The City in Which I love You

Kitty Liang

The thin old man came up to the register with a full basket on his arm and waddling like a penguin. He sighed and dumped out the basket on the counter, looking weary as he reached for his wallet. A heap of plastic bubbles sat in front of me. I thought I was dreaming.
The old man had meticulously packed every item in a clear plastic produce bag. Before tying them with yellow rubber bands, he inflated each bag so that it looked like a bubble. There were about thirty of them, containing little things like pencils, dental floss, and peppermint candies. I picked up a bubble with a small bag of cat treats in it and tried to scan the bar code without success. The old man reached into his left pant pocket and fished out a wrinkled twenty-dollar bill, and then another one. He put the money on the counter and stared down at my hands blankly. I tried not to look at him.
“Forty dollars enough?” he asked me in a heavy Chinese accent, his voice coarse and quiet.
“Probably not,” I said, “Do you mind if I take these out to scan them?”
“I do,” he said, “Air is needed.” He lifted up his right hand to gesture a big curve indicating air. I saw that he was missing all the fingers on that hand. He looked down at the counter so I couldn’t see his expression, but I saw the gray in his eyes, fogging over his dark pupils. He also had a blue raincoat on, and it was not raining outside.
I typed in a dollar for every item, and gave him change for his forty. After he left, I wondered how he tied all the bags with rubber bands.

I told Edmund about the old man when I went home that night. He had just returned from giving a lecture at Nanjing University in China, on the topic of the effect of World War II on Southern China’s eco-system. He was sitting on our leather couch, drinking a cup of Oolong tea, struggling to keep awake from the time zone difference. I was making fried potatoes and beef.
“So what do you think is wrong with him?” I yelled through the oil and smoke in the kitchen.
“San Francisco,” he said, “must be all the traffic and cheap food.”
I thought about his blank stare and blue raincoat, his wrinkled dollar bills. When he turned around to walk out the store, still waddling with the basket on his arm, I saw that he was wearing a pair of handmade black cotton shoes, the kind with five layers of white cloth on the bottom. The Chinese called them “thousand layer shoes.” I have not seen that kind of shoe since I was a child, living with my grandmother in the rural outskirts of Beijing. My grandmother made a pair for my father, who was going to graduate school at Beijing University. But my father did not want to wear them to the university because they made him look like a peasant.
When we were eating dinner, I could not help but bring up the old man again, “He was wearing thousand layer shoes,” I said.
“Give him a pair of plastic slippers from the store next time he comes in,” he said, “Potatoes are overcooked.”
“Then don’t eat them. I like them overcooked.” I said.
“I know. Doesn’t matter what I like, right? ” he said. He picked up the remote control and turned on the KTSF Bay Area Chinese News.
“Not unless you learn how to cook.” I said. I put a huge chunk of potato in my mouth, and washed it down with water. “I’m sick of you.” I said.
He shifted in his chair to get a better view of the television screen, and kept on eating. It seemed like he did not hear me. I felt a little relieved.

Later that night, Edmund came out of the shower trying to make up. “Your cooking is not bad most of the time,” he said. I wrapped the blanket tightly around myself and feigned the heavy, even breathing of sleep. I felt his hand on my hair, sliding downward to the small of my back.
“I have a headache,” I shifted my body and said.
He withdrew his hand, and got off the bed. I heard him unzip his suitcase next to the dressers, followed by the shuffling sound of searching. Then, he pressed a small, heavy bag onto my body: “ For you,” he said, “I got them from the Nanjing Natural Museum.”
When Edmund left to teach the next morning, I opened the red velvet bag. In it were pieces of smooth, opaque rocks with mysterious patterns and pretty colors. One of them was milky white with black spots that looked like blooming chamomile flowers. Another one was shaped like a pyramid, golden on the top and clear on the bottom. A small booklet read: “The Rain Flower Rocks of Nanjing- famous for dazzling colors and picture like patterns. Found on bank of Nanjing’s river. ” I put down the booklet and picked out another rock from the bag. I looked at it, and was startled by its harsh, deep color of red, almost dripping from its strangely shaped edges. I stared at it for a moment before the alarm clock went off. I shoved the bag of rocks into my purse and went to open up the shop.

The old man started coming in frequently; I suspected that it was because I sold him everything for a dollar. Edmund said that my little store would go bankrupt if I kept doing it, so I stopped telling him about the old man. It was none of his business anyway. I liked the old man. There was something steady about him, the way he always wore the same shoes and bought the same things. I watched him from the corner of my eye once to see how he tied the rubber bands. He inflated the produce bag, carefully held the opening against his stomach with his stub so that air did not escape, and quickly tied the rubber band around it with three fingers of his left hand. He hunched over while doing this, as if nurturing a child or hiding a secret. I felt a frightened sadness watching him. I remembered the time my father scolded my grandmother for taking me to the park on a rainy day. My grandmother just stood there with her eyes fixated on the calendar picture of a small gray cat in a bamboo basket. Because of old age, her back was slightly hunched over.
I wanted to talk to the old man, but every time he dumped out the plastic bubbles on the counter we seemed to be locked into an unbreakable, silent habit. I became used to this, and took comfort in being part of his steadiness, his unchanging ways.

Edmund has changed since he came back from China and began teaching again. It has been two months since he tried to have sex with me that night after our mild argument. Perhaps, he heard me when I said I was sick of him after all.
I wasn’t sick of him, I was just used to him. After six years of marriage, I finally began to realize the ridiculousness of my delusional belief in soul mate and the destiny of love. My grandmother used to tell me about the war, how when the Japanese took over Nanjing, her mother took her, her eight siblings and their father who had gone insane, and fled to Sichuan. When the family reached there, all of their money and food had run out. Her father’s condition worsened, and could not stop muttering “what to do” as he paced around the hut they rented from a local farmer. My grandmother remembered her mother’s expressionless face as she weaved the bamboo basket. The basket was just the right size for my grandmother’s emaciated thirteen-year-old body. Her mother looked away when her father put his hand on her shoulder and said, “who to do with this basket.” A splinter slid underneath one of her nails, she only flinched a little, and kept weaving. That was her last memory of her mother and father.
“If she hadn’t sold me in the bamboo basket, and if the Huang family hadn’t bought me, I would have never met your grandfather, and you wouldn’t be here. Plus, the money they got for me helped the whole family survive through the winter” was how grandmother justified it.
But she would have met someone else and gotten used to him just like she got used to my grandfather. Then she would love him. She would have children and grandchildren, and she wouldn’t even know about me. I wouldn’t even know about me, so it wouldn’t have mattered. That was what I figured out after six years of marriage—I could have loved anyone. I took out the bag of Rain Flower Rocks from my purse and fondled each one of them, held them in the light to see their hidden colors. I caressed the red velvet bag carefully, and read over the small booklet again. Last time Edmund gave me a gift was five years ago, after my father’s funeral. At that time I still believed that he was a fixed factor of my life. I grabbed his shirt collar with both of my hands, wet with tears, and leaned my head on his chest. On our way home, he stopped by his office to pick up my gift. It was a small therapeutic Zen garden, shaped like an island, with a trench around it for water to circulate. It came with a fancy ceramic fork to drag across the fine sand. I held on to the hard corners of the box that it came in and cried some more. Edmund had taped a note card onto the box that said “Honey I love you.” It had three sad eyed puppies on it, staring at nothing. Edmund was only a lecturer back then, and I had just gotten my business license. When I opened my tiny store on the sidewalk of Chinatown, San Francisco, the Zen garden was one of the first things I moved in there, right on the book shelf behind the register, square in the middle.

I felt frustrated as I closed the Li-Young-Lee book and put it on the nightstand. “Sleepy already?” Edmund said. I shook my head and closed my eyes. He adjusted the lamp and continued to read his eco-criticism theory book with the pretentious cover.
“Just what is he writing about in ‘The City In Which I Love You’?” I said.
“That poem is so rich with images,” he said, distracted.
“But what is he writing about?”
“It is sort of like Eliot’s Wasteland,” he said.
“Fuck Eliot, fuck the Wasteland,” I sat up from the bed, “Are you going to tell me what the fuck he’s talking about?”
My professor husband turned and looked at me with his bloodshot eyes. I felt a little regret, but I did not say anything because I wanted to see his reaction. I almost shivered in anticipation, and had to restrain myself from smiling out of nervousness. He would not stop staring at me; I was about to burst out laughing.
“What are you smiling at?” he said.
“I am not smiling.”
“Your lack of education is not my fault, and I cannot compensate for your analytical skills unless you take my class. If you do, I will give you an A for sleeping with me, how does that sound,” he said in his usual firm, quiet tone of voice.
All of my impulse to laugh died away at once. I got up from the bed, changed out of my nightclothes, and picked up my Li-Young-Lee book. I felt his eyes following me. I grabbed my purse, took out the bag of rocks and flung them on him as hard as I could. I heard a muffled moan as the bag collided with his forehead.
“I hope your eco-criticism can cook potatoes and beef for you, Professor.” I said softly before shutting the bedroom door. The last thing I saw was Edmund cupping his forehead with his hands.

I have never been in my store at one in the morning before. The heavy, sticky mechanical sound of the ticking clock was so persistent that I could not help but count the seconds, and I became anxious. What is Edmund doing now? Why did he say those things? I could not understand, why did he not stop me from leaving, maybe even follow me out? I locked the door and turned on the lamp next to the register. I sat down on my chair, and felt calm for a while. When I began to sweep the floor just for something to do, I was thinking of Edmund again. Sometimes he would pick me up after I closed the store. If he came early, I would ask him to sweep the floor so I could count out the register. He never did sweep the floor, and always managed to steer away from the topic by distracting me. Once, he even talked about children. “If we had some kids, they could take care of these things for us,” he said with his arms around my waist and his legs sticking up against mine, “How about going home and making some?” I laughed and did not ask him anymore. He always thought that I was ready to have children anytime, and was just waiting for him to say yes—which was probably why he never worried about it. He was waiting to become a tenured professor before having children, and when he got tenure he was waiting for us to move out of San Francisco, because of all the traffic and cheap food, “That will even drive a kid nuts,” he said.
But I did not think we would ever move out of San Francisco, and I knew we wouldn’t have kids even if we did. When I was thirteen years old, right after having my first menstrual period, a doctor in the Beijing People’s Hospital petted my silky black hair and said to my father, “She is short, and thin, below the normal range. Her stunted growth is the reason why she will be infertile, unless she uses the daily hormone shots.” My father knew that even his professor’s salary would not pay for the expensive imported hormone shots. He looked down at the only child he was allowed to have, with something in his eyes close to disgust. He did not hold my hand on the way back, even when we were crossing the wide Beijing streets. I thought I must be very sick, and was a little excited over it.
My grandmother had gone insane with old age at that time. She was moved from her rural home to a nursing home, but after six months they evicted her, because she would not stop telling stories and would not let anyone touch her. They said that her stories interested some nurses and annoyed others, but mostly they were too distracting. Other than that, she was healthy and did not need much care anyway. It was true. After my father moved her into his small two bedroom apartment in the center of Beijing, she just sat on the leather couch in the living room all day and sewed thousand layered shoes, only getting up to eat or go to the bathroom. The shoes were all my father’s foot size, but she never gave them to him. She just kept them wrapped in clear plastic bags. Sometimes when I got out of class I would sit by her and ask her to tell a story. I did not know whether her stories were true or not, but I was impressed with their details.
When my father told her the doctor’s diagnosis that day, she suddenly sat up straight from the couch, her eyes shining with excitement. She put down her needle and thread, and pulled me close to her. “But you already had a child, a boy, don’t you remember?” She said, “a small one, he was, a boy, a boy, only this big, don’t you remember?” She made a strange gesture with her hands that failed to show how small the boy was. My father turned away and slowly walked into the bedroom without another word. She stared into his direction until she heard the door lock.
“A small boy, only this big,” she said, “When Mom took him home, we all played with him. I tickled his round red cheeks with a pigeon feather and second brother fed him rice gruel spoon by spoon. That child of yours, those big droopy lips…I was only five then, the youngest, but he became the youngest when Mom took him home.
“When he grew to be five years old, he was the brightest boy—always wanting to go everywhere, see everything. Mom went to the market every Saturday morning, and always brought one of us with her. It was that Saturday, early, early, we were all asleep, except for Rao Tian, that handsome name! He was the only one, that child of yours, he followed Mom everywhere. He held on to the corner of her blouse and went. Then the dog, it was a curse, with its yellow tail, stranded with mud and spit and blood, people knew there was something wrong. Nobody touched it. Mom was buying soy beans, you know, she made this soy bean soup with beef, sometimes, that was when we still had some money left. She was picking soybeans, ones that are jade green and full—you only pick those. She had her back to Rao Tian, and that dog, I still remember Rao Tian telling me, that dog had a tongue bright red. It was a monster, it just went up to him, sank its teeth in.
“Rao Tian was cold all the time. He was shivering and that summer all the windows in the house were closed all the time. He still thought wind blew through the window cracks. But how can there be wind in Southern summers? He was so small, so small. Remember? I held on to his hands, they were sticky and cold. Mom wrote twenty-five letters and sent them to as far as Guang Zhou, begging hospitals for some western medicine, just one shot, she knew, it would cure Rao Tian. But before it got here, December came; the soldiers shut the city, all the city walls, locked like birdcages. What can you do but to watch him die? What can you do?
“Rao Tian left a curse. All of his things, whenever Mom saw them she would have a fever for days. When we fled to Sichuan with the help of a local official Mom knew, we locked all of his things in a cabinet; Mom did not look at them ever again. Such a small boy, how could he leave such a curse? Your little child.”
My grandmother slightly rocked back and forth in the couch, her fingers, swollen with arthritis, grasped onto her knees. She looked at me nervously, like she was afraid that I might deny her. I nodded and stood up, not knowing what to say. I reached for her needle and thread, and tried to put them in her hands.
“Remember?” she said quietly, begging.
“I remember.”
She took her needle and thread, and continued sewing.

I leaned the broom against the wall, and sat down on the damp cement floor. The dim lamplight grew even more faint. The room was overcast with a thick yellow hue; I could hardly distinguish the things on the shelves. Now I could see my grandmother’s swollen fingers, each of her deformed joints, clear as daylight, steadily grasping onto her knees, and I flinched at the painful vision. What makes a person so strong, that even when their bones begin to corrode, it still must corrode in a way that hangs onto someone else’s memory, just like all her stories, and never back down? And that child of mine, did he see it coming? I want to fade into a certain narrative, gently and unobtrusively, just kind of melt away like butter on hot bread, and see everything from the inside, the dog with the bright yellow tail and its big red tongue. How it came up to a little boy, about five years old, and licked him softly on the nose, while his mother picked out soy beans, jade green and full shelled, for the soup she was going to make for dinner. Or how the dog, with the bright yellow tail and its big red tongue, wanted to play with a little boy about five years old, whose mother was picking out soy beans. The dog shivered in excitement and anticipation, saliva dripping from its tongue, as the little boy climbed onto its back. And they flew through the busy market streets, through the soldiers smoking cigarettes, through the heavy city gates, through the rivers and the hills, never needing western medicine, clear liquid in a syringe, a piece of brown rubber tube, rubbing alcohol and that tiny white square of gauze. Just my little boy and his dog.

I slept so well that night on the cement floor that I made a habit out of it. Every evening after closing the store, I went across the street to the Jade Dragon Restaurant for an inexpensive dinner. I usually got a bowl of hot Wonton soup or a plate of fried potatoes and beef. Their potatoes are undercooked, not soft and creamy like how I made them. After several days of eating there, I became familiar with the waitresses and the chef. I asked the chef how he made his potatoes so undercooked that they are almost crunchy, he laughed and said, “They are not undercooked. I just soak them in water to wash off the starch before I fry them.”
Edmund did not come to find me, and I did not call him. On the fifth day, I woke up and saw three huge clear trash bags piled outside the store, with a note card taped to one of them. There were three sad eyed puppies on the card, staring at nothing. It said on the inside: “I will stop by later some time to talk about our marriage, or divorce (?), whichever you wish. –Edmund.” His handwriting still as neat as that on the first love letter he wrote to me. He was always proud of it, said he went to calligraphy school as a child for four years. I folded the card carefully, and slipped it into my back pocket. I dug into all three bags, and was relieved to find the red velvet bag of rain flower rocks from the bottom of one of them. I held the bag to my forehead, and through the soft tiny fibers of velvet I felt the calming coolness of the rocks.
It took me three trips to drag the trash bags to the dumpster behind my store and toss each of them in. The last bag got caught on a piece of broken glass in the alleyway and ripped open, some of my clothes and diary notebooks scattered across the mossy ground. I picked up a notebook that had a purple silk cover with embroidered lotus flowers, and ran my fingertips across the smooth threads of silk. With the same urge I had to throw the rocks at Edmund, I flung the notebook as hard as I could into the filthy open mouth of the dumpster. The loud bang sent tears to my eyes.

The old man was mesmerized by the rain flower rocks I arranged neatly in a row on the register counter. As I counted out the plastic bubbles from his basket, he stood there staring at them with no expression on his face. As usual, he was wearing his blue raincoat and thousand layer shoes. “Twenty-two dollars.” I said. He used the three fingers on his left hand to caress the rock with the black and white patterns that looked like chamomile flowers.
“Pretty, isn’t it? From China.” I said.
“Rain flower rocks of Nanjing,” he said.
I felt a lightning sharp pain in my stomach. I looked away from his deformed hand. “Twenty-two dollars.” I said.
“I’ve seen soldiers in Nanjing,” he said.
I did not need another story. This was not my grandmother. I tilted my head to the side and saw my Li Young-Lee book lying open, facedown on the plastic chair I was sitting in before he came in. If only I could go back to that page, that stanza, to the comfort of his words, round as pearls.
“I was ten years old,” he said. The grayness that fogged over his dark pupils seemed to clear up alittle, a strange shine glossed his eyes. I saw this and felt afraid.
I pushed his basket with the groceries in it into his chest, so harshly that it almost knocked him backwards. He caught the basket, balanced himself, and again fixed his determined stare on the rocks. I saw that he was about to speak again.
I picked up my book and opened it. The pages were white as snow, without a mark. The noon sun slanted through the window shades and shone on the white pages, the glare was painful. I dropped it on the floor.
“I had a little boy in Nanjing,” I said.
He did not hear me.
“They would not let my mother feed my little sister,” he said.
Tears gushed out of my eyes. I could not move any part of my body to turn away from him.
“They stabbed her in the chest with a bayonet until there was no milk, only blood. My sister’s hair and cheeks, drenched,” he said. He picked up a piece of rock and held it up to the sun. He squinted his eyes and looked at it. “Beautiful,” he said.
“Take it.” I said. He put the rock back.
“I went to take my sister away from my mother. Her fingers would not let go of my sister. I pried them open one by one. As I did this, the soldiers came back,” he said. He stoically held up his stump of a right hand, “This was what happened.”
“I put my sister on my back and ran. I ran home and laid flat under the thick blankets with my sister beside me. They came in but could not find us. They looked for a long time. I almost passed out. I needed air. I’ve always needed more air since then. I came to America when they put up the Japanese flag in Beijing several years after the massacre. The government was making business partners with the Japanese. There were people climbing up the flagpole to pull off the Japanese flag, so they sent the People’s Liberation Army to protect it. I could not look at them.
“When they left my house was when I noticed how quiet my sister was this whole time,” he said.
“She was so quiet, her little red cheeks were so quiet,” he said.
“Do you remember?” he said.

When it came out on the Beijing Evening News in 1990 that Japanese officials denied the massacre, saying it was fabricated for political advertisement by the Chinese communist and nationalist party, my father turned off the television. “Let’s not watch television this week,” he said. He finished the last of the rice in his bowl and went into his room, locked the door. I glanced over at my grandmother, it did not seem to faze her what was said on the news. She was slowly chewing on a piece of vinegar cabbage, enjoying it. “Grandma, the Japanese said the massacre never happened.” I said. In my childishness, I wanted to see if she would throw a tantrum. She just kept chewing. “The Japanese said the massacre never happened.” I said.
“It didn’t happen,” she said.
I felt the blood rushing to my head, and I felt my eyes swell in heat. I turned on the television. The pale faces of Japanese officials with adamant eyes and tight fists. I turned it off. I did not know what to say to her. She put down her chopsticks and leaned back in her chair.
“Listen to me, child. If they say it did not happen, it could not have happened. Because they were the ones who did it, nothing can come out of it unless they say so. My city died into nothing. Rao Tian was nothing. But he was your son. So then you know. But you do not go and fight nothing; it is a waste. My city was a waste.” She seemed exhausted by her speech. I put more cabbage in her bowl. We ate in silence.

“I remember,” I said to the old man.

Two weeks after I moved out of our house, I was eating dinner at the Jade Dragon when I saw Edmund across the street, knocking on the door of my store. I yelled his name through the open window. He jumped at my voice, looked all around and could not figure out where it came from. His perplexed gesture made him look like a lost puppy. I laughed so hard that I was choking on a piece of undercooked potato. The chef and waitresses thought I was cruel.

Another two weeks passed before we finally got to sit down and talk. Edmund made me put up my “Closed” sign, because he only had two hours before he had to drive to UC Berkeley to give a lecture on the newly discovered diaries of American missionaries who stayed in China during World War II and how their view of the environment…whatever. I stopped giving a shit about his eco-criticism before I even met him. I gave him my plastic chair to sit on, while I stood across from him behind the register. “Why do you have to stand behind the register?” he said. I looked at him, unmoved. He sighed and pulled his chair closer.

He nervously fingered the edge of the register counter. I looked at him and felt hatred, the man I loved for six years. “How’s your reading going? Do you still want me to explain that poem?” he said with a polite smile.
“I’m infertile.” I said.
He said nothing.
“I’ve known it since I was thirteen.” I said.
“Please.” He sounded so sincere.
“And I’ve always thought your eco-criticism was shit.” I said.
“You are still mad at me for that night,” he said.
“You wish.” I said. I turned around, took the Therapeutic Zen Garden he gave me off the shelf, and dropped it on the ground. Scattered across the floor, the golden sand glistened in the afternoon sun. The fancy ceramic fork was in pieces.
He stood up and tried to hug me. I let him. I did not move a limb. He sat back down and put his face in his palms. “What’s wrong with you,” he said, “I know I said nasty things to you that night, but I was frustrated. I had a bad class.”
“Don’t be so selfish, Edmund, it has nothing to do with you.” I said.
“Then what.”
“I can’t say it to you. I don’t know how.”
“Try.”
I stood silent. I saw a ten-year-old boy, holding on to his baby sister with a bloody stump, running like mad across the room. I felt immense pain in my chest, and smelled the metallic red liquid; it kept gushing out, mixed with my own warm, ivory milk.