Kartika_Issue15

ISSUE 15 | SPRING 2013
desperate strength, deserved its own stage.
I broke away from the spell of the rainy evening with an excuse to return to
my hotel room. A migraine had come over me, I said. My waiter did not
seem concerned. Perhaps he saw through my pretense. He dropped his
cigarette and shook my hand thoughtfully, and told me to visit his restaurant
again the next day, that he knew a cure for aches suffered in distant cities.
Then he returned to his job, and I wandered the park a little more, until I
came across a brightly lit cul de sac filled with smoky stalls selling snacks,
clothing, and trinkets. I sat down in one that served Vietnamese and Chinese
dishes. As I ordered, the other customers paid and left. Now I had a stall and
a cook entirely to myself. The canopy overhead assured me that I was dry
and that the outside world was not. In the meantime, the cook was washing a
vat of rice. I became lulled by the sounds of rice and rain, two cadences for
which I have an immediate affinity. Depending on the notes each strikes, I
am lulled to calm or to excitement, sometimes experiencing both at the same
time. When this happens, the world opens itself up without thought or
prejudice. An equilibrium in duality. I listen for every single grain of rice
and each drop of water rounding out the air, how they collectively nourish
and regenerate all living things. The smallness of rice, the greatness of a
storm—we are equal in size to whatever we see.
Though my surroundings looked nothing like what my waiter had described
of his missing rice shop, I pretended I had found it, and even convinced
myself, to atone for my lie, that I would return to his restaurant late tonight,
not tomorrow as he’d suggested, so I could report my discovery. I am
possessive of the rain, yes, but I am also prone to fits of reversals. As I
waited for my food, as I listened to the rice and the rain intermingle, now
rising together, now separating into their own corners, I imagined my
waiter’s reaction. By then I would have watched Farewell from beginning to
end. I would be trembling still with an absolute euphoria, knowing that I had
just witnessed an actor live deep inside himself, the only place of release.
Wah-Ming Chang has received fellowships for fiction from the New York
Foundation for the Arts, the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, the Urban Artist
Initiative, and the Bronx Writers' Center. Her fiction has appeared in Mississippi
Review and Arts & Letters Journal of Contemporary Culture, nonfiction in Words
without Borders and the Asian American Writers' Workshop's Open City, and
photography in Drunken Boat and Open City. She is currently working on a photo
essay about the essence of the dance rehearsal.
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