New Year

My grandmother passed away the day before Spring Festival. My uncle unpeeled all the red banners he’d posted so enthusiastically the night before: the diamond xuangxi with the gold outlines and the intertwined characters, and the circular fu with the fat bald baby painted next to it. Now the windows were transparent like black gems when everybody else had colors and glitters on theirs. My grandmother’s friends in the courtyard, including her old sewing mates, offered to take the banners off their homes too. But my uncle told them while holding back tears, you don’t have to do that, but thanks for offering and I hope you have a happy New Year. But it was only an offer anyway. Old people do that a lot, expecting the person being offered to refuse. To accept would be rude. And besides, a time will come in their lives when their windows must be stripped of celebration, so why waste this one?

The doctors said the cause of death was a stroke, and it was sooner or later, since her arteries were as thin as mulberry leaves. But my grandfather still contends that she died of over-enthusiasm. He says she wanted to make the celebration perfect again, which was her goal for every New Year before she became sick.

She got up and seemed to have more energy than before, arranging the clothes she made for the kids, knowing they were two years out of style. She then visited everyone in the courtyard, telling everyone, especially the children, the dangers of lighting fireworks in the crevices of walls. Actually that was because our house was the one facing the street, and last New Year at midnight, pieces of our wall flew right into a pan of dumplings. And the result was her telling us to stay under the table for two hours.

While skinning squash on her bed, she suddenly lied down and started to open her mouth in frog ways. My uncle tried to have the doctor come immediately from the hospital, but they wouldn’t come. Not for free, at least. And all we had were a couple of homemade overstuffed cotton coats.

What about an ambulance then? Sorry, everybody is on vacation preparing for the holiday. We only save those for emergencies. You should use your own transportation.

So my uncle wrapped her in a blanket and carried her on his back like a baby and ran for eight miles, amid busy intersections and curious onlookers. Incoming bicycles trampled on his heavy boots more than once, leaving opaque trails of raw tofu and spittle. He didn’t trade insults like usual.

In the process, he felt her breath on his neck getting weaker and weaker, until there was just a whisper, like the sliver of dissipated wind after a heavy storm. No one offered to help.

He passed the local infirmary. No, they couldn’t take her, all the beds are full, and the boy with the rash on his arms had a terrible infection in his abdomen. And he was also the son of the nurse in charge. He had to go to Beijing General Hospital.

By the time he arrived at the hospital, all sweaty in his down coat, people thought it was raining outside. But it was already too late. The doctors said there was no more they can do, her time had come. My uncle wanted to strangle those arrogant doctors right there, because things might have been different if they had just sent an ambulance. There would have been two extra bodies in the hospital that day if not for the intervention of a nausea that overcame my uncle at that moment. He went to the bathroom, and all he did was puke and puke and then cry his eyes out.

On account of a man racing with one hundred and twenty pounds of dead weight on his back, the doctors dismissed the wetness as sheer exhaustion. But I saw him carry heavier at work. The only difference was he was carrying a dead kinsman this time. No one expected a man to cry that much.

So that New Year’s was spent with black armbands, staring into blank space, especially the wooden partition between the bedroom and the kitchen, where the dining table would’ve been laid out had we been celebrating instead of mourning. Or looking at the spots on the windows where there were still white specks of residual glue, and eating cold dumplings. Maybe it was the dumplings, but there was a lot of puking on the part of my uncle that New Year’s day.