The Forbidden Game

by Dan Washburn

  “Should we pack their beds?” a neighbor asked.

  “No,” Zhou said. “We have those in Chongqing.”

  They did pack clothing. Two suits each for Zhou’s mother and father. Zhou felt the rest were “too ragged,” and announced they would be left behind. For about fifteen minutes, his parents’ home took on the feel of a charity giveaway. Villagers lined up to rummage through dusty piles of shirts, trousers and jackets – there were no dressers or closets in the house. They tried on items they liked over what they were already wearing. Almost everyone took home a memento of their departing friends.

  By now, Zhou and his father were rifling through the contents of the bedroom. It was a small, cluttered, windowless room with stone and brick walls and a single light bulb hanging from the ceiling. Plastic bags were scattered across the bed. They had been stashed inside pockets, under mattresses, and, like mortar, between the stones in the wall. The bags were where Zhou’s parents stored important documents, like identification cards and bank books. There was an old ledger from his father’s time working in the Supply and Marketing Cooperative. No one knew exactly how many plastic bags had been hidden or what they contained.

  “Oh!” Zhou exclaimed, jokingly. “I found a treasure!”

  He pulled a wad of pink one-hundred yuan bills out of one of the plastic bags. He counted the money.

  “All together 2,100,” he told his father. “This is hard-earned money. Bring your ID cards to Chongqing and I will have this put into a bank account for you.”

  *

  Zhou was inspecting the bounty – sack upon sack upon sack – that had accumulated in the courtyard, and wondering how he was going to get it all back to Chongqing. He had borrowed a Honda CRV from one of his golf students for the journey, assuming the SUV would accommodate five people and his parents’ meager possessions easily. But what he saw before him looked like a wholesale farmers’ market.

  “Don’t forget the roosters!” his mother shouted from inside the house.

  Of course. Roosters.

  Zhou and his brothers chased down five of them, but the brown-feathered birds put up quite a fight. Clearly these country chickens had no interest in moving to the big city. As Third Brother held the roosters by their wings, Zhou tied their legs together with twine. The brothers stuffed the birds into red boxes adorned with pictures of oranges and the word “grapefruit” in English. One rooster was especially reluctant to leave. Push his head into the box, and he’d pop it back out through an opening in the top moments later. This happened several times, until Zhou eventually gave up and let the old bird have its way.

  A procession of family and friends – each man carrying at least one heavy sack on his shoulder – walked Zhou’s parents away from their village home, down the muddy path to where a truck was waiting to take them to the bottom of the mountain. The morning fog had lifted, and visibility was good.

  Everybody was filthy. Shoes, slippers and pant cuffs covered in mud, all articles of clothing speckled in brown. The road was a mess. The driver squatted in a mucky puddle, struggling to affix chains to his truck’s balding tires. On a normal day, the road would have been considered impassable. But this was not a normal day. Zhou’s elderly parents were not going to leave the village on foot.

  The chains were not working, however. The old truck squealed. Tires spun in place. Mud flew. Were they going to leave at all?

  “Get some rocks!” Zhou ordered, determined.

  Large stones were removed from a nearby terrace wall and wedged under the truck’s tires for traction.

  “Come, help me push!” Zhou barked.

  Zhou, his brothers, and other men from the village leaned into the back of the truck. The engine howled.

  “Push with all your strength!”

  The rickety truck rocked forward, then back, before finally hurtling ahead to somewhat drier land.

  “Hurry. Load the truck!”

  With the most precious cargo – Zhou’s mother and father – safely up front with the driver, the rest of the passengers took their places in the truck bed alongside the roosters and preserved pork.

  “Wait!” Zhou’s mother yelled out the window. “We forgot the cooking oil. Can somebody go back and get it?”

  The mountains were luxuriant and otherworldly, moss-covered dragon’s teeth protruding from the loam. The view was a nice compensation for what was otherwise a loud and jarring ride. At times, the road was a river. It took an hour, but they eventually got to the bottom of the mountain, where Zhou and his brothers could transfer their parents, along with their garlic, tobacco and five crowing roosters, to the SUV.

  As they pulled away, Zhou’s father popped his head out of the backseat window and looked back toward the road that leads to Qixin. It was difficult to tell if he was smiling.

  *

  The following day, Zhou’s apartment in Chongqing smelled and sounded a bit like Qixin. Fifth Brother killed a rooster out on the kitchen balcony, covering the outdoor sink in chicken blood. On the living room balcony, Zhou’s father puffed on a pipe stuffed full of village tobacco. He was wearing Fifth Brother’s white-and-red-striped Nike golf shirt. His head was freshly shaven and, for the first time in years, not adorned by his trademark Lei Feng hat. (Fifth Brother had tossed that in the trash the moment they arrived in the city.)

  Zhou’s father sat out on the balcony for hours, silent, staring at the view from his son’s ninth-floor apartment. From his perch he could see a highway, a strip mall of restaurants, a driving range and several parking lots. But mostly he saw new high-rise apartment buildings, each nearly identical to another. He was surrounded.

  “At night,” Zhou’s father said, “they look like mountains.”

  Zhou’s home was still very much a work in progress. Furnishings were sparse. Walls were bare, save for one children’s poster covered in pictures of fruit, the name of each labeled in both English and Chinese. The living room, like most of the apartment, had white walls and white tiled floors. There was a glass coffee table, an oversized mauve sofa and, although the walls came wired for a flatscreen television, a small, boxy tube TV Zhou had received from a friend. This being the home of a baby – two, in fact, as Zhou’s mother-in-law was visiting with Liu Yan’s nephew, Yang Yang, who was only one year old – part of the floor was covered with soft foam tiles decorated with the letters of the English alphabet. Zhou’s parents slept upon straw mats on the floor of what used to be the office, just off the dining room.

  The kitchen was nearly spotless. The white tiles on the walls shone like mirrors, and the cabinets were fluorescent yellow. There was a gas stove with two burners, and an extra electric burner that sat atop a new microwave oven. The stainless steel range hood and refrigerator still had the clear protective plastic covers they shipped with. Near the sink, things began to fall apart. A line of crude sacks containing crops from the village was slouching down the wall. Atop the new refrigerator, a tub of pig lard. There were dead chickens in the sink, their clawed feet pointing at the white ceiling.

  Zhou’s mother, who cooked every day back in the village, looked lost in the kitchen. Too different. Too new. Give her some coal and a wok and she’d be fine. “I don’t know how to cook with the gas,” she said, frustrated. She looked right at home, however, feeding her grandson on the balcony. She had brought six children into the world. This is something she knew how to do anywhere. When asked what she thought of the high-rises, she responded with single words like “good” and “beautiful” before adding, “But I don’t dare look downward.” This was her first time in a multi-story building.

  There were a lot of firsts during Zhou’s parents’ initial twenty-four hours in Chongqing. First skyscraper, first elevator, first modern shower and toilet. Zhou taught his parents how to flush, and how to mix hot water with cold. Alas, he neglected to give a tutorial on the balcony’s glass sliding door, which his father discovered by walking right into it. But not everything was new. On their second day, while dining at a spicy
hotpot establishment not too far from Zhou’s home, his father announced this was not his and his wife’s first time at a restaurant. It was their second. “The other time was nineteen years ago,” he said. “It was for First Brother’s wedding.”

  There were plenty of smiles, but there were also signs the assimilation process wouldn’t be simple. You can’t move an elderly couple out of one of China’s poorest villages, into one of the world’s fastest-growing megacities and not expect some difficulty – Zhou must have expected that. Sure, there were familiarities of family and culture, but for Zhou’s parents, Chongqing was an intimidating new world, both foreign and futuristic. They were like time travelers who, because of their backwoods dialect and broken Mandarin, didn’t even speak Chongqing’s language.

  Zhou’s father didn’t like having to use the elevator every time he wanted to step outside, and he worried about getting lost. He said he was having trouble figuring out the shower and that his wife wasn’t comfortable in the modern kitchen. They weren’t sleeping well, either. They missed their crops, and felt guilty knowing they would be away from the village during harvest time. Zhou’s mother was afraid the belongings she left behind in Qixin would be stolen. And both were anxious about making friends in the big city, about finding ways to spend their time.

  “I don’t want to feel like a bird in a cage,” Zhou’s mother said. “I hope I can talk to the other old people in the neighborhood. I hope I can have fun with them.”

  Zhou had never doubted this was the right thing for him to do. He felt it was his duty. His parents were living a primitive existence in the village. He now had the means to offer them a better quality of life in the city. End of story.

  “You know, I cried that night when I was persuading them to leave the village,” Zhou said. “My mom fell in the field and hurt her leg, but she still wanted to cook rice for us. How can I tolerate my mom living in such a bad situation? I wanted them to live with us with all my heart.

  “My parents are part of my life. There will be only one change: We’ll make more rice for every meal.”

  And on Zhou’s parents’ first full night in Chongqing, the rice bowls were indeed overflowing. Soon, Zhou would take his parents to the hospital for treatment, and to the city’s famous Jiefangbei shopping area to buy new clothes. There were many things to do in the days and weeks ahead, many challenges to overcome, but today Zhou chose to focus on what lay immediately before him. It was a feast – dishes of beef, pork, fish, chicken, eggs, potatoes and fresh vegetables – and he was the provider. He was seated at a glass dining room table he had bought, in a new apartment he owned. He was surrounded by his family: his beautiful new wife and their healthy baby boy; Fifth Brother and his girlfriend; his mother-in-law; his sister’s teenage son visiting from Shandong; and, of course, his parents.

  Zhou, the peasant farmer-turned-security-guard-turned-golf-pro from Guizhou, had made all of this happen. He sat back in his chair, took a large mouthful of Shancheng beer and watched as Liu Yan used chopsticks to feed rice to their son. She sang to Hanhan:

  In Disneyland, there is a Donald Duck.

  He quacks at people every day.

  Quack, quack, quack, quack!

  Donald Duck, my Donald Duck.

  Quack, quack, quack, quack!

  On the final “quack,” Hanhan reached into the bowl and grabbed a handful of white rice, most of which ended up stuck to his cheek instead of inside his mouth. Zhou’s mother laughed. Then his father laughed. Soon, everyone around the table was laughing.

  *

  Zhou’s parents had only been living in Chongqing for one week when Zhou had to leave for two tournaments in South Korea. Zhou boarded the plane with unease. The week had gone well enough – his parents had thanked him for the new sets of clothing and their medical treatment, and they seemed to enjoy spending time with their grandson – but Zhou was now unsure how well his parents were adjusting to life in the city.

  Even on the initial car ride from the village to Chongqing, Zhou’s parents kept muttering about wanting to go back home, about their crops, their livestock. These mutterings continued throughout that initial first week, as well. Zhou thought this was probably natural, and hoped his parents’ feelings of homesickness would wane over time.

  Plus, Liu Yan enjoyed having her in-laws around, and that should help to get them settled, he thought. Communication was often difficult – Liu Yan’s knowledge of the village dialect was limited – but her new houseguests would help stave off some of the loneliness she felt when Zhou was gone for long stretches of time. And she knew how much it meant to Zhou to have his parents in Chongqing.

  But Liu Yan also worried that Zhou’s parents weren’t adapting well to their new surroundings. Their days were empty. They stayed inside watching TV. They had no activities, no chores and very little contact with other people. On the balcony of Zhou’s apartment, Zhou’s father sat and looked at the view and sighed. “Just a very boring life here,” he observed.

  They had become what Zhou’s mother had feared – birds in a cage. “They seemed lost,” Liu Yan said.

  Zhou didn’t play well in Korea, missing the cut in the tournaments, and he grew anxious to return home to a full house of friendly faces. He flew from Seoul to Beijing and then to Chongqing. During the trip, every time Zhou would talk to Liu Yan on the phone, he’d ask how his parents were doing. “Fine,” she’d always say. (“I didn’t want to distract him,” Liu Yan later explained.) And when Zhou, en route to Chongqing, called during his short layover in Beijing, the topic of his parents did not come up.

  When Zhou returned home, he stepped through the apartment door and put his bags down on the floor. Something didn’t feel right. The house was too quiet, too still. The door to the office – where his parents had been sleeping – was open, and the room was empty. Zhou’s heart sank.

  “Liu Yan!” Zhou yelled. “Where are my parents?”

  He already knew the answer to his question. He sat down at the empty dining room table, his face blank. Zhou tried to get a handle on his emotions. This was not anger he was feeling. Not sadness. It was confusion. It was guilt. What had he done wrong? What could he have done differently?

  “Before they arrived, I had always thought they would adjust to life here,” Zhou said. “That is why I invited them. But after they got here, part of me knew they wouldn’t stay for long. But I never thought they would leave when I wasn’t home.” He sighed and added, “They wouldn’t have left if I was here. I wouldn’t have let them.” And that is exactly why Zhou’s parents left when they did.

  They had spent two weeks away from the village, and that was all they could stand. At first, Zhou’s parents were thrilled to see the bright lights, the wide roads, the tall buildings. But after ten days they were just lights, roads and buildings. They were lonely. They felt they had no one to talk to. Back home, they could walk into any house in the village and chat with their neighbors. In Chongqing, they were afraid to leave the apartment.

  Fifth Brother tried to convince his parents not to return to the village, but, still weary from the intense negotiations that got them out of the village in the first place, and with no brothers at his side, he didn’t put up much of a fight. Liu Yan, too, attempted to talk Zhou’s parents into staying, arguing they hadn’t given life in the city enough of a chance. But they wouldn’t listen. Instead, they told Liu Yan that she and Zhou should visit Qixin more often.

  Zhou’s parents called the village. Less than twenty-four hours later, First Brother’s son Little Tiger arrived in Chongqing to accompany his grandparents home.

  “Homesickness can be dangerous,” Zhou reflected. “I guess I didn’t understand their way of life before. I didn’t understand what makes them happy. Now I know. They don’t care if our home in the city is cleaner or more convenient than the one in the village. All they need is clothing on their bodies and food in their stomachs. They are happier in the countryside. City life didn’t have any meaning to them. It’s a generat
ion gap.”

  Zhou, who had been trying to get his parents out of the village for years, was done chasing this dream.

  “Never again,” he said. “I think they believe they are too old to live outside the village. It’s Chinese culture. If they die outside their village, they can never go home again.”

  The day after he returned from Korea, Zhou called his parents. He asked them why they left, and they answered with reasons he already knew: the corn, the tobacco, the chickens and pigs. This all made sense to him now.

  “If it makes you happy, you should stay in the countryside,” Zhou told them.

  When asked if his parents ever said they were sorry, Zhou shot back: “No. How can a Chinese parent apologize to their child?”

  ‌10

  ‌Striking Black

  Wang Libo began to build his future in May 2009. It was his wife’s idea, actually. “When we saw that the developer was building dormitories behind our land, and realized the workers living there would have no place to buy cigarettes and drinks,” Wang recalled, “my wife suggested we build a small shop to sell necessities on our land. I said yes, because now that we had rented out our fruit tree land, she was jobless.”

  He estimated the shop he had in mind would cost around forty thousand yuan – a small fortune – but he didn’t hesitate before going ahead with the plan. It was a strange time in the village – never before had so many people been flush with cash. Even though he and his wife had spent all their land compensation money on building their new house, they still had some savings. Some relatives, who had also recently profited from land sales, helped them with the rest. “Before, I would have had to borrow from the rural banks, and there would have been a lot of red tape,” he said. “Now, every plan is like this. Everything is possible. If you have money, you can do it without concern.”