A Thousand Years of Good Prayers: Stories (16 page)

“Because she is a dimwit. A dimwit is empty, like air. Have you ever seen a diamond leave a scratch on the air?”

I think about Mrs. Pang’s explanation. It makes sense and it does not make sense. I think about Mr. Pang. “What’s Mr. Pang’s fate, then? He is not a diamond, is he?”

“What do you think?” Mrs. Pang asks with a smile.

“Of course he is not,” I say but my voice trails off. I know he has left scratches on Mrs. Pang’s life. He has left scratches on my life, too.

“You are thinking too much these days,” Mrs. Pang says, pinching my chin. “You are getting thinner. Your mom will wonder what has happened to you when she comes to pick you up. I’ll make the chicken stew for you tomorrow.”

“I NEED THE rooster tomorrow,” Mrs. Pang says to Mr. Pang the second to the last evening. He is sneaking into the kitchen to get his dinner and a small handful of rice for the rooster. He smells horrible.

“Hear me?” Mrs. Pang raises her voice when he does not reply.

“Yes,” Mr. Pang answers in a low voice, retreating toward the kitchen door. “Can I go buy a rooster for you?”

Mrs. Pang places the chopper on the chopping board with a bang. “I am going to make the chicken stew with
that
rooster in your room, and you go ahead and kill it after dinner,” Mrs. Pang says, not looking back at Mr. Pang.

Mr. Pang does not reply, still keeping his head low. I walk around Mr. Pang and hug Mrs. Pang’s back from behind with my sweaty arms. “Nana, I don’t want to eat chicken stew.”

“She doesn’t want the chicken stew,” Mr. Pang mumbles to Mrs. Pang’s stiffened back.

Mrs. Pang does not return my hug and says with a strange flat voice, “I want the rooster for the chicken stew.” I squeeze myself in between the counter and Mrs. Pang, looking up at her. Big drops of hot tears fall on my face.

Mr. Pang leaves for his room without making a sound, closing his door quietly as if fearing to let out the secret to the rooster. Mrs. Pang takes a towel and wipes my face clean. “Don’t worry. He has to do it.”

“Nana, let’s not eat the chicken stew.”

“We’ll eat the chicken stew. We cannot let him live with the rooster forever.”

THE YOUNGEST SON of the Song family is ambushed by a gang of boys from the West Forty Alley on his way to the grocery store for beer. When he comes back from the hospital, his stitched head is bound in thick blood-stained gauze. Good that he has his head shaved like a shining lightbulb that summer, I am about to comment to him but decide not to. “Clean-shaven heads are easy for doctors to sew up,” I say in a low voice to myself, making sure the boy does not hear me.

“My head is an iron head,” the boy says. He is sitting under the grape trellis and spitting bloody phlegm into the jasmine bush. “Believe me—the brick, this thick,” he gestures with two fingers, “was broken in half by my head.”

Mr. Du nods with his sad smile. He is the only one responding to the boy. The three brothers are occupied: the oldest boy is grinding a long knife on a grindstone, the screeching noise making my skin tight with goose bumps; the second boy is waving a long metal chain in the air. “I see you sons of a bitch are tired of living,” he shouts to the imaginary enemies outside the wall. “Be patient. We are coming for your heads.”

“Cut it out!” Mrs. Song comes out of the room and slaps a wet towel onto the swollen eye of her youngest son. “Nobody is going out tonight, you hear me?”

“Ma, what are you talking about?” the third son comes out of the kitchen with two choppers in his hands and says. “Boys of the Song family are not soft persimmons for others to squeeze.”

“You’re asking for death,” Mrs. Song yells, banging the gate of the quadrangle closed and sitting in front of the gate. “Nobody is going out of this gate tonight!”

“What are you afraid of, Ma?” the oldest son says.
“A tree
cannot live without the bark. A man cannot live without a
face.
They have spat in our faces. What would we be if we let this pass? Ma, let me tell you, everyone dies. Death? Death is not a bad joke if told the right way.”

The four boys stomp their feet on the ground and roar. Mrs. Song curses, shouting at her husband, asking for help. Mr. Song stands on the doorsill of their room and looks at his boys without speaking. The light switch is not functioning this time—Mr. Song is refusing to be turned on like an obeying bulb.

“Are you dead? Stop your sons.”

“Let them go. They do what they have to,” Mr. Song says, strolling across the yard. “How are the orchids?” he asks Mr. Du.

“Not bad. Not bad,” Mr. Du mumbles, pruning the orchids with a pair of tiny scissors and smiling back.

Mrs. Pang comes out of the room and pulls me back. “Don’t mind other people’s business,” she says, knocking on Mr. Pang’s door. “Time for the rooster.”

A pot of water is kept boiling on the stove for a long time before Mr. Pang comes out of his room with the rooster, both wings held tight in his big hand. He walks without looking at the boisterous sons of the Song family. The rooster itself is cooing and looking around with curiosity.

Mrs. Pang points to the chopper on the counter without speaking. She tries to drag me out of the kitchen but I keep holding on to the doorknob, looking up at Mr. Pang. He glances at the chopper and pulls a chair to sit down, holding the rooster between his arms.

“If nobody buys, nobody will sell you. If nobody eats, nobody will kill you. Rooster, it is not that I want to kill you, but you were born to fill people’s stomachs,” Mr. Pang mumbles and strokes the dark green feathers on the rooster’s head. Then he turns to Mrs. Pang. “Don’t scare the kid,” he says in a gentle voice.

Mrs. Pang drags me away and closes the kitchen door behind me. The rooster squeals for a moment and stops. For some time we wait outside the door, until Mr. Pang comes out with a bag of bloodstained feathers, green and brown, wrapped up in a plastic sack. “It’s ready,” he says in a low voice, nodding at Mrs. Pang without looking up at her. Sweat smears his face.

“Where are you going with that?” Mrs. Pang points to the bag in Mr. Pang’s hand.

“They are not going to the trash can,” Mr. Pang mumbles, walking toward the jasmine bush.

The chicken stew is for the last dinner of my visit that summer. Coming to pick me up, my mother is the only one who touches it during the meal. On the bus ride from the Pangs’ house to the Institute, I listen silently to her berating. Her volume becomes higher until all the passengers are staring at me, and in their scolding eyes I see me, an inconsiderate and impolite child who did not even bother to touch the best dish her old nanny cooked for her, especially a chicken stew that her nanny usually could not afford to eat.

I have to admit twice to my mistake, once to my mother and then in a louder voice so that all the passengers can hear me, before my mother drops the topic and the passengers turn their eyes away from my burning face. I watch my sandals and hum my favorite song to myself: “Let me sing a song to the Communist Party. The Party is dearer than my own mother. My mother only gives me a body. It is the Party who gives me a soul.”

A LOT OF things have changed by the next year I go to the Pangs’ for the summer. My favorite actress, Chen Chong, has disappeared to the other side of the ocean, waiting tables in a California restaurant, bearing the same smile she once did in the calendars on our wall. In the evening newspaper, I read an article deriding her for being a second-class resident and living on tips given by American capitalists, with long emotional paragraphs, as if working for a living was such a shame that the author could not bear the pain even of writing about it. “Sour grapes,” my mother sneers when she reads the article.

Gentleman’s Orchids have gone out of fashion. The price drops so fast that they now are cheaper than weeds, Mrs. Song says. Many growers have lost fortunes. Mr. Du may be the only person welcoming the news. He stops worrying about his orchids when he is working on his shift. The orchids grow better than at any time before, blooming with big golden-colored flowers as if they too have stopped fearing along with Mr. Du.

Mr. and Mrs. Song have both retired early, leaving their positions to the first and second sons. Mr. Pang’s jasmine bushes are cut down by the Song family, making space for a new room built as the wedding room for their first son. In another couple of years a wife and a baby will be added to the quadrangle, both of them sharing the new room with the oldest Song boy. The quadrangle becomes so packed that in the summer evening there is not a trace of breeze across the yard, and the wind from Siberia will never reach the inside of the quadrangle again.

Mr. Pang found a job earlier that summer, introduced by my father to a small scientific-education publishing house as a temporary employee. His duties include putting printed subscription ads into envelopes and sealing the envelopes with paste. My father conceals the parts of Mr. Pang’s history about rooming with a rooster and cheating in college for his diploma, and the publishing house finally agrees to hire him on the condition that he does not get a lunch coupon and overtime compensation. On the first day of his new job, Mr. Pang is said to have colored his white hair to a shining black and to have worn a brand-new woolen Mao jacket, which makes him look younger than his actual age of sixty-three. When he gets his first month’s pay, he takes a two-hour bus ride and arrives at our Institute in the late morning on a Sunday. For thirty minutes he begs the guards to let him in, and tries to convince them that he is a good citizen who works honestly and earns his living, and that he does not have a working ID only because the publishing house does not issue IDs for temporary workers.

For years I will not be able to stop imagining the scene of Mr. Pang bowing to the guards, who threaten to have him arrested if he does not leave, two live roosters in his hands cooing along with him. The sight of Mr. Pang wandering around our high walls for an hour with two roosters seems heartbreakingly comic, although it is not I who find him but my father, on the way back from an extended calculating duty. “Your father saved me again,” is the first sentence Mr. Pang says to me when he enters our apartment, holding the two roosters up like the biggest trophies of his life.

The scene will come back to me sixteen years later, but at the moment I just laugh when the roosters finally escape his grip, fluttering their wings around in our apartment. In a few minutes my father will catch them again, and in a few hours they will fill our stomachs and then be forgotten. Life goes at small baby steps when one is young, but then it picks up speed and flies. In four years, my favorite actress, Chen Chong, will finish her table-waiting career and start as Joan Chen in Hollywood, an actress and a director, her smile still pretty as I remember, though she will never again be the sixteen-year-old girl on our wall. In another seven years, Mrs. Pang will be leaving me forever. She will have been blind for a year before her death. The last time I visit her, she will be touching my face and feeling my tears beneath her fingertips, and both of us will be pretending that the tears are not there and we are enjoying the chicken stew I cook for her the way she has taught me. In five more years, I will be in America, sitting in my small and humid apartment in a Midwest town, reading my father’s letter about Mr. Pang’s death, knowing that for the last sixteen years of his life, he has never missed one day of work, sealing envelopes with patience.

As if the death of Mr. Pang is a story that would not hurt if only told by the Song boys, I imagine the four brothers talking about his death, out of boredom, out of the need to tell a joke. I have not seen the boys since the alley was torn down and the residents were moved out of the city to the suburban apartment complexes. I cannot imagine the lives of the boys and their families, the apartments gray and small as pigeon cages. What I see is the clean-shaven heads of the four boys, still in their twenties, talking and laughing and spitting and picking unripe grapes to shoot at one another.

“Wasn’t Mr. Pang an old fool?” one brother would say. “Thirty-three yuan, just enough for a pack of beers? And to a teenager robber who used a fruit knife? The boy would not have one day of a better life with the money.”

“The old man probably thought he earned the money himself,” another brother would say. “He forgot that the robber had to work to earn the money, too. I bet the boy would have been pissed off with only thirty-three yuan in the wallet. Why not just let him have the money and be pissed off?”

“Like Mrs. Pang always said: A bird is willing to die for a morsel of food; a man is willing to die for a penny of wealth,” a brother would say. “When Mr. Pang’s soul goes to the graveyard court to report his arrival, the judge would say: What? For thirty-three yuan you let yourself be stabbed? You were even stupider than me in my last life.”

“What does that mean?”

“The judge would then say: You don’t remember me? In my last life, I was that old man in East Fourteen Alley. Remember? I was stabbed by the robber of my Gentleman’s Orchids!”

I imagine the Song boys laugh together, the way they used to laugh at all the people in the world. Death is not a bad joke if told the right way, yet I do not see a right way. I start to understand what Mrs. Pang said about death long ago, that one would rather see beloved ones die instead of suffering. It comforts me that she would not have to see Mr. Pang’s death, and have to listen to the jokes told by the Song boys. It comforts me that not one more scratch would have to be left on her life, and I am the only one to live with the awkward joke that Mr. Pang’s death makes.

But on second thought, I wish that Mrs. Pang had lived long enough. I wish we would sit together and fold his clothes for the last time. I wish Mrs. Pang would smile at me when she puts away Mr. Pang’s clothes, and I would know that she is proud of him, earning his life between hills of envelopes at seventy-nine, being a useful man, defending himself, dying with dignity.

Persimmons

APRIL COMES AND APRIL GOES, AND MAY, AND June, all passing by without shedding a drop of rain. The sky has been a blue desert since spring. The sun rises every morning, a bright white disc growing larger and hotter each day. Cicadas drawl halfheartedly in the trees. The reservoir outside the village has shrunken into a bathtub for the boys, peeing at one another in the waist-deep water. Two girls, four or five, stand by the main road, their bare arms waving like desperate wings of baby birds as they chant to the motionless air, “Come the east wind. Come the west wind. Come the east-west-north-south wind and cool my armpits.”

Now that July has only to move its hind foot out the door in a matter of days, we have started to wish, instead of rain, that no rain will fall and the drought will last till the end of the harvest season. Peasants as we are, and worrying about the grainless autumn as we are, the drought has, to our surprise, brought a languid satisfaction to our lives. Every day, from morning till evening, we sit under the old pagoda tree, smoking our pipes and moving our bodies only when the tree’s shade threatens to leave us to the full spotlight of the sunshine. Our women are scratching their heads to come up with decent meals for us at home. The rice from last year will be running out soon, and before that, our women’s hair will be thinning from too much scratching until they will all go bald, but this, like all the minor tragedies in the world, has stopped bothering us. We sit and smoke until our daily bags of tobacco leaves run out. We stuff grass roots and half-dead leaves into the bags, and when they run out, we smoke dust.

“Heaven’s punishment, this drought.” Someone, one of us, finally speaks after a long period of silent smoking.

“Yes, too many deaths.”

“In that case, Heaven will never be happy again. People always die.”

“And we’ll never get a drop of rain.”

“Suits me well. I’m tired of farming anyway.”

“Yeah, right. Heaven comes to spank you, and you hurry up to bare your butts and say, Come and scratch me, I’ve got an itch here.”

“It’s called optimism, better than crying and begging for pardon.”

“A soft persimmon is what you are. I would just grab His pants and spank Him back.”

“Whoa, a hero we’ve got here.”

“Why not?”

“Because we were born soft persimmons. See any hero coming out of a persimmon?”

“Lao Da.”

“Lao Da? They popped his brain like a watermelon.” Lao Da was one of us. He should have been sitting here with us, smoking and waiting for his turn to speak out a line or two, to agree, or to contradict. When night falls, he would, like all of us, walk home and dote on his son, dripping drops of rice wine from his chopsticks to the boy’s mouth. Lao Da would have never bragged about being a hero, a man like him, who knew his place between the sky and the earth. But the thing is, Lao Da was executed before this drought began. On New Year’s Eve, he went into the county seat and shot seventeen people, fourteen men and three women, in seventeen different houses, sixteen of them dead on the spot, and the seventeenth lived only to see half a day of the new year.

“If you were born a soft persimmon, you’d better stay one”—someone says the comforting old wisdom.

“Persimmons are not born soft.”

“But they are valued for their softness.”

“Their ripeness.”

“What then if we stay soft and ripened?”

“Heaven will squeeze us until He gets tired of squeezing.”

“He may even start to like us because we are so much fun for Him.”

“We’ll just have our skins left by then.”

“Better than having no skins.”

“Better than having a bullet pop your brain.”

“Better than having no son to inherit your name.” Silent for a moment, we all relish the fact that we are alive, with boys to carry on our family names. Last year at this time, Lao Da’s son was one of the boys, five years old, running behind older boys like all small kids do, picking up the cicadas that the older boys shot down with their sling guns, adding dry twigs and dead leaves to the fire that was lit up to roast the bodies, waiting for his share of a burned cicada or two.

“Lao Da’s son died a bad one.”

“As if there is a good way to die!”

“Those seventeen, weren’t theirs good? Fast and painless.”

“But in the city, they said those seventeen all died badly.”

“Mercilessly murdered—wasn’t that how they put it in the newspapers?”

“But that’s true. They were murdered.”

“True, but in the city, they wouldn’t say the boy died badly. They didn’t even mention Lao Da’s son.”

“Of course they wouldn’t. Who would want to hear about a murderer’s son? A dead son, not to mention.”

“Even if they had written about him, what could they have said?”

“Drowned in a swimming accident, that’s what was written in his death certificate.”

“An accident happens every day, they would say.”

“The boy’s death wasn’t worth a story.”

The seventeen men and women’s stories, however, were read aloud to us at Lao Da’s trial, their enlarged pictures looking down at us from the top of the stage of a theater, a makeshift courthouse to contain the audience. We no longer remember their names, but some of the faces, a woman in heavy makeup who looked like a girl we were all obsessed with when we were young, a man with a sinister mole just below his left eye, another man with a pair of caterpillarlike eyebrows, these faces have stuck with us ever since. So have a few of the stories. A man who had been ice-swimming for twenty years and had never been ill for one day of his adult life. A mother of a teenage girl who had died earlier that year from leukemia. An official and his young secretary, who, as we heard from rumors, had been having an affair, but in the read-aloud stories, they were both the dear husband and wife to their spouses. The stories went on, and after a while we dozed off. What was the point of telling these dead people’s stories to us? Lao Da had no chance of getting away. He turned himself in to the police, knowing he would get a death sentence. Why not spare those relatives the embarrassment of wailing in the court? Besides, no story was read aloud about Lao Da. He was an atrocious criminal was all that was said about him.

“Think about it: Lao Da was the only one who died a good death.”

“A worthy one.”

“Got enough companions for the trip to the next world.”

“Got us into trouble, too.”

“It wasn’t his mistake. Heaven would’ve found another reason to squeeze us.”

“True. Lao Da was just an excuse.”

“Maybe—I have been thinking—maybe Heaven is angry not because of Lao Da, but for him?”

“How?”

“I heard from my grandpa, who heard from his grandpa, that there was this woman who was beheaded as a murderer, and for three years after her execution, not a drop of rain fell on the area.”

“I heard that from my grandpa, too. Heaven was avenging the woman.”

“But she was wronged. She did not kill her husband.”

“True.”

Lao Da was not wronged. You killed seventeen people and you had to pay with your life. Even Lao Da nodded in agreement when the judge read the sentence. He bowed to the judge and then to the guards when he was escorted off the stage. “I’m leaving one step earlier,” he said. “Will be waiting for you on the other side.” The guards, the judge, and the officials on and off the stage, they all tried to turn their eyes away from Lao Da, but he was persistent in his farewell. “Come over soon. Don’t let me wait for too long,” he said. We never expected Lao Da to have such a sense of humor. We grinned at him and he grinned back, but for a short moment only, as the judge waved for two more guards to push him to the backstage before he had time to give out too many invitations.

“Lao Da was a man.”

“Spanked Heaven.”

“But who’s got the upper hand now?”

“It means nothing to Lao Da now. He had his moment.”

“But it matters to us. We are punished for those who were wronged by death.”

“Who?”

“Those seventeen.”

“Not the wife of the cuckold, I hope.”

“Certainly not. She deserved it.”

“That woman was smaller than a toenail of Lao Da’s wife.”

“That woman was cheaper than a fart of Lao Da’s wife.”

“True.”

“Good woman Lao Da had as a wife.”

“Worthy of his life.”

We nod, and all think about Lao Da’s wife, secretly comparing her with our own women. Lao Da’s wife worked like a man in the field and behaved like a woman at home. She was plump, and healthy, and never made a sound when Lao Da beat her for good or bad reasons, or for no reason at all. Our wives are not as perfect. If they are not too thin they are too fat. If they are diligent, they do not leave us alone, nagging us for our laziness. They scream when beaten; even worse, sometimes they fight back.

“That good woman deserved better luck.”

“She deserved another son.”

“But her tubes were tied.”

“The poor woman would’ve lived if not for the Birth Control Office.”

“A group of pests they are, aren’t they?”

The Birth Control Office had been after Lao Da and his wife when they had not reported to the office after their firstborn.
One child per family,
they brushed in big red words on Lao Da’s house.
Only pigs and dogs give birth to more than
one child,
they wrote. But Lao Da and his woman never gave up. They played hide-and-seek with the Birth Control Office, hiding in different relatives’ places when the woman’s belly was growing big. After three daughters and a big debt for the fines, they finally had a son. The day the boy turned a hundred days old, Lao Da killed a goat and two suckling pigs for a banquet; afterward, the wife was sent to the clinic to have her tubes triumphantly tied.

“What’s the point of living if she could not bear another son for Lao Da? What’s the use of a hen if it doesn’t lay eggs?”

“True.”

“But that woman, she was something.”

“Wasn’t she?”

We exchange looks of awe, all knowing that our own women would never have had the courage to do what Lao Da’s wife did. Our women would have screamed and begged when we faced no other choices but divorcing them for a fertile belly, but Lao Da’s wife, she never acted like an ordinary woman. When we, along with Lao Da, dived into the reservoir to look for the body of Lao Da’s son, she drank all the pesticide she could lay her hands on, six bottles in a row, and lay down in bed. Six bottles of pesticide with that strength could cut her into pieces, but she did not make a single sound, her jaws clenched, waiting for death.

“An extraordinary woman.”

“Maybe Heaven is angry on her behalf.”

“She was not wronged by anybody.”

“But her soul was let down.”

“By whom?”

“Lao Da.”

“Lao Da avenged her, and their son.”

“Was it what she wanted?”

“What did she want?”

“Listen, she was making room for a new wife, so Lao Da could have more sons. She didn’t poison herself just to make Lao Da lose his mind and carry out some stupid plan to shoot seventeen people. Think about it. Lao Da got everything wrong.”

“Her death could have borne more fruits.”

“That’s true. Now she died for nothing.”

“And Lao Da, too.”

“And those seventeen.”

“And the three daughters, orphaned for nothing.”

We shake our heads, thinking about the three girls, their screaming and crying piercing our eardrums when the county officials grabbed their arms and pushed them into the jeep. They were sent to different orphanages in three counties, bad seeds of a cold-blooded killer. Lao Da should have listened to us and drowned them right after they were born, sparing them their troubles of living in pain.

“Lao Da could have done better.”

“Reckless man.”

We could have made a wiser choice than Lao Da. We would have let the dead be buried and gone on living, finding a new wife to bear a new son, working, our backs bent, to feed the wife and the children. There would be the pain, naturally, of waking up to the humiliation of being a soft persimmon, but humiliation does not kill a man. Nothing beats clinging to this life. Death ferries us nowhere.

“One man’s mistake can capsize a whole ship of people.”

“True.”

“Death of a son is far from the biggest tragedy.”

“Death of anybody shouldn’t be an excuse to lose one’s mind.”

“But Lao Da had the right to seek justice for his boy.”

“Justice? What kind of justice is there for us?”

“If one kills, one has to pay with his life. Nothing’s wrong with the old rule. The man who killed Lao Da’s son should have been punished.”

“He was punished all right. The first one Lao Da shot that night, wasn’t he?”

“Two shots in the brain. Two shots in the heart.”

“In front of his woman.”

“Well done it was.”

“Couldn’t be better.”

“When I heard the news, I felt I had just downed a full pot of sorghum wine.”

“It beats the best wine out there.”

“See, that’s what justice is.”

“True. One can never run away from justice’s palm.”

“You just have to wait for the time.”