In the morning she woke up to see her mother taking the frozen red bean buns out of the freezer quietly, wrapping them in a piece of thin, damp crumbled gauze, and placing them in the stainless-steel steamer, the water inside boiling and gurgling. The sieve and the lid were rattling, the steam misting up the kitchen windows, the frigid, stony buns turning soft and fluffy. She grabbed one piping hot bun from the porcelain plate, tore it apart, slurping the creamy crimson red bean paste inside the pillowy dough, her fingers swollen and red from the burn. She’d had the same breakfast ever since she was a little girl. The aroma of red beans was deeply familiar to her. After she finished the round, luscious buns she followed her mother to the train station for the trip to Beijing, hoping to see the Summer Palace in the outcast winter, and when she was at the station, when her fingers were still hurting from the burn, she was stopped and cuffed by a man who had emerged from a black car as her mother vanished in the crowd. Mom, she called out in the frosty air, Where are you, Mom? The man escorted her to the car and said, It’s your mommy who paid us to take you away. The car left Shanghai and drove for a day and a night until she arrived at a windowless room with no light and no airflow, nor any furniture or equipment, only a hole on the moldy wall where she’d get a bowl of soured rice once a day. She slept at one corner of the room, peed on the cement ground at the other corner, her inner arms itchy with rashes, her back besprinkled with a cluster of boils, and she thought, Maybe Mom will appear when I wake up from this dream.
But the real dream only began when the seven days of isolation ended. Along with all the other girls, she’d train for military posture for eight hours in the daylight, and another eight at night. Late December, snowflakes melting on the tip of her nose, she squatted on the track field, gulping down her portion of soured rice in the five minutes she was given each day. While she was standing up straight those teachers, men and women both, would pull her arms and kick the back of her knees, and if she ever moved, if she ever had any reaction, they’d spritz pepper spray that would burn her eyes in such a way that she’d stagger and crouch in the lingering smell and say, I’ll do anything you ask. When the snow piled on her shoulder she’d pick herself up and crawl to the dorm, her knees twinging, her palms scarred and red.
She would always remember the teenage girls in the dorm, girls that had smoked a cigarette, that had failed their mid-term tests, that were sent here by their parents because of other abnormalities like being disobedient, being in a relationship with a girl, or being shy. In the wintry night they’d take a cold shower together and dry their hair in the numbing air, which would freeze solid like ice sculptures draped over their shoulders, and the lice promenaded on their damp, flaky scalps, biting and stinging them day and night.
In the third month at that reform school, she stole the bleach from the laundry room, gulped it down, breathing in fumes, her esophagus blazing from the liquid flowing back upward. Maybe Mom can take my body home if I die. But when she returned from the hospital she was lifted, smashed on the track field, and sat on by those teachers who were stripping her of her camouflage pants. That’s what you’ll get if you ever try, the teachers told the other girls standing by as the one-meter-long steel pipe fell on her hips. The steel pipe felt heavy and gelid and smooth when it touched her skin. Its echo was powerful, inescapable, like her mother’s voice. Later that night she was again back in that windowless, moldy room, her hips bluish-purple, the back of her thighs swollen like a dune. As she sprawled on the ground a teacher with a rose tattoo went in, sat down by her side, nuzzled her bruised hips, showed her a video of two women heavy petting, and when the teacher’s hand went deeper between her thighs, when that teacher’s face shifted into her mother’s she said, Can you play some music, I want something to dance to. From then on that teacher would sneak out of the school and buy her black sesame soup, which was just comforting enough for her newly pumped stomach. The ground, toasted black sesame mixed with sugar and glutinous rice flour was velvety like a silk robe. She followed that teacher’s suggestions, kowtowed to the other teachers until both her knees and forehead bled, confessing her sins in front of the statue of Confucius. Watched by the other teachers she wrote letters home, saying, I’m sorry, Mother, for not being filial. I’m sorry for going out with that boy, and I’ll never go out with any boys ever again. I’m immensely grateful for you, Mother. I’ve become new.
She was in that reform school for two years. Taken back home, she was renewed. One morning, in the white mist brightly diffusing from the kitchen, she took the same succulent red bean bun, kowtowed to her mother for preparing her breakfast, left home, and headed towards her high school. The bun in her pants pocket was steaming hot, making her left thigh moist and sore. She nudged the bun, feeling its mushiness, its warmth. At the entrance to the school she paused and took a turn to the left, her knees still aching from those long nights of standing still. It was seven in the morning, and those bars downtown still hadn’t closed. Inside she’d find women like that teacher with a rose tattoo, and she’d comb their hair with her chilblains-covered, cracked fingers, probe their scalps, and kiss their hair follicles regardless of whether there were any lice or not.
Yiru Zhang has works published or forthcoming in The Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, swamp pink, North American Review, Boston Review, Columbia Journal, DIAGRAM, Pinch, Reed Magazine, and elsewhere. She is a finalist for the National Magazine Award in Fiction, the winner of the Aura Estrada Short Story Contest, and the winner of Columbia Journal’s Short Story Contest.