Fic:When you Tell my Story, Don't Forget Me 2/6
Prologue
[Your dreams // Perhaps, // They are too distant // From your mother's needs]
Growing Up in San Francisco
To My Child
From the rubbish heap
I retrieve your lump of clay that
I’ve thrown away,
By the oil lamp
I begin again to mould
That which I have shattered -
Your dreams,
Your small cars, your small house,
Your small, small spacecraft.
Perhaps,
They are too distant
From your mother’s needs.
When I went downhill with the hoe heavy on my shoulder -
How I wished you had cleaned the house,
Lit the stove,
And steamed a pot of rice . . .
Weeping,
You retorted:
‘Why must you write poems and sing songs?’
Ah my bright son
I chew over your words.
Are they sweet? Are they sour?
All is deep in sleep,
But your mother’s heart is like
Your muddled lump of clay,
Forgive me, my child,
Let me kiss away your sullen tears.
Let me light us this lamp of night . . .
Fu Tianlin
Sometimes, in the dead of night, the memory of sharp pain would create a dull ache in her bones. A mortal pain. A childhood pain. An ache in her limbs that dissipated as soon as she reached for consciousness. Nights in the first few years after her mother left she would try to sink back into the dream-memory, back into the pain, searching for a familiar face among the shadows her conscious mind pushed away.
Once he found her, though, once his small head was cradled under her chin in the darkness, small limbs wrapped around her waist, the small rise and fall of his chest pressed against hers that no longer moved except for the comfort of something lost… then the dreams gave his face and body the pain hers could no longer remember. Then, with his small frame dreaming of much more pleasant things, her mind could reach the distant memory of childhood, of mortality, of physical pain beyond silver or vervaine, of emotional pain beyond the momentary loss of her mother’s voice. He was a healthy, happy child. Yet every night she woke sobbing from the memory of him burning.
As he grew older and larger, she held onto his sleeping body more tightly. He began to wake hours before her. Without his warm body beside her own cold one, she would gasp and struggle as if the mat they shared had arms that were pulling her down. She would wake in a cold sweat, frantic with the dream of his small, round face bearing black eyes. But he would come into the room with a pot of hot tea and she would hold him and cry; rocking him back and forth even when he became so large that she fit on his lap like a doll.
She entered his life on the heels of an explosion, appearing out of the night like a ghost, walking through terror and fear with the calmest ease. She searched out the wounded and nursed them. She was a savior to many - an angel of death to those that needed it. Her dark eyes and wild hair told the story of an ancient time, one that he had no comprehension of. Through a community of broken bodies and broken dreams, she passed like a mist - just out of the corner of their eyes; as the people fought the earth, forging a road of metal into a wilderness time had tried to forget.
He was only four years old - or approximately that, there was no one around to ever tell her - when he found her, following her like a stray cat, holding a small wooden toy soldier, his bare feet and legs covered in mud. She would say he was only four when he started following me. He would say I was only four when we found each other.
Within minutes of his fixation, the women at the worker camp were handing her blankets and food for her son, to thank her for the work she had done in the dark of night. They cooed over his large brown eyes and his mild behavior. She searched through the tired faces and broken bodies for his proper mother; he doggedly followed close on her heels without saying a word. No one would help except to nod politely and offer her gifts, for the son with such a pretty face. It had been too long; she no longer knew the words they offered her. And so he stayed with her.
She found them lodging in a boarding house in the thick of the city. He began speaking only after following her through the city for a year. He said Mother: with clarity and the hope of a small child. She never knew what his first words were, in his own tongue. She worried for a year that behind his expressive eyes was a damaged brain, a child incapable of speech. Mother, he said, I love you.
And she cried at the sound.
They survived together, a teenage mother and a small child - sometimes an orphan girl and her brother, but this story only men believed, for a time. She hunted as he slept and then crawled onto their mat, cold as the stars, holding him until dawn. Days they spent wandering, her teaching and talking, him always silent and listening. She learned to speak to a child, to notice the world again. She narrated the people and places that they saw, the world that they walked on the fringes of - two children without a mother, a small girl playing house all alone, without a care in the world. She took what she wanted, as always, but now she wanted so little: some food for her companion, a few toys, a roof, and a straw mat. The hunger she had always felt began to fade in the light of this new life. She felt almost human again.
And around them, a city grew. Around them immigrants came with nothing between them but hope. Around them there was a whole world on the heels of awakening to its future. Anna spoke the words of change, but for once did not see the slow motion of time between day to day the way she always seemed to have. No, now the world was constantly in sharp focus, a dream of adventures and stories and fantasical unknowns. The child on her arm stood silent in the face of each day, while each moment she grew more frenzied - feeling time passing too quickly, change happening too swiftly. Afternoons she would take him to a park overlooking the city and they would watch it move beneath them. She could tell him things no human mother could have imagined. The stories of the whole city were there for her to hear, for her to tell, for him to learn.
One afternoon when the boy was still a child, but approaching manhood more quickly than she could see or fathom so caught was she in the beauty and wonder of their shared youth, he asked quietly if Mother was ever going to grow old like the other boy's mothers? She shook him fiercely, she had always begrudged him playmates of his own age, she was far too jealous of his time and his love to allow him much time on his own. How dare he play with others when all she wanted was for them to be happy together? She shouted and ranted, she cried at the inequity of it all, he was all his dear old mother had, could she not just have this one thing in all the world to call her own?
When he woke up the next morning, they were in new rooms above a tea house. She was his sister, he could never again call her Mother. She had a job in the tea house and he was to attend school with the sons of the mistress of the house. He cried and begged for them to go back to place they had been. He hugged her knees, intent to be her small boy again. But he was too tall and she was too small and she sighed, for there was nothing to be done about it. And though they both cried, he did go to school and he was the brightest in his class, for she had taught him well without him knowing. And though she cried, she did go to work in the tea house so that he could be a normal boy, with a sister who worked so hard.
And when he grew so tall and strong that he must work, he did. And they moved to a place with two rooms. Once, he asked why they could not be married now, he was old enough to be a good husband. But her eyes darkened to a frightening blackness and her teeth grew sharp and long, and though blood pumped through veins he never knew existed, he did not ask again while they lived there.
She still wrapped her body around him at night and rocked him to sleep, crying into his hair.
But to the world they were so very normal, just immigrant orphans from an exotic land, trying to make a new life.
Thirteen years after they met, he celebrated a birthday with some friends from the factory. They gave him alcohol and tried to buy him a woman. He laughed, they all laughed, and described with great delight the wonderful lives they would have - the homes and women and strapping sons that would bring them so much pride and happiness. The world would not wait for boys like these - these boys with so much vigor and lust and honor.
And as he stumbled home, he saw a small girl crying on the street and he walked up to her and offered assistance - his Mother had always cautioned him never to speak to strangers, especially those who pretended to be in need, but what harm could a child do?
But the child was her.
But there was no assistance to be given, only life.
He felt her teeth bite into his wrist before he could shout anything but her name, a moment of pain and the purest pleasure and she threw him away, his body rocketing through the air like a pebble thrown into the ocean.
He grasped for her and cried out, My love, my love!
All that responded was the pure, night air.
When We Were Younger, I Could Fool You
Small Rain
I’m coming.
I’m coming.
Some loathe me, saying I’m autumn’s cold tears,
Others welcome me, calling the music of spring.
Perhaps I am tears,
Perhaps I am song.
Slowly I’ll trickle down pale cheeks,
Softly sing in expectant hearts.
Be it happy or sad,
I’ll always be a rivulet flowing to the heart.
In the boundless sea of emotions
I am severance as well as confluence.
For a week, they avoided his bandaged arm, her weakness. He struggled to hold on to the silence, filling it with anecdotes from the lives of the people met - from the stories of the streets that he created just to hear a voice echoing through their rooms; obsessively filling the silence, maniacally holding the silence within himself - claiming ownership over sound and thought.
Daily she grew weaker, her skin paled, her hands shook as she poured the tea, her legs refused to walk with the speed with which he had always been so accustomed. He felt for the first time as though he had to stoop down, look down, to hear her voice, to see her face clearly… though it had been years since she had been anywhere near his height, she had always been commanding and full of energy, always on eye level with a quick wit and a slow smile. Daily he watched her lose her energy, lose her spark - like watching a long-lived candle slowly flicker out, the light that once permeated his life was now dwindling to nothing. Yet, he talked. Every moment he filled with a forced cheeriness, not allowing her to speak - his voice so loud it shook the windowpanes, it rocketed through her grieving mind like a siren.
On the eighth day, he let a single drop of his blood steep into the pot of rice he made for her. When he handed her a steaming bowl she threw it out of his hands and backed into a corner. His dimming candle becoming a caged animal in a matter of moments. She was too weak, she let her true face show - her eyes darkened to a pure, carnal black, dark veins appearing around her eyes, her teeth growing longer, sharper… she hissed.
He kept talking. Sat down on her mat and ate his own bowl of blood-rice and talked.
On the fifteenth day, he came to her with an open wound. He cried for her assistance, he shoved his arm at her with tears in his eyes, begging her to heal him - to bandage him - to care for him; his Mother. Isn't that what Mothers are for - to bandage their children's injuries and wipe away the tears.
She howled like a wounded animal and spit at him, clawing at the walls with weak arms.
On the twenty third day he found her tied to a chair in her room with heavy chains. He beckoned to her, tried to release her, but there was no recognition in her eyes - only blackness and fear and pain. He kissed her softly and she reared away, crashing to the ground.
That night and every night after, he spent on her mat, looking up at his creature and crying. Crying the sobs she once had cried when he was a child and she was so strong, but so fearful. Crying the tears of a child without a family, a home, or a name. Crying out in the night for the woman who had always held him as he slept…
He found that he did not know what sleep was without her small frame wrapped around his, weighing his dreams down so that he had no fear, holding his body in place so that it could not be harmed, wrapping with her strength and her resilience.
On the twenty fifth day, he brought a friend home from dinner. A new man from the factory with no family and no friends. A man no one would miss.
He fed the man a warm meal, they drank rice wine and toasted their good fortune, their jobs, their Mothers, their countries, and their city. And when the man was good and fed, warmed from the liquor and heavy with fatigue, Lee Shen hit the visitor over the head with a brick tied in a piece of sack-cloth.
He dragged the warm, breathing body into the room where she still sat in her self-imposed chains. He slit the jugular of the man, exposing blood, tissue, and the heady scent of copper into the room. Methodically he bent her chair over the man, forcing her face into the blood that seeped into the wood floors.
And she drank.
She drank from exhaustion, from starvation, from need. She shuddered and sighed over the body like a teenage boy over his first woman. She tried to pull out, pull away, while there was still blood pulsing through the body on the floor, but her man-child wouldn't allow it. One drink and she was not yet strong enough to fight back - not that she would, her own boy was too precious to fight for so long.
When the last ounce of blood was licked up by her small, darting tongue, only then did he sit her chair upright and loosen the chains.
Now there was only silence, neither had the words to speak.
And in the darkness and the silence, He had his first woman. His Mother, his Sister, his Friend, his Companion, his Protector, his Pet, his Lover. He drove himself into her like a conquering hero, hurting her with his force and his passion, she cried out and he smiled into her dark hair that he pulled and twisted with venom. She wrapped her arms around him like she had every night since he was a child in her arms, she cried the way he always remembered, as he kissed and bruised her face and limbs.
In the silence, he took her. And in the silence, when he sunk into her arms and drifted to sleep, her body weighing him down once more, he thought Like we always have.
Memories, They Fly Through the Air Like Cobwebs
Women of the Red Plain
Know
That waiting is your fate
Having waited through the season of summer
You begin to wait through the autumn days
The nomad’s trail is turning browner day by day
But the men still have not returned.
Those unable to bear the loneliness
Married again
Married men who hate a nomad’s life.
Know
That men never feel guilty for what they’ve done to women
Born to roam on the grassland
They come and go as they please
He drinks (and often gets into fights)
He dances (often till daybreak)
Married for seven days he leaves
Telling
The bride to give him a son
So she gives him a son
But still stiffening his face
As if she had given him a girl
He won’t allow her to step into the house
Doesn’t know
The waiting is longer than the grassplain
Doesn’t know if she should give birth to another nomad son
To cause some other woman
Grief.
Jia Jia
Lee Shen was six years old. He loved to throw rocks into the ocean. He loved to drag his hands through rough, wet grass on the hottest days. He loved to watch people come and go on the street in front of the boarding house where he and his mother lived. Most of all, he loved his mother.
She was beautiful with dark, lightly curling hair that she wore loose unlike other mothers. She made the best pastries and treats and she let him have them for dinner while other boys' mothers made them eat nasty tasting things and she would say that you were only a young boy once and then laugh in a way that frightened him. She had a slight smattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose that he liked to count as he sat on her lap, listening to her read aloud to him by the light of the moon. She was strong and brave like the knights and warriors in the stories she read him, not like the other mothers who seemed so weary and sad.
Lee Shen loved his mother and had every intention of marrying her one day. He told her so himself one sunny afternoon.
"Mother?"
"Shen?"
"Mother, will you marry me?"
Anna paused in her mending and looked down at the small boy, playing with his best marbles on the walk in front of their boarding house. "Marry me?"
Shen nodded and jumped up to stand beside her, his darling Mother. "The old potter is going to marry his third daughter to the man who delivers milk and his wife said that it was a good catch and that you should marry again so that I would have a father because a boy needs a father and Mother why would she say that because I don't want to share you and so I told her that I shall marry you if you need married, when I am tall enough to kiss your forehead because that's what Lea the girl who works in the big house on 43rd Street across from the market said was a good sign of a husband that he must be clean and polite and be tall enough to kiss her on the forehead and Mother how long until I am that tall because I don't think I could share you with anyone so much taller than me and the old potter's wife laughed at me when I said I should marry you, but I think she's just a silly old woman because Lea says that in this country we can marry for love and oh Mother," he sighed dramatically, "I just can't imagine anyone in the world as beautiful as you and how could I possibly love anyone more than my dear little Mother?" As he talked, Shen danced from foot to foot, hopping and tapping with the quick rhythm of his words, his small hands gesticulating dramatically as he relayed the important information that had been weighing so heavily on his young mind.
Anna set the old pair of boy-shorts down on the steps beside her and pulled the small boy towards her, brushing his long dark hair away from his eyes. Though he was only six, he already was close to her height, the young woman had such slight features and was so very small compared to her big-boned boy already. "My darling, you cannot marry me."
"Whyever not? I love you the most!" the poor boy's eyes filled with tears, this was not the answer he was expecting her to give him that bright and shiny afternoon.
Anna pulled him onto her lap, facing him towards the street, tucking her chin on his shoulder. "Little boys cannot marry their mothers, small one. That isn't how things work."
He sniffed and ducked his head, his small grubby fingers making patterns on her leg. "But other mothers aren't special like you?"
His little mother chuckled deep in her throat, "That's true, small one. But soon you won't be small anymore. Soon you will be big and strong and you will fall in love with someone strong like you." She tickled his stomach lightly, in just the right spot with just the right touch - the touch that only a mother knows - and he squirmed in her arms, his face scrunching up in that unmistakable look that children have when they know they are still angry, but still they want to laugh. "And when you are all grown, then you will want to leave me, like all big tall boys do, so that you can have adventures of your own."
"Wull… I want you to come with me," his voice was slurred and mushed, his tears and disappointment thickening his voice.
"Remember the story I told you? The one about the girl whose mother is trapped by a wicked witch and she has to wait many, many years before she can get her mother back?" Shen nodded sullenly. "Well, that is your Mother's story. My story. My adventure. And when you are all grown big and you find your own adventures, I need to go find my mother and free her from the wicked witch."
"Why can't I help you?"
"Oh, sweeting," she rocked him back and forth and tears welled up in her eyes. "When it comes time, you won't want to."
Shen jerked himself free and stood on the step above her, puffing out his chest, "I don't care what you say or what the potter's old grouch of a wife says, I will marry you and I will pull your mother from the witch's spell myself."
Anna stood up and curtseyed to the brave knight, "You will always be my champion?"
The small boy stamped his foot on the stone steps, "Dragons couldn't keep me from you, Mother."
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