A Thread of Sky, page 20
Don’t say any word on bridge
In order to avoid jam
The jam-causing sight just across was a leaning pagoda, dignified in its decrepitude—the culmination of all this gray, crooked, cracked beauty. People were lining up to pose in front of the pagoda, giggling as they imitated its posture. “It’s leaning today, it may topple tomorrow,” another tour guide said. If she were the pagoda, she might topple onto these gawking tourists.
Past the pagoda was a garish temple that their local guide indicated was the official highlight of Tiger Hill. Unimpressed, Sophie watched bony, shabby workers padding up and down a long stone staircase, hauling pots of flowers hung from poles balanced across their bare shoulders. At the bottom, more workers squatted to arrange the flowers—red, yellow, purple—all over the gray rock and brick. The workers were short and brown; she wondered whether that was part of the cause or the result of their backbreaking labor, which was for nothing, worse than nothing. She supposed this was another kind of Chinese aesthetic, bunching lots of colorful things together, the more colors the better, the more things the better. They might as well tape balloons and streamers to the leaning pagoda.
“Feel better from yesterday?”
Sophie jumped. It was her grandmother. “Much better, thanks.”
“Maybe your stomach is too American for food here.”
Sophie nodded. “What’s the guide saying?”
“Some old story.” Grandma listened and translated bit by bit. “Tang Mu had eight wives, but was still unhappy, so he prayed to Guanyin.” She pointed inside the temple at a fluid sculpture of an almost-smiling woman. “He knelt on each step and koutou.” She knocked her forehead and pointed to the stairs. “Altogether, fifty-three times, praying to find his true match. Then, dizzy, he sees this beautiful woman, also praying—for a husband, I guess—and loses his balance. She laughs, without showing teeth. She leaves without raising dust. She walks down steps with no sound.” Grandma gave a dismissive wave.
“Then what? She became his ninth wife?”
Tommy was already calling for the group to head down the hill.
Grandma gave a slight, wry smile. “Perhaps.”
At a leisurely pace, they descended the hill together. Sophie stole intermittent glances at her grandmother’s stolid face. Her grandmother didn’t need anyone’s strategizing, any more than she herself did.
And Brandon was right. There was no crime here, no serious trauma, no sweeping injustice. His problems were so much more real and raw; cinematic, soaked in color, like zooming in on a galloping horse’s haunches. This stuff with her grandparents was like a dried bouquet—brittle, dusty, and faded.
Sophie started to say, Grandma, Grandpa wants to see you, and if you want to see him, great, if you don’t—But she faltered. “Grandma—I could visit you, from Stanford.”
“That would be nice. But don’t worry about me. I have my little garden. I have Lou.”
Sophie wondered how Uncle Lou and a garden could fill up a week, let alone a life. No plans, no goals? At eighty, she supposed, passing time was the goal.
Grandma added, “I know you’ll be busy. I was busy at your age, too.”
“You went to college? I mean—did girls go to college back then?”
“Some did. I was meant to. But then the Japanese invaded—the country, the city, my village. They killed many people. They set my family’s house on fire. I escaped, again and again.”
Sophie stared. Grandma’s face was utterly calm. An invasion—people said her neighborhood had undergone the Asian Invasion. She tried to picture brutal foreign troops swarming the streets, but her brain could only conjure aliens and zombies. She tried to picture the house in Queens on fire. She and Mom fleeing. Unable to reach her sisters. Flames licking the urn. Her art portfolio, her Stanford acceptance letter, her transcripts and to-do lists—all ashes.
“So what did you do?” she asked.
“Instead of a university student, I became a revolutionary. I published a journal—I wrote, edited, distributed. I led protests. I made speeches. Kang Ri, jiu guo—Resist Japan, save our nation. That was the urgent call, but impossible without nan nü ping deng—equality for men and women.”
Sophie wondered how to explain this to Brandon. My grandma wasn’t a concubine type or a Chinatown type. She was a revolutionary.
“Did you succeed?”
“Well, eventually the Japanese surrendered.”
“Oh, after Pearl Harbor? After America bombed Hiroshima?”
“Yes, but we Nationalists had fought for eight long years by then.”
“The Nationalists—the elites?” She’d heard that somewhere.
“The Nationalists founded the nation. They were the ruling party. In my province, anyone in politics would be Nationalist. It meant what the word means. A united nation, men and women, rich and poor.”
“But you were a revolutionary—against your own party?”
“I was a revolutionary for the principles of our republic, which had never been realized. Minzu—nationalism, sovereignty, the right to self-determination, to freedom from foreign domination. Minquan—democracy, power for the people, civil rights for the entire citizenry. Minsheng—people’s livelihood, the right to the basic needs of food, clothing, shelter, transport.”
“Why would anyone oppose those principles?”
“The republic was founded eight years before my birth. Never in my lifetime was it not under siege. Before the Japanese invasion, the Nationalists fought the warlords and the Communists. After the invasion, there was a brief truce, a united front, between the two parties. The Nationalists fought the Japanese, while the Communists mobilized the peasantry. So the Nationalists grew weak while the Communists grew strong. As soon as the world war ended, civil war erupted. The Communists won, and people like me had to flee.”
If civil war divided America now, what would the two sides be? Would Sophie end up on the same side as her mother, as her sisters? The same side as Brandon?
She asked, “Do Nora and Kay know all this?”
“Some. But I don’t know how much they understand.” Grandma patted her shoulder and pointed to a bench. “Time for me to rest.”
They’d reached the base of Tiger Hill, a clutter of souvenir stands that looked like a small-scale Chinatown: gaudy purses and fans, cushion covers and table runners, tea sets and chopsticks, dangling good-luck doodads. Sophie paused by a food stall where locals were sucking up noodles, popping whole dumplings. Food was a basic need. People ate when they were hungry, and then they stopped. It should be that easy.
A hand on her arm—Kay, grinning. “Come. Don’t tell Mom.” She tugged Sophie into an alley lined with food carts.
“I’m not hungry.”
“Try this.”
Kay kept a firm hold on her as they watched an old man spoon batter onto a grill. He spread it in a perfect circle, thin as paint, then cracked an egg on top. When it was mottled yellow and white, he brushed on sauce, sprinkled chopped scallions and cilantro, laid a kind of fried wafer on top, and folded it all up. Kay held it, sizzling and oozing, to Sophie’s lips.
Sophie shook her head, too vehemently. Before Kay could react, she took a bite. She couldn’t taste it for the roiling inside. She couldn’t remember how to judge food by pleasure, not safety.
“Yummy, huh?” Kay said. “Eat it. I want one for myself.”
And the thing was in Sophie’s hands, weighty and hot as a bomb. The only way to make it disappear was to eat it.
Munching away, Kay led her to another cart. Plump pyramids of stuffed sticky rice, wrapped in leaves and tied with string. One for her, one for Kay. Sophie tried to eat like Kay, like a person unfettered, for hunger and for fun. She forced herself to taste the rice, dark and fragrant with soy sauce, the sweet mealy morsels of chestnut, the chunks of pork squishing and melting on her tongue. She could do it. She could do it when she tried.
“Girls? Where are you?” It was Mom.
“Uh-oh.” Kay’s eyes twinkled. “Stuff it. Quick!”
Panicked, Sophie swallowed until she held nothing but oily leaves and string. She flung them on a heap of litter on the ground and swiped the back of her hand across her mouth, her chin.
Kay laughed. “You look so scared.”
Mom was holding up a dress, severely cut silk with no stretch, a tiny collar and sleeves, a long slit. “Want a qipao?”
Kay grimaced. “In college, the white girls wore those as party costumes.”
“Well, qipao were designed for Chinese women’s figures.”
Sophie tried to stay calm. Her worries were trivial, products of peace and prosperity. All day, she’d focused on important issues—the aesthetics of Chinese gardens, the local laborers, her grandmother the revolutionary, civil war. But everyone, everything conspired against her.
Tommy was starting to herd the group to the bus. The lard was coating her throat, the carbs expanding in her stomach. By the time she reached a bathroom, all the fat would be in her bloodstream, impossible to expel.
14
On the bus from Suzhou to Shanghai, Lin Yulan tried to rest, but through the cushioned seat, she could feel each bump of the road in her bones.
Ever since the interminable flight to Hong Kong, her tendons had knotted and cramped, the soreness extending even to her fingertips and gums. Every day meant hours of walking, the bus jolting, more walking, more jolting. Every meal hard to digest, a chore to chew. Every night, a strange bed, a strange bathroom.
This vacation, as Lou had called it, was the first time she’d left America since she had emigrated. The first time she’d set foot in China since she had fled. The first time she’d traveled with her daughters and granddaughters. Each first the last. At eighty, one could be certain.
And it was her chance to soak in her granddaughters’ careless vitality, to see her daughters with silver in their hair, to feel how life branched and branched.
Traversing the new China, all three granddaughters had become inquisitive about her past. But all of Nora’s and Kay’s questions were, to her, unanswerable. Only with Sophie did she have, in scattered moments, the feeling of hanging out that she had with Lou.
Yet she still could not refute the hard truth she’d voiced more than seventeen years ago. In fact, it was clearer than ever now. Irene had let her fire die, and with every breath, she exuded regret. Of course, Lin Yulan’s fire was long extinguished, too, but she’d had no choice.
Twenty years ago in Taiwan, she’d turned sixty and was pushed out of her hard-won position as a local magistrate. She attended a mandatory party for her mandatory retirement, where her superiors spoke platitudes and raised glasses, more to her husband than to her. Her attention strayed around the banquet hall to the brass phoenix-and-dragon with blinking lights for eyes, to the carrot swans and turnip roses adorning the plates, reissued with each course. An ordinary retirement party, for an ordinary old woman.
Bolted inside a bathroom stall, she overheard two poised young women from her department gossiping: How could she abide that lecherous husband? Who couldn’t keep his hands off the interns and new hires? Especially when—they’d heard somewhere—she’d been a prominent feminist in her day. Well, that was then. She was old. No point in leaving now, was there? All at once, Lin Yulan understood that her life was over if she did not leave.
With a vigor she had not felt in years, she marched out of the bathroom, startling the young women, and left the party to call her children—all three citizens of America already. Lou on the West Coast, Irene on the East, Susan somewhere in between. Lou breezy, Susan vague, and Irene struggling, with two daughters of her own.
So Lin Yulan packed up and flew to New York to make one more attempt at leaving a legacy. She would raise her granddaughters to be the kind of woman she once was, the kind of woman she’d raised her own daughters to be. And, in so doing, she’d free Irene from the duties of motherhood to make a revolutionary discovery. Like the invention of the birth control pill, by a China-Taiwan-America transplant like themselves. Or the fact that male biology was to blame when no sons were born—so many wives abandoned for no reason, including Lin Yulan’s own mother, who’d urged her father to find another wife, and was then left to die alone in her ancestral village.
Lin Yulan became Grandma, cooking and cleaning, doling out comforting pats and tinned sweets, learning to satisfy her granddaughters’ trifling, burning wants. On occasion, she prepared speeches in her head, but they sounded mythic or mundane. They made no sense out of context. And she didn’t have the vocabulary in English, while little Nora and Kay couldn’t grasp the complexity in Chinese. Besides, on American TV, grandparents were laughable creatures, toothless and deluded. She’d kept quiet, thinking there would be plenty of time.
Irene seemed to have acquired a peculiar notion in America: that motherhood, something females in every society, females of every species, had carried out for all of history, was a grand achievement, worthy as a career, a noble choice. Still, during Lin Yulan’s tenure as Grandma, her daughter gradually refocused, that flame inside her rekindled, and soon there was success, a big step toward curing some malady of the brain, a memory sickness. Irene’s eyes gleamed bright with hope that she would indeed make her mark on the world through science. But then she got pregnant again. An accident—she said so. Then why let it stand in her way?
Even from her willful daughter, the tantrum that followed was confounding. So much shouting about choices. It was her choice, didn’t she have the choice, wasn’t that the point of the movement, now women have the choice. She seemed to mean not having to make any choices. Not this or that, but this and that, this then that. She was a fool.
Lin Yulan tried to remind her of what she had to already know. If she wanted to talk about choices, motherhood was not a choice; it was the given. The choice for a woman was to push and strain forward, or to be part of the backward pull. Life must be lived for the long view, to set an example for generations, rather than to seek temporary ease. And those positioned to make a difference had a duty to do so, to assert their power outside the home, to make public contributions, the kind that might go down in history, if history were ever fairly written. In her own era, the War of Resistance had opened the gates, and she’d stormed through. She’d understood that only by merging the causes of nationalism and feminism could either be won.
Equality was to be gained not by pointing out grievous injustices, not by courting well-deserved pity. Hers was not a society that could afford to be moved in such ways. Equality had to be earned. Women had to prove their worthiness of full citizenship by fully shouldering the responsibilities of citizenship. And if, as an individual female, you had to work harder than your male counterpart, personally sacrifice more, for less recognition, that was to be expected. That was how you knew you might leave a legacy.
And Irene was so fortunate, married to a good, honest man, living in this new, free country, not needing to wait until it was brought to its knees before it recognized half its citizenry. Not to mention all these methods of control, all these choices—if not to unfetter herself, then what for?
Irene’s sputtering was as self-righteous as it was senseless: How dare you suggest my daughters are worthless? How is that progress? You can keep your long view. You have no right to judge. I’ll do whatever I want. I never wanted to be like you.
Lin Yulan had never imagined that in one generation, the concept of women’s rights could become so absurd. No one had the right to do whatever they wanted. No one should. Progress didn’t mean having it all. Everything in life was a trade-off. Nothing was spared from this, not children, not anything.
Lin Yulan harbored no illusions. She had no patience for those who did. So, after helping to raise two granddaughters for three years, she packed up and moved to California, where Lou lived.
He never had a fire, only two considerable talents. One was charm, the other a capacity for contentment—at least outwardly, at least to her. He’d once dreamed of being a movie star, unaware how little value his face would hold in America, but his adjustment was quick. If there were deep disappointments there, unlike with her daughters, she could not see them. It was always enough for her to watch him eat, to hear him laugh—to hang out with him, her son.
Night had fallen thick by the time the bus hauled them to their hotel. Once again, when room keys were handed out, there was some strategizing, which she was never privy to, and she and Nora were paired together again.
She was washing up for bed when there seemed to be a kind of uprising: the girls gathering in the corridor, wanting a taste of Shanghai’s notorious nightlife. Lin Yulan inquired about their safety. They found this amusing.
She remembered the third necklace for Kay, still in her purse, and made them wait while she retrieved it.
On the drive to LAX, it had occurred to her that a grandma should bring presents, and she made Lou pull off the highway and find a gift shop. Lou said the girls would prefer cash, but what did he know of granddaughters? When she spotted those necklaces, she thought they were just the thing. Shiny, colorful, fanciful—but plastic, very durable; the kind of bauble she’d never had herself, never granted her daughters.
The necklaces had elicited feeble thanks from the girls and a grimace from Irene. A bit flustered, Lin Yulan had found candy in her purse and pushed it into Nora’s hand.
Now Kay’s excessive enthusiasm confirmed something was wrong with the necklaces—the colors, the size, she didn’t know. Of course, since birth her granddaughters had been glutted with shiny, colorful, fanciful things—barrettes, birthday cakes, wrapping paper and ribbons, so many photos they seemed to be growing up inside a memorial to themselves.
Lin Yulan bade them good night and tried to settle her body into yet another strange bed.
15
The way to “do” Shanghai, Kay had heard, was to live it up. Shop-ping and feasting, drinking and debauchery—here, that was sightseeing. She’d thought an expedition to the city’s famous bar strip might provide some much-needed levity for her and her sisters, but she hadn’t pictured this. Bar after bar, bar above bar, bar under bar, bars as far as they could see—and, from curb to curb, a sea of revelers, a wild clamor over blaring electronic pop, and the smells of sweat, booze, perfume, piss, smoke.
