WOODS, MARBLES, CIGARETTES

MARBLES, CIGARETTES

Milenna Huang MY MOM AND I drive down to my grandparents’ place every summer. It’s a small town in Southern China. Old bicycles and motorcycles whoosh by cars in the crowded main street in the town center. And the street extends further, separating into several rugged paths. The far left one leads to a green village under some craggy mountains, to my grandpa’s old brick house. My grandpa has four older brothers. His oldest brother, Linxiao, lived right next to the brick house; Chong and Kunjin lived three blocks down the street; and Tian was in a town a couple miles away with his son’s family. They told people that they somehow couldn’t escape from each other, stuck in this same old place for their entire lives.

Summertime, humid breezes carrying the salty smell from the Southern Sea stroked the thin twigs of the giant longan tree outside of Grandpa’s house, swinging the leaves. My mom once told me that the longan tree was planted by my grandpa’s grandpa; the longan fruit was the main source of family income; the tree was all that was left in this family during the China Cultural Revolution. Grandpa and his four brothers used to sit under the tree playing Chinese checkers all the time – wooden pentagon game board, 60 glass marbles, a round folded desk, five low plastic stools, a pack of cigarettes, a lighter, a dish of roasted peanut, a full teapot, an afternoon. They all dressed in white oversized tank tops. One hand fanned a bamboo fan. Another hand placed the marbles down on the board. Chickens strutted around their feet, picking up the peanuts that accidentally dropped on the ground. Sometimes the marbles fell off the game board and rolled into the bushes nearby. They thought it was a hassle to find those missing ones especially because they were all “old and weak.” Kids in the neighborhood thought the glass marbles were the most beautiful things in the world. They always knelt on the ground, sticking their heads into the bushes to look for those shiny glass balls. And they would hide the marbles in their pockets and walk away quickly because my grandpa and his brothers would demand those marbles back.

The winter of 2009, Chong and Tian passed away. Grandpa put up Chong and Tian’s wooden spirit tablets in his house facing the doorway, and carved their names in the bold trunk of the longan tree. A wooden pentagon game board, 36 glass marbles, a round folded desk, five low plastic stools, a pack of cigarettes, a lighter, a dish of roasted peanut, a full teapot, another four years. In 2015, Linxiao was diagnosed with lung cancer. Grandpa and Kunjin told Linxiao that he shouldn’t have smoked that much, yet Grandpa and