Time did funny things to memory; decades of hope, pain and geography growing so dense, they jumbled any sense of linearity.
She couldn’t discern specific days, or the face of the uncle who sold jasmine vines outside her house, but remembered a teenaged Ru Lian sprawled out on a chaise longue, idly flicking through her latest novel as Li Xuan helped carry a rotting dressing table out of the Zhao mansion.
In that disorienting house, which mixed Chinese wooden beams with Victorian fireplaces and coiling bannisters, Li Xuan got to know Ru Lian’s habits quite well. As the villagers peeled waterlogged cabinets from walls and blackened rugs from floors, Ru Lian enjoyed distracting them with chatter—about the history of the temple, her father’s gambling habits, or the fables she was reading. She lounged on every surface like a sunbathing lizard; no table, floorboard or mantel was safe, as she slurped at enormous bowls of guo qiao mi xian, noodles dripping soup onto her pages.
Day after day, when Li Xuan came to help clean, she saw new bruises budding across Ru Lian fingers and arms, in calculated patterns that Li Xuan knew well. But Ru Lian maintained her irreverence, enjoyed it even.
During one of Li Xuan’s last afternoons at the Zhao’s, Ru Lian rolled onto her side and smirked right at her. ‘It’s too bad you hate books so much,’ she said, ‘because this tale is scandalous.’
‘What’s it called?’ Li Xuan asked, before she could stop herself. ‘The Butterfly Lovers.’
Li Xuan snorted. ‘Everyone knows that stupid story. I’ve never read a book and I’ve heard it told a thousand times.’
‘This is an adult retelling,’ Ru Lian said. ‘There’s a scene where Zhu Yingtai pleasures Liang Shanbo, while Shanbo still thinks Yingtai is a man.’
Li Xuan blushed furiously. ‘You’re lying!’
‘I suppose you’ll have to read it to find out.’
Something about Ru Lian’s smug expression—eyebrows disappearing high into her blunt fringe—was so ridiculous that Li Xuan sank her teeth into her bottom lip to stave off laughter, blood leaking out like red bean filling.
That evening, when Ru Lian asked if Li Xuan wanted to go swimming at the lake, Li Xuan agreed.
Far too quickly.
‘See you tomorrow,’ she said, childlike, heart beating true.
*
The water that rippled in the lake was as cold as polar ice and filled with unpleasant surprises. One couldn’t wade in without bumping their foot against a desiccated milk carton, or scraping it against the spokes of an abandoned wagon wheel. If your luck was bad, you stepped directly on spongey, oozing creatures, choking the life out of them. Li Xuan theorised that this sense of unpredictability was what excited Ru Lian, driving her to dive in and backstroke with abandon. Maybe we’ll find a corpse, she whispered into the shell of Li Xuan’s ear.
Whenever they swam at dusk, they returned to shore just when the water transfigured into a void of black, wringing calligraphy ink from their hair.
Whenever they swam at dusk, they returned to shore just when the water transfigured into a void of black, wringing calligraphy ink from their hair onto the chrysanthemums growing in the surrounding bushes. Then, they lay side by side, arms slick and pressed together. ‘A long time from now, when I am old and ugly,’ Ru Lian said, ‘I’m going to have a family of my own and there will be no secrets between us.’
Li Xuan turned her head to look at her. ‘Where will you live?’
‘In a small hut, deep in the forest. I’ll paint all the walls as yellow as those flowers, and there will be no more spirits haunting me.’
‘How would this hut contain all the helpers you’d need to keep you happy?’ Li Xuan snorts. ‘A princess like you can’t even boil water, let alone make guo qiao mi xian. You’d die!’
‘You could make it for me,’ Ru Lian said, and for a second both girls were quiet.
They stared up at the handful of stars visible through the film of pollution; hazy, grey tentacles that had crawled over from the cities.
After a moment, Ru Lian tangled her hand in Li Xuan’s hair.
*
Eventually, all swims came to an end, as did yum cha. Li Xuan and Ru Lian went through the motions: they squabbled over the bill and inquired about the other’s plans for the rest of the day, before surmising that both parties were busy. They stepped on the escalator together, rode it all the way down, and began a slow trundle to the train station, not saying much at all.
Li Xuan was slowly giving in to a creeping sense of acceptance. What had she expected? Fifty years was a long time by anybody’s standard, a temporal realm where whole communities sprung up from the dirt and stretched their arms up towards the sun. And yet, wherever she looked, she saw what she was losing.
There, two blocks down, lay a store selling $15 pinstriped suits and tubs of discount school shoes. Years ago, when her daughter was still a pre- teen, the lot belonged to a Malaysian family that sold apam balik. Those days were gone, those moments of her daughter licking batter from her fingers as her husband hummed along with the shop’s pop tunes. There, at the sharp corner turn, was where Nathan had once tripped as a child, smashing his nose hard against a signpost. His mother had stroked his cloudling tufts of hair, holding his head in one hand as she wiped at his nose with the other.
That tenderness had been entombed by time as well. Li Xuan and Ru Lian prepared to part at the traffic light. Quickly, Li Xuan committed this new Ru Lian to memory: the strands of hair wisping into her mouth, the wrinkles clustered around her blank gaze. She was glad to know Ru Lian at this stage, even if she was a stranger; glad to know that she had survived and would go on surviving. When she opened her mouth to say goodbye, something in Ru Lian seemed to give way, her jaw clenching so tight that it seemed her teeth would grind through nerve.
‘I planned to say many things to you today, and said none,’ Ru Lian said, her wild tone reminding Li Xuan of the girl that had recklessly sliced her way through a darkened lake.
Li Xuan committed this new Ru Lian to memory: the strands of hair wisping into her mouth, the wrinkles clustered around her blank gaze.
‘Words are difficult,’ Li Xuan said. ‘Say them, even if they are silly.’ This seemed to be the wrong response—Ru Lian looked more frustrated. ‘All that I want to say,’ she said, shaking her head, ‘is see you tomorrow. Does that make any sense to you?’
‘No, it doesn’t,’ Li Xuan said and they both began to laugh.
*
Li Xuan dawdled in town for a few hours, buying bags of water spinach and milk, along with a single cup of taro milk tea. She returned just as the sun was slipping away, orange light illuminating the wings of bats and the mouths of yawning calico cats. She creaked her flyscreen open, unstrapped her fanny pack from around her waist.
Nathan was still in the same position she had left him, blanket wrapped around his shoulders, watching Star Trek now. Only the photon torpedoes indicated that time had passed.
‘Here you go, xiao gui,’ she said, handing her grandson his tea.
Nathan perked up and instantly began slurping jelly, touched with simple delight.
‘You’re a legend, poh poh,’ he said.
Li Xuan sat next to him, combing her hands through the bits of hair standing up from his head. ‘Are you feeling better?’
‘A little,’ Nathan said, ‘Jono updated me on his new job. We can prob- ably move in together in a few months so I can stop burdening you.’
‘You’re not a burden. I only want you to take rubbish out sometime.’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ Nathan said. ‘Soooooo, how was your romantic lunch?
Fill me in!’Li Xuan paused, remembering. She wanted to tell him everything, she wanted to tell him nothing.
A long time away, when I am old and ugly, I’m going to have a family of my own and there will be no secrets between us.
‘It go okay,’ she said simply. ‘But I think—we both change too much.’
She must have looked quite pathetic because, suddenly, her hands were being clasped in Nathan’s. It was a new feeling for Li Xuan—being the one in need of comfort.
‘Who needs a crusty old dude that doesn’t understand you,’ Nathan said confidently. ‘You have so many options now with online dating—there’s probably a Tinder for old Asians out there somewhere, I’ll find it for you! Even people like us can find love, y’know?’
This is an extract from Collisions: Fictions of the Future, an anthology of Australian writers of colour published by Liminal Magazine and Pantera Press, and available now at your local independent bookseller.
