Empire of Glass

by Kaitlin Solimine

  27. The rope wouldn’t fit in my backpack on the way home so I looped it over my shoulders, draping it such that it wouldn’t impede my bicycle ride. Li-Ming instructed me to hide the rope in a storage unit they rarely used just above the bike sheds outside their building. I unlocked the unit with the key she’d given me and placed the coils there, content to fulfill an expected task. By this point, I wasn’t thinking about whens or whos or whys or how comes or how muchs or so whats. Being an accomplice means losing yourself in the most mundane details of the task, which has the unintended side effect of making life livable. I returned the key to my back pocket, trudged upstairs, my stomach led by the smell of sautéed scallions and ginger and peanut oil and sesame seed as if all meaning we’d ever know was contained in the making of a stir-fry on a spring evening in the center of a city which was the center of a country which was, according to local estimates, the center of the universe.

  Baba

  Everywhere: Yellow.

  The cliffs. (Yellow.)

  The mud. (Yellow.)

  The rivers. (Yellow.)

  The wrinkles creasing the faces of beggars cluttering the eastward train tracks careening toward the capital. (Yellow.)

  Even his piss shone a deeper yellow.

  Yellow under his fingernails, in his hair, on his teeth, lining his gums.

  Yellow.

  A cruel trick: Li-Ming’s surname, Huang——meant ‘yellow.’ Ever since he said goodbye to her at the gates of the Jiangxi village where they first met, since she pinched his forearm (so tightly he bruised) and made him promise he’d send stories from the city, he’d been unable to clear her name from his mind. Now he was stationed in China’s driest, most yellow, province, Gansu, for an indeterminate stay of re-education along with his Beijing danwei. What stories could he send to Li-Ming from Beijing when he knew nothing of the city aside from the occasional posts from the factory leaders who spoke of Mao thought and struggle sessions, but hardly the neighborhood gossip she desired?

  Wang squinted at the yellow horizon, a setting yellow-gray sun. Around him, the yellow cave walls gleamed hotly (in truth, everything there, come sunset, was infused with the chill of a moonless desert). For months, he shared this cave with his comrades and the occasional villager who made a bed in the warmest corner (everything from soap to hot water canteens to underwear was shared; the idea that any one object could be yours alone was utterly presumptuous—yet all Wang wanted was to be alone with Li-Ming and to call her, definitively, mine——my Yellow Li-Ming). Sitting beside his work-haggard colleagues beneath a wan mid-cycle moon, he pondered the proper start to his correspondence with the girl he’d barely known but couldn’t wait to call his own:

  Dear Comrade,

  Did this letter reach you? I’m writing from Gansu Province. Here the days are short and the weather unpredictable. Here, we eat only gritty corn meal bread for breakfast and dinner. Most days, there isn’t lunch. Sometimes, like today, we are served noodle soup and, if we’re lucky, the village leaders give us a pinch of salt each to add to the broth. Have you ever gone for weeks without salt? I’d never known what a blessing salt was until now, how much humans need flavorful food—not just any old food—to truly live. Because, as you know, there’s a difference between survival and living. I would prefer the latter, if given the choice: wouldn’t we all?

  (Too much talk of food. Revise. Why can’t he write what he wants to say? Though he rather liked that bit about salt and survival and living.)

  Instead, he wrote:

  Li-Ming, what do you think about salt? If you haven’t abstained from salt, I suggest you try. The headaches are unbearable at first, but after a few days, your taste buds react with a higher efficiency. It’s quite pleasant. You can sense the nuance between a bun made entirely of corn meal and one with a spoonful of oil added for moisture. It is a gift, truly, to experience this heightened ability to taste. Everything you once thought was necessary is easily discarded. All one needs is a grain or two of salt, really, to satisfy one’s tongue. We’ve become too accustomed to anything more. Extravagance—doesn’t the Chairman say something about extravagance? Doesn’t he say a revolution is not writing an essay or holding a dinner party or reading books but an act, an action, of violence? I don’t know how much our words can mean in the context of what’s happening around them. Act!

  Yours,

  Comrade Wang

  Li-Ming must have believed Wang’s Maoist nonsense because within a month of sending the letter through the Party post, he received a reply, an exclamation of the motherland’s shared affection for Chairman Mao printed in peony red along the header. He read her letter by the dinner fire—the same embers that heated the cave at night, making the men warm enough they didn’t suffer frostbite in their sleep. Li-Ming wrote of the floods in Jiangxi that spring. She almost died, she explained, when the rains flushed the mountains and filled the valley with mud. She left the camp with her comrades to retrieve corn from a storage depository in the valley and, in an unexpected flash flood, their truck flipped onto its side, spilling them into the deluge. Li-Ming and her comrades clung to the truck’s door, but the driver, a terrible swimmer, was swept downstream, nearly lost, save for his shirt catching on the outstretched limb of a tree. She and the other girls made a human chain to reach him. One more life saved through the strength of Chairman Mao’s thought,28 she wrote in her most careful calligraphy, her thick wrist flexing and twisting to craft curling strokes. She said her comrades would soon teach her how to drive a three-wheeled tractor, that in just a few months she’d be transferred to a factory in Weifang—eastern Shandong—where she’d make soap from jasmine and lily flowers. She asked him to report back who his colleagues were—was there a girl from Beijing who’d been sent a decade earlier? A girl roughly Li-Ming’s age with long, beautiful hair and double-fold eyelids? She wanted to know. She would be tall and speak of places and poets you’ve never know. Do you know her? Wang shook his head when he read, as if Li-Ming could see him. He wished he knew this girl who sounded like she’d make good company among such dimwitted comrades. She concluded the letter:

  That’s interesting what you say about salt. Why not cry into your bowl of noodles to add spice? Maybe you aren’t soft enough, Comrade Wang. Even the great poet Han Shan knows how to cry when facing his lone shadow. I suggest you try someday.

  —Your Comrade Huang Li-Ming.

  Wang creased the letter in half, then in half again, reveling in the soft crispness of rice paper on his calloused fingers. His Huang Li-Ming was a poet, like his own mother once dreamed to be. But what was a poet except someone who wasted time trying to fold the world into words that were never enough? Han Shan. Who was this Han Shan Li-Ming wrote of? He’d never heard of this “great poet” but made a note to ask around to see if anyone knew of him.

  When he mentioned the poet’s name over dinner that night, his comrades guffawed.

  “Poetry is for capitalists,” an accountant from Xi’an said, picking a maggot from his bowl and wiping a runny nose onto his shirtsleeve.

  Wang sat by the fire he and his comrades built of twigs and newspapers while the locals boiled them a dinner of Lanzhou beef noodles and stir-fried leeks. This was one of those salt-less nights and, despite his diatribe, he didn’t anticipate the meal.

  Gansu: Too hot by day, too cold by night. Around them, the village’s toddlers bent over, exposing lily-white bottoms to the whitest of moons. Loo, Loo, Loo their parents called to the wild desert dogs who jogged closer to lick the remnant shit off the children’s naked buttocks. Loo, Loo, Loo… and between his ears, his thoughts echoed the call:

  Li-Ming…

  Loo…

  Han Shan…

  Loo…

  After the villagers returned to their neighboring caves, Wang and his comrades readied for bed. Outside their rock dwelling, across the valley, an expanding cloud stamped out the earliest rising stars. The wind picked up quickly, billowing shirtsleeves, chilling spines. Bursts whistled pa
st their perch. His colleague Xiaodong stood, abandoning his empty noodle bowl so it clattered chattily against the rock floor.

  “Ai-ya!” he yelled over the valley, a view they glimpsed occasionally in the mornings when they scrambled into the fields. Walking to the perch with his colleagues, Wang noticed a brown wall slowly moving through the village in the valley, rattling windows and knocking down drying lines, heaving laundry into the air and across the fields in which they’d labored for months. This wall of dust barreled steadily toward the mountains, their caves, them.

  One of the villagers, a toothless man they called “Smiley” because of his near-constant grin, left a nearby cave and jogged over, instinctively shielding his eyes from the growing dust. Even when pummeled by wind, he smiled. The rest of them squinted, lips tightly cinched.

  “Hang whatever beizi you have at the entrance and shield yourselves in the back corners!” he instructed. “Get ready for your first dust storm, boys!”

  They did as advised, but the storm gathered energy from the earth over which it trampled, wind scrambling toward them, ensconced in increasing boils of dust. The meek cotton beizi they’d tucked into the rocky edges of the cave entrance was ripped from its clutch; the blanket flagged wildly as if struggling to overcome the wind’s embrace but was snatched downwind where it disappeared from view. Wang’s living station, just a quilt, a bamboo sleeping mat, some clothing, and what books and letters he brought from Beijing, was nearest the cave’s entrance. Worried about his belongings, and specifically Li-Ming’s latest letter, he ran to his station, gathering what he could with his arms.

  “Are you crazy, Comrade Wang? Sit!” Smiley smiled as he talked; that dumb look: was he genuinely kind or mocking everyone around him?

  “Sit!” Xiaodong echoed.

  But Wang wouldn’t sit until he was sure he was holding Li-Ming’s letter, that it wouldn’t fly away, that he wouldn’t, yet again, be stripped of everything he owned so he was just himself standing there. Didn’t they know? The wind demanded Wang Guanmiao stand. At times like these, the wind was all there was left to face with courage—didn’t they read Chairman Mao’s speech about making mountains bow to us, rivers yield to our power? Inspired by the thought a human could indeed be more powerful than all the earthly elements combined, he trudged through the heavy swirl of yellow dust, gathering all he could, but as he returned to the back corner, belongings clutched to his chest, the wind reached its long arm into the cave, stirring everything in a maelstrom of dust, gray-gold embers, loose paper. Every unmoored object sprung to life, swimming on air, impossible to catch.

  “Snatch what you can!” Xiaodong shouted, suddenly worried.

  Smiley didn’t move; he simply laughed at the city boys who clung to their only belongings—he knew how futile objects were when compared to the might of the natural world: a villager’s intelligence is, as the Chairman reassured them, greater than that of the most educated, well-read urbanite.

  Smiley was right: Li-Ming’s letter, all three pages of thin rice paper, along with Wang’s most recent attempt at a reply, swiftly drifted toward the cliff’s edge and then, just as Wang was about to snag a corner, the pages carried into the valley like seeds—look: words could fly.

  Smiley pat Wang’s shoulder as together they watched Li-Ming’s sentences

  fall and lift,

  fall and lift,

  fall and lift,

  until finally Smiley laughed, sputtered something through his toothless mouth about how stupid urban boys are. They both stared into the distance, but Wang had a feeling they were looking for something entirely different. He didn’t know what Smiley could possibly teach him except that all actions, contrary to The Chairman’s widespread ideology, were futile.

  “Tu baozi,” Wang cursed, brushing Smiley’s hand off his shoulder and returning to the cave to begin rebuilding his latest home. As he gathered what fallen objects he could, he grit his teeth, tasting the upended earth, a salt without the biting tang.

  *

  While rebuilding their cave, that temporary home they still called home after a full day’s work in the fields, where could they live? You must start from scratch with a cave, dusting out stray rocks and bat guano and making a flat enough place for a tired, aching back to rest. While you cleaned, you must live elsewhere. Only one of the caves survived the dust storm (the villagers believed their prayers to the mountain demon Kui spared their dwelling; Wang’s engineering-trained comrades said the cave’s particular rock formation saved it). Whatever the reason, they were grateful something survived. They clustered in that cave for weeks, cramped and full of the sour stink of men who hadn’t bathed in as long. They were only there to sleep, despite the fitful nature of the rest. Nevertheless, the cave was home—because it had to be—while they remade that which was destroyed by nature’s temper.

  Every morning Wang would carefully extricate himself from the tangle of sleeping bodies and scramble into the valley, past the pockmarked grasses and crags left by last year’s rains. He was determined to find Li-Ming’s letter before the season’s weather arrived, forever dampening his chances. What had she said of Han Shan? How was he to reply? What was her new address? He’d shuffle his feet in the dust, reach between rock crevasses, turn over a boulder only to find a spider and beetle laying patiently alongside one another (what uncommon, beneficial bonds exist in nature, he thought). Was it possible to lose something never yours? He was driven by an insatiable need to see her again in that angled afternoon light, pig mud smeared on her chest, the promise of a future laid out for them like a wedding beizi on a marital bed.

  He searched until one morning a spare drop of rain tapped his shoulder saying, “What’s the point?” What was the point? Holding onto that thin rice paper, re-reading the words she’d carefully penned, was as useless as a human befriending a dog: what was in the emotional relationship for the dog? The letter didn’t need me, so why did he need it? Besides, after he sent his last missive, Li-Ming never replied. Forfeiting the search, he sat on a rock outcropping, tilting his head to the bluest stretch of sky. After a few minutes, the sun was obscured by a cloud that grew from out of the earth itself, all puffy and gray and promising something much desired as of late. Finally, the villagers would get their rain. Finally, the potatoes and yams and pumpkins and squash would sprout green and brown and pregnant from the parched soil and finally, they’d remember what it was like to swallow sweetness after so much bland. Despite this, Wang knew in tasting intense flavor again, they’d only be disappointed that the dream—how they’d fantasized about stir-fried pumpkins with leek, yams candied in raw sugar!—was always greater than the experience itself.

  His mouth swelled with expectant saliva while across the valley, above the slanted, hay rooftop of a villager’s home, a speck of white floated in the sky. It could’ve been Li-Ming’s last letter. Or, then again, it could have been a dove. An abandoned propaganda poster. Anything. What did this matter now? The unknown object drifted on the growing breeze ahead of the storm’s brew until it melded with the flat sky and his eyes lost focus, unable to pick it out for the folds of cloud, the smoke of a chimney, the triumphantly arched wing of a bird.

  28. “When words are made futile, we cannot count on poetry anymore.” Li-Ming’s full weight was in my arms. She couldn’t walk the four floors so we took turns taking her outside, like a dog needing to pee, then carrying her back upstairs. My knees shook. I’m only 16! But who was I to interrupt this history lesson? Carrying her made me feel older. Like I was someone important. We made it to the third floor landing and I left her there while I went to ask Baba for help with the last set of stairs. “What are you doing? It’s freezing out,” he said from the doorway after I banged on the door’s steel frame. I wore a tank top in 65-degree weather. “It’s plenty warm. It’s spring,” I said. He said, “You’ll get sick and then we’ll all get sick,” reminding me in a Chinese family there’s no individual action nor consequence—everything I would do from the moment I entered
the Wang home would have an impact on everyone in the family’s fates. Baba, wearing only a tank top and shorts but somehow exempt from his rules, jogged downstairs to help me. “She’s freezing,” he said, draping Li-Ming’s arms around his shoulders so her entire body clung to his chest. “I’m not cold,” she assured him, but Baba didn’t hear her or maybe I’m already falsifying facts in order to make right what long ago was made wrong. Inconsequential, I hear a voice say, and if I were to follow its cue, I’d climb right back into the middle of someone else’s story, snugly framed by the padded weight of a fattening fiction.

  Letter #3

  Dear Kang-Lin,

  Darkness and light: the unerring progress of days.

  Months: the old apartment, our bed smelling of my mother’s unwashed bras, haw rolls cousins forgot beneath the sheets.

  The only window: fly and spider carcasses collected between dusty panes.

  A new suburban life; childless aunt and belching husband, garlic-leek, unhinged by erguotou.

  Gansu: I hear it’s dry, heartless, where wheat grows forehead-high and millet bowls are filled with maggots.

  Bug Eyes again today: cockroaching my library desk. Bark fingers, seashelled nail beds.

  “What you looking for, Little Sister?”

  Maps and a pencil rubbed to a nub.

  “You’ll never find the place that has no name.”

  Latitude or longitude? Gravity or flight?