Nonfiction
Tuchan
Story by Yufei Xiao, editing by Dasha Panasenko, figure 6 by Paul Song, audio by Yutaro Shimizu. Past/alternative versions archive.
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The subterranean grocery store does not have a roof to stand under and chat, let alone to think undistracted by the sun. A woman hurries through the unshaded courtyard until she enters the tunnel lined with bikes. She spends about 6 minutes almost completely still, suppressing even the sound of her breath, just eyeballs spinning as if choosing routes on a big map in the air. Eventually she wrinkles her whole face harshly, then relaxes it and aims her bike back to the exact same express path by which she came.
As she picks up speed, the cacti crevasses and sand dunes lining the highway run and shrink. She hums, from silently to loudly, drinking the most wind with “sunny side of the street.” Unlike her way here, the sky starts sun-showering (drizzles without clouds). Drops touch her, hit the road like a drumbeat, splash dark patterns on the handlebars.
++++
The woman bikes fluently from the chemistry building elevator and brakes inside the polymer nano-material lab office. She strides to the post-it stuck centered on her corner of the whiteboard and scribbles in red:
[2]
Without pause she unloads her bag of five radishes and a bundle of papers onto the work station/lunch table. Carefully she unfolds the cleanest sheet, a printed screenshot from Grandma six years back. Her eyes trace paths that she familiarized with over dozens of afterwork sessions:
[3]
The recipe runs as cryptic as a truism or prophecy to her—but it's useless to blame anyone now and she can't phone grandma. This is supposed to be a surprise. Over the past two weeks she has extracted all the information she could with the help of online dictionaries—of her forgotten mother tongue—and botanical wikis that are unfortunately Mars-focused. From her pile of paper scraps and notes she takes only one:
[4]
Then she opens Geogebra on her laptop and clicks “start recording.”. A light starts flashing inside the wet lab. Holding the paper and a few radishes she follows the light in.
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4 hours later, the door slams open and she dashes out of the steam-filled lab, drenched, hair full of sand, gasping as if she held her breath underwater for too long.
Shaking like a cut-off gecko tail, she splatters sand-water droplets on computer desks and textbook shelves just cleaned today. Resting no more than a few seconds, she checks on the Geogebra live-generated results with auto-interpreted captions.
As if the relay is completed, she sighs, deflates, gouges down air and stares through the screen.
++++
The woman’s home is a 40-floor skyscraper on the windward side of a collapsed crater, the building coated intentionally unevenly with PMMA for natural heating and cooling. As she walks to the first of many gates, she notices wet footprints. Storm didn’t come within a 1 km radius so it must’ve been someone who walked a bit.
The prints are pointed outwards and dense, made with small and ballet-like steps. She lives alone. She picks up her pace and prods her keys through the second pair of locked gates. Grandma is standing in front of the second security checkpoint, leaning on an umbrella like a third foot. Grandma grins with her eye wrinkles. Somehow, it is similar to how she smiled ten years ago, when she picked her granddaughter up from school for the last time. In some ways it was changed. Granddaughter touches the green button on her phone for the gate, and runs towards her. Maybe because their hug slides into a comfortable curvature so perfectly, granddaughter can’t stop laughing hysterically. As she breathes longer and calms down from intermittent giggles, Grandma points her chin slyly to a bag leaning on the umbrella. There, underneath a silk paper-wrapping, the shadows of a shower head-like pod with frozen seeds lie ready for revival.
++++
The subterranean grocery store does not have a roof to stand under and chat, let alone to think undistracted by the sun. A woman hurries through the unshaded courtyard until she enters the tunnel lined with bikes. She spends about 6 minutes almost completely still, suppressing even the sound of her breath, just eyeballs spinning as if choosing routes on a big map in the air. Eventually she wrinkles her whole face harshly, then relaxes it and aims her bike back to the exact same express path by which she came.
As she picks up speed, the cacti crevasses and sand dunes lining the highway run and shrink. She hums, from silently to loudly, drinking the most wind with “sunny side of the street.” Unlike her way here, the sky starts sun-showering (drizzles without clouds). Drops touch her, hit the road like a drumbeat, splash dark patterns on the handlebars.
++++
The woman bikes fluently from the chemistry building elevator and brakes inside the polymer nano-material lab office. She strides to the post-it stuck centered on her corner of the whiteboard and scribbles in red:
[2]Without pause she unloads her bag of five radishes and a bundle of papers onto the work station/lunch table. Carefully she unfolds the cleanest sheet, a printed screenshot from Grandma six years back. Her eyes trace paths that she familiarized with over dozens of afterwork sessions:
[3]The recipe runs as cryptic as a truism or prophecy to her—but it's useless to blame anyone now and she can't phone grandma. This is supposed to be a surprise. Over the past two weeks she has extracted all the information she could with the help of online dictionaries—of her forgotten mother tongue—and botanical wikis that are unfortunately Mars-focused. From her pile of paper scraps and notes she takes only one:
[4]Then she opens Geogebra on her laptop and clicks “start recording.”. A light starts flashing inside the wet lab. Holding the paper and a few radishes she follows the light in.
++++
4 hours later, the door slams open and she dashes out of the steam-filled lab, drenched, hair full of sand, gasping as if she held her breath underwater for too long.
Shaking like a cut-off gecko tail, she splatters sand-water droplets on computer desks and textbook shelves just cleaned today. Resting no more than a few seconds, she checks on the Geogebra live-generated results with auto-interpreted captions.
As if the relay is completed, she sighs, deflates, gouges down air and stares through the screen.
++++
The woman’s home is a 40-floor skyscraper on the windward side of a collapsed crater, the building coated intentionally unevenly with PMMA for natural heating and cooling. As she walks to the first of many gates, she notices wet footprints. Storm didn’t come within a 1 km radius so it must’ve been someone who walked a bit.
The prints are pointed outwards and dense, made with small and ballet-like steps. She lives alone. She picks up her pace and prods her keys through the second pair of locked gates. Grandma is standing in front of the second security checkpoint, leaning on an umbrella like a third foot. Grandma grins with her eye wrinkles. Somehow, it is similar to how she smiled ten years ago, when she picked her granddaughter up from school for the last time. In some ways it was changed. Granddaughter touches the green button on her phone for the gate, and runs towards her. Maybe because their hug slides into a comfortable curvature so perfectly, granddaughter can’t stop laughing hysterically. As she breathes longer and calms down from intermittent giggles, Grandma points her chin slyly to a bag leaning on the umbrella. There, underneath a silk paper-wrapping, the shadows of a shower head-like pod with frozen seeds lie ready for revival.
Exercise
Dear readers, given the clues from this story, can you come up with what happened in the 4 hours at the wet lab? Be it experiment journal, proof and conjecture, fantasy adventure, send or chat about your relay idea with me at my story homebase!
Here are the granddaughter's notes from the years grandma and her raised the lotus [6]:
1. Lotus skin is dense and hard, it can protect the embryo inside to live a long time. A thousand years, a lotus seed sprouts.
2. Every lotus part can be eaten: seed as tea, leaf as porridge or wrapping for dumpling, root as soup or fry… (for example this super spicy but loved ceremonious dish in Kuramoto Japan).
3. You can even make silk from lotus stem.
a. There is lots of artistry to the craft. If you don’t extract the silk while the stem is still wet it will break. It's not tough so it must be woven by hand. A scarf uses 9200 stems, a worker 2 months. The fiber is soft like silk, breathable like linen, slightly elastic. That is a lifetime’s work, a craft for sure, maybe grandma makes silk and clothing. She has beautiful simple dresses. (Weaver! material conversion)
b. The silk of animals is made of protein. How they form is from cell excretions that left the cell. Silkworm silk is a spiral pipe like a spring, you can stretch it. Plant (cotton, linen) silk are made of mainly fiber, wood, and all poly carbohydrates. How they form is from first making a long cell, then making all kinds of poly carbohydrates and slowly filling it from outside in, finally the cell dies and its carcass becomes plant fiber. So, the lotus silk probably would turn yellow, because plant fiber oxidizes faster.
4. There is a Chinese saying: “the root is broken but the thread remains intact” (藕断丝连). That is true. How and why? There are different seasons with different harshness for life and different opportunities.
a. Grandma holds a rhizome in her hand. “Lily as a water plant like many others, they have rhizome as the root, inside are pipe holes, which transport the oxygen from leaves to other body parts, helps the plant breathe in water.” (This reminds me Andre was saying he realized humans and plants are so different when he learned that plants breathe from everywhere so drowning it can just be from too much water at the root. is that true? Humans just breathe from nose and mouth mainly, though skin also breaths alittle)
a. She splits the rhizome into half, the place of fracture stretches out long thin white threads. “These threads inside the rhizome structure are spiral shaped like springs, so when you split the rhizome it stretches very long, it’s the inductors inside the rhizome, for transporting nutrients.”
b. So… the connecting thread doesn't break easily because it’s the necessary channel for survival! The living fiber transmits nutrients and the dead duct transmits air to the broken ends of the root.
c. Not only is there material separation, there is also evolutionary divergence. There are Chinese red lotus and American yellow lotus, which represent the discontinuity between Eurasia and North America. They had the same ancestor group, who when separated with continental drift evolved into different looks.
[6] transcript based on conversation with Quan Wang
2. Every lotus part can be eaten: seed as tea, leaf as porridge or wrapping for dumpling, root as soup or fry… (for example this super spicy but loved ceremonious dish in Kuramoto Japan).
3. You can even make silk from lotus stem.
a. There is lots of artistry to the craft. If you don’t extract the silk while the stem is still wet it will break. It's not tough so it must be woven by hand. A scarf uses 9200 stems, a worker 2 months. The fiber is soft like silk, breathable like linen, slightly elastic. That is a lifetime’s work, a craft for sure, maybe grandma makes silk and clothing. She has beautiful simple dresses. (Weaver! material conversion)
b. The silk of animals is made of protein. How they form is from cell excretions that left the cell. Silkworm silk is a spiral pipe like a spring, you can stretch it. Plant (cotton, linen) silk are made of mainly fiber, wood, and all poly carbohydrates. How they form is from first making a long cell, then making all kinds of poly carbohydrates and slowly filling it from outside in, finally the cell dies and its carcass becomes plant fiber. So, the lotus silk probably would turn yellow, because plant fiber oxidizes faster.
4. There is a Chinese saying: “the root is broken but the thread remains intact” (藕断丝连). That is true. How and why? There are different seasons with different harshness for life and different opportunities.
a. Grandma holds a rhizome in her hand. “Lily as a water plant like many others, they have rhizome as the root, inside are pipe holes, which transport the oxygen from leaves to other body parts, helps the plant breathe in water.” (This reminds me Andre was saying he realized humans and plants are so different when he learned that plants breathe from everywhere so drowning it can just be from too much water at the root. is that true? Humans just breathe from nose and mouth mainly, though skin also breaths alittle)
a. She splits the rhizome into half, the place of fracture stretches out long thin white threads. “These threads inside the rhizome structure are spiral shaped like springs, so when you split the rhizome it stretches very long, it’s the inductors inside the rhizome, for transporting nutrients.”
b. So… the connecting thread doesn't break easily because it’s the necessary channel for survival! The living fiber transmits nutrients and the dead duct transmits air to the broken ends of the root.
c. Not only is there material separation, there is also evolutionary divergence. There are Chinese red lotus and American yellow lotus, which represent the discontinuity between Eurasia and North America. They had the same ancestor group, who when separated with continental drift evolved into different looks.
[6] transcript based on conversation with Quan Wang