I Painted Myself into Chang'an

Shen Qinghe was an architect specializing in Tang dynasty houses, and had spent her whole life building them on paper. She finished restoring the last fragment of a damaged drawing, and her pen left the page. The air conditioner stopped humming. She was standing in Chang'an in the twenty-fourth year of the Kaiyuan era, with not enough money in her pocket to rent even a single room. She took over a small room at the end of an alley and wagered her last bit of money on a signboard bought on credit. If she couldn't pay it off within a year, it would be taken down.

As soon as she arrived, everyone in the alley invented a husband for her who had died of illness. She nodded along. Someone asked how he had died, and another person answered for her: illness. Someone asked why she wasn't crying. She said, "I haven't even memorized his name yet." Back in her room, she asked, "Who is my husband?" Granny Liu said, "I made him up." After thinking it over, Shen Qinghe asked, "Then what was his surname?" Granny Liu didn't answer. She only said, "First, take a look at the threshold of that house across the way. They'll pay you for it."

For her first job, she measured the Zhang family's doorway and found it was eight inches too low. They dug down a foot, and the soil changed color. The doorway wasn't too low; the ground had risen. One job followed another, but the people in the alley started bringing her everything from a lost donkey to a feverish child to a neighbor's property boundaries. She said, "I don't know how." The person holding the child said, "You don't have to be modest."

The ward chief brought people to survey the land, saying they would build a wall in the twelfth month. She asked how the boundary would be decided. The ward chief said, "Women aren't registered as artisans. Their signatures don't count." She had to get everyone in the alley to write their names on one sheet of paper, but she didn't even have the first name yet.

Twelve households, twelve different problems. Only after putting all twelve drawings together did she realize they were arranged far too neatly, as if they had all been laid out wrong according to the same plan. The day the signboard came due was also the day the county began construction. If they took the signboard down, she would have to leave.