The Awakening: Learning to See the Invisible

The rain came without warning that afternoon in Kowloon, turning the narrow alleyways of Sham Shui Po into rivers of slick grey stone. Fourteen-year-old Wei Lian pressed her face against the window of her grandmother's cramped third-floor apartment, watching the water cascade down from the corrugated iron rooftops above, forming temporary waterfalls that arced into the alley below. The air smelled of wet concrete, incense from the temple down the street, and the ever-present charcoal smoke from the dai pai dong three buildings over. She had learned to love this smell—though she would never have admitted it to the girls at school who teased her about her grandmother's neighborhood, with its markets selling live chickens and its old women shuffling along in cloth slippers.

Her grandmother, Po Po, sat behind her on the wooden stool that served as her meditation seat, though she had not been meditating. She had been watching Wei Lian watch the rain.

"You see it, don't you?" Po Po said in Cantonese, her voice like old paper—thin but surprisingly strong.

Wei Lian turned from the window. "See what, Po Po?"

"The dance."

Wei Lian almost laughed. "The rain? It's just rain. It comes every summer."

Po Po rose slowly, her joints protesting in the way that seemed to Wei Lian like the natural state of old women. She crossed the small room, her slippers making soft shuffling sounds on the worn wooden floor, and stood beside her granddaughter at the window. She was a small woman, no more than five feet tall, with the kind of compact strength that came from a lifetime of hard work and simple living. Her hair was completely white now, pulled back from her face in a tight bun secured with a single wooden hairpin. Her eyes, though—they were still sharp as the edge of a kitchen knife, dark and deep, and they seemed to hold a knowledge that Wei Lian had never quite been able to fathom.

"Look at the water," Po Po said. "Don't look at the rain. Look at the water."

Wei Lian looked. She saw the grey sheets of falling rain, the puddles forming on the windowsill, the streams running down the walls of the opposite building. She saw the way the water pooled in the low places and flowed around the obstacles in its path. She saw—

She saw something else.

It was not something she could describe, not then, not with any words she knew. It was more like a feeling, or a kind of seeing that went beyond seeing. The water, as it fell and flowed, seemed to follow invisible channels. Where those channels converged, the water moved faster, gathered strength, carved new paths. Where they diverged, it spread thin and weak. And in some places—in certain corners, along certain walls—there were currents of something else, something that moved against the water rather than with it, something that pushed back.

"You see it," Po Po said again, and this time her voice held a note of satisfaction. "I wondered when you would begin to see."

"I don't see anything," Wei Lian said, though she did not believe the words as she spoke them. "It's just water flowing downhill."

"Yes," her grandmother agreed. "Just water flowing downhill. But why does it flow where it flows? Why does it pool here and not there? Why does it seem to prefer one path over another when the ground is flat and there seems to be no reason for preference?"

Wei Lian had no answer. She had never thought to ask.

Po Po placed her weathered hand on Wei Lian's shoulder—a rare gesture of physical affection from a woman who generally kept her distance—and turned her gently away from the window.

"Sit," she said, gesturing to the stool. "It is time for me to show you something. Something I have been waiting to show you since you were very small. Something your mother refused to see, and her mother before her, though I tried. But you, Lian-erh—you have been watching the rain since you were old enough to stand at this window. You have been watching the ants in the courtyard and the birds on the telephone wires. You have been watching the way the incense smoke rises in the temple and the way the breeze moves through the market. You have been watching everything, and now you are beginning to see."

Wei Lian sat on the stool, feeling the smooth worn wood beneath her, feeling the cool dampness of the rain-dampened air on her skin. Her grandmother moved to the small shrine in the corner of the room—three sticks of incense in a red ceramic holder, a faded photograph of a man Wei Lian had never known, a small jade Buddha that Po Po claimed had been in the family for seven generations—and lit the incense. The smoke began to rise in thin blue-grey threads.

"Come here," Po Po said.

Wei Lian rose and joined her grandmother before the shrine. Po Po took her granddaughter's hands and held them up, palms facing each other, about a foot apart.

"Now breathe," she said. "Slowly. In through your nose, out through your mouth. Breathe into your belly, not your chest. Let your shoulders drop. Let your hands relax. Breathe."

Wei Lian breathed. The incense smoke curled upward, twisting in patterns that seemed almost random but that, if she looked closely—and why was she looking so closely at incense smoke?—seemed to follow certain preferred paths. The smoke from the left-hand stick moved differently from the smoke from the middle stick. And there was a place in the air, right in front of them, where the smoke from all three sticks seemed to converge, spiraling together before separating again.

"Now," Po Po said softly, "close your eyes."

Wei Lian closed her eyes. The darkness behind her lids was not complete—there was the faint reddish glow of light through the skin, and the flickering shadows cast by the candle that always burned beside the incense. But she could still feel the room around her, feel the cool dampness of the air, hear the rain on the roof and the distant sounds of the city.

"Can you feel the air?" Po Po asked.

"Yes."

"Can you feel where it moves and where it is still?"

Wei Lian concentrated. She could feel the air in the room, yes, but was there more movement in one place than another? She tried to parse the sensations, to isolate them, to understand—

"Yes," she said suddenly, surprising herself. "There. By the window. The air is moving more there. And there, by the door, it is more still."

"Good." Po Po's voice held approval. "Now I want you to imagine that the air is water. Imagine you are standing in a river, and the river is flowing around you. Feel the current. Feel where it is strong and where it is weak. Feel where it pushes against you and where it flows past without touching."

Wei Lian imagined. And then, to her astonishment, she realized she did not have to imagine. The feeling was already there, had been there all along, she had simply never thought to notice it. There was a current in the room—a flow of something that was not quite air, not quite water, but something in between. It moved from the window toward the shrine, or perhaps from the shrine toward the window, she could not quite tell which direction it preferred. And there was a place, a particular place in the center of the room, where the flow seemed to gather and strengthen before dispersing again.

"Open your eyes," Po Po said.

Wei Lian opened her eyes. Her grandmother was watching her with an expression that was almost, but not quite, a smile.

"There," Po Po said, pointing to the exact spot where Wei Lian had felt the gathering current. "That is where the qi collects. That is the dragon's pool in this room."

"Qi," Wei Lian repeated. The word was familiar—she had heard it in the temple, heard it from the fortune-tellers who set up their tables in the park, heard it in the stories her grandmother told. But she had never thought of it as something you could feel, as something that gathered in pools like water, as something that had currents and eddies and preferred paths.

"Qi is the breath of life," Po Po said. "It is the force that moves through all thi