want, and Granny will get it for you. You know Granny loves you.”
“I want to go home. I want to see my mom,” Kang says. “Granny, do you think we can catch the train and go home for two days?”
Granny Lin looks down at Kang’s upturned face, seeing the small hope grow bigger in his eyes. Kang grabs her hand. “Granny, just two days. Nobody will know.”
Granny Lin sighs. “Forgive me, Kang. But Granny cannot do this for you.”
“But why? You said you’d do anything.”
“Anything that we can do here, in the school, in the mountains. Kang, good boy, we cannot leave the school.”
It takes a minute for Kang to burst into tears. Granny Lin tries to quiet him and pull him into her arms. Kang pushes her away, and his eyes, with the cold anger that Granny Lin once saw in Old Tang’s eyes, chill her. Kang runs across the school yard. Granny Lin runs after him, but has to stop and catch her breath after a few steps. Her old body is failing her young heart.
GRANNY LIN THOUGHT that Kang would be crying in his bed, but the boy is not there. She calls out his name as she walks in the building, checking each unlocked door, the activity room, the music room, the dining hall. She looks under tables and behind curtains, and her heart sinks deeper each time her hope proves unfounded.
For an hour Granny Lin searches, until it occurs to her that the boy may have left the building, and even the school. Paralyzed by such a thought, and imagining all kinds of disasters, she calls the two guards, who are playing poker in the small room by the school gate. Neither wants to admit the possibility that the boy has squeezed through the gate, both insisting that the boy must be hiding somewhere in the building. More searches are carried out by the three of them. When nothing is yielded, they each start to panic with different worries.
The police are called. The school supervisor is called. The dorm mothers are called. The guards make phone calls to whomever they can think of. Granny Lin watches one of the young men punch the number with a shaking hand, and wonders why he is so nervous. The guards are only losing a peaceful weekend. They will lose at most a month’s salary, as both are relatives of the trustees. Boys disappear every day—what would they remember of Kang a year from now even if they never found him again? Granny Lin begins to cry.
But Kang shows up by himself, in the middle of the turmoil, unharmed, hungry, and sleepy. He must have played hide-and-seek with Granny Lin while she was looking for him. Or did he want to punish her for disappointing him? Granny Lin does not know. All she knows is what he told the school supervisor, that he fell asleep under the piano.
Granny Lin remembers looking under the piano, but nobody trusts an old woman’s memory. Besides, what’s the difference even if she is telling the truth? She has proved herself incapable. More stories are remembered—of her eating the students’ ration, of her carelessness with the laundry.
On the evening of the day the children return, Granny Lin is asked to leave. Her things are packed and placed at the gate: a duffel bag, not heavy even for an old woman.
“The happiness of love is a shooting meteor; the pain of love is the darkness following.” A girl is singing to herself in a clear voice as she walks past Granny Lin in the street. She tries to catch up with the girl; the girl moves too fast, and so does the song. Granny Lin puts the duffel bag on the ground and catches her breath, still hanging on to the stainless steel lunch pail with her other hand. All the people in the street seem to know where their legs are taking them. She wonders since when she stopped being one of them.
Someone runs past Granny Lin and pushes her hard on the back. She stumbles and catches a glimpse of a hand before falling down; a man in a black shirt runs into the crowd with her duffel bag.
A woman stops and asks, “Are you all right, Granny?”
Granny Lin nods, struggling to recover from the fall. The woman shakes her head and says aloud to the passersby, “What a world! Someone just robbed an old granny.”
Few people respond; the woman shakes her head again and moves on.
Granny Lin sits on the street and hugs the lunch pail to herself. Hungry as people are, it is strange that nobody ever thinks of robbing an old woman of her lunch. That’s why she has never lost anything important. The three thousand yuan of dismissal compensation is safe in the lunch pail, as are several unopened packages of socks, colorful with floral patterns, souvenirs of her brief love story.
MR. AND MRS. SU ARE FINISHING BREAKFAST when the telephone rings. Neither moves to pick it up at first. Not many people know their number; fewer use it. Their son, Jian, a sophomore in college now, calls them once a month to report his well-being. He spends most of his holidays and school breaks with his friends’ families, not offering even the most superficial excuses. Mr. and Mrs. Su do not have the heart to complain and remind Jian of their wish to see him more often. Their two-bedroom flat, small and cramped as it is, is filled with Beibei’s screaming when she is not napping, and a foul smell when she dirties the cloth sheets beneath her. Jian grew up sleeping in a cot in the foyer and hiding from his friends the existence of an elder sister born with severe mental retardation and cerebral palsy. Mr. and Mrs. Su sensed their son’s elation when he finally moved into his college dorm. They have held on to the secret wish that after Beibei dies—she is not destined for longevity, after all—they will reclaim their lost son, though neither says anything to the other, both ashamed by the mere thought of the wish.
The ringing stops for a short moment and starts again. Mr. Su walks to the telephone and puts a hand on the receiver. “Do you want to take it?” he asks his wife.
“So early it must be Mr. Fong,” Mrs. Su says.
“Mr. Fong is a man of courtesy. He won’t disturb other people’s breakfast,” Mr. Su says. Still, he picks up the receiver, and his expression relaxes. “Ah, yes, Mrs. Fong. My wife, she is right here,” he says, and signals to Mrs. Su.
Mrs. Su does not take the call immediately. She goes into Beibei’s bedroom and checks on her, even though it is not time for her to wake up yet. Mrs. Su strokes the hair, light brown and baby-soft, on Beibei’s forehead. Beibei is twenty-eight going on twenty-nine; she is so large it takes both her parents to turn her over and clean her; she screams for hours when she is awake, but for Mrs. Su, it takes a wisp of hair to forget all the imperfections.
When she returns to the living room, her husband is still holding the receiver for her, one hand covering the mouthpiece. “She’s in a bad mood,” he whispers.
Mrs. Su sighs and takes the receiver. “Yes, Mrs. Fong, how are you today?”
“As bad as it can be. My legs are killing me. Listen, my husband just left. He said he was meeting your husband for breakfast and they were going to the stockbrokerage afterward. Tell me it was a lie.”
Mrs. Su watches her husband go into Beibei’s bedroom. He sits with Beibei often; she does, too, though never at the same time as he does. “My husband is putting on his jacket so he must be going out to meet Mr. Fong now,” Mrs. Su says. “Do you want me to check with him?”
“Ask him,” Mrs. Fong says.
Mrs. Su walks to Beibei’s room and stops at the door. Her husband is sitting on the chair by the bed, his
