanted to say?

  You, he wanted to say. Surely, you know what it’s like to look up into the sky and feel both the heaviness of the earth and this lightness of living. I saw how you danced alone. Is this the beginning or the end?25 But how could he tell her? They were merely strangers. She peered up sheepishly, as if overtaken by reason, wiping her hands on her skirt and laughing softly to fill the space. Whatever words he formulated were lost to the silence between them. Did she know what she did to him?

  He smiled, a pool of feeling at his feet. He shuffled the earth to return gravity to his limbs. The Party officials called this girl “naoteng” —mischievous—in her official report and he saw what they meant; there was something unnerving about her smile. This fit with her name, which meant “daybreak” because, she told him years later when there was time enough for the magic of this moment to be forgotten, she was born just before her hometown Nanjing was liberated from Nationalist rule. He later wondered: how could her stodgy mother have such a poetic heart? The girl standing before him was indeed like the early morning sun, tossing petulant light over everything around her. But she looked nothing like her father. He’d met the elder Huang just once in the crowded hallway of their shared danwei, a glass-grinding factory built after Liberation. Her father was short with words, square-shouldered. He handed Wang Guanmiao the letter the young man delivered now and said: My daughter’s name is Li-Ming; tell her to serve the people well. Wang pictured Huang’s daughter as a miniature version of him: stout, stubborn, prone to tantrums and pride—naoteng. He didn’t anticipate seeing someone eager to smile, light in her gestures yet harboring a buried strength, an introspective heart so different from that of her father. Hers was the strength men feared and desired to consume them with a tornado of kisses. That’s the funny thing about beginnings—we don’t realize we already have a sense for the ending. For Wang Guanmiao, he’d already written forward a life of loneliness: how could he predict Li-Ming was like the fledgling swift he once saved from his danwei’s drainpipe? He later learned young swifts fly endlessly from the nest, never stopping for years and landing only to breed.

  “Huang Li-Ming,” he stammered. Her name was bright: yellow, cheery, blinding, clinging to the back of his throat like Shanghai’s famed pear candies. That rescued swift’s weight was imperceptible in his palms, wings shivering and purple-black. “Li-Ming, I have something from your parents.”

  Wang Guanmiao reached into his pocket for her letter, only his fingers slipped through. He felt his own bare thigh. A hole! The letter must’ve fallen from his pocket on the walk here. How hadn’t he felt it? He scrambled for something to say, an appropriate excuse. How could he tell this soft-smiling girl his pockets were full of holes? That he’d been so careless with the one task he was assigned?

  “There’s a letter I came here to deliver to you, but I must have left it in my bunk,” he lied easily. It felt good to say “bunk,” meant he was sent to Jiangxi from Beijing on special assignment, his ranking high enough to warrant sending him specifically for her.

  “No problem, really.” She walked to a piglet in the corner, but must’ve breezed through a cobweb because she brushed something invisible off her shoulders, plucking threads from her ears. She picked the animal from its stall and held it against her chest. “Did you know you have to clip the teeth of newborn pigs?” The piglet squirmed and squealed, but despite its obvious discomfort, Li-Ming continued talking about a professor of veterinary medicine named Zhang who was at the re-education camp with them, how he taught her the process of birthing pigs, how he knew everything about farm animals, was the most knowledgeable, patient man she’d known. As she spoke, the pig smeared mud along her forearms, rubbed streaks onto the breast of her shirt. Calligraphy on one’s body. Mud on one’s skin. He saw moth’s wings, felt the rustling of paper against his cheeks, the strands of that web. He should’ve known what this was like. But how could he? This was a girl he’d only just met. Still, he yearned for Huang Li-Ming to give him a life different from that which he’d anticipated: a man of the city living in a tall courtyard apartment bringing home eggplants and pork knuckles for dinner, enjoying long walks in the park with children skipping alongside them as sunset dampened their hair and shoulders. A strange fantasy for an unwed thirty-something year old former PLA soldier, a glass grinder who worked alone, ate alone, lived alone. He wanted to be lonely with someone else. What else was life but shared loneliness?26

  “…don’t you think?” Li-Ming’s rising tones returned him to the barn, the dying sunlight. Her words reminded him of the lost letter. Of piglets. Of naoteng.

  “Of course,” he said, not knowing the question.

  “Hu shuo,” she said—silly talk—slapping his arm and gingerly placing the piglet on the ground. “Don’t forget, teeth clipping is the most important thing to remember. Professor Zhang said if you don’t do it, they’ll rip each other to shreds, even their brothers and sisters, fighting over food.”

  The piglet happily plopped into a puddle. Wang Guanmiao resented the piglet’s easy contentment with its life’s lot. “I’m sorry about the letter,” he said. “I’ll bring it to you tomorrow.”

  Li-Ming placed her hand on his forearm. “It’s nothing,” she said as if they were old friends, as if the letter was indeed a trivial matter and he entered the barn this afternoon to learn about pig birthing, not to deliver a message so important it would change the course of this girl’s life. Li-Ming’s hand released; as it did, a tightness inside him loosened. Gravity returned, reminding him how heavy he usually felt when standing on his own large feet.

  “Shou mang jiao luan,” Li-Ming said, using the proverb to imply Wang’s hands and feet were so busy he messed up this one task. “Don’t worry about trivial things.”

  “I should return to my bunk.” He bowed his head—a feudal politeness he hadn’t used since before Liberation.

  She bid him farewell, reaching for a pair of water buckets she slipped over her back as easily as a farmer. She followed his steps toward the bunks then veered down the rambling path toward the river, buckets slapping her ribs. She looked happy to be awarded such a mundane task27, as if life could be simpler when filled with routine. He envied her. Maybe this is what drew him to her—her naiveté, the way she believed in the density of mud under her feet, the rushing river at the valley’s basin.

  “Li-Ming!” he shouted when her face was too far away to see in perfect detail.

  She turned slowly, careful not to disrupt the balanced weight of her buckets.

  “Yes, Comrade Wang?”

  “I’ll see you at the mess hall later?”

  “We shall see!” She smiled cryptically even though everyone at the camp ate at the same tables every night and of course he’d see her there. “Now go get my letter!”

  He nodded, smiling his assurance as she returned to the path. He waited until her pigtails dipped beneath the hills then walked to hi
s bunk, his body denser than it felt in weeks. He looked to the sparse pines speckling the mountain and shielding them from the afternoon sun, shadows expanding as day descended into night. There wasn’t a bird, a cicada, nor even a housefly to accompany Wang’s walk to the dorms, everyone in the fields or attending to communal livestock, those feverish pigs who nibbled on Li-Ming’s arms. No one witnessed him methodically retracing his steps from earlier that day. He was excused from a meeting with the camp’s leaders that afternoon by employing the excuse he was sick with diarrhea—it was common for city folk to fall ill from the glutinous local millet. He checked the mess hall. Nothing. The latrines. Nothing. He perused the path back to the barn. Nothing.

  An overwhelming sense of purpose sent his feet shuffling, scuffing earth. Her name repeated its pulse, propelling him toward that last rising note: Li-Ming, Li-Ming, Li-Ming. Never before had he wanted something so badly without understanding the ramifications of what he needed. As he dug at the roots beneath a tree where he watched the sunrise that morning, he thought he felt a scratch of paper, but it was just a dried-up root, already useless at nourishing the needy trunk. Assigned just one purpose, he’d failed spectacularly. If the Party leadership in his danwei knew better, they would’ve assigned this task to someone less likely to trip on his own feet, would’ve recognized his inability to control the reaches of his long frame, as if his ego, his soul, whatever it was within him that governed his movements, was merely a dwarfish resident of a vacant, drafty home.

  Evening spread across the valley, darkening the stalls. Still there was no sign of Li-Ming’s letter. Wang Guanmiao walked more briskly as night fell, eager to find the note before twilight swallowed the mountains. Whenever he thought he saw a speck of white, he raked his fingers through the grass—but each time, he found nothing. He convinced himself the letter was lost forever as he returned to his bunk that evening to formulate an excuse to tell his party leaders in Beijing. Could he say someone stole the letter? What if he pretended he’d given it to Li-Ming? Could he live with the guilt of that lie? Wang Guanmiao knew it wasn’t about his sense of duty to the Party; he didn’t want to disappoint Li-Ming. Or was that it? His mind was cluttered in a way it hadn’t been in a long time. Thoughts piled atop one another, confusing him even more—if he didn’t find the letter, what would happen? He could return to his solitary, well-defined existence at his grinder in Beijing and live the rest of his life in bachelorhood. But where was the boy who once walked Shanghai’s dawn-swept streets with the feeling of infinite possibility, that a life could be lived and not simply prescribed by one’s superiors?