A Sheltered Woman

  Copyright

  Fourth Estate

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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  London SE1 9GF

  4thestate.co.uk

  This eBook first published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate 2015

  First published in the United States in 2014 by The New Yorker

  Copyright © Yiyun Li 2014

  Yiyun Li asserts the moral right to

  be identified as the author of this work

  A catalogue record of this book is

  available from the British Library

  Cover illustration © Gracia Lam

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  Source ISBN: 9780008153670

  Ebook Edition © July 2015 ISBN: 9780008153694

  Version: 2015-06-11

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  A Sheltered Woman

  About the Author

  Also by Yiyun Li

  About the Publisher

  A Sheltered Woman

  The new mother, groggy from a nap, sat at the table as though she did not grasp why she had been summoned. Perhaps she never would, Auntie Mei thought. On the place mat sat a bowl of soybean-and-pig’s-foot soup that Auntie Mei had cooked, as she had for many new mothers before this one. Many, however, was not exact. In her interviews with potential employers, Auntie Mei always gave the precise number of families she had worked for: 126 when she interviewed with her current employer, 131 babies altogether. The families’ contact information, the dates she had worked for them, their babies’ names and birthdays – these she had recorded in a palm-size notebook, which had twice fallen apart and been taped back together. Years ago, Auntie Mei had bought it at a garage sale in Moline, Illinois. She had liked the picture of flowers on the cover, purple and yellow, unmelted snow surrounding the chaste petals. She had liked the price of the notebook, too: five cents. When she handed a dime to the child with the cash box on his lap, she asked if there was another notebook she could buy, so that he would not have to give her any change; the boy looked perplexed and said no. It was greed that had made her ask, but when the memory came back – it often did when she took the notebook out of her suitcase for another interview – Auntie Mei would laugh at herself: why on earth had she wanted two notebooks, when there’s not enough life to fill one?

  The mother sat still, not touching the spoon, until teardrops fell into the steaming soup.

  ‘Now, now,’ Auntie Mei said. She was pushing herself and the baby in a new rocking chair – back and forth, back and forth, the squeaking less noticeable than yesterday. I wonder who’s enjoying the rocking more, she said to herself: the chair, whose job is to rock until it breaks apart, or you, whose life is being rocked away? And which one of you will meet your demise first? Auntie Mei had long ago accepted that she had, despite her best intentions, become one of those people who talk to themselves when the world is not listening. At least she took care not to let the words slip out.

  ‘I don’t like this soup,’ said the mother, who surely had a Chinese name but had asked Auntie Mei to call her Chanel. Auntie Mei, however, called every mother Baby’s Ma, and every infant Baby. It was simple that way, one set of clients easily replaced by the next.

  ‘It’s not for you to like,’ Auntie Mei said. The soup had simmered all morning and had thickened to a milky white. She would never have touched it herself, but it was the best recipe for breast-feeding mothers. ‘You eat it for Baby.’

  ‘Why do I have to eat for him?’ Chanel said. She was skinny, though it had been only five days since the delivery.

  ‘Why, indeed,’ Auntie Mei said, laughing. ‘Where else do you think your milk comes from?’

  ‘I’m not a cow.’

  I would rather you were a cow, Auntie Mei thought. But she merely threatened gently that there was always the option of formula. Auntie Mei wouldn’t mind that, but most people hired her for her expertise in taking care of newborns and breast-feeding mothers.

  The young woman started to sob. Really, Auntie Mei thought, she had never seen anyone so unfit to be a mother as this little creature.

  ‘I think I have postpartum depression,’ Chanel said when her tears had stopped.

  Some fancy term the young woman had picked up.

  ‘My great-grandmother hanged herself when my grandfather was three days old. People said she’d fallen under the spell of some passing ghost, but this is what I think.’ Using her iPhone as a mirror, Chanel checked her face and pressed her puffy eyelids with a finger. ‘She had postpartum depression.’

  Auntie Mei stopped rocking and snuggled the infant closer. At once his head started bumping against her bosom. ‘Don’t speak nonsense,’ she said sternly.

  ‘I’m only explaining what postpartum depression is.’

  ‘Your problem is that you’re not eating. Nobody would be happy if they were in your shoes.’

  ‘Nobody,’ Chanel said glumly, ‘could possibly be in my shoes. Do you know what I dreamt last night?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Take a guess.’

  ‘In our village, we say it’s bad luck to guess someone else’s dreams,’ Auntie Mei said. Only ghosts entered and left people’s minds freely.

  ‘I dreamt that I flushed Baby down the toilet.’

  ‘Oh. I wouldn’t have guessed that even if I’d tried.’

  ‘That’s the problem. Nobody knows how I feel,’ Chanel said, and started to weep again.

  Auntie Mei sniffed under the child’s blanket, paying no heed to the fresh tears. ‘Baby needs a diaper change,’ she announced, knowing that, given some time, Chanel would acquiesce: a mother is a mother, even if she speaks of flushing her child down the drain.

  Auntie Mei had worked as a live-in nanny for newborns and their mothers for eleven years. As a rule, she moved out of the family’s house the day a baby turned a month old, unless – though this rarely happened – she was between jobs, which was never more than a few days. Many families would have been glad to pay her extra for another week, or another month; some even offered a longer term, but Auntie Mei always declined: she worked as a first-month nanny, whose duties, toward both the mother and the infant, were different from those of a regular nanny. Once in a while, she was approached by previous employers to care for their second child. The thought of facing a child who had once been an infant in her arms led to lost sleep; she agreed only when there was no other option, and she treated the older children as though they were empty air.

  Between bouts of sobbing, Chanel said she did not understand why her husband couldn’t take a few days off. The previous day he had left for Shenzhen on a business trip. ‘What right does he have to leave me alone with his son?’

  Alone? Auntie Mei squinted at Baby’s eyebrows, knitted so tight that the skin in between took on a tinge of yellow. Your pa is working hard so your ma can stay home and call me nobody. The Year of the Snake, an inauspicious one to give birth in, had been slow for Auntie Mei; otherwise, she would’ve had better options. She had not liked the couple when she met them; unlike most expectant parents, they had both looked distracted, and asked few questions before offering her the position. They were about to entrust their baby to a stranger, Auntie Mei h
ad wanted to remind them, but neither seemed worried. Perhaps they had gathered enough references? Auntie Mei did have a reputation as a gold-medal nanny. Her employers were the lucky ones, to have had a good education in China and, later, America, and to have become professionals in the Bay Area: lawyers, doctors, VCs, engineers – no matter, they still needed an experienced Chinese nanny for their American-born babies. Many families lined her up months before their babies were born.

  Baby, cleaned and swaddled, seemed satisfied, so Auntie Mei left him on the changing table and looked out the window, enjoying, as she always did, a view that did not belong to her. Between an azalea bush and a slate path, there was a man-made pond, which hosted an assortment of goldfish and lily pads. Before he left, the husband had asked Auntie Mei to feed the fish and refill the pond. Eighteen hundred gallons a year, he had informed her, calculating the expense. She would have refused the additional responsibilities if not for his readiness to pay her an extra $20 each day.

  A statue of an egret, balanced on one leg, stood in the water, its neck curved into a question mark. Auntie Mei thought about the man who had made the sculpture. Of course, it could have been a woman, but Auntie Mei refused to accept that possibility. She liked to believe that it was men who made beautiful and useless things like the egret. Let him be a lonely man, beyond the reach of any fiendish woman.

  Baby started to wiggle. Don’t you stir before your ma finishes her soup, Auntie Mei warned in a whisper, though in vain. The egret, startled, took off with an unhurried elegance, its single squawk stunning Auntie Mei and then making her laugh. For sure, you’re getting old and forgetful: there was no such statue yesterday. Auntie Mei picked up Baby and went into the yard. There were fewer goldfish now, but at least some had escaped the egret’s raid. All the same, she would have to tell Chanel about the loss. You think you have a problem with postpartum depression? Think of the goldfish, living one day in a paradise pond and the next day going to Heaven in the stomach of a passing egret.

  Auntie Mei believed in strict routines for every baby and mother in her charge. For the first week, she fed the mother six meals a day, with three snacks in between; from the second week on, it was four meals and two snacks. The baby was to be nursed every two hours during the day, and every three or four hours at night. She let the parents decide whether the crib was kept in their bedroom or in the nursery, but she would not allow it in her bedroom. No, this was not for her convenience, she explained to them; there was simply no reason for a baby to be close to someone who was there for only a month.

  ‘But it’s impossible to eat so much. People are different,’ Chanel said the next day. Less weepy at the moment, she was curled up on the sofa, a pair of heating pads on her chest: Auntie Mei had not been impressed with the young woman’s milk production.

  You can be as different as you want after I leave, Auntie Mei thought as she bathed Baby; your son can grow into a lopsided squash and I won’t care a bit. But no mother or baby could deviate just yet. The reason people hired a first-month nanny, Auntie Mei told Chanel, was to make sure that things went correctly, not differently.

  ‘But did you follow this schedule when you had your children? I bet you didn’t.’

  ‘As a matter of fact, I didn’t, only because I didn’t have children.’

  ‘Not even one?’

  ‘You didn’t specify a nanny who had her own children.’

  ‘But why would you … why did you choose this line of work?’

  Why indeed. ‘Sometimes a job chooses you,’ Auntie Mei said. Ha, who knew she could be so profound?

  ‘But you must love children, then?’

  Oh, no, no, not this one or that one; not any of them. ‘Does a bricklayer love his bricks?’ Auntie Mei asked. ‘Does the dishwasher repairman love the dishwashers?’ That morning, a man had come to look at Chanel’s malfunctioning dishwasher. It had taken him only twenty minutes of poking, but the bill was $100, as much as a whole day’s wages for Auntie Mei.

  ‘Auntie, that’s not a good argument.’

  ‘My job doesn’t require me to argue well. If I could argue, I’d have become a lawyer, like your husband, no?’

  Chanel made a mirthless laughing sound. Despite her self-diagnosed depression, she seemed to enjoy talking with Auntie Mei more than most mothers, who talked to her about their babies and their breast-feeding but otherwise had little interest in her.

  Auntie Mei put Baby on the sofa next to Chanel, who was unwilling to make room. ‘Now, let’s look into this milk situation,’ Auntie Mei said, rubbing her hands until they were warm before removing the heating pads. Chanel cried out in pain.

  ‘I haven’t even touched you.’

  Look at your eyes, Auntie Mei wanted to say. Not even a good plumber could fix such a leak.

  ‘I don’t want to nurse this thing any more,’ Chanel said.

  This thing? ‘He’s your son.’

  ‘His father’s, too. Why can’t he be here to help?’

  ‘Men don’t make milk.’

  Chanel laughed, despite her tears. ‘No. The only thing they make is money.’

  ‘You’re lucky to have found one who makes money. Not all of them do, you know.’

  Chanel dried her eyes carefully with the inside of her pyjama sleeve. ‘Auntie, are you married?’

  ‘Once,’ Auntie Mei said.

  ‘What happened? Did you divorce him?’

  ‘He died,’ Auntie Mei said. She had, every day of her marriage, wished that her husband would stop being part of her life, though not in so absolute a manner. Now, years later, she still felt responsible for his death, as though it were she, and not a group of teenagers, who had accosted him that night. Why didn’t you just let them take the money? Sometimes Auntie Mei scolded him when she tired of talking to herself. Thirty-five dollars for a life, three months short of fifty-two.

  ‘Was he much older than you?’

  ‘Older, yes, but not too old.’

  ‘My husband is twenty-eight years older than I am,’ Chanel said. ‘I bet you didn’t guess that.’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’

  ‘Is it that I look old or that he looks young?’

  ‘You look like a good match.’

  ‘Still, he’ll probably die before me, right? Women live longer than men, and he’s had a head start.’

  So you, too, are eager to be freed. Let me tell you, it’s bad enough when a wish like that doesn’t come true, but, if it ever does, that’s when you know that living is a most disappointing business: the world is not a bright place to start with, but a senseless wish granted senselessly makes it much dimmer. ‘Don’t speak nonsense,’ Auntie Mei said.

  ‘I’m only stating the truth. How did your husband die? Was it a heart attack?’

  ‘You could say that,’ Auntie Mei said, and before Chanel could ask more questions Auntie Mei grabbed one of her erring breasts. Chanel gasped and then screamed. Auntie Mei did not let go until she’d given the breast a forceful massage. When she reached for the other breast, Chanel screamed louder but did not change her position, for fear of crushing Baby, perhaps.

  Afterwards, Auntie Mei brought a warm towel. ‘Go,’ Chanel said. ‘I don’t want you here any more.’

  ‘But who’ll take care of you?’

  ‘I don’t need anyone to take care of me.’ Chanel stood up and belted her robe.

  ‘And Baby?’

  ‘Bad luck for him.’

  Chanel walked to the staircase, her back defiantly rigid. Auntie Mei picked up Baby, his weight as insignificant as the emotions – sadness, anger, or dismay – that she should feel on his behalf. Rather, Auntie Mei was in awe of the young woman. That is how, Auntie Mei said to herself, a mother orphans a child.

  Baby, six days old that day, was weaned from his mother’s breast. Auntie Mei was now the sole person to provide him with food and care and – this she did not want to admit even to herself – love. Chanel stayed in her bedroom and watched Chinese television dramas all afternoon. Once in
a while, she came downstairs for water, and spoke to Auntie Mei as though the old woman and the infant were poor relations: there was the inconvenience of having them to stay, and yet there was relief that they did not have to be entertained.

  The dishwasher repairman returned in the evening. He reminded Auntie Mei that his name was Paul. As though she were so old that she could forget it in a day, she thought. Earlier, she had told him about the thieving egret, and he had promised to come back and fix the problem.

  ‘You’re sure the bird won’t be killed,’ Auntie Mei said as she watched Paul rig some wires above the pond.

  ‘Try it yourself,’ Paul said, flipping the battery switch.

  Auntie Mei placed her palm on the crisscrossed wires. ‘I feel nothing.’

  ‘Good. If you felt something, I’d be putting your life at risk. Then you could sue me.’

  ‘But how does it work?’

  ‘Let’s hope the egret is more sensitive than you are,’ Paul said. ‘Call me if it doesn’t work. I won’t charge you again.’

  Auntie Mei felt doubtful, but her questioning silence did not stop him from admiring his own invention. Nothing, he said, is too difficult for a thinking man. When he put away his tools he lingered on, and she could see that there was no reason for him to hurry home. He had grown up in Vietnam, he told Auntie Mei, and had come to America thirty-seven years ago. He was widowed, with three grown children, and none of them had given him a grandchild, or the hope of one. His two sisters, both living in New York and both younger, had beaten him at becoming grandparents.

  The same old story: they all had to come from somewhere, and they all accumulated people along the way. Auntie Mei could see the unfolding of Paul’s life: he’d work his days away till he was too old to be useful, then his children would deposit him in a facility and visit on his birthday and on holidays. Auntie Mei, herself an untethered woman, felt superior to him. She raised Baby’s tiny fist as Paul was leaving. ‘Say bye-bye to Grandpa Paul.’

  Auntie Mei turned and looked up at the house. Chanel was leaning on the windowsill of her second-floor bedroom. ‘Is he going to electrocute the egret?’ she called down.