In
I thought of Brian. I wondered if he was playing in the restaurant this weekend. We didn’t have a phone and I couldn’t get out of the house to make a call. I would take a bus to see him if I could but how could I get home before dark? It seemed as possible for me as taking a trip to the moon.
“Watch out, girl, you walk in front of my bicycle!” The bicycle break cried. A angry middle-aged man straddled on his bike and looked at me darkly under his low hanging cap.
As I scurried back to the sidewalk, I had an idea. Maybe I tell Mama that I visit grandpa then I will hop on the bus. I didn’t know if I could pull this together. Coming home on time was the biggest problem. It pained me as I stumbled into a pile of loose stones. Frustrated, I kicked one out to the passing bicycles and hit one of them by the wheels. I ran as curses of “you, your mother’s rotten-egg-girl” darting at me. When I turned into an alley and looked back, bicycles were pilling one on the other next to the sidewalk, I laughed till tears blurred my vision.
***
"Lina, is that you?" Grandpa opened the door and grinned toothlessly.
“Yes, Papa. It’s me.” I gave him a hug. His had lost some weight and I could make out the shape of his bones on his shoulders under the clothes. His hair was whiter since I saw him last. "Papa, I brought you soup." I raised the thermos to his eye level. “Fish soup. Mama made it this morning.”
“Hoo your Baba got fish from his Guanxi again?” he said. He had lost more teeth and rolled his “s” sound into the “ee”. “Nowadayee, you either work for the government or the smuggleree.”
I put the soup on the table. “They are the same now Papa. I heard Baba said his friends in the Department of National Defense in
“Shhh, you shouldn’t say that to anyone Lina,” he said.
“Everyone knows, Papa. They are just not talking.”
“Then you shouldn’t be talking too!” He threw me a half glance. His eyes were tired and one was covered with cataract for he had seen too much injustice in his life he used to say.
Papa’s apartment had been downsized to only a bed, a dresser, a table, a wicker chair and a stool scattered in his bedroom and his share of the living room. It happened one day after he came back from work and found two families living in his other bedrooms. Papa didn’t even bother to ask where the rest of his stuff, including the gold pocket watch that had been in his family for three generations and had survived two Red Guard’s ransacking.
“My big mouth that got me into trouble,” Papa continued. “Remember I used to tell people, those Commus bastards, they will communisted my bed and my pillow soon and my wife too if she’s alive? Cause of that, they sent me working as a laborer in construction site, carrying buckets of cement up six floors everyday at aged fifty seven. I had never been a laborer my whole life and I was afraid of height! If it was not your mother paid them lots of money, my old bones are already in the cement.” He was shaking like he had just confessed something unthinkable. Sitting on the chair, his knee caps hit each other like the sound of toy train with loosening coils.
“Papa, let’s talk about something happy. Let me heat it up the soup for you.”
“We can have it for dinner. I’m not hungry,” he said.
“Papa, you…you have any mail for me?" I could hear my heart beating and my words were cluttering. I hoped Mama didn’t beat me to get a hold of it.
"Oh, yes. Look at me, almost forgot. You have a big envelope. No return address.” He put his hands on the armrests and tried to get up.
“You sit. Just tell me where it is and I will go get it.”
In his bedroom, I found a thick envelop on his bedside table. Inside, I found copies of Brian’s music notes. I pulled a letter that was folded in a triangle and tugged in the middle. On it was Brian’s handwriting, lean and too neat for a musician with long hair.
“Dear Lina,” it started. My lips quivered. I never heard anyone call me “dear”, not even my parents or Papa.
“I hope you like the songs I picked for you. I will be busy preparing for the college entrance exam for the next couple months and won’t be able to play in the restaurant. It’s my only chance to get a better job. I’ve thinking about you. Please write to me when you get this letter. I will come to see you after the exam in June. Wait for my letter. By the way, you should try college too next year, Lina, you’re a smart girl and you will make it there.
Brian”
I read this letter so many times till I could recite it when I made rice and cabbage that night for dinner. I thought about how to write him back. We would meet in Ning Yuan Park then rented a boat and disappeared on the other side of the lake. I would tell my parents that I was going to see Grandpa on that day. Papa won’t remember if I really came.
“You are so quiet Lina. Anything wrong?” Grandpa asked at
dinner.
“Oh Papa, just the weather is too hot. Do you like the soup?”
“Yes, your mom is a good cook.”
After dinner, I boiled some water for tea. Then I pulled a stool next to him by liked I used to do every summer night after dinner, except then, we sat on the steps outside. People had spilled out of houses and formed groups on the sidewalk outside of the apartments to take refuge from the heat. Women clutching babies on their breasts hung around with women with half-knitted sweater to exchange gossips. Old men told stories to kids encircling them, interrupted only by “shoowaps” of bamboo fans whacking mosquitoes. Not too far, a group of shirtless guys gambled on cigarette wraps and a jar of crickets. They were the age of Brian, except now Brian is studying instead of wasting his life like these good-for-nothings.
"Papa, your stories used to attract all the kids in the neighborhood," I said handing him a cup of tea.
"Not anymore. Kidee are all grown. New grandpae tell better storiee. I’m yesterday’e tofu, you know." He sipped some tea from the cup and wiped the drips from his mouth with the back of his vein-blue hand.
"You are not, Papa, you told the best stories: ‘The Monkey King’ and "Legends of the Three Kingdoms. By the way, how are the Li's boys these days? Your greatest fans?"
The last time I saw the skinny brothers was two years ago. They had the biggest eyes I’d never seen. The younger one is taller than the older one. I believed good teeth ran in family. When the Li’s brothers smiled, all you could see are two sets of white straight teeth. I'd never seen anything like that.
"They toudu last month,” Papa said grimly.
“What? Air, sea or under?”
“Sea. They swam across the Strait of South China Sea to Hong Kong. The older one and several others made it. The younger one didn’t. He…he… I heard he was eaten by... by… sharks. Hai, Only sixteen!”
The kettle almost slipped from my hand. For a while, I couldn't talk. I could see the younger Li, his blood staining the water around him and the fought with arms to keep his head above the water, only to be pulled down by another bigger wave of blood. I could imagine his brother screaming and pulled by his friends to swim away from the sharks. My throated tightened and I swallowed my tears. It was the price we paid being born on this side of the border that we could only see the prosperity across the Strait. There they had no rations and no Commu force-sharing. There were jobs, jobs that the locals shrugged off but enough for our mainlanders to feed our brothers and sisters behind. We were young and we thought toude was like gambling on crickets. We swam the Strait, hiked mountains at night and crawled under three layers of barbed wire leaving our skin on the steel or sometimes, we hid under trucks and trains that crossed the border in hot summer days.
Grandpa's stared outside of the window. A group of girls were jumping ropes. Every time the rope whipped the warm cement it let out a clear “tap”.
“I felt sorry for the mother of the Li’s brotheree,” he continued as if talking to the street crowd. ”Now, they are all gone; the older son not allowed back to the mainland and the Mom not allowed to visit. She’s behind supporting a cripple daughter by herself. Her husband is working in a labor camp five hundred miles away. “Then he turned to me. “ Hunger that’s it, Lina, hunger is a powerful force. The older son, just graduated, no job, for he doesn’t have a retiring father who leaveee him a job vacancy and the family is starving."
He dropped his head to his chest. Outside the girls were giggling with another new song.”One, two, three, four and five, the fat lady dances for her prize.”
“What about the girl?” I said.
“What girl?”
“Don’t they always bring a girl to toudu with them, for good luck? And…and girls are better distant swimmers they…”
“Didn’t hear anything bad. Must have reached shore.”
A bare bulb swayed to the passing wind on a single wire hung from the ceiling, casting shadows that bounced from wall to wall. At the corner below the ceiling a moth was trapped in a spider web. Its wings quivered in silent vigor then its strides faltered in the darkness. For a while, I thought Papa had fallen asleep till I heard in the dark his faint but firm voice. "Why don’t you leave the country Lina?”
“I can’t swim Papa!”
“You first go to college. I heard they start giving out entrance exams now. You study English then, you leave, you leave and no turning back Lina!”
I thought of Brian’s letter. “I will after I take the high school graduation test.”
He opened his eyes tired but burning with the last flame of life. On top of my hand, he laid his, warm and heavy. “You promise me Lina, you promise me. You study hard.”
Walking home that night, I was more determined than ever to take the entrance exam.
