Experimental Fiction
The Shaman
After Shailja Patel’s Migritude & Gloria Anzaldúa’s The Borderlands/La Frontera
01. A Scattering1
2
In the dream I don’t tell anyone, I pick my way through a minefield of memory: that is to say, a deliberate detonation, a studied sort of self-mutilation, salvaging these scraps before morning comes. Old stories seep into my ears, welling beneath my pillow.
And in limbo I see a thousand years, flown by on clipped wings, tangled timelines unravelling at my stumbling feet.
1 read: diaspora, Greek: from dia ‘across’ + speirein ‘scatter’
2 Photograph from grandmother’s room in Lóngyán Village, Southern China.
02. Enbalming3
When we return to the village, my father’s path home is entombed with brush and rubble. The truck we flagged down comes to a sputtering halt, and a disgruntled farmer points a sunburnt finger towards the riverside, where the fishermen and their boats might take us the rest of the journey. Mā mutters something about the inauspicious gesture—of crossing a river in our predicament4. Bà’s pockmarked face, streaked with grease from our stalled sedan, silences her.
Water sloshes through my socks, the twitching net of fish tied to the boat’s hull drumming an uneasy rhythm against my soles. Mosquitoes skirt across the water, the river’s face choked with algae. I think of my grandmother, face down and papery limbs askew when they found her, water still bubbling. I think of my father when the news reached him—a boy never permitted to cry, staring holes into the ceiling where he lay, an ocean pooling behind his eyes.
Every few years, Bà made a point of flying back to visit the homeland—flimsy promises that, thanks to fickle immigration policies, fell through more often than not. The scorching summers we did spend in Fújiàn always dragged by, simmering from shows of filial piety over sticky smiles and my stilted dialect. I was eager to escape my stone-faced grandfather and his proverbial ramblings—in this strange, overgrown countryside, and its nauseating humidity.
I found my only refuge in Nǎināi’s5 room—a dusty nest of blues and yellows, old instruments littered over the clay tiles like discarded toys. Peeling Xiǎo Hu Duì6 posters were plastered over her bed, the singers’ handsome faces sun-bleached and smiling. And reclining by the window, plucking the same guqín7melody for hours, sat my grandmother.
“I tell you, girl—when the Tigers heard me play—this was summer of ‘88, they said—‘Won’t you join us for our next tour? Big cities and rolling plains, you’ll see all of Asia!’ And the song I played—follow along, follow along—it went just like this…”
7
July was typhoon season. A downpour split the sky wide open while I was kicking a shuttlecock on the terrace, and I scampered for shelter. It took me a moment to realise I had stumbled into my grandfather’s room—Bà said the old couple had always slept separately—and unlike the paraphernalia hoarded in his wife’s quarters, all that sat here was a bamboo chest of drawers. The top rows were stuffed with linens, but the last was heavy with the weight of unsorted photographs: negatives of wedding portraits, my grandmother’s radiant expression carving through the obscure shadow. The difference in photos taken before and after the Cultural Revolution was stark: in one photo, Nǎināi wore a dark silk qípāo, delicate wrists adorned with jade. In another, her hair hung loose, as did her dull farmer’s attire, washed out against a backdrop of earthen huts. My grandfather’s heavy footsteps sent the photos tumbling from my hands, heart thumping wildly as I ducked from the room.
“Of course it’s not true,” he’d replied curtly, when I’d asked him about Nǎināi meeting the Little Tigers. “She hasn’t left the house since your father was born—what business does a married woman have, going out on her own? I thought she stopped spouting that nonsense.”
8
The talismans on her urn flutter like wings as the monk scatters her ashes over the river. I think of crumbling posters and untuned instruments, dementia-muddled dreams of bigger cities and winding roads, of a room where time had stopped turning. Flotsam in a forgotten sea.
A girl’s heart has outward tendency.9 When you raise girls, you’re raising children for strangers.
Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior.
Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior.
4 To cross a river carries the connotation of crossing worlds, or into the afterlife, in Chinese mysticism and spirituality.
5 奶奶，grandmother
6 小虎队， “Little Tiger Team,” Popular 80s Taiwanese boy band 9 古琴，Chinese zither.
7 Nǎināi playing èrhú, a two-stringed Chinese fiddle. The zither can be spotted on the left.
8 Grandparents’ family portrait, 1968
9 Common Chinese idiom: “A girl’s heart has outwards tendency,” or 女心外向，meaning girls are never their birth families’ to keep (either due to marrying into their husband’s family trees or a stereotype that improper upbringings lead to wandering girls with loose morals).
03. Cremation
I preferred to keep an ocean between us, my rehearsed well-wishes delivered through the phone on new years and festivals. Holding my extended family at arm’s length, keeping Fújiàn at bay. From far away, they could still believe my emigrant father raised us to study medicine, law, and science. None of that nonsense I’d been spouting since I could talk—spinning fairy tales and make-believe to anyone who would listen.
“Enough writing,” my grandfather’s sharp reprimand would follow a rap on my wrist. “Scribbling your thoughts down for anyone to see—that’s inviting trouble.”
The Chinese have a history of teaching songs and cutting them from our tongues in the same decade10. I knew this, because at the very bottom of my grandfather’s bamboo chest were sheets upon sheets of calligraphy on parchment. Though I couldn’t read Chinese characters, they had the telltale spacing of lyric and poetry.
Poetry, in a house where the arts were scorned as inferior taboo. The chest was a trove of both secrets and answers, if only I knew how to look.
‘Red August,’ 1966.
Schoolteachers in ninety-six schools across China were rounded up and assaulted by rebelling student movements who called themselves the Red Guard. Twenty-seven were bludgeoned to death, and several more committed suicide from shame and public condemnation. Justification for the wide-scale attacks ranged from ‘unclear class alignments’ to a budding hostility towards traditional curricula, sentiments which had risen alongside the proletariat uprisings of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
“Big Character Posters” were plastered all over town walls with those the Red Guard deemed suspicious— “Five Black Categories,” 11 those who studied the old poets and painters, or anyone who had spoken or written something remotely culpable in passing.
Your grandfather used to be a literature professor, you know. He watched the target on his own head grow as his colleagues were seized one by one, married a former landlord’s daughter, and fled to the countryside. Burning our family’s belongings, pointing fingers away from himself, and resigning to teach only simple mathematics to village boys, your grandfather—once-celebrated local poet—let his name go up in smoke.12
Schoolteachers in ninety-six schools across China were rounded up and assaulted by rebelling student movements who called themselves the Red Guard. Twenty-seven were bludgeoned to death, and several more committed suicide from shame and public condemnation. Justification for the wide-scale attacks ranged from ‘unclear class alignments’ to a budding hostility towards traditional curricula, sentiments which had risen alongside the proletariat uprisings of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
“Big Character Posters” were plastered all over town walls with those the Red Guard deemed suspicious— “Five Black Categories,” 11 those who studied the old poets and painters, or anyone who had spoken or written something remotely culpable in passing.
Your grandfather used to be a literature professor, you know. He watched the target on his own head grow as his colleagues were seized one by one, married a former landlord’s daughter, and fled to the countryside. Burning our family’s belongings, pointing fingers away from himself, and resigning to teach only simple mathematics to village boys, your grandfather—once-celebrated local poet—let his name go up in smoke.12
Censorship has cremated entire libraries from my family’s histories, fires leaving holes in our empty picture frames and shelves. Walls barren, devoid of sentimental souvenirs. My family’s stubbornly sealed lips. The poems and paintings my father would bring back from boarding school to show my grandfather—my grandfather, who bruises even the air he touches—and earning angry weals in his palms instead, burning with an inherited shame.
13
Decades later, my second-grade teacher would hold up my composition books with a smile—you should encourage her writing, see these stories she writes—oblivious to the spark of trained terror flickering across my father’s face.
10 See: the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) and Mao’s China, which incited the purging of Chinese culture and ideologies.
11 As follows: Landlords 地主; dìzhǔ,, counter revolutionaries 反革命; fǎngémìng, rich farmers 富农; fùnóng, right wingers 右派; yòupài, bad influencers 坏分子; huàifènzǐ
12 Phone call with my father, March 2022.
13 1988: Cloud Valley Waterfall, the first and last painting my father presented in school and brought home.
04. A Splitting
In the winter of 2003, the year I ought not to have been born, my parents crammed two suitcases and a toddler into a Fuzhou train to board a one-way flight to Canada. The first reason for this was the quiet son pressed between their luggage, who’d cost Mà her job after rumours of a young mother had made their way to her higher-ups’ ears. The second was the daughter beginning to poke in her stomach, an unborn crime who—if carried to term in China—would have incurred fines hefty enough to wrench both my parents’ properties from their names, blacklisting them from most lines of work.
My brother had been old enough to remember the immigration process—endless interrogations, stony-faced Visa officers, and leaving behind everything he’d grown up with. I’d simply awoken on foreign soil, wide-eyed and oblivious to all it had taken for a Chinese family to set foot in a Canadian hospital.
“All that flying and fresh air—filled your head with too many daydreams,” Ma would chide for years after. I’d argue it was the books, too—salvaged from donation boxes and crammed haphazardly into the bookshelf my father had hauled in from the roadside. It was with these that I first learned English.
In 1879, the votes cast against Chinese immigration in the United States were 154,6378 to 88414.
Charlotte Smith, testifying before the senate regarding the “Chinese problem” in America, 1902:
“The Chinese are like a sponge; they absorb and give nothing in return but bad odors and worse morals…their very presence is contaminating.”
In MEAT VS. RICE: American Manhood against Asiatic Coolieism — Which Shall Survive? (1908) Samuel Gompers of the Asiatic Exclusion League concludes:
“Europe with her 300,000,000, China with her 400,000,000, represent, with the exception of India, the two most over-populated parts of the world. Both send their sons to foreign climes. They consist of two mighty streams, of which one is white and the other yellow…will Europe remain in a full healthy condition? What will be the result of the meeting of these white and yellow streams?”
Charlotte Smith, testifying before the senate regarding the “Chinese problem” in America, 1902:
“The Chinese are like a sponge; they absorb and give nothing in return but bad odors and worse morals…their very presence is contaminating.”
In MEAT VS. RICE: American Manhood against Asiatic Coolieism — Which Shall Survive? (1908) Samuel Gompers of the Asiatic Exclusion League concludes:
“Europe with her 300,000,000, China with her 400,000,000, represent, with the exception of India, the two most over-populated parts of the world. Both send their sons to foreign climes. They consist of two mighty streams, of which one is white and the other yellow…will Europe remain in a full healthy condition? What will be the result of the meeting of these white and yellow streams?”
For centuries, the English language carved out China as a symbol for contamination, the Chinaman a synonym for vermin, opium, and degradation. To be a Chinese English major is to accept that most of the lauded writers on curriculum syllabi were complicit in your exclusion.
Rudyard Kipling saw Guǎngzhōu in 1889 and said of it:
“A big blue sink of a city, full of tunnels, all dark, and inhabited by yellow devils…I am devotedly thankful that I am never going back there.”
Or Sylvia Plath:
“I looked as yellow as a Chinaman,” says Esther in The Bell Jar. Later, “I noticed a big, smudgy-eyed Chinese woman staring idiotically into my face. It was only me, of course. I was appalled to see how wrinkled and used up I looked.”
Rudyard Kipling saw Guǎngzhōu in 1889 and said of it:
“A big blue sink of a city, full of tunnels, all dark, and inhabited by yellow devils…I am devotedly thankful that I am never going back there.”
Or Sylvia Plath:
“I looked as yellow as a Chinaman,” says Esther in The Bell Jar. Later, “I noticed a big, smudgy-eyed Chinese woman staring idiotically into my face. It was only me, of course. I was appalled to see how wrinkled and used up I looked.”
How do you wrangle a tongue accustomed to dehumanise, a language where Chinese-American was long since synonymous with ugliness, disease, and opium? “My soul frets in the shadow of his language,” Joyce writes in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. English is an overwhelming language, one of consumption and possession. To transpose a culture is to write over palimpsests of caricatures.
Slanted eyes meet a new sunrise
A race of bodies small in size
Chicken Chow Mein and Chop Suey
Hong Kong Garden Takeaway
Hong Kong Garden
Siouxsie and the Banshees, 1978
A race of bodies small in size
Chicken Chow Mein and Chop Suey
Hong Kong Garden Takeaway
Hong Kong Garden
Siouxsie and the Banshees, 1978
The moments I feel most Chinese are not amidst harvest festival firecrackers, or at dinner tables filled with five generations of relatives, but in isolation: sitting in a creative writing workshop, or seminar classroom, adding correctional footnotes out of some larger obligation, trying to catch lingering Orientalisms like grains of falling sand. I perform as the mouthpiece for a culture I grew up looking in on. Betwixt and between, in a state of diasporic limbo—the children of immigrants are a generation of ghosts.
“Languages do not merely serve to describe the world but in fact help to create that world, establishing both a set of possibilities and a set of limits.”
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, “Whose Language?”
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, “Whose Language?”
14 Statistic from Samuel Gompers, “Meat vs. Rice: American Manhood against Asiatic Cooliesm,” (1908)
05. Prayers and Veneration
“The yellow crane has long since departed…
In this dusk, I know not where my homeland lies.
O, mist-shrouded river, I’ve so far to go.”
Cui Hao (704-754 AD), “Yellow Crane Tower”
In this dusk, I know not where my homeland lies.
O, mist-shrouded river, I’ve so far to go.”
Cui Hao (704-754 AD), “Yellow Crane Tower”
The argument that most Chinese parents have against literature studies is that language is too narrow, too volatile, too subjective. Better study the sciences and mathematics—systems more easily transferred from one nation to another. But what has been transmitted between cultures more than English itself? It’s a singular anomaly, a tongue with an open wound. Borrowed blood runs through its very vessels.
The immigrant writer finds herself sifting through a fragmented familial history. Armed with a heredity of restless solitude, I will always be a few decades too late, haunting a trail of smoke in search of its source. Each story is an ever-expanding void I will spend a lifetime finding the right words to fill.
“I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes.”
Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior
Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior
In between lands, where nothing is my own, I reach for the likeness of my ancestors and come up holding detritus, blessings scattered far from their bearers and rendered unrecognisable in my palms.
I climb this tower to gaze in four directions
And take the occasion to smooth away my griefs
…Flowers in bloom cover the wilderness
And millet crops flourish in the fields.
It is all very beautiful; but yet it is not my home,
And what have I here to wait for?
Wang Can, “Rhapsody on Climbing a Tower,” from Seven Sorrows
And take the occasion to smooth away my griefs
…Flowers in bloom cover the wilderness
And millet crops flourish in the fields.
It is all very beautiful; but yet it is not my home,
And what have I here to wait for?
Wang Can, “Rhapsody on Climbing a Tower,” from Seven Sorrows
Despite it all, let our hearts grow outwards, still.
15
15 Photo of my grandmother by the village stream, where—eight years later—she would drown.