A Map for the Missing(79)

She wiped her face and walked, down the hallway, down three flights of stairs, and outside the hotel. It seemed that she had used all her energy on preventing herself from fainting earlier, and now her body moved behind her like an object being dragged. On the street, as she walked the five kilometers home, she brought her exposed arms limply to cover her chest. Shame pawed at her heart as she walked. She replayed the moments before the encounter in the hallway, imagining scenes in which she’d prevented the outcome. If she’d said no to pouring the tea, if she’d just gone home earlier like Auntie Bao had told her to do. With Yitian, whom she’d loved, she hadn’t even dared to allow a kiss because she knew this certain danger had been lying in wait.

In Hanwen’s neighborhood, she’d known an older girl named Peipei who lived in the upper-front unit of their building. She called Peipei “upstairs sister” and sometimes Hanwen went down to the shared kitchen to chat about school and the other neighborhood girls while Peipei cooked. They had to speak loudly to be heard over the sizzling wok. Hanwen liked her because she had a kind authenticity to her face and showed none of the haughty superiority of the other older girls.

Hanwen was twelve or thirteen on a winter evening when shouts from the outside alleyway had interrupted her quiet washing of her feet before bed.

“How could I have raised a daughter like you! Capable of such depraved acts!”

Hanwen and her mother rushed to the window to see what was going on. On the street, Peipei’s father was screaming at his daughter, who cowered against the building wall. Before her mother shooed her away, Hanwen saw Peipei’s father reach down to take off his shoe and throw it at his daughter. The next day, Hanwen found out through the neighborhood gossip that Peipei had been discovered having an affair with Uncle Cai, an older married man down the street.

At the neighborhood criticism session that followed, Peipei was forced to walk through the streets with worn shoes dangling from her neck, while the neighbors yelled after her, Whore! Fox spirit! Loose woman! Hanwen only vaguely knew what these words referred to, but she seized onto another one—after the parade, Peipei stood on a platform in front of the neighborhood and confessed aloud to her “error,” which was the same kind of remark that Hanwen would receive when she answered a question wrong on her homework. What happened to Peipei terrified Hanwen, but that word meant consequences to behavior could be just as clear as a question on an exam. But what was the cause and effect of what that man had done to her tonight? All she’d done was stand quietly in the corner and do her job. There were rules governing behavior with men, how her actions would be read by them, ones that she’d been completely oblivious to.

She walked slowly home. Ever since she’d come back to Shanghai, she’d felt unaccustomed to the city air, heavy and artificial compared with that of the countryside. Now it seemed to reach like a snake, uncoiling and stuffing itself deep inside her.

Only when she arrived home did she realize she’d never zipped up her dress.





Thirty



The next day, when the time came for her to rise from bed and go to work, she instead made the covers into a cave that swallowed her. What she wanted was never to feel her own body again. She hadn’t washed since the night before, and though she wanted to scrub herself away, she couldn’t bear to look at herself naked. She wished she could cry. At moments there was a welling in her chest and she prayed for a release, but when she opened her mouth, she felt as if she’d swallowed a stone.

Her mother returned at five thirty with a basket of vegetables in her arm. She dropped them at the sight of Hanwen in bed. Potatoes rolled down the floor.

“What’s wrong? Are you feeling sick?”

“I failed the gaokao again, Ma.” The words tumbled out of her mouth. There wasn’t any point in delaying the revelation any longer.

“What?”

Hanwen expected her mother to come and embrace her and her body already shrank in anticipation of the contact. Instead, her mother broke into tears.

“It’s not fair,” she said. She flung one of the fallen potatoes against the wall. Dirt from the skin streaked the surface brown.

“I disappointed you,” Hanwen said.

Her mother looked at her squarely—too objectively, Hanwen thought, not as someone’s mother at all—and said, “It’s not about you. How could this happen, after all I did?”

Hanwen was speechless as she watched her mother cry, then flip the sink’s water on and off, then slam the cabinets. Resentment rose in her, a feeling that she’d never had toward her mother before. It was one thing to know her mother’s wishes for her, another to hear about them day and night, to feel her entire life was an obligation to the sacrifices that had made it.

That night, Hanwen lay awake in bed while her mother flapped a fan in the air. Neither of them spoke. Her body felt too stiff even to turn. This, although it was one of the hottest days of the year and her skin stuck damp against the sheets. She didn’t know when she fell asleep, but when she awoke the hot sun was already falling in shafts upon her and her mother was gone. She’d never before failed to feel the spring from the bed when her mother rose in the morning. It was as if her body’s senses were all scrambled and she could no longer touch, smell, taste. Her mother left out breakfast for her, but she barely nibbled at it. Her mother didn’t comment on the waste when she returned home. In the apartment alone, Hanwen experienced, alternately, the space as a sucking hole, borderless with its reach for her, or a pathetic remnant that encompassed the small limits of her past and future. She felt like a character in the background of her own life.