Artwork: "Anatomy of a map" by Renée Reynolds
By William Ellis
At last, I said, “What secrets do you have to show me?”
She laughed: “No secrets, really. These are just a few things I have kept since I was young”.
“How much younger can you get?” I was pushing her a little, now.
“I mean”, she went on, without missing a beat, and still smiling, “from the time when I was a little girl, maybe six or seven years old. There is nothing special, but every time I see you, you always say that you are curious about how I lived”.
She opened the box on her lap. Inside, was a large plastic envelope, of the kind that can hold sheets of stationary without folding, and two smaller boxes: this was China after all.
She slipped out the large envelope first, and took from inside it a neat pile of shiny, brightly colored papers. They were small, a few inches across, rectangular, and, creased. Some were a solid color; most were multicolored, with vivid patterns of bands and waving lines.
“These are candy wrappers”, she said. “My sisters – my girlfriends – and I used to collect them. We would unwrap them very carefully so that they wouldn’t tear. We would spread them out and press them flat; we wanted them to be as smooth as possible.”
She set the papers on the tea table, then opened one of the smaller boxes. Inside were miniature plastic spoons that were not much longer than a toothpick: at one end, each had a tiny scoop; at the other end, each had a little molded shape: a horse-head, a body of a fish, a coin, a sun, a star, or some geometric design.
“We collected these too. They came inside another kind of candy. This was a kind of powder in a plastic package about the size of a matchbox. We would shake out the powder into our mouths. Each package had one spoon. I liked the spoons much more than the candy.”
She set the box on the table. I thought that I knew what she was doing: she was allowing me to inspect, against the poverty of her early life, her childhood yearning to find and keep safe some elements of beauty in the empire of drabness that is China.
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