NANJING by Weike Wang
Nanjing means South City. It sits on the southern bank of the Yangtze River and is considered a southern city in a southern province. The city is admired for its history. It was once the capital of a nation before the capital moved north to North City where the capital is now. The city is admired for many other things – fine art, fine cuisine and poetry perhaps, but this I know less about.
I was born in Nanjing and have fond memories of my time there. I was not there long, having left when I was four or five, but I am tethered to the place by a family that once lived there. The city itself I can barely recall. Some landmarks come to mind. A perimeter wall that is very old. A mountain that is much older. In spring, the trees blossom in all sorts of funny ways and the city is very fragrant. I am tempted to say that it smells of lavender but this may have just been my mother walking alongside me.
The family that I speak of is my own, eight individuals in total, who for a short time lived in close proximity. I was then a lap-sized child, my cousin was then the same, and it became a game we sometimes played called avoid our grandparents’ knees. When my grandmother picked me up, my cousin ran away. When my grandfather picked her up, I ran away. On and on this went until our fathers picked us up and flew us to our mothers, who sat in the next room. Midair, my cousin and I practiced airplane sounds, the zip, the zoom, the beep-beep please clear the runway ma’am. News had just come that a new Boeing was in the works, called the Boeing 747-400. My cousin and I were thrilled. We thought, the higher the number, the higher it flew.
My now retired grandmother was once a city architect. At the height of her career, she used a great deal of straight lines, steel beams and tall panes of glass, taller than the average man. Of the many buildings she has built, I have only seen one, pointed out to me by my grandfather when I first learned to look up. It was a majestic metal structure that shot through the sky, and then I thought, through space. Its windows caught the light, something I had heard her say to a friend who I never saw again. The city does not get much light, so to catch it on any grey day would be an extraordinary thing.
In winter, the city cools. Heat comes and goes and teeth chatter on the subway. My grandmother who dreads the cold spends the winter with my parents in Michigan where it is no warmer, in fact much colder, but heat comes in steady plumes. In late spring, she goes back to Nanjing. She has a routine that includes needlework, long strolls and a night on the town, though the town has gotten much bigger than she remembers. One day a metro stop appeared and then a crowd and then a train. My grandmother does not mind the metro but prefers to walk or call a taxi. Aboard a taxi, she will tell the driver exactly where she wants to go and how to get there, and if in a ploy to extend the fare, the taxi driver turns when she means to go straight, my grandmother will get off and call another. Her evenings are reserved for colleagues and old friends, who do not remember me but remember my mother. She is referred to as my beautiful mother and I look nothing like her. I look like my father.
My father comes to us from a nameless countryside that he fondly calls the country. I have been there and it is truly nameless and without doors. Stone huts sit side by side like unappetizing dinner rolls and the entrance is a rectangle covered by a square cloth. My father’s father and his father’s father farmed the surrounding land. Rice, corn, anything that grew. They represent a long line of anonymous men whom I never had a chance to know. By his own abilities, my father scored well on the college entrance exam, studying, as he will reminisce, by the light of a winter solstice, whilst sitting outside on a stool. Why were you outside, I ask, to which he will say I am missing the entire point. The point being that my father was plucked from a rice field and placed in a desk. He went on to teach computer science at the second largest university in Nanjing, called the ‘Big East’. I recall his office being small and I was small at the time. I recall toppling a tower of floppy discs and his palm going across my face. My father felt immediately sorry for this. He held the hand that was not cupping my left cheek and took me to see the ice-cream man, a man on a bike wagon who stationed himself at the gate. If you went up to him and said a few words, he would pull back a grey cover and reveal cool cases of popsicles from which I could now choose one. The plan was to not tell my mother. Needless to say mothers do not need to be told things to know things. Once home, my mother saw the cut above my lip and dragged my father out by his ears.
My parents met in Nanjing, on a bridge, at a train station, the story has never been too clear. They then married and my mother, for the first time, trimmed her eyebrows, coiffed her hair and shimmied into a white dress and never did it again. The wedding, I hear, was a blast. There were many games for the newlyweds to play, like biting the same apple that dangled off a string. When guests couldn’t find an apple, they strung up a banana and huddled around my parents, chanting kisskisskiss. Honeymoon. There wasn’t one. My mother went with my father to see his hometown. It took them a day and a half to arrive there and from there my father peddled a bike to the place where he grew up. For hours, it was flat green land as opposed to the heights my mother had known. She hugged his waist and swung her feet dangerously close to the back wheel. When a ditch appeared out of nowhere, the bike fell in and threw my parents knee-deep into mud.
On date night, before our family or any family in Nanjing had a car, my father would again take my mother on the back of his bike and peddle to a hot pot place or a barbeque place or a new western cuisine place that offered what my father had never heard of, the T-bone steak. They waited until my limbs splayed out like a starfish, my sleep time mode, and then snuck out of their own house. Acts like this are frowned upon today, though I would defend my parents regardless. They were young and until I could understand that young parents needed their privacy, I must have held them back. Some mornings, he pedaled my mother to work, where she made the same amount as he did teaching computer science. This fact my mother has never let him forget and whenever my father felt the roof was more his than hers, she would remind him that women hold up half the sky, a quote from Chairman Mao.
My mother worked at a pharmaceutical plant where they raised litters of furry white rabbits. They may not have been that furry or even that white, but at this time, I believed that a rabbit could be no other color except white because I was deeply attached to a candy called White Rabbit Candy that stuck to the roof of my mouth and clung to my childhood teeth. I was too young to connect the plant with the rabbits. Each time I carried one out, I thought it was the same one I had carried out last time and the time before. Though I would still like to believe this, I know I would be mistaken. When it was time for me to go home or when my father had come to fetch me, my mother lifted me up by my armpits and sent me out a door.
Most days, I went to daycare, where I was at the bottom of my class for having poor eating habits and not knowing a utensil from my hand. I was taken to and from daycare on bikes equipped with child seats. My father had the seat in front and when I rode with him I just saw the road unfurling before me and stern hands by my side. My mother had the seat in the back and when I rode with her I saw nothing but the curve of her back on which I could lay down my cheeks. If I was good, which was not often, my mother would stop at a street corner and buy me a handmade clay figurine in the shape of the monkey king, a childhood hero of mine, part monkey, part man. The monkey king carried around a baton that could grow to the size of a building or shrink to the size of an ant. He then stored the ant-sized baton in his ear and took it out whenever evil, frequently disguised as a fair maiden, turned its pretty head. When I told the story of the monkey king to a fourth grade boy I liked named Max, he said it was dumbest thing he had ever heard, a monkey king with a baton. He then went back to his beloved Animorphs book about a boy who morphs into a dog. That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard, I told him, and this irreconcilable difference drove us apart.
They don’t sell clay figurines anymore. Children don’t find them as entertaining as battery-powered action figures of Pixar superheroes like Buzz Lightyear who light up the screen and light up in real life. The shows that I used to watch, about a hobo with a magical fan or a demigod who flew on fiery rings, are non-existent or perhaps only broadcast in the dead of night when no child is watching. What replaced them are Korean soap operas and English learning shows that teach children about American “wildlife” idioms like cat got your tongue or fish out of water or doing something cold turkey. These were not the first ones I learned. On a playground in small town America, I learned that I was at once a scaredy cat and a chicken for not jumping off a swing. I never went to grade school in Nanjing. Hence I never learned how to read. Chinese characters go by me four at a time, four at a time. Street signs pass in a blur. Though this is not entirely true. I can read some, very slowly and with my index finger glued to the page.
From my cousin, every summer I went back to Nanjing after my parents took me abroad, I heard about grade school and what that was like. My cousin is the daughter of my mother’s older brother, but looks like my mother from the nose up. They both have very large eyes, walnuts instead of almonds, and to me it became apparent early on how odd genes were, skipping and crossing generations like that. I simply wanted to pluck my cousin’s eyes off and put them over mine.
Because we went to different schools, we were teased for different things. I was teased for doing my homework and she was teased for not. She did not laugh when I tried to explain the joke that a dog ate my homework. Why would you want that, she asked. Because it’s cool and what dogs do, I said. The word cool swooped over her head like a breeze. One day, she came home in tears because some boys had thrown her pencil case out a third-floor window, thereby preventing her from completing her composition, thereby making her the dunce of the class. A pencil case, I said, reeling in disbelief, and was then ushered out of the room. In the corner of the living room where I was told to go think, I thought up the boy in the back of the number 22 school bus who told me I could not sit here because one I did not shave my left leg and two I did not shave my right leg. It was not a persuasive argument, but at the time, I ran home in tears and begged my mother for a shaver. My mother, whose naturally hairless legs gleamed, thought I meant to shave off my face and hid my father’s shaver in a box beneath the sink.
The school that my cousin went to allowed a two-hour lunch break so students could go elsewhere and not prance around the playground. Instead, my cousin pranced around our grandparents’ house with a red scarf around her neck. Teachers gave red scarves to students with exceptional grades and love of country. These students then gave those without red scarves an exceptionally hard time for their lack thereof. I don’t imagine this would have worked out well in the schools that I went to, where a kick me sign was still the funniest thing. A scarf midsummer seemed sweltering. Are you sweltering? I asked. And then ten minutes later I asked again. Are you sweltering? Again and again, I asked until my cousin threw her ink pen at me and told me to go back to America. I told her I would be glad to and pointed a finger out the balcony where I thought America was but in reality I was pointing due north towards Mongolia. We then fought over the ink pen that had fallen under a chair. I pulled and she pulled and a geyser of black ink rose up between us, before nose-diving to the floor. The ensuing silence woke my grandfather up. He came out, first an imposing voice then an imposing frame, and this ended midday lunch, at least for that summer when cousins did not get along.
If you take the bullet train east, there is an industrial city called Changzhou where my cousin now works as a drafter of mechanical engine parts. She does not like it and finds herself drifting slowly towards functional design, though on paper, she designs absurd things like ‘ready to wok’ kitchen woks in an array of glow-in-the-dark colors. Twice a month, she returns to Nanjing where her parents still live. Her mother, my aunt, is the head nurse of a surgical wing. On the day that I was born, she rushed herself down to the delivery room, in scrubs and what looked like a beige shower cap. Is she crying, my mother asked. I was not. I was asleep, unperturbed by the push that pushed me into the world. My aunt gave my backside a substantial pat and I let out a mournful cry as my mother let out a sigh of relief. For the most part, I was not a crying baby. I sat quietly in my crib and looked quietly up at clocks, sometimes tapping a finger on my left wrist as I had seen my father do. With idle hands, I would spin my grandfather’s globe. Where is baba, a face would say and I would spin to Brazil, where my father was, in a city no bigger than my thumb.
He was there on the grace of a university professor who saw in him graduate student potential and a determined young man. It was an opportunity, the family agreed, that could not be passed up and a one-way ticket on a Boeing 747 was procured with all their savings in the bank. My father was the first to leave Nanjing. My mother and I would later follow; but in the meantime he and my mother conversed over telephone, and with the telephone in her arms, my mother could finally lie down and take her feet off the ground. My father sent me cards. The cards came with Portuguese cartoon animals whose speech bubbles I could not read. I would then carry the card to my mother and ask her what it said and depending on her mood, the card would either say ‘I miss you’ or ‘be good for your mother’.
With my father gone, my uncle took me to daycare, not by bike but by bus that had air conditioning I could not believe. My uncle is quiet, unlike my mother, and took me to daycare on a two-word allowance – hello; goodbye. It is thought that my grandmother made him that way, a stern woman but sterner still on her first-born son who took the blame for my mother’s infamous deeds, the most infamous being a four-story balcony climb when there were no such things as rock walls. And while my mother looks like my grandmother, my uncle looked like no one else, until I saw a Latino man croon his way through my television screen. It was Marc Anthony but for a split second, I thought it was my uncle who karaokes in his office when everyone else is asleep. Love songs mostly. Songs he learned on the railway where he worked as a late teen. He also learned to smoke then, a habit my grandfather could not stand, and every time he lit up in the house, my grandfather walked over and snuffed it out.
Since the new millennium, summers have brought rain that sizzles into steam. These are the summers my cousin and I do get along, so much so that we are inseparable and must sleep in the same bed. She complains that I kick and snore and run off with her covers. Then kick her back, my grandmother says, knowing full well my cousin will not. My cousin believes in the power of words, a trick, she tells our mothers, is how French women keep their men. Neither of our mothers knows a word of French and have kept their men just fine, so what do you mean, they ask in unison. My cousin retreats into her bedroom backwards. I follow. My aunt is slightly younger than my mother and therefore much younger than my uncle. She talks and he listens is how my cousin sums up her parents. My aunt also eats. I do not know anyone else who enjoys crawfish as much as she enjoys crawfish. Slouched at the end of the table or in the middle of the couch, she wears billowing nightgowns and sometimes falls asleep. The rest of us have trouble envisioning her holding a scalpel with both eyes on one spot, but she assures us that no piece of metal is left behind in the wound. My mother cracks a sunflower seed. My grandmother does the same.
The sofa at my uncle’s place sinks and by the end of the day it will have sunk to the floor. In the early morning, my uncle will come here first and sit for a few moments before he cannot. Then he will go into the kitchen and make a pot of instant café au lait. The way he walks, hunched over with a palm across the chest, reminds me of my grandfather, as does the way he puts down his bifocals, achingly, as if putting down a top hat.. When my mother first noticed this, she asked if he knew what he was doing, putting down his bifocals like that. He said he hadn’t, it must have been a habit he recently picked up. At the dinner table one night, she pointed to the way my uncle was eating his green beans, nibbling with his lips and pulling the bean inward. Do you see, she asked the table to which no one made an audible response. My grandmother’s head started to bob, an involuntary act, we are told, caused by a misfiring of nerves. And I saw but could not remember if my grandfather also ate his green beans that way. I could not remember him eating green beans at all.
The fried eggs atop our noodle bowls leaked a yellowing substance. It was either sunshine or liquid gold, I then could not decide. My uncle had made my cousin and I lunch and placed it before us, between the television and us. We were inches away from the screen, inches away from a teen pop star sensation with flaming orange hair. I sang along, not really knowing the words and my cousin told me so by pushing me away from our pretend microphone, the ketchup bottle. In the afternoons, we frolicked along the streets around her neighborhood, passing stores with Hollywood films on sale. She dared me to ride a bike down a busy street and I thought what’s the big deal, until I ran my front wheel into an aquamarine moped with streamers out the muffler. The owner wore a shirt that said ‘hug me like a purple bear,’ and threw her right shoe at my face. I ran off before the other shoe came off and around the corner we went, to our grandparents’ house, we flew.
After an hour or so there, my cousin was bored. Bored out of her mind, she said. Our grandparents’ house did not have cable but was always cool and clean and calm. My grandmother read the People’s Daily and my grandfather listened to the stereo. He had a soft spot for country music – Kenny Chesney and his lonesome guitar – and listened to the stereo with an English-Chinese dictionary on hand. My bored-out-of-her-mind cousin soon left on her bike. She would find her way to a back lot CD store where the latest Westlife album had just ‘dropped’ in bootleg form. I would sit beside my grandfather and watch him flip though the b’s for the word ‘bikini bottom’.
My grandfather once cured my mother of tapeworms. As a child who enjoyed the outdoors, my mother was inclined to chew things she found on the ground, like sticks, fallen leaves, a cicada that would not shut up. Tapeworms grew out of this habit and to the length of her colon. From the bathroom, one evening, she felt snakes below the belly. She screamed for her father, who came in running with a bat, and this cured her because she promptly pooped her pants (and the worms soon followed). As a child who also enjoyed the outdoors, I was fed precautions in the form of bitter pink pills. If I ever showed cowardice in taking them, my grandfather would say I had the worms and threaten to go find his bat. I swallowed hard, even though the bat he used was long gone, lost to the neighbor’s boy during an afternoon of ball.
Sometimes when I was jumping up and down for no reason, my grandfather pulled up a chair beside him and told me to sit the blazes down. He taught physics at the same place my grandmother taught architecture and asked a ten-year-old questions she could not have possibly known. What keeps you on the ground and the moon in space? I shrugged, and thought it clever to say Elmer’s glue, which got me the doubtful eye. My grandfather started each lesson this way, with a question I could not answer, and then on a blank piece of a paper, produced an answer in shapes and lines and dots that contained the universe to a letter-sized space. The moon was the not the moon and the stars were not the stars. They were circles the size of bottle caps and we were dots the size of dots.
At night, I could not sleep. Mosquitos flew overhead. Monsters flew overhead. I would swat away at darkness and swat away at air. Then a warm breeze passed by, warm like the day ahead, and it was my grandfather who had passed by, fanning his straw fan. Of his many things, my grandmother kept the fan and a box of his cassette tapes. But the stereo is gone and not many people play cassette tapes anymore; but if they ever did, his can be found in the cupboard that once held his shoes.
When my grandparents first visited America, I had just turned fourteen. My parents and I were taking them to see the greatest city of this nation, Washington, D.C. In a car that could fit four comfortably and five uncomfortably, we packed ourselves in. My father drove. My mother directed. And with an atlas flipped to the wrong part of Pennsylvania, we were bound to get lost. My grandparents and I sat in the back. We had nothing to do except watch the sun go in and out of the space between the trees. The trees are different here, my grandfather said. The light is different here, my grandmother said. And I asked whoever was listening, if my cousin would ever visit us here or my aunt and uncle and wouldn’t it be nice if we had a car big enough for eight. No one was listening. It was either left turn or right turn, the light or the trees.
Weike Wang’s work has appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, Redivider, and Prick of the Spindle.