The Bone Pearl

By Ke Shuan Chow

Alpine Fellowship 2022 – Writing Prize Honourable Mention

This is the way I remember my grandmother: knee-deep in water, skirts knotted around her waist. Her crow’s feet crinkling, white hair puffed out like dandelion fluff.

We’re gathering oysters down on Half Moon Bay. She’s the type of grandmother who is always rationing, always trying to glean food from the earth. Wading through the shallows, she bends right over, swishing her hands through piles of colorful, clacking shells. She plucks one from the bottom of the sea bed. Straightens. Holds it in her palm.

“Here, child,” she says, beckoning me over. “Tell me what you hear.”

I’m a little too old for this, I think. But I do it anyway, only rolling my eyes internally.

The shell settles over my ear, dampening every outside sound. Salt air pricks my nostrils; I breathe in, then out, the air rushing across my tongue like the tide. Then I close my eyes, and listen.

I hear the heartbeat of my mother’s womb. I hear time stretching backwards, morphing through millennia. I hear the first cry of a human baby; the first bird’s song to greet the dawn. I hear planets turning, atoms forming, nebulae swirling through the vacuum of open space.

I hear the sun, the moon, fragmented rocks. A spark, a something; everything created from nothing.

I hear the world.

“Well?” My grandmother arches a wiry brow, the faintest smile playing about her lips.

Afraid, I slap the shell away from my head and duck away. “The sea, Wai Po,” I lie, tasting rocks in my mouth. “All I hear is the sea.”

~

When I was younger I used to play with shells on the bed while Wai Po rearranged her pearls. She had so many, all strung on different lengths of string—some as big as red dates, others small as fishes’ eyes. I used to beg and beg her to let me touch them, play with them. Usually she said no. Occasionally, though, she would say yes.

The pearls, she always said, are a penance. Payment for my services.

“What services?” I would ask, in my eight-year-old innocence.

My grandmother lived alone, somewhat apart from the village. I called her Wai Po, but the locals called her nǚ wū.

Witch.

She wasn’t a witch, not really. At least I didn’t think so. What she did was help people. Fix problems. She should’ve been called a fixer-upper.

Specifically, she helped women. They came to her—often in the void of night—and shut themselves in her bedroom for hours, whispering. When they emerged, as though from a chrysalis, they would press pearls into my grandmother’s palm and kiss her papery cheek. I always noticed they somehow seemed less substantial, more translucent, as though their color was being leached from their bodies. As though they were beginning to leave this world.

Then they would disappear, gone from the village to be never seen again. Black birds would come, harbingers of gloom, gathering on fenceposts and the rooftops of houses.

After such events people would talk of monsters, of demons, and continue hissing the word.

Witch.

I hated it. I hated it. I knew Wai Po was helping those women, but I hated the way rumors clung to my skin. I hated the way folks stared when I walked down the street, the way they’d surreptitiously pace a wide arc around me. But most of all I hated the other children. The way they spat on me, teased me. “Granddaughter of a witch!” they’d taunt, throwing rocks at my feet to see if I would trip. “Spawn of a witch!”

When I asked my grandmother about it on one of my daily visits, she said to ignore them. The women, she said, were not disappearing.

They were escaping.

            “Escaping from what?” I asked.

            My grandmother lowered herself onto the bed, bracing herself with her hands on her knees. “Fetch one of those, child,” she said, pointing to one of her pearl necklaces nestled within a velvet-lined box

            I picked it up, feeling the disproportionate weight of it in my fingers. Scrambling onto the bed behind her, I fastened it around her neck.

            “Do you know,” she said, the consonants languid, coating the top of her tongue. “That pearls are made of pain?”

            “What do you mean, Wai Po?” I replied, stroking the smooth spheres, watching the way light refracted around the luster.

            My grandmother chuckled, then shook her head. “It is difficult to explain,” she said. “Next time we gather oysters, let me show you.”

            Next time was nearly a week away, and by the time we made our descent to the beach I was nearly jumping from my skin.

            “Show me,” I said, bouncing on my toes. “Show me now?”

            My grandmother splashed into the shallows, her eyes trained on the water, looking past the shattered light and the darting schools of fish. After carefully rolling up the hems of my cotton trousers, I followed her into the sea.

            Finally, she spotted what she was looking for. Her hand plunged down into the ice-cold water, closing around a tear drop shell.

            It was still wet and glimmering, the outside glowing with oil-slick color.

“Mother of Pearl.” Wai Po grinned, taking a small blunt knife from her pocket. She levered open the two halves of the shell and presented it to me on her palm.

            I looked down and gasped. For sitting in the center of the butterflied shell was a perfect, burnished pearl.

            My eyes wide, I asked her, “How did this get here, Wai Po?” With her encouragement, I plucked it out of the shell and rolled it in my palm, its warm weight pressing against the creases in my skin.

            Grandmother’s smile crinkled her eyes until they resembled two black beetles. “It is made by the oyster, qīn ài de.” She extended one finger and touched it, very gently. “When the oyster feels pain, such as a shard of sand, it does not fall to pieces. It does not die, or resign itself to its suffering. Instead”—here she wrapped her hand around mine, curling the pearl inside my fist— “it makes something beautiful. Can you imagine? Something so beautiful coming from pain?”

            I clutched it to my chest. “Does beauty always come from pain, Wai Po?” I asked then. But grandmother was already wading back to shore.

~

Over time, I stop visiting my grandmother so often. Life gets in the way, then friends, then school. And as I grow, the schoolkids’ taunts start to dig into my skin, working their way under my membrane, my epidermis. Lodging there like a shard of sand.

At times I wish I had a way of making a pearl. Of hardening my heart to the gossip, the rumors, the backhanded insults, the nasty giggles from behind cupped hands. But I quickly realize that my grandmother had spoken nonsense; beauty never came from pain. Not my pain, anyway. All pain did was eat me from the inside, until I was as hollow and as resonant as an abandoned, empty shell.

Sometimes, I’d stomp to Wai Po’s house after school, my head engulfed by whatever dark, hormone-fuelled cloud that had accumulated that day. I would ask—no, demand—she stop helping those women; stop making them disappear. “They think you’re a witch, Wai Po. A witch! Don’t you see? Why can’t you just be normal?!”

            Grandmother would just smile benignly and shake her head. “I’m sorry, bǎobèi,” she’d say. “I can’t stop. One day, it will be you. One day you will understand.”

            I get so absorbed in my own childish woes, that I don’t notice my grandmother’s health deteriorating. It doesn’t occur to me that she shuffles more slowly, or that her shoulders are more bent, or that she doesn’t go oyster-gathering down at the beach much anymore. All that matters to me is that people judge her, and hence me, behind our backs. I try to close myself off to the whispered words, shut out the sounds like shells pressed over my ears. But somehow I still hear them. The insults find their way in, piercing holes through those sea shells like they’re made of brittle paper and not bone.

            The last time I ever see my grandmother, I am yelling at her. Screaming. “Why can’t you stop? Why is your work more important than my happiness? I don’t want this, I never asked for this.” I take a deep breath. “You know what? I don’t want you!”

I snatch up my school bag, shouldering it with unnecessary force, and stomp my way out her door.

            I don’t look back, but feel her eyes following me regardless.

The news comes early one morning, so early the sky is still untouched by dawn. My mother shakes me awake. I’m groggy as I push my hands into the arms of the robe which she is holding.

            My mother bundles me into the back of the car, and in the filtered light of the waning moon, we drive the short, three minute drive to my Grandmother’s little house.

            “What’s going on?” I ask, but Māma shushes me. Wai Po’s house is dark, too dark. And quiet. Normally she snores. Why does she not snore?

            “Mā,” I say, my voice rising. “Why are we here? Where is Wai Po?”

            My mother turns to me, the sheen of tears rendering her sclera shiny like a pearl. “Oh, darling,” is all she says.

            I run to my grandmother’s room, which is shrouded in darkness. Her bedclothes are rumpled. The pillows still bear an impression of her head. But she’s not there. Her nightgown is beside her bed, puddled on the floor. And outside the open window I spy a small black speck; a bird, winging its way toward the low-lying moon.

            Grandmother’s pearl case is lying open. Empty. When I run my numb fingers along the pale velvet lining it disturbs the nap, transforming the color into dark, fleshy pink.

Where have all the pearls gone?

            Their absence hits me harder than my Wai Po’s empty bed. I want to cry, scream, claw out my heart. But instead I run outside, pushing past my mother, slamming up against the barrier of her grief until I’m completely surrounded by my own.

            When I finally stop running, the salt air whips my hair and cools my tear-laced cheeks. Half Moon Bay. I’d believed I was running aimlessly, but my feet took me here. Fully clothed, I charge into the ocean.

Letting the water disperse my tears.

Letting the waves fizzle across my broken shell of skin.

It’s then that I see it. The tiniest pearl, half-hidden in the sea bed. And I hear my grandmother’s voice as a sigh upon the wind.

            Did you know, she’d once said, that pearls are made of pain?

            I didn’t know, Grandmother. I didn’t know before. But now I do. Pain isn’t something that comes from outside. It is, and always has been, something personal. Something internal.

I had thought of pain like barbs, spearing my skin until it was riddled with holes. Little did I know it was the pain on the inside, sequestered within my own shiny shell, that would fester. That would rot. That would break me, eventually.

            It hadn’t been the world I’d first heard inside that shell. It was my own fragile heart, the roaring of my pulse crashing in my chest. My scream had echoed through my head, my mind, until all I could hear was how the universe screamed back.

            The pain was always from me. Within me. The grit that makes the pearl.

            She is free. But what about me?

“I understand now, Wai Po,” I whisper, plucking out the pearl. Tears flash down my face like diamonds. I squint through their hazy veil.

I take this pearl, this pearl of pain, and add it to my own.

About the author:

Ke Shuan Chow

Keshe Chow (she/her) is a Chinese-Australian writer and poet. Her work has featured in Hobart, Maudlin House, Okay Donkey Magazine, Rust + Moth, and others. She was the winner of the 2020 Perito Prize, the 2021 Rachel Funari Prize for Fiction, the 2021 Yarra Literature Prize, and the 2022 Victorian Premier’s Prize for an Unpublished Manuscript. She lives in Australia with three humans, two cats, and far too many house plants.