back to "a day in the life" main
A Day in the Life...
December 2003
 He doesn't stick out much when they all pull up on their motorbikes and bicycles to make their way to an after-work badminton game. He is short, the top of his thinning black hair hitting right below the nose of the other guys around him, yet the way the racquet contained in his bag hangs against his body, you know he knows what he is doing.
When pulling back the sheet hanging in the open doorway, smeared with the fingerprints of those who frequent the badminton gymnasium, he stands back to let two women in before him. He must have learned that when watching one of the many American movies that he so often watches. Unlike the other guys stepping off the court to contribute to the cloud of cigarette smoke hanging in the air as they lounge in the low-riding plastic chairs set around the gymnasium, Will takes the opportunity to discuss The Shawshank Redemption. He has only seen it in English, with no Chinese sub-titles, but as he says, “Even without words it is so moving. All I could do was weep.” This coming from a man that lives in a place where the response to crying is, “It is nothing.”
Yet as he tells the story of his family, there are no tears. “After I joined the Party, my family told me that my grandfather was killed by the Party and my Grandmother was sent away from her four children.” These four children were each sent to a different city, and Will's father was sent to live with a family in a small town in the south of China. When Will was only five-years-old, he could not understand why he suddenly had two grandmothers. “All I knew was that this new grandmother loved me very much.”
When he learned the truth about his grandfather, at the age of twenty, he realized that “everything I believed was a lie. What is truth?” So now seven years later, his version of truth is a combination of the hopes of a new government and the image of a burning bush from the movie The Prince of Egypt. “That's why I like the movie, because the God appears in that movie not in a man figure, but a burning bush with white, holy light.”
Yet when offered the truth that is written in the Book that tells the story of this “white, holy light,” Will says, “I had considered about that years before. But I don't want to disrespect the deities.” In a place where keeping face is the ultimate goal, he fears doing something wrong and having “no face to meet the God I respect when I am dead.”
Meanwhile, he manages to keep face in his badminton game, forgetting for a moment that the next day will be just the same as the one before—working for something he does not believe in, longing for salvation to come from his fellow-countrymen and believing that his sin is bigger than the love of the God who created him. top
back to "a day in the life" main |
