new paved streets

Starchy polyester swaddled me and lifted me from my bed — eyes still closed, breath still steady, inhales and exhales softly matching the beat of the oxen’ hooves on Wai Po’s farm only a short walk to the north: no doubt already awake and greeting the horizon with their gruff snouts, sweeping the morning dew with their swishing tails.

Rays of sunlight barely peeked through the slitted blinds that lined our eleventh-floor apartment windows, but even their subtle presence was the most blaring invader to me. The sun launched its gleaming javelins, and the white spears pierced through the darkness in my room and ignited me with their sudden warmth.

Even through closed eyes and groggy morning delirium, the golden light and soothing voice of Da Yi Ma by my bed were familiar enough to wake me. Scooping me up preciously in teal polyester, Da Yi Ma slowly made way from my room to the front of the apartment. The steady bumping motion of my aunt carrying me through the hallway, as if she were rocking me to sleep instead of waking me, was the gentle cue of the start of another day. My eyes were reluctantly open by the time she released me from her embrace into the dining room chair; it was time for school.

For ten months out of twelve in the year, I detested the itchy, nonporous uniform my aunt slid on my arms and zipped through whines and flapping arms — “All little Chinese kids wear uniforms to school!” Da Yi Ma would say in Mandarin, her intonations of the last syllables slightly lifted from being used to talking in our regional dialect of 抚州话. “Then I will move to another universe far, far away!” I wanted to retort, but I was fiveyears old and the weakest boy in the village.

The thick teal and white windbreaker, so stiff you can almost hear the fabric crack when you fold it, trapped sweat from basketball games on shabby tarmac courts and offered no comfort on breezy winter days walking home from school. Each plastic fiber made my chest furiously itchy; chafed my sides whenever my arms brushed my body. The front of the hated jacket always boasted streaks of melted orange and blue popsicles in summer and oil from school-side food carts in winter, the collar and hems stained yellow year-round from sweat and dust from the untilled farmland we claimed as playgrounds.

That morning, in the middle of the two brief months of winter we got in the province of Jiangxi, I could feel the cheap fabric let body heat seep through like a broken dreamcatcher. I tightly hugged myself and shivered.

Every weekday, we marched through the front door and descended the eleven flights of stairs, cracking concrete defaced with polka dots of squished candy and cigarette ash from construction workers given living quarters in the complex. “Your uniforms are better than the ones we had forty years ago. We were the poorest children in the village,” my aunt would say on our way down, and I would shake my head trying to imagine a world when she was young.

Outside, the scaffolding of government projects, hauntingly skeletal in their shabby linings and threadbare cloaks, waved bony wire-fingers at us from across the street. Construction workers, ushered in from probably another corner of the countryside, hollered obscenities at each other and echoed them back, their conversations atop the metal beams and frames melding with the construction noise to form the crudest cacophony. They drilled into the Earth and guffawed; the jackhammer struck through the humid air and pierced my skull.

Overwhelmed by the clamor, compounded with the misery that accompanied every day with the itchy uniform, I began to cry. Da Yi Ma covered my ears and turned my head away. Pretending the construction workers weren’t there, mistaking my agony for concern that the workers were destroying the earthen streets that my family and ancestors had called home for generations — I realize that only now — Da Yi Ma cooed

” and directed us away. It was just another winter morning, and my aunt and a teary-eyed me headed towards my elementary school on foot through the newly-paved streets.

Mama told me the story of our family’s fall from grace: decades ago, when the dirt roads were dustier than the cracked paper of Da Yi Ma’s childhood photographs, poor government soldiers bustled down the verdant hills in military-green trucks and crickety wagons as brown as the soil that covered their faces. Mama’s grandfather — my great-grandfather — was our village’s landlord, and her father the principal in one of the village schools. The soldiers knocked on our doors and shouted with the kind of authority only backed by gunpowder and money, and with their dirty paws they reached and grasped and seized our land, sullied the grassy fields with their tar-black eyes and greasy fingers, pointed and saluted and bowed with fake chivalry.

I didn’t understand the greater part of the story. Trucks? Tanks? Guns? My points of interest were flawed, so Mama repeated with a more childish analogy: the green ice cream carts rolled down to our doors to serve us scoops of Cultural Revolution communism, and our family slept wealthy and woke penniless.

The strongest in our family, Mama’s grandfather stood at our gates, below our bamboo-shambled arches and brass dragonhead door knockers, and matched the uniformed fiends with fierce eyes. “You will not take what is ours,” I imagined he would have said, chest and shoulders mirroring a lion’s staunches, faded eyes and dipped nose maybe a little similar to mine?

His resistance was futile, of course. Mama whispered a subtle warning, her idea of a satisfactory story ending: “What’s good might be lost, so when you’re given something, hold on to it with desperate hands. Never let go.”

The youngest of four daughters and fourth youngest out of five, Mama also loved to recount to us the story of the meat. Once, all the cattle and all the farms belonged to us, she said, but the government, the hand that was supposed to feed us, seized us by the neck and shook us like a piggy bank, collecting the fallen coins that spilled through the gaps in our rib cages.

After the communist soldiers came and left, every piece of meat was rare and exquisite. Meal tickets for eggs and oil were saved and exchanged for savory slices sneaked through pairs of sweaty hands, paper sheets blushing red with juice from the beef or pork underneath. Dinners became festive celebrations where Aunt, Mother, and their three siblings knelt and lauded Buddha for their blessings. The worshippers were ravished, almost herbivores from deprivation; their altar was the meat.

Wai Po and Wai Gong would pass the plate to the eldest sister: Da Yi Ma. A moment of fleeting hesitation — temptation, desire, survival instincts?, recklessness threatening to burst through with a flick of her chopsticks — before Aunt would pass the plate to my second aunt. Who would pass it to the third oldest, then finally to Mama.

She would look longingly at the scarce pieces of meat, an exotic treat that illuminated the table full of rice and bland vegetables. She would eagerly raise her chopsticks, pick up the pieces, but only to surrender the pieces to the youngest sibling — my uncle.

“As is tradition,” Mama told me, repeating twice to emphasize. “In hardships, you must count on each other.” And who made us poor?, she seemed to taunt.

I would often think back to the first story she told me — the one she repeated the most — and shiver whenever I read about soldiers in books at school. Would they come again? ———

On weekends, I would frolic by the streets outside Wai Po’s house while Da Yi Ma and Da Yi Fu visited and took care of Wai Gong, who was crippled and physically frail. The soldiers that came down these same dirt roads thirty, forty years ago, had returned right before my birth to line the streets with smooth tiles; strawberry reds and crisp creams. The lack of new sidewalks had distinguished our poor rural life from the shiny new embryo of a city just ten miles east, but the urban motto was expand, expand, expand. I was then old enough to understand this, to see their dirty footsteps encroaching our land even more, land that they had taken and tainted.

The road workers had even laid out pomelo-yellow blocks on the edges of the sidewalk with raised bumps for the blind and elderly. I would stomp my feet, dust-streaked white socks in dust-streaked light-up sneakers, on the bumpy yellow tiles and watch over Wai Gong as he warily swept the sidewalk with his cane, then later his crutches, as his age sapped him of leg strength and left Alzheimer’s in its stead.

If Wai Gong looked outside from his perch in his house, glimpsed the pieces of the government’s forbidden blueprint slowly unfolding on the very soil he lit firecrackers on and chased friends in games of eagleand-hen on, the skyscrapers and modern apartment complexes with teal scaffolding blossoming wretched flowers of metal and money — would he miraculously stand and shout? Would his eyes, then dull and almost completely blind, flash with blessed clarity bestowed by Buddha to guard our land? Wave his cane and curse at the workers, as faultless as they are, until they leave the good things be, and leave us be?

I stopped in the middle of my matchsticks game on the sidewalk to watch Wai Gong with a newfound admiration. Wai Gong’s eyes were dim and burrowed in with wrinkles and sagging skin, and I doubt he saw me or knew I wished he would smile and comfort me, but his eyes were still comfortingly similar to mine, even with sixty years of age separating us.

On weekends when I tossed Bakugan and spun tops and ignited firecrackers with my older cousin, in the middle of the dirt roads or atop the new sidewalks in front of Wai Po’s house, rain clouds occasionally gathered.

I imagined the stormy skies would threaten the skeletal structures in the developing city to the east with ancient roars, roars of beasts of myth and time that will return with vengeful monsoons and lion-creatures that devour evil-doers. The torn scaffolding covering the wooden beams, so pitiful they were rags that even Wai Po couldn’t salvage with thread and her calloused fingers, would tremble and beg for forgiveness. We have wronged, they would plead. We were wrong to intrude in this land.