Hao, p.5
Hao, page 5
“Listen, I’m sorry I said those things to you. I want to help. Please trust me. I want to help you.”
•
The pain is all there is. The rest ceases to matter. She is squatting on the floor now, which is wet, sleek with the same pinkish water that was inside her. The child is in there, with her big dreamy head: cry if she can, cry with her. She is moaning so loud she’s deaf to it. She is unreachable. She is locked in her pain. No one can hurt her. She is protected by her pain. Her body feels nothing but the pain. That’s all she is, the pain. She, the pain, and the baby who knocks her head on her life’s edge, this thin edge.
•
What’s he going to do? Leaning against the door that’s locked from the inside, listening to a woman’s horrible sound of giving birth, the sound you choose to forget the moment you come into the world. A mother’s sound. His mother, dead for thirty years. You had a big head, your big head wouldn’t come out, too big for me, they had to cut me open. I thought I was going to die. His mother who would say anything out loud, who pinned her suffering like a gold brooch on her chest, who talked and talked until he was gone, shipped to the war, no more on the receiving end of those verbal spits. You must not die. You must learn to stay alive. You can’t be so selfish as to die on me. I’ve got no one else. Did she really say that? A mother to her only child whom she claimed to love so much she had to hurt. She just couldn’t help it. It was not personal. It’s not that I’m angry at you. It’s only that I love you too much. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have said all those things. It’s your life, you know, no one else’s. If you lose a limb, it’s you who will live without a limb for the rest of your life. That’s why I’m mad. I’m not going to be there to live with your lost limb for you. She is dead. He is here, with no lost limbs, but with something else missing, something harder to see. His mother knew but she pretended not to know. She would only see her own suffering reflected back to her, which made her angrier, at herself, at him, the extension of her suffering life. Let’s die together. Let’s drink this trembling glass of pain till it’s over. Cheers.
Another birth. Another woman who has no idea what she is doing. Another child coming into the world pre-burdened with pain.
•
She must stay awake to this pain, not overcome by it, not slipping under. She must trust that her body knows what it is doing. Her body has outsmarted her again and again—conceived a child weeks before she even knew, made her throw up and then eat this and that so that the baby could grow, made her laugh and cry so that the baby could learn to feel, made her reckless and afraid so that the baby could have a will. The baby must be pushing too, with her little arms and legs and blind fists, beating, flailing, reaching for the light. She must follow her body, which is breaking itself.
•
Is the weeping from inside him? His mother had kept her last breath until she saw him. She had waited, with such a will, holding that tenuous, tenacious breath, to touch his hand, to tell him that she had loved him more than anything else in this world, despite everything, and he said, I know. He forgave her. Or maybe she didn’t say anything, just looked at him, with those embittered eyes, so accustomed to bitterness that bitterness was in everything they saw. Eyes that looked at him, and then suddenly were looking at nothing. I’ve done my best, he read in her eyes. I wish I could have done better, but I’ve tried.
He slips to the floor against the door. His mother had pushed and pushed, and his head was caught in the narrow canal. He could have died, but was kept alive, brought to this moment to be a door apart from a birth taking place.
“You can do it,” he says to the door. “Breathe, breathe.”
He feels as if he is once again crawling in the birth canal, the strangling tunnel toward life, his mother’s heart pumping blood, her moans drowning his own. He will make it out somehow, as there is no turning back.
•
She sees the crown, the creamy black moss. She takes loud, shuddering breaths as her body continues to push and break. She sees the earthy head, the close-eyed face, blood-streaked, stunned, wrinkly. The baby is skidding out, mouth agape, gasping for air.
From beneath her body, she takes hold of this red child, who tenses, gathering her might into a howl. An announcement or protest? For hunger or fear? She palms her lopsided head and puts her to her breast. The baby smells her, groping for her nipple, and latches on. She holds her there, rocking lightly. Their voyage has just begun.
MILK
The boy follows the man, eyes on his pants, and mumbles, “Sir, please buy a rose, buy a rose for your girlfriend.” The man’s legs move faster; the boy grabs one of them, wraps his skinny arms and legs around it and presses his small buttocks on the man’s leather shoe and says the words again to the leg.
The spring afternoon has gone sultry, the air recalling the texture of rotten fruit. The man is on his way to a sales meeting. He did not meet his sales quota, and, before the child approached him, had been rehearsing his explanations in his head. He tries to shake his leg free, but the child tightens his grip. People circle past them: a few giggle; a few gape to see how he reacts. His face flushes. He bends down and snatches the child’s wrists and tosses him away from his leg. The child looks up at his face for the first time, shocked, as though he has just realized that he was not merely dealing with a leg, but an unpredictable man several times his size. He must also have sensed what’s coming: the man kicks him, the shoe landing on his small rib cage. The child flips over on the pavement, groans, curls into a ball, and cries, “Mama, Mama—”
A woman runs toward them on the pavement, yelling in some rural dialect the man can’t quite understand. But judging by her tone, he is sure she’s calling him names or cursing him in the worst possible way. She kneels down by the child, picks him up, and clasps him to her chest. The child’s cry turns into wail; he looks as heartbroken as any other wailing child, though the pathetic rose is still clutched in his hand. The woman strokes his ribs. Sallow-faced, ill-dressed, she must have been lurking somewhere by the roadside, blending right in with other urban poor the man has stopped paying attention to.
People gather around them, gawking like their eyes have finally found a free feast. The man’s head buzzes, his face grows hot. “Are you his mother?” he shouts down at the woman. “What kind of mother lets her child pester people on the street?”
Then he turns, quickly, not wanting to hear one single word from the woman. He walks away as fast and steady as his body can manage, controlling the impulse to run, and slows down only after he is sure the woman’s gaze no longer reaches him. Then he breathes and it feels like the first real breath he has taken since he bent down to grab the child—his wrist thin like a chicken’s neck. The man has never felt comfortable watching vendors wring chicken necks in the market. He will grimace and avert his eyes. I’m not a bad person, he imagines saying to the woman whose face still seems to hover right in front of him, its misery and rage so sharp that it reduces the dusty street, dusty plastic-looking palm trees, dusty pedestrians with their idiotic stares to nothing but a stage setting. I’m not a bad person. He imagines the woman’s face softening and him taking a ten-yuan bill from his wallet and stuffing it in the child’s grimy hand. Then, like an uncle, he will hold the child up and make faces at him till he laughs.
But he knows that’s not what he will do. He will keep walking and rehearse his explanations for the failure to meet the sales quota and pray he keeps his job. That is all he can do and will do. He takes another breath. As the air infused with humidity, dust, and exhaust fills his lungs, the city distorts—its skyscrapers, shops, multi-lane streets, vehicles losing their edges and density, fattening with the incessant despairs and high hopes steaming out of people’s heads. All around him the city is swelling, and his feet are hardly touching the ground. He has become a splinter the city is about to push out of its inflated flesh.
•
The woman carries the crying child to the side of the pavement, under a palm tree. The child murmurs, “Mimi, mimi.” The woman sighs, lifting her blouse, and the child presses his mouth to her breast. People gawk and shake their heads. She lowers her eyes and sees their shoes—tennis shoes, leather shoes, canvas shoes, high-heels, sandals, flats—nice shoes that know where their feet are taking them. She shields the child’s face with a hand: it’s better he doesn’t see any of these shoes, better still he forgets where they are. The blind fortune-teller told her that this was a hard time for them, but things would get better in three years. “Luck star will then shine above your son’s head.” The man raised his opaque eyes. She paid him five yuan and that was all she got—a promise of a turn of fortune in three years. Can she keep her milk flow that long? She felt foolish. She needed the five yuan for food, not a fortune that would not turn until three years from now. But still, three years is better than five or ten, or no luck at all.
She came to the city to look for her husband, whom she has not heard a word from since he left after the Spring Festival. She called the construction company he worked for; they said they hadn’t seen him since he’d left for home before the festival. She went to the village fortune-teller, giving him her husband’s year, month, date, and hour of birth and, as payment, a bucket of frogs her son had helped her catch. The old man flipped the brittle pages of his yellow book, wrote down four columns of words with ink and brush, squinted his eyes at a brittle page again, and shook his head: “His longevity star is clouded this year. I see possible falling, a tall building, and serious or fatal injury.” She held her breath. “A building in the south,” he added, “in the city where he builds those tall buildings.”
The woman took her son to the city. She found the construction company. They told her the same thing they had said on the phone. She told them what the fortune-teller had told her. They asked her to go talk to other construction companies. There are tons of them in the city, they told her, and her husband could be working for any of them now. She and her son wandered around the city, looking up at scaffoldings to see whether he was there. It was hard to tell. They all looked alike from down here—a helmet, a little torso, a pair of doll arms and legs. She waited with her son on the roadside for them to come down. She asked them about her husband. They shook their heads or mentioned another company or building under construction for her to check. At night, she and her son slept behind park bushes or under viaducts. She didn’t want to go back to her village until she found her husband and warned him of his ill fortune ahead. She would make sure he went home with them, where there are no tall buildings and the inevitability of falling.
She had no money left so she begged. She tried to tell people her story, but they walked away. “They think we’re fake,” an old beggar woman from the same province told her. “They don’t care about us, but some still pity children. Have your son sell flowers. That may still work.” So she picked a less-bruised rose from a flower shop’s trashcan and had her son sell it like other children on the street—except that people don’t pity children either.
She has kept her milk flow for a time like this, a time that she always knew would come. The child’s shoulders stop shuddering. His fingers loosen around the rose that lies by his feet like congealed blood. She looks up at the scaffolding across the street and the small figures of construction workers printed on the sky. Any of them can be her husband or could have been her husband. One dizzying misstep up there will be a step into the nothing down below, and if that happens, you won’t even see his body.
She wishes she had a place to go, a private place where she could lie down with her son, close her eyes, enjoy this little pleasure of giving and taking, this little numbing sensation that is slowly spreading over her body. Any time now she’s going to close her eyes. The shoes, legs, and wheels around them will disappear. She and her son will turn into some gossamer matter, hide somewhere in the air, until things get better for them.
•
A man is walking in this direction. He sees the mother and son on the side of the pavement under a palm tree. He takes out his smartphone from his messenger bag, pauses in front of them for a second, and snaps a shot. The woman doesn’t even notice, her eyes drooped, her half-exposed breast coarse-skinned and sallow-colored like her complexion. The boy is obviously too big for this: he looks like he has tried his best to curl himself in her arms, but most of his legs still spill onto the pavement. Only the utter unselfconsciousness of his closed-eye suckling resembles that of a baby.
The man goes back to his apartment and makes instant noodles and sits down in front of his computer. He has recently started a blog called Critical Eye, a title he’s having second thoughts about and considering changing into something less literal. He posts social commentaries, often in the form of snapshots he takes with his smartphone on the street. Though his blog has not gotten much traffic, he has noticed a quickening of his senses as he goes about his daily life. He is no longer a passive passerby, his life no longer a fuzzy parade of routines and a job that organizes his hours into rest, work, wants, and small gratifications.
Now he freezes moments he finds provocative, forms opinions, and makes them visible to anyone surfing his way. Sometimes, sitting in his cubicle or walking home from work, he feels he is simultaneously inhabiting the city and roaming a space ungoverned by gravity, where he’s just about as free as one can be. But when he posts his blog entries, his photos and words gone public, he cannot help but feel an unease, a weak-hearted uncertainty that his posts will be scrutinized and attacked.
After he uploads the photo, he comments: “We are a decade into the 21st century and our country is becoming one of the strongest economic powers in the world, yet, here in our city that we claim to be a world-class metropolis, a woman is nursing a five- or six-year-old on the street as though they were in a remote 19th-century village. Why is this happening?”
He clicks Post and slurps his noodles. He was going to simply write, “This doesn’t look good—nursing such a big child in public,” but thought it would be too simplistic. He checks some of the blogs and websites he frequents and then checks back to see whether he has gotten any comments. There are none. He surfs more and checks back again. Still none. No response is almost worse than a negative response. He thought this post would provoke: the photo alone should catch attention and his commentary should generate a public debate.
He puts his computer into sleep mode and goes to bed. He dreams of a woman lying so close to him he can feel the buzzing heat and electricity radiating from her body. It’s his ex-girlfriend, who by now must have become someone else’s wife and maybe even a mother. But somehow, she has come back to him. Has she kept a key to his apartment? Did she sneak in, tiptoe to his bed, and lie down by him? Gently, she palms his head with one hand and with the other cups her breast to his mouth. His penis swells up, and as her hand slides down him, he sucks on her nipple and milk flows out. The liquid only surprises his tongue for a second before it calls back an ancient euphoria—he feels as if he were soaring into a galaxy of burning stars and becoming part of its radiance and order, fervor and harmony. As he comes, he wakes up. His ex-girlfriend is not with him. He is alone in his small, stuffy room. His computer sits on the desk like a large toad. His dirty clothes litter the floor. The air smells of semen, sweat, and greasy hair. In his mouth he tastes nothing but fetid breath.
But still he remembers the smooth, luscious milk on his tongue and the wondrous feeling of soaring and peace. He closes his eyes and tries to will the true-to-life sensation back into being—his ex-girlfriend’s flesh blended with his, her breast throbbing in front of his face. He opens his mouth, closes his lips around the nipple where the elixir will flow onto his parched tongue.
•
A woman surfing the internet stumbles upon the photo on the man’s blog. She once lived in that city; now she is living abroad. Since she became a mother, she has wished she were there instead of here—if nothing else, she would at least have someone to talk to in her native tongue, another mother raising a child. The boy being nursed in the photo is much bigger than her son, who has finally fallen asleep on her lap. She is weaning him. She has nursed him for eighteen months, has suffered cracked nipples, plugged ducts, and bouts of mastitis. But her son’s demand for her breasts has not dwindled. He wants to nurse before sleep, before nap, after sleep, after nap, during the middle of sleep and nap and during other activities. He grabs her breasts as if they were his. She wants her body back. She craves spicy food and caffeinated tea, wants to wear dresses, not nursing bras and breast pads. She wants her body to be touched by her husband, and when that happens, she doesn’t want her breasts to leak milk.
Her husband is not at home again. Got some work to finish, he said on the phone. When he does come home, he sleeps on the couch in the living room, says he needs his sleep so he can get up and work and support the family. It suited her at the beginning, when she loved to snuggle with her son alone on the big bed, her body willingly letting its white ribbon of milk flow into his mouth, as though his intake was also her intake, her giving so complete it merged into taking. They were locked in the cycle of give and take, forming a circle with no beginning or end to allow another’s entrance. When her husband touched her, she recoiled from the intrusion. When he held the baby, the baby screamed for her. He spends less and less time with them.
When she asks him to change the baby’s diaper, or give him a bath, or take him out for a walk, “because he’s your son too,” he looks vexed. He fumbles the diaper on the baby loosely and poop leaks out and she has to wash him again. The walks he takes with the baby tend to be short, “because he was screaming the entire time and people thought I kidnapped him.” Once she caught him holding the baby upside down, dangling in front of his legs, big-headed like a frog, with blood pooling in his puffy face, too startled or strained to make a sound. She had just finished her weekly shower and instinctively knew she needed to be gentle. She crouched down to take hold of the baby’s head and eased him into her arms, putting his wronged face to her wet breast. “That’s enough,” she then said to her husband, still suppressing a scream in her throat. “Just leave!”
