January is the lavish month, forcing
Fish out of the unruly waters, mixing
Memory and desire, surfacing
Firecrackers out of forgetful snow.
Winter kept us warm, gulping
Liquor down her delicate esophagus, feeding
A little life, starving another, with fermented
Sorghum. The funeral sprawled the town open
With a shower of rain; they stopped by the river,
And hauled in the catches, reaping rice and reeds,
Beheaded them by the neck, and chattered for an hour.
那个季节又要来了，真是一江春水向东流！1
And when we were children, lulled by the summer ports,
My sister, she took me where the river ends,
And I was frightened. She said, Yingmin,
Yingmin, hold on tight. And down we dived.
In the waters, there I felt free.
I read in solitude most of the night, as they feasted,
Savoring the sweetness of my absence,
Sputtering, strangled by grief, white cloth dangling
Down their chest, stitched into the forearms of old ladies.
Hand in hand, tears peeled down their wrinkles and
Made their faces young, irrigated, splattering upon platters.
It is a most peculiar feeling, being treated as an apparition when I am most apparently alive & well. Emperors used to want their wives and concubines buried alive alongside their deceased body, to rejoice in their languid warmth against the chilling imagination of afterlife. After all, every sovereign has a swollen heart that couldn’t be weighed against a feather. Funerals were held for them, to bury and appease the dead. But it’s all different in this town. The sole function of funerals is to help the living live on.
I have been picturing my father’s funeral since I was born.
Given his ferocious asthma, his death never felt like a remote fantasy. He’s a fish out of water, I thought, as he tumbled in the silt of the rice field, gasping for air, trying to breathe. Maybe he would be laid on a bloody chopping board at the morning market, failing to understand the futility of his struggles, flapping his tail fin. Maybe his wide gills would refract a placid blue, as five-year-olds or fifty-year-olds pluck out the pearls of his eyes. And just maybe, precisely like how the carps were processed, they would make an incision along his belly, pull out the gills, dip him in soy sauce, vinegar, stuff a whole scallion down his throat, slice him by texture, and feast on a rainy day.
Except he never died. He became a sailor and floated down the Yangtze River, riding the black current into the sea beyond. Ten years after his departure, the village held his funeral, with the belief that he had died in unknown waters. It’s easier to weep in front of a portrait than to wish upon the stars.
What bred the roots that clasp, what branches grow
Out of this bitter gravel? Daughter of land,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the wave beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cicadas no relief,
And the dry stone crumbled in the stiff cold. Truth is
There is nothing under this tombstone
(Come in under the shadow of this tombstone)
For the sailor, my father, is not buried, nor is he dead.
The village couldn’t condone what they didn’t comprehend. A person whose complexity couldn’t be understood would be deemed crazy; the cause of such craziness, demonic possession: what else could it be? My sister planned out my funeral after my 30 bedridden days. Yimin, she exhaled a long gust of wind, did you know that fish have transparent chests?
No, they do not.
Well, I’ve met one. They live under the river.
For we don’t have transparent chests, we are able to conceal our heart, endowed with the gift to lie. If we act out your funeral, pretend you are dead – the demon will let you go. You will be free again, Yimin.
No, you don’t understand. Funerals are nothing more than a cannibalistic ritual. A photo of you, your awkward smile deformed by syrup of sweet nostalgia, lies as the central plate on a big round table, bedded by layers of red trash bags. Chopsticks clank hastily in a contest of decorum. As the yielded winner pinch off the head of the first swamp eel, your life story is dismembered, equally distributed to every platter, each part stretched out indefinitely, digested to its bare fibers, then threaded and braided into a wreath. After the feast, they gather around the wreath, and cry for a day and a night. You are deeply, achingly, sourly missed, your life relived.
And that’s what I couldn’t tell you. I was frightened, and I could only ask:
Does the demon have a transparent chest?
If he does, I’ll see his heart pulsating. I’ll read the lines that run through his veins. I’ll dutifully trace my eyes through the waves, how the bright red arterial blood, fired right from the lung, shoots through the crisscrossing rivercourse, to the ending of the nerves.
My sister,
Are you crying for me? Then fear not, look into my eyes! Mine,
Let us leave together, we will get by the river, your feet will
Melt and a fish tail would grow, and we will swim away,
As mermaids, hand in hand, flesh to foam.
1: “It’s about the season again; time is like a river of spring water flowing east!” in Chinese.