Cathy Song

The kindness of others is all they ever wanted, the laughter of neighbors prospering in the blue light of summer. Those of the small sputtering flame and the sudden white sprung hair, who feed off envy and grow old quickly, desire largesse. The role of poor relation evokes a lack they are not apt to admit, or unbearable pity. They prefer to penetrate the giver’s effortless knack of giving they perceive as vitality, a pulsating entity that rewards the kindness of others tenfold. This they have witnessed. This they have tabulated relentlessly. The generosity of others whose spirits, like their long-legged children blossoming into a progeny of orchards and fields, flourish. Those who have never known kindness drag into the privacy of their smallness the baskets of fruit appearing year after year on their porches, to be picked apart in the hushed posture of thieves. They peel skin, probe flesh the color of honey as if the seeds will yield something other than a glimmer of sweet air rising from the roots of trees and licorice-laced, half-opened leaves. Those of the small flame, who feed off envy and grow old quickly, live out their lives hungry, glaring at themselves across the table, wife of the cruel mouth, husband of the thin broth trickling like spittle.

To prepare the body, aim for the translucent perfection you find in the sliced shavings of a pickled turnip. In order for this to happen, you must avoid the sun, protect the face under a paper parasol until it is bruised white like the skin of lilies. Use white soap from a blue porcelain dish for this. Restrict yourself. Eat the whites of things: tender bamboo shoots, the veins of the young iris, the clouded eye of a fish. Then wrap the body, as if it were a perfumed gift, in pieces of silk held together with invisible threads like a kite, weighing no more than a handful of crushed chrysanthemums. Light enough to float in the wind. You want the effect of koi moving through water. When the light leaves the room, twist lilacs into the lacquered hair piled high like a complicated shrine. There should be tiny bells inserted somewhere in the web of hair to imitate crickets singing in a hidden grove. Reveal the nape of the neck, your beauty spot. Hold the arrangement. If your spine slacks and you feel faint, remember the hand-picked flower set in the front alcove, which, just this morning, you so skillfully wired into place. How poised it is! Petal and leaf curving like a fan, the stem snipped and wedged into the metal base— to appear like a spontaneous accident.

He thinks when we die we’ll go to China. Think of it—a Chinese heaven where, except for his blond hair, the part that belongs to his father, everyone will look like him. China, that blue flower on the map, bluer than the sea his hand must span like a bridge to reach it. An octave away. I’ve never seen it. It’s as if I can’t sing that far. But look— on the map, this black dot. Here is where we live, on the pancake plains just east of the Rockies, on the other side of the clouds. A mile above the sea, the air is so thin, you can starve on it. No bamboo trees but the alpine equivalent, reedy aspen with light, fluttering leaves. Did a boy in Guangzhou dream of this as his last stop? I’ve heard the trains at night whistling past our yards, what we’ve come to own, the broken fences, the whiny dog, the rattletrap cars. It’s still the wild west, mean and grubby, the shootouts and fistfights in the back alley. With my son the dreamer and my daughter, who is too young to walk, I’ve sat in this spot and wondered why here? Why in this short life, this town, this creek they call a river? He had never planned to stay, the boy who helped to build the railroads for a dollar a day. He had always meant to go back. When did he finally know that each mile of track led him further away, that he would die in his sleep, dispossessed, having seen Gold Mountain, the icy wind tunneling through it, these landlocked, makeshift ghost towns? It must be in the blood, this notion of returning. It skipped two generations, lay fallow, the garden an unmarked grave. On a spring sweater day it’s as if we remember him. I call to the children. We can see the mountains shimmering blue above the air. If you look really hard says my son the dreamer, leaning out from the laundry’s rigging, the work shirts fluttering like sails, you can see all the way to heaven.