It should have been about time for school to let out. I walked outside. At the far end of the road, a small, thin boy was coming toward me. A heavy schoolbag pressed down on his shoulders. His head was lowered and he moved forward with effort. I hurried over and took the bag off him.
“Dad.”
He straightened up, lifted his shoulders, and smiled shyly. Sweat was still running down his face.
His schoolbag really was heavy. Even I found it difficult to carry. American education is strange. When children are in elementary school, they never seem to carry schoolbags. Every day they go to school empty-handed and come home empty-handed. If there is homework, it is usually just one printed sheet of exercises and takes less than ten minutes to finish. So childhood is easy.
But once they enter middle school, the workload becomes heavy. I bought my son a backpack. Inside were three large hardcover textbooks, each weighing about three pounds, along with hard-shell folders with metal spring clips, a pencil case, and a lunchbox. Packed full, the bag weighed at least fifteen pounds. For a small, thin boy who was still growing, that was no light burden.
“Why don’t you leave the books in your locker at school?” A father always worries about his son. “Then you wouldn’t have to carry them back and forth.”
“The teacher hasn’t assigned lockers yet.”
My son drank a cold drink. Sweat covered his face, flushed red from the walk.
Later, even after he had a locker, he still had to carry books home to do homework. At night he would work on assignments over the telephone with classmates, sometimes talking for more than an hour. Listening to his fluent English on the phone, I felt comforted and also a little envious.
I remembered our first year in America, when we temporarily lived with my fifth younger sister’s family. Every morning, my son followed his little cousin to school. According to his age, he was placed in third grade and started learning from ABC.
One day in class, he badly needed to urinate but did not know how to express it in English. He held it in. While the teacher was writing on the blackboard, he quietly slipped out of the classroom. When he returned from the restroom, the teacher caught him and demanded to know where he had gone. He stood there tongue-tied and unable to answer.
That evening, his little cousin brought home a message from the teacher saying he had been playing around and breaking classroom rules. I became angry and questioned him harshly. With tears in his eyes, he explained what had happened. The next day, his uncle wrote a note to the teacher explaining the reason, and the misunderstanding was cleared up.
Time hurried on.
My son carried that heavy backpack back and forth every day. He wore out several schoolbags. Before we knew it, he had graduated from high school and entered college. Before we knew it again, he had graduated from UCLA and gone to work for a computer company in Silicon Valley.
Before Spring Festival one year, when my wife heard our son was coming home for New Year, she simmered pork-rib soup and prepared sea cucumber, large shrimp, braised fish, and other rich dishes so the son we had not seen for so long could nourish himself properly.
The doorbell rang. Our daughter had picked her younger brother up from the airport. He came in smiling, carrying a long rounded shoulder bag.
“Dad.”
Happily, I took his bag.
Wow—so heavy!
I put it beside the sofa. The whole family joyfully ate New Year’s Eve dinner together. While everyone talked about everything under the sun, I examined my son’s large bag. Inside were changes of clothes, sneakers, a thick stack of work materials, and a thin laptop computer.
Late at night, our daughter went home. My wife went to bed. Father and son remained sitting on the sofa with endless things to talk about. We talked about the Intel company where he worked and his department, then the unpredictable stock market, then the NBA and the Lakers. We became so absorbed in conversation that we did not notice the moon sinking toward the west.
Looking at my son under the lamp—his body now large and strong, his cheeks full, dark whiskers around his lips—I felt enormous happiness as his father.
And again I remembered the past.
That year, holding our immigration documents, the four of us flew to the American consulate in Beijing for our visas. After the interview, each of us had to put fingerprints and a signature onto the forms. When it was my little son’s turn, he was only as tall as the counter. I lifted him up so he could lean over it. With his small hand holding a ballpoint pen, he crookedly signed his Chinese name.
The foreign consul in a crisp suit spoke standard Mandarin to him:
“Little friend, don’t forget how to write these characters.”
My son grew up. He was no longer the little boy whose writing twisted crookedly across the paper, nor the child struggling under a heavy schoolbag. He had become a muscular young man, a Silicon Valley person with a precise mind.
Watching him concentrate on the keyboard of his laptop, his old father felt a kind of comfort—and a joy that made sleep difficult.