Land of Big Numbers: Stories by Chen Te-Ping

Author:Chen, Te-Ping [Chen, Te-Ping]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HMH Books
Published: 2021-02-01T16:00:00+00:00

Shanghai Murmur

The man who lived upstairs had died and it had taken the other tenants days to notice, days in which the sweetly putrid scent thickened and residents tried to avoid his part of the hall, palms tenting their noses as they came and left. At last someone sent for the building’s manager, who summoned his unemployed cousin to break the lock and paid him 100 yuan to carry the body down the three flights of stairs .

There was a squabble as the residents who inhabited the adjoining rooms argued that they should have their rent lowered; the death was bad luck. Xiaolei stood, listening, as the building manager shouted them down. She felt sorry for the man who had died, whom she recalled as a middle-aged man with tired, deep-set eyes, who’d chain-smoked and worked at the local post office. She supposed if she ever asphyxiated or was stabbed overnight, the same thing would happen to her.

That evening, she brought back a white chrysanthemum and went upstairs in the dark, intending to leave it outside his room. As she carefully mounted the steps, though, she saw the door stood open. The room was windowless, with a blackness even denser than that of the hall. She didn’t wait for her eyes to adjust. She pitched the flower into the void, barely breathing, and ran back down the stairs.

If she came to the store more often, Yongjie would have noticed in a flash the flower was gone; she had the sharp female eyes of a southerner. But most days she wasn’t around; in addition to the flower shop, she ran her uncle’s poultry slaughterhouse, which occupied most of her time. Since she’d been at the job, Xiaolei probably could have gotten away with taking whole sheaves of flowers: high-waisted, frilly-leaved stems of alstroemeria, clusters of lilac batons. She thought they looked better in isolation, though, and kept her windowsill lined with individually pilfered stems, each housed in its own soda bottle: a tousled-headed rose, a single agapanthus in electric blue.

It had been three years since she’d said goodbye to her parents, telling them she’d gotten a job at a microchip factory down south in Shanghai. Plenty of girls had already left their village; no one expected them to farm anymore. As it happened, she didn’t know what a microchip was, but she’d heard a segment about them on the radio. She was sixteen and took a teenager’s cruel pride in telling her parents about the microchips—​a Japanese company, she’d said authoritatively, that made exports for Europe—​and they’d been impressed enough to let her go. All the way up until she boarded the train, she’d been expecting them to catch her in the lie. When they hadn’t, she felt disappointed and unexpectedly sad, boarding a train to a city fourteen hours south where she knew no one and had only a phony job waiting.

The next morning, when she got to the flower shop, she was in a foul temper. She had not brushed her hair, and her reflection in the mirror behind the counter made her wince.

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