Creation Myth
BY ANNABEL LI
Ma always liked the moon. Never mind that our apartment was weeded into the city and that the afterglow of streetlights was, more often than not, what she saw dotting the windows. She’d still sit me down so that my knees kissed the glass and pinwheel her finger at the indigo expanse beyond.
“There. You see?” It was one of those nights where it was only us at home, and her other hand was parting my hair as she pointed. Ba had just gotten a new job as the graveyard shift gas station attendant, cleaning up the discarded beer cans and snotty tissues and passing the occasionally high teenager through the register. It was good, because he didn’t have to talk either way. He told me once it was for the free candy, grinning through the holes gorging his gums, but even Ma saw his old boss and his daughter drive up to our street in a black Mercedes, its hull slicker than his wire-thin lips, and saw the door slam, the engine rev in a puff of smoke. And Ba, stranded by the gate, folded forward as if he could re-memorize the daughter’s skirt and her bare, pearly thighs.
“Yes, Ma, I can see it,” I said, though it wasn’t a total lie. The creation myth of the moon had always been Ma’s favourite story, the one she’d memorized forwards and backwards. She loved it for the same reason why she never cut my hair and insisted on detangling it every night, even though my ends were always splintered and frayed and it was a ritual we both should’ve outgrown: she believed that we came from a lineage of moon women, silt-blooded with bones that sang of starlight and ash. That our mouths templed the moon’s creation myth before anyone else’s did, bearing its purest reiteration.
Perhaps that was why I’d always been so sickly and frail, why I held my limbs like wineglasses. When the surgeons cut me out of Ma’s womb, I was already closer to death than most of the other patients in the hospital, grey-skinned and lungs too weak to heave anything but mewls. I had to be rushed to intensive care and kept in an incubator for weeks as they tried to bloom my body with colour. But even when I finally fisted enough breath to cry, my skin remained waxen, paper-thin and softer than dust.
For that, Ma named me Chang’e – after the moon, not the girl. When the white doctors pried and prodded and still couldn’t figure out what was wrong, Ma swaddled me in a clean shirt and took me home, believing their blue-gloved hands would eventually remake me into the cover of the Scientific American. Instead, she softened our home, stuffing styrofoam into the cracks where my fingers might catch. She taught me how to orbit around sharp corners and doors and to slur my footsteps across the floor. When our upstairs neighbour was found dead because of sleep apnea, his organs suffocated to prune pits, she poured mugs of hot, dark liquids over my tongue to coach my body into a waking dormancy. She quickly stopped after I began to hallucinate my death a week later, but the insomnia remained.
On the clearest nights, I’d sit cross-legged under my bedroom window and press my hand to the glass. With my skin backlighted into translucence, I could see the throbbing of veins, and I’d open and close my hand again and again, half-expecting to find women’s faces gazing back. But I never could.
In a month, Ba will quit this job too. He will go back to China, having found a rosy-cheeked wife who can still gift him children. But for now, there is only Ma’s hands entwined in my hair, splitting the knots one by one, each brittle strand popping in the quiet of the living room.
*******
The version of Chang’e that Ma knows goes like this: long ago, when baby girls could be divined from lily pads and mountains were still men, ten suns rose into the sky. For days, the earth torched and burned, until Hou Yi, a legendary archer, shot nine of them down. For his success, the gods gifted him two bottles of the elixir of immortality – one for him, and one for his wife, Chang’e.
One day, while Hou Yi was out hunting, his assistant, Peng Meng, broke in. He cornered Chang’e, who’d been home alone at the time, and demanded she give him the elixir. But Chang’e refused to relinquish the gods’ gift. Instead, she downed both elixirs herself, causing her to fly to the moon. She spends the rest of time living in a celestial palace, ribs gowning the stars.
Whenever Ma finished the retelling, she would sit back on the chair with a satisfied exhale, like the sound of a cork popping. In her version, Chang’e is noble and pious, giving herself to a life of loneliness for her husband’s glory. “You are both so lucky,” Ma would say, cradling my hands in hers. “So beautiful.”
I wonder if every woman in our family is as adept at straddling legends and lies as Ma is, if the streak is what has sutured itself to my flesh. The one time I’d gone back to visit, it’d been at the request of Auntie Gu, who was the wife of a grandparent’s niece or the niece of a grandparent’s wife – I could never remember which. She had teeth that bucked from her mouth like dinner plates and hair that flung from her head like a yo-yo. When she saw me, the first time anyone had since Ma straddled the ocean to give birth, she palmed my face left and right, her tongue roping her lips. “How strange,” she clicked, a line of drool wobbling through the fissure in her canines. Her breath had been nauseatingly hot with pineapple buns and meat, and Ma had to lasso her hands between hers to pry her away. Neither of us told her that I’d initially refused to leave the plane, thinning my body against the seat until the flight attendant was carried me out, kicking and screaming, an hour later. I remember, now, that it was because I’d thought ‘motherland’ was the land that made mothers, not the land that did the mothering.
After my hair has been unraveled, smoothed, and washed, I stand in front of the mirror in my silk nightgown. The tresses, hazed with the fragrance of lily shampoo, shiver down to the small of my calves. My eyes track them along the length of my body and slowly, my hands follow, rippling over the silk to catch the shapes that lie beneath. But there is only the narrow ridge of hips, a straight waist. A chest flatter than the backside of a lantern. I’m nineteen, a grown woman, and I could still pass for a twelve-year-old boy.
In another version of this tale, there is no Peng Meng, no thieves. Chang’e is the greedy one. She drinks both elixirs and runs away to the moon. As punishment, her body swallows itself into a toad’s and she must spend eternity hunched over a mortar and pestle, recreating the elixir she stole.
I wonder what Hou Yi would’ve done, then, coming home after a glorious day of hunting to an empty house and two broken vials on the floor. If he would’ve found a robber to blame, thinking Chang’e incapable of such hunger. But Ma never told this version, and I never asked.
*******
When I was younger, Ma used to walk two hours to the nearest independent store to get groceries, even though there was a Costco just down the street. She told me it was because she didn’t want the middle-aged white ladies to jostle her between the tubs of peanut butter and child-sized bags of popcorn until there was none of her left. Now that I can drive, I make the journey myself. As I’m leaving, I hear Ma calling from her room. She shuffles out, a bundle of clothes pressed to her chest. “Here.”
After I dress, I glance in the mirror. Buried beneath snow pants, mittens, three jackets and a toque, I’m more fabric than flesh. Beside me, Ma’s wrinkles pull into something resembling a smile. She pats my shoulder, her fingers feather-light through my layers. “Be careful, Chang’e.”
“I know.”
Ma’s grocery list is the same every time. Ginger root. Half a loaf of bread. Milk. Oranges. She likes the fruit with the thickest rinds, the ones that guard their fruit the most. Even when she digs her fingers into the peel, there is no squirt of juice, no spillage. Just perfect crescents of pulp, plump and gleaming.
The grocery store is nearly empty when the bell on the door announces my entrance. From the speakers in the corner, soft jazz music crackles. I pull the toque further down my face until only the whites of my eyes show and grab a basket.
Everything is fine until it’s not. Sweat coils in my armpits and licks the nape of my neck. Then my arms begin to itch from rubbing against the too-large jacket. The rubbing of the canvas snow pants becomes grating as I flicker down the aisles, blinking away the wetness above my eyes. Then disaster strikes. I’m tippy-toed in the fridge section, reaching for the skim milk when the world starts to spin. Everything flashes hot and bright. The basket clatters to the floor and my body follows, arcs of ceiling slivering through my eyelids. Then, softness. I crack open my eyes to see a boy’s face inches from mine, doe-eyed and patterned with freckles.
“You okay?” he asks.
“Yes.” I stagger to my feet, tugging the cuffs of my jacket down hard enough to make my knuckles sing.
My vision is still webbed with flashing lights when he meets me at checkout, my items already arranged on the belt.
“Need a bag?”
I shake my head, tongue parched.
Grocery Boy is slow, grabbing the bread by the corner of the bag and weighing the oranges one at a time. He transfers each fruit to the bed below, each ping ringing through the store.
*******
I was twelve years old when I learned that a woman’s body was fated to bleed. By then, I was already conditioned by Ba’s sporadic absences and the empty cupboards that followed, my stomach smoothed to the knot of a tree. She’d been my age, Ma explained, when she first awoke to the sticky mass of red on her bedsheet. She spent the rest of the morning squatted by the washing basin outside, scrubbing and scrubbing until the water ran clear.
This blood meant my body was growing, weathering itself for ruin. I was ticking closer to being sucked in, pixelated and vanished, like those girls Ma saw on the news every night, naked and dead in an alleyway or in a bodycon and too drunk to fight back or so mutilated by the man she brought home she could only call for help by scratching my nails across the hardwood floor.
I shuddered, imagining being cleaved open like fruit. But Ma leaned forward and rapped her knuckles against the hollow of my stomach, the emptiness of a womb too starved to grow. “It will never happen to you,” she said, eyes darker and shinier than I’d ever seen. “I promise.”
Perhaps this was also why she let Ba gallivant away for months at a time, his line of women growing like a string of baby teeth. Why she would be in the kitchen making dinner when he returned, letting him slurp the noodles in the way all Chinese fathers do until the bowl is almost clean, and we’d huddle around it afterwards, taking turns spooning the broth into our mouths, the only sustenance our stomachs could handle.
When I come back two weeks later, Grocery Boy is there. I try to avoid eye contact, but it’s too late; he’s already waving, leaning through the till.
I think of Ma and all her cautionary tales. I think of doors and fists and the other kinds of hunger that could imprint a body.
But Grocery Boy’s uniform is crumpled where he’s bent over to wave, and he looks so pale, so uncomplicated, hand flashing like a coin. So I raise my own and wave back.
*******
We meet in the nearby park after his shift. Children play tag by the fountain, splashing each other with water. The sky is a mirror. From far away, the murmur of traffic veins through like an afterthought.
I’ve taken off the snow pants and the toque and one of the jackets, but I’m still roly-polyed on the bench, too ballooned to sit straight. Beside me, Grocery Boy is watching the children running and laughing, his expression clouded. He’s told me his name, but I’ve already forgotten it. We sit in silence.
“You know, it’s twenty degrees out,” he finally says. He turns to me, lips quirked into a small smile. “You can take the jacket off.”
I’m boiling, but I don’t answer. Instead, Grocery Boy leans over, fishing out a small white box. He lights the cigarette and lifts it to his lips. Smoke curls over itself in the air. “Wanna try?”
“No, thanks,” I say, waving his outstretched hand away. I don’t tell him it’s because of the greyness, how it dries out my insides like kindling. I remember how Ma once caught Ba showing me one of his secret cigarettes, the white stub ringed with saliva and the fishy tang of his breath, and she nearly chased him out of the house right then and there. How, in the months after, she’d peered down my throat every time I coughed or sneezed to see if a spark had caught.
“Suit yourself,” Grocery Boy says, reclining back. His mop of hair hides his eyes, but he seems amused, not annoyed. I wonder if he’s done this to other girls before, waltzing them from the grocery aisles. Still, a part of me wants to memorize the confident, easy lines of his body, hold them under my tongue. Grocery Boy takes another breath, letting the smoke spiral out in a single ribbon.
“What’s your name?”
I chew my lip, considering it. “Linda,” I decide.
“I’ve never met a girl like you, Linda,” Grocery Boy says.
Grocery Boy likes talking, so I let him. He tells me about school and his student debt, and how he’s training to be a plumber so he can go out in the world and divert the waste of people who can’t clear it themselves. “It’ll definitely be better pay than this,” he says, hooking his thumb toward the grocery store. As his sleeve rises, I catch the edges of a tattoo. I can’t discern the design but it’s fresh, the skin still raw. I doubt he fears needles or scissors or kitchen knives. I’ve never even held a butter knife, not after the time I clipped the edge of a door and my entire left side flaked purple for weeks.
When Grocery Boy asks where I live, I point out the cluster of buildings sheared against the horizon like glass. “That’s where my mother went when she was pregnant with me. We haven’t moved since.”
He nods. But it’s vacant and half-hearted and he asks again: “But where are you really from?”
He is so eager, so selfish in his want, eyes skittering over the seams and zippers coiled against my skin. Still, I want him to understand. I want him to know his flesh reminds me of the fish Auntie Gu bought in the wet market in China, pink and jewelled with fat. How I dreamt she took me with her so I could climb above the vendors and hagglers, my limbs blurred with fluorescence, looking for faces like mine. The bench is digging into the back of my legs and I want to dig back, to indent my fingers into the cold plastic. Instead, I curl my hands into my lap and say: “the moon.”
It’s not the answer he was looking for, but he laughs anyways. “You’re funny,” Grocery Boy says. He leans forward, hand whispering against the bench as he reaches for mine. I jerk away, a mass of rustling layers and sweat. Grocery Boy blinks, solemn now, his eyes just as brown as they were on the day he stopped me from falling. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he says.
I almost believe him.
*******
When I get home, Ma sees the chlorophyll stain on my pants, smells the dirty plastic bench and the boy from my clothes. She is silent but I feel the sharpness of her gaze, the way her eyes track my body as I hang up the pants and sweaters, searching for something blooming inside.
“Ma – ”
“You don’t need to say anything,” she says. I wished she would scream at me. I wish she would bare teeth, claws, anything. Instead, she stoops to the kitchen, every footstep the echo of a memory.
In the days after, Ma fills the house with oranges. Navel, mandarin, sumo, distending the cupboards, watching me while I piss like plastic idols. Even when the drying racks bruise with peels, Ma keeps buying, keeps swallowing, her body too empty to want anything else. One morning, I arrive in the kitchen to see Ma bent over the counter, carefully wiping an orange with a paper towel. She sets it on a plate and pushes it towards me.
As soon as she hobbles back to her room, I unlock the door, slip outside, and run. My footfalls fracture over the pavement as I curve through the streets, every turn a tessellation of the next. I do not stop until I collapse against the curb of an intersection whose name I never learned, lungs blistering against my shrunken ribs. The city blurs, opening like a mouth, swallowing me with honking cars and stampeding voices. When I take the orange out of my pocket, it is shiny and unmarred. I throw it to my feet and stomp as hard as my bird bones will let me until it is just another splatter on the sidewalk, my vision running clear with tears.
*******
There are some things that can’t be undone. Hou Yi is gifted the elixir of immortality. Chang’e’s appetite grows larger than what she can stomach. When you take too much, the world takes back.
When blood didn’t bloom between Ma’s thighs for the third month in a row, she rushed to the graves of her ancestors, arms cradling all the paper money she could buy. She fell to her knees and stayed there for three days, praying to any ghost who would listen for a son until her tongue lumped to the base of her throat, calcified as a dark stone. Above her head, the sky writhed red, twinned with the cracks on her knuckles.
On the last day, a cold breeze brushed against her belly. Ma looked up, expecting a man, only to see the mirage of a woman, face veiled by smoke. She closed her eyes, licked her lips. Took her shivering body home.
*******
Auntie Gu’s house was never empty. Even at night, the loudmouthed laughter and clatter of dishes seeped into our guest bedroom. Ma didn’t complain. She tucked herself into the blanket beside me and unplugged the room into darkness. Through the slits in shutters, the city lights ebbed and flowed over the eggshell-bare ceiling, staining like bruises.
In the early morning, long after the sons and guests had left, Auntie Gu’s slippered feet retired to the room next to ours. The door shut with a click. A ringtone played, muffled through the walls. When the line connected, Auntie Gu prattled about her daily finds from the market, her son’s newest girlfriend, the summer heat. Then her voice dipped, softer than I’d ever heard it before. I heard Ma’s name slip through the walls, then mine. She was recounting my strange skin, my sunken voice. My limbs, bridled with bubble wrap.
Then, a beat.
“She’s crazy, keeping her on a leash like that.”
Her scoff shuddered through the floor we shared.
I rolled over, sliding the blanket to my chin. Against the ceiling, the echoes of the streetlights stretched grey, then orange, then blue. Beside me, Ma was still as a painting. Slowly, every movement quiet, I burrowed under the covers, folding myself against her stomach and the wound we both shared. Her breaths lapped against my cheek like waves until I closed my eyes, and we were just two bodies in the dark.
