Things Only Cats Know

The summer she turned thirty, Lin Zhi called the police for the first time. Before that, she had endured everything for thirty years. She endured her third aunt selling her rabbit, her relatives carving up the courtyard her grandfather left behind, and her bedridden grandmother having her pension taken away by people who wouldn't even buy her a box of medicine. She went to work and came home alone, cared for her mother, who had an intellectual disability, alone, and adopted thirteen abandoned cats by herself. Each one, like her, had been left in a corner to fend for itself. She thought she would spend the rest of her life putting up with it all. Then one day, her third aunt showed up with a pet carrier, intent on throwing out the orange cat Lin Zhi had raised. Lin Zhi dialed 110. From that moment, the woman her relatives had called a “hopeless fat girl” for thirty years began a long fight back. Along the way, two men entered her life. One taught her what it felt like to fall for someone; the other taught her what it meant to be chosen wholeheartedly.

This is a story about protection and defiance: protecting the courtyard her grandfather left behind and thirteen homeless cats, protecting her bedridden grandmother and her mother with an intellectual disability, and protecting the self everyone had looked down on for thirty years.

It is also a long farewell: a farewell to cowardice, to silence, and to the harm inflicted in the name of “family.” When the courtyard finally becomes a ruin, the cats find new homes, and all the lawsuits are settled, she leaves Ping'an Lane with the old cat whose hind leg is disabled and starts over in another city. Years later, she returns to the site of the old courtyard, now a café. The person who had retreated again and again beneath the streetlights is sitting in a corner, waiting for her.