During those last days of his life, my father talked about the three years he spent as a music student in America. He mentioned a girl from California whom he’d met when he was there. She was called Flora, which means flower in Latin. He said that when she played the violin, she would look down at the floor and he could gaze at her long eyelashes. She’d promised to visit him in Beijing after she left college. But by the time she graduated, China had become a communist country, and no foreigners were allowed inside.
I remember the black, rotten molar at the side of his mouth. While he spoke to us in hospital, he’d stroke his cotton sheet and the urinary catheter inserted into his abdomen underneath.
‘Technically speaking, he’s a vegetable,’ says a nurse to my right. ‘But at least the IV fluid is still entering his vein. That’s a good sign.’ She seems to be speaking through a face mask and tearing a piece of muslin. The noises vibrate through me, and for a moment I gain a vague sense of the size and weight of my body.
If I’m a vegetable, I must have been lying here unconscious for some time. So, am I waking up now?
My father comes into view again. His face is so blurred, it looks as though I’m seeing it through a wire mesh. My father was also attached to an intravenous drip when he breathed his last breath. His left eyeball reflected like a windowpane the roof of the hospital building behind, a slant of sky and a few branches of a tree. If I were to die now, my closed eyes wouldn’t reflect a thing.
Perhaps I only have a few minutes left to live, and this is just a momentary recovery of consciousness before death.
‘Huh! I’m probably wasting my time here. He’s never going to wake up.’ My mother’s voice sounds both near and far away. It floats through the air. Maybe this is how noises sounded to my father just before he died.
In those last few moments of his life, the oxygen mask on his face and the plastic tube inserted into his nose looked superfluous. Had the nurses not been regularly removing the phlegm from his throat, or pouring milk into his stomach through a rubber feeding tube, he would have died on that metal bed weeks before. Just as he was about to pass away, I sensed his eyes focus on me. I was tugging my brother’s shirt. The cake crumbs in his hands scattered onto my father’s sheet. He was trying to climb onto my father’s bed. The key hanging from his neck clunked against the metal bed frame. I yanked the strap of his leather satchel with such force that it snapped in half.
‘Get down!’ my mother shouted, her eyes red with fury. My brother burst into tears. I fell silent.
A second later, my father sank into the cage of medical equipment surrounding him and entered my memory. Life and death had converged inside his body. It had all seemed so simple.
‘He’s gone,’ the nurse said, without taking off her face mask. With the tip of her shoe, she flicked aside the discarded chopsticks and cotton wool she’d used to clear his phlegm, then told my mother to go to reception and complete the required formalities. If his body wasn’t taken to the mortuary before midnight, my mother would be charged another night for the hospital room. Director Guo, the personnel officer of the opera company my parents belonged to, advised my mother to apply for my father’s posthumous political rehabilitation, pointing out that the compensation money could help cover the hospital fees.
My father stopped breathing and became a corpse. His body lay on the bed, as large as before. I stood beside him, with his watch on my wrist.
After the cremation, my mother stood at the bus stop cradling the box of ashes in her arms and said, ‘Your father’s last words were that he wanted his ashes buried in America. That rightist! Even at the point of death he refused to repent.’ As our bus approached, she cried out, ‘At least from now on we won’t have to live in a constant state of fear!’
She placed the box of ashes under her iron bed. Before I went to sleep, I’d often pull it out and take a peek inside. The more afraid I grew of the ashes, the more I wanted to gaze at them. My mother said that if a friend of hers were to leave China, she’d give them the box and ask them to bury it abroad so that my father’s spirit could rise into a foreign heaven.
‘You must go and study abroad, my son,’ my father often repeated to me when he was in hospital.
So, I’m still alive… I may be lying in hospital, but at least I’m not dead. I’ve just been buried alive inside my body… I remember the day I caught that frog. Our teacher had told us to catch one so that we could later study their skeletons. After I caught my frog, I put it in a glass jar, pierced a hole in the metal cap, then buried it in the earth. Our teacher told us that worms and ants would crawl inside and eat away all the flesh within a month, leaving a clean skeleton behind. I bought some alcohol solution, ready to wipe off any scraps of flesh still remaining on the bones. But before the month was out, a family living on the ground floor of our building built a kitchen over the hole where I’d buried it.
The frog must have become a skeleton years ago. While its bones lie trapped in the jar, I lie buried inside my body, waiting to die.
A portion of your brain is still alive. You wander back and forth through the space between your flesh and your memories.
I stare into my mind and glimpse a faint sketch of a scene. It’s the summer night in 1980 when my father arrived back home with a shaven head after he was finally released from the ‘reform-through-labour’ system in which he’d been confined for the previous twenty-two years. He walked into our single room in the opera company’s dormitory block and flung his dusty suitcase into the corner as though it were a bag of rubbish.
My mother hadn’t gone to meet him at the station, although she was almost certain that he’d be arriving on that train.
She gathered up the clothes, hat, belt and rubber-soled shoes that my father removed before he went to sleep that night, and threw them in the bin, together with his metal mug, face towel and toothbrush. She tried to throw away the journal he’d wrapped in sheets of newspapers, but my father snatched it back from her. He said he would need it for the memoirs he was planning to write.
My mother made him promise that the journal didn’t contain the slightest criticism of the Communist Party or the socialist system. After my father assured her that it didn’t, she agreed to hide it in the wooden chest under their bed.
My mother spent the whole of the next day scrubbing the room clean, trying to remove the smell of mould that my father had brought with him.
The celebratory supper we had that night was a happy occasion. My brother and I had glasses set before us, both filled with rice wine. My mother climbed onto a stool to change the low-wattage bulb to a 40-watt one. It was so bright that you could see the spider’s web in the corner of the room.
My mother had curled her hair with heated tongs. She told my brother to clear away his homework. Once he’d done this, the table looked much larger. The four of us sat down together in front of a steaming dish of braised pigs’ trotters. There was also a plate of fried peanuts on the table, and a bowl of cucumber and vermicelli salad that I’d bought from the market.
I used to hate my father for the misery that his political status had inflicted on us. Because of him, I was ostracised and bullied at school. When my brother and I were walking through the school cafeteria at lunchtime one day, two older kids flicked onto the ground the plate of fried chicken I’d just bought, and shouted, ‘You’re the dog son of a member of the Five Black Categories. What makes you think you have the right to eat meat?’ Then they clipped me around the ears, right in front of my friend Lulu, who lived on the ground floor of our dormitory block.