Snake Soup

Sijing was hungry. The air was cool and still. She tasted dust, smelled spent explosives. There was ringing in her ears and blood soaking into the fabric of her clothes. She felt no pain, however, and contemplated the arrival of death as she might have the visit of a friend. Should I change clothes before death arrives? Should I make death a snack? Is death a man or a woman?

The last question made her laugh. She had grown up knowing she was a failure as a girl, with wide, blunt features and broad, sloping shoulders, muscular arms, a large head, and a stubborn, methodical, indelicate mind. She had listened as a child as her parents argued late at night over how they would ever find her a husband. The realization that she was a disappointment was painful, and had brought her to tears many times, but her obstinance was a forge that evaporated those tears, and made her heart dense and heavy, like iron.

She knew she was useful. Mother and Father did what they could, but they had had children late in life and were chronically ill. As she grew older and stronger, they only became weaker and more vulnerable, so it was Sijing that tended the crops, kept the animals fed, harvested and slaughtered when the time came, and gave their surplus vegetables and grain to Uncle Wai to sell at the market. Her little sister, who everyone nicknamed Pear, cleaned the house, cooked their meals, and nursed their parents when they were especially sick. She was three years younger than Sijing, quiet, small, and remarkably beautiful.

I love my sister, thought Sijing, but if we were both like her we would have starved long ago, or been forced to become prostitutes. My parents can wish for two fragile flowers for daughters or they can stay fed. What use is there wishing an ox was a trembling dove? Good luck plowing your field with a dove.       

So she put her ox head down and pulled. She pulled hard against the yoke of all that held her family back: dry summers, cold winters, Uncle Wai’s death, blights on crops, the cost of medicine. They survived, until a fever came and snuffed out both her mother and father in a single night.

Pear held onto her and cried. They had no extended family to turn to. But then her sister made a confession.

“There’s a scholar looking for a wife on the other side of town. I’ve seen him watch me as he passes our yard, and he’s given me gifts more than once when I’ve been out in the market.” She paused. “Last month we arranged to meet in secret, and I’ve been seeing him every week since then. He…we’re lovers. But he’s not sure we can get married because you’re the older sister, and you still don’t have a match.” There was no condemnation or bitterness in Pear’s voice, only trust and pleading. She had a problem she did not have a solution to, a stone she could not move. But moving stones was what Sijing was good at.

“Tell your lover that you are an orphan now,” she said. “And that your oldest sister went mad with grief and drowned herself in the sea. Then throw yourself into his arms. Not only will he get a beautiful wife, but he can sell our property for your dowry. A beautiful girl with no family? It will be like one of the Pu Songling stories Uncle Wai loved so much, only your lover will be better off: the beautiful girls in those stories always turn out to be ghosts or fox spirits, and the horny lover gets cursed or dies mysteriously. With you, he really does hit the jackpot.”

“But sister, you’re not going to drown yourself, are you?”

“Don’t be stupid. Of course not. I’m going to Gold Mountain to work. I’ll sell Mother’s jewelry and buy a boat ticket. I’ll dress like a man. So, in a sense, your older sister will have disappeared into the sea.”

Pear protested for a while, but after a few days Sijing’s tender insistence and the urgency of their plight pushed her to agree. They held onto each other even tighter, then. Sijing stayed around town until she was certain that Pear’s future was secure. It didn’t take long.

She had a friend purchase her a boat ticket and some men’s clothing. She contemplated cutting hair from her armpits and pasting it on as a fake beard, but decided that was idiotic. But the idea of her makeshift disguise would have made Pear laugh until she collapsed, and Sijing blinked back a few tears. She would never see her sister again.

 

 

#

 

 

Sijing’s chest was small, easy to hide. Her sturdy frame made many of the young men she knew look wispy in comparison. When she arrived in Guangzhou no one suspected, even for a moment, that she was a woman. It felt comfortable, striding around like a man. She saw wealthy women with their feet bound, wrapped in silk gowns, three or four of them sharing one husband, either as wives or as concubines. They all looked miserable. She treated herself to noodles, shrimp dumplings, and a little plum wine, and silently toasted her new life as a man. But even as she relished her little feast she counted her remaining money carefully. Supporting her family had taught her that trouble could interrupt even the most pleasant meal, and trouble was expensive. She saved what she could for the long journey ahead.

The sea was an endless field of iron blue, spread before her like a pasture, ready for planting. As she climbed the ramp onto the boat she imagined pulling the plow behind her, cleaving the waves like soil as the boat surged eastward, wondering what this new harvest would bring.

There were many others like her on the boat, men seeking work across the ocean, but there was also a small band of Christian missionaries on board. They had been preaching for years in Eastern China, but had felt a call (or so they said) to a new ministry in America. Most were Europeans, but some were Chinese people who had been converted to this new religion. They told stories from their holy book. The European’s Chinese was difficult to understand, but as far as she could tell, he was talking about the first man and woman on earth.

“God,” the missionary said, “created the first man out of the dirt. He breathed life into him and he became alive. Then God pulled a woman out of the man’s ribs. These were the first two people.”

“God let them live in his beautiful garden. He commanded them not to eat the fruit from his favorite tree. But the snake came and tricked the woman with clever words and convinced her to eat it. The man ate the fruit, too, and so God punished them, and locked them out of the garden forever, which is why now people must work hard to grow food.”

It was a ridiculous story, but fairly entertaining. Clearly the woman had missed out on a much better option: forget the fruit. Kill the snake, and eat that. Besides, she thought, eating fruit from a tree you’ve never seen before is a pretty good way to make sure you’ll spend the night shitting.

She remembered the soup her sister would make from the snakes she would kill in the fields. Rich soy, bright ginger and savory mushrooms infused the warm broth and flaky white meat with wonderful flavor, especially soothing on a cold night. She fell asleep thinking of steaming bowls as the boat rocked on the ocean.

That night she dreamed of God. He was an old Chinese man with a comically long beard. He was fussing over the man he had made out of dirt. One arm was longer than the other, the eyes were crooked, and the toes kept falling off. He worked feverishly, puffing out his white mustache and mopping his brow. Finally his masterpiece was complete. God drew out a long pipe, the kind rich men used to smoke opium. He popped the bowl of it into the dirt man’s open mouth. He took a deep breath and blew hard.

The man came to life, coughing and shaking off the extra dirt. He looked around, confused, blinking dimly. Then, suddenly, he clutched his side. A strange slit had appeared between his ribs. He gasped and howled in pain. From the long opening in his side came fingers, then a hand. An arm shot out from his torso, followed by another, and pulled him open from the inside, and then, emerging like a full-grown newborn, out climbed a smiling woman. She threw back her black hair with a burst of laughter and took off running.

God scampered frantically back and forth, trying to piece his man back together, who was broken open like an egg, wiggling his limbs like an insect. The laughing woman sprinted to the forbidden tree. She reached into the branches and pulled out a snake, which she killed with one snap against a rock. Then she kicked the tree hard and all the fruit fell to the ground. God dropped the pieces of the man and tried to scoop up the fruit before they rolled away, and the woman bounded off, swinging the dead snake over her head, laughing like a hundred ringing bells.

 

 

#

 

 

When Sijing stepped off the boat in San Francisco, it was May 6, 1882. Though she could not know it, on that very day the Chinese Exclusion Act was approved, making it illegal for Chinese immigrants to come to work in America. When Sijing learned about this much later, it made her sad. Secretly, she had hoped she would save enough money and write to Pear and her husband. Maybe they would want to come live with her in America. That could never happen now.

She had thought she would work on the Transcontinental Railroad, but most of that work was already finished by the time she arrived. She and the others she had crossed the ocean with were herded like animals off the boat. Inert hostility clouded the air like fog. They were surrounded by white people who seemed to threaten them even as they ignored them. Their faces reminded her of the European missionaries, who seem to have vanished into thin air like the angels and spirits for whom they advertised. By force of gravity the new arrivals found their way, shunted down this alley and up that street until they heard more voices speaking Cantonese and Mandarin, smelled steamed rice and ginger and garlic. Perhaps they wouldn’t starve.

She thought back on her grandmother who died when she was little. Everyone said Po Po had lost her mind, and many argued she was a witch. But Sijing knew better, spending hours in her smoky room, the air thick with greasy candles and smoldering incense, but also full of flowers: some budding, some blooming, some already wilting.

“I’m trying to invent my own magic spells,” Po Po would tell her, confidentially. “I feel anxious all the time, and the doctors don’t seem to help me, so I’m taking matters into my own hands. I’ve got nothing to lose…” Po Po spread a massive sheet of paper over a lacquered table and painted a wide ring in heavy black ink. Then, at various points along the circumference she would place specific items: a dried dragonfly, a jade ring her husband wore, a pinecone, a braided cord tied in a knot, and a small live turtle who would occasionally wake up, emerge from his shell, and leave the circle.

“Are these items magic, Po Po?” she had whispered. “Are they cursed?”

“No, they’re just things I like. It’s nice to keep things you like in front of you, isn’t it? That’s why I keep you here, too, Sijing.” She chuckled huskily under her breath.

Po Po washed her hands in cold black tea. She twisted her gray hair into a bun and pinned in place with a gnarled budding twig, even though expensive combs and hairpins sat unused on a table behind her. She walked once around the table in one direction and twice the other direction, then she did the same thing again backwards. None of these things were a part of any tradition Sijing had ever heard of, before then or since. But Po Po did them with such solemnity that Sijing could only sit and watch with profound reverence.

Po Po took out a plain, rough sack and emptied it in the middle of the circle. A small mountain of rice now rose from the center of the black ring; Po Po’s non-magical treasures stood guard around the perimeter. Then Sijing’s grandmother would stretch, crack her knuckles, and begin to count.

She counted the mountain of rice, grain by grain. Her work was meticulous and unhurried. She arranged grains into little piles of ten, and then plowed those with her trembling, wrinkled hand into a pile of a hundred. As she counted, she sang old songs. Occasionally her wordless melodies would shape themselves into the verse of a song Sijing recognized. Other times she was sure Po Po was composing her own songs, as they were often about counting rice, or about Po Po’s dog, or the turtle, or about Sijing being the Empress of all granddaughters. Most of the time she just hummed, almost inaudibly, or recounted stories of her childhood.

“We were so poor when I was little,” she mused. “My baby brother starved to death. We couldn’t keep him fed often enough, and he got sick. One morning he didn’t wake up. Mother was always so careful with the rice, never wasting even a grain, and yet the rice bin was almost always close to empty. I would look down at it and wonder how many grains it took to keep each of us alive. Theoretically, if you could measure carefully enough, you could find out the magic number. Perhaps 416 grains of rice was too little food, and you would starve to death, but 417 was enough to keep your heart beating another day? There must be a tipping point somewhere in the count, mustn’t there? The question has always fascinated me. So I sit here and count grains of rice and pretend I’m a witch. But I feel calm when I’m counting. It helps my mind be quiet. I do this every day, and people think I’m insane. Oh, grab the turtle, dear, he’s about to fall off the table again.”

Each time she counted a thousand grains she would put that pile aside in a large bowl and continue. There were a few bags under the table, and each was labeled ten thousand. That day Po Po counted 2,160 grains of rice. She left the rest in their pile in the center of the black circle and went to go take her afternoon nap. This was when Sijing had to return home. As she turned to leave, she asked, “Po Po, where does real magic come from?”

“Oh, I don’t know if there is real magic. But if there is, I bet it’s just weird old ladies like me, fooling around because they’re bored. Maybe one day they find the right little song to sing or the right numbers to add up and someone turns into a pig! Who knows?” And she tucked a flower into Sijing’s hair, and laughed herself all the way back into her little house, closing the door behind her.

Po Po never asked her to be gentler or prettier, never hinted that she should soften her voice, never demanded how she would ever find a husband. She never did anything but love Sijing and give her flowers. One day her little house burned down, but no one could ever find her body. Sijing always believed she finally created some kind of magic spell, and hoped it was a good one. Her favorite theory was that Po Po counted some quantity of rice that unlocked the secrets of the universe to her, and that she turned herself into another tiny turtle, to marry the one she kept on the table, and that they both crawled away and lived in the pond and ate lotus roots all day.

 

 

#

 

 

After a week in America, Sijing found work in a mine. At first, she felt capable, making enough money for herself, free from any other responsibilities. A part of her was anchored now to this new country. She had made a mark on it: moved ancient stone and earth to carve out something she hoped was useful. In this small way, the continent had changed because she had laid hands upon it. She grew comfortable in this new identity, never afraid now to be too strong, no longer mindful of being covered in sweat and dust.

But each day, as she lit a sputtering lantern it seemed she was about to walk down into her own grave. It was dirty, suffocating, dangerous work, exhausting even for her, who had kept the farm alive to support her family, and working for someone else did not invigorate her the way working at home did. Her body ached perpetually. Emerging to the surface was no better. The Chinese workers were paid little, and taxed and bullied on top of it. If a crime was committed, they were accused of stealing and killing. The eyes of white people were cold and suspicious. They mocked her as she tried to shape her mouth around English words. Once, while walking up a street, a horseman riding behind her kicked her in the back as she passed. She fell forward and gravel painfully embedded into the heels of her hands as she broke her fall. Looking up, she saw the man was laughing, and seated behind him on the horse was a little girl, who was laughing too. The little girl put her fingers at the corners of her eyes and stretched the skin. “Ching chong, ching chong,” she sang. For a fraction of a second Sijing met the man’s laughing eyes and closed her hand around a stone, but then she glanced at the man’s side, where his hand rested on a revolver.

She picked herself up, dusted off her clothes, and hurried pathetically away, echoes of cruel mirth stinging in her ears. Rage made her tremble, but she knew better than to make a stand. She had heard how 20 Chinese people had been murdered in a single day in Los Angeles, their bodies hung up like dead animals. None of the killers had been punished.

She tried to rationalize away her dread. There were wars and killing in China, too. There were emperors and officials that oppressed the poor. People starved, and robbed, and raped, just like anywhere else. But here she was not being attacked because of someone’s greed or hunger, or even lust. She had nothing they wanted to take. When people threw stones or insults, when they spat or knocked her down, they gained nothing, and yet she lost so much. She lost the confidence to walk down the street without glancing over her shoulder or ducking out of the way. She lost the hope that she could look at the world around her with different-shaped eyes and see any place where she belonged. Yet as they dismissed her humanity, they coveted her labor, so happy to have a human machine to do difficult work for them.

The friends she made came and went, maimed or killed in mining accidents, moving on to find better work, sometimes just disappearing. She felt her body weakening, joints not quite returning to their previous strength and flexibility, even after rest. The mine chewed her muscles like gristle and left pain like rust on her bones. One day she saw the white foreman examining a shovel that had broken. The handle had split, but the rusty metal blade had also come loose, and rattled as he tapped it against a dry stump.

“Hey Bruner,” he called to his associate. “This ain’t worth fixing. Throw it out.”

“Right, boss.” The second man took the broken shovel and wrenched the remaining wood apart from the blade. He threw the broken handle on the cooking fire, and dropped the blade into the ditch the workers used as a latrine.

That’s me, realized Sijing. I’m a tool to them. Once I don’t work anymore, I’m worth less than shit.

The next morning she told her friends she was sick, and snuck away for the day to a nearby pond fed by a narrow stream. She brought lo mai gai purchased in Chinatown: a lotus leaf bundle of sticky rice steamed with egg, nuts, mushrooms, and chunks of lup cheung, a sweet sausage. This, and a couple apples, and she could stay away all day: nap out here, or fish, maybe even camp in the grass until morning. She needed time to be still for a while. But the thought of being unconscious and defenseless in the open didn’t feel restful. So she braced her back against a cottonwood tree and stared out blankly at the water. Her overwrought mind resisted the meditative state she desired. But eventually, in spite of her apprehensions, she found herself dozing.

A shuffle in the grass beside her woke her. She looked down to see her grandmother’s turtle, laboriously working its way down to the water. Of course it couldn’t really be the same turtle, but the resemblance was uncanny. She picked him up, peered into his tiny wizened reptilian face. He retracted into his shell at the indignity of being held. She addressed the turtle as her maternal grandfather.

“Gung Gung,” she whispered, wiping hot tears from her eyes, “did I make a mistake, coming to this country? Am I going to get beaten to death, or hanged, or just die down there in that hole, with no one to mourn me?”

The turtle looked overwhelmed by the question, and said nothing.

 

 

#

 

 

Her answer came in the third hour of her shift the next morning. A terrible sound spilled into the dark, as if thunder was being forced down the throat of the mine. Before she could take a breath, a half ton of rock came crashing down onto her.

It took time to die. Her left arm was pinned under stone and hot soil, probably broken. There was a deep gash in her leg from a rock’s edge sharp as an arrowhead, but it was impossible to tell how much blood she was losing, covered in dirt, in total darkness. The initial shock of the impact was subsiding; now it hurt to breathe. A dull knife prodded her right side: a cracked or broken rib. The anguish of it all made the effort of freeing her arm seem insurmountable. The struggle to make any useful decision seemed even more daunting. So she sat in the dark, waiting, hoping some surviving workers might dig her out.

“Wonder if I’ll bleed to death.”

Her clothes did not feel as wet as before. Perhaps the mud had formed some kind of natural plaster to dress her wound. Did that mean if no one came to the rescue she would die of thirst? Of starvation? She could see Po Po in front of her, counting her grains of rice.

Maybe I’m running out of air, she contemplated. Po Po looks so real, as if any moment she will turn and smile at me. Will I see her when I die? Will I see my parents? Or will I reincarnate as some new creature?

Inches from her feet she saw a white grub, twisting and pulsing. Invertebrates like that were uncommon this deep in the earth, so it caught her attention. Was it a worm? Some kind of larva or caterpillar? And why was it so plainly visible when she couldn’t see her hand in front of her face? Her aching mind drifted. She pondered whether worms in China spoke some dialect of Chinese, while this worm would speak English. Or perhaps the worm would speak the native language of the land: Mojave, Paiute, Cahuilleno? After all, English was a European language, and the European settlers, for all their possessive, authoritative swagger, were visitors here, just like the Chinese. When a Chinese worm burrowed in the earth, did the soil taste like star anise, white peppercorn, or winter melon? Did American worms taste in their soil the strange foods she was coming to know from this continent: avocado, amaranth, or tomato?

But her musing was cut short when she realized the worm was growing. It was now the length of her arm and twisted itself like a wet shirt being wrung out to dry. When it unraveled it was not a worm at all, but a long, white snake. It looked at her with dull white eyes, like flecks of dirty shell, and it spoke perfect Cantonese.

“You deserve to die, Sijing. Surrender yourself to annihilation, body and soul.”

“What do you mean, annihilation? Is there no afterlife? No meeting with the spirits of my family? No rebirth?”

“Ha! Not for someone like you. What are you? You are Chinese, but you abandoned your motherland and came here to work like the white devil’s livestock. You were born a woman, but you dress as a man. If your own sister came to your funeral, would she even know you? And if the friends you have here found your body, what would they think to find out your truth? You are not fit to be food for the worms. Give up.”

Sijing had no response for the snake’s verdict. Everything it said made sense. Perhaps she was hallucinating, but what difference did it make? These doubts obviously came from within her. Self-loathing, tortuously familiar, bloomed like dark fungus along the fractured walls of the pit. Nevertheless, hearing these words in the snake’s voice changed them, ground them brighter like a knifeblade.

“No gender. No country. No family. Your sister’s husband thinks you drowned, why not make it true? Submerged in water or in earth, what’s the difference? Do you even have a name? You gave your father’s name when you applied to work, but that’s a lie as well. Sijing is dead. Your miserable heartbeat slowing now is just the truth catching up to you.”

And indeed, her heart was growing sluggish, heavy. She felt suffocated, and the pain in her ribs had doubled. Like a brushstroke drawn in the dark, the snake drew closer.

Something deep inside her whispered, like a pot just beginning to boil.

“You at least did the world a service, saving them the trouble of digging you a grave. It hurts so much, doesn’t it, you ugly, nameless child? Wouldn’t letting go be a relief? Wouldn’t it be sweet, like a ripe peach?”

But the snake had gotten too close. In her free right hand, Sijing grasped a stone, and she brought it down hard, crushing the snake’s head.

“I’m not an idiot. I don’t listen to snakes.” She spat. “I liked you better as a worm.”

Her old stubbornness had rekindled within her. She would not surrender. She had work to do somewhere. She’d dug and plowed for others too long; it was time to plow for herself. If this snake was not a delusion, she would eat it raw to build her strength. Then she would leave this mine and—aaaaugh!

The movement of her arm killing the snake had torn something inside her, and the pain in her side spiked like lightning. Something was ripping her apart. She screamed, and with a burst of adrenaline wrenched her left arm free to clutch her side, but it was too late. She had opened.

From between her ribs emerged a woman. She wore a silk gown, like her mother wore for festival days when she had been well. The gown was not white like the snake, but the palest yellow, like the nectar of a flower. Her hair was fastened with a rough flowering twig, like Po Po. She was slight and slender, delicate, like Pear, but also strong, like Sijing. She rose from the dust, and she smiled.

Sijing felt her side. The second womb that had opened there was gone. So was the pain.

The young woman picked up the corpse of the snake, tipped back her head, and swallowed it without chewing, like a heron. The last few inches of tail slurped past her lips. Then she rolled up her yellow sleeves and got to work. She unbound the cloth wrap Sijing used to flatten her chest and made it into a bandage for her bleeding leg. The broken handle of a shovel became a splint for the broken arm. When the rib-wife spoke, her voice was full of love, but also hard as a river stone with resolve.

“You and I are getting out of here. We’ll dig with our hands if we have to. And after that, we can open a restaurant in Chinatown. We’ll serve dumplings and snake soup.” And with the strength of a person twice her size, she put her arms around a boulder and wrenched it aside.

The two of them worked furiously, tirelessly, their hair plastered to their faces with bitter sweat, muscles burning, smiling in the dark. After hours, or perhaps years, they found the last stone to brace themselves against, pushing like oxen yoked together, bellowing and straining to pry open the clenched jaw of the earth, until at last they unburied the stars.