Little Gods by Meng Jin

Author:Meng Jin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-01-13T16:00:00+00:00

All this I could have told you, and more, if only you wanted to know the truth. When I think of Su Lan a well opens and one memory leads to another, one thought to many thoughts. After all she was the kind of person whose combination of personality and circumstance made you wonder what life was for, even if you were fundamentally uninterested in such questions. So ask me how she spoke when you caught her off guard, ask me how she walked down the stairs carrying a stack of books, how she fiddled with the dials on her watch, how she stood on the terrace looking over the roofs of the longtang, as if something immense and invisible were keeping her prisoner.

But you are not interested in the truth; you are interested in answers. I can see it in the way you move, as if your mother has hidden something, and you have a right to whatever it is. Perhaps you believe that solving the mystery of your father will fill the hole your mother left when she died. If this is a mistake, it is forgivable; grief, I know, can manifest in stupid ways. But I think it is a deeper quality of yours—one you have had since you were a child, one inherited from your father—this ability to turn your face away from one thing in order to obtain the other thing you want.

I remember watching you one morning while you were with your mother. You were leaving infancy then, becoming pretty, your expressions exhibiting more and more those characteristics that distinguished you from any other child, the ones that would eventually form your personality. Su Lan had sat you on her desk, next to a pile of textbooks. She had put you in a white and red dress and brushed your hair so it curled around your round face, and slid a shiny white headband on your head. She was applying makeup to your face, her back bent and her eyes inches from yours, her fingers smudging your cheeks and lips with rouge, drawing lines around your eyes, plucking your brows. You did not like these sensations and would not sit still. She grabbed your face and you began to sob and scream and rub your eyes with your hands, ruining what work she had done, so she had to start over; she wiped your face hard with a wet towel until it was red and clean. She spoke to you sternly and held your chin still and made you doll-like again. The whole time you screamed and fought. When she was done, she scooped you into her arms and kissed you and told you how sweet and pretty you were, how much she loved you.

Just like that you changed; it was like a switch had been flipped. She carried you down the stairs out the longtang onto the bus for the university. You beamed, any previous injury forgotten, hugging her neck like she was the love of your life.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.