Empire of Glass

by Kaitlin Solimine

  “Ba, it’s okay,” her voice, once singing, attempted to reassure me. “You’ll understand soon. And so will she. Believe me.”

  When I turned, her face was white-washed, a boat on water. Outside the studio’s red, she grew in intensity, developing into her final, unalterable frame. Here in the dawn she was the girl I’d seen that day across the banks—unrecognizable, blisteringly foreign with her tall nose, yellow hair, pink-flushing cheeks. She spoke words with such tenacity she believed them to be true. But she didn’t know a thing.

  Had I slapped her then or was it years later? Or had it been the opposite? Had her hand coolly lapped my cheek, skin-to-skin, flashing from metacarpal to jaw, the fragile, frigid flick of one to another?

  What I think I remember: her green-gray eyes blinking vapidly, like Xiaofei’s favorite childhood doll, that blonde head my daughter combed for years until the damned creature went bald and we had to buy a baby wig to satisfy her craving to comb and comb and comb. No, the American wasn’t standing there before me as much as my wife hadn’t been standing there in the doorframe as much as my entire history would soon be erased unless someone had the time, and the patience, to write it into being from the beginning. But what use was a pen when the world was swirling with the petulance of early spring’s dust storms?48

  That wind rolled over the outer purple hills, gaining speed in Beijing’s flat valley, rushing through the city’s cinderblock alleyways, pushing tender willows and early-budding lilacs into backbends, scouring the streets in a deep, howling moan. Homing pigeons and magpies hopped, branch to branch, trying to hear what was being said, to listen with the ears of birds, creatures whose lives depend on the density of air. There must be something in nature we cannot hear—that we’ve erased from our most innate natural abilities in a desire to civilize, to construct. There must be stories passed from leaf to leaf, whole histories of sound and knowledge we’ve forgotten in order to pursue other ends, to make up for unforgivable means. But for what? To what “end” exactly? The second afternoon I knew her, Li-Ming sat in the pigsty with a hand to her forehead, a piglet at her feet. For what? She asked me, for the first and final time. I didn’t know she knew the answers. I didn’t know she actually didn’t know anything at all. She’d ask the masters and their books for their opinions. She’d ask colleagues. Her camera’s lens. Freon droplets on alleyway cement. She’d ask verses no one spoke anymore, buried in dust and caves, beneath beds and between long-lost friends. She lost her way between the hills of Jiangxi and the concrete streets of Beijing. How quickly one was subsumed by a life that wasn’t meant to be lived. The wrong paths. Lost footsteps. Everyone we knew was turning in their danwei badges for the trading of stocks, pig stomachs, ivory ashtrays, timber, petrol… so many items to be bought for a too-good-to-be-true price, sold to the highest bidder. Money! Piles of pink and blue and purple and green renminbi transferred by the bucket to the China Construction Bank on Xinjiekou. Markets unexplored: Xinjiang, Shenyang, Changchun, Changsha, and then the cities too small to be recognized on a map but with millions of potential customers. Within this all: the promise of something other than this—quiet city streets and neighbors you’ve known since childhood, rosy-cheeked corner store vendors who served the best dumplings in the nation for prices still reasonable, dumplings filled with the most buttery pork and chives you’ve tasted, not cardboard shreds dyed to resemble meat—only we didn’t know this meat, the real thing, was what we’d loved all along, was as good as our lives would ever get.

  The trees ached and moaned. The girl stared at me, waiting for me to tell her the rest of her story: of what future did the wind speak? What warnings did we not heed?

  Lao K. I knew her name, but not her family’s surname, nor her ancestral name, nor the hometown to which she would someday return where the graves of her ancestors were buried, where she too would eternally rest and then all her progeny with their bottomless green-gray eyes. How did we get here?

  Before or after the slap, she turned and walked ahead of me down the swirling columns of fallen lilac petals, Cui Jian’s music pleading with me to go somewhere. Lao K hummed that incessant chorus. I looked to her for a clue as to where people like us were supposed to go, but she simply stared ahead, nose too tall, cheeks too thin, eyes too wide, and for a moment she was ugly, but I didn’t want to believe this. I shook my head, blinked until my vision returned to its old habits of the autumn prior when Lao K was beautiful and my wife was a still a woman who would live forever.

  The wind plucked feeble lilacs from branches, scattered a purple confetti to the street.

  She stopped, bent over, ran her fingers through the petals. “It looks like snow,” she said. “Only that’s not what it is, is it?”

  I smiled, knowing she saw what I saw—that beneath us there could have been winter snow dusting the pavement. We could have been exhaling white breath in puffs between us. It could have been winter. Maybe it still was. There was magic in believing time could move sideways, that we were nothing and everything at once.

  “Did you fly from the roof or did you fall like they said?” I asked.

  She stood a few seconds, blinking. The growing windstorm riled the windows of the nearby danwei, tested the integrity of city walls. What could she say?

  “Can you ask me that again?”

  Had she not heard me? My tongue looped my teeth. “Fly,” I said, lifting my arms like a bird. “Fly—” arms raised, “or fall?” My arms fell, body tipping forward in a tight, head first dive.

  Her old habits: picking at her teeth with her thumb when she didn’t understand. But she didn’t pick her teeth now. She knew what I’d asked. Why wouldn’t she answer?

  She shook her head, that reedy hair bristling her skin and mine. I thought of drawing it to my nose so I could smell it, or plucking it, strand by strand, from her scalp and collecting it in a bushel to hang from the front door. So we’d have a piece of her always.

  “That’s a silly question, isn’t it?” she asked as she pushed open the door to the pathways snaking between the danwei and the neighboring apartment blocks, the way home. I followed her, knowing where she was leading me, what was waiting at the end of all this.

  At the entryway to our apartment building’s courtyard, Li-Ming stood, a collection of books at her feet.

  “What are you doing?” Lao K stopped.

  We were trapped between late night and early morning—early enough that the first shift at the danwei hadn’t mobilized, no one jogging down stairways to rickety bicycles, no mothers walking to the dumpling vendors off Xinjiekou for the morning baozi run. The books were in a pile, not unlike a campfire’s kindling, and Li-Ming crouched, as steadily as she could in her condition, but a burst of wind shifted her backwards onto her bottom.

  “Shit,” she said.

  Lao K and I jogged over, Lao K helping Li-Ming to her feet. My wife’s eyes were glazed but I couldn’t tell if she’d been crying or if the wind had whipped them into something resembling sadness. She raised her arms and within her hands, she held a match.

  “No!” Lao K shouted, but it was too late: Li-Ming struck the match, the small blue-orange flame rising, then dropped it to the pile. The first pages of some unknown book quickly disintegrated, turned from white to brown.

  Lao K crouched, blowing the flames, using her coat sleeve to stamp them out. The first flick of flame wasn’t enough, had barely fringed the edges of the pile.

  My wife drew a heavy breath. “You can’t always be looking for answers.”

  “Of course you can!” Lao K stood, the books behind her, her body framed by the first touch of a rising sun. But always in this city the sun lost the battle—whether to coal fires or clouds of factory smoke or the day’s draw to night. Lao K turned toward me, reached up and touched her own cheek, insinuating the first version of the story was the one she remembered too: “And I fly,” she said defiantly, forgetting to tack on the ‘le’ for past tense, then walked toward our apartment block, kicking the damaged book
s out of her way.

  “I flew,” my wife corrected, adding the ‘le,’ then crouched slowly, her body already betraying her, to gather burnt books in her arms, pleased briefly by the hint of destruction, by her ability, if she were to choose, to erase whole histories with one flick of wrist, one petulant toss—like a slap, or a kiss.

  47. What did Li-Ming see that we didn’t? Baba’s footsteps surprised me but then my body softened as I heard his breath catch up to his body. He stood in the doorway watching. When I was a teenager, I liked being watched. “Did you know he was there?” she later asked. “Yes,” I affirmed, although I didn’t know that our story was being rewritten from the ground up. After an earthquake can a home rebuilt look the same or will the cracks reveal its history?

  48. Cold Mountain now: “If you can stop struggling,” he wrote, “I’ll carve your name in stone.” (Trans. Red Pine). But what use is a name? Then again, historical accounts note this poem may not have been Cold Mountain’s after all. May have been his friend Pickup’s. Whose name should we carve on the headstone?

  Letter #11

  Wode Jiantao (My “Confession of Wrongdoing”)*

  Pidou Hui #102;

  Dewai District, Beijing, People’s Republic, Era of Mao

  I am a bourgeois poet.

  I read nonsense.

  I was told to read this book by a friend who is not a friend anymore.

  The friend who told me doesn’t live in Beijing now.

  I don’t know where she lives.

  The friend who told me to read this is bourgeois. Her thoughts are bourgeois. She has a corrupted mind.

  My mind is corrupted. My mind can be rectified. Can be cleansed of bourgeois thought.

  I hurt when you prick my head with pins because I am human.

  That is a foot in my stomach; I don’t taste blood.

  I am a loathsome child born to cockroaches. My mother is the biggest cockroach. She is a bourgeois poet who hides books under beds!

  I hate poetry.

  Poetry is written by pigs and capitalists who think art will feed people. Art cannot feed people. It will only make them starve. Poetry is art. Poetry will kill People. The People will revolt. The People will win.

  I am Huang Li-Ming, named for Nanjing’s liberation. I am a child of cockroaches. I am repentant. I will burn the books. I will chew the pages because this is all I will eat for weeks. I will not starve because words cannot feed me. Only the People and the Party will feed me.

  I am Huang Li-Ming. I am not a poet. I am not an artist. I do not believe in Buddhist thought. I do not believe in the Four Olds. I must smash the Four Olds! I believe in Mao Zedong thought. I believe in The Party. I believe in The People.

  My friend is dead because words are dead because poetry is dead because art is dead because believing is dead and I am dead. I am dead. I will be born anew after the dark and I will look like the girl I once knew but I won’t recognize her in any mirror. I will be the beneficiary of a new China and there will be food on my table and sunsets draining from window frames and I will not starve because I will till soil and believe in farmers and the People who are in the Party and I will renounce words because only Mao’s words are the words we speak and Mao is the greatest poet of all.

  *Because I am forced to talk. Because silence is incriminating. Because words can be made vile and murderous. Because words can be made irrelevant. Because I am talking huli-hutu. Because you won’t believe me anyway.

  Baba

  In Beijing, we judge the seasons by the shifting of sounds: in autumn, pigeons sail over sloped roofs with whistling tail feathers trailing behind; in winter, there’s the tick tick of heating furnaces clicking alive, each building’s rusted pipes cracking against descending cold; in late spring, dust storms smatter the windows and raze the city in yellow haze; in early summer, we wait for cicadas to brashly announce their arrival. Vastly outnumbering the lucky magpies, our cicadas signal the arrival of real heat. As if they too are angered by the spoiling of a less-balmy spring, the insects scream their displeasure, harried bodies dropping to the streets where hard shells whip-crack under the wheels of unsuspecting bicyclists.

  Beneath a canopy of cicada chorus, we rolled my ailing wife to Xiaofei’s last diving meet, while my brother, who I still called Doufu, visiting from Shanghai in order to help while Li-Ming’s condition deteriorated, stayed home to cook dinner. My brother, retired from his work as a ship builder, was oddly comforted by playing the role of homemaker. He didn’t seem worried that his chances to explore the South China Sea like his favorite ancient Chinese naval adventurer Zheng He had long ago disappeared. Retirement cloaked him in passive contentedness.

  Lao K planned to join us at Beijing Normal University’s pool after her classes, promising to bring Li-Ming’s Fed-Zorki to chronicle Xiaofei’s assured win (most days, the device hung from a strap around Lao K’s spring-tanned neck, an unlikely talisman). The heat that spring day could have felt oppressive. We could have cursed the impenetrable wall of cicada sound, but we didn’t. Li-Ming’s wheels rolled over the occasional flailing cicada, but she didn’t flinch. She wasn’t entirely with us anymore; her head lilted absently, hands flat on her thighs.

  Crunch.

  Lilt.

  Crunch.

  Lilt.

  Crunch.

  “Lili’s doing an inward,” Xiaofei said, distracting us from the insect massacre beneath our feet. “So I guess I should do an inward one-and-a-half somersault.” Everything Lili did, Xiaofei must surpass: although our daughter only began diving lessons a year earlier, she’d already progressed to the fourth form. Her instructor, Mr. Peng, called Xiaofei a ‘tenacious girl.’ I didn’t have the heart to inform him she was only trying to please Li-Ming, that nothing she did was for herself anymore, especially now. But when Mr. Peng named Xiaofei the ‘next Fu Mingxia,’ China’s gold medal Olympian diver, Li-Ming didn’t beam. What Li-Ming wanted was for our daughter to not be comfortable in water, but to conquer it. Meanwhile, Li-Ming herself hadn’t done more than dip a toe in a body of water in decades, a holdover of her harrowing experience during the Jiangxi floods.

  “You will do well,” Li-Ming said through chapped lips.

  I attempted reason: “Don’t push yourself. You don’t want to get hurt.”

  Xiaofei forced a frown. She never appreciated my caution.

  “I’m fine. I’ve been on the 7.5 meter platform for three weeks now. It’s easy. Just like a bird!” Our daughter skipped to the university pool’s entrance as I tipped Li-Ming’s wheelchair up the stairs, one by one.

  “Lao Wang, I can walk,” Li-Ming said, pushing herself into standing, but I forced her into her seat.

  “Don’t overdo it.” For weeks, the radiation made her sturdy frame more fragile. Xiaofei made light of the situation, joking eventually her mother’s bones would be as airy as a bird’s and she could fly away to judge us from the skies. Lao K didn’t like her sister’s description, revised it to say Li-Ming would fly only as far as the ceiling so we’d always have a view of her wings. Both descriptions unnerved me, made me realize neither girl understood the situation. My legs shook despite my wife’s lighter weight. She still weighed enough for carrying her to be a burden. After much grunting on my part to lift her chair up and over the stairs, we made it to the gymnasium’s lobby.

  “I’m sick of sitting,” Li-Ming said. “You know it’s not in my nature to be so still.”

  “I know.”

  I pushed her across the waxed floors past trophies in dusty display boxes and photographs of young, lithe athletes on the wall. A banner draped across the entrance doors to the pool announced the university swimming team’s winning of the All-Beijing Championship the year prior. Everywhere one looked was evidence of accomplishment.

  “Look at these proud athletes,” Li-Ming said. “Didn’t you say you once beat Chiang Kai-Shek’s son in a track meet?”

  How had she remembered that? For a moment, I thought I should let her believe this. Maybe
she’d be better off reaching the end of her life thinking her husband had once been so quick-footed, so capable of crossing the line before all others. But the faces of the smiling athletes stared down at me, admonishing me for considering lying to my wife.49

  “No, that was my cousin—not me.”

  “Oh,” Li-Ming said, digesting the revised history as we reached the pool’s entrance and I finagled her wheelchair past the doors. “Well I’m sure you could’ve beat the Generalissimo’s son if given the chance.”

  “You overestimate me.” I rolled Li-Ming’s wheelchair onto the pool platform and toward the stands where spectators sat, rows of parents awaiting their child’s performance. Xiaofei had already skipped into the women’s locker room to change into her bathing suit for the competition.

  “I don’t want to sit here,” Li-Ming said. “Take off my shoes. I want to put my feet in the water.”

  “Really? You think that’s a good idea?”

  She nodded.

  Despite my better judgment, I kneeled, knees sinking into a puddle, wet seeping through my cotton pants. I carefully untied my wife’s shoes and placed them at the foot of the stands, bundling her socks and stuffing them into the soles. I rubbed her heels, twisted the skin atop her bloated ankles in both directions. Her body had the feel of something expired—when had she transitioned from someone wholly alive to slightly less so? Where had I gone astray in this? Before I could reach a conclusion, my wife placed her hand atop mine, rubbing the bones of my fingers as I rubbed her ankles.

  “Thank you,” she said, sighing slightly, then nodded for me to escort her, arm-in-arm, to the pool deck. Behind us, parents looked on, full of pity—that man, the dying wife, hobbling precariously toward the water. They probably worried we’d trip, that we’d fall into the cool water and quickly drown, our bodies floating limply to the surface, eyes staring past the arched ceiling to the sky. How much we’d be able to see, that they couldn’t, with that unblinking stare.