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On the plane, Cuijuan Ren looked thoughtfully at the cabin window. As the plane took off, the houses and trees became smaller and smaller, until they finally became little dots. It was already night, but Cuijuan Ren couldn’t sleep. It was not that she did not know how to adjust the seat; it was just another piece of memory that intruded into her mind. Cuijuan started reminiscing.
When she first heard the news that she could go to Greece to live for two years, her feelings were ambivalent. There was no mediation. Her daughter and her granddaughter simply announced the fact to her. They knew that Cuijuan longed to travel around the world, but two years? Letting her, a senior member of the family, to make the decision may be impartial. But the unseemliness of this action was that she had to give up her husband because someone had to stay to take care of the house, her home, in China. Cuijuan knew that her daughter and granddaughter deeply believed that she would choose them rather than her husband.
And they were right.
It was difficult for Cuijuan to recount this whole Greece thing to Kim Yong at first. When she finally managed to open her mouth and told Yong that she would not stay, he just nodded and said: “Don’t forget to bring the sweet relish I made yesterday.” This was what Cuijuan dreaded. She dreaded this peaceful reaction of Yong's. She hated it when Yong understated everything, making her the selfish one and him the tolerant and independent one. But what could she do? Divorce was useless for a woman of her age, not to mention that she did not want to start a new love journey. Maybe two years would act as a cushion for the car of their marriage that was driving crazy.
Cuijuan took a last glance at the ground and shut the cabin window. A haiku occurred to her:
Light of hundreds of homes;
larva seeping out of the crust—
limb from a plane took off
Aileen, her granddaughter, poked her shoulder and asked: “Grandma, do you need anything?” A drink cart was beside them. Cuijuan smiled awkwardly at the stewardess and pointed at the coffee pot. She could only speak Mandarin.
She told Aileen that she could have a cup of tea. Cuijuan understood that her life was full of awkward moments like this, where the conversation was always asymmetric. By ‘asymmetric’ she meant that there was always a mismatch between what she wanted and what she got. The same went for her marriage to Yong. Every time when she discovered Yong’s sister gave him another red envelope or when she overheard Yong and his brother complaining about their wives. Those kinds of things always happened at big family gatherings when the occasion demanded them to meet. Chinese New Year was one of them. Cuijuan did not think that Yong’s sister gave Yong a red envelope because she loved him. Come on, Yong's not ten, she thought. And it is not like they were short on cash. Cuijuan attributed Yong's sister's money-giving behavior to her need to show off her husband’s wealth and to disguise that need as love for her brother. After they finished the food, the men would start playing poker while eating peanuts with wine or beer, and this would be the time when they called their wives ‘nuts’ or ‘out of their minds’.
But if these moments were at most awkward, others were almost unbearable. She remembered learning to drive when she was fifty-four. Nobody actually believed that she could make it but she still did and scored 95 in the exam. She thought that the license could catapult her into some new era of life, or place her at some sort of vantage point. But all she could remember now was how often they joked about it. Looking at her tea, she signed again at how asymmetric her communication with her granddaughter was. Aileen never remembered that she could not have her tea without milk. Cuijuan drank the bitter Earl Grey, recounting that Aileen once won the prize of a writing contest because she wrote a story about how she got her driver's license. Cuijuan’s image was endearing in that story: a courageous, studious, and smart old lady who wished to get a license so that she could drive her family to the mall when her husband could not do so. She realized that in reality, the license gave Aileen some sort of an advantage. The license gave everybody in the family except herself an advantage since everyone could make fun of it. The funniest joke was when Aileen’s mother made the analogy that Cuijuan would use the vehicle as a weapon. She was okay with most of the jokes as she admitted she was not a good driver. But she could not stand Aileen’s writing not because it revealed how hypocritical Aileen was. Aileen was not hypocritical. She just did not know her.
The true reason Cuijuan wanted to learn to drive was because she did want to depend on Yong. She did not want to have Yong’s permission whenever she needed to go to the mall or go to a friend’s house. She hated Yong, but not in a feminist way. She was satisfied with her role as his wife and she was definitely used to doing laundry and washing dishes. These house chores used to be Yong’s job since Cuijuan was the breadwinner when she was young and their child was young. The main problem between them was that they lack the clash between their souls; and to Cuijuan, this clash was as crucial as the sound ice cubes made with each other when they were put into a cup filled with cocktails. Cuijuan had never tried cocktails before; she only drank wine to sleep. But she would imagine that any alcohol, if willingly consumed, should be delicious. Unlike Cuijuan, Yong drank beer and spirits (or white wine). Yong’s favourite was Maotai, a strong white wine with an intense fragrance. Anybody who favoured that type of liquor was nouveau riche in Cuijuan’s eyes; she preferred to sip the liquid slowly, savoring it, rather than the way middle-aged Chinese men usually do with Maotai – they take shots.
Anybody who did not like Maotai would be considered disrespectful toward Chinese culture. This person would either be labelled as weak (as he or she probably did not have the guts or the ability to handle such strong liquor) or as stupid (as he or she could not even get how good the drink is). Cuijuan did not get any of that. In private life she strongly believed that Western culture suited her more as she grew up watching BBC TV series that were adaptations of Jane Austen’s novels. So she had a good relationship with Aileen who was the most westernized member of the family since the beginning. She was willing to tell Aileen the love stories portrayed in Austen’s novels, but not the ones that she had. She was hesitant to tell Aileen how she met Yong and how they ended up together, so oftentimes she just brushed it off by saying “Oh, I was blind when I met Yong”. For a long time, Aileen actually thought that Cuijuan suffered from illness in her eyes.
As a child, Aileen was a quiet girl who believed that her grandmother was so ill that she was blind. But Cuijuan would never describe Aileen as shy even though in kindergarten Aileen often peed herself because she did not want to tell her teacher that she needed to go to the bathroom. Cuijuan thought that Aileen must have something similar to Asperger’s. But when Aileen and Cuijuan were together, Aileen would become violent. They used to fight as a weekend activity: Cuijuan just needed to stay still on the bed like a sandbag while Aileen punched or more often kicked her. Little Aileen was confused: why didn't Cuijuan move under her “great” force? In those days fighting was divine in the sense that it formed solidarity between Cuijuan and Aileen. Fighting was not a contest, but a language. But as Aileen became more and more educated, she lost not only the language of words but also the language of fighting when she was in front of Cuijuan. Cuijuan observed that Aileen seemed to be more absorbed in another form of language – English, the language that Cuijuan loved and was deeply attracted to.
The only opportunity Cuijuan ever had in her life to actually listen to people speaking the kind of English they spoke in the BBC series was when she lived in England for eight months. That scenario was pretty similar to this Greece thing she was experiencing now. Cuijuan was also given the “choice” of whether or not to follow Aileen and her mother and father to England. But back then she did not have to choose between Yong and the family since Yong was also coming. She had a great time and she would always remember how clean and green that place was. It was true that the transportation and delivery systems weren’t as efficient as the Chinese ones, but she would have traded that for the scenery and the lifestyle. She remembered those young people (often white), walking on the lawn with headphones and a chill demeanor. She knew that she was never like that when she was young. She lived a life where she always had to calibrate something, as if life always needed constant adjustments to remain within a healthy amount of uncertainty. She was not sure if her life needed adjustments, but her body certainly did. When Aileen was young they used to bathe together, and a common topic of discussion would be Cuijuan’s surgery scars. Some of them were for the cells in her lungs, some of them were for the back… She would show Aileen the scars, like showing stamps that she collected. After they got out of the bath and got into bed, the discussion would go down the rabbit hole of literature and Cuijuan would tell Aileen the Austen-style love stories again. During summer holidays they would spend every day like this. This could be Cuijuan’s dream life. She remembered one summer Aileen was forced by the school to read Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, classics Cuijuan loved. Back then Aileen had already started complaining about things, mostly the plot of the novels. But Cuijuan never thought of Aileen as being judgemental and never expected things to go downhill after that.
Lost in memories, Cuijuan had fallen asleep on the plane. When she woke up again, she thought that the plane was going to fall as there was strong turbulence. After the turbulence went away, she saw the stewardess coming at her again and Cuijuan instantly straightened her back, ready for another awkward moment. But this time the stewardess just smiled at her and gave a cup of latte with extra sugar. This time she could finally drink something sweet, something with milk. She looked at Aileen, who was enjoying her own tomato juice and felt relieved that the love language was still there. Spoken language was never their love language, it was always the action that mattered. Cuijuan imagined that the same thing goes for Aileen. She remembered that every time Aileen used the English language, she would seem very strong and straightforward, nothing like the conversation they had. Just like Yong’s sister, Aileen and her mother disguised their need or demand. They disguised their demand for Cuijuan’s help as a way to fulfill Cuijuan’s demand of travelling around the world.
After they arrived in Greece, they quickly became acquainted with their neighbour, who was also Chinese. She introduced Cuijuan to the whole Asian community and Cuijuan became friends with Wang. Wang was a woman from the northern parts of China, while Cuijuan lived in the south-eastern parts –the best region of China, with comfortable weather, often called the land of milk and honey (or the land of fish and rice if you had an Asian background). Despite the geographical differences, Wang was an enthusiastic person and they often went to the market together. Even though both of them had no idea how to speak English or Greek, they managed to get the freshest food and vegetables. The main reason why Aileen and her mother needed Cuijuan is that they needed somebody who could cook. But a very Freudian point is that Aileen always complained about the food. She never said a word that implied that Cuijuan was a bad cook, but Cuijuan knew that Aileen was complaining about her. Back in the days when Aileen complained about the novels, she should have known that Aileen never complained about anything directly. She used the texture, or the smell of the food as a subject of her complaints, as a disguise. Due to this roundabout-like style of expression, Cuijuan could not tell why Aileen had a problem with her but she could tell that Aileen was sensitive and this certainly wasn’t a bad thing. She remembered looking at Aileen’s social media posts and once she posted a picture of the back of herself and Wang going to the market. Their bodies were two small orange dots in the image with a green tone, brightening up the whole picture. She could tell that Aileen had good taste but not enough talent in the arts, and she believed that Aileen was somehow influenced by her. Cuijuan herself was a great movie fan since she had watched “Becoming Jane Austen” multiple times. That cottage aesthetics was just what Cuijuan needed – vintage clothing, antique furniture, gardens, tea parties, picnics…Cuijuan loved them all and at the same time could not help but notice that nature was always the point of focus in Aileen’s photographs and people were just dots to mitigate the green hues of nature.
Wang was straightforward but she also used other people to mitigate aspects of her life that she was not satisfied with. She would use Cuijuan’s house as a place to convene social gatherings. On a random Sunday afternoon, she would just knock on the door and started yelling so that Cuijuan could hear from the balcony that Wang had arrived, again without noticing Cuijuan in advance. This time Wang brought Lulu, a girl from Hongkong. She was rich and clearly educated. Cuijuan never refused Wang and her friends not only because she did not want to appear awkward in front of her friends, but also due to the fact that Wang always made it seem like they had a deal. Cuijuan would prepare coffee and biscuits for them. Sipping her latte and listening to Lulu’s Mandarin, which clearly had a Cantonese accent, she made a phony smile and remained composed while internally she had already called Wang a snob for a hundred times. In that afternoon, when Cuijuan was taking small bites of her biscuit and sipping coffee, she suddenly realized that she was actually pretty similar to Jane Austen. Both were accessible to gossip as it was always the center of the womanly discussion and both were dissatisfied with their life. The only difference, Cuijuan noted, was that Jane Austen could incorporate gossip into her writing and make it art, while Cuijuan could only call her friend a snob.
When Christmas holiday came, Cuijuan was glad that she could be away from Wang’s visits, at least for two weeks since she would be taking a vacation to Finland. Cuijuan preferred Finland over Greece as it was a much more developed place. Sometimes Cuijuan thought that Greece was a replica of China with bad infrastructure. Even the people there weren’t as white as the British. They were tanned. In Finland, things were much different since the people there were white and tall. They spent an afternoon at Santa Claus’ village and when Cuijuan was asked to take a photo of Aileen and her mother, she was handed Aileen’s mirrorless FUJIFILM X100. Again, Aileen started to complain about how the camera was bad at adjusting to dim lighting and how the camera was inconvenient to use.
Instinctively Cuijuan knew that Aileen was mocking at her because she did not know how to use the camera. This time Cuijuan did not want to pretend anymore. Maybe it’s because of the weather, the snow and stuff that caused Cuijuan to be emotional, she refused to take the photo. Though Cuijuan remained calm, Aileen was the one who broke down first. She did not cry but simply said assertively and straightforwardly that Cuijuan could never give her what she wanted. So whenever Cuijuan gave her anything - food, coffee, or even greetings - it could never satisfy her. It struck Cuijuan that she was not the only one feeling dissatisfied in this family, but Aileen should definitely be punished for saying that aloud; otherwise, Cuijuan would have been withstanding the pain of not being able to say anything of her needs, for nothing. She knew that Aileen was also emotional due to the weather and both of them were just spin-offs of inclement weather but still Aileen needed to be punished. So Cuijuan, the sandbag that never moved, slapped Aileen in the forehead and said “I want to kill you” in a poignant voice. Right after she did it, she realized that she had done something terribly wrong because Aileen still retained her composure. She was back to that quiet girl who used her calm appearance as a shield even when she wanted to pee. Aileen looked straight at Cuijuan’s eyes, flecks of snow in between locks of her hair, and she said that nobody had ever had the guts to say that they wanted to kill her. Aileen’s mother pulled the two apart and explained to Aileen that what Cuijuan just did was involuntary. She suggested that they should go for a sleigh drive, the one pulled by real deers.
Sitting alone on the sleigh, watching the butt of a deer, Cuijuan for the first time in her life wanted to pour out her feelings but she realized that there was nobody she could pour her feelings to. She prowled at her surroundings and could only see snow and gleams of light. She thought of Wang, not the one in Greece, but the one in China. Wang was her friend in school and they used to chat about literature but they did not talk anymore. But if you asked Cuijuan to remember interactions with Wang, she could only pick up fragments, such as the dog-eared copy of a romance novel Wang always read, Wang’s fringe, and the plant that she brought to the classroom. No matter how hard Cuijuan tried, she could not paint the whole picture. Perhaps her perception of the world was fragmentized, Cuijuan thought. Maybe, just maybe, the only way to be satisfied is to make use of the fragments. In such a world that is either treacherous or dreary, it seems important to find at least gleams from the darkness as even snow in Finland reflects off tender white light on polar nights. By thinking that way, Cuijuan settled her queasy feelings and got off the sleigh when the deer stopped. She walked toward Aileen and her mother, knowing that both of them had decided to let what had occurred go by pretending that it never happened. Again, it was very difficult to form allies in a society like this, so family members better stick to each other.
She figured out that Aileen was listening to some voicemail sent from a man: “Remember, it is only the moments that matter. You think that you would remember your uni as a place where you gain academic success and a bunch of friends but in reality, you will only remember moments like that night at 8 pm when the smoke alarm goes off when you are watching a football match or when you only have a microwave with you when you try to cook ramen. It is those frustrating moments or fragments of life that you will remember. So stop looking at the big picture, look at the small things, it is the small things that will make the worth of your life.”
Cuijuan believed that the best way to stop looking at the big picture was to focus on the details. So as soon as she went back to Greece, she tried to start writing like Jane Austen. Even though a hundred kinds of delicate emotions welter in her heart like currents, she could not write a single word down and all she had was a blob of ink. She could not find a foothold to connect all the fragments and when she heard Aileen starting to open the radio to listen to rock she realized that it was time for sleep. Cuijuan’s room was in the attic and in front of her room were two large desks where Aileen usually studied. Whenever Aileen needed to study past 11 pm she would put on some rock songs as if it would help her to subjugate the problems. Insomnia had always been a problem for Cuijuan so she would just take some pills as soon as the music started. Cuijuan got her pills and as she was going to close her notebook, she noticed lines of poetry that seemed like haiku:
Light of hundreds of homes;
larva seeping out of the crust—
limb from a plane took off
Haiku, a traditional form of Japanese poetry known for its focus on capturing a moment of insight or observation. It consists of three lines with a specific syllable pattern: the first line has 5 syllables, the second line has 7 syllables, and the third line has 5 syllables. That’s right, Cuijuan thought, she needed something laconic but vivid. Without hesitating, she wrote another.
Exile
Door slammed with no sound
Mouth shut to reject words--exile
White snowdrops on mountain high
Haiku opened a new world to Cuijuan. Each haiku was a small bottle with a delicate moment in it. After Cuijuan wrote a haiku, she felt like she could keep a bottle or a fragment of memory, pleasant or not, up on the shelves.
Gossip
Squinting and nodding
Message sent through the grapevine
A teacup just spilled
Innocence
Acne on the cheeks
Sprinkles on the birthday cake
Things with early expiry date
Writing haikus became a habit of Cuijuan and one night, when Cuijuan was still thinking about how to reduce the last sentence to only five syllables, she received a text from her ex. Lim was Cuijuan’s classmate. She remembered him as a boy with acne and high math scores and the person who always lent her an umbrella when it was raining season. Cuijuan lost contact with him when they graduated from high school but she did hear that he went to Australia. From then on, Cuijuan had a special place in her heart for Lim, since he should be living a life that Cuijuan had dreamt of, in a foreign country full of white people and beach and blue sky. That night when Cuijuan received the text, she did not take any pills. After a few rounds of Q&A, she knew that he was doing tourism in Australia. This was a little bit different from what Cuijuan thought he would be doing. She did not want to be discriminant toward workers, but she expected him to be doing some more high class job such as being the manager of a large company importing and exporting goods in between China and Australia. This is what Yong used to do, to be a manager transporting goods from one place to another. But tourism? That is one thing Cuijuan could not stand. When Cuijuan travelled to the white communities, her goal was to blend into the background and be part of it. The last thing she wanted would be to become a foreigner. Being a tour guide leading a bunch of foreigners would be an absurd job to do, Cuijuan thought, if you ever wanted to be a local. In Chinese there was a saying, "Those who are near vermilion become red, those who are near ink become black." Simply being around red causes a person to adopt its color, and the same goes with Lim and the environment he was situated in. As Cuijuan decided to exit the conversation, she received a question from Lim: “Wanna come next month? I’ll have you live at the house of a local friend of mine.”
The word “local friend” tempted Cuijuan, and for a second she started to fantasize if this could be a real possibility of her life. She would be independent, and go on a journey not initiated by her daughter or Aileen or Yong. She would be going for herself for romantic reasons if you would like to think that way. She stared at the lamp on the table beside her bed. The light bulb glowed tenderly in the room, soft indie rock in the background, Cuijuan felt peaceful, not because she reconciled her situation, but because now she had some hope, and with hope even that light bulb could carry some meaning or harmlessly personified. But not long after 1 minute her phone buzzed again to remind her that Lim had sent her another text. She waited for another minute to reach for the phone, just to hide her desperateness. Even counting numbers from one to sixty was meaningful and hopeful to her. For Cuijuan, counting was something she would avoid for a long time since the last time she counted anything was when Aileen and her father, who was a doctor, told her to count to one hundred just to see whether she had Alzheimer’s. Her pace would be messed up if she counted to any number larger than seventy so counting from one to sixty was safe, familiar, and stable. Just like how Lim used to make her feel when she was still a schoolgirl and had no worries. She looked at the text, and the words seemed very blatant to her: “If you bring ten more people I can give you a discount and we can go on a cruise ship.” It was all in the techniques, she remembered Aileen saying as she analyzed the visuals of advertisements for her English class. The next word Aileen said was pathos, a word that meant “playing with the audience’s emotions”.
Cuijuan politely rejected the “invitation”, pulled off the lamp, put her phone on charge, and took a pill. She closed her eyes and remembered her days in England. She remembered one afternoon vividly when she went to a famous tourist attraction with Aileen’s mother, and when they came back to look for Aileen and Yong, they found out the two were sleeping on the lawn in Regent’s Park. Aileen was a child and Yong had no knowledge of the cultural and aesthetic significance of Regent’s Park, yet both fit nicely to the picture. Cuijuan thought at the moment three sentences to describe the afternoon:
Hydrangea blooms
Young gurgled. Old snores.
Regent’s Park their home.
Cuijuan opened her eyes, staring at the ceiling as if she were trying to embrace darkness using her eyes. It now seemed incontestable that nothing could thwart her love for Aileen and Yong. Not Finland snow, not language, not Lim, nothing could undo the bond that had formed in her that afternoon. It was all determined in moments like that and it was the moments that mattered.
In the summer the three women decided to come back to China and when the four of them gathered at the table again, Cuijuan’s driving skill became the topic of discussion again. Right after she got back to China she booked a trip to a neighbouring village with her old schoolmates (of course not including Wang and Lim). The only effort Cuijuan had to make was to do that 2 hour drive to arrive at the small verdant village. But she kept mixing throttle with brake, wiper and a.c. “You know what, if I did not teach her she would let the car fly to outer space when she made that turn without braking!” Yong shared that funny remark with the family members at the table, appearing very happy that the three had come back. Cuijuan knew that this could be their love language but she did not want to tolerate it anymore so she fought back: “You think you are clever? Remember last time when I told you to do one small thing, simple and easy, everybody knows how to do that…ordering food! He cannot order food! He ordered wonton and claimed he used a coupon so it cost only 70 but actually it messed up the calculation and it costed us 120! 120! You think you smart in front of your grand-daughter, grandpa Yong? ”
Aileen and the others laughed, and the lunch ended in a jolly atmosphere. Aileen went to the hospital for an internship. She worked in the psychiatry department. The same hospital and even the same department Cuijuan went to when she said that she needed to get some sleeping pills. Well, that was just a bluff – Cuijuan wanted to know if she actually had something stronger. Now Aileen could probably make out that Cuijuan may have something more than insomnia, but that did not matter anymore. Cuijuan remembered that time when Aileen accompanied her to get sleeping pills in Greece. Although the nurse insisted on giving Aileen melatonin, Aileen explained patiently again and again that melatonin was not strong enough for her grandmother. From her patient and calm appearance, Cuijuan knew that Aileen would eventually grow up as somebody who would sell people sleeping pills. In those moments when the line between sleep and awake became blurred, Cuijuan would always pray that there would be people who buy sleeping pills from Aileen in the future before entering the dream state. It is quite clear now that her family always lied about their needs by either making harsh remarks or shutting up completely and love can only be extracted from moments when a person’s gesture or expression in his or her eye sold out their true intention. This is what makes haikus honest and precious, as they were indications of love, her life purified. The haikus she wrote were unpretty, strange, and not even in Japanese. But nobody was supposed to live a pretty life and be satisfied with it. Straightforwardness was never a necessity for the expression of love since if it became the standard, it would be too hard for people to meet.
One time in that summer she heard something very straightforward from Aileen and her happiness could not be disguised – she got the opportunity to go to England again for an academic conference. Cuijuan expected herself to have the same emotions she had when she received Lim’s texts, but this time her heart did not race and she decided to stay with Yong in China to take care of the house together. Aileen offered Cuijuan the opportunity this time not because she thought that she needed Cuijuan, but because Cuijuan needed to clear her mind: at this point, everyone in the house knew that Yong was on the brink of betraying Cuijuan. It was another awkward moment when Yong’s phone accidentally connected to Aileen’s Bluetooth music player and the voice of Yong’s old schoolmate singing a nostalgic love song was amplified through the whole house. Yong claimed that nothing had happened and that what he said was true. They just got in touch. They were just catching up. Everything was fine. Three simple answers were given by Yong at those dinners and lunches when interrogations from the three women were disguised as jokes. At the same dinner when Cuijuan announced that she gave up the opportunity to go to England, Aileen made fun of Yong again, hinting that Cuijuan should go with her: “Guess grandma going to listen to more of the songs over the summer, right?” Then they switched to the topic of Cuijuan’s trip to the village and gossiped about her old schoolmates while all of a sudden Yong said in a stern voice that he had blocked the number of his schoolmates and cut all contacts.
The women stopped chatting for a minute and continued making seemingly scornful jokes about Yong the same way they joked about Cuijuan’s ex in Australia and her driving skills. But Cuijuan understood. Under those jokes was a heart full of understanding and compassion. She finally realized that haikus were no better than jokes. They just used a better disguise – it used nature and observation as masks to veil emotions. Cuijuan would still write haikus, because they were more sincere, and she just wanted to savor the moment. Moments like this when they all laughed at the table and her eyes made contact with Yong’s.
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