Huina Zheng

Her Solitary Odyssey in Shanghai

Chen Yun is thinking about Fan Liuyuan as she squeezes into the crowded Subway Line 9 at Sijing Station, standing chest to back with other passengers. She listens to the audiobook of Eileen Chang’s Love in a Fallen City through her headphones, imagining her own Fan Liuyuan. She longs for a handsome, considerate man who understands her enough to fall in love with her but with a graduate degree from a prestigious university; she shouldn’t be naive and overly romantic; she can’t afford to be lovesick. She needs to update her WeChat public account, Yun Her Publication, with weekly articles full of sharp, independent feminist thoughts, criticizing the patriarchal society’s subtle exploitation and brainwashing of women. Her students at Learning Star Tutoring demand her insightful guidance, explaining the techniques for different Chinese reading comprehension questions. Within her office cocoon, she transforms daily, donning delicate makeup and American coffee, her fingers dancing on the keyboard, yet her heartbeat always escapes her. Each night she strips off her applied armor, each layer revealing more emptiness than reality. The mirror reflects the truth within her pores, as time cruelly robs her of her collagen. Her world shrinks to the glow of her phone, the brilliance of TikTok masking the dull canvas of life, while drama provides a fake richness her reality lacks. Some weekends she buries herself in office work, revising students’ essays that always sound hollow and insincere, never fully capturing the intended meaning. Other times she strolls down Nanjing Road Pedestrian Street with friends, trying on countless styles but never finding that pair of comfortable, non-chafing white shoes. She avoids arranged marriages, resisting the constraints they place on women, yet her soul yearns for love. Fan Liuyuan, oh Fan Liuyuan, where are you? Her high heels tap the metropolitan rhythm on the skyscraper’s tiles, the path to a leading lady’s life possible now because of her continuous dedication. She opens the door to her rental, taking the suancai (酸菜) fish takeaway the Meituan deliveryman hands over, a thing she feels she should avoid, but deep down, a voice tells her she shouldn’t cook, doesn’t want to clean, and she is fed up with all the greasy, salty, premade meals from daily takeouts, so fed up with the unrefined life.

Always and Always

Ming always says there’s always a way out, a phrase I dread. It echoes his habitual optimism cloaking ever-present issues, but does this pattern have to resurface now, just as Chinese New Year looms, with our sofa drowning under a sea of bills—water, electricity, rent, credit cards—and a mountain of hongbao, or red envelopes awaiting cash, traditionally filled with “lucky money” to express blessings and good luck, awaiting cash, a burden I refuse to shoulder alone since half are Ming’s, yet he shuns them, a blindness I’ve had since the start, fooled by his generosity that shone at a friend’s wedding where we first met, his eagerness to help with a hearty leave it to me! basking in the glow of gratitude, a glow I mistook for virtue; now, seeking therapy to curb his excessive generosity, I ponder the time it will take to reshape him, fearing his eruption or retreat into his own world if he learns of my resolve to change or leave, leaving me to justify to my parents why, despite Ming’s fidelity, support, stable job, and shared chores, I ponder ending our marriage, or if it would be easier to try to explain why the task of filling his festive red envelopes falls solely on me.

I Don’t Want to Leave

In this timeworn abode, where walls whisper tales through faded wallpaper and below, the street hums a symphony of urban life, car horns merging with passerby chatter, we dwell in a sanctuary with a creaking bed and a dust-laden fan dancing futilely against summer’s swelter; here, a blurred seascape mural calls to unknown worlds, and perched on our windowsill with cold milk tea from Heytea, we watch life’s hurried dance below, pondering, as college students in the throbbing heart of Guangzhou, a future that is a mosaic of uncertainties, wondering if, like many before us, we’ll drift back to quieter towns, yet for now, it’s about the tea’s creamy caress on our tongues, a satin symphony of taste, as below us life’s rhythm persists; movers lug story-laden boxes, and from a truck, a soft melody ascends, whispering, I don’t want to leave, don’t want to give up everything here.

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Huina Zheng has her Distinction M.A. in English studies and is a college essay coach and editor. Her stories appear in Baltimore Review, Variant Literature, and elsewhere. Nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, she lives in Guangzhou, China, with her family.