The Seventh Day (12 page)

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 prostituti
on—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.