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He would have assumed that Yitian was a son, part of a family back in that place, home, with a set of duties toward his parents. This understanding of obligation as the core of one’s being was their shared culture. How could Yitian explain that he’d failed in his fundamental duties to his father for fifteen years, and hadn’t even spoken to him in all that time? Steven wouldn’t understand.
But his father hadn’t left the village in years, never breaking the outline of that circumscribed space where things were familiar to him, which protected him from the dangers he’d seen of the world outside.
He wouldn’t have had that word then, love; that came later, when he’d come to America and picked up the language that insisted on putting names to every feeling.
A shudder would run through Yitian’s body. An accidental gesture enough to return him to an earlier time completely.
“One task at a time,” she said, if he was distracted while feeding the stove’s flame. “How will you get bigger things right if you can’t do one small task correctly?”
As with so many other things, he’d been in college when he’d first heard it named formally, and then in America he learned the English name for the disease. Alzheimer’s. In those years, many of the illnesses they’d once found mystical turned out to be curable once they were
She could see more clearly now that some things were not about want, but rather about the sacrifices one had to make to survive in this place, in this time. What her mother had been trying to tell her was that her dreams could no longer hold.
原谅我,
Tilgi meg
Where is forgiveness? How far is it, and how long must I walk until I reach there?
