China's Son (5 page)

“Whaddya doing here, big shot?” my new neighbor shouted, stretching his arms to mark his territory line on the desk we shared.

Somehow, I had a feeling they knew I had been kicked out of group one, where all the brightest students and the snobs were.

By the second class, I was able to answer eighty percent of the math questions, and by the third, the class had found a new star. At the end of the day, a big guy with a nasty cut, who was known as the King, walked over and patted my shoulder, announcing, “From now on, you can sit next to me and do my homework whenever I feel like it.” I was flattered by the intimacy and readily agreed. It wasn't as if I had
any choice. The boy was a head taller than me and was surrounded by all his lieutenants, each more devilish than the other. They seemed to be the class Mafia.

That night, lying in bed, I was convinced that I couldn't have found a more nurturing environment to revive my student career. My classmates were animals, but they couldn't care less where I had come from. They respected me.

I considered it a tragedy when group eight was dissolved at the end of the term. A school closer to the villagers reopened and the students happily went back to their own school. I got placed in group two, next door to the hateful faces I tried to erase from my memory forever. Each day I ran past the doors of group one as fast as possible, for fear of bumping into them and getting into trouble. In the new group, I soon became the recognized top student. I began to hear some good words from a few of the teachers. But a gang of students in my new class was organized against me. It was headed by a sneaky boy called Han, whose father had fallen out with mine after a bee-raising business they had started together failed. The others in the gang were Quei, the son of a local politician, and Wang, whose father was a carpenter and an enemy of some of my father's good friends.

During this time, Grandpa was slowly dying. He was seventy-seven years old. Almost every day, I found writings on the blackboard that debased and humiliated him.

On the day he died, we carried him in a wheelbarrow about twenty miles away to the city of Putien for cremation. I wore a white shirt and spread pieces of paper money over the bridges we passed and chanted sayings like “peaceful passing” to the imaginary soldiers guarding the bridges. In the crowd that watched the procession, I saw the three ugly mugs of Han, Quei, and Wang, smiling without pity or sympathy.
They even made faces at me. I bit my lips, trying to control my sadness and hatred. Tears poured forth as the strong voice of revenge cried out within me. I wiped away my tears and walked on with my family, pushing Grandpa's body along the dirt road to Putien for two more hours.

When we got there, four young monks were hired to carry Grandpa up the mountain to the cremation site. I knelt before his body with my family like a pious grandson, sobbing farewell as an ancient monk torched the woodpile beneath Grandpa's flimsy coffin. Flames shot up against the setting sun. My beloved Grandpa was no more.

Even in wintertime Yellow Stone was laced by the greenness of the surrounding wheat and fava bean fields. Yellow wildflowers were scattered across the green carpet like solitary souls still searching for their destiny. The water of the Dong Jing River lay calm and pensive, as if quietly dreaming about the coming spring.

Farmers flocked to the market square to trade goods for the new year, a week away. The narrow streets of Yellow Stone became filled with mules carrying food and vegetables. Bicycles strained beneath the double weight of two riders, and noisy tractors fought their way among crowds of people carrying sacks of produce slung over their shoulders.

One morning, Teacher Lan visited our home with the results of our first countywide exam. I had scored 100 percent in all four subjects. He and Mom couldn't stop smiling and my sisters swarmed, fighting to get a glimpse of the report card.

“Only two students made that score in the whole county of Putien,” Lan said, beaming happily, for my distinction had made him one of the teachers of the year.

I became an instant star among the neighbors. There were some warmer glances and sweeter greetings for me. It was both liberating and a little intoxicating. I felt glorified. I was no longer just another one of those hopeless descendants of the old ruling class, who ended up becoming a carpenter, a blacksmith, or a nobody, buried in the guilt and shame of his fathers. I shone, despite their efforts to snuff me out.

Early in the morning on New Year's Day, I helped Mom prepare all kinds of sacrifices before our makeshift shrine of numerous gods. There was Buddha, his Kitchen God, the Earth God, Rice God, Water God, and all our dead ancestors. It was pretty much like the administration of a government, Mom explained. There were local gods, provincial gods, and the big Buddha on top. She had designated a spot for each, with different displays of food as sacrifices. There were chicken, fish, shrimp, clams, crabs, whole piglets painted in red, greasy ducks, colored eggs, wine, peaches, pears, bananas, rice, and a lot of incense and paper money to burn.

With incense clutched in her hands, Mom knelt and said the prayers.

I waited on the side and kowtowed as many as fifty to a hundred times before each god, doing extras for my sisters and brother. I couldn't remember how I had gotten into the business of kowtowing for my siblings. All I knew was that I was a little more religious than they were. I had always been afraid of ghosts and believed in the power of good gods. I
prayed like a monk and didn't mind bending down on my skinny knees to kowtow as often as Mom thought appropriate, usually imagining a hundred to be her lucky number.

By the end of the ceremonies, though my back and knees ached, I was quietly content with the prospect of having bought my insurance with gods at all levels for the new year to come. I told my sisters and brother that I had also done favors before the gods in their stead and had them pay me back in monetary terms. They believed enough to pay me five fen each.

For breakfast on New Year's Day, long, thin handmade noodles were prepared, served in elegant little bowls and decorated on top with slices of fried egg, marinated meat, fried peanuts, oysters, crispy seaweed, and lightly sautéed crunchy snow peas. Long noodles promised longevity. The word
oysters,
in my local dialect, meant “alive.” Eggs were round and perfect. Peanuts indicated countless offspring, and if you twisted the pronunciation of
seaweed
a little, it sounded a lot like the word that meant “fortune.”

I fought down the long noodles, donned a new jacket that Mom had tailored herself, and ran off to offer New Year's greetings to our neighbors. I clasped my hands, bowed my head, and wished wealth to the garlic-nosed Liang Qu, an old man with seven sons, who made a living selling cigarettes to children behind closed doors at a huge markup. He wiped his big, dripping nose and threw me a cigarette with dark tobacco in it. “Thanks and happy new year, young fella. Have a smoke,” he said.

“It's not one of those moldy ones, is it?” I teased as I pocketed it. He was known to pass the kids rotten products. Since the children were smoking secretly, they never complained. Only on New Year's Day could I get away with a joke like that.

I crossed the bridge to greet the white-haired country
doctor, who peered at me through his thick glasses, trying to figure out who I was.

“I'm the younger son of the Chens,” I said.

He nodded, pointed with his cane at the seat next to him, and offered some tea. I politely told him I had just had breakfast. He asked how my grandpa was. “He's gone,” I said. I couldn't believe how forgetful the doctor was. Only half a year ago, he had been telling us that Grandpa didn't have long to live.

“Oh, I'm sorry. But the living has to go on, ain't that right?”

“Right, Doctor. Happy New Year.” He nodded in silence and watched me run off down the dirt road.

It was a tradition that for good luck you should greet as many people as you could on New Year's Day. To me, it was the easiest way to score brownie points with people, for they were in the best of spirits then and you could get a lot of goodwill for nothing.

By noon, I had greeted no fewer than fifty people. There was the brigade leader, the neighborly Teacher Lan, the kind tailor who sometimes let Mom use his sewing machine, the blacksmith who made good farming tools for us, and the locksmith who stuttered when he became excited. His son had gone to Chinghua University in Beijing, the equivalent of MIT. He had the hardest time saying the name and always ended up stuttering “Chin … Chin … Chin … Chinghua University.” By the time he did the third “hap … hap … hap” of his unfinished “happy New Year” greeting, I was long gone.

When I got home for lunch, our living room was already filled with well-wishers. Dad was holding court, busily pouring hot tea and lighting the water pipe for his visitors.

I often thought that if Dad hadn't been the unfortunate son of a landlord, he probably would have ended up being one of the Communist leaders. He was a big man who commanded attention the moment he entered a room. Dad loved laughing and could charm your boots off, but when he was angry, his temper thundered and his tongue lashed out mercilessly. He was a natural, a dramatic leader in a sleepy little town like Yellow Stone.

The commune leaders put him down like trash; bad neighbors and ignorant militiamen spat in his direction when they passed him in the street. But villagers from the surrounding towns and remote farms still came to him for all sorts of advice. They came in groups of five and ten and treated Dad as if he were still the son of an old family that had once headed the local gentility.

He wrote persuasive letters for those whose relatives resided in rich places like Singapore, Hong Kong, and Malaysia, helping them to squeeze money from their rich relatives. Defenseless widows sought his aid in drawing up complaints about neighbors who had encroached on their properties and families who had abandoned them. They paid Dad with money or a sack of rice or yams. But a lot of advice was offered free, with a smile.

Gradually, Dad's reputation spread, with villagers dropping by daily when they were in town to shop. They came for a cup of hot tea, a puff on the water pipe, or just to rest their feet. If Dad wasn't away at a reform camp, by eleven every morning the living room was always full of all sorts of personalities. Dad felt comfortable in the role and presided over the affairs of others like an unpaid civil servant. The only rule was that there was to be no spitting on the clean floor, which Mom scrubbed daily.

On this special day, all the friendly, familiar faces were crowded into our sun-drenched living room, bubbling with excitement as they lit their good cigarettes. I sat there, as I had for many years, listening to Dad's friends doing their New Year's version of a daily chat for a little bit.

But on New Year's Day, I felt a need for something more festive and entertaining, only there wasn't much I could do. I could just see my enemies, Han, Quei, and Wang, chomping cigarettes and lurking among the crowds, plotting their revenge against me. And I couldn't fight that day; it would be bad luck.

After lunch, when my brother, Jin, was out playing poker and my sisters had long since gone out giggling with their friends, doing whatever girls did, I told Mom I was heading out to a basketball game at school.

“I didn't hear about a game there,” Mom said.

“Yeah, well it should be starting soon,” I lied, and streaked out the door. I walked cautiously along the small path meandering among the wheat and sugarcane fields, staying away from the crowded streets, which were now filled to the brim with villagers who had flocked to town for the New Year. It was an event locally known as Yu Chun, or Spring Outing. They came in groups of boys and girls, nicely dressed in new and colorful outfits. They sang, laughed, flirted, and ogled each other.

The spring, now ripening with blossoms, seemed to stir a nameless agitation among the youngsters and to give an added luster to the world. I envied the simplicity of their lives. Why was mine so damned complicated? Soon I was alone, looking for a shortcut to the secret gambling pits somewhere among the tall sugarcane fields. Children my age whispered about them and raved over the heroism of some
of the big-time winners whenever news mysteriously found its way out of the pit. But none dared venture near the place. A few really bad older boys from our neighborhood were said to make their homes there during the whole New Year's holiday.

If I couldn't have fun in normal places, then I was determined to find something else to do, watching the game or even running errands for those bad boys. I had only brought half a yuan with me. That way if they wanted me in the game, I wouldn't have too much to lose.

I was mentally prepared for any roughing up that might occur.

I checked over my shoulder to make sure nobody was following me, then slipped into the sugarcane field. The leaves were thick and sharp.

I ducked beneath them and walked with bent knees toward the heart of the field.

After ten minutes, I heard vague, hushed voices. Then I suddenly saw lights and a clearing ahead of me. Twenty yards of sugarcane had been felled and trampled down, and there were at least two dozen young people sitting at tables, squatting, and standing in clusters around the cleared area.