two stories

by Huina Zheng

The Paper Boat

When I was six, my mother first asked my cousin Lan to hide money for her. She had just sold our old hen, and she knew my father would soon take every cent and spend it on liquor.

“Quick,” my mother said, shoving the fifty-yuan bill into Lan’s hands. “Hide it somewhere he’ll never find it.”

My mother had hidden money in her shoes, in the cracks of doorframes, even wrapped in tissue paper and taped beneath the bed. Every time, my father found it. She said my father must have been a dog in his previous life. His nose was too sharp. No matter where she hid money, he could smell the greasy scent of banknotes. Even if you sprayed them with vinegar, he could still sniff out the cash. Our neighbor, Uncle Chen, liked to say that when my father sold vegetables at the market, he could smell a ten-yuan bill lying on the ground through all the mixed smells of cabbage, fish, and mud.

My mother turned back to the stove and fed more firewood into it. The firelight illuminated her face and her belly, where my younger brother had already been growing for six months. It stuck out in front of her like half a wok strapped to her body. A month earlier, we had gone into hiding in the mountains, like rabbits hiding from foxes. My father built a mud hut with a roof made of tar paper. My mother said that once my brother was born, we would be able to go home.

Lan lifted the bill bearing Chairman Mao’s portrait to her ear and flicked the paper lightly with a finger.

“What are you listening to?” I asked.

“Listening to whether it talks,” Lan said. “Money talks. It tells you whether someone will find it.”

Lan was better at hiding things than anyone I knew. Perhaps that was because she herself had spent her life being hidden. My mother told me that when Lan was born, her parents, who lived in the city, sent her to live with her grandmother in the countryside. When Lan was five, her grandmother died, and her parents brought her to our house. My mother was her mother’s older sister. That was the first time I met Lan.

“This is your cousin,” my mother said, pointing at her.

I looked at Lan. She didn’t cry. She didn’t call for anyone. She just stood there. Back then, I didn’t know what people meant by things quieting down. I thought they were talking about a typhoon or a flood.

“Didn’t her parents want her?” I asked my mother.

“Of course they did,” my mother said. “That’s why they sent her here.”

I didn’t understand, but I stopped asking. Lan simply stayed. She squeezed into my bed at night. We shared a single pair of rain boots, her left foot in one, my right foot in the other, as we hopped through puddles together on rainy days. She called my mother Auntie, but she never called anyone Mom.

Once, I asked her, “Do you miss your mother?”

She was weaving a grasshopper from a blade of grass. Without looking up, she said, “No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know her.”

“Didn’t she give birth to you?”

Lan looked up at me. Her eyes were small but bright, sharp as shards of broken glass. “She did,” she said, “but that doesn’t mean I know her.”

I didn’t ask any more questions. Back then, I didn’t know the difference between being born by someone and knowing them. I only knew that Lan was a year older than me but half a head shorter. My mother said she’d had no milk as a baby and had been fed spoonful by spoonful with rice gruel. Her fingernails were clipped down so short they looked gnawed by mice. But those hands could do anything. She could braid hair, sew buttons, and fold paper. She could make herself disappear into a crowd. And she could hide other people too.

A month earlier, when the family-planning officials came, it was afternoon. We were sitting in the courtyard shelling peanuts. My mother sat in a bamboo chair, her belly resting against her knees. She squeezed a peanut in her palm, crack, and the shell split open and the kernels rolled into the bamboo tray. She shelled them slowly. Not like Lan. Lan could snap a shell open with a pinch of her fingers, whole peanuts tumbling out one after another. Then Lan stopped. She didn’t speak. She didn’t move. She only tilted her head, like a dog that had caught some distant sound. One ear angled toward the entrance of the village. Between her fingers was a peanut she hadn’t yet shelled.

“What is it?” my mother asked.

Lan didn’t answer. She walked to the gate of the courtyard. I followed her. A moment later she hurried back and bent down to grasp my mother’s arm. “Someone’s coming.”

The color drained from my mother’s face. She pushed herself up from the bamboo chair, her belly jutting out before her. Peanut shells slid from her apron and scattered onto the ground. “What did you see?”

I hadn’t seen anything. The road was empty. There wasn’t even a dog.

“Didn’t see them,” Lan said. “Heard them. Three people. Walking fast. Leather shoes. Two on the left, one on the right.”

My mother grabbed my hand. Her palm was slick with sweat.

Lan stood in the middle of the yard. Without speaking, she swept her gaze across the house, the cowshed, the woodshed, and the lychee grove. Finally her eyes settled on a haystack inside the cowshed. She took my mother’s arm and led her there. Pulling the hay aside, she revealed a hollow in the wall, about half a meter deep, just large enough for a person to curl up inside. My mother looked at the hole and bent down. She tried to climb in. Her belly caught for a moment. She turned sideways, letting her stomach pass through first before squeezing the rest of herself inside. Lan put a hand against her back and gave her a shove. My mother crouched in the hollow, facing the wall.

Together we pushed the hay back into place, covering the opening. Then Lan led the cow over and tied him to a wooden post beside the haystack. She scattered a handful of dry grass in front of him. The cow lowered his head to eat, his tail swishing lazily back and forth, blocking the haystack from view.

Lan took my hand and led me back to the courtyard. She sat down and picked up another peanut. Then the gate swung open. Three men stood in the doorway. One of them had a scar running down his forearm like a centipede. He walked in first, his eyes sweeping across the yard.

“Where’s your mother?” he asked.

Lan didn’t look up. “She went out.”

“Where?”

“She didn’t say.”

The man went into the house first. I followed behind him as he lifted the bedboards, opened cabinets, and kicked beneath the bed with the toe of his shoe. Then he checked the kitchen and glanced into the water jar. A gourd ladle floated on the surface. He looked toward the hillside behind the house. The hill was thick with lychee trees. You couldn’t see anything through them. Then he returned to the courtyard.

The other two had finished searching as well. One emerged from the woodshed. The other came from the direction of the cowshed.

I stared at the cowshed. The cow was still eating, his tail swaying.

“Let’s go,” the scarred man said. As they reached the gate, he turned back. “When your mother comes home, tell her to report to the village committee.”

“Okay,” Lan said.

After a while, we heard movement from the cowshed. Lan stood up and walked over. She pulled the haystack apart. My mother crawled out of the hollow. Her knees were covered in dirt. Her face was white. So were her lips. Later we heard that five pregnant women from the village had been taken away that day. That very night, we moved into the mountains. My father built the mud hut in less than a day. My mother said Lan had saved my brother’s life.

“A girl like you,” she said, “will surely find her way back to her parents someday.”

“Maybe,” Lan said. Then she tilted her head and smiled. “Or maybe not everyone wants to be found.”

After that, my mother trusted Lan with more than people. She even began asking Lan to hide money for her.

After listening to what the money had to say, Lan smoothed the fifty-yuan bill across her knees. She tore a page from the calendar hanging on the wall. It was yesterday’s date. A red rooster was printed in the center. Then she folded the bill in half, then in half again, and again, until it became a tiny green square no bigger than a fingernail. She pressed it into the middle of the calendar page and began folding.

When Lan’s fingers moved, they were like fish underwater, quick and slippery. The paper flipped one way, then another. Sharp creases appeared beneath her thumbs. The red rooster disappeared into the folds, leaving only one claw visible. When she finished, she placed it in her palm.

It was a boat. Pointed at both ends, swollen in the middle. The front of the calendar page was red, the back white, the colors crossing over one another like currents.

“The money’s inside?” I asked.

“It is,” Lan said. She turned the boat over and slipped a fingernail into a seam along the bottom. The belly of the boat opened. It was empty.

“Where’s the money?” I asked, alarmed.

Lan picked up the boat and gave it a gentle shake. Then she held it to her ear and listened. A smile spread across her face. “It’s still in the belly,” she said. “But folded so small you can’t dig it out.”

She set the boat on the windowsill, its bow pointing toward the doorway. That way, she said, my father would see the boat the moment he walked in, but he would never think to look for money inside it.

Years later, after Lan disappeared, I took the dozens of paper boats she had folded out of my wardrobe. The money, of course, had long since been removed by my mother. The boats had begun to yellow with age. Lan returned to her parents when she was thirteen. Two years later, she vanished. There were stories. Some said she had run away with a man she met online. Others said that on her way to school, she was pulled into a white van that sped away before anyone could react. No one knew where she went. Not even the police. My mother said that if she’d been taken somewhere far away, we would probably never find her. All she left behind was a box of paper airplanes. I asked her mother to send them to me, but she said she had already burned them.

In our courtyard, the same courtyard where we had shelled peanuts years before, I laid the boats out one by one beneath the sun. Each hull was empty, yet every fold remained tight and precise, as though something were still hidden inside. I ran my fingers over the softened edges and imagined Lan’s hands moving as she folded them, quick and alive. I picked up one of the boats and held it to my ear. I wanted to hear it speak. It said nothing. Like every answer we received while searching for Lan all these years.

Goodbye

“Lan, be good. Listen to your grandma.”

Every time my mother left our village for Guangzhou, she told me the same thing. When I was three months old, she and my father left to work in a factory there, leaving me with my grandmother. They came home only once a year, during the Spring Festival, and stayed for seven days. When my mother walked away, her back looked like a bird, flying past the village road. I reached out my hand, but she never looked back.

“If you’re good and don’t wander off, I’ll bring you a whole bag of White Rabbit candies.”

Although I loved White Rabbit candy, I stayed home not because I had a sweet tooth, but because the familiar surroundings made me feel safe. You could step in cow dung or chicken shit if you weren’t careful on the village paths. Snakes might be hiding in the weeds. Stink bugs under the lychee trees. Leeches in the creek. After getting stung by a bee and having my cheek swollen for three days, I decided never to climb the longan tree again. I hid the White Rabbit candy my mother brought back in the cupboard. I unwrapped one, then wrapped it back up again. I couldn’t bear to finish it.

The day my parents left after the seventh day of the Spring Festival, I began tearing pages off the calendar, counting how many days remained until they came home again. On May 10, a lovebird landed on the clothesline in our courtyard. It had a red face and a yellow body. Grandma said it was a peach-faced lovebird. She thought it must be waiting for someone or another bird because it kept saying, “Zaijian. Zaijian.”

“Doesn’t zaijian mean goodbye?” I asked.

“It also means you hope to meet again,” Grandma said. “You say zaijian to someone you miss, someone you hope to see again. You don’t say bye or take care. This little bird knows. It must miss someone.”

As I stared into the lovebird’s black eyes, it flew onto my shoulder.

“Zaijian,” it said.

Who was it hoping to see again? Maybe it, too, was waiting for someone to come back.

Grandma went inside first, her back to me, because those who leave always leave their backs behind for those who stay. I reached out and stroked the bird. It lowered its head for me, tilting it sideways. Its eyes drifted half closed beneath my fingers, as if it liked being touched. It was strangely friendly, as though we’d been separated for years and had finally found each other again. Had it escaped from its old home? Or had someone abandoned it?

“Who do you miss?” I asked in the same earnest voice I used when talking to my mother on the phone. “Who are you waiting for?”

My mother called every Saturday night. Every time she asked, “Have you eaten? Have you listened to Grandma?” I said yes to both. Then she always said, “Long-distance calls are expensive. I’d better hang up.” Our calls never lasted more than three minutes. I never had time to tell her about the bird.

The next morning, whenever there was the slightest noise outside, even if it was only a motorcycle passing by, the lovebird flew to the gate and cried, “Zaijian! Zaijian! Zaijian!”

It spent every morning perched on the clothesline, facing the entrance. The wind lifted Grandma’s laundry, but it never moved. Its black eyes stayed fixed on the gate, like two damp black beans. Sometimes I reached out to touch it. It merely tilted its head, its eyes still fixed on the entrance.

Occasionally the gate really did open. Sometimes it was Grandma returning from the market, setting her basket down by the kitchen door. Sometimes it was Granny Chen, the tofu pudding vendor, balancing her shoulder pole as the buckets of tofu pudding sloshed gently. The lovebird flew over, called "zaijian" twice, then returned to the clothesline. Granny Chen laughed.

“This bird greets people better than people do.”

Grandma scooped me a bowl of tofu pudding and sprinkled sugar over the top. I ate it in big mouthfuls. The lovebird stayed on the clothesline without another word.

None of the people who came were the one it was waiting for.

The lovebird and I waited together in the courtyard.

When it rained, we sat in the living room, looking out through the window. I watched raindrops bloom on the ground before gathering into puddles. The lovebird perched on the windowsill, tilting its head at the rain, pecking at the glass now and then.

When the sun blazed overhead, we turned the fan up as high as it would go. I sat in a bamboo chair, licking a popsicle while syrup ran down my wrist. Sometimes I carried my washbasin into the yard, filled it with water, and soaked in it until the cool water reached my stomach. The lovebird stood on the rim, lowered its head to drink, then fluttered its wings and splashed water all over my neck. Sometimes it sang two or three syllables to itself, half speech, half song, sounding as though it had changed the tune of zaijian. It was noisier than I was, and sighed less.

I had never realized I wasn’t waiting for someone to come back. I was waiting for people to leave.

One morning, it began beating its wings inside the cage, screaming, “Zaijian! Zaijian!”

I opened the cage. Instead of flying into the courtyard, it flew to Grandma’s bedside. It stood there, saying, “Zaijian.”

Grandma didn’t wake up. She didn’t move. I reached out and touched the back of her hand. She didn’t wake. She was still asleep at noon. Only later did I learn that she had died. No one knew exactly when. She had stayed in bed for two days without getting up. Granny Chen, the tofu pudding vendor, sensed something was wrong and pushed the door open.

Grandma had no wings. She never went anywhere.

The lovebird was gone before my parents came home. Some blamed the gray cat next door. Others said it had flown into the lychee tree. After Grandma’s funeral, my parents left me at a boarding school.

“Be good. Listen to your teachers,” my mother said. “I’ll reward you with a big bag of White Rabbit candies.”

I told her I no longer knew when I was supposed to eat them. She brushed it off, thinking I was only sulking. Transparent wings seemed to grow from her back, always impatient to carry her somewhere far away.

I unwrapped one candy. The wrapper held the outline of a white rabbit drawn in blue. The candy had softened and stuck to the paper a little. I wrapped it up again and put it back in the bag without eating it.

The school sat at the foot of a mountain, surrounded by high walls and tall trees. Whenever I heard birdsong, I followed the sound. Not every bird was my lovebird. But every now and then I would see one with yellow feathers or a red face. I would stop beneath the tree and look up.

If it flew down, I would hold out my hand.

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Huina Zheng holds an MA with Distinction in English Studies and works as a college essay coach. Her creative work has been published in Baltimore Review, Variant Literature, Midway Journal, and other literary journals. She has received multiple honors, including nominations for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, and Best Microfiction. She lives in Guangzhou, China, with her family.