"Cicadas and the Dead Chairman" by Pingmei Lan
This story from our archives is featured in Epiphany’s My Last White Boyfriend anthology, available now for sale from Ristretto Books, which collects the last 20 years of Epiphany’s greatest prose hits.
That summer when Chairman Mao died I saw a funeral for the first time, a national one. It had gone on for weeks. Everywhere I turned people were wearing black armbands and making white paper flowers. The usual sea of blue Mao suits seemed to be foaming, churning, shaping into dark and light swells. Thousands of mourning wreaths blanketed Tiananmen Square, eventually spilling down to the sidewalks of Chang’an Avenue. For days, then weeks, it looked like snow in summer.
Then an old farmer came to Beijing riding a donkey cart. He cried over Mao’s body while waving his copy of the Little Red Book. The Chairman looked down at this loyal subject from an old photo gracing the wall of the red Tiananmen fort. A half smile flashed permanently between his smooth pink cheeks and bright black beauty mark. The farmer made the news after crying for days and passing out, his fingers brittle and curled over the good book.
I didn’t understand that kind of devotion and grief, having just turned seven that spring. And the only thing I knew about death was from the old maid who lived across the hutong.
“My lover died and came back to life,” she said one day.
I walked away without answering. I didn’t know if she was crazy. I didn’t know if she was talking to me.
She was sitting on her doorstep, watching the clouds move and threading her fingers through her hair. Everyone in the hutong gossiped about how she had gotten that creepy head of white hair when she was only twenty-six.
She never ate salt. (Eat your salt or your hair would turn like that.)
She lived in a cave for ten years and ate mushrooms that grew on the walls.
She was a white snake who turned into this thing when she ate the magic ginseng roots from the Manchurian Mountains.
I preferred to think of her as having been born that way, with a connection to the underworld and hair frosted by Yan Wang’s brew to prove it. Her eyes too, they had this dark pull, at once mercurial and warm. Her lashes were pale and shiny like the hooks fringing a Venus flytrap. I imagined men who inched closer, willing to latch on. They’d follow her into this other place, where gremlins made decisions to either feast on the dead or send them back to life untouched. The old maid—no one knew her name, so we called her that—was the only one who could sway that decision one way or the other.
***
One day, I decided to ask Dad about the old maid. My parents were both propaganda writers for the Department of Education and they were both young and eager to please their Party Secretary. Dad, however, had a collection of ulcers and a bad cough from his cowshed days in a reeducation camp. So sometimes he gazed out the window, sighing when he was supposed to be working. This is what he was doing while Mom slaved over “Virtues of China’s Own Brand of Democracy.”
When I climbed onto Dad’s lap to ask him about the old maid, Mom looked up from her desk. “Shut up,” she said. “Have you done your calligraphy today?” Then she fished out a book of Mao’s poetry, wrinkly rice paper, and her calligraphy kits and told me to copy ten poems.
The stench of her ink mill made me gag. But I didn’t want to make Mom mad. So I sat next to her and tried to hold my breath while grinding out a tray of ink at a snail’s pace.
When finally she had to go look up something at the National Library of Beijing, I stopped copying poems. As soon as she left, I went to Dad. He handed me a five-fen coin and whispered, “Go! Play outside and get a snack or something,” but he did not speak of the old maid.
***
It was one of those thirty-nine degree Celsius days. Sunlight bounced onto every surface, until even the dingy outhouse walls glared like sheet metal. The old maid was sitting on her steps mumbling to herself, her skin pale for someone who sat in the sun so much.
We walked to Drum Street to get a slice of watermelon.
Near the fruit and vegetable stand, a group of men were unloading boxes of tomatoes. They stopped their work and watched us, their eyes darting up at the old maid. Her shirt was open, with several buttons missing. I hardly noticed it then, having seen her dressed like that year round. But the men must have been new to the neighborhood. Their mouths fell open, and I could see their yellow teeth thrusting above swollen gums.
The tallest man shouted, “Hey honey, come here!” He was staring at this heart-shaped mole between her breasts. It looked like a button that could open some kind of hidden doors.
We tried to ignore him. The old maid covered her face with a sleeve while I picked a fat slice of melon from a neatly layered pile, despite the vendor’s chiding.
The center of the melon was sweet and juicy. The old maid took the rest, the pink-white flesh along the rim. I’d always leave plenty for her. But more so on that day, I was uneasy with the men’s hard eyes.
“Hey, want me to buy you a slice?” The man who had shouted earlier took a step forward and gave her a wink.
When she didn’t answer, he took another step and lifted a hand as if to pet or to strike her. I couldn’t tell. His knuckles were covered in scabs, either from working or from punching something hard, or both.
The old maid looked at me and I could see that she wanted to dash. That was one of the reasons I liked to hang around her. If I tried hard enough, I could read her thoughts.
We broke into a sprint, the last of the watermelon rind drawing a pink arc in the air. I must have muttered a curse as she shouted over me, “Shish . . . I like the rind!”
We ran down a block, then another, deeper into the maze of hutongs. After a few minutes, the only thing I could hear was the sound of our feet slapping the pavement. The men seemed to have given up. So we began to double back. As we ran, I could see the wind splitting her hair into light strands. They looked silvery, as if dissolving into streaks of moonlight.
“I can’t breathe!” I crashed under the nearest pagoda tree.
The cicadas screamed. It made the hutong feel empty, vast.
“Shut up, shut up.” The old maid plopped down next to me and shouted at the restless insects.
When I squinted, I saw a ball of white light bursting through the pagoda’s canopy. Tian Gong (The Sky’s Emperor) seemed to be staring down at it, or at me, with disapproving looks. When my eyes began to water, I turned to see the old maid laying down to her side. On the back of her neck was a blue-black bruise. I rubbed my eyes.
I was about to ask her about it when something small and hard fell on my head. I froze, a scream rasping in my throat.
She leaped up. “A cicada!” she said, picking the nugget of black out of my hair. “It’s dead. That’s why it was screaming. Her last song.”
I breathed hard, unsure of what to say. She plopped back down to show me that cicada then shove it in her mouth. Maybe she only took a bite. Either way, a squirt of green liquid flew out, thin and curling, like a snake.
I shut my eyes. But it was too late.
She laughed and smeared something damp on my hand, “Look. Green blood. Isn’t that cool? No red. No red. No red at all! That’s what I like.”
When I tried to reply that it was a dangerous thing to say, I threw up green bile.
She hopped up and stared blankly, as if I were morphing into a cicada with my eyes bulging, my skin cold and shiny, and a pair of bright sticky wings rubbing out desperate, screechy songs against my back.
***
As I said, the neighborhood had plenty to say about the old maid. The popsicle lady, for example, rolled up her little wooden cart when she saw me with her and pulled me away.
“Don’t you know that old maid is messed up in her head, crazy as a winter snake?” She patted my hair with her knobby, spotted hands. “They need to send her to an asylum. And comb her hair and find her a shirt that still has a button.”
Opium Andy appeared out of nowhere to cut her off, his wifebeater riddled with holes that weren’t supposed to be there. “No shit,” he said. “But the retard isn’t hurting anyone. Besides, in the West—that’s the other side of the world—women walk around bare-chested. And men wear high-collared button shirts. So it is us that got everything backwards.”
I knew nothing about this other side, this Western world. It sounded like the underworld to which the old maid belonged. The hutong hushed as if to consider Andy’s perspective.
The popsicle lady shook her head and touched her high collar. It pushed against her skin and made these folds on her throat. We padded further down the street, her bound feet pecking the hot asphalt. She waited until Andy was out of sight. “You’d never know that he was a big opium ghost. What a handsome devil! Shame he’s got such a pretty wife but no kids after all these years.” Andy’s wife, Char, was our neighbor, and she would talk up a storm with Mom nearly every day. Dad called her the Chain-Smoking Gossip Mill Operator when Mom wasn’t around, which made Andy chuckle, and I kind of liked that. The popsicle lady continued. “I bet he’s spreading it around somewhere else. Char is holding up more than half the sky if you ask me.”
It was a chairman Mao saying, Women hold up half the sky. I was tired of hearing it. Maybe Andy was, too, and figured he wouldn’t have to hold anything if he spread it around. But I liked hearing words like opium ghost. Nobody else said things like that to a little kid.
That night the moon was the size of Mom’s dinner plate. No clouds. I watched the old maid’s window through mine, thinking she might wave good night to me. The street got quiet after a while and a man came up and knocked on her glass. Then the window opened and he climbed inside. So it was true. She had a lover and he’d come back for her.
I didn’t like the idea. What if this time, he snatched her away to the underworld?
The man didn’t come out for days. And neither did she. I tried to peer through her window whenever the hutong was empty. But nothing materialized.
When she reappeared, a week later, her hair was all tangled and big. Her eyes looked weepy, red around the rims. When she turned her face I saw the bruise again. I wanted to ask her if her lover had come back and taken her somewhere. And did he leave again or did he die this time. But she wasn’t in the mood to talk. In fact, she seemed to be sinking under oceans of water. My only connection to her was this string of thought bubbles I couldn’t read.
I pretended I’d noticed nothing and sat next to her. Mom had said once, after I lost a balloon, “Forget about it.” So I told the old maid the same thing.
She nodded and folded herself into a tight little ball. A few minutes later she shifted her head closer. Or maybe I was leaning toward her. Our heads touched, and it felt nice, her hair cool and hot like the dying flame on a candle. I kept trying to read her thoughts, but nothing came through. Our heads knocked gently against each other while splashes of summer poured.
Later, we washed our feet in the river near Temple Street, where the air was cool and damp. Along the banks, green summer worms slicked shiny trails over willow leaves while dragonflies dashed among floaters, drawing bright red arcs like upside-down smiles. We made a shrine by piling up pebbles under the pagoda tree. I wrote “Peace Under The Other World” on a piece of paper and secured it near the top. We bowed a dozen times and murmured nonsense as prayers to silence her lover’s lingering spirit.
Over that summer, the old maid and I added a few more things to the little shrine. A button. A bottle cap. A pressed, flattened cigarette-pack wrapper. Each commemorating the departure of someone she called “her lover.”
It never occurred to me to ask her whether there was more than one.
People had stopped walking around in black armbands by then. All the wreaths had disappeared from Tiananmen Square, too. The giant photo of Chairman Mao remained on the red fort as always, his beauty mark bright like cicada shells.
***
During those weeks Mom and Dad occasionally fought around dinnertime. One night, Dad banged on the table until it tilted, spilling a bowl of cabbage soup. The way his lips trembled gave me a chill. I ducked under the table to catch bubbles of grease so they didn’t make the floor slippery. The shouting continued. Apparently Mom should have considered marrying herself to work instead. And Dad was perfectly capable of taking care of himself.
I, for once, didn’t have much to say.
When they finally stopped yelling, Mom was shaking so much her chair went ta, ta, ta. I thought about touching her hand but she stood up and tripped on me. Dad started cursing again. Mom stomped to the big window and shuffled things on her desk. The house was like a balloon ready to burst. I had to sneak away.
Outside, a dozen boys in the neighborhood were chasing the old maid until they were up against the outhouse. She was wearing a shirt that almost covered her. Still, it was open in the front.
The boys yelled, Retard! Stinky shoe! And they pushed her into a corner and tore at her shirt. Mom had shown me picture books about how the Red Guards had done such things, during the fat Chairman Mao years. However, I hadn’t seen it in person. The boys narrowed their eyes, and the muscles on their faces quivered. They spat on the old maid as if she were a slab of the sidewalk.
I flapped my arms and opened my mouth but my voice was lost. My feet weighed a thousand pounds. A part of me was glad they ignored me as if I were nothing but a vision, a ghost. Another part of me wanted to break the little circle of boys wrapped around her.
When the boys left, I crept closer. Her shirt had fallen to her waist. Her hair was damp with spit; her hair stuck to her chest. But she smelled like the outside, not stinky. I scooted until I was close enough to touch her or to shout into her ears, Play time, watermelon time, run away time! It was sort of our song. But I never got up the nerve.
She must have sensed I was there. It would be my first inkling that something was indeed not right about her, as she couldn’t seem to recognize me. And it wasn’t because I couldn’t rescue her. Her body was rigid, her eyes hollow so that things of this world seemed to be falling through, getting lost in a void. I could see that she’d gone to that other place where I couldn’t follow, or try to bring her back from.
Still, I lifted a finger toward her, willing her to touch me back, waiting, as my legs fell asleep, waiting.
It was nearly dark, so I was drifting off a bit when she split my eardrums with a long howl. Like the cicada’s death song and its awful green blood, it made me want to scream.
Then Popcorn Sam came into the hutong and sang about his fluffy sweet popcorns. Soon, a growing crowd of kids surrounded him. I couldn’t resist running up to join them, reaching out my dirty hands for a share. When the old maid howled again, my hands had become too full and my legs too stiff to turn back.
***
Mom was talking to Char when I finally made it home.
“I thought she was still an old maid. You know, untouched,” Mom said, her hands busy scrubbing a pot. “Where is she hiding these men? I don’t buy it.” She clucked her tongue.
“Why not? She’s got those soul-sucking eyes men leave their wives for.” Char tapped on her cigarette and puffed out a line of smoke that sliced into the sky.
Mom shook her head hard. “No. Not Andy. No way. Listen, the retard’s pretty but useless. Can’t tell the Yins from the Yangs on a good day. She’s practically old now. Andy’s too high-minded.”
“Better be,” Char coughed a bitter laugh. “Or I’d break both their legs! I don’t care if she is a witch or a snake monster or The Skeleton Ghost!”
Mom reiterated that the old maid was not worthy of worry. Then she turned inside with a stack of dishes. I paused near the door, unsure whether to back away or move forward. Char was quiet a second, turning on me next. “Where did you come from?” she said, “Were you hiding this whole time?”
“No,” I said, irritated. “Are you talking about the old maid? And what does that have to do with Andy?”
Her face changed from pink to ashen. She grounded the cigarette butts littered around her feet until they made hissing noises. She slapped me hard. “Look at you,” she said, “starting school soon and still hanging around that slutty old shoe!”
I snapped, “Is she older than you? I bet she runs faster than you barefoot. Are you jealous?” By then, I’d forgotten that Mom was close.
“Shut up!” Mom’s voice shook me. I turned to see she was trembling and staring me down. “Go wash up.”
I started to tell her about the old maid and the boys and Popcorn Sam and how his machine had exploded and threw up soot. But she shoved me inside before I could say another word.
“Shut up,” she said. “Shut up, oh Pusa, shut up!”
The moon was cold that night. Dad was coughing an awful cough when Mom finally came in to wash his feet, make tea. I peered out the window by my bed. One of the street lamps was out, so the rest struggled, hissing in the dark. A small mob of moths flew around the halos of the surviving bulbs, making an occasional dull clink. The old maid’s window was an even shade of black.
I sank into my bed and listened to Mom and Dad peck at each other with words I didn’t understand. My head throbbed. I tugged and pulled on the rubber band clutching my hair to loosen it.
After a while, Mom appeared by the side of my bed. “Want a hand?”
I nodded and sat up. She hadn’t done this for days; it felt like ages.
After she detangled my hair, she combed it from root to tip. I took a deep breath and leaned into her hands. Her warmth seeped into my scalp, making me sleepy.
“What’s that?” She pointed to my window. The panes were coated in layers of dust and mud splatter from winter snow and summer thunderstorms. But I had cleaned a small circle in the center, so moonlight was pouring through it.
“My secret portal. Everyone in the world passes through it,” I whispered, my eyes half closed as she rubbed my scalp. When she pulled forward to look, she forgot to let go of my hair.
“Ouch!” My eyes snapped open.
Mom was staring out at the street below, and the old maid’s window. Perhaps another lover had returned. I didn’t know. But Mom’s face was far away then really close. She told me to lie down, shut my eyes. Her voice a whisper but firm, tangled into my sleep. I dreamed she hovered there all night, her shadows keeping the moon from frosting my eyes.
***
For the rest of the summer, Mom locked me in the house.
The house grew darker earlier as summer receded into fall. On one evening, I dipped a hand in the calligraphy ink tray and stamped the pages of Chairman Mao’s Poems with spiraling impressions of my fingers. Each was a twisted vortex. I was on the verge of finger painting the walls when Mom came home.
The next day, she put away the padlock. School was starting. I was told to march straight from home to school and back again with an assigned walking group.
***
The circumstances of me running away that fall have faded over the years. But I know it started with a note my teacher wrote. She had sent me home with it out of the blue, a few weeks into the semester. On the way home, I snuck out of the walking group and hid behind the outhouse wall. When the other kids called, I told them to go ahead.
Under the pagoda tree, I unfolded the note. It said that I’d never turned in my homework and that I got zero points on my quizzes. If things didn’t change, I might not graduate first grade.
I read it again. The teacher’s signature stared like menacing eyes.
“What’s that?” The old maid plopped down next to me. I was happy to see her but the letter weighed in my hands.
“It’s school,” I said, giving her a half wave, the paper flinging and making a tearing sound in the air. I hoped she would tear it and toss it over the roof.
But she patted it flat and licked around its corners before settling down and reading the note, her head jerking back and forth. Her words sounded slow and a little blurry. “Is this for your dad?”
“The teacher said I should get his signature.”
“Will he get mad?” she asked.
“Probably,” I said.
“Parents are mean,” she said slowly, petting the paper, as if it were a hand, my hand. And somehow I felt better.
We sat a while. When the sun began to breathe down our necks, she snapped off willow branches and made whistles out of leaves. We tried to make a song. Hers sounded good but I got a headache from trying. When she laughed at the way I puckered my lips, I laughed too.
The old maid braided two willow branches together and it started to look like a wreath. “You want to come live at my house?”
I wanted to say yes. But then she had a look.
“No,” she said, changing her mind. “My lover will kick you. Plus, my mom’s here now. That witch is a pain.” She picked at a scar on her lips. It looked like a blister. “She only makes me want to run again,” she said. I hadn’t known that about her. Maybe some of the rumors were true. I tried to picture her running away, living in that magic cave, eating those mushrooms. “You should run too,” she said, “Have an adventure!” She darted in circles around the tree. The paper fluttered in her hand like a dove trying to get free. I pictured myself as that bird, flying south, where it was always summer.
I’d read about ancient heroes running away from their lives in the old books. But I’d never thought I knew anyone who’d done it. “Maybe I could take a bus!” I said, excited. “Then I won’t get too tired from running.” It would be my first bus ride, too, I neglected to say.
“You’re right!” She flapped over to me and pulled me to a run. We turned from the hutong onto the Peaceful Underworld Avenue. From there, the number 24 bus station was only a block away.
***
The bus was crowded. The old maid had to jam a shoulder against my back to push me through the crowd. No room for me to turn around and wave goodbye to her, but I figured she’d already left. The crowd smelled like fatigue and they didn’t care who was getting squished. After a few stops, I found an open seat. The window was cracked and it was still bright out. An army of bicycles rang their bells; some of the riders put a hand on the side of the bus while they waited. The crowd had thinned on and off the bus as the sky changed its colors. Pink, purple, dark blue, gray. The Drum Tower looked big and forbidden for a second, then orange and gold, becoming a paper cut-out in the end.
The bus trudged forward, pushing away thick bubbles of night air. I looked down and realized the letter was back in my pocket. I didn’t feel like reading it again. Besides, the driver had turned off the inside lights. I closed my eyes.
“What’s your name, little girl?” The driver looked at me through his rearview mirror.
“Shut up,” I said.
He looked kind, with curved lines around his eyes, but scary too. I remembered then that the teacher had said shut up was not my real name. But I couldn’t remember the name she said after that. So I curled into a corner of my seat and hid my face behind my hands. The driver didn’t ask me anything else, but drove me to the main bus station at the end of his route.
There, an old lady smiled at me in the street. I told her all about the old maid and about where I lived with my parents. The lady nodded and wrote in a notepad the whole time. Then she took me home on her bicycle.
***
The popsicle lady told me later that they took the old maid to an asylum for good. But I didn’t believe it at first. Was it because of me? The question churned in my head. In the days that followed, a man came and sealed her door with red strips of paper, as if her house was the site of something bad, a murder, or an anti-revolutionary coup. There were whispers. It was bound to happen.
Char told me, “She’s probably dead now in one of those places, so,” winking, “forget about it.”
I ran. And I stopped looking through my little portal. Mud soon reclaimed it. One day, I noticed my circle had re-blended with the rest of the glass. Not even my own fingers could trace a faint outline around it.
***
Dad found the teacher’s note in my pocket the night I returned. After that, he changed his schedule so he could watch me do my homework and occasionally help Mom with dinner. One night, he told me Opium Andy and Char were getting divorced. And Mom hated it because it meant Char was moving back to Mongolia.
They had both stopped calling me shut up then. I would never learn to read Mom’s thoughts the way I could read the old maid’s, and Mom never talked to me the way she talked with Char. Still, when Mom came to comb my hair that night, I sat close and ran my fingers through hers after she was done with mine. She sat quietly while I brushed, and for those few minutes I felt a strange, animal sound rattling inside her, a cry she had stuffed down for so long it’d gotten lost, couldn’t find its way out. I kept brushing, but she must have sensed that briefest pause in me when she said, “You are all grown up now. Old enough to brush your own hair from now on.”
Then she was gone.
In a few years, the city would eradicate harmful insects, including the cicadas. The old neighborhood would look immaculate, like a street maiden being forced to put on a new dress, her hair combed and stuffed in a bun, so she looked garish and pretty, different. No leaves, broken wings, or smears of green blood remained on freshly swept streets. The old pagoda trees had been uprooted, replaced with neat rows of willows, planted at equal distance, like soldiers marching in parades. The district around the hutong, in fact, was left in an eerie quiet, its last scream exorcised from a tidy, balled-up body. I strolled among the hutongs, alone, listening and waiting for a familiar pair of eyes to emerge, thoughts unread, like pebbles waiting to become a shrine, under blue-white streaks of this new moon’s hair.
Pingmei Lan grew up in Beijing, China. Her writing has appeared in Epiphany, Tahoma Literary Review, and The Florida Review. She is a winner of the 2019 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers.
