Yaomei'er

“Yaomei’er, yao de.”

Whenever you think of your mother, it always begins with these three words. Not with her face—her face, in memory, had long ago been scorched at the edges by the sun—but with her voice. Voices can be kept, like seeds stored in a clay jar, still able to sprout once they fall into the earth.

Your mother taught you to speak under the oil lamp. Not the language of the village, but another one, one that made your tongue curl and your endings rise. She said it was called Sichuanese, that her home was in Leshan, where a great river ran past the edge of the city, where boats moved on the water and the boat-trackers called out their work songs. She said that across the river there was a mountain, and on the mountain sat a Buddha, and the Buddha’s instep reached down into the river, and if you stepped on it you could hear the water running between his toes. You didn’t believe her. How could a Buddha sit on a mountain? Your mother said, yao de—never mind, just hold onto it for now; you’ll believe it when you see it with your own eyes.

She called “to know” xiaode, called “comfortable” bashi, called “it doesn’t matter” mo laitou. She wrote these words out in the sand, the characters upright, each stroke its own stroke. Her fingers were thick, the creases of her nails stained with red earth that never washed clean, but the characters she wrote came out clean.

Your mother had left home to work abroad. The labor contractor took their passports, said he’d keep them safe. He kept them for many years. Your mother said that once she got her passport back she would return to Sichuan. She said this while husking corn, her hands never stopping, as if she were talking about someone else. Later she began to cough—first at night, then in the daytime too. The clinic was far, the medicine expensive. She coughed through two rainy seasons, and then she called you to her bedside and pressed a photograph into your hand. On the back, in pencil, was an address, half the characters blurred by sweat. She said: Go. Go to Sichuan. Go see that Buddha.

After saying this, she breathed out one more word, very softly: “Mo laitou.”

Mo laitou. Right up to her death, she was saying it doesn’t matter.

That year you were twelve. Your father had left long ago, leaving a debt behind. The village had its rules: a debt was paid with a person. You went to work in the creditor’s house—carrying water, chopping wood, husking corn—until the debt was cleared. You never asked why. Someone raised inside the rules does not ask why.

After the rainy season, a team of Chinese people came to the village, setting up white tents on the elementary school field for a free clinic. The chieftain’s sister-in-law had nearly died in childbirth; the bleeding wouldn’t stop, and she’d been carried over from another hospital. It was Dr. Lin, the team leader, who pulled her back from the cliff’s edge. The chieftain was deeply grateful. Gratitude must be repaid. He led you before Dr. Lin and said: This person—I give her to you.

The tent went quiet for a moment.

You remember what Dr. Lin looked like: thin, deeply tanned, the arm of his glasses mended with tape. He stood up and spoke a long stream of words to the interpreter. The interpreter said: Dr. Lin says a person cannot be given. A person is not a cow, not a goat, not a gift. Saving a life is simply our duty; we cannot accept thanks like this.

You stood where you were, thinking you were about to be handed back. But then he turned to look at you and asked: would you be willing to work at the clinic—sweeping floors, washing gauze, registering names, drawing wages each month, the wages recorded in a ledger, entry by entry, to pay off your family’s debt to the village.

You didn’t understand all of it, but you understood “drawing wages.” Working for a creditor and working for wages were two different things. In the first, you were a thing in a ledger; in the second, you were a person.

The clinic days had their hours. You learned to read forms, learned to write pinyin in the register. One noon, Dr. Lin answered the phone and spoke a few sentences in a language you hadn’t heard in years—tongue curling, endings rising. The medicine bottle nearly slipped from your hand. When he hung up, you heard yourself speak:

“Dr. Lin, you’re from Sichuan, ain’t ya?”

He turned around and for a long while said nothing. Then he said: say it again.

You said: “Yao de. Bashi de ban. Yaomei’er, let’s go, back home for dinner.”

You poured out everything your mother had taught you. When you reached “back home for dinner,” you stopped yourself first. You hadn’t said that sentence in over a decade. The moment it left your mouth, it felt like a coal, red-hot, lodged in your throat.

Dr. Lin took off his glasses and wiped them. He said: Yaomei’er, don’t rush. Take your time. Start from the beginning.

You started from the beginning. About your mother, the passports, the characters in the sand, the Buddha’s foot in the river. Dr. Lin turned the photograph over, copied down that half page of pencil writing, and said: Sichuan, Leshan. This address—I’ll find a way.

What came after was letter after letter, phone call after phone call, one rainy season of waiting followed by another. The medical team contacted people back home; someone traced the address to an alley in Leshan and found a white-haired old woman. The old woman said her daughter had left to work abroad thirty years ago and never came back. She wept, and agreed to a test. Blood samples crossed the sea. On the day the results came in, Dr. Lin laid a piece of paper in front of you and said: She’s your grandmother. Your own flesh and blood.

There had been rumors in the village. Some said you’d gone off with foreigners and would never come back; some said you’d been sold. The creditor’s family came to make a scene too. The chieftain summoned you, and you sat for a long while while he smoked through a whole pipe. Then he said: Go. The debts of your mother’s generation are settled, once and for all. He said, too: A person is not a thing to be given away—that doctor was right. That way of thinking, you people brought it here. I accept it.

The day you left, you looked back once at the school field. The white tents were gone; only the flagpole still stood.

The plane landed at dawn. Someone at arrivals held up a sign. On the sign: Bai He.

That was the name the medical team had given you. Before that, the villagers had called you Masha, and Masha was written in the creditor’s ledger too. Dr. Lin said your mother once described her old home—fields and paddies, golden grain, white egrets coming down to land. The bai of egret, the he of rice seedling. He asked if you wanted it. You said: yao de. From then on, the name was your own.

Your grandmother was smaller than you’d imagined, and taller too. She stood at the exit, a woven bag at her feet. When she saw you, she didn’t cry first; she reached out to touch your hair first, touching it for a long, long time, and then said:

“Yaomei’er, you’ve grown so tall.”

The words you’d rehearsed dozens of times on the plane—all of them vanished then. You simply held her hand. Her fingers were thick, the creases of her nails stained with dirt that would not wash clean, exactly like another pair of hands in your memory.

Everything after belongs to after. You moved into the old house in the alley, learned to pedal a three-wheeled cart to the market, learned to rub your grandmother’s back when she coughed. You went to see the Buddha. The Buddha really did sit on the mountain; the Buddha’s foot really did reach into the river. You climbed the stone steps along the bank, and with each step you spoke one of the sentences your mother had taught you, like returning the seeds from the clay jar to the earth, one grain at a time.

There were boats on the river. Someone on a boat was calling out a work song.

You stood still at the foot of the Buddha, faced the river, and in your mother’s accent, softly, said three words:

“Mo laitou.”

(This story is adapted from real events. All names are pseudonyms.)