By Jiachen Wang

Every morning our father went under the bridge to collect the coal scattered along the railroad tracks. On a good day, he could fill three sacks and sell them for twenty yuan. On Sundays, he brought me and my brother with him. Sometimes the pieces I put in my sack were no good, and he had to pick them out one by one. It was very difficult for him to bend down, and this made me think that perhaps everyone in this world had some kind of clockwork inside their bodies, except that the one inside our father had not been oiled for a long time. That’s why it’d become so rusty.  

The three of us lived in a warehouse. It belonged to the government but had been mostly unoccupied. As time went by, it became filled with cardboard boxes and rat shit, like how when a garden stopped having children poisonous weeds started to grow. Every month, Old Liu from the train station would receive something from our father (in a good month, a carton of cigarettes; in a bad month, two bottles of baijiu), and he’d let us live here rent-free. Behind the warehouse stood a garbage mountain that looked like Kilimanjaro in winter but smelled terrible in summer. The inside of the warehouse was similar to a deep well. When we talked it sounded as if we were underwater. At the end of the storage racks was a little room with two plank beds and no light except for a lamp I used to do homework. That was where we lived. After dark, my favorite thing to do was climb up the pipe to the rooftop. Standing there I could always recognize, from the lights afar, the Ferris Wheel in South Lake Park.  

The winter our father was arrested was the winter I turned sixteen, at the end of 1999. He was seen by an engine driver and caught at the spot with a sack full of coal in his hands. Not knowing when exactly he’d be released, my brother and I went to the bus station whenever we had time and waited for him. Our aunt said it was nothing serious and that, even in the worst scenario, he’d be back before Chinese New Year. We stayed at the bus station in the morning and sometimes all day. We didn’t have much to do anyway. While my brother tossed snowballs across the street, I stood under a MiG jet fighter monument and counted the passengers who got off. There were headscarfed women with leeks in their baskets, little girls with popsicles in one hand and their grandpas’ hands in the other, but there was never our father. The jet fighter behind me was engraved with the words A Gift from the People’s Liberation Army Air Force. Below them was an inscription mentioning the number of American planes it’d shot down during the War.  

Afternoons we spent wandering alongside the tracks or sliding on a frozen lake. Sometimes we’d stand on the shore for hours just to watch people with wooden stools fish on the ice. The best among them was a seventy-two-year-old man with only one arm. Whenever he fished, the sleeve that had nothing inside would float in the wind like a national flag. He had lost his arm in Korea, he told us, in 1951. Before that his dream was to become a professional accordion player. Once, he gave us a small fish from his bucket, and we made soup with it, using half a turnip and some scallions. It was the most wonderful fish soup I’d ever tasted. 

Not a single photo of my brother from that winter survived, yet I vividly recall what he was like. He was tall and skinny and pale. He liked to play soccer and chew strawberry-flavored bubble gum and did terrible in school (before going to bed, he’d stick the gum to the wall and chew it again the next morning if it still had any flavor). He was nearsighted after reading lianhuanhua late at night but had refused to get glasses. He had oily hair and pretended he was not interested in girls, even though I’d caught him peeking at a physical heath booklet he had found in the trash. His favorite part to see was the lower part of a female body diagram. It looked like a pear upside down. Weeks before the semester ended, without our father there to keep an eye, my brother simply decided to stop going to school. Every morning, while I splashed cold water on my face and put on my uniform full of holes, he’d pull the quilt over his head and pretend to snore. At first I had no idea how he’d spent his time off. But every evening, he’d come back with ten or twenty yuan in his pocket, like our father used to. He never told me where he’d gotten the money, but before long I recognized the familiar smell on his coat. It was the smell of coal. Later, when his head teacher, a young woman with a very gentle voice, found me in the schoolyard and asked about his absence, I lied and told her my brother had been very sick. He might even die, I said, putting my hands around my neck and making the face of a man choking to death.  

That winter night seemed to fall much earlier than usual. I rarely played with my classmates after school and headed home as soon as the bell rang. I tried very hard not to let my friends know where I lived. I’d say goodbye to them at a crossroad that was supposed to be my home, watch them leave, and walk back to the warehouse alone. They never discovered my secret. By the time I got back, I had to grope in the dark for two minutes before I could reach our room. I walked carefully around the cardboard boxes so as to not interrupt the rats having babies. And I’d imagine that I wasn’t in a warehouse, but in a library, and the stuff around me weren’t boxes either, but bookshelves much higher than I was, filled with books I’d never finish reading. It felt like playing hide-and-seek with my own shadow, who seemed to be my only friend. 

On my way back, I’d always cross a square that had banners that looked like rainbows. Some read Buy Soon, Win Soon! Buy Late, Win Late! Some read Help the Orphaned, the Poor, the Elderly, and the Disabled. Some read A Million Yuan is Smiling at You. On drawing days, a man who was very good at giving speeches would stand there with a microphone, and some lucky guy would drive home one of those brand-new minivans parked in the corner, or carry off one of those fancy color TVs stacked into a pyramid. Meanwhile, the man with the microphone would invite them up and ask if they felt happy inside (it was like asking someone whose toes had been crushed by a bicycle if it hurt). After the drawings ended, the ground would be carpeted with lottery tickets, like a quilt embroidered with flowers. Even after the square had emptied, I could still see old people in dirty overcoats picking tickets up from the snow and holding them under the lights to check the numbers.  

After our father left, my brother became the one responsible for our meals, except that the only thing he knew how to make was plain noodles. Every night we found new ways of eating noodles, and we’d eat them with raw garlic, one slurp of noodles followed by one bite of garlic. On Saturday nights, he’d use the money he’d earned and take me to One-eyed Zhang’s restaurant for dumplings. He invented imaginative methods of devouring them. When the dumplings arrived, we’d eat five; then add vinegar and eat five more; then add soy sauce and eat five more; then add chili oil and finish the last five. That way, even if we only ordered one plate of dumplings, it was as if we had eaten four plates. After the big meal, my brother did headstands on the bed, like he was trying to pour the dumplings back out. I guess he really could go on forever if there was no one there to stop him, maybe even taking a nap along the way. While he did this, I was staring blankly at Kilimanjaro outside. He called me a bamboo stick and told me that Chairman Mao had said, Those who do not work out do not have the right to talk about revolution. 

We kept an old dog, a white Pekingese our father had found in the street the summer before. He could barely open his eyes and all his fur had fallen out. Before that I’d kept a pet mouse in a tiny box made of yellowed newspaper. The mouse was the size of my thumb and had two school-teacher whiskers around his mouth. When he got hungry, he’d squeak and gnaw at the box or even my fingers. Later he was hit by a cargo tricycle and flattened into a pancake. His body was stuck to the tire and we had to scrape it off with chopsticks. I wanted to call the Pekingese Great Fortune or Double Happiness like all the other dogs, but my brother insisted on Eisenhower, which was supposedly the name of an American president. I asked him what America had got to do with all this. Do the Americans also have to pay social insurance? He said that America had nothing to do with this. He just thought the name sounded cool. While I stuffed paper balls into my nostrils (the smell!) and solved geometry problems under my desk lamp, Eisenhower lay quietly by the stove. His back gently moved up and down in the orange light. Strangely, the moment I turned on the lamp, the room immediately felt warmer. 

Soon winter break came. I’d failed to score a hundred in the final exams like I’d promised our father. I received a seventy in Math and a sixty-five in English. It seemed that I’d long forgotten what it was like to be a good student. Back then the saying our teachers quoted most often was A dragon begets a dragon; a phoenix begets a phoenix; a rat’s son only knows how to dig holes. In fact, the only thing I had a knack for was writing. My Chinese teacher was an old lady whose hair had been whitened by the years and who wore thick glasses that looked like the bottoms of beer bottles. She called me to her office and told me that my essays were very good, but I should never write like this in exams again. If you keep writing like this, she said, you might become a great writer one day, but you’d never get into a university. I was even starting to think that maybe I should stop going to school like my brother did. He said he’d rather die than be in a classroom. I often thought about our father. I missed him terribly. I kept feeling that if I opened my eyes the next morning, I’d see him by the stove, making us breakfast. Then he’d lift his head and wave at me.  

One afternoon, on our way back from the bus station, I noticed a most beautiful poster  glued to a telegraph pole by the railroad tracks. On it was a golden lion leaping through a ring of fire. Below were the words: 

The Great Manchurian Circus Show 
New Year’s Eve at South Lake Park 
The Most Astonishing Sight You Will Ever See! 

Those words seemed to possess some kind of magic power. For a moment my brother and I stood there, completely dazzled by it. When I saw that there was no one around, I blew warm air onto the edges and peeled it off carefully. I rolled it into a scroll and hid it under my fat uniform like it was a shotgun. We went on walking until we saw the warehouse and beyond that smoke coming from distant factory chimneys. The stripes on the chimneys made them look like lit cigarettes stuck to the plain. 

I wish I could see it, I said. 

I wonder if they have lions, he said. They probably have lions. 

Of course they have lions, I said. There was one in the poster. 

Wasn’t it a tiger? 

I thought it was a lion. 

I guess I remembered it wrong. 

As soon as Pa comes back we’ll go see it, I said. 

We’ll go see it together, he said. As a family. 

In the days that followed I lived as if enchanted by a magician. There was this old wristwatch I owned. It had no strap. Our father had given it to me and I had almost lost it once—I discovered that there was a hole in my pocket; anything I put there would eventually fall out, like it had gone to another world. Whenever I couldn’t sleep, I’d take out the wristwatch and watch the luminous dials move in the dark, as if doing this might somehow make time go faster. If my brother stirred on his side of the bed, I’d hide the watch under my pillow and pretend I was asleep. Then the lion would come up to me like a giant cat. It’d yawn and blink at me, and I’d drift off.  

Another week passed. The night before New Year’s Eve, I was awakened by a noise that sounded like a stray cat. I listened to it for a moment and suddenly realized it was not a cat, but my brother. He was crying violently under his quilt. I opened my eyes in the dark and saw his body twitching, like some kind of sea creature. This realization chilled me. I lay in bed awkwardly for what felt like eternity and feared that my breathing might disturb him. It was then that I remembered the last time I had heard him cry, in the summer of 1992, after our mother left.  

I was very little when she first ran away, but my brother was old enough to remember all the details. He was playing milk caps with the other kids on the grass when she walked out the door with a woven bag. The bag looked very heavy and she was having trouble lifting it up. Ma, what good stuff you got in there? my brother asked, Let me take a peek. Our mother paused for a second. Then she turned around and gave him a coin. Go buy yourself a popsicle, she said, The milk cream kind. Go on. My brother looked at the emblem on the coin. Then he looked up and smiled at her. She was already gone.  

Our mother did not come back until six months later. She gave us sweaters she had knitted herself. On the blue one she sewed my name and the red one my brother’s. Our father smiled at her nervously and tried to hold her hand, but the whole time she hid it behind her back. It made my father cry. A few days later, she took my brother and me to the swan boats in South Lake Park. It was a sunny afternoon. She bought us grilled sausages that cost one yuan apiece and sang us a song called “Let Us Paddle Our Oars.” Sitting on the boat I could see all the tall buildings beyond the willow grove. They all looked so, so far away. 

Our mother stayed for two weeks and left again without saying goodbye. Since then, she’d disappear for months and come back briefly to see us. We were always so happy to see her. At night, I dreamed about tying a rope around her ankle so she’d never leave us again. It was good while it lasted and it lasted till 1992. That year she left and did not come back. Our father became taciturn and picked up drinking and sometime later we moved out of our old house. One night, he had gone out to drink and it was just me and my brother in bed. I remember being awakened by the same sound. It came from the direction of the window, and I mistook it for some lousy cat outside, desperately trying to mate.  

But everything became clear now. I saw that it had been my brother crying.  

On the morning of New Year’s Eve, my brother got up very early. He walked up and down the room, clenching his fists. For once he washed his oily hair and put on a scarf. Together we went to the bus station and waited there for a couple of hours. We saw no one other than a beggar with no legs, a boy selling frozen pears, and a few laid-off workers who smoked under the wings of the jet fighter. Around noon, we ate some pickled vegetables and flower rolls we had brought from home. They had become impossible to bite into. We drank all the water in the thermos and kept waiting. We waited and waited and our father did not appear.  

When the sun was starting to fade, a woman with a large photo came up and asked if we had seen her son. The photo showed a little boy in a red T-shirt. He had a buzz cut and looked about four or five years old. Beneath it were characters written in clean ink brush: 

Looking for my beloved son.  
Full Name: Wang Hai-yang. Nickname: Mao-mao.  
Scar on forehead. Loves to smile. Polite to strangers. Very quiet.  
Lost in Wuai Market in 1994.  
If you have any information, please let me know. A generous reward will be offered.  

My brother shook his head. The woman sighed and went across the street to ask the policeman in the pavilion. When she was gone my brother spat out his bubble gum and said we’d quit waiting and go home. I did not move. He turned around and asked what the hell I was waiting for. I said nothing. Move your ass, he kicked me and said. I stood there for a moment and followed him.  

Neither of us spoke on the way back. We walked along the embankment, our hands in our pockets, kicking at the snow. At a grocery store, my brother stopped and used the payphone there to call our aunt. He asked if there was any news about our father. We’ve never been apart so long, he said, and we miss him terribly. Our aunt told us she understood. Still, she’d heard nothing. Nothing at all. But tomorrow she’d go to the police station and ask. She promised she’d do that. Then she asked how we were, whether we’d been drinking enough hot water or eating enough vegetables. My brother said thank you Auntie and told her we were doing just fine. Then he hung up. The sky was growing dim. I could see pink lights rising between the border of land and sky. They ascended from the darkness like liquid.  

Maybe he’ll never come back, I said.  

My brother stumbled over a chunk of snow. He got up and kept walking.  

Would you still recognize Ma if you saw her again? I asked. You know, when she is old and wrinkled? 

My brother paused for a moment. 

Of course, he said. I can recognize her no matter how old she is. 

Is Pa all right? I said.  

He is, he said. He’ll be.  

Tomorrow we’ll go to the station again, I said. 

We sure will, he said.  

After a moment, he asked if I could recall what we did last New Year. I told him I couldn’t. He said he couldn’t either. I asked if he thought Zhao Ben-shan would perform at the Spring Festival Gala tonight. He must be on it, my brother said, he’s on it every year. Then we talked about all the jokes from last year’s Gala, and we both laughed. Those moments long passed seemed to have returned to us, like fruits on a tree, ready to be plucked. You know, it won’t be long before they sing that song again, my brother said. I nodded and could almost hear it in my ears. The road was long and there was a lot of snow. It’d take a while, I thought, for our father to get back. 

Old friends and new acquaintances, 
Next spring shall we meet again. 
The mountains will still be green, 
And people will still be young. 
Together we wish our motherland well. 
We wish our motherland well.  

We kept walking until we reached One-eyed Zhang’s restaurant. On the windows were big red characters listing all the dishes we wanted to eat but could not afford. Through the foggy glass we could see people eating and drinking. White steam circled their bodies and made the restaurant look like a fish tank and them the fish that swam inside. How much money have you got? I asked in a low voice. My brother told me not to worry. We sat down and ordered two bottles of pear soda as well as a plate of pork-and-chive dumplings. 

It was One-eyed Zhang who served us. He set down the dumplings and popped open the bottle caps. I saw him staring at the chili oil with his dog eye. Someone told me that he’d lost his eye back when he was still in the factory (night shift, broken machine, flying screw), and the doctor had to replace it with a dog eye. The dumplings were steaming hot. We picked up our chopsticks and chased them around the plate. They kept slipping away like they’d grown tiny legs, but we ate them all the same. My brother walked to the counter and handed One-eyed Zhang a fistful of coins. Then he took a shrimp candy from the glass bowl and put it into his pocket. One-eyed Zhang grabbed some more candies and stuffed them into his hands. He smiled and said, Take some more. Take some more. When we left the restaurant, we could still hear from behind us him shouting Happy New Year. 

Walking in the dark we could see figures shivering among the willow trees, but we could not make out their faces. There were only the sparkles coming from the burning cigarettes in their hands. On the side of the road several girls kept stamping their feet, as if they were waiting for someone. It was freezing. Still they were wearing short skirts and brown stockings and had makeup on their faces. My brother took out the shrimp candies and handed me one like it was a cigarette. I unwrapped the candy and softened it with my tongue. It was sweet and made me want to cry.  

From across the tracks came the sound of fireworks like thunder in a wet valley. But then everything quieted down and it was just us on the road. I shivered in the wind. My brother took off his scarf and threw it on me. Take it, he said. Goddamnit. Just take it. I don’t need it, I cried, rubbing my nose. A long silence passed. He asked if I knew anything about the Eskimos. About What? I said. The Eskimos, he said. I said no and he started telling me about a kind of snowshoes the Eskimos used. They are shaped like badminton rackets, he said. When you walk in them you feel like stepping on flat ground. I listened to him and pictured people running on the snow with badminton rackets. I felt like laughing. I laughed so hard that even my stomach hurt. In front of Kilimanjaro a lone boy was setting off rockets. He pulled down the earmuffs of his cotton cap and covered them with his hands. We did not disturb him. 

The warehouse gate was wide open. Cold wind poured in. I could hear Eisenhower barking, but after a while his voice faded. I thought our father must have come back, and my body trembled uncontrollably. We walked through the stacks. My brother took out a lighter and held it up. The flame lit up the dark irises of his eyes and the few young whiskers on his chin. We stood outside our room and saw lights swaying inside. We opened the door. In the room stood two men in peaked caps, flashlights in their hands. One of them had grey hair and the other looked quite young. The old man touched our quilts and uncovered them to see if there was anything hidden down there. The young man rummaged through our closet and casually tossed things onto the floor. We stood by the wall and watched them do it.  

The old man said something to the young man, who came up and asked for our IDs. There was a long silence. I raised my hand to block the flashlight from my face. He asked if we had parents. Again we were silent. Finally he asked who gave us permission to live here. It’s Old Liu, my brother replied, he works at the train station. The young man said he’d never heard of this Old Liu. He turned around and asked his partner. The old man paused. Then he tapped ash off his cigarette and shook his head. The fireworks outside went on and on like a ceaseless engine. After that came the squeaking of rats. The young man took off his cap, smashed it on my brother’s head, and asked if he was lying. My brother swore he was telling the truth. Old Liu gave us permission to live here. Old Liu said it was okay.  

The old man stubbed his cigarette on our bedsheet. He passed my brother and came to me. He told me that this place didn’t belong to us, but to our country. Do you know what it means to take things that are not yours? he asked, it means that you are a thief. A T-h-i-e-f. I wanted to tell him we weren’t thieves, but I didn’t know how. He said that there were people in our society who didn’t like to work and took all kinds of advantages from the system, and he asked if I knew the kind of people he was talking about. I thought for a moment and understood what he meant: he was talking about my kind of people. His voice softened. He told us it was okay. What did we know anyway? It’d seem pretty cruel of them to kick us out while it’s snowing outside and everyone’s celebrating New Year, he said, but he wanted us gone before the next morning.  

After they left Eisenhower came running back from God-knows-where, sniffing the snow on my pants and licking it. I kicked him away and went out to pee. When I came back I found my brother lying on the bed with his face down. He had been crying again. I picked up my desk lamp and wiped it with my school uniform. I thought if it was broken, I could fix it again. But it lit up the room perfectly. I took out the family photo that was hidden in the wall crack and grabbed a few workbooks, two sharpened pencils, some socks, and a leftover flower roll. Then I sat down on the bed and stared at my wristwatch. My brother wiped off the tear stains on his face. He stood up empty-handed and walked out of the room. Let’s wait and leave tomorrow morning, I said. He ignored me and pushed his way through the darkness. It started snowing again. Are we gonna sleep outside? I asked, it’s really cold. Or should we build a snow hut like the Eskimos? He buried his head in his coat and plunged into the storm. I caught up with him. Where exactly are we going? I said. South Lake Park, he said slowly. I stopped for a second. Then I said nothing more and walked behind him. When I turned around, I could see Eisenhower following us at a distance. After a while, I looked up and the Ferris Wheel was right there. In the night sky it still looked like a pearl necklace, except that it was a necklace that had lost its shine. 

The gate was locked. We walked to the fence. He lowered his body so I could step on him. After I climbed onto the fence, I gave him my hand and we both came over. Just as we were about to move on, Eisenhower barked a few times, caught up with us, and squeezed through the fence. My brother looked at him. Then he picked him up and held him in his arms. There wasn’t a single person in the park. We passed the Bumper Cars, the Merry-Go-Round, and the Statue of the Three Ballet Girls. We stood on the Wave Bridge and saw stranded swan boats on the beach. In summer the lake was green, but now half of it was frozen. Steam was rising from the other half. Along the path were snow-covered benches where people had once sat, like faces pressed into a birthday cake. We searched for some more time. Still the circus show was nowhere to be seen. 

A familiar tune came from behind the little train. It was “Jingle Bells” and sounded a bit like the music box I had when I was little. There was a rundown tent. Next to it was a sign that seemed to read: T— Great M—rian Circus S—w. My heart leaped. We went to the back of the tent. My brother pointed out to me, with joy on his face, an egg-sized hole he had found in the canvas. He put down Eisenhower and pressed his head to the hole. Soft and white snowflakes fell down on his hair and his shoulders and the back of his boots. More music came from inside the tent, and I could tell something very exciting must have been going on.  

What do you see? finally I asked.  

He did not answer. His shadow looked so still it was as if he’d been possessed.  

I wanna see it too! I said and hit him in the shoulder with a snowball. His body shook a little. He turned his head and looked at me blankly, like someone who had just woken from a dream.  

I wanna see it, I said again and pulled him away. Somehow his body felt very light, and he sat straight down on the snow. I paid no attention to him and looked into the hole. There was nothing there.  

I was puzzled. I told my brother I couldn’t see a thing. He told me to look again. I glanced at him skeptically and looked back into the hole. It was dark inside and still there was nothing other than that familiar melody. But after a moment, everything I’d dreamed of appeared in my eyes. 

Well, do you see it? my brother asked.  

I went on watching, not saying a thing. I watched until I could hear nothing other than a gentle rhythm that sounded like an infant breathing. It might have come from somewhere under the ground. It might have come from the sky. But I did not feel like it was coming from anywhere. Anywhere at all.  

I finally saw the lions. 

---

Jiachen Wang is a bilingual writer from Shenyang and Shanghai, China. He is a 2026–2028 Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and an alumnus of the Cornell MFA Program in Fiction, where he also taught as a lecturer. He has completed the Chinese manuscript of a short story collection titled Stealing Fire and is currently working on its English version as well as a novel.