A Piece of Me

The year her mother died, she pawned a jade lock engraved with the words "Long Life" at the Longnight Pawnshop. The term was eighty years. The name listed as the person retrieving it was "Wei of the Troupe," while someone had blacked out the collateral entry with ink.

At twenty-six, Chen Zhao returned to the city to reclaim the pawned items and took over the shop from her grandfather. It had only half a sign left. Beneath the counter lay a white ticket no one had come to redeem. On the first page of the ledger were four words: We don't pawn the living.

With an abacus, five seals, and thirty-six rules of the trade, she would redeem, one item at a time, everything her mother had pawned: tickets that had changed hands three times, the erased collateral, the sealed account stamp, and her own name, written onto a pawn ticket by her younger brother.

A pawnshop takes in things, but what it is owed is people. This shop had been open for eighty years, and no one had ever asked: How much is a memory worth?