by Hua Laura Wu
Dawa’s gestures were awkward, but gradually her hands gained confidence. When she held her fingers tightly together, they looked like they were holding soil after a downpour, like the rich soil was being squeezed between her fingers. When she opened her fingers, it looked like her fingers had flicked away soil, as though green droplets of water had splashed from her hand.
Neil was still braiding the rope. The sweet grass passed nimbly through his fingers, and the rope gradually grew longer, like a blue-grey snake coiling in his lap. Finally Neil tied a knot to hold both ends together. It became a loop.
From the corner of his eye, Zhongyue saw Neil pull the grass loop over his head and slowly walk toward Dawa. After a few steps, he hesitated.
Zhongyue made a wrong gesture intentionally. Dawa also made a wrong sign. And Neil took a few more steps and finally stood behind Dawa.
Zhongyue gestured wrongly again. Dawa followed suit. Neil cried out and grabbed Dawa’s fingers from behind her. He pressed them down and then re-opened them. Dawa turned her head and pushed Neil toward Zhongyue. Winking at Zhongyue, she told Neil to tell Dr. Chen that he was wrong.
Neil glanced at Zhongyue. Suddenly he bent down and pounced on him. Since he had prepared for this, Zhongyue grabbed Neil’s collar and pushed him back down to ground. Then he placed his knee firmly on Neil’s chest. Neil was like a huge bug nailed on a board; his limbs were flailing helplessly, and his voice was whining, but his body was stuck. Hearing Dawa’s footsteps behind him, Zhongyue shouted, “Dawa, stop there! You can’t report this fight. It’s no use. No one else is here. You have to let me do it my way, like we discussed.”
Both Dawa and Neil became quiet.
Zhongyue pressed his knee harder. Neil was like a fish in a pot. His mouth opened to cry, but no tears came. Lowering his face close to Neil, Zhongyue said, half in English and half in sign language, “If you dare to bite me again, I will keep you like this for five days.” Then Zhongyue removed his knee from Neil’s chest.
Neil stood up, walked hesitatingly to Dawa, and sat down. He eyed Dawa, but Dawa ignored him and bent down to dig into her straw basket. She took out a packet of cigarettes. Tearing it open, she drew out a cigarette, but her hand was trembling so much that she couldn’t light it. Zhongyue couldn’t help but laugh, and told her she shouldn’t be upset. If she kept spoiling her boy, he would never grow up. Zhongyue said he had done something good for everybody.
Dawa finally lit her cigarette. After a puff, she started to cough. The cough made her eyes fill with tears. Zhongyue grabbed Dawa’s cigarette and threw it away, saying it was not good to smoke in front of children. Dawa pulled off her scarf, dried her eyes, and retrieved the cigarette from a clump of weeds. She didn’t even bother to rub the soil off, but immediately lit it again and took another puff. “Even if I don’t smoke, Joy will,” she sighed. “If Joy doesn’t, someone else will. Winter is deadly long. How can we survive if we don’t smoke?”
Zhongyue guessed that Joy was probably Dawa’s husband. He asked Dawa to bring Joy the following day. Mother is too soft for this naughty boy. Father should make rules.
Dawa laughed loudly. Her laugh was like the sound of a hungry crow whose flapping wings could shake the leaves off a tree. “You should ask people in town who the naughty boy in our family is,” she croaked.
Xiaoyue,
Dad met a stubborn boy here. He’s not even seven years old, but he has spent most of his life struggling. In fact, he is only trying to survive in this world. That’s all.
Although Dawa had carried Neil for five months, her belly only looked a little bigger. Then her belly stopped growing. When she got up one morning, Dawa noticed that her pants were looser then when she had put them on. When she touched her abdomen, it seemed flat. Realizing that her baby was too quiet and wasn’t kicking, Dawa was afraid, and her heart sank. There was no time to call Joy, so she drove to the hospital by herself.
Once in the hospital, she had to stay there. The test results showed something abnormal about the foetus’ umbilical cord and placenta. They weren’t sending enough nutrients to the foetus; instead, they were absorbing the nutrients themselves. Because of that, the baby grew smaller and might die at any moment. The doctor decided to induce labour immediately. Dawa went into the delivery room. She did not even have a change of clothes with her.
After the birth, the baby was washed and wrapped. He skin was the colour of meat, a reddish-black. When Dawa held in the infant in her hands, she could almost cover him with her palm. She only dared look at her baby after she had uttered the words, “Buddha bless you.” Fortunately, he had all four limbs and all of his organs. His face was the size of an egg, but it was covered in wrinkles that exposed two pea-sized eyes. His eyes barely opened and then closed. His mouth opened, and he made a humming noise that sounded like a swarm of mosquitoes—he was crying. Before Dawa had time to comfort him, the doctor had carried him away. The baby had to be put into an incubator where the air was infused with oxygen.
At birth, her son weighed one pound and ten ounces, which broke the hospital’s twenty-five-year-old record.
The doctors told her that he might have pulmonary hypoplasia, brain damage, impaired vision and hearing, bone deformities, and motor nerve damage. It would take a while to define the symptoms. The primary question now was how to help him breathe and prevent any possible infection. “Do you understand?” they asked. “Do you need an interpreter?”
Dawa shook her head, her mind blank. The doctor’s English was not in fact clear. She didn’t understand much of it, but she didn’t need to completely understand it. It was enough for her to understand one of those sentences.
That same night, Dawa signed the treatment plan at the hospital and boarded a helicopter with her infant in the incubator. They flew to the Thunder Bay General Hospital, the nearest one equipped with neonatal facilities. Once on the aircraft, she fell asleep under a thick blanket, snoring loudly. With the sky so close overhead, she was nervous, and her muscles tensed. But now her sky had fallen; she didn’t need to worry any more. Dear heavens, do whatever you like. This was her last clear thought before she fell into a dark dream.
Neil lived in the most advanced incubator at Thunder Bay General Hospital for five months. His first medical problem was jaundice. Then he developed pneumonia followed by persistent eczema. After his recovery, pneumonia attacked him again. One by one, each illness, like a mountain between them, separated Dawa from Neil. Wanting to hold her son close, Dawa had to climb those mountains one after another. Finally, one day, she was too tired to move.
That day the doctor came to give Neil new medicine. The veins on Neil’s hands and feet were too small. The nurse could only insert needles into his head, where there were already two intravenous lines—one for liquid transfusion and the other for blood transfusion. She selected the finest needle, but barely found a vein. Her first try failed. Then she poked a couple of places. Each time she inserted the needle, Neil opened his mouth. Dawa knew that that was Neil’s cry—he didn’t have the energy to make sounds. Dawa felt as if the needle were pricking her heart over and over and chiselling a hole there. It was her flesh and blood at the end of the needle. She couldn’t breathe. Darkness suddenly covered her eyes; she saw nothing.
A moment later, her sight came back, and the nurse said she could hold her baby. Neil could leave the incubator once a day for half an hour. Dawa took Neil and asked the nurse gently, “Can I be alone with him for a couple of minutes?” The nurse nodded and walked away, gently closing the door behind her.
Dawa lay Neil flat on her lap. She gazed at the needles attached to the veins in his head, which glinted dark blue under the dim light. She saw her son’s body filled with intravenous injections, shivering like a jellyfish floating in the water. She stared at his peapod-sized palms, and his hands which formed loose fists, and she knew each of his breaths was a battle; she knew every bone and every bit of flesh i
n his body cried in pain. Nobody could hear his cries; only she heard them clearly. That day, the third needle in Neil’s head was the last straw on the camel’s back. Suddenly it all became too much of a burden. She no longer wanted to climb the mountains between them. Not because she couldn’t, but because Neil couldn’t, and she knew she was the only one who could find a solution.
If the oxygen mask was removed, after five or ten minutes he would no longer have to climb those mountains.
Dawa placed her mouth at Neil’s ear. “Maybe you should go, eh?” she whispered.
Dawa’s voice was very light, like the early morning breeze coming out of the woods. The tree don’t feel it; only the leaves sense its presence. Dawa was negotiating with her baby.
Suddenly, the infant opened his eyes fully. A turbid yellow tear dropped from the corner of his left eye. She wiped it with the back of her hand, but then another cloudy yellow tear came out of the corner of his right eye. She suddenly understood his words. He said, “Climb the mountain. Climb it. No matter how high it is, we should try.” Dawa bent over her son, and began to cry.
When he was discharged, Neil weighed barely five pounds. Dawa wrapped the infant in a woollen blanket, placed him in a basket, and brought her son back to town. Many people stood along the street. The basket was passed from the first person to the last. Neil’s appearance made the most ambiguous blessing sound insincere and Dawa could see the sorrow in everybody’s eyes. What a pity! Pour old Joy! And she guessed what they were thinking.
At the time, Joy was at a bar that opened just before suppertime. Joy only had time to sit on a tall stool and drink his first glass of draft beer. When he heard the news, he grabbed the lemon slice on the glass rim, placed it in his mouth, and hurried onto the street. When the basket was handed to him, he had a moment of surprise. The Thunder Bay General Hospital wasn’t far, but it wasn’t close by either. It took a few hours to get there on a Greyhound bus. He’d been there twice during Dawa’s hospitalization; the first time was when Neil was born, and the other time was two months ago. Even after so much time, he still felt his paternity. The infant’s eyelids shivered under the strong afternoon sun. Although the baby was ugly, he still softened Joy’s heart. In fact, at that moment, Joy sincerely wanted to be a good father. It was later that he couldn’t control himself.
Since then, Dawa and Neil had continued to climb their mountains, high or low; they had gradually gotten over them. Only the last mountain, rising steep into the sky, blocked them completely. They seemed unable to climb over it. That mountain was called deafness.
Xiaoyue,
I just heard today why that deaf child was called Neil. His surname was Maas. Neil Maas was the name his mother gave him in order to humour Canadians; only she knew the real significance of it. If you omit some sounds when speaking it fast, it becomes Nima. It’s a common Tibetan name, meaning the sun. Neil’s mother was born and raised in a small town in Qinghai where both Han Chinese and Tibetans live. How she came to live in this remote town in Canada, I believe, is a mysterious and interesting story, but she didn’t want to tell me. Her name is Dawa, meaning blue moon in Chinese. A mother named Moon calls her son Sun. I think she holds a lot of hope for him. However, such a name, given to such a child, seems somewhat cruel.
September arrived. It was like summer at noon, but like fall in the early morning and evening. It was the last weekend before school started. Sioux Lookout was the largest town within several hundred square kilometres. Its department store was in the largest shopping mall in the area. The mall was a bit crowded on this particular day—parents from everywhere around had come to shop for school supplies for their children. With no need to rush to work, Dawa dropped Neil at Zhongyue’s place, and then drove to the mall to get things for Neil.
Watching the dust dancing after Dawa’s car as it vanished at the end of the dirt road, Zhongyue squatted near Neil. “The person who controls you has gone. Do you want to learn or play?”
Neil didn’t speak, but his clay-like face moved, exposing two rows of grey teeth. Guessing this was probably Neil’s smile, Zhongyue sat the boy in his car and drove to the corner store.
The woman storeowner, who knew Zhongyue, shouted at him: “Ah Ningning!” Zhongyue knew this meant “Greetings” in Ojibwa, so he said the same. The owner asked what he wanted. Zhongyue said he needed a can of skim milk and a roll of hemp string. The woman filled a bag quickly. Hesitating for a second, Zhongyue asked for a pack of locally produced cigarettes. Stifling her laugh, the woman said, “You’ve learned fast. Tobacco made here is soothing and also much cheaper than that in Toronto.” When the purchases were bagged, the owner got Zhongyue’s change and asked him if he was still teaching old Joy’s wife. Zhongyue said that she didn’t know how to read, but that she had learned how to use sign language and gestures. He asked how the storeowner knew Joy, since he lived in Whitefish. The woman smiled ambivalently, saying that everybody in the area knew Joy and his family. Zhongyue placed his finger on his lips and shushed. Noticing Neil in the corner, the owner sighed, “He’s deaf, ha. He can’t hear.” She took a small packet of jelly beans from the counter and put it in Neil’s hand.
Zhongyue led Neil to the door, but was called back by the woman. Looking at him, she shook her head. After hesitating for a while she said, “That old Joy is a jerk after a few drinks. You should be careful.”
Neil got into the car and opened the packet of jelly beans. He chewed the first one, but then spit it out. Then he rolled down the window, and threw out the whole pack. Zhongyue watched him and thought that the kid was not stupid.
Zhongyue bought the hemp string to fly a kite. He had a kite that he had bought from a fair before he left China. It was very old. The kite, in the shape of a swallow, had a black body with a red beak and eyes. Its tail was tied with long festoons of coloured paper. The line was broken and hadn’t been fixed. A few years earlier, he had taken his daughter to participate in the Kite Festival on Toronto Centre Island. The kite had gotten stuck in a tree, and with a great effort, he had managed to get it down. Xiaoyue had had a good cry, and Zhongyue could still remember his daughter’s weight on his back, her tears hot on the nape of his neck. Does Xiaoyue still fly kites? Does she go with Xiang, her potential stepfather?
Xiang had been Xiaoxiao’s colleague. He had a wife in China. He was supposedly in the middle of a divorce. Xiaoxiao must’ve been in his heart for a long time, but Xiaoxiao hadn’t been sure about him. But that was a while ago, of course. His daughter mentioned Xiang often in her emails. Maybe Xiang also tried to please Xiaoyue, for Xiaoxiao’s sake, of course. Zhongyue felt that his daughter was like that kite, stuck on that remote tree—Xiang. With the string still in his hand, he was unsure whether he should pull. If he pulled too hard, the line would break, and Xiaoyue would spend her whole life with Xiang. If he didn’t pull, he would watch his daughter drift farther and farther away from him. He thought of calling Xiaoxiao that evening to talk about bringing his daughter to Sioux Lookout for the Christmas break. Whenever he had mentioned this idea before, Xiaoxiao had always had a vague answer—perhaps Xiang had already made plans for the holiday. Zhongyue would only mention it one more time—the last time. If she consented or not, he would drive to Toronto and bring his daughter here.
The weather was good. When he looked into the sky from the slope, he found it different from when he was on the ground. That clear sky, like a huge blue cloth, wrapped the slope, the land, and the lake tightly and thoroughly; no air could escape from it. Only occasionally drifting clouds would make narrow gaps in that blue fabric. If the wind blew in from the gap, the kite would fly away. The hemp string in his hand would get shorter, and his swallow would seem to be riding on a cloud.
Neil ran after Zhongyue. Huffing and puffing, he called, “Bird! Bird!” Zhongyue stopped suddenly—this was the first time that Neil had talked to him. Getting out a piece of paper from his pocket, he wrote down a large word—“K
ITE”—and held it in front of Neil. Zhongyue told him that it wasn’t a bird, but a kite. “Say ‘kite.’” Neil looked down at his shoes and said nothing. Zhongyue held up Neil’s chin and asked, “Neil, would you like to fly the bird?” Neil hesitated and then nodded. Zhongyue shook the line. “If you say the word ‘kite’ ten times, I’ll let you hold it.”
Before hearing Neil’s answer, Zhongyue pulled the kite in and walked away without looking back, knowing that Neil was stumbling after him.
When he finally stopped, Zhongyue knelt down, coiled the string around Neil’s index finger, and then lifted him onto his shoulders. Then he ran with the boy along Penguin Lake. The wind whistled past his ears as startled flocks of wild geese hovered over the lake. Zhongyue was all ears. The sounds of the wind and geese gradually faded, and he only heard Neil’s cries.
“Kite! Kite! Kite! Kite! Kite! Kite! Kite…!”
That day, Neil shouted “kite” several dozens of times. The sound of the word beat against Zhongyue’s eardrums. He put Neil down and told him that he could stop shouting. Neil’s voice was hoarse. Suddenly, Neil left the kite to Zhongyue and he bolted toward the woods.
Neil stopped under a tree, unzipped his pants and urinated against the trunk. Hearing Neil doing his business, Zhongyue felt an urgent need to relieve himself as well. He tied the kite to a stone, opened his zipper, and urinated just like Neil had. The urine from the long night came out, one high and one low; one thick and one thin. The buzzing sound in the wind accompanied its warm odour, and then the sound got quieter. Zhongyue felt his depression melt away with all the smelly urine, and each pore of his body opened to the clear breeze and sunlight. Incredible pleasure rose in him.
They zipped their pants up and walked out of the woods. The kite bumped along on the ground. At the end of the sandy road, away from the slope, a yellow dot moved toward them slowly. Neil said that his mother was coming. Zhongyue asked what he would say when he saw his mom. Thinking for a while, Neil suddenly pointed to Zhongyue’s crotch and then his own. “You, big. I, small.” It took a moment, but when Zhongyue understood what he had heard, he burst into laughter. Seeing Zhongyue laugh, Neil followed suit. They laughed so hard they couldn’t walk. They lay down on the grass in the sunshine, stretching their arms and legs.