Marcus spent 18 months in Shanghai’s former French Concession. He is the author of two novels, German Justice, which was published by Blackspring Press in 2020 and Sarabande, published in 2008. This short story is part of a collection of stories titled “Loneliness”. Marcus works in development-finance and writes and paints in his spare time. The proceeds of his writings and art sales go to support the children charity Children of the Mekong (www.childrenofthemekong.org).
Jia Chen
Jia closed the window mainly to shut out the sound of the rain and took her photo album out of the drawer again. Ten years ago she had collected all the photos of the moments she had shared with her husband Bingwen. At least ten more years it should have been, alas, the last ten years she had spent alone in their apartment in the Xincun in Xuhui, Shanghai. She remembered well the day she had been waiting for him for hours to come back, for the screeching sound of his bicycle when he braked in front of the door, for the click in the lock and the footsteps on the staircase. By ten pm he had not returned from playing Mahjong with his mates and Jia sensed that something was not right. Just after midnight the call from the hospital came. At one am she was standing at his bedside but it was too late. Bingwen smiled when he saw her. At least this is what she thought.
“I am sorry, he is dead,” said the doctor. “It looks like he had a heart attack and fell off his bike.”
Bingwen continued smiling and his wife smiled back at him, holding his hand which seemed cold.
Jia remembered she could not cry. The funeral took place, her son Donghai arrived from New York and still she could not cry. She tried, but failed.
“When you cry, you finally accept fate,” she explained to her son. “I just cannot accept it yet.” Her son tried to comfort her but she did not need comforting, preferring to smoke and listen to Chopin, which her son played for her. She had kept the Bechstein in her apartment even though she could not play. Bingwen had been a superb pianist and she used to love to listen to him. Music was love. And now the piano was cold and slightly out of tune.
Donghai was 35 at that time and already working as a surgeon at Mount Sinai hospital in New York. He had married an American born Chinese colleague and had no intention of ever returning to China for good, which saddened his mother. Jia hated New York and found Nantucket, where Donghai spent the summers, just too American. She felt a bit out of place, even though the people were friendly. As were most Americans. Jia did not understand her daughter in law, which of course was another reason. How come that after only one generation, we are so different, she had asked herself at the wedding. Her daughter in law had made all the efforts to welcome her, but only the American way, not the Chinese way, and so Jia felt like an outsider in her own family. When she and Bingwen flew back after the wedding, it felt like flying back after a funeral. First class, paid by her daughter in law, and Jia somehow felt that it was an insult to herself, her husband and their lives that she was shipped back first class, almost as if it was expected of them never to return.
Was it? To her friends she told a different story, how proud she was of her daughter in law, how luxurious the first class flat bed and the Veuve Clicquot champagne had been.
Jia looked at the photos, the wedding photos of her son, her husband in a tuxedo, which made him look so weirdly out of place. She took a photo out from the previous page which showed her husband in 1975, in a Mao dress, a revolutionary, full of idealism. Both Bingwen and she had been dedicated to build a better China and both had become engineers. And China had become such a better place, she reflected, comparing the two photos. Did her daughter in law not realise? Did Donghai not appreciate all the efforts they put into his education from kindergarten to university? And the money they spent on Columbia Medical School straight after Fudan.
Another photo of her alone on Staten Island, and one with her grandchild on the beach of Nantucket. The toddler could not even speak Chinese.
Jia closed the album and took out a cigarette but put it back again as she realised the rain had stopped. Like every evening she walked over to Xujiahui Park to join the group of friends practicing square dance to both Korean pop and then to revolutionary music. She loved the atmosphere, being with her friends, talking about the good times, comparing notes on their smartphones.
The previous week she had met with some of her former work mates. All grandmothers like herself, alas more fortunate than her as their grandchildren were now part of their daily routines. Jia would have loved to live with her son, or at least nearby, picking up her granddaughter from school, accompanying her to piano lessons and ballet classes, teaching her proper Chinese and calligraphy. Alas.
One of her former workmates had discovered on Taobao, the Chinese ebay, a manufacturer of revolutionary clothing. Just like in the early 1970s. The group decided to order uniforms for each of them and when the dresses arrived three days later, they all dressed up and went to Xujiahui Park. Properly dressed, she thought and felt proud for the first time in ages. She did not mind the stares of some of the youngster. What little did they know.
Later that evening she decided to sit outside for a while on the bench in front of her house. Here nobody stared as everybody knew her and she knew that most people had either already been living here in the Xincun in the 1970s or moved in during the Revolution. She finally lit a cigarette and inhaled, slowly blowing out the blueish smoke. She watched it rise into the evening sky, a sky that never ever went totally black anymore, black, as she had experienced it in her youth. Her phone rang but she declined the wechat call request, as she realised it was her son who tried to reach her. A video chat in revolutionary dress would be too much, she thought, and had to smile. He would not understand, having been born only in 1975. She would call him later, or over the weekend. She was not lonely, she thought as she inhaled again and again blew out the smoke towards the trees.