When I return to Shanghai, my father is working as a food delivery man. Two years earlier, when he was fifty-nine years old, he’d been hired by an app that allowed its workers to ride bicycles instead of the ubiquitous scooters that zip around Shanghai. Smartphones were only beginning to gain popularity when I’d left the city, and now everyone could tap a button to receive anything, from a single coffee to business lunch-sets to crates of genetically engineered fruit from southern provinces. My father started delivering as a pastime and to make some extra cash. Sometimes he claims it is for exercise.
For a few hours each day he rides his bicycle and delivers meals to households in the upper middle-class neighborhood of Century Park, earning between the equivalent of ten to twenty dollars a day. He is visibly much older than the other delivery drivers, usually young men from provinces seeking economic opportunities in Shanghai. The fatality and injury rate for delivery drivers in China has skyrocketed in recent years, mostly because the delivery men race through ruthless traffic to deliver the most orders. They track their earnings and statistics in apps like it’s a videogame, only they suffer real penalties if they do not meet targets. My father was recently reported for working in ‘plain clothes’ and the company docked his earnings, forcing him to order and wear their bright blue helmet and uniform. But if he dons this getup, he does so privately, and changes before he returns, at least while I am visiting. When he comes home he sits down at his desk and watches online videos on 2x speed: Taiwanese talk shows with pro-China slants, true crime vlogs, and 100-episode documentaries on Chinese history. Sometimes several videos are running at the same time, the chipmunk noises of sped-up narration intermingling like the manifestation of a noisy, overstimulated mind.
The first week I visit, his documentary is about the Zhou kingdom, which gave rise to some of China’s most famous thinkers and precedes the Chunqiu and Warring States eras. My father is obsessed with the matter of worship, which he says has been washed out of most Chinese history taught since the Communist takeover, a matter of downplaying religion. But the enormous bronzes that are preserved in so many museums were in fact, he says, instruments of worship. Besides building temples, these ding were the ultimate methods of communicating with the worlds beyond, of divining the future. He tells me human and animal remains had been found in ancient sacrificial ceremonies, cooked in these cauldrons. He then switches to an open tab with Twitter and scowls at a headline about Hunter Biden in a dispute over alimony payments. ‘America is going down the drain,’ he says.
This trip to Shanghai marks four long years since I saw my Chinese family, and nearly a decade and a half since I moved away from China at age sixteen. As China sealed itself off from the world during the pandemic, and even in the years prior, as the party’s reign became increasingly uncompromising, I’d begun feeling a distance from the country, and a resignation that I might never return. Filtered only through headlines, China had become a political entity more than a physical place where I had grown up, where half of my family still lived. Before boarding a flight from San Francisco to Shanghai via Taipei, I felt foreign to the Mainland, and apprehensive. But it took less than twelve hours, once I’d settled into my father’s apartment in our old compound, for that distance to dissipate. Century Park, a large, manicured green space in Pudong around which I’d run loops for P.E. tests, had opened to the public during the pandemic. I’ve arrived in late April and the flower blooms are splendid, cared for by populous teams of gardeners. They are mostly older men and women from the countryside, also in blue uniforms, albeit of a deeper hue than the one my father is supposed to wear. They sweep the park’s countless paths of fallen leaves and clumps of tree pollen. In the first mornings after my return, I run along these paths at six a.m., while the park is still deserted save for another few early joggers, and I often observe the gardeners sitting in the grass, chatting in the morning dew. I breathe in deeply, though the pollution is always a concern, but in the quiet mornings, amidst so much tufted greenery, it seems impossible that living here could be poisonous. An especially intoxicating road is lined with orange blossoms. The soft morning light flits through the tender leaves, and I can’t believe I am here, in China, in Shanghai, in this very park of my childhood, after so many years, feeling as though nothing has changed.
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During the visit, my mother and I flee Shanghai’s concrete and cranes for a trip to Yunnan’s mountains. In Kunming the jacarandas are in bloom and the sun sets late. The nights are warm and the streets lively, night markets swarming with people and families, little children in great outdoor plazas and roadside eateries lined with low tables and fold-out camping chairs. I order a dish of stir-fried chili peppers with chicken and gizzards, as well as glutinous rice cooked inside bamboo, suffused with a woodsy, floral fragrance.
It’s here that I begin to sense that things have in fact changed. The future has arrived already, insidiously: amid the bustle of a provincial capital known for mountains, meadows, and an emergent hippie culture, markers of dystopian technology and global capitalism are everywhere, as omnipresent as they are in Shanghai. The barbecue and foldout chairs, along with tarps and rugs, are the product of a ‘camping glam’ trend surging this year on Chinese social media. The restaurant menus rely on QR codes to order and pay without interacting with any staff. Live-streamers amble around with high-end equipment, responding to comments surging on their phone screens. Even the tiniest convenience stores have Oatly.
On our way back to the hotel, the moon is full and bright. I say to my mother that a stone lion guarding an entrance is hideous – its face and lips grotesque, almost twitching. Then immediately I regret this insult, think of the flights we have yet to take. I think of the dings. I am not a superstitious person, I think to myself. And yet.
The next day, we board a train to Dali. My mother and I take a cable car up Cang Mountain, rising 3,900 meters. There, lightheaded from the altitude, we find prayer ribbons, a dried-up glacial lake, bright red rental parkas and oxygen cans. I teach a foreign woman, stroke by stroke, how to write the character 福, which translates to something more potent than happiness. It is the character my Chinese grandmother repeated in the names of each three of her sons.
On the chair lift down from Zhonghe Temple our feet dangle in the air. I can almost graze the spruce tips on the pines with my toes. Below us are wild graves and paper money, plastic flowers. In contrast to official cemeteries with neat rows of engraved headstones, circumscribed by planned perimeters for auspicious ancestor-worship, these wild graves seem anarchical, their border with the realm of death porous and loose. I had read online that the superstitious avoid this route down, and as the graves grow denser the air does turn eerie. We glide, silently, just a few feet above the headstones. We can see them minutely – the saturation of those plastic flowers, the forest floor of pine needles, the scattered paper money that could not be burned (to prevent forest fires). There is no one below, only the haphazardly laid out graves, but I look up with a sense of unease. Straight ahead is Erhai Lake, the three pagodas, a sacred Buddhist site. On foot towards the old city, we walk through the thoroughfare of the Three Month Festival, which celebrates Guanyin’s visit to Dali. Farmers and folk from the nearby countryside sell coconuts, street food, and important collections of wild mushrooms and traditional Chinese medicinal herbs. An entire tent and concrete slab city, on dirt grounds, is dedicated to Yongping yellow braised chicken.
I think of my father during this trip, of his newfound interest in worship. When I am standing in Yak Meadow, below the Yulong snow mountain range, it is hard not to feel spiritual before the sheer physical mass of the thirteen peaks rising before me, all rock and snow, the dark green layer of pine, the endless scorched yellow meadow, accessible only by old rickety cable cars with peeling paint. At the exit a man grills beef skewers and the rich smell wafts over. The boardwalk goes on for a very long loop, many portions of it invisible due to the curvature of the immense meadow. When I reach the top, there is a tent of Tibetan prayer flags flapping and shredding wildly in the wind, which comes in violent, hat-ripping gusts. Next to the prayer flag pyre is a structure of small cairns. There is also a very old temple supported by intricately painted beams with chipped varnish and faded colors, its walls pasted with informational posters from the government against illegal occult practices, its deepest hall dense with incense, a photo of the Chinese lama smiling congenially at its center.
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On the trail, you have to look where you are walking so you don’t trip on a rock. To the right are cliffs that fall steeply into the gorge. Every year there are deadly accidents. On a stone someone has written: 看山, look at the mountain. On another: 辞职, resign.
We reach Naxi Family guesthouse, a humble but clean traditional courtyard compound at the head of the Tiger Leaping Gorge. On its large concrete terrace, we sit and watch Yulong mountain’s snowy peaks turn golden under the sun. The place is run by a man called Li Yuan, a village local from the Naxi ethnic minority, who handwrites each of our information to later send to the mandated police registry on his phone. He offers us mint tea and walnuts.
He opened the guesthouse thirty-three years ago, and back then there was no road to this village, only a mountain trail, and only foreigners would walk it to the gorge. As time went on, Li says, there was perhaps one Chinese visitor out of every ten, then three out of ten before the pandemic. Now my mother – and myself, I suppose – are the only foreigners. Chinese people are beginning to hike, Li muses, now that the quality of life is improving. Because who had the heart to hike when still living in poverty as a nation?
Outside the train windows back to Kunming the next day, wild graves blur by on the hills lining the train tracks. Here the dead are buried close, dotting these mountains. I think again of worship, how overspilling it is here, how the dead’s resting places are public, unwalled. Since the burning of paper money is prohibited, people pin small stacks of them on the graves with rocks. My father had asked me why I thought early humans worshiped. I said those who have crossed over must be feared, respected, as a means of understanding death. My father said there is fate and destiny governing each of our paths, of individuals and of nations, and this only the dead may know. Li Yuan, the innkeeper, had said something similar the other night. He said that rich or poor, the only thing that mattered in life was luck. No material fortune could fend off tragedy.
My Chinese grandfather prayed to a Guanyin shrine he set up next to the kitchen. Every day of his adult life, he asked for good fortune, but mostly protection for each family member – his three sons, me, his granddaughter, his other grandchildren. It wasn’t until much later that I looked closely at the deities he prayed to. There is something terrifying in the face of a Buddha, in the curve of the eye and the lip: beauty, but also an expression that is not quite benevolent, an expression that reminds you that awe also means fear. An expression like knowing.
—
After Yunnan, my mother and I take a flight to China’s opposite corner: the northeast. Dalian is a port city that was once in the Russian sphere of influence, and also where I spent part of my childhood in the early 2000s. My grandmother – Nainai – still lives there. Nainai hasn’t left her apartment in a month and a half. Today we go to the wet market together, and she walks farther than I expected and buys strawberries, cherries, and cucumbers, all with cash, to the consternation of the sellers. Cash is nearly a relic in China with WeChat and AliPay. When I was a child, we used to go to another market, one in a big dirt field down the road, but this modern one is on concrete floors and under a covered ceiling. When we get home she is hot and takes off her bra, a heavily padded contraption with cotton stuffing, and it’s only then I remember that she wears such a bra because of the double mastectomy she’d had twelve years before. It’s just a brief walk to the market, but she doesn’t want to appear like she is missing breasts.
We lie side by side in bed and scroll through photos on her phone. I ask Nainai to tell me the old stories. She’s told them before, but I’ve forgotten. She says her older brother was beaten to death at the age of thirty-three during the Cultural Revolution, when working as an accountant and refusing to lend money to agitators. He left behind four young children and a wife, all of whom came to live with my grandmother. My father was just a child when this happened. The wife remarried nine months later, but her second husband froze to death on the street soon after (my grandmother isn’t sure how). Nainai says she only figured out last year how her own mother died. One winter in the 1970s there was warning of a great earthquake. Villagers were told to sleep outside in the courtyard, and in the state of emergency no one had food rations to replenish. First, Nainai’s mother said she didn’t really have an appetite, and no one thought too much of it, but for the next seven days she really ate less and less. ‘And I didn’t force her to eat. No one forced her to eat. The seventh day I held her hand at night and it was ice-cold. The next day she drew her last breath. It was only later, when reading about people going on hunger strikes, that I finally figured it out. She went on a hunger strike.’
‘Deliberately?’ I asked.
‘She was seventy already. We didn’t have enough food. She didn’t want to be a burden.’
As she speaks, I remember my grandmother’s apartment two decades ago, when it was empty and new, how I’d loved its warm wood flooded in light, and the windows that looked out onto Russian-style turrets, and planes landing on the airport tarmac beyond. Now there’s black mold creeping along the edge of its ceilings. My mother and I stay the night in the city center, in what used to be the Swiss Hotel, now called the Swish Hotel, having been bought by a Chinese company. Our room is on the thirtieth floor and we look over the aging downtown. Below us, old towers with peeling paint stand beside glassy, blue skyscrapers. In the distance, the Dalian harbor with its cranes and cargo. That night, sea fog rolls in and the only thing we can see is the underbelly of a moth resting on the window. What is it doing, this high up in the sky?
—
When we return to Shanghai, my father is still in front of his screen, playing multiple videos on different tabs. Except now I observe him pausing the video, taking out his cell phone, and taking a picture of the screen. ‘I’ve discovered a secret pattern,’ he says. ‘This secret pattern is everywhere.’ He is pointing at the wallpaper behind a pundit speaking in the video, adorned with a nondescript spiral shape. Later he shows me a folder full of hundreds of screenshots. They all depict a particular swirling pattern. He plays portions of the documentary on Chinese history, zooming in on the bronzes, on the edges of walls, on the fabric of robes. He’s pointing to a same kind of stylized spiral. ‘Once you know it, you see it everywhere. This, here, is China. It is on the dings, the murals, all the instruments of worship. It’s the secret code of Chinese history.’ As he speaks, I think of a line from Pale Fire, about how our humanity lies in our crazed, desperate efforts to ‘see the web of the world, and the warp and the weft of that web.’
Tomorrow my father will get back on his bicycle, don his blue helmet and uniform, pick up a meal at a restaurant and deliver it to an office tower, to a mother minding a toddler at home, to a doorstep where he will see no one. And I know he will see it everywhere: the spiral, the pattern that holds the secret to his country, its history, his sense of meaning of everything. It doesn’t strike me as mad, since I know I do the same as a writer, another form of semiotics: seek the pattern in forgotten memories, the plastic offerings stacked on wild graves, the manic parade of pixelated interconnectedness – the warp and weft of the world’s web. The collective pulse of the future. It strikes me that neither my father nor I, nor the people encountered on this trip, nor my grandmother in that city in northern China, worship the past. She has kept the modest, makeshift Buddhist shrine before which my grandfather used to pray, but she does not speak in front of it. She only tells the stories of the dead when pressed. She feels like she herself is at death’s door, a body ravaged by cancer. She only wants to know if there is a tomorrow, a next year, and if then she will see us.
I recall the last moment I saw her as I left Dalian. Escorted by my uncle, she met my mother and I at a miniature Starbucks at the airport, and handed me two plastic bags to take on the plane. There were containers of the pork baozi she had made for my father. An aloe plant butchered into little segments, because I’d accepted a little piece to gnaw on during an earlier visit. Hiding beneath it all, a container full of live, squirming silkworms, a dish she used to make on special occasions, and which she knew my father liked. Silkworms were hard to buy in the south. I said they couldn’t possibly go through security. She said they would. I accepted, resigned. After I hugged my grandmother, who stood there in the departures hall in her pale pink Yale windbreaker, purchased for my university graduation, the only occasion she left China, I fought hard not to cry. I did not know if and when I would see her again. She was so close, but as I stepped towards the metal gates of security, towards my inevitable return to the US, to new rounds of visa applications to be able to re-enter China, I did not know how far the distance between us would grow. But then I was past security, and the silkworms were on the conveyor belt, and no one said a thing as they passed the threshold.
Image © Kara Stenberg
