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I stand here alone in the space between closer to death than I have ever been before, and against all of my expectations I feel a duty to continue forward. The ankle-high water which I stand in does not soak into my shoes and socks and it barely feels like it’s there at all. I take a step forward in this space between and where my foot once was, the water ripples and a flower appears. With each step I take, I leave a trail of flowers behind me.
The space between is beautiful—almost hauntingly so, and my eyes look up to the twilight-indigo sky peppered with stars to see my memories laid out before me upon the metaphysical paper of giant scrolls floating above. The space between should feel surreal and eerie, but it does not. It is beautiful and solemn and thoughtful and it feels welcoming and warm. There is not wind to make me shiver or sun to beat down on me and make me sweat. The space between has no need for these things.
The first memory that is presented to me is my earliest memory of my grandfather. It was a warm autumn day, and grandfather had taken the day off to take care of me while my father had business to take care of elsewhere. I was much too young to know the details of what business had lead to my grandfather being the only one left at home to take care of me, and even if I wasn’t I do not believe I would still remember such details. Either way, we were in the courtyard of the family home and I was playing by myself as I did. It’s always quite sad to see an only child have to entertain herself as she has no siblings to play with, but it was simply a fact of life that, when I did not have friends around and I did not have school to attend, I had to play by myself in the courtyard of our home.
I was not placated by the usual toys you give a young girl; dolls and hair brushes and the like. I enjoyed such things, but they did not fascinate me quite as much as I think my mother would have preferred. I was much more imaginative and active than that, and so when I grew bored of my dolls, I would invent friends to play with and I would run around and play the same games I would with my friends at school. I would run around and swing a stick that fell from the plum tree in that same courtyard at someone who wasn’t there, and when I ran out of breath I would have conversations with them. All of them had their own lives and did their own things and went to their own school, and they told me about their days at school and I told them all about mine. I do not remember the names of my imaginary friends any longer, chiefly because this memory was the first time where I realized I did not need them.
“Tao!” Grandpa called from one of the rooms that looked out upon the courtyard. He sat at a table and drank tea as he always did. He wore his hat, although he did not wear the rest of his uniform and instead wore casual clothing which he rarely wore outside of the house. “Come here please!”
“Yes, yeye1 ,” I said. I dropped the stick I wielded and hurried over to where he sat and he handed me a cup of tea which had cooled enough for a child of my age to drink without burning my tongue. I eagerly took a sip. I loved it when he made tea for me.
“Have you learned about poetry yet?” He asked me, his tone hushed as if he were telling me a secret. I looked at him with curiosity, since I knew what poetry was (I had been fascinated by the strange way someone spoke when they recited poems during Lantern Rite celebrations) but had not learned about it with any sort of detail in school by that point. I was too young to begin understanding the intricacies of poetic language versus everyday language, or how to construct a dui lan2 , or to start drilling various combinations of ping and zè3 .
I shook my head at him, my lips still pressed against the tea cup and he simply closed his eyes and smiled. He sighed with his gentle and aged voice and I sat still in anticipation as if I were waiting for a play to start.
“Poetry is a wonderful thing,” he said, “And for a kid as smart and free-spirited as you, it can be the greatest thing in the world.”
“Why?” I asked, not because I wanted to know the answer to the question, but because that’s what I felt like I should ask. I didn’t quite understand what he was talking about.
“Because when we read and write poetry, rules no longer matter.” This piqued my interest, because I hated grammar at school. “When we wish to write poetry, we forget about speaking correctly, and we begin to speak exactly how we feel.”
I held the tea cup out in front of me, asking for more tea, and my grandfather obliged. He poured the hot red liquid into my cup and told me to be careful and not to burn myself. I nodded in understanding.
“Imagine it’s winter,” Grandpa said, “and the plum blossoms are beginning to fall. We do not have to bother with describing it correctly. We simply choose the words that describe this scene the best, and nothing more.”
He paused for a moment, and I remember being so intrigued at what he was saying that I took a sip of the tea forgetting how hot it was, and I burned myself on it. I did not say anything about it, though, and waited for him to continue.
When I placed the cup of too-hot tea back onto the table, my grandfather began to speak, and he did so with such precision and tone it felt as if I was being whisked away by the wind, carried aloft by its gentle breezes and made to feel exactly as a plum blossom did when it fell from its branch in the late winter. My eyes widened and my breathing stopped, as the sound of my own breath interfered with the words my father spoke, all of which seemed incomplete, yet perfectly placed and whole all at the same time. And although I did not know some of the words he used in those few lines of poetry he came up with on the spot, I knew enough to have the image of that blossom conjured in my mind. Once he stopped speaking, I remember looking to the plum tree across the courtyard, expecting to see those same blossoms falling to the ground and being disappointed to see the tree still green and with no sign of flowers.
For the rest of that afternoon, my grandfather recited poetry to me. Some of them were classic poems that were drilled into him when he was in school, and some of it he came up with on the spot just to amuse me. Either way, I was fascinated by it all and so from then on I was obsessed with poetry.
I know my grandfather never told my mom what he had done because when I approached my mom to ask if we could go to the book store or the library (something I never did before), she agreed with suspicion. She was even more confused when we did go and I handed her books of poetry for children. She did not argue against her daughter wanting to read, but she was confused where this streak of literary curiosity had come from, especially in her child which was infamous in the family for being much more active and mischievous, truly living up to the meaning of her family name.
I remember spending entire days where the weather was perfect for playing with either my real friends or my imaginary ones inside the house and reading those books, sounding out each character to myself, trying to imitate how my grandfather had recited the poems to me. I was too young to have control enough over my speech to make the correct tones and to speak the words with a rhythm enough to make the poem evocative enough, but I tried anyways. And whenever I came across a character I didn’t know, I would pick up the book and sprint across the house to wherever my mother or father or grandfather or whoever else was located, ask them what it meant, and when they answered, I would sprint back to where I was reading and begin the poem again. Sometimes I might do this multiple times per poem.
I would bring these books to school and read them whenever I was able to, and on a few occasions I got in trouble with my teachers for reading when I wasn’t supposed to. It didn’t happen very much since I never had the greatest pain tolerance and could barely withstand a single strike from a whip, but there were a handful of occasions where I was scolded. I was never hit for reading in class, though.
My grandfather would always shrug innocently whenever my mother or father asked where I had learned about such things, saying that he had nothing to do with it and that I had become interested in it on my own. If I was in the room whenever he was asked about this, he would absolve himself of guilt with a shrug, and then turn to me while my parents weren’t looking and would give me a knowing wink. I would giggle and smile back.
This infatuation with poetry kept me occupied enough to completely leave behind those friends I had made in my head, and so I spent the rest of that warm autumn sitting by the open doors out into the courtyard reading books of poetry and learning new words, and then as the winter approached and my parents shut those doors, I sat in whatever nook or cranny in the house I could find which had enough light to read and read even more poetry until I could recite my favorite little stanzas from memory. And this lifelong obsession began all because, one day when I was very young, my grandfather asked me if I liked poetry because, instead of seeing in me a mischievous girl who would grow up to be a troublemaker and a disgrace in the family, he saw my intellect and imagination and appreciation for the world around me.
The space between in which I stand alone has no discernible temperature, nor does it have a wind to carry the blossoms of a plum blossom tree, but even still I felt the warmth of words in my body, and with it I felt the familiar pulse of ping and zè in my heart. I smile as I move on, amused by how cute and ignorant I once was, surrounded by a happy family which had not known tragedy yet.
I move on from that memory, my feet now no longer standing in ephemeral water and instead walking atop soft green grass, flowers still following me with every step I take. There is the faint sound of a child giggling and wind rustling the leaves of a tree as I turn from my earliest memory this place between has chosen to show me, and for a second I thought I could hear the sound of my grandfather humming.
I look up at the next memory suspended in the sky, and instead of seeing the house in which I grew up in, I see the streets of Liyue harbor, and it’s one of my earliest memories of my father. I rode on his shoulders through town as he brought me to work, and I was fascinated by the view of the boats in the harbor. I remember I tried to keep waving at them, expecting them to somehow wave back.
I’m not entirely sure if this was the first time I had ever gone to the Parlor, but it definitely is the first time I remember going. Father wore his uniform, and I wore a red dress which was the nicest thing I owned since, even as a kid, I had to presentable and respectful when I went to the Parlor. Grandpa was serious when it came to that sort of thing, and since I suspect he was already sure I would be working there in a handful of short years, he probably wanted to hammer these things into me from the first moments he could.
I think that day was one of the first warm days of the spring and the plum trees were shedding their last few blossoms and letting them free into the spring wind, and my grandfather had been collecting the blossoms he liked for displaying on his hat for the coming year. I remember watching him as he scanned the ground in the courtyard with a very discerning and particular eye, stroking his beard and occasionally bending down to grab a blossom before shaking his head and placing it gently back onto the ground. I once looked up from the book I was reading and asked him what he was doing.
He turned to me and took off his hat. He walked over to me and sat down next to me. “Every year when this tree flowers, I look for blossoms that I like the most. Those that I think are the most beautiful I will preserve, store away, and wear on my hat throughout the year.”
“Why do you do that, yeye?”
“Many reasons, Tao,” my grandfather said, “Many reasons which you will eventually learn.”
“Why are there so many things I need to learn? Why not tell me now?”
My grandfather chuckled, put his hat back on, and said: “You are a very smart girl, Tao. I think you will also figure that out soon enough,” before standing back up and continuing to search for plum blossoms.
We approached the Parlor, and I waved one last time at the boats in the harbor before we stepped inside. It was a quiet day inside, and the only person that was in there when we entered was my grandfather, who had a fresh blossom in his hat which you could tell by the way its fragrance filled the room and made the parlor smell faintly of cooler months. He was sitting in the place where he and my father would talk to clients on days where talking to them outside wasn’t possible, making tea as he always did. His face lit up when he saw I was with my father, and I climbed down him as fast as I could so that I could run over and give grandpa a hug. I don’t quite know why I was so excited to see him since I had probably seen him that morning or at most a few days prior, but I did anyways. I hugged him and breathed in the scent of the brewing tea and that of the plum blossom in his hat, and he said how good it was to see me.
When I was as young as this, my father would bring me to the Parlor only when they knew for absolute certain nobody would be coming in and the day was certain to be slow and it was alright for the mood inside to be more lighthearted since I was very good at making people smile when I was a kid which seemed to be a skill I only got better at as I grew older.
At this point, I knew that dad and grandpa worked for a business that ran funerals. It was rather hard to hide that fact from me, but even then it didn’t mean anything to me as I young enough to know that death existed, but I did not quite make the connection that the same things that lived around me also some day had to die. The concept of time to the mind of a young Hu Tao was not quite developed enough to make the connection between the moments she was currently living and the future that was soon to come where the people she knew and loved and cherished so deeply would no longer be with her. That connection would take place at the first ever funeral I had ever attended, which was for someone I did not know but whom my family was well acquainted with. It was a humble funeral, and my grandfather ran it, and while everyone there looked at the floor with such sadness which I did not understand, I finally put together that this person which I heard my mom or dad talk about many times was in the coffin which I had seen briefly a few times before, and he was dead.
It was a unique revelation for me because, instead of it feeling like I had solved a puzzle like whenever I had deduced the meaning of a character in a poem, it felt much more solemn and mature, and I felt so much of my youthful joy disappear at that moment as if I had aged years at once, right there in that very moment.
I remember going to the parlor twice before I learned what death was at that funeral for someone I never met. Back then, I remember how mysterious the interior of the Parlor was. Every detail, every symbol that had any tie to the most obscure cultures across Teyvat which had to do with funerals or death, all of it didn’t mean anything to me yet. But it felt like I could figure it out on my own just like I could those mysterious characters in my books I spent most of my time reading at that point, and so I would dart from place to place and try to discern the purpose for the Parlor and sleuth out what my father and grandfather did that was so important.
After that funeral, exploring the parlor was much less fanciful and wonderful, and was much more solemn, slow, and methodical. I now knew what my future had in store for me, and so whenever I went to the Parlor with my father after that funeral, I would quietly and respectfully ask what something on the wall meant or why he did a certain thing a certain way, and he explained it to me with all the seriousness in the world. That was how I learned all the customs and traditions that revolved around a funeral and someone’s death.
In a very short amount of time, I became very knowledgeable in the ways of death and the running of the business, and being as young and naive as I was, I remember deciding to bring some of that knowledge to school. What the topic of conversation was I have long forgotten, but I remember standing up and giving a long explanation of a certain funerary ritual with perhaps a little too much detail. I gave the whole speech with such pride that, once I sat down and looked around the room, it took me perhaps too long to realize that the kids around me looked at me, impressed, but instead they looked at me with judgment and amusement. I eventually became known at school as the “corpse girl” for just how much I knew about it all, and the problem only compounded when a few boys that liked to pick on me found out that my family ran a funeral parlor and that I went there rather often.
One day when the bullying was particularly bad, I came home and couldn’t keep my tears at bay long enough, and I cried in my mother’s arms. I told her about what had been happening, and she tried to comfort me as much as she could, but soon passed the responsibility off to my father, who did his best to calm me before my grandfather took up the task and comforted me and taught me how to be myself around those kids and not worry about what they thought of me.
In the space between, I smile at how happy I looked waving at the boats in the harbor (a habit which I carried into adulthood), and I continue on to the next memory which should be much more joyous and exciting, but what it means to me makes it much more bittersweet. In the next memory floating above me in the sky of the space between, I see the dinner table and food laid out upon it, and my family sitting around it. The decorations in the room as well as the amount of food on the table indicated that this was a Lantern Rite celebration, and I knew it was the last Lantern Rite I had ever spent with my father.
Our Lantern Rite celebrations were never very exciting. We ate dinner together and made some lanterns, and when I was young we would do our lanterns before dinner and as I grew later and my need for going to sleep so early started to drift away we stayed up late and released the lanterns after the sun set. But once we had eaten and released our lanterns, we were done for the night. We rarely went into town to eat food or to see any performances. The night of the Lantern Rite, we just stayed at home in what almost felt like quiet contemplation. It had always confused me why we didn’t go out and celebrate the same way my friends at school did.
I remember this particular dinner was fun because my grandfather had been getting on the nerves of my mother the entire night (as he was prone to do) and so when we all sat down at the table and began to eat, every word that exited his mouth seemed like it was pointed towards my mother in a playful and mischievous way, and every time he said something me and my dad would giggle as if we were trying to keep a straight face but were failing miserably. When she looked at my grandfather, her eyes shot daggers at him and communicated wordless anger, but when she looked at us, her face spoke of betrayal, as if we were supposed to defend her from Grandpa.
This was the first year that we released lanterns after dinner, and we did so in the courtyard of the house. We released our lanterns into the black sky and watched as they climbed to above the tallest branch of the plum blossom tree and then caught the wind until they were floating peacefully out to sea to join the others.
A few months after that night, my father died.
The next memory in the long line of memories displayed for me in the space between was of my father’s funeral. One might expect a little Hu Tao to be crying her eyes out in this humble funeral, but I did not, because more than sadness for the death of my father, I felt confusion.
The day was blazing hot, and we held the funeral at our home. He was to be buried in the family graveyard which was on a flat plot of land that took five minutes to walk to, but we paid respects to him in our courtyard. My mother and I did it together, and both of us did it without a single tear in our eyes, and while I’m not sure why my mother never cried, I know I wasn’t able to conjure tears because I did not know how I was supposed to feel.
On one hand, I knew I was supposed to be sad, and I was. I revere and respect death, but I am not immune to the emotions that we all feel when a loved one passes. Even then, the emotions of death which I had recently figured out for myself wanted to bubble up and make me cry the same way I did whenever I scraped my knee playing outside. But on the other hand, I knew that I was supposed to approach death with reverence and respect as now that would be my job in the far future, and a funeral director who respects death is one that does not cry.
I also did not quite know if I was supposed to cry at a funeral because I was going to miss my father, or if I shouldn’t cry because my father was the sort of man who would welcome death with open arms and tell me, my mother, and my grandfather to move on without him. Unlike when my grandfather died, my father never had the chance to tell me.
“Live in life, die in death, follow your heart, do what you can,” my grandfather would say. He said it almost so much that it grew irritating. And for the longest time, I believed that he understood that motto just as well as Grandpa or I did. But when he died and left behind all these things for us to hold onto, I think we realized that he did not want to let go of us, and that he wanted to defy death and to keep living despite the fact that the world had said that it was time for him to go.
I didn’t want my father to die, obviously, but I also didn’t want our memory of him to haunt us just because he did not heed my grandfather’s words. I didn’t want to feel guilty for his untimely death, and so my family wordlessly agreed to move on from him, and so our family became three: my mother, my grandfather, and me.
In the years that followed his death, as I grew older and more aware of the world and people around me, I could feel the family start to fall apart. My mother and grandfather barely talked, and we no longer celebrated holidays together as a family anymore. My mother seemed to grow more and more distant despite my efforts, and as a result I grew closer to my grandfather since I was still a child who needed a guardian to provide guidance and protection.
There were a few times where I tried to connect with my mother again, such as when I tried to help her make dinner. It was then that I discovered that I am not a great cook.
The next memory that is in store for me in the space between is one of my most cherished memories: it is a young yet now much more developed me—I think I was around ten years old at this point—sitting next to my grandfather in a room looking out into the courtyard which bathed in warm summer light, the open door letting a breeze through which fought off the warm and humid air. In front of me, Grandpa showed me how to measure out tea leaves to pour into a gaiwan4 and the many other intricacies of making tea. He had gifted me my own gaiwan for my birthday which had been only a few weeks prior, and after a few weeks which had very little time for him to spare for me, he finally found an evening which he could sit down with me and teach me. This began a long string of memories of making tea with my grandfather and having many discussions of great importance to my life and formation as a person.
After he had taught me enough so that I could clumsily make my way through making a cup of tea, he asked me about my poetry and if I had learned or had written anything new as by this point I had started to dabble with writing my own poetry. I enthusiastically recited my favorite new finds, and even some of my own dui lan to him, and he responded by helping me workshop my poems or helping me analyze the ones I had found. These sessions of poetry and tea ended up becoming tradition for us. We continued to do it through the summer into the winter, always drinking tea and sharing poetry with each other, until I turned eleven and he told me he had another gift for me.
At the time, the concept of planting a plum blossom tree with me and teaching me how to take care of it was a beautiful gesture of love, if not a little confusing, since one of my favorite things in my little world was that plum blossom tree in the courtyard of my home which my grandfather picked blossoms from every winter, but now I see it as an act of even greater love because that tree was my reminder of him once he passed alongside the hat, and I think he knew that I would think of him every time I went to pluck blossoms from that tree.
He helped me plant it and then taught me how to take care of it, and then we walked back home and made tea and shared poetry and talked about the Parlor and the business surrounding it which I was starting to become familiar with as I spent more and more time there and started to study under my grandfather more. There were some days where, when school let out, instead of going home I would go straight to the Parlor and do my homework there before helping Grandpa out with whatever he needed help with.
It was under this sort of apprenticeship that I learned truly how smart of a man my grandfather was. There was no one better suited for running the Parlor than my grandfather, and the prospect of having to take his job once he passed grew ever more daunting with each new thing I learned, each new tradition that belonged to an obscure people up north, or new meaning behind a specific choice of material. And it was this revelation that lead to the second biggest revelation I had about that man: he intentionally acted as a fool to make people underestimate him. When partners or rivals came into the parlor to make a deal, Grandpa would pretend to be the aloof and joyful old man that he appeared to be, but once he found a vulnerability in the people sitting across from him, he would drop the act and speak as if he were the wisest man in all of Liyue harbor. This would catch those on the other side of the table off guard, and very often Grandpa would walk away from whatever the negotiation was with the upper hand.
I want to linger on this memory as much as I can—reminisce on the inside of the parlor and talk about Grandpa’s choice of incense and how it felt to be inside the parlor late at night while he slaved over invoices and budget breakdowns—because I see the next memory in store for me in the space between, and it brings great embarrassment to look back on it.
In my early teenage years, I started to realize that I was not entirely the person my family expected me to be. Yes, I was growing up to me a mischief maker obsessed with poetry and duty-bound to the family business, but I also discovered that the expectations that my family had for me to marry and have children and continue the family was not going to happen quite like everyone told me it would.
My first real crush, I remember, was when I was fourteen. I was infatuated with this girl who was trained in classical opera that sat in my classics class, with how gorgeous her voice was and how elegant she was and how beautiful she was and I found for the first time my eyes being drawn to places unbecoming of me to look, and I very swiftly realized that my feelings towards her were not something that most other girls felt. I remember talking to a close friend of mine and asking her how she felt about the opera singer, and she told me things that were distinctly different from how I felt about her.
The first person I ever came out to was that same friend, and her first advice to me was that, if I had a crush on this girl, then I should go and talk to her more. And so I tried exactly that, and in the process made an absolute fool of myself every time I tried to converse with her in that classics class we shared. But I was encouraged by how she giggled at my jokes and did not shoo me away whenever I conversed with her, and through the course of that class I grew rather close to her until it seemed like our relationship was something that could become something more.
The one fear I had, however, was that if my family learned that I liked women, then I would be shunned or disgraced or forced to marry a man anyways in the worst case scenario. So I held off on asking the opera singer anything until I could confide in someone else I could trust.
The second person I ever came out to was my grandfather over tea. It was the middle of winter, then, and the plum blossom tree was just beginning to bloom. I had just poured myself a cup of tea, but I was too afraid to drink it.
“Hey, yeye?” I said sheepishly. I stared into the red liquid of the tea which steamed slightly with heat, “Would you be mad with me if I said I wasn’t interested in boys?”
“What do you mean, Tao?” Grandpa said. He took a sip of tea calmly, as if I hadn’t just brought up a very awkward topic of conversation. I continued to stare into the unmoving red ocean in my hands.
“As in, what if I don’t want to marry a man. What if I liked girls, instead?”
“Ah,” Grandpa said, “Well, that makes my job of being your personal iceman5 much easier!” He chuckled at his little joke. I tried to smirk, but I didn’t find the quip very comforting. I think he noticed me staring into the surface of the tea which still steamed, and his voice became much more serious and comforting. “Live in life, die in death. Follow your heart, do what you can.”
“I know that, yeye,” I complained.
“Well then why worry?” Grandpa said. “If you know that so well, you should be following your heart with no worry for what the others around you might think.”
“But so many people expect me to marry to a good man and start a family and all that now that Dad is gone. Mother doesn’t want me to be the next director even though I’m really the only person around to be the next director, and you and Dad probably want me to continue the family so that the parlor doesn’t pass into another family…”
“You are correct, your mother and the family wish for you to continue on the same path that your ancestors before you did, but that is because we are a family that honors tradition. Just because we honor tradition does not mean that you should honor tradition. If you wish to run off to another nation with a wife in hand, then so be it. Live up to your family name and be free, and don’t let the expectations of your family dictate that.”
“Would you be mad though?” I asked.
“I would not be, no. As long as you are happy and following your heart, I do not care who you love.”
I finally took a sip of the steaming tea, and the taste of it calmed my racing heart immediately. I still felt the guilt of possibly being the last in our long-running bloodline, but my heart and regained it’s steady poetic rhythm.
“Sometimes it feels like this family is slowly falling apart,” I said, “And I don’t know if I can live with the guilt of being the final nail in the coffin.”
“The coffin is already closed and there is nothing to be done, so do not feel shame in finishing the job that must be done. Live in life, die in death.”
“But isn’t that selfish?”
“Yes,” Grandpa said with surprising confidence and tacitness, “But who is to say that being selfish is always wrong?”
“But in this case?”
“In this case, you are deciding between your lifelong happiness and meeting the expectations others have for you. I know for a fact I would always choose lifelong happiness over meeting the expectations of the family.”
“Sometimes I wonder how you were never completely disgraced from the family,” I said.
“I am simply living up to the name my family gave to me,” he chuckled. We both took a sip of our tea, then he leaned over to me. “So then, do you have your eyes on someone?”
“Yeah,” I said, my face starting to blush, “There’s this pear orchard pupil6 at school that is just so pretty and her voice is absolutely beautiful and she’s just so funny and makes me feel warm inside whenever I see her.”
“My artistically-inclined granddaughter falling for another artist. We raised you correctly, I think,” Grandpa said with a chuckle. “I wish you the best then. If you ever gather the courage to ask her out, I hope she says yes and you get to bring someone home.”
I wish I had been able to ask her out in the years that followed in the weird and awkward way that teenagers might, and if I did then she might have been the one I ended up with in the end. However, those bright years came swiftly to an end when my grandfather took ill and I withdrew myself from school. I never talked to her again, but I did retain a particular love for opera in the years that came.
His sickness started off as something we weren’t intending to worry about since he was a healthy man despite his advanced years and we figured that he would make it through if given enough time and rest. But the longer we let him rest, the weaker he became, until it was clear to me, my mother, and Grandpa that he wasn’t going to get better. So we started preparing for his funeral.
He asked me to organize it. Knowing that I would be taking the mantle of the 77th director even though I was only thirteen years of age, he asked me to organize and run his funeral. My mother protested at this, calling him crazy for asking a thirteen year-old girl to organize an entire funeral on her own (one of the last times my mother ever stood up for me in any capacity), but he was firm and I was not going to say no. It made me nervous, the prospect of having to gather all of the materials and organize everyone involved and plan out how we would transport his body, and part of me wanted to shy away and say no, but I stood firm and did what I could.
Grandpa’s funeral, unlike my father’s, was frigid and cold taking place in the middle of winter, just before the plum blossom trees were to bloom. Unlike my father’s, I did not have my mother’s hand to hold tight, I did not have the disdain and confusion to rely on so that I wouldn’t cry. Unlike my father’s funeral, I could not stand off to the side and pretend that nothing concerned me. Unlike my father’s funeral, I wouldn’t have my grandfather there to comfort me when all was said and done and I went home and shut myself in my room and threw myself onto my bed and cried.
By the end of the day, my eyes were tired of crying and my entire face was sore, but still I continued to cry. My inability to control my breath and to stop the tears frustrated me, and when I felt frustrated I thought of Grandpa and the words that he might tell me, and the thought of him and his soft voice and his gentle smile and his stupid jokes led to the realization that I would never see him again, and to that I cried more. It was a vicious cycle that lasted until it was the middle of the night, and in my delirium caused by my exhaustion and grief, I packed a few day’s worth of food into my school backpack and left my house silently and headed north to the place where I knew I could see him one more time.
As I walked through the silent sleeping harbor, I thought of the last coherent conversation I had with my Grandfather only a few days before he finally passed, and for some reason I did not cry this time.
“Have you found any more poems, Tao?” He had asked, his voice so weak now that it sounded ancient and exhausted.
“I have not had the time to read, yeye,” I said. My throat was sore from trying not to cry.
“Well, have you written anything new?” He asked.
“No, I haven’t,” I replied.
“Oh, don’t let my health get you down, Tao,” He said, “You can be busy, and you can be sad, but do not let that get in the way of expressing yourself. I know you have the heart of a poet, so let your sadness run through your poetry.”
“I don’t know if I can,” I said.
“Of course you can. I know you can.”
“But… I’m just so tired. I don’t want to express anything because I want everything to go back to normal. I don’t want to have to write sad poetry, I want to go back to sitting around the courtyard drinking tea and writing dui lan of beauty and serenity and jollity instead of this.”
“I know,” Grandpa said. He no longer carried the expression of an exhausted man trying to cheer a child up; he was now simply exhausted. “What I wouldn’t give to live in a world where we didn’t have to be sad. I wish I could stay with you for a little longer and write more poetry too. I wish I could stay here and watch you grow up to be a wonderful young woman, a wonderful Director, a published poet, and to marry the woman of your dreams. I wish I could, but instead fate has decided that it is time for us to be sad, and so you cannot refuse that. I promise that feeling bad now will make the future infinitely easier.”
My eyes were beginning to water now, and instead of letting him see me cry, I threw myself onto him, face buried in his chest. I could feel him chuckle.
A few moments of silence passed, and then I felt something on my head, as if something were being placed lightly atop my hair. I sniffled once and lifted my head from his chest, bringing a hand to my head to see what Grandpa had put there.
“Take care of it,” Grandpa said. I took the hat from my head and saw that it was the Harmony Hexagram Hat which had a withering and faded plum blossom affixed to it. I lost control of my tears when I realized what he wanted me to do with it. He smiled softly as tears flowed down my face and I hugged the hat against my chest, and I hugged him for what felt like an eternity, not wanting to let go of him for fear of him disappearing for forever.
Prior to the funeral, I had modified the hat to fit my head, and I wore it to and from Wuwang hill, keeping it clean as if it were my only purpose in life to keep the hat spotless.
Before I departed, I plucked a fresh blossom from the tree in the courtyard, and the comforting smell accompanied my for my entire trip.
I can now see my journey through this space between coming to an end, and now I can see what looks like the front entrance of Wangsheng Funeral Parlor in the distance beyond a bridge that crosses over a river of the water which doesn’t feel like it exists when you walk through it. Only a few more memories float in the sky before me, and so I continue on.
The first funeral I lead entirely by myself was when I was fifteen years old. Prior to that, I had relied on the help of family and business friends that Grandpa and father had accumulated over the years as well as the strange man that appeared shortly after the death of Grandpa that had offered himself as my “consultant” named Zhongli. But it wasn’t until I was fifteen that I lead a funeral on my own from start to finish, every detail and every purchase being my doing.
Shortly after my first funeral and after I had largely grasped the entire business and all that I had to do, I was faced with my last challenge of my childhood. My mother, who had been living in the same house as me all this time but who didn’t talk to me as if she were a ghost living in the house of an orphan instead of being a mother with a daughter who needed all the help she could afford, sat me down one day in the months leading up to my sixteenth birthday and told me that she was going back home to Chenyu Vale to reunite with her family.
If one were to have peered in through our windows and listen to the conversation as it happened, they might have thought that it came across as eerie. Here was a mother and her daughter, sitting across from each other at the dinner table, discussing the logistics of the mother moving to the other side of the country and giving her daughter the option to either stay in the harbor or come with her. It was not a discussion fueled by emotion and grief and desperation, but instead it was calm and cold and practical. I told her that I was going to stay in the harbor and run the Parlor, and she said she was going to go home and could not continue to live in the house of her dead husband.
In the following days, my mother packed her bags and left, and I never saw her again. I was alone now in a house built for an entire family which had fallen apart.
I continued to run the Parlor and live in that house alone for the years that followed. I finished my primary education and did business as usual through my sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth years of age with nobody but the mysterious Mr. Zhongli by my side. I was a talkative person, yes, and I was cheerful and chatty and playful and lived up to my family name, but I didn’t really have anybody to consider a friend. I was a very sad person, and I went to bed at night feeling empty and without the desire to rhyme words to make poetry.
Eventually, that did change when I met the daughter of the chef that owned a restaurant that I frequented located just down the street, and we swiftly became friends and ate lunch and wandered around the harbor and did whatever friends did when there was time to spare.
It didn’t take long for that friendship to blossom into something more that I hadn’t experienced since I was thirteen. Very quickly I began to feel things for her that reminded me of the way I felt for that pear orchard pupil.
I asked Xiangling out at Lantern Rite. It was somewhat pathetic, too, because right before I asked her, the wish I had written on the inside of my lantern said: “I wish to see my grandfather one more time, and I wish that Xiangling will say yes.”
I always wished to see Grandpa once more every Lantern Rite, but this was the first and only year I wrote anything other than those familiar nine words. Shortly after letting my lantern go and watching it fly into the dark sky, I took a deep breath and asked her:
“This might sound odd but… and this feels like a strange time to ask but,” I paused to take a breath, knowing that she was looking at me inquisitively, “Do you want to… be my girlfriend?”
There was an awkward silence for a minute, and I was afraid I had made her uncomfortable until she started to giggle which made me even more concerned.
“I didn’t know you could be so awkward!” Xiangling said laughing, “Usually so confident and careless and you get scared to ask me out?”
“Well it’s not like I do this often, now is it?” I said.
“When was the last time you asked someone out?”
I paused for a second. “Never…”
“Oh you poor thing,” Xiangling said. She scooted next to me so that our hips were basically touching as we sat there watching the lanterns float away. “Of course I will be your girlfriend.” She grabbed my hand and we locked fingers, and she tucked her head into my shoulder and we spent the rest of the night there watching the lanterns.
And so now I was no longer the Hu Tao who had to pretend to be cheerful and goofy; now that I had someone by my side that genuinely made me happy and made me feel like my days were worth it, I could actually be happy. For the first time since I was thirteen, I had someone I could recite my poetry to and who would listen to me with the same investment as my Grandfather did, I had someone who I could spend time with so that silence was no longer terrifying and lonely, and I had someone who I could make tea for.
For the first time, I felt what it was like to fall asleep with the warmth of another person in the same bed to remind you that you were not alone and never had to be.
And now I stand here in the space between, looking at the last memory in the long line of memories I had accumulated and curated in twenty years of life, and I feel the guilt of having to leave her alone now just as my Grandfather did. I look up and see an image of us eating at Wanmin restaurant, both laughing at some joke which I no longer remember, and I’m wearing the outfit she had just purchased for me
“Thank you, darling,” I whisper to myself, “And happy Lantern Rite.”
Notes:
1. Paternal Grandfather [ ↺ go back]
2. Chinese version of a couplet [ ↺ go back]
3. In Chinese, each syllable has four different “tones” which dictate the meaning of the word. In poetic settings, these tones are split into two categories: ping tones (which are longer and hang a bit more when spoken), and zè tones (which are shorter and more punctuated). Because of this, just as an English speaker can clap to find the stress of a line, a Chinese speaker can chant patterns of ping and zè to find the intended rhythm of a poem. For example, the first rhythm many school kids learn is:
平平仄仄平平仄
Ping ping zè zè ping ping zè
仄仄平平仄仄平
Zè zè ping ping zè zè ping
This pattern can match to the given couplet:
春蚕到死丝方尽
Chūncán dào sǐ sī fāng jǐn
蜡炬成灰泪始乾
là jù chéng huī lèi shǐ qián
[ ↺ go back]
4: Translates literally to “lidded bowl,” it is a small ceramic bowl used to make tea in traditional gongfu tea-making ceremonies. [ ↺ go back]
5: In Chinese, there are many ways of referring to a “matchmaker.” In this case, Old Hu uses the term 冰人 (bing ren) which literally translates to “ice man.” This term originates from “The Biography of Suo Dan” in 晋书 (The History of the Jin Dynasty, or literally “The Jin Book”), where an official dreamed of standing atop a frozen pond. In the dream, he had a conversation with another man who was underneath the ice. When asking Suo Dan to interpret the dream, he said that the conversation between the man above the ice and the man below the ice represented a conversation between yin and yang, which meant that the man would become a matchmaker, as the melting of the ice represented the unification of yin and yang. This story led to “an ice man” referring to a matchmaker. [ ↺ go back]
6: Opera in China is variable by where in China you’re talking, but a term that can ambiguously refer to an operatic troupe is a “Pear Orchard,” (梨园, li yuan） which is a reference to Emporer Li Longji of the Tang dynasty. To refer to a member of the troupe, one might refer to a “Pear Orchard Pupil” (梨园弟子). [ ↺ go back]