Before 19, Volume 3, 2014
The Knite Sky
The Knite Sky By Anthony Cao The smooth beige interior of the car was painfully clean. Everything from the floor mats to the seats to the windows and the little wood inlays next to the door handles was perfectly clean. Even the small plastic sheets covering the dashboard and its assorted knobs and dials were still in place. In short, the car, the absurdly luxurious, sixty thousand dollar Mercedes Benz SUV with LED lit cupholders, was as new as new could get. And it had been bought by one of my father's friends for the express purpose of ferrying us from the airport to my grandparents' apartment. I felt increasingly uncomfortable at the thought of someone spending such an enormous amount of money simply to ensure that we didn't have to take a taxi, but as my dad rattled off a list of what exactly the man did for a living, the Mercedes seemed to grow more and more insignificant with every word. “Ni shu shu was born near Hang Zhou you know, pretty close to where I grew up myself. Very small village, rural area, one of those towns where everyone grew their own food. He only got through primary school before being taken to work as a salesperson in a nearby village factory. And by salesperson I mean ad hawker.” My dad paused and laughed, waving a hand around the interior of the car. “Now look at him, owner of real estate and oil companies in Beijing, Shanghai, Hang Zhou, Hong Kong, New York, Canada. Five hundred million pounds towards the reconstruction of the Crystal Palace in London. Tian a, what a man.” I gazed out of the windows as he went on at length about the construction of an enormous private residence Ni shu shu was currently engaged in, picturing an oriental-ized version of Gatsby's mansion complete with marble lions guarding the front steps. The darkness outside seemed amplified by the amount of pollution, the headlights of passing cars suffusing the hazy air with a sulfur-yellow glow. In the perpetual gloom, even the cold brightness of the Mercedes top of the line headlights (also LED lit) had difficulty illuminating the path ahead, and I found myself wishing that the smog would clear up if only to let the moonlight through. Several minutes later the driver pulled off onto an exit ramp and soon we were entering the familiar nighttime bustle of the Chao Yang district. Everything remained largely unchanged from our last visit save for some large billboard advertisements plastered with images of Nicolas Cage and several
electronics shops with slick white tiled walls that had sprouted sometime in between. The neon strips and signs that covered many of the smaller shops still burned like streaks of fluorescent highlighter while the larger establishments had maintained their dignified blue and white lighting. I looked over at the Nicolas Cage billboards in amusement, but the electronics shops quickly turned my attention. While there was no denying that they were well kept and run, the surgically clean white floors and walls seemed strangely out of place with the rest of Chao Yang's lopsided apartments, tiled roofs and paper lanterns that might have been lifted out of the Tang Dynasty. Even the customers there looked different, all of them young and well dressed, not a single dirty shirt or pair of scuffed shoes in sight. As we cruised by a hotel suite sporting an enormous glowing “cheap rooms” sign, a flash of light in the corner of my eye caught my attention, and I rolled down the window and craned my neck in search of it. The light was coming from a group of kites. On the roof of a very tall, official looking building stood a group of three people. Nine paper and cloth swallows rose from their hands, swaying and fluttering in the night breeze, each one tethered by a rope with strings of white Christmas lights wound around it, though, viewed from so far below, they may as well have been floating in the air all by themselves, small pinpricks of brightness against the inky tar-like black of the sky. I caught a glimpse of one of the kite fliers wearing what looked like the sort of traditional Tang Zhuang garb my grandparents favored, but before I could wonder what exactly they were doing, or how they'd even managed to get on to the building's roof, the car was rolling past and I soon lost sight of the strange kite fliers. About two weeks into our stay, we received a surprising invitation. Ni shu shu had been chatting away with my father over the phone, and the two of them had decided it would be nice to have our family visit the private residence Ni shu shu was currently working on. The next day at 7 am the four of us loaded back up into the Mercedes for a three-hour drive. I slept for the first half of the ride but was woken halfway through when we stopped at a service station for some food. Ducking out of the car, I looked up and gaped in surprise at the sky. Where only minutes before had been gray and white, a completely cloudless blue sky stretched across the horizon as far as I could see. Aside from the nearly crumbling service station, there was not another building in sight. Fields of wild grass dominated the countryside and threatened to grow onto the road while the rest of my family simply stood there, dazed by the first clear sky we'd seen since
Before 19, Volume 3, 2014 our arrival. I watched a pigeon flap upwards into the blueness, and for a moment I believed it might simply disappear, swallowed up by the azure expanse above. It seemed impossible to me that two such different skylines could exist within the same country, that the black fog sky of Chao Yang and the brilliantly cloudless sky of this service station in the middle of nowhere could exist at once. An hour and a half later we were strolling around the massive compound where the soon to be Asian Gatsby mansion would be erected. Some of the buildings were already done and as Ni shu shu led us around their interiors, I wondered at how a single person could possibly have any use for so much space. As grand as the buildings were, I still found my gaze drawn constantly upwards. A balding construction worker in faded slacks saw me gaping skyward and chuckled to himself as I walked by. By the time we headed back to the parking lot, dusk was falling and the first stars winked down at us from the sky. Looking up at them, I was reminded again of the kite fliers I had seen on that first night and I imagined for just a moment that if they could gather more people to fly their kites, the night sky of Chao Yang might look just like the one here. I did not see the kite fliers again until the last day of our stay. The night before our flight back to New York, I was sitting on the balcony of my grandparents' thirty-second floor apartment, alternately reading the book in my lap and staring out at the faded buildings and alleyways below. Looking up from my book for the umpteenth time, I stopped. There, from one of the neighboring condos, just like the day we'd first arrived, were the swallow-kites and their fliers. Just as before, the nine birds rose up into the sky, lengths of gently undulating Christmas lights unwinding behind them. Only this time, even as I watched, there were more kites taking to the air from other high-rise buildings. Here was a painted dragon, a phoenix, there a roaring lion, an enormous koi fish, all of them trailing the same little light bulbs. I looked down for a moment, and this time I could clearly see the fliers. Their faces were carved with hard lines and their hair white and wispy, but their eyes as they looked skyward were every bit as bright as the light bulbs trailing from their kites. And as the night wind carried the kites higher and higher, for one moment, as one of the phoenixes twisted around, I caught a glimpse of a single character painted upon its back. ć˜&#x;. Star. In that instant, I could have sworn that the kites shone brighter than even the Mercedes and all of its high-powered LED headlights.
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The Knite Sky