by Chongda Cai
I lay there for a while, motionless, fighting to choke down the sob that threatened to escape. I didn’t want my mother to hear me. I swallowed my tears and ran from the second floor. I wanted to end that terrible quest. I was done exploring.
My mother woke me early the next morning. She had discovered a team of municipal workers with surveying equipment. It reminded me of the times years before when she had come into my room to tell me, helplessly, that my father had fallen.
We watched them through the window for a while as they set up their instruments, went about their inscrutable business, then quickly jotted down figures in their notebooks. My mother said, “Looks like we’ll have to hurry, huh?”
The afternoon after the surveyors came, my mother paid a visit to my uncle. Since my father had passed away, she had begun going to him for advice. She also knew he had some connections with construction companies, so he could get her a good price on the work that remained on the house.
I stayed home, but restless anxiety sent me eventually to the fourth-story roof. The house was built at one of the highest points in the village, and from the roof I could see the entire town laid out below me.
I had never noticed before that the entire town seemed full of construction sites. Seen from above, the construction sites and excavation pits in the red soil looked like oozing sores and bloody gashes. A highway under construction in the east had the sinister appearance of some massive beast snaking across the landscape. All along the new road were houses in various states of demolition; the scaffolding and dust-proof netting that covered them gave them the appearance of smashed limbs wrapped in splints and gauze. I knew the house I was standing on would soon join them, as would many others. In another year or two, this scene would be even more grim, flayed raw like a prisoner’s backside.
I tried to imagine all the stories that had taken place in the homes I could see below me. How many traces were left of the souls that had once occupied them? All the sadness and happiness of years gone by—they would be reduced to dust floating over the ruins.
It occurred to me that I treated my heart just like municipal planning officials had treated the town: in the name of development, in the name of building toward some future goal, in the name of respectability, I had been in a hurry to redevelop, demolish, and rebuild everything I held dear. There was no going back, for me or for the town.
When my uncle came over that evening, my mother hurried to greet him, thinking he had found her a company to work on the house.
When the tea was ready, he took a sip and paused for a moment to savor it. He said, “I don’t think you should build it.”
My mother demanded an explanation. He refused to give her one. “I just can’t figure it out,” he said angrily. “You said you wanted to build a house for Blackie. You said it was so your family could hold their heads high—I can understand that, but what’s the point now?”
I tried to help my mother explain it to him, but he refused to listen. “I’m opposed to the idea,” he said. “Don’t bother trying to convince me.” He changed the topic, suggesting I buy a place in Beijing. “Don’t be so selfish,” he said to my mother. “You have to think about your son.”
My mother’s face turned red as she tried to hold back her emotions.
“Well,” he said, feeling uncomfortable, “I’m willing to listen, if you want to tell me what you’ve got in mind.”
But my mother did not speak.
“It was actually my idea to keep building,” I said.
I didn’t want to explain it to him, but I could understand why my mother wanted to keep building. Even though I had become the nominal head of the family after my father’s stroke, he had never really given up the position. It was his family; he started it.
It took me until that day to understand my mother’s real intentions. She had not been building for herself, or even for me. It wasn’t about being able to hold our heads high. She was doing it for my father, the man who had brought us together. She wanted his family to be strong; she wanted the family to be complete.
Even though she could never say it out loud, this was the way my mother expressed her love.
My uncle couldn’t understand why I was supporting my mother’s idea, but he agreed to respect my decision. I knew he had practical concerns about my future. The idea of building under the almost assured threat of demolition was absurd, and I knew there was no way I could honestly explain it to him.
With his help, my mother found a construction team and made hasty preparations. She prayed over the right date to begin work. It would be a week from then, and I would already be back in Beijing.
The afternoon before I left, I took my mother to the bank to withdraw money. When she had the bills in her hand, she immediately sat down to count and recount them. That money was a treasure won through years of struggle and poverty. She tucked the stack of bills against her breast and carried it home like a newborn.
It should have been a happy day for her, but she grumbled the whole way home. “I’m sorry,” my mother said, as we walked down the alley toward the house. “If we do this, you’ll never have the money to buy a place in Beijing.”
I could only laugh.
And then she finally summoned the courage to say what was really on her mind: “There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you, but I’m worried it’ll upset you. You know the most important thing for a house in our town is the stone tablet beside the gate, right? I want to know if you would mind putting your father’s name on it.”
“I don’t mind,” I said. I didn’t want her to know what I felt at that moment. So many things I had long suspected were proven to be true. I fought to hold back tears. “Actually,” I said, “I think you should keep the stone that Father put above the gate of the old house, the couplet with your two names.”
I saw a smile slowly spread across her face. Her middle-aged face had the expression of a shy teenager. I reached out and stroked her cheek. I said to myself, “This sweet mother of mine.”
That year, all of my coworkers who were back in Beijing for the first workday after the Spring Festival break went out together. Over a table in the noisy dining room, everyone told their stories about going home to visit family for the new year: waiting in line two days to buy train tickets, the new unfamiliarity of home, the growing gap between parent and child. . . . Someone suggested a toast to all those faraway hometowns.
I raised my cup. I gave an unspoken toast to my coworkers: Do whatever it takes to be happy, you lonely souls and wild ghosts.
And then the thought of my mother and her house came to mind.
Even if the house was demolished, even if I could never afford a place in Beijing, I would always have a family to go back to.
3
Frailty
I knelt to light the gold paper, and my two cousins helped him step across the flame. The burning paper was a ceremony meant to cleanse the soul. All bad luck and spiritual pollution would be swept away and deposited safely outside the doorway. And that is how my father returned home from the hospital, where he had been recovering from a stroke. It was about ten o’clock at night.
Our local Hokkien custom dictated that the relatives—both distant and close—stop by our home for a visit. They paraded up to the house, each one offering supplements and snacks they thought might help his condition, and then proffering their solemn vows to help my father in any way they could. Some of the men started reminiscing with my father about old times, the glory days, ripping and running together. Some of the relatives brought up times when my father had helped them out of a jam and thanked him again. And a few of the women couldn’t help themselves and wrapped their arms around my father, sobbing.
My father seemed distant. He let the women cry. He would have preferred to go back to reminiscing about old times. “What are you crying for?” he asked a woman who had broken down in tears. “I’m back, right? It’s nothing.”
But my father’s tongue was still partially pa
ralyzed from the stroke. When he spoke, all that came out was a string of slurred syllables. He paused and looked around, then he laughed, showing his smoke-stained teeth. Everyone laughed along with him.
It seemed like a fairly good start.
The reception went on until one in the morning. The stream of well-wishers slowed to a trickle, and when all of the relatives had finally come and gone, my mother and I each supported a shoulder to help him to the bathroom. We looked like two movers trying to lift a grand piano. We labored under his weight, huffing and puffing the whole way.
We had to stop a few times, and my mother laughed and said, “You didn’t miss any meals in there, did you? You somehow managed to gain weight!” I couldn’t help but think to myself, how many times a day will we have to make the same trip, dragging him to and from the bathroom? I started to wonder exactly how we would live from then on.
It was no easy feat getting my father back to bed. There was plenty of time to make small talk, but it felt like an unspoken tension lingered between us. During the three months my father had been in the hospital, first in Quanzhou and then in Fuzhou, I had only seen him a few times when I was home from school. I barely recognized the man my two cousins helped out of the car that night. His head had been shaved for surgery. He looked deflated. It wasn’t that his arms were thinner or he’d lost his belly; he just looked like the air had been let out of him.
Since he came in the door, during the two hours while he received our relatives, I had been studying him. I was trying to find some trace of my father in that hunchbacked stranger. When he spoke, it was not with my father’s voice. My father had a booming voice, and he cursed fluently at the slightest provocation. The paralysis on his left side had affected his mouth, so he slurred his words, and the effort of speaking left him exhausted. The rowdy, larger-than-life man in the stories the relatives told—I couldn’t find him.
He broke the silence first. “You okay?” he slurred.
I nodded.
He smiled. “Don’t worry. Give me another month and I’ll be back to normal.”
I nodded. I opened my mouth to speak, but I wasn’t sure what to say. I knew in my heart that it was impossible.
“That motorbike has been sitting there for too long. When I get better, I’ll buy you a new one. We can ride up the coast, feel the wind in our hair! You can take your sister. Your mom can ride with me.”
That trip up the coast had been our only trip together as a family. My father wanted to step backward to the time when he had been the pillar of the family.
The morning after returning home from the hospital, he fell for the first time.
My mother was out shopping when it happened. I heard a muffled thud from his room. I jumped out of bed and ran to check on him. He had fallen to the floor and was as helpless as a baby. When he saw me, he tried to mutter some explanation. He hadn’t come to terms with his own condition. He wasn’t ready to become a man who struggled to get out of bed. He had sat up and tried to swing his legs to the floor, but his paralyzed left side hadn’t kept up with the rest of his body. He had ended up tipped over and crashed to the floor. As he tried to explain, I saw tears gather at the corners of his eyes. His body was no longer under his control, and neither were his tears.
He wasn’t used to his body. I wasn’t used to him crying. I rushed to help him, trying not to let our eyes meet. I tried to pull him to his feet, but he outweighed me by seventy or eighty pounds. He did his best, putting every last ounce of strength into helping his son. But it was a lost cause.
I knew it, and he knew it, too. The disease hung like an anchor around his neck. He laughed and said, “I guess I did get fat, huh? Don’t worry. Give me some time. I’ll figure it out.”
He slowly and carefully got his right leg under him and then managed to get himself upright. He teetered for a moment, looking like a high-rise with its foundation knocked out, then he tilted precariously to the right and collapsed to the floor.
I panicked and rushed to grab him, but gravity won, and we both toppled to the floor.
We lay together on the floor for a long time, trying to catch our breath, neither of us moving, neither of us speaking, neither of us knowing what to say.
Finally my father looked over at me and tried to force the disobedient muscles in his face into a smile. Even if he had been able to, his face would have betrayed how he really felt. That smile . . . I don’t think I’ll ever be able to put it into words.
After that, I began to put myself in his shoes. I tried to imagine what it would be like to find my own body unresponsive to my commands. I wanted to experience it myself, so that I could better look after him.
When I smiled at someone, I tried to hold the left side of my face rigid, so that I could see the shock and horror of the person I was smiling at. I wanted to experience the same embarrassment my father must have felt. I thought about what I would say to make the situation less awkward. When I was eating, I tried to imagine what it would be like to struggle with a pair of chopsticks. When I went out for a walk, I practiced walking with my left leg stiff and immobile. I fell a lot. I was bruised black and blue. But I realized that my father’s numb left side wouldn’t even have been able to feel those cuts and scrapes.
In the days after my father returned home, the members of the family slowly fell into their roles. It was as if we were staging a play with no access to the script. We only had a general idea what the play was about. We knew that we had to express some type of optimism. We were all trying to convince each other that things were getting better. We muddled our way through, improvising our lines, trying to figure out exactly what parts we were playing.
My mother was cast in the role of the unflappable wife who never let on how she suffered. When my father had an accident in bed, she would laugh and tease him. “Look at you! Like a little kid again!” After her laughter abruptly ended, she would take the sheets out into the alley to wash them. The joke wasn’t funny, but she had to keep telling it. When she finished her tasks at home, she went out to watch over the gas station, which, before it closed, provided our family with a livelihood.
My elder sister was a perceptive girl. She stayed by our father’s side and tried her best to take care of anything she thought he might need. She cooked for him, fed him, and massaged the numb left side of his body. Since my father’s illness had forced him to temporarily abandon his post as head of household, my mother picked up most of the slack, and my sister got the rest.
And my role, I knew, was to take over as head of the family. I felt like a politician on the campaign trail. Even when my constituents’ concerns went unspoken, I could still read their expressions and the true states of mind that those expressions were sometimes deployed to conceal. I read their faces and gave them whatever I thought they needed. I put in carefully calculated appearances and gave them a share of my time and effort. I was sometimes forced to rule on the family’s various disagreements, swooping in to rap my gavel and offer judgment. Whatever the content of the ruling, I knew it had to be delivered with confidence. When I ruled, I felt like an actor again, delivering a forceful monologue to a rapt audience.
We were all actors, and we played our roles the best we could, but each of us felt how unnatural the whole production would have seemed to an outside observer. It was all so cheap and tawdry—more comedy than drama perhaps. None of us were professional actors, after all, and we were all frustrated and dissatisfied with the roles we had been cast in.
But the show had to go on. Even if we were playing to only one spectator, that spectator was life. Life does not sit quietly in its seat and take in the show; instead it jeers and glares like a harsh director, never satisfied, always quick to throw another plot twist into the script, demanding that we dig deep for our true motivation.
My mother fell while trying to move an oil drum at the gas station. She used to help my father with them, tipping over the several-hundred-pound drums, then rolling them away for storage. But with him confined to
bed, she was forced to attempt it by herself. She had set her shoulder to a drum and was leaning the entire weight of her slim frame against it. The drum wouldn’t budge an inch. That day, when I got out of school, I headed to the gas station, as I usually did. I saw her squatting in the oily mud of the yard, sobbing. The director had called for action, but I had no idea what my lines were. I pretended not to see her and rushed home instead.
Meanwhile, my father had lost his temper with my sister for not getting his dinner ready fast enough. As soon as she saw me come in the door, she pulled me aside. She couldn’t tell me what had happened. All she could do was mutter angrily.
In the end, it was my father who yelled “cut.” Two weeks had passed since he had returned home. He had tried many times to test the limits of his body, but each trial had been a failure. My mother came home looking exhausted, her hair disheveled. Without speaking, she put a cane down beside my father. He looked at the cane, and he saw his future. His frustration got the better of him. He picked up the cane and swung it angrily at his wife.
Thanks to the paralysis, his aim was off. He didn’t land a solid blow but still managed to raise a bruise and knock her to the floor.
The next scene in the drama was my sister shrieking, my angry shouts, and my father’s hysteria. Finally, we collapsed in each other’s arms, all of us weeping.
What the hell kind of story is this? That was the question I asked after I had helped my mother to bed and got my sister calmed down, prepared my father’s dinner, helped him wash, led him back to his room, and then retreated to my own bedroom. I was asking thin air.
I don’t know if I expected anyone to answer me. I looked around and then asked another question: How does this story end?
There was no response. I didn’t expect one.