Part II
Chapter 9
The air in Surfers Paradise is darkening; he checks his mobile, it is 8:03pm. He is the only person on the gloomy beach.
Capricious as he has known Serena to be, it was still a surprise she could change such a paramount life decision within a couple of days. Thinking about it, he is now certain she must have been exceedingly lonely when she sent him the matrimony proposal. And to imagine it was raised by a text message! But why hadn’t he a sense to ridicule it then?
Oh, it was just a joke. No wonder, he has been also fretting about it since her whimsical proposal. To large extent, they were no more than two victims of flood, both heading desperately for an illusionary boat.
Well, it has all passed. And now his sense coming back to him, he is never so clear that Serena won’t be the type of woman who will get along with him even if they do live together. Apart from her youth and certain superficial aspects, he can’t add up much ‘good’ points in regard of the virtues as a wife.
Instantly, he is missing his ex-wife Qiuyan; oh, how good had she seemed to be!
…
The sand is soft and cool; his footsteps are just a pair of eddies among others. Finding a sloping dry area, he sits down with his legs crossed.
Before him, the tide is flirting with the beach. They hold and kiss each other for a long moment before the tide decides to leave, ebbing away slowly but surely. However, the beach is not disappointed, for the tide will soon come back again, to continue the eternal cycle of their loving affair.
Without changing his position, he ponders a long time upon the sea and the sky, until he feels the strain in his legs. He lies down, his legs stretching, his hands crossed under his head as a pillow.
His front is vulnerable.
No moon is in the sky. The few visible stars are sparsely scattered. In the sweeping firmament they are too weak to sustain their existence. He has the impression they will be entirely drowned at any moment.
They are barely existent, and can be neglected by the world.
‘So am I,’ he mused, blinking to the stars; and the stars, as distant and far back as his childhood, blink back.
When he was eight years old, he once asked his father, ‘Dad, what is the meaning of my name? Our Chinese teacher told us to ask parents for that.’ His father, who had just come back from the town where he worked as an electrician in the broadcasting station, thought a while, and answered him, ‘“Bing” means polite, respectful, good-natured, intellectual, reading a lot of books.’
‘And Wang?’
‘Wang is our family name. It has passed from generation to generation since many, many years ago.’
‘Why do all my classmates have the same name?’
‘Because, many, many years ago, there was only one family. The family bore many offspring, like a big tree with many branches and leaves, therefore they all inherit the same name.’
‘Does that mean we are all sisters and brothers in our class?’
His father paused as if to amuse himself for a little while, and replied, ‘Well, well, in a sense, yes, we are all brothers and sisters descended from the same parent, living in the same village,.’
‘Oh,’ Bing nodded, his eyes widening in awe.
Through his primary years, Bing had maintained steadily a position within the top three students. Whether or not it was because of his ‘intellectual’ name he didn’t know. But it was a truth that his father, who had himself successfully completed eight years of primary and secondary school and was considered well-educated compared to many villagers with little chance of doing any form of schooling, had always placed Bing’s study as the first priority. Any household chore or farm work would have to be set aside for his homework. And his mother, though herself illiterate, was nonetheless of the same opinion as his father.
In the class he was the youngest, for he had begun his kindergarten at six, which was one year earlier than the normal entry age. A clever boy was he supposed to be, an incident that had happened seemed to prove the otherwise.
One evening, when he came back from school, he noticed his mother was very upset. She questioned him, ‘Bing, the two Yuan I put in the drawer is not there any more. Do you know where …’
‘I don’t know,’ he denied hastily.
‘Now, Bing, I need the money to buy pork. Your dad has friends visiting us this weekend.’ She squatted down, holding his arms. ‘If you know, tell me, okay? Otherwise we won’t have anything for our guests, and Dad will be angry.’
‘I… ’ he stammered, his head sagging, his fingers twisting against his schoolbag. He was not afraid of his mother, but his father, well, he couldn’t imagine.
‘Did you take it? Where have you put it?’
‘I gave it to Wang San, to buy a stone with it.’
‘What? Stone? What stone?’ his mother was utterly confused.
Bing fumbled in his pocket, pulling out a little stone, bluish, its surface very smooth and shining. “This,’ he gave it to her.
‘Oh, just this?! There are a lot of them in the stream!’
Losing her temper, she threw the stone away. ‘How dared you take the money from home? Are you a thief? Eh? Now go and get the money back.’ She shook his arms, and pushed him away.
He had never seen his mother angry like this. Realizing its seriousness, he began to cry and turned, heading towards Wang San’s home. But his effort was unsuccessful, for San refused to return the money, saying he had already spent it. In the end, his mum had to talk to San’s mother, who was a bit mean and unwilling to persuade his son for the returning. But two Yuan was not a small amount in those years, Bing’s mother had no choices but kept on requesting. So after a lot of blaming, jeering and arguing between the two mothers, the money was finally returned, at the price of Bing’s silly reputation spreading through the village. Even a long time after this incident, Bing’s mother would, whenever she got a chance, tell others that such a little boy (San) had already learnt how to cheat for money; and San’s mother would, whenever she got a chance, fight back, saying who was to blame if a boy (Bing) was so stupid?
But, stupid or not, Bing’s didn’t have to bother, for there were a lot of fun in the village that would make him laugh and forget. One of them was ‘hide and seek’. The person, or the loser, who had been sought out in the game would be treated as an imaginary enemy. The winners would grab and twist his or her arms behind the back, marching to an ‘execution’ field. It was typical of scenes in many of the revolutionary films and posters where the winner was supposed to punish by gunning down the loser. Oftentimes the loser was a girl and Bing as a winner would grasp one of her arms, another winner the other. The soft and boneless feeling of a girlish arm seemed so different from that of boys, which must have been the first time he had a vague comprehension of sexuality.
A couple of years on, the boys in the village started to avoid girls’ company. The boys’ fun after school went for field-battling, fishing and loach-catching. In his village Guzhai, which means Ancient Village, there was a low, marsh-like field just in front of a row of houses. In winter, it turned dry, when the kids, usually four, would group into two fighting teams. Each team stacked up a pillbox made from the ploughed soil, about twenty metres apart. During the battle, they used lumps of soil, imitating gun-shooting to attack each other, and through the spy-hole opened in the middle of the pillbox they were able to detect their enemies’ attempts. Serious injuries rarely occurred, for the soil lumps, even hitting one’s face, caused no more harm than a loud boyish wailing. However, in all scenarios, the battle would in the end turn each of them into a soil-boy, with dust and dirt splotching their hair and faces and clothes.
Once, Bing was injured in another type of field battle. Instead of making a pillbox, they made the wooden-grenade. Simply cut from a bough, one end of the 20cm length of wood was then thinned with a knife to shape up a handle. During the game, two groups of people would stand about fifty meters apart, throwing the grenade at each other. Most of the time, if a fighter paid enough attention, he was able to see it flying through the air and avoid it. But Bing, nine years old, at the particular time stood there motionless, unaware of the flying object falling towards him. It landed between his eyes, at the point where the bridge of his nose started.
He was bleeding all over his face, but he was not struck entirely unconscious, for he heard his mother running to him, shrieking like a hen whose chick has just been taken by an eagle.
He didn’t die, nor was he blind. Both eyes were found to be unscathed after the blood was stopped and cleaned off.
He was extremely lucky. A tiniest shift in any direction would have caused damage that would very much ruin his life. The boy who had hit him, a few years older than himself, was as much frightened as everyone else. He must have been sure Bing had already been dead, for, after escaping the frightful scene, he had not dared to come back until three days later.
Since this accident, Bing’s mother never forgot to pray with incenses at every chance she could possibly find, in the temples or at home where she set up a little altar for the purpose. She thanked the greatest Buddha for saving his boy, by the assortment of tributes such as orange, banana, home-made rice wine, or whatever good-foods she could prepare. She truly believed it was not a mere accident or pure luck but the hand of Buddha that, at the last fraction of second, had moved the ‘grenade’ away from his eyes, from his nose, from whatever points on his head that were weak enough to be fatal, or disabling.
The wooden-grenade game was then forbidden in the village. Bing had become a source of behavioural education and teaching among parents. ‘Don’t play that, remember Bing…’ was often heard in the soil-stacked houses as Bing passed by.
The year 1980, when Bing was ten, marked the fourth year since the chaotic Cultural Revolution was officially ended in 1976. Though the country, led by Deng Xiao Ping, was on the course of economic reform, it was still half starving. Like many remote villages across China, the Guzhai was very poor; its villagers were forever craving for food, extending their efforts to hunt the birds and even field-mice. It was true the crops were not plentiful, but the field-mice seemed to be sufficiently fed and the birds in the hills had no trouble thriving on the wild fruits and seeds.
Bing’s uncle had a rifle he used to shoot birds, and boars, and other scarcer animals such as deer. In addition, he possessed a great number of mouse snares made of bamboo and strong strings. One at a time, he would place up to thirty of them in the fields near the burrows and tracks frequented by the rodents. Using grain as the bait, the snares were laid in the evening, to be collected next morning. One day, Bing, on his way to school, saw him coming back with the dangling corpses in the snares.
‘Whoa… Uncle,’ he ran to him excitedly. ‘How many have you got?’
‘Don’t know, you count yourself,’ said his uncle, grinning to show his tobacco-stained teeth.
Bing fiddled among the snares; his counting skills he had learnt from school were put into practical use. At last, he declared, ‘Fourteen, three more than last time.’
‘Quite a few escaped from the snares, I need to fix and tighten the springs,’ his uncle said. ‘Let your aunt cook it tonight, and you come over.’ His uncle’s family lived in the same mud-house, but in adjoining rooms with a separate kitchen.
‘Yes, ’ he said, already hungry in anticipation. ‘Uncle, when do you go hunting for boar?’
‘Have to wait for a few days. Jilin told me he saw the footmarks of boar somewhere on White Water Hill. But Kan hasn’t come back home yet.’ Both Jilin and Kan were local farmers, who would go together with his uncle when hunting for the bigger animals.
‘Can’t you just go with Jilin?’
‘No, we need at least three people. Boars are crazy and dangerous. And if we catch one, with three it is also easier to carry it home.’
Seeing Bing still lingering about him, his uncle waved him away, ‘Go to school, you will be late.’
So reluctantly Bing had to leave for his school, but couldn’t resist looking back now and again at those little dangling creatures. His uncle was tall and skinny, and on his shoulder the snares were rocking with a rattling sound of bamboo.
Coming back from school at four in the afternoon, Bing went straight to the ledge of the house fence. The mice were already detached from the snares and laid on top of a bundle of fire-twigs. His uncle was not in. His aunt was busy in the kitchen.
‘Aunt, when are you going to cook the mice?’
‘Eh? Oh, we need to remove the fur first,’ answered his aunt, peering up at him from the low seat in front of the stove. ‘Or you want to do it?’
‘Yes,’ Bing replied gladly. He had done it a few times before.
‘You go bring the basin, and fetch the ashes from here.’
Bing went for a big tin-basin and came back to her. She poked the spade inside the stove and brought out the ashes that she emptied into the basin. She did this a number of times until the basin was half filled.
In a minute, Bing was skinning the mouse on the outside courtyard. After applying the ashes to its skin, he began to rub it passionately with his palm. Then his cousin Wang Dan who had just come back from kindergarten, came to him.
‘Ah, mice,’ Dan said excitedly. ‘How many has my dad caught this time?’
‘Fourteen.’
Dan sat down immediately on the ground to work together.
However, even with all their enthusiasm they had put into the task, they had only done three mice during half an hour, and even those three were poorly done with fur still stuck about the surface. Bing was amazed at the efficiency of his aunt in doing the job. Grabbing a handful of ashes with her big rough hand, she soaked a mouse with them, stroked it briefly but harshly, put it aside, and repeated the same application to the rest. Then after allowing them stay there for a minute or two, she proceeded to skin one after another. In her hands, the fur was dropping off so easily, and the job was complete in less than ten minutes. The end result were like a pile of small skinned rabbits, smooth and clean.
‘Aunt, why don’t we use hot water to remove the fur from the mouse?’ Bing asked curiously. He knew his mother used boiling water to do the job with rabbit, which seemed to be a better and cleaner method.
‘No, a mice is too small and not as fatty as a rabbit. Boiling water can even harden its fur roots.’
‘Oh…’ Bing frowned, not understanding how smallness and fat should make such a difference.
His aunt then went on washing the mice, preparing them in the same way one usually does with fish.
Dinner time, it was a big meat-feast for two families. Bing’s dad and grandpa were not at home. Bing and his sister Ming, two years his junior, and his mother and his grandma joined the three members of his uncle’s family. His aunt fried them with ginger and spring onion, in the same method she did with birds and rabbits. His uncle, who would always on such occasions drink rice-wine, were spending hours at the dinner table in the dim light of the oil-lamp, reading a small book that seemed to Bing always the same, and chewing a piece of meat or bone so long that it must have become a pulp before he finally let it go down his throat. No doubt, with four mice set aside for him by his wife, together with a plat of peanuts, he would stay around the table ruminating until very late in the night.
Bing’s grandpa had two wives, but only living with his first wife since the 1949 Chinese Revolution and the renunciation of concubinage. Bing’s father and uncle were the children of his second wife, or concubine so to speak, who lived alternatively with her two sons. His first wife had also given birth to two children, but both of them had died, one during labour, the other from hunger in China’s famine in 1960s. Childless since she had been, she had never been quite fond of children, also seldom meddling in the affairs of the other two family units under the same mud-house roof. Now and then Bing’s uncle would approach her and offer her some meat he had available, but she would most times simply decline.
The mud-house, which was a soil-stacked two-storey building, had six bedrooms upstairs. Its ground floor was used as the living area which, apart from a common and also the most spacious one for all, provided three separate units for cooking and dining for the three households.
His grandpa was a peddler, a businessman, often going far away, sometimes absent from home for up to a month. When he came back from his travels, he would always bring many little exotic delights for the whole village, such as candies, fireworks, new clothes and toys. However, Bing didn’t seem to have developed much affection for his grandpa in his childhood, probably due to his long absence or more to his bad temper.
At school, Bing was a good student. Teachers liked him, especially his Chinese teacher. This had unfortunately caused some jealousy among some of the other students. Bing was slim and pale, shy and clever - well, if his previous silly stone-deal was not accounted. Therefore, without the build and the bodily strength that could lend him an advantage in a possible physical friction, he tended to be a target of bullying of some stronger boys.
One day, his sister went together with him to his class. During the class break, he was sitting with her on the stool, reading a book. The teacher was away in his room. Two boys in the class decided to ill-treat him. One of them with his hands covered Bing’s eyes, the other knocked Bing’s head with his knuckles. Bing was weak, he cried, and so did his sister.
When the teacher came back and heard about the incident, he punished the two culprits by making them stand the entire 45 minutes session on the teaching platform, before the class of more than forty students. Since then, two boy’s resentment towards Bing had grown even worse, and as far as he could remember, had hardly faded during the rest of their school days.
While boys were tricky and tended to be more mischievous than girls, the girl with whom he was sharing the desk and the stool was an exception, as in one morning class she had demonstrated to him, and to the whole class.
As soon as the teacher stepped into the classroom, the class monitor of the day ordered the class to ‘Stand up!’ So all students rose to their feet and immediately shouted their respect to the teacher, ‘Teacher good!’ then in a little while ‘Sit down!’ Just a moment after Bing had begun lowering himself, the girl, Wang Chun, moved his end of the stool away. Although he instantly detected her trick, there was not enough time to prevent him from falling to the ground. With a sensational thumping, followed immediately by an explosion of laughter from every little soul in the class, he didn’t feel any pain but the hottest shame in his face. Even the teacher couldn’t suppress his amusement from the corner of his mouth, though he did promise to punish anyone who dared to do this again.
As a shy person, he couldn’t possibly do anything to her on the spot. She was a girl, and worse, she was the one to whom he was mostly attracted in the school. Two or three times had he tried to avenge his suffer by ‘teeth-to-teeth’, she had been too smart, too vigilant to fall into his trap. The timing had been calculated, the stool moved at right moment, but instead of sitting into the empties and dropping onto the ground, she was able to gracefully pull back the stool, and at the same time throw him a crowing smile that must be the most malicious and foxiest he had ever seen.
However, it was not as if he had to hate her. Instead, a strange friendship seemed to exist between them. Tricky though she had often been, she would hand over her rubber, without his asking, when she noticed he didn’t have one. Sometimes she would write him a maths question on a slip of paper and quietly, he would work it out and push his answer slip over to her. Every new term when the seats were to be changed, he would hope secretly to sit together with her again, and feel very downcast if failing to do so. At the times of school assembly or the radio-guided exercise which occurred twice a day during the class break, his wandering eyes would always centre about where she was located.
But she couldn’t be possibly aware of such a boyish infatuation, for apart from some sweet wordless communication between them along their desk, she had not been detected deliberating any of her glances towards him. And her ignoring him couldn’t possibly disappoint him either, for it was more like a curious wondering state of mind, expecting something sweet, yet bearing little shadowy sensation if nothing came out. Sometimes he would go to the places where she had been seen staying previously, hoping to see her there again, yet only watching her at a safe distance if she did turn up, teetering on the boundary of hiding or showing himself.
After their last time sharing the desk in Year Four, he had never been close to her again. But the covert friendship between them, though likely just his own wishful, had become one of his sweetest and most unforgettable childhood memories.
Between age 10 and 12, like his fellow students in the village, Bing was obliged to do a range of work during the weekends and school holidays. He had participated to varying degrees in numerous laborious tasks involved in rice-growing, such as sowing, planting, weeding, to name just a few. He was not strong, but he would help his mother in every possibly way. With his father employed in the town, his mother was the only adult working full time in the field, which made his little contribution very helpful. The acres of field were allocated by the government based on the head count of the family, according to the newly adopted Land Contract Policy in China following the end of the People’s Commune style of collective production.
To him, farming was on most occasions fun. The only thing he had often felt dreadful was when he had to thrust his bare foot into the muddy field. To his young imagination, inside the mud there was something like a piece of harsh clay or stone, or a sharp glass, or even a snake or a lump of manure, ready to cut or bite or scrape his foot. And the worst of all was the leech, a kind of repulsive blood-sucking worm capable of penetrating one’s leg without one’s notice. In the village, the terrible leech intrusion had occurred to quite a number of farmers, as he had heard of, and when it happened, some strong smoke had to be used to urge it out from deep inside the flesh.
Frightful as it was sounding, the leech horror had never happened to him. And after hundreds of times of planting his feet unthinkingly into the mud, he seemed to have adequately overcome his fear with the like boldness and spirit possessed only by a young adventurer.
One afternoon he was with his mother in the water field. His mother was smoothing the soil to ready it for planting. A cow-driven cart with revolving vanes was used for the task. His mother, in a majestic posture, was standing on its two small ledges, one hand gripping the rein, the other a whip made from a bamboo stick.
‘Hemn, hemn, hemn…’she yelled, spurring on the animal, assisted with occasional use of the whip. The cow, hauling the heavy weight, was lurching forward, its speed depending on its mood which was influenced predominately by the food level in its stomach. With the vanes of the cart rotating, the soil mass in the water was pressed and smoothed.
At the time, Bing was at the other end of the field, checking the water inlet to increase the inflow, as his mother had said more water was needed. He squatted down and pushed to enlarge the inlet of the upper field, hearing the yelling and whipping and the water splashing in his mother’s direction.
Then a brief but sharp cry came to break the dull and rhythmic moments. Bing lifted his head and saw his mother falling, plunging heavily to the field, a flourish of muddy water pushing at her sides.
‘Mum!’ he leapt to his feet, stamping and skipping across the field.
Totally at a loss as how to rescue, he tried clumsily to pull her up by her arm, but finding it very difficult. Then he realized one of her feet was stuck between the vanes. So with his hands, he set to untangle her foot. At the same time, his mother was scrambling by her own effort to have already turned her face out of the water. With one hand propping herself up, she was choking fitfully, gasping for breath, her face all smothered with the slush she was frantically clearing with one hand.
As soon as she was able to speak, she muttered, ‘Wait, wait… don’t pull …’
He halted his effort, and slowly, his mother moved herself around to a position easier to disengage her foot from the tight vane columns. When she was at last freed, Bing held her arm and helped her to stand.
‘Hurt much? Hurt much?’ Bing asked anxiously.
Utterly bedraggled, and continuing to slosh the water to clear her face, she didn’t answer him. Then her breath becoming normal, she bent over to check her ankle. ‘I don’t feel I’ve sprained it,’ she said, and looking at the cow, and smiling a little, she made a comment, ‘Lucky, the cow stopped immediately when my foot slipped into the vanes. Otherwise I might have been dragged along, and my foot will be done for.’
The cow was bulky. Its eyes were bleary, bulging, and unfathomable, assuming an air of stern indifference to what was being said about it. Its four feet, each as big as a sizable trunk, were rooted in the field motionless. But its dark head kept on swinging, its long and thick tail flinging in its futile effort to drive away the swarming flies. But how could such a ponderous creature sense the accident at its back and stop at once to protect its human master? This was a question Bing’s little mind couldn’t answer.
He and his mother went to the little ditch. There was a livid red streak around her ankle, but it was not bleeding. She cupped many handfuls of clean water to wash thoroughly her face. She was soon showing her florid face again. Slim, and only a little taller than him, she was to him firm and safe like a pillar.
They went home. His sister Ming was sitting on the front yard among a group of chicks which, with their beaks and eyes desiring, were approaching her for the crumps of a sweet potato she was eating. His grandma was on a stool, peeling the taro with a sickle. His mum passed her and told her briefly what had happened.
His grandma raised her eyes and said, ‘Aiya-hah… hurt anywhere? Always need more careful!’ Her concerning eyes were following her daughter-in-law’s drenched body into the house, but she didn’t stop the work at hand. The way she peeled the taro was remarkably intricate and fascinating. The sickle stood with its wooden end on the ground and was steadied by her left foot. The small, round and hairy taro was quickly scraped clean by the swift movement of the sickle’s blade under the precise control of her nimble fingers. One must be careful not to get the juice of taro into the eyes, or the skin or the clothes, because the substance was irritable and scratchy, its stain hard to remove. Bing had once got some in his eyes, suffering terribly, and the pain could only be relieved by a great deal of water. Nonetheless, the taros, especially the young and slimy ones, were his favourite food. Its white and soft and sticky pulp felt and tasted excellent. It was indeed the best alternative food to rice he had eaten plentifully during his childhood, serving well his growing appetite.
After washing herself and changing into a new set of clothes, his mother and Bing went down to the field again. In the village, it was usually the men doing the task in which a cow was involved. But because his dad did not normally work in the field, his mother did it herself in order to save the cost and trouble by hiring others to do it. His uncle was often out hunting, and couldn’t tend enough his own fields.
At dusk, on their way home, Bing saw his uncle coming from the other end of the road. He was carrying a long rusty rifle on his shoulder, a number of birds tied with a wire dangling from the barrel.
‘Uncle, how many?’ he asked, as soon as his uncle came over.
‘Eight,’ his uncle was grinning, his teeth all black.
‘Sparrows,’ Bing said, looking at the little lifeless bodies with a little sympathy. ‘Uncle, can you take me with you next time when you hunt for the birds, please?’
‘You got to do your study,’ he evaded the request, adopting the exact tone of his dad. ‘Don’t run after Dan, you must study hard and one day go to high school and university.’
However, Bing knew for a fact that his uncle was willing to take him, so long as his dad didn’t know. While seeking the sort of permission from his father was out of the question, Bing believed his mother was not entirely unnegotiable in the matter. For a reason, his father was obstinate about his not mixing with other village children, let alone hunting for wild birds in the hills. His cousin Dan had rarely done any homework, and it was a simple fact that the majority of the kids didn’t do well with their study. Too much fun and field work, and lack of parental supervision were the main reasons the village kids couldn’t pursue the study any closer. Most of them would quit school after Year Five and begin to help their family with whatever labour they were capable of doing.
But Bing was different. His father was a high school graduate, and worked as an electrician instead of a farmer like the majority of his fellow students’ parents. He was expected to study hard so as to escape a lifetime toiling fate that had been with all the generations who had shared the Wang surname in the Ancient Village.
--End of Chapter 9--
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