A Thousand Years of Good Prayers: Stories (17 page)

“Heaven sees, doesn’t He?”

“But if He does see, why are we punished? What kind of justice is this?”

“I’ve told you: there is no justice for us persimmons.”

“If you kill one person, you are a murderer. If you kill a lot, you are a hero.”

“Lao Da killed seventeen.”

“Not quite enough.”

“If you’ve made a point, you are a hero. If you’ve failed to make a point, you are nothing.”

“What’s the point to make?”

“There should be an order for everyone to follow.”

“A dreamer is what you are, asking for the impossible.”

“We all asked for that at the riot, but it didn’t get us anywhere.”

“That was because we gave up.”

“Bullshit. What’s the point fighting for a dead boy?”

“True.”

“What’s the point risking our lives for a nonexistent order?”

“True.”

We all nod, eager to shoo away the tiny doubt that circles us like a persistent fly. Of course, we did what we could— after the boy was found in the water, we marched together with his little body to the county seat, asking for justice. Hoes and spades and axes and our fists and throats we all brought with us, but when the government sent the troop of armed police in our direction, we decided to go back home. Violence will not solve your problem, we said to Lao Da. Go to the court and sue the man; follow what the law says, we told Lao Da.

“Maybe we shouldn’t have put the seed in Lao Da’s mind to sue the man.”

“Had I been him, I would have done the same.”

“The same what? Going around the city and asking justice for his son’s death? His son was drowned in a swimming accident—black words on a white page in his death certificate.”

“The other boys told a different story.”

“Why would the court want to listen to the story?”

We sit and smoke and wait for someone to answer the question. A group of boys are returning to the village from the reservoir, all dripping wet. Lao Da’s boy would never have been drowned if there had been a drought last year. We don’t worry about our sons this year, even the youngest ones, who cannot swim well. But last year was a different story. Last year’s reservoir was deep enough to kill Lao Da’s son.

“But don’t you think the officials made some mistakes too? What if they gave Lao Da some money to shut him up?”

“What if they put that man in jail, even for a month or two?”

“Isn’t that a smart idea? Or pretend to put the man in jail?”

“Yes, just tell Lao Da the man got his punishment.”

“At least treat Lao Da a little better.”

“Would have saved themselves.”

“But how could they have known? They thought Lao Da was a soft persimmon.”

“Squeezed him enough for fun.”

“Squeezed a murderer out of it.”

“Lao Da was the last one you would think to snap like that.”

“Amazing how much one could take and then all of a sudden he broke.”

“True.”

“But back to my point, what’s the good losing one’s mind over a dead son and a dead wife?”

“Easier said than done.”

“True. How many times did we tell him to stop pursuing the case?”

“Sometimes a man sets his mind on an idea, and he becomes a hunting dog, only seeing one thing.”

“And now we are punished for his stupidity.”

We shake our heads, sorry for Lao Da, more so for ourselves. Lao Da should have listened to us. Instead, he was writing down the names and addresses of those officials who had treated him like a dog. How long he had been preparing for the killing we do not know. He had the patience to wait for half a year until New Year’s Eve, the best time to carry out a massive murder, when all the people were staying home for the year-end banquet.

“At least we have to give Lao Da the credit for carrying out his plan thoroughly.”

“He had a brain when it came to revenge.”

“And those seventeen dead souls. Think about how shocked they were when they saw Lao Da that night.”

“I hope they had time to regret what they had done to Lao Da.”

“I hope their families begged Lao Da for them as Lao Da had begged them for his boy.”

“You’d never know what could come from a soft persimmon.”

“I hope they were taught a lesson.”

“They’re dead.”

“Then someone else was taught the lesson.”

“Quiet! Be careful in case someone from the county hears you.”

“So hot they won’t be here.”

“The reservoir is not deep enough for them now.”

“The reservoir is really the cause of all these bad things. Think about the labors we put into the reservoir.”

We nod and sigh. A few years ago, we put all our free time into building the reservoir, hoping to end our days of relying on Heaven’s mood for the rain. The reservoir soon became an entertaining site for the county officials. On summer afternoons, they came in jeeps, swimming in our water, fishing our fish. The man was one of the judges—but what indeed was his line of work we never got to know, as we call everybody working in the county court “judge.” That judge and his companions came, all drunk before they went into the water. Something Lao Da’s son said, a joke maybe, or just a nickname he gave to the judge, made him angry. He picked up Lao Da’s son and threw him into the deeper water of the reservoir. A big splash the other boys remembered. They cried, begged, but the judges all said it would teach the little bastard a lesson. The boys sent the fastest one among them to run for help. Lao Da’s son was found later that night, his eyelids, lips, fingers, toes, and penis all eaten into bad shapes by the feasting fish.

“Remember, Lao Da was one of those who really pushed for the reservoir.”

“He worked his back bent for it.”

“The poor man didn’t know what he was sweating for.”

“None of us knows.”

“At least we don’t have to sweat this summer.”

“Of course, you don’t sweat waiting for death.”

“Death? No, not that bad.”

“Not that bad? Let me ask you—what will we feed our women and kids in the winter?”

“Whatever is left from the autumn.”

“Nothing will be left.”

“Then feed them our cows and horses.”

“Then what?”

“Then we’ll all go to the county and become beggars.”

“It’s illegal to beg.”

“I don’t care.”

“If you want to do something illegal, why be a beggar and be spat at by everybody? I would go to the county and request to be fed.”

“How?”

“With my fist and my axe.”

“Don’t talk big. We were there once with our fists and our axes.”

“But that was for the dead boy. This time it’ll be for our own sons.”

“Do you think it’ll work?”

“You have to try.”

“Nonsense. If it works, it would have worked last time. Lao Da wouldn’t have had to kill and we wouldn’t have to be punished.”

Nobody talks. The sun has slowly hauled itself to the southwest sky. The cicadas stop their chanting, but before we have time to enjoy the silence, they pick up the old tune again. Some of us draw and puff imaginary smokes from our pipes that are no longer lit; others pick up dry twigs from the ground, sketching in the dust fat clouds, heavy with rain.

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

A ROCKET SCIENTIST, MR. SHI TELLS PEOPLE when they ask about his profession in China. Retired, he then adds, out of modesty, when people marvel. Mr. Shi learned the phrase from a woman during a layover at Detroit, when he tried to explain to her his work, drawing pictures when his English failed to help. “A rocket scientist!” the woman exclaimed, laughing out loud.

People he meets in America, already friendly, seem more so when they learn his profession, so he likes to repeat the words whenever possible. Five days into his visit at his daughter’s place, in this Midwest town, Mr. Shi has made quite a few acquaintances. Mothers with babies in strollers wave at him. An old couple, the husband in suit and the wife in skirt, show up in the park every morning at nine o’clock, her hand on his arm; they stop and greet him, the husband always the one speaking, the wife smiling. A woman living in the retirement home a block away comes to talk to him. She is seventy-seven, two years his senior, and was originally from Iran. Despite the fact they both speak little English, they have no problem understanding each other, and in no time they become friends.

“America good country,” she says often. “Sons make rich money.”

America is indeed a good country. Mr. Shi’s daughter works as a librarian in the East Asian department in the college library and earns more in a year than he made in twenty.

“My daughter, she make lots of money, too.”

“I love America. Good country for everybody.”

“Yes, yes. A rocket scientist I am in China. But very poor. Rocket scientist, you know?” Mr. Shi says, his hands making a peak.

“I love China. China a good country, very old,” the woman says.

“America is young country, like young people.”

“America a happy country.”

“Young people are more happy than old people,” Mr. Shi says, and then realizes that it is too abrupt a conclusion. He himself feels happier at this moment than he remembers he ever did in his life. The woman in front of him, who loves everything with or without a good reason, seems happy, too.

Sometimes they run out of English. She switches to Persian, mixed with a few English words. Mr. Shi finds it hard to speak Chinese to her. It is she who carries the conversation alone then, for ten or twenty minutes. He nods and smiles effusively. He does not understand much of what she is saying, but he feels her joy in talking to him, the same joy he feels listening to her.

Mr. Shi starts to look forward to the mornings when he sits in the park and waits for her. “Madam” is what he uses to address her, as he has never asked her name. Madam wears colors that he does not imagine a woman of her age, or where she came from, would wear, red and orange and purple and yellow. She has a pair of metal barrettes, a white elephant and a blue-and-green peacock. They clasp on her thin hair in a wobbly way that reminds him of his daughter when she was a small child—before her hair was fully grown, with a plastic butterfly hanging loose on her forehead. Mr. Shi, for a brief moment, wants to tell Madam how much he misses the days when his daughter was small and life was hopeful. But he is sure, even before he starts, that his English would fail him. Besides, it is never his habit to talk about the past.

IN THE EVENINGS, when his daughter comes home,Mr. Shi has the supper ready. He took a cooking class after his wife died, a few years ago, and ever since has studied the culinary art with the same fervor with which he studied mathematics and physics when he was a college student. “Every man is born with more talents than he knows how to use,” he says at dinner. “I would’ve never imagined taking up cooking, but here I am, better than I imagined.”

“Yes, very impressive,” his daughter says.

“And likewise”—Mr. Shi takes a quick glance at his daughter—“life provides more happiness than we ever know. We have to train ourselves to look for it.”

His daughter does not reply. Despite the pride he takes in his cooking and her praises for it, she eats little and eats out of duty. It worries him that she is not putting enough enthusiasm into life as she should be. Of course, she has her reasons, newly divorced after seven years of marriage. His ex-son-in-law went back to Beijing permanently after the divorce. Mr. Shi does not know what led the boat of their marriage to run into a hidden rock, but whatever the reason is, it must not be her fault. She is made for a good wife, soft-voiced and kindhearted, dutiful and beautiful, a younger version of her mother. When his daughter called to inform him of the divorce, Mr. Shi imagined her in inconsolable pain, and asked to come to America, to help her recover. She refused, and he started calling daily and pleading, spending a good solid month of his pension on the long-distance bill. She finally agreed when he announced that his wish for his seventy-fifth birthday was to take a look at America. A lie it was, but the lie turned out to be a good reason. America is worth taking a look at; more than that, America makes him a new person, a rocket scientist, a good conversationalist, a loving father, a happy man.

After dinner, Mr. Shi’s daughter either retreats to her bedroom to read or drives away and comes home at late hours. Mr. Shi asks to go out with her, to accompany her to the movies he imagines that she watches alone, but she refuses in a polite but firm manner. It is certainly not healthy for a woman, especially a contemplative woman like his daughter, to spend too much time alone. He starts to talk more to tackle her solitude, asking questions about the part of her life he is not witnessing. How was her work of the day? he asks. Fine, she says tiredly. Not discouraged, he asks about her colleagues, whether there are more females than males, how old they are, and, if they are married, whether they have children. He asks what she eats for lunch and whether she eats alone, what kind of computer she uses, and what books she reads. He asks about her old school friends, people he believes she is out of contact with because of the shame of the divorce. He asks about her plan for the future, hoping she understands the urgency of her situation. Women in their marriageable twenties and early thirties are like lychees that have been picked from the tree; each passing day makes them less fresh and less desirable, and only too soon will they lose their value, and have to be gotten rid of at a sale price.

Mr. Shi knows enough not to mention the sale price. Still, he cannot help but lecture on the fruitfulness of life. The more he talks, the more he is moved by his own patience. His daughter, however, does not improve. She eats less and becomes quieter each day. When he finally points out that she is not enjoying her life as she should, she says, “How do you get this conclusion? I’m enjoying my life all right.”

“But that’s a lie. A happy person will never be so quiet!”

She looks up from the bowl of rice. “Baba, you used to be very quiet, remember? Were you unhappy then?”

Mr. Shi, not prepared for such directness from his daughter, is unable to reply. He waits for her to apologize and change the topic, as people with good manners do when they realize they are embarrassing others with their questions, but she does not let him go. Her eyes behind her glasses, wide open and unrelenting, remind him of her in her younger years. When she was four or five, she went after him every possible moment, asking questions and demanding answers. The eyes remind him of her mother too; at one time in their marriage, she gazed at him with this questioning look, waiting for an answer he did not have for her.

He sighs. “Of course I’ve always been happy.”

“There you go, Baba. We can be quiet
and
happy, can’t we?”

“Why not talk about your happiness with me?” Mr. Shi says. “Tell me more about your work.”

“You didn’t talk much about your work either, remember? Even when I asked.”

“A rocket scientist, you know how it was. My work was confidential.”

“You didn’t talk much about anything,” his daughter says.

Mr. Shi opens his mouth but finds no words coming. After a long moment, he says, “I talk more now. I’m improving, no?”

“Sure,” his daughter says.

“That’s what you need to do. Talk more,” Mr. Shi says. “And start now.”

His daughter, however, is less enthusiastic. She finishes her meal quickly in her usual silence and leaves the apartment before he finishes his.

THE NEXT MORNING, Mr. Shi confesses to Madam, “The daughter, she’s not happy.”

“Daughter a happy thing to have,” Madam says.

“She’s divorced.”

Madam nods, and starts to talk in Persian. Mr. Shi is not sure if Madam knows what divorce means. A woman so boldly in love with the world like her must have been shielded from life’s unpleasantness, by her husband, or her sons maybe. Mr. Shi looks at Madam, her face brightened by her talking and laughing, and almost envies her for the energy that his daughter, forty years younger, does not possess. For the day Madam wears a bright orange blouse with prints of purple monkeys, all tumbling and grinning; on her head she wears a scarf with the same pattern. A displaced woman she is, but no doubt happily displaced. Mr. Shi tries to recall what he knows about Iran and the country’s recent history; with his limited knowledge, all he can conclude is that Madam must be a lucky woman. A lucky man he is, too, despite all the big and small imperfections. How extraordinary, Mr. Shi thinks, that Madam and he, from different worlds and with different languages, have this opportunity to sit and talk in the autumn sunshine.

“In China we say,
Xiu bai shi ke tong zhou,
” Mr. Shi says when Madam stops. It takes three hundred years of prayers to have the chance to cross a river with someone in the same boat, he thinks of explaining to Madam in English, but then, what’s the difference between the languages? Madam would understand him, with or without the translation. “
That we
get to meet and talk to each other—it must have taken a long
time of good prayers to get us here,
” he says in Chinese to Madam.

Madam smiles in agreement.

“There’s a reason for every relationship, that’s what the saying means. Husband and wife, parents and children, friends
and enemies, strangers you bump into in the street. It takes
three thousand years of prayers to place your head side by side
with your loved one’s on the pillow. For father and daughter?
A thousand years, maybe. People don’t end up randomly as father and daughter, that’s for sure. But the daughter, she
doesn’t understand this. She must be thinking I’m a nuisance.
She prefers I shut up because that’s how she’s known me always. She doesn’t understand that I didn’t talk much with her
mother and her because I was a rocket scientist back then.
Everything was confidential. We worked all day and when
evening came, the security guards came to collect all our notebooks and scratch papers. We signed our names on the archive
folders, and that was a day’s work. Never allowed to tell our
family what we were doing. We were trained not to talk.”

Madam listens, both hands folding on her heart. Mr. Shi hasn’t been sitting so close to a woman his age since his wife died; even when she was alive, he had never talked this much to her. His eyes feel heavy. Imagine he’s traveled half a world to his daughter, to make up for all the talks he denied her when she was younger, but only to find her uninterested in his words. Imagine Madam, a stranger who does not even know his language, listens to him with more understanding. Mr. Shi massages his eyes with his two thumbs. A man his age shouldn’t indulge himself in unhealthy emotions; he takes long breaths, and laughs slightly.
“Of course,
there’s a reason for a bad relationship, too—I must be praying
halfheartedly for a thousand years for the daughter.”

Madam nods solemnly. She understands him, he knows, but he does not want to burden her with his petty unhappiness. He rubs his hands as if to get rid of the dust of memory. “Old stories,” he says in his best English. “Old stories are not exciting.”

“I love stories,” Madam says, and starts to talk. Mr. Shi listens, and she smiles all the time. He looks at the grinning monkeys on her head, bobbing up and down when she breaks out laughing.

“Lucky people we are,” he says after she finishes talking. “In America, we can talk anything.”

“America good country.” Madam nods. “I love America.”

THAT EVENING, Mr. Shi says to his daughter, “I met this Iranian lady in the park. Have you met her?”

“No.”

“You should meet her sometime. She’s so very optimistic. You may find her illuminating for your situation.”

“What’s my situation?” his daughter asks without looking up from her food.

“You tell me,” Mr. Shi says. When his daughter makes no move to help the conversation, he says, “You’re experiencing a dark time.”

“How do you know she would shed light on my life?”

Mr. Shi opens his mouth, but cannot find an answer. He is afraid that if he explains he and Madam talk in different languages, his daughter will think of him as a crazy old man. Things that make sense at one time suddenly seem absurd in a different light. He feels disappointed in his daughter, someone he shares a language with but with whom he can no longer share a dear moment. After a long pause, he says, “You know, a woman shouldn’t ask such direct questions. A good woman is deferential and knows how to make people talk.”