Empire of Glass

by Kaitlin Solimine

  But we didn’t fall. We shuffled carefully to the edge, where chlorine burned our nostrils.

  “Sit here,” Li-Ming instructed, voice cracking. Once a songstress, Li-Ming’s words now chafed like the ragged scrape of grasshopper wings.

  I wanted to tell those sad, downward peering eyes in the stands above us Li-Ming was the best swimmer I’d ever known. She was so strong a swimmer she’d saved a man from drowning during the famous Jiangxi floods. But what was the use? Li-Ming didn’t swim anymore. The floods taught her the true power of water. I lifted her off her feet, positioning her rigid body at the pool side. Her round backside, sore from so much sitting, cushioned her landing.

  I rolled up my own pant legs, removed my shoes. Our toes stretching in the water, we felt young again.

  “If only your daughter had her mother’s round head, she’d enter the water more smoothly,” Mr. Peng’s hands spread atop my wife’s round head. Her head, now bald, was covered with a magenta silk handkerchief painted with blue butterflies. Mr. Peng rubbed that handkerchief as if it could bestow good fortune upon him, as if Xiaofei’s only downfall was she’d inherited my large, square jaw and not Li-Ming’s perfectly smooth apple head. “Ready for your daughter’s debut?”

  Li-Ming nodded and I didn’t need to look at her face to see her smile. What pride is wasted on the dying. Our water-happy toes flexed and stretched, flexed and stretched. I couldn’t remember the last time my feet felt so unencumbered, like a caged bird finally released into the expansive, airy world beyond the bars. What world is outside the one we know?

  “Our debuting daughter better be safe,” I muttered to my own unsteady reflection.

  Mr. Peng tapped my shoulder. I looked up, recognizing those sunglasses he always wore, even on the indoor pool deck—he blamed an astigmatism but we knew he preferred the crowds not see his gaze lingering on his girls as they climbed up the board’s steps, their arms and chests dripping as they pushed their slick bodies out of the water. He never touched any of the girls, but there was an uncomfortable closeness in the way he spoke of them; then again, parents are always protective of the bonds they share with their children, worried about displacement by another. I shuddered, remembering briefly my encounter with Lao K in the dark room, how a young, female body is always magnetizing: A body not yet become itself. A form before the final indelible shape. That must be it, I thought, before Mr. Peng inserted himself—

  “Your daughter will do fine,” he said. “And as we speak...” He nodded to the door to the women’s locker room which slapped open, Xiaofei breezing past with Lili on one side and Lao K on the other, arms locked. The girls strode in unison, as if their announcement was timed to music and applause. Lao K, despite the fact she wasn’t diving, wore a red swimsuit clinging snugly to her tall, shapely body. Atop her chest swung Li-Ming’s camera enshrouded in plastic encasing. Xiaofei and Lili donned matching Beijing Youth Diving League suits in navy blue with angled white stripes. Their bodies paled in comparison with Lao K’s womanly frame. They were all bone, hips protruding, knees knocking, reminding anyone who looked at them of the awkward, self-conscious experience of adolescence. Xiaofei didn’t seem to mind we were here to watch her dive, that despite our smiles, our proud faces, we worried for her. What was it that worried us? We couldn’t explain to Xiaofei that despite her eagerness to climb to the board’s highest rung, we once believed we were capable of such impressive goals. How we once hoped for so much in our bodies, our ability to overcome heights, water, platforms. But we could not overcome every difficulty. That growing up—zhang da, —was about this, despite the fact at a certain point we’ve grown as big, as tall, as we’ll ever be and yet don’t know any more than we did before. We’re better not knowing eventually we’ll stop looking upward and outward and only backward and inward, perhaps the reason the aged shrink, lose short-term memory.

  My bony, calloused toes still absently flexed and stretched. Li-Ming’s wide feet stopped fanning the water and for a moment, I worried I’d lost her altogether until I saw her arm lift, her hand waving at our daughters.

  “Ba!...Ma!” Xiaofei waved back as Lili scanned the stands for her parents. Upon finding their prideful faces, her parents—her father, an academic of economics at Beijing Normal, with his signature eyeglasses and bowtie; her mother, a tall, thin bookkeeper at my danwei with long, straight hair and patient eyes—smiled, nodded knowingly. Lili was the more stoic child. I didn’t dare inform Xiaofei she wasn’t anything like her fearlessly independent friend. That we never fully surpass the failures of our forbearers.

  Xiaofei jogged to her mother, unaware of Li-Ming’s bare legs and feet. “Did you see what Lao K did? She brought your camera! She’s going to take my photograph from under water!” Lao K stood on the other side of Li-Ming. I avoided looking upwards at her tall body, all that skin I knew would be nakedly exposed, goose bumps lining her arms and legs, a puff of hair shielding her groin.

  “Amazing,” Li-Ming said. She gripped Lao K’s sculpted shin, rubbing her fingers along the stubbly hairs to calm or subdue her—but who needed calming most? Either way, Lao K didn’t mind. Women’s intimacies were always lost on me, how they could rub one another’s legs, hold hands, sleep next to one another on trains without a hint of sexual attraction. Now my wife and Lao K shared this physical relationship and although the American was supposed to be our ‘daughter,’ the nature of this disturbed me. Was I jealous? I dismissed the thought in time for Lao K to explain how she found a contraption capable of filming underwater scenes.

  “Mr. Wang’s shop has everything you could imagine,” Lao K said. “I said I needed to take photographs in a pool and he found this on his shelves.”

  Since the day of the attempted book burning, I knew Lao K and Li-Ming took to one another even more closely than before—they left every morning for walks in the park and one day I attempted to trail them but worried they’d see me rounding the corner near Zhang’s corner store, so I rushed home, readying breakfast. I wanted to know what they spoke about, how Lao K’s language could improve so steadily that Li-Ming and she shared lengthy conversations, growing so close, and so quickly. Xiaofei vacillated between sulkiness and showing off—today was one of the days she expected to shine, and for her mother’s attention to be directed at her. She watched her mother’s hand absently stroking the American’s leg. While my wife and Lao K discussed the inventory at Wang’s, Xiaofei examined Lao K’s rounded breasts rising with each breath, the girl’s hips, then looked to her own breasts and hips, clearly comparing sizes. Her gaze descended to Lao K’s thighs, how much more toned and muscular the American’s were than her own, as if Lao K spent a life working in the fields, which we knew wasn’t the case. Finally, Xiaofei examined the differences between their ankles and feet. Xiaofei had Li-Ming’s thick ankles, her flat, wide feet. The American’s were narrow, bony. When Lao K asked Xiaofei what kind of photographs she should take, my daughter shuttered into awareness.

  “Whatever you want,” she said.

  Mr. Peng summoned Lili and Xiaofei to the base of the platform with the other competitors. There, they stretched and bended and jumped and hopped like soldiers readying for battle. How silly, it seemed, that the battleground was a diving board and the innocent bystanders were merely parents who wanted more happiness for their children than they’d experienced in their collective youth. But for what? Generation after generation played this game: more and more opportunities spoilt upon their progeny when, in the end, each generation only craved more, and—despite the money, the jobs, the education, the homes—the next generation couldn’t bestow upon their children any more answers than those who came before. Wasn’t it Li-Ming’s poet Han Shan who told us, over a dozen centuries ago, “Go tell families with silverware and cars: what’s the use of all that noise and money?” But now, thanks to Deng Xiaoping, we had more noise. We had more money. And still the diving girls threw their arms over the heads, slapped the air like tai chi practitioners. The performance was for our sake,
rows of eager parents believing this was the right path for their children—the only path. The judges, two grim-looking middle-aged women with gray-streaked hair pulled into tight buns and one stout man with rosy cheeks, sat at a long table on the far side of the pool. They organized scoring placards, seemingly unaware of the gymnastics happening beneath the diving board’s staircase, unapologetically preparing to disappoint most of the parents.

  Lao K. What was there to say about Lao K? She slid into the pool just beside Li-Ming’s feet and dunked her head as casually as a seabird, hair dampening into a seaweed’s reddish brown.

  What happened next surprised me: my wife slipped loose the knot of her scarf and the fabric, silk fluttering, floated to her lap. As she shook her head, the motion—my bald wife shaking a head bereft of its once long, black strands—wasn’t sad, no, not even pitiful; it was a relic of an older gesture, a gesture that once meant nothing but a misplaced flirtation. I reached my fingers to comb the air above her head, that invisible, once-was hair.

  Then I heard the snickers. The gasps. Hadn’t the crowd seen a bald head before? Yes, my wife was dying. Yes, she’d lost her hair in the belated, futile batch of chemotherapy she’d only agreed to after I promised her if she went to the hospital with me, I’d stop pestering her about what she and Lao K were studying on the sundeck. Lao K re-emerged, propped herself atop the pool deck and glared into the crowd with so severe, so instinctively protective a look, she silenced their gaping; still, Li-Ming didn’t notice the attention her careless exposure garnered, nor Lao K’s response. My wife was too transfixed on our daughter, who now calmly climbed the stairs to the diving board’s highest rung. There she was—my oval-shaped head and strong jaw, now hers, hidden beneath a black rubber cap and Li-Ming’s thick calves flexing with each step. If only she’d known her true, underlying resemblance to Li-Ming. If only they could stand side-by-side to compare bodies—hairless twins. Merely the shape of their heads would betray their symmetry.

  Chlorine smell: Lao K returning to the water and paddling past Li-Ming to retrieve the camera with its clear plastic shield. She winked at my wife who smiled calmly back: What had they discussed in my absence? Women—would we ever know? I thought in the time that passed since our run-in in the photography studio, since Li-Ming’s attempted book burning, since the chemo treatments and Li-Ming and Lao K’s late afternoon discussions, something would change. But what needed to change? My wife and I slept in the same bed but we could have been kilometers apart. Xiaofei buried herself in schoolwork. Lao K buried herself in Li-Ming’s books, nights drinking at JJ’s Disco.

  “Tell me what you see under there,” Li-Ming said, nodding at the water beneath the unsteady surface.

  Lao K held the camera to her eye. “Nothing.”

  Xiaofei reached the end of the platform. She turned to the back wall, calves flexing, heels descending and raising, twitching slightly with each slow, cautious pump. 7.5 meters. Lili. Inward somersaults. I thought of Li-Ming’s insistent desire for our daughter to be the best at everything, how Li-Ming must have thought of herself as not measuring up to some earlier expectation when in reality we all knew we were just victims of our era. What did it mean that my wife put so much stock in the American daughter she’d barely known when her own daughter, the one who grew within her all those months and caused her a hernia post-birth, was there in front of her, struggling and trying to show her how brave she could be, how she could beat Lili, the city’s best diver, and be as confident in the water as her own mother was once? My daughter stood at the edge of a board the height of a two-story building. She inhaled the breath that would keep her body buoyant underwater as Lao K inhaled as well, plunging that honeyed hair beneath the surface of the pool. They inhaled together, speaking a language I never understood. My hands raised instinctively, about to clap, to plead with Xiaofei to stop, that this spectacle would ultimately lead to failure and heartache, but Li-Ming reached back and slapped them to my lap.

  Xiaofei looked to her feet.

  We all held our breath as her toes lost their grip, but then, quickly, her body folded into itself, towards the board, the tip of her head just millimeters from glancing the edge, and after exactly one-and-a-half spins, her arms extended above her head and—her legs passed upright—yes, her legs continued until flap!—

  There was no straight entry.

  No arms perfectly extended (triceps firm, elbows locked).

  No stomach duly pinched against an exquisitely arched back.

  No legs lengthened to pointed feet, toes so curled they flicked the water like a feather.

  Mr. Peng marched sternly to the pool’s edge where Xiaofei surfaced. He leaned over and whispered something to her rubber-capped head, something to which she nodded dutifully. The judges frowned, holding their placards above their heads in solidarity:

  4.5/10 – 4.5/10 – 4.5/10

  Our daughter was less than perfect. Much, much less so.

  Xiaofei climbed the silver ladder, watching as Lili ascended the platform, a soft, knowing smile painted on her friend’s lips—like Chairman Mao said, If you think just once about sinking, you’ll never be able to float. Lili wasn’t a thinker and was therefore incapable of sinking. Our Xiaofei, on the other hand, seemed to have inherited her mother’s impetuousness, along with my necessity to trip just when the moment called for me to stand—with that, she’d always want to jump and yet, simultaneously, fear falling, failure. She’d looked down.

  Lao K surfaced, cheeks puffing with fresh inhales, oxygen flushing her cheeks pink.

  “I got a good shot,” she said. Water dripped down her forehead and into her fluttering eyes, but Li-Ming wasn’t listening. Li-Ming was tying her scarf back atop her bald head as if she’d suddenly experienced this odd nudity, standing on her own, a burst of energy and capability, stomping barefoot through puddles to her wheelchair beside the stands, then recklessly walking her chariot out the door while Lao K, who’d quickly climbed out of the pool, skin water-beaded, jogged beside her, telling her to take a seat, to slow down, to be more careful.

  “Man man de, Mama,” she said. “Mama, man man de.” The crowd gaped: the American called the Chinese woman ‘Mama.’

  I sat at the edge of the pool, knowing the crowd was waiting for my next move. Let my wife throw her tantrum, I wanted to tell them. Her own life given away in the moment she became a mother—what possibilities remained when our nation was just born; what possibilities remained when we had the rest of our lives to live. Let her make Xiaofei return to the competition for her next dive, to climb to an even higher platform and take one more spin in the air. I was done pretending. Our daughter was below average, and whatever the reason—my head, her mother’s hotheadedness—it wasn’t worth pushing her. What version of success had we so quickly taken to, anyhow? Dreams were for the living. Didn’t Li-Ming know? We’d been writing the wrong story, the narrative faltering in the vision of our daughter’s body slipping past straight, legs making a long, horizontal splash, our ability to always be on the sidelines watching, cheering her on. What we should have written was the truth, if only we’d understood what it was that brought us together all those years ago in the shadowed pigsties of Jiangxi, what made a child in the heat of summer, or made the cicadas sing, or made their bodies drop to the ground when full of too much song. The heat? The sky? This is what I meant about asking too many questions. I warned Xiaofei of this when she was only four years old and we were at her grandmother’s funeral in Nanjing. Our daughter asked where Lao Lao had gone even though the woman’s ashes were stuffed into a heavy urn at the head of the table. She’s gone to heaven, I said, but Xiaofei was persistent. Where’s heaven? She asked, and when I pointed toward the ceiling, she continued, How is heaven in the sky? Can I see it? Can we get there by airplane? That’s when I said the thing about asking too many questions. Although it silenced my daughter for the remainder of the afternoon, I later regretted this lesson, worried I’d stifled some childish belief that every question has an ans
wer, that there’s someone, somewhere in this world, likely a parent or grandparent, who knows everything. For Li-Ming, that person was Han Shan. No one could compete with a long-dead poet. No one could compete with a hermit who abandoned the world in order for us to see our existence as we should: from above, from afar, both shadow and figure together, as in the sun’s penumbra. All of it senseless when our lives had nothing to do with mountain perches or snow-saddled pines or years spent contemplating the distance between the horizon and the sky.

  I stood slowly, feeling the heat of many eyes boring judgment into my back: How could he let his sick wife walk away? How could he allow an American to try to help, the antithesis of what we’d been taught in our Little Red Books? I shrugged off their gazes and followed my wife and Lao K into the gymnasium lobby, down the corridor between the entrance hall and the locker rooms, where plaques glistened golden on the walls and more eyes, these wide and unblinking, witnessed my failure to help my wife into her wheelchair. Instead, Lao K persuaded Li-Ming to sit. Our American daughter stood facing her Chinese mother with her bare arms tucked into her sides, wet body shivering. As I drew closer, I recognized the purple goose bumps raised along the flesh of her limbs. I recognized the quivering buttocks, the smell of hair and sweat and chlorine and… What use was there in recalling? I touched her shoulder and she didn’t jump. I ran my fingers through her hair and she didn’t flinch. I saw purple and blue, skin attempting to pulse life back into the farthest reaches of her limbs. She was looking at Li-Ming and I was looking at the girl’s hair, the way I could lift it with one flick of my wrist, the weight of it damp, the density of waterless gravity, our one true curse: Time. All the spinning kept us believing the lies of our own origins. Who was this girl standing between us, who prevented us from living the lives we’d intended to live? The girl who cleaved to us both, splitting our union down the middle and making my wife’s death her own entirely? I wanted to rewrite this book. I wanted to lift away the girl’s skin and bones, to leave only her shadow at our feet, to resurrect the old shadows in the Jiangxi sties, the heat of the sun remnant on our forearms, the world not yet dissected into cities and countries but simple, digestible, present. I wanted, more than anything, to start over.50