A Place Where You Still Exist
by Claire Jiang
In my mind, I come back home from school to be greeted by your embrace.
You offer to take my backpack, but it would be too heavy for those fragile hands, the ones streaked with jutting purple and green veins, sporting sunspots and bent at the joints like the knots on a tree. Your hand has withered from age and sadness; nevertheless, it tightly grasps mine the entire walk home.
You set a slow pace to take in the yellow day, our yellow fence, and the butt of the yellow school bus driving away.
We’d come back to the familiar leather couch, worn from sitting and sticky with crumbs. Sitting on the small coffee table would be a reminder of your brilliant craftsmanship: slices of apples with the skin peeled, oranges with the piths carefully plucked at and discarded, white peaches examined at the grocery store for every blemish and rough contour, and the occasional curved cucumber from your garden soaked in water, scrubbed clean with salt, and nestled together on a cheap plastic tray.
And at night when chaos runs amok, you stand in your haven—the kitchen—where rolling pins and chopsticks lie peacefully, knowing their places in the world. You watch a simmering pot of congee and chicken broth, scooping away the pieces of fat that float to the top. You dump salt into your hands, turning a few ounces of water into a wide expanse of a sea.
As you cook, I try concentrating on the math in front of me, the scribbles and dashes and crosses and dots that connect what else wouldn’t belong together. I’m trying to envision the possibility of simplicity in collecting and gathering these spare parts, running them through what is lorded with laws and axioms. I used to wonder who invented these nonsensical ideas, who decided to weave intangible concepts into a pill that’s easy to chew but hard to slip down your throat, that instead clumps into a glob at the pit of your mouth.
In Hunan, a city of metal scraps littering the sidewalks and streets, that’s just what you did—piecing together what didn’t work to create a life. Grease stains the hands of a passerby who sighs out smoke in a dark alley. At work, petroleum catches on your students’ shirts, ironed and folded, almost perfect except for the slight whiff of gas that unavoidably perfumes their homes.
Perhaps later, you hold your daughter’s identical uniform and hang it in the closet, qualified as a slit in the wall in any other house, before eating dinner—ground cornmeal that made you and mama nauseous and your bellies churn like a washer.
If you had it your way, you and mama would eat white congee with eggs simmered in tomato juice, the gold and red reminders of good fortune and health. The meal would be served with a side of pickled vegetables, dug from the bottom of a plastic bag, turning the air acrid. But you would be happy, and you would be together.
I love these stories. I like to recreate your life back in Hunan, because I don’t quite know what I’m doing. It’s a particularly high sensation when the moon peaks and I’m in bed, dreaming about false realities that are all mine.
I’m reminded of how easily the tiny fragments of ourselves break into shards, the pieces we thought were already broken and irreparable crumbling into a fine layer of dust, infinite particles of us floating in the air. We collect every shard—each tear, each smile—like glasses of a broken frame, only to pack it away in that box of shattered dreams.
If the world were kind, we would all be brought back together, sitting on the leather couches. On the coffee table, two plastic trays filled with fruit, soaked in water and scrubbed clean with salt. We would drink tea together; you would fumble with a bag and grasp at its string. In the ritual and routine of the day’s end, you would dip the bag in hot water and rinse out the cup, leaving behind streaks of green.