A Thousand Years of Good Prayers: Stories Read Online Free Page A

face, seeing the small hope grow bigger in his eyes. Kang grabs her hand. “Granny, just two days. Nobody will know.”
    Granny Lin sighs. “Forgive me, Kang. But Granny cannot do this for you.”
    “But why? You said you’d do anything.”
    “Anything that we can do here, in the school, in the mountains. Kang, good boy, we cannot leave the school.”
    It takes a minute for Kang to burst into tears. Granny Lin tries to quiet him and pull him into her arms. Kang pushes her away, and his eyes, with the cold anger that Granny Lin once saw in Old Tang’s eyes, chill her. Kang runs across the school yard. Granny Lin runs after him, but has to stop and catch her breath after a few steps. Her old body is failing her young heart.
    GRANNY LIN THOUGHT that Kang would be crying in his bed, but the boy is not there. She calls out his name as she walks in the building, checking each unlocked door, the activity room, the music room, the dining hall. She looks under tables and behind curtains, and her heart sinks deeper each time her hope proves unfounded.
    For an hour Granny Lin searches, until it occurs to her that the boy may have left the building, and even the school. Paralyzed by such a thought, and imagining all kinds of disasters, she calls the two guards, who are playing poker in the small room by the school gate. Neither wants to admit the possibility that the boy has squeezed through the gate, both insisting that the boy must be hiding somewhere in the building. More searches are carried out by the three of them. When nothing is yielded, they each start to panic with different worries.
    The police are called. The school supervisor is called. The dorm mothers are called. The guards make phone calls to whomever they can think of. Granny Lin watches one of the young men punch the number with a shaking hand, and wonders why he is so nervous. The guards are only losing a peaceful weekend. They will lose at most a month’s salary, as both are relatives of the trustees. Boys disappear every day— what would they remember of Kang a year from now even if they never found him again? Granny Lin begins to cry.
    But Kang shows up by himself, in the middle of the turmoil, unharmed, hungry, and sleepy. He must have played hide-and-seek with Granny Lin while she was looking for him. Or did he want to punish her for disappointing him? Granny Lin does not know. All she knows is what he told the school supervisor, that he fell asleep under the piano.
    Granny Lin remembers looking under the piano, but nobody trusts an old woman’s memory. Besides, what’s the difference even if she is telling the truth? She has proved herself incapable. More stories are remembered—of her eating the students’ ration, of her carelessness with the laundry.
    On the evening of the day the children return, Granny Lin is asked to leave. Her things are packed and placed at the gate: a duffel bag, not heavy even for an old woman.
    “The happiness of love is a shooting meteor; the pain of love is the darkness following.” A girl is singing to herself in a clear voice as she walks past Granny Lin in the street. She tries to catch up with the girl; the girl moves too fast, and so does the song. Granny Lin puts the duffel bag on the ground and catches her breath, still hanging on to the stainless steel lunch pail with her other hand. All the people in the street seem to know where their legs are taking them. She wonders since when she stopped being one of them.
    Someone runs past Granny Lin and pushes her hard on the back. She stumbles and catches a glimpse of a hand before falling down; a man in a black shirt runs into the crowd with her duffel bag.
    A woman stops and asks, “Are you all right, Granny?”
    Granny Lin nods, struggling to recover from the fall. The woman shakes her head and says aloud to the passersby, “What a world! Someone just robbed an old granny.”
    Few people respond; the woman shakes her head again and moves on.
    Granny Lin sits on the