The Sixties Tailor Shop
My stepmother told me to give my job placement to my younger sister.
I did.
On March 17, I reported to the state-run tailor shop and repaired the Feiren sewing machine in the corner, which had been gathering dust for three years.
The next day, a neighbor brought in a torn military uniform. It had belonged to her son, and she said it seemed a shame to throw it away.
By the third stitch, a scene flashed before my eyes: snowfields. A trench. A young soldier tucking a bloodstained letter from home into his breast pocket.
The uniform had been at the bottom of a trunk for twenty years. The old woman couldn't read and had no idea what the letter said.
I sewed the letter into the lining.
When she came to collect the uniform, the old woman touched the mended place on the chest and said through tearful eyes, “Young lady, after twenty years, this is the first time I've felt he can finally rest in peace.”
A few days later, a man wearing a gray-blue Sun Yat-sen suit came into the shop.
His cuffs were worn through. He watched me patch a child's padded trousers and asked, “Who taught you that stitch?”
“My master.”
He was silent for a long time.
At the door, he suddenly turned around.
“Is she... still alive?”
Old friends never ask when someone will return; a tailor only mends old clothes.
She sews all the words left unsaid into the fabric, one stitch at a time.
