Night, Death, Summer Palace

Image courtesy of the author.

In the north, there are young widows, chronic diseases, air too somber to breathe. 

There are skeletons gazing into the heart of inner Mongolia, scattered namelessly over the hearth. Along the road, travelers suck on the sweet tooth of famine like milkwhite goats. In the north, there is the dim sun, year after year, dynasty from dynasty, that disappears along the horizon of the aging snow. 

Beijing’s winter was silent and frostbitten. In the third month drifting between Beiluo and Gulou, I was never so feeble, rootless, eyes blinded by tears of love. 

“Is that you? Standing behind me. 

You stared at me long, too long

…

Each time you walked up to me

The fingertips held onto another balance

…

Sometimes you held me in the back, 

Thick as the night sky            

…

If I turned around, eyeless, thoughtless

Will you stand still, lifeless 

Under the facade of a lost isle 

Living in millions of scattered spaces

As we breathed quietly into each other’s

Mouth” 

 I knew Xiao did not write this for me, yet I longed for his breathing in my mouth, like living an underwater dwelling-life–– ageless, airless—as in a capsule of immorality. 

I dip my feet in cold water many times when we ferried across Kunming Lake inside Summer Palace. Xiao became so muted, so silent, as my feet grew numb. His eyes lingered on the silky threads of trees and crowds along the shore, stretching his arms slightly as if he were curved, transparent, vanishing all together with the rest of the world. Fixing my eyes on him, I hummed a song about harvest and the crescent moon. He then took out a pack of cigarettes and lit one quickly, as with violent thoughts, anchoring himself in the exhaustion of growth and time. 

“I don’t believe in love, Sherri.”  He looked at me, projecting a fat, ugly reality onto my surface of dreams. 

I was younger, more reckless. I felt fresh billows of life rushing through the depth of deadly longing and treacherous hearts. I was an infinite number of planetary stars, throbbing fully with cosmic thought and the origin of love. With his hands reaching for my body and fingers dancing along my spine, almost mischievously, I looked back at him. 

I told him he would believe in love again. 

In front of an ancient wall curved with lotus, I forced him to propose to me in the middle of the road. He went down on both knees, kissing my hands as if to lick some miraculous water from a deep sea of life. 

We laughed at everyone’s curious glances and started to run along Hutongs of terracotta lions and dragons. Along lines of familiarity, of belonging, of salvation in this life, we ran and ran to forget we had existed here on this barren earth where all loved ones were plundered into unnamable seas of betrayals, departures, and death. Entering old, dilapidated alleys, we kissed and kissed and breathed gently, quietly into each other’s mouth. 

The tower of birds in the alley became conscious of lights. 

The sparrows waddled awkwardly along the clothesline and flew hastily through the rhythmic rise and fall of morning mists­­­­. Clouds became glaciers, horizon, the arctic rim. Inside such a pristine, almost deceptive state of inception, Xiao became a fragile, boneless child––an embryo inside the warm interior of silent, submissive remembrance. 

Lying next to his bed-warm flesh, I felt his breathing through my nostrils and thoughts rattling inside my mind. I felt so close to him that I could almost hug him, own him, love him, become him, and suffer for him. “He….” Xiao paused to take in this dawn of watery life as if to wet his mouth. “He….” Xiao almost started to convulse uncontrollably. “He just constantly had affairs, Sherri. I never saw him and called him ‘Dad’ before 15.” 

In families where the parents went missing—off on business, off to visit relatives, off to just leave us again—“Ma” and “Ba” became too blunt to pronounce and swallow. Year after year, we waited by the landline as silence slapped us in the faces. 

So we were forced to grow taller, run from home, gamble in love, lose all, and still lingered over the thought of imagining someone calling us from the other end of the landline. The night when I was kicked out by the landlord, I shoved all my clothes and books in trash bags and carried them around the city. I saw a woman with long curly hair that reminded me of my mother: she was packed with bags and sat on the benches, staring into the void so attentively that I had the urge to walk up and ask her why she left me behind. Instead, I walked back and forth, crying all night long. Xiao picked me up after I sat by the roadside for hours. Penniless and sleepless, we roamed around Beijing on a broken Vespa. He told me to hold on tight, but I felt I almost broke him in half. 

We stopped in front of a hotel, the one that my parents warned me never to enter. I gave my last 200 rmb to the cashier, and we moved into a room, windowless. 

I told him I have not slept for the past week. Something bad had happened and I could not forgive myself. I thought I would scream and tear him apart, but I didn’t. 

Xiao lit another cigarette mindlessly. He did not even look at me. I rehearsed the sentence several times before telling him that I was almost raped the other night. 

“The film director, who showed me the stars in constellations when I was a child, shut the door behind him. He took off his clothes and threw me on his bed. The weight of his swollen belly pressed against my breasts, and I begged and begged…” 

Xiao became hesitant. He became small, remote, shrunk into a voice on the other side of the room. He finished his cigarette and told me I was “too silly.” His fingers then went slowly through my hair, back, thighs, examining my body flirtatiously with both hands to find the opening of my freshly wounded soul. 

“Are you too traumatized to…” He smiled at me, unbuttoned my shirt gently, and slipped his hands under my skirt. 

I thought of the night I ran until I felt I had died. After removing each of his fingers off my body, I closed the director’s door carefully like the times I left the house when I was younger. As I ran from him, from Beijing, from Xiao, I ran from myself, from my grandmother who raised me, from playing in the rice field, from harvesting dates in the late bloom, from the silver moons, from imagining to experience my first love, from believing my parents would ever make up and fall in love again. 

So, I removed each of Xiao’s fingers off my body. I started to unbutton my skirt, take off my stockings, unclasp my bra, and tear off my underclothing. I knelt and laid quietly in front of him. In this grave of nudity, I told myself and told myself and told myself that I had never been born, and Xiao and I were madly in love.