Together Again
It’s the painful moments that substantiate life.
Below, the strip of dark water between the hull and Long Beach was widening, churning into a frothy white as thrusters pushed us out. I raised a hand, waving at nothing in particular. At the smog blurring the horizon into a dusty purple. At the cranes and warehouses and endless sprawl of concrete beyond them, all already disintegrating. By the next time I stepped on land, “home” would have shifted three thousand miles east.
The afternoon light was still bright, but heavy. The day was beginning to turn, just barely. I took a breath and held it.
Last time I went home to see Grandma, my nose was dry. I attributed the fever to a night of gaming that bled into morning. Ibuprofen saved me for the night, but the soreness lingered as we climbed up to Guiyuan Temple in the rain. My mother’s monk friend greeted us at the top, her robe dark with rain. She would die from Covid in two years, but that morning she was indistinguishable from pine trees in the mist.
The drizzle followed us south. Homeward. At 300 kilometers per hour, the high-speed rail devoured the land — five kilometers vanishing every minute. I watched the hills blur past my window, the rice farms and half-built condos, the villages that appeared and disappeared before I could read their names. From north to south, the gray wetness was a singular silent stretch. Entire lives are missed in one glimpse. A woman hung laundry out of her window. I see her for half a second and will never know anything more.
Grandma’s house didn’t have AC or proper flooring. It was damp and rough like any country house in China: chicken droppings in the yard, a wood-burning stove in the kitchen, walls with red calendars and a portrait of Mao Zedong.
It used to be loud. On New Year’s Eve, my uncles would crouch in the yard with lighters, fusing flame to firecrackers as I watched from the doorway, hands on my ears in anticipation of a bang. Then we set off fireworks and rockets that bloomed above the house. I sat in Grandma’s room — that’s where everyone congregated. The electric heater under the table and drapes that encased it kept me warm. On the table, I peeled a pomelo while staring into the fire, or occasionally at the television which played a war drama no one was watching. I liked the citrus smell of pith collected in my fingernails.
At night, we slept in the back room, my four cousins and I, piled onto homebuilt bunk beds that squeaked on every turn. Those were the nights when horror stories told by MP3 players were enough to make me slide under the thick quilt with clumpy cotton balls and sense every creak of the house as footsteps, every gust of wind a voice. I’d lie there listening to my cousins’ breaths slow into sleep and feel terrified and completely safe at the same time.
But it’s just my mom and I that year. The back room smelled of moldy wood and neglect despite incense burning behind every corner. Seeing the dust as humidity seeped through my pants, I knew I couldn’t sleep there again. I had changed too much, five years in the US. It cured my chronic sinusitis but made me too spoiled for the damp, too soft for the cold.
Fire crackled and shadows danced on the peeling kitchen walls. Grandma boiled water at the stove. My feet in a red plastic basin, heat rising up my shins. I was watching Mountains May Depart. There was only the kettle’s hiss and Sally Yeh’s 珍重 tinny from laptop speakers.
The film’s Chinese title is 山河故人, Shanhe Guren. Mountains, rivers, land that belongs to kings and queens, and the people of the past. The concept of guren resists translation. It’s not quite old friend. It’s all those from the past who can no longer have a role in your life, no matter how you try to reach for them. The ones who kneaded your story and then receded, not with animosity, but the simple accumulation of distance and time. If guren is the person, guxiang is the place — they both take on the past tense. You only acquire a guxiang once you have turned around and left. You always think you could turn back around, look back. But how often do you?
My mom walked away from that house to be an accountant down south, in another province thousands of miles away. She was young. She wanted more than the village could give. Then she would meet her husband and get married in Wuhan. Her dad would die of cancer before her first son was born. She would never live in that house again. When she left, she didn’t know she was suspending a life. You never do. You think you’re saying goodbye — just for now, you tell yourself. But you don’t know when the temporary becomes permanent. Within that goodbye, you’ve bid farewell to another version of yourself. One who stayed. One who went back. The one who kept the thread intact instead of letting it unspool across oceans.
I said I would go back to China every summer. I said I would fly back to Los Angeles every month. Every move was promised to be temporary; every settlement permanent until boxes were packed.
That time I was back at Grandma’s house, I didn’t know. I didn’t know that a willow branch would break in the wind. I would send it off to her. That the plane would fly over Taipei City. Fall would come around three more times. I would never speak to her again.
It’s only times like now, when I’m leaving, that I think about this. I stand at the bow in the California wind. The sun sinks and sinks lower; my heart beats then beats again. I know that nothing remains, that everyone can only be with you for a part of the way. And so I ache to speak — to say something that might outlast the moment, that might reach back across the water to everything I’ve left. What can I say. What would I say. I have nothing to say, and everything, and the wind takes it all away.
I dreamed of Grandma last night. I ran out of the car on my way to the train station because I realized I’d forgotten something at home. In the distance, she stood in the field behind her house, the grass golden. She braced the wind in her usual coat, hands tucked in her padded sleeves. Strands of silver hair blew across her eyes. She didn’t brush it away. I waved my arms and called her name but no sound came out. She just stood there watching me approach, then a smile broke. I forgot she was already gone.
My hand met only air. No matter how far I tried to reach.
When I snapped awake, my heart was bursting. The cabin dark; the ship hummed beneath me. It’s the painful moments that substantiate life. It’s a shame that we only see the scenery in hindsight — through choppy seas, on a high-speed train, through these tears, after these pains.
This year marks the tenth anniversary of Mountains May Depart. At the screening, they handed out tickets for another one — in 2035. So that you know: somewhere, ten years from now, a screen will flicker to life, Zhao Tao will dance alone in the snow, and someone will be watching. Maybe you. Maybe no one you know.
We will be together again.