Quadriptych of Terrible Situations
BY WEIJIA PAN
Someone waiting for an elevator. Someone turning on a light.
Someone flying a kite and losing it. Someone planting two date trees
in the yard, and imagines dating. Someone writing a short story.
Some poet ushers in a century of sadness. Some f— whispered
to the empty clouds. Someone withholds his f—, knowing you
and the s— you did in high school, and lights your cigarette. Some wind
chases a bottle into the wet undergrowth. Someone at a demonstration.
Someone demonstrates patience. My grandma was patient, chopsticked
celery into my bowl. My great aunt reminded me that I was lonely
and read me printouts from a matchmaker. Some girl returning home
from America: is this also her story? Some apartment building
where this happened, a family gathering. Some families are formalities
but some love each other so much as when they laugh, their heads throw back
as in f—ing. As in f—ing, someone secretly sighs, and looks up to the light.
~
My father sighed, and looked up to the light. Grandpa is writing a story.
In this story, a young man returns to Shanghai after thirty years
and, while relearning the local dialect, is jailed for spying.
Grandpa occupied the living room to interrogate the young man
with his pen. Tuck in your shirt, father patted me on the head.
In the summer of 1985, my hair was an abandoned field
of bamboos. I widened my eyes: a wobbly lamp; yellowed ceiling;
all my toys hidden in a box by the wall. A wind banged tirelessly
on the window, like a young man without a cigarette. I saw him
come in and throw himself into the rattan chair. Five more minutes,
he mumbled through chapped lips. An editor? A policeman?
All I could hear was a click in my father’s throat. I was thirty too
but wanted the room for myself, my hands itchy in my pockets,
counting among my friends a chimney and a white water tower…
~
1937: no chimneys or water towers in sight. A boy counted flowers
covering the bodies of his dead friends. The Japanese bayonets, shiny
like family letters. In 755, Li Bai wrote a letter home before joining his wife
but didn’t know the Tang civil war was a few months away. He died in 762.
Also in 762: the Abbasid Dynasty began its Golden Age in the new capital
of Baghdad, which would last until 1517 when the last Caliph-in-name
surrendered to the Ottomans. Reading history in his father’s study,
wiping dust off the book spines, the boy thought of empires, an ever beautiful
invasive species. 1618: the (third) defenestration of Prague. 1918: WWI.
Chinese laborers built trenches for Entente powers: who was alive in 1949
for a plot of land? The boy was counting again, his imagination flourishing
in his empty belly. He asked me yesterday: Who are you? And I wondered
which answer wouldn’t surprise him. Also yesterday: how he saved up peanuts
for a girl outside a bomb shelter. -What happened to her? -I didn’t dare to look back.
~
I don’t dare to look forward. Do you? Tonight, time is a reaping machine.
I sit in my room, wondering what power I have, if I’m choking up
because I haven’t been writing enough. Who would I blame? What if
this happened: a poet stole my ration, traded all of it for a cup of wine.
His wife works at a jar factory and lost two fingers. His son snores
and gives me the finger. Tonight, I have a pen to set things straight.
I offer them more than what they wished for: the poet a lifetime of doggerel,
the wife another alcoholic. As for the son, who wanted to blow up the world:
his tomb will be full of flowers. I will visit him every third Wednesday,
bring him fresh lilies that glitter under the sun. I will tell him
all the stories in the world, how everyone forgets everyone else
and lives happily ever after, how every morning now is such a delight
there is only the news of blissful, blissful marriages:
between chairs and wardrobes, between birds and diligent flies.
