“Baba” & A Lineage of Light
Image by K-Ming Chang, book cover by Michael C. Morris
Story: “Baba”
In an interview for BOMB magazine, K-Ming Chang described her debut novel, Bestiary, as being “structured around the violence of men, around martial law and…different social forces” which is part of why I was drawn to her short story “Baba” (Gulf Coast Fall/Winter 2020) that weaves tradition and culture into a modern ghost story. That wasn’t the sole reason why I chose to look at this story, though. I was drawn back to “Baba” because of the magical, nearly surreal elements packed tightly into this story about an Asian family—a mother and son and daughter, none of whom are named—trying to find their father who has left to work in a slot machine factory; he moves alone to Chengdu, “a city that sizzles out in [the] mouth like a match”, and before long stops calling and stops sending money back to them week after week. Their father, who isn’t dead, has ghosted them. And as a story in part concerned with hauntings—a topic Chang, too, is interested in, saying in her BOMB interview that she “wanted to reanimate history as this memory of something that is continually haunting”—the story’s plot is driven by the family’s attempt to rid themselves of the ghost of their father, their patriarch.
Once, my father drew me a map of China on the back of his hand and made a fist….This is where you come from, he said, placing his fist in my lap, the weight of it boring a hole in me. You come from my fist.
The story is narrated by the daughter of the family and, through her point of view, we’re shown how thoroughly possessed the family is by the memory of the father and his family as the narrator describes aunts and uncles, relatives who are strangers that remember her as a baby, as a memory only, and how they spring almost from nowhere to influence the story’s movement in necessary ways before vanishing again. Part of what the story explores is an oppressive system of abuse and degradation that the women in the story are forced to endure, a system reinforced through storytelling and survivable only with the support of other women. “To have a husband,” the narrator’s mother says, “you have to stop seeing. You have to stop feeling. You grow bark instead of skin.”
If you pay close attention to the story, you’ll see that it’s packed into dense paragraphs that contain, without the distinction of white space, all the tools authors have at their disposal to navigate time and place and action, unseparated in a way that readers may not be familiar with—paragraphs so tight-knit they swallow even the dialogue, traditionally set apart by space and quotation marks, that’s instead contained within the paragraphs and italicized. A nod, perhaps, at the difference in language, how italics are used to denote when someone is speaking in a foreign tongue, or to draw attention through emphasis. Italics sometimes are also set aside to denote thought and interiority. Here, I think the italicized dialogue is doing all of that, and a lot of heavy lifting, thematically. For one, it’s marking the dialogue as foreign, as something outside of “normal”, and for another thing it’s presented as being lighter than traditional dialogue, and softer, airy like thought. It’s also reminiscent of the smoke that saturates the landscape in the city. Tthe narrator’s great-aunt, Nine, who puts the family up while they search for their father, works at a crematorium and is described as having the “ability to read smoke….written across the sky in all kinds of languages, and she knows all of them…she can read if it had come from a wildfire or from a pyre or from a factory, if the fire that made it had been accidental or on purpose or in mourning or in celebration.” Like smoke above the city, the dialogue, too, drifts through the paragraphs, haunting them.
There’s a wonderful tone and voice to this story that feels as if you’re sitting around a fire while it’s unfolding, the darkness gathered behind you, the glow ahead. It utilizes the images of fire and smoke, of mirrors and other everyday things, as a means to anchor you to a specific meaning. For example, the night the narrator’s father leaves he asks for the tall mirror his wife uses every morning because he believes it has “memorized her body”, something the narrator returns to later, concluding that her father “took the mirror with him because he hoped my mother would appear in it daily, because a mirror always remembers what is shown to it”, which becomes a resonant image carried through to the story’s conclusion.
My father is the only ghost she cannot kill, and that summer, she hires a priest to come to our house and exorcise it.
The story itself has the ring of ritual, its telling an urgent exorcism meant to cleanse the narrator of her father, the telling a way to trap an aspect of him within the confines of the story, something mimicked in the dialogue being trapped within the paragraphs, and echoed in the metaphor of trapped images and mirrors. A story, like a mirror, only remembers what is shown to it, which is a wonderful thing about this story, that it presents the act of storytelling as magical and necessary. That through that act we can exorcise from ourselves something—wonderful or terrible or confusing—and trap it, and release from ourselves whatever haunts us.
Cocktail: A Lineage of Light
[My father] hung up the mirror in the dark of the bathroom while my mother always hung it across from her bedroom window. She gave it a lineage of light.
Something that stuck with me through “Baba” was the invocative imagery: the persistence of smoke as the family searches for the father in Chengdu, the image of a woman hanging in the window of her uncle’s restaurant “like a plum-glazed duck”, and one of two joyful memories the narrator recalls of her uncle’s wedding when she was younger and, drunk, he lifts her up and swings her through the air: “I could feel my ribs loosen like fingers and let my heart go. I watched it ascend, a buoyant blue-red moon”. These things drew my thoughts, and palate, towards plums and spice, and towards the seemingly contrary spirits of Cognac and Islay Scotch. The drink’s name, A Lineage of Light, is derived from the narrator’s relationship to her mother, their relationship with mirrors, and the other joyful memory she has of seeing herself and her mother reflected together in a cracked mirror: “And even though the mirror is fractured like a bone, even though it’s so hot our hair has curled into wisps of black smoke, we laugh. We laugh at how monstrous we are: two heads stitched to the same body.”
Not all scotch is smoky, nor all of it peaty. This may be a surprise, especially if they’re first encounter with scotch involved a blended scotch, like J&B or Dewars or Johnny Walker. These blends contain parts of scotch from the many regions of Scotland that produce wildly different spirits with varying flavor profiles (from sweet to salty to smoky to earthy), and while complex and interesting, I won’t dive into that here. But you should know that Isaly scotch (pronounced eye-lah and not is-lay) is touted as the smokiest scotches amongst the regions. And while it’s bold, it’s often sweet, as well, if you allow yourself a few sips to acclimate to the roaring taste of smoke and peat, the soft notes of wildly incongruent flavors like chocolate and banana and fig will linger on the finish.
Cognac, distilled from a strong wine made from grapes grown in the Cognac region of France, is also assertive and bold, but sweet and floral. A type of brandy (which is a spirit distilled from wine or fermented fruit), Cognac is wholly unique in its flavor because of where it comes from, like Islay scotch, the particular region of France unlike any other, and fitting for the voice and spirit of the story and a necessary counter-balance in the cocktail’s profile. And they stand up to the sweetness of the Plum Cordial and tart Pomegranate Molasses; as aged spirits, they are complemented by the Sweet Vermouth and bitters; but, more importantly, they linger. In a way, the cocktail haunts your palate. And yet this drink is a delight in sips, surprisingly light, something to return to again and again, and to miss once it’s gone.
Recipe
1oz Cognac (I used Hennessy VS*)
1oz Islay Scotch (Ardbeg 10*)
1oz Sweet Vermouth (Noilly Prat)
4 Dashes Plum Bitters (Fee Brothers)
3 Dashes Peychaud’s Bitters
1oz Plum Cordial
0.5oz Pomegranate Molasses
Make the Plum Cordial: From 3 plums, remove the pits and dice into medium chunks. Add them to a pot with 8oz of water, 4oz of white sugar, two green tea sachets, and a pinch of salt. Bring to a boil then reduce to medium heat and cook for 10 minutes; remove the green tea sachets at 5 minutes. Mash or blend, then pass through a mesh strainer (this may take a little while and some cajoling with a spatula). The leftover mash in the strainer works great as a spread or jam. Refrigerate the cordial; it’ll keep for at least two weeks. Outside of cocktails, use it on pancakes, to sweeten tea, or with some soda or tonic water.
Add all cocktail ingredients to a mixing tin or glass, and then add ice. I shook my cocktail for 15 seconds and strained it over more ice, but you don’t need to do all of that. If you don’t shake it, I would put all of the ingredients into a glass you don’t plan to drink from, stir them together, then pour them over a large glass with a lot of ice so that the cocktail will dilute and open up over time. You can also top it with soda water to make it a long drink, just make sure to give it a stir so the soda is incorporated.
Enjoy.
Notes: If you’re not a big fan of smoke, you can use 2oz of Cognac and zero Scotch. If you don’t have Cognac, you can use Brandy but there’s a lot of bad Brandy out there, so use what you already enjoy. Pomegranate Molasses can be found in Asian, Indian, and Mediterranean grocers and sometimes at big box stores like Kroger or Whole Foods; it lasts for a very long time in the fridge.
*At the time of posting, I was an active representative for these spirits brands.