by Jennie Liu
I find my voice. “The zodiac drawings? He finished them! I found them in his things.”
“He got them done?” He leaps out the chair again. “That’s great!”
“Well, I don’t have them with me,” I tell him. “They’re back in our village. But I can bring them to you when I get a chance.”
Wei brings his arm around again and gazes at the monkey clinging on his wrist. “I usually do all my own designs, but he showed me several things he drew. He came up with this one for me. I liked it so much I asked him to do the whole zodiac. He really understood when I explained how to design things so they age well. There’s a certain way to draw so the ink doesn’t blur as your skin gets old.” He rubs his arm absently for a moment before he looks up. “I’m so glad he finished them. I can’t wait to see them. When can you bring them to me?”
“It may be a while before I go back to the village. A few months, maybe.” I can’t ask Nainai or Baba to send them to me, because they’d demand to know everything about them. I certainly don’t want to bring up things about Bao-bao that would probably upset them.
“He wanted to learn how to ink,” Wei says, closing his eyes and rubbing his cheek. “I promised I’d teach him if he did the series for me. You should have seen him trying to hold back the tears when I gave him his tattoo.”
“Bao-bao had a tattoo?!”
“Tiny one on his cheek.” Wei points to a spot behind his left hip. “His sign, the dragon.” He reaches over for an album on the table behind him and flips several pages before he finds what he’s looking for. “His design, of course.”
I lean over the book to see a tiny blue-green scaled dragon with flames coming out of his mouth. The mouth is wide open and appears to be smiling despite the flames that burst out and wrap around the body. “I can’t believe he had a tattoo,” I say.
My phone dings and I pull it out. It’s a text from Ma: Where are you? I glance at the time. I’ve been gone more than an hour.
“I have to go,” I say.
Wei gets up and walks Min and me to the door. Before I step out, I tell him that I’ll bring Bao-bao’s designs as soon as I can. He nods and slips his arms around Min’s waist. I let the door close behind me, leaving them inside, but I watch through the glass as she turns to face him. He gathers her in his arms and they kiss. Deeply. Intensely.
A blush creeps over me, and I shift my gaze to an ad for a clinic that does double eyelid surgery. As I wait for Min, my eyes are trained on the before and after images, but all the while I’m wondering why Gilbert has never kissed me like that.
17
My job at the recycling plant begins the next day. Mama walks to the bus stop with me, pointing out landmarks to help me remember the way, repeating the bus number several times to drum it into my head. The bus pulls up, and I’m surprised when Mama boards and goes with me to the plant. She explains that she’s been given permission to train me the first day and will only do a half shift of her own tonight.
The plant is beyond the outskirts of the city, the last stop on this line. Everyone on board disembarks and walks the long dusty approach road to the sprawling facility, North China Scrap Metal Recycler. Mounds of material are piled under a high open-air shed, spilling out beyond its shelter. The noises of heavy machinery and the scrape of metal on metal are all around the plant. Men are shoveling the scrap into two-wheel carts and pushing them to another building, where Mama leads me.
We enter through another door and go to a locker room where we stash our purses and don green uniforms, gloves, and white cloth masks before entering the main sorting room. Here, huge square tables are piled with jumbles of metal scraps. Everything in the room is gray—the carts, the plastic bins under the tables, the high concrete walls and metal supports of the building, the second-story offices in the corner with windows that look down onto the floor. There must be more than thirty tables in the workroom, and the workers, six to eight per table, are the only dots of color.
Mama sets to work, telling me to watch her. She grabs a long pronged cultivator like Nainai uses in the fields and rakes several rusty hunks of metal toward the edge of the table. She hands me a heavy magnet and shows me how to touch it to each piece of metal.
“If it sticks, put it here.” She points to a bin on the floor between us. “These are ferrous. Everything else goes in the other bin where they’ll go to another table and get sorted into the different types of metal. That’s my usual post.”
I spend another minute listening to the thunk, thunk of metal being chucked into the bins and watching her hands fly before I take the pronged tool and get to work. Mama glances at me frequently while she works, making comments and pointing to the bins as I sort. “That one goes there, right? Okay, and that one goes in the other one. Yes! Don’t get them mixed up.”
She works swiftly and speaks sharply as if she’s left her sorrow at home, and she is again the parent with the instructive voice on our phone. Na, listen to what I say. Study hard. Help your Nainai.
After an hour of monitoring my work she prods me to go a little faster. The work isn’t hard, but it’s dull, and after several hours I begin to lose focus.
“You dropped it in the wrong bin!” The woman on the other side of the table catches me in an error.
“Na, you have to concentrate!” Mama chides. “Work fast, but no mistakes!” For the next few hours Mama eyes me like a hawk. She clicks her tongue at me when she sees me drifting or slowing down. Despite the simplicity and drudgery of the work, her scrutiny makes me anxious, and I mess up several more times.
The day creeps along, and my back aches from standing. When my shift is finally over, Mama insists on riding the bus home with me even though she has to work another half-shift after dinner.
“But you’ll have to come back right away. You won’t have time to eat!” I tell her that I can find my own way, but she just shakes her head and strides toward the bus stop.
“I want to make sure you don’t get lost! We’ll pick up something near the complex once you know where you are, then I’ll get on the next bus back here.”
“Mama, I can find the way!” I’m about to point out that I’m nineteen years old and have been living essentially on my own at school for years.
“Don’t argue!” The flinty quality of her tone sets me in my place, and she already has her back to me as she marches ahead. I sigh, feeling like her child. Which I am.
***
Back in the apartment, I make some rice and eat it with a tin of salted greens. I can hear the audience laughter of a television program and the sizzle of food being cooked on the other side of the wall. Funny that scores and scores of people live down here in the sublevels. I’ve seen them in the halls, ducking into their tiny apartments and going in and out of the washrooms and showers, yet besides Min and Mrs. Hu, I haven’t become friendly with anyone.
I suppose they all have busy lives. They work all day, come home exhausted with takeout food, and collapse in front of their screens. Or if they’re young like Min, they come home and change and go back out again. I’ve heard the click of their hard shoes in the hallway late at night and I wonder what they’ve been doing—karaoke, movies, dates?
The apartment is lonely without Mama, but although I hate that she’s chosen to work nights, part of me is relieved she’s not here. I know that she would be grimly ruminating on Bao-bao and I wouldn’t know what to do to make things better.
I text Gilbert. No answer.
I decide to try Xiaowen. When she answers my spirits revive a little, and I quiz her on what she’s been doing. She’s gone to stay with her parents, who work in another city. She’s watching lots of movies and lots of episodes of the American television shows Friends and The Big Bang Theory.
I picture her in front of a screen, with her feet up, cracking melon seeds between her teeth. No worries to stew about. I text that I’m working now, that I won’t be going back to school. I feel a finger of self-pity tickling at me, so I quickly add that Gi
lbert proposed, that we’ll probably be getting married.
I knew it! How? When? She demands details, and giving them to her helps pull me out of my mood.
But why not finish school first?
That seems a completely practical idea. I almost don’t know how to explain. I tap out the simplest answer: that Bao-bao has died, that Mama and Baba need me to work now. I push send as fast as I can.
From the long pause, I know the news is such a shock that Xiaowen doesn’t know how to reply.
Oh no, how awful! I forgot how you had to rush home! She texts her condolences.
Before she can ask any questions, I change the subject. So strange not to go back to school. It hits me again like a hunk of metal slamming into a bin. I have no reason to go back to Linfen. But I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to any of the girls. They’ll all get their degrees and find jobs where they can advance. I’ll be going back to the village to wash Gilbert’s socks and cook lunch for his grandparents.
Me: We won’t see each other anymore.
Xioawen: Maybe I can come to your wedding? When is it?
Me: Spring Festival?
Xioawen: The worst time to travel! Everyone has to be with family. I’ll see what my parents say.
She’s telling me that she won’t be able to come. Already my old life has disappeared.
18
Over the next week, Mama and I settle into a routine with our alternating twelve-hour work shifts. We don’t see each other much, but she texts me often, especially during her meal breaks and in the morning and afternoon when we’re on buses going in opposite directions.
I made soup for your dinner.
AQI 260—wear a mask!
Don’t forget your lunch.
At the start, the texts make me smile because it’s nice to have this daily contact with Mama. But as the week goes on, the frequency of the texts increases.
Be sure to greet the supervisor before you leave.
Ask Mrs. Hu if she needs anything when you do the shopping.
Make sure the fat on the pork is white not gray. Be in bed by 9:00.
I text back I will or Thank you, Mama each time at first, but soon I grow weary of the instructions and my responses fall off. If I don’t answer, a flurry of texts appears until I do. I quickly learn I have to give at least a thumbs-up emoji so she won’t worry.
This close daily scrutiny from Mama is new to me, but as smothering as it is, I realize that turning the spotlight on me must distract her from her own misery. It’s little enough for me to tolerate, if it makes her feel better—but I’m glad of the hours when she returns to the floor where phones aren’t allowed, because then I know I’m free until the next day.
Gilbert and I exchange brief texts too, but my long hours and the mindless sorting of ferrous and non-ferrous piles of scrap offer me nothing interesting to talk about. He seems tired as well, and his discontent at being in the countryside shows in his complaints about his boss, about having to work so much out in the bad air, about the lack of things to do for fun. The excited flutters in my stomach diminish when he talks about all that.
I work, go home, make something to eat, then get into bed, too tired even to pull out my dog-eared copy of Anne of Green Gables, which I always like to reread when I have time. The sounds of people moving around in the sublevel, living their lives, make me feel friendless and isolated.
In the moments before I drift off to sleep, Bao-bao sneaks into my mind like a ghost. Sometimes, bitter thoughts edge in with him. His suicide has brought me here, alone in this dark apartment, not quite filling his place as Mama and Baba’s little emperor. Instead, I’m working in a gritty, mind-numbing job, not studying, further than I’ve ever been from anything I want.
Whatever that is.
I’ve always been a good girl, doing as my family expected, not dreaming too far ahead. I thought Bao-bao was the same way, but the illustrations I found show a different story. Many nights, those images swirl in my dreams.
By the end of the week, the unvarying pattern of each day and night has made me restless. After I’ve eaten my post-work bowl of instant noodles, instead of climbing into bed, I go to Min’s.
“Hi! Come in.” She sounds so friendly, gratitude floods me as I slip in. Her room is messy, with prints and papers scattered on the bed, but light from the desk lamp, her laptop, and the fairy lights makes the room bright and inviting.
“I’m so glad you’re home!” I say. “It’s too quiet in my apartment.”
“Your mama sleeping?”
I shake my head. “She works the opposite shift.”
“Really? Isn’t that hard on her?” Min gathers the papers off the bed and gestures for me to sit. “She must hardly see you.”
I shrug. “She prefers it, I guess. She’s having such a hard time, work is the only thing that helps her to forget what happened to Bao-bao. For a little while at least.”
Min swivels her desk chair to face the bed. When she sits, she folds one leg under herself. “How’s it been for you?”
“She’s been checking in on me a lot. All kinds of reminders, instructions . . .”
“Ah! I meant, how’s the work, but I’m afraid you mean your ma has taken you in hand now.” She grimaces sympathetically. “Well, I suppose with living apart all these years you’re not used to having the constant . . . guidance.”
I nod. “I guess this is what it must have been like for Bao-bao.”
“Of course! Probably worse. You were lucky to be at school on your own, not having your parents watching every move you make. What did your ma say about your engagement?”
I draw in my lip for a moment. “I haven’t told her yet. When I first got here she was too tired to talk. Every day since then it’s been work, work, work so I haven’t had a chance to bring it up.”
“Really? But you know it will make her so happy. Or at least give her something to think about other than your brother. Maybe it’ll help her get a little bit past it. And you must be bursting with the news.”
I give a half nod.
“No? Are you having second thoughts?”
“I don’t know.” I sigh. “It’s just so unexpected, doesn’t seem real.”
“It does seem sort of like a flash marriage. But that’s not too unusual these days,” Min says.
“I still haven’t really said yes. Gilbert doesn’t push. He’s giving me room to think, but it seems like the right thing to do. Like you said, Gilbert suits. And if nothing else, getting married would have to be better than sorting metal twelve hours a day, six days a week!”
Min winces. “Sorting metal! That’s terrible. You’ve had a year in college, you should look for something else.”
“Coal operations technology is sort of specific. And I’ll probably be getting married in six months.”
For several moments Min doesn’t say anything, and I’m aware of how my words, with their feeble tone, hang in the air. She tilts her head, studying me. “What do you want to do?”
No one has ever asked me that. I only shrug again and flip up my hands.
She brings her leg out from under her and taps me lightly with it. “No, really. Tell me.”
I root around for an answer and say the first thing that comes to mind. “Go to school first.”
“And finish your degree in coal operations technology?”
I wrinkle my nose. “Well, once I wanted to study English,” I admit. “Or literature.”
Min’s eyebrows shoot up. “I don’t suppose they had that at your school.”
I laugh. “No, they didn’t. But in middle school, English was my favorite subject.”
“Well, why didn’t you take the social sciences track in school and go on to a university?” Min asks.
I look down, my gaze falling on her slippers. They’re robin-egg blue, made of real leather and shaped like the ones ballet dancers wear. It’s too much to explain to someone like Min that I was lucky to even go to vocational high school. “An English or literat
ure degree is completely impractical for someone like me.”
“That’s our parents talking. Look at me. My parents wanted me to work in computers or medicine. When I got my degree in communications, they pushed me to take a position as a publicity rep with a big company. I did that for a few years—riding a donkey to find a horse. With that, and the photography on the side, I’ve saved up and in a couple of months I’m going to open my own studio in Beijing. And not a wedding photo shop.”
“That’s wonderful!” I’m impressed and glad for her, yet the smile on my face is stiff. Her situation is different than mine. Her parents piled all their resources on her and gave her all their attention. She grew up as a singleton in a city, with easy entry to the city schools, which are always better than the ones in the countryside. She didn’t have to work in the fields, look after her little brother, or cook meals and wash clothes.
“Look at these!” She turns her computer screen toward me. “These are the images I’m using in my installation for the Marriage Market.” She scrolls through several headshots of women without makeup, their hair down, their shoulders bare.
“Min, they’re beautiful!” The photos are stark, each woman glowing and natural.
Min then rifles through some papers on her desk and hands them to me. “And these are their statements.”
I take them and begin to read.
I don’t want to get married just to be married.
I have a great career and I enjoy my single lifestyle.
I haven’t finished living out my youth.
I press my lips together, my enthusiasm faltering. I wonder if Min is trying to tell me something. “Do you think it’s the wrong thing for me to get married?”
Min clacks her tongue impatiently. “No! I told you the other day, it’s not for me to say. If you want to get married for love, for security, or for your parents’ sake, that’s up to you! I’m not judging you for choosing the one lifestyle that society tells us is acceptable.” Her tone sounds harsh, but after a moment her expression softens.
