ZHEE HYAN COLLECTED BIRDS.
His reed cages filled the courtyard. Some cages dangled from the eaves; others rested on a little bench he had fashioned from scrap wood. Sometimes, I sat in my room and listened to him talk to them. All the words he no longer spoke to me spilled from his heart: his complaints about his teachers, his crush (it was the peanut vendor’s daughter, Ah Lu, as I’d suspected), his concern about the health of one of their bird compatriots.
Thirty-nine birds, most of them various kinds of buntings with brown, yellow, or red breasts and a stern little white stripe above each eye. They spoke to one another in a clash of staccato tweets. Zhee Hyan soothed them with his clicking tongue. One escaped bird sent our whole family into an uproar. First, Zhee Hyan’s shouting and flailing around the yard as he tried to capture it drew us all outside in a panic. Then, once he realized it had flown off forever, we spent days carefully tiptoeing around his sadness. “You don’t understand,” Zhee Hyan said. “That was Brownie. Will he even remember how to feed himself?” I didn’t know how he learned to distinguish Brownie from Little Bird from Blossom, but I just nodded in sympathy.
“It’s a bird zoo,” our grandfather grumbled. Yet he sat among them, smoking the opium pipe his father had passed down to him but which now held tobacco, and basked in their song.
“You are like the last emperor of China,” our grandmother said to Zhee Hyan. “I bet he had a room of birds. Only an emperor makes himself ruler of so many animals.” She saved the burned rice scrapings from the bottom of the pot for his birds.
“Why do you like birds so much?” I asked.
Zhee Hyan scooped rice into tiny trays that slid in and out of the cages. He moved down the row, cooing to his pets. He even wore a shabby hat, formerly our grandfather’s, and he reminded me of a worn old farmer who had forsaken the company of men for more trustworthy creatures.
“I don’t know.” That had been his answer for most questions recently. His voice had newly settled into a lower pitch and his words slurred softly together. He hushed the birds that fluttered around, alarmed by the intrusion of his hand into their space. “They’re pretty.”
I giggled. The idea that Zhee Hyan might find anything “pretty” was funny. The birds mostly were brown and plain: perfect for disappearing among the shadows and light of a field. At the market in town, I had seen pretty birds with brilliant colors. These birds were not pretty.
A few times a week, he went out with his net and stalked them in the field behind our house, driving them out with noise. He was not always successful, but he was patient. Every bird in the cage was a trophy. Occasionally, he had even allowed me to come along. I drove the birds out by clanging pots and Zhee Hyan would catch them in a net. He named me godmother of one, and I called it “Coffee.” It was the only bird I learned to recognize among the others.
“I think you like catching them,” I declared.
“I guess,” he mumbled. I wanted to tease him about the soft black hair on his upper lip, but I held back. Mama was not around, but Zhee Hyan might tell, and I didn’t want Baba involved. Mama’s punishments were short and sharp; Baba made me kneel or hold a bucket of water over my head until my arms began to shake and the water splashed on the ground. My arms would be so sore that I could barely hold a pencil all evening.
The hospital neared completion. Baba had stayed on. He rose every morning and smiled at Jie-fu. He was so friendly, and the atmosphere of the entire house shifted. Mama seemed to even take pleasure in the chopping of vegetables. It was like a fist had unclenched. I didn’t bathe for four days and no one said a word until the fourth day, but even then, the scolding ended in laughter as each person embellished the description of my odor (“Your head smells like stinky cabbage!” “No, her head smells like cabbage left in a damp pot for half a year.” “A damp pot buried in the outhouse!” “Stop teasing me!”). We were like a government slogan painted on an alley wall: Harmony of the Family. At dinner, Baba told anecdotes about work, putting Jie-fu at the center of them, and Jie-fu beamed.
“And the hoisting rope had come loose and the cement bucket started to fall, but this hero”—a nod and grin at Jie-fu—“this hero caught it! Grabbed the rope just as it finally broke free and kept the bucket from knocking out a guy down below.”
Another day: “And when the foreman asked who would go down into the hole—mind you, it was so dark I could not even see the bottom—can you guess who volunteered? My son-in-law. No fear at all.”
And this: “We heard the cry for two days, but only my son-in-law thought to look at the top of the scaffolding. And there it was: a cat. He carried it down in a sack and we all cheered when it scampered off.”
Then, all of a sudden, Baba was back. The Baba I had known, not the one Mama had loved or Ah Zhay had adored, or the one who had charmed us at dinner with silly anecdotes about the construction site. He came home in the middle of the day, globs of concrete stuck to his sandals, hardening on his feet, and speckling his pants. Only my grandparents were home, and my grandmother saw him approach as she tended the garden.
She called his name.
He kept walking, a hungry ghost deaf to the world.
She had a strange feeling seeing her daughter’s husband stomp home in the middle of the day with his eyes dull as a dead fish. My grandfather was napping, and she decided to not wake him. She watched Baba go around the house, then stood up and followed him. He went to the pump, rinsed his hands, and dragged water through his hair.
“Son-in-law,” she finally called.
He rubbed his hands beneath the water until they turned pink.
“Have you eaten?”
He scraped his fingernails against one another. The water darkened his sleeves.
“I’ll fix some food for you. I’ll go inside and heat some soup.”
He seemed to notice her for the first time and he glumly assented.
She watched him through the kitchen window as she prepared his lunch. Baba sat in my grandfather’s smoking chair. Only his hands were clean. He closed his eyes. All around him, Zhee Hyan’s birds, agitated, chirped as if they suspected that his dark figure so close meant they would be fed. My grandmother went to the stove. Her grandson had used the word “broken”; reluctantly, she agreed. She stirred the pot. Bubbles broke through the surface, popped, and tiny splatters stung her arm. She could not decide whom she pitied more: my mother or my father.
She had been worried since the day he had shown up out of nowhere, saying nothing about the past decade. She was reminded of the old story of the man who drank the wine of the gods during a game of Go and fell asleep for generations. He had awoken and stumbled down the hill into another world, where children tugged at his long beard and laughed at him. Everyone he knew had died. She shook her head. It was a pitiful situation.
Suddenly, my grandmother looked up. A weighty silence had settled on the day. She went to the window.
All the cage doors were open. A stunned look in his eyes, Baba stood before the empty cages. My grandmother exclaimed and ran outside still holding the spoon.
The bare cages swayed. Not a bird left. She surveyed the courtyard, hoping kindness had ingrained some loyalty into the wild creatures. None remained.
“What have you done?”
Baba shook his head and his eyes filled with hurt.
“Your son’s birds!” she cried. She wanted to jostle the fragments inside him until they settled into something like sanity.
“It wasn’t right,” he said.
“What’s the matter with you?”
Who was this man who had come in her son-in-law’s stead? This man who ruled the dinner table with his mood, who punished his children like soldiers, who set loose his son’s pets. What was recognition? she thought. She had recognized his face the day he arrived, but she could not say she knew this man who moved without sense.
The house was quiet the way it was when it was going to rain and the birds nestled together in contented silence. I looked up but the sky was blue. Puzzled, I wheeled my bicycle through the gate. Zhee Hyan kneeled in the dirt in front of the empty cages.
I dropped my bicycle and ran to him. “Zhee Hyan! What happened?”
He refused to speak. Now, he looked not so much like a farmer as a weary old man. Dust dulled his black hair.
“Go inside,” my mother ordered me.
Seven of us were in the courtyard, distaste and fear clearing large spaces between us. My grandfather had settled at my homework table and appeared to be leisurely smoking a pipe. Yet it was surely not incidental that he faced away from us, and his gaze traveled through the gate.
“Yes, Mama.” I pretended to obey, but squatted in the doorway.
“What’s your problem, old man?” Jie-fu snapped. His dark skin, inflamed with rage, appeared copper. Ah Zhay tugged at his arm. “Please, don’t.”
Jie-fu gestured toward the empty cages. “And this too?” When he turned toward my sister, she flinched. “You didn’t see him—kicking the cement bucket, shouting nonsense. Now this?”
Go to Zhee Hyan, I thought. Please, Mama. But Mama didn’t go to him. Whatever radiated from his curled figure was so intense that it repelled us. Mama took one step toward Jie-fu, then retreated. “Let’s calm down,” she said.
“Tell him! Tell your husband!” Jie-fu waved his arms violently. The energy of his frustration strained against his skin, made his muscles taut and his veins bulge; he was a beast ready to strike.
“Don’t talk about my father that way!” Ah Zhay cried. She covered her face and turned away from her husband. Her stomach heaved with sobs that sucked the breath from her.
Baba watched the scene like an awkward child in a new classroom. His arms hung at his sides, just slightly away from his body, unnatural, as if he could not puzzle out the position of his limbs. His eyes darted between his anxious wife, his crying daughter, his livid son-in-law, and his indifferent father-in-law. Then he settled on me, the neutral observer. Clarity glittered in his eyes. I saw it. I tried to smile, but had to look away. I wanted to cry.
A deeper silence came over us when Zhee Hyan stumbled to his feet and began pulling down the cages from the eaves. Though the cages were delicate, the clatter as they crashed atop one another was horrific. He swept the rest from the bench. Then he stomped on them. Ah Zhay gasped and began sobbing again. The courtyard filled with the jagged sound of splintering wood. I covered my ears and pleaded with him to stop. Tremors in my throat turned to tears. He slammed his foot down a final time and shouted, “I hate you!”
The ruins lay like brown bones picked clean and trampled. Baba held up a hand. Silence. He offered no reprimand or apology. He pushed his way through the thick sadness between us and disappeared inside, leaving us wordless.
Zhee Hyan picked up a handful of splintered wood and, with an impotent cry, tossed it after him.