Vessel

by Chongda Cai

  “Why didn’t you write me back?” he asked.

  I couldn’t decide whether to tell him the truth. I decided it wasn’t worth trying to explain.

  As always, he was concerned about maintaining his reputation and impressing other people, so he invited me out to a fancy restaurant in the Mid-Levels where there was a beautiful nighttime view of Victoria Harbour.

  We reminisced about the old days for a while, but eventually I couldn’t hold back from asking him, “But how are you doing now?”

  “Me? I’m working hard. Nothing like you, though. You made something of yourself!”

  “Working hard at what?”

  He held up his glass and paused, then chuckled to himself. He looked as if he had come to a momentous decision. He said, “I install anti-theft doors.”

  He explained that they were fortified steel doors with multiple locking mechanisms, and he made twelve thousand Hong Kong dollars a month.

  I didn’t know what to say. The silence between us grew thick. I started to panic.

  Tiny made a valiant effort to get the conversation going. He told me the truth of his time in Hong Kong, about how his classmates had looked down on him, how he had never made any friends, how he was sick of the place, and how his parents’ business had failed.

  “You know what?” he said. “Now that I think about it, that little town was home, even if I looked down on it back then.” He smiled at his own remark. “Even that’s just wishful thinking. I don’t have a home.”

  I knew there were things he wasn’t telling me. Why didn’t he have a home? What were his parents doing?

  I realized that as honest as he had been, there were things he preferred to leave unsaid.

  We finished eating around ten, and Tiny had to run to get the bus back home. I walked him to his stop.

  There was a long line at the bus stop, with men in ties and cheap suits or the uniforms of appliance repair companies and women with the aprons they wore to work in hair salons. As he stepped on the bus, he paused and turned to ask me if I wanted to come with him. He figured since we had spent so much time apart, it might be nice to keep catching up. “We can stay up talking all night even!”

  I thought for a moment and then followed him onto the bus.

  The sign on top said the destination was Tin Shui Wai. I knew what that name meant to people in Hong Kong. As we wound our way between the skyscrapers, he told me what each one was. He told me more about his life over the past several years.

  The bus left the urban core and headed out toward the edge of the city, where the lights become dimmer and farther between.

  “We’re almost there,” Tiny said.

  We drove out onto a long suspension bridge.

  “This is the Tsing Yi Bridge, the longest suspension bridge in Asia. I cross it every day.”

  “Oh, really?” I asked, nodding politely.

  He looked out at the bridge and then, as if talking to himself, said, “I had been in Hong Kong for three years when my father found out he had cancer. It was nasopharyngeal carcinoma. There was no way for him to continue working. He went all over looking for a doctor and a hospital that could treat him. He was still hopeful at first, but my brother figured it was going to end badly. He took the money my parents had saved up and ran away. We had just sold our house so we could keep paying the medical bills, but one day I guess my father had enough. He drove out here on the bridge and jumped. Now, to make a living in this city, I have to pass by the spot every single day. . . .”

  I was stunned. I didn’t know what to say.

  Tiny went on, still speaking as if only to himself: “This city is disgusting. As soon as my father got sick, his friends all disappeared. When he died, my mother and I were the only ones at his funeral.”

  He laughed softly to himself.

  I opened my mouth but nothing came out. Tiny seemed to know how I felt.

  “I’m fine,” he said. “I’ll get through it. You know, the newspapers here actually reported the case. We still have a copy of that day’s paper. It was the top headline on the front page. Can you believe that?” He turned to me, and I saw that he was smiling even though his eyes were wet with tears.

  The bus kept going. The bridge seemed never-ending. The lamps that lit the span rushed past the bus windows, illuminating the tired faces of the passengers, then fading, then illuminating them again.

  Most of those riding the bus back home were tired enough to fall asleep. They had gotten up at seven in the morning to put on their makeup and their uniforms and take the bus into the city to jobs as maintenance men or dishwashers or appliance salesmen or hair stylists. When their workday ended, they rushed back to the bus to ride an hour or two back to the edge of town so that they could prepare for another day.

  These people were as much a part of the city as anybody else. We had imagined Hong Kong as a paradise. These were people we assumed were living in a heaven on earth.

  Tiny opened the bus window and let the wind rush in. I suddenly recalled the other Tiny, back at home in our small town. He had started riding his motorcycle again, I had heard.

  While we were on the bus, he would be getting the nets ready for the next day, and then he would jump on his motorcycle and roar back home up the levee. He had a house and a wife and a son. He had a black dog that rushed out into the alley at the sound of his motorcycle and greeted him with a wagging tail.

  8

  Wenzhan

  I fell ill around the time I was eleven.

  It wasn’t a serious illness, but I lost all inclination to speak or eat, and I wanted to isolate myself. When he heard my symptoms, the doctor I went to see in my small town was disdainful, or perhaps he simply couldn’t wrap his head around that kind of illness. It wasn’t a time of excess, and patience wasn’t a luxury anyone could spare. My illness was considered no better than an indulgence.

  “Leave him alone for a while,” the doctor said. “He’ll feel better soon.”

  He was the same doctor who had treated my cat, and he had also looked after the cow my nana had raised. He prescribed the same medicine to the cat and the cow, only modifying the dosage. My cat died that same night, but the cow managed to hang on for a month. When it looked like the end was near for Nana’s cow, she sent for the butcher. “If a cow dies on its own, you can’t eat the meat.” That was the reason my nana sent for the butcher instead of the doctor. She went tottering around on her formerly bound feet, delivering cuts of meat in a basket to relatives and friends. She made sure she went to see the doctor, too. He didn’t wait for her to say anything, but immediately said, “You should thank me. If it wasn’t for me, that cow wouldn’t have lived a whole month longer.”

  When my mother heard the doctor’s prescription for me, she went to my father and told him, “I think it’s more serious, but the doctor doesn’t have a solution. We have to do something for him.”

  My father was a real man, and to him that meant not spending a lot of time pondering complex solutions to things. What made my father feel good was surrounding himself with friends, so he decided the same prescription might work for me: “He needs some kids his age to play with. Find someone for him.”

  My mother brought Wenzhan over the next day.

  That was the first time we met.

  My mother hadn’t devoted much time to vetting Wenzhan.

  Back then, the adults in our town all had a special talent, which was being able to eat with a bowl of rice in one hand and a small dish balanced on the wrist where they put a few pieces of pickled mustard or some meat. That was so they could move around while eating, the women getting together to gossip about this and that, and the men gathering in a corner to crouch down and talk about their own topics.

  The Saturday I met Wenzhan, my mother took her lunch and went over to one of our neighbors’ homes. She came back with Wenzhan. His house was behind ours. He was a year older than me, and he was also—my mother emphasized this point—“a pretty good student.”

 
I don’t remember how his face looked looming over me. I only remember saying, “Oh,” covering my eyes with the back of my hand, and going back to sleep. During that time, I used to nap after meals. When I woke up, I would stare blankly at the wall until it was time to eat again, and then I would go back to sleep.

  My indifference didn’t deter Wenzhan. I have a memory of him looking me over and then turning to examine the rest of the room before sitting calmly at the foot of my bed. There was something ritualistic about his vigil. He looked like a holy man convinced that the first task on his spiritual quest was to enlighten or save me.

  He prodded me and said, “Get up. Let’s chat.”

  “I don’t want to,” I said.

  “We might as well. You want to spend the rest of your life in bed?”

  I base this only on my own observations, but I’ve noticed that when kids reach the age of twelve or thirteen, words like “life” and “dreams” enter their vocabulary in a major way. When I encountered these significant terms, I felt a subconscious anxiety rising. When Wenzhan asked me that question, it had the desired effect. “There’s nothing to talk about,” I said. “There’s no point hanging around here bothering me. I’m not interested. I’m not interested in anything.”

  “That’s exactly why I want to talk to you,” Wenzhan said. “I’m here to tell you: we have an opportunity to follow our dreams. You can leave all of this behind.”

  That made me sit up. He had managed to put his finger on exactly the point that had been bothering me. I thought it might be because he suffered from the same problem. I was growing up in a town without a single paved street, just packed dirt roads and cobblestone alleys, and all of those unpaved lanes were lined with the same chaotic cityscape. Around that time I had started to ponder what life held in store for me. When I imagined that I would one day become like all the other adults I knew, I felt a petrifying hopelessness.

  Back then, I couldn’t conceive of my small town as anything but dull, so I imagined my future in that town would be equally dull. But what had made me sit up in bed was Wenzhan’s sincerity. When he opened his arms to punctuate his words, perhaps he imagined himself as an eagle soaring overhead—as skinny as he was, he looked more like a clothes drying rack hung with wet laundry.

  “So,” he went on, “we have to build a life for ourselves.” Every word of that speech was carved into my memory. At the time, it impressed me that there was a person not only making such a bold statement but also taking it completely seriously.

  After he finished delivering his speech, my mind went blank for a few seconds, and I had a vision of a vast blank space like a barren plain, like the open ocean, like the boundless sky. . . .

  I looked at him, suddenly feeling a bit light-headed. I thought for a while, then said, “I have to sleep. Come back tomorrow. We can talk.”

  As he left, I managed to focus my eyes enough to get a better look at him, and I realized he had a cleft lip.

  I went to see him the next day.

  After his speech, I had begun to once again pay attention to the world around me. I made a careful survey of Wenzhan, too, noting the ill-fitting suit pants and baggy white shirt he wore, both clearly castoffs from an older sibling.

  His thin chest looked like a washboard, but he insisted on keeping the top three buttons of the shirt undone. Maybe, I thought, he liked the way it moved in the breeze. Maybe it felt like he was floating.

  What really made an impression, though, was his cleft lip, which split his upper lip and locked his mouth at a particular angle.

  In my childhood, the evil—even if it was subconscious—that children most commonly perpetrated was attacking the physical defects of their peers. Children quickly realize their own defects and learn to hide them, always fearing that they will be uncovered. That fear of exposure drives them into a dead end. I had seen it myself many times: kids with some obvious physical defect being laughed at, then banished to the margins of the in-group. Those kids gave up on their dreams. They were destined to never enjoy the benefits of their peers. Their lives would forever be marred by that persecution.

  Wenzhan was the only one who had overcome this pattern. I couldn’t help but admire him.

  When I arrived at his house, I realized that I was only one of many neighborhood kids who seemed to gather there every Sunday. Nearly half of my younger neighbors were scattered around the living room as if waiting for Wenzhan to grant them an audience.

  On Wenzhan’s rounds of our neighborhood, he was always looking for other kids to talk to. He invited them to his house and waited for them to gather at the appointed time. When the group had assembled, he would address them: “In a little while, we’re going down to the beach to dig clams.” He put two kids in charge of getting some shovels, assigned two others to find a set of scales so they could weigh out the clams they harvested before selling them, and sent two others to get a pair of shoulder poles. . . . Everyone was organized into regiments that set out from Wenzhan’s house. On the way, he kept his team entertained with a long talk that included a legend about the white-snake fairy who he claimed lived in the forest near the beach, as well as a brief history of our own town.

  None of the activities were particularly unusual, but the way the kids listened to Wenzhan’s directions was truly remarkable. These were kids who were thirsting for freedom, and it was no easy thing for one of their peers to lead them. I realized, however, that some of the kids were not particularly interested and seemed to be only half-heartedly tagging along.

  Even if the enthusiasm wasn’t unanimous, when I watched him loftily proclaim the day’s schedule, with his cleft lip giving him a peculiar speech impediment, I wondered how he got so many of the neighborhood kids to follow him. I couldn’t figure out how he had managed to install himself as the leader of these kids. They could have made fun of him or revolted against his leadership, but they didn’t.

  The reason was that he was already operating on a higher plane than these kids were, but I only realized that later. I know it’s a simplistic explanation, but it’s the only thing that explains his stubborn commitment to his project.

  I joined the so-called Wenzhan Battalion, too (it was later renamed the Barefoot Army), and I learned Wenzhan was planning a project that would be even bigger than his current efforts.

  Wenzhan’s troops were on a strict schedule. They got together every weekday afternoon at 4:30, when school let out, until 6:00, when it was time to head home for dinner; on weekends, they spent all day together.

  On Saturday and Sunday, Wenzhan’s troops went out on exercises, which mostly involved roasting sweet potatoes, swimming, digging clams, and things like that. Through the week, they did their homework together, then started playing board games like Monopoly and checkers, battle chess, xiangqi, and weiqi. I don’t know why he had so many board games at his place, but he had nearly everything we could have wanted to play.

  The games themselves weren’t the real attraction—it was chatting and talking trash while playing. Talk often turned to vague boasting about the big project Wenzhan had planned.

  “He’ll be just as powerful as President Zhang!” one of the kids said.

  “Maybe,” another said, “but if he can pull it off, he’ll go down in history like Chairman Mao.”

  I asked for details, trying to figure out exactly what Wenzhan was planning.

  “You wouldn’t even get it,” one of the kids said to me disdainfully. “It’s going to be massive.”

  Finally I couldn’t stand it, and when everyone else had left for the day, I went to ask Wenzhan. “Everyone is talking about this project,” I started cautiously, “but what is it exactly?”

  When he smiled, his cleft lip blanched pale and he looked even stranger. “You want to see it?” he asked me.

  I nodded.

  “I haven’t shown them yet,” he said, leading me toward his room, “but I can let you see it.”

  Wenzhan shared a room with his older brother, and I could tell th
eir relationship was not harmonious by the stark divide between the two sides of the room.

  He pulled a beige suitcase from under his bed. I guessed that it must have come from his mother’s family when she married into a new household. He opened the suitcase, and I saw that it was filled with stacks of paper covering a layer of books.

  He took the paper out sheet by sheet and stacked it up on the floor. “Look at this,” he said in a low voice. “For each year in Chinese history, I wrote down the major events, then made my own attempt at an explanation. . . . I’ve been working on this since I was nine years old. Every day after dinner, I come back to it. I figure if I can get through a millennium before I’m eighteen, I’ll consider myself a success.” His face had flushed a deep crimson, and I imagined I could see the blood vessels throbbing under his cheeks.

  I felt a strange sensation, as if there was steam rising from my head and all of the pores in my skin had opened up. I looked at him with wide eyes. Whether he finished it or not, I thought he was already amazing.

  After Wenzhan showed me what he was working on, I started going to his house every day. I dutifully played board games alongside the other kids, but I was just biding my time before asking about the project. “Are you going to be working on it today?” I would ask him.

  He always smiled serenely, and when he looked up at me, I felt like there was some holy gleam in his eyes. I felt as if I were witnessing a momentous project being shepherded into the light.

  I had always been a good student, but Wenzhan’s project had given me a sort of desperation to succeed at school. Even though I easily managed to finish at the top of my class, it was no longer enough for me. I felt a constant anxiety. Sometimes I felt like I couldn’t catch my breath. I wanted to keep pace with Wenzhan.

  I wanted to take every opportunity to talk to Wenzhan.

  At first he kept telling me not to worry, that he would wait until I finished first in my class again to talk to me seriously. When I got my exam scores, I went to see him again. I got some satisfaction out of his obvious surprise at my academic success. I asked him, “What should I do now?”