Kartika_Issue15

ISSUE 15 | SPRING 2013
I didn’t know how to respond, but the willow limbs bristled at a passing
breeze and the cicadas clucked, annoyed that the wind had, for a moment,
stolen the stage.
“Li-Ming will be okay too,” she said. She spoke from a place she didn’t
quite trust, but her words were there, nonetheless, puffs of smoke rising from
a valley floor. This smoke, these words, hovered above us before being
stamped out by the sound of revived cicada chorus. The drone rose,
encouraging me to speak. What am I supposed to say?
“Baba,” Lao K said, her eyes still fixed on the sky.
“That’s my name,” I said.
“She’s really going,” she said. She didn’t yet know the word for ‘die.’ Or to
‘leave this world’, or any other idiomatic saying we used to mask the sting of
death. For her, there were only a few assortments of verbs: ‘to go,’ ‘to be,’
‘to eat,’ ‘to study,’ ‘to make.’ Her lesson books hadn’t mentioned death
yet—why would they?
“Si,” I said, correcting her. “She’s really going to ‘si.’ Like the number
‘four,’ but in the falling-rising tone.”
死. To die. That body struggling beneath a flat, black surface, arm stretching
upward. No one above reaching below, no one capable of saving that which
was already lost.
“I will never say that word, Ba,” Lao K said. “I like ‘to go’ better. It means
there can be a return.”
I sighed, placed my hand on my American daughter’s wide shoulder but this
gesture didn’t have the resonance I’d hoped so I dropped my hand.
“Where I live, there’s a wide beach without any houses, no people,” she said.
“When I was a kid we’d go there at night to count the stars. Have you ever
seen a star that falls?” I realized she meant a shooting star: liu xing.
“Never in the city,” I said. “Only when I was a child in the countryside.”
“That makes sense,” she said. “You need to be paying attention in order to
see falling stars and no one is ever paying enough attention in the city.”
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