Bronze and Sunflower

by Cao Wenxuan

  When it had rained in the night and there was water everywhere, they would set off, Bronze in a plaited bark rain-cape holding a fishing net, Sunflower in a round bamboo rain-hat with a fishing creel on her back. There would be just the two of them in the wide open fields, silvery screens of rain still falling, everywhere drenched in silence. They would walk and stop, and stop and walk. Then the boy would disappear from view. He’d be down in a water channel with the fishing net and she’d be crouching at the edge, her arms around the creel. When he popped up again, dragging the net behind him, they’d lean together and pick out the fish. Then they’d run about in the rain, wild with excitement at their catch. Until Bronze would slip – on purpose. And Sunflower would slip too – on purpose.

  They’d come home with a creel full of wriggling fish.

  They would go to the sunflower fields, too. Without the bright leaves and petals, the fields seemed bare and bleak. The sunflower heads were packed tightly with seeds. They hung heavily on the stalks, no longer rising in the sunshine, no longer turning to follow the sun. It was Sunflower who wanted to go there, and Bronze was happy to take her. They would sit for a long time on the high ground looking out over the fields, searching. Then she’d stand. She’d see her father, over there by that sunflower. Bronze would stand too, but when he looked in the same place, all he could see was row upon row of sunflower stalks. But he would believe her, believe that she’d seen him. Some of the villagers said they’d also seen him there, in the moonlight. Bronze believed them, too. Whenever he saw in her eyes that she wanted to go to the sunflower fields, he dropped everything and took her there.

  The pair were always together: in the daytime, at night, in the sun, in the rain. When he was covered in mud, so was she. And when the villagers saw them out in the fields, walking about and having fun, something stirred inside them. They felt a warmth course through their bodies, a pure and gentle warmth that melted and softened their hearts.

  Having spent all summer out in the fields, the village children suddenly realized that school would be starting soon. They wanted to play as long as they could under the crisp, bright autumn sky.

  The adults had already started calculating all the things they would need to pay for when school started. It wasn’t a large amount of money, but for most of the villagers the expense was significant. Some families sent their children to school as soon as they were old enough. Others couldn’t afford it. One year lost wouldn’t matter, they thought. It would only be reading and writing, and as long as their children could write their names, that was enough. So instead the children would feed the pigs, herd the sheep and drive the ducks. But for some children many years would go by without them ever going to school. Finally, when they reached their tenth or eleventh birthday, their parents would grit their teeth and send them. For this reason, a single class would be made up of children of very different ages. To look at them standing in a line you would see a jumble of different heights.

  There were also families who never sent their children to school. And some children who’d missed so much school that they refused to go even when their parents wanted them to. They felt too big, and too embarrassed, to be in the first year with the little ones.

  “Don’t blame us when you’re an adult and can’t read,” their families would say when their children decided to take their futures into their own hands.

  For those who did attend school, things didn’t always go smoothly either. The school was strict about fees, and if money was owed, action was taken. If the fees were not paid, the teacher would tell the child to pick up his stool and go home. And the child would pick up his stool, in front of the whole class, and cry all the way home. If the fees were then paid, he might go back … or he might not.

  For the last few days, Baba and Mama had not slept well. Their minds were heavy with worry. They had put aside a sum of money to send Bronze to the school for deaf and mute children in town. He was eleven now, and he couldn’t carry on like this, not going to school. They had a distant relative in town who had agreed that he could sleep and eat there. But Sunflower was seven, which was the age to start school. Some families in Damaidi sent their children to school as young as five. Whatever else the family did or did not do, they had to send Sunflower to school.

  The adults took out the wooden box where they kept their money. They had earned every cent, from each hen’s egg, each fish, each basket of vegetables they had sold, and each mouthful of food they had saved for the next meal. They tipped out the money, counted it, then counted it again. They did their calculations over and over, but no matter how hard they tried, there was not enough to send two children to school. They looked at the pile of money, with its stench of sweat, and wondered what on earth they should do.

  “We could sell some chickens,” said Mama.

  “We don’t have much choice,” said Baba.

  “The chickens lay eggs,” said Nainai. “If we sell the chickens, we still won’t have enough. But as long as the chickens are laying, we can sell the eggs.”

  “We could borrow some money,” said Mama.

  “Who’s rich around here?” said Baba. “And it’s an expensive time of year.”

  “Starting tomorrow, the children can have rice every tenth day,” said Nainai. “We can sell the rest and raise some money that way.”

  They did all of these things, but they still couldn’t find enough money to send both children to school. They discussed it again and again, and came to the same conclusion: this year they could only send one child to school. But which? Bronze? Or Sunflower? It was a terrible decision to have to make.

  In the end they decided they would send Sunflower to school. They reasoned that Bronze was mute, and it didn’t matter so much if he went to school or not. He’d already missed so much; he could miss another year or two. They could wait until things were a bit better, then he could go too. As long as he could write a few characters, that would do.

  The children had seen it coming.

  Bronze had wanted to go to school for years. He’d been so lonely walking through the village and out in the fields, all alone in his private world. He used to graze the buffalo near the school and listen to the children reading out loud. He was captivated by it. He knew he’d never be able to read aloud like the other children, but he could sit with them and listen. He wanted to learn to read. He looked at those characters with wonder, drawn to them as if to lights glowing in the wilderness at night. For a while he collected scraps of paper with writing on, then hid himself away and pretended he could read them. When he saw boys scribbling characters in chalk on someone’s wall, he felt envious and ashamed – so ashamed that he had to keep his distance.

  Bronze had once tried to sneak into school to learn a few characters, but before the teacher even had time to chase him out, he was laughed at by the other children.

  “Mute!” shouted one of them, and all heads turned to look. Then they crowded round him, shouting, “Mute! Mute!” He felt awkward and embarrassed. He tried to break through the wall of children, raising squeals of laughter when he finally burst through, rolled across the floor, scrambled to his feet and fled for his life.

  Bronze dreamed of being able to go to school for real. But the facts could not be clearer: only one of them, he or Sunflower, could go. He lay in bed at night, his eyes wide open, unable to sleep. But in the morning, as he wandered about the fields with Sunflower, he behaved as though nothing was bothering him.

  Sunflower seemed carefree too, always by his side. They watched the swallows flying south. They punted one of the little boats through the reeds and picked up gorgeous feathers dropped by wild geese, wild chickens and mandarin ducks. They went hunting for insects in the dry grass, following their lyrical cries.

  Then, one evening, the adults called them over to tell them their plans.

  “Let Bronze go to school!” cried Sunflower once they had spoken. “I can go next year. I’m little. I can stay home with Nainai.”

  Nainai pu
lled the girl to her chest and wrapped her arms around her. There was a lump in her throat.

  Bronze seemed to have prepared what he wanted to say. He expressed himself with his hands and his face, and there could be no mistaking his meaning.

  “Let Sunflower go to school. I don’t need to go; there’s no use to it. I have to graze the buffalo. I’m the only one who can do it. Sunflower can’t, she’s too young.”

  As the two children continued to argue, the adults grew more and more upset. Mama hid her face and burst into tears.

  Sunflower buried her face in Nainai’s chest and started to cry too. “I’m not going to school. I’m not going to school!”

  “We’ll see,” was all Baba could say.

  The next day, when they were still unable to resolve the situation, Bronze left the room and returned holding an earthenware jar. He put it on the table and took two ginkgo nuts out of his pocket: one dyed red, the other green. The village children dyed them pretty colours and played games with them – if you lost, you handed over a ginkgo nut. Most children always had a few in their pockets.

  Bronze explained, “I’ll put one red and one green in the jar, and whoever picks out the red one will go to school.”

  The three adults looked at him doubtfully.

  “Don’t worry,” he gestured.

  Bronze’s family knew he was clever, but they couldn’t work out if he was up to something.

  “Nothing’ll go wrong,” he gestured again.

  The adults looked at each other, and then agreed.

  “Do you understand what this means?” Bronze asked Sunflower.

  She nodded.

  “And you agree?”

  She looked at Baba, Mama and, finally, at Nainai.

  “I think it’s a good idea,” said Nainai.

  Sunflower looked at Bronze and nodded.

  “And what’s decided is final?”

  “Yes!” she said.

  “No tricks, please, you two. We’re watching,” said Mama.

  Bronze wanted to be completely sure that everyone agreed. He put out his hand and curled his little finger round Sunflower’s little finger.

  “Cross my heart,” said Nainai.

  Sunflower turned and smiled at Nainai. “Cross my heart.”

  “Cross my heart,” said Baba and Mama.

  Bronze held the jar upside down and shook it to show there was nothing inside.

  Then, one by one, he showed them what was in the palm of his hand: a red ginkgo nut and a green ginkgo nut.

  Everyone nodded. One red. One green.

  Bronze closed his hand into a fist and pushed it inside the jar. A few moments later, he pulled his hand out, placed it over the top of the jar, held the jar up to his ear and gave it a good shake. They could hear the two ginkgo nuts bouncing about inside.

  When he stopped shaking the jar, he put it down on the table and asked Sunflower to take one.

  Should she go first? she wondered. She glanced at Nainai.

  “On the ridge, picking grass, young grass first, old grass last. Sunflower’s the youngest, so it’s right that she should go first,” said Nainai.

  Sunflower went up to the jar and pushed her little hand inside. The two ginkgo nuts were lying there in the dark. Which one should she choose? She hesitated, then made her choice.

  “There’s no going back!” said Bronze.

  “No going back,” said Nainai.

  “No going back,” said Baba and Mama.

  “No going back,” said Sunflower quietly, her voice trembling. Slowly, she pulled her hand out of the jar, like a bird afraid to leave the nest. Her hand was clenched tight, and she didn’t dare open it.

  “Open up!” said Nainai.

  “Open up!” said Baba.

  “Open up!” said Mama.

  Sunflower closed her eyes and slowly opened her hand.

  “We can see it!” said the adults.

  Sunflower opened her eyes. There in the palm of her clammy hand was the red ginkgo nut.

  Bronze reached inside the jar, felt around, pulled out his hand and opened it. In his palm was the green ginkgo nut. He smiled, but he was holding back his tears. He would never be able to tell them his secret.

  Sunflower was a timid little girl, and she was scared of going to and from school on her own. They lived a long way from the village school and she had to cross a stretch of wasteland to get there. Some other children went the same way, but she didn’t know them properly yet. They still felt that she was an outsider and different from them, so they tended to keep their distance.

  The adults were also anxious, but Bronze already had the answer: he would take her and bring her back himself.

  It was probably the first time in the entire history of Damaidi that a little girl had gone to school by buffalo, escorted by her brother. They left the house promptly in the morning, and at the end of the school day, Bronze and the buffalo would be waiting at the school gate. In the mornings, Sunflower would sit on the buffalo reading the lesson out loud, and by the time they reached school she knew it off by heart. On the way home, she would do some maths in her head so that once she got home, it didn’t take long to finish her homework.

  Every time Bronze dropped her off in the morning, she’d run into school, then run straight out again and check that he would be there to pick her up later. She was worried that he’d forget. On the one occasion that he was a little bit late getting the buffalo from his father, he arrived to find her in tears by the school gate.

  On rainy days, the earth road became a slippery slimy mudbath. The children who walked to school arrived with their shoes covered in mud and, if they’d slipped on the way, with splashes of mud on their clothes. But Sunflower would arrive pristine. The other girls were envious, and almost resentful.

  There was another reason why Bronze was keen to take Sunflower to and from school, and that was to prevent Gayu from bullying her.

  Gayu was the same age as Bronze, and he did not go to school either – not because his family couldn’t afford it, but because he wouldn’t buckle down and take it seriously. He’d repeated the first year three times, and had still been bottom of the class. When his father saw that he wasn’t going to learn more than a handful of characters, he’d tied him to a tree and beaten him.

  “Three years in school, and what do you have to show for it?”

  “Nothing. I gave it all back to the teacher,” Gayu answered.

  He didn’t care about learning, but enjoyed being a troublemaker at school. Every day there was something, whether it was fighting with one child or arguing with another, breaking a classroom window or snapping the trunk of a newly planted tree. Eventually the school paid his father a visit.

  “About your Gayu, would you like to take him out of school … before we expel him?”

  His father thought about it. “He won’t be going to school any more,” he said. And after that, Gayu was free to hang around the village all year long.

  Gayu made a point of driving his ducks at exactly the same time that Sunflower was on her way to and from school, often blocking the road with his flock. There were so many of them and they waddled along so slowly. Every now and then Gayu would glance back at Bronze and Sunflower with a nasty look on his face. It seemed as though he was waiting for an opportunity, when Bronze wasn’t there. But Bronze was determined not to give him one.

  It seemed that Gayu was a bit scared of Bronze. When Bronze was there, he looked uneasy and inhibited and he took it out on his ducks. He drove them all over the place, and from time to time, a duck, startled by flying mud, would suddenly start quacking and flapping its wings, causing others to do the same.

  Bronze and Sunflower would pay no attention to him, and would continue on their way.

  Bronze’s family was like an old cart that has rolled for years along bumpy roads and through wind and rain. The axles need grease, the wheels need fixing, the parts seem a bit loose and the cart creaks forward, as though everything is a big effort. But it
still works, and it still gets to where it needs to go on time.

  With Sunflower now on board, the cart seemed even heavier. And she knew she added to the family’s load.

  One day, towards the end of term, the teacher made an announcement. “Tomorrow afternoon Limping Liu from the studio in Youmadi is coming to our school. He’ll be taking photos of the teachers. It’s a wonderful opportunity to have your photo taken too. But you’ll need to pay for it in advance.”

  The news was announced in all the classes, and soon the school was bubbling with excitement, like rice porridge bubbling in the pan.

  For the village children, it was a luxury to have their photograph taken, something they only dreamed of. Those who knew they could ask for money at home leapt about, whooping and laughing. Those who thought they might be able to ask for money, but who knew how hard that money was to come by, were excited but apprehensive. Then there were some who knew very clearly that they could not ask for money – not because the adults wouldn’t give it if they could, but because there simply wasn’t a spare cent at home. These children kept quiet and stood to one side, sad and dejected. A few of them wanted a photo so badly that they secretly borrowed from the children who had money, promising to do things in return: to carry their stools for them, to do their homework, to steal one of the family pigeons for them. Those who had managed to borrow some money were happy. And those who hadn’t were annoyed with the people who refused to lend. Cries of “I’m not your friend any more!” could often be heard over the bubbling excitement.

  It was the girls who were most excited about having their photos taken. They huddled together in small groups, chattering away about the shoot the next day, choosing a nice landscape as a backdrop and deciding what to wear. Those who didn’t have nice clothes tried to borrow from those who did, and were delighted when they got a “yes”.

  Both inside and outside the classroom, the photos were the topic of every conversation.

  Sunflower stayed at her desk, all alone. The excitement in the schoolyard was beginning to affect her. Of course she would have liked to have her photo taken. She hadn’t had a photograph taken since she’d arrived at the Cadre School with her father. She knew she was pretty, and everyone had always admired her photos. She liked to look at them too, and was always a bit surprised: she never quite believed the girl in the photos was her.