The Leavers(48)

By the time I returned to the dormitory it was dark and my feet were aching. Qing was angry with me, thinking I had stolen her Walkman. And so I broke down and told my friends.

“Get the procedure,” Xuan said. “It’s not that bad. I did it once. It hurts, but you’ll only be out of work for a day. We’ll come with you.”

“There’s a hospital out on the highway,” Qing said.

Haifeng called the dormitory and asked for me. I didn’t call him back. I never spoke to him again.

AT THE HOSPITAL, A woman with oblong eyeglasses sat a desk obstructing the door to the examination rooms. “ID,” she said. Xuan and Qing hadn’t been able to get time off work, and I told them I would be fine going by myself. But I wished they had insisted on coming, even if they would miss out on a day’s pay. I would have done the same for them.

I handed over my ID and the woman frowned. “You’re not eligible for medical care here because you’re not registered as a city person. Your hukou is rural, so you can only go to a rural hospital. Go to the one in your village district.”

Back in the dorm, I slumped in my bunk and batted Qing’s orange teddy bear with my feet. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been alone, though every day felt lonelier than the one before. My stomach flip-flopped at the reek of too many sweaty bodies in too small a space. I was sluggish and spaced-out at the snippers’ table, like a window shade was being yanked over my eyes. I missed threads, cut accidental holes, letting the heaps of jeans grow larger, taller.

Then Foreman Tung fired me. Xuan and Qing were sure that if I took my ID to the rural hospital they couldn’t turn me away. I told them I would be back in the city next week to find another job, and on my last morning at the factory I snuck away to retrieve my bag while everyone else was working. In the empty dorm I slipped Xuan’s heart bra into my pocket, even though it was too small and my boobs would never fit inside those tiny hearts. I left my notebook of song lyrics, my small collection of cassette tapes. I didn’t have a tape player to listen to them.

I took a minibus straight to the rural hospital and flashed my ID. “I’m a rural resident.”

“Is your fiancé meeting you here today?”

“I don’t have a fiancé.”

“Boyfriend?”

“Sure . . . ”

“Your ID says you’re only eighteen. You can’t get a marriage permit until you’re nineteen and your boyfriend is twenty-one. And once you’re married, you need to be twenty to get a birth permit.”

“Okay. Can I get the procedure done today?”

“Not without the father’s consent. And without the proper permits for pregnancy there are usually fines. But since you’re under the legal age for marriage—” The nurse glanced at the hallway and motioned to a door. “Please, take a seat inside this room. I’ll be back in a minute.”

I waited, but the nurse didn’t return. The more time passed, the more worried I got. I had seen the family planning cadre drag pregnant women to the hospital, the women coming home smaller and subdued, but with no babies. I had also heard of married couples being fined for unauthorized pregnancies, forced to pay the equivalent of five years’ worth of the average provincial salary. For an unmarried woman the fine would probably be steeper, though I had never heard of any woman in Minjiang declaring a pregnancy without a father involved. If I told Haifeng, I might as well get measured for a wedding gown.

I heard a telephone ringing, footsteps and voices, a running faucet. At the other end of the hallway, a pair of orderlies pushed a bed with a gasping figure strapped to it. I would step into the hallway and announce I had an out-of-quota pregnancy. They didn’t need to come to 3 Alley and force me to go to the hospital. Here I was! Yet the nurse had mentioned fines, and paying even a year’s worth of the average provincial salary would bankrupt me and Yi Ba. The only way to avoid the fees would be to apply for a marriage permit with Haifeng, even if we were underage. Or I could leave before the nurse got back.

The hallway was clear. I heaved myself off the chair and ran in the opposite direction of where the nurse had gone, down the stairs, out of the hospital, until I reached the bus stop. The sky was so clear and blue, so striking in its stillness that I wanted to cry.

AFTER TWO YEARS AWAY, the village was different. Mansions had spurted up, built with the money of those who’d gone farther than Fuzhou, gone all the way to places like New York and Los Angeles, mansions with scalloped rooftops and fountains with plaster statues of goldfish, gates like metal doilies, four-storied balconies, windows as big as a lake.

“Everyone’s gone to America,” Yi Ba said. I told him the factory had given me time off since we met our orders for the season. His eyes were more sunken, and his pants smelled, not faintly, of fish. Accustomed to eating in a room with one hundred people talking at once, I was no longer used to our quiet meals.

Three days passed. I cooked vegetables, gathered the chicken eggs, swept the floors, and scrubbed the laundry. I missed the city, especially during the sunny, unending afternoons, and knew I had to do something soon, but each morning I woke up frozen, overwhelmed. I could eat a spoonful of rat poison, but didn’t want to die; I could go to the hospital and take my chances on another nurse, but what if I got someone who was even less sympathetic, who fined me six years’ income or insisted on telling Yi Ba?