The cold wind can be heard knocking at the thin windows, but those aren't the windows inside the room where Yao is lying, awake and eyes wide open. His room has no windows. They've turned off the heat even before they have changed into their thin pajamas and crawled under their scratchy blankets. It's warm enough, however, and the mattress is comfortable enough. Here in a suburb of Beijing Yao lies awake far from his village two provinces away, separated from him with tall snow peak mountains. The wind reminded him of his days in the village situated in a valley that also gets a lot of wind in the winter. That village brings him a lot of memories, but he's realistic; those memories are gone. The village is also practically gone. It's very different now.
It's not the memories that have kept him awake. Maybe it's the fatigue. He worked nearly twelve hours today at the construction site an hour of bus ride away in one of the hotel zones of the Capital of the fastest growing country in the world. He reads the newspapers; he knows he is lending a hand in that progress. But his fatigue is quite unbearable. And yet, it's not just the fatigue that has kept him awake. He wanted to get up and get a smoke. He could afford better cigarettes now, and still send money home to that village that no longer existed in his mind, whose memories have vaporized by the dynamo of progress in the past ten years. He no longer slept on thin straw mattes over a brick bed connected to the furnace. He no longer ate meat bought with ration coupons given twice a month. But what's more, he didn't live like a frog at the bottom of a well, as the Chinese proverb goes. He is now in a big city, one not only of great progress but a lot of culture. He has still never stepped into a museum, didn't understand a lot of the advertisements that have replaced the old Communist slogans in his village, but he felt his life had become bigger. Sure, he had never worked as hard in his life, and the construction business was a dangerous one, much more than tilling the little bit of land given to them after the economic reform started fifteen years ago. One of his closest buddies became a paraplegic and someone he didn't know fell to his death, which was compensated by two year's worth of his salaries. Still, there were many of them, and he would have to be really unlucky to meet his doom so soon.
He doesn't want a cigarette now. He has smoked nearly a pack today, and he's getting tired of smoking it, sort of weird. That annoyance comes and goes.
He sits up in the darkness and listens to the wind a little more. About two hours ago, he was standing at the bus station with other construction workers. His face was worn down by the mud on his face that was a mixture of the construction dust and his day's worth of sweat. His eyes were sunken under the weight of the work he had done. He knew all this because he saw it in his comrades. He also saw in them his own worn out clothes, his astray construction helmet, and in one of each person's hands a lunchbox. It wasn't a lunch box to carry lunch to work, but the reverse. There were no wives here to cook lunch for them to bring to work, but rather using their ration coupons from the construction company they could buy a generous size of lunch, and with a few dimes more they could add a couple of nice pork buns. And each of them would eat only half and save the rest for dinner. On a weekend they would go out for a meal and drinks for dinner. It wasn't an entirely bad life if you could suffer through the exhaustion that could make you sleepy on the dangerous job.
Sitting up in the darkness, listening to the sound of the howling wind, and the occasion tinkling sound of snow hitting on the window panes, he thought about the bus. He thought about the looks on his comrade's eyes. How is it that he never has noticed them, how worn out their souls were, how defeated. He remembered that when he was a child his family bought their first mule, and they would work it till it could no longer walk by the end of the day. The emptiness behind that mule's eyes, he remembered as a child, chilled him. This time it didn't chill him, that emptiness, just saddened him because he knew he too bore that same burden behind his eyes.
When they were in the bus he could see a little more even though the light was very dim. It was the cheapest bus line, very uncomfortable chairs, very crowded, nearly all construction workers; this was partly because the construction companies cut deals with the cheap buses and allowed the workers to ride for free or at a steep discount. He never rode a bus for free in the village, but then.... He looked at the people around him as he stood there squeezed among the tired shirts soaked in sweat. Everyone reeked of the absence of energy from the machines and tools of the day. The stink was barely bearable. He had been doing this for two years now, this being his second construction job, but he never could get used to the crowded pooling of sweat in the air. He felt like he was drowning in it, with no surface to reach, and whenever the bus came to a halt, the whole bunch of standing people would sway like wheat stalks in the wind, leaning against the people in front of them and being leaned against from behind. Then there's the dread that more people would be allowed to squeeze in. From time to time someone would yell at the driver for letting more people squeeze in, but since people can't get killed merely by squeezing in a bus, as long as the door could close it was all right.
By the middle of the ride, people started getting off. Those were the lucky ones whose dormitory was closer. He wondered how they got those jobs. His dormitory was not only farther away, but he shares a room with fifteen other people, more than half of whom would be snoring at any given time. But tonight that wasn't the reason he couldn't sleep. He kept thinking about this boy that got on the bus at the middle of his ride. He wasn't wearing construction worker's clothes, but he was neither old nor some middle-aged woman, which comprise the rest of the usual bus riders. He was another young man, a little younger than him, like his brother who's still stuck in the village failing to secure a work permit to go to a big city. He had a small bag on his back, more like an improvised bag, much like the one he had when he came to the city. He had come illegally, in that he didn't have a residence permit as he hadn't secured a work permit yet. But unlike his younger brother, he saved up money for the transportation and risked it to find a job here where he knew no one and had to sleep in hidden places away from the watchful eyes of the public security officers until he could find a job. It was a scary few months, lonesome, trying. And he looked at the boy, saw his lost face, and knew he was on the same boat. That lost look smothering the bravery and conviction that motivated those little country legs, was too familiar to him. Bravery was what fueled his perseverance. Plus, he had a family to support, not just his parents and the cowardly brother, but his newly wed wife, who was taking care of his parents. Perhaps it wasn't just bravery, he thinks in the darkness, that propelled him to go into the big city. He didn't even bother with the capital of his province, but came all the way to the Capital. Perhaps it was also necessity. But maybe even curiosity of the world and boredom with the village. Boredom with a destiny he somehow believed must be alterable by the sheer will of his hands and heart.
He saw that boy, that young man who looked a like a boy under that imposed straitjacket of fear and despair. He knew no one or at least didn't know how to get to where he needed to go; that was the look. And he wondered what motivated that boy to be there. No, it's no mystery, his comrades have told him all the same stories; necessity and a bit of curiosity. Yet, when he saw him he could still trace some of his own innocence that lent a credibility of bravery in the summary motivation of his adventure. It was this connection, even sympathy, that made him, almost, want to talk to the young man who had come with nearly nothing on his shoulders. To be his big brother, to make his life easier.
But then he looked around and saw all the mirrors around him in the dark incandescent light of the bus illuminating from the head of the bus. He saw phantasmal visages that all looked the same, that all looked like his, all exhausted of life and soul. He felt suddenly very lonely. He couldn't remember the last time his wife wrote to him, but that was less because she has been writing less often and more because he has paid much less attention to her letters as the days ground on. He was just a machine, doing what his body could to make money for motivations that made little sense but never questioned. The sheer loneliness that the lives around him reflected on his life made him take a step back from the boy. He was still looking lost in the thinning crowd when Yao got off the bus.
Now he thought about him, that young man. And slowly, as the familiarly cold wind outside making familiar sounds, conjuring up the details of that young man's fears and despair, tears start to flow down his cheeks.
