“You did have the tendency to go investigate if you heard riots or gun fire though,” my mother said. “I was really scared, especially when we were passing through the towns where we didn’t know anybody. I was so afraid that the fighting between different groups would turn against strangers.”
Anyway, despite his displeasure, my father did let me eat the lollipop, pragmatic man that he was. “You already have it. No need to let anything go to waste.” But after that, I stayed away from the Foreign Devil, and he did not offer any more candies. Sometimes he looked up when I passed by, trying to smile at me, I thought, as I saw his missing teeth.
Days went by and I did not remember anything else remarkable, except for the time when Chairman Mao passed away, in September that year. I was outside the bookstore and by habit glanced over in the direction of the Foreign Devil, but he was not there. I thought that was odd. Then I saw my father rushing out of the bookstore. He put the lanyard with our apartment key over my neck and told me to go straight home. I could eat the soda crackers my mother kept in a jar. “If you are really hungry, you can boil some water on the stove and cook some noodles. You remember I showed you how to do it, don’t you? Your mother and I won’t be home until probably very late. Go to sleep if you get tired.” Before I could ask more, he rushed back into the bookstore. Then I heard funeral music blasting out of the loudspeakers, and I saw people rushing about on the street, many of them openly weeping.
That seemed to be the end of my childhood. I made noodles for myself without burning down the apartment; I even saved some in a bowl for my parents. I took care of myself when my parents were gone all day, every day, for eight straight days so they could attend various memorial ceremonies. After that, my parents officially passed the key to me, so I could head home after school. I loved the freedom of doing whatever I pleased from the time school was over to the time my parents got home, but I still went to the bookstore when I was bored and wanted to disappear into a more interesting world, or when I missed the weight and smells of the books there. By then it was my counter, and I would hunker down under it as if in a bunker. Even when it was okay to be seen reading these books─there was no need to hide anymore in the eighties─I still liked to get under the counter. I often saw the Foreign Devil working at his stand, but I did not pay him a visit until almost my last year in high school, when I was seventeen.
On my way home from school one day, I was stopped by several kids, led by a guy in my class, nicknamed Brother Number Four. He was number four because he was a sworn brother to three other guys, whom I realized much later, were what you would call a street gang. I did not know what I did to make him stop me. “Listen carefully, little pretty boy! Stay away from Lily, or else me and my brothers will teach you a true lesson about being a man!”
Lily was a girl I had known since first grade. We had gone to the same elementary school, junior high and now high school. I started to notice how pretty and grown-up she was when one day some guys whistled at her and called out “Hey, Xiao Hua!” (“Little Flower,” which also happened to be the beautiful female protagonist of the popular 1979 movie of the same name). There were always guys waiting for her when school let out; some were from other schools, and some were not even students. Apparently Brother Number Four was one of the suitors.
Brother Number Four and his friends were all from local families. Their ancestors were mostly merchants and businessmen who came from northern China, long before any other Han did, to do business with the Tibetans, the Yi, and the Huis. They married local women and established extensive connections with each other. You could tell the offspring of these families, for they were all handsome and tall, beautifully tanned and strongly muscled. Unlike me, in other words. I was pale and skinny like a bamboo pole. Still, I did not like to be called a little pretty boy.
“Hey, man! Take it easy. I don’t know where you got the idea; there is nothing between me and Lily.”
“Then why did she say she was going out with you?’
That damn little girl. She was playing a joke on me. “Is that so?” I said, “Then what can I say…?”
Before I finished my sentence, I was lying flat on my back with a bloody nose.
“Next time, it won’t be just your nose that’s bleeding!” The punks went away laughing.
I probably should have stayed out of their way. After all, my parents had a firm “no girlfriend in high school” rule. Instead, I went to see Lily.
“Why did you set me up with Brother Number Four?”
“Okay, maybe I did. But…”
“No but! You have to go out with me now. I’m not going to take a punch from that bastard for nothing.”
“Oh yeah, go out with you?” She laughed. “Why should I? What do you have to make it worth going out with you?” She tried to wipe my nose with a towel, and all of sudden I remembered her doing exactly the same thing in first grade, wiping my boogers.
She had asked a good question. What did I have for her? For some reason, I recalled my mother’s face, how she lighted up when my father brought home the watch. And I also recalled what I heard from some of the girls I was friends with: that Lily liked expensive gifts. “Of course, she should! She has good taste! She’s so beautiful, she has the destiny of being surrounded by things as beautiful as she is!”
“You wait.” I pushed her hand and towel away. “I’ll be back and you will see.” I heard her laughing behind me, a laughter like the jingling of a strand of pearls, falling from their string into a jade bowl. The sound lingered in the air for some time.
I waited for a few days until my father was out of town. When I got to the Foreign Devil’s repair stand, I was amazed how little he had changed. While I had grown from the little kid who took his candy into a young man, he seemed exactly the same as I remembered: grayish, sunken face lined with deep wrinkles, and the little round glasses perched on the tip of his nose. He still wore the army coat and cap, and they looked as worn and dingy as ever. He was one of those people for whom time and age have stopped meaning much. Life itself seemed to have cast him like a statue.
He offered a little smile when he saw me, showing a couple of missing teeth.
“How are you, Foreign …umm…foreigner?” I said. “Remember me?” He nodded, but I wasn’t sure he did. I realized then that I’d never heard him speak.
I saw on his little stand a box with a couple of nice ladies’ watches laid against a maroon-colored velvet lining. From the moving hands, I judged that the watches were working, or had being repaired, or were maybe even new, as they looked new to me. My heart pounded in my chest so hard that I was sure he could hear it, and I hesitated for a moment. But he kept his head low, buried in his work, so I seized the opportunity.
I walked away with a Seiko Grand Quartz with a black face, shining silver hands, and a little screen for the date. It felt oddly heavy in my pocket. When I took it out and held it in my hands again in my bedroom behind a closed door, I felt the strange coldness of its metal. I imagined that the face of the watch somehow came to life, and it rose up from my palm like a snake, staring at me, full of accusation: “Thief!” I shoved the watch into my keepsake box with my other prized possessions─my collection of candy wrappers, a couple of stamps, and paper-cuttings─under my bed. I felt so sick that I lost my nerve, and I did not give the watch to Lily or anyone else. In fact, I felt sick for a long time, and I couldn’t wait for high school to be over, so I could get out of that town, which I did.
I did not speak to Lily at all until after many years later, when we met again at a high school reunion. She still was the most beautiful woman in the room, her perfectly sculptured oval face, elegant neck, her model-perfect height. She was married to a police chief and local Party chairman, so, yes, she had been united with her destiny, being surrounded by expensive and beautiful things. She joked with me at the reunion, “Hey, you were the only guy who didn’t even look at me in high school! Now, I see that nobody is good enough for you,” referring to the fact that I was the only one at the reunion who had no kids, or even a spouse.
The night of the day I took the watch, I almost choked when my mother mentioned to my father at the dinner table that the Foreign Devil had had a screaming customer.
“What happened? His stand is usually quiet,” my father asked.
“Yes, customers and the Foreign Devil get along well. But I heard that he lost a customer’s watch today, and she was very unhappy about it,” my mother said.
“That’s very strange,” my father said. “I don’t think that’s ever happened before. His business has been good, since more people have watches now, even imported ones.”
All the while, my parents did not look at me, though I was pretty sure my face was burning. I tried not to draw attention by busying myself with a mouthful of rice and vegetables.
“What do you think he’ll do? He can’t have enough money to pay for a lost watch!” My mother sighed.
“Haven’t you heard?” my father said. “He may not be here much longer. I heard his family is coming to get him. Whoever they are, perhaps they will be able to pay for the watch.”
Family! I never imagined that the Foreign Devil had parents, much less that they would be looking for him. According to my father, the parents of the Foreign Devil belonged to the Paris Foreign Missions Society, and had been Jesuit missionaries in our small mountain town when they had their son. The boy grew up in the local church─now in ruins—where he learned his parents’ language and how to fix watches and clocks. His parents had left hastily for home due to health problems, leaving him behind with some friends of the church, thinking they would return soon. The boy had probably not been much older than I was when I took the candy from him. But his parents were never able to return as they’d hoped: earthquakes, blizzards, wars and bandits, the new government and all sorts of revolutionary movements─something always prevented them. The boy had stayed with various families, kind local people, who took care of him, but he had lost his desire to speak. Those families helped him by starting the little repair stand, and someone with connections to the military had given him his peculiar outfit, as a way of protection perhaps. Those families probably knew his real name, but it was a hard-to-pronounce foreign name, and soon it was all but forgotten. The boy himself did not utter a word. So he was called Foreigner, and then, Foreign Devil, because being a foreigner was equivalent to being a devil. The older people who had known his parents slowly died off, and the younger ones did not want to associate with him anymore. By then the Foreign Devil had become a fixture in town, and no one seemed to mind him being there.
“Do you know why sometimes he was gone from his stand?”
“No. Why?” my mother asked.
“Apparently the town government kept an eye on him, and he was told to stay home on certain days and keep out of sight, so there was no trouble.”
“Like what?”
“You know, when government officials from the province or even Beijing came here for visits. Also, remember when Chairman Mao died? Those were special times to round up people like the Foreign Devil.
“I heard his family never stopped looking for him,” my father continued. “They kept sending letters and even packages, some of which even made it to him. I heard they sent him food, like sweets.”
By that time, I was taking the dishes to the sink, but I was sure my father looked in my direction.
“Now that the Cultural Revolution is long over, doors are opening to the outside world again, I’m sure. Before long, his family will be able to take him home.
“How strange life can be,” my father concluded.
That was the last time anyone mentioned the story of the Foreign Devil.
I only thought about him a couple of times, once when a girlfriend asked me if the watch belonged to my mother or a former girlfriend. I told her it belonged to someone whose name I did not know.
Another time, I thought about him when someone yelled at me from the street in front of a store, “Hey, you, Foreign Devil! Chink boy! Go back to China!”
“That guy just called me Foreign Devil!” The thought stopped me in my tracks, just as I caught my reflection in the window─a face unlike that of most around me and, though not written on my forehead, a definitely hard-to-pronounce foreign name. Some mornings when I wake up, it is true that I do forget where I am and which language I should speak. On this day, though, I burst out laughing. This made the guy mad.
I wish he knew what I was laughing about.
—
X.H. Collins grew up in the far western part of Sichuan province, China, near the East Tibet Plateau. She came to the Midwest to earn a Ph.D. in nutrition and is currently a professor of biology in a community college in Illinois. She wrote her first short story in English in the summer of 2015. She placed third in the fiction category of the 2016 Midwest Writing Center Iron Pen contest. One of her flash fictions was chosen as a judge’s favorite in the River Cities’ Reader 2016 short-fiction contest. Besides teaching biology, she reads, writes, takes writing workshops, plays and reads with her young son, and practices ballroom dancing with her husband whenever she can.
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