Prodigy
by JJ
“See? We are not late,” Dad said when we got to the bus stop. “You will get to your exam in plenty of time.”
I told him I needed time to get settled, to prepare.
“At worst you will get second place.” He grinned with all his teeth. “Your stepmom and I can accept that.”
It was an hour’s ride to school. Bus rides used to be my favorite thing. On a bus I could read frivolous things. Pride and Prejudice could be read during bus rides without the guilt of underutilizing my time, because on a journey, productivity is a bonus. Everyone needs to travel sometimes. I enjoyed bus rides like I enjoyed being sick. Even the greatest geniuses get sick occasionally and can’t do anything but lie in bed. Even Einstein got the flu, I bet, and had to put aside relativity and lie in a stupor, or read the funny pages of the papers until he got well, a few times in his life. Suspended between point A and B, it’s no use wishing you could get there faster; you are in the driver’s hands.
The bus hobbled near us.
Aunt Juying warned me about kidnappers who attacked during the rush to get on and off buses, especially on outbound routes like this. “It doesn’t take much to stick your skinny ass into a potato sack,” my aunt warned. “The way your head’s in the clouds you won’t know what went down before you are a child bride to some farmer’s idiot son.”
I used to plan a course of action if a child trafficker grabbed my wrist and hauled me off the bus. I’d do the requisite kicking and screaming then move right into the negotiations. Look, go kidnap someone else, I’d say. What a waste to sell me to the countryside. Let me go and I’ll find you someone more suitably ordinary, assist you with a swift capture and a smooth transportation. And if you are after money, then you are in luck because I’m a prodigy with enormous potential to go on and succeed in any field so if you let me go, I will give you half of my lifetime earnings, I swear, more reliable than your kidnapping business plus I will take no offense, hold no grudge, extract no retribution, just for this one-time life-sparing favor, you can 100% count on me.
Not all traffickers will listen to reason. They might kill you in spite of a compelling argument. I thought about my Dad, his sadness when they saw me all motionless and dead. But mostly, I thought about how bummed I’d be to die before I had a chance to achieve Greatness.
I had a theory that there were two types of lives, the meaningful kind and the busy bee kind. The latter you see everywhere. Salary men. Housewives. Poor unlucky people who didn’t get an education, like the mop makers next door. They run from home to work back to home, squirreling away little crumbs of money; they have children, then die. They live their whole lives in the sphere of mundane concerns, fulfilled by a savings account. It’s debatable whether running a business or military belonged in here, whether even Bill Gates or Napoleon had meaningful lives. On the other hand, you have people like Einstein or Bach, geniuses who did things ordinary people can’t dream of. With their intellects, they tapped into the universe’s true mysteries. They reached above our limits. They single handedly advanced our kind. What are you human for if not for this, otherwise why not be a bee, or a bird, or a dog?
I didn’t share this thought with my teachers because I didn’t want them to know that I considered them bee-like. But I felt like my dad would understand. I know he feels the same way. It was why he said what he said when Stepmom asked, “Why don’t you take the job Uncle Qi found for you? Such a good, stable job? Is that too much to ask? For you to have a job?”
“You know what you are asking me? You are asking me to wait to die.”
Out of everyone I knew, Dad was the only person who was striving to make something out of his life. All stepmom wanted was an apartment of our own to live in. All Aunt Juying did was cook-eat-scrub, cook-eat-scrub. But even Dad, I think, knew he couldn’t hope for anything but a mundane kind of success.
I knew this because whenever we walked past my elementary school, Dad would pause and peek through the iron gate. There was nothing to be seen. The school buildings were hidden behind a path. All you could see were some hedges. But Dad never tired of looking through that gate, even if all he saw were hedges. “Isn’t this a good school, Yun? Aren’t your teachers world-class?”
“If only we had a school like yours back then,” he would say. “You know we didn’t even go to classes after 1968.”
“The price of a small apartment, you know that? That’s how much this school cost. World-class education.”
In his most sober, sober moments, when, for some reason, instead of thinking about his next venture like Dad usually did, he remembered his various business failures, Dad said, “Your dad never accomplished much, did he? You are your dad’s greatest accomplishment.”
I’d say, “Noooo, dad.” I threw my head back and acted like he was telling a joke. This was to conceal the fact that, in my heart, I agreed with him.
Dad was watching TV in the bedroom. In the glow of the TV, you could see his face, all craggy. Dad was well over 30. More than a third of his life had already passed. No more illusions of limitless potential for him. I remembered the time when we saw a TV commercial for a moisturizer. This was when we first moved to the attic in Grandma’s house, in the middle of the Old Vegetable and Livestock Market – after we had to move out of our city apartment, because Dad’s watermelon seeds venture didn’t work out. The commercial-man said, “This is how you measure skin aging.” When I looked at Dad, he was pinching the skin on the back of his hand like the commercial man was demonstrating. “Look how quickly my skin returns to its original shape!” He beckoned me and Stepmom to look. “This means my skin is young, you see?”
I sat down next to Dad. I wanted to tell him that I would like to make something of my life, but I didn’t want him to think I was just “saying it.” I didn’t want him to think I was saying what I thought would cheer him up.
An opportunity came when the TV showed some scientist explaining his work observing stars in distant galaxies. When I sat next to dad, he always turned the channel to something educational. “I want to do something like that,” I said.
Dad didn’t say anything right away. I could sense he was looking at me – I could always tell when Dad was looking at me. Finally, he said, “Do you, Yun? You want to do something like that?” By the end of that sentence, he was smiling. “It’s not going to be easy.”
“Of course I know it’s not easy,” I said.
I knew there was a price to pay. I’d read enough great-people biographies to know having talent wasn’t enough. You have to spurn all other sources of pleasure. I watched the frivolous, the shortsighted, the un-save-able toss their lives away as they played ball, knitted, danced, labored over meals that would vanish in hours and one wouldn’t even know they existed at all.
Luckily, I never felt any impulse to play ball or knit or cook or dance. But I envied those who were born with even fewer desires than I did, who could walk past store windows without wanting to see what’s inside, who wouldn’t steal glances at the entertainment pages of the newspaper, who looked into mirrors without making wishes to change unimportant, ephemeral things.
Until recently, I had been working on it.
When my school appeared in the bus window, I didn’t get out of my seat.
The truth was, I would never study something like galaxies. I was afraid of galaxies. Until the night the power went out all over the city, I hadn’t realized just how terrified I was of them. That night, we brought our cots to the roof to escape the heat. Most of our neighbors were already settled on their rooftops. Everywhere around us people talked and laughed and chewed sunflower seeds.
I read. A few times stepmom told me to put down my book and look at the stars. I ignored her.
It was dead quiet when I switched off my flashlight. Suddenly I was in a darkness so thick I could grab it with my fingers. Even the traffic lights were dead, not a car in the distance. Then I saw.
Hundreds of thousands of stars. They hung so low you could touch them, big and small, floating in this viscous darkness. They formed dense swirling cities and colonies. For a second I felt them drawing close. Every time I blinked they pulled closer, until some were up against my face. Nothing existed but the stars, the stars and me.
The chattering had long faded. No humming of ACs, no fans. The earth fell away and I floated up, untethered.
I didn’t get scared then. It was wonderful, I was happy, happily surprised. Then, a neighbor to my left moved and the squeak of his cot reeled me back to earth, to my cot on our roof top flanked by other rooftops with other cots.
When I looked back up again, everything was different. The crowd of stars terrified me.
“Dad?”
My voice fell into the darkness like a reed. There was nothing in front of me. I couldn’t see my hands.
“A-yi?”
I didn’t know how long I sat like that, trembling, waiting for a reply, any reply, before there was a cough. It was the neighbor’s wife. I clung to that sound like a fishing line and reeled myself back to my kind, to people who thought in a time scale I could understand, away from the stars that blink away many lifetimes in an instant.
I clamped my eyes shut and lay there. I didn’t sleep – in this state, I couldn’t risk slipping into oblivion. I waited and waited. An eternity passed and I heard the first sound of morning. The clanking of a wagon as the first farmer wheeled his cart into the vegetable and livestock market. More sounds. Then a sliver of light. The outline of buildings.
I told no one. I didn’t want them to feel disturbed like I was. Instead, I found a way to look at people’s edges, focusing on their hands, the tips of their shoulders, the lobes of their ears. It usually kept the questions at bay. But today, I had already slipped. I’d seen the old man in the front row seat when I got on the bus, had taken in those long, sparse eyebrow hairs, the dangling eyelids, the way he munched on the air in front of him. Five years, I’d give him, and that felt generous. A thin stack of calendar pages. The two permed women next to him, talking about their daughter-in-laws, were definitely past their midway point. Each day ahead of them was matched by a day already behind, every minute the scale tipped a little less in their favor. It’s not all that far away for them, is it?
Do you know? I wanted to grab each of them and shake their shoulders. How do you feel about this?
You know how your mind is like a stack of books? We deal with the top ones first. New ones keep piling on and as a result you never get to the end. There are some very tough ones to get through like family or career on the top of your stack. You read those couple of books for a long time. All those books prevent you from reaching down. You may even forget that a book lays there at the bottom, you don’t think about it on most days. At most, now and then you glance at the spine.
But what if what’s inside that one bottom Big Book cancels all the other ones out? What if it contains the one big story, the only story that matters, and once you start reading it, you don’t feel like opening any of the other books ever again?
Even on a day like this, when all you could see from the bus window was a uniform blue, I knew the stars were there, hidden just behind the sunlight, enormous and indifferent as always.
I told him I needed time to get settled, to prepare.
“At worst you will get second place.” He grinned with all his teeth. “Your stepmom and I can accept that.”
It was an hour’s ride to school. Bus rides used to be my favorite thing. On a bus I could read frivolous things. Pride and Prejudice could be read during bus rides without the guilt of underutilizing my time, because on a journey, productivity is a bonus. Everyone needs to travel sometimes. I enjoyed bus rides like I enjoyed being sick. Even the greatest geniuses get sick occasionally and can’t do anything but lie in bed. Even Einstein got the flu, I bet, and had to put aside relativity and lie in a stupor, or read the funny pages of the papers until he got well, a few times in his life. Suspended between point A and B, it’s no use wishing you could get there faster; you are in the driver’s hands.
The bus hobbled near us.
Aunt Juying warned me about kidnappers who attacked during the rush to get on and off buses, especially on outbound routes like this. “It doesn’t take much to stick your skinny ass into a potato sack,” my aunt warned. “The way your head’s in the clouds you won’t know what went down before you are a child bride to some farmer’s idiot son.”
I used to plan a course of action if a child trafficker grabbed my wrist and hauled me off the bus. I’d do the requisite kicking and screaming then move right into the negotiations. Look, go kidnap someone else, I’d say. What a waste to sell me to the countryside. Let me go and I’ll find you someone more suitably ordinary, assist you with a swift capture and a smooth transportation. And if you are after money, then you are in luck because I’m a prodigy with enormous potential to go on and succeed in any field so if you let me go, I will give you half of my lifetime earnings, I swear, more reliable than your kidnapping business plus I will take no offense, hold no grudge, extract no retribution, just for this one-time life-sparing favor, you can 100% count on me.
Not all traffickers will listen to reason. They might kill you in spite of a compelling argument. I thought about my Dad, his sadness when they saw me all motionless and dead. But mostly, I thought about how bummed I’d be to die before I had a chance to achieve Greatness.
I had a theory that there were two types of lives, the meaningful kind and the busy bee kind. The latter you see everywhere. Salary men. Housewives. Poor unlucky people who didn’t get an education, like the mop makers next door. They run from home to work back to home, squirreling away little crumbs of money; they have children, then die. They live their whole lives in the sphere of mundane concerns, fulfilled by a savings account. It’s debatable whether running a business or military belonged in here, whether even Bill Gates or Napoleon had meaningful lives. On the other hand, you have people like Einstein or Bach, geniuses who did things ordinary people can’t dream of. With their intellects, they tapped into the universe’s true mysteries. They reached above our limits. They single handedly advanced our kind. What are you human for if not for this, otherwise why not be a bee, or a bird, or a dog?
I didn’t share this thought with my teachers because I didn’t want them to know that I considered them bee-like. But I felt like my dad would understand. I know he feels the same way. It was why he said what he said when Stepmom asked, “Why don’t you take the job Uncle Qi found for you? Such a good, stable job? Is that too much to ask? For you to have a job?”
“You know what you are asking me? You are asking me to wait to die.”
Out of everyone I knew, Dad was the only person who was striving to make something out of his life. All stepmom wanted was an apartment of our own to live in. All Aunt Juying did was cook-eat-scrub, cook-eat-scrub. But even Dad, I think, knew he couldn’t hope for anything but a mundane kind of success.
I knew this because whenever we walked past my elementary school, Dad would pause and peek through the iron gate. There was nothing to be seen. The school buildings were hidden behind a path. All you could see were some hedges. But Dad never tired of looking through that gate, even if all he saw were hedges. “Isn’t this a good school, Yun? Aren’t your teachers world-class?”
“If only we had a school like yours back then,” he would say. “You know we didn’t even go to classes after 1968.”
“The price of a small apartment, you know that? That’s how much this school cost. World-class education.”
In his most sober, sober moments, when, for some reason, instead of thinking about his next venture like Dad usually did, he remembered his various business failures, Dad said, “Your dad never accomplished much, did he? You are your dad’s greatest accomplishment.”
I’d say, “Noooo, dad.” I threw my head back and acted like he was telling a joke. This was to conceal the fact that, in my heart, I agreed with him.
Dad was watching TV in the bedroom. In the glow of the TV, you could see his face, all craggy. Dad was well over 30. More than a third of his life had already passed. No more illusions of limitless potential for him. I remembered the time when we saw a TV commercial for a moisturizer. This was when we first moved to the attic in Grandma’s house, in the middle of the Old Vegetable and Livestock Market – after we had to move out of our city apartment, because Dad’s watermelon seeds venture didn’t work out. The commercial-man said, “This is how you measure skin aging.” When I looked at Dad, he was pinching the skin on the back of his hand like the commercial man was demonstrating. “Look how quickly my skin returns to its original shape!” He beckoned me and Stepmom to look. “This means my skin is young, you see?”
I sat down next to Dad. I wanted to tell him that I would like to make something of my life, but I didn’t want him to think I was just “saying it.” I didn’t want him to think I was saying what I thought would cheer him up.
An opportunity came when the TV showed some scientist explaining his work observing stars in distant galaxies. When I sat next to dad, he always turned the channel to something educational. “I want to do something like that,” I said.
Dad didn’t say anything right away. I could sense he was looking at me – I could always tell when Dad was looking at me. Finally, he said, “Do you, Yun? You want to do something like that?” By the end of that sentence, he was smiling. “It’s not going to be easy.”
“Of course I know it’s not easy,” I said.
I knew there was a price to pay. I’d read enough great-people biographies to know having talent wasn’t enough. You have to spurn all other sources of pleasure. I watched the frivolous, the shortsighted, the un-save-able toss their lives away as they played ball, knitted, danced, labored over meals that would vanish in hours and one wouldn’t even know they existed at all.
Luckily, I never felt any impulse to play ball or knit or cook or dance. But I envied those who were born with even fewer desires than I did, who could walk past store windows without wanting to see what’s inside, who wouldn’t steal glances at the entertainment pages of the newspaper, who looked into mirrors without making wishes to change unimportant, ephemeral things.
Until recently, I had been working on it.
When my school appeared in the bus window, I didn’t get out of my seat.
The truth was, I would never study something like galaxies. I was afraid of galaxies. Until the night the power went out all over the city, I hadn’t realized just how terrified I was of them. That night, we brought our cots to the roof to escape the heat. Most of our neighbors were already settled on their rooftops. Everywhere around us people talked and laughed and chewed sunflower seeds.
I read. A few times stepmom told me to put down my book and look at the stars. I ignored her.
It was dead quiet when I switched off my flashlight. Suddenly I was in a darkness so thick I could grab it with my fingers. Even the traffic lights were dead, not a car in the distance. Then I saw.
Hundreds of thousands of stars. They hung so low you could touch them, big and small, floating in this viscous darkness. They formed dense swirling cities and colonies. For a second I felt them drawing close. Every time I blinked they pulled closer, until some were up against my face. Nothing existed but the stars, the stars and me.
The chattering had long faded. No humming of ACs, no fans. The earth fell away and I floated up, untethered.
I didn’t get scared then. It was wonderful, I was happy, happily surprised. Then, a neighbor to my left moved and the squeak of his cot reeled me back to earth, to my cot on our roof top flanked by other rooftops with other cots.
When I looked back up again, everything was different. The crowd of stars terrified me.
“Dad?”
My voice fell into the darkness like a reed. There was nothing in front of me. I couldn’t see my hands.
“A-yi?”
I didn’t know how long I sat like that, trembling, waiting for a reply, any reply, before there was a cough. It was the neighbor’s wife. I clung to that sound like a fishing line and reeled myself back to my kind, to people who thought in a time scale I could understand, away from the stars that blink away many lifetimes in an instant.
I clamped my eyes shut and lay there. I didn’t sleep – in this state, I couldn’t risk slipping into oblivion. I waited and waited. An eternity passed and I heard the first sound of morning. The clanking of a wagon as the first farmer wheeled his cart into the vegetable and livestock market. More sounds. Then a sliver of light. The outline of buildings.
I told no one. I didn’t want them to feel disturbed like I was. Instead, I found a way to look at people’s edges, focusing on their hands, the tips of their shoulders, the lobes of their ears. It usually kept the questions at bay. But today, I had already slipped. I’d seen the old man in the front row seat when I got on the bus, had taken in those long, sparse eyebrow hairs, the dangling eyelids, the way he munched on the air in front of him. Five years, I’d give him, and that felt generous. A thin stack of calendar pages. The two permed women next to him, talking about their daughter-in-laws, were definitely past their midway point. Each day ahead of them was matched by a day already behind, every minute the scale tipped a little less in their favor. It’s not all that far away for them, is it?
Do you know? I wanted to grab each of them and shake their shoulders. How do you feel about this?
You know how your mind is like a stack of books? We deal with the top ones first. New ones keep piling on and as a result you never get to the end. There are some very tough ones to get through like family or career on the top of your stack. You read those couple of books for a long time. All those books prevent you from reaching down. You may even forget that a book lays there at the bottom, you don’t think about it on most days. At most, now and then you glance at the spine.
But what if what’s inside that one bottom Big Book cancels all the other ones out? What if it contains the one big story, the only story that matters, and once you start reading it, you don’t feel like opening any of the other books ever again?
Even on a day like this, when all you could see from the bus window was a uniform blue, I knew the stars were there, hidden just behind the sunlight, enormous and indifferent as always.