twenty-six
the last time
We step out of the air-conditioned charter car onto the main road in front of Da Ji Cun. It’s hot like I remember. The atmosphere
smells faintly earthy and burnt. I can still recognize the brick wall, whitewashed, with the white paint fading back into
pink from age, at the outer edge of the village.
But much is different now, as I was afraid of when we got on the plane to come back.
The final trip before the village disappears.
The road is paved. The cement does not yield underneath my shoes, like the dirt used to. Heat reflects back up and roasts
my ankles.
I’m wearing a light blue cotton dress and espadrilles. You’re wearing a white shirt. We seem to realize at the same time that
we’re more well-dressed than we ever have been before, returning to this place. Although it has been several years since we’ve
come back. It feels like many more than that.
The creek bed running alongside the main road is dry. It is now grassy and wild at the bottom, full of dandelions and other weeds.
We walk across the bridge over the creek that no longer runs. We go down the main street. All the houses are as I remember.
Except that it’s midday and yet there is no bustle of activity. No children running around. No women sitting on stools along
the street, preparing vegetables, laughing loudly. The calmness is unsettling. In the distance, I hear machinery grinding.
Construction in the works. It’s coming closer. The sound is claustrophobic.
We round the corner to Nai Nai’s house. My heart beats faster. I look over at you, and your jaw is clenched. I wonder if you,
too, find this experience to be surreal. The place we grew up. The same and yet so, so different. It is just us for now. Mama
and Baba are following in two weeks. They don’t have a lot of vacation saved up, so we came first.
The double doors to Nai Nai’s house—our old house—swing open. There she is. A little shorter and more stooped. But she is
rosy and bright. She grins widely at us, and immediately, I’m in tears. We cross the courtyard. We embrace, a three-person
pile much bigger than we used to be.
We used to be in her arms; now she is in ours.
Nai Nai has a huge spread for us waiting for lunch. She must’ve been cooking all morning, maybe even last night. We eat quietly.
For the years of being away, there’s so much to say that we don’t know how to say it.
“It seems empty,” I say as the plates in front of us become mostly clear.
“People are already moving out. There are only a few months left before the deadline,” Nai Nai says. She sounds tired.
“Oh.”
I look at you.
“Do you like the new apartment?” you ask.
She sniffs. “I’ve been there twice. It’s fine. I’m on the twenty-second floor. So high up, you feel like God. It’s unnatural.
I like to be closer to the ground. But the building was filling up, and Gu Ma said this was a good place to be. Anyway, what
does it matter? I only have so many years left. All the good ones were here.”
I feel sorry for Nai Nai. When we were children, she seemed so in control, powerful. The matriarch of the family. But now,
she is hunched over in her chair, her life being decided for her by others. She seems, in some ways, more like our equal than
our elder.
“We should visit Ye Ye’s gravesite,” Nai Nai says. “It will be the last time you’ll see it where it is today. He will be coming
with me. The others... we haven’t decided yet.” She sounds distracted. “We have to...”
We get a knock on the doorframe. One of the neighbors from across the street comes in. Lao Zhou, an older man, a bit younger
maybe than Nai Nai. His hair was always sparse, but now it is almost all gone, just wispy tendrils coming out of his temples.
Makes him look like a bit of a mad scientist. His skin is tanned from the sun, liver spots popping out of his shiny bald head.
“They’re finally here, eh?” he asks, grinning ear to ear. He pokes you in the shoulder. “Big strong man now. You used to be
just a little boy. Going to Harvard? Making us proud.”
You thank him and smile.
“And you, xiao jie.” He cocks his head to the side. “You look different too. I wouldn’t even recognize you from before, with
all your fancy clothes and makeup. You like it better here or there?”
It’s impossible to verbalize how it feels to come back. The things I miss here, but the sundry conveniences that I’ve grown
accustomed to. I’m sweating profusely. My hair sticks to my neck. I wish I had air-conditioning. I wish I had a functional
shower.
I hesitate for only a moment, but Lao Zhou clocks it immediately. He eyes me hard and then shouts a laugh. “So quick to become
American.”
His words are like a slap. My face flushes warmer than it already is from the temperature.
Nai Nai looks at me. Her eyes are dark and sad. She can see right through me. I wonder if she thinks it too.
At the end of the week, we go to Ye Ye’s grave. It rained overnight, and the path there is caked with mud. Nai Nai leads the
way, while you and I squish dutifully behind her.
The day is hazy, bright with glare. I gaze out toward the horizon.
The foreground is still flat and broad with fields of low-slung wheat.
The neatly sown rows stretch out in endless radiating lines.
But in the distance, clouds of dust kick up against the outline of towers.
You never used to be able to see tall buildings from this far out.
The city has expanded, and it is coming closer every day.
The land here is going to be used—ironically—as a designed expat community, complete with an international school and housing
complex. Soon, the developers will repossess the fields and raze all the homes to the ground. If I ever come back, everything
will be gone. It will be unrecognizable. As though the places I once knew never existed at all.
I don’t believe I will come back to see what replaces it. This will be my last time.
We pass the creek where, once, you and I went hunting with all the village kids for frogs. The summer has been dry. There
is no sign of water, much less of wildlife. It feels like even Mother Nature must know that times have changed.
“Do you remember this place?” I ask you.
You nod. “That was a fun day.”
We had come back numerous times after, of course, but it seems that first day is still what we’ll always remember.
We thread our way through a patch of high grass that brushes our wrists as we pass, into a grove of trees. You rush ahead
to pass Nai Nai and clear some of the overgrowth that is a tripping hazard for her.
“Not maintained,” she mutters under her breath.
We step into a clearing within the pine trees.
The plants are so thick here it is hard to notice at first that we are in a family plot, but as I look carefully, I see the gravestones, dusted in a coat of dirt and yellowed pine needles.
They are lined up in the shade, one by one.
The graves of our ancestors. Traces of charred paper linger from Qing Ming Jie earlier this year.
We stand in front of Ye Ye’s headstone, side by side. Your shoulder is warm against mine. Nai Nai talks about how we are grown
and how we have come to see him. Ye Ye passed away so long ago. You have a few faint memories of him. I have none. Still,
I feel appropriately solemn and regretful as I stand there, listening to Nai Nai, the wind blowing through the branches.
“You will always be with us. We will bring you to the new apartment,” Nai Nai says, tears catching in her voice. “Even if
home is gone, wherever you are, we will be home.”
I glance at her. Her words echo in my bones. I’m gripped with a wild need to grab her and not let go.
You shake your head very slightly at me.
So instead, I clutch your arm and stay rooted to my spot. We bow three times to the grandfather I cannot remember. I try very
hard not to think about how one day, probably sooner rather than later, we will be bowing to Nai Nai too.
I compel time to slow down and freeze, but it doesn’t. The last day comes upon us, inevitable, like the tide pulling in. I
know this goodbye will not be the same as the ones before.
I will never come back here. I will never see these dirt roads again. Everyone is moving away. In the future, this will be
an entirely new land, and I will be the foreigner.
If everyone departs a place, then can it still be your home? If someone were to ask me where I was from, would I tell them of a place that no longer exists?
This is all so strange, I think. For a land to just disappear, like Atlantis. Da Ji Cun may as well be sinking below the sea.
If I were to drive back here, years later, I wouldn’t even recognize the landscape. It might be beautiful. Overbuilt with
gardens and new white buildings and wide roads. At night, it could have flashy neon displays and festivals with live music
and delicious street foods. A subway line built directly out here, where people can come and enjoy the expanded greater city.
They’ll even call this area something else. Who would know that before, there was a village, with children who ran around
barefoot and people who mattered? Who would know, except the people themselves, scattered to four corners, paid to fade away?
It is easy to be erased, I realize, when nobody is around to remember. The snap of a finger for a government bureaucrat. A
decision from a person we’ll never know, on high. We are being erased now, as we go, each of us. We are being erased today.
But everything is constantly changing, so maybe this is no different.
We eat breakfast quietly, all our separate thoughts, unshared.
It’s difficult to tell what Baba thinks; this was his home too, after all. But his face is impassive, as always. I never know
how he feels about anything. It’s as though he believes his job is to keep it all inside.
You look sunken and tired, like you’re just waiting to get this over with, the worst part.
Nai Nai is bright and hard. Chipper. Trying to paper over the tragedy of the day.
She never liked to leave on a bad note. I watch her, bringing dishes out of the kitchen, and I try not to feel obligated to remember every outline of the kitchen.
The chipped tile by the sink, the green plastic fringe across the doorway.
I won’t remember it perfectly, and soon, it will be gone.
I try not to think about it, but it’s impossible not to. And then I feel silly for feeling nostalgic about a plastic curtain.
Emotional over a squeaky faucet.
The clock hand on the big square analog clock hanging above the table keeps moving around the face. Time flows forward, each
minute filtering through our fingers. Tiny grains of sand falling to the floor. I wish we could stop. Oh, I wish we could
stop.
I’m trying to remember everything so hard that I forget most things. My brain stutters and impresses only snapshots as the
morning wanes toward noon, when we have to leave.
Mama washing the dishes with Nai Nai after we’re done.
The water droplets glinting off the swirled stone sink in the courtyard.
The sound of the neighbors’ chickens clucking.
The dull resistance of the suitcases as we pull them out of the house for the very last time. Out the front door. Through
the garden. Stepping over the main entrance and down the path toward the main road.
The pond in front of our house, green and clear and soon to be gone. I wonder if the frogs survived. I wonder if the frogs
have descendants in that pond. I wonder where they will go.
Nai Nai’s knuckles white as she clutches my hand as though she might never let go. Her fingers thin, too thin and brittle.
My eyes are dry. The glare of the overhead sun reflects off your white shirt ahead of me. My black hair absorbs the heat like
a furnace.
The car waiting to escort us to the airport is waiting. The driver leans against the outside, pulls on a cigarette. The smoke
wafts up.
We all hug, one by one. Then Baba is ushering us into the car, and the sound of the door slamming shut behind me shocks me.
The window is tinted. Nai Nai stands alone outside the car. She looks tiny. I think—somebody should be here with her. We can’t
just drive away and leave her here by herself.
But, of course, we can and we will. We have always been leaving.
After, I don’t remember much about that morning.
What I do remember: the last moment before we drive away. Nai Nai tentatively hobbles up to the car door. She places her hand
on the window right in front of my face, and I put my hand on the window too, so our palms are together, through the glass.
One old and one young. Our hands, finally, the same size.
We hold them there for as long as we can. A millisecond. An eon. And then, the car starts moving and she steps back.
You put your arm around me.
We drive away.