1.

I am a forty-one-year-old woman living by myself, in the same one-bedroom flat where I have always lived, in a derelict building on the outskirts of Beijing that is threatened to be demolished by government-backed real estate developers. Apart from a trip to a cheap seaside resort, taken with my parents the summer I turned five, I have not traveled much; I spent a year in an army camp in central China, but other than that I have never lived away from home. In college, after a few failed attempts to convince me of the importance of being a community member, my adviser stopped acknowledging my presence, and the bed assigned to me was taken over by the other five girls and their trunks.

I have not married, and naturally have no children. I have few friends, though as I have never left the neighborhood, I have enough acquaintances, most of them a generation or two older. Being around them is comforting; never is there a day when I feel that I am alone in aging.

I teach mathematics in a third-tier middle school. I do not love my job or my students, but I have noticed that even the most meager attention I give to the students is returned by a few of them with respect and gratitude and sometimes inexplicable infatuation. I pity those children more than I appreciate them, as I can see where they are heading in their lives. It is a terrible thing, even for an indifferent person like me, to see the bleakness lurking in someone else’s life.

I have no hobby that takes me outside my flat during my spare time. I do not own a television set, but I have a roomful of books at least half a century older than I am. I have never in my life hurt a soul, or, if I have done any harm unintentionally the pain I inflicted was the most trivial kind, forgotten the moment it was felt—if indeed it could be felt in any way. But that cannot be a happy life, or much of a life at all, you might say. That may very well be true. “Why are you unhappy?” To this day, if I close my eyes I can feel Lieutenant Wei’s finger under my chin, lifting my face to a spring night. “Tell me, how can we make you happy?”

The questions, put to me twenty-three years ago, have remained unanswerable, though it no longer matters, as, you see, Lieutenant Wei died three weeks ago, at forty-six, mother of a teenage daughter, wife of a stationery merchant, veteran of Unit 20256, People’s Liberation Army, from which she retired at forty-three, already afflicted with a malignant tumor. She was Major Wei in the funeral announcement. I do not know why the news of her death was mailed to me except perhaps that the funeral committee—it was from such a committee that the letter had come, befitting her status—thought I was one of her long-lost friends, my name scribbled in an old address book. I wonder if the announcement was sent to the other girls, though not many of them would still be at the same address. I remember the day Lieutenant Wei’s wedding invitation arrived, in a distant past, and thinking then that it would be the last time I would hear from her.

I did not go to the funeral, as I had not gone to her wedding, both of which took place two hours by train from Beijing. It is a hassle to travel for a wedding, but more so for a funeral. One has to face strangers’ tears and, worse, one has to repeat words of condolence to irrelevant people.

When I was five, a peddler came to our neighborhood one Sunday with a bamboo basket full of spring chicks. I was trailing behind my father for our weekly shopping of rationed food, and when the peddler put a chick in my palm, its small body soft and warm and shivering constantly, I cried before I could ask my father to buy it for me. We were not a rich family: my father worked as a janitor, and my mother, ill for as long as I could remember, did not work, and I learned early to count coins and small bills with my father before we set out to shop. It must have been a painful thing for those who knew our story to watch my father’s distress, as two women offered to buy two chicks for me. My father, on the way home, warned me gently that the chicks were too young to last more than a day or two. I built a nest for the chicks out of a shoe box and ripped newspaper, and fed them water-softened millet grains and a day later, when they looked ill, aspirin dissolved in water. Two days later they died, the one I named Dot and marked with ink on his forehead the first to go, followed by Mushroom. I stole two eggs from the kitchen when my father went to help a neighbor fix a leaking sink—my mother was not often around in those days—and cracked them carefully and washed away the yolks and whites; but no matter how hard I tried I could not fit the chicks back into the shells, and I can see, to this day, the half shell on Dot’s head, covering the ink spot like a funny little hat.

I have learned, since then, that life is like that, each day ending up like a chick refusing to be returned to the eggshell.

I was eighteen when I entered the army. Lieutenant Wei was twenty-four, an age that I now consider young, though at the time she seemed much older, a lifetime away from me. The day I arrived at the camp, in a midsize city plagued by hepatitis and pickpockets, I came with a single half-filled suitcase. The army had sent an extensive list of supplies that would be issued to us: toothbrushes and towels and washbasins, mess kits, thermoses to be shared among a squad, uniforms for all seasons—we used to joke that, had the army known the sizes of our bras, they would have ordered them too, dyed the same green as our socks and underpants.

A few men and women in uniform loitered under a tree. I had taken a night train, making a point of leaving home and arriving at the camp at the earliest time allowed. My father had seen me off at the train station, shaking my hand solemnly through the open window when the train whistled its signal of departure; my mother had not come, citing illness, as I had known she would.

After I registered, a woman officer, about a head taller than I was, her hair cropped short, introduced herself as Lieutenant Wei, my platoon leader. She had on a straw-colored uniform shirt buttoned to the top, dark green woolen pants, and a crimson tie. I did not cringe under her severe stare; I had lived, until then, beneath the unrelenting eyes of my mother. Decent if not strikingly beautiful—sometimes during a meal she would study my face and comment on it; in the evenings when my father was working the night shift, she would remark on my adequately developed curves. I had learned that if one remained unresponsive in those situations one could become transparent; when my mother’s eyes peeled off my clothes piece by piece they would meet nothing underneath but air.

After I changed into my uniform, Lieutenant Wei ordered me to mop the barracks. Yes, I replied; yes Lieutenant, she corrected me. Yes, Lieutenant, I replied readily, and she looked at me for a long moment then turned around as if disgusted by my lack of defiance.

I was the first one of our platoon to have arrived, and I walked through the aisles between the bunk beds, studying the names taped to the metal frames. The company was housed in a three-story building, with each platoon occupying a long floor and bunk beds lining both walls, separated into four squads by washstands and desks. I would be sharing a bunk bed with a girl named Nan: we each had a white sheet, underneath which was a thin straw mattress; a quilt and a blanket, both dark green, folded as though they were sharply cut tofu. There was no pillow, and soon we would all learn to wrap up our outside clothes—dresses and shirts that were forbidden in the barracks—into pillows at night. Next to my bed was a window opening to the courtyard, where trees whose names I had yet to learn stood in a straight line, their branches pointing upward in a uniform manner.

Lieutenant Wei came back later and ran a palm over the floor. Do not think this is your home, she said, adding that I’d better prepare to shed a few layers of skin. When she ordered me to mop the floor again, I replied, “Yes, Lieutenant.”

“Louder,” she said. “I can’t hear you.”

“Yes, Lieutenant.”

“I still can’t hear you,” she said.

“Yes, Lieutenant,” I said.

“You don’t have to yell in my face. A respectful and clear reply is all we need here.”

“Yes, Lieutenant,” I said. She stared at me for a long moment and then said that a soldier shed sweat and blood but never tears. I waited until she left before I dried my face with my sleeve. It was my father’s handshake through the open window that I had cried for, I told myself, and swore that I would never again cry in the army.

 

2.

A dream has recurred over the past twenty years, in which I have to give up my present life and return to the army. Always Lieutenant Wei is in the dream. In the early years she would smile cruelly at me. Didn’t I tell you that you would be back? The question was put to me in various ways, but the coldness remained the same. The dreams have become less wicked as the years have gone by. I’m back, I tell Lieutenant Wei; I always knew you would come back, she replies. We are older, having aged in my dreams as we have in real life, the only remnants of a previous life among a group of chirrupy teenage girls.

These dreams upset me. Lieutenant Wei’s marriage, two years after I had left the army, and her transfer to another city, which would know her only as a married woman and later a mother, and then would see her die, must have wiped her history clean so she could start collecting new memories not about young, miserable girls in the camp but about happy people who deserved to be remembered. I never showed up in her dreams, I am certain, as people we keep in our memories rarely have a place for us in theirs. You may say that we too evict people from our hearts while we continue living in theirs, and that may very well be true for some people, but I wonder if I am an anomaly in that respect. I have never forgotten a person who has come into my life, and perhaps it is for that reason I cannot have much of a life myself. The people I carry with me have lived out not only their own rations but mine too, though they are innocent usurpers of my life, and I have only myself to blame.

For instance, there is Professor Shan. She was in her early sixties when I met her—but this may be the wrong way to put it, as she had lived in the neighborhood for as long as my father had. She must have watched my generation grow up, and studied every one of us before singling me out—I like to imagine it that way; you see, for a lonely woman, it is hard not to make up some scenario that allows her to believe herself special in a minor way.

Professor Shan was in her early sixties and I was twelve when she approached me one September evening. I was on my way to the milk station. “Do you have a minute?” she asked.

I looked down at the two empty bottles, snuggled in the little carrier my father had woven for me. He had painted the dried reed different colors, and the basket had an intricate pattern, though by then the colors had all paled. My father had a pair of hands that were good at making things. The wooden pegs he put on the foyer wall for my school satchel and coat had red beaks and black eyes; the cardboard wardrobe had two windows that you could push open from the inside, a perfect place for me to hide. He had built my bed too, a small wooden one, painted orange, just big enough to fit in the foyer alongside the wardrobe. We lived in a small one-room unit, the room itself serving as my parents’ bedroom, the foyer my bedroom; there was a small cube of kitchen and a smaller cube of bathroom next to the foyer. Later it occurred to me that we could not afford much furniture, but when I was young I thought it was a hobby of my father’s to make things with his own hands. Once upon a time he must have made things for my mother too, but from the time my memory begins their bedroom had two single beds, my father’s bare and neatly made and my mother’s piled with old novels, perilously high.

“Do you have a minute? I am asking you,” the old woman said again. I had developed a look of distractedness by then, and she was not the most patient woman.

I was on the way to the milk station, I stammered. “I’ll wait for you here,” she said, pounding on the face of her wristwatch with a long finger.

When I was out of her sight I took my time examining the trees by the roadside, and the last blossoming wildflowers. The line at the station was long, and that was what I told her when I reported back to her late. I addressed her as Teacher Shan, and she corrected me, telling me to call her Professor Shan. She led me up flights of stairs to her flat on the fifth floor. It did not occur to me that there was anything odd about this. The only thing my mother had warned me about, when I had had my first period a month earlier, was not to spend time alone with a man.

Professor Shan’s place, a one-room unit also, seemed more crowded than ours even though she lived there by herself. Apart from a table, a chair, and a single bed, the room was filled with trunks: dark leather ones with intricate patterns on the tops and sides, wooden ones with rusty metal clips, and two matching trunks—once bleached but by then more yellow than white—made of bamboo or perhaps straw, I couldn’t tell which. On each trunk there were books. She moved a pile of books to make a spot for me to sit on her single bed, and then took a seat in the only chair in the room. Up to that point I had not studied her, but I realized now that she was a beautiful woman, even at her age. Her hair, grayish white, was combed into a tight bun, not a single strand running loose. Her face—the high cheekbones, the very prominent forehead, and the deep-set eyes—reminded me of a photograph of a female Soviet pilot in my textbook. I wondered if Professor Shan had some mixed blood. It was a secret joy of mine to study people’s faces. I must take after my mother, who, apart from studying my face at a meal—the table placed between the two beds in my parents’ bedroom—rarely took a bite. Sometimes, waiting for us to finish eating, she would comment on the people passing by outside our window: oily and puffy as fresh fried dough she described a woman living a floor above us; the man next door had a long and bitter-looking face, like a cucumber.

My mother was the prettiest woman I had known until then, with almond-shaped eyes in a small, heart-shaped face, a straight and delicate nose, and, as I later learned from her collection of romantic novels from the early 1900s, a cherry-petal mouth. When she grew tired of watching the world, she would study her own face in an oval mirror that she kept close to her all day long. “A princess trapped in the fate of a handmaiden,” she would say to no one in particular. My father, eating silently, would look up at her with an apologetic smile, as if he were a parent responsible for his child’s deformed body.

My father had married late in his life, my mother early, he at fifty and she at twenty. Two years later they had me, their only child. When I was in elementary school, other children often mistook him for my grandfather, but perhaps that was because he had to be a parent to my mother, too. Together my mother and I made my father grow old fast. You could see that in his stooped back and sad smile.

“Do you always let your mind wander in front of your teachers?” Professor Shan asked, though I could see the question was more an amusement than a criticism. In her youth, she must have been more beautiful than my mother. I wondered what my mother would think if she knew my opinion. One thing I was certain of was that my mother would not get along well with Professor Shan, eccentricity being both women’s prized possession.

I was aware of Professor Shan’s existence as much as I was aware of the other people in the neighborhood: If you live in one place long enough, you do not need to seek out gossip and rumors; stories, all sorts of tales, will come to find you. Even for a family like ours, with a mother who rarely talked to people, and a father who was, in my mother’s words, quiet as a dead log, stories would come in eavesdropped form while I waited in lines—and it seems that I spent my childhood perpetually in lines, waiting for eggs, cooking oil, meat, soap, milk, and other rationed goods, waiting to pay the rent and utilities, waiting to get my mother’s prescription filled at the pharmacy. That was where I had first heard bits and pieces of Professor Shan’s story, even before I met her: She had taught high school English in another district before her retirement. She had a son and a daughter, who, after graduating from college, had both vanished, reappearing every once in a while as visitors from America. People could not agree on how they had managed to leave the country, though the most reasonable explanation was that Professor Shan had relatives on her mother’s side who had fled to the States. Once upon a time there had been a husband, a much friendlier person than Professor Shan, but he had disappeared, too, and it was said that he had been sent to the American relatives just as their children had been; it was also said that he had taken up with a younger woman and started a Chinese restaurant with her in New York City, which might be true, as he was never seen in the neighborhood again.

In any case, sitting in Professor Shan’s room on that first day, I could not imagine that the place had once been occupied by a family. There were no framed photographs or letters bearing foreign addresses, and the room, packed with trunks, seemed too small even for Professor Shan by herself. She studied me while I looked around the room, then picked up an old book and turned to a random page. “Read the line to me,” she said. The book was the first one in a series called Essential English, which Professor Shan had used to learn English fifty years ago. The page had a small cartoon of a child on a seat, the kind one would find in a luxury theater. In the cartoon, the child, who was not heavy enough to keep the seat from folding back, smiled uncertainly on his high perch, and I felt the same. I had entered middle school earlier that month, and had barely learned my alphabet.

When I could not read the caption, Professor Shan put the book back with the other volumes, their spines different colors that were equally faded. “You do know that you are not your parents’ birth daughter, don’t you?” She turned and faced me. “And you do know that no matter how nicely they treat you, they can’t do much for your education, don’t you?”

I had not doubted my blood until then—I knew that my parents were different from most parents, but I had thought that it was their age difference, and my mother’s illness. Moyan: my mother sometimes said my name in a soft voice when my father was not around, and I would know that she had some secrets to tell me. A man can have children until he is seventy, she would say; a woman’s youth ends the moment she marries. Moyan, do not let a man touch you, especially here and here, she would say, gesturing vaguely toward her own body. Moyan, your father would get you a stepmother the moment I died, she would say, narrowing her eyes in an amused way; do you know I cannot die now because I don’t want you to live under a stepmother? In one of these revelatory moments she could have said, Moyan, you were not born to us; we only picked you up from a garbage dump—but no, my mother had never, even in her most uncharitable moment, said that to me, and in fact she kept the secret until her death, and for that alone I loved her, and love her still.

“If your parents haven’t told you this, someone else must,” Professor Shan said when I did not reply. “One needs to know where she came from, do you understand?”

In my confusion I nodded. I am fortunate to be slow in responding to news—I have avoided much drama in my life, as the impact, if there is any, comes much later, in solitary meditation.

“I was an orphan myself,” Slowly, over the next three years, Professor Shan’s story would come in full. Her mother, a woman who had stayed unmarried to take care of her own aging parents, had inherited their small china shop when they died; by then she was too old to get married. She went to a Shanghai orphanage in the deadly winter of 1928 and adopted the only girl who was not suffering pneumonia. She named the young girl Shan Shan; she had no family name, as there was not one she could claim. McTayeier School for Girls, the best school in Shanghai, was where Professor Shan had been educated, the school’s name spelled out for me to remember, “The McTayeierians,” the song she and her classmates had sung at school gatherings, sung to me. In her early twenties, Professor Shan had been hired by a teachers college but was fired when her dubious history was discovered. People who think they know their own stories do not appreciate other people’s mysteries, Professor Shan explained; that is why people like you and me will always find each other. Those words, first said to me in the early days of my visits, are what made me go back to her every day at five o’clock.

She read to me. She scoffed at my English textbook, and told me to start on the first volume of Essential English. She never checked my progress, and after a while I realized it did not make any difference to her that I only looked at the illustrations. Instead she read her collection of novels to me. We began with David Copperfield, she sitting in the only chair in the room, I on the bed. Intimidation kept me focused at first, as sometimes she would look up sharply in mid-sentence to see if my eyes were wandering to the trunks, or the trees outside. I worried that she would find me a fraud and dismiss me. I did not like her or dislike her yet, but I was in shock, unable to process the fact that I was not related by blood to my parents, and Professor Shan’s reading voice, with a melody that was not present when we talked, was soothing in a way that my mother’s voice never was. Professor Shan would read long passages, stopping only when she seemed pleased, and then translate for me. Her translation seemed shorter than the original English, but even those brief Chinese words gave me a joy that I did not get elsewhere—she used phrases that belonged to a different era, a language more for the ancients than the living, and before long I began to mimic her. I had never been a talkative person, but now I had even fewer words, for the ancients had the most efficient ways of saying things. My schoolmates found it laughable but I persisted, ignoring teenage slang for a mixture of language used in ancient poetry and eighteenth-century romance novels. My father, who was not an educated person, did not seem to find it odd, perhaps having little idea how education could change one’s speech, but my mother, more than once, studied me after my father and I exchanged some words. I knew I had invaded her territory—after all, she was the one who read ancient poetry and centuries-old novels to pass the time. She could not make up her mind about how to accept my change, I could see, just as I could not make up my mind about the news of her not being my birth mother.

 

3.

By our third week in the army everyone in my squad had received a letter from home; a few had received additional letters from their friends. Without fail all of them cried when they read them. Ping, the youngest among us, fifteen and a half, doubtless a genius to have graduated high school so young, read aloud her father’s letter between sobs: “After you registered and went into the barracks, Baba cried on the way to the train station. The night train from Wuhan to Beijing was fully packed, and Baba stood for eighteen hours, but that, compared to Baba’s little darling’s suffering in the army, was nothing. I have the calendar on my wall, and every morning I mark a day off, knowing it is one day closer to our reunion.”

I was the only one, by the fourth week, not to have received a letter. “Are you sure you don’t want to write to your parents again?” asked Nan, who stood next to me in line for the formation drill and slept in the bunk bed above me. “Your last letter might have got lost, and they might not have the address to write to you.”

I shook my head. I had sent a postcard to my parents the first week, saying nothing but that I had arrived safely. My father was not the type to write a letter, and secretly I was relieved that my father was not like Ping’s, who would continue sending letters filled with unabashed words of love, which Ping never hesitated to share. My mother might write me, on a whim, a letter filled with quotations from ancient poems, but then again, she might have decided to cut me out of all communications.

At the end of the week I was summoned to Lieutenant Wei’s room. It was a Sunday, and we had the morning off from drills. She motioned for me to take the only chair, and I moved it away from her before sitting down in the middle of the room. There was a single bed on my left, with an army-issue quilt, blanket, and sheet. There was no pillow on her bed, and I wondered if she wrapped up some old clothes as we did at night, or if she had a pillow hiding in her closet. On the wall next to the bed were a few framed photographs. A black-and-white one stood out. A young girl, thirteen or fourteen, looked away with a smile, as if she had been teasing the photographer. “That was taken the summer before I enlisted,” Lieutenant Wei said as she studied me. “Have you been out to town yet?”

“No, Lieutenant,” I said. She only had to check her chart to know that I had never requested one of the two-hour permits to visit town on Sundays.

“Why? The town is too small for someone from Beijing to visit?”

I thought about the question, which, like all questions put to us by an officer, could have many traps. There was no particular reason, I said. I could have said that I wanted to give the opportunity to the other girls, who were more eager to have the two hours of freedom, but that would have led to more questioning. I had learned, in the past few weeks, that an officer’s friendliness was not to be trusted. Lan, a girl whose hometown was in the same province as Lieutenant Wei’s hometown, once had an amicable chat with Lieutenant Wei at a drill break, but five minutes later, when Lan made the mistake of turning right when the rest of us turned left, Lieutenant Wei ordered her to leave the formation and do a hundred turn-lefts. Even worse, Lan was to give herself the drill command, and by the time she reached thirty, her voice was choked by her tears. Lieutenant Wei, while the rest of us watched with anxiety, told Lan that if she did not make the command clear and loud to all who were witnessing her punishment, it would not count. Similar incidents had happened to others: a girl was ordered to stand in the middle of the mess hall during a meal after she had laughed at a joke told quietly to her by a squad mate; another girl was asked to read a self-criticism in front of the company because she had claimed the food from the mess hall was better suited for feeding pigs than human beings. These punishments were measured out not only by Lieutenant Wei and the other junior officers, but also by Major Tang, the commander of our company, who, as the only male officer, liked to storm through the barracks for unannounced inspections.

When I did not reply, Lieutenant changed the topic and said that she had heard that I hadn’t yet received a letter from home. I wondered who had reported this to her, but perhaps this was how the army worked, details about our lives recorded by informants among us. My parents are not the type to write letters, I said.

“Is that a problem for you?”

“A problem, Lieutenant?”

“Would you like to phone them?” Lieutenant Wei said. “I could arrange for you to make a phone call to your parents if you wish.”

My parents did not own a telephone. The nearest public telephone was a few blocks from our building, guarded by a brusque middle-aged woman. A message would be taken but would not be delivered until the end of the day; she was a government worker, her salary at a set level, so she rarely inconvenienced herself to deliver even the most urgent messages. Once in a while when the residents filed complaints, she would for a week or two put the callers on hold and send her teenage son around the neighborhood. “A phone call for number 205,” he would call out in front of a building, his voice no longer a child’s but not yet a grown man’s. He was said to be slow, so no school would admit him, and he spent his days, if not as a companion to his mother, then running around the neighborhood and intimidating young children with incoherent ghost stories. My mother would never respond to such a boy calling our flat number in that manner, nor would she be willing to make a trip to the phone booth to call me back.

I told Lieutenant Wei that there was no need to make a call, as my parents did not have a telephone at their place.

“And a neighbor? A friend living nearby?” Lieutenant Wei said. “Anyone who could receive a phone call on their behalf so they know you are well?”

The only telephone number I knew—though I had never used it—was Professor Shan’s. It was written on a slip of paper, in her neat handwriting, and taped on the red telephone next to her single bed. I had studied the number many times while she was reading a long passage, and after a while I could not get it out of my mind.

There is no one I could call, I said when Lieutenant Wei pressed me again. She studied my face as if trying to decide if I was lying out of defiance. She retrieved a file folder from a drawer, and pages rustled under her impatient fingers. I looked out the window at the evergreen trees, wishing to be one of them. I loved trees more than I loved people; I still do. Few creatures are crueler than human beings, Professor Shan had said once; we had been standing side by side next to her fifth-floor window, looking down at people busy with their late-afternoon lives. I can guarantee you, Professor Shan said, pointing to the weeping willows by the roadside, every one of those trees is more worthwhile than the people you’ll get to know in life; isn’t it a good thing that once you are bored by people you still have trees to watch?

“Your father’s work unit? Can you call him there?” Lieutenant Wei said. “But of course we’ll have to arrange for you to call during the weekdays to catch him at work.”

I had put down “service” for my father’s occupation on my registration form, along with the name of the department store where he worked night shifts. I wondered if she was calculating my parents’ ages, as the registration form asked for their birth information, too.

There was no need to call him, I replied. My parents were not the type who would begrudge the army for not giving them sufficient information about my well-being.

Lieutenant Wei seemed not to notice the hostility of my words. “Your mother—what kind of illness does she have?”

When I had entered elementary school I had been instructed by my father to put down “retired early from illness” for my mother’s occupation. What kind of illness, the teachers would ask. What did she do before she became ill? At first I did not know how to answer, but by middle school I became an expert in dealing with people’s curiosity—she was a bookkeeper, I would say, the most tedious and lonely job I could come up with for her; lupus was what had been troubling her, I would explain, the name of the disease learned in fifth grade when a classmate’s mother had died from it. I thought about what kind of tale would stop Lieutenant Wei from pursuing the topic. In the end I said that I did not know what had caused her disability.

The earliest I could remember people commenting on her illness was when I was four. I was standing in a long line waiting for our monthly egg ration when my father crossed the street to buy rice. What kind of parents would leave a child that small to hold a place in line, asked someone who must have been new to the neighborhood, and a woman, not far behind me, replied that my mother was a mental case. Nymphomania was the word Professor Shan had used, and it was from her that I had learned the story of my parents’ marriage: at nineteen, my mother had fallen in love with a married man who had recently moved into the neighborhood, and when the man claimed he had nothing to do with her fantasy, she ran into the street calling his name and telling people she had aborted three babies for him. They would have locked her up permanently had it not been for my father’s marriage proposal. My father, whom people had thought would remain a bachelor for life, went to my mother’s parents and asked to take the burden off their hands. Which would you have chosen for your daughter had you been a mother, Professor Shan asked me—an asylum or an old man? She’d told me the story not long after I had become a regular visitor to her flat. I had stammered, not knowing how to pass the test. Professor Shan said that it was my mother’s good fortune that her parents had given her up to a man who loved her rather than to an asylum; love makes a man blind, she added, and I wondered if my father’s misfortune was transparent to the world.

Later I would realize that my family—my father’s reticence, my mother’s craziness, and my existence as part of their pretense to be a normal married couple—must have been gossip for the neighborhood, and their story, sooner or later, would have reached me, but when I left Professor Shan’s flat that day, I resented her heartlessness. We were only fifty pages into David Copperfield, and I could have easily found an excuse not to go to her flat again, but what good would it have done me? I was no longer my parents’ birth child, and their marriage, if it could be called a marriage, was no doubt a pitiful one.

Lieutenant Wei closed the file folder. She seemed, all of a sudden, to have lost interest in my case. She looked at her wristwatch and said that since there was still an hour until the end of the day, meaning eleven o’clock, when drills started, I might as well use the time wisely and go water and weed our platoon’s vegetable garden.

Today I would give anything for a garden, but the only space I can claim now is my flat. It’s on the north side of the building, so the only sunshine I get is slanted light for an hour in the evening. My father used to keep pots of plants on the windowsill, but they have long since withered and found their way to the trashcans. Today I would give anything for a garden—perhaps not as big as the one we used to have in the army, as it would be pure greed to ask for that, but a small patch of earth. At eighteen, though, I did not have the urge to nurture anything. “The garden was weeded and watered yesterday, Lieutenant,” I said.

“Are you telling me that I have given you a worthless order? How about the pigs? If you think the vegetables grow without your contribution, maybe you could put some efforts into cleaning the pigsties.”

The pigs, not yet fully grown, were kept at the far end of the camp. There were five pigs for each company, and the conscripts in the cooking squad had told us that they were to be butchered at the end of our year for the farewell banquet. Other than the five pigs, we saw little meat. Once in a while Ping would devise an extensive plan to sneak a pig out of the camp, find a willing butcher to kill it, and another willing soul to cook it; the scheme grew more detailed and vivid, but it was only talk, for the sake of passing time.

I said it was not our squad’s turn to take care of the pigs. Most shared duties—grounds-keeping around the barracks, gardening, helping the cooking squad prepare meals for the company, feeding the pigs and cleaning the pigsties, cleaning the toilet stalls and the washing room—were rotated among the four squads in the platoon, and apart from the kitchen duties, during which we could sneak extra food to our table, they were dreaded and carried out with aversion.

“I see that you haven’t learned the most basic rule about the army,” Lieutenant Wei said. “This is not the civilian world, where one can bargain.”

 

4.

The civilian world slowly crept in on us, in the form of letters from old school friends and packages of chocolates from parents, memories of childhood holidays and teenage expeditions, and, in my case, Professor Shan’s voice, reading D. H. Lawrence, her tone unhurried. Well, Mabel, and what are you going to do with yourself: when I closed my eyes at the shooting range I could hear her voice, and the question, posed from one character to another, now seemed to request an answer from me. Or else: To her father, she was The Princess. To her Boston aunts and uncles she was just “Dollie Urquhart, poor little thing.”

The point of a boot kicked my leg, and I opened my eyes. I was not in Professor Shan’s flat, released momentarily from responsibility by her voice, but facedown, my elbows on sandbags, my right cheek resting on the wooden stock of a semiautomatic rifle. The late October sunshine was warm on my back, and two hundred yards away the green targets, in the shape of a man’s upper body, stood in a long line. Two magpies chattered in a nearby tree, and the last locusts of the season, brown with greenish patterns, sprang past the sandbags and disappeared into the yellowing grass. I shifted my weight and aligned my right eye with the front and rear sights. The training officer did not move, his shadow cast on the sandbags in front of me. I waited, and when the shadow did not leave to check on the next girl, I pulled the trigger. Apart from a crack, nothing happened—it would be another two weeks before we would be given live ammunition.

“Do you think you got a ten there?” asked the training officer.

“Yes, sir,” I said, still squinting at the target.

He did not think so. Try again, he said. I held the rifle closer so that the butt was steadied by my right shoulder. I had noticed that people, once in the army, become two different species of animals—those who were eager to please, like the most loyal, best trained dogs, and those who, like me, acted like the most stubborn donkeys and need a prod for every move. I looked through the sights and pulled the trigger.

“Much better,” the training officer said. “Now remember, the shooting range is not a place to nap.”

Shooting practice was one of the few things I enjoyed in the army. Major Tang showed up occasionally to inspect us, but since aiming was one thing we had to practice on our own, he had little patience for staying at the shooting range for hours. The three platoon leaders, including Lieutenant Wei, sat in the shade of the ash trees and chatted while two of the shooting officers for the company, who liked to sit with them, told jokes. Our officer, older and more reticent, sat a few steps away and listened with an indulgent smile. The two girls on my right talked in whispers, and now and then I caught a sentence; they were discussing boys, analyses and guesses that I did not bother to follow. On my left, Nan hummed a tune under her breath while maintaining a perfect shooting position. I was amazed at how soldierly she could act, her posture perfect in formation drills, her impeccable bed-making winning her titles in the internal-affairs contest. Anyone could see her mind was elsewhere, but the military life seemed to provide endless amusements for her; she never misbehaved, and she was among the few who hadn’t received any public humiliation. I turned my head slightly, still resting my right cheek on the stock but looking at Nan rather than the target. Her uniform cap was low on her eyebrows, and in the shadow of the cap she squinted in a smile, singing in a very low voice.

“The Last Rose of Summer,” she told me when I asked her about the song during the break. Nan was a small girl and looked no more than thirteen years old. She had joined a famous children’s choir when she was six, and when the other children her age had entered middle school and left the choir, she had remained because she liked to sing, and she could still pass for a young child. When she reached sixteen, the choir changed its name from “children’s choir” to “children and young women’s choir.” She’d laughed when she told us about it. Would she go back to the choir, one of the girls had asked her, and she’d thought for a moment and said that perhaps after the army she would have to find some other hobbies. One could not possibly remain in a children’s choir all her life, she’d said, though she seemed to me the kind of person who could get away with anything she set her heart on. I could imagine her still singing at twenty or thirty among a group of children, looking as young and innocent as them—though this I did not tell Nan. We were friendly toward each other, but we were not friends, perhaps the only two in our platoon who hadn’t claimed a close friend eight weeks into the military life. I did not see the need to have someone next to me when I took a walk around the drill grounds after dinner for the fifteen minutes of free time; nor did I need to share my night-watch duty with a special friend, so I was often paired with leftover girls from the other platoons—girls like me who had no one to cling to—and it suited me to spend half a night with someone as quiet as I was in the front room of the barracks, dozing off in two chairs set as far apart as possible.

Nan was a different case. She was friendly with everyone, including the officers and the conscripts in the cooking squad, and was courted by quite a few girls hoping to become her best friend. You could see that she was used to such attention, amused even, but she would not grant anyone that privilege. Even our squad leader, who had become a favorite of the officers with her increasingly militant treatment of us, was unwilling to assign the most dreadful duties—cleaning the toilets, or the pigsties—to Nan. A less gracious person than Nan would have been the target of envy, yet she seemed untouched by any malignancy.

One girl, overhearing our conversation, asked Nan to sing “The Last Rose of Summer.” Nan stood up from where we were sitting in a circle and flicked dried grass and leaves from her uniform. Her voice seemed to make breathing hard for those around her; her face, no longer appearing amused, had an ancient, ageless look. I wondered what kind of person Nan was to be able to sing like that—she seemed too aloof to be touched by life, but how could she sing so hauntingly if she had not felt the pain described in those songs?

The shooting range was quiet when Nan finished singing. A bumblebee buzzed and was shooed away, and in the distance, perhaps over the hills where a civilian world could not be seen, a loudspeaker was broadcasting the midday news, but we could not hear a word. After a while, a girl from another platoon who had sneaked away from her squad to join our circle begged Nan to tell us something about her trips abroad. Apart from Nan, none of us had traveled abroad—none of us had ever had a legal reason to apply for a passport.

I could not decide if Nan was annoyed or pleased by such requests, but she never failed to tell some tales: singing in front of a Vienna palace, learning tap dancing from an American teenager on a cruise ship, taking a long train ride across Siberia in February on her way back to China from a European tour, the whole time stuck in a carriage with girls eight or nine years younger. She had learned chess from the choir director on that train ride, she said, while the children sang and clamored, and a doll-like girl, not yet seven, had played violin for hours like an oblivious angel.

“How old is your choir director?” the girl from the other platoon asked.

Nan shrugged and began another tale about the Macedonian folksongs they’d had to learn because of a detour. I noticed that this was her way of not answering questions she found unpleasantly nosy or uninteresting. Even though Nan kept smiling, you could see the girl who had asked the question was ashamed of her blunder. In fact, there was so much pain and yearning in the girl’s face that I turned to look at the officers under the ash trees, Lieutenant Wei massaging the nape of Lieutenant Hong’s neck, and the two young shooting officers competing with exaggerated gestures to talk to another platoon leader. From where we sat, twenty meters away, they looked young and ordinary, their laughter distant but their happiness tangible. After a moment the older shooting officer looked at his wristwatch and, almost apologetically, blew the whistle to signal the end of the break.

At night, when I could not sleep, I thought about other people and their pain. I wondered, for instance, what kind of pain could be found in Nan’s heart that gave such unbearable sadness to her songs, but she was the most imperturbable person I had met, and if she could be connected to any pain, it would be what she inflicted on others, perhaps against her will. I thought about the girls who vied for her attention, often with open animosity toward each other; they had become transparent in their longing, but I did not know what more they could ask from Nan. She shared her songs and her stories; she treated everyone kindly. Would they be lying in their beds, wondering if Nan had ever known pain? But why would one want to access another person’s pain, when there is enough in one’s own life? In the barracks there was much love in the air—boys left behind in the civilian world were missed and written long letters; boys met in the camp were discussed, sometimes with giggles, sometimes less gleefully; more subdued was the longing between the girls that manifested itself as a competition to become best friends. People don’t know what they are doing and saying. They chatter-chatter, and they hurt one another, and they hurt themselves very often, till they cry. At night I tried to remember Professor Shan’s voice when she read her favorite story to me, and when I was not sure if I remembered the exact words, I turned on my flashlight and reread the story under the quilt. But don’t take any notice, my little Princess.

We had spent ten months with David Copperfield, slowly at first, two or three pages a day, and later five or six pages. I don’t remember at what point I had begun to understand what was read to me, in bits and pieces of course; it must be similar to the moment a child first understands the world in words, when what is spoken to her has not yet taken on a definite meaning, but she becomes more confident each day that there is message behind those jumbled sounds. I told my parents that I had been visiting Professor Shan, as she had agreed to tutor me with my schoolwork, a lie that my father had not questioned and my mother had not bothered to listen to. I did not tell Professor Shan that I had begun to understand her, but surely she saw the change: perhaps my eyes wandered less often to the tress outside the window, or perhaps my face betrayed an eagerness where before was only ignorance. In any case, two-thirds into the novel she stopped translating for me. Neither of us talked about this change of routine. I was quiet, still intimidated by her, though I had begun to look forward to the hour spent in her flat. She had not begun to tell me her stories—that would come later. I had not begun to share her attachment to books—that too would come later, much later, perhaps only after I stopped visiting her. Still, her fifth-floor flat, where life did not seem to be lived out in the measuring of rice and flour or the counting of paper bills and coins, at least during the time I was there, became a place that no other place could be: strangers, closer to my heart than my neighbors and acquaintances, loved tragic and strange loves and died tragic and strange deaths, and Professor Shan’s unperturbed voice, made it all seem natural. Looking back, I wonder if it was because of my limited understanding of the language that all tragedies became acceptable to me. Perhaps all that time I was imagining a different story than the one read to me.

After David Copperfield, we read Great Expectations. Then The Return of the Native and, later, Tess of the d’Urbervilles. It was during Jude the Obscure that she began to tell me her story, in fragments I would piece together later. Sometimes the story came at the beginning of the afternoon, sometimes when she took a break from reading the novel to me. She never talked long about herself, and afterward we did not discuss it. I had become less nervous around her; still, I did not talk much about my life at school or at home—intuitively I knew she had little interest in the life I lived outside the hour in her flat. Only once did I ask her advice, about where to go for high school. I was not an excellent student, though decent enough to do well in entrance exams. She asked me my choices of schools, and when I listed them for her, she answered that they were all good schools, and it rather did not matter, in her opinion, where I went. In the end, I chose the school farthest from our neighborhood, a decision that later proved convenient when I had to come up with an excuse to stop visiting Professor Shan.

 

5.

I turned out to be excellent at shooting. I was one of the few who scored all tens in our first live-ammunition practice, and when we marched back from the shooting range, I was displayed in front of the company along with three other girls, with a red ribbon pinned to my chest. Major Tang called the four of us budding sharpshooters and gave a speech that ended with the slogan, “My gun follows my orders, and I follow the Communist Party’s orders.”

“That slogan,” said Jie, one of the other sharpshooters. “Don’t you think it sounded so… off-color?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“You’re too innocent for this discussion,” Jie laughed, but a few days later she sought me out. “Do you read English?”

Apart from the officers and the conscripts in the cooking squad, all of us were able to read some English, since we had studied it in high school, and I said that to Jie. “I know that, of course,” she said. “I’m asking you if you could read an English novel for me.”

I had never talked to anyone about Professor Shan, and I did not memorize English vocabulary during the free time, as some of the other girls, who had their hearts set on going to America after college, did. I replied vaguely that I could try, and after dinner the next day approached me with a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. “It was once a banned book,” she told me with hushed excitement, and asked me to promise not to let the secret out to anyone. “My boyfriend sent it to me. Don’t lose it. He went to great trouble to find a copy.”

The book, a poorly Xeroxed copy, was wrapped in an old calendar sheet, the words small and smudged. “Don’t look like I’m corrupting you. You’re old enough to know these things.” In a lower voice Jie told me that there were many colorful passages in the novel, and could I mark all the passages describing sex between the man and the woman for her? I blushed at the words she used—zuo-ai, doing love, an innocent yet unfortunate mistranslation of the English phrase. making love. Jie said she didn’t have the patience to read the book herself, and told me if I wanted I could skip pages as long as I did not fail to mark what she should be reading.

Jie was an outgoing girl, loud and confident, fond of crass jokes. Perhaps the fact that I did not have someone to reveal her secret to was behind her reasoning; or she might have simply pitied me for my naiveté about the world, and thought of me as someone in need of enlightenment. In any case, I did not ask her for an explanation—it was easier to let people have their opinions than to convince them otherwise.

At night I covered my head with the quilt and pointed the light from my flashlight onto the pages. I was sixteen when Professor Shan began to read the stories of D. H. Lawrence to me; it was the fall I entered high school. My favorite author, she said of Lawrence, but did not say more. It became clear to me—and I tried not to show my disappointment—that we would not return to Dickens or Hardy, at least not for a long while. She pointed out the novels she would read to me after we finished with the two volumes of Lawrence’s stories: The White Peacock, Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love. Her eyes seemed to gleam unusually as she laid out her plan. I wonder whether she had been waiting for that moment ever since I had begun visiting her. Were Dickens and Hardy only a preparation for Lawrence? Was she waiting for me to grow older, or to become better with English, so that I could understand Lawrence?

That fall, milk was no longer rationed, but our family could not afford it, as I needed lunch money for the high school canteen. Every day I rode out of the school gate at quarter to four, the earliest possible time, and cycled across a district and a half to get to Professor Shan’s flat at a quarter after five. I did not go home to report to my parents first. My father, on a longer night shift now, would leave for work around five, and it mattered little to my mother when I returned home—my father left a cooked meal for us, which my mother rarely touched. She had become even thinner, ghostly hollows around her cheeks, and she lay in her bed and read ancient romance novels for hours.

There was a woman who was beautiful, who started with all the advantages, yet she had no luck. She married for love, and the love turned to dust. Professor Shan began reading to me as soon as I arrived. Sometimes she would lay snacks on the table —a few biscuits, half an orange, a handful of roasted chestnuts—but she herself never ate anything when I was around, so I did not touch the food either.

I did not like Lawrence, and my mind began to wander to other things. I had enjoyed Dickens, who talked to me at times in a wordy manner as I imagined a grandparent would. I had never met my father’s parents, and my mother’s parents had washed their hands of her, so I was only a stranger to them. I had loved Hardy, and had dreamed of the countryside in his books—black-and-white dreams in which everything looked slanted as if in a woodcut print—but this may have had more to do with the joy of finding myself able to understand English. I dared not show that I was annoyed by Lawrence. I had lived with a mad mother all my life and found madness, which seemed prevalent in the stories read to me now, the most uninteresting topic. I tried to suppress a yawn and let my mind wander to a man whose name I did not know and whose face had begun to haunt me. The man lived on the second floor of Professor Shan’s building and had a young daughter named Nini. “Nini’s Papa” was how I greeted him. He did not use my name—he had never asked me for it, so perhaps he did not know mine either—and he called me Nini’s Sister, as if I were connected to his daughter by blood.

I now know his name, as he has become one of the most renowned flutists in the nation. I have seen his face on posters, and read in newspapers and magazines the story of his success after years of hardship, about his childhood spent as an orphan with distant relatives, serving in his teens as an apprentice to a blind folk musician whom he then had buried while traveling across south China, about his years of playing in the street for small change, his failed marriage, and estranged daughter. The articles called him “a figure of inspiration.” He has not aged much in twenty-five years, though he looks less melancholy, more at ease with the world. I imagine his students in the conservatory having youthful crushes on him, love that has long been due him. Sometimes I wonder if he still remembers me, but the moment the thought occurs to me, I laugh at myself. Why should he think about someone who is a reminder of his humiliation? Only those who live in the past have space in their hearts for people from the past; the man surely has enough success to savor only the present, with many people to occupy his heart, perhaps far too many.

Nini’s father had married into the flat on the second floor. Having no place of his own and, worse, no job, made him a laughingstock, or, rather, his wife. It was said that she had fallen in love with him when she saw him play his flute in the park, a near beggar who, the neighbors used to say, “must have a short-circuit in his brain to think of himself as an artist.” Much to her parents’ chagrin, she made up her mind to marry him and support him while he tried his luck getting into the National Conservatory. A year later they had a daughter, and his in-laws, with whom he and his wife shared the two-bedroom flat on the second floor, refused—unlike most grandparents—to take care of the baby. Nini’s mother worked as a clerk in a government agency, and while she was away Nini’s father could be seen walking the baby around the neighborhood. It must have been disheartening for a man, once homeless, to be made homeless again, during the daytime, along with his child, but as a young girl I did not sense the agony of his situation. Rather, I was envious of his freedom, not belonging to a school or a work unit, and I wished to be his companion during his long hours of aimless wandering.

Nini was just learning to speak when I first began visiting Professor Shan. I was not the kind of well-raised child who knew to compliment a woman on her new dress or a father on his adorable daughter, but whenever I saw Nini and her father in the late afternoons, often playing in the small garden across the narrow lane from Professor Shan’s building, I would greet them. I praised the girl for the stick she held in her hand, or the pebbles she gathered into a pile. Her father thanked me, speaking on her behalf, and it became a habit for both of us to speak through his daughter. “Nini, have you had a good day with your baba?” I would ask her. “Tell your sister that we’ve had a good day,” he would reply, and even later, when Nini was older and chose not to acknowledge either of our existences, we would still use the girl as an intermediary to exchange words.

I never saw Nini’s father play the flute. He had a gaunt look by the time I entered high school: where there had once been a smile, there was now only a distracted look, his hair gray before its time, his back beginning to stoop. He spent less time with Nini then—the girl must have been accepted by her grandparents, as a few times I saw them walk her to a preschool. I wondered what he would do with his time now that Nini was in school. When I walked past their flat on the way to Professor Shan’s, I studied the green wooden door, the paint peeling off at the edge, a child’s doodle by the doorknob. I imagined the world behind the door, what Nini’s father, when he unlocked the door, would have to brace himself to face. At night I tried to remember his face and his voice, but hard as I tried, I was never able to recall enough details to make him a real person.

On an early November afternoon, when I was locking my bicycle in front of Professor Shan’s building, Nini’s father appeared quietly from around the corner.

“How are you, Nini’s Papa?” I said when he did not speak. “Did Nini have a good day?”

An old woman exited the building and gave a meaningful glance toward him before calling out to her grandchildren to come in and do homework. In a low voice, Nini’s Papa asked if he could talk with me for a few minutes.

I followed him to the small garden. It was one of those mild autumn days, the last before the harsh winter would begin. The sun, half setting, was pinkish orange in the cloudless western sky, which was warm orange and pink and magenta.

The man stopped by a trellis of wisteria, the flowers long gone, the last leaves hanging on to the vine. “I want to let you know that I will be leaving the neighborhood tomorrow.”

I nodded, as if I had known it all along and was not surprised by the news. The streetlights, whitest blue, blinked to life with a collective buzzing.

“Nini’s mama and I signed the divorce papers today,” he said.

I had known Nini’s mother for as long as I could remember. She was fifteen years older, ordinary in all ways but for her marriage. She was too old to be part of my generation, but not old enough to become one of those ubiquitous women we called “auntie,” who claimed the right to yell at any child from the neighborhood, so our paths had never crossed. It occurred to me that I had never, despite all the time I spent imagining his life, thought of her as someone dear to him. I wondered if she had been forced to divorce him by her parents, or if she had, at long last, joined the world in condemning him a useless man.

“I was waiting for you to come back from school,” he said. “You’ve always been kind to me, and I want to have a proper farewell.”

“Where will you be tomorrow?”

He looked lost at the question, and then said that there were ways for a man to manage.

“Will you still try to get into the conservatory?”

Perhaps he would, he said, but such things were not up to him. One should not give up, I said eagerly, quoting an old saying about fate allowing what is allowed, but it is one’s responsibility to fight for what one wants before it’s decided by fate. He smiled, and I recognized the derision. I must have sounded childish to him, but when he spoke, his derision was directed at himself. He had fought more than his share of fights against fate, he said; perhaps he should be a warrior rather than a flutist.

I tried to find other words of comfort, but it was enough of an effort to hold back my tears. He was about to say something when a sanitation worker, sweeping a pebble path nearby, began to whistle a love song from a Romanian film from the fifties. We both turned to look at the man. I wondered, for a moment, if my father, mopping the floor of the empty department store in the middle of the night, hummed old love songs to himself.

“Will you let me know when you get into the conservatory?” I asked when the sweeper had moved on.

Nini’s father raised his eyes as if startled by the question. Professor Shan is waiting to tutor me, I said.

He hesitated and held out a hand to shake mine. I wished I had more to say to him, and he to me. I took his hand; as soon as our fingers touched we both let go. “Farewell, Nini’s Sister,” he said.

“Farewell, Nini’s Papa,” I said.

Neither of us moved. A bicycle bell chimed and was followed by other chimes, none of them urgent—a child must have been walking past the bicycle shed and felt the urge to test all the bells. “Farewell, Nini’s Papa,” I said again.

He looked at me, and I wondered if he would come closer, and if I should push him away if he did. I wanted to ask him if he would miss me as I would him; I wanted to ask him if away from this sad neighborhood we could see each other again. But the love that was not yet love, the questions that were not asked thus never answered—in retrospect, I wonder if it was all mere fantasy in a lonely teenager’s heart. But there were things to be accounted for: the farewell that a man thought necessary for a girl he barely knew, the silence while listening to a stranger’s whistling, the hand that was raised to wipe my tears but that had paused midair and then patted my head. Be good, he said, and walked away into the dark shadows of the trees.

I was no more than ten minutes late when I got to Professor Shan’s flat. She opened the door before I knocked and looked at me quizzically. There was a traffic accident in Peace Road, I said, and she led me into the flat without acknowledging my lie. When she turned the pages to the place we had ended the day before, I stared at the yellow tassel on the bookmark. The man’s fingers had been cold to the touch; I clasped my hands together, and my palms felt feverish.

Professor Shan stopped reading. “You seem to have trouble focusing today,” she said, and replaced the bookmark in the book, putting it back where it belonged on top of a leather trunk.

I mumbled, but she waved in dismissal and told me to help myself to the fruits and biscuits she had laid out on the table. She walked to the only window in the room and parted the curtains. I wondered if she spent her days, when I was not around, studying the world from her fifth-floor window; and if she had caught me talking to Nini’s Papa, on that day or previously.

“When one is young, one thinks of love as the most important thing,” Professor Shan said, still facing the window. “It’s natural if you think so, though I do hope you’ve learned a few things from the books I’ve read to you. One could waste one’s life pursuing a flower in the mirror, a moon in the river, but that is not what I want to see happen to you.”

I looked at the back of her head, the impeccable bun that was pulled a little higher than an old woman’s, so that she looked like a ballerina, with her straight back and long pale neck, and when she turned around, for a moment her face looked cold and marble-like in the light. “The moment you admit someone into your heart you make yourself a fool,” she said. “When you desire nothing, nothing will defeat you. Do you understand, Moyan?”

I was caught by Lieutenant Wei one night reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover. I was close to finishing the novel; perhaps one more night would do. I had bracketed every sex scene and marked it with an arrow in the margin of the page, though I was not enjoying the novel myself. Duty propelled me to continue reading and, on top of that, curiosity what Professor Shan might say about each of the characters. Toward the end I was overtaken by fatigue. Perhaps that was what made me less alert to the creaking of the barracks door. When Lieutenant Wei lifted the quilt from my head, I had barely enough time to hide the book under the makeshift pillow of bundled clothes.

“What are you hiding from me?” Lieutenant Wei asked in a low voice.

The early December night air was cold on my warm face, which must have looked flushed in the glare of her flashlight. I fumbled under the bundled clothes without lifting my head from the pillow. When I found the right book I raised it to the light. Lieutenant Wei grabbed it and told me to get dressed and report to her room in two minutes.

When I was certain that she had gone back to her room, I checked under the clothes again. Jie’s book was safe there, and I decided that I would smuggle it back to her first thing in the morning.

The confiscated book—a collection of Lawrence’s short stories—was lying open on Lieutenant Wei’s desk when I entered her room. She signaled for me to sit down on her chair. “What’s the book about?” she asked.

“A lot of things, Lieutenant.”

“Like what?”

“Men and women, Lieutenant,” I said. “And children.”

“What about them?”

What about them? I thought about the question and wondered what kind of punishment Lieutenant Wei would give me. The only time I had come to her notice was when I scored perfect marks during shooting practice. It was one of those useless talents you don’t ask for in life. Still, at practice I aimed and pulled the trigger with the utmost concentration, my mind calm; the care-taking of the rifle—disassembling it and laying the parts at perfect angles on a sheet of newspaper, then cleaning them with a soft rag and putting them back together with precision, all while the training officer timed us on his stopwatch—gave me immense satisfaction.

“Are they romantic stories?” Lieutenant Wei asked.

I would not call them romantic, I replied. What would you call them, then? she asked, and I said they were stories about mad people.

“Are they worth breaking the rule of internal affairs?”

“Not really, Lieutenant.”

“Are you lying?”

“No, Lieutenant,” I said.

Lieutenant Wei picked up the book, ready to tear the pages. I wished I could plead with her that the book was a present from a dear friend, but the truth was, I had always known that I would be punished for having it: apart from the volumes of Essential English, which I had little in reading, Professor Shan had never allowed me to take a book away from her flat; I had stolen the stories of Lawrence when I decided not to go back.

“I can see you’re lying,” Lieutenant Wei said. “Do you want the book back?”

“No, Lieutenant.”

“Why not?”

“They are unworthy stories, Lieutenant,” I said.

She stared at me, and I tried to look as blank as I imagined I had in front of Professor Shan when I told her, a few days after the departure of Nini’s father, that my schoolwork no longer allowed me to spend the time with her. For the briefest moment Professor Shan had looked disappointed, or perhaps even hurt. One has to do what she thinks suits her best, she’d said, and I mumbled that the coursework was heavier than I’d expected. I had wished to leave her with the impression that I would return once the summer holidays began, but she must have seen through me. She told me to wait and then left the room. I still cannot understand what I did next; I quietly took one of the story collections of Lawrence—the one we had just finished—and slipped it into my book satchel. A moment later, Professor Shan returned with a bar of Lux soap, which had just begun to be imported, the most expensive and most luxurious soap. It was wrapped in a piece of peach-colored paper with a beautiful woman printed on it, and I recognized the fragrance that I had always connected with her flat. Be good to yourself, she said, and before I could think of words of gratitude or apology, she waved for me to leave and told me to close the door behind me.

The soap and the book had traveled with me to the army. At night I slept with them, sometimes opening the book to a random page and imagining Professor Shan’s voice reading it. I had seen her around the neighborhood a few times after that, and she acted as if we had never known each other. I wondered then—and wondered again in the army—why she did not confront me about the stolen book. Could it be that she had stopped reading the stories after I left, so never realized her loss?

When Lieutenant Wei asked me if I was certain that I did not need the book, I replied that as far as I cared, the book could be tossed into the garbage can at this very moment.

Lieutenant Wei said that in that case, she would keep the book for herself. I wanted to remind her that she did not read English. “Who knows? Maybe one day I can learn English, too, so I can read the book myself,” she said, as if she had read my mind. “What do you think? Will I be able to read the book after I learn English?”

“I don’t know, Lieutenant,” I said.

“How long did you study English before you could read the book?”

The digital clock on her desk said quarter to midnight. I wondered how long she would keep me. A few years, I said, and shifted in the chair.

“A few years is not that long,” Lieutenant Wei said. “Maybe you can start teaching me now. Will I be able to read a little English by the time you leave?”

I did not know what kind of trap she was setting. A few of the girls from the platoon had become friendly with Lieutenant Wei, but I did not see the point of befriending an officer.

“I’ve had reports that you have received letters from your parents, is that right?” Lieutenant Wei asked.

“Yes, Lieutenant,” I replied. My father had written twice, both letters brief, saying that he and my mother were well and that they hoped I was, too.

“Why are you unhappy?”

“Unhappy, Lieutenant?”

“What’s bothering you?”

“I don’t understand the question, Lieutenant.”

 “Did you break up with your boyfriend?” Lieutenant Wei said.

“I have never had a boyfriend, Lieutenant,” I said. I would rather she had ripped my book and sent me back to the barracks with a week of cleaning duty at the pigsties.

“When I enlisted,” Lieutenant Wei said, “my boyfriend saw me off at the train station and then sent a letter to the training camp to break up with me. The first letter I got in the camp. I was much younger than you are now. I was fourteen and a half. He was eighteen, and he did not have the courage to say it to my face. You think it’s the end of the world, but it is not. The army is a good place to sort these things out.”

I wondered if other girls, for different misdemeanors, were kept hostage at odd hours in this room and informed of the love history of Lieutenant Wei. It was ludicrous of her, I decided, to think that any unhappiness could be explained by a breakup; more ludicrous if she thought she could, by recounting her own story of triumph over heartbreak, lessen other people’s pain.

“Apparently you have no interest in this discussion about feelings,” Lieutenant Wei said.

“I do my best to summarize my feelings in my ideological reports, Lieutenant,” I said. Every Sunday night, we read our weekly reports at the squad meeting. I always began mine that in the past week I had kept up my faith in Communism and my love of our motherland; I filled the rest of the page with military and political slogans that not even Major Tang could find fault with. I had been criticized by our squad leader for being insincere in my reports, so I learned to add personal touches. “In the past week I have continued my efforts to understand the invincibility of Marxism,” and, “In the coming week I will work on The Communist Manifesto.”

Lieutenant Wei sighed. “I’m not talking about the feelings in your ideological reports.”

“I don’t have much feeling about most people, Lieutenant,” I said. There had not been a boyfriend and perhaps there never would be one—the man who had not wiped away my tears under the wisteria trellis had later done so, repeatedly, when my memories were revised into dreams, and who had chosen not to claim the love had left no space for others it: in high school there had been a boy or two, like there is a boy or two for most girls during those years, but I had returned their letters in new envelopes, never adding a line, thinking that would be enough to end what should not have been started.

Without a word Lieutenant Wei put the book in her drawer. I wondered how Professor Shan would have felt had she known that her beloved book had fallen into the hands of someone who, in her mind, was ill-educated. I felt a slight, vindictive joy, directed both at Professor Shan and at myself.

I saluted to Lieutenant Wei’s back when I was dismissed, but before I opened her door she told me in an urgent tone to come back. We stood in front of her window, watching huge flakes of snow falling in the windless night. In a hushed voice, as if it were a secret that we needed to keep between us, she said without turning to me, “You know, I’ve never seen real snow.”

 

The snow continued falling the next morning, bringing a festive mood to the camp. It was the first snow many of the locals had ever seen, and the weatherman had forecast a record storm, more snow than in one hundred and twenty years, if not longer. The officers’ orders came as though from a faraway land, their shrill whistles marking our military routines muffled. At formation drill, we marched with less resolve, the ground becoming more and more plush by the hour. A huge snowman was erected in front of the mess hall by the cooking squad, his straw hat almost touching the eaves; a squad of smaller snowmen were installed next to the pigsties, in perfect formation.

The wind picked up in the evening, and by the next day the snow was more of a concern than a marvel. It did not stop until the end of the third day. The temperature had fallen sharply. There was no heating in the camp, and most of the pipes were frozen. The cooking squad, who kept the big stove burning, managed to have running water in the kitchen, and each of us was rationed a basin of water. In the mornings we broke the ice on the surface to clean our faces.

Ping was the first in our squad to develop frostbite, which in a day or two affected all of us, on our cheeks and ears, hands and feet. None of us, after days of marching in the snow, had dry shoes or socks.

The snowstorm had turned us quiet; talking seemed to require extra energy that we did not possess. On the evening of the third day, while we were waiting for the dinner whistle, Ping reread her father’s letter from the previous week—the snowstorm had stopped the post, and the weekly letter from Ping’s father, precise as clockwork, had not come—and announced that she was not crying not because there was nothing to cry about, but because tears would do more damage to her already swollen cheeks. Nan smiled, then sang us a folk song in which a girl named Little Cabbage loses her mother during her infancy and suffers a long and painful life under the reign of a cruel stepmother and spoiled half-brother.

“We Little Cabbages should unite and take our fates into our own hands,” Ping said after Nan finished the song. “I have an idea: we should pair up and share beds at night.”

The most miserable time of the past few days had been crawling under the ice cold quilt. Most of us went to bed wearing layers of clothes. Still, a small shift in position would cause one’s arm or leg to come into contact with the cold sheet; we dared not move in our sleep, and as a result woke up with cramped muscles.

Ping began telling a story that she said she had read in Reader’s Digest. A priest, having arrived in the Canadian wilderness, was assigned a young local girl as a guide for his journey to his post, and when the two were stranded in a shed by a snowstorm, the girl discovered that she had forgotten to bring a flint and tinder. At night, it was so cold that they were in danger of freezing to death, so the girl suggested that they sleep together to keep each other warm. “Of course the priest, who had never been close to a young woman, fell in love when the girl wrapped them up together in a blanket. He never reached his destination, but married the girl. Years later, she told him that she had lied—a local girl, she would never have forgotten the flint and tinder,” Ping said, for a moment looking alive and happy. “Imagine that!”

Lieutenant Wei might not allow us to share beds, our squad leader said. Why not? Ping asked, and said that Lieutenant Hong had begun sleeping in Lieutenant Wei’s bed. “They’re cold, too.”

“How did this discovery occur?” Nan asked, and winked at me as if she and I had access to some secret knowledge that was denied Ping. She was on the way to the restroom a couple of nights ago, Ping said, when she saw Lieutenant Hong sneak into Lieutenant Wei’s room. “They didn’t see me, of course,” Ping said. “But think about it. It makes sense, no? Two bodies are better than one in this cold weather.”

Two girls whose beds were across the aisle asked the squad leader to pair them up. The squad leader said that she would have to report to Lieutenant Wei, and five minutes later returned with the official permission. Should we draw lots every night? Ping asked, becoming more excited about her idea. We could spend the day guessing who we would sleep with at night, she said; suspense would make the time go faster.

Nan watched the squad with amusement. I waited, and when she did not say anything, I said that I could not bed with another person.

“Why?” asked Ping.

I would not be able to sleep, I said.

“But think about how warm it would be,” Ping said. “One can’t possibly sleep well in this cold.”

I shook my head, and said that under no condition would I share a bed with another person.

“You’re aware”—the squad leader looked at the other girls before turning to me—“that if we’ve made the decision collectively, you should honor it.”

I could feel the other girls’ animosity. I had made myself into a hedgehog, with its many arrows, which could neither protect itself nor frighten its enemies, sticking out ridiculously.

“I’ll sleep alone then, too” Nan said.

“But it’s not fair,” Ping said. “I don’t understand why some people feel they have the right to be special.”

People make fools of themselves in this or that way—Professor Shan’s words came back to me later that night, when I tried to stay still under the icy cold quilt; neither you nor I are exempt, she had said, but we do our best, do you understand?

The snow stopped the next day. The city, having no means to deal with the snow, had been paralyzed by the storm. The afternoon drills were called of, and when we arrived at the city center, with shovels and pickaxes, most of the roads were covered by frozen snow that had been packed hard by wheels and feet. “Soldiers,” announced a general who drove past us in a Jeep with Major Tang, speaking through a megaphone. “You’ve been fed by the army, and now it’s time to prove your value to the army.”

The city, where proprietors of small shops called out to passersby for business, and peddlers fought to sell fruits and other goods, as I had found out during my only Sunday visit, was vacant. The street lamps were scarcely lit, perhaps to conserve energy. A few early stars flickered in the sky, which was a smooth dome of deep blue. Once in a while a bus, empty and lit dimly from inside, rattled past us, and we would stop our pickaxes and shovels to watch the wheels leave hard tracks in the newly loosened snow.

“What do you mean you can’t finish?” Major Tang yelled at Lieutenant Wei, when she reported to him, an hour into cleaning, that she worried we had been assigned too much. The night wind cut into our cheeks as if with a thin blade, but more despairing than the pain was the endless road. “The word impossible does not exist in the military dictionary. Now, Lieutenant, do you and your soldiers have the courage to face the challenge from nature?”

“Yes, Major,” Lieutenant Wei replied.

Major Tang told us that dinner would be ready only when the road was cleared. “Now let’s sing a song to boost our morale,” he said, and ordered us to sing “The Marching Song of the Red Women’s Warriors.” 

An hour, and then two hours later, the platoon still saw no hope of finishing the road. Ping threw the shovel onto the hard snow and began to cry. Our squad leader tried to hush her, but halfway through her sentence, she was choked by tears, too. I leaned on the handle of the pickaxe and watched a few of my squad mates join in the crying, their world complicated only by the most superficial dilemmas.

Lieutenant Wei came toward our squad, and without a word grabbed the pickaxe from my hands and lifted it over her head. The ground shook when the pickaxe hit the hard snow, and more girls stopped shoveling. Lieutenant Wei looked possessed, her jaws tight, her arms brandishing the pickaxe with mad force. Ping stopped crying and, shivering, hid behind another girl. Nan shook her head before picking up the shovel again, trying to pry loose the snow that Lieutenant Wei’s pickaxe had cracked.

It was after midnight when we returned to the barracks. Nan said that she had changed her mind, and she wanted a bedmate too. “I won’t do it,” I said when my squad mates looked at me, and I said it again to Lieutenant Wei. The lights-out bugle blew, the drawn-out tune seeming to take forever to reach the end. She had no great desire to live, I remembered from one of Lawrence’s stories, underlined twice with red pen by Professor Shan. I wondered if she had thought that she, too, lacked a great desire to live, but that must not be the case: people who do not cling onto life perish, one way or another. As far as I could see, Professor Shan would live forever in her flat, watching with all-seeing eyes those who peopled her books; perhaps she was thinking of me at this very moment, shaking her head at my follies.

I climbed into bed before Lieutenant Wei left the barracks, and turned my back to my squad.

In late January, three days after the Lunar New Year, I left home to return to the army. I did not tell my parents that there was still another week until the holiday leave ended, nor did I inform anyone at the camp of my decision to return early. 

“Would you like me to see you off at the train station?” my mother asked when I came into her bedroom to say goodbye. She was leaning against a stack of pillows on her bed; an old novel, its pages yellow and fragile, resting on her chest as if her hands were no longer strong enough to lift the book. She had become less careful with her looks, strands of hair going astray, pajamas worn all day long where before she had always dressed herself at dawn; she looked frailer, too. On the day I returned from the army, she had seemed happy to see me.

There was no need, I replied. My father, standing in the doorway with a duffel bag in his hand, waited for us to finish our farewell. In the bag he had packed, heads to ends, two dozen pickled eggs, wrapped up neatly in four columns of newspapers. I had told him not to bother with the eggs, but he insisted that I looked ill-fed.

“So, you are doing well in the army?” my mother asked.

I said that all was well. I had noticed, upon returning, that my mother would sometimes make an effort to chat with me, but her interest was fleeting, and she was easily tired or bored by me; so eventually we settled into the old mode, conversations between us polite and formal. My father, too, seemed to cling to my presence more than before: in the mornings when he returned home from the night shift, he would pick up two pieces of fried bread from the street peddler and watch me eat them before they turned cold. The previous day he insisted on accompanying me when I went to the stores to buy a few things for the camp, looking away when I asked the clerk for sanitary napkins.

Had they missed me while I was gone? I could not tell. My parents had always been quiet around each other, simple household communications transmitted not by words: my father, upon returning from work in the morning, would brew the tea and hand a cup to my mother, who would by then have groomed and dressed herself; when breakfast was ready, he’d place her plate first on the table, and she would join us without having to be reminded, though she rarely touched the food. My father would nap from mid-morning to early afternoon, and my mother left the flat when he slept. I never knew where she went, but she always came back and rested in bed when my father got up to finish the day’s chores. When she became weaker, she no longer took long walks when my father napped. They must have talked to each other, but mostly there was silence between them, a comfort more than a reason for resentment. I believe, to this day, that despite its cruelty, fate granted them the best companions they could have asked for in a marriage: they knew what they needed from each other, and they did not request what they could not have.

My mother told me to come closer to her bed. My father nodded at me in a pleading way, and she told me to bend over so she could have a good look at my face. She touched my cheeks where the frostbitten skin was now puffy and tender, with a yellowish hue, which gave my face the look of a rotten apple. “Look what they did to you,” my mother said, as if she had noticed it for the first time.

The frostbite is getting better, I said, and then asked my father if it was time for us to go.

“Things get better. Or else they get worse,” my mother said. “You should learn to take care of your face. You are prettier than you let yourself believe.”

I don’t mind looking ugly, I said.

“You should know that you can’t possibly be ugly because you are my daughter.” She was almost inaudible.

Later I wondered if she meant that she would not have adopted a homely-looking baby, or if, perhaps, on a whim, she wanted to claim my blood connection to her. She seemed to have other things to say, but I said good-bye, and she only laughed lightly. Typical for a young girl to be in a hurry, she said, and then waved for my father and me to leave her alone.

Neither my father nor I talked on the bus ride to the train station. He looked older, moving more slowly than I remembered. Men his age should be thinking about retirement, but I knew he could not retire before I could support them. I felt guilty about escaping home and leaving the burden of my mother to him. How was he managing while I was not home, I asked him as we waited in the long line at the boarding entrance. He seemed surprised by my question. Nothing much to manage, he replied, and said that things were as they always were. This talk, neither here nor there, left us embarrassed, and I could see his relief when we finally boarded the train. He lifted my suitcase to the luggage rack and carefully stored the duffel bag with the eggs under my seat. Be well then, he said, shaking my hand, again solemnly. I told him not to wait for the departure of the train, knowing he would not obey my wish. When the whistle blew, he stepped off the train and waved behind the gray and grimy window when the train inched forward, and I waved back once, thinking perhaps we were the loneliest family in the world because we were meant to be that way.

No one questioned my lie when I arrived. The camp was empty, no rushing steps on the staircase for the early morning training, no singing contest before meals so that Major Tang could determine which platoon would enter the mess hall first. The senior officers, who had families at the compound across the street, showed up once a day, and only when they were present did the junior officers—Lieutenant Wei and the other two platoon leaders, the company supply officer, and the clerk—assume a military appearance.

I began to eat with the cooking squad in the kitchen so that the officers would not be reminded of my presence. The conscripts, boys my age or younger, had joined the army to seek a future that was otherwise not available to them. I knew there were girls who were particularly close to the cooking squad—whether for friendship or an extra bite or two I could not decide. Before, I had talked to the conscripts only when our squad was on cooking duty, so I worried that they would resent a stranger, but they seemed happy that I—or perhaps any girl for that matter—chose to eat with them. They told jokes, making fun of people that I had never met, or of one another, and I tried my best to smile, since I knew they were doing it for my sake.

After each meal, I followed the two conscripts on duty to the pigsties, and then to the vegetable garden, which did not require a lot of work at this time of the year. None of us had things to rush to, so we made the outings last as long as we could. The boys took turns pushing the handcart, slowly so the slopping swill would not spill; at the beginning I asked to help, but they were gallant and never let me. Their jokes continued on these trips, but soon bits and pieces of their secrets surfaced. It did not take me long to figure out that each of them was in love with a girl from the company, but theirs was the most hopeless kind of love, as they would continue their lives in the army, and we would be gone by summer. When the boys began to confess, I did not ask questions or make comments; all they needed was someone not in their position to listen to them, so I did. None of the girls being dreamed about was me, though the conscripts did not seem to sense any awkwardness in confessing to a girl they had collectively dismissed as undesirable.

I wished this life could go on forever. When the swill was poured into the trough, white steam rose into the chilly air, and the pigs, already snorting with impatience, pushed against one another—but sooner or later, satisfied by a good meal, they would calm down. The conscripts cleaned the trough and then the sties, and the pigs found their favorite spots to lie in the sun. The pigs’ needs were simple, their happiness easily granted; the boys were in pain, but still they joked, their dreams laughable to their companions and to themselves alike. If I climbed atop the low brick wall of the pigsties, I could see the shooting range, and the hill beyond that was turning yellowish green. The earth in the vegetable garden softened every day, and soon another planting season would begin, but when harvest time came, we girls would be back in the civilian world. If I focused on the joyful squeals of the pigs, I could pretend my parents did not exist; in the sun-filled vegetable garden, who were Professor Shan and Nini’s father but phantoms in one’s fantasies?

The night before the other girls returned from leave, Lieutenant Wei found me in the barracks. Apart from brief greetings, she had left me alone the past few days, and I wondered if my early return was an inconvenience. Sometimes I could hear, from the hallway, her voice along with the other officers. One night a few male officers from the boys’ companies had visited, and their laughing and singing had not ended until after midnight.

“So, I see you’re getting yourself ready ahead of time,” Lieutenant Wei said. She examined the barracks, which I had been cleaning daily.

“Yes, Lieutenant.”

“Did you have a good leave? Was your family well?”

“Yes, Lieutenant.”

“Why did you come back early, then?”

 “I misremembered the date, Lieutenant,” I said.

Perhaps I was disappointing her with my insistence, but disappointment can only occur where there is something to hope for in the first place. I had no hope to offer her.

“I see that you’ve spent a lot of time with the cooking squad,” she said.

“They are kind to let me help, Lieutenant.”

“But I want to remind you to keep things simple regarding them.”

“I don’t understand, Lieutenant.”

“Of course you do,” she said. “Don’t you know that you do a bad job acting dumb?”

“I consider my behavior soldierly around the cooking squad, Lieutenant.”

“You don’t have much feeling toward those poor boys, is that what you’re saying? To tell you the truth, you’re not my concern. You could suffer the most horrible thing and I wouldn’t give a damn. But have you ever thought about the boys? They won’t have your future. When you’re back in the city they will still be here. You don’t mess with other people’s lives and then disappear. But how can you understand other people’s pain, you city girl, full of yourself?”

We had been polite around each other since the snowstorm, and I thought we would go on maintaining that formality. If the boys of the cooking squad were in pain, I was not the one who’d caused it, I wanted to defend myself, but I knew Lieutenant Wei was talking about herself more than the conscripts. I did not give my future much thought, though other girls made it obvious, with their talk about college life and occasionally about going abroad, that we girls had futures worthy of our suffering in the army. I wondered if I could make Lieutenant Wei feel better by telling her about my parents, whom I had run away from, or about Professor Shan, whom I longed to visit again but for reasons I did not understand could not allow myself to, or Nini’s father, whom I would never see again. But animosity is easier to live with than sympathy, and indifference leaves less damage in the long run.

 

In early April we set out on a month-long march across Mount Dabie, hailed by Major Tang as the revolutionary cradle of our Communist nation. The expedition, planned to boost our Communist morale, was nevertheless a welcome alternative to our daily drills, and to the long hours we spent sitting in ideological seminars.

Never would I have a more memorable time than the month I spent in the mountains, though I wonder, when I say this, if it only appears so because it is our nature to make a heaven out of places to which we can never return. But if I close my eyes and hum the songs that we sang on the road—“The Red Azaleas,” “The Warsaw Marching Song,” “The Song of the Communist Youth,” “Under the Shining North Star”—I can see us again, lining up on the first day at the drill ground, waiting for the lorries to arrive and transport us from the camp to an army depot in the mountains. Don’t we look like giant snails bearing our homes on our backs? I remember Ping’s comment—each of us carried, bundled tightly in a plastic sheet, a bedroll and a set of uniforms for changing, a heavy raincoat, two pairs of shoes, a satchel with towels, a cup, a toothbrush and toothpaste, and a canteen, all arranged as compactly as possible so the items would not become more of a burden than they were. Turtles, Nan corrected Ping, and went on to tell a joke about turtles, though hard as I try now, I can remember only the laughter around her after she finished the joke.

We were jostled in the covered lorries, for hours it seemed, on the winding mountain road, and our excitement was slowly replaced by exhaustion. On a particularly uneven stretch of road, Nan stood up from where she was sitting on her bedroll, and worked loose the rope that bound the two roof tarps together. Lieutenant Wei, who was sitting at the other end, ordered her to sit down. Nan looked out the gap for a long moment and then retied the tarps as best she could. “If the lorry missed a turn, we would die together,” she said to no one in particular, and began to sing in English: If you miss the train I am on, you will know that I am gone. You can hear the whistle blow a hundred miles.

 Her voice was more sorrowful than ever, though there was a smile on her face. Lieutenant Wei seemed to be as stricken as we were, even though she could not understand what Nan was singing. When the song ended, we listened to the tree branches scratching the tarp and pebbles bumping off the wheels of the lorry. I wondered why sadness seemed to roll off her as raindrops roll off a lotus leaf, without leaving any trace; I wondered how one could acquire as unaffected a soul as she had.

We stayed in the army depot that night, the last time during the journey we would be sleeping in bunk beds—later we would sleep on the unpaved dirt floors of village schools, and in the meeting halls of People’s Communes from the fifties that were no longer in use, and in the field, our whole squad squeezed together in small patch of space. I would soon learn to let my defenses down, but on that first night, when the mountain air chilled our bones and made our teeth chatter, I again refused to share a bed with a squad mate.

At three o’clock in the morning, I was shaken awake for my night-watch duty. I wrapped myself in a quilt and went into the yard, and took my position under the brick wall. The night was clear and cold, the stars so close that one could almost reach them by raising a hand. An owl hooted and was answered by another, and I remembered the story—one of the few my father had told me—about the owls that carried the message of death: they would spend each night counting the hairs in a person’s eyebrows, and when they finished counting at daybreak, that person would die. When the owl hooted again, I shivered and rubbed my eyebrows, as my father had done for me when I was little, so the owls cannot count your eyebrows, he had said, his gentle touch on my eyebrows a comfort.

Jie, the other girl on night duty, shone her flashlight at me from where she was sitting at the foot of a tree. I clicked on my flashlight and waved back. A minute later she trotted over. “Are you cold?” she said.

“Yes.”

“Are you afraid?”

“No.”

“Are you lonely?”

Jie arranged her quilt around her and said she would sit with me, and I did not remind her that, if we were discovered, we would both get into trouble. We sat back to back, leaning on to each other, both huddled with our machine guns, though we had not been supplied ammunition. Jie had behaved casually around me since the winter, and I wondered if it was natural for friendship to be formed out of shared secrets; she was the closest friend I had ever had.

“If some bad guys came, we could do nothing,” Jie said.

“We’d whistle and then run,” I said, searching my quilt for the whistle I had been supplied along with the gun.

 Jie laughed lightly and asked me if I realized the irony of our hugging guns that would not shoot. I don’t understand, I said, though I did; Jie was fond of telling me off-color jokes, as if my reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover for her had qualified me to hear all the secrets she said she could not share with the others.

“Have you ever been in love?” Jie said.

“No,” I said.

“Sometimes you miss someone so much that all of a sudden you can’t remember how he looks or sounds,” she said, and asked if I had ever experienced that.

I thought about Nini’s father, whose face I could call up if I wanted to, though I rarely did; I thought about Professor Shan, whose voice came more easily to me than her face.

“My boyfriend and I—we did it in the winter.”

“Like they did in the novel?” I asked.

Jie told me not to believe anything I’d read in that book. “You think you will remember every moment, every detail, but the truth is, I can’t remember much about it. Can’t even remember how long we were at it.”

How could one forget such things? I could recall many details of the afternoons in Professor Shan’s flat, the last sunshine of the day slanting in from the window, her fingers slowly turning the pages, a cricket chirping from under one of the old trunks; I had not forgotten a single word that Nini’s father had said to me on the night of his divorce.

“Let me ask you—if two people love each other, doesn’t it mean that every minute of one’s life matters to the other?”

I had never loved someone, I said, so I would not know. Jie said that in that case, she was asking for directions from a blind person. Her boyfriend was not interested in her life in the army,; he saw it as a nuisance that kept them apart for a year. “But won’t you remember tonight fifty years from now?” Jie asked. “I wish he’d remember these things with me. Two heads are better than one.”

“In bed,” I said. Jie laughed and said she did not know I could be naughty. It was a pity that I was in his place, I said, and Jie told me not to make fun of her. I was sad that she did not understand I meant it: She and I would drift apart once we left the army; we were not close, not even real friends. I would not be the one to carry the memory of tonight for her.

I wished her boyfriend were here; I wished too that someone other than Jie were next to me, someone who one day would share the memory of the mountains with me. The wish, illogical as it was, persisted into the following days when we marched in the mountains. It was sunny in those days, the sky blue, red azaleas wild on the cliffs. If one looked up, one could see the long line of green figures ahead, disappearing and then reappearing along with the winding road, and when one quieted her steps momentarily, the singing of the companies behind would drift uphill. In the valleys, there were creeks, and sometimes a river, and there was always a lone fisherman, sitting in the shade of his wide-rimmed straw hat, and a long-legged white egret nearby, neither disturbing the other. When the mountains were replaced by rolling hills we knew that we were approaching a village: first came the fields of purple milk-vetch that unfolded like giant rugs, white and yellow butterflies busying themselves in and out of the lavender blossoms; closer to the village, there were rice paddies, and water buffaloes with bare-footed boys sitting astride them; once in a while a sow would spread herself across the narrow road that led into the village, a litter of piglets pushing against her. Small children chased after us, calling us Auntie Soldiers and begging for candies. Even the youngest ones knew not to eat them right away—they gingerly licked the candies and then wrapped them up so they would last days, perhaps even weeks. Feeling guiltily privileged compared to the children, we competed to offer them treats, but sooner or later we would leave them behind and march on until dusk fell, when smoke could be seen rising from the field kitchen in the valley.

Walking comforted me. I marched alone and did not join the chorus when the platoon was singing; here in the mountains, walking was the only thing required of me, and for hours I would be left undisturbed, my mind as empty of troubling thoughts. Never before had I loved the world as I did then, the sunshine and the spring blossoms, and the new trees in the woods, and the lizards in the grass. Even the daily ritual of blister popping—in our satchel each of us carried a sewing needle, and in the evenings the brigade doctor would pass out cotton balls soaked in alcohol so we could sanitize the needle and pop the blisters on our feet—brought me an odd sense of liberation. There was a joy in knowing the realness of one’s body: the sting when a blister was pierced; the heaviness in one’s arms where the blood was pulled down by its own weight after a day of marching; the exhaustion in one’s limbs lying down on the floor of a village school; the moment of uncontrollable shivering when one left the cluster of warm bodies for night-watch duty, the coldness seeping in.

 

We arrived at a town called Seven-Mile Plain after one of the longest marching days, covering thirty-two kilometers across two rivers, over mountains and valleys. It was the fifteenth day, halfway through our journey, and when we limped into the town’s only elementary school, the full moon was already in the eastern sky, golden with a red hue. The cooking squad had set out in the schoolyard one of the most extravagant meals we would have on our journey: stir-fried eels, marinated pork with snow peas, tofu and vegetable soup, and to our surprise, a bottle of local beer for each of us.

In a very long toast, Major Tang summarized every day of the journey, squinting at times, trying to read the map he held. Is he already drunk? Ping mumbled, eyeing the basins of food on the ground that would soon have a layer of fat congealing on their surfaces.

A free night was announced after dinner, and we were told that bedtime would be called an hour later. That generosity, along with the beer from dinner, created a festive mood. Girls walked in twos and threes in the schoolyard, which was a sizeable plot that went uphill until it reached a fence. Locust trees, decades old, surrounded it, with clusters of cream-colored blossoms hanging heavily between branches, their sweet fragrance growing more intense as the night progressed. Under one of the oldest trees a group of girls sang a love song from an old movie.

I walked to the school gate and was disappointed to discover that it was padlocked. Before I turned around, someone stepped from the dark shadow of the high wall and called to me.

It was a boy in uniform, and he asked me if I knew Nan. I thought of denying it, but he said he had seen me at drills and knew that I was in Nan’s squad. He told me his name and which company he was from, and then asked me if I could pass a letter to Nan.

“Where are you staying?” I asked, and the boy said that his company was stationed for the night in the middle school across the street.

“And you can leave the school yard freely?” I said.

The boy smiled and said he had jumped the wall. I thought about him outside the school gate, waiting to catch a glimpse of Nan. When he asked me again if I could pass on his letter, I said that Nan had too many admirers to care about a letter from a stranger. The boy appeared crestfallen, and I refrained from asking him why he had never imagined that other people falling in love with the girl of his dreams. “Here,” he said, passing a green bottle through the gap in the metal gate. “You can have this if you help me.”

He had put a bottle of local yam liquor in my hand. Under the crudely drawn trademark of a phoenix was a line that announced it the fiercest drink west of the Huai River, with a 65 percent alcohol concentration.

“I only drank a little,” said the boy eagerly. “It’s almost full to the top.”

“What do I do with it? Pour it on my blisters?”

He seemed perplexed at my joke, and I wondered if his courage had come from the drink, which had made him as much a fool as his love had. I did not know why I had accepted his present. I had given my ration of beer to a conscript in the cooking squad—I had never touched alcohol in my life, nor had I ever seen it around our flat. I took a stroll around the schoolyard, and when I couldn’t locate Nan, I sat down in the farthest corner of the yard, under an old locust tree, its bulging root the perfect seat. What dissolves one’s sorrow but a good drink? It was one of my mother’s favorite quotations from an ancient poem, even though she had never touched a drop. I uncapped the bottle, wiped its mouth carefully, took a gulp, and was immediately choked to tears.

After the burning sensation in my chest became less of a torture, I took another mouthful, all the while aware of my intention to pour the liquid out and discard the bottle, though I never did gather the resolution. When Lieutenant Wei approached me, much later it seemed, I recognized her footsteps. I hesitated, and did not stand up to salute her.

“What are you doing here?” she asked. “You missed the bedtime whistle.”

It occurred to me that I had heard some muffled steps, and later that the schoolyard had become quiet, but I had not once thought of my obligation to report to the classroom for bedtime. I did not hear the whistle, I replied. I wondered if the officers were conducting a search for me; and perhaps in my daring confusion I even asked the question aloud, since Lieutenant Wei snatched the bottle from my hand and said I should be grateful that she did not report me missing. “What would happen if you reported me?” I asked. I stood up, trying to steady myself by leaning onto the tree trunk. The world seemed sharper, as if a hand had retraced the edge of everything: the moon, the dark shadows of the trees, Lieutenant Wei’s frown, my bottle in her hand. “Would I be punished in any way that you think would make me repent?”

“You’re drunk.”

Perhaps so, I said.

“Is anything the matter?” she asked, her voice softening. “Can I help you?”

Anything the matter? I laughed and said that the trouble was, I did not know a single thing that could be called the matter. How do you unravel a mess of yarn when you don’t even see the yarn, I said, realizing that I must sound ridiculous.

Lieutenant Wei asked if she could have a drink. I nodded. She took a sip of the liquor, then passed the bottle to me. Let us drink like good friends, she said; I took a gulp and poured the rest of the liquid on the root of the locust tree. “We are not meant to be friends,” I said to Lieutenant Wei.

“Not for once?” she asked.

I could not tell if her tone was a pleading one. “I was not yet given a life when you were born; when I was born you were old already,” I said.

“I don’t understand,” Lieutenant Wei said.

Of course she would not understand. When I was in elementary school, I had once discovered a handmade bookmark in one of my mother’s old novels, a few lines of an ancient folk song written in my mother’s neat handwriting: I was not yet given a life when you were born; when I was born you were old already. How I wish I had not come this late, but death has placed mountains and seas between you and me. I had thought, at twelve, that my mother had written out the lines for my father, and I had cried then for them, thinking that she was right, that one day death would come for my father long before it was her time. Later I realized that it was not for my father but for a married man she had written those lines out; I did not know who the other man was, but I knew he must be younger than my father. Still, with a wife and children, and without any affection to spare for my mother, he must have been as unreachable as death would have made him.

“Why are you unhappy?” Lieutenant Wei said when I did not speak. Placing a finger under my chin, she lifted my face slightly toward the moon. “Tell me, how can we make you happy?”

I now know that it was out of innocent confidence that Lieutenant Wei asked those questions. She was twenty-four then, a sensible and happy person. There are people, I now know, who have been granted happiness as their birthright, and who, believing that every mystery in life can be solved and every pain salved, reach out with a savior’s hand. I wish I had replied differently, but at eighteen, I was as blind to her kindness as she was to my revulsion to any gesture of affection. “Why don’t you give me a happiness drill right at this moment?” I said. “There is nothing we can’t achieve in the army, isn’t that right, Lieutenant?”

The rainy season began the next day, and it rained on and off for the rest of our journey. The mountain road was muddy, and the bedrolls on our backs, despite our heavy raincoats, inevitably got damper each day, “good for nothing but cultivating mushrooms,” as Nan dryly observed one night. Wild flowers by the roadside drooped in the storms, but even if they had not, we would not have regained the impulse to decorate our buttonholes with them. The officers stopped ordering us to sing, and sometimes we walked for an hour or two without talking, the only noise coming from the rustling of our raincoats, the rain falling on the tree leaves, and our footsteps in the soft mud.

I avoided Lieutenant Wei as much as she avoided me, though strangely, when we sat down in an open field at breaks, I would watch the rain fall off my visor, and hope for the chance to talk to her again. Stop being an idiot, I scolded myself; still, I found myself involuntarily searching for her when we set up camp in the evenings.

The rain stopped on May Day, and the sky lit up, the purest blue I had ever seen. We ended the marching early, at mid-day, and stationed ourselves in a place called Da-Wu—nirvana—an unusual name for an impoverished mountain town. There were only two days left in our journey, but before we returned to the camp, there was to be a field exercise that night. Da-Wu, once a model town, which had spent more than it could afford building intricate air-raid shelters and tunnels outside of town as preparation for the Sino-Soviet war, provided the perfect site.

We set out at eight, the third platoon to use the training site. On the way there we met the other platoon of girls, marching and singing as if returning from a most exhilarating game. The assignment was simple—two squads were to face each other in a meeting engagement, and the squad leaders were to lead their soldiers to annihilate the enemies. Each of us got two rounds of ten blanks, and when we reached the entrance to a network of tunnels, Lieutenant Wei whistled the signal to begin.

The musty tunnel, unused but by the most adventurous children perhaps, smelled sulfuric from the encounters of the previous platoons. We stumbled our way through, the flashlight of the squad leader the only light. Someone giggled when she bumped into the person ahead of her, and Ping, in a loud whisper, wondered if there were rats or bats running to find shelter from us. It was as if we were returned to our childhood for a war game in the schoolyard, and the machine guns only added to the excitement, since as children the most we could do was use a tree branch as a weapon, or shape our hands into pistols.

After fifteen minutes, we exited the tunnel and stepped into a long trench. Across the dark field we heard rustling, so our squad leader ordered us to find shooting positions in the trench. No more than five minutes later we had emptied our rounds of ammunition into the emptiness between us and our enemies, the metallic explosions shrieking in our ears and lighting up the field just long enough for us to see the smoke dispersing. What a fun game! a girl shouted before she fired the last bullet. There was clapping on the other side of the battleground in reply.

When we gathered again, Lieutenant Wei asked us to report on the battle. I killed ten and injured five, Ping yelled out, and soon it became a boisterous competition. When the clamor quieted down, Lieutenant Wei said let me show you something, and led the platoon down a different road back to town.

We stopped at a trench on the other side of the battleground. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of fireflies twinkled, lighting up the tall, slender grasses in the trench. No one spoke. We had killed as many times as we had been killed, yet we had never been as alive as we were on that beautiful night in May.

“In memory of tonight, I’m going to ask someone to sing a song for us,” Lieutenant Wei said. Many girls turned to Nan, and she handed her machine gun to the girl standing next to her. Lieutenant Wei shook her head at Nan and turned to me. “Can you sing a song for the platoon?”

I could not read Lieutenant Wei’s face. “I’m not good at singing, Lieutenant,” I replied.

“That is not a problem for us,” Lieutenant Wei said. “All we need is for you to step up and sing.”

Some of the girls gazed at me sympathetically, others were perplexed. They must have been wondering what wrong I’d committed to earn myself this punishment. When I still did not move, Lieutenant Wei raised her voice and ordered me to step out of the formation, her voice no longer patient.

At eighteen I entered the army fresh and young, and the fire-red stars on my epaulets shone onto my blossoming youth, I sang flatly. It was the first marching song we had been taught back in the fall. Lieutenant Wei ordered me to stop. “Sing us a civilian song,” she said.

“I don’t know any civilian songs, Lieutenant.”

“Do you need me to find someone to teach you a song at this very moment, Comrade Moyan?” Lieutenant Wei said.

“I am a slow learner, Lieutenant.”

“There is nothing we can’t achieve in the army,” Lieutenant said. “We’ll stay here all night waiting for you to learn a song and sing it for us, if that has to be the case.”

When I began to sing again there was a ripple of unease. “It Is a Shame to be a Lonely Person” was the song, called by Major Tang the product of a corrupt and lost generation. Halfway through I saw Jie roll her eyes, unimpressed by my foolish stubbornness; Nan watched me, puzzled. What would Professor Shan have said if she had seen me then, singing and crying in front of people who deserved neither my song nor my tears? One’s fate is determined by what she is not allowed to have, rather than what she possesses: Professor Shan’s words came to me then, her only comment after reading me a Lawrence story called “The Fox.”

 

A military Jeep was waiting for me when we returned to the meeting hall where we had set up camp for the night. Major Tang, who was exchanging small talk with the driver, informed me that I was to leave immediately for the train station at the county seat. Three hours earlier a telegram had arrived at the camp, which the driver now produced from his pocket, the thin green slip of paper smelling of cigarette smoke. Mother passed away please return, sent by someone whose name I did not recognize. My father, unable to leave my mother alone, must have sent someone to the post office in his place. I imagined the stranger spelling out the message; when words of condolence were offered he must have said thank heavens it was not his daughter who would be getting the telegram.

I brought only my satchel with me. There was no time to say farewell to anyone, as the driver had orders to make sure I caught the last night train to Beijing. We arrived just as the train was leaving the station, so the driver, ignoring my suggestion that I could spend the night in the station and catch the first train in the morning, sped down a country road that for the most part ran parallel to the tracks until his Jeep overtook the puffing engine. At the next station, a small one with neither a waiting area nor a ticket booth, the driver insisted on waiting with me and seeing me board the train safely. The only other passenger on the platform was a dozing old man, leaning on a thick tree branch he used as a walking stick; at his feet were two heavy nylon bags and a bamboo basket. He stirred when he heard our steps. The driver asked him where he was going, but the old man, not understanding the question or perhaps too deaf to hear it, mumbled something in some local dialect before dozing off again. Soon the train arrived, and the driver helped the old man up the steps and then passed him his bags. I went for the basket, and only then did I discover the small child, wrapped in an old blanket and sleeping inside, one finger curled under her smiling face.

I lifted the basket gingerly, and the child shifted her head, heaved a sigh, but did not wake. Someone—a conductor perhaps—took the basket from me. The driver said something about “the poor child,” but I did not hear him clearly enough to reply. Once I boarded the train, the driver pulled the metal door and closed it behind me. When I looked at him from the window in the door, he saluted to me and waited until the train began to move before putting down his hand.

I waved at him. I did not know if he could see me through the dark night and smoky window, though he did not move, standing straight and watching the train leave. When I could no longer see him I leaned against the cold metal door, the loneliness I had learned to live with all of a sudden unbearable. I did not know the driver’s name, nor had I gotten a close look at his face—but for years to come I would think of his salute, a stranger’s kindness always remembered because a stranger’s kindness, like time itself, heals our wounds in the end.

My father looked a very old man, his eyes hollow, his hands shaking constantly, the grief too heavy. He had turned seventy the day before my mother’s death—a suicide, I had guessed at once, though he did not tell me what she had done. It was from neighbors that I found out—she had hanged herself in the bedroom. Anybody else would have broken that curtain rack with her weight, but of course your mother was so skinny, an old woman said to me, as if my mother’s only misfortune was that she had never become a nicely plump woman.

“Your mother was the kindest woman in the world,” my father said the night before her cremation. He was lying in bed, his head propped up by the stack of pillows my mother had used when she read. I told him to eat a little and then rest, but the noodle soup I had made for him remained untouched, and he insisted on watching me pack up my mother’s side of the bedroom. Her clothes—many of them from her youth—were to be cremated with her; her collection of novels and ancient poetry I was to put into boxes and move out to the foyer—my father, like uneducated people in his generation, revered anything in print; he told me to keep the books, that I should use them as I continue my education. “She was never happy to be married to an old man, but she kept her promise.”

I examined each book, hoping to find the handmade bookmark that I had once discovered. I did not know what promise my father was talking about, but I knew I need not press him for an explanation. In the past two days, he talked more than he had for years. Stories of my mother’s childhood and youth—of being the middle daughter sandwiched between many siblings and feeling neglected by her parents, of loving books despite her parents’ decision to send her to a factory as an apprentice at fifteen, of her favorite three-legged cat named Sansan, of her delight in painting her fingernails with the petals of balsams every spring, red or pink or lavender, depending on which color was blooming in her best friend’s garden—all this was related to me. I wondered if my mother had told my father these stories in the early years of their marriage—but she had already been a mad woman then, so how could he have been certain that she was not just making up tales the same way she had made up her love story with a married man?

“She asked me if twenty years was enough,” my father said after a moment. “Twenty years was a long time for an older man like me, I told her. So she said let’s be husband and wife for twenty years. People said I was out of my mind to marry a mad woman, but you see, she was only unhappy. She did not break her promise.”

I placed a romance novel on top of a pile quietly. I wondered if my mother had calculated it all out—an older man in love with her was better than an asylum or the reign of her disgraced parents and siblings—but no matter, she had returned his kindness with twenty years of a life she had no desire to live.

“Of course it’s not fair for you, Moyan,” my father said. “I thought twenty years enough time to bring up a child together. She did not want you at first.”

“Why did she agree?”

“A child gives a marriage a future. That was what people told me. I thought when we had you she would forget that foolish deal of twenty years,” my father said, his voice so low I could barely hear him. “I am sorry we haven’t had much to offer you as parents.”

I turned my back to my father, pretending to pick at another stack of books so he would not see my tears. Neither he nor I, in the end, had given her more reason to live than the obligation to fulfill a simple promise, though even in her maddest years, she hadn’t given up the pretense that she was my birth mother. I wished Professor Shan had never told me about my adoption.

The next day my father and I saw my mother off at the funeral home. There was no memorial service for her, nor did any of her siblings come and acknowledge her departure. My father insisted on waiting by the furnace alone, so I wandered into one of the meeting halls and sat through a memorial service for a stranger whose children and grandchildren wailed when it was time for the man to go to the furnace.

On the bus ride home, my father carried the wooden box, inside of which was an ivory-colored silk bag that contained what was left of my mother. I had tried to convince him to bury her in the municipal cemetery, but he had refused. He wanted to be buried with her on the same day, he explained to me. Not right next to her, he said, since she had fulfilled her promise and he should fulfill his of leaving her alone—but also not too far from her, he added after a moment. “I’m sorry we have to burden you,” my father said when I said nothing about his request. I knew that he had guessed by then that I had found out about my adoption, as one’s birth father would not have to apologize for his own last request. “You deserve a better life, but this is all we could do for you.”

 

The pigs would continue lying in the sunshine after meals until they were butchered for the farewell banquet in late July. The new grass at the shooting range would soon be tall enough for small children to play hide and seek, though no children would ever know the place, where bronze bullet shells that would otherwise have made thrilling toys remained undisturbed. At the exhibition drill, on an extremely hot August day, several girls fainted from standing in the sun and listening to the speeches of a general and several senior officers. Lieutenant Wei, along with other junior officers, stood in formation and saluted by the camp entrance until the last lorry carrying boys and girls eager to go home, had left for the train station. While the cooking squad cleaned up the mess hall after the banquet, they sipped cheap liquor, and when they became drunk they cried and later fought among themselves. At night Lieutenant Wei walked through the barracks and picked up a few items left behind—a stamp, a ballpoint pen almost out of ink, an army-issue tie pin, golden colored, with a red star at one end. There were other things for me to remember, details I had not seen with my own eyes yet nevertheless had become part of my memory, some gathered from a chat with Nan in college, others imagined.

I did not report back to the army after my mother’s cremation. On the last day of my five-day leave I sent a telegram to the camp, addressing no one and giving mental breakdown as the reason for not being able to return. I did not know what would happen to me—if, without the last two months of training, I would still be qualified to go to college in September—and I did not care enough to worry about it. My father had become a shaky old man, and the department store where he had worked for thirty years had to let him go, apologetically granting him half his salary as his pension, and an expensive-looking, gilded clock as a retirement present. We talked a lot at the beginning, about my mother and sometimes my childhood, but these conversations wore us out, as neither of us was used to talking, and in the end my father replaced my mother in their bedroom, lying in bed all day long; I wandered my days away till sunset as my mother had once done.

A few weeks after I had come home, I was standing by the roadside and watching workers brush the trunks of elm trees with white paint mixed with pesticide when Professor Shan approached me. “I see that you’re back,” she said. “Come with me.”

I had not been to Professor Shan’s flat since I had left her, yet from the look of things, time had stopped passing in her world.

 “I heard about your mother’s passing,” Professor Shan said and signaled me to sit down on her bed. “Is your father doing all right?”

A few days earlier my father had asked me if I thought he had been responsible for my mother’s death—would she have had a longer life if he had not married her, he asked me, and I assured him that my mother, despite her unhappiness, loved him as she never loved anyone else. My father looked at me sadly and did not speak—he must have been thinking of the married man who had never returned my mother’s love, so I showed him the bookmark I had saved from her books. What does the poem mean, he asked after reading the lines many times, and I said it was a love song from a younger woman to an older man.

“Love leaves one in debt,” Professor Shan said. I nodded, though I wondered whether she meant that my father was forever paying back his debt to my mother because of his love for her; or that being loved and unable to love back had made her indebted to him. “Best if you start free from all that, do you understand?”

I had read enough love stories to be interested in one more, I said, and Professor Shan seemed satisfied by my answer. After that I resumed my daily visit to her flat, and I continued for the next twelve years. At the beginning she read to me, and later, when her eyesight deteriorated, I took over, though she was always the one to tell me which book to read. She never asked me about my life in the army, and she showed little interest in the civilian life I led in college, and later as a schoolteacher. When I reached marriageable age, people began to press me, subtly at first and later less so, saying that a young woman’s best years were brief, saying that I was becoming less desirable by day, like a fresh lychee that had not found a buyer in time. Professor Shan must have suspected all this talk but, as always, she refused to let the mundane into her flat. Instead, we read about other people’s stories, more real than our own; after all, inadequate makers of our own lives, we were no match for those masters.

My father died less than a year after my mother, and against his wish I buried their urns next to each other. I visit them every year on my birthday, my only trip outside the district where I live and teach. My mother fell in love at an early age, my father late; they both fell for someone who would not return their love, yet in the end their story is the only love story I can claim, and I live as proof of that story, of one man’s offering to a woman from his meager existence, and of her returning it with her entire adult life.

I think of visiting Professor Shan’s grave in Shanghai, too, but I know I will never do it, as the location is kept from me by her children. In the last days of her life they came back from America to arrange the funeral and the sale of her flat. They were alarmed by my friendship with their mother, and before she was transferred from the geriatric ward to the morgue they told me that I was wrong if I thought they would give me a share of the inheritance.

I laughed and said that had never never been my intention, though I could see they did not believe me. Why would they, when life to them was a simple transaction between those who owe and those who own? Before she entered the hospital, Professor Shan had watched me pack up her books. Take them home before my children sell them to the recycling station, she told me, and I packed them all, including the book of D. H. Lawrence’s stories that I had once stolen from her. The summer after I left the army, Lieutenant Wei had mailed it to me, along with my half-empty suitcase, with the bar of Lux soap wrapped in my civilian clothes, and a letter expressing her condolences. “I wish we had met under different circumstances,” the letter concluded.

I did not write to thank Lieutenant Wei for sending the suitcase, nor did I reply, a few months later, when she sent another letter, saying she and the other two platoon officers had been officially invited to visit my college, and she would love to see me in my city. After that there was one more letter, and then a wedding invitation, and now, twenty years later, a funeral notice. Professor Shan would have approved of my silence, though I wonder if she was wrong to think that without love one can be free. What was not understood when I was younger is understood now. Lieutenant Wei’s persistence in seeking my friendship came from the same desire as Professor Shan’s to make me a disciple. Both women had set their hearts on making a new person, though, unlike Professor Shan, Lieutenant Wei was too curious and too respectful to be a successful hijacker of other people’s lives. Sometimes I wonder if I would have become her friend had I not met Professor Shan. Perhaps I would have subjected myself to her will as I had Professor Shan’s, and I would have become a happier person, falling in love with a suitable man, because that is what Lieutenant Wei would have considered happiness. But what is the point of talking about the past in this haphazard way? Kindness binds one to the past in as obstinately as love does, and no matter what you think of Professor Shan or Lieutenant Wei, it is their kindness that makes me indebted to them. For that reason, I know Lieutenant Wei will continue coming to me in my dreams, as Professor Shan’s voice still reads to me when I sit in my flat with one of her books in hand.

I now memorize ancient poems from my mother’s books. I reread the romantic stories and never tire of them. They are terrible stories, terribly written, yet they are about fate, a kinder fate that unites one with her lover despite hardships and improbability—and they never fail to give me a momentary hope, as they must have given my mother years ago, as if all will be well in the end.

But it is Professor Shan’s collection that I truly live with, Dickens and Hardy and Lawrence, who once saw me as a young girl and who will one day see me as an old woman. The people who live out their lives in those books, like their creators, are not my people, and I wonder if it is this irrelevance that makes it easy for me to wander among them, the same way that not being related to my parents by blood makes it easy for me to claim their love story as mine.

The girls I served with in the army with must be mothers and wives by now. I imagine them continuing with their daily lives, unaware of Lieutenant Wei’s death: Ping, in a warm cocoon, once provided by her father, now by her husband; Jie, married but perhaps keeping a lover from time to time; and our squad leader, the most militant eighteen-year-old of us all, providing a warm home for her family, for even a militant girl could turn out to be a loving wife and mother. I have never forgotten any person who has come into my life. As I am on my way to work this morning, I see Nan’s face on a tv screen in a shop window. I watch her through the glass pane—I cannot hear what the program is saying, but by the way she smiles and talks, you can tell she is an important person. I study her, still petite and beautiful, still able to pass for a young woman in a choir. For a moment my heart mourns for the passing of time as it has never mourned the deaths of my parents, or Professor Shan, or Lieutenant Wei. If I close my eyes I can hear again Nan’s beautiful voice, singing “The Last Rose of Summer” at the shooting range, a random act of kindness that will continue living on in the memory of someone who is a stranger to her now.