A Piece of Me

The year her mother died, she pawned a jade pendant engraved with the words "Long Life" at the Long Night Pawnshop. The loan term was eighty years. The name under "Pawner" was filled in as "Wei of the Troupe," while someone had inked over the item listed as collateral. At twenty-six, Chen Zhao returns to the city to reclaim the pawned item and takes over the shop from her grandfather. The sign outside is missing half its characters. Beneath the counter lies a white pawn ticket no one ever came to redeem, and the first page of the ledger bears four words: No living people as collateral.

With an abacus, five seals, and thirty-six rules of the trade, she must redeem, one by one, everything her mother pawned: a ticket that has changed hands three times, the erased collateral, the sealed shop seal, and her own name, which her younger brother wrote on a pawn ticket. The shop takes objects as collateral, but the debt is owed by people. It has been open for eighty years, and no one has ever asked: How much is a memory worth?