The Vagrants

April, too, came, and with it the approaching Ching Ming, the long-awaited first holiday of the season, the day for people to bring their ancestors and their recent dead freshly steamed rolls painted with spring grass, newly brewed rice wine, and other offerings. As immigrants in a recently built city, the people of Muddy River did not have family burial grounds and ancestral compounds close by to visit, so Ching Ming became a holiday as much for the dead as for the living. Drugstores and peddlers prepared bunches of candles and incense for sale; edible green dye too, as Muddy River would not see its first real grass till after the holiday. Women shopped for the best meat to make cold cuts to feast on at the holiday picnic; men oiled and cleaned their bicycles for the annual spring outing. Even though the city government had announced a new policy eliminating Ching Ming as a public holiday—communicating with the dead in any form was an act of superstition, unfit for the new era when the country was rebuilding itself after the Cultural Revolution—the holiday this year fell on a Sunday, so the impact of the new policy on the townspeople was minimal.

NINI'S PARENTS DECIDED that this year's Ching Ming was to be celebrated as a special occasion. More than ever they needed the blessings of their ancestors. These dead people whom they had rarely thought of in the past years had no doubt been properly honored by more pious relatives in their home province; still, nobody would refuse an additional offering. At night Nini's parents calculated and discussed the menu of their offerings to these ancestors, who, if pleased, would surely send their blessings for male progeny.

Nini couldn't remember similar preparations for the births of any of her sisters. Ever since the execution of the Gus’ daughter, her parents had taken on a more cheerful view of life. Nini's mother moved around with extra caution, her two hands cupped around her belly. Nini's father touched her mother's belly often, in a way that made Nini shiver with disgust, but she couldn't take her eyes off his big-knuckled hand on her mother's body. She kept on looking until one of her parents, usually her mother, caught her staring and gave her a chore to do. Nini's father forbade her mother to do any housework, including the matchbox making that was nothing even for a small child—Nini was told to take all the duties off her mother's shoulders, and now, as well as getting coal, picking up leftover vegetables, and doing grocery shopping, she was going to cook three meals a day and do the laundry for the entire family. Nini pointed out that if they waited for her to cook breakfast after coming back with the coal from the train station, they might be late for work and school; her parents were shocked that she dared to challenge their decision, but what Nini said was true, so they had to reassign the duty to their second daughter, which made her hate Nini more than ever.

Except for the baby, all the girls sensed the importance of this pregnancy. Twice a day, in the morning and in the evening, Nini's mother gagged and threw up into a chamber pot, which it was Nini's duty to clean. Her first and second sisters moved quickly to prepare warm water and a clean towel for their mother. Nini looked on, appalled by how thoroughly the sour, bitter odor of her mother's pregnancy permeated their lives—even though it was warm enough to open the windows now, it seemed that the smell clung to everything in the room, the blankets and the pillows on the brick bed, meals Nini cooked, the laundry that hung from one end of the room to the other, even Nini's own skin. The two younger girls, however, did not wrinkle their noses when they tended their mother, and for that Nini's father praised them; after all, he said, education had made them into sensible and usable human beings. Nini might be the oldest, her mother would say, but she remained a worthless idiot. Nini listened stone-faced; she bit the inside of her mouth and fixed her eyes on a crack on the floor. This made her mother impatient, but when she looked for something to hit Nini with, a broomstick or a ruler, Nini's father would stop her. It was not worth her effort to beat some sense into Nini, he said. What she needed now was to care for the baby; she might hurt him with too much anger.

Nini's mother consented, telling Nini to hide her ugly face so that she would be spared the pain of looking at it. Instead of acting dumb, as she used to, Nini made an obvious effort to look around the small, crowded room for a hiding place before picking up Little Sixth and half burying her face into the baby's soft tummy.