In his final days my father believed that the best thing he had ever done in life was to adopt a son named Yang Fei. By that time he had retired and I was a section head in the company. I had saved some money and I planned to buy a new two-bedroom apartment. I spent a weekend with my father looking at a dozen housing developments under construction and took a liking to one particular apartment, so we planned to sell my father’s railroad dormitory unit. It had been assigned to him as one of the perks of his job, and now he was free to dispose of it as he chose. With the funds gained from its sale, combined with the money I had put aside over the years, we could purchase a new apartment cash down, without needing to pay a mortgage. My professional success offered some consolation to my father for the disappointment of my failed marriage.
During this period I had a lot of work-related engagements in the evenings, and when I returned home late I would find my father waiting for me with a full dinner on the table. If I wasn’t home, he would not eat and could not sleep. So I began to turn down as many invitations as possible and instead went home to keep my father company as he ate and watched television. During my vacation that year, I took him to Huangshan for a holiday — the first and last time that he left home for travel. At sixty, my father was still very fit, and while I was soon panting for breath as we climbed the mountain, he moved as nimbly as a swallow and was able to give me a helping hand on the steepest stretches.
Hao Qiangsheng and Li Yuezhen had also retired. Their daughter, Hao Xia, had gone to graduate school in the United States after she finished university in Beijing, then stayed on in America to work, marrying an American and bearing two attractive children. On retirement Hao and Li planned to emigrate to America, and as they waited for their green card applications to be approved they would often come to visit my father — these were his happiest moments. When I opened the door on my return from work and heard peals of laughter from inside, I knew that they were visiting. Li Yuezhen would give me a cheerful greeting, “Hi, son,” when I appeared in front of them.
Li Yuezhen had always called me “Son,” and in my mind she was the only mother I had as I grew up. When I was still sucking my thumb in the cotton sling on Yang Jinbiao’s back, she had come almost every day to our shack next to the railroad tracks to breast-feed me. “Formula is never as good as mother’s milk,” she would say to Yang Jinbiao. In my memory she had always been thin, but according to my father she had once been quite plump — it was from feeding me that she grew slender. My father’s claim sounded plausible to me, for in those penniless days the poorly nourished Li Yuezhen breast-fed two young children.
I had always been just as familiar with their family as I was with my own. Much of my time as a young child was spent in their home, for I would eat dinner and sleep there when my father worked the night shift. Li Yuezhen treated me and Hao Xia as though we were siblings, and on the rare occasions when we had a meat dish for dinner she would slip the last morsel of pork or chicken in my bowl and not in Hao Xia’s. Once Hao Xia burst into tears, saying, “Mom, I’m the one who’s your child!”
“It’ll be your turn next time,” Li Yuezhen said.
Hao Xia and I had been childhood sweethearts and had privately vowed to marry when we were grown up, so we could always be together. “You can be Dad and I’ll be Mom,” was how Hao Xia put it. At that point we thought of marriage as a combination of a dad and a mom, but once we understood that marriage is defined more precisely as a partnership of husband and wife, neither of us ever again mentioned our secret agreement and we both forgot it with equal speed.
I never again visited my family in the north, but simply called them on the phone on major holidays. Usually it was my birth mother who picked up, and after quizzing me about my affairs she would always urge me to look after Yang Jinbiao properly, saying with feeling, “He’s such a good man.”
My father fell ill the year after he retired. He lost his appetite and rapidly lost weight; the whole day through he felt drained of energy. He kept me in the dark, unwilling to let on that he was battling an illness; he thought he would slowly recover. When he got ill in the past he wouldn’t go to see the doctor and refused to take medication, instead depending on his strong constitution to see him through, and this time too he was confident he could fight it off. I was busy at work in those days and didn’t notice that my father was losing weight, until one day when I found he was just skin and bones and learned that he had been ill for half a year. I insisted that he go to the hospital for tests, and when the results came out, my hands trembled as they held the report, for my father had developed lymphoma.
I watched helplessly as the malignant cells gradually consumed my father’s life. Radiation treatment, surgery, chemothera
py — all these tormented my once-strong father so that when he walked it was with a crooked gait and it looked as though a gust of wind would be enough to blow him over. As a retired railroad worker he could claim reimbursement for a portion of his medical expenses, but these expenses were so enormous that we had to bear the bulk of them, and I quietly sold off his railroad dorm unit. So as to look after him, I gave up my job and bought a small shop near the hospital. My father slept in the back room, while in the front room I sold daily necessities to customers going by, so as to bring in a little income.
My father was upset, for I hadn’t consulted him before quitting my job and selling the property. He knew this was a fait accompli and would often sigh and moan, saying to me in distress, “You’ve got no house and no job — what will you do in the future?”
I tried to reassure him, saying that once he had recovered I would return to my original employer, start saving once more, and buy a new apartment for him to see out his days peacefully. He shook his head. “Where will you find the money to do that?” he said.
“If we can’t afford a full-cash purchase,” I told him, “we can always buy an apartment by taking out a mortgage.”
He shook his head all the more stubbornly. “Don’t buy an apartment. Don’t go into debt,” he cautioned.
I said nothing more, knowing his mind was made up. Before housing prices skyrocketed I had thought of taking out a mortgage, but my father was daunted by the prospect of owing the bank so much money and I had had to abandon the plan.
It was as though we had returned to the life in that rickety shack next to the railroad tracks. In the evening, after I had closed up shop, the two of us crammed onto the single bed to sleep. Every night, I could hear my father’s sighs and groans — the sighs on account of my grim future, the groans in reaction to his own pain. When his suffering was not so acute, we would share memories of earlier days, and at such moments his voice would take on a blissful tone. He would mention little episodes from my childhood, recalling how I would insist he lie next to me and watch me as I fell asleep, how sometimes when he adjusted his position and turned his back to me, I would call again and again, “Dad, look at me, look at me….”
I told my father that I remembered hearing him snoring when I woke up in the middle of the night when I was small. A few times I didn’t hear his snore and was so scared that I started crying, worried that perhaps he had died. I would shake him and shake him, and when he sat up, my tears would turn to smiles and I would say to him, “So you’re not dead after all!”
One evening my father neither sighed nor groaned. Instead he talked quietly about some key moments in our lives, such as how he had heard me crying on the railroad track and carried me in his arms to Li Yuezhen’s house. It was that evening too that I learned how, when I was four years old, he had abandoned me in order to get married. When he got to this point tears trickled from his eyes and he was stricken with self-reproach, saying over and over again, “How could I have been so heartless?”