I took off my scarf and sunglasses and gazed upon the November prairie. Summer left a long time ago, yet the sun stayed up for most of the day. It hugged the night tightly like paper soaked up in lard, turning half transparent. Hustled by homing hawks, the sun left the tipsy night, and the sky turned claret. Grassland rich in spring became a sparsely furred rug, painted with footsteps of buffalos and mastiffs.
After a couple miles of walking, the sky turned almost completely dark. I stopped at an old lady’s brick house and asked to stay for the night. In Tibet, elderly women were respectfully called “ama” by youngsters, and requests like this were always welcomed with hot tea and probably a car ride the next morning. Ama didn’t answer. She moved herself in front of me, feeling my face with both hands. Her hands were rough like sandpaper, but gentle and warm. She held my arm firmly like I was going to leave her and led me into the house.
The door pretended to be light – ama opened it to invite moonlight inside. But the moon isn’t here tonight.
The darkness smelled like sandalwood. I turned on my flashlight, and its white beam instantly dug a tunnel through the dark. At the end of the tunnel, pink galsangs garnished the wooden threshold. They were brave flowers that only bloomed among hardships, resisting churlish wind and snow despite their tender bodies. In literature, galsangs were used to symbolize brave girls. Ama fumbled on the table for candles – just for me, because she didn’t need light.
A slim flame danced on the tip of a candle; shadows in the room all became alive.
“How is Jujee?”
Ama’s voice, rusted but pleasant to hear, trickled through my ears. Behind the candle, the tall shadow of ama’s nose danced on her left cheek. Her cheek bones were mountains, her lips sleeping at the foots and her squeezed eyes gazing down from the cliffs. The wrinkles on her forehead betrayed how she has indulged poverty and solitude with benignity, like they were her children. If nature was humanized, she would be ama.
“Jujee is fine. Her galsangs are still blooming. She is there for you, ama. She is always there for you.”
Ama pushed the candle closer to me. She couldn’t see, but she always knew where the lights were.
“How is Dorlma?”
“Dorlma has become a nurse, she works in Beijing… Let’s go find her, ama.”
Ama couldn’t hear anymore.
Jujee had a doll next to her pillow. She said her grandmother made it for her when she was very little. The doll was only half stuffed, its sunken body dressed in the same material as Jujee’s school bag: fragile blue fabric unrecognizable of its original color. Its eyes were made from two different size black buttons located in the middle of its face. The nose was gone, or maybe it never had one, and the mouth was a red pen mark on its chin.
“I would never put a doll like this anywhere in my room. I would have nightmares sleeping with something like this, wouldn’t you?” Yonla said while she put her books away. “My grandmother’s needlework is the best; she sews flowers like they bloomed on the cloth.”
Jujee slowly moved her eyes away from her diary. She looked to the ceiling, then looked at Yonla with a complicated smile, as if she learned how to smile merely for this question. “Of course not.”
“Let me see your doll.” Dorlma jumped down from the upper bunk and grabbed the doll in her arm, feeling the texture of it. “What’s inside?” Dorlma stared at Jujee’s backpack as she tossed the doll over to Yonla. “Jujee, what’s inside the cloth?”
“Don’t you see all these books in my hands?” Yonla let the doll fall. Our room didn’t have a floor. The walls and everything else stood on brick ground. I peeked at Jujee, still sitting in her chair, staring at her doll with sparkles in her eyes. I got out of bed and picked it up, and as I dusted its blue dress, I felt Jujee smiling at me.
I scrutinized the stitches… Her grandmother stuffed the doll with her own hair?
“What are you looking at?” Yonla squished over. “Has your grandmother ever done needlework before? The stitches are loose, and you can even see the filling.” Yonla pulled at the doll’s insides until its body became an empty bag. “Wait, is this hair?”
That night, I heard someone mumbling inside our closet. “Take a bite… One more…” The next morning we found Jujee asleep inside the closet, holding the doll to her chest. Tears and dust created two muddy streams, one on each side of her face. The doll’s empty body was stuffed again, this time with candy wrappers.
If Jujee was still with us she would be twenty-three, a successful elementary school English teacher. She planned to study English in college, become a teacher, then mail all of her salary back home to her grandmother so she wouldn’t have to care about what things cost by the gram or keep plastic shopping bags and milk bottles for later use.
Jujee left on the day of her middle school graduation. An automobile carried her away.
She had to keep her plans with her forever.
I felt lucky I didn’t see her at the very last minute. I needed to stay ignorant visually, for her grandmother.
Dorlma looked like a friendly spider when she dressed up in white. Her skinny, pale arms would glow if the lights were off. She guided people out of the dark. Fragrance on her collar licked up against their faces and minds, and they would show her what they wouldn’t reveal to the outside. Those people included me only.
It was almost ten o’clock at night. The red “4” flashed, and I stepped out of the elevator. As its door closed, the last shreds of light disappeared. Lights-out was an hour ago. There were only a few lamps gleaming far away, like fireflies around a pond after sunset. A stream of cold wind brushed over my eyes. It smelled exclusively like the in-patient department, leaving a sense of disinfectant. This sense made me behave solemnly. I came here frequently enough that I learned to like it.
Nurses with white uniforms wandered around in silence like spirits redeeming their unfinished virtues. Their silver name tags peaked out under their collars, fiercely reflecting light from dim lamps, like giant beetles glaring at me from deep inside their dark caves.
I found Dorlma at the nurse office at the center of the fourth floor. I showed her my visit receipt. Her grey eyes tried to convey kindheartedness while vacuity gestated in loneliness leaked out silently from the corners. “Let’s go.”
Following behind her, I was surrounded by a feeling like home, and something nostalgic flowed over my nose. Dorlma’s heels tapped a heavy, deep rhythm, making me think it was something I could trust. I could still recognize the fragrance of buffalo curd hidden under her uniform. I wiped a cold teardrop hanging on my jaw. I never got embarrassed crying in front of her.
“When will you make your next visit?”
“Next month, right before I fly to America.”
“Say hello to Jujee for me, then tell me how her galsangs are.”
“I will.”
“Yonla always said Americans are wolves because they eat raw beef and drink cold water. She would have traveled there with you… Ama is waiting.”
The fourth floor housed mostly elderly people. I liked it there; I liked old people. I felt sorry for them because of how they speak genteelly to young nurses, how they sip water with straws, how they scrutinize newspapers with magnifying glasses. It made me feel like I had stolen their happiness. They survived as orphans in tranquility, forgotten by the world. They indulge the world by instinct, then the world takes it for granted.
“Ama, Duodo is here,” Dorlma said, even though no one would answer. She left the room quietly.
Ama sat on her bed like she always did, facing the moon. Moonlight hid in her wrinkles as it hides among mountains and rivers. The curtains were never closed at night. That was enough light for her. She couldn’t see, but she knew where the light was.
Even though ama had Dorlma, I was sinned with taking her far away from home.
Holding Jujee’s doll in her hands, ama breathed calmly in the grey moonlight. I kneeled in front of her. Sensing someone blocking the moon, ama set the doll aside, then reached out. I pressed her hands on my cheeks. They were warm.
“How did you come? Cars are dangerous.”
Ama’s grey hair was braided and twisted into a bun behind her head, like she was waiting for me to ask for a new doll.
I knew she would ask, so I came to the hospital by subway. I can’t lie to her, even if she doesn’t expect an answer.
“How is Jujee?”
Ama liked to chat with youngsters. She couldn’t hear, but Dorlma and I would still answer. It was our way of communicating. We took responsibility, announcing to the moon, the silence, and the room: this old lady has a family and is still very healthy.
“She is always there for you, ama.”
There will be a tiny galsang flower that stays brave for her, in a tiny corner of the prairie.
Before I started college, I went back to Tibet and visited the temple where the four of us grew up. The temple smelled like bronze and sandalwood. I stood a strip of incense in the censer and stared at the smoke spiraling upward in front of ShuiYue Guanyin’s Tangka. In Buddhism, she governs the moon.
The room was dim. It must have been around nightfall. When we were young, Dorlma used to read Sutras every evening in front of Guanyin. Sometimes she read it out loud so Yonla and I could learn, too. I leaned on the wooden gate and looked upon the village underneath our temple.
Out in the yard, Jujee laid underneath her galsangs. It was autumn, but they were still blooming. I tapped my fingers on the petals. We shouldn’t have made her cry that night. Ama couldn’t afford cotton and purple flannel for the doll like Jujee hoped for. That night we hadn’t just made fun of the doll; we had also mocked ama’s kindness.
“I’m back… Ama said hello. And Dorlma misses you… I will leave for college next week. I promise you, people in America wouldn’t have understood your English. You used to speak Tibetan English and feel pretty good about yourself. If you taught children with your accent, they would be misled.”
Wind blew by and Jujee’s galsangs waved at me, just like Jujee waved her hands at me after I told her jokes.
The mala beads around my neck were red and heavy. I kept them with me all the time. On the night before Dorlma left our village for modern medicine, she laid the string around my neck and said it would bring good luck and protection to those who wear it. I wore it for Jujee and ama, too. Dorlma left that year for her own journey, seeking out protective force through good deeds for herself, and for Jujee. She called it pilgrimage.
“Hey.”
“Yeah?”
“She was still blooming.”
“That’s good. Ama misses you. She kept asking me when you would be back. I kept saying soon. I feel like I lied to her, but I think she got what I meant.”
“Maybe this summer.”
“How was school?”
“I have decided to join the English department.”