John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

“They do not work as hard as I do,” said Baba, who only helped Mei during the harvest when he was afraid the grain might shatter if left too long on the stalk. “But they have twice as much in their palms at the end of it.”

There was enough to eat that winter. Ma made noodles once, and once Baba brought home a chicken he had won gambling.

“Too bad you don’t eat meat,” he said to Ma. “It will be torture for you to cook this.”

Most years he only got to tease her about being a White Lotus at New Year, when they spent their savings to buy pork buns and Ma would only eat the outside.

The next year Feng came to talk to Baba even before planting, but he had Mei put in the millet seed again. That was the year Quan Chuntao, who was Mei’s age, was taken as a bride by a young man in a village outside of Weifang and Eldest Brother was taken by the soldiers to fight against the Dwarf Bandits. Once again there was not too much or too little rain and only the usual insects and the crop was nearly up to Mei’s chin when Second Brother came home to say he had been let go from working in the sheng-yuan ’s fields.

That night they were already asleep on the k’ang when there was a banging on the door and Baba went to it holding the rusted ax. It was poor Mr. Chan, who had taken to begging and sleeping outside since his wife died, shouting that there was a fire in Baba’s field.

There was a big moon and if Mei had not weeded and planted and weeded till her hands bled she would have thought the fire beautiful. As the night breeze swept it across the field, grasshoppers, some of them on fire, buzzed into the air just ahead of the flames. The breeze pushed the fire to the stone wall by the road and soon there was nothing left.

“We are cursed,” said Baba, his face black from the blowing soot, flecks of ash in his hair. “She has cursed us.”

The next day Mei was with Baba in the charred field, looking for burned animals they could eat, when Zhou stopped on the road. He had a sedan chair now, with silk curtains and four porters wearing a kind of uniform who carried it, and he wore a long silk vest and a hat that had a jeweled button on it to signify that he was a sheng-yuan . Mei stood by the wall while Baba climbed over to squat by Zhou’s chair and be spoken to.

“You are an unlucky man,” said the sheng-yuan . “We will have to discover who has done this to you and see that they are punished.”

“I have nothing,” said Baba, looking at the ground.

“Nobody starves in my village,” said Zhou. “I will have Feng bring you some seed, and you will plant again. They say a fire is good for the soil.”

“You are very kind.”

The sheng-yuan looked at Mei then with his wolf’s eyes and gestured for her to come forward. When she put her leg over the stone wall he began to laugh.

“What clown feet!” he said. “Your daughter is very beautiful — above the knees. You are truly an unlucky man.”

When the sedan chair and its passenger had passed Baba slapped Mei in the face.

Mr. Chan was arrested then and charged with setting the fire, worse, accused of lighting it with a match he had been given for that purpose by the yang gweizi . The village was told to gather by the gate in front of the sheng-yuan ’s house, gathering obediently to watch Mr. Chan beaten one hundred strokes with the bamboo cane before he was taken away with a yoke around his neck. The sheng-yuan came out to warn all of them to be wary of the foreign devils, who were all spies for the Dwarf Bandits who were making war on the Empire. He offered free baijiu for the men then, and when Baba finally danced home he was with a half-dozen others, all of them ready to go to war. Ma was having her bleeding and he held her down and yanked away the rag and went out to the others saying they were going to Weifang to wipe the dirty blood on the house of the yellow-hair yang gweizi and break their spells.

It took Mei a week to rake the ash in the field till it was even. Then after a little rain Feng came with the seed and watched her plant the first handfuls.

“Not so deep as the millet,” he said. “Put it in rows with space to walk in between. This is gold you are planting.”

Ma’s left foot had begun to smell, and soon she could only walk on one leg using a crutch that Second Brother made for her.

“I was as pretty as you,” she said to Mei one night before either of the men had come. “Would you believe that? And then I was married. Mei, your feet have saved you again.”

“If I don’t marry,” Mei asked, “what will I be?”

Ma thought a long time about it. She was in less pain than usual but weaker, her eyes growing cloudy, and she smelled too sweet, like fruit fallen to rot.

“When this kalpa ends,” she said finally, “and it will be very soon, there will be a way for you. It will be a difficult way, terrifying, but you must stay on the path and never despair.”

“Like when I ran from the wolf.”

Ma squeezed Mei’s arm then. As Mei’s arms had grown stronger Ma’s had turned to sticks.

“Running may not be possible.”

Baba was very worried about the new crop, never having grown flowers before. Every day he scolded Mei, telling her not to crush the new plants under her big feet as she searched for weeds to pull. In only two weeks the sprouts came out, and after a month and a half it looked like they were growing tiny cabbages. And then the plants began to rise. Baba would brag to Second Brother, who had been taken on again in the sheng-yuan ’s fields as an act of charity, that he was going to have the finest poppy-flower crop in the village, and Ma would cover her ears so she wouldn’t hear. Most years she put a smear of honey on the lips of their kitchen-god statue so in the New Year it would say sweet things about them when it flew to report to the Jade Emperor. Now she covered his whole head with clay so he could not see or hear what had become of her family.

“The four walls that we must escape in this life,” said Ma, who was more of a White Lotus than ever now that she could barely walk, “are liquor, lust, anger, and wealth.”

Baba and Second Brother laughed.

“We have escaped from wealth thus far,” said Baba. “Maybe this year we will let it catch us.”

Three months after the sowing, Mei’s plants began to blossom. The petals were crimson red, the color of happiness, and more beautiful than anything she had ever seen. But in only a few days they began to fall off the plants, carpeting the ground in red and leaving a little green ball on top of the stem.

The balls were growing fatter each day by the time Eldest Brother returned from fighting the Japanese. Everybody in the village knew that the Imperial Army had failed, had somehow been defeated by the Dwarf Bandits and their yang gweizi weapons, and so the family could not have a public celebration. Baba and Ma were excited though, even if Eldest Brother looked like a different person and was not at home in his body anymore, as if the Imperial officers or the Dwarf Bandits had stolen his spirit. He was going to be an escort, he said, a guard for the caravans passing from the mountains to the sea, but most days he only sat around drinking and gambling with the pu hao at Yip’s and people in the market said he was a salt smuggler. Then he joined a group called the Obedient Swords and on market days would appear with them to demonstrate how they could whip their swords at each other but always duck or leap over the blade and never be cut. Eldest Brother was the one who had to pass through the crowd with a rice bowl, asking for the audience to contribute money for their further training. He never came home to visit.