Kowtowing

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 moment I entered to the moment it ended, he did not say a single word. Not a question. Not a refusal. Nothing. My mother sat up. I remember her sigh. She told me to get up — get up, get up. I stayed kneeling. She asked how a paternity test was done. I told her it only needed a blood draw at the town hospital, and that I would take the samples to Zhengzhou myself. Then there was silence again, and I went on crying and knocking my head on the floor. At last she said it, over and over as if to end it: "All right, all right, all right." I thanked her again and again, got up from the floor on my own, backed towards the door, closed it behind me, and went back to my room. My father still had not spoken. — Mufan From Mufan's memoir *At Fifty, I Came to the Wu River* — Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HMFM99H8

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