She turned her head slightly to look at the streets outside the window, and said, ‘I remember. There used to be a cemetery here, too, we walked past here when we went to the open-air movies. We were always too scared to look this way — the cemetery was to the left of the road — so we all kept our eyes fixed right and ran for all we were worth.’ Her son wasn’t paying any attention, and his indifference contained a message for Yongshan: ‘Don’t count on me co-operating. I’m completely uninterested in this city.’ For a moment, Yongshan’s eyes wandered between the road outside the window and her son, then finally they fixed on her son’s suitcase.
‘Actually, I know why your uncle’s put off.’ Her line of thought had jumped suddenly to the question of her brother. ‘I know he’s avoiding me on purpose. They got some money from knocking the old house down and he’s worried I’m going to ask him for my share.’
Her son snorted and said, ‘Well, are you?’
Yongshan stared at her son and said nothing, then all the way to their stop she remained silent. He could see turmoil in his mother’s eyes, like brewing storm clouds, but due to his tender age, he didn’t realize what his mother was thinking about. Yongshan was silent and so was her son. He followed her off the bus and waited for her to lead the way, but she was standing beneath the bus stop sign and looking all around her. Suddenly she said, ‘Where are we?’
Yongshan was lost. She was on her way home, but she was lost. The water tower at the soap factory must have been pulled down at some point, and without the water tower, Yongshan couldn’t find the way to Cabbage Market. How could so much be gone? Yongshan watched the crowds of people and the buildings on both sides with something approaching dread. She said, ‘I walked this road for dozens of years. How come I don’t recognize anything? Do I really need to ask for directions to get to my own home?’
In fact, it was the same as everywhere else; the city of Licheng had been transformed through the efforts of various government departments. The narrow, winding roads characteristic of the old city had been resolutely straightened and widened, but it was more than a physical change — they had also forced people to abandon their old, unscientific sense of orientation. Many women now lost their way on the streets because, without a certain corner store, postbox or water tower, they could no longer find the associated street. Yongshan was just one of those disoriented women. She grumbled for a moment, then abandoned her attempts to find the tower. Finally, she asked directions from an old man selling fruit by the roadside, who immediately gave her the information she needed. The old man pointed to a great expanse of ruins to the north and said ‘That’s the way you’ll want to be going; where the buildings have all been half torn down. That’s Cabbage Market.’
Yongshan hadn’t expected that her return home after seven years would consist of an itinerary of ruins. Looking down at the broken bricks and tiles covering the ground she said, ‘How are we supposed to get across this?’
Her son behind her said, ‘If you can’t get across it, then let’s forget it. We could say we’ve paid our respects to the old place, right?’ But Yongshan had already walked over to pick up the suitcase. ‘We’ll have to carry the suitcase,’ she said. ‘Be careful where you put your feet; there’s broken glass.’
And so it was that the ruins of Cabbage Market welcomed back Yongshan and her son so many years after their departure. Late Qing dynasty, Republican era and socialist wood and bricks mixed together and mourned in the May sun for their vanished ways of life, and now the tranquillity of their mourning had been disturbed by their last visitor. Perhaps every brick and tile in the ruin remembered Yongshan, remembered that girl of many years ago, scampering back and forth between Cabbage Market and the cultural centre with an accordion on her back. Perhaps they were saying, ‘Yongshan! Hello. How’s that accordion practice going?’ But Yongshan couldn’t hear them. All Yongshan heard was the rumble of a bulldozer rolling in a construction site nearby, mixed in with the ‘lalala‘ of a female rock singer coming from a nearby music store. Besides, Yongshan was now the mother of a thirteen-year-old and had long ago abandoned the accordion. With difficulty, Yongshan and her son were making the way back home. Neither one looked very happy. The rubble itself engendered their resentment, since it was impossible to roll a suitcase through it. And so, despite their hostile mood, they were compelled to carry the heavy suitcase between them. Mother and son puffed with fatigue, and every now and then the boy viciously kicked a glass bottle or crushed an innocent tile fragment. Meanwhile, Yongshan cursed the havoc and disorder of the rubble, but, as anyone knows, rubble is never tidy, and so her complaints were somewhat unreasonable. A rat in the rubble seemed to want to warn the visitors about something, for it suddenly popped out of a pile of bricks and tiles, frightening Yongshan.
‘That scared me!’ she said, covering her mouth. ‘What’s a rat doing here? And such a big one!’
Her son said, ‘Of course there are rats in trash heaps. Where else are you going to find rats, if not in trash heaps?’
Yongshan frowned and took a look around. Towards the west, a parasol tree was still standing, albeit with great difficulty, among the piles of bricks, and towards the east, the façade of a brick-and-wood house had survived the wreckage, standing lofty and solitary like a stage set. By the eaves, a line of writing could still be clearly read: ‘Watch and Clock Repair While You Wait’.
Yongshan’s eyes suddenly lit up: ‘I know this place. This was Mr Kang’s place. You remember him. Mr Kang — ugly as sin but great with his hands — he fixed watches.’ She looked to the left side of the rubble, searching for something. ‘The well was right here. I used to come to the well every day to do the washing, clean the rice, and rinse out the mop,’ Yongshan said. ‘How strange. Why can’t I find the well?’
‘It’d be strange if you could,’ said her son. ‘It must be under the garbage.’
Yongshan’s eyes paused on the tree. ‘Let’s go and have a look.’ She sounded quite excited. ‘When I graduated from elementary school, I carved my name on that tree, and when I came back from the countryside it was still there. I grew up with that tree. I wonder if my name is still on it.’
‘I’m not going,’ her son said. ‘Go and have a look yourself if you want to.’
Yongshan glared at her son and went over to the tree by herself. She walked, her back slightly bent, over the pile of bricks, and made two turns around the tree. What she saw was a cracked and battered tree trunk, on whose coarse bark someone had written a line in red paint: ‘Piss here and you’re a dog!’ accompanied by a very rude drawing. Yongshan couldn’t find her name, so she lowered her head, reflecting, and sullenly walked down from the brick pile. Her son had taken a seat on the suitcase; he must have guessed the result, for he looked at his mother with eyes filled with ridicule. She tried to smooth her disappointment over and said, ‘It’s good that it’s gone. Who knows what kind of people rub up against that tree. Disgusting!’
The sky suddenly began to grow dark. They had reached the depths of the Cabbage Market rubble and the orange sunlight had vanished from the scene of devastation. They were a stone’s throw away from their old home when Yongshan loosened her grip on the suitcase. ‘Let’s put it down,’ she said to her son. ‘If I didn’t tell you that behind this wall is our old house, would you have recognized the place?’