Empire of Glass

by Kaitlin Solimine

  As he rounded the corner to the men’s dormitory, he saw a group of girls standing outside the lavatories. They clapped and sang, and in the center of the crowd someone danced.

  Li-Ming stood in the middle of the circle. He recognized those pigtails, plump arms waving white beneath a dangling light, the piglet mud now caked along her forearms like a tribal marking. What did the mud tell him? He squinted to see the lines clearer in the dark, hoping to catch a glimpse of her smile. Ever since the border years, his eyesight vacillated from better than 20/20 to a dim haze, the world around him a mirage above a sweltering summer field. There was no way to know when the mirage would appear: sometimes in the morning, it would take minutes for the fog to lift and finally trust he was safely situated in his own dorm-style danwei bedroom; sometimes, when walking down Xinjiekou, the trees would briefly turn to rivers of brown and green, the bicycle traffic a long stream of red, and then, just as quickly, each object would slowly announce its outline, a verifiable presence, but there remained a lingering haze in the periphery reminding him at any moment his perception could falter, not easily trusted. Tonight was one of the better nights and he was grateful he could witness, in stark clarity, Li-Ming performing a version of the Dai peacock dance. The girls around her clapped the beat to a folk song playing scratchily over the camp’s loudspeakers. Li-Ming seemed to be improvising and yet everything about her looked rehearsed. Wang wanted to join the crowd of girls and watch until the moon swelled above the mountains, but he couldn’t—men and women in those days were assigned to their own camps, bunks, latrines. He wanted to watch her forever, for this dance to be the center of his existence, her swaying hips, her white palms flashing in the dusk. The clapping strengthened as the music ascended.

  One of the camp leaders, Sheng Li, broke Wang Guanmiao’s reverie.

  “The women here make the most of it, eh?” he wrapped his arm around Wang’s shoulder. Sheng had been at the camp for years and as a result of his long stay, smelled of garlic and the imbedded sweat endemic to those who worked their days (sun up, sun down) in the fields, but he didn’t notice his own odor as he puffed happily on a cigarette, smoke clouding Wang’s view of Li-Ming. Wang exhaled loudly, blinked twice to clear his eyes. There were hundreds of discarded cigarette butts at their feet in a trail like bird droppings leading from the bathrooms to the dorms and back again. Humanity’s mark was everywhere at this camp—the cigarette trails, the washboards leaning on the river’s edge, the bare hillsides ransacked for firewood to feed the valley’s hunger, the mountain’s skin eternally scarred.

  Sheng coughed. “That Li-Ming—she’s sweet, isn’t she? They tell us not to date our comrades, but if it’s in the spirit of Mao then I suppose a marriage would be appropriate. Our love for Mao triumphs all.” He laughed heartily, expecting Wang to join, but Wang wanted to shake off his arm and be alone again.

  Instead, Wang Guanmiao nodded and quoted a Maoism about the importance of putting Marxist thought above interpersonal relations so Sheng wouldn’t think he had bad intentions with Li-Ming. The song finished and the girls dispersed, slapping Li-Ming on the back and returning to their dormitory with their arms around each other’s waists, heads leaning into one another like loving swans. Wang wondered if they felt the same lightness he experienced earlier, if Li-Ming had that effect on everyone. He was suddenly, inexplicably jealous.

  Wang tapped his new friend on the hand and told him it was time to retire to bed. Sheng smiled and cocked an eye, implying Wang’s statement meant something else.

  “No, not that,” Wang reassured him, but Sheng’s smile widened, exposing tobacco-stained teeth—his was a countryman’s mouth. He smacked Wang’s back so hard it stung. Sheng laughed, muttering something about “a man’s bed time” as Wang walked toward the dorms. The laughing man struck another match and the acrid smell followed Wang, seeping into his shirt.

  As he walked, cockroaches skittered like wind-blown leaves across his path. Fog obscured the brightness of the moon. Outside the dorm, his boisterous comrades clustered around the doorway smoking and coughing clouds into the clear mountain air. Their breaths hovered, lingering beneath a flickering spotlight, before disappearing into the dark. He elbowed his way through them and they barely noticed; like wind cutting through a wheat field, they gave him only the slightest room to pass.

  That night, he lied in bed watching halos of smoke rise above the bunks. Li-Ming, he thought. With every puff, he sung her name again:

  Li-Ming.

  Puff.

  Li-Ming.

  Puff.

  Li-Ming.

  Puff.

  The name, the repetition, began to have a soothing effect, a prayer solely his from that day forward, a word to fill spaces without words, a poem whose silence comprised the vacuity carved around it, a man clinging to the sound of a tongue, two syllables, waiting for them to make their appearance over and over again like a child anticipating a mother’s call, a bird navigating the old way home:

  Li-Ming.

  Li-Ming.

  Li-Ming.

  *

  The next evening Wang Guanmiao found Li-Ming in the stalls. A pig was pregnant and she was excited by the prospect of birthing the gilt. It was finally her turn after months of watching others perform the task.

  “So many piglets will soon be running around here,” she said.

  He sputtered proudly: “I found the letter.” He didn’t tell Li-Ming that after his comrades went to sleep, he spent the night with a box of matches in hand, circling his dorm, walking the path to the pig troughs, striking a match every few minutes for light and bending to run his fingers through the dirt and grass. He finally resorted to using a twig to comb the grasses in case he stumbled upon one of the many mountain snakes said to slither the fields, deadly in their venomous bite. After all that, he found the letter below his bed, brushed into a corner by a careless comrade on cleaning duty. Cao!, he exclaimed, banging his head against the bed frame before surfacing with the letter in hand, dust clinging to his chest.

  Li-Ming smiled at him—for him—as she dropped her rake and reached for the letter, which he had kept, cautiously, in his breast pocket. Opening it quickly, she held the thin pages to the light of the only window, her eyes enthusiastically scanning the contents, the bleeding black ink. As she read, her face changed expressions—first her eyebrows pinched together and her lips pursed, then her mouth loosened into a frown. When she reached the end, she flipped the pages over again as if they didn’t contain what she expected then dropped the letter to a hay pile at her feet.

  He didn’t understand—wasn’t his presence here, all the effort he made to find the letter, enough? He wanted to comfort her but what could he say? He hardly knew her. He placed a hand on her shoulder; a gesture he’d seen in film and occasionally among married comrades who sat across from one another at the mess hall. To his surprise, Li-Ming didn’t rebuff his gesture. Her chin dropped to her chest and a few seamless tears meandered the scope of cheek to jaw.

  “I’m sorry,” Wang Guanmiao said, instinctively. He was sorry, but for what, he wasn’t sure.

  “Did you know?”

  “Know what?”

  “Did you know this letter was complete turtle shit?”

  Wang Guanmiao wobbled on his heels, hand slipping from Li-Ming’s shoulder.

  “Turtle shit?” He wasn’t accustomed to speaking so crudely among comrades, let alone females.

  “Yes, it’s turtle shit,” she said succinctly, not aware of the effect this word had on him. She raised her head, fearlessly and competently as a fighting rooster.

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “I mean you came all this way, probably spent thousands of the people’s currency and ate dozens of earth-loving farmers’ meals in order to give me a letter filled with useless drivel.”

  “I didn’t eat dozens of meals,” Wang Guanmiao said but it was a stupid thing to say and maybe he had eaten a dozen or so meals since he left Beijing—he started to
count but before he could correct her, she interrupted his calculations.

  “The exact number is not the point,” she sighed dramatically, braids sliding from shoulders to back. “The point is you thought you were delivering me a letter of substance when in reality this is a declaration from my mother’s struggle session. A struggle, I might add, she needn’t be having in public but should be holding in private because even that is turtle shit.”

  “Oh, I didn’t know…”

  “You shouldn’t have known. And that’s not why I’m upset.” She paused, perhaps unsure if she should continue, but her emotions were too embroiled in the present moment to stop them spilling onward. “I’m upset because this wasn’t the letter I expected. Are you sure there wasn’t more mail you were meant to deliver? Not a letter from Gansu?”

  “I’m not a mailman,” Wang said.

  “No, of course not,” she said. “I didn’t mean to say you didn’t fulfill your duties today.”

  “It’s fine,” Wang Guanmiao slipped his hand into his pocket and stepped backwards, one step closer to the door.

  “And now you’re leaving because I’m asking too much of you,” she said.

  “No, I mean, yes, I mean…”

  Li-Ming walked closer. “I said too much. In truth, it doesn’t matter about my mother. She’ll be fine and she’ll survive this struggle—what is one struggle in a life full of them? I didn’t mean to sound callous or that she shouldn’t be struggling alongside the great professors and minds of our nation. We must deeply consider what we’re here to do, why some of us end up in positions of power and others are trampled like dust or mice. No, that’s not the right metaphor but you know what I mean, right? I wasn’t crying about my mother. I was crying because I’ve been expecting a letter for quite some time that hasn’t arrived. You must know what this feels like, right? To be wanting something that never arrives?”

  Wang nodded, but he couldn’t explain his wanting to her. This girl who in a minute’s time had turned from a sweet guardian of piglets to a petulant, selfish brat, to a competent and worldly weaver of words. There was something oddly comforting in a woman who wasn’t one type of person but every measure of human ever existing, or so she seemed in this moment.

  “I knew you’d understand,” she said. But how could she when she hardly knew him? Before he could ask, she stood on tiptoes, placed her hands on his shoulders. They remained like that—her straining to reach him, his arms drooping listlessly, their bodies hovering dangerously close—for what felt like a very long time. Outside, the other girls returned to the dorms after their work in the fields, giggling and singing country songs off-tune. Chickens pecked at the grain piles by the latrines. Pigs squealed from the stalls, slap-happy amidst the draining sunlight. Villagers rubbed tattered, soil-heavy clothing over the ridged washboards by the river. The river rushed downstream, carrying remnant suds, discarded oil from cafeteria vats, pig shit, and moldy hay. The world outside moved on without them yet something unnamed kept Li-Ming and Wang Guanmiao standing together.

  Wang was so distracted by the idea of an uncaring, ambivalent world he hardly noticed when Li-Ming wrapped her arms around his waist and buried her face in his chest, her breath wetting his shirt. He touched the top of her head like someone off stage directed his movements as he smoothed her hair, brushed off dandruff flakes that fell onto her shoulders like Beijing’s first, dry December snow. Puppets—but who was the puppeteer?

  “I’ll see you in the mess hall tonight, Comrade Wang,” she said, pulling away just as quickly as she’d fallen into him. After collecting her buckets, she strode out of the barn to join the lines of girls giggling and slapping one another. Wang heard only snippets of their conversation—what Mao would do, the strength of peasants, best fertilizers for green beans—but his ears longed to overhear something else. For Li-Ming’s voice saying his name again. The ability to forget, be forgotten.

  That girlish laughter hugged the evening air past the empty dorms and toward the mess hall where it blossomed in a glowing chorus, echoing under the open-air rafters with their resident bats and crowded nests of barn swallows. That girlish laughter. He never wanted to join the laughter more than when he walked toward the mess hall, stomach growling. But he couldn’t loosen his lips into a smile yet. Hours earlier, Li-Ming pressed her body to his then just as easily parted. Strange, he thought, the way you can momentarily be pulled into the orbit of someone else’s body, only minutes later to be sent spinning on a new trajectory.

  Wang retrieved his tin bowl, filled it with sticky rice and sat at a long table of long-faced comrades who discussed topics everyone before them had discussed for hours and years and decades and centuries: the weather (too cold this week), the most attractive girl at the camp (a lithe, freckle-faced student from Hangzhou with breasts like winter melons), the over-saltiness of the congee (always), who had the best chance with the Hangzhou girl (a square-faced comrade named Bing Tan), who had the least chance (the village’s mute hairdresser), who would get the next bout of diarrhea. When they asked for Wang’s answer on that last question, he responded “Me!” and they laughed and shook the table with laughter, slapping his back. Even their tin bowls clattered with laughter, the only sound bowls could speak.

  He didn’t understand what was so funny, but maybe he was the stupid one. Maybe he should be laughing. Wang Guanmiao opened his mouth and let out the heartiest, most boisterous laughter to spill from his body, water splashing from a too-full jug. This only made the table lose more control, Bing Tan’s tears scrolling his cheeks, his dorm mates doubled-over, heads in hands, uncontrollably shaking and begging Wang to stop. But stop what? He’d only said one word——and yet it was the most humorous thing they’d ever heard. Amidst the laughter, he looked up from the table to notice Li-Ming watching them from across the mess hall, her shoulders rising, a smile expanding. You too? Was she as frivolous as the men surrounding him, jowls loose, bellies shaking? She shook her head and laughter rose from her unknown place, and then, in suit, the girls surrounding her, giggling at first then clutching their waists, this collective, mindless laughter ballooning in the mess hall without an understanding of what he’d said that was so funny. None of them knew. They were all equally, blissfully, stupidly silly.

  Li-Ming laughed in Wang’s direction. Despite how little he knew, how little he’d be able to predict of their future, of the times they’d belly laugh like this when everything in life felt too onerous to handle any other way, he laughed along, certain of only the simplest of terms: he couldn’t let her go. Sometimes you know things in life, he thought, his mouth as wide as a cormorant searching the river’s floor for fish, that laughter spilling from a place he didn’t know existed within him, would desperately yearn for in coming years, trying to remind himself that there lies the bottom of a being, the deepest, most solid, indestructible kernel of a life.

  24. “What gauge of rope could support a fifty-five kilo woman?” I should have asked, but instead, the shop clerk, a dense man with a wrinkled forehead handed me a key to the back storage unit. “Help yourself then I’ll ring you up.” “I don’t know what I need.” “Ta ma de,” he cursed and I asked, jesting, “Why do you hate me already? You don’t know me.” “I know your type,” he said. “You’ll need a stronger rope. 24mm width. American hips and all.” “Thanks,” I said, temporarily annoyed he thought I was inquiring for myself and he didn’t care about my intention. This ending. But I didn’t buy the rope that day. The day I bought the rope was a few weeks later, after we’d already gone to investigate a number of places for Li-Ming’s final act: Rending Lake Park where retirees ballroom dancing inspired Li-Ming to vomit onto her lap (which I cleaned with a generous janitor’s toilet mop), and then to Houhai with its arm-locked lovers (where Li-Ming elbowed one couple and glared at them; were she not in a wheelchair, they may not have forgiven her), and finally to Chaoyang (“no way, not here,” she said, nodding at a rusted merry-go-round filled with Donald Duck and Minnie Mouse-faced horse
s). I don’t know why she made me go with her to the parks, to test the sturdiness of tree limbs, when she knew all along there was only one option. As was always the case with Li-Ming, everything was a test—she wanted to know how much you’d believe her, if your fortitude in her kindness or insanity (depending on the day), was enough to gird her weight. “Fifty five kilos!” I shouted on my empty-handed way out of the hardware store that afternoon. “Do I look like I’m fucking fifty five kilos?” I wanted him to stop me. I wanted him to know this wasn’t about weight but about the many ways we attempt to weigh down lightness, to fool ourselves into thinking even the most detached of us won’t eventually drift away.

  25. “I don’t think two people could’ve been happier than we have been,” wrote Virginia Woolf in her last letter to her husband before entering the River Ouse with twenty pounds of rocks jostling in her pockets. Li-Ming requested the rope, not the stones, but does it matter the method?

  26. If we know the thickness, then how long should the rope be? At Jingsong Hardware, I looped the rope into wide, concentric Os on the glass countertop. The proprietor, that wrinkle-foreheaded middle-aged man who dumbly watched a staticky television set to CCTV 4, didn’t pay any attention, despite my outburst weeks earlier. Could I ask him what length of rope was needed to loop 2-3 times around a neck? Was that the way this was done? I settled for three meters—surely long enough, but not too long. We could always double the loop around the tree for extra support. Funny the way the details rub clear now like a clamshell in the sun, opening in excess heat to reveal a shiny, spit-shined pearl.