Him or her
—why did she write that when there are no female bone pickers? Death, in China, being
yin
, has always been handled by its opposite,
yang
. And a bone picker in Iowa! On five days’ notice! She is wondering if she should add a P.S. when, to her surprise—already!—Tina writes back.
Dear Auntie
,
I have found one. His family from Taiwan but actually he live Los Angeles, so very easy to meet you there, he can just take an airplane. Of course, there is a reason he is so willing to help. He used to buy bonds at the office—giving them 2 percent right there, he never even thought about it before, how he is give money away. Now I save him money every transaction; that can add up to thousands of dollars savings, depending on his volume. So he is always willing to help us. And you too, willing to help! I am very happy. I always say it to Johnson, how important that family should stick together, even we are all over the world. People say home is where the job is …
Home is where the job is.
but life is too hard for everyone just say I am by myself, I come from nowhere. I tell my girls all the time. New generation, you know, they do not even know what life is. They think life is easy. They do not realize how your house can fall down any moment. Anyway, we all thank you very much. I have always believed you are wise. Now I know what I believed is true. I will tell the other family members, they will be very glad, too. I know I myself am crying while I write. That is how grateful I am. The situation with my daughter has
been so difficult, I cannot sleep. Johnson say I am become some kind of ghost. We thank you, just thank you
.
Hattie writes back,
I am glad to help. But, tell me. Do you really believe this? Because I am modern, like my parents. Of a scientific disposition, as you know
.
Answers Tina,
I know it sounds like crazy superstition, even I think that sometimes. But you know Chinese culture is last 5,000 years, some part must be something right. Wrong part cannot be so wrong, either. Johnson says anyway it is cheaper than go to psychiatrist, but actually even Johnson is not just try save money. Even Johnson believe something in his heart. He is talk to the fengshui master. He is arrange our house in some crazy way. In fact to get from the kitchen to the rest of the house you have to go outside now, the maid is complaining in the bad weather she has to use umbrella. And he goes to the temple to burn incense, too. Especially when big trouble come, he goes to ask his ancestors for help. Because what else can he do? So many times we do not know how we can go on. He say when he go there, he feel better. So maybe it is a kind of crazy, but it is a crazy that make you feel less crazy. And maybe that has some kind of effect. You can say, that does not mean it is not superstition. And maybe you are right. Maybe it is just hang a sheep head to sell the dog meat—kind of like trick people. But I think so many people believe something for thousands of years, how can be nothing inside? I think our ancestors look after us. Look after you, too—how else can you live in United States today, so comfortable, and not so many people. We have too many people. Even you are rich you know they are there, try to grab your money. You can never say now we have siesta. Always we worry, worry
.
Hattie writes,
Actually, we worry here, too. Maybe not in quite the same way. But think about the World Trade Center. We’re guarding
our airports and our subways. Our reservoirs. Our schools. Everyone is on edge, and losing money, too. Usually people come to see the leaves turn, but they’re not coming this year. And what if we lose our jobs? What if we break a tooth? What if we get cancer, or Alzheimer’s? I lost my husband and best friend to cancer, you know. Both in one year.…
She stops.
Probably you will say, You see? That just goes to show the graves should be moved. I do not believe so, but who knows, maybe you are right. Recently my neighbors, too, had a terrible thing happen.…
She stops again.
So I remember worry, yes, and heartache, too. People here move and move. We don’t feel quite in control. And research has shown, I believe, that that correlates with, if not religion exactly, at least magical thinking
.
Replies Tina,
Maybe it is not so polite to say so, but I do not think fengshui is just think something magic. It is believe in some right relationship with the world. It is try to think what that is, not just do any way you like. It is believe your life will be more smooth if you say OK, I am not such a big shot. Our relatives are bury in Qufu for 70 generations. 2000 years. How can we say we are now bury all over? Who are we? As if we know everything! Talk about crazy
.
Writes Hattie,
Who are we, indeed. I cannot say you have convinced me, and if you will forgive me for putting on my scientist hat, I must point out that we humans are prone to superstition. We’re wired to seek cause and effect whether it’s there or not—to make “sense” of things even if the result is nonsense. But never mind. Insofar as your thinking appears to have little to
do with the less tenable tenets of Confucianism, and more to do with tradition and hope and humility and coping …
—and where you do not, thank goodness, imagine your will to be the will of God—
… I will meet the bone picker this weekend
.
Tina replies,
Thank you, Auntie, thank you. Thank you. Johnson say to tell you of course we are crazy, but at least we are not pray to Jesus Christ! Talk about crazy!
Hattie sighs.
Q
ufu is not the only graveyard with a claim on Hattie’s parents. Back when her mother went native, Hattie’s grandfather wrote a letter about the graveyard in Iowa, which Hattie unfolds now, on her tray table, on the plane. She only has this letter because her mother sent it back unopened, she was so mad; Hattie can still see Grandpa Amos’s face as he passed it on to her, years later. “Whatever you do, don’t send it to me again,” he said ruefully. “I’ve seen enough of this particular missive.” Why didn’t she ask him then why he wrote clear across the page, as if he did not believe in margins? Now she will never know, though she guesses it was to save weight: for what lovely thin sheets of onionskin she spreads out on her tray table. They are translucent and crisp, and quite unlike his handwriting, which is loopy and close-packed, and hard to decipher even with her reading glasses.
Dear Caroline, I do fear you will be the death of your mother. She has heard so many stories over the years, and while I cannot say that she has not had her worries about the hazards of missionary life—the stories of beheadings were particularly hard to shake—she could always put them aside, as long as you had the Good Lord over you. But now she fears for your soul, as do we all. What do you mean you do not care to be
saved? And how can Christian compassion be expanded? The way to salvation is open to all, but John 3:3 says, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. To claim that a just God would not demand that all accept their salvation! Daughter, we are justified by faith alone. You describe your hand shaking, on occasion, as you assist at a baptism. That is the devil shaking you, body and soul. It is blasphemy to question the ways of the Lord. He is Justice; His actions are Just. The Buddha is a fine example of living rectitude, but he is not Divine. He is not Absolute, and demands a different fealty. To think him an “alternative,” as you say, is to have a false god before you. Heaven help you. You have mixed yourself among the people, like Ephraim. Strangers have devoured your strength
.
I have never seen your mother pray so fiercely. She has lost weight. She cannot eat. She has even developed a tremor, in consequence of which she leaves the serving to me when we have company, and sits on her hands in general. It is making her self-conscious and unsociable. I myself went for a walk by the family cemetery today, as I do in times of trial. We are blessed to have it so nearby. And in such a splendid spot! Can you picture it still? The plains extending as far as the eye can see and, in the midst of that enormity, our little spot, with its fence. I don’t think there is another place on earth with a sky of that size
.
Daughter, I do have faith. The devil has done his best on many of us, but our last days have found every one of our family recounting the reasons of the hope that was in us. This is your trial. Remember that salvation is possible for all but certain for none. I pray that you will call out like David and have restored to you the joy of your salvation, that one day you too will lie at peace here, your struggles at an end. We have much for which to thank the good Lord, and call on Him to aid you now. May He bless you and guide you. Yrs in Christ, Father
Hattie folds the letter back up carefully. Would Grandpa Amos have forgiven her for doing this? He did write, many years later,
I am coming to wonder how a heaven that would not have your mother could be heaven
.
But who knows. Bless him, in any case, she thinks, descending already—her ears popping, and the Great Plains spread out below her in all their eventless modesty. Hattie likes their nondescript brown-green, brushed here and there with white. And the general levelheadedness that seems to have grown up out of the level land—she likes that, too. Though why did she not let anyone know she was coming? On the one hand, no one has the claim on her parents that she does, and everything was so last-minute. On the other, well, what would it have taken to drop people who had e-mail, an e-mail?
Greetings, all! Forgive the group missive, but I wanted to let you know …
The plane lands with a jolt and a bounce; Hattie gathers up her things. There’s a jetway now—things have modernized. And what a cheery new lounge, with such cheery new carpet; it could be a children’s playroom. She finds a pay phone.
Just tell them you’re here to disinter some folks
—Lee’s voice.
Rings.
She holds on for twenty rings, checks her address book, dials again, and goes twenty rings more. No answer. No machine. Some years ago, there’d have been dozens of numbers to call. It was nothing to scrounge up a last-minute supper if you needed one, and no one ever had to buy sports equipment; there were always skates or nets or cleats around somewhere. But her mother’s family is all over now, just like her father’s. Only the youngest of the uncles is still bravely holding out in Grandpa Amos’s house—Uncle Samuel. Living alone, though he’s in his nineties now. Who knows if he can even hear the phone.
She dials a cousin—no answer there, either.
Were the handsets of these public phones always so heavy? And that coil it’s attached to—was it always so stiff and wayward?
So wound up
, Lee would have said.
She’d forgotten.
An athletic Asian man with porcupine hair approaches her out by the baggage claim. “Mrs. Kong?”
Somehow Hattie had not imagined that the bone picker would be dressed all in black. But here he is—black sweater, black jeans, black boots, and he’s holding a black leather jacket, too. He has respectfully removed the earbuds of his MP3 player; they dangle back behind his neck like the earpieces of an inexplicably limp stethoscope. Still, a mini-beat emanates from them, tinny and tuneless.
“My name is Lennie.” He puts out a hand.
“It’s nice to meet you, Lennie.”
“Lennie Dow, like in Dow Jones.”
“Nice to meet you,” she says again.
The bone picker is so long-waisted and short-legged it is hard not to wonder if he is not part Japanese—the Japanese having occupied Taiwan for so long, after all. He has a kite-shaped face, too, planar. Seeing as how she also grew up under the Japanese, though, and seeing as how she was so often asked if she was Japanese—strange-looking creature that she was—she doesn’t ask.
He senses her interest in his appearance all the same.
“People are surprised I’m so young,” he says. “I learned the business from my dad.”
“And he was old.”
“Yeah.” No laugh. “I mean, when he got older, he was. And he learned it from his pa, and so on. We’ve been bone pickers for generations—a great living in the beginning. These days, though, you need other irons in the fire. Especially if you’re based in the States, like I am. Kind of the U.S. franchise.”
“I would imagine.”
“I was born here.”
“Is that so.”
He shrugs. “I’m just telling you because people want to know. But I speak Chinese—you couldn’t really do this job if you didn’t speak Chinese. Mandarin, Taiwanese, Cantonese, at least. Fujianese, too, these days. Seeing as how all the bones are Chinese. The clientele.”
“English is fine,” she says. “
Dōu kĕyi.
”
“Can I get that bag for you?”
“Thank you. Though it’s very light, really.”
“It’ll be heavier on the way back,” he says, pulling; he’s wearing some kind of string bracelet. “It’s ashes, right? I mean, we do do bones. That’s why we’re called bone pickers. Because we do do that, pick the bones out of any flesh that might be left.”
Pick ’em out, jar ’em up.
“But your folks have already been cremated, is my understanding.”
“They were cremated for the move here, I believe,” says Hattie. “It was some years ago.”