Xiuzhen

Lin Xiuzhen lived in the last row of brick rooms in the cotton mill's family compound. Her husband had died young. Her son Dawei worked in the south and came home once a year; his wife found the road too long and seldom crossed the threshold, not even for the new year. Xiuzhen was seventy-one. Her pension was twelve hundred a month, and the medicine took more than half of it.

One summer afternoon a young man in a white shirt appeared at the gate. He called himself Manager Chen and said he came from Restful Elderly Care to do a good turn. The state had a new policy, he said: a house could bear fruit. No moving, no selling — simply three thousand a month, free. He called her mother. He carried her vegetables, fixed her pipes, swept her yard. When she coughed at night he brought pears to stew. Within a fortnight Xiuzhen took the young man for her own true son.

Manager Chen said all she need do was visit the notary, sign a line, and "entrust" the house to the company; the money would come each month. He read it fast and soft; the print was small and dense. She could not make it out, but she caught one phrase: the house stays yours. She pressed her thumb to the page.

The notary asked nothing more; he only hurried her thumbprint and mumbled a line about willingness. Old Zhou in the compound had muttered once that nothing falls from the sky for free; she had taken it for idle talk and shown Manager Chen inside, shutting the door.

For three months the money came. From the fourth it stopped. When she sought Manager Chen, the company had changed its signboard and the man was gone. Not long after, a stranger arrived with a red certificate and said the house was his now, and she must leave. She would not believe it. At the station the police said this was a civil dispute, not their affair. At the court the statutes were words she could not follow; a lawsuit wanted money and time. She called Dawei; he shouted down the line that she had been a fool, the house was meant to be his, to marry off his son.

She held out half a month. Then the stranger brought men who tossed her pots, bowls, and bedding past the gate. Seventy-one years old, Xiuzhen sat on the stone block at the compound's mouth with her dead husband's portrait in her arms, and when night fell no one came for her.

Later some saw her in the west hospital's corridor, where she had spread a folding bed and kept watch for the dying for a few coins. Dawei sent two hundred now and then, with a line: Mother, you brought this on yourself. She folded the two hundred and slid it under her pillow, thinking that once she had saved enough she would redeem the house — to her last day she believed the house was still hers.

Such companies were not alone in the city. They changed their signboards and their names, and preyed on the solitary, the hard of hearing, the barely literate. Commerce pushed to police, police to court, court to evidence; by the time the circle closed, the old one's house was long transferred. The newspaper printed the story once, and a few days later it was gone.

The locust tree at the lane's mouth shed its leaves again. No one remembered the old woman called Lin Xiuzhen who once lived in the compound, and no one remembered that she had signed away her life on a paper she could not read.