There’s a woman shifting under a ragged blanket on a thick bed of dry grass, her face red with effort and shining with sweat.
“It’s a girl,” the midwife announces from the foot of the bed. She’s definitely not speaking English, but I understand her as if she were.
She holds up a gleaming pair of steel scissors, opens them wide like teeth, severs the umbilical cord with a resounding slice.
The mother reaches for the kicking mess of little limbs.
“A daughter,” her husband says. “Do we keep this one?”
The woman brushes away a bit of gunk sticking to the baby’s nose. “No. This one we sell.”
The colors change, go dark. A glimmer and burst bring new light.
The same woman in the doorway of her hut, rocking the baby, who is small and unknowing and swathed in rags. The woman’s face smudged and empty, her husband beside her looking broken. He takes a filthy wad of money from a balding man in the grass just outside their home. The man takes the child. An easy transaction, hearts aside.
The balding man carries the baby across the field and into the trees. Out of the trees and up a mountain. And inside his own run-down mud cottage, he shows the baby girl to his wife. She rocks another tiny body in her arms, helping the mouth find her nipple and feed.
“What should we call our new daughter?” says the man.
“Yuanyang,” she says, rocking.
“Like the birds?” says the man, sounding not at all surprised.
“Just like the birds,” she says.
“Yuanyang,” the man repeats to himself.
Something about the smoke, the careful way he says the name—I suddenly understand. This is my grandmother. Yuanyang is Waipo.
“Yuanyang,” the man says again, carrying her across the room to see the other child. “See who Mama’s holding. Meet our son, Ping.”
Flicker, darkness, flash. New colors come; the smell of this memory is earthy and green.
Yuanyang, seven years old, watching everyone greet the uncle who has come to celebrate the Lunar New Year. I can see into her mind, can hear her thoughts, feel what she feels.
“Ping! You are getting so tall! Soon you will be taller than your mother.” The uncle laughs deep in his belly as he steps through the doorway. “Eight years old. That’s a lucky number. This will be a good year for you.”
Ping smirks. “Thank you for coming, Uncle. Happy New Year.”
“Thank you for coming,” Mama echoes. “You must be tired after your trip. Yuanyang, bring the tea out for your uncle!”
Every corner of the tiny kitchen is crowded with the aftermath of Mama’s preparations. Dried spices dusting the splintery slab of wood used for a table. Bowls ringed with sauces and oil. There are roasted yams, stir-fried yam leaves, rice porridge. Noodle soup—no meat in it but made with pork bones, so close enough, a rare treat. A handful of water spinach, thanks to a neighbor who made a trip down the mountain. There are even a few tea eggs; if Yuanyang is lucky, she’ll get a bite of one.
She wonders how they are able to afford all this food. Lucky for Ping that his birthday coincides with the biggest holiday. Only once a year do they eat like people who deserve to survive.
Her eyes hunt for the clay teapot she heated only moments ago. There it is, on a tree stump beside the large pail in the back of the kitchen, the house’s only source of water. She wraps her hand in rags so the pot won’t burn her.
Yuanyang sets a cup before the uncle and pours the red tea slowly, careful that her elbow angles away from him so as not to be rude. He taps two fingers on his knee in thanks, and she shrinks away. Her job is done best when she turns invisible, blending into the wall, becoming one with the sparse furniture.
She heads for the kitchen knowing Mama will want her to clear away the mess. But as she leaves, she hears the uncle chuckle and say, “When the time comes, Yuanyang will make the perfect wife for Ping.”
Little Yuanyang stiffens, nearly trips on her way out. She hears Mama say faintly, “I just hope that her hips get wider, or she won’t be fit to bear a healthy child.”
The darkness drops like a veil, followed by a sweeping beam of light, opening up into new colors.
On the sloping side of a hill, nine-year-old Yuanyang stands among bushes reaching as high as her shoulder. She wears a ragged scarf tied around her head, and a leather strap presses over the fabric around her forehead to dangle a straw basket against her back. Sweat beads at her temples, trickles down the sides of her face. Her quick hands pluck at leaves and buds from the tops of the bushes.
As Yuanyang moves across the mountain, she wonders who her birth family is, what life with them might have been. She imagines a mother sewing her beautiful dresses, weaving elegant braids. A father teaching her songs, accompanying her voice with a bamboo dizi, his fingers running adeptly over the holes, lips stemming the air. Yuanyang wonders: Would she have any siblings? Perhaps a sister to share a bed with, and whisper secrets to?
With a hand, she swipes the perspiration from her brow. This work is exhausting but easier than school. Easier than studying characters by scratching them into the mud, worrying that a mistake might bring the teacher’s biting stick down upon her hand. Here among the leaves the only punishment to be had is the burn of the sun, the occasional itch or sting of a bug. But it’s quiet. Nobody telling her how to think. Her hands are busy, but her mind is free to roam.
She clutches a handful of tea leaves to her nose and inhales deeply, letting the green smells tell her the secrets of the land.
40
Was it real? It had to be.
My brain turns these new pieces around and around.
Yuanyang.
I think of the careful way my grandmother brewed the pot of tea. The way she gazed intensely into that foil bag brimming with stiffly curled leaves.
I say her name out loud to feel the shape of it on my tongue. “Yuanyang.”
Yuanyang, who is my waipo.
Does that make Ping… my waigong?
Everything in my brain is glimmering with wonder, with iridescent hues, like the colors pinned by the sun against an oil-slicked surface. Wonder, and sadness. Because I’d always imagined that one day it would be my mother telling me the stories of her family. Not memories materializing from wisps of incense smoke, memories that feel stolen.
And somehow—I’m absolutely certain of it—these glimpses of the past will lead me to my mother, the bird. These pieces will help me find her, will bring her to me.
And when the time comes, I’ll be ready for it.
I pick the scissors back up, thread my fingers and thumb through the plastic loops to find a good grip.
41
I’ve cut up all the shirts, and my hand is sore, so I decide to try to get some rest.
My body is heavy with exhaustion, but my brain won’t stop. It flutters like a restless animal. When I close my eyes, the past dances across the darkness in spurts and swirls of light.
Sleep is a thing I can’t remember. The face and smell and texture of it all forgotten, as if it’s been wiped from my mind.
I think of the temple, the people chanting, the melody of their words dark and lilting.
I think of that tail sweeping past us. What I need is for her to come down out of the sky and stay awhile.
I want you to remember
I’ll throw that net—gently, lovingly, so that she senses that I don’t mean to hurt her. I’ll catch her in it, and then she’ll talk to me. She’ll tell me what I need to know.
I blink, and the ceiling turns shadowy. The cracks are there again, widening, spreading farther. They’ve stretched across the entire surface and begun fissuring down the walls. An entire corner’s missing, like someone just took out a chunk of it. There’s nothing to be seen there, only oblivion made of the blackest black.
Blink again, and it’s gone.
42
In the early morning darkness, the display of my phone glows like lightning, white-hot as the latest email loads.
Axel.
FROM: [email protected]
TO: [email protected]
SUBJECT: (no subject)