The Sugar Man's Mark
Old Gu has blown sugar figures at the west-street locust for forty years. A thin boy watches each dusk. On the seventh day he slips Gu a paper: a crooked-neck rooster and 'Mother says this is the mark Father left.' Gu knows that lean—his vanished apprentice Shen once blew such roosters. Gu finds the boy's mother, confirms the man was his apprentice, leaves him the old molds. Whether the father still lives, neither says. Gu returns and each evening blows one crooked rooster he never sells.
Under the old locust at the west-street mouth, Old Gu had kept his sugar-figure stall for forty years. A small copper pot, a pinch of malt sugar, a few bamboo sticks—wind or rain, he blew that lump of syrup into mice, roosters, plump little dolls. The neighbors called him Sugar Gu; his real name nobody recalled.
Gu spoke little, but his eyes missed nothing. Which child was hungry, which woman had come to market—he knew at a glance. That spring, just after the gravesweeping festival, a thin, tall boy of maybe thirteen or fourteen began to circle past the tree each day after school. He would plant himself and watch Gu blow sugar. He watched long, but never reached for his coins, never left. Gu noticed the boy's left wrist bore a reddish-brown scar, as if burned.
On the seventh day the boy suddenly drew a crumpled paper from his chest, pressed it into Gu's hand, and bolted. On it was drawn a crooked-necked sugar rooster; on the back, in pencil: "Mother says this is the mark Father left."
Gu's hand trembled. The crooked-necked rooster—he knew it. Thirty years before, he had taken an apprentice, surname Shen, clumsy-handed, whose roosters always leaned. Gu teased him; the Shen boy said, let it lean, call it a mark. Later Shen married, left to seek work elsewhere, and was heard from no more.
Gu tucked the paper into his chest. The next day, closing his stall, he went to the riverside. The boy's home was two earthen rooms by the shoal. The mother was spreading tofu to dry at the doorway. Seeing Gu, her strainer froze. Gu passed her the paper. The woman looked a long while, her eyes reddening. She said, the year he left, at the door he pressed that sugar rooster into the child's hand and said: if ever you meet one who blows sugar into living things, that is my master. He said his master knows a craft by its marks.
Gu asked, and the man? The woman shook her head. Eleven years gone; letters for the first two, then none. The boy only last year dug out that sugar rooster and asked where his father had gone. She could not answer, so taught him: go to west street, find the sugar man.
Gu was silent a long moment. From his carrying pole he took the old set of twelve-animal wood molds and pushed them before her. Your man was my apprentice, true, he said. Keep these for the boy. Let him learn; when his craft is ripe, someone will know him.
He rose to leave. The woman caught his sleeve. Master, she asked, do you think—is his father still alive? Gu looked once at the shoal; the wind lifted the cloth over the drying tofu. He did not answer. He only said, sugar figures are living things, and so are people. The living return, in time.
Gu went back to west street and his stall as before. Only now, each evening before he packed up, he blew one crooked-necked rooster and set it deepest in his box. No one bought it, and he kept it anyway.