China's Son (13 page)

“Mother,” he called out to my mom, as if he knew that we were behind the closed door listening to every single word, “get me the blue jacket and a flashlight. I need to go out.” Mom hurried in with his jacket, the one with all his acupuncture needles. I passed him the flashlight he kept under his pillow.

“God bless you. You are a kind man, as they said. I don't know how to thank you, Dr. Chen.”

“Please don't call me Doctor, just Ar Gang.” Dad was beaming. He didn't know what to do with the “God bless you” part.

“We can wait until tomorrow morning. I just needed to let my poor sister know. If you agree to treat her, then she will sleep peacefully tonight.”

“She needs to be seen as soon as possible,” Dad said.

“Oh, how can I thank you all!” She turned and bowed to each of us again.

We all bowed back.

After Dad left, I told the others that he had made a mistake.

“What mistake?” Mom asked.

“Well, when Professor Wei said ‘God bless you,' Dad should have said something polite back. I'm sure she was expecting it.”

“And what should he have said?” Mom asked.

“Buddha bless you!” They all laughed.

We were all proud of Dad. This case would put him at another level.

I was sure he had chills crawling up his spine at being called a doctor by her. This was a landmark, a milestone in Dad's career. It would be whispered about for a long time to come.

The other twin had had a light stroke. Dad soon began to see some progress. He reported that she was able to utter her first clear sound after two weeks of intensive and painful treatment. She was resilient and cooperative.

To thank Dad, the twins insisted on paying him for his work, but Dad wouldn't hear of it. They asked him whether there was anything they could do for us in return. Dad said that the twins begged him to think of a way, otherwise they would feel bad.

One night I said to Dad, “Maybe they could teach me English in their spare time.”

He looked up from his medical book and stared thoughtfully at me for a second. “That's a wonderful idea. But your level might be a little too low for them. They taught in college, remember?”

“Maybe they won't mind,” I begged. “I could try. Son, how did you come up with such an idea?”

“Well, they have been trying to find a way to thank you.”

“Yeah, but tell me why you thought of it.” He put aside his book.

“They talk about college in school. I have no future. I'm not doing well, and I'm a couple of years behind. Other subjects are easier to make up, and I'm working on it, but no one can help me with English.”

“What about the English teachers?”

“They made fun of me when I went back to their classes. Besides, their pronunciation is terrible. Each time my teacher reads English, he sounds like he's choking on a fishbone. He spits and gets red-faced. I don't think Englishmen talk like that.”

Dad laughed. “Now, son, if you do get to study with Professor Wei, I want you to make at least as much effort as you did with the flute,” he said seriously.

I nodded.

That night, before falling asleep, I blew out the light, knelt down on the pillow, and kowtowed to Buddha to beg for help. For the first time, I didn't know what to ask for. I buried my face in the soft pillow until I began to stifle myself. I murmured in my head the word
college,
but I could feel my face blush with shame for even thinking about it. College was for the superior few who not only had extreme intelligence but diligence, too. What was I? That night I dreamed about being sent to a remote farm where I was forced to dig a rocky hill until I collapsed. I woke up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat.

As the summer vacation drew near, Dad came back one day with the good news that Professor Wei would be willing to help tutor me in English. However, she would be away in Fuzhou for a couple of months, accompanying her sister, who would be in rehabilitation under the care of some famous doctors. She would see me when she returned.

I was happy and nervous at the same time. It gave me the whole summer to prepare, so maybe I wouldn't look too stupid. I drew up a study plan, leaving very little time for music or anything else.

A few days later, I-Fei rode his bike to my home and stopped briefly to tell me that he was leaving Yellow Stone for good and was transferring to another high school. Or maybe he would become a driver soon. He was extremely mysterious and his eyes kept looking beyond me. I asked him to stay for a while and chat about the old days, but he said it was a long way to travel to his mom's. So off he went, without
regret. I was deeply hurt. He had been a loyal friend and great to be with. School would not be the same without him.

One day, when the remote Ching Mountain was wrapped in layers of lingering clouds that looked like a woman's hair flying loose in the wind, the commune sent an announcement over the loudspeaker system to warn the farmers of an impending typhoon. Suddenly all was chaos. The brigade leader banged on every member's door, urging the villagers to head for the fields and harvest the rice. All of it, even that which was still green, was to be cut rather than be ruined in the flood.

My eldest sister was away in Han Jian, working at her temporary job in the canned food factory—a violation of the commune's no-working-out-of-town-in-harvesttime rule. Dad asked me if I could step in and do her work, so the next day, while it was still dark, Mom awakened me at dawn. My brother, Jin, and my two sisters, Huang and Ke, were already at the dining table stuffing themselves with fried rice by the bowlful and washing it down with the soup Mom had been preparing since midnight. My brother, now a veteran farmer at the age of twenty-two, could eat as many as three large bowlfuls before going to work. Everyone worked fourteen-hour days, and Jin couldn't stand being hungry in the fields. After burping a few times, he lit a cigarette and put on his straw hat, ready to go.

I had stuffed as much food into my mouth at four in the morning as I could. Mom had warned me that I wouldn't eat again until one in the afternoon. With my eyes half-closed, I smelled the freshly simmered rice as though it were still a sweet dream.

“Follow me, little brother.” After I, too, had burped with
satisfaction, Jin gave me a sickle and out I went, barefoot, into the dark fields.

The edge of the sky was whitish, as if someone had barely lifted the lid off the earth. We walked in silence among the weeds and grasses still wet with dew. I dragged my feet, fighting the fatigue of being woken at such an ungodly hour, a time when I should have been having the sweetest dreams. I stumbled blindly after my brother, the leader of the group, who whistled, hummed, and smoked as casually as if it were just another day.

“Here we are. We have about five
mu
s [about one acre] of rice to cut before the sun sets.” He pointed at the endless stretch of rice fields looming in the whitish dark. “The four of us will go in rows. I'll take the widest, then Ke and Huang will take the rows beside me. You, little brother, go slow and rest when you need to. Try to see if you can do that slice.” He indicated the edge of a huge plot and smiled at me.

“No problem. Give me more,” I said.

Jin showed me how to cut the tall rice stalks at their base and stack them behind me. He warned me not to cut my fingers in the dark. I stepped into the muddy, wet field, making a squishing noise. Some frogs and wild rats ran at the sound. Mosquitoes and insects hummed constantly around my nose, eyes, and ears, and I had to keep batting them away. I could feel the little worms and eels slithering away from under my toes. I closed my eyes and tried to think of something pleasant. The violin.

I grabbed big handfuls of stalks and cut them fiercely. My sisters stopped to check on me once in a while and were pleased with what I was doing. Soon the sun rose above the horizon and the endless fields gave off steam as the morning light embraced them. The rest of the land was still asleep.

The knee-high rice plants with needle-sharp leaves got in the way of my face and neck as I bent down. The fuzzy blades needed only to brush my skin to leave behind a red kiss. Soon the summer sun turned from gentle to glaring. Sweat beaded my forehead and trickled down into my eyebrows. My skin began to itch as though it were being attacked by thousands of slimy, crawling creatures angry that I had invaded their world with my sickle. I unbuttoned my drenched shirt and peeled it off, wiping my cut, sweaty face with it before tossing it behind me. I clenched my jaw to keep from yelling out loud at the pain of my burning skin. I didn't want my sisters and brother to think that their little brother wasn't farmer material. As I stretched my sore back, feeling like the old hunched merchant next door who didn't know what the sky looked like anymore, I saw that they were already thirty yards ahead of me, tirelessly bending over the rice that only seemed to end where the sky launched a rainbow.

My sisters and brother had grown up farming. I had seen them carry on their shoulders more than a hundred pounds of animal manure, to be used for fertilizer in the fields. Their skinny legs had trembled beneath the weight, but they dared not slow down for fear of criticism by the commune leaders, who were especially harsh to them. They had all endured, their teeth gritted. Brother Jin had once had a rusty nail go through his right foot. It took two months to heal. Huang had once become so dehydrated under the baking sun that she had passed out. And they all complained of constant back pain, but they had to push themselves on, for the commune would not allow any leaves of absence. Their food ration would have been withheld until those absences were made up. They had all grown tall, thin, and tanned like coconuts.

As I stood there watching them, I felt respect and fear. A
future as a farmer stretched out before me like the brutal fields. There would be endless toiling under a cruel sun, all for a meager existence that consisted of rice porridge and pickled vegetables. There would be hunger for at least three months a year, during which even the moldy yams became treasures on the dining table.

“Have a rest, brother,” I heard Jin shout at me. His voice sounded tiny in that enormous field. “You don't have to hurry.”

“Put your shirt back on or the sun will kill you,” Ke said, standing up to take a look at me.

“I'm fine, you guys.” But my mind was saying,
Let me go home.
I was sick of it already. I dropped my sickle and drummed my back with my fists, imitating my dad when he had had a hard day. I sighed at the narrow stretch of rice still before me, standing proud and nodding lazily in the occasional breeze. Slowly I bent my cracking back to pick up the sickle again, this time resting my elbows on my knees like a pregnant woman and hacking the plants stem by stem. I wished the sun would go down faster so that we could all go home and rest, but it stayed eternally motionless, a taunting fireball in the cloudless sky. Then I wished the rice would all fall on its back by itself.

The sun hung high above my head, and my back felt hot. Even the wet mud in the field was lukewarm, and the proud rice stems began to droop beneath the blaze, tired and sleepy. The day was only half done, but I was totally exhausted. My back hurt, my legs trembled, my face was covered with cuts, and my hands were a mass of raw blisters. I was so miserable I even didn't feel the walls of my stomach rub against each other. There was a burning in my throat that would take a whole fire brigade to snuff out. I felt angry, belittled, and
pathetic. I could not beg to get out of my duty. It was just not done in the Chen family. We all worked hard together and played together. Mom and Dad would never approve of my giving up in the middle of my task. I hung on a few more yards; then the blisters burst. The raw flesh looked red and stung like needles. I heard my sister call my name.

“Little brother, come eat.” I saw my mom stumbling along the edge of the field, carrying our lunch on a long bamboo pole. Her face was red beneath her straw hat.

I was so grateful to see her.

“Come wash your hands and eat, young farmer.” Mom smiled at me as I dragged my feet toward her. The beautiful smile on her face was the highest praise she could give us. My sisters and brother gathered around Mom, who was pouring water from a bucket and passing out wet towels.

“You're not doing too bad at all. With your help, we will finish before dark.” My brother beamed, slapping my back.

I screamed before I could stop myself.

“What's the matter? Did you burn your back?” Huang asked.

I was silent.

“I told you to leave your shirt on,” she said.

“It was wet.” They looked at me.

“Let me see your hands,” Jin said. I held them out. The blisters continued to ooze. “Pack up and go home after lunch, okay? I'm sorry, it must hurt like hell.” Mom and my sisters were upset. My mother hurriedly cleaned my bloody hands with a wet towel.

“I'm sorry, guys. But I can finish my share.”

“No, go home and take care of your hands.”

I was ashamed, feeling like a defector.

“It happened to me, too, when I started out.” Jin extended
his hands. “Now look at them. They feel like iron. Go home and try to be a good student. Maybe someday you'll go to college and won't have to do hard work like this anymore. You can still shoot for it. The rest of us are too old for that.” He looked at my sisters.