Should the Child Go Along?

In the first days of the seventh month, A-Sheng drummed like a chicken that couldn't keep up with itself. Cai Heng taught him one stroke on the left and two on the right. A-Sheng listened for a while, then his hands started chasing the tune in that short piece of bamboo, and out came a whole string of unrelated loud and soft beats. The drummer pressed a hand against the rim and asked which instrument he actually wanted to learn. Afraid of giving the wrong answer, the boy said both, though his eyes kept straying to the windowsill.

Qin Xiaoman sat nearby sewing an inside tie and immediately told him to concentrate. He said he would, then lost the rhythm again before long. The longer she watched, the more anxious she grew. She’d never had one solid skill to stand on early in life, so she’d ended up doing a bit of everything on the opera boat. Her son had a good drummer to learn from. How could he treat it like banging away for fun? Cai Heng took back the drumsticks, though, and said that was enough for today. He still had to practice himself and couldn’t sit around waiting for someone else’s mind to come back.

Xiaoman apologized and went back to the room ready to scold him. Asheng said nothing. He went to the low table and began writing, pressing harder than usual, nearly punching through the paper. She saw the old groove in the side of the table that Lu Zheng had left. She was about to tell the boy what his father had been like at his age when she stopped. He was looking at the paper in front of him, and already she was putting someone else in his path and asking him to catch up.

Her mother’s letter happened to come that day. If Xiaoman was busy over the summer, it said, A-Sheng could stay in Liuwan for a while. A teacher on the next street taught children their characters, and there was room in the back of the lantern shop. He wouldn’t have to bend over his writing at the side of the stage every time. Xiaoman’s heart stirred at the word ‘teacher’ and sank again at ‘back room.’ The arrangement had some sense to it. Backstage was hot, loud, and busy, and the boy had been woken several times halfway through a sung line. How could it be a bad thing for him to have a quiet table of his own?

But her mother had still lined up the people and the room for this arrangement before asking her. She could picture A-Sheng going to stay there, with someone to watch him by day and a hot meal at night, and herself finally able to go onstage without worrying about where he was. The thought of how much easier it would be let her breathe for a moment, then felt like betrayal. All those years ago she'd been willing to give up her home to sing, and now she'd finally have to send her child back to that safer place and concede the point to her mother.

She was angry with herself for thinking that way. The child was no piece of paper that could tell her who had won the old argument, and her mother might have reasons beyond wanting to take something back. Yet if she said no, would it be because the boy was better off in the troupe, or because she was afraid that once she sent him away, he would rather stay with his grandmother? Right now she couldn't easily tell. She folded the letter and held off on answering with an outright refusal.

Seeing her lost in thought, A-Zhao asked if something had happened in Liuwan. Xiaoman handed her the letter and went to scoop water for A-Sheng. After reading it, A-Zhao said a place to learn his characters sounded good, though Xiaoman should first talk to the boy and see what the teacher was like. Xiaoman took a dislike to this for reasons she couldn’t name and asked if A-Zhao also thought she was doing a poor job of raising him in the troupe. A-Zhao looked up, a flash of annoyance in her eyes at being put on the spot. Only then did Xiaoman see that she’d taken her anger over a letter out on the person next to her.

Without waiting for her to explain, Xiaoman said she hadn't meant to take it out on her. A-Zhao's face still hadn't quite softened. She put the letter back and looked down at the garment in her hands. Watching her turn away, Xiaoman suddenly thought how her mother must have felt in Lanting when she went to fold a piece of blue-green cloth and was told to leave it alone. She had probably felt unwanted too. Sometimes the blame was in a place inside you that you could not bear to have touched, and whoever came near got struck first.

That afternoon the boy picked up the wrong wooden supply slip and read two chi as three. Gao Man didn’t scold him. She told him to check the characters himself. The longer he looked, the less he understood. In the end he admitted he’d only remembered the lengths of the slips and hadn’t learned to read them all. Xiaoman heard from the doorway and felt her face grow hot. Then she grew cross with herself for always treating whether her child could read as a test of whether she was making a go of her own life. Gao Man wrote the character 短, “short,” again and told him to start each day with a few words he’d actually need, instead of thinking he could read books just because he knew his own name.

Later she took the boy to see Shen Feng. He used to play flute and strings at several theaters. In the last two years he’d tired of hurrying from landing to landing every day and stayed in Lanting to tune small instruments and teach a few children to read music. Xiaoman had met him before without asking him much. She used to assume A-Sheng ought to start by following his father’s path. Now she pushed the door open and found people already sitting there, each reading something of their own, without anyone asking what kind of master they were meant to grow up to be.

Shen Feng looked at the short piece of bamboo and smiled first. He said A-Sheng had not even learned all the holes yet, so how was he already hoping to play a long tune? A-Sheng said he had made a sound once and proudly tried again, only to blow a breath of empty air. The teacher neither invented a reason to call him gifted nor threw the bamboo away. He took out a finished short flute, played two notes for him, then had him repeat them with his mouth. The boy did not imitate them accurately, but listened closely; plainly he was more willing to wait than when he sat beside the drum.

Xiaoman watched, still a little reluctant to accept it. Drumming had its depths too. How could the work her husband had given half his life to count for less in the boy's eyes than this light piece of bamboo? Shen Feng asked what she wanted him to learn. She almost said a trade that would put food on the table. Just as she was about to speak, she thought of Cai Heng's hand holding down the drumstick. She said to start with reading and learn some rhythm too. There was time before she had to decide for him what would feed him for the rest of his life.

The teacher nodded and quoted six lessons per ten-day period, at thirty wen per period. He took no pupils at night; he needed rest too. If the troupe went away and the children could not all attend, they must tell him beforehand rather than keep the others tied to one place waiting. Hearing this made Xiaoman feel a little more secure. He was not some kind man who had suddenly agreed to raise her child for her, only another person willing to do what he could and aware of when to stop. She paid for one ten-day period first, without agreeing on the assumption that whenever everyone became busy later, the teacher would take care of everything.

The teacher gave him a scrap of old paper as well and told him to copy 水 (“water”) and 木 (“wood”) first, before he went filling the page with bamboo flutes. A-Sheng crumpled the paper in his grip, then slowly smoothed it out himself.

On the way back, A-Sheng asked if he would still learn the drum. Xiaoman said he could. Even if he chose not to, he had to be able to hear when someone set the beat. He couldn’t sit at the side of the stage and always have someone else sort things out for him. The boy nodded, then asked after a while whether the teacher near his grandmother’s was stricter. Xiaoman glanced at him and only then realized the flute hadn’t been his sole thought on the way. The lantern shop in Liuwan had found a place in his mind too.

She asked if he wanted to go. He said yes at first, then quickly added that he wanted to come back to South Hall too, as though saying he wanted one might cost him the other. He said the table in Liuwan didn't wobble and Grandma could tell him how bamboo frames were made. But at South Hall there was the little clay dog, and Uncle Gu, and Ma. He put no particular feeling into the last one. It was as though he'd remembered to put in the everyday thing he could least afford to leave out. Xiaoman's eyes grew hot even faster than when he'd first managed to get a note out of his flute.

“You can choose today and still change your mind later,” she said.

The words felt unfamiliar in her own mouth. When she was a child, one wrong choice seemed to buy her days and days of being questioned. Going with the troupe, marrying Lu Zheng, having Asheng, each decision had felt like something she could never admit to being tired of once she'd made it. But her son was only eight. If she turned even the question of where he would learn a few characters into choosing a side for life, what would he gain from having a mother who said she'd let him decide?

She did not explain all this to the child. She only said he should study with Teacher Shen for ten days first, and once the troupe's later itinerary was settled, they would decide together about the summer. A Sheng found that answer less satisfying than a straightforward yes to going to Liuwan, yet he was not entirely unhappy. He ran back to fetch the short bamboo sticks and spent a long while earnestly trying the two sounds he had just heard. At last, his tapping no longer sounded like chasing chickens.

Indoors, A-Zhao was finishing a new tie for Gu Ming. The Changqing troupe had reached Qingxing Stage, and the manager wanted to see him perform a full passage. He hadn't borrowed a whole set of new costumes from Chunhe. He'd just asked Gao Man for the old robe that was already entered in the ledger, with the pickup and return times written out clearly. Watching A-Zhao bend her head over the work, Xiaoman's first thought was to tell her not to let a man's singing a few lines make her follow him wherever he went. Before she'd said a word, the familiar tone of it stung her.

Instead she asked whether A-Zhao had any time the next morning. The young woman said she had a piece of lining to deliver to Lu Heniang first and might be free before noon. Xiaoman had meant to ask her to take the boy to see the teacher, but after hearing that, she said she could go herself. There was no hurry to fill every free moment of someone willing to help. A-Zhao looked up at her and smiled a little, then went back to telling Gu Ming not to let the end of the strap get caught under his sword again. She didn't stop working to thank Xiaoman for giving her one less thing to do.

That night she wrote back to her mother, giving her more than a curt “busy” or “no need.” A-Sheng, she said, had spent ten days trying out lessons in characters and rhythm with Teacher Shen. The teacher in Liuwan wanted to know which lines he had got through as well. They would settle things once they knew the summer schedule and spare the boy the trip back and forth in the meantime. She included his foot measurements, having taken them twice so her mother would not make the next shoes too tight from memory. When she finished, she let A-Sheng sign his own name in the corner and left its two uneven bamboo radicals as he had written them.

Just before bed, the boy suddenly asked whether his father would mind that he wasn't learning the drum first. Xiaoman took her hand off the corner of the quilt and said she didn't know what his father would say first if he were here. The people here today were the two of them, and they couldn't ask someone who was gone to nod his approval of every little thing. She didn't say it very gently, but the boy listened closely. Then he set the short piece of bamboo on the low table beside the old groove, leaving both where they could be seen.

When she blew out the lamp she looked at the two things, one heavy and one light, one old and one new. They could share the same small tabletop without either having to disappear. Xiaoman cleared a path by the door. Tomorrow she would get up early to take the boy to his first lesson, and she would still sing the mother’s part onstage as usual. She kept the two times in mind and left them both in a morning she could wake with her own hands.