The Duty of a Sun

For as long as I’ve known, my hipbone has made music.  It clicks in the socket, rattles slightly when I run, and hums in the cold.  When I was younger, my mother refused to take me to the doctor when I complained that my bones were hurting me: she told me I would grow out of the pain, the way I would grow out of hand-me-downs that I hated. The way all children outgrow their bodies.  But this never came true: year by year, every time I lifted my leg to climb the stairs, my hip hinged on ache. Eventually, my mother conceded that this was no growing pain.

We began our weekly visits to an acupuncturist in San Francisco Chinatown, an hour’s drive away.  My mother played cassette tapes of recorded Buddhist prayers both ways, and so our visits to Chinatown always felt oddly religious, a weekly pilgrimage.  The acupuncturist was my mother’s age, a distant aunt, and her office was a narrow third-floor walk-up. I piggybacked my mother as she climbed the stairs to that cramped, damp room, which had one bed and one chair, the walls tinged yellow with moisture.  The back of the door was papered with posters of qi points, and there were diagrams taped everywhere, maps of the body’s energy that were so detailed I was afraid to look at them directly. There was something more intimate and more naked about those abstract meridian maps than the nude, life-like diagrams at a Western doctor’s office.

I laid on my stomach for an hour, the needles populating my skin into a city.  There was never any pain during the session, but I always had trouble watching the needles enter.  It felt intrusive, and I wanted to give my body some privacy from me. While lying on my stomach in the dark, I was never in silence.  On the sidewalk below the acupuncturist, which was unadvertised and unlicensed, there was always the same old man sitting on a rusty stool.  He played the erhu, a two-stringed fiddle whose song always seemed to be some bone-deep sorrow. His erhu sounded different than the recordings my mother played: there was something raspy about its sound, as if the song, tired of itself, had grown hoarse over the years.  Still, the man never seemed to play with any sadness. There was only matter-of-factness, as if song has the duty of a sun, and must simply play itself for the sake of providing a necessary service.

There were many elderly erhu players, especially around parks or at street corners in Chinatown.  When I moved to New York, the subway stations around Chinatown were always occupied by erhu players, old men who often looked at the ground when they played, as if tracing some subterranean movement that none of us had the power to sense.  Whenever I hear these men, their songs looping infinitely, the high notes harmonizing with the arrival of another train, a twinge begins in my hips. My injury always remembers itself before I do. For me, the sound of an erhu cannot exist without that pain, those weekends I spent on that bed in my aunt’s apartment, the man who played the erhu below, and his song that sounded much clearer from above.  I have never felt so far and so close from my body than when I hear an erhu in Canal Street Station.

After an hour of acupuncture, my mother would pay my aunt in cash, and we crossed the street to Hon Wonton, ordering a bowl each of wonton noodle soup.  There was always one waitress and one cook, both of whom knew us by name, both of whom I called my aunts. The soup was always so hot, I had to squint through steam to locate each wonton, ripe with chili oil and scallions.  When the soup singed my tongue, it was a song. When my mother reached under the table to tap my knee, there was an entire symphony in that gesture. I knew she felt guilt for waiting so long to treat my hip, and I knew that a bowl of soup was her way of saying sorry.  Every week, she sat in the chair beside the bed and waited with me. My aunt urged her to run errands, go grocery shopping, visit the Chinatown bank. But my mother never left. She stayed the whole hour with me, not looking at me, not looking at anything. I knew that she, too, was listening to the man playing his erhu outside, the song we were both hearing but could not name.

I remember that my mother once said that the erhu is a man’s instrument: women are not allowed to play it.  When she told me this, it was always in her warning voice, the way she might tell me that I was too young for knives.  It is a man’s instrument, she said.  Then what is a woman’s instrument? I always asked.  I don’t remember her answer, or if there was an answer.  I only remember thinking that I might learn the erhu someday, just out of spite or defiance.  But now, I think I understand what my mother meant. Every time I watch an elderly man hold the erhu as if it were his own limb, every time I hear the notes of a song that accompanies my hip’s ache, I can’t help but think this is a man’s sadness. Then I immediately scold myself for internalized misogyny, for thinking that men have some particular, special suffering that women have not yet discovered.  The truth is the opposite. Still, I hear in the erhu an entire history, a Chinese-American history that for many years was mostly a history of laboring men, a man-made legacy.

I cannot see the erhu as separate from those men’s bodies, those men’s migration.  To me, the erhu will always belong to a generation, a time. Is it possible for an instrument to go extinct?  I wonder if archeologists ever find instruments we no longer know how to play. I wonder if civilizations ever agreed to retire certain instruments, or if all instruments are evolved from each other, and we have never lost anything.

When my brother and I were young, my mother sent us to joint piano lessons at an elderly Russian woman’s house.  In exchange for free lessons, my mother would do housekeeping work. So every time we had a lesson, I knew my mother would be in the house to hear our every mistake, to hear us butcher the keys, turn a song inside-out.  She would spend the weekly two hours dusting every floor, washing dishes, sponging countertops. She was desperate for my brother and I to become prodigies, that immigrant cliche. What I regret most isn’t that my brother and I were awful players; it was that my mother had worked for each hour of our failing.  I wonder if she still thinks it was worth it.

For my mother, the erhu was too folksy, too Chinese.  The violin and the piano were universal, American. White people think the erhu is stringent, harsh-sounding.  I’ve learned all the ways we make hierarchies of sound, the ways we gender silence. Now, when I pass the men who play their erhu on street corners, my hip remembers what it’s tried to forget.  My body becomes an instrument of its history. The erhu plays a song to hear its own hurt.