The Evening Light Home
He Guizhi, seventy-four and half-paralyzed, is left by her three children at the Evening Light Home, a private nursing house where one underpaid aide tends fourteen beds. Neglected and bruised, she dies of a bedsore infection the manager dismisses as trivial. At her wake the manager preaches filial piety online; the aide who truly fed her is fired without pay. A quiet indictment of how profit, poverty, and faded duty consign the old to silence.
By the second spring at the Evening Light Home, He Guizhi could no longer shape a single whole sentence.
She was seventy-four, and half of her was dead. Three years before, she had slipped by the stove, and the left side of her had answered no more. Her eldest daughter, Xiuqin, sold clothes in the county town; her son, Guoqing, tied rebar on a site in Shenzhen; her youngest, Xiulan, had married away to a neighboring county. The three of them scraped together eighteen hundred yuan a month and lodged their mother at the Evening Light Home, a private house on the edge of town. The day Xiuqin left her at the door, red-eyed, she said, Ma, you stay a while, we will fetch you home once we get on our feet. Guizhi made a sound in her throat, and no one knew if it was yes or no.
The Evening Light was private, run by a Manager Qian who had once kept the canteen at the county clinic. It held some twenty old people. Those who could walk, walked; those who could not, like Guizhi, were stacked on the second floor. Manager Qian hired four aides. Xiaoman was the youngest, only twenty-three, and she alone watched fourteen beds. Her wage was twenty-three hundred a month, minus Manager Qian's performance deductions: fifty for a fall, thirty for a wet sheet, more still for a family's complaint. Xiaoman had come smiling. After nights of rising three or four times her back would not straighten, and the more tired she grew, the heavier her hands.
Guizhi often needed turning in the night, a sip of water, and she rattled in her throat. Xiaoman, woken mid-sleep, grew to hate that sound. Sometimes she pretended not to hear; sometimes she fetched a cold rag and swiped it across the old woman's face, calling it a wash. Guizhi ate little; Xiaoman, impatient with her slowness, fed her half a bowl and tipped the rest to the slop. Once Guizhi soiled herself, and Xiaoman, pinching her nose, pinned her to the bed and scrubbed with a brush, so that the old woman's hip and wrist bloomed black and blue. Guizhi tried to cry out, but her mouth was crooked and gave only half a sound.
The next Spring Festival Xiuqin came to see her mother. At the door she found Guizhi shrunk to skin, her mouth raw, a ring of bruise around her left wrist. Xiuqin's tears came, and she asked Manager Qian. He smiled and flipped his ledger: the old lady did it to herself, at her age the skin splits at a touch; and see the banner on the wall, he said, families send those, they all say we tend them well. Xiuqin thought to take her mother home, but the shop was busiest in the twelfth month and her husband was in hospital; she thought to ask more, but Manager Qian had already pressed a warm cup into her hand, saying, your mother eats and sleeps well here, do not listen to her muddled talk. In the end Xiuqin did not take her.
Guizhi understood it all. Her mouth was merely crooked, that was all. At night, when the others slept, she worked the one hand that still moved, picking at the seam of the bedboard, again and again.
With summer the bedsore on her hip broke open and bred white maggots. Xiaoman was frightened and hid it from Manager Qian for two days, saying only that the old lady had a fever. He came, looked, and said, do not make a fuss, a dusting of talcum will do. By the time they carried her to the county hospital the blood was poisoned, and she did not last the night.
The wake was set in the home's own yard. Xiuqin counted the funeral costs; Guoqing complained over the phone about the price of the round-trip ticket; Xiulan wiped her eyes and said, we sent her to a home precisely so we could rest easy. Manager Qian came with a basket of fruit and took Xiuqin's hand, eyes reddening: she never suffered a moment under us, she went in peace. Then he turned and posted to his friends a photo of that very banner, with the line: Standing in for all sons and daughters, in filial duty.
The next day he called Xiaoman to settle. She was owed two months' wages; Manager Qian said, the old lady's trouble happened on your watch, by the rules your pay covers the damages, you are finished here. Xiaoman did not quarrel. She packed and left. At the door she took from under Guizhi's pillow an old enamel mug, the one Guizhi had slipped her at first, to hold sweets, with two words scratched on the bottom: Guizhi.
Xiaoman tucked the mug to her chest and walked out the gate. The sun was merciless, and she did not look back.