PUSH – scary stories

WEB VERSION: https://www.floatingprojectscollective.net/art-notes/linda-lai-push-02

(1)

When I was a little girl, it was my maternal grandmother who told all my bedtime stories.

Big cities in the evening are full of exuberant Cantonese opera performances with a steamy audience and fruit hawkers swarming around to feed them.  But in small villages in the Southern part of China, it seems only two kinds of living beings are watching the night: an old female wolf and little children who are bad because they are crying too much.  Adults, parents, relatives and friends are often either asleep or they are simply not there.  As my mind’s eye recalls, streets humid and windy cut through these little villages, and I only see them in the evening.  It is not unlikely that adults partake of the day, whereas children and wolf alone dwell the night.  I can easily tell you what it is like for a place to have children only in the dark for that is the story that I listened to every other evening. But what is a place like without children and with adults only playing and working in broad daylight?  And as far as I remember it, it seems most of the children crying are girls.  In fact, I don’t recall any boys -- or my eyes are just not made to see them.

Don’t ask me why little girls cry all the time.  My Grandma never told me and I never asked.  For I’m far more interested in questions of another sort.  What is the transition like between day and night? What happens when the sun sets and when or before the moon rises?  What happens if the sun suddenly drops in a moonless starry night?  What was the moment like when adults fade out and children and wolves fade in?  Is there such a flip of a second in which all parties see each other face to face?  Would they have the chance to chat, even for a few seconds, eyeball to eyeball?  What would they have talked about?  Are they looking forward to this diurnal rendezvous-separation?  What colors do I see?  Are there thunders, lightning, laser lights, burst of a rainbow, or a sudden furious whirlpool of muddled hues and shades?    …  If you ask me, I would tell you I prefer to see the busy activities of the village slide into slow motion without anyone’s notice.  Then at a random moment in the thickest of dusk, everything comes to a standstill.  Clothes and skin shed from the adults’ bodies like a shell shattered.  Children of the night they all are!  A dazzling glaze beams up the place like over-exposed photographs, or like negative images but with lots of white and faded lavender brims.  A flush of butterflies sweeps by.  A fragment or two of a Cantonese opera crack open and drop like the end of a noon shower then – a direct cut to a humid village at night with children all in bed hiding under their blankets, as if the place and children have always been there like that.

As a matter of fact, the village in the evening is not terribly miserable.  You don’t find the place filled with choruses of crying.  It was quite the opposite and thanks to the wolves.  In order to stay safe, most children, as much as they could, would hold their cries except, of course, every now and then, a tear or two can’t help but leak out from the corner of their eyes, or they will burst into a rush of sobs which subsides in no time at the thought of the wolves coming.

At this point of the story, my Grandma would plant herself right into the middle of the story world in the form of an anonymous wolf-ish voice admonishing the children of the village, “Be quiet, Granny Wolf is coming to the village to find all the children who cry.  Ssshhh … can you hear her?  Listen!  Listen to her footsteps.  She’s coming!”

This was often followed by a long and winding description of Granny Wolf’s rags and bags, which I’ll skip here: for it never really interested me too much as it’s no more than a good combination of details from Little Red Riding Hood and other stories with a witch in disguise. 

Punchie moonie rookie ru ru.  Tummie lunchie pookie su su.   So Granny Wolf makes her way through the empty streets.

No one’s crying, but faint muffled sobs soak into damp darkness.

Ru-log-ru-log-ru-loglog.  Gru-log-gru-log-gru-rogrog.  You hear Granny Wolf chewing up the delicious fingers of a bad girl who refuses to stop crying.  And here, my dear grandma would leave me with the true protagonists of the story -- other little girls who are listening intently next doors, scared, speechless, and yet excited under their sheets, waiting for Granny Wolf to finish off, fathoming where she’s heading for her next dish.

(2)

An April day 1989 in a certain suburb west of Chicago downtown –
My MA thesis was still finding its direction in the third last month before it was due.
I saw my grandma in a dream.  Details all forgotten.

Mid-June, 1989, in the after shock of the June Fourth massacres –
I returned to Hong Kong with my MA. 
At my welcome dim-sum gathering, Mum told me grandma had passed away, on a certain April day.

Since then, Grandma had been in my dreams once in a while, just like a piece of furniture in a scene.  For over a year now, she has not come to my dreams.  And I don’t think she will.             PUSH.

(3)

Grandma is an interesting character.  She learned her first few Chinese characters from her brother.  Otherwise, she taught herself how to read and write.  My one single memory of her from my childhood is: a profile side shot of grandma sitting on a low wooden stool in the verandah, smelling the newspaper in the daylight.  She never read gossip pages or entertainment news, but Page One where international affairs and Mainland news were surveyed.  Other times, I found her in the same place, same position, chanting to herself from thick books rhymed lines of Chinese folk legends like Yang Jia Jiang or The Story of the Three Kingdom.  I didn’t know until recent years that it could have been Mu Yu Shu, the lost art of Cantonese folk sounds.  All I knew was: her chants were sad, subtle and moving.