The Seventh Day

THE THIRD DAY

I roamed on the borderline between life and death. The snow was bright and the rain was dark. I seemed to be walking in morning and evening, both at the same time.

More than once I walked toward my bedsit. Yesterday Li Qing and I had left traces there of our reunion, but today there was no way to get close to it. However much I walked, I seemed to be stationary and never got the least bit nearer to my building. I remembered how I had taken my father’s hand when I was small, thinking to walk until we stood right underneath the moon, but, though we walked a long way, the distance between us and the moon did not change in the slightest.

Just at this moment two shining rails grew up beneath my feet and swirled ahead of me. They appeared tentatively, like rays of light that had lost their way, but they led me to the scene of my birth.

I was delivered between two rails as a train sped off in the night, and I gave my earliest wail not amid howling wind and pounding rain, but under a sky full of stars. A young switchman heard my feeble sobs and came to rescue me, while another train made the adjacent track quiver as it rushed toward me from the far distance. No sooner did the switchman clutch me to his chest than that train raced past with a deafening roar, and that is how, between the time it took for the first train to go one way and the second train to go the other, I acquired a father. A few days later, I had acquired a name as well — Yang Fei. This father of mine was called Yang Jinbiao.

I entered the world through the strangest of channels, for my delivery was effected not in a hospital’s obstetric unit or at my mother’s home, but in the cramped toilet of a train in motion.

Forty-one years ago, my birth mother boarded a train in the ninth month of a pregnancy. I was to be her third child, and she was heading back to her parental home to visit my ailing grandmother. As the train slowly approached a station ten hours into its journey, she felt a faint ache in her midriff. I was still three weeks away from my scheduled first appearance, and my older brother and sister had both been born strictly in keeping with the usual timetable, so my mother assumed I would follow a similar course. She simply felt that she needed to go to the toilet, and had no inkling that I was impatient to come out.

She rose from her sleeping berth and waddled down the aisle toward the toilet at the end of the railroad car. The train had just pulled into a station, and her passage to the toilet was made all the more difficult by the travelers who had crammed their way onto the train with bags over their shoulders. She carefully squeezed her way past the passengers and their big and small bags. As she entered the toilet, the train slowly began to move. Trains in those days had primitive facilities and squat-toilets only; if you looked down through the spacious round hole you saw an endless succession of railroad sleepers flash past below. With me in her belly hampering her movements, my mother was unable to squat down and had to kneel, trying to ignore the filth on the toilet floor. Pulling down her pants, she gave an effort and out I popped — and down into the round hole in the toilet floor. It took only a second for the speed of my slide and the speed of the train’s forward motion to break the cord that linked me to my mother, and immediately we were lost to each other.

My mother lay slumped on the floor in acute pain; it took a few moments for her to realize that her womb was now empty. After looking around for me in panic, she realized that I must have fallen out through the hole. With great effort she managed to prop herself up, and after opening the toilet door she cried out to a passenger waiting outside, “My baby, my baby—”

With that she collapsed in a heap, and there was a shout of “Somebody has fainted!”

First a female attendant rushed up, and then the conductor. The female attendant was the first to see blood between my mother’s legs, and she prompted the conductor to broadcast an appeal for medical personnel to proceed at once to carriage 11. Two doctors and a nurse rushed to the scene, to find my mother lying sprawled in the passageway, sobbing and begging for help in incoherent fragments of speech. Soon she fainted again and had to be lifted onto her sleeping berth. The three medical workers attended to her while the train trundled on.

By this time I was already in the cabin where the switchman lived. This young man — at twenty-one, now suddenly a father — looked at me in consternation. I was covered in purple-red blotches and crying fit to burst, my umbilical cord quivering in time with my crying and making him wonder if I had grown a tail. As my sobs grew weaker, it dawned on him that I must be hungry. It was late at night then and all the shops were shut, so he could find no infant formula for me. In his anxiety he remembered that the wife of a coworker of his named Hao Qiangsheng had given birth to a daughter three days earlier, so he wrapped me up in his cotton-padded overcoat and dashed toward Hao’s apartment.

Hao Qiangsheng was woken from sleep by a pounding on his door, and, opening up, he saw Yang was carrying something in his arms and crying desperately, “Milk! Milk!”

Still not fully awake, Hao rubbed his eyes. “What milk?” he asked.

Yang opened his coat to show him the wailing infant inside, then immediately passed me on to our host. Hao gave a start, accepting me as gingerly as he might a piping-hot roast sweet potato, and with a face of utter amazement carried me into the inner room. “It’s Yang Jinbiao’s,” he said to his wife, Li Yuezhen, who had also just woken up. From one look at me Li Yuezhen could tell that I was newborn, so she took me into her arms, and after she pulled up her shirt I quieted down and began to gulp down my first milk.

Yang sat with Hao in the outer room, mopping his brow, and explained what had happened. Only now did Hao get the full picture. He told my father how flabbergasted he had been to see he had suddenly acquired a child, when he didn’t even have a girlfriend. My father chuckled loudly at this, but soon shared with Hao his concern that I might be a freak, given that I had a tail — and one attached to the front of me.

Inside, Li Yuezhen overheard this exchange between the two new fathers, and after I had drunk my fill and dropped off to sleep she dressed me in a set of her daughter’s homemade baby clothes and went into the outer room with a wad of used fabric in her hand.

Li Yuezhen returned me to my father’s arms and instructed him on how to change diapers, showing him how to cut up old clothes to make diapers — the older the clothes the better, because the older the softer. Finally she pointed at the thing protruding from my navel. “That’s the umbilical cord,” she said. “Tomorrow you need to go to the station clinic and have the doctor cut it off. Don’t try to do it yourself — the baby might pick up an infection.”

I walked on, following the rails that looked like light beams, looking for that rickety cabin next to the railroad line that harbored so many stories from my early years. In front of me was rain and snow, and in front of the rain and snow were row upon row of tall buildings dotted with dark windows. They retreated as I walked toward them, and I realized that that world was gradually leaving me.

Faintly I could hear the sound of my father lamenting the ways of the world, a sound so far away and yet so intimate. In my ears his complaints began to stack up high, just like those tall buildings in the far distance, and they brought a smile to my lips.

For a long time Yang Jinbiao was convinced that my birth parents must have abandoned me on the railroad tracks because they intended me to be run over by a train, and for this reason he would often mutter to himself, “I could never have imagined there could be such heartless parents on this earth.”

This stubborn conviction made him all the more devoted to me. From the time he plucked me up from between the rails, I was never out of his sight. At the beginning, I spent my days in a cotton sling. The first such sling was made by Li Yuezhen, out of blue cotton; the later ones, also blue, were made by my adoptive father himself. Every day when he left home to go to work, he would mix milk formula and pour it into a bottle, then stuff the bottle into his clothes, next to his beating heart, so that his own body heat could keep the bottle warm. Then he would lower me into the sling around his neck. Hanging by his side was an army-issue canteen, and on his back he carried two bundles, one stuffed full of clean diapers, the other one empty, ready to be stuffed with my dirty diapers.

He would walk back and forth when he had to change the switches at forks in the railroad line, and I would sway back and forth on his chest. Surely there could be no finer cradle, and the sleep I had as a baby was the sweetest I ever had. If it hadn’t been for hunger, I think I might never have woken up when in my father’s arms. When I burst out bawling, my father would know I was hungry and would feel for the bottle, then stuff the nipple into my mouth. I grew up day by day sucking on the bottle, in my father’s body heat. Later, when I woke up hungry, I no longer bawled but stretched out a hand to feel for the bottle. That action delighted him no end, and he ran to tell Hao Qiangsheng and Li Yuezhen how smart I was.

My father soon attuned himself perfectly to my needs, knowing when I was hungry and when I was thirsty. When I was thirsty, he would take a mouthful of water from his canteen and then slowly transfer it from his mouth to mine. He was able to distinguish — or so he told Li Yuezhen — the subtle difference between the sound I made when I was hungry and the sound I made when I was thirsty. Li Yuezhen wasn’t sure whether to believe him, for she depended on the time of day to determine whether her daughter was hungry or whether she was thirsty.

If my father caught a whiff of something smelly as he tramped along the railroad line, he knew he needed to change my diaper. He would squat down next to the tracks, lay me on the ground, and as trains trundled by he would wipe my bottom with grass paper and fasten a clean diaper around me. Then with a lump of soil he would briskly wipe away most of the mess on my diapers, and then fold them up and place them in the other bag. After he got home at the end of the day, he would set me down on the bed and use soap and running water to wash the dirty diapers.

Our home was a little cabin some twenty yards from the railroad tracks. Outside the door, diapers were hung out to dry at various heights, like leaves hanging from a tree.

I grew up amid the sounds of trains rumbling by, in the shaking and trembling little house. When I was a bit bigger, the cotton sling on my father’s chest gave way to a cotton sling on his back, and that sling slowly got bigger too as I continued to grow.

My father had quick hands, and he soon taught himself how to tailor clothes and knit sweaters. During work hours, his coworkers couldn’t help laughing when they saw him, because he would knit a little sweater for me as he walked along the tracks, with fingerwork so expert that he didn’t need to look at what he was doing.

After I learned to walk, we would hold hands. On weekends my father would take me to the park to play. There, confident in the safety of our surroundings, he would let go of my hand and follow along behind as I ran around everywhere. We were very much attuned to each other’s needs, and if we were going down a little path I would sense at once, even without looking, when my father stretched out his arm, and would give him my little hand right away.

After we returned to the house next to the tracks, my father would be vigilant in protecting me from dangers, and when he was cooking inside and I wanted to play outside, he would attach us with a cord, one end tied to his foot and one end tied to mine, so that I grew up within the safety zone that he had defined. I could roam around near our front door, but if I saw a train approaching and couldn’t resist going closer to the tracks, I would hear the warning shout of my father from within the room: “Yang Fei, come back!”

The little house that I had been looking for appeared, just as the two rails were drifting off into the distance. A second earlier it had not been there, but the next second it was. I saw myself as a young child and my father as a young man, and also a young woman with her hair tied in a long braid. The three of us emerged from the house. My face looked vaguely familiar, my father’s face I remembered as though it were yesterday, but the girl’s face was indistinct.

As a little boy I was happy as a lark, utterly unaware that I was ruining my father’s life. My railside birth had narrowed his path dramatically. He had no girlfriend, and marriage was now only the remotest possibility. His best friends, Hao Qiangsheng and Li Yuezhen, introduced him to several prospects, informing them ahead of time about my foundling origins, so as to make clear that my father was a kindhearted and reliable man. But when those young women met him for the first time, if he wasn’t changing my diapers he’d be knitting a sweater for me, and the sight of him in full domestic mode, although making them smile, would also make them turn around and leave.

It was when I was four that I met the young woman with her hair in a braid. She was three years older than my father. She had missed the scenes of diaper changing and sweater knitting and saw simply a rather cute little boy. She reached out a hand to pet my hair and face, and after I addressed her as “Auntie,” she happily took me in her arms and dandled me on her knee. These friendly gestures settled my father’s nerves and gave him a glimpse of what happy married life could be.

They began to date, in encounters not involving me, I being left on such occasions with Hao Qiangsheng and Li Yuezhen. The dates took the form of evening strolls along the railroad line. My father was a bashful, introspective man, and he would escort his partner back and forth without saying a word. Typically it would be she who broke the silence with a remark or two, and only then would he say something, but often his words were drowned out by the roar of an approaching train.

At first their dates were of short duration; they would end after just one or two turns along the tracks, and then my father would come to collect me. Later, the pair would take five or six turns and keep walking until after midnight, by which time I would be sound asleep alongside little Hao Xia, who was three days older than me. Hao Qiangsheng himself, unable to keep his eyes open, would have lain down in bed and begun to snore. Only Li Yuezhen would be sitting patiently in the outside room waiting for my father to arrive. She would briefly inquire about the progress of the relationship before she let my father carry me off. In those days I would often fall asleep in the evening on the bed in Hao Qiangsheng’s apartment and wake up in bed in my own house.

This situation continued for two months or so, after which Li Yuezhen felt that my father and the young woman were not making any real progress but simply spending more time on their walks. After she questioned my father closely about the nature of their exchanges, she discovered where the problem lay. By the end of the evening, after all their walking, the girl would be tired. She would come to a stop and say “Good night.” My father, not knowing quite what to say, would simply nod, then turn around and head off quickly to Hao Qiangsheng’s apartment to collect me.

“Why don’t you walk her home?” Li Yuezhen asked my father.

“She already said good night,” my father replied.

Li Yuezhen shook her head and sighed. When the girl said good night, she told my father, what she was really hoping was that he would see her home. Seeing his confusion, Li Yuezhen took a firm line. “Tomorrow night,” she instructed, “make sure you walk her home.”

My father was enormously grateful to Li Yuezhen and her husband, for ever since I was born they had never stopped helping the two of us. He followed her advice, silently walking the young woman back to her home after she said good night. Outside her door, in the moonlight, she said good night a second time, and this time she looked radiant.

Their relationship leapt ahead, and now they did not wait until after dark for a surreptitious date but strolled confidently side by side into the park on Sundays. They were now formally in love, and passionately so. They began to meet in the little house that swayed and shook when trains passed, and they probably hugged and kissed, but I suspect they went no further than that.

From dating to full-blown love affair, I was absent from all the proceedings. This reflected Li Yuezhen’s view that for me to join the fun would hinder the normal development of the romance, and my appearance should be delayed until the waters had settled in their course. She believed that so long as this girl truly loved my father, she would naturally accept my existence. During this period I was practically living in Li Yuezhen’s apartment. I liked this family: I had a close bond with Hao Xia, and Li Yuezhen was like a mother to me.

When things got to the point where my father and the young woman were ready to discuss marriage, they had to bring me into the conversation. Earlier, when they were courting so avidly, I hardly figured in their thinking at all. Now my father began to talk about me in detail, starting with how he’d heard my wailing and picked me up off the tracks, and sharing the highlights of my development these past four years. He spoke as a happy father, and a proud one, relating a wealth of anecdotes that revealed how clever I was, for he thought me the smartest child in the whole world.

Never before had he talked for so long, or so volubly. After an hour or so, his intended said to him coolly: “You shouldn’t have adopted this kid — you should have left him with an orphanage.”

My father was speechless. The cheerful glow that lit up his features gave way at once to a stiff, pained expression, and that look of distress, rather than passing quickly, settled on his face for some time. His emotions were in turmoil, for he was now deeply in love with the girl, while loving me, of course, too. These were two different kinds of love, and he needed to choose one and abandon the other.

Actually, the young woman wasn’t really rejecting me out of hand — she was simply being pragmatic. She was twenty-eight, which in those days counted as very late to be single, and it meant she didn’t have many choices of men. In her eyes my father was strong in all departments — his only drawback was that he had adopted a foundling. She pictured how in the future they would have children of their own, and it seemed to her that fitting me into the family would be an awkward proposition. So that’s why she said what she did: if they didn’t have me to worry about, things would go more smoothly. She wasn’t wrong to think that way: they might well have more than two children, and to have a foundling to care for too would impose a heavy burden on a couple with a limited income. Even so, she still accepted my existence — she just felt that my father should have left me with an orphanage at the outset. She was just saying.

My father tended to have a one-track mind, and if an idea that he was set on found obstacles in its way, he would be unable to think of an alternative. And so the idea got fixed in his head that she would never go along with a package deal. Perhaps he was right, for even if she could have brought herself to accept me, in the long run I would have been a flash point for conflict and strife. My father was like a wet towel dripping with emotions: she and I had seized opposite ends of the towel and were wringing it with all our might, and his heart was in torment.

I had no inkling of his struggle and no awareness that now, when my father looked at me, it was with pity and not with joy. If anything, during these days he seemed to be all the more devoted to me. Although I was now steady on my feet, my father would carry me in his arms as though I couldn’t walk properly, and he would put his face close to mine. Always a bit of a penny-pincher, now every day he would buy me two candies, one of which he would slip into my mouth, the other of which he would pop into one of my pockets.

Much as he found it difficult to part from me emotionally, in his mind he was steadily moving in a different direction. Now twenty-five, one way or another my father needed a woman in his life. He loved me, but he needed a woman’s love even more. After much agonizing, he chose her and abandoned me.

Early one morning I woke up to find my father sitting on the bed. He leaned over and said softly, “Yang Fei, let’s go on a train ride.”

Although I had lived four years next to a busy railroad line, I had never once taken a train. I stuck my nose against the windowpane: as the train began to move and I saw the people on the platform quickly receding, I gave a wail of alarm. Then I saw houses and streets retreating rapidly, and fields and ponds as well, but I noticed the farther away things were, the more slowly they retreated.

“Why is it like that?” I asked my father.

“I don’t know,” he said morosely.

At noon that day we disembarked in a small town and lunched on noodles in a little place opposite the station, my father ordering a bowl of noodles with shredded pork for me and a bowl of plain noodles for himself. I couldn’t finish such a big bowl and my father ate the leftovers. Then he had me sit while he asked directions to the orphanage. The first three people he talked to said they weren’t sure; the fourth thought for a moment and then told him where to find it.

He carried me a long way, until we arrived at a stone-slab bridge over a dry riverbed. He heard children singing in a building on the opposite bank and assumed it was the orphanage (it was actually a kindergarten). Clasped in his arms, I heard the singing too. “Dad, there are lots of kids there,” I piped up happily.

My father bowed his head and looked around. Next to the bridge was a copse of trees interspersed with rocks and clumps of grass. The biggest rock was dark and flat, and he wiped it with his hand, clearing away little stones as though burnishing a piece of metalwork with sandpaper. Once its surface was clean and shiny, he lifted me up and deposited me on the rock, then brought out a handful of candy from his pocket and put it in mine. I was delighted to see so much candy, and what pleased me even more was that he then filled my other pockets with cookies. Then he unhitched his army canteen and hung it around my neck. He stood in front of me, his eyes fixed on the ground. “I’m leaving now,” he said.

“All right,” I told him.

My father turned and left, not daring to look back. Only when he was about to disappear around a corner could he no longer restrain himself; he cast a glance back and saw me sitting on the rock and happily swinging my little legs in the air.

It was evening by the time my father arrived back in our town. After getting off the train, he did not go to his own house but presented himself at the young woman’s home. He called her out and then headed off toward the park without another word. Accustomed as she was to his taciturn ways, she followed behind. Finding the park closed, he marched around the perimeter wall until they reached a quiet spot, and there he came to a halt and told her everything he’d done that day. The young woman was stunned and even a bit frightened, finding it hard to believe that he would just abandon me like that. Then she realized that he had done this out of love for her, so she hugged him tightly and kissed him with abandon, and he hugged her back, just as tightly. Dry kindling met hot fire, and they agreed to marry the very next day. After further embraces, my father said he was tired and returned to his cabin next to the railroad.

That night he could not sleep. It was the first time the two of us had ever been separated, and he began to be anxious and afraid, not knowing where I was at that moment and not knowing whether the people at the orphanage had discovered me or not. If they hadn’t, I might well be still sitting on that rock, and maybe a wild dog would pick up my scent as the night deepened….

The following day, my father, racked with worry, walked with his fiancée toward the marriage registry office. She did not realize that a drastic shift was taking place in his mind; she was thinking only that he looked unusually worn out. When she asked tenderly why this was, and he answered that he had not slept a wink, she attributed this to excitement and a sweet smile came to her lips.

Halfway to the registry office, my father said he needed a rest. He sat down by the sidewalk and put his hands on his knees. Then he buried his head in his arms and burst out sobbing. The young woman had not expected this at all. She stood there dumbly, as a deep unease began to settle over her. Suddenly my father stood up. “I have to go,” he said. “I have to go back for Yang Fei.”

I didn’t know that I had been abandoned — he related all these scenes to me subsequently, and only later did I find traces of this episode deep in my memory. I remember that I was very happy in the beginning, for the whole afternoon I sat on that rock eating cookies and candy. When the children from the kindergarten walked past after school, I was still eating these little snacks. The children were green with envy, and I heard them tell their parents: “I want a candy,” “I want a cookie.” Later, the sky darkened and I heard a dog barking nearby and I began to feel frightened. I climbed down from the rock and hid behind it, but was still afraid, so I picked up fallen leaves and covered myself with them until even my head was concealed, and only then did I feel safe. I fell asleep under the protection of the leaves, and in the morning it was the voices of the children on their way to the kindergarten that awakened me. Between the gaps in the leaves I saw the sun come up; then I climbed back onto the rock and sat there to wait for my father. I sat for a long time and it seemed that someone came over to talk to me, but I don’t remember what the person said. Now I had no candy and no cookies and just a little water in the canteen, so when I got hungry all I could do was drink a couple of mouthfuls of water, and then there was no water either. I was hungry and thirsty and tired, so I climbed down from the rock, lay down in the long grass, heard dogs barking, and covered myself up once more with leaves from head to foot, and then I fell asleep.

My father arrived in the town at midday and ran all the way to where he had left me. From a distance he could see no sign of me. His running steps gradually slowed and he came to a halt not far from the rock, looking around despairingly. Just as he was in an agony of anxiety, he heard me murmur something in my sleep:

“How come Dad’s still not here?”

My father told me later that when he saw how I had made a quilt out of leaves, he first laughed, then wept. He pushed aside the leaves and when he picked me up out of the grass I was already awake and was calling happily, “Dad, there you are! Daddy, there you are at last!”

My father’s life and mine once more were intertwined. After this he gave up on marriage — meaning, first of all, that he gave up on the girl with the long braid. She was very upset and couldn’t understand it at all; she went running over to Li Yuezhen to pour out her woes. Only then did Li Yuezhen realize what had happened. She gave my father quite a talking-to, pointing out that she and Hao Qiangsheng would have been perfectly willing to adopt me, for she thought of me as her own son, since I had drunk her milk. My father nodded in embarrassment and admitted he had shown poor judgment. But when Li Yuezhen insisted that he make up with the young woman, my father dug in his heels, convinced that he had to choose between the two of us. “All I want is Yang Fei,” he insisted.

No matter how Li Yuezhen tried to persuade him, my father responded with total silence. Angry but powerless, all she could do was vow never again to involve herself in his affairs.

Later, I saw that young woman with the long braid several more times. If I spotted her in the street as my father and I were out walking together, I would tug my father’s hand and give a cheerful shout of “Auntie!” My father bowed his head and just kept on going, clutching my hand tightly. At first the young woman would still give me a smile, but later she would pretend not to have seen us and not to have heard my call. Three years later, she married a PLA company commander ten years her senior and moved as a military dependent to the faraway north.

After this my father simply devoted himself to raising me, without entertaining any further romantic aspirations. I was his everything. Relying on each other, we led a life that passed slowly at the time but in retrospect was over very quickly. He recorded my growth, having me stand up against the wall every six months and using a pencil to mark one line after another above my head. When I was in middle school, I quickly grew taller, and when he saw wider and wider gaps between the lines, a blissful smile would appear on his face.

By the time I was in the first year of high school, I was already about the same height as my father and would often beckon him with a smile on my face. He would walk over to me, chuckling, and I would stand up straight and compare our heights. As I steadily grew taller and he steadily got shorter, I continued this practice until the final year of high school, when I could clearly see the strands of white hair on the top of his head and I noticed the wrinkles on his face. With all the work of caring for me, my father looked ten years older than his actual age.

By then my father was no longer a switchman. Manually operated switches had been replaced by electric points and the railroad had become automated. It took a long time for my father to adapt to his new job as a station attendant. He enjoyed responsibility, and when he was a switchman he’d invested all his attention in his work, for if he had made an error in setting the points, a major accident would have ensued. Once he became a station attendant, he had less pressure weighing on him, but the humdrum routine often made him feel that his talents were underused.

The cabin gradually faded into the distance and the two wavering rails did not return. I continued to linger in my own traces, and I felt tired, so I sat down on a rock. My body felt like a quiet tree. My memory trotted slowly through that world I had left, as though on a marathon course.

Through thrift and self-denial my father saw me from primary school through to university. Although in material terms our life was impoverished, it was warm and idyllic in its emotional tenor. One day, however, my birth mother came from afar in search of me, and our calm life was shattered. I was in the final year of university then; my mother came looking for me by retracing her original route and stopping at one town after another. It was her second attempt to find me. On that day forty-one years ago, by the time she had recovered from her fainting spell, the train had already traveled another hundred miles. All she remembered was giving birth to me when the train left a station, but she had absolutely no recollection of which station it was. She had asked people to conduct inquiries at three stations she had passed, but they had not found any sign of me. For a while she thought I must have been run over by the train or had died of hunger on the tracks or had been carried off by a wild dog, and for this she had wept in despair. Later she gave up trying to find me, but in her heart there always remained a sliver of hope — the hope that a kindhearted person would have found me and adopted me, supporting me until I grew up. At age fifty-five, when she retired, she decided to come south herself to look for me, and if she hadn’t found me this time she would probably have truly put this thought behind her. Our television and newspapers threw their weight behind her search, for my remarkable birth was truly an appealing catch line, and television and newspapers made hay out of the story of my birth; one headline described me as “the boy a train gave birth to.”

In the paper I saw a picture of my weeping mother and on TV saw her tearful recitation, and already I had a presentiment that the child she was searching for was me, because the date that she mentioned was precisely the date that I was born. But on an emotional level I was not particularly perturbed by this development, feeling that this was somebody else’s story. What intrigued me, actually, was the difference between her shedding of tears in the newspaper photograph and that on TV: in the photo her tears were stationary, stuck firmly to her cheeks, whereas on TV her tears were in motion, streaming down to the corners of her mouth. For twenty-two years Yang Jinbiao and I had clung to each other through thick and thin, and the only mother I was used to was Li Yuezhen. Now, when another, unfamiliar mother came into the picture, I had a strange feeling of dissonance.

Reading the papers and watching the TV, my father closely followed her accounts of what had happened and became certain that I was the child she was looking for. From information provided by the paper, he knew which hotel she was staying in, so he placed a call from the station office and soon was talking directly to her. After a quick exchange of information they found all the details matched. She started sobbing and he started crying, but they managed to carry on talking on the phone for over an hour, my father fielding a constant stream of questions about me. They arranged to meet at her hotel that afternoon, and when my father came home he told me with excitement, “Your mom’s here looking for you.”

He went to the bank and withdrew three thousand yuan — his entire savings — and took me to the town’s biggest shopping mall, which had just opened its doors. He felt that when I met my mother I should be dressed smartly, like a TV star, to show that he had not been mistreating me. In recent years he had hardly ever left the area around the railroad station, and entering this grand six-story shopping center for the first time he gazed around in wonder, muttering to himself, “What a splendid place!”

The first floor was devoted to cosmetics. He sniffed appreciatively. “Even the air smells good here,” he told me.

He walked over to one of the counters. “Where will we find name-brand suits?” he asked the girl.

“Second floor,” she replied.

Taking my arm he boarded the escalator, as proud and confident as a millionaire. We arrived on the second floor to find a well-known foreign-brand outlet straight ahead. He stopped to examine the prices on several rows of neckties in the entrance display and was rather taken aback. “Two hundred eighty for a single tie,” he told me.

“Dad,” I said, “you’ve got it wrong. It’s two thousand eight hundred.”

The look of surprise on his face turned to one of dismay. Suddenly aware of the limits to his budget, he stood there dumbly. Because he had always lived frugally, even on a meager income he had tended to operate under the illusion that he was quite comfortably provided, and it was only now that he became fully aware of his poverty. He didn’t dare step foot inside this name-brand store, and with a new sense of inferiority he asked the hovering shop assistant, “Where will we find a cheap suit?”

“Fourth floor.”

Head down, he walked toward the escalator, and as we rode up together I heard him muttering that my life would have been so much better if I hadn’t fallen out of the train. He knew from the media reports that my birth mother had retired with the benefits befitting a deputy office head, and my birth father still held the position of section head. My birth father was actually just a low-level functionary in that northern city, but in Yang Jinbiao’s eyes he was a powerful, influential figure.

The fourth floor was all domestic brands, and there he bought me a suit, a shirt, a tie, and a pair of shoes, spending only two thousand six hundred yuan — two hundred yuan less than the price of an imported tie. Seeing how smart I looked in my Western-style outfit, he shed his chastened look of a few minutes earlier and recovered much of his misguided complacency. In high spirits once more, as the escalator slowly descended he gazed haughtily at the foreign model in Western clothes displayed in an advertisement on the second floor, claiming that I looked more stylish in my outfit than the foreigner did in his. “It’s true what they say,” he added. “Clothes make the man.”

At two o’clock that afternoon, my father — dressed in a brand-new uniform — and I — in my suit — arrived at the three-star hotel where my birth mother was staying. On inquiry at the front desk, we were told that my mother had gone out that morning and had not yet returned — perhaps she had gone to the TV studio. The girl at the front desk clearly knew her story. She threw me a glance, not realizing I was actually the main character in that story. We sat down in the lobby to wait. The brown sofa had turned grimy from use, and we sat on it stiffly, concerned that our new clothes might get creased.

Before long a middle-aged woman came in. When she looked in our direction, we recognized her instantly and rose to our feet. She noticed us both and looked at me very intensely when the receptionist told her she had visitors. Although we had arranged to meet in the afternoon, my mother had found she couldn’t wait that long, and had gone to the station that morning to look for my father, just when we were in the shopping mall. She had succeeded in talking to Hao Qiangsheng, and had even made the trek to my university and quizzed some of my classmates about my situation. Now she came over, trembling from head to toe, and looked at me so fixedly that I felt her eyes were boring into my face. When she opened her mouth, no words came out — tears simply came to her eyes. Finally, with great effort, she spoke. “You’re Yang Fei?” she asked.

I nodded.

“And you’re Yang Jinbiao?” she asked my father.

My father nodded too.

Her shoulders began to shake. “You’re so like your big brother,” she told me tearfully. “But you’re taller than him.”

Then she threw herself on her knees in front of my father, crying, “I owe you so much! I don’t know how to thank you.” My father took her arm and led her over to the sofa. She couldn’t stop sobbing; he had tears streaming down his face. She thanked him over and over again, and after each “I’m so grateful” she would say, “I don’t know how to repay you for all you’ve done for Yang Fei.” Knowing he had forsaken married life for my sake, she burst into another round of sobbing. “You have sacrificed so much for my son — way too much,” she said.

This way of putting things didn’t sound right to my father. “Yang Fei is my son too,” he said, looking at me.

“That’s true, that’s true,” my mother said, rubbing her eyes. “He’s your son too, he always will be.”

Once the two of them were more composed, my mother seized my hand and launched into a jumbled, flurried sequence of remarks and questions. Whatever response I gave, she would turn to Yang Jinbiao and cry exultantly, “He sounds just like his brother!”

My looks and my voice left my mother in no doubt that I was the child she had given birth to twenty-two years earlier in the toilet of a moving train.

Later, the results of a DNA test confirmed that I was her son. Then other relatives I had never seen before hurried to join us: my birth father and my older brother and older sister, along with my sister-in-law and brother-in-law. The local media had a field day, with “the boy a train gave birth to” achieving the family reunion that all commentators agreed was the ideal outcome. On TV I made a nervous, uneasy appearance, and in the newspaper I saw my awkward smile.

Fortunately, the excitement lasted only two days, for on the third day the TV and newspapers’ love of drama was transferred to an intensive police crackdown on vice and pornography. Under cover of night the authorities had launched spot checks of the city’s sauna centers and salons, detaining seventy-eight people suspected of engaging in prostitution — and one of the hookers had turned out to be a man! This person, by the name of Li, had performed so effectively as a drag artist that not one of the hundred or more clients he had serviced during the course of a year had detected his imposture. This sensation became the new focus of media energies, and the various news platforms all dropped the story of “the boy a train gave birth to” to concentrate on the antics of the cross-dressing prostitute. They drew particular attention to the subtlety of his techniques for delivering sexual gratification, but drew a discreet veil over the details. So people in our city speculated with relish as to what these techniques were.

Sleet fluttered in front of my eyes but did not land on me. I knew that it was leaving too. I stayed seated on the rock, and my memory continued its loop through that topsy-turvy world.

Two months after those new relatives of mine returned to their northern city, I graduated from university. When we met, my birth parents had expressed the hope that after graduation I would pursue a career in their part of the country. My birth father said he could continue as section chief for another four years, after which he would have to retire. Taking advantage of the authority he still wielded, he had lined up several good job opportunities for me. Yang Jinbiao approved of this suggestion, conscious that he was an insignificant figure with no connections or clout, unable to help me find my dream job. He believed that if I moved to that northern city, on the other hand, there was every chance of an excellent future. My birth father had proposed this option rather cautiously, fearing Yang Jinbiao would not be pleased, and he stressed that for me to stay where I was would also be fine — he would find a way to establish connections here and make sure I got a good job. To his surprise, Yang Jinbiao readily accepted his first proposal and expressed heartfelt thanks for everything he was doing for me. This ended up putting my birth father at a loss to know what to say, and when Yang Jinbiao realized his embarrassment, he corrected himself: “I shouldn’t say thank you, for Yang Fei is your son too.”

My birth mother was very touched, and later, when we were alone, the recollection brought tears to her eyes. “He’s a good man — such a very good man,” she said to me.

My father knew that winters were severe where I was going, so he knitted me a thick sweater and woolen underwear and bought me an overcoat and a large suitcase. He started packing clothes for all four seasons into the suitcase, but soon took the old items out again and went into town to buy me new ones — I didn’t realize at the time that he borrowed money from Hao Qiangsheng and Li Yuezhen to buy me them. Then, on a summer morning, I hauled this suitcase filled with winter clothes — that Western suit was in it too — and followed Yang Jinbiao into the train station. After my ticket had been checked, he handed it to me, urging me to keep it in a safe place and reminding me that it would be inspected again on the train. He looked pensive and said not a word as we waited on the platform, but when my train pulled in he raised his hand and patted me on the shoulder. “When you have a chance,” he said, “write me a letter or give me a call to let me know you’re all right. Don’t make me worry.”

As my train left the station, he stood there waving. Although the platform was packed with people, I felt as though he was standing there all on his own.

Later, after he slipped away from me, I would bleakly recall the scene on the platform that summer morning. I had burst into his life all of a sudden when he was just twenty-one, and soon I had filled it up entirely, leaving no space for the happiness that should have been his to squeeze its way in. At last I had reached adulthood, thanks to so much painstaking effort on his part, only for me to abandon him on the platform with hardly a second thought.

In that northern city I began a short and uncomfortable chapter of my life. I saw very little of my birth father, wrapped up as he was in his work and his business engagements. My now-retired mother, however, kept me company morning to night. She took me to every sight worth seeing, combining these excursions with visits to the homes of a dozen former colleagues, to exhibit her long-lost son. They were happy, no doubt, to see us reunited, but I think their primary reaction was simply curiosity. Glowing with elation, my mother would take her hosts through every step in the saga, her eyes brimming with tears when she got to the more stirring moments. On the first few occasions I was very self-conscious, but later I gradually got used to it. I felt like an article lost and then found, and listened unmoved to my mother’s account of the pain of her loss and the joy of her discovery.

When I first arrived in my new home, I seemed an honored guest, for my birth parents, my brother and his wife, and my sister and her husband all regularly asked how I was doing, but by the end of the second week I realized I was beginning to outstay my welcome. We were crowded into a three-bedroom apartment, and the family members who were already there occupied the three bedrooms. I slept on a collapsible bed in the cramped living room, and needed to push the dining table right up against the wall before I could open up the bed. Every morning, my mother would rouse me and ask me to fold up the bed and move the table back into the middle of the room, otherwise people would have no place to eat their breakfast. She apologized for the inconvenience, but assured me that my brother’s work unit was about to assign apartments and my brother-in-law’s unit was about to do the same; after they moved out, I would be able to have a room of my own.

This new family of mine would often get into arguments. Brother and sister-in-law would argue, sister and brother-in-law would argue, my birth parents would argue, and sometimes everyone would argue in such a confused medley that I couldn’t sort out who was arguing with whom. Once, they got into an argument on my account; it happened when I was about to go for a job interview. My brother said I was getting the thin end of the wedge by having to sleep in the living room and proposed that once I had work and a salary I should rent an apartment outside, and my sister said the same thing. My mother got angry. “You both have jobs and salaries,” she shouted, wagging her finger at them, “so why don’t you go rent an apartment outside?”

My father supported my mother, saying my siblings had been working for several years and had some money in the bank, so they should find a place of their own. So then they argued back, detailing how their classmates’ parents had so much pull that they had lined up homes for their children ages ago. My father, livid with rage, cursed my brother and sister for having “wolves’ hearts” and “dogs’ lungs.” My mother delivered a similar accusation but in milder language, cursing them for having no conscience, saying they would never have got their current jobs had my father not pulled strings on their behalf. I stood in the corner and watched in desolation as their argument raged. After this my brother fell out with his wife and my sister with her husband. The two women scolded their husbands for not having enough get-up-and-go, saying how so-and-so’s husband and so-and-so’s husband in their respective work units were so much more resourceful, acquiring in short order house and car and money. The two men didn’t take this lying down: their wives were welcome to get a divorce, they said, and then try their luck landing a man with a house and car and money. My sister ran into her room to draft a divorce agreement, and my sister-in-law did the same. My brother-in-law and brother rushed to put their signatures on the documents. After that there were more tantrums, and threats of suicide. First it was my sister-in-law who ran onto the balcony and prepared to throw herself off, and then my sister followed. My brother and brother-in-law softened at this point, grabbing hold of the two women, appealing to their sense of reason and then admitting their own fault. In front of me, one of the men fell to his knees and the other began to slap his own face. At this point my parents retreated to their bedroom, closed the door, and went to bed, for they were only too familiar with this kind of row.

After all the furor had died down, I stood on the balcony in the quiet of the late evening taking in the splendid night views of this northern city, and I began to miss Yang Jinbiao. Never in his life had he cursed me or beaten me; if I’d acted out of line, he would simply and gently reproach me and give a sigh as though he was the one who’d done something wrong.

The next morning the family reverted to calm, as though nothing at all had happened. After the working members had breakfast and left for their offices, only my mother and I were left sitting at the dining table. She felt embarrassed about the row, but even more she felt misused. She kept complaining, complaining about how my brother and sister and their spouses would eat and drink at her expense, never ever paying a penny for their meals; then she grumbled about how my father had too many parties after work, coming home drunk almost every single evening.

She babbled on and on. “What a mess this family is!” she said. “It’s so exhausting, managing this kind of household!”

I waited till she had finished. Then I told her gently, “I want to go home.”

She looked blank for a moment, before realizing that the home I was talking about was not hers but my other one. Tears trickled from her eyes, but she made no effort to dissuade me. “Will you come back to see me?” she said, wiping her cheeks.

I nodded.

“Things have been difficult for you here,” she said sadly.

I said nothing.

After living in this new home for twenty-seven days, I took the train back to my old home. When I got off the train, I did not leave the station, but hauled my suitcase through the underpass and looked around for my father on one platform after another. I finally saw him at the far end of platform 4, and when I approached, I found he was giving directions to a confused traveler. When the man said “Thank you” and ran to catch his train, I called out to my father, “Dad.”

He froze, and it was only when I called a second time that he turned around and looked at me in astonishment, gazing in equal amazement at my suitcase. He saw that I was wearing the clothes I wore on the day of my departure. I had returned in just the same state as I had left.

“Dad, I’m back,” I said.

He understood what this meant. He nodded slightly and the rims of his eyes reddened, then he quickly turned around and continued with his work. Looking at the clock on the platform, I could tell that he would get off work in another twenty minutes, so I lugged my bag over to the steps leading down to the underpass and stood there watching as he applied himself to his various tasks. He gave directions to several travelers, indicating where their carriages were located, and he carried bags for an elderly traveler and helped him onto his train. Once the train had pulled out, he looked up at the clock and saw that it was time to knock off, so he came up to me and, picking up my bag, went down the steps. I reached out to grab it back, but he brushed me away with his left hand. It was as though I were still a child and not strong enough to lift such a large suitcase.

I was back in my own home. By this time we had already left the shack next to the railroad line and moved into a dormitory occupied by railroad employees. There were only two rooms, but they were rooms free of argument.

My father was quite composed, despite my sudden return. Since he had not expected me back, there was nothing much to eat at home, and he suggested that I have a shower while he went to a restaurant nearby and picked up some take-out food. He seldom patronized restaurants, and for him to come back with four dishes all at once was quite a novelty. He hardly said anything as we ate, concentrating mainly on putting bits of food into my bowl with his chopsticks. I didn’t say much either, telling him simply that I felt this home of ours was the right place for me. I said it wasn’t that difficult for university graduates to find work, and a job that I found here wouldn’t be significantly inferior to the job my birth father had in mind. My father nodded as he listened, but he spoke up when I said I would start looking for a job the next day. “What’s the rush?” he said. “Take it easy for now.”

I learned later from Hao Qiangsheng that after I went to bed that night, my father paid a call on them, bursting into tears as he came in the door and announcing to him and Li Yuezhen, “Yang Fei is back! My son is back!”

In his final days my father believed that the best thing he had ever done in life was to adopt a son named Yang Fei. By that time he had retired and I was a section head in the company. I had saved some money and I planned to buy a new two-bedroom apartment. I spent a weekend with my father looking at a dozen housing developments under construction and took a liking to one particular apartment, so we planned to sell my father’s railroad dormitory unit. It had been assigned to him as one of the perks of his job, and now he was free to dispose of it as he chose. With the funds gained from its sale, combined with the money I had put aside over the years, we could purchase a new apartment cash down, without needing to pay a mortgage. My professional success offered some consolation to my father for the disappointment of my failed marriage.

During this period I had a lot of work-related engagements in the evenings, and when I returned home late I would find my father waiting for me with a full dinner on the table. If I wasn’t home, he would not eat and could not sleep. So I began to turn down as many invitations as possible and instead went home to keep my father company as he ate and watched television. During my vacation that year, I took him to Huangshan for a holiday — the first and last time that he left home for travel. At sixty, my father was still very fit, and while I was soon panting for breath as we climbed the mountain, he moved as nimbly as a swallow and was able to give me a helping hand on the steepest stretches.

Hao Qiangsheng and Li Yuezhen had also retired. Their daughter, Hao Xia, had gone to graduate school in the United States after she finished university in Beijing, then stayed on in America to work, marrying an American and bearing two attractive children. On retirement Hao and Li planned to emigrate to America, and as they waited for their green card applications to be approved they would often come to visit my father — these were his happiest moments. When I opened the door on my return from work and heard peals of laughter from inside, I knew that they were visiting. Li Yuezhen would give me a cheerful greeting, “Hi, son,” when I appeared in front of them.

Li Yuezhen had always called me “Son,” and in my mind she was the only mother I had as I grew up. When I was still sucking my thumb in the cotton sling on Yang Jinbiao’s back, she had come almost every day to our shack next to the railroad tracks to breast-feed me. “Formula is never as good as mother’s milk,” she would say to Yang Jinbiao. In my memory she had always been thin, but according to my father she had once been quite plump — it was from feeding me that she grew slender. My father’s claim sounded plausible to me, for in those penniless days the poorly nourished Li Yuezhen breast-fed two young children.

I had always been just as familiar with their family as I was with my own. Much of my time as a young child was spent in their home, for I would eat dinner and sleep there when my father worked the night shift. Li Yuezhen treated me and Hao Xia as though we were siblings, and on the rare occasions when we had a meat dish for dinner she would slip the last morsel of pork or chicken in my bowl and not in Hao Xia’s. Once Hao Xia burst into tears, saying, “Mom, I’m the one who’s your child!”

“It’ll be your turn next time,” Li Yuezhen said.

Hao Xia and I had been childhood sweethearts and had privately vowed to marry when we were grown up, so we could always be together. “You can be Dad and I’ll be Mom,” was how Hao Xia put it. At that point we thought of marriage as a combination of a dad and a mom, but once we understood that marriage is defined more precisely as a partnership of husband and wife, neither of us ever again mentioned our secret agreement and we both forgot it with equal speed.

I never again visited my family in the north, but simply called them on the phone on major holidays. Usually it was my birth mother who picked up, and after quizzing me about my affairs she would always urge me to look after Yang Jinbiao properly, saying with feeling, “He’s such a good man.”

My father fell ill the year after he retired. He lost his appetite and rapidly lost weight; the whole day through he felt drained of energy. He kept me in the dark, unwilling to let on that he was battling an illness; he thought he would slowly recover. When he got ill in the past he wouldn’t go to see the doctor and refused to take medication, instead depending on his strong constitution to see him through, and this time too he was confident he could fight it off. I was busy at work in those days and didn’t notice that my father was losing weight, until one day when I found he was just skin and bones and learned that he had been ill for half a year. I insisted that he go to the hospital for tests, and when the results came out, my hands trembled as they held the report, for my father had developed lymphoma.

I watched helplessly as the malignant cells gradually consumed my father’s life. Radiation treatment, surgery, chemotherapy — all these tormented my once-strong father so that when he walked it was with a crooked gait and it looked as though a gust of wind would be enough to blow him over. As a retired railroad worker he could claim reimbursement for a portion of his medical expenses, but these expenses were so enormous that we had to bear the bulk of them, and I quietly sold off his railroad dorm unit. So as to look after him, I gave up my job and bought a small shop near the hospital. My father slept in the back room, while in the front room I sold daily necessities to customers going by, so as to bring in a little income.

My father was upset, for I hadn’t consulted him before quitting my job and selling the property. He knew this was a fait accompli and would often sigh and moan, saying to me in distress, “You’ve got no house and no job — what will you do in the future?”

I tried to reassure him, saying that once he had recovered I would return to my original employer, start saving once more, and buy a new apartment for him to see out his days peacefully. He shook his head. “Where will you find the money to do that?” he said.

“If we can’t afford a full-cash purchase,” I told him, “we can always buy an apartment by taking out a mortgage.”

He shook his head all the more stubbornly. “Don’t buy an apartment. Don’t go into debt,” he cautioned.

I said nothing more, knowing his mind was made up. Before housing prices skyrocketed I had thought of taking out a mortgage, but my father was daunted by the prospect of owing the bank so much money and I had had to abandon the plan.

It was as though we had returned to the life in that rickety shack next to the railroad tracks. In the evening, after I had closed up shop, the two of us crammed onto the single bed to sleep. Every night, I could hear my father’s sighs and groans — the sighs on account of my grim future, the groans in reaction to his own pain. When his suffering was not so acute, we would share memories of earlier days, and at such moments his voice would take on a blissful tone. He would mention little episodes from my childhood, recalling how I would insist he lie next to me and watch me as I fell asleep, how sometimes when he adjusted his position and turned his back to me, I would call again and again, “Dad, look at me, look at me….”

I told my father that I remembered hearing him snoring when I woke up in the middle of the night when I was small. A few times I didn’t hear his snore and was so scared that I started crying, worried that perhaps he had died. I would shake him and shake him, and when he sat up, my tears would turn to smiles and I would say to him, “So you’re not dead after all!”

One evening my father neither sighed nor groaned. Instead he talked quietly about some key moments in our lives, such as how he had heard me crying on the railroad track and carried me in his arms to Li Yuezhen’s house. It was that evening too that I learned how, when I was four years old, he had abandoned me in order to get married. When he got to this point tears trickled from his eyes and he was stricken with self-reproach, saying over and over again, “How could I have been so heartless?”

I pointed out that I had left him too, joining that family up north, so the score was even. In the darkness he patted my hand, saying that for me to go to the home of my birth parents didn’t count as abandoning him.

He gave a little laugh. He recalled how clever I’d been to cover myself with leaves to keep myself warm that time he left me by that dark rock. This comment somehow refreshed my memory, and suddenly I remembered the stones, trees, and grasses, and the barking dog that had made me so fearful. I said it wasn’t that I was cold, but that I was afraid, for a dog kept barking constantly.

“No wonder,” he said, “that you had leaves over your head as well.”

I chuckled, and so did he. “I’m not afraid of dying,” he said to me evenly. “I’m not afraid of that at all. What I’m afraid of is not being able to see you.”

The next day he left without saying goodbye. He said nothing at all, not leaving even a note, dragging away the little life left in him. In the days that followed I kept kicking myself for being so inattentive. Shortly before this, my father had me take out a new railroad uniform from the wardrobe and put it next to his pillow. I hadn’t given this a second thought, assuming he just wanted to admire the last new uniform he had been issued prior to his retirement. But I overlooked his longstanding custom — that he liked to put on a new uniform when faced with some important task.

On the day that my father left home, there was a fire in our city — at a department store just half a mile from my little shop. It was afternoon when I heard news of the disaster, and by then I was in a very anxious state, because my father had yet to return home. A horrible thought came to mind — could he have gone to the department store? It seemed just possible. My birthday was coming up, and my father might well have wanted to buy me a present.

I shut up shop for the night and dashed over to the department store. The silver structure was now reduced to a charcoal hulk, as thick smoke billowed upward. The flames had been largely extinguished, but hoses from a dozen fire trucks were still spurting long jets of water on the charred wreckage. Ambulances lined the street, along with several police cars. Fire ladders were propped up against the building and firemen were already inside searching for survivors. Some of the injured had been carried out and ambulances were speeding off, sirens wailing.

Every intersection next to the department store was crammed with people, and everyone was talking about the fire. Standing among them, I heard only snatches of conversation: some said the fire started around ten in the morning, while others said it started at noon. I shuttled back and forth among the onlookers, listening as they discussed the cause of the fire and guessed the number of casualties; it was dark by the time I returned home.

The TV news that evening had a segment on the department store fire. According to an official source, the disaster was triggered by an electrical short circuit at nine-thirty in the morning. The store had only just opened at the time, the news anchor said, and there were few customers inside. The majority were successfully evacuated and only a handful were trapped. The precise casualty figure was still under investigation, the report said.

My father did not return home that evening, and I was on tenterhooks the whole night. In the morning the TV news had the latest on the department store fire: seven dead and twenty-one injured, with two in critical condition. At lunchtime they released the names of the dead; my father was not among them.

But other reports were circulating on the Internet. Some said there were over fifty dead, while others claimed there were twice that. Many people online criticized the authorities for underreporting the figures, and some noted the Work Safety Administration’s definition of accidents: a single episode that caused between three and nine fatalities counted as a “fairly serious” accident; over ten deaths constituted a “serious” accident; and a death toll of over thirty was classified as an “extremely serious” accident. The authorities were castigated for trying to downplay the gravity of the disaster by limiting the reported fatalities to seven. Even if the two in critical condition were to die of their injuries, that would only make a total of nine, confining the fire to the category of “fairly serious” accident and thereby averting any unpleasant repercussions on the career prospects of the mayor, the Communist Party secretary, and other bigwigs.

Rumors were spreading like wildfire on the Internet. Some people said the relatives of the unreported dead had been threatened, while others claimed they had been given huge wads of hush money, and still others listed the names of unreported fatalities—again my father’s name was absent.

He had now been gone two days, and I began to mount a search. First I made inquiries at the railroad station, thinking the staff there might have seen him, but I drew a blank. He had become so rake-thin, even people who knew him might fail to recognize him. Then I went to see Hao Qiangsheng and Li Yuezhen, who had just got back from Guangzhou, having passed their visa interview at the U.S. consulate there, and were now attending to the sale of their apartment and preparing to make the long flight across the Pacific to join their daughter. They were shocked by my news. Hao Qiangsheng wouldn’t stop sighing, and Li Yuezhen burst into tears. “Son,” she said, “he doesn’t want to be a burden on you.”

The most likely explanation, they felt, was that my father was set on returning to his roots — going back to the ancestral village where he was born and where he grew up. I should try looking for him there, they thought.

I passed the shop on to someone else and took a long-distance bus toward my father’s old home. I had visited once when I was small, but my father’s parents had no warm feelings toward me, thinking I had wrecked his life. My father had five siblings, but their relationship also was strained. My grandfather had worked on the railroad, at a time when state policy allowed an employee’s child to get a job on the railroad if the parent took early retirement. Of his six children, my grandfather selected the youngest — my father — to inherit his position and thereby angered the other five. That’s maybe why my father never took me back home a second time.

By now, my grandparents had both passed from the scene. My father’s five siblings were still living where they always had, but their children had moved away years earlier. Migrant workers in an assortment of different cities, they had put down roots elsewhere.

I got off the bus in a bustling county seat and took a taxi to my father’s village. We rode along a road that was broad and level and paved with asphalt concrete, a huge contrast to its condition on my previous visit, when it was a mud track rutted with holes so big that our car was bouncing around all the time. Just as I was marveling over the progress made, the taxi came to a sudden stop. The asphalt road had come to an end and the crude, potholed surface of the past reappeared in front of me. No county official was going to visit a place this far out in the boondocks, the taxi driver said, so the asphalt ended here. Seeing my bewildered city-boy expression, he explained that country roads are built just for the convenience of leaders when they venture out to conduct inspections. The village that I wanted to go to was another three miles farther on, he said. He pointed down the narrow track ahead. “No leader would dream of going to a godforsaken place like that.”

My father’s village, when I finally got to it, was nothing like the village that I had visited as a child. That village was skirted by trees and stands of bamboo and several ponds. My cousins and I had shot at the birds in the trees with catapults, and we had rolled up our trouser legs and waded into the ponds to catch little shrimp. In those days, field after field shimmered with rapeseed blossom; the voices of men and women, young and old, mingled with the sounds of chickens and ducks, oxen and sheep; and pigs careened along the paths between the fields. The village now was desolate, the fields lying empty, the trees and bamboos cut down. The ponds had disappeared. The young and able-bodied had all abandoned the village for jobs in the city, and the only people I saw were a few old-timers sitting outside their houses and the occasional toddler wandering around. I was doubtful I would recognize my father’s siblings, so when I came upon a hunchbacked old man smoking a cigarette by his front door, I asked him where I’d find Yang Jinbiao’s brothers and sisters. He muttered “Yang Jinbiao” a few times before he remembered. He called out to another oldster peeling fava beans across the way, “Here’s someone looking for you.”

The old neighbor got to his feet and studied me as I walked over, rubbing his hands on his pants in preparation for greeting me. I went up to him and introduced myself as Yang Fei. That elicited no reaction, so I told him I was the son of Yang Jinbiao. “Ah!” he went, then opened his toothless mouth to call his siblings: “Yang Jinbiao’s son is here!”

Then he turned to me. “You’ve grown so tall, I’d never have known it was you.”

Four other old folk emerged one by one to join their brother. All five siblings wore cheap polyester clothes, and standing in a group they looked very much alike. They differed only in their heights, like the fingers of a single hand.

They were very pleased to see me. I accepted the cup of tea they poured for me but shook my head at the proffered cigarettes. Almost immediately they began to busy themselves washing and chopping vegetables and fetching wine. Seeing that it still wasn’t quite three in the afternoon, I said it was a bit early to start preparing dinner, but they disagreed.

With the passage of years, they were no longer jealous of my father, and they all got a bit red around the eyes when they learned he had disappeared after falling critically ill. Perhaps because their fingers and palms were so rough, they used the backs of their hands to wipe away their tears. I told them I was looking for my father and thought he maybe wanted to die where he’d been born, but they shook their heads and said he’d never come back again.

In the silence, I stood up and left the rock on which I’d been sitting. Sleet continued to billow, but still it did not fall on me — it simply surrounded me. When I walked on, the sleet opened a passage, and when I looked back, it had closed up again.

On the path of memory I was making my way toward Li Yuezhen.

By the time I returned to the city from my father’s village, Li Yuezhen was no more. As she was crossing the road in the evening, she was knocked off her feet by a speeding BMW, and as she lay sprawled on the road she was run over first by a truck and then by a delivery van. In the three short days that I was away, I had lost the mother figure so dear to me.

Hao Qiangsheng was overwhelmed by shock and grief, and his daughter was in transit back from the United States. When I arrived at their house, Buddhist priests were conducting a service to ease the passage of the departed soul. Incense swirled around the room and a yellow cloth lay on the table, with fruit and cakes laid out on top, along with a tablet inscribed with Li Yuezhen’s name. Several priests stood in front of the table with their eyes half closed, chanting a sutra in a constant hum, like that of mosquitoes. Hao Qiangsheng sat off to one side with a dull look in his eyes, and I sat down next to him.

The priests perhaps knew that Li Yuezhen had been planning to emigrate to the United States, for after reciting the sutra they told Hao that during the service Li Yuezhen’s soul had clambered over his knees and over his shoulders, up and into heaven. The fee for the funeral service was three thousand yuan, they said, but with the outlay of another five hundred yuan they could ensure that Li Yuezhen would be reincarnated in a new body in the United States. Hao Qiangsheng nodded woodenly, so the priests closed their eyes once more and resumed their recitation. This time the reading was short, and though I couldn’t make out most of the words I did hear references to America — not the regular Chinese term for it, but the English abbreviation, “U.S.A.” The priests said that Li Yuezhen had already begun the journey to U.S.A. and would be there shortly, even faster than if she traveled on a Boeing jet.

Hao Qiangsheng didn’t seem to register my arrival, and I had been sitting there for quite some time before he realized who I was. Now he burst into tears and grasped my hand. “Yang Fei,” he cried, “you’ve got to go and see your mom!”

Three days before her death — on the morning I went to the village to look for my father, in other words — Li Yuezhen had stumbled upon a scandal. As she crossed a bridge on her way back home from the market, she saw a number of human fetuses floating in the river below. At first she thought they were dead fish, but couldn’t understand why they seemed to have arms and legs. Wondering if her eyes were playing tricks on her, she asked a couple of young people nearby to come over. They said it didn’t look like fish, but like babies. When Li Yuezhen hurried down the steps to the riverside, she could see that they were right. Tiny babies were floating downstream amid a tangle of sticks and leaves, and soon several more babies emerged from the shadows underneath the bridge and bobbed on the sunlit surface. As she strained to make them out, Li Yuezhen stumbled over an obstacle underfoot. She looked down to find three fetuses snagged on the bank.

Li Yuezhen felt it her duty to report this find. Instead of going home, she proceeded directly to the offices of the local newspaper, her basket of groceries under her arm. The guard at the entrance, noting her unprepossessing appearance and suspecting she might be coming to lodge a complaint against the authorities, told her that she needed to go to the Letters and Visits Office of the city government. So she waited outside, and managed to intercept two reporters just arriving for work. They rushed to the scene, by which time both bridge and bank were crowded with people and some were using bamboo poles to maneuver the dead babies ashore.

In the course of that morning the two reporters and a dozen or so locals found twenty-seven babies, both infants and fetuses. The eight infants wore, around their feet, tags on which the name of the city hospital was printed; the nineteen fetuses had no such identification. After taking photos with their mobile phones, the reporters paid a visit to the hospital. They were received warmly by the hospital director, who assumed they had come to interview him regarding new hospital procedures designed to alleviate the difficulty and expense of securing medical treatment. One look at the photos of the dead babies, and the director’s smile disappeared. He announced that he had to head off to an important meeting immediately, and he called in a deputy to deal with the reporters. After seeing the photos, the deputy director informed the reporters that he had a meeting at the public health department; he turned them over to the hospital’s office manager. After glancing testily at the photos, the office manager identified the foot tags. These infants, he said, had died after failing to respond to treatment; their parents had fled because they couldn’t afford to pay the medical expenses. Patients’ families were always trying to get out of paying their bills, he groused, generating losses of over a million yuan for the hospital every year. The nineteen fetuses, without tags, had been aborted at the end of the second trimester in order to comply with population-control guidelines. Population control is a national policy, after all, he reminded them condescendingly. The twenty-seven babies were medical refuse, he declared, and the hospital had done nothing wrong: trash has to be dumped, after all.

A directive came down from above, and the newspaper pulled the report that the two journalists had filed. But they wouldn’t take this lying down: they posted the story and the photos on the Internet. Public opinion was outraged, and on social media criticism hailed down on our city authorities like a spray of bullets. Only now did the hospital admit it had made a mistake, conceding that it had not done a good job of disposing of medical refuse and saying it had already punished those responsible. For the hospital to repeatedly refer to the dead babies as “medical refuse” enraged the netizens, and in the face of even more virulent commentary the media spokesperson for the city government issued a statement that the twenty-seven medical-refuse objects would be disposed of appropriately. They would be treated as human and cremated, and their ashes would then be buried.

I went to the morgue to pay my respects to Li Yuezhen. The reception room was lined on all sides with wreaths of flowers, a white ribbon inscribed “In deep mourning for Liu Xincheng” pinned to each wreath. I didn’t know who Liu Xincheng was, but with so many people dropping off wreaths, this person clearly had to be either of great wealth or of high rank. I did not see Li Yuezhen, and the rows of wreaths somehow made the reception room look bare and empty. I began to wonder if I had come to the wrong place.

At this point I noticed a small chamber off to one side. When I entered its doorway, I found that a large white cloth had been laid on the floor, and the uneven contours of the cloth made me suspect there was a body underneath. I squatted down and pulled the cloth aside: there was Li Yuezhen. She lay in a white dress with a crowd of dead babies around her, as though she were their mother.

Tears streamed down my face. This woman who had mothered me during my formative years lay there peacefully, her face still maintaining its familiar air. I gazed forlornly at her now-frozen expression and inwardly cried “Mom!” as I wiped away my tears.

Late that night, a sinkhole suddenly opened up. Hospital staff on duty at the time, along with some patients and local residents, heard an almighty roar, and people rushed out in panic, thinking there had been an earthquake, to discover that the morgue had been sucked down a huge hole. The sudden appearance of this gaping pit inspired widespread panic. Fearful of being trapped indoors, patients and local residents crowded onto the streets; only those critically ill remained in their sickbeds, leaving their fate to the hand of providence.

The evacuees, though still shaken, began to feel grateful to Old Man Heaven, saying he had a good eye, letting the morgue collapse but sparing the taller buildings nearby — if that sinkhole had moved a few hundred feet to one side or the other, a big building would have collapsed and the death toll would surely be horrendous. “Oh, thank you, Lord!” people mumbled, and one tearful old man added, “What could collapse did, and what couldn’t collapse didn’t. Old Man Heaven is really on our side.”

Panic, after spreading the whole night through, began to recede with the light of day. The city government attributed the sinkhole — measured as a hundred feet wide and fifty feet deep — to excessive pumping of groundwater. Five inspectors were lowered into the hole by ropes, and an hour later they emerged to report that the interior of the morgue was still intact, but the walls and ceiling had developed cracks.

Spectators arrived in throngs. They stood next to where the morgue had once been and admired the hole. “It’s practically a perfect circle,” they marveled, “as though drawn in advance with a compass! Even old wells are not this round.”

It was a couple of days before people remembered that Li Yuezhen and the twenty-seven babies had been laid out in the morgue, but the inspectors said they had not found a single corpse. Li Yuezhen and the dead babies had mysteriously disappeared.

A reporter interviewed the hospital staff member responsible for cleaning the morgue, and he said that when he left work that afternoon they were all still lying in that chamber. Had they been cremated? the reporter asked. The staff member said no, that the funeral parlor did not operate in the evening and no cremations would have been done. The reporter then went to the hospital office, and the people there could not explain how Li Yuezhen and the babies had vanished. It’s just too peculiar, they said: surely corpses can’t climb out of a hole and slip away by themselves.

Hao Xia, just off the plane and in the throes both of grief and jet lag, came with her father to the hospital, hoping for a last glimpse of her mother, but the staff had to tell her they did not know where she was.

News of the mysterious disappearance of Li Yuezhen and the twenty-seven babies spread throughout the city and appeared on the front pages of several websites. As interest grew, rumors flew, and on the Internet people freely speculated that there must be some awful secret lying behind all this. Although the local media kept silent, having been ordered to refrain from any reporting, media outlets based elsewhere were eager to make the most of this story, sending their reporters in by plane and train and car, and getting all set to provide saturation coverage.

At a hastily arranged news conference, an official from the civil administration bureau announced that Li and the babies had been sent to the funeral parlor for cremation on the afternoon before the collapse.

“Were the relatives informed?” a reporter asked.

It had been impossible to contact the babies’ relatives, the official said.

“What about Li Yuezhen’s relatives? Couldn’t you contact them?” the reporter asked.

The official was lost for an answer. “Thank you, everyone,” he said. The news conference was over.

Late that afternoon the civil administration official and a hospital representative delivered an urn to the Hao family, saying that they had made the decision to cremate because the weather was hot and Li Yuezhen’s remains could not be easily preserved. Hao Xia, though she had not slept for over thirty hours, still had her wits about her. “It’s only spring now!” she cried furiously.

The morgue attendant then changed his story, claiming that Li Yuezhen and the babies had indeed been sent to the funeral parlor for cremation, and he himself had helped load them into the hearse. Soon, someone who said he worked for a bank put up a post on the Internet, disclosing that five thousand yuan had been deposited in the attendant’s personal account that day — hush money, he suspected.

So as to calm such rumors, the city government asked the journalists to come to the funeral parlor to inspect a line of twenty-seven tiny urns, explaining that all the babies had been cremated and would shortly be buried. But with this matter apparently settled, a further wrinkle emerged, for somebody soon reported that the urns of Li Yuezhen and the babies were actually filled with the ashes of other people cremated on that same day. When the relatives of those cremated that day got wind of this, they rushed to open their urns and soon became convinced that a lot of ash was missing, even though they weren’t sure just how much ash was normal. One reporter made a point of going to the funeral parlor, hoping that someone there would be brave enough to stand up and admit that the ashes had been tampered with. But all the workers denied this categorically and their leaders dismissed it as Internet rumor. One joke making the rounds in cyberspace was that the funeral parlor workers were definitely going to get a jumbo-sized bonus this month.

I disentangled myself from memories that were now growing tight and thick, as though threading my way out of a forest dense with vegetation. Weary thoughts lay down and rested, but my body continued to move through a boundless void, an empty silence. In the air no birds circled and in the water no fish swam and on the earth nothing grew.