by Yu Hua
Early one morning I woke up to find my father sitting on the bed. He leaned over and said softly, “Yang Fei, let’s go on a train ride.”
Although I had lived four years next to a busy railroad line, I had never once taken a train. I stuck my nose against the windowpane: as the train began to move and I saw the people on the platform quickly receding, I gave a wail of alarm. Then I saw houses and streets retreating rapidly, and fields and ponds as well, but I noticed the farther away things were, the more slowly they retreated.
“Why is it like that?” I asked my father.
“I don’t know,” he said morosely.
At noon that day we disembarked in a small town and lunched on noodles in a little place opposite the station, my father ordering a bowl of noodles with shredded pork for me and a bowl of plain noodles for himself. I couldn’t finish such a big bowl and my father ate the leftovers. Then he had me sit while he asked directions to the orphanage. The first three people he talked to said they weren’t sure; the fourth thought for a moment and then told him where to find it.
He carried me a long way, until we arrived at a stone-slab bridge over a dry riverbed. He heard children singing in a building on the opposite bank and assumed it was the orphanage (it was actually a kindergarten). Clasped in his arms, I heard the singing too. “Dad, there are lots of kids there,” I piped up happily.
My father bowed his head and looked around. Next to the bridge was a copse of trees interspersed with rocks and clumps of grass. The biggest rock was dark and flat, and he wiped it with his hand, clearing away little stones as though burnishing a piece of metalwork with sandpaper. Once its surface was clean and shiny, he lifted me up and deposited me on the rock, then brought out a handful of candy from his pocket and put it in mine. I was delighted to see so much candy, and what pleased me even more was that he then filled my other pockets with cookies. Then he unhitched his army canteen and hung it around my neck. He stood in front of me, his eyes fixed on the ground. “I’m leaving now,” he said.
“All right,” I told him.
My father turned and left, not daring to look back. Only when he was about to disappear around a corner could he no longer restrain himself; he cast a glance back and saw me sitting on the rock and happily swinging my little legs in the air.
It was evening by the time my father arrived back in our town. After getting off the train, he did not go to his own house but presented himself at the young woman’s home. He called her out and then headed off toward the park without another word. Accustomed as she was to his taciturn ways, she followed behind. Finding the park closed, he marched around the perimeter wall until they reached a quiet spot, and there he came to a halt and told her everything he’d done that day. The young woman was stunned and even a bit frightened, finding it hard to believe that he would just abandon me like that. Then she realized that he had done this out of love for her, so she hugged him tightly and kissed him with abandon, and he hugged her back, just as tightly. Dry kindling met hot fire, and they agreed to marry the very next day. After further embraces, my father said he was tired and returned to his cabin next to the railroad.
That night he could not sleep. It was the first time the two of us had ever been separated, and he began to be anxious and afraid, not knowing where I was at that moment and not knowing whether the people at the orphanage had discovered me or not. If they hadn’t, I might well be still sitting on that rock, and maybe a wild dog would pick up my scent as the night deepened….
The following day, my father, racked with worry, walked with his fiancée toward the marriage registry office. She did not realize that a drastic shift was taking place in his mind; she was thinking only that he looked unusually worn out. When she asked tenderly why this was, and he answered that he had not slept a wink, she attributed this to excitement and a sweet smile came to her lips.
Halfway to the registry office, my father said he needed a rest. He sat down by the sidewalk and put his hands on his knees. Then he buried his head in his arms and burst out sobbing. The young woman had not expected this at all. She stood there dumbly, as a deep unease began to settle over her. Suddenly my father stood up. “I have to go,” he said. “I have to go back for Yang Fei.”
I didn’t know that I had been abandoned—he related all these scenes to me subsequently, and only later did I find traces of this episode deep in my memory. I remember that I was very happy in the beginning, for the whole afternoon I sat on that rock eating cookies and candy. When the children from the kindergarten walked past after school, I was still eating these little snacks. The children were green with envy, and I heard them tell their parents: “I want a candy,” “I want a cookie.” Later, the sky darkened and I heard a dog barking nearby and I began to feel frightened. I climbed down from the rock and hid behind it, but was still afraid, so I picked up fallen leaves and covered myself with them until even my head was concealed, and only then did I feel safe. I fell asleep under the protection of the leaves, and in the morning it was the voices of the children on their way to the kindergarten that awakened me. Between the gaps in the leaves I saw the sun come up; then I climbed back onto the rock and sat there to wait for my father. I sat for a long time and it seemed that someone came over to talk to me, but I don’t remember what the person said. Now I had no candy and no cookies and just a little water in the canteen, so when I got hungry all I could do was drink a couple of mouthfuls of water, and then there was no water either. I was hungry and thirsty and tired, so I climbed down from the rock, lay down in the long grass, heard dogs barking, and covered myself up once more with leaves from head to foot, and then I fell asleep.
My father arrived in the town at midday and ran all the way to where he had left me. From a distance he could see no sign of me. His running steps gradually slowed and he came to a halt not far from the rock, looking around despairingly. Just as he was in an agony of anxiety, he heard me murmur something in my sleep:
“How come Dad’s still not here?”
My father told me later that when he saw how I had made a quilt out of leaves, he first laughed, then wept. He pushed aside the leaves and when he picked me up out of the grass I was already awake and was calling happily, “Dad, there you are! Daddy, there you are at last!”
My father’s life and mine once more were intertwined. After this he gave up on marriage—meaning, first of all, that he gave up on the girl with the long braid. She was very upset and couldn’t understand it at all; she went running over to Li Yuezhen to pour out her woes. Only then did Li Yuezhen realize what had happened. She gave my father quite a talking-to, pointing out that she and Hao Qiangsheng would have been perfectly willing to adopt me, for she thought of me as her own son, since I had drunk her milk. My father nodded in embarrassment and admitted he had shown poor judgment. But when Li Yuezhen insisted that he make up with the young woman, my father dug in his heels, convinced that he had to choose between the two of us. “All I want is Yang Fei,” he insisted.
No matter how Li Yuezhen tried to persuade him, my father responded with total silence. Angry but powerless, all she could do was vow never again to involve herself in his affairs.
Later, I saw that young woman with the long braid several more times. If I spotted her in the street as my father and I were out walking together, I would tug my father’s hand and give a cheerful shout of “Auntie!” My father bowed his head and just kept on going, clutching my hand tightly. At first the young woman would still give me a smile, but later she would pretend not to have seen us and not to have heard my call. Three years later, she married a PLA company commander ten years her senior and moved as a military dependent to the faraway north.
After this my father simply devoted himself to raising me, without entertaining any further romantic aspirations. I was his everything. Relying on each other, we led a life that passed slowly at the time but in retrospect was over very quickly. He recorded my growth, having me stand up against the wall every six months and using a pencil to mark
one line after another above my head. When I was in middle school, I quickly grew taller, and when he saw wider and wider gaps between the lines, a blissful smile would appear on his face.
By the time I was in the first year of high school, I was already about the same height as my father and would often beckon him with a smile on my face. He would walk over to me, chuckling, and I would stand up straight and compare our heights. As I steadily grew taller and he steadily got shorter, I continued this practice until the final year of high school, when I could clearly see the strands of white hair on the top of his head and I noticed the wrinkles on his face. With all the work of caring for me, my father looked ten years older than his actual age.
By then my father was no longer a switchman. Manually operated switches had been replaced by electric points and the railroad had become automated. It took a long time for my father to adapt to his new job as a station attendant. He enjoyed responsibility, and when he was a switchman he’d invested all his attention in his work, for if he had made an error in setting the points, a major accident would have ensued. Once he became a station attendant, he had less pressure weighing on him, but the humdrum routine often made him feel that his talents were underused.
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 appreciatively. “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—perhaps 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.
This way of putting things didn’t sound right to my father. “Yang Fei is my son too,” he said, looking at me.
“That’s true, that’s true,” my mother said, rubbing her eyes. “He’s your son too, he always will be.”
Once the two of them were more composed, my mother seized my hand and launched into a jumbled, flurried sequence of remarks and questions. Whatever response I gave, she would turn to Yang Jinbiao and cry exultantly, “He sounds just like his brother!”
My looks and my voice left my mother in no doubt that I was the child she had given birth to twenty-two years earlier in the toilet of a moving train.
