INTERVIEWS
The Pedestal Magazine > Archives > Issue 56 > Fiction >Charles Lowe - Disturbing the Sleep of Sparrows

Disturbing the Sleep of Sparrows

          Normally, Lu was a sound sleeper, so sound in fact that once a Japanese air raid had failed to wake him despite leaving a hole in the alleyway wide enough to fit comfortably a shakily constructed tin-roofed flat. But despite his talent for remaining undisturbed, Grandfather Lu had only last week been jarred awake by the sound of an off green crown of a scholar tree scratching at his window pane. And for a brief time, before dropping off to a typically well ordered sleep, Lu felt the fingernails of a daughter carving up the window’s smudged surface.

          Lu was surprised at first because his four daughters shared a meaty character: his oldest having rings of fats overgrowing her thumbs and pinkies and this daughter (the one in the scholar tree) appeared barely to be surviving on a starvation diet. But the biggest surprise was that Lu had thought of a daughter at all, his own daughters having fled home as soon as they had reached high school age: the second oldest being the only one to stay in contact, dropping off a postcard every other New Years’ festival—a card that ever since his wife had died, Lu had not bothered answering.

          In this regard, Lu was not that different from the other grandfathers of Goubuli Alley. Not a one gave a thought to the subject of daughters. Instead, each grandfather was careful to budget his declining resources towards the task of acquiring a son: the one species that mattered. Indeed, other than an orphaned daughter that had briefly disturbed his sleep, nothing was that unusual about Lu except possibly when he started demonstrating an interest in the subject of a son.

          Two posters had appeared: one met by a second a few weeks later that was tacked to the lower left corner of the first on a bulletin board in the off center of the park. The first showed a man showing his daughter how to kill a single sparrow with a well placed slingshot. The father had a medium-sized wrinkle cutting across the center of his smoothly sanded-off brow. The daughter was holding back the rubber band of a slingshot while concentrating on murdering the sparrow and the sky. The second did not show a family. Instead, the poster had a dragon soaring above a flock of sparrows towards some symmetrically shaped clouds.

          Being the late 50s when the appearance of even one such political advertisement was considered a significant occasion, this convergence of two acted as a continual spark for conversation though no one could precisely find the connection between a flock of sparrows and a father with his daughter except to know generally what would happen when, as the saying went, “the donkey lifted his leg.”

          There would be a campaign, and, just as certain, that campaign would find its way some time into a headline across the front page of The Tianjin Daily, a headline demanding that “everyone fight the sparrows.”

          The Great Sparrow Campaign or The Campaign In Opposition to Pests, as it became doubly named, arose from a musing by the old Chairman. No one regarded such an origin as unusual: pretty much, the country operated like that: the old Chairman mused on a matter. Then, an article would appear, presenting the Chairman’s poetic musing as an undeveloped theory. Then, the donkey would lift his leg, and everyone would be covered in some sort of mess. In this case, his inspiration was straightforward. The old Chairman saw some sparrows eating into a rice harvest. Later, he theorized that the hunger of sparrows cut into the national harvest. Then, his No. 2 came up with a tactic aimed at putting the old Chairman’s theory into a compact slogan: Kill the sparrows. Raise the harvest.

          Then, in keeping with the highly poetic character of the old Chairman’s initial observation, the Goubuli District Committee was given its task in highly metaphorical terms: generate enough wind that a cluster of sleeping sparrows would not break up a dragon’s flight, an order meaning that each family head had to have a turn playing lookout on the edge of the shakily constructed rooftops, lining either side of the alleyway. When a sparrow landed on the crown of a scholar, the lookout would bang on the top of a garbage can: screaming until his lungs grew sore. Then, the entire alleyway would join in, terrified of being accused of permitting even one pest an undisturbed sleep.

          No one was excused from the duty—ever, which was why Lu Leng was not at the birth of his first child. And though Lu understood the consequences of being caught praying, most of all for his private benefit, Lu Leng held together his thick fingers that had become tinged from a night that was cold by late spring standards. Then, from an uneasy perch on a tin roof of a flat next to the crown of a scholar, Lu tried to make out whether his prayer for a son had come true.

          Here is how that went. In the middle of a shift at the textile mill, Lu’s wife felt a push but tried to outlast her 10-hour shift until Lu’s wife felt a puddle forming an uneven circle on the tiled production floor: then, Lu’s wife felt compelled to request the necessary form to be excused from work: then, biking a few blocks slowly—slowly enough for Lu to discern his wife’s progress until her wide hips and protruding belly were covered by the off green crown of a scholar.

          Lu stood guard on a shakily constructed rooftop while eavesdropping on his wife’s labor pains. Then, watched his mother-in-law dump the blood before disposing of the placenta, which seemed at first a red tail sinking into a mud layered alleyway before grafting onto the bark of a scholar. Then, Lu heard an echo erupt from his apartment, which he recognized as belonging to his mother-in-law who came from Henan and whose accent Lu could never parse out. And Lu had to wait for the translation from a neighbor who wore a well knit sweater. And while Lu waited, Lu studied the stitching until he felt that he could almost touch the woolen threads cutting across his neighbor’s warm sweater.

          When he heard the news, Lu felt successful, even though he played a minimal role in the birth of his first son. Really, other than the wedding night, Lu’s only contribution was giving up his side of the bed to his mother-in-law. But all that didn’t matter. Lu had his son and was determined to keep his son, a resolve that was only fortified when “the donkey lifted his other leg,” and the countryside became flooded with waves of insects and locust—these pests no longer having a reason to worry about a sparrow disturbing their sleep.

          Instead, it was the residents of Goubuli Alley who had their sleep disturbed, though perhaps their fear of a famine was premature, the hunger remaining restricted to the countryside. Still, the concern was real and would startle Lu Leng from his sleep. And he would awake to find an off green crown of a scholar against the smudged glass of his window.

          The release from his anxiety was simple and highly accessible: Lu merely having to consider his son’s meaty chin and thick arms as symptoms of a steady diet of rice porridge plus a healthy dose of milk. Nevertheless, Lu would lie awake, regarding his own fingernails, searching for horizontal lines and chipping, sure signs, Lu had heard, of an oncoming case of malnutrition—an obsessive study that led Lu each evening to ask his wife to prepare enough stir fry to ward off even the hint of hunger. And when his wife died on a trip to the vegetable market across the Liberation Bridge, one of the few markets to sell flower peppers, a delicacy: Lu merely had his daughter-in-law pick up the same cooking habits—making certain that above all, Lu was served first.

          That was why Lu never remarried. He saw no reason. His daughter-in-law had the same wide hips and slim shoulders that his wife had. And his daughter-in-law was quiet like his own wife, content to keep him company. And Lu was fond of the stir fry that his daughter-in-law whipped up: a perfect combination of eggs, hot flower peppers plus rice. Of course, Lu never gave away his appreciation. He was after all a grandfather from Goubuli Alley and therefore, only grunted vague hints of his approval. But in the evenings, when his daughter-in-law left to play mahjong with friends (that was her favorite sport), Lu complained gingerly (he was a subtle man) that he felt a slight spasm in the chest: not much, probably only a muscle pull from having to move his chair closer to the TV. And his daughter-in-law, being a dutiful daughter, gave up her favorite sport to spend each evening on a couch with a pillar digging into her lower backside, and only a few times did Lu show another side. And on both these occasions — guess what, the matter involved: a boy.

          Lu’s daughter-in-law became pregnant in the 80s when China was experiencing its version of the Prague Spring and when the state-run mill where Lu worked had just found a private partner. Eventually, that spelled the beginning of Lu’s retirement. The partner, from England, bought the remaining 51% and started immediately to downsize: “trim the fat” was how the foreign manager put matters: a food metaphor that immediately Lu and the other older workers translated as meaning: they were about to be let go. But at the time, when the foreigner at least bought a share in the mill, the workers all got a slight bump in wages, so the merger seemed in line with the Great Helmsman’s thinking that the proletariat was forever on the rise, fated in the next five years or in the five years after that to overtake his fellow workers in England.

          Of course, the pregnancy was not unplanned. But even though there was a one-child policy, usually, the newly married couple tried to make quota as soon as possible, which was why Grandfather Lu gave up his room: with the understanding that once his daughter-in-law had the kid, she and her husband would be thrown out of the master bedroom—the theory being that the best form of birth control was for a couple to sleep in the open beside a recently born son or daughter.

          But the problem was that Lu’s daughter-in-law had to become pregnant first, and while there were manuals that detailed the step-by-step process by which an IUD could be inserted into the cervix, the mother with the shiny white grin on the cover of About Birth Control had very little to say to a daughter who could not get pregnant after sixteen months of trying. A respected elder remained solely in charge of that aspect of the training, so for a second time in Lu’s well ordered existence, a mother-in-law was trucked in from the countryside, only from Jilin Province which was a good three days travel. But the mother emerged from the somewhat grainy bus as if she were a gun fighter in a grainy Western, pushing aside her son-in-law and indeed Lu with a well-executed straight arm that many years later retained its capability to send shivers down Lu’s vertebrae. Then, the mother-in-law made various hand gestures, which might have appeared to be random from a distance but evidently addressed the issue at hand; for Lu’s daughter-in-law sat in rapt attention: her rounded legs and thick eyelids remaining about motionless. And within two weeks, whatever the instructions were, they worked: Lu’s daughter-in-law started throwing up after eating her father-in-law’s favorite dish: stir fried eggs, rice, tomatoes, heavily doused with flower peppers, so after scrubbing the tile on the bathroom floor to make sure that the tile shimmered, the mother-in-law returned on the next bus to attend to her own husband. And Lu’s son took on a third shift at the taxi cab company—leaving Lu, by a process of elimination, to take care of his daughter-in-law once she got hit by a severe bout of morning sickness.

          The problem, then, was not Lu’s obsession with a son or even the sudden drop off in his income caused by a steady decline in the number of hours at the factory. Lu’s son could take in more as a taxi cab driver than a mill worker in Tianjin could hope. The problem was simply that Lu Leng had never stopped being a son. The kitchen for him was full of foreign instruments: the knives threatening: not at all ready to sustain him. Still, the task did not appear that difficult to work through, as his daughter-in-law really only wanted one dish, the same dish that Lu preferred: fried eggs, rice, tomatoes doused with flower peppers. But that was Lu’s problem: to figure the precise amount of flower peppers to balance off the dish. And he felt that this was his duty to feed his daughter-in-law just the right balance of the spicy food. Otherwise, what chance would the Leng family have to have a son?

          But instead of helping his daughter-in-law overcome her initial morning sickness, his cooking sparked a new chapter. His daughter-in-law would politely smile at her father-in-law’s efforts: then, return to the bathroom, where he would hear her shaking, and Lu wanted to convey to his daughter-in-law how he felt helpless: that the only other time that he had felt so helpless was the time when he had stood on a rooftop, waiting for the news of his son’s birth to be translated by a neighbor wearing a finely stitched woolen sweater.

          Of course, he did not recount that story to his daughter-in-law: he assumed that she would not understand, so instead, Lu decided to be of more use, covering his daughter-in-law with a blanket while wiping away the sweat lining a groove in her forehead.

          Then, Lu rested on the couch, waiting for sleep to hit him like a bomb from a Japanese airplane. But tonight, he was safe from such an attack, and instead uneasily turned on the couch, listening for his daughter-in-law’s uneasy breathing from his bedroom. About midnight, he heard his daughter-in-law drifting up towards the coal stove near the center of the kitchen. Then, he heard the stir fry simmering in the wok, the grease adding a layer of film to the leafy film of scholars that had already half clothed the block. And Lu felt a sleep pour over him that even an air raid siren could not disturb.

          It was only in the eighth month of his daughter-in-law’s pregnancy that Lu began again to become gifted with an uneasy rest, though this time his sleep was not disturbed by any premonitions of a lost daughter. The dream of a lost daughter was several years in the distance and in any case, Lu was not looking out his bedroom window but was staring out the narrow glass in his living room at the infected reddish bark of a scholar. And Lu began considering the probability that he would never see a grandson. All the signs pointed to that eventuality. His daughter-in-law’s belly was drooping low—“like an overly ripe watermelon,” a sure sign, according to his neighbor in the nicely stitched wool sweater, that Lu’s daughter-in-law was holding a daughter. And unlike when he was a rooftop guard on the level of a scholar tree, when Lu had felt only dangerously prayerful, here Lu became terrified. The Leng family could not handle the weighty fine that accompanied a family having a second child. Lu would never be able to celebrate the birth of his son’s son. Lu did not lose hope, however. But after keeping with his daughter-in-law’s nightly preparations of flower peppered stir fry, enough to cure her father-in-law’s as well as her own hunger: Lu felt certain that his daughter-in-law would never abandon a child even if that child turned out to be a daughter.

          Grandfather Lu began to consider a more indirect strategy just in case. On the back page of The Tianjin Daily, he had seen ads placed by Chinese adoption agents displaying photos of smiling infant daughters lying in blankets on translucent and very modern linoleum floors in Leeds, England. And Grandfather Lu considered cutting these ads out and placing a clipping on the end table next to where his daughter-in-law slept but decided that might be too subtle an approach. A breeze might disturb the cutout, and these days anyway his daughter-in-law had an aptitude for falling into an imperturbable sleep. So, instead, Lu took what he regarded as much sounder course. And one night, he awoke his daughter-in-law (she was sleeping alone, her husband doing the all night shift), and Lu complained about the muscles twitching around his chest, which coincidentally or not so coincidentally were accurate statements of his condition. Then, while facing the crown of a scholar half blocking out his bedroom window, Lu told his daughter-in-law that he saw his own death lurking behind its greenish crown, and he made his daughter-in-law promise that, if she had a daughter, and if she decided to keep his granddaughter (many of the foreigners paid a lot, he had overheard a neighbor in a woolen knit sweater say), please remember him to his granddaughter—which in order to get some sleep (the kid was kicking hard already), Lu’s daughter-in-law agreed to do with as much fervor as a lookout during the Great Sparrow Campaign might employ when disturbing the sleep of sparrows entrenched in the off green crown of a scholar.









Charles Lowe’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Guernica, Dirty Goat, Fiction International, Raven Chronicles, J Journal: Writing on Social Justice, Bitter Oleander, Hanging Loose, and elsewhere. Charles Lowe is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics and lives with his wife and daughter in Shanghai.
Enter your email:

Home      Register     About Us/Staff     Submit     Links     Contributors     Advertising     Archives     Blog    Donation    Contact Us    Web Design