Listen to the Melody of Wind and Rain

In 1990, on the day the Dragon lifted its head, rain poured down over Qinchuan. I was born in that storm. My father waited all night by a bridge half-submerged in water, a colorful stone he had picked up tucked against his chest. He held it close until dawn before daring to go inside and see me.

I grew up under my father’s whip. I was beaten for stealing sweet cakes and lying, and punished in front of everyone for hitting my grandfather’s dog. When I was eleven, five lashes left my skin torn and bleeding, and I swore to myself that I would never call him my father again. But whenever I got up in the night, I would see him crouched beneath the oil lamp, clumsily mending my mother’s clothes.

When I was seventeen, I found the colorful stone in the corner of a cabinet. It was wrapped in red cloth and worn smooth and bright. My mother told me, “The night you were born, your father brought it home and held on to it all night.”

At fifteen, Yu Jing crouched by the Qinchuan Bridge, drawing a flower in the dirt with a twig. She looked up and asked me, “Your name is Guo Heng? Heng as in ‘horizontal’?” She taught me to read, gave me a dictionary, and told me, “You don’t have to stay at the quarry.”

The Qinchuan River flowed on for twenty years. My grandmother passed away, then my grandfather. My father grew old. The colorful stone was still there, like the waters of the Qinchuan River: silent, yet flowing through an entire lifetime.

This is a story about home, growing up, and learning to understand our fathers through their silence, dedicated to every child who has ever tried to understand their father.