Hong Kong Young Writers Anthologies Fiction 4 - 7 2018 | Page 49

At this Sun Yi shook her head so hard the chopsticks in her hair rattled. She put a finger to her lips,
contemplating a reply before she spoke. “Everyone is telling me I cannot find my purpose in life because I
spent half a century caring for other people that I forgot about myself. They don’t understand. Life doesn’t
have to be thrilling to be meaningful. Sometimes, it can just be simple.”
***
The rain had stopped and now a sour smell, rising from damp leaves, hung low over the alley. The
neighbours, figuring their advice to Sun Yi was futile, gave up. Sun Yi’s back continued aching and she
continued telling stories. Her stories were a juxtaposition to her lustreless life. They were exciting escapisms
and absurdist fantasies about monsters eating flesh and mountains adorned with flowers and fruit.
More rains came, but Sun Yi no longer felt bothered by the dripping water that passed over her head. She
circled the same street in the afternoons. Reed broom in hand, white shoes smeared from newspaper ink,
she snaked around the dilapidated buildings. It was a routine of hers to buy a packet of puffed rice and a cup
of sugarcane juice as she strolled.
Tai-tai was waiting for Sun Yi when she returned one afternoon. People whispered as she arrived, all
echoing the same news: this was the sixty-first day; the last day in two months. As they all gathered on the
rooftop, Sun Yi suddenly said, “I have something to tell.”
There was a staggering silence as everyone waited.
“I will soon embark on a new journey to the west. The journey to death. I am not fearful for mortality as I
will meet my daughter in heaven. Death is a solitary experience, one that, no matter how many stories I tell
in my lifetime, I cannot prepare myself for,” she whispered. “We all experience two journeys. One during
life and one after it. This life I was destined to be a caretaker, but not a mother. I did not live among gentry,
but I did live a simple life. And to me, that is enough.”
It turns out Sun Yi’s daughter was already dead, she died of scarlet fever after three months of living. The
handkerchief that Sun Yi held every night was the one that wrapped around her daughter’s body when she
was ill. The stories Sun Yi told of her daughter were her own imaginations of what she wanted her daughter
to become. Sun Yi’s whole life had been one futile journey spent seeking for something that no longer
existed. Her whole life was spent taking care of other p eople because she never had the chance to take care
of her own. Maybe her stories were that captivating because it was to fill a void in her. It was a journey into
fantasy, but one that was so fleeting it never gave Sun Yi any enlightenment.
So she told the neighbours to disband, leaving her in solitary peace. As she sat down on the concrete, Sun Yi
tried to reknot her bun, but now her hair was too thin to hold the chopsticks securely.
Footnotes:
1
Traditional Peking Village
2
Wife or madam