kelvin’s Reviews > Hao: Stories > Status Update

“What words were turning inside her, as she cooked, waited for us to come home from work, from school, as she ate, slept? Words that surged forth, subsided, surged forth again. They birthed, they died, consumed, and renewed each other, bred and multiplied. They made her head heavy. She bent her head, like the lean locust tree in front of our window, its leaves rustling until they were gone…”

I held my daughter… her cry sounded ancient, like a river that flowed from a far-off place. I remembered the gray crane standing on one leg looking into the river of my hometown, and the next time I saw it, it lay sideways, half buried in sand…

She wanted to say something to him, on behalf of her mother, who she knew would want to say something, but couldn’t, and instead grew more and more silent. The words remained tangled and sunken inside her mother and she wanted to salvage them, to bring them to light, and let them hang crystal clear in the space between her and her father…

“At the beginning of human life, its nature is kind,” she listens to her daughter recite the classic. Eventually, we shall all go back to that beginning state of kindness, she thinks.

“He is her father’s age but gentler… She plays and hears wind rushing through bamboos, their hollow stems knocking and echoing, their lance-shaped leaves flipping and cutting the air…. “Keep playing,” he whispers… She picks, plucks, pushes, and pulls the strings until with her half-closed eyes she sees silver dots like those cast by the sun on the deep grove…”

“Luyao wants to ask her daughter to repeat what she has just said… so that she won’t forget them. If only she could stay inside her daughter’s words and never come out…”