by Meng Jin
How incredible Lanlan’s life has been, he said suddenly, bursting out, his face breaking into an expression so intense it almost looked like pain. How far she has come! She must be so happy. I’m so happy, for her.
Do you know what she has been through? he continued. Do you know what she was up against? I’m sure your parents have told you, but still I find it remarkable. Every day I’m amazed by what a long path upward my own life has taken, and she—she started lower and has climbed higher.
His story sounded familiar. Professor Zhang’s parents were farmers in a village in Zhejiang. As a child he dreamed of having enough money to eat rice every day. He could never have imagined living in the capital city, working at a desk, getting paid for performing engaging work of the mind instead of tiring out his muscles with hard labor, having enough money to buy silly, unnecessary things like a car or a TV. Once when he was a boy he had been beaten for eating a piece of pork smaller than his thumb—it had been in a dish meant for guests. Now he didn’t even like to eat meat anymore, he’d eaten so much since.
And Lanlan has gone farther than I have! he said again. To America and back again, and not just wealthy but influential.
He smiled, then his eyes floated to his hands.
But as I’m sure you know, your mother is a rare kind of person. She never lacked for dreams. She never imagined herself as a peasant. I’m sure she dreamed of leaving the mountains even when she had no idea there was a world beyond them. I never knew anyone with a bigger ambition than her, and a stronger will to make that ambition true.
Oh, I am so happy for her, he said again. She got everything she wanted.
What did my mother want?
I didn’t ask this question out loud.
I noticed how Professor Zhang, like the old woman in Shanghai, seemed to have forgotten about my father.
And my father, I said. He’s very ambitious too.
I said it as a statement, but added a slight lift to the end, so if Professor Zhang wanted to take it as a question, he could.
The professor blinked, looking at my face. He frowned, looked contrite, frowned again.
Yes, he said with softness, yes, I suppose he is.
Professor Zhang was the second oldest in his family, he told me at our next meeting. He had one older sister and two little brothers. When he was a boy he wore his older sister’s secondhand clothes. For years I went to school wearing a dress with flowers printed on it, he said, and cloth buttons up the side.
So the professor and my mother both wore dresses! Another common experience, I said. He laughed generously.
Two times could be an accident, three was a pattern. Something about my third visit to Professor Zhang’s office made the meeting familiar, an expected appointment. Again he did not question me. I stopped questioning myself as well. He talked to me about his childhood as if we were old friends reminiscing.
Since your mother didn’t have brothers or sisters, he said, she had to wear her mother’s old clothes, which were her grandmother’s old clothes. Lanlan hated wearing dead people’s clothes, it made her feel like she couldn’t breathe. I guess that’s why she became so obsessed with fashion.
He spoke of winter in the countryside, how in the snowy fields he wore thin cloth pants and a cotton coat, and for months it was so, so cold. One of his most vivid memories of early childhood was of warming his feet on a hot coal stove. As he sat there he nodded off to sleep, and his feet slipped and dropped onto the coals. He woke up shouting, the soles of his feet seared, hissing with burn. There was no medicine, no money for creams or balms, so to disinfect the burn his mother dunked his feet inside the bucket where they pissed.
He told me of how the skin on his face blistered when he was an infant, because his mother went out to the fields to work with him strapped on her back, and the hot mountain sun burned it raw.
He kept speaking as if pulling something out from inside himself. I drank it in.
His grandmother had an old ox that he took up the mountain when he was a boy. It had blue eyes and was so thin you could see the rungs of its ribs. Most mornings he walked for at least an hour before finding a spot with enough grass for the ox to graze. Before he let it eat, he scanned the area for wild edible plants he could pick for the family. Once the ox wandered into a neighbor’s plot of potatoes and when he tried to pull it out it picked him up with its horns and threw him in the rice paddy. When he was eight that old ox died of hunger. For the next five months his family had meat—first eating the organs and the heart, salting the slabs of ribs so they would keep. They boiled the same bones over and over for soup and sucked out the marrow, scraping the hollow insides clean.
The day the ox died, his mother beat him so hard he couldn’t sleep. She often beat him, but this time, when her fists got tired, she didn’t stop. She picked up a long piece of firewood and broke it on his bare back. The next day his older sister helped him pick out the splinters, and he still remembers—there were fifty-two.
As a child you don’t understand how poverty can make a person mean, he said. You don’t understand how terrifying being a parent is, how powerless you feel. It sounds obvious, but now that I’m a father I understand. When little Zhang gets even a small cold I start to feel like a failure. It’s hard to manage these feelings. My mother didn’t hate me, even if I felt like she did at the time. She was frustrated with the world and her inability to give me a secure place in it.
He paused.
I tried to tell Lanlan that, he said. I told her, Now that you’ve gotten this far, let old pains go. But she was never good at that. Nothing could just be an unfortunate circumstance—everything had to have a meaning. This attitude of hers used to frustrate me to no end.
I nodded. I saw an opening, and measured my next move carefully.
Professor Zhang continued: Now I understand that this stubbornness was what made her mind so special, and what made her such a good physicist. Every discordant note in the universe had to have a meaningful, fruitful reason, whether personal or physical, and she wouldn’t give up until she got to the bottom of it.
I’m getting so sentimental, he said apologetically. My wife and I agree not to talk to our son about the old days, you know. Or each other, for that matter. Some parents are always berating their children with comparisons of how much they suffered, but we just want our son to enjoy his life and have a happy childhood. Anyways, enough about me! Tell me about you. Are you moving to China with your parents?
I waved away the question. I don’t mind, I said. My parents don’t talk to me about the past either, it’s nice to hear about it from you.
I took a drink of tea.
What about my father? What was his childhood like?
Professor Zhang shrugged. No idea, he said. He paused. He had a very different upbringing from your mother and me. He grew up in the city, in Hangzhou. If you’re curious you should ask him—he’ll be able to tell you much better himself.
Alone in my hostel, I sank into my lies. I imagined I was in one room of a nice big house, that Mom and Daddy were downstairs. I imagined them speaking to each other, in English and in Chinese, switching between the two seamlessly, scheming their future, collaborating on a work project, discussing financial and property investments, discussing the summer home they’d keep in America after moving back to China, all sorts of conversations I had not known existed until I went to college and met rich people. Then they were gone—out shopping, perhaps. The house was empty. I found myself in small spaces, the undersides of beds, the corners of closets. My hands dug in these corners and grew tired, my fingernails packed and sore with dirt. I found evidence that they had been here—hairs in the carpet, nail clippings on the floor—but the image of what I was really looking for receded, faded to black, and it was my fault, I was too exhausted, I could not keep my eyes open, I wanted only to sleep.
I woke to a nagging feeling. Lying to the professor was too easy. Easier than trying to understand how my mother had changed so much. How st
range that the mother I’d invented, who was nothing like the mother I’d really had, somehow matched his memory of her. Perhaps my lie was an act of mercy. The professor would be shocked to hear the truth. It was inconceivable that I stop him and say, actually, the woman my mother became shrank inside a room and disappeared. She didn’t care about clothes and she didn’t want anything. To an outsider she appeared plain at best, pathetic at worst. No one would have described her as a person who never lacked for dreams.
It was easier to imagine the mother I didn’t have than to remember the one I’d had. With every day, with each new revelation, with each new image of the places she had been and the people she knew, remembering became more confusing.
Professor Zhang said my mother was born in a house with a floor made of mud. The first time he saw her, he recognized immediately that she had suffered and learned to hide that suffering under an expression of stupidity. She came dressed in the coarsest country cloth, and you could see the bones of her face through her skin. Her skin had that peasant look; it was brown and splotchy from the sun. It looked perpetually dirty, dirty from dirt that couldn’t be washed away.
We were all poor and hungry then, but Lanlan was a little older than the rest of us. Just a year, but even that was enough to make a difference. She was born in the last of the famine years, and so she felt its last repercussions.
A year older? I said. I thought you were all classmates?
Yes, we were. He leaned forward. She dropped out of school for a year. Did she never tell you? Oh, but it’s such a good story! He was excited, like a child preparing to present his favorite toy. It did not surprise him that I didn’t know.
It wasn’t uncommon for kids to drop out of school then, he said, especially in the countryside, and especially for someone like your mother, who didn’t have a big family. Lanlan’s grandmother had gotten ill, and around the same time her mother got injured in the field. So Lanlan stayed home to take care of her waipo and help her mother—your waipo—with chores and cooking and maintaining the small plot of land that fed them. When the injury healed, your waipo didn’t let her go back to school. She had no brothers, I think her father died when she was young, so there were never enough hands in her family for all the work. For years I urged her to forgive your waipo—anyone else in that situation would have done the same.
Having no education herself, all your waipo knew was that your mother’s going to school meant one more person to feed who wasn’t helping to generate food. But in a strange twist of fate, that year helped your mother. Listen to this, Professor Zhang said, taking on his professorly persona. Lanlan dropped out of school in 1976, the year Chairman Mao died. The next year, in 1977, Deng Xiaoping reinstated the gaokao, the national higher education exam, along with secondary school entrance exams. Many of the top secondary schools, which had been depleted during the Cultural Revolution, opened their doors to merit scholarship students based on the test results. If your mother had stayed in school the year before, she would have continued on to the village secondary school. She might have ended up a factory worker at best.
I know your mother resented your waipo for taking her out of school, but maybe she should have thanked her, he said, adding, Maybe she has. Of course it was still incredible that after a year working the fields, she was able not only to convince the teachers to let her take the test but to get the highest score in the county.
That was how Professor Zhang had made it into the Hangzhou school too, with the highest score the next county over. But he’d had many siblings, younger brothers, and his father could read and thus had some sense of what an education could do for a person. Professor Zhang had always been encouraged to study, had seen his education, correctly, as a way out of the hard life. He still couldn’t imagine how my mother had pulled it off.
He called her a remarkable woman, and more and more these seemed like the right words to describe her, even though he spoke from misinformation. He told me about my mother’s transformation in just two years (high school was only two years then, he explained, because after the Cultural Revolution there were not enough teachers and students to go around). He could not stop talking about her. He seemed to need to do it.
We both grew fatter the first year of gaozhong, he said. Your mother had an allowance with her scholarship. It must have been the first time she could choose at every meal what she wanted to eat. She always picked the simplest thing—rice, vegetables, one egg—and by the end of the year she had saved up enough money from her food allowance to buy a piece of nice cloth, which she stitched herself into a dress.
From the start, my mother was intent on becoming someone new—this will was her defining feature, and to this day when Professor Zhang met someone with a similar fire he couldn’t help but think of her. She might have tested into the school with the highest scores in her county, but in their scholarship class she was at the very bottom, dead last place. There were certain mathematical concepts that everyone was expected to have mastered by middle school that she’d not seen before. She had a natural talent with numbers and abstraction, so once she reviewed the concepts she caught up, but she always struggled with Chinese. There were words she had never learned, and her country accent was terrible. She studied when others were sleeping. She woke up every morning at five to practice proper pronunciation of putonghua with Professor Zhang while taking laps around the track. For a long time she continued to pretend to be stupid. She didn’t care about making friends. By the end of two years she had made it to the very top of the class, and had changed the look of stupidity on her face to one of defiance.
I think she became what she wanted, Professor Zhang said.
Which is?
A rich person. He laughed. But I mean, a real rich person, a rich person through and through.
You would think, he said, that a poor person would carry a habit of frugality. I certainly did. Even now when I have enough money to buy a nicer house for my family, I think, what will we use it for? This is fine, this is more than enough. Part of me is always counting, adding up prices and bills, making sure there’s enough left to survive if—I don’t even know if what.
But the minute your mother started to make money, Professor Zhang continued, she changed her habits. She bought nice clothes and cosmetics, eventually she even began to eat extravagantly. She wasn’t rolling in cash, but it was more money than she had ever seen, and she did not hoard it. She sent a portion to your grandmother and then spent the rest of her paycheck before the month was up. And she had plenty of suitors, who bought her gifts of food and clothes.
In Professor Zhang’s office, my parents were happy, wealthy, full of life. They wore Swiss watches and Chanel perfume and rode around the city in cars with tinted windows and chauffeurs. They laughed loudly and had big appetites.
Professor Zhang got up and poured himself some water, nodding and looking out the window.
He said, I guess Yongzong was right after all.
I sat up. What did you say?
I guess your father was right about her after all. He paused, then continued: Your mother changed so much in university, after she came to Beijing. Your father said her transformation was remarkable not because of how much she’d changed, but because it was less like a change than a return to a natural state. Her true self has emerged, your father said. At the time I thought I knew her better.
I was trying to listen. Trying to listen as I searched my pockets for a piece of paper. Finally my fingers closed around something. I pulled out the receipt for my train ticket to Beijing and held it out to him.
I asked, Can you write something for me?
I said, without hesitation, without making it a big deal: I’ve been relearning Chinese since I got here—it’s a steep curve. Now that I’ll be living in China, I’m trying to become more Chinese.
I paused, continued: Still, even though I know how a lot of words sound, I don’t know how to write them.
This, at least, was true.
Sure, P
rofessor Zhang said, looking a little confused. What words do you want me to write?
I tried to keep my voice even. I said, My father’s name, Yongzong.
I walked—ran—back to my hostel with the marked train ticket in my hand. Gripped between the fingers, already bending, the paper revealed its vulnerability, how easily it could be torn or blown away. It didn’t matter. I had already memorized the shape of the words.
李永踪.
In the hostel room I looked at the paper again.
Li. Yong. Zong. Professor Zhang had explained the meaning of each word without raising his eyebrows. Or perhaps he had—at that point I no longer cared about the illusion—his or mine. 李 (li), he said, a common Chinese family name, referring to a plum or plum tree. I nodded (of course! this was my name too). 永 (yong), as in 永远 (yongyuan), as in forever, eternal. He wrote the word slowly so I could see the proper order of strokes. The teakettle boiled and he stood to retrieve the hot water. He sat down again and eagerly picked up the pen.
踪 (zong), as in 踪迹 (zongji), as in footprint, or imprint. He paused, staring at the page. A solid name, he said. I guess his parents wanted his life to make a lasting mark.
Underneath the professor’s neat script I copied my father’s name until my hands memorized the motions.
李永踪
李永踪
李永踪
李永踪
李永踪
李永踪
Zong, I thought, as in 失踪 (shizong). As in lost, as in missing.
In the universe, there exist objects that cannot be seen or have not been seen—black holes, undiscovered planets, massive presences of gravity that assure us of their existence simply by the way they affect the behavior of nearby lesser objects. This, according to my mother, was the measure of an object: something that exerts substantial influence over others in its field, drawing continually toward itself, even if ever so slightly. In some ways, this evidence of effect is more necessary than sight. An image alone could be merely a hologram, a vision. No, scientifically speaking, seeing or not seeing is not equivalent to making be or not be. Rather, it is the inevitable attraction and movement of that which surrounds a mass that secures its position among real things.