Read an Excerpt
Mother River
Our village is called “Fishing River Village”—a fitting name. There really is a river—the Wu River—flowing past the village, and there really are fish in the river. In our village, at least two families depend on fishing for a living. The way to fish is to set a large net on a bamboo frame, place it on the riverside, and go back at a set time to pull the net out. Although one can’t say that they make a fortune from this trade, its generally still enough for their families to live on.
I wished my family were fishermen. When I had time, I would watch Meng Ha fish. He was a youth a few years older than I, and very good at whistling. He was good-looking, and I worshipped him. I asked him to teach me how to fish, but he turned me down. He said there are a limited number of fish in the Wu River. And if people fished without restrictions, the source would be endangered. So if I learned to fish, I would rob him of his livelihood. When Meng Ha said this, he seemed mature for his age. I had to respect him. But I still loved fishing. It was precise and methodical, requiring the fisherman’s meticulous attention.
One question had been plaguing me for a long time: the Wu was a large river, and I thought there should be a lot of fish in it. How could the people of Fishing River Village have determined only two fishing nets could be placed on the shore of a river more than three miles long? If it was because two families could barely get by from fishing that they concluded that the fish in this section of the river could not support more people—wasn’t this a little too arbitrary? Many factors played a role in deciding the size of the catch: technique; weather; and even a fisherman’s mood (based on my observations of Meng Ha). Why couldn’t this section of the river have a couple more fishing nets? I couldn’t explain this. I could only observe and analyze Meng Ha’s words and actions. But Meng Ha wasn’t a transparent guy at all! I thought he was also surreptitiously trying to figure out what I was trying to figure out. He was enjoying this.
Lately, Meng Ha had been distressed about something. He told me that in the middle of the night, a huge dark shadow would rise in the Wu River and it would motionlessly occupy half the sky. To check this out, I stayed with him until midnight. But when he pointed it out to me, I was drowsy and my vision blurry. I couldn’t see anything. “It’s as sure as fate! Can’t you see anything at all, Yuaner?” In despair, he said, “See, here’s the head, here are the shoulders. Even without legs, it moves very quickly.” These words roused me. Ah, when I fixed my eyes on the dark shadow he pointed out, I had an indescribable feeling! I still didn’t see it, but it moved my insides. I subconsciously murmured, “This . . .” “THIS!!” Meng Ha repeated this, making a deafening sound.
“Where is it? May I talk with it?” I was weak, but I still managed to utter these words.
I stared: Meng Ha had disappeared. The large net was pulled up by a formless hand. A glistening silver fish was jumping in the net in midair. My God, how had Meng Ha made his body completely disappear? Could he have split himself in two—one part combining with that dark shadow, and one part still fishing here? No one picked up that fish. The bamboo pole and the fishing net fell into the water. Thump.
“Meng Ha! Meng Ha . . .” I called out in annoyance.
“Yuaner, don’t yell.” His voice came from far away. “Everything’s fine.”
He was coming over here from the east side of the riverbank, his body draped in silvery light—a little like that silver fish. The odd thing was that he never reached me. I waited and waited, yet he was farther and farther away. “Yuaner, you’d better go back by yourself . . .” His feeble voice rode the wind over to me.
So, all right, all I could do was go home alone. I was far away from Meng Ha’s world: what had just happened confirmed that much. Hadn’t I been unable to see the dark shadow? Yet, it had affected me! It was dawn now, and Uncle Jun was eating breakfast by himself in my home. He looked up from his bowl and greeted me with a smile.
“Yuaner, your parents have gone to the neighboring county to visit the tombs. They asked me to watch the house for them. They said, ‘We can’t depend on Yuaner for this. He’s always out somewhere.’ Is that true?”
“Uncle Jun, thank you.” I was ashamed of myself.
“It’s okay. I was like you when I was young. So, did you run into ‘it’? Oh, when I think back on it, that was such a beautiful chance encounter. Everyone was young once upon a time.”
“Uncle Jun, do you ever see ‘it’ now?”
“Now? Now I sleep next to it every night!”
Suddenly, Uncle Jun burst out laughing. Then he rose and dished up food for me. Sitting across from each other, we began eating in silence. At this moment, neither of us knew how to express our inner feelings. We were dejected, partly because of this. Uncle Jun whispered to me: I should go to sleep for a while—I would surely have good dreams. “Good dreams!” he emphasized while patting my shoulder. I stared at the sunlight on the windowsill, a shudder flitting past for a moment in my heart. I sensed that this hot dry sunlight was actually the dark shadow from the night before. I had no idea what this meant, but I sensed it quite distinctly. I heard my voice buzzing like a mosquito’s: “Uncle Jun, Uncle Jun, could you please close the curtains?”
Uncle Jun closed the curtains right away, and then he disappeared. Had he left the house?
I leaned over the table, trembling. I knew it was morning—I had just eaten breakfast—so why was the room as dark as night? Had I brought the dark shadow into this room from the riverside? But that dark shadow was something that belonged to Meng Ha. It seemed that everything was changing: my life had been spun up into a whirlpool.
I stood up with an effort. I sensed that Uncle Jun was still in the house, perhaps in my parents’ bedroom. I walked into that room, and sure enough, there he was. It was cool there, and I stopped trembling. He was studying a globe, but it was not like any I had seen before. He had probably made it himself. That little ball on the bedside table gave me a strange feeling.
“Yuaner, look: this is a map that I made of Fishing River Village. This is the east side, and this is the west side. And here: this black ribbon is the Wu River. What do you think of it?” As he spoke, he twirled the globe.
“How can Fishing River Village be spherical?” I finally blurted out.
“You don’t think it is?” Uncle Jun was looking at me seriously as he asked, “How do you think this map should be made?”
I was stumped. I was feverish. Finally, I admitted I didn’t know.
“Uncle Jun, I think there’s something wrong with my eyes.”
“Haha, Yuaner, that’s not likely. That’s impossible! Haven’t you seen everything? You must be able to think of a better—”
“A better what?”
“Map! You wander all over. You were an expert on this village’s landform long ago.”
Uncle Jun said he had to go home to get rid of the insects in the vegetable garden. Picking up the globe, he took off.
My head cleared as I sat in my parents’ shady bedroom. I shouted to the air: “Uncle Jun is an old fox!” The more I thought about it, the more I felt that his map was true to life. He was a gifted craftsman. To all appearances, he repaired alarm clocks for a living. But secretly, he had honed this consummate skill. I really wanted him to teach me, but did I have any aptitude for it? After all, the first time I looked at that spherical map, I hadn’t understood it, had I? Then I thought there was something wrong with my vision, and Uncle Jun had corrected me . . . As for that dark shadow, I had better give it some more thought! I felt this had something to do with the Wu River. This Wu River that nurtured Fishing River Village wanted to tell us something that was a little hard to talk about. It did so by demonstrating what it wanted to say. That’s all I knew about it. Well, then, how much did Meng Ha know? Was he also limited in what he knew? Indeed, the dark shadow was as inconceivable as a spherical map. Meng Ha and Uncle Jun lived every day among these incredible objects. Uncle Jun had even made this one with his own hands. And I was just a beginner. I was with these alien life-forms at every moment, but I was deaf to their whispers. My parents had gone far away: I felt they were like me—delving into the same thing. They hadn’t gone to visit my grandparents’ graves since I had grown up. Dad had even said that visiting the tombs was “completely meaningless.” But now they’d both gone to engage in this meaningless activity.
