Empire of Glass

by Kaitlin Solimine

  The raisin villager looked up at Wang, eyes narrowed and red, hands curled tenaciously, as if forever clinging to the crane’s legs. Within the man’s palms, he held only air.

  “Ta ma de!” Xiaodong plunged the blade into the soft earth. “What the fuck were you thinking?”34

  Wang’s tongue slapped the roof of his mouth as slickly as a lie (No, I didn’t lead Mother to the river’s edge; Yes, I saw the planes; The letter’s in my room; No, I didn’t kill my wife; Yes, I’ll go with you to the protests; No, I don’t know why Xiaofei hasn’t called). “I’d once read cranes bow at the sound of two hands clapping.”

  “Well, Poet,” Xiaodong said, “That sounds like bullshit poetry to me. Clearly, you were wrong.”

  The raisin villager didn’t say a thing. He wiped his hands on worn pant legs then shuffled to help his neighbors in the skinning of their only kill. Xiaodong shook his head and joined them as well, slowly slicing the long neck of the remaining crane with the care and caution of a parent. The blood slipped effortlessly to the earth, staining red what had been eternally yolk-yellow.

  For years, decades perhaps, the villagers would speak wistfully of this day: The Day of Killing Cranes. On this day, the entire village roasted the black-rumped hide of this mythical creature on fire spits hand-prepared by dutiful wives and daughters. The villagers and their city comrades crowded the heat, warming their hands and drinking hot water from rusted tin mugs. They smoked cigarettes and chewed on tar, willfully spitting cud into growing flames. They told each other stories of the hunt. In these stories, they were all heroes. They fought graciously over the singed wings:

  You first, Comrade…

  No, you, please, Honorable Elder…

  No, Uncle, take the skin.

  “Are you returning home for the holidays?” Xiaodong’s face removed Wang Guanmiao from the reverie of bird song in flame, of the writing forward of a history no longer his.

  Wang shook his head—he didn’t feel like running through the various impossible options that qualified as ‘home’ to him. Xiaodong wasn’t the kind of man who’d understand. His home was always the same, easily contained within the courtyard walls of the birthplace of his parents and grandparents—his ancestry spoke to him from the stones.

  “Smoke?” Xiaodong kicked an unwrapped pack of cigarettes across the dirt that skidded to a stop at Wang’s feet. On the cover, Wang didn’t believe what he saw: the Yellow Crane Tower of Wuhan, one of China’s four most famous pagodas, the same tower Li Bai’s poetry often mentioned. These cigarettes were Yellow Crane Tower 1916 cigarettes. They were expensive, even for an urbanite like Xiaodong. This level of cigarette was allotted from its state-owned factory in Hubei to only the highest ranked Party officials.

  “Impressed?” Xiaodong winked and Wang noticed that sometime between the hunt and the following campfire, his comrade managed to find time to shave his mustache into its requisite U. Although this usually made him look more mature, now all Wang could see was a boy freshly emerged from his parent’s closet, donning his father’s Liberation-era PLA jacket, stuffing his pockets with army-issued condoms, pretending to be a man.

  Xiaodong elaborated: “The village boss gave the cigarettes to Xu Min for feeding the entire village. That bird has enough meat on it to make Lanzhou ‘bird’ noodles for a week!”

  “Xu Min,” Wang repeated.

  “Yeah, that’s the man who killed the bird. The man I helped.”

  “Xu Min,” Wang said again. So Xu Min was the name of the Raisin Villager. Xu Min: ‘Small People,’ or ‘smaller than the people.’ Wang couldn’t decide which was more fitting. Nor what his mother ever thought in naming him something so diminutive.

  “Yeah, so what if that’s his name?” Xiaodong didn’t understand Wang’s confusion.

  “So, nothing,” Wang said, opening the cigarette box, pulling out a stick and inhaling the floral-sweet tobacco. Honey. Fields filled with flowers, women lying on their backs between tall grasses and men on their knees laughing into a forgetful white day. Laughing. He laughed. Xu Min was the name of a man in one of Lu Xun’s stories Wang read in what classes his father could afford to send him to as a child. In the story, Xu Min buys his wife an expensive bar of soap so she doesn’t have to wash behind her ears with honey locust pods, but the man is ridiculed by schoolboys when he wants to unwrap the soap and inhale the first whiff. Back then, Lu Xun’s story was from a time of ‘New Culture’—irrelevant, except in its discussion of scrubbing, how you could turn a bad woman filial by buying her some good soap. Scrubbing clean. That’s what Wang could use, he thought—a proper shower, not the tossing of a bucket of cold water over his shivering, naked body as was the custom in Gansu, but a warm bath surrounded by steam and shrouded figures of one’s comrades in the communal shower halls. Of course Xiaodong wouldn’t know any of this. He was born in an era when students read only the Chairman’s books. Xiaodong was schooled in the ways of keeping step and smoking expensive cigarettes when they were handed to you. Xu Min—the man who thought soap could cure everything. Wang wanted to tell Xiaodong and Xu Min: you need more than a box of soap. You need an understanding of objects that goes beyond the object itself. As soon as the soap performs its function, it becomes something else entirely—no longer capable of simply cleaning, but bestowing on you yesterday’s filth as well. Soap can clean, but it can also cake, mold, grow foul and ugly.

  Wang returned the cigarette to its roost and closed the box’s top with a crisp snap, then handed it to Xiaodong.

  “Not smoking, Little Brother Wang? Not even a victory smoke?”

  Flames blanketed the body of the bird spinning on its spit, charred feathers dropping to the ground like wasted black snow.

  “No,” he said, lowering his head. .

  “Still thinking of that woman?”

  At the fire, the villagers stepped away from the crane, contemplated the best way to roast the meat evenly—the bird’s head revering the sky or placating the earth?

  “No,” Wang repeated.

  Xiaodong was undeterred. “That Li-Ming, I’ve been meaning to ask you: is she the same Li-Ming who went to the PLA school near Zhongnanhai?”

  “Yes,” Wang confirmed, confused how Xiaodong could know her.

  “Then she’s the same Li-Ming my wife went to school with. Said she was quite the catch then, making the boys run after her. You think you can catch her, Comrade?”

  Wang’s fists clenched. He stood, hovering above Xiaodong, his figure drowning his comrade’s face in shadow.

  “What’s gotten into you, Poet?” Xiaodong nonchalantly dragged on his cigarette, exhaled smoke in a victorious puddle at Wang’s feet. “First you’re too weak to kill a damned bird and now you’re angered at the mention of a woman who’s not even yours?”

  “I…” Wang wanted to strangle the words spilling from Xiaodong’s ignorant mouth. He wanted to stop everything from happening as if the world had a distinct plan for him and he was to follow along, like the last bird in a flying V. His fingernails dug deeper into his palms, breaking the skin. His jaw clenched tightly around the ready muscle of his tongue. He swallowed loudly, acid settling into his gut like a stale mantou.

  “Let’s see what the Poet’s capable of,” Xiaodong egged.

  Wang’s nails dug deeper, clenching his own pulse, peeling himself to his stoniest core.

  His comrade’s eyes glistened in the firelight, nostrils flamed. The young man gripped his knees, about to stand to face Wang, but in that mocking gesture implied he didn’t truly anticipate a fight. Wang raised his fists to strike his comrade, but then, in the evening shadows collecting at his feet, waltzed the body of a dancing crane. Wang blinked and dropped his hands to his thighs. The crane turned, raised its wings, and ran.

  29. “If I could be a crane, I wouldn’t have to ask for your help,” she said as I uncoiled the thick rope and placed it on her lap to show her the length recommended. “Don’t you think we’re going to look odd bringing rope onto the subway?”
She laughed: “This is China. Everything is weird. Normal is what’s not.” At her side: the morphine tablet Baba left each day, a pin-sized remedy for pain but not the murmur in her lungs. “Cold Mountain has so many wonders; climbers all get scared,” she said, and for the first time since she launched our plan, I wanted to strangle her, to mute a mouth that proffered too much nonsense.

  30. As in Han Shan:

  “I sit beneath the cliff, quiet and alone.

  Round moon in the middle of the sky’s a bird

  ablaze:

  all things are seen mere shadows in its brilliance,

  that single wheel of perfect light . . .

  Alone, its spirit naturally comes clear.

  Swallowed in emptiness in this cave of darkest

  mystery,

  because of the finger pointing, I saw the moon.

  That moon became the pivot of my heart.”

  —Trans. Red Pine

  31. “Seven hundred and eighty-two steps to the subway entrance.” She mapped them by memory, and although she infrequently traveled by subway, I trusted her estimation. “Isn’t there an elevator?” Hahahaha. Laughter above magpie song outside the window; in spring, they puff slate-blue feathers and masquerade as desirable mates.

  32. I think here Li-Ming is referring to this Cold Mountain poem:

  “Out of work, our only joy is poetry:

  Scribble, scribble, we wear out our brains.

  Who will read the words of such men?

  On that point you can save your sighs.

  We could inscribe our poems on biscuits

  And the homeless dogs wouldn’t deign to nibble.”

  (Trans: Burton Watson)

  33. What does loneliness feel like on another man’s tongue, in another’s man’s mouth? Traduttore, traditore.

  34. He was thinking, “Maybe if I save just one, I’ve saved them all.” Radio static of a song we’ve never sung and his chest to mine repeating the chorus ringing in my ears. Didn’t he know that’s what I needed too? To save someone in order to spare myself? “It’s not going to happen,” he said. Although the weather turned nearly to summer, the basement’s darkroom was still cool; a chill passed between us, ruffling arm feathers, marking time and space. The photographs clinging to the line were not of me but of strange men, smug faces stuck in static smiles. “Don’t,” I said as his arm raised to brush a housefly off my shoulder. I wanted to believe him. Now I find myself wanting to believe history is capable of being erased, that by the simple act of translation we can rewrite entire narratives of time and injustice. As in Valéry translating Virgil: “At moments, I caught myself wanting to change something in the venerable text…‘Why not?’ I said to myself, returning from this short absence. Why not?”

  Baba

  Perhaps it was the memory of a dead bird roasting on a spit, the taste of flight on one’s tongue. Or perhaps it was that spirited anthem, ‘The East is Red,’ braying through the crackling speakers like a bird’s final, raspy hoot. Or how Wang’s companion Xiaodong sang along as if every time the song played publicly it was his duty to provide the harmony. Always he sang shrill and off-tune. Everything about him was unabashed, even his lyrical ineptitude.

  The pair was finally heading home to Beijing after the requisite three years of reeducation in the deserts of Gansu. The villagers taught them what they needed to know—the proper height for corn stalks to grow in dry soil (two and half meters); how many piglets a sow births in a litter (eight to twelve); what to do at the first sign of frostbite (liberally apply zi cao ointment). The city boys left the villagers with the memory of rose-cheeked, tall-nosed northerners who daintily plucked meat off the bones of a roasting crane, goat, or pig. They’d never think of the western provinces with the spite they once had for these cold, rugged regions in their childhood years; now they knew the coldest cold, the hottest heat, the happiest Hui villagers, what it meant to be family, comrades. They’d experienced entire days (sun up, sun down), shoulders bathed in the heat of the desert sun without any promise of shaded respite. Heading home to expectant wives, children, and parents, these men were supposed to be exuberant. They were supposed to be thrilled at the prospect of instructing their city colleagues in the ways of country villagers. Comrades in the field. In the caves. At the communal fire.

  But why wasn’t Wang more excited? Li-Ming’s last letter never arrived as promised—he heard from other colleagues in his work unit she was transferred to a factory in Weifang, a city on China’s eastern seaboard. More than a season passed since he wrote to her about the killing of cranes and noted the Yellow Crane cigarettes, the uncanny link to Li Bai’s poetry. Had he been too presumptuous in making this intellectual leap? Or did he lack academic rigor entirely? Had he not cited Li Bai properly? Had she learned something of his uneducated background, his lack of a university degree, and his tenuous understanding of poetry?

  He missed her letters’ stoic introductions:

  Greetings Comrade, What do you think of Chairman Mao’s proclamation we cannot waste two hands lazing about the city?

  He missed the way she seamlessly transitioned (and with such effortless pragmatism) into an analysis of the country’s greatest poetry, how the lessons she learned from Du Fu, Li Bai, Li Shang-yin, and Han Shan could be applied to the daily life at the Jiangxi commune—she wrote once, quoting Han Shan, ‘What’s the use of all that noise and money?’ and Wang responded by saying money and noise can be drowned out by the belief in the shadows money and noise make. She said this philosophical extension made her laugh. He missed her summation of life as a barefoot doctor, how important she made such a tiresome existence seem:

  …there’s no other way to put it: when you wake to the howl of a rooster and sleep to the chorus of crickets, you learn your place in this world. All the great masters—Confucius, Mencius, Chairman Mao—teach us what humans are truly capable of, but don’t they also teach us humility? Today I birthed a foal. If you haven’t already, you must witness this—how quickly a young thing can wobble into standing, still reeking of the womb. I envied its sure footing, its instinctive rush to stand. When did we lose our ability to live as innately as when we were first born?

  He also missed her swift closings, which left him wondering if she expected he’d know all the answers to her questions:

  Your Comrade,

  Li-Ming

  Sitting on the train returning to Beijing, Wang tried not to think of Li-Ming. Her letters were carefully folded in his knapsack. Besides, he wasn’t alone with his thoughts on this trip—Xiaodong, his companion on the twenty-five hour ride in the hard seat cabin, hammered on, one of his usual rants about the Party’s new plan for Beijing, how many of the old city walls would be knocked down. Around them, Red Guards knit sweaters to send to the Chairman and gambled for pins blinding them with the Chairman’s golden-cheeked face, while Xiaodong made suggestions about the shape of the Capital’s new streets, the freshly-planted aspens lining the boulevards large enough for a parade of PLA officers to march down. Xiaodong’s city was one of martial importance. His city represented China’s destined future of greatness. In truth, Wang now found his city tiresome. He preferred the quiet of traversing a mountain path alone, bird song waking him each morning.

  “Don’t you care about our city’s new urban planning? Aren’t you interested in a capital besting all the world’s capitals?” Xiaodong’s questions always seemed rehearsed.

  “What’s so thrilling about urban planning?” Wang asked.

  Xiaodong discarded Wang’s ambivalence with a guttural “Aiya…” he continued. “Only a true country boy wouldn’t care about the state of his city. Are you a country boy now or have you always been one?” His pretentious breath clouded the window beside him. Although his eyes casually glanced the platform rolling away, the desert cliffs slowly turning to flat, dry fields, he didn’t see any of it. Xiaodong, Wang wanted to ask him, where are you now? Although he sat beside Wang, his body rocking forward as the train chugged away from the
station, his thick thigh scraping Wang’s, his dreaming mind was already stepping off the train onto Beijing’s newly paved streets. But what of the scene rolling by outside their dusty window? Yellow soil exhaled beneath the train’s wheels. Yellow everywhere and not a hint of the red and green turrets of Beijing. Beijing’s gray. Beijing’s brown. Here, the world was only soil and rock and earth. Hard. Unforgiving. Somehow more real than the ground beneath one’s city feet. Barren, yes, but a barrenness to which Wang grew accustomed during the months sleeping on the cliffs of Gansu. He’d learned the strength of a man’s lean legs, his wide, firm fingers. He examined the grimy crescents lining his fingernails. Maybe Wang was more a country boy than he’d known; maybe we can never fully unshackle ourselves from our birth place (a Gansu former astrologer with whom Wang once shared a corn harvest told him the entirety of one’s life is governed by the position of the stars at the time of birth). But maybe Li-Ming would be impressed by Wang’s new practical abilities. Her Poet could not only grind glass into the perfect shape for the army’s telescopes and binoculars but also knew the exact temperature at which to plant soybeans in spring (at least 15 degrees Celsius), the best soil type for a gourd’s growth (in full sun, on a raised bed).

  Xiaodong didn’t look out the window but merely stared past his companion to the line of railway cabs chugging forward, all the Red Guards cluttering the floor with their eager banter and cigarette butts. “And then, in place of city walls they’ll build avenues wide enough for eight lines of bicycles!”

  Xiaodong. Xiaodong. Where are you buried now? When he sat next to Wang and casually allowed his breath to fog the window, his hands were more weathered and thick-fingered then than they’d ever been, would ever be again, one day receding into their original slender form. Yet he paid his appendages no attention—not once did he look to his nails as he gestured the span of Beijing’s newly paved avenues. He already knew one’s hands weren’t much use when one’s tongue can flick words into the world with such precision and ease. Wang should’ve known his comrade was destined for the one rung below truly great things, the constant over-striving his life’s greatest hurdle.