becoming untethered

(note: contains sensitive language)

The light in the dim kitchen seemed dusty and grainy. It hung like a film between the two women. It seemed almost tangible, as if they could run their hands through it like swishing through a puddle. Like it was sticking to the sides of their windpipes, their lungs, with every inhalation. The kitchen was hot, too. A midsummer, late-afternoon heat. As if someone had switched on an oven, and left the oven door cracked.

Someone was yelling in the road below the window. Someone peddling something, probably. Sticky wheat buns, perhaps, filled full with egg custard, thick and sweet and lush, like eating soft white clouds pregnant with sulfur-yellow rain. The voice bounced and echoed, reverberating through their little corner of the city, finding its way into every crevice, every sun-baked office with sweating wrinkle-creased workers in stained white shirts, every quiet kitchen corner. 

Jenny had lived in the apartment for a year. She was transferred there by her work unit. She’d spent years rotting in a cramped staff dormitory block. Her name had finally arisen for an apartment vacancy. She worked in administration for a small city-run architectural firm. At least this is what she muttered when asked what she did to serve the country. But her work was far from elegant, or even intellectual. She prodded prices into calculators all day. Her fingers slippery with sweat, she totted up how much it’d cost to smother a newly-planned office block with white plaster, or put a few bland brown couches in corners of waiting rooms. This is what she really did to serve the country. In a sultry office in a leafy suburb of Chengdu. In the steaming summer of 1978. Chairman Mao, China’s god for thirty years, had died a couple of years ago. The country was under the tentative stewardship of Deng Xiaoping. A dramatic reform was underway. Like the country’s body was shaking off something stagnant and long overdue for change. Like a dog shaking water from its sodden coat.

May sat across the table from her. They both had cups of green tea, shaded like the aqua of an algae-ridden pond. They savored and embraced the bitterness as they drank. Like an antidote to the sultry afternoon, that tea. The heat slowed them, made them apathetic and lethargic. The tea rejuvenated them, cleared the debris from their minds like a street sweeper clearing parks from fallen leaves during the night. May lived close by. She’d had her own apartment for as long as they’d been working adults.

May and Jenny had been friends through their youth. They met after Jenny moved with her family to Chengdu, a few years before. They were smack dab in the middle of secondary school, then. They were fifteen at the time. An age of tidy tenderness. When brushing accidentally against the smooth hand of a classmate they liked would leave them tingling with warmth for hours. An age flooded with sensitivities, with fragrances perfuming alleyway walks home to solemn parents, with looking out of bedroom windows on bright weekend mornings, and wanting to grasp the whole world, feel every emotion, live every possible life. They swam through these murky early periods of growth quietly, while the country did somersaults in tumult. The tumult of political upheaval, like a never-ending inky shadow blotting out anything good.

Everything was enveloped in raucous change while their friendship began. China was grappling with the violence of the Cultural Revolution. Mao’s attempt to solidify power, to stop it trickling away, to cement his reverent status, to stomp on anything or anyone that was still tinged with capitalism, was fully underway. Jenny and May didn’t attend classes anymore. Their teachers had long been denounced, their pasts sieved through for anything even remotely counter-revolutionary. They were condemned cruelly, sometimes even killed, for the loose evidence dredged to the surface. 

Jenny and May would sometimes peep in their empty classroom while stomping behind their peers down school corridors, screaming ugly slogans on the way to the school grounds, where they’d spend the day plucking the remnants of flowers and grass from the fields, to rid it of remaining pockets of color. They’d peer in, towards the splotched desks where they used to sit. And think of droning lecture voices during dusty afternoons, white chalk jutting along blackboards. Calmer times.

They were chatting about this at the kitchen table that afternoon. In subdued voices, almost low enough to be whispers. They kept the kettle softly boiling with a gentle whistle, to mask any stray words that may fall out the window, and land in a neighbor’s ear. Although Mao had died, and government reforms were upheaving everything normal, like a powerful construction digger unearthing tons of dirt, emotions were still wound tight like a spring with the Chinese. People were filled with decades of anger, ready to snap at any moment. And so they kept the kettle boiling while they spoke. To avoid anything unnecessary.

“When are you leaving for London, then?” Jenny said to May, pausing with the rim of her cup a few inches below her thin purple lips. The steam danced lazily around her nose, towards her eyes. Jenny relished the chance to look away from May’s eyes. To use the steam as a brief respite from the intensity of holding eye contact. To use it as a shield of sorts. 

May glanced out the window before answering. At the evergreen trees that crowded the view. Lush and full, they made her feel tremendously calm. As if the broad, thick canopies could envelop her in their private, chlorophyllic world, if real life became too hard. She had felt this throughout the cultural revolution. A pulsing urge to scurry up a tree trunk, while her peers glanced away. Like a cat chasing a squirrel. She’d planned to never come down once up there.

“In only two weeks. The reforms have made it quite easy. It’s very odd. Even my family speaks about the UK with a slight smile, now they know the central government is pushing students to universities there. We’ve been trapped here for so long, Jenny. It’s as if no other country existed. They certainly didn’t matter under Mao. We were so self-obsessed. Consumed by internal things. Finally, I can see for myself what the world is like.” The smell of bougainvillea came through the window. Sweet and ethereal. The smell of damp summer. May let herself smile. 

Her words made Jenny feel uneasy. She fidgeted in her cheap wooden chair, as if an ant was crawling up her thigh, grappling with her oily leg hairs. She suddenly remembered times reciting quotes with May, in the local park next to their school, from Mao’s propaganda book. The endless summer afternoons, enunciating each syllable of a phrase, making sure it sounded just right, like fine-tuning an instrument to perfection. She thought privately to herself, May never would’ve spoken like that back then. She didn’t care about the outside world, then. A strange emotion passed through Jenny’s body. A yearning for that time again. When her friend was close by. When there was no dismal prospect of her ever leaving. When things between them seemed more balanced, even though their country was hurting.

“I’m happy for you, May.” The words felt dry, like they were printed on old newspaper. Like she was reading them, prewritten, at some sort of ceremony. Whether she was happy for May was something she hadn’t entirely worked out. Leaving for another country. Leaving China behind. The place of their youth, which looking back felt overflowing with horrors and traumas. With the metallic smell of blood on hot pavement, with curdling denunciations in their ears. 

But it was still the place of their youth. A place of beauty and growth. Where they learnt from their mothers to roll earthy coriander into fat-flecked ground pork, and fry it sizzling in amber oils. Where they combed their siblings’ hair next to breeze-tickled, moon-lit windows, pulling hard on the brush to break through knots, which would untangle with a fibrous crackle. These contrasts of life felt interwoven in Jenny’s memory. It suddenly felt immensely confusing. Her head throbbed, like she’d smacked it against the top of a doorway. Had her life been okay, or utterly messy? 

“Do you think you’ll come back, or will you be sucked into the West? Dragged permanently into its capitalist sprawl?” Jenny’s mouth creased upwards at the edges when she said this. She knew how silly it sounded now. It was Mao-era talk. She felt like a grandmother, speaking like that. But she wasn’t sure how she felt just yet. She wasn’t sure she wanted May to leave. To swan off, and shake off the Chinese’s shared traumas of the past few decades, like a person shakes off a bad dream once they wake in the morning.

May made her voice as delicate as a velvet-soft petal, now. She knew her words were extremely sensitive. Even during these times of relative liberty, what she next said could have her in jail, plans to go abroad canceled as quickly as they were formed. “No, I want to stay there. If I can find a way, of course. I think I’ll go straight for the first man to show any interest in me. No matter how small the interest is.” May paused while the kettle quietened. She began to speak only once the whistle trembled the air again. “I’ll love him like we loved Mao. Only it’ll be genuine love. Aside from the fact that I’ll want him to propose. So I can forget I was ever here. Forget the revolution. Forget I was ever Chinese. This is a country of mixed-up people. Of mixed-up policies. It’ll take years to sort out. I don’t care who’s in power.”

Jenny pulled her chair a touch closer to the table. The plastic feet scraped against the wooden floor. Like someone dragging their chipped pink fingernails against a bone-dry blackboard. She felt a quiet anger in her chest. A fire, started there ages ago, that was now turning to a blaze. How little of a shit does she give about this country, now? Doesn’t it mean anything to her? She still has memories here. Plenty of them. They’re real, and will forever be a part of her. She can’t just run from those.

“Don’t be rash, May, please. Don’t be rash.” Jenny suddenly found herself speaking quickly. As if her time to speak her mind to May was ticking down. “There is still a good life for you here. For all Chinese. Things are changing now. Don’t leave because you're bitter about our youth. We all trudged through that together. What about me? I’m your best friend, surely? Doesn’t that mean something to you? What will you have in this new place? You’ll be starting again. A blank slate, as white and as hard as river ice in the middle of winter.”

May paused again now. With her eyes hovering on the plastic table covering, splotched with the shiny grease of a thousand quiet meals. Something passed over her face, and made her look much older. The weight of their youth, perhaps. And all the fumbling, confused events they had had to steel through, under the guise of nationalism. Her nose crinkled as she remembered stomping on a teacher’s shins, while denouncing him with a group of her classmates. She’d heard a dull crack as her foot landed on him. She realized, sitting there, that the noise was with her forever. No matter where she moved. No matter how far she ran. What was it we were all so angry about? She thought to herself. She almost couldn’t remember. Her stomach clenched, like a vise was tightening around it. She wanted to vomit. To choke up acrid stomach acid all over the spotless kitchen floor. She took a long, deep breath. And placed both hands gently over her abdomen. It’s just not fair that we have these memories now. It’s just not fair. But it’ll be okay. It’ll be okay. As soon as I leave, it’ll be okay.

After a few minutes of silence, May took her hands off her abdomen. She placed them on Jenny’s, which were lying folded on the table. She closed her heavy eyes as she felt the warmth there. “Friend, I’m..” she started, but then had to stop. Something had caught in her throat. Scratchy and dry, the precursor to a flood of tears. She settled herself. “Jenny, I’m so confused. By the things we went through, and what may lie ahead for our country. All I’m doing by leaving is trying to run from this confusion.” 

“But tell me this, then, May,” Jenny said, interlacing her fingers with May’s. The sunlight was dimming a bit now. It made May look tired, and more sad than she’d ever seen her before. “Is home where you’ve been placed, by your family and by fate? The place where you first laugh and love. Or is home where you place yourself? Where you flee to, in a desperate attempt to right everything that’s seemingly gone wrong. Tell me that, please. For the good of my own life, too, I need to know.”

May still had her eyes closed. All sounds outside had come to a pause, now. The snack peddler had probably cycled off, enjoying the coolness of the late-evening breeze as he rode. The hubbub of the neighborhood seemed muffled. Even the kettle had stopped whistling its one-note tune. The flame heating it had flickered away, the gas ration to Jenny’s apartment having run dry for the day. May’s lips parted as she began to speak.  

~

A thousand miles north-east, in a slate-gray government building in Beijing, soaked wet by the gloom of afternoon drizzle, Deng Xiaoping sat by a tall window. He had his legs crossed, and was tired from speaking all day in stuffy rooms to red-eyed officials. He loosened his collar a bit. It felt tight against his neck. He found himself gazing down at two schoolgirls, as they bobbed along the road, hand-in-hand as they went home from school. Have some hope, he thought to himself. Things will change.