Beixi Li

Family Injured, Boy Killed During Street Collapse.

The Wall Street Journal headline opens into death as words on paper tell the story of poverty and helplessness. Through the rubbage of the street you can still see remains of furniture, a broken chair leg, a lampshade crushed and misshapen. Words run across the page, New york… weak infrastructure…homeless numbers increasing…casualties. A voice cuts through the image on the screen and she looks up to see her 5 year old son standing alone in the doorway, trailing a blanket behind him.

“Mommy, what are you doing?” He hugs the blanket closer as she blinks the lights from the computer out of her eyes.

“Honey, what are you doing out of bed?” She swivels the chairs around and straightens her stiff  form, trying to clear the image out of her mind.

He reaches up and as she scoops him up, lays his head sleepily on her shoulder. The blanket trails near the floor and she tucks it between his curled hands, under eyes that are already drifting closed.

“I couldn’t fall asleep,” comes out broken midst yawn.

Superheroes leap off the walls and the nightlight illuminates crumpled blankets on the child size bed.

At the store, they had walked down the aisle two, five, ten times looking at the white, golden, mahogany bed frames. Deliberated whether shelves were necessary, whether drawers underneath would be useful.

And the sales woman had smiled, impatient yet understanding, and they had finally, sheepishly, pointed at the one that now leaned against the wall, holding spider man sheets and missing a little boy.

He fidgets as she stretches out the covers, and suddenly, both eyes are wide again in anticipation of a story. He curls into her a little tighter and her hands play with the soft brown strands, as she leans back against the headboard.

Unbidden, the cracked and broken streets resurface and swim before her eyes. Again, she can see in her mind the picture of a little boy looking up through similar cracks years ago. Only that time, it was someone halfway around the world in Korea, looking at her from the slideshow of a professor from college, trying to convince students of a lesson they were too ignorant to understand back then.

 

 

 

PhD student with an accent, he had stood there and looked at their aspiring faces, their confident stances, swallowed hard and put his soul into his lectures twice a week for a semester.

She had sat in ergonomic chairs, stayed awake for him, and learned management operations with a class of 80 who knew that they wanted to make money when they left that LEED certified building—and they would all go on to do it.

Last day of class he stood up there and asked what family was. Wearing a blue fleece half zip and dress pants, he looked expectantly at the students and they were embarrassed to answer.

Looking down he threw up a picture on the screen of a little boy looking through the cracked undergrounds of a street. She looked and looked and the perspective was so skewed she couldn’t understand what was going on. What existed below a street? Cement, earth, clay?  No, people did, with furniture and a family.

“My grandfather used to be a reverend and I would always play soccer against one of my best friends right in the courtyard of the church. Whoever won would always get a little monetary prize and I made it so that I won every time. He was always furious and I always thought it was hilarious.”

He looked back at the screen, at the little boy looking up through broken concrete with big eyes, and then turned slowly back to us, “Then, one day, I went to his house for dinner and that picture you see, that’s where he lived. The road had caved in and there was a hole in the ground under the street and that’s where his family had made their home.”

The slide flipped and nighttime Korea was illuminated by the lights of skyrise buildings, captured in a five by eight to share with others half a world away. The laser hovered on the tallest building.

“That’s where I worked.”

The red dot jumped to a squat, blue building on the side of the mountain.

“That’s where the President of Korea lived.”

The red dot wavered, then disappeared. He turned back to us and said wryly, “Literally, I stood above the president.”

She allowed herself a laugh and the sound was echoed out of the students around her, undulating with their ambitions.

“But then I came back to teach.”

 

 

 

A year before she met Professor Chu, she had sat in a state of the art auditorium, bored listless when a lanky, stern, young man, whose personality seemed to old for his age, strode onto the platform, and began a speech with a voice that bit each word off dry.

“You know, I was at the best point in my life. I was young and moving faster than ever, climbing the corporate later, doing deals with Martha Stewart and yachts. At my age, I was at the top of the world and when I told my bosses that I wanted to go back to school and work with students, to advise them on their careers, he said I was crazy—and so did everyone around me.”

From the looks on the faces of those around her, they all thought he was crazy too.

He paced back and forth and held the silence.

“But while some parts of my life were going great, others were going far from great. All that time I had been spending had to come from somewhere, and my family was the vault it came from. But you can’t spend forever without giving back.”

They understood, they had heard this lecture time and again. Balance your life, money isn’t everything, they could repeat the lecture back to you and she could see people sinking drearily into seats, checking cell phones.

A student raised her hand: “Was there one moment that really determined your change of mind?”

He looked down, cleared his throat, walked to the end of the stage and back again. Then he looked straight back at his audience and said with a steady voice,

 “Yeah, when my wife walked out on me.”

 

 

 

Little boys whose families had nothing and professors whose families had lost everything blurred into indignant Spider man eyes as she realizes her son was still waiting for a story.

 

The bed creaks as she shifts her weight and pulls the covers up tighter.

Nobody ever really answered that question Professor Chu had asked so long ago. Nobody really knew what to say after that presenter revealed the biting injury that changed his life.

 

She could still see the faces of her friends sitting in that room, training to be the next world conquerors. He had stood up there in his blue fleece, trying to share a message with them one last time before they all left and became creators of their own futures.

 

The last slide of the day had two children snuggled in a hammock, giggling with shadow and sunlight playing over their faces. He had turned around and looked at that slide, smiling, and they had clapped and clapped and the girls swallowed hard and the boys looked up and away.

 

Even as they looked at those little eyes crinkled with laughter, two children walked into the classroom with boxes of donuts, and were shocked to see themselves on the screen. Professor Chu walked over, picked them up, kissed his wife as she walked in behind the family, and smiled at our applause.

 

20 years later, those classmates were spread out all over the world. They all had different stories to tell and different paths for getting there. But 20 years later they still talked about Professor Chu and his sincerity in trying to make them better people. His last lecture had been titled, “Words Never Spoken.”

And as they remembered, some smiled with relief and some looked away.

 

Earlier today, she had baked a plate of cookies and had them ready on the counter cooling when she picked her son up from first grade. All the way home he was filled to the brim with what they had done at recess, the alphabetical line they had waited in at lunch, and the contentiousness of clean up time. She’d smiled as he was ecstatic, frustrated, and exasperated in the capacity of a five year old and how his face had broken into the biggest grin with the sight of cookies. Her husband had walked in the door ten minutes later, scooped him up in a bear hug, and listened with enthusiasm to the same dramatic trilogy she had been privy to moments before. Father and son had crouched over a plate of cookies, father with his tie loosened over a dress shirt, son with his mouth messy with crumbs, chocolate, and stories.

 

“There was once this family, made of cookies and hugs…”