The Vagrants

SEVEN

The nanny stood by the doorway of the nursery, watching Kai and Ming-Ming with detached patience. The morning leave-taking was never easy, but before the girl's gaze Kai felt more incapable than ever. The nanny was young, fifteen and a half, but there was a look of resignation on her face that made the girl look old, as if an aged woman had taken over and lived out all that was to come in her life before her time.

“Now, now,” said the nanny finally, when Kai failed to pry Ming-Ming's small fingers off her hand. He screamed in protest when he was pulled out of Kai's arms, and the nanny caught the small wrist and shook it gently. “Ming-Ming will be a good boy. Wave to Mama and let Mama go to work. Without work Mama doesn't make money. Without money there is no food. Without food Ming-Ming's tummy will rumble. And when Ming-Ming's tummy rumbles Mama will be too sad to go to work.”

The girl had a way of talking in circles, her tone flat and unhurried, as if she was telling an old folktale that no longer held any suspense, and Ming-Ming always calmed down. In those moments Kai felt that the girl was innocent and mysterious at once, a child and an old woman sharing the space within her skinny body, neither aware of the other's existence.

Han came out of the bathroom, buttoning the last button on his Mao jacket. “Let Mama go to work, yes,” he said, and tickled Ming-Ming under his chin. “But your baba will make more than enough money even if Mama doesn't work. Aren't you a lucky boy?”

Ming-Ming turned away and hugged the nanny's neck, having already banished his parents from his world before he was abandoned for the day. The child's attachment and indifference, both absolute, were a mystery to Kai. She did not recall ever being close to her mother, an unhappy woman who had been easily disappointed by everything in her life: her husband's lack of social status, the three children close to their father but stingy with their affection for her, promotions given to her colleagues, the tedious life, year after year, in a provincial city. Han's mother, a shrewd woman who had been credited with both her husband's political career and her own—she had been a nurse in the civil war, and had tended several high-ranking officials—was attentive to Han's needs, a better mother than Kai's own perhaps, but Kai had never thought of apprenticing herself to her mother-in-law. Until Ming-Ming's birth Kai always had someone to rely on for advice, teachers for instruction at the theater school, an older actress as a mentor in the theater troupe, her father. In her new motherhood, she felt not much different from a young child in a fishermen's village—her father had once told her and her siblings about the practice in his hometown near the East Sea, where a boy, upon turning three, would be thrown into the sea without warning; the child was expected to use his instinct to stay afloat, and those who could not save themselves were banished from the fishing boats, to live out their humility onshore, mending fishing nets and harvesting air-dried fish and seaweeds from clotheslines among women. Life is a war, and one rests only when death comes to fetch him, Kai remembered her father saying. She looked at Ming-Ming's small limbs; in another life he would soon be expected to fight in his first battle.

Kai repeated to the nanny a few details about feeding and napping. The girl looked patient, and Kai wondered if the girl was eager for them to go to work so that she could mother Ming-Ming more capably than Kai could herself. When the girl had been hired, her parents had told Kai that, as the eldest daughter of the family, she had helped to bring up six siblings, the youngest not much older than Ming-Ming. She had become a mother before she had grown into adulthood, Kai thought now, and Ming-Ming's plump arms, circling the nanny's neck with trust and familiarity, reminded Kai how easy it could be to replace a mother with another loving person in a small child's life.

Han insisted on walking Kai to the studio. The well-orchestrated denunciation event of the day before and, more so, the successful transplant—by now Han felt little need to keep it a secret from Kai that a top official had received Gu Shan's kidneys, and that Han himself was to be praised for that—had made Han more talkative.

“Is that why her trial was expedited?” asked Kai.

Han smiled and said they need not be concerned about irrelevant details; they had more important things to look forward to now, he said, and when she asked him what he meant, more pointedly than she had intended, he brought up the possibility of a second baby.

But Ming-Ming was no more than an infant himself, Kai said. Han studied her face and told her not to be nervous. By the time his little sister was born Ming-Ming would be old enough to be a big brother, he said. Even before Ming-Ming Han had hoped for a daughter, though he knew a boy as the firstborn would please his parents more.

They might get another boy, Kai reminded Han.

“Then we'll have another baby. I won't stop until I get a daughter as beautiful as her mother.”

Kai was silent for a moment and then said that she was not a sow. Han laughed. He could easily find a joke in everything she said, and she thought he would have failed as an actor, unable to recognize or deliver the subtlety in his lines.

It was time to think about a second baby, and soon a third, Han said, more seriously now. Ming-Ming was for his parents, Han explained, as the first grandchild was born for the sake of satisfying and entertaining the grandparents. For her mother too, he hastily added when he found Kai gazing at him, though she was not upset-rather, she was thinking that he had stumbled into the truth: Kai's mother doted on Ming-Ming in a timid way, as if she had less right to claim him as a grandchild than Han's parents did.

The second baby would be for Ming-Ming, as he needed a companion more than they needed another baby to deprive their sleep, Han said. Only the third child could they have as their own. “I'm not a selfish person but I want us to have something for ourselves,” Han said.

Kai walked on without replying. She had always convinced herself that the decision to marry was not much different from serving a meal to a tableful of guests, with different people to consider: her parents’ elation at being taken more seriously by those who had previously treated them with little respect, the futures of her two younger siblings—a brother whom Han had arranged to send to Teachers College in the provincial capital, and a sister who had been delighted to be courted as the relative of an important figure in the government. The heroines Kai had once played onstage had all given up their lives for higher callings, but it was not for a grand dream that she had decided to marry Han, but for a life with comfort and convenience.

When they arrived at the studio, Han assured Kai that there was no pressure. He handed her the mug of herb tea he had carried for her. “Sometimes a man can talk like an idiot when he is dreaming.”

Kai smiled and said she was only tired. She had no right to stop a husband from dreaming up a future to share with his wife. She wondered if the foundation of every marriage was made up of deceptions, and whether to keep the marriage from collapsing the deceived party had to maintain a blind confidence or a willingness to look away from the unwelcome truth. In his last year of life Kai's father had admitted, in one of his few private conversations with Kai, that marrying Kai's mother had been the most unfortunate decision he had ever made, and that he had stayed in the marriage only for the sake of the three children; this confession was not to be shared with her mother, as both father and daughter understood without having to make any promises to each other.

“I know I may not be the perfect husband for you,” Han said. “But I also know that you may not find someone who wants to do as much for you as I do, or someone who can do as much as I do for you.”

“Why are we talking like a new couple who needs to prove our love to each other?” Kai said, trying to make her voice light. “Isn't Ming-Ming enough for what we are to each other?”

Han gazed at Kai with a strange smile. “How many children do you think would make you settle down?”

She had never been unsettled, Kai said.

She had not been the only girl, Han said. Kai had never asked him about other suitable matches, and he had questioned little about her own past, though she knew he had the connections to investigate if he had wanted to. There was little mystery about what the other girls wanted, Han said, and there was little doubt that he could easily give them what they were after. “But you were different. I knew it the moment I saw you. You were more ambitious than all the other girls, and I thought maybe even I couldn't get for you what you wanted.”

Kai had never seen Han speak with such candor, nor had she expected his insight, and this alarmed her. She had thought that there was little in him beyond the spoiled boy, and she had found it suffocating to tend the boy both as a mother and a playmate. Now she wished that was all he was. She looked at her watch. She needed to get ready now, she said, and Han nodded. In a lighter voice he told her to forget their conversation. Spring fever, he said of himself, and promised to recover from the illness by the time he saw her for lunch.

IT TOOK BASHI A FEW SECONDS to realize that the night had long been over. The patch of sky in the high bedroom window was blue and cloudless, and through the half-open door of the bedroom he could see the living room filled with bright sunlight. He had missed the best time to see Nini. He wondered if the girl had looked for him. It had been a restless night for Bashi. He had been going over the different ways he could reveal Kwen's crime to the town, but none of them seemed right. In the meantime, he had a feeling that the woman's ghost was perched at the foot of his bed, and when he shut his eyes and refused to acknowledge her presence, she took over the space inside his eyelids. After an hour of tossing and turning, he masturbated. The woman's ghost retreated, taking with her his usual joy in the activity. In the end, he exhausted himself, in pain more than enjoyment, and fell into a series of dreams. In one, a double wedding was taking place, Nini and himself the first couple, the executed counterrevolutionary and Kwen the other. What a horrifying dream, Bashi thought now, but perhaps it was a sign that justice would send Kwen to his dead bride.

His grandmother did not answer when Bashi asked her for the time. He raised the curtain between them and found her in her bed. What dreams had kept her in bed? he asked. Had his grandfather come for a visit? Bashi thought of joking, but before the words came out, he noticed that there was something odd about his grandmother, her cheeks ashen-colored.

After five minutes Bashi was convinced that she was dead, even though her skin still felt lukewarm to the touch. He sat down next to her on the bed, unsure what to do next. She had been less of a nuisance than any other woman her age when she was alive, but she had chosen the most inconvenient time to die. It was the beginning of a new life for Bashi, with Nini to befriend and Kwen to battle with, and he needed his grandmother to live a while longer to take care of him. Bashi checked a few more times over the next half hour, but she was colder with each inspection.

His grandmother had been preparing for her own ending for some time. A few years ago she had hired two carpenters and a painter to make a casket, and she had supervised the whole process to ensure that no effort was spared and that the casket turned out as she desired. She also accumulated stacks of embroidered outfits for the burial—black silk robes with blooming golden and pink chrysanthemums, ivory-colored shoes and sleeping caps, made of fine satin, with dozens of the embroidered symbol shou—long life—arranged in intricate patterns. A box of cheap replicas of her jewels would go to the next world with her; the authentic ones—gold and silver and jade and emerald—had been sold for cash when Bashi failed to secure a job after graduating from high school. “I've arranged everything for you,” she said to him when she went over her inventory for the next world, once or twice a month. “I won't be a burden to you.”

How could she call herself a burden, when she was the dearest person he had in life? Bashi often told her, but instead of making her happy, the words would bring her to tears. “What a bitter life you were born into. Not knowing one's own parents! Thank heaven that I was given a long life to watch you grow up,” Bashi's grandmother said, and would repeat stories from different eras of her life.

This talk had always made Bashi laugh. What did he need an old woman for, when he could take care of himself perfectly well? But now he wished she were here to help him. She had said she was ready to go, but what were the things he needed to do to make her really go, out of the house and into the ground? Bashi sat by her bedside for some time and decided to seek help. The neighbors wouldn't do—even though they were friendly with his grandmother, they all despised him; putting her into their hands would only make him more of a talking point at their dinner tables. Nini wouldn't know anything other than her baskets of coal and rotten vegetables. Kwen seemed to be a man of the world, as he had been sought by the other family to bury their daughter, but with Kwen's dark secret fresh in his own mind, Bashi would never want him near his grandmother. The only people left were Old Hua and his wife. They took care of babies thrown out like rags; surely they would help to bury an old, respectable woman.

The street was the same one as the day before, but people on the way to their work units would not look at Bashi and understand his loss. He walked south to the riverbank and, from there, along the river to the west. When he was out of sight of the townspeople, he sat down on a boulder and wept.

“What are you crying here for, first thing in the morning?” asked someone, kicking his foot lightly.

Bashi wiped his face with the back of his hand. It was Kwen, a heavy cotton coat on his shoulders and a bag of breakfast in his hand. He must be coming back from the night shift. “Leave me alone,” Bashi said.

“That's not the right way to answer a friendly greeting. Would you care for a piece of pig-head meat?”

Bashi shook his head. “My grandma died,” he said, despite his determination to keep Kwen an enemy.

“When?”

“Last night. This morning. I don't know. She just died.”

“Sorry to hear that,” Kwen said. “But how old was she?”

“Eighty-one.”

“Enough to call it a joyful departure,” Kwen said. “There's no need for the tears. Be happy for her.”

Bashi's eyes reddened. These were the first words of condolence he'd heard, and he almost felt he had to forgive Kwen. “I'm wondering what kind of funeral would honor her life. She's been father and mother and grandmother to me,” Bashi said. The thought of being an orphan made him feel small again, as he had felt on the day his mother deposited him, years earlier, with his grandmother. He tried to cough into his palm but it came out as sobbing.

“Hey, we know you're sad, but if you want to do her a favor, don't waste your time on tears now.”

“What can I do? I've never taken care of a dead person,” he said.

Kwen looked up at the sky. The wind from the night before had died out, and the weather forecast predicted a warm front. The sun, halfway beyond the mountain, promised a good early spring day. “It will thaw in two weeks,” Kwen said. “I would find a place to keep her before thawing. Go to the city hospital and rent her some space.”

“Why didn't the family yesterday rent from the hospital?” Bashi asked, but once the question came out, he regretted it.

“The morgue only accepts bodies from natural deaths.”

“What's a natural death?”

“Like the one with your grandmother.”

The image of the woman's body came back to Bashi. He breathed hard, trying to control a bout of nausea. “Thanks for reminding me,” he said. “I'm going there now.”

“But you're walking in the wrong direction,” Kwen said.

Bashi looked at the road, leading west into the mountain where the woman's body lay butchered under a bush. He wondered if Kwen had seen through him. He wanted to report the news to Old Hua and his wife first, Bashi said, as they were old friends of his grandmother's.

Kwen studied Bashi, and he felt his scalp tighten under the man's gaze. “So I'm going,” Bashi said, raising a hand hesitantly.

Kwen lit a cigarette. “You know I don't like anyone to be naughty around me?”

“Why would I want to? I have my own grandmother to take care of.”

Kwen nodded. “Just a reminder.”

Bashi promised that he would behave and left in haste. He should have returned the boulders to their place the night before. A good detective did not leave any traces of his investigation around. He wondered if it was too late for him to correct his mistake.

The Huas’ cabin was padlocked. Bashi picked up a small piece of coal and wrote big scrawling characters on the door: My grandma is dead—Bashi. He looked at the characters and then wiped out the word dead and wrote gone. There was no need to disturb two old people with the harshness of reality, Bashi thought, and then it occurred to him that the Huas might not be able to read.

The visit to the morgue was disappointing, one more sign that this world was becoming as bad as it could get. The woman at the front desk threw a pad across the table, before Bashi could explain things to her. When he opened his mouth, she pointed to the papers. “Fill them out before you open your mouth.”

It took Bashi some time to work out how to answer the questions. He had forgotten to bring the household register card; the woman wouldn't be too happy about it, but she would certainly understand negligence from a bereft grandson. Perhaps people would regard him differently now that his grandmother was dead; perhaps they would forgive him and love him because he was an orphan. He dipped the pen into the ink bottle and said to the woman as he wrote, “You know, she is the only one I have and I'm her only one too.”

The woman raised an eyebrow and glanced at Bashi without replying. Perhaps she did not know who he was. “My grandma, she left me today,” he explained. “I don't have parents. I never did, as long as I can remember.”

“Did I say not to open your mouth before finishing the forms?”

“Yes, but I'm just being friendly,” Bashi said. “You don't have many people to talk with you here, do you?”

The woman sighed and put a magazine up in front of her eyes. He looked at the magazine cover; Popular Movies, the title said, and a young couple leaned onto a tree and looked out at Bashi with blissful anticipation. Bashi made a face at the couple before going back to work on the forms. The last paper was a permission sheet for cremation. Bashi read through it twice before he could understand it. “Comrade,” he said in a hoarse, low voice, intending to earn the sympathy that he fully deserved.

“Done?”

“I have a question. My grandmother—she was eighty-one and she raised me from very young—she already had a casket made. She didn't like the idea of being burned,” Bashi said. “I don't know about you but I myself would rather not be burned, alive or dead.”

The woman stared at Bashi for a long moment and grabbed the registration from his hand. “Why are you wasting my time then?” she said. She ripped the sheets off, squeezed them into a ball, and targeted the wastebasket by the entrance. She missed, and Bashi walked over to pick the ball up. “I don't get it, comrade,” he said, trying to sound humble. “You asked me to fill out the forms and open my mouth afterward, and I did as you told me.” Most women were ill-tempered at work, according to Bashi's observation; at home they served their grumpy husbands, so women had to show, at work, that they were fully in control. Bashi was willing to humor this one despite her looks—she was no longer young, and the dark bags underneath her eyes made her look like a panda.

The woman pointed to a poster on the wall. “Read it,” she said and went back to the magazine.

“Of course, comrade, anything you say,” said Bashi. He read the poster: The city government, in accordance with the new provincial policy to transform the old, outdated custom of underground burying, which took up too much land that could otherwise be used to grow food for the ever-growing population, had decided to make cremation the only legal form of undertaking; the effective date was two and a half months away.

“It seems we still have some time till the policy becomes effective,” Bashi said to the woman. “Enough time to bury a little old woman, isn't it?”

“That's your business,” the woman said behind the magazine. “Not ours.”

“But can I rent some space in your freezer, until the ground starts to thaw?”

“We only take in bodies for cremation.”

“But the regulation says—”

“Forget the regulation. We don't have enough space here for everyone, and our policy now is to take bodies that are for cremation only,” said the woman. She left the front desk and entered an inner office.

Bashi left the morgue with a less heavy heart. His grandmother, a wise woman, had chosen the right time to die. Two more months of living would have sent her into an oven; just like she had always said—heaven assigned punishment to any form of greed. The death of his grandmother, instead of being a tragedy had become something worth celebrating. One must always look on the good side of things, Bashi reminded himself. His usual energy was restored. The sunshine was warm on his face, a cheerful spring morning.

“Bashi,” said a small voice, coming from a side alley. Bashi turned and saw Nini, bareheaded, with his hat in her good hand, standing in the shadow of the alley wall. She did not look as ugly as he remembered.

“Nini!” Bashi said, happy to see a friendly face. “What are you doing here?”

“I've been looking for you. I didn't see you this morning,” Nini said. “You said yesterday you would give me coal if I talked to you.”

Bashi knocked on his head harder than he'd meant to and winced. “Of course, it's my mistake,” he said, and walked over. “But it was only because I was running an important errand this morning. Do you want to hear about it?”

Nini opened her eyes wide, and for the first time Bashi noticed her lovely, dense eyelashes and dark brown irises. He blew at her eyelashes and she winked. He laughed and then rubbed his eyes hard to look sad. “My grandma died last night,” he said.

Nini gasped.

“Yes, my grandma who brought me up alone and loved no one but me,” said Bashi.

“How did it happen?”

“I don't know. She died in her sleep.”

“Then why are you sad?” Nini said. “You should be happy. I've heard people say if a woman dies in her sleep, it means she's been rewarded for her good deeds.”

“Happy I am!” Bashi said. “But the thing is, nobody is willing to help me with her burial.”

“Where is she now?” Nini asked. “Did you clean and change her? You don't want her to leave unwashed and in old clothes.”

“How do I know these things?” Bashi said. “Nobody has died before. You know a lot. Do you want to come and help me?”

Nini hesitated. “I need to go to the marketplace.”

“We have enough vegetables to feed you and all your fairy sisters. Coal too. You can get as much as you want. Just come and help a good old woman,” Bashi said. “Come on, don't make a friend wait.”

A FEW STEPS BEHIND BASHI, Nini counted the lampposts. It was his idea not to walk side by side, so that people would not suspect anything. From the marketplace they turned north and followed the road halfway up the northern mountain. Here the blocks were built in the same fashion as in the valley, but Bashi's house was unusually large. He looked around the alley, which was empty, before unlocking the gate and motioning to Nini to enter. She looked at the mansion in front of her, impressed. The yard was twice the usual size, with a wooden storage cabin as big as the front room of her family's home and with a high brick wall to separate it from the neighbors’ yards. His father had been a war hero, Bashi explained, so they were granted more space for their house; however, he added, the construction team hadn't bothered to make it presentable, building a two-room house like every other house on the street, only twice as big.

“You must need a lot of coal to keep this house warm,” Nini said when she entered the front room. It was divided by a high shelf into a kitchen—with a sink and a water tap, a stove for cooking, and several cabinets with painted flowers—and a living room, which had its own stove for heating. The wall of the living room was covered with posters showing scenes of heroes and heroines from revolutionary movies and operas. Nini touched the table in the middle of the living room, heavy-looking with old-fashioned carvings on its four sides. Two armchairs, dark red, with intricate patterns carved on their backs, showcased soft, inviting cushions. “Where is your mother?” Nini said.

“Heaven knows. She remarried and left me here.”

Stupid woman, Nini thought. No one would ever make her give up this luxury. Before she voiced her opinion, she heard some familiar rustling. “Mice,” she said, and squatted down to look for the source of the noise. Her own house was infested with mice, their nibbling keeping her awake at night. They ripped old clothes and, sometimes, new sheets of cardboard that her family used to fold into matchboxes. Except for the baby, every one of the girls in her family was trained to hunt down the mice and put them to death with a single twist of the neck.

“Don't worry, I've got my cure,” Bashi said. He went into the kitchen and, a minute later, came back with a box wrapped in fine red satin. Inside were a few dry roots, wrinkled and earth-colored. “Ginseng roots,” Bashi said, and handed the box to Nini.

She touched the red satin with her finger. She did not know how much money the ginseng roots cost; the box itself was expensive-looking and finer than anything her family owned.

“My grandpa was a ginseng picker, and my grandma loved ginseng roots. The best medicine in the world,” Bashi said. “But of course they don't make you live forever.”

“Where is she now?”

Bashi gestured at the bedroom. “We'll get to it in a minute, but let's take care of the mice first.” He broke a small branch from one of the roots and put it by Nini's mouth. “Do you want to taste? Sweet as honey.”

Nini opened her mouth but Bashi took the ginseng root away before she had a bite. “Ha, I'm kidding you, silly girl. Only people older than seventy can eat ginseng. Too much fire in it. It'll make your nose bleed and your skin and flesh burn and rot.”

Nini shut her mouth tight, a little angry. She did not know why she had agreed to help Bashi. She thought of leaving him with his grandmother and returning to her own life, finding a few deserted cabbage leaves and then going home, watching her little sisters play with the baby, telling them horrible stories if they made Little Sixth cry, threatening to feed them ginseng roots if they dared to complain. But Nini found it hard to move her legs. Bashi had promised many things, coal to take home, vegetables too. Friendship, and something else that Nini could not put into words.

Bashi found a jar of honey and dipped the ginseng root into it. When he got the root out, it looked dewy and delicious. Nini had eaten honey only once, in Teacher Gu's house. Her stomach grumbled.

“Here,” Bashi said, pushing a spoon and the jar into Nini's hands. “Eat the whole jar if you like. I don't care for honey myself.” He wiped the ginseng root clean of the dripping honey. Nini stuffed her mouth with a spoonful of honey. He was a good person, after all, generous and kind, even though his jokes left her confused at times. “What are you doing?” she mumbled through the sweet stickiness between her lips.

“This is my invention of mouse poison,” Bashi said. “Mice love honey, like you, don't they? So they'll eat the ginseng root without thinking and then they'll get such a fire in their stomachs they will wring themselves to death regretting they took that sweet bite of stolen food.”

Nini shuddered. She looked at the jar in her hands. “Did you put poison in the honey?”

“Why would I?” Bashi said. “You thought I would poison you? What a funny thought. You're not a mouse. You're my friend.”

Nini looked at Bashi's grinning face and felt slightly uneasy. “Do you have many friends?” she asked.

“Of course,” Bashi said. “Half the people in Muddy River are my friends.”

“You have other girls as friends too?”

“Yes. Men and women. Young and old. Dogs, cats, chickens, ducks.”

Nini could not tell if Bashi was joking again. But, if he did have other girls as friends, did they ever come here? The way he had behaved on the way here, making sure people did not see them together, made her suspicious. “Do you bring girls to your house often?” she asked.

Bashi shook his hand at her, his face taking on a serious look.

“Are you all right?” asked Nini.

Bashi wiggled a finger at Nini. “Don't make a sound,” he whispered. “Let me think.”

Nini looked at Bashi. With his pouting lips and knotted eyebrows, he looked like a small child pretending to be an adult. He was a funny person. She could never tell what he would do next. She had heard neighbors warn their daughters not to talk to strangers; her parents had told her sisters too, but the warning had never been issued to her, as nobody seemed to think she would ever be in danger. Nini studied Bashi again. If he ever did anything very bad, she had a voice to warn his neighbors. But perhaps her worry was unnecessary. He was not a stranger. He was a new friend, and Nini decided that she liked him, in a different way than she liked Teacher Gu and Mrs. Gu. They made her want to be better, prettier, more lovable, but what difference would it make now? They hated her and wouldn't allow her back into their house. Bashi made her forget she was a monster. Perhaps she was not.

“Yes,” Bashi said, clapping his hands after a moment and smiling. “I've got the whole plan worked out.”

“What plan?”

Bashi beckoned Nini to follow him into the bedroom. The curtain between the two beds was not pulled up. He sat her down on his unmade bed. “Can you keep a secret for me?” Bashi asked her.

Nini nodded.

“You can't tell anyone,” he said. “Can you do that?”

“I don't have other friends besides you,” Nini said.

Bashi smiled. He drew the curtain and Nini saw the old woman, eyes closed as if in sleep, the blanket pulled up all the way and tucked tight under her chin. Her thin gray hair was coiled in the style of an old woman's bun, with a few strands escaping the hairnet. She looked like an old woman Nini might have liked, but maybe death made people look kind, as none of the old women she met in the marketplace was nice to her.

Bashi put a finger underneath his grandmother's nose for a moment and said, “Yes, she's as dead as a dead person can be. Now you take a vow in front of her.”

“Why?”

“Nobody fools around with dead people,” Bashi said. “Say this: I swear that I'll never tell Bashi's secret to other people. If I do, his grandmother's ghost will not let me have a good death.”

Nini thought it over. She did not see much harm in it, as her parents reminded her often that, with all the pains and troubles she had brought to the family, there would be nothing beautiful in her death. For all Nini cared, there was nothing good in her life either, so why should she be fearful of an ugly death? She repeated the words and Bashi seemed satisfied. He sat down next to Nini and said, “I'm going to kill Kwen's dog.”

“Because Kwen beat you yesterday?” Nini asked. She was disappointed. A dead dog didn't seem to fit with a solemn vow in front of a grandmother's body.

“More than that. He's a devil, and I'm going to make the whole town see it. There's a lot I'll tell you later. For now, you just have to know that I'm going to kill that black dog of his before I can go on with the rest of my plan.”

Nini nodded. She did not know if she wanted to hear more of Bashi's plan. The old woman, no more than five feet away, distracted her.

“So here's how it will work. Dogs are not old women and they don't take a liking to ginseng roots, right? What is to a dog as a ginseng root is to an old granny?”

Nini looked at Bashi, perplexed.

“Think, girl. A sausage, or a ham, no? Dogs like meat, so do you and I, but we are smarter than dogs,” said Bashi. “This is what I'm going to do: I will give the dog a sausage a day until he wags his tail at me whenever he sees me, and then, bang, a sausage cured with pesticide. The poor dog will never imagine that his only friend in this world has killed him. How does that sound?”

Nini fidgeted. It seemed that Bashi could sit here talking to her, or to himself, all morning. If she did not return in time to cook before her parents came home for lunch, as she hadn't the night before for dinner, her mother would let that bamboo broomstick rain down on her back again.

Bashi looked at her. “Don't you like my plan?”

“It's not good to think of other things before taking care of your grandmother,” she said. “I don't have all day to sit here talking to you.”

“The business of the living comes before that of the dead,” Bashi said. “But you're right. I need your help to get her into the casket before you leave.”

“You don't want to hire some professionals?”

“I'd have to burn her for them to be hired,” Bashi said. “It's all right. We can do it ourselves.” He pulled a trunk from the corner of the bedroom. “I think she got everything ready here. Find what you need and dress her up well. I'll get the casket.”

Bashi left for the storage cabin before Nini replied. She opened the trunk. Silk and satin clothes lined the inside in orderly layers: coats, jackets, blouses and pants, shoes, and caps. She touched the one on the top with her good hand and her chapped palm caught a thread. What a waste, to bury such fine clothes with a dead woman, Nini thought. She rubbed her hands on the outside of her pants hard before she touched the clothes again. Piece by piece she took them out of the trunk and piled them neatly next to the old woman on the bed. When she reached the bottom of the trunk, she saw several envelopes, each bearing a number. She opened the first one and saw a stack of bills, mostly of ten or five yuan. Nini had never seen so much money. She bit her lips and looked around. When she was sure Bashi was not in sight, she put the money back into the envelope, folded the envelope once in the middle, and slipped it into her pocket.

“The casket is too heavy for me,” Bashi said when he came in a moment later. “I wonder if the carpenters put some lead in it. Let's not worry about that part now.”

Nini's voice quavered when she pointed out the envelopes to Bashi. He checked their contents and whistled. “I thought she saved everything in our bank account,” he said. He pulled out two ten-yuan bills and handed them to Nini.

She shook her head and said she did not want the money.

“Why not? Friends stick together, so why don't we share the good fortune?”

Nini accepted the money. She wondered if the ghost of the old woman was around supervising her afterlife business like old people said, and if so, whether she would be outraged by the envelope in Nini's pocket. But why did she need to worry about a ghost? Nothing could make her life worse than it was now, with Mrs. Gu and Teacher Gu turning their backs on her. Nini pulled back the blanket and peeled off the old woman's pajamas. There was a strange smell, not pungent but oily sweet, and Nini felt nauseated. When her hand touched the old woman's skin, it was leathery and cold. So this was what it would be like when her parents died. The thought made Nini less scared. After all, it would be her job to care for her parents when they got old, and eventually clean them up for burial. She wondered who would see off Teacher Gu and Mrs. Gu. She had more trouble imagining them dead and naked in bed than her own parents. She wished things could be different for the Gus—perhaps the wind would carry them away like smoke before someone's hand touched their skin—but why would she let them off so easily, when they had thrown her out without hesitation?

Bashi loitered on the other side of the curtain without helping Nini. She thought it strange until she realized that perhaps it was not good for a boy to see the naked body of his grandmother. He was a good and honorable person, after all, despite his oddness.

When it came to cleaning the body, Bashi suggested that they use the cold water from the tap in order to spare unnecessary trouble. Nini disagreed. The folded envelope threatened to jump out of her pocket and reveal itself to Bashi and to the world—she wished she had thought of a better way to hide it, in her shoe so she could step on it firmly—and out of guilt, she insisted on starting a fire so she could bathe the old woman with warm water one more time. Bashi followed her to the kitchen, leaned against a cabinet, and watched her stoke the fire. “What a nice granddaughter-in-law you would make!” he said with admiration.

Nini blushed and pretended that she had not heard. Bashi placed a chair by the stove and sat astride it, both arms hugging the back of the chair. “Have your parents arranged someone for you to marry?” he asked.

What a strange question, Nini thought, shaking her head.

“Have you heard of the saying that the bird with the weakest wings needs to take off earlier?”

“No.”

“You should think about it. You don't want to wait too long before looking for a husband.”

Nini said nothing and wondered if Bashi was right. Her parents had no wish to marry her off; they would have no one else to wash them before their burials. Had she been the daughter of Mrs. Gu and Teacher Gu, would they have started to worry about her marriage by now, so that when they exited the world, she would not be left alone?

“I'll keep my eyes open for possible candidates, if you like,” said Bashi.

Nini watched the fire without replying. The water hummed. When he pressed again, she said, “Let's not let your grandma wait too long.”

Bashi laughed. “She won't know now,” he said. He helped Nini carry the kettle to the bedroom and then sat down on his own bed on the other side of the curtain. Nini wiped the old woman gently, trying not to study the dry and creased skin, the eerily long and sagging breasts, the knotted joints. If not for the stolen envelope in her pocket she would have finished the job in a minute or two. When she finally did, she tried to slip the silk clothes onto the body, but the old woman, completely still and stiff, would not cooperate. Nini yanked one of the old woman's arms out of her sleeve when she felt a small crack. She must have broken the old woman's arm, Nini thought, but she did not care anymore. It took her a long time, with her one good hand, to fasten the coiled buttons of the robes. When she finished with the sleeping cap and silk shoes, she said to Bashi, “Now you can come and see her.”

The two of them stood side by side. The old woman looked serene and satisfied in the finest outfit for the next world. After a while, Bashi circled an arm around Nini's shoulder and pulled her closer to him. “What a nice girl you are,” he said.

“I need to go home now,” she said.

“Let's get whatever you need from the storage cabin.”

“Not too much,” Nini said when Bashi put several cabbages in her basket. “Otherwise, my parents would question.”

“I'll walk you home.”

Nini said she would rather he did not walk with her.

“Of course,” Bashi said. “Whatever you prefer. But when do I get to see you again? Can you come this afternoon?”

Nini hesitated. She would love to come to this house again, with food and coal and a friend, but it was impossible. In the end, Bashi found the solution—Nini could spend an hour or so every morning in his house and she could get the coal from his storage bin; later in the day, she could come to see him at least once, with the excuse of going to the marketplace.

Nini was sad when they said goodbye. On the way home, she turned into a side alley and took the envelope out of her pocket. Her parents would certainly discover this by the end of the day. She wondered if they would send her to the police because she was a thief, or just happily confiscate the money. She disliked either possibility, so she changed direction and walked toward the Gus’ house. When she reached their gate, she could not help but hope that they would throw the door open and welcome her into their arms.

A man walked past Nini and then turned to her. “Are you looking for Teacher Gu and Mrs. Gu?”

Nini nodded, a small hope rising—perhaps they had known she would come, and had asked a neighbor to watch out for her.

“Teacher Gu is ill, and Mrs. Gu is taking care of him in the hospital. They won't be back for some time.”

Nini thought of asking for more details, but the man went on before she could say anything. She waited until he was out of sight and slipped the envelope beneath the gate. They would never guess that the money had come from her, but perhaps they would change their minds, when they realized that they were well treated by the world while they themselves had mistreated her; perhaps they would come and look for her when Teacher Gu was released from the hospital.

TONG LEFT HOME after lunch. His parents were taking their midday nap, and Ear was running around somewhere in town. Tong's father was not fond of Ear, and thought it a waste of Tong's life to play with the dog. Tong was happy that Ear found places to wander about until sunset, when the darkness made him less of a nuisance to Tong's father, who would by then have begun his nightly drinking.

It was early for the afternoon class, and Tong took a longer route to school. In the past six months he had explored the many streets and alleys of Muddy River, and he never tired of watching people busy with their lives. The marketplace, where many mouths seemed to be talking at the same time without giving anyone the time to reply, was an exciting place, while the back alleys, with men and women gossiping in different groups, were full of overheard tales about other people's lives. Only an old man pondering over nothing or a loitering cat mesmerized by the sunlight at a street corner would make Tong feel lost, as if they belonged to a secret world to which he had no access.

Life seemed the same after the previous day's event. All these people must have attended the denunciation ceremony, but none of the faces betrayed any memories. The announcements, some torn down and others now only fragments glued to the walls, were no longer noticed by the passersby. In the marketplace, housewives bargained in loud, accusing voices, as if the vendors were all shameless liars. At a state-run vegetable stand, a male sales assistant, bored and idle, formed a pistol with his hand, aiming it at a female colleague's bosom. The woman, in her twenties with a round, full moon face, waved her hand as if chasing away an annoying fly, though every time the man made a banging noise, she laughed. Tong smiled, but when she caught sight of him, she called him a little rascal. “What are you looking at? Be careful or I'll scoop out both your eyeballs.”

Tong blushed and turned away. Behind him the male assistant asked the woman why he himself hadn't the right to such a luxury. She replied that she would oblige him on the spot by removing his eyeballs if he really wanted to be blind; the man urged her to do so, saying that he had no use for his eyes now that he had seen her heavenly beauty. Tong walked on. There was a secret code to the adults’ world, Tong realized once again, and without knowing the rules, he would always be found offensive for reasons he did not understand.

Around the corner a few chickens sauntered in an alley. Tong fixed his eyes on a bantam hen, willing her to stop pecking, but she searched attentively for food, oblivious. A feral cat quietly approached the chickens from behind a three-legged chair, but before the cat could move closer, an older woman, sitting on a wooden stool in front of a yard, hit the ground with her stick and shrieked. The chickens scattered, flapping their wings and cooing frantically. Caught off guard, Tong took a few breaths to calm down before asking the old woman if everything was all right.

“Things could've gone wrong if not for my vigilance,” replied the old woman.

Tong turned to look at the feral cat, studying them at a safe distance. “That cat probably just wanted to play,” he said.

“I'm not talking about the cat,” the old woman said. Tong looked up at the woman, baffled. “I'm talking about you, boy. You thought you could snatch the hen when nobody was around, huh?”

Tong stammered and said he had never thought of stealing anyone's chicken.

“Don't think I didn't hear that little abacus clicking in your belly when you looked at my chickens,” the old woman said. “A village boy like you!”

Tong retreated from the alley. There was little he could say to defend himself.

AFTER LUNCH KAI WENT to the one-room clinic on the first floor of the administration building and told the doctor that she didn't feel well. The doctor, around sixty-five years old, was entitled to give out only cold medicines and slips for a sick leave—with any problem bigger than a cough or a runny nose, the officials and clerks would go to the city hospital across the street.

Three days? the doctor asked while writing Kai's name neatly on top of the slip.

An afternoon would be fine, Kai replied. The doctor put down a cold that required a half day's rest, and then studied his old-fashioned penmanship for a moment with satisfaction before signing his name. Could he run it over to the propaganda department? Kai asked; she did not want her colleagues to make a fuss about a small cold, she explained, and the doctor nodded understandingly saying he would personally deliver the slip.

Kai went up to the studio through the back stairs and unlocked the bottom drawer of her desk. Inside was an old cotton jacket of brownish gray color, with mismatched buttons, and patches sewn on both elbows. A scarf was tucked into one pocket, and in the other pocket was a white cotton mask. The jacket and scarf had belonged to their previous nanny, and Kai had traded with the woman for a jacket and a scarf of her own. For possible out-of-town assignments, Kai had told the nanny, and even though she had tried to keep the explanation vague, the nanny had replied that of course Kai would not want to wear her woolen jacket or silk scarf to some of the filthy places the lower creatures dwelled in.

Kai changed into the outfit. Underneath where the outfit was kept were a stack of letters, in unmarked envelopes, all from Jialin. Before she locked the drawer again she took one envelope randomly from the stack. Inside she found a long letter about the nature of a totalitarian system, and Kai, having reread it many times and memorized the content by heart, scanned the page; it was written more as a meditation than a letter, and she always wondered if the same letter had been sent to and read by many of Jialin's friends. On a separate page in the same envelope there was a note, a brief paragraph about a new program from Britain, broadcast in Mandarin, which Jialin said he had picked up recently on his shortwave transistor radio. Once again Kai wondered if it was pure imagination when she had sensed his eagerness to share the news with her; it was these shorter notes, addressed to her and about the small details of his life that were largely unknown to her, that made her unwilling to burn his letters as he had instructed her to do.

Jialin and Kai did not see each other often, and sometimes a week or two would pass before she could find an excuse to walk to the town library. They did not talk much, but quietly exchanged letters tucked inside magazines. Sometimes there would be several letters in the envelope he passed to her, and she tried not to wonder whether he might be waiting for her in the reading room day after day, or about his disappointment when she did not show up. The librarian was his friend, Jialin had once said; she allowed him to sit in the reading room as long as he had his mask and gloves on. Kai made herself believe that the librarian, a quiet woman in her late forties, offered enough friendship to Jialin so that his trips to the library were not futile.

Jialin and Kai never planned their encounters, and in their letters they dwelled little on the world where they would have to find excuses to see each other for just five or ten minutes; rather, they wrote about topics they could not discuss in person. She saved every letter from him. She wished she could bring herself to burn them, as she knew he must have dutifully done with every letter she had written to him, but one day she would have nothing left of him but his words, written on sheets of paper from a student's notebook, his handwriting slender and slanted to the right. Sometimes the ink from the fountain pen would run out and the dark blue words turned pale in the middle of a long passage; only when the words became as light as the paper, seemingly engraved onto the page rather than written, would he remember to refill the fountain pen.

Kai put the sheets back into the envelope and locked it with the others. A few minutes later, she left the building, her head wrapped up in the old scarf, her face covered by the mask. Few would recognize her now as the star announcer, and she felt momentarily free.

The library, the only one in town that was open to the public, was in a house that had once served as the headquarters for a local faction of Red Guards. Before that the house had belonged to an old man, but soon after the beginning of the Cultural Revolution the man had killed himself with rat poison. His action baffled the townspeople. The man, said to have been an orphan adopted by a doctor and his wife, had grown up as half son, half apprentice to the doctor, who was the only medical expert in town when Muddy River was no more than a trading post; when the old couple passed away the man inherited their money and the old-style house, built as a quadrangle around a small and well-groomed garden, near the town center. The man practiced acupuncture occasionally but only for older patients troubled by back pain and arthritis; he was sage-looking, polite, and friendly, and it seemed that there was little reason for him to fear the upcoming revolutionary storms. But as any death had to be accounted for—suicide in particular, since any suicide could be a sinful escape from Communist justice—rumors started that the man was a Manchurian prince who had been biding his time to resurrect the last dynasty; as a famous general had said, a lie repeated a thousand times would become truth, and after a while the old man was deemed a political enemy who had slipped through the net of justice with an easy death. The local Red Guards soon occupied the property, printing out propaganda leaflets and storing ammunition; for months the back rooms also served as a makeshift interrogation room and prison cell.

The library, established now for a mere year and a half, occupied the two front rooms of the house. A few desks and chairs lined one side of the reading room, and on the other side was a butcher's workbench, where a dozen magazines were on display. The librarian sat at a desk at the entrance to the reading room, and if one asked for a book from the collection, she would unlock the door to the other room, where there were no more than ten shelves of books. There were no cards or catalogs; rather, when one was looking for a specific subject, the librarian would go into the collection and then come out with a book or two she had deemed fit for the subject at hand.

Few people in town used the library, and it had not surprised Kai that Jialin chose this place to wait for her. The librarian nodded at Kai distantly when she arrived, and went back to her reading. Kai wondered if the woman recognized her as the news announcer, but probably she just remembered Kai as the woman who stopped by once in a while to check out the few magazine subscriptions in the reading room. Kai did not talk, so that the librarian would not recognize her voice. The woman was a widow, and her late husband, a clerk in the city government, had jumped into the Muddy River when two young boys called for help; the man himself could barely swim and had saved neither his life nor the two boys’, in the end. The city government granted the man the title of hero, and when his wife, once a schoolteacher, requested a less challenging job, the government gave her the newly established position as the town's librarian, a position with an abundance of time for her to mourn in quiet.

Jialin was the only person in the reading room. Sitting in a corner and facing the door, he looked at Kai from above his cotton mask before resuming his writing in a thick notebook. She always looked for a change of expression on his face, but there never was one, and she wondered if her own eyes above her mask looked as blank as his. She walked to the magazine display and picked one up, the front cover showing an enlarged picture of the new national leader.

Kai read a few words on one page and then turned to another. The librarian, behind her desk, seemed to pay little attention to the two people in the reading room. Kai took out a piece of paper and scribbled a few words on it before walking past Jialin for another magazine. We need to talk, said the note that she dropped next to him. She wondered if he could sense the urgency in it. She had never requested anything before; a letter, drafted and revised, was what she usually passed to him.

Jialin put his notebook away in a bag and got ready to leave. Meet him at his place, instructed the note left inconspicuously next to the magazine that Kai was feigning interest in.

After waiting for a while she left too, walking away from the city center and into a more crowded world where cats, dogs, and chickens shared the alleys and the afternoon sunshine with dozing old men. It was a world Kai had once been familiar with—before she had moved away to the provincial capital she had lived in one of these alleys with her parents and siblings. The shabby house had been one of the reasons for her mother's unhappiness, as she believed that Kai's father had not climbed up the ladder fast enough to move them into one of the modern buildings. Only after Kai's marriage to Han did her parents get the flat that her mother had been dreaming of all her life. Their farewell to the alley was celebrated by Kai and her family at the time, but now she wished she had never left this world.

Kai found Jialin's house and pushed the slate gate ajar. The yard, the standard size of fifteen feet by twenty, was filled with all sorts of junk: unused pickle jars placed haphazardly on top of one another; inner tubes twisted and hung from the handlebars of a rusty bicycle, its two wheels missing; cardboard boxes crushed flat and piled high; three metal chain locks displayed prominently, forming a triangle inside which were three bayonets. They belonged to his three younger brothers, Jialin had told Kai the first time she visited him; he was walking her out to the gate then, and the passing comment about his brothers, along with the clutter, were mere facts about some strangers’ lives. But six months later, seeing them again, Kai knew she would one day remember these details as part of the world Jialin had inhabited; one day they would be used to construct him in her memory.

The door to the house opened. “Do you need help?” asked an older woman wrapped in a long cotton coat.

Kai pointed to the shack and said in a muffled voice that she was looking for Jialin. The older woman, who was no doubt Jialin's mother, with traces of him recognizable in her face, nodded and waved before closing the door.

His mother had learned not to ask about his life, Jialin explained when he caught her glancing back at the closed door of the house. He let Kai into the shack and pointed to the only chair.

“Your mother—she's not working today?” Kai asked.

“She has a cold.”

“And your brothers—are they at school?”

Jialin looked surprised by the small talk that never occurred between them. He hoped they were at school, he said, but rumors were that they had become part of a street gang and skipped school for their own business.

“Do your parents know?”

“The parents are always the last to learn of any bad news.”

“Don't you want to talk to your brothers, or at least let your parents know?”

They expected him not to interfere with their lives, Jialin said; in return they left him to his own world. Besides, they were only his half brothers, and there was little reason for him to step in front of their birth father and claim any responsibility. Did he share these stories about his life with his other friends? Kai wondered, thinking of all the questions she could not ask him.

Jialin waited for a moment, and when Kai did not speak, he asked if there was anything she needed to speak to him about. Yes, Kai replied, the same request she had put to him all along: a protest on Shan's behalf, not for her life now but for her rights to be recognized as wrongfully executed. Kai spoke of the suspiciously expedited trial and of Shan's kidneys, transplanted into another man's body; she spoke of Mrs. Gu's insubordinate action at the crossroad, remembering Mrs. Gu's straight back when she had been dragged away from the smoldering fire. It was time to wake up the townspeople of Muddy River to the atrocity and injustice done to a daughter and a mother.

Neither spoke for a moment after Kai had finished her speech. Then Jialin beckoned her to a corner of the shack and removed some plastic sheeting. Underneath were a mimeograph set and a pile of newly printed leaflets. Kai picked one up; she recognized Jialin's handwriting. It was a letter addressed to the townspeople of Muddy River, dated on the day of the execution. Kai looked up, perplexed. “Did you have them ready yesterday?”

“Yes.”

“I didn't know you had done everything by yourself.”

Jialin shook his head and said it had been done with the help of several other friends.

“But why did we wait if you had the leaflets ready?” Kai asked.

“Situations change every day,” Jialin said. Then he asked her if she had heard any news about the democratic wall in Beijing. Kai shook her head, and Jialin seemed surprised. He thought she would have heard the news even though she would not be allowed to broadcast it, Jialin said. She replied that she was no more than a voice for the government, and she relied on him more than anyone else for real news about the world.

A wall had been set up in the national capital, Jialin said, where people could express their opinions freely; in the past few weeks many had posted comments, requesting a more open and democratic government. As he spoke Kai felt a strange sense of loss. She did not know how long Jialin had been following the news, but he had never told her this in his letters. She imagined young people gathered in groups in the nation's capital, sharing their dreams. Even in Jialin's shack his other friends must stay up late at night sometimes, hoping for any positive news on the shortwave radio. Where was she on those nights, but playing out her role as a dutiful wife and a good mother?

Could she meet Jialin's friends? Kai asked.

Jialin took off his glasses. He massaged his eyes, wiped the lenses with his sleeve, and put the glasses back on. “You do understand you're not as free as most of us are, don't you?” he asked gently. “My hope is not for you to be part of this. At least not yet.”

“Why? Can't you trust me?”

Jialin shook his head. Once the leaflets were delivered to the world, he said, waving a hand at the pile, there was no turning back for anyone, and he would have not only his own life but also the lives of his friends to be responsible for.

“Am I different from your other friends?” Kai asked.

“I'd be lying if I said no,” Jialin said, and explained that there had been some disagreement among his friends; he was vague in his explanation but Kai realized right away that it was not Jialin but his friends, whoever they were, who did not trust her. She wondered if he had spoken up for her in front of his friends, and if they had questioned him about how he had known her, to defend her. Her letters, read and then burned by him, would not be of any assistance, but even if he had kept them, she could not imagine his showing her letters to his friends. “They may not know you as well as I do,” Jialin said, apology in his eyes.

“And you won't help them get to know me better?”

He had to protect everyone, Jialin said, and it was his averted eyes, more than his words, that made Kai understand there was more than the simple unfriendliness of his cohorts that he was concealing.

“So if I went to the police to report on you, your friends would be spared, as I would not know who they are?” Kai asked.

“I'm protecting you too,” Jialin said. “Each one of us could be the one to sell out our friends.”

“Was it a decision agreed to by all your friends, for you to write to me?” Kai asked. “Or was there disagreement in the first place?”

It mattered little, Jialin said, now that he had let her down. But she wanted to know, Kai insisted. They had thought of finding someone in the government, Jialin said, but then the plan was determined to be immature.

“So you wrote to me on your own?”

Jialin looked away without replying.

“Why?” Kai asked.

Years ago he had seen her act as Autumn Jade, Jialin said finally, and he had always wondered since then what kind of person she was, whether she could put on a performance like that without having the purity and nobleness of a martyr in her heart. “You could've been a different person and I'd have been sitting out my sentence now. You could say I took a bet with myself, writing to you, because I wanted to know, but how I did not lose the bet I do not know. By pure chance, perhaps. I'd not have been surprised if it had turned out the other way,” Jialin said, trying to suppress the cough that threatened to overtake him at any moment.

So that was the history they had been avoiding all along, Kai thought, imagining Jialin as an audience, before his illness had taken over perhaps, before her marriage. That one's existence could extend beyond one's knowledge was not a new discovery; many times in the theater troupe Kai had received letters from her fans, some written under real or made-up names, others left unsigned. But the crossing of paths at a wrong time—too early or too late, and Kai could no longer tell which was the case in her encounter with Jialin— could not be understood. It was to be endured, as anything beyond one's control. Had she met Jialin not as a new mother but as an older woman, Kai thought, imagining the time when Ming-Ming would be a young man, she would perhaps be grateful for this encounter; she would even be free to choose again. But illness would soon be replaced by death on Jialin's part, before she was liberated by time; soon their paths would part.

“You must know I am not turning you away as a friend,” Jialin said gently.

He had enough to work on now, and she would respect his friends’ wishes and leave them alone, she said; there was no need for him to worry about how she felt. She knew where to find him, as he knew where to find her. For a moment her voice wavered, and she left abruptly before they might weaken and let out all that was better left unsaid.

THE OTHER PATIENTS in the ward must have heard about his daughter. They glanced at Teacher Gu when they thought he was not paying attention. When he looked back, they turned their eyes away and lowered their heads. Teacher Gu saw their efforts to refrain from talking about the case. A pitiful man, they must be thinking, unable to stand up straight, easily defeated. Teacher Gu did not talk to his ward mates. When visiting time came, and their wives and children swarmed into the ward, he hid under the striped blanket and pretended to be asleep. His wife did not talk to the other patients and their families either. She came with a thermos of chicken soup and sat on a chair by his bedside; half past the visiting hour, when he still refused to acknowledge her, she rocked him gently and told him that he'd better drink the soup before she had to leave. He let her prop him up on the pillow; she moved from the chair to the bedside, spoon in her hand. He obeyed and drank the soup without making a fuss and waited for three days before asking why she had killed their two hens for a useless man; the hens were their only children, he thought of saying, but did not let the cruel remark slip out. She had not touched their hens, she said, offering no explanation as to how she had managed to afford the chickens. She bought other food too, from the expensive store next to the hospital—canned fruit of all kinds, dried-milk powder, dates cured with honey, condensed orange juice that Teacher Gu believed to be made of nothing but saccharine and orange dye. After another day, he could not help but ask about the money for these unnecessary luxuries. She hesitated and said that someone kindhearted and sympathetic had slipped money into their yard. He imagined that she had withdrawn money from their meager savings account and then agonized over how to cover the expense, making up philanthropic strangers he no longer believed existed. He didn't cross-examine her lies. The world was cold enough; if she wanted to light a small fire of hope, he would let her, but he refused to be drawn into her fantasy.

The stroke, not a fatal one, had left Teacher Gu's left side paralyzed, though it was not a serious case compared to a few other old men in the ward, and he was expected to recover some ability to move. Dr. Fan, a woman in her forties, harshly ordered about all the patients in the ward when she oversaw their physical therapy; and the other patients and their relatives, despite the deference they showed to her face, had nicknamed her the Tigress.

On the fifth day of Teacher Gu's stay in the hospital, Dr. Fan was late for her morning rounds, and when she did come she wasn't wearing her doctor's white cap. Teacher Gu noticed that her short hair had been transformed into many small and busy curls. She must have wanted not to destroy her new perm—indeed it was the first perm she'd had in her life, as her generation had grown up at a time when a permanent wave was an illegal bourgeois legacy. After being ordered to lift his arm and leg, which he could not possibly do, Teacher Gu complimented Dr. Fan on her new hairstyle.

Taken aback, Dr. Fan blushed without saying anything. She moved quickly to the next bed and soon regained control of herself by chiding the man lying there. Her flustered gesture saddened Teacher Gu. He took pity on Dr. Fan, and a generation of women like her, who had spent their best years in dull-colored and baggy clothes and short straight hair that had stripped them of their feminine beauty, and who were now trying to catch the last of their no longer youthful days, hoping to look beautiful. But then what right did he have to think of these women in such a way, when he himself, old and invalid, was the object of people's pity?

There were eighteen beds in the recovery ward, fifteen of them occupied, mostly by old people suffering from strokes and cerebral hemorrhages. One man, however, had a unique condition that fascinated everybody. Teacher Gu too paid attention to the discussions among the patients, families, and nurses, even though he never let it show. From what he had overheard, Dafu, who was in his late forties and had lost his wife a year earlier, had been a healthy man before he committed himself for a special operation to take out his gallbladder—he had gallstones but did not suffer much, and it seemed that there was little surgical necessity for it. However, news came that the army hospital in the provincial capital needed a model patient to demonstrate a new, drugless anesthetic method. Dafu, through some connection, got himself chosen for this political assignment on the condition that his two daughters would be granted positions in factories. The daughters, both educated youths who had been sent down to the countryside for years and had just returned to the city, had not been able to find jobs. The father underwent surgery without anesthesia, except for five acupuncture needles in his hand. Told to stay still while he was filmed, Dafu suffered so much pain during the procedure that afterward both his legs were paralyzed for no clear medical reason, and his ability to urinate was permanently impaired. After a few days of observation, the perplexed army doctors decided that the problems were psychological and sent Dafu back to Muddy River.

It amazed Teacher Gu that a man could exercise such stoicism for his daughters. Dafu, however, did not think himself a hero, as his ward mates did. A low-ranking clerk, he was easily embarrassed when his selflessness was commented upon. He apologized when he failed to urinate. “Relax,” Nurse Shi, the older one who had gentler hands than the others, urged him. The doctors had told Dafu that because he had used such great control to endure the pain of the operation, his muscles were in a constant seizure, which explained his symptoms. “Relax,” Nurse Shi repeated. “Use your imagination. Think of when you were young and could not hold your pee. Did you wet your bed when you were a boy?”

“Yes,” Dafu said.

“Close your eyes and think of the time you wet your bed. You want to hold it but you can't because oh, oh, it's coming out. It's coming out.” Nurse Shi's voice became breathy and urgent, and at such moments, the patients, even the four old men on the far end of the ward who enjoyed drawing attention by moaning and complaining about nonexistent problems, dared not make a noise. To further stimulate his imagination, Nurse Shi would order a young nurse to turn on the tap at the washstand and have the water drip into an empty basin. Dafu sat awkwardly at his bedside, supported by Nurse Shi and another nurse, his pants rolled down to his ankles and a white enamel bedpan waiting between his legs. The water would drip, Nurse Shi would murmur encouragements, and everyone else in the room would hold his breath until, eventually, one of the four old men at the far end of the room would break the silence and yell that he could not hold his pee anymore, and could someone please pass him a bedpan. A young training nurse would try to conceal her joy as she obliged the old man; Nurse Shi would comfort Dafu, saying he was doing better and she believed that the next time he would succeed. His face the color of a beet, Dafu would apologize for all the trouble he had brought to the nurses and everyone else in the room. He apologized constantly, even to his two daughters, who came to the ward to show him the white lab coats they wore for their positions at the pharmaceutical factory, white rather than the regular blue, which would, in the eyes of people unfamiliar with their jobs, promote them to the same level as a nurse or perhaps even a doctor. The daughters did not talk about the possibility of attracting suitable men with the coats, but the father saw such hope in their eyes; they were twenty-six and twenty-seven, no longer young for marriage. At night he practiced secretly in the darkness, willing his legs to move so he would not become a burden to his daughters; the prospect of marrying a woman with a bedridden father might frighten away potential suitors, and Dafu imagined his dead wife looking down at him with disapproval from the heavens. On the morning of the day when she had been run over by a truck, they had had an argument over some small household chores; she had married the worst man in the world, who was of little use to his wife and daughters, she complained then, the last words she said to him. He had wondered ever since if she believed it, but she was known to be unable to choose the right words when she was overtaken by her temper, and perhaps the comment was not meant to harm him. There was no way he could know now, Dafu thought; all he could do was prove to himself otherwise.

At the moment Dafu wept into his pillow, parental worries plagued many more hearts outside the hospital. A mother who had just helped her panicking daughter with her first period could not close her eyes next to her snoring husband. She remembered her own mother, constantly checking the panties of all her daughters for fear they would be raped or seduced by strangers. The daughter who had escaped the sad fate envisioned by her mother had become a mother herself, and was now horrified that the ghost of her mother's fear had decided to make its home in her own heart.

In another bed in the same block, a man reminded his wife to warn their two teenage daughters not to dress up in bright colors. But it was no longer forbidden to look beautiful, his wife pointed out, defending their daughters and thinking about her own youthful years that had withered before she had ever blossomed. People would notice and talk, the father said, unwilling himself to broach the awkward topic with his daughters, who had, with their swelling breasts and fuller lips, made him avert his eyes and feast instead on other girls’ young bodies along the street.

Nini's parents did not sleep. Her father's hand on her mother's belly, which was starting to show, they talked with hope about a son, not wanting to share their dread about yet another girl. On the other end of the brick bed, Nini eavesdropped, praying to unknown gods and goddesses that they would be given a baby girl.

Jialin's mother worried too, about the remaining time in Jialin's life, but more about his three younger brothers, who had stolen her money to buy three pairs of sunglasses. Earlier that day they had come home with the shining black things on their faces, and when she looked at them she saw in their lenses six duplicates of herself, face tired and hair gray. She wondered if they were on their way to becoming the newest gang members in the city, but when she talked to her husband about this worry, he replied that it was natural for the boys to grow into men.

In the Huas’ shack, Mrs. Hua dreamed about her seven daughters. Sometimes they would come to talk with her about a newborn baby girl who did not please the husband's family, or a long-awaited son whose arrival had finally stopped another husband's beating; the younger ones talked about their orphanages, where they were too cold or too hungry or had too much labor. On this specific night the youngest daughter, born with a cleft palate and nicknamed Bunny by her older sisters, came and told Mrs. Hua that she had decided to go home; she was coming to say goodbye to her parents because the years she had lived with them were the happiest of her life. For a moment, Mrs. Hua felt the girl's breath on her cheeks, and then the girl vanished, leaving Mrs. Hua in a cold sweat. She bit her finger; the pain was real, so she was not dreaming. She lay in the darkness for a moment and started to cry. Bunny's ghost had come to say her final farewell, Mrs. Hua told her husband when he was woken up; something had happened and the poor girl was now on her way to the otherworld. Old Hua held Mrs. Hua's hand; after a while Mrs. Hua calmed down. They would never know what or who had killed their little girl, she said, and he replied that perhaps heaven had known it would be harder for the girl to live on.