Lisa Ko: The Leavers

“Excuse me,” I would say, as they walked past me. I’d wait until they got back from their breaks. It could be five minutes, or two hours, and I had to intercept them fast, before they disappeared into the building. I learned to bring a bag of peanuts for lunch and a bottle of water, to speak politely yet forcefully, smiling to evoke both urgency and empathy. “I’m looking for the family of Leon Zheng. I’m his wife. We got separated. I need to find his family.”

After the first few visits the officials recognized me, and they’d flinch when they saw me waiting, avoiding my eyes. “Miss Guo,” one man said, “I told you last week that family registration records were classified. Unless you found your marriage certificate. ”

“I’ll come back again. I’ll call tomorrow.”

I went each week and called every day until a man said if I didn’t stop asking, they would arrest me.

For months, I only spoke if I had to, avoiding the other women at the boardinghouse, who treated me with suspicion and spoke to one another in Sichuanese. I had two outfits and washed each one in the sink at night after wearing it, hung it to dry on a rack I’d constructed out of dowels and rubber bands. I worked as much as I could, until I was too tired to be overrun by guilt, fury, and crushing sadness. Sometimes, painting a woman’s nails, I’d suddenly want to scream, and on breaks I’d go into the bathroom stall and do exactly that, stuffing my fingers into my mouth so no one could hear. The weeks melted by. Days off were the worst, because there’d be no work to distract me, and my mind was fresh enough to cough up memories of you and Leon and Ardsleyville. The hours spent waiting outside the government office were an opportunity to berate myself until I wished a bus would swerve off the street and flatten me. I started working seven days a week. I did a double take in the bathroom mirror when I saw the mournful, wounded expression on my face — like I’d been permanently punched — but it also seemed a fitting punishment.

One afternoon, after I had been in China for about six months, I was painting some lady’s toenails when I noticed a strange man in the salon. I returned to the toenails, but could sense him walking closer, and when I looked up I saw the gap between his front teeth and let a blob of polish fall on my knee.

“Little Star?” he said.

I finished the pedicure as fast as I could, asked a co-worker to take my next customer and led Leon outside and down the block. He said that one of the Zhengs in his home village, a man I’d left the salon’s address with, had run into him in Mawei.

We found an alleyway and put our arms around each other, and when I pressed my cheek to his, the smell of his skin was exactly the same. Musty and sweet, so beautiful, familiar. When was the last time anyone had held me? Too long ago. It had been Leon, before I’d been taken to Ardsleyville. I held him tighter, spoke into his neck. “Where’s Deming? Is he with you?”

“I need to tell you something.” Leon spoke at the wall. He told me how you had been adopted by a white couple, Americans in New York. Vivian had arranged it. She hadn’t known how to get in touch with me, and they’d thought I was never coming back.

“I should have never left,” he said. “If I hadn’t left, he would still be with me. It’s my fault. I don’t know how to get in touch with him.”

I heard Leon sniffle, and then the sound of my own crying. I yelled at him, blamed him, called him the worst names I could. For the past six months, I’d been alternating between holding out hope that I would find you and trying to accept that you were gone.

Leon drove me to the boardinghouse and I got my things. We went to a small apartment on the eastern edge of the city, which belonged to a friend who was out of town. I asked him why we weren’t going to his apartment, and he said, “I need to tell you something else.” And he did.

The first night we were together, I jolted awake. Fluorescent lights, a guard with a notepad — I felt a hand on my arm and shouted out loud.

“Little Star, Little Star.”

I saw Leon’s face. It was a repeating nightmare, the screaming in my sleep that my roommates complained about. The walls of the Hole, the weight of the handcuffs around my wrists and ankles.

Leon kissed me. “You’re here with me now.”

We only left the apartment for food, takeout meals we ate at the kitchen table naked, taking quick showers only to end up in bed again. Leon’s cell phone rang occasionally, but he rarely answered, and when he did, he was considerate enough to take the call in another room. The third afternoon, he went out and came back with a bottle of pills, and that night my nightmares were blotted away, sleep reduced to a dark, blank square.

It was only five days, a fever dream, and by the end we were exhausted but still coming together, like two tired magnets that gravitated toward one another out of habit, or lack of choice. As long as we stayed in this room, time wouldn’t go on. We could pretend that two years hadn’t passed since we’d last seen each other, that we weren’t avoiding questions. That you weren’t missing.

You being gone like that, given over to another family like a stray dog, was too much to comprehend, and it hovered, like the rest of the world, just out of reach. I’d heard of a rural couple who had tried to get their daughter back from a family who had adopted her, but had gotten thrown in jail. I thought of taking all the pills at once, took them out of the bottle and counted them (there were thirty-five), and put them back inside. Maybe you could still find me.

As long as we stayed inside, your adoption would not be real. But Leon’s friend was coming home the next day and we would have to leave the apartment.

“I could come with you,” Leon said. We were eating breakfast in a bakery, had gone out to wash the sheets and towels. “We could be together again.” He held his arms across the table, his fingers wrapping around mine.

An ambulance drove past, and I jumped at the sound of the sirens. The past five days had been a delusion. He was asking me to stay with him because he thought it was what I wanted to hear, but he already had a family. I could see the relief in his face when I told him no.

Because being with Leon made your loss real. “Go home to your wife,” I told him. The first day we had been together I thought I could make him choose, but by the fifth day, I no longer wanted to. “Go home to your baby girl.”

You slid down the wall until you were buried under the hotel sheets.

“And that was it?” you said. “You forgot me?”

“I didn’t forget. I just survived.”

I TOOK A CLASS in business Mandarin so I could bury my village accent and get a better job. When the teacher heard I had lived in America, he said he was also opening up an English school. I told him I’d studied in New York and gone to America on a student visa. Even if my English wasn’t good, it was better than some of the other teachers’.

“Working for World Top can’t get you an urban hukou right now,” Boss Cheng said, after I moved into the teacher dormitory, “but we’ll see about the future.” I decided I would work this job, make a lot of money, and figure out a way to go back to New York so I could find you.

I’d been teaching at World Top for almost a year, working and saving as much as I could, when Yong appeared in my class. He didn’t manage to learn much from me, but on the night of his last class, he said in English, “I’d like to see you sometime.”

He started to take me out to dinner twice a week, a few hours during which my grief would retreat, a momentary break. I liked his steadiness, his ambition and kindness; I’d forgotten what it was like to have someone pay attention to me, to have someone to talk to. Here was someone who could be a partner. And this was my chance to marry into an urban hukou, to get a permanent city residency permit. Without one, I’d always be a migrant. The city could kick me out any time. Those five days with Leon, the feeling of the floor dropping out from beneath me? That could never happen again.