The Iron Lock

When Tiesuo was four, the village of Liuxi held its third-month temple fair. Xiuqin held her son with one hand and two jin of wool with the other. Someone jostled her in the crowd; when she turned back, the wool was still there, but the boy was gone.

The woman in the red padded jacket had promised a sweet to a good child. The sweet melted on the tongue, and the child melted into the crowd.

Xiuqin ran until one shoe fell off. She burst into the station, lips trembling, describing a boy called Tiesuo, tiger-cap, blue jacket. The officer on duty slid her a form: fill it in, he said, children wander, he will likely come home himself, wait a couple of days. She spoke of the camera above the fair; he said it had been broken for years, a prop. She asked him to find the sweet-seller; he said there were dozens, which one.

The form sank like a stone.

The villagers searched three days, then the tone shifted. By the well, Aunt Zhao lowered her voice: they say Dashun is up to his neck in debt, maybe the child was... The listener understood. Old Shuan picked up the thread: selling a son for cash, seen it on television. So Tiesuo was not lost; he was sold. When Xiuqin went to claw those mouths shut, they spat in her face and asked why she was so guilty.

Dashun, already a silent man, collapsed entirely. The creditors came; he drank a night of loose liquor by the village gate, went down the mine in spring, and by autumn the word came that he was gone. Xiuqin became the woman who sold her son, unable even to draw quiet water in Liuxi.

She began to walk. Seven villages, then the county seat, then the provincial city. In her arms, a crumpled poster with Tiesuo's first-birthday portrait, round face, tiger eyes. She pasted it at the bus station; they tore it. On a pole; the city crew washed it away. She squatted at the train exit with a cardboard sign; security moved her on. Once a red armband told her she was spoiling the city's face and would be carted off. Xiuqin knelt: just a moment, my son was carried from here. The armband turned his face away and left.

Year on year, the photo gave way to a drawing, Tiesuo grown, this is how he would look. The drawn boy's features blurred, like every missing child.

On the buyer's side, another picture. Old Zhang of Zhangs' Bend, childless at fifty, paid thirty thousand for a boy through a go-between and registered him as found. The boy was called Tiesuo, grew on the Zhang kang, and called another woman mother. The neighbors all knew and none broke the secret; they said the old man had done a good deed, taken in an orphan. To buy a grandson, in these parts, was no shame, it was fortune.

Xiuqin searched twenty-three years. Her hair went white, her right eye wept blind. Then came the blood-test registry; she gave hers every year, and every year, silence. Until that winter a volunteer called: a young man in a southern city had registered, and the record matched. Xiuqin rode through the night. Behind the glass, a young man with Dashun's brow, but behind him stood a woman and an old man, and the woman pulled him back and said, you have the wrong person, this is our son. The young man lowered his head and did not claim her.

Xiuqin coughed blood in the inn for half a month and did not survive the winter. Before she died she slid the first-birthday photo under her pillow: when Tiesuo comes back, show him.

The village talked for a few days, then scattered. Some said pity, some said deserved. The next fair was loud as ever; the red jacket still smiled in the crowd. Tiesuo, or the Zhangs' son, still calls another woman mother, and still does not know that in Liuxi a woman once ran until her shoe fell off, and emptied a whole life.

Some locks lock doors. Some lock people in. The name Tiesuo was meant to keep him fast, to keep him from being lost. In the end, what it locked was the door she could never enter again.