Vessel

by Chongda Cai

  When I left the VIP room, I went by myself to the roof of the hospital. I noticed for the first time the ring of chain-link fence around its edge. Maybe it was there for when people had abandoned hope.

  I expected to be alone up on the roof, but I saw that another boy about my age was there, too. I recognized him. I had seen him leaving the VIP room shortly before my mother and I went in. I guessed that the same responsibility had been thrust upon him.

  The unspoken rules of the ICU dictated that we should ignore each other, but he unexpectedly broke the silence. “Did you know tomorrow is Christmas?”

  “Is that right?” I said. I hadn’t realized.

  “My father wanted to be back home by Spring Festival. He said he wanted to see the fireworks. Can you set off fireworks on Christmas?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  We both turned to look at the falling darkness, then down at the city below, with its crowded streets and its tapestry of lights coming to life in the dusk.

  I signed the consent form. I went back to the VIP room alone because my mother was afraid she would start shaking if she had to face the doctors and desks again.

  When I had finished, the young doctor was put in charge of preparing me. “Tomorrow night,” he said, “I want you to make sure he’s mentally prepared to go into surgery. That means taking care of anything he might ask for. He has to want to survive this. If someone wants to live, if they’re really holding on to this world, their chances of making it through go up. But you need to make sure he’s ready.”

  As usual, I was in charge of fetching dinner that night. My mother wanted to get my father his favorite marinated duck. He couldn’t eat it, but she thought it might be nice if he could look at it. But I suddenly had another idea. I went and bought him his least favorite food: fish slices and greens.

  My father was upset and nagged me all night.

  I tried to comfort him. “The day after tomorrow,” I said, “I’ll buy you something—how about a whole duck?”

  My father had no idea that the surgery had a 60 percent success rate, but he knew enough to be anxious. He seemed to want to impart some final wisdom to me. “I want you to look after your mother,” he said.

  “I’m not ready to look after her. I’m too young.”

  That did nothing to settle his nerves.

  He paused and took a deep breath. “Why aren’t your uncles here?” he asked. “I should call them. I have a few things I need to tell them.”

  “They have their own problems to deal with. They don’t have time to talk to you. Just wait until you get out of here. You can talk to them then.”

  He glared at me. “You know you’re not supposed to upset a sick person, right?”

  “I’m not trying to upset you,” I said. “I’m telling you the truth. They said they’d come over the day after tomorrow. They can spend the whole day with you.”

  “You’re tricky, aren’t you?” he said, then he went quiet.

  The surgery was a gamble, and I didn’t know if it was worth taking. If my father didn’t make it, I knew I would regret that conversation for the rest of my life.

  I heard a child out in the hallway shouting about Christmas. He was asking someone for a present, but I didn’t hear anyone react. The child’s cries were like a stone dropped into a well too deep to hear a splash. He did not know what I knew. There were days far more important than Christmas Day.

  My mother could not take it. She was depressed and anxious. She went to open the window to get some fresh air. At that very moment, a streak of light rocketed up from the ground, cutting through the murky darkness, climbing up and up until it was almost level with the window. When it reached its apex, it blossomed into a bright, multicolored ball of light: someone was setting off fireworks.

  That made everyone on the ICU happy: “Fireworks!”

  The lights from the colorful explosion flashed. I turned and saw that my father was smiling. How wonderful, fireworks.

  I immediately knew who had lit the fuse down below. I realized how much he must love his father. I stuck my head out the window and saw the boy from the rooftop with three security guards surrounding him.

  At nine o’clock on the day of his surgery, my father was wheeled into the operating room. My uncles and the rest of the cousins had arrived the night before. We stood outside the door.

  There were a few chairs outside the operating room, but they were cheap plastic stools like the kind you would find at a cheap restaurant. Nobody could sit on one for very long before deciding it was better to stand.

  Around ten o’clock, a nurse rushed out of the room. My mother broke down in tears. Nobody dared ask the nurse what was going on.

  A short time after that, a team of doctors walked by us and went into the operating room. Ignoring hospital regulations, my uncles took out cigarettes and lit up.

  At twelve o’clock, there was still no news from the operating room. The nurses and doctors had stopped coming and going. Everyone in the waiting room stewed in anxiety.

  The silence was so complete that we could hear the second hand of the clock moving. A few of the relatives wanted to find someone to ask how the surgery was going, but the door to the operating room was shut tight. Nobody was coming or going.

  A little after one o’clock, a lone nurse stepped out of the operating room and brushed past us without saying a word.

  Some of the family started to cry.

  My uncles had had enough. “What are you crying for?” one of them asked.

  “They’re busy in there,” the other one said. “You’re all imagining the worst.” The two men threw their cigarette butts to the floor and went to stand in the corner.

  When my father was finally wheeled out of surgery and into the recovery room, I looked around for the boy who had set off the fireworks, but he was nowhere to be found.

  “Did you get any other patients out of surgery today?” I asked a nurse.

  “Just your father,” the nurse said.

  I couldn’t sit still. I sneaked off without telling anyone and went back up to the ICU. The patients and their families couldn’t hide their excitement. But I wasn’t in the mood for their congratulations.

  “Do you know the patient who had surgery on the same day as my father?” I asked. “How is he?”

  Someone seemed to know whom I meant.

  “Right, that must be who it was,” I said. “He has a boy about the same age as me.”

  “He went in for surgery yesterday. We never saw him come out,” someone finally explained.

  I turned and walked to the elevator without speaking. I rode it down to the first floor and walked out through the outpatient department. The marks of the fireworks were still on the pavement outside. There was not much left, just a layer of gray ash.

  I knew that in a few days the wind would blow it away, and the dust of the city would bury all traces.

  Not much left. As if it never happened at all.

  5

  Friends in High Places

  It was not long after my father’s funeral that he began to appear in my mother’s dreams. The man she saw was still partially paralyzed, as my father had been in his final years. In the dream, she glimpsed him across a creek. He was squatting there, leaning to one side, smiling slightly, looking at her peacefully.

  Nothing in particular seemed to happen in these dreams. They were quite tranquil in fact. But she was not prepared to chalk them up to simple grief. This was her conclusion: “Your father is coming to me for help.”

  “There must be something from this life still hanging over him,” she told me, “some debt he couldn’t repay. That’s why he still looks like he did after his stroke. If someone’s soul has moved on, they can’t keep appearing in your dreams. They appear one final time, and then they disappear.”

  There were two things my mother was sure of: the first was that “we all have debts to pay in this life, and you can’t leave this world until you pay them,” and the second was th
at “if someone’s soul has moved on, they can’t keep appearing in your dreams.”

  My mother made a solemn promise to help my father.

  Only much later I learned that when my mother was young, she was a hard-boiled skeptic. She didn’t believe in anything supernatural. That was surprising, since her mother had been a sort of shaman.

  My mother was born shortly after the founding of New China. That was in 1949, a time when the political was paramount and slogans went up in the ancestral shrines and temples. My grandmother and nana kept belief alive, and they never stopped offering incense to the gods and ancestors. In fact, my mother’s skepticism had nothing to do with politics. Times were hard, and she was hungry; she didn’t believe her family could be abandoned to their fate like this if there really were gods.

  My mother had three sisters, one older than her and two younger, and two brothers, one older and one younger. That large family was the result of a campaign to increase the birth rate. The same as everywhere else in this world, the government was mostly concerned with the theoretical—how to increase the number of children being born—but the quotidian aspects of the campaign (feeding all of those children, for example) were sometimes too minor to fall within the scope of their concerns. The person in charge of feeding the children was my grandmother, who was, like my father, partially paralyzed. She worked as a shaman at home. My mother was happy to talk about that time in her life, but she always avoided exaggerating what she had gone through. As she told it, they had to get through it one way or another. She went through the same things as everyone else, she said. Her suffering was not unique; what was unique were the ways different people invented to deal with it.

  In our Hokkien culture, women and girls are supposed to be virtuous and dutiful, but my mother learned to be tough. She was the first girl to climb up into a tree to pick fruit. The fruit was a help, but it wasn’t much, so she shocked her family by becoming an expert at trapping crabs and netting shrimp. She was good at it because she took risks. She got up at four or five every morning, long before anybody else was up, and went down into the marshes. She was willing to go places where nobody else would (the waters around the rocky atoll were teeming with marine life, but most people wouldn’t take the risk, since it was impossible to approach by boat without running aground, and if you went on foot, you ran the risk of being caught in a tidal current). . . . My mother nearly didn’t make it back from one such expedition.

  The bigger the risk, the richer the reward: it’s a rule that applies to many things in this world. Dusk was the best time to fish the atoll, but it was also the most dangerous time, when the tide was sweeping back in to submerge it. The currents were fierce and carried a legion of waves that crashed against the atoll. Anyone unlucky enough to be caught on the rocky outcropping at that time faced the waves and tidal currents but also the inexorable rise of the ocean around them.

  One evening, my mother’s hunger and greed kept her at the atoll past the point when she could safely escape the tide. The water was rising all around her. The waves came, trying to take her in their embrace. The ocean rose, threatening to swallow her. There was a small boat not too far away, and someone on board had seen what was happening. They tried to get close enough to rescue her, but the waves tossed the boat around, and the pilot was finally forced to retreat. The people on the boat could only yell to her from across the water.

  My mother was forced to rescue herself. She gritted her teeth, slung the afternoon’s catch over her shoulder, took a deep breath, and jumped into the sea. There was something childish in her resolve, like a toddler throwing a tantrum. The waves tore at her, but perhaps because she refused to give in, the demons of the sea tossed her back. She was spun out of the labyrinthine currents and spit into the open ocean, with her catch still over her shoulder.

  According to her, when she was pulled into the boat, she kept her head held high. She didn’t let on how frightened she was. But that was her last trip to fish the atoll. “I still remember how alone I felt,” she told me. “I can still feel it.”

  For many years after I heard the story, I tried to imagine my mother diving in to battle the currents. She had the arrogance of youth, when you are completely unafraid because you are ignorant of the dangers you face. She relied on some instinct, some innate sense, to struggle through the chaos of the waves. Whatever fate held in store for her, my mother went in the opposite direction.

  She told me that my grandmother, from the time my mother was a girl, used to sigh and say, “How is a tomboy like you ever going to raise a child or be a good wife?”

  When gods want to bring a mortal to their side, they discover what a person’s life is lacking and then bestow it. Most people do not know what it is they really want or need; in fact, my mother told me, they’re afraid of discovering what it might be.

  Even during those revolutionary years, the Hokkien people clung to their customs. These customs, even if outmoded, were passed on in a self-perpetuating cycle.

  My mother, like all the women of southern Fujian, was obligated, beginning in her teenage years, to take part in the arranged dates that would lead to her finding a husband. At that young age, her future life, and the man who would play a central role in it, was glimpsed as a blur, like something vastly remote. My mother and her peers knew the steps required to fulfill their womanhood: the first step was to get married; the second was to bear a son for their husband, so that another entry could be recorded in the family genealogy and the family name passed on to another generation; the third was to make enough money to look after their children; the fourth was to save up for a daughter’s dowry (if the dowry was too meager, bullying could be expected from their future in-laws); the fifth was to pay the bride-price and hold a wedding for their son; the sixth was to ensure that a grandson was born and the family name would be passed on again; the seventh was to help raise that grandson; and once all of those steps were complete, matriarchal responsibility was passed on to the next generation along with all the customs and traditions, and the women of the last generation were relegated to a supervisory role. When the gods and ancestors had deemed a woman’s work complete, she would finally be summoned out of this world and on to her next life.

  For women like my mother, each step of their adult lives was laid out for them, slowly leading them toward a “happily ever after.” When my father and his parents visited my mother’s family, my mother stood in the corner, giving my father a brief glimpse and an almost imperceptible nod. The slight nod was her giving her assent to a firm push toward adulthood.

  The first major test came when her first child was a daughter. The family offered their best wishes, but she knew that their kind words tactfully concealed an exhortation to make sure that her second child was a son. The pressure came not only from the family—my mother dearly wanted a son, too. She wanted a son to inherit her impulsiveness and stubbornness.

  The second test was coming, and my mother managed to maintain her composure for most of her pregnancy, but she cracked a month before she went into labor. She broke down crying and went to the Lady of Linshui temple and vowed to its goddess of motherhood that if she gave birth to a son, she would stop denying the supernatural and pledge her eternal belief in the gods.

  I was born a month later.

  My mother described how she had wound up at that particular temple. In southern Fujian, unlike most of China, temples are not segregated by sect. Inside a large temple, there are often gods and deities from numerous faiths, so you might find the Three Buddhas beside a shrine to the Daoist deity Guan Yu, and then an altar to local earth gods beside a temple to Mazu, the goddess of the sea.

  When she first arrived at the temple, she had no idea exactly how to go about petitioning the gods for assistance or which gods in particular would be the most effective. Finally, an elderly woman passed by and explained to her that the gods each have their own jurisdiction and constituents: there is a kitchen god for the kitchen, there are earth gods for agricultural
concerns, and each village or district has its own local deities. “Whatever you’re going through, you can find a god who can talk you through it or take some of the burden off you.” At that moment, my mother wanted to believe.

  “I realized that whatever I was carrying with me was going to crush me,” my mother told me, “and I thought it sounded great, the idea that there was a god who could take some of the weight off me.”

  I’m not sure how many people in our hometown have quite the same relationship to the gods as my mother does. From as far back as I can remember, she treated the gods with the casualness of family, dropping by the temple like she would drop by a cousin’s place. Whenever anything was bothering her, the first place she would go was a temple.

  To talk to the gods, she used her moon blocks. These were two blocks of wood, both flat on one side and curved on the other. She would ask a question and then divine the answer by tossing the wooden crescents to the floor. The answer was contained in the various positions the blocks took after coming to rest. The three possible answers were yes, no, or no comment. She poured out her complaints to the gods, whispered a possible solution to the moon blocks, then cast them to get the response. She could weep and wail to the god in his niche but then turn to me with a smile on her face.

  She often treated the gods like a spoiled child might treat doting parents. When she got a negative response from her moon blocks, she would throw them again and again until she got the answer she wanted. Once she was satisfied, she would smile guilelessly up at the god, who was at that very moment cruising through the heavens on a towering cumulonimbus, and say, “Thanks!”

  I didn’t really understand what my mother was going through that drove her to seek solace in those temples. What I remember is the thick scent of agarwood climbing slowly upward and the clatter of moon blocks on floorboards.

  It was my mother’s idea for me to be adopted by a god. I was around three or four years old when my divine godfather was introduced to me. Around the time she was pregnant with me, things at home had been rough, and maybe because of that, I was born a sickly child. The way I heard it, my mother had gone to the Guan Yu shrine in the old city and thrown her moon blocks until she got the answer she wanted. After receiving the blessing of Guan Yu, we went to the shrine each year, carrying offerings of pork knuckle. The temple attendant would give me incense and joss paper to burn, securing another year’s blessing.