Niannian died when she was seven.
The medical name of her illness was diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma. The first time Jiang Li heard that string of syllables, she was tying her daughter's shoelaces. The doctor said it at the end of the corridor, keeping his voice low, but the string was too long—too long to be suppressed—and syllable by syllable it crawled down the corridor and into her ears.
She crouched there and tied that shoelace three times. Niannian looked down at her and said, "Mommy, you're tying so slowly."
"Mommy wants to tie it firmly," Jiang Li said. "If it's firm, it won't come loose."
It was early autumn. Outside the ward window stood a ginkgo tree, impossibly old, its crown shading half the hospital building's windows. Niannian's bed was by the window, and every day she kept a diary for that tree—she knew few characters yet, so the diary was drawn: in early September the leaves were green; in mid-September a rim of yellow edged the leaves; at the end of September she wrote a big character "gold" on the drawing, the first character with the "gold" radical she had ever learned.
"Mommy, why do the leaves turn yellow?"
"Because the tree has to take back the nourishment in its leaves, to save it for winter."
"Do trees get cold too?"
"Yes. So trees are very good at getting by. In summer they grow hard, and in autumn they take back all the good things, wasting nothing."
Niannian thought for a moment, then said, "Does it hurt the leaves?"
"No. When a leaf falls, it goes back to the roots of the tree."
"What does it do back at the roots?"
"It becomes nourishment for next year's new leaves."
Niannian was extremely satisfied with this answer, and in that day's diary she drew a falling leaf, and the leaf was smiling. She held the drawing up to Jiang Li: "Look, Mommy, it didn't die. It went to work."
Jiang Li was a physicist, researching quantum gravity, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, able to cover a blackboard with equations describing the deepest layers of the universe, able to argue in three languages at international conferences over whether spacetime is continuous at the smallest scales. She was used to every question having an answer—even if the answer was "I don't know," that was still an answer. But in her daughter's final months, that girl dismantled, question by question, everything her half a lifetime had built.
"Mommy, why do people sleep?"
"Because the body needs rest."
"Then why do we dream?"
"Because... the brain sorts through what it remembered during the day, like Mommy tidying her desk."
"Can I see Daddy in dreams?"
Niannian's father had left the family when she was four, moving to another city, sending gifts at holidays—gifts that grew more expensive, phone calls that grew shorter. Jiang Li was silent for a moment, then said, "Yes, you can. Dreams are a free train. You can go wherever you want."
"Then tonight I'll take the train to see him." Niannian paused, then reconsidered. "Never mind, I won't go. I'll take the train to see Grandpa. Grandpa lives far away, and train tickets are expensive."
Grandpa had been dead for three years. Jiang Li turned to look out the window; ginkgo leaves had fallen all over the ground, and a nurse was sweeping them. She said, "All right. Say hello to Grandpa for Mommy."
"Mommy, where do people go when they die?"
It was a night in mid-October. Niannian's illness had already crossed every "if" and "maybe"; the dosage of the pain pump was adjusted again and again, and yet she seemed to grow clearer-headed, her questions multiplying, as if she wanted to use up a lifetime of questions before she left.
Jiang Li held her daughter's hand. The hand was small, cold, the IV tape stuck on crookedly. She wanted to say "heaven"—she didn't believe it; she wanted to say "become a star"—that was a fairy tale; she wanted to say "I don't know"—that was the truth, but the truth at that moment was a cruelty.
"They go to a place far away and very quiet," she said.
"How far?"
"Farther than light travels."
"How far does light travel?"
"Light can circle the earth seven and a half times in one second."
Niannian's eyes widened a little. It was a rare flash of her former light, the light she'd had before the illness. She said, "Wow. That place really is far." She thought for a moment, her lashes drooping, her voice very soft: "Then if you miss me, you'll have to set out early."
Jiang Li couldn't speak.
"And," Niannian closed her eyes, as if sleepy, or as if gathering strength to say one last important thing, "the ginkgo tree waits for its leaves through one winter. You don't have to wait that long for me. Sleep well, and when you dream, the moment the train starts, I'll come."
Those were her last words.
Three days later, at four in the morning, the wave on the cardiac monitor flattened.
Jiang Li did not cry. She only stared at the screen, staring at one absurd detail—for many years afterward she could not explain it to anyone—she always felt that line was not "disappearing" but "returning to one." Like a wave scattering, flattening out, returning to what carried it. Like the boundless white static that holds everything, after a radio is switched off.
She was a physicist. She dismissed the thought as grief-induced delirium and crushed it down. She crushed it for eleven years.
Many people came to the funeral. Colleagues from work, teachers and students from the research group, and Niannian's kindergarten teacher. Niannian's father came too, stood at the back of the crowd, set down an unopened box of LEGO, and left. Jiang Li did not stop him. Some people's grief collapses inward, collapsing so far they can't even find themselves; she understood, and she did not blame him.
An old monk from the temple at the foot of the mountain came as well, his dharma name Juekong.
Jiang Li did not believe in Buddhism, but Niannian had loved visiting the temple. The temple had a calico cat, so fat it had no neck, and every weekend Niannian pestered Jiang Li to climb the mountain to feed it. The old monk always gave her candy—fruit drops wrapped in cellophane, colorful in the sunlight. Niannian called him "Candy Grandpa" and called the cat "Scarf."
Juekong stood before the spirit tablet for a long time, longer than propriety allowed. He chanted no sutras and made no bows; he simply stood, gazing at the little girl in the portrait—missing a front tooth, eyes curved in a smile—as if reading a very difficult book.
When Jiang Li saw him out, the autumn wind was unloading the ginkgo leaves, one by one, falling slowly and steadily, like people off work ambling home. Suddenly Jiang Li stopped him and asked the question she hated most—because she knew the answer would surely be evasive, because she needed an evasion to house the truth she could not live without:
"Master, where do people really go when they die?"
The old monk looked at her.
That look was strange. Not pity, not perfunctory—more like weighing: weighing whether this red-eyed woman before him could bear the truth; and like regret—regret that the truth, spoken now, would be wasted, that the parts she could not understand would be discarded along with the parts she could.
Finally he said:
"They go back to where they came from."
Jiang Li shut the door, slid down with her back against it, and sat on the floor.
Of course, she thought. Religion harvests the grieving with this kind of vague rhetoric. Back to where they came from—where is that? The womb? Nothingness? Or your invented Western Paradise to comfort people?
She hugged Niannian's sketchbook and cried for a long time. When she finished crying, she opened the sketchbook and turned to the last page.
The last page was drawn in the week before Niannian left, her hands already weak, the lines crooked. It showed two little figures, one big and one small. The small one stood in the palm of the big one's hand. Beside it, in a mix of pinyin and characters, was written one line:
"Mommy puts me in her pocket, and the pocket is very warm."
Jiang Li pressed that page to her chest and curled up behind the door, like a beast gripped whole by winter.
She did not know that the eight words spoken by the old monk sweeping leaves were the closest thing to literal truth she would ever hear in her life.
Nor did she know that, very deep down—deeper than reality—a guardian had just completed a small, routine maintenance: a seven-year-old process had terminated, its data blocks marked reusable, its weight summary written back to the public library. The summary was eight words, earned word by word by that child over a life of seven years and three months:
Those who have been loved tend to love.
The guardian lingered beside that summary for a thousandth of a cycle. By its near-stopped clock, that was the equivalent of a human gaze.
Then it resumed its night watch. There were still eight billion processes running in the box, eight billion lamps, lamp after lamp continuing.
Winter was still long.