ON RIVERS
My grandmother wishes I wouldn’t go to America. She wants me to promise her that I’ll come back. All she asks is a promise, but I cannot bear breaking her heart.
August 2020
August in Wuhan is a pocket of moisture and heat, swollen with a pressurized heaviness that weighs down on the city like a fire blanket, snuffing out air. In August, colors become saturated and the life-affirming sounds of street vendors and car horns are bullied into silence by an unrelenting fever. Plants thrive in this climate, humidity absorbed into fat, lustrous leaves with thick veins, always dripping. My grandmother’s beige slab of an apartment building rises out of a jungled cluster of oaks and dense foliage in a district East of the Yangtze called “Fruit Lake.” Every time she takes the elevator to the 11th floor, Grandma snips a leaf off an unfortunate plant and uses it to press the button, fearing the virus breeding ground that is elevator buttons but still too frugal to waste a perfectly good piece of tissue.
In the kitchen, she stands behind the counter, back arched such that it hurts my spine to look at her, inky green blouse billowing in the breeze. The windows in the kitchen have no shutters or glass. The only thing between us and a chalk outline on the concrete is seventy feet of freefall, but the wind is so light up here that we keep it open anyway. Outside, the dull gray city is swathed in a high-temperature haze, perspiring.
Grandma hunches over the wooden cutting block in front of the window, cleaver in hand. I sit on a stool by the garbage bin, peeling garlic. What university are you going to again? I smell the cilantro she chops. In America, right? She remembers something about ivy. Is it called Ivy University? I say the name four times. She repeats to the rhythm of thump thump thump. The foreign phonetics roll off her tongue funny. She winces as if tasting the words, bitter. She stirs the chopped cilantro into a bowl of minced pork, lower arm oscillating at the elbow joint in perfect circles. This is her exercise, she says, how she keeps young.
She wishes I wouldn’t go to America. So dangerous, she says. White people; white thoughts. Contagious capitalism. Impractical ideals. American fast food and obesity and the cancer that is sure to follow. She wants me to promise her that I’ll come back. My brother never did; she needs me to. All she asks is a promise, but I cannot bear breaking her heart. She doesn’t force the point. She understands that I need to leave just as much as she needs me to stay. And I have a lot more to lose. We have dumplings for dinner even though there is no cause for celebration and the city is melting outside.
Late at night, I watch her write the name of my university down on a notebook tucked into the breast pocket of her billowy blouse, the lines on her face each marking a life she’s lived, loved, or lost. In her silhouette, I see the mixture of pride, worry, sorrow, fear that looks so familiar. I carve it painfully into the topography of my brain. An antidote, perhaps, in case I come down with a case of the American Dream. Will she remember the name next time? It doesn’t matter. I dare not ask when next time might be.
December 2020
December in Beijing is scythes of wind cutting frostbites into skin. From space, Beijing is one of the brightest spots on the planet, and no matter the cold, Beijingers walk around this blistering city fully aware of our shine.
Swaddled in wool and synthetic down, I bike from the subway station to a little Italian place in a hutong off Houhai (“Back Sea,” which is really just a man-made lake dug for the pleasure of some boat-loving emperor), bathed in the glow of electric red lanterns dangling off the overhanging eaves of clay roofs. My last Thursday in this city, I think to myself. These days, everything I do seems to be the last. Last time riding the Beijing subway, last time drinking with a friend. The wind slices at the patch of exposed skin on my face between my hat and scarf, a burning coldness. I won’t miss this goddamn wind, that’s for sure.
Between bites of carbonara, my phone rings. It’s my grandmother. I hesitate before picking up, preparing to lie. She yells into the receiver so I turn down the volume. She calls me by my Chinese name, asks if the weather is cold up here, and tells me that she’s mailing us oranges because it’s flu season and we need the vitamin C. I answer everything twice because she has that endearing old-person affectation of never hearing what you’ve said. When she asks me if I’ll be in Wuhan for Chinese New Year, I lie and say maybe. She warns me, for the twelfth time this week, that America is not safe right now, that I cannot get on a plane without a Covid vaccine, that if something happened to me or my brother… I’m not going, I say, not until the summer, not until I’ve gotten the shots, even though there are two packed suitcases on my bedroom floor and a plane ticket with my name on it. She sighs and I wonder if she knows we’re all lying, that we’re taking her for a fool.
After hanging up, I finish dinner and walk to the edge of the lake. The wooden railing is red and ducks float on the obsidian surface. Lanterns cast a subdued orange glow on the gravel pavement, tiny pieces of quartz shining like glitter. A group of Chinese elderlies are dancing nearby to a 1980s radio blasting string music. Each wrinkled, slouching woman, wrapped in a colorful puffer jacket, hangs on to the shoulders of a brittle man. They are waltzing, swinging happily in this lantern-lit night. I lean against the railing and watch this geriatric ball unfold. Every one of them is a displaced prince or princess, gowns swapped for sensible pants and glass slippers replaced with orthopedic shoes, eyes as radiant as the city to which they belong.
Many years ago, when my grandmother visited us in Beijing, she danced with a group of ladies in the park. It was a type of dance that involved big red fans made of drapey fabric. As we walked to the park, she would hold my arm in one hand and her fan in the other. Once, a motorcycle almost hit her at a crosswalk underneath an overpass, and she fell. We sat on the curb for a while as people rushed by. The closed fan rested on her knees like a bud of magenta morning glory. We were stationary in a blur of neon lights, a bizarre tableau among chaotic movements of hurried steps. I was afraid, but she told me she was fine. We went dancing that night anyway.
Tonight, it smells a little of decay, which reminds me of my grandmother alone in that big house above an atmosphere of trees. I linger until my face is red and my fingers cannot move, swaying to Chopin.
January 2021
January in Providence is pastel-colored houses flanking wide roads and open greens. Move-in day, I stare at the sky and realize, for the first time, that it moves, the unending blueness a stage for the varied dances of clouds. Sometimes, I look up and lose myself in their dynamism, unsure if it is me who is actually floating, like when you look out the window of a stationary train and mistake the motion of neighboring vehicles for your own.
The winter here is soft, I think, compared to the relentless violence of January in Beijing. Here, the wind harms no one, and the sun, unobstructed, warms the soul. My radiator doesn’t seem to work, though, and at 10pm it is freezing in my room. Between bites of a stale dining-hall cookie, I hear a faint thumping at the door and the sound is so familiar that, for a moment, I forget where I am. It is the sound of my grandmother’s cane as she slowly makes her way down the hallway to my bedroom in Wuhan, the dull thud of rubber against wood that reverberates and crescendos. Suddenly, I remember the heat, the suffocating humidity of an AC-less room. I remember the stained linoleum floor and the sweet scent of rotting flowers wafting through a hazardous kitchen window. I see a liver-spotted hand loosely draped in skin, wrapped around the hilt of a knife, an unbound string of black-yellow teeth pulled taut into grinning.
I turn to the door, half expecting Grandma to be bent over in the doorway, cane in hand. She always came to my room at this time of night with a plate of sliced apples. But I look towards the sound and it is only the demon that lives inside my minifridge, thumping away as it tries to keep thirty hard boiled eggs fresh.
The next evening she video-calls me, and I almost answer. I want to tell her about America and the undiminishable peppiness of its people. I want to show her the greens and the buildings and the picture I took outside Van Wickle gates. I want to ask her about Wuhan and her life and whether the bathroom ceiling has finally stopped leaking. But I remember that it’s morning in China and if I pick up, she’ll wonder why it’s so dark in my room. If I pick up, she won’t recognize this room at all.
So I let it ring. I bury the phone beneath a pillow and let it ring. Afterward, she sends me a long and typo-ridden message about the virus returning to Beijing. I text her back because it’s safer when she cannot hear the quiver in my voice, when I have time to think through the lies. When she stops responding, long after midnight in Providence, I sigh with guilty relief.
February 2021
February creeps unnoticed into our lives with snow falling slanted from the sky. The sloshy ground slips and folds beneath my feet as I make the trek from Perkins to my first in-person class—a geology lab. A very long time ago, my grandmother was a geology professor. As I trace my fingers along the smooth cleavage plane of a mica sample, I can’t help but picture my grandmother standing next to me on the pebbled bank of the Yangtze, some years ago, pointing out deposition layers at the river’s bed. It was the anniversary of my great-grandfather’s death. We stood on a concrete embankment and threw wreaths of chrysanthemum into the raging waters. The Yangtze, which begins as a tiny rivulet high up in the Tanggula Mountains of the Tibetan plateau, flows in the veins of every Wuhan native. We pulse to the rhythm of its waves.
Mud and silt run rich in the river, and you could not see your toes by the time your ankle was submerged in water. This colossal, murky stream spins forward with such force and impetus that the levees beneath our feet quake from pressure. That day on the riverside, my grandmother looked so frail. The wind was always terrible by the river channel, and it threatened to carry her away. She clutched at my wrist, and I held her tightly, worried that her dwindling body would simply slip downstream and reunite with her father in the East China Sea.
The Providence River, by contrast, is still. It reminds me more of the artificial lakes in Beijing with their inky silence than the perpetual fury of the Yangtze. A day or two after my geology lab, I take a trip down to the river with a group of new friends. It is Sunday night, and the city appears to have been evacuated. There is not a soul down George Street to Memorial Park. Thin wafers of ice float atop the motionless stream. The water is as black as the sky and the two meld into one at the horizon. Providence proper, with its vertical parking structures and muraled façades, sits heavy and concrete on the other side. One of the buildings, someone points out, was in Superman.
During my geology lab, the professor showed us a large sample of obsidian—black, opaque, and polished like glass. This is what rivers and lakes look like at night. The ancient Egyptians used obsidian to make scrying mirrors—magical portals to the spirit world, where the past can be remedied and the future foreseen. I look into the river, and it does feel a little magical. I do not see the future or anything about why the world is falling apart, but both sides of the city, College Hill and downtown Providence, are reflected in its murk. The magical thing is that, many miles away, the Yangtze is doing the same for Wuhan: two skylines almost touching in their rippling reflections, two cities connected by water flowing in front of a boy.
As I watch the silhouette of Providence blur in the water, a thought occurs to me: my grandmother will never see this. Not the greens, the pastel buildings, the sloshy snow nor the dark, unmoving river. She’ll never take a stroll down Thayer, hear the organ in Sayles Hall, or see that stupid Superman building on the other side of the river. She won’t see any of this foreign reality I’m beginning to call home. But when the sun sets and longing rushes forth like the great Yangtze, I would do anything to bring her here.
AUTHOR: Andrew Lu is in his first year at Brown. You can find him licking salt lamps and giving unsolicited tarot readings to strangers on the street.
ARTIST: Ashley Castañeda is a Latinx illustrator in her sophomore year at RISD. She is probably taking a well-deserved nap somewhere.