Becoming My Own Moses

The street where I live now is quiet in the evenings. At dusk, the windows glow softly, and someone down the road always seems to be boiling a kettle. The air smells faintly of cut grass and clean rain. Sometimes, when I close my front door and feel the solid click of it settling into its frame, I am startled by how much safety can weigh. It is then that I remember the wind of my childhood—the way it moved through rooms that had no doors, carrying dust, illness, and the long echo of unfinished grief.

I was born in Xukou, a small place in western Fuyang, a dot too minor to earn its name on most maps. The mountains there always looked as though they were coated in ash. A cement factory stood nearby, its chimney rising like a crude stitch through the pale sky, sewing grey air to yellow earth. Everything was damp—dust, clothes, skin. It clung to you with a fatigue that never quite washed off.

My father had once been a “sent-down youth,” swept out of the city by history’s tide and stranded in this muddy corner of the world. He became a factory worker. Every morning he walked into the grey fog, and every evening he returned carrying a heavier version of it in his pores. My mother was local. By the time I can remember her clearly, she was already living inside an illness with a name I did not yet understand: bipolar disorder. When it flared, it was like a summer storm breaking furniture and voices into pieces. When it receded, she became terrifyingly still, her eyes empty like mudflats after the tide has gone.

I learned very early to read the weather in her face. A shadow passing through her gaze, a brittle sharpness in her voice, the way her fingers curled without reason—I could predict the size of the coming storm. Without a mother’s shelter, safety became a skill rather than a given. I learned to placate. To watch. To disappear into books, where grief and joy followed rules, and pain had the decency to resolve itself by the last page.

My father’s love came differently—quiet, awkward, stubborn. He bought me cheap plastic toys from town. He taught me to fold paper cranes. Each crease he pressed into the thin paper felt like a message he could not otherwise send. These small gestures were my fires in winter. Weak light, yes, but still light.

In 1988, we moved into a factory dormitory in Xindeng. I believed, foolishly, that life was about to level out. That was the year my mother fell ill beyond return. A fever. Pneumonia. Convulsions. When the fire burned out, it left part of her brain damaged. She became paralysed, confined to a bed. A living person collapsed into a silent body that needed constant tending.

The house acquired a new scent: bitter medicine, unclean bodily smells, and my father’s sweat mixed with despair. Something cold slid into my chest and made itself at home—guilt. I felt that my mother and I were two mountains on my father’s back. I decided my repayment would be achievement. I studied as if my life were a ledger that could be balanced by exam results. Every certificate I brought home felt like a small offering: Look, I am useful. Please don’t give up yet.

Two years of middle school passed like an interlude of mercy. A teacher who had once been my mother’s classmate treated me with displaced tenderness. A young physics teacher smiled like a plant turning toward the sun. I absorbed their normality greedily. I moved between good students and bad ones. The bad ones took me to smoky video halls and greasy billiard rooms. Their parents did not reject me for my family’s shame. Their ordinary acceptance felt like grace.

I had resigned myself to a modest life path when the headmaster came to our house. He stood in the thick, stagnant air and said, without negotiation, that I would sit the entrance exam for Fuyang Middle School’s gifted program. Two days before the exam, he returned to speak solemnly with my father. For the first time, I thought: perhaps someone, somewhere, had scribbled a marginal note beside my name.

Four years at Fuyang. Seven at Zhejiang University. I turned myself into a machine designed only for study. I thought my father’s endurance would last forever. It didn’t. In my final university year, his mind fractured. He wandered out into a winter night and broke his leg. On December 18, 1999, I admitted him to hospital. The world outside was celebrating Macau’s return. Fireworks beat against the windows while I stood under white hospital lights, feeling as though joy existed behind thick glass I could never touch.

I begged the university for a dorm room and turned it into an ark. My paralysed mother. My disoriented father. My studies. I moved between academic papers and dirty nappies. Sometimes my nose bled into the sink as I brushed my teeth. The smell of formaldehyde and funeral flowers became the signature of my youth.

Then came the day that changed everything.

It was late 1999. The sunlight was thin, like diluted milk. Hospital bills stacked under a glass board like verdicts. I had just cleaned my mother’s chamber pot. The smell clung to my hands. An elderly neighbour, Granny Dong, sat across from me with a cold bowl of rice.

“You should go to Aiguo,” she said.

I said nothing. The sky outside was iron-grey.

“You must go,” she said. “Your father is the sort of man no one would mourn if he died a hundred times.”

Her voice was flat, factual.

“He’s too ordinary,” she said. “Too ordinary to deserve pity.”

Silence fell. My mother groaned faintly in the next room.

“Like bayberries on a mountain,” Granny Dong said softly. “Just as they turn red and sweet—one storm comes, and they’re all knocked to the ground.”

Her eyes, clouded but bright, held no cruelty. Only clarity.

“People can’t help feeling sorry for that,” she said.

The next day, I went to the factory. I stumbled through my plea in the manager’s office. My father hospitalised. My mother dying. No way forward. He listened. Tapped the desk twice.

“I understand,” he said. “You can rest easy.”

Ten minutes. That was all it took.

Later, he sent a car to move us to university housing. On New Year’s Eve morning, I knelt and bowed to him in gratitude. He panicked, tried to pull me up, embarrassed.

“Don’t do that,” he said. “Don’t ever do that.”

Years later, an opportunity carried me across the ocean to Seattle. The rain there was clean. It did not wash away memory, but it created distance.

My father once tried to take my mother with him into death. After he was rescued, I told him:

“If you live, I’ll take you wherever I go.”

Then, colder:

“If you die, I’ll bury you and never remember you again.”

It was the last umbilical cord I cut.

I do not glorify suffering. If I could choose, I would choose a healthy mother and a quiet afternoon. Suffering has no virtue. It is only something you cross.

Now, when I look back, my past stands behind me like a long shadow of trees. The sun moves. The shadow stretches, but it no longer weighs on my shoulders. The people who helped me—teachers, neighbours, managers—were flickers of light that shaped that shadow.

Hope, I have learned, is not heroic. It begins with admitting how cold reality is. Only then can that stubborn, unreasonable will to take one more step forward begin to matter.

Tonight, in England, I close my door. I make tea. Outside, the wind moves gently through hedges and parked cars. It no longer howls through broken doorframes. But I still hear it sometimes. It is the wind of my childhood. It reminds me that I walked through something that should have destroyed me.

And it tells me—quietly—that I did not walk through it alone.