The Seventh Day (14 page)

On the day that my father left home, there was a fire in our city—at a department store just half a mile from my little shop. It was afternoon when I heard news of the disaster, and by then I was in a very anxious state, because my father had yet to return home. A horrible thought came to mind—could he have gone to the department store? It seemed just possible. My birthday was coming up, and my father might well have wanted to buy me a present.

I shut up shop for the night and dashed over to the department store. The silver structure was now reduced to a charcoal hulk, as thick smoke billowed upward. The flames had been largely extinguished, but hoses from a dozen fire trucks were still spurting long jets of water on the charred wreckage. Ambulances lined the street, along with several police cars. Fire ladders were propped up against the building and firemen were already inside searching for survivors. Some of the injured had been carried out and ambulances were speeding off, sirens wailing.

Every intersection next to the department store was crammed with people, and everyone was talking about the fire. Standing among them, I heard only snatches of conversation: some said the fire started around ten in the morning, while others said it started at noon. I shuttled back and forth among the onlookers, listening as they discussed the cause of the fire and guessed the number of casualties; it was dark by the time I returned home.

The TV news that evening had a segment on the department store fire. According to an official source, the disaster was triggered by an electrical short circuit at nine-thirty in the morning. The store had only just opened at the time, the news anchor said, and there were few customers inside. The majority were successfully evacuated and only a handful were trapped. The precise casualty figure was still under investigation, the report said.

My father did not return home that evening, and I was on tenterhooks the whole night. In the morning the TV news had the latest on the department store fire: seven dead and twenty-one injured, with two in critical condition. At lunchtime they released the names of the dead; my father was not among them.

But other reports were circulating on the Internet. Some said there were over fifty dead, while others claimed there were twice that. Many people online criticized the authorities for underreporting the figures, and some noted the Work Safety Administra
tion’s definition of accidents: a single episode that caused between three and nine fatalities counted as a “fairly serious” accident; over ten deaths constituted a “serious” accident; and a death toll of over thirty was classified as an “extremely serious” accident. The authorities were castigated for trying to downplay the gravity of the disaster by limiting the reported fatalities to seven. Even if the two in critical condition were to die of their injuries, that would only make a total of nine, confining the fire to the category of “fairly serious” accident and thereby averting any unpleasant repercussions on the career prospects of the mayor, the Communist Party secretary, and other bigwigs.

Rumors were spreading like wildfire on the Internet. Some people said the relatives of the unreported dead had been threatened, while others claimed they had been given huge wads of hush money, and still others listed the names of unreported fatalities
—again my father’s name was absent.

He had now been gone two days, and I began to mount a search. First I made inquiries at the railroad station, thinking the staff there might have seen him, but I drew a blank. He had become so rake-thin, even people who knew him might fail to recognize him. Then I went to see Hao Qiangsheng and Li Yuezhen, who had just got back from Guangzhou, having passed their visa interview at the U.S. consulate there, and were now attending to the sale of their apartment and preparing to make the long flight across the Pacific to join their daughter. They were shocked by my news. Hao Qiangsheng wouldn’t stop sighing, and Li Yuezhen burst into tears. “Son,” she said, “he doesn’t want to be a burden on you.”

The most likely explanation, they felt, was that my father was set on returning to his roots—going back to the ancestral village where he was born and where he grew up. I should try looking for him there, they thought.

I passed the shop on to someone else and took a long-distance bus toward my father’s old home. I had visited once when I was small, but my father’s parents had no warm feelings toward me, thinking I had wrecked his life. My father had five siblings, but their relationship also was strained. My grandfather had worked on the railroad, at a time when state policy allowed an employee’s child to get a job on the railroad if the parent took early retirement. Of his six children, my grandfather selected the youngest—my father—to inherit his position and thereby angered the other five. That’s maybe why my father never took me back home a second time.

By now, my grandparents had both passed from the scene. My father’s five siblings were still living where they always had, but their children had moved away years earlier. Migrant workers in an assortment of different cities, they had put down roots elsewhere.

I got off the bus in a bustling county seat and took a taxi to my father’s village. We rode along a road that was broad and level and paved with asphalt concrete, a huge contrast to its condition on my previous visit, when it was a mud track rutted with holes so big that our car was bouncing around all the time. Just as I was marveling over the progress made, the taxi came to a sudden stop. The asphalt road had come to an end and the crude, potholed surface of the past reappeared in front of me. No county official was going to visit a place this far out in the boondocks, the taxi driver said, so the asphalt ended here. Seeing my bewildered city-boy expression, he explained that country roads are built just for the convenience of leaders when they venture out to conduct inspections. The village that I wanted to go to was another three miles farther on, he said. He pointed down the narrow track ahead. “No leader would dream of going to a godforsaken place like that.”

My father’s village, when I finally got to it, was nothing like the village that I had visited as a child. That village was skirted by trees and stands of bamboo and several ponds. My cousins and I had shot at the birds in the trees with catapults, and we had rolled up our trouser legs and waded into the ponds to catch little shrimp. In those days, field after field shimmered with rapeseed blossom; the voices of men and women, young and old, mingled with the sounds of chickens and ducks, oxen and sheep; and pigs careened along the paths between the fields. The village now was desolate, the fields lying empty, the trees and bamboos cut down. The ponds had disappeared. The young and able-bodied had all abandoned the village for jobs in the city, and the only people I saw were a few old-timers sitting outside their houses and the occasional toddler wandering around. I was doubtful I would recognize my father’s siblings, so when I came upon a hunchbacked old man smoking a cigarette by his front door, I asked him where I’d find Yang Jinbiao’s brothers and sisters. He muttered “Yang Jinbiao” a few times before he remembered. He called out to another oldster peeling fava beans across the way, “Here’s someone looking for you.”

The old neighbor got to his feet and studied me as I walked over, rubbing his hands on his pants in preparation for greeting me. I went up to him and introduced myself as Yang Fei. That elicited no reaction, so I told him I was the son of Yang Jinbiao. “Ah!” he went, then opened his toothless mouth to call his siblings: “Yang Jinbiao’s son is here!”

Then he turned to me. “You’ve grown so tall, I’d never have known it was you.”

Four other old folk emerged one by one to join their brother. All five siblings wore cheap polyester clothes, and standing in a group they looked very much alike. They differed only in their heights, like the fingers of a single hand.

They were very pleased to see me. I accepted the cup of tea they poured for me but shook my head at the proffered cigarettes. Almost immediately they began to busy themselves washing and chopping vegetables and fetching wine. Seeing that it still wasn’t quite three in the afternoon, I said it was a bit early to start preparing dinner, but they disagreed.

With the passage of years, they were no longer jealous of my father, and they all got a bit red around the eyes when they learned he had disappeared after falling critically ill. Perhaps because their fingers and palms were so rough, they used the backs of their hands to wipe away their tears. I told them I was looking for my father and thought he maybe wanted to die where he’d been born, but they shook their heads and said he’d never come back again.

In the silence, I stood up and left the rock on which I’d been sitting. Sleet continued to billow, but still it did not fall on me—it simply surrounded me. When I walked on, the sleet opened a passage, and when I looked back, it had closed up again.

On the path of memory I was making my way toward Li Yuezhen.