My Grandfather Tells Me

Elena Jiang, China

of climbing mountains. Falling between the chasm of two and drifting upwards on swollen feet—in this hackneyed world, babies learn to walk anywhere. Eggshells mixed walnut shavings and a pregnant woman’s belly, this was our solid earth.

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Our mother’s song: the muted color of half-starved tongue, the sigh of rainwater hitting it. Our bathings came in red banners and characters she could not read. Alone at crooked windows, we learned to decipher tunes of dead men thrown on side-road before we learned to sing.

One breathless noon, a bird was shot from the sky. Our neighbors spat fruit pits from their empty mouths to feed their emptier skeletons, a mess of prey-like groans; we stared into the gaping eyes of the bird. Into the gaping eyes of our mother. Do you see the bird sucking liquid from a nest of its own eggs, drinking pearls into eye-socket? In red bath that night, she closed her eyes for too long and we almost drowned. We forgave her because she was only 17.

There is no future for you here, she declared to us one day. So we left: children barely eight turned fish on ice, packed onto the back of a cargo ship by a mother that did not know how to write ai. But loved too much. Dragonflies flew low that day. Strung opaline wings above our heads like fairies—we remembered more pixie dust than our mother’s name.

The mountain inn ran out of beds, so we slept next to strangers. Woke up kissing mosquitoes, nomads of debauched underlip turned upwards to a starless midnight. Quietly, we put our dirty fingers to the noses of the sleeping bodies beside us to check that they had not yet died. That our aliveness was real. We whispered about seeing mountain ridges in a man’s forehead crease, then pretended he was a father we never knew. A dream-induced whisper: Baba.

The morning after was of climbing mountains. After many days, once we had sandpapered our soles into tree bark, we arrived at a tiny school. Yes, this is a story about education. But before that, it is about becoming alive.

At the molding door, they asked us for our birthdays and we simply shook our heads. To food, we nodded. We stuffed our cheeks full with rice to choke down the fish bones in our throats. We laughed even though it hurt. Remembered to swallow the occasional egg whole, like how this country ate revolution, so that we could impregnate ourselves with dreams.

Some nights, we would run out onto the schoolyard and scream. Picked grass from the field to patch our thinning hair; pressed our dried-plum lips to dirt; if we give up now, will we be buried here? Awoke good kids in the morning. Sugar canes came in little metal cups: we sucked neatly, then spat out the dry fiber into our trouser pockets. Even when the teacher whipped our thighs numb for being dirty, we did not give up.

Steady heat pulsated through the remaining days, and our heartbeats rode lunar waves to catch up. The waning burn of oil lamp, hot friction between pencil and damp paper, a post-exam fever and the warm stench of vomit. How else could we warm ourselves in our empty January dorm rooms, when frigid air carried talks of college, and finally leaving this place, and a beautiful city called Nanjing?

When the time came, there was not much to say goodbye to. A baby tooth. Flakes of blackened tree bark, eggs with odd-shaped yolks we saved for strange reasons, another tooth—a molar, this time tendered with cavity. The vestiges of our tiny town we hid under cheap down blankets grew elastic upon summer, stretched into necklaces in the warmest of places. Medals for our graduation. Requiems our naked necks wore as if wrought from motherly gold, and everything more wonderful.

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An afterwards: mountain wind still chalks up shells of wounds, and maybe then our footprints dance. Maybe they have grown into trees, bled sugar from rock. The world will shake a little bit, to this final repose.

Bury us in the schoolyard. Let us regrow our leafless heads; nurse childhood from eroded thighs. A bare honor to this aching story. We want to feel toddlers run on our chests at our last dying breath, please, pave the earth solid in our wake.

Elena Jiang is a junior attending Shanghai American School in China. They are a previously unpublished writer and a student of Kenyon Review Writers Workshop 2021. Their work has been recognized in the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. In addition to writing, they enjoy photography, philosophy, and watching sad movies.