THE YANGTZE by Laurie Frankel
My sister disappeared on a trip to China. But not like you would think. No lost body. No missing person’s report. She wasn’t even on the trip with my mom and me. She had, by the time we went, been estranged from us for more than twenty years ever since her wedding in 1987, the details of which bore me now – lots of lousiness leading up, an insulting speech by my father, others guilty by association. Mistakes were made. Decisions in the moment and for weeks after, in retrospect, were the wrong ones. I made attempts at contact over the years: phone calls, then cards, and finally e-mail, but some damage can never be undone. And so my sister has been disappearing for years, but no matter how much sadness or contemplation, temporary indifference or anger, she never really goes away for good.
There is a game I play when I am bored and find myself in an enclosed space with strangers – an elevator, a bus, at dinner with tourists chatting like shock victims – I pretend these are the last people on earth with whom I can socialize, then I assign them to life’s basic categories: like, love and hate. I was doing just this over dinner at a table with fellow China travelers when the blond, husky German woman across from us, who had already disqualified herself from the categories of like and love, presses my mother for information.
“I could have sworn,” she says leaning forward on puffy arms, “the other day, at the Summer Palace,” she continues, “we were on the lake near the seventeen-arch bridge, you said you had another daughter, with lots of children, in addition to this one,” and she directs her tight, yellow head toward me.
My mother shakes her head, looking down, folding her napkin as if preparing a parachute.
“No, just the one,” my mom says refolding her napkin, this time as if performing a magic trick and when she finally snaps the white cloth open, replacing it on her lap, her daughter, my sister, is gone.
I feel a jolt and an instantaneous need to correct my mother as if she had actually forgotten the number of humans she had birthed. The literalness of the logical mind is disappointing.
“But didn’t you say – ,” the German woman, dreadnought that she is, continues. I smile uncomfortably then look at my mom who remains focused on transforming her napkin.
The woman’s husband breaks in. “You’re thinking of someone else,” he says, touching his wife’s shoulder with a hand black as soil.
“Oh, so it was,” she says abruptly, “someone else, yes, must have been,” then pats a tissue to her beading forehead.
Without direct thought, my sister rapidly slips backwards from young adulthood through adolescence and childhood back into diapers, then, head first, into the wet dark of my mother and beyond, where she becomes nothing more than a notion, a wish without substance or consequence, something future and good and that is all.
And, just like that, my sister is gone but in a different way than she had ever been gone before. It was amazing at first, in a good way – a relief. Never having existed seemed the perfect answer to a desperate problem.
The next day we are on the tour bus headed to Tiananmen (“Gate of Heavenly Peace”) Square. Tom, our Chinese tour guide, briefs us on its history, omitting the government-sanctioned 1989 massacre of hundreds of peaceful protesters. When we ask him about the uprising he tells us he’s heard about it but is not sure it really occurred. “It may have happened, yes,” he says, but he never read the stories, didn’t have any proof – those Internet sites were censored – and so while many tourists have told him about it, his government has told him otherwise. But, I want to say, of course it happened. I want to get his address and send him clippings when I get home, bust his world wide open. I want to force the truth on him. And then I think, why? To what end? Better to forget, better yet to never know. In denial there is freedom and a respite from never-ending memory of what was.
Two days later we enter the port town of Chongqing. Hundreds of stairs lead down to the dock area where we will board a riverboat to begin our cruise along the Yangtze. The stairway is a gauntlet of sorts – legless beggars on calloused knuckles rhythmically swing down, thigh stumps hitting. I try to hide my alarm as I descend, concealing panic, revulsion, sadness, with a face stone-still. I give yuan to one and instantaneously I am surrounded, a rat in a snake pit scurrying.
The transition onto the boat is magical. The gently-angled entrance, a fairy tale portal, is lined with bowing crew members welcoming us onto the Viking Century Star, imploring us to watch our step. As we walk down the red-carpeted plank I leave the maimed and poor behind. I focus on the marble floors, the shiny brass, a spiraling staircase, but there is the thump of a suitcase catching on a stair and, before I know it, mind and sound collide and there is the beggar, ascending beside me.
“So, no J,” I say, once my mom and I are in our riverboat suite, out on the balcony watching the Yangtze go by. My mom looks up, questioning. “At dinner, a few nights ago, you told that woman, one kid instead of two.” My mom nods, sighs, nods again and looks out. We stare at villages that will soon disappear when the Three Gorges Dam is complete.
Terraced land of green and ochre, centuries-old shacks and hand-stacked stone walls would soon be under water. Looking out I imagine we are all submerged – villagers appear willowy-tall through the water’s distortion, beautiful in their demise.
Then, on top of the dark water, I see a large shape in the distance and step up onto the bottom rung of the railing for a better look. I lean out and squint. “What is that?” I say, pointing. My mom leans forward in her chair and together we wait for the boat to pull us closer, wanting and not wanting to see the object headed our way. And then we are upon it – bloated, misshapen, barely recognizable, a giant pig floating on its back, all four hooves in the air, its skin a palette of shadow and purple. My mom jumps and goes inside, but I am drawn, fascinated and sad, staring, wondering how something like this happened.
That night, after sleep takes me, my sister and I float down the Yangtze on a pig. Farm people on the hillsides wave vigorously as we pass. I wave back smiling, but the more people we see the more frantic their movements become. White noise rumbles in the background and quickly fills the picture as if sound were replacing sight. Roiled water rushes past. White caps form. My sister clutches my wrist, her nails digging. “It’s ok,” I tell her, loosening her grip, covering her hand with my own. I look ahead to where the world will end. Then together we fall over the edge in silence, bracing for an impact that never comes, caught in a foggy quiet. And when I get to the bottom, my sister is gone.
Laurie Frankel’s work has appeared in Green Mountains Review, The Pedestal Magazine, Clackamas Literary Review, and Kalliope.