‌9

‌Homecomings

Zhou Xunshu was watching television, and he was crying, moved to tears by a show called National Models of Virtue, which, according to an AFP write-up, honored “53 people who were selected by a pool of 21 million voters for their superiority in the five categories of altruism, bravery for a just cause, honesty and confidence, hard work and filial piety.”

The show, Zhou said, made him think about his parents. “I really need to get them out of the village,” he said at the time. “Some day, I am going to move them to Chongqing.”

When that day came, it was the eve of the Beijing Summer Olympics – and his parents did not yet know that they were about to be relocated.

*

Salaxi was the last town before the ascent to Qixin. There, Zhou and Fifth Brother and Fifth Brother’s girlfriend, who also lived in Chongqing, had made plans to meet Third Brother. At an outdoor market, they each bought a pair of canvas “liberation shoes.” Cheap and sturdy, with reinforced rubber toes and cleated soles, they are the footwear of choice – or perhaps lack of choice – for blue-collar workers in China. That they were wearing them could mean only one thing: they were walking up the mountain to Qixin. Recent rains had made the road to the village impassable.

“We need to hurry,” Zhou said. “It’s getting dark, and the route is slippery.”

Zhou did not carry any bags, no change of clothes. As a child he had hiked this route every day, his back either loaded with schoolbooks or a delivery of coal. He thought it would take about two hours.

The mountain had been transformed by the summer. What was once brown and barren now felt like a rainforest, green and overgrown. Lush terraces overflowed with corn stalks that towered over their tenders. Every person along the route was burdened with a heavy load of some kind of crop, be it potatoes, garlic, walnuts or corn.

“There’s going to be a good harvest this year,” Zhou observed. “Good weather, enough rain. The crops are growing so well now.”

A steep incline through a bamboo forest led to an opening in the side of a tall, gray rock face. It was a proper tunnel, albeit slightly small, and with no lighting. The brothers pulled out flashlights and mobile phones to illuminate the path. There was no light at the end of the tunnel – it was more than half a mile long – and the further you walked, the smaller it got. Walls, once smooth and expertly arched, were now irregular and riddled with chisel marks.

“Nothing gets finished around here,” Zhou sighed, as he emerged from the tunnel into a stunning verdant valley. Dark silhouettes of jagged hills loomed like shadow puppets in the distance.

It started to rain. The group walked alongside a stream, and then, as the water flowed higher, in the stream. The liberation shoes were soon soaked and struggling to find traction.

“It’s a tough journey!” Third Brother yelled from the darkness.

And then, a light played like a firefly in the distance; then two, three, four. The faint barking of a dog came next. With each step, the village slowly took shape out of the night.

Zhou’s father was waiting for them in front of the house. “Such a hard and tough journey,” he said of the hike he no doubt had made a thousand times himself. “Come and sit. Drink some tea. Dinner is almost ready.” Everyone gathered around the huolu, and watched the tea kettle boil.

Several minutes later, Zhou’s mother emerged from a back room. She shuffled delicately and awkwardly, leaning heavily on a bamboo walking stick. She was in obvious pain, but smiled at the sight of her family filling the room. Zhou watched his mom struggle to take her seat. He shook his head. He held back tears. This is why we are taking them back to Chongqing, he thought.

Zhou brushed a fly off his shirt, but two more took its place. They were swarming. A couple dozen of them, little winged magnets, clung to the exhaust pipe extending from the huolu, and the insects seemed especially attracted to their guests from Chongqing. It was the shirts – they were the brightest things in all of Qixin. Zhou wore a white Nike quick-dry shirt, and Fifth Brother a white-and-red-striped Nike golf shirt with a red collar to go with his white golf trousers. His girlfriend’s ladies golf top was hot pink with a deep neckline. Aside from a few specks of mud, their shirts looked clean and new – three brilliant lights in the monochrome room. Zhou brushed off fly after fly from the front of his shirt, unaware of the colony that was forming on his back. His parents, by contrast, wore drab suits, the same as they had been wearing back in the winter. They melted into the room’s gray interior. When a fly landed on them, they simply waited for it to fly away.

“Let’s eat!” Zhou said abruptly.

“Let’s drink!” Fifth Brother said with a nervous chuckle. First Brother would have usually been the one to get the drinking started, but he was off building a tunnel.

Zhou, his parents, Third Brother, Fifth Brother, Fifth Brother’s girlfriend and two neighbor boys who helped out the family in the fields walked to the cinderblock structure adjacent to Zhou’s parents’ house and crowded around a rectangular table. First Brother’s wife served the food. The dishes looked familiar: Various combinations of local tofu, potatoes, pickled cabbage and preserved pork. Corn also made its way to the table, in the form of mijiu, a wine that Fifth Brother distributed and consumed liberally.

Zhou had made the decision to return to Qixin only a couple days before. “I always make decisions suddenly. Especially about coming back home,” he explained. “It’s just not something I can plan. But, you see, my mother fell down while working in the fields several days ago and is using a cane now. So I thought I should come back.”

Zhou was smoking a cigarette. He took a long drag and stared at the ceiling.

“You know,” he continued. “All I have wanted was to be able to buy a large apartment so my parents could live with us in the city. Now I have done that. But they don’t want to move.”

The plan had been to wait until after dinner to start persuading the parents to leave the village. But Fifth Brother, perhaps emboldened by the corn wine, couldn’t wait.

“Mom and Dad,” he began, “last night, I taught two students to golf, and I charged them 2,500 yuan. It’s very easy for me to make money. We can hire an ayi to do the household chores for you two. You can just enjoy the city life.”

“I know you love your parents,” Zhou’s father replied softly, “but we are rural people since birth. We have lived in the village for decades. We can’t get used to the city life. And we will cost you a lot of money.”

Zhou groaned. He’d heard all of this a dozen times before. “I don’t want to talk about this right now,” he said.

But Fifth Brother continued, loudly. “How much money could the two of you possibly spend per month?” he asked. “To be honest, if every month I buy one less item of clothing, that’s enough for your monthly expenses.”

Third Brother spoke up, in a more measured tone than his youngest brother. “Dad, you are getting old,” he said. “Who knows how many years you have left? You have five sons, and you and Mom are still working in the fields? Don’t you think the other villagers will think that we don’t support you? Don’t you think that will humiliate us?”

“But what about our corn?” his father replied with concern.

“You calculate how much money the corn is worth and I will give you the money,” Fifth Brother shot back.

“Let’s talk about it after dinner,” Zhou said. “Let’s eat and drink first. After dinner I’ll make the arrangements.”

But the conversation droned on, different versions of the same arguments that had been made hundreds of times before. Sons tell parents they are old and deserve a better life away from the backwards village; they no longer need to work; they raised successful sons who are able to care for them. Parents tell sons they don’t know what they’d do in the city; they don’t want to be a financial burden to their sons; they fear for their farmland and crops in the village. Again and again, often with multiple people speaking at once.

Zhou’s father looked confused at times, shifting the rice in his bowl with a wooden chopstick. At other times he looked pensive, painfully so, as though the calculations taking place inside his head were physically hurting his brain. His wife, on the other hand, seemed amused by the proceedings. She leaned on her cane and smiled, happy that three of her sons were seated around her dinner table – together – for the first time in years. She was willing to put up with a little shouting in exchange for that, and she knew the loudness was born out of love. When he wasn’t shouting, Fifth Brother was feeding her larou with his chopsticks.

Zhou was surprisingly quiet for most of the discussion. But once the dishes were cleared and the neighbors were gone, he began to take a more aggressive approach. This was an intervention. And he wasn’t leaving until he got the result he had come for.

“You two have already had decades of the tough life in this village in the countryside,” he said to his parents. “What if something were to happen to you? You know that saying, ‘A slow remedy cannot meet an emergency’? What if something happened to you and the weather is like it is today? How could we get you to the hospital?

“You know, when I was looking for a wife, I didn’t care whether she was ugly or not. Filial piety is the most important thing. And if I can’t find a woman who will treat my parents well, I would have gone to a temple and become a monk.

“Dad, you started working at the age of twelve, and you have worked hard for almost sixty years. You and Mom had six children, and when Grandpa was still alive, you took care of him, too. The whole family was raised by you two, by your four hands working in the fields.

“Now I am raising my own son, and I understand what you went through to bring us up. You two need to listen to us. The past thirty or forty years we listened to you – from now on, you need to listen to us.

“You must come live with us in Chongqing. We will take you to see the experts in the hospital. You both have leg problems now. You know, for a person without legs, life won’t be interesting at all.”

There was silence. For a moment it seemed that Zhou’s speech had put an end to the back and forth. Then his father responded.

“What about our corn? Our potatoes?”

“We already arranged for the crops!” Fifth Brother said, drunk, tired, exasperated. It was past midnight. He leaned against the huolu and held his head in his hands.

“What’s the arrangement?” Zhou’s mother asked.

“Third brother will come back for the harvest,” Zhou said.

“And what about after the harvest?” she asked.

“We will store it for you,” Zhou said. “And if you come back, you can eat it.”

“If I cannot do it all on my own, I can ask other people for help,” said Third Brother.

“Mom, you need to see where I am living now,” Zhou insisted. “After you live with me for a while you won’t want to come back here. You can eat better in Chongqing, too. You can have more nutritious foods – I can give you fresh fruits and vegetables every day.”

“No, that costs too much money,” Zhou’s mother said.

“We don’t want you to waste your savings on us,” his father added.

Zhou looked like he was going to explode. Third Brother doled out another round of cigarettes. Fifth Brother poured another glass of corn wine.

“Why are you drinking so much tonight?” his mother asked. “Wine is money, too. In Chongqing, you must drink every day.”

“How could I drink every day?” Fifth Brother shouted. “I need to work to make money to support you two and my girlfriend. Tonight, I came back to my hometown, to remove my elderly parents from the poor village. I am very excited, so I drink more than usual.”

“Father, you need to go to Chongqing,” Third Brother said. “Growing potatoes is too tiring, too tough for you two. You work the whole year, from the planting to harvest, but you still don’t make any money.”

“Father, several days ago a friend gave me a bottle of rice wine worth two thousand yuan,” Zhou said. “I was waiting until you got to Chongqing before I opened it. I want to drink it with you.”

“How could you buy rice wine that expensive?” his father asked. “Such a waste of money.”

“My friend gave it to me,” Zhou said. “If you don’t come to Chongqing, I will throw it away.”

“No, no,” his father said. “Don’t do that.”

While the brothers smoked cigarettes, Zhou’s father puffed on a tiny pipe that had an inch of local tobacco stuffed into its bowl. He sat next to a glass of yaojiu, a local medicinal wine, and occasionally dipped his fingers into the liquid and rubbed it onto his aching knees and ankles.

“So, this place – this dirty, poor place – you still like it?” Zhou asked. “You want to stay here for the rest of your life? Don’t you get tired of such a remote life? Mom fell down and hurt her leg. No doctors available. Don’t you know to call me?”

First Brother’s wife joined the conversation. “That’s not the problem,” she said. “This is just the place they are used to. I wanted to call you, but Mother said she is okay. She said, ‘Don’t interrupt their life. Don’t waste their money.’”

“I am okay now,” Zhou’s mother added quickly. “I just don’t want you to worry about me. Going to the hospital costs a lot of money.”

“Health is more important than money!” Fifth Brother shouted.

“You need your money in the city,” she replied. “You need it to start your family and raise your children.”

“Can’t we just stop quarreling?” Zhou pleaded. “Please, let’s just stop. There are important things we need to do. You should be packing.”

“But what about our corn?” his father said again.

“Aren’t you listening to us?” Zhou screamed. “I’ll have people harvest them. I’ll have people put the crops here. If you want them to be sold, they will be sold. If you want to keep them, you can keep them. Okay? I told you I already arranged everything. Do you not trust me?”

Zhou’s father squinted his eyes. He pursed his lips. He massaged his temples. He tapped the stem of his pipe against his forehead. He made a clicking noise with his tongue and teeth. The wheels were spinning.

“Listen to me,” his father finally said. “If you have arranged for everything well, I will listen to you and go to Chongqing. We know you want us to have better life and we are very happy that you think about us. But, you know, the corn in the field, and the potatoes. You know, the corn grows very well this year, and the potatoes can fetch three yuan per kilogram…”

Zhou’s father went on for close to ten minutes about the crops, the harvest. Zhou did not interrupt. Instead, Zhou stared blankly toward the darkness beyond the window and shook off a couple flies. His father still talking, Zhou walked to the door, opened it and spat. He sat back down. His father was still talking. Zhou just stared. He must remain a national model of virtue.

“Living in the city is already difficult enough,” his father finally said. “I don’t want to be a burden. I just want you to save money. If I could harvest enough food, you wouldn’t have to pay a monthly allowance for my expenses.”

It was now past 1 a.m. The three brothers were standing. They had their parents surrounded. They pleaded them to leave the village.

“But what about the corn?” Zhou’s father said, again.

“Second Brother and Third Brother will sell the corn,” Zhou said. “Don’t talk anymore about your reluctance to go to Chongqing. You must go there. Third Brother, Fifth Brother and I have been talking about this for a long time, and it takes us much time and pain to persuade the two of you.

“Think about this,” Zhou continued. “Three generations will be living together. Is that not like paradise? Why don’t you want that? Money is not important – what matters most is that the family is all together. Right? We can pay for your food, your hospital fees. You should see the outside world now. It’s quite different than years ago.”

“Don’t let us go back with a broken heart,” Fifth Brother added. “It’s time for you to enjoy a better life. Hard times are over.”

“But the crops…”

“Father, don’t you want to meet your grandson?” Zhou asked.

It was 2 a.m. The room reeked of tobacco and corn wine. Everybody was exhausted, like prizefighters struggling to stand in the final round of a title bout. Then, suddenly, seemingly prompted by nothing, Zhou’s father threw in the towel.

“Okay,” he said. “We will go.”

Nothing more was said. The lights were turned off. And three grown brothers shared a bed for the first time in twenty-five years.

*

The next morning, it was raining lightly. Zhou donned his liberation shoes, still wet from the night before, and walked down to the spot where his primary school used to be. Next to it was a piece of flat earth that once served as the village basketball court. It, too, was a thing of the past.

A woman was feeding pigs near the old basketball court. She smiled at Zhou and invited him to her house for tea.

“I can’t,” Zhou replied. “This morning I have something to do.”

He walked on, past the village tobacco kiln, past piles of spent zinc retorts, toward the farmland carved into the mountainside. Another woman recognized Zhou and invited him into her stone home. “Do you want to stop and have a rest?” she asked.

“No, I have something to do this morning,” Zhou replied.

He walked on, toward some leafy farmland glistening with the morning rain. It was part of the five or so acres, scattered around the mountainside, that Zhou’s family owned. Zhou came alive. “So many memories,” he said.

His pace quickened. He spoke like an enthusiastic tour guide.

Look! That’s tobacco. Have you seen it in the field before?

Look! Hot peppers. They will soon turn red.

Look! Jicama. The meat is underground – I ate it as a child.

Look! A chestnut tree. The spikes protect the nut inside.

Look! Sunflowers. Have you seen them grow so tall?

Zhou spun around and took it all in. “This year is going to be a productive harvest,” he said. “That is why my father is reluctant to leave.”

He had finally arrived at a landing overlooking the overgrown valley. Tall blades of grass filled in the gaps between gray boulders. “This is the place I would graze the cows,” Zhou said simply.

A mist hovered over the hollow, but he could just make out the white cliff face, which now wore a beard of green, on the opposite side of the valley – where the stone man resided. “Some villagers think the stone man can make their wishes come true,” Zhou said. “They burn papers near him and pray. Maybe I should ask him to help me win a tournament?” He rolled his eyes.

Some of Zhou’s fondest memories of Qixin took place on this swath of land. The cows were content to feed, leaving their young minders free to play, explore and roast potatoes on an open fire. They played the golf-like game involving bound-up balls of papers, sticks and scythes. Another game, Zhou called it “village bowling,” saw the boys hurling sickles at bundles of tied-up grass. Knock down a grass “pin” and it’s yours; fail to do so, and a day’s worth of reaping goes home with someone else. Zhou and his friends would also scamper up trees and try to catch adult birds. But he had never managed to catch one. “They are so clever!” Zhou said, shaking his head.

He squatted on a boulder, his back to the valley, and took a piece of grass in his hands. He began to tear it into tiny pieces and stared at nothing in particular.

“I have a feeling of sadness,” he said after a lengthy silence. “I don’t know how to describe it. This place is so remote, so wild. Look at this muddy and broken road. We have so many villagers here, but they never unite to maintain this road. They are so lazy that they would rather stay at home doing nothing than go out to maintain the road. Once a road is built, cars can drive in easily, and it can fuel the local economy. But there is nobody in charge here. People just live life for themselves.

“I think the quality of life in the village has actually deteriorated. More than twenty years ago, we could grow anything we want and have enough to eat – vegetables and meat. Now, it’s just the same, but in the city, life has improved dramatically. We are still stuck in the same place. Everyone else is marching ahead, and we are lagging behind.

“If I ever have lots of money, first I want to build a nice new house here. Then I’d invest some money to maintain this road in winter. I’d like to give the poor villagers some money. But they need to work for it. I think fifty villagers could fix the road in just two months. If you pay every worker one thousand yuan a month, that’s fifty thousand yuan per month. Maybe someday.

“This is where my roots are, and I won’t forget this place completely,” Zhou said. “I may return here again when time allows. During Qingming Festival, I will return to sweep the tombs of my ancestors.” Qingming Festival, or Tomb-Sweeping Day, took place each year around early April, when the village road was a bit more passable than during the new year celebration.

He took the muddy path back to the village. Along the way, he bent down and pulled a handful of garlic chives out of the earth. “These will go well with lunch,” he said. “My stomach is calling me home. I am hungry.”

*

Third Brother was waiting for him in the courtyard. “Have you decided to leave today or tomorrow?” he asked Zhou. There was unease in his voice.

“I thought it might be better to leave tomorrow,” Zhou responded.

“It needs to be today,” Third Brother said. “I suggest you leave in a hurry.”

Third Brother was obviously concerned that Zhou’s parents’ early morning surrender had all the permanence of sidewalk water calligraphy on a summer’s day. He made it clear: the brothers’ mission was not complete until their parents were sipping tea while sitting on Zhou’s sofa in Chongqing.

His pronouncement set off a flurry of activity. First, the brothers must host an early lunch, a last supper of sorts, that included the five village men who would be responsible for tending to the family farmland in their parents’ absence. As the dishes arrived at the table, Zhou addressed the guests.

“I know I left the village several years ago,” Zhou said, “and I wanted to express my thanks to all of you for helping look after my family. I wanted to deliver my thanks to you individually, but because time is very tight on this trip, I didn’t have time to walk around and say thank you one by one. In the future, if I have enough time, I hope to catch up with all of my old neighbors.”

He closed with some abstract words of encouragement: “I think we people have the ability to do things well. But we need people to guide us in our work. If we have the chance to follow a leader, we can do things well, and make money. Solidarity makes things easier – those who fight alone are idiots.

“Let’s eat!”

After the lunch everything became a blur – part farewell party, part forced evacuation. Imagine trying to pack up a life in an hour. Then imagine trying to do it with half of a village looking on with curiosity. This was a major event in Qixin. Village elders rarely left. They rarely had anywhere to go.

Zhou’s parents took the dizzying pace of their departure in their stride. They smiled and laughed as they stuffed their most important belongings into plastic rice sacks and cardboard fruit boxes. They didn’t pack photos or family heirlooms – they had none of these. They packed sugar, preserved pork, heads of garlic, soybeans, dried chili peppers, fresh eggs, white radishes, tobacco and corn wine. These were the possessions they could not leave behind.

“Should we pack their beds?” a neighbor asked.

“No,” Zhou said. “We have those in Chongqing.”

They did pack clothing. Two suits each for Zhou’s mother and father. Zhou felt the rest were “too ragged,” and announced they would be left behind. For about fifteen minutes, his parents’ home took on the feel of a charity giveaway. Villagers lined up to rummage through dusty piles of shirts, trousers and jackets – there were no dressers or closets in the house. They tried on items they liked over what they were already wearing. Almost everyone took home a memento of their departing friends.

By now, Zhou and his father were rifling through the contents of the bedroom. It was a small, cluttered, windowless room with stone and brick walls and a single light bulb hanging from the ceiling. Plastic bags were scattered across the bed. They had been stashed inside pockets, under mattresses, and, like mortar, between the stones in the wall. The bags were where Zhou’s parents stored important documents, like identification cards and bank books. There was an old ledger from his father’s time working in the Supply and Marketing Cooperative. No one knew exactly how many plastic bags had been hidden or what they contained.

“Oh!” Zhou exclaimed, jokingly. “I found a treasure!”

He pulled a wad of pink one-hundred yuan bills out of one of the plastic bags. He counted the money.

“All together 2,100,” he told his father. “This is hard-earned money. Bring your ID cards to Chongqing and I will have this put into a bank account for you.”

*

Zhou was inspecting the bounty – sack upon sack upon sack – that had accumulated in the courtyard, and wondering how he was going to get it all back to Chongqing. He had borrowed a Honda CRV from one of his golf students for the journey, assuming the SUV would accommodate five people and his parents’ meager possessions easily. But what he saw before him looked like a wholesale farmers’ market.

“Don’t forget the roosters!” his mother shouted from inside the house.

Of course. Roosters.

Zhou and his brothers chased down five of them, but the brown-feathered birds put up quite a fight. Clearly these country chickens had no interest in moving to the big city. As Third Brother held the roosters by their wings, Zhou tied their legs together with twine. The brothers stuffed the birds into red boxes adorned with pictures of oranges and the word “grapefruit” in English. One rooster was especially reluctant to leave. Push his head into the box, and he’d pop it back out through an opening in the top moments later. This happened several times, until Zhou eventually gave up and let the old bird have its way.

A procession of family and friends – each man carrying at least one heavy sack on his shoulder – walked Zhou’s parents away from their village home, down the muddy path to where a truck was waiting to take them to the bottom of the mountain. The morning fog had lifted, and visibility was good.

Everybody was filthy. Shoes, slippers and pant cuffs covered in mud, all articles of clothing speckled in brown. The road was a mess. The driver squatted in a mucky puddle, struggling to affix chains to his truck’s balding tires. On a normal day, the road would have been considered impassable. But this was not a normal day. Zhou’s elderly parents were not going to leave the village on foot.

The chains were not working, however. The old truck squealed. Tires spun in place. Mud flew. Were they going to leave at all?

“Get some rocks!” Zhou ordered, determined.

Large stones were removed from a nearby terrace wall and wedged under the truck’s tires for traction.

“Come, help me push!” Zhou barked.

Zhou, his brothers, and other men from the village leaned into the back of the truck. The engine howled.

“Push with all your strength!”

The rickety truck rocked forward, then back, before finally hurtling ahead to somewhat drier land.

“Hurry. Load the truck!”

With the most precious cargo – Zhou’s mother and father – safely up front with the driver, the rest of the passengers took their places in the truck bed alongside the roosters and preserved pork.

“Wait!” Zhou’s mother yelled out the window. “We forgot the cooking oil. Can somebody go back and get it?”

The mountains were luxuriant and otherworldly, moss-covered dragon’s teeth protruding from the loam. The view was a nice compensation for what was otherwise a loud and jarring ride. At times, the road was a river. It took an hour, but they eventually got to the bottom of the mountain, where Zhou and his brothers could transfer their parents, along with their garlic, tobacco and five crowing roosters, to the SUV.

As they pulled away, Zhou’s father popped his head out of the backseat window and looked back toward the road that leads to Qixin. It was difficult to tell if he was smiling.

*

The following day, Zhou’s apartment in Chongqing smelled and sounded a bit like Qixin. Fifth Brother killed a rooster out on the kitchen balcony, covering the outdoor sink in chicken blood. On the living room balcony, Zhou’s father puffed on a pipe stuffed full of village tobacco. He was wearing Fifth Brother’s white-and-red-striped Nike golf shirt. His head was freshly shaven and, for the first time in years, not adorned by his trademark Lei Feng hat. (Fifth Brother had tossed that in the trash the moment they arrived in the city.)

Zhou’s father sat out on the balcony for hours, silent, staring at the view from his son’s ninth-floor apartment. From his perch he could see a highway, a strip mall of restaurants, a driving range and several parking lots. But mostly he saw new high-rise apartment buildings, each nearly identical to another. He was surrounded.

“At night,” Zhou’s father said, “they look like mountains.”

Zhou’s home was still very much a work in progress. Furnishings were sparse. Walls were bare, save for one children’s poster covered in pictures of fruit, the name of each labeled in both English and Chinese. The living room, like most of the apartment, had white walls and white tiled floors. There was a glass coffee table, an oversized mauve sofa and, although the walls came wired for a flatscreen television, a small, boxy tube TV Zhou had received from a friend. This being the home of a baby – two, in fact, as Zhou’s mother-in-law was visiting with Liu Yan’s nephew, Yang Yang, who was only one year old – part of the floor was covered with soft foam tiles decorated with the letters of the English alphabet. Zhou’s parents slept upon straw mats on the floor of what used to be the office, just off the dining room.

The kitchen was nearly spotless. The white tiles on the walls shone like mirrors, and the cabinets were fluorescent yellow. There was a gas stove with two burners, and an extra electric burner that sat atop a new microwave oven. The stainless steel range hood and refrigerator still had the clear protective plastic covers they shipped with. Near the sink, things began to fall apart. A line of crude sacks containing crops from the village was slouching down the wall. Atop the new refrigerator, a tub of pig lard. There were dead chickens in the sink, their clawed feet pointing at the white ceiling.

Zhou’s mother, who cooked every day back in the village, looked lost in the kitchen. Too different. Too new. Give her some coal and a wok and she’d be fine. “I don’t know how to cook with the gas,” she said, frustrated. She looked right at home, however, feeding her grandson on the balcony. She had brought six children into the world. This is something she knew how to do anywhere. When asked what she thought of the high-rises, she responded with single words like “good” and “beautiful” before adding, “But I don’t dare look downward.” This was her first time in a multi-story building.

There were a lot of firsts during Zhou’s parents’ initial twenty-four hours in Chongqing. First skyscraper, first elevator, first modern shower and toilet. Zhou taught his parents how to flush, and how to mix hot water with cold. Alas, he neglected to give a tutorial on the balcony’s glass sliding door, which his father discovered by walking right into it. But not everything was new. On their second day, while dining at a spicy hotpot establishment not too far from Zhou’s home, his father announced this was not his and his wife’s first time at a restaurant. It was their second. “The other time was nineteen years ago,” he said. “It was for First Brother’s wedding.”

There were plenty of smiles, but there were also signs the assimilation process wouldn’t be simple. You can’t move an elderly couple out of one of China’s poorest villages, into one of the world’s fastest-growing megacities and not expect some difficulty – Zhou must have expected that. Sure, there were familiarities of family and culture, but for Zhou’s parents, Chongqing was an intimidating new world, both foreign and futuristic. They were like time travelers who, because of their backwoods dialect and broken Mandarin, didn’t even speak Chongqing’s language.

Zhou’s father didn’t like having to use the elevator every time he wanted to step outside, and he worried about getting lost. He said he was having trouble figuring out the shower and that his wife wasn’t comfortable in the modern kitchen. They weren’t sleeping well, either. They missed their crops, and felt guilty knowing they would be away from the village during harvest time. Zhou’s mother was afraid the belongings she left behind in Qixin would be stolen. And both were anxious about making friends in the big city, about finding ways to spend their time.

“I don’t want to feel like a bird in a cage,” Zhou’s mother said. “I hope I can talk to the other old people in the neighborhood. I hope I can have fun with them.”

Zhou had never doubted this was the right thing for him to do. He felt it was his duty. His parents were living a primitive existence in the village. He now had the means to offer them a better quality of life in the city. End of story.

“You know, I cried that night when I was persuading them to leave the village,” Zhou said. “My mom fell
in the field and hurt her leg, but she still wanted to cook rice for us. How can I tolerate my mom living in
such a bad situation? I wanted them to live with us with all my heart.

“My parents are part of my life. There will be only one change: We’ll make more rice for every meal.”

And on Zhou’s parents’ first full night in Chongqing, the rice bowls were indeed overflowing. Soon, Zhou would take his parents to the hospital for treatment, and to the city’s famous Jiefangbei shopping area to buy new clothes. There were many things to do in the days and weeks ahead, many challenges to overcome, but today Zhou chose to focus on what lay immediately before him. It was a feast – dishes of beef, pork, fish, chicken, eggs, potatoes and fresh vegetables – and he was the provider. He was seated at a glass dining room table he had bought, in a new apartment he owned. He was surrounded by his family: his beautiful new wife and their healthy baby boy; Fifth Brother and his girlfriend; his mother-in-law; his sister’s teenage son visiting from Shandong; and, of course, his parents.

Zhou, the peasant farmer-turned-security-guard-turned-golf-pro from Guizhou, had made all of this happen. He sat back in his chair, took a large mouthful of Shancheng beer and watched as Liu Yan used chopsticks to feed rice to their son. She sang to Hanhan:

In Disneyland, there is a Donald Duck.

He quacks at people every day.

Quack, quack, quack, quack!

Donald Duck, my Donald Duck.

Quack, quack, quack, quack!

On the final “quack,” Hanhan reached into the bowl and grabbed a handful of white rice, most of which ended up stuck to his cheek instead of inside his mouth. Zhou’s mother laughed. Then his father laughed. Soon, everyone around the table was laughing.

*

Zhou’s parents had only been living in Chongqing for one week when Zhou had to leave for two tournaments in South Korea. Zhou boarded the plane with unease. The week had gone well enough – his parents had thanked him for the new sets of clothing and their medical treatment, and they seemed to enjoy spending time with their grandson – but Zhou was now unsure how well his parents were adjusting to life in the city.

Even on the initial car ride from the village to Chongqing, Zhou’s parents kept muttering about wanting to go back home, about their crops, their livestock. These mutterings continued throughout that initial first week, as well. Zhou thought this was probably natural, and hoped his parents’ feelings of homesickness would wane over time.

Plus, Liu Yan enjoyed having her in-laws around, and that should help to get them settled, he thought. Communication was often difficult – Liu Yan’s knowledge of the village dialect was limited – but her new houseguests would help stave off some of the loneliness she felt when Zhou was gone for long stretches of time. And she knew how much it meant to Zhou to have his parents in Chongqing.

But Liu Yan also worried that Zhou’s parents weren’t adapting well to their new surroundings. Their days were empty. They stayed inside watching TV. They had no activities, no chores and very little contact with other people. On the balcony of Zhou’s apartment, Zhou’s father sat and looked at the view and sighed. “Just a very boring life here,” he observed.

They had become what Zhou’s mother had feared – birds in a cage. “They seemed lost,” Liu Yan said.

Zhou didn’t play well in Korea, missing the cut in the tournaments, and he grew anxious to return home to a full house of friendly faces. He flew from Seoul to Beijing and then to Chongqing. During the trip, every time Zhou would talk to Liu Yan on the phone, he’d ask how his parents were doing. “Fine,” she’d always say. (“I didn’t want to distract him,” Liu Yan later explained.) And when Zhou, en route to Chongqing, called during his short layover in Beijing, the topic of his parents did not come up.

When Zhou returned home, he stepped through the apartment door and put his bags down on the floor. Something didn’t feel right. The house was too quiet, too still. The door to the office – where his parents had been sleeping – was open, and the room was empty. Zhou’s heart sank.

“Liu Yan!” Zhou yelled. “Where are my parents?”

He already knew the answer to his question. He sat down at the empty dining room table, his face blank. Zhou tried to get a handle on his emotions. This was not anger he was feeling. Not sadness. It was confusion. It was guilt. What had he done wrong? What could he have done differently?

“Before they arrived, I had always thought they would adjust to life here,” Zhou said. “That is why I invited them. But after they got here, part of me knew they wouldn’t stay for long. But I never thought they would leave when I wasn’t home.” He sighed and added, “They wouldn’t have left if I was here. I wouldn’t have let them.” And that is exactly why Zhou’s parents left when they did.

They had spent two weeks away from the village, and that was all they could stand. At first, Zhou’s parents were thrilled to see the bright lights, the wide roads, the tall buildings. But after ten days they were just lights, roads and buildings. They were lonely. They felt they had no one to talk to. Back home, they could walk into any house in the village and chat with their neighbors. In Chongqing, they were afraid to leave the apartment.

Fifth Brother tried to convince his parents not to return to the village, but, still weary from the intense negotiations that got them out of the village in the first place, and with no brothers at his side, he didn’t put up much of a fight. Liu Yan, too, attempted to talk Zhou’s parents into staying, arguing they hadn’t given life in the city enough of a chance. But they wouldn’t listen. Instead, they told Liu Yan that she and Zhou should visit Qixin more often.

Zhou’s parents called the village. Less than twenty-four hours later, First Brother’s son Little Tiger arrived in Chongqing to accompany his grandparents home.

“Homesickness can be dangerous,” Zhou reflected. “I guess I didn’t understand their way of life before. I didn’t understand what makes them happy. Now I know. They don’t care if our home in the city is cleaner or more convenient than the one in the village. All they need is clothing on their bodies and food in their stomachs. They are happier in the countryside. City life didn’t have any meaning to them. It’s a generation gap.”

Zhou, who had been trying to get his parents out of the village for years, was done chasing this dream.

“Never again,” he said. “I think they believe they are too old to live outside the village. It’s Chinese culture. If they die outside their village, they can never go home again.”

The day after he returned from Korea, Zhou called his parents. He asked them why they left, and they answered with reasons he already knew: the corn, the tobacco, the chickens and pigs. This all made sense to him now.

“If it makes you happy, you should stay in the countryside,” Zhou told them.

When asked if his parents ever said they were sorry, Zhou shot back: “No. How can a Chinese parent apologize to their child?”