Cocoon, page 9
Completely isolated, I played alone and walked home alone. When we went on our spring outing, everyone else joined in the games while I sat gnawing a bun. In our class photo, I stood right at the end of the back row, my neighbor twisting away from me. I hated school. Whenever we had group activities, I pretended to have a tummy ache and got Auntie to write me a sick note. She soon guessed what was going on, and told me a story about someone she’d known when she was a little girl, who’d also been a pariah because of her family background. That was the first time I heard Wang Luhan’s name. No one wanted to be Luhan’s friend, Auntie said, because her dad was a murderer. She told me to find a way to become part of the group, otherwise my self-esteem would get so damaged, I’d never recover. I told her I would, but did nothing.
What finally turned things around was an essay I wrote in class. The topic was “My Family,” and the teacher said mine was so good, she read it out in class.
“My grandfather is a zombie.” All my classmates looked up. My essay described Granddad as a martyr who’d tried to keep his comrades safe on the frontlines of the Korean War, and ended up in a vegetative state after an enemy strike—luckily the other soldiers managed to bring him safely home rather than abandoning him on the battlefield.
There was silence when she finished reading. After class, two girls came up to me and said I wrote really well. Then during study hall, the boy sitting next to me nudged me and asked what kind of rifle the enemy had shot Granddad with.
“One of those long ones.” I mimed it. “They pulled so much shrapnel from his brain. Granny keeps it in a little wooden box. I’m not allowed to touch it, or I’d show you.”
Over the next few days, my schoolmates kept asking me questions about Granddad. I hated repeating myself, so I made up a new story each time about how he’d ended up in his current state—he was shot, it was a bayonet attack, the enemy ran him over with a truck, he was flung from a high wall. I was moved by each of these fantastical tales, and came to believe they were all true.
One drizzly evening, I brought seven or eight classmates to see him. Only family members were allowed to visit, but we managed to sneak in while the nurses and security guards were on their dinner break. In order to create more atmosphere, I’d bought a Party flag and draped it across his torso beforehand. Everyone gathered round the bed, staring at him with such respect, he might have been a Party leader. Granddad accepted their attention with equanimity while his own gaze remained fixed to the ceiling, where a gecko slowly crawled across his field of vision.
Granddad’s heroism was enough for my classmates to overlook Dad and Granny’s misdeeds. Now they asked me to play with them after school, and happily passed me the ball during gym class.
The good times only lasted a short while. One morning, a girl pounced on me as soon as I walked into class. “My granddad says your granddad never fought in the Korean War. He’s unconscious because he got beaten up during the Cultural Revolution.”
“Nonsense!”
“My granddad said he must have done something really bad to get tortured like that …”
“Stop it!” I clapped my hands over my ears and ran out.
After school, two boys blocked my way, rolling their eyes up so the whites showed and letting their tongues loll out of their mouths. “My grandfather is a zombie,” they chanted, mimicking my voice. “He’s a martyr of the Korean War, he bravely fought the enemy …” They bent over laughing.
From then on, Granddad was a punchline. When I had to see Auntie at the hospital, I avoided the wards, and I swore never to set foot in Room 317 again. I blamed Granddad for not being a war hero. I didn’t ask Auntie what happened during the Cultural Revolution. What was the point? All that mattered was he wasn’t a hero. It must be because he was useless and weak, I thought, that they’d done this to him.
Li Jiaqi
Earlier on, you said everyone has a moment when their fate is activated, and after that they’re being led around by a rope. For me, that probably happened when I turned eight. Dad left Jinan in the fall and traveled alone to Beijing. From then on, I had no home.
Dad didn’t actually know anything about business—he was just throwing his lot in with a cousin he didn’t even know that well. Grandma’s little sister had moved to Beijing early on, got married and had kids there. This cousin of Dad’s was her eldest son, and he didn’t fit into our clan at all. He hadn’t done well at school and refused to get a proper job. Instead, he hung out with his loser friends, and speculated in various goods. To Grandpa, speculation and swindling were basically the same word, so it must have been a shock when Dad said he was going into the same line. This was an unforgiveable breach.
I hated the things people called Dad: speculator, profiteer, and so on. I always mentally corrected them: he was a businessman. Back in 1990, this sounded like a fancy word you might see in a book. I’d certainly never met a businessman—the hawkers who sold puffed corn sticks and cartoon stickers outside the school gates probably didn’t count. In fairy tales, though, the main character was often the daughter of a merchant, living a life as luxurious as any princess. She might get into trouble because of her beauty and innocence, until a handsome, brave man showed up to save the day. Unassailable good fortune, as if her father had paid a bribe to God. So, I would be a merchant’s daughter—surely that meant I would have a good life.
After leaving for Beijing, Dad called once a week on Sunday evenings. Mom and I would wait by the public phone at a nearby convenience store. He was supposed to call at six, but was often late. Standing awkwardly there, we bought snacks out of embarrassment: fruit leather or haw flakes. By the end of winter, even these phone calls had stopped, because Dad was now traveling to Moscow for business, and the train took an entire week to get there. We only heard from him when he got back to China. Mom joined him in Beijing that spring because he needed help, and I was packed off to Grandpa’s house. That was Grandma’s idea—she thought it might repair Dad and Grandpa’s relationship. Besides, Peixuan was living with them too, and could serve as a role model for me. Dad didn’t want to owe them anything, but he had no choice—each trip to Moscow took half a month, and there was no way he could have brought me along. He only agreed on the condition that he would send Grandma money each month for my living expenses.
I didn’t want to live with Grandpa. I’d much rather have gone to Beijing, even if that meant being stuck in a boarding school and only seeing my parents twice a month, but no one asked for my opinion, and I don’t remember protesting either. I wasn’t sure I had the right. If I’d complained, Mom would probably have said this was all for the sake of my future. A strange idea—I only wanted a better present. My childhood was the only part of my life they controlled completely; if they couldn’t make me happy now, how could they make promises about the future?
We completed the transfer paperwork, and Mom took me and my suitcase to Grandpa’s house. This was only for a short while, she promised. When they were settled in Beijing, she’d come and get me.
You’re right that I made no effort to fit in. This was only supposed to be temporary, so I had no expectations or desires for my situation. Playing with you guys was just a way of annoying my grandparents and Peixuan. Sometimes I’d be having fun, then I’d look at your faces and wonder how we’d become friends. I was always screaming for no reason. Maybe I wanted to hide in the noise and cut myself off from you. I was completely out of control for those two years, running wild. Looking back, it might have been the happiest time of my life, though I can’t remember how that actually felt. Memory is selective, and my memory would rather cling to suffering.
Everyone said Dad was making plenty of money. All I knew was he regularly went to Moscow and came back with new stock.
“He’s lost his way,” Grandpa said at dinner.
“He’ll turn back when he runs into an obstacle,” said Grandma.
“Hasn’t he already met plenty of obstacles? It hasn’t done any good.”
As far as I can remember, I saw Dad once during this time. His business expanded and needed more capital, so he decided to sell our house. He came back alone, took care of the paperwork, and stored our stuff in a friend’s warehouse: family photo albums, journals that had published Dad’s poems, my old diaries, dolls. The warehouse caught fire a couple of winters later, and all our possessions were burned, leaving no material evidence of the years I’d lived with Dad.
On that visit, Dad showed up with a video player he’d gotten someone to bring back from abroad, a thank you to my grandparents for taking care of me. This was his first gift to them in years, but he plonked it on the table and said, frostily, This is for you. Grandpa left the room without even looking at it. Grandma asked Dad to stay for dinner, but he said he was meeting friends, which I knew was a lie. During the meal, I imagined Dad sitting in some little restaurant eating a bowl of noodles alone.
That night, Peixuan and I tested out the player with a video tape Dad had brought too, a film about a man who lost his teeth and sprouted fur all over his body as he slowly turned into a fly. Each day, he stood before the mirror silently examining his transformation, a strange exultation on his face at being cut off from the rest of the world. I was reminded of Dad.
Mom visited regularly, always with something special from the friendship store: chocolate, Swiss fruit candies, Ma Ling luncheon meat. She’d lost weight, gotten a perm, and wore knee-high low-heeled boots. Even her accent had changed—she now added er to ends of words, like Beijingers do. I pestered her for travel stories, and she told me the train was very dangerous, full of bad people. She didn’t enjoy those journeys. Moscow, she said, was nothing but cold, cold, cold. I overheard her complaining to my aunt that Dad stayed out all day drinking, until he was so wasted he couldn’t find his way home, so would sit on some steps and wait for her to find him. He was always going to gambling dens, sometimes losing every ruble he’d just earned. Aunt sighed and said money can alter a person’s character.
I didn’t believe what they were saying—Dad couldn’t have changed like that. At the time, nothing would have made me happier than riding a train with Dad. Of all the people who’d never been on the K3 service, I must have known the most about it. It set off every Wednesday morning from Beijing, and arrived in Moscow the following Tuesday. I could have recited the name of every stop along the way, and knew the train skirted Mohe City around sunset on Thursday. On Saturday you could see Lake Baikal from the window, and on Sunday you passed the Yenisei River. The route was as clear to me as the lines on my palm. I spread out my map, knelt before it, and traced it with my marker, filling the skinny crescent of Lake Baikal with blue, imagining its surface thick with ice, glistening with snow on freezing nights.
All my fantasies about faraway places ran along these tracks. I imagined Dad in a woolen coat and leather boots, standing on the windswept platform with his briefcase. A grizzled pickpocket slouched in a corner of the dining car smoking, hat pulled low over his eyes. A green-eyed prostitute in vertiginous heels tap-tapping her way along the scarlet carpet. Dad shrugging off his coat and pouring himself a glass of vodka in a Moscow hotel room. Dad pushing a towering stack of chips across the table at the famous Crown casino, while a lady with blonde wavy hair expertly dealt the cards.
Thieves, hookers, drunkards, and gamblers—the ingredients for my imaginings all came from Mom. She must have regretted mentioning the prostitutes as soon as the words were out of her mouth. In any case, everything she said made me imagine a life full of peril. A wayward life, according to Grandpa. Yet danger and waywardness seemed foreign and exciting to me. They stirred my childish heart, like the scent of poppies.
I never got the chance to take the K3 or to see Moscow, but these images stubbornly persisted into adulthood. You might find it hard to understand, but my eyes grow moist when I hear the word Siberia. It makes me think of an ending. Dad didn’t die there, but when I think of his actual death, everything goes white and there’s a humming in my ears, like a train speeding along the tracks.
The K3 train between Beijing and Moscow ferried the last few years of Dad’s life. In Russia, that frozen country, the train is a metaphor for destiny. Anna Karenina’s soul wanders the platforms. The first time I read that novel, I thought I might run into her if I ever got to follow Dad to Russia. Sadly that never happened, and I don’t know that I’d have recognized her anyway. If I’d had the chance, though, I’d have asked her what it meant to be a soul.
Dad’s final trip to Russia was in November 1993. The country’s vast body had come crashing down, and the fallen flag had been tucked away where no one could see it. The hammer and sickle had grown rusty. A month later, the double-headed eagle, dating back to the Byzantine Empire, was back on the national crest. In that last month, everyone lay in the rubble of the old order, losing themselves in cheap vodka, bidding farewell to the Bolsheviks. As life ebbed away, Dad arrived, wanting to share in their pain and confusion, because just like them, he believed in nothing.
That’s just how I imagined it, of course. Ridiculous, right? When I told this to Tang Hui, he said, That’s very moving, but also laughable.
“I have a question,” he said. “You’re always linking your father’s life to great historical events, as if that’s the only way to give meaning to his existence. When you can’t find a connection in China, you reach for world history. Why not untie him from the past? Give him a bit of freedom?”
After all, he reminded me, Dad wasn’t in Moscow to share their pain and confusion, but their money. He was fervently speculating away, swindling rubles by the handful from the pockets of the Russian people. I objecting to the word swindling, but he insisted, “That’s exactly what he was doing—selling them shoddy merchandise.”
Tang Hui’s a Beijinger. One of his relatives ran a wholesale business on Yabao Road in the nineties, selling goods to people like Dad who’d transport them to Moscow. “The down jackets we sold the Russians were stuffed with rotting chicken feathers, often from infected birds. Not one scrap of duck down. As for the leather jackets, they were cardboard with a layer of shiny paint. Just imagine, the suffering, confused Russians you described shivering in the snow, thinking they’re cold because the collapse of their country has weakened them, not because they’re wearing knockoff coats. Then they finally get into a warm room, the snow melts into their jackets, the ‘leather’ cracks apart and disintegrates before their eyes. You said they don’t believe in anything. Why would they? After watching a leather jacket turn to scrap paper under their nose?”
“Not all businessmen were like that,” I said without much conviction.
“Why do you think so many Chinese people got attacked in Moscow afterwards? The Russians hated those deceitful Chinese traders, that’s why. Okay, maybe your father had a different way of thinking, but he was doing the same as everyone else—taking advantage of the disaster to line his pockets.”
I hadn’t been dating Tang Hui long when we had this conversation in a coffee shop near the school. I looked up, biting my straw. This was my first inkling we might not be compatible—he had a sense of righteousness I would never possess. Already he understood I’d built Dad up into an impossibly great idol whose looming presence threatened our relationship, which is why he wanted to topple it. In fact, he thought he’d already done this and that it was just a matter of time. Tang Hui was an optimist, and that was probably the most fundamental difference between us.
Mom never talks about doing business in Russia—she doesn’t even seem to remember she once lived in Beijing for a year. In the last few years, I’ve met a lot of people who were also in Moscow around that time, such as Auntie Ling, who knew Dad well. Like many others, Auntie Ling and her husband made a ton of cash, though he later left her for a younger woman. I took the metro to the last stop to meet her—she grumbled that the city was expanding too fast, and had gotten too full of outsiders. She missed the Beijing of the nineties with its dance halls, bars, friendship stores, and foreign currency coupons. Sitting in her chilly living room in a quiet suburb, she reminded me of a white-haired courtesan sitting by the palace walls reminiscing about her heyday.
“The train was a moving bazaar. As soon as we crossed the border into Russia, we’d haul out our bundles of coats at each station. The platforms were packed, and the crowd swarmed towards us before the train had even stopped moving. Each stop was less than ten minutes—not enough time to disembark, so we traded through the windows. A few words of Russian, hand gestures, move fast, grab the money and toss it into the sack, no time to count, fling the garment out. If you were unlucky, someone snatched a coat and ran off with it—there was no way you could go after them. Once, your father had a whole bag stolen. He ran after the thief, didn’t catch him, then had to run back to the train as it started—he barely made it back on board.”
Memory brightened Auntie Ling’s murky eyes. In an instant, she was back on the K3, stopping at a small station, every moment a battle. I looked away from her face, out the window. In order to stop myself interrupting, I’d been chain smoking, staring at my cigarette ash as it crumbled off. Her narration was too realistic, and it hurt my dignity. I couldn’t imagine Dad leaning out a window, brandishing a down jacket and calling his wares, chasing down a thief and having to grab the railing to clamber back on a moving train. Even if I accepted what he was doing, I didn’t need to think about what it was actually like to sell each garment.
He was a solitary man, said Auntie Ling. The other traders hung out during the weeklong journey to Moscow, but Dad didn’t join their nightly boozy games of cards. He had no patience for their vulgar jokes. He enjoyed drinking, but preferred doing it alone in his compartment. The others complained he thought he was too good for them because he’d been to university. It annoyed them that he was doing well, so they ganged up and got the suppliers to give him the worst merchandise. Between that and his growing alcoholism, his business went downhill.
