China's Son (12 page)

Dad said it would probably be a good time to start being serious about school. He had just heard from my aunt in Shanghai that her son was already preparing for the college entrance examinations that were open to all test-takers, regardless of age, race, or family background. People would be admitted solely on the basis of their scores.

He added that I was the only one in our family who was still in school and therefore able to benefit from such great news.

I went to sleep with a heavy heart. I kept thinking about the indifferent way the teachers treated me. I had been acting like a bad student.

No, I
was
a bad student. Now I was miles behind everyone. It was unfair. When I was a good student, winning
honor for the elementary school with perfect marks, they hadn't needed high marks. Now, when they did want them, I was at the bottom.

Next day, I put away my music, wrapped up the small Beethoven bust that I had kept at my bedside, and stored it under my bed. I loosened the strings on my violin and locked its wooden box. Then I searched for all the textbooks I had long since stopped bringing to school. They were new, untouched, and covered with dust. I cleaned them and laid them neatly on the desk beside my bed. Slowly I leafed through the physics book. It was filled with strange symbols and new formulas, expressed in oddly shaped letters and filled with words I couldn't understand. It didn't look as if I could just close my eyes and sink my teeth into the subject. The only formula I recognized was H
₂
O. I shut the books with dismay and hopelessness. Time had deserted me, or, rather, I had deserted myself. The knife of regret cut deeply into my soul.

Finally, I opened my English book. On the first page I had drawn the face of my wheezing English teacher, with his dead eyes and stooped back. The sketch had really captured his spirit. I gave a small laugh and turned the page. It listed the twenty-six letters of the English alphabet.

I stood up, closed my bedroom door to make sure no one would hear me, and twisted my tongue and lips trying to pronounce each letter. I could only get as far as
F.
Next to the letter
G
I had drawn a chicken, because the Chinese word for chicken came closest to the sound of the English
G.
The letter
H
became
love paint.
For the rest, the symbols I had drawn and characters I had written next to them didn't help. It was another dead subject for me. I slammed the book
closed and stared at my violin for a long time, until I drifted into a little nap.

“Hey, what's this?” I-Fei asked jokingly the following morning before class. “Is this a schoolbag, or are my eyes seeing things?”

“We have to do some studying,” I said seriously.

“We have no time for this, Da. Remember, we're having a major rehearsal this afternoon. You're looking a little down after the audition.”

“I don't know. Maybe we shouldn't be skipping class for the rehearsals anymore.”

“And then what?” He pulled out a filtered cigarette from his pocket and lit it. “Grab one for yourself.” He threw me the whole pack.

“Sit in class and try to learn something. The whole country is talking about college. My cousin in Shanghai is attending a crash course to prepare for the entrance exams.”

“And
you're
thinking of college?” He looked at me, surprised.

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean, when was the last time you did your homework?”

“There's always time.”

“No time can make up for that. We're two years behind everything. And this is a lousy school to begin with. The teachers are suckers. Good thing I don't have to depend on them.”

“Right, you can always go and become a driver.”

“I'll make you a driver too. I really could try my dad on that one,” he said, smiling. “Here, smoke.”

I pushed his hand away.

The bell rang. The first class was English.

“Let's go in, I-Fei.”

“You go ahead; let me finish smoking,” he said coolly, a little grumpy at my new attitude.

I threw myself inside through our usual route, the window, and landed right in my seat. The teacher was leaning against the desk, trying to catch his breath. His glasses slipped to the tip of his nose and his beady eyes were looking around but not seeing anything. Boys and girls were still talking noisily. The teacher commanded no respect. He didn't care. He weighed two pieces of chalk in his hands.

One he held like a cigarette, the other was to throw at the most badly behaved student in class. You could count on being hit right on the tip of your nose.

“To what do I owe this honor, Mr. Da?” the teacher asked.

I ducked down. I hadn't been to his class for a long time.

“No rehearsal today?” The teacher threw the chalk at me. It landed on my head.

The class laughed.

I stayed down, quiet.

“If you had let me know earlier, I could have prepared something special for you, like an ABC lesson.” He laughed along with the class and, as usual, ended up coughing until his face turned blue. He leaned on the desk until the spasm passed.

I felt embarrassed and ashamed, but I was angry, too.

Cough some more, you fool,
I thought.

Outside the window, I-Fei was making a face at me, gesturing for me to join him.

“Yeah, why don't you just let yourself out and have a smoke with your pal down there?” The teacher caught his
breath, then threw another piece of chalk at I-Fei, which hit his forehead.

Laughter again.

I could feel my face turn red, then white. I decided to leave the room and never return. As I crossed the threshold, I heard him say, “Now we can start our lesson.”

I-Fei had already lit a cigarette for me. Quietly I took a long drag as soon as I was out of the teacher's sight.

“What did I tell you?” I-Fei said. “There's no place for us there. We might as well be the kind of students that we have always been.”

“I wasn't always like this,” I said, puffing.

“I know,” I-Fei said. “You should have learned then what you know now.”

“You know everything.”

“You're my best friend. People told me things after we beat up that Han guy.”

“I used to be a very good student.”

“But you were a miserable wimp,” he said.

“That wasn't my fault,” I said harshly.

I-Fei changed the subject. “Suppose you
were
a good student. Do you think a college would take you?”

“Do you mean with my family background?” He nodded.

“But my aunt said it was regardless of one's family background.”

“And you believe that?”

“Why shouldn't I?”

“Because my dad said it was just a pretense. There will be different standards for admission. This society isn't going to change that fast. No offense to you people.” He shook his head and threw a stone at a passing bird as we left school for the day.

From then on, miserably, I carried my schoolbag, heavy with untouched books, heading for classes I didn't understand. I would ask this student and that student, humbly trying to catch up on my own. But the more I learned, the more I realized how much I had missed and the more depressed I got. I was too ashamed to talk about it to my parents or to any teachers, most of whom had given up on me by now.

But my parents had noticed that I had been spending more time in my room, using a kerosene lamp at night, looking at my textbooks, and occasionally gingerly trying out some English pronunciations. I often heard Sen and Mo Gong whistling outside my window to get my attention, but I tried to control myself.

One night, the whistling lasted longer and I knew they couldn't wait anymore.

“You've become a bookworm nowadays,” Mo Gong said.

“You can't simply close the window and not answer us.”

“What's going on, brother?” I asked.

“Well, Yi is leaving.”

“Where's he going?”

“His grandpa is retiring from the factory and Yi is taking over his job as an office worker.”

We walked to Yi's workshop, where there was a table of food waiting for us. Sen, Siang, and Yi rushed over, picked me up, and threw me onto the sawdust.

“The place is clean!” I exclaimed to Yi, dusting my coat. “You're really getting out of here?”

“Yeah. I was hoping you would get into the county performing troupe so that we could be working in Putien together.”

“You have to go alone for now,” I said.

“Let's celebrate our first breakthrough among the brothers,” Sen said. “Yi, don't you ever forget us. I'm still the eldest.”

“He's going to marry a fair-skinned Putien City girl and she's going to say she'll leave if you keep those dirty friends,” Siang joked.

“Talk about marrying,” Sen said, “Da, you should write a letter for Yi to his old master's daughter, Ping. Remember her? And tell her the news.”

“Maybe in English,” Mo Gong said. “I heard you making those funny sounds.”

“Shut up, you,” I said good-naturedly.

“Don't be shy. We want you to do good. I would want you, if anyone, to make us proud by being a college student,” Sen said. “The rest of us are history. You're our only hope.”

The party ended with us wrestling each other on the soft sawdust. I promised to go with Yi to his factory the next day and help him carry the luggage. We chatted about the future until midnight. I told them I wanted to go to college. They laughed and said if I could master the art of that four-stringed thing the name of which they still didn't quite know how to say, then I should have no problem. They were my true friends. There was a generous spirit among them, not jealousy. As I walked home alone in the darkness, whistling, I saw a star shine brilliantly over the top of our ancient pine tree to the east of Yellow Stone. I was like that, only a twinkle in the dark.

The western tip of Yellow Stone was all river and ancient lychee trees that dipped low in the water. In summer, strawhatted boatmen poled along slowly between the green branches that were in their way. The lychees, ripe and juicy, burned red like the cheeks of a gaudily painted woman and made the branches droop even lower. Only cicadas disturbed the tranquillity.

In the crook of the river, where the houses thinned and the trees thickened, nestled a three-story white house with a red-tiled roof. A tall wall fenced it off. It was a small world within itself. The entrance stayed closed at all times. Only the tops of papaya trees could be seen from the outside. The little white house belonged to twin sisters, the Weis, who were Baptists and had never married. In the town where Buddha called the shots, the little white house by the river was a symbol of something alien yet sacred.

People said the twins read the Bible in the sun and prayed
under the moonlight. They lived a quiet life and paid for a maid to do the shopping and cleaning for them. Occasionally, they had visitors on weekends. Townspeople whispered that they were secretly involved in some sort of ceremony. Their father was one of the first Chinese Baptist ministers in Putien, and the twins had grown up in a Baptist church run by American missionaries. The Americans taught them English, and they went on to become English professors at a teachers' college in Fuzhou. When the college closed down, they retired into the country, where their father had held the first Sunday service in the history of Yellow Stone.

The white-haired twin sisters enjoyed a special status among the townspeople. They were the closest thing to real Westerners. Those few who had been inside the home had had a glimpse of a mysterious life behind those closed doors.

The old vegetable man claimed to have heard the twin sisters talking in “the language of the red hair,” probably English, one day when he was making a delivery. It was gentle, like singing, he said. The old cleaning lady insisted that the twins only used forks and knives. It puzzled the local people. It was such a terribly unlucky thing to do, using a knife at the dining table. Maybe it was the different god they believed in who helped them ward off the consequences of all the wrong things they did.

One day, after dark, we heard a gentle knocking at our door.

Dad opened it. Outside stood the white-haired Professor Wei, one of the twin sisters. Upon recognizing her, Dad took a step back.

“May I come in, please?” Her voice was so gentle and sincere.

“Of course, of course.” Dad opened the door wide and let her in.

She bowed and smiled sweetly at us. We put down our chopsticks and bowed back to her. She was a petite lady in her late sixties. Upright and dignified, she seemed taller than her mere five feet. Her white hair was braided and twisted into a bun in back, neat and elegant.

“How may I help you, Professor?” Dad asked politely. He gestured for us kids to leave the room. We hurried out, then stuck our ears against the closed door.

“Please forgive me for intruding at such a late hour.” She took out a handkerchief and continued. “My poor dear sister has had a minor stroke, and now her mouth is twisted to one side. I have heard of your reputation. Can you please help her?”

“I am flattered.” Dad rubbed his hands like a joyful kid. “I'll be more than happy to see what I can do.” Dad was in his best mood when he was called upon to help others.