Ghost Forest Page 4

  Because we didn’t know what was going to happen after ’97.

  Then why didn’t we move back to Hong Kong like everyone else?

  When you and your sister were kids, I asked if you wanted to move back, and you both wanted to stay.

  MY MOM SAYS:

  I asked you two if you wanted to move back to Hong Kong the year your sister was in grade three. That spring, cherry blossoms bloomed everywhere in Vancouver, and your sister was allergic to cherry blossom pollen. She couldn’t fall asleep, even though she tried sleeping in every room in the house, including my closet. Eventually she started missing school. I asked your sister if she wanted to move back to Hong Kong, where there weren’t so many flowers everywhere, but she refused. You were already in grade eight then, so you didn’t want to move back either.

  Of course, it’s better to be together as a family. Taking care of everything alone was hard. All I had was the telephone. Every Sunday, I waited for your dad to call. Many of my friends took their kids back to Hong Kong after getting their Canadian passports, not caring if the kids were happy or not. It was called Wui Lau—the tide returns, the water flows back to Hong Kong. No more flying here, flying there. Families were happy together again.

  But I thought if both of you didn’t want to go back, then I wouldn’t force you. I would go back by myself after you went to college, and by then, where you lived would be up to you.

  PAJAMAS

  I remember, after we immigrated to Canada, sneaking into my parents’ bathroom once. My dad had just left for Hong Kong again. The black bathroom tiles were cold on the soles of my feet. I reached down into the white plastic laundry basket, and pulled out his faded striped pajamas. I buried my nose in them, so I could remember what he smelled like until he came back.

  THE ARTIST’S SPIRIT

  Though I grew up studying western art techniques, when I got to college, I wanted to learn Chinese ink painting. I applied to study abroad at the China Academy of Art in my junior year.

  In Hangzhou, I stayed at the international student dormitory. My room had a glass table for a desk, a dark wood chair, and a dark wood bed. On the bed was a hard mattress. My window looked out on a teal basketball court, encircled by a brown four-hundred-meter running track. In the evenings, when there was a basketball game, they turned on the stadium lighting. On these nights, I opened the curtains to let the fluorescent light flood my room against the black sky.

  My dormitory was across the street from the West Lake. Along the lake walking path, pale green weeping willows bowed down to graze the water. Smooth stone bridges led to pagodas with curved eaves. Sometimes, to the staticky sound of erhu from a plastic radio, groups of old people practiced tai chi together, moving slowly as one body.

  In the mornings, I attended class with six other international students. Our semester was divided into three parts: Copy of Bird-and-Flower Works, Copy of Landscape Works, and Calligraphy. Like the local students, who were far more skilled than we were, but who had a much harder time enrolling at the China Academy of Art, we learned by imitating old master works every day.

  We stood around our teacher’s desk as he showed us how to paint ink bamboo. After wetting the brush with water, he dipped it in black ink and smoothed the tip across the rim of the inkstone. Hovering the brush above the bottom edge of the raw mulberry paper, he painted each gray bamboo segment with a quick upward stroke.

  This freehand style of painting, the teacher said, is called xieyi. Xie is to write. And yi is idea or meaning. To write meaning, what does that mean? Unlike the painters of the royal court, who layered multiple colors and outlined the finest details, the artists who invented xieyi painting were scholar-amateurs, and they were not interested in depicting the physical likeness of things. They left large areas of the paper blank because they felt empty space was as important as form, that absence was as important as presence. So what did they seek to capture instead? The artist’s spirit.

  The teacher looked at each of us, nodding, before dipping the brush in more ink. Then he dashed a thin black line across each node of bamboo. The black lines bled out into the damp gray stalks, alive.

  Watch the way I am sitting, the teacher said. Good posture is important because it allows your qi to circulate through your body, to flow into the brush and breathe into the artwork.

  He painted each leaf with a single stroke.

  When you look at a good xieyi painting, the teacher said, you feel the artist’s spirit. Look at this hanging scroll of lotus. Look at this sketch of shrimps. How fresh, how spontaneous. Almost childlike, don’t you agree? With a single line, you can paint the ocean.

  BAMBOO GROVES IN MIST AND RAIN

  After class, I walked to a teahouse by the West Lake. A layer of mist hovered above the water, and among the dangling weeping willows, peach blossoms began to bloom. I sat down by the window and ordered osmanthus tea, which I had never tried before. In the glass teapot, hundreds of tiny yellow flowers floated in hot water. I lifted the lid and the steam smelled of apricots and honey.

  As I sipped the tea, I searched for Chinese women artists on my laptop, and began reading about the poet and painter Guan Daosheng. Born in 1262, she was considered to be the greatest female painter in Chinese history, known for her paintings of ink bamboo, which was an unusual genre for women artists at the time. Bamboo was thought to embody strong and gentlemanly qualities—the ability to stay green through the winter, and to bend without breaking. Guan’s bamboo paintings were widely praised. Critics said her confident and vigorous brushstrokes showed no signs that they came from a woman.

  My research on Guan Daosheng led me to another artist, active around 925, known as Lady Li. In one account, Lady Li sat outside one evening and noticed the swaying shadows of bamboo under the moonlight. In a moment of inspiration, she picked up her brush, dipped it in ink, and traced the shadows on her paper window pane. From then on, more and more artists imitated Lady Li’s technique, and that was how the genre of ink bamboo was born.

  Guan was married to the artist and calligrapher Zhao Mengfu. In her husband’s studio, nine years before her death, she wrote an inscription on one of her paintings:

  To play with brush and ink is a masculine sort of thing to do, yet I made this painting. Wouldn’t someone say that I have transgressed? How despicable, how despicable.

  This inscription survived, but the painting itself is now lost. Even though Guan Daosheng was seen as the greatest female painter in all of Chinese history, she has only one authenticated painting surviving today. Titled Bamboo Groves in Mist and Rain, the beautiful paper scroll shows feathery groves of bamboo growing along the edge of a riverbank. This artwork is an example of Guan’s lasting contribution to the genre: she took the technique of ink bamboo and integrated it into landscape painting.

  Out of curiosity, I looked up how many of Zhao Mengfu’s paintings remain. It turns out there are countless. His works are collected around the world.

  GHOST FOREST

  A month later, my dad came to Hangzhou. I suggested he visit during the hundredth anniversary of the China Academy of Art, since there would be celebrations. The night before he arrived, I couldn’t sleep. I realized he had never visited me anywhere before, and we hadn’t spent any time alone since I interned in Hong Kong two summers back. I read every tourist guide to Hangzhou, and made a spreadsheet of itineraries.

  It was sunny the day my dad arrived. We watched the opening ceremony, which began with firecrackers and a lion dance. Several famous artists attended, and many of them signed the school guestbook with beautiful calligraphy. We stared as an old man with long gray hair and a long gray beard dressed in long gray clothes signed the guestbook. We listened to a woman play pipa in the lobby.

  Then I gave my dad a tour of the school campus, and led him to the international student exhibition. For weeks, I crumpled painting after painting before submitting one
to the jury. Unlike oil painting, ink painting was unforgiving, and I couldn’t cover up mistakes with more paint. Whenever I hesitated, holding the brush still for a second too long, the ink flooded the delicate paper. I didn’t tell my dad that my painting had been accepted. I wanted it to be a surprise.

  We walked up the pale wood stairs to the top floor. The room was bright, and on the white wall across from the stairs, my painting hung in a dark wood frame under a track of lights.

  In the painting, I am riding a brown bird. We are soaring above tree after tree, and each one is white and translucent. I washed white watercolor on gray rice paper to create that effect.

  I titled the painting Ghost Forest.

  My dad stood in front of the painting for a long time, holding his hands behind his back.

  Without looking at me he said, I think there is something wrong with you that you’re making art like this.

  I stood there and watched as he walked away, still holding his hands behind his back. As he paced through the rest of the gallery, I stayed a few steps behind him.

  Afterward, we went to Lingyin Temple, a Buddhist monastery. The word Lingyin translates to the place where one’s soul retreats. Founded in 326, it is one of the largest Buddhist temples in China, with numerous halls, statues, and grottoes within.

  At the entrance, framed by deep green foliage, peaceful gray rock reliefs of Buddhas watched over the long line of people waiting to go inside. They say the temple is famous because people who pray there often see their wishes come true. We walked around in silence, entering the halls together, kneeling before different statues of Buddhas, putting our palms together to pray.

  When we took a taxi back to the city center, I asked my dad what he wanted to do next.

  Shouldn’t you be the one taking me around? he said.

  We could go to the flower garden, I said.

  Would that be your top recommendation?

  I don’t know, I haven’t been there yet.

  You’ve been in Hangzhou for over a month. You’re not very ambitious, are you?

  I watched the West Lake pass by outside the taxi window. Mist began to collect on the glass, and soon, tadpoles of rain raced across the windows.

  My ankle hurts, I said. I don’t feel like walking anymore.

  I asked the taxi driver to drop me off at my dormitory instead. When we arrived, I got out of the car and went up the stairs without looking back. I walked down the dim hallway and knocked on my classmate’s door. She was cooking tomato soup on a hot plate in her bathroom.

  I thought you were showing your dad around, she said.

  Can I have some? I said, staring at the bubbles on the surface of the soup.

  I sat down on her bed and ate two bowls.

  THIS BEACH WOULD BE PERFECT

  I remember going on a rare family vacation once, a few years before my dad died. We were walking along the beach, my dad, my sister, and I. The sand was white and so fine. We waded in, the water licking our shoulders cold.

  This beach would be perfect, my dad said, if the rocks weren’t so sharp on the soles of our feet.

  I looked down through the water, and lifted my toes. We swam in small circles. Then, as we dried ourselves on the sand, my dad squinted at me.

  You’d look better if your face were thinner, he said. And if you were two inches taller.

  GRINDING THE INK STICK

  After my dad returned to Hong Kong, the days in Hangzhou got warmer and the tulips by the West Lake bloomed. My classmates and I completed the Copy of Bird-and-Flower Works part of our semester. As a treat, our teacher took us on a field trip to his studio outside the city.

  Our taxis slowed down to a stop at the edge of a golden field. In the middle of the field stood a small white house with thin stalks of purple bamboo growing along its walls. We walked through the field toward the house and stood in front of the entrance. Among the purple bamboo, white butterflies fluttered.

  The teacher led us into the house and up the stairs. As we sat down at a large wooden table, his assistant lit a stick of incense and steeped green dragonwell tea leaves that were handpicked before the yearly rains. The teacher took out an ink stick and an inkstone, and laid a fresh sheet of mulberry paper on a thick piece of cream felt. Adding a bit of water, he ground the ink stick against the inkstone in clockwise circles. It made a soft scratching sound.

  Looking up he said to us, I am not simply grinding the ink. When I grind this ink stick, I am clearing my mind. I am preparing for the painting. Sometimes I sit here, just grinding the ink for half an hour, making space in my mind.

  HEART LIKE WATER

  For my final project at the China Academy of Art, I wrote a piece of calligraphy. Using black ink on mulberry paper, I wrote three simple characters in bold clerical script, and mounted it on silk.

  心如水

  Heart like water

  I wrote it, thinking of my grandma, who only went to school for one year, but who knows more Chinese characters than anyone in our family.

  It’s such a shame, my mom likes to say. Your grandma is so intelligent. She would be famous, if only she were born decades later, instead of in 1930.

  My aunt has a theory that my grandma hasn’t yet fulfilled her life’s potential, that she hasn’t accomplished what she came into this world to do.

  I think about some of the things my grandma has done—read classic historical novels, written an opera, starred in that opera, and distilled that opera in the style of Tang poetry.

  MY GRANDMA SAYS:

  It was by chance that I wrote my own opera. I was living in Guangzhou at the time, and there was a government campaign to get women out of the kitchen, so I started working at a ceramics company. At the company, some people made money selling the bowls and plates, and some people did the accounting. All of them were men. Women were only allowed to stick flower paper on the bowls and fire them in the kiln.

  When the Hundred Flowers Campaign started, the manager told us to organize some cultural activities. I found out that the men in accounting and sales knew how to play the gongs and drums. Doong! Doong! Chaang! Those things. One of them even knew how to play the erhu. One of your aunts is learning how to play the erhu now, and it sounds like she is carving a chicken.

  I’d seen many Cantonese operas with my father during the time I lived in Macau, and I’d read the Three Hundred Tang Poems during my one year of school. Because in Tang poetry, the last characters of the first, second, and fourth lines have to rhyme. Every line except the third. So I knew how to do it.

  Ming ming ming ming. Like that.

  Wah wah wah wah. Rhyming.

  And I was very intelligent, ha! I wrote the entire opera in four and a half hours. It was a one-act Cantonese opera called 仙女會鋼帥, Fairy Meets Steel Commander.

  In the opera, people collect all the steel in the country and melt it. The sparks fly so high they disturb the gods in heaven. A fairy descends to earth to see what they are doing. When she meets the handsome steel commander, they begin dancing together. The government reviewed my opera, said the theme was correct, and approved it for performance.

  At the show, I played the lead actress. I was the fairy that came down to earth, and my tall broad-shouldered female colleague was the handsome commander. We rehearsed together at work, and then we went to a nearby shop to borrow costumes. On the night of the show, I brought all my children to watch. All my children except your mom, she wasn’t born yet. One of your aunts overheard someone in the audience say I looked like a star.

  The audience stood up and clapped for a long time. I bowed and walked off the stage to a room in the back. Inside the room, I saw a big table with brush and ink, and a poem came to me. Do you want to hear my poem?

  鋼鐵火花衝上天

  驚動天上眾神仙

  引來仙女會�
��帥

  雙雙飛舞在人前

  Steel sparks surge up into the skies

  The gods are disturbed and surprised

  Descending fairy and captain meet

  Together they dance before our eyes

  I wrote out the characters in big strokes across the cloth, and later, when the company manager walked into the room he said, Who wrote this poem? The calligraphy is beautiful.

  All my colleagues pointed to me and said, She did! She did!

  The manager asked, Did you study literature in school?

  I said, No, I only went to school for grade three!

  THE LIVER AND THE SPLEEN

  There is a Cantonese saying my dad liked—I think he wrote it himself. He said: Before age forty, we use our health to make money. But after age forty, money can’t buy back our health.

  My dad was sixty-one when he started getting sick. At the time, I was living in London, where I found a job in advertising after graduating from college. My mom called me one night to say she bought a one-way ticket to Hong Kong because my dad was in the hospital, his feet and belly were swollen, and he had liver disease.

  I don’t understand, I said. Dad doesn’t even drink.

  According to traditional Chinese medicine, my mom said, the liver restores itself between eleven p.m. and three a.m. You know your dad, he hasn’t slept well in years. Having a bad temper and working too much are also bad for the liver. But don’t worry about him! Worrying is bad for your spleen.

  WOULD IT BE SO DIFFERENT?

  For a time in elementary school, whenever I closed my eyes at night, I saw my parents dying. I saw their faces smiling at me. Then I saw them lying in the hospital, in a scene from a Cantonese drama, and everything was blinding white. What would I do, how would I survive? I reminded myself that I saw my dad only twice a year. Would it be so different? Then I pulled the blanket over my head so that all I could see was black.