We invite our neighbor Xiaocai to join us in the yard, which is nothing more than a tilted kumquat tree and yellowed weeds. It is morning, and my aunts have left for the factory. Their departures describe them perfectly: Cold-Blooded Ayi—so named because her blood is cold and can only be heated to a human temperature with the consumption of soups, period dramas after work, and killing a particularly acrobatic fly on the first try—insists on kissing Mandy on the cheek before she leaves, and today she pins the kiss with such force that a blood vessel breaks.
Aunt Elizabeth, Yangyang’s mother, never kisses anyone or anything, not even the rim of her cup when she drinks. Instead, she tilts the water into her mouth so that it unfurls like a ribbon into her throat. When Aunt Elizabeth leaves for the factory, she slips out the door silently, and Yangyang says she used to wake up early and wait by the door, hoping to catch her mother mid-flight, but she would always fall asleep on the threshold.
By the time she woke, her mother was gone. What carried me was a basket of light. I will try my best not to burden her in this life.” Aunt Elizabeth insists this isn’t her house, this is Ama’s house, and she lives here temporarily until she can get back on her feet and leave.
Cold-Blooded Ayi scoffs and says, What feet, you’ve barely got a spine, and Aunt Elizabeth says she never meant to stay so long. Cold-Blooded Ayi rolls her eyes, but I can tell she is relieved not to live alone in Ama’s house. Three women together produces one soap opera.” But she loves soap operas, especially when the emperor is forced to choose between his mother and his beloved concubine.
When he chooses the concubine, Cold-Blooded Ayi throws her slippers at the TV and says, “Never happens! A man is first come, first served. He loves whoever served him first.” When he chooses his mother, Cold-Blooded Ayi flings an orange peel at the TV and says, “Never happens!
A man can’t fuck his mother, and he always follows his prick.” Aunt Elizabeth hates soap operas and shuts them off mid-episode, insisting that they’ll give us girls nightmares, what with all the ritual suicides and the incessant sobbing, but Cold-Blooded Ayi says it’s better to be heartbroken by a man on TV than one in real life, and Mandy says she agrees. All the soap opera storylines are so cyclical and repetitive, I plug my ears with wads of tissue paper to avoid living the same day over and over again. Every season, they kill off the characters one by one so that the actors can come back reborn, this time playing their own descendants.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
