Mufan · At Fifty, I Came to the Wu River

The Music Lesson That Moved My Name Up the List In my first years of primary school, my grades were very poor. From kindergarten through third grade, I was usually among the last few in the class. When test papers were handed back, the teacher started from the highest score and worked downward, calling one name, and one pupil going up. Only at the very end did it usually come to me — my place was mostly last, second from last, or third from last. When it was my turn to go up and take my paper, the teacher would sometimes, in front of the whole class, say a sarcastic, cutting sentence or two to me. Exactly what she said, I can no longer remember clearly. I only remember that when she had finished, some of my classmates below would laugh. This kind of thing happened more than once. I already spoke very little. I was unhappy inside, and I did not know what to say. I could only take the paper and go back to my seat. The change came in a music lesson in fourth grade. The school had a mal...

Gentlest When the Sack Was on My Shoulder Our family grew two crops of grain a year, one season of wheat and one season of corn. When the grain came back from the fields, it was still damp. It was put into sacks, and the sacks had to be carried, one by one, up onto the roof to dry in the sun. Each year there were about thirty sacks of wheat, and the corn could be even more. When it had just been brought back, each sack weighed about a hundred jin (a jin is half a kilogram). To carry one, you first got the sack up onto your shoulder at the main gate, then walked through the house, then climbed the stairs, then reached the roof. Once you were up there, you set the sack down, opened it, poured the grain out, and spread it out to dry. At first, it was my father and my mother who carried. Later, when I had grown a little, at about twelve years old, I began to carry too. After I began carrying, my mother no longer carried sacks into the house herself. She stood beside me and helped me li...

Kowtowing — kneeling and knocking your forehead against the floor — is the most extreme plea a Chinese son can make. That night, a little after nine, my son was asleep and I went downstairs and knocked on my parents' door. I rarely entered that room. Before I went in, I already knew what I was going to do. My father was on the outer side of the bed, sitting up against it. My mother was on the inner side, lying down at first. I knelt near the foot of the bed, facing them at an angle, and knocked my forehead against the floor. I cried as I begged them to go with me for a paternity test. I said I had doubted since I was a child whether I was really their son, that I was grown now, married, a father myself, and that I only wanted to know where I came from. I knocked my head again and again, hard, at least six or seven times. It hurt. The whole thing lasted about eight to ten minutes. In those minutes, my father stayed where he was, leaning on the outer side of the bed. From the mo...

Her sister put the terms on the table: it works out, the family's Santana is mine to drive; we marry, they buy us an apartment in the county town. The car was worth about 180,000 yuan then; the apartment, around 70,000. I asked myself: is my whole life worth just a few hundred thousand yuan? Question first, story after — in my place, do you nod, or shake your head? What you need to know: a Santana then cost about 180,000 yuan — many years of a worker's wages — and the offer meant marrying into her family's world. In China, the groom's family normally pays at a wedding. Here, the money flowed the other way. She came to me herself — asked her way to my house the first time, then kept coming, bringing cooked chicken, cooked beef, New Year goods my family rarely bought. The offer was made at the county power plant, where her sister worked, with her sitting right there. Richest family in town; they could pay it. Hardly a household in town owned a car. At the factory, my s...

My job included drinking so my boss didn't have to. I had worked nearly three years in the factory run by our village Party secretary. I went in at fifteen, as a security guard in name, on a wage of a little over one hundred and seventy yuan a month. But slowly the nature of my work changed. I was not spending my days in the guard room. More and more, I was doing things for the secretary himself: pouring water when guests came, going out with him on errands, drinking in his place at banquets, and whatever else he told me to do. My wage rose twice, and by the time I left it was two hundred and forty yuan a month — still, from what I understood, the lowest wage in the whole factory. I never asked for a raise. Leaving was not easy either: if I left, where would I work? So I stayed. Doing those things, I was not comfortable inside. I felt it was shameful. I felt small. But at that time, for me, earning money mattered more than face. I also treated following the secretary as a chance ...

That year I was seven or eight years old, and I had run away from home — to my grandparents' house, diagonally across the lane from ours, a dozen metres away. I was staying there, waiting for my father or my mother to come and say one sentence: "Come home." I waited several days. Nobody came. The seventh or eighth day after I left home was the first morning of the new year. It was the first time in my memory that I had gone so long without seeing my parents. On the morning of Lunar New Year, everyone goes out early to pay respects to elders and greet the neighbours; the lanes are full of people. That morning, my grandfather went into the yard to set off firecrackers, and I went with him. In other years, it was my father who got up to light the firecrackers, with my brother and me at his side. This year, the man standing beside me was my grandfather. After breakfast, at about eight o'clock, we went out. Our lane was very narrow — about three metres wide, with houses ...

I was seven or eight, and in the second year of primary school, when I could not bear it at home any longer and ran away for the first time. Home was in the countryside, in Henan. My family lived at the southern end of a lane about three metres wide. At the northern end, just across the lane, twelve metres or so away, was my grandparents' yard. I had grown up eating at their house until I was five or six, and then I went back to my parents' house. The food I ate at my grandparents' was always better than what I ate at my parents'. The day I ran, I was at home by myself. I was going to sleep over at my grandparents' that night, but first, while it was still light, I walked back home to close the gate and gather a few things. Everything was quiet in the yard. I went into the kitchen and got a cloth, and then I wrote on the ground of the yard, in big characters, stroke by stroke: "I am leaving. Do not come looking for me." The characters were written on di...

At that time, my son was with me alone. After his mother went back to her parents' home, he stayed with me. In our neighborhood there was a boy about my son's age who was mostly looked after by his grandmother; his parents would ride off on their motorcycle and leave the child with her. I had seen that more than once. But my parents would not help me with my child. I had asked my mother, and she refused. He was a little over two years old, and I had been at home raising him for close to a year. I had almost no money left, the financial pressure kept growing, and I was getting more and more anxious. I felt I could not go on staying at home like that; I had to go out and earn money. But if I went out, someone had to look after him. It was in those days that I had just had a paternity test done on myself. I was my mother's biological son, but I was not the biological son of the man I had called my father for decades. That first test was to find out whose son I actually was. ...

In the 1990s, Chinese hospitals required a cash deposit before emergency treatment began. I already knew this the way you know any rule of the world you live in. What I did not know, until one night at the county hospital, was what that rule looked like when it landed on a family that did not have the money. My son was about eighteen months old. His mother had gone back to her parents' home, and I was raising him by myself. With a child that small, nothing about him was a small matter to me; the moment he burned with fever, I felt we could not afford to lose a minute. That night he spiked a temperature, and I carried him from our town to the county hospital's emergency room. The doctor took his temperature, said he needed an injection, and told us to wait. While we waited, the emergency room doors were pushed open. Two women wheeled in a gurney. On it lay a girl of eleven or twelve. Her whole body was shaking, convulsing violently, and white foam was coming out of her mouth. ...