by Xiaolu Guo
Shitang hadn’t changed much; the salty fishy smell from the sea was still just as strong as I remembered. The little alleyways were always wet and slippery from the women doing their washing-up on their doorsteps. The gardenia flowers blasted their powerful scent into my nostrils, and the sea in the near distance churned with brown waves. My footsteps were light and impatient.
I pushed open the door of my grandmother’s house; I knew she never locked it. I burst in and saw her, a small hunchbacked figure in the kitchen. It was dark inside. She was kneeling on a straw mat, praying to her statue of Guanyin. It stood in the same place, right above the dining table. I looked over to the stove, and saw rice-porridge leftovers in a bowl, along with a small jar of pickled crab.
I flung out my arms and wrapped them around my grandmother.
‘Ah, Xiaolu! Is it really you?’ My grandmother had been informed about my visit, but she was still surprised to see me. Her eyes were filled with joy – a rare emotion for her. She put her hands on my arms and I helped her to stand up. I noticed a white discharge around the edge of her eyes.
‘I can’t see much these days, but I could tell it was Xiaolu before you even entered the room!’ she cried. I told her that my parents had asked me to bring her back to Wenling to live with us, so we could take care of her.
‘We eat fried pork every day in Wenling!’ I lied, trying to convince her. ‘And we have a big television. You can watch operas on it,’ I said before realising that she probably wouldn’t be able to see the screen even if we had it anyway.
She was delighted. But first she asked if I was hungry from the trip. Of course I said yes. She then warmed up some rice porridge and fished out a big spoon of pickled crab. A sadness came over me as I chewed on the astringently salty flesh of the crab and drank the watery porridge. Although this was the food I had grown up with, I had never liked it. Such salty food was barely edible, but it was all we had been able to afford. As I sat at the old dining table, looking around my grandmother’s kitchen, I realised it had all been bitterly salty: salted jellyfish, salted kelp, salted crabs. There had never been any variety in our diet. It was poor people’s food. In Wenling, my parents and I ate much better, even though supplies were limited by a quota. No wonder my grandfather couldn’t bear this kind of life. But then, how could it have been any different? I watched my grandmother pack as I finished my porridge. As the brine bubbled down into my intestines, I felt even hungrier than I had before the meal.
That night I lay in my grandmother’s squeaky bamboo bed, unable to sleep. I listened as my grandmother continued packing her clothes and sorting the house out in the dim light, as well as the sounds coming from upstairs. I hadn’t been up there in years, and the thought still frightened me. I wondered whether my grandmother went up there, and sometimes did her prayers.
‘Your grandfather’s ghost comes to visit me almost every night,’ my grandmother remarked, her breathing heavy as she climbed into the bed beside me.
‘What does his ghost look like?’ I asked.
‘Very thin, very pale. Like he has no blood in his body.’
‘What does he want from you?’
‘He says he wants some money to use in Hell. He needs to buy some meat and rice, and a pair of new shoes too,’ my grandmother murmured.
Chinese Hell is made up of eighteen layers. Each layer is ruled by a judge who decides what sort of punishment the dead deserves. The old people had been telling us about it ever since we were little. The ones who killed themselves or killed other people were placed in the bottom layer. I imagined my grandfather squashed inside, unable to breathe or stand up straight. He was probably given rotten food to eat: moss, shit, rubbish, dirt. And his feet must have hurt, either from the burning-hot stony floor or the icy-cold ground.
‘But if my parents heard you say this, they would criticise you and tell you there’s no such thing as Hell!’ I said, even though I was not entirely sure who was right.
At school, the teachers told us this talk of Hell and Heaven was just stupid superstition, left over from the feudal times, designed to fool and control the masses. And I was inclined to believe them.
My grandmother didn’t argue with me. The street outside sank into the darkness. With the sound of the sea and wind echoing around us, we fell asleep.
The next morning, after another ritual bowl of bitter salty crab and porridge, we were ready to leave. I helped my grandmother to carry her shoulder bag of clothes and shoes. Before we left the house, my grandmother prayed one last time to Guanyin, and murmured something I couldn’t hear. I was about to suggest she bring the Guanyin statue with her, but I realised that none of the villagers dared to move a god or goddess, let alone take it to another town. That would be the height of disrespect. So we left Guanyin there. As we locked the house, I told my grandmother I wanted to say hello to Da Bo’s four daughters. I rushed over and banged on their door. But no one came out. They were probably all working in the new Shitang Frozen Seafood Processing Factory, my grandmother said. Since it was now the summer break, all the local kids would be helping their families on the cold workshop floor, peeling shrimps, cutting fish heads and packing them into boxes. I was disappointed. But I couldn’t waste any more time here.
By noon, we were on the bus. I told my grandmother that my parents would be waiting at the other end. She looked slightly worried. I could sense her concern about dealing with my mother. I knew already about the terrible conflicts between Chinese mothers- and daughters-in-law. But everything would work out in our family, I thought.
Mother-in-Law
The bus journey back from Shitang to Wenling felt much faster. And yet, the constant motion of the bus made me feel sick once again, although I managed not to throw up as much, perhaps because I was in a good mood, or because I was so focused on looking after my grandmother, who felt worse than I did.
‘It’s too far to travel for an old person like me!’ my grandmother croaked in a weak voice.
As the fishing village receded further and further away behind us, she grew increasingly uncertain about leaving the village: ‘I don’t know if I will ever manage to get my old bones back there!’ She kept repeating phrases like that as she clung to the rail in front of her seat, her eyes moist and doubtful.
Our napkins were soaked with vomit. We took turns stretching our heads out of the window to let the air on our cheeks restore us. Life was always torture, I thought, even for a young kid. But that particular day, I didn’t feel miserable for once. My heart was full of the joy of our reunion. Although I was still very young, I felt the weight of responsibility to improve my grandmother’s remaining days. She was already sixty-seven that year, to me an ancient creature, always bent over like a dry, brittle leaf that could be swept away by the wind any second. Finally, the bus arrived at the station in Wenling. My parents and my brother were waiting by the entrance hall, my mother looking anxious, my father relieved, and my brother oblivious. My grandmother was happy to see them. In no time, my father had arranged two electric rickshaws to take us back home.
Daily life in the small apartment of our factory compound wasn’t as easy as I had described it to my grandmother. Firstly, it was indeed too small to fit one more person in it. Nevertheless, we managed to set my grandmother up in a corner next to my small bed, placing her small bundle of possessions underneath it. That night, after a family meal, my grandmother and I managed to squeeze in together and sleep. The next morning, I gave her a tour of the compound. She seemed a little disorientated, but I tried to comfort her and make her feel welcome.
Things didn’t seem to be going too badly for the first few days. But tension was growing between my mother and my grandmother. My mother felt that the hunchbacked village woman in her smelly rags and her crooked shuffle was always getting in her way. My grandmother simply didn’t know where she should hide herself so as not to take up space. Every meal was a torture for her. She had never eaten at the table, especially when there were men around. She felt comp
elled to make herself invisible. She would hide behind us and sit by the stove to eat like a frightened mouse. For my mother, this only made things worse, because in her eyes, this was just a display of self-effacement, a spectacle of feudalistic female debasement. My mother would demand that she sit with us at the table. She also kept ordering my grandmother about, telling her to place her chair at a particular angle, to mop the table twice but not three times, to wash dishes with a yellow cloth rather than a green one … All this made my grandmother deeply stressed. As an illiterate peasant woman born in old China, she had lived her whole life anonymously.
She couldn’t bear her humbleness being exposed before everyone’s eyes. She felt embarrassed about helping herself to vegetables, or meat on the rare occasions there was some, given how little food there was on our table. My mother scolded her, and told her to stop being so pathetic and weak. In response my grandmother wept, which in turn only drove my mother to curse her more and more, choosing the most horrible words she could imagine. ‘Get up from your bench! Don’t you dare go drinking poison like your dead husband!’ My mother was cursing my grandmother as if she were her class enemy.
My grandmother shook at these vile utterances, her fragile spine shuddering under the formless black of her old widow’s clothes. Yet my father didn’t intervene, despite his affection for his old mother. Although modern and open-minded in many respects, he too was a slave to convention, and felt powerless against my tyrannical mother. This was between the women and he had no part in it. He sat quietly at the dining table, spooning food into my grandmother’s bowl, before retreating to his studio to paint.
As the days went by, I could see my grandmother was feeling more and more lonely. We were out all day at school or at work. No one came home until late. She sat alone on a bench in the yard, with no one to talk to. She couldn’t really venture out much further with her twisted, bound feet. And she was worried about getting lost in the town with its hectic traffic and complicated road system.
The tension between the two women was becoming unbearable. My mother wanted my grandmother to help her with the housework because she had to labour in the factory from early morning until late in the evening. But my mother never liked the way my grandmother approached the household tasks. She claimed that the old woman didn’t even wash our clothes properly. But my father and I thought that was because of my grandmother’s bad eyesight. One day, she chopped a cube of soap into a wok of noodle soup, thinking it was pork fat. The noodle soup bubbled and soon foam started to pour out over the brim and onto the floor. We had to throw away what had promised to be a hearty soup. My mother cursed my grandmother with such toxic hate, as if a wok of noodle soup was more important than my grandmother. Feeling ashamed of her mistake, my grandmother sobbed as she hobbled out into the yard where all the neighbours were watching and gossiping. The next day a doctor came and checked my grandmother’s eyes. She had thick membrane cataracts and possible macular degeneration. The old woman was practically blind, he told us. But it wasn’t really her eyes that were the problem. She was profoundly depressed. She looked sick and had aged a lot. Her white hair was an unkempt mess. Her black clothes were a patchwork of ingrained dust and brown stains. She needed help just to change her clothes. She was homesick, and missed her Guanyin statue.
One day she announced that she had to go home. My father was in a dilemma: whether to look after his aged mother or appease his wife. He asked her to stay longer. But she refused, not even for one more night than necessary. She cried silently beside me in bed; by morning her pillow was soaked in tears. She had met my grandfather in Hell and he had asked her to join him. We were all disturbed by her telling us this. After a quiet conversation between myself and my parents, I was given the mission of accompanying my grandmother to the bus. But I wasn’t going with her all the way back to Shitang. We packed my grandmother’s belongings and walked slowly to the station. Before we separated, she repeated the words she had once said to me as a child:
‘Xiaolu, your grandmother’s life isn’t even the life of a dog. I don’t have anything to live for.’
My eyes smarted, my throat grew tight, and I looked away. Then I heard her utter these last words:
‘I don’t know if I will ever see you again, but I hope that you will be happy and healthy. Obey your parents and study hard in school. One day, when you grow up and are making a living, send me a ten-yuan note to remind me of you.’
Her tears were flowing down her face. She wiped her eyes and took her place on the bus. I managed not to cry. I thought if I started, it would make her feel worse. As the bus disappeared along the dusty new road that led out into the countryside, I turned and walked back home. My heart was still there with my grandmother, but space and time were already tearing our bond apart. And I felt the terrible injustice of her life – her bound feet, the arranged marriage, the daily beatings at the hand of her husband, the fact that she had never learned to read or write, that even in our home she had been denied basic dignity. I couldn’t draw her out of her pain, life was a brute force that I had no power to change. The only thing I could hope for was that my fate would not be a repeat of hers. Never, ever!
Farewell, Shitang
Five months later, we received an urgent call from Shitang. It was Da Bo, our next-door neighbour. Come back, as quickly as you can, he said. My grandmother was dying. ‘She can barely breathe, but she asked for Xiaolu …’ he added. My mother didn’t say a word, and my father too was silenced. We were told to pack our clothes.
We sat on the bus, all four of us, and didn’t speak. The traffic was bad and the bus seemed to be stopping every ten metres. It felt like we would never get there, or that we were going to be too late. My brother had barely spent any time with my grandmother, and he looked on, detached from the situation. I, however, was so worried about my grandmother that I began to cry on the bus. I cried non-stop. I was so afraid that she would die before we reached the village. My weeping made my parents gloomy. Neither of them said anything to me, as we rocked slowly along the congested road. And yet I thought I saw my mother’s eyes welling up with tears. Maybe she felt guilty, perhaps even sorry for what she had done to my grandmother. With every jolt in the road, I felt more keenly the inner knot forming in my chest, and although I tried looking out of the window, images of my grandmother coloured my vision. How I dreaded the thought of her body being drained of life. I resented my mother and I despised my father’s weakness. If he had been a good son, my grandfather wouldn’t have poisoned himself. Nor would I have grown up in that lonely village by a grey sea.
When we finally arrived at my grandmother’s house, many of our neighbours were standing around. Da Bo and his wife had been looking after her, and I watched as his daughters ran in and out with soup. My grandmother was lying on the bed, her face the colour of the ocean and her eyes closed. She was barely conscious. My father tried to wake her up.
‘Mother, we’re here to see you! Mother!’
There was no response. Then my father asked me to try.
I restrained my tears, leaned over the bed and let my words fall upon her grey-white face. ‘Grandmother! It’s me, Xiaolu! Grandmother, can you hear me?’
My grandmother’s eyes fluttered slightly. We stared at her and listened to her faint breathing. Then she opened her eyes and turned to my father with a confused look. Her throat made a noise no one understood. Was it speech? Then she groaned again, this time we discerned the meaning.
‘Is that Third Cousin?’
Third Cousin was from her maternal family and he used to visit her in the past, but he had died a while back. My grandmother didn’t seem to recognise my father. He leaned in closer: ‘Mother, I’m not Third Cousin, I’m your son, Xiuling.’
She rolled her eyes blankly.
My mother tugged on my arm, hinting at me to speak again. Then my grandmother noticed me, and said: ‘Is that Jinglin selling crabs in the market?’ No one knew who Jinglin was and why she was selling crabs in the marke
t. My grandmother was thoroughly confused, and as if exhausted by our visit, she closed her eyes again. Now my brother was a bit scared. He left and wandered the streets outside. We waited by her bedside for an hour or two but she didn’t open her eyes again. Then Da Bo and his wife said maybe we should come to their house to have some noodles and tea if we were not too worried. My father said he would wait with my grandmother. My mother and I returned half an hour later with a bowl of noodle soup for my father, but my grandmother had stopped breathing. My grandmother never realised that her son had been with her when she died.
It turned out that my grandmother had been saving money for years to buy herself a coffin. Da Bo and his wife knew exactly where it was stored, in the backyard of the village coffin maker’s workshop. That was behind the village market, as far as I could remember. So my father and Da Bo went to fetch the coffin. Later, I heard that the coffin maker had been complaining for years about not having enough space and that he hoped my grandmother would die soon so he could be rid of it.
Before we laid my grandmother in the coffin, we had to change her clothes. We had a special outfit prepared for her. My parents undressed her and wiped her skin with wet towels. Only then did we see how thin and spindly she had become. She was a skeleton. I was not unfamiliar with my grandmother’s naked body, but it was a horrid sight. Being old seemed the most undignified state in the whole world. She looked so ghastly that my parents ordered my brother and me to leave the room.
As I walked around outside, I saw the neighbours gathering and gossiping. Someone thought my grandmother might have starved to death. ‘Either she had no money for food, or she couldn’t get up to feed herself,’ one of the mean-looking women said.
