Jialin leaned on his pillow. When his mother entered the shack with a late breakfast he did not move. She had forgotten the kettle of boiled water for the heater, but he did not ask. The night before, his three brothers had come home with blood on their hands and shirts. They had, in a gang fight, smashed a boy's head and, for the first time in their lives, understood the taste of fear. All night they couldn't sleep, taking turns looking out the gate for possible enemies coming with bats and bricks, or worse, policemen with handcuffs. Jialin's youngest brother, who had never talked much to him, came into the shack before daybreak, asking Jialin to take care of their parents if it reached a point where the three of them had to flee for a few years.
Jialin had thought the boy's dramatic behavior laughable but had not said so. Before the boy had entered, Jialin, with his transistor radio tuned to the Hong Kong station, had heard the news that in Beijing the secret police had started to carry out arrests.
“I heard people talk about yesterday's event in the marketplace,” Jialin's mother said, and put the food on the makeshift table made of an old tree stump.
“What did they say?”
“They said the government wouldn't let anyone get off so easily.”
Jialin did not move. “What else did they say?”
“They said the woman announcer is married to an important figure so there's no need for her to worry,” Jialin's mother said, and then glanced at him. “You were with them, weren't you?”
Jialin had always told his family that his friends came to read books with him, but he knew that his mother could easily have guessed the connection. “Other things? What else did people say?”
“They said she must be using the rally to become famous,” Jialin's mother said. “But I don't understand. She's already famous. Why did she need to become more famous?”
“Don't listen to rumors,” said Jialin. “People think they know more than they do.”
“So were you one of them?”
“Yes.”
Jialin's mother did not speak, and after a while, he looked at her and saw her quietly wiping her eyes.
“Mama, don't worry,” he said. “Nothing has happened, and people are just indulging their imaginations.”
“There must not be a heaven above us,” Jialin's mother said, dabbing at her eyes with the corner of her blouse. “Or else, why were you given a brain only to get sick, while your brothers are healthy and strong but empty- headed?”
“They'll learn their lesson.”
“How about you? I can't afford to lose you,” Jialin's mother said, and tears dampened the front of her blouse.
Jialin smiled. It was no secret that he would die soon. What mattered to him was how he left this world. His mother wanted him to die in her arms; she wanted him to belong to her, and her only.
“Do you think there'll be trouble? People say different things and I don't know whom I should believe.”
“Listen to nothing and believe no one,” Jialin said.
“What will happen to you?”
Jialin shook his head. Perhaps it was only a matter of days, or hours, before someone would come into his shack and break his mother's heart, but he did not want to share this knowledge with her. “Think about it, Mama, I wasn't meant to live forever.”
Jialin's mother turned her head away.
“There's nothing to be sad about,” Jialin said. “Thirty years from now—no, let's hope it's not that long. Ten years, or five years, from now, they will come to your door and say to you that your son Jialin was a hero, a pioneer, a man of foresight and courage.”
“I would rather you were as unambitious as your brothers.”
“They'll live their lives in their ignorance, but not I. Why do I read books if not to live up to principles that are worth striving for?”
“I would rather you had never touched a book in your life. I wish I had never stolen a book for you.”
“That's a stupid way of thinking, Mama,” Jialin said, shocked by his own vehemence. After a bout of coughing, he said in a gentle voice, “What else can I leave for you, Mama? I can't give you grandchildren.”
Jialin's mother left the shack without answering; on the way out she bumped into the door frame. He listened to her broken sobs disappear into the depths of the house and had to force his heart to remain hard, untouched by his mother's tears.
THE TEACHER'S HEART WAS restless on the Monday after Ching Ming. She gave the class an assignment of copying the textbook, and sat for a while at her desk, then went to the hallway to talk to another teacher. The children, still excited, could not keep quiet. Boys exchanged tales of ghosts and wild animals they had spotted on the mountain; girls showed off souvenirs offered by nature-bookmarks made by pressing new leaves and wildflowers between the pages of a book, feathers of bright colors, bracelets made from linked dry berries. Only when the classroom became boisterous did the teacher come in and bang on the wooden blackboard with a ruler. They were to copy every lesson in the textbook three times instead of one, the teacher announced, and they would not be allowed to go home for lunch before finishing the work.
The children, terrified by the prospect of being kept behind for the midday break, stopped wiggling on their benches and started to write, their pencils scratching on the paper like a thousand munching silkworms. Tong counted the few blank pages in his exercise book—he did not have enough pages for the assignment, but even if he had the space to copy all the words in the world, his heart was not in it today. Ear had not come home for another night, and Tong's hopes were dimming.
Dogs got stolen and eaten all the time, his father had said the night before, and there was no reason to cry over it; the world would become a crowded place if dogs, or, for that matter, little children, did not disappear. Tong's mother had held his hand while his father ran on with his drunken philosophy about stolen children and butchered dogs. However, when Tong's father fell into a stupor, she herself repeated the same message. Once the
