The Weight of Hope: A Chinese Miner's Struggle to Give His Son an Education

I was almost knocked over by the stink of decaying cabbage that hit me right in the face as soon as I opened the door. The air in the tiny rented room was heavy and thick with the foul and sour odor of rot. In the corner a heap of cabbage leaves-the leftovers from the bunch I had taken on my motorcycle a few weeks ago-were lying on a piece of plastic mottled and yellowed with the rot. Some had become soggy and were oozing dark stains on the unpainted concrete floor. One half-broken head had been chosen on the kitchen table, the parts that were pouring out with the knife had been separated, and it was being prepared for the next meal by boiling it.
This is what my son was eating.
In order to send my son to high school, we moved to a cramped town tw…
“You really don’t know,” he would snap back whenever I really wanted to get to the bottom of his mysterious time-wasting with those games.
Perhaps I really didn’t know. I, however, got the numbers – his grades, the cost of living, the way the time was running out.
One autumn when we were financially depleted, my wife and I decided to go and pick chestnuts, which was the only income we had left for the winter. We picked from the trees, shook the branches, and even dug in the thorns until our fingers bled. During that season, a neighbor fell from one of those trees and hit his head on the rocks below. We made a stretcher out of the car to take him to the road and his wife held the hospital tight.
That’s the way it was. Life for every coin was a battle of sweat, sometimes blood.
Yet, in spite of all this, my son was wandering. He missed school to unearth herbal roots and was so happy when he gave his mother a handful of cash. “I can look after us,” he said. But I didn’t want him to! I wanted him to live a life that was different from ours.
Once, I just lost it. I took his phone that he had been saving for years to buy and threw it to the floor. The screen dimmed, still functioning for a little while, then it went dark. He did not shout at me, but instead, he looked at me with something that was even worse than anger: resignation.
Afterwards, at the door waiting for him to come back, I saw his figure become more visible as he was walking down the alley. I could see that he was taller and stronger, a young man and not the boy I was used to.
It could be that I let him down. It might as well be that the world failed both of us.
However, when he came walking down my way, I was wondering if his generation could be the one to carry the load that we could not carry.
Hope is a thing that is heavier than its appearance, just like every other thing.