John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

“The foreign devils have put a spell on Ma,” he told Second Brother when he saw him at the market. “They are making her rot while she is still breathing and it is unlucky to look at her.”

The plants were as high as Mei’s breasts and the green balls the size of hens’ eggs when it was time to harvest. Feng came to show them how to do this, bringing Mei a special slicer, a wooden handle with three slivers of glass stuck in it.

“Choose only the pods that are standing at attention, like this one,” he said, demonstrating. “Then make a cut, up and down, on three sides. Wait until the sun is three hands from the ground before you do this, or the nectar will dry too quickly and not flow out. In the morning you take this other blade and scrape off the gum, but be careful not to hurt the pod, because it can be milked many times.”

There was so much work to be done that even Baba had to help every morning, scraping the pods that had been scored and then slicing the newly ripe ones in the late afternoon. Ma refused to help drying the gum they collected, so he had to tend to that as well, even boiling some down to a brown paste in the cooking pot and then drying it more. Ma only watched him with her cloudy eyes, sitting on the k’ang all day, unwilling to help him keep the fire going for his business and unable to cook because he always had opium boiling in the pot. Mei came in late from the field, sticky with poppy gum, and had to help Ma outside to relieve herself on the dungpile. Second Brother came to say he was moving to the barracks the sheng-yuan kept for his workers. At night it was only the three of them, Mei trying to rub the gum off her fingers and Ma sitting on the k’ang looking into the next world and Baba sitting on the floor under the window smoking opium in his pipe, his eyes as cloudy as Ma’s.

The pods were milked out in two weeks and then Mei had to cut them off and leave them in the sun to dry. The day she cut them open to take the seeds out was the day that Ma died.

The hut was ripe with the sweet smell of her. Mei came home just as the sun hid behind the earth and Baba was already on the floor with his cheeks wet with tears, smoking opium, Ma laying flat on the k’ang with a white cloth laid over her face.

Eldest Brother took charge then because Baba could barely breathe without weeping. He came home from the swordsmen and burned spirit money in front of the hut and poured a ring of sorghum wine around it. Feng sent word that the sheng-yuan would offer credit on the opium paste that was still drying, and a coffin was ordered and a new set of white clothing for Baba and Mei and her brothers and even for Ma. Mei was allowed to help prepare the body with Mrs. Hong, taking Ma’s old clothes off to burn and cleaning her and dressing her in the new white clothes and the beautiful beaded slippers from the day she was married. Mei had never seen her mother’s feet naked before, and they were not beautiful. Mrs. Hong held a cloth dipped in jasmine water over her nose because the smell was too powerful, and put the powder on Ma’s face and put her brass earrings on and covered her face with a yellow cloth and her little wasted body with a sky-blue one.

Eldest Brother lifted Ma into the coffin and put up an altar at the foot of it. Because Ma had a bad ending very few people came. Mei remembered only a paid monk chanting prayers and Ma’s older sister crawling into the hut on her knees. Eldest Brother broke Ma’s comb in two pieces, putting one half into the coffin and giving the other to Mei, and then Ma was gone from the earth.

Feng did not wait the forty-nine days of mourning, incense still burning at the altar, before he came to sit with Baba.

“A death in the family is a very hard thing,” he said, sitting cross-legged on the k’ang and drinking the tea Mei had served him. “Very expensive. The coffin, paying the monk, clothing — with all that the sheng-yuan has advanced to you, I can only pay twelve tiao for what you have harvested and what you have cooked.”

Baba only nodded. Twelve tiao was more than he had had in his palm for many years. The foreman sighed.

“But now you have no real woman to tend to this house,” he said, as if Mei was not squatting on the floor only a few feet away from him, “and no son to work in your field. It will be difficult. You will have to hire someone to do these things, and that costs money.”

“I have seed drying,” said Baba, picturing the twelve tiao disappearing into the hands of strangers. “And my Second Son will come back.”

Feng shook his head sadly. “He is contracted to the sheng-yuan , and owes him money for food and shelter. A contract is a sacred obligation. However, I know people in the South,” and here he glanced at Mei, “who are looking for girls to work for them. People willing to pay a good price.”

She wanted Baba to say he would not sell her, that she was too good a worker, wanted at least to hear him say her name out loud, but he only nodded and said, “This flower-growing is not so easy as it looks.”

Later he filled his pipe with opium and sat on the k’ang and smoked, silent as always, staring at Ma’s altar while Mei tended the fire. It was beginning to be winter, wind moaning outside their hut, and Mei thought she heard barking and wondered, as she never had before, if dogs might have spirits and if Ling-Ling might come back to haunt her.

One day all the opium paste was gone and Baba came home drunk like he used to, singing to himself and jingling coins in a sack. Mei did not speak to him, did not even look at him. When he fell asleep he lay on top of the sack and Mei had to stay awake watching him, her breath showing in the cold hut as she waited. It was almost light when he stirred and rolled over and she eased the sack away and emptied it on the floor and counted the coins. She was worth less than thirty tiao .

My feet will save me again, Mei thought as she pulled all her clothes on, layer after layer, and started out into the village. Nobody was on the road. Nobody was awake in Yip’s hut, but the door was unbarred, and she stepped over the bodies of the sleeping pu hao until she found Eldest Brother in the arms of a wicked woman. He was not pleased to see her.

“Why would you want to stay with Baba when he treats you like a dog?” he said without sitting up. The wicked girl lying with him was named Ai and was only a year older than Mei, a third daughter who had been sold to Yip when no husband could be found for her. “Go with Feng — the people in the South aren’t so bad.”

As she left, Yip woke up and cursed her for leaving the door open.

Mei began to run as she passed their hut again, worried that Baba might wake and find his coins melting in the fire. The workers were just coming into Zhou’s fields as she passed, cutting the last of the giaoliang , which was twice as tall as Mei. She asked for Second Brother, who she had not seen since the burial, and when she found him he was on his knees chopping the stalks with his knife. He turned and smiled when she called his name and she saw that his teeth were blackened like the other workers’, blackened from chewing opium paste.

“Is something wrong with Baba?” he asked.

“I have only come to say goodbye.”

She ran down the road then, away from the village, away from the sheng-yuan ’s fields, vowing that she would not stop until she was in a place she had never seen before, running even faster as she passed through the market. It was not market day but there was a caravan, the porters pulling down the tents where they had spent the night. Feng was with them.

“Ah,” he smiled when he saw Mei and caught hold of her arm, squeezing tight. “We were just coming for you.”