Between the Two Tigers
Fei Sun
I stood in the rain on Daming Road before an open gate of rusted iron bars. It was in the summer at the end of my first college year. Before I went to a university in the United States, there used to be a cluster of more than a hundred tiny houses on the other side of the gate, one of which, Number Eighty-One, was my home; but while I was away, my grandparents, as well as all the other dwellers, had cleared out for a government scheme. Each of the houses consisted of a downstairs room, an attic and a lean-to kitchen shed that people built themselves, but now all the sheds and attics, the ceilings of the downstairs rooms, and the front walls were gone. Now all the houses were bare lots indistinguishable from one another.
On the day I left a year ago, my grandparents rented a minivan and, together with my aunts, uncles and cousins, accompanied me to the airport. I already knew then that the houses would all be demolished in half a year, but at the time, my mind was occupied with red-brick dormitories and high-domed lecture halls, which I'd seen in the brochures my new school had mailed me. I didn't look back once at my gray old home as I pulled two shiny black suitcases past my neighbors. At the time, everyone in the neighborhood was excited to leave, not expecting to miss the place. Even my grandmother, who'd just recovered from surgery for stomach cancer, was gladdened by the prospect of relocation. She'd been burdened with washing spittoons for five decades, in icy cold water in winter, but with the compensation money, she and my grandfather would be able to afford a condo with a flushing toilet, a shower, and hot water coming right out of the faucets.
Then, one morning a few months into my college life, right after I woke up in my dorm room thousands of miles away from Daming Road, I had a moment of confusion. I thought I was still sleeping in the attic of my old home. I didn't understand why the roof was not sloped. By then my grandparents had moved and told me of the ongoing demolition. As I stared at the flat ceiling, my mind cleared, and it suddenly struck me that I would never see the slanting roof again. I had not said my proper goodbye.
I'd been prepared for the sight of the rubble, for the lonely walls and the abandoned furniture. What caught me off guard was that five minutes after I walked through that rusted gate, which swayed and squeaked in the wind, I got lost.
I used to be able to find my home even on the darkest night, despite the fact that the paths before the houses, barely a meter wide because of the kitchen sheds, branched off randomly and came to abrupt ends. As a little child I might've registered that I should turn left at a shed whose walls were visibly not parallel, or that I should turn right once I passed a toothless woman who was forever sitting on her doorstep and yelling at passersby, and who, sometimes, used a mop to trip us. Those instincts were gone now. Somewhere in the cluster, I made a wrong turn, followed by more wrong turns, and soon I lost the sense of where I was.
I searched for a sign, for something my grandparents had left behind, such as our decades-old wicker chair—I had not seen it in our new home. But as I trod on sodden fragments of plaster walls, clay shingles, glass shards, and splintered wood that might've once been a door, the only piece I recognized among the furniture too tattered for new homes was a square table with one leg thicker than the others. It was not my grandparents'. I had watched them play mahjong at such a table, in a neighbor's home, but I could not remember the neighbor's face, nor where he or she had lived from us. Three or four lots past the square table, a steel cooking pot, whose bottom had been thinned and darkened, lay without a lid on a half-rotten nightstand; in another home, on the ground, a red cloth rose stuck out of an intact porcelain vase brimming with rainwater. But they too were remnants of other people's pasts. The wicker chair that I searched for, the old table lamp that had a cracked parasol-shaped cover, or the small wooden tub in which my grandmother used to bathe me when I was a baby, none of them were there.
Raindrops continued to beat down on my umbrella. Dirty water and granular debris kept getting into my ballet flats. The air smelled of urine, and though it might have little to do with all the spittoons that people discarded, the sight of them added to my discomfort. I was worrying my frugal grandparents had sold whatever they no longer wanted for scrap, or they'd made more trips to the garbage bin—my grandmother had always prided herself on keeping Number Eighty-One clean—when I found myself staring straight at a poster of a tiger.
When I was a few months old, my parents died in an accident. My retired grandparents took me in. With the addition of me, they redivided their housework to be fair, and the job of buying groceries and cooking three meals a day transferred from my grandmother to my grandfather.
Every morning, my grandfather pedaled a bike to a nearby food market, while my grandmother washed clothes and cleaned the home. One day, when I was about ten, Grandfather came back pushing his bike instead of riding it. He pushed with one hand, rather awkwardly, for it was hard to maintain the direction, and in his other hand, he was carrying a long white tube.
At first I thought it was a fluorescent light tube, but to my excitement, my grandfather, still panting and sweating, said it was a poster. The only wall decoration in our home was a little cat I'd drawn and pasted by my bed in the attic.
"A picture?" My grandmother had been rubbing clothes against a washing board at the sink in the kitchen shed, and she came out with foam still on her hands to scowl at my grandfather.
"It was only twenty yuan," Grandfather said sheepishly. Then he raised his voice. "You wait till I show you what it is."
In the front basket of his bike, a bighead carp was twitching in a plastic bag. Grandfather paid it no attention and went inside our little home in two strides. With one more he reached the square dining table and unrolled the picture on it.
It was a painting of a tiger running down a mountain path. Instantly I recalled that my grandmother had been born in a Tiger Year. Up till then, I'd never imagined any romantic feeling between my grandparents, or between any couple more than forty years old. But as my grandfather gazed at the picture, something clicked in my head. I didn't know what it was, until I heard myself chanting, "Grandpa loves Tiger! Grandpa loves Tiger!"
My grandmother continued to frown at the picture as I chanted, as if still begrudging the money. But the wrinkled corners of her mouth were slightly turned up, even as she pressed her lips into an overall downward curve. Then she said, "The picture is not even right, you old fool. The tiger's running down a mountain path that winds to the right, you see, but its tail curves to the left. It's not even right."
I don't remember what my grandfather said the next. I only remember that he put the picture on the wall by their bed downstairs. But if I had to make up a response according to his temperament, it'd be something like, "I haven't seen a tiger running, not me, so I can't say whether the tail should go left or right. But twenty yuan for a magnificent picture like this? It sure is a good deal, you've got to say!"
A decade later, I stood before the tiger picture, among the ruins. The rain stopped; the sun came out. It was three or four in the afternoon. The midsummer sun shone blindingly upon the picture's plastic coating. I had not seen sunlight on it, for there had been a ceiling before. Squinting at it now, I thought it was even more magnificent than I remembered. The tiger's eyes were full of strength. Its fur looked richly colored, especially as the picture was wet. The mountain range in the distance was partially revealed among clouds, which only added to its grandeur. Right by the path upon which the tiger ran, a cliff fell down to a river in a ravine. The river was ablaze from both the sunshine in the picture and real sunlight. As a final touch, four characters were written in brush calligraphy at the upper right corner: "Mountains and rivers quake with its greatness." They looked as if they had been written by one with a steady, willful wrist.
All in all, though the tail swept in the opposite direction to that of the mountain path, the picture—
But the tail didn't go the wrong direction. So it was not my grandfather's picture, and the place was not my old home.
When I got back to my new home, a two-bedroom condo near the west edge of the city, where home prices were relatively low, my grandfather had just gotten home too. My grandmother was in their room yelling, apparently to Grandfather: "Can't you wait until I've died to go out? Can't you wait?" But the angry words were mingled with a wheeze. Her cancer had come back and spread. She lay feebly in bed most of the time.
"We ran out of ginger, that was why. You can't cook fish properly without ginger," my grandfather's tired voice drifted out of the open door.
I pretended I didn't hear, and snuck into my own room.
Later, when Grandfather was cooking dinner, I went to the kitchen to help. As he cut open the fat head of a bighead carp and stewed the two mirrored halves with rice jelly sheets and ginger, I told him about the poster that looked the same as ours except for the tiger's tail. Above the humming of the range hood, my grandfather said, "Really?" But he didn't seem interested in this other picture. His only comment was, "I wanted to take our picture with us, but your grandma said it was moldy and yellowed too because I smoked too much. I left it on the wall there."
I'd wanted to tell my grandmother about the tiger with the right tail too, but she fell asleep after the exertion of shouting. Then at dinner, when she got up to join us, the sight of her thin body once again stole words from my mouth. Before the cancer, her plumpness reminded me of a panda; now crinkled skin sagged from her mop-handle-thick arms. So I only mentioned the errant weather forecast. She said, "It didn't rain here," and turning to my grandfather, "did it, old man?"
That night I thought I would not go back to Daming Road to look for Number Eighty-One again. I'd gotten at least ten mosquito bites on my legs and arms by the time I left there, my Italian leather flats had been scratched and sodden, and on my way home, I was hungry and felt the trip was twice as long as before. What was more, my grandmother was already too weak to receive chemotherapy, and though no one talked of it, we all knew it might be the last summer we spent together. Every minute I was not with her was a minute wasted.
But in the days and weeks that followed, I found excuses to "drop by" Daming Road, excuses like the fact that Grandfather used to buy pot-stickers from a cheap but famous restaurant there, and he and Grandmother must've missed the taste, so I went to buy take-outs; or that my childhood friends still lived in the area, and I should visit them because friendship mattered too. Each time I dropped by, I searched for our old tiger poster, the one that should look yellowed, though I did not remember it to be so. I didn't find it, not after three visits, not after five or ten.
Yet every time I went there, I saw the other tiger picture, the one that was as bright as when I had first seen it. It was readily there, easy to be found, as if welcoming my visit. After the first time, I studied it more closely. I ran my finger over it and saw no dust. It was nailed to the wall, but the nails were not rusted. Once I lifted a small triangle of a corner and found no mold on the wall behind it. Yet all around it, waves of dust rose and fell with mere breezes. Black rot in the walls spread visibly between my visits. And while I could almost hear the tiger's heavy bones pound the mountain ground, the many sounds in my head from long ago, such as my friends and I jumping over the mad woman's mop back and forth, or my grandparents' cheers bursting out somewhere along with the clicks of mahjong blocks, gradually fell into silence.
After several visits I stopped looking for my old home, and instead only went to see the tiger poster.
My visits to Daming Road increased from once or twice a week, to once every other day, then nearly every day as long as it didn't rain. Toward the end of August, I did not even care about the weather. But the summer break had an end after all, so on the day before my flight back to school, I decided to take the picture with me. I put a pair of pliers in my backpack to take off the nails, and went there, once more, in the rain.
The nails came off smoothly. The picture tumbled down onto my open palms. On the white back side there was not a single stain, nor was there anything on the wall. But in the wall there was a roughly round hole big enough for a fist to thrust in. As I looked into it, a trickle of water came out. One moment I saw it, or thought I'd seen it; the next moment it left no trace behind.
The poster had been used to cover an ugly hole. When I saw the hole, the urge to take the picture was diminished. The trouble of carrying it on the bus, and the question of where to put it became more real—What would my grandparents think if they saw it? And how ridiculous would it look in my dorm room overseas, even if I managed to fit it in a suitcase without folding it? So I left it there, among the ruins.
Then two months later, the rubble of my old neighborhood was flattened for high-rises. In another month, my grandmother passed away. I didn't reach home quickly enough to hear her last words, though my grandfather comforted me and said that she could not speak anything to anybody on the day she died.
"But the night before, she could not stop talking," he added. "She could not stop talking about you and your mother."
On Dongzhi, the Winter Solstice, when my grandfather, my aunts, uncles and their children all got together at a cemetery to witness my grandmother's ash box being sealed by concrete in a hole under the ground, I was given the honor of holding the box until it was the moment to bury it. My grandparents shared one gravestone, with two holes side by side before it. As I held the box and looked into the grave on the right, I suddenly remembered the hole I'd dug a long time ago.
I had been at the most four or five. I saw on television a bunch of children had dug a hole under a tree and buried in it a box, in which were letters they wrote to their future selves, and I envied them. But I had no trees around my home. The only green we had were some cucumbers and bottle gourds my grandparents grew on the roof of the kitchen shed. So one day, when my grandparents were both at a neighbor's place, playing mahjong perhaps, I thought of digging a hole in the wall that would later be covered by the tiger picture.
At the time the wall was covered by a big round tabletop. The tabletop was only used when all my grandparents' children (except for my parents) and grandchildren got together at Chunjie. The day I dug the hole, it was right after Chunjie; I was wearing a new hooded coat the color of a ripe banana. Each year on the Lunar New Year's Eve, my grandmother would give me a new coat and say she'd bought it with the money my parents left. I thought my grandparents would not find out about the hole until a year later. To a child of four or five, a year was just a bit shorter than forever.
It was a quiet afternoon, quieter than usual because snowflakes were falling on the gray-tiled roof and had formed a puffy quilt on the path in front of my home. We rarely had snow that did not melt into muddy water as soon as it fell. In the midst of the silence, I rolled the tabletop to the side. The rumbling sound made me look back at the front door many times to check if my grandparents had heard it and come back.
They had not, and I dug the hole. The plaster wall was so old and weak that I could chip bits off it with a steel spoon. I dug until the sunlight was tinged red. Then I looked for a thing worthy of the attention of the future me, for I had not learned to write yet. I decided the beautiful snow would do. I made a snowball about the size of a small apple, and pushed it into the hole.
