Xiaoman
In the small hours of the night, Xu Qinghe lay with her eyes open.
Not that she didn’t want to sleep—she didn’t dare sleep too soundly. Her daughter had cried and fussed all day; she had held her the whole afternoon, arms too sore to lift, a swell of grievance lodged in her chest like a well, too deep to see the bottom. This grievance could not be allowed to reach her daughter. The girl could not see—but her mother always felt that children who cannot see have hearts that glow. So she digested it only at night, inch by inch, and once it was digested, dawn came and she was a mother again.
She often thought: Heaven has shut two doors on her; I have to become a window. And if there is no window, then I will take myself apart, and be my daughter’s window.
In this world there are grievances no one else can see; in this world there is strength no one else can see either.
In the ten months she carried her, she could not imagine what would come. The year Xiaoman was born, outside the delivery room she laughed until creases formed at the corners of her eyes. Before the laughter settled, the diagnosis arrived: congenital visual disability, congenital hearing disability, both of the first degree. The doctor’s words she remembers to this day: “Severe. Rare.”
The day the child’s father left, there was no slammed door, no quarrel. Only that one morning, a pair of shoes was missing from the house. Xu Qinghe did not chase after him. She stood in the doorway a long while, holding Xiaoman in her swaddling clothes. Some people leave; some people stay. Those who stay must carry the days on.
What are days? Days are odd jobs by daylight, care given hand to hand, soothing again and again the child’s nameless terrors; nights of waiting until the child sleeps deep before daring to let the tears out; and once they’ve fallen and been wiped away, a couple of hours of sleep, then eyes opening again.
Xiaoman’s world was once a dry well. At its bottom, no light, no sound. It wasn’t that she never cried—she cried for herself alone, and heard no echo. Then one day a warm hand closed around her small one, and the wall of the well knew a little warmth. From then on she held on to that finger, held it with all her might. It was her world entire, her road, her lamp.
And the one outside the well had her fears too. At night Xu Qinghe would massage Xiaoman, inch by inch, murmuring under her breath. Xiaoman could not hear—she murmured anyway. It was not scripture she murmured; it was a mother’s fear: fear that she would be the first to fall, fear that one day her child would have no one left to lean on. When the fear had run its course, her hands went on working. Dawn always comes. She had to be there.
When Xiaoman was two years and nine months old, she received a cochlear implant. On the day it was switched on, Xu Qinghe’s palms were slick with sweat.
As the doctor’s lips parted and closed, a sound fell suddenly into Xiaoman’s world. Not thunder, not a bell—a word, a word she had never heard, yet seemed to have waited nine hundred days and nights for:
“Xiaoman.”
The child turned her head.
Xu Qinghe’s tears fell then and there. Years later she still remembered that turn of the head: hesitant, timid, like someone at the bottom of a deep well gazing up, for the first time, at the circle of sky at the well’s mouth.
The door had been knocked open, but beyond it lay a thousand mountains and ten thousand rivers. One sound, taught a thousand times; one word, taught ten thousand times. She learned to take words apart—“mā” was “m—ah,” “huā,” flower, was “h—u—ah”—pressing Xiaoman’s little hand against her throat, against her lips, teaching the child to catch sound through touch, feeding the syllables one by one into those newly opened ears. Come wind, come rain, come winter, come summer—never a day missed. And after ten thousand repetitions, one dusk, Xiaoman suddenly spoke. The sound was crooked, but it was clear:
“Ma… Ma…”
Xu Qinghe answered, “I’m here”—her voice steady, though the tears fell first.
With her ears seen to, her eyes could not wait. Word was that in Guangzhou there were good doctors, so Xu Qinghe packed their bags and led Xiaoman onto a southbound train. The carriage surged with crowds. Xiaoman, who could not see, clutched her mother’s hand and held on for dear life. Xu Qinghe bent down and said, “Don’t be afraid. Ma’s here.” Words the child, at last, could hear.
The road from doctor to doctor was long; the lights of clinic rooms lit and went dark. Those eyes had only 0.05 of their sight left. The doctors did their utmost; the progress was slow. Xu Qinghe did not complain. She thought: even the 0.05 that remains is light. One thread of light is enough for Xiaoman to find her way; and if it is not enough to find her way, it is enough for her to find me.
The hardest days—those she was not spared. But the world’s warmth is passed along, one lamp at a time. People from the neighborhood office came; people from civil affairs came. The key to a low-rent home was set in her palm; the subsistence allowance was written into the ledger. The night they moved in, Xiaoman reached out to touch the freshly painted wall, and suddenly laughed out loud. Xu Qinghe stood in the lamplight watching her and thought: this lamp was lit by many hands together. In the days to come, she too would learn to be someone else’s lamp.
Xiaoman is nine now, a third-grader at a special education school in Guangzhou.
The morning classroom, sunlight slanting in. The teacher writes on the blackboard, and Xiaoman sits in the front row, body nearly bent against the desk, making out each character, one at a time, with the 0.05 that remains; then she tips her ear slightly, letting the implant behind it chase every word the teacher says. The chasing is effortful—and it is joy.
Sunlight falls on the little device at her ear. It glints like a drop of morning dew held fast.
No one knows where this little girl will go from here—not even Xiaoman herself. But she knows two things: the light in the classroom is warm; and when school lets out, at the gate, those hands are always there.
Xiaoman, Xiaoman—the name is a solar term too: the season when the wheat kernels first fill out, on the verge of ripening, not yet ripe.
All things, having come this far, hold their small, brimming fullness. And the days ahead are long.
Based on a true story