No One Noticed the Moon Was Defaced

By Jennie Lin

ON THE FLIGHT home from Taipei, an old Chinese man to my right slept with his massive head hanging into the aisle. People kept knocking it around as they squeezed through to the toilets, and his head swung in semi-circles like the clapper of an upturned bell. Sometimes it even gave a crack, hitting things. But he didn’t wake. I thought he had died. He smelled like he had been rubbed in mothballs; his left arm lopped over the armrest and the skin looked soggy. To my left, my father slept, too. I checked his hands to make sure they looked different.

At the announcement of each meal, the old man woke. He lowered his tray, took his spectacles out of the seat pocket and peered down the aisle at the cart. When the food was placed in front of him, he gave it a long, significant look. Then he started at the top compartment and worked clockwise, and all that was left in his wake was plastic.

The meals of the flight made up a confused day. They went: Chinese breakfast, Chinese dinner, and just before we landed, American breakfast. Lunch had disappeared like the daylight, which had been sucked away so that we slid through an artificial night, a humming black tunnel. An exit taken on faith.

During the last meal, the old man reached over to my tray and took my bread roll. He unwrapped it and ate it without ever speaking at me. When he finished, he stuffed the plastic wrapper into my cup. I kept my eyes forward. I had been saving the roll for my father, but he slept through the meal anyway.

At our layover in the Hong Kong airport, my father had ushered me through the entire international terminal looking for mooncakes. We found every flavor and type. It was mid-September, a week before the Mid-Autumn Festival. The stores were expelling mooncakes from their entrances. Up and down the halls were stacked displays of shining, embossed red cardboard boxes, each of them promising temporary delight and eternal contentment. Some stores offered free samples, and I tried little slices of everything: mooncakes packed with tarot, or pineapple, or nuts, or roast pork. There were also ice cream bars shaped like mooncakes, which had an outer shell of chocolate printed with Chinese characters for luck or harmony or longevity or prosperity–I didn’t really know.

“What have they done?” My father despaired, looking at a promotion for translucent mooncakes that were sky blue. “Are those even edible? Where are the normal ones?”

I found a box of mooncakes that were golden outside and filled with the traditional red bean paste, but my father wanted the kind that also contained whole, salted egg yolks, suspended like moons in a dark red sky. My mouth watered, thinking of the dense cakes resting on our kitchen counter. They were rich, sweet, and salty, satisfying any possible craving, and lasted forever because we snacked on them in thin, precise slices that came cleanly away from the cake. One box could last me a blissful month of after school snacking. After school was key. Once I had brought dried, preserved plums to lunch, and people had said I ate stones.

At the same store, I located a box with salted duck yolks in the red bean filling, but my father set this aside, too. He said we were looking for quality. This was something new. Down the wide corridor of the airport hall, more stores opened themselves to us, clean, modern stores without clutter and with just one or two items displayed like art. Instead of cardboard boxes, there were painted tins.

My father had also purchased our plane tickets to Taiwan in a new way, without the protracted months of watching prices. We had to make it in time for my grandfather’s funeral. But on the way to the airport, when we stopped by McDonald’s for breakfast, he still grabbed handfuls of ketchup packets, stuffing them into his pockets and my mother’s purse. Charlie and I would later empty them one by one into an old ketchup bottle, squeezing the packets flat as paper. We would also sneak some outside to the driveway and stomp on them.

At a duty-free store where the shop attendants wore pink flowered qipaos with knotted buttons at their throat and slits up to their hips, my father picked up a box of four mooncakes in a crimson and gold tin. I thought of the things I could store in the tin once it was empty. Money, or one of my many collections: colored pens, matchbooks, stickers rescued from fruit and vegetables, empty floss boxes. I looked at the price tag. It shocked me, and I did the conversion to dollars three times. I wondered if we had that much money left, after our last-minute tickets to Taiwan.

“Mom won’t be happy,” I whispered to my father.

He shook his head at me and purchased two tins.

One of the attendants, whose hair was pinned up with a sparkling clip, wrapped the tins with tissue and slid them into a sturdy bag with handles. Huge red flowers covered both sides of the bag. My father looked into his wallet after he had paid in cash. He accepted his purchase with both hands and slowly, gravely, walked out of the store. It was exactly how we had walked at the funeral. It was as though he were still there.

In enormous black robes–Charlie and I had to cuff the loose sleeves–we walked in single file, taking small, measured steps through the audience in the funeral hall. We stopped to kneel or bow, then plodded into the back room, where the open coffin was. We slowly returned to the hall. While we slogged back and forth between the hall and the back room, a monk beside us chanted verses. Charlie and I did not understand most of what was being said, and were pushed down on our knees or forward or backward by our aunts and uncles and older cousins, whoever happened to be nearby.

The funeral hall was not an enclosed structure, but rather three walls and a ceiling assembled with aluminum poles and thick canvas. Before the ceremony, the next-door hall had been set up simultaneously with ours. A huge, framed picture of their deceased was up, surrounded by a table of chrysanthemums. It was a boy Charlie’s age, but chubbier, and very alive-looking, as though he were about to stick his face into a bowl of noodles. Our ceremonies began at the same time. During my grandfather’s ceremony, a disembodied female voice could be heard moaning from the other side of the canvas wall, a low sound with very little range, hardly ever pausing for breath. At one point I thought I heard my father join in close by, and then I tried to stop listening.

Charlie was the oldest son of the oldest son of my grandfather, so despite being only nine years old and speaking not a word of Chinese, he had to lead some rituals. At one point he was told to stand over the head of the coffin and take nails out of it with his teeth. Charlie put his face down, right over my grandfather’s. Misunderstanding, he kissed my grandfather on the mouth. By that time, my grandfather had been dead for six days, and a grimace that I had never seen on him when living had hardened across his face. Charlie had a similar grimace. I had never seen it on him either, but knew it was fear.

Charlie, just three years younger than me, is somehow very different. My parents had to come up with new techniques for him. Mostly, their attempts failed. Charlie has always refused to eat half the things presented to him, which is why he looks like a speck. My father used to say, appealing to Charlie’s interest in animals, “That pig gave its life up for you.” Sometimes it was a cow or a chicken. Once it had been a vegetable, but even when he was very small, Charlie had been too sharp for that.

Charlie said the pig was already dead anyway, and that it probably would have preferred to stay whole. “It doesn’t want to be chewed up,” he said. I thought of this later when my grandfather was cremated and we were told to sift through his ashes with chopsticks.

The tragedy of a wasted death wormed into me instead. It made me want to finish all the food that Charlie left behind, so that the animal in question would not have its shoulder or a chunk of its side thrown into a garbage can. I would tap Charlie’s leg, signaling him, and he would pass a pork chop or beef ball to me, smacking it into my palm under the table edge while looking straight ahead. Once he tipped a spoonful of warm soup into my hand, and we laughed so hard we both slid under the table.

At school, my things were being ruined. Someone stepped on my purple pen, snapping the barrel, and another time someone cut the hood off my jacket, though I continued to wear it. Once the Griely triplets spray-painted my cello a lime green. I closed the case quickly and looked around the music room, but everything else was normal and untouched. One of the triplets coughed in the corner.

The triplets were fat, shaped like barrels, and they rode my bus. One day one of them put a hand flat on my head and said, “You’re a shrimp of a shrimp. I could crumple you like paper.” At our age, boys were not speaking to girls in this way anymore, and it made me feel like something less than a girl.

The paint covered not just the wood, but the ebony fingerboard, pegs, bridge, scroll, and strings. Some of the paint went inside the F-holes and I even saw paint marking a sound post. I managed to scratch paint off the strings and the fingerboard, but not the wood. The cello used to reverberate with a deep, round sound, but the sound turned dull.

At home, gazing upon my cello, my father made a sound like he was physically hurt. Neither he nor my mother asked questions, though they often looked at my case in the corner of the living room. There was no explanation that would have made sense to them. It was outside their understanding of what people did.

Unlike me, Charlie had some quality that made him well liked by other children, even by boys older and much bigger than him. He had several nicknames and played street hockey around the neighborhood cul-de-sacs. My friends were limited to the two sisters across the street, the only other Asian family in our school. They spoke Cantonese at home, and our parents had to use English to communicate. In the end we did not have all that much in common except that people thought we did.

My mother once told me that the sisters’ parents had escaped Communism in the sixties by swimming from Guangdong Province to Hong Kong. In a time when most people could not swim, they had swum separately on the darkest, most moonless nights through two sets of border guards, and ran through shells and other sharp objects along the water that cut their legs so that scars remained. The mother had swum with a friend who had drowned, though she had not realized it in the darkness and waves until she reached the shore and waited and waited.

I wanted to look for scars on the mother’s legs, but she always wore pants. She was at home all day long, and sometimes she gave me odd looks.

Once, when I was waiting for the sisters to come home, she said, “Vanessa says you get the best grades at school.”

I nodded.

“Taiwanese kids know how to study,” she said.

I did not say anything.

“All you do is study,” she said. “Study all day long and play piano. And get fed and washed.”

“I play cello,” I said.

She chuckled hoarsely and repeated, “Cello.”

I looked out the window. Charlie and his friends were kicking a piece of trash across the street.

“Have you ever dug a hole?” She asked.

“Yes.” I thought of the tiny garden in our yard, where we planted tomatoes and watermelon and struggled with water buckets back and forth from our kitchen. We had released worms in the garden last summer.

“But have you ever really dug a hole? Really, really dug a hole?”

“Yes,” I insisted. “Once we planted a peach tree.” This was true, but my father had dug the hole, and the tree had failed to produce any fruit and then it had died.

“No you haven’t,” she said. “Not a real one. Not a hole that is seven feet deep and three feet across. You haven’t dug a hole like that.”

The day after the funeral, Charlie swelled up and turned blue. Not purplish or reddish, but a real blue tint. We had five days left in our Taiwan stay, and on the first day of his sickness, all our relatives stood around him with theories about why he had ballooned up and changed colors.

“He’s allergic to something. But what?”

“Kids grow up different in America. It could be anything.”

“Mosquitoes.”

“Maybe he drank water from the faucet.”

“You idiot, mosquitoes?”

“What do you know?”

I was sure something had happened to him when he had kissed my dead grandfather.

Charlie was taken to several different Chinese doctors. Each of them had a theory too, a complicated one that involved the flow of life forces through the body. When he was home in my grandmother’s house, Charlie rested on a pile of blankets on the floor. We spent the afternoons trying to list all the superheroes and cartoon characters we could think of who were blue. He decided he was The Tick, but mostly because he thought I resembled The Tick’s sidekick Arthur, the nervous guy in the moth suit. At home we had an entire cabinet full of The Tick episodes on VHS, which my mother had found at a garage sale. In between our list-making, Charlie slept. He slept a lot. My father rented action movies, but Charlie fell asleep just a few minutes into each one. I fanned him with a paper fan and half-convinced myself that my fanning was keeping him alive, until I found I could not stop. I switched hands over and over, until finally my mother took the fan away from me and put me to bed, too.

Soon it was time for us to go home, but everyone agreed Charlie could not fly. My mother stayed behind with him and they gave up their return tickets. I was not sure we had enough money to buy them a new set of tickets home.

After boarding at Hong Kong, my father placed the mooncakes in the overhead compartment on top of his carry-on suitcase, and wedged his jacket in to prevent them from sliding around.

I kept thinking of them up there and could not stop myself. “Can we eat one now?”

“When they come home,” my father said. “We’ll eat them together, the right way.”

“But we have two boxes,” I said. “And each box has four cakes.”

“Just wait,” he said. He leaned his head against the window and closed his eyes.

My desire for the cakes intensified, and as we lifted off the ground, I sat there with my ears popping and my entire body tingling for the cakes. My hunger for them expanded as we climbed higher and higher, and for a while I thought I had swelled up like Charlie, I felt so large and burning.

At the booth, our officer was an Asian man much younger than my father, and with no perceptible accent, like me.

He asked my father, “Returning home, sir?”

“Yes.”

“Where did you go?”

“Taiwan.”

“What was the purpose of your trip? What city did you stay in? What day did you arrive there?” He asked more questions as soon as my father answered, so that their words rolled together.

“We stayed there for two weeks,” I said, and hoped the officer would take note of my perfect English.

He smiled at me. “Did you bring any fruit or meat back with you?” He asked. “Any mooncakes?”

I grinned and held up the bag of mooncakes.

“Just mooncakes,” my dad said.

“Line A,” he said, and marked our customs form with a flourish of his black permanent marker.

Line A turned out to be a long queue to a scanning area, where passengers were placing their belongings on a huge, slow belt. We had coincided with an arriving flight from Vietnam, and for some reason all of the Vietnamese passengers had traveled with enormous cardboard boxes instead of suitcases. The boxes all looked exactly the same, wound around many times with rope and taped shut, sometimes covered on all possible surfaces by tape. After passing through the scanner, the boxes were being cut open, and a spectacular mix of strange and everyday possessions exploded out onto the counters, with no way of being contained again. Around us, there were Vietnamese and Chinese exclamations. The clamor was punctuated by loud, slow English phrases such as, “This is meat! This is meat! No meat!”

We placed our things on the belt, and all of them emerged from the other end except for the mooncakes.

“Is this yours?” The officer had broad, hard-looking shoulders and a soft, round face. “I need to scan this again,” he said.

He placed the bag on the belt and squinted at the screen as it passed through the X-ray scanner. He caught the bag on the other end and came over to us. “Can’t let you take this.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“I’m sorry, it has egg yolk in it. No poultry can come through here.”

A female officer to his left was shouting, “I need to run these mooncakes through again. One box had red bean in it, and another had pork in it, but I forgot which was which.” Another officer was shaking a bag, saying to a small, shriveled, rapidly blinking Chinese woman, “Mooncakes? Mooncakes? Mooncakes?”

I was dimly aware of the strangeness we had entered. It was the week before the Mid-Autumn Festival, and they were hunting mooncakes.

Our officer took a knife out, and it shone under the yellow airport light. “You see?” He asked me, and in one quick gesture, before I could prepare myself, he cut open one large, beautiful mooncake in his hand, slicing smoothly through the packaging and the cake all at once, as though he had already done it a hundred times that day. The flaky duck yolk was exposed, the crumbling moon.

All this time my father had not said a word. I said, “Yes, we know it has egg yolks. But why won’t you let us take it?” I sounded young and squeaky.

The officer straightened. “You know?” He said. He held the customs declaration form high above us. He said to my father, “You checked the box for no food. That’s a federal offense.” His round face grew pink spots.

“I’m sorry, sir,” my father mumbled. “I didn’t think...”

The officer grabbed the entire bag with his big hands and shoved it into an enormous plastic garbage can, where it rested slightly wrinkled on a high pile of other cakes and bags and boxes.

My father was gazing at the garbage can full of mooncakes. I looked down at the flimsy counter. It was what separated the cakes and the people who would have consumed them. Would they bother with me, I thought, if I grabbed a few boxes and ran?

On the way out, I saw the old Chinese man who had sat beside me on the flight. He was carrying a bag of mooncakes. I looked at the line of exiting passengers who had not gone through Line A, and saw the telltale red bags everywhere.

“I’m sorry,” my father said. “I should have let you eat one on the plane. Or I should have picked the plain kind. I didn’t know.”

At that moment I realized I had not even asked for the empty tins, and it stopped me short. I looked back into the customs hall. A woman was standing guard at the automatic doors.

Outside the airport, it was still night. How many hours of night had passed, I wondered. I thought of Charlie, sleeping twenty hours a day, and thought he might have liked this flight, with its license to sleep forever.

Beyond the concrete overpass leading away from the airport, the harvest moon hung low and fat. In the episode The Tick vs. Chairface Chippendale, there was a moon as enormous as this one, hanging in the backdrop. Chairface, wanting to get back at the world, plotted to carve his name into the moon with a ray gun. He said, “All my life the world has tried to forget my face, but after tonight, they will never forget my name!” Charlie loved that episode, loved the villain whose head was a piece of furniture. I hated it because The Tick, Arthur, and the American Maid stopped Chairface’s evil deed only after he had already carved a C, H, and part of an A. Then the episode ended. It seemed not to have occurred to anyone that, for eternity, the moon was nonsensically going to read “CHA” in block letters.

As we waited to catch our bus home, I said to my father, “All those mooncakes in there.”

My father shook his head.

“All those duck eggs,” I said. “They died for our country.”

My father chuckled.

The bus came then, and I followed my father down the curb to meet it. In those few yards, I matched my father’s plodding step, each foot set an even distance forward. It kept us going forward–we always came back to this, could always come back to this.