Countdown to Nothing

China 1 · Stubborn as Stone

They say experiences shape the person. In the next few chapters, I will be leading you through a series of glimpses into my past, highlighting some of the seemingly mundane things that defined me as a person. Hopefully, by the end of these flashbacks, you will see me with a little more depth than just another shadow washed up to your shore by the tides of the internet. 

I am an only child because the one child policy wasn't abolished yet in China when I was born. For most of my early childhood, I lived in Beijing, China. At that time, I wasn't old enough for kindergarten yet, and both my parents were working. Therefore, they left me to the care of my grandparents. In Chinese, we call grandma and grandpa on the father's side "Yeye" and "Nainai", and on the mothers side, "Laoye" and "Jiajia". While my mother and father worked, I stayed at Nainai's house. 

I've heard people say that houses which seemed big when you were young will seem smaller when you visit again, because you've grown physically. However, Nainai's apartment was small even in my orange tinted memories. It was little more than a corridor with a bedroom on one end and a kitchen on the other. I remember the cool sensation of the dark gray floor beneath me, which was usually accompanied by Nainai's voice: "Don't sit on the floor, you'll freeze your bones!" Of course, I would not listen because it was the middle of August in Beijing, where the stifling air was filled with the rhythmic drone of cicadas. I would press my face into the uneven stone floor and take in the smell of damp and earth and steamed rice and stir fried cucumber (my favorite). The undulating chorus of cicadas would squeeze into the open window and bounce off the bare walls so that it sounded like they were coming from everywhere at once, accompanied by the rhythmic percussion of the wok in Nainai's expert hands as she stirred the contents with a spatula. 

As is the case with all grandparents, Nainai would do anything in her power to satisfy my desires. Every time my parents came back from work they would find me sitting amid a pile of sweets and toys, and they would sigh and complain "You're spoiling him". To some extent, Nainai knew that they were right, and so she started to refuse some of my requests, trying to teach me how to take "no" as an answer. However, I was having none of that. 

By some occasion I can no longer remember, I discovered that if I hurt myself, I would always get whatever I asked for. So for a while, it became my newfound "secret weapon". Whenever I felt like I was not going to get my way through repeated begging, I would charge headfirst into the nearest wall. It might seem like a stupid thing to do, but in my mind it was a simple trade off: the pain for that which I desire most (in that moment). My parents were unaware of my newfound super power for quite some time, until one day I took it a step too far, even by my own standards. 

Nainai and I decided to relax outside in the communal garden as the inside of the house had become too hot. Coincidentally, nearly everyone in that apartment building had the same idea, so every shaded bench in the park were taken. To me, bench or no bench made no difference at all as longs there was a surface to sit on, therefore when I discovered a rough piece of stone under a tree, I was convinced that I had found the perfect spot. However, Nainai wasn't thrilled with the idea of me sitting on a piece of stone, so she suggested that we go back home to get a stool, then come back out. I must have been quite unhappy with that plan because I turned to face that piece of stone and fearlessly rammed my head into it. 

Years later, my mother told me that I had to get stitches in my forehead and that I went to my first day of kindergarten with a vertical scar almost exactly down the center of my bare forehead so that I vaguely resembled a buddhist monk. She couldn't chide me for using self harm as a way to extort favors because what did I know back then? Obviously, since then I have stopped smashing my head into walls, but the determination to get what I wanted regardless of the method or cost remained with me. My mother said years later that this quality of mine is more than a simple case of brattiness, but a certain stubbornness, the same stubbornness she saw in my father. 

My father is the first in his family to escape rural life and work in the city. How, you might ask? He fought for it. He fought with more perseverance than anybody I have ever met. He lived in a mountainous area in the province of Hunan, and would wake up before daylight to hike the 20 kilometers to the only high school in the mountains, then return in the afternoon to work the fields with his parents. He never missed a day, no matter how impossible the weather was. He swallowed his pride and worked towards his only goal: to bring himself and his parents out of poverty. Then one day, the province council of Hunan sent an officer to his school to scout for promising students for the university of Hunan. My father was the only one selected. 

Over the next 20 years, he did not once let himself slack off. He earned his ph.D in fluid dynamics, then began an office job in the department of water utilities in Beijing. For most people, a well paying government job in the capital city of China would have been enough, but not for him. He worked silently at home while his coworkers went out to drink and play mahjong, jumping at every opportunity hoping that one of them would bring him to new heights. Like everything in life, opportunities like that come with huge risks. He was offered a chance to go on an international mission to investigate the rural infrastructure of a developing country. The country in question? The war torn Iraq. 

By that time I was around 5 years old, and I remember that for a few days, my mother and father fought for the only time I could remember in my life. I couldn't understand much because they would lock me in the bedroom, but I understood enough to figure out that my father wanted to take the chance and go on the mission, while my mother wanted him to stay home and stay safe. He went in the end, against my mother's wishes. For him, such an opportunity was too precious to miss. Therefore, he took the risk, and he was rewarded generously. Within a year, he was offered a job in the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, and he moved to his designated post in Bangkok soon after. 

He did not stop there either. He worked tirelessly first to overcome the language barrier, then to inch his way up in the organization, competing against rich and powerful coworkers. I remember even during the times when he did return to China for vacation, he was permanently working on reports and books. Every time I entered his study, his short figure would be glued to the chair, a stack of papers to his side, the blue square of light from his laptop framing his balding head. That's what a real humanitarian diplomat looks like: they do not wear suits all the time, they do not have massive mahogany desks decorated with copious amounts of flags, nor do they play pool and golf with presidents. Instead, they sit in their pajamas in their modest apartments, they tell their kids "No, I'm working, I'll play with you when I finish this report", and when the smell of freshly cooked food and the sound of their loved ones calling them to dinner waft into their rooms, they know how many people in the world do not have that luxury. Therefore, they take nothing for granted, and they pour their life into their work so that people in distant countries thousands of miles away could have an easier time escaping from poverty than my father had. And if I ever turn out to be half the man my father is, I would have him to thank for passing onto me his stubbornness and perseverance because sometimes, some goals simply can't be achieved without running headfirst into some stone.