A Thousand Years of Good Prayers: Stories (12 page)

The Bible was discovered by Han’s father and then burned by his mother. Afterward, Han was no longer able to face his friend. He made up excuses to stay away from his friend; he found fault with his friend and argued with him for any trivial reason. Their friendship—their love—did not last long afterward. It would have been doomed anyway, a first love that was going nowhere, but the way it ended, someone other than himself was to be blamed. “Remember, it’s you who burned the Bible,” Han says.

“Yes,” his mother says, trying hard to find words. “But Baba said it was not appropriate to keep it. It was a different time then.”

“Yes, a different time then because it was Baba who gave out orders, and it was the communist god you both worshipped. And now Baba is gone, and you’ve got yourself a new god to please,” Han says. “Mama, why can’t you use your own brain to think?”

“I’m learning, Han. This is the first decision that I’ve made on my own.”

A wrong decision it is, but Han only smiles out of pity and tolerance.

LATER, WHEN HIS mother cautiously suggests a visit to the church, Han says he will accompany her for the bus ride. It won’t hurt to go in and listen, his mother says, but Han only nods noncommittally.

West Hall, the church that Han used to ride his bicycle past on his way to high school years ago, remains the same gray nondescript building inside the rusty iron fence, but the alleys around were demolished, and the church, once a prominent landmark of the area, is now dwarfed by the surrounding shopping centers. Han watches people of all ages enter the church, nodding at one another politely. He wonders how much these people understand of their placing their faiths in the wrong hands, and how much they care about it.

A few steps away from the entrance, Han’s mother stops. “Are you coming in with me?” she asks.

“No, I’ll sit in the Starbucks and wait for you.”

“Starbucks?”

“The coffee shop over there.”

Han’s mother stretches and looks at it, no doubt the first time she has noticed its existence. She nods without moving. “Mama, go in now,” Han says.

“Ah, yes, just a moment,” she says and looks around with expectation. Soon two little beggars, a boy and a girl, run across the street to her. Brother and sister they seem to be, both dressed up in rags, their hands and faces smeared with dirt and soot. The boy, seven or eight years old, holds out a hand when he sees Han. “Uncle, spare a penny. Our baba died with a large debt. Our mama is sick. Spare a penny, please. We need money to send our mama to the hospital.”

The girl, a few years younger, follows suit and chants the same lines. Han looks at the boy. There is a sly expression in the boy’s eyes that makes Han uncomfortable. He knows they are children employed for the begging job, if not by their parents, then by relatives or neighbors. The adults, older and less capable of moving people with their tragedies, must be monitoring the kids from not far away. Han shakes his head. He does not have one penny for such kids; on his previous vacations, he even fought with the kids, who grabbed his legs tightly and threatened not to loose their grip until they were paid. Han is not a stingy person. In America he gives away dollar bills to the musicians playing in the street, quarters and smaller change for homeless people who sit at the same spot all day long. They are honest workers according to Han’s standard, and he gives them what they deserve. But child laborers are not acceptable, and people using the children deserve nothing. Han pushes the boy’s hand away, and says, “Leave me alone.”

“Don’t bother Uncle,” Han’s mother says to the children, and they both stop chanting right away. Han’s mother takes out two large bills from her purse, and gives one to each child. “Now come with Granny,” she says. The children carefully put the money away and follow Han’s mother to the church entrance.

“Wait a minute, Mama,” Han says. “You pay them every week to go to church with you?”

“It can only benefit them,” Han’s mother says.

“But this is not right.”

“It doesn’t hurt anyone. They would have to beg in the street otherwise.”

“It hurts my principles,” Han says. He takes out several bills from his wallet and says to the boy, “Now listen. I will pay you double the amount if both of you return the money to her and do not go to the church today.”

“Han!”

“Hold it, Mama. Don’t say a word,” Han says. He squats down and flips the bills in front of the children’s eyes. The girl looks up at the boy, and the boy looks up at Han’s mother for a moment and then looks down at the money. The cunning and the calculation in the boy’s eyes infuriate Han; he imagines his mother deceived even by such small children. “Come on,” he says to the boy, still smiling. A few seconds later, the boy accepts Han’s money and gathers the bill from his sister’s hand and returns the two bills to Han’s mother. “Good,” Han says. “You can go now.”

The children walk away, stopping people in the sidewalk and repeating their begging lines. Han turns to his mother with a smile. “What did this tell you, Mama? The only thing that matters to them is money.”

“Why did you do that?” his mother says.

“I need to protect you.”

“I don’t need your protection,” Han’s mother says.

“You can say that, Mama,” Han says. “But the truth is, I’m protecting you, and it’s my duty to do this.”

“What right do you have to talk about the truth?” his mother says, and turns away for the church.

HAN TRIES TO convince himself that he is not upset by his mother’s words. Still, he feels hurt. He is his mother’s son. The boy who accepted the money from him is a son, too, but someday he will become a husband, a father, maybe sending his sons and daughters into the street to beg, maybe giving them a better life. Han will never become a father—he imagines himself known to the world only as someone’s son. Not many men would remain only as sons all their lives, but Jesus is one. It’s not easy being a son with duties, Han thinks, and smiles bitterly to himself. What right does he have? His right is that he lives with his principles. He works. He got laid off, struggled for a few months, but found work again. He pays his rent. He greets his neighbors. He goes to the gym. He watches news channels but not reality shows. He sponsors a young girl’s education in a rural province in China, sending checks regularly for her tuition and her living expenses. He masturbates, but not too often. He does not believe in long-term relationships, but once in a while, he meets men in local bars, enjoys physical pleasure with them, and uses condoms. He flirts with other men, faceless as he himself is, on the Internet, but he makes sure they talk about arts too. He loves his mother. He sends two thousand dollars to her every year, even though she has said many times that she does not need the money. He sends the money still, because he is her son, and it’s his duty to protect her and nurture her, as she protected and nurtured him in his younger years. He saves up his vacation and goes home to spend time with her, but what happens when they are together? A day into the vacation and they are already hurting each other.

Han walks across the street to the Starbucks. He feels tired and sad, but then it is his mother’s mistake, not his, that makes them unhappy, and he decides to forgive her. A few steps away from the coffee shop, there is a loud squealing noise of tires on the cement road. Han turns and looks. Men and women are running toward a car, where a crowd has already gathered. A traffic accident, people are yelling, a kid run over. More people swarm toward the accident, some dialing the emergency number on their cellphones, others calling their friends and family, reporting a traffic accident they are witnessing, gesturing as they speak, full of excitement. A man dressed in old clothes runs toward the crowd. “My child,” he screams.

Han freezes, and then starts walking again, away from the accident. He does not want to see the man, who must have been smoking in a shaded corner a block or two away, cry now like a bereaved parent. He does not want to know if it’s the young girl with the singsong voice, or her brother with the sly smile in his eyes, that was run over. Traffic accidents happen every day in this city. People pay others to take their driving tests for them or buy their driver’s licenses directly from the black market; cars do not yield to pedestrians, pedestrians do not fear the moving vehicles. If he does not look, it could be any child, a son, a daughter, someone irrelevant and forgettable.

But somehow, Han knows it’s the boy. It has to be the boy, ready to deceive anyone who is willing to be deceived. The boy will remain a son and never become a father. He will be forgotten by the crowd once his blood is rinsed clean from the ground; his sister will think of him but soon she will forget him, too. He will live on only in Han’s memory, a child punished not for his own insincerity but someone else’s disbelief.

Han sits in Starbucks by the window and waits for his mother. When she finally walks out of the church, the street is cleared and cleaned, not a trace of the accident left. Han walks out to meet his mother, his hands shaking. Across the street she smiles at him, hope and love in her eyes, and Han knows she has already forgotten the unpleasant incident from two hours earlier. She will always forgive him because he is her son. She will not give up her effort to save his soul because he is her son. But he does not want to be forgiven, or saved. He waits until his mother safely arrives at his side of the street, and says without looking at her, “Mama, there is something I want you to know. I’ll never get married. I only like men.”

Han’s mother does not speak. He smiles and says, “A shock, right? What would Baba say if he knew this? Disgusting, isn’t it?”

After a long moment, Han’s mother says, “I’ve guessed. That’s why I didn’t try matchmaking for you this time.”

“So you see, I’m doomed,” Han says. “I’m one of those— what did we say of those counterrevolutionaries back then?—stinky and hard and untransformable as a rock in an outhouse pit.”

“I wouldn’t say so,” Han’s mother says.

“Admit it, Mama. I’m doomed. Whoever your god is, he wouldn’t be fond of people like me.”

“You’re wrong,” Han’s mother says. She stands on tiptoe and touches his head, the way she used to touch his head when he was younger, to reassure him that he was still a good boy even after he did something wrong. “God loves you for who you are, not what others expect you to be,” she says. “God sees everything, and understands everything.”

Of course, Han wants to make a joke. Her god is just like a Chinese parent, never running out of excuses to love a son. But he stays quiet when he looks up at his mother, her eyes so eager and hopeful that he has to avert his own.

The Arrangement

UNCLE BING CAME TO VISIT RUOLAN AND HER mother when her father went away on business trips. Ruolan’s father worked as a salesman for a tea factory, so every year in late spring, he traveled with samples of new tea to Shanghai, Nanjing, Beijing, big cities Ruolan dreamed of visiting when she grew up. Earlier on, he had come home before summer, but each year he traveled longer, and by the time Ruolan was ten years old, he did not show up until late December, when he was home just in time for the end-of-the-year housecleaning and the holidays. He sent postcards but not often. He brought Ruolan gifts from the cities, too: a doll with blond, curly hair and blue, deep-set eyes, fragrant rubber erasers in the shapes of little bunnies, dresses with laces and shining decorations that were too fancy for the town. Her mother put the dresses away in a trunk and never let Ruolan touch them. After a while, she learned not to ask. She wore passed-down clothes of her mother’s to school, gray blouses and blue pants, faded and too big.
Gray-Skinned Mouse,
the boys in school nicknamed Ruolan, but even that had stopped bothering her.

Uncle Bing lived in the mountains nearby, and was the only teacher in the small village school there. He was not married. He was not even a relative, but as long as Ruolan remembered, he had been Uncle Bing. Every spring, before her father’s trip, he left an envelope for Ruolan; inside were a piece of paper with Uncle Bing’s address and enough money for the round-trip bus fare. “Go find Uncle Bing in case of an emergency,” Ruolan’s father told her. She had never taken the trip once; there was no need really, as Uncle Bing came to visit Ruolan and her mother every weekend when her father went away. The paper bills Ruolan had put away, between pages of an old textbook that she hid under her straw mattress.

On Saturday evenings, Uncle Bing arrived, with a small basket of bayberries, or apricots, or freshly picked edible ferns, gifts from the students and their parents. They cost Uncle Bing nothing, but Ruolan’s mother always thanked him as if he had gone to great trouble to get them. “It’s so very kind of you, Uncle Bing. How could we ever repay you for your generosity?” she said.

Ruolan frowned. Her mother had the ability to fill her words, even the best-meaning ones, with disdain and sarcasm. Uncle Bing, however, was not annoyed. He went into the yard to chop the firewood, and when he became warm, he took off his shirt and hung it over the clothesline. From the kitchen, where Ruolan was cooking, she looked at the small and big holes in his undershirt. When she had been small, she used to stick her fingers into the holes and call it a fishnet. She no longer did it now; thirteen years old she was, and already she had started missing her childhood, when she had been less restrained around Uncle Bing, and happier.

Uncle Bing went on to fix the grapevine trellis that had been partly taken down by an early storm. Ruolan watched him work, and cut the vegetables halfheartedly until her mother called from the bedroom, “Does the knife weigh a thousand tons?”

Ruolan did not answer and chopped the celery with an angry speed.

At supper, Ruolan’s mother poured the strong yam wine for Uncle Bing. They talked about the weather, too much rain or too little, and how the peasants’ lives would be affected, even though neither of them needed to worry about the harvest season. Ruolan listened to their pointless chatting and spun the chopsticks between her fingers. Her mother did not tell her to stop the bad-mannered game in a snapping voice when Uncle Bing was around.

Sometimes, when they ran out of small talk, Uncle Bing poured a cup of yam wine for Ruolan’s mother, and they let the rims of the cups touch slightly. She took a few sips, which made her cough and blush, and she would tell Ruolan to see to it that Uncle Bing had a good drink, and then excuse herself and retreat to the bedroom.

“How’s Mama’s health?” Uncle Bing asked Ruolan after her mother left.

Ruolan shrugged and did not reply. Her mother had been ill, or thought of herself as ill, for as long as Ruolan remembered. Every morning, her mother rocked her awake and told her to get rid of the dregs from the medicine pot—it was said that to make a patient recover, the dregs were to be scattered on the crossroads for people to trample on. Ruolan believed that her mother did it only to remind the world that she herself was not well; since age five, Ruolan had been the one to carry the medicine pot into town, disgusted by the bitter smell of the leftover herbs, her mother’s prolonged and fake illness, and the looks people gave her.

Uncle Bing drank silently for a few cups. Ruolan pushed a plate of fried peanuts toward him. “Uncle Bing, drink slowly,” she said.

He downed another cup. “Want to hear a story, Ruolan? Once upon a time, there was a man who loved dragons so dearly he had dragons painted everywhere in his mansion.”

“And when the real dragon came to visit him, he was scared out of his wits,” Ruolan said. “You’ve told it many times before.”

“Once upon a time there was a man who spent a fortune to buy a pearl—”

“And he fell in love with the box, and thought it alone was worthy of the money, so he returned the pearl to the seller,” Ruolan said. “Why are your stories always about idiots?”

Uncle Bing smiled a sad and drunk smile. “What other stories can an idiot tell?”

Ruolan regretted her impatience right away. It had always been a game between them that Uncle Bing told stories and sang folk tunes to her when they were left alone. But she knew enough now to start suspecting the real reason for those stories and songs. The neighborhood grannies and aunties commented to her on her father’s long absence, and the frequent visits of Uncle Bing. “Do they send you to bed early?” some of them asked, their smiles pregnant with mean curiosity. “Is your mother still sick when your uncle’s around?”

Ruolan tried to ignore the women, chatty and shameless like a group of female ducks, but they had left something poisonous inside her. She had looked at herself in the mirror and tried to find a resemblance to her father’s face, or Uncle Bing’s. She did not look like either of them.

“Here’s a new story,” Uncle Bing said and poured another cup for himself. “Once upon a time a man heard the story about magic leaves. If you put a magic leaf in front of your eyes, it would make you disappear so nobody would be able to see you. The man believed in the story, and went out to gather bags of leaves every day. He put each leaf in front of his eyes and asked his wife, ‘Can you see me now?’ The wife said yes until she finally lost her patience. ‘Oh, heaven, where are you, my husband? I can’t see you now.’ The man was happy. ‘Finally, the magic leaf!’ he said, and went to the marketplace with the leaf in front of his eyes. But when he tried to steal, people caught him and gave him a good beating.”

Ruolan laughed for the sake of Uncle Bing. He laughed, too. “Poor woman. How could she marry such a stupid man?” Ruolan said afterward.

“Perhaps her father didn’t pay the matchmaker enough,” Uncle Bing said.

“Perhaps she was very ugly, she could only marry an idiot.”

“Or she was a lazy woman, nobody else wanted to marry her.”

“Or when she was a girl, she
stole men,
so only an idiot wouldn’t mind being a cuckold,” Ruolan said with a wicked joy.

“Don’t say words that you don’t understand,” Uncle Bing said.

“I’m not a child anymore,” she said. “A good woman doesn’t let her husband live elsewhere and let another man visit her every week.”

“Ruolan,” Uncle Bing said, and she stared back until he looked away. “You’re a big girl now, and Uncle Bing is old,” he said, and got up drunkenly.

Ruolan ran across the room and made a bed for him in her cot before he could stop her. When Uncle Bing came and stayed overnight, he slept in her cot at the corner of the living room, and she slept with her mother in her big bed. “Uncle Bing,” she said, the edge of her defiance softened by a sudden pity for his sadness, “have a nice sleep.”

Later, Ruolan huddled on the edge of the bed, as far away as possible from her mother, whose shallow and quick breathing reminded Ruolan of a dying fish. Ruolan covered her head with the blanket, but the smell of her own body, warm and familiar, mixed with the bitterness of the herbs from her mother’s bed, nauseated her. She wished she would never have to sleep near her mother, but then, when Uncle Bing’s bus was late, she was the one to look out the door for the sight of him every three minutes until her mother reminded her not to lean on to the door frame like a shameless girl displaying herself for all the men in the world.

Every time after Uncle Bing left, Ruolan buried her head in her pillow and sniffed the unfamiliar scent of his hair. It smelled strangely comforting, different from the stinky boys in her class, or her own home.

ON THE FIRST day of every month, Ruolan walked to the cement factory three miles outside the town for the illness allowance for her mother. Ruolan’s mother had stopped working totally two years ago. She was forty-one now, still four years short for the early retirement pension.

Ruolan signed the slip and accepted the few bills, soft and worn out, from the old accountant. “How’s your mother?” he asked.

“All right.”

The old man looked at Ruolan from above his glasses and shook his head. “
The most beautiful woman always has
the saddest fate,
” he said. “When your mother first came— you were a baby then—she looked so young that you’d think she was only sixteen. Who’d imagine that she would become ill so early?”

Ruolan left the old man lost in his own sentiment. She could not imagine her mother possessing any beauty. Because she lay in bed all day long, her complexion was sickly pale, almost translucent. Her hair, carelessly cut by herself, was like a bird’s nest most of the time. She wore her pajamas even when she had to walk to the next lane for the public outhouse. On Saturday afternoons, however, before Uncle Bing’s arrival, she cleaned herself and changed into her best clothes. She powdered her face, too, with stale, caked rouge; it gave her hollowed cheeks an unnatural pink, as if she were a patient dying from consumption.

That summer, Ruolan had her first period. She was not surprised; she had seen darkly stained tissues in the public outhouse, and had heard other girls her age discuss it. She found an old cotton shirt in a trunk and ripped it into rags. “What are you making all the noises for? I’m having a headache now,” her mother said from her bed.

Ruolan hesitated and answered, “I have my
bad luck
with me.”

Her mother sighed aloud and came out to the living room. “
Bad luck?
What’s bad about it?”

“What do you call it, then, Mama?” Ruolan said. Her mother had never talked about it with her; moreover, untidy as her mother was, Ruolan had never seen stained underwear or any sign of her having the monthly visit of her
bad
luck.

“It’s not something you need a name for,” Ruolan’s mother snapped. “You don’t need to go around and talk to everybody about it.”

“Whatever,” Ruolan said under her breath.

Ruolan’s mother stared at Ruolan with contempt. “Why does a patient want to waste her energy talking to a brat like you?” her mother said, and counted a few bills and coins from her small silk purse. “Go buy what you need.”

Ruolan accepted the money. She did not know what she needed, but she would rather ask a stranger in the street than her own mother.

“And stop by at the old pharmacy,” her mother said, and brought out a piece of carbon paper and two more bills. “Ask for a week’s dose for yourself.”

Ruolan looked at her mother’s handwriting on the paper. It was the same prescription her mother sent her to fill every month, the mixture of grass roots, tree barks, and dried flowers that her mother boiled the first thing in the morning. “I’m not sick,” Ruolan said.

“A prolonged illness makes a good doctor out of a patient,” her mother said. “I know what you need.”

“I’ve heard that all medicines are poisons,” Ruolan said.

“Are you saying that your mother wants to poison you?”

“I’m only saying maybe it’s not good for you, or anyone, to have medicine every day.”

“I’m ill,” her mother said. She dropped the bill and the carbon paper on Ruolan’s cot. “You’re a woman now, so you’d better listen to me,” her mother said. “Being a woman is itself an illness.”

Before Ruolan replied, her mother walked back to her bedroom. Ruolan looked at her mother’s feet, skinny and ashen colored in the tattered, sky blue slippers. She felt choked by disgust and pity for her mother’s body. Her own body had changed over the last two months, her breasts swelling with a strange, painful itch. She imagined herself growing into a woman like her mother; it was the last thing she wanted from life. She squeezed the carbon paper into a small ball and flipped it through the open door to the courtyard. She flattened the extra bills with her palm and put them in her textbook.

Ruolan’s father came home the next week, much too early. For the first time, Ruolan was overjoyed to see him. They had never been close. She had got used to his absence, and now she understood the reason for it. They were comrades, trapped in a life with the woman they could not love, but could not leave, either.