Yiyun Li - A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

“My head is an iron head,” the boy says. He is sitting under the grape trellis and spitting bloody phlegm into the jasmine bush. “Believe me — the brick, this thick,” he gestures with two fingers, “was broken in half by my head.”

Mr. Du nods with his sad smile. He is the only one responding to the boy. The three brothers are occupied: the oldest boy is grinding a long knife on a grindstone, the screeching noise making my skin tight with goose bumps; the second boy is waving a long metal chain in the air. “I see you sons of a bitch are tired of living,” he shouts to the imaginary enemies outside the wall. “Be patient. We are coming for your heads.”

“Cut it out!” Mrs. Song comes out of the room and slaps a wet towel onto the swollen eye of her youngest son. “Nobody is going out tonight, you hear me?”

“Ma, what are you talking about?” the third son comes out of the kitchen with two choppers in his hands and says. “Boys of the Song family are not soft persimmons for others to squeeze.”

“You’re asking for death,” Mrs. Song yells, banging the gate of the quadrangle closed and sitting in front of the gate. “Nobody is going out of this gate tonight!”

“What are you afraid of, Ma?” the oldest son says. “A tree cannot live without the bark. A man cannot live without a face. They have spat in our faces. What would we be if we let this pass? Ma, let me tell you, everyone dies. Death? Death is not a bad joke if told the right way.”

The four boys stomp their feet on the ground and roar. Mrs. Song curses, shouting at her husband, asking for help. Mr. Song stands on the doorsill of their room and looks at his boys without speaking. The light switch is not functioning this time — Mr. Song is refusing to be turned on like an obeying bulb.

“Are you dead? Stop your sons.”

“Let them go. They do what they have to,” Mr. Song says, strolling across the yard. “How are the orchids?” he asks Mr. Du.

“Not bad. Not bad,” Mr. Du mumbles, pruning the orchids with a pair of tiny scissors and smiling back.

Mrs. Pang comes out of the room and pulls me back. “Don’t mind other people’s business,” she says, knocking on Mr. Pang’s door. “Time for the rooster.”

A pot of water is kept boiling on the stove for a long time before Mr. Pang comes out of his room with the rooster, both wings held tight in his big hand. He walks without looking at the boisterous sons of the Song family. The rooster itself is cooing and looking around with curiosity.

Mrs. Pang points to the chopper on the counter without speaking. She tries to drag me out of the kitchen but I keep holding on to the doorknob, looking up at Mr. Pang. He glances at the chopper and pulls a chair to sit down, holding the rooster between his arms.

“If nobody buys, nobody will sell you. If nobody eats, nobody will kill you. Rooster, it is not that I want to kill you, but you were born to fill people’s stomachs,” Mr. Pang mumbles and strokes the dark green feathers on the rooster’s head. Then he turns to Mrs. Pang. “Don’t scare the kid,” he says in a gentle voice.

Mrs. Pang drags me away and closes the kitchen door behind me. The rooster squeals for a moment and stops. For some time we wait outside the door, until Mr. Pang comes out with a bag of bloodstained feathers, green and brown, wrapped up in a plastic sack. “It’s ready,” he says in a low voice, nodding at Mrs. Pang without looking up at her. Sweat smears his face.

“Where are you going with that?” Mrs. Pang points to the bag in Mr. Pang’s hand.

“They are not going to the trash can,” Mr. Pang mumbles, walking toward the jasmine bush.

The chicken stew is for the last dinner of my visit that summer. Coming to pick me up, my mother is the only one who touches it during the meal. On the bus ride from the Pangs’ house to the Institute, I listen silently to her berating. Her volume becomes higher until all the passengers are staring at me, and in their scolding eyes I see me, an inconsiderate and impolite child who did not even bother to touch the best dish her old nanny cooked for her, especially a chicken stew that her nanny usually could not afford to eat.

I have to admit twice to my mistake, once to my mother and then in a louder voice so that all the passengers can hear me, before my mother drops the topic and the passengers turn their eyes away from my burning face. I watch my sandals and hum my favorite song to myself: “Let me sing a song to the Communist Party. The Party is dearer than my own mother. My mother only gives me a body. It is the Party who gives me a soul.”

A LOT OF things have changed by the next year I go to the Pangs’ for the summer. My favorite actress, Chen Chong, has disappeared to the other side of the ocean, waiting tables in a California restaurant, bearing the same smile she once did in the calendars on our wall. In the evening newspaper, I read an article deriding her for being a second-class resident and living on tips given by American capitalists, with long emotional paragraphs, as if working for a living was such a shame that the author could not bear the pain even of writing about it. “Sour grapes,” my mother sneers when she reads the article.

Gentleman’s Orchids have gone out of fashion. The price drops so fast that they now are cheaper than weeds, Mrs. Song says. Many growers have lost fortunes. Mr. Du may be the only person welcoming the news. He stops worrying about his orchids when he is working on his shift. The orchids grow better than at any time before, blooming with big golden-colored flowers as if they too have stopped fearing along with Mr. Du.

Mr. and Mrs. Song have both retired early, leaving their positions to the first and second sons. Mr. Pang’s jasmine bushes are cut down by the Song family, making space for a new room built as the wedding room for their first son. In another couple of years a wife and a baby will be added to the quadrangle, both of them sharing the new room with the oldest Song boy. The quadrangle becomes so packed that in the summer evening there is not a trace of breeze across the yard, and the wind from Siberia will never reach the inside of the quadrangle again.

Mr. Pang found a job earlier that summer, introduced by my father to a small scientific-education publishing house as a temporary employee. His duties include putting printed subscription ads into envelopes and sealing the envelopes with paste. My father conceals the parts of Mr. Pang’s history about rooming with a rooster and cheating in college for his diploma, and the publishing house finally agrees to hire him on the condition that he does not get a lunch coupon and overtime compensation. On the first day of his new job, Mr. Pang is said to have colored his white hair to a shining black and to have worn a brand-new woolen Mao jacket, which makes him look younger than his actual age of sixty-three. When he gets his first month’s pay, he takes a two-hour bus ride and arrives at our Institute in the late morning on a Sunday. For thirty minutes he begs the guards to let him in, and tries to convince them that he is a good citizen who works honestly and earns his living, and that he does not have a working ID only because the publishing house does not issue IDs for temporary workers.

For years I will not be able to stop imagining the scene of Mr. Pang bowing to the guards, who threaten to have him arrested if he does not leave, two live roosters in his hands cooing along with him. The sight of Mr. Pang wandering around our high walls for an hour with two roosters seems heartbreakingly comic, although it is not I who find him but my father, on the way back from an extended calculating duty. “Your father saved me again,” is the first sentence Mr. Pang says to me when he enters our apartment, holding the two roosters up like the biggest trophies of his life.