Since coming back to Beijing in September, I’ve turned the gas on the burner all the way down instead of turning it off three separate times. It’s a strange and dangerous mistake to make, a worse one to repeat. The reasons the mistake is dangerous are obvious: Turned down instead of up, the knob looks like it’s off, and a flame that low almost invariably goes out when the drafts in the apartment pick up. I don’t know if the stovetop turns the gas off automatically. I do know there isn’t an alarm.
The reasons the mistake is strange are less clear. What I can say is that I can’t remember doing this once all last year. In fact, one of the first things I noticed when I moved into the apartment was that every time I cooked, the air became filled with the unmistakable smell of gas. Within a few days, the building maintenance men had gotten to know me as the American on crutches with ok Chinese who had insisted on replacing a perfectly good stovetop because she smelled gas no one else could smell. In the weeks that followed, my Chinese friends who came to my apartment would comment on how even though the apartment was very old and the bathroom was not that great, the stovetop was pretty good. “It’s new,” I’d say, proud to have advocated for myself, “It was leaking gas, so I made them replace it.” Sometimes, if I felt especially spirited that day, I’d add: “It’s the only thing in this apartment worth money!”
It wasn’t true, but it was a good story, and I liked to tell it. Meanwhile, the man who later became my fiancé bought me a combination smoke and gas detector. It was a sweet and maybe useless gesture. I’ve burned a lot of things and left the stove top on three times already this year. It’s never gone off.
One of my first nights out in Zhengzhou, I heard a story about a woman on the 19th floor of a high-rise apartment building who’d committed suicide by leaving on the gas in her kitchen. It was early in the morning--between 6AM and 8AM--when something finally caused the gas in the kitchen to explode. No one besides the woman was seriously hurt (the woman died), but the explosion tore through the building’s main gas line, and inspectors quickly declared it unsafe for habitation.
I heard the story from an American woman who had been living just three floors below the woman on the 19th floor, and she understandably told the story from her perspective. That morning, she’d gone out to swim and come back to find the ground in front of her building covered in glass (from the windows, which had blown out). Here my memory becomes hazy; did she uncomprehendingly push through the fire department to get up into her apartment or did she somehow get to the scene before them? I can’t remember, but I do know what happened next: She entered her apartment, realized not the extent of the catastrophe but that there had been one, and gathered just enough things to survive before dashing off to her on-again-off-again boyfriend’s place.
The explosion had led to a series of disasters for the young American. She hadn’t been able to return to the apartment to get her things because she was frightened of how unsafe it was, and she hadn’t wanted to continue paying rent for an apartment that was uninhabitable. Her landlord, in a fit of pique, left all of her belongings out in the hall and changed the locks. When the American finally returned, she found most of her most valuable things missing and herself with no recourse to reclaim them. Now she was leaving the country, and she wanted to sue her landlord for the value of the things that were missing and also her deposit.
“Most of it is just stuff,” she said in a practiced, weary way. “But there was also jewelry and art.” She sighed. “The art is irreplaceable.”
When I was leaving Zhengzhou, the women downstairs, who would eventually collaborate with each other to try to prevent me from getting a good deal on selling my furniture, asked me if I’d forgotten anything while packing. “I think I have everything,” I’d told them. They’d nodded, knowingly. “Just remember your jewelry,” they’d said, gesturing toward the plated gold necklace they were constantly insisting was evidence of my wealth. “Everything else is replaceable.” I never told them that the necklace was $35 and that it too was replaceable. Sometimes people need to tell themselves stories about you in order to live.
I’ve often wondered about the story of the woman on the 19th floor. How would we tell the story from her perspective? The American insisted that she committed suicide over a lover’s quarrel with either her boyfriend or her ex-husband, and that’s what the papers said too, but that doesn’t sound quite right to me. In Zhengzhou, every woman’s suicide ends up being about love, regardless of whether it is or not.
For example: There was a suicide at a local mall in 2014 precipitated by a lover’s quarrel that everyone knew about. It’s strangely common for malls in China to be the sites of multiple suicides, and at one mall, a woman jumped from the eighth floor to her death during the mall’s opening week. Local Zhengzhou-ers gossiped that the mall had bad fengshui and was doomed to fail. Before it had been this mall, it had been another mall that had been forced to close after only four years, and before that it had been another merchant street that no one ever shopped at, and before that it had been a mass grave. “From the Cultural Revolution? From the Great Leap Forward? From World War II?” I would ask, taking notes furiously.
There have been enough natural and manmade disasters in Zhengzhou that no one could tell me for sure which one had precipitated the mass grave, but they were sure it had been there and that there were ghosts. It was the ghosts who had made the girl jump. Onlookers had seen her fighting with her boyfriend and accusing him of not loving her when he refused to buy her something--a bag? Shoes? The tellings diverged on this point--and the girl, distraught, had thrown herself over the railing, falling down between the 16 sets of escalators and landing in a mess of blood on the immaculate white tiled floors.
“To kill herself over a bag!” one local scoffed, “It doesn’t make any sense. It’s not worth it! Before I’d kill myself, I’d break up with the boyfriend, earn the money, and buy it myself. A bag is not worth dying for!” She paused for emphasis. “That’s why the ghosts must have made her do it.”
Phrased that way, it was hard to disagree. Sometimes we tell stories about dead people in order to live.
The night I met the American woman who lost her irreplaceable art after the woman on the 19th floor committed suicide, I also met the local who told me the first version of this story. She was working as a waitress at the bar where the American had come to meet the lawyer she hoped would help her sue her landlord (she’d lose the case). The American was trying to bake a pie in the bar’s oven, and even without a command of basic Mandarin had managed to communicate her disdain to the woman who would eventually become my best friend and favorite interlocutor, full of stories about ghosts under malls and in swimming pools. “I liked you because you were different from that other American,” she’d later tell me, “She was sad and tense, but you were happy and relaxed.” At the time, I’d tried to defend the other American. Now I don’t know if I’d make the effort. Much later, someone told me the American and the boyfriend she left Zhengzhou for broke up. I haven’t heard anything else about her though.
One way to do fieldwork is to focus in on stories that seem valuable or confusing to you and repeat them to others. Valuable and confusing are for me the same thing; anything I don’t understand immediately is an opportunity to learn from others’ interpretations. That’s how I ended up repeating the story of the mall suicide to another local friend of mine who I knew to be particularly superstitious. He stopped me in the middle of the telling.
“Which mall are you talking about?”
I told him and tried to continue. “Can you believe it! She killed herself over a bag--”
“She didn’t kill herself over a bag.” He stopped me again.
In my memory, he was driving me to dinner, but I might be wrong; always, we are either driving together or else eating things he doesn’t like, (”We are bad at picking restaurants together but good at drinking together,” he jokes, loving to remind me that we too met at a bar.) Maybe we were driving, but we may also have been eating mediocre Italian pasta or mediocre Korean fried chicken.
“How do you know?” I asked.
“Because I know that person,” he said sadly. “Her mother is my friend. She was there with her mother, not her boyfriend. She’d had depression for a long time. Those days, she’d been ok, so her mother left her by herself while she went to the bathroom. She was in her twenties. She wasn’t a child, it should have been fine. But in those few minutes when she was gone, her daughter jumped.”
The air left the car. Or the restaurant. Or maybe the dark, empty bar. I didn’t say anything. He went on to explain that the family was rich but the parents were divorced, and the mother felt particularly close to her daughter. She knew the depression was dangerous and real, and for years she had tried to do everything she could to cure it, getting her daughter doctors and drugs, anything that might help. That month, the daughter had seemed ok, which was why she’d agreed to go to the mall opening in the first place.
“Can you imagine,” he continued, “You leave your only child alone for a minute and then she’s gone forever.”
The month before I got engaged I started to have a recurring nightmare. Or not a nightmare, because I was always awake when it would come to me. It was more like an invasive thought. I’d be washing dishes and suddenly I’d feel a rush of adrenaline: my then-not-quite-fiancé was out there in the world somewhere. What if he were dead? The fear ramped up when I knew he was about to get on airplanes or go on long bike trips, but it was lurking even when I rationally knew he was fine, just sleeping away in his apartment in New Jersey while I puttered around my updated Chinese kitchen. Even though I was by that point--like now--too tired to keep a diary, I made a quick note to myself: Do not confuse fear of loss with love, and, There must be better ways to love than fear.
What space can we make for those lost, for valuable lessons never internalized? When my cat came into my life, I woke up the first night in a cold sweat, convinced I’d rolled onto the tiny creature and smothered her with the weight of my dumb, unlearning body. That same week, a man delivered a pizza, and when the cat didn’t emerge for minutes after, I knew in my chest that she’d somehow scurried out the door and would be lost forever. Weeks later, I confessed to a friend that I irrationally worried about shutting the door on the cat each time I left the house, and when she teased that maybe we had, I stopped dead in my tracks ready to turn around and undo the unforgivable thing I’d done till she touched my arm and apologized: “I’m joking, of course, I’m joking.”
Now, months later, I talk about the cat as teaching me about my own capacity for love, and that’s true. By living with and caring for an animal that cannot reciprocate the kind of care I’m giving her, I’ve learned something strange and dangerous about how to love unconditionally, without expectations. Strange because why love an animal so much, and dangerous because it’s shown me just how conditional the love in the rest of my life is. I love the cat when she settles in my lap and meows in my face to stop me from sobbing and I love the cat when she sprints around the house while shitting. She is, I half-joke, the only thing keeping me here in Beijing, which feels less like home and more like a trap every month.
The cat has been alive now for exactly the same amount of months that I was engaged, which should be meaningful but isn’t. I haven’t grown out of the fear I felt when she first came into my life. Last night, I woke up gasping from a dream where she’d choked on her own vomit; instead I found that she’d overturned her food and water bowl and was happily tracking the contents of both all over the kitchen. Just a day before I’d cradled her with one arm while rinsing cat puke out of the e-collar she’s wearing while recovering from surgery with the other. The day before that, I’d cried quietly in the back of a cab for 30 minutes, convinced she was going to die from the spaying surgery I’d elected to give her and leave me with nothing. Here it is, the depth of my love, and it’s so big and yet so shallow: the certainty that I will lose myself if I lose this dumb sweet creature because I wanted her not to reproduce.
Could my sense of self be that tenuous? After all, I’ve lost those things I dreaded losing before. Not the way I feared losing them (to car accidents, airplane crashes, or natural disasters), but it’s hard to see what difference that makes. I’m still the same person, aren’t I? Even if I do turn the burner down instead of off, I can still say that I’m not completely lost. Sometimes you have to tell yourself a story because you can still live.
Here’s another strange story: my friend who drove the car or ate the pasta or drank the beers also believed that the suicide had happened because of ghosts, specifically the ghosts from the mass grave that the mall was built on top of. Otherwise, he reasoned, it didn’t make sense. Sure, she had depression, but so did he. Why would she be fine one minute and throwing herself over the railing the next? It didn’t make sense. Lots of places in Zhengzhou had bad fengshui, he went on. The swimming pool in the office building across from the building where his failed coffee shop had been had a demon living below it. How else could I explain the cold he’d gotten after swimming there that had taken months to go away? From other vantage points in the city, fortune tellers could see the bad luck and bad energy lurking underneath Zhengzhou’s newest buildings and most developed boulevards. The city was like the movie Poltergeist, except at a much larger scale: Everywhere was an American Indian graveyard.
Weeks after we had this conversation, news broke that construction crews had discovered an ancient Shang Dynasty tomb underneath the basketball courts at the city’s athletic facilities. The response was incredulous. “Discovered”? Everyone in Zhengzhou knew the real estate industry had sacrificed countless irreplaceable national treasures in its quest for new kinds of capital. I read the news and imagined my friend, sneaking a knowing look at me from the driver’s seat and saying, “See?”
Sometimes only one version of the story can be told if everyone else is going to live. Is it dangerous to ask whether the woman on the 19th floor might have also died because of ghosts? Because of an accident? Because of any reason that isn’t her failure to keep a man? I’ve been thinking a lot recently of this story, “Du Tenth Sinks the Jewel Box In Anger.” It’s very old, and almost too on the nose--you barely need me to tell it to you. All the tellings are the same. A woman chooses a man, and she is wrong to choose him. He betrays her out of fear and for money. Horrified to have committed her whole self to a man who could recognize neither her value nor the fact that she was going to be able to secretly fund them with priceless treasures for the rest of their lives together (hidden in the title jewel box), she commits suicide after dumping everything of value into the river that would have otherwise taken them to their happy life together.
When I first read the story, I remember not understanding the story’s climax at all. “Killing yourself over a man when you’re already rich,” I remember thinking, “It doesn’t make any sense! Why not just keep living and build a better life by yourself?” My teacher guessed that it was less about the man and more about her inability to live with herself; in a world where the only true choice a woman might be lucky enough to have is who she has as her partner, Du Tenth’s failure to love correctly might have been too much to bear.
Or maybe not. There could be other things at play. The story doesn’t guess about the fengshui of the river port where Du Tenth met her early end, though she herself comes back as a ghost to terrorize the man who tried to buy her until he too commits suicide. She spares, however, the cowardly man who betrayed her, and there’s somehow nothing mysterious about that: an irresponsible man never having to bear the consequences for outliving the better woman he should have valued. It’s an old story. I’m surprised I even want to tell it anymore.
When I tell the story of the woman on the 19th floor to people in Zhengzhou, the metaphor I think of is clucking. No one connects her to Du Tenth or to the depressed woman jumping into the space between the mall escalators because of ghosts. No one wants to talk to about the fengshui of the ordinary apartment building whose gas lines she destroyed. Instead, everyone is suddenly a mother hen, brooding over the irresponsibility of it all. “How selfish,” they cluck, their heads bobbing back and forth, “If she was married, maybe she had children! If she wasn’t married, maybe he did! Certainly there were children in the building.” At the beginning, it was hard for me to understand the connection between the woman dying in her enclosed, oxygen-free kitchen and these phantom children, but now I understand. It is a story that makes it hard to live. The woman’s actions disrupted the necessary fiction of an actually isolated urban life and laid bare just how connected each family in each Chinese high-rise apartment building were to each other. Through the woman on the 19th floor, people became aware of a danger to their own children that they’d been able to repress before.
There are children in my building, but they are not my children. And anyway I feel differently about children now, somehow. There was a period of time when I got back from Zhengzhou when just the sight of a stranger’s baby on the street would make me start to cry. “It doesn’t make any sense,” I told my therapist, and she told me that maybe it wasn’t about the children themselves but what they symbolized: innocence, newness, a future. Precious, irreplaceable things that we should spare from economic metaphors like value. Now I cry more, but not about babies, and never in those moments when I am cooking and can hear the school children playing outside the window of my pretty good kitchen, where I haven’t smelled gas all year.
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