by Ge Fei
“I won’t stay long. Two months, maybe, six at the longest. As soon as I find a decent place, I’ll move out.”
Songping didn’t reply, but turned to look out the west-facing window. “The temperature’s starting to drop. The maple trees in the mountains aren’t fully red yet, but they’re starting to turn. This morning, when I woke up and looked out the window, I thought I was still in Canada.”
“They want me to move out by the end of the month. I can talk to my sister, but her husband, Chang Baoguo, is the main problem. He’s from Hubei and has a short temper. He’ll spit right into your collar if he gets mad enough. He’s a taxi driver. Got into a bad accident up in Changping last year. He killed the other driver, and ended up handicapped himself.”
“People from Hubei can be hard to deal with. Smart as a nine-headed hydra, they say.” Songping passed me a small cup of black tea and smiled: “Yesterday someone sent me a little ‘Yunnan Red.’ Have a taste. Everybody’s been buying ‘Golden Forelock’ nowadays, and the price has become a bit unreasonable. But I’ve always thought the flavor of ‘Yunnan Red’ better anyway.”
“Chang Baoguo usually doesn’t bother me, but he takes it out on my sister almost every day. I feel bad staying in that apartment. This morning he kicked her in the . . . under her stomach with a square-toed leather shoe. She’s been pissing blood.”
“When the cart gets to the foot of the mountain, a path will appear,” Songping quoted. His face darkened and he frowned again. “I need to use the bathroom.”
When he returned from the bathroom, he was wearing athletic sweats and a windbreaker. He stuffed a paper bag into my hand and told me he was going to a club on Fragrant Hill to play tennis. Then, as if he’d just remembered something, he said, “Remember to call that guy Ding up. How you do business with him is your affair, but there’s just one thing: whatever you have to say, say it, without asking too many questions.”
All I could do was excuse myself and go. If you had caught sight of me at that moment, you wouldn’t have missed the look of desperation and shame on my face. As I turned to leave, Songping stopped me. He asked me to wait for a second.
Leaning on his desk and playing with his extinguished cigar, he stared at me with a strange expression, a smile that wasn’t a smile.
“I want to remind you of something. It might not be my place to say it, but don’t take it personally,” he said quietly.
“If you have something to say, say it, and stop wasting time.” I was starting to get agitated. His changing the subject just now had unsettled me.
“Don’t take your sister’s ultimatum too seriously; it’s really an empty threat.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Your sister is obviously lying to you.”
“I don’t . . .”
“You just said that this morning, your brother-in-law Chang Baoguo kicked her in the stomach with a square-toed shoe, right? Well, think about it: where the hell would you get a square-toed leather shoe these days? You’ve sold shoes before, you should know better than me. What’s more, if your brother-in-law lost the use of a leg after the accident in Changping, well, then it wouldn’t matter which leg he supported himself with,” here Songping waved a hand over his crotch area, “he’d never be able to kick that high. So, either your sister is lying, or . . .”
Then he gave a knowing smile, gazing at me like some kind of cocky amateur detective. The self-satisfied expression on his face truly irritated me. Of course I knew what he was implying.
He thought that I might be the one lying.
•
By the time I got back to my car, a light drizzle was coming down. I opened the paper bag and looked inside: a couple of new Tommy Hilfiger shirts. It wasn’t the first time Songping had given me shirts. Still, as I looked down at this particular pair with their crosshatched design, I don’t why, but I felt an incredible sadness.
4. THE SHORTWAVE RADIO
ON FRIDAY morning, I got another call from my sister, this time inviting me over for dinner at the Mahogany Street house. She would make pork-and-fennel dumplings for me. Although I’m a native Beijinger, I don’t really like dumplings, especially not ones with fennel in them. My sister said that Chang Baoguo had been in a good mood ever since he heard that I’d agreed to move out. He hadn’t kicked her again, and he wanted to sit down and have a few drinks with me. I bought some fruit and also brought along the two Tommy Hilfiger shirts as gifts for the hosts. I didn’t dare tell them where the shirts came from. The name Jiang Songping was taboo in our house and had been for many years, repressed along with a certain story from our childhood.
Whether or not Chang Baoguo knew the story I wouldn’t presume.
I hadn’t been back to the family home since my mother’s death. I passed right by it once, on my way to the open market by Red Gate Bridge to buy KR amplifier tubes from a Fujianese guy. From a ways off I could see that the courtyard door was shut, so I decided not to bother them. Their son lives in the south, in Shenzhen, and apparently can’t be bothered to keep in touch with his parents. They made the long journey there to visit him once, but this nephew of mine, who apparently married a Malaysian woman and works as a top executive at some corporation, refused to see them. So they went to the Window of the World theme park, snapped some bad pictures in front of miniature replicas of the Arc de Triomphe and Dutch windmills, then hastened back to Beijing with their tails between their legs.
Yet that never discouraged my sister from bragging about her successful son to everyone she met.
Mahogany Street is just like every other narrow hutong alley in the south part of Beijing. Some people call it Mahogany Lane, others the Armory, most likely referring to a time when the area was known for its foundries that manufactured armor for Manchu soldiers. It’s a historic neighborhood, at any rate. Our house originally consisted of two cramped brick rooms. We built an additional room when my father was still alive. Later, the district development committee started to come around regularly, trying to enforce a removal order for redevelopment. My father never gave them a word of response. Even when pressed hard, he would simply express his opinion with one long sigh: “Ah!”
But no one could ever figure out what the hell he meant by “Ah!”
After a while, my mother started to crack under the pressure; my father, however, decided to push back even harder. He used the bricks left over from the renovation to wall off a courtyard in front of the house at least thirty square meters wide. Shockingly, after he did it, the development committee stopped showing up. They expressed their tacit acceptance, perhaps afraid of my father’s reticence.
My father was tall, pale-skinned, and a little stooped. He was indifferent to almost everything. He used to work full-time at a state-owned factory near Jiuxian Bridge that made radio tubes, but somehow managed to get laid off. After that he spent his days in a white apron and blue canvas sleeve protectors, fixing radios in a workshop one street down from our house. I was still a kid then. One day I asked my mother why my father never talked to us. Because he’s sad, my mother replied, and it’s changed him. She told me that when I was still a baby, the first thing he would do when he came home from work every day was to run inside without even taking his boots off and kiss me all over my face. When my mother said this, Cui Lihua looked up at her with an uncertain expression.
“Did he kiss me too?” my timid older sister asked, unable to keep it in any longer.
My mother thought for a moment, then smiled and mussed my sister’s hair. “You too,” she said. “He kissed you, too.”
A day finally arrived when, in that dark little shop, my father lay down at his workstation amid a pile of semiconductors and died, still clutching a small green screwdriver in one hand.
They said he had a coronary.
•
That evening I arrived early. Chang Baoguo was out playing cards at a neighbor’s place. My sister stood at the kitchen counter, chopping meat. She had some ground pork in
the fridge she could have cooked but said that machine-ground meat tasted of metal. Though only two years older than me, she showed her age more severely. It was the first time in many years that I’d looked at her closely. There was something ingratiating about her expression whenever she smiled. It had always been there, but now, staring at her face inspired a twinge of loathing. She asked me if I had met anyone I liked recently, then followed up immediately with the announcement that she had a colleague in the office who was divorced, in her forties, had a boy of about thirteen, you know, a nice, straightforward person, “pretty and well-proportioned,” with just a slight lisp when she talked, did I want to meet her?
I told her that a couple days ago I had run into a fortune teller, and from his pronouncement it seemed I should forget about getting married in this life. Of course I didn’t mention where I had bumped into him; she would still have no desire to hear the name “Jiang Songping.”
“You believe blind scam artists, too? I’ve introduced you to a number of women over the years, and no one interests you. You know what, I think you haven’t gotten over that vixen Yufen.”
I chuckled and replied, “Maybe you’re right,” to appease her. I didn’t feel like arguing about it.
“Do you want to go in and watch TV? Baoguo will be back soon.”
I continued to stare at her blankly without speaking. Observing her hair, dyed black but still graying, I felt a sudden sense of grief and déjà-vu—for a second I could have sworn the woman standing before me was my mother. She seemed just as thin, and was shrinking as she aged. A cold draft blew through the kitchen; the old locust tree outside shook off a few gold leaves; I felt a stinging in my nose. I felt like . . . like standing up and hugging her.
“Do you . . .want to take a walk outside?” My sister became alarmed by my spaced out mental state.
I got up, went out alone, and sat down on the courtyard stoop to have a smoke.
The hutong was packed with parked cars, motor dollies, and those tricycles with metal cabins the handicapped use. My father’s old workshop was long gone, replaced by an open-fire Peking duck restaurant. The old state-owned barber shop and the tailor shop run by a family from Zhejiang were also nowhere to be seen. Only the public toilet remained, still as foul as ever, though now its façade displayed a blue and white checkerboard pattern of ceramic tile. And of course no familiar faces passed down the lane.
Human memory really is unreliable. I could clearly remember this alley being long, wide, submerged in green shade or sprinkled with white locust flowers, and nowhere near as cramped and seedy as it looked that day. Street vendors used to lay their wares on blankets at the intersection on the east end. In the summers, the same group of old men sat with their straw hats, waving bamboo fans over their wrinkled stomachs as they eyed the emerald watermelons. In the winter, that corner was occupied either by a man from Shandong who cooked popcorn, or by others who sold caramel haw berries and cotton candy.
As I sat on the stoop and surveyed the cluttered street under the setting sun, I felt vaguely alienated from everything. Sacred fragments of my past life stirred my sluggish memory like echoes of a dying voice. I’m certainly not a nostalgic man; maybe my heart was heavy because this place used to be called “home.” The scraping of tree branches against the roof; the moon in the leaves; the whirr of cicadas and the crash of rain; the smell of coal dust brushed from the furnace on an early morning—all used to accompany me to bed night after night and gently touch my soul in the darkness. But once that unique sort of loneliness settles in your chest, you feel afraid of time and life extinguished, as if your best years had been squandered completely.
Our place abutted the eastern end of the hutong; Jiang Songping lived on the western end. Our houses were separated by a private courtyard and a large compound for factory workers and their families. Residents rarely appeared in the clean little courtyard; on rare occasions you would see a black luxury sedan parked in front of the stone lion at its gate, and at night, a muted light would come on in one of the windows behind the courtyard trees and stay lit until morning. To this day I have no idea who lived there.
During our childhood, I often would watch Jiang Songping kick a filthy pig’s bladder or push an iron hoop from the west end of the hutong to the east, turn just before the intersection, and go back. Our house sat right at the terminus of his mysterious, solitary route. Sometimes it wasn’t a pig’s bladder, iron hoop, or a slingshot he brought with him, but a date seed, which he’d drag along the wall as he walked. He scratched white line after white line on those dirty concrete walls, already scrawled with “FUCK” and “DESTROY,” until he’d worn two little eyes and a mouth onto the pit’s surface. No one paid any attention to him.
Every time he passed close by our door, my mother would peer surreptitiously out the window, sigh, and say that little shrimp from Pimply Jiang’s household must be the loneliest kid she had ever seen. I never heard anybody say who Pimply Jiang was or what his family did for a living, nor did I ever meet him. It was like they never existed.
Jiang Songping eventually became friends with my sister and started playing games with the local girls. He turned out to be very good at all kinds of them—shuttlecock, jump rope, jacks. As for what moved him to hang out with girls, I expect it was loneliness.
I remember there was a spell when my sister was obsessed with playing jacks—not the modern metal ones, but the old ones made from sheep knuckles. She would take the S-shaped talus bones and polish them until they shone like jade, then dye them with red ink. She sewed her own neat little beanbags, filling them with expensive green mung beans—who knows how many times Ma slapped her for that. I never played the game myself, so I don’t know much about the rules, but I’ve heard that you need at least four bones to play. Those weren’t easy to get ahold of, back in those days. But somehow Jiang Songping possessed a magic pocket that could produce whatever my sister wanted. Whenever he presented the fruits of his labor to my sister, dropping the greasy black objects into her hand, she would laugh and ask, “Jiang Songping, do your parents own a butcher shop or something?”
For a period of time after the heart attack took my father away, I would go to his wireless repair shop almost every day. Somehow, sitting quietly at his workstation made me feel a little better. The other two repairmen in the shop pretended not to notice me; they neither engaged me, nor attended to what I did. Not even in the days immediately following my father’s death did they ever offer a single word of comfort. My young heart couldn’t handle such indifference, and retaliated with hate. I would stomp into the repair shop, sit down at my father’s workstation, and stare at the half-repaired radio and the green screwdrivers. It was my privilege.
When it got dark, my mother would show up with tears in her eyes and quietly take me home. That was how it went most days.
Until one day one of the repairmen, whom we called Horsewhip Xu, walked over and sat quietly with me for a long while. He smoked two cigarettes in a row, and then his expression became serious. He put a large hand on my shoulder, sighed heavily, and said, “I’ll make you a deal, okay? If you can get that old semiconductor radio your father left behind to make noise again, you can take it home. How’s that sound?”
At that age, having a radio of my very own was beyond my wildest dreams. So I started to play around with the dust-covered mess. Horsewhip Xu taught me some basic skills: how to re-coil tangled magnet wire evenly around a spool; how to scrape rust off the spring poles of a battery with a razor’s edge; how to find a short circuit and reconnect it with a bead of hot solder; how to upgrade a system for a larger battery; how to install capacitors and resistors....
Two weeks or so later, my father’s half-gutted radio finally made a sound. I still remember the first song I heard on it: the revolutionary opera Night Assault on the White Tigers, with Song Yuqing singing the lead.
If it could be said that I had an idol during those long years of my childhood, it would have been Song Yuqing. His presenc
e, the way he carried himself, displayed a strength no Jay Chou or other such celebrity could even dream of imitating. Not even Wang Xiaogang, the movie heartthrob that Yufen’s generation all fell in love with, could equal Song Yuqing’s magnificence. To this day, the only Peking opera I ever learned was the part he sang from Overthrow the American Imperialist Wolves:
Debate has cleared our comrades’ hearts and minds
To see beyond the enemies’ evil scheme.
America’s hunger for power knows no bounds;
To conquer the world is their undying dream.
When they fail, they hide the sword and talk of peace,
But soon, they wave their claws with avarice.
Listening to this song that sunny afternoon, I thought of my father and how great it would be if he were still alive, if he could listen to this music, if he could know that I learned how to fix a radio. As I fantasized, I started to cry. A gust of cold wind hit my face, my chest relaxed, and the stone that had been blocking my throat and pressing down on my heart suddenly disappeared.
I finally accepted the fact that my father was gone.
Horsewhip Xu sewed a black leather case for my radio. When my mother came to get me that evening, I heard him say to her, “This kid has talent, even more than Liankun (my father).”
“When he’s older, you should take him as an apprentice,” my mother replied.
“No, no.” Horsewhip Xu put my radio into its case, snapped it shut, and placed it ceremoniously in my hands. “If he got into this business, what would we do for work?”
Hearing him say that tickled my mother. She held my hand as we walked home along the empty streets, our shoes squeaking in the fresh snow. My radio played an old army show tune, “The Old Landlord Checks the Barracks.” At the start of our street, I caught sight of Jiang Songping standing in the darkness with a top in his hand, his mouth gaping in astonishment. He wore a leather cap with ear flaps, and his eyes opened wide. I can still remember the look of surprise mixed with envy apparent on his face.