Sichuanese women

by K-Ming Chang

There’s a stereotype about them. Like my Aunt Little Knife: she loved to fight. I mean she was born with teeth all over her body, bottle-capping her skin like barnacles. Her spine raised molars like an altar to hunger. I mean one time when the butcher wouldn’t sell her the pig’s head, she beat him with the handle of his own cleaver and threatened to sell his skull full of soup. Years later, he killed himself. This is unrelated. She beat me once with a chopstick and it broke in half. The chopstick was leg-long and made of some kind of bone so you know she buried the halves of it and unearthed it whole again. She had that ability: she could make anything whole just by holding it in her mouth. She could lick a wound shut and sweeten. She beat all her husbands soft as yolk. You don’t believe me, look in this bowl. This gold. She keeps something of each husband. The first, she shaved his head in his sleep and scattered the hairs in her daughter’s backyard and see what’s grown. A tree without a shadow. You have to watch out for those. A tree without a shadow is a ghost tree, and if you walk underneath a ghost tree, it bends its boughs like elbows and picks you up and hangs you in the branches. I know a woman who died that way, my Aunt Joy. Aunt Joy’s husband broke her hand by slamming a door on it, did you know? She went to one of those doctors who said a bone could be resewn with a thread of prayer. With that hand, she couldn’t drive right. She could only turn left. I see her sometimes in my dreams, driving in circles around the city, pretending to be leaving. Those were the years I didn’t sleep. I worked as a plant poacher, selling California succulents online to all those rich wives in China and Korea. Succulents are weeds here, but they’re exotic there, desert plants. Architects of thirst. Those rich men’s wives, they never get it. You can’t take a dry-weather plant and plant it in a wet-weather place. They send me emails, you know, complaining about how all their succulents are dead in a week, how the leaves have turned the color of a sick stomach. Rich people will buy anything and ruin it. The man who bought that house by the highway that looked like a mushroom, the roof like a forehead? He repainted it navy and now the night doesn’t know how to differentiate itself from his property. The whole sky resembles the rest of his roof. I think there should always be bouquets of baby’s breath at funerals. I prefer the Chinese name for baby’s breath: skyful of stars. Imagine if stars grew in fields, small as those flowers, and it was our job to pluck them and sell them to the sky, or online. Those wives who buy my poached plants, they should know their air is gouged full of holes by knife-sized rain. The sun’s a different temperature everywhere. Here it’s like a slit thumb or the inside of a throat. My mother always used to say, keep your words in your throat, boil them awhile. Don’t say them raw. You’ll poison everyone. She never fought. She cleaned the floor of a fish-canning factory and smelled sour as a gill. Like the thing a fish breathes through, you know that word, gill? There are so many ways to breathe and I don’t know enough of them. I’ve never been married, but I’d rather live inside a fish than love a man. The only man I’ve ever loved is my father, and that’s because he’s dead. When he died in that plane accident, he left me a bar of gold the size of a chicken thigh. My mother’s grief was lean. She stopped eating. She’d just chew things and spit them back out. We had to carry a bucket around to catch the scraps of what she spit, skins mostly. My father was in the air force. You wouldn’t believe a man like that could fly: he was so thinskinned you could see the shadows of his kidneys from the front and back and side. He was more wind than engine. Those kidneys turned into fists inside him and yellowed his eyes. I always thought it was on purpose, his crash. He claimed he once bombed the Japanese, but I heard from my uncle that his aim was worse than an infant who hasn’t been potty-trained. He disappeared over the ocean, probably sunken somewhere too deep to be dredged, but imagine. If he was still in the water slitting gills into his belly, swimming the world in circles. If I were in the air force, I’d fly toward the moon like Chang’e. I’d want to crush the earth in my fist, dribble light like a lemon. Don’t work at the factory. The floor is a swamp of innards and not even a mop can paddle through it to establish land. There was a woman before me, Charlene. She was a dentist back in Wuhan and taught me how to feel your gums for mouth cancer. There’s a way to detect these things and it begins with fitting four fingers in your mouth. Except my fingers can’t feel because of the fever. When I was a kid everything was called the fever. Your sister who never learned to read had the fever. Your father who disappeared had the fever. Your brother who proposed to a goat had the fever. Your aunt who immigrated to Canada to become a lesbian park ranger and hire the trees as her bridesmaids especially had the fever. That man from when you were a kid, the one who went from house to house asking for fifty dollars and he’ll set himself on fire, right there on the street or in the fields, he had the fever. When he asked me, I gave him a leaf and he put it in his pocket like it was money. Struck the match on his teeth and haloed himself with the light until I flayed the flame off him. He carried around a jug of gasoline and chewed the stalk of a matchstick indented in his mouth. I wonder if anyone ever gave him the fifty, if he’s the smoke coming off my stove. I should pray for him now. A Sichuanese woman would have told him to go home to his wife and pour the gasoline somewhere it was fuel. Into the tank of a car. All over the sleeping body of a government official. I know too many of these women, and all of them can be summarized into ash. My stove is the kind that needs to be lit with a match, but I never buy matches. They remind me of that man. They remind me of my sister who cremated her dead baby over a stove. I’m trying to remember what season this was. Yesterday or raining. I remember paying for her plane ticket home. She said it was too hard here, living where the only trees were detained in the memorial park, a park dedicated to a war we don’t know the name of. Copper statues of soldiers with bird-shit buffing their shoulders. She hated the factory and how no one knew the species of what they were eating. On her last day in California, we sat on the floor of the dorm and ate canned fish with our fingers and when she was asleep I pried open her mouth and reached in four fingers and felt and felt. But her gums were glass-smooth and nothing in this language was soft enough to say. When she flew to Mianyang with a taped-together jar in her lap I watched for her plane to pass over me. I didn’t think it would, but maybe. The sky was dull as the side of a cleaver. I prayed the plane wouldn’t donate itself to gravity and fall and pierce the sea like a fishhook. There’s a stereotype about us. We never learned to swim but we float. We know what we owe to the hollowness of our bones. We indebt ourselves to emptiness.

K-Ming Chang is a Kundiman fellow and a Lambda Literary Award finalist. Her debut novel Bestiary was published by One World/Random House in September 2020. She is located at kmingchang.com.