14Chong Suk gazed at the brown river as he did every evening before going inside to take down the rake from its hook and slap on his straw hat. In another hour or so, the sun would set. Just as he was leaving their hut, his wife called out from the kitchen.
“The long beans are ready for harvesting!”
“How much do you need?”
“Harvest the lot. What’re you waiting for?”
How he hated and loved this river when he thought of his first wife. She would always be ‘Weng’s mother’ in his memory; he couldn’t bear to recall her name, her beautiful name that reminded him of the plum blossoms in their family’s village back in Kwongchow, China. She was his distant cousin, and the matchmaker had laughed and said they were a perfect match for each other. He was seventeen and his village’s best pipa playe
