The Vagrants (26 page)

Ear didn't return by dinnertime. When Tong mentioned this absence to his parents, his father, who slumped in the only armchair and looked at the wall, where there was nothing to see, said dully, “He'll come home when he will.”

It was useless to talk with his father about anything before dinner—for him, it was the most important meal and nothing, not even a falling sky, could disturb him while he waited for it. Tong's mother glanced at him with sympathy but said nothing. She put dinner on the table and brought out a bottle of rice liquor. Tong took the bottle from her and poured some of the liquor into a porcelain cup. When his father was drunk and asleep, he would beg his mother for help.

Tong carried the cup with both hands to his father. “Dinner is ready, Baba.”

Tong's father accepted the cup and tapped on Tong's head with his knuckles. It hurt but Tong tried not to let it show. “It's better raising a boy than a dog,” his father said, his way of showing his approval of Tong. He moved to the table and downed the cup. “Now pour me another one, Son.”

Tong did and his father asked him if he wanted to try some. His mother intervened halfheartedly, but his father wouldn't listen. “Try once,” he urged Tong. “You're old enough. When I was your age, I smoked and drank with my father every night,” he said, and he struck the table with his fist. “My father—your grandfather—wasn't he a real man? I tell you, Son, don't ever do anything less than he did.”

Tong's paternal grandfather was, according to his father's drunken tales, a local legend, with a firecracker temper, ready to fight anyone over the slightest injustice. He had died in 1951, in his late forties. The story was that he had had a big fight defending his fellow villagers against a party official, sent down to supervise the process of turning private land into a collective commune. He had beaten the official half to death; the next day he had been arrested and executed on the spot as an enemy of the new Communist nation.

Tong's mother scooped some fried peanuts onto his father's plate. “Don't drink on an empty stomach,” she said.

Tong's father ignored her. He poured himself another cup and pointed his chopsticks at Tong. “Listen, your grandfather was a real man. Your father is nothing less. You'd better not disappoint us. Now move here next to me.”

Tong hesitated. He did not like his father's breath and his intimate gestures when he was drunk, but his mother moved his chair, with him in it, before he could protest. His father put a hand on Tong's shoulder and said, “Let me tell you this story, and you'll know how a man was made. Have you heard of Liu Bang, the first emperor of the Han dynasty? Before he became an emperor, he had to fight many years with Xiang Yu, his toughest enemy. Once, Xiang Yu caught Liu Bang's grandparents, his mother, and his wife. He brought them to the battlefield and sent a messenger to Liu Bang.
If you don't surrender this very moment, I'll cook them into meat paste and my soldiers will have a feast tonight.
Guess what Liu Bang said? Ah, wasn't he the hero of all heroes! He wrote back to Xiang Yu,
Thank you for letting me know about the banquet. Would you be a good and generous person and send me, your hungry enemy, a bowl of the meat paste?
Think about that, Son. If your heart is hard enough to eat your mother and your wife, nothing can beat you in life.”

Tong looked at his mother, on the other side of the table. She gave him a smile, and he tried to smile back. They were on their way, it seemed, to another night during which he and his mother would have to sit and listen to his father tell the same old stories; the dishes and the rice would be reheated a few times, until his father was finally too drunk to carry on with his tales, and eventually Tong and his mother would be permitted to eat.

Tong thought about Ear; his father said that love for a dog was a lowly thing to feel, and his only concern, when it came to Tong, seemed to be to make him into a manly man. Tong wondered if he would disappoint his father. If an enemy were to threaten him with his grandparents’ and his mother's lives, he would cry and beg, promising anything in exchange for their lives.

After several more rounds of drinking, Tong's father pushed his chair back and told his mother to get a brick—she kept a pile of bricks in the kitchen for him to demonstrate his kung-fu skills with, and she replenished the stock dutifully when it was running low. When she came back with a red brick, he shook his head and said it would be too easy; he needed a bigger, harder brick tonight. Hear that? he said, stretching his fingers and making cracking sounds with his knuckles. She replied that the red bricks were all they had, and wouldn't it work for him if she stacked two bricks. Tong's father lost his temper, calling her a brainless woman and ordering her to go out and borrow one from their neighbors, who were building an extra shack in their yard for a granduncle who had come to visit and decided not to leave.

When she returned with a heavy construction brick, six times as big as the red brick, Tong's father took it over and put another hand on her neck. “I could wring your neck with two fingers. Do you believe me?” he asked. She giggled and said of course, she had no doubt about it. He snorted with satisfaction and set down the brick in the middle of the yard.

Tong watched his father chanting and dancing a little before he crouched down and, with a bellow, hit the brick with the heel of his hand. Ear would have enjoyed the evening if only he had been home in time—he was always the most excited member of the family when Tong's father put on a drunken show. The brick remained intact, but his father's hand looked red and swollen. Tong hid both hands in his pockets. Only once in a while could Tong's father break a brick in half, by sheer luck perhaps, but he never tired of his brick-hacking trick.

He tried another time with both hands but the brick did not yield to the strike. When he examined his hands, the sides of both of them were bleeding. Unfazed, he told Tong's mother to stop fussing, when she brought a clean, soft rag for him. He tried two more times, and when the brick refused to surrender, he kicked it, which seemed to hurt his toe more than it had his hands. He cursed and hopped on his good foot to the storage cabin, and before Tong's mother could protest, his father hit the brick hard with a hammer. The brick broke but not into two halves; he squatted down to study it and roared with laughter. Tong moved closer with his mother, and they saw three rusty iron rods in the middle of the brick, holding it together. “Where did they steal the construction blocks for their shack?” Tong's father said. He wiped his bleeding hands carelessly on his pants and drank more liquor, content with the fact that he had not lost face. When he was urged once again by Tong's mother to go to bed, he retreated into the bedroom with a last cup, and soon his snores thundered through the closed door.

Tong and his mother sat by the table and she smiled at him. “What a funny man he is,” she said quietly, and shook her head with admiration. The dinner was cold now and she stoked the fire to heat it up for Tong, but he was not in the mood for eating. “Mama, do you think something has happened to Ear?” he asked.

He shouldn't worry, Tong's mother said. Before he could reply, he heard a noise. He rushed to the yard and was disappointed to find that it was not Ear scratching on the gate but someone knocking. He opened the gate. In the yellow streetlight Tong saw the unfamiliar face of a middle-aged woman, her head wrapped in a shawl. She asked for his parents in a low voice. Next to her on the ground was a big nylon bag.

“Are you coming because of my dog? Did something happen to Ear?” Tong asked.

“Why, is your dog missing?”

“He's never been out so late,” he said.

“I'm sorry to hear that. But don't worry,” the woman said.

The grown-ups all said the same thing, without any offer to help. Tong stood aside but before he could invite the woman into the yard, his mother came to the gate and asked the woman what had brought her.

“Comrade, you must have heard of Gu Shan's case by now,” said the woman. “I'm here to talk to you about a rally on Gu Shan's behalf.”

Tong's mother looked around before apologizing in a low voice that she and her husband were not the type of people who cared for this information.

“Think about the horrible things that happened to a child of another mother,” the woman said. “I'm a mother of three. And you're a mother too. How many siblings do you have, boy?”

“Three,” Tong said.

His mother pulled him closer to her. “I'm sorry. This household is not interested in politics.”

“We can't run away from politics. It'll catch up with us.”

“It's not that I'm not sympathetic,” Tong's mother said. “But what difference would we make? The dead are dead.”

“But if we don't speak up now, there will be a next time, another child maybe.
A thousand grains of sand can make a tower.
We each have to do what we can, don't we?”

Tong watched his mother, who looked away from the woman and apologized again. Once in a while, beggars from out of town would stop in their alley, asking for money and food. Tong's father never allowed these people near their yard, but his mother always looked embarrassed when he shouted at the poor and hungry strangers that he was an honest worker and had no obligation to share his blood-and-sweat money. Sometimes when Tong's father fell into a drunken slumber, his mother would wrap up a few leftover buns and leave them outside the gate. When Tong got up early the next morning, the buns would always be gone. Did the beggars come back to get the buns? he asked his mother when his father was not around, but she only shook her head and smiled, as if she did not understand the question.

“Comrade, please listen to me just for this one time,” the woman said. “We're having a memorial service for Gu Shan tomorrow at the city square. Come and meet her mother. Perhaps you'll change your mind then and sign the petition to support the rally.”

Tong's mother looked flustered. “I can't go—I—my husband won't be happy with it.” She looked around as though to check if he was coming.

“I'm asking for your own heart and conscience,” the woman said. “You can't let your husband make every decision for you.”

Tong's mother shook her head slowly, as if disappointed at the accusation. The woman unzipped the nylon sack and brought out a white flower. “Even if you don't want to sign the petition, come with this white flower and pay respect to the heroic woman and her mother,” she said.

Tong looked at the flower, made of white tissue paper and attached to a long stem, also made of white paper. His mother sighed and did not move. Tong accepted the flower and the woman smiled. “You're a good helper for your mama,” the woman said to Tong, and then turned to his mother. “Every family will receive a white flower tonight. It won't pose any danger if you just leave the flower in the basket for us tomorrow. We'll be there before sunrise.”

Tong's mother closed the gate quietly behind the woman. She and Tong stood in the darkness and listened to the woman knock on their neighbor's gate. After a moment, Tong nudged his mother and handed her the paper flower. She took it, and then tore the flower off the paper stem and squeezed both together into a small ball. When Tong raised his voice and asked her why, she put a warm, soft palm over his lips. “We can't keep the flower. Baba will find out and he won't be happy.”

Tong was about to protest, but she shushed him and said the matter was better left where it was. She led him gently by the arm and he followed her into the front room of the house. His father was still snoring in the bedroom. The dishes that his mother had reheated had grown cold again, but she seemed too tired to care now. She sat him down at the table and took the seat on the other side. “You must be starving now,” she said.

“No.”

“Don't you want to eat something? There's your favorite potato stew.”

“No.”

“Don't be angry at me,” she said. “You'll understand when you're older.”

“Why don't you want to take the flower back tomorrow? The auntie said it wouldn't bring any trouble.”

“We can't trust her.”

“But why?” Tong asked.

“We don't want to have anything to do with these people,” his mother said. “Baba says they're crazy.”

“But Baba is wrong and they aren't crazy,” Tong said.

Tong's mother looked at him sharply. “What do you know to say so?” she said.

Tong did not speak. He thought about the leaflets he had kept and made into an exercise book. He had read the words on the leaflets; the part that he could grasp sounded reasonable to him— they said that people should have the right to say what they thought; they talked about respecting everyone's rights, however lowly people were in their social positions. Tong himself understood how it felt to be looked down upon all the time as a village boy.

“Don't question your parents,” Tong's mother said. “We make decisions that are in our own best interests.”

“Mama, is the auntie a bad person?” Tong asked.

“Who? The one with the flowers? I don't know. She may not be a bad person, but she is doing the wrong thing.”

“Why?”

“The government wouldn't have killed the wrong person in the first place.”

“Was my grandfather a bad person?”

Tong's mother was quiet for a long time and then got up to close the bedroom door. “Maybe I shouldn't tell you this,” she said. “But you have to know that the story Baba told was not all true. Your grandpa did beat an official but it was over a widow he wanted to marry after your grandma died. The official also wanted to marry the woman, so they had a fight after an argument in a diner. When the official was beaten, he announced that your grandpa was a counterrevolutionary and executed him. There was nothing grand in the story, and Baba knows it too.”

“So was my grandpa wronged?”

Tong's mother shook her head. “The lesson for you is: Never act against government officials. Don't think Baba is only a drunkard. He knows every rule by heart and he doesn't make mistakes. Otherwise, he would not have lived till now, with a counterrevolutionary father.”

“But what if the government made a mistake? Our teacher says nobody is always right.”