by Tao Lin
“Ever since I hit her by accident yesterday,” said Li’s mom, who’d walked into Dudu the previous day.
Li entered the kitchen.
“You don’t care about Mom anymore?” said Li’s mom. “Wah, wah, wah. Look, sitting in your room.”
Dudu jogged to Li.
“She goes again!” said Li’s mom, finally sounding unself-conscious and cheerful. “Look!”
Li laughed quietly.
“Hurry and hold her!”
Li kneeled and petted Dudu.
“Why did she change to like this?” said Li’s mom. “She’s a very sensitive kind of human.”
“She really likes me,” said Li, holding Dudu. “Once Dad is back, she won’t like me.”
“Will,” said Li’s mom.
Li put down Dudu, got a handful of almonds from the refrigerator, put sea salt on them, and heard his mom talking to Dudu.
“I said, ‘Mom hug-hug,’ and she went to you,” said Li’s mom, entering the kitchen.
Li saw Dudu looking at his eyes.
“Do you want to hug-hug?” said Li’s mom.
After a moment, Dudu walked to her.
“See, she also wants you,” said Li.
“I told you Mom did it by accident,” said Li’s mom. “She doesn’t believe me.”
Li went in his room and typed some notes, then crossed the hall to his mom and asked if she had extra earphones that he could use. She did.
He apologized for having sometimes seemed against her earphones, getting annoyed when she kept them in while talking, and she smiled and said it was okay.
“You’re going out?” she said.
“Yes,” said Li. “I’m going to bike.”
“Wah. Then Du is worried. She’s afraid I’ll hit her again.”
“Feed her ghee,” said Li. “Keep saying sorry.”
“Keeps looking at you,” said Li’s mom. “Look.”
“Why is it like this?” said Li, smiling widely, happy he and his mom were friendly and lighthearted again.
* * *
—
The next morning, Li’s dad returned from China with small bags of snacks, a beyond-hacking cough, and a rapidly twitching right eye. His trip had gone well. He’d met with a government agent, who’d said bribes weren’t being accepted anymore, so the application to sell his lasers in China should be submitted as normal.
In a movie theater that day, Li’s dad ate a mochi and wiped his mouth with a paper towel, then stretched his neck, touched his face and hair, moved his shoulders, scuffed his pants, grunted, and coughed for half an hour before falling asleep open-mouthed—seeming in Li’s peripheral vision like one long sleepward convulsion.
On a pre-dinner walk, Li approached a catatonic Dudu. Instead of avoiding him, or begrudgingly, without eye contact, allowing him to carry her, like every previous time, she strolled agreeably into his embrace.
At dinner, Li asked his parents if they’d heard of pig-dragons—the earliest depictions of dragons in China, jade Hongshan sculptures with the head of a pig and the ouroboric body of a snake. They hadn’t.
“I’m going to sleep,” Li, who was born in a pig year, announced at ten p.m. “Good night.”
“Good night,” said Li’s mom, who was born in a dragon year. “Are you saying good night to Du?”
Li sat with his dad and Dudu on the sofa. Now that they were friends, Dudu seemed calm and happy and affectionate. Before, she’d seemed worried, defensive, even paranoid.
Li patted his lap. Dudu walked onto it.
“Du,” said Li’s dad, typing on his computer. “You don’t love me. You’re not obedient.”
“Dad is being jealous,” said Li’s mom.
Daoism
Four days later, on February 22, Li emailed his editor, thanking him for the three-chapter-deletion edit, which he’d gotten increasingly excited about over seven days after three days of internal resistance; the excised chapters—“Goddess,” “Younger Dryas,” “End of History”—would eventually be absorbed into his novel.
Working on his nonfiction book’s second draft for five hours each morning after a brief jog and two hours each night after dinner, Li entered a flow state, which he viewed as whenever life felt enjoyable, he wasn’t idle or bored, and he didn’t seem to be ignoring his problems but addressing them in a long-term, premeditated manner—times when, easing into resonance with nature, minutes to weeks passed in a novelty-clouded, calmly emotional, deathward trance.
On a walk one day, Dudu stared at a man holding a large sign with three blinking lights on it. She circled him, looking at the sign, which promoted a new bank.
“She sees something strange,” said Li’s mom.
“This kind of child is too smart,” said Li’s dad. “Hair child is both smart and beautiful.”
“So, everyone in our family is smart,” said Li’s mom.
“Yeah, didn’t you, in school…,” said Li, not remembering the details.
Li’s mom had been ranked first in middle school, second in high school, fourth in college. Li’s dad, who’d also excelled academically, said school, in which they’d memorized things, had been useless, though.
Li’s parents, flanking Li, bumped into him repeatedly, from both sides, as if continuously nudging him, while reminiscing about memorizing data on hundreds of emperors.
Li moved out of it, overwhelmed.
“We memorized Confucius’s Analects in high school,” said Li’s mom.
“What did he write?” said Li, who’d read in The Chalice and the Blade in Chinese Culture that Confucius “despised women indiscriminately” and that his writings had “played a role similar to that of the Bible in the Indo-European culture in setting up an irrational, unequal gender relation.” Society’s unfairness, destructiveness, and amnesia could only be changed by amending those same tendencies in oneself and one’s relationships, argued the anthology.
“Can’t remember,” said Li’s dad after a moment.
“He had finicky rules on how to cut meat,” said Li’s mom. “Had to cut it straight—not at angles. Had to cut it into cubes.”
“What was his main message?” said Li.
Li’s parents seemed stumped.
“What was one of his messages?”
Li’s parents still weren’t sure.
“Didn’t he not like women?” said Li.
“Don’t know,” said Li’s dad. “No.”
Li’s mom laughed, looked at Li’s dad, and said Confucius, who was born five centuries before Jesus, had said xiǎo rén (villains) and women were the same.
Despite four millennia of autocratic patriarchy, China hadn’t fallen as deep into domination as the West, though, it seemed to Li. Confucianism hadn’t violently spread across the planet. After Confucius, Daoist texts had revived archaic partnership ideas. Zhuangzi referred longingly to a time when people cared for their mothers, weren’t aware they had fathers, and didn’t think of harming one another. Daodejing, a five-thousand-word, poetry-collection-like book by Laozi, promoted the return to a former egalitarian society; viewed de, nature, as the most faithful expression of Dao; and called Dao, which seemed to be synonymous with change, the underlying creative, maternal source of everything.
A huge, giraffish dog approached Dudu, sniffing and calm. Dudu bared her teeth, stiffened, and leapt at the dog’s face with her mouth open, emitting a cackled bark. The dog twisted away, surprised.
Li’s parents remembered driving for seven hours in 1982 from New York to Virginia with their possessions, a five-year-old Mike, and a cat Li’s dad had brought home from the University of Rochester.
“Du wasn’t born yet,” said Li’s dad. “Li. Li wasn’t born yet.” He said Li’s mom had had three abortions between Mike and Li.
“And now we’ve had three dogs,�
�� said Li’s mom.
“Look,” said Li. “We’re walking as a square.” He moved right, toward Dudu, and everyone shifted a space, counterclockwise, continuing ahead in the same shape.
“Can you stay in Taiwan for six months instead of three?” said Li’s dad.
“No,” said Li, smiling. “I have to do things. I have to write.”
“You can write here,” said Li’s dad.
“I have to have my own life,” said Li.
“Dad is happy when you’re home,” said Li’s mom. “It’s like he has a friend.”
* * *
—
On Round Mountain the next day, Li’s dad got a call from India. He was organizing an eye conference in Beijing. He was in demand, he’d said, because he was becoming “most senior” in his field.
“Look, Du wants to walk to the edge to look,” said Li’s mom.
Dudu patrolled or explored whenever the others idled.
“When I was a baby, when I fell off the sink, did I hit my head?” said Li somewhat unexpectedly. That morning, transcribing his recording of the dinner at Fairy Story Organic Farm, he’d noticed his mom hadn’t answered the first “what” in his question “What hit what?”
“Don’t know,” said Li’s mom, laughing a little. “I was very scared, picked you up.”
“What noise did it make?”
“It’s forgotten. It must not have been your head, because nothing was the matter.”
“Was something the matter with my arm or leg?”
“No. Not at all. Maybe when you fell, I quickly caught you.”
* * *
—
Walking the next day to Ximen Station after seeing the movie Moonlight, Li and his parents passed a beggar whose forehead seemed glued to the ground in a sustained kowtow.
“Nothing is wrong with him,” said Li’s mom. “He could get a job.”
“You don’t know what’s wrong with him,” said Li.
“Looks like nothing’s the matter.”
“If you didn’t have family or friends, you could be him.”
Li’s mom argued against Li again, and Li began to criticize her to his dad, who said little things in agreement.
Li continued muttering about his mom as they boarded a train, then moved away to stand alone, feeling more upset than he’d felt in weeks.
Li’s mom touched Li’s shoulder as they got off the train. She began to say something reconciliatory, but Li callously turned away, and she went home.
Li and his dad walked toward the farmers market. Li’s dad said Li’s mom’s family had had money—her dad had been a Chinese medicine doctor—and that she only cared about her own family.
“Caring for family is good,” said Li.
Li’s dad said Li’s mom had donated money annually to a Buddhist group until their leader disappeared with everyone’s money. “We shouldn’t give money to Buddhists,” he said, eyeing Li.
“I don’t care about that at all,” said Li.
Li’s dad sort of snorted a little, smiling.
“I just felt not good that she criticized the beggar,” said Li.
“You’re right that it’s not easy to beg,” said Li’s dad.
At home, Li said he was going to set up the printer they’d bought the previous day, and do work, and not go on a walk.
In his room, he felt terrible. He heard his mom tell his dad to walk Dudu alone. As he set up the printer, the cannabis he’d ingested during the movie began to work.
He went into the kitchen, loitered there, and, without saying he’d changed his mind about the walk, left the apartment with his parents and Dudu.
In the elevator, Li and his mom apologized to each other at the same time. They patted each other’s backs.
Outside, Li was friendly and garrulous. He said he was currently extra-defensive of beggars because he’d written in his nonfiction book about listening in high school to punk bands that extolled panhandling as monkish and ideal.
After the walk, Li washed Dudu’s feet—a Dad task he’d taken on to reduce parental tension—then read an email his mom had sent before the walk: “I have been feeling good that we have been able to communicate and reach an understanding when we have different points of view. But it hurt me so much when I tried to talk to you outside the station. You turned away with abhorrence on your face. Please, can we go back to how we have been?”
Li read an email she’d sent two minutes earlier: “I feel so happy now.”
* * *
—
The flow state resumed. Li began to spend an hour in bed each night before sleep mentally reviewing his day’s edits. Li’s dad’s weight and Li’s mom’s blood sugar reached new lows. Li proofread one of his dad’s papers that kept getting returned due to deficient English. Li’s mom made a dish called Lion Head—small pork burgers over stewed cabbage—and said a phrase that meant, she taught Li, “success.” Li read that in oracle bone script—the oldest known Chinese writing—a character that resembled the pig-dragon meant “to recover.”
In an email, he asked his mom about the word xuán (玄), and she said it meant “too mysterious to explain.” Ellen Marie Chen translated xuán in In Praise of Nothing: An Exploration of Daoist Fundamental Ontology as “inscrutable” or “dark.” Dao, according to the Daodejing, was xuán. It was “dark, dark and darker again, the way to mystery”—which seemed to Li like an earlier, positive form of Lorrie Moore’s “she was gone, gone out the window, gone, gone.”
Reading in Chen’s book that Daoism was “a repository of all Chinese religious beliefs and practices from the earliest animistic, shamanistic origins down,” and gleaning from various sources that Laozi didn’t invent Daoism but found it in ancient texts while working as a government librarian in the Zhou Dynasty, Li realized Daoist ideas may have appeared in Old Europe on pottery, pendants, walls, and possibly cloth or felt books five millennia before emerging in China on bamboo strips threaded together like miniature picket fences.
Maybe, thought Li in bed, history would end when Earth was coated in enough time-collapsing minds, holding sufficiently detailed eons in emotioned awareness, to invoke a wheel-like property, making the planet roll out of its ontology. Emergent properties were unpredictable and weird, he knew. Everything, he’d realized, was an emergent property, had once been a strange surprise. When he was in two places at once, as brainless gametes, his future had been beyond impossible to anticipate.
One day, Li’s dad answered a call and talked in a detached voice. “Hang up,” said Li, loud enough for the caller—a solicitor, it seemed—to hear. “Just hang up.” Li’s dad had a growing tea hoard and various unused appliances, like a noodle maker, due to his susceptibility to sellers. After Li’s dad hung up, Li learned the caller was his dad’s older sister, laughed for a while, and apologized.
One night, Li’s mom entered Li’s room and said her college friend who lived in Chicago had bought a house in Hawaii, in Honolulu, and was moving there with her husband. Li said Hawaii had no nuclear power plants and that Terence McKenna and Kathleen Harrison had moved there in the seventies and started an ethnobotanical forest-garden and that maybe he’d move there.
* * *
—
In mid-March, Li and his parents went to central Taiwan for sǎo mù. At dinner with thirteen relatives, everyone held up tea or water for a toast. “Du,” said Li’s dad, clinking Li’s cup. “Yes, Du is you. Du is the one we love most. When you’re home, you’re Du.”
At a Buddhist temple the next day, Li photographed photos of his dad’s parents on urns containing their ashes. Afterward, walking by Sun Moon Lake, which was shaped like a conjoined sun and waning crescent moon, Li’s dad told Li to stand by two boys looking at the lake and say, “Clear water, no fish.” Li laughed and said, “No. Not today.”
The next morning, th
ey visited Li’s mom’s parents’ mountainside grave. Li and around ten of his relatives swept leaves, branches, and vines off the oval, concrete tomb. Fat Uncle, the last living kin who remembered what to do, directed the loose, easy rituals—putting down fruit and paper, verbally thanking their ancestors.
Sweating, Li realized it must’ve gotten grueling for the eldest sibling to attend. He reconceived Fat Uncle’s complaint of her absence as encouragement.
* * *
—
Back in Taipei, Li’s mom said she feared Li and Mike would discard everything in her office after she and their dad died. Li briefly tried to say it wouldn’t matter—after death, which Chen called “change’s most drastic form,” they might be where lives were as explorable and secondary as novels—then asked what was in there.
Under Li’s dad’s cardboard-box hoard were birth certificates and other documents; family photo books; Mike and Li’s art, awards, and school yearbooks; Li’s childhood collections (pogs, coins, Magic and sports cards); and other things from their three decades in the States.
On Round Mountain, Li confused a parent with Dudu for the first time, saying, “Du forgot phone today,” about his dad. On the way down, he asked his dad about his inventions, and his dad said that besides LASIK, in which the stroma was ablated with lasers, he’d also invented a way to correct presbyopia by lasering eight lines outside the limbus.
Li’s parents fell into political bickering one night. Standing by one of his machines, Li’s dad touched it repetitively, seeming frustrated to have gotten upset. It seemed to Li that his dad had entered the kitchen and said something political, but Li’s dad said Li’s mom had entered the TV room and told him to stop talking to the TV. “What you two did was not good,” said Li. “I’m going to work on my book.”
But they recovered quickly—by that night instead of after one or more days, as in previous years—and Li viewed the conflict as an expectable resonance of decades of habit, a piece of experiential evidence of improvement.
