up for the second time in our yard with my sister in his arms, Mother appeared perfectly calm, as if he was only returning from visiting the neighbours with his daughter. His behaviour surprised me too. Calm, his movements natural, nothing like a down-and-out man coming home after having endured the storms of inner struggle. He was just an ordinary home-loving husband who'd taken his daughter to the market.
Mother shrugged off her overcoat and put on a pair of canvas over-sleeves she'd picked out of the trash so she could scrub the pot, fill it with water and gather fuel for the stove. To my surprise, instead of the usual scrap rubber, she fed it with the finest pine, wood left over after building the house. She'd squirrelled that away after chopping it up for kindling, waiting, I supposed, to burn it on some special occasion. As the room filled with the scent of burning pine, the firelight filled my heart with warmth. Mother sat in front of the stove, looking a bit like a woman who's sold a wagonload of fake scrap without getting caught by the inspectors from the local-products office.
‘Xiaotong, go to Old Zhou's and buy three jin of sausage.’ She stiffened her leg, took three ten-yuan notes from her purse and handed them to me. ‘Make sure it's freshly steamed,’ she said cheerfully. ‘And on the way home, buy three jin of dried noodles at the corner store.’
By the time I made it back, red, oily sausage and dried noodles in hand, Father had changed out of his overcoat and Jiaojiao had taken off her down coat. The lined jacket he now wore was shiny with grime and missing a few buttons but he looked more respectable than in his overcoat. Jiaojiao too was wearing a lined jacket—white with a red floral pattern, with sleeves not long enough to cover her rail-thin arms—over lined red-checked pants. She was a lovely, docile creature, like a little white-fleeced lamb, and I couldn't help but feel a sense of affection towards her. Both she and Father were sitting at a red, stumpy-legged catalpa-wood table we brought out only over New Year's; the rest of the year, Mother lovingly wrapped it in plastic and hung it from the rafters, out of the way. Now she placed on it two bowls of steaming hot water and then brought out a jar enclosed in plastic. As soon as she opened the wrapping and unscrewed the cap to reveal its sparkling white contents, my eyes and sensitive nose told me that it contained sugar crystals. Now, there couldn't have been many children with a greedier mouth than mine and, no matter how cleverly Mother hid them, I always managed to ferret out my favourite foods. All but this jar of sugar. I had no idea when she'd bought it or found it. Obviously, she was craftier than I thought, certainly craftier than me, which got me thinking: How much more good food has she hidden away?
Far from being guilty about hiding the sugar from me, she seemed proud of it. She scooped out a spoonful and dumped it into Jiaojiao's bowl, a display of generosity I never thought I'd see till the sun rose in the west or a chicken laid a duck's egg or a pig gave birth to an elephant.
Jiaojiao looked up at Mother, her bright eyes full of apprehension, and then at Father, whose eyes shone. He reached over and plucked the knit cap off her head. Next, Mother held a spoonful of sugar over Father's bowl but stopped before pouring it in, and I noticed a little-girl pout form on her lips as a pink blush spread across her cheeks. I simply couldn't figure that woman out! She placed the jar on the table in front of him—hard—and said, softly: ‘Put it in yourself. That way you won't have anything to say about me!’
Father gazed into her face with obvious puzzlement but she quickly turned away so she wouldn't have to endure the look in his eyes. He took the spoon out of the jar and put it into Jiaojiao's bowl, then screwed the cap back on. ‘What right does someone like me have to eat sugar?’ Stirring the mixture in his daughter's bowl, he said: ‘Jiaojiao, thank your aunty.’
She obeyed, timidly, but failed to please Mother. ‘Drink it,’ she said. ‘There's no need to thank anyone.’
Father dipped the spoon into the sugar water, blew on it, then carried