The south wind carries the humidity from the East China Sea between the monumental skyscrapers of Shanghai. Every household opens their windows wide, as the walls are mouldy with winter damp. Inside Fuxing Park the cherry blossoms are fully bloomed, their petals falling like snow in the wind; the willow trees and maples turn deep green with their fast-spreading shoots. Spring cannot wait to arrive; it rushes in on the tide of the Yangtze River, making everyone sluggish and restless, as if one had drunk too much hot Oolong tea.
In the patients’ canteen, over fried tilapia fish, Mu breaks the news of her departure.
“I’m leaving tomorrow. Flying back to Beijing.” She speaks in a neutral tone, as if she is just taking a trip between her father’s room and the doctor’s office.
“Tomorrow? So sudden!” her mother responds. “What have we done to make you so miserable here? Eh? Can’t you see your father is dying? We haven’t seen you for two years, you come back for two minutes and now you want to leave us again!”
Swallowing a piece of fish, Mu keeps her head cast down at her rice bowl.
Her father is saddened, but he says nothing. He puts down his chopsticks.
There is no good excuse the daughter can offer her family. She has been a determined person since she was small. She was born in the year in which the Vietnam War ended, 1975. Although her mother desperately wanted another child—a son, or two or three more sons if possible—her exhausted womb wouldn’t produce any siblings for Mu. She tried swallowing kilos of ginseng and oyster powder but to no avail. So the “Lonely Only” girl grew up in a tea-producing southern village accompanied by her mother’s discontent. Her father was the one who showed love and affection for Mu. It was also him who taught her the first poem she ever heard, “Farewell to the Grassland,” from a Tang-dynasty poet, Bai Juyi. “The grass on the vast plain, one season it dies, another season it grows; wild fire cannot bring it scorching death, spring wind draws it into new life.” Her father would recite it slowly to his young, eager daughter, lingering over the words, drawing out each character with his ink brush.
When Mu was very young she kept falling ill from sunstroke. Her nose would often bleed in the summer. Her father took her out of school or the Young Pioneers’ Palace, where she would study at weekends, and put her in a clinic. And the child with her burning red cheeks would swear to her father: “One day I will leave this hot oven and I will live in the north. I’ll find a snowy town, I’ll live in Haerbin or Beijing.” It was as if she was never meant to be in the south, as if by pure accident she had been placed there, a child who really belonged to snow and crisp blue skies. And one day she did run away. A four-day train ride took her to what had always been the home town of her heart: Beijing. Her first year in the city was a mix of loneliness and exhilaration. She loved the ice skating and the heavy snows, the broad streets, the urban ugliness, the vast sports stadium and the secret underground bars. She would cycle around the enormous city, in spring through sandstorms, in winter through blizzards. She hardly slept. It was here that she discovered her people, her friends and comrades. The ones with whom she could live the life of ideas, with whom she could create a new world of literature and freedom.
In Mu’s heart, her father is the person she cares for most, but she tells herself that she can do nothing more to change his situation. “I cannot bury my life with his cancer cells, and I am not going to just wait here for him to die! I cannot repeat my mother’s life!” Mu feels like it’s all very clear for her suddenly: “And when I grow old, I will not mind dying alone. Goddamnit! I can die alone without demanding that anyone die with me. And I am not going to make my children sit beside my deathbed watching me wither away.” She remembers conversations with Jian on their balcony looking out over the hectic ringroads below, foodstall sellers, businessmen, peasants and students all walking fast on the same pavement.
It is the last day of Mu’s stay in Shanghai. A train ticket to Beijing is in her pocket and it is a one-way pass. After her last lunch with her parents, there are a few hours to go before her departure. She writes in her diary:
Father and Mother laid their skeletal bodies on the bed for their afternoon nap. I lay beside them, flipping through the local newspaper which only publishes adverts. Slowly, I felt the anguish growing with each passing second. I looked at them, as they lay there. For the last decade the only life my parents have been allowed is one of eating and sleeping. Like animals—like cows or pigs. I gazed into their faces, half covered by a bed sheet. It felt strange, like I was invading their skin. Their bodies moved only very slightly, their breath coming between long pauses. It was as if a slow cyclic sigh was escaping from their half-open quivering mouths. It was a collective sigh, the only act that they now truly perform together. They are my parents, who once held me up as a baby, and helped me walk, and fed me, now lying together in their exhaustion. I could see the sigh that travelled through their bodies, back and forth between the walls, with no release, no escape.