Chapter 5 #2
“To make sure the body is burned properly,” said Meijuan. “Otherwise they might just throw it away, or even sell it on the black market.”
“Does that happen a lot?” I asked.
“Does it have to do with the organ trade?” Shuya asked.
“I don’t know,” said Meijuan. “But better safe than sorry.”
“Was it hard to watch?” Teacher Lin asked.
“I don’t know,” Meijuan said again. “My brother didn’t say. He was very quiet when he came home, but then we never spoke of it again.”
I thought of another friend, from India, whose father had recently passed.
In her village, it was traditional for the family to witness the body as it burned.
I too had asked her if it was difficult to watch her father transformed to ash, and she’d said no; actually, it was cathartic, it let her recognize this earthly husk wasn’t her father anymore, that her father’s soul had gone somewhere else.
I recounted all this out loud, because I wanted to practice talking about “grief” and “catharsis.” But I got stuck trying to explain what I meant by “catharsis,” and my dictionary app seemed not to recognize the word.
Teacher Lin didn’t understand what I wanted to express either, so we had to settle for the phrase for “release,” which could also be glossed as “liberation.” Shuya asked Meijuan if her brother might have felt this kind of liberation.
“Yes, maybe,” said Meijuan. “My brother didn’t actually watch the body burning, though. He just saw it go into the chute.”
Teacher Lin told Meijuan she was very sorry for her loss.
“It’s all right,” said Meijuan, although her eyes were red. “It’s been a few years.”
There were still fifteen minutes left in class, but none of us knew what to say.
I had nothing to offer regarding Gonggong’s death.
I hadn’t been there; I couldn’t supply details such as he had just asked for a sponge bath.
I composed a sentence in my head, but I couldn’t speak it out loud, it sounded so stupid.
He fell. 倒. Dǎo. Such a generic word. I didn’t have the words for the gritty, material reality of what had happened: a fragile frame, a railing that wasn’t there.
Anything could dǎo to the floor. A stack of laundry.
Water from a cup. A toddler learning to walk.
Things toppled over all the time, and it was just too bad that my gonggong died from it.
Shuya told us that his parents and grandparents were still alive, so unfortunately he had nothing to contribute. He showed us a picture from a recent family gathering. We congratulated him on his good fortune.
“My husband’s sister’s husband died a few years ago,” said Teacher Lin.
“He had cancer. It was very sad, because he had two small children, and they had to explain to them how Daddy wasn’t going to be around anymore.
They took lots of photos of him before he died.
It was fascinating, actually—they had him pose in various positions so they could Photoshop him into important events later.
Graduations, weddings, that sort of thing.
A digital solution to grief. Sort of like in the story.
” She showed us a photo on her phone. “See, here he is, in last year’s Christmas card.
You can’t even tell he’s not really there. ”
She passed the phone around. We took turns admiring the photo and agreed: The Photoshop had been very good.
Teacher Lin said that next week’s story was about the author’s sister’s suicide, and it was a bit graphic, so we could skip it if we wanted.
She apologized that we had been reading so much dreary stuff lately.
We told her it was okay. We were tough. Also, we wanted to learn all the relevant vocabulary around suicide.
That was the whole point of these elective courses.
You learned all sorts of phrases to do with the texture of life.
It was important to learn terms like “clinical depression” and “coal burner.” You never knew what might come up one day.
“LILY, HI!” TEACHER SUN WAS TYPING SOMETHING ON HER KEYBOARD when I entered the classroom. “I see you took some leave this week?”
“My grandfather died,” I said. I had had more practice uttering this by now, and this time it rolled smoothly off my tongue. “I had to go meet my mother at the airport.”
“Oh, Lily.” Teacher Sun’s expression softened.
“I am so sorry. But you should really say that he passed away.” She typed the correct characters on the screen for me to see.
去世: literally, “to depart from the world.” She put a big X next to the term that I had used: 死掉.
“Passing away is much more dignified,” she explained. “Dying is for animals.”
She must have noticed my stricken face, because she didn’t make me go through that week’s vocabulary. Instead we went over some formal condolences that I could say at Chinese funerals, if ever the occasion came up.
節哀順變: Restrain your grief, and obey change.
節哀保重: Restrain your grief and take care of yourself.
請節哀: Please restrain your grief.
“These are all very formal, elegant sayings,” said Teacher Sun. “You can say these to the bereaved, and people will be really impressed!”
None of these seemed appropriate to text my mother. I asked Teacher Sun if there were any phrases that didn’t have to do with restraint.
“No, no, it’s actually very comforting,” she said. “I guess it sounds kind of bossy in translation. But it’s a kind expression. It shows your concern.”
FUNERAL WENT WELL, MY MOTHER TEXTED IN THE FAMILY GROUP chat. Grandpa was very well respected.
She did not elaborate further or send any pictures. My father reacted with a thumbs-up.
WHEN I GOT HOME FROM THE DEPARTMENT I SHRUGGED OFF MY backpack and crawled to the floor.
I lay flat on my back and stared at the ceiling for a while, pondering my circumstances.
I had five weeks left in Taipei: an eternity.
There were so many events still on the syllabus.
Weekly quizzes. Four more Thought and Society essays, four more speeches, five more texts each in Modern Taiwanese Literature and Considering the News.
Final exams, a final presentation. A graduation ceremony.
These did not seem like real events. They seemed like insurmountable speed bumps on a tar pit of time.
To get to the finish I would have to do all these things, and I could not do all these things because I could not even stand up.
I wanted so badly to go home. All those differences I had thought myself acclimated to now seemed unbearable—the heat, the rain, the tight alleys, the mosquitoes.
I wanted to see a parking lot. I wanted to see a movie without subtitles.
I wanted to eat pizza—not a “fruit pizza” topped with dragon fruit and strawberries, a real pizza, with a thin charred crust and salty tomato sauce.
More than anything I wanted to be in my own room, under my comforter, burying my face in my quilted baby pillowcase that had been rubbed so thin that it couldn’t be machine-washed.
I wanted to sit with my homework sprawled over the dining room table instead of always hunching over this narrow coffee table with my elbows on my knees, and when I thought about how much time I still had to spend here in this place that was not my home, I felt the blind panic of a child lost at a supermarket.
I clicked around the airline website, and when I saw it would in fact save money to switch my flight to an earlier return date, I felt a brief, delirious wash of relief.
But how would I explain my decision to quit?
I would not get academic credit for the program.
I might have to pay all my scholarship money back, and if I left the program I was fairly certain I would never receive funding to return.
And then I would have failed at the one thing I was good for: studying hard and getting good grades.
MY MOTHER ASKED IF I WANTED TO TALK TO POPO OVER WECHAT.
When the call connected, I saw the three of them on a couch in the living room, as if they were posing for a picture: Popo in the middle, with my mother and A Zhu, Popo’s health aide, sitting on either side of her.
“Hi, Li-Li!” said A Zhu. A Zhu was Fujianese.
I could just barely make out everything A Zhu said, because she spoke Mandarin with my family, but she pronounced words like she wished they were something else.
“Hello, Popo, how are you?” Sloppy words, the wrong words, but I said them anyway. I found myself waving and putting on a high-pitched and cheery affectation, the way I would have spoken when I was a child. “I’m in Taipei now, working on my Chinese. I miss you.”
Popo didn’t react at all when I spoke. I wasn’t sure that she heard anything I said.
Even when A Zhu shouted my words into Popo’s ear, she still didn’t react.
A long moment passed, and then Popo mumbled something that I couldn’t make out.
A Zhu repeated whatever it was to my mother, who said, “It’s Li-Li. Li-Li, remember?”
Popo stared down at her knees.
My mother said, louder, “Li-Li, your granddaughter. My daughter. Number two, remember?”
Popo made a noise that sounded like ungh, which could have been assent, or just discomfort. I wondered when, and how, we could end this call.
“Li-Li has some questions for you,” said my mother. “She wants to know more about your life, isn’t that fun?”
Popo made that sound again. Everyone seemed to take this as a yes.
“Go on,” my mother told me. “What do you want to ask her?”