She knelt on the execution platform, waiting for someone to erase her name.
In this city, women had names and surnames, written in family registers, marriage contracts, and on gravestones, only for someone to cross them out. Once a name was erased, her husband called her "hey," her child called her "that person," and when she looked into a basin of water, she couldn't recognize the face staring back. Four days, and a person was simply gone. Not dead, but as if she had never existed.
At the third recitation, she raised her head.
She said, "My name is Chunlan."
The ink still came pouring down. But she climbed off the platform herself and dug a book out from beneath a gravestone. Its cover was blank, and it felt empty to the touch. On the first page were eight characters: "With your memories, trade for another's name."
Use what you remember to trade for that person's name.
Speak the name. Give consent. Write it down. Restore the name. Complete all four steps, and a name will return. When she wrote back the first name, the person's son was eating lunch when two words suddenly escaped his lips. He hadn't called her "Mother" in three years.
The price was her own memories. With every name she restored, she lost something from her mind: the tune her mother used to hum, the pattern for her child's shoes, until at last she could no longer say her own name.
Three hundred names. She wrote them all alone.
The Revision Office didn't kill her. To kill someone, they'd have to give her a cause of death, a name, and a gravestone. They had spent their lives erasing names so that she wouldn't count. Killing her would mean she counted.
They only erased her memories.
(Names restored: 1 / 300)
Theme: A name isn't given by someone else. It's something you call out yourself. Only when someone is remembered have they truly lived.
