By Sun Wei
I took away the spatula from Father's hand, and urged him to take a nap. Father dragged himself towards the kitchen door. But on seeing the sittingroom empty, he shuffled back and opted to wash dishes behind me, not minding the already cramped kitchen. I heard water running from the faucet, but there was no sound of Father washing the dishes.
Father had fallen into a trance, a suds-covered china bowl in hand. “It has always been your mother who does the washing. She was still here two weeks ago washing all these bowls. While the bowls are the same, how come the one who washed the bowls is no longer well…? ”
He turned suddenly. “You may cook as you like. Why do you have to stare at me?” His voice was strange, like he was holding back from sobbing.
Father is normally a serious man, and rarely expresses himself emotionally. Mother was the diametrical opposite. She took charge of all the washing and cleaning around the house and made a point of organizing a fair division of labor in the home.
“Jin’s domain is cooking since he is more skilled at delicate works, which makes me the manual worker shouldering all the rough chores!” She loved to declare this over and over again.
Never having seen Father cry before, I was astonished by his tears. I distinctly remembered Father giving me mild knocks on the head when I was little whenever I cried on Mondays before going to kindergarten. Mother would protest, “I gave birth to this child. Even if she deserved a scolding, it should be from me!” But if it was Brother who was given the knocks, Mother would go straight up to Father and gave him a knock or two on the head in return. Now both of them have retired. The retirement is official, but not really. For they continue to vie for leadership at home with Father as Director Jin and Mother as Professor Chen and Associate Director Chen.
I was certain this was not the time for me to cry. We had come back not to cry but to prepare dinner for Mother. Actually, we did not come back for that either, even though Mother had been complaining about hospital food for weeks. We had come back to discuss privately whether we should tell her the diagnosis. She was dying.
The bell rang. I had barely opened the door when Brother barged in.
He immediately protested to Father. “How can you and Sister do this to me? When Mother needed looking after in the hospital, you decided you two would see to that and I was not needed for anything. Why are you asking my opinion now? You don’t know what to tell her, huh? But you do know it’s a matter of life and death, don’t you? What if I made the wrong decision? How do you expect me to live with the guilt if Mother takes a turn for the worse after hearing the bad news? you want to look sweet and innocent, and make me your fall guy?”
Mother was silently sitting on the bed with two pillows behind her back. Father had tucked them in when she was eating, and hadn’t found time to take them away. Either because she had these pillows at her back or her muscles were tense, she was sitting upright. Pale and expressionless, with her emaciated body cowering under the blue and white striped patient gown, she looked as if she was a painting hanging from a white wall. I could not bear to look her in the eyes, they were like the mushy eyes of stewed fish served on a plate.
Even more unsettling was the silence in the room. As far back as I could remember, Mother’s voice had been an inescapable presence at home. Father would always make fun of her nonstop preaching sessions to Brother and me. How deafening her silence was now! I looked at Father, and Father looked at me. He then looked at my younger brother, who was sitting on the only wooden chair, dodging Father’s gaze by resolutely fixing his eyes on the floor.
But what had been said could not be unsaid. Back in the kitchen, I realized that Father probably wanted to tell Mother the truth, but because he had never looked so sad and defeated, I had felt obliged to say for him what was on his mind, “Mother was an intellectual and a professor. All her life she has been devoted to the dissemination of knowledge. Wouldn’t it be her bitterest regret if she had to leave the world without the least knowledge of her own disease? What if she would like to make better use of whatever time was left in her life? ” I did my best not to cry, so that my sentence would not choke on my words.
Father nodded. “I think what Min has said is right. We do not know what your mother wants to do before she leaves. She has every right to be prepared and do whatever she wants with her time left.” He had regained his composure. He looked at my brother: “Wey, what do you think?”
Brother frowned, “Are you asking for my opinion? How am I supposed to know?” Father’s face darkened, so Wey had to continue, “Why don’t we ask the doctor? Surely he knows better than us.”
The doctor my brother spoke of was Liu, a young resident in charge of Mother’s case. Father and I never called him Dr. Liu, because he had a thin layer of facial hair above his lip, barely a moustache, which made him look far too young. I would like my son to go to a medical school and it will be no more than ten years before he grows into a young man like Liu. But even though Liu was very young, he had sophisticated manners. He sounded like the director of his own medical department.
I had no idea why Brother wanted to ask Liu. What was the point of consulting a doctor about anything other than a diagnosis? To my surprise, Father nodded his consent and solemnly led us to the young doctor.
Liu looked as cocksure as when he explained the “large area of shadow” on the X-ray. Jokingly he said, “What are all the jitters about? In my experience, no patient has yet been shocked to death.”
Is “shocked to death” something to joke about? Before I got a chance to object, Father, not minding what the doctor had just said, had followed up with another question. “We won’t do any harm to the patient by telling her the truth, will we, Dr. Liu?” Father had started addressing Liu as Dr. Liu.
Liu smiled as he put the medical record down, tucked his hands into his white doctor’s gown. “Tell her if you want to. It’s quite a burden to hide something so weighty from her. I totally understand.”
I didn’t know why Father became infuriated at this. Looking deadly serious, he said, “It is not appropriate for you to say that! We are all working for the benefit of a patient here!”
Father stormed out of the room, breathing heavily, my brother and I following with a bag filled to the brim with lunch boxes. From the look of his eyes, I knew Father had come to a decision.
Amidst her favorable and unfavorable observations about the food, Mother finally finished her lunch. Father slowly cleaned everything up, and sat down at the bedside. Tying up the plastic bag that carried the lunch boxes, he said to Mother, “Chen, I need to talk to you about something.” With his eyes on the plastic bag, he spoke as if he was reading that notice I saw on the bulleting board in our neighborhood last night, which read “Water tank cleansing. No water supply this afternoon. ”
While Father was talking, Brother somehow moved his chair a few feet away from the bedside. I also could not help but take a few steps back. As soon as Father finished speaking, he too stood up, putting some distance between himself and the bedside, as if Mother were some explosive device.
Mother was silent for a long time after Father finished what he had to say. In the still air, I sat staring at Mother, a woman lying on the bed in a trance.
A few days ago, when I watched her overnight, I had also stared long at her sleeping face. Those lines and wrinkles were as familiar to me as the alleys around my house that I walked every day, caused me acute bouts of heartache. Now that Father had spoken the truth, I had a feeling that Mother, together with the part she had played in our life, was relegated to the other side of a gap, too distant and intangible for me to concern. We, the living, were on one side of the gap, while she belonged to the other side.
Chair scraping against the floor, Brother was twisting his body to look outside of the ward. Everyone wanted to get out of the ward as soon as possible, to leave Mother and death behind for the time being. If only something that needed us taking care of would happen outside! If only Mother would yell, “All of you get out! Leave me alone!”
Mother began to speak, “Why do you have to tell me this when I have just finished eating?” She put her hand that was free of intravenous needle on her stomach, and looked up at Father, “Jin, why are you being as immature as them? It is not often that I have such a good appetite. Now I can almost feel my stomach bulging with all the food I have taken.”
Father became strangely diplomatic, nodding and smiling forcedly. “It’s my fault. You are right. Criticism from Professor Chen is always well-founded!” Trying hard to make it look easy, he touched Mother on the stomach, in the same way a daredevil child would touch a flame and spring back.
Mother’s eyes swept over us, “Do you think I don’t know what’s wrong with me? I pretty much guessed it. No wonder last week you wouldn’t let me look at the examination report! No wonder you wouldn’t let me leave hospital! I am no fool. You’ve kept it from me for more than a week! Do you really think as long as you don’t tell me I will not have any idea? ”
I wanted to point out that we did not know either until yesterday when we asked Liu to interpret the X-ray. Barely had I opened my mouth when Mother proclaimed, with emphasis on every word, “I want to leave hospital.”
Father was taken aback. Despite a visible movement of his Adam’s apple, he was speechless. I did not understand what he was hesitant about. If that was what Mother wanted, we should simply go along with her wish. Wasn’t this what we wanted for her in the first place by telling the truth?
“Nothing is going to work, isn’t it? Isn’t that what you meant, Jin? Why do you want to keep me here, suffering pain? No decent food, no good sleep! Why do I have to put up with all these tubes and bottles when they are not going to do me any good? I need to get out of here, now!”
Father frowned, and shouted at Brother, “Wey, come and talk some sense into your mother!”
He knew Mother would listen to Brother.
Brother crossed his hand over his chest, and groaned, “Dad, it was you who said earlier that Mother had every right to get her last wishes. Now her wish is simple. Are discharge papers so difficult to get? ”
“Right, what’s so complicated about leaving the hospital? Chen, I’m talking to you! Why do you involve the child in this?”
Finally able to look at Mother in the face, Father lowered his voice and grunted, “Where will you go when you leave here? Can you be better treated at home? What if something happens to you at home? ”
“What’s wrong with that? I plan to die at home. Am I not allowed that luxury? You won’t let me go back from now on, will you?” Mother spoke more loudly.
“It’s not that you can’t go back. You are not fit to go back in such condition. ” Father sounded resolute.
“Tell me then. In what condition will I be suited to go back? In the condition of Death?! ”
Father turned to me, “Min, look at this! Telling her the truth? What a great idea of yours!”
I was astonished Father should pin the blame on me. But I made no defense. I saw the unmistakable fear in his staring eyes.
“Whether you agree or not, I am going home, right now! You go get the nurse and pull all the needles and tubes out. You won’t, will you? I will do it myself!” Mother made as if to pull the needle from the back of her hand.
“Don’t you dare!” Father grunted.
Mother took the intravenous tube in hand. At the sight of this, Father immediately threw himself at the bed to stop her.
Mother struggled as she shouted, “Go get the nurse! Get the doctor! I want my discharge papers right now!”
Gasping for breath, she wriggled and twisted to be rid of Father, who was keeping her in check with one hand and groping for the intravenous tube with the other. The tube swung back and forth so violently that the intravenous bottle on the hook started to wobble. Brother jumped up to take hold of it.
I hurried to say, “Ma, do not pull it yourself. I will get a nurse right now! It‘s a disgrace that the nurse should walk into a scene of you behaving like this! ”
When I brought the nurse to the ward, Brother was pacing back and forth near the window, his hands dangling at his sides. Father was squatting by the bedside cupboard, taking things out, one item at a time; Mother’s books, glasses case, clothes etc. He moved in slow motion. Mother was sitting upright on the bed with those two pillows behind her.
The nurse who came was the head nurse, a tall, thin middle-aged woman who was on familiar terms with Mother. She bent to check the needle on the back of Mother’s hand, pressed the skin around the needle and squeezed the tube to make sure there was no reverse fluid flow. Deliberately ignoring of the strained atmosphere, the nurse was all smiles. She said, “Professor Chen, they say you want to remove the needle?”
Mother pursed her lips and said nothing.
The head nurse spoke slowly and sweetly as if she were coaxing a child, “Professor Chen, the needle is inserted quite neatly! Once it’s pulled out, you have to wait for quite some time before taking another one, which will make you suffer one more time. What’s more, with so many bottles left, you may need to stay overnight to be able to finish all of them if you do not hurry. ”
“We don’t want any more of these”, explained Father, weak and feeble, “We are going home today.”
“Is that so?” the nurse did not look as surprised as she sounded.
“Don’t listen to him!” said Mother suddenly. She smiled at the nurse, “It’s alright. You see this bottle is almost finished. Could you please change it? ”
She sounded as if everyone in this room, with the exception of herself, were a child. The head nurse immediately chimed in, “That’s right! There is so little left in that bottle. It’s time that I changed it.” She did her job, and walked quickly out of the room with the empty bottle in her hand, acting as if nothing had happened.
As the footsteps trailed off, Father slammed the book at the bedside cupboard. “Wasn’t it you yourself who said that you wanted to…” He couldn’t bring himself to say “go home”.
Unflinchingly, Mother responded, “We’ve already paid for the medicine. It will be a waste if I don’t finish those bottles. ” Far-fetched as this explanation might sound, Father did not refute it.
Mother took up the medical record that the head nurse had left behind on the quilt, and groped around the pillows for her reading glasses. I quickly moved up to help her put them on. She studied the chemical terms for quite some time, pressed the skin around the needle, fiddled with the intravenous clamp and adjusted the rate of the drip in a most serious way as if intravenous drip were the only thing she cared about in the whole wide world. A while later, she looked up at Father and asked in surprise, “Jin, are you leaving?”
With the bag of lunch boxes in his hands, Father had already been standing at the door for a good ten minutes. “You can’t keep the boxes here. They will go bad!” He sounded self-righteous.
“OK,” Mother replied. She then instructed me to compare the number on the medical report with the one printed on the intravenous bottle. A few minutes later, she asked Father again, “Why are you still here, Jin?”
Father raised his voice to a higher pitch and sounded extremely angry, “I am waiting for your instructions, Professor Chen! Don’t let me run extra errands simply because you can’t think of any now. I know everything about your likes and dislikes for food. And you do not need to say anything for me to know what you want. But when it comes to other things, you prefer to do things separately. So I can’t help you with those!”
I suddenly realized that to do things separately referred to their financial situation. Throughout the forty years of marriage, they had tacitly been keeping their own bank deposits and cards. They took turns to buy furniture and appliances and were each in charge of one child’s tuition. There had never been an occasion where they felt the need to “notarize” bank accounts for each other.
“You are so muddleheaded. Who can believe you were a professor that taught hundreds of students, and even the associate director of an entire department? ” Father said.
“Right”, Mother drooped her head despondently, “You are right! It’s time we cleared things up.”
Mother told me to shut the door and then made a pronouncement to everyone. She had one debit card from China CITIC Bank, one from China Everbright Blank, and two sets of cards and deposit notebooks from China Construction Bank, which added up to 1.5 million RMB and thirty thousand dollars. She sounded as if she was reading her own memorial speech. She went on to spread the legal knowledge that once the owner of cards and deposits died, the identification card would become invalid. If the families wanted to get the money, they had to get the will notarized, the charge of which was three percent of the total amount. I noticed that she referred herself in third person throughout this mini-lecture.
“That’s several thousand”, Mother made a point of emphasizing the number. She asked Father to go home and fetch her ID and all the cards, so that the money might be transferred to Father’s account with the least dent possible. Father practically trotted out of the room. Mother said to me, “Min, Xiongxiong should be out of school now. You go and bring him here. I want to see my grandson once again.”
On my way home, I pressed the gas pedal to the floor several times. It was early spring, with new buds sprouting everywhere. The view from the car window was brighter and brighter. When I pushed open the door of the house, Xiongxiong was doing his homework in the sitting room, his tiny little body looking as if it were hanging from the wooden table. The house keeper came smiling with half a cabbage in her hand.
I went to hug Xiongxiong, who giggled and pushed me way. “Mum, what are you doing? That tickles. I am doing my homework. You shouldn’t just come and hug me. Cheeky! ”
I inhaled the scent of his clothes washed by sweet-scented soap. Xiongxiong had impressive strength for an eleven-year-old. He has started acting awkwardly when hugged by any woman, even me, his mother.
I lifted his overcoat from the rack and said, “Come, wear this. I want to take you somewhere.”
Xiongxiong shoved the stationary and notebooks to one side of the table and jumped out of the chair, eagerly slipping one arm into one coat sleeve while I helped him with the other one.
“Where are we going? Where?”
Suddenly I changed my mind. I said, “Oh, it’s Mom’s fault. I remembered it wrong. ”
However hard he tried to contort his face into disappointment and cajole me into telling him why, I insisted on taking his coat off and hanging it back up. I knew death was not contagious, but I feared that something irredeemable would be imprinted on him. I convinced myself that it was not appropriate for Xiongxiong to see his grandmother in such a condition. Better to take him to her when she recovered. But the fact of the matter was she was not going to recover. She was inching closer and closer to death with every passing day.
I went to collect my husband Haoming at his company, to go straight to the hospital.
When we arrived at the ward, Father had not arrived back yet. Brother, who had been sitting on the chair and bending himself over the cell phone, looked up with the pleading eyes of a drowning man coming in sight of a rope.
“It so happens that Xiongxiong is going to have an exam tomorrow. The teacher has kept the students at school to give them extra classes... ” I said to Mother.
To this Mother didn’t say anything. I hurried to push Haoming to the bedside. “See, here is Haoming. I’ve hijacked him from his boss.”
Mother nodded, “It is good to see him here.”
Father arrived with a small leather bag.
Mother took out all the cards and bank books and made sure they got around to everyone. When they were passed to Haoming, he stepped backward and did not take them. We skipped him and then they were all given to Father. Mother pronounced the amount of money in every card and had Father write it down. I felt Haoming breathing right against the back of my neck. He was poking his finger at my back. I knew he had something to say to me, but the room was too dead silent to allow for even a whisper.
Mother took over the pen and notebook from Father, put on her glasses and began to write. We knew she was writing down the pin number, which was the final procedure. When she would finish writing and give the little notebook back to Father, Father would be able to walk through the gate of the ward to a bank, leather bag in hand, which would bring this dispassionate ceremony to an end in spite of all its minor hiccups. We could then help remove the two pillows behind Mother so that she could lie down and have some rest. One of us would stay to watch her overnight . From then on, we would take turns day and night to see death disintegrate the life that was left in Mother until she was gone.
But suddenly Mother stopped writing and surveyed us from the rims of her glasses. I tried to read her intentions from eye contact, but all I could see was the hostility in her face.
She paused for every word when she said, “If it is really such a big deal, how come the doctor’s never mentioned this to me? ” Father rubbed his hands a little, having no clue about what Mother was trying to say. Mother surveyed all of us in the ward once again, “You are all grown-ups, aren’t you? You think all of you can outwit me, huh? ” Suddenly she blazed with fury, “You are lying to me, aren’t you! You did that on purpose, didn’t you? You should never have made such a joke! ”
At first I thought Mother was talking about Xiongxiong and got into a cold sweat. Father and Brother were also stiff and uptight. After pausing for breath Mother turned to me, “Min, you tell me! Which doctor told you about my condition? ” Something in her tone made me realize she was accusing us of having made the whole thing up!
I must clear it up for her. The name of Liu was brought up and I was obliged to repeat what he said earlier to Father and me. I had hoped against hope that I would be the last person in the world to have to say those cruel words to Mother.
But Mother reacted very differently from how she did earlier. Instead, she instantly retorted in an angry voice, “If that were the case, how come all these medicines have made me feel better? Even if they have not made me any better, at least they have kept me from getting worse!” I did not know how to respond. She came after Father next, “Why haven’t you notified my department about such a matter of life and death? I dare you to fool my colleagues with this bundle of lies of yours!” Mother had her point. For their generation, it was common to discuss important personal affairs with leaders from the workplace even before you told your families about it.
Father retorted irritably, “It was you who wouldn’t allow us to contact your department, so that you wouldn’t become a bother.”
The latter half of the sentence was almost drowned in Mother’s hoarse voice, “Look at you, still lying! You know what? It is too late to improvise lies like that!”
Brother also started to shout, “Father, was that true, what you said? I wasn’t there when the doctor told you that. What’s going on…”
Father slapped him in the face with the back of his hand. Brother put his hand over his mouth, too shocked and indignant, too busy gasping for breath to react. The last time this thirty-year-old received a slapping was twenty-five years ago. I rushed to wrap my arms around his quivering shoulder to comfort him. I noticed Haoming had already moved back toward the door. He looked mortified, visibly torn between the urge to leave and the sense of human decency that dictated him not to. He must be thinking that all his wife’s family members had gone insane.
“I know I am not dying. But by the looks of it, you do wish me to die as soon as possible.” said Mother.
Mother held up the notebook and declared, “I ask you for one last time: was what you told me true or false? As long as you have the gall to say that again, I will write down the pin numbers for you and give you my ID and all my cards. You may then transfer the money to the bank account of whoever gets to keep it. I will even give you my share of the house. My body will be donated to save you the extra cost of holding a funeral and finding a grave. ”
No one said anything. No one wanted even to breathe. Whoever talked first would be the maniac who didn’t mind cursing people to death for money.
Mother started laughing. It was hard to tell whether her laugh sounded more sardonic, bitter or simply relieved for getting out of a near encounter with death. That gave me goose bumps. She talked to herself while she kept laughing, “I know you are after my money. Isn’t it enough that I’ve worked my backside off for this family? Now that I am old and of no use to you any longer, you all wish me death even when I still have plenty of years before me. How come after decades of wifehood and motherhood you find it impossible now to have me around? “
“Alright!” Father said. “You are right! You are the very embodiment of truth. We are all just lurking around to pounce on you at the first opportunity! I must be nuts to have kept you company everyday here on that miserable folding chair.” Father paused for breath, “You go on living your long life here. I will just go home to get some proper sleep.”
Haoming wouldn’t take the elevator with Father on his way downstairs. When I was walking him outside of the hospital, he kept nagging at me, “You’ve led me into a trap by asking me to come here. It looked as if I was the son-in-law who couldn’t wait to have his share of money! Am I in need of money? Is our family in need of money? Am I that sort of person? Not to say she’s still very much alive! ”
“Fine! I set you up! Everyone was set up by me today!” I replied.
At the hospital gate, I told Haoming to keep an eye on Xiongxiong to make sure he goes to bed on time. It will probably only be me who’s willing to stay for the night. Just as I turned around, Haoming stopped me, looking uneasy, “Min, I think your mother seems fine and nothing like she’s going to die. You aren’t really lying to her, are you?”
I went again to Dr. Liu with Father. Brother was also with us. He wanted to know for sure whether the doctor had said anything about Mother’s impending death.
I told Liu that it had been three days and that Mother didn’t believe the diagnosis. She even asked me to bring to her ward all the books on health and medicine I could find in the bookstore. She told Father to bring her the laptop with a new wireless card installed. She wanted to wrap herself up in books and Internet searches for the latest technologies and cures. She would rather be a credulous follower of online pop-up quackeries than believe a word her husband and children told her.
Father hurried to make his comment, “We are all well-educated people. We love and trust each other. She’s really not being herself lately. ”
Liu smiled, “I think it is pretty normal.”
Scarcely had he finished the sentence when Father got furious and shouted at him, “What do you mean? What do you take us for?”
Liu was taken aback. He did not know what Father was upset about. I said to Liu, “We are worried that there is something wrong with her…” What I did not say I made up for by signaling at my head, “Could it be some sort of side effects, or complications?”
“Oh!” Liu nodded, indicating his sudden grasp of the situation. Now he sounded sure of himself again. “Rest assured. It is nothing. Haven’t I already told you that no patients have yet been shocked to death? It’s simply that nobody can believe that they are going to die, as if they had somehow come to assume they themselves were the exception to the rule of mortality. I’ve had my experience with such patients here. Even with a tube down his throat, a patient may still want to hoard two boxes of albumin lest it be in short supply. ”
Father mumbled to himself, “If it is to go on, what a huge complication indeed!” He kept mumbling all the way home, probably unaware of his so doing.
Mother began to give us three or four lectures a day. According to her, what was the use of modern medicine when it could not even cure colds? When people fell ill, they would do better resorting to folk wisdom from the country. She also enlightened us to the fact that every one of us had cancer in our body and that those without it were simply not blessed with a strong constitution. She made it understood that some people got cured just by eating chilly peppers while others used boiled water caltrop as a cure-all. What’s more, mudfish were said to have healing powers if taken as a daily staple for each of the three meals. She also learned by heart some therapeutic chants, which she would sing every morning while seated cross-legged. She couldn’t talk enough of the legendary doctors, of whom she had compiled a long list. She planned to visit them in Beijing, Guangzhou, Wuhan, Henan, all sorts of places.
Father used to criticize Mother for “wanting to look a bit smarter than everyone in everything.” But Father’s criticism was never carried so far as to interfere with Mother’s lectures, which he had always accepted as background music for his enjoyment of newspaper or TV. But now, whenever Mother started to lecture, Father would interrupt her with excuses such as, I need to wash the lunchbox now or I'm going to send for a nurse as the intravenous drip is running out soon, as if what Mother said were some shrill noise he could no longer bear.
“Would it kill you to listen for one more minute? Would it?” Mother would yell at him in a shrill voice.
She had never talked to Father like this before. But now it looked as if all these lectures on her disease were meant solely for Father and any inattention on his part was a slap in the face for her.
Mother shouted at me, although again Father was the intended audience, “Elder people always talk about standing on one’s own feet. Now I understand what it really means! When one is young and healthy, one has not only oneself but also so many other people to support. But when she becomes old and sick, no one will care to spare one minute to provide her with a bit of assistance. One has only oneself to rely on even if she is already too frail to walk out of the ward. But what other choice does she have? She either depends on herself, or dies! ”
Father changed his tactics. He listened to Mother talk for ten minutes until she had fully expressed herself in one long paragraph, and then made a facetious comment, “We all believe miracles exist in this world. But how can you even begin to presume you are THE miracle? Is it because you are cleverer or more knowledgeable about these things? ”
Remaining impassive, Mother responded, “Don’t pretend any longer! You never listened. When did I ever mention anything about miracles? What I mean is that my disease is not terminal! ”
With a flush emerging on his neck, Father retorted somewhat breathlessly, “If that’s the case, you can get well by lying down for a couple of days. Why do you bother to look up such a motley assortment of hospitals? Why all the hysterical fuss? Do you have even a little sense of family responsibility? How old are you? Are you not as mature as Wey? You would rather give your money away to the government, wouldn’t you?”
The unexpected speech of father’s was confusing for me. Yet Mother’s reply sounded calm enough, “I know what I am doing. I know when to deal with my own money and would rather do without other people’s calculations. ”
It was not until later that I came to realize what Father meant by “hysterical fuss”. Mother had ripped the paper with the passwords off from the notebook. When he turned away for a moment, she also seized the opportunity to take the ID, deposits and cards out from the leather bag. Mother looked quite intense back then, so Father couldn’t bring himself to ask her to give them back. A few days later when Father did bring it up again, Mother simply glared at him, too suspicious to tell him where she had hidden them.
Father explained to me, “It’s a hospital, not a bank, isn’t it? There is no safe in here. A hospital is absolutely not ideal for keeping things, with all these people coming in and out. It’s for the best if she will transfer the money now. If not, it’s still better for me to lock the cards up at home. ”
While Mother was having her shower, Father scoured all the drawers, coats, cupboards and even pillows, leaving no stone unturned. But he could find nothing. After searching breathlessly for some time, Father said to me, flabbergasted, “Is it possible that your mother brought everything with her into the bathroom?” He pointed at the bathroom where water was running loudly from the faucet. I felt shivers going up my spine, as if Mother had been watching our daily idiotic spectacle from behind that door, gloating and smirking.
Father summoned Brother and I again for a meeting, “I know your Mother best. She’s not an unreasonable person. The only reason she’s been acting inconsiderately can be nothing but that we’ve not paid enough attention to her. If we do a little bit more for her…even the most trivial things, she will think that we have tried everything possible and therefore stop her temper tantrums. Things will be much easier that way.”
Father turned to Brother, “Wey, from now on, you have to come to the ward every day too!” To avoid making an unnecessary fuss while he searched the ward for Mother’s bank cards, Father had asked Brother to Go get a days’ rest for the moment and had only me there to assist him.
Back at the ward, Father began to encourage Mother to search the Internet more often and promised to be at her service if she needed him for any errands.
Before going to bed every night, Mother saved whatever information she had found onto a flash drive, which Brother would print out the next day. Brother was an arts designer, so he had a state-of-the-art color printer. At first, Brother would always leave without putting the flash drive into his backpack, which he had deliberately left behind on the window sill. Every time Father would chase him up to the elevator. Brother would then mutter something like “Nothing is going to work, is it? I don’t have time for sleep with all the printing I have to do.” Father shoved the flash drive into the side pocket, zipped it closed, and patted him heavily on the back of the neck, “Check what you’ve printed and make sure no page is missing. Don’t forget!”
Every day I cooked for Mother, using the anti-cancer recipes she had invented for herself. Porridge made out of ten different kinds of rice tasted worse than medicine. But Mother had no trouble swallowing it, together with asparagus juice and stewed water chestnut. Her latest recipe was some concoction based on red bean and seaweed, of which she forced herself to devour three bowls each day. When Xiongxiong was asleep, I would begin to browse English medical websites. Neither Father nor Mother asked me to do that. But I was a translator of English and thought I might be able to find something Mother could not find for herself on the Internet.
Father thought of tapping the social network in his old company. It was a retail food group, with such a large staff that the chance was fair of finding some of them related to people working in hospitals. Father had been the office director and quite popular with his colleagues. Father began to visit experts at different hospitals, and insisted that I drive him around. I complained, “I already have my hands full with the cooking and night duties. Do you really need me to accompany you right now? ”
Father said, “Min, don’t you see it? Since this terrible thing happened to your mother, I am the one under the worst pressure! I would rather trade places with her, lying in that bed, surfing the Internet, and waiting for some miracle to happen. Every day I travel the four points of the compass in Shanghai with all the hope in the world, only to have it dashed again by one more death verdict. I am suffering more severe blows than your mother! I am in such bad shape that I’m afraid I cannot drive without the constant danger of being in a car crash someday.
Father convinced me that he was the most hapless victim of the whole affair. What’s more, I was already destined to lose Mother, I could not possibly bear losing Father to a car accident. Yes, I was more than willing to chauffeur him around.
But Father also said, “Min, actually there is no point in me running from one hospital after another! All experts require face-to-face contact to reach a diagnosis. As the attending doctor is still away on his business trip, we cannot even borrow the examination report and medical record. All I can do is talk with the experts, which serves no other purpose than to reassure your mother! ”
To serve the purpose of reassuring her to the fullest, Father made a daily report for Mother of whatever he had garnered during the day. All experts talked in the same seventy percent pessimistic and thirty percent optimistic way. That was their routine --- always leave room for possibility. But Mother seemed to opt only for the thirty percent optimistic part, which she would reiterate for us over and over again. Father would humor Mother to the extent of blurting something like “We the four of us shall go to Maldives someday!”
The more faith Mother had, the more folk therapies she would put herself up to. Although Mother lived in a single room ward, she had already got several stern warnings from doctors and nurses for not using medicine prescribed by the hospital. Her room looked as if she was hosting a medicine exposition. With smoke of incense hovering everywhere, the strong presence of what Mother had been hoarding was hard to ignore.
Brother ushered in a monk, who was said to possess magical powers. The monk circled the ward and put his hand on Mother’s forehead for a good thirty minutes before he closed his eyes, smiled, nodded and pronounced the evil spirits to have been exorcised.
Gradually mother got her hearty laughter back, and we took care to show our support by coughing up some dry laughs with her. I knew the day would come when illusions would be shattered. It was hard to imagine the pain Mother would suffer when she was brought back into reality.
Half an hour after he finished making rounds on Monday morning, Dr. Liu came to Mother’s ward, head drooping. He wanted me in his office. My heart sunk. I ran to get Father, who was out buying breakfast.
Liu made a deep bow to us before he said anything. I expected that he was going to sputter out something like “we’ve tried our best for her.” I clutched Father’s arm, which had become all stiff. Liu said, “Sorry. The attending doctor who’s been away for several weeks is back now and has just examined Professor Chen’s X-ray and other medical reports.”
I saw his lips moving, with his poor excuse of a moustache above them. “Professor Chen’s got benign tumor and inflammation. That’s all. Nothing else. I am terribly sorry. It was presumptuous of me to have read the X-ray for you. It was only because you were all so anxious to know the result. Fortunately we have not prescribed any wrong medicine so far. All she’s taken is also effective for tumor and inflammation…” I was not sure I understood what he was talking about. I felt Father trying to pull his arm away from me. Liu retraced a few steps backward in panic to avoid Father’s fist in the face, only to bump into the corner of the desk and have his face distorted in agony.
I didn’t know whether I felt more ecstasy or rage, but I had to shout out the fear that had been eating me. It was the first time ever I raised my voice to such a pitch, “Doctor? People like you? A doctor? Why don’t you go home and tell your own mother she’s dying? ” My unfamiliar voice reverberated through the office.
Father’s eyes were bloodshot, with veins pulsing visibly on his neck and temples, “You bastard! I am telling you! You have pissed off the smartest person from the law school! We are going to sue you, sue your department, and sue this hospital!” Breathing heavily, Father was almost inarticulate with fury. I added in my new high-pitched, violent voice, “Professor Chen was a professor of Studies in Law. All her students are judges and lawyers!”
It dawned upon me that the first priority for now was to tell Mother about the good turn of events. I started running across the tile-paved corridor, leaving behind raucous and fragmented sounds of argument. Everyone in that part of the hospital had their eyes on me.
Seeing me rush into the ward, Mother shook her head and started to criticize me, “What’s all this rushing about? What has the doctor told you? I’ve already told you the doctors here are of no use. I’ve been feeling better than ever since I began my self-therapy. ”
I threw myself at Mother and hugged her, with my head buried in her chest. Since I was three years old I had not hugged Mother in this way. Every day since she came to hospital, I had intended to hug her. But all I could bring myself to do was arrange the few strands of hair that lay on her face when she was sound asleep, or touch the back of her hand gently to make sure it didn’t turn icy cold taking IV drips. If she were to die, I would insist on being prim and proper to the very end of her life. Now with my face close against her hospital gown and feeling the warmth underneath, my eyes watered. I said to her, “Ma, you are fine now.”
I was pushed away instantly, and I saw a tinge of repulsion flicker through her face, as if I were a caterpillar that had inadvertently landed upon her shoulder. She frowned, “I AM fine. What’s the matter with you?”
I realized I had not made myself fully understood. Sitting at Mother’s bedside with my arms cuddling her quilt-covered knees, I delivered an extensive report on the wrong diagnosis, “Don’t be angry, Ma. We will collect evidence and go to court with them! We will demand a public apology and made people in this hospital reflect on their mistake! It’s our blessing that you think positively of things. If it had been someone else, they might have frightened the hell out of her! What if you had taken some wrong medicine? ”
As I rambled on, I literally felt my heart brighten and my body thaw out. For the first time in weeks I thought of attempting a witticism, “Ma, haven’t you been complaining about the waste of your talent since your retirement, and wishing to be reemployed or involved in some counseling work? Now this is your opportunity! What about you yourself taking charge of this case? ”
Mother had not uttered a word. Much as I prayed and hoped she would feel as excited as I was, the sight of her face filled me with trepidation. The skin on her face had drooped almost to the jaw and the shadows under her eyes reached her jawbones. She looked sadder and sadder as the light in her eyes diminished.
I shook her by the shoulder, “Ma, say something!”
A few moments later, she said weakly, “You are lying to me again.”
“No, never!”
She said, “I am really dying, aren’t I?”
After a few more words of explanation, I thought Mother finally came around to the truth, for she wanted to have fried turnip cakes, which was exactly the sort of “acid reflux food” she should be avoiding according to her anti-cancer theories. When I left the ward, she was examining her features in the mirror---not exactly a common sight those days. As I went downstairs to look for turnip cakes, I called my brother about the good news. He said he would get here immediately and we could have our celebration lunch in a restaurant near the hospital. A few minutes later he called to say he had booked a place online and even got us some coupons.
Fried turnip cakes weren’t as easy to find as a restaurant. I walked quite a while amongst lanes and alleys. Greasy paper bag in hand, I ran into Father at the door of elevator. He had just closed the negotiation with the hospital director and seemed to be very much appeased. We walked into the ward laughing and talking. But, Mother was not there!
Her bed was empty, and the shoes under it were gone!
The intravenous bottle was still hanging from the hook. At the tip of the needle, the fluid was slowly draining out. On the bed were traces of diluted blood. Mother did not even take off her hospital gown. All that was missing was a coat and her wallet.
We could not understand why Mother left. It was natural to feel a little out of control over the narrow escape from death, but this didn’t make any sense! We shouted her name, running along the corridors, charging into every ward. Whenever a doctor or nursed tried to stop us, we assailed them with scathing accusations without mercy or the least regard to acceptable social behavior. We wanted all the patients to see for themselves what a wrong diagnosis might come to! We demanded Mother be returned to us safe and sound. Otherwise they would all be guilty of manslaughter.
Brother arrived at the hospital with no idea of what was going on. When he finally wrapped his head around the situation, he swore to break Liu’s legs.
Liu had already taken off his white coat and was walking back and forth in front of the doctors’ lounge. The moment Brother saw him, he took up a mop and ran after him. Liu was too scared to think of a route for his way out. After a few runs around the corridor, he scrambled for his escape through the fire exit. From this stairway came the sound of someone tripping and falling.
We called 110. The police asked as if there were any traces that might indicate kidnapping or robbery. According to them, when a patient left of her own accord, they’d keep their nose out. We turned to the medical affairs office, only to be castigated that a patient shouldn’t have left without paying her fees.
Father wanted to know what on earth I had said to Mother, I was the last person to have spoken to her. He had me repeat every sentence and went into every detail at least three or four times. Round after round of cross-examination from both Father and Brother finally brought me to tears, “All these days I’ve been doing my best for Mother, more than anybody else! Why would I want to hurt her? Should something happen to Mother, you won’t let it go until I take my own life, will you?”
Having pierced together every fragment of Mother’s reaction, we came to realize that somehow, this time, Mother seemed to believe she was dying. How could it be? Once again Father had me describe the ins and outs of the matter in great detail and kept grilling me about one point, “Did your mother give you something important?” Confused though I was, I tried hard to dig into my memory, convincing myself the whole time that I might have left out something. Then it occurred to me that what Father was asking about were Mother’s deposits and bank cards!
For the first time in my life I lost my temper with Father. I shouted at him, “To think you feel like coveting these things at a time like this! Mum is nowhere to be found! We don’t even know if she’s still alive! I’m no longer sure it is her that you are looking so concerned about. ”
Father grunted, paused for quite some time, and started to speak in a higher-pitched voice. “Do you think I am after her money? I am asking you about this so that I can better judge what might be going on in her mind. Money is very important to her. Not until she’s given us all the cards and deposits can we really know for sure whether she thinks she’s dying or not. ”
“According to this theory of yours,” I said, “Now that Mother is gone, it must be me who has appropriated the money!”
Brother howled, “Keep quarreling, please! Quarrel for some more time so that Mother can run a little farther!”
Brother’s voice pierced through the sound of our argument. “Where would Mother want to spend her last days?”
We tried to think in her thoughts and guess her likes and dislikes. The university department office? The department library? Or the Carrefour Supermarket? Only then did we realize how little we knew her.
My Buick sedan stopped at the crossroad where traffic lights kept changing colors, hesitating over which direction to head. The world was wide and strange. People floated in the continual bustle with faces that bespoke their cheerful belief in eternal life.
When the car did finally start, Father suddenly said to me from behind the back seat, “Because your Mother’s got terminal disease--oh, right, it’s not terminal now--and she’s disappeared in pretty bad shape, you go on to assume whatever she does or says is right while I cannot say or do anything right. But if you were to just top and think about it, she is the one who has left without leaving so much as a word. Is it the right thing to do to put the whole family through all these troubles? Instead of handing them over to her own family, she would rather keep deposits in the ward with no security to speak of. Now does that sound right to you? ”
We drove blindly in the city for an entire afternoon and had to refill the gas tank twice. Mother was not at home or in my house. Nor was she in the university. We had no choice but to pick random places to go, such as People’s Square, Huaihai Park, the Bin Jiang Avenue, and the Oriental Pearl TV Tower, which I later realized made parts of a sightseeing map for tourists in Shanghai.
When darkness began to close in, it got quiet inside of the car. I pulled over by the roadside and slammed on the brakes. Brother who was in the front seat had stopped calling Mother. In front of us was the roaring Huangpu River. I thought to myself, “Could it be that we are already too late?”
At that time I heard Father say, “Why don’t we try the old house?” He added, “It won’t hurt to try one more place now that we’ve even tried so many impossible ones.”
The old house was a taboo topic for us. It belonged to our maternal Grandma. To get me into a key primary school in Luwan District, Mother had changed my permanent residence address and got me to move into this house. In order to take better care of me, it was decided that the whole family was to live here for some time. Grandma embraced us, but not Father. She used to nag Father all the time about having the nerve to take advantage of her. And she insisted that Father would use this as a pretext for his cunning plan to turn the house of Chen into the house of Jin.
In the Shikumen building, right across the courtyard was the living room. The last time I came here was to say my final goodbye to Grandma, who was lying in the big bed against the corner, every part of her covered by a quilt except her head. I remembered trying to stay away from that bed, making detours here and there just to keep my distance. Mother had pushed me to “look at Grandma one last time”. There had seemed to be no change whatsoever about her face, but I realized somehow it did look different from what it used to. And the realization had made me shudder. That was the year I graduated from primary school.
Now this same room was almost dark. At the other side of the room, a 14 inch black-and-white TV was sputtering irregularly, like a faraway nightmare. My mother was sitting on the big bed in front of the TV. The alternating light and darkness on her face made her look stony and dappled like a statue, as if she had already allowed herself to be subdued by death. She might as well have been looking at us from the Underworld, a yawning gap from where we stood.
After Grandma had passed away, the house had always been empty. It was neither the house of Chen nor the house of Jin. It served as a reminder of the intricacies of love and hatred between family members. Now, Mother looked up at us, dazed, “Do you remember? You grew up here. I lived here too when I was little. I loved it when my mother cooked me my favorite dish---stewed cabbage with shredded meat.”
I had never heard Mother talk in such a soft voice. She sounded helpless, like a child. She sat Bother and I either side of her, clutching our palms with her two hands. I felt her clutch get tighter, and she began to whimper. In the darkness Father’s calm voice floated, “Chen, didn’t you say you would be prudent? But look at this! Have you truly been acting prudently these days? ”
Mother stopped whimpering. The silence in the the room became crushing. I heard Father take a breath. He started talking again, “Chen, have you any idea how you frightened us? We almost went out of minds over your disappearance.” Then Father caressed Mother’shead, gently pressed it against his shoulder. Mother started to sob.
I had been waiting for the whole family to just hug and cry together. Ever since Mother went to hospital, I had felt the urge to cry out loud, but the timing was never right. I thought Father and Brother might have felt the same. But nobody cried. Only Mother sobbed, the sound of which blended with the gusts of wind sighing and winding along the alleys.
Mother went back to hospital. We borrowed the entire medical and examination reports from the doctors’ office so that she might read them for herself. Our spoken explanation hadn’t been entirely adequate for her. The doctors and nurses took great care not to touch upon any topic remotely related to death. Dr. Liu disappeared. It was said that he had been transferred to another department where work was easier and career prospects were better.
The law department of the university found out about Mother’s situation when we had gone to look for her on campus. Now a constant parade of colleagues came to visit her. People from the workers’ union and the CPC party committee and department leaders were the first ones to come. The department director even made an unprecedented offer to Mother, “Professor Chen, if you feel well and willing enough to come back to work, you are more than welcome in the department. The Re-employment after Retirement Contract will be readily available to you.”
Mother had been hoping to get reemployed for a long time. I had made some inquiries for her on the quiet, only to be told there were no vacancies and that many young teachers were already queuing up for any possible job opening. I was surprised the director should have made the improbable promise when no one was even asking it of him. Bouquet in hand, he took a bow in front of the bed and shook Mother’s hand three times, which looked as if he were taking leave of a dying person. Unruffled, Mother said in response, “Director, that’s really nice of you. I’ve already caused the department much trouble. ” She sounded as if she knew for sure she was never to get out of that bed.
The day Mother went back to the ward she was not her old self any more. She talked little, and was always sighing or in a trance. She seemed to shed tears when she was alone. Yet she hadn’t even cried at Grandma’s memorial service. Taking charge of everything on that day, she managed to deliver a moving memorial speech and shake hands firmly with everyone, thanking them for coming.
Colleagues from the department also visited, and former students, from different years ranging in age from 20-year-olds to 40-year-olds. There were so many bouquets and flower baskets that they needed to be piled up.
Mother received a few of them but only if she was in the mood. When occasionally she felt like it, she would chat to them for a little while. More often she would take shelter in having a fake nap on the balcony, turning a blind eye to those visitors who would come in, put down flowers and fruits, exchange greetings with Father and then tiptoe out of the ward. This was nothing like what Mother would usually do. She never once asked for leave during her 40 years of teaching, was never late for a class. Luckily the students who came to visit did not seem to mind. Though they looked at a loss when they came in, they breathed a sigh of relief the moment they went out. Mother said she didn’t like other people to visit her as if they were paying their final tributes to a dead body. But if nobody came to see her on some day, she would whine about another day being wasted, “No one notices I am still breathing!” Once I saw Mother furtively appraising her former students from behind the balcony. Afterwards she said, “Even those kids have gone bald and big-bellied. How come I have let my years drift away, just like that?”
Two weeks later, Mother handed all the cards and deposits over to Father. He told me, by doing so, the money would not be confiscated by the bank for lack of deposit receipts. “As for the three percent notarization fee”, he said, “We shall dutifully pay if we have to. It is one of the civil obligations, isn’t it? ” Father had regained the poise of someone who used to be an office director. Talking in mandarin Chinese, Father seemed as though he had taken the high moral ground and offered to make up with Mother.
Father explained especially to me, “Min, I know you always think this is her money. But in fact everything in this family belongs to the whole family, not any single one of us. To be perfectly honest with you, decent as being a professor may sound, it is not a lucrative profession at all. Her retirement salary is less than 5,000 RMB. All these years aren’t I the person who’s been meeting the living expenses in this house? Even your mother’s hospitalization fees are covered by me! ”
I couldn’t think of a proper reply. Father remained silent for some time before he let out a sigh and put his hand over my shoulder, “When you come to think about it, we parents have been working hard throughout our lives with the sole purpose of leaving you a larger inheritance. I am doing this for the family and for your children!”
I had never included inheritance into my plan for life. It had never occurred to me until the wrong diagnosis came barging into our life. Hearing Father say those things, I was deeply touched. I had never thought about what our parents had been saving money for. Since their retirement, I hadn’t seen them plan such things as traveling around the world. However, at this very moment, I was more caught up in an eerie feeling that Father sounded like he was going to outlive all of us.
One week before Mother left hospital, Brother told us in private that he was going to talk to Mother and advise her to transfer all the money to Father’s account. He said, “If something should happen…” I cut in, “Mother’s recent examination report is probably better than ours. Since we have the same slender chances as Mother of remaining alive, why don’t your transfer your money to her account?”
Brother was rendered speechless, casting his eyes at Father in search of support. Father did not fly into a temper. He looked pensive and said nothing. Brother blurted, “This is not an idea of mine! Father and I have been discussing it for several days.” Brother stared at me smugly, exulting over the secret he had with Father. I thought to myself, “You weren’t so in the know as you are now when Father scoured Mother’s ward with me.”
Father had no choice but to say something, “There must be something wrong with your mother. A few days ago she was sent some contribution fees to the Politics and Law magazine. She said yes to my offer to get the money for her in the post office. But when I told her I needed her ID for that to happen, she simply wouldn’t give it to me. I think it better that we get the whole thing straight! ”
I felt unhappy, not because Father brought up the old topic again, but because Father had never counted our share in the inheritance. With Mother always nagging us about basic legal knowledge, it’s hard not to know. That if Mother passed away, she had three first-order inheritors, Father, Brother and me, among whom the inheritance should be equally divided. But if Father transferred the money to his own account, Brother and I would feel embarrassed to ask him for our share, for he would be sure to say, “The money will be yours sooner or later!” But who might guarantee Father was going to die before us?
Putting up a face of innocence, I blinked and looked Father in his eyes, “Pa! Ma is finally getting out of hospital. Why don’t we just go along with her wishes and make her feel happy? What’s the worst that could happen? We will pay the three percentage! But this is not until many years later. We don’t need to bother about it now!”
What I said was true. But it did not prevent me from arranging for Haoming to get Xiongxiong to visit Mother twice within one week. Xiongxiong was going to have his mid-term exam. Once he even had to skip the after-school tutoring and asked for leave of absence to visit his grandma in hospital. Watching Mother and Xiongxiong play happily with each other, I became so distressed that I turned away to wipe the tears from the corner of my eyes. It was not until Haoming was driving me and Xiongxiong home that I realized actually I had never believed Mother was dying before the misdiagnosis was exposed, even though I had attempted to persuade her to accept the reality. This was why I hadn’t felt the urge to bring Xiongxiong to see her at that time. However, after having gone through this tragicomedy, somehow, though ridiculous, I now began to have a feeling that Mother didn’t have long left to live!
My head felt as if it were to explode with pain. I took out a wet wipe to clean Xiongxiong’s hands despite his wriggling resistance. At a red light, Haoming stopped the car, and somewhat hesitantly said to me, “Min, could you tell me the truth? Is your mother really fine now? Is it really not cancer? You are not hiding it from her, are you?”
I noticed trees along the road had turned green, and that magnolias and winter jasmines were blooming in the streets. The air smelt mellow with an aroma which belonged distinctively to late spring and early summer. In the blink of an eye, a season had gone.
The day Mother left the hospital, everyone tried hard to look exultant, as if now that the family was reunited, things could go back to the way they were when Mother had not been taken ill and all of us could live happily ever after.
Mother made a joke that if she went back to the law department to ask the director about reemployment contract, he would probably go hide in the toilet. Father proposed the Maldives trip again, but can not even tell the price of the airline ticket. Teasingly Brother said, “You are not counting on me to get a boat for you to row all the way there, are you?”
Back at our parents’ house, Father was the chef and I the assistant. I noticed a new dishwasher in the kitchen. Still with the labels and tags on, it must have been there for at most a week. To lighten the atmosphere, I led Mother into the kitchen and teased Father in front of her, “See how considerate Father is towards his wife. Since you are the person in charge of washing dishes, Father has bought you a dishwasher to spare you the hard work.” Mother had her first hearty laugh after leaving hospital, “Oh, I am put out of a job again? Do I just have my hands crossed after finishing meals? You have to find me a new job in this house then!”
Father did not join Mother in the laughter. He did not even turn around. Instead he was facing the flame of the gas stove, waving the spatula, unsure what expression to wear. Seeing his dodging eyes, I realized the dishwasher was not Mother’s homecoming present. It was what Father had prepared for Mother’s anticipated death.
Translated from the Chinese by Emma Shen, Roxanne White
Acknowledgements to Patrick O’Conner, Xu Qin and James Etue for copyediting the translation