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ISSUE 15 | SPRING 2013<br />
in water, but to conquer it; Li-Ming herself hadn’t done more than dip a toe<br />
in a body of water, a holdover of her harrowing experience during the<br />
Jiangxi floods. Whenever Mr. Peng spoke highly of Chenxi, I gripped my<br />
wife’s shoulder, pretending to believe our daughter was capable of so much<br />
bravado when within my stomach a knot grew, a knot that would twist upon<br />
itself from that point onward.<br />
“You will do well,” Li-Ming said through chapped lips.<br />
I attempted reason: “Don’t push yourself. You don’t want to get hurt.”<br />
Chenxi looked at me, forced a frown.<br />
“I’m fine,” she said. “I’ve been on the 7.5 meter platform for three weeks<br />
now. It’s easy. Just like a bird!” Our daughter skipped to the university<br />
pool’s entrance and we watched her as I tipped Li-Ming’s wheelchair up the<br />
stairs, one by one by one.<br />
“Lao Chen, I can walk,” Li-Ming said, propping herself into standing, but I<br />
forced her into her seat.<br />
“Don’t push yourself.” For weeks, the radiation made her typically-sturdy<br />
frame fragile. Chenxi made light of the situation, joking that eventually her<br />
mother’s bones would be as airy as a bird’s and she could fly away to judge<br />
us from the skies. Lao K said Li-Ming would only fly as far as the ceiling so<br />
that we’d always have a view of her wings. Both descriptions unnerved me.<br />
My legs shook despite my wife’s lighter weight. She still had a form after all<br />
and she still weighed enough for carrying her to be a burden. Finally, we<br />
made it to the gymnasium’s lobby.<br />
“I’m so sick of sitting,” Li-Ming said. “You know it’s not in my nature to be<br />
so still.”<br />
“I know,” I said and she reached up to the handlebars, placing her hands atop<br />
mine. I pushed her across the waxed floors past trophies in dusty display<br />
boxes and photographs of young, lithe athletes on the wall. A banner<br />
drooped across the pool’s entrance, announcing the university swimming<br />
team’s All-Beijing Championship win the year prior. Everywhere one looked<br />
was evidence of accomplishment, success. I worried how this would affect<br />
my wife, so I walked especially briskly, but it was of no use.<br />
“Look at all these proud athletes,” Li-Ming said. “Didn’t you say you once<br />
beat Chiang Kai-Shek’s son in a track meet?”<br />
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