悲 [bēi]; sorrow

    A story, said Grandfather, was a fènghuáng. A 鳳凰 combusted from air and fire. You could drown its flames, reduce it to ash, sink the remnants into the mouth of the ocean, and yet it would be rebirthed.
    Every morning, before the gray flush of the horizon and the blear canopy of the sky, he would sit on a wooden stool out in the street. We lived at the start of a twisting, long, path, and when we looked down the tangle of cars and workers and horses, only the mist blinked back. There was no end. So Grandfather sat on his stool and cleared his throat, and when he had downed a cool glass of water, he would start telling stories regardless if he had any audience. He would, eventually. His voice held the flexibility of a dancer, the strength of a general, the light of the dawn.
    In that dirty gray street, I listened as my grandfather transformed into many people.
    Some days when the streets were still early and sleepy, he recited poems from the Xia to the Qing. Some days when the streets were wide awake and astir in miscellany, he told bold tales of Huo Qubing racing across the wild plains and Chang’e seeking the moon. Some days when the air hushed itself over the newspaper or another expansion of the foreign concessions, his erhu sang songs; a cadence that everyone, Western or Chinese, worker or official, could hum along to.
    I listened to lullabies and laments. I saw dynasties fallen and current. Under the awning of the tea shop, I saw the world swaying in its epochs and faces, and I held a single breath in my chest.

憤 [fèn]; indignation, anger

    A circle, said Grandfather, had no start or end. Like its circumference, the end seemingly descended upon us with stealth footsteps, yet we could never quite grasp its path. It came with the wind; it left in the ocean, across steamships and trains intermingling East and West.
    Maybe, I thought, it was easier to consider a beginning in the eyes of a nine-year-old girl. A pair of eyes like that did not encompass the world in all its storms and tides. A pair of eyes like that bore innocence stripped away, witness to the change that trickled into the alleys and lights of the city as more and more Mandarin turned to English on the streets, as more and more young scholars went abroad. A pair of eyes like that could track all the fallen stars in the graveyard of the silent streets and retain the ability to startle when reached up to find the change in the larynx, the stranger’s words that nestled beneath the tongue, the deathly silence of what once had been there and the desperation to resurrect the bygone.
    But even the nine-year-old girl did not recognize it at first. The first beholder, it seemed, did not speak. Could not speak. Was not able to speak.
    Before the start, I remembered Grandfather alone on the streets, the same wooden stool set under the same shade of the willow tree. When Grandfather looked up, there was frost and snow congregated between his brows from the early winter, and when he breathed out, only his breath melted into the air. Grandfather waited a few moments for the streets’ resuscitation, and when he looked around to see only me, he reached out to secure the coat around my shoulders, as if the winter would somehow steal me away.
    Then he straightened himself, the worn man gone, and he was a commander once more.
    On this day, there was something in Grandfather’s voice that burned into the snow and ice. Forgotten lands. Mountains and plains eroded by passing. Homes broken, nostalgia for the gone, winds hollering in rebuttal. An entire landscape forged into his voice.
    When he ceased, the oceans slowly stopped to ebb, and the entire world was coated in a daze. Grandfather reached out to grasp my shoulders. I had looked into his eyes, and in that moment, I saw the vastness in his gaze.
    “Mei, never forget.”
    I moved my lips, wanting to show him the unfamiliarity around us— land that no longer belonged to us, homes without nostalgia, winds whispering in tongues of the present. And me— accented tongue lost for a home, no longer able to be reborn, for there was too much forgotten.

慷 [kāng]; distraught, agitated, stirred

    A memory, said Grandfather, was a mark. The carvings of a dagger into your heart, etching remembrance into the garden of your mind— peonies, hyacinths, roses. The garden could not fill.
    On the day the newspapers brought the first loss of the war, the streets scattered by a gust of wind; the garden released all its petals and colors into the air, where they found different destinations and sunk into the waters. The once waterlogged streets were emptied hollow. But they would be refilled, soon by tanks and planes and cars, by soldiers who would round up the remaining flowers and watch them wilt.
    Beneath the willow tree, Grandfather did not move.
    The listeners who had once been the audience of his stories came and went, some ignoring the sight of him and disappearing with their fabricated passports and disguised faces, some catching sight of him and telling him to run in stilted accents, some shaking their heads and telling me to go.
    Go, I pleaded to Grandfather. They would come. They would imprint their marks into your throat. Stories would not thrive in a place like this, all fractured fragments and abandoned lands where the tales he held onto were a forgotten remnant of the past. No fènghuáng could be resurrected. The fire that surrounded it would become its cage, and it could only screech and claw, then sink, sink, sink…
    It would always return, said Grandfather, gaze level on the horizons. In the end, he did not.

慨 [kǎi]; lament

    A dream, said Grandfather, was another life. When I returned to the street imprinted into my memory, it was as if no life had passed, as if the store banners fluttering in the wind still sold sugar figures instead of pastries, as if the automobiles rolling down the streets were carriages instead, as if the women still wore qipao and the men still kept their shan.
    Did Grandfather dream? This was the question I asked him beneath the willow tree, me in the awning of the shop and him sitting upon the same old stool, our aged house’s shadow gentle upon the dirt.
    Yes, I dream, Mei.
    Do your stories come from your dreams?
    Some do, and some do not.
    I kept the breath in my chest and asked, my voice resurfacing, “Can you tell a story again, Yeye?”
    “To who?”
    “All of us.” The shadows whispering of the past, the dreamers, the present, the passersby.
    “I would tell a story,” said Grandfather with a slight smile, “if the listeners would listen.”
    The jaded mountains had changed ownership, the shine of its brocade ripped into astray pieces that in the end belonged to none. If dynasties could fall, if the city changed lips and throat and eyes, could they still listen? Could they still listen, the Chinese accented with the English and the Chinese with the French? Could they see the fire that ignited our tongues for millennia?
    And I saw the fènghuáng in Grandfather’s eye, something like a songbird’s lament, like an enduring song, something birthed and died and rebirthed a thousand times. And I saw, and I knew— this cycle would not die.

∞

《登华山有感》(Sentiments Above Mount Hua)

偶来此地竟忘归，(Rarely do I come here, yet I forget to leave,)
风景依稀梦欲飞。(The scene is vague and my dreams desire to take flight.)
回首故乡心已碎，(My heart breaks when I look back at my home,)
山河无恙主人非。(The mountains remain constant, yet the holder is no more.)
     – 张学良 (Zhang Xueliang)