by Su Tong
‘Me? Worked up? About what?’ Her son looked as though he would no longer bother to reply, so she explained, ‘Your uncle holds a grudge against me. He didn’t tell me on purpose – on purpose, I know it.’
Her son and the suitcase were standing crookedly on the steps when he said, ‘Do you call this a family visit? So what are we going to do? Are we going to look for Uncle Yongqing, or what?’
Yongshan stood still, not answering; she had stopped by the window on the third floor landing and looked outside. ‘This used to be the countryside. Something Commune . . . "Victory Commune".’ She went on, ‘I used to take Yongqing here to watch the open-air movies; we would walk along the paths at night, beside the pitch-dark paddies, and there were vegetable patches, too, where you could hear the frogs croak in the flooded fields, and there were fireflies sparkling back and forth.’
Her son wasn’t interested in hearing about her endless reminiscences, and said, ‘A family visit, you said. Well, might I trouble you to produce the family?’
Yongshan turned round to rebuke him, ‘Shut up. Who said anything about a family visit? I haven’t been to Licheng in six years; I’ve just come here to pay my hometown a visit, if that’s all right with you.’
Her son looked at her a little afraid, and his taunting turned to lamentation: ‘So, now we’re going to drag our suitcase around the streets. People will think we’re migrant workers.’
Yongshan twisted away, still looking out of the window. ‘There’s nothing wrong with coming back for a visit,’ she said and seemed to have settled on this idea. ‘We can go and see your uncle, or we can just forget it. We’ll stay in a hotel if we have to; it won’t break the bank.’
It was an afternoon in May, and the sun was very fine. They were on the north side of Licheng and the air was seasoned with the foul smell of dust and a faint, unidentifiable floral scent. The two travellers crossed the little square inside the gates of the housing complex; it was a crude, cramped little square, featuring concrete grapevine trellises, and though there were no grapevines on them, there were flowerbeds filled with roses and peonies. The sun lit up the faces of a few strangers here and there, making them look golden from a distance. They stopped for a moment in the square and her son went to the store to buy a Coke, and when he came back he saw that Yongshan had sat down to chat with a woman who was knitting on the flower terrace – so he went off to watch two men playing chess. Soon Yongshan lifted up her suitcase and said, ‘Hurry up! What are you watching the chess game for?’
Her son ran up to her, ‘I thought you’d met someone you knew. What on earth were you chatting about if you don’t know her?’
Yongshan said, ‘Can’t I talk to someone I don’t know if I want to? I thought she was someone else – Huang Meijuan, a girl who went to elementary school with me, that’s who I thought she was.’
She looked forlorn for a moment before turning back to look once again at the knitting woman, who had her head bowed as she worked in the sunlight. The yarn was a garish shade of peach, so she remarked casually, ‘What a tacky colour. I wonder who would wear it?’ Then she heaved a sigh and said, ‘Strange. It’s not as if Licheng is all that big, but I haven’t met anyone I know since I got here.’
Her son took a sip of Coke and tilted his head to look at the greyish-blue May sky. He pondered a moment, then said something that sounded as though he’d learnt it from a TV series. He must have been a good mimic, for it struck his mother speechless.
‘It’s a shame you still remember Licheng,’ he said, ‘because Licheng forgot about you a long time ago.’
They took the public bus to Cabbage Market; the trip was Yongshan’s decision.
‘No matter what, we must go to Cabbage Market to take a look at the old house. We have to go this time, because next time there’ll be nothing left to see.’ She tried to push her son onto the bus, but he wouldn’t let her touch him and shrugged her hands off.
‘Don’t grab me. What is this? A kidnapping?’ he said. ‘I’ll visit whatever you make me visit – we can tour the outhouses for all I care.’ He had likened the old house to an outhouse. He regretted the comment as soon as it left his lips. He stuck out his tongue, not daring to look at his mother. Fortunately for him, Yongshan was trying to find seats and had paid no attention to her son’s mumbling. She claimed a seat and told him to sit down, but when he refused Yongshan took the seat herself.
She turned her head slightly to look at the streets outside the window, and said, ‘I remember. There used to be a cemetery here, too, we walked past here when we went to the open-air movies. We were always too scared to look this way – the cemetery was to the left of the road – so we all kept our eyes fixed right and ran for all we were worth.’ Her son wasn’t paying any attention, and his indifference contained a message for Yongshan: ‘Don’t count on me co-operating. I’m completely uninterested in this city.’ For a moment, Yongshan’s eyes wandered between the road outside the window and her son, then finally they fixed on her son’s suitcase.
‘Actually, I know why your uncle’s put off.’ Her line of thought had jumped suddenly to the question of her brother. ‘I know he’s avoiding me on purpose. They got some money from knocking the old house down and he’s worried I’m going to ask him for my share.’
Her son snorted and said, ‘Well, are you?’
Yongshan stared at her son and said nothing, then all the way to their stop she remained silent. He could see turmoil in his mother’s eyes, like brewing storm clouds, but due to his tender age, he didn’t realize what his mother was thinking about. Yongshan was silent and so was her son. He followed her off the bus and waited for her to lead the way, but she was standing beneath the bus stop sign and looking all around her. Suddenly she said, ‘Where are we?’
Yongshan was lost. She was on her way home, but she was lost. The water tower at the soap factory must have been pulled down at some point, and without the water tower, Yongshan couldn’t find the way to Cabbage Market. How could so much be gone? Yongshan watched the crowds of people and the buildings on both sides with something approaching dread. She said, ‘I walked this road for dozens of years. How come I don’t recognize anything? Do I really need to ask for directions to get to my own home?’
In fact, it was the same as everywhere else; the city of Licheng had been transformed through the efforts of various government departments. The narrow, winding roads characteristic of the old city had been resolutely straightened and widened, but it was more than a physical change – they had also forced people to abandon their old, unscientific sense of orientation. Many women now lost their way on the streets because, without a certain corner store, postbox or water tower, they could no longer find the associated street. Yongshan was just one of those disoriented women. She grumbled for a moment, then abandoned her attempts to find the tower. Finally, she asked directions from an old man selling fruit by the roadside, who immediately gave her the information she needed. The old man pointed to a great expanse of ruins to the north and said ‘That’s the way you’ll want to be going; where the buildings have all been half torn down. That’s Cabbage Market.’
Yongshan hadn’t expected that her return home after seven years would consist of an itinerary of ruins. Looking down at the broken bricks and tiles covering the ground she said, ‘How are we supposed to get across this?’
Her son behind her said, ‘If you can’t get across it, then let’s forget it. We could say we’ve paid our respects to the old place, right?’ But Yongshan had already walked over to pick up the suitcase. ‘We’ll have to carry the suitcase,’ she said. ‘Be careful where you put your feet; there’s broken glass.’
And so it was that the ruins of Cabbage Market welcomed back Yongshan and her son so many years after their departure. Late Qing dynasty, Republican era and socialist wood and bricks mixed together and mourned in the May sun for their vanished ways of life, and now the tranquillity of their mourning had been disturbed by their last visitor. Perhaps every brick and t
ile in the ruin remembered Yongshan, remembered that girl of many years ago, scampering back and forth between Cabbage Market and the cultural centre with an accordion on her back. Perhaps they were saying, ‘Yongshan! Hello. How’s that accordion practice going?’ But Yongshan couldn’t hear them. All Yongshan heard was the rumble of a bulldozer rolling in a construction site nearby, mixed in with the ‘lalala‘ of a female rock singer coming from a nearby music store. Besides, Yongshan was now the mother of a thirteen-year-old and had long ago abandoned the accordion. With difficulty, Yongshan and her son were making the way back home. Neither one looked very happy. The rubble itself engendered their resentment, since it was impossible to roll a suitcase through it. And so, despite their hostile mood, they were compelled to carry the heavy suitcase between them. Mother and son puffed with fatigue, and every now and then the boy viciously kicked a glass bottle or crushed an innocent tile fragment. Meanwhile, Yongshan cursed the havoc and disorder of the rubble, but, as anyone knows, rubble is never tidy, and so her complaints were somewhat unreasonable. A rat in the rubble seemed to want to warn the visitors about something, for it suddenly popped out of a pile of bricks and tiles, frightening Yongshan.
‘That scared me!’ she said, covering her mouth. ‘What’s a rat doing here? And such a big one!’
Her son said, ‘Of course there are rats in trash heaps. Where else are you going to find rats, if not in trash heaps?’
Yongshan frowned and took a look around. Towards the west, a parasol tree was still standing, albeit with great difficulty, among the piles of bricks, and towards the east, the façade of a brick-and-wood house had survived the wreckage, standing lofty and solitary like a stage set. By the eaves, a line of writing could still be clearly read: ‘Watch and Clock Repair While You Wait’.
Yongshan’s eyes suddenly lit up: ‘I know this place. This was Mr Kang’s place. You remember him. Mr Kang – ugly as sin but great with his hands – he fixed watches.’ She looked to the left side of the rubble, searching for something. ‘The well was right here. I used to come to the well every day to do the washing, clean the rice, and rinse out the mop,’ Yongshan said. ‘How strange. Why can’t I find the well?’
‘It’d be strange if you could,’ said her son. ‘It must be under the garbage.’
Yongshan’s eyes paused on the tree. ‘Let’s go and have a look.’ She sounded quite excited. ‘When I graduated from elementary school, I carved my name on that tree, and when I came back from the countryside it was still there. I grew up with that tree. I wonder if my name is still on it.’
‘I’m not going,’ her son said. ‘Go and have a look yourself if you want to.’
Yongshan glared at her son and went over to the tree by herself. She walked, her back slightly bent, over the pile of bricks, and made two turns around the tree. What she saw was a cracked and battered tree trunk, on whose coarse bark someone had written a line in red paint: ‘Piss here and you’re a dog!’ accompanied by a very rude drawing. Yongshan couldn’t find her name, so she lowered her head, reflecting, and sullenly walked down from the brick pile. Her son had taken a seat on the suitcase; he must have guessed the result, for he looked at his mother with eyes filled with ridicule. She tried to smooth her disappointment over and said, ‘It’s good that it’s gone. Who knows what kind of people rub up against that tree. Disgusting!’
The sky suddenly began to grow dark. They had reached the depths of the Cabbage Market rubble and the orange sunlight had vanished from the scene of devastation. They were a stone’s throw away from their old home when Yongshan loosened her grip on the suitcase. ‘Let’s put it down,’ she said to her son. ‘If I didn’t tell you that behind this wall is our old house, would you have recognized the place?’
‘No,’ her son said. ‘Who can remember stuff like that?’
Yongshan stared at the half wall still standing. She looked for the roof, but there was none. Nor was there a door. She saw the cement steps that led up to the front door, but they were swallowed in the debris. Yongshan looked and looked, and suddenly she was angry with her son. ‘You can’t remember anything? Your grandma looked after you here till you were three. Right up until her heart attack, when she had to go to the hospital, she was the one who cared for you. Don’t you remember that either? You don’t recognize this, you can’t remember that – you’re not human, you’re a pig!’
Her son discovered, to his surprise, that his mother’s eyes were shining with the glow of furious overreaction. ‘I remember grandma, but that doesn’t mean I remember the house,’ he uttered quietly in his defence, then he said nothing more; for though he understood that he had provoked his mother’s wrath, he felt guiltless. And it really was true that he had no recollection whatsoever of Licheng, or of the old house in Cabbage Market.
Besides Yongshan and her son, the vast rubble of Cabbage Market was completely empty. Sunset glowed over the main street not far away, and the sound of people and cars would occasionally subside, then a fragmentary, hardly discernible, rustling would drift across the rubble, a sound like a subterranean sigh. A pigeon flew in the face of dusk towards the rubble and circled over mother and son for a while. Then, panicking, it flew to the parasol tree. It was probably somebody’s domestic pigeon, lost a long time ago, and now that it had finally found the way back to its shed, both shed and owner had vanished.
There was only half a wall left of the old house, and in it half a window. Yongshan walked up to it. The window-frame had had many layers of red paint, and the long years of sunlight and rain had given the surface stripy wrinkles, like the wrinkles on an old man’s body. The glass was broken, but the frame was still firmly set into the broken wall. Yongshan stretched out her hand to give the window a push, and it opened with a creak. Something fell down off the windowsill. Yongshan looked in and found that it was an ink bottle, which had fallen into the debris inside without breaking.
‘It’s your grandfather’s ink bottle,’ said Yongshan. ‘He used it to correct his students’ homework. He liked to keep it on the windowsill.’
Her son, standing behind her, peered inside; perhaps he was trying to remember the brief time he had spent in this house as a child. Maybe he couldn’t recall, or maybe he wasn’t trying, but he said, ‘It’s like an earthquake zone. It’s as if we’re earthquake victims.’
Yongshan touched the window; the greasy frame was covered in a layer of dust which came off on her hand. ‘When I was small, I liked to stand by this window and play the accordion,’ she said. ‘Your grandpa could read music, and sometimes before recitals he would make me practice, then he’d stand next to me and turn the pages.’
‘I never knew you played the accordion,’ her son said. ‘What happened to it?’
‘I gave it to your uncle,’ she said. ‘Your grandpa wanted him to learn it, but he didn’t take to it. Your uncle’s a good-for-nothing; later your grandma told me he sold the accordion to a scrap collector for twenty bucks.’
The pigeon on the pagoda tree flew back towards them, so low they could see its grey feathers, which looked as if they’d been dipped in water. The pigeon stopped on the remaining wall of the old house, paused for a moment and flew off again.
‘That pigeon can’t find its way home,’ Yongshan said.
‘Maybe it’s a homing pigeon?’ Pigeons were something her son was interested in and his eyes brightened. He followed the pigeon’s flight path with his eyes and said, ‘A homing pigeon can fly five hundred kilometres and come back home. A homing pigeon can find its way back home no matter how far it goes.’
‘Even people can’t find their way back home these days. How can a pigeon?’ said Yongshan.
She stopped following the pigeon with her eyes and bowed her head to look for something. ‘Let me see,’ she said. ‘Maybe I can find your grandma’s flowerpots. We could take one home as a memento. Do you remember how grandma made a flower terrace outside the door? She planted lots of flowers and the pots were all made from Yixing clay. They were very good pots.
’
‘What’s the use of bringing pots home? You never plant flowers.’
‘We don’t have to plant flowers. It would be a memento, don’t you see?’
It was obvious that her son was trying to suppress his irritation; he picked up a tile fragment and threw it far away. It happened to land on a piece of glass, which made a crisp and resonant bang.
‘Can’t you behave like a decent human being?’ Yongshan said. ‘How old are you, anyway? It’s time you grew up.’
‘If you take me to a trash heap, how can I behave decently? Do you have some master plan or something? It’ll be totally dark in a second. Are we going to look for Uncle Yongqing or not?’
Yongshan looked blank for a moment, then turned to look inside the house, supporting herself on the windowsill. It was obvious that she had been avoiding this question. While Yongshan had been pondering the old home in the dusk, her heart, too, had sunk into the shadows. ‘I’ll take you there in a moment. Don’t worry, Licheng is my hometown; I won’t make you sleep on the street no matter what.’ She spoke to her son, then suddenly craned her neck to look into a corner. Her son assumed that this was her final glance and was surprised when Yongshan called out loudly, ‘The cabinet. Our five-drawer cabinet’s still here!’
Only half believing her, her son quickly climbed in through the window, and there against the broken wall was indeed a cabinet, covered in plastic film and a few newspapers, standing crookedly in the rubble. It was a style of cabinet that had been popular in the south in the seventies, and though it didn’t have five drawers, that’s what it was called. In any case, it looked like it might serve as a small wardrobe. Carved, symmetrical woodwork was inlaid in the dark red drawers.
The sight of the cabinet made Yongshan nostalgic. Her son was prepared for this, and having helped her through the window, he kept his peace. He sat on an abandoned plastic stool, and looked up at the dusky sky over the rubble of Cabbage Market, remembering, no doubt, the graphics from some computer game. He gave a giggle and said, ‘It’s like I’m in the Infinite Magic Castle. Do you know what that is? You go into the castle and forget everything, but you have all these powers, so you can walk with your brain, or talk through your nostrils!’