Crying Won’t Bring Rice

I am a simple man. 

When I left my wife, people spat at my name. She came from a well-off family: owned land, had servants before the Revolution, silk bedsheets even when the rest of us lined our jackets with  paper. I was just a factory man. I realized she only loved the idea of being different to rebel  against her late father. 

I left because the silence in our house was louder than shouting. My wife looked at me like I was  already gone. Our sons, Yong and Dawei, stopped calling me Baba long before I walked out.  When I left, they didn’t cry. They were not even there to watch me go. 

Just to be clear, I am not a saint. I have done wrong things that are not misunderstood. But I was  a middle-aged man. Not young enough to begin again, not old enough to know better. My joints  already hurt when I squatted too long, and my reflection had started to look like my father’s. I  had built nothing, really. Just years of factory smoke in my lungs and bowls of food scraped too  clean. 

I found Lanhua in a village where the air was thin and the nights bit through your clothes. She  was alone with 4 children and a field of rotten turnips. Her husband had been crushed in a textile  mill—buried without a coffin, just wrapped in tarpaulin. She was thin like bamboo in winter, and  still, she carried 4 children and a broken house on her back. I first saw her dragging a sack of rice  up the road, her boy, Ming, clinging to her waist, her 3 girls, Ling, Mei, and Yan, tagging along barefoot in the mud. 

She didn’t cry at the funeral. “Crying won’t bring rice,” she said. 

So, I brought her rice. Then cabbage. Then myself. I slept in the shed the first year, laid bricks, and patched the roof in the day. Her son Ming wouldn’t speak to me. Mei peed her pants the first  time I tried to carry her. I didn’t blame them. I was merely a stranger. 

Years passed. I took a few factory jobs in the city, hauled bricks in the rain, and came home with  blood under my fingernails. I paid for Ming’s motorcycle. I sold my winter jacket for Yan’s  school shoes. Lanhua never said thank you. She didn’t have to. 

Then one year, Ming started bringing home cigarettes and a bad attitude. He had told me,  “You’re not my father. You’re just a squatter.” Mei laughed so hard she flipped her bowl of  potatoes onto the floor. 

I waited for Lanhua to speak, to say something in my defense. She was washing radishes in a  metal basin. She didn’t even look up. 

They stopped letting me eat with them, not that I wanted to. My bowl was left on the front step  like a dog’s. I didn’t complain. I had slept in worse places. Been hated by kinder people. 

When I could no longer work, when my hands trembled too much to hold bricks, when my  breath came in ragged wheezes—they told me it was time to leave. I had become an old chair in 

the corner, taking up space. Lanhua didn’t say much. She just handed me a red plastic bag with some steamed buns and told me not to come back. Ling threw my bag into the yard. 

Ling, the eldest, turned out just like her mother: sharp-tongued, always with something to prove. She only finished middle school, barely at that. Always at the bottom of her class, scraping by  with red-marked test papers stuffed in the folds of her coat. But she had grit. That kind of woman  who doesn’t ask for a seat at the table—she kicks the chair out from under someone else and  takes it. She clawed her way into the courthouse as a temporary, filing case notes and pouring  tea, then climbed up the ranks. They say it was helped more by her looks than her intelligence.  She’s a judge now. Maybe she is. Or maybe she just wears the title like her mom’s cloth shoes— too big for her, but she wore them with such confidence that no one questioned her.  

The second, Yan, married some weasel-looking, greasy little man with money. Always in short sleeved dress shirts and fake gold rings, the kind who laughs too loudly at his own jokes. She  bosses him around, and he obeys like a dog. She got what she wanted, I think. A husband who  listens, a house of her own. I never hear from her. 

Mei, the youngest, was sent off to live with her aunt. Too quiet, too soft. She disappeared from  the family. I think of her often, though I never know where to write. 

“Get out,” Ling said. “We don’t owe you anything.” 

I looked at Lanhua. Her hands were folded, her face like stone. 

“I built this house,” I said quietly. “With my hands.” 

Ming lit a cigarette. “So build another.” 

I walked away. No one followed. 

The sky was already turning. Behind me, a dog barked. The door slammed shut. I didn’t cry. Crying doesn’t bring rice.