It took several nights in the library that Donnan Bei finally finishing writing a reply to Jia Jia.
My dearest Jaja.
I have always loved you, and if anything has made you doubt my love, I think it must be that I have not expressed it clearly enough, or I have not expressed it firmly enough because I cannot hide my inner bitterness, confusion and uncertainty about everything in my life, including life itself.
I don't remember what my father looked like or what happened when I was a child in the country. My family says that during that time my father spent his days sitting on the south bed, not talking much and not smiling much. There was paper and some books spread out on the small table, and he was constantly writing and smoking, coughing as he drinking. Apart from going to school and doing homework, my brother and sister went to the mountains to collect dry branches used to burn, and dig up wild vegetables, and listened to my mother's instructions to do housework and read the books my father brought over in traditional Chinese vertical format, not daring to breathe. My mother barely spoke, sitting next to my father doing sewing and pouring some boiling water for him from time to time. When I grew up and envisioned that image, what I felt was not a warm, quiet, poetic idyllic life, but a feeling of depression, seclusion and loneliness, of being forgotten by the world.
Dad had two kinds of writing to do, one kind of books and plays were used to exchange the extraordinary pay, and the other was the real literature that he felt in his heart needed to be recorded and expressed. Long-term internal torture and hard living conditions made Dad's lung disease worse and worse, and when he finally back to the city, he didn't stay at home for a single day and was sent to the hospital, never come out again.
In the early hours of one morning, when the sky was as dark as ink and the wind and snow were heavy, mom woke up the children and rushed them to the hospital. mom threw herself on top of Dad and cried, while the three of us stood back and didn't know what to do. It wasn't that we didn't know how to grieve, it was that fear overcame grief, we'd never seen mom cry before, the sky must be falling.
When Dad was taken to the morgue, mom told my brother and sister to go home first and took my hand and looked steadily through the crumbling morgue door at Dad lying flat on his back, no longer crying, but I could feel the emotion more than sadness. It was February in the northernmost of China and I was freezing, but I didn't dare say a word. It was the first time I had ever seen a dead person, and it was my closest relative. A year later my uncle died in a car accident. He had been a very popular figure during the Cultural Revolution, with a special car and guards, but was later stripped of all his rank completely. My uncle was talking to himself in a trance every day, and one day on his way to work on his bicycle, he was hit in the temple by a skidding tram. Less than a month later Grandma also passed away. I attended three funerals in a short time, watching their flesh turn into a handful of ashes, not afraid at all, just feeling that life was too impermanent, that all dreams, love and promises were worthless in the face of death.
When I returned to the city, my clothes with patches, my hair stuck together, my face thickly chapped, my nose never wiped clean, mud underneath my fingernails, frightened eyes. Even as a child I could feel the discrimination, which was made even more undisguised by the death of my father and evolved from words to bullying. My brother began to rebel and came back from school with torn clothes almost every day, always with bruises on his hands and face. Mom never blamed my brother, she just silently scrubbed and wrapped him, took him in her arms and wept tears.
My brother made a name for himself by hitting hard, and from then on the whole family was under the shelter of my brother's little fists. But the shadow of inferiority always lingered, because the fact that he did not have a father was irrevocable, and even when I argued with children, I would breakdown on the spot when I was scolded for saying "your father is dead".
