LIN ZHAO

TREES

translated by Jesse Young and Xiao Yue Shan

Suppose trees could really pin down a space (rhododendrons for Salt Water Town, cotton rose—fog-shrouded cities, camphors—tropical islands), or a person (the Buddha as a bodhi, Huan Wen as a willow, Zhang Zao as a plum blossom tree). Then they would also definitely be able to reify a moment in time. Different trees have me pinned to different pages in the script, versions of myself for two hands to press, dry, classify, and store away.

Typhoon moments are oil palms. The interregnum between school bells for classes ending and classes starting is the fishtail palm. Before turning fourteen, I was the white sandalwood. Not the lilytree or the southern magnolia, but rather the purely Southeast Asian Magnolia x alba—with a green knife-edge carving a wide courtyard out from the world, lifting it upward, like those unchanging birthday nights with their serrated blades propping up a corner of cake year after year. White sandalwoods in military formation, making a fairy ring, containing between them all the light from the ages zero to fourteen. Oh, time. . . wheeling like a dragonfly before the rain. Tear-blotted memories are like the weight of light, congealing on the membranes of their wings.

June’s first white sandalwood: a skirt enwrapping the body of a beautiful woman, just like the kind mama used to wear. The passing of time, ablaze, pinches at the petal-tips and scorches them (the botany teacher materialises suddenly with a correction: “They’re not petals! They’re tepals!”). The perianth of the female specimen turns upward, falling, filling the flurried stage in the chiaroscuro theatre of childhood years. 

The era of the white sandalwood is stretched a bit wide; that of the plumeria is always drawn tight. If you were after order and structure, you could switch to an alternate pair of nouns: Michelia alba 缅桂花 or plumeria 缅栀子—the era of the Michelia alba is somewhat stretched, and plumeria’s forever drawn tight. I can't figure out the logic behind these names either. In these two iterations of “缅”, which is the true meaning—缅甸 the country of Burma, or 缅 as in “distant”? There was only ever that one plumeria—standing in its particular place within the intestines of labyrinthine Cai Wu Wei's eighth turn, like a grain of golden sand caught up in hair. Cai Wu Wei is a village bounded by urbanity. Three hundred years ago, it was three hundred steps away from where the Salt Water Grounds were built, slowly evolving into a noisy, pulsating heart. The grounds beyond Cai Wu Wei were broken countless times, and the names of times past went the way of the dirt and the foliage—ploughed through. Cement pouring over. Cement much like that poured for Renmin Road, Jiabin Road, Jiefang Road. Cai Wu Wei held out in using its Ming Dynasty designation, a name ripe with native flavour, helping it stand out on the map—native things being easily identifiable. The original vegetation. The native insects. Those birds that return year upon year. The names of these places: bite, corner, tail, pit, bay, sand, gush which must read as chōng. . . These rugged, sunken, wet, rolling-sand-and-sweeping-water things. In the Salt Water Town of the nineties, “local” often just became “hick”, and “hick” was taboo to the youth of Salt Water Town.

Hick is subtle. One must be vigilant of it. Salt Water Town thinks the whole north is hick. What about the south? Hong Kong is not hick in the slightest, but Hainan is. Southeast Asia isn’t that hick. Mandarin is hick. Non-standard Cantonese is hick. The Cantonese of the capital is more hick than Hong Kong's. The Teochew dialect is hick. Hakka is hick, but not nearly as hick as Mandarin. Yasuo is hick, but Nobita isn't. Saying “don't got it" is hick, saying “don't have it" isn’t. Papa speaks proper Cantonese. Mama can speak Teochew dialect but her Cantonese isn’t very good. Under an influence similar to religious devotion, I diligently trained myself to speak Mandarin without the tiniest hint of an accent. By four I could accurately differentiate the Cantonese from any region, the TV being my humble mentor. By the time my elementary school classmates drawled out their syllables to ask, "Whaaa. . .? So you speak Mandarin at your house?”, I could only resentfully admit to it, enduring the painful humiliation.

At the Salt Water Town elementary school, Cantonese was like a cool steel sieve, mechanically swinging. The northern children who couldn't speak Cantonese leaked loose from its mesh, screaming “Ahhh!” as they tumbled into the pitch-dark abyss. As for the southern children proficient in Cantonese, they neatly formed a troupe in the sieve. Skipping, shaking. The non-Cantonese speaking northern kids were left to befriend other non-Cantonese speaking northern kids. Every grade had about two or three of them, very naturally playing together, despite likely loathing one another. Have you ever played “Find the Middle Finger”? First, you make the challenger turn around, then you quickly manipulate your left hand: squeeze, disguise, and twist those five familiar digits—force them to all look like middle fingers. Finally, form a lid with your right hand, and firmly cover those five fakers. Then shout: “Oi, let’s go.” Then you extend forth this knot of twisted snakes, holding your breath, leaving your opponent to the search.

Imagine I tied up the entire class, devised a lid with my right hand, covered them, and reached out toward you. I assure that you'd see an indistinguishable bunch of browned sticks, skinny and frail, like monkeys, and among them, a slender pole standing there deafeningly in ashen white—neat, clean. No matter how hard I would press or rub, there’d still be no way of obscuring it. You'd immediately pick her out of the fray. She was Xu Meng.

First, even her name—Xu Meng—couldn’t even be said in Cantonese. As soon as you took a glance at the student register, you’d know that this name belongs to a northern kid. “Alien!” Some male students would shout, circling Xu Meng round and round. Her seat happened to be behind mine, and that year she was the class' only northern student; new in Salt Water Town, she determined that I was her friend after hearing me say just one sentence in Mandarin.

Xu Meng sat firmly in her seat, waiting for me. “Let's walk home together,” she poked at my back. And the first several times we did actually make the trip as a pair. We walked the big road. Exiting the school gates, trailing the newly built, wide and spacious avenue with eyes closed. Xu Meng was elegant, clear-skinned. When she spoke Mandarin it sounded like a tumbling stream of glass marbles. It wasn't until I reached adulthood that I understood this to be a certain brand of self-restrained Beijing speech. We would turn onto Jiabin Road, home for me just over the river. Xu Meng had to cross the street, walk past another intersection, and go to the bus stop to wait for the number eight. I told her, “There’s a number eight bus stop by the school.” Xu Meng was quiet. She wanted to walk home together regardless. To say goodbye, to cross the street, to walk to the next intersection, and wait for the number eight. 

But the southern kids also wanted me to walk home with them. They came at it differently from the northern “Let's walk home together.”; southern kids had a distinctive way of doing things. They’d start their long tones from far away, swinging in circles. “Haaaa. . .?” They'd throw out, “Today ya gonna be going with that girl?” They even came ready with Cantonese nicknames, the granting of nicknames being a particular skill of theirs. Xu Meng had sat looking at me from her seat, clutching her packed school bag. I looked at her. I said, “I’m not walking home with you anymore.” 

From then on I'd always catch Xu Meng walking by herself. Some time after, a northern kid from an adjacent class became Xu Meng’s walking companion. The two of them walked together right up until elementary school graduation. After that, I never saw Xu Meng again.

The southerner clique I walked home with were all living in Cai Wu Wei: a large-eyed girl, her little brother (born in lieu of the one-child policy), little sister (born in lieu), older male cousin (born in lieu), and extended older female cousin. She herself was a (born in lieu) little sister, having also an older brother. They all looked rather alike: protruding lips, crooked teeth, wide buggy eyes spread far apart. In secret they spoke Teochew dialect; in class, never. We would set off like an onslaught. Emerging from the school gates, we only took two steps on the new road before ducking immediately into the narrow Jintang Street for a couple more steps, and from there we could peer at the entrance of a maze from between the split of two power poles—cement rods plastered with STI clinic ads. After that comes the slender Goose Intestine Alley, curling up like a real goose intestine, dribbling and damp. Laying bare there was the opening to the sewage, a matted circle of black hair dangling at its entrance. Fetid water gushing out. Teochew dialect like a machete cleaving back and forth. Along the street, the buildings haphazardly reached upward, sloping, staggering, maddeningly trying to bite down on the last remaining thread of sky. The viscous liquid dribbling onto the scalp makes your whole body convulse. Stands of fruit, spreads of merchandise, hot food carts, bare-bottomed toddlers. Everywhere naked children came into view, a wide-eyed girl sometimes suddenly scooping one up for a kiss, the clamour of Teochew dialect gliding from mouth to mouth. A foul odour. The proprietor of the fifth intersection's fruit stand was the class captain’s mother. Occasionally the class captain’s younger brother (born in lieu) would be on hand helping out. Popping buzz of conversation. Shoelaces dragging up filthy water, splashing up against calves. People streaming in from every which way. A rain of people. And then there was that single plumeria, rooted, encircled by this volatile, Boccioni-esque scene.

I remember its thick, many-forked trunk, the crooked way it bore its leaves. The plumerias I would come across in later years, in Southeast Asian gardens or tucked behind a Malay beauty’s ear, were never the same. That one resides in the cloudburst of Cantonese and Teochew dialect, draped in neglected perfume, grasping a notice board: “This stop for separation.” Under this tree I parted from the southern kids. Bye bye, I had said, watching their clustering hyena pack shuffling off, disappearing at the top of an overpass’ staircase. I'd sigh, gather myself, and summon my imaginary friends, compelling them to accompany me along the remaining half of the suddenly treacherous journey, through the tapering roads of the village, bounded by the city.

Did walking home together equate to some monumental friendship? An elementary age Zhang Zao-er would have genuinely nodded her head. The plumeria was the trophy of that friendship. We tore together the flowers from its body, madly inhaling its scent, ripping the leaves apart to catch sight of a milky white substance flowing, grinding them into a paste underfoot. I spat out their pet phrases, loved their Aaron Kwok, faced down an annoying classmate with a hand gesture I picked up from them. Knitting my brows, I'd pinch my nose in a mad dash through the remainder of the alley. At the end is mama, holding her comb and ready for battle, wanting to smooth out the hair of her daughter who was always “rolling around with the commoners” (direct quotation). That was her true concern. Before her daughter entered school, she'd investigated every institution within a ten kilometre radius, forced by the “commoner brats infesting every nook and cranny” (direct quotation) into a dead end. Half having used up all her tricks and half out of pure luck, she finally happened upon a newly built school—but ultimately, the fate of being besieged by the commoners was unavoidable. Big brother Jia Ming had at least entered a good school. Ugh, but as expected, the offspring of your big uncle is different. Isn’t that just the way it is? Mama’s eyes were always locked on big uncle's. Big brother Jia Ming started learning violin at three, piano by five. When I turned three, mama plopped me down on the piano bench without a second word, and papa regularly guarded the instrument at night with his belt folded in half. The TV series airing on the Jade network—“idiotic"; the once-popular handmade leather backpack and flat canvas shoes—“tacky as hell"; me in fifth grade yearningly looking into the “tacky as hell" displays behind the glass window—“if they jumped off a cliff, would you?”. I had personally investigated the “trendy market” which the city’s youth chased manically after: a five-storey building packed so tight by vendors that not even a needle could be shoved through, the Aaron Kwon-hairstyle of the dropout shopkeeper (chickenshit yellow, devil-fire green) cutting a contrast with the pinched corners of her mouth and her northern frame. Mama, at her wit’s end, finally explicitly forbade her dumb daughter from “ever going to that damned place again,” as if she had forgotten her past self ushering the whole family in the nineties to the grand opening of China's first McDonalds beside that same “damned place,” as if on a pilgrimage to Mecca.

This dumb daughter still remembers a seldom-seen radiance spreading on her mama's face (the radiance that starts her humming) when—after preening her daughter's red and white striped suit with little red pompoms until every fold was in place, and the scarlet beret was tilted at a pretty angle—she grasped one arm and her husband took the other, letting that red-and-white child hover lightly in the air, gliding on the overpass ramp and a string of giggles. Who took that photograph? Condensed it down to a slight and chilly page slipped into the album, until, while tidying old mementos, the thirteen-year later version of me had flipped to it all over again, and suddenly, it became infused with an inexplicable heat, and the sea of faces around the three main subjects (making up the photograph's bustling edges) churned again, rushing down the overpass, hitting the whirlpool overflowing that resplendent double archway, flooding the order counter already sunken by the preceding wave (a group of well-trained but collapsing McBrothers stranded there like overturned sea turtles), exploding into the first and second floor dining areas and the stairs crowded with seated diners (each and every one hugging their plastic trays as though possessed), then finally like a bottle of champagne shaken to its limits—bang! The lid rockets to the skies, the jet of wine shatters the door, fountaining out to a wonderland built with tropically blue skies, rainbow balloons, and green velveteen rugs, the surreally massive golden double arches turning soundlessly, the blended fragrance of deep fried potatoes and hot coffee pounding deep into the soul of that red-and-white child. A promised land of handbags and wax paper cups rises from the sea of people—an old auntie sits in their midst, transcendent with fortune, beaming with joy, waving her arms madly at us. 

*

Your so-called first love, the most tender, most sultry, most delicately green person in your viscera—Boccaccio’s muse Fiammetta, Goethe’s Anna Katharina, Nabokov’s Valentina. . . Look at Freud for one: welcomed his first love at sixteen, and nothing at all came of it before the whole episode was done with. I also have a first love (much like you normal people), and coincidentally, it also happened at sixteen. Reclining under instant noodles, classroom exercises, and failed test papers—sixteen year old Xiang Di, who had once killed for me an unceasingly imposing bee.

The era of middle school was already becoming economised into a series of self-enclosed corridors: the well-lit corridor before the classroom door, connected to the bicycle shed and football field's open-air corridor (hemmed in by imposing jackfruit trees), the corridor along the swimming pool eternally accumulating water, corridors of clear days, corridors of winter nights. . . All linked up to make up a candy-coloured tunnel, its impossibly distant and fuzzy starting point already dragged by time into a depth beyond seeing. Now Xiang Di has accepted my invite, once again taking on his past role of looking around curiously in the halls. The supporting players are resurrected. The screen alights. Floods of people surge onto campus, like an overturned pot of ball bearings.

There are even more northern kids amongst the ball bearings, all speaking Cantonese, their accents exposed only here and there. But that accent no longer seems to prick people, and Cantonese is no longer on its high pedestal. Starting from the crowns of their heads, the southerner kids split off—I see their scalps, as I have already grown very tall. The northern DNA of my grandfathers is making itself felt. The southern children’s Mandarin is gradually becoming unbearable. How did this happen? Perhaps mama succeeded, or perhaps it’s time that has prevailed. The civil war has quietly died down, and Cantonese was defeated, retreating to the classroom, the after-school hours, the narrow streets and alleys, into the depths of the TV. In the third year of middle school, the final senior teacher who had persistently delivered his lessons in Cantonese retired with honours. Or perhaps it’s the books that clinched it. Once I’d suddenly caught my voice, reading to myself: using Mandarin to recite the rows of characters. It was as shocking as swallowing a star. The mostly likely theory is: Cantonese had been a detour all along, a temporary misadventure. No matter how circuitous, or how far off it leads, eventually one turns back to the golden road stretching out from the maternal womb. Where did that book come from? I noticed—I newly saw—mama carting them home over and over, sometimes three or five, other times by the case. Mama didn’t want to read herself. Like—she herded me off to piano lessons, but she couldn't play; she sent me to study painting, though she couldn't paint; she sent me off to take up dancing, but she couldn't dance. Mama used up all her time shuttling me back and forth, and also took care of papa. Whatever time she had left, she’d spend watching TV, or playing Landlords.

The tall, perennially sunny Xiang Di and I began maintaining an intriguing distance. There were certain instances in particular.

A Week of Good Fortune: Zhang Zao-er’s seat is moved to the left of Xiang Di's, the latter could snatch away her pen pouch (canvas: patterned with small fish and mushrooms) just by lifting his hand. Early during self-study, Zhang Zao-er pretends to read (the majestic Goethe) while dispatching a squadron of surreptitious side-glances: fluttering glimpses, bypassing the sea of space between their two tables, finally disembarking atop the enemy’s shoulder, the marshal kisses the chief’s collar! The perfume of the fabric softener infatuates the soldiers. They march on along the shirt. Slowly. Do not shake the grasses and alert the snakes. Several soldiers slide into the shirt pockets—a warm and moon-white trap. Leave them behind! Those treasonous weeds! The surviving sisters-in-arms, treading softly, softly, holding on tight to one transparent button, using the other as a foothold, until the garment's front gate splits open, and the skin like fruit-flesh can be seen—a firm mountain of fruit-flesh: the enemy’s charm offensive. Mobilise downward with the aid of those buttons, don't forget to caress the downy and delicate grasses of the mountain walls. Set up camp inside the belly button (cool and shady, full of valleys), become fanatical navel gazers, hear an undercurrent of rumbling stirring at the cave's bottom. . . Xiang Di suddenly tears off the marshal’s hair tie and runs as if his life depended on it—finally, a real battle is coming.

A Fortnight's Dusk: Zhang Zao-er’s seat is tight against the back door, a potted daphne odora at her once-blessed right. (Zhang Zao-er and the daphne odora sigh and sigh.) The bell rings: a revitalising potion of rich oil and rock sugar. Hurriedly gather classmates for a heated discussion. . . (Look, Xiang Di's stood up.) Exaggerate the emotions, add body language, speak with more vivacity, hands dancing madly, narrow the eyes to communicate consensus, forgotten, totally overlooked—Xiang Di passes by and through the back door, the wind in his wake licking at the nape of Zhang Zao-er’s neck. Okay, discussion over. Close up shop. Calm yourself. 

After-School Brilliance: During the hottest and coldest seasons, the scenes of Xiang Di are diffused with fried snacks, Tuxedo Mask, seascapes, Pop’s Biggest Hits, male cousins, cicadas, and ice skates. The new millennium stretches out its hands to offer up a gift of rendezvous—half of the grade is planning to meet at the plaza by the waterfront to welcome this generous benefactor. Xiang Di, decked out in his radiant blue coat, twilight dawning, standing at the corner of the oceanside highway, the earth and skies brimming with strangers, composing a backdrop worthy of the neo-impressionists. The golden child, collecting the most of this purest evening glow, lilies, sapphire, the bubbling foam of soda chilled by winter winds. . . An end-of-century Zhang Zao-er delivers the end-of-century greetings: “Hello.” The seaside barbecue: Xiang Di letting a chicken wing dangle happily from his barbecue fork, squeezing each pimple on the chicken skin with wild abandon (for the sake of those five little oval cushions, who wouldn’t want to become a chicken wing?). Let’s have some honey. The honey-coloured chicken wings shriek in the charcoal flames. The beach volleyball match: eight against eight. Xiang Di her enchanting opponent.  Look at the shoelaces limply moaning, intwined in his long fingers, despairingly coveting his size forty-four feet. Barefoot Xiang Di—Hermes with the wind at his back. The volleyball is always gunning for him—wailing “Don’t let me leave!” But in a split second he spikes it past the net, cratering in the sand. That’s how it was. A few balls snatched away here and there, a body caked in wet sand tumbling into the ocean, the camera pursuing to the end, the winter night bending to wash its chilled skirts, sky filled end to end with scattered, sporadic points of light (stars, sea vessels, lighthouses) like gemstones on a dress. Counting backwards, Xiang Di stands behind Zhang Zao-er. When she turns to face him, a rose-coloured firework ignites the sky, the millennium rides a silver chariot across its glittering, rose-colored downpour. . . Zhang Zao-er has absolutely no interest in trailing its tracks. She is already locked into the palace of his pupils—its endlessly multiplying columns leading her unawares into an exquisite, secret garden.

*

Mama wants to put her little one in the bicycle seat, but the little one doesn't want it. The child writhes, stamps, fat tears falling drop after drop. Mama says, “What’s wrong with you? You'll be late for ballet class!” The child’s mouth breaks into a pout, bunching up. The child spins on the spot, tighter and tighter, as tight as a screw, drilling into the ground. There's a very large screwdriver stuck in the child’s head, spinning her! The kind of screwdriver mamas don't see. Mama spanks the child, lots of people looking over. A voice, “The kid’s not listening. How embarrassing.” Mama says, “I don't like you anymore. If you don't get onto the bike now, I’ll leave you here.”

The screw snaps with a click. The screw yells, “I don’t like mama too!”

Mama turns to straddle the bike, and goes. A forest of legs closes in, faces peering down with odd expressions. It's getting dark! The little one cries and hiccups. A face says: “Hey, mamas don't want kids who don’t listen.” The faces all say the same. The little one, drenched, squeezes through the forest of legs, “Mama!” Crying out in all directions, jaw hanging slack and wobbling, making a funny creaking sound, “Baobao likes mama! Baobao listens!” Not knowing why, the child stuffs her whole right hand into her mouth. The forest behind rustles, “Ah, just come with us. Your mama doesn't want you anymore.” The little one feels like she’s about to be sick.

But mama suddenly appears, not from somewhere distant, but from very close by. Because when mama comes out she is already big, not slowly becoming big. She asks from high up: “Now you’ll listen?” The child hiccups: “Listen. Listen.” She asks from high up: “Do you like mama?” The child hiccups: “Like. Like.” Mama says: “Good girl.” She puts her little one into the bicycle seat. Sure enough the child is good and she listens, quietly, tremblingly clinging to mama's back, like mama’s favourite kind of baby, heading off to mama's favourite ballet class.

*

I described some of my childhood mornings to Yang Baima—if the shadows of the white sandalwood point westward, you’ll be able to meet them under the tree—and I just happened to be passing the liminal zone between dream and reality, my body left out of the sea of dreams, sustained like a reef stilled in water. This suspension of time and space taught me the secret magic of soul imprinting. Movements must be light. Force is a great transgression. The pattern of one’s own bedsheets—a crown of petals like holy lotus, toothed-spoon petals, its orbiting branches a result of the curious hybrid between peony and vine, a species only existing in the imaginations of bedsheet manufacturers. At that time, I did not yet comprehend the logic of nature and creation, but I was deeply grateful that someone had conjured up that divaricating, serpentine, sleek universe into which I could deeply sink. My blueprint was full of excess, selfishness, and pretense—but the flowers and branches kept adjusting their choreography, until they were in sync with the dream-tide, until their surging patterns pushed in upon my wavering soul, leaving an impression even shallower than sunburn. Years later, I fell into a wormhole, listening to a young, salacious woman perform Troubles on repeat. At the eight hundred and fortieth rendition, the phantoms of those branches suddenly reappeared upon me.

What I mean is, when we quiet ourselves, lay down our presuppositions, and carefully sift (with a net) through those first times (having freed myself from the other side), we’ll find luminescent crystals hanging in the eyes of the mesh. You're lifting up the net throwing sparks, I'm also lifting up the net throwing sparks. In that initial moment, we’re the same. We're innocent, at ease. You sit, peacefully pulling open your memories, until that most distant piece—almost completely free of shadow—wafts away just as you pinch at it. Tranquility is the last remaining thing you can keep: it is the door you’ve gone through, the door you firmly remember, the door to which you ultimately wish to return. Xiang Di is one of the doors. When I was in the inner depths of his palace, lightly tapping the pillars, stepping towards the end (an end I foresaw), it was as if, in all the moments that came before and would come after, I would know that tranquility had descended. I want to corral a lifetime into that moment. To exhaust that place to its end. . . But the truth of it was that the hysteria of true love lashed into me, and I was tossed from the depths of his eyes, tumbling back into the euphoric crowd—look, the millennium’s confetti is floating down.

*

Since the bottle of tranquility has already popped its cork, we’ll let it bubble up a little more. Childhood was a tenderly white layer of gauzy fog, descending, shouldered tall by a white sandalwood, then collapsing down into a spread of flowerbeds, hopscotch grids in chalk, and children returning home alone, before again being caught by the head of another white sandalwood. Living things bumping into this gauzy fog are eternally imprisoned, not dead and not living—they themselves feel nothing, just swaying, among the grasses from this tree to that, trailing a shadow of twinkling stars. The wind blows and the scenery flashes, flashing out in lines and rows. It's all shadows. The cement railing was taken down long ago, but the feeling of that solid gravel overhead still lives in the well of my fingertips, rattling when I move. The feel of the Chloranthus spicatus bush still exists in my arm, in my shoulders, their constellating golden blossoms still giving off light on the backs of my eyelids. Papa planted the mulberry tree in the northern corner of the courtyard, and in the thick of night it takes on a severe expression, decked out in formalwear. Papa lets me step on his outspread palms, and with an inexplicable toss, I’m in the tree. On the right side is a plastic basket mama had handed up from below, and this basket lies unused until papa and I have eaten ourselves into purple-mouthed people. Mama is still standing on the ground, helping the basket down, helping me down. Those enduring summer evenings, scatterings of bats playing against the boundaries of the sky. Mosquitoes are the monarchs of summer nights, some large, some skimpy. Papa says the smellier the head, the richer the crown. We all believed him, and feverishly compared how much our heads smelled. The other two of “we” were big brother Jia Ming and little brother You En: we sauntered through the hotel of childhood as a team. There was only a year’s difference between each of us, like three adjacent white keys on a piano. White sandalwood trees are so tall! Its floral fragrance weighing down feels like a mosquito net descending. In adulthood, I could only struggle to find my way back to a slight impression of that gauzy fog by way of an artificial scent named the “White Sandalwood Series”.

During the winter and summer vacations Lady Santa came calling, bringing candy, air conditioning, Legos, and ever more rainbow-bright foreign goods, crowded with flourishing English letters. Lady Santa was Little Auntie.

Little Auntie was a very strange adult, as good with children as papa was, but with her own particular style. Little Auntie was glamourous, charismatic, mischievous, and a little obsessed with imparting vulgar Cantonese children's rhymes: 

Slap ya thigh, sing a song,
Everyone says I ain’t got no wife,
But I’ll sure get one in this life.

Got some money, get a pearl,
Got no money, get a bean curd girl,
Bean curd girl, bean curd girl,
Eat a lot, shit two pots,
Shit goes out, ass farts loud.

Every time a note hit on a dirty word, we would gleefully shake our heads frantically, whole bodies jiggling electric. We pressed into a tight clump hugging Little Auntie’s thighs, our faces raised, giggling non-stop, begging her to sing another.

So Little Auntie sang another:

There was a fat man fat and broad, got some old pork to take to god,
Trailed his shit till halfway there, back at home there’s nothing but air!

The deep and proficient singers would always crescendo their voices at the very end; the wave of sound, that invisible exclamation point, and the image of a suddenly empty home never failed to combine into a deep-water bomb—air expanding and swelling into an explosive, raging laughter sweeping all across (you could see into what it lifted). Immediately after, the fat man's body quivers like a butterfly wing, the ample flesh which had almost lifted to the heavens turning back in an enormous wave, landing one last blow on our upturned, grinning faces.  

That was the very first, most unblemished world. A glass marble through which light comes and goes without leaving a shadow. Finally that marble was shattered, and the story can no longer be told again: the story tears open the storyteller, flies toward the characters’ bodies—or maybe it was the storyteller that set the story free. 

What else is inside the marble? The flower beds protecting my beloved leaf-shade. Big brother Jia Ming and little brother You En holding full water guns or imaginary swords on the narrow path in front of the woodshed, acting out Kamen Rider BLACK, shrieking soldiers and bandits, a groom who has forgotten his ring, or a gibbering priest. During wide-open noontimes, I played with my imaginary friends. I never introduced my imaginary friends to anyone, I knew they were shy. Those shy bastards and I used a scar on the white sandalwood (from where a branch used to stretch) as the starting point, and our sun-browned arms were iron chains, the normally developed six or seven-year-old body turning, turning, tossing outward, tossing up even more friends, more chirping chimes. These fragments finally form a half-arc, then a ring, growing fuller with every spin, stretching outward, crossing past the cry that always cut across the dusky sky at six-thirty (“Ma Lingyan! Come home and eat-ah!”), the Soviet-style corridors and U-shaped gates, extending into a windless realm in which time fails to take effect. The scenery gradually loses substance, derails, collapses—the railway tracks passing through the city, the high, fishy smell of Jiabin Road’s seafood market, the rainy season heights of the transboundary river flooding into a messy fold of inverted images, pierced by a bale of uncertain light; now who’s playing tricks, releasing the wrong flock of doves at the wrong time, leaving a field of mangled feathers.

Nothing is permanent. I know, I know, the Earth's crust is quivering, the roof is quivering. Today it’s one way, tomorrow it’s another, isn't that just the way things are? If you flip a few pages quickly you’ll come to a rainy day, the rain carving out silken threads between the white sandalwood. Papa, mama, and I come in from the outside. They're dragging luggage, clasping umbrellas, me under them, a cat trailing at my feet. A stray cat, no bigger than six months old. It’s soaked through, and follows me all the way in through the front door. Papa dries it with a blowdryer, fashions a little nest out of cardboard. It nestles in and falls straight asleep. “There's no way, mama won't let us keep it,” papa says. Mama paces back and forth, emptying the suitcase. “Cats! Humph! I hate cats more than anything!” Mama throws back her head and puffs out her chest, doing laundry, mopping floors. It’s a tiny white cat, curled in a ball, purring, shrinking one moment, growing the next. Papa walks to the shop by the intersection to get milk. “There's no way,” papa says, “Let’s wait until it wakes up, then ask mama.”

Nobody knew what time it woke up. There was only the dish of milk, left by the empty box.