The Bicycle’s Chain

by Khoi Pham

The day my dad died was the day I set foot in my home country again after twenty-one years. My plane had a two-hour delay in Chiang Mai, so he had already passed away a few hours before I went through our front gate, for the first time since I went through it to catch a bus to the airport as a teenager.

I admit I wasn’t feeling sad. Not even nostalgic. I just felt very tired after sitting in the airplane seat for twelve hours straight.

I thought about my dad. It felt a bit shameful to admit, but I didn’t remember many details about him. A man of average build and an ordinary face, he wasn’t the type that stood out in a crowd. When I was a kid, my dad worked on a cargo vessel and was away from home most of the time, or at least that was what my mom told me.

My first memory of him was him bringing me many small toys he bought when he was abroad: one month it was a toy car; another, a tiny dinosaur, a plastic sword, or a model ship. My country was so poor at the time that I quickly became the coolest kid in my class in primary school. I shared a lot of those toys with the other kids who let me join in various childhood games with them.

Some of those toys were still in the garage, his garage, when we had it cleaned the day after his funeral. They were probably put there after I grew up enough that I did not enjoy playing with them anymore. They were among his old clothing, some of his repair kits, and his old scooter. And, in the corner, I found his city bike. It had clearly been used and showed traces of time. The frame was rusted, and the felt covering on the handlebars and seat was all worn and torn. I unconsciously touched the handlebars as if I wanted to ride it again.

My dad had bought that bike thirty years ago or maybe more, I don’t remember. Back then, it was a fortune in our poor country, the equivalent of an expensive sports car in most countries today. No, we weren’t rich. Dad had inherited a decent sum of money from Granddad. He didn’t know what to do with it, so he bought the first thing that came to his mind, the thing he had always dreamt of since he himself was a kid. Our relatives called him silly. If he had invested it in the stock market or bought some land with it, we would have been millionaires today. Yes, Dad was always a silly man when it came to money.

He did take care of the bike with his utmost care, though. The bike frame was shiny and jade green. The tires still carried the fresh scent of rubber. He cleaned it very thoroughly every afternoon, before wheeling it carefully into the house, and double-checked the garage door every time before he left home for long.

Now I suddenly found myself riding the bike again after who knows how many years. Why, I didn’t know. I was surprised that it still worked in this state. I rode through the roads near our house, to the park, then the large avenues, the city’s old quarter. The sun had gone away, the blaring car horns that gave me a headache all day long had cooled down a little bit.

The signs along both sides of the street began to flicker as in any other vibrant Asian city. The city had changed so much since I was there. The biggest change was that no one was riding bikes anymore: some young people who were out late looked at me curiously, probably due to the rusty chain groaning heavily under my feet. I could hear it clearly: Click-clack-clack-clack, click-clack-click-click, clack.

I remember sitting on the back rack of the bike, behind his back, when he took me to kindergarten for the first time in my life. I remember that day because it was the first time I stayed on my own in a place that wasn’t my home. It was a hot late summer day, his back was all sweaty, and his face became red due to the heat. The road was rocky, so I held tightly onto his back. I wasn’t crying, though. I had always been surprisingly calm , ever since I was a little kid.

When I grew up a little bit, Dad taught me how to ride the bike. I happened to fall off the bike a lot. Dad often was losing patience because I wasn’t very good at controlling a vehicle. The bicycle accumulated several scratches over this period, some of which were still visible two decades afterward. I still kept falling for days before I managed to control the bike. It hurt like hell. I wasn’t crying, though.

When I got my first girlfriend in high school, I used to carry her on the same bike. The bike was already a little worn, but most of its parts were still holding well. She was light, but the pedaling became so unbearable when we went uphill on hot summer days that I often had to get off the bike and walk alongside her. That first love didn’t last long. Dad and Mom didn’t know of it. I could handle myself perfectly fine.

When I got into a fierce argument with my family and decided to leave home for another country to pursue my medical career, Dad didn’t say much. Having just retired, he spent most of his time either in the garage or on the rooftop fixing something for our family. We didn’t have much chance to talk to each other, nor did I want to. I used to shut myself in my tiny room most of the time back in those days.

The day I left my family, though, Dad came to see me off, alone, at the bus station. He was riding the bike. It could already be considered an old, worn bike, and so many people had switched to other more convenient vehicles that it was worth nothing compared to the fortune Dad paid for it. He wanted to give me some money which he had saved during his working days.

I rejected the money at first but, in the end, I took some of it. Then the bus came. When I tried to look back for him, he was already lost in the crowd. I didn’t feel anything when leaving my childhood behind.

Now, I realized I was already pretty far away from home. The streets became more and more unrecognizable the further I was away. I decided it was time to go back. The more I traveled with the bike, the more I felt comfortable, as if the familiar sensation had slowly crept back into my limbs.

I pedaled faster and faster. The bike shook more and more heavily, as if it couldn’t bear my weight after all those years of lying in storage. The scenery flew past my mind: from the old bus stop where I last saw Dad, to my high school, my middle school, my elementary school, to the street where I learned to ride, to my kindergarten. The chain squeaked even louder: Click-clack-clack-clack, click-clack-click-click, clack.

When I reached the front gate of my childhood home, I heard a loud, cracking noise. The pedal had snapped off, and the chain came loose from the gear. The bike Dad treasured so much had broken down at last.

Inside, Mom had just placed Dad’s memorial portrait on his altar for the forty-nine-day memorial period in our tradition. Under his picture, incense smoke still curled from the bowl in ghostly spirals. I looked at his face in the picture. It was taken more than twenty years ago, before the day I saw him for the last time by the bus stop. It suddenly came to my mind that I didn’t know how he had looked ever since then.

Then my mom said to me: “Welcome home, Nguyen.”

For the first time in years, I found myself crying.