Luofengcen, Hainan, China
What told Father, after returning home from an exhausting shift at the hospital, that there were too many people in his house, was not the noise of the neighbors clucking at each other in Hlai, nor the motorbikes parked in the potholes outside, but was the chubby boy with porcupine-bristled hair sitting on the porch on Mother’s makeshift chair, the one she used for reaching things from high shelves.
“Little boy, what are you doing here?” Father frowned.
The boy was so lost in his phone that he did not notice that the owner of the house was addressing him. Father asked a few more questions, but there was no answer. The boy was the only boy of that size in this part of the village, so Father surmised that he was the son of the neighbors who owned the wine shop. They barely talked to Mother, except for when they wanted her to invest in their business schemes.
“Yes, yes,” they would say. “I agree, Sanya is getting too expensive. My cousin wants to buy an apartment, and he simply can’t afford it…”
“Can you send it to me on WeChat Pay? I don’t have enough cash…”
“Yes, yes…it is very nice… I’ve also been there…”
So random were the neighbors Mother had invited over that Father could not make out who they were, even as he heard their voices from his position on the porch. The question was why they had to be there in the first place. The light from his house’s interior was spilling into the darkness like oil. The chickens were sleeping in the shrine next to their flimsy coop, by the statue of Sun Wukong and the oolong tea offering Mother had most likely made earlier that day.
No matter how serious his patients’ cases were, Father could not help but dwell on Son’s rash decision to return home. When he had talked to Son on the phone the day before, there had been nothing of warmth in his voice; he had been arrogant and self-assuming. “I know you are lonely” and “A good son takes care of his old parents.” It was as if Son were negotiating a business deal. Father should have told Son no. Even a decade ago, before Son left, the world was saying that the future belonged to China. All of the well-paying jobs were here, and all of the opportunities were here too. If Son really thought so little about his parents then he wouldn’t have left in the first place, and he certainly would not have done so with such a dramatic exit. But Son had lost his job, so Son was going to lose his right to a visa. What other choice did he have other than to return home? Father thought in a logical way 99 percent of the time, but in that off 1 percent, when he was swayed by emotions, it was akin to the way hurricanes destroyed the roots of trees. “I will buy your ticket. Come quickly,” was what he had said to Son, and buy that ticket was what he had done, even after Son had hung up instantaneously.
While Father was taking care of a patient earlier that day, he had gotten so lost reimagining his conversation with Son that right in the middle of delivering a diagnosis he had stared out of a window, directly into the sun, as if he were waiting, just waiting, for the moment when the rays would blind him.
In a bout of similarly uncontrolled emotion, Father approached the shrine outside their house and kicked at the ground. The chickens clucked and clacked, pecked at his shoes, and started attacking the boy on the porch. That was enough for the boy to finally realize there was another person outside. He shouted to his parents that something was going on.
“Look, your husband is back,” said one of the neighbors as he stuck his head out of Father’s house window, alerting a good ten others inside that Father was acting like a madman outside. One by one they looked at him and hollered, “Good evening! How was your day? Hello! Have you eaten?” Almost all of them came to shake his hand and to talk. He wanted to tell them not to touch his hand as he had just left the hospital. Some of them were so close he could smell the cigarette smoke on their clothes.
He led them back into the house. They took their seats on the wooden benches lining the wall. There were so many people that Mother had to stand, as did Father despite having spent the day on his feet. He stood by the television, on the opposite side of the raised table, on which all of the idols, from Sun Wukong to Guanyin and Yuhuang Dadi to Long Wang, were either seated in reverence or striking a flamboyant pose. They took up so much of the space that Father felt he was almost in audience with them and not his neighbors. The incenses were brimming with smoke, as if recently lit, and the pears that had been offered to the idols had a freshly washed glow. He wondered whether Mother and these neighbors had prayed together.
One of the neighbors was sharing a story about her son and the exorbitant amount of money he was making working in Guangzhou. It deepened the craters around Father’s eyes. He peered into the kitchen where the wooden bed stand was being used to stow the rice cooker, a vat of oil, and some dishes. He imagined the only items in his bedroom—the straw mats, the pillows—and it made him sleepy.
“Hey, hey! Village doctor, don’t doze off.” Father didn’t recognize the voice, but he suddenly felt his head bang against the wall. He snapped himself awake to the sight of all of his neighbors staring at him with wide, chuckling eyes.
“Leave him be,” said one of the others. “Poor guy. He must be tired.”
“Working is hard, yes,” said another. Father recognised this gruff, nicotine-thinned voice as that of the man who worked in the paddy fields. Despite his small frame, he had the biggest muscles of the men gathered in Father’s living room. They locked eyes. The man added, “So many patients. So much disease. Too much.”
One of the wives interjected, “Now, now, come on. This is not important. We’re here for another reason.” She approached Father and grabbed his arm. “You must be so excited. Your son is coming home.”
Father shot Mother a disapproving glance. Mother looked away, burying an impish smile. He turned to his neighbor’s wife and said, “Yes, very much so.”
Another of the women spoke up. “Mine lives in Fiji. He has a store there. You would be surprised by how much he gets paid. Very good salary.”
“Yes,” one of the men added. “Mine is living in Canada, so rich. Glad to live there. Says life is perfect there. Wanmei.”
A third man joined the discussion. “We make nothing in this village. We work our entire lives. Look at our fingers, look at our skin. The government does nothing here. They go over to Binlang, make it a tourist site. What about us?”
Father was frankly grateful his village had not changed much. Except for nights like this one, he could come home from work, get into bed, and only hear the chirping of the crickets or the clucking of the chickens. One of the women, whose uncovered arms revealed a collage of tattoos, took a different view. “Well, be happy. Most of our children make good money. They live well. They send it to us. What is there to complain about?”
The men and women nodded to each other attentively. Mother took this as an excuse to go to the kitchen and brew more tea, while one of the housewives who had been talking to her reiterated to Father what the other one had said: “You must be so happy.”
If there was a word to describe how he was feeling, happy would not have been the one he would have picked first, no. Luckily Mother was coming in, with the porcelain teapot piping steam into the room, pouring cha into each of the small cups before Father could speak his mind.
The neighbor with dented teeth said, “He will speak good English.”
“But will he still speak good Hlai?” asked another.
“Hah! My son in Canada says they barely speak Mandarin there. How will he remember Hlai?” replied the first.
“Hlai is our language. It is his mother tongue.”
“My son is forgetting.”
Mother had finished serving the tea and interrupted, “Well, we speak in Hlai on the phone, and he is still quite fluent.”
This was not true for two reasons. First, Son barely spoke to them on the phone, and that had been the case for many years. And second, he only spoke Hlai in short sentences and with a lot of English mixed in. He might have done this to give the impression of a new and better life abroad, with friends who were absolutely not from any part of China – to show that he no longer saw his language as a part of his identity. Father didn’t know any English, but he could make out Son’s anglophone accent. The rhythm was too musical, while the words were chopped up. Nevertheless, Son always had to insert some English into whatever he said during their six-or-seven-minute conversations, making it clear that no matter how much Hlai was imprinted into his tongue, it was not the language his mind wanted to produce.
Father wasn’t going to say any of this aloud. He simply sipped his tea, happy to have the pungent punch of the leaves on his tongue. It was opening up his nostrils, giving his brain a bit more air, making him feel like he could converse for that much longer. In the meantime, Mother sat next to the woman with the tattoos. Mother was running her finger along the rim of the cup as if it were in the tea itself, and she told one of the neighbors, “Son had hard work to do. This I know. But he needs to take his work less seriously. I am glad he is starting to think about his parents.”
The reason Son was coming home was not because he cared about his parents but because he was out of money, yet Father wasn’t going to correct her.
“Be proud,” replied the woman, nodding her head. “That college, it is very prestigious. And a law degree! In English! So difficult.”
“Why does he have a law degree in English?” one of the neighbors asked.
He had a valid point. Son had not in fact studied law, but English language, and he was very clear about that, but Father remembered how Mother had told all of the neighbors when he first got into university that he was going to be a law student, and it had stuck.
Mother folded her arms and chuckled at the ceiling. “My son is a smart boy. Whatever he wants, he does.”
The neighbors were nodding, most likely thinking of their own children. One of the women asked Mother, “Tell us again, what job will he do?”
It was a good question, Father thought. Work opportunities were plentiful in Sanya, but not in the tourist industry, the only industry in which Son had any prospects. Based on the story Mother was telling, however, in which Son was a successful lawyer rather than an unemployed waiter, it would be almost impossible for him to work in China; he was not educated in Chinese law. Mother kept her fists to her torso and laughed even harder. “He worked in hospitality for some years, so with English under his belt, I am sure he could manage a restaurant.”
That was not how the hospitality industry worked, but the guests were too confused to notice. There was an exchange of awkward glances, then one of them found the courage to ask, “I thought Son was working as a lawyer – why did he work in hotels?”
Had Father been asked the question, he would have partially confessed that Son had, in the course of the last decade, held more than one job. They might have asked more difficult questions, such as how Son had sustained his visa while shifting around so much, and Father would have admitted that he really didn’t know since Son didn’t like to talk about it. There would be a silence, but that would be welcome. To these neighbors, who were kind enough at social gatherings but vicious in the privacy of their own homes, he would rather say nothing at all.
But Mother was not Father. Instead she said, “Why, he worked in tourism here, in Sanya, before he moved abroad.”
All of the neighbors nodded and chuckled along. This was in fact a common thing for most people from Hainan to do, so it looked as proper as anything else the other local boys or girls would do. Mother looked triumphant, and she stood, as if she wanted to serve something else other than tea. Then the rice farmer asked, “How many years has your son worked as a lawyer?”
“Ten years,” replied Mother. It only took one question slightly more attuned than the rest to open up the flood of others.
“So long?” asked one of the neighbors. “Directly after his undergraduate course? He did not have to go to school again? And then, how was he working here in tourism?”
“Come to think about it,” another said, “law is very tough abroad. You can’t become a lawyer without law school.”
“Law school is very expensive, isn’t it?”
“This is why your house still looks like this. You were spending all your money on law school.”
In truth, none of the houses in the village were anything special. Most of the neighbors lived in roadside shacks or houses of concrete painted pink or left bare, grimly stained by the residue of rain and dust. Nonetheless, they were the ones laughing to each other now, as if they were better off than Mother and Father, even though Father was the only person in this part of the village with a degree. The neighbors started up again about their own children, their own successes, their own good fortune. Mother and Father didn’t speak, but Father said, with one look to her, This is why I never want them here. I tell you this, and you never listen.
Mother responded with her own look, I know. She went into the kitchen on the excuse of washing the teacups. She wasn’t coming back, this much Father knew. He wished he could say something, anything, to make the neighbors go away, but the gathering had a life of its own. Father and Mother were going to be forced to talk to the guests, serve them drinks, and listen to their opinions until they left of their own accord. Father took a deep breath. Incense filled his nostrils and widened his eyes. “So, tell me,” he said to the neighbor with the dented teeth, “how expensive is it for your son to live in Canada?”
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