I lay on the lawn, pillowing the back of my head with my hands. It was so pleasant to lie down like this. The girl was standing over me. When she bent down to talk with me, her head looked huge — just like a dustpan.
“Hey, you’re resting your head on three little babies. Two of them are dead. One is still alive. You’ve pinned her legs down.”
I jumped up with a rush. I wanted with all my heart to dash out of this garden that was possessed by evil spirits. From behind, she held onto me by my clothes and wouldn’t let me go. She even tripped me, wanting to make me fall.
“Look at the flowers, look at the flowers! You aren’t looking at the flowers.”
I felt wronged, and tears welled up in my eyes and spilled out. Through teary eyes, I saw large roses swirling all over the sky, and so I gradually calmed down. I stood there foolishly and gazed at the roses. The girl surreptitiously placed a soft, cold thing in my hand; she wanted me to hang onto it. Flustered, I threw the thing off and swung my arms for all I was worth. I felt something moist on my hand.
“Why are you so jumpy? It’s just a twig!” she said.
The wind stopped blowing, and the roses fell slowly to the lawn — one rose here, another there, trembling as if they were alive. I looked closely at my palm and finally saw that it was clean; nothing dirty was there. So I relaxed and took careful steps to avoid trampling the beautiful roses. The girl’s voice echoed in my ears — tender, yet stiff; fervent, yet frosty. Such an unearthly voice—
“In the slums of Gaoling, a girl died next to the hospital, and in the hospital there are borders of roses. Shhh. Quiet, quiet! We’ve come out. Look, here’s the gap in the wall.”
As the girl and I walked on the blazing asphalt road, it was almost twilight. The old woman selling popsicles had gone home.
We parted at the intersection, each of us surprised by the other’s presence.
Cotton Candy
The thing I love watching most is the swirling cotton candy. The contraption for making it is like a flat-bottomed pan. One puts sugar in it, turns the crank, and after a while, a large shimmering ball emerges; it’s like cotton — and like silk, too. Indeed, there’s nothing lovelier.
The old woman with bulging eyelids who was selling cotton candy was so absorbed in the operation that she never looked up at us. We crowded around the contraption, staring at it with our mouths watering. We secretly hoped that more and more people would show up to buy cotton candy, so that we could watch longer. Still, this didn’t mean that we could eat the cotton candy: the old woman had never been that generous. We stood there to feast our eyes. None of the balls of cotton candy was the same; each one had a special beauty of its own. Only our eyes — kids’ eyes — could tell them apart. After the cotton candy was shaken out, the old woman spoke in a sharp, crisp voice to the child who had paid for it: “Here you go!” And then our gazes turned toward the thing in the child’s hand. We weren’t jealous of him. We shared his enjoyment of the delectable food — with our eyes.
Ah, this lovely thing has run through my entire life! That treasure sparkling in the sunlight, that magic-like spinning, brought me so much joy. At the time, I secretly planned to become a cotton candy vendor when I grew up. This old woman’s absorption and calmness while she worked were mystifying. Even with my enthusiasm running so high, I was sometimes distracted — for example, when an old crow flew past, or when my parents yelled at us to go home for dinner. But this old woman: after she set up her “black pot” and her customers lined up in front of this contraption, she lowered her eyes and never looked up. I thought that each ball of cotton candy was so marvelous because it was inseparable from her frame of mind. What kind of person was this old woman with hands like bark?
I’ve eaten cotton candy just twice. It was the most mystifying experience on earth. When I put that soft, transparent, fluttering white thing in my mouth, it vanished like air. It had no taste. I knew I’d seen that cotton candy was made of sugar, so why didn’t it taste sweet? I asked Amei and Aming, but they both laughed at me and said I was “miserable.” In my anger, I started ranting and raving, and they ran off.
But the cotton candy that those children ate certainly was flavorful. If they were eating only air, they wouldn’t make such a scene in front of their parents, demanding a few pennies to enjoy this kind of thing. I understood them. Maybe something was wrong with my taste buds. Later on, I brazenly asked my parents for a few cents, and this time I bought a small pear-shaped one. I tasted it gingerly. I saw this thing melt little by little on my tongue, and still I tasted nothing. It was so unfair: Had the old woman played a trick on me? It didn’t seem so. She treated me the same as everyone else. And, after all, she didn’t know me: she had never laid eyes on any of us.
My extreme dismay touched off endless daydreams. If I amassed some capital someday and became a vendor, maybe I could shake cotton candy out of the air. I was excited about my brainchild: at midnight, I smiled happily. I would shake out the most beautiful cotton candy, and it wouldn’t be white, either. It would be a color I couldn’t even imagine. It would be many times more beautiful than the rainbows in the sky or the coral in the sea. And the flavor certainly would not be a sugary taste, but would be a sweetness that had never existed before. It would be better. No, I couldn’t imagine what it would be better than.
=
The old woman finally went bankrupt. She had made so much money every day, how could she have gone bankrupt? I didn’t get it. She still came to our street to make cotton candy. Children lined up in an orderly fashion. When the first one in line paid his money, she bent her head and started shaking her contraption. She no longer had any white sugar. She was shaking air. Everyone started guffawing. Distracted for a moment, she brought her other hand — the one that was gripping the money — up to her face and stared at it carefully. The child who had given her the money quickly grabbed it from her and took off. She wasn’t angry: she just clutched the crank again and shook the air. She didn’t even look at us.
Feeling sorry for her, I rushed home and pilfered a small jar of sugar. I shoved my way through the crowd and placed the jar of sugar on the old woman’s chopping board. I had barely turned around when I heard a sound: the old woman had swept the jar to the ground. In a frenzy, the children grabbed the sugar that had fallen on the ground. The old woman was still shaking her contraption, her wooden face expressionless. The children whispered that she’d gone “crazy.”
As the days passed, fewer and fewer children crowded around. Finally, no one came any longer to watch her crazy activity. I was the only one who was reluctant to leave, and I observed from one side. Sure, I also ran off sometimes, because I had to help out at home and because of other temptations. But for some reason, I kept thinking about this. I felt vaguely that if the old woman would just go on shaking her contraption, a shiny white treasure would surely emerge from it. Perhaps she hadn’t really gone so bankrupt that she couldn’t even buy sugar. Maybe she had deliberately chosen not to use sugar. Otherwise, why would she have knocked the sugar jar I gave her to the ground?
=
One day, after I had helped my family fetch water, I came here. She looked like a fossil sitting motionless on a wooden stool. This was a rare sight. It was drizzling, and she was drenched. In the past, she would move her contraption under the tea shop’s awning as soon as it began raining. I felt nervous. What on earth had happened? Could she have died? I moved closer to get a better look at her face.
“No matter how much energy you put into your work, the hungry ghosts will eat everything you make.”