About This Work

The dragon is in the street dancing beneath windows pasted with colored squares, past the man who leans into the phone booth’s red pagoda, past crates of doves and roosters veiled until dawn. Fireworks complicate the streets with sulphur as people exchange gold and silver foil, money to appease ghosts who linger, needy even in death. I am almost invisible. Hands could pass through me effortlessly. This is how it is to be so alien that my name falls from me, grows untranslatable as the shop signs, the odors of ginseng and black fungus that idle in the stairwell, the corridor where the doors are blue months ajar. Hands gesture in the smoke, the partial moon of a face. For hours the soft numeric click of mah-jongg tiles drifts down the hallway where languid Mai trails her musk of sex and narcotics. There is no grief in this, only the old year consuming itself, the door knob blazing in my hand beneath the lightbulb’s electric jewel. Between voices and fireworks wind works bricks to dust—hush, hush— no language I want to learn. I can touch the sill worn by hands I’ll never know in this room with its low table where I brew chrysanthemum tea. The sign for Jade Palace sheds green corollas on the floor. It’s dangerous to stand here in the chastening glow, darkening my eyes in the mirror with the gulf of the rest of my life widening away from me, waiting for the man I married to pass beneath the sign of the building, to climb the five flights and say his Chinese name for me. He’ll rise up out of the puzzling streets where men pass bottles of rice liquor, where the new year is liquor, the black bottle the whole district is waiting for, like some benevolent arrest—the moment when men and women turn to each other and dissolve each bad bet, every sly mischance, the dalliance of hands. They turn in lamplight the way I turn now. Wai Min is in the doorway. He brings fish. He brings lotus root. He brings me ghost money.