1953, in a Californian town they called their new home. Flicking off the dust on the first page of the recycled calendar, she listened to the faint pattering of rain against the barren window and imagined flowers growing, blossoming against the silver pane; Grandpa would use the leftovers to fold paper snakes, because the Year of the Snake was coming.
***
When morning dawned, the children’s faces beamed at the sight of fresh snow. They built snowmen, with limbs made of flimsy sticks, noses they had bought in pounds for eleven cents, and bodies covered in pebbles they gotfrom the sidewalk littered with cigarette butts.
Lin Lin leaned against a barren trunk, watching wistfully at the children throwing snowballs at each other on the other side of the fence, running around under the fragile sun, building, creating, without her. She pinned her ears wide to what they were saying in this moment, but like a failed butterfly catcher she ended up with an empty net and colorful fluttering notes all around. “Watch out!” and “Feel this!” then a string of laughter. With a vague sense of pain, she watched as the afternoon sun started to subside and the clouds cluster. She stood there, right there, until the faraway church bell tolled four times.
She set her mind to make a snowman, one like theirs, perhaps smaller. But when her mittened hands touched the snow—something she had never seen before, something foreign—she felt reluctant to let it slip. As she held the snow it was as if she held her heart, one pure, pale, crushable and she seized it with childish delight. There were no restrictions to how much time she could spend in the snow, or how much snow she could take at one time, so she, out of a new found audacity, sneaked Grandpa’s three-legged stool from the house and atop of that, rolled three snowballs as big as she could make them—each half as tall as herself—hauled them, and built the first, and last, snowman of her life. For once, she forgot she was lonely, and savored the few moments of newfound joy in solitude.
When she sunk the final rock onto the wet snowy surface, she felt a gust of life running through the chest of the snow man, and she hopped back onto the level ground, examining with curiosity and caution, her snowman, having sensed a steady beating of its frozen heart.
Was it possible?
“Hello,” she whispered.
“Hello,” the snowman echoed. It was as if she had heard a voice in a tunnel, the kind that always made her dizzy. She held her breath, gazing in awe, for the first time she had built something taller than herself.
When she started to reply “Xu”, her family name, she clenched and unclenched her teeth; and instead stuttered “Livvy”, her English name Papa had given her in a paper document months before they had set off to America. It meant Olive, a crop she had never seen back home. When she first got here, her old name had evoked a lot of long silences and people stared, half confused, waiting either with sympathy or impatience. She had thought they only wanted to learn her name, since they always twisted her “x” into an “s”. After several tries, they started whispering among themselves, and she, perceiving nothing, only thought they were curious, and repeated foolishly. In China, there were a handful of children who had names like hers, and to distinguish her the adults often called her Lin Lin, like the sound of silver bells swaying to the wind. In America, her name wandered around air-conditioned movie theaters.
People whispered and had their own ideas. They also forgot quickly. She turned away, ashamed, finally realizing her words carried no weight on their own. The previous twelve years of her life—now they seemed as light as the snowflakes blown in the wind, nowhere to be found thousands of miles from home.
She could not think, dared not think, the snowman would think the same way, though she has already accepted it as a living thing and reality: she had bought the carrots from an American supermarket, the sticks were picked up from an American pavement, and the buttons—the kind on American men’s suits. As if that wasn’t enough, the snowman had spoken American English. The snowman must be American, she was convinced.
***
The snowman was quiet for most of the times as if it forgot it was alive, and the girl wondered what happened if it ever got angry, if it could explode because of the searing flame it was forced to hide under the frosty veneer. Or maybe it was just quietly catching up with the world in a thick immobile torso above forty inches of deep snow.
Light grew dimmer from the bird-less sky. Lin Lin fidgeted because there was something she wanted to ask—but on second thought she looked down at her boots, and then up again and the sullen snowman, and down at her mittened hands suddenly feeling cold.
“I just wished you weren’t so alone all the time, don’t you?” The snowman’s words hovered in the air. It mixed with the sounds of the wind, and she would have believed nature had spoken; the valleys had talked to her; she listened, and the words translated themselves.
If lonely meant having only a three-legged stool as a companion in the past two hours, if lonely meant chewing on bland white rice, staring at the children who had peanut butter and jelly sandwiches packed in their lunchboxes, if lonely meant she had tried not to be alone. Then yes, she was lonely.
When the tallest boy in her grade laughed and said her forehead spelled communist and said to her GO BACK WHERE YOU COME FROM! she closed her eyes and tried to imagine their apartment back home where dry autumn sunlight filtered indoors, making
Grandma’s paper cuts glisten. “My uncle’s American.”
It was a mistake. They laughed harder, chanting, and she found her backpack tossed onto a tree.
“怎么了？” When she slammed her soaked backpack on the kitchen table Grandma asked. What happened?
“没事” she said, “对不起，婆婆.” Nothing. Sorry, Grandma.
Everyone had believed their lives would change for good when Papa showed them the paper certificates, their new identities. Paper-thin, soft, smooth, fragile. A delicate snowflake balancing the world. She wondered what would happen if she folded the papers and sent them into the sky, and whether they would fall because the weight of their lives was too heavy to bear.
“If you say you’re Livvy, that makes you American,” Mama said, “Chinese people don’t have names like that.” Mama also said, “If you say your uncle George is an American and has estate here, they will leave you alone.” But they did not have an uncle George. Uncle Xu had gone to America before they did, and when they saw him again, he had become another man. He was a retail store owner now, and said America was good in this way and that. He seldom spoke Chinese anymore when they talked, and he had slammed his chopsticks in such vigor that the girl thought the wooden chopsticks would bend in half, when Mama yelled at dinner: “So you’d rather be a rat at America!”
She did not know why Mama was deliberately making the whole house upset and only responded with a punitive silence for the rest of the week, or why Mama had broken into another quarrel with Papa that night. When the door opened, she quickly blended herself into the darkness of the doorway, and followed Mama to the bright yellow kitchen, watching Mama change diaper for her little brother, and before she could open her mouth Mama turned away and opened the water faucet with her numb fingers, her brother crying in the background.
***
“I wish I wasn’t so lonely,” Lin Lin said loudly.
But it is different now. She wouldn’t be lonely anymore. She could keep her snowman for herself and only herself. There was no one she’d have to share it with, no one who would drive its attention elsewhere, and most importantly, no one to hinder her in making a new friend, her first foreign friend. She could finally find someone who would listen to her happiness and pains. Her second thought was: she had done something good and extraordinary. Her hands possessed such magic, that though the snowman was frosty, it was human enough, or—or more than human?
She had to ask it. Even if she got a negative answer. Even if it meant everything would fall apart. Because despite everything she needed a certainty, she needed to make sure she wasn’t dreaming.
“Will you be my friend?”
***
“If you really want to be my friend, you would have preserved my body from the heat.
You would have taught me to walk, so I could find a refrigerator. You would have…”
There were so many “would have” and “if only”, that her face immediately flushed with shame. The sky has greyed, and the sun has sunken lazily behind the layered clouds, so the remaining sunlight barely touched the stiff snowman.
“I’ll help you,” she pleaded, “If you accept me…”
***
THE SNOWMAN
I had no time to brace myself when above us, the winter clouds parted, and I cried in pain at the dismemberment of my own body: one stick and one button had fallen out, and I began melting like icecream. Taken aback, the human exclaimed in horror.
I did not know what happened, or how it happened, and especially why, only that there was a moment when my soul detached from my body to answer a higher calling—I was still. Desensitized. Drifting in void, and I could hear everything much clearer than before, and I could hear her begging in a single voice, “Don’t take away my friend,” breathlessly, her pathetic articulation, the way she must have carried my stick in one hand and my button in the other. I could not see, but I could feel.
Somehow we merged. Like when she had rolled the snowballs and stacked them to build me and a part of herself. It was still she who begged, but now her voice suddenly become echo-like and muffled as if she was six feet under the snow; she begged and begged, until her voice became hoarse, but to others they could only hear a dreadful, beastly moan—and I heard myself cackling with laughter, fresh with life, human life. A life like theirs. After all, all humans were alike.
She was melting, dripping, blurry, burning away like a candle in a blizzard.
I had promised I would take the responsibility of a human and more, the kind of sweaty but relieved aftermath that one feels when waking from a nightmare worse than reality. I could stretch my neck—I had one now—I could move my arms, my hands, my fingers, my torso, my legs. I could walk, now, but there was no need to find a refrigerator.
“It’s becoming sunnier,” I said, for now I had every right to say what I liked, and what I didn’t like—being a snowman. Now that I saw myself, my new self: a short, skinny girl, with straight black hair and lantern-red mittens, I looked at her in scorn and sympathy—more scorn than sympathy—especially when I saw how she wanted to cry but realized that the tears would not come from her buttoned eye. Her view had become partial—the other eye was starting to crumble, too. Soon her facial features became indiscernible, a supernatural paleness; and she saw blackness, creeping, hunting down her last visions of the ruddy evening sky.
***
XU LIN LIN
She knew the day would come, the day when her diary would be read by someone else. She imagined that day to happen after she died.
She knew everyone would die, eventually, and imagined her family and friends would all be there, but they wouldn’t be scared because she would have told them not to be. She would have been back home then, which made sense because she promised to Tofu who was still waiting for her to rub his belly, and she needed to play shuttlecock one more time because the last time she did, the woman next door pointed at her and exclaimed: “The girl from the Xu family is truly an athlete!”
The many words she wanted to say in English but couldn’t; the many words she wanted to learn. The many things she wanted to do in the new land: work in the restaurant with her father, helping her mother deliver the beautiful dresses, watching her big brother grease his coal-black hair, walking side by side with…
Somehow, a source of unknown happiness stayed. Was it hope?
***
THE SNOWMAN
Many years later, when the scene played over and over again in my head that I can memorize every single word she said, I imagine myself assuring her that I would do everything she had wanted. I had not felt any remorse, for I thought it was a fair deal, for how pathetic they have pretended themselves to be. I had seen nothing in the girl. Or rather, I thought I had seen everything in her, the same as all the others.
***
I returned home, finding humans more gullible than ever. I sat on the bedside, flipping through her diary, listening to the loud construction noise upstairs, and felt lucky. A moment later the door flung open. “Dinnertime,” a woman with her hair tied in a bun announced. I stared at the bowl of white rice in front of me and the chopsticks, and two empty, creaky seats.
“You’ll go to school tomorrow and tell these kids,” The woman leaned close to me, and I smelled something like detergent from her mouth so wide to swallow me, “Your Uncle has estate in America. Then they will leave you alone.”
“Who?”
“We’ll go back one day,” she reassured me, but I saw from the corner of my eye as I ate, she was staring blankly at something else.
I didn’t ask where.
***
Months passed, then years and I became accustomed to living in the human body. I had two extra limbs, and I no longer feared my nose would stab into someone’s face. Now and then I made some friends, Katie, a girl growing up in the states, and Nathan, my neighbor. I thought of my friends back in China, sometimes I still received letters from them asking how I felt. I wrote back, and they complained that my tone was like another person’s now. One January we went to Chinatown, and the paper lanterns lit up the sky like fireworks, and Uncle had paused once and asked, in Chinese, if Grandpa was okay, and Papa reminded him Grandpa had died last winter. Grandma had kept herself locked in her room for days like a child. My little brother Johnny could walk now, and he trailed behind me and my sister, and when he stumbled, we could all hear him cry. In winters, I sat with Katie and Nat on the sofa that was too small for the three of us, sometimes watching movies through the TV screen that always had bad signal, and sometimes watching rain fall on the empty street singing along to “Hey, Jude”.
Now and then my little brother called me to fly paper airplanes and I got up reluctantly. The childhood excitement had passed; the neighborhood was again. At school we learned about how snow was part of a water cycle that repeated over and over again…
Is this the life she had imagined? Am I living the life she would have loved? And I ran faster towards my death, a concept I only knew two years after parting with the child, that humans were no less ephemeral as snowmen; daylight may be more merciful in their world, but nights could be chillier.
***
I stand awkwardly on the first day of college with a crowd of people that I don’t know, and that reminds me of being a snowman.
“What’s your name?” the girl at the register asks. “Livvy.”
“You from the US?”
“Yes—” I pause. “Actually, no. I grew up in China, then I moved to California.” “Beijing?”
I haven’t spoken the word for a long time. “Shanghai, I’m from Shanghai.”
“Shanghai? I’ve heard of it,” she says, handing me the flyer like we were old friends,
“Welcome, Livvy!”
I see Mama at the gates with Johnny and Grandma. “Thanks. You can call me Lin Lin.”