Cracks in the Heel: Papa’s Story
Homesickness can be really painful, just like cracks in the heel.
Papa does not speak much on the phone. Every week when I call them, from twelve time zones away, Papa would only talk with me very briefly. If Mama is not home, who usually does most of the talking, Papa’s first words upon knowing it’s me on the other end would be, “Mama’s not in,” meaning today I wouldn’t have to speak much. I’m always amused and would try my best to elicit more from him, asking all kinds of questions I can come up with within seconds. Last time at such a moment, I suddenly thought of his heels, very often cracked, painful heels.
“Are you still using the foot cream I brought you last time?” I asked.
“Yes, yes. Very good.” Papa stopped a second and seemed to think of something important, “Oh, you yourself should use some too — I mean the cream!”
“I know. I’ll bring you more next time I’m back. Um…” Reminding myself that we couldn’t afford a trip home this year, I added, “maybe I can send you more by mail?”
“No, no, there’s still plenty left. Don’t spend money on that, it’s too expensive to send. We can wait till you’re back next year.” Papa suddenly poured out a lot of words, as if afraid that I’d go to the post office immediately. He won’t believe it doesn’t cost much. He is always concerned that I can’t make my own ends meet — to him I’ve always been a little girl that easily gets ill and doesn’t know how to take good care of herself.
“Did you have kung-fu tea recently?” I came up with another question. Face to face, Papa is a great speaker, especially over kung-fu tea.
“No, not in the mood,” said he tersely, and then added, “no fun without your and your brother’s company.” Unexpectedly, his words brought tears to my eyes. He seldom spoke of his liking of our company explicitly like this. Winter was still lingering in the middle of April in Ann Arbor, and when I was talking the wind was blowing outside and raindrops tapping the window panes. For a moment I found myself at loss for words.
So I repeated. “You take good care of your heels!”
PAPA HAS SUFFERED from cracked heels for years ever since 1962 when he went to Peking University in Beijing. The stories of his heels and homesickness are what I like best among those told while having kung-fu tea, our favorite tea ceremony. Interestingly, the word kung-fu in Chinese not only means martial arts but also refers to the time and effort required to achieve success in anything from scholarly learning to this particular tea ceremony originated in Guangdong, one of the southernmost provinces of China. The teapot and teacups for kung-fu tea are tiny compared with commonly used household ones. Papa would put tea leaves into the pot until it was almost full before pouring in boiling water. The tea thus made would be much stronger than an ordinary brew and could only be relished in sips. In a cold winter night when Papa was in the mood for kung-fu tea, Mama would help him boil the water, and my brother and I would be happily waiting at the table, more for Papa’s stories than for the tea, which tasted too strong for children. Papa was from Raoping, a small county in the east part of Guangdong. Located in the subtropical coastal area, the climate there was warm and humid throughout the year. He had never been away from home before going to college, and the experience of being at a strange place brought a whole new world to him, at first extremely overwhelming and intimidating. In the dry, sandy wind of Beijing’s early fall, Papa’s feet became cracked and painful as he first felt the pain of homesickness.
In fact, Papa’s “heel” stories are inseparable from those about his earlier life in Raoping. “I’ve been to those sea islands with uncles from our town to sell our stuff,” in a deep and meditative voice he spoke as if more to himself than to us. As he poured tea into the four small cups, rims touching, we could hear a rushing cataract and see bright clouds rising from the table. Little by little, the light fragrance of Raoping’s famous Shan-cong tea was in the air, and the life and the place Papa described all became vivid images before my eyes, misty with a light sadness.
Years later with more knowledge about the climate of different regions of China, I realized that the late summer in Nanjing, the city in which we lived, often had weather similar to that of the subtropical Raoping. Having tea with us in that season must have meant a returning for Papa. Just like now, the April here would make me think of Nanjing’s mild, humid spring, and I therefore would try to cook for myself dishes in Mama’s recipes.
“When Pa was too busy with things in the field and at home, he would ask me to go,” Papa continued. “Rice, cloth, lamp oil, tea, we sold. I would carry stuff with a shoulder pole — the shoulder pole is so useful for us. I didn’t have a bag for books and stuff as you do, you see. I even use the shoulder pole to carry things to school. One end there hung a basket for rice, the other my books and pickled turnips. Every Sunday afternoon I would walk for hours to school, carrying them like that.” Papa stood up and made a gesture of having a pole on his shoulder, which made me laugh. “The school was in another town, I went home only on Saturday afternoons.”
“Were you tired? Did your feet hurt, walking so long?” I asked, saying to myself, “poor Papa!”
“I was always too happy to feel tired. I just loved school! Besides, it was always warm and humid in Raoping. Wearing slippers almost all the time, my feet never hurt — it was only after I went to the north did I start to have cracked heels.”
“What about the islands?” As a curious girl, I was more intrigued by the imagined salty smell of the sea than Papa’s love for school.
“We arrived at the small port, and the uncles would help me arrange the baskets and goods. We walked into the villages and trying to sell from door to door. Some people were really nice. They would ask me, after handing me the money, ‘do you know the way back to your boat?’ Maybe I looked too young and small and easily getting lost in a strange place. ‘Don’t worry. I know.’ I would tell them, feeling confident enough to do whatever I was supposed to. But… the confidence didn’t work the moment I left home for Beijing.”
“How did you decide to go to Peking University, Papa? Wasn’t that because you were the best student in class so naturally would go to the best university?”
“Ha… I knew nothing about PKU. See, you and your brother grew up with TV, newspapers around; in our time — 1950s and early 1960s — there was little information for us village kids. I heard vaguely about PKU, which only seemed too good and too far away for me to consider. Besides, I wanted to be a doctor. I loved subjects like biology and chemistry and was very good at doing experiments. So what I did was to fill up all the preference lines in the application form with one school name: Zhongshan College of Medicine. Located in Guangzhou, the capital city and also the biggest city of Guangdong province, it was the best medical school in my mind! So I put it all over the form, which, however, made the teacher in charge of our class mad. ‘Why not aim high?! Mai Jinzhao, you should go to Beijing! Apply for PKU,’ he said to me. “I couldn’t believe him or myself. I kept asking myself, ‘how can I get into the best university in the country?’ I thought it was just too high an aim to think about for someone from the rural area like me. But the teacher insisted I try it in such a forceful way that I had to pick up a new form and put PKU on the first line and kept Zhongshan in all of the following. Well, there actually was another problem — you had to write down your preferred major, you know, on the form as well. I didn’t know what to put for PKU there. Someone — no, I don’t remember who it was — had mentioned to me something about psychology, which sounded fascinating and somehow related to medicine, so I put the practically incomprehensible term there for the major. The college entrance exams were about two months away, and I was extremely sure that I could never make it to that first line. My dream was all about Guangzhou, the dazzling city marking the farthest boundary of my imagination.
“Things are always like that, aren’t they — what you desire most may never come for all your hope and effort, whereas what you don’t want may easily fall on your head! I was working with Jinyi, your uncle, in the field when the admission came. Renshan, a classmate and also our neighbor shouted at us from afar, ‘Jinzhao, you got in! PKU!’ He was running, full of excitement. At first I didn’t understand what he said, and then all of a sudden the full meaning of the word PKU came across. I was taken aback. ‘Why is this? Why is not Zhongshan College of Medicine?’ I murmured. Looking up, I saw Renshan and Jinyi staring at me, surprised by my unhappy expression. ‘Come on, Jinzhao, what an honor and victory it is!’ Renshan said. But all I felt was confusion about what to think and what to do. While I was supposed to be more than happy, I knew it was but a joke that turned out to be true. Wasn’t it ironic that the best school admitted me but my dream was going another way? But it was simply no use asking questions. Things immediately went out of control — the good news got spread faster than I could imagine. It was like that, you know, in a small place everybody knows everybody else in town. It seemed suddenly all the people in the neighborhood heard that I was going to PKU, which they somehow came to know as a kind of place that might very probably guarantee wealth and high social status. So they started to pour congratulations over us. Our town had indeed rarely seen people getting the opportunity to go outside, not to speak of to Beijing. ”
“See, Meimei, it was just like your Papa became a zhuang-yuan!” Mama, who was from the city of Nanjing we now lived in, liked to make fun of Papa. In ancient China since the late ninth century, civil officials were chosen according to their performance in the Civil Service Examination, a system of written tests, usually on people’s grasp of classics and skills of thinking and writing on statesmanship. Zhuang-yuan is the title conferred on the one who comes first in the highest Imperial Examination. Historical stories and TV shows often feature the merry scenes of someone becoming the zhuang-yuan of the year and making his whole family and neighborhood VIPs over night. The term is still being used today for the topmost title or for high achievements on various occasions.
“Haha… yes, guess the ancient time when people passed the Imperial Exam might have been like that.” Papa sipped the tea from one of the fine porcelain cups, semitransparently white and beautiful with a brownish glow because of the tea it contains, and continued with his distinctly southern-accented mandarin, “People seemed really happy for us as if I was going to be an official somewhere immediately just like a zhuang-yuan. But actually we couldn’t even afford a one-way trip to Beijing, and I simply couldn’t pull myself together to be glad. Only disappointment was in mind: ‘I can’t go to Zhongshan, and I won’t become a doctor! Shall I stay at home then?’ Pa had passed away at that time, and Ma would need my help with the field work and everything. I told this to Renshan, who was astonished by my idea of giving up, ‘How can you think so? What then did you work hard for? It’s the best university in the country!’ ‘Yes, what have I been working hard for all these years?’ I asked myself. While Guangzhou was the farthest place I had been thinking of, Beijing, in the unknown north, seemed simply unimaginable. With Renshan’s almost scolding voice around, I started to ask myself if I was scared to leave home for a completely strange place where there might be no one understanding my Teochew dialect and, according to what I had heard, there would be snow in winter — heaven knows what snow would be like. I was nearly 20, and maybe I should be courageous enough to go out for a look at least? The unknown world was not totally without attraction for me after all. But on the other hand the concerns about Ma and my sisters as well as Jinyi kept gnawing me. If I were going to Guangzhou, which wasn’t that far, it would be easier for me to come back in the holidays to help out a bit; going to Beijing was totally a different story, you know. It took more than 40 hours from Guangzhou to Beijing by train then, and I doubted if one trip a year would be affordable to me. I didn’t know how to talk about all these things with Ma and Jinyi.”
Perhaps history really repeats itself. The moment I had to decide whether to come to America for the graduate study was a difficult moment for the whole family as well. Mama was diagnosed with breast cancer and went through a surgery immediately. My brother had already settled down in California, and if I left there would be no one else to help Papa take care of Mama. I was struggling for long about whether I should decline the offer and immediately try to find a job in Nanjing. They wouldn’t let me do so. “We’ll feel sorry if you don’t go. You have your own life,” Papa and Mama said together. I left after accompanying Mama through the first stage of her chemotherapy. I tried hard to hold back my tears when Mama kissed me goodbye, and I knew she was trying hard to keep hers too.
Papa must have felt the same way about his mother in the summer of 1962. “Ma was always very quiet and seldom expressed her idea. When Pa was still with us, she did whatever Pa asked her to do and never complained.” Speaking of Grandma, Papa held his small cup and kept watching the tea in it. Without a savor, he continued, holding the tea in hand, “Now knowing I got admitted to a school in Beijing, still she was quiet, without showing much pleasure nor upset to anybody. Yet I knew, as the oldest son, she was worried about the future of the whole family. Without me around, Jinyi, fifteen then, would be the only man at home. However, she would never articulate all these concerns to me. She was illiterate and did not have any idea of what a university would be like, nor did any of our relatives. Nevertheless, she had a natural respect and admiration for dushu-ren (literally, people who read, or intellectuals in a more general sense). Perhaps she had always believed I would become a brilliant dushu-ren with my consistent high achievement at school. She must have known that the university provided an extremely important opportunity for me to achieve higher. When the time I had to decide whether to go to Beijing finally came, neither Ma nor Jinyi asked me to stay. The idea of PKU and the excitement it brought to people around us haunted me, and before I knew it I had already started to repaint my dreamland in a totally imaginary northern world. Deep inside, I was actually as tempted by the idea of the “best university” as Renshan after all. Ma, Jinyi and I somehow agreed that I would go at the end of August if I could borrow enough money for the trip. We didn’t have to pay for the tuition fee then, and for the books and other expenses I heard that I could apply for financial aid when getting there. Everything went smoothly in the last couple of weeks. One uncle was so generous to lend me enough money for the whole trip. So with a small baggage of a couple of old shirts and stuff, I started out, guilty about Ma, Jinyi and sisters’ tears, uncertain about the future, yet a bit excited as well.”
While as a child I listened to all this as Papa’s adventure, in retrospect the stories once told and now relived in my mind evoke more sadness, bringing back to me all those memories: he and Mama saw me off at the railway station when I first left home for a college in Beijing, then at the airport when I first went abroad to Singapore, and later when I started out for America. Is it true that, once you are on the way of leaving, it will be increasingly hard to return? Had Papa known that he was never coming back to Raoping except for short vacations, how would he feel the moment he left?
“The nearest railway station having trains to Beijing was in Guangzhou, and the trip from Raoping to Guangzhou was already too long and tiring for me.” Papa smiled, almost in a self-mocking way, “You and your brother traveled a bit as children, but we at that time — we never left home before. The moment when I got to Guangzhou, I was already too overwhelmed to think clearly, having never seen so many people in my life! My head got so dizzy I didn’t know which way to go at the railway station. How lucky I was with a shi-xiong (senior student) who was also going to Beijing — but for him, I would never have reached the correct train to Beijing! It was almost three days later when I finally got to the dormitory room assigned for me at PKU, so exhausted that I felt my brain had gone blank. I sat down on the strange bed that was supposed to be mine and looked up from the big window of our room that faced the south. The sky looked so high and far away in the early fall of Beijing, different from that seen in the south where clouds looked like just above head when I stood in the field. A poignant sense of pain suddenly awoke in me — I realized I had already been far, far away from home.
“The wind in the northern city feels dry and sandy, and I felt so cold with my almost ragged clothes. Within the first week, I started to have cracked heels.” Papa smiled. It was a quiet smile, and only looking back when I myself had been away from home for long did I sense the traces of sorrow there. “‘Why aren’t you wearing socks?’ One of my roommates showed some care. But, you know, having never left the warm and humid Raoping before, I didn’t have socks or a pair of good shoes fitting the newly encountered, different climate. The new college life seemed even more unbearable when I found I had difficulty making myself understood. My strong Teochew accent made me laughable in class, and the loneliness was more terrible than the cracks in the heel. During the long sleepless nights I thought maybe I should go back home, since life there would be a lot easier. When the first public holiday came, I sent home a photograph taken for the school ID, and before long got a letter from Jinyi, saying they were all glad to see I look good in the photo. It must have been the letter that somehow gave me some power to sustain. They might all be disappointed if I went back at that time, failing to survive in the new, challenging situation, not to speak of helping them out with my achievement.”
Papa stopped for a moment. The tea by this time had got the third infusion and was just nice in terms of color and taste. “People can get used to the feeling of homesickness. Isn’t it amazing we can gradually learn to face the difficulty, solve the problems, and survive? I got to know there was a department store nearby where I could buy socks, and I tried to build up my confidence while speaking even with my strong accent… Somehow, with courage and effort it seems we always can survive.” Saying this, Papa finished his last cup of kung-fu tea. In his first year at PKU, Papa picked up mandarin little by little and soon distinguished himself in many courses. All these years he had still kept asking himself, “what if I did go back home within the first month?” But he would often dismiss the question with a rather proud laugh, pointing to my brother and me and saying, “Ha, then you two couldn’t have come to the world!” Maybe life has always been like this: you’ll never know what it would turn out to be if you took a different road. Years later after first listening to Papa’s story, I took a course on American Literature at a university in Beijing. Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” gave me a moment of epiphany. If Papa had chosen to go back home then, his life would have been completely different — he wouldn’t even have known Mama, who went to a university in Beijing two years after he did and got to know him through a classmate also from Raoping.
If I could ever draw a picture of Papa’s Raoping, I believe I will paint it in a light brown with a golden glaze, the color of the kung-fu tea. Against the pure whiteness of the small porcelain cup, the color of the tea conveys a sense of profundity and strength. Papa has not gone back to Raoping very often these years. Grandma passed away years ago. Traces of his homesickness can only be found when he was watching the weather forecast. Raoping is in the area Typhoon often visits, and Papa calls Uncle Jinyi frequently in summer.
I STARTED TO have cracked heels two days after I arrived in Beijing, where the weather in the early fall, just as Papa had told us before, was unbearably dry. While walking with cracks in the heel, I could feel the pain transferring to the whole sole and even other parts of my body. Applying cream and massaging my own feet in night, I missed Papa and Mama and the hot tea at home. Maybe the pain I felt then did not merely come from the heels but from the experience of leaving home for the first time. My heels got almost fully recovered in Singapore’s tropical climate during the three years I lived there. But then in the snowy yet dry winter of this Midwestern town, I found my heels full of painful cracks again.
Just as Papa said, my brother and I had a bit experience of traveling while we were little and got much more information about the world outside of home than he did as a child. Therefore I did not feel much overwhelmed when first going to Beijing as an undergraduate; it was not until I landed in America after a year’s work at home and three years’ study in Singapore that I was first confronted with a strong feeling of alienation. It had to do with the necessity to use a different language in daily life, with people, plants and architecture exotic to my eyes, and with all kinds of frustration and embarrassment I easily fell into at a strange place. Yet Papa was right: our potential for acclimation often surprises ourselves. Gradually, the feeling of homesickness becomes just like the pain in the heel. It is not something gnawing all the time, but, triggered by a certain step, it hurts for a while. Walking on campus everyday, the occasional pain in the heels would make me think of Papa and Mama, of the pain they must have felt when deciding not to affect my future and encouraging me to leave. Unlike Papa, who had no idea about what socks were when he left home, I never lack necessary shoes and socks. But perhaps just because I am Papa’s daughter, I have necessarily inherited such a pain of homesickness. From Beijing to Singapore and then to America, the cracks seem to keep reminding me although I have been traveling so far away, I still remain close to Papa, to home.
Xiwen Mai just completed her graduate study in English at the University of Michigan. She will start teaching very soon.
Homesickness can be really painful, just like cracks in the heel.
Papa does not speak much on the phone. Every week when I call them, from twelve time zones away, Papa would only talk with me very briefly. If Mama is not home, who usually does most of the talking, Papa’s first words upon knowing it’s me on the other end would be, “Mama’s not in,” meaning today I wouldn’t have to speak much. I’m always amused and would try my best to elicit more from him, asking all kinds of questions I can come up with within seconds. Last time at such a moment, I suddenly thought of his heels, very often cracked, painful heels.
“Are you still using the foot cream I brought you last time?” I asked.
“Yes, yes. Very good.” Papa stopped a second and seemed to think of something important, “Oh, you yourself should use some too — I mean the cream!”
“I know. I’ll bring you more next time I’m back. Um…” Reminding myself that we couldn’t afford a trip home this year, I added, “maybe I can send you more by mail?”
“No, no, there’s still plenty left. Don’t spend money on that, it’s too expensive to send. We can wait till you’re back next year.” Papa suddenly poured out a lot of words, as if afraid that I’d go to the post office immediately. He won’t believe it doesn’t cost much. He is always concerned that I can’t make my own ends meet — to him I’ve always been a little girl that easily gets ill and doesn’t know how to take good care of herself.
“Did you have kung-fu tea recently?” I came up with another question. Face to face, Papa is a great speaker, especially over kung-fu tea.
“No, not in the mood,” said he tersely, and then added, “no fun without your and your brother’s company.” Unexpectedly, his words brought tears to my eyes. He seldom spoke of his liking of our company explicitly like this. Winter was still lingering in the middle of April in Ann Arbor, and when I was talking the wind was blowing outside and raindrops tapping the window panes. For a moment I found myself at loss for words.
So I repeated. “You take good care of your heels!”
PAPA HAS SUFFERED from cracked heels for years ever since 1962 when he went to Peking University in Beijing. The stories of his heels and homesickness are what I like best among those told while having kung-fu tea, our favorite tea ceremony. Interestingly, the word kung-fu in Chinese not only means martial arts but also refers to the time and effort required to achieve success in anything from scholarly learning to this particular tea ceremony originated in Guangdong, one of the southernmost provinces of China. The teapot and teacups for kung-fu tea are tiny compared with commonly used household ones. Papa would put tea leaves into the pot until it was almost full before pouring in boiling water. The tea thus made would be much stronger than an ordinary brew and could only be relished in sips. In a cold winter night when Papa was in the mood for kung-fu tea, Mama would help him boil the water, and my brother and I would be happily waiting at the table, more for Papa’s stories than for the tea, which tasted too strong for children. Papa was from Raoping, a small county in the east part of Guangdong. Located in the subtropical coastal area, the climate there was warm and humid throughout the year. He had never been away from home before going to college, and the experience of being at a strange place brought a whole new world to him, at first extremely overwhelming and intimidating. In the dry, sandy wind of Beijing’s early fall, Papa’s feet became cracked and painful as he first felt the pain of homesickness.
In fact, Papa’s “heel” stories are inseparable from those about his earlier life in Raoping. “I’ve been to those sea islands with uncles from our town to sell our stuff,” in a deep and meditative voice he spoke as if more to himself than to us. As he poured tea into the four small cups, rims touching, we could hear a rushing cataract and see bright clouds rising from the table. Little by little, the light fragrance of Raoping’s famous Shan-cong tea was in the air, and the life and the place Papa described all became vivid images before my eyes, misty with a light sadness.
Years later with more knowledge about the climate of different regions of China, I realized that the late summer in Nanjing, the city in which we lived, often had weather similar to that of the subtropical Raoping. Having tea with us in that season must have meant a returning for Papa. Just like now, the April here would make me think of Nanjing’s mild, humid spring, and I therefore would try to cook for myself dishes in Mama’s recipes.
“When Pa was too busy with things in the field and at home, he would ask me to go,” Papa continued. “Rice, cloth, lamp oil, tea, we sold. I would carry stuff with a shoulder pole — the shoulder pole is so useful for us. I didn’t have a bag for books and stuff as you do, you see. I even use the shoulder pole to carry things to school. One end there hung a basket for rice, the other my books and pickled turnips. Every Sunday afternoon I would walk for hours to school, carrying them like that.” Papa stood up and made a gesture of having a pole on his shoulder, which made me laugh. “The school was in another town, I went home only on Saturday afternoons.”
“Were you tired? Did your feet hurt, walking so long?” I asked, saying to myself, “poor Papa!”
“I was always too happy to feel tired. I just loved school! Besides, it was always warm and humid in Raoping. Wearing slippers almost all the time, my feet never hurt — it was only after I went to the north did I start to have cracked heels.”
“What about the islands?” As a curious girl, I was more intrigued by the imagined salty smell of the sea than Papa’s love for school.
“We arrived at the small port, and the uncles would help me arrange the baskets and goods. We walked into the villages and trying to sell from door to door. Some people were really nice. They would ask me, after handing me the money, ‘do you know the way back to your boat?’ Maybe I looked too young and small and easily getting lost in a strange place. ‘Don’t worry. I know.’ I would tell them, feeling confident enough to do whatever I was supposed to. But… the confidence didn’t work the moment I left home for Beijing.”
“How did you decide to go to Peking University, Papa? Wasn’t that because you were the best student in class so naturally would go to the best university?”
“Ha… I knew nothing about PKU. See, you and your brother grew up with TV, newspapers around; in our time — 1950s and early 1960s — there was little information for us village kids. I heard vaguely about PKU, which only seemed too good and too far away for me to consider. Besides, I wanted to be a doctor. I loved subjects like biology and chemistry and was very good at doing experiments. So what I did was to fill up all the preference lines in the application form with one school name: Zhongshan College of Medicine. Located in Guangzhou, the capital city and also the biggest city of Guangdong province, it was the best medical school in my mind! So I put it all over the form, which, however, made the teacher in charge of our class mad. ‘Why not aim high?! Mai Jinzhao, you should go to Beijing! Apply for PKU,’ he said to me. “I couldn’t believe him or myself. I kept asking myself, ‘how can I get into the best university in the country?’ I thought it was just too high an aim to think about for someone from the rural area like me. But the teacher insisted I try it in such a forceful way that I had to pick up a new form and put PKU on the first line and kept Zhongshan in all of the following. Well, there actually was another problem — you had to write down your preferred major, you know, on the form as well. I didn’t know what to put for PKU there. Someone — no, I don’t remember who it was — had mentioned to me something about psychology, which sounded fascinating and somehow related to medicine, so I put the practically incomprehensible term there for the major. The college entrance exams were about two months away, and I was extremely sure that I could never make it to that first line. My dream was all about Guangzhou, the dazzling city marking the farthest boundary of my imagination.
“Things are always like that, aren’t they — what you desire most may never come for all your hope and effort, whereas what you don’t want may easily fall on your head! I was working with Jinyi, your uncle, in the field when the admission came. Renshan, a classmate and also our neighbor shouted at us from afar, ‘Jinzhao, you got in! PKU!’ He was running, full of excitement. At first I didn’t understand what he said, and then all of a sudden the full meaning of the word PKU came across. I was taken aback. ‘Why is this? Why is not Zhongshan College of Medicine?’ I murmured. Looking up, I saw Renshan and Jinyi staring at me, surprised by my unhappy expression. ‘Come on, Jinzhao, what an honor and victory it is!’ Renshan said. But all I felt was confusion about what to think and what to do. While I was supposed to be more than happy, I knew it was but a joke that turned out to be true. Wasn’t it ironic that the best school admitted me but my dream was going another way? But it was simply no use asking questions. Things immediately went out of control — the good news got spread faster than I could imagine. It was like that, you know, in a small place everybody knows everybody else in town. It seemed suddenly all the people in the neighborhood heard that I was going to PKU, which they somehow came to know as a kind of place that might very probably guarantee wealth and high social status. So they started to pour congratulations over us. Our town had indeed rarely seen people getting the opportunity to go outside, not to speak of to Beijing. ”
“See, Meimei, it was just like your Papa became a zhuang-yuan!” Mama, who was from the city of Nanjing we now lived in, liked to make fun of Papa. In ancient China since the late ninth century, civil officials were chosen according to their performance in the Civil Service Examination, a system of written tests, usually on people’s grasp of classics and skills of thinking and writing on statesmanship. Zhuang-yuan is the title conferred on the one who comes first in the highest Imperial Examination. Historical stories and TV shows often feature the merry scenes of someone becoming the zhuang-yuan of the year and making his whole family and neighborhood VIPs over night. The term is still being used today for the topmost title or for high achievements on various occasions.
“Haha… yes, guess the ancient time when people passed the Imperial Exam might have been like that.” Papa sipped the tea from one of the fine porcelain cups, semitransparently white and beautiful with a brownish glow because of the tea it contains, and continued with his distinctly southern-accented mandarin, “People seemed really happy for us as if I was going to be an official somewhere immediately just like a zhuang-yuan. But actually we couldn’t even afford a one-way trip to Beijing, and I simply couldn’t pull myself together to be glad. Only disappointment was in mind: ‘I can’t go to Zhongshan, and I won’t become a doctor! Shall I stay at home then?’ Pa had passed away at that time, and Ma would need my help with the field work and everything. I told this to Renshan, who was astonished by my idea of giving up, ‘How can you think so? What then did you work hard for? It’s the best university in the country!’ ‘Yes, what have I been working hard for all these years?’ I asked myself. While Guangzhou was the farthest place I had been thinking of, Beijing, in the unknown north, seemed simply unimaginable. With Renshan’s almost scolding voice around, I started to ask myself if I was scared to leave home for a completely strange place where there might be no one understanding my Teochew dialect and, according to what I had heard, there would be snow in winter — heaven knows what snow would be like. I was nearly 20, and maybe I should be courageous enough to go out for a look at least? The unknown world was not totally without attraction for me after all. But on the other hand the concerns about Ma and my sisters as well as Jinyi kept gnawing me. If I were going to Guangzhou, which wasn’t that far, it would be easier for me to come back in the holidays to help out a bit; going to Beijing was totally a different story, you know. It took more than 40 hours from Guangzhou to Beijing by train then, and I doubted if one trip a year would be affordable to me. I didn’t know how to talk about all these things with Ma and Jinyi.”
Perhaps history really repeats itself. The moment I had to decide whether to come to America for the graduate study was a difficult moment for the whole family as well. Mama was diagnosed with breast cancer and went through a surgery immediately. My brother had already settled down in California, and if I left there would be no one else to help Papa take care of Mama. I was struggling for long about whether I should decline the offer and immediately try to find a job in Nanjing. They wouldn’t let me do so. “We’ll feel sorry if you don’t go. You have your own life,” Papa and Mama said together. I left after accompanying Mama through the first stage of her chemotherapy. I tried hard to hold back my tears when Mama kissed me goodbye, and I knew she was trying hard to keep hers too.
Papa must have felt the same way about his mother in the summer of 1962. “Ma was always very quiet and seldom expressed her idea. When Pa was still with us, she did whatever Pa asked her to do and never complained.” Speaking of Grandma, Papa held his small cup and kept watching the tea in it. Without a savor, he continued, holding the tea in hand, “Now knowing I got admitted to a school in Beijing, still she was quiet, without showing much pleasure nor upset to anybody. Yet I knew, as the oldest son, she was worried about the future of the whole family. Without me around, Jinyi, fifteen then, would be the only man at home. However, she would never articulate all these concerns to me. She was illiterate and did not have any idea of what a university would be like, nor did any of our relatives. Nevertheless, she had a natural respect and admiration for dushu-ren (literally, people who read, or intellectuals in a more general sense). Perhaps she had always believed I would become a brilliant dushu-ren with my consistent high achievement at school. She must have known that the university provided an extremely important opportunity for me to achieve higher. When the time I had to decide whether to go to Beijing finally came, neither Ma nor Jinyi asked me to stay. The idea of PKU and the excitement it brought to people around us haunted me, and before I knew it I had already started to repaint my dreamland in a totally imaginary northern world. Deep inside, I was actually as tempted by the idea of the “best university” as Renshan after all. Ma, Jinyi and I somehow agreed that I would go at the end of August if I could borrow enough money for the trip. We didn’t have to pay for the tuition fee then, and for the books and other expenses I heard that I could apply for financial aid when getting there. Everything went smoothly in the last couple of weeks. One uncle was so generous to lend me enough money for the whole trip. So with a small baggage of a couple of old shirts and stuff, I started out, guilty about Ma, Jinyi and sisters’ tears, uncertain about the future, yet a bit excited as well.”
While as a child I listened to all this as Papa’s adventure, in retrospect the stories once told and now relived in my mind evoke more sadness, bringing back to me all those memories: he and Mama saw me off at the railway station when I first left home for a college in Beijing, then at the airport when I first went abroad to Singapore, and later when I started out for America. Is it true that, once you are on the way of leaving, it will be increasingly hard to return? Had Papa known that he was never coming back to Raoping except for short vacations, how would he feel the moment he left?
“The nearest railway station having trains to Beijing was in Guangzhou, and the trip from Raoping to Guangzhou was already too long and tiring for me.” Papa smiled, almost in a self-mocking way, “You and your brother traveled a bit as children, but we at that time — we never left home before. The moment when I got to Guangzhou, I was already too overwhelmed to think clearly, having never seen so many people in my life! My head got so dizzy I didn’t know which way to go at the railway station. How lucky I was with a shi-xiong (senior student) who was also going to Beijing — but for him, I would never have reached the correct train to Beijing! It was almost three days later when I finally got to the dormitory room assigned for me at PKU, so exhausted that I felt my brain had gone blank. I sat down on the strange bed that was supposed to be mine and looked up from the big window of our room that faced the south. The sky looked so high and far away in the early fall of Beijing, different from that seen in the south where clouds looked like just above head when I stood in the field. A poignant sense of pain suddenly awoke in me — I realized I had already been far, far away from home.
“The wind in the northern city feels dry and sandy, and I felt so cold with my almost ragged clothes. Within the first week, I started to have cracked heels.” Papa smiled. It was a quiet smile, and only looking back when I myself had been away from home for long did I sense the traces of sorrow there. “‘Why aren’t you wearing socks?’ One of my roommates showed some care. But, you know, having never left the warm and humid Raoping before, I didn’t have socks or a pair of good shoes fitting the newly encountered, different climate. The new college life seemed even more unbearable when I found I had difficulty making myself understood. My strong Teochew accent made me laughable in class, and the loneliness was more terrible than the cracks in the heel. During the long sleepless nights I thought maybe I should go back home, since life there would be a lot easier. When the first public holiday came, I sent home a photograph taken for the school ID, and before long got a letter from Jinyi, saying they were all glad to see I look good in the photo. It must have been the letter that somehow gave me some power to sustain. They might all be disappointed if I went back at that time, failing to survive in the new, challenging situation, not to speak of helping them out with my achievement.”
Papa stopped for a moment. The tea by this time had got the third infusion and was just nice in terms of color and taste. “People can get used to the feeling of homesickness. Isn’t it amazing we can gradually learn to face the difficulty, solve the problems, and survive? I got to know there was a department store nearby where I could buy socks, and I tried to build up my confidence while speaking even with my strong accent… Somehow, with courage and effort it seems we always can survive.” Saying this, Papa finished his last cup of kung-fu tea. In his first year at PKU, Papa picked up mandarin little by little and soon distinguished himself in many courses. All these years he had still kept asking himself, “what if I did go back home within the first month?” But he would often dismiss the question with a rather proud laugh, pointing to my brother and me and saying, “Ha, then you two couldn’t have come to the world!” Maybe life has always been like this: you’ll never know what it would turn out to be if you took a different road. Years later after first listening to Papa’s story, I took a course on American Literature at a university in Beijing. Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” gave me a moment of epiphany. If Papa had chosen to go back home then, his life would have been completely different — he wouldn’t even have known Mama, who went to a university in Beijing two years after he did and got to know him through a classmate also from Raoping.
If I could ever draw a picture of Papa’s Raoping, I believe I will paint it in a light brown with a golden glaze, the color of the kung-fu tea. Against the pure whiteness of the small porcelain cup, the color of the tea conveys a sense of profundity and strength. Papa has not gone back to Raoping very often these years. Grandma passed away years ago. Traces of his homesickness can only be found when he was watching the weather forecast. Raoping is in the area Typhoon often visits, and Papa calls Uncle Jinyi frequently in summer.
I STARTED TO have cracked heels two days after I arrived in Beijing, where the weather in the early fall, just as Papa had told us before, was unbearably dry. While walking with cracks in the heel, I could feel the pain transferring to the whole sole and even other parts of my body. Applying cream and massaging my own feet in night, I missed Papa and Mama and the hot tea at home. Maybe the pain I felt then did not merely come from the heels but from the experience of leaving home for the first time. My heels got almost fully recovered in Singapore’s tropical climate during the three years I lived there. But then in the snowy yet dry winter of this Midwestern town, I found my heels full of painful cracks again.
Just as Papa said, my brother and I had a bit experience of traveling while we were little and got much more information about the world outside of home than he did as a child. Therefore I did not feel much overwhelmed when first going to Beijing as an undergraduate; it was not until I landed in America after a year’s work at home and three years’ study in Singapore that I was first confronted with a strong feeling of alienation. It had to do with the necessity to use a different language in daily life, with people, plants and architecture exotic to my eyes, and with all kinds of frustration and embarrassment I easily fell into at a strange place. Yet Papa was right: our potential for acclimation often surprises ourselves. Gradually, the feeling of homesickness becomes just like the pain in the heel. It is not something gnawing all the time, but, triggered by a certain step, it hurts for a while. Walking on campus everyday, the occasional pain in the heels would make me think of Papa and Mama, of the pain they must have felt when deciding not to affect my future and encouraging me to leave. Unlike Papa, who had no idea about what socks were when he left home, I never lack necessary shoes and socks. But perhaps just because I am Papa’s daughter, I have necessarily inherited such a pain of homesickness. From Beijing to Singapore and then to America, the cracks seem to keep reminding me although I have been traveling so far away, I still remain close to Papa, to home.
Xiwen Mai just completed her graduate study in English at the University of Michigan. She will start teaching very soon.
