1
When I was small, I was very good at Go, or good enough to win the annual Go contest for the neighborhood kids and acquire a rabbit as a prize from my parents. It was small and red-eyed and round-butted, a russet beauty that infused in me a burgeoning sense of responsibility before it ate too much and died. So we got me another rabbit. This second rabbit was big and ugly, and I loved yelling at it and watching it chase itself around in a cage. It made me feel smart. One day it bit me. I never saw it again.
Then I had Lion. Lion was a hamster. I poured heart and soul into Lion’s well-being, but then my brother was born and Mom couldn’t risk a hamster (rodent now, under the current rhetoric) smuggling bacteria into our newly babied household. Lion was ostracized. I reestablished him in the attic of our apartment building until he too died a mysterious death.
The hen was my last attempt at a pet. It was doomed from the start: Mom got her for dinner. She let her live for a few weeks, for my sake, and didn’t eat the eggs. I must have cried very hard though I can’t remember.
2
It is no good telling it now, after so many years, when my tears (whatever tears I had) and their bones (whatever bones they had left) have calcified and gone cold and seeped into the depths of the earth. It is certainly no good telling it to Yun, who nods his head at everything I say until he nods himself to sleep. I saw a bird with three legs today, I’d say. Uh-hmm, he says, thoughtful, seeping into the depths of our bed. What? Oh. Bird.
There is no point in telling any of it. Except, perhaps, in fragments. Tears. Something like this:
I had a hamster named Lion.
My mom’s mom loves playing the hero.
My mom was abusive towards the animals I wish I had. She is also a little snobbish and way too harsh on me.
A man was tested positive and hid in the woods for two weeks.
Yun works for a lab.
Go isn’t of any use. Neither is music, or art, or literature. I like looking at birds, even the ugly ones.
Hens are birds too. So are sparrows and ravens and bats. And hamsters, to an extent.
I had a hamster named Lion, who died a mysterious death.
Nature is the most beautiful, ravenous thing that can happen to you. Miracles don’t happen, but disasters do.
I wish Yun had a bigger dick.
My mom says everything happens for a reason.
Yun happens to have an average-sized dick. In January, when we had sex for the first time, he wouldn’t show it to me because he was embarrassed.
“I don’t give a fuck,” I said.
Then, when he put it in me with a thrust, I stifled a cry and felt it for the first time. It was a crack. A tear. A minuscule imperceptible fissure starting from my clit and crawling through my waist, climbing up my chest, and arching over my head. A rift right down the middle, like cell plates in mitosis. I looked up at Yun.
“You like that?” he said.
“Yea,” I said.
And he thrusted again.
3
It was late January and I was in Wuhan, staying with Mom and her mom. Mom and I went back for Lunar New Year—me from Beijing, her from Shenzhen. When it happened, Mom’s mom, my grandma, immediately felt like she had a responsibility in protecting the two of us. She volunteered to do the shopping.
“This is ridiculous,” said Mom.
“What do you know,” said Grandma.
The next morning, she put on a hat, plastic gloves, reading glasses, and two layers of masks. We watched her step out the door. Grandma loves playing hero, Mom said to me. Perhaps it was for the best. Grandma hit the grocery store at 7 a.m. sharp, when there was barely anyone. After that first day, Mom and I rarely woke up before noon.
New Year’s Eve we went out for dinner. It was late January—24th, 25th perhaps. It hadn’t happened yet. The three of us were walking down the streets, and I paid extra attention to the birds—the sparrows, the magpies, the doves. The sparrows were particularly ugly. Their heads moved spasmodically, and there was not much of a color scheme going on. Whenever I came close to approaching a lone sparrow, it spread its pathetic little wings and fled. I wondered if they could smell the blood of fifteen-year-cold hamsters and hens on my hands.
When we got to the restaurant, we had to wait a little because it was fully packed. We were reassured by the fact that it was fully packed, but then we saw the waiters and waitresses. They all wore masks. So that was when we knew it was happening.
“How’s Beijing?” said Grandma. “Everything good?”
“Good,” I said. We had finally settled down at a spot by the window. Mom was looking at the menu and her mom was looking at me. “Great.”
“Miss your mom and dad?”
“No.”
“Ha!” said Grandma.
“Miss us?” said Mom. “Not in this lifetime.”
“I’m used to it,” I said.
“How’s work been?” said Mom.
“It’s fine. It’s boring. But it’s fine.”
“At least it’s an easy job.”
“Hmm.”
“Why don’t you ask for more work?”
“That’s not how it works.”
“Ha!” said Grandma.
I looked out the window. The fancy lights were on, red and yellow and blue in the not-so-dark night. I looked at them and thought about Yun.
4
Yun says: “Guess what happened at work today.”
Yun says: “I’m gonna take a nap.”
Yun says: “Could you reimburse me?”
Yun has fifty-eight bucks to his name. After rent, electricity bills, a Big Mac, and the five Starbucks he bought for his coworkers this morning, that is. Some more numerical facts about Yun: he goes to bed at four and wakes up at eight, wrestles with sleep all day and gets home at six, takes two-hour naps at one-hour intervals as soon as he does so until he eventually falls into the four-hour slumber that kickstarts his next day. He spent seven hours in the lab today, and he is twenty-four years old.
Yun said: “I miss you.” It was February and I was in Wuhan, staring at Yun across time and space and the marble reflexivity of an iPhone screen.
“I miss you too,” I said.
Why don’t you move in with me?” he said. “When it’s over.”
“Oh,” I said.
“You’re coming back. Aren’t you?”
“I think so.”
“Why don’t you move in? When it’s all over.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Saves rent,” he said.
I did not know what Yun meant by over, or if anything could really be all over. And it wouldn’t be over, not by any definition of the word. Not for another three months, at least. It was May when I saw Yun again. He was standing maskless amidst the thronging crowds of the train station. He had roses in one hand and shades in another, even though there was no sun.
“Yun!” I said.
And he was right there, white hoodie and ripped jeans and the same cap he wore on our first date. He wrapped his arms around me.
“Put on your mask,” I said.
5
One evening in March, I decided to go for a walk. Things were better then, so I did not put on a mask. Outside, there were few lights and fewer people. I had been walking alone for a while when I came upon two figures, a mother and her child. The child looked at me. She kept tugging at her mother’s sleeves.
“No mask!”
Before I could say anything, they turned around and fled.
6
Yun’s lab, or the lab that Yun works for, does COVID testing. It means absolutely nothing. Yun still makes his meager seven thousand yuan a month, barely enough to cover rent and food. Yun likes his job and doesn’t like the way I talk about it.
“The lab manager compliments me daily,” he says.
Yun is under the illusion that he’s moving up the corporate ladder.
“I’m moving up the corporate ladder,” he says.
I shut my mouth. His eyelids are fluttering.
“May I take a nap?”
“Why not,” I say.
I took naps all through February and March and April. I had planned to return to Beijing early February, but instead got stranded in the middle of nowhere in Wuhan, stuck with a mom whose growing detestation for me exacerbated Grandma’s growing detestation for her.
“How could you be so lazy?” said Grandma at dinners, for we no longer got up for lunch. “What a terrible example for the children.” The children being me.
“I was up late,” said Mom.
“Why didn’t you sleep earlier?”
“I couldn’t fall asleep.”
“It’s the weather,” I said. “It’s hot and cold.”
Mom threw me a dirty look.
“What do you know,” she said.
I took naps all through February and March and April, and the naps I took during odd hours of the day drove me to insufferable insomnia at night. I lay with fingers laced across my chest, peacefully, demurely, displaying an unwavering grace in that silent battle against fate. At last morning would come, sheathed in light and noise and the chirping of sparrows, and I fell asleep just as I lost all hope of it.
It was a bottomless slumber of screaming hamsters and three-legged birds, an insidious allegory that trespassed on reality and overturned truth. I may not know many things, but I do know this: when nothing much goes on in real (actual, day-to-day, conscious, non-sleep) life, dreams take on the part of reality. I suppose that was what happened to me in those days. I gave in to dreams and lost track of reality.
“May I take a nap?” says Yun.
“Why not,” I say. Why not. Fuck you, I say.
What? says Yun.
Fuck you and your naps. Can’t we spend one second awake? Alone and awake?
His eyelids are fluttering. He lies belly up on the narrow bed, a trail of mucus crawling down his cheek. Yun, I say.
Ten centimeters away lies Yun. Half a meter away lies the edge of the bed. Two meters away lies the door, closed but open to being open. And that’s the scope of the room in its entirety, three times three meters, or three times two-point-something meters, which makes a total of nine square meters or eight-point-something square meters, whatever.
7
Fun fact about sparrows: in the fifties, there was a great movement aimed at eliminating all sparrows as one of the Four Pests. The other three were flies, mosquitoes, and mice. Later, they replaced sparrows with bedbugs. Within a few years, the little feathered things tyrannized Beijing again, materialized as perennial fixtures of primordial hutongs or brownish-grey spots in the otherwise spotless CBD. In summer, which dragged on way too long and way too short, the brownish-grey spots took on damnable three-dimensionality, joining the cars and the stars and the screaming children in an elaborate chorus of hell.
Still later they replaced bedbugs with cockroaches. It was all very well. Fuck the bloodsucking, trash-eating, antennae-donning motherfuckers. I never liked them anyway.
But what did the mice do?
8
There are stories—a man hiding in the woods after his diagnosis. Some health official advising people to wear masks during sex. A child dying of oxygen deprivation from a mask-on running session. I was thinking about this particular child on my way home that day, taking the metro from the north side of Beijing all the way to Fengtai. It was rush hour and the mask seemed my only protection against the squirming bodies and perforating smell of sweat. It was like a masquerade party, an impromptu beauty contest in which everyone looked beautiful because everyone was masked. It was easy being beautiful masked. Everyone had pretty eyes. What mattered was the nose underneath. So the uggos pulled masks over their ugly noses and peered out of their pretty eyes and acted pretty. And the really pretty ones shrank away in this aesthetic chaos, bitter and inert in their oblivion. I peered at the undifferentiated mass of uggos or beauties and they peered back at me, wondering which one I was.
And then I saw her.
Well, it was hard not to. She was very thin and very tall, towering over the undifferentiated mass of beauties and/or uggos, like those comic book characters with a bird in their names. In front of her face, which was pale and masked, two slivers of raven dark hair fell like curtains. She was like no one I’d ever seen. At the same time, there was something vaguely familiar about her, like with a distant relative or a long-lost sister.
When White Raven (that was the name I decided to give her) got off at Science Park, I did too.
She strode through the thronging crowds like Moses through the parted sea, insular, contact-proof. Virus-proof. I tried to follow her, but the sea pressed down on me. I was thrown into oblivion. When I resurfaced again, she had gone.
9
I watch Yun’s fluttering eyelids, the tremulous lashes and trail of mucus down his cheek. Not a pretty sight. I look at him, dumb and inaccessible in his sleep, and think about all the things he doesn’t know. It gives me a strange satisfaction.
What doesn’t Yun know?
That he wears his shirt inside-out five times a week. That my mom hates him for his poverty. That I hate him because it’s not even poverty, not to the point where you can make something romantic out of it anyway. That my orgasms are as fake as his shoes. That I was a virgin when we fucked for the first time and it wrecked me permanently, left a rift through my middle and made me incomplete.
Yun doesn’t know this, and he certainly didn’t know this in February, when I was in Wuhan and he worked for a lab that did COVID testing.
“What’s it like?” I said, staring at Yun across time and space and the marble reflexivity of an iPhone screen.
“Tiring,” said Yun.
“Hmm,” I said. “But what’s it like?”
“What do you mean?”
“The testing. How do you do it?”
“Oh, you just do it,” said Yun. He looked tired. “It’s no different than any other test, really. Just QPCR. Then you send back the results.”
I looked at him and said nothing for a long time. Then I said: “Be careful.”
“Of course,” he said.
It wasn’t until after the call that I realized I was shivering. I had forgotten to turn on the heat. I looked out the bedroom window. It was snowing, the first snow Wuhan had seen in years. In another time, the streets would be thronging with children, small and bright from where I stood at the window like distant dying stars. Not today. The snow fell silently, solitarily. There was not a shadow to be seen.
10
Mom said: Is he rich?
She did not say that. A snob she is not. What she really said was: Where does he live in Beijing? How big is it? What do his parents do?
This was March, when I first told Mom I had a boyfriend.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“How could you not know?”
“Well, I don’t.”
“You’ve never been to his place?”
“Mom,” I started to say.
“He’s never mentioned his parents?”
“He works in a lab,” I said. “He has a car.”
By the time I was sitting inside Yun’s car in May in Beijing, we had spent more time apart than together. We had just driven out of the station parking lot. The car lumbered forward with the weight of three suitcases, two humans, and the McDonalds they’d devoured for lunch. One of these humans put his hand over the hand of the other.
“Careful,” I said.
“I missed you.”
“I missed you too.”
“I’m excited,” said Yun. “We’ve waited for so long.”
“I can’t believe we’re doing this.”
“But isn’t it nice?”
“Sure,” I said. Then, “I love you.”
“I love you too,” said Yun.
For a while we did not talk. Yun drove on to wherever it was he lived. I looked at myself in the rearview mirror. I had short dark hair and my lips were bloodless. Suddenly Yun said, “Could you reimburse me?”
“What?”
“For gas,” he said.
“Oh,” I said. “How much is it?”
“I’ll take a look.”
“Sure,” I said.
“It’s way cheaper than if you call a cab, you know.”
“I know,” I said. “Whatever.”
11
Yun grumbles in his sleep. It means he’s wrapping up his two-hour nap. Time for a short break of lucidity.
“Yun,” I say.
Yun tosses and turns, tormented by his dreams or the prospect of leaving them. I hit him in the arm.
“It’s been two hours,” I say. “Get up.”
“Ten more minutes,” he grunts.
I wrap my arms around him. Yun has thick arms, hard nipples, and a tense, hairless stomach that pushes my arms away with each heave. I slide my hand into his shirt, moving it down the nipply summits to a hairless plain where it becomes a rabbit at bay. The rabbit squirms in want of cover, finds it in a place not so hairless. She wraps herself around it, drawn to its warmth.
“Get on top,” says Yun.
I strip myself naked and then strip Yun naked from waist down. It is staring at me, hard and ugly and primordial as the sun, and I stare steadily back.
It hurts a little when I put it in. I can feel the rift again, a swift, imperceptible demarcation between the left and right sides of my body. Strictly symmetrical, hitting all the right spots: the nose, the bellybutton, the clit. Then I start moving.
“Oh,” I say. For my sake and for Yun’s. “Ooh.” Yun’s eyes are closed. My legs are open. I am reminded of my childhood, of rocking back and forth on a pirate boat with Mom. But it is not just back and forth. I am rocking sideways, hauling my body around the axis that is Yun’s penis.
And that’s when it happens. A ticklish feeling, an insidious serenade that starts with a spindrift and ends with a tsunami. A disaster. Then a warm something—not cum, something concrete, cement—coming into me, flooding into the rift. Closing it.
“Fuck,” I say.
Afterwards, I lie inert in our bed. I pull the covers to my chin and cup my hands around his face. His eyes are closed.
“Yun,” I whisper.
He mumbles something in his sleep.
I have thought over and over about how this would end. Perhaps this is where it ends, with pirate boats and rabbits and Yun’s sleep-infected mumbles. Perhaps it ended a bit earlier, some weeks ago, a June day at the mall when I held out my hand for a routine temperature check and found no one around to check it. Or when I stopped wearing masks at work. Perhaps there is no end. Or perhaps there is one, disguised in the form of a beginning.
12
The next day I spot White Raven in the metro again.
She’s wearing ripped jeans and a leather bag. I’m wearing khaki skorts and a blue T-shirt. Her hair dangles over her face, curtain-like. The crowds fill the space between us like wrong answers on an exam page. It is twenty minutes past six and I have just gotten off work.
White Raven gets off at Science Park. I do too, even though Fengtai is really where I’m going. White Raven makes her way through the crowd, distinct as heaven or earth and untouched by anything in between. The crowd rushes over me like a tsunami, but I am experienced now. I find loopholes, pieces of dry land in the raging web of waves. And in the midst of that aqueous disaster her head guides me like a lighthouse, not bobbing up and down like most people’s when they walk but steadfast as lighthouses are. At last it ascends, rising from the muddied sea to a metropolitan dusk.
I rise with it.
White Raven, with her short dark hair on a lighthouse head, exits the metro station, turns right to a boulevard, walks, turns right again to a secluded trail. The trail is flanked by trees and bushes, a heavily vegetated human desert in the heart of Science Park. I did not know it existed and am not sure anyone should. But White Raven intrudes on it like she owns the place, and I tag along, not bothering to lighten my steps.
For she is beyond all disturbance now. She walks in a sort of trance, solitary, secure, a marble facade with something very good or very dark brewing underneath. Then she stops, looks around. Looking for something. The sparrows are chirping.
White Raven takes off her mask. She has her back to me so I can’t see her face. Then she squats down, fumbles in her bag. Pulls out a pair of scissors. The sparrows are chirping. She is squatting and jabbing at something with the pair of scissors, cutting and jabbing at it with child-like curiosity. What is she cutting? The sparrows are chirping, sharp and long and solitary. Maybe the bushes. That’s when I realize.
These aren’t chirps. They are screams.
For some reason I think of Yun. For no reason at all, I think of Lion, of all the hamsters that are ostracized, displaced, disappeared, dying their mysterious deaths in not-so-mysterious corners of the world.
“Oi!” I say.
White Raven turns. Her hair whips around and falls to the sides of her face like a mask. Her nose is the most beautiful nose I’ve ever seen. I open my mouth to say something, close it again because I have nothing to say. White Raven disappears into the trail.
I rush to the tortured hamsters, only to find that they aren’t hamsters but a nest of baby sparrows. There are five of them in total. Four of them are dead. They are all wingless. The fifth one, the only one with wings, is where the chirping comes from. A maroon something oozes out of the roots of its left wing, where it has been cut. The chirps are waning. When I try to wrap it in a piece of paper, it rolls over, showing three legs.