Where Waters Meet by Zhang Ling

Author:Zhang Ling [Ling, Zhang]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-04-30T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter IV

SISTERS

Email from Phoenix to George, 2011.11.3 @ 02:07 China Standard Time

Dear Old George,

My visit to Wenzhou feels like a French absurdist drama. I tried to look for the school I attended and the metallurgical plant my dad and I both worked for. The school is gone, and the site of the plant now a shopping mall. Town-head, the street where I was born and raised, has been expanded to a thoroughfare, all the houses along it eradicated. I don’t have any DNA left in the city to prove who I am. Can someone staying in a hotel honestly claim she’s come home?

The real climax came yesterday when I ran into an old schoolmate. We were in the same class for four years and trained together at the Youth Palace, she in table tennis, I winter swimming. But her version of school life differs so much from mine that I wonder whether someone has drilled into my brain and replaced a chip. She had no recollection of me ever in the swimming program, and she told me the reason for Meng Long’s downfall was “he couldn’t keep his dick in his pants”—he screwed a female phys ed teacher whose husband kicked up a huge stink with the committee. Holy cow, her details are juicy.

I was in a daze for much of the day. The scenes I wrote with such a sense of reality in my manuscript, are they not even my actual experience? Did I create a childhood and youth purely with my imagination? Or have I fallen prey to some sort of gaslighting? The one person who can verify my history is silent in an urn. But I have decided to trust my own memory—this is all I have. My lost town has no place to go except in my memory, so I have to stick to it regardless.

More bad news. It may not be a viable option to inter Ma’s ashes next to Pa. The situation is complicated, I’ll give you the details when you call.

Don’t bother proofreading the section named Sisters. Auntie Mei has added a few new details and switched the sequence of some events. She says Ma and she had several long heart-to-hearts before Ma left for Wenzhou to marry Pa, during which Ma told her things she had had no idea about. I am trying to knead in Ma’s perspective, so just wait.

Nix

P.S. I am taking the noon train back to Shanghai.

Email from George to Phoenix, 2011.11.4 @ 12:55 Eastern Standard Time

Dear Nix,

It’s good to hear your voice (don’t look at the phone bill for this month). As much as I miss you, I must say your trip has done you good: it stirs up emotions in you I didn’t quite see in Toronto. People believe what they choose to believe. Memory is subjective, so in that sense we are all gaslighting others somewhat when we assert our version of the past. But we have to trust our own memory, otherwise we crumble.

As soon as I hung up the phone, I realized I had forgotten something—my memory is a sieve now.

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