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