Reclaiming the Years of Youth

Mu Mei stood before the bathroom mirror and gently wiped away the fog with her fingertip. Water droplets slid down her cheeks, impossible to tell from tears. The face in the mirror was already thirty-seven, with fine lines at the corners of her eyes and years of weariness between her brows.

She had just coaxed her eight-year-old son to sleep, checked his schoolbag for tomorrow, and laid out the shirt her husband would wear to work. Everything was in order. Everything was calm as still water.

"Is this all there is?" she murmured to the mirror.

In the living room, her husband, Li Xiangyang, was watching a soccer match on TV with the volume turned down so it wouldn't disturb her. He was a good man: he could cook, didn't smoke, took their child to play soccer on weekends, and remembered her birthday and their wedding anniversary. Their life had no great upheavals, just a gentle, steady flow.

But at some point, Mu Mei had begun to feel that something was missing inside her. The emptiness seemed to grow with time, especially in the dead of night, when she lay alone in bed listening to her husband's even breathing. Then that inexplicable void would sweep over her.

She thought of the conversation among the young mothers she had overheard that afternoon while waiting for her child at the school gate:

"My kid's signed up for an advanced math class. It's eight thousand yuan a semester."

"We just bought a home in the school district. Our mortgage is twelve thousand a month."

"I heard Mrs. Chen's husband got promoted. He makes a million a year now..."

Mu Mei had stood quietly to one side, holding the groceries she'd bought on sale at the supermarket the day before. Her family's monthly income barely topped ten thousand yuan. In this city, they weren't exactly struggling, but they weren't comfortable either. A home in the school district, enrichment classes, study-abroad trips: these were all distant concepts to her.