After the Lunar New Year, I take the plane from Beijing to New York City to Phoenix, where the gingery dialect of cordialities is sloughed, like chili pepper, from my tongue. Here in the stretch of uncharted Arizona canyon, there is an astounding dust-filled silence: wind whistling across undulating tiers of limestone, and the soft footsteps of my solo pilgrimage. 

I came here to forget, but as I walk through the curving red halls of a sedimentary past, I am nevertheless reminded of that little red-decked apartment back in Jinan, where my grandparents’ tassel ornaments and raucous laughter frightened my American daemons into turning sheepishly, tuck-tailed from the door. If I look down, I’d see a phantom little sister tugging at my shirt asking me how to say When’s dinner? in Mandarin. With each passing year, the minutiae of their everyday life—the politics of a smile, the sweet grime of rough skin in summer—turns alien, no longer a comfortable suit but a garish costume. 

In the heart of the canyon is the record of a long history: towering archives of warm stone. Geology is the art of gods, so it imitates life: the layers of an onion cupped in my hand to peel smoothly away, the ruddy flaring gill of tilapia on a cutting board. In the changing colors of rock strata I see my mother’s eyes sweetening to brown in the sunlit city smog above a KN95 face mask and rounded cheeks dipped in warmth. In my childhood, I had watched, silent, as she reddened with flattery when the ayis and shushus crowded around me to tell her what a polite girl I was, and how well I had played Liszt on the small upright tucked forgotten in the corner of the living room. 

A long time later, fraught with whistling wind and roaming thoughts, I hear a new voice slipping into the noise: “Hello!”

I look over my shoulder, startled; back through the canyon, where my car was left to bake in the vindictive noon sun, the freeway had stretched empty for miles. “Hello?”

In hindsight, it may have all been a dream. I was sad, parched, world- and sun-weary. The rat spoke, and I wanted conversation. So when she came across my path and raised her nose to me, I crouched down and heard her entreaties. 

“Happy New Year!” begins the rat. “Have you seen an ox around here?”

“An ox? No. And I’m afraid the New Year is over.”

“Why, of course it isn’t over! My ox will arrive any minute now and take me home, to my mother.” And she turns and points a tiny finger around a bend of rock shoulder to the vast expanse of desert and sky. “Thataway. Across the ocean.” She looks up at me imploringly. Her whiskers quiver in a passing breeze. “I’ll tell you how to get there,” she adds. 

Blame it on insanity or homesickness, but I scoop her up onto my shoulder and we descend together from the blue shade of the canyon. 

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“You don’t act very much like an ox,” observes the rat from the top of my head. “More like a human.” Her tail is draped across my face like a long forelock and bobs limply with each step I take. 

“You don’t act very much like a rat,” I point out. “More like a human…”

“I’m not a real rat, you know,” she says. “I’m the idea of a rat. I act human because humans brought me into existence.”

I pause. “You know I’m not really an ox, right?”

“Well, maybe not, but you’re my ox. A figment of my imagination.” She tugs at my hair. “Hey, keep up the pace, will you? I’m trying to get home.”

“Geez,” I say, pulling a fistful of hair out of her grasp. “Why the rush?”

“I have to be the first to finish the race. On the day of the New Year, my mother finished the race before me, and her mother, and her mother, and her mother, and…”

“But the New Year has already passed!”

“Bah!” says the rat. “What do you know? Shut up and be a good ox.”

“I don’t think your mother ever won any races,” I retort. “I think she caught a ride with a foolish ox and cheated it out of a fair victory.”

Here the rat goes quiet and curls her tail sourly. 

After a long while, I squint into the horizon and point towards a glittering strip of silver hovering in the distance. “What’s that?”

The rat stands up and tilts her head curiously. “I’m not sure. It wasn’t there last year.” 

As we approach, the strange view, rippled with heat waves, comes into clearer focus: a pool like a round mirror reflecting the sky and trees bowing with clementines, more orange than green. I crouch on the bank to test the water; my hand comes back cool and glistening.

“Clementines are auspicious,” muses the rat. “You reckon the water’s safe?”

I shrug. “It’s probably safe for you. You’re not real.”

The rat scampers down to the bank and dips her head to drink from the edge of the pond. I watch her with some envy; the heat has slowed the world to a buzzing crawl and the water laps mockingly at the shore. As I look on, the rat sits back, satisfied. Glancing toward the sky with a lopsided grin, she suddenly hiccups and falls over.

I make my way over to her in alarm.

“What? What’s wrong?” slurs the rat, giggling up at me.

I stare at her. “Are you…drunk?”

“Drunk? No! C’mon, let’s go. I’ve been waiting to speak to my mother for ages.”

“Well, how are you going to give me directions now?”

“You think I don’t know where home is? Get a move on!”

We walk across the desert for another hour, the rat lying on her back gushing about clementines and blue skies and mirrors. As the day peters away, my own mind begins to betray me; I trip over the lolling heads of oxen sunbathing on dunes, parades of rodents balancing towers of fruit on their noses. The sand shifts from yellow to red to orange to brown, kaleidoscopic tangerine hues that threaten to swallow the blue sky.

“We’re walking in circles,” I complain to the rat, stopping to let a stray mouse in my path pick up his fallen apple slice. “Do you even remember where it is?”

“It’s the New Year,” replies the rat. “Of course I remember. My mother gives me the address every year, as if I’d forget it otherwise.”

“The New Year is over,” I repeat. “Haven’t I told you?”

The rat has sobered considerably, and sits up to ponder this. “Do you really think it’s over? Have I missed my chance?”

“Yeah, it’s definitely over,” I say shortly.

She sniffs at the sky. “It’s just…I need to finish the race,” she murmurs. “I need to.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. It’s for my mother and me. It’s our way of renewing things…making things right.”

“Then why do you have to do it every year?”

“Well, you can’t do it all in a day! So we pick it up again the following year.”

I squint at the horizon: there is something large moving in the sand. “Can’t you do it on any other day?” I ask.

The rat pauses to think. “I don’t know,” she says, shrugging. “I guess not.”

“Well, have you tried?”

“No! It’s too awkward.”

I laugh aloud in disbelief. “Awkward?”

“It’s just not how we do it, alright? My mother doesn’t talk about that sort of stuff on just any old day…well, not unless she’s drunk.”

I am about to respond when, at that moment, a behemoth of stone suddenly rears up from the ground in front of us. A cliff face yawns from the desert surface, splitting vertically into a deep gorge. When I turn around, mouth open in wonder, I see that across the desert, the canyon from which we had first come has disappeared. “What the—”

“Land ho!” the rat cries, scurrying down from my head to dig her nails into my collarbone. “We’re here! Although the world seems to have reversed directions…”

I look around confusedly. “Aren’t we back to where we started? The desert just turned beneath us.”

“We’re right where we need to be,” says the rat. She jumps onto the sand and extends a tiny paw in my direction. “Why don’t you come with me? My mother’s just through that canyon.”

“But—”

She leads me in anyway. 

---

A canyon’s hollowness makes it only an echo machine. Amidst the violent topography of hue, I think of home, and the hundred apologies delivered to me in the juicy pulp of peeled clementines on willow pattern plates (made of a blue deeper than the cloudless Arizona sky). The onion layers of limestone fall in a ring around me and I imagine them to be generations stacking up before my eyes: decades of daughters who cried silent syrupy tears through the tartness of sliced fruit—who bit their tongues about communism and the Chinese government and the girl from biology class. And then the daughters have daughters of their own.

We come from a long line of hungry girls fed on clementine appeals and clementine sorrows, and the color orange is the color of our deepest, most paradoxical wounds: the red of a flattered mother diluted with the gold of fruit pulp. A real Chinese New Year. 

The rat has gone, presumably to finish the race; she’ll be dead last, although I’m not sure that matters anyway. Standing there silently at the end of the second canyon, I realize that I, too, have lost the race. But there are no second chances for me—no more Chinese New Years, no more petals of clementine. I return to the freeway through the red-decked halls and the ground and sky come to feel the same, as if the world’s colors have turned to a weeping mud, where mothers and daughters alike drown clinging to apologies that die too fast and fester too long. 

To celebrate the New Year is to become ensnared in cyclical grief—each proud smile a plea, each porcelain plate a mirror of the year before. And in the deepest corner of your soul, a little rat running circles, drunk on mirage, searching for an ox that will never come.

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Jasmine Leng is a writer from Western Massachusetts. When she’s not writing, she loves playing the piano and flute, learning foreign languages, and attempting literary puzzles. Her work is often inspired by environmental and cultural issues.