|
Literature |
HeavensGate-Chapter01Website: http://www.yellowtailshark.com/Literature/HeavensGate Chapter 1I never met my grandfather. But somehow I can recognize him in my dreams. In it he sits in a kind of detention cell, meditating, until you can smell the sky burning, and in few seconds, everything vaporizes. This same dream happens fairly regularly, begging the question of whether Fate is trying to tell me something about him that I should remember. When I ask Mother about it, it is met with a long silence, broken only by her insistence that I finish my duties. "Nhân, you still need to finish sweeping the house." My father left us when I was a child. I never saw him since then, and asking about him only brought me the same set of responses. As years go by, more and more evidence that I even had a father disappeared from the house. Instead I had surrogate fathers who would try to teach me how to be a man. Mother would bring over male friends – companions really – to fill the void in the household. I suppose this year is her fifth boyfriend, and he might actually be the one for her. We live on a hydroponic plantation just outside of the village of Tâysơn. The soil around here is rich, but village leaders emphasize the vast improvement of raising our crops in chemical baths rather than soil. We gather much of the food and have it shipped off by train. None of my friends nor I have ventured beyond the village. My friend Tâm tells me it's the same thing for hundreds of kilometers: hydroponic plantations interspersed with villages, connected by transport trains to collect food and drop off supplies, as though the villages themselves were a product of design. With every boyfriend Mother had, I usually asked the men about life outside of our village. Much of it was typical to what we already did in our own village. The first was a courier at the train yards. The second was a mechanic. The third was a physician. The fourth was a storeowner. There was nothing different about them, except for their personalities. I guess my mother was looking for something that these men did not have. In the same way, I was trying to fish for something too. Sadly, I never remembered their names for that reason. The fifth man, Thiên, was different. He was a writer and poet. Though I never took much appreciation for the poetry he recited to me, there was something markedly different about him. I remembered this line he told me once, "Don't believe anyone who tells you otherwise, but having a philosophy is the most important thing in our life. It might not be the most immediate necessity such as food and shelter, but it is the reason for living. It is our purpose in life." Mother told me one evening that she intended to marry him, and I was happy for her. But I knew that I was too old to have an older man pretend to be my father. — "So what are you going to do after high school, Nhân?" Tâm asked me at school. We were graduating seniors, and I hadn't given much thought about life without school. "I don't know, help out at the farm I guess." "What a bore! Me, I'm going to go explore the world!" Tâm punched me in the arm lightly. "Right, and do what? Find more farms to look at? Weren't you the one who told me that it's nothing but farmland forever out here?" "Yeah, true, but there's got to be more than that. The schools tell us it's nothing but farmland. But with all this food we make, we couldn't possibly be consuming it all. Where does it all go?" "Tâm boy, you're starting to sound like a dissenter. If you know what's good for you, you better shut up." But no matter how many times I tell him that, you couldn't wipe that sparkle from his eye. And by the same light, there was no way to quell the burning question in my heart: Who is my father and my grandfather? The smell of burning flesh and earth is sharply distinct and unforgettable. |