At Length

NOTE: “Coming Around” is a blend of memoir and fiction as author Suo Er writes from his father’s perspective in an attempt to better understand him. It’s unclear where the story diverges from reality and crosses the line into “false memory,” a motif Suo Er uses to explore family history and inherited memory spanning oceans and generations. Suo Er’s writing is heavily influenced by Jonathan Bernhardt, lending it a stream-of-conscience lyricism that sweeps the reader up in the narrator’s stream of thoughts. On the one hand, the story defies the capitalistic productivity rampant in western narrative norms, while on the other, the original’s writing style seeks to defy Chinese grammatical norms and the linguistic suppression of dialect in mainstream literature.

Keep reading after “Coming Around” for an interview with translator Grace Najmulski.

It’s fine, our daughter’s grown, has never stirred up trouble, has always been cute, and could make her grandparents laugh so hard they spit out their food, they even gave her several strings of coins that date back to the Qing Dynasty, coins they’d originally planned to give to a grandson. They developed Alzheimer’s in her second year of high school, one after the other; it was swift and devastating, the two cursing and jabbing their fingers at each other every day in the dark living room, transforming our dialect’s ugliest curses into embellishments for their words, words that completely pervaded the language we were intimately familiar with. They were constantly inventing a new culture, it’s just a shame we couldn’t be there to record the fights, it could have been valuable research material for the local Ministry of Culture. I remember in particular paying a visit to the family altar after dinner—roaches scratching at the ceramic vase beside their bed sksksk and the clear scent of the courtyard wampee trees’ ripened fruit leaking into the evening—someone was spying on them, following them, and the couple who’d been relaxing in the cool living room burst into a fit of rage, their curses something fierce, one accused the other of taking a lover while the other accused the first of being a whore, a fox spirit feeding upon the vitality of men, and they kept at it in vivid detail. I listened with rapt attention and came to realize that most of their accusations were sheer fiction because the fact of the matter is I was a witness that year like I’d been many years before, and I saw with my own eyes how they supported each other, how they made it through those dark and gloomy months, they were different from the superficiality of this generation, they didn’t have enough food to fill their stomachs so how would they have the energy left to come up with such things, but still that’s why they were constantly making up words and stories, those fragmented memories like spirits floating around in their skulls, it might have been but an encounter, a look, a gesture, a passing comment, an overheard rumor blown up into a disagreement from their life of endless marriage, pieced together again and again to become this unbelievably absurd story. During my literary research I gathered a bunch of old newspapers, the Ling Dong Daily’s Chao Jia News had a ton of articles about married couples fighting, and amongst these was a particularly awful case, a couple over seventy who were dependent on others’ emergency rice supply to satisfy their hunger—their only son killed by the Japanese troops’ poison gas while smuggling people into Hong Kong, leaving them with no one to lean on—became a community spectacle, spending all day sitting inside fighting non-stop in raised voices for an entire year until one day the noise suddenly stopped; neighbors saw a golden pheasant fly from their window, a spectacle, and went to knock on the couple’s door only for no one to answer; they broke in a few days later but the room was already empty. As for where on earth the couple went, no one knew; of course I believe the end of this story was made up, real life is tragic enough as it is, and pitiful—there used to be complete privacy, everyone had the right to keep their affairs behind closed doors and savor the bitterness of their own lives, but now everything was out in the open and there wasn’t even that sliver of precious truth. My daughter’s mother—who is also my ex-wife—knows about my parents and sets aside time to come check on them; we moved a bench to the front of the living room to sit and look outside but we ended up not knowing what to talk about. I’d ask her how business was and she’d answer that she was keeping herself busy, the gold watch on her wrist flashing in the corner of my eye as she said this, and with sweat beading on her neck it wouldn’t be long before she’d say it was too hot, even hotter than Shenzhen, how could anywhere be so hot? I’d turn to the mother of my child and know that this northern girl would never get used to the southern heat, even if she’d come to the south at nineteen she still would’ve followed the footsteps of kindly old Deng Xiaoping walking his rounds around the mouth of the Pearl River; she made toys at the factory, laced shoes, sold wontons at a food stall, and worked as a pub hostess; I saw an old picture of her with a purple streak in her hair, bell bottoms, and sandals in front of Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall, I don’t know what tripod the photographer used to make her legs look so very long and to whiten her skin so that the bronze statue of Sun Yat-sen behind her looked short and dark, it’s highly likely she thought the same about me when we met but didn’t say anything, as she was very reserved; we went to see an episode of The Burning of Red Lotus Temple then strolled circles around the park, muddle-minded but together; my parents never approved of our relationship and hoped I’d find someone local, they said them northern girls won’t give you boys and in the end they were right, but our marriage wasn’t destroyed by a lack of sons, we’re both well aware; one time when my daughter was in the fifth grade—she still wore her hair up like ram horns—she ran up to me and asked if her mother and I would’ve stayed together if she’d been born a boy, in response to which I sat her on my knee and said of course Mom and Dad’s divorce had nothing to do with her and that Grandpa and Grandma also loved her dearly—to be honest, at the time I didn’t know if I was soothing her or the fear in my own heart: that town had become a vulture spiraling above our heads, descending time and time again to peck at our skulls and call out for attention—exhausting every means to shield my daughter with my body I was already cautious as could be, but some part was always inevitably left exposed. I took my daughter out to play during the divorce and when we came back my wife had already picked up and moved out—she didn’t have much stuff—but I maintained our home’s status quo to the best of my ability by telling her Mommy’s gone away on business, which wasn’t a lie, she really did have a lot of business to take care of, there were factories in both Shenzhen and Dongguan that made lighting fixtures that were exported to Southeast Asia, she was busy all year round and perhaps that was our biggest difference, or to use her words: I was like an old man flipping through books and reading the paper with nothing to do, she didn’t know what I was fiddling with, writing a lousy essay and not making any money, she couldn’t comprehend it just as I couldn’t comprehend how she could stand around in a factory with the never ending sounds of machinery pouring into her ears, to me that was a dissonance too difficult to endure and my life had too much dissonance already, some of which was obvious and some of which was impossible to spot so we swallowed it blindly only to spit it out many years later; take my parents as an example: I told my ex-wife about their nightly fights and she listened silently until the end when she suddenly started to laugh, the creases at the corners of her eyes spread their wings and she said good thing we called it quits early on, a few decades and our fights would be worse than theirs; if you look at it this way we’ve made a little progress since the last generation, cutting our losses before it’s too late—no need to trouble the next generation too. The greatest act of love we can do for the next generation is to take care of ourselves and not cause trouble. My ex-wife stressed this one more time and I agreed; the evening after she left I climbed up to sweep the roof of my childhood home by myself, the lychee branches in the gutters stretched towards the roof their thick and dense blooming flowers like a string of stars; I was stunned by their brilliance—not their beauty, but the extent to which they’d already matured without my realizing, blooming with life as if they lived in another atmosphere, and as we focused on ourselves and the moment of time’s unavoidable erosion we didn’t know what nook or cranny those few secret lives would emerge from, so I snapped a photo of the bouquet with my phone and sent it to the family’s WeChat group—there was no responding ping, no one cared about our hometown’s lychee trees, it was enough that they cared about the elderly. There weren’t many people in the family group chat to begin with: I had an older brother caught up in gambling who once sat for twenty straight hours of mahjong in a single day, then when it was time to leave he stood up dizzy-headed then fell to the floor and hit his head, he was taken to the hospital to be revived and there he then claimed to have seen Ox Head and Horse Face, the demon attendants to the King of Hell, snag a hook around his legs, his mind has been sometimes clear and sometimes confused ever since, the man can’t care for himself let alone others; then there are my two younger sisters, one emigrated to Canada and one got married and moved to Australia—both have better prospects than the men of the family (which I also find laughable)—keeping in touch eventually grew inconvenient while separated by thousands of kilometers of ocean, so caring for the two old burdens fell mostly upon me, though this was fine too; some families in the village have far more kids than ours just to avoid getting pushed around, each one out making a name for themselves while casting their elderly to the side like bags of sand before finally being thrown back into the broken houses of their hometown, I’ve seen so many situations like this—having a lot of kids isn’t always a good thing. I’m convinced that having and caring for a child is like buying a bunch of physical armor¹: it’s a form of defiance against Aging’s magical attack, but it can’t fix the problem or prevent the enemy’s impending strike. I learned this metaphor from my daughter who knows I spend my days at the retirement home looking after our old people and who downloaded a bunch of MOBAs on my phone for when I get bored; she said she’d keep in touch and I promised to play with her, but not because the game could kill time, you should know that I was attending college in Guangzhou the year electronic games had just made their way into the mainland and I used money from odd jobs to buy a second hand NES, just about blasting through the fastest recorded time of 1987’s Mega Man before buying a computer and playing through all the DOS games—this was three years before my daughter’s birth—when did this passion disappear? Maybe it was after I got married, or maybe it was after my daughter was born; I can only say it’s the course of life, an exam with no answer key, a step by step entropic reduction until finally becoming an early-to-bed-early-to-riser, a creature dancing in a public square, it’s the truth, and when I went for an evening stroll through town I bumped into a number of uncles and aunties under the banyan trees shaking their hips along with the routine, their shoes kicking up that entropic heat, I watched them quietly and then I too couldn’t help but want to take some steps and shuffle around; I thought it all had to be some kind of trick, that the people who’d set up the public square dance wanted to give an excuse to those few who’d lost and had no energy to change the world; I watched for several days, spotting in the group of people a childhood friend, my elementary school language teacher, a sweets peddler, the head of my old production brigade², the daughter of the sugar factory’s elderly director, and the factory’s security guard; some who were still feuding and had vandalized their rivals’ homes during the 60’s turmoil were now dancing to the same music; the woman leading the dance was my family’s sworn enemy—I remember clearly, when I was young my parents would often say this person’s name during dinner or call her a “flower faced woman,” a dialectal term used to look down on women, as was my parents’ intent, intentionally engraving their hatred into my memory; that family had employed every kind of swindler trick over the past thirty-five years and to this day still occupy our umpteen fields, and now my parents have fallen ill and can no longer tend to the fields, which would probably result in our nemeses growing more brazen—I stared at her face set apart by the streetlamp’s prism of light, perhaps a thin layer of sweat on her forehead and jaw, her white-streaked hair cut short and tied back—I don’t know how many times this face played the villain in my childhood dreams, the best one involving an earthquake where the ground split into a giant crack and all of the villagers jumped back, all except our enemies, who fell in but didn’t die, living instead inside the crack in the earth where I’d see them crying wah wah every time I walked through the village, but the earthquake and giant crack never actually happened and their family has done well for themselves, far better than ours—after I left home this hatred faded until there was practically nothing left; it might be because after seeing more people and the wider world, the mold of the original hatred had been broken, replaced by an even greater one, and this “flower faced woman” returned to her basic form, nothing more than a regular person; humanity’s base design was ordinary and common, we were entrusted with too many possible variations, we raised too many of Frankenstein’s monsters; I don’t know how much hatred is left in my parents’ minds and how many regrets stand around in concentric circles, each round increasingly larger, drawing and comparing life’s regrets and resentments in hatred’s periphery, there could be boundless millions—this is an example I understand; I had a brother who died young and who to this day remains a knot in my father’s heart; this brother, my junior, was clever and smart at five years old, his life stolen within a matter of days when taken by a sudden and violent illness, my father held his body and heartbreakinigly cried My boy! My boy! then sighed; afterwards, whenever Father took up his pipe it wasn’t a simple expelling of vapor but a sigh of habit, a practiced drawn-out and indispersable groan that I understood as Father once again remembering his lost son, but his sighs dwindled markedly after he fell ill—mainly because he sometimes forgot where he put his pipe, curbing his temper until he finally found it—when he ate he would gnaw gnaw on his chopsticks or bury his head in his bowl, smothering his face in rice and insisting it was stolen from the brigade; sometimes he peed the bed and his face would redden with embarrassment but he’d refuse to get up and claim he was framed; sometimes he and Mom exchanged heated words, while other times he leaned on her the most, clambering into a cool bath and wanting Mom to change out the water for him; when she wasn’t sick Mom’s emotions were so much more stable than his that she made a colder and quieter observer than me; as if watching this man for almost fifty years wasn’t enough, her unwritten observations of him were hidden in the most unfathomable grooves of the hippocampus; I once saw a picture online that compared the neurons of a normal brain and a sick brain through the lens of a microscope, the normal brain’s purple neurons with their brown centered nuclei floating through the yellow custard-like medium, four or five synapses extended in all directions to look like one-eyed dancing aliens from science fiction, while the neurons’ nerve fibers in the sick brain tangle alarmingly and amyloid plaques crowd around them, healthy cells gradually lose their vitality, synapses decrease, other neurons are stamped out one by one, brain activity slows, space dwindles, life’s precious images disintegrate and those that remain are surrounded by delinquents, closing in step by step, up until the last room, the last window; I believe my mother’s final memory was also reserved for my father who, for some reason, did the same; even though they hated each other, they were still each other’s most hated person.

I had a chat with them one day and they mentioned the few close friends who had come to visit them; Mom said her sister-in-law Shikeng and nephew Nan still hadn’t come and Dad said You’re remembering it wrong they came at the end of April; they fought a while before I finally calmed them down and was exhausted when my mother suddenly said I just realized that Skinny hasn’t come to visit yet why hasn’t she come? Her mention of Skinny left me speechless; indeed we’d been very close and she’d lived with our family for a bit when I was young, and even though she was actually two years older than me we called her Skinny because malnutrition had left her small and skinny; I thought Mom would have already forgotten since they’d last seen each other many years ago when Mom was still normal with nothing more than a stooped back; Skinny brought her son, a tall and handsome young man in silver framed glasses who’d just begun his third year of middle school; there’s a photo of him with my mother left behind like the historical remnant of a nineteenth-century western colonizer and eastern native, his arm around her shoulder and a smile exposing his braces—we sat in the main room eating the guava Skinny brought, she said her family had grown it and her husband was in the fruit trade, I asked her where do you work and she said anywhere with a stable job, anywhere that was shorthanded that’s where she worked, sometimes helping people with their children and sometimes working the register at a convenience store, she’d even do community sanitation work, I asked why she didn’t work in a factory to which she shook her head and said she couldn’t, the arthritis in her shoulder was pretty bad and the ones who usually worked ten plus hours were all young ’uns, not to mention that a lot of the Pearl River Delta factories were closing and being relocated to Southeast Asia, not a good mix. I understood her unease, a divorcée with two children and no academic credentials who’d drifted between jobs on the Pearl River Delta for—now that I do the math—twenty years already; I still think about the summer when I was a student in 1992 or 1993 and I went to look for her in Hong Kong, she was selling SIM cards in one of the Chunking Mansions—that’s right, those Chunking Mansions, the ones listed in that popular 70s Lonely Planet world travel guide and described in Tony Wheeler’s 1989 Southeast Asia on a Shoestring under “magical phrases to get affordable accommodations in Hong Kong,” and later appeared in the 90’s Wong Kar-Wai film where Takeshi Kaneshiro and Faye Wang discuss the shelf life of canned pineapple—I originally wanted to meet her there but Skinny declined and suggested a food stall that was hundreds of meters away next to Kowloon Garden; she looked like she had nothing to do with the bright, beautiful surface of the city with her dark skin, hair tied back, and faded straight-cut jeans; we walked along the ramp and chatted, I forget most of what we talked about and can only remember her saying that right after she’d arrived there’d been an arson case at the jewelry store inside the Mansions, the police came and arrested a few Nepalese—not necessarily because they did it but just because they wanted gold the most and would allegedly hide it in their digestive tract to smuggle back to their country—the police took them into custody and made them do squat jumps like rabbits until the gold inside fell out, even playing music for them, it was all too easy to picture; when she mentioned music the first thing that came to mind was a Michael Jackson song and the image of him dancing Billie Jean on stage, a hip thrust and glistening metal jingling in the golden light as it fell, I was a diehard fan back then but Skinny looked like she didn’t know who Michael Jackson was, she said this made her think about when she was hungry and scavenged for food only to give herself constipation—an unpleasant experience—I didn’t know she’d gone through this, only that she was eleven or twelve when she’d stayed with us—to be precise, when our family took her in as she was my aunt’s kid, naturally unruly and stubborn, but my aunt died early on and her husband couldn’t take care of Skinny and wanted to give her up, so my family took on one more mouth to feed even though we were also so poor that our clothes were worn to holes, luckily she got on well with us, she was with us for four or five years and Mom wasn’t too keen at first when my uncle came around to take her back but Dad said it’s up to her, no matter how long we look after her she’ll always have a different last name, she’ll always be someone else’s daughter and we can’t change that, he made my uncle take her back after that and we slowly grew apart—I heard Skinny dropped out not long after she went back and rushed off to work part-time on the Pearl River Delta, but I still had several more years to endure, retaking the Gaokao so I could finally escape that plot of land that made us a feel deep guilt; we were a violent collision when we met in Hong Kong, two marbles filled with kinetic energy that could only follow the correct route after a mutually violent collision, we were just over twenty and believed life had its own path, confident we would strike it at the perfect angle, as we took the tram, ate ice cream bars, sat close together as if we’d never been apart, and talked about the countless things we saw and heard, everything was novel and warm, because “The Spring Winds of Reform Blow Across the South” is what the papers said, a golden era to rattle people’s hearts; Jacky Cheung’s earliest recordings at the Hong Kong Coliseum reverberated through streets and alleys, and before that there were the delicate echoes of Alan Tam and Leslie Cheung, every Chinese character on the Nathan Road shop sign like a giant stone suspended in midair; we still encounter so many foreign devils frightened by those big characters, shouldering their cameras as they shuffle back and forth along the sun-scorched asphalt to converge into a mass of people; it was my first time seeing so many people, each stepping confidently—I thought we walked fast but not fast enough to keep up with everyone swish-swishing like they were chasing after the sweet scent of pineapple buns from the street corner bakery—and then there were the newsstands sent spiraling in the wind alongside front pages tracking the stock market’s recent rises and falls, and the students lined up on their way from Bible school, uniforms tidy and trim, some with story books still in hand—this made a deep impression on me because we never acted like this when we were in school, our bodies were created from mud and grass (mud and grass that remains within us, even now)—these students head towards Victoria Harbor to sing hymns, their path momentarily coinciding with ours, the exaggerated guttural sound of roiling brine from the green-bottomed cruise ships just happening to cover the students’ singing; exhausted, we took a brief break against the railing to take in the scenery, an opposing continuous shore and imposing architecture that included the tallest building in all of Hong Kong at the time—Central Plaza—and the second tallest building—the Bank of China Tower—one side set ablaze glittering in the sunset, you might call it orange-red, that dazzling hue refracted by the three-column frame, I don’t remember what specific color it was but at the same time I realized my daughter and I had shared a moment—we’d both seen the light of the setting sun shine orange upon a gigantic forest of man-made steel—the sheer beauty awed Skinny and I into silence; I saw a twinkle in her eyes as the light reflected off the mansions before us, the naturally upturned and rounded tip of her nose and the curl of her generous upper lip formed an angle unique amongst philtrums; shining even redder in the sunset glow her lips needed no lipstick—a gene particular to us—I looked towards this maternal relative who felt momentarily like a stranger, like nothing more than someone I might pass on the street if not for the formation of space between her nose and lip, the moment reminded us of our close blood ties and that was something immutable—it was what set us apart from others—our shared grandmother had the same nose and mouth and I remembered from an old black and white picture taken in 1926 that her mother did too; because the photo was taken in a studio she wore a solemn expression that made the lower half of her face even more prominent, barely twenty, she was in the golden days of youth, hair pulled back and her fringe combed into a curtain across her forehead, a large aoqun draped over her slightly stooped torso, a pair of unbound feet in English-style leather shoes extended before her, she held a fan in one hand and an open book in the other and behind her stood an indoor palm tree, all carefully staged, it shows how the art of portraiture has gotten worse with each generation, our modern day replicas won’t get within an inch of this art no matter what we do; not many city goers could get their picture taken back then—this photo was taken at the famous Afong Studio and according to Grandma’s memory the picture was taken after my great-grandmother and her father settled in Hong Kong, he let her get her photo taken because he was choosing a partner for her at the time and it was convenient to have; as for its effectiveness and whether it was this picture that caught my great-grandfather’s eye, I can’t say; there was a long stretch of time when I didn’t understand my mother or my grandmother, not to mention my great-grandmother, it was lucky enough that we still even had her portrait—this was what led me to believe great-grandmother was born into what was, at least at the time, a middle class family—but fortunes turned and this is what our generation had become; I remember when my daughter was little she asked me if we had any really cool ancestors and I said we didn’t, we were three generations of farmers, all common and ordinary—I probably hadn’t considered my great-grandmother’s side of the family—my daughter was let down by my response and I know how she felt because I once asked a similar question of my parents; this is probably a question all children ask, because who wouldn’t wish for an awe-inspiring ancestor? Their ancestor’s noble blood still flows through them even if they don’t brag about it and to me that’s something to be proud of, I believe it’s what our ancient ancestors worked so hard for—extending privileges for later generations to enjoy, becoming their determination to climb their way up, this constitutes a sort of closed circle of causality, memory’s remnants and reminiscence—I don’t actually care about it all that much and I’m not sensitive about it either, although I’m still collecting data on family histories, ancestral halls, folk customs, and the like, but it’s nothing more than a job; I’ve drawn a clear line between work and my own life, I’ve researched so many other families excluding my own—until later—my daughter told me in an email that she took an online genealogy test on a website apparently launched in San Francisco by some overseas Chinese called “China’s Genealogy,” spending two hundred dollars to register as a member to browse and post on the forum, which she assured me was one hundred percent reliable because her classmate Roderick James found his great-great-grandfather on this site, Charlie Law—1891 Enping, Guangdong: born Luo; age 19 Shantu: tricked by the Dutch into becoming a “coolie” on an English ship leaving from Hong Kong; 1910 Indonesia: worked on the East Sumatra Plantation until 1914 when, no longer able to tolerate their boss’s orders, he and his companions attacked the foreman and fled into exile before being captured, imprisoned, and then resold to an American; 1916-1917 Hawaii: made a living in and almost became fish food, then earned his freedom when his employer went bankrupt—he readily volunteered and enlisted in the Marine Corps when America entered the Great War, but broke his leg during a drill and was laid up for almost half a year until it was finally decided he couldn’t fight; end of the following year: the war was won and his superior granted him a pension in recognition of his service, he took that recognition to go into the fishing business where he struck gold, everyone around him called him “Fishbone Luo,”—I can’t think of the reason, perhaps because he was tiny and shriveled—and so Fishbone Luo settled in California and five-generations-of-marrying-white-people later came Roderick James, there were roughly three hundred people in his family but none of them knew about their ancestor Fishbone Luo’s ties to China, Fishbone Luo never again set foot in his hometown an ocean away; Mr. Luo’s original name “Luo Chengtang” was changed within his family, he’d apparently never been on good terms with his siblings and was often bullied, another big reason he cut ties with them and never sent his hometown a cent until he died; Fishbone Luo recorded these memories and actually passed them to the following generation, one of Roderick James’ great uncles, but as time fades people forget; later on Roderick went to visit Luo and quickly found other relatives to whose graves and ancestral halls he paid his respects; memories are Legos pieced together block by block demonstrating once more that we’re not alone in this world, we’re not singular continents but rather archipelagos with shared horizons, and no matter how far we go, those discarded and thrown to the streets will inevitably be given shelter, that’s why my daughter’s email about the feeling brought on by the Golden Gate Bridge’s orange glow was no coincidence but was likely passed on to her by some ancestor: she just happened to stumble upon my great-grandfather’s documents confirming he sold tea leaves in San Francisco from 1931 to 1940 by which time he’d already been married to my great-grandmother for several years—reading up to this point, somewhere deep in my heart there was a sudden trembling, like shivering flesh that instinctively jumps about—the information my daughter provided in the email was extraordinary, I’ve long since neglected this thread left by my great-grandfather, her email ended there but later she’d have news that was even more reliable than the website; she’d said it would take some time but that night I couldn’t sleep, my bug spray had lost its effectiveness and I couldn’t help thinking that every buzzing mosquito sounded like a somber greeting striking my face; already immune to the mosquitoes my father lay asleep in the main room, his snores drifted from the bamboo mat towards the sky, climbing past the ancestral tablet on the main wall and around the ceiling beams before winding up in my room, I held these snores that have continued for over half a century close to my breast, feeling their purity and how they lived shallowly and simply, sincerely and diligently, unaware, chasing the traces of sun sent silently into the night, they lived in a time and space separate from us, one that wasn’t as noisy or disorderly as the present, one where the obsolete would never rot; if there was an intersection between these two realities it would be because the elderly still clung to life in this world. Living is a reminder of sorts. I remember the game I played with my father when I was little, “cockfighting”—two people are fenced in, each holds one of their legs and hops on the other bumping the opponent with their knee until there’s only one standing, the winner—my older brother and I took turns challenging our father and were effortlessly defeated each time only to defiantly rise and be beaten once more; Dad would stand in the enclosure on one leg sweat streaming from his forehead dripping into the crook of his leg looking like one dignified cock, then my boyish little sister would applaud and shout; sometimes we thought him ruthless because what good did it do for an adult to bully little kids, but he never got it and continued to beat us time and time again, he was serious like that, like he was preserving the dignity of this ancient game—games, too, had their own dignity and you couldn’t rely on careless cheating to win—then my brother and I grew up and never played “cockfighting” again, I don’t know when we stopped, I don’t remember when the last time we played was or where we were, many things have faded similarly and the longer we live the more deeply we understand this; I eagerly awaited my daughter’s next email in the following days but happened upon something unexpected, I was dozing on the hammock, one quick dream following another, the breezeless afternoon weather hot and humid with clouds blocking out the sun, even Mom with her shady and cool constitution was sweating soundlessly, the indoor electric fan was swiveling creakily when I suddenly heard someone shouting and knocking on the front door and I sat up to answer the door, I was a little dumbfounded to see Skinny even skinnier than last time, she wore linen clothes and cloth shoes that were soaked in more than a little mud like she’d come through sugar cane fields to get here, I told her that my folks had mentioned her a few days ago and here she was, Skinny said she knew about their condition and had wanted to visit but always got caught up in other things which led to her putting it off, for a moment I didn’t understand what she meant by “other things”; I saw her quietly make her way to the center of the yard like she was scared of waking the elderly, but my parents were already up—it was like they’d had some sort of premonition—and she ran into them under the eaves; endlessly joyous, they had me bring the bench to the yard, sat down, and exchanged greetings, the conversation deepening gradually; Skinny mentioned she’d just finished filing for divorce—her husband had crossed the line half a year prior and cheated, in the end she asked for nothing and left the marriage almost empty-handed—we were all stunned to hear this and sighed in sympathy for her fate as this was the second time she’d met a good-for-nothing man, but it was her who comforted us saying it was nothing, that she didn’t divorce because he’d crossed the line but because she’d wanted to shake free from those family ties for a while now; my parents asked what about her children and she said her youngest son stayed with his father; my mother sighed in sympathy saying she shouldn’t leave her son to others and that only she could care for him, but I hurried to cut off her off and said, Skinny-jiejie’s son is grown and in high school, you took a picture with him last time he came, he wasn’t a little kid then either, these people know what they’re doing. Mom got up without another word and grabbed a peanut dumpling from the kitchen where there was still a slice of the jackfruit I’d bought in town yesterday, she grabbed that too; Skinny ate with us as part of the family, her smile warm and open, the changes I felt so sharply in her weren’t like last time, the things that once weighed on her had already disappeared and left her at ease; she mentioned that she recently began attending painting classes and that her teacher who was currently living in Guangzhou was a woman artist from Nanjing who volunteered to teach women laborers in cities and villages how to read and paint, Skinny had already gone through two sessions’ worth of course materials drawing pastel portraits of her work friends—there was a short person with a cane, a person screwing screws in an assembly line, a worker in a rubber suit hanging on a clothesline, a person with swollen legs standing at the front desk, someone who’d had their hand bitten off by the machinery, a woman with a protruding belly standing on the roof of a twelve-story building, a person who stole and ate dogs, another who looked like he’d played around with an electric saw and gave himself a Smart³ hairstyle—they were all people; Skinny flipped through her phone showing me the photos in her album, the ones that seemed like simple sketches were in no way simple and the people she drew all had distinct features: round heads, big eyes like they’d been wronged upturned so the whites emerged—it reminded me of Bada Shanren and Edvard Munch, but Skinny said it was just because she couldn’t draw eye movement—she said her teacher had chosen these pieces for an exhibit that more than a few young people who were happy to talk to Skinny had attended, encouraging her to keep drawing by saying she was better than many of the pros in their circle and that her drawings were sincere, her teacher said that she could connect with even more drifting women laborers in the future and hold even bigger exhibitions throughout the country. Her teacher encouraged her to read more and write a memoir. We highly praised the plans Skinny described and my parents awkwardly laughed along even though they didn’t understand. We chatted for a while and finished the snacks, then my parents went back to their room for tea; Skinny came out with me and had me take her for a turn about the old house, pointing to the building we lived in when we were little atop the hill on the other side of the village, it was even older than where we lived now; I’d renovated it some years ago transforming it into my own little museum—the inside was in truth just some old stuff I couldn’t bring myself to throw away, none of it whole: she remembered the wood fish she beat during the town’s theater festival and the trundling hoops we played with, the leftover half of the blowball gun and the Chinese history picture book on the shelf published by Liaoning Fine Arts Press—a rarity back then, the young people in the village had loaned it out far and wide. She lingered a while before the wall plastered full of pictures; at the top was a group photo from when my father and I went to register me for college in Guangdong’s capital, I shouldered a green military bag and wore slides, my pale face making the photo appear aged, my father one or two centimeters taller than me, skinny and full of energy in a dark short-sleeved open-collared shirt and pants, he still dresses like this—my impression of him hasn’t changed—we’re pressed together, shoulders touching, hands hanging at our sides, we took so many pictures with this somewhat strange posture and distance between us—in the back apart from the school gate is the statue of the Five Yuexiu Goats, the old Canton Customs House, the ministry for the concession of Shamian Island, and the White Swan Hotel; Skinny pointed them out one-by-one but eventually she couldn’t bear to smile any longer; the picture with my father left a strong impression, but at the time no one found it odd, it was natural, perhaps just a reflection of nothing more than what was, for the time, a typical father-son relationship in a typical rural household, but there’s no way to withstand the scrutiny of today’s generation more than twenty years later, it’s very normal, those who survived the changes of the past years might be deranged; I’m happy to still be alive and so is Skinny, at least I could still use my life as a record and evade forgetting, and then, climbing through the skylight to the roof, I warned Skinny whenever she was about to fall through the tiles, but she kept walking without the slightest hesitation; I followed her, and lit a cigarette, and for a while we stood silently looking out at the scenery; the sun peeked out to sprinkle the nearby banana leaves with spots of light bright one moment and dim the next; in the distance the kind of wind good for burning straw had engulfed a eucalyptus forest and even farther off was a sugar factory’s smokeless chimney high in the gray-white clouds like a charred stick in the air, it only worked at specific moments and now goes through endless meaningless spells, not unlike humanity, offering feeble resistance while exposed to the void for long stretches of time—from the roof’s eastern side the tip of Zhushan’s distant silhouette is visible—here Zhushan means “Bamboo Mountain” but it’s really a small hill—I pointed and told Skinny that Dad’s already bought a grave plot there and I’ve only just learned he bought a plot on the other side as well, there might be even more; it’s too early and sounds a little irrational but it’s actually very reasonable, with everyone now scrambling for land; I don’t know who stirred things up first: two years ago it didn’t matter that this place was so remote, the tens of hundreds of square kilometers rich in feng shui were all snatched up, leaving nothing but unusable wild land, and with everyone racing to seize land Father’s reasoning of “I’ll be able to sleep peacefully with all that land on my mind” felt like a giant taunt; but the countryside baby boom⁴ had ebbed with the tide, the babies were old and awaiting the bell that would signal the end of their days when they’d crumble to dust and be shoved deep underground. We were on the road once more when, perhaps tinged by my words, Skinny asked me if she could stay for a bit longer to alleviate some of the pressures that came with caring for my parents; she took my lack of response as silent agreement when in actuality I didn’t have the right to answer; her particular position in our family meant she could decide for herself, of course we were both happy with the idea, and so years after she’d first stayed with us she came to live with us once more; I helped Skinny sweep the eastern wing so she could stay—it was originally my older brother’s but he hadn’t been back in a long time so it had gathered dust—she really saved me a lot of trouble, I strolled into the main room every day after morning prayer to find her wrapping up my parents’ morning routine, breakfast already made, and then after the meal she’d deftly give massages as she apparently used to work in a beauty salon; I was secretly embarrassed because compared to Skinny my previous work wouldn’t even earn a passing grade, I included this as well in the email to my daughter, who replied with a laughing emoji and expressed how much she wanted to meet this cousin in person—only then did I realize she’d never officially met Skinny, maybe I’d mentioned her in a story before bedtime when my daughter was little or maybe she’d seen Skinny at the family’s New Year celebration, but there was no way she could remember such a brief encounter, she doesn’t even care about our distant relatives—understanding this generation was like understanding my past self, understanding who I was in the beginning and my struggle to integrate into city life; even after having my daughter I still consider it natural that I’m responsible for communicating the value of identity to this generation and a personal failure if I can’t: clearly I underestimated the degree of difficulty that stretched before us across the gulf that was tearing and expanding at immeasurable speeds every year, not even bay bridges grounded in mud  could traverse it, and any man attempting to serve as a bridge would instantly end up as gulf fodder, that’s what I think; according to my daughter, who never saw eye to eye with my gloomy village and watched distantly with cold eyes until it vanished, the sediments of times past reveal only a faint halo under outside scrutiny, which is why she so desires to trace the footsteps of our ancestors over the last hundred years; in the email she sent was a single black and white picture she’d found in the University of Southern California library’s online archives: in the photo a bright light shone down on a hill covered top to bottom in black tombstones, the illuminated and darkened surfaces of those stones interlocking to embody a refined sort of order, like aliens had planted hieroglyphs there—it’s a 19^th-century cemetery for overseas Chinese laborers, laborers who had been made into “coolies,” tossed in the brig of a ship, and sent across the ocean to pan for

gold on another continent before finally dying in a strange land; those with tombstones were the lucky ones: most of them disappeared under bridges, in the depths of tunnels, or were left floating amongst the seaweed, unknown. My daughter said my great-grandfather died in America, in a car accident at fifty-three without any final words, and since then he has (his bones have) remained in San Francisco; my great-grandmother never thought to bring him back. That’s the latest news. It has left me with even more questions like why didn’t he go back in the end? It was like a complicated riddle where every thread I pulled was another question, my daughter continuing her search while I continued waiting for her to hurl more spears of news, maybe it’s the yellowing image or the many brief sentences that caused my emotions to rise and fall, I have a feeling that the truths she finds upstream of time’s flowing river might not be the truths we want to know—we only believe in established truths—my daughter still needs time before she gets this; sometimes we prefer to shut our mouths and to let our memories be sealed within our minds—this seems quite effective—we have far too much faith in our rationality and domestication’s artificiality, but history has already confirmed time and time again that the most magnificent part of anything is always the part that supersedes reason, the undefinable bit—that’s how it happened: my mother was having trouble sleeping one night and so I was at Skinny’s side helping her hypnotize my mother; she had her lay back in the recliner, a dimly lit lamp in the main room left only their dimly lit silhouettes for me to see, it was a rare evening when my father slept peacefully and only the chirping of the crickets outside could be heard; a layer of sweat covered my mother’s forehead, she was a little nervous and slow to get into the swing of things since it was her first time being hypnotized—Skinny was incredibly patient and spoke softly making it the first time I realized our dialect could be spoken so gently it was like hearing a different language, maybe twenty minutes later Skinny and I started seeing results in my mother’s breathing as it gradually evened out, her pupils starting to rapidly move around beneath her eyelids, we were about to go back to the room to get her a light blanket when my mother suddenly mumbled when do we set sail? There’s such an awful stink below deck I can’t stay there. Skinny and I looked at each other shocked, she bent down and asked Mom Auntie, where are you headed? Mom’s answer To San Francisco gave me goosebumps. Skinny followed up asking what she was going to San Francisco for to which my mother pursed her lips and let out a heavy sigh before finally saying she was searching for a relative she had there so they could strike it rich together. I looked on as Skinny continued her questioning; I found that much like an experienced fieldwork journalist there was a surprising precision to Skinny’s questions which were essentially all the questions I wanted to ask—did she know something about my great-grandfather that made her want to continue her search? I strained to understand my mother’s sporadic responses most of which were, not counting the few nonsensicles, logical; she said she was on a Japanese steamboat that had departed from Hong Kong for a twenty-some day journey overseas and that she was deckside every day vomiting from seasickness but there were too many people in the hold—all Chinese—and she had to struggle to squeeze her way through the wall of people whose bodies had been pickled in the stench of sweat and piss, she endured the days thinking things would get better once they landed never considering that this was only the beginning, the ship reaching San Francisco’s port just as the weekend began and the immigration office closed, so their party was rushed off to Angel Island where they stayed in a detention center, her in the cell for women and children with over forty others, children together with their mothers—many of them Taishanese—though there were also people from Xinhui and Xiangshan, some with hollow eyes who’d been detained for a while; one person said the site had an enormous Christmas tree every winter that played Christmas songs and the national anthem and they’d already been through it four or five times; Mom got a nasty shock from that and couldn’t sleep for a long time—the entire night was the rank smell of bed sheets and the wails of small children; she was summoned a week later, there were a great many people in the courtroom all asking crafty questions like How do you make bedroom floor tiles? Where is the lamp situated in the kitchen? What kind of script is on your ancestor’s gravestone? Unprepared and nervous, she couldn’t respond and they denied her entrance into the country, extending her stay on Angel Island; afterwards she still had to go for a medical exam, completely naked, where a doctor in a white coat inspected her lower body with a probe; horribly uncomfortable it was all she could do not to cry; the doctor gave her a wooden basin after the exam to collect urine and stool samples, she had no problem with the urine but her diet of only salted crackers and tapioca flour kept her from pooping, they even had someone standing nearby with the specific job of making sure they finished their food, not allowing for any leftovers, she was parched and longed for water but the hot water supply was incredibly limited and she could only drink water from the tap near the entrance to their living quarters where the supervisor would yell, rush her inside, and then lock the gate as scheduled; the gates opened for activities once every morning, afternoon, and evening, which is when she walked around the yard watching others knit and make small talk, there was a church lady who surprised them with gifts—she really liked Church Lady—she remembered her name was Mora or Molly (Mom opened her mouth to exaggerate each sound when she said her name), she often had Church Lady tell stories, ones about people blessed and protected by God, those in Heaven, in Hell, at sea, everywhere, then when Church Lady finished she would shake mom’s hand and say she hoped they would become reality and that there was nothing to fear as long as you were an honest person; Mom believed Church Lady’s words thinking she could enter the country sooner, never thinking that afterwards she’d be brought in twice for questioning only to be sent back, it was like a never-ending nightmare spending over a year in the Angel Island detention center. Skinny asked And then what, were you finally let into the country? Mom hesitated, caught off guard, her voice was quiet when she said Of course, they let me through. She still remembers when she stepped off the boat onto the Golden Gate Bridge—such a large bridge, such high towers, such long cables—when she first laid eyes on it it wasn’t just her but also those alongside her that exclaimed How did they build this bright red bridge? Where did they get so much steel? America sure is rich! The people on board were abuzz as if they’d soon be able to dig for gold and strike it rich; with the azure sea as its backdrop the bridge shone beneath the sun’s rays as if made of gold; the wind picked up and the bridge cables moved with it, the massive reflection floated on the water’s surface as if washed in by the surging sea, capsized, crashing against the white waves; it was truly a sight to see and she watched spellbound unable to find the words to describe it, it was just “a sight;” she thought about it repeatedly like paying a temple visit—she believed there was something otherworldly about this bridge, otherwise it wouldn’t be this gargantuan, larger than even the temple statues; from then on whenever she had a break after work she went down to the coast to gaze upon the bridge—it was more satisfying than a temple visit—she must have taken it in over a hundred times from every angle and every side, cloudy days and sunny, in winter and summer, she could paint it with her eyes closed. Mom stopped here and fell into silence and despite our prompting offered nothing more than a grunt, her breaths gradually became drawn out and I saw she was already in a deep slumber, I let her be and dragged Skinny to our respective rooms for the night; Mom was energetic and had completely forgotten what she’d told us when I got up the next day—she just barely remembered having a dream but that was fuzzy too—she’d slept well and explained the hypnosis had worked, we tried several more times after that but it never worked the same again; we found out by chance—some things are hard to explain—that Mom had never been to San Francisco, never mind her colorful recollection of the ocean voyage, detention center, Church Lady, and Golden Gate Bridge; no matter how I rack my brains I can only come up with two possibilities: 1) These were originally someone else’s memories; 2) They were fragments of someone else’s memories that my mother had pieced into something new. I’m inclined towards the latter—Mom’s Alzheimer’s really changed things—I’ve seen her fight with Dad, seen her during a flare-up as she assembled the chaotic jumble of memories in her head in such a way that I never knew whether to laugh or cry and could only think how pitiful—suffering from this disease is truly the most undignified thing in the world, taking a person you knew so intimately only to transform them into a complete stranger; Skinny and I seized the opportunity one night and carried a bench into the yard so we might enjoy the coolness while my parents were sleeping, high in the sky the moon beamed upon us until our shadows left no trace, we talked about my mother’s decades of hardships and Skinny remembered Mom’s early years on the production brigade working dawn to dusk, the sweet potato she’d taken for lunch gone uneaten, to earn some credits, then when Skinny came home from school hungry Mom would fish the potato out of its sack for her—Skinny’s eyes grew moist here—maybe Skinny associates that Mom with the Skinny from the past few years living half her life like a leaf floating on the water’s surface, shallow but without any regrets, the good and bad are but the blink of an eye—who would’ve thought we were still two youngsters making shapes with our hands in the moonlight and now here we sat white-haired and middle aged talking about the past until four or five in the morning yet not tired in the least—Skinny suddenly grew quiet and said she heard something, I said It’s a corn crake, they cry every morning, real reliable and a lot better than any human, Skinny said So something like that’s still around, she thought they’d already disappeared, though I’d never actually seen one I firmly believed it was a crake—from a distant memory it was a sound we didn’t take seriously when it first occurred, I’ve already forgotten them like the stories my grandmother told when Skinny brought up our childhood, but my grandmother remembered them clearly and the older she got the more clearly she remembered. As far as I can remember, when the old woman who was always smiling at us never showing any other expression sitting beneath the jackfruit tree year round was alone, she stared blankly at the pool of water that had formed in the yard, that glimmering puddle lighting up her entire figure—what kind of scene was this, how was the mind of a ten-year-old supposed to process it? I contemplated Skinny’s words and listened to her go on talking about how my grandmother once mentioned a large treasure chest her family had that was filled with imported goods and all sorts of strange fun things; she loved hiding inside when she was little, then she was found out by my great-grandmother and could no longer avoiding her beatings—wiping her tears at the same time—Grandma thought she’d broken her mother’s heart but she didn’t know it was actually the chest that was at fault; her father had brought that box over, she’d never met him and didn’t know what he looked like. In truth our great-grandfather went back to his hometown for the last time and stayed over a month in 1931, then he came back with that chest and bestowed Grandma to my great-grandmother, Grandma was the last female addition to the family born the following year, she had two older brothers so it would’ve been natural if she was doted on the most but that wasn’t how things turned out; after my great-grandfather disappeared there was a rumor that he had a family in America, my great-grandmother couldn’t remarry and spent the rest of her life as a widow making the chest an object of resentment a feeling that gradually fell onto her children’s shoulders, especially my grandmother who received the least of her love; during the war at the age of seventeen my grandmother seized the opportunity to flee to Hainan with the KMT and the villagers taking the same path south to western Guangdong where things were safer; she never went back after. Skinny said that aside from what my grandmother had told her she’d put quite a bit of effort in gathering this information from close friends and family, even making the roundtrip to Grandma’s hometown—a town in the Five Counties of Jiangmen known for having lots of overseas Chinese—my great-grandmother had lived on some market street that had already worn away without a trace falling into a true pile of ruins; Skinny said she’d captured it all on her phone and handed me a picture—all remnants of arcaded buildings, mold-covered walkways lined by pillars, carved cornices crumbling to wind erosion, faded Roman columns like a beauty resting chin in hand, conveying a certain tiredness, the Manchurian windows on both sides

had already lost their sparkle yet under the light of a cloudy day maintained their many colors, a row of triforia deflected the sunlight and drew the eyes of onlookers to an unknown darkness, there were protruding tiles along with gloomy limestone and cracks of growing greenery, some of the windows facing the street were punched through into gaping mouths while some remained in one piece, steadfast specters reflecting the clouds in the sky as they drifted left one moment and right the next before vanishing leaving behind nothing more than a thin gray light; the giant characters on the shop sign emerged from this darkness while some had been washed away by the years now nonexistent, occupying the empty space in our minds where we visualize and question them instead. I stared at the pictures for a while not wanting to take them from her hand, I’d seen a fair amount of arcaded buildings mostly designed as tourist spots but this architecture, entirely abandoned, turned out to be a striking beauty; a bit dizzy I couldn’t tell whether its beauty stemmed from its broken down form (because we, too, are easily broken) or from something behind it—or maybe I didn’t see anything at all. Skinny was amused to see me in a daze and took back her phone; I think she saw something; I’m certain she did; otherwise, why would she go through the trouble of searching for it; I’m sure it’s nothing as simple as fate and has no connection to what I’ve seen or learned; I’m an outsider compared to Skinny and I was still an outsider when compared to my daughter who belonged to the next generation, without a doubt these women have a secret means of communication from my great-grandmother to my grandmother, my mother, Skinny, and now my daughter, there must be some sort of obsession that allowed for the inheritance of this information; that night Skinny and I were up ‘til dawn, our discussion fruitless; the only thing we agreed on was that my mother’s fragmented memory of ocean travels were likely from my grandmother and that my grandmother’s memories came from the previous generation. It hadn’t even been two hours since we retired to our rooms when we rose, exhausted, Mom was waiting with my father, she’d already made breakfast of just plain rice and side dishes but we ate them with relish, her cooking was the only thing that hadn’t changed—everything else had—the roof-level lychee blossoms withered, the fruit swelling and reddening to be picked and gobbled into our stomachs; a scorching June ended only to become an even more scorching July then August and before we knew it Skinny had been with us for more than three months, I sensed her unease near the end and asked what’s wrong, she said that next month her son had tests and she needed to go back to Guangzhou—I guess she couldn’t wait to see my daughter and I reassured her saying it’s no big deal, our meeting was fate and if it doesn’t work out we’ll see each other again but I didn’t know when we would meet next because “friends could meet in this life as rarely as Orion and Scorpio”—then there was my daughter who found out about her departure later and immediately bought a plane ticket back starting her summer break early, her mom had made plans to visit too so we all got a meal together and considered it a farewell for Skinny. Skinny had gotten up early to slaughter a chicken, steam some oysters, and bustle about the kitchen before changing into a nice open-collared short-sleeved shirt; she looked a little nervous because when all was said and done this was her first time seeing mother and daughter together; my daughter was no stranger, after paying her respects to her grandparents she went to greet her cousin Skinny like they’d known each other for years, my daughter looked darker this time around, her skin was a sun-soaked wheat color like the sun was even hotter in California than here; the air about her had matured as well—she’d been Cardcaptor Sakura ever since she was little, I could never grasp her fluxes and shifts, every other moment was like opening a mystery box, different every time, this is probably one of the joys of being a parent, I’m grateful for this development and so is my ex—though she’s rarely present I know her love for our daughter has never waned, the same as the moment she first saw our daughter while laying in that hospital bed, consciousness muddled and still dizzy from the anesthesia; she wiped the sweat from our daughter’s hand; here we were at the dining table, our daughter loudly telling us everything she experienced in America as my ex-wife listened carefully and quietly, occasionally showing a tiny smile while I watched, and—I don’t know what made me remember this—the moment our daughter arrived was the moment the world blessed us with a kiss. My daughter told us about being pick-pocketed in New York; about museums that were magnificent beyond compare; about how in New Orleans she ran into an old middle school classmate at the beach who drove a Bentley; she spoke in Mandarin one second and switched to Hlai dialect the next, wanting to be considerate of her grandparents who don’t understand the Mandarin and her mother who doesn’t understand dialect, but we all listened intently, not bothered in the slightest, and maybe this was a completely new form of expression, I think I might’ve even heard a Mexican accent; Skinny was non-stop with her asking this and that, just like old friends quickly establishing a silent understanding amongst themselves hand in hand as they left the dining table whispering and sharing secrets under the eaves behind veranda columns or in the shade of the yard’s fruit trees as if trying to avoid us; my ex-wife and I could only stand to the side and respectfully watch from afar; the centripetal force of this fast-spinning female universe was so indescribably powerful that despite coming to say farewell they’d completely forgotten everyone around them; we walked Skinny to the bus at the edge of town, my daughter tugging her arm while my ex-wife and I followed behind; they walked as carefree as we did, as though taking a stroll through sugarcane fields beneath the scorching sun over glowing slab stone streets and alongside the scattered Tudigong shrines; we could hear a lively game of pai gow drifting from the shops under the camphor trees to permeate the dense and sweltering air, a group of old men smoking on the storefront bench followed us with their eyes as we passed; half-naked kids chased a dog this way and that blocking the road every now and then, but my daughter and Skinny took a leisurely detour talking non-stop—my ex-wife and I had nothing to say, only the sound of our shoes on the gravel road; the three of us saw Skinny off and walked back, our footsteps louder now that our daughter had joined us; finally she couldn’t take it and broke the silence to tell us she and Skinny had talked about our great-grandparents, earning an astonished click of the tongue from us—my great-grandmother had never actually entered America and had never seen the Golden Gate Bridge, it was a story she’d created from a picture, a black and white bird’s eye-view of the bridge that my great-grandfather brought back from America; when she was little Skinny had seen the framed picture that has since discolored and distorted inside Grandma’s dresser drawer, leaving the bridge nothing more than a white shadow; I don’t know how many times my great-grandmother glanced at that picture: a dream of a bridge, a husband overseas, and a well-traveled life so beautiful that she actually went to America in search of a husband, she was jammed like a coolie into the bottom of that boat, and held in detention on Angel Island for one and a half years before finally being sent right back without even setting foot on American soil, let alone finding a husband; my daughter found the information online in the released immigration and detention records and confirmed Skinny’s hunch that my great-grandmother came to America in 1934, but it was a failed attempt, meaningless; her time in the detention center became a nightmare that stayed with her until the end, silently affecting everything she did, and that was ultimately inherited by her descendants; as for her husband, my great-grandfather—this is just what we heard—he married a white woman in San Francisco, had great-grandchildren, and lives in LA. That’s the whole story. I was in a trance as my daughter finished the account one 字 at a time, I’d forgotten who was telling the story, the voice sounded distant, like my daughter’s but also not—it’s not important; why Skinny didn’t tell me herself but told my daughter, that’s not important either; we rack our brains to return to the events of that year struggling to approach an unapproachable reality while those involved do their utmost to cover up and hide the memories in a dark corner, so we play an unwinnable game of hide and seek with history and ancestry, wherethe person closest to reality can’t change a thing, where we came from and where we’ll go has already been written; my daughter stayed at the house several days after we said goodbye to Skinny, then went to Shenzhen with her mom; it’s such a large house with only me and my parents as we continue to endure the scorching sun; when it cools down at night I sometimes still see my parents fighting, scowls on their faces; my Dad’s rumbling snores wake me in the middle of the night, and unable to fall asleep I listen to the corn crake’s cries day after day until suddenly, it stops.

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1. In video games, physical armor cannot protect you from magical attacks, only magical armor can. ↩︎
2. The accounting and farm production unit from the 50s to the 80s. ↩︎
3. A jagged, ragged type of hairstyle in China belonging to the “smart” subculture, which consisted of young migrants from the countryside. ↩︎
4. After WWII ended, the Chinese government encouraged people to have larger families which resulted in the rural baby boom seen during the 1950s and 60s. ↩︎

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Interview with translator Grace Najmulski

Editor Anne O. Fisher: Your translation attracted my attention immediately. “Coming Around” is a gorgeous read, with a powerful tone of detachment and wonder, and deft maneuvering amongst very long periods. This stream-of-consciousness syntax is like floating down a continually branching river that sometimes eddies, or changes direction as the flow goes around a feature of the landscape, but never stops. The syntax is also a perfect fit for this piece, with its themes including the flow of time, and the branches of family, and the ebbing and flowing of relationships and memories over years.  Can you talk about the language and syntax of the original?  

Translator Grace Najmulski: You describe the voice so beautifully, especially considering the Pearl River Delta as a motif in this collection. I’m someone who always has an internal monologue playing in my mind, so this almost stream of conscious style narration made the reading experience feel very intimate. I’ve only ever encountered stream-of-conscious narration in high school when I failed to read The Sound and the Fury, and that left a bitter taste, so it was a pleasant surprise how the voice here swept me away. I knew that the translation needed to stay accessible and easy to follow along, but I also needed to preserve the flowing vibe and purpose of the style, so keeping sentences long enough to push the boundaries of what we’re comfortable reading was a must. After Suo Er told me what he was hoping his style would accomplish—a “subtle” subversion of standardized language—I knew I couldn’t change the actual sentence length. I preserved all of the period placements and tried to use the commas as a way to control the rhythm.

Chinese is much more flexible when it comes to punctuation (which actually came from the west), so I felt justified in playing with comma placement. The rhythm of Chinese stems from syllable count (since each character is 1 syllable), so even if the source text has a lot of commas that doesn’t necessarily mean the text reads choppy to a Chinese speaking audience. To preserve the flow of information seen in the Chinese and not confuse or bog English readers down with subclauses, I actually had to shuffle some information a bit. However, when the narrator was clearly interrupting himself I made sure to preserve that and keep the almost conversational feeling.

AF: How did you come to Suo Er and this piece of writing by him?

GN: 神游 (“Coming Around”) is actually the first story from Suo Er’s debut collection 非亲非故, published by CITIC press in 2023. He has titled this collection “Noncorrelation,” which I might change later since 非亲非故 is actually an idiom describing when you look around and there is nothing and no one familiar in sight: “neither relatives nor friends.” The collection was published by CITIC press in 2023. Suo Er and I met in Iowa when I was completing my masters. He was one of the writers participating in the International Writers Program (IWP) and I was taking a translation workshop that paired up graduate student translators with writers. The voice of Suo Er’s piece struck me immediately. I wanted to know more about him as a writer and see what was going on inside his head. As for how we started with this piece, I just asked him if there was anything he wanted me to translate and he sent me this! I will say, I was pretty shaken when I saw it was ~26 pages with no paragraph breaks, but the story had me so invested in the end that I continued working on it even after that class had ended.

AF: These long sentences are so hard to knit together with the tools at English’s disposal, mostly punctuation and verb forms, but you did it. One inset phrase that struck me as especially richly textured was this: “–extending privileges for later generations to enjoy, becoming their determination to climb their way up, this constitutes a sort of closed circle of causality, memory’s remnants and reminiscence—” There’s so much in there, but that itself is just one piece of a much longer sentence. Talk about layers upon layers!

GN: The original of that phrase is: 泽被后人，荫及子孙，成为他们向上爬的信条，这就构成了一种因果的闭环，记忆的下游和上溯，The part that I found challenging to translate was the “记忆的下游和上溯” which I translated as “memory’s remants and reminiscence” but which if translated literally would be something like “memory’s lower reaches/downstream and going upstream/tracing back to a source.” The original is much more metaphorical since 下游 and 上溯 can both carry strong river associations. What’s interesting is they can function as gerunds too, so 下游 can be to actually go downstream or “going downstream” and same for 上溯. I like the idea of memory being personified, but wanted to try and keep an open interpretation since it could go either way. It also very much plays with the concept of memory and time as being fluid and everchanging, maintaining a water theme that we see “running” throughout the piece. Sadly, keeping the water without the actual meaning of the 下游 and 上溯 getting “lost in the sauce” felt like too big a hurdle for me to leap. While I was playing around with ways to try and keep that river feel I considered using “sediments” as opposed to remnants, but it was hard to find a good pair word to go with it that meant “remembering”. My good friend, thesaurus.com, also had no satisfactory suggestions. However, a big part of poetry is also sound, and saying “sediments” made me think of “remnants” and that in turn quickly led me to “reminiscence,” both of which are audibly similar to sediments. It didn’t address my issue of preserving the water theme, but I felt that this chain of thought really embodied the spirit and style of the piece. Translation is almost always talked about as loss, but here I wanted to think of it as a simple transfer. The poetry of the water theme was simply transferred into the poetry of embodiment + sound. I know this sounds like a convenient way to explain away my “deficiencies” as a translator (and it is), but I think it can simultaneously exist as one of the beautiful things about the art of translation. Translation isn’t one final act, it’s a conversation meant to spark deeper interaction, so I like to think of my English translation here as a seed that needs to be watered and fed.

AF: That’s a productive and generative (germinative?) way to think about translation, and thank you for walking with us through just one of the many “decision trees” in the forest. Another facet of translation that is always a challenge is whether and how much to explicitate—like with the word “indispersable” in the line where the father is thinking about a lost child: “a practiced drawn-out and indispersable groan.” We had a whole conversation about that, with me suggesting expanding the translation to spell out, or explicitate, some of the layers of meaning here.

GN: The original Chinese is kind of like “to erase via scattering.” The image in my head is that when you sigh you exhale all the negative feelings you have, but here he can’t seem to get rid of those negative feelings because he’s kind of suppressing his feelings, not letting himself sob anymore. But I ended up keeping the word “indispersable” because I liked keeping it a little murky there. The word stands out in the fact that (at least microsoft word thinks) it’s not an actual word. And then it can draw attention and let readers go on their own mental journey of what this word means to them, what this piece means to them, and kind of experience it for themselves.

AF: Another word choice that we talked about was “tapioca flour,” which comes up when the narrator’s mother “remembers” being held in detention on Angel Island during her attempted emigration to the US. I suggested that maybe it was “powdered tapioca,” as in a water-soluble powder meant to be mixed with hot water to create a food of sorts, rather than “tapioca flour” which is an ingredient, not a food?

GN: I was also kind of astounded by the idea that it was just flour and asked Suo Er about it. His reply was a picture of the flour along with the explanation that it is commonly used in baking. It’s also what comes up when you google the original text. I think it’s meant to emphasize how inhumane the conditions were because while flour is consumable (technically), it can’t (or really shouldn’t) actually be eaten in its raw form, but that’s all they were given.

AF: Just goes to show how much meaning rides on word choice, even a choice as seemingly small as “flour” vs “powder.” On a lighter note, I love the word nonsensicles. Did you invent it?

GN: Hee hee I did!

AF: How did you come up with it? What led you to that, rather than just “nonsense” or some extant word?

GN:  I feel like the concept of particles, cells, small units of measure, pop up a lot throughout the piece in subtle ways: “indispersable” to imply a scattering of emotions, the neurons in the brain, particles filled with kinetic energy striking each other with their entropic chaos. I think “nonsensicles” was born from a subconscious parallel that my brain found between the father’s indispersable grief and the mother’s “nonsense utterings.” A combination of “nonsense” and “particles,” I envisioned the grief/nonsense as invisible particles radiating outwards in a sort of emotional entropy. Another reason behind my choice was because the original Chinese uses one word, so I wanted one word in English that would imply a plurality that “nonsense” just doesn’t have. The creative aspect of nonsensicles was a happy coincidence, as it also stretches our understanding of the English language, an act of resistance from the source text that refuses to be completely subjugated by English norms. It’s something I try to work into most of my translation projects when I see an opportunity.

AF: And I’m glad you do. It’s inspiring to hear how many thematic threads come together to inform every choice. And now, echoing the end of Suo Er’s narrative—carrying us along “until suddenly, it stops”—our interview ends, too. Thank you so much, Grace Najmulski, for the interview, and fingers crossed that you find a publisher for Noncorrelation—whatever its eventual title!