The Hsiehs
A short story by K-Ming Chang
They were my cousins, the Hsiehs, and they lived in a house in Reno with six bedrooms painted different shades of spill, yolk and milk skin and oil sheen green. It was eggshell on the outside, the kind of house that hatched girls who flew, never you. Our cousins were two fish-wristed girls, twins: Vision and Infinity. Each girl owned a red Prius with a white interior, which they drove like twin blood clots traveling the artery of the street, heart-halting. My tongue snailed when I spoke them, curdled in its own spit, but my brothers said I shouldn’t be so nervous, that the Hsiehs were just rich people who named their children like companies, and at least when we were invited to their house, which was only once a year during the Spring Festival, we could kneel on the poreless concrete of their four-car garage and steal gas from their tanks while the adults inside were watching CCTV ribbon dances. My brothers siphoned the tanks empty and uncapped the gallon bottle and inhaled the fumes, gasping and bobbing their heads, floating from their knees, butting their heads against the beams of the garage where hummingbirds, rusty-winged and trapped, died of exhaustion trying to find a way out.
Vision or Infinity – I couldn’t tell them apart, and both were pale and hairless as lizard bellies – told me that hummingbirds were always flying into their garage and getting lost. They hailed to the floor when they were tired. Her mother broomed their iridescent bodies out of the garage, brushed them to the gutter, and I prodded those dead hummingbirds with my toes until they sputtered open like grapes. They were that breed with red feathers on their necks, as if their throats had been newly slit, and I thought of Aunt Hsieh and the red Hermes scarves she always wore for the Lunar New Year gathering, tied around her throat and napping across her chest like new blood, her throat so white I could see what beat inside it, a scarred jewel. One time I plucked up one of those hummingbird bodies and dropped it into my mother’s porkbone soup pot, and at the table that night, Vision tugged a feather out of her mouth and screamed. It was red, one of the slit-throat feathers. A bird flapped out of her mouth. That night, Aunt Hsieh ran around the house trying to figure out which one of us had eaten the hummingbird, and then she shook my mother and said, wild birds carry diseases, you have brought death into this house, and then finally she forced Vision and Infinity to vomit into the bathtub and into a plastic bag to bring to the doctors, and my mother and brothers and I watched all of this laughing, their panic, the bird we knew was beating its wings in the night of our bellies, alive because of us.
My mother was the darkest and poorest of her sisters, and though she wore her red dress from Ross with the matching belt, Aunt Hsieh said she looked like a ladybug or a boil that required lancing. It was my mother who did the cooking while my cousins and I were cinched into the living room, where the Hsiehs had a television set that was socketed into the wall and looked like a darkened window, a night bridled behind it. Vision or Infinity asked if we wanted to watch something while my mother cooked and Auntie/Uncle Hsieh circled her in the kitchen, singing like gnats about how their daughters were does, their eyes enlarging every year, their legs tapering, their grades as good as layer cakes, and all three of my brothers said they’d rather stay in the garage. It’s dark in there, Vision and Infinity said. They looked nervous about leaving my brothers unsupervised with their vehicles. I wanted to go to the garage too, but just to look for any trapped hummingbirds, their wings helicoptering above me.
Instead we watched the Chinese channel, where two MCs were discussing the merits of fishing your own New Year 鱼. In the kitchen, my mother was boiling something. I could hear her sweat tinkling, the way it glassed her arms. She said nothing about us when she was in this house. She said it was safer this way, so the Hsiehs would find nothing to criticize. One year, as we were leaving through the garage door – they never let us in or out of the front door – Aunt Hsieh pointed down at the carpeted hallway and said, look at all this hair, the maids must not being doing their jobs. It was our hair, I knew: my mother and I both shed like dogs, and my brothers complained they were furred in us, that they woke with wicks of it in their mouths. After that, my mother made us wear hairnets every year we went over, even though the hairnets always tore open by the end of the night, our hair leaking down our necks, our backs.
On TV, the two MCs were both bald and braised in rain, standing beside a river in a city of only women. In this city, the MCs were saying – the mountains behind them looked computer-generated – women grow their hair so thick that they can use the strands as fishing line. So legend goes. And every year, when they cut their hair for the New Year, they sell it back to the city at the same time. They are entrepreneurs of the body. Do you think, my brother said, you could sell other dead parts of yourself, like your toenails or something? I said he was stupid, that hair could be stitched into wigs but toenails weren’t for anything but growing or prying off. Vision and Infinity flinched at the word toenails, and when I looked down at their feet in their feathered house slippers, I saw that their toenails were painted rhyming shades of red, blood clot and papercut.
This was the last time we were invited to their house, but we didn’t know it then, watching the women in that city pierce pieces of raw pork onto the ends of their hair and fish with their own follicles as bait. We’d driven six hours east, and my mother kept repeating every two miles: remember she’s my sister, remember she’s my sister. But none of us had ever forgotten: Aunt Hsieh used to have the same nose as my mother, sprawled, a nose I loved best when it was inhaling soup-steam, when it was trumpeting laughter, when it was asleep and her breath came out battered. This year, when Aunt Hsieh let us in through the garage, we noticed in the fluorescence of the living room – which was no longer carpeted white but instead a hardwood so slippery, my brothers and I clung clam-like to each other and slid across as one mass – that her nose was curbed, cornered, the nostrils narrowed into vents. Around her neck, a red LV scarf hung like a bib of blood. It fluttered when she spoke, and her voice was altered now too, fluting through her nose, ruffling through us. I liked to watch my mother and Aunt Hsieh together, the matching width of their wrists, the white in their hair, the same moles on their left cheekbones. The difference was that my mother’s hands were hoof-hard and that she preferred to fart in public, to let the gas gallop out of her, while Aunt Hsieh always excused herself from the room, or so our mother said. Whenever Aunt Hsieh left any room, my brothers whispered to me: she’s gone to fart. I tried to laugh without opening my mouth, and Vision and Infinity asked what we were smiling about.
This year, after we said ayi-hao and gifted her the bags of oranges and the dates my mother syruped in a jar for a month, dark and slick as kidneys, Aunt Hsieh led us to her new altar room, where tables teemed with photos of no one we recognized, ancestors from the Hsieh side. Mr. Hsieh’s family had all been doctors, and so in the photos all the men were carrying diplomas or wearing white coats and all the women had hair like handlebars, styled stiff. Look, Aunt Hsieh said, polishing the photo-frames with a towelette. The way she gestured at these strangers’ faces reminded me of those game show hostesses when they present the prize they know you’ll never win, as in look all you want but you’ll always lose. The altar room used to be their home gym, and you could still see the indent on the milkfat carpet where the treadmill had been. The first time my mother saw that treadmill, she thought it was something to hang clothes on. Aunt Hsieh had demonstrated how to use it, stepping onto the treadmill and pressing a green button with her thumb until the panel lit up and she began to walk in place, her hands gripping the rubberized handles. It’s like a conveyor belt for humans, my mother said, asking my aunt if she remembered their years at that fish-canning factory where they lay whole fish on the conveyor belts and the bodies exited a machine with all their bones torn out like earrings? How the whole place stank so bad it sardined your skin and sometimes the bus driver wouldn’t let you get on so you walked home together, licking each other for salt?
Instead of answering, Aunt Hsieh dialed up the setting on her treadmill and began to run, the belt whirring and whining above my mother’s voice, though we could all tell that she’d heard, and later that evening when my mother carried in the icebox with the fish she’d cook for the New Year meal, Aunt Hsieh said why don’t we eat something else, who needs to eat fish for a long life anyway, let’s all die young and eat what we want, let’s have the pork belly and the beef and the shrimp in the freezer, let’s pin some meat to our tongues. My mother said okay, but that if we didn’t eat the fish tonight it would go bad, and beside, the fish was still alive and it would be rude not to slaughter it. Aunt Hsieh said still alive? And when my brother opened the icebox, the fish was there, submerged and stunned in the ice water, its scales the color of an oil spill.
Kill it, Aunt Hsieh, but not in my house. So my mother stood outside on the street and grabbed it by its slick tail and slammed it once against the edge of the sidewalk, staining the curb where the number of their address was written, 8177. When Aunt Hsieh saw the bloodstain, she told my mother, how could you, you bitchsister, you got blood all over my address, now what will the neighbors think when they see it, couldn’t you have killed it clean. My mother said not to worry, you could say the stain came from roadkill, some stray dog you ran over by accident, and Aunt Hsieh said there was no roadkill here, no strays either, and my mother laughed and said do you remember. Aunt Hsieh did not want to remember, but my brothers and I listened as we helped our mother skin and filet the fish in the kitchen. My mother said Aunt Hsieh used to date this man who drove a water spinach truck. One time, Aunt Hsieh was sitting in his passenger seat, and they were driving on a mountain road, and she told him: if you hit a pig crossing the road, it’s yours to bring home and spitroast whole. They were drunk that day, driving on a road shaped like a wrist vein, and something crossed the road, lugging its shadow. The man accelerated, and the animal battered the front of his truck. When the truck knuckled and crashed into the gutter, Aunt Hsieh climbed out and saw the animal stand up and run away, tailing smoke. She watched it run. On the road there was blood, sequins of it. That night, Aunt Hsieh drove the truck away and left the man unconscious in the gutter, water spinach strewn on the street behind him. I don’t know what it was that I hit, she told my mother later, I don’t know what it was, what it was.
Whenever my mother told a story about that mountain, about its wild pigs that were rumored to each children, Aunt Hsieh turned up the TV so loud we couldn’t hear any endings. It was a flat-screen TV, glistening like a folded river, and the color inside it was brighter than real colors, colors that beaded in our mouths like blood.
My mother placed oranges on all the Hsieh altars, asking where their mother was among the dead, and Aunt Hsieh said, I don’t have a picture of our mother, that woman. At home we had an altar and a statue of Mazu with its face flayed. Because we didn’t have a photo of Ama either, we drew her face on fast food napkins and collaged her on the wall. My mother shook her head and said, you should have a picture of her. You should remember whose shadow you wear.
It was Aunt Hsieh who said things needed to be done properly. So Vision and Infinity walked downstairs in red qipaos with gold thread and high collars that I wanted to replace with my hands, strangling them both. Look at their faces, tiny as almonds! Aunt Hsieh said, and I imagined a crack in each of them, a seam behind their knees, a place to begin unraveling.
While the fish steamed, my brothers brought out playing cards and a xiangqi set, which Aunt Hsieh promptly confiscated. No gambling in this house, she said, and in the kitchen my mother de-veined shrimp, sorting through the slimed gems of their bodies. She always said, There are millions of ways to die, but hunger won’t be one of them. Aunt Hsieh herded us into the TV room and said, you all should sit and watch the festival, it’s proper. There was a skylight in the room and the light landed on us like wasps, stinging. The smell of shrimp-brine entered the room, and Aunt Hsieh ran to open all the windows. Uncle Hsieh, who stayed in his room with his computer until it was time to eat, was a Taiwanese-Chinese-Malaysian man whose wealth – according to my mother – was ancestral. It came from prawns, then cloth factories, then computers. Can you imagine, my mother always said when she pulled up to the house, all this came out of the sea?
We resumed the CCTV channel, my brothers on the right side of the sofa, Vision and Infinity on the left, me in the middle. Outside, someone’s dog was baying, and I wondered if there were really no strays here, if everything here was named, owned. Vision or Infinity turned to me on the sofa and said, I don’t see you guys wearing anything red. My brother laughed and lifted up his shirt, the scabs like crackled pavement, the bandage made from another cut t-shirt, berried with blood. Vision flinched and said, oh my god, what is that, and I explained to her that it was healing, it was fine, it was healing. Someone had hit him on his bike, I said, while he was delivering something. My brother always said he wanted one of those electric bikes that could slide him from neighborhood to neighborhood, but my mother said those things were dangerous, that they could catch fire as he was peddling it, or it could set fire to his pubic hair and combust at an intersection.
The car hit him from behind while he was turning a corner, and then it drove off. My brother never even saw what color it was. The buckets of wonton noodle soup dangling from his handlebars flung themselves up and scalded his face and scalp. He blacked out when he hit the pavement, and when he woke up, there was a woman trying to untangle his bike like a necklace. The woman was old, our grandmother’s age if she was still living, if she hadn’t gotten into a fistfight with a flood, and on the sidewalk were bags of oranges she must have bought and dropped. My brother got up from the street and dragged himself to the sidewalk, sprawling on it, and the woman stood over him, offering an orange. I’ve got a delivery, my brother mumbled, I’m running late. The bike was bright and scattered in silver. It was an old bike he’d bought on Craigslist, but the old woman was still trying to gather pieces of the chain, the ripped seat. Her hair was in curlers, the plastic kind our mother wore. Sitting on the sidewalk, my brother brought the orange to his split lip, singing to it. It was bitter, heavy as a fist, the skin cold against his lip. He lay down on the sidewalk, the orange numbing his mouth, and the street seemed to be folding itself like a sleeve. At home, he knew, our mother was doing the laundry, hanging the clothes above the bathtub. She once told us we had to beat all our drying clothes with a stick to get the ghosts out of them. Otherwise, ghosts would wear our unoccupied clothes around the house, and at night we’d wake to our shirts fitted around the ceiling fan, our mother’s shoes on our feet.
Look, my brother said to Vision or Infinity, tracing the part of his lip that caverned, a piece missing from it. Vision and Infinity harmonized their groans and turned away, but behind me I heard the sound of silk, a jingling wrist, and it was Aunt Hsieh standing behind the sofa, listening. She was looking at my brother, a platter of orange slices in her hands, peeled by my mother and her brined fingers. I anticipated their fish-salt, the seeds graveling my tongue. Aunt Hsieh’s hands were tremoring, and the slices pulsed like organs plucked from an animal belly, the pulp quivering.
Days after my brother came home from his accident and we stitched up his lip, I went back to the corner where he was hit and saw a strip of his skin on the road, scalded and sticky like flypaper, a few hairs still growing from it. I wondered if the driver would ever come back, or if they would avoid this road and never return for this skin. In her living room now, Aunt Hsieh was still looking at my brother, who was laughing at his reflection in the TV screen, his mouth broken open like a geode, his shattered teeth shining, so beautiful to me. Aunt Hsieh was kneeling on the hardwood now, still looking at my brother, the tray of orange slices offered up as if to a god. I could hear her saying something, though I was sure it was wrong: I’m sorry, she said again and again, I drove away. It was you, she said, it was you. That’s impossible, we kept telling her, she was cities away when it happened, it wasn’t her who hit my brother, she was confessing to nothing, but in the kitchen I heard my mother laughing a boneless laugh, the sound of an animal dragging itself across these clean floors.
K-Ming Chang is a Kundiman fellow, a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. She is the author of the New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice novel BESTIARY (One World/Random House, 2020), which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Her short story collection, GODS OF WANT, is forthcoming from One World in 2022.