Smoke and Sweetness by Zhui Ning Chang
A florist ponders on her relationship with her granddaughter and her legacy.
First published in Stories for a Cause II (Tabung Pelangi) in 2021. Content warning: internalised homophobia.
From the author:
I’ve been fumbling my way back to telling stories after a hiatus of around ten years. This story was selected as part of a zine to raise funds for queer Malaysian communities during the COVID-19 pandemic — it felt right to begin my narrative rediscovery locally, and to do it in service of a cause. I came home after a decade abroad due to the pandemic — this is as much me pulling apart the idea of my country, what I know of it and what it knows of me, and how to weave that into my writing, as it is about exploring the intersections of queerness across generations. I have an idea of what it means to be queer, and what it means to be Malaysian, but what do those two aspects mean in tandem? I wanted to touch on many kinds of family — blood, found, and chosen. How we may unlearn ingrained assumptions, the ways the world has (and has not) changed over time, and how we navigate complex webs of love, obligation, selfhood and community. Family (in every definition) is tangled, complicated, requires constant communication and commitment. It is a choice, every day, to put in the work for those relationships, but when you have made that choice, love and support should not be conditional on any aspect of identity. I wanted to ask my main character those questions, explore what she chose for herself in the past, and how it is never too late to start paving kinder, better choices in the future.
Listen to the author read an excerpt of the piece:
The faint scent of incense clings to every nook and cranny of the shop, a consequence of setting up next door to the local Chinese temple. The taste of smoke, sandalwood and jasmine curls around leaves and petals.
People come to her shop to buy bouquets and single stems and seed packets and gardening supplies. Six months ago, her granddaughter convinced her to stock a series of watering cans with “chibi” animal designs, and they are still selling well with the local university students.
Some flowers she imports from Cameron Highlands, same as every other florist, but she cultivates most of her best flowers by her own hand, toiling away in her garden. Her own mother had taught her how to turn the soil, pack the pots, study the line of each petal and stalk. The strongest wish is one that has carried the touch of her care from its inception.
Pay attention, she taught her granddaughter, long ago. Press their stories into the flowers, and you will see the patterns underneath.
There is a boy, drifting about the shelves. He is tall in a gangly, half-grown way, probably a Form Six student, fiddling with his phone. There are a handful of other customers, so she lets him wander, keeping half an eye on him to make sure he does not slip a flower past. It has been known to happen.
Ten minutes in, he circles around and approaches her, wary and uncertain. “Um, Auntie? I’m looking for a custom bouquet. Please help?”
Finally. “Who are the flowers for?” She starts to lay out protective plastic sheeting and cream wrapping paper, smoothing out the wrinkles. “What’s your budget?”
“Um, my girlfriend,” the boy stammers, fiddling with his phone. “Any price is OK. I’ll pay.”
“Lucky. Your first time in this shop?” She already knows, but the soothing tone seems to steady him. “Good. Whatever you’ve heard about this place, it only works when your desire is true. So, tell me.”
His gaze skitters from floor to counter to peeling ceiling and back, a rapid hamster wheel cycle. She takes pity on him. “How long have the two of you been together?”
His cheeks darken in a soft blush. “It’s our one-month anniversary tomorrow.”
“That’s sweet. What’s she like? Are you taking her somewhere to celebrate?”
She shuffles out from behind the counter and heads to the roses, pulling out several stalks — predictable, but classics rarely go wrong. Behind her, she hears him take a deep, quavering breath, and his voice turns softer, dreamy. “We’re going to a café not far from here, near the sea. I — she’s a good cook, and makes funny jokes, and I want to take her to look out at the water. Is that — is that too much?”
“It’s never too much,” she calls over her shoulder. She adds a smattering of pink peonies, a touch of baby’s breath tucked under the chin of luscious rose petals. “As long as you share your memories sincerely, I can always put the right bouquet together for you.”
Still, she frowns down at the current arrangement. It isn’t quite right. She has made similar bundles so many times, this one should be singing with ease, but it is hollow, incomplete in some fundamental way.
She carries everything back to the counter, and starts to arrange them properly. The pervasive sense of wrongness nags at her. “Anything you tell me will not leave this shop. Remember, the wish has power only when it is made with a true heart.”
When she looks up, she catches in his expression a trace of guilt and fear. He knows the bundle is incomplete.
“It’s my boyfriend,” he blurts out, and then puts a hand to his mouth. His eyes are wide. He looks as though he has never spoken the words aloud. “It’s my boyfriend.”
Her hands jerk involuntarily. His expression morphs into alarm.
“No, no, don’t worry. I know what is missing now. Come here.” She points at the lavender shrubs next to the counter. “Choose what you like.”
Contrary to his entire time in the shop, the boy is slow and measured in evaluating the lavender, and when he has made his selection he deposits it gently in her hands. She folds it into the bundle, threads the arrangement with wire, and then wraps it all up. “Congratulations on your anniversary.”
“I — thank you.” His voice only trembles a little. He takes the bouquet with the same careful hands, and inhales once. He looks so surprised by the resulting sneeze that she laughs.
“Keep it watered and in a sunlit room, and it will last another month,” she offers. “Your boyfriend can look at it longer, keep the wish in your hearts strong.”
Once he has paid and left, the shop grows quiet, traffic slowing as the sun inches towards its zenith.
Her granddaughter’s voice echoes down the years, tiny fists buried in the dirt. I want to play, I want to see the fishes!
The flowers wait for no one, she tells her. If you miss the hour, they are gone forever.
Just before he left, the boy asked how long the wish would last — like a hundred boys before him. Nothing is forever, is her standard answer. Then again, she still buys a toto number when snakes slide out of the neighbourhood longkang. A young customer once told her about chain emails they used to send to classmates, promising miracles if the chain remains unbroken. The temple next door floods with visitors during exam season.
She has been running this shop for thirty years. Her flowers are but a part of those rituals, those little wishes — tiny flares of hope, chances to be seized, luck to be courted. Just in case.
She hopes the boy treasures what he has today, before the future steals it from him.
Most of her flowers are sold to temple visitors, seeking love, luck, luxury — all the usual requests to the gods. It is comforting, a conversation that she conducts with the temple caretaker whose seekers search her out first.
One of her regulars, a middle-aged woman who comes in on the fifteenth of each month, enters during an ebb in the afternoon crowd. They make small talk while she prepares the arrangement, asking after the usual: health, family, street gossip.
“Same as usual today?” She is already bundling the order: carnations and chrysanthemums, clean and fragrant.
The woman frowns. “Maybe something different. You know that I pray for my family and my child in Singapore, to have a peaceful and successful life. So far, Guan Im has been kind to us.” Her gaze grows faraway. “You always tell me that this is a place for honesty, and nothing less. My child told me last week that they aren’t a girl or a boy so they aren’t my daughter anymore. I don’t know if that changes the flowers.”
Ah Ma, I have something to tell you. I want to get married — to a girl. I want to ask for your blessing. I want her to pour tea for you at our ceremony.
“It depends,” she replies, her wrinkled hands plucking at a knot of begonias. “How do you feel about it?”
“Young people have strange words for this, nowadays. In our day you’d get on with it, what’s all these words for? They think a different name means they aren’t my child anymore? I carried them in my womb for nine months, no?” The woman is gesturing, and her fingers brush over a bush of jejarum, newly bloomed. “I don’t understand it, but they sent me all these articles, told me to read them.”
The flowers are guided by a touch of fate. She crosses the shop and retrieves the jejarum with their needlepoint nectar, slides the cluster into the heart of the bundle, a burst of vivid red amid the soft whites and pale yellows.
“Here,” she rings up the purchase. “Your child wants you to know them. That’s it.”
Her mind skitters away from her own granddaughter. Who would feed and care for her when she was old? Who would she pass on the knowledge of seeds and songs to? What would she do if the world demanded recompense at her door? In this country, anyone can be made a scapegoat. Best to keep your head low and look after your own.
The woman looks at the bouquet, long and searching, and huffs. “Young people can be silly. Nothing changes the fact that I’m their mother. Guan Im knows: I ask only for them to be safe, healthy and happy. And if this is what happiness means to them, then that’s what I’ll ask for.” She nods decisively, then takes her flowers and leaves.
What do you have, if you do not have your blood?
She told her granddaughter: I’ll think about it.
The call to prayer echoes down from the mosque over the crest of the hill, a low hum jostling with the traffic honks and purring engines, the high cries of seagulls wheeling overhead. The evening light spills into the shop like a yolk, deepening the shadows. The flowers seem to lengthen, stretching to chase the last of the light.
She is jotting down inventory notes and calculating her accounts, peering down at her logbook, when the last customer of the day crosses the threshold.
The man looks older than even her, with sun-browned skin and white hair receding from his hairline. He walks slowly, one hand gripping a tongkat, but his eyes are clear and sharp. He gives his story easily, in the manner of old men who enjoy sharing their memories, allowing others to carry the same remembrances.
“My best friend,” he says, with a wistful smile. “We have known each other since 1942. Now I use a walking stick, and he is in a wheelchair, but we go to the park every Friday evening, like we have been doing for twenty years since retirement. It has been many good years, and I hope to take some flowers to the temple and pray for as many as we can have.”
Her stiffened joints ache as she gets off the chair to help him with his order. “A special occasion, it sounds like.”
“At our age, every day we spend in each other’s company is a special occasion.”
She pauses, a memory rising. In her youth, she played pebble games with her best friend and chewed on tapioca slices in the jungles when their families hid from the Japanese. When they were grown, they clasped hands when stepping out together, wrote each other long letters across state lines. She has looked, once, twice, wondering.
In the end, they each married upstanding men, and then there were children crawling all over and demanding attention, and she had no more time to write fat letters to old friends. She did not love her husband less — it was a different love, but no less true. Of course she had to wed. What else was there?
She has pressed thousands of seeds into soil, potted countless plants from one home to another, planted wishing into the hearts of so many blossoms. These bouquets will wither in time, like any mortal thing. Their fragrance is a transient pleasure; they are, after all, only flowers.
For the old man, she selects sunflowers, brilliant and bold. A lasting love deserves its joy.
“I wish —” her voice catches somehow, and she has to swallow to get her next words out. “I wish the two of you a long and peaceful road together.”
He grips his flowers in one hand and his tongkat in the other, and shuffles out of the shop, slow and steadfast and sure.
When her granddaughter last came home, she brought gifts of butter biscuits in double-decker tins for the entire family. Along with it, there is a box of pressed flowers, in every hue of the rainbow, dried and woven into bracelets.
Take your time, her granddaughter told her. I know it’s a lot to ask.
Is it too late to grow something new, so long as the land is rich and the hands are willing?
What is family, but a thousand shared memories, rituals performed and forgotten side by side, collective hands buried in the earth with damp soil under fingernails? It is not blood that makes the wishing true, after all. No seed buds without care.
If the heavens are kind, the flower shop will remain standing, the temple will continue to welcome visitors. When her time comes, her children’s hands will wash her clean and lay her in the earth to reunite with the roots, but this is her legacy: the customers who come every festival day, every turn of the new year, every time someone falls in love with someone else, wanting to make a wish on a blossoming bud. It is her daughter, her granddaughter, her neighbour’s children whom she has trained to run the till and turn the soil, the part-time student workers who carefully free each grown stalk from the earth. It is the pale haze of incense that blankets the storefront, the fresh fragrance of new stock, the tinkling of wind chimes when someone steps into the shop, the careful trim of her garden out back.
She walks slowly through her shop, checking the flower rows, locking the till and securing the back door. Her hands move easily across the pots: pink tulips, irises, orchids, and bright birds of paradise — her granddaughter’s favourite. She draws them out, bundling and blowing on them, imprinting care, constancy, comfort. The colours may not exactly line up, but then the flowers are only the carrier baskets. It is the wish that matters.
She takes a breath, lifts her phone to her ear, waits for the call to connect.
“Hello? Ah Ma here. I’ve got some flowers for you.”
Zhui Ning Chang is a Malaysian editor, writer, librettist and theatre maker based in London, UK. They serve as the editor-in-chief in the award-winning khōréō magazine, the assistant editor for SFWA’s Publishing Taught Me series with Nisi Shawl, and co-editor of the anthology Best of Malaysian Short Fiction in English 2010-2020. Their writing for performance includes the queer rom-com Seashore Yuanfen and the time travel romp Asian Pirate Musical; their reviews and essays have appeared in Strange Horizons, The BSFA Review, Library Journal, Fantasy/Animation, and more. Currently, Zhui Ning is a PhD researcher in decolonial Southeast Asian speculative fiction at Birkbeck, University of London.
Website: zhuiningchang.com
BlueSky: @witchywonderer
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