Empire of Glass

by Kaitlin Solimine

  But the sun tucked itself beneath the horizon of nameless brown buildings, leaving shadows of phone wires draped above the city in dusty, abandoned webs, humming conversations pulsing between posts, words that weren’t Wang’s—like all the invented dialogues he created in anticipation of this day:

  Wang Guanmiao, you’re taller than I remembered!

  Wang Guanmiao, you’re truly a poet!

  Wang Guanmiao, we can begin the rest of our lives now!

  Instead: steps folding behind rusted banisters. A stolen glimpse of white sock above black saddle shoe, the faintest hint of the creased back of a knee. A pig’s snout pushing against the thin burlap sack, exhaling. Did he witness the animal’s last, punishing breath? Who had seen the last blink of an eye closing its final cinch?

  Wang waited.

  He waited until the snaking wire shadows were swallowed by a navy night, until the duck egg vendors bicycled home with empty cartons rattling, until shifts ended at the factories, dinners cooked, dinners eaten, apartment lights proudly ticked off—click tap tick—as if they’d been waiting all day for this moment, for children slumping into sleep at the dinner table, for wives and husbands sliding wordlessly into bed.

  Wang waited until waiting itself became a chore. Then, shoving his hands in his pockets, he walked slowly toward the empty courtyard, to the shared apartment in the western block, nearer the factory floors, the machinery droning until dawn. Why hadn’t he called ahead to Huang Daozhen, or allowed Li-Ming a day alone with her parents to exhaust all the stories of Jiangxi and Weifang? Why hadn’t Wang considered he might not be welcome here? Was there an old folk song about him? Lo, lo, lo, you’ve made a fool of yourself again, old man—but while the song droned on, families pulled chairs to tables, the moon silvered the city blocks, and even the magpies retired to crowded nests. You’re a fool to think you’re anyone, the song should have sung. You’re a fool to think you deserve to be loved. Musicians would write songs about people like Wang. They’d write songs about all the times he stood beneath doorways, outside windows, beneath trees. Waiting. Waiting. Deng. Deng. Deng.

  Finally, as Wang traversed a long expanse of concrete toward the alleyway leading him home, a familiar name pierced the slowly descending evening:

  “Comrade Wang!”

  “Wang Xiansheng!”

  “The Poet!”

  “Comrade Wang! Stop!”

  He stopped. He was Comrade Wang. He was The Poet even though he’d never penned a verse.

  When he turned, he saw Li-Ming’s head poking from her apartment’s sole south-facing window, hand waving. He could ascribe three wan’s worth of metaphors to her hand waving because he’s remembered it like this for decades, telling everyone it was like this, it must have been, could only be this way.39 But Wang didn’t yet know what hope he had in Li-Ming would leave him, ultimately, an old man with the same habits and rituals ruling his youth: lifting chopsticks to mouth over a meal shared with only a bouffant-donning TV game show host who announced a newlywed couple eager to try their hand at the Wheel of Life—What would they win this time? A trip to Hainan Island? A Japanese-made microwave? Old Wang would shout: You will win a lonely death alone! But no one would hear him, not even the host with his superfluous hairdo waving mockingly.

  But that night, his would-be wife stood there waving. They would try their hand at the Wheel. What would they win?

  “Where are you going, Wang Guanmiao?” Li-Ming asked, as if Wang was the one who was rude that night. Huang Daozhen stood behind her, his hands pressed firmly into her shoulders, a gesture bordering on paternal, but lingering close to condescension. She was his only child—how could he do anything but love her indiscriminately?

  “Why are you standing outside in the cold so late? You must come upstairs to join us!”

  “Comrade Wang, please join us for a second dinner.”

  It was Huang Daozhen extending the offer.

  It was Li-Ming laughing expectantly and raising her shoulders as if his question demanded no other answer than what Wang quickly responded.

  “Yes, of course.” Wang nodded, already playing the role of husband that would enact itself occasion after occasion in coming years: Bicycle Xiaofei home from school, will you? Yes. May I meet my colleagues at the office for evening badminton? Yes. Can you pick up sanitary napkins from Pang’s Grocery? Yes.

  Huang Daozhen’s face disappeared from view, lost to the darkness of their candle-lit apartment, the scene familiar those nights, the near-daily power outages they blamed on the imperialists and their unscrupulous trade embargoes. Li-Ming smiled at Wang, made a gesture with her once-waving hand that meant ‘hurry up now’ and then she too was lost to the quivering golden light behind that open window.

  Now it was Wang’s feet bounding up four flights of stairs, the forty-six steps. Forty-six seemed an easy number to climb to reach Li-Ming. Forty-six could pass in a heartbeat. Why had he waited so long?

  36. “You don’t understand,” she said during one of the afternoon lessons, then realized this hurt my feelings so softened her tone. “The Great Unraveling was the beginning of the end. It’s when we lost our way. Maybe we never should’ve gotten married.” “You can’t say that,” I said. Her hair gone now; a butterfly silk scarf knotted at the nape of her neck. “And why is it a Great Unraveling? Maybe it’s a raveling?” “No, that’s not how it works.” Why in death, or so near it, was she so stubborn? In the apartment kitchen, the wok sizzled, garlic added to peanut oil, a toss of ginger too. My stomach peaked, tongue caressing teeth. “I’m hungry,” I said, ignoring the fact she couldn’t rise on her own to follow the smells into the kitchen where Baba hunched over the stove, quiet, his thoughts merely his own for just a few chapters longer.

  37. In Rending Lake Park, where we went before she was too tired to walk, old men with oversized calligraphy brushes sat on wooden stools painting water-poems on stone earth. Poems whose beginnings would evaporate before the last stroke was penned. Why didn’t we stop to read the words, write them down in ink on paper? I know she’d have an answer. She’d say something about the mountain being a mountain and not being a mountain. Suchness/no suchness. Form/No form. As I waited for the Route 22 bus to Tiananmen last week, I watched a grown man pluck a nose hair from his nostril, examine its slick form for a minute, then flick it to the ground. Such was the nose hair, I thought, as he must’ve too. Such and such not.

  38. “His two actions are open and shut, between which we all live.”

  39. The first time I visited Jingshan Park to scope out the tree Li-Ming mentioned, the park was surprisingly quiet—school children in early summer exams, danwei units still in session, not yet released for lunch. I read the plaque, a history lesson: from this perch, Emperor Chongzhen watched his city crumble, asked his most devoted eunuch, Wang Cheng’en, to string him from the lone tree’s branches then follow with his own rope, their final glimpse of the world together, a city ablaze, an empire crumbling. A janitor shuffled down the path, glimpsing up at the foreigner sitting beneath the dead tree, then returned to his task, sweeping away Orion choco-pie wrappers, relics of a busy weekend full of sound and forgotten sweets.

  Letter #8

  Dear friend,

  Are we now both mothers-to-be?

  Strained, stretched skin: an elbow, a knee, my crotch.

  The train south, my husband’s lao jia a dead, brown weight on his shoulders, visible on the horizon.

  Vomit curds—congee or stewed egg?—crusting my lips.

  Suck the last tendrils off the lychee, leave me bare, child.

  I never wanted to be a mother.

  It began with the Tangshan earthquake:

  My mother woke us up, banging her head on the wall and begging us to crawl outside. Glittering glass underfoot, a darkened city. How many aftershocks until the neighbors stopped screaming? How long for gravity to return to our feet?

  Slant of sunlight, my husband’s body rocking with the train’s pulse: “That crazy man’s word
s are etched on your cheeks.”

  A calligrapher’s sentences stroked my skin.

  I laugh too, Mr. Wang, when you make a poem,

  Like a blind man trying to sing of the sun.

  Tick tock: the Soviet-made Pobeda, my father’s.

  Time on wrists, walls, school bells, train whistles.

  What of this? Lin Biao’s plane flattened in the Mongolian grasslands, The Gang of Four in black and white:

  Mao and Yao and Chang and Wang—poetic justice?

  Where is our bow-legged goose Lei Feng now?

  sun-shadow-sun-shadow—

  barred window frame and this body hedging me in

  I need to get out

  First tremorless night after the Tangshan quake, we made a daughter.

  Wang said: “Oh no, the earth would not move again! It couldn’t!”

  Until one day, it did.

  How could we trust the earth wouldn’t shake itself loose once more, casually shedding us?

  This time: One last layer of skin, a pleated skirt pooled at my Lao Wang’s feet.

  Baba

  Silver moonlight pooled at my wife’s side as she nestled, too tired to resist sleep, into the mat of my family’s old pingfang. We’d come to announce our betrothal to my father and show him Li-Ming’s growing belly—our baby. Here I was: her husband, and a poor one at that, this lanky body willing itself to standing, waiting for the night to end—so what? So I could tell my father I was finally a man, a husband? A stupid idea. For so long I’d been Skinny Wang, Hawk Eye, Comrade Wang, Lao Wang. Who did I think I was?40 Below me, the sleeping bodies of my pregnant wife and elderly father looked like bags of hay or millet or—what difference did it make the shape of their forms?—their bizarrely matched snores rocked the granary’s maggot-ridden bags of rice, millet, flour. This was not a home. Homes are more than four walls.

  “We’re having a child,” I wrote. Three months later, the reply: “Let me see the wife first.”

  When I walked outside, I tried to reconstruct a failing geography: the bamboo forest in the gardens flanking my first home, cobblestone streets wobbling underfoot, and over there, Mr. Li with his cotton pajamas and horn-rimmed glasses out for his midnight walk, slouched monks shuffling across Square Bridge to retire at the candlelit Sword Temple. My mind had a dangerous propensity for superimposing past upon the present.

  Through the old bamboo forests, shuffling over the same path on which Mrs. Li would walk in her silk, butterfly-print night robes to retrieve her husband from his nightly escapades, I picked my way to the river’s edge. I removed my shoes and wriggled my bare feet in the mud. Lazy, sewer-fed worms perused my toes. This river was my mother’s last home before her brothers buried her bones atop Xiagai Mountain. But her skin had already disintegrated from the weight of water and stone, flaked into the mud in which my toes wriggle and slip. Is she here? I reached down to pluck a worm from its path, examined him in the moonlight, his wriggling, fragile body translucent. Die! I squeezed his body into submission but he simply encircled my finger in pointless loops. I tossed him back.

  When I returned to the old pingfang, my father was still there, his snores filling the room to the web-laden rafters, but there was a gap between where I’d been and he was.

  “Li-Ming,” I whispered, wondering if she was sheltered beneath the blankets but there wasn’t a response or a lump big enough to betray a pregnant woman’s shape.

  I checked the kitchen, where flies danced above rusted pots, dried zhou still clinging to the rims. Had she gone for a midnight walk as well? That wasn’t like her, but in the months since we learned of her pregnancy, she’d been more distant—like the outermost planet of a galaxy just close enough to be drawn into orbit but precariously wobbling along. With just one touch, we both worried, she’d spin off kilter.

  I walked outside and the moon, which I hadn’t noticed before, nearly blinded me in its whiteness: white rooftops, white parched river, white forgotten village.

  The alleyways of my old town were a labyrinth of small shop fronts, wooden doorframes unhinged, shriveled ears of corn hung to dry from eaves. Nothing new, nothing bright, nothing worth holding on to. The villagers, I knew, were a dying breed—only the sick and elderly remained here, even the local peanut crops not yielding as big a bumper as years before.41

  I turned back to the river, following the moon’s footsteps nearer the glimmer of water. That’s when I saw her crouched like a wide stone.

  “What are you doing?”

  She didn’t look up but I saw silver in her hands, mocking moon dance.

  “Give me those.” Wrestling the scissors from her grip, she slipped—her bare feet in the mud, top-heavy ass yielding forwards. I wanted to catch her but with the blades in my hand, any attempt at salvation would be puncturing as well.

  She landed on her stomach, one cheek to the mud.

  “Get up,” I demanded. She rolled to her side, her knees. That’s when I saw it—the bald patch on her head, the hairs she managed to cut in what reflection she could see in the moonlight.

  I peeled off my nightshirt, gave it to her to wipe her face.

  “What did you do,” I said, but it wasn’t a question as she stood looking in my direction not really seeing me.

  “Let’s get you home and I’ll wash you off with rainwater.”

  I tried again: “They once brought soy sauce all the way down this river from Shanghai to Hangzhou. Qian Wanlong soy sauce. You know that kind?”

  When I reached for her, she didn’t budge. Forty years earlier, I’d been the one stuck in the mud, my father’s grip demanding I move, Sword Temple monks shuffling over Square Bridge and the world continuing in its orbit that morning when everything around me stopped. If I can hear my heartbeat, I’m still alive, I thought, but where was that pulse behind my ears now?

  “C’mon,” I said, but again, she was stuck. “Do I have to carry you home? You know that’ll break my back.”

  A joke: a softening. She yielded enough for me to pull her over the embankment and along the dirt path to my father’s old home.

  “Where’s the trail to Cold Mountain? I saw a mountain but now it’s gone,” she said. The moon was setting and a blanket of dawn obscured the old skeletal shapes. “Can we go there?”

  “There are heaps of mountains around here. Nothing worth throwing a stick at,” I said.

  My wife grimaced as her bare feet rolled over the cobblestones. “I want to go to the mountain.”

  “We’ll clean you up and we’ll leave in the morning,” I said. A cuckoo babbled from a branch, too early for bird song but singing nonetheless. I led her back to the house, pants still rolled to my knees, shins stinking of fish shit and kitchen grease.

  My father had set three bowls of tepid porridge on the wooden bench near the beds (the only bench awarded as dowry from my mother’s family, the year of its making—Year Three of the Republican Era—etched into the bottom, an unalterable reminder of its place, and ours, in our republic’s confused history). He didn’t notice the mud smeared on Li-Ming’s face or my pant legs dampened to the shins.

  Dutiful husband, filial son: we spoke of the weather in spring, the inaccuracies of this year’s foolhardy Tongshu. We spoke of what a summer’s harvest could bring. But my father was not a farmer anymore. Who would tell him this? The money he saved from decades making lenses dried up, much like the soil of the once-fertile fields surrounding his village. Now my brother and I shipped him a stipend from our salaries. No one wanted glass lenses anymore—it was plastic the masses preferred, the sturdy, flexible material that wouldn’t degrade. Glass had seen its day, as would soon be the case at my Beijing factory. Father moved back to Cen Cang Yan where, during the land reform campaigns of the ‘50s, he’d been awarded two mu of land—but the soil was thirsty and dry. Overworked, his patches produced nothing more than a few limp green beans, a thin-leaved cabbage head each fall. The sweeter produce did not grow here anymore and my father bemoaned the loss of good earth as we
ate our breakfast, a pearl of white zhou dribbling down his chin. His teeth gone, he gummed his food. I didn’t wipe his face clean—I wouldn’t make a child of my father.42 I owed him this much courtesy.

  “You’ll go with me to the mountain later,” my wife whispered. Her lips synched the rim of her bowl.

  “The mountain, yes,” I replied but I knew: the mountains had been blasted into boulders; buried bones pulverized into dust.

  My father didn’t hear us—his hearing compromised by age. He slurped the last of his gruel and tipped back the bowl, rimming the surface with his tongue like a wild dog whose belly has never known fullness.

  “We’re leaving as soon as we’re done with breakfast,” I said but my father didn’t reply, the bowl encompassing the entirety of his face as my wife kicked my shin under the table and I recoiled, the blanched sting, rubbing my protruding, lanky shinbone, wondering, briefly, if this was in fact the place in which I was meant to be or if there was a parallel history that could lead me to a different ending altogether. There aren’t any mountains, I wanted to say, only fragments of stone where dynamite ripped open whole hillsides, granite packed onto the truck beds and transported to seaside marshes where pharmaceutical factories are built every week to cure society’s headaches and toothaches and backaches and…

  “I’m so damn hungry these days,” my wife said.

  My father, his hearing attuned only to the impoverished, nodded in agreement.

  “Hunger is the fiercest of human emotions,” he said as if once a scholar or a scribe. So many untruths licked clean from these bowls.

  “We’ll miss our train,” I said. “Can Cousin Ming drive us in his fancy truck?”

  My father nodded quietly and even though I could see the shape of his jawbone beneath his paper-thin skin, I didn’t realize this same silhouette would be mine soon enough.