Ever since we moved to Jiaoda Yicun, the place where we used to pay our mortgage every month to maintain the right to live became "the old home." Ma Xiaoyuan calls it "Xi'an," because she's known since she was little that she lives in Xi'an — Xi'an is home, home is Xi'an. I can already imagine that many years from now, Xi'an will be to my "clan" (Ma Xiaoyuan has recently taken to saying "clan") what the great pagoda tree of Shanxi is to the people of my hometown Xunyang — many of them were Shanxi migrants who came south to Shaanxi during the Ming Dynasty.
After Ma Xiaoyuan was diagnosed with a cat hair allergy, we sent Lipi back to "Xi'an." We go check on him every other week, and each time we arrive, he rubs against my pant legs with that dopey grin, meowing loudly without a care in the world — just like the yellow cat we had at home when I was Ma Xiaoyuan's age. Each time I go back, I'm struck with amazement at the thought that the sun sets and rises, rises and sets, and time passes in "Xi'an" outside of Jiaoda Yicun just the same!
Lipi has his own life too. Every night when darkness falls, he uses his four magnificent paws to majestically spin this tangled ball of yarn called Earth, then falls asleep in that catty way of his, and wakes up again in that same catty way.
After the Spring Festival, it was time to visit the cat again. When I reached the door, I saw a vast expanse of water. I opened the door — water, water everywhere, enough for Lipi to drink for several lifetimes. He was standing on the highest point of the sofa, just like those southern farmers I saw on TV in '98, perched on rooftops waiting to be rescued from the floods. He was sort of standing on tiptoe, terrified of getting his paws wet. This is a disaster, a disaster, a disaster. I called the neighbors upstairs and downstairs, and finally figured out it was our own problem.
I waded into the water, thinking: if your paws aren't getting wet, then mine will have to. Like catching fish as a kid, I did a full inspection, and finally discovered the water pipe had a small leak, and the drain had been plugged by a yellow ping-pong ball — it had to be Lipi's doing. While we were raising kids, working, scrolling through short videos, drowning in our own ego-driven afflictions, this silly cat was playing ping-pong!
Saving up enough water to share with a future boyfriend for a lifetime (he'd even thought about the boyfriend situation)!
The next day when the plumber came to fix things, the water had mostly drained out — I'd opened the drain and turned the air conditioning to maximum — but Lipi still refused to set foot down. While the plumber worked, he went over to observe, like a fussy old man. This little episode will be something to reminisce about for a long, long time.
Yesterday we finally went and cleaned up the place, and it was lovely as a home again. As I left, I thought about the life we'd lived there — there was so much life in that place. I say this because you, the reader a hundred years from now, wouldn't understand. It reminds me of living at school when I was young — you felt like all of life was elsewhere, and inside the school there was no life at all.
On the way back to Jiaoda Yicun, I rambled on in my thoughts, rambled on out loud. We lived there, and there was so much life. Our car got a flat tire there, got splashed with mud. A boy upstairs got into Peking University — face full of acne, standing downstairs holding his acceptance letter, posing for a photo with the postman — the scene my mom might have imagined for me but I never delivered. During those dark, bleary days of caring for Ma Xiaoyuan, one morning I went downstairs to buy breakfast for my wife and child, and saw the red of the emcee, the red of the bride, a groom packaged in a suit, standing at the calm entrance of the building on such a clear morning — I had no idea what ceremony they were going through. And there were, there were several times I saw young women like Miss Zhao, putting on makeup for whatever occasion life had brought them, spraying perfume, all dressed up — they were still so, so young, still feeling self-conscious about those adornments, striding out the door at a run.
And of course, the one who provided the grand finale to all this life was Lipi, who in that apartment that once held us, had been batting a ping-pong ball around all day long, finally lodging it firmly in the drain. Then he laid his head completely, solidly sideways on the floor, and slept. In his dreams, clear water rose, flooding over life itself, and he paddled with all four paws, infinitely slowly, swimming out of Xi'an, out of China, out of the Pacific Ocean, into the boundless, fearless freedom without edge or end.