Butterfly Kingdom
Yong-Yu Huang
COUNTERCLOCK Emerging Writer’s Awards – 1st Place, Prose
My mother forgets the little things first: the number of folds in a xiaolongbao, her childhood neighbors and the fuchsia buds that bloomed on their grey balcony, the order of the zodiac animals. All of them scatter like dust in her wake, her mind gutting itself in every frame. When she calls me at work, she reminds me that I should come home earlier. Even in a city as brightly-lit as Taipei, she says, there are still too many shadows.
“Ma, I can’t. I just started a new job, remember? Next to the metro station?”
She breathes in and out, steady like the soft wash of rain. I think of the way run-off pools on the sidewalk and how my mother and I used to loiter when it rained, contorting our faces into ridiculous, almost grotesque expressions. I think of how we giggled at the way the skin stretched and shrank in the rippling surface of the water. It’s been years since we’ve done anything like that.
“Of course,” she says, “How silly of me––that travel agency job.”
I glance up from my cubicle. Around me, my colleagues pore over editorials, interviews, reprints from the last news cycle. There are pages of paparazzi shots strewn over slate-gray tabletops, most of them blurred beyond recognition. In one, a young woman’s face stares up at the ceiling, her eyes wide, terrified in the face of the blinding flash. I look down at my wrists. The undersides are smeared with ink, dark like an indelible shadow, with some of the tiny words still visible: the headlines bleeding into one another, serif font stark against my skin.
Record Temperatures This Summer. Boy Band Splits For Military Service. Protests Against Trade Deal.
My mother is still talking, her voice tinny over the phone, “Make sure to stay away from that construction site. The power lines for the streetlights are out again.”
“I will.” I glance at the news clipping still attached to the far wall––bold, angry characters describing how that building project had collapsed late last year, a disastrous combination of poor management and cheap construction materials. They had stuffed the walls with styrofoam instead of concrete, and when the earthquakes came, the entire site descended into a plume of dust. My mother and I had watched the news report together, images of bloody, dust-streaked survivors moving sluggishly on-screen.
“I’ll see you later,” I promise.
After she hangs up, I press my knuckles against my bottom lip, hard enough to bruise.
***
When I was a girl, my mother told me that there were no shadows at night in the countryside. Only the moon, its pearled mouth opening in hunger, light leaking onto the flat land. That to be touched by it was to be cleansed, to let memory slip into its maw. How when it skimmed the fields, the creatures burrowed into the soft soil, afraid of its touch. Afraid to lose their bodies in the silver flood. I asked her what happened to all the creatures of the air. The dark sparrows and the butterflies, wings flickering like gauze.
“It’s just a story,” she said impatiently, tucking me into bed. The sheets were crisp and bone-white. “They were eaten. All the ones who couldn’t get away were eaten.”
I wanted to ask her why she came to the city, but I think that I knew the answer, even then.
***
Over dinner, she asks me the name of the dish that we have just scraped clean. The rice sours in my mouth. I turn away from the table, only to find myself facing the mirror hanging on the wall above us, its edges covered in a fine layer of dust. She has always looked too much like me, or maybe I look too much like her, but in that moment, I see only two versions of the same desperate face, silty and out of focus. In the reflection, we look bigger than life, like all the advertisements littering the newspapers. Women who are running. Women who are chasing down youth. Women who don’t like what they see looking back at them.
“What did the recipe say?” I ask.
She hums, her gaze somewhere far away. She has already moved on. “What color was your father’s car?”
“Silver. The last one was, at least.”
“I know,” she snaps, then her voice drops. “I’m never going to forget that. I meant the one he drove before that.”
We finish the rest of the meal in silence. I don’t stop thinking about how we watched the taillights swerve away from our street, even after we turn the TV on and start clicking through the channels. We slide through a dozen scenes, all of them going fuzzy in the summer heat.
Finally, she settles on one: a close-up of a flower’s mottled center, its petals milky like the rouge my mother used to streak her lips with, back when my father would kiss her when he came home. Then the camera slowly pans out, revealing the paper-thin wings of a yellow butterfly, paled in the sunlight.
A voice begins to narrate, “Taiwan is known for its butterflies, close to 400 species, in fact. Today, let us introduce––”
***
We spend hours under fluorescent lighting, watching our hazy reflections contort in the waxed tile of the waiting room. This is enough, I think, to make anyone lose sight of the world. Next to us, a white-haired woman curls her knees into her chest. I stare at the fine bones of her wrists.
“It’s rude to stare,” my mother whispers, pursing her lips. I fix my eyes on the ceiling instead, trace the spatterings of dust clinging to the white surface with my eyes.
I fill out form after form until I can package every detail of her life into neat boxes. Along the wall, there are faded posters of families smiling down at us and they are all perfectly imperfect. A little boy wears an ear-splitting grin as a needle poises above his arm. His mother leans on a pair of crutches. Her dark hair gleaming like gasoline, flawlessly coiffed. Her husband’s arm, the one not in a cast, is draped around her. My mother cannot take her eyes off them, keeps staring even when I tug her to her feet after our number is called.
The doctor’s office has a full-color illustration of the brain tacked up on one wall. My mother sits in the chair underneath it, and I cannot decide whether to focus my eyes on her or the poster.
The doctor points at me and asks her who I am. He asks if she’s married.
“My daughter.” Then she hesitates. “No, not anymore.”
An intern in the back laughs. “Ma’am,” she says, “You won’t remember that at all soon.”
***
The next time we are called into the doctor’s office, there is a different intern. This one does not meet our eyes, only carefully shines a flashlight into my mother’s pupils and busies herself with a prescription. More dosages to measure out. I think about the cupboard behind the bathroom mirror, the miniature skyline of pill bottles that have already found home, the colorful chalk she swallows dry after every meal. The saccharine pink of a love letter. The buttery yellow of a swallowtail.
***
My mother asks too many questions and I don’t know how to answer them. She doesn’t recognize the mayor on TV, the one she had voted for in his previous term. She asks what my grandfather’s voice sounded like when we visit his grave during Tomb-Sweeping Day. When my nails carve crescents into my palms, she threads her hand through mine.
“She remembers me. She remembers me.” This is what I whisper to myself, hunched over the phone. I dial the doctor’s number anyway and while it rings, I imagine the sharp tang of hospital bleach whetting the sickness from her mind. When he picks up, he listens carefully even as I lick the heaviness from my throat, metallic on my tongue.
“It’s getting worse. She doesn’t remember things in the right order anymore,” I say, teeth clenched. ”
The doctor hums. “I wouldn’t worry about it. At least not until she starts forgetting important things.”
I tell him I don’t know what those are.
He pauses, and I can hear his pen scratching across the page. Patient’s daughter does not know what important things are. Patient’s daughter spends her nights searching up symptoms, answers, small deaths.
“You’ll know when that happens.” Everything is uncomfortably warm, the calloused touch of the muggy air snaking across my throat. In the other room, my mother is singing a lullaby––only she is mumbling through half the lines. They tremble in the air, disembodied.
After that, I take to carrying around a notepad. I write down her questions with whatever I can find in neat lists that spill onto old receipts, sheet music browning at the edges, take-out menus that slice into the tender flesh between my fingers. I convince myself that as long as I can answer these questions, there is still some small part of her that can be salvaged.
One night, we are sprawled on the couch, the television bathing us in its technicolor glow. She has taken to watching shows where families unravel like silk and then put themselves back together. At the same time, I shuffle through the papers and look up the lyrics to the national anthem. The name of the metro station by the museum. I remember a summer where I waited on the steps for a train, my mother’s hand in one of mine.
My father is absent in this memory, just like all of the others, and I think about where he is now––maybe down in the countryside with a younger wife, an intact memory, my mother’s jade bracelet.
Next to me, the light from the soap opera dances across my mother’s face. In this scene, the matriarch is swathed in a gray shawl and yelling at her unmarried son. He stands and looks her in the eye. His gaze flinty, gunmetal cold. From the camera’s angle, the height difference is almost comical.
“I don’t know who you are anymore,” he says coldly. The transformation is instantaneous––her face splinters, hands streaking through her graying hair. Clawing for her son even as he slams the door.
The audience is given a perfect view of all of this: from his silhouette disappearing down the stairwell to the metamorphosis of the mother, crumpling to her knees.
***
An alternate name for this country: the Butterfly Kingdom, but instead of the slow expansion of the body, the women move only backwards, shriveling into themselves. My mother stops going to the convenience store down the street after she stares at the cigarettes on display and discovers she cannot recall which kind my father used to smoke. On the good days, she tells me about how she used to scrub tobacco stains from his shirts under the naked lightbulb by the backdoor. How she plunged her arms into the soapy water––hoping to find her husband there to meet her––and was left with only pink bubbles streaking the steaming water. Her knuckles stinging all night, the empty sheets next to her speckled with blood.
“Like a disease,” she sniffed, pursing her lips, then pauses. “It was always hardest to get the yellow out from the starched collars. I used to have such soft hands, you know, just like yours.”
“I know, Ma.” I swallow thickly. I press my hands to hers. “I know.”
***
On a muggy Friday in July, I come home from work to discover glass scattered all over the floor and the acrid smell of smoke leaking into the hallway. The family portraits shucked from their frames. In all of them, a tear where my father used to be––my mother’s arm severed at the elbow, half my body cut off in his embrace. In the kitchen, she feeds little scraps of paper into the ring of fire on the stove, and I glimpse my father’s smile before it shrivels into a blackened wing. I ask what she’s doing.
“Forgetting.”
Somehow, I understand––the desire to undo memory on her own terms.
On the other side of the wall, I can hear our neighbor cursing at her lottery tickets. Tonight’s lucky numbers are forty-seven and sixty-three. I want to swallow them whole, parse their reddened limbs for the kind of bloodline that brings luck.
Instead, I open the window to clear the smoke from the room before it discolors the whitewashed walls. My mother keeps burning the pictures. I pull out my phone, the smooth metal cold against my cheek. On the other end of the line, the doctor sighs.
***
Once, I asked her if it hurt––the forgetting. I had always imagined it feeling like a phantom limb or maybe a dull inflammation. Something that would ache when it rained.
“No.” Slowly, as if she were unraveling a tapestry to string the words together. “Do you think the butterfly hurts when it comes out of the cocoon?” She pauses. “I tell myself it’s a little bit like that. A fresh start.”
***
The man in the documentary reminds us that Taiwan is home to one of the largest butterfly migrations in the world––that in the winter, hordes of purple crow butterflies flood into the southern regions of the country. There, they shelter for the winter in the warmer valleys, inland enough to be shielded from the harsh northeastern winds. When he pauses and the television cuts to montages of speckled indigo wings, I wonder if they remember the way home at the end of the season. A wind brushes through the dense undergrowth, and all of a sudden, shimmering purple ripples through the shot. They stay––they always stay, at least until the cold passes.
I grasp my mother’s hand tighter, her pulse soft and steady as she dozes on the couch next to me. She stirs. I lower the volume on the television.
***
My mother forgets her own mother’s name. The women are always the first to forget, to be forgotten. One morning, she tells me that female butterflies die after laying their eggs, that motherhood is only another kind of evisceration.
On another, I find her tracing a finger over the family photos, a sepia-toned jumble that nobody had ever bothered to organize. Dates penciled in on the backs, faint numbers already swollen with mildew.
“Who is this?” She demands to know. In her hand, she is clutching a picture of my grandparents so tightly that the surface is beginning to crack. Her voice higher and higher, panicking. “Who is this woman?”
I point at her father, younger than I remember him. “She was married to him, remember?”
She looks at me, eyes wide. “And who is he?”
My mother looks so small, her legs swathed in a pool of pictures. People she doesn’t remember, birthdays and weddings and New Year dinners that have all blended together in her mind. I sift through the mass, pull up picture after picture, name after name.
“This is the great-uncle that died during the White Terror. You used to tell me stories about him. This is the cousin who dropped out of college after he borrowed so much money from Auntie and spent it all on women. This is the aunt that moved to America and married rich. This is your favorite niece, the one who just graduated.”
Her lips move, murmuring to herself––names, I tell myself, she’s remembering names.
“I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’–”
“Did you take your pills?” My mother is crying, tucked into herself. I cannot get her to stop. “Your pills?”
She shakes her head. “I just wanted to remember,” she whispers. “I just wanted to see how much I could remember. I thought I could.”
Her hands are clenched against her chest, the fingers that once looked so much like mine fisting the thin fabric of her blouse.
For the first time, she looks properly ill, and I let myself imagine that my mother is sick with something tangible, something that the doctors can excise from her body. I imagine them carefully teasing a wisp of white from the nape of her neck and placing it on a gleaming tray. It shrivels into a caterpillar, inching its way back towards her. Somebody squashes it, a shiny leather shoe scraping against the floor of the operating room. There, they say, your mother’s cured.
“Your father. He’s coming home later, isn’t?”
I weigh the answer in my mouth, let the bitterness sink in before I speak.
“Ma, it’s just you and me now.”
***
She is staring out the window again, one hand fisting a fraying rag. A bucket of soapy water rests next to her feet, the bubbles tinged gray and already thinning.
“Ma.”
My reflection appears in the pane next to her, both of us pale and drawn. She had still been asleep when I had slipped out that morning for work––I had held her the night before, murmuring the same story she had once told me. Through the slats of the blinds, the moonlight slipped in anyway.
I move closer and closer, and then I see her mouth open into a silent scream. A limp rag flies towards me. I reach for her, and she shrinks away. There is a desperate kind of light in her eyes, the kind one might find in a crippled bird or some other hunted animal. The whites shot through with red––bathwater and cracking hands. They are fluttering, desperate.
She is backed up all the way against the window now. Her lips move frantically, and I think that she is praying until I get close enough to grab her shoulders, to hear the stream of words tumbling from her lips.
“I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,” she sobs.
My mother looks me in the eyes, and I realize what she is seeing––a ghost of her past self, finally back to haunt her. She looks down at my hands, their crushing grip on her shoulders.
“I used to have hands like those,” she whispers.
Writer’s Notebook
Over the past few months, I’ve been thinking about memory and the way it interacts with family, history, and illness. I started writing Butterfly Kingdom while processing the loss of a family member who struggled to recall names in their last couple of years. Though their experiences are very much different from the events in the story, I found myself reaching for the words to construct a series of moments in the life of someone watching their loved one slowly disappear. As I wrote, I decided to examine the lives of people surrounded by memory––from family pictures to national history like the White Terror––and how memory can be lost to illness. To be honest, the reason this story is set in Taiwan is a little selfish. Apart from Taiwan being an excellent backdrop for these characters with the healthcare, the metro, and the butterflies, it’s also been over a year since I’ve been back, which is by far the longest between visits I’ve ever gone. Ultimately, Butterfly Kingdom is meant to deconstruct the intersection of memory, family, and illness, and how these ideas inform so many stories.
Judge’s Notes
This is a story of forgetting, of mother and daughter, of the power and necessity of language to bear out the hard truth of living. I was hooked from the first sentence.
about the writer
Yong-Yu Huang is a Taiwanese student living in Malaysia. Her work is forthcoming in Frontier Poetry, Up the Staircase Quarterly, and Passages North, among others, and has been recognized by Princeton University, The Kenyon Review, and Columbia College Chicago. In her free time, she enjoys listening to Studio Ghibli soundtracks and sitting by bonfires on the beach.