Huina Zheng

---

The Boy He Failed to Erase

The old man collapsed. Lin yanked off his sun-bleached jacket and used its sleeves to strap the man tightly across his back. Beneath the old man’s half-closed eyelids, his right pupil had dilated far wider than the left, and saliva trailed from the corner of his twisted mouth.

“Hold on, Old Village Chief!” Lin shouted, his voice nearly swallowed by the sputtering motorcycle engine.

The motorcycle jolted through dusk. The flickering headlight barely lit the narrow muddy road. Weeds scraped Lin’s legs. Behind him, the old man’s breathing wheezed like a broken bellows.

The thin poplin shirt did little to shield Lin from the autumn wind. The village had faded behind him into a distant blot of shadow. The town hospital was still miles away. Lin could only press on, praying he wasn’t too late. He didn’t dare stop, didn’t dare look back.

The old man’s mind flickered like a faulty bulb, pulling him back to another wind-torn night, when he had been riding through the wind then, too, leading a handful of village officials on bicycles, chasing down pregnant women. Women who had already given birth but were now, secretly, pregnant again. His orders were clear: Abort what can be aborted. Extract what can be extracted. Never let them be born.

Back then, under China’s one-child policy, he had believed he was doing good. For the nation. For the people. He had been proud of his role as an enforcer.

Lin’s mother had been one of their targets. Eight months pregnant. If they didn’t find her in time, she would break the rule.

The next morning, the old man awoke to the cold sting of an IV drip. An elastic tourniquet bound his right arm; a needle sat beneath clear tape. A corner of his right eye’s vision was gone, like a torn piece from a calendar painting. He tried to speak but only managed a rasping hiss. His left fingers felt the coarse weave of the sheets. His right arm lay cold and numb, as if resting on stone.

“Bed Seven’s awake!” A nurse called in a county accent, holding a tray of glass syringes. When the doctor lifted his eyelid, the metal disc of the stethoscope dug into his collarbone.

“He pulled through,” the doctor said to Lin. “But the right side of his body might not function again. Blood clot in the motor cortex.”

Lin nodded, dark circles under his eyes. “You’re safe now, Old Village Chief,” he said hoarsely. “Rest. Your family’s on the way.”

The old man tried to sit up. Lin supported him, slipping a pillow behind his back. The man’s lips trembled. His right cheek was paralyzed. Only the corner of his left mouth twitched upward into a crooked arc. The words he wanted wouldn’t come.

That night 28 years ago, he had captured four women. Despite their pleas and tears, he had them taken in. Lin’s mother wasn’t among them. She had evaded him. Months later, she returned, a baby in her arms.

The old man had never regretted his decisions. He had thought himself a guardian of order, one who reduced births, enforced policy, and served the state without question. But among those who slipped through, one boy had grown up, gone to university, returned, and become the new village chief.

Lin.

And now, he had become the man who saved his life, the boy he had failed to erase.

The old man wanted to tell him that, at seventy, things had become clearer; that blind obedience—his kind of obedience—could be terrifying, a slow sort of unthinking; that to see the world through a single lens was to forget what it meant to be human, and never notice the forgetting. The old man wanted to tell Lin that saving him had been a kindness misplaced and that he should’ve just let him go.

Lin poured him a cup of hot water. All the old man could do was watch the steam rise, curling into the air above the rim.

---

---

Banner Art:
from Mosaic of Tigress and Cubs, Easter Roman Empire, 300s CE