by Su Tong
Yongshan tried to open the cabinet door, but saw that somebody had hung a little lock on it, so the door could not be opened. Yongshan went over the wood carvings with her hands and said, ‘I’m sure you don’t remember this cabinet, but I used it every day. I had to put the clean clothes in it and take out the stamps to buy rice and oil. You couldn’t possibly understand those things; you don’t know anything about what it was like.’
‘What good would it be if I did?’ her son said. ‘What’s the problem, as long as you know yourself?’
‘I wonder who put the lock on. Must be your uncle. How could he have forgotten to take the cabinet with him?’ Yongshan held the lock in her fingers, then contradicted herself, ‘Maybe it’s not your uncle. He’s a good-for-nothing; he’d throw it out or sell it. Maybe some scrap collector locked it. If we hadn’t come, he would have sold it.’
‘So let him. It’s not new and it’s not antique. Who would want it in their home?’
‘You’re a good-for-nothing, too.’ She gave her son a vicious glance and said, ‘When you grow up, you’ll be even more useless than your uncle.’
Forced back into silence, her son gazed around the rubble and saw that the lights of evening were turning on in Licheng. He looked past the ruins of the house and saw an even greater expanse of rubble, hazy with dust, shrouded by the colours of the gloaming. This was his mother’s city, his mother’s rubble, and her son didn’t feel any close connection to it. He felt exhausted and, bending down to hug his knees, he curled up like a cat. He spoke to his mother in an attitude of great passivity, ‘Just call me when you’ve seen enough, and you’re tired of wallowing in the past. I’m going to have a nap.’
Her son heard her rustling about, doing something with the cabinet; he didn’t even lift his head, which meant, ‘Go ahead, do what you want, it’s nothing to do with me.’
But Yongshan suddenly shouted at him, ‘Get up, quick! Help me carry the cabinet out.’
She had the cabinet bound with hemp rope and several packing strings, so that it resembled a piece of luggage. There was even a length of rope by which to haul it along. Who knows where Yongshan had found the ropes. She stood by the cabinet and looked at her son with some pride. ‘It’s all properly tied together. I’ve tried it; it’s not heavy at all. We can take it away.’
‘Are you mad?’ said her son. ‘Why on earth would you drag this old thing off? Maybe you’ve gone mad, but I haven’t. And I’m not going to take it.’
‘I don’t care if you want to or not; you have to.’ Yongshan’s voice became sharp, and there was also a tremor in it. ‘You really make my blood boil sometimes. Don’t you have any feelings at all? This is the last memento we have of your grandparents. I can’t just leave it here!’
Her son stood up, but turned away. He didn’t move, but there was the sound of snorting. They stood like that, in a stalemate, for about two minutes, and then he heard his mother stamp her foot. She said, ‘If you’re not going to help me, I can do it without you. I’ll take it out myself!’
On that May Licheng evening, Yongshan and son, having returned for a family visit, were walking down the street. Yongshan was in front, rolling a suitcase, but the thing her son was dragging along puzzled the passers-by: it seemed to be a piece of furniture. Everyone looked back to examine it as it chafed against the road surface, emitting occasional piercing sounds, creaks and groans. People of a certain age recognized it as a five-drawer cabinet, which had been popular in the seventies, and there were some who called out, ‘Look! A five-drawer cabinet!’
They had still failed to meet anyone Yongshan knew. The last time she had returned, seven years earlier, she had encountered old neighbours and elementary school classmates on the streets of Cabbage Market, and even run into someone who had played the accordion with her in the Children’s Palace, but this time she hadn’t seen a soul. Yongshan led her son along the streets of Licheng, and it was as if they were in an unfamiliar city. The cabinet had, to a large extent, relieved her helpless, distressed mood. Every now and then she looked back at her son and the cabinet he dragged behind him. ‘Watch out; don’t let the string break,’ she said. ‘Don’t pull that long-suffering face at me. There’s nothing wrong with a boy of your age getting a little exercise. Hang in a little longer; you just have to take it to your auntie’s on Mahogany Street.’
Her son didn’t take great care at all. When he heard one of the packing strings snap, he said nothing; soon afterwards another packing string snapped and he heard the clatter of the lock. Then, just as he had hoped, the cabinet refused to budge. He stopped and said in an almost delighted tone, ‘It’s snapped. They’ve all snapped. I told you the strings would snap!’
Not only had the string snapped, but the cabinet door had broken from the shock, and two of the drawers creaked to be let out. Yongshan ran over and smacked her son on the head. ‘You did it on purpose,’ she said. ‘I knew you wouldn’t do a good job of it. If you won’t take it, then I will.’
One of the drawers fell out of the cabinet. It was empty and exuded the smell of mothballs. The newspapers that covered the bottom were from 1984. Yongshan squatted down and looked at what was written in the newspaper. ‘Eighty-four,’ she said to her son. ‘You weren’t even around yet, then.’
He looked at his mother and said, ‘Just when I thought it couldn’t get any more embarrassing! Can’t you see that people are staring?’
Yongshan ignored his complaints. ‘Your grandma used to like to put the residence permit and grain stamps underneath,’ she said as she removed the old newspapers. A photo abruptly appeared before their eyes. It was a family photo of four people – a man, a woman, a boy and a girl – sitting in two rows. All of them were wearing army uniforms and, except for the little boy, who looked miserable, the other three were smiling stiffly. The background could be instantly identified as a painted curtain; it depicted Tiananmen Square in Beijing.
The photo from the past century tickled him: ‘A photo like this is cool, man.’ He tried to take it out of his mother’s hand, but she threw the photo back into the cabinet as if it had scalded her.
Her expression was very strange. She said, ‘I made a mistake. This photo isn’t of our family.’
He couldn’t absorb this information right away and, lifting the photo up to have a look, he said, ‘No wonder. I didn’t think the girl looked like you.’
Yongshan’s lips were trembling, as if she were afraid she might burst into tears. Suddenly she covered her face. ‘I’ve made a mistake,’ she said. ‘How could this be? This isn’t our cabinet.’
All at once, her son realized the full extent of the injustice he had suffered transporting the cabinet and shouted, ‘And so after all that, you were making me lug somebody else’s stuff around town! You’ve got to be kidding, right?’
‘How could this be?’ she squatted down and looked vacantly in the direction of Cabbage Market saying, ‘I wonder who left the cabinet there? It was in our house, and it looks just like the one we had.’
Her son produced some derisive hooting noises. Having thus finished mocking his mother, he relaxed and took a closer look at the strangers’ family photo. ‘Whose picture is this? It must be some neighbour’s. Man, do they look lame; so lame, it’s almost cute. Do you know these people?’
Yongshan scanned the photo blankly. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I left here a long time ago. They might be people who moved to Cabbage Market later; I don’t know them.’
Now that he’d been relieved of his onerous burden, her son joyfully dragged the cabinet to the side of the road. He put it next to a ceramic garbage can that was about half the size of a person, with a tiger’s head and a huge mouth to throw the garbage in. Once he’d finished this bit of business, he took a step back and examined how the garbage can and the cabinet stood, so to speak, shoulder to shoulder: an old piece of furniture with an unknown owner and a majestic garbage can. Underneath the pale light of the street lamps, the garbage can looked like a bodyguard protecting the
cabinet. The son looked at his mother who was squatting on the ground and seemed to tacitly agree to the disposal of the cabinet. Her son was very pleased with himself, and giving himself a clap he said, ‘Cool, man! Modern art!’
Yongshan didn’t look at the cabinet again. She stood up slowly and, as she rose, her eyes welled up with tears. The lights were on in the windows of Licheng, and the newly paved road glimmered with an orange and white glow that seemed to flow like a river. Yes, her eyes welled up with tears, for she felt that she had now truly left her native city far behind, and it her. Besides some memories, the city had left her nothing, and she knew in her heart that she had bequeathed it no part of herself. Yongshan fished out her handkerchief and wiped away the tears. She heard her son say, ‘Where are we going to go now?’
She hesitated and, looking back at him, she began to feel the stirrings of a guilty conscience. ‘Where do you want to go?’ she asked.
He looked at her doubtfully and said, ‘I dunno. I’m going where you’re going. Didn’t you want to go and see your cousin?’
Yongshan bent down to brush some dust off the suitcase and said, ‘Suppose we didn’t go?’ It seemed like she was soliciting her son’s advice. ‘I haven’t seen her in seven years.’ Her son said nothing, and a kind of pity, and lenience, began to emerge in his eyes as he looked at her.
‘Whatever.’ Then he joked, ‘You’re the boss; I’m just staff. I’ll go wherever you’re going.’
Night-time Licheng was nothing like it used to be. After seven o’clock the streets looked splendid all lit up, and Yongshan took her son to a famous local restaurant. They ate Licheng’s famous crab dumplings, noodles with congealed duck’s blood and fried wontons. After stuffing themselves with a filling meal, both of them felt their strength return, so Yongshan took her son to a large department store, where they walked around and rode up and down in the lift. Yongshan bought some of Licheng’s famous silk, as well as some other local specialities, for gifts. She got a pure wool sweater for her husband, and even bought her son some brand-name sneakers, which were on sale; he picked them out himself. Then they rolled their suitcase to the train station, one in front of the other, as before, except that now Yongshan was carrying a few shopping bags. One was an ordinary white plastic bag, but the other was a red bag with an elaborate design, covered in countless white pear blossoms.14
On the way to the station, Yongshan saw her son furtively take something out of his pocket and stick it into the suitcase’s inner lining. He had always enjoyed collecting, and he must have found the picture very amusing: four strangers in a family picture. Well then, let him keep it. Yongshan didn’t stop him. She was leaning on a lamp post, waiting for her son, when she took a deep breath and smelled something. ‘The air in Licheng is better than at home,’ she said, ‘I wonder what flower that is. Lovely smell. The air here is best in April and May.’
Then they walked with their luggage to the train station, looking very much like tourists who had come for the day on an organized trip. Yongshan was a very thrifty woman; they had walked all day and yet still she couldn’t bring herself to hail a taxi. She told her son, ‘We can rest once we’re on the train. Why should we pay for something we don’t need?’
The Giant Baby
The town doctor took a piece of bread out of his basket. Even this simple lunch had been delayed again and again on account of the sheer number of his patients: childless women who came to him looking for a cure to their infertility. To make matters worse, the bread was a few days old and already quite stale. Just as he was taking his army canteen off the wall to take a sip of water, footsteps sounded. They were followed by the appearance of a woman’s shadow swaying back and forth on the bamboo curtain before stopping by a very small window that had once been used to dispense medicine. Through it, the doctor could see a white blouse with red flowers, and underneath it the slight bulge of the woman’s breasts, though he couldn’t see her face.
‘Come in,’ said the doctor, biting off a mouthful of bread, ‘I can hardly examine you if you’re standing out there.’
‘Out here will be fine.’ The woman’s voice was very low, as if she feared that passers-by might hear her. Then she said, ‘Just give me some medicine, doctor. That’ll be enough. I have to rush home, so please hurry.’
The doctor laughed and took a swig of water from his canteen. ‘That’s a new one. How am I supposed to give you medicine without examining you? And what medicine do you need, anyway?’
‘The childbearing soup,’ she said in an even quieter voice. ‘Everyone says it works. But please hurry up, doctor, I have to get home straight away.’
Something about this woman was very odd, and so the doctor decided to go outside and get a good look at her from the steps of the clinic. She was wearing a straw hat with cotton cloth wound around it that covered her face. Because of the cloth, he couldn’t tell who she was or whether he knew her.
He decided to ignore this furtive woman, and instead he sat down, opened up his logbook and wrote down the date. Then, all the while loudly chewing his bread, he informed the woman outside, ‘I’m a doctor, not a temple god. My medicine might work well enough, but it’s not some kind of Taoist cure-all. I don’t know where you get your ideas from!’
At some point the woman had come inside. The doctor heard the creaking of the stool behind him, and at the same time he noticed a powerful, acrid smell of sweat. He looked behind him to find her sitting stiffly on the stool.
‘I won’t take off my pants,’ the woman said.
‘Nobody asked you to,’ the doctor replied, a little annoyed. ‘Is that why you think I became a doctor? Now just hold out your hand so I can take your pulse.’
Hesitantly, she did as she was told. Irritated as he was, the doctor pressed her hand roughly down on the table and took her pulse. Meanwhile, he occupied himself by staring at the profuse grime that had accumulated under her fingernails. Her hand emitted the slightly nauseating smell of chicken shit.
‘I suppose there is a man?’ the doctor asked casually. He knew that wasn’t the proper way to ask such a thing; but for some reason he felt thoroughly malicious towards this woman.
She hung her head and didn’t respond. He noticed that she had sweat stains all over her straw hat, just like a man. She also had a silver necklace on, which was the kind of old jewellery women in the town had long ago stopped wearing. She must be from the mountains, up by Wangbao, he thought, for that was the only area where women still wore necklaces like that.
‘Are you from the mountains? From Wangbao?’ The doctor listened carefully to the woman’s pulse, but her long silence aroused his suspicions, so he asked, ‘What is this, anyway? Do you mean to tell me there isn’t a man? Are you even married?’ The doctor stared at the cloth hanging from the straw hat and was suddenly seized by the desire to tear it off, but her reflexes were quick and she managed to dodge his lunging hand. The doctor scoffed at her, saying, ‘You’re nuts, do you know that? Do you want to get pregnant without a man? You can drink childbearing soup till hell freezes over before that happens!’
The woman’s body twisted on the stool, and her breathing became more rapid. Then the doctor heard the sound of her muffled sobbing. All of a sudden, she was down on her knees embracing the doctor’s leg and crying ‘Save me, doctor, give me a child, give me a son, so I can take revenge.’
Automatically, the doctor jumped up to free himself. His arm knocked off her hat, and she gave a sharp cry. At that moment the doctor saw the world’s most hideous face, the face of a severe burn victim. Apart from her unscathed eyes, the skin of her face resembled nothing more than blackened pine bark.
What happened next seemed to the doctor to be part of some kind of dream. He recalled that the woman picked up her hat and ran out, while he sat petrified by shock in front of the window. He thought she had left, but a moment later her filthy, grime-fingered hand thrust through the window and the woman said, ‘I beg you, give me the soup. Give me the soup, so I can take
my revenge.’
In shock, the doctor picked up a pile of medicine packets and passed them to her, accidentally brushing her hand in the process. At this touch, he was seized by a sensation of intense dread, and grabbing at the woman’s fingers he said, ‘Revenge! Revenge for what?’ She freed her hand and said, ‘Wait till I have a son and you’ll find out.’
It was a summer afternoon and the weather was oppressive. The doctor remembered rushing out after her to see which direction she would take, and even then he had the premonition that this woman would one day become the subject of much tongue-wagging. He was about to call out to the people from the barber’s across the street, or from the cooperative next door, so that they too could come out and see the woman, but the ingrained idlers were all dozing behind their counters. Thus, the hideous mountain woman passed through the cobblestone streets of the town as if she were a normal farmer’s wife, without attracting anybody’s attention. The doctor watched as she turned off and disappeared into the cornfields, following the paths up to the mountains.
The matter preoccupied the doctor for the entire afternoon, and at about four o’clock he heard a terrible thunderclap from the horizon, so sharp and resounding that both he and the few women in the room had to cover their ears. For some reason the doctor thought immediately of the woman. He supposed she must still be on her way up the mountain, hurrying on amidst the lightning flashes and rumbling thunder. An invention of his mind’s eye disquieted him: the dim image of a blue bolt of lightning hitting the woman’s straw hat, the paper medicine packets in her hand torn and the black herbs within leaking into the mire of the mountain trail.
It was rare for the people from around Wangbao to come down from their mountain village. They grew corn, sweet potatoes and apples to bring to market, while they themselves ate only the simplest fare. As a result, they enjoyed sturdier health than the relatively affluent townspeople below, and rarely went down the mountain for medical attention. For a long time the doctor took pleasure in discussing the woman from Wangbao with his patients, but nobody knew who she was; nor did anyone recall a woman with a straw hat. No one was very interested in his story, so when the doctor began to speak again about the vengeful, child-hungry woman, they all repeated the same sentence: ‘She must be crazy!’