Who Will Wear Me On Their Back?

In the Northeasternmost province of China, years after the operations of the Japanese Germ Warfare Experimental Base had been terminated and its secrets uncovered (Chinese bodies injected with bubonic plague, bodies injected with syphilis; bodies frozen alive, bodies roasted alive for the advancement of medical knowledge);

years after White Russians bled down from the North to escape the Bolsheviks and build Orthodox churches;

after the Red Army liberated Harbin, the capital city, and began to plant factories and statues;

after the railway carved through the city, air-raid tunnels dug under it, the Songhua River leaked mercury and the city’s Manchurian name, “where the fishing nets are dried,” lost any significance;

after seasons of snow and ice sculpture and tourists,

Wang Saihung, nearly eighty years old, bends his back one more time to pull the last flax stem from the ground by its roots. “It is no wonder...” he begins, but his comrade has already turned his face to the fading sun...that in a city of such terrible secrets, some of us spend our lives gutting the fiber from plants for clothing. He ties up the final bundle of stems with a wisp of flax straw. Who will wear me on his back when I am dead?

Indeed, the long fibers eventually will be sewn into linen shirts or cloaks, loose coverings mostly, to hide the shapes of bodies, any inappropriate curves. But before that happens, the shoves must be broken wide open, the bark and hard core expelled.

First, the flax will be rippled, to remove the seeds, then retted in vats of warm water where hungry bacteria will gorge on the pectins that bind together the wood and fiber. After several days of ripening in this noxious stew, the flax will be dried, skutched, hackled, and spun. In other words, it will be crushed and beaten to remove the wood loosened in the retting, and finally combed, cut, and spun into threads. Threads that may wind up across the world. Or simply Beijing.

Yu Mengtao has woven linen threads into cloth at the Beijing Textile Factory for twenty years. She has never smelled the rotted pulp or seen the short or tangled tow fibers. And what she weaves she will never wear. When she leaves her apartment at 5am to begin her 2-hour commute to the city, she worries about her husband and son, whether the family will finally get a 2-room apartment, how many years more before they can buy a television. She is mostly used to the noise of the factory now. She just doesn’t hear it.

But the cloth that leaves her hands is minutely stained with her sweat and breath, tiny codes hidden in the warp and weft. Traces remain after the bleach and the black dye. The cloth picks up other scents. Skin cells and tears from the woman in the sewing factory, who cuts the linen into a shirt and then stitches it together. Who drops her glasses onto the table and rubs her eyes before returning to work. Who will return to her home each day never having seen the sun.

The shirt has history. Reads like a book. Except that where it’s going, few people know the language.

Beth hides out before the mirror in the Macy’s fitting room. She likes the looseness of linen. The safety of black. She wonders if in the black shirt she looks too much like Johnny Cash. She wonders if she can afford an $88 shirt just now. She wonders if she should buy a vest to go with it. She looks at the label. Hand wash cold water. Dry flat. She wonders if it’s too much trouble to care for. She thinks she will machine wash it anyway. If she ruins it she’ll just give it away. She reads the label again. Made in China. She decides to give some money to a homeless person on her way home with the shirt.

On the sidewalk, just after the farmers’ market, is a red blanket laid out with other peoples’ belongings for sale: a blue denim mini-dress with built-in push-up bra; a pair of brown corduroys; a vinyl purse accented with gray fingerprints. Clothes on the street. Like a mouthful of crooked teeth. Like a grotesque birthmark. Beth fingers the black linen shirt, imagines it after a year’s sweat stains and accidental snags, pictures it on the sidewalk next to the other debased items. This is what will happen, she realizes, horrified. Eventually, everything I own will end up like this.

The whole thing is obscene. Like finding someone’s intestines strewn across the road. Going over a roller coaster with your legs spread. Inviting the world to watch your open-heart surgery. Only this is sidewalk surgery. Street forensics. People passing on clothing like organs. She stops walking and clutches the fabric to her face. It smells like chemicals. But also something else. Whose hands are hidden in this shirt already? Whose hands will brush against my breasts or feel the curvature of my back?

Whose back will wear me when I am gone?

ãElizabeth Terry
9/5/96