* — August 22, 2019
Mazu

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AYI TELLS ME NOT to wear black at her funeral (the way Americans do). She tells me not to wear white (the way Chinese do). She wants all of us to dress in red, the shade our goddess Mazu wears when she stands on the shore, guiding fishermen home with the beacon of her body. Ayi says death is just like any man: he’s attracted most to girls. Ayi teaches me how to stay a virgin: don’t sleep with your mouth open or it will invite a man in. In public, keep your hands above your waist. Practice your chokehold on trees. In the kitchen, Ayi tears the mustard greens with her bare hands, says using a knife will cut your life short. Says, Wait til you have a man. You’ll learn the bed is a cutting board.


*

Ayi was my mother’s oldest half-sister, born in a bodice of her own blood. Because of this, Ama nicknamed her Mazu, and every day Ayi wore something red: a petal pressed into her thumbnail, a handkerchief tucked against her waist, the hem of her only dress. Even her favorite foods were red: pig’s blood cake, char siu buns, fish that grew red gills after drinking the blood of the drowned. Ayi’s touch could turn anything red: when she drank out of the river, it unraveled like a red ribbon all the way down to the sea. The missionaries called her blessed, a girl who could turn water to wine, but Ayi never felt that way. Her teeth were always stained red, and her bathwater always looked bloody. After three of Ayi’s classmates turned red themselves, their skin recast in the color of wounds, Ayi had to start wearing gloves to school.

 

During martial law in Taiwan, it was easier not to bury the dead. It was considered a waste of sky to burn bodies. Ayi once thought she saw a skull in the river, but it was just the sky’s reflection, blue clawed apart by clouds. Ayi’s favorite time of day was sundown, when even the sky was the color of wartime water, when her mother tethered the chickens before a typhoon. Each hen’s legs were tied to another’s, weighing them down as one body. Ayi says it’s the same strategy to drown: mothers were tied to their daughters’ corpses, fathers tore holes in the water for their sons to follow through.

 

On Sundays, we pinch dumplings for Ayi’s church friends, kneading each into a white nipple. She tells me a story about a line of boys with their backs to the river, guns to their chests. I tell Ayi that maybe God likes when we die in a line because it’s more polite. She laughs and uncouples the two dumplings I’m holding in one hand, says One at a time, meimei. Do one at a time.



*

Ayi was converted by an American who wore two belts at a time – one to keep his pants up, the other to strip off and beat schoolboys with. He taught the bible in beatings: if a child misspoke a verse, switching the English word for salt with the Atayal one for water, he flayed the brown off their backs. He taught my grandmother how to use a toothbrush, though she set its bristles on fire and used it as a thumb-sized torchlight. He tried to teach her to chew 21 times before swallowing. But there were no numbers in her language, so he counted for her, pressing his ear to her jaw to count the meetings of her teeth. I know the face of everyone I love, my grandmother likes to say. I never need to count who’s here, who’s missing.

 

On days he claimed were Sundays, the missionary led a choir through all the villages. The boys swung at the high notes and missed, most of them too old to be singing children’s songs. The girls tripped on their hymns but kept going anyway, voices muted by the humidity. There were tent-sermons and cheese sandwiches. There were buckets of lemonade and the missionary wives’ children, each sunburned a different shade and nicknamed for their redness: the tallest son was Terracotta, the twins were called Blood, the little blonde girl was Rosewater. Of all the missionary children, Terracotta was least afraid of the godless and went sparrow-hunting with Ayi and her cousins, even brought along his own pocket of stones. Ayi and Terracotta shucked off the tail feathers, tore off wings that were too much bone, and grilled the torsos on abandoned sections of chickenwire heated by the sun. Cooked on wire, the sparrows’ meat blackened in a square-grid pattern, but it tasted better that way: they could pretend they were eating something bred in captivity, something caged to collect fat. Ayi and Terracotta could pretend they came from the same home, the same hunger. That their mouths shared a word for bird.

 

Terracotta kissed Ayi once. They were waist-deep in the river, eels curling into anklets. Terracotta had taught her to skip stones, but Ayi preferred throwing them in deep, watching the eels scatter in rings. She liked the way things sank. She liked the way her nipples stained through a wet dress, how Terracotta prayed with his eyes open when everyone else’s were closed. How he brought his mother’s salty bread wrapped in newspaper, explained what wheat was by motioning a field, acting out the stalks with his fingers. His eyelashes were so pale they seemed to speak light. It made her feel eel-dark, oily. When he kissed her in the middle of the river, she thought of Jesus walking on water. She thought of the river stiffening to glass, caging both of them from the waist down. He bent her against the riverbank, fastened his teeth to her left breast. He pinned her by the wrists like Jesus. She thought: if this is not divinity, then it must be death.



*

My first time in church, I sweat my dress into a deeper red. I don’t understand the Mandarin word for God: is it shang di, which sounded to me like “above earth,” or “xiang di,” which sounded like “elephant land”? I spend so long thinking about a planet inhabited solely by elephants that I don’t stand up when it’s time to sing. I sit until Ayi twists the skin of my kneecap and I cry out in the pitch of worship. I don’t know the words. I mouth elephant elephant elephant until the very end, proud of this small sacrilege.



*

After that night by the river, Ayi checked her belly hourly, tapped it as if testing the ripeness of a melon, not sure what she was listening for. The rest of that summer, Terracotta spent more hours with his father in the churchyard, building birdhouses everyone mistook for birdtraps. When the priests realized the locals had been stealing eggs and hatchlings from the nests, they dismantled each house. Terracotta grew two feet in one summer, began wearing two belts like his father. In another year, he would grow a beard. Cheek-rash began to spread among the local girls, until almost every one of Ayi’s schoolmates wore the same style of redness on their faces, necks, inner thighs. Later, when Ayi was midwife to one of Terracotta’s bastards, she waited for the mother to fall asleep before bringing the child to her breast, pretending it was hers. She wanted it to wake, to be seen by its blue eyes, to name it something biblical, something fatherly. But already the baby responded to any sound, turning its head to birdcall, the stove steaming, Ayi washing the birth-blade. Already this child was native to its namelessness.

 

When I was born with a red birthmark like lacework on my belly, Ayi called this karma, said my skin was her punishment for surrendering by that river. Later, the birthmark darkened to the color of a burn, a menstrual stain. Ayi promised she’d pay to have it removed when I turned 16, no matter how expensive it would be. She said it was a price she’d been waiting to pay.



*

When Ayi had her first stroke, all the blood vessels in her eyes broke at once, her pupils pinned to red. She had been holding a bowl of red dates stuffed with rice cakes, and the bowl broke in two even pieces. Ayi’s left side was paralyzed for that whole year. She could only walk in circles, turn corners. She complained about her knifehand, which shriveled as if soaked in water. I loved playing with her dead fingers, the way her bones rolled beneath the skin, a bag of loose parts. Her thumb slumped forward, and I liked to flick it back and forth with my tongue. When she had her second stroke the following summer, Ayi lost all jaw movement. It gave her an accent on top of her accent, each vowel filling with spit. My mother said we couldn’t go to the doctor because Ayi had no papers, but after the second stroke, when Ayi flapped twice on our floor like a fish and I suggested putting her in water, my mother agreed we had to see a doctor.

 

At the doctor’s, Ayi refused to undress, said if any man wanted to see her naked he had better marry her first. The doctor let her keep her clothes on under the gown, and the nurse cut a slit in her long sleeve to draw her blood. They better not ask me to shit into anything, Ayi said. I shit for no one.

 

In Chinese, the word for stroke is the middle wind. When the doctor asked what happened to Ayi’s eyes, I translated literally: there’s a wind in her body, I said. He asked me what I meant by wind, and I blew into his face, my spit landing on his lip. His flinched, shut his eyes. Like that, I said, but inside her.

 

Later, one of the nurses translated, a woman from Malaysia whose hair was dyed like a Japanese pop star’s, red highlights and black at the roots. The nurse from Malaysia said that Ayi should have been hospitalized or dead. She told me I should be seeing a doctor regularly, that she was having trouble finding my birth records, my medical history. Later, she showed us the X-ray of Ayi’s body, the screen cloudy over Ayi’s spine. That’s permanent nerve damage, she said, thumbing the space between Ayi’s spine and pelvis. After that, Ayi spent most of her days on our sofa, a pill bottle of blood pressure medicine wedged between the cushions. Twice a day, she took three pills. She’d always say, for the price of these, I could buy a whole new body.

 

When the school called, asking why I had missed so many days, I said my aunt suffered two winds. Ayi still refused to take off her clothes when my mother tried bathing her, so my brother and I dragged her into the backyard, hosed her down with all her clothes on. Her clothes were so cheap the color slid right off the cloth. We watched the red polka dots on her pajama pants fall off one by one. She spat water at us and swore the whole time, said there was no reason for a woman like her to be clean.



*

Ayi had three miscarriages. After each one, she ate a whole papaya with seeds, prayed to Guanyin, bought all new clothes. After each one, her husband slept in another room, couldn’t stand the smell of the bed after something dead had been born in it. Ayi’s husband was later arrested for driving an illegal taxi, scamming Japanese businessmen who toured aboriginal reservations looking for millet wine and girls. Ayi’s husband had stolen a car from a junkyard in Taipei, hammered it into a drivable shape, and repainted it himself. The original color was red, and occasionally, when he backed the car into someone’s chicken coop or swerved too close to a corner, its red skeleton would show in spots. After jail, Ayi’s husband was seen on the southern coast, impersonating pop stars in karaoke bars for tips. By then, Ayi had already remarried and miscarried twice more. Her longest pregnancy lasted one summer. The tribal doctor told her to eat only things with seeds or eggs, so she ate only watermelon, only the teeth-colored pits of guavas, only the reddest fish roe.

 

When the city bought her house and remodeled the sugarcane fields into a stripmall, Ayi moved to another house, riverside and tin-walled. It was so cheap she knew it must already be rented out to ghosts. She was right: a local boy had died there one night, stabbed in his sleep by his father. His father – drunk that night and craving pork – mistook him for the family pig, though exactly how this was possible – the pig weighed twice as much as the boy – no one really understood. The boy’s father later said he knew something was wrong when he stabbed the pig and it made no sound. After hearing this story, Ayi stopped cooking pork in the house. Even when she craved red things, she never ate any part of a pig in the presence of such slaughter. Sometimes, she liked to treat this ghost like a son, talking to him at the darkest time of night: Hello, pig boy. I’m sorry your father wanted to eat you. She pictured a boy with hooves. She pictured a baby with ears on the top of its head. She thought about loving it anyway. When she looked at other people’s children in the streets, catching fish in the river with hand-folded paper cups or cutting cucumbers with baby teeth, she wondered if the hunger she felt was murder or motherhood.

 

Pig boy, I’ll never eat you again. Ayi stopped sweeping her doorway of spirits. She wanted him to stay. Whenever the neighbors retold the story of the murdered son, she always stopped them short of saying his name. As long as she never knew it, she could name him herself. She gave him her maiden name, meaning flood, a homonym for red. It was a relief to love a child not hers to kill.



*

I once asked Ayi if there was a country for the dead. A place after the body. Ayi said America is a kind of afterlife. When I look at old photos of Ayi on the beach in Yilan, I almost believe it: in all of them, she is alive in a way I’ve never seen her, mouthful of salt, the sea’s movement in her hair. She is pregnant in almost all of them, her belly casting a shadow no body would ever fill.

 

In the last photo we took of her, Ayi is holding a nail clipper in her mouth. By then, neither of her hands worked. Her wrists swelled into beets, purple-red and shiny. The wind in her was a blood-whip. Ayi learned to sew with a needle tucked between her two front teeth, her tongue tying the knot. I can do everything but wipe my own ass, she said, laughing. No one’s got a tongue long enough for that.



*

It was Ayi who taught me how to flood-proof a house: fill the door-cracks with sand. Keep a bucket under every sink. Learn to read the salt in the air. Before a flood, there is always a flock of birds pointing like a finger to the east. There is always a red rim around the sun. In Yilan, everything floods twice a year. Here, Ayi wakes from the sofa after sleeping for a day at a time, her throat frantic with thirst. I help her swallow by stroking her collarbone, tilting her chin back. When my brother brings friends home to play video games, we have to drag her behind the couch, hide her beneath blankets. Still, his friends always squint through the air like it’s smoke, ask what’s that smell? We both shrug, say we don’t know, say it’s probably coming from somewhere outside.

 

Whenever Ayi falls asleep, my brother and I play our game: whoever can fit the largest thing in her nostril without waking her is the winner. The first time, we get to a bobby pin in before she snorts awake. After that, my brother calls her pig aunty.

 

The biggest thing we could ever fit inside her was a metal whistle my brother got in his Boy Scout wilderness survival kit. When she breathed out of her nostril, the whistle wailed her awake. That same year, my brother quit the Boy Scouts when he was caught pissing in the corner of the room during a potluck. The other parents called him un-Christian, asked my mother where he had learned to behave that way. My mother didn’t explain that when Ayi couldn’t make it to the bathroom, she peed quietly in the nearest corner of the nearest room. Everywhere the walls met in our house, there was a yellow shadow, the paint splayed off.

 

Instead, my mother reassured the scout leaders that we had converted a long time ago, that we had never known another god, that she would teach my brother to behave his body.



*

The etymology of Mazu: ma, meaning mother. Zu, meaning ancestor, originator. In every version of the story, Mazu is the seventh child of a fisherman. When she didn’t cry at birth, they named her Mo Niang, meaning silent girl, mouthless maiden. Mazu could project herself in dreams, swimming out to save men from the mouths of storms. When she died saving her father and brother from a typhoon, she was rebuilt as a statue where the river unraveled into the sea. They painted her red from head to toe, a woman with skin like blood, a woman who still appears in the sea’s dreams.

 

My mother was the seventh daughter of a salt farmer. Even now, she can’t stand the taste of salt, says it reminds her of the scent he left in every room, how he came back from long shifts of washing dishes at the Chinese restaurant in LA, skin puckered up to the elbow. At church with Ayi, we pray for my mother, her father, all mothers without fathers. The preacher is a man with a son. Ayi says that God is a man’s work, and grief is a woman’s.

 

At home, my mother replaces all the salt in her dishes with sugar, cooks everything so sweet we spit it back into our bowls when she’s not looking. She cooks everything with so much sugar the ants re-infest the kitchen. My brother and I loved when the ants came. We used pieces of scotch tape to pick them up in clots. We perforated their lines and count the seconds it takes for more ants to pour into the gaps we’ve made. Sometimes, we liked to kill them one at a time, watching an entire lineage of ants walk over their dead, no one bothering to pick up the body or bring it home. We kept waiting for the queen to show, but we knew it was winged, somewhere above our heads and unkillable, her appetite an entire army.



*

Ayi flew back to Taiwan the day of our elementary school field trip. We were on our way to San Francisco for the Body Worlds exhibit, owned by a German scientist who skinned human specimens and suspended each skinless body mid-movement: playing soccer with an imaginary ball. Riding a bicycle made of wire. Doing the backstroke in invisible water. Some of the bodies were pregnant, some were children. Without skin, they all looked like the same body, a clutter of organs for a torso, blue and red veins streaming into a shellacked skull. Later, the exhibit would undergo international scrutiny for body trafficking. News sources would later report that most of the bodies were Chinese. One Chinese mother insisted that the pregnant woman, installed on a wire stand with her fetus exposed, must be the body of her missing daughter – on the news, she holds a picture of her daughter wearing skin, juxtaposed next to a photo of the exhibited woman. Doesn’t the baby look just like her? Can’t you see she’s my daughter?

 

Ayi packed her suitcase with everything she’d miss: boxes of Cheerios, apple-flavored B-vitamins, fuzzy ankle socks. The only thing I can’t bring with me is you, she said, pretending to zip me up in her suitcase. Ayi still limped and her hands hung loose from their wrists, but she had begun to eat solid food again, could swallow all by herself. For a year after Ayi left, my mother wouldn’t throw out the uneaten jars of baby food we had bought her, all the red flavors: beet and apple, mixed berry, rhubarb. Before my mother drove her to the airport, Ayi gave my brother a quarter minted the year 1988. Eights were lucky, and a double-8 meant double-riches. My brother later spent it in the high school condom machine, just to prove that he knew how to use it. Ayi gave me her jade bangles, a gold coin with Chiang Kai-Shek’s portrait, and her only red bra. The cups were large enough to be my helmet. When I told her this, she laughed. It’s a helmet for your chest, she said, using the word for chest that also means heart.

 

The bra was fringed with lace, with a rhinestone bow between the cups that had already started to loosen and fall away like a scab. It’s good to own something to aspire to was the last thing she told me. I put both my fists in one cup, fingered the band. By the time my breasts grew large enough to wear it, the band wouldn’t fit around my ribs. I asked my mother if she had washed and shrunk it, but she swore she’d never touch that thing.

 

I couldn’t believe Ayi had ever been smaller than me, but I heard that when she died of her last stroke, two years after landing in Taiwan, our family saved money buying a child-sized coffin.



*

Ayi’s favorite folk song begins: When yesterday is young again. After church, she walked me to the park where the geese were known to eat anything. We tested this theory for hours, tossing them bits of pork sausage, fishbone, pieces of a broken frisbee. Ayi was often mistaken for my mother or my grandmother. She bought me my church outfit, a red velvet tiered skirt and a satin blouse the color of margarine. It was so shiny I liked to lick the fabric, but Ayi pinched my tongue with her thumb and forefinger, told me it was disrespectful to eat the clothing off my body in the presence of its creator.

 

Later, Ayi told me that feeding the geese was cruel. They get fat from being fed by humans, and then they can’t migrate, she said. They could no longer fly south, or maybe they no longer needed to. They were stranded in their bodies. After the stroke, when I first started to spoon-feed Ayi, I remembered those geese. I’d never seen one open its greased wings. I wondered if one day Ayi’s legs would seam together, her skin leathering like the sofa’s. When I asked Ayi if feeding her like a goose meant she could never go home again, she said she was already there.




Originally published in No Tokens Issue No. 8. View full issue & more.
*
K-Ming Chang is an emerging lesbian and a Kundiman fellow. Her poetry has been anthologized in Ink Knows No Borders, Best New Poets 2018, Bettering American Poetry Vol. 3, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. She was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. Her debut novel BESTIARY is forthcoming from One World / Random House in fall 2020. She lives in New York.