The Old House

by Yao Xiao

Winner, Ray Ventre Memorial Nonfiction Prize, selected by Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint

The soil underneath my feet had the color of sand, so I thought I was at the beach. But unlike the beach, I didn’t hear any roaring of the waves and instead only the sound of leaves rustling overhead in the midday sun. A cluster of large, solid brown fingers gripped my hands, hard, like the tangling roots of old trees. A thunderous voice, unlike any I had heard, louder than the hoot of the train that tore through mountains to get me here in the arms of my parents, woke me up into tears. It’s too loud, I complained which made everyone laugh, without knowing that it, was a he, my great grandfather on my dad’s side, the Shanxi side.

People were just getting used to the idea of the ‘90s when I turned one year old in the house that was referred to as the old house. Even in the village, there was TV instead of radio, pop instead of disco, agricultural entrepreneurship instead of just planting fields. The old house was yellow, squat, plastered with a layer of dried earth, with latticed wooden window frames covered only with colored paper: red, pink, and yellow diamonds through which light peers through, like translucent skin pulled over a drum.

With only two rooms, the old house was full of novel surfaces: painted walls, oil cloths, wood softened with age and smoke. Outside, the hens in the pen slept at high noon, snoring like little old ladies. Pungent smells from the cesspit drifted in the air along with the smoke of burning firewood from the kitchen chimney.

In my childhood, I came here with my father every summer. Green tin trains took us here when summer heat started to rise in my humid seaside hometown, and after two and half days of sleeping on hard cushioned seats, we would take a small bus, then a small motor taxi, and at the end, walk on foot till we reached the wooden gate, then the small metal gate where a guard dog would scare me.

During the day, there’s hardly any sound in the old house except for the pendulum clock crowned with a gold-painted ornamental roof. When it struck, sound reverberated the walls like light reflected off the mirrors that hung high just below the exposed beams in the ceiling.

Even though there were water kettles and thermos bottles, once I tasted fresh water from the well I refused to drink it boiled. I knew where the water came from; I saw it, from the square well, the destination of a family excursion through pleasant birch woods where we walked with a pushcart to get water in buckets. In the old house, where the clean water was chilled in giant clay vessels, I would walk up to the vessel next to the stove, move aside the wooden plaque covering the opening, pick up the copper ladle hooked to the side of the edge and dip it back into the chilled water, filling it, bring my face down and drink. In the village, the color of clean water was black. It meant that there was nothing else in it to reflect light except for the deep, deep well it came from. As the water made its way down my body, the dark coolness in the entrance room would drop on me like a flood of ink. The smells in the hall invaded after that—dried mushrooms, sour and medicinal, then it was apples, the ones slowly going stale in cardboard cases under the couch, a gift from a relative that my grandma saved for later.

. . .

Here in New York during COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, forced to stay in my own apartment on the Upper West Side, I, like many millennials on Twitter who shared a collective sense of dread-turned-escapism, started playing Stardew Valley, a video game where the protagonist leaves their dreadful tech job and returns to the countryside to revive their grandfather’s farm. In the game, I step off the bus at an overgrown patch of land. A crumbled cottage. Rocks to be cleared and weeds to be reaped. On the first night after I cut pixelated weeds, planted my first crop of green beans, and made a short strip of low stone walls to protect them from crows, I had the first dream of returning to the old house.

. . .

I did it, I got into the house. The television is on, some trivial local news about an apricot farmer-turned-businessman winning an award. I ignore the programming and take stock of the trace of daily life, hoping they are still here. I find money, a pagoda-shaped thermometer, cigarettes, a rusted tin hen, a middle school physics textbook from the ‘80s. I find yellowed newspaper from 1997, the dictionary my dad used to learn to write, alarm clock missing its hands, plastic bags.

I swing open the wardrobe, it is full of clothes, everyone’s clothes, of every generation…blue swaths of socialist workwear from way back when, flimsy nylon of the ‘80s, spandex of the ‘90s…from birth to death. Twelve posters of the same opera character, an old man type with a big white beard. Twelve hands holding the twelve white beards in an honorable pose.

Towels, soaked with salt from grandmother, grandfather, my father and his siblings, their children, hung stiff like dried fish on a wire tied to the chimney, so hard they can cut your skin before they clean it. The chimney goes all around the room, casting a soft shadow. I see the clock but I don’t read its time, instead I open its secret compartment to find spare change folded into triangles and grandma’s copper ring. I used to toss this ring in the yard, watch it bounce back from the ground, making a crisp chime like a bell, and imagine that if I concentrated really hard, it could turn into gold.

. . .

In the United States, China was a myth. My childhood, my past, my clothes, my beliefs, were curious artifacts to people who listened to NPR and read coffee table books. The idea of otherness occurred to me suddenly one year, when I visited the village in the summer of 2008, the idea that this life I saw as a mundane, intimate, and inseparable part of myself could be placed at arm’s length, be observed.

So instead of truly returning, I observed, pointed my film camera at the linen sellers, the children with their large, clean, beautiful eyes, the dangling cigarettes from somebody’s dad’s fingers. There was a village fair going on that summer. How have I never noticed the village children before, how their faces, reddened by crude weather, glowed with a raw authenticity unseen in the sleek, commercialized part of the world? How have I never looked at the patterns on fabrics at a bazaar, and noticed the charm of mis-registered colors, the unabashed blooms? I felt like a grave digger, the ones described in stories about Europeans and Americans who robbed ancient temples clean, when they saw unspeakable treasures that glinted in candlelight, without an awareness of the thousands of years that rushed past in the outside world. I felt their thirst: no one’s seen this before. How can it be possible that no one has seen this before?

That year when I felt the most greedy for taking what I could just experience, our family retired the old house for good. It was becoming structurally unsound; it was never built to last. A new house had been built nearby, with glass windows and large rooms. I stared at its door, which looked even more crooked than before, with a lock on its handle. No longer can it be opened just for a drink of that water from the well.

I was disappointed; the old house was the treasure trove of all unseen treasures. How beautiful it would have been to capture on film the beam of light coming through the dyed paper. Not to mention on the inside, the traditional stove cluttered with blackened pots and pans, the family shrine that I paid no mind to for sixteen years, didn’t even bother to ask questions about it…in front of the house, I photographed the patch of sunflowers newly planted, yet already each eight feet tall, their tall shadows in the violet evening sky looked like people catching on fire.

. . .

There was a folk story my mom likes to tell with mouth-watering vividness. Once upon a time, there was a young lumberjack who passed by a giant boulder everyday when he goes chopping firewood in the mountains. He never paid much mind to it until one day, in his dream, two immortals came to him and told him that the unseemly rock was in fact a door to incredible treasure beyond his wildest imagination. In his dream, he heard the sound of trickling water coming from behind the rock, like a gurgling spring, making his heart itch. When he woke, he had an insurmountable desire to move the rock, and see what was inside.

After a year of walking into the old house in my dreams, I too developed an intense longing for what was inside the house. By dreaming of the house, I was rebuilding it. Walking through it over and over, inventing new details while preserving old ones, I believed that a part of my true self was left there, severed and shriveling, and until I reached it and incorporated it back into myself, I would never be complete.

. . .

Second uncle restored the house. I hope they didn’t clean out all the shit. I rush in and see that someone has made a new set of furniture. No, no, no that’s not the same color as before. There is a new bathtub right in the middle of the room. I swing open the wardrobe and it’s divided into puzzle-like small compartments, and there’s a padlock on every drawer.

The old house is about to collapse. I have to go in and save the things. I dash into the house, dodging the falling dust, then the rubbles on the kang turned into a pile of warm chestnuts dumped on a new piece of red cloth. The room was glowing, new, like it was New Year’s Day.

. . .

32 years after I met my great grandfather, I still don’t know his name. I don’t know till my father told me recently, that he died just days after that first time he held my hands and scared me with his voice, in the old house. I don’t know what he did before he became old, I’ve never visited his grave even though I knew it was nearby. Having known the old house intimately, I still never asked a single question about its origins, when and how it was built. (“We built it.” Would likely be how my father answers if I do ask. ) The written text feels excessive here. History feels invasive here. To paint a portrait of it is not the same as living in it, touching it, drinking its water. To paint a portrait of it is to be estranged from its image, and my own image inside the house.

The idea of documenting this house grew into an obsession, because I feared that its existence and what it meant to me was lost forever when I failed to save it. It’s the most permanent house I know, the singular existence out of all the transient houses I’ve lived in. Documenting it would have justified the generational migration in one direction: away from here.

. . .

The first time I watched one of Jia Zhangke’s films, I shivered from what felt like an impossible situation: illuminating the screen suddenly in the opening scene, after the theater had gone dark with suspense, was the hazy sunlight through the windows of a minibus, the kind that I rode with my family to our village in Shanxi. The camera gently rocked, and a girl in the window, wearing a colorful sweater that could only be from the ‘90s, suddenly turned back to look at me. No, she didn’t turn to look at the indie-Chinese-film-watchingon-a-weekday crowd in West Village, the western audience full of curiosity, or people with a general interest for the other parts of the world: she looked at me. The sight was for me. I was just another child on that bus. It couldn’t be, I remember thinking to myself, knowing nothing of the director back then, it must be a different province in China, another one of my illusions when I try to look for home everywhere when I grew intensely nostalgic. It was the first time that I understood what film was supposed to do—at least one aspect of it—to affirm our ability of sight as humans. Before that matinee in the West Village, I had never seen my own sight reflected back to me in this way. The village, always with its potent meaning in Chinese society, looked exactly as I remembered it in Jia’s films—rundown, technologically altered, always juxtaposed and tampered with, always inhabited by characters you’ve never met who claim to know you or your father, never pure, never quite sentimental in that way, which is its charm.

The depiction of the rural life in literature is an eternal topic for the modern Chinese literati. In Jia Zhangke’s documentary Swimming Out Till The Sea Turns Blue, Jia explored the literary genre of The Village, from the perspectives of three prominent authors—Jia Pingwa, Yu Hua, and Liang Hong—born in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, respectively, and all from the same Shanxi province where Jia also grew up, where my grandma’s village is. Instead of portraits of any of these authors, the film opened with scenes from an elders care center. Wrinkled faces of the elders loomed large like planets in an orbit on the screen, their eyes black like beads of onyx, casting a loose gaze over the camera’s general direction, which was set up behind a buffet line in the cafeteria. Again, who did they look to? The film screening was at Francesca Beale theater in Lincoln Center. If they did look at us, what could they possibly say with their gaze?

In The Future of Nostalgia, the Russian immigrant author Svetlana Boym recounts through her research that early recorded characteristics of nostalgia include “hearing a loved one’s voice.” How do you hear the voice of a house? How do you hear the voice of something that didn’t speak? In my dreams of the old house, I often reveled in the light that came through the window. It’s the quiet gaze of the place, the indirect, yet indiscriminate gaze of the sun. We communicated for years, without words, without recorders and cameras, without awareness of an outsider, peeping in. The house was there. Somebody built it. I was a child in front of it, in it, slapping its walls for joy. What else need I know? The way I communicated with the house was through sight. And now I miss it through sight. 

When I left the theater, meeting my eyes were vertical lines of the architecture that cut up the black night sky at Lincoln Square, bright industrial lamps piercing my eyes.

. . .

During the pandemic, in the height of news about the Wuhan lab and Biden’s promises to keep confronting China, when I slowly slid into a hole where I didn’t even listen to the radio anymore, a close friend of mine became obsessed with an algorithm that really caught her attention—it started feeding her all sorts of videos about young Chinese people our age who cannot afford their parents’ healthcare. We were the same age, born in 1989 and 1990, and as we turned 30 right into the pandemic, we suddenly realized that things aren’t permanent, that the childhood glow will fade, on people, things, furniture and walls, bodies, even the mind. But worrying about living people somehow didn’t provoke the same emotion in me as fearing that the evidence of living would disappear. If there was a content genre of people going back into old houses to film items of nostalgia, I thought, I would be addicted to it all the time. 

As it turned out, there was. I couldn’t believe it, but my dad shrugged, why not? You are not the only city person who grew up going to their grandparents’ house who honed a soft spot for the village as a disappearing place. There are decomposing houses like this all over China. In Shanxi, with its long history, houses better built than ours had been sitting there decaying for twenty, thirty centuries. More recently, there were tiktokers that produced content exclusively covering this as a genre: old house walk-throughs. He quickly sent me a few, they were all just like described—overgrown houses, emptied yards, latticed windows laced with wild weeds, crumbled walls, ruins that inspire nostalgia like the strong potion they are. Someone else’s old house, someone else’s whole generation, none left where it was born.

. . .

The young lumberjack in the story woke up with a seed in his hand. He planted the seed in the yard in front of his little shack, and watered it everyday. The seed grew into a beautiful, jade-green cabbage. As if he knew how to do this all along, he took the cabbage, went to the rock in the mountain, heard the water running from behind it—he inserted the cabbage like it was a key—and the door opened. Gold coins poured out like the gurgling spring he heard over and over. The euphoria that follows, would be pure satisfaction itself.

. . .

My grandmother, the person I associated the most with the old house, has Alzheimer’s. She had been appearing on New Year’s video calls with puffy, teary eyes since 2019, and I used to soothe my dad saying that old folks were always a little sorrowful. By the end of 2020, she could not be left in the house alone, she forgot how to cook. She has lost her logic, my dad said of his own mother, and I imagine when he said that he must have felt pain and longing, of all the time they spent before that point, when they could have talked normally, mother to son, son to mother. Soon, she and my grandfather had to be removed from their lifelong home in the village into an apartment in the nearest city, this time not because their house was collapsing, but grandma’s mind.

You could always build a new house next to the old one. But there is no replacement for a person.  

You are used to your new life? You are used to living there, all by yourself? I miss you so much! I miss you! You are used to it. You take care of yourself. I miss you!

On video chat, grandma said the same things over and over. I wondered if she even remembered she was talking to me, or it was something she said to all her children when they left the village to live in some other place. 

My dad spent months in the old village trying to clean the house and yard, now left behind. In the background of his video chat window, I saw a tea-colored dress trimmed white lace with a purple plastic flower on its collar hanging on one of the bunk beds. It was a frilly dress my second uncle gave me when I was five years old.

“Your grandma doesn’t throw away anything,” he told me, all he had been doing was trudging through time, material of time, made of old clothes entangled with one another, hidden and piled up in every corner of grandma’s house. I couldn’t imagine the emotional vortex that work must have been, moving tumbleweeds of cloth as if they were bodies, pulling on sleeves and seeing the phantom of a hand you suddenly recognize, taking you back to the day when the person attached to it fed you, or hit you.

But that dress, my dress, must have traveled in my parents’ suitcase one of these summers, to the old house, the depository of memories. Every old thing just calls back to the day it first showed up, my dad said. He would remember his mother when she was still glowing with youth, and the old house being a new house once upon a time. I remember the last time I saw my parents in person. It was in 2019 at the airport in Los Angeles, and I felt silly waving goodbye to my own parents as I put them on a plane, something they always did for me. I stepped out to the departure hall and sat on the floor for a while, looking at all the other passengers around me, some traveling together, some saying goodbye. I felt like I could just sit there all night and no one would stop me. I could sit till the sun comes up, buy a burrito and eat it, take an Uber to my friend’s house where I was staying for a few more days, go back to New York. These places, Santa Monica Beach, Empire State Building, The Met, days ago places I was dying to take my parents and show them around—it was the first time they visited the United States after I moved here as a teenager— suddenly seemed detached without family. Honestly, it felt better when they had never been there yet. I thought I was more independent than this, but there was something special about being in the same place as the people who you grew up with, seeing them age. Then the pandemic hit, my passport expired, the Chinese consulate closed, and I lived in New York for three years and tried to recreate everything in my head. 

You are used to your new life? You are used to living there, all by yourself? I miss you so much! I miss you! You are used to it. You take care of yourself. I miss you!

. . .

“Your grandma ran away on a cab back to the village. She took grandpa with, too.” One day my dad called me to say. He should be concerned, but did I detect a sense of pride? It turned out that grandma had, on a day when she couldn’t stand the apartment anymore, conspired with grandpa to take a taxi for an hour to get back to their house. The whole family trailed after them and scrambled to settle them back in a day later. Why was I surprised? They couldn’t read or write, but they spoke the local dialect and knew where their house was; a two-hour cab ride was all it took.

Maybe grandma also had dreams about the old house. Unlike me, she reached the point where she didn’t care if being sad about things would make other people worry. She ran away a few times more, and now, her children had relocated her into an elderly care center. It was a big center filled with elders from many villages, many people’s parents and grandparents; the same kind that was shown in Jia Zhangke’s film, where old people with shiny onyx eyes orbited around their meals.

. . .

I wanted to see the old house one more time. I wanted to smell its smokey, sweaty funk, hear its diffused chatter, see its painted body come to life. I wanted to absorb its yellow walls into my consciousness, to become a living document, after my grandmother had let go of her wordless past, so the handprints I left on its dusty back would fit into a puzzle that told me, like all other children who ran from it the moment they were born, what kind of person I really was. I wanted to know whether it was compassion or abandonment to leave the house, the past, the family as a physical place, to die. I finally asked my cousin, second uncle’s son, to take a few photos, maybe even a video of the old house for me.

Without a question, he sent over a video, first person, walking through the exposed yard towards the house. In the video, I saw that weeds had grown taller than people where I first met my great grandfather all those years ago. Getting closer, the iron latch jiggles and the door opens, the way it did in my dream. The hall was as black as before, except there’s no more mirrors to reflect light and no more clock to tell time. The water vessel, with no water inside, stood in the center of the room. The camera turned left, its gaze fell on the exposed surface of the kang that held only rubbles. Inside an emptied cabinet, a lamp without its bulb still lying in there, on its side.

The cabinet had a mirror on its door, the water lilies etched into it reflected what light they could catch from the newspaper-covered window. On the window sill, there’s even someone’s tooth brush resting on a soap dish. A supremely old man could be living here, a man made of dust.

A hand-painted fresco above the stove, a gift from my grandmother’s uncle astonishingly rendered in folk tradition when she first married and built this house, still showed a full-bodied lotus on the right, a spray of peony on the left, flanking an opera scene of a man and a woman, their aqua and fuchsia dress vibrant like in grottos found after a thousand years. Together, the young couple pulled open a spectacular bow.

My cousin said, in a few years, we would probably have to demolish this house.

Yao Xiao is a writer and artist based in New York City. She is the author of graphic novel Everything Is Beautiful, And I’m Not Afraid, a Lambda Literary Award Finalist. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, Catapult, Lit Hub, and Autostraddle. She is working on a book of essays about becoming an artist as a first-generation immigrant from China. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Hunter College.