Fusion Stories - 8. Raindance in Guangzhou by Guest Blogger Rebecca Jane

This is a beautiful and romantic personal story from Rebecca Jane, who emailed me a few weeks ago.

She writes:

My English name is Rebecca Jane; my Chinese name is Zhang
Bei-qi. I grew up in an American town outside of Chicago, Illinois.
In the Midwest where I grew up, about the only association my
community made with China was take-out food and fortune cookies. When
I was 21-years-old, I met a man who introduced me to Chinese language.
Nine months after meeting, we married. Thus began my fusion journey.

My fusion story is a romance, so it contains fair doses of love
and disappointment. I can promise you the tension did not heat up
over different languages or crossing cultures. My husband and I
proved adaptable, wise, and agile in clearing those hurdles. The
tension heated up when I attempted to go where I discovered there are
no real boundaries or borders—I attempted to create art and beauty.

I had been married to Yong-xiang for less than a year when
we’d agreed that I would travel to China to meet his parents, whom he
hadn’t seen in eight years. He didn’t have a green card and was
attending law school. My solo journey was the best arrangement we
could make, and I wanted to meet my in-laws. They welcomed me to
Guangzhou in April 1999. I’ll never forget my first car ride through
those crowded streets. The gridlock. My intense desire to be able to
read every sign in every shop window. ‘I will stay in China,’ I
thought ‘until I become literate here.’

I fulfilled that promise. My mother-in-law read to me from
children’s readers. She read the romantic novel Hong Lou Meng and the
strange ghost stories of Pu Songling. I focused, practiced, and
labored, wrote Chinese characters every day, looked everything up in
my dictionaries thrice.

I surprised myself when I started writing my own creative
fiction in the Chinese language. While living in Guangzhou, I secured
a job teaching English at a nearby university. My students submitted
impressive English essays to me. I was astonished by their expressive
ability with the English language. As a gesture both humble and
proud, I showed them my efforts to write a short story in Chinese.
Sitting in a circle with nine Chinese students who helped me edit and
rewrite that story was the most profound collaborative experience of
my life.

To this day I have not found another audience or institution
interested in my efforts to write fiction in Chinese. I have only
written a couple of stories and have given up the pursuit to focus on
writing in English. I have put the idea on the back burner. But I am
hoping one day to return to my bi-lingual creative writing.

Here is a prose poem I wrote while living in China. It is
called “Raindance in Guangzhou.”

The rain echoes; it falls in strings that vibrate forever. I am
listening for your notes. Do you stretch toward me and wrap around
like the wind? Or do you strum in the heart of the rolling thunder?
But what of these wordless sounds? I want to write to you; I want to
write with you, but I want to speak to you in a language no one
understands. Even more, I desire to listen to you. I sit on my bed
with my legs crossed, my head drops. I have closed my eyes. My hands
cover my ears. When my elbows touch in front of me, my knees also
fold into my body as naturally as hands folding together in prayer. I
am curled up in this way, and all noises wash over me like water
around a rock: brooms lifting dust, people breathing behind dust
masks, men spitting out nicotine throats, buses hiccuping fuel, a
shirtless beggar crying at the road’s edge with his body curving
toward a hole in the center of his chest, a motorcyclist avoiding a
pothole and just missing slamming into a busload of people who worry
about pickpockets, the voice-over on the bus shouting out the stop and
more people shoving in and pushing their way out, a guard standing
watch at this gate shouts something to the guard watching that gate—he
removes a lighter from his pocket and tosses it to his comrade—another
man lighting a cigarette, children’s running feet carry them to the
shade to cover them from the fiery sun, bicycles clapping their tires
over hot pavement, a crowd cheering for an approaching parade:
millions of wild rabbits jumping followed by a dancing dragon
swerving, the clashing, the drum beating—a sweet voice calls to me,
“Beiqi, Ni kan yi kan!” Look. I see sun flickering in the dragon’s
eye, white fire swirling around a dark spot, the drum sends tremors
through my entire body; Mama says, “Beiqi, ni e la ma? Wo men hui jia
ba!” Hungry? Let’s go home. We follow some stray rabbits down the
narrow lanes, and then comes the rain with drops as bis as dragon’s
eyes. Our hair sticks to our necks and we drip with the sky’s grief,
so at home Mama combs through my hair until it is dry. Then she makes
soup with flowers and green vegetables; we drink rice wine and eat
bitter melon, winter mushrooms, grass mushrooms, cabbage, corn, white
gourd, sea cucumber, rice, snow peas, carrots, bai cai, and turnips.
Then Baba’s hand wraps around the bottle and he pours me another glass
of wine saying, “He jiu! Drink wine.” As if those two words are an
epic poem. He tells me a story about the wine being brewed in some
far off northern place. My mind wanders, and I think of his enormous
hands, hands that can tell a thousand stories far better than his
words can. I wish I could use his hands as pillows at night and fall
asleep to the sound of the blood rushing through them—and I am still
as a rock, listening, hearing thunder within, hearing you.

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You can visit Rebecca Jane’s blog at http://rjaneflashfiction.blogspot.com

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