hometown stories

In Nanchong when you want a taxi around nine out by the west river, you saunter into the middle of the intersection and wave down the one making a wide arc around the corner, though he will pull to the curb for you to climb in. Tiny mutton kebabs near the back alley movie theater where ZX and his friends met their teacher one day skipping class. He can't believe that in high school we were free everyday at 2:45. Though not really, I explain, because there was always a sports practice to be at, or a club meeting, but he is not impressed. In high school they went home at 9:00 every evening, and had homework.

HF's parents' have flown to Nanjing, so he and his wife host us for Sunday dinner. Sausage that is a million times better than in Nanjing, and homemade grape wine. HF was a wide-eyed baby with a parasol, a soldier so skinny we barely believe it's the same boy, but when the building begins to shake he drops the picture album and bolts out the door. ZX is right behind him, and neither with a word, though I know, of course, that we are running out of gathered fear, that it doesn't matter that the shaking stopped before I'd made it down one flight. We slip down six floors of cement stairs in our house slippers. The old woman in front of me almost falls on the last landing in her hurry, though if there had been real danger she would have been too slow. Todd says later that there are lots of broken bones to be set in the hospital these days. Later HF's wife chastizes him for running first, for abandoning his guests.

In the courtyard another thin, gray-haired grandma shakes visibly, though she has a seven-year-old girl to comfort. She sits at the cement picnic table and clutches it strong across the wide part, not even a glimpse on her face of the self-depreciating humor that might lighten the situation. There were screams as everyone in the two facing apartments fled down the stairs and into the courtyard; ZX predicts that many people will sleep outside tonight. When we wake at four, or six in the morning and to fierce thunder and lightning, and rain in sheets that will drive down for hours, I feel sorry for the ones protected by their makeshift tarp tents. The next evening Dan and I see people working on their temporary shelters out by the west river. It seems the storm hasn't persuaded them to return to their homes, but only to make their shelters stronger, drier.

XXF used the word 后怕 which means something like "post-fear." Like how you wanted so badly to go on the art fieldtrip that you begged to be allowed to join class one, and did ... how you shake when you hear the news of your school collapsing. And on the others side, the tragic stories of those who should've come back a day earlier; they had a few more things to get done, and postponed the return. How a new branch had just been opened in that city; so many became managers ... but what is a promotion when you lose your life? The regret in her eyes is so honest, because she too put off, waited, lost, is realizing now what's important in life. It wasn't worth putting off a baby for a career . . . especially when hard work and talent don't earn you anything in the end anyway. There are certain ways these things go, and that's just how it is.

XXF told me too of a mother who kneeled to shelter her nursing baby, and gave her life. They found typed on the cell phone a message to the infant: "If you live, don't forget that your mother loved you."