Guilan

Guilan's husband died young. She was forty-nine that year; Dajun, her son, was twelve. She swallowed her grief and raised the two mu of wheat alone until the boy married. Dajun took a wife, and the very next year left for the provincial capital to tie scaffolding on building sites, returning to the village only a handful of times a year. Her daughter, Xiuzhi, married into a neighboring county and, with a strict mother-in-law, seldom came either.

Now Guilan is seventy-two. Most of the villagers younger than she have also left. Those who remain are white-haired, squatting against the wall to catch the sun, their talk trembling like dry leaves in the wind. Guilan once kept a flock of chickens in her yard; later she lost the heart to feed them and sold them off. An empty house makes a person look older.

It began last autumn. The village office, long shut, suddenly lit up: a "health service team" from the county, they said, offering free blood-pressure checks and talks on keeping well, even handing out eggs and noodles. Guilan went the first time for the two eggs. After the check, a white-coated young man named Xiaowu took her hand and said, Auntie, your lower pressure runs high, you must take care. Xiaowu was barely out of his twenties, with honest features and two tiger-teeth when he smiled. He called every old person there Papa or Mama, but fixed his attention on Guilan alone — the next day he came to her house, filled her water vat, swept the fallen leaves from the yard, and stood at her gate to call out crisply, "Mom, you rest; your son will come again tomorrow."

Guilan's ears had not heard that word in a long time. Dajun called, yes, but the voice at the other end was always rushed: "Enough money?" "Enough." "Then I'm hanging up." Xiuzhi, needless to say, called less. Xiaowu's "Mom" brought tears to her eyes. She was not unable to tell real from fake. But at her age, between false warmth and true cold, she would rather take the former.

That team was not fooling Guilan alone. The village office filled daily with white heads; Xiaowu and his mates took turns on the makeshift stage talking of "sub-health" and "dampness," and the old folk below nodded like pounding garlic. Third Aunt bought two boxes of "damp-dispelling tea" for eight hundred yuan, but her daughter came home every month and warmed her feet at bedtime, so she never lost the larger sum. What set Guilan apart was that Xiaowu had seen she was unloved — and the more unloved a person is, the more readily she gives her heart for a little kindness.

Over the next fortnight Xiaowu came often, and the things he brought changed names: first a "magnetic therapy mattress" that, he said, would unblock her meridians — three thousand eight hundred; then "cordyceps lozenges" to strengthen her root — six thousand; then a "far-infrared device," several thousand more. Guilan had skimped all her life; the money from sold grain, the occasional remittance from Dajun, the little her husband left — she handed it out sheet by sheet until the passbook showed bottom. She was not without suspicion. But each visit Xiaowu washed her feet, peeled an orange and fed her the segment, and left shouting "Mom" loud enough to carry. She thought: even if the goods are false, this care was real to no one else.

In the twelfth month Dajun came home. He pushed the door open to a bed stacked with cartons, then turned to the passbook and sucked in his breath — of more than eighty thousand, only loose change remained. His face went green; he demanded where the money had gone. Guilan lowered her head and whispered at last, "Your brother Wu... bought them for me, said they'd cure me." Dajun kicked over the mattress box and cursed her a muddle-headed, wasteful old fool, said the gang were swindlers the county police had already warned against. He did report it; an officer came once, said the people had long since fled, told him to wait. He waited half a year. No news.

That winter Guilan lived inside her son's anger and the villagers' gossip. Behind her back Third Aunt chewed: "Dajun's mother, hoodwinked out of eighty thousand — serves her right, at that age still believing in pies from heaven." Guilan heard and said nothing. She knew she had been a fool. But she knew better that within those eighty thousand she had not bought only mattresses and lozenges; she had bought someone willing to look her in the eye, willing to call her Mom. Dajun had sent money; he had never sent that.

Xiuzhi came home once after that, heard the story, and pouted, "Mom, how could you be so silly," then turned to fuss over her own granddaughter. At the gate she pressed five hundred yuan into Guilan's hand and said, "Don't trust strangers next time." She did not stay long, did not even cook her mother a hot meal. Guilan walked her to the village edge and stood there a long while.

After spring began Guilan's high blood pressure struck; she lay abed over half a month. Dajun, tied up in the city, transferred back two thousand. She took her medicine, recovered, and kept watch over the empty yard alone. The cartons by her bed she could not bear to throw away, as if keeping a little something to hold onto.

This year at the Qingming festival Dajun returned to tend the grave and, tidying his mother's old things, turned up her battered phone. The screen was dark; he lit it, and inside was a voice message Xiaowu had recorded the previous twelfth month: "Mom, it's turned cold, lay the mattress on your bed and remember to take your medicine on time. Your son will be home to see you in a couple of days." The tone was warm, like a real son's. Dajun listened once, then again, and suddenly remembered that he himself had not called her Mom, nor properly come home, in three years.

That night he sat in the yard and, without thinking, dialed his mother's number on his own phone. Of course it rang busy. Yet he held the phone and opened his mouth, and found he did not know what to say. The wind came in cool off the wheat fields.

The swindler spent eighty thousand to buy the filial duty that should have been his. And that one word, "Mom" — he would likely never again have the chance to say it properly.