The Seventh Day (11 page)

The cabin gradually faded into the distance and the two wavering rails did not return. I continued to linger in my own traces, and I felt tired, so I sat down on a rock. My body felt like a quiet tree. My memory trotted slowly through that world I had left, as though on a marathon course.

Through thrift and self-denial my father saw me from primary school through to university. Although in material terms our life was impoverished, it was warm and idyllic in its emotional tenor. One day, however, my birth mother came from afar in search of me, and our calm life was shattered. I was in the final year of university then; my mother came looking for me by retracing her original route and stopping at one town after another. It was her second attempt to find me. On that day forty-one years ago, by the time she had recovered from her fainting spell, the train had already traveled another hundred miles. All she remembered was giving birth to me when the train left a station, but she had absolutely no recollection of which station it was. She had asked people to conduct inquiries at three stations she had passed, but they had not found any sign of me. For a while she thought I must have been run over by the train or had died of hunger on the tracks or had been carried off by a wild dog, and for this she had wept in despair. Later she gave up trying to find me, but in her heart there always remained a sliver of hope—the hope that a kindhearted person would have found me and adopted me, supporting me until I grew up. At age fifty-five, when she retired, she decided to come south herself to look for me, and if she hadn’t found me this time she would probably have truly put this thought behind her. Our television and newspapers threw their weight behind her search, for my remarkable birth was truly an appealing catch line, and television and newspapers made hay out of the story of my birth; one headline described me as “the boy a train gave birth to.”

In the paper I saw a picture of my weeping mother and on TV saw her tearful recitation, and already I had a presentiment that the child she was searching for was me, because the date that she mentioned was precisely the date that I was born. But on an emotional level I was not particularly perturbed by this development, feeling that this was somebody else’s story. What intrigued me, actually, was the difference between her shedding of tears in the newspaper photograph and that on TV: in the photo her tears were stationary, stuck firmly to her cheeks, whereas on TV her tears were in motion, streaming down to the corners of her mouth. For twenty-two years Yang Jinbiao and I had clung to each other through thick and thin, and the only mother I was used to was Li Yuezhen. Now, when another, unfamiliar mother came into the picture, I had a strange feeling of dissonance.

Reading the papers and watching the TV, my father closely followed her accounts of what had happened and became certain that I was the child she was looking for. From information provided by the paper, he knew which hotel she was staying in, so he placed a call from the station office and soon was talking directly to her. After a quick exchange of information they found all the details matched. She started sobbing and he started crying, but they managed to carry on talking on the phone for over an hour, my father fielding a constant stream of questions about me. They arranged to meet at her hotel that afternoon, and when my father came home he told me with excitement, “Your mom’s here looking for you.”

He went to the bank and withdrew three thousand yuan—his entire savings—and took me to the town’s biggest shopping mall, which had just opened its doors. He felt that when I met my mother I should be dressed smartly, like a TV star, to show that he had not been mistreating me. In recent years he had hardly ever left the area around the railroad station, and entering this grand six-story shopping center for the first time he gazed around in wonder, muttering to himself, “What a splendid place!”

The first floor was devoted to cosmetics. He sniffed appreciati
vely. “Even the air smells good here,” he told me.

He walked over to one of the counters. “Where will we find name-brand suits?” he asked the girl.

“Second floor,” she replied.

Taking my arm he boarded the escalator, as proud and confident as a millionaire. We arrived on the second floor to find a well-known foreign-brand outlet straight ahead. He stopped to examine the prices on several rows of neckties in the entrance display and was rather taken aback. “Two hundred eighty for a single tie,” he told me.

“Dad,” I said, “you’ve got it wrong. It’s two thousand eight hundred.”

The look of surprise on his face turned to one of dismay. Suddenly aware of the limits to his budget, he stood there dumbly. Because he had always lived frugally, even on a meager income he had tended to operate under the illusion that he was quite comfortably provided, and it was only now that he became fully aware of his poverty. He didn’t dare step foot inside this name-brand store, and with a new sense of inferiority he asked the hovering shop assistant, “Where will we find a cheap suit?”

“Fourth floor.”

Head down, he walked toward the escalator, and as we rode up together I heard him muttering that my life would have been so much better if I hadn’t fallen out of the train. He knew from the media reports that my birth mother had retired with the benefits befitting a deputy office head, and my birth father still held the position of section head. My birth father was actually just a low-level functionary in that northern city, but in Yang Jinbiao’s eyes he was a powerful, influential figure.

The fourth floor was all domestic brands, and there he bought me a suit, a shirt, a tie, and a pair of shoes, spending only two thousand six hundred yuan—two hundred yuan less than the price of an imported tie. Seeing how smart I looked in my Western-style outfit, he shed his chastened look of a few minutes earlier and recovered much of his misguided complacency. In high spirits once more, as the escalator slowly descended he gazed haughtily at the foreign model in Western clothes displayed in an advertisement on the second floor, claiming that I looked more stylish in my outfit than the foreigner did in his. “It’s true what they say,” he added. “Clothes make the man.”

At two o’clock that afternoon, my father—dressed in a brand-new uniform—and I—in my suit—arrived at the three-star hotel where my birth mother was staying. On inquiry at the front desk, we were told that my mother had gone out that morning and had not yet returned—p
erhaps she had gone to the TV studio. The girl at the front desk clearly knew her story. She threw me a glance, not realizing I was actually the main character in that story. We sat down in the lobby to wait. The brown sofa had turned grimy from use, and we sat on it stiffly, concerned that our new clothes might get creased.

Before long a middle-aged woman came in. When she looked in our direction, we recognized her instantly and rose to our feet. She noticed us both and looked at me very intensely when the receptionist told her she had visitors. Although we had arranged to meet in the afternoon, my mother had found she couldn’t wait that long, and had gone to the station that morning to look for my father, just when we were in the shopping mall. She had succeeded in talking to Hao Qiangsheng, and had even made the trek to my university and quizzed some of my classmates about my situation. Now she came over, trembling from head to toe, and looked at me so fixedly that I felt her eyes were boring into my face. When she opened her mouth, no words came out—tears simply came to her eyes. Finally, with great effort, she spoke. “You’re Yang Fei?” she asked.

I nodded.

“And you’re Yang Jinbiao?” she asked my father.

My father nodded too.

Her shoulders began to shake. “You’re so like your big brother,” she told me tearfully. “But you’re taller than him.”

Then she threw herself on her knees in front of my father, crying, “I owe you so much! I don’t know how to thank you.” My father took her arm and led her over to the sofa. She couldn’t stop sobbing; he had tears streaming down his face. She thanked him over and over again, and after each “I’m so grateful” she would say, “I don’t know how to repay you for all you’ve done for Yang Fei.” Knowing he had forsaken married life for my sake, she burst into another round of sobbing. “You have sacrificed so much for my son—way too much,” she said.