Dian by Dian
Richard Wu
A year from now, in a distant memory from the future, you will stand before a soot-colored granite tombstone in Nanchang, watching as wisps of smoke swirl up from an incense burner. The sky above will be washed in a tranquil blue, and a bird will sing from a nearby pine tree, and you will hold joss-paper money and a joss-paper cigarette pack in hand while Mom tells you, “I want you to remember something.”
Mom will say, “Grandpa really loved you.”
Mom will say, “Even though he didn’t express it much on the outside.”
Mom will say, “People in China show love differently than in America.”
You will watch silently as your parents—first your mother, then your father—kowtow before Grandpa’s grave. Three kowtows per person, hands and feet rooted onto the ground, heads facing downward and lowered to the stone altar before the gravestone.
One.
Two.
Three.
***
What do you remember?
Your grandfather in Nanchang lived by himself, up on the apartment third floor: no elevator, only three flights of concrete stairs rising up, up to the green door adorned with red good-luck stickers.
To get there, your family took a taxi—no seatbelts—from the Nanchang railway station. You would ride along dirt-caked roads and up ramps and across the Gan River, then past a glittering sea of green roof tiles, below tangled shadows cast by concrete high-rises. Everywhere you looked, you would see an unending flood of traffic, with sirens flashing and horns blaring and drivers yelling, and through the taxi’s open windows you would smell the stench of gasoline exhaust and cigarette fumes hanging in the air. You would also watch the people that swarmed the streets—food vendors waving skewered meat at passersby, mothers holding screaming babies, old men performing tai-chi, beggars huddled in corners. Sometimes you saw dogs wandering about, urinating on the grimy pavement. Sometimes you saw young children doing the same thing, right out in the open.
At some point, the taxi would wind off the highway onto a dusty storefront-choked alley. From there, you’d get off and march the rest of the way, your lungs ablaze with the sizzling aroma of chili peppers and fried pancakes, your ears bombarded by the sputtering of motorcycles and oil.
At the noodle restaurant you’d take a left, continuing onward, across the park, through the apartment’s metal gate, up the three flights of concrete stairs.
***
You can feel the moist Houston night pressing against your skin—the air thick and sticky like rice porridge—as you slouch against a fat green couch in the living room, staring up, up into the high ceiling stretched out above. Outside, spring rain splatters down, crackling as it falls against roofs and streets.
Your mother sits across from you on another couch, asking, “Do you want to visit China again this summer, before you start eighth grade?”
“Not really,” you mumble. “It’s too hot and smelly and dirty over there.”
“Grandpa wants to see you again.”
“But we already saw him last summer,” you reply, “and the summer before that. And the summer before that. Besides, Grandpa doesn’t really like me.”
Mom sighs and says, “Grandpa loves when you visit. Even though he doesn’t always seem that way.”
You scratch your head. You can hear the rains outside softening, and across the street, the neighbor’s truck blares to life, its headlights flashing a river of molten gold through the windows. Then, finally, you say, “Can’t we just go next year instead?”
“Are you sure?” Mom asks.
“Yeah.”
With that, your mother gazes down at the floor. “Well,” she says softly, “this year’s airline tickets are a bit expensive. I suppose we’ll go next year, then.”
“Okay,” you yawn. You close your eyes, listening to the fading sound of the neighbor’s truck as it rumbles further and further away along the puddle-filled street.
***
Back then, you didn’t need glasses to see your grandfather’s face clearly. Grandpa’s yellow-brown teeth jutted haphazardly from his jaw—like rocks poking out against the Yellow River’s muddied banks—and their contours and crevices were darkened with soot from a lifetime of cigarette-smoking. His skin was tanned to the shade and texture of roast duck, and his ash-colored hair was already thinning at the top. To you, he looked like a slimmer version of old Chairman Mao.
You were still in second grade when Grandpa came to Houston and got his first taste of pizza. It had been a spring day, about a month or two after Chinese New Year, which meant that Mom’s gardenias in the backyard were in full bloom and the year’s first June bugs had already begun erupting from the earth.
The pizza was from Mr. Gatti’s—Italian sausage—with greasy cheese bright and glistening under the kitchen lamp’s pale glow. You eyed that pizza at the dinner table, imagining it sliced into a numerator and denominator, the way you’d learned from math class.
“Grandpa,” you said across the table, “try this.” Outside, the Texas sun had been setting, flooding the kitchen with tints of oranges and pinks, and you could smell the gardenias’ pearly fragrance wafting in from the backyard.
You watched your grandfather lift a greasy slice of pizza to his mouth, saw the bronzed skin on his face contort and wrinkle into angry folds, then snapped your gaze away as his mouth ejected a half-chewed glob onto a nearby napkin. “What is this?” asked Grandpa. “It tastes terrible!”
“It’s my favorite food,” was all that you said.
“No wonder you’re so skinny,” Grandpa muttered, before rising from the dinner table and heading outside to light a cigarette.
As Grandpa silently puffed on his cigarette in the backyard, you peeked out at him through the window. Tendrils of smoke seeped out from his mouth, rising up and away, melting off into the canopy of lilac clouds overhead. There in the backyard, lit ablaze by the fading sunset, Grandpa’s hazy silhouette became the shadow of a dragon breathing fire.
***
龙
You go to Chinese school in Houston, every Saturday, from 9:30 in the morning to 4:30 in the afternoon. On the way to class, you head past pecan trees and playgrounds, toward a red-brick church. Inside, a left, right, left, left, up the white linoleum stairs to the second floor.
In Chinese school, you learn the character for ‘dragon.’ You learn to form the characters for all the animals of the zodiac, stroke by stroke, character by character, line by line, except sometimes you might forget to add a dian at the beginning or end or someplace in between. Just a dian—a small extra bit, like a smidgen of extra pepper in your noodle soup, or in calligraphy, a little dot. Round at one end and tapered at the other, the shape of a runaway ink droplet.
While the teachers drill everyone on the four tones and stroke order and character radicals, you like to gaze out the window and watch the pecan trees shift and sway in the wind. Their dancing branches look like brushes tracing invisible words across the open sky—stroke by stroke, character by character, line by line, all the way down to the little dian that you inevitably forget to add.
***
Your grandfather’s apartment in Nanchang was big by Chinese standards, which amounted to about half the size of your home in Houston. The apartment’s chalk-white walls were scarred with lightning-shaped cracks, and the low ceiling was close enough for a grown-up to reach up and touch. On summer days, the air conditioning never worked, and the fan whooshed out a warm, damp breeze that felt like the breath of a guardian lion. If someone opened a window, you would hear the rush of traffic outside, and above that, the sound of a man chanting through a bicycle-mounted loudspeaker: “Recycling! Old computers! Refrigerators! Washing machines!”
Every time you came to visit that apartment, Grandpa’s pack of cigarettes would vanish. “Where are my xiangyan?” your grandfather would ask, his Mandarin words tinted with a coarse Nanchang accent.
You would sit at the living room table and stack mahjong tiles, one layer at a time, as if walls and towers emerging from those tiles could conceal the smirk expanding across your face. As if you had nothing to do with those cigarettes, which instead must have been swallowed up by the hungry earth, like that one missing boy on the Chinese news who’d tumbled down a mountain cave one day and never climbed back out. Because you could never understand why the Chinese word for ‘cigarette’ was xiangyan, or ‘fragrant smoke.’ To you, cigarettes were stinking smoke that promised nothing but bad breath and raspy coughing and soot-stained teeth. Not xiang, not fragrant at all. Not even a tiny bit. Not even a dian.
And so, on lazy summer afternoons, those cigarettes would be peeking out from your grandfather’s imitation Reeboks next to the green front door. Stinking cigarettes, enveloped by stinking foot odor.
But you were never good at picking hiding places—Grandpa always ended up putting on those shoes, and when his toes finally rubbed against the forbidden cigarettes, you would hear him yelp, “Which mischievous rascal put my xiangyan here?”
“I don’t know,” you always responded innocently. As those words slipped out from your throat, your fumbling hands would inevitably mess up the tower of stacked mahjong tiles before you, triggering a clattering avalanche that spilled out over the table and onto the floor.
“Hmmf, liar,” your grandfather would mutter. “You little rascal. Not respecting your elders.” With xiangyan in hand, Grandpa would stride out to smoke on the apartment balcony, shutting the door just for the little rascal—the little rascal who’d already be plotting how to hide the cigarettes next time.
***
It is summer in Houston, the summer before eighth grade, the summer you do not visit Nanchang. Even indoors, the humid night is full of mosquitoes flitting about. They pockmark you with itchy little bites, as if trying to outdo the acne sprouting across your face. Above, the kitchen lamp glows against a sea of aquamarine-blue wallpaper, attracting more insects and illuminating a watermelon slice in your hand.
You bite into the watermelon slice as the mosquitoes bite into you, and from the kitchen you can see your mother in the living room, hanging up the phone. She looks small against the living room’s high ceiling and big couches as she says aloud, “Grandpa’s lost several hundred yuan.”
“What happened?” you call out to her.
Mom sits down on a couch, a hand held to her forehead. “Mahjong gambling.”
“Grandpa’s been gambling?”
“To get more money,” she explains. “For name-brand cigarettes.”
“Oh,” you reply, while nonchalantly taking another bite of watermelon. “I think Grandpa should quit smoking.”
Your mother shakes her head. “He’s getting old. You should try to understand.”
“Whatever,” you say with a shrug, and then you spit out a mouthful of shiny watermelon seeds onto the kitchen table. Outside, the neighbor’s dog begins to bark, its howls answered only by echoes rolling across the darkness.
***
Some days your family would visit Lu Shan, lofty Mount Lu, and gaze downward at the mists that engulfed the valley below. Quaternary glaciation, the Chinese-English information sign read, and you would squint long and hard at those words, hoping that maybe they’d mutate into something more intelligible than the rust-colored Chinese characters on the other side of the sign.
While your parents savored the fruits of Quaternary glaciation—mountain expanses, waterfall scenery, lakeside landscapes—you and your grandfather drifted among the bamboo groves, through layers of mist and shadows. The bamboo stalks towered above as if they were chopsticks for giants, nearly tall enough to pierce the sky and send the stars above spilling down in a rain of diamonds.
“Don’t go too far,” your grandfather told you. But you took off out of his sight, weaving through the maze of giant chopsticks, until you found yourself at the edge of a small village. You saw the peddler’s face, his skin a shade darker than your grandfather’s, and heard the clink-clonk-clink-clonk of the peddler’s wares—bamboo flutes, Buddha carvings, zodiac medallions, a percussion ensemble of trinkets singing and dancing in the wind.
And then you saw the wooden snake, segmented like a millipede that could slither in your hands as smoothly as the real thing. You heard your grandfather call your name in the distance, followed by his footsteps, then his face bursting through the bamboo-chopstick forest. When Grandpa found you, you pointed to the wooden snake. “Please?”
Grandpa refused to listen to the little rascal who hadn’t listened earlier.
But the little rascal persisted.
“I’m not a rich American,” your grandfather replied. “I’m not going to waste my money.”
You huffed. You puffed. And not just a little. Not just a dian. You thrashed about like the Monkey King had done when he rampaged through the heavens.
“Stop being so selfish,” Grandpa said. He spat out cigarette-flavored phlegm onto the ground. “Mom and Dad are waiting. Let’s go back.”
The Monkey King’s answer was clear: “No!”
Grandpa was silent. He looked at you, then the peddler, then back at you, his eyes seesawing in their sockets. And then, finally, he let out a sigh like smoke and turned to the peddler. “How much?”
“Seven yuan,” the peddler answered.
Later that afternoon, after your family returned to Nanchang, Grandpa’s cigarettes would vanish into his shoes again. And while your grandfather paced back and forth for his missing xiangyan, the smirking little rascal would be perched atop the couch, a wooden snake clutched in hand like a slithering scepter. “Stinky, stinky xiangyan!” you taunted. “Nowhere near as xiang as me!”
***
臭
One day at Chinese school, you watch the teacher write a new character on the board. First, the character for ‘self’, followed by the character for ‘big’, right below. Then the finishing touch—a dian, a small dot, a little extra smidgeon added to make that big self just a little bit bigger.
“This character,” the Chinese school teacher explains to the class, “is chou. Chou as in ‘stinky’ or ‘smelly’, the opposite of xiang.”
“Or,” the teacher adds, “it can also mean that you’re too full of yourself.”
You sit there, remembering your grandfather’s cigarettes, and then you think of yourself, the little rascal, and to your surprise you can’t quite tell what is chou and what is xiang.
***
What did Grandpa remember? What did he forget?
One summer day, Grandpa’s missing cigarettes were not hiding inside his shoes. You had already finished sixth grade by then, and you were stacking mahjong tiles again at the apartment’s living room table, layer by layer, as if trying to build a second Great Wall. You could hear Grandpa’s thumping footsteps coming across the hallway, step by step on the yellowing plank floor, their angry rhythm punctuated by raspy exclamations of, “Where are my xiangyan?”
The heat had been as thick as cigarette smoke, with the Nanchang sun beating down from overhead, and the dusty streets drowning under shimmering mirages. You kept a wet towel folded over your neck, but rivers of sweat still oozed down your back, and you wondered if it was possible for a human body to melt away into an entire ocean of sweat. “I miss AC,” you grumbled aloud.
Your grandfather appeared. “You Americans are crazy. Always turning up AC too much, cold enough to make popsicles!”
“I’d like a popsicle,” you said.
“Did I ever tell you,” Grandpa continued, fanning himself with an old Chinese newspaper, “that I once lived in a warehouse in the countryside? Six families under one roof, nobody ever asking for AC.”
“But in Houston everyone has AC,” you said.
“Crazy Americans,” answered your grandfather, who then grabbed your wrists and squinted. “Why are you so skinny?”
“Because I don’t want to be fat.”
“When I was your age, no one worried about getting fat. We worried about starving to death!”
And then you heard your mother’s voice say, “How about some green bean popsicles?”
Your eyes darted up from your mahjong-tile construction site to the kitchen, to Mom opening the freezer drawer, to the mist spilling out from that freezer’s gaping depths like cigarette-breath. As the mist dissolved away, your mother asked, “What are these doing here?”
There in the freezer, nestled among ice cream boxes and frozen wonton wrappers, sat a frost-encrusted pack of xiangyan.
Instead of a smirk, though, a frown unfurled across your face. “How’d they end up in there?” you wondered aloud, because you didn’t recall the little rascal hiding any cigarettes that day.
Your grandfather marched into the kitchen. “I’ve spent the whole day looking for those xiangyan! That little rascal must have hidden them in there.”
“I didn’t put them there,” you protested.
“Hmmf, you liar,” muttered Grandpa as he wiped off the frost from his cigarette pack. “Who else would have put my xiangyan in the freezer?”
***
About two months later, you were gazing up into a moonlit Houston night, craning your head upward, as if to kiss the sky. Up above, a full moon hung aloft against the clouds, yellow and swollen as if it had swallowed up the sun, and you squinted and stared at its engorged surface in search for the legendary Moon Rabbit. You could hear frogs croaking and crickets chirping out from the backyard, and then the kitchen phone suddenly rang out, its clamor drowning out the chorus of frogs and crickets outside.
“Hello?” your mother answered.
“Happy Mid-Autumn Festival!” blared out your grandfather’s speakerphone-amplified voice, his Nanchang accent cutting through the humid night. Then Grandpa asked, “When are you visiting Nanchang again? You didn’t come this past summer.”
Your mother was silent for a moment before asking, “What do you mean? Don’t you remember that we left a few weeks ago?”
“No,” said Grandpa, and for a moment it sounded like your grandfather had lost his voice, that it had drifted off into the sky like cigarette smoke. Finally, he said, “Maybe…”
But that’s all you remember, because then the neighbor’s dog began barking outside, and you couldn’t hear anything else. So you stopped listening, and you went back to watching the heavens above, your eyes illuminated by a moon that you could see but not touch.
***
Another evening in Houston, another phone call. You can hear the rush of the air conditioning as it blasts through the ceiling vents, and before you, sprawled out over the kitchen table, is a jumbled rainbow heap of new eighth-grade school supplies—pencils and erasers, pens and highlighters, binders and folders. You grab a pencil, twirling it in circles with your fingers, and watch your mother shaking her head over in the living room. You can see a few white hairs glinting amidst the rest of her ink-black hair, and then she murmurs, “Grandpa forgot his apartment keys at the grocery store today. And his groceries.”
“What?” you say.
“He walked out of the store without his keys or groceries,” Mom explains. “But he was lucky—a cashier chased him down to return his things.”
“What about his xiangyan?”
Mom’s brow furrows. “Grandpa forgot those too.”
“Oh,” you reply.
A sigh escapes from your mother’s lips. “Grandpa’s memory is getting worse. He doesn’t remember how old you are.”
You blink, and the pencil in your hand stops twirling. It stays still in your hand, suspended over the table, like a breath, and for the first time you find yourself wondering what Grandpa will still remember the next time you see him.
***
望子成龙
Another day at Chinese school, the teacher inscribes four characters on the board. “Wang-zi-cheng-long,” the teacher enunciates slowly, “is a well-known Chinese saying.”
You squint at the board, your eyes jumping from character to character in a game of visual hot-potato, before your gaze eventually settles on the last part: the character for ‘dragon’, dian and all.
“The literal meaning of wang-zi-cheng-long,” the Chinese school teacher tells the class, “is to hope that one’s offspring become dragons.”
Your eyebrows wrinkle up together. “Dragons?”
The teacher nods. “This idiom also has a deeper meaning: to have great hopes for one’s offspring.”
You practice writing wang-zi-cheng-long—stroke by stroke, character by character, line by line. But as you write those words over and over again, one question keeps coming to mind: What does it take to become a dragon?
***
You are already a month into eighth grade when the last phone call comes. The crickets outside are chirping again, and you barely hear your mother’s voice when she hangs up the phone and says softly, “A fall.”
Her hand covers her eyes. “Internal bleeding,” she adds a moment later.
You try to picture Grandpa walking outside with a cigarette, somewhere beyond the park, somewhere past the noodle restaurant. You imagine him stumbling all of a sudden, his head landing against the dusty concrete pavement and his fingers still gripping onto his xiangyan, the fall to the ground traced by little lingering plumes of cigarette smoke.
But you don’t know what to say, and you don’t know what else to think, so all you do is close your eyes and try to remember.
***
The last time you ate a meal with your grandfather, your family had eaten at the noodle restaurant, the one down by the park. The restaurant was always awash in second-hand cigarette smoke and the air conditioning only worked in spurts, but you knew that soon enough you’d be aboard a train, watching as Nanchang rolled off and faded away to the size of a dian over the horizon.
Your family had ordered rice-flour noodles, a Nanchang specialty and Grandpa’s dish of choice. You had been eying the cream-white noodle strands as if they were pale slimy worms, asking, “Are the noodles spicy?” because so far every dish from every restaurant in Nanchang had been spicy.
“Not spicy,” replied your grandfather. “I told them that you can’t eat anything spicy.”
So you grabbed a pair of chopsticks and slurped up a mouthful of noodles, and as the slick white strands slid past your tongue, you felt a firestorm erupt within your mouth, a blistering conflagration ignited by the pinpricks of chili peppers.
“Grandpa, you said these noodles weren’t spicy?” you choked out, panting faster than a dog.
“But they’re not spicy,” Grandpa remarked with a frown, while sampling a mouthful of your noodles. “These barely have any flavor, just a dian of seasoning.”
You didn’t know what to say then, and there wasn’t any water or milk available, so you gulped down a fizzy glassful of Sprite and waited for the burning in your mouth to fade. But soon your stomach began to boil with an outbreak of Sprite-scented gas bubbles, and when that gas came surging up your throat and out your mouth, all you knew was that you were belching fire.
***
Back in the cemetery, after your parents finish kowtowing before Grandpa’s gravestone, you will be next. Three kowtows to Grandpa.
One. You will lower your head to the stone altar, with droplets of sweat mixed with tears dripping down from your face. The sun will heat the back of your neck, and the wind will sigh through a grove of trees.
Two. Someplace in the distance, you will hear the twirling, pirouetting melody of birdsong. Grandpa, you will say to yourself, I’m sorry we didn’t visit this summer.
Three. Your forehead will meet the altar once more, as if resting against a stone pillow. With your head fixed there, and your elbows and knees kissing the ground, the moment will bleed away to a single boy kneeling before a single gravestone.
Finally, you will rise.
Beside you, Mom will fold the joss-paper money and set it upon the altar before Grandpa’s grave. She will flick Grandpa’s old cigarette lighter, and you will see tender flames flickering in the sun, slowly but steadily nibbling at the offering, and then that paper will evaporate into the air, into the endless blue sky.
You will fold some more bills and toss them into the hungry pyre, and that’s when you’ll remember the joss-paper cigarettes.
“You can burn those too,” Mom will tell you.
And then you will feed the cigarette pack to the dancing flames, you’ll watch it melt off into ashes, and from the glowing embers the rising smoke will carry your thoughts up, up, to someplace far away.
***
When you return to Houston after the funeral, winter will already be creeping into the air. It won’t be snowing—Houston winters are too warm for snow—but you’ll be able to see your own breath.
You will tilt your head back and swallow a gulp of powder-blue sky, savoring the slicing chill of the air as it washes against your tongue and teeth and the insides of your cheeks. And then you’ll exhale, warmth rolling out from your lungs, each puff of breath expanding and drifting up, up, like wisps of smoke.
“So this must be what it feels like to be a dragon,” you will tell yourself. “To breathe fire.”
You’ll breathe in. And out. In. And out.
Your breath will pool all over your glasses, smudging the world around into a foggy blur. And just for the moment—just for a dian inscribed upon the surface of time—there you will be, a little fire-breathing dragon, a little dragon blinded by the veil of smoke seeping out from your own mouth.