Three Brothers, page 20
That year, Jianke was only eleven or twelve years old.
In the north, the summer wheat harvest season is a road that all local bowed-head workers must walk down. In the summer of the year I went to join Fourth Uncle to work in the cement factory, he returned to harvest the wheat as usual, and as usual, after he went back to the factory, he promptly fell into a deep sleep. When he saw that I had returned to the dormitory from the mines, he invited me to go with him to take a bath. The cement factory had many limitations, but it had one thing that made people truly happy—it offered free baths. The water in the showers was hot and abundant, and at the turn of the faucet, it would flow over your body like a soft stone. Furthermore, there were many faucets and bathing pools, and when you wanted a bath you never had to wait. When you walked into that garage-like bathing hall, you would often notice you were the only one there. This was especially true of the middle pool, which was boiling hot and, apart from an occasional old man, usually empty. On that particular day, I went with Fourth Uncle to soak in that middle pool. Because a bath relieves fatigue, Fourth Uncle and I both took a deep breath and slowly exhaled—as though in that instant we were both seized by the happiness and good spirit we had long been pursuing. The pools were each as large as a three-room house, and at the narrowest they were still five or six meters wide. Separated by a distance of five or six meters, Fourth Uncle and I sat naked on opposite sides of one pool. Between us were clouds of steam that were so large we couldn’t even see each other clearly. Then I said something that anyone nearby could have heard.
I said, “Uncle, is your family’s wheat doing well this year?”
“Yes …” Fourth Uncle said. “Yes, it is. At harvest time, all the workers developed blisters on their hands. But when the work points were assigned a monetary value, each work point was worth only twelve cents.”
Twelve cents. I mean, if I were to pick up two tattered leather cement sacks from the side of the road in front of the cement factory and sell them to the recycling center in the entrance, I could earn as much money as a peasant who has slaved away in the fields all day—even a peasant who has worked like a horse or ox for days during the busy summer. I stared at the damp fog in front of me and also looked through it at Fourth Uncle. I followed up on Fourth Uncle’s statement by remarking, “At home working the land, one is truly like a horse or ox!”
Fourth Uncle reflected for a moment, then replied, “At home, there are always periods of the year when the workload is lighter, but when you are working away from home there are no slack periods.” After shifting the topic in this way, Fourth Uncle proceeded to discuss which was better: working at home or outside. Naturally, he concluded that if people working away from home can find work that is clean, dignified, and relaxing, then they will come to have some power and dignity, and they may find a spouse in the city, thereby becoming bona fide urban residents. But if you end up in a filthy and exhausting location like a cement factory or coal pit, then you will neither advance nor regress. If you try to marry a young woman from the city, she will resent you for being too poor, and if you try to marry another worker like yourself, you’ll find that they all have their sights set on cadres, or at least workers with a higher status. So you’ll have no choice but to return to a rural family and become a bowed-head, and then you’ll have no choice but to resolve yourself to staying at home and working the land.
Although Fourth Uncle’s personal experiences might appear to have been simple and basic, they contained a sweetness and bitterness that people who have not had similar experiences will never be able to comprehend. As he was telling me all this, he had already finished his bath and was sitting on the edge of the pool, letting the hot water soften his calluses and his tough skin. He was in the process of lancing the blood blisters on his hands with a small pair of scissors he had brought with him. Blood flowed from his palm and down his fingertips, and after it was diluted in the pool’s hot water, the dark red blood became light pink. It became even lighter as it flowed toward the edge of the pool and then into the pool itself. As he was speaking, I went over and massaged Fourth Uncle’s shoulders, then sat down beside him. I watched his peaceful expression and how every time he popped a blister he would wave his hand, but I didn’t really understand the significance of his discussion of who was happier: those people “working on the outside” or country folk.
Only many years later, when I was in the army and was promoted to cadre, and when I was trying to find a wife and was determined to find a city girl, did I feel a belated understanding of what Fourth Uncle had been trying to tell me. I finally realized the effect that his comments had had on me. I don’t know whether my current life should be called life or living, but I must acknowledge that my understanding and my pursuit of life and living at that time were not unconnected to Fourth Uncle’s own life. Even if my understanding of life and living was misguided, or even completely wrong, it nevertheless came to function as an article of faith, a rough worldview. During my youth, this understanding provided a basic support for my struggle and efforts.
When Fourth Uncle retired, he didn’t hand over his job in Xinxiang to either of his two sons but rather to his daughter, Suping. This decision constituted a major breach of the rural tradition of prioritizing sons over daughters. At the time, none of Fourth Uncle’s fellow villagers could understand his choice, and even his own children were bewildered. I think he made this decision because the hardship he had endured convinced him that you must either resolve yourself to becoming a complete peasant or else you must attempt to become a complete city person—because when you are half-rural and half-urban, you not only don’t have access to what peasants perceive as the happiness and the job of urban life, you also don’t have access to what city dwellers perceive as the leisure and freedom of rural life. Instead, all you have are the sorts of frustrations and insecurities that city dwellers and country folk both share.
To tell the truth, to this day I cannot say with certainty how Fourth Uncle understood family and existence, city and countryside, life and living. But I sense that he hoped his children and I would either become full-fledged peasants who worked the soil from dawn to dusk, or else that we would make every effort to become full-fledged city residents and try to minimize our interaction with the land and the countryside. Precisely because he had this wish, by 1977 I was already working like an old peasant in the cement factory but would periodically return to the countryside to sow the fields and for the harvest. I performed backbreaking labor every day for six hours, and continued in this way for several dozen days. This confirmed to me that life was indeed like a dark cave or a bottomless well.
One day, Fourth Uncle suddenly came up the mountain to bring me a telegram instructing me to return home immediately upon receipt of the message. With considerable anxiety, I walked down the mountain and to the city. With Fourth Uncle, I went to the post office and spent over an hour arranging to call my family long-distance to ask them what had happened. It turned out that the reason I was being summoned was that the year was 1977—not 1976 and even less 1975, 1974, or 1973. The year 1977 was significant because this was when China’s national university entrance exams were reinstituted. As long as you were Chinese, regardless of whether you had graduated from high school, middle school, or even only elementary school—if you wanted to you could go to a testing site and take the test to get into university and test your fate.
That afternoon before dusk, Fourth Uncle hurriedly bought me a train ticket, helped me pack, and even gave me a couple of large apples to eat on the train. I estimate I had spent a total of just around two years doing piecework with him, but when I suddenly had to leave, I felt as though I were bidding goodbye to the father who had raised me since birth. The train left in the middle of the night, meaning that there was some time between dinner and when I had to go catch the train—time I would savor like half a bowl of hot, nourishing soup that you can’t bear to finish. In the factory, workers typically ate dinner early, and the sun would still be high in the sky when they finished. So Fourth Uncle and I, together with my cousin Shucheng, all sat quietly in the room, while rays from the setting sun shone in through the window and illuminated the table and floor. The air in the room smelled of moisture and laundry detergent mixing with the odor of the food we had brought back from the canteen but hadn’t yet finished. In those days, the flavor of life and the taste of daily life mixed together like dirty water, and my uncle, my cousin, and I were immersed in this mortal mixture. It was like sunlight on a winter morning, which gently warms the trees and plants out in the fields that had been frozen all winter, until the sun disappears behind the buildings on the western side of the city. When the sound of the train horn cut through the silence, causing the window glass and window paper to tremble, I knew it was time for me to head out. I had to go seek a different kind of life. As Fourth Uncle and Shucheng prepared to send me on my way, Fourth Uncle grabbed my bag and said, “It’s time to go. I want you to take the exam, and do well.”
I gave my uncle and my cousin a bitter smile, and said, “I’m afraid I probably won’t, given that I didn’t even finish the second year of high school.”
Fourth Uncle said, “If you don’t pass the exam, you can always come back here and continue doing piecework with me. If you do pass, however, you’ll never again need to lead the kind of life that your parents and fourth uncle have had to lead.”
Shucheng then took my bag from Fourth Uncle, and we left. Fourth Uncle came out last, and with a bang he locked the door’s black steel lock—as though cutting off my retreat and encouraging me to struggle forward in a new direction.
7. IN THE RAIL STATION
By contemporary standards, the Xinxiang rail station could not be considered luxurious or modern, much less luxuriously modern. Located at a considerable distance from the city center, the station’s waiting area was like an empty warehouse, and while some of the iron and wood waiting chairs were still in good condition, others were in various states of disrepair, with broken legs or missing backrests. Fourth Uncle, Shucheng, and I sat there for a while, whereupon Fourth Uncle went to buy me a packet of crackers to eat on the train. Then I got up—both because I was afraid I might miss the train and also because I wanted to be one of the first ones on, so I might be able to get a seat and nap on the journey.
The train station was as cold and empty as a barren field, but the tracks stretched into the night like a pair of fried dough sticks. The platforms beneath every pair of tracks were made from cement blocks, and their worn edges resembled a collapsed ridge around a field. The moon was in its crescent phase, though I can’t remember whether it was waxing or waning. All I remember is that it was bright and hazy. It moved at a constant speed, and sometimes it was behind a cloud and sometimes it slipped out and hung suspended in the open sky. At this point, a milky-white light shone down on the rail tracks, like clear water flowing through willow and poplar branches. A pungent odor of gasoline surged up from the tracks and hovered over the train station, like dawn mist strolling through the morning light. When the moon emerged, the light under the platform promptly dimmed, and when the moonlight faded, the platform lamps lit up again.
The three of us stood in an empty area in the middle of the platform and gazed at one another under the light from the lamps and the moon. Then we looked at the sky, at the railroad tracks, and at several dark train cars that were slumbering in the distance. It was as if it were only then that I finally realized I was going to leave Fourth Uncle and Shucheng. I was pursuing a seemingly impossible objective. At this instant, everyone became anxious, as though they suddenly remembered they still had a lot to say and do, and if they didn’t act now they might never again have the opportunity. My cousin carried my bag and walked back and forth along the train platform, as though he knew where a certain train car was going to stop and where the door would open, and therefore wanted to position himself correctly. Before the train arrived, Fourth Uncle took out a pile of bills that had been carefully folded and wrapped in paper, and stuffed them into my hand. This was a hundred yuan, which he wanted me to take back to my parents. He said I was leaving in a hurry and therefore wouldn’t have time to go back to the factory to clear my account and collect my salary, and so he was giving me those hundred yuan to take to his elder brother and sister-in-law. He said that although he had been working in the factory for more than twenty years, having started before he turned twenty, he nevertheless had rarely given even a cent to his brothers. He explained that the money was a subsidy for my parents, which is to say his brother and sister-in-law. He said that at the end of the month, he would collect my entire salary, and when he went home for New Year’s he would pass it on to me.
Naturally, I couldn’t accept Fourth Uncle’s money. Although he had a job outside, and I had previously viewed him as an urban resident, during those two years that I had been working with him I had spent approximately seven hundred days coming to appreciate his frustration and misery, his embarrassment and financial problems. During that time I had come to realize that he shouldered the miseries of both urban life and rural life, like someone suspended in midair and surrounded by thorns.
He was unable to let go—not only of the thorns but also of the red-hot steel rods on either side of him. This had been arranged by fate, so he had no choice but to continue grasping both of them for dear life.
I knew I definitely couldn’t accept Fourth Uncle’s money, but as we were jostling back and forth on the train platform, Fourth Uncle’s eyes suddenly filled with tears, and other travelers stared at me. Shucheng said then, “Just take the money. If Fourth Uncle wants to give it to you, just take it.” Shucheng then gave me a look indicating I should take it.
So I accepted the money.
Then the train arrived, as though it had been waiting for me to take the money. Before I even had a chance to stuff the packet of cash into my pocket, the train noisily stopped in front of me. No one boarded with me, but my uncle and cousin pushed me up onto the train.
As the train was leaving, I stuck my head out the window and waved to my uncle and cousin, then stuffed that neatly folded pile of bills into Fourth Uncle’s hand, shouting, “Uncle … take this. On Sunday, I want you and Shucheng to go into the city and buy yourselves some new clothes.”
In the instant Fourth Uncle took the money, I saw him standing under the lamplight and the moonlight, and noticed that his face resembled a dark yellow piece of fabric that had just been removed from a pool of water, as two tears rolled down his cheek like raindrops. After the train pulled away, my hand—which was waving in the dark—gradually fell still. Fourth Uncle and Shucheng’s shadows grew increasingly small and faint until they were specks of dust.
8. RETURNING HOME
In the end, I wasn’t fated to pass the university examinations.
At the end of the year, when Fourth Uncle returned home to visit his family, I bowed my head and told him I hadn’t passed. Fourth Uncle laughed and said, “Then why don’t you return to the factory with me?”
I replied, “Next year I want to join the army.”
In the end, I did in fact join the army.
I entered the city.
Then I was demobilized.
After I was demobilized, since I loved literature, the army summoned me back and promoted me to cadre, and I married a city girl. When I got married, I wrote Fourth Uncle a letter, and in response he offered me his congratulations, repeatedly emphasizing that I should “enjoy life.” He said that life was important, but that nothing could surpass having a secure and stable existence. This was 1984—my love for literature was like my love for my wife, and my attachment to my family was like my attachment to my writing. Although I initially published several stories as mere exercises, I ended up feeling a growing desire for success and recognition. In order to publish a story in the Kaifeng journal Dongjing Literature, I went with a couple of fellow soldiers and took a pot of jasmine from the Shangqiu barracks greenhouse and placed it in the window of my dormitory. That weekend, I picked up that large flowerpot, which weighed several dozen jin, and took it into the Shangqiu train station through a side door where they didn’t check tickets, then placed it in the aisle of a train. Next, I played hide-and-seek with the ticket attendant—repeatedly moving from one train car to another and periodically stepping into the bathroom to avoid the attendant. Finally, two and a half hours later, when the train stopped at the Kaifeng station, I grabbed the flowerpot and got off. I didn’t leave the train station through the main entrance but rather continued forward along the train tracks until I reached a field, and from there was able to cross over into the ancient capital of Kaifeng City. I met up with my wife, and we proceeded to take that flowerpot to the office of the editor of Dongjing Literature.
For a long time, because of my feverish investment in my family and my literature, I didn’t properly consider the questions of “living” in the countryside and “life” in the city, nor did I attempt to determine whether—after I established my own family—what I would be leading would be “living” or “life.” So when Fourth Uncle wrote me a letter urging me to “enjoy life,” I didn’t stop to consider whether Fourth Uncle himself was enjoying a combination of living and life, or whether the two were completely separate for him. Finally, one day I went out on business, and when I returned home Fourth Uncle suddenly appeared before me, and it was only then that I realized that he was already fifty-eight and had retired. After he retired, his daughter Suping took over his job, while he returned from Xinxiang to move back into his old family house.
