Ada Zhang

Prancing down the building’s stairs, Hui concentrated again on the boy who had stopped returning her calls. Acknowledging another’s pain obscured one’s own. Hui wasn’t ready yet to accept that. From the window, Meng watched her granddaughter walk up the tree-lined street. The old woman’s longing was like that of a child, featuring prominently in her eyes, which captured that spirit from her youth. It would have been easy for anyone to picture what she had looked like back then, if anyone had been there.

When they asked what she would miss most about New York, she said the ubiquity of art, how it could be found on the streets and in museums, in the people and the ways they chose to live. She knew this was the answer they were seeking, the one that assuaged the precarious matter of continuing in New York, which was brought into question every time another person chose to leave. Art was what she loved about the city, what everyone loved, but it wasn’t what she would miss. She would miss the drugstores that punctuated every block, some of them converted from beautiful old buildings, giving them that stumbleupon quality she’d have to do without in a place like Nashville, where people drove cars and drugstores were treated more respectfully as destinations. After work, or before a night ended, the rows of products provided a sense of order, filled with latent possibility. The colors—condoms, toothpaste, Zyrtec, folic acid—were brighter, more abrasive under white overhead lights. She loved going in and discovering a need she hadn’t known was there. It felt good going home not empty-handed.

In August, shortly after the start of the fall term, he came home to a dome on the table, the color and translucence of urine. Lettuce and small tomatoes make a wreath around the perimeter. Inside the dome, sliced radishes and shredded cabbage were suspended in space.”The food is trapped?” he’d asked, wondering if this was a joke or a game. “How do I get to it?” “You eat the whole thing,” Ailian said, looking pleased with herself. “It’s lemon-flavored. They call it Jell-O.”