"Come on, Dad!" Yun Jieshi groaned while looking dumbfoundedly at the large flower pot by the front door. "More of these weeds?"
The peach blossoms sitting in the flower pot were his father's latest addition to the redecoration of their house, only this time, Yun Muyang seemed to be moving his campaign outside the house. The flowers didn't look bad by any means, but Yun Jieshi did not like the fact that there was yet another plant he would have to help sustain.
Damned green freeloaders!
He cursed before cleaning his shoes on the doormat, taking them off, and unlocking the door. The sight of two more friendly spots of green on either side of the front door made Yun Jieshi scowl.
"Does he really think this will boost his spirituality or whatever?"
Alas, there was another in the kitchen, next to the fridge. It was a peace lily, and it had every intention of keeping its spot close to the window.
As annoyed as he was, Yun Jieshi managed to stifle the explosion building up from his chest. Truth be told, most of it was being fuelled by the slow, mocking laugh he thought he heard from the white pine at the park.
But the last straw was cozying up inside the fridge. Over three packets of bean sprouts and bok choy, was a note that turned Yun Jieshi red. It read:
"I'd love it if you joined me for tomato and egg stir fry tonight. No meat."
In his rage, Yun Jieshi wrote the response, "Today is a terrible day to fast from meat. I'll have my chicken, thank you very much!" on the note. It ripped halfway through his second sentence, but that didn't stop Yun Jieshi from finishing the rest of the words on the bok choy.
He soon cooled off as he leaned against the fridge.
"Fine. I'll do it," he said with a click of the tongue. "I suppose that'll be me doing my part for filial piety."
Yun Jieshi hated that his father had to find his comfort from sorrows this way.
Before Yun Muyang left for America, he had not been the religious sort. That didn't change even after his life abroad stabilized.
Jane changed that, however. She affected father and son in different ways.
To Yun Muyang, she was the spark that spelled his need to re-subscribe to tradition and religion, something his own parents had been heavily devoted to.
If there was anything Yun Jieshi could attest to, it was the fact that his father had done a rather poor job at making sure he felt a powerful connection to half of the heritage he belonged to.
Yun Jieshi had been American through and through for a major portion of his life. Yun Muyang had hardly exposed him to anything that built up his love for Eastern culture, tradition, and people.
Yun Muyang believed this was what started his misfortune from Jane to the other three women who left him abruptly, shattering his heart each time.
That was why, after he and Yun Jieshi came to China, he had found his peace in folk religion. Yun Jieshi's father seemed to find something precious among the inviting local souls who pushed forward the ideas of filial piety, and animism.
Yun Jieshi thought the latter in particular beckoned Yun Muyang's broken soul. Animism was a belief that everything had a soul. Everything, even plants.
Yun Jieshi wasn't too big on religion, but if his father sensed something soothing from the flowers and weeds he invited as freeloaders into their house, he wasn't too keen to stop him.
'I should ask how he judges which vegetables to eat and which ones to spare,' Yun Jieshi thought as he went to his room. As he pushed open the door, something scraped against the floor and offered some resistance.
An erhu had fallen over in the door's path, and as Yun Jieshi entered his room, he nearly stepped on another one of his musical instruments. It was a dizi, mere millimeters from his right foot. Three of his pipas and a liuqin were spread over the floor to the bed, making the room look messier than it was.
A bookshelf next to the guzheng, which was set against the wall, spotted books that had spilled from their previously neat rows.
Yun Jieshi felt his frustration soar. He had left in such a hurry when Li Chyou had told him she wanted to see him. He had knocked over nearly everything in his room while fumbling for clothes, shoes, and his zhongruan.
'I should have killed that optimism,' he thought and plopped to his bed. The chaotic image of his instruments sprawled across the floor summoned a deep, sullenness in him.
His mind, ever his worst enemy, replayed Li Chyou's words:
I get that you want to challenge yourself or whatever, but why can't you just stick to one thing?
Yun Jieshi could almost taste the bile in his throat.
Someone like Li Chyou could never understand the dreadful, depressing feeling of loving everything about your culture and feeling like you were several centuries behind everyone else.
That was how Yun Jieshi had felt when he came to China. Far removed from the diverse, somewhat entitled, and loud pressures of the West, his home was almost completely different. The chaos in the streets was different, the tension felt when teetering beyond even the slightest society norm, the loud and silent, which somehow almost meant the same thing… Yun Jieshi might have been in a different galaxy altogether.
Yun Jieshi had seen America through Jane Stock. Growing up, she had fed him the finer things that made one an American: a voice, diversity, deep egotistic ambition, and a great sense of freedom that was simultaneously constrained.
It all started in the comic books she shared with him when he was young, to the diverse foods, to all the sights she dragged him to every week, to the music. Yun Jieshi had been obsessed with it, up until the point Jane fell out of love with both him and his father.
At least, that was how Yun Jieshi explained her disappearance that night. He hadn't seen her since.
Growing to love the other side of him was never a problem for Yun Jieshi, but mastering everything in order to not feel like he didn't belong, had been a battle.
It took three years for Yun Jieshi to feel like he could mask the whiter half of him in his speech and two more years to find a job where he felt like he really fit in. The English teacher gimmick was harrowing.
In between, he had been doing crash courses on every piece of literature he could find that could help him relate to the old and the young.
And that was where Yun Jieshi's passion came from.
He loved all the old poetry, the old fables, the rich history, and the music. He wanted to devour it all before he was thirty, a mere five years from the present.
The young man looked at his bookshelf. He still couldn't hear the gong of completion on that objective.
Ultimately, his father was better off than he was. He had already fit in snugly, leaving him behind.
"Well done, Chyou," Yun Jieshi said and he clicked his tongue again. He lay flat on his bed. He suddenly felt sleepy. It had been a long, draining day and his body wasn't especially pleased with what supper had in store. Clicking on a playlist on his phone with the name, Faye Wong Rocks, he pressed 'play', and closed his eyes.
Soon, he was sinking into deep sleep.
…But Yun Jieshi was suddenly prompted to clap a hand over his nose as he jerked up from the bed.
Whether he had slept or not was a mystery he never got to solve because his mind immediately responded to the familiar, overwhelming, rancid odor.
'URGH!' Yun Jieshi groaned, and his eyes raced about. 'This smell again? Where is it coming from? Is it something I had on me before I came home?' His eyes turned bloodshot. Try as he might to strangle his nose, it did little to help. The smell was too strong. It might have been stronger than before.
Yun Jieshi eyed his zhongruan accusingly. Had it brushed against something foul? He made the valiant effort to sniff it. From what he gathered, the instrument was innocent.
'What is it then?' he thought angrily. He rushed to the door. Perhaps the source was outside. He had passed the doorway when he bumped into something.
No, it might have been someone. But truthfully, it was an entity unknown.
Yun Jieshi turned to stone. His eyes went round, his throat dry. Fear had never crept into him so quickly.
He might have thought that he had bumped into a person… if his eyes weren't transfixed on a bare foot on the floor the size of his entire torso. It was pale like that of a corpse and riddled with black, lumpy spots.
The foot was about as much as Yun Jieshi could take. He didn't dare look for what else was attached to it. The fact that his eyes were burning from the horrendous stench blasting from the figure in front of him, watering incessantly, was also a reason for that.
'What… what the…?' Yun Jieshi stammered in his own mind.
There then came an atrocious, hoarse cry, like a donkey's braying… and then he felt large sets of teeth clamp around his neck while darkness devoured him. A humid warmth tickled his skin, but it brought no comfort. An instant later, Yun Jieshi's neck was bitten and pulled on, his head torn from its body.