Stargazing

In 2005 we moved from Shenzhen to Shunde, from a two-story apartment to a small rented place. My father had just sold the house he'd bought years earlier in Bao'an District for over a million yuan, and was starting a business in Shunde. I was in second grade in Shenzhen then. Before that, I could go a long time without seeing him even once; all I remember is that every time he came back from wherever he'd been working, he could always find a reason to give me a beating. His reasons usually came from what he'd learned about us over the phone — from my mother, or my teachers — as if a child's love of play were the most unforgivable thing under heaven.

I rarely talked with my father, probably because we were equally stubborn. He was always telling me what I should and shouldn't do, what kind of person I ought to become; but I had no wish to be somebody else's finished work. However firm he was, that was exactly how hard I pulled away. The move that year was the same. Told at the last minute, kept completely in the dark, I set my heart against leaving — rage, sobbing, locking myself in my room, refusing to budge a single step. But all the struggling of a second-grader is soft and powerless in the end, and everything I was holding onto got carried off along with the furniture. On moving day I didn't even leave my best friend a way to reach me. Only later did I learn that my friends had gotten my father's phone number from our teacher — and all they were told was the fact that we had moved. The call never made it to me.

After settling in Shunde, we made a trip back to our home village; we hadn't been back in a very long time. I couldn't see what there was to go back for — even as a child, I found the countryside boring. Past the mountains, more mountains; on the far side of the sea, more sea. Summer was at least more interesting than winter: in summer you could crouch in the grass and watch the insects slaughter one another at close range, or dig clams big and small out of the beach. In winter you pasted up couplets, made the rounds of relatives, and the holiday was gone. Because my grandmother flatly refused to figure out newfangled products, and didn't want to pay that much for electricity either, our house in the village had no appliances at all. For a kid raised in the city, a trip home meant months cut off from everyone and everything urban — including the cartoons I loved most.

Our whole family lived in a brick house whose layout was terrible. The two floors were nearly identical: a room tucked into each of the four corners, with an enormously empty living room in the middle. Almost everything happened in that living room; the bedrooms were strictly for sleeping. No beauty to speak of. Every room had a great many windows for natural ventilation, our defense against the brutal heat of summer nights. Of course, if wind and rain kicked up in the middle of the night, you might be startled awake by the rain, lie there gauging how hard it was falling, and decide whether it was worth getting up to close the windows a little.

That trip home fell in the middle of summer — everything growing wild, ferociously hot, the windows thrown wide without a breath of wind coming through. With nothing to do in the daytime, we could only head up into the cool of the woods to catch insects, or hunt for mimosa among the ferns that covered the mountainside — which was, to be fair, great fun. The only trouble was coming home to a trouser leg full of cocklebur seeds. Plucking them off your trousers, even if it pulled the fabric to fuzz, was tolerable; but when those seeds got into your hair, that was a proper disaster. Life there ran from sunrise to sunset, and the village had nothing going on at night; everyone headed home early to boil water and bathe. My mother always nagged me to bathe with hot water even in summer, but in summer I loved washing with groundwater fresh from the well, carrying a faint chill up from beneath the earth. The hot summer nights had a thread of breeze in them, and every night I fanned myself until my arm gave out and I fell asleep.

The stargazing happened in that summer.

There is always one day of summer vacation so hot you want nothing more than to soak in water. Lying on a bamboo mat in the dark was like lying in a steamer basket: I could feel my metabolism racing, sweat forcing its way out of every pore, soaking bit by bit into my undershirt. If you ask me, when Sun Wukong — that old monkey — was being refined in the flames of true samadhi fire, it was probably only a shade worse than this. Then again, he didn't have maddening mosquitoes droning around his head, so let's call it even.

Suddenly my father burst in and asked whether I wanted to come sleep on the roof with him. Before I could even get out the word "why," he was off explaining on his own — how as a boy he and his brothers and sisters would climb onto the roof to cool off, back when the house was nothing like as good as this one, and what lengths they went to just to get up there and catch the breeze and look at the stars. Cooling off sounded good to me; the mention of stars made my eyes light up. I rolled up my bamboo mat and followed my dad onto the roof.

I had spent kindergarten and elementary school in Shenzhen, so stargazing existed for me only in the lovely tales of storybooks and the dreamlike pictures in science readers — the Shenzhen sky could hardly scrape together a handful of stars. That night I saw a true starry sky for the first time, and awe filled me to the fingertips: I had never imagined my own hometown held a sky like that. Across the deep blue-violet dark, silver-white stars were scattered everywhere, even gathering into a banded corridor straight through the middle of the sky. Lying on that roof, I felt I could stretch out a hand and be joined to the whole universe. I was utterly content.

That night my dad told story after story of the funny things that had happened on that roof, all the mischief he used to get up to, while I giggled beside him. I felt I had never been so close to him in my heart; it had never occurred to me that my father wasn't such a rigid man after all. I can no longer remember what exactly he said that night. I only know that I never again saw that many stars under the same sky, and that moments like that, between father and son, hardly ever came again. A child is the closest person in the world to his parents — and yet so much of the time, we do not understand each other at all.

In all the years since, we almost never went up to the roof again. One recent night I dreamed I had gone back to the countryside, and my grandmother told me my dad was waiting for me on the roof — but when I climbed up, I couldn't find him anywhere. I felt sure that if I waited until the night deepened and the stars came out, I would see him, just like those evenings we talked on the roof. Then the night finally came, and went, and a faint light broke at the edge of the sky, and a voice inside me said: you will never see him again.