by Meng Jin
Picture the sturdy toddler. He was just tall enough to see into the bowls of old yellow wine his grandfather left around the house. It makes the flies sluggish, his grandfather said, easier for your father to kill. The toddler’s father waved him over and drew on a corner of old newspaper the molecular form of ethyl acetate: four carbons, two oxygens, the triangular plane formed by the double bond, followed by the ethyl tail. If the flies were trapped in a glass with a spoon of wine, his father said, the air would fill with this, and the flies would choke and die.
It was summer in Hangzhou. In the evenings after dinner I walked to West Lake with my big sisters to watch old men play chess and tourists drink lüdotang on the banks. If we were lucky, Mother gave us a penny and a handful of raw rice for the baomi man to pop. On one such evening, walking home from Xihu and eating from Dajie’s bag of popped rice, we found the road ahead lit with pinprick yellow lights. The sky was purple and it looked as if the stars had fallen down.
Fireflies! Dajie cried.
I stood still and listened for the buzz of flight. The lights drifted around me, blinking on and off in the branches of the peach trees lining the sides of the road.
Dajie and Xiaojie poured the popped rice into their mouths. They danced around chasing fireflies with the empty paper bag until finally Dajie raised her hand, triumphant. The bag glowed, a lantern.
We ran home. Xiaojie sneaked a glass jar from the kitchen and we dropped the captive inside. We huddled around it in the corner of the garden. Dajie covered the top of the jar with paper and poked holes in the paper with a needle. I took the jar in my hands and was surprised to find the glass cold. The firefly was still emitting bursts of yellow light. Our father called, and Xiaojie tucked the jar behind a potted orange tree before we ran inside. At the door I stopped and turned. A weak light pulsed against the ceramic base of the pot.
The next day after lunch when everyone was asleep, I went to the garden to check on our firefly.
At first I thought it had disappeared. In the dark I had imagined it as a floating flame with wings, and I saw no such thing. Instead, a black beetle sat motionless at the bottom of the jar. I wondered if the firefly had burned up and died. I shook the jar and the beetle slid to the side. I tapped the glass. Suddenly it flew up, crashing into the paper, wings whirring. I tucked the jar between my knees and, cupping my hands to shield the light, looked inside.
Yes, it was glowing!
The bug was ugly. It had a long, sectioned body and black wings folded over its back, two curling antennas, and three sets of thin crunchy legs. The bottom half of its hard body glowed faintly. The picture of hundreds of these bugs flying around me replaced the picture of walking through stars. Suddenly I felt sick.
I went inside for one of my grandfather’s bowls of old wine and brought it to the garden. I dug my finger into an airhole and widened it. In a swift movement I poured all the wine into the jar, until the insect was drowning.
The firefly’s legs twitched and flailed madly. Its wings opened and closed. Its body spun in circles, curling and uncurling. It writhed for a very long time. Then all movement stopped, and it hung stiff and suspended in yellow liquid.
I poured the wine onto the earth and picked up the dead bug. I peeled its wings, layer by layer. I pulled off each leg. I pinched off the head. Finally I squeezed the juice out of the bottom, where the glow had been. White pus oozed onto my fingers.
I buried the evidence in the dirt. I covered the jar with a new paper, punctured new holes, and left it behind the orange tree. When my sisters returned in the evening to retrieve their glowing pet, I didn’t say a word.
I have never thought of myself as cruel. Most of the time I think I must be ordinary. When I was younger, the prospect of being ordinary tormented me, but now it is comforting, almost a relief, like the first breath of warm air in the spring.
Yes, I am ordinary! I lay out the facts of my life and there is no other word for it. I have been married to my ordinary wife for ten years. Five days a week I go to an ordinary job translating foreign books at an ordinary office. The books I translate are ordinary too, neither trash nor great works of literature, detective stories and mystery plots that ordinary people read to escape from their ordinary lives. I collect my salary and return home. My home too is ordinary: a two-bedroom flat in a six-story loufang. It could be anywhere in Beijing.
I have one child, a six-year-old daughter who has just started school. She is thin and shy; she has a boyish haircut and thick glasses. Most days, she wears her school uniform: teal pants and zipped jacket, with a white polo shirt underneath. She wears the uniform happily; she is carefree and unselfconscious. On the weekends when my daughter may wear whatever she likes she pulls on shorts and a T-shirt, whatever is easiest to reach in the trunk of clothes her mother has filled, though she refuses to wear anything with flowers or frills. Prints of cartoon animals she tolerates. She pulls on her clothes without thinking about them, rinses out her mouth, splashes water on her face, and comes into the living room full of contentment and ease. Every day I am amazed by her peace with the world. I watch her anxiously as she grows, afraid that she will lose it.
She inherited these qualities from my wife, who is a practical woman. Practical and perfectly competent, my wife is everything I need and as much as I can stand, the kind of woman who makes me content in my ordinary life because she is so content in hers. She does not goad me to be anything more than I am: that is the beauty of her practicality. She is organized and efficient, an accountant; her clients’ lives settle neatly like her own. She wakes every morning at six to turn on the washer, boil six eggs (two for each of us), put out slices of sausage and bread, hang up the washed clothes on the balcony to dry, and shepherd us through breakfast before striding out the door with her smart work bag in hand. After work she swings by the market for vegetables and meat. I clean up after meals, but there is not very much to do. When my wife cooks, she cleans as she goes along. Every moment of the day she is doing three things at once. This is how she likes it. If I try to do any more housework than I’ve been assigned she hovers over me, wringing her hands, impatient, and I know she is thinking how much better and faster she could do it. She is warm, but always efficiently so. There is nothing desperate in her kindness, nothing at all desperate in her energy. I cannot imagine my life without her.
But mathematically, that was most of my life, without her.
Who have I been? I am an ordinary man, but would my past, put down on paper, make me look cruel?
For a year I have woken to the gasping urgency of this question—for a year since the text of an old skin resurfaced, while I was browsing in the Wangfujing Bookstore after work.
I do not often go to the bookstore. It is close to my office, but I must walk ten minutes in the opposite direction from home to get there. When I left the office I’d felt restless. The day was still bright—the winter was just beginning to let, for months it had been dark at this same hour—and I must have felt the possibility of it, must have wanted to use my legs, to feel the pumping of blood in my veins.
At the bookstore I scanned the shelves for something I had worked on. I took the escalator to the third floor and browsed in the foreign language section, flipping through titles in English. In the center display was a table of Harry Potter books. I considered getting one for my daughter, who would soon start to learn English in school. I picked it up and began to read.
I had sunk into the easy world of imaginative pleasure when I was struck by the feeling of eyes on my skin.
A man was staring at me. He stood two bookshelves away with the new Han Han book open in his hand, and he did not pretend to read. He was short and graying, with a substantial gut, rectangular glasses. He looked at me pointedly, his eyebrows furrowed in amusement, or was it confusion?
I’d seen him before. I thought he was some colleague of my wife’s, or perhaps, another father from my daughter’s school.
For a full minute we stood there with books open,
staring at each other.
Then it struck me who he was.
I put down my book, turned, and walked to the escalator. Hearing steps behind me, I quickened my pace. I brushed past shoulders. A book flew from a pair of hands onto the floor. I stared ahead and plowed through. Behind me I could hear the man muttering excuse me, excuse me. Finally, as I ran out the front door into the brisk evening—now it was dark outside, the streetlamps lit and the fragrant smoke of food vendors thickening the air—I heard a shout.
Zong!
Zong, is that you?
I’m sure it’s you, Yongzong!
I turned back.
It was him all right.
I gave him a look of utter bewilderment and stomped out into the dark.
He was Bo, Zhang Bo, big Bo from my high school class. He sat in the middle of the second row and farted during every test. We called him Bo Cai because his hair stuck up like a bushel of spinach. Now he was a middle-aged man, like me.
Bo wasn’t a bully, but he could’ve been one. He was sturdy, solid, and he reminded me of the boys in xiaoxue I’d given my homework to copy so they wouldn’t beat me up. He wasn’t from Hangzhou but from some village in the mountains, where he’d grown up pushing plows and chopping firewood. He was a peasant boy and he looked it, brown and thick and brutish. And he had a personality that ran at you like a bull, charging into the classroom and commanding all attention. His steps seemed to shake the ground. His lowest decibel was a throaty shout.
From day one he was the king of the class, the one everyone saw and heard first. I wondered how he had gotten in. The Cultural Revolution was over, the high school had just reopened after ten years. The students in our class were supposed to be the brightest in the province.
During the first week we took preliminary tests in every subject. I knew what my father expected. Compared to most of the students, who had been recruited from all over Zhejiang, I had everything: the best primary schools in the city, an educated father who could tutor me, meat on the table and new clothes every year, and I never had to do anything in the house but study. I had come into the school with the highest entrance exam score in the entire class of new recruits.
I sat in the row behind Bo, one seat to the right, trying not to breathe in his warm farts, that sickly sweet smell I would later learn was from eating too many yams. I bent my head down and worked. I didn’t let him distract me, not even when he turned in his test scroll a good fifteen minutes before time was up and sat back down in his seat, grinning like he’d won a prize. I had finished the test too, but had gone back to check over every problem, plugging my answers into the original equations to make sure they worked, redoing entire problems because even though I knew I was smart, I wasn’t an arrogant jerk. I wouldn’t let a careless mistake take me down.
The next morning a crowd gathered by the blackboard where the test results were posted. In the middle was Bo with his big head sticking up above the others, sitting on the teacher’s desk and laughing with his mouth wide open. The other students stood around him, patting him on the back.
All the blood drained from my face. Bo saw me and looked over with a bemused grin. The other students stopped chatting and turned to stare.
You’re Yongzong, right? he said.
I didn’t respond.
Zong, comrade! Don’t look so green.
He jumped off the desk and put his arm around my neck.
Hey, he said, grabbing my hand and raising it into the air, here’s our Number One!
His followers cheered.
So I was Number One. Bo was Number Two. He’d scored just three points lower than me, and we were leagues ahead of everyone else. Number Three scored twelve points lower than Bo.
Bo might have been Number Two, but he was still king. He had the charisma, the big booming voice, the body that everyone feared. Because for some reason he respected me, we became friends. I was named class prefect, and the two of us ruled, I with the teacher’s favor, he with the students’ admiration.
Bo was the type of student who breezed through classes without trying. He did his homework in a flash and left it crumpled in the bottom of his backpack, or handed it around to other students to copy, never worrying about losing it or getting it smudged with greasy fingerprints. He lazed around campus, visiting people’s dorms, playing cards and making jokes and kicking a soccer ball around the track. I never saw him study. Everything about him—his coarse looks, his bullish demeanor, his careless attitude—would have made anyone think he was dumb. But he was a genius. I studied furiously to maintain my position as Number One. I was terrified that one day Bo Cai would get it into his head to crack open a textbook and reveal to everyone how much smarter than me he really was. If that ever happened, I knew we could no longer be friends. Perhaps he knew it too.
The summer before our second high school year, I shot up like a sprout. I woke each morning taller than I had been the night before. White jagged lines appeared on the skin of my thighs, like a plastic bag pulled past its stretching point. One morning, as I got up to leave the breakfast table, I realized I was taller than my father.
For a moment my father and I stood frozen across the table from each other. My mother cleared away our bowls. From my new vantage, I could see that his hair was thinning. The smooth skin of his scalp glistened through sparse gray strands. I felt ashamed, as if I had taken something that was not mine. I slumped and looked down.
Stand up straight, boy! my father boomed.
He walked out of the room with the newspaper curled in his hand, swatted a fly on the counter, swept up the corpse in his fist, and threw it into the trash bin. I watched him, seeing for the first time what a small man he was.
Besides eating and sleeping, I studied. At the end of the next school year I would be taking the gaokao, the university entrance exam. My father made it clear to everyone in the house that I would not touch a broom or washcloth. I was to score high enough on the exam to attend Beijing University for civil engineering or physics, to prove my intellectual acumen. After graduating from Beida I would apply to be a party member and enter into public service, and rise through the ranks until I made Politburo and worked in Beijing.
My father was a mid-level city planner in the Hangzhou mayor’s office. He had climbed to achieve this rank—he should have been proud, the son of a matchbox factory worker—but he continued to grovel in hopes of rising. Still, despite keeping his head low during the early years of the Cultural Revolution, despite the gifts and deference he gave his superiors, he remained stagnant.
In other words, he wanted me to achieve all he had not.
While I lived under his roof, my father’s plan had been so much a part of the fabric of my existence that I could not question it. But living in the school dorms for a year had opened a door in my mind. That summer, as I listened to my father discuss my future as if I were a highly capable puppet, it occurred to me that, having worked so relentlessly to achieve my father’s vision, I had also earned the right to deny it.
Perhaps a part of me never believed in my ability to be a politician. I was a follower by nature—if I ever did lead, it was by example, by adhering to the rules and succeeding by them. As class prefect I enforced the teacher’s commands with diligence and gained respect through undeniable demonstrations of superiority. I thought about how naturally Bo Cai commanded attention. No one would say he was trying to lead. It was completely unselfconscious. He did not care about having followers, and so he got them.
The evening before my return to school my mother prepared a feast. Dajie, who now lived across town with her husband, came over to see me off. My uncle, aunt, and their two children were also invited. We pulled the kitchen table to the living room and brought out the round banquet top. I ate greedily, knowing that for six months I would have only cafeteria food. My father pushed the best plates of meat and fish toward me and poured beer into my bowl. He refilled it whenever it was empty.
I had drunk a little alcohol before, but n
ever like this. My father was treating me like a man. Soon we were laughing and eating, talking over each other, finishing each other’s sentences. I told anecdotes about school, about the dunces and the jokesters, about Bo Cai’s exploits, all the while showing that I never let my arrogance get the better of me. Everyone serves Bo Cai, I said, and Bo Cai serves me. I drank a big gulp of beer and burped as I imagined a general in the army might. Good, my father said. His face was red with drink and he chuckled contentedly. He lifted up his bowl and waved it over the table.
Look, Yongzong, what a father provides for his son, he said. All with the hope that one day, his son will become a greater man than he.
My father nodded at his father and brother and took a drink.
Yes, that is every father’s dream, for his son to surpass him.
I lifted my bowl and poured the remaining beer down my throat.
Ba, I said with a laugh, haven’t I already surpassed you?
The table fell silent. My words rang in the room, my voice sounding louder than I’d intended. I looked across the table at my mother. She looked at her chopsticks. Dajie’s husband, deep in conversation with my uncle, had stopped talking. Next to him, my grandfather continued to eat quietly, his eyes fixed on his bowl. For the first time, I noticed how his shrunken shoulders seemed always to curl inward, as if he were trying to make himself disappear.
My father set his empty bowl on the table and filled it to the brim. The beer gurgled and hissed. He poured it all into his mouth, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallowed. He slammed the bowl on the table. He grasped my shoulder and turned me to face him. His eyes were red and sharp, boring into mine.
I made you, he said. Whoever you become, whatever big shot you turn out to be, you will always answer to me.
My mother cleared her throat. Dajie picked up a piece of meat and put it in her husband’s bowl. Slowly, the meal resumed. My father laughed loudly with Dajie’s husband about something I did not hear, my cousin whispered something in my grandfather’s ear. Xiaojie went to the kitchen to cut some fruit, and my aunt followed to help.