BY CHRIS YITAO SHEN
*Editor’s note: The following story won 3rd prize in our first ever annual NüStories personal essay contest. This year’s theme was Chinese identity – read more here. Photo: Chris Yitao Shen
She loved you, but you fell asleep at her funeral. You didn’t know the difference between fireworks and red candles lit during Spring Festival or a funeral. The smoke smelt the same either way. You hated crowds. There was a crowd. You fell asleep on the red futon.
Your memory was a blur. It felt like you were in a cave. It felt like you weren’t there. You saw fire flickering. It was cold as fake ones made of electric lights, fans, and red tissue paper.
The only thing that looked real was the dark red coffin.
It seemed everyone was crying except for you. Your parents, your cousins, your aunts and uncles, your whole world at that time dressed in black, it was wrong you couldn’t cry. You were seven, but you knew what death was. You knew it was a funeral. You knew no one would ever see her again.
You shared less than ten percent of these seventy years of hers.
And after the funeral, you remember your father in mourning. He was drenched in a thick gloomy fog of grief that you recognized but could not understand. He stood somewhere between depression and acceptance where there was rain but not a flood, where he was damp but not drowned. He stayed there for a month.
She was his mother and your grandmother, calm, caring, loving but you didn’t cry for her, not once. When your drenched father told you that she would be watching over you and listening to you from the sky, you had nothing to say.
You remember your father sitting in the grassy field of Huang Xing Park about two weeks after the funeral. You hugged him from behind, covered his back like a blanket with green peony petals. You forced yourself to be quiet. You recognized his grief. As a seven-year-old you didn’t know what psychology was and what skills other than intentions were required to properly comfort someone; once you knew you would never dare do that again. You hugged him the same way you ran to her with your doctor’s set toys, tapping her chest with that toy stethoscope while she smiled and called you her good granddaughter. She smiled very slowly and carefully; her wrinkles were soft. Her teeth were good but could not be used.
You were not familiar with your grandparents on your father’s side. You only saw them once or twice a year. They loved you but you didn’t care. You loved them but you didn’t remember them most of the time.
You loved them because of blood bond and things. You loved them because you should. They shared less of your childhood than the Huang Xing Park and you shared less than ten percent of their life. And when you became old enough to learn about their stories, you start respecting them, admiring them, as a stranger.
You knew little of them from your own memories. You knew your grandfather was good at writing, drawing, and calligraphy. You knew he had been through the Cultural Revolution as a Black-Five-Categories. You knew he was great as Professor Shen, but you didn’t remember much of him as your grandfather. You remembered him in a black hat with a wooden walking stick. You remembered him talking to your father in Hunan accent. You know he must have been young. But the man you remembered was always old.
You remembered that your grandmother loved to call you her good granddaughter. You knew she was always caring. You remembered she was tired, slim, slow and shivering. You remembered that you were told not to jump or mess around her, that you were to treat her delicately as a glass with cracks on it. You remembered that she was fragile. You didn’t remember her ever not fragile.
You knew your father and your grandfather were grateful towards her, grateful and apologetic, for her being so perfect the figure of a gentle mother and wife and nothing else.
You remember her sitting in a peony embroidered bed. The bed was grey and the peony petals were green. The window was closed and the curtain was drawn. The light was off. The room was dim. She sat very still. Smiling very still.
She smiled very slowly as you walked in with the toy stethoscope.
You remember a misty figure eating buns at the dinner table. She soaked the buns in a bowl of purple porridge before eating. The figure had teeth but couldn’t chew. You sat next to her, stealing looks at the white buns stained purple, swollen, softened to be stirred and broken by lips and tongue.
She had short, grey hair. She had faint, soft smiles. She was from a time where she was referred to as your grandfather’s wife and her name was very often omitted. There she gave birth to five children and raised them through the years of poverty and hunger: around the Cultural Revolution, with her husband as a Black-Five-Categories, a very common and convenient title to shut people up. Forty years ago she was in an old hut in Hunan, younger, healthier, but still skinny. Cooking rice for her kids. Uneducated but knowledgeable. Invented a way to generate two meals from one serve of rice.
“She first boils the rice in water. When the congee’s half done, she scoops out the rice for another meal,” said your father long after acceptance.
You didn’t know any of this when you fell asleep in front of the coffin.
Someone showed a series of photos of her life. She was at least sixty in those photos because taking photos wasn’t cheap enough when she was younger. In most of them she looked fragile as usual. There was one in which she looked healthy, taken after she was relieved from a pain she endured silently for years. There was only one because she died a few days later.
You didn’t know that when you ran to your grandmother with your doctor’s set toys, she smiled at you with all her might because the trigeminal nerve on her face was twitching and aching and it hit her like a car when she moved her muscles. She couldn’t chew because it radiated a stunning pain had she dare use her teeth. She could live, however, with that pain. It was your father who found a doctor and gave her an operation to ease that pain. The doctor didn’t inform anyone that a small place in her head bled a little during the operation, and he didn’t fix it though he thought he did. That photo was taken a few days before she was sent to the hospital again and never walked out.
It was all so distant to you.
You never knew her as who she was. You never knew her youth, her early stories, her life on her own. You never knew her outside a mother, grandmother, or a wife. You knew she wouldn’t be angry when you fell asleep on the red futon. You knew she loved you.
Her love was the shape of a woman who didn’t know what else to do.
About the author
Chris (Yitao) Shen is an international student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She’s a junior. She’s a creative writing major. She writes to remember. She writes quietly and deletes all exclamation marks. She writes assuming that the readers don’t care about her or her stories at all, that she’s more like a busker singing in streets than a lecturer in a classroom. Her favorite book is Slaughterhouse Five. Not really a nonfiction but as thick. She has written a lot and will keep on writing. She thanks you for reading this piece and hope you’re doing well.