Where else could they be? he thought. This is my home.
With a throbbing heart he knocked on the door. A moment later his son stepped out, rubbing his sleepy eyes. “Who are you looking for?” asked the young man, his left cheek twitching.
“Yaning, I–I’m your father!” Guhan moaned.
His son was taken aback, then looked at him closely. “Are you really my dad? He’s very thin.”
“Look at me!” He took off his felt hat; the morning sun flooded in through a window, glistening on his sweaty balding head, which sent up coils of steam. He said, “I gained some weight because I was sick after the earthquake and lost my memory for a while.”
Yaning recognized him and rushed over; father and son embraced, sobbing. Meili, his daughter-in-law, came out, wearing dark-blue maternity trousers, and she joined them in weeping. His family had thought he was dead. The memorial service had been held five months before, after the cannery notified the Tongs that he had vanished in the earthquake.
“Where’s your mother?” asked Guhan.
“She’s at Uncle’s,” his son answered, then turned to Meili. “Go tell her Dad is back.”
Meili put on a fur overcoat, then waddled away with her protruding belly to Gorki Street, where the uncle’s family lived.
Because the Tongs had believed Guhan was dead and they had been afraid the cannery would take back their housing, Yaning and Meili had gotten married a week after the memorial meeting and moved into the apartment. At the same time, Jian — the “widow”—went to stay at her brother’s, since she refused to sleep in the kitchen. Exhorted time and again by her friends and relatives, she had just begun looking for a man, a husband-to-be, so that she would again be able to live under her own roof someday.
The Tongs had made another decision that was sensible under such circumstances. Instead of going to the agricultural school, Liya had returned to Muji City; the cannery hired her, filling the quota left by her father; now she worked as a quality inspector in the lab.
Hearing Guhan had come back alive, his wife almost passed out. She cried, stretching up her bony hand, “Lord of Heaven, why are you so cruel to us? Why didn’t you let me know my old man was still alive? Or why didn’t you kill me instead? Where can I hide my face?”
Initially, on leaving Taifu, Guhan had planned to give his family a joyful surprise, but their joy was mixed with confusion, shame, and sadness. At dinner that evening, Liya kept blaming herself for returning to the city, while Yaning was crestfallen, having no idea how to accommodate his parents now. However, Guhan had a large heart and assured his children that everything would be all right and that the cannery might provide him with new housing, because this mess had been caused by nature and nobody should be responsible for it. He told his family, “I’ve worked for them for over twenty years, so I belong to the cannery. When I’m alive, I am their man; when I’m dead, I am their ghost. They have to take me. Don’t worry so much. It’s good just to be alive.”
But the next morning, when Guhan showed up at the cannery, he found his position already occupied by Fei, the young Party member; more surprising, there was a vice director now, who had been sent over by the city’s Light Industry Bureau. Obviously Guhan was no longer needed here. Heavens, in just six months he had become an unwanted man, as though he were truly dead, back as a mere ghost.
His reappearance shocked the workers and staff. Some of them gathered around him, listening to his story and telling him how heartbrokenly they had wept at the memorial service. They told him that twenty large wreaths had been placed on both sides of his portrait and that his wife had cried so hard her limbs had cramped. Now, who could imagine he was still alive! A few people went on asking, “Are you really Old Tong?” Two even touched his knees to make sure he was corporeal.
Both Director Li and Secretary Niu sympathized with Guhan, but they said the cannery couldn’t employ him anymore, for his daughter had taken the only quota available. They had managed to obtain the residence card for Liya mainly because they had named him a Revolutionary Martyr; otherwise the police would not have cooperated. As for additional housing now, it was out of the question. How could he think of such a thing when he no longer worked for the factory? If they had assigned him an apartment, how could they have appeased those employees in line for housing?
After a Party meeting, the leaders came up with a solution: they allowed Guhan to retire on a pension. He had no choice but to accept this offer. Since the Spring Festival was just two days away, his brother-in-law took him and his wife in. Yaning begged his parents to let him retain the apartment, saying they’d wreck his marriage if they drove his pregnant wife and himself out. So they allowed him to keep it; after the holiday, they’d have to search for housing for themselves.
Guhan became reticent and gloomy. He couldn’t resist wondering whether he should have stayed with Shan and Mo in Taifu and let people here believe he had left this crowded world for good.
In the Kindergarten
Shaona kept her eyes shut, trying to sleep. Outside, the noonday sun was blazing, and bumblebees were droning in the shade of an elm. Time and again one of them would bump into the window’s wire screen with a thud and then a louder buzz. Soon Teacher Shen’s voice in the next room grew clearer.
“Oh please!” the teacher blubbered on the phone. “I’ll pay you the money in three months. You’ve already helped me so much, why can’t you help me out?”
Those words made Shaona fully awake. She moved her head closer to the wall and strained her ears to listen. The teacher begged, “Have mercy on me, Dr. Niu. I’ve an old mother at home. My mother and I have to live. . And you know, I lost so much blood, because of the baby, that I need to eat eggs to recuperate. I’m really broke now. Can you just give me another month?”
Shaona was puzzled, thinking how a baby could injure her teacher’s health. Her grandmother used to say that babies were dug out from pumpkin fields in the countryside. Why did her teacher sound as though the baby had come out of her body? Why did she bleed for the baby?
Teacher Shen’s voice turned desperate. “Please, don’t tell anyone about the abortion! I’ll try my best to pay you. . very soon. I’ll see if I can borrow some money from a friend.”
What’s an abortion? Shaona asked herself. Is it something that holds a baby? What does it look like? Must be very expensive.
Her teacher slammed the phone down, then cried, “Heaven help me!”
Shaona couldn’t sleep anymore. She missed her parents so much that she began sobbing again. This was her second week in the kindergarten, and she was not used to sleeping alone yet. Her small iron bed was uncomfortable, in every way different from the large soft bed at home, which could hold her entire family. She couldn’t help wondering if her parents would love her the same as before, because three weeks ago her mother had given her a baby brother. These days her father was so happy that he often chanted snatches of opera.
In the room seven other children were napping, one of them wheezing with a stuffy nose. Two large bronze moths, exhausted by the heat, were resting on the ceiling, their powdery wings flickering now and again. Shaona yawned sleepily, but still couldn’t go to sleep.
At two-thirty the bell rang, and all the nappers got out of their beds. Teacher Shen gathered the whole class of five- and six-year-olds in the corridor. Then in two lines they set out for the turnip field behind the kindergarten. It was still hot. A steamboat went on blowing her horn in the north, and a pair of jet fighters were flying in the distant sky, drawing a long double curve. Shaona wondered how a pilot could fit inside those planes, which looked as small as pigeons. In the air lingered a sweetish odor of dichlorvos, which had been sprayed around the city to get rid of flies, fleas, mosquitoes. The children were excited, because seldom were they allowed to go out of the stone wall topped with shards of dark brown glass. Today, instead of playing games within the yard as the children of the other classes were doing, Teacher Shen was going to teach them how to gather purslanes. Few of them knew what a purslane looked like, but they were all eager to search for the herb.