Chapter 6
It was Mother.
My tears burst out at once.
The country lane was dark. Mother carried two huge sacks from a shoulder pole, her waist bent beneath the weight.
I ran to her. “Why did you come back?”
She slowly squatted and set down her burden, then stroked my head with red-rimmed eyes and a smile. “I missed the train and had to change my ticket. That’s why I’m late.”
“You’re my child. If I didn’t come back, where else would I go?”
Father heard us and hurried over to help carry the load.
The moment he put it on his shoulder, he staggered.
“What the hell did you bring?” he cursed. “Why is it so heavy?”
Mother had brought jackfruit, lychees, rambutans, and other fruit.
The two bags must have weighed close to two hundred jin. She had carried them from a small county on Hainan Island to this mountain village in Hunan.
She was only five foot two. I still do not know how she managed it.
The old woman found something else to sneer about.
“Of course she wouldn’t run. Her family is dirt poor. They can’t even feed themselves.”
“Where could she live as comfortably as she does here?”
Mother shared the fruit with the villagers.
The jackfruit was a soft, sticky variety.
My aunt recoiled. “It’s slimy as snot. Disgusting.”
Ignoring Mother’s warning, Grandmother peeled every lychee for Jinbao. The two- or three-year-old overheated from eating them and suffered a nosebleed.
Grandmother planted her hands on her hips and cursed in the courtyard. “You did this on purpose, didn’t you? You wanted to kill my precious grandson!”
See?
Bad people will always find someone else to blame for their own mistakes.
Many things happened that summer.
The first was that my eldest female cousin brought home a boyfriend.
He was nearly six foot three. When he entered our house carrying a huge watermelon in each hand, he had to duck.
They worked at the same factory. My cousin was petite; standing together, they had what people later called the cutest height difference.
But the marriage never happened.
My aunt and uncle demanded sixty thousand yuan as a bride price so they could build their son a house.
Bride prices were nowhere near as outrageous then. They were mostly ceremonial.
You might ask for 1,888, 2,888, or perhaps 8,888 yuan.
My cousin was locked inside and forbidden to leave. She cried every day.
Not long after, she went on a match-made date and married a man ten years older than her, moving like an empty shell.
On her wedding day, I guarded the bridal-room door.
She held my hand and smiled weakly.
“Tian Tian, you must study hard.”
“If I had gone to high school, gone to college, then now I would…”
She could not finish. The door burst open.
The groom and two groomsmen roughly hoisted her up and carried her away.
I suddenly remembered an evening when I came home from school and saw her walking through the village with her former boyfriend.
Summer was rainy, and a huge puddle blocked their path.
Her boyfriend crouched. She jumped onto his back, tiny and deliberately wriggling, her silvery laughter carrying far into the distance.
So there could be an enormous difference between one man and another.
The second thing was that Hu Mei dropped out of school.
Before leaving for Guangdong, she rode her bicycle for an hour beneath the blazing sun to say goodbye.
Nine years of schooling was compulsory. Denying a child that education was illegal.
But in practice, countless rural children went to work before finishing middle school.
Hu Mei’s father refused to support both children. Hu Mei decided to head south and earn money for her brother’s schooling.
“Mother is gone. I’m all he has.”
“He’s been sickly since childhood. How can he survive without an education?”
“Tian Tian, study hard for both of us, all right?”
The sun was so fierce that it stung tears from our eyes.
The third thing was Grandmother demanding all of Mother’s wages every month from then on.