Empire of Glass

by Kaitlin Solimine

  *

  The problem, Wang Guanmiao realized, was Wu Wei looked even more handsome naked. Whenever the danwei men entered the communal showers together, Wu Wei was the first to remove his towel from its tight wrap around his sculpted hips. Wu Wei’s chest wasn’t sunken and bony like Wang’s. His limbs didn’t reach toward the earth like dead twigs. His body was made in perfect precision. Even his penis seemed to retain its girth at all times of day and night, despite the lukewarm temperature of the shared showers. Yet none of the men envied him; they were more in awe the world provided them with such a beautiful sight. They wanted to believe nature was kind, not that the heavens regularly doled out cruelnesses like Pockmarked Zhang’s acned skin or Xiaodong’s short stature and watermelon belly. For so long, they wondered which of the five women Wu Wei regularly dangled from his bulging hipbones every night at the mess hall would eventually call him ‘Lao Gong’ and provide him with an equally-attractive son. And so, naturally, Wu Wei would turn Wang’s blade of fate upon its head while he and the others soaped themselves in the steaming heat of the danwei’s mildewed showers. Water at full blast, an opaque wall of mist, their voices carried far, echoing against the tiled floors, spilling out into the dressing room along with clouds of steam. Wang needn’t be in the showers to hear the pronouncement that would eventually change his life and send Li-Ming running back into his heart with a swelling ta-dum.

  Fate, Wang’s father regularly reminded his son from a young age, throws daggers at you. Wang never understood what he meant by this seldom-used idiom. He’d tell Wang at night, before they curled onto their floor mats in the two-story Shanghai home: You’ve got to grab fate by the handle, not the blade. But what fate had Wang’s father handled so successfully? His father: the farmer’s son who learned a trade as best he could, who built from wide country hands a quiet empire of glass, now living alone, impoverished, in his hometown’s granary, sleeping beside well-fed rats and cockroaches. Did he know how to grab the handle instead of the blade?

  The winter had been Beijing’s coldest—killing thousands of chickens in suburban coops and requiring the Party to declare a free run on coal—and Wang was drying off with a starched towel, enjoying the heat of the room’s only radiator when he heard the news that would change his life.

  “Shi Lili said Pockmarked Zhang’s balls are as big as grapes!” Wu Wei’s voice was unmistakable—loud, brash, and adding ‘er’ sounds to the ends of ‘ah’ words. His was the voice of a native Beijinger, full of the privilege of urbanity and inherited Party status.

  “No way!” one of his compatriots doubted: how could Pockmarked Zhang, with those fleshy hips, have such small balls?

  “Oh yes, Lili told Qinglin the other night she and Zhang had been up to their ears in a snow bank behind Factory Building Number Five. She said his balls were as big as grapes.”

  “As small as grapes!” someone corrected.

  “As shriveled too!”

  “Oh that’s a story.”

  “It’s no story.” Wu Wei’s laughter carried from within the showers, that clucking chicken pecking pointlessly at dry earth. Compared to his body, his laughter was frivolous, feminine—an anachronism. At least he was somewhat human.

  “I’m telling you,” Wu Wei spat into the streaming water as one-by-one the shower heads turned off, sputtered a mindless dribble. Feet splashed toward the exit, voices—still marveling over the size and shape of Zhang’s unusually small testicles—drawing nearer.

  The metal door to the showers flapped open, releasing into the room billowing steam. The three freshly-showered men sauntered to their belongings, which were strewn haphazardly over wooden benches. They seemed not to notice Wang standing beside the radiator in the corner in only blue underwear and socks. As they toweled their legs and asses, Wang turned away, rubbing his hands to the heat. He pulled on his pants, buckled his belt.

  “What about you, Wu Wei? Which women have been naming your balls?”

  “Cannonballs!” Wu Wei shouted, correcting the crowd. There was the slapping of wet skin. That tweeting Wu Wei laughter. There must have been stomach muscles contracting and Wang wondered what kind of masculine display he missed by not turning from his perch at the radiator to watch.

  “What’s this going around the factory about you and Boss Huang’s daughter? The pretty one with plump ankles and hips wide enough to shake a bed?”

  Wu Wei bellowed a quick, polite laugh. “Oh she’s just one of the pack,” he muttered with his trademark confidence (could Wang hear his smile?).

  His cohort expressed their approval—whose pursuits could they live through if not Wu Wei’s?—and dressed quickly, still speaking of the gossip, how Pockmarked Zhang made a woman of Shi Lili, a girl Wang knew only for her freckled cheeks, her dog-like obedience to her suitors, and inability to quote Chairman Mao thought.

  “Shi Lili and Pockmarked Zhang. What a pair,” someone remarked.

  Wang leaned over to tie his shoelaces as Wu Wei swaggered toward the door.

  “Who will it be tonight, Comrade Wu?” the stouter friend, the same man Wang knew as the one with cinnamon piss, looked to his leader like the sycophantic Shi Lili. Wu Wei had everyone in his grip, even Wang himself was in awe of his comrade’s every motion; Wu Wei gestured with a wrist as if the latest pursuit meant nothing—was as effortless as slipping into a wide-knit sweater—then his face unexpectedly scrunched in concentration as he made his decision. When thinking, as when laughing, Wu Wei wasn’t particularly attractive. His face was meant only for moments of distraction, petty talk. In pensive thought, his body betrayed him, his mind incapable of controlling the smooth, tanned muscles of his cheeks and square jaw. Perhaps the heavens are not so kind after all, Wang thought with crude satisfaction.

  But what thinking on the part of Wu Wei, what internal discussion, was required to answer his comrade’s question? Li-Ming. The answer—quickly, confidently, unabashedly—was Li-Ming. Wang’s answer was only Li-Ming. It should have been Wu Wei’s too. How could he take so long to reply?

  “Shi Lili!” he finally announced, finishing the flick of his waiting wrist (suspended in air while his face, his mind, betrayed this grace). He confidently slapped open the door to the entryway.

  “Pockmarked Zhang’s girl it is!” the stout comrade shouted in astonishment. “Well done, indeed! You can show her those elephant’s balls of yours!”

  “Cannonballs!” Wu Wei corrected again.

  Laughter, always laughter: the loud laughter of Wu Wei’s men punctuated by Wu Wei’s chirpy giggle as they exited, leaving the door flapping behind them, the same singing approval trailing the leader happily down the hallway and forging into the fogged autumn cold.

  Wang dressed quickly, nearly forgetting to don his woolen hat and gloves to protect against the frigid chill that descended that morning from Manchuria. But he didn’t feel cold as he walked from the showers to his dormitory in the purpled dusk. All he knew was the warmth that slid into Shi Lili days earlier, the same warmth that promised to slide into her tonight, was the warmth that now gave him re-inspired faith Li-Ming could one day return to Beijing for him. For me!37

  At the corner of the dormitory, Wu Wei’s gang, their leader in the center, chatted, slapping one another’s backs, still laughing. As Wang walked past, Wu Wei called out for him.

  “Roomie!” he said, speaking as if the pair had any camaraderie when, in fact, they were barely acquaintances.

  “His name’s Wang,” one of Wu Wei’s gaggle whispered.

  “Come over here, Comrade Wang, my roommate! We have a question to ask you.” He waved his broad white hand and the deeply embedded image of a similar hand waving made Wang’s foot snag concrete. White on brown: an image stored in his brain, or, in reality, closer to his chest, hoping one day he’d wake up to find it there, a seed blossomed like a lotus in mud, its fragrance overwhelming the world with light and heat. While Wang reached to pull this flower from the surface, he fell forward, knapsack flying out of his hands and t
oward the pavement sprawled between him and Team Wu Wei. His knee burned. His back kinked. When he looked up, Wu Wei leaned over him, extending a hand (it was smaller than Wang imagined).

  “Need help?” But behind his eyes was the glimmer Wang knew well: like the shimmer at the bottom of a pool, that vapid space where knowledge becomes revolutionary practice becomes nothing. Wu Wei’s eyes: beautiful, if what you loved was a version of human beauty, but when you looked deeper, you’d see a pool of deep, lovely, nothingness.

  Hatred and love: neither really an emotion, but an action. For Wang Guanmiao, his hatred had little to do with Wu Wei, he could admit that, and, had little to do with his hunch-backed tu baozi father, his mother’s final walk into the river, his temporary blindness at the front. What he hated was not himself but his body’s boundaries—that he could stand now, shaking feeling into his feet and hands, and face Wu Wei, that he could cock a fist and lash it across those perfect cheekbones, shattering nose bone, eye socket, jaw. That the blood could run down his wrist but not be his own, would never match his in color or viscosity. Wu Wei could fall to the pavement, smack skull to cement, and all that laughter could spew out of his mouth, a sewer drain unplugged. But who would be the victor then?

  Wang’s hands pressed the pavement. No wonder everyone loved Wu Wei. No wonder everyone wanted to be him—isn’t it easier to live without questioning the reason why we’re living than be burdened by the weight of answers without questions?38 His arm was still outstretched, beckoning.

  Once Wang was on his knees, Wu Wei extended a hand again, this time closer to Wang’s chest, too close, Wang thought, to the flower that blossomed earlier then recoiled.

  “I don’t need you,” Wang said. “,” but when he spoke, consciously or not, he spit on Wu Wei’s hand. .

  Attached to the words clattering off his tongue (bu bu bu), Wang’s saliva landed on Wu Wei’s skin where it glistened, river slime on reeds.

  “Turtle shit!” Wu Wei shouted, wiping his hand on his pant leg. “What’s with the inconsiderate fool who can’t walk or talk like a true Comrade?”

  Behind him, the gaggle swelled, full of revolutionary talk and words without meaning or place here, but they didn’t care. Their faces looked down at Wang as he struggled to his feet. Who were they? In what Party office or at what government job pushing papers and stamping strokes of red did they now sit, smoking Panda cigarettes, coughing and complaining about their lao wives and their zisi children, waiting on an inevitable death that felt like the closing of a book, the final pages growing slender and so, what was the point in paying attention? The sun, most days, was shrouded not by clouds but by what weather reporters called smoke or fog: Wu. Wu was in the sky and wu was in their lungs. Wu was everywhere.

  Bu bu bu.

  Wu wu wu.

  “I’m just trying to be a good roommate,” Wu Wei said, a smiled scoff, that glimmer behind his eyes beckoning. Who was he? Wang wanted to believe in him. They all did. Because without people like Wu Wei, how could they trust the earth beneath their feet?

  He gripped Wang’s elbow. “Don’t you know what Mao says about roommates?”

  “Yes,” Wang said, allowing Wu Wei to help him stand. He’d never noticed how he was actually taller than Wu Wei; despite how large the mythical man grew in their minds, he was quite average-sized.

  “Yes,” Wang repeated while within his mind that chorus grew:

  Wang knew what Mao said. Who didn’t? “Mao says ‘roommates’ are the fools of the bourgeois. Our real roommates are those who stand beside us when we fall—like the sparrows, the cranes, the river’s fish. Are you calling yourself as great as a bird, as a flying fish?”

  The crowd parted, water past cliffs or a bird through mist.

  But what Wang really said was: “I don’t know.” What he really did was walk away, past Wu Wei’s gaggle of faces, the faces that had been above the surface while he struggled for breath, their feet kicking him back under. He’d seen enough.

  After the run in with Wu Wei, after his team dispersed to their various apartments, wisps of laughter following them home, Wang stood at the entrance to his building’s stairwell, waiting for the flickering lights to flick on, fixed as they were to the sun’s unacknowledged setting, knowing with just one step he’d be entering the rest of his life. With that step, he grip fate’s handle tightly, a surging confidence. ‘Hello dagger, meet Wang Guanmiao,’ he told himself, as the Soviets did in films the Party showed on Saturday nights at Chaoyang Park, backlit screens with fluttering images of mustached generals greeting one another with head bows and handshakes. So much formality in a world so colorless and stale.

  The next morning, after the gossip about Wu Wei and Shi Lili became public, Wang would walk into Huang Daozhen’s office to meet the knife that splintered his own ancestral name into his daughter’s—Huang Daozhen becomes Wang Guanmiao’s Huang Li-Ming. That same fated knife would now cleave to their lives like the scent of the communal squat toilets at the end of the dormitory hallway, that sweet, buttery refuse rising to one’s nose with added zest, reminding Wang it was time to walk upstairs, that he was, as much as he was anywhere, home.

  *

  Of course, fate is trickier than one can expect. Fate, like life, gives reasons to wait. Makes hours become days become weeks become months become years.

  It would be nearly half a year from the day Wang grabbed fate’s handle that Li-Ming returned to Beijing. Her homecoming was arranged with a Weifang native working as a porter in Beijing’s Chaoyang district—those days when travel was only ordained by party affiliation. Without a proper Beijing danwei, Li-Ming was the property of Weifang’s Shandong Soap Factory. Huang Daozhen requested that Wang deliver to the Weifang native a new Phoenix bicycle, purchased for the exorbitant price of 150 yuan, in exchange for the man’s Beijing hukou; likewise, Li-Ming would give her Weifang resident status to him. The Weifanger (a bow-legged, freckle-cheeked man) accepted the trade begrudgingly—Beijing’s my home, he told Wang as he examined the bike. But he had an arranged wife waiting for him in the fields outside his village. Wang wanted to say he understood better than anyone the distance that grows between spaces over time, but he simply rolled the bicycle toward the man. The Weifanger would talk to the party bosses that night and would arrange for Li-Ming’s return in exchange for his departure. That was the way things were done those days, the red stamps necessary to complete a transaction, to leave factories in the fields of Shandong for factories within Beijing’s now-demolished ancient city walls. Wang waited until the bow-legged man rounded the corner on his new, shining bicycle, then jogged to the danwei’s dormitory, his feet finally regaining the lightness they’d felt years earlier.

  A month later, the day Li-Ming arrived in Beijing, Wang waited for her at the entrance to her family’s apartment building clutching a bag of guazi, the lightly-spiced sunflower seeds he knew she loved. Magpies jumped between the branches of flowering pink peach trees, children chased their shadows in the complex’s courtyard, duck egg vendors bicycled the alleyways shouting for patrons to test the salinity of their once-buried product. This was the Beijing Wang loved.

  Just as another magpie touched down, as the egg vendor’s call was swallowed by the busy city streets, Li-Ming’s voice billowed from around the corner, drawing nearer with each breath. What pleasure was this? What was the unexpected wincing pain cradled within it?

  Now that Li-Ming’s return was imminent, now that her voice reached Wang before the image of her smiling face stretched around the corner, he could not will himself to believe the rest of his life would unfold so blissfully.

  Of course Li-Ming wouldn’t see him. Instead, as Wang stood beside the entrance to her parents’ apartment building, Li-Ming, freshly-butchered pig head happily stuffed into a burlap sack swinging from her wrist, bounded up the stairs without once stopping to say ‘hello’, not glancing in his direction. Wang remained alone clutching his guazi at the bottom of the stairwell as she hopped ebulliently upstairs.
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  Of course she would not see him in the shadows.

  Of course he would be forgotten, the guazi bag hanging limply by his side.

  She bounded to her parents’ cramped apartment, her parents, who, in a year’s time, would move to Nanjing, her father transferred to a higher position in another glass grinding factory and her mother’s health deteriorating due to those struggle years where the label ‘black’ hung heavily upon her neck.

  Wang tipped his head: through the column of staircase windows, he counted each of Li-Ming’s steps, those light-tapping feet climbing higher, higher—

  Shi-er…

  Shi-san…

  Shi-si…

  Er-shi…

  San-shi…

  And finally: si-shi-liu. Forty six. The door slapped open, followed by the expected commotion over the pig’s head.

  Who would eat the roasted ear? Who would receive the fattiest piece?

  The magpie perched on a branch above Wang’s head, long tail flexing.

  “You alone too?” Wang asked. The bird’s head twisted inquisitively, but before he could speak, he stretched his neck to wrestle with a particularly stubborn berry then flew into the blue-gray sky, slowly growing smaller, as if the pair were never friends to begin with, birds alone immune to the loneliness plaguing humanity.

  Wang envied his easy escape. But what had Wang expected in this waiting? He wanted his future wife to bound down those stairs to find him standing there. To throw her arms around him, tell him how much she missed him in the years that passed since their first and only meeting. To shout to the entire courtyard of homes, all the apartments with their spring-happy windows, the descending evening sun: “Comrade Wang: I’ll marry you next week!”