Alex Liang: The Shadow & Mahjong Table
/Mahjong Table
by Alex Liang ’21
When I arrived at your 34th-floor apartment for dinner, as I usually do on Fridays, I felt as if the last step of the stair had vanished and I was about to fall face-first onto the floor. Being a counselor, I often became dizzy and nauseated after a long day of listening to spouses arguing; attempting to reconcile broken relationships was a nightmare.
When I noticed my surroundings, your apartment seemed larger than the last time I was here. Had you redecorated? The space between the shoe rack and credenza had grown larger and the painting of sunflowers had gone elsewhere. The red-and-white checkered tablecloth normally covering your kitchen table was gone, leaving the wood bare. I set down my takeaway boxes of char siu, a sweet roasted pork dish, and white rice—your favorite. At Guangzhou’s Canton Tower across the street, the light show was beginning—the usual run-through of the colors of the rainbow. When I was a child, you never told me that the lights started at nine every night. Instead, you told me, “Watch this. Your father has magical powers,” and you pointed at the tower, which lit up because you commanded it to. I didn’t find out until one day when you fell asleep before nine, yet the tower still sparked. Still, I believed that you powered the tower for years after because only my father was so formidable.
Inside your apartment, the quiet whir of a fan and the dim light of the bulb hanging under it filled the living room. Rather than looking up to greet me, you sat hunched over at the couch, clasping the pillow against your chest instead of leaning back with it behind your shoulders. The tall wooden clock sat in its usual corner, hands moving loudly and clicking every second. A bowl with what looked to be stains of the tomato and beef soup you had for lunch sat in the sink, along with other plates crusted with residue.
“Game Of Thrones? What happened to Keep Running on Friday nights?”
You looked at me blankly and muttered, “What about it?”
I sat down on the opposite end of the couch and watched along for a bit. I tried not to notice the changes in you. Your hair was white and filled with bald spots yet still nicely combed. The undershirt you wore sagged off you as if it wanted to just lean forward and sleep. Age marks populated your hands, and a few ran up your arms and grouped on the sides of your cheeks.
On the wall, the photos of my childhood hung: the ones of the snow day in Beijing when my siblings and I were so small we sunk into white, of the expo in Shanghai where we stood between the legs of the giant blue mascot, and of the boat ride we took in Hangzhou. Briefly, I studied these images, pondering the years that I hoped you still remembered.
“Should I bring Jeff’s graduation photos to add to the wall? You know, the one with all three of us in front of his school?” I thought of telling you that mom would’ve liked to have a picture of her grandson on the wall but I reconsidered.
“Jeff? Oh, yes, bring that one.”
But the aloofness of your answer and the way your eyes glanced over the photos, through the white plaster wall, beyond the small cluster of buildings you lived among, made it seem as if you couldn’t remember the black dress shirt with the red tie that Jeff wore that day or the fuzzy brown sweater you wore over a collared shirt. I loved that brown sweater. You always wore it on special occasions. I liked it so much that I bought the same one but in blue for Jeff’s elementary school graduation.
The empty thumps of your feet on the cold wooden floor pestered me as you headed down the hall. Where did those dusty white slippers that you always insisted on wearing go? And where were the clacks of your walking cane?
“Dad, do you want me to get your cane?”
“I don’t use a cane,” you shot back.
You finally made your way to the bathroom, your Game of Thrones episode left behind. I thought of the days when I would come home and rob the box of candy you left on the counter and then ask how much you made playing mahjong with your friends. You’d complain about your bad luck and curse in Chinese. Then you’d demand I give back your chocolates.
I took the char siu meat and rice I’d brought with me and placed it in the microwave in your kitchen. The sweet smell of barbecue reminded me of the times when you were still our chef at family parties. While the food heated, I grabbed your favorite blue-trimmed plate and rinsed the oil and leftover bits of food off it. I took the white styrofoam box and carefully poured its contents onto the plate and placed it onto the panda-adorned tray. As I heard you open the bathroom door, I took the tray of food back to the couch and switched the channel to Keep Running.
You picked at the slices of meat, and I watched the episode for a couple minutes until I realized it was a rerun. I loved the TV here when I was younger because I could watch for as long as I wanted while your friends and my uncles laughed or argued at the mahjong table. But the clatter of mahjong pieces always made me want to join you. And whenever I wanted to play a game, you told me, “Once you start earning money, I’ll invite you to the table.” I would then run through the house to ask for leftover change before getting tired and watching TV again.
“Dad, how about a game of mahjong? We can bet if you like,” I chuckled as I turned around to face you. I waited for your energetic step and rolling laughter that always came when I challenged you to a game. But while your eyes may have moved off the screen, your mind stayed there staring.
“Oh sure, son, just go find it somewhere,” you muttered dismissively. I turned back around, as fast and as rigidly as your response. I knew the table was usually stacked underneath the newspapers you collected in the corner of the room behind the matte black couch. But the mahjong table was nowhere in sight. When I turned back around to ask you where the table was, the TV you were staring at had vanished, leaving the room quiet, and your eyes bore holes into the pale yellow wall instead.
“No, Dad, you can’t forget.”
But my cry was faint and disappeared as soon as it left my mouth. It was gone before you could hear it, departed like the photos with baby blue frames, the credenza, the box of candies and beef jerky. You hugged yourself instead of the pillow. The coffee table with the Doraemon comics you used to read to me and the burgundy rug beneath it had vanished from the room like vapor. I caught a glimpse of the curtains right before they whisked away. The soothing tick of the clock was suddenly absent and even the smell of roasted meat became the moldy odor of an empty apartment. Panic rose in me like smoke and I had to rest my hand against the wall to steady myself.
“Bring me the remote,” you said.
“I can’t. Everything in your apartment is ... missing,” I said. The muscles in my neck tightened and something ominous seemed to be grabbing at my throat. I felt fear, like the fear when I dangled from the swaying ski lift when I was five. You held me around the shoulder as my legs hung 100 feet off the ground and said, “If you want to ski, son, you have to get used to the heights.”
I replied, “What if I don’t want to get used to it?”
“You don’t have that choice, not now.”
The cold accentuated the wrinkles around your mouth, and you looked different, less like that indestructible hero I’d made you out to be, and far more fragile. As we trembled in the ski lift, your goggles hid your eyes but your pinched voice told me I would have to get used to it, even if I had the choice not to.
That same frail look seized you now. Rather than sitting on the black couch, you were sitting in the last chair in the house, the one I sat in to study as a child, the one with simple metal legs and a green plastic seat. Your entire living room was like a piece of paper smudged with erased marks—all the furniture effaced. The glasses with the brown frames you always kept on your lap didn’t sit there anymore. I wanted to claim something, but there were no objects left that really mattered anymore. Rather than fretting over it, I knelt down next to you, clasped your hand, and we watched the Canton Tower light show come to its end from your apartment window. Little gradients in sections like ombre shot straight up as if they might take off. The entire tower stood solemnly, glowing white like an angel, while pink rays of light rose from its sides and spanned out, forming large wings made of layers of crisscrossed radiance. It started over the night sky of Guangzhou with its small expressionless face, cruelly dimming everything else just by being so terribly bright.
The Shadow
by Alex Liang ’21
From my grandfather’s pale yellow house, I trudge to the little local market down a road that winds through terraced fields that look like overlapping green-onion pancakes. The smell of cooking smoke rises from the hay rooftops of my new neighbors. I pass the local dust-colored three-story school, where I see my would-be peers in classrooms remaining quiet, furiously taking notes. Standing outside windows crusted on the edges with falling plaster and watching failing students who couldn’t leave before they finished or before they gave up on their tests, I wanted to laugh. I hadn’t come here to take more tests; I had come for cheap candies and cheaper entertainment. No more Saturday classes or online tutors. No more final exams or midterm grade reports. I had left all of that behind.
It’s my first morning in the county of Yuanyang, far from Shanghai, far from the mass of surging people who jostled me on the subway and the thousands of students who outranked me at state math competitions, far from the small shadow that lingered behind me. Here in Yuanyang, the horizon has no rising towers; the blue sky, clear of smog; the air, bare without the blasts of honks and the odor of pollution. Here I am a red-crowned crane in a small willow tree, while in Shanghai I was a swallow in a cypress.
I walk into a small, nameless store and look around. On the floor, a lone black cat prances toward the fish section, where several questionable-looking fish lie on a bed of ice. I approach the clerk, and a girl about my age turns to greet me. “Huan ying guang lin.”
I know this girl. I saw her at my grandpa’s Chinese New Year party last year, the one my parents had forced me to attend. She had sat at the same table as all the other children in the corner of my grandpa’s shack, and while the rest of us grumbled over too-traditional dishes like pork in sweet and sour sauce, I remember her eyes, partially hidden behind wide rimmed glasses, glued to the dishes as they were passed from the parents’ table to ours. While the rest of us argued over the best restaurant in Shanghai and Beijing, she was the first to grab a piece of food. In that moment, I had wanted nothing more than to fly back to Shanghai. Now I was back in the same town as this country girl, who hadn’t even been accepted into the local high school.
I greet her as quickly and casually as possible so she doesn’t recognize me and then tell her. “I’ll take a bag of white rabbit candy and shrimp crisps.” I hand her a clean 100 RMB bill, and she ducks under the counter to grab the items.
As she pulls them out and sets them down on the counter, she asks, “Don’t you go to school in Shanghai?”
The muscles in my leg tense and my knees suddenly lock into place, trapping me at her store counter as if her curious eyes were grabbing me, holding me hostage. She’s waiting for an answer. Before my failures can come spilling out of my mouth, I blurt, “Aren’t you supposed to be in school?”
She looks down at the candy and crisps, stuffs them into a plastic bag, and tosses it across the counter at me.
My knees finally come unclenched, and I catch the bag and totter out of the store, mumbling a mix of an apology and a thank you. The sun’s glare is disorienting, I sit down on a stool by the door, the shade of the roof shielding me from my shadow. Ripping open the bag on my lap, I gorge on my candy, each piece becoming a wrapper on the ground. I tear through more than a dozen before I store the rest in my pockets for later.
With my stomach full of white rabbit, I head back to my grandfather’s house. On the way back, I glance at the farmers slaving over their premature corn and rice paddies, as if such meager harvests—partially eaten by hungry youngsters and bugs—could support their families. I pass the school again just as the sound of Chinese campus music plays and children run outside for jump rope. The three-story brown brick stands like an artifact. The entire school looks as if it has been washed with flames. The kids are almost as dirty as the school. Their tracksuit-like uniforms are more blue and black than blue and white, and the zippers all hang uselessly at the sides.
As I stop to watch, a little boy runs up to me and tugs on my pants. “Where’s your uniform?”
I stiffen. Instinctively, I say, “Don’t touch my pants. You’ll get them dirty.”
I chew on another white rabbit and throw the wrapper behind me near their jump rope, leering at the kids when they flock to it excitedly. Then I brush the dirt off my pants. I turn back towards my grandfather’s shack, leaving a trail of white rabbit wrappers behind.
The road ahead of me is flanked by green fields and mountains. On my right, the grass stretches from the sides of the stone road down to the canals of mud between rows of tea plants. Little clouds of gnats buzz around the horses in a wooden pen.
With the sun casting an orange haze over Yuanyang as far as the eye can see, the shadows of the hills and mountains stretch far over tiny hay rooftops and wooden doors. My own shadow casts itself across dirt shoe prints, disappearing every time the sun dips just under the clouds or the mountains, painting itself onto walls when I run past them, and fading away when the patches of sunlight on the sides of brick houses vanish behind me. It follows my footsteps and dropped candy wrappers while glancing all around its new home, always creeping at the corners of my vision. It sprints behind me, winds sharply around the chicken pen and right up to the wooden door of my grandfather’s house. But with the sun now setting at my, it leaps from its place on the stone floor and dangles from the door handle, and I see it all for the first time.
My shadow stands in front of me, head the size of a watermelon with legs and arms the length of toothpicks. My hand, reaching for the door, stops and hangs centimeters from the handle. I stare at him, a cut out of darkness. Me, but not.
My heart sweats, ice cold blood pumps against my eardrums. My breath clogs. And the shadow reaches out with its own hand, grips my skin between its knife-like fingers, pinching its way up my arm. It’s cold and sleek, feverish and rusty, painless, but sharp like a chainsaw all at once. It rests on my shoulder for a moment. As every draft of wind sends its head tumbling down and its body shivering, its vindictive grip sinks my shoes into the stone.
Finally, it reaches the back of my neck, clutching at strings of my hair and grabbing at my scalp. My breath freezes as it pinches the corner of my mouth and swings onto my nose. It tugs on my eyelids before pulling itself up to the eyebrows and hanging there, both dead and alive in the same moment. It is the cold body of a dead man that still pulls on the rope, weighing down on my face with his fingers like blades.
It laughs at my pocket of white rabbit candy. It scoffs at my shoes—their scratched soles, the soot on the laces. It snorts at the watch I purposely keep exposed before tearing it off and throwing it away.
The shadow grows, or perhaps I shrink. It leans down, and its cold breath washes over me, stinging my ears bright red. It smiles, a wolfish grin, and asks, "Is this the last place you can go?"
Its hand catches my skull in the same way thorns tear and ensnare clothes, and I let it, my insecurities holding me by the head again. Even if I leave, it will never.