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Big City Dreams Along a Shanghai Road
by Rob Schmitz
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CK's father, who had no idea how to play the accordion but plenty of time to learn, took over as instructor. It didn't take long for CK's knowledge to surpass his father's, and practice became a subtle power reversal as son began to instruct father. Lessons turned tense at unpredictable moments, with CK's father screaming and slapping his son for any perceived misstep.
CK's father was insecure, temperamental, and so scrawny he looked feminine. His mother was calm and confident, with the strong hands of a peasant. The Chinese say such characteristics often sprung from childhood. CK's father grew up in the city, while his mother was raised on the shores of Dongting Lake in the Hunan countryside. She seemed to have absorbed the resolute stillness of its serene waters. "She was somehow more masculine," CK said. "She demanded self-esteem and independence."
CK's father hit his mother, too. CK sometimes heard screaming from their bedroom at night. He usually noticed a spattering of purple bruises on his mother's face and arms at breakfast the next morning. As he got older, the boy would try to step in between his parents at the height of these arguments. "I would try to protect her, but he was too fast," he said.
CK spoke of his father not with bitterness, but with the resignation that the Chinese often feel towards people they despise yet also love out of duty. It wasn't his father's fault, he says, nor was it the system's. It was his father's spleen.
The Chinese believe the spleen is the receptacle for a person's temperament and willpower. This belief is immortalized in the Chinese character for spleen or pi. Add in the Chinese character for energy, qi, and together piqi — literally "spleen energy" — comes to mean "temperament" in Mandarin. Many Chinese believe that any damage to the spleen threatens your piqi, making you unable to control your emotions. When CK's father was a boy, he was punched so hard in a fistfight that his spleen ruptured. CK said once his dad had injured his spleen, his piqi had been lost forever.
It was the spring of 1989. CK was eight, too young to understand the news of student protests and hunger strikes from Beijing. There were whispers of democracy and the possible end of one-party rule in China. Hundreds of miles away in Tian'anmen Square, protesters had erected a white statue, 'The Goddess of Democracy,' that towered over a sea of students. She held aloft a torch with both hands and her gaze was fixed on the oversized portrait of Mao hanging at the entrance to the Forbidden City, and, beyond that, to China's current patriarchs ruling the country from inside their guarded compound, like a mother protecting her children from the tyranny of their father. But the students had swiftly assembled the goddess from metal, foam, and papier-mâché in just four days, and they were pitting it against a civilization that had lasted millennia. It was hardly a surprise when China's patriarchs prevailed, employing their brute strength to kill thousands, silencing the discussion about the system that would endure.
In the aftermath of the Tian'anmen crackdown, CK's father ratcheted up his politically inspired rants. CK, again, was forced to play audience. "I was a kid and I didn't understand much of it," he told me, "I just felt depressed. I wanted to be alone. I didn't want to be stuck at home, left to face my father."
Soon after, CK's mother sought an audience of her own. She sat him down and delivered some news. "Ma's going to be staying somewhere else from now on," she told him. "How about every Wednesday or Thursday I come back here to see you?"
At the time, divorce was uncommon in China. Marital strife was typically worked out behind closed doors, moderated by older generations to ensure the family unit — the backbone of Chinese culture — remained unbroken. CK's mind raced. His classmates would soon find out. His teachers would know. He would have to live alone with his father, with only his grandmother as buffer for his rants and tirades. CK's father stepped into the room. Would his father blame his mother's departure on the system too? The boy wondered. Family, he concluded, was the only system that mattered.
Excerpted from Street of Eternal Happiness by Rob Schmitz. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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