“Do you want some time off today?” Shaokang asked.
Why would she, replied Mrs. Hua. He worried that the denunciation ceremony might bore Mrs. Hua, Shaokang said, and added that enough workers would be representing the sanitation department. As if boredom was something that people like her should be concerned about, Mrs. Hua thought, but she could use a day off to help her husband sort out the bottles that had been accumulating in their shed. Indeed, she was trying to fight off a cold, Mrs. Hua said, lying for the sake of the office desk and the brooms and the four empty walls. Shaokang nodded and said that after she cleaned up the crossroad she need not report to the denunciation ceremony.
The pile at the intersection was scattered by the indifferent tramping shoes of adults as well as the kicking feet of children for whom the half-burned fabric and scorched shoes all provided endless amusement. Mrs. Hua shooed a few persistent children away and cleaned the street while thinking about her dream from the night before.
“Morning, Mrs. Hua,” a voice whispered to her, too close to her ears.
Mrs. Hua, startled, saw Bashi, that good-for-nothing idler, smile at her. She mumbled that she wished he had better things to do than frighten old folks in the street.
“Frighten? I didn’t mean to. I was only going to remind you that Old Hua might be waiting for you at home.”
“Home? Rubbish collectors do not boast about home,” said Mrs. Hua. “It’s a temporary nest.”
“But my home is your home, Mrs. Hua. I’ve told my grandma many times that you and Old Hua could move in with us any day you like. You know she’s a bit lonely and wouldn’t mind some old friends around,” Bashi said, looking sincerely into Mrs. Hua’s eyes.
Mrs. Hua shook her head and said, “Nobody believes your sweet talk except your grandma.”
“I mean it, Mrs. Hua. Ask anyone in town. Everyone knows I am generous about my wealth, and ready to help anyone in need.”
“Your wealth? That’s the money your father earned with his life.”
Bashi shrugged and did not bother to refute the old woman.
“Son, don’t you worry about your future?”
“What do I have to worry about?” Bashi said.
“What can you do, son?” she said. “I worry about you.”
“I can go rubbish collecting with Old Hua,” Bashi said. “I can sweep the streets with you too. I’m a hard worker. See my muscles. Here and here. I’ll tell you, Mrs. Hua, it’s not a joke to lift dumbbells every morning.” There were neither dumbbells nor muscles worth bragging about, but such stories came readily and convincingly to Bashi.
“Street sweeping is a hard job to get now,” Mrs. Hua said. In the past two years, the end of the Cultural Revolution had brought many young people back from the countryside, where they had been sent over the past decade. Even a street sweeper’s position was something people fought over now. She would not be surprised one of these days to find herself replaced.
“There’s no permit required to go rubbish collecting,” Bashi said. “That’s an easy thing to do.”
“It’s a hard life.”
“I don’t mind. Honestly, Mrs. Hua, I would love to go rubbish collecting, and baby collecting too, with you.”
Mrs. Hua gathered the wet ashes on the ground without replying. It had been years since she and her husband had given up the seven girls they had found in their wandering lives as rubbish collectors, and she did not know what continued to capture the young man’s interest, when the story had long ago lived out its due in people’s gossip and curiosity. He asked them often, and she never offered much to satisfy him.
“Would Old Hua and you bring up a baby girl again if you found a live one now?”
Mrs. Hua looked at the sky and thought about the question. Hard as she tried—often at night when she was unable to sleep—she could not summon up clear images of the seven faces. How could she forget their looks when she had raised them from rag-covered little creatures left by the roadside? But old age played tricks, dulling her memory as well as her eyes.
“Would you, say, keep an eye out for a baby girl?” Bashi persisted.
Mrs. Hua shook her head. “Too hard a life. A hard life for everybody.”
“But I could bring up the girl along with you, Mrs. Hua. I have the money. I can work too. I’m young.”
Mrs. Hua studied Bashi with her cataract-bleared eyes. Bashi stood straighter and arranged his hat. The young man in front of her had not had the first taste of hardship in life, Mrs. Hua thought, and said so to Bashi.
“I lost my parents when I was young,” Bashi said. “I’m as much an orphan as your girls were before you picked them up.”
Caught off guard, Mrs. Hua could not think of what to say. She had not known that Bashi would remember his parents. After a moment, she said, “Better to have left them to die in the first place.”
“Where are your daughters now?” Bashi asked. “How old are they?”
“Wherever their fates have brought them to. Where else can they be?”
“Where is that?” Bashi persisted.
“Three of them we left with people who were willing to take them in as child brides. The four younger ones were confiscated by the government and sent to orphanages because we were not the legal parents. What do you think of that, son?” Mrs. Hua said, unaware of her raised voice. “We fed them spoonful by spoonful and brought them up and then we were told it was illegal to keep them in the first place. Better just to let them die from the start.”
Bashi sighed. “It makes no sense, this life, does it?”
Mrs. Hua did not reply. Bashi repeated the line to himself and let it stay in the air between them for a beat longer.
NINI SLOWED DOWN when she approached the alley where Teacher Gu and Mrs. Gu lived. She had managed to get to the railway station in time, and the workers had given her coal and then shooed her away. None of them seemed to like her, and she often wondered if someday they would find her unbearably ugly and change their minds. That had not happened, but she often worried about it.
She worried too about Mrs. Gu’s hospitality. For the past two years, Mrs. Gu had never failed to show up where her alley joined the street. Standing by a half-dead plum tree, she would put a hand on the trunk and swing her legs, one and then another, as if she were doing some halfhearted exercises, and when people walked past her she did not greet them. At the sight of Nini, Mrs. Gu would nod imperceptibly and turn toward her alley, and Nini would know that she was welcome in the house for another day.
This morning ritual had started not long after Nini’s parents had made her responsible for providing coal. Since the Gus’ house was out of Nini’s way, Mrs. Gu had been the one to seek Nini out one morning, asking politely if she would like a few bites of breakfast before going home. Nini thought the invitation odd and suspicious, but a hungry child all her life, she found it hard to turn away.
Nini did not know why Mrs. Gu and Teacher Gu invited her to breakfast. They seldom talked between themselves, at least when she was around. They asked her about her family once in a while, and when Nini offered the briefest answers to their questions, they did not press for more information, so Nini knew they had no more interest in the topic than she did. Teacher Gu ate fast, and while waiting for Nini to finish her breakfast, he folded a frog out of the piece of paper he had ripped off the calendar and had kept neat and flat on the table. For your sisters, Teacher Gu said when he placed the paper frog in her hand, though she never passed it on to them. She had thought of keeping all the paper frogs but there was no corner in her house to save anything. In the