An Excerpt
from the forthcoming Janalyn Guo novel, FISHPOND
It is customary to visit relatives at their homes, bearing gifts that are red, after the lunar new year. This is after you eat far too much food, after the streets fill up with red paper, and after you visit the dead. When her older sisters come over to the house, each gifting her a liter of Coca Cola, Grandmother calls the nurse and the ichthyologist into the living room and introduces them to her siblings. Altogether, there are three Jin sisters, and they have the same slender frames and short bowl haircuts. Their mannerisms are so similar, they can never be mistaken for anything other than sisters. The three of them make themselves at home on the couch, cracking sunflower seeds between their teeth at the speed of light.
“Sit, sit,” Grandmother says when the nurse and the ichthyologist arrive from their respective wings of the house.
“Any luck with the unification?” one sister asks. “Is our brother-in-law’s spirit still inside the fish?”
“They are working on it,” Grandmother says.
The nurse and the ichthyologist look at each other. “We haven’t yet figured out a way” the nurse says.
“You will,” the other sister says. “Something will work eventually.”
Grandmother introduces her sisters to the nurse and the ichthyologist as “Big Eye” and “Big Throat.” They brace themselves for wild tales like the ones they hear from Grandmother during their daily meals and breaks. They prepare for the bounds of reality to grow muddled as Grandmother explains the origin of their nicknames. The sounds their mouths make while eating sunflower seeds set the mood, like the crackling of a fire at a hearth.
Each of the sisters has a strange gift. Big Eye can see ghosts. When she was young, she could not tell them apart from the living. It wasn’t until she was ten years old, when the sisters’ own grandmother died in her sleep one winter, that Big Eye started to notice the dead. The family mourned the matriarch’s passing. All the rituals and processions happened. But even after all of that, Big Eye saw her grandmother circling around their house under the moonlight, not acknowledging anyone, as if she couldn’t see them anymore. In the height of harvest season, Big Eye could see the corn stalks parting, making way for her grandmother who continued to walk through the fields.
To this day, she is the one to contact in town if anyone is trying to send a message to the dead. Her customers pay her well. She is given a name and a photograph, and she tries to locate the dead. She knows it’s no use. They don’t acknowledge or speak to her. Instead, she puts on a dramatic show for her believing customers. She sits in the center of the room and lets them feed her peaches and freshly roasted meats as if she is part deity, and with her eyes closed, she says a few words on behalf of the dead.
“This is a secret within the family,” Grandmother says to the nurse and the ichthyologist, “but you are basically family.”
Big Eye argues that it is not deception. Though the ghosts are unreachable, she can see them and can describe what she sees. The dead still stroll around the reservoir. People from her childhood. Their anachronistic clothes stand out and catch her attention. She is used to it now. The world is always like this for her—unbelievably crowded, the normal intermingling with the strange. Nothing created or destroyed, just transformed.
Grandmother’s middle sister, Big Throat, is a vocal performer. She is the most glamorously dressed of the three. Her face is dolled up and looks very pink at the cheeks, like she has a perpetual fever. Ever since she was young, she followed the trends of what was considered cool and fashionable for women. Her hair is permed, and her clothes are bedazzled with rhinestones and embroidered with bright thread in floral patterns. She can sing very beautifully and make her voice do strange things with her throat. It is not from any formal training. It all comes very naturally. There is an entire street in town that has nothing but enticing and neon lit KTV taverns, and all the business owners know her. The taverns have these ornate facades that mimic faraway destinations like Venice and Palm Beach and the Alhambra. She is a regular at all of them. She goes after she fixes dinner for her family, singing late into the night. She gets lost in her songs.
All the time, she sees women her age wearing ballgowns and performing ballads on TV and laments that she could sing the songs just as well, sometimes singing over them. The other sisters quickly reassure her that she is better. In fact, Big Eye mentions, her younger sister’s voice is the only one she’s known that can reach the dead. She’s witnessed it herself, the dead turning to acknowledge her voice when it goes strange.
“Sing something,” Grandmother says to Big Throat.
The nurse and the ichthyologist clap along as Big Throat sings an old operatic folksong about the grasslands, her voice undulating like the purple karst mountains she sings about.
“Very beautiful,” the ichthyologist says when she is done.
The nurse and the ichthyologist form impressions of the sisters. The oldest sister has the look of someone very uncertain and indecisive, not understanding the nature of things because the nature of things is not easy to understand. The middle sister has the mercurial personality of a celebrity whose talents didn’t get her as far as she hoped, oscillating between acceptance and despair. People who are spared these gifts could have more uncomplicated lives, the ichthyologist thinks.
“What is our Mrs. Jin known for?” the nurse asks the sisters, pointing at Grandmother. Grandmother is the youngest. She can’t see ghosts and her voice is as gravelly as they come.
“She is ‘Little Hand,’” the oldest sister says matter-of-factly. “You cannot squeeze out of her grasp.” She tells the nurse and the ichthyologist about Grandmother’s ability to catch the swiftest birds with her bare hands.
Grandmother shushes her oldest sister. “I’m not nearly as quick as I used to be.”
“Nonsense,” Big Eye says. “She could probably catch the dead in the next world if she knew where they stood.”
She tells the nurse and the ichthyologist about Grandmother’s superb skills at ga la ha. She was undefeated in town. It was a game that girls played in their leisure time. They ran around the village collecting the ankle bones of goats and sheep, slaughtered for a midsummer feast during the hottest time of the year. By then, the sheep had gotten three months of spring grass. That was when their meat would be the most flavorful. Every part of the animal was cooked. Globules and cubes of fat and blood were boiled in a soup along with tendons. Their meat was carefully sliced and roasted on a makeshift grill over a fire. The skull and face meat of the animal was cooked last with a torch. Some lucky person ate the eyes. Nothing went to waste. What you eat you repair, the saying went. Strong eyes, strong tendons, strong blood, strong heart, strong kidneys, strong liver.
There was something about the shape of the ankle bone, asking to be turned into a game. They were curved so that you could grab and flip them between your fingers. Grandmother carved the character of her name into each of her bones with a small knife. Ga la ha was a simple game. There were many variations, but Grandmother and her opponents played it this way: They tossed out all their ankle bones, which scattered across the floor, landing on different sides. On Grandmother’s turn, she threw a beanbag in the air and snatched up as many bones as she could that had landed on the same side. In order for her sweep to count, she had to catch the beanbag before it fell on the floor. She picked the bones up one after the next, clearing the circle in which they played. While other girls could only snatch three or four bones, she could pick up double. Over the years, Grandmother amassed a large collection of ankle bones. She’d take them from whoever she beat, their names carved in the corner for her to remember them by.
The sisters run out of sunflower seeds, and the cracking sound subsides. Grandmother gets up to boil a pot of tea. The nurse asks if the sisters have ever worked together, combined their talents.
The question comes as a surprise to the sisters sitting together. It’s something they’ve never thought about before. “What if we did?” Big Eye responds. “And then what? Don’t forget that the boundary between worlds is thin. If we upset the order, then anything could happen.”
Eventually, the nurse and the ichthyologist excuse themselves to go back to their tasks so they do not fall too far behind. The sisters get up from the couch and pass a cigarette around, standing out on the narrow deck overlooking the pond. In the growing dark, they lose their shape, blending into the night, until it is just the small red dot at the end of their cigarette moving in a small orbit.
