by Chongda Cai
We called on one of my cousins who lived there. He was my cousin, but he was closer in age to my father. He already had a son who was six or so years younger than me. When they saw that I was bored, the boy was charged with taking me out for a walk. I thought I might finally see something interesting, but it was another invitation to count the floors of high-rises and inspect the materials used to pave the streets. The city seemed to be a place of countless rules: you can’t throw garbage all over the place, you have to line up to get on the bus, you have to cross at a crosswalk. . . . I was just a kid, so to me it seemed like a wretched place to grow up. When I saw all that concrete stretching away to the horizon, I felt sad. There weren’t any interesting creatures lurking or strange flowers in the scenery. There were no muddy ponds with tadpoles and colorful little fish. There were no places to dig in the dirt.
I’m writing this from Beijing, where the air is so bad it has numbed any sensitivity my nose once had, and I wouldn’t be able to appreciate fresh air if I got it. I have been thinking about what it meant to grow up in a place like my hometown. There’s a simplicity to people who grow up outside the big city, and with that comes sincerity. I consider Xiamen to be one of the most beautiful cities in China, but I was happy that my father finally decided not to move. I remember talking to Ling Hulei, the creative director at New Weekly, about our childhoods. He was from a small town outside Zhanjiang in Guangdong, and I was from a small town outside Quanzhou. By his estimation, we were not outliers. He had noticed the preponderance of suburban and rural young people working in literature and journalism. He put the figure at around 80 percent. Ling Hulei called it “the village laying siege to the city.” When he asked me what I thought the reason was, I told him it was because people who grow up in a small town tend to be simple and honest folks.
There are deeper reasons than that basic explanation, though. People from a small town usually first leave the small town for the nearest city, usually the county capital, and then move on up the ladder until they arrive at a first-tier city. As they make that climb, they get a clear understanding of each level. When they arrive at the next stage, they can look back at where they have come from and have a better understanding of that place and fully assimilate what they might have learned there. On a journey like that, you gain an understanding of your place in things. And on top of all that, kids from small towns just have better stories to tell than city kids.
Again, I don’t want it to seem like I am singling out Xiamen. Of all the cities I have been to in China, I would say that Xiamen is one of my favorites, right up there with Kunming. My problem is with cities in general. Most cities in China, and that includes Xiamen, are built according to a simple idea: observe what cities outside China have done and how they organize their citizens, and then copy that model. Modern Chinese cities are not born, nor are they cultivated in an organic way. Everything in a Chinese city is planned. Earlier periods of history were more chaotic, so Chinese cities are built and governed with a strong sense of order controlling how and where people can do certain activities. The people who grow up in that kind of environment have a two-way switch: they can either maintain and support that order or work against it—but they don’t often develop any sort of secondary way of looking at the world.
Life needs some turbidity; that goes for the muddy pond and for our own upbringing. If you compare the water in a muddy pond and the water in a fountain, the water in the pond will always be teeming with life, while the water in the fountain is virtually sterile. A child can spend an entire afternoon watching the countless varieties of life that exist in a muddy pond. A child in the city cannot spend more than a few moments contemplating an urban landscape that has been carefully arranged and planned down to the last detail.
“A thousand identical cities” is a phrase that’s become popular with foreign architects to describe the Chinese urban environment. Every single city can be analyzed by standards that are very familiar to those architects, even if they are from outside China. They can see how and why each aspect of the city was planned, but what’s missing is any natural, intertwined evolution of people and place. Chinese cities have been deprived of their essence.
In the same way that I prefer Quanzhou to Xiamen, I have always liked Beijing better than Shanghai. The way I see it, Beijing isn’t a city at all, but rather the world’s largest village. My home in Beijing is close to the bustling hub of Wangfujing, but it is situated down a small hutong, one of the narrow alleys that once made up most of the cityscape. I’m still fascinated by my neighborhood in Beijing, where every turn on my walk home from the main road reveals something. Passing a courtyard home converted into a teahouse, I might be lucky enough to hear an old man warming up his voice with local opera, or I might catch a game of chess going on in a corner watched over by a local auntie eating her lunch. Beijing is still capable of offering up pleasant surprises hidden away in its many corners. Beijing is a city with countless layers. It contains multitudes. Shanghai is the complete opposite: an advanced metropolis where if you have seen one part of it, you’ve seen it all—it all looks the same.
You can make a similar comparison between Quanzhou and Xiamen. I always say that Xiamen is like Quanzhou with a facelift. Quanzhou is a place where the flow of traffic and pedestrians has not yet been tamed, where there are still rough, old buildings, and the nastiest local habits haven’t yet been civilized. I like taking in the scenery from the road that goes around the island out in the bay, but it has never really moved me. It could never touch me as deeply as the way the city looks around the festival to mark the Buddha’s birthday, when every doorway is hung with offerings, the air is perfumed with incense, everyone is praying for peace, and I hear down a stone alley the sound of someone singing a slow, sad Nanyin ballad.
12
The Question We All Must Answer Eventually
The night before I left Beijing, the weather turned cold. By nine o’clock, the streets were already quiet. I got my mother settled in a hotel in Wudaokou, then took a taxi halfway across Beijing to Li Daren’s place in Nancheng. During the whole drive, the wind was howling.
I know I’m making it sound a bit bleak, but that’s how I felt at the time. I couldn’t say for sure why. I also wasn’t sure why I had such an urge to see Li Daren and his daughter, Kiki.
Li Daren’s father was in his thirties when the son he was so proud of was born, and by coincidence, Kiki had come along at right around the same point in Li Daren’s life. As Li Daren told me about his own father, he hugged Kiki to himself, her small frame resting on his shoulder. Watching Li Daren shower the child with love and kisses, I was moved by his fatherly tenderness.
A year before, when my father passed away, Li Daren told me that he believed your father’s blood flows into your body. I believed that, too.
It was a wonderful coincidence. That’s what a relationship between two people always is. A friendship always happens by chance, but it also seems inevitable. Our friends play their own roles in our lives, and they also transform us, molding us into the people we will become. There is a certain logic by which each person leads his or her life, and if I had never met Li Daren, my own individual logic would be completely different.
Li Daren was a direct and passionate man. He was very particular about journalism and people. He had a knack for spotting logical fallacies in his interlocutors; he would never give you the opportunity to cover up those flaws, either. And he wasn’t shy about pointing out when someone was being evasive, hesitant, or simply unclear.
Each time I talked to him, I ended up with my feelings hurt. I was often frustrated when he uncovered exactly the thing I was unwilling to say. Sometimes it was a case of not even understanding exactly how I felt, then having Li Daren perfectly sum it up with absolute accuracy. I knew Li Daren only had the best intentions, but after I talked to him, I couldn’t help feeling a bit disappointed in how it had gone.
He did the same thing to me on the night I went to see him before I lef
t Beijing. The reason I am writing about that night in particular is because it changed my life.
He asked me, as he always did, “How’ve you been? Things going okay? Talk to me.”
I told him about the time after my father died, how I had spent a few months back home and why I had decided to quit my job to be with him, about my old hometown, motorcycle rides with no destination in mind. I told him how bored I was and how I had lost all interest in my work. And I told him how worried I was about the state I had found myself in.
Li Daren had a habit of chuckling before he spoke. He said, “But that’s just an excuse. You know your father’s death isn’t at the root of all this. That’s just your way of avoiding a question you don’t want to answer.”
At the time, I believed that everything could be explained by my father’s stroke eight years prior. Everything revolved around my father’s illness, the responsibility I felt toward my family, and the career I had planned to help me provide for them. In my mind, there was a very simple explanation for what I had become. When I was stricken with anxiety about writing a bestseller or becoming a famous author, the reason was that I hoped to be able to shoulder the financial burden of my father’s illness. With my father’s passing, I felt like I had lost what had once been the focus of my life. I thought my indecisiveness and worry were natural.
So when Li Daren told me I was using all that to avoid facing something, I was angry. He explained himself, though: “The question is, how do you want to live your life? You still don’t have the courage to answer.”
He didn’t explain himself further, but I thought I understood what he wanted to say. I didn’t know how I wanted to live my life, so I had replaced any real consideration of the question with a narrow, utilitarian logic that relied on a ready-made excuse. I didn’t have any goals beyond getting as rich as possible and as famous as possible, and I had covered up even that with pretty words like “dreams” and “responsibilities.”
Now that some time has gone by, I appreciate Li Daren’s care and attention. I treasure his words.
I don’t think I am in the minority in getting by without really knowing how to live my life. People like me reach for the easiest excuses—our dreams and our responsibilities—to avoid answering that key question.
Since leaving Beijing and returning to Fujian, I have been thinking about the person I was for the eight years after my father’s stroke. I had passed the juncture where I should have begun to consider how to define myself, to decide how I was going to live and what goals I should work toward, but I had used my family’s misfortune as an excuse not to face those questions.
I threw myself into my work, keeping myself constantly under pressure so that I would never have any free time. I didn’t want to have to figure out how to fill that free time, and I didn’t want to ever have time to ponder how I should live my life, what I really thought was valuable, and what I really enjoyed.
I was fundamentally unwilling to pass judgment on my own life. I also couldn’t manage to take control over it. I was always running away, hiding behind what I described as my responsibility to my family. I chased after the news and called it chasing my dream. Everything in my life moved with the rhythm of my job, so I became fragile, capable of being unsettled and frightened at the slightest turbulence.
That night, Li Daren’s final words to me were “Think hard about your life. Figure out how to actually enjoy it.” I thought I understood what he wanted to say. Life isn’t simple; it comes with hardships. It’s more complicated than simply staying true to what you call your ideals, and the meaning of living an authentic life is up to us to decide.
Perhaps life is like a questionnaire. When you refuse to answer a question, you can’t go on to the next question, and that unanswered query continues to follow you around.
When I left Li Daren’s house that night, it was already eleven o’clock. From that moment on, I felt an unprecedented comfort and relaxation. Before that, I had been avoiding my friends. I couldn’t face myself, so there was no way I could face them.
I was suddenly anxious to get in touch with my friend Chenggang, whose calls I had been avoiding. He was the deputy director of the newspaper in my hometown. He was a workaholic who loved talking to me about journalism and about life. He was committed to his ideals. After my father died, he had often called to cheer me up.
Sometimes life is like a bad soap opera. The morning after I talked to Li Daren, I got a call from Yifa telling me that Chenggang had died. He was just over thirty and had been taken out by a heart attack. For a man so committed to his ideals, it seemed an appropriate way for him to go.
Forgive me, Chenggang, my brother, my teacher, my intimate friend. The whole way back home to see you off, I was blaming you—for not answering the question either and for leaving behind a wife and daughter, and leaving friends like me with infinite regrets over your short life. I wish I could have talked to you about how to enjoy your life, to tell you that we should never have filled our heads with false dreams. I wish I could have talked to you about what we should cherish most in this life and what we should have realized was really valuable.
Forgive me, Father, for throwing myself into my work after you got sick. I thought that was how I could make you happy. But when I saw the photo you kept of me, the only one I had given you, worn pale by the stroking of your fingers, I knew I had deprived you of what only I could give you, what was most valuable to you then.
I wrote this for my father, and for my good friend Wang Chenggang.
13
Homecoming
I still felt the familiar comfort: I knew every stone, and every stone knew me. I knew every corner of the neighborhood and how the years had collected there, transforming them, and every corner of the neighborhood had also looked back, watching time change me.
I returned to my hometown to convalesce, but as I lay on my sickbed, it was my power of recollection that seemed to have recovered. Thinking back over everything that had happened in the past several years, I concluded that the only thing I could take pride in was choosing my father’s burial plot.
As far as cemeteries go, it was a high-end neighborhood, and my mother wasn’t happy with the price. It was a display of vanity, but I cherished my ability to finally do something for my father, to whom I had never been able to give a better life.
After my father passed, his urn had been placed in a columbarium near his old school. It was my mother’s idea, since she volunteered at a nearby temple, and it was convenient for her to stop by on her way there and wish her husband a good morning. She had also taken his waistline into consideration. “He’s getting fat,” she told me, “so I thought he might appreciate having the sports field at the school right there, since he used to like to exercise.”
In my hometown, there was a nearly universal belief that the gods were watching and the spirits of the departed were always lurking. Our world and the netherworld were separated by only a thin membrane. Everyone knew that spirits lived much like we did, just on the other side of the barrier between worlds. Spirits got hungry, sometimes they ate too much, and sometimes they started to pack on the pounds. Spirits could be happy or sad or bored or sick. . . . My father went on living much as he always had, still in our hometown. On the anniversary of his passing, she burned agarwood incense in front of the memorial tablet on the altar and asked, “How was the marinated duck?” Every now and then, someone in the family would catch some sign of his presence, and when they told my mother, she would stop by to read sutras for him. “You need to read these,” she would tell him sternly, “or you’ll never get into the Western Paradise.”
That went on for a few years, until Second Uncle unexpectedly passed away. His son, who had done well in business, wanted to lay his father to rest somewhere nice. He toured the cemeteries of the area by car, weighing up the advantages and disadvantages of each. He eventually settled on the Old Plum Mound Garden, which had been built with money from a Taiwanese businessman.
The price was steep, but my uncle was insistent. He wanted the two brothers to be together again. “They were so close,” he said. “Why separate them now?”
The way he imagined it, the two brothers would hang out like they always had, drinking and telling stories, running off somewhere to catch a show. . . . Their two younger brothers—Third Uncle and Fourth Uncle—were in full agreement; the cousins were unanimous. My mother, though, was hesitant. She refused to explain exactly why she was holding back, and finally, one of the aunts was dispatched to ask her directly. “It’s too expensive,” she said, “and anyway, it’s too far away. You know I get carsick. It’ll be impossible for me to get out there. . . .” She went on in that vein for a while.
When all other efforts had been exhausted, I was recruited to press my mother to make a decision. She decided it would be my responsibility to make the final call. Since my father had his stroke when I was in my second year of high school, she had given me the role of head of the family, and it was often my place to pass final judgment on things like this.
I was in Guangzhou during that period, and I rushed back home to see the cemetery my uncle had selected. I was haunted by a need to pay my father back. I hadn’t cried when my father passed. I was furious at myself, because I had lost my chance to do anything for him. I owed him so much, and I feared the debt would go forever unpaid. The cemetery plot was one way I could pay him back. Perhaps my mother still had misgivings, but she had to accept my decision.