Empire of Glass

by Kaitlin Solimine

  Letter #10

  Maybe everything begins and ends with Coca Cola—

  ke kou ke le: thirst-quenching happiness

  quickly turning into

  bitter-quenching bitterness.

  “I’m dying,” I told him.

  Not:

  I’m hungry to death

  I’m tired to death

  I’m bored to death

  It cannot be.

  Can.

  Cannot.

  Can.

  He didn’t believe in impossible to undos.

  The day of the chandeliers: we four—a family,

  even the tall American writing Chinese ideograms on notecards,

  a trip to Xinjiekou to learn the richest could buy what we couldn’t afford.

  Yellow.

  Why is everything in my memory yellow?

  A bee on Xiaofei’s back as we parked our bicycles near a light post; gust of wind, off it flew, unsure the destination.

  No, the bee is not of consequence.

  What we loved: glittering chandeliers hung from rafters—

  Buy me! Love me!

  The brightest also the most blinding—

  Sparkle, rat tap tap.

  Entranced, ensconced:

  heads tipped,

  fish-scaled light shotgunning ceiling and skin.

  His fingers kneading my hand,

  bloated palms that once birthed pigs, massaging away

  how many days it would take to re-write this memory

  so I’m dusting dishes,

  he’s placing groceries in the fridge,

  the duck egg vendor calls from outside,

  the girls giggle in the back bedroom:

  vanity, cock, hierarchy, manic.

  Voracious vocabulary of early language learners.

  How a city is built in layers, like a person.

  How first we are organs then only our skin holds us in.

  Chuang Tzu’s fabled mountain tree is not cut down.

  The cackling goose, neck sliced, song slung

  from open throat is the choicest victim.

  Always magpies on my window

  —yet I’ve never seen a nest.

  Baba

  Aside from poetry, Li-Ming and our American daughter shared a new obsession: photography. For much of our married life, Li-Ming was transfixed by the focused view of the world through a camera’s lens, how she could reinvent the angle, the lighting, the frame, such that the ordinary could be seen anew. When she was in Weifang sculpting soaps, Li-Ming’s father returned from Russia with a gift for his youngest daughter—a Fed-Zorki camera. This possession made us feel dangerously rich.

  In our early months of courtship, Li-Ming sat me on a stool for extended sessions during which she insisted I pose in several positions:

  —knuckle to chin (scholastic)

  —cheeks in palms (boyish)

  —hands on lap, back straight, face unsmiling (my true yin nature, she mocked)

  The evenings she spent in the danwei basement darkroom were a welcome respite, hours when I didn’t feel the need to answer her every question, the weight of her descended underground so I was left walking a little lighter, whistling old tunes unearthed from a country boy’s tongue and teeth.

  I hoped after Xiaofei’s birth our daughter would became my wife’s newest model—but with her arrival, the camera disappeared, and with it, my evening retreats. Instead, my wife rolled Xiaofei on her tricycle in the park, absently admiring every detail around them (the draped willows caressing the glassy lake, the slumped old men on concrete benches), then escorting our daughter to the library to collect images of every bird they’d seen: azure-winged magpie, spotted dove, red-rumped swallow. Panels of pastel illustrations were soon tacked to our bathroom wall—“What are you studying?” I’d ask, but she’d merely cluck and say, “This isn’t a lesson. You’re missing the point.”

  We tip-toed around Li-Ming’s shifting obsessions, her attention to the most mundane details in our world—how many worms the magpie in our courtyard could carry in its beak (three, if they didn’t wriggle too much), the exact angle of the slanted window panes on our block’s sundecks (49 degrees), and then, with the arrival of air conditioning units, the unexpected symmetry of Freon droplets on the pavement below our feet (horizontal lines, but only in the morning). Despite her desire to chronicle life’s regularities, she reveled in only the most chaotic forms (like when the magpie didn’t carry any worms and the Freon droplets were as random as splattered paint). “Only one worm!” Li-Ming would shout, and we’d nod, briefly looking up from whatever book, newspaper, hangnail was holding our attention that day.

  When the American’s vocabulary turned from syncopated words into syntactical sentences, Li-Ming and Lao K realized they had more in common than any of us suspected. Within two months of her arrival, the Fed-Zorki reappeared, lens dusted, knobs greased.

  Lao K played the perfect model to Li-Ming’s revived obsession: my wife rouged the girl’s cheeks with department store blush, slicked her long eyelashes with mascara. Lao K’s green eyes shone translucent when blinking against the bright external flash. Xiaofei moaned that her mother was ‘nao zi feng’—muddle-headed—with all this photography, but the American couldn’t speak enough of our language to protest. She’d sit on the sundeck and stare at our city’s fading haze, cheeks glowing, lips parted so the slight gap in her front teeth showed (but didn’t Americans spend a Chinese’s annual salary on orthodontics?). Despite this obvious dental imperfection, Li-Ming thought our new American daughter was beautiful, that the idiosyncrasies in her face (those teeth, the freckles, the long, thin nose and dimpled chin) didn’t just make her different, but desirable. We quickly learned how she slurped her soup (loudly), how she handled her chopsticks (like a child). Eggplants were Lao K’s favorite vegetable. In fact, the American seemed an expert on all manner of vegetables. They were all she ate. She promptly informed us of this the first night we dined together over candlelight (Beijing’s latest heat wave knocking out the city’s electrical grid), listing the vegetables she loved and Li-Ming translated:

  Tomatoes —

  Carrots —

  Cucumbers —

  Cabbage —

  “Unfathomable,” Li-Ming said in the language we shared. Unfathomable that our American, so rich her hair was the color of young ginger, would be a vegetarian, would choose not to eat meat.

  As autumn descended into winter, the days growing shorter and the courtyard pigeons making feather roosts in our building’s eaves, Li-Ming chronicled the American’s every idiosyncrasy: how she cautiously ate moon cakes for Mid-Autumn Festival, inspecting the sweet yellow innards before biting; how she pulled the longest string of caramel off the long-life potatoes and would, as said the tradition, outlive us all. In this time, she transformed from ‘The American,’ to ‘Menglian.’ Between the months of December and January, when Beijing’s pipes cracked and the Gobi spat chilled air down Chang’an Boulevard, the girl whose American name we knew began with the letter ‘K,’ a long, complicated name we could never pronounce, received the nickname we’d call her the rest of our lives: ‘Lao K’ or ‘Familiar K.’ Li-Ming said it first, when our daughters trod upstairs from school one afternoon, slapping open the door and leaving it swinging behind them. ‘Xiaofei and Lao K are home,’ Li-Ming said; just like that the name stuck, indelible as a wooden seal’s red ink.

  *

  As winter turned to spring on an evening when Beijing’s misted sky melted the horizon, a wailing saxophone called to me from the dark basement hallway of Li-Ming’s danwei. The voice of the Chinese rock star Cui Jian (now familiar due to Lao K’s replayings of the cassette tape in her bedroom every night) wailed its incessant, unanswered questions: Ohhhhh…. When will you go with me? Ohhhhh…. When will you go with me? Lyrics from a song I hadn’t heard for years, when roadside stores regularly blasted it from tape players positioned proudly on stoops, but Lao K discovered the tape in a cluttered music shop in
Xinjiekou specializing in rock music. She hadn’t stopped listening to the album since. What could she possibly find soothing in this combination of electric guitar and thumping drum?

  Ohhh… When will you go with me?

  Ohhh… When will you go with me?

  “Lao K?” I asked of the cavernous hallway, but my voice was weak compared with Cui Jian’s throaty, scratchy vocals.

  Because it was nearly midnight and Lao K still wasn’t home, Li-Ming sent me to find the American, my wife’s body already too tired for impulsive missions. I pushed open the door to the makeshift photography developing room where my wife once spent her evenings. A red bulb hung limply from a ceiling wire. Lao K hunched over a bucket of glossy liquid. With silver tongs, she carefully removed a photograph of two men playing mahjong on a street corner, mouths eternally frozen in laugher.

  The makeshift dark room was barely big enough for two bodies—certainly not the bodies Lao K and I possessed with our too-long limbs and barrel chests. I moved cautiously into the space, my torso nearly parallel with hers, the heat of her back resonating against me. Her hair, hanging limply, brushed my collarbone and a shock rang through me, warming my abdomen and toes with a rush I hadn’t experienced in years. My hands clenched at my side, but I didn’t move closer—how could I? We were the closest we’d been alone, but she didn’t sense my presence. I allowed my body to sway and bend in symmetry until she sniffed, hand raised to smooth hair from off her forehead and she turned—

  Ohhhh… When will you go with me?

  Ohhh… When will you go with me?

  “Ba?” We were chest-to-chest, a red sliver between us. She wiped her top lip with the back of her hand, a wet photograph clinging limply to her tongs. “What are you doing here?”47

  She acted as if it were natural for her body to lean into another’s, as if she didn’t live, like most Americans, with an invisible shield of empty space surrounding her. America: land of endless exploration, happiness. Happiness: a frivolous word in Chinese, so hopelessly American. A stupid pursuit. No one would ever be happy. Hadn’t Lao K read Li-Ming’s Cold Mountain enough to know there’s no happiness and no unhappiness? The true path lies in between, in the space that cannot be caught with a clap of hands or a brush of wind—

  “Ba, are you okay?”

  I leaned back, cleared my throat: “Li-Ming was wondering where you were.”

  Lao K shrugged and waved her hand across the tight sweep of the room. Her fingertips graced my stomach. My insides hugged my spine.

  “Clearly, she’s not here.” Her Chinese grew more confident by the day. Her accent barely betrayed her origins, filling me with a disconcerting parental blend of pride and fear. “Does she need me for something?”

  The music’s tempo increased and I recognized this section of the song when the crowd is asked to sing along: during the Tiananmen days, the streets rang with this melody as we shuffled between the apartment and our danwei, hands to ears and a growing clutter of confusion in our chests.

  “I think it’s best you come home. It’s late,” I said, but Lao K simply tacked the wet photograph to a clothespin. The smiling faces of the men steadily darkened, shadows on the wall behind them echoing their shapes. Shadow on shadow—Lao K’s own shadow melding with mine in a pool at our feet too perfect, a mockery of us as Cui Jian sang on:

  You always laugh at me… nothing to my name…

  Lao K harmonized.

  “You’re a better singer than Cui Jian.”

  “Na hai yong shuo ma?” Is that even worth saying? She asked and I realized she’d inherited some of Li-Ming’s signature idioms, as well as her confidence, in the months Li-Ming’s had waned. Strange, how we can cling to someone else’s old forms even when they’re barely a shadow themself.

  “It’s still worth saying,” I said.

  Lao K laughed, peeling the photograph back to judge it. “I know Mama’s sick,” she said, but her eyes remained fixed on the now-steady image of the two men caught in the middle of a joke.

  “No,” I said.

  Why did I say no?

  “No?”

  “Well, maybe.”

  What was I doing?

  “Maybe?”

  “Perhaps.”

  Perhaps?

  “Perhaps?” she asked. Her eyes hadn’t lifted from her photograph.

  I looked to my feet. My shoes were worn so thin that my frayed, gray socks showed through, edges of bulged bone. I wriggled my toes and reminded myself this ground could move, like Cui Jian reminded us. The water beside us was flowing, sloshing in its buckets. I wasn’t ready for another earthquake. Not yet.

  “Ba, we both know Li-Ming isn’t dying. Remember what Cold Mountain says about that tree older than the forest? How the world laughs at its useless exterior but when stripped of flesh and outsides, there’s only the center of truth?”

  I wanted to strangle the words spilling so carelessly from her tongue, how her jumbled vocabulary and grammar now reminded me she wasn’t one of us, could never be; she wasn’t anything more than a stranger trying to own a land that could never be hers but who thought she could simply hop on a plane, dictionary in hand, and then—

  The laughing men between us unhinged, landed in the pool of their conception. She cursed in a language we didn’t share.

  I lost my moment, whatever could be resurrected from it: Lao K hunched over the developing buckets, attempting to save the faces who now struggled to return to their crisp, smiling forms. For years, I witnessed Li-Ming in this same light: glowing red, hands steadily washing the liquid over each frame so that the memory, as she witnessed it, would patiently rise to life. In the underground light of this developing room, nothing felt permanent—everything caged between dreaming and waking. Past/present. Here/there. Lao K sighed as she worked to save what was already lost. Maybe she didn’t want to talk about this any more than I did. Maybe she wanted to believe some long-dead poet could save her, save Li-Ming, save the rest of us whose fates would one day follow the same inevitable trajectory. We name things and then we have a place for them—put the comb in the dresser. Tack the map to the wall. Position the futon beside the bed. With names, we know where the objects of our lives belong. Only we really don’t know anything, except where we stand relative to our beloved objects, all the tangibles that will outlive us, the intangible as transient as dust. I stood behind Lao K, so close I could smell remnant cigarette smoke on her clothes, the sugar-sweet strawberry chewing gum she chomped on unabashedly like the American she was. Beneath my belt, a familiar stirring rose. What craving within me had never been filled? What poems hadn’t been written, never would?

  Ohhh… When will you go with me?

  Ohhh… When will you go with me?

  Lao K’s hair loosened, untangling from bun to ringlets, flamed by the light crawling the width of her shoulders, her t-shirt angled diagonally. She raised the smiling men from their bucket, returning them to their clothespin, where they would dry and eventually be made whole again, or as near to it as men can be. Her t-shirt dropped lower, the whole of her shoulder and arm, even a partial glimpse of a black bra: exposed. So much skin. Sometimes it feels all we ever are is skin. And there it was—that long-buried impulse: I raised my hand to touch her hair, to run my fingers through the strands like a housewife clearing webs from window frames. What did I expect to gather in my palms? She smelled like sweat and vanilla-scented smoke and strawberry chewing gum and I wanted to tell her I’d never eaten a fresh strawberry, didn’t know what she could give me that I couldn’t name. How had we, speakers of wholly two languages between us, miserably failed at finding the right words?

  When my fingers glanced her back, she turned and caught my wrist in mid-air.

  “Ba,” she said, pulling on the syllable.

  The red light swung above, and beside us, still swinging, was the photograph of the men in their most skeletal shapes, their constant laughter incapable of turning to a frown. Damn the perpetually smiling!

  “
Don’t,” she stated, calm as a schoolteacher. She returned my hand to my hip.

  My palms instinctively sprung to her cheeks, pressing them so tightly the sharp outlines of her teeth spoke back to me.

  I’m telling you, I’ve waited a long time

  So I’m telling you my final request

  I want to grab you by the hands

  And then you’ll go with me…

  “Ba,” she squeezed my name between taut lips then reached for the radio and slapped the cassette to stop. Silence would have been comforting. Silence would have been far better than what followed—

  The stamping of feet echoing in the basement hallway then jaunting upstairs.

  My hands dropped, fists wrenching the mechanical tightness with which they gripped the American’s face. They didn’t regret a thing. Hands never do. Following the sound, I caught only a glimpse of a short nylon sock above a boot as it ascended up the basement stairs, the creased back of a nyloned knee flexing beneath a bobbing tattered hem of a familiar sleeping robe. Immediately, I regretted running so quickly after that knee. How much time is wasted in dark rooms. How much we wasted without ever wanting to turn on the light, alone in the artificial night, hands to faces, meeting ourselves for the first time. To hold a face… she had said, the pig squealing. I didn’t stop her, would always think of that pig when slicing pork years later, her hands on his animal cheeks, his eyes imploring hers for an answer to a question he couldn’t ask. But what was the point? Vision: useless to those who don’t know how to see.

  “Li-Ming,” I called up the stairwell. But when I reached the top, the white of an unwelcome dawn forced tears into my eyes. I blinked incessantly. When had night turned to day? When had the page flipped to today, an ‘X’ on the calendar’s square for yesterday, that calendar that was Li-Ming’s favorite, “Tropical Scenes From Around the World”? A more familiar scene: the city’s pigeons wobbling like old country women among day-old puddles, edges crusted with frost. Even pigeons can make puddles their homes. I’d never hated birds more.

  “Li-Ming,” I called again, but she wasn’t here.

  A panting breath laid itself upon my shoulder.