1
My earliest memories of Mother weren’t of me at her breast, or of me at her breast seeing my siblings’ faces turn pale because she was nursing me rather than them, or of Mother chasing after me because I had forgotten to bring in the chilies spread out on a mat that she had instructed me to watch in case it rained. No, it wasn’t any of that.
It was me waking up in the middle of the night, scared and crying over the dead skin peeling off my back, and in the process waking Mother, who had already worked a busy day at the Health Center for Women and Children and now had to tend to the dead skin coming off her son’s back, with me crying and carrying on all the while.
That was the year pupils at my primary school started going swimming in the “New River,” a man-made tributary that flowed from the south and drained into Dianchi Lake. The word “new” was misleading, though, for all along the riverbank stood mulberry trees, or the stumps of mulberry trees, belying the supposed newness of the waterway.
If you thought we had sunscreen when we made the two-mile walk to the rivière nouvelle after school and took a dive into water the color of the Amazon in the rainy season, in which there seemed to be more mud than H₂O, you’d be wrong. No, it was muddy water all right.
And what was the worst of it? The boys got to dive into the deeper water above the channel dikes and drink plenty of that muddy water in the process. The girls, on the other hand, in swimsuits that covered more than ninety percent of their juvenile, stick-like bodies, had to settle for standing in knee-high water farther downstream, where there were plenty of mulberry stumps.
A pretty pathetic sight, if you asked me.
In any case, the highland sun was unforgiving. It had always been, and it was especially brutal on the young skin of grade-school boys full of bravado. By the time we had nearly drunk enough muddy water and drowned ourselves challenging one another to venture into the deeper parts, we were already so badly sunburned that you could hardly recognize our faces.
That was more or less the condition I was in every day that summer when I showed up at the Health Center for Women and Children, where Mother worked.
2
The locals called the place House of Jesus—耶稣堂. But to Mother and me it was simply 妇幼保健站, the Health Center for Women and Children.
Mother was an obstetrician, but at the time she also worked as a general nurse at the center, during that particular summer when I was receiving all the protection from sunburn that a child could possibly receive—which, of course, meant none.
Even as a young child, I knew it was an unusual place.
On the nights I spent there with Mother, we slept in a room on the first floor of the wooden side building across the small courtyard from the main church building. That was where the nurses on duty stayed. I had no idea then, and even today do not know, who occupied the rooms on the upper floor of the main building.
I never ventured upstairs, not even once. That puzzles me to this day, for the staircase was right there, and climbing such a thing was something no little boy could resist.
Be that as it may, when nature called, everyone went to the outhouse twenty yards or so from the church building. And, surprisingly to me at least, beside the outhouse stood a small grove of palm trees. They seemed exotic and strangely out of place.
But why was Mother lodged in the wooden side building on the nights she was on duty, rather than in one of those rooms on the second floor of the main masonry building? Those rooms seemed so much better, and somehow more proper for someone like Mother, since she worked there “to save lives and help the injured.”
That I did not know.
Who occupied those second-floor rooms anyway? To a child they seemed so much nicer—and mysterious.
Many years later, when I read a petition the church had submitted to the local government asking for the return of its property so that it could once again be used as a place of worship, I thought I might have begun to understand. But it is all still fuzzy, and I really cannot say whether that had anything to do with why Mother, who was there simply to do her job—the health of women and children—could not use one of the upstairs rooms.
Here is what I remember of the old church compound.
From the door opening onto the street, you entered through a short corridor walled on both sides. Beyond the wall to the north was the congregational hall, large and spacious, with a high ceiling. On the opposite side was another room—not as large as the congregational hall, but still spacious enough to be called a hall in its own right. What its original purpose had been, I could not fathom.
I did know what it was used for when Mother worked there.
It was the pharmacy, or dispensary.
When a poor local peasant came for a medical examination and was prescribed medication, he or she would go to the dispensary window, pay, and receive the medicine.
And here comes the hideous part.
The cashier at the dispensary, the mother of one of my later junior-high classmates, took advantage of her position and embezzled funds. She was caught. What became of her afterward I did not know. But it is one of those things I remember and have never forgotten.
I had written about the building before. Nearly twenty years ago, when I was teaching in Michigan, I wrote a story called “Hills.” In it, three characters walk through the old quarter of town to look at an abandoned church. The granite walls are weathered, mold grows on the stones, and the paint has peeled from the window frames. One of the characters tells the others, almost in passing, “The place once housed the town’s health center for women and children.”
I had already carried the old church that far with me.
Years later, when I wrote the story “Father Gerbillon,” that pharmacy became the room that housed the Sunday school. The poorest families in town sent their children there, partly, as I imagined it, for the free meal.
And where was the meal served?
Well, of course, on the first floor of the wooden house across the little courtyard.
By then I knew—or thought I knew—what everything had once been for.
It had to be that way.
In the world that emerged when I wrote “Father Gerbillon,” the priests occupied the main church building. The north wing of the first floor was the congregational hall, where services were held. The room at the south end, where the pharmacy had later been, was the school, where local children learned prayers and a little Latin.
And the wooden house?
Of course the handymen, maids, and cooks lived there.
The cook was a local woman in her early fifties. She suffered from rheumatism. She had been baptized and given the name Marie—玛丽.
And, oh, before I forget, let me mention the boat.
If you had a church, you had repairs that needed doing from time to time, and for that you needed a handyman. A handyman the church therefore must have possessed, and his boat was always moored by the old city moat, to my great delight.
For I just know, by the laws of physics and the mandate of Lord Jesus, that if a house of God is built by the water, it needs a boat for errands.
3
Decades after those nights I stayed with Mother while she worked the night shift at the Center, my wife got into crocheting. When she finished her very first work—a cat with sideways-looking eyes and uneven, crooked whiskers—she sent everyone in the family a photo of it.
I was already in bed that night, but the instant I saw the image, these words rang out inside me, and no more than a few seconds later they ended up on her phone:
“For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given…and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor…the Prince of Peace, the everlasting Father.”
The speed of my reply delighted my wife and amazed everyone else. The only person who wasn’t surprised was me.
I wasn’t surprised at all that these exact words came to me, and not some others.
I mean, no offense, my Lord! Even a crocheted cat is a creature of your creation, and one of your children!
I knew the entire Handel’s Messiah by heart.
Don’t ask me why I did, for then you would only be showing your ignorance and possibly your path to hell.
Just kidding, OK!
Years before, many years after those nights with Mother in that old church compound, I met a man in college who knew a Jewish guy who had married a Hakka girl, about which I wasn’t particularly thrilled, my mother being Hakka herself.
Anyway, one night this friend took me to meet the man at an upscale hotel in Beijing. This would have been sometime in the mid- to late 1980s, when China was still in a slump and Beijing was too. There was something I didn’t particularly like about the man—his manners, more than his race or religion.
But that was how I obtained a copy of Handel’s Messiah: a set of four cassette tapes.
I don’t know how many times I played that set. It must have been enough that eventually rewinding became nearly impossible, the tapes having become warped from constant playing and rewinding.
Years later, in Michigan, I happened to share an office with an Irish American who told me an anecdote about Messiah that I would never forget. After learning that I used to listen to Handel, he told me that his father used to play the entire Messiah, volume turned all the way up, on a cassette player.
Until his mother lost it.
I get it. I’ve done the same. I mean, who hasn’t?
That probably says more about us—and the age we live in—than it does about “those high in the skies,” to borrow from my buddy Emily.
Still, that’s no excuse. Just because you’ve had a quarrel with your wife doesn’t mean you have to put on Handel’s Messiah, turn the volume all the way up, and drive the poor woman crazy.
4
The morning Mother died, I was five thousand miles away, alone in my home in Upstate New York. My wife and son were in New York City for the weekend.
At around seven that evening, for no particular reason, I walked over to the fireplace, picked up the family’s old acoustic guitar, and began to play, ever so slowly.
The notes fell from the strings one at a time.
And the little tune, it turned out, was Agni Parthene, the Marian hymn written by St. Nectarios of Aegina.
That was strange.
But I liked it. I liked the sad and mournful tune. In fact, I liked it so much—or, more accurately, it fit my mood at that moment so perfectly—that after playing it once, I took out my phone, opened Voice Memos, and recorded myself playing it a second time.
What my guitar was singing at that moment, on that day, in metallic notes, slow as an adagio, one note at a time, ever so slowly and ever so mournfully, were these words:
Ἁγνὴ Παρθένε Δέσποινα, ἄχραντε Θεοτόκε
Agní Parthéne Déspina, áchrante Theotóke
Pure Virgin, Lady, immaculate Mother of God.
Χαῖρε Νύμφη Ἀνύμφευτε
Chére Nímfi Anímfefte
Rejoice, O Bride unwedded.
As soon as the recording was finished, I messaged it to my family.
The timestamp showed 7:15.
My wife and son were on the subway when they received it. They did not play it immediately; there was too much noise on the train. But even if they had not been on a train, they probably would not have played it right away.
Well, it was just one of those things Dad does.
But when they received my second message, which I sent at 7:30, they replied immediately.
For Mother had died just a few minutes before, between the two messages.
My family in China had sent word through WeChat telling me that our mother had passed away.
I was stunned. Dazed. The hair on my body stood on end.
And I felt the presence of an invisible force. It filled the room, and it filled my whole body.
5
A few years ago, I returned to my hometown for a visit. The first place I stopped by was the House of Jesus.
From the street I could hear hymns. That was rather unexpected.
I was stunned when I entered through the wide-open door: a service was going on. A woman pastor was leading the hymn from the raised platform in what used to be the pharmacy, while the parishioners sat in rows of pews in the hall opposite. The narrow corridor that had once separated the congregational hall from the pharmacy was gone. So were the cubicles that had served as various rooms of the health center. The two sides had been opened up and joined into one large worship hall.
I tiptoed to the back, found a pew, and sat down.
By then the hymn had ended, and the pastor was giving her sermon. I heard the names of Paul and Isaiah. Most of the parishioners were old, many of them women. Each had a Bible open before them.
There was amazement in me.
This was the very place where Mother had worked as a nurse, where I had had my tooth pulled by Dr. Liu, and where I had hung around waiting for her to get off work. Many years before any of that, Mother herself had attended nursing school in the provincial capital, in a building that belonged to the church.
And then I heard Isaiah 65:1:
“I am sought of them that asked not for me; I am found of them that sought me not.”
And at that, there was great joy in me.
Yego’s Chronicles 