Four from the Graveyard

 Adam Zhou  

 From Boundaries

I. 

Back when we used to live in the bungalow next to the graveyard, I had a ritual. Every night after dinner, I sat on Yeye’s rocking chair on the veranda, listening for any sign of footsteps. Sometimes, it was the tent that I noticed first, swathed with fairy lights behind the bamboo trees. The minutes that passed quickly. The hunched figure’s movements that were hurried. Any other new observation, any means of understanding who this person was made the ritual complete. Yeye kept telling me it was useless. All there was to know was already spread through fairy tale gossip over tea and mahjong. The hunched man sells carvings made from bone. He steals them from under the tombstones. 

“Xue shi ruo,” Yeye would remind me. Blood is weak. It dries up with the muck of the soil. What remains tells a story after thousands of years. What remains are the shards of bone. In Chinese culture, being skinny was something to be proud of. Bones looking as if they were threatening to break the surface of skin were a standard of beauty. The velvety white substance symbolized the qualities of a pearl. But to me, I see the paleness and emaciation of a dead body. 

II. 

The winding road that led toward the dead bodies removed me from the heat. It was the Qingming festival, and as we sat on the rickety tricycle that took us to our destination, we held the straw broomsticks in our hands to sweep the graves. The offerings of joss paper and oversized baozi nestled in our laps. 

At one point, I started to think that it was a bad decision to come. Under Yeye’s breath, I heard him whisper the words “wo bu pa” over and over again until the syllables blurred into each other. I asked him what he wasn’t scared of but he ignored me. Instead, he looked down at his hands, rolled into fists. In China, you are expected to conceal your emotions. Sometimes, it helps to comfort yourself with a fictitious, whimsical story about death, like that of the bone carver. But when you are helpless, lost in the sea of your emotions, there is nothing left to do but to let the waves pull you down. In a way, it’s another form of a burial. 

III. 

By mid-afternoon, two more people came by to pay their respects. They looked like lovers, and as they recited the things they remembered about the dead body, I realized how much we had in common—the improvisations on the erhu or the love for fried rice or the mahjong games that lasted until midnight. I wondered as they looked at me if they saw the same pair of hazel brown eyes of their former friend staring back. Blood is what made us related. It is what allows a dead body to walk on two legs and breathe, so that after a thousand years, its personalities and stories will live on. 

In China, you are expected to conceal your emotions, but at the same time, you are expected to know when to say “wo zai zheli.” I'm coming to think that these three words—I am here—are enough to save someone from this sea of emotion. Even if I too am pushed in, I will see the other bodies in the water. We will grip each other as we topple, and it will surprise me how smoothly we can carry each other above the crests. 

IV. 

“Xue shi ruo." Did Yeye mean to say he thought life was insignificant? But he stood on the veranda, five hours later, resolute to the fact that he was in the present. The stars were painted with a jewellike sheen, and a slight wind shifted around the curvature of the moon. A crow’s wing would flash by this scene, and now only its shadow would be seen, now only a wisp of its flightpath remaining. All the while, I sat in his rocking chair. I saw his silhouette embrace the night sky—and behind the darkness, the hurried movements of a bonecarver. 

Image © Europeana

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Adam Zhou is a student at Harvard University, class of 2025, studying Computer Science and Economics. Adam is the founder of multiple ventures, from a mobile science laboratory recognized by National Geographic and UNESCO to a PPE-adjacent startup that has sold over 1.5 million units and has two international patents. In high school, Adam was recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards at the National Level. His work has appeared in The Rising Phoenix Review, Blue Marble Review and Glass: A Journal of Poetry, among others. He won the Kathy Carlson and Emily Stauffer Award from Apogee, and was one of ten Asian American high school writers included in Hyphen magazine's Youth Poetry Folio for National Poetry Month in 2019.