寸草心

Twenty-third of December, 2036, four in the afternoon, New Jersey. A narrow street of identical two-storey wooden houses, a patch of lawn under two-day-old snow gone grey and melting into mud at the edges. Marco paid, dragged his case out, and stood at the kerb looking at the house: white walls, grey roof, a strip of paint gone from the porch rail. The porch light was on though it wasn't yet dark. The door open a crack. His mother inside it — not on the step, not at the car; as on the day he left eight years ago, inside the door. She was shorter — a head shorter than him eight years ago, more than a head now, her back bent, one hand on the frame. Her hair entirely white. Eight years, two calls a month; he had heard her voice and never seen her hair. "You're thinner." — "Mum." — "Come in, it's cold." She walked slowly ahead, touching the wall at every step. Upstairs the room was exactly as in the photograph: fresh sheets folded to sharp edges, a dustless lampshade, the baseball team with him second row far right, cap askew; the calendar at September 2028, a circle round the fifteenth, no word beside it. He remembered what the circle meant: go. From below, the sound of her cooking, heard all through his growing up, then not for eight years — quick chopping, the flame, the oil — only with more pauses now. Chop a while, stop a while. He knew it was her back.

Meng Jiao came that night. She went to bed early — "these two years I sleep early and wake in the night and sit up a while." In the wardrobe, the clothes he left: a college coat, work suits, a down jacket, and at the end the soft, much-washed pale grey jacket he wore on that first trip to Chengdu, kept there two years, and hung back here on the one visit home. He put it on. Snow falling fine under the porch light. In the yard a very thin, very old man in a thin worn robe that clung to his bones in the wind, arms wrapped round himself, neck drawn in, looking up at the lit window. At the door he would not come in; he looked at the jacket: "The thread on that button isn't the same colour." The top button sewn with dark grey; the other two pale grey like the cloth. Years of wearing it; never noticed.

On the porch step, snow on his shoulders, a blanket over them — "warm." All my life I was cold. A poor family; I sat the exams for years and failed. Each time I left to sit them, my mother sewed my clothes the night before, under the lamp, very close, stitch against stitch. Why so close? Afraid I'd be late coming back. Sewn close, the clothes last; if I couldn't come home for a year or two, the coat would still hold. I wrote: before he leaves she sews it close and tight, afraid he'll be slow, slow to come home. And: "That time I really was late. I passed at forty-six; at fifty I got a small post at Liyang. Only with that post could I bring my mother to me. The day I brought her I wrote that poem." Who says the heart of an inch of grass can repay the light of three springs. "People read it as repayment. When I wrote it I was thinking: it can't be repaid. What can an inch of grass give back to three months of spring sun? Nothing. At fifty, all I could do was bring her near so she could see me every day." And, and I picked up the pen: it can't be repaid; what you can do is come back, so she no longer has to lean at the door and watch. And the other poem? Daylilies by the steps are planted for a mother to look at, to forget a little sorrow. But I wrote: his mother leans at the door and does not see them bloom. The flowers open; she doesn't look; she leans at the door and watches the road. I thought of the afternoon — the door ajar, the porch light on before dark. Was that light for me? He looked at the lamp with the snow falling under it: "Ask her." — M.

Memo to file. New Jersey, 23–26 December 2036. Home after eight years. The line in my own accounts that was never there.

1. The porch light. On at four every afternoon. "You left in September, when it got dark late; I switched it on at seven. Then winter came and it got dark early, so four. I got used to it. Eight years."

2. The button. Top button of the old grey jacket, dark grey thread where the others are pale. The night before I left she saw it was loose and sewed it while I packed upstairs; the pale thread had run out. "I thought you wouldn't notice." — "I didn't. Eight years." — "Then it was done right. A button that shows it's been sewn wasn't sewn well." And: "I sewed it tight. In case it came off over there and there was nobody to sew it."

3. The precedent. A poet who failed the exams for years, passed at forty-six, got a minor post at fifty and only then could bring his mother to live with him — and wrote, that day, the best-known poem in Chinese about a mother: sewn close because she feared he'd be slow to come home. His reading of its last line: it can't be repaid. What you can do is come back, so she doesn't have to lean in the doorway watching the road.

4. The basement. Under an old sheet, a treadle sewing machine, the paint worn off the pedal to bright iron. Thirteen small notebooks, 2006–2018, one line a night: 4 March, 42 pieces, 35 cents. In some margins a word or two: two needles broken; power cut, candle; Xiao Ke has a fever, didn't finish. Xiao Ke is me. She began the notebooks because the man who handed out the work sometimes undercounted her; once she showed him the book he stopped, and she kept writing anyway. "Your father worked days at the factory; I worked nights here. You needed money for school, more for college." I never heard it. "You heard it once. At ten you came down for water at night and asked what the noise in the basement was. I said the heating pipes." She stopped in 2018, the day my first salary cheque came: "That night I slept right through. Thirteen years, the first time."

5. The sum. Thirteen years; 3,900-odd nights; about 156,000 pieces. In the book: I thought I knew the accounts of my four years at Columbia — scholarship, loans, my father's wages. There was another line, in the basement, thirty-five cents a piece, thirteen years. It has never been in my accounts.

6. Why she showed me now. "In July you phoned and told me about an old man telling his son fifty-two years, one thing at a time. I hung up and came down here and sat a while. I thought: I have thirteen years too." What followed in Turpan, Kuqa and Aksu this year followed me home: the night shift nobody recorded; the ledger nobody read aloud; the person who must say it while they're still here.

7. Three nights. I asked her for any of those nights. She gave me three: the winter of 2010, heavy snow, two days without power, candle wax dripped on white cloth and the piece done for nothing; my last year of high school, me upstairs with vocabulary till midnight and her downstairs at the treadle till midnight, neither knowing; the day the Columbia letter came, ten extra pieces, till three. "I was happy and couldn't sleep, so I might as well sew." I wrote them down in her words under a heading: Lin Xiufen, 26 December 2036, New Jersey. On the 24th at four she had walked to the switch, stopped halfway, looked at me on the sofa and gone back to the kitchen. That day the porch light went on after five, when it was dark, and I was the one who switched it on.

8. Next. 26 December, after breakfast: "Your father's tin box — I kept that too. His table is in it."

"It can't be repaid; what you can do is come back, so she no longer has to lean at the door and watch."
The Tang poet in this chapter spent much of his life poor and failing the civil examinations. He passed at forty-six and was given a minor post at fifty, and only then could he bring his mother to live with him. On that occasion he wrote the most famous poem in Chinese about a mother: she sews her son's clothes close and tight the night before he leaves, "afraid that he will be slow, slow to come home." It ends by asking how an inch of grass could ever repay three months of spring sun.
The poem is usually taught as a lesson in gratitude. Read against his life, it is also an admission of accounting: some debts have no instrument of repayment. What remained possible was presence.
Every family balance sheet has entries of this kind. The visible ones are wages, scholarships, loans. The invisible ones are contributions made at hours when the beneficiary was asleep, recorded, if at all, in someone else's notebook: a line per night, so many pieces, so many cents. They do not appear in anyone's analysis of how a career was financed, and the person who made them rarely mentions them.
What brings them to light is often not a question but an example. A mother hears her son describe an old man telling his son fifty-two years of work, and goes down to the basement and sits by the machine.
A button that shows it's been sewn wasn't sewn well.