Candy Cigarettes
The sun shower smells foul on the first clear April in years, as if the sky itself is mocking my country and its bereaved. It is not the good kind of foul, the comforting kind that carries the promise of nicotine, but rather a greasiness that reminds me of oil sliding down through metal tubes, and of blood. I press my nose against the flowers I brought to lay on my grandfather’s grave, inhaling the sweet perfume.
When I exhale, I form my lips into a small, rounded shape and direct the breath upwards so as not to tarnish the flowers my grandmother entrusted me with. A ghostly mist escapes, hanging in the air, though spring has long come and taken away the cold.
My grandmother has always had an ordinary contempt for noxious fumes, for clouds of grey darkening the already grizzled Shanghai sky. “Hold your breath when we cross the street," she would say, folding her leather fingers over mine as we weaved around blaring cars and the trucks that had stopped in the middle of a crossing. "You're just the right height to get caught in the exhaust."
I obliged, at times pinching my nose and puffing out my cheeks, at times taking quick strides with no ceremony like I was a proper adult. It was the only way I could start to pay the debt I owed to my grandmother for raising me.
At home, she banished her husband and his packs of cigarettes, one falling into his hand after the other was emptied, to the balcony. It was a beautiful place, clotheslines criss-crossing over his head, my grandmother’s plants filling every sensible space. Lining the edge of the balcony alone were small pots of mint, bright marigold, and a singular hibiscus plant with buds that shied away from our eager eyes. In the center of them all stood a money-making tree and a plum sapling, both perpetually due to be replanted, but instead doomed to cages far smaller than their roots yearned to stretch. They welcomed my grandfather with open arms six times a day, and he rarely grumbled when he was sent outside.
Without fail I followed him, curling up at his feet and gazing adoringly into the smoke that he sent spiralling into the air. "Tell me the story of the little white cat," I'd say, nudging him. His voice was deep and resonant, scratchy through the smoke but rising and falling fluidly. He made up adventures on the spot: the little white cat did this, the three-legged corgi did that. The smoke veiled his eyes, and I stared at him trying to imagine what he looked like in his journalist days.
Sometimes I saw my grandmother sending a scornful glance through the glass, like he was polluting all that was colorful and precious.
“Stop bringing her out with you,” she would hiss when we came back in. “No one wants to be there when you do that.”
“She doesn’t mind. Right, Xixi?”
I only smiled as he patted my head. “Nuh-uh! It doesn’t bother me!”
It did, and it bothered me more and more as the years went by. But pretending was what I owed to my grandfather, for he had raised me to.
One day, he came back with groceries as usual: vinegar, spices, an assortment of vegetables, and a whole fish. What was out of the ordinary was that he walked over to my room. I flinched when he poked his head through the door, a mischievous smile on his face, but he did not rebuke me for reading instead of doing my summer homework; only my grandmother did.
“I got something for you,” he said, and pressed a small box into my palm. I looked at it, mystified – white with black lettering, C-A-N-D-Y printed across the front – and shook it a little. Something clattered inside.
It was white, and like chalk, but distinctly sweet on my tongue. When I breathed out, the sugar formed a cloud and fell softly like snow to the ground. I held the candy between two fingers, a smile blooming on my face, and followed him to the balcony.
That was the day, the second day of July in the summer of my eighth birthday, that the hibiscus bloomed, vivid red streaks opening up toward the sky for a scant few hours before curling in on themselves once more. It too was the summer that the money-making tree finally suffocated in its soil, and the plum tree that lived was relocated onto solid ground.
It’s still there, sixteen years later.
Every Tomb Sweeping Day, my family meets by the cemetery at noon and collectively brings a meal to share with our ancestors. I am in charge only of green rice balls, but it's ten in the morning as I stand here, and for once I long not for the sting of my own smoke, but for balcony fumes and candy cigarettes.
I make my way to my grandfather’s grave, fumbling to open the pack of candy I brought for the occasion and pull one out before laying the rest in front of his headstone. The box is white with black lettering, and the candy inside looks just as I remember: chalky, nondescript sticks of sugar that, from a few meters away, are just reminiscent enough of the real thing. Conscious of the glances of strangers, I move to cover them with my jacket.
"I got something for you," I whisper to him, and hold my false cigarette between two fingers, the gesture second nature after years of following in his footsteps.
I’ve never been one to believe in spirits, but as I crouch there with my head between my knees, watching snow white dust fall onto the floor beneath, I can almost hear his velvety voice and smell the fragrance of his smoke in the wind, as if the portrait inlaid on the smooth grey stone has come to life just to tell me stories again.
