FRAGMENT 09
The Great Earthquake
Fragment: The Tangshan Earthquake | Mao Zedong's Death | Like a Massive Sheet of Ice Cracking Apart
Time & Place: Summer 1976 · Pocket Alley, Houhai, Beijing | Autumn 1976 · Mainland China
I was awakened by the trembling of the earth.
I rolled out of bed and ran into the courtyard.
Father was not home.
Grandma Yang was still asleep.
I pounded on her door until she finally woke up.
When she appeared, she was already dressed. Her right hand was fastening the row of cloth buttons across her chest, while her left hand smoothed her hair.
"Child, it's an earthquake. Don't panic."
She looked up at the gray sky.
Then suddenly froze.
"Oh my. Your eyes and ears are bleeding."
She touched my face with unusual gentleness.
“Don’t be afraid, child. I'm here.”
Then she ran.
Almost flew.
Out of the courtyard and toward the telephone at the entrance of the alley.
Not long afterward, a military jeep carried me away to the Public Security Hospital.
I remained there for more than a month.
When I finally returned home, I found myself trapped beneath an endless sea of mourning music.
I did not notice at first that Grandma Yang had become unusually quiet.
The music was slow.
Low.
Repetitive.
Like enormous slabs of cold stone descending from a gray sky.
September 9, 1976.
A little after four o'clock in the afternoon.
I put on my dark glasses and ran into the street.
There was no one outside.
From inside the houses came the sound of people crying.
Weeping.
Sobbing.
Wailing.
Yet I could hear that almost none of it contained sorrow.
Or grief.
Or even emotion.
I returned home.
The green wooden door stood half open.
The room was saturated with the bitter smell of tobacco.
I had not called him Dad in a very long time.
"You're back?"
His voice dragged against resistance.
His tall frame had collapsed into an old hardwood chair, as though some central support had suddenly snapped.
Only a few days earlier, my physics teacher had explained the meaning of acceleration.
At that moment, I understood that despair also had acceleration.
Dad did not look at me.
His eyes were fixed upon the spotless portrait hanging on the wall.
Inside his broad chest, something was breaking apart.
Like a massive sheet of ice cracking.
"He's gone."
The words rolled through his throat, carried by an air stream so dry it almost rasped.
All my life, Dad had spoken of that man in a restrained tenor touched by something sacred.
Again and again he described his greatness.
His holiness.
As though the elderly figure in the portrait was not a human being at all.
But the atmosphere.
Gravity itself.
The fundamental frequency upon which their breathing depended.
His fingers gripped the back of the chair.
Creak.
Creak.
Gravity had suddenly vanished from his world.
I could hear the chaos in his heartbeat.
One hundred and thirty beats per minute.
Then a sudden emptiness.
A pause of two hundred milliseconds.
It sounded far more desolate than the mourning music outside.
Far more desolate than the wailing of an entire nation.
At last, the funeral ended.
So did China's endless crying.
FRAGMENT 10
A Fermata
Fragment: A Beast-Like Growl | Mao Zedong's Death | The Sound of Cloth Buttons Coming Undone
Time & Place: Autumn 1976 · Pocket Alley, Houhai, Beijing | Autumn 1976 · Mainland China
I kicked stones and clumps of dirt as I walked home.
Everywhere, doors were being pushed open.
Pots and bowls clattered.
Inside some houses, men and women flirted in low frequencies not unlike the sounds Grandma Yang used to make.
Dad was still crying.
Not as openly as before.
But during those days, his was the only voice of genuine devotion I heard.
It sounded like shattered bones sinking into a deep well.
I placed my hand on his back.
For several minutes.
Then I stopped and quietly left his room.
The moment the door closed behind me, Dad began gasping for air.
Deep.
Heavy.
Animal-like.
At that moment, the soul engraved with the word loyalty finally shattered before the portrait of his leader.
I lay down on my narrow wooden bed.
A dense, fishy odor drifted in from the eastern room.
Strange.
I could not hear Grandma Yang breathing.
Her room remained silent for a very long time.
I went over and looked through the crack in the door.
She was lying on her bed.
Several hairpins held her dyed-black hair perfectly in place.
Her arms rested straight at her sides.
The embroidery frame beside her pillow was neatly arranged.
So were the scissors and sewing needles.
Even her delicate reading glasses seemed to be resting inside their tiny coffin.
Her pumice stone for rubbing her feet had been washed clean.
It lay beside the bed.
Instinctively, I looked away.
Then I noticed one of the rice sacks.
Without the support of life, it hung from the opening of her blouse.
I crouched down.
My palm rested against the cold gray brick floor.
I touched decay in its chemical form.
Pop.
Pop-click.
The sound of cloth buttons coming undone.
It was writing a fermata beneath the funeral that had just ended.
One week later, the truck arrived to carry away her body.
Its engine roared through the alley.
At the entrance of Pocket Alley, the gaunt old erhu player began performing *The Moon Reflected on the Second Spring*.
He was not mourning a blind musician's sorrow.
He was seeing off a piece of neighborhood gossip.
