Cocoon, page 6
One evening on the cusp of spring and summer, I stood in the doorway watching Dad hurl everything we owned into a couple of plastic sacks. As the sun set, shadows filled the cavernous space, and the bare white walls, empty of photographs, no longer looked so stark. I quietly rescued a clockwork frog and a few marbles from the junk pile. Dad strapped the sacks to his bicycle and we set off for Granny’s, him riding and me running behind. He went slowly at first, then as we passed through a crowded market, he got impatient and sped up. I had to sprint, almost crashing into a fruit stand and knocking a little girl’s pinwheel from her hand. The marbles jolted from my pocket and rolled across the ground, but I was too afraid of losing him to stop.
Granny’s apartment also consisted of two small rooms, and I wondered if that’s what everyone’s home was like. She didn’t have much furniture, only cardboard and wooden boxes of all sizes, making the place look like a warehouse. I looked around for a vase or picture frame, but the only ornament I could see was a square clock on the wall whose face read, in red, Commemorating the 90th Anniversary of the Medical University. Granny loved this red writing, which also adorned her tea mug, washbasin, and flask, some commemorating the school, others the Party.
It was dinner time, and several dark bowls sat on the table. There were only three chairs, so Auntie fetched me the stool from the sewing machine. Granny grumbled that Dad had promised to get her another chair after smashing the fourth one, but never had. Then she began enumerating all of Dad’s promises that hadn’t materialized, from buying her deep-fried rice cakes to paying for her gold teeth. She’d remembered every single one. Granny spoke without apparently using her tongue—rather than being bitten into shape, words seem to hurtle from her throat, a peculiar sound that reminded me of a partridge or some other bird. Dad calmly ate his dinner, as if he simply didn’t understand this language.
Dad left right after dinner. As he walked out, Granny shouted after him not to forget my monthly living expenses. I stacked the dirty dishes and brought them to Auntie in the kitchen, then wiped them dry after she’d washed them. I thought it would be easier to get on her good side than on Granny’s. Soon the dishes were done, the stove was wiped, and the kitchen was all tidy. I followed Auntie back into the outer room.
It was so dim here, I felt oxygen-deprived. The only light came from a fluorescent tube above the dining table, whose dusty bean-green shade cast a shadow like a bat spreading its wings. The black-and-white TV hummed. Granny lounged beneath the window on a dilapidated sofa, many of its bamboo strips snapped and jutting out at odd angles. In the middle of the sofa was a large dip that wrapped itself around Granny’s squat little body, like a bird’s nest in the crook of a branch. I thought she’d fallen asleep, but just as I was breathing a sigh of relief, she jerked upright and squinted at me. Then the partridge voice issued from her wrinkly face: “Remove all the clothes he’s wearing!”
Before I understood what was going on, Auntie had caught hold of my arm and was undoing my shirt buttons.
“Don’t bother with that,” said Granny. “Just rip it off!”
Auntie tugged the shirt hard, and the buttons popped off onto the floor, allowing her to wrench it off me by the collar.
“The trousers! The trousers too!” yelled Granny.
Auntie knelt and held me with one hand, while the other ripped off my corduroy trousers.
“You think these clothes your mom gave you are so precious? Ha!” Granny spat on the floor. “They were taken from dead children! You stink of rotting, maggoty dead kids! The eggs will have hatched by now, soon you’ll have maggots crawling into your ears.”
“That’s not true!” I shouted.
“Your granny’s telling the truth.” Auntie picked up my shirt and turned it over to show me the label, which was covered in scribbled English writing. “Your mom bought these at Haiyou Market. Everything they sell there comes from containers of trash from overseas.”
I stood there stunned, allowing Auntie to lift my legs and pull the trousers off. She lifted them between two fingers. “Look, the color’s so bright, you can tell it hasn’t been washed many times. If it hadn’t come off a dead body, why would they throw out a perfectly good pair of trousers like these?”
“Stop waving that around, it’s filthy!” said Granny, jabbing Auntie in the shoulder. “Go through his bags and get the other corpse clothes. Take them downstairs and burn them.”
Auntie yanked open the plastic sacks and pulled out a sweater with an anchor embroidered on it, a hoodie, a cap, holding up each item as if to give me one last look. They smelled familiar, but now I wasn’t sure if that was my mom’s scent, or the dead children’s. Auntie stuffed them into a cardboard box and took them downstairs.
“I’ve never heard of such an evil mother, giving her own son dead people’s clothes.”
Granny yawned, expelling rancid breath, stretched, and headed into the room she slept in.
I stood in the middle of the room in my long underwear. After a while, I burst into tears, though I couldn’t have said why I was crying. Because I’d lost the clothes I loved, because maggots were crawling into my ears, because Mom deceived me. I thought of the peach sweater I’d fallen asleep cradling. Did its rotten apple fragrance come from a dead woman’s perfume? All my sweet memories were now horrifying. Mom felt like a stranger too. I didn’t think I could love her in the same way anymore.
Tired from crying, I slumped over the sewing machine stool and fell asleep. After a while, I heard movement. Auntie was placing the chairs alongside the single bed, extending it. From a wooden chest at the head of the bed, she produced a quilt.
“Come here, we’ll share the bed.” She lifted me off the floor and studied me. “Your granny will want to get rid of that underwear, too. Here …” She handed me a maroon thermal shirt. “Wear this for now. We’ll get you new ones tomorrow.”
I just stood there haplessly, so she did it for me. When she accidentally pulled down my briefs along with the long underwear and my little genitals were exposed to the lamplight, she flushed bright red and quickly pulled the shirt over my face, as if afraid I would see.
It was a woman’s top, which, on me, became a nightshirt that reached to my ankles. Auntie reached into the flappy sleeves to pull my arms through.
“Done.” She sat on the side of the bed, looking at me. I turned my face aside.
“Here, this is for you.” She reached into the pocket of her cardigan and put a piece of candy in my hand. The cool, waxy wrapper rubbed against my palm. I looked down—it was one of Uncle Candy’s.
“I found it in your trouser pocket while I was burning your clothes,” she said. “There was only one. If you like them, I’ll buy you more.”
“No thanks.” I withdrew my hand and took the candy into my sleeve.
Before going to bed, Auntie pulled the rubber band off her braid and shook it out, then turned off the light and lay next to me. In the dark, her distinctive bulbous forehead and high cheekbones were hidden by her long hair, and she looked a bit like Mom. I had to fight to keep my hand from reaching for her breast. After a while, I heard snoring.
Rustling in the dark, I unwrapped the last piece of candy and popped it in my mouth.
Li Jiaqi
When I was very young, I had a sort of premonition that Dad would leave us one day. I even came up with the simplest way for him to do that—falling in love with one of his students. Apart from teaching, his duties in the Chinese Department included acting as a counselor, which naturally meant asking students about their lives, allowing girls with long hair like flowing water and books of poetry clutched to their bosoms to open their hearts to him. An old-fashioned phrase, “open their hearts”—it reeks of the eighties, when our hearts weren’t buried so deep and could still be brought to the surface.
Dad never brought students home, and Mom and I weren’t invited to join their gatherings, so I never met the girls he taught. My only knowledge of them came from the yearbooks he brought home, hence I didn’t get to know them until they’d already graduated. It never felt like they’d truly departed, because of the words they left: Our story hasn’t ended yet, or You’ll always be my hitching post. Inscriptions that felt like love notes. In the afternoon sun, I squinted at those little pictures of girls hugging their knees and staring into the sunset or sitting on lawns in sunhats, as if I were choosing a stepmother from a catalog.
I believed they were superior to my mother, even though she was hard to beat in the looks department. This wasn’t because of their youth, but because they weren’t countryside folk. I never considered the possibility that they’d grown up somewhere rural, and perhaps hadn’t even been in the city as long as Mom. They didn’t seem like country folk, deploying fancy metaphors like “hitching post” that my mother could never have come up with.
Yet the student who was supposed to steal my dad away never showed up. In 1990, he resigned from the university, having decided to go into business in Beijing. Just before he left, I met his students for the first time.
That night, seven or eight of them came to our home. Dad wasn’t back yet—his friends were throwing him a farewell dinner at a nearby restaurant. The students filled our tiny living room, their lips compressed and expressions grim, not taking a single bite of the watermelon my mom served them.
“We’re sorry to disturb you, Mrs. Li, but we really wanted to say goodbye to the professor,” said a girl, her eyes swollen as if she’d been crying for a long time.
“Yes,” said another student. “You have no idea how kind he’s been to us.”
Mom smiled at him in confusion, uncertain what to say.
The boy continued, “Last summer, when we went to Beijing, he was the only one who supported us. And now those people are using that against him ...”
Mom didn’t know anything about Dad being punished, though that didn’t matter anymore. What worried her was their mention of Beijing.
“Will there be any problem with him going to Beijing now?” she asked.
The students assured her there wouldn’t be, but still she worried. As far as she was concerned, Beijing was just another word on the Xinwen Lianbo daily news, like nation or world. In her mind, Beijing was a place to do important things—conferences with leaders of other countries, hosting the Asian Games, inspecting the troops on National Day—and she couldn’t imagine actually living there. She urged them to say more about the city, asking if the roads were as wide as she’d seen on TV, and if the Square was always so crowded. Really, the students had only been to the capital that one time, but they sounded as if they’d spent half their lives there when they told Mom about their two-week visit.
I lurked nonchalantly behind my mother, twisting the arm of my plastic dolly. Round and round, like winding up a gramophone. I sped up as their mood intensified, until all of a sudden, the arm slipped out of its socket and flew through the air, landing at a student’s feet. They stopped speaking and stared at me, as if they’d only just noticed I existed. Blushing, I walked over hesitantly. A boy took the doll from my hand and, carefully lining up the limb with its cavity, shoved it into place.
“Here, stop fiddling with that.” He handed it back to me.
After that little interruption, the room sank into silence. The air around us seemed to stiffen. Our voltage was low, and the lights kept flickering. Bzz, bzz.
Dad was drunk by the time he got home, a scarlet miasma of alcohol in the air, like a burning coal sizzling as it consumed him. He stepped through the door, still despondent from having left the previous gathering, only to cheer up instantly when he saw the roomful of students. This was the sort of happiness only a drunk person could muster, a hollow enjoyment of bustle. Mom brought him a chair, but he kept staggering around. I worried this would make him look bad, but the students continued gazing at him with the utmost respect, along with a sort of sorrow, as if fully aware of his pain. I was jealous of how well they knew him—they seemed more like his family than Mom and I.
“How many times do I have to tell you, my resignation had nothing to do with you!” He waggled his finger at them. “I just saw through everything.” He shook his head. “It’s completely meaningless.”
The students bit their tongues, not saying a word. A girl started weeping quietly.
“Don’t cry, Little Feng. You mustn’t cry.” Dad’s voice turned tender. He finally sat and stared into space for a moment, then suddenly burst out laughing.
“Let’s not hope for anything more,” he said.
In my memory, that tragic evening concluded with those mysterious words. But actually, that’s when Mom dragged me off to bed, while the others kept talking.
I hadn’t understood much of the conversation, but for some reason I remembered the words they’d used. Many years later, Xu Yachen was astonished that I was able to recall everything they’d said about their trip to Beijing, including some details that had vanished or shifted in his own memory. He said, perhaps many things are destined to inscribe themselves in our minds even without us meaning them to.
I reconnected with Xu Yachen four years ago, while I was working as an editor at a fashion magazine and ran into him at a charity auction. As usual, it was full of wealthy businessmen, socialites, and nouveaux riches. A showcase of wealth. Everyone was vying to bid on jewelry worn by movie stars, premier cru wines, and pieces by trendy artists. The proceeds were going to build an elementary school for the children of rural migrant workers. Love is priceless, the emcee kept saying, although every measure of love there had a price tag on it. Xu Yachen went all in on a statue by a famous sculptor. When the emcee invited him up on the stage, he looked tenderly at the schoolchildren seated in the front row.
“This is just a tiny effort on our part, but it could change these children’s entire lives,” he said.
Thunderous applause rumbled across the room. I couldn’t say why this felt wrong, but I was sorry for those kids. How insignificant they must be, that their whole lives could be altered by someone else’s tiny effort.
Xu Yachen was in a gray shirt, its top button fastened with difficulty, collar tight beneath his round head like someone strangling him to demand his money. I forced myself to remember that unremarkable face, so I’d be able to go up to him in the dispersing crowds later. He was the owner of a food and beverage consortium, and had been in the headlines after his business started doing well and he got into a dispute with his cofounder. My chief editor wanted me to interview him for our “New City Millionaires” column. After the auction, I wandered over slowly with a champagne flute in my hand, waiting till the handful of people talking to him had wandered off before I approached. He readily agreed to the interview. I felt awkward running off right after accomplishing my mission, so I stayed for a bit of small talk. He asked where I was from, and I said Jinan. He said he’d studied there, and told me which university, which department, which year. Every piece of information correct. Finally, I had to ask whether he knew Li Muyuan. That’s my professor, he said. And my father, I said.
“The professor’s daughter!” he yelled with some emotion.
My hand shook, almost spilling my drink. It was moving to be named in that way, as if I was one amongst my father’s students.
Yachen said the last time he’d seen me, I’d been a shy little girl. I couldn’t place him until he suddenly recalled how he’d reattached my dolly’s arm. I was shocked, and completely unable to reconcile the man in front of me with the boy from back then.
“You were so young then, you probably don’t remember what I looked like,” he said.
“I do, actually.”
“Then I must have got old and fat.” He smiled sadly.
It wasn’t that either. I’d never imagined he would own a food and beverage consortium. I couldn’t have said what sort of person he’d become, but it shouldn’t be someone so successful. That night had been so melancholy, I’d assumed the rest of their lives would follow suit.
One of the organizers came over and asked Yachen to pose with the statue he’d bought, a figure of a girl, maybe ten years old, in a red dress, leaning forward with slightly bent knees and closed eyes, as if to sniff an invisible flower. She looked intoxicated. The artwork was titled “Dream.” Yachen did as the photographer asked and reached out to embrace this “Dream” with a dazzling smile.
A few days later, I met him for our interview. This ended with him taking me out to dinner at one of his restaurants. It was on the sixty-fifth floor, and through the large windows the city lights might as well have been at the other end of our lives, as if the ground were as distant from us as 1990. Neither of us dared bring up the past. He chatted about red wine, travel, collecting art, just as he probably did with every girl he met. It was a happy conversation, but I knew I wasn’t going to retain any of it. After dinner, he gave me a lift home. As his car sped down Chang’an Road and the vast emptiness of the Square, the deep red walls looked the color of rust. It was very quiet, just the wheezing of the air-conditioning. He turned to ask if I wanted to come to his place for a drink, he had a lot of excellent red wine. All right, I said.
He’d gotten a divorce not long ago, and now lived alone in this huge villa. We sat in his garden drinking. It was a June evening, and after the rain earlier in the day, the air felt fresh and clean. A light breeze blew across my face, keeping me from getting too drunk. As he opened the second bottle, he started talking about my father. I stared at the rim of my glass, not wanting to miss a single word.
Several years after graduation, they heard about Dad’s death. The whole class got together and had a mini memorial service. Every one of them wept for him, a bout of tears to mark the end of youth.
“Not just our youth, it was the end of an era too,” he added.
“The end of an era,” I repeated softly, pressing down on the words, as if I’d finally found a sufficiently weighty sentiment to attach to my father’s death.
