I’ve told the taxi driver it’s my birthday today. He wishes me “Happy Birthday.” I thank him. He says, “Bu ke qi.” I notice the “ke” of his “You’re welcome” comes out with a straight tongue, a guttural sound that charges from the back of his throat. My “ke” comes out with a bowed tongue… the sound high… inflected into the roof of my mouth. Before I leave, I hand him the money and say, “Master, I thank you.” His “ke” explodes again like left over Spring Festival firecrackers. Long after he is gone the word, “ke” travels after me like the dust particles I displace in the cold street. I climb up the stone ramp and stand next to the corroded, wrought iron gate prickly with last summer’s dead vines… wait for my friends in the clear night… watch for the arrival of stars… one here, one there.
Words come at me, desired and undesired. They come at odd angles… head on… behind me… slow to form… at lightning speed… inflected and uninflected… syllable by syllable… plosive… strident. Words are what I have. Words are all I want. I’ve said it now. Words are all I want to take me to that place. Just as if they are a Chinese ink drawing revealed by blank space behind the images, written words have begun to take me to a sanctuary of clarity. Kong bai. Blank space. Much of everything else, I’ve given up. Now, in China, I know something else. Much that I’ve wanted I’ve given up when the words became too unsettling… too close… when I had cast the dye anyway with a steady hand already knowing the outcome. Words are what I chose. I write them all down… read… unread… discovered… undiscovered. Sometimes they are clumsy. Sometimes they are graceful. Sometimes they are merely prosaic. I write them all down anyway in Chinese and in my native tongue. It hardly makes a difference. They take me to the same place… blank space.
I am laughing with Lili and Liu Na a night later. They infuse the air with lemon balm… the scent of roses… orchid oil. I’ve been away in Spain and haven’t seen them for almost two months. They catch me up on Mei Li Fang gossip as one pummels my body and kneads out the soreness from my damaged knee… the other one smears my face with a medicinal seaweed concoction and mysterious essential oils. The little black fish that swam in the bowl on the glass shelf of the beauty shop for weeks, has died. Lili accuses Liu Na of eating it. I agree with Lili and tell her in front of Liu Na, that Liu Na, always hungry, surely must have gobbled it up. Lili agrees and we fight on and on about the fish forever. A sentence forms in my head, “Drunk on the essences of flowers, I fly away… in a moment I am gone like the tiny, willfully, unnoticed butterfly that comes to the lavender in the evening just before the sun sets.” My swollen poetic thought collapses in silliness as we laugh and laugh. I tell them about my birthday party. We ate “huo guo”… hot pot… but they don’t understand the tone of my “guo”. What I’ve said is that I have eaten a “fire country.” They laugh and laugh at my stupidity. I feign anger. Isn’t Mongolian Hot Pot a country? It is to me, I say. We giggle onward… the word “slapstick” coming down from above like a mandala upon us that blends into the other colors of sand until it is brushed away. I am floating once again.
We sit in a draft in the land of Mongolian Hot Pot the night before for my birthday. There is a jar of rice porridge made with Chinese white lightning on the dirty plastic table cloth under the dull, flyspecked fluorescent lighting. Countryside girls with rough red hands pour the chrysanthemum tea into tall glasses. They bring the “ma zhe”… the sesame sauce we will dip everything into and sample the pickled, hot cabbage with peanuts they have put on the table. They bring the divided pot of spicy and aromatic broths, the former to set our heads on fire, the latter, to give us relief. They put it slopping over the sides on the gas flame attached by a plastic hose to the gas bottle beneath the table. The splashed broth hisses… the gas flares… and, then, the dishes to cook in the pot come one by one… cabbage, mutton, fresh bamboo, tofu noodles, meng bean noodles, rice thread noodles… noodles, noodles, noodles. I conjure up the word “noodle” in a half dozen different languages. “Noodle” is a word, a word that implies simplicity. I decide that noodles make a difference. We all stop talking one by one… then, the guest, I cease polite conversation, too. We are at the altar of Mongolian Hot Pot. The temporal world passes away. The word “divine” wafts from the aroma of the pot undulating up through my chopsticks and comes to rest in my imagination linking me forever to China… no words needed… just a feeling… mercifully unexplainable.
We stride through the back of the restaurant across the courtyard, avoiding a broken glass bottle down the narrow, dark, grimy alley to the apartment. We walk over a patchwork quilt of paving stones and trampled leaflets… words defying the Communist Party. Those are words, too. We say nothing. What is there to say? We talk about everyone else’s unhappiness instead. They know that we know that they are unhappy and that they don’t like it that we know although they know their unhappiness make us unhappy, too. The “they” in this web of entangled words are other expats. They complain. They are sick of the Chinese in the crudest of terms. These rough words without any ameliorating context have been hard for us to hear. We are guests in this place… perhaps it might be nice to share what is positive about our respective countries instead of breeding opposition and dislike. We carry around in our pockets in one month what it takes a peasant in some provinces of China to toil for in ten years. The words come polluting the already noxious air as if car exhaust has a sound. I listen for these words. I live to listen to the words of others… words like sunset… words like dust storms that destroy everything… any words. I stand in the shadows of these words, but the shadow I cast is not their shadow… I stand in the shadow world sensed from underneath… the something that is China and not China at the same time… as delicate and fleeting as a dragonfly’s wing.
I come home. I am tranquil as the words write themselves from the underground spring of me… the gray days of scattered snowflakes… hot soup… sensual branches of pussy willows in crystal vases in the hotels reaching for the sun they cannot see looking just like the long fingers of elegant women… crocuses uncurling their leaves from cheap porcelain pots… the warmth under heavy, Northern Chinese silk quilts. Blank space. The blue catbirds have returned to the mountain. They flit among the crackly brown branches feasting on the last of the fall berries. I am conscious of the birds hopping from branch to branch in their frenetic bird lives on the mountain… but what is behind them gathers my attention.
There is a shift to energy so subtle, I dare not make a move… I dare not make a sound.