by Te-Ping Chen
Their apartment was a cramped two-bedroom on the eleventh floor, and as we entered, Gao’s father shuffled to greet us in rubber slippers. He looked older than his wife and wore a soft-brimmed, flat black cap, and chuckled in greeting on seeing me. I liked him straightaway. “Hello,” he said. He offered me some tiny candies wrapped in foil, chuckling some more; it appeared to be a tic of his.
“Ni hao,” I quavered, and he beamed again.
“Please sit,” Gao’s mother said, and arranged me on the couch before heading to the kitchen. My legs ached, and I didn’t protest. At the museum she had hovered by my side, reading the mangled English descriptions aloud to me as though I were a child, and if I missed a single display case, she would gesture me over to study its contents.
Gao’s father sank into a chair beside me, looking pleased. The apartment had a transient look, nothing on the walls. I tried to speak with him, but he didn’t understand me, and together instead we turned our attention to the television, where an androgynous host was interviewing a rail-thin woman who clutched a curly-haired dog to her chest.
“Are you sure I can’t help?” I called to Gao’s mother, craning my neck around the corner.
She stuck her head out from the doorway. “No need,” she said. In one hand, she waved a slick-shelled gray shrimp at me, antennae twitching in a way that briefly made it look alive. “It’s very easy.”
From the kitchen, I could hear the pot sizzle, and when the androgynous interviewer’s segment was over, I got up and followed the smell. Gao’s mother was standing before a cutting board, mincing garlic into a sticky crumb, ginger into matchsticks. “That smells good,” I said.
“There are some pictures in the other room,” she said, without turning around. “You can have a look.”
I left, feeling rebuffed. The study was strewn with books and papers in a way that seemed at odds with Gao’s mother’s clipped decisiveness. A stuffed orangutan sat on the desk, its tags still on. In one corner a dozen plants bulged from their pots, leaves filmed with dust. Beside them was a bookshelf adorned with framed photos. One showed a teenage Gao, slim as a fairy-tale waif, hair spiked with gel and wearing a white button-down open at the top. He looked young, and the sight of him made me catch my breath. Another showed him as a toddler, his parents crouched beside him and smiling as he extended his hand, as though it held something he wanted the photographer to see.
There was a noise behind me as Gao’s mother entered the room, and I turned around, still holding the photo of him as a teenager. “That’s Gao,” I said, and managed a laugh.
“That’s Gao in Germany,” she said. It sounded like a correction.
I put the photo reluctantly back and thanked her for cooking. “I’m afraid I’ve given you a lot of trouble,” I said insincerely.
“No trouble. Eat.”
Gao’s mother set the steamer of the once-gray shrimp, now turned rosy pink, in the center of a table in the living room, along with a dish of water chestnuts and pale cabbage. The three of us sat down, the television still on, fluorescent lights bright overhead.
The meal was strained. Gao’s mother did not want to talk, replying only tersely when I asked her about the school, the neighborhood, the family. I kept trying to reach for answers anyway, feeling a mounting sense of frustration that after all my years of fieldwork, somehow in this most important of interviews, I could not seem to connect. The minutes ticked by. “Eat some more,” she said brusquely, when I tried to ask her again about Gao’s childhood. And then: “Why are you crying?”
I shook my head, embarrassed, and wiped my nose before returning to my chopsticks. When I looked up, though, she was still examining me. “I thought this trip would be different,” I said at last, disliking the tremor in my voice.
“What did you think would be different?”
“Everything,” I said. “I don’t know.”
A flicker of impatience crossed her face. She pulled napkins from their plastic holder and passed them to me.
“My son should never have gotten married,” she said.
When I asked her what she meant, she appeared to consider saying something, then gave a little laugh. I couldn’t tell whether she intended it for my benefit, and all at once I didn’t care. “If you mean something, just say it,” I said.
She ate steadily away, picking up another one of the shrimp, sliding it neatly from its skin and placing it in her mouth. Then she sighed and laid her chopsticks down.
“Gao was very competitive,” she said. “But jealousy is no excuse for what they did to that poor boy.”
I paused, not liking her version of the story. My hands felt suddenly very cold. “That’s not what happened,” I said slowly.
Gao’s father said something to her, and she replied sharply. It occurred to me that theirs was not a happy marriage, or maybe it was just the shock of losing their son, far away in a country they’d never visited.
“I’m not going to sit here and listen to you attack him,” I said. She lifted her glass but did not drink from it. She set it back down and looked at me, almost pityingly. “You didn’t really know him.”
* * *
Outside the light was fading as Gao’s mother and I made our way back to the car. The cicadas thrummed noisily in the bushes around us. The sky was a faint pink, and the chill of the air felt good on my face.
“I’ll get a cab,” I said, but she said no. It felt like an overture until she explained: it wasn’t an easy part of town to find one.
We drove along the highway, passing warehouses the size of city blocks and billboards with advertisements for new apartments and furniture stores. There was nothing remarkable about the scene, and I doubted Gao would have recognized any more of it than I did. Still, I took my camera and pointed it out the window anyway.
“Gao hated it here,” his mother said abruptly. “I asked him to bring you, many times. He always said no.”
We rounded along a curved overpass that flung us out onto a narrow road. On one side were low-slung shops and a gas station, and scattered cheap eateries on the other. We passed a few children riding their bikes along the side, yelling happily at one another, and soon a forest of closely packed apartment blocks reared up on our right. They looked new and mostly untenanted, windows that gaped without glass.
Farther along, the dense curtain of buildings parted, and as we neared the gap between them, I inhaled sharply.
“What is that?” I asked. “Can we stop?”
Gao’s mother pulled over. Outside the passenger window, I could see the buildings had been erected atop landfill, but where they were interrupted, a cliff of earth fell away, and below that was a rocky wasteland strewn with debris and construction material. At its center stood a lone concrete house. At first glance the house looked as though it might be several floors high, until I realized the ground had been hollowed around it, scooped away from it like the base of a sculpture; the building stood atop stories of packed earth.
It looked like an odd art installation, or an image from a surrealist painting: a city melting into a puddle, a single house floating on its remains.
I asked if anyone actually lived there, and Gao’s mother said yes. “It’s called dingzihu,” she explained. “The government wants to take their land but they won’t move.”
On the other hand, it seemed, whoever was inside couldn’t leave the house, either. Apart from the difficulty in scaling down the rocky incline, she said, the developer would likely come and demolish the house if it was ever left empty.
“People bring them food,” she said. “Look.”
I got out, slamming the car door behind me, and she followed. We stood at the road’s edge and watched a woman and a child pick their way across the rubble, holding a sheaf of bananas, a sleeve of crackers, and a big jug of bottled water. It took them a while. When they reached the house, we heard them shout up to the window. The window slid open, and a bucket tied to a rope was flung out.
From our vantage point, the w
oman and her child looked as small as dolls. It was hard to see what happened next, but then the bucket was rising, slowly and jerkily pulled by an invisible hand.
“See? There’s someone inside,” Gao’s mother said.
For a moment, I thought I saw a flash of a face at the window, but it disappeared too quickly to be sure. All I could see was the rope, and the bucket that hung from it, dangling.
We got back into the car. The light was fading, and we were two strangers anxious to get home.
Flying Machine
In the autumn of his life, after the corn had ripened and been plucked, Cao Cao decided he would build his own plane, though he did not know how to fly.
He lived in a village of red brick and cement homes. He had a smiling face, as though someone had once told him a joke and he hadn’t stopped laughing since. He had a great affection for his chickens, their tiny little heads and anxious, restless pecking. “Good morning, dummies,” he would say cheerfully as he fed them.
One of his legs was shorter than the other, and though his wife folded wedges of fabric into his shoes, they weren’t comfortable and he took them out. He was usually seen walking through the village at a jerky clip, sometimes to smoke and sit outside with his friend Old Li, or to the small shop at the village’s entrance that sold chips and bottled drinks and domino-size packets of shampoo, a shop his wife swore he visited at least twice a day.
“It’s too much,” she’d say. “We are poor farmers, remember?”
Cao Cao did try to restrain himself, but then he would get thirsty and think of what a fine thing it would be to buy drinks or cigarettes for his friends as they sat and played cards. Or he was restless and wanted the clack of sunflower seeds under his teeth after a day spent in the field.
The idea that he was just a poor farmer, though—that was simply incorrect. In his bedroom was a stack of business cards that spoke of his true vocation. He’d had them printed up a decade ago, a stack of one hundred that had not dwindled noticeably since. INVENTOR AND GRASSROOTS ENGINEER, they read. Two years ago, when he had gotten a new phone number, he had gone back laboriously over them with a pen, correcting them.
What he really wanted to be was a party member. For fifteen years, he had submitted his application, copied out in duplicate by hand. I am an ordinary farmer, but I truly feel that the Chinese Communist Party is the guide of our nation and its great revival, he wrote. I solemnly apply to the party and strive to overcome my shortcomings and deficiencies, to try and become a glorious party member at an early date! With it he attached his résumé, two lines written in careful blue ink: inventor, farmer, male, 68. Family background: farmer.
On each occasion, the village’s party secretary, Jiang, a muskrat-faced man in a black windbreaker, rejected him kindly but firmly. All across the country, fortunes were being minted. The party wanted university students, not elderly farmers. It wanted brains, it wanted talent, it wanted (this was implied, but not spoken) wealth. Big Duck Village had just one other party member, a man who owned the village’s sole thriving business, a company that pressed corn into corn oil. At the village’s monthly meetings, he would sit with the party secretary, bent in conversation together at the back, like a parley of men among boys.
It stung, but Cao Cao wasn’t one to dwell upon slights. When he was young, he had lived through a famine in which they ate the bark off trees! He’d seen the village since then electrified, paved with a road, reinforced with cement, grown noisy with motorcycles and mechanized tractors. He’d seen the village transform itself over a lifetime, just as he, too, was going to transform himself with an invention the likes of which his neighbors had never seen.
To that end, he had become a connoisseur of what others might call rubbish: rusted-through woks, old bicycle parts, broken farm implements. For years now, the villagers had made a habit of popping by Cao Cao’s any time they had some unusual item they wanted to discard: a broken chair, leftover construction materials. The two little girls who lived next door had made it a private joke: whenever they encountered something their parents made them put in the trash—a tiny scrap of soap, a discarded candy wrapper—they would giggle and say, “Give it to Cao Cao!”
Actually, Cao Cao would have found a use for both and not been offended in the bargain. The candy wrapper, for example, could be cut into a decorative flower for his robot’s hat. Not that the robot had many accessories or even a name; it was simply a jiqiren, or machine-person. It was tall and ungainly and in the early days was just some hose and wires attached to a box, and for years the sound of Cao Cao’s labors over it could be heard through the village, all that beating and hammering, and yet it never seemed to be done.
After a time, when they encountered Cao Cao, villagers would inquire after the jiqiren as they would a son who’d gotten himself into a difficult situation.
“How is the machine-person today?” they might ask, a touch of solicitousness in their manner.
“Not very obedient,” Cao Cao would say, gritting his teeth, on the days that sparks flew and wires were twisted and retwisted until they frayed. On other days, though, he would beam proudly. “Very good! Just wait, soon Big Duck Village will have its very own machine-person to serve us.”
At last, after six years, the robot was unveiled on a frigid December morning. The whole village turned up to watch as Cao Cao wheeled it out from his courtyard. The robot was built of a large silver-painted box with buttons across its torso, two legs made from fat piping, and new arms of soldered metal. His face was silver as well, with pink lips and black eyes and ears of pink cardboard. A white chef’s hat sewn from an empty flour bag sat atop the robot’s head, catching the pallid sunlight. One child exclaimed, “He’s got a knife!” and so in fact he did: on his left arm, which was hinged, a piece of blunt metal rather like a letter opener had been affixed.
When Cao Cao placed a block of dough under it and activated the robot, the arm with the knife started to pump up and down, shaving the dough mechanically, yielding up a batch of even noodle strips. They were the kind of knife-cut noodles local to the area, easy to make, thick and chewy. At his side, his wife, Anning, stood shyly and caught the flying strips in a bowl.
A noodle-slicing robot! The crowd hadn’t seen anything like it. Even Cao Cao and Anning’s son had come back from town, an hour’s drive away, to celebrate with them, even the party secretary had turned up. Some of the children came up and tried to touch the robot, and when they did, Anning shooed them briskly away, saying it wasn’t a toy. Then she boiled the noodles and served them in bowls, a splash of vinegar and smashed garlic and chili oil thrown on top. She served the party secretary first, and Cao Cao tensed, awaiting his verdict.
“Chewy,” he pronounced. “Delicious, Comrade Cao!”
It wasn’t a term you heard much anymore, not like when Cao Cao had been in the army half a century ago. He often liked to think back to those days, back before the country had gotten rich. On the train ride out to join his company, at every stop, he and the men in camouflage had been greeted like conquerors: pretty girls cheering, offering them crackers and fruits. At one stop, he tasted an orange slice for the first time, a bright wedge of liquid barely held together by its skin, and as he released it between his teeth he nearly cried out in pleasure. Everyone was a comrade in those days, everyone a hero.
He’d hoped for a platoon, but because of the shortness of one leg he’d been assigned to the logistics division and chopped vegetables (mostly potatoes) for more than a year, fingers slick and aching. He’d been posted to a desert base three thousand miles away, where the sands stretched out interminably, and that was what he remembered most: gold sand, blue sky, planes taking off into that blue sky, and an endless parade of tubers to be chopped.
“Chairman Mao said to serve the people,” Cao Cao told the assembled villagers earnestly. “With this machine-person, I hope to serve you good-tasting noodles.”
That was a decade ago, and despite the party secretary’s praise, Cao
Cao’s application for party membership was once again rejected that year, much to his disappointment. For a while one restaurant in town had rented the robot, with a big sign proclaiming ROBOT-SLICED NOODLES: CHEAP, MODERN, DELICIOUS. But the restaurant shuttered after the device lost its novelty, and the machine-person was sent back home to Cao Cao. It stood in their small kitchen, a hulking presence that mostly gathered dust, though occasionally women would run over if they were having a large family gathering. “Could we borrow your robot?” they’d ask, just as if they were asking to borrow a cleaver or a pan.
The airplane came to Cao Cao in a dream one night. In his dream he was flying in a silver contraption, not unlike the planes he’d seen take off during his army days. He was alone, and his knees felt weightless and a warm breath of wind hung all about his body. He could move it at will, in diagonals, in graceful arcs, and he flew over the village, inspecting the rows of corn, the hills in the distance, and then, when night came, he bundled up a cloud in his arms like an infant and sang it softly to sleep.
The next morning, he started work on the airplane promptly, as though he’d been given a precise set of instructions. For months, Cao Cao’s courtyard was again filled with the sound of hammering and sparks and motorized whirring. It would be a scaled-down plane, of course, just big enough to seat two people. But it would be a thing of beauty. He and Anning could ride it. As he grew older he found he grew more sentimental, and spoke more extravagantly of his love for her. “Such beautiful eyes,” he’d say, staring at her over breakfast.
She’d snort. “Where was this nonsense when we first got married?” That had been a lifetime ago, another era. For their wedding, he’d given her parents a dowry of six chickens and three bags of Shanghai milled rice. The village had been poor then, subsisting on potatoes; rice of any kind—especially white—had been a luxury. Anning’s strongest memory from the time was of standing outside the village toilet, waiting for a man with a shovel and pail to empty it. Every morning, she remembered, people waited for their allotment to spread in the fields, a dirty chore the children hated. In the summer, the stench rose like a thick cloud. In the winter, you could hear the sound of the shovel chipping away at the frozen mound.
