"Nobody will admit that my little sister ever existed. I'm the only one who's glad she got away when she did, exiting our lives like a ball through a window, making barely a sound as she bounced off to the unseeable end of our blindingly sunlit street" (p. 27)
Her style and narrative are elliptic: many things remain unsaid, unnamed, and approached in a very indirect way, maybe as a protective strategy of an author who still lives in China, or maybe as a reflection of what it means to live in a country where every single utterance can be considered a subversion deserving punishment.
"What I actually wanted to say was trodden beneath the soles of my feet, muted like the scurrying shadows. After school, I'd put on my backpack and walk, on and on around the streets, eyes on my silhouette while my mind conjured all the ways the police could collect evidence against me. I'd heard there was a crime called loitering. How far would I have to wander aimlessly, and for how long, to commit it? I mentally rehearsed my response to police questioning. I'd point into the distance, where dust swirled around the foot of a pedestrian bridge, and claim that was where I was headed. Headed to the bridge to uncover the meaning of my life." (p.38)
Her sister disappeared of her own free will. Her mother disappears when sitting together with other housewives in a protest meeting.
"The missing housewives reappeared on the TV news, their heads carefully extracted from family snapshots and enlarged for our screens. Their long-unused names were resuscitated by the news anchors, who read them aloud in one long list. Those women had become the city's most wanted criminals. I saw my mum's face again; she was posing beside a bushy tangerine tree, wearing new clothes in honour of the new year, sporting a wide grin and that hairdo I cringed to look at. '... the counter-revolutionaries are members of a criminal gang that disguised themselves as housewives' " (p. 51)
Even if the story is told by one person, about her own situation with her sister, her father and mother, the real lead characters are the city and its citizens, as well as the repressive system that wants to drown every act of dissent. Even if the perspective is personal, the story is about the collective.
"Then we came to realize there was also something childish about the police. They needed only the smallest encouragement to start playing around with their pistols, instantly obsessed with winning their invented game. All we had to do was sit mournfully on the street, singing elegies to our lost mothers, and bullets would come at us from all sides. The smoking rounds released a stink that made our eyes weep as much as our skin. We walked the same streets we had always walked, but now we felt like deep-sea explorers. Even school kids were equipped, their book bags crammed with swimming goggles, water to counteract tear gas, cling film to protect arms from toxic spray" (p. 53)
It's only eighty-six pages long, enough to present the drama of a single city delivered to the power of autocracy.
