Perhaps everyone will have a moment when they hope to erase a period of experience and a period of emotion. However, killing one's own father in memory is undoubtedly the most sorrowful thing. I don't know how this child is doing now. If he could see what I've written here, I hope he contacts me. I wish he is doing well and can someday calmly say that he is very happy.
Interview time: From January 30, 2007 until now.
Yang Xiao, female, 21 years old, from Beijing. Graduated from a tourism vocational school in Beijing, currently working as a telephone operator at a hotel.
Yang Xiao's story:
I know I should call him dad. I stood outside his ward for a long time, but I still left.
Before this New Year, I had never seen my dad. Since I was aware, I accepted a fact: I am a kid without a dad, my dad died early. That's what my mom told me. When I was little, I pestered her to find out where I came from, she dodged at first, then somehow decided to tell me that my dad died, and was run over by a car, cut into two pieces. The first time I heard my mom say this, I even cried and said "how terrible." Later, I got used to it. Anyway, my dad is gone, cut into two pieces, so let it be. My mom and I are fine.
Last Christmas, I noticed something was off with my mom. She had been laid off and worked for a neighborhood cleaning company, cleaning elevators, lobbies, and doing sanitation every day. The company provided lunch, I ate at the hotel cafeteria, so we didn't need to prepare much food at home. Those days, my mom would get up early in the morning to buy vegetables from the early market, cook porridge and make noodles in the evening, pack them in an insulated bucket, and leave without saying where she was going. This went on for several days, and when I asked her what she was doing, she hesitated and didn't say anything.
Later, one evening, I was watching TV. It was almost midnight, I was about to sleep, and she called me, saying she had something to tell me. I had never seen my mom so stammering. I made her tea and said it doesn't matter, I can accept anything, even if you remarry, I'll be happy for you. My mom suddenly cried and said you're such a good kid, I want to tell you that your dad is really dying, and he wants to see you. I froze at that moment, my dad? Wasn't he cut into two pieces? My mom said, that was a lie, it was also a curse, if he was cut into two pieces, it would have been better, but he wasn't.
Living to be 21 years old, that night my mom told me about her and my dad's story, and of course, mine too. In a sense, I was the fatal weapon that caused their separation — because I am a girl, and my dad is an only child. My grandma had seven daughters before having my dad, so she absolutely couldn't tolerate my mom giving birth to me. My mom said that when she gave birth to me, even before entering the delivery room, my grandma and aunts all left, saying they were going home to cook soup for my mom, but the soup never came back, neither did they. After leaving the hospital, my dad sent my mom and me back to my grandmother's house and disappeared. My dad proposed divorce. Guess how old I was then? Two and a half years old. Before that, I was at my grandmother's house, and my dad and his family never looked at me once. Even when I was sick, hospitalized, or had my leg crushed by a fallen bicycle, they never cared. My mom said she didn't hesitate at all and agreed to the divorce. She said she could raise me no matter what, rather die as an official's father than live as a beggar's mother. As long as the child follows the mother, there will be happiness. A child is born for oneself, whether others like it or not doesn't matter, as long as oneself likes it. That's how I became fatherless—not truly dead, but treating us as if we were dead.
Listening to this, I felt extremely angry. What kind of father is this? He deserves to die. My mom said, now he is about to die, lying in the hospital. Maybe because he is about to die, his conscience has awakened, he found my mom and asked her to take me to see him. My mom went alone. He cried to my mom, saying he was sorry to both of us. Later, he remarried and had a son. Since he fell ill two years ago, his wife and son abandoned him. His wife has someone else, and his son is still in school. I said, serves him right, karma!
My mom said you should still go see him, after all, he is the one who gave birth to you. My mom froze some noodles in the fridge and asked me to send them to him before my mid-shift the next day, and talk to him.
The next morning, my mom prepared a thermos of noodles early for me, and especially carefully wrote down the ward number, bed number, and his name on a piece of paper.
I went. If I didn't go, my mom would definitely be sad. My mom is very kind. Her ex-husband of nearly 20 years is now lonely, and she is still taking care of him. Doesn't she remember how he treated her back then? The night before, I heard noises from my mom's side. She didn't sleep. I couldn't sleep either. I am not a meticulous person, always careless, but that day my mood was particularly bad, my mind was full of details of our life over the years. I can't forget how envious I was as a child seeing others sitting on their dads' shoulders. My mom is a worker, earning not much money every month, just enough to support the two of us. We didn't have a house, living at my grandma's place. My uncle got married and lived with his wife at my grandma's place too, in a big courtyard, we lived in the smallest room, year-round without sunlight. Still, my aunt-in-law often scolded us, calling us "dirty dogs" and "homeless dogs." My mom is very strong-willed. She divorced my dad at 28, and since then, she and I have relied on each other. When I grew up, I asked her why she didn't remarry since my dad was already "cut into two pieces." My mom said, remarrying is easy, but finding someone who can treat me well is hard, so let it be.
That night until the next day, standing outside my dad's ward, my mind was filled with memories of the days my mom and I have walked through, like watching a movie. My mom didn't have much money, but she never neglected me. During the New Year, my aunt gave my cousin lucky money, and my mom gave me too. She didn't have much, just ten yuan. But she ran to the bank and exchanged it for new one-yuan bills with consecutive numbers, wrapping it in red paper for me. When she was first laid off, she only earned 200 yuan a month. We couldn't afford daily necessities, I went to school, and my mom ate steamed buns with cold water for lunch. She begged people to help her find a job, doing anything to support me. She sold pants at a mall as a salesperson, earning ten yuan per pant sold. I saw her promoting those cheap pants, her lips almost worn out, almost kneeling to ask people to buy them. When I was in junior high, classmates could attend tutoring classes and hire private tutors, my mom couldn't afford it, she couldn't do it. When I graduated from junior high, I said I would go to a vocational school, my mom cried so hard she couldn't speak, saying she was sorry to me. Despite our poverty, my mom never let me wear torn clothes growing up. She couldn't afford to buy me clothes, so she made them herself. My mom is very smart, borrowing a book on making clothes from a tailor, buying a piece of fabric, measuring carefully, and making dresses for me. She knows where the yarn is on sale, summer short-sleeve shirts are knitted with cotton thread by her, spring and autumn have sweaters, winter has high-neck and small-flip-collar sweaters... Before I started working, my mom seemed to always be knitting with needles. My mom is poor, but she is very hygienic. Our small room was always spotless. Every Saturday morning, the first thing we did was air out the quilts, and by night when I went to sleep, my quilt smelled of the sun. My mom loves life, I think she lives very energetically. She says it's all because of me, because of me, she has everything, even avoiding illness. We celebrate the Spring Festival starting from the twenty-third day of the twelfth lunar month. My mom makes dumplings, fried vegetable balls, rice cakes, and cuts window decorations from red paper... Over these years, I didn't feel our life lacked happiness, although we were truly short of money.
Later, my grandma's house was demolished, and we could get two apartments. My uncle took the larger one, and since we didn't have money, my grandma took out her savings and added to my mom's, so we could have the current one-bedroom apartment. My aunt said, whoever takes the elder's money must take care of the elder until the end. Moving to a new house, we didn't have money for renovation. My mom pasted newspapers into a hat, climbed a ladder herself to paint the walls, and did all the work alone. Talking about spending money, it was sealing the balcony. My mom hired someone to seal it for me to live in, saying girls should have their own rooms, and I should have one too.
I always thought my dad was really cut into two pieces, so I never thought why my mom struggled so hard to raise me and didn't look for my dad or his family. I never realized there was such a person and such a family in the world. My family was just my mom, grandma, and me. My mom took care of grandma until she passed away, and now there are just the two of us.
I started working, earning less than 1400 yuan a month in total. I give my mom 1000 yuan, and she earns 800 yuan a month as a cleaner. We are much better off than before.
These 21 years haven't been easy. How many grievances has my mom endured? Just as we were about to turn things around, suddenly a person showed up, wanting food, wanting porridge, wanting attention, claiming to be my dad. Who does he think he is? When we were poorest and my mom couldn't even afford to feed me, where was this dad? Isn't he longing for a son? He has a son, and the son isn't young anymore. Why doesn't he rely on his son and come looking for us?
I kept thinking, the more I thought, the more I felt this person was despicable. I remembered something I heard recently. In a rural area in Sichuan, a woman killed her husband. Why? Every time she gave birth to a girl, her husband drowned the baby. She had five girls, and he drowned all five. Eventually, this woman, while her husband was sleeping one night, took a butcher knife and hacked him to death. People like this deserve such treatment.
With these thoughts, I stood outside the ward door. I saw him, leaning against the bedhead, thin, wearing vertical stripe patient pajamas, looking like a lunatic from an asylum. Gray hair, stubble, IV tubes in his hand, squinting eyes. I've seen movies where father and daughter reunite and hug and cry together. I had none of those feelings. My only feeling was that this person has nothing to do with me or my mom. What am I doing here?
I knew I should call him dad. I stood outside his ward for a long time and still left. I took the thermos with me, went to the restroom, poured out the noodles inside, washed the thermos clean under the tap. At that moment, I thought, life is like this. Without effort, there can be no harvest. He put in no effort towards me, so now I won't let him reap any rewards.
Interview notes:
Yang Xiao's interview was finished a long time ago, and I don't know how to write about it. Yang Xiao showed me photos of her and her mom, a harmonious mother-daughter pair. The deepest impression her mom left on me was her eyes, gentle and loving. I have no doubt that they lead a happy life, but there seems to be some regret, unclear what kind of regret. Perhaps, like many others and myself, as outsiders, we can't help but judge others based on common sense. These days, the story about her father she told me, along with her indifferent, nonchalant, and even somewhat mocking attitude, kept haunting me, unforgettable.
It's time to write this article, yet I still don't know how. Bored, I watch TV. Clicking through channels with the remote, I encounter a calm young man's face in a close-up. His gaze is very composed. He is a fugitive just captured, having personally killed his father years ago. Back then, he and his mother were victims of domestic violence. In his recollection, his father was utterly evil, a devil in their lives. During one routine violent episode, he endured silently, using an iron chair to smash his father to death. He and his mother fled separately. He settled in another city, working anonymously. This time, he suddenly missed home. Following the railway, he returned home, finding it empty, no news of his mother. Returning home led to his capture. The journalist asked him if he regretted killing his father. He lifted his face and said, "Never regret it." There was no coldness on his face, just a hint of沧桑(cang桑).
Quietly watching this interview, I fell into a kind of mourning, remembering a child I interviewed once, meeting him at age 20, searching for his father for ten years.
This child had clear, sad eyes. At the age of ten, one night, he vaguely felt someone lightly kissing his forehead in his sleep. He opened his eyes and saw tears on his father's face. He smiled and then fell sound asleep. When he woke up, there was only his mother sitting on the edge of the bed crying alone. He asked his mother, did dad go to work so early? His mother said that dad left and wouldn't come back. The child kept asking, and his mother kept dodging. After more than a week, the child got into trouble. His mother angrily hit him, hitting and crying, saying, "You're so useless, you deserve not to have a father!" At that moment, he understood. His mother wasn't threatening him; that kiss in the middle of the night was a real farewell.
From then on, the child and his mother relied on each other, and he began searching for his father. He asked all relatives and people who knew his father, finally getting the confirmed information that his father had resigned from his job and divorced his mother, then left for somewhere else. The exact location, no one knew.
This was a sensible child, seeing how difficult it was for his mother to raise him alone, he began learning independence—doing whatever he could himself so as not to burden his mother. He had a small hope: if he behaved well and loved his mother, his father would one day return. It was a process full of hope and frustration, a journey of a little boy growing up alone. He learned to buy groceries, cook, wash dishes, and pump air into his mother's bike. There were a few pieces of clothing in the wardrobe that his father forgot to take or simply didn't want, and they were his treasures. As long as his father's scent remained in the house, it meant his father might return today, like riding his bike home from work every day. He heated a small iron on the stove, laying a wet towel on his father's pants, pressing down, steam rising, www.louzh.com, his father's pants became completely wrinkle-free, and he proudly hung them back up. His father's pants were squeezed and wrinkled again in the wardrobe by his mother's clothes, and he ironed them again. How many times did this happen? He didn't remember. He only remembered the last time, when the hot iron pressed on the wet towel, emitting a burnt smell—his father's pants were scorched. That time, he was really disappointed. He knew everything was different from what he hoped, destined not to be the same.
Indeed, everything was different from what he hoped. His mother began associating with different men. Sometimes his mother would stay out all night, sometimes he could hear unfamiliar footsteps in the hallway and other rooms from his own room. He asked his mother, don't we need to wait for dad to come back? His mother impatiently told him, your dad doesn't want us, you need a new dad. His mother's words frightened him. Could dads be divided into old and new? Could dads be changed casually? Those days, nightmares haunted him, being beaten by faceless men forcing him to call them dad, biting his teeth and refusing to beg for mercy hh he only wanted his own dad.
His mother's side seemed to not be going well either. Men who had the chance to become his "new dad" came and went like a revolving door, but none stayed in the end. This continued for several years. He had gotten used to strangers staying at his home, and his mother smoking with strange men while wearing slippers. He even noticed his mother aging, the spark in the eyes of a woman nearing middle age decreasing, and an indifferent expression becoming more common. Despite all this, he never asked if his mother still hoped to find him a "new dad."
Quickly, he grew up, beginning to understand why his mother had no friends, and what "reputation ruined" meant. Others called him "bastard's son," and unlike before, he no longer jumped to beat them up, instead learning to bite his lips and walk away.
But he never forgot that night and the faint traces of tears on his father's face. He longed for him differently, hoping for a miracle—his father suddenly coming home.
He was certain that his mother must know where his father went, but she didn't want to tell him. From the irregular remittance slips his mother received, he saw his father's name and address. He quietly noted down those place names, comparing them with maps mm the roads were too far, he didn't have the means to go, he was still a child. So he came up with a method that was relatively easy for him mm writing letters, writing letters to his father. This process often made him feel happy, imagining while writing the peaceful, kind father reading his letters. Gradually, he became dependent on this method, detailing every aspect of his life in the letters. He believed his father, upon seeing these, would surely miss him, these things that he believed a father should know about his child, even giving him a sense of responsibility mm shouldn't sons and fathers exchange so meticulously?
However, he never received a reply from his father, and his letters were never returned. So he persisted, writing like keeping a diary, buying stamps with his pocket money, once buying 100 at a time. He hardly paid attention anymore whether his father read his letters in some far-off place, focusing only on his desire to express himself, to his father, even to the shadow of an imagined father. Silently talking to himself, he grew into a handsome young man.
On his 18th birthday, his mother gave him a "Longines" watch, very thin, very delicate, left by his father, instructing it to be given to him on that day. His mother was getting older, still alone.
The child was admitted to university. It was a new world, and for the first time, he felt capable of arranging his own life. Quietly, he worked part-time, saving the money he earned. He thought as soon as he saved enough for the fare, he would set out to find his father.
During the winter break of his second year in university, he had enough money for a round-trip ticket. He didn't tell his mother, wearing the watch left by his father, he arrived in Haikou.
He found the tall building, the door that had never opened for him, standing outside, hesitating for a moment, he gently knocked a few times. The man who opened the door was indeed his father. Although his father's appearance was vastly different from his memory, he recognized him instantly. They stood back-to-back, and he suddenly found he couldn't call out the simple word he had called out countless times in his heart. He just stood there, unsure whether to move forward or back.
It was a family completely unrelated to his and his mother's life, with a mistress and children, appearing peaceful and happy. His father introduced him to the mistress, saying he was a friend's child looking for work in Hainan. His father quickly took him away from this home, and they sat in a private room at a restaurant to talk.
The child thus understood the reason for his father's departure—the face-saving father couldn't bear his disgraced mother and chose to leave alone. None of these adult emotional histories interested him; he only wanted to know if his father had ever missed him. However, from start to finish, the child never asked this question, each time he wanted to, he was stopped by his father's silent rejection.
He only stayed in Haikou for one day. His father sent him to the airport, and the words his father said were unforgettable throughout his life. This man, growing old, said he had received all the letters, asking him not to write anymore, because until now, he couldn't confirm whether this big-eyed child was his son.
I miss this boy who has now vanished, I believe he must be very sad. For him, every Father's Day is without a father. He said that when he watched his day-and-night-missed father turn and leave the Haikou airport, the father in his heart died, and he became a child who never had a father.
That interview ended, and this child left me a DVD, the Russian film "The Thief," his favorite. It's a story of killing one's father. Little boy Sanya lived with his mother, encountering a conman named Tolyan. Tolyan was a thief, but Tolyan protected Sanya. Sanya regarded this man as his father in his heart. Tolyan was arrested. Years later, Sanya met Tolyan, the surprised child asked if he remembered them, receiving Tolyan's mockery. Finally, Tolyan died under Sanya's gun, the gun left by Tolyan.
At the end of "The Thief," grown-up Sanya said, the father never existed, never. Little Sanya took off his shirt, revealing a tattoo on his back entirely different from the thief's, this person did exist, impossible to erase.
Maybe everyone will have a moment when they hope to erase a period of experience and emotion, but killing one's own father in memory is undoubtedly the most sorrowful. I don't know how this child is doing now.
If he could see what I've written here, DreamBasha, I hope he contacts me.
I wish he is doing well, and one day can calmly say he is very happy, just like Yang Xiao now.
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