The Empty Third Bowl

Shen Changshun is sixty-one this year; his wife, Zhou Fenglan, is fifty-nine. The two of them live in an old brick house at the head of Shenjiawa Village. Since Mingyuan died, not a single new thing has been added to that house.

Before dawn Fenglan is up, and the first thing she does is sweep Mingyuan's room. The door is locked, and the key is tied to the belt at her waist. She pushes it open, wipes the table clean, straightens the photograph of him in his school uniform, then takes from the cupboard the one set of bowl and chopsticks that belonged to Mingyuan, out of the three, and sets it in its proper place. Mingyuan is gone; no rice is put in the bowl, but it is set, for him to see. Changshun tells her to stop, that it only weighs on the heart, but Fenglan pays him no mind and does it every day.

These days the township family-planning office requires an annual review for the bereavement stipend. Changshun caught a neighbor's tractor to town at first light. The clerk was a young woman who flipped through the certificate he handed over without looking up. "What year did your son pass? Did you bring the death certificate? Is your wife still living?" Changshun said the twelfth month of 2013, that he brought the certificate every year. The woman went through the motions, said the stipend would come next month, a few hundred yuan a month, had him press his thumbprint, then passed him a sheet and told him to sign, on the public notice posted at the village gate, that he "acknowledged his status as a bereaved-only-child-assisted household." Changshun's hand trembled a little as he pressed it. He remembered that more than twenty years before, he had received the Certificate of Glorious Only Child in this very room. A different person had sat there then, all smiles, saying, "Glorious! The state rewards you. Relying on policy beats relying on a son for your old age." Now the reward had become assistance, and the first step of assistance was to let the whole village know: you are a household that has lost its only child.

On the way home he met Auntie Wang at the village entrance. Her only son had married the month before, thirty tables of guests; Fenglan had sent word through someone, meaning to contribute a gift, and Auntie Wang had not answered. Now they ran into each other head-on, and Auntie Wang acted as though she had not seen him, quickened her step, and cut across to the other side of the road. Everyone in the village is like this. In the first years after Mingyuan left, people still came to urge Fenglan to take it easy, saying the dead cannot return. Those who urged stopped coming too. The two of them, it is as if something unclean clings to their bodies; whoever draws near, draws bad luck.

Chunni was Mingyuan's wife. When Mingyuan left, she was three months with child. She bore Xiaoyuan and lived in Shenjiawa for a year; the child had just learned to call her Grandma when she left with an out-of-town truck driver, and took Xiaoyuan with her. The night before she left, Fenglan held Xiaoyuan and wept till dawn. Chunni knelt and kowtowed. "Ma, I have wronged you, but I have to live." After that, no word. Fenglan later asked someone to inquire, and heard Chunni had remarried in the south, and Xiaoyuan had taken his stepfather's surname. Fenglan did not blame her; she only locked Mingyuan's room tighter, the key never leaving her body.

On Qingming they went to Mingyuan's grave. It lies on the slope behind the village, where the grass grows taller than a man. Changshun bent to pull the weeds; Fenglan laid out three sets of bowl and chopsticks and poured half a cup of liquor into Mingyuan's. The wind came up and scattered the paper money across the slope. Fenglan said suddenly, "Changshun, the latter half of last night I dreamed Mingyuan came back. He stood in the doorway and said, Ma, I'm hungry. I scrambled up and felt my way in the dark to dish out rice; when I'd filled the bowl and turned, the space beside me was empty. No one was there." Changshun said nothing, but crouched on the ground and snapped a blade of grass in two.

At dusk the two went home. Fenglan went again to open Mingyuan's room and set the bowl. Changshun sat in the front room and looked up at the Certificate of Glorious Only Child on the wall, red-backed and gold-lettered, framed, thick with dust. Across the top it reads: "Heed the call of the nation; one child is best; the government will provide for your old age." Changshun stared a long while, then rose and took a damp cloth to wipe it; but as he wiped, his hand stopped. Outside the window the sky darkened. Inside, the old couple: from one pot, two bowls. The third set of bowl and chopsticks sits in Mingyuan's room, day after day, year after year, gathering dust, and no one comes to touch it.