When I awoke the next morning, I again told Big Ma that I had suffered a nightmare. “You’re still sleeping,” she said. “Now get up. We’re taking you to someone who will wake you out of this dream.”
We walked to a village called Duck’s Return, six
li
south of Changmian. In this village lived a blind woman named Third Auntie. She was not really my auntie. She was auntie to no one. It was just a name, Third Auntie, what you call a woman when you should not say the word “ghost-talker.” In her youth, she had become famous all around the countryside as a ghost-talker. When she was middle-aged, a Christian missionary redeemed her and she gave up talking to ghosts, all except the Holy Ghost. When she was old, the People’s Liberation Army reformed her, and she gave up the Holy Ghost. And when she grew very old, she no longer remembered whether she was redeemed or reformed. She was finally old enough to forget all she had been told to be.
When we entered her room, Third Auntie was sitting on a stool in the middle of the floor. Big Ma pushed me forward. “What’s wrong with her?” Du Yun asked in a pitiful voice. Third Auntie took my hands in her rough ones. She had eyes the color of sky and clouds. The room was quiet except for my breathing. At last, Third Auntie announced: “There’s a ghost inside this girl.” Big Ma and Du Yun gasped. And I jumped and kicked, trying to rid myself of the demon.
“What can we do?” Du Yun cried.
And Third Auntie said, “Nothing. The girl who lived in this body before doesn’t want to come back. And the girl who lives in it now can’t leave until she finds her.” That’s when I saw her, Buncake, staring at me from a window across the room. I pointed to her and shouted, “Look! There she is!” And when I saw her pointing back at me, her puckered mouth saying my words, I realized I was looking at my own reflection.
On the way home, Big Ma and Du Yun argued, saying things a little girl should never hear.
“We should bury her, put her in the ground where she belongs.” This was Big Ma talking.
“No, no,” Du Yun moaned. “She’ll come back, still a ghost, and angry enough to take you and me with her.”
Then Big Ma said, “Don’t say she’s a ghost! We can’t bring home a ghost. Even if she is—wah, what trouble!—we’ll have to be reformed.”
“But when people see this girl, when they hear the other girl’s voice . . .”
By the time we reached Changmian, Big Ma and Du Yun had decided they would pretend nothing was the matter with me. This was the attitude people had to take with many things in life. What was wrong was now right. What was right was now left. So if someone said, “Wah, this girl must be a ghost,” Big Ma would answer, “Comrade, you are mistaken. Only reactionaries believe in ghosts.”
At Buncake’s funeral, I stared at my body in the coffin. I cried for my friend, I cried for myself. The other mourners were still confused over who was dead. They wept and called my name. And when Big Ma corrected them, they again wept and called Buncake’s name. Then Du Yun would begin to wail.
For many weeks, I scared everyone who heard my voice come out of that puckered mouth. No one talked to me. No one touched me. No one played with me. They watched me eat. They watched me walk down the lane. They watched me cry. One night, I woke up in the dark to find Du Yun sitting by my bed, pleading in a lilting voice. “Buncake, treasure, come back home to your ma.” She lifted my hands, moved them near the candlelight. When I yanked them back, she churned the air with her arms—oh, so clumsy, so desperate, so sad, a bird with broken wings. I think that’s when she started believing she was her daughter. That’s how it is when you have a stone in your heart and you can’t cry out and you can’t let it go. Many people in our village had swallowed stones like this, and they understood. They pretended I was not a ghost. They pretended I had always been the plump girl, Buncake the skinny one. They pretended nothing was the matter with a woman who now called herself Du Lili.
In time, the rains came again, then the floods, then the new leaders who said we must work harder to wash away the Four Olds, build the Four News. The crops grew, the frogs creaked, the seasons went by, one ordinary day after another, until everything changed and was the same again.
One day, a woman from another village asked Big Ma: “Hey, why do you call that fat girl Pancake?” And Big Ma looked at me, trying to remember. “Once she was skinny,” she said, “because she wouldn’t eat frogs. Now she can’t stop.”
You see, everyone decided not to remember. And later, they really did forget. They forgot there was a year of no flood. They forgot that Du Lili was once called Du Yun. They forgot which little girl drowned. Big Ma still beat me, only now I had a body with more fat, so her fists did not hurt me as much as before.
Look at these fingers and hands. Sometimes even I believe they have always been mine. The body I thought I once had, maybe that was a dream I confused with waking life. But then I remember another dream.
In this dream, I went to the World of Yin. I saw so many things. Flocks of birds, some arriving, some leaving. Buncake soaring with her mother and father. All the singing frogs I had ever eaten, now with their skin coats back on. I knew I was dead, and I was anxious to see my mother. But before I could find her, I saw someone running to me, anger and worry all over her face.
“You must go back,” she cried. “In seven years, I’ll be born. It’s all arranged. You promised to wait. Did you forget?” And she shook me, shook me until I remembered.
I flew back to the mortal world. I tried to return to my body. I pushed and shoved. But it was broken, my poor thin corpse. And then the rain stopped. The sun was coming out. Du Yun and Big Ma were opening the coffin lids. Hurry, hurry, what should I do?
So tell me, Libby-ah, did I do wrong? I had no choice. How else could I keep my promise to you?
“N
ow you remember?” Kwan asks.
I am transfixed by her plump cheeks, the crease of her small mouth. Looking at her is like viewing a hologram: locked beneath the shiny surface is the three-dimensional image of a girl who drowned.
“No,” I say.
Is Kwan—that is, this woman who claims to be my sister—actually a demented person who
believed
she was Kwan? Did the flesh-and-blood Kwan drown as a little girl? That would account for the disparity between the photo of the skinny baby our father showed us and the chubby girl we met at the airport. It would also explain why Kwan doesn’t resemble my father or my brothers and me in any way.
Maybe my wish from childhood came true: The real Kwan died, and the village sent us this other girl, thinking we wouldn’t know the difference between a ghost and someone who thought she was a ghost. Then again, how can Kwan not be my sister? Did a terrible trauma in childhood cause her to believe she had switched bodies with someone else? Even if we aren’t genetically related, isn’t she still my sister? Yes, of course. Yet I want to know what parts of her story might be true.
Kwan smiles at me, squeezing my hand. She points to birds flying overhead. If only she said they were elephants. Then, at least, her madness would be consistent. Who can tell me the truth? Du Lili? She isn’t any more reliable than Kwan. Big Ma is dead. And no one else in the village who would be old enough to remember speaks anything other than Changmian. Even if they did speak Mandarin, how can I ask? “Hey, tell me, is my sister really my sister? Is she a ghost or just insane?” But I have no time to decide what to do. Kwan and I are now walking through the gate to Big Ma’s house.
In the central room, we find Simon and Du Lili carrying on a spirited conversation in the universal language of charades. Simon rolls down an imaginary car window and shouts, “So I stuck my head out and said, ‘Come on, move your ass!’ ” He leans on an invisible horn, and then
—“Bbbbrr-ta-ta! Bbbbbrrr-ta-ta!”—
imitates an Uzi-wielding thug blowing up his tires.
Du Lili says in Changmian what sounds like the equivalent of “Hnh! That’s nothing.” She acts out a pedestrian lugging bags of groceries— heavy bags, we are asked to observe, that stretch her arms like noodle dough. Suddenly she glances up, leaps back nearly onto Simon’s toes, and launches her heavy bags just as a car zigzagging like a snake flies past the tip of her nose and plows into a crowd of people. Or maybe she means a stand of trees. In any case, some sort of limbs are flying this way and that through the air. To end her little drama, she walks over to the driver and spits in his face, which in this reenactment is the bucket next to Simon’s shoe.
Kwan bursts into hoots and cheers, I clap. Simon pouts like the second runner-up in
Queen for a Day.
He accuses Du Lili of exaggerating— maybe the car was
not
going fast like a snake, no indeed, but slow as a lame cow.
“Bu-bu-bu!”
she cries, giggling and stamping her foot. Yes, and maybe she was walking with her head in the clouds and
she
caused the accident.
“Bu-bu-bu!”
As she pummels his back, Simon cowers: “All right, you win! Your drivers are worse!”
Except for their age difference, they look like new lovers who flirt with each other, bantering, provoking, finding excuses to touch. I feel a twitch in my heart, although it can’t be jealousy, because who could ever think that those two— Well, whether or not Kwan’s story about Du Lili and her dead daughter is true, one thing is certain: Du Lili is way past old.
The charades now over, she and Kwan drift toward the courtyard, discussing what they are going to make for dinner. When they are out of earshot, I pull Simon aside.
“How did you and Du Lili get on the topic of bad drivers, of all things?”
“I started off trying to tell her about yesterday’s trip here with Rocky, about the accident.”
Makes sense. I then recount to him what Kwan told me. “So what do you think?”
“Well, number one, Du Lili doesn’t seem crazy to me, nor does Kwan. And number two, they’re the same old stories you’ve heard all your life.”
“But this one’s different. Don’t you see? Maybe Kwan really isn’t my sister.”
He frowns. “How can she
not
be your sister? Even if she isn’t blood-related, she’s still your sister.”
“Yeah, but that means there was another girl who was
also
my sister.”
“Even so, what would you do? Disown Kwan?”
“Of course not! It’s just that—well, I need to know for sure what really happened.”
He shrugs. “Why? What difference would it make? All I know is what I see. To me, Du Lili seems like a nice lady. Kwan is Kwan. The village is great. And I’m glad to be here.”
“So what about Du Lili? Do you believe her when she says she’s fifty? Or do you believe Kwan, who says Du Lili is—”
Simon breaks in: “Maybe you didn’t understand what Du Lili was saying. You said it yourself, your Chinese isn’t all that great.”
I’m annoyed. “I just said I couldn’t
speak
it as well as Kwan.”
“Maybe Du Lili used an expression like—well, ‘young as a spring chicken.’ ” His voice has the assured tone of masculine reason. “Maybe you took her literally to mean she thought she was a chicken.”
“She didn’t say she was a chicken.” My temples are pounding.
“See, now you’re taking even me too literally. I was only giving an example of—”
I lose it. “Why do you always have to prove you’re so goddamn right?”
“Hey, what is this? I thought we were just talking here. I’m not trying to—”
And then we hear Kwan shout from the courtyard: “Libby-ah! Simon! Hurry come! We cook now. You want take picture, yes?”
Still irritated, I run into Big Ma’s room to retrieve my photo gear. There it is again: the marriage bed. Don’t even think about it, I tell myself. I look out the window, then at my watch: almost dusk, the golden half-hour. If ever there were a time and a place to allow gut passion into my work, this is it, in China, where I have no control, where everything is unpredictable, totally insane. I pick up the Leica, then stuff ten rolls of high-speed film into my jacket pocket.
In the courtyard, I take out a numbered roll and load it. After the heavy rain, the sky has drained itself to a soft gouache blue, splotches of powder-puff clouds swimming behind the peaks. I inhale deeply and smell the woody kitchen smoke of Changmian’s fifty-three households. And beneath that bouquet wafts the ripe odor of manure.
I scope out the elements of the scene. The mud-brick walls of the courtyard will serve well as overall backdrop. I like the orange tinge, the rough texture. The tree in the middle has anemic-looking leaves— avoid that. The pigpen has definite foreground potential—nicely positioned on the right side of the courtyard under an eave of thatched twigs. It’s rustically simple, like a manger in a kids’ Christmas play. But instead of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, there are three pigs rooting in muck. And a half-dozen chickens, one lacking a foot, another with part of its beak missing. I dance in an expanding then shrinking arc around my subject. Out of the corner of my eye, I see a slop bucket full of grayish rice gruel and flies. And a pit with a terrible stench, a dark watery hole. I lean over and glimpse a gray-furred creature, along with clumps of puffy rice that writhe—maggots, that’s what they are.
Life in Changmian now seems futile. I should be “previsualizing” the moment I want, willing spontaneity to coincide with what’s given. But all I see in my head are well-heeled readers flipping through a chic travel magazine that specializes in bucolic images of third world countries. I know what people want to see. That’s why my work usually feels unsatisfying, pre-edited into safe dullness. It isn’t that I want to take photos that are deliberately unflattering. What’s the point in that? There’s no market for them, and even if there were, hard realism would give people the wrong impression, that
all
of China is this way, backward, unsanitary, miserably poor. I hate myself for being American enough to make these judgments. Why do I always edit the real world? For whose sake?
Screw the magazine. To hell with right and wrong impressions. I check the light, the f-stop. I’ll just do my best to capture a moment, the sense of it as it happens. And that’s when I spot Du Lili crouched next to the hand pump, draining water into a pan. I circle her, focus, and begin to shoot. But upon seeing my camera, she jumps up to pose and tugs at the bottom of her old green jacket. So much for spontaneity.
“You don’t have to stand still,” I call to her. “Move around. Ignore me. Do what you want.”
She nods, then walks around the courtyard. And in her diligence to forget the camera’s presence, she admires a stool, gestures toward baskets hanging from a tree, marvels over an ax covered with mud, as if she were displaying priceless national treasures. “One, two, three,” I count stiffly in Chinese, then take a few posed shots to satisfy her. “Good, very good,” I say. “Thank you.”
She looks puzzled. “I did it wrong?” she asks in a plaintive child’s voice. Ah—she’s been waiting for a flash, the click of the shutter, neither of which the Leica will produce. I decide to tell a small lie.
“I’m not really taking pictures,” I explain. “I’m only looking—just practice.”
She gives me a relieved smile and walks back to the pigpen. As she opens the gate, the pigs snort and run toward her, snouts raised, sniffing for handouts. A few hens warily circle her for the same reason. “A nice fat one,” Du Lili says, considering her choices. I skulk around the courtyard like a thief, trying to remain unobtrusive, while I search for the best combination of subject, light, background, and framing. The sun sinks another degree and sends filtered rays through the twig roof, throwing warm light on Du Lili’s gentle face. With this bit of serendipity, my instincts take over. I can feel the shift, the power that comes from abandoning control. I’m shooting now between breaths. Unlike other cameras, which leave me blind while the shutter’s open, the Leica lets me see the moment I’m capturing: the blur of Du Lili’s hand grabbing a chicken, the flurry of the other chickens, the pigs turning in unison like a marching band. And Simon—I shoot a few pictures of him taking notes for possible captions. This is like the old days, the way we used to work in rhythm with each other. Only now he isn’t in his business-as-usual mode. His eyes are wonderfully intense. He glances at me and smiles.
I turn my camera back to Du Lili. She is walking toward the hand pump, the squawking chicken in her grip. She holds it over a white enamel bowl that sits on a bench. Her left hand firmly clutches the chicken’s neck. In her other hand is a small knife. How the hell is she going to lop off the chicken’s head with that? Through the viewfinder, I see her pressing the blade against the bird’s neck. She slowly saws. A thin ribbon of blood springs up. I’m as stunned as the chicken. She dangles the bird so that its neck is extended downward, and blood starts to trickle into the white bowl.
In the background, I can hear the pigs screaming. They are actually
screaming,
like people in terror. Someone once told me that pigs can go into a deadly fever when they’re being led to the slaughterhouse, that they are smart enough to know what awaits them. And now I wonder if they also could have sympathy for the pain of a dying chicken. Is that evidence of intelligence or a soul? In spite of all the open-heart surgeries and kidney transplants I’ve photographed, I feel queasy. Yet I keep shooting. I notice Simon is no longer writing captions.
When the bowl is half filled with blood, Du Lili lets the chicken fall to the ground. For several agonizing minutes, we watch as it stumbles and gurgles. At last, with dazed eyes, it slumps over. Well, if Du Lili believes she is Buncake, she certainly must have lost her compassion for birds.
Simon comes over to me. “That was fucking barbaric. I don’t know how you could keep shooting.”
His remark irritates me. “Stop being so ethnocentric. You think killing chickens in the States is more humane? Anyway, she probably did it that way so the meat will be free of toxins. It’s like a tradition, a kosher process or something.”
“Kosher my ass! Kosher is killing the animal quickly so it
doesn’t
suffer. And the blood’s drained after the animal’s dead, then thrown away.”
“Well, I still think she did it that way for health reasons.” I turn to Du Lili and ask her in Chinese.
“Bu-bu,”
she replies, shaking her head with a laugh. “After I have enough blood, I usually cut off the head right away. But this time I let the chicken dance a bit.”
“Why?”
“For you!” she says happily. “For your photos! More exciting that way, don’t you agree?” Her eyebrows flick up as she waits for my thanks. I fake a smile.
“Well?” says Simon.
“It’s . . . Well, you’re right, it’s not kosher.” And then I can’t help it, seeing that smug look on his face. “Not kosher in a Jewish sense,” I add. “It’s more of an ancient Chinese ritual, a spiritual cleansing . . . for the chicken.” I return my attention to the viewfinder.
Du Lili dumps the chicken into a pot of boiling water. And then, with her bare hands, she begins dipping the bird as though she were washing a sweater. She has so many calluses they cover her palms like asbestos gloves. At first she seems to be petting the dead chicken, consoling it. But with each stroke, a handful of feathers comes away, until the bird emerges from its bath pimply-skinned pink.
Simon and I follow Du Lili as she carries the carcass across the courtyard to the kitchen. The roof is so low we have to crouch to avoid brushing our heads against the thatching. From a dark corner in the back, Kwan pulls out a bundle of twigs, then feeds them into the mouth of a blazing mud-brick hearth. Over the fire sits a wok big enough to cook a boar. She grins at me. “Good picture?”
How could I have had any doubts she is my sister? They’re all stories, I tell myself. She just has a crazy imagination.