#wentai

Wentai. You are the one person... I will never forget.

She could no longer hear her nene’s panicked hysterics, her ma’s grindingly calm reassurances, her er-ge’s groans. She was again in the cramped hospital room in Nanjing, watching green lines zigzag up and down, counting them as she would the seconds. Apart from the machines, everything was otherwise still in the room, even time itself. And so she was surprised to find how far and quickly the days had left them behind, like a dream in which she just couldn’t remember what had transpired. They started to wonder: Would they spend birthdays here? New Year’s? Chuxi? Chinese New Year? But they were out of that room before the year ended, and the question of spending chuxi in that room would never be anything more than one of her wild hypotheticals.

But now her nene was insisting on bringing her er-ge to the hospital, the preparation for tuanyuan be damned, because er-ge was starting to struggle to breathe, and he now resembled the diagram of a budding yeast in her biology textbook. From the corner of her eyes she could see da-ge mouthing just how in hell could there be a bee (“no, this is a wasp!” cried nene, “all the more dangerous!”) in this season, and how stupid could someone be to get stung by one right on the nose. Da-ge’s eyes were still red, and his tears were drying up on his cheeks. He put down the bunch of spring onions onto the chopping board and lifted up one finger to wipe at his eyes. Tears started flooding down his face again.

They had discussed not too jokingly about going out of the country for Chinese New Year, just the four of them. Place names were thrown around: Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines, Bali, Goa. Imagine spending New Year’s without having to spend two days in the kitchen to feed two-three dozens people; imagine spending New Year’s under an earnest sun, maybe even by the sea, and without breathing in a storm of pollens; imagine having pizza for chuxi and McDonald’s for New Year’s!

They were still discussing this even as the car pulled up in front of a row of ancient, crumbling houses in the shadow of Tiantai mountain, but they fell silent once the car headlights outlined the figures of nene waiting for them outside her house, accompanied only with her helper. Shangxiang tried to return Nene’s welcome warmly, but it was cold: her tongue was cold, and so after sputtering some customary greetings she dragged her cold feet into the cold house feeling heavy and defeated.

Nene lived alone in this big cold house with only a helper and a gardener, both of whom would be returning to their own home villages for New Year by the break of dawn. Her sons had always begged for her to come live with them in the cities, but she was steadfast in her duty to the Sun family home. She was attached to her grandchildren, and her parents were not above using them to entice her to stay with them: they were both working, and they could use help taking care of the kids. The strategy worked to an extent: back when Shangxiang was still a toddler, nene would stay with them, although she would return to Longmen village from time to time to check on the house. Once Shangxiang was in school, nene returned to the Sun family home for good, and if her son and daughter-in-law told her that her grandchildren missed her, she would instead ask for them to stay with her. And they did spend many long happy summer holidays in Longmen, hiking up hills and mountains, and running along the river and streams.

Nene was especially fond of er-ge, who was born prematurely in this Sun ancestral house when Shangxiang’s parents were visiting her. Er-ge had grown faster than she had shrunk, and by now he was easily three heads taller than her. Yet she still insisted on patting his hair and pushing his head into her bosom, pulling er-ge to his knees on the floor. Meanwhile, nene crinkled her nose at da-ge’s hair with the Sun ruddiness bleached off it. She seemed to look at him with closed eyes now.

The stone and brick walls kept the cold of the dying winter in the belly of the house. Nene had an electric heater now, but an ancient charcoal stove still stood at the center of the study. She would let her ba or the two bobo light it up and hang a heavy iron kettle filled with the most acidic and delicious pu-erh tea above it. Family and guests would always gravitate to the stove like moths to a lamp, their cheeks stung by the heat, their nose tickled by the heavy assured smell of charcoal and tea. The next morning Shangxiang woke up early and went to the study to find ma bent over the stove, poking at the black stumps piled in front of her to coax them to life.

“Did you sleep well?” said ma. She tucked the curtain of hair behind her ear to let Shangxiang see her smile. Climbing above her crown was a wisp of smoke from the first charcoal to catch fire.

Shangxiang had slept with her ma on the spacious bed the night before instead of struggling for dominance against her two brothers in their usual room. A lifetime ago, the room she slept in last night used to belong to her ba and his brothers growing up; nene had moved the old bed to the room her two brothers now use and had a new one fit for a married couple brought in instead.

The truth was she could hardly sleep. She had felt cold in that room. She had quietly tiptoed across the room to a dresser, opening it so slowly her arm cramped up because all ancient things in this house always screeched in complain with the slightest touch. She held her phone as a torchlight in her mouth as she searched for and found a sweatshirt, the bottom of which when she slipped it on almost reached her knees. It smelled like stale air and stale wood, without even a hint of sandalwood-based cologne, or minty shampoo. She choked in the terrible stale smell, but she kept the sweatshirt on until the next day when everyone was sweating in the kitchen.

Nene was reciting recipes like a mantra from her seat across the kitchen. Her knees would no longer hold her up for more than ten minutes of a time, so ma had to cook as her proxy. Ma had long been recognised as a terrible cook even before her marriage into the family, but she was all nene got until the two bobo arrived with their families.

Shangxiang was half hidden behind the piles of vegetables to be chopped, but she could see her da-ge lazily folding wotie, stopping every now and then to find snacks to munch on, or to play with his phone. Er-ge, by virtue of his height, had the easiest task: nene had shown him where the new year decorations were kept and told him to hang them up however way he found nice. The reds of the paper lanterns and cutouts had long turned a dull pink, even the glitters glued onto them seemed to glimmer only halfheartedly; none of the decorations betrayed any allusion to any zodiac (the only animals to be found were fat golden fish) so as to maximise reuse.

“Bofu, where are the wotie?” Ma’s voice was the same shrill pitch as the whistling steamer in front of her.

Shangxiang stood up and leaned over her fortress of vegetables to slap her da-ge’s head with the bunch of leeks she was chopping.

“Let’s switch tasks since you’re useless at this,” she said, already walking over to his chair and tugging him out by the shoulder.

Her da-ge shrugged and took her chair and knife. Shangxiang saw that the few wotie he had folded were in dreadful shapes.

“Abstract art,” her da-ge had said with a grin when she lifted one up and glared at him. “Edible one at that.”

Her er-ge then came into the kitchen and expressed interest at folding the wotie. She shooed him away when she realised he was raining glitter all over them and the wotie. Er-ge spotted the deformed wotie and laughed, lifting them up to the light and pronouncing just what kind of animals or things they resemble.

Ma stomped to the table, her face red from the heat, and then redder from the lack of progress on the preparation front. She did not see anything amusing about the deformed wotie, even the one er-ge said look like a rabbit foot, which he said (because he was wise in useless trivia) was supposed to be lucky in Western culture.

Nene interrupted her sutra of generations of Sun family recipes to ask about the flowers. Ma took the wotie out of er-ge’s hands and gave him some money, telling him to pick up fresh flowers from the market. Ma cooked the deformed wotie anyway, and they were the first to be picked up by da-ge’s and er-ge’s wandering hands as they rushed around the house making sure everything was ready, and the food was up to expectations.

A great heavy roundtable carved out of a solid trunk that seemed to grow out of the centre of nainai’s living room had been covered by an even greater red cloth, so massive it became a skirt for the table. Plates bearing food had been arranged tactfully like tetris to cover every inch of it the red surface.

Either the Suns generations ago did not think about making enough chairs to go around the circumference, or time itself had only spared a few from its harsh judgments, but the result was that chairs and stools of all shapes and colours would be squeezed in between the surviving artefacts to make up the number. Shangxiang was in the storeroom, passing one by one the hodgepodge of chairs to da-ge, who would in turn pass them to er-ge to arrange around the table. She could hear voices floating in from outside: her relatives had arrived. She slowed down her pace of work, and da-ge didn’t hurry her.

“Look,” she called out to da-ge, “you can sit on this chair.”

Da-ge entered the room to shake his head at the baby highchair. It was stained yellow by the dim light of the storeroom and maybe the cumulative waste of several Sun offsprings.

“After you. Your butt was the last one on that chair,” said da-ge, “back when you were a cute angelic little baby.”

“Angelic little baby?” said er-ge. He had to fold his body to enter the storeroom. “Our meimei? Not according to my recollection.”

“You’re one to speak, demon child,” said Shangxiang, eliciting a chuckle from da-ge. He must be in a good mood from all the warm and savoury oily food resting in his stomach now. On other days, da-ge would only regard any mention of his brother’s increasingly theatrical antics in school and the streets beyond with a frown. She had kept her voice low, and he had kept his chuckle quiet, so as to not risk even this lighthearted reference to er-ge’s reputation in Nanjing reaching the ears of any family here. As far as the Suns outside this room were concerned, he was a model son, brother, and class president.

Er-ge ignored her and scratched around the swollen bandaged lump that was his nose. He had stopped breathing through his mouth, but his voice was still flat as if he was speaking through a blocked sinus.

“We’re not done yet,” said er-ge, “we still need one more chair.”

Shangxiang made to pick one up but da-ge grabbed her shoulder and held her back.

“No,” said da-ge, “no we don’t.”

She was already full even before tuanyuan had started, having followed her brothers’ lead in prooftasting all the snacks and food served on the great table. But she kept her head down and didn’t stop eating until everyone had stood up, drifting to the charcoal stove for a taste or smell of pu-erh tea.

“Even your appetite is that of a boy’s,” said xiao-bo beside her. He was still sipping his beer, his fourth can of the night. She slurped down her noodle and grimaced at her bowl. She knew this would happen: her relatives would comment on the hair she had shaved and hacked, on the chest that was as flat as the table they were eating on, on her careless mannerisms and even more careless words that would scare even a Cantonese gangster. She was prepared for it, and had even prepared a special smile for it.

But she could not look up at her uncles, so she continued to grimace politely at her food.

“Oh, leave her alone, Youtai. Wentai only wished for her to grow up healthy and happy,” said ah-bo across the table from her, “and so do I.”

Shangxiang blushed at that. She wished she couldn’t hear him. His voice was low and warm and it was nothing like the stale air and stale wood she smelled in the sweatshirt, but hearing it still made her choke on the crispy pork belly and she coughed loudly and harshly so that the tears seemed to be a natural reaction to it. Ah-bo was six minutes older than her father: his hair was longer, his dimples were less pronounced, his canine less pointed, and he wore no wedding band around his finger. He was an echo of her father, but all distorted, and in this distortion even the gaps around the table into which one more chair could have and should have been squeezed became a chasm in all of time and space.

She wished she could stop crying. She wished she was more like her brothers. She was jealous of her er-ge, who wandered around as if in a dream, daring the world to wake him up. She was jealous of her da-ge, who she had never seen in her life shed a single tear, not even when he was holding ba’s hand as the beeping became as still as the rest of the hospital room, not even when he was holding her to his chest, watching over her shoulder the casket being enthusiastically embraced by the hungry embers.

Then she did remember she had watched him cry once, just that afternoon itself. He was ugly when he cried: his lips were pulled down, his cheeks were red and bloated, and he had snot mixing with tears dripping down his chin. She wanted to laugh at him then, but she was surprised to find herself shaking with anger. So Sun Bofu had finally met his match in the form of a handful of spring onions–never mind a dead father he didn’t even shed a tear for.

It wasn’t fair. Why was she the only one crying? Why wasn’t anyone mourning that chasm around this very table? Why did her mother let her sleep beside her in their bed? Why was ah-bo not sorry for his face and his voice, why was he not sorry for how he had become a mocking reminder of their loss? Why can’t her brothers cry? Why did all of them let time and space flow into this chasm, why did they accept it could be filled when they could let it stay empty and this emptiness could linger around them like a ghost--like his ghost?

Er-ge didn’t need to be rushed to the hospital after all. While nene and ma panicked around him much of the swelling subsided and he could breathe again. Nene dug up a traditional balm that the family applied on all parts of their body for every kind of ailment, from sinus (apply liberally on the philtrum), to constipation (slather onto stomach), to bug bites (dab onto wound), and er-ge soon forgot about his pain and started laughing at da-ge’s ugly crying face. Da-ge tried to hit er-ge with the spring onions, but the otherwise impeccable accuracy of this captain of his college basketball dream was hindered by his tears and he instead hit nene as she continued her fussing over her favourite grandson.

The preparation for tuanyuan continued. Wotie and crispy pork and braised pork and pork ribs and abalone and dousi and fried eefu noodles and fish maw and scallop and lotus roots, a celebration of colours and texture and taste and smell, passed down probably by those who had built this house, binding generations of Suns across time in this same space through nainai’s chanting and her two daughter-in-laws’ hands. All of these dishes they carefully arranged to fit on the great round table were ripples in space and time. They were tiny wormholes, becoming tinier and tinier as they were chewed and pulled apart and absorbed by her teeth and stomach and intestines, and just like the red of her hair in the sun, the taihu twang in her Mandarin, and the trace scent of stale cologne on an old sweatshirt, they would all become a part of her.

We are all a sum of those who had come before us. Our lives are a testament to those of the dead.

Shangxiang thought again of the hospital room, the one she was convinced she would never leave. She thought again of the stillness of the room, where time had coagulated into something so thick she sometimes thought she could feel it brush against the soft hairs of her arms. The lights were dim in the room, dim enough for the moonlight to outline the bundle in the blanket, shrunken in some parts, swollen in others.

Mulan and Wentai from Hua Mulan chinese movie.

My deviantart gallery

Mulan and Wentai from Hua Mulan chinese movie. This is end of watercolor stage. I guess you can't see too much for now :D

My deviantart gallery