Cassiopeium

She got up early, when the Prussian blue of daybreak had yet to wane. She shuffled around barefoot, waking him. He opened his eyes, his mind strangely clear. Yet as he looked around the room, the sight of their studio apartment startled him completely, as though he’d forgotten where he was. For maybe twenty seconds, or maybe much longer, as it seemed, he rewired his mind around the humming noise of the booming metropolis that permeated the window pane. The noise had been subtle but unsettling and incessant, like the electro music his college dorm room neighbor used to play all night long. He’d noticed it the moment he stepped off the airplane. As he walked under the endless jungle of cranes and steel beams, around the asphalt conglomeration choked in serpentine smog, he’d tried to reminisce, like right now, whether there’d been such noise in his childhood memories. He found no answer, as that part of his past had been sitting inside him like a foreign country where he’d been denied any access.

The room darkened as she went up to the window. Her naked shoulder tensed as her arm reached to pull the blind, the curl of her silhouette twisting like that of a rose petal. He thought of the Dance of Flying Apsara she’d been performing on stage—her body rose to the sky, the silk ribbons entwining her torso flicking, and the sapphire between her brows glistening.

He was going to see about his new job at a law firm later today. Mother’s old colleague was a partner there, and had agreed to do her a favor by hiring him as an interpreter. The thought made his head hurt. Yes, it was probably much better than tutoring English conversational classes at that third-tier high school, where the agony on the students’ faces depressed him. He’d felt as though he wasn’t teaching but was doing them a disservice, like partaking in a state-sponsored torture.

But he didn’t come back to be a nine-to-five cubicle creature. He’d returned from America to pursue his “artistic aspirations.” He was also concerned with losing connection to his own culture after years abroad, a feeling like he’d been transfixed by a giant, invisible syringe, and sucked dry of his substance, day by day.

Yet so far he’d proven to this society that he was good for nothing other than his fluent English. Such is life, full of irony, he thought, fucking ironies. At least it was a full time job, and he needed money to pay the bills. He’d been unexpectedly caught up in the travail of moneymaking, which irritated him above all things and made him feel helpless.

Yin’in never complained, though, and that was what’s disconcerting about her. She’d always been the one in the background, like those lone girls you’d see in a fading Polaroid photo. It made him unsure whether to take her usual obedience as acquiescence, or apathy.

She was naked on her way to the shower. She’d always been so at ease with her own body, half of which was wrapped underneath that long black hair of hers. The hair shone under the pale light like strands of obsidian beads.

Her beauty was daunting. Sometimes it unnerved him. He used to believe there was always some vanity in pretty girls, because in his college years he’d seen much indulgence and vanity in those unscrupulous young souls. Not in her.

The sound of splashing water caught his attention, and he thought of when they’d first met. He was schmoozing around in a suburban loft saturated with wanna-be Parisian décors and people who admired it. He wore a navy blue Lacoste tee and pair of Hugo Boss grey wash jeans, a bottle of wine in his left hand and a half-filled goblet in his right. She was standing in the corner, confabulating with one of the rich boys whom he’d marked as a philistine. She seemed rather amused—perhaps by his effort. Soon the guy gave up, and he approached. She’d been expecting him, and smiled as they shock hands cordially. Right away he thought—out of randomness—of a white poppy. He immediately found such thought ludicrous—the same way after he found himself secretly in love with the young wife at Sushi Shop off-campus. Yet there wasn’t a better way to describe her. She wore a rice-colored tunic and casual khaki-green flax pants, probably shopped from venues on Xiushui Street. These were two colors that no Chinese girls would wear together, but she did anyway because her skin was pale like that of an untanned Scandinavian girl. Her hair was coiled up and pinned with a cloisonné hairpin, her makeup plain like the colors she wore. At first he’d thought it was her way to catch eyeballs, but later he learned that she never wore makeup off-stage and never shown her hair loose in public. When she laughed her head lifted a little, exposing the fine clavicle.

When he’d first returned, he tried hard to get along with those artists who gathered around the 49th District—a place deluged with works that made travesties out of the Maoist Era. Soon he saw that these people were not only narrow-sighted and fame-thirsty, and their works piles of bromides perpetuating the Orientalist conceptions of Western collectors, but they’d lost all integrity and given hedonism a whole new definition. And the benefactors he’d had to deal with, whom he first thought, being more educated, were more agreeable, soon appeared to be a bunch of mere loaded riffraff. People he knew were conformists back in America, but at least there were some genuineness to be found. But here, these fair-skinned bon vivants…he couldn’t go on thinking, such realization was much too painful.

Yin’in came out of the bathroom dressed in t-shirts and jeans. Her hair, still dripping water, was tied back in a ponytail. She began searching for something on the bureau, which made him look up from the bed, the muscles on his neck tightened; he felt the artery on his neck popping.

“What are you looking for?” He asked.

“The door keys.”

“First drawer on the left.”  He didn’t want her to see the airline booking information he’d brought home two days ago. Father had called last week, said enough with your illusions so now get your ass back to the States and get a job, while Mother sighed deeply on the side.

He was twenty-five, an age still imbued in ambitions, thinking you could take your dreams and go far and beyond, but meanwhile, already realized that some doors were shut to you, and that you’d have to go around with an incubus of reality on your shoulders. He’d been good at telling stories without particularly trying to impress, and she liked it. In fact, when he tried to impress he did it absentmindedly, casually adding flavors to the tales and claiming others’ deeds under his own belt. He’d always taken pride in his talented storytelling, yet he got nothing but rejections, coldhearted disinterest.  A kind-hearted screenwriter eventually told him the truth: They wanted something American but in essence localized, like selling Chinese donuts at MacDonald’s, because people can’t accept anything more than a Western facade.

He’d whined to Yin’in, and she’d listened attentively without comments. He thought she’d never understood him fully. After all, she’d been a dancer all her life, didn’t speak English, and didn’t even get much schooling. The night they’d met, she didn’t give him her number, but her email. He’d gone on to find her blog online and read it. She wrote almost daily, in succinct, poetic lines that pertained to the bagatelles of her life：

You came along with Solitude, I loved you both

You left, but Solitude left his shoes here

No matter how I opened the window

Letting my fingers go

How many times

I couldn’t throw them away…

…Whatever guise you come up with in my world, it must be happy

This is my monomania…

He spent the entire night reading her blog. It was never talked about afterwards.

His parents found out about her soon as she came back to his hometown with him. They disapproved of their relationship: She didn’t have a decent college degree, and was six months older. Not to mention that she was from a modest family in Shanghai, and what had Mother been telling him? Never involve yourself with Shanghainese girls.  But she’d given up her career in Beijing to come back with him, when he’d hit the lowest point of his life and needed support the most. Did she do it, like some had warned him, only because she knew he’d soon go back to America, and take her with him? Men had always fallen for women’s beauty. Was this his hamartia, too?

No! Of course not! He gasped at the thought. In the days with her he no longer felt distressed and insecure. He’d always felt that something was rotten in this state, but couldn’t tell in exact words, just like that noise he’d always heard. His beloved motherland had long become faithless, so was he. There was something soothing about her, not intimately, but kept in a fair distance, like she’d been watching him from afar all these time, and understood. He was unsure what drove him to this obsession with her, it kept him up at night. No, wasn’t her body, he’d had other beautiful girls, younger and better educated than Yin’in. So what was it? Was she really an opiate, like he’d jokingly thought of her in the very beginning?

He’d seen poppies once when he was seventeen. His uncle drove him to Blue Mountain Plantation, where the state-owned commune grew 600 acres of opium. He saw the flowers from miles away, behind the car window and a row of sand jujube trees. It was a vast expanse of white and red so much more vivid than any color he’d seen in his life that he felt a twinge in the eyes.

He remembered walking amidst the white poppies, whose beauty was no less soothing and addicting than the opiate they’d give birth to. The palm-sized flowers were blossoming in an audacious and reckless enchantment, bending their branches. When zephyr blew by, the ocean of bone-whiteness waved gently, calming and ominous.

She came up to him, bent down, and kissed him on the forehead. When Mother was still young she kissed him twice every day, before school and before bed.  He disliked it when Yin’in kissed there, too. It seemed to unravel his shells of manhood, exposing that unfledged boy within.

He asked quietly, “where are you going?”

And before she could answer, he held her in his arms, kissing on her naked clavicle.

He closed his eyes and whispered,

“Not going anywhere, Yin’in. Not going anywhere.”

–>

It was twenty-one years ago in the midst of a hazy day. The sun had just mounted high above the Gobi horizon, casting rings of murky halo that rendered the cityscape restless in a khaki glare. Mother was lying in a sickbed at Women and Children’s Hospital of J City. She’d arrived early in the morning, after months of battling with preeclampsia and the thought of getting an abortion for her career in the more prospective South. The bed on Mother’s left was vacant, and in a scarlet Red Cross sign splattered in the center of the clean white bedsheet like a pool of fresh blood.

She waited, tremulous in impatience. The air reeked of formalin, and the tacky viridescent of the wall paint that was ubiquitous in public buildings somehow bothered her more than usual. Grandma was sitting next to her in a military armchair; her hands sat on the worn-out armrest, holding on to a red “Double Happiness” thermos. She asked intermittently whether Mother wanted hot water, and Mother answered “No” each time.

The hospital was located on Beijing Avenue, then the only asphalt-paved street in town. Herds of industrial workers, unemployed farmers, and canny businessmen from the South (Southern Flatheads, as locals called them) flooded the streets, searching for their own share of fortune in this booming mining town. Everything was new, and makeshift. When Mother revisited the town years later, she saw a KFC restaurant swarmed with middle-class consumerists. The hospital had long been demolished, melted into the smelter of time together with the nickel ores. Trios of single-child families waited in queue. The children’s faces were filled with anticipation for a taste of American junk food. Amid the neon-lit venues and metropolitan ecstasies, Colonel Sanders chocked in the industrial smog, his smile ever unrelenting.

The subtle, spasmodic pain was becoming more palpable, Mother tried to remain still and supine. Outside, a bicycle reeled by, its bell tinkling loudly. It was followed by the sound of rushing footsteps from end of the aisle. The noise grew louder and more rapid, like water heating to boil in a kettle. Then the door smashed open, a group of middle-aged men and women escorted a pregnant woman inside onto the bed beside Mother’s. Their hands were all stretched out, almost lifting her up like a group of eunuchs lifting the Empress Dowager.

Soon the group began chattering in an indistinct southern dialect. Mother examined the woman: She was chubby and appeared almost twice Mother’s age.  Exhausted by either her debilitating condition or by her boisterous family members, she laid quietly on her side, her lips dry and bloodless. Yet mother saw on the woman’s weathered face the once-striking beauty that’d become hardly discernible. She had eyes and nose resembling finely-carved porcelain—a typical Southern beauty. Her husband had a somewhat aversive complexion of a typical parsimonious merchant, his face distorted in vexation. The group seemed more anxious than the woman, whose pale face was covered with perspiration.

Two young nurses came in, dismissing the loquacious crowd, and whined to Grandma after they’d left.

Around noon, the woman gave birth to her child safely.

It was the most beautiful baby girl Mother had ever seen, with willow-leaf-shaped browns and her mother’s nose grown immaculately on her ruddy, cherubic face. She cried very little, as if afraid of this new world she’d just arrived in.

Her father dashed in with the others. He eagerly held the infant up. Then, suddenly, the fire in his eyes extinguished altogether. His body rocked tremendously in spite of himself. The relatives yelled out: “What is it!? A BOY?!”  (The law had prohibited the disclosure of infants’ gender before their birth). He dropped his daughter back to the cradle, turned around without uttering a word and walked to a corner of the ward. The once loquacious cohort of siblings and in-laws fell completely taciturn. The man reached into his pockets for a cigarette. He made a great effort to put his trembling hand onto his lips. His void eyes stared into distance. Soon as he’d realized that no smocking was allowed, he held the cigarette in his mouth and walked out of the door. His family members, one by one, followed him out in reticence.

Mother looked at the women, she’d already passed out.

An hour and half later, Mother delivered a nine-pound boy. Grandma joyously ran out to make phone calls. Mother regretted a bit beneath her faint smile, because she’d always wished for a girl.

Later that day relatives came and took turns to scrutinize the chubby newborn. Behind them the older woman wept alone silently, the stretcher that carried her in was abandoned, leaning on the wall next to her sickbed. Grandma tried to sooth her and feed her food, but she kept on crying as if she’d not just had a child, but had lost one. The baby slept serenely beside her, rarely making a sound.

The man eventually came back and brought his wife some food. He looked as though he’d aged five years in an afternoon, his eyes bloodshot. His wife hurriedly ate and breastfed the baby girl. Then the guy sat by her feet while she stared at his hunched back.

To break the silence, Grandma spoke,

“You should be happy, look how beautiful your daughter is. Raise her like a piece of treasure.”

The man gave out a long sigh and spoke in heavily accented Mandarin, his voice low and hoarse, “Old Sister, you’ve no idea. I have three brothers; all four of us each had three daughters, which make it twelve girls, no boy. Now all the wives were ordered to get sterilization by the government. This one was our last hope.”

Mother said: “This girl is so pretty.  She won’t be less than any boy.”

“Ein, back in our hometown, if you have no sons in your family, you couldn’t even build a new house. People will point at your back. With all these money we make, we can’t lift our heads up in the village.” The room fell back in silence.

Soon it was bedtime, the hospitals then endorsed the policy of letting babies staying in the same room with their mothers. So the two mothers and their two newborns stayed in the same ward.

Mother could not sleep. She saw the women’s envious gaze from the bed across, fixed onto the boy, as if  the woman would make up her mind any moment and jump up to snatch Mother’s son away. The woman gazed on for hours without moving, she gazed with a desire like one desired her life.

Mother hoped she could see Father, who was then a college lecturer working 300 miles away and whose monthly salary came short to buy a last-minute bus ticket.

But she was there along in the dark, too scared that she might lose her only child. She tried to talk to the woman without a stop.

“You should really be happy, nowadays people love girls more. I’ve always loved girls…”

The woman gazed away, biting her lips hard. She asked abruptly:

“You wanted a daughter?”

Mother’s heart quivered. She cried out: “NO.” Her fragile body trembled, but her eyes filled with bravery.

The woman said nothing for the rest of the night. Early next morning her husband came and they checked out of the hospital.

A month later, when Mother took her son back for a physical checkup, the head nurse, an old lady in her 60’s, asked Mother if she remembered the woman in her delivery room.

Mother nodded, that night’s image was still hauntingly eidetic.

The head nurse shook her head and signed,

“Such a pity, you should have asked us to report your son and her daughter as twins.”

Mother was bewildered.

A young nurse said heartbreakingly,

“The couple, they’d given the girl away to a farmer.”

Mother gasped. She was in one of the most impoverished region on this land. A farmer to this day made 300 American dollars a year on average.

The head nurse kept on moaning,

”Ein, such a sin, such a sin…”

Mother held her son and walked down of the limestone stairs of the Soviet-style hospital building. She went out on the street; the wind was dry and dusty, cutting at her pallid face. Further away, Father was coming toward her, pushing their rusty “Forever” bicycle.

I cried, mewing and puking in Mother’s arms.

–>