Tremors

The first time Jing Mao watched the child walk he knew his personal legacy was secure. The first time the young boy created a rudimentary painting for him, with crude green paste and stinking silver pastels ground of mashed freshwater tadpoles, he became aware of the unspoken distance between his own consciousness and that of this legacy. And somewhere in between, when the boy spoke to him, when he heard the distinct nature of his voice, Jing knew that although his physical being would move along past himself, the pure psychological essence of his life, and that of his ancestors, may very well not. He could hear the distance.

So although the goat’s legs quivered and seized under his full weight, and although his youngest son squealed and gasped at the inverted showing of the future before him, as the animal all three of them had fed and nurtured was brutally filleted and left to shudder in the humid afternoon air; he felt nothing but pride. Not because the boy had felt, in his hands, in his core, in that gruesome vibration, the taking of life for life, but because it was now immediately understood that the village would always have hands to feed it and the daring to face the tasks that kept it fed.

In a sense: His hands.

Or so he thought. It wasn’t until some weeks later, after he’d seen the boy milling around the rice paddies absently and pushing younger children down with random violence that he began to wonder where his legacy was really going.

The night he washed the twin dots of drying goat’s blood off of the boys cheek, there was nothing but pure static silence between them; a stoic recognition of the things that lay between what was connected and what was not. Jing had responded poorly at the time: he stayed silent alongside his son.

And yet one evening, late in a midsummer’s soup of overbearing heat, over the evening’s hard earned dinner, to which everyone could attest, the eldest son finally made him hurt.

That night, randomly, the boy said: “The difference between our pet goat, and my friend’s throats, should I recognize it? Is it even real?”

“Respect them both, but much differently,” Jing said quickly. Reflexively. Caught off guard.

The eldest boy did not lower his gaze.

“What are the differences?” He said.

It was then that Jing knew that he had not a legacy, but a reason to stay alive and well. A reason to keep teaching.

He had a son. 

Photo by Michael Seminer. Words by Paul Oliveri.