Echoes Ginkgo
He had walked too long in the greyness of the bricked Hutong. In the alleyway he grew up in – it should be somewhere around here – there were yellow Ginkgo trees at this time of the year. They lined up in the narrow path. Every autumn of his childhood, there would be one night when all the leaves suddenly coat their magic golden glimmer. Back when he was young and trapped in his ambitions, those trees were the sky. They held a feeling he had been looking for, perhaps the longing he had for freedom, for escape. That longing was so precious, so invigorating. All changed when he left to seek it.
He had always associated that pure yellow with Beijing. It was the color of revitalization when the sun beams on a chilly morning. The sky was yellow; sunlight poured through the gaps of the leaves; the ground was yellow, too, covered in fallen gold. As a kid walking through Hutong, he would look up at the leaves fluttering down their trees. He would stand under the shimmering yellow confetti, under the spotlight created by patches of sun, imagining himself taking a bow while his audience roared into applause, shouting his name “Ying, Ying!” He would wave his Golden Eagle actor award, grinning and blowing kisses to his fans. In his imagination, the stage was as golden as the trees in the Hutong’s autumn.
Ying took a deep breath and walked on, slowly, peering at the unfamiliar doors along this Hutong that had only been in his memory for the past twenty-six years. He studied each of the grey, worn bricks, restoring their details. The walkway seemed more crowded, and the buildings were more renovated. White beams of light penetrated the windows; neon signs flashed on the pale bricks. The doors were wide open; clothes and hats and lollipops hung on it for sale. People were dressed up, photographing and touring the Hutong that used to be his home. He was helplessly lost.
His gaze fell on an old man, sitting on a stool outside of a convenience store, smoking. “Yeye,” he asked carefully, stitching together phrases of Chinese, “sorry to bother you, but do you know where HuiSheng Road No. 6 is?”
Yeye, grandpa in English, had tumbled on his tongue before it was muttered awkwardly. Addressing strangers as family members was another Chinese custom he had relinquished.
The old man sat up straighter to look at him: “HuiSheng Road? Sounds familiar, but most of the roads changed their names about twenty years ago. Why do you need to find that? Tourists don’t usually go there. Nothing to see.”
Tourist, such an unfamiliar and prickling word. Ying winced slightly: “No, Grandpa, I lived there. My old home. It’s the place with a lot of – yellow leaves?” He emptied his head but couldn’t recall what Ginkgo was in Chinese. He was sure he knew it when he was six.
“Young lad, this place had changed too much. I don’t even know if your home is still there. But if you are looking for Yinxing trees, there are a lot a few blocks ahead.”
Yinxing, maybe that was what they were called. Ying nodded before leaving, the man’s voice still echoing in his head. Things have changed too much. The modern beams preyed on him.
The memory of the ally where he grew up was not like this. It felt more personalized, more familiar. He had customized it, hiding stories around each corner, behind each wall. Now, he saw what every other stranger saw: the dark asphalt road, brick walls rising on either side of the pathway, the giant red doors facing each other, and the trees with almost no leaves.
When Ying was young, the Hutong’s narrow walkway would be overcrowded – elders sat on the chairs placed outside of the doors, conversing while waving bamboo hand fans; kids ran around chasing each other – the entire Hutong was like a large family. After school, he often banged on his neighbors’ doors, calling their kids out to play. If they didn’t respond, Ying always had a way to sneak in, through a secret passageway he discovered or climbing over the walls standing on a pile of bricks. When the dogs barked at him, he would say “Hey, hey, Dahuang, it’s me. Shhh,” and they would instantly quiet down, wagging their tails. He had no fears – except for that old hen – which perhaps was why no one was surprised that he left HuiSheng Road first and furthest behind.
Ying shuffled forward. The clunks his dress shoes made on the ground were suddenly too piercing. His black suit felt too tight, and he became painfully conscious of the way he walked. He hunched down, staring at the moving walkway, at the passing patches of darker, refilled asphalt.
The midday sun shone; his shadow gathered under him in a black dot, like a tiny, specialized stage. His steps pointed northwest, but his mind was directionless – it was exactly opposite to the day he left Huisheng Road. When he dragged his luggage out of the Hutong to meet Uncle Li for the airport, young Ying thought he found his direction in life. It would just be forward, away from this narrow alley: to the East, to America; to his Uncle Meng on the other side of the earth, to the faraway freedom everyone talked about. Yet, years after pursuing his so-called direction, he found himself back where he came from. Ying knew he wasn’t the person to follow the conventional path – six years of elementary school, three years of middle school, three years of high school, then Gaokao, the standardized test to rank all Chinese of his generation and veto his future – he drifted too much, both his body and his mind.
He was never still, not enough for his parents, not enough for his kindergarten teachers, and most certainly not enough for schools after that. When other kindergarten kids took lunchtime naps in the stuffy room, he was wide awake. When teacher Huang left the room, he would jump up from his bed and flap his arms around silently like a blind bird in water, provoking puffs of laughter from around the room. Hearing the chuckles, his heart would pound like drumbeats in his chest. Every laughter pushed him to do something riskier – poking the boy next to him awake or jumping off the bed to run around the room barefoot. At times when no one was awake, he would imagine himself as the great hero, saving a group of poisoned victims and fighting the villain alone. Occasionally, teacher Huang would catch him awake. But before she could grab his arm, he would scream “I need to pee” and squirm out under her arms, grinning as if he had won a trophy.
The phone number to his house was always on top of teacher Huang’s dial list. “Yingying mom,” teacher Huang half-pleaded Ying’s mother, “Yingying is too active, you have to teach him to stay still and quiet down. The teachers can’t even teach!”
Back home, Ying’s mother looked at Ying half-pleadingly, too.
“But I don’t want to!” the five-year-old Ying complained, every time, “those people are too boring!”
He was named Ying, 影, the shadow, because he was the shadow. In the cradle, he cried whenever left alone – someone had to carry him and involve him in the action. After learning to walk, he followed his mom as if he was glued to her. His tiny feet shuffled back and forth, going wherever the bustle was.
The older Ying grew, the more he hated the name. He wanted to be under the spotlight, where shadows are under his feet – he wanted to shine. He changed the character of his name after settling in America. Still pronounced Ying, the logogram, 英, now meant blossom; excellence; hero; English. The idea to change his name was planted in his mind the day he met Uncle Meng on the other side of the world. “Speak English or don’t talk,” Uncle Meng had said,
“it’ll help you live better in America.”
The sun set further down west, stretching his shadows to the right side behind him. He had walked too long. Now, in a deserted walkway, it was just him and his shadow. A little into the afternoon, the silhouette was still shorter than him. He stopped his steps and stared at his shadow a little too long. A swirl in his vision suddenly blurred the surroundings, muting all sounds. His gaze zoomed into the darkness, and the grey asphalt swallowed all other colors of the world. Time stopped. His shadow dug a deep hole in the concrete, into which he dropped. He sunk and fell into the gloom. At the very bottom of the pit, where his body slumped and banged on the core of Earth, he became his younger self. He became Ying the shadow.
Colors poured out from the pitch-blackness. He was standing again at the Huisheng Road of his childhood, on the day of his departure.
“Uncle Li is at the door with the car. Get your bag! I’m putting your passport here. Look, right in the pocket I sew here. Don’t lose it!”
It was his mother’s voice, but Ying couldn’t see her – the young Ying wasn’t looking at her.
“Drink lots of water on the plane. Here’s your snacks and fruit. Your Uncle Meng will pick you up from the airport in America. Don’t go with anyone else. Don’t wander off. Here’s your name tag with his phone number on it. Follow the flight attendants. Let us know when you get there...”
Young Ying stopped listening and drifted into the future – a future free of the nagging and all the dos and don’ts; a future, away from the trapping Hutong, where his stage glimmered; a future on the other side of the earth, which, he thought, was arriving in less than a day.
“Ying. YING! Are you listening? Uncle Meng was kind enough to offer to take you, remember to always say thank you, okay?”
“Mom, when are you going?” young Ying finally turned around to look at his mother.
His mother was exactly the image Ying had traced in his memory. But there seemed to be something more, something he didn’t catch when he was young. The something swiped past in his mother’s eyes, even in the grey one that had lost its glimmer a long time ago. If he could just look closer – he could almost see it now.
He stared. In the infinite seconds, pieced into his mother’s graying pupil, something inexplicable blinked and perished.
He heard the young, stupid Ying filling up the silence: “It’s okay, I know you have work. Uncle Meng can come get you whenever you want.”
His mother smiled and handed him his bag and luggage. Young Ying waved and turned around, excitement carrying him away and out of the Hutong. Ying didn’t dare blink – it was the last of his mom in his memory. He knew that afterward, all that remained in his memory – his vision now – would be the grey bricks of the narrow Hutong and Uncle Li’s shining black car.
His eyes soured. Ying tilted his head up. It was autumn. Patches and patches of yellow shadowed the tiny Hutong. The golden fans of yinxing leaves gleamed above him, shielding the sunlight that was making his eyes water. The yellow wasn’t pure as he had envisioned: an ethereal light seemed to shimmer within the colors. He couldn’t quite grasp it. He raised his right hand instinctively, trying to reach the leaves. He was sure he never looked at the yinxing this closely the day he left. A thought flashed by in his mind. In a sudden, shivering chill, he lowered his gaze to the end of the Hutong: Young Ying was already in the car, but the scenes were now clearer than ever.
Colors rushed into his mind, bridging the blurriness that had been the edge of his memories. He spun around. In front of him wasn’t the greyness of his unseen past, it was his mother.
His mother stood beside the red door of his childhood home. Her hands were squeezed tightly together in front of the apron that hung on her waist. In the one clear eye, where she held her entire vision of the word, gleamed a thousand stars of an unsettled night. A gentle wind blew. Yinxing leaves fluttered down. Under the yellow confetti of his childhood, Ying met the gaze of his mother across time. She was looking at him, studying his broader shoulders and his newly bought black suit. Her gaze lingered temporarily on the white chrysanthemum flower, pinned in his left chest pocket for the occasion. The solemn black suit accentuated the pure, apologetic white. She understood. She raised her gaze slowly to meet his eyes; her lips curled up. A gleaming, golden line slid down her cheek – it traced the entire autumn of Beijing.
Ying woke up lying flat on the road. The sun drowned below the bricked wall next to him – his shadow was gone. Slowly he stood, not bothering to pat off the dust on his suit. He took a step forward. And another. His feet brought him ahead. Direction or destination didn’t seem to matter anymore.
The Hutong led him forward. The sky dimmed. He thought he would wander into darkness like this. In his mechanical steps, each one as mundane as the other, he suddenly walked into a shower of sunlight. An alley opened, its streets pointing west, through which poured in the most magnificent sunset. His shadow popped back into life behind him, clear- edged and almost tangible. He squinted into the narrow alley where the orange glow washed through. There were the colors he had sought – the yellow Ginkgo leaves, the brown trunks of trees, the grey cement bricks, and the red wooden doors, all fogged under the setting sun. On the wall opening into the alley, an old, dusted blue plate showing Huisheng Road hymned like a plaque of his childhood. Above it stuck a newer sign –Yinxing Alley.
He stared long at the unornamented bluntness of the new name. He liked Huisheng better. It meant echo – the most accurate rendering of the Hutong. In the silent alley, painted in the gold of yinxing, his memories echoed: his laughter, his mother calling him home, his dreams, his complaints and tears, her sighs and phone calls and whitening hair, the doctor’s warnings, the graying eye, the absence of goodbyes. Then, his memories of her fell to a period of nothingness, her figure never changing – it was as if he shielded her from the passing of time. That was all before the phone call from far away, when the doctor’s quiet condolences silenced the entire world.
A week ago, when that call ended, Ying closed his eyes. The beeping phone brought him to the room where her heart gave up. On the sickbed, where her soul slipped out of his grasp, she still wore the face he remembered twenty years ago. Even now, Ying did not know what his mother looked like when time and labor weathered her. He shielded her, and shielded himself, in the voids of his memories.
Yellow Ginkgo leaves blanketed the ground, whispering to those vacancies. They reverberated around the small, silent, suffocating alley. They grew louder and louder in the silence. Ying bent and picked up a drying leaf. It had lost its golden shimmers; it was turning brown. He placed it carefully in his left chest pocket, behind the white chrysanthemum flower. Above his pounding heart, the two colors sang: one for when he left her in his memories, one for when she left him to his memories. Ying squeezed his eyes, then raised his head to the sky of yellow leaves. Below him, his shadow stretched and stretched.
The sun sunk into the grey bricks. His golden sky lost its glamor. He closed his eyes. Savoring the gentle but piercing breezes of the night, he pulled up memories of his childhood yinxing. He stood, very long and very still, under the colors he had sought but choosing the darkness of his closed eyes. He listened to the echoing of his Huisheng Road. Clouds covered the crescent moon, veiling the stars and the pale, pathetic light. Ying’s shadow diffused between the fallen yellow leaves, through the patches of dark pavements, and disappeared into the cold autumn night.