The Toon Root

Guilan turned sixty the year Houhe Village was marked for demolition.

The news reached the village in early spring. A strip of white paper was wrapped around the old locust at the village mouth, inked with a notice: the whole village was to be relocated, an industrial park rising west of the city, every registered homestead taken in. At the bottom, square and heavy, was the township government's red seal, like a coffin pressed onto the page. Guilan could not read. It was old Widow Qing, leaning on her cane, who read it aloud to her. When she finished she clicked her tongue and called it a good thing. "Move into a building," she said, "heating in winter, no more weeping eyes from the smoke of a kang. And you sit alone in this ruin; one day you'd go and no one would know."

Guilan said nothing. She turned to look at her own courtyard wall. Her husband Tieshan had built it when he was young, rammed earth mixed with chaff; thirty years of wind and rain had raised a film of white alkali on its face, like the spots on an old woman's skin. At the heart of the yard stood a toon tree, dug from the mountain and planted the year their daughter Manman was born. Its trunk had grown too thick for one arm to circle; when it leaved in spring, half the lane breathed its sharp, heady scent. Manman had loved the young shoots; Tieshan would climb a stool to pinch the tender tips, Guilan would scald them and dress them with tofu, and Manman would clean two bowls of rice.

Tieshan left in a spring too. The mine caved in; no body came back, only a chipped enamel mug, its rim notched like a crescent. Guilan set the mug beneath the toon and poured half a bowl of liquor each Qingming, talking to him. Later Manman went to the city to scrub other people's floors and came home less than once a year, and the tree became the only thing left to talk to.

One by one the villagers went to sign. Compensation was reckoned by the mu on the title deed, plus a stipend for a floor in the resettlement block. Most were glad — generations face-down in the yellow earth, and at last the earth had settled its account. Widow Qing was first to leave; at the gate she pressed her dowry camphor chest into Guilan's hands, a keepsake, and added: "You'll go too, in the end. No one outstubborns the tide."

Guilan would not go. Not because the money was short — she had never once reckoned in money. The village head, Old Wu, came three times. The first two he was all smiles. "Sister Guilan," he said, "if your one household won't sign, the whole village's handover stalls, and the ones above will hold me to account." The third time he brought two young men, and his tone hardened. "The policy is set, it comes down sooner or later. You only shame your own name by stalling, and when the machines come, you'll be the one who loses."

"My yard is not for sale," said Guilan.

After Old Wu left, the village fell quiet. Door after door emptied, locks rusting on them. Even the dogs stopped barking at night; only the wind came through the broken window frames, whining, like someone weeping outside the wall. Guilan lit a candle and, in its yellow light, wiped Tieshan's mug again and again.

Manman called from the city. "Mother, just sign. I scrub floors for a living; a month's wage won't cover my boy's tutoring. Your compensation would let me breathe." Guilan held the receiver and heard her daughter draw breath on the other end, the way she had as a child caught in a fault. "I'm not without pity for you, Manman," she said. And Manman: "Then you pity that worthless tree more than me." Guilan said no more.

The water and power were cut in midsummer. Guilan went to draw from the well, but the well too was filled — with the rubble of other people's torn-down houses. She shouldered her buckets to the one bitter well still open at the village head, its water yellow, bloating the belly when drunk. The candles ran out; she sat in the dark and heard the bulldozers far off, like thunder grinding the earth flat.

One night she took a spade and dug quietly at the toon's roots, meaning to lift the tree, soil and all, and plant it elsewhere. The earth was hard, the roots deep; the blade struck a thick root and rang. She sat in the wet mud and understood suddenly that the tree could not be moved — move it and it died, like a person: pull it from its soil and the green on its branches is only a lie.

At dawn Manman came back, on leave from work, with men from the demolition office behind her and the agreement in hand — paper thicker than the white notice at the village mouth, the characters denser. Manman's eyes were swollen. "Mother," she said, "I'd get on my knees if it helped; just sign. Hold out longer and they'll dock the money; what's left won't even cover next term for my boy. And the apartment takes a top-up fee — everything I saved is already in it and still falls short. I'm counting on your payout to close the gap."

Guilan looked at her daughter, then at the toon. The leaves had been beaten limp by the night wind and hung like the white paper hung at a funeral gate. She took the pen; her hand shook, and she set down a crooked mark.

They sawed the tree at noon the next day. The men brought a chainsaw; its thrup-thrup-thrup shook the white alkali from the wall in little showers. Guilan stood in the doorway of the main room and watched them lay the toon down. When it fell there was no sound, only the raw, green-sweet stink of fresh wood spreading up over her feet. Sawdust settled on her shoes, white-green, like someone had scattered a handful of uncooked rice.

She bent, and while no one watched, pried a palm-sized piece of root from the broken base, wrapped it in a blue cloth, and pushed it into the pocket against her chest.

In the city, Manman rented her a single room in a building — the twenty-first floor. The windows were large; beyond them lay a gray haze of towers, one indistinguishable from the next. Guilan sat all day, watching no television, going downstairs for no one. There was heating, enough to parch a person, yet she always felt the wind leaking through her bones.

The balcony was empty at first. One day Manman brought home a potted plant, a pothos, easy to keep. Guilan did not look at it. She opened the blue cloth and buried the piece of root in the pot's soil, then watered it. The root would never sprout again; she knew that. Yet she watered it still.

Manman thought the ugly root a shame and urged her to throw it out. Guilan moved the pot to the innermost corner of the balcony, where no one could touch it. Once, while cleaning, Manman mistook it for trash and tipped soil and root into the bin; Guilan fished the root from the garbage, rinsed it, and buried it again. It was the same root, black and hard, like an old man with his eyes shut.

Winter came; the heating pipes below were fixed and refixed and stayed cold. Guilan stood on the balcony until her legs ached, then looked down at the pot. The soil had cracked into fine lines, like the dry riverbed of Houhe. She remembered suddenly what Tieshan had said: "A person needs a patch of earth under her feet wherever she goes, or the soul drifts."

Beneath her feet now lay twenty-one stories of concrete; her soul had likely long since drifted back beneath that toon. But the toon was gone and the earth was gone, and going back would be nothing but broken brick and shoots that would never come.

Often at night she had the same dream: the toon in the yard green again, Tieshan sitting beneath it, the enamel mug on his knee, smiling at her. She would wake to a city lit up outside the window, not a trace of earth's damp smell, only the bulldozers on the distant site, one growl after another.

She opened the blue cloth again and felt the root. Cool, hard, solid in her hand. A person's whole life, she thought, and in the end what you can close your fist around is probably just a piece like this.

Outside the window the bulldozers sounded again, though she could not say which patch of earth they were tearing now. Guilan listened a while, pressed the root to her heart, and closed her eyes.