The Year of the Rat (III)

1984

Snap. Snap. Pop. Pop.

Firecrackers popped throughout the night like celebratory gunfire and crowds cheered it on up and down the streets of Chinatown, but all Remembrance Wu wanted to do was sleep.

It had been an arduous week in preparation for the lunar new year holiday, and much of the final work had fallen on her her seventy-two year old shoulders. She rubbed oil on her fingers, joints aching from folding hundreds of dumplings and xiao ma for the festival of food over the next few days.

But it was worth it, as always. What is life if not for family? What is the world without the traditions that bind us, from the far into the precipice of our ancestors to our descendants for whom we live on for?

Remembrance stopped rubbing her fingers long enough to pick up a photo on the mantle near her chair. Her tall, proud son Bernard and his wife Sherry stood side by side. Sherry gently cupped the enlarged curve of her heavy belly. This year would be more blessed than most with the addition of a new grandson to the family line.

So why do I feel so weary? What heavy ghost keeps sleep at bay?

Remembrance put down the photo. With great effort she then pushed herself to her feet. Despite the celebrations outside the interior of the apartment was silent, making her feel oddly disconnected from the rest of the world. Her husband, loud as thunder during the day, slept soundless throughout the night. He had no trouble falling asleep as she often did, finding serenity within seconds of closing his eyes.

She approached the tall polished shelf in the kitchen which housed her greatest treasures. Photos of Bernard and her daughter Linda played out like a reverse canvas of their lives, from the recent birth of Linda’s twin daughters, to their wedding ceremonies in 1983 and 1981 respectively. Both brides were wrapped in traditional red. The backward story continued to their childhood in the black and white era of the 1940’s. Bernard looked stoic even then, an old man in an toddlers body.

On the upper shelves was her own life from that point backward before her children were born, with her extravagant wedding at the Palace Highground in the San Francisco Chinatown standing as the centerpiece.

There she paused. She had never been beautiful as her mother or her children, a curse she supposed she carried from her ill timed birth. Yet looking back at the single captured second of time she felt a burst of vain pride. She did look lovely on her wedding day, and happy, with the best years of her life laid out open in front of her like an unwritten book. What would she have thought that day seeing this old woman, who stays awake into unsavory hours, worrying about thoughts she can’t even fully grasp? She turned back to other photos of her life, scrolling backward again to her years as a nurse in the Army base in the Presidio during the Great War, then all the way her own carefree school days in the cozy home of her parents on Waverly Streets.

From there she looked up on that highest shelf where the surviving mementos of her parents themselves survived. There she studied photos of her stone faced father, a successful finance trader between San Francisco and Shanghai before the Japanese invasion, and her mysterious, beautiful, green-eyed mother, of whom much rumor swirled, that she was the illegitimate daughter of an American senator and a Chinese escort, that she had been a woman of ill repute herself, that she had donated all the wealth she possessed to rebuild the parts of Chinatown after the great earthquake of 1906 leveled the city.

Remembrance pulled down the oldest photo she had of her mother, from the turn of the century when she was young and in the full bloom of her beauty. She was looking away from the camera, the strange style at this early time of photography, but still smiling richly, as if she saw some some secret magic of life she kept to herself. She preferred to remember her mother like this, with a sense of wonder that still gleaned occasionally over the years before it was overtaken by an ebbing sense of sadness.

She gently turned the photo over and read the strange notes written along the back edges she had read a thousand times before she had first discovered them two decades back. The first, in looping classic writing read:

With all my love, always — C

Then scribbled below in different handwriting:

Always. The origin is the source, the source is the origin.

Her skin prickled with goosebumps as another round of muffled firecrackers and applause rang from outside. She felt some certainty developing in her gut. It was a core intuition, something she had always possessed as a womanly instinct but which had grown sharper over the decades.

Something was wrong in the air this night, something dangerous.

And as she looked from the photo of her mother in her fingers over to the photo of at the mantle of her son and pregnant daughter-in-law and she knew they were all connected somehow, and that the shape of this connection was still being formed.

The child has been cursed.

Her intuition stopped beating within her. She closed her eyes, feeling a throbbing sensation in her forehead replace it. Her fingers grasped at the counter, dropping the photo of her mother, and for once she did not feel pain. She coughed, sucking in air, hearing the distant beat of drums and fireworks.

This is my fault, she realized. Someone has found the boys name.

After a few moments she composed herself and knew what she had to do. She shuffled across the dark living room to put on another sweater layer and coat, then added a bonnet over her head. She grabbed her wallet stuffed full of cash to give out for the new years celebrations and opened the door outside.

The sound of the festivities struck her with a wall of incomprehensible noise. Her husband had always boasted the Chinese knew how to through a proper celebration. While the Americans sang quiet hymns and carols for their Easter and Christmas holidays the Chinese welcomed in the lunar new year, the greatest of celebrations, with a non-stop bonanza of parades, fireworks, and noisemakers.

The streets of Los Angeles Chinatown were covered in red confetti and blackened marks where fireworks had detonated. The air smelled heavy of sulfur and the cooking oils boiling dumplings and dim sum from street vendors. The parades were long over but men were still beat drums and singing drunken songs. One dancer stood half in and half out of Dancing Lion costumes, stumbling drunk and slurring Cantonese.

She often suspected part of the point of the ruckus was a show of defiance to the normally differential, silent way the Chinese immigrants lived their lives in America. Keep your head down, follow the rules, and stay out of the way, her father often urged her. You are Chinese, not American. Never forget that because they never will. So most Chinese like her husband and son thrived in America by taking on names like Harry and Bernard and learning to speak English as well as any of their white associates. Any animosity built up was repressed throughout the year, as they hid their true nature into small safe harbors such as this cluster of streets near the Chavez Ravine. The new year was the one time of year all that pressure could be released, and the Chinese of the city took full advantage of it.

As Remembrance made her way down the street she saw small groups of Americans mixed in the waves of red Asian faces, some openly gawking at the scenes and others seeming to enjoy being embedded in the reverie. Every year there are more and more here, she thought. Even a few Mexicans and negros. What a world, when are seeing us with true eyes.

She finally stopped at the teller shop of Yang Weihan on the corner of Alpine and Hill streets. Inside the cluttered main room she found him, wizened down to thin bones and wearing a white wispy mustache that he assumed made him look like an ancient mystic.

Yang Weihan spotted her and his little brown eyes widened. He hurried the two teenage girls he had been doing readings for out of the building and beckoned Remembrance into the back room of his shop where he did the most extensive, deep fortune tellings.

“Esteemed Wu, what brings you at this hour? I have never seen such terror in your eyes, most resolute as they are.”

She chose her words carefully with the new year date so near. “I suspect an unwelcome thought has been laid upon my grandson,” Remembrance said.

Yang Weihan raised bushy eyebrows in concern. “Oh that will not do, not do. Sit, sit please tell me more.”

He served tea, a mild oolong blend, and she delved into the story.

Two months before she had been discussing the name of her grandson with her own son and daughter-in-law. They had already settled on the name Daniel to appear on his American birth certificate, and that was without concern as it would not be his true name, the name that Ould be recorded in the Wu family history back in the ancestral village in Guangzhou Provence and logged for all future generations to pay reverence to.

For that true name she discussed using the family poem, which had been used by the Wu family for millennia. Family poems were sacred things, a text written by a long distant ancestor which echoed through the ages. Each new generation of Wu took the next word of the poem as part of their own name so that whenever family gatherings were held relatives could identify each other by the given name for their generation. For the Wu poem her husband Harry carried the generation word yin for “sound”, her son Bernard had the name sheng for “rising”, and her grandsons generation would carry the name zhi for “wisdom”.

Following the naming structure had been a matter of course for generations. Her daughter Linda had even used zhi for both of her daughters names, even though women were typically left out of poem. This was acceptable because her own husband was of Fujian descent, a region with much chaos and internal migration and whose family poem had been lost.

To her surprise Bernard shook his head at the suggestion. “No mother, we are a modern family now.”

“We could not find any variation of Zhi in a name that we liked,” Sherry explained. She had the grace to look pained over the decision.

Remembrance was too shocked to speak for a moment. “Did you discuss this with a fortuneteller?”

Her son and daughter-in-law laughed. “We are not seeing a doodling old fool like Yang Weihan for something like this mother. We were reading from characters in a book of baby names.”

Remembrance gently put down the cup of tea she had been drinking and shook her head, mouth agape. “You cannot do this. Your son would be left out of the Wu family book that goes back hundreds of generations. He would be lost among his own family.”

Bernard dismissively waved his hands. “No mother, we are still recording it in the family book, the tilling money has been paid already to the family temple in Guangzhou. We just see no need to continue on this archaic tradition.”

“We’ve selected the name Wu Zhang Wei. It’s a fine name, don’t you think?”

At that moment Remembrance made a critical decision. She could have forced the issue, plead with them to reconsider, drug them by the ear directly to Yang Weihan himself and demanded they get a proper accounting of their sons future.

But then she thought of her mother, the free spirit she was, who had never forced through draconian means the strict adherence to rule and ritual that many of her friends and classmates suffered through. She had allowed Remembrance to find the grace of their traditions in her own natural way, which allowed them to bloom more fully in the end in her respect for them. She had tried to be the same as a mother to her own children but often found herself acting more like the mothers she had heard about in whispers, laying into her children about respect for their ways.

Maybe that is why he is rebelling against me now, she had thought. Bernard was always stubborn, more-so than me or even his father. This is his revenge.

So against her own judgement Remembrance had relented in the name and allowed the chosen name, lacking any coherence or meaning to her grandsons future, proceed forward.

At the end of her tale Yang Weihan shook his little head side to side in dismay. “Oh dear, oh dear. You made a terrible mistake. The name they chose was weak and offered no protection. When it was shared with others back in the home register someone learned and took advantage of it.”

“Da siu yan?” Remembrance asked. A curse from a beating woman, another fortune teller selling their skills to inflect a black mark on others. It was part of the trade of the business.

The small man nodded sadly. “We must reverse it quickly.”

“I will pay what is needed,” she replied. Nothing was more important to her in this critical moment that would decide the future of her grandson.

Yang Weihan nodded. “Come, come.”

He led her to the back end of the room, where he rolled out an old dusty rug. Inside the rug were the bones of a thousand old readings, cracked and drained of marrow. From other small wrapped cloth drenched in a layer of oil he pulled out his own tools, equally ancient dice and a knife carved of steel.

“Your finger, please.”

She nodded. Her grandson was of her blood and he was of hers. The source is the origin, and the origin is the source, she thought. He pricked her outstretched finger and squeezed out drops of her blood onto the animal bones in his collection. It soaked in a new layer of crimson red.

Yang Weihan lit candled incense and wrapped the bones in the oiled sack. He rolled them about, praying as he tossed and turned them together. Then he rolled them across the velvet rug, white stars on dark sky. He waited to see where they landed and which numbers faced upwards at them. He pulled on a parchment and pen and took notes. He continued, chanting throughout, recollecting and rolling again and again.

Remembrance watched nervously the longer this went on. She had done such tellings before, during the births of her own children and before her wedding day. Yet never before had she been possessed with such a feeling of dread. This reading went on longer than those as well, with the gaunt face Yang Weihan face growing deeply creased with concern at every new reading. Fortunes in such readings could be as dreadful as they were joyous. You might learn your child would be born healthy, but suffer an early death. Or that they would have some ill curse upon for their entire lives. The truth was never easy to learn.

Finally Yang Weihan rolled out one final reading. “Aha!”

“What is it?”

“Your grandson has a complex future. There are many moving pieces, which make a singular fate hard to see. His fortune is incredibly auspicious in material fortune and health, but terribly in other ways. He will be unlucky in love, and have nightmarish, prophetic dreams for his entire life. Such an imbalance is unstable, and his life sits on a precipice.”

“What can we do?”

“I do see the curse on him, attempting to shift this balance to disaster. We must counter it with a perfect name. One kept secret and known only to a sacred few know. The name must be bound to him at birth. Anything less and the boy is doomed.”

“And what should that name be?”

Yang Weihan looked up at her with sad eyes. “This perfect name is one that can only be discovered by you, Wu Yong-Shi. And you haven’t much time.”