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
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
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