The old thing had gone through many transformations over the years. White enamel hid old paint jobs for a while but the facade of elegance was always fractured when flecks of white came away to reveal the yellow mold underneath. It’s also been broken several times, and every repairment has snuck in new impurities. Two especially long scars embraced the bowl’s circumference and left deafening valleys of serrated material on the otherwise pristine surface. 

我的国家。五千年。/ My country. Five thousand years.

In the battered bowl, a stew of viscous ink slept undisturbed. Thought and history swam and swirled in soft patterns I promise I have tried to understand but can’t seem to. Great names and heavy words cheapened under my eyes. They were just lines and dots to me—any meanings kneaded out of the original pulchritude as soon as I gazed at them. 

李白。Li Bai.

杜甫。Du Fu.   

李清照。Li Qingzhao.

They were all literary giants whose words my great grandfather taught to his children and my grandfather taught to his. They have all wrote stanzas that have carried fermented wisdom through the centuries. But as children in the orient motherland soaked it all in, I remained an imprudent illiterate. 

Floating on top of the ink like a raft lost at sea, a drying petal bobbled with uncertainty among the thick darkness. Red, once as vibrant as the five-starred flag flowing above Forbidden City. Lanterns, firecrackers, and blessings on translucent parchment—living history right in front of me. 

I held my bowl with both hands. At the airport, the lettered gate, and when I walked up the carpeted tunnel and onto the plane, I cradled it against my chest as I landed on the world’s underside. But as I lingered longer here, my petal dulled in the ink, now a grimy puddle that showed gray. 

When I lugged the bowl to the first day at the new school, blonde boys and green-eyed girls stared until I hid it under my jacket—ashamed.

A few years later, I saw a huddle of girls holding their own bowls in the hallway after Volleyball practice. Their inks were darker than their ebony eyes, jet black against the pearly porcelain. And resting on top of their immaculate bowls like crowns of kingdoms—perfect red peonies with thousands of petals furled outwards in pride. The girls looked lost, out of their depths in the unfamiliar air. They scrutinized the bump under my clothes and the ink stuck in my fingernails—waiting for me to leap into recognition, to join them. 

“你跟我们一样. “ / “You are the same as us.”

I did not look at them. I did not take out my bowl. I knew my single petal was curling into itself from a lack of nourishment, all its color drained and leaving only a crinkly brown corpse in its place. I walked past them and re-joined my pale classmates. 

When I first saw you among my friends, you were the one other pair of black eyes that fit seamlessly in the sea of greens and blues. You knew I saw your bowl too—shattered into shards and thrown in a clear Ziploc bag with a neon zipper like you didn’t care. But we talked as if we didn’t know we came from the same place and chose to discard ourselves and estrange from our roots—now having nothing left to grasp onto but cracked porcelain and muddy water when we turned back. We pretended that we weren’t different in the same way trudging through this distant ground—our father’s ink in our eyes and our mother’s peonies in our sighs but with none of the original flavor.

Walking down a particular street on Lunar New Year’s, I felt like a lost knight in faerie land, entranced in everything but hesitant to immerse in its unfamiliar brilliance. Round lanterns stretched from one side of the street to the other, hung on clothing lines and swaying against the wind. Teenagers were drinking cheap beers by street stands with lamb skewers dripping grease on their flimsy tables, and children ran around the shops with hawberry sticks flailing dangerously close to their eyes. 

And in this craze, the flowers reigned. Red stars glistening across a galaxy on the ground, every person on the street carried their bowls under their arms. 

Perched on a stranger’s windowsill next to a chihuahua slurping up a plate of dumpling carcasses, a particularly plump bulb sat proudly above its pool of rich black ink, branches twisting like it was frozen in the middle of a dance. Through the glass, celebrations roared. 

I stood outside the window and covered my bowl with a sleeve—dreary and dull in comparison—and felt like crying. But just when the first tear slid down, you put your hand on my shoulder and gave me a look as if to say “me too.”

“我跟你一样。”/ “I am the same as you.”

You extended an arm to stroke a single red petal on the large blossom, then brought your hand back to show me the smear of carmine pigment on your fingertips. I turned to the flower and almost reached for it; sitting in the obsidian pond, it looked like a fat ruby that burst through a veil of night.

“还有机会。“/ “There is still a chance.”

We choose a spot on the barren field where a few tufts of grass survived meekly on the cracked earth. I swing my bowl in a wide arc and black ink splash on the verdant ground, sinking in and taking root. It stains the grass like a stubborn shadow. You take out your ziplock bag and bury its contents next to an ant mound. I look at you; and we sit down and wait for our red spring of peonies.

Biography

Xujia (Nicole) Guan was born in Beijing, China but flew across the world to Canada at nine years old. She is slowly piecing back her culture, and loves reading classical Chinese poems and literature to add to her own writing.