The Light Is Still On

Mr. Emilio:

As I take up my pen, it is as if we were face to face.

“Come in, child. The lamp is lit for those who travel by night.”

Those were the first words you ever said to me. For more than twenty years, I have turned them over in my mind a thousand times, translated them again and again, and with every rendering I find them truer: there is no better sentence in this world.

You may not remember me. That winter, a man from the East sat on the bench before your door, thin as a bundle of sticks, smelling of seawater, with half a shoe left on one foot. You came out holding a lamp, raised it to my face, then lowered it and simply held out your hand.

My name is Chen Chaosheng. I was born by the sea and grew up around boats. My father was sick for three years, and the family fell into debt for our boat. Desperate, I listened to men who said there was a living to be made overseas. Only later did I understand: the “living” the traffickers spoke of was a leaky old ship. For more than forty days we drank water from a tin bucket and gnawed biscuits gone hard with age. Some wept in the night; some burned with fever and talked in delirium. I buried my face in my knees and counted the waves, not daring to think of home.

The ship made land, and we walked many more days. The night we reached Reynosa, I was burning with fever, and my money was gone along with the man who had taken it. I sat down at your gate, meaning only to rest my feet for a night.

It was you who helped me through the door. Aunt Rosa brought a bowl of hot soup—beans cooked soft as silk, the smell of corn tortillas mingled in it. In half a lifetime I have drunk many soups, and none has ever come close to that one. Seeing me gulp it down, she pressed her hand on the rim of the bowl: “Slowly. There is plenty in the casa.”

Casa—home. That was the first Spanish word you two taught me.

I stayed with you nine days. Aunt Rosa took apart my ruined padded jacket, quilted in new cotton, and stitched it so finely you couldn’t tell it had ever torn. You opened a thick notebook and asked me to write my name. I wrote the three characters “Chen Chaosheng,” and you studied them a long while and said, “Like three little boats, moored at the same shore.” By day, you would set a small stool in the courtyard and go over “code words” with me, stroke by stroke—you learning Chinese, I learning Spanish. The first Chinese phrase you learned was not a greeting but “Have you eaten?” You said that every year travelers came from the sea, and this phrase mattered most.

You see—even your comfort was aimed at the stomach.

Those days happened to fall on our Chinese New Year. After I gestured for a long time trying to explain, Aunt Rosa rolled up her sleeves and wrapped “dumplings” out of corn dough—they came out looking like little boats. I laughed out loud—the first time since my journey began. She laughed too, pointed at the pot, and said: “Casa.” I said: “Home.” Two words; one and the same meaning.

In those nine days, I grew used to the sight of your courtyard: a Guatemalan man asleep in the hammock, a Honduran mother and child sitting by the stove, a boy who’d lost his luggage leaning in the corner. Different nationalities, no common tongue—but when the meal was served, everyone took up a bowl and ate with heads bowed. What is home? Home is where someone sets food aside for you.

Sir, there is something I must confess. On the ninth night, wearing the jacket Aunt Rosa had mended, I sat on the doorstep half the night. To go forward—the road ahead was all fog and danger; to turn back—I had nothing, and no face to show anyone. At first light, as you came out to refill the lamp, I asked: “Father, does a man who turns back count as a failure?”

You trimmed the wick and said: “Child, roads have no right or wrong. Coming home alive is the greatest work there is. This lamp faces the sea and the mountains alike—whoever comes to it, it shines for.”

I wept. The tears I had not dared to shed through forty days at sea, I shed them all, freely, beneath the lamp of an old man in a strange land.

I went home. The villagers thought I was a ghost; my mother held me and for a long time could not say a word. In the years since, I have gone back to boats, paid off the debt, and opened a small food stall by the wharf selling fish soup and hot rice. On opening day, I served my first bowl to a stranded sailor who had slept two nights on the docks. He asked how much. I said: “Nothing. Eat, then be on your way.” A lamp hangs at my door, lit at dusk, rain or shine. People ask what I get out of it. I say: the roads by the sea are slippery in the dark, and someone is always traveling by night.

Last winter, a young man who crews ocean freighters came in for fish soup and mentioned in passing that when he changed ships, he had passed through Reynosa and seen a little house with a lamp at the door, its threshold worn smooth and shining, strangers from everywhere coming and going. He said it was a shelter, that an old couple had kept it for twenty-four years, and that when a Chinese traveler arrived, the old gentleman would ask in halting Chinese, “Have you eaten?”

The young man stared at me for a while. “Boss, your eyes are red.”

I said the soup was hot.

Enclosed is a small packet of seaweed from our coast, dried by my mother’s old recipe—it goes well with bean soup. There is also a small roll of money, pooled by the brothers who left the village with me and came back with me. It isn’t much—use it to patch your roof. I heard Reynosa’s rain under your eaves once; it comes down fast.

I will not urge anyone to turn back, nor to go forward. I ask only one thing: let the lamp stay lit. As long as there are people like us across the sea keeping watch for that light, the night is not so frightening.

While the lamp burns, no one is truly adrift.

Paper is short and feeling is long. My daughter is learning a foreign tongue; one day she will write to you herself, and the signature shall read—“From your Chinese man of three little boats.”

With respect,

Your student, Chen Chaosheng The twelfth of the twelfth month, at night, by lamplight

—This piece is adapted from true events. All names are pseudonyms.