The Matchmaker, the Apprentice, and the Football Fan by Wen Zhu

Author:Wen Zhu
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC019000, Fiction/Literary, FIC029000, Fiction/Short Stories (single author)
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2013-07-02T00:00:00+00:00

I probably need to insert a little detail here about my relationship with Xiao Liu. He was an old student of my mother’s, not a particularly brilliant one but hardworking and devoted. His middle school years coincided with the nadir in my family’s fortunes. My father was under investigation (for alleged illicit dealings with foreigners, espionage, possession of a radio transmitter—that kind of thing), and my mother had been banished to a school in deepest rural China to teach physics. No one learned much of anything in the Cultural Revolution and especially not in the countryside; it was hard enough to find anyone interested in either studying or teaching, and harder again for them to encounter each other. Xiao Liu originally came to us not to study but to fulfill an important undercover mission. He had a crashingly bad class background himself because one of his ancestors had been a shopkeeper in the county town and his own skin was too fair (he was the only boy in the school who used vanishing cream, for which he was universally derided). The local party branch had given him a chance to redeem himself by spying on my mother, who was suspected of being my spymaster father’s top accomplice. The difficulty in advancing the investigation was that all the other teachers, students, and political activists in the village were terrified of her; she didn’t suffer anyone particularly gladly. So Xiao Liu decided to make a living sacrifice of himself and win some political credit by personally investigating her.

Our family was one of the very few at the time to have a transistor radio at home. Xiao Liu promptly dismantled it, hoping to discover the rumored transmitter. Having scattered parts all over the house, he unsurprisingly proved unable to resassemble them, for which my mother ripped several strips off him (at that moment, he was not a radio obsessive; my mother hadn’t yet turned him). He next confiscated our dusty piles of old newspapers, went through every back issue of the weekly digest Reference News, and was delighted to discover two copies missing (which my father had obviously sold to overseas agents in exchange for foreign currency). His toughest assignment was to try and break our family’s code. Both my parents were from south Fujian, on the east coast, and spoke to each other in the local dialect. When my grandmother was still alive, we spoke nothing but Fujianese at home because she didn’t understand Mandarin. Fujianese sounds utterly foreign to speakers of other dialects of Chinese; as a result, we were accused of speaking in cipher. The instant my mother spoke a word of Fujianese, Xiao Liu would ask what it meant. When my mother was in an adequately good mood, she would tell him, and he would lovingly transcribe it in pinyin. More likely, though, my grandmother would chase him out of the door with a broom, as she might an impudent chicken; Xiao Liu would then report back to the

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