心太软
[heart, too tender]
That day Aba smuggled home the answers to the gaokao, Ama reminded him that he was a nobody at the Department of Education. As a janitor, his most notable achievement was burying the beast-sized shits of the exam writers. When this honor could not be bestowed upon him, he orchestrated the ejection of chalk from erasers, clapping them together until he came home indistinguishable from mountain spirits, wordless and weary, trapped within the curved peak of his hunched spine. If this were an Agatha Christie novel, you would have a rock solid alibi, Ama said. We all laughed, not because the joke was particularly funny, but because after months of planning, Aba and Ama had summoned their heart’s innermost wish.
The packet of answers was printed on pale blue graph paper with characters marching down the pages like rows of ants. Ama looked upon it lovingly, as if a sheath of paper could save us, while Aba barely acknowledged its presence. They were not for me or Jie, but the son of a wealthy acquaintance, Hai-Ou. If the exam went well for him, he would attend his top choice university and take Jie as his wife. If the exam went well for Jie––well, it didn’t matter. Daughters are not allowed to be the cartographers of their own futures.
Over bowls of rice, pickled mustard greens, and the last of our marinated duck eggs, whose desperate origins I could not remember, Ama waterboarded us with stories of the factory-made prince. How Hai-Ou pulled me out of the tide’s mouth once when I fell asleep ashore, saving me from a lifetime of servitude to the Dragon King; how he brought home, year after year, the coveted red scarves the Party distributed only to the most excellent children.
(I recalled Hai-Ou capsized the boat I was curled up in while napping, and the branch he held out to me was stretched no differently than how a cat toyed with a mouse on the doorstep of the spirit world. As for his dumb red scarves, Jie would have possessed the same quantity if she scored top marks in hygiene when the teachers checked our fingernails and scalps. That too was Hai-Ou’s fault: the factory his family owned stained the river where we washed our clothes ballpoint-blue.)
Better to marry smart, Ama said to Jie, and then perversely she spooned the yolk from the last marinated duck egg into her bowl. The yolk––the fattiest, most delicious substance––was always reserved for Jie who used her brain the most. The rest of our mouths were bleached with the remaining crumbled egg whites, salty enough to bring tears to my eyes. Ama never finished the refrain, though it lodged in my throat all the same: Better to marry smart, than to be smart.
After dinner, Jie spread her workbooks and protractors on the table. While she started her math homework on piles of scrap paper and a blunt piece of charcoal, I sat on the ground, whittling her pencils into spears that she would use to translate the correct answers onto thick creamy sheets of workbook paper (courtesy of the Department chairman, who never noticed which papers were consumed faster than the sorry excuse of toilet paper). As the day bruised into night, we lit candles that burned long and gold and reminded me unbearably of sausage pastries that Ama used to make when the two of us still hunted in tandem.
Here, time was measured not with the swollen weight of apricots, chicken wings, purple yams, crabs, and frogs safe in my stomach and dangling from my jaws, but with candles. Jie allotted a pinky’s length for each subject, except for physics which took more than a skull’s length. Since the mountainside had grown foreign in its scarcity, I paid Jie company while she studied, performing the tasks she gave me as if her livelihood depended on it, which it kind of did. Ama used to harp on Jie for wasting candles and matches but after that night Aba brought home the answers, Ama never again mentioned the expense, swallowing her breath like a cold lump of rice each time she passed the kitchen table. She said nothing even when the neighbors joked we were manufacturing suns. We’ll have to resurrect Houyi to shoot down the extra suns, said Auntie Jiao, whose chickens mistook the light in our kitchen for dawn.
What was I supposed to do other than take that retracted breath as permission for the theater I set in motion?
Later I would wonder if I would have made the same choices Ama did. She was sent with her sisters from their home in Wenzhou to the mountains in Sichuan. Under Mao’s directive, they arrived in the countryside with thousands of other teenagers, oblivious to how to read the sky for rain, how to tame a flock of manic chickens. I understood why Ama was hesitant to mend Jie’s fate; the sheet of answers would not afford Jie an easier life. There was only suffering in studying useless things and who knows how much bitterness afterward.
The following night, I played temptress. Aba and Ama were in the kitchen, frying tofu skin, a special preparation that made it taste like chicken.
“Don’t you want to look?”
“I want to use my own brain.”
“What if I stole it for you? They won’t notice for one night.”
“You don’t even know where they’ve hidden it.” Jie turned her back to me on the bed, bamboo mat rustling, and creased another page of Pride and Prejudice with a knuckle crack. Aba bought the book as her sixteenth birthday present. I know someone must have thrown it away at the Department for us to receive a copy with pristine deckled pages and a broken spine.
But I did know where our parents hid everything. Jie would have accused the hulijing inside of me though I would argue it was human to know the lengths we would go to endure this world. Aba bookended his days with a jug of millet wine buried with the chili peppers, the cork never tightened so the chili peppers always flowered with a curiously wheat-laden sweetness and astringency. Ama rotated her cache due to my enterprising aunts who trafficked Western goods like Hershey’s cocoa powder and American films to the Party’s officials (everyone was susceptible to earthly desire no matter what ideology they were smoking). They always had an eye on her kills: flocks of white-necklaced partridges and pheasants rounder than the full moon. Meat was worth more than its weight in gold.
“Where do you think 心太软 comes from? The jujubes and walnuts and sweet sticky rice just fall from the sky?” Until the words fell from my mouth, I’d almost forgotten why I’d dug up some of Aba and Ama’s secrets. 心太软 were Jie’s favorite snack. She could eat them faster than Ama could make them, wrapping the sticky rice around the walnut and stuffing it into a split open jujube. Each one resembled a tiny soft heart and I could never refuse them from her and sometimes traded Ama’s partridges or Aba’s wine to buy the ingredients, then lied about the source of my pocket change to Ama and Aba, layering deceit upon deceit so that Jie could have this one pleasure. I knew she would have done the same for me.
“Shut up, I’m at a good part. But look—” pages rustling, I could tell she wasn’t even listening, “I’ve prepared my whole life for this god-forsaken test. Whatever I get is what I deserve.”
“And you deserve to get married to that fool?”
“Look,” Jie said and crossed her arms across her chest, which had grown bird-cage hollow since New Year’s. “This isn’t some prank for you to pull off.” Sometimes I forgot Jie was more prideful than any of us. Though she possessed neither hooked teeth nor claws, she proved to be the best butcher out of all the foxes in our family and could break down a chicken, carp, or pig with terrifying precision; the smallest of fish bones removed; veins and fat trimmed away; leaving behind marbled cubes and discs of translucent filet so beautiful we all admired them before Ama sent them skittering into hot oil.
Ama always praised Jie for her heart of stone and chided me for my heart of sticky rice. When I caught my first crayfish from the river, tail still slapping the air, it was Jie who took it from my hands and led me back to the kitchen, her fingers wrapped around mine as she lifted the cleaver to lop off its head. And it was Jie who, before either of us could read, stole wuxia novels from under Aba’s side of the bed and cut a deal with Hai-Ou to read them to us. “You can read them only if you read them to us first.” Hai-Ou’s parents forced him to memorize classics for hours a day and somehow she knew at five years old how to convert his desire and fear of reading useless adventure novels into our advantage.
My parent’s nickname for me was Rock Head, a reference to my perpetual rank of last in class. My mind consumed only secrets, sniffing out someone’s crippling fear of spirits or exposing a classmate’s red silk underwear embroidered by their doting mother. I was incapable of calculations of any other kind: physics impossible, unless it was flinging someone’s gym shorts onto the ceiling fan; history, I frequently confused with English literature that Jie read to me. Ama believed a hulijing’s ability to shapeshift was a curse, but I believed the real curse was our inability to sift through realities. It was easy to dream what futures belonged to us if we put on the right face, stitched our bones into someone’s childhood lover or estranged father. Without this tenet, Jie and I would not exist. Ama once seduced a scholar of history, someone who might have been invited to teach in a city and thus offered some avenue out of exile. In reality, Aba was an amateur student of history and metastasized the facts he knew into stories, and––like any well-meaning professor––took too damn long to tell them.
There were six months left until the gaokao, held on the first week of June. We never cleared the kitchen table anymore. A flotilla of scrap paper occupied its surface. The air smelled sharply of pencil shavings and white flower oil Jie dabbed on her temples for headaches. I ran a courier service rotating textbooks through everyone studying in the village; no one had a complete set on any subject and there was no standard for what was on the exam. Outside the roofs and magnolia trees shed their caskets of ice. The stream babbled gossip as little boys stood barefoot, catching fish until their feet turned blue.
“But what if Ama is right? And all the rich kids cheat to do well just like Hai-Ou.”
Jie continued practicing derivations on the margins of a textbook, pencil scratching softly, correcting other people’s attempts. “You can’t let this go can you.”
I slashed the page I was helping her erase, the clay eraser once white and malleable, was now metallic and stubborn as her stupid head. “Are you going to give up?” This morning, Aba delivered the answers to Hai-Ou and came home breath potent enough to pass for a rotting fruit tree.
She drew a box around her answer. QED. “What does it look like I’m doing?”
Before I could parry back, Jie heaved the textbook shut. We were sisters only a year apart but her face was unreadable to me, like characters I recognized but could not sound out. She opened Middlemarch and began to read, faithful to this ritual of reading to me even as the days til the exam ticked closer. There was nothing for me to do than fold myself at her feet. Our breaths twinned with Ama and Aba across the room, shreds of mist wandering with nowhere to go.
Later that night, I remembered Ama once mentioned to Aba with great jealousy that Hai-Ou’s family lived in a courtyard with an orange tree. Aba pointed out the tree was akin to no tree at all; it refused to bear a sliver of sweetness and each winter pummeled the ice-tasseled garden with fists of sour flesh.
The moon covered our quilts in fat slices of shadow and wet blue light. Jie slept soundly, her snores punctuated with bitter, little laughs, like the ones she gave when she made a careless mistake on an exam. Aba’s hand fell on Ama’s face and she slapped his ass cheek, both of them fighting even in their sleep. I reclaimed my tail from Jie’s arms (I usually left it with her during the day so I wouldn’t be tempted at school, turning into the teacher, stealing hot meat buns from the cafeteria), the downy tip tickling her nose, then shed my clothes, bunching them under the covers in an approximation of my horrible posture.
With my tail in hand, I could make my transformation: sun-sauced skin cast onto a pelt rinsed with white pepper. When I was first born, everyone on the mountainside was horrified by the color of my fur. White was the color we wore to bury our dead. It was Aba who cleared my name, citing Classic of Mountain and Seas and other esoteric texts that declared the appearance of a white hulijing to be the beginning of a peaceful and prosperous era. Many of the villagers were wary of scholars, so many recently purged from memory, and never took to me the same way they did with my mother and my aunts. Every time Auntie Jiao spotted my mother’s red and chestnut-colored tail, she insisted on inviting her in and challenged her to eat more dumplings than her son.
I bounded over the clay-shingled roof of the compound and crossed into night, this underside of the world where secrets were easy prey. Tonight I would hunt for what we were owed.
I followed the scent of puckering—waylaid only once by a bramble of sour grapes—across fields of millet and lines of smocks and billowing pants shivering in the twilight chill. Before the village dogs could raise their heads to bark, I plowed through flocks of chickens, my saliva sweetening the coals still incandescent from heating a villager’s nighttime bath. Though the chickens and solitary goats tempted me (how long it was since I had Ama’s braised goat smashed between jian bing!) I did not stop. To take their life meant severing a village’s lifeline. Ama would see to disemboweling me herself if I ever killed a chicken still plump with egg-laying years.
Past a grove of ghost-blue pines, I located the orange tree. The leaves were glossy, tightly-bunched, and reminded me of Jie’s once exuberant schoolgirl’s pigtails. I snacked on an orange. The larger the navel the sweeter the orange I remembered from one of the many pithy lines Ama hammered into us. The softness of one’s ears reveals the softness of their heart. How funny, I thought, after years of her lectures to Jie on how to snare and take care of a husband, that I was the one who absorbed them.
As I carved segments of the orange in my palm, savoring the sour heart of it, I watched Hai-Ou sleep. I was surprised that he occupied the room facing the southern courtyard—an honor reserved for the elderly, who needed the warmth of the sun.
My eyes adjusted to the gloom—someone in the house was smoking opium—and I was surprised to see the sparse furnishings: the desk no taller than a dog, varnish fading at the edges: the surface crowded with newspapers, words melting from rainwater poking through the roof.
But the books! Here was the wealth hoarded: the whole left wall was inlaid with mahogany bookcases, a giant matchbox that contained sliding panels. I unspooled my forelegs and squeezed through an opening in the window frame and ran my hands hungrily through the rows and rows of books. Intact spines and dry pages. Jie could have gorged several lifetimes here. For a second, I doubted what I was here to do. What if Jie could be happy married to him?
His snores rattled the hoops piercing my ears. While I heard the snores on the way here, I thought they could only belong to a wild hog, one of the few animals in the mountain who could afford to give away their sleeping quarters. His complexion was tinged qing, that shade of green particular to catastrophe and unnatural beauty. Though not completely soft and free of dirt, I could tell his hands were incapable of wringing a washcloth or a chicken’s neck and knew only how to hold an ink pen and bleed useless thoughts on paper. No wonder Ama thought he was a good match for Jie. Somewhere in this room was a secret that would convince Ama otherwise. I was not here to steal back the answers––Jie would never read those in this lifetime––I was here to find something to stop the marriage. I had not listened to Jie read Pride and Prejudice for an eternity only to learn every secret could be shaped to your liking.
Suddenly, he turned over and let out a fart, the sound of some strangled beast, the echoes of it shaking the mountainside, or so it seemed from my vantage point. But the smell of it is what made me fall from my perch on the roof. Only foxes farted with such potency.
The bulge in his pants—was it a tail? His back was striped red from the bamboo mat, and as I came closer, it gave the impression of a cut of pork, tender from Ama’s mallet. He wore no shirt and pants scuffed with ashes, a long stalk of dried grass looped through the belt holes. As far as I could tell, he was no different than any other village boy. Dirty and stupid, sleeping with his mouth open like that.
The silk tie was easy to undo, and I transformed back into human. My fingernails left red marks on his hip bones, and he woke with his pants pooled at his feet, while I kneeled over him. It was embarrassing when he did not scream.
“What the fuck?” Hai-Ou scrambled away from me, newspapers flapping, ashtray knocked over, water sloshing everywhere, soaking the sleeping mat. When he lit the kerosene lamp—I thought for a second, the god of matches had some grievance with me, each match sputtering, short-lived as sparrows these days—“Auntie! What are you doing here?”
“Oh please. Call me Ama,” I said. “We’ll be family soon,” I choked the words out. His eyes darted between me and the window, thick brows wiggling like silk worms dangled over a vat of boiling water. I couldn’t blame him. Not all the features were my mother’s. I wasn’t that good. The hands, their plump and dimpled knuckles, were stolen from one of the many cliché posters the Party had pasted over the compound’s walls. The rest of Ama I believed I captured well: the hairy pimple on her left cheek that she was too lazy to shape-shift away, her uneven gait (a suitor once caught her foot and she yanked it back hard enough to stretch the bone), the white streak that had sprouted when she and Aba conceived their scheme to secure Jie’s future.
“Please have a seat, Auntie.” He shook out his bedding, the dust startling the moths drinking in the lamp light. From under the pillows, he pulled out a bottle of millet wine. “I would offer you roasted melon seeds but unfortunately they have gone stale.”
I accepted the shot glass, downing it to avoid his eyes. “I should be on my way.” I stood up, the room blurring like ink wash—I’d forgotten how potent millet wine was. Last New Year’s, Aba painted the garden with Ama’s hard-cooked dishes, bottles of millet wine gripped in his fists like they were hard-won hand grenades.
“My parents were expecting you. Just not at this hour.”
“There was a problem at the Department. I came to make sure you still needed them. It’s a big hassle, isn’t it?”
Immediately, his cheeks flushed. “Of course, Ah––Ama. I’ve troubled you greatly.”
“Don’t forget to make some mistakes. Otherwise, it’ll be too obvious. Miracles make people suspicious.” I was almost down the hallway—I could smell the cut of the wind, woodsmoke and orange zest—when Hai-Ou cried out, “Wait!” and sensed his steps, the sour scent of his sweat quickening.
If he really was a hulijing, then he would have been able to hear my heart, its galloping, a bundle of currents more restless than the tree branches splashed across the moon. His hands circled my wrists, cold as fresh ink. Outside the window, the wind undressed the orange tree, throwing aside its robe of glossy green leaves.
No matchmaker could have envisioned it better (a snap of red thread pulling taut). I turned back and he would not let go. Panicking, I yanked his arm down so both of us were crouching. My skin furred in his hands and he scrabbled to encircle my torso but I was already bounding up the orange tree and over the courtyard wall. I looked back once (my cursed sticky rice heart would never let me go otherwise) and there he was. Head bowed, shoulders weighed with humility and––in between his fists placed together, hanging like some ghostly fruit, was my tail.
◆
Study snacks I foraged for Jie: peaches larger than my fists and sour grapes I kidnapped off trees, hidden in solitary compounds like mistresses. Ama and I eat the bruised ones, first soaking them in salt water, the bugs fleeing only to drown, then skinning each fruit until they sweat with plum-dark juice. We leave the ones of pure color for Jie. “Is it sour?” she asked and I lied, wanting to spare her every bit of suffering. I hunt though I have no appetite for flesh anymore. Hai-Ou’s robbery of my tail meant I was trapped in human form (though I could still shape-shift into his ugly pig-face if I wanted to). Through the crooked backs of osmanthus trees, the moon flashed like a necklace of teeth, sharpening each night with my hunger. I grew light-headed, leaping boulder to boulder, the mountain sharpening my bare feet and hands on a new language of touch. Shadows dripped down my cheeks, like I too was studying for the gaokao, burning the wick of my life. I mended the spine to Pride and Prejudice, which took weeks to find the right thread to do it: horse hair snipped from the province secretary’s entourage through the countryside. Jie does not notice—no one in my family does—how I can go against my nature to make things whole again.
All the while, I waited for Hai-Ou to command my tail, wary that in my most unguarded moments, he might choose to inhabit my body. I had experienced the airless feeling before when Ama held onto my tail after the neighbors complained of some mischief (slinging a stone through a window, letting a cat drink its fill of baijiu). But the days passed and every twitch of my limbs was commanded by my own idiocy.
Since birth, Ama hammered into me not to let my tail into an enemy’s hands. It’s not safe with family either, she said. Those who loved you the most may choose to haunt you instead. Anyone who possessed a hulijing’s tail possessed their body, could use it as a script for their own desires. It was why history was punctured with hulijing wreaking havoc, emperors and scholars losing their minds to seduction––each fox-daughter controlled by greedy fathers or vengeful deities. Despite all her warnings, I was more worried about Jie. Her fragility now gave me goosebumps and reminded me too much of the animals I went after when I was first learning to hunt. I found her in the mornings tea-cold, shadows stretched under her eyes, the candles burned to baby fists. Ama was constantly massaging the furrow between Jie’s eyebrows. “Temple!” she lamented, “You’re carving a temple on your forehead!” At the time I read this as Ama’s concern for Jie’s beauty, but it could have been terror. Jie seemed ready to fade from this world.
Every day I shed my clothes and followed Hai-Ou on all fours, waiting for the moment when he would shed his or let his tail loose when he was drunk or careless. I wanted to show everyone that he was the same kind of beast I was. But perhaps he was not monstrous at all and perfectly civil, a Mr. Darcy.
Jie fell asleep on my shoulder, sure of my presence, while I held vigil on the cloudless nights, my heart in barefoot pursuit. You deserved someone who would spoon you ginger soup during your period and wood chip soup when you caught a cold. I wanted to be able to leave a chicken on your doorstep, knowing you wouldn’t have to lift a knife to taste its tender meat and crackling skin. More than anything, I wanted to summon a future where someone would read to you because for all our lives, you read to us, out of history textbooks, out of any scrap paper you could make meaning from, out of novels that were more real and beautiful and available to us than the desolation of our own imaginations.
I was willing to sacrifice all nine of my lives to make this true.
◆
One morning when Hai-Ou left with his father to harvest their wealth of cheaply made ink pens, I stole into his room to search for my tail. My paws were unsteady as I hooked them through the window’s beams, my flank shuddering as I brushed past his quilt that smelled of rainwater, smoke, and preserved plums. One day Jie would be forced to sleep here.
On his desk were two books. One was a book of poems that I knew would probably give her acid reflux. The other was Lady of the Camellias. Ama banned the book from the house when Aba once gave an operatic retelling of it, complete with clusters of wild camellias that no one knew how he came to possess. Since it was clearly more precious to Hai-Ou (the pages grease-kissed), I took the latter, and was about to begin rifling through the dresser––where in the world had he hidden my tail!––when the window frame lifted and someone jumped into the room.
Carrying a plate of steaming dumplings, was Auntie Jiao’s son. I didn’t know what else to do. I shape-shifted into Hai-Ou. Eyebrows as thick as strokes of ink, the callouses and scars from hunting molted from my hands into ones stained by ink.
“I begged my mother to make your favorite filling,” he said (I smelled chives and eggs). “She asked me why my tastes have changed and I almost blurted out your name.” My breath grew jagged––was this what Hai-Ou had been hiding all this time? A secret lover? Gaokao answers, dumplings; why did everyone in the village owe Hai-Ou their heart on a bloody platter? He set the dumplings on the desk and leapt onto the bed, burying his face in the quilts, extracting scent from a square pillow as if it were equivalent to an embrace.
“I thought you were with your father today.” He took my hand. I yanked it back.
“You should go. I don’t have time for this.”
I didn’t say another word and stuffed my face with the dumplings, their skin cold and salted as mine, now coated in sweat. I opened a book on his desk, eyes roving with the speed of a wild horse, but Auntie Jiao’s son patted my shoulder and closed the window after him with such tenderness that my eyes prickled, the room blurring with the force of a nightmare. Hai-Ou must have dismissed him the same rude way, opening a book and pretending to study.
Imitating such cruelty made me sick. What I was about to do felt worse, even though it was a fair exchange of debts. He stole my tail; I would steal the secret of his lover. With feverish haste, I once again started looking for my tail, wishing my thoughts could be pinned as easily as voles in daylight as I sent a teacup flying. Suddenly there rose the memory of Jie, earlier that morning, sipping hot salt water instead of tea. The salt was supposed to precipitate the physics formulas she’d forgotten in her fitful sleep––Ama swore by the cure. She walked to school that way, eyes half-closed, incanting a language of sound and light. “An object remains at rest unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.” Jie would never disobey Ama and call off the marriage to pursue her studies. But both of them would have no choice if Hai-Ou changed his mind.
When my hands were steady enough to write, I tore a sheet from a leather-bound notebook I was tempted to steal and dipped a pen in my mouth.
“I’ll make you a deal.”
◆
In the days and years to come, I wondered if I had needed to make Hai-Ou the deal at all. “You can love who you love,” I wrote, “but let my Jie go and marry me instead. Tell your parents you’ve had a change of heart; I’m sure it won’t be difficult given your skill in deceiving them thus far.” When the news of the modified offer of marriage came, Ama asked me over and over, “How long must you pretend? You can end this performance now.” There was no convenient way to tell her of the true nature of my theater without revealing I’d lost my tail or my original secret-thieving intentions. I was willing to forfeit my own future––scrub Hai-Ou’s stinky underwear, animate my body in the motions necessary for love––if it meant Ama would allow Jie’s to be as expansive and prosperous as a son’s.
“What have you done?” Jie whispered, as we laid spine to spine in bed. I couldn’t see her face in the dark then. This would be a different story if I had lit a candle and read her face. “I didn’t have a choice” I said, which only fattened the silence between us. In the mornings, she snuck me her egg yolk under the table. “There aren’t debts between sisters,” I said, palming it back. “I don’t believe you,” she said. “Else why would you take my place?” Even then, I should have noticed the difference, how there was no warmth in the gesture.
Ama could no longer look me in the eye. But it was Ama who procured jujubes and walnuts, cracking the shell with her jaw, sacrificing three molars for it and who knows how much money. She wrapped each walnut with a globe of sticky rice and stuffed it into the sweet shell of split-open jujubes for 心太软, fattening Jie on a whole army of hearts. She slapped Aba’s hand away from the walnuts. “See how a walnut piece is shaped like a brain? Do you have one? They’re for my brilliant daughter.” The night before the first day of the exam, Ama pushed Jie’s pillow flush against the wall. “The higher you sleep, the higher your score.”
“Ama, since when were you superstitious?” I dragged my pillow next to Jie’s but Ama stopped me. “Jie must sleep above everyone in the house for it to work.”
“But I don’t count. I’m not taking the gaokao.”
“Would you like to try your sister’s fate against it?” Frowning, Jie said nothing and we went to bed, spine to spine as usual, while Ama carried the candles into the kitchen where our aunts had come to play poker. The sound of their bickering was as comforting as rain but I carved half-moons into my arms to stay awake, listening for Jie’s breath to slow (so I could drag her stubborn, heavy head up). Even when they started sautéing sugar chestnuts for a midnight snack, she did not snore.
I woke to rain and saw with relief Jie’s rumpled pillow at the head of the bed. The rain came down in bursts as if the sky was sweating with all the country’s students as they rushed to finish each section. Through the relentless trickle in the eaves, I could almost hear the scratch of the proctor’s chalk as they carved the remaining hours, minutes, seconds. Outside, the rain severed my senses from the world. I couldn’t smell Auntie Jiao’s chicken coop or the chili-millet wine peppers in the garden. Strangely, I craved oranges. A sour heart I could gouge out from bitter peel.
Ama walked through the front gate and squatted next to me on the doorway. Her voice was strained in the same way when she pleaded with Aba to stop drinking. But I heard none of her questions. Her tail shredded the begonia tree, which wept blossoms in the yard. For weeks, I’d practiced not thinking about the impending marriage, stocking the shelves of our pantry with peanuts and crabs three mountains away. “You would have done the same for any of your sisters,” I said.
She pressed me to her chest. I couldn’t remember the last time I was trapped this way against her ribs, the silence strung together with the private rhythms of our own fickle hearts. We bathed in the faded color of the rain and waited for Jie to come home.
◆
All the things I could have said to Jie in the months after the gaokao, while we waited for her results: This morning I watched him dress to go to work at his father’s factory. For breakfast he had fresh milk and pastries with a heart of candied winter melon that he did not finish. You would have perished from his arrogant wastefulness.
After the last day of the test, you came home and slept like some deity had placed an enchantment on you, waking only to eat and say hello to our aunts who gifted you a graduation present of a whole tin of cocoa powder. I fed it to you dry by the spoonful and you were content, but I’ve tried it once with milk from a cold bowl sitting on Hai-Ou’s desk––you would have declared it a better elixir than mercury.
Your cheeks have grown rounder, even the beads of sweat more vivid as you dream-mutter chemical properties and relations, their fine dance that you have only read about in books (One day I hope you might witness this magic in a real lab).
I weeded the white hairs from your head until Ama told me they would always grow back with a vengeance stronger than lion’s mane mushrooms. In the morning, when I slip back, pockets full of jujubes pilfered from Hai-Ou’s pantry to make 心太软, all the tender hearts you desire, but you are still asleep. I ask my aunts to help me sew more pockets, book-sized pockets.
This was the last secret I thieved for you: Ama and I hunt together again. I anger the wild boars with taunts (I’ll leave these to your imagination), while she tackles them from behind. Our aunts sell such tasty pork for a handsome sum. They are saving for you to study comfortably at university, possibly in America.
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Firecrackers took the place of birds, shattering the sky with their song. I knew nothing of the ceremony. My only duty was to show up in a red dress. There are pork knuckles and pearled corn, a fried fish for every table. For dessert, my favorite: lotus seed soup, sweetened with rock sugar and jasmine flowers. The whole day possessed the quality of a newly finished painting, the air rippled with the intoxicating scent of oil, the candles placed in my hands and dyed them fresh-blood red, the gold bracelet Ama fastened around my wrist glowed pale like a scar under the sun.
That morning, Jie took my face in her hands as we sat across from each other, crushed flowers at the ready to stain my face into life. It was at this moment, this distance, her face close enough to be a mirror of mine, that I noticed the consequences of what I had done. In meddling with her fate, I was no better than Ama. All this time after the gaokao, the silence between us was not born from her fatigue, but from the injury I rendered her. I tried to shape an apology but language collapsed––camellias, orange tree, chive dumplings, temples, saltwater––as I tried to explain the cascade of all that I had hidden.
“There’s no need for any of that,” she said. But I knew the cadence of a lie. It came to me years later that in one of Aba’s novels, a famous hulijing was ended not at the hand of the most powerful weapons, but in the face of a mirror. I might have known it then, might have known it since I set out to change her fate, but looking into her eyes––bloodshot, glittering, cool––there was so much distance between us, we might have already been separated by an ocean.
“You wouldn’t have been happy with him,” I said.
“You think I’m happy now?” she said as she wiped the tears clean from my cheeks and blew them dry gently like I was a spoonful of soup to be cooled down.
“Hai-Ou never would have loved you––no, I didn’t mean it like that! He has other lovers”––this was a gross exaggeration but I believed then Hai-Ou was heartless enough––“Really Jie, just trust me. Trust me, I know.”
She said nothing more in those last minutes. Perhaps she knew Hai-Ou’s secret after all. Perhaps she knew and wanted to spare me from the knowledge that I could have done nothing and she would have been content in that house under the rain-laden eaves, tucked into that matchbox of books. Perhaps neither of us said anything (Or is it that I have forgotten, molded the memory and pressed it into a sweet shell?). Perhaps we would have said something utterly unforgivable and it was better this way to let the wound between us cool into stone. Perhaps the last things we said to each other were not meant for each other, but for ourselves, for all we had done. I forgive you.
The hiss of a match.
Before I knew it, I was carried over the threshold of what was to be my new home and dumped on the bed. The covers, I realized with a sobering start, were quilted by Ama and her sisters. The word for comforter and the word for a lifetime shared the same pronunciation: both sounded like an emptiness in my mouth.
Hai-Ou enclosed my left hand, lifted the match to light a candle together. With the other, he caught my right hand for us to trim the wick with a pair of golden scissors, a superstition fulfilled to extend the longevity of our marriage. I closed my eyes, the dancing flame reminding me of the nights I spent with Jie studying at the kitchen table.
He placed something in my hands. “Let’s go to bed,” he said. “It’s not right for me to keep this anymore.”
It was my tail. He must have combed it, massaged it with camellia oil, and taken better care of it than I did. It was more beautiful than ever. The animal inside of me unraveled at his earnestness and tilted its head.
“Will you stay?” He held out his hand.
I gave my hand to him and fought to hold the claws in, the white fur burning under my wedding clothes. For the first time that day, my senses rang with clarity. The tail in my hands was softer than water. I could hear my aunts feinting their hand of cards; a fierce pack of small, ferocious beasts slurping the leftover honey beer; the shimmering heat of the lanterns devouring the night fog overhead as Jie walked home, Ama and Aba by her side. The air tasted sweeter than lychee, juicier than mountain grapes.
“Let me go one last time,” I said and twisted my fingers from his embrace onto the windowsill, letting out the scythe of my paws at last.
As I bounded over the roofs I’d known all my life, I wondered if I would have the heart to look back.