The Bridegroom

by Ha Jin

  On the whole, they led a peaceful life. The temporary Street Committee voted them a model family in January.

  A week before the Spring Festival, the city was decorated with colorful lanterns, scrolls, bunting, and red flags, though a lot of rubble remained uncleared. These days, train after train of relief goods poured into Taifu; as a result, the citizens were allocated more meat, fish, fruit, eggs, and branded cigarettes for the festival than in other years. There were even some fresh vegetables on the market, like cabbages, turnips, spinach, bamboo shoots, cucumbers, garlic stems. Every family was given a coupon for one bottle of wheat liquor, but there was no limit on draft beer and wine. The supply of hard candies and pastry was abundant, too.

  On his way home one evening, Guhan caught a whiff of fragrance in the air—something very familiar, like that of leek dumplings. It was an unusual smell for late winter, when leeks were hard to come by. As the aroma entered his lungs, a domestic scene suddenly opened in his mind. He saw a cheerful family making dumplings at a table—a slender girl in a pink apron was grinding a chunk of dough with a rolling pin, a young man was kneading together the edges of a wrapper with his fingertips, and a middle-aged woman stirred the stuffing in a porcelain bowl with a pair of chopsticks. A dizzy feeling surged in him, and he got off his bicycle and squatted down on the snow-covered sidewalk. As he sniffed the fragrant air some more, the domestic picture grew clearer. He lit a cigarette and focused his mind on the scene. Gradually their talk became audible. A male voice, somewhat like his own, said, “It’s time to heat water to boil the dumplings.”

  That voice shocked him, though he couldn’t see himself in the scene. “No rush, Dad,” the girl said, clapping her floury hands.

  Again he was surprised. Did she talk to me? he asked himself. Yes, it seemed so. Why did she call me dad? Was I her father? Who were they? Why did the young man look like me? Who was the middle-aged woman? Were they my family? Did I really have a family? Where did this gathering take place? And how long ago?

  By instinct he followed the leek scent, which came from a hut about a hundred yards to the east. As he was walking, a sign emerged above the door of the restaurant: tasty dumplings. He hastened his steps toward the hut while his mind’s eye still observed the family scene. “Dad, you should put these in neat rows,” the young man said, lining up the dumplings. Those words shook Guhan and made him realize that the girl and the young man must have been his children. He froze, then turned a little, gripping the handlebars of his bicycle with both hands while his left shoulder leaned against the bole of a dried mulberry tree killed by the earthquake. A gust of cold wind passed by and made him sneeze and cough. As though the coughing had been meant to precipitate his recollection, picture after picture of his family came back to him—Yaning’s tic fits, the garlic eggplant Jian had pickled, the handsome shoes she had made out of pasted rags stitched together with jute threads, Liya’s sweet voice and thin braids, the tropical fish he had kept, as large as bats. He tried hard to control his emotions as he raised the door curtain and went into the restaurant.

  He sat down in a corner and ordered half a pound of dumplings, which came in a white bowl with a blue rim. While he was eating, his memory was further revived and sharpened by the familiar taste of the stuffing, made of pork, leeks, cabbage, dried shrimp, ginger, sesame oil. Every bit of the memory became unmistakable now. He recalled that the family gathering had taken place on the Spring Festival’s eve two years ago, when his daughter had returned from the chicken farm and spent the holiday season in Muji. Leeks hadn’t been available in stores at the time, but he had obtained two pounds through the back door. He had done that mainly for Liya, because she, after a year in the countryside, had lost her appetite, grown emaciated, and suffered from low blood pressure. At his daughter’s name—Liya—he was suddenly overcome with self-pity and began weeping and sniffling, his tears dribbling into the tiny vinegar plate. None of the diners or waitresses took the trouble to console him. They were used to such an occurrence; every day there were a few customers who wept in here, especially those who ate alone.

  From the family his mind moved to the cannery. He remembered that he had been a section leader in the factory and that people had called him Old Tong. His name was Guhan, not Sweet Apple. He had held a respectable position, giving orders to forty-eight people, unlike at his current job, where he merely copied names and statistics. What’s more, he had been liked by his workers, who had elected him an outstanding cadre every year. Oh, how he missed his wife and children. How warm and clean his home had been. How pretty those flowers he had grown in his yard. How he wanted to return to Muji and work in the cannery again.

  When he finished eating, it became clear to him how he had been trapped in Taifu. What was to be done now? The question baffled him. He didn’t love Shan very much, but he had grown quite attached to Mo, whom he often carried in his lap when he bicycled around. He thought of secretly taking Mo with him back to Muji, but on second thought he realized the police could easily track him down if he had the boy with him. Besides, Mo had almost become Shan’s flesh and blood now; he shouldn’t rob her of this sole solace. Should he tell Shan everything? Would she believe him? Or should he inform the authorities of his real name and identity? Would they allow him to leave without a thorough investigation? No, they wouldn’t. They might demand that he be responsible and stay with Shan and Mo, at least for some months.

  He walked all the way home, pushing the bicycle with one hand. As he was getting close to his shack, a miserable feeling again overwhelmed him. He crouched down and wiped his tear-stained face with handfuls of snow. He made up his mind to leave this hopeless place as soon as possible.

  “Ah, there you are. How we were worried!” Shan said at the sight of him and rose to her feet.

  “Daddy, I miss you,” Mo cried, placing his plump hand on his chest, and expected to be carried up.

  Guhan bent down, kissed the boy on the cheek, and turned to Shan. “I don’t feel well,” he said, then went to bed.

  “Don’t you want to eat dinner?” she asked. “I made twisted rolls, still warm on the stove.”

  “I ate already.”

  “Are you sick?” She came over and touched his forehead.

  “I’m all right, just tired.” He avoided looking at her. “I’ll be fine tomorrow morning.” He felt like weeping, but he contained himself.

  Together she and Mo resumed reading a story about how a pair of young bunnies outsmarted a gray wolf. Guhan had just subscribed to the children’s magazine Tell Me a Story for Mo. Two weeks ago Shan had begun teaching the boy how to read and do addition.

  After midnight, when he was certain that Shan and Mo were fast asleep, Guhan got out of bed, left on the table the key to the bicycle and three ten-yuan notes—half his savings—and stuck into Mo’s pocket a thick pack of firecrackers that he had forgotten to give the boy. He put on his army overcoat and sneaked out. In the howling wind he set off for the train station.

  Crowds of passengers were waiting for buses in front of Muji Train Station. Many of them wore fur coats. Soon Guhan began shivering, his cotton-padded overcoat unable to keep out the cold. Fortunately, after just an hour’s wait, he got on a bus bound for Victory District, where his home was. The bus was so packed that soon he felt warm.

  When he arrived at his apartment, he was surprised to see that at the center of the door was a New Year picture, in which a fat baby boy was sleeping in a bean pod floating on a river. He stopped for a minute, wondering whether his family still lived in there.

  Where else could they be? he thought. This is my home.

  With a throbbing heart he knocked on the door. A moment later his son stepped out, rubbing his sleepy eyes. “Who are you looking for?” asked the young man, his left cheek twitching.

  “Yaning, I—I’m your father!” Guhan moaned.

  His son was taken aback, then looked at him closely. “Are you really my dad? He’s very thin.”

  “Look at me!” He
took off his felt hat; the morning sun flooded in through a window, glistening on his sweaty balding head, which sent up coils of steam. He said, “I gained some weight because I was sick after the earthquake and lost my memory for a while.”

  Yaning recognized him and rushed over; father and son embraced, sobbing. Meili, his daughter-in-law, came out, wearing dark-blue maternity trousers, and she joined them in weeping. His family had thought he was dead. The memorial service had been held five months before, after the cannery notified the Tongs that he had vanished in the earthquake.

  “Where’s your mother?” asked Guhan.

  “She’s at Uncle’s,” his son answered, then turned to Meili. “Go tell her Dad is back.”

  Meili put on a fur overcoat, then waddled away with her protruding belly to Gorki Street, where the uncle’s family lived.

  Because the Tongs had believed Guhan was dead and they had been afraid the cannery would take back their housing, Yaning and Meili had gotten married a week after the memorial meeting and moved into the apartment. At the same time, Jian—the “widow”—went to stay at her brother’s, since she refused to sleep in the kitchen. Exhorted time and again by her friends and relatives, she had just begun looking for a man, a husband-to-be, so that she would again be able to live under her own roof someday.

  The Tongs had made another decision that was sensible under such circumstances. Instead of going to the agricultural school, Liya had returned to Muji City; the cannery hired her, filling the quota left by her father; now she worked as a quality inspector in the lab.

  Hearing Guhan had come back alive, his wife almost passed out. She cried, stretching up her bony hand, “Lord of Heaven, why are you so cruel to us? Why didn’t you let me know my old man was still alive? Or why didn’t you kill me instead? Where can I hide my face?”

  Initially, on leaving Taifu, Guhan had planned to give his family a joyful surprise, but their joy was mixed with confusion, shame, and sadness. At dinner that evening, Liya kept blaming herself for returning to the city, while Yaning was crestfallen, having no idea how to accommodate his parents now. However, Guhan had a large heart and assured his children that everything would be all right and that the cannery might provide him with new housing, because this mess had been caused by nature and nobody should be responsible for it. He told his family, “I’ve worked for them for over twenty years, so I belong to the cannery. When I’m alive, I am their man; when I’m dead, I am their ghost. They have to take me. Don’t worry so much. It’s good just to be alive.”

  But the next morning, when Guhan showed up at the cannery, he found his position already occupied by Fei, the young Party member; more surprising, there was a vice director now, who had been sent over by the city’s Light Industry Bureau. Obviously Guhan was no longer needed here. Heavens, in just six months he had become an unwanted man, as though he were truly dead, back as a mere ghost.

  His reappearance shocked the workers and staff. Some of them gathered around him, listening to his story and telling him how heartbrokenly they had wept at the memorial service. They told him that twenty large wreaths had been placed on both sides of his portrait and that his wife had cried so hard her limbs had cramped. Now, who could imagine he was still alive! A few people went on asking, “Are you really Old Tong?” Two even touched his knees to make sure he was corporeal.

  Both Director Li and Secretary Niu sympathized with Guhan, but they said the cannery couldn’t employ him anymore, for his daughter had taken the only quota available. They had managed to obtain the residence card for Liya mainly because they had named him a Revolutionary Martyr; otherwise the police would not have cooperated. As for additional housing now, it was out of the question. How could he think of such a thing when he no longer worked for the factory? If they had assigned him an apartment, how could they have appeased those employees in line for housing?

  After a Party meeting, the leaders came up with a solution: they allowed Guhan to retire on a pension. He had no choice but to accept this offer. Since the Spring Festival was just two days away, his brother-in-law took him and his wife in. Yaning begged his parents to let him retain the apartment, saying they’d wreck his marriage if they drove his pregnant wife and himself out. So they allowed him to keep it; after the holiday, they’d have to search for housing for themselves.

  Guhan became reticent and gloomy. He couldn’t resist wondering whether he should have stayed with Shan and Mo in Taifu and let people here believe he had left this crowded world for good.

  In the Kindergarten

  Shaona kept her eyes shut, trying to sleep. Outside, the noonday sun was blazing, and bumblebees were droning in the shade of an elm. Time and again one of them would bump into the window’s wire screen with a thud and then a louder buzz. Soon Teacher Shen’s voice in the next room grew clearer.

  “Oh please!” the teacher blubbered on the phone. “I’ll pay you the money in three months. You’ve already helped me so much, why can’t you help me out?”

  Those words made Shaona fully awake. She moved her head closer to the wall and strained her ears to listen. The teacher begged, “Have mercy on me, Dr. Niu. I’ve an old mother at home. My mother and I have to live. . . . And you know, I lost so much blood, because of the baby, that I need to eat eggs to recuperate. I’m really broke now. Can you just give me another month?”

  Shaona was puzzled, thinking how a baby could injure her teacher’s health. Her grandmother used to say that babies were dug out from pumpkin fields in the countryside. Why did her teacher sound as though the baby had come out of her body? Why did she bleed for the baby?

  Teacher Shen’s voice turned desperate. “Please, don’t tell anyone about the abortion! I’ll try my best to pay you . . . very soon. I’ll see if I can borrow some money from a friend.”

  What’s an abortion? Shaona asked herself. Is it something that holds a baby? What does it look like? Must be very expensive.

  Her teacher slammed the phone down, then cried, “Heaven help me!”

  Shaona couldn’t sleep anymore. She missed her parents so much that she began sobbing again. This was her second week in the kindergarten, and she was not used to sleeping alone yet. Her small iron bed was uncomfortable, in every way different from the large soft bed at home, which could hold her entire family. She couldn’t help wondering if her parents would love her the same as before, because three weeks ago her mother had given her a baby brother. These days her father was so happy that he often chanted snatches of opera.

  In the room seven other children were napping, one of them wheezing with a stuffy nose. Two large bronze moths, exhausted by the heat, were resting on the ceiling, their powdery wings flickering now and again. Shaona yawned sleepily, but still couldn’t go to sleep.

  At two-thirty the bell rang, and all the nappers got out of their beds. Teacher Shen gathered the whole class of five- and six-year-olds in the corridor. Then in two lines they set out for the turnip field behind the kindergarten. It was still hot. A steamboat went on blowing her horn in the north, and a pair of jet fighters were flying in the distant sky, drawing a long double curve. Shaona wondered how a pilot could fit inside those planes, which looked as small as pigeons. In the air lingered a sweetish odor of dichlorvos, which had been sprayed around the city to get rid of flies, fleas, mosquitoes. The children were excited, because seldom were they allowed to go out of the stone wall topped with shards of dark brown glass. Today, instead of playing games within the yard as the children of the other classes were doing, Teacher Shen was going to teach them how to gather purslanes. Few of them knew what a purslane looked like, but they were all eager to search for the herb.

  On the way, their teacher turned around to face them, flourishing her narrow hand and saying, “Boys and girls, you’ll eat sautéed purslanes this evening. It tastes great, different from anything you’ve ever had. Tell me, do you all want to have purslanes for dinner or not?”

  “Yes! We do,” a few voices cried.

  The teacher smacked
her lips. Her sunburned nose crinkled, a faint smile playing on her face. As she continued walking, the ends of her two braids, tied with green woolen strings, were stroking the baggy seat of her pants. She was a young woman, tall and angular, with crescent eyebrows. She used to sing a lot; her voice was fruity and clear. But recently she was quiet, her face rather pallid. It was said that she had divorced her husband the previous summer because he had been sentenced to thirteen years in prison for embezzlement.

  When they arrived at the field, Teacher Shen plucked a purslane from between two turnip seedlings. She said to the children, who were standing in a horseshoe, “Look, its leaves are tiny, fleshy, and egg-shaped. It has reddish stems, different from regular veggies and grass. Sometimes it has small yellow flowers.” She dropped the purslane into her duffel bag on the ground and went on, “Now, you each take charge of one row.”

  Following her orders, the children spread out along the edge of the field and then walked into the turnip seedlings.

  Shaona lifted up the bottom of her checked skirt to form a basket before her stomach and set out to search. Purslanes weren’t difficult to find among the turnips, whose greens were not yet larger than a palm. Pretty soon every one of the children gathered some purslanes.

  “Don’t stamp on the turnips!” Uncle Chang shouted at them from time to time. Sitting under an acacia, he was puffing away at a long pipe that had a brass bowl, his bald crown coated with beads of sweat. He was in charge of a few vegetable fields and the dilapidated pump house.

  Shaona noticed Dabin, a rambunctious boy, sidling up to her, but she pretended she didn’t see him. He nudged her and asked, “How many did you get?” He sniveled—two lines of dark mucus disappeared from his nostrils, then poked out again.