Chapter 2
Father finished the Baisha cigarette my aunt had handed him and nodded, ignoring Mother’s objections.
That afternoon, I went with Mother to the village secretary’s house to call my maternal grandmother.
Mother spoke in a Hainan dialect I could not understand. I did not know what she said to Grandma and my uncle on the other end.
As she talked, her eyes reddened.
The old village secretary had been smoking in the main room. He stood, took me outside to the packed-earth yard, and left her some privacy.
Through the thin door, I heard Mother’s muffled sobs.
The old secretary smoked and sighed. “Your mother is such a hardworking wife. Your father and grandmother don’t know how lucky they are.”
“Tian Tian, be good for her, understand?”
How I wished I could grow up faster.
Once I was grown, I could protect Mother.
The call did not last long.
Telephone charges were expensive then, and Mother could not bear the cost.
When she came out, she had wiped away her tears. She took out the five yuan she had prepared and insisted the village secretary accept it.
That evening, as I passed Grandmother’s house, I heard the old secretary advising her, “Xiaoyu is such a good daughter-in-law. Don’t take things too far.”
Grandmother dismissed him. “Her family is so far away. Where could she run?”
“We’re not killing her. Keep out of our family business…”
Father had met Mother while serving in the army in Hainan.
He promised to treat her well, so she married far away in Hunan despite her family’s objections.
This was how it ended.
During the slack farming season, Father traveled to sell tea.
He bought loose tea from local households and took it to nearby counties that did not grow tea.
Every trip lost money. One year Mother sold two fat pigs to give him capital.
He came back two months later with ten jin of tea on the verge of molding and only one hundred yuan in his pocket.
After that, Mother expected nothing from him.
When I started middle school, a tea factory opened in town.
Mother pestered the manager five or six times until he finally hired her as a worker.
The factory stood beside my middle school.
Every morning, Mother rode her bicycle with me on the back.
Lunch came with the job. Mother collected her food and waited for me at the school gate.
Students could bring rice to the cafeteria and exchange it for meal tickets.
I got my rice, then sat beneath the big camphor tree with Mother and shared her dishes.
In those days, we saved wherever we could.
Mother always picked the slivers of meat out for me. “You eat them. I don’t like meat.”
The tea factory was busiest from before Qingming until the Dragon Boat Festival, and workers often stayed very late.
An overtime shift came with dinner and a token five yuan for the entire night.
Sometimes Mother did not finish until eleven or midnight, and I fell asleep waiting in the guardroom.
Whenever we reached home, the courtyard was covered in chicken droppings and the kitchen cauldron was piled with dirty dishes.
Father’s filthy clothes lay everywhere.
If we accidentally woke him, he would unleash a torrent of abuse.