Thaddeus Rutkowski – Cheer Sing

Rutkowski LE P&W February 2025

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Live Encounters Poetry & Writing February 2025

Cheer Sing, story by Thaddeus Rutkowski.


Yun Long artwork
Artwork by Yun Long

Cheer Sing

When I met my Chinese grandfather, I tried to say his name, Qi Xing, but it came out wrong.

“Call me Cheer Sing,” he said.

His English was good. My mother had told me he’d gone through divinity school in the US and returned to China to set up a branch of the YMCA. He’d lived with his family on the ground floor of the Y.

He gave me a scroll made of thin sticks of bamboo. I unrolled it and saw a pen-and-ink drawing of a tiger leaping from bottom to top. The drawing had been filled in with a bright-orange color. Chinese characters formed a vertical row beside the predator.

“This is your name, Xiao Lin,” he said, pointing to two ideograms. “It means Little Forest.”

“Why a tiger?” I asked.

“This is not your zodiac animal. It is your complement. You are a horse.”

“Does that mean I’ll live on a farm?” I asked. We were talking in my family’s house, which was surrounded by dairy farms.

“The tiger and the horse work together. The tiger is fierce, and the horse is steady.”

My mother had told me her father vanished soon after Mao took over—he’d helped some people leave China. The family didn’t hear from him for the next twenty years.

“Where were you?” I asked him.

“I was in work camp,” he said. “I lost some teeth. But I survived by turning the other cheek.

“You made it here.”

“I was lucky. I give my luck to you.”

I looked for a place to hang the tiger scroll. The wall next to my bed looked like a good place. I positioned the image of the orange tiger there. I could read the characters that went with the image—I could see my name next to the tiger.


© Thaddeus Rutkowski

Thaddeus Rutkowski grew up in central Pennsylvania. He is the author of eight books of prose and poetry, most recently Safe Colors, a novel in short fictions. His novel Haywire won the members’ choice award from the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. He teaches at Medgar Evers College, Columbia University, and a YMCA and received a fiction writing fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

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