Madwoman On the Bridge and Other Stories

Home in May

Yongshan was taking her son back to Licheng to visit relatives, but when she reached her brother Yongqing’s house, she discovered he had recently moved away.

Some of her relatives had passed on, others had left the city, and yet more had simply grown distant. Her younger brother was the last of her close relatives in Licheng, so as you can imagine, his disappearance deeply embarrassed Yongshan in front of her son. Her brother’s home was totally empty — Yongshan could see that through the round hole where the lock had been. The narrow parlour was quite dark and the only thing that could be clearly seen was a broken white toilet; perhaps it had broken when they’d attempted to take it out, so her brother had left it there, a shining white ring. Out of sheer disappointment or fury, Yongshan beat heavily on the door. But a few knocks was not enough to calm her frustration, so she switched hands and beat the door even more. Her son let go of the rolling suitcase and sat down on it.

‘They’ve moved out. What’s the point of knocking?’ he said, looking calmly at his mother. ‘Don’t your hands hurt when you go at it like that?’

A neighbouring couple came out of their apartment, obviously confused about the connection between these two people and their former neighbour. The man asked her, ‘Are you related to him?’

‘I’m his sister,’ she answered.

The woman standing behind her husband looked Yongshan over and said, ‘You mean cousin? On which side?’

Yongshan, understanding the meaning of the couple’s doubtful looks, answered quietly, ‘Not cousin. I’m his older sister.’ She blushed as soon as she finished speaking, for she knew her tone made it sound like she was lying. The neighbours asked no further questions, but suggested to Yongshan that she should call her brother’s cell phone. Her answer was, ‘I called the number, but it’s out of service. Maybe I wrote it down wrong.’ The woman then suggested that Yongshan enquire at the gas company, because if she remembered correctly that was where he had worked. Yongshan smiled confidently and corrected her, ‘Not the gas company; the water company. I know that. My brother called me back in January to wish me a happy new year.’

Then they went downstairs. Her son took the suitcase and walked behind his mother, but rather than rolling it properly he began to drag it so that it grated against the cement steps. ‘You don’t have to take it out on the suitcase!’ Yongshan shouted, looking behind her, ‘It’s new!’

Her son said, ‘Oh, so now I’m taking it out on the suitcase? You’re the one getting all worked up, not me.’

‘Me? Worked up? About what?’ Her son looked as though he would no longer bother to reply, so she explained, ‘Your uncle holds a grudge against me. He didn’t tell me on purpose — on purpose, I know it.’

Her son and the suitcase were standing crookedly on the steps when he said, ‘Do you call this a family visit? So what are we going to do? Are we going to look for Uncle Yongqing, or what?’

Yongshan stood still, not answering; she had stopped by the window on the third floor landing and looked outside. ‘This used to be the countryside. Something Commune. "Victory Commune".’ She went on, ‘I used to take Yongqing here to watch the open-air movies; we would walk along the paths at night, beside the pitch-dark paddies, and there were vegetable patches, too, where you could hear the frogs croak in the flooded fields, and there were fireflies sparkling back and forth.’

Her son wasn’t interested in hearing about her endless reminiscences, and said, ‘A family visit, you said. Well, might I trouble you to produce the family?’

Yongshan turned round to rebuke him, ‘Shut up. Who said anything about a family visit? I haven’t been to Licheng in six years; I’ve just come here to pay my hometown a visit, if that’s all right with you.’

Her son looked at her a little afraid, and his taunting turned to lamentation: ‘So, now we’re going to drag our suitcase around the streets. People will think we’re migrant workers.’

Yongshan twisted away, still looking out of the window. ‘There’s nothing wrong with coming back for a visit,’ she said and seemed to have settled on this idea. ‘We can go and see your uncle, or we can just forget it. We’ll stay in a hotel if we have to; it won’t break the bank.’

It was an afternoon in May, and the sun was very fine. They were on the north side of Licheng and the air was seasoned with the foul smell of dust and a faint, unidentifiable floral scent. The two travellers crossed the little square inside the gates of the housing complex; it was a crude, cramped little square, featuring concrete grapevine trellises, and though there were no grapevines on them, there were flowerbeds filled with roses and peonies. The sun lit up the faces of a few strangers here and there, making them look golden from a distance. They stopped for a moment in the square and her son went to the store to buy a Coke, and when he came back he saw that Yongshan had sat down to chat with a woman who was knitting on the flower terrace — so he went off to watch two men playing chess. Soon Yongshan lifted up her suitcase and said, ‘Hurry up! What are you watching the chess game for?’

Her son ran up to her, ‘I thought you’d met someone you knew. What on earth were you chatting about if you don’t know her?’

Yongshan said, ‘Can’t I talk to someone I don’t know if I want to? I thought she was someone else — Huang Meijuan, a girl who went to elementary school with me, that’s who I thought she was.’

She looked forlorn for a moment before turning back to look once again at the knitting woman, who had her head bowed as she worked in the sunlight. The yarn was a garish shade of peach, so she remarked casually, ‘What a tacky colour. I wonder who would wear it?’ Then she heaved a sigh and said, ‘Strange. It’s not as if Licheng is all that big, but I haven’t met anyone I know since I got here.’

Her son took a sip of Coke and tilted his head to look at the greyish-blue May sky. He pondered a moment, then said something that sounded as though he’d learnt it from a TV series. He must have been a good mimic, for it struck his mother speechless.

‘It’s a shame you still remember Licheng,’ he said, ‘because Licheng forgot about you a long time ago.’

They took the public bus to Cabbage Market; the trip was Yongshan’s decision.

‘No matter what, we must go to Cabbage Market to take a look at the old house. We have to go this time, because next time there’ll be nothing left to see.’ She tried to push her son onto the bus, but he wouldn’t let her touch him and shrugged her hands off.

‘Don’t grab me. What is this? A kidnapping?’ he said. ‘I’ll visit whatever you make me visit — we can tour the outhouses for all I care.’ He had likened the old house to an outhouse. He regretted the comment as soon as it left his lips. He stuck out his tongue, not daring to look at his mother. Fortunately for him, Yongshan was trying to find seats and had paid no attention to her son’s mumbling. She claimed a seat and told him to sit down, but when he refused Yongshan took the seat herself.

She turned her head slightly to look at the streets outside the window, and said, ‘I remember. There used to be a cemetery here, too, we walked past here when we went to the open-air movies. We were always too scared to look this way — the cemetery was to the left of the road — so we all kept our eyes fixed right and ran for all we were worth.’ Her son wasn’t paying any attention, and his indifference contained a message for Yongshan: ‘Don’t count on me co-operating. I’m completely uninterested in this city.’ For a moment, Yongshan’s eyes wandered between the road outside the window and her son, then finally they fixed on her son’s suitcase.

‘Actually, I know why your uncle’s put off.’ Her line of thought had jumped suddenly to the question of her brother. ‘I know he’s avoiding me on purpose. They got some money from knocking the old house down and he’s worried I’m going to ask him for my share.’

Her son snorted and said, ‘Well, are you?’

Yongshan stared at her son and said nothing, then all the way to their stop she remained silent. He could see turmoil in his mother’s eyes, like brewing storm clouds, but due to his tender age, he didn’t realize what his mother was thinking about. Yongshan was silent and so was her son. He followed her off the bus and waited for her to lead the way, but she was standing beneath the bus stop sign and looking all around her. Suddenly she said, ‘Where are we?’

Yongshan was lost. She was on her way home, but she was lost. The water tower at the soap factory must have been pulled down at some point, and without the water tower, Yongshan couldn’t find the way to Cabbage Market. How could so much be gone? Yongshan watched the crowds of people and the buildings on both sides with something approaching dread. She said, ‘I walked this road for dozens of years. How come I don’t recognize anything? Do I really need to ask for directions to get to my own home?’

In fact, it was the same as everywhere else; the city of Licheng had been transformed through the efforts of various government departments. The narrow, winding roads characteristic of the old city had been resolutely straightened and widened, but it was more than a physical change — they had also forced people to abandon their old, unscientific sense of orientation. Many women now lost their way on the streets because, without a certain corner store, postbox or water tower, they could no longer find the associated street. Yongshan was just one of those disoriented women. She grumbled for a moment, then abandoned her attempts to find the tower. Finally, she asked directions from an old man selling fruit by the roadside, who immediately gave her the information she needed. The old man pointed to a great expanse of ruins to the north and said ‘That’s the way you’ll want to be going; where the buildings have all been half torn down. That’s Cabbage Market.’

Yongshan hadn’t expected that her return home after seven years would consist of an itinerary of ruins. Looking down at the broken bricks and tiles covering the ground she said, ‘How are we supposed to get across this?’

Her son behind her said, ‘If you can’t get across it, then let’s forget it. We could say we’ve paid our respects to the old place, right?’ But Yongshan had already walked over to pick up the suitcase. ‘We’ll have to carry the suitcase,’ she said. ‘Be careful where you put your feet; there’s broken glass.’

And so it was that the ruins of Cabbage Market welcomed back Yongshan and her son so many years after their departure. Late Qing dynasty, Republican era and socialist wood and bricks mixed together and mourned in the May sun for their vanished ways of life, and now the tranquillity of their mourning had been disturbed by their last visitor. Perhaps every brick and tile in the ruin remembered Yongshan, remembered that girl of many years ago, scampering back and forth between Cabbage Market and the cultural centre with an accordion on her back. Perhaps they were saying, ‘Yongshan! Hello. How’s that accordion practice going?’ But Yongshan couldn’t hear them. All Yongshan heard was the rumble of a bulldozer rolling in a construction site nearby, mixed in with the ‘lalala‘ of a female rock singer coming from a nearby music store. Besides, Yongshan was now the mother of a thirteen-year-old and had long ago abandoned the accordion. With difficulty, Yongshan and her son were making the way back home. Neither one looked very happy. The rubble itself engendered their resentment, since it was impossible to roll a suitcase through it. And so, despite their hostile mood, they were compelled to carry the heavy suitcase between them. Mother and son puffed with fatigue, and every now and then the boy viciously kicked a glass bottle or crushed an innocent tile fragment. Meanwhile, Yongshan cursed the havoc and disorder of the rubble, but, as anyone knows, rubble is never tidy, and so her complaints were somewhat unreasonable. A rat in the rubble seemed to want to warn the visitors about something, for it suddenly popped out of a pile of bricks and tiles, frightening Yongshan.

‘That scared me!’ she said, covering her mouth. ‘What’s a rat doing here? And such a big one!’

Her son said, ‘Of course there are rats in trash heaps. Where else are you going to find rats, if not in trash heaps?’

Yongshan frowned and took a look around. Towards the west, a parasol tree was still standing, albeit with great difficulty, among the piles of bricks, and towards the east, the façade of a brick-and-wood house had survived the wreckage, standing lofty and solitary like a stage set. By the eaves, a line of writing could still be clearly read: ‘Watch and Clock Repair While You Wait’.

Yongshan’s eyes suddenly lit up: ‘I know this place. This was Mr Kang’s place. You remember him. Mr Kang — ugly as sin but great with his hands — he fixed watches.’ She looked to the left side of the rubble, searching for something. ‘The well was right here. I used to come to the well every day to do the washing, clean the rice, and rinse out the mop,’ Yongshan said. ‘How strange. Why can’t I find the well?’

‘It’d be strange if you could,’ said her son. ‘It must be under the garbage.’

Yongshan’s eyes paused on the tree. ‘Let’s go and have a look.’ She sounded quite excited. ‘When I graduated from elementary school, I carved my name on that tree, and when I came back from the countryside it was still there. I grew up with that tree. I wonder if my name is still on it.’

‘I’m not going,’ her son said. ‘Go and have a look yourself if you want to.’

Yongshan glared at her son and went over to the tree by herself. She walked, her back slightly bent, over the pile of bricks, and made two turns around the tree. What she saw was a cracked and battered tree trunk, on whose coarse bark someone had written a line in red paint: ‘Piss here and you’re a dog!’ accompanied by a very rude drawing. Yongshan couldn’t find her name, so she lowered her head, reflecting, and sullenly walked down from the brick pile. Her son had taken a seat on the suitcase; he must have guessed the result, for he looked at his mother with eyes filled with ridicule. She tried to smooth her disappointment over and said, ‘It’s good that it’s gone. Who knows what kind of people rub up against that tree. Disgusting!’

The sky suddenly began to grow dark. They had reached the depths of the Cabbage Market rubble and the orange sunlight had vanished from the scene of devastation. They were a stone’s throw away from their old home when Yongshan loosened her grip on the suitcase. ‘Let’s put it down,’ she said to her son. ‘If I didn’t tell you that behind this wall is our old house, would you have recognized the place?’

‘No,’ her son said. ‘Who can remember stuff like that?’

Yongshan stared at the half wall still standing. She looked for the roof, but there was none. Nor was there a door. She saw the cement steps that led up to the front door, but they were swallowed in the debris. Yongshan looked and looked, and suddenly she was angry with her son. ‘You can’t remember anything? Your grandma looked after you here till you were three. Right up until her heart attack, when she had to go to the hospital, she was the one who cared for you. Don’t you remember that either? You don’t recognize this, you can’t remember that — you’re not human, you’re a pig!’

Her son discovered, to his surprise, that his mother’s eyes were shining with the glow of furious overreaction. ‘I remember grandma, but that doesn’t mean I remember the house,’ he uttered quietly in his defence, then he said nothing more; for though he understood that he had provoked his mother’s wrath, he felt guiltless. And it really was true that he had no recollection whatsoever of Licheng, or of the old house in Cabbage Market.

Besides Yongshan and her son, the vast rubble of Cabbage Market was completely empty. Sunset glowed over the main street not far away, and the sound of people and cars would occasionally subside, then a fragmentary, hardly discernible, rustling would drift across the rubble, a sound like a subterranean sigh. A pigeon flew in the face of dusk towards the rubble and circled over mother and son for a while. Then, panicking, it flew to the parasol tree. It was probably somebody’s domestic pigeon, lost a long time ago, and now that it had finally found the way back to its shed, both shed and owner had vanished.

There was only half a wall left of the old house, and in it half a window. Yongshan walked up to it. The window-frame had had many layers of red paint, and the long years of sunlight and rain had given the surface stripy wrinkles, like the wrinkles on an old man’s body. The glass was broken, but the frame was still firmly set into the broken wall. Yongshan stretched out her hand to give the window a push, and it opened with a creak. Something fell down off the windowsill. Yongshan looked in and found that it was an ink bottle, which had fallen into the debris inside without breaking.

‘It’s your grandfather’s ink bottle,’ said Yongshan. ‘He used it to correct his students’ homework. He liked to keep it on the windowsill.’

Her son, standing behind her, peered inside; perhaps he was trying to remember the brief time he had spent in this house as a child. Maybe he couldn’t recall, or maybe he wasn’t trying, but he said, ‘It’s like an earthquake zone. It’s as if we’re earthquake victims.’

Yongshan touched the window; the greasy frame was covered in a layer of dust which came off on her hand. ‘When I was small, I liked to stand by this window and play the accordion,’ she said. ‘Your grandpa could read music, and sometimes before recitals he would make me practice, then he’d stand next to me and turn the pages.’

‘I never knew you played the accordion,’ her son said. ‘What happened to it?’

‘I gave it to your uncle,’ she said. ‘Your grandpa wanted him to learn it, but he didn’t take to it. Your uncle’s a good-for-nothing; later your grandma told me he sold the accordion to a scrap collector for twenty bucks.’

The pigeon on the pagoda tree flew back towards them, so low they could see its grey feathers, which looked as if they’d been dipped in water. The pigeon stopped on the remaining wall of the old house, paused for a moment and flew off again.

‘That pigeon can’t find its way home,’ Yongshan said.

‘Maybe it’s a homing pigeon?’ Pigeons were something her son was interested in and his eyes brightened. He followed the pigeon’s flight path with his eyes and said, ‘A homing pigeon can fly five hundred kilometres and come back home. A homing pigeon can find its way back home no matter how far it goes.’

‘Even people can’t find their way back home these days. How can a pigeon?’ said Yongshan.

She stopped following the pigeon with her eyes and bowed her head to look for something. ‘Let me see,’ she said. ‘Maybe I can find your grandma’s flowerpots. We could take one home as a memento. Do you remember how grandma made a flower terrace outside the door? She planted lots of flowers and the pots were all made from Yixing clay. They were very good pots.’

‘What’s the use of bringing pots home? You never plant flowers.’

‘We don’t have to plant flowers. It would be a memento, don’t you see?’

It was obvious that her son was trying to suppress his irritation; he picked up a tile fragment and threw it far away. It happened to land on a piece of glass, which made a crisp and resonant bang.

‘Can’t you behave like a decent human being?’ Yongshan said. ‘How old are you, anyway? It’s time you grew up.’

‘If you take me to a trash heap, how can I behave decently? Do you have some master plan or something? It’ll be totally dark in a second. Are we going to look for Uncle Yongqing or not?’

Yongshan looked blank for a moment, then turned to look inside the house, supporting herself on the windowsill. It was obvious that she had been avoiding this question. While Yongshan had been pondering the old home in the dusk, her heart, too, had sunk into the shadows. ‘I’ll take you there in a moment. Don’t worry, Licheng is my hometown; I won’t make you sleep on the street no matter what.’ She spoke to her son, then suddenly craned her neck to look into a corner. Her son assumed that this was her final glance and was surprised when Yongshan called out loudly, ‘The cabinet. Our five-drawer cabinet’s still here!’

Only half believing her, her son quickly climbed in through the window, and there against the broken wall was indeed a cabinet, covered in plastic film and a few newspapers, standing crookedly in the rubble. It was a style of cabinet that had been popular in the south in the seventies, and though it didn’t have five drawers, that’s what it was called. In any case, it looked like it might serve as a small wardrobe. Carved, symmetrical woodwork was inlaid in the dark red drawers.

The sight of the cabinet made Yongshan nostalgic. Her son was prepared for this, and having helped her through the window, he kept his peace. He sat on an abandoned plastic stool, and looked up at the dusky sky over the rubble of Cabbage Market, remembering, no doubt, the graphics from some computer game. He gave a giggle and said, ‘It’s like I’m in the Infinite Magic Castle. Do you know what that is? You go into the castle and forget everything, but you have all these powers, so you can walk with your brain, or talk through your nostrils!’

Yongshan tried to open the cabinet door, but saw that somebody had hung a little lock on it, so the door could not be opened. Yongshan went over the wood carvings with her hands and said, ‘I’m sure you don’t remember this cabinet, but I used it every day. I had to put the clean clothes in it and take out the stamps to buy rice and oil. You couldn’t possibly understand those things; you don’t know anything about what it was like.’

‘What good would it be if I did?’ her son said. ‘What’s the problem, as long as you know yourself?’

‘I wonder who put the lock on. Must be your uncle. How could he have forgotten to take the cabinet with him?’ Yongshan held the lock in her fingers, then contradicted herself, ‘Maybe it’s not your uncle. He’s a good-for-nothing; he’d throw it out or sell it. Maybe some scrap collector locked it. If we hadn’t come, he would have sold it.’

‘So let him. It’s not new and it’s not antique. Who would want it in their home?’

‘You’re a good-for-nothing, too.’ She gave her son a vicious glance and said, ‘When you grow up, you’ll be even more useless than your uncle.’

Forced back into silence, her son gazed around the rubble and saw that the lights of evening were turning on in Licheng. He looked past the ruins of the house and saw an even greater expanse of rubble, hazy with dust, shrouded by the colours of the gloaming. This was his mother’s city, his mother’s rubble, and her son didn’t feel any close connection to it. He felt exhausted and, bending down to hug his knees, he curled up like a cat. He spoke to his mother in an attitude of great passivity, ‘Just call me when you’ve seen enough, and you’re tired of wallowing in the past. I’m going to have a nap.’

Her son heard her rustling about, doing something with the cabinet; he didn’t even lift his head, which meant, ‘Go ahead, do what you want, it’s nothing to do with me.’

But Yongshan suddenly shouted at him, ‘Get up, quick! Help me carry the cabinet out.’

She had the cabinet bound with hemp rope and several packing strings, so that it resembled a piece of luggage. There was even a length of rope by which to haul it along. Who knows where Yongshan had found the ropes. She stood by the cabinet and looked at her son with some pride. ‘It’s all properly tied together. I’ve tried it; it’s not heavy at all. We can take it away.’

‘Are you mad?’ said her son. ‘Why on earth would you drag this old thing off? Maybe you’ve gone mad, but I haven’t. And I’m not going to take it.’

‘I don’t care if you want to or not; you have to.’ Yongshan’s voice became sharp, and there was also a tremor in it. ‘You really make my blood boil sometimes. Don’t you have any feelings at all? This is the last memento we have of your grandparents. I can’t just leave it here!’

Her son stood up, but turned away. He didn’t move, but there was the sound of snorting. They stood like that, in a stalemate, for about two minutes, and then he heard his mother stamp her foot. She said, ‘If you’re not going to help me, I can do it without you. I’ll take it out myself!’

On that May Licheng evening, Yongshan and son, having returned for a family visit, were walking down the street. Yongshan was in front, rolling a suitcase, but the thing her son was dragging along puzzled the passers-by: it seemed to be a piece of furniture. Everyone looked back to examine it as it chafed against the road surface, emitting occasional piercing sounds, creaks and groans. People of a certain age recognized it as a five-drawer cabinet, which had been popular in the seventies, and there were some who called out, ‘Look! A five-drawer cabinet!’

They had still failed to meet anyone Yongshan knew. The last time she had returned, seven years earlier, she had encountered old neighbours and elementary school classmates on the streets of Cabbage Market, and even run into someone who had played the accordion with her in the Children’s Palace, but this time she hadn’t seen a soul. Yongshan led her son along the streets of Licheng, and it was as if they were in an unfamiliar city. The cabinet had, to a large extent, relieved her helpless, distressed mood. Every now and then she looked back at her son and the cabinet he dragged behind him. ‘Watch out; don’t let the string break,’ she said. ‘Don’t pull that long-suffering face at me. There’s nothing wrong with a boy of your age getting a little exercise. Hang in a little longer; you just have to take it to your auntie’s on Mahogany Street.’

Her son didn’t take great care at all. When he heard one of the packing strings snap, he said nothing; soon afterwards another packing string snapped and he heard the clatter of the lock. Then, just as he had hoped, the cabinet refused to budge. He stopped and said in an almost delighted tone, ‘It’s snapped. They’ve all snapped. I told you the strings would snap!’

Not only had the string snapped, but the cabinet door had broken from the shock, and two of the drawers creaked to be let out. Yongshan ran over and smacked her son on the head. ‘You did it on purpose,’ she said. ‘I knew you wouldn’t do a good job of it. If you won’t take it, then I will.’

One of the drawers fell out of the cabinet. It was empty and exuded the smell of mothballs. The newspapers that covered the bottom were from 1984. Yongshan squatted down and looked at what was written in the newspaper. ‘Eighty-four,’ she said to her son. ‘You weren’t even around yet, then.’

He looked at his mother and said, ‘Just when I thought it couldn’t get any more embarrassing! Can’t you see that people are staring?’

Yongshan ignored his complaints. ‘Your grandma used to like to put the residence permit and grain stamps underneath,’ she said as she removed the old newspapers. A photo abruptly appeared before their eyes. It was a family photo of four people — a man, a woman, a boy and a girl — sitting in two rows. All of them were wearing army uniforms and, except for the little boy, who looked miserable, the other three were smiling stiffly. The background could be instantly identified as a painted curtain; it depicted Tiananmen Square in Beijing.

The photo from the past century tickled him: ‘A photo like this is cool, man.’ He tried to take it out of his mother’s hand, but she threw the photo back into the cabinet as if it had scalded her.

Her expression was very strange. She said, ‘I made a mistake. This photo isn’t of our family.’

He couldn’t absorb this information right away and, lifting the photo up to have a look, he said, ‘No wonder. I didn’t think the girl looked like you.’

Yongshan’s lips were trembling, as if she were afraid she might burst into tears. Suddenly she covered her face. ‘I’ve made a mistake,’ she said. ‘How could this be? This isn’t our cabinet.’

All at once, her son realized the full extent of the injustice he had suffered transporting the cabinet and shouted, ‘And so after all that, you were making me lug somebody else’s stuff around town! You’ve got to be kidding, right?’

‘How could this be?’ she squatted down and looked vacantly in the direction of Cabbage Market saying, ‘I wonder who left the cabinet there? It was in our house, and it looks just like the one we had.’

Her son produced some derisive hooting noises. Having thus finished mocking his mother, he relaxed and took a closer look at the strangers’ family photo. ‘Whose picture is this? It must be some neighbour’s. Man, do they look lame; so lame, it’s almost cute. Do you know these people?’

Yongshan scanned the photo blankly. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I left here a long time ago. They might be people who moved to Cabbage Market later; I don’t know them.’

Now that he’d been relieved of his onerous burden, her son joyfully dragged the cabinet to the side of the road. He put it next to a ceramic garbage can that was about half the size of a person, with a tiger’s head and a huge mouth to throw the garbage in. Once he’d finished this bit of business, he took a step back and examined how the garbage can and the cabinet stood, so to speak, shoulder to shoulder: an old piece of furniture with an unknown owner and a majestic garbage can. Underneath the pale light of the street lamps, the garbage can looked like a bodyguard protecting the cabinet. The son looked at his mother who was squatting on the ground and seemed to tacitly agree to the disposal of the cabinet. Her son was very pleased with himself, and giving himself a clap he said, ‘Cool, man! Modern art!’

Yongshan didn’t look at the cabinet again. She stood up slowly and, as she rose, her eyes welled up with tears. The lights were on in the windows of Licheng, and the newly paved road glimmered with an orange and white glow that seemed to flow like a river. Yes, her eyes welled up with tears, for she felt that she had now truly left her native city far behind, and it her. Besides some memories, the city had left her nothing, and she knew in her heart that she had bequeathed it no part of herself. Yongshan fished out her handkerchief and wiped away the tears. She heard her son say, ‘Where are we going to go now?’

She hesitated and, looking back at him, she began to feel the stirrings of a guilty conscience. ‘Where do you want to go?’ she asked.

He looked at her doubtfully and said, ‘I dunno. I’m going where you’re going. Didn’t you want to go and see your cousin?’

Yongshan bent down to brush some dust off the suitcase and said, ‘Suppose we didn’t go?’ It seemed like she was soliciting her son’s advice. ‘I haven’t seen her in seven years.’ Her son said nothing, and a kind of pity, and lenience, began to emerge in his eyes as he looked at her.

‘Whatever.’ Then he joked, ‘You’re the boss; I’m just staff. I’ll go wherever you’re going.’

Night-time Licheng was nothing like it used to be. After seven o’clock the streets looked splendid all lit up, and Yongshan took her son to a famous local restaurant. They ate Licheng’s famous crab dumplings, noodles with congealed duck’s blood and fried wontons. After stuffing themselves with a filling meal, both of them felt their strength return, so Yongshan took her son to a large department store, where they walked around and rode up and down in the lift. Yongshan bought some of Licheng’s famous silk, as well as some other local specialities, for gifts. She got a pure wool sweater for her husband, and even bought her son some brand-name sneakers, which were on sale; he picked them out himself. Then they rolled their suitcase to the train station, one in front of the other, as before, except that now Yongshan was carrying a few shopping bags. One was an ordinary white plastic bag, but the other was a red bag with an elaborate design, covered in countless white pear blossoms.¹⁴

On the way to the station, Yongshan saw her son furtively take something out of his pocket and stick it into the suitcase’s inner lining. He had always enjoyed collecting, and he must have found the picture very amusing: four strangers in a family picture. Well then, let him keep it. Yongshan didn’t stop him. She was leaning on a lamp post, waiting for her son, when she took a deep breath and smelled something. ‘The air in Licheng is better than at home,’ she said, ‘I wonder what flower that is. Lovely smell. The air here is best in April and May.’

Then they walked with their luggage to the train station, looking very much like tourists who had come for the day on an organized trip. Yongshan was a very thrifty woman; they had walked all day and yet still she couldn’t bring herself to hail a taxi. She told her son, ‘We can rest once we’re on the train. Why should we pay for something we don’t need?’