Empire of Glass

by Kaitlin Solimine

  “Lao Wang!” Li-Ming called, but we were down a deep hall where even sound was marbled, spoken in caves.

  “Lao Wang! Go get your daughter.”

  I released Lao K’s hair and when I did, the American turned, bare feet squealing against linoleum. Her entire body was at attention with the sincerity and immediacy belonging only to youth: pink-red flushed cheeks, pricked nipples pushing through her thin red bathing suit, blonde hairs standing in columned attention on her long, tanned arms. The camera straddled her breasts. The camera Li-Ming used to chronicle Xiaofei’s childhood now contained within it our daughter’s greatest failure: she’d tried. She’d climbed to the highest rung. She stood tall but didn’t trust her feet would hold her. She spun in the air one turn too many. That camera. I reached out to remove the film canister.

  “Ba! What are you doing?”

  “Lao Wang! Stop!”

  “Ba, give it to me!” Lao K snatched the device as I was prying it open, as the first glimpses of light spoilt the edges of that final photograph—Xiaofei’s failed entrance. Lao K slapped my hand and I dropped it to my hip.

  “You don’t know what you’re doing,” she said. She knew, she insinuated. She knew me better than I knew myself. Was this what we loved about her, about all Americans? They always knew best, had all the answers, while we sat on the sidelines observing, forgetting to ask the questions for which the Americans had already prepared the answers. Li-Ming frowned, a tear calcifying the corner of her eye. How they knew everything and I was just the child attempting to shield us from the knowledge that this—this photograph, this moment, this daughter—will never be enough.

  No.

  Drowned legs, wasted strokes.

  “Don’t ruin the film,” Lao K said, protectively clutching the camera to her chest. “Let’s get Xiaofei and go home.” She pushed my shoulders, leading me to the pool, past the flapping plastic-stripped doors, the sad-eyed spectators who grew eager with the sight of their daughters’ bodies ascending the platform but looked down at us with embarrassment, as if we represented everything they wished not to acknowledge. Outside, the cicada chorus crescendoed louder, then abruptly fell to a dull hum.

  Li-Ming was still behind us in the hallway in her wheelchair, unable to roll herself to the stands to watch our daughter’s last dive. I didn’t know how in leaving Li-Ming alone we were actually entering the rest of our lives together: me and the girl who suddenly thrust herself onto our lives with the tenacity of a sand storm funneling down Wudaokou.

  If Xiaofei noticed our brief departure, it hadn’t fazed her. She was due for her second redemptive dive. She climbed the stair’s spokes, crested the board. Coach Peng stood cross-armed across the pool next to the judges. He still wore his sunglasses and a calm, unsmiling face. What did he see through those lenses? Although I never owned sunglasses, suddenly, I wanted more than ever to wear them, to wash the world in red and brown—to stamp out, once and for all, the unbearable honesty of sunlight peeling past the skylights to wrestle with the pool’s surface, blinding us if we stared too long.

  Lao K jogged on tiptoes then dipped smoothly into the pool, holding the camera to her eye and descending below the surface, beyond my reach. What she saw beneath the waves that day at the Beijing Normal University swimming pool I’d never know—if she ever developed that photograph, she never showed us. And Li-Ming was in no position to expose the film herself, her illness quickly devouring what was left of her, every bone, lymph node and organ riddled with cancer in the coming weeks. But I’ll remember what I want of Lao K surfacing briefly for a breath, long enough to shout to her sister: “Don’t look down!” then submerging herself as Xiaofei did exactly as Lao K reminded her not to—she looked to the water glistening meters below and as she did, her tentative toe grip on the edge of the board slipped.

  The crowd behind us gasped as our daughter’s body faltered, feet struggling to retain their grip on the slick board, knees bending to push herself off prematurely. It was too late: Lao K was already underwater, already snapping the photograph that would last beyond our lives, paper objects outliving the bodies they contain—this time, our daughter’s body, taut and perfectly-straight, slicing the water like a knife. Like perfection alone could heal us. Or at least our belief in it.

  She didn’t make a splash.

  *

  “Did you hear that, Ba?” It wasn’t Xiaofei’s voice, but Lao K’s, her proper Beijing accent with all it’s rolling ‘er’ sounds exaggerated. We were alone—Li-Ming somehow wheeled herself home immediately following Xiaofei’s redemptive dive and Xiaofei went to McDonalds for her post-meet celebration with Lili’s family who were eagerly doting on their daughter who snagged first place, Xiaofei with the second place medal. Already, we’d lost our daughter to someone else. For now, this tall, slow American would have to take her place. “Ba, did you hear?”

  “Hear what?”

  “How it’s so silent now.”

  I hadn’t noticed: The cicadas were a static background noise you learned to ignore. On the walk home, I was too consumed by the events that evening—Xiaofei’s poor dive and then her perfect one, a tear clinging to my wife’s eye, Lao K’s hair dipping beneath the water’s surface. But as we left the pool, following in Li-Ming’s trail, the cicadas indeed silenced their song-happy voices. Or had something else silenced them? The sky was misty with clouds and the first starlight somehow reminded me of a tropical place even though I’d never left our motherland, only seen photographs of Hawaii and the Philippines and the Caribbean in Li-Ming’s favorite brightly-colored calendars. These unlikely stars winked and danced, but we didn’t have time to stop and watch. Li-Ming awaited us at home, likely seething with anger: Over what? Xiaofei’s terrible first dive? My inability to escort Li-Ming from the pool hall? The way I’d touched Lao K’s hair? What hadn’t I done?

  Lao K stopped below a willow with limbs limping to the ground, exhausted by the nature of being born a tree. She tilted her head to the sky.

  “What are you looking at? Hurry up, Li-Ming’s waiting.”

  “Li-Ming can wait. Besides, haven’t you noticed the stars?”

  First the cicadas; now this. I reluctantly tilted my head to the cavern of black beyond the tree’s limbs. Lao K was so much like Li-Ming in this way; she didn’t realize that looking up would only make her trip, that a life lived so distracted by the details of the world would only make you mistrust your own form. This was a dangerous way to live.

  “I haven’t seen this many stars in Beijing,” Lao K said.

  She was right. Tonight’s wind, brisk and chilled by spring, cleared the air of any remaining dust or pollutants as it fluffed our hair. There was an entire sky above with visible, sparkling stars.

  “Xiaofei will be okay,” she said.

  I didn’t know how to respond; the willow limbs bristled at a passing breeze and the cicadas clucked, annoyed that the wind had, for a moment, stolen the stage.

  “Li-Ming will be okay too.” She spoke from a place she didn’t quite trust, but her words were there, nonetheless, puffs of smoke rising from a valley floor. The words hovered above us before being stamped out by the sound of revived cicada chorus. The drone rose, encouraging me to speak. What am I supposed to say?

  “Baba…”

  “That’s my name,” I said.

  She laughed softly, kicked at the earth. “She’s really going.” How did she not yet know the word ‘to die?’ Or even the softer ‘to leave this world’, or any other idiomatic saying we used to mask the sting of death? Her lesson books hadn’t mentioned death yet—why would they?

  “Si,” I said, instructing her. “She’s really going to ‘si.’ Like the number ‘four,’ but in the falling-rising tone.”

  . To die. That body struggling beneath a flat, black surface, arm stretching upward. No one above reaching below, no one capable of saving that which was already lost.

  “I will never say that word, Ba,” Lao K said. “I like ‘to go’ better. It means there
can be a return.”

  I sighed, placed my hand on the American’s shoulder and for the first time, this felt right. She didn’t shrug me off, her head still tipped backwards, skin resonant with chlorine.

  “Where I live, there’s a wide beach without any houses, no people,” she said. “When I was a kid, my mother and I would go there at night to count the stars. Have you ever seen a star that falls?” I realized she meant a shooting star: liu xing.

  “Never in the city,” I said. “Only when I was a child in the countryside.”

  “That makes sense. You need to be paying attention in order to see falling stars and no one is ever paying attention in the city. And there’s too much light.”

  “True,” I said. I hated how she spoke as if she had the answer for everything, despite the fact I almost believed her. She still believed in something bigger than this. Yet for that ignorance, I was suddenly, unexpectedly grateful.

  “Maybe if we wait, we’ll see one.”

  “Maybe. But what about Li-Ming?”

  “Maybe she’s looking too,” she said. “Maybe she sees them all the time.”

  “Did she tell you this?”

  Lao K shrugged. The cicada chorus died, briefly silent, before resuming its resonant hum.

  “What did she tell you?”

  “We never talk of stars,” she said, and although I didn’t believe her, I didn’t know what else to ask. Succumbing to the sky, I tilted back my head again and waited. We stayed like this for a while, all those stars staring back at us, but none able to provide what we wanted. What we needed them to tell us. I thought of all the wushu films I watched throughout my life. In every film, as in each of Li-Ming’s poems, there was a categorical belief in the impossible. At just this moment in one of those films, the sky would burst with the most brilliant shooting star ever to race across the curve of earth, red-blue flame trailing. Lao K would point and I’d follow her finger’s trajectory, trusting it to lead me in the right direction. But we don’t live in films or poems. Lao K and I didn’t see a shooting star that night, or anything as brilliant. We stood beneath the willow, peeking past its branches, hoping for many minutes the world would give us what we wanted. But what was that? Despite the changes in scenery, the walk from the country to the city to the border to the city again, the grinding of lenses, the birth of a daughter, I hadn’t changed. My life was one long dead end pathway, everything I’d hungered for in vain and impossible—a bowl incapable of being filled, a burning star whose light would never reach us on earth. Did Lao K understand this? Is that why she reminded me to look upward, reminded me there was something bigger than my tall, shoulder-hunched frame?

  As we walked home, I worried maybe we hadn’t waited long enough, but Lao K was already ahead of me, undeterred by this failed lesson in stargazing. She skipped toward the courtyard blocks, her wet hair trailing, leaving an undecipherable script on the pavement.

  “Lao K, maybe we need to be more patient,” I called to her, but she slipped around the last corner, her moonlit shadow grasping for me then quickly snapping back to her body, retreating.

  “We can try again tomorrow.” Her words hugged the corner.

  “Tomorrow,” I repeated. But I didn’t want to wait. I paused and tipped my head to the sky again. Thankfully, the stars were still there, blinking from their various distances. I breathed deeply and waited, but—nothing. The more I wanted, the less my life would reach its intended ending.

  …Yet the longer I waited, contrarily, the less I believed this. The longer I waited, the longer the sky didn’t shower me with shooting stars—or even just one—the more patient I grew. Not much had changed in the sky’s map since I was the boy in Cen Cang Yan sitting by the river’s edge looking at the same stars, same constellations shifting in identical patterns, same planets rising from the horizon in the same seasons as the year before. I grew taller, lankier. I watched American fighter jets peel open the sky, met a woman, made a child. All this was the way we lived a life, in one version or another, but basically holding to the same premise. What did we expect to change when above us the sky’s tapestry remained essentially the same? Why, when everything around us—water, earth, sky, fire—was exactly as it had been since we’d known it, did we want more?

  I remembered something Li-Ming taught me, from one of the many books she’d checked out of the National Library—that somewhere these suns we called ‘stars’ had burned out, that we received their light only millions of years after they died. I took comfort in this: even dead stars remain bright somewhere. Perhaps all that mattered was where we stood relative to them, that we believed their light meant something, was still here with us, after all that time.51

  Lao K yelled for me, this time followed by Li-Ming’s insistent voice. I lowered my head to my chest, but the stars still burned my retina, lingering for a few minutes until I rounded the corner and saw my American daughter and her Chinese mother, my wife, waiting in the doorway.

  “Carry me upstairs,” Li-Ming requested and although there was much more we needed to say, I gathered her body in my arms, worried suddenly by the lack of weight, how it was easier to lift her now than earlier that afternoon.

  “Hurry,” Li-Ming said, perhaps also sensing how much smaller she’d become, how now I was the one shouldering her gravity, carrying us home.

  49. Li-Ming handed me the scissors. “Start at the nape of my neck,” she said. I held the blade to the thinnest hair, took a breath, then snipped in a taut, straight line. For days, I found her short, blunt hairs caught within the fabric of my sweater, the crease of my wrist, trapped within the folds of my pillow.

  50. From Baba’s cluttered apartment, I stare at a Beijing sky lit afire with car exhaust, coal smoke. I close the book for the night, vowing I’ll finish translating this chapter in the morning. I also want to start over, I tell her but her words can’t speak back, can’t assure me my ending is not contained within these pages, only hers.

  51. I once read a report that the biggest stars in the universe were the brightest, but these luminescent stars would also die fastest, their own fiery energy consuming them in the end. The smaller the star, the longer its life, the lesser its burn.

  The Last Letter?

  Can a room feel like a room when you can’t see the walls?

  In blackness, I stand,

  brush cobwebs off shoulders, thighs,

  pluck from my fingers:

  the last belching operatic note sung above an empty stage.

  But I cannot. See. Anything.

  I see blackness.

  So I suppose I see SOMETHING.52

  But nothing and something are the same, aren’t they?

  Isn’t no-thing a thing too?

  “No one knows I’m sitting here alone,” I speak Cold Mountain.

  My mother and father are nowhere—I stumble forward, turn on a light and: aha!

  On the counter: Porcelain plates (painted blue carp alighting edges),

  catfish fried in a pan,

  coveted eyes gauged with a chopstick,

  smattered oil on table,

  plastic chairs askew, abandoned for—where?

  Warbled loudspeakers: silent;

  shuffling feet: stilled;

  Where am I?

  Apartment windows blackened with tar,

  Mocking my core: black.

  How long until they forget me? Forgive?

  *

  A thunderclap and the People’s Daily on the kitchen table, inspired by an unhinged window, fans to a story about a boy who saved his grandmother from drowning in their farm’s sinkhole. The grandmother was drowning in shit! And her grandson saved her. How utterly heartwarming.

  Don’t you understand? Many years ago I lost my best friend. It took me as long to read your dense, mellifluous poetry, make it comprehensible to the point it lost all meaning. We are no closer to understanding! I write letters, like this, in the hope I will thank you for handing me these words. The words survive. If you don’t. If I don�
��t. The rest have turned their backs. Over time, rain will wash away the tar and my view of the city will turn from black to gray to a yellow-tinged ecru the sheen of eggshells or abandoned bones. No one will remember my window was once black, that I lived in darkness so deep even ants and rats clung to the walls for fear they’d succumb—to what? A world without light is still a world.

  Night has a way of quieting even the loudest noises—Lao Wang’s cooking (slamming pots and woks and chopsticks and cleavers—does he hate to cook or just need to make shrill every undesired task?), then his nightly snores, Xiaofei chewing on her fingernails like a red squirrel, Lao K belching after a night gulping beer at Old Wu’s restaurant with its infinite rows of mirrored walls. We ignored the signs because we needed to—don’t we all?—but Lao K was unraveling53; and us: a cancerous family who’d devour any healthy specimen who entered our home. Which meant it was time to show her your books. I brought her to Rending Lake Park. They do not practice there the way we once did beneath the Scholar Tree, but this was the closest we’d come to the patience we attempted in the back of Teacher Liang’s musty classroom. We had to believe in something Great because Great had become Mundane.

  Now they tell me they want to take me to the hospital; Lao Wang insists there’s one more treatment. He asked my elder cousin to send funds from Meiguo because it’s too expensive for my pension and Lao Wang’s combined to cover.

  I’m going to find you, even if it kills me (which, given my condition these days, it very well may). We’ll climb the long, slow path up Cold Mountain together. We’ll fingertip trace cave-drawn words, live off herbs and brush, find solace in the darkness of a place forever untouched by sunlight. I have gone completely astray in this life of motherhood and mailing box counting and cooking and cleaning and—where are you? I imagine you’re there, waiting for me, watching from the cliffs with the serenity of a bird, knowing you can fly to the next crest with one lift of your wings. Soon enough, I’ll take the long train south to find you on your perch. To return to the place, the time, that mountain, where we began.