Finale: Love Letters to my Great aunt

Michelle Li

I have this last memory of you, one I’m not sure you've lived long enough to be in. The summer I am referring to is July of 2017, the summer when I rollerbladed off a set of stairs and barreled bare-skinned into a dirtied, concrete wall. I bleed from places all over. I find I cannot get up, but I cannot feel anything. I am sure that I am dying.

There is the painful silence from an accident, a second of wincing, followed by many voices: asking if I can move my leg, if I can sit, if we can buy frozen yogurt, if I can move this limb or that one, if my cousins could please stop being so goddamn trivial with desserts, and in the distance the neighbors and friends are asking about so and so’s marriage, and when they see me collapse like a marionette, they say something about dian jiu disinfectant then glide into another conversation about who my aunt should and should not marry.

The first thing I can see is the sky: bloodshot and falling. No birds. It is nighttime: the apartment buildings skyscraper tall, industrial smog blanketing over timid stars, lights everywhere, streetlights, lights, shop lights, headlights, and juveniles setting off a single red firecracker, color throbbing against the deep and blackened sky. Everything stood awfully still, and I waited for the pain to come. I think you had already been dead by that summer.

2017: also the year when I had watched a bird die, but I cannot be sure of anything now. I recall my brother standing over what remains as a dark mass in my memory, a body twitching like a wet match trying to spark, twig-thin legs, wings fluttering into dampening flames, and then there is blood, dark as asphalt, on the asphalt, and we cannot be sure how there can be so much; a wetted, shell shaped beak, and Ethan on the verge of tears and traffic all around, and this is what I think of when I rollerblade into the wall that night—am I dying from this pain or from this reality, that nobody seems to know that you are still gone, and what use is life if you spend it unnoticed?

When I am 17 and newly alone in a new city, a girl from San Diego asks why I feel the need to write so frequently about death. All of these poems are unnecessarily sad, she muses. Did I know what I was doing to others and to myself?

Have you seen people die? she then asks, and of course not, I haven’t, I tell her.

So it’s not unprocessed trauma then, she says, and of course not, it isn’t, I tell her.

Once, before all of this, Grandma, Ethan and I walked three miles to visit your dying body. I remember the sun more than anything else, how it beat the shine into our unfortunate backs, the road paved with red tile, the glistening temerity of all life: green and sprouting and unyielding.

We sweated like dogs. Ethan and I complained and dragged our feet, both of us skinny and damaged. We arrived at a set of buildings past our side of the city, watched the telephone wires crisscross the baby blue sky, saw the rows of gardening plants and blackbirds prancing in wildberry bushes, entered into a 30-story high-rise apartment complex, and rode the elevator up to your floor.

I didn’t know you were sick, but I knew that there was something deeply wrong. We had brought you these American-branded clothes, pecans, a few sticks of rouge, and dark chocolate by the pound.

When we called a taxi to leave, I hung my head out of the window to see you waving, to keep you standing outside, to hold your image for a few seconds longer.

How odd it was that you would die out into a May evening, the sky pale clear, lackluster, with no ardour. From underneath my parents’ bedroom door, light leaks its way into the hallway, and there is a gentleness to see the end of days spent suffering in wait, in suspension of pain, replaced by the softness of a family mourning. The dinner left uneaten, unthought of, burning into thick char on the stovetop. How long we will remain this way, how intense but short-lived struggle always gives out to the blunt ache of paralysis. I was ten and sitting in a wooden chair, the sun drying over our kitchen table, imaging your breathing slurring into the slowest and prettiest nothingness. The long-winded sky, churning out a rhythm of birds. They said you were done. Later, I looked at my reddening and sorrow-scraped face in the mirror, pushed my grief through the mesh of anything that could hold me. For the next month, if I stayed up late, I could hear my grandmother crying.

If there is one thing I am certain of, it is the trip to the Port of 日照 (1), on the coastline of the Yellow River.

I was six at the time and smart enough to know all of this would come to matter. On the sleeper train, we talked about the cows outside the windows and waved at them. You handed me these crumbly and wheaty sweets in dark blue and red packaging.

I think of our final destination, 姨姥 (2), past the mooing cows that look longingly at the night train hurtling itself into the dawn, to the beach where the birds are beginning to sound their morning caws, white-feathered, breathing, and rising above the warm sea.

Did I know that you were going, going away? Did I know that when you said goodbye that night in front of your apartment, you had meant it at a level I could not understand?

In a watered-down shack somewhere near the sea, you unshell saltwater clams by the handful.

All of my cousins are outside playing by the beach; even my brother has abandoned me for someone better. They are laughing, making sand angels, shoving each other violently, childishly. I do not know what I am upset about—perhaps not being wanted—just that I am alone.

So I am watching you unearth the meat from each broiled shell—a hardness in the way you scrape at the remains of flesh—slouching over the table. Under an awning, we have a direct view of the grey, wild sea, grasses straggling past the water line. I am watching you unshell clams, watching as you peel off the clear scab of shrimp skin, revealing a peach curvature of meat, watching as you pull the salted tilapia out of the kettle, debone it across the vertebra, pull out each needle-thin vertebral spine.

It’s not in the business of children to be so sullen, you say. I don’t reply.

Go ahead, try it, you gesture at the fish.

I say that I don’t like fish.

The shrimp is good, it’s fresh. I swear it.

I don’t eat seafood.

Seafood makes you smarter, you laugh, and there are so many good American schools you could go to.

I eat it not because I care much or even know anything about university, but because you are giving me that pointed look that I do not have the heart to press upon.

Isn’t it good?

And you are right, of course. It is the best thing I have tasted for a long time: salted and plain and tasting of briny wild, the plump meat catching between my teeth.

Evening finds the plates empty as we pack for the hotel.

My grief is not less because I understand it more.

I must have always had this unexplainable sadness, so when I finally got up from the fall down the staircase, I limped into the park where all the children were playing tag and jackstraws and trading game cards, and the grown-ups were still talking; then I sat down on the steps in front of the frozen yogurt and apothecary shop and cried and nobody, not even I, could figure out why. I let the blood leak out of my shins and skull. Red Chinese characters slid across the screen display between the two shops, and I couldn’t make out a single word through my tears, yet still I could see the lights everywhere, yo-yos lit up, digital watches, a boy joking about setting off another firecracker. I remember my aunt coaxing, half laughing, offering to buy frozen yogurt, sitting down on the steps next to me, and my battered knees pressed together in the blistering heat.

I tell myself this pain is how I know I am still alive, the way all memory lives and dies, these ragged moments under congested midnight: I’m still loving something devastating like you, but no one would know now. The thing is, whether you are here in the flesh is of little importance, because there you are in these southerly days; there is the color of your iris in the pit of dusk, the yogurt shop we’ve stopped at due to my whining, the barber shop next door where you know all the employees by name, the blood trickling and the red lettering on the screen that is your favorite, favorite shade of sweater, the dust beneath my feet and on my knees the same specks of dirt you carried to underneath your shoe soles when you danced on one of the main streets of 西安 (3) with 舅姥 (4) way back in the late 90s—here is the city you spend your life in, and the one that will carry you for life.

The thing about life is you have to be paying attention, because no suffering lasts—either the sufferer will die, or the suffering will (5)—and the only thing I remember is the falling motion, the gravity carrying you towards a small plot of land, the pinpricks of light, the yo-yos, the red letters, the singular firecracker hissing in June, the stone wall, the love for a vanishing world, Ethan crying over two bodies below; and above, the sky turned a color I didn’t know how to name, didn’t know or want to understand anymore.

No, I didn’t see the last breath you took, whether it was on your red, scratchy couch or tiny queen-sized bed at your apartment on whatever floor of whatever building, either three kilometers or three thousand kilometers north or northeast of our apartment in China or at the posh hospital one my aunts and uncles had spent great money on, the hospital where one of my aunts worked at, with x number of people watching you die, and y number of people piling cards and flowers outside the hospital room and probably even at your doorstep back home, and x+y number of people showing up to the funeral and falling to their knees, and how a few months before you rung up my grandmother and said you couldn’t get a lick of sleep anymore, and we all cried and cried except for maybe Ethan because he was still young, and perhaps I didn’t know exactly either but could understand that whatever had been wrong was even more wrong now and fated to fully play out its horrific course—the chocolate I imagined you couldn’t eat, the bloodied coughing and the last time I saw you at the airport—did you die when I was ten or when I was eight; at what age was I sitting at that dinner table alone?—and none of it means anything to me at the terminal—let us suppose that my grief is inconsolable and unwielding, what could I do to change anything now? To recall what year it was when I left China and when you left for good—where I am sure you knew it was the last our lifelines would tangibly touch and intersect and have the potential to be altered, and afterwards we would never come to know each other again: you will never peel more shrimp for me or for anyone for that matter and I will never have the chance to say thank you because you have been one of the only kind people to me, and I will never tell you about the American universities I will and won’t get into, and everyone else but us has the chance to see the cows and laugh, and in this matrix of infinite possibility, there are things you must know are impossible now.

For a long time, all I could eat were crabs and scallops and clams and shrimp and more shrimp. I did not touch a drop of red meat.

No, I didn’t see you die, and none of it is real to me, except all of this.

One last thing before you go, 姨姥: when you say forever, I want you to mean it. When you say goodbye, I want you to know I miss you as well.

I am sure you are gone in this memory because you would have snuck out to pay for the bill ahead of time. There are birds everywhere: flocking the sky, on overhead wires, hopping along the dark pavement.

Birds everywhere and everyone wants so badly to pay the bill out of politeness. This is a new year, and I have not been injured yet. My cousin is asking me about American films—we are standing outside the restaurant and waiting for the adults. Out of boredom, he asks if we would like to wander into the art store nearby.

The store is larger than we expected it to be, and everything is more expensive than we can imagine. Both of us are aware, at least subconsciously, that we are breaking rules: we are too young and vulnerable to be alone. There are watercolors placed in glass casings, and the galleries expand into long hallways; in one exhibit, spanning the entire length and height of the wall is a painting of a foreign shoreline, marooned, grey-ish.

Isn’t this so beautiful, my cousin says.

Yes, of course it is.

(1) The city Rizhao (日照) is in the Shandong Province of China; the name “Rizhao” translates directly to the word “sunshine”

(2) Great aunt, your grandmother’s sister

(3) The place of homeland, where you died, the historical capital city of China, the capital city of Shaanxi Province

(4) Another great aunt, the wife of the brother of your maternal grandmother

(5) From a piece by poet and writer Shannan Mann

Michelle Li has been nationally recognized by Scholastic Art & Writing, Bennington Young Writers Awards, and Apprentice Writer. An alumna of the Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop and the Adroit Summer Mentorship, her work is forthcoming or published in Up the Staircase Quarterly, wildscape. literary journal, and Frontier Poetry. She is Editor in Chief of Hominum Journal, editor of The Dawn Review, and reads for Ex-Puritan. In addition, she plays violin and piano, loves Rachmaninoff, blackberries, and the rain.