Waipo peers out the window, distracted.
I sip at the tea, slightly sweetened by the fruits. That heavy feeling is returning, that thick fog creeping into my brain. With each blink, it takes a bit longer for the world to resettle and sharpen.
Careful not to get anything wet, I turn to a fresh page in my sketchbook and start a portrait of my grandmother. Her faraway, wistful eyes. Thin, pensive lips. Flowy tunic draping down the rounded slopes of her shoulders. Soft fingers wrapped around a cup of tea. Fat wooden beads and a glassy jade bangle knocking together on her wrist.
It’s hard to imagine her arguing with my mother. It’s hard to think that their relationship could fray to the point of breaking, to the point of someone snipping the thread between them clean in half, deciding to never look back.
With just the one pencil, I try to capture all the colors of her aliveness in gray scale.
By the time I finish the portrait, the sun has gone to bed. It was tricky, the way the shadows against her face kept shifting. But she was good at sitting still. That must’ve been some bottomless thought she got stuck in.
“Hua wo a?” says Waipo. You drew me?
“Shi ni,” I confirm.
“Gan ma hua wo?” She laughs a little and shakes her head.
Outside the window the sky has gone black. There are the lights of the town, flickering in oranges and yellows and blues and greens. The fat red lanterns are lit up, festive and bright. And more lights are out over the water, their reflections twinkling faintly. Proof this little world is still wide awake.
My grandmother summons a waitress, who brings us a menu. Waipo points to the photographs of the dishes, asking questions about each one, gesturing with her hands as she speaks. I listen to the rolling cadences of their conversation, busy myself with a doodle of our second pot of tea.
It’s not long before platters arrive: dumplings, stuffed lotus root, sautéed yam leaves, noodle soup, a bamboo basket full of steamed buns.
“Baozi,” says Waipo, pushing the basket toward the center, where we can both reach. A little white napkin unsticks itself from underneath the bamboo structure.
Actually, not a napkin. A square of paper, half soaked with the condensation from the steam, so I can see that there’s text on its underside. It takes a few seconds and a few careful fingers to peel it off. Handwritten in blue pen:
If I could see you in a year,
I’d wind the months in balls,
And put them each in separate drawers,
Until their time befalls.
That’s all. Nothing else.
What the actual heck?
I know only through pure, unshakable instinct: It’s by Emily Dickinson.
“Shenme?” says Waipo, seeing my face.
I have no idea how to answer her. The tremors start in my toes, making their way up the rest of my body. I am an earthquake. Any second now, I’m going to split apart.
Gripping the poem hard, I slide out of my seat, searching for the waitress who served us. “Hello? Excuse me?”
A different woman comes over and says something to me in Mandarin.
“I need to know who gave this to us,” I tell her, holding out the wet square of paper.
She gives me an uncertain look.
“Do you speak English? Is there someone who speaks English?”
“Deng yixia,” she says, and she turns back, click-click-clicking away from me fast in her heels.
I try to still the panic.
My grandmother has stood up, too, now. She takes the poem from me, her eyebrows scrunching together at the sight of the English words. “Shenme?” she says again.
Minutes later, it’s Fred who appears. He scowls at us. “I told you to behave like normal customer!”
Before I can say anything, Waipo starts spewing words. She points to the piece of paper in my hand.
“I’m trying to figure out who brought this to us,” I say. “It was under the baozi.”
Fred snatches up the paper and reads it, his eyes scanning impatiently from side to side. “What is this?”
“I think it’s an Emily Dickinson poem.”
“Emily Dickinson,” he repeats slowly. Again, even slower. “Emily. Dickinson.”
“Right. Do you… know who that is?”
He shakes his head. But then, a moment later, his eyes widen. He pulls up a nearby stool and sits down at the end of our booth. “I know this name, Emily Dickinson. We burned the poem by Emily Dickinson for the wedding.”
“What wedding?” I ask sharply.
His voice drops. “When I married the ghost of Chen Jingling.”
I stare at him, speechless.
“You don’t know?” he says, reading the expression on my face.
I shake my head.
“Okay.” Fred sighs. “I don’t want to talk here. First you have to see.”
“See what?” I ask.
He points out the window. “Look at those trees.”
I squint through the lights reflected in the pane, through greasy smudges of fingerprints on the glass, try to find something in the dark outside to focus my eyes on. After a moment I see the silhouette of trees, a cluster of them not too far from the teahouse.
“Kan dao le ma?” asks Waipo. Do you see?
What am I supposed to be seeing?
“Energy flow through trees,” Fred says quietly. “Watch the leaves.”
And there it is. The sharp, silhouetted edges shifting and melting, forming the shapes of animals and humans. The shadows extract themselves from the tops of the branches, pull free, and drift upward into the sky, turning to a pale mist before vanishing into the darkness. Every time I blink, my eyes have to resettle, refocus, find the edges all over again.
“Where there is a shape, there is a spirit,” says Fred. “People have those statue of Guan Yin and they know there is something there, filling the shape. But then those people forget about the original shapes made by the earth. The trees hold spirits, too.”
“Gui?” I ask, looking at Waipo. Ghosts?
She nods.
“You should never shine a torch at trees,” Fred tells me. “The light disturb the spirits. Right now because it is Ghost Month we can see them clearly here, so close to Jilong. Most people try not to see the ghosts. They just burn offerings and ignore signs. But if you look and try to see, you will see.”
There’s something beautiful about the way the shadows move. Like contortionists. Like dancers. Like brushstrokes across a canvas.
I watch carefully to see if there’s a large bird. If there’s a silhouette that might be my mother.
Fred reaches across the table for the last bun. He crams the whole thing into his mouth. “Now we drive back so your grandmother can rest. Then I’ll tell you everything.”
79
On the third floor of Fred’s bed-and-breakfast, there’s a balcony with chairs and a table situated right up against its stone wall. Overhead, the vague shapes of gentle giants shift across the sky, clouds veiled by night. We sit here in the quiet dark, Fred on one side of the table with an unlit cigarette between his fingers, me on the other, leaning on my elbows and gazing out over the town. Breezes whisper past our faces. For the first time since arriving in Taiwan, I find myself feeling cold.
He slides the cigarette behind his ear and pulls out a box of matches. “You have the poem?”
I hand it to him and watch as he cracks open a flame and touches it to the scrap of paper, drops it into the porcelain ashtray.
“This came from a ghost. Now we send it back.” He holds the cigarette in the small fire until it catches.
If I squint my eyes, I can just barely make out the lines of the mountains. I can see the sparkle of lights like gemstones on the surface of the water.
“Many years ago, when I still live in Taipei, I go to Shilin to visit my sister. I was walking to her apartment, and I saw a red pocket on the ground. Someone dropped it.” Fred pauses and looks up at me. “You know red pocket?”
“They have money in them, right? They’re given for, like, Chinese New Year?”