The Faded Red Dress

At nineteen, Tang Yun was introduced by her blind date, Chen Yue, to his younger brother Chen Yuan, a bricklayer, because of her family’s financial circumstances. With the trowel he used to repair roofs and the warmth of his body, the young man warmed the metal bed in a construction-site dormitory. He brought warmth to Tang Yun’s lonely, insecure heart, and on that crude metal bed, she gave herself to him. The result was an out-of-wedlock pregnancy and the birth of their eldest son, Chen Fei, without a wedding.

For ten years, they moved from one construction site to another. The formula in their second child, Chen Xin’s, bottle was mixed with cement dust. The night they got the keys to their newly purchased home, Tang Yun realized that silence was harder to break through than concrete. Chen Yuan’s inaction meant she couldn’t get the paperwork needed to transfer the children to a new school. On nights when a child had a high fever, she carried them alone under the streetlights. Meanwhile, Chen Yuan sat on the balcony smoking and playing video games. Their marriage had become a wall with no cracks.

On the night of her twenty-ninth birthday, Tang Yun put on lipstick in the mirror of a cheap hotel. The smell of a strange man’s cigarettes drowned out the scent on Chen Yuan’s shirt. In the distance, the red lights on a tower crane pierced the night sky, just like the sparks that fell when Chen Yuan repaired the roof when she was nineteen. They flickered as they burned through ten years of her life.