Read an Excerpt

Ten Thousand Waves

Poems

Wings Press

BARGAIN

    A Hakka Man Farms Rare Earth in South China

    First of all, it's not rare nor earth, as they call it.
    The metal lies under our feet, sparkling in the soil we farm,
    Red, green, yellow, blue, purple, sky of grass
    And buffalos, patches of rice, bamboos, sweet yams.
    We came here as guests — Hakka — fleeing from angry
    Lords. Year after year, we bent over the earth
    Feet and hands in the neon soil, our sweat
    Fertilized the fields, children, ancestors' graves
    Our stove cooked the fragrance from the sun and moon.

    Now we dig, deep in the mud, our boots
    Rotting in the rainbow sludge ... Dig, and we dig
    Hoes, pickaxes, guns, explosives, acid wash
    Ten yuan a sac, this red dirt speckled with
    Blue and yellow. Home, we cry,
    A small haven painted with green.
    Now the mountains are lifted.
    Deep crates in the fields, blood and pus
    In streams and rivers ... all because the world
    Wants this earth — "Vitamins" for I-pods
    Plasma TVs, wind turbines, guided missiles —
    Things that make the world
    Cleaner and more beautiful, as they say

    And here we are, in the waist-deep sludge
    A sac of mud — a tail of greed
    Leaching in our stove.
    Fire licks my wife's slender hands
    Acid fumes in her lungs, liver, stomach
    Till she can no longer sip porridge laced

    With the thousand-year-old egg.
    In our cooking woks, we exhume
    Dysprosium, Neodymium, Promethium
    All the names of Gods, they say.

    If gods have eyes, would they see us
    Slaves on this earth that no longer holds us?

    In the distance, a mushroom of dust —
    Boss and his Prius, powered by the sludge
    That chokes my eyes, ears, nose ... One Rich Field
    twenty-five pounds of metal, ten-thousand sacs of earth
    Ripped under our feet. We're slipping,
    Our chests soaked in blood, backs broken
    Digging, pulling, no food or water.
    Our quota still short, the boss will be mad,
    But no matter. I light a cigarette, each puff
    Is the last. Tomorrow is gone, like our village.
    Here and far away, where horses ran wild
    Under the sky, where we, children of
    Genghis Khan, return every night in our dream,
    which is gone, too, they say. Mongolia,
    Our origin, now a rare earth pit for the world.

    Oh, Hakka, Hakka, forever a guest
    Wandering on this bare earth.


    Dust Angels

    stars, diamonds, tears of hearts
    sand and cut, cut and sand
    shrouded in silicon fog
    we string beauty with cornhusking hands

    bracelets, necklaces, rings
    day and night, night and day
    we bend over screeching wheels
    making trinkets for the U.S.A.

    saints, gods, Buddha
    rush down the belt at a dizzying speed
    a quarter cent a piece — the price
    of our hands, a nation's pride,
    a civilization eating us alive

    opal, malachite, topaz
    stones from deep in earth — sold cheap at Walmart
    our lungs harden from quartz crystals
    our lives weigh less than dust
    we cough and wheeze
    walking half a block we gasp for air

    they say we fake our sickness
    have never worked in their factories
    they hire lawyers to erase our names, ban our union
    Marx and Mao are history, they claim
    only freedom of market economy
    the golden path toward democracy

    no money to go home
    no face to see parents, wives, husbands, children
    all bridges collapsed —
    we loiter in hospitals, courts
    we pray not to die in this strange land

    dust angels, dust angels
    who wears the stars and hearts strung with our tears?
    who makes a fortune from our wretched breath?
    who will see us —
    of all the Buddhas and saints
    carved out of our bodies
    all the eyes of Mary and Jesus
    painted in our blood


    Bargain

    This is a pair of handmade shoes
    Awkward and lovely like the maiden behind the stand
    Gold peonies bloom unabashed on red corduroy tops
    White soles are made of layered cloth
    Pasted on a door with flour
    A slow air dry in the moonlight
    Stitches lined up neatly
    like terra-cotta soldiers on battle grounds

    This is a pair of shoes
    I've been seeking for years
    The craft my grandma tried to pass on
    Before I left home for good
    Without trying them on, I know
    They would comfort my calloused soles
    Let me run like a whirlwind
    Make me feel like
    A sword drawn out of its sheath

    And we start the bargain.

    "Ten," she says, "for the sake of fate
    That brought you to this desert town."
    "Five," I say without thinking,
    a trick from my American partner.
    "Good joke, Big Sister," she laughs,
    deep creases flashing across her frostbitten face.
    I blush for no reason.
    "Six then," I say, avoiding her hands
    that bring back Grandma,
    her flickering shadow on the wall threading a needle.
    "Come on, Sister, have some respect."
    "Okay, seven. Can't go up any more.
    Respect has to be mutual, don't you think?"
    "Barely enough to pay for the materials, Sis,"
    her voice low, wet like the drizzle.
    "No mercy," I repeat the mantra drilled into my brain.
    "Peddlers are good at arousing sympathies.
    That's how they make a living."
    "Eight, then, the highest I can offer.
    You peasants are getting greedier day by day."

    She raises her hands, ten knotted roots,
    ten question-marks of childhood and wisdom
    "Do you know how many nights I stayed up
    to stitch the soles? Do you see
    my fingers? Do you see my eyes? See
    my little brother waiting for a bowl
    of noodles my shoes could buy?
    His hunger does not lie.
    My callouses do not lie.
    We do not lie."

    I walk.
    I'm not practicing the walk-away tactic
    That works like magic.
    I'm running from the mirror of her eyes.
    "Stubborn girl, stubborn girl,"
    I murmur to myself,
    "It's just a game, just a game."
    She chases, thrusts the shoes into my hands.
    "You won, Miss. Take them for nine.
    What's nine yuan to you, a dollar twenty cents?
    And what's a yuan, less than a dime?
    Would you even bother to pick it up from the street?"

    I put away my victory in a trunk,
    never give it a second thought
    until I'm pulled out of the line
    at Minneapolis custom, maggot fingers
    prodding socks, underwear, wrapped gifts,
    and there it is — my bargain
    red and loud like thunderclaps:
    "You saved a dime, fool,
    but lost your soul."

Young Monk at Debating Court

"Fifteen Yuan," said the young monk guarding the gate, a thick pad of cash in his hand.

"Since when did you start charging money? Last time I was here, everything was free, the debate, the monasteries ..." I put on my best smile. The boy monk took his job a bit too seriously.

"Read the sign," he said with a stone face, pointing to the tree in the yard. "If you take photo in this the debating courtyard, you should pay fifteen Yuan please." The sign was hung high on the old tree. I smiled again as I suppressed my urge to point out the grammar and spelling mistakes in the sign, and started to explain that I was invited by an older monk, a friend I had met in the temple an hour ago. He told me his secret plan to enter India via the Himalayas. He wanted to meet the Dalai Lama. But my friend had vanished in the maroon sea of monks who were clapping their hands and jumping in the air as they debated the Buddhist sutra. I didn't know why I was doing this. I could easily afford the fee, but something in me didn't want to.

"I'm going to close the door in two minutes," declared the young monk.

I yanked out a one-hundred-yuan note from my wallet.

I don't have the change."

"Yes, you do." I pointed to his hand clutching the crumbled notes.

"I said, no change." His face remained hard. He knew I was a Han Chinese tourist desperate to take photos.

"Keep the rest of the money," I said, slipping my foot into the closing gate.

"Fifteen yuan," he said through the crack of the old gate.

We stared at each other. He was young, no more than thirteen years old, his cheeks chubby with baby fat — yet his eyes were already hardened — they already knew the power of money.

The debating went on inside, still thunderous and lively as I remembered from ten years ago. Yet everything had changed in Tibet. The railroad and market economy had entered the plateau.

I found fifteen yuan in my pocket just as he was about to lock the gate.

"Here it is," I shouted and shoved the money into his hand.

I raised my camera and got close, really close. I didn't ask for his permission. I didn't need to. I had paid my due, so now I owned him, the young monk, and everything in the debating court, everything that was for sale. I cursed myself as I took my shots, one after another. The young monk turned his back, his head hung in the silence of thunders.

    Winter Worm, Summer Plant

    It looks like a worm, but really it's a plant
    From Qinghai-Tibet — the Blue Treasure Plateau
    Where bat moths lay eggs on thin grass
    And lava hatch by thousands
    Through their mouths fungus invades
    The sickened worms crawl into the soil
    Heads up as they turn in agony
    Till spring comes and the fungus bursts —
    A purple sprout on the hollowed head
    On the first day, it has the best value as medicine
    On the second, half of its potency is lost
    On the third, it becomes a weed

    This is how chongcao grows on the high plateau
    Where glacier water tumbles into Asia
    It's not lava or plant
    Not gold or diamond
    But cooked with ducks, turtles, or sparrows
    It cures cancer, increases sex drive, keeps women young
    In Mao's era, a bag of chongcao traded for a pack of cigarettes
    Now a kilogram sells for $25,000
    So merchants insert wires into their tiny bodies
    Soak them with alum and mercury
    to add weight, color, and shine
    or simply make plaster fakes smoked with sulfur
    For those who want longer lives, better sex

    When the wind blows in early spring
    Traders mob the Three River Source — headwater
    Of China's major rivers where chongcao grow
    Nomads and their children come
    By trains, trucks, tractors, motorcycles, horses
    They set up tents, put on masks, rubber pants
    They get down on their knees and search each blade
    To gather a chongcao, thirty square miles of grass is turned
    A kilogram leaves behind thousands of holes
    Where rats have moved in, churning
    The Blue Treasure Plateau into a new desert

All Roads to Lhasa

It has nothing to do with human activities, you said, the vanished Black River, the Yellow River turned into sewage, the Yangtze on its way to becoming a second Yellow River — nothing to do with mankind. Don't give me that smirk, you said. This is backed up by the Japanese scientists who study glaciers. I spent a year traveling with them in the desert where the Black River used to roar along the Silk Route. They begged me to help them prove that the desert, once a fecund wetland, has nothing to do with warring or over-grazing. Don't ask why. I'm just a Tibetan Buddhist sutra translator. I know nothing about global warming. I learned from this trip that flood, drought, wars — whatever is recorded in ancient documents — can been found in the fossils and none of them has anything to do with us.

So don't you dare point your finger at China as if you were not Chinese! We know what we're doing. We're cleaning up the lakes, planting trees around Beijing, monitoring the air so we know when to go out and when to stay home. Factories are shut down, trucks are allowed in the city only at night. A special farm raises organic chickens for the Olympic athletes. Plastic bags are banned in supermarkets. Can you do that in America? With your free speech and democracy? So stop pointing your bony finger, if you still consider yourself a Chinese.

When I was a kid, I swam everyday in the river that flowed by my house, a small town near Shanghai. Whatever I caught in the water — fish, shrimp, crabs — I'd bring home for dinner. Once a year, we paddled two days to visit Shanghai. We sold our vegetables, chickens, and ducks on the market to buy sugar, soap, and clothes. If we still had money left, we'd go to a movie. Oh, the joy we had, more so than going to Disneyland. Now if I want to take friends to a fancy dinner in Shanghai, my chauffeur will drive us there within an hour. No kidding. In only twenty years, my hometown has become one of the richest towns in China, a hub of factories and super highways. But the river in front of my house stinks with chemicals. The water is thick with red, green, and yellow. Nothing grows, not even weeds. For years, my son begged me to see the river where I fished as a boy. But when he saw the rainbow soup from the window, he just bawled. You ask me if it's worth it? You tell me! Shanghai is only an hour away now, and there are tons of restaurants with food from all over the world, as long as you have money.

Yes, there's a problem of how to spend money that comes to us so fast. Do you know what is most wanted on the market? Tonics. Deer horn, ginseng, chongcao, sea horse, dog penis, donkey penis, walrus, all the penises that make you hard all night long, that make you an immortal.

I used to believe that planting trees could help. Those tree huggers used to make me cry. I worshiped the old Japanese man planting trees in Mongolia. For ten years he bought saplings and planted them in the desert that used to be the best pastureland on the earth. The Chinese president visited him and offered his hand. "No time shaking hands," he said. "Plant trees," he said.

I used to be naïve just like him. But those idiots at Toronto University chose a German who knew nothing about Tibet. They believed the Chinese cut the trees, caused all the destruction, the death of the Yellow River, the dying Yangtze. But trees have never grown on the plateau. Too high, too cold, too little oxygen. Only Sichuan had virgin forests. It's nature that is causing global warming, not human activities. I tried to tell the truth, but guess what? I lost my job to the German man, even though I have two PhDs, two post docs, ten translations of sutras, and hundreds of articles.

A blessing in disguise? Perhaps. I am the Director of Cultural Studies of China's Northwestern Region. I have a free apartment in Beijing, a chauffeur, millions of yuan for research, endless friends and women, but I'm far away from home.

That's why I'd rather believe in surgery than Chinese medicine or global warming. Neither has any scientific backing. Five thousand years or not, they don't matter if you can't prove them. The Tibetan herbs, 95% of them are poison. And the algae explosion in Lake Tai that left 2.3 million people in my hometown without drinking water, although they live on the biggest freshwater lake in China. Is it a natural or a human disaster? You tell me.

All I want is to watch my son grow. He can't live in China. He has asthma, can't keep up with their insane schoolwork, can't study from dawn to midnight like those robot kids, can't breathe the air. That's why my wife keeps him in Minnesota and I pine away in Beijing, a kite with no string.

But it's a small sacrifice. "China has stood up," as Mao announced from Tiananmen Square in 1949. We are indeed standing, even though we're choking in the smog. But we have stood up, our bodies covered with cancerous sores, our feet deep in muck. It's part of the process. To stand as a giant is what matters the most, you said.

Time to Go Down the Mountain

Come on, Big Aunt, there must be something for me down there — washing dishes, doing laundry, cleaning, cooking, scrubbing toilets, babysitting, walking dogs, or shining shoes. Look at my hands. They're strong, nimble. No, I haven't learned Mandarin yet. You know I don't read or write, Big Aunt. You tried to teach me when I was little, tried to send me to school on the other side of the mountain. But I was homesick, and the teacher beat me with a stick because I couldn't recite Chairman Mao's poems. I had to go home. Mother was sick. Sisters were too young to cook, to clean the house, or to take care of our little brother. They needed me. I did what I had to do. Now my brother is becoming a man. My sisters are happily married. And I'm ready to leave.

Please, Big Aunty, you loved me when I was young. Remember how you combed my hair and told me one story after another about fairyland — paved streets, tall buildings, a disco, movie theater, stores, restaurants, cars, trains, and planes. You said you'd take me there when I grew up, to eat delicious food and to wear beautiful clothes like your own daughter. You planted the seed. Now it's sprouted and growing bigger than my body, my family, and my village — bigger even than the Big Cold Mountain.

I'm twenty-three. No decent man will marry me. I no longer care to raise a dozen kids with a drunk, or feed goats and pigs for the rest of my life. I want to play. See the world before I get too old.

    Solstice in Lhasa

    What more can you say
    Nomad daughter of glaciers?
    The city has bleached the sun from your face
    Eighteen years old with a freckled nose
    Hides of yak, barley, sandy wind
    Knees stiff from scrubbing toilets
    What dreams keep you alive
    On the marble floor of Gangkar Hotel?

    Drunken tourists and their nightingales
    Money is the moon on Lhasa's holy streets
    In Beijing a storm drops thirty-six tons of dust
    Upon the city of concrete
    Nomad daughter from the Black River
    What more can you say?
    The wetland is becoming a desert
    Home for rats, carcasses of yaks

    The salted tea you brought to my room
    Yellow butter afloat from a distant factory
    "It's fake but tastes okay.
    The real is gone, like the snowcaps."

    Wind, breath, naked riverbeds
    At dusk, a boy on a motorcycle
    Comes home with his last herd
    Nomad daughter from the Sacred Lake
    What dreams keep you going
    In the glass cage of illusion?

    Before the clouds
    Cabs, trucks, mobs of fortune seekers
    Behind the clouds
    Patola Palace absent of its Buddha

    Your ancestors are on the road
    Nomad daughter from the Blue Treasure Plateau
    Wooden gloves and padded knees
    Long prostrations into the thin air
    Their cry of never-perish ghosts
    Calling you to keep the lamp burning, burning

    And you shout to me across the street
    "Sister, please find me a rich husband in America."

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Excerpted from Ten Thousand Waves by Ping Wang. Copyright © 2014 Wang Ping. Excerpted by permission of Wings Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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