Phoenix

My mother is a bird.

I know this because when I stepped off the plane in Taipei, I saw a streak of crimson against the murky predawn sky in the shape of a bird. She glided towards me, her plumage sailing like a flag. Her wings flapped once, twice, sweeping over the half moon.

I hadn’t been frightened. Not even when she landed on the tarmac ground before me, her eyes level with mine. She reminded me of a long-legged crane, except her feathers were every shade of red — scarlet and mahogany and sangari, the colours gleaming underneath the last slivers of moonlight. 

“Ava,” the bird said in my mother’s voice. 

“Mom?” 

The bird dipped her head, and I knew with certainty that this creature was my mother. It was the eyes that gave it away; they were brown and shining, mischievous, as if on the verge of sharing a joke. I knew them as surely as I knew my own face; the only thing was that my mother was supposed to be buried in a coffin, six feet underground.

But when I reached out to touch her, it was as if I’d touched the surface of a pond. The air between us rippled, and suddenly, she stretched her wings, launching into the sky. The wind stirred against my cheek, and when I blinked, from one moment to the next, she was gone. 

 ~

The bird is what I think of now as the funeral procession makes it way up the winding path to the temple. My train of my black dress trails behind me, the black velvet caressing the stone path with a soft whisper. I am careful to keep my head lowered. The low, somber chords of the organ play and we march to it, the stream of our moving bodies like a silent, black snake underneath the Taipei sun.

I clutch a bushel of white iris in one hand, and hold my grandmother’s hand in the other. She looks at me, but says nothing. Only marches on, her face cracking like those porcelain vases she loves so much. There is no such thing as beautiful sadness, I think as I see the shadows underneath the eyes, feel her weightless, limp hand in mine. Sadness weighs you down like a rock, your features drooping as if you are made of clay.

She isn’t gone, I want to tell her. I saw her yesterday. My mother is a bird. 

But the words get caught in my throat and I know better — we do not speak of the dead. We do not look at death in the eyes — to do so is like flinging your doors wide open and inviting it to settle. So we look at the edges of it and ignore its hulking shape. This is how we are supposed to grieve. 

As I trudge up the path, I look back to my father, a few feet behind us. He has not spoken a word to me since I’d landed, and I remember his voice over the phone, how the static had made him sound so distant. 

“The funeral procession will be in Taipei. It is tradition,” he’d said in a tinny voice. Tradition. It was a word that meant little to me; how could it, when I lived in America my whole life? I had twisted the telephone cord around my finger, twining it so tightly it bit into my skin. 

“It’s what she would’ve wanted,” he’d continued, his voice flat. “She was happy in America but Taipei was her home. Your grandmother and I… We hope you can make it.” 

I had closed my eyes. My mother had grown up in Taipei, yet to me, it had always been distant, more of a fleeting idea than a concrete image. My mother and I, we both had Taiwanese blood, but her roots ran deeper than mine; sometimes, when she spoke of it, I would catch a note of longing, a split second of yearning for the land across the sea. 

“I’ll be there.” 

~

My grandmother walks up the front steps of the temple alone, as tradition decrees. Sweeping red roofs form archways above her head, and a pair of stone dragons guard the opening with jagged teeth and hooked claws. Firebright lanterns hang from them, their tassels dancing in the breeze.

And from the corner of my eye — a streak of red, a pair of outstretched wings outlined against the sky. My mother. But I blink again and she is gone. But she is close. I think of when I first saw her in the airport, eyes shining with urgency. It reminded me of an old tawainese folklore she had once told me; she’d said that after death, spirits linger in the world of the living for forty-nine days. Perhaps this was it; perhaps my mother was a spirit in the form of a bird. 

But why would she linger? 

“Dad,” I whisper. “My mother. . . I think I see her. Or, a part of her.”

He only looks at me, uncomprehending. I am struck suddenly by how much he seems to have aged in the past week; the lines on his face, carved from loss, paired by his greying hair and hollow, slow, movements. He is almost unrecognizable. 

“I think she’s a bird,” I plough on, wincing at how foolish the words sound. “She-”

“Ava,” my father finally hisses. His words are sharp like a knife, edged with anger. “What are you saying? Your mother is gone, this isn’t a joke. Don’t talk about her. Do you want to invite more death onto the family?”

The words knock the breath from my chest, stinging like a slap. What had I expected? 

I blink away tears and look towards my grandmother.

She tilts her head upwards, clasps her hands together and her lips move, whispering words that are snatched by the breeze. Then, after a breath, we follow. My dad, aunt, uncle and cousins — all of whom I have not seen in years — surge silently up the stairs. I stumble awkwardly, feeling as if I am the only one who doesn’t know the choreography in an elaborate dance. 

We weave through the columns and stop at the heart of the temple. My grandmother sinks to her knees in front of a small table set up. Sticks of incense and wreaths of white iris adorn it, surrounding a single photograph of my mother. With careful hands, my grandmother burns colourful joss paper and the smoke curls into the air. I try to follow her movements but I fumble, my movements clumsy. This is a tradition I do not know—and I feel my relative’s disapproving gaze. When the joss paper is gone, a heavy silence falls and we each retreat to our own prayers.

But before I close my eyes I see the crimson tail of a bird. A flash of long feathers the colour of molten gold. My eyes widen and there she is — she perches on the thick, winding branch of a willow tree in the stone terrace we passed by earlier. I stand up. Grab my grandmother’s hand.

“Lái,” I say, in my broken Chinese. Come. I lower my voice so my praying relatives do not hear. “Kuài... lái kàn” Come look. 

She seems to understand, and lets me lead her by the hand. We slip out of the temple, and there, underneath the dazzling sun, is my mother. 

A slight breeze blows, stirring her feathers as she turns to look at us, wings spread wide, nothing like the petite form my mother had when she was human. Her gaze was piercing, so utterly her — these were the same eyes that lit up when she smiled, clouded with worry when I was sick, and drifted wistfully when she spoke of Taiwan. 

I look at my grandmother, and from the way she stares — eyes widened, mouth agape, she must see it, too.

“Mom,” I breathed at the same time my grandmother whispered “Fei Hong.” 

My mother’s given name. The words fell from my grandmother’s lips, her voice carving around the sound gently. It was beautiful, and I longed to pick it up like a dropped gemstone and pocket it — the way the vowels soared and the consonants bended.

I take a step forward just as my grandmother takes one back. Her face is white as a sheet, stretched taut as her lips tremble. She presses the heel of her hand to her eyes, startling when I put a hand on her shoulder.

“Ava,” she says, her voice broken and strained, grasping at english words she cannot find. But there is no need, for I could see the emotions conflicting in her face — anguish and horror and love and hope. I take her white, trembling hands in mine and though I said nothing, she gradually lifts her head. Looks my mother in the eye. 

“Gui?” She finally asked. Ghost? The word slid out of her mouth, both like a prayer and a curse. And for a fleeting moment, I could see this from my grandmother’s eyes. Her daughter, returned ,as a spirit in the form of a bird. A ghost — the very thing that tradition warned against.

“I want you to remember me.”

My mother’s voice spills from the beak of the creature, warm and yellow, knit from bright and melodic syllables. My grandmother finally lifts a hand, reaching for my mother, but my mother meets her gaze, apology in her eyes. And then she lifts to the sky and away she flies. 

This is the last time I will see her, this bird that holds my mother’s spirit. Somehow, I know this in the same way that I know the sky is blue and that my mother is dead, but not completely. Never completely. There is an ache in my chest, and it is a little like losing her again, but her words ring in my head:

I want you to remember me.

She is wrapped in layers of memories; and I reach for them. 

My grandmother sits and we stare at the sky for a long time. Finally, she takes my hand, her jaw set, and we walk back into the temple. The rest of the ceremony draws to a close, and we slowly make our way to the front of the temple — the place where it had all begun. This is where tradition decrees that we draw to a close. This is where the mourning ends. 

But instead, my grandmother stops. Turns to my father, my uncles and aunts and cousins. And she lifts her chin and in slow, stumbling sentences, tells the story of a time when my mother first walked the streets of Chinatown. Her stories weave a net around us, drawing us closer. I can understand snatches of it, a word here and there — enough to now that this is not tradition. My relatives shoot uneasy gazes, their eyes darting around. Bad luck, they whisper to one another. She’ll invite the ghosts. But those dim as my grandmother carries on, her voice strong and steady for the first time in weeks. When she finishes, there are tears streaming down faces and the air sings with the hum of memory.

Surprisingly, my father is next. The stories spill after that, like a cup that has long been brimming, and we tilt our heads to it. My uncle speaks. Then my aunts. We tuck our ache for her in layers and layers of remembering.

I want you to remember me.

It is not breaking tradition, I think as I look to the colourful joss paper and the beautiful curving roofs of the temple. It is bending it. Stretching it so the memory of my mother can breathe — so that her ghost can wander and be remembered. 

I look to the sky and think of my mother as a phoenix with fiery red wings outstretched — destined to rise again.