He wanted to say that his grandmother had passed away. He wanted to say that his mother believed she was returning to this world. He would tell everybody, “My mother believes my grandmother is being reincarnated as my child. That is why I am here, because my grandmother’s first language was Teochew.”
But all this, all this was too much. This was a place of strangers, and anything they had shared had been lost generations ago.
He had come to a community event for Teochew descendants at a nearby university. They sipped passion fruit iced tea with homemade, hard-shelled boba, and now they were cutting shapes in red paper. In the heat of a Vancouver August, sweat was pooling under his armpits as he sat on a blue-padded folding chair. This yellow T-shirt, even after a tumble in the washer and dryer, always bore faint stains. What had he wanted when he’d filled in his details on that Google Form for this lantern-making event?
Something more. He had wanted something unnamable. He had wanted to explain that he did not know how to speak Teochew, that his ancestors had gone from China to Vietnam, from Vietnam to Malaysia, from Malaysia to America. Then he, the descendant of refugees, had emigrated once again. He lived in Canada now and had never been to his ancestral home.
There was no air conditioning. He wondered whether he was the oldest person in attendance. The university students clustered in small groups, talking to each other mostly in English. They folded red construction paper in half lengthwise. He did the same. They cut slits, triangles, circles along the folded edge. So did he. Then, with varying degrees of success, they all rolled the paper into cylinders and shaped them into lanterns. Flimsy imitations of the real thing. Ugly, but no one said it out loud. Two international students spoke Teochew to each other. Were they disappointed? What had they expected from this group? He didn’t know if he really belonged anyway. He was only half Teochew, and that too on his mother’s side.
His fiancée had been thrilled that he’d gone. “It’s been bugging you,” she’d said. “What your mother said. A crazy thing.” She’d been careful not to call his mother crazy, even though his mother believed that Buddha would return to Earth one day as a second coming of Christ, wearing a crucifix. That, and she had stopped taking her blood pressure medications because she read on WeChat that they carried a fungal strain the government could use for mind control.
He and his fiancée were not expecting a child. They were, in fact, not even planning to have a child. A few years ago, though, they had mentioned that in the case of an accident, they would keep the child.
The 1.2 to 8.9 percent failure rate for combined oral contraceptives could yield the new incarnation of his dead grandmother. Two years ago, she had died in Singapore at seventy-nine. Her last nine years were spent in retrograde. She sat quietly, being spoon-fed and scrubbed in the bathtub. She lost the ability to speak Mandarin, and her diluted descendants did not speak Teochew. The dementia spread to her cerebrum, leaving her unable to experience conscious thought. When it reached her brainstem, she could no longer breathe or digest.
He had not liked the thought of her being kept alive like that, but thousands of miles and a few language barriers away, what was he? There was nothing he could have done for the grandmother who once cherished him.
After the community event came to an end, he felt hollow. He would not be returning to the group. There was no path there, and where had he been trying to go in the first place? His maybe-child would only be a quarter Teochew.
The 84 bus was out of service. He walked. He walked until the city faded into Queen Elizabeth Park. The half-full yellow moon hung high over the hills in twilight. He continued on a path that wound through the hills and back into the city.
On Calgary Ave, he passed Magus Books. In the shopwindow, they had displayed a new book on the little tulip table next to the blue velvet armchair. It was three inches thick. On the cover, the words MUSEUM OF THE OTHER MOON were embossed over a close-up of a black-and-white moon. He decided to go inside.
The book was heavier than he had expected. He cracked it open, landing on page 78, a wide and glossy white space with a square photo of a red piece of rock in the middle. Narrow type underneath labeled it as “a sample of the other moon, blood-orange in the sky but rust-colored in small quantities.” The red piece of rock was lit dramatically, like an exhibit in a museum.
The pages were so sharp they could leave paper cuts. He thumbed through them carefully. Each chapter began with a small photograph and caption. Then came detailed, encyclopedic entries on the names given to the other moon, myths related to the other moon, theories about which moon came first, and more. They spoke of it, this blood-orange moon, as though it were real. This soothed him. But the book cost $40, which was a little steep for Magus.
He remembered something his grandmother had told him two decades ago, when he was leaving Malaysia for America: “You’ll look up at the same moon as your old grandmother. There, the moon will still be blood-orange.”
Why had she said the moon was blood-orange? The moon was yellow. Had he misunderstood? Had he mixed up the words for yellow and orange; or had she, translating from her first language to her second?
Later that evening, he tried to Google the book. There were no search results. He thought perhaps he remembered the name incorrectly. Was it called MEMORIES OF THE OTHER MOON? A word could make all the difference. He asked his fiancée to search it too.
Still nothing.
He closed the blinds on the yellow half-moon outside.
• • •
A week later, the 84 bus still wasn’t running. He walked home the long way through Queen Elizabeth Park, up the hills that rose behind the duck pond. The sun had not set, yet the cream-colored moon was full in the sky.
He was slightly out of breath from the ascent. One of these days, he needed to download that half-marathon training app and sign up for a race. From his vantage point on the tallest hill, the empty baseball field looked like a quadrant of pie. A few seabirds squawked and flapped in the middle of the diamond of grass. Near the field, there was a community pool, except he didn’t remember there being a small domed structure next to it. He had the thought that he might find something there. That his grandmother might be waiting for him inside. Or maybe not that, maybe something else he wanted. Something.
He went down the hill, breaking into a run. When he arrived, he saw that the dome was marbled and the outer pillars were vaguely Grecian. The small A-frame sign outside said MUSEUM OF THE OTHER MOON. The picture on it was the same as that on the cover of the book. He put his hands against the tinted glass doors of the museum and peered inside.
At the front desk, a receptionist was frowning at the screen of a laptop. The receptionist looked up and met his eyes. For a moment, the receptionist looked like his fiancée, not in the facial features, exactly, but in the persona. Then, the resemblance melted, and he saw that the receptionist was a different person altogether, with circular tinted glasses and a decidedly pointed nose.
“Please, come in,” said the receptionist, pushing open one of the glass doors between them. “We were hoping to squeeze in another visitor.”
The receptionist’s badge said Mari (they/them). They were not his fiancée. If their voice had a color, it would be a deep and warm orange. His fiancée’s voice had a silver-edged timbre, and she was downtown at her weekly knitting club making a vest with blue penguins on it. He sensed the air conditioning of the museum. It cooled the sweat on his neck and swept him inside.
Mari folded their glasses away and hooked them on a chain around their neck. “You have heard of the MUSEUM OF THE OTHER MOON, yes?” they said.
“Yes,” he said, slightly out of breath. “Yes, from a book, once. The book looked exactly like this museum,” he added, as though to justify his presence.
“We place advertisements out in the world from time to time,” they said.
“Advertisements,” he repeated. He was remembering now, the first page of the book, a photo of a round blood-orange moon, and under it the name KELVIN. The other moon was called Kelvin. He recognized the framed glossy photo of it on the wall behind Mari’s desk. It could be a human name, like Luna.
“We close in an hour,” said the receptionist. “The exhibits are sequential. Please don’t touch any exhibits or surfaces, except the rock that says PLEASE TOUCH.”
“Okay,” he said. He had to leave in less than an hour anyway. He had a video call with an India-based team at eight o’clock.
He walked through a white hallway. At the end was a domed room dedicated to the history of the other moon. It had many names: KELVIN, YANG, MAV, 56-G. The numbers associated with it, 5 and 6, signified magic and the unknown. Old calendars lay open under protective glass. Ancient civilizations used this moon for timekeeping, counting the years of their people and societies in lunar time. Once there was even a plant that bloomed under the light of this moon, but it was long extinct.
In the crisp air conditioning of the museum, he wandered from room to room in quiet wonder. The walls were so smooth that up close he could not see any divots or chipped paint. They must have been concrete that was painted eggshell white. He could not resist touching them, even though the receptionist had said not to. But they had said it was okay to touch something. What was it? A nervousness crept into his diaphragm.
The last time someone had told him not to touch something, it had been his mother.
“Don’t touch that!” she’d snapped.
It was last month. He startled when she said that. He plucked the amber vial out of the blue recycling box. “Y-you can’t recycle medication vials with pills in them,” he stammered. He always stammered when he was talking to his mother, and it made him feel like he was small again.
The vial held elegantly shaped capsules, teal on one end and cream-white on the other, with the words “PROZAC 20 mg” printed on them. The recycling box was an open container that could hold no secrets.
His mother stared at him and his fiancée. The white of her left eye was shot through with red vessels. “I don’t need them,” she protested. She didn’t say what they were for; she never wanted to talk about what was really wrong. She insisted that nothing was wrong with her, nothing was wrong with them, nothing was wrong in the world at all. “Anyways, nobody knows how they work!” she added. “I’m not like those crazy people. I don’t need them.” Then, she lowered her voice conspiratorially. “You know what I think? Your Po Po got dementia because of this overprescribing business. It’s all a business.”
The thing was, there was a thread of truth in the things she said, and she clung to it and wove a cocoon of half-lies around herself. And her son now clung to the thought that his grandmother might be reincarnated and returned to the family lineage. There was an unspoken promise in it, a chance for him, in this lifetime, to continue something, maybe even to make something whole.
Now, in the museum, the memory of the amber vial faded. He walked through another long white hallway and entered a dark, curtained theater. He could hear nothing but the audio of the black-and-white documentary playing on the big screen: “Once there were two moons. Luna and Kelvin. Yellow and blood-orange. Which came first?”
He learned that Kelvin’s orbit was tilted by 7 degrees, as opposed to 5 degrees. Like Luna, Kelvin went through phases. In black-and-white, you could not tell the difference between Luna and Kelvin, except that perhaps Luna had more craters, and Kelvin had a silvery river flashing on its surface like a bolt of lightning. The clip was choppy, like a silent movie, and it stopped after twenty seconds.
He stepped into the adjoining room. There was a diorama of an enlarged moon orbiting a miniature Earth. The moon reminded him of Jinta, the huge whale shark at the Okinawa aquarium. He was in his twenties and Jinta was in his forties, but Jinta had lived most of his life swimming in circles. Every two minutes he rounded the same corner of his tank and came into full view, thirty glorious feet of spotted navy blue. People oohed and ahhed and made reels. His fiancée had made a slow-motion video of the whale shark rounding the corner, but he couldn’t stand to watch it.
He remembered the eeriness of the viewing room, its dimness and the subterranean glow in which a child moved their hand down the glass, as if to pet Jinta. When the whale shark swam upward, his exposed belly was white velvet.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” his fiancée had said.
Then the child had thrown up, and he and his fiancée had moved on.
What a life he lived, visiting Japan as a tourist and staring at a captive whale shark. What would his ancestors think of him? At least in this museum, the moon before him was false, made of paper and plastic.
He walked out of the room and into a hall with a PHYSICS sign overhead. Along its walls was a series of exhibits. One discussed why, without the gravitational influence of the moon, Earth’s days would be only six hours long. Another showed a miniature ocean with waves approaching and retreating from the shore again and again.
“The moon creates tides on Earth,” a voice narrated. He was sure it was Mari. “How?” A pause. “The moon’s gravitational force pulls on the water closer to it, causing it to bulge up. On the opposite side of the Earth . . .”
Mari’s voice trailed off as he went on. When he passed under some vents, the rush of air conditioning stirred up a memory. It was one of his first memories of air conditioning. They hadn’t had it in the home he lived in with his grandmother, so he had been startled by the blast of cold air. Po Po had laughed.
It had been at a museum, he was sure now, except they weren’t there to look at anything. They were sitting on some steps inside, eating sliced apples that Po Po had packed in a box and wrapped in her handkerchief. She was already old then. Her joints must have hurt. They were visiting Penang to run an errand that had to do with his papers. In three months, he’d be leaving Malaysia, forever. He was six years old.
“This story is from far away. In our own people’s village,” she said. “Not in Malaysia,” she added, out of breath. “Far away. People reincarnated into the same village. Generation after generation. Sometimes, people remembered their past lives. They remembered the debts they owed. Promises they made. They remembered who had been kind to them and who had murdered them. There was a boy born to that village. He cried whenever he saw the butcher. He cried, ‘That man killed me!’ Turns out, he was once a pig.”
He had been horrified by this story as a child. How the boy had suffered! Had he once been a pig, too?
Po Po wiped the sweat under her nose with her handkerchief, the same checkered blue-and-white one she had owned all her life. Then, she grinned, displaying a mouth full of stained teeth. “In one life, you could have been my grandparent.”
He had forgotten that she said that. When he was a boy, he fixated on the boy who had once been slaughtered. Now that he was grown and knew the stories of his family, he understood that suffering was everywhere. Sometimes, you could drift into a new life and soften the edges of your history.
In the MUSEUM OF THE OTHER MOON, he walked into a dark room, where a piece of glittering moon rock was displayed on a cement pedestal. Bright overhead lights lit it as though it were on a stage. It was red and brown with flecks of silver.
PLEASE TOUCH, the placard said.
He touched it. It felt like an ordinary rock. Kind of cold, kind of grainy. It had small pores all over, like an overused kitchen sponge. It was small enough to hold in his fist. What if it wasn’t a moon rock at all? What if it was just some rock from a state park or playground? What if the whole museum was—
A wave of déjà vu descended over him. He had been here before, perhaps. He had touched that rock before, perhaps, and found it to be false. He couldn’t be sure. Had it been a long time ago? He grasped at a memory that was hanging from a precipice. If he let it fall, it would be gone forever. If his grandmother reincarnated as his child, he could do something for her. Make up for what they lost when he left, and when she died. What was it, a kind of love?
“The museum is closing in fifteen minutes,” announced the PA system. Mari. Everything here was narrated in their rounded orange voice.
He returned to the entrance of the museum. Outside, the baseball field had come alive with Little Leaguers in blue and white uniforms. In the distance, the mountain ranges of Vancouver hung like blue shadow curtains in the sky. The sun was setting.
He had something. Something to go to at seven? Eight? Was it a dinner reservation? “I have to go,” he murmured. How had he ended up in the museum, and why was he the only person here?
Mari sat at the reception desk, tinted spectacles perched on their nose. They looked up at him when he approached.
“I don’t remember paying an entrance fee,” he said.
“There isn’t one,” they said politely.
He didn’t know what to say. In the silence, Mari stood and handed him a business card with both hands. He received it with both hands. It said MEMORIES OF THE OTHER MOON. NARRATED BY MARI.
“Please visit again,” they said. “But not for a while.”
He nodded and exited through the doors facing the baseball field. The sun had sunk behind the mountains, and the Little Leaguers were done already. It was blue hour, that slice of time right before darkness.
Where had the time gone? It had passed too quickly, and he was late. For what?
His phone pinged. A meeting at eight.
He ran further down the hills of Queen Elizabeth Park, and a blood-orange moon rose in the vastness of the blue hour sky. It was as full as a ripe fruit. One silvery vein cut across it, like a river.
Was it the moon from the museum? It felt odd, like touching the moon rock, grainy and porous under his fingers. The moon must be real if he’d touched it. Yes, it had always been blood-orange, unlike the other moon. A yellow one. How strange.
A fog in his mind rolled over his memories of the museum. When he looked back at where he had been, there was only a swimming pool next to an empty baseball field.
• • •