Bronze and Sunflower

by Cao Wenxuan

  “I left my schoolbag at home,” said Sunflower.

  “It won’t be any use now,” said Nainai. “The books will all be soaked.”

  “I have to go and find it,” said Sunflower.

  Baba and Mama were also worried about the things they had left at home. They urged Nainai to stay at the school with the items they’d brought with them, and began to head home with the children. The road was deep in water. Bronze helped Sunflower onto the buffalo and off they went.

  The water stretched before their eyes like a lake. The tips of broken reeds peeked out and swayed, like countless tails sticking up in the air. The tall trees were half underwater and looked short and dumpy. If you were on a boat, you could reach out and touch the birds’ nests that had withstood the wind. Floating about on the water were pan lids, shoes, chamber pots, mats, buckets, ducks without a home to go to – all sorts of everyday things.

  The family went home. But it was no longer a house, just some broken-down walls. Bronze went in first, determined to find Sunflower’s schoolbag. He poked about with his foot underwater, and every time he felt something, he’d hook it up with his toes: a bowl, a wok, an iron shovel. Sunflower watched him pull out one thing after another, wondering what he’d find next. She asked Baba to help her down from the buffalo, and stood trembling in the water. The next time Bronze fished something out, she cried out in delight.

  “Bronze! Give it to me!”

  Baba and Mama were standing in the water too, watching dejectedly, barely moving. Then all of a sudden something flew out of nowhere and hit Sunflower. It almost knocked her over. She gave a startled cry, then saw something swimming away fast underwater, stirring up waves. A fish! An enormous carp! Bronze hurled himself forward and hurried to close what was left of the door, to trap the fish inside the house. The whole family watched as the fish swam round and round. Every so often it would crash into one of the walls, or into Bronze’s or Sunflower’s legs, and whenever it hit something it would leap out of the water.

  Bronze ran round trying to catch it. Sunflower squealed.

  The fish leapt out of the water again, splashing Sunflower’s face. She put her hands up to keep the water off, and when she looked up again, everyone was laughing. Bronze was grinning and leaning back, laughing, not paying attention, when the fish thrashed against his leg and knocked him off balance. He staggered backwards and tumbled into the water.

  “Bronze!” shouted Sunflower.

  He clambered to his feet, dripping with water. He looked so funny that Sunflower started to giggle and giggle and giggle, unable to stop. As he was already wet, Bronze simply plunged back into the water and began to feel around with his hand. Sunflower had dodged out of the way and was standing on the corner of the low wall, watching him anxiously, expectantly.

  He almost caught the fish several times, and it annoyed him when it got away. He knew he could catch it. He huffed and puffed as he felt around for it. Then the enormous carp swam straight into his arms. All he had to do was hold on tight. The fish struggled for its life, its tail splashing water all over Bronze’s face. Sunflower was so excited.

  “Bronze! Bronze!” she cried.

  Eventually the fish had no strength left, but Bronze didn’t dare loosen his grip. He held on tight and stood up. The fish had red whiskers, and they quivered as it opened and closed its mouth. Bronze beckoned Sunflower to come and touch it. She walked through the water, reached out her hand and lightly ran her finger over its cold, slippery body.

  The next moment they were jumping for joy at their catch, leaping and splashing about in the water. Mama looked at the two children, who hadn’t a care in the world, and at the house that had no walls. She turned away and wept. Baba’s hard, rough hands rubbed his hard, rough face over and over.

  When the flood receded, the family built a shelter on the foundations of their old house. From now on, they would have to live even more frugally. They would need to build a new house, and with two children to look after, there was no time to lose. Besides, people would look down on them if they lived a shelter.

  But building a house would be expensive, and they barely had any money. Within days, Baba’s hair turned grey and Mama’s face became more wrinkled. Nainai grew even thinner than before, so thin that Bronze and Sunflower were afraid the wind might blow her over.

  “I’m not going to school any more,” said Sunflower.

  “Oh yes, you are,” said Mama.

  Nainai pulled Sunflower close. She didn’t say anything, just stroked her hair over and over. But Sunflower could hear the voice deep in Nainai’s heart: “Don’t say such ridiculous things.”

  Sunflower never mentioned it again. Instead she worked harder than ever and came top of her class in everything. “If only all the children in Damaidi were like Sunflower!” sighed the teachers.

  In the evenings Sunflower would do her homework, but she was worried about burning up too much paraffin in the lamp so she would say she was going to play at Cuihuan’s or Qiuni’s house. In fact, she was going there to do her homework, sharing their lamplight – although she was careful to let the others have the light and she didn’t chatter or distract them. Cuihuan liked people to do things for her. She was always asking Sunflower to pass her the rubber or draw lines in her exercise book, and Sunflower did what she asked. With Qiuni she’d try not to appear too smart. It annoyed Qiuni that Sunflower did her homework faster and better than she did, so Sunflower kept quiet. She didn’t say, “All done!” when she’d finished, or, “I know!” when Qiuni couldn’t answer the questions. If Qiuni asked for help, she would talk the question over with her tentatively as though they were working it out together. This way, Qiuni could appear to answer it before her, and when Qiuni said smugly, “Maybe you’re not so clever after all!” Sunflower would stay silent.

  One day, the teacher was particularly critical of Cuihuan’s and Qiuni’s work, and tore up their homework books in front of the class. Then she opened up Sunflower’s pristine homework book, stepped down from the teacher’s platform and passed it around. “This is Sunflower’s. This is what I call homework!” Sunflower kept her head down.

  That evening, after the family had eaten, Sunflower wondered if she could still go to Cuihuan’s or Qiuni’s to do her homework. It was dark outside and there was no light in the shelter. They’d barely lit the lamp since the house fell down. They ate in the dark and went to bed in the dark. But she still had a lot of homework to do. She thought it over, and told her family she was going to play at Cuihuan’s.

  It was unusual to find Cuihuan’s door closed. Sunflower knocked.

  “I’m already in bed,” called Cuihuan.

  But Sunflower could see through the crack in the door that Cuihuan was sitting doing her homework by the lamp. She walked around the village, her head hanging. She didn’t want to go and knock on Qiuni’s door, so she decided to head home. After a while, however, the thought of the homework she still had to do made her turn back in the direction of Quini’s house. The door was open, but she stood in the doorway for a few minutes before going inside.

  “Hi, Qiuni,” she said.

  Qiuni carried on doing her homework as though she hadn’t heard. Sunflower saw a stool on the other side of the table and went to sit down.

  “My mother will be here soon, and she’ll need to sit there while she stitches soles for the cotton shoes she’s making.”

  Sunflower froze.

  “Don’t you have a light at your house?” asked Qiuni, without looking up.

  Sunflower didn’t reply.

  “Do you ever light the lamp at your house?” She still didn’t look up.

  Sunflower picked up her homework book and hurried out of Qiuni’s house as fast as she could. She ran down the street that stretched the entire length of the village, keen to get home as soon as she could, tears streaming down her face all the way.

  But she didn’t go straight home. Instead, she went and sat on the stone slab under the old tree at the end of the
village, the same stone slab she had sat on a few years earlier, before riding to Bronze’s house on the back of the buffalo. She looked up at the old tree and saw its branches heavy with lush summer leaves. She longed to throw her arms around the tree and weep. Instead, she gazed through teary eyes at the dark sky and the moon above.

  Meanwhile, Bronze went looking for her. He stopped at Cuihuan’s house first. From the street, he could hear her mother telling her off. “Why didn’t you open the door and let her in?”

  “I don’t want her using our light.”

  Then Cuihuan started crying. Perhaps her mother had slapped her.

  “I just don’t want her using our light!”

  “You know, Sunflower is one in a million. You and the other girls don’t even begin to compare!”

  Bronze decided that Sunflower must have gone to Qiuni’s. But as he approached her house, he heard her crying too. She seemed to be talking to herself. “If you can’t afford school, then don’t go. How dare you come to our house and use our light?”

  Qiuni had probably been slapped this evening too. Bronze started to run through the village. He raced down one street, then another, and eventually found Sunflower beneath the old tree. She was lying on her front on the stone slab, struggling to do her homework in the moonlight. Bronze stood very quietly behind her. When she realized he was there, she grabbed her homework book in one hand and gave the other hand to Bronze.

  Neither of them said a word as they walked hand in hand by the river and then headed back to the shelter in the pale milky light of the moon.

  The following evening Bronze went to the vegetable garden and picked ten or more stems of pumpkin flowers that were just about to open. When Nainai asked what he was doing, he just smiled. Then he took a boat to the reed pond. As he steered through the dense patch of reeds to the pool of water, there they were: hundreds and thousands of fireflies dancing about in the grass. They cast their glow on the water and lit up the sky. It took his breath away and reminded him of the time his father had taken him into the city. In the evening they’d climbed up a tower and seen all those thousands of lights shining below them. He stood for a while and drank it all in.

  The fireflies seemed to dance aimlessly, free to go wherever they liked, their magical trails criss-crossing the sky. There were so many of them, he couldn’t help wondering what drew them to this pool of water. Their light was so bright that he could spot a dragonfly on the tip of a blade of grass: its eyes, feet and the pattern on its wings.

  Bronze stood in the shallow water beside the grass and began to catch the fireflies. He went after the biggest, brightest and most beautiful. When he caught one he put it inside one of the tight pumpkin flowers. It lit up like a lantern. He put a dozen or so fireflies in each flower lantern; the more fireflies he put in, the brighter it glowed. As soon as he completed a lantern, he placed it in the boat and started on the next. He wanted to make ten lanterns. He wanted to fill their temporary shelter with light, and illuminate every single character in Sunflower’s homework book.

  He had identified the biggest and brightest firefly, but it kept flying over the middle of the pool and didn’t look as though it had any intention of landing on the grass. Bronze wanted this one most of all. He started clapping his hands. All the village children knew that fireflies like the sound of clapping. Sure enough, the fireflies started dancing around him. As long as he kept clapping, they kept coming, and soon he was surrounded by rings of light, as though caught in the middle of a glowing whirlwind. He chose the biggest and brightest ones, between ten and twenty per lantern, but he was really after the magnificent one that kept flying over the middle of the pool. No matter how much he clapped, it would not come. Bronze was annoyed.

  By now he had ten lamps. They were all lying on the boat, at different angles from each other, and looked like a massive lamp in the shape of a branch. Bronze got back into his boat and prepared to head home, but he couldn’t get that firefly out of his head. He plunged the bamboo pole into the water at the back of the boat and found himself heading for the middle of the pool instead. He was determined to catch that firefly. He could not get it out of his head.

  As the boat approached, the firefly flew off. Bronze chased after it, but the firefly only flew higher. Bronze’s chin rose as he watched it flying higher and higher. There was nothing he could do. Then, after a while, it started to hover and circle downwards again. Bronze kept as still as a wooden post and waited patiently. The firefly was attracted by the lanterns and darted close to investigate, then just as quickly darted away again. It did this a few times, growing in confidence each time, until it was flying right in front of Bronze. He could see its wings, shiny and brown, but he couldn’t reach it. If he could just hold out, he thought, this little creature would come close enough…

  Eventually, the firefly began to fly above his head, as though it had mistaken Bronze’s hair for a patch of rough grass. The firefly flew around him, lighting up his face whenever it passed in front of him.

  Bronze waited for the right moment. The firefly was just above him to the side. He reckoned he should be able to jump up and catch it unawares. He held his breath, waited until it came closer again, then leapt up, clapped his hands together in the air and… Got it!

  But as he’d pressed his feet into the boat, it had slid across the pool. He landed in the water and swallowed a couple of mouthfuls, but still he managed to keep his hands together tightly. He scrambled out of the water, the firefly safely inside his hands, which were glowing from the light within. He climbed back onto the boat and slipped the firefly inside one of the pumpkin lanterns.

  Bronze headed home. When he got back, he hung the lanterns from a string, and holding one end of the string in each hand, arms outstretched, he went inside.

  The dark shelter filled with light. Everyone’s faces lit up, and for a moment they stood staring – Nainai, Baba, Mama and Sunflower. They were lost for words.

  Bronze tied the ends of the string to a couple of the shelter posts and grinned as if to say, “Look! We’ve got light!”

  It was the brightest, most beautiful light in Damaidi, and Sunflower never needed to do her homework at Cuihuan’s or Qiuni’s again.

  The family could not spend the winter in the temporary shelter. They had to build a house before the cold weather arrived. The adults had decided that they should build a good house, and build it well.

  They spent the summer making plans. They would sell whatever they could. They sawed down some of the large trees at the front, and sold them. They sold a fat pig. They also had a pond full of lotus root, a plot of arrowhead and a smaller plot of white radish, which they would harvest and sell. But when they added it all up, it was still a long way off what they needed.

  They put pride to one side and borrowed from relatives and neighbours, promising to repay it all with interest. They didn’t care if people looked down on them; all they wanted was to be able to move the children into the new house before winter came. Nainai wanted to contribute, but Baba and Mama wouldn’t hear of it: she was getting old and deserved respect, not the scorn of the neighbours. But watching the two children playing outside made her even more determined. She glanced at Mama and Baba, took up her stick and went out to ask for loans. Most people were alarmed, and embarrassed, to see such an elderly lady asking for money. “Of course,” they said, “when do you need it?”

  Nainai had a nephew. She thought she might be able to borrow a little from him, so she went to ask him. He refused, snapping at her that he didn’t have any money. She had never expected he would be so nasty, so heartless. As a senior member of the family, she was entitled to get angry at his disrespect, but she bit her tongue and hobbled away on her stick.

  Although some of the newer buildings in Damaidi had tiled roofs, everyone knew that the best roofs were those made from cogongrass. Cogongrass grew by the sea, over a hundred kilometres away, and the family had planned to go and rent a plot of ripe cogongrass and harvest it themselves.
But first they needed to find the money.

  “We could use straw instead,” said Baba and Mama.

  “No,” said Nainai, “we agreed that we would have the best: a cogongrass roof.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Mama.

  “We are having a cogongrass roof!” insisted Nainai, shaking her head.

  Nainai left the house early the next morning. No one knew where she had gone. She didn’t come home at lunchtime. It was evening before she appeared, staggering along the main road by the village.

  “Nainai, where have you been!” shouted Sunflower as she ran to meet her.

  Her grandmother looked exhausted, but there was joy in her eyes.

  Nainai had always been the smartest old person in Damaidi. She was tall, with silver hair, and she kept herself immaculate, washing in cold water throughout the four seasons. She folded her clothes carefully at night, so they always looked neat and had crisp lines in the morning, never a crumple. Although there were patches on almost all of her clothes, they were sewn with such fine stitching and such a closely matching colour of thread, that it seemed they were part of the garment, that it would look strange without them.

  To the villagers, Nainai was a kindly, elegant old lady. She was also very strong-willed. She’d told Sunflower that she’d been born into a rich family and had enjoyed a good childhood. Pale jade earrings dangled from her ears; she wore a gold ring on her finger and a jade bangle on her wrist. She’d wanted to sell them, or at least some of them, but Baba and Mama wouldn’t let her. One day, she’d pawned the earrings, but as soon as they heard about it, Baba and Mama sold some of their grain and went into town to buy them back.