The Silence Between Father and Son

After a drought of books because I wasn't actively hunting down titles to read, I'm now buried in an avalanche of unread books. LOL But I couldn't give up on reading those short stories published in the journals. Had to read 'Heart' by Shuang Xuetao / 双雪涛的《心脏》, published in The New Yorker on October 2, 2023. 

'Heart' was originally written in Chinese and published in a collection of 11 short stories titled 'The Hunter' 《猎人》(2019). The book and all its stories are deftly translated by the adroit Jeremy Tiang. 

The father and son relationship is the focal point in this story 'Heart'. The author tends to use the decade of China's Cultural Revolution as the historical backdrop. The father in this story also grew up with the baggage of the era. It's a painful timing. The son in this story, struggles to understand him. In an interview, a question posed to the author had him explaining about his views of a relationship between his characters and his own relationship with his father. 

The father-son relationship is especially poignant in this story. It seems like they don’t quite know how to relate to each other, possibly because of the differences in their circumstances: the father has spent his life laboring in factories, whereas the son has gone to university, has worked in a white-collar job, and now writes fiction. At one point, the father says to his son that “your existence devours mine.” As children, is there a way in which we consume our parents’ lives?

I often wonder why, when my father was alive, we never properly talked about anything, not even the smallest matter. All our conversations seemed to speed by in just a sentence or two. I understood very clearly that I was consuming his youth, but I didn’t see anything wrong with that—that’s just how life is. It seems to me that some people from his generation had a tendency to give up on themselves, because their lives had been so shaken up by the turbulence of their times, in which a person could easily be destroyed. Yet there was still hope for their children. This wasn’t a rational judgment on their part, but a sort of instinct: we didn’t have very good lives, so yours should be better. The future must contain hope, or what’s the point? 

Of course, the father in “Heart” is not my own—my father would never say such bombastic things, nor did he ever box. In the story, the father expends himself without realizing it. Out of inertia, his life got quietly nibbled away. When resources are limited, fathers and sons are in competition. That’s roughly what the father means when he says “your existence devours mine.”

'Heart' is written in the first person narrative. The protagonist's family of woodworkers has a history of heart disease, about "three in every ten" family members die from it. However, surgery could save them now. 

After a heart attack, the protagonist sent his father in a night ambulance from the local town hospital to a bigger hospital in Beijing where the facilities were top-notch. On the eight-hour drive, the protagonist reminisced about his childhood and grandfather, and how boxing connects them all. It was a hobby that his father fiercely protected, something to call his own, and didn't allow his then-young son to learn it.

It touches on the relationship of 'silence' between father and son. It's awkward because they don't seem to know how to relate to each other. To the readers, this is very relatable. We might have the same relationships with our parents. Our parents and us, we belong to different generations, shaped by different life experiences. Every one of us is wondering how to bridge that gap. It's not easy if one generation is defined by war and political turmoil, and the other isn't. 

双雪涛笔下的父亲其实代表着那个年代里的一大批命运相同的人，他们也许曾经会弹钢琴、却也只能在时代的洪流中沉默，做着一名普通油漆匠的工作。

One short story, eight hours in the ambulance on a night drive, and a lot of reminiscing about the past, what family ties are, and what the protagonist must be. The protagonist's pondering was interrupted by Dr Xu, the doctor on duty in the night ambulance who checked in with him on his father's statistics, then continued chatting with him. 

I said, Me? I don’t have a job. She said, Why don’t you have a job? I said, Because I don’t want to work. I’m really lazy—is that a kind of illness? She said, You don’t seem lazy—lazy people don’t usually get so anxious, nothing about you feels lazy to me. If you don’t have a job, what do you do? I said, I sit around at home. She said, What are you, a Buddhist? I said, No, sometimes I get bored and do some typing. She said, What kind of typing? Are you an author? I said, Yes, fiction, it’s childish but I like to write short stories. She said, If you’re sleepy, go ahead and have a nap. Your dad seems stable and I can keep an eye on him. I said, That’s really dutiful of you. I feel bad. After a pause, I said, in a small voice, I forgot to get money before we left. I’m sorry about that. She said, I’m not dutiful, it’s just that I’m new to the job and don’t get much say in anything. For the last half year they’ve stuck me with way too many overnight shifts. I couldn’t go to sleep now if I tried, and if I were tired I wouldn’t be able to stay awake no matter how much money you gave me. How come an author like you has such strange ideas?

The story ended in one long paragraph. And it left things to wonder about. It's completely open-ended. We don't know what eventually happens, or if the father survived this trip and made it through. I'm not even sure the protagonist wanted to have a 'second chance' to continue the relationship with his father or try to bridge it, considering that there's a lot of acceptance in his tone and attitude. He would fulfil all duties of filial piety, but he doesn't bother to question 'why' anymore or wish for otherwise. 

“父亲说，怎么这么呛？我说，我们快到北京了。父亲说，去北京干吗？我说，去给你看病，你犯了心脏病。” 是啊，希望北京永远健康无病，因为北京从来都是我们这个时代的“心脏”。