Chinese Stories in English
Ordinary People 03
百姓人家(2023), 秦俑/赵建宁选编
The Chinese text can be found at the page and the website cited after each story.
1. Am I Your Favorite? 3. Moon Over Wanlu Lake 5. Keep Your Phone On
2. The Door 4. An Odd Building 6. As Long As You’re Safe
1. Am I Your Favorite? (我是不是你最爱的人)
Hu Yan (胡炎)
A drunken session. We’d arranged for Old Heh to pay me back today. Thirty thousand Yuan. We’d already been having a tug-of-war about it for a month. But Old Heh gave me an acid stomach, on top of a stomach full of bitter booze. He said, “I’m sorry. I’ll be sure to pay you back when I have the money.” There was nothing I could say, so I staggered out into the pitch-black night.
Blurry lights and shadows, a long, lonely street. I sat down on the side of the road, spent some time heaving, then looked up to see the moon. It was hidden by a thin layer of clouds, mysterious like. I didn’t know how I’d explain it to Sunrise. I was just about at my wits’ end, and it was all my fault. I’d invested blindly and the capital I’d saved up over half my life had gone down the drain.
I was looking at a daughter about to take the college entrance examination without a good foundation in cultural studies. She’d have to be an art and music major. Quick review classes in fine arts, quick review classes in cultural studies – the tuition would cost tens of thousands of Yuan, and they couldn't wait even a day…. But Old Heh, he’d shattered my last glimmer of hope.
It was already late, so I bit the bullet and went home. No one was there. My daughter was staying at her grandma’s, but where was Sunrise? This had been going on for some time, her coming home late at night.
A misty dream, a very profound dream. I saw us cuddling in a small grove by the river in the summer of my senior year in high school. With tears in her eyes, she was playing a guitar and singing a song for me, "Am I Your Favorite". Her voice was beautiful, mellow and clear, more lovely than that of an oriole. She was going to be working in a bar from that night on, while I was going off to college in a distant city.
"Will you have a change of heart?
"No way. The moon is my witness!"
The dream lingers long, covering almost the entirety of our love. Later, I couldn't see her anymore. I only saw a vegetable peddler wandering the streets and alleys on a three-wheeled bike, avoiding the Urban Control cops like a panicky mouse....
I heard heavy snoring at three in the morning. It was Sunrise. I didn’t know when she‘d come home. It was a rude and ugly kind of snoring, as if she’d been laid off from a brewery and become a street vendor selling vegetables. She looked more and more disheveled every day, and her language became more and more vulgar every day.... The girl playing the guitar and singing was no longer there.
She woke me up at five o'clock.
"Are you getting the money back?"
"Oh... in just a few days."
"You have a lot of nerve going to sleep. If you don't get the money again today, don't come home!"
Her voice was cold and sharp, like the paring knife she used to peel and chop veggies. I put up with it. I couldn't defend myself because I was the one who caused the trouble. This patience I have for putting up with things has endured for several years.
"Why did you come home so late last night?" I tried my best to smile.
"Mind your own business!”
She left. I knew she was going to get on that broken-down trike to get vegetables from farmers in the suburbs. It wasn’t easy for her, really not easy, and that was why I was patient. There was another more important reason, something my mother said to me back before I married her. "Wait and see. There’ll come a time when you’ll regret it.”
Mother sneered when she said that. She’d tried to talk me out of it many times before, all to no avail. Now it seems I was too naive and thought love was like a fairy tale. I was always hard-headed, but at this moment, I couldn't hold on any longer. I didn't want to spend this life of mine with a vegetable vendor. It was too painful. Besides, I already had another woman in my life who was after me.
I was still tipsy when I left the house. A bit hazy but still clear about where I was going. I wanted to see Mr. Ma, a nouveau riche type who wore a gold chain around his neck every day. He’d asked me to write a documentary for him on several occasions, but I’d turned him down every time. I scorn such people, even though I’m just a poverty-stricken scholar. I have dignity and character. But now the tiger has come out in the open, so I have no choice but to forget my dignity.
Everything went smoothly. I got a bank card for a fifty-thousand Yuan deposit without writing a single word. At dusk I wandered around the city like a wild ghost. For a moment I wanted to hug the streetlights and dance, no matter what anyone said. Later I wanted to run around wildly, to lose the night and let it never catch up with me. I held back, though -- I do care about my image.
Eventually I walked into a park in the center divider of a street. I sat on a park bench and took a picture of the moon with my cellphone. It was hiding in the clouds, only showing a blurry halo. I bet myself that it would be able to drill its way out, and I won the bet around ten p.m. It hung there in the navy blue sky, very round and very bright.
But I didn't want to go home. I needed to get plastered. Then I’d hand the bank card to Sunrise and calmly lay my cards on the table: “Let's get divorced.”
I went to a large night market in the suburbs and chose a rather secluded corner. Ordered ten bottles of beer. When I was on my fifth bottle, I heard a woman's voice. I don't know why, but I felt her singing voice was uncommonly kind. Later the sound of her singing gradually drew closer to me. I saw a woman with powdered cheeks, blue eye shadow and pink lip gloss that seemed too vivid.
She was standing by a table next to customers, playing the guitar skillfully and really into her singing. Some of the customers began to cheer and whistle loudly. Some also made crude jokes while they gave her money. The woman seemed to be utterly unaware of them, thoroughly engrossed in the sound of her own voice. I watched her intently, unable to distinguish her age and true appearance, but the song "Am I Your Favorite" flowed like a deep autumn spring, slowly filling my heart...
I stood up and walked closer to her. When she finished singing the last note I took her gently into my arms. I was crying.
I said, "Let's go home, Sunrise."
Text at p. 79. Translated from 远看 (edited version) at
https://m.zhangyue.com/readbook/12944108/3.html?p2=104017 (third story)
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2. The Door (门)
Yang Jinglong (杨静龙)
I came into the office early that morning because I was in a hurry to process a document. I finished the task before it was time to start work and the office was still quiet.
I printed a copy of the document and got on my bike to head out for breakfast. After I ate, I delivered the document to another unit. It was past time to clock in by the time I got back to work, and the office was bustling with busy colleagues.
I noticed that my office door was closed as I walked towards it. I remembered that I’d deliberately left it open when I went out just now because I wanted the fresh morning breeze of early autumn to blow through and freshen the air inside. Now it was closed tight, and I stopped to look around before I opened it. A lot of people doing their jobs were coming and going in the area. I hesitated a moment, then pushed the door open.
I made myself another cup of tea, sat down at my desk and took a sip. I began to wonder if I remembered it wrongly. Maybe I did close the door when I left. If not, who’d close it for no reason?
Mr. Li from the Finance Department next door came in while I was thinking about it. He had a stack of financial statements in his hand and put them down on my desk. "Did you forget to close your door when you got off work yesterday?” he asked. “I closed it for you...."
"Oh," I said, and was about to explain when he continued with a smile, "You know, I’m always the first one here and boil water for the office before everyone comes in. I saw your door was wide open when I got here today, and it was still open after I boiled the water. Lots of people come around the office to do their thing, so I closed it."
The morning breeze blew in through the window, making the reports on my desk rustle. A few sheets of paper fell to the floor. Old Li bent down to pick them up, smiled at me and walked out. "Thanks, Old Li!" I stuttered as I watched him go.
"Ha, there’s no need for thanks between colleagues…." he replied, without even turning his head.
I hadn't explained to Old Li about the door, and it did feel a bit strange to thank him. No matter what, though, the friendship between colleagues still gives one a warm feeling.
Old Chen was the second person to tell me he’d closed the door.
He was walking past my office wearing his high-power myopia glasses, in a hurry to get somewhere, when he stopped and stepped back, stretched out his neck and turned his head to look at me. "You’re here,” he announced. “Did you forget to close your door when you left yesterday?" Speaking quickly and without waiting for my answer, he proceeded to explain, "I passed by your door several times and didn't see you, so I closed the door for you. Heh, heh." Then he waved at me and sped off on his way.
His claim left me rather unsettled. What was going on? OK, so they didn't know I’d come in early that morning to work overtime; didn’t know I went out to eat breakfast and deliver the document after I finished the task; and didn’t know that I deliberately left the door open to get some fresh air. It was also true that they closed the door for me, which made me feel warm and grateful. But how could two people close one door?
I was still puzzled when I heard the sound of high-heeled leather shoes on the tile floor, coming from far away and approaching my door. When I heard those footsteps, I knew it was Young Pan, our unit’s beautiful secretary. "Wow, you really are serious about your work. Did you forget to close your door yesterday?" She was leaning against the door frame and smirking. Her voice was as soft as she is.
A strange thought flashed through my mind as I looked at her pretty face. I blurted out, "It wasn’t you that closed the door for me, was it?"
She grinned. "It was just a little thing, wasn’t it, a piece of cake. Ha, ha, ha..." The grin was still on her face as she walked away. Her giggles faded away and finally disappeared when she rounded the corner in the hallway.
I spent the whole morning wondering about it. I figured that two of the three people, Old Li, Old Chen and Young Pan, must have lied. It only takes one person to close a door, so it was impossible for three people to have closed it. There couldn’t be a clearer arithmetic problem. But that’s what they each said they did. It seemed that any one of them might have closed my door. If it were me, I’d have done the same, a simple task and an act of friendship between colleagues. Why wouldn’t they? But still, I only have one door, and three people came to tell me they’d closed it for me. It’s hard to describe how I felt about it.
Of course, there was another possibility. Maybe all three of them got the idea to close the door at the time, and then they chose a representative to actually do it. Thus one person closing the door also represented the wishes of all three. But that hypothesis didn’t hold water.
I kept speculating while I did whatever work was at hand. At lunchtime I still didn't have a clear idea what had happened.
I stumbled into the company cafeteria to get a meal. I’d only taken a couple of bites when a voice rang in my ear. "Say there, you didn't close the door when you left after work. Do you know who closed it for you?"
I looked up and was surprised to see a smiling woman's face. It was the union chairperson for our unit, a nice old lady. She put her plate on the table across from me, sat down, picked up a piece of food with her chopsticks and put it into her mouth. She chewed slowly and didn't say anything else. From her her tone of voice, however, it seemed that she was the one who’d closed my door.
Text at p. 85. Translated from 菁优网 at
https://www.jyeoo.com/shiti/2f8f101f-d315-1531-a52d-25a11e32afa2
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3. The Moon Over Wanlu Lake (万绿湖的月亮)
Xu Dong (徐东)
It’d been ten years since he gave up his job and devoted himself to writing poetry. During those ten years, his son was promoted from junior high to high school, and from high school to college; and later graduated from college. He and his wife were both over fifty years old now.
One day he told his wife, “Let's get a divorce.”
He’d been a senior executive of a large company who’d made a lot of money when he was young. He’d purchased two houses in the city center when the housing prices weren’t too high. He didn’t receive any salary after he resigned, but he still had some shares in the company and the annual dividends were enough to cover his expenses. Since they had no worries in life, his wife hadn’t objected to his resignation and his focus on writing, but she clearly disagreed with the divorce.
But he was obsessed, as if he’d been possessed by a ghost, and insisted on going through with it.
A few years previously, he and his wife had gone to a tourist spot called Wanlu Lake. They bought a lakeside house there because they liked the green mountains and clear waters. It was their third house, and it was given to him when they divorced.
He moved into that house and lived facing the lake. He gazed at the mountains, the water, and the clouds in the sky by himself; he walked, ate, and slept by himself; he read, thought, and wrote poetry by himself.
I called him one day and I learned that he was divorced, had left Shenzhen and was living in that fairyland. I hadn't seen him for nearly a year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The next time we met was at his home on Wanlu Lake.
I sat down on the sofa in the living room. “I never thought you’d get divorced at your age,” I said. “Why’d you do it?
He was sitting across from me, brewing some tea. "The water for this tea came from Wanlu Lake,” he told me. “It’s OK to drink. To be honest, I’m really satisfied with the environment here. My life got quiet once I left the noisy big city. Peace and quiet. Living alone in peace, that’s what I wanted -- You can understand it was for that, the reason I wanted to live alone."
“Living in solitude like this, I guess you might get used to it after a while!”
“It's OK for now, at least. Truth is, spending every day in solitude and reflection is torture as well as pleasure. The person I am now is different from the person I was. The now me reads poetry, ponders poetry and writes poetry. You can think of it this way -- what I’m doing is roosting poetically.”
“Is that fair to your wife?”
“I’ve deliberately kept my distance from the outside world over these years. The reason is, I’ve wanted to get closer to my true self, to get closer to poetry. Other people can’t begin to understand, but it’s important to me. It’s a special way of loving myself. At the same time, I’m in love with everyone, with all life, of course including my sons, my ex-wife and my parents. This kind of love transcends the secular world and lets me obtain the sublime in my life. It even has me thinking that poetry is my religion -- one should have the right to choose the life he wants, right?”
“I understand, but still, I couldn't live like you. The more poems you write the better they become, but I’ll allow that even more people can’t begin to understand them….”
He picked up his teacup, took a sip and continued, “That shows that the vast majority of people in the world still need to understand themselves better, and understand poetry. That’s not easy, though, because many people can only live within the boundaries of their destiny. They have neither the method nor the power to choose a new life or new possibilities.”
“Will you fall in love again?”
“No. What I want to love isn’t any actual person. That would limit my life. What I love could be the existence of a small flower or a small animal, a patch of clear lake water, a poem, that kind of thing. Including people as well, of course, but it’s best not to fall in love with a specific person.”
“If you were me, with a small house and monthly mortgage payments, two children to raise , and financially not enough income to meet your expenses, then perhaps a life of ‘roosting poetically’ would be something you could only think about, right?”
“Actually, I fell in love with poetry when I was in junior high, but I gave it up because of the college entrance exam. After I graduated from college, I flailed around for ten-plus or twenty years just to survive, start a family and begin a career. Then one day, it all became clear to me -- my aspiration was writing poetry. I wanted to change my way of living. But wants are just wants, and sometimes reality keeps throwing problems in people’s way.
“My ex-wife called last week and told me she had breast cancer. The doctor said that surgery was still possible, but no one could tell how it would turn out. She called again this morning and said her mother was in the hospital and might not make it. Her father passed more than ten years ago, and she was their only child.”
“Maybe you would’ve gone back there If I hadn't come over….”
“Yes -- but since you’re here, let's go out for a walk. I'll take you around the area.”
We walked outside and spent the afternoon wandering around Wanlu Lake. We had dinner at a Hakka restaurant that evening and drank a bit too much. On the way back, he looked at the moon in the sky and said, “Look at that, the moon.”
I also looked up and said, “Yes. The moon over Wanlu Lake is really full today, like a mid-August moon….”
He suddenly lost control of himself and burst into tears. He kept calling himself an SOB.
I helped him sit by the lake and he calmed down after a while. Eventually he asked, sighing with emotion, "What do you think is the purpose of human life?"
“Yes,” I parroted, “what is the purpose?”
We looked at the light the stars and the moon cast on the rippling lake. It seemed there was a kind of peace, peace and quiet, bobbing poetically on the water. It gave one a touch of sadness, but also a feeling of beauty which no words can describe.
Text at p. 100. Available from 远看 (edited version) at
https://m.zhangyue.com/readbook/12944119/6.html?p2=104167lI
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4. An Odd Building (怪楼)
Wan Qian (万芊)
An odd character lived in Gold River Village. His surname was Feng and his given name was Chinaman. In his early years, when most of the villagers had only a primary school education, he already had a diploma from an out-of-town high school. He worked as a substitute teacher in the village primary school after he got back to his hometown.
In the last century, as the 70s were turning to the 80s, most of the families in Gold River Village demolished their old, tiled houses and built new ones. Almost every family then had the same white-walled, black-tiled homes with a small mud courtyard surrounded by a hibiscus hedge in front. To be self-sufficient, they also built sties for pigs and coops for chickens and ducks, and also planted a variety of vegetables.
Chinaman Feng built a house as well, a one-story place with a few small rooms. The courtyard was quite large, though, with a high wind-and-fire wall on the east side and a half-pavilion on the west. He dug a pond for koi and turtles in the courtyard, and planted a row of spotted bamboo by the east wall and a banana tree by the pavilion. The effect was unique, a bit like a miniature Suzhou garden.
After the courtyard was finished, Chinaman’s neighbor on the east side, Third Huang, said it wouldn’t do. “You plastered so many small tiles on your wind-and-fire wall that the water drips into my yard when it rains. What did you think you were doing?”
The west-side neighbor, Familiar Jiang, was even more put out. He stood in the mud of his own courtyard and shouted curses. "Chinaman Feng, your pointy banana leaves are poking into the east side of someone else’s yard. Don’t you care about your neighbors?"
Third and Familiar reported Chinaman to the brigade. The brigade sent people to mediate, but all they did was smooth things over, leaving the problems unresolved. Later, sometime late one night, without warning, some unknown person knocked down Chinaman's courtyard wall and pavilion. Chinaman had it out with his neighbors on either side, but Third and Familiar both claimed it wasn’t them who did it. Chinaman had to eat the loss in silence.
All of a sudden, with his carefully designed courtyard wall destroyed, Chinaman went batty. His contract as a substitute teacher in the school expired and wasn’t renewed for some reason. Since all he’d done while he was away from home was attend school, he wasn’t much good at farm work, and now that he could no longer substitute teach, he became an idle good-for-nothing. He couldn’t work or earn work points, so even having food was problematic year around. When his wife and daughter left him, tears in their eyes, Chinaman became even more of a weirdo. Behind his back the villagers called him "Poison Bookhead", meaning “nerd”.
There’s a large river at the head of Gold River Village, and an isolated island at a bend in the river with only a few parcels of land. No one wanted it when the commune was disbanded and private plots were distributed, so the team gave it to Chinaman. He had nothing to do and was getting nowhere with his old house, so he started working on a place on the island. He used waste bamboo to make a raft and transported bricks and tiles there from the old knocked-down wall and pavilion. All by himself, he threw together an odd hut that, from a distance, looked like a pillbox.
Further, he built a shed out of bamboo scraps on top of the hut to keep a pig. He added several chutes made of bamboo scraps on the raised pig shed to allow the pig manure to flow down to the surrounding vegetable fields. He fashioned a “fairy jump” enclosure from waste wood and bamboo on a shallow beach on one side of the island, so that fish could swim in but couldn’t swim out. He not only trapped enough fish and shrimp for his own use, but even raised chickens and ducks in the enclosure. The chickens took up the part of the enclosure that was on land, and the ducks took the part in the water.
He also made an open-air flower bed on the pig shed and planted flowers and plants that would bloom year-round. He’d sit among the flowers and play the erhu in his spare time, at ease and contented. The walls of his hut and the pig shed were uneven, so he planted some Japanese creepers which, in just a few short years, made the walls look seamless.
What’s more, he planted reeds in the water around the island as well as bamboo and small trees on the shore, thus solving the problem of materials to reinforce his hut. He had no electricity on the island, so he used kerosene lamps for lighting. He lived there alone for years and no one cared how he got along.
Every household in Gold River Village started a new round of reconstruction recently. They all built two-and-a-half-story, Chinese-style villas with clean and elegant courtyards in the front, like miniature Suzhou gardens. In fact, many of the families imitated Chinaman's former courtyard. They have ornamental bamboo, fishponds, rockery, pavilions, flowers and plants that they enjoy viewing.
A wide asphalt road was paved to connect the village to the outside world to promote tourism. Almost every village household wanted to run a farm stay -- they tried various means to attract city people to stay a while, pick veggies, go fishing, cultivate the land, and eat farm-fresh vegetables as well as fish and shrimp from the rivers and lakes in the area.
At that time, someone went to the village office to complain that Chinaman's odd building on the island was dirty and messy, and that he even raised pigs, chickens and ducks for himself. In particular, the strange look of the odd hut was a black smear on the village with its brand-new farmhouses. The village office reported the matter to the town leaders, and the town law enforcement team came around many times to assess punishment and order demolition of the hut, but Chinaman hid inside his hut and wouldn’t allow strangers on the island.
Occasionally things happen that most people would never expect. Someone staying in a village farmhouse on a pleasure trip posted a video online that they’d taken with a drone, showing the odd hut and the weird Chinaman’s daily life. The odd hut became an internet sensation overnight, a place for people to check off their list. A number of red-hot news anchors came from far-away places to follow the trend.
The time chosen to tear down the odd hut arrived. The town law enforcement team brought several people to carry out the demolition. To their surprise, the entire population of the village blocked the road and prevented the team from entering. The team captain asked, “Didn’t you guys report this?”
“We’re not reporting it now.” the villagers told him. “The odd hut has become a hot spot on people’s lists, and it’s finally made our village popular. If it’s torn down, our village will once again hold no interest for anyone.”
The demolition issue was at a stalemate after that. Unexpectedly, the longer the stalemate lasted, the more popular the odd building became, to the point where red-hot turned to purple-hot.
Many people came from distant places to report on the village and thereby increase the followers and likes for their posts. Then, one night, there was a dramatic storm. When it stopped raining, the visitors were disconsolate to learn that the odd building had collapsed. Weird Chinaman Feng was found hugging his pig on the riverbank with an indifferent look on his face.
The residents of Gold River Village had somewhat lost their way.
Text at p. 66. Translated from 第一昆山 at
https://www.ksrmtzx.com/news/detail/154500 under the name 网红怪楼
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5. Please Keep Your Phone on for Your Parents (请为父母二十四小时开机)
Heavenly Water (天水)
Several girls were still sleeping soundly in the early morning, before dawn, in Women’s Dorm 801, Building F, of a graduate school at a university in Shanghai. A knock on the door by two uniformed policemen and a security guard woke them all up.
Graceful Teng was rubbing her sleepy eyes, wondering what was wrong, when the police abruptly called her name. She was confused, but her roommates were even more confused.
"Have I done something wrong? I’ve always abided by the law and never played online games or taken out loans online, and certainly never gambled online...." It was hard to tell whether Graceful was defending herself to the police or talking to herself.
The police continued with their questions. “Are you okay?”
“I'm fine?”
"That’s good,” the policeman said. “Your mother called us! Why didn't you answer her calls? Call her and let her know you're safe."
A false alarm for Graceful and a false alarm for her roommates. Even for the policemen and the security guard, it was a false alarm.
Graceful picked up her phone right away and saw she had ten or more missed calls, mostly from her mother. At first she felt was that something had happened to her mother back home, and she almost cried as she dialed her mother’s number. She could hear that her mother was also crying on the other end of the line.
"What’s up with you, Mom?” she asked. “Are you feeling well? What's the matter?"
"I'm fine,” her mother responded. “What's wrong with you? Have you run into any problems...? You mustn't be upset."
It was a long time before Graceful realized that she’d accidentally dialed her mother's number before going to bed last night. She’d turned off her phone and gone to sleep without noticing it.
The misdialed call shook up her mother. She saw that her daughter had called but hung up before saying anything, so she kept calling her daughter, but no one answered. She kept sending text and voice messages to her daughter on WeChat, QQ and the phone, but didn’t get any response.
Her mother only then regretted not making a note of the contact information for her daughter's teacher and roommates. She’d always thought it was unnecessary, but now at this critical moment she felt it was crucial. She’d even gone online to look up the phone numbers for the university and the graduate school, but they were all landlines and it was outside office hours. Every phone rang a few times before a mechanical voice came through, just like her daughter's phone, saying, "No one is answering the number you dialed...."
She was so anxious she thought of her only brother and called him. He couldn't get through to his niece, so he told his sister "Don't worry, maybe the phone is on mute," to make her feel better. After several hours of worrying about it, he suggested calling the police. At the same time, he booked a flight for the morning and was ready to fly to Shanghai if needed.
Afterwards, Graceful checked her mobile phone carefully and found no less than a hundred texts, WeChat, QQ and voice messages from her mother. The content of the messages was mostly, "Is something wrong, Daughter?"; "What happened, Daughter?"; "Daughter, Daughter!”; “Is my daughter in trouble?"....
The more she watched, the more she had to cry. “I can’t imagine how distressed my mother was all that time.”
Her father had died young, and her mother hadn’t remarried. The mother and daughter depended on each other for survival. During her college and graduate years, when Graceful was away studying in another province, her mother called to chat or video chat every day. She felt lost if she didn't contact her daughter every day.
Later, Graceful posted her mother’s one-sided chats, texts, voice messages, etc. on her WeChat Moments page, and added the caption, “Please keep your phone on 24 hours a day for your parents.” In no time she’d received the most likes and comments in WeChat Moments history. Everyone said they were moved by such great maternal love.
The story isn’t over yet. At the end of the year, netizens rated Graceful’s mother as “the most touching maternal love”. Reporters both Graceful and her mother, and her mother say softly, “All parents in the world are just like me. They just hope that their children are safe.”
Graceful said, This incident made me realize that parents worried about us constantly. They’re on call for us twenty-four hours a day, so we should be on call for them twenty-four hours a day, too.”
Text at p. 122. Translated from 四川科技报 at
http://kjb.sckjw.com.cn/m/b6b54373925345a8945e7d0acd13b6d3?l=1
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6. As Long As You’re Safe (平安就好)
Jiang Xianping (蒋先平)
Old Man Wang from Village-by-the-Mount was lying on his kang at around ten o'clock in the evening, his attention on a TV miniseries. His wife sat beside him with her head down, concentrating on knitting a sweater.
"Bang", an apple on the TV cabinet shook twice and dropped to the floor. Wang jumped off the kang. “Oh no! Earthquake!” He shouted to his wife, "Hurry, run outside!"
The couple stumbled out of the house into their empty courtyard. Panting, the wife pointed to the east end of the village. "Quick, let’s go see if our son and his wife are OK!"
"The youngsters like to sleep,” Wang muttered. “Could they have gone to bed so early? I'm afraid the dummies are still having sweet dreams." But he’d already taken a long stride toward his son's home at the east end of the village. The lights were out, and he led his wife through the darkness.
Wang and his wife breathed long sighs of relief when they saw the young couple standing outside their house. "Thank Heavens you two hadn’t gone to sleep yet. You were able to make it out when you felt the earthquake."
"It wasn’t that close,” their son said lightly. “I was posting something on my friends circle when I felt my phone shaking. It wasn’t a big earthquake, just enough to get you shook up." Then he thought of his grandparents. "By the way, Dad, Grandpa and Grandma are old, and their legs and feet aren’t in good shape. They ran outside too, right?"
"That, that...." Wang sputtered. He looked at his wife, then at his son, and scratched his head out of habit. His son got anxious. "You guys didn't go to Grandpa's house?!"
Wang came to his senses and exclaimed, "Quick, let’s go to grandpa's place!" He led his wife, son, and daughter-in-law toward the west side of the village, where grandpa's house was located. The four of them panted heavily as they groped their way through the darkness. When they got to Grandpa’s place, they saw that the lights were on in the house and the door was wide open, but there was no sign of the elderly couple in the courtyard.
Ignoring the others’ advice, the younger man dropped his wife's hand and rushed into the house. He searched high and low but didn't find his grandparents, so he had to run outside again.
The four of them waited in the courtyard for more than half an hour, but the grandparents didn't show up. Where had they gone? The village square? That must be it, because it’s spacious and has streetlights. The family talked it over and headed off towards the square. As they were passing by Wang's house, his sharp-eyed son gushed, "Mom and Dad, look! There's Grandpa and Grandma!" Two dark figures sitting on a tree stump by the door stood up when they heard his voice.
Wang helped his mother sit down again. "What’re you and dad doing here in the middle of the night, Mom?"
"When the light bulb shook a few times, I knew it was an earthquake,” the old lady said anxiously. “Your father and I left the house and scrambled and clawed our way to your place. We were afraid you were asleep and didn't know you had to run outside."
"Jeez, Mom, I'm more than half a hundred years old,” Wang said in a low voice. “Why wouldn’t I know to run outside? Why would I want to make you worry?!"
"No matter how old you are, you’re still my son." His mother held Wang's hand tightly. "As long as you’re OK! It’s good you’re safe."
In the dark night, two lines of tears slid down Old Wang's face.
漓江年选•2018年中国年度微型小说•作家网 选编 冰峰 陈亚美 主编, p. 216.
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