Read an Excerpt
Attic
Memoir of a Chinese Landlord's Son
By Guanlong Cao University of California Press
Copyright © 1998 Guanlong Cao
All right reserved. ISBN: 9780520204065
Memory of the Belly I slept in the same bed as my mother until I was seven years old.
That was more than forty years ago, in the early 1950s, in Shanghai.
My mother was full and fair, with thin eyes and thin eyebrows, a little like palace ladies in Tang dynasty paintings. Mother seldom smiled, but when she did, her smile was charming—her teeth even and white. Mother had a full head of luxuriant hair. It was so shiny that if she ever had the chance to stroll down Manhattan's Fifth Avenue, I am sure the fashionable New York girls would have approached her for the name of the fancy shampoo she used.
Mother, however, would not spend money on soap to wash her hair. Instead, she scrounged straw bags from the marketplace and burned them to ashes. When she wanted to wash her hair, Mother scooped a cupful of ash into a small pouch and soaked it in a big pot of warm water. Light gray trails seeped
out of the pouch, dyeing the water the color of Wulong tea. Mother said ash contains soda, and soda is a good detergent.
When the special solution was ready, Mother poured her hair into the pot. She rubbed, twisted, andsqueezed it, torturing the hair to her heart's content. But after rinsing, the hair was still as silky and alive as ever. And it left a whiff of the straw's ash behind, making her smallest son dream of the soda-tinged fragrance of reed-wrapped rice.
I said I slept in the same bed as my mother, but, in fact, there was no bed in our home. My family lived in an attic. The two slanted roofs and the floor formed an equilateral triangle—no bed could fit into that compact geometric shape. But the two sharp angles created spaces ideal for pallets. A large dormer window projected from each roof slope. The pallet under the northern window was for Father and my two older brothers, Bao and Ling. Mother, my younger sister, Chuen, and I used the one under the southern window. Six members of my family lived in this cozy nest, far from our homeland, quietly enjoying the time heaven graciously granted to us.
My father was originally from Jiangxi Province. He was the third son of a farmer who had lived beside Poyang Lake. Third sons in Chinese fairy tales are always a bit odd. So was my father. Father could easily have stayed with the foot-bound wife chosen for him by his parents, worked the small plot of land inherited from his ancestors, peacefully enjoyed his life, and peacefully been buried in his homeland.
He, however, chose to stir up his lukewarm life and tried his hand at a variety of businesses. Fortunately or unfortunately, his luck ran hot and he made some money. He bought a few acres
of farmland and remarried, this time to a woman with big feet who became my mother. Four children were born to them. We moved to Shanghai when the Communist Revolution came. From that time on, Father spent his life, thirty declining years, in the attic.
My mother was the oldest daughter in her family. Her father had established a soap factory in Hunan Province. At eighteen, she had married a handsome officer from the local army. A couple of years after the wedding, she discovered her husband's insatiable whoring, and she went home to her parents. The officer tried to bring her back, but she never returned. She lived in her parents' house until her husband was killed in a battle in Jiangxi. Then, at thirty, my mother married my father.
Mother did not tell us about that part of her life until I was grown up and had to fill out an official curriculum vitae, a periodically updated biographical report. In order that her child could be truthful to the government, she briefly related her history. I was shocked.
When I think back, it seems I never saw Mother and Father sleep together. I never even saw any intimate behavior between them. In the minds of their four children, Mother and Father were eternally asexual. Their function was to raise the little creatures that came from nowhere, giving them food, giving them clothes, and, occasionally, giving them a good beating.
Mother belonged to me.
Her hair, with its fragrance of soda, belonged to me. Her back, her breasts, her tummy, even the sweat oozing from her body in summer, all of them belonged to me.
My sister, Chuen, is six years younger than I am. When I was
seven, she was only one. Mother, in her sleep, always held Chuen and turned her back to me, but that by no means prevented me from possessing her.
There is a fish called the remora, which lives in the sea. Remoras have suction cups on their abdomens. The fish attach themselves to the backs of whales and hang on. The whale can never get rid of them, nor could my mother get rid of me.
Every night I hung on Mom's back. Her back was soft, without any bones. One of my hands would trespass around Mother's waist to hold her even softer belly.
Fat, soft, smooth, and warm, Mother's belly concentrated all the feminine charms. While cradling my sister, Mother bent her legs, creating rolls of flesh at her tummy, just for my little hand to squeeze and squeeze. Mother always tolerated me. No matter how I tormented her belly, even when I dug my fingers into her belly button, she tolerated me.
After I had mangled her tummy for a while, I would invade upward.
Being skinny is fashionable nowadays. Chests as flat as airport runways frequently require colorful patches to signal their precise coordinates. Mother never wore a bra because she had voluptuous breasts. I approached them in the dark and I never missed my landing zone.
The diameter and weight of her breasts far surpassed those of the rolls at her stomach. My fingers tired after a few forays. Then I would rest my hand between her breasts, letting the palm and back of my hand sleepily absorb my mother's warmth.
Sometimes my body would make a rhythmic movement. My stomach pressed repeatedly against Mother's behind. A kind
of warm and swollen feeling would emanate from between my legs.
In those days I still occasionally wet the bed, but Mother never yelled at me or even made a fuss. In the morning when she got up, she would put a hot water bottle on the sheet where I had peed. Steam would arise, mixed with a faint smell of urine. My two brothers could probably smell it, but I never felt embarrassed. Chuen was younger than I and had not yet learned to defend herself. She had no alibi. She was my natural scapegoat.
But Mother was vigilant about the territory below her navel. Occasionally my little hand would probe downward. As soon as I touched a hair, my hand would be caught and escorted back to her tummy. I thought those hairs must be like the whiskers of a cat, remaining highly sensitive even when the cat is sleeping.
While wandering about Mother's body, my fingers frequently encountered my sister's tiny hands and tiny feet. But there was never any conflict. Sometimes Chuen put my fingers in her mouth and sucked on them. Nothing would come out, so she began to bite them with her pointed teeth. It hurt slightly, but only enough to register a few blips on my sleepy brain waves. So my sister and I shared Mother's love and maintained a harmonious coexistence. From those experiences, I presume, developed the bittersweet relationship Chuen and I shared when we were grown.
After my seventh birthday, for some unknown, or at least undeclared, reason, Mother exiled me to the northern reaches of the attic. Each night four males crowded onto a pallet like a
well-laid-out dress pattern. Heads and feet interlocked in a complex arrangement. At midnight, if someone wanted to pee, he first had to dig himself out by moving a few legs and arms aside, and then had to be careful not to step on anybody's face.
For the first several nights I cried shamelessly. I cried to go back to Mommy's bed. My two brothers laughed at me, but I didn't care. The only problem was that every time I began to cry, Mother started to snore, and my noise-making instantly lost momentum. Like a baby being weaned, I took more than a week to adjust to my new status.
Continues...
Excerpted from Attic by Guanlong Cao Copyright © 1998 by Guanlong Cao. Excerpted by permission.
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