These foreigners, all of these foreigners, all of these shiny people. I want to dazzle them, and so I show them the Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven, Tiananmen Square, today, like every day, I show them.
I stand at the front of the bus beside the driver. I stand with a microphone in hand. I stand steady in my new heels, each adorned with a plastic flower. I finish my speech, and I turn around to play some music on the sound system, but a teenage girl from England raises her hand before I can and asks if she can stand on the Avenue of Eternal Peace when we get there. She doesn’t say, because she knows better, that she wants to stand in the spot where that protester-boy was infamously gunned down. She doesn’t say she wants to stand atop history, to feel its solidity beneath her feet, to take photos to email to all of her friends.
But I know. But we aren’t there, not yet. But she’d get run over. And I’m responsible for this girl, for all of them, these shiny people. I am responsible for their well-being, for their happiness, for keeping them alive, for telling them the facts, for earning my salary. And so I’m the one who has to break it to them, these silly foreigners and this silly yellow-headed girl, I’m the one who has to tell them what they don’t want to hear, and that’s rough, but, come on, it’s the truth it is, and I’m trying to practice it, I am…

…A difficult child, and Ma didn’t suffer through thirteen hours of labor so I could work as a tour guide, that’s what he says, that’s what he always says. He says, education is utmost; education is solid ground in a world of earthquakes; things won’t save you, but thoughts will. I nod and comb out my hair with my fingers. I want to say, yeah, okay, Ba, but times are tough, and the pay is good, and now everyone’s got a college degree except for those bridge-troll peasants who hock cheap plastic jewelry and stolen cell phones on the sidewalk. I say nothing; I comb my hair.
“Anyway,” he says, “Eat. Eat.”
I remove my fingers from my hair and stare down into the bowl full of rice, all brown and crusty and stuck together, scraped from the bottom of the cooker. Pathetic, I think, and I wonder how he manages to keep himself alive. I pick up my chopsticks and shovel the rice into my face anyway. I am hungry, starving, and when I look down again, my bowl is empty. There are no other dishes, of course not— no pork, no vegetables, no fish; just rice, just Ba, alone, of course, always…

…But not always. I used to exist alongside him until I found my freedom in test scores and left for university when I was seventeen. A month in Beijing, a month of ring roads and racy novels and pizza restaurants and designer purses, and I swore to myself I’d never return to my hometown for anything other than a visit. I promised myself I’d never return to the corpse-gray arms of that dull, dusty life.
In my second year of university, sometime between Spring Festival and summer break, my mother decided the same thing, left my father, left for Beijing, but not to find me. There was some other man, and I knew that, and there was probably something else, some sadness, some driving force, but what it was, for sure, I’m not entirely sure, never will be.
But I am sure of this, of this I’m sure, what my mother and I both knew, but never discussed, didn’t then have the words to express, not then. This: in a city of glittering lights and open sidewalks, in a city of steamy restaurants and sleek shops, in a city of subways and Olympic games, in a city of shaggy artists and legless beggars, in a city of thirteen million, it’s easy to go and seek your truth, it’s easy to find and fall in love, it’s easy, easy, beautiful, easy, just too easy to just disappear…

…and now I sit, visible, in his tiny apartment, the same apartment in which I grew up, hours from Beijing. A gnawing still burns at my stomach like a slow-spreading fire. I’ve got this appetite like a country boy, but I’m a factory-town girl— was. Now, I’m a young Beijing lady, a tour guide, moving up and up, saving money, saving, saving face. I’m civilized, and I’m not going to ask for more. I balance my chopsticks on my bowl, rim to rim, and place my hands in my lap.
Ba starts and then finishes his own bowl of rice, and then he asks after my health; he says, “Li, how is your health?” He’s already asked me this four or five times during this visit alone, four or five times in a couple of hours. I answer like I answered last time and every other time, “Not so bad.” I don’t ask after his health; I don’t want to know.
He grunts at my answer or my lack of a question, I’m not sure, and he stands up from the table. His spine is beginning to curve and the skin around his eyes is beginning to wrinkle like a spoiled fruit. He is getting older, aren’t we all, but Ba doesn’t know about Clinique or Lancome, doesn’t understand the secrets of youth, doesn’t know that now we can live immortally, eternally. He shuffles over to the kitchen sink, turns on the faucet, and slow as an autumn leaf drifting toward the ground, he begins rinsing out our bowls…

…and in the city, I have my own bowls, and I wash my own dishes, and I have a fat wad of red bills under my mattress, and I have a bank account, and I have a college degree. In my life, I have had two boyfriends, and I have kissed three other men, and I have gone on dates with half a dozen more. And I have a small apartment with bars on the windows and a view of an alleyway, and I have a potted flower in the window sill. And I have ten pairs of shoes, maybe more, and a frilly dress for each season and a color TV. And I have girlfriends with whom I have lunch weekly in trendy cafes, and I have a purse that I bought at a designer boutique, and I have a job that requires me to speak in English, to memorize random facts, to represent my country, to represent myself. And I have a heart that is a willing student, a heart that is ready to learn to love, a head that wants for greatness, ears that always remain open, eyes that see all that this world can offer me, a mouth that longs to speak the truth. And I have everything Ba didn’t have, everything he was too stubborn to want; I have hope. I have…

…Silence, the world spins closer to silence here. Outside, there’s a different kind of smog, and outside, people walk a little more slowly. There are no massive machines constructing buildings here, no cranky men crouched in hutongs playing chess, no billboards plastered with snooty foreign girls in revealing foreign clothing, no taxis speeding toward destinations unknown, no excited buzz, no neon, no life. Outside, there is just a kid screaming, a screaming kid, a kid screaming some nursery rhyme he picked up in school or somewhere, but it doesn’t sound like a nursery rhyme; it sounds like a curse. This is the place I left; factories and dirt and family homes.
Ba turns off the faucet, sets the bowls on the counter to dry, and clears his throat—it grinds like a malfunctioning engine. He joins me again at the table. There is a creak, and I wonder if it
sounded from his chair or from his bones. He asks me when I’m going to grad school, when I’m going back to the university to get my Master’s. He adds, “Your mother wants to know.”

There is almost silence, but not quite; that kid screams outside, screams that nursery rhyme about dragonflies—dragonflies stop on the rocks, dragonflies stop on the water, dragonflies stop on the breeze.
And, I see my father tense up at the noise, the words, the rhyme. I see his mouth twitch at the corners. I see, in my head, suddenly, my father manning a tank, gunning this kid down, and I see myself, years from now, posing for photos at the crime scene, my mouth smiling, my fingers forming a peace sign. I see myself sending these photos to all of my friends, to everyone I know. I see this as a portrait of who I am.

I clear my own throat; it does not sound like a machine. “Where did you say Ma was?” I speak these words, and I feel light as air. Stop pretending, I think. Admit it, Ba, just say that she left you, that you haven’t spoken to her, accept it, move on, it was four years ago. Admit it to yourself and admit it to me, Ba, she’s not a dragonfly, and neither am I, and neither are you, and we cannot stop, and we must keep moving, rolling forward. I think, but can’t say, let’s go, now, Ba. Let’s go chasing after those shiny things, let’s go, let’s go back…

…to when I was young, to when my mother played guitar, to when we were still a family. She wrote songs then— songs about love, syrupy songs, songs that spelled out her desires. And I loved her then, my honest ma, and now I wished she hadn’t left him, us, but, too, I understand. Then, she sang, and then again, Ba had worked hard his whole life to build a life for himself, for us— a factory management job, an apartment, money for my tuition. When my mother strummed, Ba saw steel-framed buildings crumble into ash, phoenixes that would never rise again. Within the walls of our apartment, Ma’s voice rang, rings, out, flat and haunting, and my father’s face, Ba’s face, burned lantern red, burned and burned and burned and…

…and now he snores. I sit at the table and study the sparse apartment, the wooden sofa, the collection of empty Coca Cola bottles, the old Technicolor TV. The whole place smells bitter, like loneliness and rust. It is dark now, and he rests in the other room, dreaming, I’m certain, of smog and dragonflies, dreaming, I’m certain, of minor keys, of college degrees, of doom and destruction.
I won’t be able to sleep; I know this. I will stay one night, tonight, and I won’t sleep, and then I will return to my life, riding cozy buses and speaking English into microphones, and then, I will return again, someday, to this factory town, maybe next month, only to visit and to further disappoint my father, to remind him of my dream-chasing mother, to remind him that happiness is out there if he wants it, if he just opens his hands and reaches for it.
I sit in the dark, at the kitchen table, alone, hours away from all of the things I’ve earned, and I think, this is the route my life has taken; this is the path of my twenty-four years, always under construction…

…Because we all have dreams, and we all have dreams that are smashed to the ground, and I love him, I do, but happiness is a choice, and I want something more for myself than this, these four walls, this crusty rice, that chanting child. I want to open my own business and I want to earn millions and I want to wear Prada and I want to drive a car faster than any man has ever run. I want to speed, in this car, through alleyways that stink like rotting fish, and I want to turn up the stereo and roll down the windows, inhale the neon, inhale the life, inhale the colors, breathe in, swallow everything I want. I want, I want, I want, and I’ll announce it into microphones, and I’ll announce it in English, and I’ll announce it to the world, and I will tell everyone what they don’t want to hear because they need to hear it, because I want to tell the truth, I do, I do, I do, but…

…in the morning, Ba counts coins, hobbles down to the street, and buys two pieces of steamed bread and two pouches of soybean milk from a street vendor. By the time he returns, the food’s gone cold. We eat it anyway, we chew slowly, and then we stand up to say goodbye; my bus leaves at eight forty-five. In that apartment, in those four walls, in that palace of dust, I hug my father and I place five red hundred-yuan bills, bank-crisp, in his empty coat pocket. I pause for a moment, and then I slip an extra hundred in his pocket for her. I say, tell Ma I love her, tell her for me. One red bill and a few cheerful words, something new for him to burn, a glowing offering to a dusty ghost, a smoke signal that leads nowhere, a love I cannot buy, a song, a song, a song…