A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

Death Is Not a Bad Joke If Told the Right Way

THE HOUSE OF MR. AND MRS. PANG IS THE PLACE where I can take a break from being someone’s daughter. The days spent there, one summer week and one winter week, are the only time when I am not living under my schoolteacher mother. Being someone’s child is a difficult job, a position one has no right to quit. Heaven forgive every child who dreams of being an orphan while her parents are working with backs bent to make the child’s life a happy one. No life seems happier than an orphan’s life for a non-orphan like me. So many times have I dreamed of standing on a street corner, wearing shabby clothes two sizes too small, my ankles and wrists frozen to a bluish white. In my dream I am singing songs about all the sadness in the world, my small voice quavering in the wind. After the most heartbreaking song, I bow to the crowd and they let streams of coins drop into my street singer’s basket, men sighing and women wiping tears away with their fingertips.

“Good singing. Sing another song, Little Blossom.” It is always the sons of Mr. and Mrs. Song who clap and awaken me from my daydreaming. I am standing in the center of Mrs. Pang’s yard, wearing my brand-new bunny coat, snow white fur soft and smooth, the two long ears too tender to stay up, resting on my forehead like extra bangs. I push the ears aside and blush from excitement. Little Blossom is not my name but the name of a famous heroine in a movie, played by my favorite actress, Chen Chong. At sixteen, she is already the most famous actress in the country; every day she smiles at me from the calendar by my bedside.

“Come on,” the oldest of the four boys says. “Do you want to be a little blossom?”

I nod hard and the two ears flap in front of my eyes. In other dreams, always following the dreams of being an orphan selling her singing voice, I would eventually grow up into an actress like Chen Chong, my beautiful face on other people’s walls, wearing makeup. Only actresses are allowed to wear makeup without being denounced as morally degenerate. Lipstick and rouge are part of my orphan dreams.

“Oh yeah, you want to be a little blossom for us?” the second of the four brothers says with a teasing smile. The four boys roar in laughter. At seven years old I am too young to understand the meaning of the little blossom in their vocabulary. I laugh with them but Mrs. Pang stops me. She rushes out from the kitchen and waves a spatula at the boys. “Watch your mouths,” she says. The boys laugh again and go back to their room. Mrs. Pang drags me out of the yard and puts me down on the female stone lion in front of the quadrangle. The heads of the pair of lions were chopped off by the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution as part of the old trash. I sit astride the lioness, fingering the sharp edges left by the axes.

“Now, don’t get mixed up with the Song boys,” Mrs. Pang said. “Wait here. We are going to the market soon.”

Mrs. Pang does not like the Song family. Mr. and Mrs. Song started as tenants, renting the room at the western side of the quadrangle, but they stopped paying when Mr. Pang was kicked out of his working unit as an enemy of the People. Mr. and Mrs. Song stayed, claiming themselves to be the legal owners of the room. During the years of their occupancy, they demolished Mr. Pang’s flower bed and built a kitchen on the spot. They installed clotheslines between Mr. Pang’s pomegranate tree and grape trellis, their flagging underwear the permanent decoration of the yard. They produced four sons, and the six of them are still living in one room, the youngest son already sixteen and the oldest twenty-three.

THE MORNING SUN is halfway up in the sky. Three old men are sitting under the north wall of the alley, their eyes closed and their toothless mouths half open, enjoying this unusually warm winter day in Beijing. On the other side of the alley, four girls are jumping rope, chanting a song I have never heard before: “One two three four five. Let’s go hunt the tiger. The tiger does not eat man. The tiger only eats Truman.” It will be years later when I realize that the Truman they are singing about was the American president during the Korean War, so in the winter of 1979, the song makes little sense to me. I sit there and chant the song silently to myself. After a while the four girls stop singing and start to draw squares on the ground. I jump down from the lion. “Can I join you?” I ask.

“Say the pledge,” a girl says and the four of them quickly surround me hand in hand, waiting solemnly.

“What pledge?” I ask.

“You don’t know the pledge?” a girl says, making a face. “Where are you from? The Java Island?”

“No, I am from the Institute.”

“What institute?” the girl says.

“Let’s not waste time,” another girl cuts in. “Say with me: I promise to Chairman Mao — she who does not obey the rule is Liu Shaoqi.”

“Who is Liu Shaoqi?”

“A counterrevolutionary,” the girl says, impatient with my ignorance.

I take the oath, feeling strange that they have so many rules unknown to me. It will also be years later when I know more about Liu Shaoqi: a loyal follower and close colleague of Chairman Mao, he was tortured to death by a group of teenagers when he showed doubt about Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

The alley girls make me feel like a foreigner. The place where I live is called the Institute, in a suburb of Beijing next to an ancient graveyard. The Institute is secured by high walls and patrolled by armed soldiers, bayoneted rifles on their shoulders and leather pistol holsters chained to their belts. Rumors are that the holsters are filled with old newspaper and the rifles are always empty, but the bayonets are real, sharp and shining. The heart of the Institute is a gray building secured by more soldiers. That is where my father as well as many fathers work, a research center for the Department of Nuclear Industry. Children like me growing up inside the Institute have different rules for life and games. We are not allowed to go out of the security gate of the Institute, not allowed to approach the gray building. The game we enjoy playing is to guess whose father is on “calculating duty”—our fathers go to another institute to use the machine, which we know nothing of until “computer” becomes a household word years later. Calculating duty is always performed at night, and every afternoon a father or two ride a luxury car into the dusk to a place nonexistent on any map. We watch the car drive by noiselessly, and then play the game. Every one of us pretends to be the child of the man behind the curtain. Only after asking questions and carefully examining one another’s words do we find out who is telling the truth and who is making up stories.

That is where I am from, a world different from the world of the alley girls. I am surprised that they have never heard of the Institute or nuclear industry. In my world every child knows nuclear weapons, and we have made “atomic bomb” a nickname for the principal of our elementary school. But then I have to admit that they surely know other things that I do not know, like Truman and the Truman-eating tiger.

THE WIND STARTS at lunchtime, the wind from Siberia that brings winter to our city, whistling across the alley and shaking the tiles on the roof of every house. For the whole afternoon I kneel on a chair by the window, waiting for the wind to calm down so that I can go out to play with the alley girls. The blue sky has turned brownish gray, the sun behind the sand and dust pale like a dirty white plate. In the late afternoon, one by one the four boys of the Song family run into the yard, each of them sporting a newly shaved head. I run into the yard. “Hey,” I shout in the wind, my eyes hurting from the dust. “What happened to your hair?”

“Gone,” the youngest of the brothers shouts back. “Windy days are good for haircuts.”

“Why?”

“No need to clean up. The wind does it,” the third brother says, making a gesture of being blown away by the wind.

I laugh. I like the boys of the Song family, each one of them knowing how to tell a joke and make people laugh. None of them is in school, the youngest one expelled from the high school for gang fights earlier in the year; nor is any of them working, since jobs are so scarce and the city is full of young idlers like the Song boys, to-be-placed youths, as they are called. The Song boys spend their days wandering in the city, picking fights with other boys and coming home with stories of their victory.

Mrs. Song sticks her head out their door and yells, “You money eaters! Who told you to shave your heads? I don’t have money to buy you hats.”

“Use the money we save on shampoo!” the oldest boy retorts.

I laugh and run back into the room.

“Out again to speak with the Song boys?” Mrs. Pang says, shoving coals into the burning belly of the stove.

“No,” I lie, though I know Mrs. Pang will not be angry with me. Mrs. Pang was once a nanny for me, and she spoils me the way I imagined kindhearted women would spoil an orphan, loving me for whom I am, exactly the opposite of my mother, whose love I have to earn with great effort and with little success.

“They’ll have a lot to worry about soon,” Mrs. Pang sighs, placing a water kettle on the stove.

“Why?”

“They need to think about finding wives in a few years, right? If they do not have jobs and places to live, how can they get married?”

“Can they inherit their parents’ jobs?”

“They sure can, but they only have two parents. What would the other two do?” Mrs. Pang says. “They learned nothing in school.”

“I bet the oldest two will not inherit Mr. and Mrs. Song’s jobs.”

“How do you know?”

“I just know,” I answer with a smile of secrecy. The oldest son of the Song family told me that their father worked in a factory making lightbulbs and their mother worked in a factory making light switches. “My mother clicks and my father is turned on. Perfect pair, huh?” he said, and was happy to see me laugh hard. Mr. Song is a quiet man, following every order of his loud wife, a loyal bulb always responding well to the light switch.

“Don’t boast because you know too little,” Mrs. Pang says. “Things change a lot. Within a blink a mountain flattens and a river dries up. Nobody knows who he’ll become tomorrow.”

NOT LONG BEFORE dinner, Mr. Pang comes back from work, chatting with Mr. Du in the yard about the weather before entering the room. Mr. Du rents the two small rooms on the eastern side of the quadrangle, and he pays the rent on time. He is a dutiful son, living with his old mother, who has been left paralyzed by a stroke. He does not have a wife, as nobody is willing to take care of his mother. Besides the Songs and the Dus, five other families live in the inner quadrangle, around a bigger yard that is connected to the front quadrangle with a moon-shaped door. The inner quadrangle used to be the Pangs’ living quarters while the front quadrangle was for the servants. But of course that was before the liberation. Mr. and Mrs. Pang live now in the small quarters that once belonged to their chauffeur and his family, with a living room, a bedroom, and another bedroom that used to be shared by the Pangs’ two daughters before they married, occupied by me when I visit. A small room next to the kitchen serves as Mr. Pang’s study, the door always locked and the windows shut tight behind a heavy curtain.

“How was your day?” Mr. Pang comes in, putting his briefcase in the usual corner and hanging his coat and hat neatly behind the door.

“Good,” I answer. “How was yours?”

“Working hard, as usual,” Mr. Pang says and turns to Mrs. Pang. “How was your day?” It is the only thing he can think of saying to us at the end of the day. In the morning it is always, How was your sleep?

Mrs. Pang does not reply. Mr. Pang never earns a penny, hardworking as he is, six days a week and sometimes overtime on Sundays. Nobody knows what he does at work. He was kicked out of his working unit at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, on the charge of being the son of a big landlord, an enemy of the proletarian class. After the Revolution, when he went back to his working unit in the Postal Department, he was told that his files had been lost and there was no record of his being employed there, even though every one of his colleagues had attended the meeting and voted for denouncing him as a dog son of the evil landlord class. Still he goes to work every day, taking the first of each month off to deliver copies of yet another letter to several sections in the Postal Department as well as the city government, appealing for an investigation of his history.

“A tiring day,” Mr. Pang says, and sits down at the head of the table.

Mrs. Pang places a bowl of rice heavily in front of him. “Nobody pays you to work. What can you do? Just wasting your own life. Better if you could stay home and help me with the housework.”

Mrs. Pang is the rice earner of the family. She was a nanny for years but I was the last kid she nannied. The year she spent with me made her age fast, as my mother always says when she blames me as the most difficult child in the world. After me, Mrs. Pang performs only small chores: buying groceries for some families in the alley, doing laundry for other families, and taking care of Mr. Du’s paralyzed mother.

Mr. Pang does not reply and counts the grains of rice with his chopsticks.

“Please eat, Mr. Worker,” Mrs. Pang says and exchanges a smile with me.

Mr. Pang eats silently. Dinner is the only time when Mr. Pang stays with us. Afterward, he goes directly to his study. One year he installed a folding bed in the study, and started to sleep there.

“What is he doing there in his study?” I ask when I am helping Mrs. Pang do the dishes.

“Heaven knows!”

“You know, he is the only one I know who has a study,” I say. “I thought only rich people had studies and they never used them.”

“That sounds like him.”

“Why?”

“Because he does nothing in his study.”

“But he is not rich.”

“Well, he was at one time.”

“Why does he still keep a study when he is no longer rich?”

“Because we still have these rooms left with us so he can play a rich man. Things could be worse — everything confiscated, not one penny left.”

“Why? You are good people.”

“Good people may not have good luck,” Mrs. Pang says. “Remember the saying? Bad luck always chooses a good man. ”

YET BAD LUCKhas chosen Mr. Pang for another reason— he is a useless man.

“I wouldn’t say his parents were parasites, but he sure is one,” Mrs. Pang says. She likes to chat with me when she is hand-washing the laundry in the afternoon, a big washbasin in the middle of the living room, the winter sun pale on the floor.

“Yes, I think so, too.” I dip my finger into the water to check the temperature. If Mrs. Pang does not forget to pour some hot water into the basin, I will be glad to catch the floating socks like slim fishes and wash them all, Mr. Pang’s big gray socks last.

“How do you know?”

“I just know. He is a parasite and he lives off you.”

Mrs. Pang laughs. “You sure know a lot. What else do you know?”

“He is very educated.” I’ve learned that from the boys of the Song family. They said Mr. Pang was proof that school was useless.

“Ha, educated. You know how he got into the college? The entrance exam was very difficult, so he asked his younger brother to take it for him. His brother was very smart. That was how he got into college. If he took the test himself? Ugh, he would have to spend all his life taking the entrance exams.”

“Really?”

“Yes. That’s the story,” Mrs. Pang says, handing a slice of soap to me.

“And then what?”

“Then? Then he went to the college and never took a single course for his engineering degree. He hired someone to take the courses and the tests for him for the diploma.”

“But who would do that for him? Why get a diploma for someone else if he had taken all the tests?”

“There were always poor students willing to do that. They could not afford the tuition, but they did not have to pay a penny to receive a good education. The diploma? That was just a piece of paper. And that was all my husband got.”

“Oh,” I say, and throw Mr. Pang’s sock back into the water, feeling cheated. “What was he doing in college?”

“Going to the theater. Practicing calligraphy and painting. Gardening. Teaching his parrots to recite poems. Thinking of himself as an artist. What else could he do? Just wasting his time and money.”

This is the most incredible story I have ever heard, I think, unable to connect Mr. Pang, the gray-headed, hunch-backed man, with the young man squandering his money in the city. “How come you married him?” I ask.

“You know who I was then?” Mrs. Pang says. “My father was a landlord, too. We used to have servants, handmaids, nannies, chauffeurs, private teachers in our house. I was a parasite too.”

From what I learned from books and movies, the daughters of landlords were always spoiled, ugly, and vicious. “You don’t look like one,” I say.

“I’m not anymore.” Mrs. Pang smiles.

“But Mr. Pang still is.”

“Yes, he still is.”

“How come you married him?” I ask again.

“We got married because our parents wanted us to. That’s my share of luck. No one will have more good luck or bad luck than heaven permits. And no one will have all good luck or all bad luck, like I once had a nanny and handmaids to do everything for me and now I am doing things for other people.”

“But Mr. Pang always has good luck. He never works.”

“That’s his bad luck. He has nothing to do. He is useless.”

THE NEXT SUMMER when I arrive at Mr. and Mrs. Pang’s house, Mr. Pang has retired. Retired may be the wrong word because he has not been paid for years, nor is there any indication of a pension. According to the Song boys, who know every single story in the city, one Monday Mr. Pang found his desk assigned to another man and his stuff piled in the hallway, the handle of his favorite teacup missing. He insisted that he would not leave until they returned the handle of his teacup. “It’s an old piece of China, older than your grandfather,” he kept saying until people felt insulted by his comparison. They told him to shut up and go to the trash can along with his teacup.

That did it. Mr. Pang became a piece of trash. By the time I arrive that summer, he has locked himself up in his study along with the rooster Mrs. Pang has bought for my favorite dish. “Mr. Retired Worker!” Mrs. Pang knocks on the door when I arrive. “The kid is here.”

Mr. Pang lifts a corner of the curtains up and looks at me with suspicion. I press my face on the window and peep in. There are shelves of ancient books in the room. His bed is unmade like a messed-up rooster nest. The rooster itself is sauntering and pecking around on his desk. White and gray rooster droppings are drying on the floor, perfectly round like large coins.

“Yuck,” I say, pointing at the floor. Mr. Pang waves and tucks the curtain’s corner into its place.

The fact that Mr. Pang is losing his mind makes me so unhappy that I do not go out to play with the alley girls. Even though I despise Mr. Pang as a parasite, I want him to be a healthy parasite. My knitted eyebrows make Mrs. Pang laugh at dinner. Mr. Pang is not coming to dinner with us anymore. He eats with the rooster in his room.

“What happened?” Mrs. Pang asks.

“Nothing,” I say, shoveling the food into my mouth without swallowing.

“Mad at him?”

“Umm.”

“Why?”

“I don’t like him being this way.”

“He lost his mind long ago. Don’t worry about him.”

I put down my chopsticks and walk around the table to Mrs. Pang. “I am mad at him for you.” I hug Mrs. Pang and start to cry.

Mrs. Pang wipes my tears off with her hand, her palm scratching like sandpaper. “You are a very kind girl, even better than my own daughters,” she says.

“Why?”

“They said they wished that they had never been born to us,” Mrs. Pang says, still smiling. “You’ll make them ashamed.”

I go back to my seat and continue my dinner, not feeling better.

“Bad things happen,” Mrs. Pang says.

“Not to you.”

“Believe me, this is nothing. I have seen worse things.”

“Why didn’t you marry the younger brother?” I ask.

“Whose brother?”

“His brother, the one you said was very smart and took the entrance exam for him.”

Mrs. Pang laughs as if she has heard the most absurd story in the world. I do not laugh with her. “He has been long gone. He died before he finished college,” Mrs. Pang says.

“That’s very sad.”

“No, it’s not that bad. Sometimes I feel glad for him to have died that early.”

“Why?”

“Because he was a son of the landlord, too. He was such a bright and sensitive boy.” Mrs. Pang looks across the table at the wall behind me for a moment and sighs. “He would have been killed by the Revolution.”

“Why? Was he a bad guy?”

“You don’t have to be a bad guy to get killed,” Mrs. Pang says. “In ’66 the Red Guards whipped to death eighty people from three families in the county next to my old home, and the youngest one was a three-year-old boy. I used to know some of them. Their grandfathers were landlords.”

“Were they not bad guys?”

“They were people just like me,” Mrs. Pang says. “That’s why you would rather see someone you love die young than suffer from living.”

I think for a moment. “My mom and dad never tell me these things.”

“Maybe they will when you grow up.”

“No, they won’t. It is their occupational malady.” In our world in the Institute, a secret is a secret and it is always better to speak less than more.

AFTER DINNER EVERYONE in the quadrangle sits in the yard to enjoy the cooling air. Mr. Pang and Mr. Du’s paralyzed mother are the only two people missing.

The jasmine bushes in the yard are blooming like crazy that summer, the fragrance so strong that one could become dizzy if sitting too close to the bushes. A horde of wasps has built a heavy hive under the roof, buzzing around the grapevines and tasting the grapes before they are large enough for an early harvest. The sticky juice from the pierced grapes is as corrosive as the most poisonous liquid. If you sit under the grape trellis long enough, you would think that you could see the grapes rotting one cluster after another, in a blink their smooth rinds replaced by ugly scars.

Mr. Du is the last one to sit down, after moving his orchids out of his room and carefully lining them under his window. Mr. Du is a big fan of orchids. What he raises are the most expensive species, the Gentleman’s Orchid. That summer a small pot of blooming Gentleman’s Orchid costs hundreds of yuan on the black market, more than the earnings of a worker for a year.

“Old Du, be careful of your orchids,” Mr. Song says, waving his bamboo fan at a mosquito passing by. “Did you hear what happened last week in the Eastern Fourteen Alley? Someone broke into this old man’s house and robbed him of all his orchids, and stabbed the old man, too.”

Mr. Du nods without answering, his face squeezed into a smile that makes him look like a wrinkled baby. He is a janitor in a nearby warehouse. Apart from the bed in which his old mother moans and curses all day, all the other furniture in their rooms is made of the cardboard boxes he has taken home from the warehouse. Sheets of old calendars are pasted on the outside. One time I went with Mrs. Pang to their room and saw my favorite actress, Chen Chong, dangling from a cardboard cabinet. Underneath her smile were the printed words FIRST CLASS UREA, IMPORTED FROM JAPAN.

“What’s the big fuss about the orchids?” Mrs. Song purses her lips. “I don’t see anything special about them.”

“What do you know, Ma?” the third son says. “It’s said that they are Japanese orchids. Imported, understand? Just like Toshiba, Sony, Panasonic — Japanese products.”

“Imported? No, no,” the oldest son says. “The orchids are raised here, so they are at most Japanese parts, Chinese assembled. ”

Everybody laughs. Japanese brands have become the symbol of modern life in Beijing. At lower prices, people can buy appliances of Japanese parts assembled in China, and still be able to boast about their second-class luxuries.

“Still, it is not worth losing one’s life for the orchids,” Mrs. Song says.

“A bird is willing to die for a morsel of food. A man is willing to die for a penny of wealth,” Mrs. Pang sighs. “They do not see the flowers. They see money.”

“Not everyone.” The second son points to Mr. Du. “Old Du here is an exception. Others raise the orchids for money. He is raising them as his wife and kids.”

“Absolutely,” the first son says to Mr. Du. “You know, you have every right to fight for your orchids. We won’t blame you if you are killed by a robber. A man has to fight with someone who steals his wife and kids, right, Old Du?”

All of the Songs laugh. Mr. Du smiles again and does not say a word. His old mother is shouting indistinct words from inside her room. He nods again and moves the orchids back to his room, as tenderly as if they were his wife and children.

THAT NIGHT I can’t sleep. Mosquitoes dash outside the netting around my head like small bombers. I lie on one side of the bed until the bamboo mat becomes sticky from my sweat, and roll to the other side, feeling the patterns left on my thighs by the woven bamboo. I am waiting for the burglar to break into our quadrangle, running away with the orchids as dear to Mr. Du as his own wife and children, leaving Mr. Du in a pool of blood. For the first time, I start to miss our apartment, secure within the high wall of the Institute.

The burglar does not come that night, nor the following nights. Still, the waiting keeps me awake night after night, until the dawn light sneaks in from above the curtain and the rooster’s muffled song comes from Mr. Pang’s tightly closed window. I stop going out to play with the alley girls, spending the hot afternoons taking long naps and waking up soaked in sweat. My head grows dizzy as I sit on the bed, looking out the window at the inner quadrangle, waiting for the Dimwit to come out of her room and dance in the yard. She is the only resident from the inner quadrangle who has ever crossed the moon-shaped door to the front quadrangle. The five families, reluctant to face Mrs. Pang in their everyday life, have built another door leading to the alley and blocked the moon-shaped door with barbed wire. The Dimwit once squeezed through the wire to talk to the Song boys, baring her breasts, which looked so stunningly huge that I was frightened speechless. When the Song boys targeted her breasts with slingshots, she giggled with them.

“What are you looking at?” Mrs. Pang comes in with a cup of chrysanthemum tea. She always keeps the pot of tea cool in a basin of water while I nap.

“Where’s Dimwit? I haven’t seen her all week.”

“She’s not living here anymore. I must have forgotten to tell you. She was married off this last spring.”

“Who would marry her?”

“Someone in her auntie’s working unit. An older man. He married three times, and three times the wife died. They say he has the fate of a diamond.”

“What does that mean?”

“Can you think of anything harder than diamond?”

“No.”

“Right. His life is as hard as a diamond and whoever he marries will be damaged.”

“Then why did they marry Dimwit to him?”

“Because she is a dimwit. A dimwit is empty, like air. Have you ever seen a diamond leave a scratch on the air?”

I think about Mrs. Pang’s explanation. It makes sense and it does not make sense. I think about Mr. Pang. “What’s Mr. Pang’s fate, then? He is not a diamond, is he?”

“What do you think?” Mrs. Pang asks with a smile.

“Of course he is not,” I say but my voice trails off. I know he has left scratches on Mrs. Pang’s life. He has left scratches on my life, too.

“You are thinking too much these days,” Mrs. Pang says, pinching my chin. “You are getting thinner. Your mom will wonder what has happened to you when she comes to pick you up. I’ll make the chicken stew for you tomorrow.”

“I NEED THE rooster tomorrow,” Mrs. Pang says to Mr. Pang the second to the last evening. He is sneaking into the kitchen to get his dinner and a small handful of rice for the rooster. He smells horrible.

“Hear me?” Mrs. Pang raises her voice when he does not reply.

“Yes,” Mr. Pang answers in a low voice, retreating toward the kitchen door. “Can I go buy a rooster for you?”

Mrs. Pang places the chopper on the chopping board with a bang. “I am going to make the chicken stew with that rooster in your room, and you go ahead and kill it after dinner,” Mrs. Pang says, not looking back at Mr. Pang.

Mr. Pang does not reply, still keeping his head low. I walk around Mr. Pang and hug Mrs. Pang’s back from behind with my sweaty arms. “Nana, I don’t want to eat chicken stew.”

“She doesn’t want the chicken stew,” Mr. Pang mumbles to Mrs. Pang’s stiffened back.

Mrs. Pang does not return my hug and says with a strange flat voice, “I want the rooster for the chicken stew.” I squeeze myself in between the counter and Mrs. Pang, looking up at her. Big drops of hot tears fall on my face.

Mr. Pang leaves for his room without making a sound, closing his door quietly as if fearing to let out the secret to the rooster. Mrs. Pang takes a towel and wipes my face clean. “Don’t worry. He has to do it.”

“Nana, let’s not eat the chicken stew.”

“We’ll eat the chicken stew. We cannot let him live with the rooster forever.”

THE YOUNGEST SON of the Song family is ambushed by a gang of boys from the West Forty Alley on his way to the grocery store for beer. When he comes back from the hospital, his stitched head is bound in thick blood-stained gauze. Good that he has his head shaved like a shining lightbulb that summer, I am about to comment to him but decide not to. “Clean-shaven heads are easy for doctors to sew up,” I say in a low voice to myself, making sure the boy does not hear me.

“My head is an iron head,” the boy says. He is sitting under the grape trellis and spitting bloody phlegm into the jasmine bush. “Believe me — the brick, this thick,” he gestures with two fingers, “was broken in half by my head.”

Mr. Du nods with his sad smile. He is the only one responding to the boy. The three brothers are occupied: the oldest boy is grinding a long knife on a grindstone, the screeching noise making my skin tight with goose bumps; the second boy is waving a long metal chain in the air. “I see you sons of a bitch are tired of living,” he shouts to the imaginary enemies outside the wall. “Be patient. We are coming for your heads.”

“Cut it out!” Mrs. Song comes out of the room and slaps a wet towel onto the swollen eye of her youngest son. “Nobody is going out tonight, you hear me?”

“Ma, what are you talking about?” the third son comes out of the kitchen with two choppers in his hands and says. “Boys of the Song family are not soft persimmons for others to squeeze.”

“You’re asking for death,” Mrs. Song yells, banging the gate of the quadrangle closed and sitting in front of the gate. “Nobody is going out of this gate tonight!”

“What are you afraid of, Ma?” the oldest son says. “A tree cannot live without the bark. A man cannot live without a face. They have spat in our faces. What would we be if we let this pass? Ma, let me tell you, everyone dies. Death? Death is not a bad joke if told the right way.”

The four boys stomp their feet on the ground and roar. Mrs. Song curses, shouting at her husband, asking for help. Mr. Song stands on the doorsill of their room and looks at his boys without speaking. The light switch is not functioning this time — Mr. Song is refusing to be turned on like an obeying bulb.

“Are you dead? Stop your sons.”

“Let them go. They do what they have to,” Mr. Song says, strolling across the yard. “How are the orchids?” he asks Mr. Du.

“Not bad. Not bad,” Mr. Du mumbles, pruning the orchids with a pair of tiny scissors and smiling back.

Mrs. Pang comes out of the room and pulls me back. “Don’t mind other people’s business,” she says, knocking on Mr. Pang’s door. “Time for the rooster.”

A pot of water is kept boiling on the stove for a long time before Mr. Pang comes out of his room with the rooster, both wings held tight in his big hand. He walks without looking at the boisterous sons of the Song family. The rooster itself is cooing and looking around with curiosity.

Mrs. Pang points to the chopper on the counter without speaking. She tries to drag me out of the kitchen but I keep holding on to the doorknob, looking up at Mr. Pang. He glances at the chopper and pulls a chair to sit down, holding the rooster between his arms.

“If nobody buys, nobody will sell you. If nobody eats, nobody will kill you. Rooster, it is not that I want to kill you, but you were born to fill people’s stomachs,” Mr. Pang mumbles and strokes the dark green feathers on the rooster’s head. Then he turns to Mrs. Pang. “Don’t scare the kid,” he says in a gentle voice.

Mrs. Pang drags me away and closes the kitchen door behind me. The rooster squeals for a moment and stops. For some time we wait outside the door, until Mr. Pang comes out with a bag of bloodstained feathers, green and brown, wrapped up in a plastic sack. “It’s ready,” he says in a low voice, nodding at Mrs. Pang without looking up at her. Sweat smears his face.

“Where are you going with that?” Mrs. Pang points to the bag in Mr. Pang’s hand.

“They are not going to the trash can,” Mr. Pang mumbles, walking toward the jasmine bush.

The chicken stew is for the last dinner of my visit that summer. Coming to pick me up, my mother is the only one who touches it during the meal. On the bus ride from the Pangs’ house to the Institute, I listen silently to her berating. Her volume becomes higher until all the passengers are staring at me, and in their scolding eyes I see me, an inconsiderate and impolite child who did not even bother to touch the best dish her old nanny cooked for her, especially a chicken stew that her nanny usually could not afford to eat.

I have to admit twice to my mistake, once to my mother and then in a louder voice so that all the passengers can hear me, before my mother drops the topic and the passengers turn their eyes away from my burning face. I watch my sandals and hum my favorite song to myself: “Let me sing a song to the Communist Party. The Party is dearer than my own mother. My mother only gives me a body. It is the Party who gives me a soul.”

A LOT OF things have changed by the next year I go to the Pangs’ for the summer. My favorite actress, Chen Chong, has disappeared to the other side of the ocean, waiting tables in a California restaurant, bearing the same smile she once did in the calendars on our wall. In the evening newspaper, I read an article deriding her for being a second-class resident and living on tips given by American capitalists, with long emotional paragraphs, as if working for a living was such a shame that the author could not bear the pain even of writing about it. “Sour grapes,” my mother sneers when she reads the article.

Gentleman’s Orchids have gone out of fashion. The price drops so fast that they now are cheaper than weeds, Mrs. Song says. Many growers have lost fortunes. Mr. Du may be the only person welcoming the news. He stops worrying about his orchids when he is working on his shift. The orchids grow better than at any time before, blooming with big golden-colored flowers as if they too have stopped fearing along with Mr. Du.

Mr. and Mrs. Song have both retired early, leaving their positions to the first and second sons. Mr. Pang’s jasmine bushes are cut down by the Song family, making space for a new room built as the wedding room for their first son. In another couple of years a wife and a baby will be added to the quadrangle, both of them sharing the new room with the oldest Song boy. The quadrangle becomes so packed that in the summer evening there is not a trace of breeze across the yard, and the wind from Siberia will never reach the inside of the quadrangle again.

Mr. Pang found a job earlier that summer, introduced by my father to a small scientific-education publishing house as a temporary employee. His duties include putting printed subscription ads into envelopes and sealing the envelopes with paste. My father conceals the parts of Mr. Pang’s history about rooming with a rooster and cheating in college for his diploma, and the publishing house finally agrees to hire him on the condition that he does not get a lunch coupon and overtime compensation. On the first day of his new job, Mr. Pang is said to have colored his white hair to a shining black and to have worn a brand-new woolen Mao jacket, which makes him look younger than his actual age of sixty-three. When he gets his first month’s pay, he takes a two-hour bus ride and arrives at our Institute in the late morning on a Sunday. For thirty minutes he begs the guards to let him in, and tries to convince them that he is a good citizen who works honestly and earns his living, and that he does not have a working ID only because the publishing house does not issue IDs for temporary workers.

For years I will not be able to stop imagining the scene of Mr. Pang bowing to the guards, who threaten to have him arrested if he does not leave, two live roosters in his hands cooing along with him. The sight of Mr. Pang wandering around our high walls for an hour with two roosters seems heartbreakingly comic, although it is not I who find him but my father, on the way back from an extended calculating duty. “Your father saved me again,” is the first sentence Mr. Pang says to me when he enters our apartment, holding the two roosters up like the biggest trophies of his life.

The scene will come back to me sixteen years later, but at the moment I just laugh when the roosters finally escape his grip, fluttering their wings around in our apartment. In a few minutes my father will catch them again, and in a few hours they will fill our stomachs and then be forgotten. Life goes at small baby steps when one is young, but then it picks up speed and flies. In four years, my favorite actress, Chen Chong, will finish her table-waiting career and start as Joan Chen in Hollywood, an actress and a director, her smile still pretty as I remember, though she will never again be the sixteen-year-old girl on our wall. In another seven years, Mrs. Pang will be leaving me forever. She will have been blind for a year before her death. The last time I visit her, she will be touching my face and feeling my tears beneath her fingertips, and both of us will be pretending that the tears are not there and we are enjoying the chicken stew I cook for her the way she has taught me. In five more years, I will be in America, sitting in my small and humid apartment in a Midwest town, reading my father’s letter about Mr. Pang’s death, knowing that for the last sixteen years of his life, he has never missed one day of work, sealing envelopes with patience.

As if the death of Mr. Pang is a story that would not hurt if only told by the Song boys, I imagine the four brothers talking about his death, out of boredom, out of the need to tell a joke. I have not seen the boys since the alley was torn down and the residents were moved out of the city to the suburban apartment complexes. I cannot imagine the lives of the boys and their families, the apartments gray and small as pigeon cages. What I see is the clean-shaven heads of the four boys, still in their twenties, talking and laughing and spitting and picking unripe grapes to shoot at one another.

“Wasn’t Mr. Pang an old fool?” one brother would say. “Thirty-three yuan, just enough for a pack of beers? And to a teenager robber who used a fruit knife? The boy would not have one day of a better life with the money.”

“The old man probably thought he earned the money himself,” another brother would say. “He forgot that the robber had to work to earn the money, too. I bet the boy would have been pissed off with only thirty-three yuan in the wallet. Why not just let him have the money and be pissed off?”

“Like Mrs. Pang always said: A bird is willing to die for a morsel of food; a man is willing to die for a penny of wealth,” a brother would say. “When Mr. Pang’s soul goes to the graveyard court to report his arrival, the judge would say: What? For thirty-three yuan you let yourself be stabbed? You were even stupider than me in my last life.”

“What does that mean?”

“The judge would then say: You don’t remember me? In my last life, I was that old man in East Fourteen Alley. Remember? I was stabbed by the robber of my Gentleman’s Orchids!”

I imagine the Song boys laugh together, the way they used to laugh at all the people in the world. Death is not a bad joke if told the right way, yet I do not see a right way. I start to understand what Mrs. Pang said about death long ago, that one would rather see beloved ones die instead of suffering. It comforts me that she would not have to see Mr. Pang’s death, and have to listen to the jokes told by the Song boys. It comforts me that not one more scratch would have to be left on her life, and I am the only one to live with the awkward joke that Mr. Pang’s death makes.

But on second thought, I wish that Mrs. Pang had lived long enough. I wish we would sit together and fold his clothes for the last time. I wish Mrs. Pang would smile at me when she puts away Mr. Pang’s clothes, and I would know that she is proud of him, earning his life between hills of envelopes at seventy-nine, being a useful man, defending himself, dying with dignity.