by Ling Zhang
bird
tree
grass
flower
I used these simple words to lead Ah May into the world of English. But that wasn’t enough for her. She wanted to know “this bird in this tree,” or “the grass beside the stone.” So we added some more specific terms to our conversation—sparrow, swallow, eagle, tea tree, willow, reed, dandelion, sunflower, rose. She soon grew bored with these, wanting to give these things hands and feet—or wings. These things began to walk, fly, run, touch, and float. When she was used to the activities of these objects, she generated new ideas, and she hoped I would give them expression. I had to think hard to remember the vocabulary I hadn’t used in many years, and finally I found a few adjectives.
happy
sad
lonely
excited
beautiful
Gradually, each of these words extended to the periphery, trying to form relationships with adjacent words. It was a course filled with explorations and risks, so some absurd sentences, full of flaws, came out of her mouth.
This rock fly lonely.
This sparrow sad touch.
My sunflowers happy float.
This tireless little sprite, who practically oozed curiosity from every pore, wore on my patience, greedily demanding new knowledge from me, tightening up the neurons I’d let grow slack in recent years. There were thirty-two students in my class, but the energy I expended on those students combined wasn’t sufficient to keep up with this one little mind. She drove me with an invisible whip, allowing no laziness, no rest, and no aging.
Every day after class, we went into the forest and expanded the realm of our private language inch by inch. At first, there was just enough space to stand up, but gradually we found room there to stretch our arms, legs, and bodies. Eventually, we were able to stumble around in our tiny world. One day, suddenly, with an earth-shattering burst, the solid walls encircling our little kingdom toppled. New walls grew on top of the ruins. We pressed against these walls and found them as pliable as rubber, flexible enough to accommodate our infinite thoughts and feelings. So we moved the world to the woods. When we departed from the forest, everything we said there turned to stone.
The initial motivation for Ah May and me to develop this private language was simply to allow us to avoid those ears with tongues and eyes with teeth. Eventually, this mode of communication became a habit. In that resilient realm with blurring boundaries, Ah May and I could express our endearment, fondness, or concern in a way that, if we’d used the language that flowed in our blood, we would’ve felt embarrassed and pretentious. It was as my poor mother had often said when she was alive, that it’s always easier to use someone else’s things. And one day, I learned that this foreign language that I thought of as “someone else’s thing,” was actually in Ah May’s blood. Or, I should say, half her blood.
It was her father’s language.
One day, as we continued to find our words, it began to rain heavily without warning. Ah May’s straw hat was blown off by the wind. She held her hands over her head, as if it were a bomb that might detonate if she released it.
“I don’t want to become a scabby baldy!” she said in horror. She looked like she’d not lost her hat, but her heart or her liver.
I’d never seen her so panicked before. I laughed as I comforted her, telling her that if one could get a scabby bald head just by getting wet in the rain, I would have had one long ago.
“It’s different for you,” she shouted at me, sounding like she was close to tears. “Mommy said I had scabies when I was little, and if my head is exposed to sun or rain, it will turn out like Yang Jianguo’s father’s.”
I realized I’d never seen Ah May not wearing a hat. She wore a straw hat all summer and a wool cap all winter. She even wore a cloth hat when she slept. Ah Yan said it served as protection against the summer heat or winter cold and to keep dirt from seeping into the pillow.
I laughed and said, “Is that what your mother told you? And she’s a doctor? Scabies don’t just grow on your head. Your head is like your body, it needs sun and rain. I don’t understand how you can go around with your head covered up every day and not catch cold.”
Ah May peeked at me dubiously from under her fingers, then suddenly opened her mouth and sneezed. I took off my half-damp jacket and put it over her head. As she loosened her grip, my hand suddenly turned to stone. I saw a row of wet waves in her hair, even though it had been clamped down by numerous hairpins. Ah May’s eyes, as deep and bright as the ocean suddenly flashed and rippled. Her eyes and hair were like siblings separated for many years, now unexpectedly reunited. They cheered, leaped, and embraced, all language superfluous. Anyone would know in an instant that they were related by blood. Ah May suddenly became another person. Behind the Ah May I knew there hid an Ah May I seemed to both know and not know. All the pieces of puzzle fell into place with the rain, spelling out the whole truth for me. Of course, heaven had already given me all the clues. I was just slow and needed the rain to help me put them together. I finally knew who Ah May’s father was.
That day, when I returned home with Ah May, her hair hanging loose and drenched, Ah Yan rushed out of the house and stood, stunned, at the door. I looked at her. It was a pointed look, and she understood immediately. Her lips twitched, but she made no sound. Ah May went into the house, dried her hair, and changed her clothes. I sat by the stove, rolled a cigarette, and let the rain water drip from me, forming turbid yellow puddles on the ground. I’d learned to smoke back at the training camp, but now, I went at it with a new ferocity. A silent wall separated Ah Yan and me. It was made of granite and would blunt even the hardest blade in the world.
“There’s a natural phenomenon called atavism,” I finally said, after a long silence. “In some organisms, some traits of one’s ancestors reappear after several generations.”
Ah Yan didn’t dare take up the conversation. She still wasn’t sure which way I’d go.
“My great-grandfather lived in Ürümqi, and my family has Uighur blood. Their descendants, of course, sometimes have the hair of those ancestors,” I said.
Ah Yan didn’t say anything, but her silence built a defensive alliance with me stronger than any words, writing, thumbprints, or red seal. My family were outsiders to Sishiyi Bu. My parents were dead, and my brother was far away. I was the only witness to my family’s history. My words were our history.
I heard Ah May’s footsteps as she came out of the room after changing her clothes.
“Please tell Ah May she never had scabies, and she won’t get a scabby bald head if she goes without a hat,” I said to Ah Yan.
Ah May skipped one level in her primary schooling and one in her secondary schooling, and at the age of sixteen, she was admitted to the English department of the provincial normal school. With her results, she was eligible to choose a better school, but she chose a normal school because it came with a living stipend. Ah Yan’s clinic had been turned into a public health clinic, and a graduate from a vocational health school had been sent from the county seat to run it. Ah Yan was now just a medical assistant and, like me, received a meager monthly wage that was barely enough to survive on.
In the autumn, when Ah May left home, the pain in my arm suddenly intensified. This was the old wound from when Ah May had hung her whole body from my arm as the officers were dragging me out of the classroom in handcuffs. It was a memory embedded in my bones. The memory of the bones is different from that of the flesh or the brain. The memory of flesh and brain is soft, worthless, and unreliable. A beloved face, a comforting word, or even warmth or a cool breeze can change its shape anytime. But the memory of the bone doesn’t know the season or the direction of the wind. It only has one stubborn tendon. The memory of the bone reaches all the way to the grave. So the memory Ah May had left on my arm when she was six, which had been hurting me for ten years, would continue to hurt until the day I died.
That year, the pain in my arm spread t
o my whole body. It drew all the bones in my body into an alliance, not even letting the smallest bones in my toes escape. After successfully conquering the skeleton, it recruited my throat. When the pain in my bones broke out, my throat roared with dark pleasure, as if eager to pull out my lungs and put them on display. Showing loyalty to the bones, my throat sometimes went a step further than my bones had dared, so that once my bones had tortured themselves to exhaustion and entered a brief cease-fire, my throat was still relentless.
I could tell from my students that my condition was getting worse. At first, the children would exchange one or two mischievous glances when I coughed, passing notes and making small jabs at one another while I recovered. Later, the time it took me to recover allowed them time to finish a joke about their mothers, fathers, or livestock. Eventually, they took my coughing fits as an opportunity to catch a short nap, and by the time they woke, they found that I was still coughing and spitting some grim substance into my wrinkled handkerchief.
The pestilence had probably been lurking in my body for some time, whether from the time Ah May had clung to my arm or from the time I spent crawling in the mines. Maybe even earlier. I couldn’t see it, but it could see me, and it watched my every move. When Ah May was at my side, she pulled me forward with never-ending curiosity. I was strapped to a perpetual motion machine, and I couldn’t stop to get sick. Now that Ah May was gone, the clockwork that ran my nerves was loosened, and my body began to unwind. The disease was the first to know, even one step before I did. It seemed to take it a single second to switch from latency to full force. In the blink of an eye, it was all over my body.
It started with a stubborn cold and with the arthritis that developed in the cold, damp coal tunnel. That was Ah Yan’s initial diagnosis. After giving me baskets of a variety of traditional Chinese and Western medicines to relieve rheumatic pain, nurse a cold, and stop inflammation and cough, she finally realized that the superficial medical knowledge passed on from Pastor Billy was enough for emergencies, but not to deal with this sort of chronic illness. She started wading through mountain streams, traveling hundreds of li away to seek some secret ancestral remedy. That autumn, every pot in the house was stained with the smell of traditional Chinese medicine. Even the crow of the roosters gave off the offensive smell of herbs. But these remedies were nothing more than bowl after bowl of expensive black water that was hard to swallow. They couldn’t reason with my bones or make peace in the battle between my throat and lungs.
One evening, I sat on the threshold soaking up the sun, and my throat made a fierce attack on my lungs. I noticed that the sun had changed color, becoming a huge taupe coal cake. After a moment, I realized gray dust from my throat had blackened the sun. I had a long dream that night in which I dragged the sun down the forty-one steps of the village and soaked it in the water to wash it, but even when the whole river turned black, I still couldn’t clean the sun back to its original color.
When I woke the next morning, I found that the sun was finally clean. It lay round, bright red, and wet on my pillow. It was the first little sun I spat out from my lungs, but in the not-too-distant future, it would have many companions. I quickly tossed the pillowcase in the water bucket, but I was too late. It didn’t escape Ah Yan’s eyes. Her face changed, looking like a piece of coal. Leaving no room for negotiation, she carted me off to the county hospital. I lay on a narrow, cold bed that day and let the doctor turn my scrawny body over more times than I could count, leaving countless fingerprints all over my flesh. I watched as the nurse extracted enough blood from my veins to paint nine suns. She stripped my clothes off and put me behind an X-ray machine, revealing the lily-white, scimitar-shaped ribs inside me and the two black lobes of my lungs. I felt almost guilty for the thoroughness of the check-up that day, because I wore out the doctor, the nurse, and that poor machine all at once. When it was over, the doctor didn’t say anything to me. He just glanced at me with tired, sympathetic eyes, then called Ah Yan into the office and closed the door.
It was a long time before Ah Yan came out. I knew the doctor wouldn’t have much to say. It was only plain facts from his mouth. Facts are always simple, and the harsher the facts, the simpler things are, requiring just a few words to lay it all out. Ah Yan only stayed in the room so long to erase all evidence of tears from her face, just as I had tried to erase evidence of the sun from my pillow.
“There’s an infection in your lungs and bones. You’ll need nutritional supplements to enhance resistance, then you’ll be fine,” Ah Yan said.
Her tone was its usual calm, but her skin belied that, flushing from nose to forehead, saying something that undermined the words from her mouth.
“You’ve got late-stage lung cancer, and it’s spread to your bones. Go home, eat well, and wait for death,” her skin told me.
I immediately understood. In fact, this was written not only on Ah Yan’s skin but also elsewhere. I saw it in the newly formed fine line at the corner of each eye, in the new vertical groove between her eyebrows, in her hurried footsteps, and in the two bottles in her hand with my name written on them. One of the bottles held painkillers, and the other cough syrup. I knew my body had been hollowed out by black pestilence like dense ants, and I heard it devouring my internal organs. The poor doctor was helpless to fix that.
Over the next few months, it was no longer the bitter Chinese medicines simmering on the stove. First it was chicken and egg drop soup. I didn’t expect the chickens to go so fast, though. Before long, all the cages were empty, which also meant no eggs. The extinction of our chickens and eggs did not mean the stove remained idle. Next, the smell of carp escaped from beneath the lid of the pot. This fish was like leeks, infinitely available because it was sold every day at the market, if you were willing to spend some money. I used the skills I’d developed teaching math to figure out our household income and expenses and found that my calculations always put us in the red. But faced with my questions about our financial situation, Ah Yan always answered simply, “We’re fine.” She put different things in the soup each day, sometimes tofu, sometimes radish, sometimes dried shrimp, sometimes yam or lotus root. As I ate bowl after bowl of Ah Yan’s fish soup, I felt like a woman who needed to produce milk. One day, my stomach finally complained about the feelings my mouth had already been having. When I saw a layer of milky white gelatin on the surface of the soup, I couldn’t help but spit up a few mouthfuls of yellowy green bile.
After that, the contents of the pot changed again. Ah Yan told me she got some pig liver when one of the villagers slaughtered a pig. Over the years, Ah Yan had delivered babies for every family in the village. More than half the children in the village called her Qin Niang, “godmother” in the local southern Zhejiang dialect. It was reasonable for her to ask for a bit of pig liver. At least, that’s what I thought at first, but after I was served several pig livers in a row, I became suspicious. The villagers usually slaughtered livestock only in the twelfth lunar month, when they could dry the meat to preserve it, so it could last all winter and even into early spring. It was counterintuitive that people were slaughtering pig after pig when it was not the twelfth lunar month. One day I saw Ah Yan with her sleeves rolled up as she washed, and I noticed a series of bluish-purple needle marks on her arms. I realized then that it was not gifts of pig liver that had graced my plate, but liver purchased with Ah Yan’s own blood.
At dinner that night, when Ah Yan put down the plate of shiny fried pork liver, I took a bite, then spat it out. This was a performance put on by my throat, tongue, and teeth, but my stomach didn’t participate. Saying nothing, Ah Yan sighed, picked up the pig liver I’d spat out, and ate it.
“I’ll make something else tomorrow,” she said.
Next she tried mudfish. She couldn’t remember who had told her it was nourishing and provided energy. Mudfish were as common as earthworms where we lived. Without lies, without needles, and even without money, one would never face a shortage of mudfish. So I ate with a clear conscien
ce all sorts of mudfish—deep-fried, stewed, stir-fried with minced meat bits . . . I add the word “bits” to “minced,” though it sounds off, the way someone talks when they’re confused, because I want to emphasize not only how small the pieces were but also how scarce. On the plate, they seemed smaller than ants.
The days of the famine had passed, and bran was once again chicken feed, but meat was still rare. So my brain, the only territory in my body unoccupied by the pestilence inside me, took a dictatorial command over my stomach, eyes, tongue, and teeth, insisting that they eat every bite of the mudfish and all its accompanying items, with no hint of revulsion. In executing these orders, the various parts of my body conspired to feign cooperation, consuming what they could when Ah Yan was looking but spitting out what they had taken in when she was distracted.
Though I was dragged to the gate of death with all kinds of pain, I still felt lucky. If I had fallen ill earlier, I would’ve dragged Ah Yan into an even darker abyss. The great famine was over by this time. A year or two earlier, the pots had forgotten even the fragrance of rice, the stoves didn’t remember how they warmed oil, and people were eating chicken feed while the chickens’ guts were filled with pebbles. If I’d fallen ill then, the only thing Ah Yan could have fed me was her own flesh.
One day, she told me with great excitement that the livestock in the commune could supply us with a small quantity of fresh milk. All we needed was a certificate from the team leader. At noon that day, Ah Yan ran to Yang Jianguo’s house, but she returned depressed. She said nothing, and I knew she’d failed to get the necessary red stamp on the paper. The following morning, she went out early, and by the time she came home, the sky was dark. When she came in, she was carrying a thermos in a bamboo casing. She took a cup and poured the contents of the thermos into it, then put it on the table beside my bed.
