One day, after dark, we heard a gentle knocking at our door.
Dad opened it. Outside stood the white-haired Professor Wei, one of the twin sisters. Upon recognizing her, Dad took a step back.
“May I come in, please?” Her voice was so gentle and sincere.
“Of course, of course.” Dad opened the door wide and let her in.
She bowed and smiled sweetly at us. We put down our chopsticks, and bowed back to her. She was a petite lady in her late sixties. Upright and dignified, she seemed taller than her mere five feet. Her white hair was braided and twisted into a bun in back, neat and elegant.
“How may I help you, Professor?” Dad asked politely. He gestured for us kids to leave the room. We hurried out, then stuck our ears against the closed door.
“Please forgive me for intruding at such a late hour.” She took out a handkerchief and continued. “My poor dear sister has had a minor stroke, and now her mouth is twisted to one side. I have heard of your reputation. Can you please help her?”
“I am flattered.” Dad rubbed his hands like a joyful kid. “I’ll be more than happy to see what I can do.” Dad was in his best mood when he was called upon to help others.
“Mother,” he called out to my mom, as if he knew that we were behind the closed door listening to every single word, “get me the blue jacket and a flashlight. I need to go out.”
Mom hurried in with his jacket, the one with all his acupuncture needles. I passed him the flashlight he kept under his pillow.
“God bless you. You are a kind man, like they said. I don’t know how to thank you, Dr. Chen.”
“Please don’t call me ‘doctor,’ just Ar Gang.” Dad was beaming. He didn’t know what to do with the “God bless you” part.
“We can wait until tomorrow morning. I just needed to let my poor sister know. If you agreed to treat her, then she will sleep peacefully tonight.”
“She needs to be seen as soon as possible,” Dad said.
“Oh, how can I thank you all!” She turned and bowed to each of us again.
We all bowed back.
After Dad left, I told the others that he had made a mistake.
“What mistake?” Mom asked.
“Well, when Professor Wei said ‘God bless you,’ Dad should have said something polite back. I’m sure she was expecting it.”
“And what should he have said?” Mom asked.
“Buddha bless you!”
They all laughed.
We were all proud of Dad. This case would put him at another level. I was sure he had chills crawling up his spine at being called a doctor by her. This was a landmark, a milestone in Dad’s career. It would be whispered about for a long time to come.
The other twin had had a light stroke. Dad soon began to see some progress. He reported that she was able to utter her first clear sound after two weeks of intensive and painful treatment. She was resilient and cooperative.
I questioned Dad each time he came back from his visits, asking him about the papayas, the twins’ knives and forks, and the wild roses in the garden. Dad said it was all true. The papaya trees were from the Philippine mountains; the Weis’ father had brought them back from his mission work there. Their fruit tasted delicious. Yes, they used knives and forks, and Dad said they insisted that he eat some papaya with them. The wild roses crept across the rambling garden. Professor Wei told him it was an English-style garden, and they had brought back a hundred types of flowers to plant alongside what already grew there.
But it was about the English language that I asked most often. Did they use the language at home? Dad said it was rather hard for the patient to speak the local lisping dialect in her present condition, so yes, they frequently spoke in English. He said they had a big library filled to the ceiling with books.
To thank Dad, the twins insisted on paying him for his work, but Dad wouldn’t hear of it. They asked him whether there was anything they could do for us in return. Dad said that the twins begged him to think of a way, otherwise they would feel bad.
One night I said to Dad, “Maybe they could teach me English in their spare time.”
He looked up from his medical book and stared thoughtfully at me for a second. “That’s a wonderful idea. But your level might be a little too low for them. They taught in college, remember?”
“Maybe they won’t mind,” I begged.
“I could try. Son, how did you come up with such an idea?”
“Well, they have been trying to find a way to thank you.”
“Yeah, but tell me why you thought of it.” He put aside his book.
“They talk about college in school. I have no future. I’m not doing well, and I’m a couple of years behind. Other subjects are easier to make up, and I’m working on it, but no one can help me with English.”
“What about the English teachers?”
“They made fun of me when I went back to their classes. Besides, their pronunciation is terrible. Each time my teacher reads English, he sounds like he’s choking on a fishbone. He spits and gets red-faced. I don’t think Englishmen talk like that.”
Dad laughed. “Now, son, if you do get to study with Professor Wei, I want you to make at least as much effort as you did with the flute,” he said seriously.
I nodded.
That night, before falling asleep, I blew out the light, knelt down on the pillow, and kowtowed to Buddha to beg for help. For the first time, I didn’t know what to ask for. I buried my face in the soft pillow until I began to stifle myself. I murmured in my head the word college, but I could feel my face blush with shame for even thinking about it. College was for the superior few who not only had extreme intelligence but diligence, too. What was I?
That night I dreamed about being sent to a remote farm where I was forced to dig a rocky hill until I collapsed. I woke up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat.
AS THE SUMMER vacation drew near, Dad came back one day with the good news that Professor Wei would be willing to help tutor me in English, but she would be away in Fuzhou for a couple of months, accompanying her sister who would be in rehabilitation under the care of some famous doctors. She would see me when she returned.
I was happy and nervous at the same time. It gave me the whole summer to prepare, so maybe I wouldn’t look too stupid. I drew up a study plan, leaving very little time for music or anything else.
I didn’t care how badly I did in the finals. I just walked out of the English test, to I-Fei’s surprise. He already had a good student waiting outside the window to guide us through the exams: the price, just two packs of Flying Horse.
“What’s the matter with you?” I-Fei asked, running after me. “Don’t you want to pass?”
“Yeah.”
“So? I got a helper out there. He knows everything. You know he found the crumpled carbon copy of the test in the teacher’s garbage can. It’s a sure thing.”
“I don’t want to copy anymore. It means nothing.”
“You’ll get zero.”
“But I’ll do better next semester.”
“How?”
“I’m taking lessons from Professor Wei next semester.”
“You can’t even say the ABC well, how can you take lessons from an English professor? That’s a joke. Have a smoke.” He threw me the whole pack of cigarettes, after lighting one for himself. I threw the pack back.
“I’m not a good student because I haven’t been studying. I skipped classes with you. I’ve been doing those stupid rehearsals and drama productions. I’m sure I could do well with the Weis’ help.”
“Gee, are you blaming me for all this now?”
“I’m not blaming you. I’m blaming myself.”
“Blaming yourself is blaming me, because we did things together. Maybe I shouldn’t be hanging around you anymore, let you be a good student again.” He picked up his cigarettes and left.
“Hey, you stupid dog,” I yelled at him. “Come back here.”
I ran after him. ?
??You’re still my best friend in school.”
“Best friend?” He stopped and looked back at me for a few seconds. “You’re different. I don’t like the change. You don’t want to smoke, you don’t want to skip classes. Don’t this and don’t that. I have to go home early every day and stare at my mosquito net. It’s getting so boring here in this tiny town.”
“I have to change, I’m sorry. I can’t afford to goof off like you. Your mom and dad can give you a future, mine can’t. Give me another smoke.”
He fished one out for me. I lit it with his lighter. “I was hoping we could study together like we did with your accordion. You did a great job.”
We sat down again. “It was all because of your help.”
“Well let’s do it again, this time with our work in school.”
He shook his head, blowing smoke rings.
“I’m not interested in studies. If I were, Dad could get ten teachers to coach me every day. Some of them would even wash my feet. I hate studying.”
“But why?”
“There are no girls in the books.”
“There will be girls, lots of pretty girls, after you are in college. They love college men. My cousin waited until she was almost thirty, only to marry a shorty with a funny face. Why? Because he was a college man.”
“You’re too dreamy. Normally only one out of a hundred gets to go to college, but with the new system reopening after being closed for the last ten years, there are ten years’ worth of accumulated high school graduates out there. Your chances are more like one in a thousand. You have no chance.” He threw the cigarette away.
“You think not, huh?”
“No.”
“Maybe you’re underestimating me,” I said.
“Don’t overestimate yourself.”
“We’ll see, I-Fei. Maybe you’re right, but I’m going to give it my best shot for the next couple of years, no matter what you say.”
We walked in silence until the fork, where we parted to take our separate roads home. Before he left, I patted him on the shoulder and wrestled him from behind like we always did when one of us was getting mad at the other. It didn’t work this time. He pushed me away and made an ugly face before he left. I stood watching him until he disappeared along the dusty road.
A few days later, I-Fei rode his bike to my home and stopped briefly to tell me that he was leaving Yellow Stone for good and was transferring to another high school. Or maybe he would become a driver soon. He was extremely mysterious and his eyes kept looking beyond me. I asked him to stay for a while and chat about the old days, but he said it was a long way to travel to his mom’s. So off he went, without regret. I was deeply hurt. He had been a loyal friend and great to be with. School would not be the same without him.
June was a tough month for the farmers of Yellow Stone. Stretches of rice fields had just turned golden. The hot sun burned them, grilling and baking the rice until it ripened, and the husks filled with millions of little white pillows. It would soon be harvesttime, but typhoons lurked like evil monsters along the Pacific Coast only miles away. They brought torrents of rain, and could devastate the rice fields in a matter of hours. Each day, the farmers waited in agony for the rice to ripen a little more. They were at the mercy of the temperamental coastal climate. The wait was like pulling teeth out of a dragon’s mouth. When the weather forecast was bad, farmers worked incessantly to harvest the rice before they lost it all to nature.
One day, when the remote Ching Mountain was wrapped in layers of lingering clouds that looked like a woman’s hair flying loose in the wind, the commune sent an announcement over the loudspeaker systems to warn the farmers of an impending typhoon. Suddenly all was chaos. The brigade leader banged on every member’s door, urging the villagers to head for the fields and harvest the rice. All of it, even that which was still green, was to be cut rather than be ruined in the flood.
My eldest sister was away in Han Jian, working at her temporary job in the canned food factory—a violation of the commune’s no-working-out-of-town-in-harvesttime rule. Dad asked me if I could step in and do her work, so the next day, while it was still dark, Mom awakened me at dawn. My brother, Jin, and my two sisters, Huang and Ke, were already at the dining table stuffing themselves with fried rice by the bowlful and washing it down with the soup Mom had been preparing since midnight. My brother, now a veteran farmer at the age of twenty-two, could eat as many as three large bowlfuls before going to work. Everyone worked fourteen-hour days, and Jin couldn’t stand being hungry in the fields. After burping a few times, he lit a cigarette and put on his straw hat, ready to go.
I had stuffed as much food into my mouth at four in the morning as I could. Mom had warned me that I wouldn’t eat again until one in the afternoon. With my eyes half-closed, I smelled the freshly simmered rice as though it were still a sweet dream.
“Follow me, little brother.” After I, too, had burped with satisfaction, Jin gave me a sickle and out I went, barefoot, into the dark fields.
The edge of the sky was whitish, as if someone had barely lifted the lid off the earth. We walked in silence among the weeds and grasses still wet with dew. I dragged my feet, fighting the fatigue of being woken at such an ungodly hour, a time when I should have been having the sweetest dreams. I stumbled blindly after my brother, the leader of the group, who whistled, hummed, and smoked as casually as if it were just another day.
“Here we are. We have about five mus [about one acre] of rice to cut before the sun sets.” He pointed at the endless stretch of rice fields looming in the whitish dark. “The four of us will go in rows. I’ll take the widest, then Ke and Huang will take the rows beside me. You, little brother, go slow and rest when you need to. Try to see if you could do that slice.” He indicated the edge of a huge plot and smiled at me.
“No problem. Give me more,” I said.
Jin showed me how to cut the tall rice stalks at their base and stack them behind me. He warned me not to cut my fingers in the dark. I stepped into the muddy wet field, making a squishing noise. Some frogs and wild rats ran at the sound. Mosquitoes and insects hummed constantly around my nose, eyes, and ears, and I had to keep batting them away. I could feel the little worms and eels slithering away from under my toes. I closed my eyes and tried to think of something pleasant. The violin.
I grabbed big handfuls of stalks and cut them, fiercely. My sisters stopped to check on me once in a while and were pleased with what I was doing. Soon the sun rose above the horizon and the endless fields gave off steam as the morning light embraced them. The rest of the land was still asleep.
The knee-high rice plants with needle-sharp leaves got in the way of my face and neck as I bent down. The fuzzy blades needed only to brush my skin to leave behind a red kiss. Soon the summer sun turned from gentle to glaring. Sweat beaded my forehead and trickled down my eyebrows. My skin began to itch as though it were being attacked by thousands of slimy, crawling creatures angry that I had invaded their world with my sickle. I unbuttoned my drenched shirt and peeled it off, wiping my cut, sweaty face with it before tossing it behind me. I clenched my jaw to keep from yelling out loud at the pain of my burning skin. I didn’t want my sisters and brother to think that their little brother wasn’t farmer material. As I stretched my sore back, feeling like the old hunched merchant next door who didn’t know what the sky looked like anymore, I saw that they were already thirty yards ahead of me, tirelessly bending over the rice that only seemed to end where the sky launched a rainbow.
My sisters and brother had grown up farming. I had seen them carry on their shoulders over a hundred pounds of animal manure, to be used for fertilizer in the fields. Their skinny legs had trembled beneath the weight, but they dared not slow down for fear of criticism by the commune leaders, who were especially harsh to them. They had all endured, their teeth gritted. Brother Jin had once had a rusty nail go through his right foot. It took two months to heal. Huang had once become so dehydrated under the baking sun that she ha
d passed out. And they all complained of constant back pain, but they had to push themselves on, for the commune would not allow any leaves of absence. Their food ration would have been withheld until those absences were made up. They had all grown tall, thin, and tanned like coconuts.
As I stood there watching them, I felt respect and fear. A future as a farmer stretched out before me like the brutal fields. There would be endless toiling under a cruel sun, all for a meager existence that consisted of rice porridge and pickled vegetables. There would be hunger for at least three months a year, during which even the moldy yams became treasures on the dining table.
“Have a rest, brother,” I heard Jin shout at me. His voice sounded tiny in that enormous field. “You don’t have to hurry.”
“Put your shirt back on or the sun will kill you,” Ke said, standing up to take a look at me.
“I’m fine, you guys.” But my mind was saying, let me go home. I was sick of it already. I dropped my sickle and drummed my back with my fists, imitating my dad when he had had a hard day. I sighed at the narrow stretch of rice still before me, standing proud and nodding lazily in the occasional breeze. Slowly, I bent my cracking back to pick up the sickle again, this time resting my elbows on my knees like a pregnant woman, and hacking the plants stem by stem. I wished the sun would go down faster, so that we could all go home and rest, but it stayed eternally motionless, a taunting fireball in the cloudless sky. Then I wished the rice would all fall on its back by itself.
I thought about the great future Mao had promised China, the machines and the modernization. Where was all that when I needed it? I had seen beautiful propaganda pictures of good old Russians using fancy combines to harvest their wheat and rice. Dad was right again. He said that we were farming the land the same way we had done thousands of years ago, the only difference being that we got paid less.