Changji’s life was in between. And I don’t mean in between as in neither physically here nor there, as I’m sure wherever he was, and is, is the geographic center of his own world, like everyone else. When I say in between I mean as in the way others looked at his life.
Let me try and explain. Changji’s father was a long distance bus driver. He married and had a family, including Changji’s two sisters, who are considerably older than him. Later his father left this family for a woman of the Miao ethnicity. This Miao woman is Changji’s mother. Their relationship didn’t last too long, and his father reconciled with his first wife and went back to his original family. Changji’s mother, in anger or out of spite, sent Changji back to his father’s original family in rural Maogou village at a young age, and refused to care for him. As far as I know Changji had no further contact with his real mother, who lived in Huayuan city about forty-five minutes away.
Changji was about twelve I think when I knew him and his family, and his father was rarely around, spending most of his time on the road or at his company’s dormitory, even though I believe he had already reached the retirement age of sixty. Changji’s father’s wife was in Taiwan working, and his two older sisters lived and worked in different cities in the Xiangxi region. When he wasn’t at the local school, Changji thus lived in an old, traditional, and rather decrepit house in Maogou village, looked after only occasionally by his father’s parents, who were extremely old. His grandparents also split their time between this small house and a cottage far up in the mountains, well outside the village and accessible only by extraordinarily rough roads and paths. His grandparents were quite old (his grandmother died in the year that I lived in the area) and had survived The Great Leap Forward, among other brutal times in modern Chinese history. His grandfather would often walk with a large satchel of vegetables on his back from the mountains all the way to Maogou village, a journey of numerous kilometers and across steep terrain, to sell goods or to spend time in the village. He was a tough old man of nearly ninety, hunched over and almost completely deaf, but still chain smoked and drank the harsh local liquor with every lunch and dinner. The times his grandparents, and later just grandfather, were around, Changji seemingly took care of the elders as much, probably more, than the reverse.
Changji was either held back in school or had started late, and was older and taller than the other kids in his grade. A number of the other boys in his grade looked up to him as he was the tallest and biggest among them. They had a carefree and mostly normal life, running around outside in the sparsely-populated village and its neighboring hills playing sports and creating their own games, watching pirated DVDs on tiny, ancient-looking TVs, or inside one of the absurd number of internet cafés in the small village.
Often I was lucky to have Changji as one of my local guides, as I was well acquainted with one of his sisters, and he would take me through local areas I probably wouldn’t have traversed on my own. On one of these such ventures, he stopped abruptly at a pile of trash and pointed,
“Gege (big brother), look.” It was a dead puppy, carefully rested on top of the garbage, perhaps laid to rest by an owner or passerby, or perhaps that had found the place itself and had made it a final resting spot.
“Must have frozen to death,” Changji said, an animal lover himself.
As we took in the sight, another dog quietly came up to us, wagging its tail, hoping for our attention.
Changji was first to react, petting the newly arrived and now pleased second dog.