“Do not speak to me,” he repeated one more time, out loud—knowing himself bereft, yet somehow knowing also that it would not be long at all before he forgot his present wounds entirely. Then buried his face in his hands, shoulders shaking, ‘til he raised it again with an exclamation over the odd clamminess of his cheeks, unable to remember why he had been crying.
HELL FRIEND
You could make paste for Hell stuff from flour in a pinch, but it didn’t burn as well and customers didn’t like the smell, which even incense wouldn’t cover. Jin-li Song bought three unmixed boxes for five bucks at the Dollar Store—just add water—and negotiated her way back out, threading a narrow path between teetering wicker receptacles of every given size stuffed haphazardly in/on top of each other and piles of open boxes packed full of Fung’s Gold Rosette sandalwood-, rose-, or jasmine-scented soap.
Outside, the air reeked like smeared goose-shit, pressing down with a palpable weight. It almost hurt to breathe as Jin drifted back slowly, through Chinatown’s sluggish, skipping heart. The smells of home were everywhere, thick enough to slice: Dhurrian and fireworks gunpowder, dried persimmon, pickled ginger, red bean jelly. The stiff stock and vinegary dyes of Hell money. The sweet stink of joss-sticks. Kuan Yin and the Monkey King staring down, smiling and glaring. The zodiac’s animals, rat to pig and back again, contorted in red lacquer poses.
And since it was the last week of Zhongyuan Jie, after all, getai were indeed everywhere, just as her Ah-Ma had warned her—blooming in every doorway, on every porch and corner: little shrines, wilting plates of food, smoking joss-sticks. Passersby whose ages ranged from roughly eight to eighty swirled carelessly around them, wearing brightly-colored clothes designed to insulate their chi against the streets’ death-heavy atmosphere; everywhere Jin looked, people (maybe tourists, maybe not) could be seen laughing, dancing and singing to entertain whatever ghosts might be lurking—resentfully, implacably, invisibly—in their immediate vicinity.
Step lightly, Jin, Ah-Ma would say if she was here, and even if she wasn’t. This is a time of confusion, in which every decision—no matter how well-intentioned—may bring harm . . . less a celebration than an inconvenience, even to we who honor it. The doors of Hell stand open, letting the dead back up onto the earth. And so, though we may make money from Hungry Ghost Month, it is Hell money only . . .
Yeah: Hell cash, thick and crisp and useless; only fit to spend in Hell, by those who lived there—or rather, who didn’t. And this was what Jin’s ma spent her days cobbling into commissions, stuff made expressly to burn, falling down through the fire to give some lucky ancestor’s ghost a big surprise—Hell cars, Hell fridges, Hell air conditioners. Hell cellphones.
While up here above, there was no buying a new house, no renovating the old one, no going on vacation or hanging at the beach, for fear of ghosts luring you down into the water . . .
Jin stopped short in front of the Empress’ Noodle restaurant, between its flanking totem dragons, and bent over for a minute, rummaging for her inhaler. Inside, framed by the front window’s fever-red rows of halved pigs and Peking duck-flesh, Mrs. Yau—the Empress’ owner—sat alone at her usual table near the back, playing mah-jongg with herself. A cup of green tea steaming at one elbow.
Her name is Yau Yan-er, was all Ah-Ma had said the first time she’d caught Jin studying her, out of the corner of one eye. You don’t ever go in there, wei? Don’t speak to her, don’t look at her . . .
Why not, Ah-Ma?
Ah-Ma had sighed. Because. People like us—we don’t want people like her to even know we’re here. It’s safer that way.
Sometimes, like now, Jin wondered exactly what Mrs. Yau must have done—what she must be—to have become “people like her,” in Ah-Ma’s eyes. From the outside-in, at least, she seemed perfection itself, a T’ang Dynasty screen-painting come to graceful life—regally slim, black hair tamed into an elaborate, chopstick-skewered crown of knots, veins showing faintly green as milky jade beneath the pale skin of her long-fingered hands . . .
. . . and her eyes, black stones, raising suddenly from a cast-down fistful of Plum Blossom, Knot, the Centre, White . . . to meet with Jin’s own, through the glass. Faint twitch at the temples, those high, nude arcs where her eyebrows ought to be; she raised one palm slightly, a subtle yet unmistakable gesture of beckoning. Jin coughed on the draw, tucked her inhaler away again, and stared: You mean me? Now?
Apparently, yes.
But: Don’t look. Don’t speak. never go in.
Waaah, Jin thought; I’m thirteen, for God’s sake. I’ll do what I want, this one time. If not now, when?
Jin straightened, touched her hair lightly, then gave up on getting it to look any better than it already did. Shrugged Ah-Ma’s voice away, like a horse switching flies—
—and opened the door.
***
Though the summer job she’d lined up to start a week from now would officially be her “first,” Jin’d been an unpaid worker in Ah-Ma’s Gods Material Shop pretty much ever since she, Ba and Ma had come over from Taiwan, when Jin was five. Which meant she could reckon federal and provincial tax in her head, make chit-chat in enough other dialects to deal with people who didn’t speak Cantonese (or English), and locate back-stock items without checking the book (mostly).
But none of this impressed Ah-Ma enough to stop her from taking Jin—and Ma—off the floor whenever she could; though she often said it was because Jin’s Ma was “so good!” in the workshop that she wanted Jin to pick up her skills, Jin suspected different.
“Ma,” Jin had overheard her Ba saying that afternoon, quietly, as she let herself in by the delivery door, “you have to stop. Eun-Joo is Asian as you or me . . . ”
“Not like you and I, and you know it. What good does it do to pretend?”
“That’s just . . . insanely racist, even for you. Besides which, you do get that if my wife is unacceptable, that makes Jin at least half-unacceptable, right?”
“Ai-yaaah! You know I love Jin, but things will be hard enough for her, without drawing attention. How can she ever make a good marriage? So tall, with so much color in her skin? And her face, so long—like a melon!”
At this, Ba had huffed, and fell straight back into Cantonese: “Wan jun, Ma! Dim gai lay gum saw?” Which would surely have brought on an exchange too quick for Jin to completely follow, given how red Ah-Ma’s face went, if they hadn’t both suddenly spotted Jin where she stood, rooted to the spot by throat-roughening embarassment.
Ba coughed, looking down. “Uh . . . Ma’s not back yet, ah bee. You could start setting up, I guess . . . ”
Ah-Ma nodded. “Best, yes. Do you have enough paste?”
“I think I forgot,” Jin said. “I could . . . go and get some.” As Ba reached for his wallet: “No, I can . . . I’ve got it. No problem.”