| Do not wear gloves. Even if the wind is terrible, is inside you, do not, for you need your hands for all the days’ work-- to plant, to carry, to cut beets into lattices you dry for winter food, to hold the cold basin of water you wash in. Your hands will tighten until they are purple and twisted into something small, a woman’s deformities. But do not cover them in foolish warmth that hides their claim of who you are, what you have been. _______ Deep, very deep in the countryside, though not hidden from the fragrant spring, there are trains of buildings, factories of brick and tile that mean once someone was afraid. Their red characters announce them: Prepare for War. Prepare for Famine. For the People. This is a hiding place. When Chairman Mao, astride the country, thought that China could be rife with war, that the many sons of Chinese women would build a living Chinese Wall, his arsenal went here. How very different now. No gangs of ten or four, but groups of three: mother, father, wonderful child. It’s the slogan after all: One couple, one child-- everyone is responsible. | And so everywhere--on roads with firecrackers popping off to cry a death, at shiny-littered temples, at hot pot where birds’ eggs and tripe and chicken fat are boiled in oil and small girls dream themselves the leggy women dancing in their well-slit gowns--everywhere you see the parents and their solitary child. You’d never think the child was made for sacrifice. _______ Poetry is written in the river. For centuries on the Yangtze ships paused for sailors to carve the characters of dynasties deep in stone, leaving their mark, their words on the White Crane Bridge. You can touch the stones now, walk on them. You can clamber on boards to a boat that rows you out to the middle of the river. When you get there, when your skin touches the poems you cannot read, know that you are feeling history in its passage, that the great dam, when it comes, will drown all legends in a sudden rush. ________ | In town there’s a grey roller rink and, on an alley, tea houses for old men, tables of mah jongg manned by women, and always markets, their fleshy, sweet colors of countless faces and raw food. You climb mountains on the steps. Where the alley turns, there’s an outdoor cooking pot for a room that is home to all generations and to jiaozi dumplings for guests. There’s a closeness in the easy-moving city and, in the winter dust and summer heat, a chance for money. You’re quite right to be happy. _______ You make your own job. With your back and homemade baskets and a length of bamboo, smooth and tough enough to lift any burden, you join the army of stick men who carry China to itself. Pestering gets you the job, but chance is still part of the game, as though it were mah jongg and you needed a chosen tile, the right image of lucky sticks to make your hand. ________ | Friday night is a real dream. In a week that starts with morning exercise and works through college days and evenings in a chalky classroom that you learn in and then clean with a bucket, it’s the only break except for the odd picnic and Sunday meeting exhortations to the communist good life. But Friday night you dance. Outside, at the cold water tap, you wash your hair. Your dance clothes are the clothes you’ve worn since six a.m. and the charging tunnel rush to calisthenics. But your hair shines like the black cloud of heads afloat the listless, stretching bodies of the dawn. Your shoes, in this land of dust and mud, will also shine. Turning in a cavernous building of plain cement, a disco ball threads rays of color to the misty dark. In a perfect fox trot, two boys glide by to the swing of music that is never more exotic than “Moon River.” Girls dance, and then rest, one in the other’s lap. There is nothing gay about it, but only the fluid line of the dance, whatever quiet longing its rhythm brings. _______ In the old people’s croquet court, their arms stroking the dimming twilight, women walk backwards in the graveyard of day. They are walking off time, each dusky step erasing the long step of light. In the shadows, eerie as haunts, they summon night spirits, but only to cow you, tame you to a faint piano. |
“The You of China” originally appeared in the 2002 Mississippi Review Prize
Questions in the Interview from Rob Schmitz and Dai Xiaohong