Yiyun Li - A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

The scene will come back to me sixteen years later, but at the moment I just laugh when the roosters finally escape his grip, fluttering their wings around in our apartment. In a few minutes my father will catch them again, and in a few hours they will fill our stomachs and then be forgotten. Life goes at small baby steps when one is young, but then it picks up speed and flies. In four years, my favorite actress, Chen Chong, will finish her table-waiting career and start as Joan Chen in Hollywood, an actress and a director, her smile still pretty as I remember, though she will never again be the sixteen-year-old girl on our wall. In another seven years, Mrs. Pang will be leaving me forever. She will have been blind for a year before her death. The last time I visit her, she will be touching my face and feeling my tears beneath her fingertips, and both of us will be pretending that the tears are not there and we are enjoying the chicken stew I cook for her the way she has taught me. In five more years, I will be in America, sitting in my small and humid apartment in a Midwest town, reading my father’s letter about Mr. Pang’s death, knowing that for the last sixteen years of his life, he has never missed one day of work, sealing envelopes with patience.

As if the death of Mr. Pang is a story that would not hurt if only told by the Song boys, I imagine the four brothers talking about his death, out of boredom, out of the need to tell a joke. I have not seen the boys since the alley was torn down and the residents were moved out of the city to the suburban apartment complexes. I cannot imagine the lives of the boys and their families, the apartments gray and small as pigeon cages. What I see is the clean-shaven heads of the four boys, still in their twenties, talking and laughing and spitting and picking unripe grapes to shoot at one another.

“Wasn’t Mr. Pang an old fool?” one brother would say. “Thirty-three yuan, just enough for a pack of beers? And to a teenager robber who used a fruit knife? The boy would not have one day of a better life with the money.”

“The old man probably thought he earned the money himself,” another brother would say. “He forgot that the robber had to work to earn the money, too. I bet the boy would have been pissed off with only thirty-three yuan in the wallet. Why not just let him have the money and be pissed off?”

“Like Mrs. Pang always said: A bird is willing to die for a morsel of food; a man is willing to die for a penny of wealth,” a brother would say. “When Mr. Pang’s soul goes to the graveyard court to report his arrival, the judge would say: What? For thirty-three yuan you let yourself be stabbed? You were even stupider than me in my last life.”

“What does that mean?”

“The judge would then say: You don’t remember me? In my last life, I was that old man in East Fourteen Alley. Remember? I was stabbed by the robber of my Gentleman’s Orchids!”

I imagine the Song boys laugh together, the way they used to laugh at all the people in the world. Death is not a bad joke if told the right way, yet I do not see a right way. I start to understand what Mrs. Pang said about death long ago, that one would rather see beloved ones die instead of suffering. It comforts me that she would not have to see Mr. Pang’s death, and have to listen to the jokes told by the Song boys. It comforts me that not one more scratch would have to be left on her life, and I am the only one to live with the awkward joke that Mr. Pang’s death makes.

But on second thought, I wish that Mrs. Pang had lived long enough. I wish we would sit together and fold his clothes for the last time. I wish Mrs. Pang would smile at me when she puts away Mr. Pang’s clothes, and I would know that she is proud of him, earning his life between hills of envelopes at seventy-nine, being a useful man, defending himself, dying with dignity.

APRIL COMES AND APRIL GOES, AND MAY, AND June, all passing by without shedding a drop of rain. The sky has been a blue desert since spring. The sun rises every morning, a bright white disc growing larger and hotter each day. Cicadas drawl halfheartedly in the trees. The reservoir outside the village has shrunken into a bathtub for the boys, peeing at one another in the waist-deep water. Two girls, four or five, stand by the main road, their bare arms waving like desperate wings of baby birds as they chant to the motionless air, “Come the east wind. Come the west wind. Come the east-west-north-south wind and cool my armpits.”

Now that July has only to move its hind foot out the door in a matter of days, we have started to wish, instead of rain, that no rain will fall and the drought will last till the end of the harvest season. Peasants as we are, and worrying about the grainless autumn as we are, the drought has, to our surprise, brought a languid satisfaction to our lives. Every day, from morning till evening, we sit under the old pagoda tree, smoking our pipes and moving our bodies only when the tree’s shade threatens to leave us to the full spotlight of the sunshine. Our women are scratching their heads to come up with decent meals for us at home. The rice from last year will be running out soon, and before that, our women’s hair will be thinning from too much scratching until they will all go bald, but this, like all the minor tragedies in the world, has stopped bothering us. We sit and smoke until our daily bags of tobacco leaves run out. We stuff grass roots and half-dead leaves into the bags, and when they run out, we smoke dust.

“Heaven’s punishment, this drought.” Someone, one of us, finally speaks after a long period of silent smoking.

“Yes, too many deaths.”

“In that case, Heaven will never be happy again. People always die.”

“And we’ll never get a drop of rain.”

“Suits me well. I’m tired of farming anyway.”

“Yeah, right. Heaven comes to spank you, and you hurry up to bare your butts and say, Come and scratch me, I’ve got an itch here.”

“It’s called optimism, better than crying and begging for pardon.”

“A soft persimmon is what you are. I would just grab His pants and spank Him back.”

“Whoa, a hero we’ve got here.”

“Why not?”

“Because we were born soft persimmons. See any hero coming out of a persimmon?”

“Lao Da.”

“Lao Da? They popped his brain like a watermelon.” Lao Da was one of us. He should have been sitting here with us, smoking and waiting for his turn to speak out a line or two, to agree, or to contradict. When night falls, he would, like all of us, walk home and dote on his son, dripping drops of rice wine from his chopsticks to the boy’s mouth. Lao Da would have never bragged about being a hero, a man like him, who knew his place between the sky and the earth. But the thing is, Lao Da was executed before this drought began. On New Year’s Eve, he went into the county seat and shot seventeen people, fourteen men and three women, in seventeen different houses, sixteen of them dead on the spot, and the seventeenth lived only to see half a day of the new year.

“If you were born a soft persimmon, you’d better stay one”—someone says the comforting old wisdom.

“Persimmons are not born soft.”

“But they are valued for their softness.”

“Their ripeness.”

“What then if we stay soft and ripened?”

“Heaven will squeeze us until He gets tired of squeezing.”

“He may even start to like us because we are so much fun for Him.”

“We’ll just have our skins left by then.”

“Better than having no skins.”

“Better than having a bullet pop your brain.”

“Better than having no son to inherit your name.” Silent for a moment, we all relish the fact that we are alive, with boys to carry on our family names. Last year at this time, Lao Da’s son was one of the boys, five years old, running behind older boys like all small kids do, picking up the cicadas that the older boys shot down with their sling guns, adding dry twigs and dead leaves to the fire that was lit up to roast the bodies, waiting for his share of a burned cicada or two.