Where Waters Meet

by Zhang Ling

Things have a strange way of working themselves out, he concluded. Force and reaction, pressure and endurance. In the sphere of marital science, one needs chemistry to kick open the door, but after that, it’s physics that governs the running of it.

Grief was messy, with its many folds, layers, and loose ends that were vaguely familiar to him from the days when he had lost Jane, his first wife. A void filled with amorphous grayness, as he came to remember it, a numbness to the evanescence of all things.

“She was in a fetal position when she died,” muttered Phoenix dryly. “She was tired of being a ma, she just wanted to be a child.”

It was that little glow in her eyes, the shimmer of childlike longing for good food, for a chance to know the world, for a moment to be kind, that had fended off the erosion of time.

She can look after your mother in the future.” “Why?” She was a little surprised. “Because”—he paused for a moment—“I’d like to ask you out. Can’t see your mother anymore, not as a patient. Conflict of interest.” He walked away without waiting for her reply, smiling to himself while imagining her eyes wide open, lips parted, and her entire face a contorted exclamation mark.

“We always remember what we want to forget, and forget what we want to remember,”

She was called Ah Feng, meaning little phoenix, when she was born, because Mother Chunyu (called Rain later) had dreamed,

“They all have to bow to that one bird. And you are going to be that bird, someday.”

When she started school in 1960 at age seven (the age that marks the evolution from wild monkeys to remotely civilized little humans), she was then called by her full name, a school rule that everybody simply had to abide by. She became Yuan Feng, Yuan being her mother’s family name. It was a deal, she was told, that her parents had struck before she was born, a prehistorical arrangement that the firstborn would assume Mother’s family name, and the rest, Father’s. But Father’s family name, Wang, never saw the light of day, as they didn’t have any other children. The end of the story.

for everything she wanted, there would be something else she had to give up, as the price.

“Ma, please, sing ‘A Bright Sunny Day.’” It was a song from the wildly popular movie The Story of Liubao, Yuan Feng’s favorite, about an early spring day filled with sunshine breaking through the end of winter’s gray. The lyrics and the tune were quite jolly, even leaning a bit towards flippancy, but there was something in Mother’s voice that weighed her down. Yuan Feng didn’t know then that it was Mother’s apology to the world for the sibling she couldn’t give her daughter, for the chipper home she couldn’t build, and for a dreary course of life she didn’t quite know how to avert.

Father’s world had a door but it did not connect to Mother’s; they moved in different orbits.

Father’s full name was Wang Erwa, meaning the second boy of the Wang family, but it was seldom used, except on important documents such as the household registration, his work ID card, his honorable discharge papers, and the marriage certificate. At the pinnacle of his glory, when he’d just returned from Korea with a near-fatal injury to speak for his undisputed bravery, he was addressed by the adoring crowds as Our Great Hero or the Most Respected.

“There’s this young man, twenty-four years old, among the first to be sent to Korea, fighting the American devils.” Mother’s voice grew steady and clear. “He was assigned to work with a group of construction engineers, that’s a big word, he was just a laborer, pure and simple, to fix the bridges blown up by the American bombs, to make sure things could move over the bridges smooth and fast, people and goods, you know. “It’s a tug of war, between them and us, blowing up during the day, fixing up overnight, round and round. Then one day, the planes came early, a surprise attack, the Chinese men were not prepared. This young fellow got hit by shrapnel in the head. He stood in the middle of a river, in water deep to his waist, with three other guys, holding a rock that’s used as a bridge pile, for over an hour. “Two degrees, freezing cold. It was his muscles that did the trick, not his mind, because the shrapnel had taken his mind. When rescue finally got there, they saw a half-dead man lifting a bridge, so to speak. They couldn’t move him, he was hard as a rock, all frozen up. That’s how he got this medal.” The class was so quiet, you could hear a needle drop. “Now you call him Dumb Head to his daughter’s face, you rotten, stinky, cruel bastards. Without him you’d all be minced meat in the hands of the Americans, understand?”

Father was conscripted, by force, from his home village in late 1943, when he was barely seventeen. The Japanese were bleeding the Chinese army at a rate even the harshest conscription law couldn’t keep up with. As soon as he had finished buttoning up his uniform, he was put on the front line. It was nothing short of a miracle that he, a completely green soldier, survived the first few clashes unscathed. The bullets finally caught up with him, riddling his right leg in the fall of 1944. He had a nasty wrestle with death, drawing on his raw will to live and the full reserve of his youth, finally surviving a series of severe infections and narrowly escaping amputation. The war against the Japanese, which dragged on for eight years, finally ended in the summer of 1945. He took a furlough back home, only to find his village in ruins and his family vanished. A fatal air raid, a deadly attack of cholera, a ruthless famine, siblings sold to different provinces . . . Over the years, he had heard quite a few versions of how his family ended up. Truth or fiction, he could never be sure. The only rock-bottom fact was he never saw any of his family again. Upon returning to his army unit, he was almost immediately dragged into the civil war against the Communists. Another injury, this time a mere scrape on the left arm by a stray bullet, too trivial to be worthy of note. His battalion, led by an undercover Communist operative, soon fell apart, like snow melted by the sun, surrendering ...

the fall of 1953, after two miscarriages and a very difficult labor, Chunyu gave birth to a baby girl whom she named Ah Feng, little phoenix.

She had thought, when Father was around, that their days were hell. What an ungrateful brat she had been, now that she knew real hell.

It would take twenty more years for her to wise up and accept the plain truth that every daughter in the world loathes but nevertheless ends up living: the life of her mother.

Nurse Yang told me she kept crying, “Little Tiger go away.” I remember in the section about the famine, you mentioned a guy called Little Tiger coming to your house asking your ma for money. Do you know who he was?