by Yu Hua
My father was upset, for I hadn’t consulted him before quitting my job and selling the property. He knew this was a fait accompli and would often sigh and moan, saying to me in distress, “You’ve got no house and no job—what will you do in the future?”
I tried to reassure him, saying that once he had recovered I would return to my original employer, start saving once more, and buy a new apartment for him to see out his days peacefully. He shook his head. “Where will you find the money to do that?” he said.
“If we can’t afford a full-cash purchase,” I told him, “we can always buy an apartment by taking out a mortgage.”
He shook his head all the more stubbornly. “Don’t buy an apartment. Don’t go into debt,” he cautioned.
I said nothing more, knowing his mind was made up. Before housing prices skyrocketed I had thought of taking out a mortgage, but my father was daunted by the prospect of owing the bank so much money and I had had to abandon the plan.
It was as though we had returned to the life in that rickety shack next to the railroad tracks. In the evening, after I had closed up shop, the two of us crammed onto the single bed to sleep. Every night, I could hear my father’s sighs and groans—the sighs on account of my grim future, the groans in reaction to his own pain. When his suffering was not so acute, we would share memories of earlier days, and at such moments his voice would take on a blissful tone. He would mention little episodes from my childhood, recalling how I would insist he lie next to me and watch me as I fell asleep, how sometimes when he adjusted his position and turned his back to me, I would call again and again, “Dad, look at me, look at me….”
I told my father that I remembered hearing him snoring when I woke up in the middle of the night when I was small. A few times I didn’t hear his snore and was so scared that I started crying, worried that perhaps he had died. I would shake him and shake him, and when he sat up, my tears would turn to smiles and I would say to him, “So you’re not dead after all!”
One evening my father neither sighed nor groaned. Instead he talked quietly about some key moments in our lives, such as how he had heard me crying on the railroad track and carried me in his arms to Li Yuezhen’s house. It was that evening too that I learned how, when I was four years old, he had abandoned me in order to get married. When he got to this point tears trickled from his eyes and he was stricken with self-reproach, saying over and over again, “How could I have been so heartless?”
I pointed out that I had left him too, joining that family up north, so the score was even. In the darkness he patted my hand, saying that for me to go to the home of my birth parents didn’t count as abandoning him.
He gave a little laugh. He recalled how clever I’d been to cover myself with leaves to keep myself warm that time he left me by that dark rock. This comment somehow refreshed my memory, and suddenly I remembered the stones, trees, and grasses, and the barking dog that had made me so fearful. I said it wasn’t that I was cold, but that I was afraid, for a dog kept barking constantly.
“No wonder,” he said, “that you had leaves over your head as well.”
I chuckled, and so did he. “I’m not afraid of dying,” he said to me evenly. “I’m not afraid of that at all. What I’m afraid of is not being able to see you.”
The next day he left without saying goodbye. He said nothing at all, not leaving even a note, dragging away the little life left in him. In the days that followed I kept kicking myself for being so inattentive. Shortly before this, my father had me take out a new railroad uniform from the wardrobe and put it next to his pillow. I hadn’t given this a second thought, assuming he just wanted to admire the last new uniform he had been issued prior to his retirement. But I overlooked his longstanding custom—that he liked to put on a new uniform when faced with some important task.
On the day that my father left home, there was a fire in our city—at a department store just half a mile from my little shop. It was afternoon when I heard news of the disaster, and by then I was in a very anxious state, because my father had yet to return home. A horrible thought came to mind—could he have gone to the department store? It seemed just possible. My birthday was coming up, and my father might well have wanted to buy me a present.
I shut up shop for the night and dashed over to the department store. The silver structure was now reduced to a charcoal hulk, as thick smoke billowed upward. The flames had been largely extinguished, but hoses from a dozen fire trucks were still spurting long jets of water on the charred wreckage. Ambulances lined the street, along with several police cars. Fire ladders were propped up against the building and firemen were already inside searching for survivors. Some of the injured had been carried out and ambulances were speeding off, sirens wailing.
Every intersection next to the department store was crammed with people, and everyone was talking about the fire. Standing among them, I heard only snatches of conversation: some said the fire started around ten in the morning, while others said it started at noon. I shuttled back and forth among the onlookers, listening as they discussed the cause of the fire and guessed the number of casualties; it was dark by the time I returned home.
The TV news that evening had a segment on the department store fire. According to an official source, the disaster was triggered by an electrical short circuit at nine-thirty in the morning. The store had only just opened at the time, the news anchor said, and there were few customers inside. The majority were successfully evacuated and only a handful were trapped. The precise casualty figure was still under investigation, the report said.
My father did not return home that evening, and I was on tenterhooks the whole night. In the morning the TV news had the latest on the department store fire: seven dead and twenty-one injured, with two in critical condition. At lunchtime they released the names of the dead; my father was not among them.
But other reports were circulating on the Internet. Some said there were over fifty dead, while others claimed there were twice that. Many people online criticized the authorities for underreporting the figures, and some noted the Work Safety Administration’s definition of accidents: a single episode that caused between three and nine fatalities counted as a “fairly serious” accident; over ten deaths constituted a “serious” accident; and a death toll of over thirty was classified as an “extremely serious” accident. The authorities were castigated for trying to downplay the gravity of the disaster by limiting the reported fatalities to seven. Even if the two in critical condition were to die of their injuries, that would only make a total of nine, confining the fire to the category of “fairly serious” accident and thereby averting any unpleasant repercussions on the career prospects of the mayor, the Communist Party secretary, and other bigwigs.
Rumors were spreading like wildfire on the Internet. Some people said the relatives of the unreported dead had been threatened, while others claimed they had been given huge wads of hush money, and still others listed the names of unreported fatalities—again my father’s name was absent.
He had now been gone two days, and I began to mount a search. First I made inquiries at the railroad station, thinking the staff there might have seen him, but I drew a blank. He had become so rake-thin, even people who knew him might fail to recognize him. Then I went to see Hao Qiangsheng and Li Yuezhen, who had just got back from Guangzhou, having passed their visa interview at the U.S. consulate there, and were now attending to the sale of their apartment and preparing to make the long flight across the Pacific to join their daughter. They were shocked by my news. Hao Qiangsheng wouldn’t stop sighing, and Li Yuezhen burst into tears. “Son,” she said, “he doesn’t want to be a burden on you.”
The most likely explanation, they felt, was that my father was set on returning to his roots—going back to the ancestral village where he was born and where he grew up. I should try looking for him there, they thought.
I passed the shop on to someone else and took a long-distance bus toward my father’s old home. I had
visited once when I was small, but my father’s parents had no warm feelings toward me, thinking I had wrecked his life. My father had five siblings, but their relationship also was strained. My grandfather had worked on the railroad, at a time when state policy allowed an employee’s child to get a job on the railroad if the parent took early retirement. Of his six children, my grandfather selected the youngest—my father—to inherit his position and thereby angered the other five. That’s maybe why my father never took me back home a second time.
By now, my grandparents had both passed from the scene. My father’s five siblings were still living where they always had, but their children had moved away years earlier. Migrant workers in an assortment of different cities, they had put down roots elsewhere.
I got off the bus in a bustling county seat and took a taxi to my father’s village. We rode along a road that was broad and level and paved with asphalt concrete, a huge contrast to its condition on my previous visit, when it was a mud track rutted with holes so big that our car was bouncing around all the time. Just as I was marveling over the progress made, the taxi came to a sudden stop. The asphalt road had come to an end and the crude, potholed surface of the past reappeared in front of me. No county official was going to visit a place this far out in the boondocks, the taxi driver said, so the asphalt ended here. Seeing my bewildered city-boy expression, he explained that country roads are built just for the convenience of leaders when they venture out to conduct inspections. The village that I wanted to go to was another three miles farther on, he said. He pointed down the narrow track ahead. “No leader would dream of going to a godforsaken place like that.”
My father’s village, when I finally got to it, was nothing like the village that I had visited as a child. That village was skirted by trees and stands of bamboo and several ponds. My cousins and I had shot at the birds in the trees with catapults, and we had rolled up our trouser legs and waded into the ponds to catch little shrimp. In those days, field after field shimmered with rapeseed blossom; the voices of men and women, young and old, mingled with the sounds of chickens and ducks, oxen and sheep; and pigs careened along the paths between the fields. The village now was desolate, the fields lying empty, the trees and bamboos cut down. The ponds had disappeared. The young and able-bodied had all abandoned the village for jobs in the city, and the only people I saw were a few old-timers sitting outside their houses and the occasional toddler wandering around. I was doubtful I would recognize my father’s siblings, so when I came upon a hunchbacked old man smoking a cigarette by his front door, I asked him where I’d find Yang Jinbiao’s brothers and sisters. He muttered “Yang Jinbiao” a few times before he remembered. He called out to another oldster peeling fava beans across the way, “Here’s someone looking for you.”
The old neighbor got to his feet and studied me as I walked over, rubbing his hands on his pants in preparation for greeting me. I went up to him and introduced myself as Yang Fei. That elicited no reaction, so I told him I was the son of Yang Jinbiao. “Ah!” he went, then opened his toothless mouth to call his siblings: “Yang Jinbiao’s son is here!”
Then he turned to me. “You’ve grown so tall, I’d never have known it was you.”
Four other old folk emerged one by one to join their brother. All five siblings wore cheap polyester clothes, and standing in a group they looked very much alike. They differed only in their heights, like the fingers of a single hand.
They were very pleased to see me. I accepted the cup of tea they poured for me but shook my head at the proffered cigarettes. Almost immediately they began to busy themselves washing and chopping vegetables and fetching wine. Seeing that it still wasn’t quite three in the afternoon, I said it was a bit early to start preparing dinner, but they disagreed.
With the passage of years, they were no longer jealous of my father, and they all got a bit red around the eyes when they learned he had disappeared after falling critically ill. Perhaps because their fingers and palms were so rough, they used the backs of their hands to wipe away their tears. I told them I was looking for my father and thought he maybe wanted to die where he’d been born, but they shook their heads and said he’d never come back again.
In the silence, I stood up and left the rock on which I’d been sitting. Sleet continued to billow, but still it did not fall on me—it simply surrounded me. When I walked on, the sleet opened a passage, and when I looked back, it had closed up again.
On the path of memory I was making my way toward Li Yuezhen.
By the time I returned to the city from my father’s village, Li Yuezhen was no more. As she was crossing the road in the evening, she was knocked off her feet by a speeding BMW, and as she lay sprawled on the road she was run over first by a truck and then by a delivery van. In the three short days that I was away, I had lost the mother figure so dear to me.
Hao Qiangsheng was overwhelmed by shock and grief, and his daughter was in transit back from the United States. When I arrived at their house, Buddhist priests were conducting a service to ease the passage of the departed soul. Incense swirled around the room and a yellow cloth lay on the table, with fruit and cakes laid out on top, along with a tablet inscribed with Li Yuezhen’s name. Several priests stood in front of the table with their eyes half closed, chanting a sutra in a constant hum, like that of mosquitoes. Hao Qiangsheng sat off to one side with a dull look in his eyes, and I sat down next to him.
The priests perhaps knew that Li Yuezhen had been planning to emigrate to the United States, for after reciting the sutra they told Hao that during the service Li Yuezhen’s soul had clambered over his knees and over his shoulders, up and into heaven. The fee for the funeral service was three thousand yuan, they said, but with the outlay of another five hundred yuan they could ensure that Li Yuezhen would be reincarnated in a new body in the United States. Hao Qiangsheng nodded woodenly, so the priests closed their eyes once more and resumed their recitation. This time the reading was short, and though I couldn’t make out most of the words I did hear references to America—not the regular Chinese term for it, but the English abbreviation, “U.S.A.” The priests said that Li Yuezhen had already begun the journey to U.S.A. and would be there shortly, even faster than if she traveled on a Boeing jet.
Hao Qiangsheng didn’t seem to register my arrival, and I had been sitting there for quite some time before he realized who I was. Now he burst into tears and grasped my hand. “Yang Fei,” he cried, “you’ve got to go and see your mom!”
Three days before her death—on the morning I went to the village to look for my father, in other words—Li Yuezhen had stumbled upon a scandal. As she crossed a bridge on her way back home from the market, she saw a number of human fetuses floating in the river below. At first she thought they were dead fish, but couldn’t understand why they seemed to have arms and legs. Wondering if her eyes were playing tricks on her, she asked a couple of young people nearby to come over. They said it didn’t look like fish, but like babies. When Li Yuezhen hurried down the steps to the riverside, she could see that they were right. Tiny babies were floating downstream amid a tangle of sticks and leaves, and soon several more babies emerged from the shadows underneath the bridge and bobbed on the sunlit surface. As she strained to make them out, Li Yuezhen stumbled over an obstacle underfoot. She looked down to find three fetuses snagged on the bank.
Li Yuezhen felt it her duty to report this find. Instead of going home, she proceeded directly to the offices of the local newspaper, her basket of groceries under her arm. The guard at the entrance, noting her unprepossessing appearance and suspecting she might be coming to lodge a complaint against the authorities, told her that she needed to go to the Letters and Visits Office of the city government. So she waited outside, and managed to intercept two reporters just arriving for work. They rushed to the scene, by which time both bridge and bank were crowded with people and some were using bamboo poles to maneuver the dead babies ashore.
In the course of that morning the two repor
ters and a dozen or so locals found twenty-seven babies, both infants and fetuses. The eight infants wore, around their feet, tags on which the name of the city hospital was printed; the nineteen fetuses had no such identification. After taking photos with their mobile phones, the reporters paid a visit to the hospital. They were received warmly by the hospital director, who assumed they had come to interview him regarding new hospital procedures designed to alleviate the difficulty and expense of securing medical treatment. One look at the photos of the dead babies, and the director’s smile disappeared. He announced that he had to head off to an important meeting immediately, and he called in a deputy to deal with the reporters. After seeing the photos, the deputy director informed the reporters that he had a meeting at the public health department; he turned them over to the hospital’s office manager. After glancing testily at the photos, the office manager identified the foot tags. These infants, he said, had died after failing to respond to treatment; their parents had fled because they couldn’t afford to pay the medical expenses. Patients’ families were always trying to get out of paying their bills, he groused, generating losses of over a million yuan for the hospital every year. The nineteen fetuses, without tags, had been aborted at the end of the second trimester in order to comply with population-control guidelines. Population control is a national policy, after all, he reminded them condescendingly. The twenty-seven babies were medical refuse, he declared, and the hospital had done nothing wrong: trash has to be dumped, after all.
A directive came down from above, and the newspaper pulled the report that the two journalists had filed. But they wouldn’t take this lying down: they posted the story and the photos on the Internet. Public opinion was outraged, and on social media criticism hailed down on our city authorities like a spray of bullets. Only now did the hospital admit it had made a mistake, conceding that it had not done a good job of disposing of medical refuse and saying it had already punished those responsible. For the hospital to repeatedly refer to the dead babies as “medical refuse” enraged the netizens, and in the face of even more virulent commentary the media spokesperson for the city government issued a statement that the twenty-seven medical-refuse objects would be disposed of appropriately. They would be treated as human and cremated, and their ashes would then be buried.
