The Figure in the Bushes

While waiting for my flight from Frankfurt back to Shenzhen, I was scrolling through videos when I suddenly remembered something I had not thought about for many years. If I had to estimate, this memory had been buried in my mind for about seven years. I often eat barbecue and like it very much, but in all those years, barbecue had never made me remember it. Then just now I came across a short drama and watched only the first three seconds. In the video, a summer worker grilling food by the roadside was being confronted over some dispute by people who looked like urban enforcement officers or management staff. He looked a little shabby, dusty and worn. It was that instant, something about the barbecue or the way he looked, that suddenly pulled this memory up from somewhere very deep.

It happened when I was little. Less than five hundred meters’ walk from home were a shopping mall and Sam’s Club. That mall was there through almost my entire childhood and adolescence. I went to preschool there when I was three, took English lessons there later, and often went to Sam’s Club with my mother to shop. It also had my favorite restaurant when I was little.

To walk there from home, we first crossed the road, then followed a straight sidewalk that sloped slightly uphill. The big trees on both sides kept it fairly shady all year. It was not that there was no sunlight at all, but the ground always looked brownish-black, and there were always small black marks left by the fruit that fell from the trees. To the right was a two-way road, then another sidewalk just like this one, with residential compounds and a kindergarten to its right. On the left side of the sidewalk I was on was a long, narrow strip of bushes, dark green or black, very dark, very deep. Looking back now, those bushes were not really very wide, probably only about two meters. Behind them was a low wall, and inside the wall was the playing field of Shenzhen Senior High School.

I do not think that road had streetlights, at least not in my memory. So it would be fairly dark in the evening or at night. There was still some moonlight and light from the surrounding buildings, but on the whole it was dim. When I was little, my mother and I walked that road countless times at night.

I remember that many times, there would be a little firelight deep in the bushes on the left. Not a large blaze, but tiny flames and some glowing orange-red things that, looking back now, were probably charcoal. Leaves and branches blocked them, so the glowing things were never fully visible, appearing and disappearing. The firelight was at the very back of the bushes, and beside it there seemed to be someone, a figure. As a child I asked my mother, “What’s in there? Who’s there?” I can no longer remember her exact words. She said something like, “Someone’s barbecuing in there.” But at the time I did not really understand what she meant. Looking back now, I still do not seem to understand.

What I really remember is only an image: at night, deep in the dark bushes on the left, a dim fire, a few pieces of charcoal glowing red, an extremely blurred figure standing there. The figure seemed to have moved, and also seemed never to have moved at all. I can no longer say.

Even when I remembered it again today, I still instinctively wondered: Why would anyone be barbecuing there? To this day, I cannot understand it.

If you asked me now for a completely honest answer, I could not be a hundred percent sure whether I had really seen that scene repeatedly. But my feeling is that I probably saw it more than once. Then one day it disappeared and never appeared again. And I never thought of it again either, until today.