The boy squats in the dust and the roadgrime tracked in on their shoes. He has his mother’s raven hair, eyes as blue as a fabled sea. They call the boy a mixed blood and he watches father, aging reminder of a faraway land he will never see, the room dark day or night. Eight years old. Already the boy understands much. He sees and he listens.
Father drinks. He speaks the common dialect poorly and when he isn’t drinking he takes the boy out and shows him the city. Cramped backstreet restaurants and shops, father’s memories strewn across a chaos of hammers and horns. Holding the boy’s hand at the city’s many lakes, distant cranes and buildings across the silver waters, skeletal sketches of New China halfbloom in the construction dust.
The haze floods the sky and swallows the sun.
Father sits in a chair. Fat stranger to the boy save his eyes. Each time the boy sees him anew. Mother spends her days selling jianbing in an alley and she slips the chengguan money each month for her spot working from dawn past dusk and by the time she comes home father is passed out in the chair or else curled up in the corner, a stinking snoring cat in manclothes.
Father talks. The boy asks no questions and father’s voice changes, words in that coarse hua shedding their form, a slurry of noise. He reaches for the boy, his arm falling limp, and the bottle crashes. Beer the color of the boy’s morning pee sweeps over the hardwood floor.
Slants of daylight peek through the curtain. Father’s slumped in the chair, his eyes wide. The boy scoots close, avoiding the spilt beer. The smell is terrible. The boy holds out his hand and at its maximum stretch he runs a finger along father’s neck beardstubble and dandruff catching under his fingernail.
The boy jerks his hand back. He steps over the spilt beer and in the kitchen fills a paper cup with warm water. He sips. Dishes piled in the sink. Beer bottles line the windowsill, the hanzi for snowflake emblazoned white on each glass.
The boy finishes the water. He crushes the cup and drops it in the trash and eeks his way into the dark room. Father has not moved. The boy remembers where mother works, she has taken him there before, it’s not far. He unlocks the door.
He heads out into the courtyard and into the city and from there into a world at which he peers through the windows in the dark room and the windows in his dark dreams.
Blocks of gray apartments, curbside cars. The boy keeps to the sidewalk looking no one in the eyes he has to find mother at the end of the street hanzi flash on an electronic sign bolted to the wall they mean medicine shop and a police uncle mans the guardpost, newspaper stretched over his lap mother says Don’t trust police uncles and Don’t talk to anyone the other kids have hukous and live in real apartments and go to school during the working time, I have to find mother, and the boy balls up his fists and marches past the guardpost.
The people sea snatches the boy in its current older brothers and sisters aunts uncles a woman rides a bicycle dinging a tiny bell and the boy slips between arms and legs and shirts the stench of baijiu the scent of grillsmoke hands clap a cigarette burns the boy stops. Juice drips from skewered meat a tall uncle working a long grill his beard darker than father’s he asks What do you want? in a gutted dialect.
The people sea carries the boy away. Workmen are building an expressway. Construction engines blast concrete and wild sparks rain on people and cars traffic crawls through the mess like a pack of stunted snails and not only does the people sea grow larger so does the noise, standing taller than what he hears in the dark room with the strange man who drinks too much noise from chatter from engines from horns people ford the traffic alone in pairs in groups the big vehicles sputter towards the big people stop honk sputter the sparks rain cry curse raised purses and swift feet.
The boy spots mother.
In the gapalley she makes jianbing for a pair of older sisters waiting with their arms linked. The boy watches mother work. She first pours the paste on the cooking surface, spreads it with a spatula and sprinkles shredded green onions on it. Her labor betrays no effort. As natural to her as breathing this task is hers from waketime till sleeptime father drinking fat sleeping stranger he does nothing for the family.
Mother slides the jianbing into a paper pouch and the boy calls to her the people sea surging if the chengguan one day decide to stop mother they can and then he and mother will be no different from the ugly men the boy sees on his trips with father who trundle up with their bowls or cups outheld Shameless never give them money it’s their job and the boy thinks that’s the worst job to have.
The people sea sweeps him on.
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