Where The Stars Rise: Asian Science Fiction and Fantasy

by Law, Lucas K.

  Until now.

  She remembered that day, remembered where they were: the beach, just before Benny was born. A romantic getaway, just the two of them. Everything was clear: the sky, the sea, Manuel. This was years before the ground had swallowed up the Philippines, before the Great Tremors rendered the archipelago into broken, distant islands in hours. She did not have to watch the livefeeds from the newsdrones to know that she could not return to Davao City, that she had no home to return to. She refused to look at the lists of the dead. She knew her husband had died, and she was the one who had killed him.

  Melissa stared at the eyes in the container and at the video playing on the wall. He may have changed his last name but certainly not his memory. Guilt tugged at her chest, where she knew her heart was still beating, faintly, for this man.

  A ring from the comm stationed at her cube startled her from her thoughts. “Dr. Remedios?” came a voice from the nurses’ station. “The family of Mr. Co is here, waiting for the DNR recording.”

  She paused, and stepped toward the recording equipment, at the looping memory of herself. She came to Mars with nothing to remember him by. Beyond the borders of the memory, she could almost see his hand, the faint outline of his arms. His body. His eyes.

  “Please tell them that the files are corrupted and that we have been unable to retrieve his memories. We will be compensating them, of course, for this unfortunate incident.” She kept her voice clear, steady.

  But for now, the lie was just between her and a dead body. “Alright,” said the nurse on duty. The comm clicked off, and for good measure, Melissa removed the wire that connected it to the central communications system. Then she cupped the eyes and placed them in a transport container. Finally, she withdrew the recording chip from the machine and tucked it into her pocket, where it jostled with her ID.

  Manuel Co, she thought, a finger stroking the smooth cylindrical container holding his eyes. Mine. All mine.

  A Visitation for the Spirit Festival

  Diana Xin

  The night before she was to return to China, Mrs. Liu woke from a terrible dream and knew with certainty that a ghost was sitting upon her chest. Her skin was damp from his condensation, and it took several seconds to catch her breath. Hours passed before she returned to a troubled sleep.

  In the daylight she was herself again—reasonable, practical, and rational. She was a woman who balanced her chequebook every Monday and attended church every Sunday. Ask any of her friends and they would agree: she was the most logical and morally upstanding woman, one of the last people who deserved to be haunted by a ghost she did not believe in.

  The ghost had come from Grand Auntie Du. Ten years ago when the dear woman passed, she bequeathed a ghost to Mrs. Liu in her will. The ghost being a ghost, and Mrs. Liu not believing in ghosts, the inheritance had been easily settled, until recently.

  In the last year, the ghost stirred from an afterthought, often not thought of at all, to a daily nuisance, an incorrigible bother. She couldn’t count the number of times he had switched the sugar and the salt or stolen her keys only to slip them back into her pocket hours later.

  How did she know it was a he-ghost and not a she-ghost? She didn’t. She had never seen the ghost. She did not believe in the ghost. But he felt like a male ghost. And she was positive he was responsible for taking her passport from the drawer and leaving it on the piano, for breaking the zipper on the suitcase she had checked only the other day, and for transforming the jars of codfish oil she had purchased as gifts into capsules of worthless vitamin E.

  Preparing for the trip had left her more scattered than usual. She was always grasping for stray thoughts, for parts of herself that seemed to simply wander off. She took a deep breath, trying to find a quiet moment and stretch it as long as she could. Then, her husband entered the room, and everything she’d slowly gathered together fell apart again. His smell, his foot shuffling, his throat clearing—they intruded her space like pebbles skipping across her skin.

  “Boarding pass,” he said, brandishing one of his lists. “Melatonin. Peptol-Bismol.”

  “I only get indigestion from Italian food,” she interjected.

  “But you can’t trust the food quality in China. Dirty cooking oil, you know.” Mr. Liu shook his head and sighed. “You have your passport?”

  “I’m ready.”

  Mr. Liu took a deep breath, and she wondered if the witnesses he interviewed on the stand also got fed up with his theatrics. “But are you ready? To go back home?”

  Mrs. Liu managed a tight smile. Neither she nor Mr. Liu considered China home, but they, like all their friends, still called it jia. Mr. Liu left China when he was barely a teenager. What did he know about China? What did she herself know about it, when she hadn’t visited in fifteen years? Jia was the same word for family. Her only family in China was a pack of greedy cousins, and now, her daughter.

  Michelle had only been to China once before, when she was five. Mrs. Liu remembered her standing in confusion at her grandfather’s funeral, her small form swallowed by the white gown, and her face brightly indignant that she had been scolded for snatching a piece of red bean cake from the altar. Anyone could see the little girl, though the same as everyone else in appearance, did not belong there. Then, last summer, Michelle announced that she was quitting her job, leaving the nice Mountain View company that recruited her out of college, and she was moving to China. Just for one year, she had said. She would teach English at an elite private high school. She had already Skyped with the principal. The contract was final.

  Now the year was up, and she wanted to stay another. It was time to go back and get her. Operation: Retrieve a daughter.

  “Talk to her about graduate school,” Mr. Liu reminded Mrs. Liu in the car. “She won’t have a future without graduate school, and she can’t go back to school if she’s too old.”

  “She doesn’t know what she wants to study.”

  “Tell her law school.”

  “Tell her yourself.”

  “She doesn’t listen to me.”

  “Like she listens to me.”

  Mr. Liu squinted and leaned forward, concentrating on changing lanes.

  “Make sure she’s eating well,” he said. “Take care of yourself, too. Keep your purse zipped up and your passport with you at all times.”

  “You just focus on keeping our house standing, okay?” Mrs. Liu said. He was full of advice and admonishments, but China wasn’t his area of expertise. She knew the country much better. She had been dreaming about it for months: the empty classrooms at her college, the courtyard, and the little fountain with the water lilies where the students held their rallies, punctuating the peacefulness with their discontent.

  “What an opportunity for you, huh?” her husband asked. “Visiting all your old friends. Did you get in touch with anyone?”

  She gave him a long look, studying his cheerful gaze. He was no doubt looking forward to two weeks of solitude, all the time in the world for his crosswords and history books. If he had really cared, he would have made time to take the trip himself.

  “No,” she said finally. “They’re all busy.”

  “Really? What about Wen?”

  All Mrs. Liu had of her best friend from youth were a few faded photographs. “She’s not in Beijing anymore.”

  “I thought everyone with a college degree lived in Beijing. Floating north. Isn’t that what they call it?” He pulled up to the curb. “It’s time for grad school. Tell her that. And find out if she has a boyfriend.”

  Rolling her suitcase behind her, Mrs. Liu was glad to get away from him. It had been a long time since she last travelled alone. She laid her things out for the security officers, confirmed with the woman at the gate that she had found the right place, and buckled herself into her seat with relief. Her anxieties finally began to lift. Now there was nothing to do but sit. Thirteen hours of sitting. She had become good at sitting this past year.

  Just around the time Mich
elle left, the dental office, where Mrs. Liu filed insurance paperwork, replaced her job with a computer. With all that free time in her schedule, she could sit in one quiet room for hours. That was when the ghost came out from whatever cobwebbed corner he’d gotten lost in. As she sat, he would tease the curtains and cast shadows onto the wall. Occasionally, his breath would fall over her and pool like a cold lake inside her stomach. She learned to listen for him, allowing herself to hear the creaks in the floorboards, the hum of the refrigerator, the ticking of the clock, until her senses grew sharp enough that she could hear his sighs as well.

  She heard him again now, settling into the empty seat beside her. She felt him brush a feathery hand over hers, and she was glad the airline had somehow known to save a spot for him.

  “Okay, fine,” she said, softly. “That’s just fine. I remember you. I’m ready for you.”

  And then the plane hurtled forward, nosing up against gravity.

  Ghost was delighted.

  Many ghosts resided in Heaven, but there couldn’t have been more than a few who got to ride in an airplane. Unless they all rode up in airplanes. Ghost didn’t know because he’d never made it into Heaven. As Grand Auntie Du had patiently explained, his plasma was besmirched by a stain of sin that only the blood of Jesus could wash away, but through no fault of his own, Ghost had not received the baptismal fire. Grand Auntie Du had gone to Heaven or so Ghost thought. As the plane rose into the clouds, he pressed himself against the little oval window, hoping for a glimpse of Grand Auntie Du to confirm that she had gotten through.

  There was nothing but clouds. Far below, he could still spot the shimmering ocean next to geometric patches of land, but soon, that too disappeared. Ghost sank back from the window and tucked himself against the warmth of Mrs. Liu. At times, a musky weight entered his usual weightlessness. This was the closest he ever got to substance.

  He always felt it more when Mrs. Liu was close by. When he touched her hand, the heat of her skin would radiate into him, as if he too were buzzing, pulsing with life. As if he, too, had a form that mattered.

  What a surprise it was when he realized how much he liked Mrs. Liu. Grand Auntie Du had complained all the time about the younger woman’s pushiness and pride, ever so sanctimonious about bringing over food that she had clearly purchased from the Lucky Bamboo. “But they’ll take care of you,” she told Ghost when she bequeathed him.

  Well, they hadn’t. All the best behaviour he could muster, and they had all ignored him. For years, he wept alone. Then, Mrs. Liu began weeping, too. He tiptoed out from who knows where and sat beneath her. Her sadness seeped into his, and his began to recede. Each bit of sorrow was like a tiny shard of her soul, and each clear and jagged piece he touched brought him closer to replicating the container of something that was like her body.

  Already, he could enter her dreams. He knew all about her. For months now, he had felt the strums of her growing tension as he sorted through the faces that appeared in her subconscious. Faces from China. Sometimes he wondered if one of them was his own, lost a long time ago. Other times, he thought maybe he had never had a face, only what Grand Auntie Du invented for him, now subject to Mrs. Liu’s creation. But he found Mrs. Liu’s mind an interesting place, energy firing every which way, pockets of breath with seams of silence. He flickered in and out of it.

  Another pang of sorrow struck. He could not identify it as his or hers, so he nestled as close as possible, letting the rhythm of her sad heart knock against him.

  A flash of sunlight hit the window, but it did nothing to warm him. Mrs. Liu pulled down the screen, shuttering them in shadow.

  Ghost squeezed even harder against her chest, wrapping every tendril of himself tight against her. Sometimes, he imagined her shattering.

  It was hard to breathe in China. The July heat was dense with pollution, people, and ash. It was the month of the Spirit Festival, and on every street corner, someone crouched on the ground burning paper money. The air made Mrs. Liu’s eyes water.

  She felt as if she were walking between two worlds, China present and China past. China present was a behemoth, full of tall, glass buildings and shiny automobiles, but every once in a while, she caught a glimpse of China past. A face confusingly familiar. Mao’s smiling countenance dangling inside an ornament of red thread on a cab driver’s rear view mirror. A smell in the air, of meat cooking in oil or of oil blistering out from the sewers. All these pulled at her already askew heart.

  An unnamed nostalgia had settled over her at some point after her arrival, lodging so deeply in her chest that she found it difficult to swallow. She couldn’t say for what she was nostalgic. Everything was foreign to her, even, surprisingly, her daughter.

  Michelle had cut her hair short. Not just shoulder-length, but trimmed up to her ears, exposing her pale, delicate neck. Last year, this haircut would have made Michelle look more like a child, but this year it made her look more adult. It was in the way she moved, how she stepped confidently into the road, a hand raised to hail a cab. The way she talked back to people, no apologies for her stilted Mandarin.

  Let’s go there, Mom, she would say, and then we can eat that and I can you show this and you can buy those.

  She was becoming more and more like her father.

  Mrs. Liu followed her daughter dutifully around the city and tried to remember that she was on a mission. It was several days before she could make a move. They were eating sandwiches and pasta at a café called Alba. Michelle claimed that it was her favourite spot. Mrs. Liu didn’t understand why she couldn’t go back to the U.S. and eat spaghetti there.

  “So,” she said, twirling her fork, “you meet any nice guys?”

  Michelle offered a quirk of her eyebrow. “The guys I teach with are all nice.”

  “You all hang out, huh?”

  “It’s a good group of people.”

  “Big groups of friends always break into small groups. It’s natural. Then you are alone with one other person. Things happen. Have you met anyone special?”

  “Not like that.”

  Mrs. Liu heard the scorn in Michelle’s voice. What was she hiding behind the roll of her eyes? When she was a teenager, she lied by acting offended. When she was a child, she never lied. “Your father says it’s time to think about graduate school. I agree. If there’s nothing keeping you here, you should come home and keep pursuing your studies.”

  “Does it have to be a boy keeping me here? Why can’t it be about other things? There’s more to life than boys, isn’t there? There’s so much more.” Michelle expelled a long sigh that made Mrs. Liu remember her daughter at twelve, thirteen, when her hair was always in her eyes and frustration would send her bangs lifting from her forehead.

  But this woman was a completely different creature. Michelle had grown up sometime in the past year, and Mrs. Liu had missed it. Her arguments were laid out now with assertive grace and clarity.

  “I don’t care about men, Mom. I’m here to fight for the women. And children, too, I guess.”

  Feminism. Inequality. Lack of social responsibility. Her father would be proud.

  But when Mrs. Liu relayed to him their conversation the next day while waiting for Michelle to come out of the shower, he responded mockingly. “She’s out to save the world, huh? And are we her sponsors? Ask her how she plans to feed herself.”

  Mrs. Liu felt her heart shrink even tighter as he went on. His speech rang too familiar. After the end of idealism, the only whisper in the air said, money.

  “How are the subways,” Mr. Liu wanted to know next. “Clean? Dirty? Did you ride a high-speed train?”

  “Those only go outside the city.”

  She walked over to the window and glanced over the contents on Michelle’s desk, as if that would reveal more of this woman. There were a few sheaths of student work, a green leather-bound journal. She thumbed through the journal pages. Just to check the paper quality. When Mrs. Liu was young, her thoughts had been scribbled onto thin rice paper th
at ripped often under the tip of her pen. Mr. Liu prattled on about some story he had heard on the news, some accident in Hangzhou.

  Something sharp bit against her finger, and she paused before opening the journal. A Polaroid of Michelle with another woman, sitting at a restaurant. It was a recent photo, Michelle already sporting her new hairstyle. They both looked so young, so happy. It reminded her of Wen.

  “How is she, really?” Mr. Liu said.

  “Grown up.”

  “Still senseless.”

  At that moment, a dark shape shifted in the corner of her eye. The sound of the shower faucet stopped. She turned, but there was nothing. A tremor ran down her spine.

  “Can’t you talk some sense into her?”

  Her reflection in the windowpane stared sullenly back. The streets below were quiet and blanketed in haze.

  Ghost watched as alarm etched itself into the lines on Mrs. Liu’s face, followed by confusion. He wondered if she had felt it, too, the shifting of gears, the click of the earth locking against something else, its shadow or underside.

  Since disembarking the plane, Ghost had felt a vibration humming through his nebula. An excitement was mounting, filling the air, and now, at the click of the lock, it stilled.

  The lull lasted only a moment. Then, a flurry of voices, rushing up from the depths below, rustled like thousands of hushed wings.

  It was the fourteenth day of the seventh lunar month, the eve of the Spirit Festival. The gates to the realm of the dead had opened, and the ghosts were charging out.

  Hou Hai was rotten with people. Tourists and ex-pats swarmed here regularly for the shops and the nightlife. Locals had come as well to send off paper lanterns and little boats with candles to light the path home for their ancestors, released from the lower realms to roam the night. Bars and restaurants around the three back lakes of the Forbidden City broadcasted loud guitars and off-key singing to attract their guests. Across from them, peddlers reached out to sell the passersby sticks of incense and yellow joss paper folded into houses, televisions, Bentleys—gifts for the dead.